Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 87) 1802077170, 9781802077179

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Necropolitics
1 Revenants: The Deadly Symbiosis of Linda Lê
2 Haunting: Living Memory and Dead Silence in Patrick Modiano
3 Afterlives: Open Tombs and Proper Burials in Assia Djebar
4 Remains: Grasping the Void with Patrick Chamoiseau
5 Recovery: Maylis de Kerangal’s Anonymous Litany
Conclusion: From Dead Letters to Literary Tombs
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 87

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: 74 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945–1960

80 Antonia Wimbush, Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

75 Edward J. Hughes, Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative

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

76 Anna Kemp, Life as Creative Constraint: Autobiography and the Oulipo 77 Maria Kathryn Tomlinson, From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French 78 Kaoutar Harchi and Alexis Pernsteiner, I Have Only One Language, and It Is Not Mine: A Struggle for Recognition 79 Alison Rice, Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music

82 Debra Kelly, Fishes with Funny French Names: The French Restaurant in London from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century 83 Nikolaj Lübecker, Twenty-FirstCentury Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé 84 Ari J. Blatt, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography 85 Martin Munro and Eliana Văgălău, Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader’s Guide 86 Jiewon Baek, Fictional Labor: Ethics and Cultural Production in the Digital Economy

OA NA PA NA Ï T É

Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory

Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2022 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2022 Oana Panaïté Oana Panaïté 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 978-1-80207-717-9 eISBN 978-1-80207-899-2 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

For those encounters that left in their aftermath “rien qui nous fût propre, ni qui fût ou sien, ou mien”

Contents Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Necropoetics

1

1. Revenants: The Deadly Symbiosis of Linda Lê

31

2. Haunting: Living Memory and Dead Silence in Patrick Modiano

53

3. Afterlives: Open Tombs and Proper Burials in Assia Djebar

85

4. Remains: Grasping the Void with Patrick Chamoiseau

117

5. Recovery: Maylis de Kerangal’s Anonymous Litany

143

Conclusion: From Dead Letters to Literary Tombs

175

Bibliography

185

Index

197

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

This book owes much to the graduate students who attended my Fall 2018 seminar at Indiana University-Bloomington: Elke Defever, Claire Fouchereaux, Jamie Lauer, Timothy Lomeli, Antonio Marvasi, Gaya Morris, Sneha Ravichandran, Ruth Riftin, Cristina Robu, and Marion Velain. Our weekly meetings filled with exciting, sometimes meandering, sometimes puzzling, but always engaging discussions challenged and inspired my thinking. Several years ago, Eric MacPhail’s 1986 article, “The Roman Tomb or the Image of the Tomb in Du Bellay’s Antiquitez,” sparked my interest in seeing how the current period reimagines this aesthetic form and its public functions. A seminar organized by Emmanuel Bouju at the Twentieth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (AILC) in 2014 provided the opportunity for a first articulation of the project. Two years later, Yolaine Parisot and Charline Pluvinet kindly included my article “Tombeaux littéraires contemporains” in their edited volume Pour un récit transnational: la fiction au défi de l’histoire immédiate (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016), thus enabling me to develop further the conceptual and historical framework. Following a conference organized in 2014 at the Université de Toulouse, Pierre Soubias and Delphine Rumeau edited the volume Patrick Chamoiseau et la mer des récits, which featured my contribution “Une poétique de l’inscriptible: Patrick Chamoiseau et le tombeau littéraire contemporain” (Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2017). These imperfect early drafts benefitted from subsequent revisions and corrections thanks to my exchanges with two scholars who studied “le tombeau poétique” and “le tombeau musical”: Delphine Rumeau and Agathe Sultan. Three invited lectures at Rice University, Tulane University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison further nurtured my thinking and

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prompted me to clarify my approach. On these occasions, my conversations with Oana Sabo, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, Nevine El-Nossery, and Vlad Dima were particularly beneficial and inspiring. From my heartening exchanges with Cornelia Ruhe I have derived timely support and a shared understanding of how our research informs our lives and how our lives shape our work. At Indiana University-Bloomington, the faculty, graduate students, and staff of the Department of French and Italian have provided many kinds of support both moral and material, and above all a sense of warmth, collegiality, and kindness that endures even when challenged by worldwide crises, daily worries, and personal anxieties. Outside of the department, Laura Plummer, the tireless and passionate organizer of the IU Faculty Writing Groups, was instrumental in fostering an environment where one can set aside the many distractions of academic life and join a like-minded group of colleagues dedicated to writing and thinking about writing. I would also like to recognize Jessica Tindira and Amanda Vredenburgh for their kind assistance at different stages in the preparation of the manuscript, as well as Emma Young for her essential contribution to the final draft. The anonymous readers of Liverpool University Press deserve my sincerest gratitude for their considerate comments and immensely helpful suggestions. It has been an absolute delight to collaborate with Chloe Johnson, Senior Commissioning Editor, who, along with the Series Editor, Charles Forsdick, has kindly, expertly, and unfailingly encouraged and guided me through the complex publication process. I would also like to recognize the exemplary professionalism of the entire production team, in particular that of Sarah Davison, Assistant Academic Production Editor. For their lucid, earnest, warm, loyal, and timely encouragements, I would like to thank Étienne Achille, Hall Bjørnstad, and Mélanie Giraud. I owe a long-standing debt of gratitude to Martine Antle and Sahar Amer. I am aware that I will never be able (nor should I be allowed!) to repay my debt to my mentors, friends, and models, Margaret Gray and Eileen Julien. My deepest thought goes to my parents, Zâna and Virgil, who carry the memory of those who came before them and pass it on with humor, wit, and grace, and to Craig, always minding the past while caring for the present.

Introduction Necropoetics Introduction

Les chers disparus entrent dans le texte parce qu’ils ne peuvent plus nuire ni parler. Ces revenants trouvent accueil dans l’écriture à condition de se taire pour toujours. (De Certeau, 1975, 8) À chaque fois que tu regarderas le sommet de ta tour, tu penseras à nos corps sans tombeaux au fond de l’océan. (Mati Diop, 2019)

If philosophy is learning how to die, fiction is imagining death itself. Literature as a scriptural practice – “tout graphème est d’essence testamentaire” (Derrida, 1967, 100) – approaches death as a lived experience focused on the very temporality of being out of time, or, in its most spectral modern iterations, as a near-posthumous activity.1 Regardless of its subject matter, literary narrative as a creative activity reimagines loss, reacts to the looming threat of death and experiences of bereavement, or tries to anticipate scenarios for coping with the grief brought about by an individual or collective disappearance. Even when espousing the most experimental and subversive forms, it invariably relies on working with remains, recovering and reusing preexisting formal models, narrative strategies, and stylistic devices. While this can be said of any other artistic practice from poetry to the visual arts, in 1 Or, to quote Georges Poulet’s phrase about the author of “La littérature et le droit à la mort,” writing is “une activité pour ainsi dire posthume” (1966, 496).

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

the case of fiction the inescapable need or constraint to write with the means inherited from the past (construed not only as tradition but as the foundations of fiction itself) is even more salient. In testament to this stance, despite the numerous mid-century formalist attempts to do away with the “obsolete notions” of plot, storytelling, or character, these very same ghosts invariably make their triumphant return in the works of late twentieth-century writers and continue to inhabit, sometimes even to overpopulate, the pages of contemporary texts ranging from archival or dystopian novels to autofiction, biofiction, and documentary narratives.2 The current literary landscape features a host of what could be called narratives of the aftermath, mindful of the word’s etymological root (Middle English math or mathe, “mowing”) that refers to the second crop of grass after the first has been cut.3 Among these texts that struggle to put into words the shock of a senseless loss and the need to make sense of it, the ones that revolve around the loss of a child, especially when written from the parent’s perspective, test the formal and ethical limits of literary expression. Indeed, creating a poetic tomb as a way of coping with the split between oneself and one’s other self, a self that forever remains a promised, never-realized life, harkens back, at least in the French modern tradition, to Mallarmé’s Pour un tombeau d’Anatole, a work 2 While postwar French literature – and, more specifically, fiction – was conceptualized in terms of decay (Nathalie Sarraute in 1956 and Alain Robbe-Grillet in 1963 both draw on the vocabulary of obsolescence and depletion to address the need for an aesthetic and political turn in novelistic writing) and even death (the famous “death of the author” theorized by Barthes in 1967), the shift that was initiated in the 1980s has been described as a resurrection – of the author, of the subject, of history, and of literature itself, which the previous experimental and formalist movements had sought to bury. In her recent book, Dépasser la mort. L’agir de la littérature, Myriam Watthee-Delmotte summarizes the ways in which literature allows humans to face and cope with death: “Il y a bien des manières dont un texte peut nous aider face à la mort, depuis la résistance au choc de la confrontation à l’irrémédiable jusqu’à la commémoration sereine avec le recul des années, en passant par l’accomplissement des différentes étapes du deuil” (2019, 9). She continues with the comment: “La littérature se trouve ainsi au cœur de ce qui constitue le propre de l’humanité, seule espèce vivante à honorer ses morts,” an example of a standard anthropocentric stance that sets humanity apart from other species in its ability to honor the dead. Without invalidating literature’s unique ability to voice grief and commemorate loss, a growing body of evidence, provided by fields such as “comparative thanatology,” invites us to call into question such apodictic claims (Pierce, 2018). 3 “aftermath, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary.

Introduction

3

begun in 1879 after his child’s death and left unfinished. The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have witnessed the publication of several books inspired by similar unimaginable events, mostly narratives, such as Philippe (1995) by Camille Laurens; L’Enfant éternel (1997), Toute la nuit (1999), and Tout les enfants sauf un (essay, 2007) by Philippe Forest; Tom est mort (2007) by Marie Darrieussecq; Camille, mon envolée (2015) by Sophie Daull; and La Gloire d’Inès (2016) by Philippe Delaroche. The deeply subjective nature of these texts underpins their authenticity, as mirrored in their formal features: first-person narrative voices, temporal clashes and distortions, obsessive revisiting of a seminal scene, textual fragmentation that conveys feelings of confusion, denial, or anger. It also buttresses their claim to a universal anthropological experience that is nevertheless always acutely singular: a loss that negates the very possibility of a particular life, a life borne within the person loved. Yet, as demonstrated in the intense polemics between Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq in 2007, such a theme cannot be transposed in a fictional genre without triggering accusations of misappropriation, imposture, and plagiarism. As Laurens poignantly, if debatably, states in her account of this literary scandal, such a topic transcends or rather suspends all discussions about verisimilitude and empathy, requiring instead the testimony of lived experience: “Nous voulons des romans d’amour, pas des romans sur l’amour, des livres de deuil, pas des livres sur le deuil” (2010, 20). The text itself should be an act of mourning, not a fiction of mourning.4 Other narratives of the aftermath operate in an extended temporality, one in which individual or family trauma is a repercussion of greater historical upheavals like exile, war, or genocide.5 Ivan Jablonka’s Histoire 4 Having already been the object of a similar accusation of “plagiat psychique,” as Laurens termed it, or, rather, “stylistique,” as Marie NDiaye’s 1998 attack implied, Darrieussecq herself seized on the opportunity to publish her own response in Rapport de police. Accusation de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction, a scholarly study that places her situation in the larger historical and theoretical context of literary plagiarism. See also Leslie Barnes’s article, “Truth, Trauma, Treachery: Camille Laurens v. Marie Darrieussecq,” in which Barnes summarizes the two radically opposed ethical stances: “whereas Laurens’s autofictional je writes from the place of mourning, explicitly reflecting on how, why, and for whom one brings oneself to narrate the death of a child, Darrieussecq’s fictional je writes about that place of mourning as an absent center” (2015, 1006). 5 In some cases, death is approached not from a traumatic perspective, but as the defining moment of the human condition – and, therefore, of literature. The

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des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus. Une enquête (2012) is an example of a work situated in an unapologetic and even programmatic way on the threshold between scientific inquiry and fictional reenactment. In keeping with his reputation, Jablonka uses this project to put forth a new “manifesto” for history as a form of contemporary literature addressing the real. His “fiction of method” (Jablonka, 2018, 164) combines creative techniques (undisguised subjectivity, point of view, characterization and dramatization) with historical reasoning to provide a unique insight, a view of reality that a purely factual and (professional historians’ protestations notwithstanding) only deceptively objective approach cannot truly access. Animated by the desire to bring “retrospective justice” (Gefen, 2017, 221) to his grandparents lost in the Holocaust, Jablonka’s example of micro-history delivers “une recherche-enquête contre l’oubli et le silence pour réparer l’injustice d’une vie brisée” (2012a, 36). The text brings together two authorial stances and scriptural practices that are often kept separate for the sake of scientific integrity: taking his family as an object of investigation as both a scholar and a private individual, an undertaking that requires both distance and reflexivity, personal involvement and scientific detachment, or, as he explains it in a self-exegetic article, “aborder, dans le cadre d’une étude savante, l’objet de son deuil, de son obsession ou de sa névrose” (Jablonka, 2012a, 39). In the process, he also offers a definition of empathy unencumbered by any association with sentimentality or even pathos: meaning instead “feeling for” or “feeling-together-with.”6 Obviously, this resemantientire novelistic œuvre of the Belgian Henry Bauchau, which spans from the 1960s to the 2010s, is centered around the experience of death, which tears apart families and forces individuals to come to grips with life’s intrinsic divide: one of his early novels, dedicated to the death of the mother, is entitled La Déchirure (1966). At the same time, accounting for the dead becomes a haunting but vital duty that the writer is called to answer by drawing on autobiography, mythology, and history; thus, the dead are brought to life anew in ways that emphasize the continuity between past and present and create a sense of community across generations. 6 On historical introspection, Jablonka writes: “Empathie ne signifie pas ici commisération, attendrissement, mais plutôt capacité de penser ‘comme,’ de se mettre ‘à la place,’ de co-sentir” (2012a, 41). This borrows from Ricœur's distinction between “un moi de recherche” (good subjectivity) vs. “un moi pathétique” led by passions, resentment (Ricœur, Histoire et vérité, qtd. by Jablonka, 2012a, 41). Jablonka's own “roman vrai,” Laëtitia ou la Fin des hommes (2016), does not hew closely to this distinction, as evidenced for example by the stance and tone of the chapter strikingly entitled “Laëtitia, c’est moi.”

Introduction

5

zation invites us to ponder the implications of such a substitutive view of human experience. It might be acceptable in the case of a literary tomb to family, where the biological link and genealogical bond can justify identification with the dead. In other cases, it can be quickly dismissed as a form of presentist arrogance laden with the unexamined prejudice of the (Western white male) scholar faced with the ordinary man or woman whose life he purports to recover from the common grave of History. Such instances of “commémoration savante” (Jablonka, 2012a, 39), in which a scholar treats a personal subject, often in order to cast new light on the methodology, epistemology, or ethics of his or her profession, are, of course, not new; one can point to the volume Pierre Bourdieu: images d’Algérie. Une affinité elective, issued to commemorate the eponymous exhibit organized in 2003 at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, or to Benjamin Stora’s work on France’s postcolonial “memory wars.”7 As Stora explores in both his theoretical work and personal recollections about Algeria under French rule, vehemently competing versions of history can find themselves embodied by the dead and their place of rest.8 Alice Zeniter’s 2017 novel, L’Art de perdre, features a trip to the family’s homeland, Algeria, a country that the main character, Naïma, comes to know at first through her grandparents’ and other relatives’ intermittent, incomplete, and inevitably subjective stories and only later on, as an adult, through her autodidactic efforts to explore the archives and study the buried history of French colonization, the Algerian war, the harkis’ forced exile, and their difficult integration into French society in the post-independence era. Her journey reveals neither the epiphany of a genealogical or identitarian mystery nor a sense of alienation caused by some irretrievable loss stemming from her family’s exile, but rather a double attachment that Naïma registers with lucidity and experiences 7 See, for instance, his contribution, “Une France si proche, si lointaine,” to the volume edited by Leïla Sebbar, C’était leur France: en Algérie, avant l’Indépendance. 8 Rosello: “The past is a story that we weave with the type of material that contemporary norms authorize us to use. The episode that focuses on the unresolved issues of situations that no longer need to be disclosed reveals the limits and borders of that memory. The contours of what France is today are enabled and limited by the possible pasts that are recognizable and addressed. The complex mechanism that brings the colonial past to the fore is not a simple linear and temporal process that replaces one layer of memory with a more recent one. Several pasts are now entangled” (2010, 202).

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without pathos while returning to France, her country of birth and, ultimately, of choice. However, this double attachment does manifest in a telling scene that involves not the protagonist’s family but a childhood friend, Annie, a pied-noir whose story complements Naïma’s own and completes the picture of “the art of losing,” the seminal metaphor of the novel. Annie, whose parents are buried “Chacun d’un côté de la Méditerranée” (Zeniter, 2017, 352), reflects on her divided legacy by calling to mind her father’s anxiety over the abandonment of her mother’s grave. Not being able to visit and care for her burial site creates a family trauma that is passed on from one generation to the next: Il y pensait toujours […] à qui il aurait pu demander d’aller sur la tombe, de mettre des fleurs, de vérifier qu’on ne lui prenne pas la concession. Et il a fini par me transmettre cette angoisse. Ne plus revoir la maison, je m’en moque. Ne plus revoir sa tombe, en revanche, je ne pouvais pas m’y résoudre. (Zeniter, 2017, 353)

Yet, characteristically of Zeniter’s poetics of narrative fracturing, the character zigzags to a seemingly lighter topic, wondering whether when playing “if you were stranded on a desert island” anyone had ever considered taking their dead with them: “À ma connaissance, personne n’a jamais répondu: ‘Mes morts’” (Zeniter, 2017, 353). The art of losing teaches how to leave behind one’s dead even as one must continue to worry about the place that hosts their remains – a place that becomes a site of memory and a symbol of the duty of care. Philippe Ariès in the early 1980s described modern death as transformed from a familiar, domesticated, or “tame” phenomenon into a repressed, silenced, and profoundly alienating one, a transformation he named the “wilding” of death.9 Rather than following Ariès by asking whether our modes of sociability or representation have further changed our relation to death in some fundamental way,10 this 9 Ariès: “[Death] has by now been so obliterated from our culture that it is hard for us to imagine or understand it. The ancient attitude in which death is close and familiar yet diminished and desensitized is too different from our own view, in which it is so terrifying that we no longer dare say its name. Thus, when we call this familiar death the tame death, we do not mean that it was once wild and that it was later domesticated. On the contrary, we mean that it has become wild today when it used to be tame. The tame death is the oldest death there is” (1981, 28). 10 Casta: “Le questionnement qui sous-tend notre propos est simple: notre rapport à la mort a-t-il changé? […] Catastrophe morale sans retour liée aux atrocités du second conflit mondial, faillite des idéologies de substitution, replis sur l’individu

Introduction

7

book will focus instead on the ways in which certain literary configurations – assembled under the generic name of “necrofiction” (ancient Greek, nekros, “corpse, dead”) – make possible the narrative recovery and non-traumatic understanding of an event that strengthens as much as it severs the ties between the living and the dead, past and present, remembrance and forgetting. Necrofiction may, at times, evoke the Blanchotian “instant de ma mort,”11 that is, a near-death paired with a return from which the hero never fully recovers, as the foundational experience of literature from Orpheus and Odysseus to Dante, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, and Artaud. It may sometimes overlap with what Frédéric Weinmann, in an essay that brings together novels by Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Alice Sebold, Yasmina Khadra, Mackenzie Orcel, and Dominique Rolin, calls “autothanatography,” that is, a text in which an individual narrates their own death.12 Yet, unlike the modern auctorial thanatography or the postmodern autothanatography, necrofiction does not focus on the sublimity of the limit-experience of living death; nor does it play on the formal and psychological paradoxes of narrating silence and nothingness. Instead, its objective appears to be artistically and intellectually more modest, insofar as it seems to harken back to a less sophisticated or at least less vertiginous narrative tradition: that of ou sur la communauté, exaltation du matérialisme marchand comme unique référence, seule finalité et seule mesure des activités humaines: toutes ces données forment la toile de fond d’une émergence fictionnelle forte” (2007, 16–17). 11 Blanchot’s autobiographically inspired third-person short narrative about a young man who almost comes to be executed at the hand of Nazi soldiers only to be saved in extremis by the intervention of Russian troops during the Second World War has engendered its own literary and philosophical legacy, becoming the matrix of a critical debate around autobiography and literature, narrative authenticity and falsehood, the limits of bearing witness to one’s own life and death, and the (in)transitive nature of writing itself. See Blanchot (1994); Derrida (1998); and Lacoue-Labarthe (2011). 12 Borrowing the term from Derrida while eliminating the hyphen, Weinmann calls autothantography “un écrit ayant pour objet l’histoire d’une mort particulière, racontée par le mort lui-même. Ce serait par conséquent un récit doublement paradoxal puisque, d’une part, la mort peut sans doute se définir comme la suspension du temps et l’arrêt de l’histoire (si la mort est néant, qu’y a-t-il à raconter? qu’est-ce qu’un récit thanatographique?) et que, d’autre part, à supposer qu’il se passe quelque chose après l’instant fatal, que la mort soit une action, qu’il y ait matière à raconter, on peut se demander comment le récit pourrait émaner du mort lui-même, d’un être ayant perdu la vie et quitté le monde des humains (si la mort est silence, qu’est-ce qu’une fiction autothanatographique?)” (2018, 12–13).

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

the tombeau littéraire genre established during the French Renaissance as an artistic homage to a departed historical personage. Erecting narrative tombs is a gesture through which contemporary literature collects in a single commemorative place the remains of h/ History and its own story. In the manner of its Renaissance avatar, the genre covers lapses in memory and corrects historical injustices all while asserting its own generative force. The “literary tomb” designates a creative space in which writers can either honor the past or cast off its burden; dismantle or reassemble affective, political, and aesthetic communities; or both. By examining the ways in which fiction both reflects and resists what Achille Mbembe has defined as “necropolitics” – “an arrangement with the world […] that […] consists in counting whatever is not oneself for nothing” (2019, 2) – this book seeks to delve into the contentious yet intimate relationship between singular models of literary remembrance and the “scripting” power of dominant (political, historical, mediatic) narrative frames.13 It examines the ways in which creative writing engages with questions such as: Can the Other, in light of all that is happening, still be regarded as my fellow creature? When the extremes are broached, as is the case for us here and now, precisely what does my and the other’s humanity consist in? Why must I, despite all opposition, nonetheless look after the other, stand as close as possible to his life if, in return, his only aim is ruin? If, ultimately, humanity exists only through being in and of the world, can we found a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude? (Mbembe, 2019, 3)

Even though death, just like any other universal (love, time, conflict …), appears in countless narratives, not all of them place it at their thematic or formal center. I therefore propose to consider a series of texts in which death and the dead not only serve as the narrative’s source of inspiration but, and more importantly, provide and shape the book’s aesthetic agenda. For instance, this marks the difference between The Stranger by Albert Camus with its famous incipit “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte” and Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud: both narratives are brought into being by a death but, while the former 13 Mbembe: “necropolitics, or necropower, […] account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (2019, 92).

Introduction

9

follows the perpetrator’s inner and outer gaze, the latter plumbs the depths of the event’s aftermath, pulling together different strands (eulogy for a lost family member, elegy for the future promised by Algerian independence, jeremiads over a hopeless present, agonistic engagement with a canonical writer, and indictments of colonialism and neocolonialism). This does not mean that a literary tomb is a second-degree narrative or a rewriting of a previous, canonical text; however, it does entail revisiting events, memories, and affective constellations, and intervening in their written transmission. Similar in this respect to trauma writing, the genre induces a “rethinking of reference” which requires “resituating” history in order to make it intelligible, particularly in those overwhelming situations that preclude “immediate understanding” (Caruth, 1996, 11). In Linda Lê’s work, necrofiction can reflect a reaction to “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events,” which elicits a literary response marked by the “often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth, 1996, 11). Nonetheless, in combining narration and commentary, reflection and storytelling, necrofiction takes the “long view,” aiming not only to provide a space where repressed feelings can be expressed, events reenacted, and the healing process initiated through the sensate and sensible recreation of the traumatic moment, but to offer a wider framework in which what could be called a “traumatic” vs. an “energetic” (Emmanuel Bouju, Yolaine Parisot, and Charline Pluvinet, 2019) regime of historical fiction can be meaningfully articulated. The texts examined here were written in French by individuals whose personal and artistic trajectories transcend political, cultural, and, in some cases, linguistic frontiers. They combine a commemorative stance with an ambitious formal scope reminiscent of the Renaissance’s “literary tombs.” The form was subsequently abandoned and then rediscovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has often been practiced as a musical and poetic form (Castonguay-Bélanger, 2002, 56–57; Rumeau, 2014, 27).14 I argue that these types of narrative texts fulfill in distinct 14 In her analysis of several funeral poems by Aimé Césaire such as “Tombeau de Paul Éluard” and “Mémorial de Louis Delgrès” from the volume Ferrements, Delphine Rumeau contends that the Martinican poet “travaille sur les ambivalences des genres funéraires, en particulier celui du tombeau, entre pérennisation et actualisation du souvenir, entre célébration héroïque et retour réflexif sur soi, pour les investir d’une réflexion sur l’engagement poétique” (2014, 27–28), underscoring

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

ways the social and artistic functions of an individual or collective act of remembrance (of a lost family member or of a historical, individual, or collective figure). At the same time, they offer a creative space in which the writer can overcome the burden of literary tradition by incorporating existing models and devices into his or her own poetic art while also seeking to provide new representational and interpretive configurations for coping with the burden of history. The tombeau littéraire and Its Contemporary Avatar In its early modern form, the term “literary tomb” refers to narratives designed to honor an important character or event while emphasizing the author’s artistic achievement.15 In his analysis devoted to the composition and meaning of the Roman tomb in the works of sixteenth-century French poet Joachim du Bellay, Eric MacPhail develops Françoise Joukovsky’s expression “the poet of the sepulcher,” explaining that the tomb becomes “a controlling metaphor both for the evocation of Rome’s that even in the context of twentieth-century postcolonial writing, this poetic form maintains its original features and functions: “le tombeau est l’occasion d’un hommage, qui passe par la citation, la mise en exergue des mots de l’autre, mais aussi celle d’un retour sur soi, d’une appropriation même” (2014, 35). For examinations of the musical genre, see for instance Charles Van den Borren (1962); Carolyn Abbate (1999); Agathe Sultan (2005); and the overview provided on the website of radio station France Musique (Charvet, 2014). 15 From a historical standpoint, examined by Ariès in his study The Hour of Our Death (the English translation of L’Homme devant la mort): “the visible tomb had to indicate where the body was and to whom the body belonged, and finally, it had to recall the physical appearance of the man, the symbol of his personality. Besides designating precisely the site of funerary worship, the tomb was also intended to transmit the memory of the deceased to later generations. Hence its name of monumentum or memoria. The tomb was a memorial. The survival of the dead man had not only to be assured on the eschatological level by means of offering and sacrifices, it was also dependent on a fame that was maintained on earth either by the tombs with their signa and inscriptions or by the eulogies of writers. Of course, there were a great many miserable graves with neither inscriptions nor portraits, which had nothing to transmit […] But in the history of the funerary colleges, the mystery cults, one senses the desire of the poorest persons, even slaves, to escape this anonymity that is true death, total and definitive annihilation. In the catacombs, the humble loculi, or cavities designed to receive the bodies, were covered with slabs that often contained brief inscriptions and a few symbols of immortality” (1981, 202).

Introduction

11

ruin and for the complex and provocative definition of poetry” (1986, 359). The image of the Eternal City in ruins allows the poet to affirm the permanence of a temporally remote classical heritage, while the figure of the tomb “vacillates between thoughts of the transience of human endeavor and of the immortality of art” (MacPhail, 1986, 359). The creator and author of the bilingual Latin-French panegyric conceives of it as a grandiose architectural work that “ne doit ceder ny à l’excellence du Mausolée, ny à l’orgueil des Pyramides Égyptiennes”16 (Du Bellay, qtd. in MacPhail, 1986, 361). “Celebrate to your heart’s content the glory of this royal monument” (Du Bellay, qtd. in MacPhail, 1986, 361): it is with these words that the poet of the French Pléiade invites readers to admire his poetic and memorial prowess, associating the Horatian aspiration for eternity with the redemptive gesture to which only he holds the secret: “ce petit tableau … // Se pourra bien vanter d’avoir hors du tombeau / Tiré des vieux Romains les poudreuses reliques” (qtd. in MacPhail, 1986, 363). Furthermore, in Joël Castonguay-Bélanger’s view, “this double [ceremonial and monumental] quality thus designates the poetic tomb as a place of homage, both formal and discursive, paid to death” (qtd. in MacPhail, 1986, 57). Yet the emphasis placed on the extraordinary character of this commemorative gesture means that “the poem’s epidictic aim finds itself […] skillfully moved from the deceased to the living, who, in their quest for social recognition, certainly have more material and symbolic capital to take away from a literary representation than the dead person himself” (MacPhail, 1986, 64). From a morality of obsolescence, the practice of the literary tomb slides progressively towards a phenomenology of longevity. Even though the Renaissance literary tomb was conceived as a reaction to recent events (the death of Louise de Savoie, the mother of François I, and, in the halcyon days of the Pléiade, that of the king himself in 1547 followed, in 1559, by that of his son, Henri II) and a form of action for the organization of the memory of these events, its current iteration does 16 In a recent study of Africa as a dialectical form of negativity in Hegel, Hassanaly Ladha sets the emphasis on architecture as a vector of theorization (of the sign, subjectivity, and history): “In his lectures Hegel refers to the pyramids as ‘memorials to the dead’ [Totenmäler]; these structures memorialize not by remembering a specific individual, but rather by preserving his individuality in the abstract, removed from any particular features. The pyramid, like mechanical memory, remembers by forgetting – effacing particular content ‘proper’ to corporeal matter and evoking the specter instead of only a departed ‘soul’ or absent meaning” (2019, 58).

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

not break completely with its foundational model due to its own practice of “ultra-contemporary” (see Soulet, 1994) writing and the inspiration it draws from current or past events that continue to shape today’s world.17 Unlike its early modern precursor, the contemporary genre is not the product of a collective artistic endeavor but rather an individual project and is not always written as a circumstantial piece, that is, as an immediate reaction to a recent death: “Par contraste avec le monde ancien, ce qui est sacralisé, c’est désormais la singularité d’un individu” (Watthee-Delmotte, 2019, 101).18 Instead, it can represent the reactualization of a distant event brought to the fore by personal or political circumstances, which sometimes reflect and intensify an ongoing preoccupation on the part of the writer. While the story recounted, or fable, may originate in a deeply personal experience, 17 Rumeau: “Ce sont les poèmes funéraires – écrits à l’occasion d’une mort, célébrant un disparu ou s’adressant à lui – que nous retiendrons ici, pour montrer qu’ils ne sont pas seulement des poèmes de circonstance ou d’éloge sans nuance, mais qu’ils posent avec acuité des questions sur l’histoire, la mémoire et l’art poétique […] toutes les grandes tensions qui animent ce genre: poème de circonstance, le tombeau cherche en même temps à s’en extraire, à atteindre un temps autre, dans lequel le passé se trouve pérennisé sans pour autant se figer irrémédiablement; poème d’hommage adressé à l’autre, il est aussi l’occasion d’un retour sur soi et d’une célébration de la poésie qui permet ce singulier aménagement temporel” (2014, 27–32). 18 Referring to modern iterations of the literary tomb that pay homage to peers or precursors (the form could even be called a “metaliterary tomb” insofar as the person commemorated is another poet or novelist, and, by extension, literary creation itself) such as Mallarmé’s Tombeau d’Edgar Allan Poe (1877) with its famous line “Donner un sens plus pur au mots de la tribu” and the much more recent Tombeau de Romain Gary (1995) by Nancy Houston, Watthee-Delmotte emphasizes the synergy between individual authorship and the central role of the importance afforded to the singularity of the artist being honored: “La seule manière de lui rendre hommage est donc de lui écrire un texte dans lequel ses traits uniques, en quelque sorte, transparaissent […] L’immortalité du poète disparu passe par la parenté symbolique: l’auteur célèbre l’apport du feu confrère et l’enrichit par un texte novateur où il apporte, selon la fidélité en esprit, sa propre singularité” (2019, 101). At the end of this section, entitled “Élever un tombeau littéraire,” she summarizes: “Le Tombeau opère donc par le biais d’une fictionnalisation ce que le travail documentaire de toute biographie écrite, filmée ou journalistique ne peut faire: reconstruire, au départ des traces du vécu et de l’œuvre, un personnage qui donne lieu non pas à un gain quantitatif et objectif de savoir, mais qualitatif et subjectif d’émotion, de sensibilité, entraînant le lecteur à la réflexion et à la compassion […] C’est ainsi que l’étranger devient familier” (2019, 108).

Introduction

13

the narrative also reveals a political intentionality, one that neither negates nor transcends the specificity of the intimate dimension, but is coeval with it. Furthermore, all these novels manifest their writers’ ambition to be read as, if not timeless, at least enduring works both for their treatment of the subject matter and for their linguistic creativity, narrative innovation, and stylistic originality. Finally, all of them display a certain degree of engagement with what I would call metaliterary concerns construed in an inclusive, non-autonomist way. These include the role and responsibility of the writer relative to specific historic and political circumstances; the status of the literary text at the crossroads of several debates around factuality, authenticity, and competing institutional or truth-claiming discourses; the relation between literary creation and the realm of the political understood as the totality of activities that define living together (policies, societal structures and social concerns, religion, public discourse, culture and the arts). In particular, these works are concerned with the redefinition of the human or post-human in the age of necropolitics. The concept of biopolitics, famously introduced by Michel Foucault in his 1978–1979 seminar, has been redefined more recently by Roberto Esposito as “the increasingly intense and direct involvement established between political dynamics and human life (understood in its strictly biological sense), beginning with a phase that we call second modernity” (2013, 69).19 In proposing the terms “necropolitics” (2003) and “necropower” (2019),20 Achille Mbembe seeks to draw attention to the ways in which “in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds,” leading to the emergence of “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (2003, 40). Necrofiction seeks to undo “the lethal circle that grips the imagination and is increasingly difficult to escape” (Mbembe, 2019, 7) by exploring the forms of personal reflection on and 19 Esposito: “Of course we know that politics has always had something to do with life – that life, even in the biological sense, has always constituted the material frame within which politics is necessarily inscribed. [But] in the ancient and medieval periods, preserving life as such was never the primary objective of political action, as it was to become in the modern era […] What we call modernity, in other words, taken as a whole, might be nothing more than the language that allowed us to give the most effective answers to a series of requests for self-protection that sprang forth from the very foundations of life” (2013, 69–70). 20 The latter represents a translated version of Politiques de l’inimitié.

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

public resistance to the root causes and existing conditions of necropolitics: memory wars, identitarian conflicts, large-scale migration, and economic and military globalization. The modern iterations of the literary tomb have been studied in the fields of poetry (Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Segalen, Aimé Césaire, Michel Deguy) and music (Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla, Pierre Boulez). Yet, I will argue that the present-day convergence of three phenomena also invites us to think of certain fiction-writing practices today through the prism of the literary tomb. These three phenomena are: the persistent interest in memorialization, the rivalry between history and literary fiction over the production of an ethical account of the past, and the choice made by many contemporary writers to address topics that bridge the gap between the personal and the political, the national and the global, and the colonial and the postcolonial. In its contemporary manifestations, the literary tomb undertakes the commemoration of a character or an era by notably emphasizing the effect of its presence through the narration and the discursive deployment of its current reverberations or afterlife. As a result, one may affirm, in the wake of François Hartog’s analysis, that the contemporary narrative tomb stems from a presentist approach, which “considère le passé en ayant en vue le présent” (2003, 223).21 Necrofiction: Recounting the Past, Healing the Present The memorial and nostalgic tenor of recent literature has been the subject of numerous studies exploring phenomena from the commercialization of the exotic past, to haunting and victimhood, and the problematic manifestations of postcolonial nostalgia (Huggan, 2001; O’Riley, 2007; Walder, 2012; Sanyal, 2015; Panaïté, 2017). Yet, a significant amount of critical attention has also been dedicated to literature’s restorative, even healing vocation in readings that bring together phenomenology, psychoanalysis, affect theory, and cognitive criticism to highlight how novels, plays, and poems play out individual or collective crises and engage, imaginatively and critically, with traumatic events in order to enable both readers and writers to overcome and make sense of them (Caruth, 1996; Gefen, 2017; Merlin-Kajman, 2016a and 2016b). 21 This formulation is found in note 28 in the first chapter, “Ordre du temps, régimes d’historicité.”

Introduction

15

The five authors whose works are examined here represent distinct generational, cultural, and aesthetic trends. Assia Djebar and Patrick Modiano began their careers in the decades following the Second World War, respectively in 1957 and 1968, and earned significant national and international recognition, Djebar by being inducted into the French Academy in 2005, and Modiano by winning the Nobel Prize in 2014. Their works are shaped by reflections on and of a familial and communal past crystallized around memories of colonial Algeria, for the former, and of the French experiences of the Nazi Occupation, the Vichy Regime, and the Holocaust, for the latter. Linda Lê and Patrick Chamoiseau were both born after the Second World War, in Vietnam and Martinique respectively, and their literary voices were forged in the crucible of postcolonial turmoil and identity conflicts. Chamoiseau’s career reached the peak of institutional recognition in 1992 when his novel Texaco received the Goncourt Prize, and his subsequent work further solidified his entrance into the contemporary canon, while Lê, who made her debut in 1993, has created a literary universe that, intensely haunting and stylistically unique, has remained generally overlooked by large audiences. As for Maylis de Kerangal, a writer associated with the “Inculte” group whose aesthetic evinces an interest in observational, fieldwork-inspired writing and a precise, specialized lexicon, after her debut at the start of the century, she has attained a considerable level of visibility with novels such as Réparer les vivants, adapted into a movie in 2016. The differences in their biographical backgrounds and artistic profiles notwithstanding, all five writers devote a significant part of their work to questioning the ways in which literature as a practice of remembering can inscribe and make sense of death and the dead. Their works illustrate distinct forms of contemporary necropoetics insofar as they move beyond the treatment of mortality and memory as a general theme in order to plumb the possibility and limits of creating ways of writing not only about death and the dead but with them. Rejecting both the vividly macabre and the paralyzingly melancholy, they write mourning as reviving. The texts chosen to illustrate this dimension of their writing are by no means isolated in each of their œuvres: for instance, one could cite Modiano’s Voyage de noces (1990), Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995), Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique (1988), Lê’s Les Trois Parques (1997), or Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants (2014) as examples representative of other works in which these writers deploy narratives of the aftermath.

16

Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

Originating in private forms of grief (Lê’s ghostly narratives), the genre of necrofiction centers on mourning as a public act (Kerangal’s meditation on the death of immigrants) that entails, even demands, participation in a communal process (reclaiming a conflicted legacy in Djebar, situating a family story in a historical or anthropological perspective in Chamoiseau), shifting the focus from the effects of a collective trauma on individuals to the shared experience embedded into discrete events of loss (writing against anonymity in Modiano). This narrative, discursive, and enunciative structure first appears as a funerary site, a site of commemoration. The scriptural gesture’s ceremonial or ritual quality allows contemporary writers to revisit the past by devoting to it a space that is both appropriate (suited to the occasion) and proper (doing justice to its subject). From a rhetorical point of view, the form could be compared to the old demonstrative genre that consists of praise and blame.22 From a formal point of view, it is comparable to metafiction, the postmodern genre par excellence that functions on two or even several interpretative levels since it offers a text that is both readable and writable.23 The author-psychopomp officiates at this ritual, appearing as the guide of lost souls in the night of forgetting or political 22 See Aristotle, On Rhetoric, chapter 3; Quintilien, The Orator's Education, 2.15. Watthee-Delmotte draws attention to the rhetorical and political transformations of the genre from Bossuet’s seventeenth-century oraisons conceived in the age of monarchical absolutism to the nineteenth-century literary éloge funèbre such as Hugo’s honoring Balzac and, more importantly, that of Anatole France upon the death of Émile Zola in the context of the post-Dreyfus consolidation of republican values. In both periods, paying public homage to the dead must fulfill a positive social function. In the times of Louis XIV: “Bossuet préconise qu’il y ait dans chaque oraison une allusion à l’actualité, ce qui permet de ne pas rester piéger dans le deuil, mais de reprendre pied sur terre. En un mot, on fait droit à l’émotion pour la canaliser et on rappelle les valeurs partagées, cohésives, rassurantes, pour que la vie rentre dans ses plis” (Watthee-Delmotte, 2019, 44). Two centuries later, Hugo and France deliver two eulogies that, despite being quite different in tone and content, “poursuivent la même logique: enclore, c’est-à-dire constituer autour du défunt regretté le cercle des endeuillés; rassembler par le pathos lié à l’évocation de ses réalisations remarquables et de ses combats; et exhausser, c’est-à-dire exprimer la valeur supérieure fédératrice, ici la justice et la liberté comprises comme l’âme profonde de la France […] Les éloges funèbre apparaissent, en ce sens, comme des moments par excellence où des formes d’héroïsation sont mises en œuvre pour les proposer en modèles qui s’appuient sur des valeurs communes sacralisées” (Watthee-Delmotte, 2019, 50). 23 See Barthes (1970, 10) for the opposition readable/writable and Linda Hutcheon (1988) for the well-established concept of metafiction.

Introduction

17

discord (Rancière, 1995). She is not a mere scribe but a commentator who adopts the point of view of posterity or eternity in order to gather in a single place, through the structural or rhetorical tour de force of the poetics of recuperation, historical facts and words, evidence and counterevidence, truths and lies. Necrofiction provides some striking examples of what Greg Forter calls an “assault on the fetish of the fact” (2019, 7) embedded in a narrow vision of historical writing. The intervention of an auctorial persona whose involvement is either displayed through the use of the autobiography (Chamoiseau) and autofiction (Lê, Kerangal, and Modiano) or implied (as in the case of Djebar’s extradiegetic narrator), provides a counterpoint to the traditional doxa on the topic, whether it involves the story of the Prophet Muhammad or the memorial realms and rituals of Martinican culture. The imaginary of necrofiction feeds off of the historical “discourse of the dead,” of their burdensome “absence” but, instead of making them the silent object of enunciation, the passive topic of a dialogue between the living, it opens up a space for them to address the living. Necrofiction gives the dead voice through prosopopoeia (Djebar, Chamoiseau) or, with a more intricate rhetorical turn, imbues them with the power to shape the narrator’s first-person discourse from within (Modiano,24 Lê25). As the chapters dedicated to Linda Lê and Patrick Modiano demonstrate, the commemorative dimension of these narratives cannot be severed from the ethical and scriptural impossibility of completing the act they set out to accomplish. Vietnamese-born writer Linda Lê grapples in her 24 I am borrowing the powerful expression used by historian Kirsten Weld in the title of her book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. The book studies the reconstruction of the archives of the dictatorship period in Guatemala as a material, social, and political process. Sifting through the recovered archives to identify the hundreds of thousands of desaparecidos requires recognition of the fact that “what is rescued remains a paper cadaver, not a citizen: a testament to the repression suffered by that citizen, a thin and tragic representation of a once-full life […] The right to truth is critically important, but not more so than the violated right to life” (Weld, 2014, 19). 25 De Certeau: “Le discours sur le passé a pour statut d’être le discours du mort. L’objet qui y circule n’est que l’absent, alors que son sens est d’être un langage entre le narrateur et ses lecteurs, c’est-à-dire entre des présents. La chose communiquée opère la communication d’un groupe avec lui-même par ce renvoi au tiers absent qu’est son passé. Le mort est la figure objective d’un échange entre vifs. Il est l’énoncé du discours qui le transporte comme un objet, mais en fonction d’une interlocution rejetée hors du discours, dans le non-dit” (1975, 60).

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

work with issues of guilt stemming from the loss of her father after an extended process of estrangement and disavowal. The process, which began well before her father’s physical death, is rooted in a shared history of alienation and self-alienation that expands in concentric circles from the nuclear family to the larger family dynamic into the communal (the neighborhood) and the political (the native and adoptive countries). Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano resurrects an ordinary victim of the Holocaust, Dora Bruder. In the eponymous novel that brings together autobiographical reflection, archival research, amateur sleuthing, and the Benjaminian wanderings of a contemporary flâneur, Modiano creates an antithesis of History. While fundamentally a work of fiction that seems to invite readings inspired by Hayden White’s skepticism about history as a narrative, Dora Bruder questions the very nature of writing, fictional or historical, insofar as it pretends to be about the dead. Questions about truth, variously defined as methodological reliability, scientific objectivity, ideological self-awareness, and factual accuracy, are incorporated into a quasi-programmatic scriptural effort to recover the past without silencing it; in other words, to create a textual space that the dead can again inhabit without, as the epigraph from De Certeau reminds us, expecting them to keep quiet forever. Working against this historical pressure, Modiano’s own writing seems to maintain a relentless, uncompromising, and agonizing connection with loss and its traumatic consequences. However, the ritual dimension of these texts also enables contemporary writers to part with the past through an elaborate rhetorical and poetic apparatus that combines archival and documentary materials, factual and imaginary characters and events, and vivid portrayals and theoretical reflections. In 1991, in the context of civil unrest in her native country, French-Algerian writer Assia Djebar published Loin de Médine [Far from Medina], in which she draws on early Muslim historians such as Ibn Hisham, Ibn Sa’d, and Tabari in order to fill the lacunae of these texts with the stories and voices of women who played an active part in the establishment of Islam and, thus, to restore, against fundamentalist religious interpretations as well as Western misconceptions, a forgotten tradition of tolerance and pluralism. Moreover, literary tombs singularly reassemble the body (corpus) of different historical and cultural traditions, recasting them in distinct ways reminiscent of the classical epidictic forms of praise or blame (laus or vituperatio). The tomb allows for a restitution,26 a recomposition, 26 This is associated with what French critics have identified as “une éthique de restitution” in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing: “Restituer,

Introduction

19

and a rearrangement of the great corpus – the textual body and the symbolic body – of the past. This is immediately apparent in La Matière de l’absence in which Martinican-French writer Patrick Chamoiseau alternates between deeply personal stories about his departed mother and reflections on the Atlantic slave trade, plantation culture, and the history of humanity writ large.27 Finally, in erecting the tomb of a person or event, these texts also gesture towards their own authority.28 Their authors and narrators situate themselves as privileged witnesses of a forgotten or misrepresented loss, custodians of a valuable historical or cultural tradition, and interpreters of the events recounted. Even though their texts are vastly dissimilar in size and structure, both Chamoiseau and Kerangal weave intricate connections between their recounting of an event (a death, a shipwreck) and their own literary œuvre. Writing as an act of mourning also summons memories of one’s own literary past and prompts authors to measure their works against the challenge of representing the unrepresentable and saying the unsayable. The literary tomb is a place of resurrection of a departed character and reinvention of his or her past. Although the material of the invention may be historical, and the author may manifest her commitment to truth from the outset, its arrangement is nevertheless eminently fictional and literary. Fictional because the historical material is transformed into a fable, this fantasy allowing readers to feel the experience of the time period evoked and to grasp its inner workings (through the force of c’est certes reconstruire, rétablir la mémoire oubliée de ce qui fut, mais c’est aussi – peut-être surtout – rendre quelque chose à quelqu’un” (Viart and Vercier, 2008, 79). 27 The gesture of necrofiction stands in close proximity but also in opposition to the “operative premise of all biopolitical paradigms […] that the state is a vast organism that requires physiological research, pathological diagnoses, and medicinal, curative prescriptions.” John T. Hamilton contends that in the context of biopolitics, “the biologization of the political fades into the politicization of the biological,” its measures being “all-too-often a mask for thanatopolitics” (2013, 45). This dovetails with R. Esposito’s comments on “the double and crisscrossing politicization of life and the biologization of politics that unfolds at the opening of the twentieth century” in the wake of which “this biopolitical vector is turned into a thanatopolitical opposite, thereby linking the battle for life to a practice of death” (2013, 71). 28 Barthes: “Je voulais, selon le vœu de Valéry à la mort de sa mère, ‘écrire un petit recueil sur elle, pour moi seul’ (peut-être l’écrirai-je un jour, afin qu’imprimée, sa mémoire dure au moins le temps de ma propre notoriété)” (1980, 99).

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

the hypotyposis); literary because the text, through its structure and its closure, offers, in addition to a living portrait of the past, a reflection on the past (by virtue of its mimesis). Greg Forter’s observations about the idea of truth that emanates from postcolonial historical novels also hold true in the case of necrofiction: This is a truth contained in the imperative to keep faith with the forgotten dead. It follows from the conviction that history is not singular but plural, that a central task for the historian is to retrieve the memory of those whose lives are threatened with a second, post-mortem effacement (not merely conquered or killed, but written out of the annals of history), and that the effort at faithful reconstruction often colludes in burying the shattered remnants of stories for which few “facts” survive. (2019, 7)

This type of narrative marks a site that allows the past and the present to merge in the same offering gesture. It operates both in the margins and at the center of history by proposing a vision that is simultaneously internal, intimately connected to the lived experience of historical events, and external, informed by the lesson derived from the events themselves. The peritext composed of epigraphs, dedications, notes, and back covers aiming to inform the reader or even to frame or contain the meaning of the (Hi)story attest to this duality, reinforcing the diegetic articulation of heterotemporal perspectives (Cheah, 2016, 11). The narrative tomb’s point of view could therefore be found at the place where prehistory and post-history come together. At times, as in the cases of Djebar and Chamoiseau, its ambitious formal scope harkens back to the Romantic idea of a novel that could be, as Victor Hugo put it almost 200 years ago, “à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique, réel mais idéal, vrai, mais grand” (1894, 264). Its corrective ethical agenda, visible especially at the heart of Modiano’s work, seems to resonate with Édouard Glissant’s call to create novels that give a voice and a sensible shape to the myriad lives suppressed by official History. Glissant’s idea of a novel able to offer “une vision prophétique du passé” (1981, 227)29 transcends the limitations of a putative “postco 29 Glissant expounds on the connection between the liminal condition of colonial history and the task of the postcolonial writer: “C’est dire aussi que notre histoire est présence à la limite du supportable, présence que nous devons relier sans transition au tramé complexe de notre passé. Le passé, notre passé subi, qui n’est pas encore histoire pour nous, est pourtant là (ici) qui nous lancine. La tâche de l’écrivain est d’explorer ce lancinement, de le ‘révéler’ de manière continue dans le présent et l’actuel” (1981, 226).

Introduction

21

lonial” body of work and demonstrates its paracolonial relevance as it spurs the imagination and shapes the writing of authors from different generational and political backgrounds (Panaïté, 2017a, 4). For Lê and Kerangal, scriptural practices associated with contemporary literary tombs (e.g., the use of repetitive structures indicative of trauma or the attempt to anchor an unmoored event) represent the concern felt by the present in regard to its own place in the temporal continuum: Thus, this present, reigning supreme, “dilated,” sufficient, evident, is revealed to be worried […] It reveals itself as incapable of filling the gap, at the limit of rupture, which it itself hasn’t ceased to dig between the field of experience and the horizon of expectation. Enveloped in its bubble, the present is discovering that the ground is giving way beneath its feet. (Hartog, 2003, 132)

François Hartog singles out three key words that anchor this “shift in ground”: first, memory, that is voluntary, provoked, reconstructed memory that enables one to recount one’s own story; second, patrimony, inspired by the crisis of national legacy (a long-standing concern in France, inaugurated in the mid-1980s by Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire); and third, commemoration, which engenders several successive and often competing forms of memorialization (2003, 133). Writing death and the dead in contemporary fiction represents an active, and sometimes polemical, dialogue with these forms and their social, cultural, and political functions. Un/writing the Monument The contemporary literary tomb can appear as a creative paratopia or a literary coup de force, conjuring up the monumental ambitions of its Renaissance precursor.30 In contemporary texts, this is reflected in the sheer size and scope of the book (Chamoiseau), the political 30 The paratopia refers, according to Dominique Maingueneau’s definition, to un mode d’inscription dans l’espace littéraire qui ne fait qu’un avec le travail ininterrompu de positionnement” (2004, 126) in the literary field. This convergence of two dimensions, the autotelic and heteronomic, confirms and expands the writer’s “enunciative vocation.” Just as Maingueneau highlights, “Il s’agit pour les écrivains de produire une définition de la littérature légitime qui soit en harmonie avec leurs propres qualifications: celles dont ils disposent au départ comme celles qu’ils pensent nécessairesd’acquérir” (2004, 119).

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

and ideological risks taken by authors who set out to rewrite conventional versions of the past (Modiano and Djebar), and the ethical entanglements of first-person narratives engaging with large-scale phenomena (Lê and Kerangal). Its distinct yet related manifestations are reminders of the fact that “monumentum is both a memorial and a warning (monere), a poetic security project and a gravestone” – yet, unlike historical, political, or religious monuments which seek to affix a meaning to the commemorated object, necrofiction “staves off death by keeping death perennially in view” (Hamilton, 2013, 47), preventing the semantic entombment of the event through a relentless excavation of its misplaced, lost, forgotten, or erased remains.31 In Lettre morte (1999), Linda Lê’s narrator grapples with the everyday torture of the living being bound to the dead: “Je suis envoûtée par le mort. Il m’appelle sur l’autre rive. Et de nouveau les idées de suicide m’assaillent. Je prends un rasoir. Je voudrais voir mon sang couler dans l’eau de la baignoire. Mais mon père m’en empêche. Je dois vivre. C’est ma punition. Vivre et me souvenir de lui” (1999, 42–43). The Vietnamese father’s death seals the impossible double bind: forever inseparable from the daughter who survives him, penetrating every corner of her life, his memory is a constant reminder of the absence to which the daughter’s exile had condemned him while still alive. The narrative of the revenant father is one of struggle but also of ontological and existential interpenetration that makes it virtually impossible to determine where the living end and where the dead begin. Lettre morte is a fictional embodiment of the inseparability that Blanchot places at 31 John Hamilton raises a series of questions about the use of security discourses in the current public sphere that could be compared to those of necropolitical discourses which in fact combine security and thanatological vocabularies to conceal or to elicit visions of ongoing threats (at one end of the political spectrum, the emphasis will fall, for instance, on the deadly threats of terrorism, war, immigration, and the equally radical policies needed to fight them, while at the other end, ecological, humanitarian, economic, or health-related threats will be portrayed with the same rhetorical force): “Why are we faced with the term security in such a huge variety of contexts with such a bewildering scope of applications? […] Or should we not instead take security to be a component in strategies of power, a thoroughly historical tool for implementing control along the populace and among ourselves, a mechanism of governance, including self-discipline, which draws decisive lines and sanctions exclusionary practices, a formidable instrument of life management that derives its persuasiveness, undeniability, and legitimacy from this presumed universality?” (2013, 8).

Introduction

23

the heart of literary writing where “la vie porte la mort et se maintient dans la mort même” (1949, 31). Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) also queries the boundaries between the living and the dead in a haunting narrative. The random discovery of a teenager’s name in a Second World War–era newspaper haunts a narrator who both obsessively identifies with her experiences and relentlessly probes the temporal gap that separates them. This leads to a hybrid text: neither entirely fictional nor claiming archival legitimacy, it relies both on documentary evidence and imagined scenarios to narrate the past. Writing then becomes simultaneously a contestation of Dora’s erasure from collective memory and a ceremonial act honoring her untimely disappearance in the horrors of the Holocaust. This meditative investigation into an unaccounted life provides a compelling memento of literature’s memorial power: “Si je n’étais pas là pour l’écrire, il n’y aurait plus aucune trace de la présence de cette inconnue et de celle de mon père dans un panier à salade en février 1942, sur les Champs-Elysées. Rien que des personnes – mortes ou vivantes – que l’on range dans la catégorie des ‘individus non identifiés’” (Modiano, 1999, 65). As the investigation rescues the absent protagonist from oblivion and anonymity, the narrative calls attention to her ubiquitousness, highlighting her haunting presence in the other people who shared – or, like the narrator’s father, could have shared – her fate, and in the Parisian sites that bear witness to her past existence.32

32 Adriana Cavarero investigates the etymology of the terms “terror” and “horror” and links them to different phenomenologies of fear. Linked to trembling, motion, and war, the former “displays a specific link with the kind of total fear, synonymous with absolute disorder and loss of all control, known as panic” (2009, 5), which finds its full realization in the physics of collective panic “inasmuch as it forces bodies to turn the very violence that, sweeping them along in the rush of flight, has transformed them into a killing machine against one another” (2009, 6). Associated with being cold and feeling frozen, “horror” suggests, on the contrary, a state of paralysis and petrification as experienced by Medusa’s victims. Rather than being a reaction to the threat of death, horror comes from witnessing the disfiguring and dismemberment of a body thought to be unique, singular, and endowed with “ontological dignity” (2009, 9): “It has rather to do with instinctive disgust for a violence that, not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability. What is at stake is not the end of a human life, but the human condition itself, as incarnated in the singularity of vulnerable bodies. Carnage, massacres, tortures” (2009, 8).

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With Loin de Médine (1991), Assia Djebar accomplishes a memorial gesture that, far from constituting a thematic hapax in her body of work, reaffirms her interest in the rewriting of history from a point of view that is both subjective and corrective. Subjective because in Djebar’s work the voices of silent witnesses and vanquished protagonists resonate inside a familiar history, belying its false objectivity. Corrective because, in order to destabilize the authorized version of truth, one must enter into the cracks of political or sacred history and remove the veil from its omissions, failings, and lies, thus disrupting its mythologizing power (see LacoueLabarthe, 1988). Historical truth, although presented as absolute, turns out to be merely one ideology that obscures many others: the ideology of the conqueror, the colonizer, the patriarch, the political, religious, or clan leader. Loin de Médine retells the legend in order to remove it from the confinement of theological doxa. However, in diffracting the apodictic truth of authorized religious and political discourse into a series of individual stories anchored in the intimate and life-defining realm of domesticity, the novel both exemplifies and transcends the literary practice of “the nation writ small” (Andrade, 2011). Composed of multiple stories that cross, bend, or challenge the unified story of the Qur’an, this subversive narrative does not, however, proceed in a lateral, peripheral, or minor way. On the contrary, it strategically “elaborates a new theoretical site (totalizing system and discourse capable of articulating a group of physical places where forces are distributed)” (De Certeau, 1990, 62). The literary tomb erected by Djebar “counts […] on the resistance that the establishment of a place offers to the erosion of time” (De Certeau, 1990, 62). Confronted with the great question that has rent the Islamic world since the death of the Prophet, Who is his legitimate heir?, Djebar’s novel erects an audacious funerary response. Truly paying homage to the two bodies, physical and spiritual, of the Prophet means ending the bloody wake that has continued since his death. To accomplish this task, the Algerian-born writer first revisits the holy story in all of its material and affective dimensions, and then unearths its contradictions and falsities, using them to build a shattered monument, a stele of voices, memories, and multiple truths.33 33 Ladha: “In this sense the voice, a conceptual letter, is rather a pyramidal sign, a sepulcher containing no meaning other than the negation of meaning itself in the act of indication […] Thus to recognize the voice as a meaningless sign is already to know the voice as a symbol, a corporeity exceeding the strict limits of meaning, just as earlier we saw that to recognize the voice as a sign-bearing medium is to know it

Introduction

25

In “Crater,” the last part of La Matière de l’absence (2016) inspired by his mother’s passing, Patrick Chamoiseau engages in a multilayered poetics of recovery that spans from individual and family recollections to reflections on precolonial history and the prehistoric condition of humanity. The tragedy of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée that effectively destroyed the colonial city of Saint-Pierre, transforming it into an “immense sépulcre” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 338), represents the lynchpin of his narrative. Over a hundred years later, revisiting this site, once left for dead and then eventually reborn, prompts a meditation on ruins, an enduring trope of Western literature from Homer and Virgil to Petrarch and Du Bellay, and from Byron and Lamartine to Yourcenar and De Lillo.34 Nonetheless, rather than eliciting an elegiac reaction to the loss that occurred in this “champ de destruction,” the experience underscores the past’s powerful, “énergetique” presence (Chamoiseau, 2016, 346). This is manifested through the fragmentary and mineralized traces which permeate the place as it stands today and induce a reaction of “haute compassion” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 346). Combining “une tristesse sans peine et une joie sans imbecillité” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 347), this attitude allows one to experience the catastrophe (etymologically, the reversal of life into death and again into life) without the theatricality of a public reenactment or the empathic performance of identifying with the dead. The “stone,” an important motif in Chamoiseau’s writing, is the key image here, with its alchemic and magical properties highlighted in the language (“transmuer,” “faire substance”) used to refer to the spiritual and material survival of the old site’s remains in the new life of the city. To the question “Que devient la pierre quand elle doit assumer seule l’impossible survivance?” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 340), the seemingly obvious response warranted both by the commemorative tradition and the nature of the material itself is a monument. A similar impulse requires that his mother’s memory be honored with “le plus beau des cercueils” in order to “magnifier ce qui nous restait d’elle” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 210). However, her bereft heirs come to the realization that, rather than give in as a symbolic instrument, a tomb or storehouse of the psychophysiological vestiges of language” (2019, 75). 34 Hui: “In the Iliad, tombs and other constructions such as the Achaean wall correspond to the text itself, insofar as both are objects meant to preserve the memory of Troy. In Homeric Greek sêma means ‘thought,’ ‘sign,’ ‘memory,’ ‘tomb,’ ‘monument,’ and ‘grave.’ Thus sêma is the word used for the scar of Odysseus, the tomb of Hector and the Achaean wall” (2016, 31).

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to the fear that has ruled the Western spirit from Socrates to Heidegger and fight against the invading nothingness (“rien”) in order to save what can be saved (“sauver ce qui pouvait l’être”), they could instead, in Presocratic vein, celebrate the constant transformation of the material and spiritual substance, that is, the life itself, of which their mother had been a part: “célébrer la vie: la vie en elle, elle dans la vie, la vie sans distinction soudain devenue elle” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 210, 211). Similarly, Chamoiseau situates the tomb of Saint-Pierre – and his own necrofiction – between the monument that implies a prescriptive attitude and a set of commemorative rules, which he calls “authorized memory,” and the fugitive, discontinuous, impossible manifestations of “Traces-mémoires,” dominated memory (2016, 347): “Ces grandes ruines de Saint-Pierre et ses vestiges tiennent à la fois du monument et de la Trace-mémoire: brisure de la mémoire coloniale, squelette d’un vaste effondrement, ils ont touché à la fragilité labile de la Trace quand leur origine, leur fonction, s’est doucement effacée des mémoires” (2016, 348). While the former follows an authoritarian top-down logic, the latter emerges from the depths of what has been relegated to oblivion, and their confluence makes possible the creation (Chamoiseau, 2016, 348), that is, a new way of unreading and undeciphering the world while bearing witness to its becoming.35 In Maylis de Kerangal’s À ce stade de la nuit (2015), the images of bodies floating around the island of Lampedusa after the shipwreck of a boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy on October 3, 2013 spark a series of reminiscences. The news of the shipwreck engenders a complex web of relations between past and present events, places, and artistic media, conveying ideas about loss (of class status or group identity) and nostalgia (for clearly defined social values or cultural distinctions). Responding to the metonymical interplay of name migration, the narrator is transported outside of her domestic space into an ever-expanding realm of travel, exploration, and (self-)discovery: “le nom réel appelle et se déporte dans le nom fictionnel, migre de l’état civil au roman, du registre historique des titres de noblesse à celui de la littérature; ou comment le nom fictionnel peut ressaisir le nom réel” (Kerangal, 2014, 31). Kerangal’s insistence on the relationality of disparate – even incompatible – objects, epitomized by the “insondable 35 These ideas receive an emphatic formulation in Chamoiseau’s book: “un mouvement flottant de significations […] dans l’illisible d’un devenir […] Depuis le départ de Man Ninotte, j’ai appris à ne pas nommer les ruines, à n’envisager que leur indéchiffrable” (2016, 348–349, 351).

Introduction

27

tristesse” that binds together “le prince et le migrant” (2014, 16), calls for an examination of the ethical implications of her text. As Chamoiseau vehemently calls out: "que les morts massives en Méditerranée […] nous permettent de distinguer les petites morts du quotidien, le désastre disséminé, […] l’innomée catastrophe” (Chamoiseau, 2017, 29). Can one establish a morally sound relation between, on the one hand, a disenchanted and even socially déclassé Western individual’s voluntary ordeal (i.e., arduous tourism) and, on the other, the life-threatening urgency (war, violence, dispossession) the deprives migrants of any form of agency beyond the quest for safety and security? Does the Other, in order to warrant our care, have to reach the liminal stages of humanity as it is represented in our sovereign perception of the self? Burial, Resurrection, Commemoration At the onset of his study on the material forms of caring for the dead throughout the ages, Thomas W. Laqueur argues that: The history of the work of the dead is a history of how they dwell in us – individually and communally. It is a history of how we imagine them to be, how they give meaning to our lives, how they structure public spaces, politics, and time. It is a history of the imagination, a history of how we invest the dead […] with meaning. (2015, 17)

The manifestations of this bond between us and those who are no longer (among) us, between their community and our own, between what used to be and what is, may well vary according to time and place, yet historians are well aware of the duality of any gesture that purports to affix meaning to the body of the dead, to describe the kind of “work” they perform on us and for us, or to define their legacy. De Certeau sees it clearly when he points to the fundamental duality of the historical project, its internal contradiction: in trying to com-prehend or to grasp the historical Other, one is always on the verge of erasing its difference and taming its alterity: “La quête historique du sens est celle de l’Autre mais ce projet, contradictoire, vise à ‘comprendre’ et à cacher avec le ‘sens’ l’altérité de cet étranger, ou, ce qui revient au même, à calmer les morts qui hantent encore le présent et à leur offrir des tombeaux scripturaires” (1975, 8). Envisioned as a funerary site, the literary tomb offers a place where the departed can be laid to rest in a proper fashion, mitigating the acts of indifference, neglect, disagreement, mistreatment, or violence

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

perpetrated by the narrator herself or by others (jealous and selfish heirs or an entire society blinded by hatred and prejudice). The key element that affirms the narrative’s ritual aspect is the presence of an authorofficiant. Not content with being an istor, literally an eyewitness (see Bouju, 2013), but entering into hand-to-hand combat with historical material and its doxal truth, she becomes a feared agonist – rival, competitor, or adversary – in a fight to defend the honor of those who are disdained or forgotten. She can also be a prosopon, by situating herself in the foreground of the stage or in a head-to-head with history, its actors, and its victims.36 Much like history, fiction elaborates models that help make sense of memories, documents, and other material traces. The quest for different forms of intelligibility can also emphasize the relation between the historian or writer and the lived experience of the past or, in De Certeau’s terms, “la possibilité de faire revivre ou de ‘ressusciter’ un passé” (1975, 47). Writing to restore the fabric of the past and find those who have gone in the traces they left behind calls for a specific form, which De Certeau simply calls “the narrative genre.”37 This agenda of narrative recovery is shared by the nineteenth-century historical novel draws its inspiration directly from history while rivaling it through the intensity and projective power of representation, by historiographic metafiction that relies on multiple perspectives and a complex intertextual web in order to probe the limits and even the possibility of knowing the past, and by postcolonial novels that imagine counter-narratives to fill in the lacunae and correct the falsehoods of the official chronicle. Necrofiction 36 Philippe Ariès links the historical emergence of funeral inscriptions (such as tombstones and epitaphs) to “the discovery of the individual, the discovery, at the hour or thought of death, of one’s own identity, one’s personal biography, in this world and the next.” It can be said that, in the contemporary context of a secularized, mediatic, and “wild” or “savage” death (“la mort sauvage” in French), the following statement applies to the writer undertaking a literary tomb as much as (or more than) to the subject it commemorates: “The desire to be oneself forced tombstones to emerge from their anonymity and to become commemorative monuments” (1981, 293). 37 De Certeau underscores two types of historical approaches: one that emphasizes methodology and another that focuses on experience: “privilégie la relation de l’historien avec un vécu, c’est-à-dire. Elle veut restaurer un oublié, et retrouver des hommes à travers les traces qu’ils ont laissées. Elle implique un genre littéraire propre: le récit, alors que la première, beaucoup moins descriptive, confronte plutôt les séries que font sortir différents types de méthodes” (1975, 47).

Introduction

29

draws from the positive project of the historical novel, with its confident view and immersive representation of the past, and also from the critical project of historiographic metafiction, with its constant perspectival shifts and strategies of distantiation and disenchantment. Drawing on both traditions, necrofiction brings the dead and death into focus as defining ways of relating the past and relating to it. History occurs on the threshold that both joins and separates society from what went before.38 Necrofiction is also traversed by this constant tension, or “vibration de limites” in De Certeau’s words, between the present and its other, and its aim is not only to understand it but also to acknowledge and preserve its opacity.39 For the modern historian, history “ne ressuscite rien du tout,” but serves to make possible an exchange between the living (see De Certeau, 1975, 61).40 For the postcolonial writer, history represents both a trap, a constant reminder of “carence épistémologique” thrust upon the collective consciousness, and a duty, a creative exploration of an obfuscated, repressed, and forgotten past (Glissant, 1981, 221–279). Caught between the standard principles of historical inquiry predicated on archival research, transparency, and rationality, on the one hand, and the overwhelming evidence of the senselessness of these principles amid the traumas, silences, erasures, and irrationalities of colonialism on the other hand, the postcolonial writer contests the hierarchical teleology of atavistic history. Neither steeped in the fantasmatic nostalgia of past glory nor deceived by the archive’s factual promise, necrofiction partakes in a larger project in which narrative recovery engenders visions of a literary and political future. Necrofiction illuminates the interplay of three features that define narrative writing today: the persistent interest in memorialization, the rivalry between history and literary fiction over the production of an ethical account of the past, and the choice made by many contemporary 38 De Certeau: “L’histoire se joue là, sur ces bords qui articulent une société avec son passé et l’acte de s’en distinguer; en ces lignes qui tracent la figure d’une actualité en la démarquant de son autre, mais qu’efface ou modifie continuellement le retour d’un ‘passé’” (1975, 49–50). 39 Note the historian’s wording: “Le discours ne cesse de s’articuler sur la mort qu’il postule mais que la pratique historique contredit. Car parler des morts, c’est également dénier la mort et quasi la défier” (De Certeau, 1975, 61). 40 A similar discomfort with the “revivalist” abilities of theoretical discourse can be registered in Mbembe, who declares, in relation to his treatment of Fanon, “this essay is not at all about singing back the dead but rather aims to evoke in fragmentary fashion a great thinker of transfiguration” (2019, 8).

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writers to address topics that bridge the gap between the personal and the political, the national and the global, and the colonial and the postcolonial. My analysis will revolve around a set of narratives taken as distinct but by no means isolated examples of a contemporary necropoetic trend in which death writing informs a book’s epistemology, ontology, and structure with equal force. The five chapters are each devoted to a work by one of the five writers I consider representative of the aesthetic and thematic landscape of literature in French in the last 25 years: Linda Lê, Patrick Modiano, Assia Djebar, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Maylis de Kerangal. While my approach adopts a somewhat “traditional” or monographic format, it is better to attend to the singularity of each author’s engagement with necrofiction without severing them from their peers and precursors. For, even as these writers belong to the Frenchspeaking and -writing world (what has been dubbed la Francophonie or la Francosphère), I show that their relationships to the French language, and the histories, cultures, geopolitical spaces it encompasses, and to each other’s poetics, are intensely complex. Moreover, my study revolves around the narrative genre insofar as prose writing (the novel, autobiography, and memoir) can be construed as our era’s dominant literary form in terms of both institutional prestige and commercial popularity. This does not exclude but rather invites an extension of the field of necropoetics to other literary genres as well as comparisons with other art forms, which I occasionally discuss in connection to the main corpus. Ultimately, Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory provides a compelling lens through which to consider a significant set of works in contemporary French-language literary fiction while making an intervention in the current debates on literature’s inscription in and reflection on pastness, memory, inheritance, specters, vulnerability, and mortality at the turn of the twenty-first century. Necrofiction is not just fiction that is concerned with the dead, in which case it would not be a historical or specifically contemporary category, but fiction that, by way of a thematized, ritualized, enunciative, and metanarrative engagement with the event of death, is also self-consciously a meditation on the historical and biopolitical present and its own work of memory and writing within such a present. Thus, as a category, necrofiction enables a thoughtful articulation of the singular work of mourning or death as event or theme within a text with an authentic politico-philosophical reckoning with the terms by which contemporary societies understand death, life, world, finitude, community.

chapter one

Revenants The Deadly Symbiosis of Linda Lê Revenants Depuis la mort de mon père, je ne lis dans les journaux que la page nécrologique, les annonces de décès et les anniversaires de mort. Toutes ces dates comme des pierres tombales sur papier. (Lê, 1999, 48)

From beginning to end, Linda Lê’s Lettre morte (1999), the last installment of a triptych inspired by her father’s death,1 obsessively probes the fateful polysemy of the idiomatic expression that inspired its title. The text unfolds in an uninterrupted vocal and textual flux, and in a nebulous spatiotemporal setting. The dictionary indicates that the principal meaning of the expression lettre morte is a legal or official text that has lost its value and authority, while the second or figurative meaning implies a disregard or betrayal; one emphasizes the object’s passive loss of its performative value, the other reveals the subject’s active decision not to lend it power or relevance.2 “Les morts ne nous 1 The other titles in this series, which the writer associates with feelings of loss, betrayal, and guilt brought on by this personal event while at the same time rejecting an autobiographical interpretation, are Les Trois Parques (1997) and Voix (1998). In a 2007 interview with Sabine Loucif, Lê speaks in detail about her loss of home and language, as well as the death of her father, admitting, “J’ai trahi mon père, puisque je l’ai abandonné. J’ai trahi ma langue, puisque j’ai choisi le français,” and yet she also asserts that she experiences “un dédoublement” (Loucif and Lê, 2007, 882, 883) while writing that precludes reading even her most autobiographically inspired works as pure autobiography. 2 “Lettre morte,” Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 9th ed., https:// academie.atilf.fr/9/consulter/lettre?page=1: “Lettre morte (toujours au singulier), se dit d’un texte de nature juridique (titre, pouvoir, traité, etc.) qui est devenu sans

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lâchent pas, dis-je à mon ami Sirius en rangeant les lettres de mon père dans un tiroir” (Lê, 1999, 9), the narrative begins.3 The tension between the two semantic fields is further enhanced and complicated throughout the epistolary exchange between father and daughter, which features frequent references to the mortifying, or, conversely, reviving force of the act of writing, and to the power or powerlessness of literature itself, the daughter’s chosen vocation. In what follows, I examine this semantic interplay as it unfolds throughout the narrative to discuss the ghostly presence of the biopolitical in a book that speaks of the horrors of colonial and neocolonial wars (France’s war in “Indochina” followed by the US war in Vietnam) and of exile (between a ghostly “South” and “North”) while refusing a realistic representation with these themes. Rather than taming or soothing the trauma by giving it a mimetic shape, the text compulsively revisits without ever fully reconstructing the memory of the dead father, allowing him to invest the narrative space not in spite but because of the daughter’s exile and the familial estrangement that preceded and foreshadowed his disappearance. Bound to the Dead Throughout a narrative that also delves into themes of alienation, exile, love, and madness, the dead father represents a constant as formative as it is destructive. The seminal figure of the text is the image of a live person condemned to be tied to a corpse until their own death, the so-called “punishment of Mezentius,” a method of execution that embodies the cruelty and impiety of the Etruscan tyrant who lends it his name.4 However, effet, qui n’a plus ni autorité ni valeur. Cette convention est devenue, est restée lettre morte. Ses instructions sont restées lettre morte, n’ont pas reçu d’exécution. Fig. Recommandations, avertissements, reproches sont pour lui lettre morte, il n’en tient aucun compte.” 3 In Dépasser la mort, Watthee-Delmotte begins the section entitled “Donner un exutoire au remords” in a similar tone that tries to account for the literary tomb’s atoning function: “Certains trépassés ne passent pas; ils restent et hantent les vivants, âmes errantes en quête d’un geste qui répare un outrage qui leur a été fait: injustice ou assassinat. Ils s’imposent dans les pensées, appelant la réparation de ce qui est resté en souffrance” (2019, 75). 4 In Book VIII of Virgil’s Aeneid (verses 485–488), this punishment visited on Mezentius’ enemies by the “brazen tyrant” who “came to rule by violence”

Revenants

33

rather than trying to free herself of her own Mezentian punishment, her inescapable dead father, the narrator strengthens the ties between them, recognizing that “les morts ne meurent pas” (Lê, 1999, 10–11). The narrative recounts the aftereffects of the death of someone who, in life, lost his “existence charnelle” (Lê, 1999, 16) to be a “fantôme” (10, 98), resuscitated in his daughter’s body: “Sa mort le ressuscita en moi” (17). The narrator’s soliloquy constantly wavers between the father’s gradual disappearance and eventual death, on the one hand, and the remorseful confession of her own neglect and betrayal on the other. Lacking a physical portrait that could mitigate his absence and assuage her guilt, the narrator describes her own body as possessed, penetrated, inhabited, ventriloquized, and, ultimately, inseparable from her father’s: Si je regarde la mer, ce sont ses yeux qui voient le scintillement de l’eau, ses oreilles qui écoutent le roulement des vagues. Si je marche dans la rue, ce sont ses sensations que je perçois. Si je mange un fruit, c’est lui qui croque dans la pomme. Si je parle, ses mots demandent à être formulés, ce sont ces phrases que ma bouche récite. Le silencieux habite le ventriloque et la nuit je rêve ses rêves. De ce corps-à-corps avec un fantôme, je sors épuisée. (Lê, 1999, 10)

In the diegesis, without being able to mask or assuage the narrator’s guilt, the abstract materiality of the letters replaces or rather disguises her physical contact with the father as an author (etymologically, auctor, the one who engendered both his daughter and the letters to which the current text is the ultimate and posthumous reply). Early memories depict him as a nurturing figure in stark contrast with an absent and melancholy mother; he is the parent by whose side she slept, sharing both the carefree rest of childhood and the moments when one slips into a quasi-death, thus partaking in a daily ritual of preparation for death itself.5 While describing the loss of the father as a metonymy for the loss is described as follows: mortua quin etiam iungebat corpora vivis | componens manibusque manus atque oribus ora, | tormenti genus, et sanie taboque fluentis | complexu in misero longa sic morte necabat. A recent English translation emphasizes Mezentius’ ownership of the impious linkage of the living with the dead: “He even tied dead bodies onto live ones, / Hands against hands and faces against faces – / His special torture. In this grim embrace, / His victims slowly died, in liquid rot” (Virgil, 182). 5 Heidegger: “The directive has often been repeated that ‘care’ is to be thought only in the originary realm of the question of being and not in terms of an arbitrary, personally accidental, ‘worldview,’ ‘anthropological’ outlook on the

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of one’s childhood is a conventional literary trope, Lê’s style foregrounds the actualizing power of death; the hole (“trou”) of the grave is not a void, since its nothingness allows for the voice of her youth to emerge again: “Ce trou devant lequel je me tiens, c’est la tombe de mon père, d’où sort la voix de mon enfance” (1999, 15). Leaning over the grave can accomplish what her posthumous attempts to heed “la voix du mort” fail to do; in the process of rememoration, the father’s ignored letters regain their active power through their words that “me parlent d’outre-tombe” (Lê, 1999, 14, 15). Lettre morte probes the indeterminacy of the subject and the object, the living and the dead, the father and the daughter, the writer and the reader. The formal compactness of the text delivered in one paragraph uninterrupted by any typographical breaks, creates a sense of imprisonment or confinement in a “paper tomb”: “La tombe de mon père est faite de papier” (Lê, 1999, 15). However, its spasmodic syntax, which alternates short and long sentences, ellipses and prolixity, conveys the narrator’s desperate grappling with lost time and her breathless quest for meaning. The figural language teems with images of the symbolic con-fusion that originated the narrative: “attachée à un mort, main contre main, bouche contre bouche, dans un triste embrassement” (Lê, 1999, 11). The reference to the punishment of Mezentius is further complicated by references to Chinese sky burials and Jacob’s biblical fight with the angel; if the first highlights the inseparable connection between the living and the dead, the second sets the emphasis on the burden of filiation and genealogy, while the third underscores the idea of struggle. This is not a struggle for meaning or closure (katharsis),6 but for a closeness akin to the unmediated intimacy the narrator experienced during her childhood, which is as much an object of mourning for her as her father: “Toute mon enfance est contenue dans ces lettres écrites pendant les vingt années de séparation” (Lê, 1999, 14). human being. This directive will remain a dead letter in the future as long as those who merely ‘write’ a ‘critique’ of the question of being do not experience, and do not want to experience, anything of the plight of the abandonment by being” (2012, 15). 6 Relying on the prevalent semanticism of “purgation,” Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud adopted the Aristotelian term in the nascent field of psychoanalysis in their Studies on Hysteria (1895). For a current reading of this work of conceptual appropriation and its interpretive potential, see Turri (2015).

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By imagining events and phenomena that make it ontologically and psychologically impossible to distinguish between what is and what is no more, Lê does not have recourse to the vocabulary of contamination and abjection, activating instead the language of imbrication and the fusion of two separate things into a heterogeneous entity – the revenant. Unlike the trope of living memory, in which the living keep the dead alive by speaking and living for them, her imagery of the revenant (“squelette,” “fantôme”) emphasizes the hold of the dead over the living. Indeed, the living daughter is trapped in the physical space (“sous-sol,” “lieu sombre et humide”) and mental realm (“détresse,” “solitude,” “déraison”) of the dead: “Le mort me saisit. Le mort me visite” (Lê, 1999, 11). In Lettre morte, living itself is an act of remembrance, yet one that must be carried out as a punishment: “Je dois vivre. C’est ma punition. Vivre et me souvenir de lui” (Lê, 1999, 43). Lê’s narrative offers a powerful critique of memorialization as an attempt to domesticate and tame the dead by negating their radically different condition. Their memories become fixed (“elles se figent”); we place them in small boxes (“Toutes ces boîtes forment un autel”); we recite their words as prayers (“comme des prières, des invocations au mort”; Lê, 1999, 14); we want to capture their voice, “la voix,” but instead we pin it up like a dried butterfly, thus rendering those who are no longer among us captive exhibits in our own museum where we can contemplate them at our ease.7 Acts of commemoration such as personal rituals, religious practices, or secular musealization allow us to reassert our own control over past lives and to affix certain significations to their events: “Désormais, il est mort, il nous appartient. Nous nous sommes appropriés ses mots, les choses qu’il aimait, et il est en notre pouvoir de le faire revivre de temps à autre” (Lê, 1999, 14). Our freedom to manipulate the memorial apparatus affords us a degree of governance over life and death: we the living choose to let memories live or die as we display or hide them away in our internal museum. Yet, the restorative use of memory8 can act as a pharmakon, at once a remedy against forgetting and a poison that burns the survivor’s insides: “Ils me brûlent les entrailles” (Lê, 1999, 15). 7 Kurmann and Do (2018) offer the concept of “redemptive hauntings” when discussing the symbolic function of ghosts in the works of Linda Lê. Situating it in the context of Vietnamese spiritual traditions, they argue that being visited allows one to reconcile with the dead while going on living. 8 Kurmann and Do call this the “re-establishing of the parameters of personal trauma” (2018, 228).

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Instead of remembering in order to erase death, her narrator dwells in it. She reactivates the old paradigm of death, what Foucault called the old technology of death, the elaborate ritualization of which signified a passage between two sovereign powers, the mundane and the sacred. The dead are intermediaries whose ability to straddle the two realms endows them with the power to dictate the lives of those who are left behind through last words, wishes, and testaments. Lê’s necrofiction harkens back to a forgotten “transmission du pouvoir” from the dead to the living, in which however the power is not relayed to the characters in the diegesis but is seized by the narrative itself.9 The recurrent and recursive evocation of the dead instills them with a vivid and persistent presence: “Les morts ne nous lâchent pas, dis-je à mon ami Sirius en rangeant les lettres de mon père dans un tiroir”; “les morts se vengent”; “les morts ne meurent pas”; “les morts laissent leur image sur notre rétine et […] à travers ce voile nous ne voyons plus le monde de la même manière” (Lê, 1999, 9, 10, 11). This constant probing and prodding of the plasticity, not of death as a process of decay or metamorphosis, but of the dead as a collective entity endowed with endurance, intentionality, even agency, renders them more alive than the living.10 By contrast, the latter suffer from either, like the narrating daughter, the mourning paralysis of what could have been or, like her 9 Foucault: “Or, je crois que la raison pour laquelle, en effet, la mort est devenue ainsi cette chose qu’on cache, n’est pas dans une sorte de déplacement de l’angoisse ou de modification des mécanismes répressifs. Elle est dans une transformation des technologies de pouvoir. Ce qui donnait autrefois (et ceci jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle) son éclat à la mort, ce qui lui imposait sa si haute ritualisation, c’était d’être la manifestation d’un passage d’un pouvoir à un autre. La mort, c’était le moment où l’on passait d’un pouvoir, qui était celui du souverain d’ici-bas, à cet autre pouvoir, qui était celui du souverain de l’au-delà. On passait d’une instance de jugement à une autre, on passait d’un droit civil ou public, de vie et de mort, à un droit qui était celui de la vie éternelle ou de la damnation éternelle. Passage d’un pouvoir à un autre. La mort, c’était également une transmission du pouvoir du mourant, pouvoir qui se transmettait à ceux qui survivaient: dernières paroles, dernières recommandations, volontés ultimes, testaments, etc.” (2004, 220). 10 Leslie Barnes provides an extensive reading of Lê’s work through the lens of the concept of plasticity theorized by Catherine Malabou, which emphasizes writing’s ability to receive, give, and destroy form. Rather than emphasizing haunting, plastic reading seeks to reveal “a form in the text that is both other than the same and other than the other” (Malabou, 2010, 52, qtd. in Barnes, 2014, 175), a form which ultimately exceeds and holds the potential for destruction of the very writing that it inhabits (Barnes, 2014, 173–177 and passim).

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lover, Morgue,11 the ghostly frigidity of never truly being there. Like some of the author’s other books, such as Les Trois Parques (1997) or Cronos (2010), Lettre morte is intensely dystopian, but rather than fleshing out, so to speak, the materiality of the living dead, in the vein of post-apocalyptic or zombie fiction, Lê here focuses on the depths of a very personal, even intimate experience of loss. The leitmotiv, or constant figurative return, of the dead’s action upon the living (they never let go, they exact revenge, they imprint their image on our retina, and so on) further intensifies this feeling of loss, which is not only the loss of the person who has departed but that of all the possibilities connected to their existence. The sense of loss also encompasses a despair over the impossibility of a redemptive narrative, the text serving at best as a substitute, a pis-aller. It is because the dead escape the grasp of the living that the “dead letter” seeks – and, by its own account, fails – to become a literary grave, a mausoleum capable of capturing and assembling not only the daughter’s images and memories of her father, but also his own memories of her, of himself, of their time together, and, more importantly, of their time apart. Feeling possessed by his ever-present memory during her waking hours and by his nightmarish manifestations in her sleep, the recounting daughter also seeks to inhabit her father’s body and recapture not only his ideas but, on a more corporeal level, his sensations, perceptions, and emotions: “Je tente de rassembler les images de ce mort qui m’a fait faux bond pour mieux revenir m’assiéger. Pierre après pierre, je reconstruirai la maison de mon enfance. Pan après pan, je recoudrai le manteau de la mémoire” (Lê, 1999, 13). From the very beginning, the text is thrust back and forth between the hypothetical clause of remorse and the projective force of writing. Whereas the former reenacts impossible scenarios of return, consolation, and comfort, the latter asserts the future certainty of rebuilding the old childhood house and stitching together again the memorial vestment not as a place of rest or a funeral shroud, but as a dwelling space and a living connective tissue. Underscoring this polarity is the tension between the spoken and the written discourse in Lê’s narrative, made visible and audible by the different tones and forms of mourning. On the one hand, 11 The name itself is a personification of coldness, severity, and death. In French, the word is a homonym that describes both an attitude and a place, with the latter conveying an older meaning as the place where those who were condemned to death were made to wait for their fate. The fact that the noun is feminine suggests the possibility of reading the character as a double of the narrator herself. https:// academie.atilf.fr/9/consulter/Morgue?page=1.

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the oral modulations of the narrative span from the actualizing energy of the direct address to Sirius – the narrator’s mysterious companion, introduced by the quotational phrase “dis-je à Sirius,”12 whose answers are never heard – to the drone of a stifled lament, and from the obsessive repetition of words and phrases to the rare moments when the monologue reaches the dramatic intensity of funeral wailing.13 On the other hand, textual fixity operates in the compact typography that stands in sharp contrast with the discontinuous movement of a spoken confession, lending the narrative an airless and breathless quality. Here, the constant flow of reminiscences, recriminations, and oneiric projections constantly pulsates within the text’s material borders, accentuating the narrative’s preoccupation with confinement: psychological, inside one’s own psyche or one’s personal history; institutional, inside an asylum or a political system; or spatial, inside or outside a house, a region, or a country. Unwriting the Fatherland The political itself maintains a ghostly but obstinate presence in Lettre morte. Countries or continents are rarely named, but references to “North” and “South,” along with allusions to war, persecutions, exile, 12 Interestingly, in Philippe Ariès’s previously cited study, there is a peculiar reference to Sirius, used as a synonym for the modern era and its views of the past, in relation to how Latin Christian societies dealt with “the functions of commemoration of the personality and containment of the body,” that is, by keeping them neither totally combined nor totally separated. The historian writes: “Viewed from the perspective of Sirius – or of today – such an evolution might seem like the beginning of a new attitude of detachment, a liberation from old pagan superstitions regarding a mortal husk that was no longer of any importance once it was devoid of life. But this attitude was not quite that of the scientific agnostic or the Christian reformer in our contemporary cultures. Moreover, after the eleventh century, we shall witness a return to the individuality of the grave and its corollary, the positive value attached to the dead body. It is a long and uneven evolution that may in certain respects resemble a return to Roman paganism, but that will eventually culminate in the cult of the dead and of tombs of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century” (Ariès, 1981, 208–209). Here Sirius is a metaphor for modern myopia when it comes to understanding the full spectrum of attitudes towards death because of a failure to envision them in their historical depth. 13 Ladha: “Just as crying out disembodies the grief following death, Hegel’s voice, uttering the name of the Memnon, frees the statue from the death it memorializes, the history it represents” (2019, 27).

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and, most specifically, the country’s partition and reunification along the seventeenth parallel, allow for the inference that the country in question is Vietnam.14 Seen as a synecdoche for the native land – or rather, since Lê’s text resists any nativist interpretation, of the country she left behind and the site of her absence – the image of the father appears divested of any political, male, or patriarchal authority. In a reversal of the Foucauldian paradigm of biopower, it is not the father qua sovereign who holds the power to “‘faire’ vivre et […] ‘laisser’ mourir” (Foucault, 2004, 159), but the daughter whose self-mortification over her father’s demise is described through the causative turn “je l’ai laissé mourir seul” (Lê, 1999, 12). The use of the hypothetical in a vividly imagined scene that slides from filial devotion (holding the father’s hand) to homicidal closeness (slipping a gun under his pillow) renders the idea of indirect causation even more insidious. Rather than mitigating her sense of responsibility, the scene relies on a simile between misleading words and bullets, teasing out the symbolic violence of family relations: [Mon père] ne m’a demandé que de lui tenir la main, mais en n’y allant pas, en n’étant pas à ses côtés, c’est comme si je lui avais glissé un pistolet sous l’oreiller. J’ai tiré sur lui à bout portant. Les mots, mes mots mensonges, mes promesses non tenues ont tué plus sûrement qu’une balle. (Lê, 1999, 30)15

The forcefield of tensions and contradictions that define Lê’s text can be situated in a biopolitical paradigm, where the individual body is incorporated into the collective body perceived as a whole, and where death, in its unknowability, represents a condition that eludes governmentality (Foucault, 2004, 164). In replaying the fantasmatic scene of her father’s death through the limits of her own body, the text attempts a sort of gnoseological recovery that touches the very origins of knowledge. The only explicit mention of Vietnam is both inaugural and indirect. Placed at the beginning of the text, it contains the news of the father’s 14 The theme of civil war can be read in the context of its necropolitical necessity: “Civil peace in the West thus depends in large part on inflicting violence far away, on lighting up centers of atrocities, and on the fiefdom wars and other massacres that accompany the establishment of strongholds and trading posts around the four corners of the planet” (Mbembe, 2019, 19). 15 Biopower is not solely associated with direct death but with its indirect forms as well: “tout ce qui peut être meurtre indirect: le fait d’exposer à la mort, de multiplier pour certains le risque de mort ou, […] la mort politique, l’expulsion, le rejet, etc.” (Foucault, 2004, 159).

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death and thus provides the origin for the narrative we are about to read. Yet it also circumvents any direct engagement with geography or politics through the synecdoche of the idiom (Vietnamese) in a turn of phrase that brings out the asymmetry between it and French: “La formule, en vietnamien, disait non la mort, mais la perte. Mon père s’était perdu en route, s’était égaré, n’avait pas trouvé le chemin du retour. Je réprimai un cri, des larmes” (Lê, 1999, 16). Rather than reading it as a reiteration of the theme of lack (manque) in Lê’s work or as an allusion to the referential or affective inadequacy of language in general, this could be seen as another instance of Lê’s preoccupation with what remains to be said or heard, or with what could have been done, which returns to haunt and inhabit us – in other words, with the revenant nature of our lives. France, however, is explicitly mentioned several times, as a land of exile for herself, her mother, and other family members such as her mad uncle (“l’oncle fou”). For the narrator, it is also a place of failure or shipwreck, an ambiguity maintained by the term “échoué” in the sentence “Il [the father] attendait mes lettres, qui arrivaient du foyer où j’avais échoué en France” (Lê, 1999, 56). The course of the self-destructive relationship with Morgue and, by extension, with Morgue’s wife, family, and society, reveals France to be a site of non-belonging that lays bare her radical strangeness. These passages draw on the lexicon of genealogical or national kinship while using it to convey an existential and even ontological impossibility of dwelling elsewhere than in her own sorrow: [Morgue] répétait que seule sa famille comptait, que jamais il ne bouleverserait le confort d’une vie établie pour m’y faire une place. J’étais la clandestine, l’intruse, la concubine […] Chaque mot que proférait Morgue et qui tendait à me renvoyer à mon néant comblait en moi le désir d’être réduite à rien, une femme de trop, une clandestine que rien n’apparentait à la vie, un tiers que l’inventaire du bonheur reléguait dans la colonne des accessoires […] Morgue ne m’avait donné qu’une certitude: ma radicale étrangeté au monde, l’impossibilité de m’épanouir ailleurs que dans la serre du malheur. (Lê, 1999, 61, 82, 83)

The family separation that decides the narrator’s and her father’s destiny is a direct result of events that are mentioned only obliquely: that the narrator’s mother chose to go into exile in response to some persecution is a fact never hidden, but never explained. Her father’s later disappearance seems to seal the process of separation, as it severs the last ties between the narrator and the place she calls not her “homeland” but “the land of her childhood”: “Je m’aperçois que

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plus jamais je ne trouverai des lettres écrites du pays de mon enfance” (Lê, 1999, 18). It is not so much that the reasons for this momentous change in the family’s situation are actively silenced or repressed by the narrator, but that the mourning daughter’s monologue never stops to question in depth or describe in detail the external factors shaping the family plot.16 Such social and political circumstances are immaterial to the substance of a narrative primarily attuned to the ebb and flow of emotion and memory. Lettre morte looks beyond documentary testimony and realistic representation. The focus is instead on the change of state, in which the daughter’s relative agency, reflected in her choice to follow her mother into exile (“ce fut ma mère que je suivis en exil”), contrasts with the father’s passivity, or rather his passivization; as his wife and daughter leave, he does not so much remain behind as he is left, helpless and alone: “mon père fut laissé là, sans personne pour lui acheter des bouteilles d’alcool, pour le soutenir quand il tombait, pour dresser la moustiquaire quand la nuit venait” (Lê, 1999, 58). From the very first page, the anonymous character finds herself “à des milliers de kilomètres” from the “pays de [s]on enfance,” thus condemning her father to die “une mort solitaire” (Lê, 1999, 9). The sparse chronotope emphasizes distance; references to language, untranslatability. The political is barely visible, at most as a trace or an aftereffect. Language is almost never associated with nationality, with one notable and inaugural exception, the aforementioned “La formule, en vietnamien, disait non la mort, mais la perte” (Lê, 1999, 15). The narrative remains intensely focused on the phenomenal and affective manifestations of a world where the real and the imaginary are intertwined: Toujours, je relis ses lettres et toujours je me vois dans la maison de mon enfance, j’y habite désormais, je ne suis plus ici, mais à des milliers de kilomètres, et je suis un vieillard qui attend la visite de sa fille avant un thé triste […] je suis un homme seul qui pense à l’absente. (Lê, 1999, 9)

From a biopolitical perspective, death is, as Foucault and, more recently, Mbembe have emphasized, the ultimate space of individual freedom, both in the sense of the last remaining place in which the individual can escape the different forms of institutional control, and the space that allows for an extreme manifestation of this residual 16 See Tindira (2019), chapter IV, “L’héritage de son père: Secrets, Discoveries and the Future in Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père.”

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freedom. Moreover, since death in modernity has moved from the public into the private sphere, literature – and, in particular, those forms like necrofiction that draw their inspiration from its event and dwell in the imaginary, affective, and ethical breach that it creates – has reappropriated death, an otherwise enduring literary subject, as a profoundly intimate act that is nonetheless performed in the public sphere. The formal choice of addressing a letter to the father after his passing in a text bound by literary conventions confirms this ambiguous relation to the visibility (and the “writability”) of death. On the one hand, unlike Assia Djebar’s counterhistorical undertaking or Patrick Modiano’s recuperative writing, Lê’s narrative seems to domesticate death by laying it to rest, so to speak, and giving it a central yet limited place in a funeral monologue where it features alongside themes of exile, love, and madness.17 On the other hand, the more it is obsessively replayed in the absent daughter’s memory, the more the key event of the plot, the parent’s disappearance, appears to be irreducible to one structure or reason; thus, in its bare inexplicability, death seems to elude any kind of institutional apparatus (political, medical, or familial). What maintains the radical and unassimilable strangeness of death in Lettre morte is its ability to contaminate and transform life from within, rather than accept its proper place in what is presumed to be the natural cycle. While he is alive, the daughter is untouched by her living father’s words: “Je lisais ses lettres, mais les mots glissaient sur moi sans laisser de traces” (Lê, 1999, 15). This is conveyed through a visual metaphor that evokes the aquatic (at one time the words used to slide over the narrator) as well as its antithesis the mineral (the words are never truly inscribed in her memory). Now, the lost father’s words operate as a poison – a liquid that imprints itself on the body or a powder that can liquefy solid matter. As scholars such as Michèle Bacholle and Siobhán McIlvanney have 17 Lê’s narrative brings out the “prowling” status of modern death, shunned from the social scene only to be confined to a muted domestic function, while never ceasing to surround our collective space: “Mais le discours sur la mort a une autre raison: la mort chassée de la sociabilité, réfugiée dans la cellule familiale, où elle est condamnée au silence, rôde cependant autour des cités des hommes, dans la marginalité de la littérature et de l’art: la mort aujourd’hui […] n’est pas seulement la mort refoulée ou interdite, c’est aussi, comme il dit, une mort rôdeuse” (Ariès, 1982, 166). Lettre morte attempts, and inevitably fails, to suggest a reverse metamorphosis of death – from “savagely” omnipresent, repressed but ever-present, to domesticated through private rituals, both personal and familial, that bring it out into the open where it can find its place.

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shown, the text plays with the paronymy and homophony of “mort” (the dead and death) as well as with the near-homophony between “mort” and “mot”: “Jusqu’à sa mort, je n’étais pas attentive à ses mots […] qui me parlent d’outre-tombe” or “Je relis ces mots qui désormais appartiennent à un mort” (Lê, 1999, 15).18 Rather than relying on the modern trope of writing as transcending death and transfiguring the contingent condition of the dead through the work (understood both as ideal process and formal artifact) of art, Lê’s narrative renders the daughter’s story inseparable from that of the father, framing the one within the other, but without allowing the reader to decide which is the frame and which the enframed (see Peretz, 2017). Even as the text is saturated with images of the living being vampirized or ventriloquized by the dead, such as “Le silencieux habite la ventriloque et la nuit je rêve ses rêves,” it also plays on the reversal of family and gender roles: the father is gradually depleted of all symbolic power and physical strength, while the daughter assumes the role of uncaring mother: “Car le père, en mourant, est devenu le fils […] Je suis une mère qui n’a enfanté que la tristesse” (Lê, 1999, 10, 27). Underscoring the defining indeterminacy not only of their relationship, but of their ways of being in the world, Lettre morte is as much the daughter’s necrologue as it is the father’s. The Family Specters The self-necrological dimension of the text becomes salient in the plotline of the narrator’s relationship with her lover, Morgue, a figure who is all-powerful, all-controlling, and yet vastly absent. His similarities with the paternal figure have been examined by critics from a Lacanian perspective, which brings out the interplay between the sexual, familial, and linguistic facets of Lê’s writing. Several textual elements support such readings. In particular, the narrator uses a near-identical poison 18 McIlvanney analyzes the connections between the figure of the father and that of the lover and shows how the narrator finds herself torn between two familial imaginaries: “While her father is alive, the narrator’s guilt at having neglected him is transformed into self-hatred and a revilement of her own body […] most apparent in her relationship with Morgue […] Her own sexual abjection is given symbolic significance in the form of an unborn fetus, a significance that marries the paternal and the amorous” (2009, 378).

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metaphor to describe the effect of each man’s words on her: “Ces mots qu’il m’a donnés dans une langue que j’ai déjà presque oubliée, ces mots maintenant empoisonnent ma vie […] les mots de Morgue se fichaient dans mon corps comme des flèches empoisonnées” (Lê, 1999, 15, 61).19 However, I would like to shift the focus to another dimension of the triangular relation between the unnamed narrator, her anonymous father, and the onomastically overdetermined Morgue: love as a catalyst for the fluidity of life and death. As she grapples for meaning in the wake of her father’s invasive disappearance, the narrator plays and replays past moments in scenes constructed around a duality, oftentimes an antithetical parallel structure. In one rhetorical interrogation, her own birth is contrasted to and nullified by her father’s death: “Pourquoi étais-je venue en ce monde que mon père a quitté?” (Lê, 1999, 26). In another instance, her guilt over her father’s endless wait for her return is aggravated by her own wait for her elusive lover: “Mon père m’attendait, j’attendais Morgue, qui n’attendait rien, cultivait le plaisir de se faire attendre” (Lê, 1999, 32). At the end, the narrator reverses her refrain of guilt (“J’ai laisse mon père mourir seul”) into a statement that condenses but also expunges the (self-) accusatory energy that has suffused the text to its final pages: “Mon père m’a abandonée” (Lê, 1999, 104). The meaning of the sentence is tempered by a series of reflections that break the isolation of the discourse of guilt and mourning and restore the connection with the narrator’s own life story as well as life in general: “Mais ne m’a-t-il pas abandonnée depuis toujours? Engendrer, c’est ordonner l’abandon. La mort de mon père signifiera-t-elle ma mort ou une seconde naissance? Si les morts ne nous lâchent pas, n’est-ce pas pour mieux nous accompagner vers la vie?” (Lê, 1999, 104). Nonetheless, before reaching this conclusion that points to a possible reconciliation between life and death, the narrative follows a seemingly chaotic course filled with obsessive formulaic repetitions and zigzagging sentences, in which 19 Collie details the symbolic linguistic meaning that each of the characters in the novel embodies. Performing a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of the novel, she demonstrates how the narrator’s father embodies the Vietnamese language of her childhood and how her lover, Morgue, symbolizes the French language, “the new language she has entered that has violently attempted to remove all traces of her previous identity.” Therefore, the relationships between the narrator and her father and Morgue “act out and reveal the mechanisms and power struggles that are at play in language” (Collie, 2015, 416, 409).

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the paternal and romantic figures vie not only for domination over the woman’s psyche, but over her corporeal existence and her condition as a living or dying being. Filial and romantic love mirror each other in a series of juxtapositions that may call to mind Electra or even Chimena. Unlike these classical characters who epitomize the dilemmas of filial duty, however, Lê’s narrator does not appear to be truly torn between her father and the man she loves. During her father’s lifetime, she is consumed by passion only for her lover: “mais je ne pensais pas à mon père. Je pensais à Morgue, j’avais peur pour lui […] Mais les mots, je les réservais à Morgue” (Lê, 1999, 25, 34). It is only after her father’s death that she revisits her actions and finds herself guilty of filial betrayal: “Jusqu’au dernier instant, j’avais trahi mon père […] Un mot de moi et peut-être mon père aurait-il prolongé son existence” (Lê, 1999, 25, 34). The second half of the book mimics the overshadowing of one relationship by the other, as the narrator’s preoccupation with Morgue comes into greater focus. Yet neither her actions nor her emotions neatly fit a dichotomy between life with her lover, in its emotional, carnal, or generative plenitude, versus the weakness, exhaustion, otherworldliness, and renunciation associated with the spectral father. For being in love with Morgue has always been an alienating and life-draining experience: J’avais perdu ma force en étreignant dans les yeux de Morgue le vide, cet amour de soi qui ne se donnait que pour mieux se reprendre et qui tuait à coups d’esquive. Ce fut une passion ordinaire pour un homme marié. Dans les yeux de Morgue gît ma jeunesse, dans les yeux de Morgue gît ma beauté, dans les yeux de Morgue gît ma raison. J’avais presque perdu la raison en le perdant. (Lê, 1999, 17)

Facing the emptiness of the man’s gaze, which can only reflect his own image, Lê’s narrator makes herself the object of a murder by evasion. Embracing his emotional emptiness, she surrenders her reason, she becomes nothing herself. The funerary expression “ci-gît” elicits the image of a tombstone, as though the narrator’s own burial is brought about by her lover’s absent presence as well as his deadly absence. The conflation of the animate and inanimate object – “j’avais perdu la raison en le perdant” – operates once again as a circular device that encloses the woman in a space where life and death are indistinguishable. Traces of each are scattered throughout the passage – youth, passion, beauty, embracing someone dear or holding the lover’s gaze vs. the void, lying as if dead, losing one’s reason – and are so interspersed that one cannot tell where the realm of life ends and that of death begins.

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In the imaginary economy of a text laden with oneiric material, dreams that are expressly identified as such occupy a significant place. They are singled out by their temporality; the historical present or the imperfect replace the passé composé of statements such as “Les lettres ont cessé d’arriver du pays de mon enfance,” while also standing apart from the immersive present of the narrator’s plaintive address to Sirius, as in “Les morts ne pardonnent pas, Sirius” or “Crois-tu, Sirius, que nous sommes condamnés à mésuser de nos sentiments?” (Lê, 1999, 9, 38, 92). One such dream enacts the conflict between the law of the father and the law of the lover in a fantasmagoric scene that draws on the sadistic imagery of fairy-tale monsters and the symbolism of water and of the grave: Je rêve souvent que je me rends au bord du cours d’eau et que je déterre mon père. Je soulève la pierre tombale, je creuse la terre de mes mains, j’extrais du cercueil le cadavre que je prends dans mes bras. Il revient doucement à la vie. Il remue les lèvres, ouvre les yeux, me regarde et dit, Te voilà enfin. Mais Morgue apparaît, il tient à la main une épée étincelante, il m’écarte et décapite mon père, dont la tête roule dans l’eau. La tête, séparée du corps, continue à gémir. Ses yeux me fixent. L’eau rougit. Je m’agenouille au bord du cours d’eau. Je tente d’attraper la tête de mon père. Morgue me tire par le bras et m’enlève sur un cheval noir qui file au galop et s’enfonce dans une épaisse forêt. Là, Morgue m’attache à un arbre et me fouette avec sa cravache pour me punir d’avoir déchiré ses lettres. Tu es à moi, crie-t-il, tu es à moi. Tu dois te soumettre. (Lê, 1999, 57)

The “mythèmes” of this dream trace the contours of a compensatory scenario: a daughter bringing her father back to life in a primordial watery setting where the grave stands for the uterus, his subsequent decapitation at the hands of her lover as a symbol of castration, and the fantasy of being whipped as a way of drawing pleasure from humiliation. The transitional role of this scene is confirmed in the conclusion of the text, when the daughter, finally returning to the country of her birth and of her father’s death, completes the process of displacement: “Ainsi, mon père m’avait abandonnée, lui aussi. Il n’y avait plus personne au monde pour me susurrer des mots tendres, plus personne à qui je pouvais dire que de son existence dépendait mon bonheur. Toutes les douceurs m’avaient été retirées” (Lê, 1999, 89). The metamorphosis of the lovers into an alienated father and an illegitimate daughter allows the narrator to devise a compensatory alternative to her own familial reality, one in which she holds the position of victim: “Morgue se comportait avec

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moi comme un père qui avait abandonné sa fille et la voyait revenir rôder. J’étais illégitime, l’encombrant fardeau d’une passade” (Lê, 1999, 95). This new redistribution of roles allows her to shift the blame to the paternal while also criticizing her controlling lover: “Il avait sa famille, sa précieuse famille, à laquelle il avait donné son nom, ce nom si commun mais dont il était si fier parce qu’il marquait son appartenance au grand nombre” (Lê, 1999, 95). Besides never being mentioned in the text, the anonymous commonality of Morgue’s surname does little to differentiate, as its function would require, and instead confuses. The confusion affects not only Morgue, indistinguishable from his peers with whom he shares his putative name, but also any reader who might attempt to make sense of the character’s identity. His pride in his name appears to spring from the quasi-anonymity that allows him to assert his domination over a land – “domaine,” “paradis perdu” (Lê, 1999, 86) – from which the narrator, one of his possessions, is excluded. The dream sequence also reactivates the symbolism of abjection, self-loathing, and self-dispossession that permeates the narrator’s story, and in particular her description of herself, her body, as dirty, soiled, impure, or infected. This imagery reaches its peak in a passage that brings together the news of the father’s death and a sexual encounter with Morgue: “Je haïssais mon corps,” she says, because it bears “la marque de Morgue” (Lê, 1999, 60). Alienated from her body by a possessive touch that conjures up images of territorial conquest, she feels like a “marionnette sans vie […] gisante,” her mind assailed by fantasies of self-mutilation, as it is, elsewhere in the text, by thoughts of suicide. This urge to self-harm is prevented only by the necessity to force herself to live as penance, for the sole purpose of mourning her father: “Et de nouveau les idées de suicide m’assaillent […] Mais mon père m’en empêche. Je dois vivre. Vivre et me souvenir de lui” (Lê, 1999, 48). A shower scene is depicted as an act of ritual cleansing and self-purification, an invocation against all future contact with Morgue: “[qu’il] ne pût entrer en moi, prendre possession de ce territoire qu’il avait conquis avec des airs désabusés” (Lê, 1999, 60). No longer the negligent daughter, the narrator now casts herself in the role of the revenant coming to trouble the proud banality of a pater familias, “le seigneur et maître” (Lê, 1999, 86), an interpretation born out by the conflation of the two male figures. This is a watershed moment in the necrofictional construction of Lettre morte, a moment which transforms the passive stance of a narrator haunted and inhabited by the endlessly returning specters of the past into a projective disposition: rather than being constantly returned to the imaginary site

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of the trauma, the narrator returns the trauma to a (de)finite place in time, without however severing herself from it. This thematic thread invites a reading that goes beyond considerations of the narrator’s psychopathology (i.e., sadomasochism). Lê’s use of a “semantics of defense and invasion” (Haraway, 1990, 297) places the question of the self at the center of her writing. However, the self (as expressed through the personal pronouns and attendant possessive forms: “je,” “moi,” “mon père,” “ma trahison,” etc.) is not defined by essentialist or intensive statements. Rather, it is defined by its relations to others. These relations almost always reveal the narrator’s own moral or physical limitations. Negative statements abound in the text, as does the vocabulary of lack, absence, and failure. At the same time, Lettre morte highlights the permeability of a self which comes to be possessed, manipulated, haunted, inhabited, and transformed through contact with others. The transformation is plastic and manifold, but all its manifestations imply a degree of reification: a ghost, a madwoman, a dead body (“gisant”), a captured land, or a machine (“automate”; Lê, 1999, 70). Donna Haraway’s interrogations of the condition of the contemporary self as a cyborg, “text, machine, body, and metaphor all theorized and engaged in practice in terms of communications” (1990, 284) resonate with Lê’s own exploration of spectrality, which reaches a particular salience at the intersection between the body and madness. The vector of this recurring theme is the mad uncle, “l’oncle fou,” who can be seen as an alter ego of both father and daughter: his madness mirrors the former’s solitude and suffering while prefiguring the latter’s all-consuming grief and radical non-belonging or “étrangèreté” (Panaïté, 2014). He is a Doppelgänger, an antagonist to his own brother, whom he tries to annihilate by setting fire to his place of rest, but also a familiar figure to his niece, who imagines him in his “asile quelque part en France” (Lê, 1999, 74) and lends him her voice in a vividly ekphrastic scene. Far from being an accident, madness is a state of being that situates the narrator within an “inoperable” community20 that lies somewhere between the 20 The English translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s term “désœuvrée” is especially resonant here. Roberto Esposito draws on Kant and Rousseau, quoting the famous passage, “Men are not naturally kings, or lords, or courtiers, or rich men. All are born naked and poor; all are subject to the miseries of life, to sorrows, ills, needs, and pains of every kind. Finally, all are condemned to death” (Rousseau, 1979, 221–22), to situate the unresolvable antinomy of community in connection with the

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genealogical bonds of blood and the social connections of shared behaviors. The uncle’s confinement in France medicalizes the narrator’s earlier memories, “Il me semble parfois, Sirius, que, toute mon enfance, j’ai vécu enfermée dans la chambre d’asile,” as well as her own image and self-image as “la petite folle marquée par l’hérédité” (Lê, 1999, 64, 66). But Lê’s writing of madness also offers a form of resistance against the limitations imposed by the language of medicalization and biopolitical immunity. The uncle holds up a mirror – she writes him a letter out of a need to see herself reflected in another being: “J’ai besoin d’un miroir” (Lê, 1999, 63) – to the narrator’s own life because he either enacts or inspires fairy-tale reveries: his appearance “en habit d’Empereur” prompts her to proclaim, “Je suis l’Empereur du Palais celeste” (Lê, 1999, 48, 64). Similarly, her parent’s neighbor, the mad pianist relentlessly seeking her lost love, who bursts into the father’s funeral ceremony with her “rire douloureux, […] sanglotant,” also emerges as a “préfiguration de mon destin” (Lê, 1999, 100–101), as the narrator puts it, because of the projective power of her hallucinations. Even at its most fantastical, the imagery does little to alleviate the psychological burden of the narrator’s nightmares, as its function is not to offer an escape but to enrich their texture and deepen their substance – in other words, to make them indistinguishable from reality. Madness as a form of experience that brings together incompatible ideas or incongruous behaviors provides different, counterfactual ways of interacting with others and relating to the world. In Lettre morte, it does not function as a trope or a plot device that would complete a psychological narrative of loss of self, quest for meaning, and final anabasis. On the contrary, madness brings about a discursive mode that disrupts the clear separation between objects, categories, feelings, and states of being (self/other, normal/abnormal, body/mind, love/hate, exile/home, kin/alien, dead/alive). In Haraway’s terms, it forces us to ask: When is a self enough of a self that its boundaries become central to entire institutionalized discourses in medicine, war, and business? Immunity and invulnerability are intersecting concepts, a matter of consequence finitude of mortality: “Community is both necessary and impossible. Community not only offers itself in an ever-flawed way (insofar as it is never achieved) but is solely a flawed community, in the specific sense that what hold us together, what constitutes us a beings-in-common, as beings-there-with [con-esserci], is precisely that flaw, that nonfulfillment, that debt” (Esposito, 2013, 18).

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Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor in a nuclear culture unable to accommodate the experience of death and finitude within available liberal discourse on the collective and personal individual. Life is a window of vulnerability. (1990, 297)

Without favoring the dramatic shift between affective, technical, and artistic language registers seen in the work of Maylis de Kerangal, Lê’s writing draws on the vocabulary of medicine, science, technology, and warfare, but of also religion, the natural sciences, myth, fairy tale, and literature, blending all in a symbiotic style meant for symbiotic narrative: “Cet amour complice, cette symbiose de tous les instants, je les avais connus avec mon père et toute ma vie, Sirius, je chercherai dans les yeux des hommes les éclats de cette tendresse […] j’échouerai avec tous les hommes qui ne pressentiront pas en moi l’appel de l’ailleurs” (Lê, 1999, 96). Fusing Together the Living and the Dead Despite its relentless plumbing of the depths of loss, grief, and guilt, Lê’s writing does not envision the relation between the living self and dead other as a quest for immunity and division; nor does it reimagine it as a figure of hybridity that brings together heterogeneous elements made to coexist while maintaining their irreducible specificity. Her necrofiction erases biological and ontological boundaries and fuses together different conditions, states, and objects that become inseparable parts or extensions of one another not in spite but because of death, which makes possible this new relationship: [J]e n’avais pas d’existence, je n’étais que l’enfant de mon père, sa chère enfant, un prolongement de lui-même […] Car le père, en mourant, est devenu le fils […] Je vivrai éternellement dans la nostalgie de cet amour, la tête posée sur le cœur d’un mort. (Lê, 1999, 23, 27, 98)

In Lê’s writing, the work of mourning does not withdraw the subject from the object of its love but rather increases its melancholy attachment by constantly reimagining the interdependency and interpenetration of the two (see Freud, 1966, 244; Derrida, 1996).21 Her radical mourning 21 On Louis Marin, Derrida writes: “It is in the re-presentation of the dead that the power of the image is exemplary […] Representation here is no longer a simple reproductive re-presentation; it is such a recrudescence or resurgence of presence thereby intensified, that it gives to be thought the lack, the default of presence or

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does speak of detachment, separation, and autonomy, but it dwells in duality: between the narrator’s country of birth and the country of her exile; between the exiled mother and the abandoned father; between the uncle and the father, “l’un en habit d’Empereur du Palais celeste, l’autre dans son manteaux de mots” (Lê, 1999, 48); between the caring Sirius and the cruel Morgue. Sirius himself, a caring son tending to a dying father, presents a contrast to the narrator’s self-representation as a treasonous child, while the image of celestial empire is opposed to the empire of death, evoked in an oft-repeated syntagma drawn from Dylan Thomas: “Et la mort n’aura plus d’empire” (Lê, 1999, 43).22 However, all these dualities, unfolded through seemingly obsessive repetition, also ever so imperceptibly move the narrative along towards the possibility of a different future, engendered by the physical return to the native country to attend the father’s burial. The final section of the book begins with a fateful statement: “J’ai désappris la vie, elle ne m’apporte que des souvenirs douloureux” (Lê, 1999, 98). Yet it also features new imagery: that of an open road, of a horizon, and, at the very end of the text, an open window letting in the dawn’s fresh air. Rather than opposing these two final moments, the flow of the narrative combines them in passages that underscore the symbiotic nature of this new state: now the living walk alongside or follow the ghosts of the dead without renouncing their condition but instead “unlearning” life with its illusions and pretenses: La longue route qui s’ouvre devant moi, je la ferai seule, avec le fantôme de mon père qui guidera mes pas. Il est mort pour me rappeler à ce paradis perdu que j’ai trahi. Je l’ai tué en vendant mon âme à Morgue, en portant mes yeux loin de l’horizon où nos regards s’étaient rejoints. Je suis morte moi aussi, morte à l’amour, puisqu’il n’y a de choix qu’entre la nostalgie des sentiments réchauffés au soleil de l’enfance et la froide désillusion de l’âge adulte, quand l’autre vous tient le langage du désenchantement et du cynisme. (Lê, 1999, 98)

This last section of the book (pages 98–105) could be read as much as a hallucination as a recollection (and does little to offer its narrator a Dantesque anabasis). What it clearly affirms is a state of being that holds together the living and the dead. the mourning that had hollowed out in advance the so-called primitive or originary presence, the so-called living presence” (1996, 178). 22 All quotations from primary works include original italics unless otherwise indicated.

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The seminal duality of Lê’s narrative is that of Cronos and Medea, who appear in the narrative as mythical transfigurations of the two abject and fearsome guardians of the realm of otherworldliness (“l’autre monde”; Lê, 1999, 68). In the narrator’s childhood memories, they appear as a leper and a disfigured woman who block the entrance to the movie theater where father and daughter used to go. The deity presiding over is a patricidal son, a devouring father, and ultimately a prisoner forsaken by his own children; the priestess of Hecate epitomizes at once the murderous traitor of her kin, the abandoned lover, and the infanticidal mother. Cronos and Medea represent distortions of genealogy whose assumed natural course is thwarted by violence and vengefulness. When situated in a historiographical or autobiographical context, their symbolism might provide exemplary and transparent lessons in accounting for past faults and envisioning a common future. By contrast, Lê’s viscous writing delves deep into the symbolic substance of these negative figures of filiation. Instead of offering a symbolic closure or an operative aesthetico-ideological model, it rejects a binary ontology of being, exposing the illusory partition between the living and the non-living through a necrofiction of mutual dependency. Rather than joining two distinct bodies, her style predicated on repetition and variation, the undulation of parataxis and hypotaxis, the movement between verbal tenses and modes, and the alliance between concrete and abstract vocabularies, fuses together different realms and states of being. The psychological ambivalence and ethical ambiguity that define this non-mimetic writing are further enhanced and complicated by frequent references to the mortifying or, conversely, reviving force of the act of writing in the epistolary exchange between father and daughter, and the power or powerlessness of literature itself, the daughter’s chosen vocation. Linda Lê offers a unique reflection on the survivor’s condition through the narrative of the revenant father as the ontological and psychological interpenetration between father and daughter, past and present, the colonial and postcolonial makes it virtually impossible to determine where the living ends and where the dead begins.

chapter two

Haunting Living Memory and Dead Silence in Patrick Modiano Haunting Paris On recherche une jeune fille, Dora Bruder, 15 ans, 1 m 55, visage ovale, yeux gris-marron, manteau sport gris, pull-over bordeaux, jupe et chapeau bleu marine, chaussures sport marron. Adresser toutes indications à M. et Mme. Bruder, 41 boulevard Ornano, Paris. (Modiano, 1999, 7)

The above insert from a period paper at the incipit of Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, published in 1997 in the Gallimard Blanche series and reprinted in a revised version in Gallimard Folio two years later,1 inscribes the book in a documentary reality just as much as it frees it from the burden of veracity typically imparted to historiographic fiction. The Nobel Prize committee recognized the French writer’s entire body of work, spanning more than five decades and comprising over forty books, most of which are novels, “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation” (“Patrick Modiano,” 2014). Mindful of this impulse shared by both history and fiction, Modiano’s own writing seems to maintain an unrelenting yet restrained connection with past loss and its traumatic consequences. In Dora Bruder, the story of the eponymous character appears to be as much an epiphenomenon of the narrator’s own story as an effort 1 The 1999 edition serves as reference for this analysis. For a study of the differences between the two versions, see Morris (2006).

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to reconstruct a historical object.2 Despite the evidentiary value of the exact address “41 boulevard Ornano,” the text’s constant oscillation between archival investigation and personal quest defies a simple historiographic reading. Modiano’s work has been analyzed as an example of “ego-histoire” which overtly inserts the subjectivity of the historian into the making of history (Nora, 1987); “invented life” or “biofiction” (Gefen, 2015), which infuses literary writing with the sense of delving into the secrets of singular and inimitable existences; and “field literature” (James and Viart, 2019), which draws its inspiration from the methods and objects of social sciences. What or who, then, is the object of Modiano’s necrofiction? This chapter argues that while the 2014 Nobel Prize winner’s narrative exhibits features common to the historiographic novel or “roman d’archives,” inviting comparisons with other major publications on the Holocaust or Second World War fiction, in contrast to these texts, writing represents for Modiano simultaneously a contestation of the dead’s erasure from collective memory and a ceremonial act honoring the possibilities of their existence. As the investigation rescues the absent protagonist from oblivion and anonymity, the narrative draws on the intermedial resources of other arts (such as photography and cinema) to call attention to Dora’s ubiquitousness, highlighting her haunting presence in the other people who shared – or, like the narrator’s father, could have shared – her fate, and in the Parisian sites that bear witness to her past existence. I show that this meditative investigation into an unaccounted life provides a compelling memento of literature’s memorial power all the while querying the limits of its expressive techniques and representational strategies. It is this very interrogation that is at the heart of Modiano’s necrofiction to the extent that writing about the dead amounts to writing with and around the traces they left behind, forming a cenotaph, a negative space that can never be filled.

2 Modiano’s poetics is defined by the discreet but constant presence of a­ utobiographical references that come in and out of a peripatetic narrator’s focus as a direct function of his shifting positionality with regard to the city through which he roams. For a study of autofiction in the writer’s work, see Laurent (1997).

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Funerary Rites between Fact and Fiction The scope of the text widens gradually through narrative amplification: from Dora to her family and others who shared their time and, often, fate, to the narrator and his own family and friends. What begins as an elegiac quest for Dora expands to one that accounts – and also accounts for the failure of accounting fully – for her contemporaries lost during the years of the Nazi Occupation and the Vichy regime. Modiano inflects the idea of “contemporary” with “an imaginary of confraternity, of coexistence” (Ruffel, 2017, 21) by privileging intellectual, affective, and spatial relations across timelines. He formulates this paradox in a striking sentence: “Beaucoup d’amis que je n’ai pas connus ont disparu en 1945, l’année de ma naissance” (Modiano, 1999, 98). He also expands the semantic field of loss to include not only what is no more (people, places) but also what could have been (moral choices, paths taken). This comes into view most notably when the text turns to the story of the narrator’s father, whose life was perhaps synchronous with but not, in Modiano’s sense, fully contemporary with Dora’s. The text can ultimately be read as a literary cenotaph that eulogizes but also renounces the historiographic narrative in both its forms: the scientific endeavor committed to providing us knowledge about the past and the literary approach that allows us to immerse ourselves in its lost world(s). In the book’s inaugural moment, the article that mentions Dora’s disappearance becomes at once evidence of both her life and her death, a watershed moment in which the narrator becomes consumed by the irretrievable past which history as knowledge cannot restore, and by an unforeseeable future which history as fiction cannot grasp. From the very beginning, Modiano’s narrative exhibits features that call to mind the historiographic narrative model. First, it relies on a precisely defined series of chronotopes starting with the event that prompts the narrator’s quest. Clearly situated in relation to the temporality of the narration – “il y a huit ans” – it also defines narrated time: “le 31 décembre 1941” and potentially signals an investigative and interpretive approach, one that seeks to link, if only through a seemingly neutral act of juxtaposition, past and present, bygone actions and their present-day traces: “D’hier et d’aujourd’hui” (Modiano, 1999, 7). Four temporal foci emerge from the narrative which, though intertwined around the narrator’s own story, can be clearly reduced to a chronology that is distinct from his subjective experience. December 31, 1941, is the date when the missing persons ad is published in the

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paper. September 18, 1942: Dora and her father leave Drancy. The third point of temporal focus falls sometime in 1958, a significant date in the narrator’s childhood, and the timeline reaches its endpoint in May 1996, when the greater part of his quest for Dora Bruder takes place. However, this timeline is shot through with fragmentation, discontinuities, overlaps, and gaps; moreover, the objective certainty of each temporal coordinate is shattered as a whole host of other dates are spliced in throughout the book. Ultimately, instead of supporting an epistemically reassuring time frame such as the dates of an event clarified through the lens of a historical investigation or those inscribed on a tombstone to indicate the span of a person’s earthly existence, the chronology spirals out of control and the reader is faced with the riddle of “Un temps désorienté […] placé entre deux abîmes ou entre deux ères” (Hartog, 2003, 13). Each fragment of time contains a singular logic, experience, and set of relations to other similar fragments. If the historian, loyal to Herodotus’s prescription, as Hartog puts it, is the one who “grâce à son savoir, peut réunir et donner à voir les deux bouts de la chaîne,” closing “l’intervalle” or the Arendtian gap, between injustice and its reparation (2003, 11), the writer for Modiano is the one who, while digging for the same kind of exculpatory or reparative evidence, widens the gap and turns a singular quest into an open and collective tomb. Instead of providing an epic, sweeping, and pathos-filled illustration of the duty to remember (devoir de mémoire), Dora Bruder seems to follow a more modest agenda: the narrator’s need to recover the past is not controlled or subordinated to a greater responsibility than one’s own ability to remember, subjectively and imperfectly.3 If the discovery of a young woman’s avis de recherche from December 1941 is a “nœud de mémoire” (Rothberg, 2010), it is first and foremost in the sense of a confused and confusing, even messy entanglement between the remembered object and the remembering subject. Thus, in the opening pages of the book the narrator will use this pretext to wander around his own life story, bringing up to the surface of the text different stages of his life (first as a child, then as a young man) when his own 3 In an article published in Libération, “Avec Klarsfeld, contre l’oubli,” Modiano writes about his struggle with the distrust of literature “d’abord, j’ai douté de la littérature. Puisque le principal moteur de celle-ci est souvent la mémoire, il me semblait que le seul livre qu’il fallait écrire, c’était ce mémorial, comme Serge Klarsfeld l’avait fait” (Modiano, 1994).

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path intersected with the space once occupied by the Bruders. The temporality of the quest is plural and remains open-ended, carrying with it a sense of futurity that points less to an agenda to be accomplished or a promise to be kept, and more to a possibility that may or may not come to pass. For instance, in the opening sections of the book the narrator seems intent on recreating the biography of Dora’s father, Ernst Bruder, working both with the archive’s resources and against its silence. Yet the narrator’s quest, empathetically informed by his own youthful visit to Ernest’s native city, Vienna, is left unfinished, suspended in a projective passage where the intentional certainty of the future tense is curbed by markers of doubt, its promise never to be fulfilled: Un jour, je retournerai à Vienne que je n’ai pas revue depuis plus de trente ans. Peut-être retrouverai-je l’acte de naissance d’Ernest Bruder dans le registre d’état civil de Vienne. Je saurai les lieux de naissance de ses parents. Et où était leur domicile, quelque part dans cette zone du deuxième arrondissement que bordent la gare du Nord, le Prater, le Danube. (Modiano, 1999, 22)

Earlier in the text, the same apparent lassitude stalls the search for Dora’s school. Even though this time the authorities, described as “gardiens” or, more memorably, “sentinelles de l’oubli,” answer encouragingly (“gentiment”), inviting the querent to come and consult the documents in person, it is the latter who delays the confrontation with archival reality: “Un jour, j’irai. Mais j’hésite. Je veux encore espérer que son nom figure là-bas” (Modiano, 1999, 13, 16, 14). The narrator’s choice to delay an encounter with written records in one of the rare instances they are available may seem incongruous. His narrative is predicated precisely on the quest to rebuild something – a life – out of (next to) nothing: a paper trace of a person otherwise buried in collective and institutional oblivion. However, the silence of the archive can sound like a death sentence: it brings a proscriptive answer to a question that is less about knowledge and more about wanting to know. In Dora Bruder this wanting to know, or wanting to hope for something, is better supported by the speculative nature of fiction than by the rigors of facticity alone. While this does not invalidate the importance of facts, it does draw attention to the internal rhythms of the search for Dora, in which slowness and patience enhance rather than diminish the sense of urgency about the need to find answers. The narrator provides repeated warnings of the need for patience at the beginning of the text, drawing on images of natural phenomena

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(light, rain) to convey the idea that painstaking efforts are required to recreate what has been destroyed: Il faut longtemps pour que resurgisse à la lumière ce qui a été effacé […] Il suffit d’un peu de patience […] J’ai mis quatre ans avant de découvrir la date exacte de sa naissance: le 25 février 1926. Et deux ans ont encore été nécessaires pour connaître le lieu de cette naissance: Paris, XIIe arrondissement. Mais je suis patient. Je peux attendre des heures sous la pluie. (Modiano, 1999, 13, 14)

The text’s conclusion also harks back to this metaphorical web that brings together history defined as human action and history as a natural process of decay and rebirth. Under the “thick layer of amnesia” that urban reconstruction has laid, like a tomb cover, over old sites of memory (immigrant neighborhoods, poor tenements, and old prisons used during the Occupation to round up those caught in the anti-Jewish raids), something subterranean struggles to get through, making itself present but only through a stifled, indistinct sound that pulls the witness in like a magnetic field: “Et pourtant, sous cette couche épaisse d’amnésie, on sentait bien quelque chose, de temps en temps, un écho lointain, étouffé, mais on aurait été incapable de dire quoi, précisément. C’était comme de se trouver au bord d’un champ magnétique, sans pendule pour en capter les ondes” (Modiano, 1999, 131). The language of elementality places the narrator at the intersection between the inevitable (whether intended or unwitting) destruction of material memory and its enduring, if unnoticed, residual presence. He then becomes the instrument of its survival as the only person able to heed the call of the past under the rubble and the rumble of the present – and, since the reference to a magnetic field conjures up images of extrasensorial perception and ghostly manifestations, the officiant of its revival.4 4 The salience of the quest for architectural sites of memory combined with the primal image of stumbling upon the reference to a name would support an interpretation of Dora Bruder as a Stolperstein or “Stumbling stone.” The term refers to a form of public memorialization introduced by German artist Gunter Demnig in the early 1990s which has led to a series of works spread throughout Europe now said to constitute the world’s largest Holocaust monument. In Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem, Hélène Cixous’s 2016 book that also probes the walls and cobblestones of the city to exhume the secrets of genocidal history, revive the dead, and give a voice to those who were once silenced, the narrator is met by “deux Stolpersteine [qui] me defient avec leurs yeux de bronze” (107). The Stolpersteine project has been the subject of intense public debate and academic discussion, more

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Projections, Conjectures, (Re)presentations Dora Bruder inhabits the gap between reviving the past and instrumentalizing it. The careful retracing of the Bruders’ actions and the events that affected their lives along with the unintrusive attention paid to their interiority speak to a humanity that is both undeniable and ungraspable. But this approach also frames the narrator’s own life in the structures established by his investigation. As some of his own experiences mirror Dora’s, the text’s referential regime alternates between the uncertainty of her past and the implied certainty of his own. Yet it also casts Dora’s life as a site of historical authenticity and chronological primacy and the narrator’s as a belated and imperfect imitation. Each experiences life as a teenage runaway, 20 years apart, a striking parallel that at first excites the narrator to attempt to fathom the girl’s excitement and her parents’ anguish. Nevertheless, the context – in other words, history – forces us to take a critical look at the assumed commonality of our experiences, no matter how anthropologically or culturally similar they may appear: “Qu’est-ce qui nous décide à faire une fugue? Je me souviens de la mienne le 18 janvier 1960, à une époque qui n’avait pas la noirceur de décembre 1941 […] le seul point commun avec la fugue de Dora, c’était la saison” (Modiano, 1999, 57). The attempt at empathy ends on a discordant note that emphasizes the dissimilarities between the dead person and the living one trying to reconstruct her experiences. Here, the appeal to our universal humanity, the cornerstone of our storytelling practices, cannot function as a panacea for what was lost at a specific time in a given place. Dora Bruder treads a fine line between the exemplarity associated with historiographic narratives in general and Holocaust literature in particular, and the effort to bring out the irreducible specificity of each

recently in Lars Östman’s book The “Stolpersteine” and the Commemoration of Life, Death and Government, which discusses the problems associated with its restorative claim. In an earlier article, Kirsten Harjes summarized the ethical issues stemming from the project’s representational dimension, which can be construed as substitutive and, therefore, erasing of the subjects it purports to bring back to public awareness: “these memorials generally attempt to fulfill three functions: to mourn and commemorate the dead, to educate their audiences, and to politically and socially represent contemporary German citizens. Of these three functions, the representative is the most contested. Representation is a complex concept, but for present purposes it might be defined as ‘standing for’ some group of people” (2005, 139).

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life, a specificity that the parallels and generalizations of exemplary narratives cannot capture. Paradoxically, what emerges from the trope of spatial coincidence often used in the text is a sense of attentional disconnection. The building in which Dora once lived is a persistent presence, yet the narrator has failed time and again to notice it: “L’immeuble […] n’avait jamais attiré mon attention, et pourtant je suis passé devant lui pendant des mois, des années” (Modiano, 1999, 9). The seemingly random encounter with an archival object brings the familiar and the ordinary into focus, first for the narrator, and then, through narrative mediation, for the readers themselves; however, the narrative asks us to pay as much attention to what is concealed behind the quotidian and the mundane as to the fact that our daily lives rely on this concealment. At first, the interplay between spatial identification and temporal distance, the conscious blurring of perspectives casts a doubt on the entire project, jeopardizing its often implied but rarely stated mission to “faire le lien entre le Paris de ce temps-là et celui d’aujourd’hui […] me souvenir de tous ces détails” (Modiano, 1999, 10, 50). This is hardly surprising, since Dora Bruder has become the epitome of “biofiction,” a form which relies on the paradoxical combination of a poetics of recovery and a rhetoric of uncertainty. The latter surrounds not only Dora herself, a shadow figure emerging from a “gray” past,5 but also the narrator’s investigation, which is hampered by the scarcity of evidence and by his own self-doubt. Ultimately, it affects even the perceived reality of other people, like his father, whose very existence, as if contaminated by the general mood of the project, suddenly starts to raise questions: “un jour grisâtre […] je finissais par douter de l’existence de mon père” (Modiano, 1999, 17–18). The elusive and ambiguous father figure is a well-established theme in Modiano’s work, already looming large in his first novel, La Place de l’étoile (1968), made into the subject of the son’s deliberate (in)quest in Les Boulevards de ceinture (1972), and 5 The choice of the term “gris” is telling, since Modiano’s narrative refers to the period that historian Henry Rousso famously dubbed, only a few years before Dora Bruder came out, “the dark years” or, in literal translation, the “black years” (1992). What colors the narrator’s view of the past is certainly neither idealization of a lost time nor an attenuation of the gravity of the events it witnessed, but rather a need to account for the effects of temporal and affective distance, as well as the double mediation of subjective recollection and writing, on the sharpness or definition of the past as a graspable form.

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returning as a troubling figure in Villa triste (1975). In Dora Bruder, he becomes subject to a more radical process of existential deconstruction and reconstruction. The father’s compromised moral status both as a private individual (a neglectful husband and parent) and as a French Jew (a suspected collaborator) is aggravated by the comparison with Dora’s emblematic image. At the same time, the circumstances of his life are illuminated by the investigation that she makes possible, offering an explanatory context that seems to attenuate the gravity of his guilt, or at least to explain the limited set of possibilities that constrained his choices. The scenes featuring the father either draw an asymmetrical parallel between him and Dora, each appearing in extreme situations where death is a potential outcome, or show him as an aging figure whose biological disappearance offers a final confirmation of his physical and emotional absence in life. In Modiano’s writing, the paternal figure emerges as emblematic of the intersection between what Debarati Sanyal calls “memory-in-complicity” and “memory of complicity,” a distinction that draws on the etymology of the term which can alternate between collusion or collaboration and understanding or intimacy.6 These scenes call into question not only the moral status of the father, reprehensible 6 In the opening of her book, Sanyal explains the importance of the term and its generative analytical potential: “Complicity is a capacious and elusive term, which may explain the relative paucity of its theorization. It may be worth unpacking the range of its uses in this book. If complicity designates the state of being an accomplice, or partnership in wrongdoing, its secondary and now archaic usage is ‘the state of being complex or involved’ (OED). Further, if it means collusion or collaboration, in French complicité can also mean understanding or intimacy. As I noted earlier, complicity’s Latin root, complicare, ‘to fold together,’ captures the interweaving of histories and memories examined in this book. The recognition of complicity can have contradictory effects: It might illuminate convergences between self and other, past and present, here and elsewhere. But it can also convert difference into sameness or conflate the extreme and the everyday. Each of the works that the book discusses is, in effect, a case study of this more complex understanding of complicity” (2015, 10). She further elaborates: “I approach complicity not as a generalized sign of the times but as a form of commitment. How might the memory of complicity, and memory-incomplicity, open an engagement with the violence of history, and offer alternatives to discourses that route us back to ‘the scene of the crime’? How might complicity rather than shame or trauma, both honor remembrance and enable us to contest ongoing injustice? Complicity might in fact be at the foundation of responsibility since it is the refusal of complicity that is the traditional hallmark of commitment” (2015, 12).

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and victimized, but also that of his resentful and reminiscent son, and ultimately that of the reader, who is caught between contradictory moral judgments and wavering affective allegiances. Modiano’s telescopic technique employs the uncanny repetition of a similar scene in a similar setting to layer together events from different time periods. A trip in a police van provides an example of this expanding and collapsing field of view in which the narrator’s focus shifts repeatedly: first the van houses the shared experience of father and teenage son after a family dispute; then the father alone, as a young man, arrested for small-time black market trafficking; then Dora, and others like her, undergoing a similar trip with a dramatically different end. Thus the setting of a dramatic, maybe even traumatic, moment in the narrator’s biography in 1950s France acquires a potentially life-threatening meaning for his father over a decade earlier, a threat that is indeed materialized in the case of Dora and her peers, for whom the police van could be seen as a hearse, carrying many who were never to return home.7 While this can be read through the lens of biopolitical seriality vs. irreducible individuality or narrative exemplarity vs. event singularity (the reading I have provided so far), repetition here also assumes a new function: unlocking the fictional potential of a historical account. The three iterations of the trip in a police van lead to a scene in which the narrator imagines himself cuffed to Dora as she grips his wrist, a commanding Eurydice to his compliant Orpheus; they find themselves doubly attached to each other, by both the fetters of history and the binding call of memory. The investigation relies on lists that lend it an amorphous aspect but also allow it to escape the constraints of a historical narrative: the book’s sections feature lists of places remembered, dates, daily actions, memories, bureaucratic data, and conjectures on what characters might have done, seen, or thought at various points in their reconstituted life. Modiano’s poetics of the list densifies brevity as his enumerations juxtapose assertive statements of facts and interrogative sentences, ellipses and elaborate descriptions of events, impersonal inventories and empathic if-clauses. The lists teem with the unsaid and the unsayable, 7 On the legal framework, bureaucratic applications, and social consequences of the measures to strip those considered “anti-France” of their nationality, chief among whom were the Jews, which the Vichy regime began introducing as early as July 1940, see Zalc (2016).

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ranging from hesitant suppositions to expanded hypotheses through glimpses of recognition, attempts to elucidate, and factual expositions. In its minimalist approach to history and storytelling, Dora Bruder offers readers a framework for imagining the past in its distinct and contrasted possibilities: “Il est nécessaire que le romancier ne force jamais son lecteur,” Modiano states in his Nobel acceptance speech, “mais l’entraîne imperceptiblement et lui laisse une marge suffisante pour que le livre l’imprègne peu à peu” (2014, n. pag.). The book does not seek to furnish a demonstration, relying on factual evidence to appeal to the reader’s intellect or moral sense; nor does it offer an immersive experience meant to effect a permanent transformation of the reader’s thoughts and actions. Instead, it intends to guide the reader “imperceptibly.” It is interesting that in defining his poetics, the writer uses the verbs “entraîner” and “imprégner,” each without an object that could indicate the destination of the journey on which the reader is led (entraîner) or the intellectual, moral, or affective substance which should be instilled (imprégner) in them. While Modiano may not favor a poetics of uncertainty to the same extent as Assia Djebar, the imaginary space of his books allows considerable room for wandering in and out of the referential framework. Comprised not only of information gleaned from the archives, pried from the clutches of a bureaucratic Cerberus, and conjectured based on the narrator’s own experience, but also of the gaps, silences, and interstices of the narrative itself, Dora Bruder instills in the reader a sense of frustrated certainty not unlike the one experienced by the narrator. If the investigative premise of the novel allows us to construe the past as a labyrinth, itself originally conceived as a monster’s prison and, eventually, his tomb, the narrator’s guiding thread lies as much in the information he provides as in his warnings against the very possibility of reaching the center of the structure, its secret, or ultimate truth. In the way she haunts the book, Dora herself is the Minotaur, the offspring of the monstrous coupling between humanity and its hidden history, a hybrid creature half-living and half-dead, half-real and half-fictional. Even though at times the narrator makes use of empathic techniques such as the subject pronoun on or the vous implicatif that seem to involve the reader in his narrative, the text does not create intimacy with the reader, who witnesses the narrator’s, and, through him, the characters’ emotions, actions, and reactions without being invited to feel along with them. Modiano’s strategy of inclusive distanciation includes narrative ellipsis, typographical discontinuity, and the frequent

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use of blanks, the abrupt shifts between Dora’s story and his own. Also belonging to this strategy are the assertions of his singular, almost exclusive, relation to the topic of his book such as “J’ai l’impression d’être tout seul à faire le lien entre le Paris de ce temps-là et celui d’aujourd’hui” or “Si je n’étais pas là pour l’écrire, il n’y aurait plus aucune trace de la présence de cette inconnue et de celle de mon père dans un panier à salade en février 1942, sur les Champs-Elysées. Rien que des personnes – mortes ou vivantes – que l’on range dans la catégorie des ‘individus non identifiés’” (Modiano, 1999, 50, 65). These rhetorical and narrative devices bring the readers into close proximity to the events recounted while constantly reminding them, through the emphasis on the subjective nature of the process of investigation and narration, of the doubts and uncertainties it creates, that Dora’s story is framed and in turn frames the narrator’s own life story, that they are strangers to both the story and its telling. On the other hand, the connections between the narrator and Dora are emphasized time and again in discreet, hypothetical, but nonetheless effective ways: “Elle aussi devait suivre le même chemin de retour, le dimanche, en fin d’après-midi […] Voilà le seul moment du livre où, sans le savoir, je me suis rapproché d’elle, dans l’espace et le temps […] Qu’est-ce qui nous décide à faire une fugue? Je me souviens de la mienne” (Modiano, 1999, 45, 54, 56). Dora’s restlessness and rebellious spirit also cast her as an avatar of the narrator. Their bond is enhanced by the use of the plural subject pronoun on in sentences that underline her rejection of categories, her choice to be mobile and placeless in a society that denies her a place only to immobilize her: “On vous classe dans des catégories bizarres dont vous n’avez jamais entendu parler et qui ne correspondent pas à ce que vous êtes réellement. On vous convoque. On vous interne. Vous aimeriez bien comprendre pourquoi” (Modiano, 1999, 37–38). Despite the shared “ivresse de trancher […] tous les liens,” which represents for both a form of “suicide” (Modiano, 1999, 78), the narrator remains vigilant of the dangers of anachronistic comparisons, for instance when he ponders the difference between himself and Dora as teenage runaways. Once more, the desire to emphasize a shared or universal human experience cannot be allowed to gloss over the historical context that ultimately gives an action its innocuous or fatal significance: Je me dis que sa fugue n’était pas aussi simple que la mienne une vingtaine d’années plus tard, dans un monde redevenu inoffensif. Cette ville de décembre 1941, son couvre-feu, ses soldats, sa police, tout lui était hostile et voulait sa perte. (Modiano, 1999, 78)

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Dora’s initial disappearance foreshadows the dénouement of her story and the book itself appears as a brief trace between two vanishings. Dora’s “fugue” restores the agency of a subject who has been gradually stripped of her freedom. When she asserts this freedom against the biopolitical complex of family, school, and society by running away from her restrictive boarding school, she exposes herself to the vagaries of a necropolitical system that combines exclusionary legality, bureaucratic precision, and random judgments to decide “who is disposable and who is not” (Mbembe, 2003, 27). Dora’s story is not one of active resistance, even though a comparison is drawn with other violent and militant rebels of the same age. In a context where “resistance and self-destruction are synonymous” (Mbembe, 2003, 36), her actions set off a potentially self-destructive chain of events which, framed by Modiano’s poetics of uncertainty, are left open to the reader’s interpretation without excluding the possibility of a deliberate choice: the use of “paraît-il” indicates that this is speculation rather than assertion and the vous implicatif is one of those instances in which the narration appeals to the reader’s empathy while strengthening the ties between the narrator and Dora: La fugue – paraît-il – est un appel au secours et quelquefois une forme de suicide. Vous éprouvez quand même un bref sentiment d’éternité. Vous n’avez pas seulement tranché les liens avec le monde, mais aussi avec le temps. Et il arrive qu’à la fin d’une matinée, le ciel soit d’un bleu léger et que rien ne pèse plus sur vous. (Modiano, 1999, 78)

In running away twice Dora makes herself both vulnerable and unattainable: she gives herself over to the forces that seek to destroy her while also escaping their grasp, cutting all ties with the world and unburdening herself of the pressures of time.8 Although this scene of self-liberation is framed by images suggesting that such moments are fleeting and futureless, the narrative’s conclusion suggests that Dora’s departure for Auschwitz was the result of a deliberate choice. She refuses 8 In his analysis of the Master-Slave dialectics that seeks to situate Hegel’s thought in the context of a paradigmatic and abstract, therefore non-racialized, theorization of the congruence of individual and social, Ladha emphasizes the relation between freedom and mortality in Hegel’s philosophy of self-consciousness: “In the fight for recognition, the absolute proof of freedom is death” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 3:59, qtd. in Ladha, 2019, 170 n. 39). “Our mortality – or more exactly our capacity to take our own life – underwrites our freedom from coercion even in the face of violence” (Ladha, 2019, 170).

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the illusion of security offered by the laws that would have sent her to the internment camp of Pithiviers, reserved for French Jews. Instead she “prefers to” stay with her father. Once more, the neutral tone of the narration does not tilt the balance in favor of a definite and substantial interpretation, steering clear of assigning the character’s action any existential or moral value beyond the ordinary preference of a young person to remain close to a family member when forced to embark on a journey to an unfamiliar place during dangerous times: À cause du trop-plein du camp […] les autorités décidèrent d’envoyer de Drancy au camp de Pithiviers les juifs de nationalité française, le 2 et le 5 septembre […] Dora, qui était française, aurait pu elle aussi quitter Drancy avec eux […] Elle ne le fit pas pour une raison qu’il est facile de deviner: elle préféra rester avec son père. (Modiano, 1999, 143)

Even in the moments when the affective charge of the text is at its peak, creating a sense of shared experience and, through it, of narrative closure, it remains haunted by the negative space of prints and traces and saturated with references to the void and the absence left by the unaccounted-for disappearance of its subject: [Dora et ses parents] étaient déjà là, en filigrane […] On se dit qu’au moins les lieux gardent une légère empreinte des personnes qui les ont habités. Empreinte: marque en creux ou en relief. Pour Ernest et Cécile Bruder, pour Dora, je dirai: en creux. J’ai ressenti une impression d’absence et de vide, chaque fois que je me suis trouvé dans un endroit où ils avaient vécu […] des parents perdent les traces de leur enfant, et l’un d’eux disparaît à son tour […] Jusqu’à ce jour, je n’ai trouvé aucun indice, aucun témoin qui aurait pu m’éclairer sur ses quatre mois d’absence qui restent pour nous un blanc dans sa vie […] Derrière le mur s’étendait un no man’s land, une zone de vide et d’oubli […] La ville était déserte, comme pour marquer l’absence de Dora. (Modiano, 1999, 11, 28–29, 82, 89, 131, 144)

Timelines and identities are superimposed in the many portraits, tableaux, and ekphrases of the narrative, like effigies on commemorative steles. This written commemoration, however, exceeds the fixity of a physical stele, by combining perspectives and figures who inhabit the same space at distinct temporal moments.9 For instance, in the 9 For Victor Segalen, the stele as a scriptural and literary practice ought not to show the object itself but evoke it by conveying its effects. Thus, allegory becomes the seminal figure of the Segalenian stele, while the poet himself proclaims in “Perdre le Midi quotidien”: “Éviter la stèle precise” (1995, 106). This

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scene that describes the narrator walking through the neighborhood where Dora Bruder’s boarding school used to stand, the perspectival slippage from “je” to “elle” renders the person that occupies the present of narration as spectral as the one whose ghost still haunts the Parisian site of memory. Such slippage does not occur without mediation; in this case, the transition from the first to the third person is ruled by the verb “il fallait” which creates a zeugma that blends together the two entities through the expression of impersonal and perhaps inescapable necessity: “J’ai marché dans le quartier et au bout d’un moment j’ai senti peser la tristesse d’autres dimanches, quand il fallait rentrer au pensionnat […] Elle retarderait le moment où elle franchirait le porche et traverserait la cour” (Modiano, 1999, 129). Photography, a major thematic and stylistic feature in Modiano’s literary work,10 also occupies a significant place in Dora Bruder, where it functions as a paradoxical memorial supplement. Photographs hold together, albeit in constant tension, the urgency of retrieving the past, arresting its flight, and expanding it from within. “Une photo est une seconde qui dure une éternité” (Modiano, 1999, 94) but also the constant memento of the incompleteness and vagueness of any such attempt. Roland Barthes described the ontological and semiotic duality of the photograph in terms strikingly reminiscent of the Mezentian punishment evoked in Linda Lê’s symbiotic relation to the dead: “On dirait que la photographie emporte toujours son référent avec elle, tous deux frappés de la même immobilité amoureuse ou funèbre, au sein même du monde en mouvement; ils sont collés l’un à l’autre, membre par membre, comme le condamné enchaîné à un cadavre dans certains supplices” (1980, 17). In Modiano’s case, the material, almost organic binding together of the sign to its referent – “La photo est littéralement une émanation du referent” (Barthes, 1980, 126) – functions as a remedial object in both the ethical commemorative poetics of indirectness hews to the Chinese attitude to death, as he notes in a commentary to a historical epigraph that inspires one of Segalen’s pieces: “Un ami mort? […] à l’encontre de tous les usages littéraires: le caractère ‘mort’ étant très déconseillé” (1995, 67). Yet, at the same time as it favors semiotic obliqueness, the stele is formally and ontologically characterized by fixity and timelessness: “La stèle en effet ne se contente pas de circonscrire un fragment de l’espace, elle isole et fixe un moment du temps” (Segalen, 1995, 23). 10 In her examination of the interaction between text and image in Dora Bruder, Annelies Schulte Norholt focuses on its posthumous function, noting that in the photos the characters appear to be “en deuil d’elles-mêmes” and describing the author-narrator’s gaze as “un regard d’outre-tombe” (2012, 536, 537).

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and artistic senses of the word. The extended ekphrasis occasioned by the finding of what the narrator surmises to be the girl’s last photograph describes an image that “tranche” (stands against or contrasts with) the previous ones. The detailed description of Dora’s no longer childish face and demeanor indicates an awareness of her fate in the face of which “Elle tient la tête haute, ses yeux sont graves, mais il flotte sur ses lèvres l’amorce d’un sourire” (Modiano, 1999, 91). To describe the visual trace left by Dora as a display of strength, wistfulness, and serenity is a way to remedy – avant la lettre but after the fact – the humiliations, suffering, and anguish that she would soon experience. To call upon photography’s tangible and visible qualities in order to correct, guide, and redirect the understanding of the past is to recognize that it cannot be reduced to a source of information or translated into a narrative structure.11 And, indeed, rather than leading to an affirmative assertion, the ekphrasis concludes with a series of questions about the absent person implied by the photo’s existence, that is, the photographer. The notion that the latter might have been Dora’s father or, conversely, that the father’s absence might be indicative of his arrest at the time when the picture was taken, leads to a widening gyre of interrogations, from which point the text veers off into a series of micro-biographies of German and French writers who met with distinct but similarly tragic endings during the same era. Such moments of narrative fade-in and fade-out are analogous to the textual dissolution that occurs when the narrator imagines Dora’s Sunday outing to a theater to watch a movie released in 1941 starring a runaway teenager, a sophomoric piece in which she could have found an idealized version of her life. Rather than tarry with the escapist role of cinema or with the contamination of life by fiction, Modiano’s narrator trains his sights on the convergence between the shared experience of viewing the same movie, decades later, and the material imprint, which 11 Barthes: “Imaginairement, la photographie (celle dont j’ai l’intention), représente ce moment très subit où, à vrai dire, je ne suis ni un sujet ni un objet, mais plutôt un sujet qui se sent devenir objet: je vis alors une micro-expérience de la mort (de la parenthèse): je deviens vraiment spectre […] je suis devenu Tout-Image, c’est-à-dire la Mort en personne” (1980, 30, 31). Barthes also remarks that in a historical photograph, “il y a toujours en elle un écrasement du Temps: cela est mort et cela va mourir” (1980, 150). In his own (non-)eulogy of his friend, Derrida emphasizes the haunting dimension inherent to Barthes’s theorization of photography by writing: “Neither life nor death, but the haunting of one by another” (2001, 41).

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he calls a “voile” (1999, 80), a veil or a shroud, left on the film by the gaze of all the past spectators whose lives were brought to an end soon thereafter. The text verges on a Benjaminian interpretation of the work of art, one in which the aura is a chemical, material manifestation, indeed a remnant, not of the life represented on screen but of the life to which it was exposed; the aesthetic values of originality and authenticity are supplanted by the sheer experience of being-alive-together to which the artwork bears witness not as art but as an artless, enduring object. This underscores the contrast between the subjective nature of the investigation – prompted by a personal encounter, interspersed with autobiographical recollections, teeming with digressions – and the use of archival, factual information to recreate someone else’s life. For instance, the precise nature of the details that comprise Dora’s police portrait – “41 boulevard Ornano, 1 m 55, visage ovale, yeux gris-marron, manteau sport gris, pull-over bordeaux, jupe et chapeau bleu marine, chaussures sport marron” (Modiano, 1999, 53) – is immediately belied by the inability of such details to provide anything more than the sum of their parts. Despite their effect on him – “L’extrême precision de quelques détails me hantait” (Modiano, 1999, 53) – the narrator immediately denounces the futility of using such information to summon Dora as a living being. In pivoting to the theme of powerlessness, Modiano uses his favorite syntactic connector, “et,” which allows him to attach sentences or entire paragraphs in a loose, paratactic way. In this case it functions as an oppositional conjunction carrying the contrasting meaning of “however” or “nonetheless” rather than the semantic continuity of “and”: “Et la nuit, l’inconnu, l’oubli, le néant tout autour” (Modiano, 1999, 53). The statements that bookend this reflection seem to hesitate between affirming the evocative potential of the detail – a recurrent theme in the novel – and contesting its reparative value. “Il me semblait que je ne parviendrais jamais à retrouver la moindre trace de Dora Bruder” (Modiano, 1999, 53). Thus, the trace of Dora is not to be found in the details of her life, no matter how personal or how exact they may seem; if anything, their shining clarity intensifies the darkness around them, bringing out all the other minute aspects of a life twice lost – to its own individual promise and to collective memory. Why, then, not only dwell on each and every one of these details but also build a narrative of recovery through their careful accumulation? This is where the tenuous plotline of Dora Bruder bifurcates, taking us into the metafictional realm by way of the well-known trope of the

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book-within-the-book. Finding himself incapable of making sense of the information yielded by his investigation into Dora, the narrator uses not the information but the frustration caused by this failure in order to write another book, a novel, Voyage de noces (published in 1990). Fiction allows an indirect approach to a topic that keeps eluding the writer, as if his investigating gaze was myopically lost in the minutia of data and unable to form a complete picture, while his novelistic vision provides a way to “elucidate or guess” something about her, without the burden of accuracy and completeness ascribed to documentary writing: Comme beaucoup d’autres avant moi, je crois aux coïncidences et quelquefois à un don de voyance chez les romanciers – le mot “don” n’étant pas le terme exact, parce qu’il suggère une sorte de supériorité. Non, cela fait simplement partie du métier: les efforts d’imagination, nécessaires à ce métier, le besoin de fixer son esprit sur des points de détail – et cela de manière obsessionnelle – pour ne pas perdre le fil et se laisser aller à sa paresse –, toute cette tension, cette gymnastique cérébrale peut sans doute provoquer à la longue de brèves intuitions “concernant des événements passés ou futurs,” comme l’écrit le dictionnaire Larousse à la rubrique “Voyance.” (Modiano, 1999, 53)12

The variable functionality of detail as an engine for the imagination in fiction or a mere part of a larger whole is also tied to its ability to signify different things in different generic contexts. In Dora Bruder, it takes on the form of a haunting figure that causes an emotional tear in the protective fabric of oblivion and makes possible the irruption of the past into the present. It is the banal and stereotypical remains that demand to be attended to, their incompleteness acknowledged, and their metonymical potential addressed. When the narrator first encounters a trace of Dora, his first impulse is not to “complete” her larger story. 12 The writer’s visionary gift bridges not only past and present but also the two dimensions of the literary tomb, historical and artistic; it has the ability to “faire entrer dans les esprits qui nous accompagnent et qui nous écoutent raconter, pour l’utilité de quelques-uns peut-être, l’histoire mélancolique de Jean Valjean” (Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, qtd. in Modiano, 1999, 52). Through Hugo’s emblematic figure, Modiano pays homage to literature’s power to bring together “Paris réel, Paris imaginé” when he collapses chronologies and planes of existence by evoking Cosette and Jean Valjean’s escape from the manhunt mounted by their persecutor, Javert. This scene was located by Hugo at the same address that hosted Dora’s boarding school a century later.

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Instead, he responds to the haunting detail of that fragment with a different detail: a scene from his childhood in which every day he used to accompany his mother down the street where Dora’s parents used to live. Dora Bruder is replete with acts of self-memorialization not only of the writer/narrator’s and his family’s past but also of his research and writing process. The book does not quite feature a writer’s diary, but certain sections are reminiscent of a literary notebook as they historicize the recent past or the present. The quest for Dora plunges the writer and his readers into a relentless questioning of the present as a remainder or residue of the past. Modiano’s presentism records the ways in which the “here and now” engages with or eschews what went before, understood not as a uniform block but as a mutable amalgamation of discrete moments. His narrative seems less interested in historicizing the present, that is, incorporating it into an intelligible continuum, than in exploring its fitful, sometimes fractured and sometimes slavish, ways of relating to the past. Instead, it is the question of forgetting that shapes both his writing and reflection. In Dora Bruder, a random encounter with a trace of the past causes a tear in the reassuring surface of the present. Constantly shifting between temporal lines, the narrative is focused just as much on restoring what was lost to the vagaries of personal and bureaucratic recollection as it is on plumbing the meandering, anamorphic, and unreliable nature of memory, both individual and collective. Time then becomes an active participant, no longer a medium but an actor, in the production of history.13 Yet, while Modiano’s literary project seems to reflect Hartog’s definition of a presentist regime of history, not only in foregrounding the role of time and its internal plurality but, more importantly, in trying to “explain the world to the world,”14 he adopts a decidedly opposite tack, insisting rather on what tethers the present to the past, to the point 13 On the presentist regime of history, Hartog writes: “Surtout, elle est désormais conçue comme processus, avec l’idée que les événements n’adviennent plus seulement dans le temps, mais à travers lui: le temps devient acteur, sinon l’Acteur. Aux leçons de l’histoire se substitue alors les exigences des prévisions, puisque le passé n’éclaire plus l’avenir. L’historien n’élabore plus de l’exemplaire, mais il est en quête de l’unique” (2003, 116–117). 14 Hartog: “Expliquer ‘le monde au monde’, répondre aux questions que se pose l’homme d’aujourd’hui, telle est donc la tâche de l’historien qui fait face au vent. Du passé il ne s’agit pas de faire table rase, mais de ‘bien comprendre en quoi il diffère du présent’. En quoi il est passé” (2003, 14). Hartog cites here Louis Febvre’s manifesto “Face au Vent: Manifeste des Annales Nouvelles,” first published in 1946.

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of making the two indistinguishable. One striking passage shows the narrator in the process of creating his own memorial archeology as, rather than creating distinctions and separating temporal moments and historical contexts, he causes them to overlap and collide: Mon père avait fait à peine mention de cette jeune fille lorsqu’il m’a raconté sa mésaventure pour la première et la dernière fois, un soir de juin 1963 où nous étions dans un restaurant des Champs-Élysées […] Je l’avais presque oubliée, jusqu’au jour où j’ai appris l’existence de Dora Bruder. Alors la présence de cette jeune fille dans le panier à salade avec mon père […], cette nuit de février, m’est remonté à la mémoire et bientôt je me suis demandé si elle n’était pas Dora Bruder. (Modiano, 1999, 63)

The insistence on spatial coincidence and temporal intersection, sometimes to the point of compression and indistinction, displayed throughout the novel supports the writer’s continuist vision, as it were, which in turn intensifies the sense of loss over the many instances of erasure, oblivion, and disappearance that fill the story. Tellingly, the narrative discourse vacillates between framing this collapsing recollection as an external event, an accident independent of the narrator’s volition, or an intentional act manifesting a will to unify disjointed moments and figures of the past: “Peut-être ai-je voulu qu’ils se croisent, mon père et elle, en cet hiver 1942” (Modiano, 1999, 63). Furthermore, what the narrative historicizes is not the past (or, at least, not the “past that would not pass” of the Occupation and Vichy) but the process of recollection in its different stages, that is the quasiAristotelian recognition that operates in opposition to the classical literary model, sparking rather than concluding the plot of archival investigation, autobiographical inquiry, and the process of writing: J’ai écrit ces pages en novembre 1996. Les journées sont souvent pluvieuses. Demain nous entrerons dans le mois de décembre et cinquante-cinq ans auront passés depuis la fugue de Dora. La nuit tombe tôt et cela vaut mieux: elle efface la grisaille et la monotonie de ces jours de pluie où l’on se demande s’il fait vraiment jour et si l’on ne traverse pas un état intermédiaire, une sorte d’éclipse morne, qui se prolonge jusqu’à la fin de l’après-midi. Alors les lampadaires, les vitrines, les cafés s’allument, l’air du soir est plus vif, le contour des choses plus net, il y a des embouteillages aux carrefours, les gens se pressent dans la rue. Et au milieu de toutes ces lumières et de cette agitation, j’ai peine à croire que je suis dans la même ville que celle où se trouvaient Dora Bruder et ses parents, et aussi mon père quand il avait vingt ans de moins que moi. J’ai l’impression d’être tout seul à faire le lien entre le Paris de ce temps-là et celui d’aujourd’hui,

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le seul à me souvenir de tous ces détails. Par moments, le lien s’amenuise et risque de se rompre, d’autres soirs la ville d’hier m’apparaît en liens furtifs derrière celle d’aujourd’hui. (Modiano, 1999, 50–51)

If the documentary, personal, and direct tones and structure of Dora Bruder authorize a reading informed by Hartog’s reflection on the contemporary event, which “se donnant à voir en train de se faire, s’historicise aussitôt et est déjà à lui-même sa propre commémoration” (2003, 17), these considerations apply not to the events recounted but to their recounting; or, in narratological terms, it is not erzählte Zeit (the narrated time) but Erzählzeit (the narrating time) that is brought into presentist focus, being chronicled as it unfolds and stages its own commemoration (see Scheffel, Weixler, and Werner, 2004; Weinrich, 1964; Genette, 1980). Sites of Oblivion, Sights of Memory The book’s opening sentence posits both the separation between past and present and their enduring connection: “Il y a huit ans, dans un vieux journal, Paris Soir, qui datait du 31 décembre 1941, je suis tombé à la page trois sur une rubrique: ‘D’hier à aujourd’hui’” (Modiano, 1999, 7). The “to … from” expression is less indicative of a chronological teleology than of a need to elucidate how “yesterday” and “today” can continue to hold meaning for one another beyond presentist appropriation and anachronistic identification. The connective tissue between the “two eras” (Modiano, 1999, 13) is Paris, a place shared between reality and fiction, shaped as much by history as it is by the literary works of precursors such as Victor Hugo, Robert Desnos, and Jean Genet, or contemporaries like Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Between these two groups of peers who provide distinct models for writing space, time, and memory, another group plays a key role: wartime writers like Felix Hartlaub, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, and the young Jewish-Italian writer Albert Sciaky, nicknamed “le Zébu.” Throughout Modiano’s book, vignettes focused on these writers are interspersed with segments from the narrator’s and Dora’s stories – not as illustrations of the redemptive power of literature, but as transitional textual objects that make the act of coming to writing possible in the face of the unfathomable. The remarkable story of Zébu particularly engages Modiano’s narrator. He lived in France during the Occupation, published a novel at the age of 21 under the pseudonym François Vernet, entered the Resistance, and

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died at Dachau, in the meantime leaving behind an inscription on the wall of cell 218 at the Fresnes prison: “Zébu arrêté le 10.2.44. Suis au régime de rigueur pendant 3 mois, interrogé du 9 au 28 mai, ai passé la visite le 8 juin, 2 jours après le débarquement allié” (Modiano, 1999, 99). This inscription serves as an epitaph that both presages the writer’s impending death (by summarizing in passive participles his spiral of suffering) and contests it (by affirming – “suis” – his enduring presence). Once again, the narrator telescopes from Zébu’s story to his own: D’autres, comme lui, juste avant ma naissance, avaient épuisé toutes les peines, pour nous permettre de n’éprouver que de petits chagrins […] Je m’en étais déjà aperçu vers dix-huit ans, lors de ce trajet en panier à salade avec mon père – trajet qui n’était que la répétition inoffensive et la parodie d’autres trajets, dans les mêmes véhicules et vers les mêmes commissariats de police. (Modiano, 1999, 99)

Through this (self-)ironic juxtaposition, Modiano’s narrator creates a double effect of continuity and contrast. In this experience mediated by the physical and affective proximity of his father, he finds himself occupying a position similar to Zébu, which nonetheless reveals itself to be, like the experiences that draw him towards Dora, a mere imitation of the original event. In the 1999 text replete with literal duplications and mirror images, which features a revised version of its initial edition,15 repetition always harkens back to a past event that can never be fully grasped or transcended through psychological closure or narrative closing. Instead, Modiano’s writing foregrounds the gap between “now” and “then” in a recursive way that signals back to a groundless foundation. Situations (like the trip in a police van) or places (like rue Greffuhle) that suggest an original event are constantly recast in different contexts – the narrating present, the recent past of the investigation, the distant autobiographical past of the narrator’s childhood or youth, or the remote past of his father’s, Dora’s, or others’ lives: Répétition et première fois, voilà peut-être la question de l’événement comme question du fantôme: qu’est-ce qu’un fantôme? qu’est-ce que 15 Repetition as a rhetorical manifestation (the prohibitive inscription “Défense de filmer” appears several times in the text, to provide only one small example) of haunting and being haunted by uncertainty, silence, and absence is essential to Modiano’s poetics. See also Morris’s comments on rewriting and repetition in the different editions of Dora Bruder.

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l’effectivité ou la présence d’un spectre, c’est-à-dire de ce qui semble rester aussi ineffectif, virtuel, inconsistant qu’un simulacre? Y a-t-il là, entre la chose même et son simulacre, une opposition qui tienne? Répétition et première fois mais aussi répétition et dernière fois, car la singularité de toute première fois est en fait aussi une dernière fois. Chaque fois, c’est l’événement même, une première fois est une dernière fois. Toute autre mise en scène pour une fin de l’histoire. Appelons cela une hantologie. (Derrida, 1993, 31)

In this hauntology, the event is buried in its own repetition, its first and last occurrence impossible to differentiate from its spectral iterations, not “une fin de l’histoire” but a “trou noir” (Modiano, 1999, 65) where history replays itself before a narrating subject caught between not-yetknowing and having-already-forgotten. Paris is both a site of memory and the stage of a collective act of oblivion. Whether it endows actions with a special meaning (the cultural archeology of the city suffuses Modiano’s text, blending together topography, history, literature, and urban mythology) or provides a canvas for their unfolding, the city itself participates in the dehumanization and erasure of the French Jews during the Occupation: Je me souviens du jardin des Diaconesses. J’ignorais à l’époque que cet établissement avait servi pour la rééducation des filles. Un peu comme le Saint-Cœur-de-Marie. Un peu comme le Bon-Pasteur. Ces endroits, où l’on vous enfermait sans que vous sachiez très bien si vous en sortiriez un jour, portait décidément de drôles de noms: Bon-Pasteur d’Angers. Refuge de Darnetal. Asile Sainte-Madeleine de Limoges. Solitude-de-Nazareth. Solitude. (Modiano, 1999, 41)

The litany of benevolent names drawn from the Christian repertoire of charity and sainthood is undercut by the last word – “Solitude.” Within the city’s confines, on streets and squares with reassuring historical and religious names, inside or in the shadows of the buildings that populate the pages of Dora Bruder, people were gradually abandoned to a fate for which very few took responsibility.16 Deprived of their freedom, stripped of their rights, transformed into numbers, they disappeared.17 16 The mention of the “amies des juifs” imprisoned alongside Dora at Tourelles is an exception in a narrative that generally emphasizes neither heroism nor villainy, but moral grayness manifested through silent acquiescence or hostile indifference. 17 As is often the case in Modiano’s writing, topography functions an an uncanny reminder of the still-present past; experiencing the city as a living memorial does more to enhance than erase the sense of loss because the survival of

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At the same time, the book suggests that the victims’ martyrdom was that of Paris itself, for those whom necropolitics would remove had become one with the city: “On avait imposé des étoiles jaunes à des enfants aux noms polonais, russes, roumains, et qui étaient si parisiens qu’ils se confondaient avec les façades des immeubles, les trottoirs, les infinies nuances de gris qui n’existent qu’à Paris” (Modiano, 1999, 138–139). Buildings and people, humans and nonhumans become indistinguishable in the grayness of the city. In the book’s early pages, the same indistinctness between people and space ties together the motifs of the trace and the precise detail with the themes of anonymity and unknowability in a manner that foreshadows both their importance for the narrator’s memorial recovery project and his refusal to give precedence to the salvific work of the former over the destructive effects of the latter: Ce sont des personnes qui laissent peu de traces derrière elles. Presque des anonymes. Elles ne se détachent pas de certaines rues de Paris, de certains paysages de banlieue, où j’ai découvert, par hasard, qu’elles avaient habité. Ce que l’on sait d’elles se résume souvent à une simple adresse. Et cette précision topographique contraste avec ce que l’on ignorera pour toujours de leur vie – ce blanc, ce bloc d’inconnu et de silence. (Modiano, 1999, 28)

While taking pride in its ability to endure challenges, postwar Paris has undergone a twofold process of transformation. First, the material continuity with the past has transformed it into a living museum, its streets and buildings now haunted by the lives and deaths they once witnessed. In the narrator’s personal story, sites like rue Greffuhle are paradoxical nodes of memory, “black holes” that bring out the delayed, imperfect, or incomplete nature of one’s intelligence of the past, in the etymological sense (intellego, -ere) of perceiving, understanding, or comprehending it: “Je ne savais pas encore que mon père avait risqué sa vie par ici et que je revenais dans une zone qui avait été un trou noir” (Modiano, 1999, 65). Such is the case of the Gare de Lyon neighborhood, whose proximity may have inspired Dora to run away both because of the attraction that the sight and sounds of the trains might have had for a young girl ready to rebel, but also because the school already prefigures certain sites (as building or mere places) underscores the finality of the human loss: “cette précision topographique contraste avec ce que l’on ignorera pour toujours de leur vie – ce blanc, ce bloc d’inconnu et de silence” (Modiano, 1999, 28).

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other places of confinement, like the prisons (Clignancourt police station, the Préfecture de police, Tourelles) and the camps (Drancy, Auschwitz). In addition, the train station rings the call of the “free zone,” illusory as that call may have been: Quartier dont les rues portent encore des noms campagnards: les Meunieurs, la Brèche-aux-Loups, le sentier des Merisiers. Mais au bout de la petite rue ombragée d’arbres qui longe l’enceinte du Saint-Cœurde-Marie, c’est […] la gare de Lyon […] J’ignore si la proximité de la gare de Lyon avait encouragé Dora à faire une fugue […] Elle connaissait sans doute ces mots trompeurs: zone libre. (Modiano, 1999, 73–74)

The second transformation of Paris was prompted by the peacetime efforts to erase the past, razing its material vestiges, not accidentally or haphazardly, but methodically, bureaucratically: “On avait tout anéanti pour construire une sorte de village suisse dont on ne pouvait plus mettre en doute la neutralité” (Modiano, 1999, 136). To facilitate the overhaul of an urban area, the administrative process begins by assigning it a standardized name and a number such as “l’îlot 16” (instead of “la rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul”) and ends with replacing the old houses with lifeless buildings whose “façades […] rectilignes,” “fenêtres carrées,” “béton de la couleur de l’amnésie,” and “lampadaires […] froide[s]” (Modiano, 1999, 136) cover the city’s memorial sites with an artificial décor. The lexical fabric and the semantic tone of these passages mark a departure from Modiano’s typical stylistic restraint, characterized by a preference for descriptions involving names or statements with limited recourse to subjective modifiers. The metaphors of the concrete in the color of amnesia and the apartment buildings described as Swiss villages, the use of the verb anéantir, along with the repeated reference to tracing and traces – “modifiant […] l’ancien tracé des rues […] c’étaient les traces des chambres où l’on avait habité jadis” (Modiano, 1999, 136) – describe the profound and harmful changes made, decade after decade, to the city’s architectural configuration. In their wake, the places where Dora and others like her lived, dreamed, hid, escaped, or were imprisoned have first become “terrain[s] vague[s]” and, later, following a modernizing, leisure-oriented, and soporific urban logic, “terrain[s] de sport” or “village[s] suisses[s],” that is, places of oblivion where “les numéros des immeubles et les noms des rues ne correspondent plus à rien” (Modiano, 1999, 134, 135, 136, 137). The gradual but definitive sense of loss is further intensified by the image of strips of wallpaper – “lambeaux,” a term commonly used for flesh (lambeau musculaire,

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lambeau de chair) – still visible during the narrator’s childhood as the last remnants of the rooms where Dora and her family would have lived.18 The narrative casts this transformation as even more insidious because it is the result of soft violence, a violence that, unlike its military or totalitarian counterparts, does not spell out its forms of exclusion and its threats: “On ne s’était pas contenté, comme au mur de la caserne des Tourelles, de fixer un panneau: ‘Zone militaire. Défense de filmer et de photographier’” (Modiano, 1999, 136). Instead, it covers death with death – doing away with the remains of a conflicting past with the quiet self-assurance of democratic bureaucracy.19 Modiano’s juxtaposition of Occupied and late twentieth-century Paris may be jarring, but the similarities between the quest for Dora and the necrologue of a city whose Holocaust history is silenced by postwar urbanization support Achille Mbembe’s contention that “the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army)” (Mbembe, 2003, 18). Empty Tombs, Retraced Lives Modiano writes an antithesis of history, his sparse, elliptic, seemingly neutral style marking a strong contrast with the rich stylistic folds and complex phrasing of historical fiction as practiced by Jonathan Littell or 18 The gradual disappearance of the strips of wallpaper reminds us that “Lying beneath the terror of the sacred is the constant excavation of missing bones; the permanent remembrance of a torn body hewn in a thousand pieces and never self-same; the limits, or better, the impossibility of representing for oneself an ‘original crime,’ an unspeakable death: the terror of the Holocaust” (Mbembe, 2003, 27). 19 From this perspective, postwar urban policies unwittingly extend and complete the work of “killing death” itself as the ultimate stage of the anti-Semitic Nazi agenda. Lyotard writes: “The individual name must be killed (whence the use of the serial numbers) and the collective name (Jew) must be killed in such a way that no we bearing this name might remain which could take the deportee’s death into itself and eternalize it. This death must therefore be killed, and that is what is worse than death. For, if death can be exterminated, it is because there is nothing to kill. Not even the name Jew” (1989, 101).

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Alexis Jenni, for instance, in their epic renditions of the lived experience of Nazism (Les Bienveillantes, Goncourt, 2006) or contemporary French history seen as a series of maddening yet unacknowledged wars (L’Art français de la guerre, Goncourt, 2011). While the combination of documentary research and mordant commentary can be found in the other works about the Second World War (such as the 2018 Goncourtwinning narrative L’Ordre du jour by Éric Vuillard), the author of Voyages de noces does not espouse the carnivalesque idea of history as spectacle. Nor does he practice the narrative of history as an eternal return of struggle between barbarism and resistance such as it is displayed in Yannick Haenel’s controversial novel Jan Karski (2009), which could be called a literary tomb for history’s witness. Modiano writes simultaneously with and against the archive, recounting the inquiry into the factual traces of the past only to stress its lacunae; reenacting the theater of bureaucratic indifference, incompetence, and bad faith; activating a process of rememoration that remains stubbornly subjective even when its object is someone other than the narrator himself.20 In Dora Bruder “ce blanc, ce bloc d’inconnu et de silence” (Modiano, 1999, 29) refers as much to historical oblivion – to being left out of the everyday acts of remembrance (street signs, monuments, the mainstream historical lexicon) and forsaken by the memorial grand narrative (“le roman national”21 with its attendant rituals) – as it does to the erasure accomplished by history itself, in which a stock acknowledgment of the past disguises the past’s own internal and often contradictory plurality. The semantic network established by “blanc,” “inconnu,” and “silence” 20 On the unconventional generic status of the book whose formal frictions, ambiguities, and controversies mirror the quasi-unrepresentable nature of the topic itself, see Damamme-Gilbert (2015). More recently, writing on “The Holocaust and the Novel in French,” Colin Davis observes that French novels “draw attention to atrocity by omitting it,” adding that “this aesthetic impossibility is also a moral imperative: there should not be a novel about the Holocaust” (2020, 531). 21 Offenstaedt writes: “L’expression ‘roman national’, popularisée par Pierre Nora, est passée dans le langage courant: elle désigne le récit patriotique, centralisateur, édifié par les historiens du XIXe siècle tout à la louange de la construction de la nation. Le récit national met en avant la grandeur du pays, ses hauts faits et édulcore souvent les pages plus délicates. Il naturalise le ‘patriotisme’, depuis les temps anciens. Dans sa version mystique, la France existerait de toute éternité et les souverains qui se sont succédé n’auraient fait qu’accomplir une destinée quasi naturelle, transcendante” (2009, n. pag.). For an analysis of the current debate around the idea of a “national” French novel, see Obergöker (2019).

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indicates forgetting, with its attendant connotations of absence or erasure, ignorance, and wordlessness. The image of a “bloc” evokes both the tombstone that reduces life to a few words and numbers, and the block of stone used to disguise the absence of a body (le tombeau du soldat inconnu). Modiano’s narrative relates to both gestures: as an abstract entity, it offers a substitute for Dora’s physical absence; as a textual object, it reduces her life to a series of dates and words. At the same time, the book lays bare the reasons for which such an enterprise – that is, a literary project predicated on storytelling as a strategy of historical recovery and reparation – may be fraught with peril and perhaps even destined to fail. First, there is Modiano’s technique of intercalating the transcription of archival documents (official police reports, school records, letters, and internment camp registers) into a largely narrative account. Oftentimes, these documents create a realistic background to Dora’s story, adding important layers of information about Paris and life for French Jews before and after the implementation of the 1940 and 1941 statutes restricting their legal rights. However, these archival passages fracture the textual compactness and disrupt the narrative flow. Moreover, the reader is not allowed to enjoy the unfolding of the primary story – which could be called “Dora Bruder’s historical novel” – as her attention is constantly disrupted by the narrator’s divagations – his literal wanderings or flâneries. The reconstructed identities of the Bruder family members serve as reminders of the irreducible nature of individual lives. Each of them is endowed with distinct characteristics and, far from displaying an illusory family harmony in the face of collective victimhood, each seems to follow a solitary and at times seemingly selfish path. One glimpse of this complexity appears in the letter retrieved from the New York archives of a French Jewish organization with a checkered past, the Union générale des israélites de France. The group’s stated mission was to assist the members of the persecuted minority they represented, but in fact it maintained close ties with the Vichy and German Occupation regimes that oversaw its creation – based on the model of the Polish Judenrate. In an archival letter dated June 1942, the family dynamics are laid bare in bureaucratically sympathetic terms: Dora Bruder a été remise à sa mère le 15 octobre, par les soins du commissariat de police du quartier Clignancourt. En raison de ses fugues successives, il paraîtrait indiqué de la faire admettre dans une maison de redressement pour l’enfance.

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Du fait de l’internement de son père et de l’état d’indigence de sa mère, les assistantes sociales de la police (quai de Gesvres) feraient le nécessaire si on le leur demandait. (Modiano, 1999, 101)

The narrator finds himself walking in someone else’s footsteps uncertain of whom or what exactly he is following: “Cet après-midi-là, sans savoir pourquoi, j’avais l’impression de marcher sur les traces de quelqu’un” (Modiano, 1999, 49). Modiano’s narrative calls attention to the importance of traces not only as clues to something else, valuable only insofar as they allow access to a full body (of evidence), but also as relics with an intrinsic value, as objects worthy of contemplation and reflection. The figure of spectrality moves across realms of being and realms of memory, blurring not only the lines between the living and the dead, as they do in Linda Lê’s cyclical return to and of the past, but also between the remembered and the remembering. Dora – and all those who shared her fate – was transformed into a shadow by the triple loss of her home, her body, and her political status22 while still alive. In death, she maintains an in-between presence, always around but never fully there.23 22 Mbembe: “First, in the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow. Indeed, the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a ‘home,’ loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether)” (2003, 21). 23 One element that could explain Modiano’s roving narrative energy, constantly shifting between timelines and spaces, is the fact that his character, and many others like her, has “more than one tomb for a single body,” as Philippe Ariès points out when discussing evolving attitudes towards the commemoration of the dead (which alternate and overlap between anonymity and individualization from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century), “either because the body had been dismembered […] or because the aspect of commemoration prevailed completely over that of containment, and monuments were built in several places, with no particular importance accorded to the one that contained the physical body” (1981, 208). In the case of Holocaust victims, one could think of the symbolic dismembering of the body – the legal/social/physical body, which is a gradual process suggested in Dora Bruder by the different stages (police stations, prisons, and camps) of the erasure from the body politic and, following the narrator’s lead, envision the lack of one identifiable tomb as a call to build tombs in several places to commemorate each of these symbolic deaths. Rather disturbingly, however, while dedicating a section (“Death Denied”) to modern and contemporary death that he defines through concepts such as concealment, technologization, medicalization, and invisibility, Ariès does not cover in any significant way its collective

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Fleshed out by the narrative, she is much more than a bureaucratic skeleton reduced to a number or a name; yet, despite all the information gleaned from the archives and the hypotheses that open an imaginary window onto her inner life, Dora Bruder never becomes the life story of its eponymous character. Inasmuch as the title holds the promise of a detailed account of the life and times of its heroine, it is misleading; but inasmuch as the text employs misdirection as a literary device, it delivers more than a metafictional critique of the historiographic genre. The pull of history and the belief in fiction’s ability to fill the gaps of memory and even heal the wounds of historical trauma remain strong in this text, this nostalgia being enhanced by the author’s skeptical stance and stylistic heterogeneity. The closing of the book is a testament to this haunting poetics, which sees him switching, sometimes within the same paragraph or book section, from general reflections to very specific examples, from frequent statements of ignorance and doubt24 to extensive archival quotations (police and school reports, personal letters from prisoners to their families, etc.), from internal to external focalization, from one timeline to another, from a constative utterance to intimate declarations, constantly alternating between the granular level of a story and the great canvas of History:

manifestations, such as mass exterminations (through war or ethnic cleansing) or genocides (such as the Holocaust), nor does he engage with their forms, practices, and imaginaries. 24 Rhetorical devices like reticence, hesitation, and epanorthosis appear frequently in biofiction (Gefen, 2015) and filiation narratives (Viart, 2001). Modiano’s text features many examples of what I propose to call loci dubitativi: “Longtemps, je n’ai rien su de Dora Bruder après sa fugue”; “Ainsi, Dora Bruder, après son retour au domicile maternel le 17 avril 1942, a fait de nouveau une fugue. Sur la durée de celle-ci, nous ne saurons rien. Un mois, un mois et demi volé au printemps 1942? Une semaine? Où et dans quelles circonstances a-t-elle été appréhendée et conduite au commissariat du quartier Clignancourt?”; “Je me demande ce qui s’est passé, pour Dora entre le 15 juin, quand elle se trouve au commissariat du quartier Clignancourt, et le 17 juin, le jour de la ‘note pour Mlle Salomon.’ … J’ai beau fermer les yeux, j’ai peine à imaginer Dora et sa mère marchant le long de cette rue jusqu’à leur chambre d’hôtel, par un après-midi ensoleillé de juin, comme si c’était un jour ordinaire” (Modiano, 1999, 109–110). “Peut-être l’un de ces dimanches doux et ensoleillés d’hiver où vous éprouvez un sentiment de vacance et d’éternité – le sentiment illusoire que le cours du temps est suspendu, et qu’il suffit de se laisser glisser par cette brèche pour échapper à l’étau qui va se refermer sur vous” (Modiano, 1999, 60, 102, 109–110, 59).

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Le samedi 19 septembre, le lendemain du départ de Dora et de son père, les autorités d’occupation imposèrent un couvre-feu25 […] La ville était déserte, comme pour marquer l’absence de Dora. Depuis, le Paris où j’ai tenté de retrouver sa trace est demeuré aussi désert et silencieux que ce jour-là. Je marche à travers les rues vides […] Je ne peux pas m’empêcher de penser à elle et de sentir un écho de sa présence dans certains quartiers. L’autre soir, c’était près de la gare du Nord. J’ignorerai toujours à quoi elle passait ses journées […] C’est là son secret. Un pauvre et précieux secret que les bourreaux, les ordonnances, les autorités dites d’occupation, le Dépôt, les casernes, les camps, l’Histoire, le temps – tout ce qui vous souille26 et vous détruit – n’auront pas pu lui voler. (Modiano, 1999, 144–145)

The image of souillure connects the moral and religious symbolism of defilement with the medical semantics of contamination and infection, harkening back to the immunitary and thanatopolitical vocabulary of Nazi ideology. Dora Bruder undoes the work of thanatopolitics and refuses to subscribe to the benign rhetoric of thanatography: it rejects the cult of the dead, even as a recuperatory and redeeming gesture. Instead of being lured by the fascinating mechanisms of death, it turns its attention to the myriad ways in which life persists within, around, and despite it. At the core of Modiano’s literary grave lies not the process of putting-to-death or the expanded chronotope of dying, but a minute, stubborn attention to the continuation of life, a life unaware 25 Mbembe: “power (and not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy” (2003, 16). 26 Esposito: “Here the defense of life and the production of death truly meet at a point of absolute indistinction. The sickness that the Nazis wanted to eliminate was the death of their own race. This is what they wanted to kill in the bodies of Jews and all others who seemed to threaten from within or without. Furthermore, they considered that infected life dead already. Thus, the Nazis did not see their actions as actual murder. They merely reestablished the rights of life by restoring an already dead life to death, giving death to a life that had always been inhabited and corrupted by death. They made death, rather than life, both the therapeutic object and the therapeutic instrument. This explains why they always had a cult of their own ancestors – because, in a biopolitical perspective that had been completely turned into thanatopolitics – only death could have the role of defending life from itself, making all life submit to the regime of death” (2013, 74). Modiano’s novel undoes the work of thanatopolitics by refusing to acquiesce even to a redemptive cult of the dead.

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of the inevitable arrival of “l’instant de ma mort” but endowed with a heightened sensitivity to all the possible outcomes that every living instant holds within it. The intermediary, transitional, and ultimately elusive figure of the adolescent woman emerges as a being whose secret is not held captive by her death but set free in the undeniable traces of her life.

chapter three

Afterlives Open Tombs and Proper Burials in Assia Djebar Afterlives

Il a eu un regard de désolation et il a tourné la tête vers le mur. Il n’a rien voulu dire. (Djebar, 1991, 11)

“Il est mort. Il n’est pas mort” (Djebar, 1991, 11). So begins the Prologue of Loin de Médine: Filles d’Ismaël, Assia Djebar’s novel1 written in reaction to the increasing fundamentalist threat in Algeria at the end of the 1980s and published as the country’s “black decade” was about to start (Stora, 2001).2 I first situate the novel’s writing and publication in its historical context, which saw Assia Djebar and her contemporaries witness the start of what would come to be known as “la décennie noire.” Spanning from 1991 to 2002, this period of civil unrest was dominated by clashes between the partisans of political authoritarianism and those of religious fanaticism, and was characterized by widespread violence. While discussing the book in the wider context of texts that engage critically with the history of Islam and religious Muslim doctrines, such as francophone novels which reimagine the life of the Prophet by Driss Chraïbi (L’Homme du livre, 1995) and, in a post-9/11 context, Salim 1 The generic status is clearly indicated in the novel’s paratext, beginning with the title page. 2 See also Tristan Leperlier’s study of Algerian literature of the “décennie noire” (2018).

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Bachi (Le Silence de Mahomet, 2008), I also account for the criticism directed at Djebar’s perspective on Islam’s values and its foundational narratives. Loin de Médine offers another retelling of the legend in order to remove it from the confinement of theological doxa by diffracting the apodictic truth of authorized religious and political discourse into a series of individual stories anchored in the intimate and life-defining realm of domesticity. From the very start, the author meets the reader on the threshold of the book, where she explains her understanding of the term “novel” as born from the encounter between historiographic knowledge and subjective vision: “J’ai appelé ‘roman’ cet ensemble de récits, de scènes, de visions parfois qu’a nourri en moi la lecture de quelques historiens des deux ou trois siècles de l’Islam (Ibn Hicham, Ibn Saad, Tabari)” (Djebar, 1991, 7). This conjunction results in a text doubly rooted in reality: objective and subjective, learned and felt. The importance of Muhammad’s historical existence (the French text uses the spelling “Mohammed”)3 and the tradition of sacred objects, religious beliefs, and devotional practices revolving around him are not only recognized but also internalized as a personal spiritual experience.4 But it is the Prophet’s death and not his life that constitutes the focal point of Djebar’s novel. As stated in the brief explanatory foreword (“Avant-propos”) that precedes the narration itself and seeks to anticipate and dispel any confusion regarding her approach to a contested subject, the author intends to “combl[er] les béances de la mémoire collective” (Djebar, 1991, 7). In this respect, Djebar remains loyal to her “reparative” poetics, to borrow Mireille Rosello’s (2010) term, which characterizes her entire œuvre from her 3 In my commentary, I follow the English spelling of Arabic and other Quranic names provided in the 2008 translation of the Quʾrān that appears in the bibliography; Djebar’s text uses slightly different French transliterations. 4 On the understanding of history that Islam introduced into Arab civilization, Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Haddad write: “Replacing the pessimistic world view of a people who felt themselves under the sway of an impersonal force leading inevitably and only to personal death came the conception that life has a purpose, that the events of human history, both individual and communal, are in the hands of a just and merciful God, and that death is not the end but the passage into a new and eternal existence. Along with this sense of the purposeful direction of human events, the Qurʾān posits an understanding of meaning and significance to the flow of time and history […] History is the framework in which God makes manifest His signs and His commands, and at the same time it is the arena in which humanity exhibits its acceptance or rejection of those signs” (2002, 3–4).

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novelistic debut with La Soif (1957), through the career-defining Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980) and L’Amour, la fantasia (1985) to the autobiographical somme that is Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2008). In Loin de Médine, the conjunction of a place – “‘loin de Médine,’ c’est-à-dire en dehors, géographiquement ou symboliquement, d’un lieu de pouvoir temporel qui s’écarte irréversiblement de sa lumière originelle” – and a time, after the death of the Prophet, authorizes (both in the sense of allowing and, etymologically, engendering) a project of revival, as suggested by here use of the verbs “ressusciter” and “rétablir” and the noun “reconstitution” (Djebar, 1991, 7, 8). The women at the center of the novel are historical figures, but as the preface explains, they have been left out of the official chronicles by “scrupulous” yet prejudiced historians (“transmetteurs”). The French term “transmetteurs” evokes a complex semantic network of conveying, carrying over, and passing on, not only of stories but of traditions and meanings – which may explain the writer’s critically disputed5 assertion that they were “naturellement portés, par habitude déjà, à occulter toute presence feminine” (Djebar, 1991, 5). These feminine figures have nonetheless pierced (“troué”) in brief but memorable moments the concealing veil of the historical texts, thus already asserting a certain level of agency before prevailing upon the author herself: “de multiples destinées de femmes […] se sont imposées à moi” (Djebar, 1991, 7).6 The aim of Djebar’s own prefatory discourse 5 Hanan Elsayed criticizes this assumption by commenting: “This recalls orientalist discourse, in an easy manner, and one may also wonder to what extent Djebar is reiterating the view of the West, where she has been living for decades” (2013, 97). However, as Émilie Cappella shows in an article that engages with Elsayed’s critique, the writer’s project turns towards the origins of Islam not to negate them but to intervene in the contemporary discourse by making these very origins relevant to today’s context: “c’est en récupérant un lieu de désaccord dans l’histoire islamique que Djebar parvient à aborder l’étouffement de la politique présente et à ouvrir un espace de parole aux Algériennes dépossédées de la décennie noire, aussi bien qu’aux musulmanes de France aujourd’hui” since “lorsque Djebar réécrit les origines de l’Islam, c’est l’histoire présente de l’Algérie qu’elle vise à interrompre” (Cappella, 2015, 85). 6 Another criticism leveled at Djebar bears on her own erasure of the generic differences between the texts she draws on, which feature prophetic biographies, bibliographical collections, and annals, each form requiring a distinct way of incorporating women. “Despite being a trained historian, Djebar placed them all in the same category. Clearly, the French training she received did not include Islamic historiography. In brief, the amount of information available on the subject of women is dictated by several factors and indeed varies from one work to the other”

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is not to denounce a particular agenda, but to release through novelistic “vision” a latent meaning (etymologically, “lying hidden” from Lat. latere) at the expense, indeed, of the historical (that is, recorded and authorized) truth. Furthermore, while the writer’s aim is to give a voice, as well as a body and face, to characters who have been silenced, obscured, or reduced to unidimensional effigies, she does so by relying on a grammar of hesitation and uncertainty.7 Instances of narrative derealization such as the conditional mood, or the use of the fairy-tale formula “Il y avait une fois une reine” (Djebar, 1991, 19), along with moments of authorial pause, doubt, and reflection (the use of “peut-être” and questions concerning what was previously stated or represented) seem to be at odds with a poetics of restitution and recovery. Yet this very uncertainty is subsumed into a granular approach concerned not with an all-encompassing picture of the historical experience, but with the lived experience of history, with the coming-into-being of a religion as a community with its beliefs, rules, internal disagreements, and external struggles at the very moment of its incipience, when its world-project is but one among many. The text lays bare the process of storytelling as a work of interpretation not only of sacred or historiographic sources, but also of the author-narrator’s own opinions, assumptions, and fantasies. Without contesting the notions of factual truth and historical veracity, it exposes the formal and ideological limitations inherent in all narrative practices by juxtaposing, interlacing, and confronting the should have been of historical doctrine with the could have been of fictional elaborations.8 (Elsayed, 2013, 96). While this argument that Djebar’s literary and political agenda blind her to certain differences between texts does serve to highlight a contradiction in her approach, it is hard to follow Elsayed when she makes an argumentative leap to assert “From this, one can conclude that there is no particular tendency to obscure a female textual presence in the eighth and ninth centuries” (2013, 96). 7 Chatti: “Les certitudes de l’origine et les tabous de la tradition s’y trouvent altérés par la rencontre avec l’étranger et l’autre, par la polyphonie et le doute. L’interrogation menée depuis ces deux positions extrêmes – du dedans et du dehors – donne lieu à une scénographie hérétique, à une poétique de l’impureté” (2016, 10). While the rhetoric of doubt and uncertainty affects Djebar’s treatment of authoritative sources, it also accompanies her own rereading and reimagining of the past. Shrouding herself in layers of doubt, does she then become more or less “heretical,” in the eyes of the keepers of tradition? 8 De Certeau: “Si donc le récit de ‘ce qui s’est passé’ disparaît de l’histoire scientifique (pour s’étaler au contraire dans l’histoire vulgarisée), ou si la narration

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Troubling Resurrections Djebar offers a (re)construction of the historical doxa, a doxa that is neither entirely reducible to the syntagmatic structure of the historical text nor completely identifiable with the paradigmatic configuration of oral memory, but constantly alternating between the two. The fictional narrative weaves a doubtful path between the former’s scriptuary authority predicated on the idea of a truth that it carries on its literal surface, and the latter’s rich, layered, and often contradictory tradition of storytelling.9 The publication, after Loin de Médine, of other novels that engage with the human and historical foundations of Islam, notably Chraïbi’s L’Homme du livre and Bachi’s Le Silence de Mahomet, testify to the seminal nature of the novel that made possible the exploration of this topic not only thematically but also poetically.10 It is perhaps because des faits prend l’allure d’une ‘fiction’ propre à un type de discours, on ne saurait en conclure l’effacement de la référence au réel. Cette référence a plutôt été déplacée. Elle n’est plus immédiatement donnée par les objets narrés ou ‘reconstitués’. Elle est impliquée par la création de ‘modèles’ (destinés à rendre ‘pensables’ des objets) proportionnés à des pratiques, par leur confrontation avec ce qui leur résiste, les limite et fait appel à d’autres modèles, enfin par l’élucidation de ce qui a rendu possible cette activité en l’inscrivant dans une économie particulière (ou historique) de la production sociale” (1975, 56; emphasis added). 9 Many works inspired by their era’s public debates and moral dilemmas seek to intervene by casting light both on the enduring nature of these issues and on their historical roots in order to dispel fallacious or anachronistic interpretations of the past that place a burden on the present and prevent societies from imagining common projects for the future. In such works, fiction appears to take its cue from the idea that “le passé est fiction du présent” (De Certeau, 1975, 17) to better exploit and explore the duality of the genitive, which can be subjective or objective, signaling either that the present was fabricated by the past or that the past is a fiction created by the present. De Certeau emphasizes this interrelation, while appearing to give precedence not to the present itself but to its interpretation, when he reiterates: “Bien que ce soit une lapalissade, il faut rappeler qu’une lecture du passé, toute contrôlée qu’elle soit par l’analyse des documents, est conduite par une lecture du présent” (1975, 31). 10 Mounira Chatti’s study of “heretical” Arabic and francophone novels discusses, in addition to Djebar’s, works by Kateb Yacine (La Kahina ou Dihya), Salim Bachi (Le Silence de Mahomet), and Tahar Djaout (Le Dernier Été de la raison), contending that: “Tous engagent une relecture de l’héritage arabo-islamique dont ils dévoilent et interrogent la violence. Violence de la littéralité du Coran et de sa mémorisation; violence d’un récit d’origine qui refuse de reconnaître ses sources juives ou chrétiennes, pour ne citer que ces références bibliques; violence d’un

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Loin de Médine is epistemically incomplete, because it summons up the ghosts of the past without assigning them a fixed place in a sacred fictional pantheon, it opens up a venerated tomb without replacing it with a mausoleum, and because, in keeping with the Muslim tradition, it refuses to place a unique tomb on a memorial site, privileging instead a plurality of narrative markers, that other writers have taken up the task of revisiting it. The well-established context of the book’s writing (Bourget, 2013; Chatti, 2016) – elaborated over a period of several years, between 1985 and 1990, as Algeria was already experiencing the political and ideological conflicts that would eventually bring about the “décennie noire” and the 1990 fatwa pronounced against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1989) – situates Loin de Médine11 in an illuminating position with respect to a transnational reflection on the place and meaning of the dead and death in history. Her novel joins a set of works that inaugurate rather than conclude; they open up an era of confrontation and continuity between past and present, which are called to face each other’s assumptions and beliefs as the present’s reverence for the past turns into a crippling tether while the value and shape of the past lie at the mercy of the present: Chez Kateb Yacine, Nawal El-Saadawi, Assia Djebar, Salim Bachi et Tahar Djaout, le détour par les figures du passé va de pair avec l’ancrage, explicite ou implicite, dans le présent marqué de désolation et de mort. Que la fiction pressente le désastre à venir ou qu’elle naisse au cœur de ce désastre, elle s’affirme comme une écriture d’urgence et un espace de liberté face au fanatisme religieux. En totale opposition avec l’approche orthodoxe anhistorique, atemporelle, épique, la fiction figure l’histoire de manière dynamique, dialectique, créatrice. (Chatti, 2016, 169)

Positing itself as a missing link between the lived substance of the past and the potential energies of the present in a highly disputed context récit historique qui se construit sur la négation de l’histoire préislamique; violence enfin de la réclusion des femmes, condensation et symbole de l’exclusion de l’autre” (2016, 10). 11 The 1988 riots brought about the rise of the FIS, and the subsequent civil war that was sparked by the annulment of elections that the FIS was poised to win. The civil war raged in the 1990s, with its well-publicized atrocities, some of which targeted women who did not follow certain Quranic precepts such as covering their hair. While the riots hastened the writing of this novel, its targeted sociopolitical context dates back to 1984, when women became an easy pawn in the hands of the ruling FLN to quiet down Islamists’ demands, through a Personal Statute and Family Code that maintained gender inequality (Bourget, 2002, 71).

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where the opponent is denied the very language she speaks, necrofiction mediates even as it castigates past errors and stabilizes even as it rattles current certainties. Djebar’s 1991 novel has received critical and sometimes polemical attention for its engagement with the Qurʾān and the sacred texts of the Sunna (which relates the practices, laws, and customs established by the Prophet) along with the Hadith (the collection of sayings by the Prophet or stories about him) as well as several authoritative historical chronicles: A sira is a path through life and so by extension a biography, but the Sira (with a capital S, as it were) is the life of Muhammad. The Sira contains sunna, the latter setting out in a systematic fashion the Prophet’s customary or normative behavior, that which must be imitated and obeyed […] In sum, the Sira is the narrative biography of Muhammad, while the sunna is the record of his legal or normative example and action […] No longer a narrative, the hadith marked out, systematized, and sacralized sunna, arranging it under the principal features of the good Muslim life (faith, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, and so forth). The Sira on the other hand pursued the path of the narrative. There is a great deal of overlap in biographical content between the two genres, but in style, presentation, and objectives they are wholly different. (Khalidi, 2009, 15)

In light of this formal and pragmatic distinction, Djebar’s mixing of the genres can be viewed as a feature of the literary tomb as the Renaissance envisioned it. This strengthens both the accusations that she disregards the differences between the documents on which she draws, as Elsayed contends from a secular, philological perspective,12 and the contentions that her project is essentially blasphemous from an orthodox Islamic point of view, as Chatti (2016) explains. The book has been analyzed through the feminist lens by scholars such as Clarisse Zimra and Priscilla Ringrose as a reassessment of women’s place in Muslim history and through the lens of cultural critique as a redefinition of the fraught relation between fiction and the sacred Islamic tradition. Readers have emphasized Djebar’s rewriting of these sources at the expense of historical accuracy, or her unwriting of what has been held as the unquestioned and unquestionable truth; they have underscored her discursive and narrative strategies such as recounting the male-dominated past from the perspective of women and 12 See n. 9 above.

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blending fact and fiction by introducing imaginary characters alongside historical figures.13 The rich paratext features two epigraphs that seem at odds with each other, since one is a humble captatio benevolentiae while the other affirms the writer’s demiurgic powers. They foreshadow the duality at the heart of Djebar’s project, between East and West, between the humble stance of an heir to the legacy of great men who went before her and the pride of the modern individual who wields the symbolic power of life and death over her forebears. On this point, the choice to center the book on the death of the Prophet could also be read in dialogue with a largely defamatory European tradition of textual and pictorial representation that begins in the twelfth century with De generatione Machumet et nutritura eius and is solidified by Canto XXVIII of Dante’s Divina Commedia, extending all the way into the eighteenth century, when the first attempts are made to provide a positive, if not historically accurate, portrayal of Muhammad. Heather Coffey summarizes the issue in these terms: “Whether in Christianity or Islam, relics literally embody the religious experience of the venerable deceased. What better place then to denigrate a saint or prophet than an imagined theater of death?” (2013, 85). Assia Djebar’s book refuses both the defamatory and hagiographic models and can be read as an attempt to restore, both through its content and tone, the dignity of a significant life narrative while questioning her subject’s motivations and actions and adopting a decidedly critical stance towards an absolute and ahistorical portrayal used to support sectarian ideologies and theocratic politics.14 13 For a useful summary of the bibliography on this novel, see Cappella (2015), which highlights the importance of discursive mobility and the technical composition of the novel for generating a space of dialogue and negotiation. 14 Di Cesare: “The events of Muhammad’s life are exaggerated and transformed in order to discredit the foundation and message of Islam, by portraying its founder as an anti-saint and alluding more or less explicitly to apocalyptical tradition, in which the pseudo-historical Muhammad fits into the figure of the pseudo-prophet, Antichrist’s forerunner, and Antichrist himself” (2013, 12). The early modern imagery focuses on the idea of the Prophet having a monstruous and grotesque nature, placing a particular emphasis on his corporeal body, often submitted to gruesome punishments, as in the case of Dante’s poem, and his death. For instance, while European texts attribute to him the ability to foretell his own death, they void it of its hagiographic significance the better to denounce him as a heretic or a fraud: “When Mahomat felt that death was imminent, he foretold that Gabriel would come and resurrect him on the third day following his death. But then, the

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The first epigraph consists of two excerpts from the epic Book of Kings (Le Livre des Rois or, in Farsi, Shahnameh) by the late tenth-, early eleventh-century Persian writer Ferdowsi, featuring quotations about the garden of knowledge and the author’s lack of originality, his inferiority, and humility: “tous ont déjà parcouru le jardin du savoir […] Peut-être pourrais-je trouver une place sur une branche inférieure de ce cyprès qui jette son ombre au loin” (Djebar, 1991, 9). The second epigraph is drawn from Jules Michelet: “Et il y eut alors un étrange dialogue entre lui et moi, entre moi, son ressusciteur, et le vieux temps remis debout” (Djebar, 1991, 9). The novelist harkens back to the nineteenth-century historian and philosopher of history for whom the study of the past was predicated on an intimate engagement, almost a chemical fusion, with its lived experience (Lefort, 2002; Aramini, 2013). The masculine “lui” in the quotation from Michelet refers syntactically to “time” but in the context of Djebar’s project it can also underscore the book’s focus on reviving the historical and symbolic figure of the founder of Islam. Djebar aims to evoke an active and just dialogue between the figure of the Prophet and the traditional and current ideas derived from his words and actions, as well as from his silence. The four sections of the text (“La liberté et le défi,” “Soumises, insoumises,” “Les voyageuses,” and “Parole vive”) feature chapters with exclusively feminine titles, such as “The Yemenite queen,” “The woman who is waiting for Gabriel,” “The prophetess,” “The repudiated woman,” “Keramah the Christian,” “The female combatant,” and “She text recounts, he died and nothing happened. His followers, thinking that the angels were scared by their presence, left the body unguarded, and dogs, attracted by the smell, came and devoured it” (Di Cesare, 2013, 13–14). Dante’s description of the contrapasso torture (or removal of the entrails) inflicted on Muhammad also performs a symbolic gesture of “cross-cultural mutilation” by reinscribing in a Christian context the Islamic legend of the shaqq al-sadr or splitting of the chest, “which relates how the Prophet Muhammad was subject to corporeal mutilation – in this instance, not as divine punishment, but rather as an initiatory passage into prophecy. The narrative, which survives in multiple renditions, relates how several angels opened Muhammad’s chest and removed his heart, which was immersed and washed in a basin filled with water – alternatively, with melted snow, or water from the Zamzam well in Mecca or the Kawthar pool – to ensure its purification. The narrative also described how his heart was mended and restored to its rightful position inside his chest cavity, which was then shut with the seal of prophecy (khatam al-nubuwwa), itself a visible confirmation of his divinely decreed apostleship” (Coffey, 2013, 69).

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who preserves the living word.” This formal strategy confirms the will to probe Quranic exegesis and Hegirian history in order to uncover the feminine foundations of Islam. The narrative voice launches into a sustained and oftentimes critical dialogue with tradition and the cultural reflexes that it produces. Dividing recitatives, called voices, and rawiya (which is the feminine form of “the one who reports or the one who narrates”), along with typographical strategies of differentiation (the use of italics and blank spaces), confirm the polyphonic vocation of the narrative. But the story also endeavors, by the force of its discourse and the counter-exemplarity of its narration, to construct around the person of the Prophet the edifice of the true Islam, whose message was first understood by women: obedience to God requires disobedience to the laws of men. The narrative core of the book is framed by a multipartite critical apparatus composed of an “Avant-propos,” a “Prologue,” an “Épilogue,” and a list of “Personnages cités,” and interspersed with quotations from the chronicles, two extensive sets of which (taken from Ibn Sa’d and Tabari) are titled after, respectively, Abu Bakr’s and ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab’s califates, serving to divide the narrative material into two chronological segments. This paratextual and intertextual apparatus raises questions of voice, perspective, and authority as it creates several layers of textual involvement and distinct levels of authorial responsibility, without, however, introducing clear demarcations between them: she who speaks in the book’s foreword presents a different tone and stance from she who greets us in the prologue, who, in turn, is not quite identical to the one who voices the rawiya or she who narrates the women’s stories. Chatti’s analysis also points out the two apparently contrasting effects of Djebar’s intertextual strategy: one is corrective, counter-discursive, running against the grain of the traditional texts it mines for narrative material, while the other is reinvigorating and restorative of these very same works, since their literary, fictional rewriting also reactivates their latent energies.15 It is however important to note the distinction that Djebar’s author-narrator draws between the sacred texts, on the one hand, and chronicles or exegeses on the 15 Chatti: “Une riche intertextualité littéraire, historique, mythologique travaille Loin de Médine d’Assia Djebar dans une perspective de déconstruction, de distanciation, de recréation du passé épique. Une écriture fragmentaire et discontinue restitue aux femmes une place dans la genèse de l’islam […] L’héritage sacré se trouve ainsi revivifié par le rire, la dérision, le symbole, l’allégorie” (2016, 12–15).

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other. For instance, she contrasts the letter of the Qurʾān, perceived as more open and permissive especially when understood in its historical context, with its official interpretation, which performs a hermeneutical or historiographic closing of its meaning, frozen in time (an atemporal time that does not account for the material conditions of a text’s emergence) and motivated by an ideological agenda. It is the potentiality of the former that her fiction favors, while exposing the obtuseness of the latter. Djebar revives the dead by setting them, in Aristotelian fashion, before our eyes in vivid tableaux that reenact their actions and unveil their thoughts, thus making us adhere to the plausible truth of a reality that could have been, according to certain parameters of historical possibility, or that should have been, if the course of events had followed a hypothetical yet more ethical path. It is important to look back on the author’s opening statement already mentioned at the start of this chapter. Calling on a time-honored literary trope, the characters and their destinies compel the writer’s attention, prompting her to bring them back to life: “de multiples destinées de femmes se sont imposées à moi: j’ai cherché à les ressusciter” (Djebar, 1991, 7). Her retelling is doubly remedial since it translates the medium of the chronicles with its biases and lacunae into a fuller, more complete fictional medium while also correcting not only the historical text but the course of history, the events that make up its factual reality. Interestingly, the narrative makes manifest a subtle antithesis only alluded to in the “Avant-propos.” On the one hand, there are the scrupulous historians of Islam who were nonetheless hampered both by their biases against women (“naturellement portés […] à occulter toute présence feminine” (Djebar, 1991, 5) – the adverb “naturellement” can be interpreted as a reference both to their gender and their time period, wherein cultural conditioning acquires the force of nature) and by their belatedness, their absence from the actual events, their lack of quality as eyewitnesses or active participants in the events they write about. While this does not invalidate their honesty,16 it does imply, in the rhetorical and ethical 16 Addressing the status and function of historical or documentary writing in the Islamic tradition, Mounira Chatti writes: “La parole de Dieu vient rappeler régulièrement, par le cycle de la prophétie, les modalités et les exigences de cette réciprocité [between God and man]. La prophétie est une catégorie essentielle de la révélation juive, chrétienne et coranique. En témoigne, en islam, l’importance de la valeur documentaire de cette littérature hagiographique (rédaction des vies des

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framework of the novel, that they find themselves at a paradoxical disadvantage in relation to a twentieth-century woman writer who sets out to “rétablir la durée de ces jours que j’ai désiré habiter” (Djebar, 1991, 7). The writer’s drive to close the historical gap and her capacity to empathize with her subjects underwrite her attempt to inhabit the past in an affective, even instinctual way. From this perspective, Loin de Médine can be seen not – or not just – as a critical take on Islamic history but as an attempt to attain an immersive understanding of it.17 Nevertheless, the authorial voice systematically marks the distance – which could almost be called a temporal incompatibility – between narrated time (itself divided into different temporalities), narrative and scriptural time, and reading time. While references to religious genealogy establish filiation, both masculine and feminine, as one of the major axes of the narrative, they also underscore the idea of death as the inevitable event that marks both a definitive conclusion and a tear in the fabric of time through which not the future but futurity18 saints et/ou prophètes) ‘ou se dévoilent les procédés et les degrés de transfiguration du personnage historique en un personnage mythique’. L’attitude religieuse ignore toute référence à l’histoire” (2016, 34, quoting Arkoun, 2005, 20). 17 Chatti: “En effet, tout le discours coranique réfère à trois temps hiérarchisés: le temps de cette vie immédiate, ou temps court de la mise à l’épreuve de l’homme par Dieu; le temps de la mort dont la durée est indéterminée; le temps de la vie éternelle vers lequel est tendue toute création […] Toute action humaine, individuelle et collective, doit tendre vers l’avenir eschatologique: la fin du monde, la résurrection, le jugement dernier. Le temps de la mort, conçu comme celui du passage du temps court au temps infini, marque la fin du pacte qui, dans le temps de la vie immédiate, liait Dieu à chaque homme” (2016, 33–34). 18 Smith and Haddad: “The aspect of this debate most relevant to our present endeavors is the question of how Islam has understood the nature of the human person in terms of what survives the death of the body at the conclusion of one’s ajal. What, in other words, lives beyond the physical death and awaits in some form the coming of the eschaton when it will again be joined to the resurrected body? By what terminology is that remaining individuality to be understood?” (2002, 17). The two scholars define ajal as a pre-Islamic term that describes human life as a fixed term; the Qurʾān also uses it to define the specified time between birth and death while inscribing it into a macrocosmic scheme that subsumes the individual time, dunyá, to the collective time that exists apart from the measure of time or ākhira. Moreover, individual time does not end at death, as it is followed by a period of “existence in the grave (or elsewhere) awaiting the resurrection” or participation in the collective events associated with the resurrection (Smith and Haddad, 2002, 5–6).

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irrupts, an event that makes possible both the claim to a heritage and the disputation of that claim. The subtitle “Daughters of Ishmael” places the text in the shadow of Abraham, the patriarch shared by all three monotheistic religions, and of his son Ishmael, considered to be the father of the Arab people. As the reader prepares to leave behind the book’s world, the theme of filiation resurfaces in the section “‘Filles d’Agar,’ dit-elle,” an italicized, poetic account of Ishmael’s and his mother Hagar’s miraculous survival in the desert “between Safa and Merwa.” This scene has become ritualized in the Islamic tradition through its yearly reenactment during the pilgrimage of the faithful, and Djebar’s rewriting of the story ties together in a new, subjective, and decidedly literary way both Jewish and Islamic versions of the story. From heroic women like the Islamic Judith, untamable women like the Berber queen Kahina, and rebels like Umm Kalthum, to ʿAʾisha, Muhammad’s youngest wife, and Fatima, his daughter, stripped of her inheritance by power-hungry men, Loin de Médine reestablishes the forgotten pillars of Islam: “Des Musulmanes de la plus rare espèce: soumises à Dieu et farouchement rebelles au pouvoir, à tout pouvoir” (Djebar, 1991, 302). It could be tempting to say that Djebar tries to naturalize the importance of women in Islam; however, that would be to misinterpret both the premise and the mission of the novel. The book draws critically on historical accounts and, as such, seeks to remind those who may have forgotten – or elucidate for those who have not yet learned – that women have always been central to Islam’s formation and existence. Uncertain Legacies Death operates in Djebar’s novel as a figure of uncertainty, in-betweeness, and transitionality: that of the Prophet is said to have occurred “ce lundi – jour de sa naissance, jour de sa mort” (Djebar, 1991, 13). The story itself opens not with a question but with a dual, contradictory statement: “Il est mort. Il n’est pas mort” (Djebar, 1991, 12). This antonymical juxtaposition between two existential states that affect not only the individual but an entire community and even the idea of a communal project is a leitmotiv in the short but suggestive Prologue that sets the tone for the four narrative sections of the book. It is often amplified by repetitions and questions (“Est-il mort, le Messager?”) reminiscent of the

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call-and-response techniques of oral narratives, and continues to echo throughout the book: “exception faite des habitants de La Mecque restés fidèles, l’Arabie entière est prête à admettre que, le prophète Mohammed mort, l’Islam est mort” (Djebar, 1991, 30). The women’s perspective, discounted in the men’s quarrel, also introduces, as the novel suggests in the section dedicated to Fatima’s unsuccessful fight for recognition of her legacy, the possibility of, if not overcoming, at least setting aside duality in order to question the nature of the inheritance itself: “‘Quel Islam n’est pas mort?’, semble questioner la voix entêtée de Fatima” (Djebar, 1991, 75–76). In the chronicles, the idea of duality emerges not as a political or historical problem to be solved with one authoritative pronouncement, be it that of the Prophet Muhammad or of the two caliphs – Abu Bakr (years 10–13 of the Hijra) and ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab (years 13–23 of the Hijra) – in whose times the events, real or fictional, recounted in the book took place, but as the very condition of the history of Islam. At the end of a book made of fragmentary, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory narratives, the Epilogue reaffirms the unavoidable, even necessary coexistence of plurality and duality (“Parole plurielle, parole duelle”) through the opposite examples of Fatima and ʿAʾisha: “Parole donc de la contestation et, à l’autre extrême, parole de la transmission: celle de la fille mystique sur un versant nocturne, celle de l’épouse sur le point de devenir femme de pouvoir et de rayonnement, sur le versant de l’aube” (Djebar, 1991, 301). Ultimately, this death also makes it possible for other members of the Muslim or non-Muslim community, including women, to imagine themselves as prophets: C’est la première bataille importante, depuis que Mohammed est mort. Fatima aussi vient de mourir. Puisque ce ne sont pas les héritiers naturels qui commandent à Médine, puisque c’est sur le mérite personnel que les Musulmans s’accordent pour choisir un continuateur temporel, en cette 11e année de l’hégire, de multiples inspirés s’imaginent être de nouveaux Mohammed! (Djebar, 1991, 30)

The duality of the Prologue’s incipit sets the tone for considering alternative versions of the Prophet’s burial: Selon certains, il sera enterré la nuit même de ce lundi – jour de sa naissance, jour de sa mort […] Selon d’autres transmetteurs, Mohammed est enterré le mardi au soir, une fois que le choix s’est porté sur Abou Bekr qui pourra rassembler. Selon d’autres encore, les remous autour de la succession dureront

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trois jours. Trois jours pendant lesquels la dépouille de l’Envoyé, dans la chambre d’Aïcha, est oubliée de tous les Musulmans. (Djebar, 1991, 13)

Recording the doubt that surrounds the time of the Prophet’s death and burial renders the event itself more salient for, even as its disputed circumstances and modes of memorialization create the substance of the narrative, the importance of the event is never called into question. His inaugural death enters into a complex dialogue with many others that precede and follow; its symbolic significance does not isolate it, in Djebar’s narrative, from other disappearances that, on the contrary, foreshadow, complete, explain, or relate to it. If the defenders of the disputed legacy are men, women are the keepers of the undisputed body: “Il a penché la tête, légèrement, sur le côté, contre la gorge de Aïcha” (Djebar, 1991, 11). A seminal image of fragility and care shows the dying Prophet placing his head on his wife’s neck: as his male followers busy themselves with establishing the doctrinal truth that will erase all traces of the quarrels, debates, and violence at its root, the women care for what remains before, during, and after the doctrine’s pronouncement: Les hommes auraient donc négligé Mohammed allongé dans sa couche, mais les épouses, mais Fatima la dernière des filles vivantes, elle-même très affaiblie, mais les vieilles tantes, mais la douce Oum Aymann, mais Marya la Copte accourue de sa demeure lointaine, toutes, c’est certain, se relaient autour du mort, attendent les instructions pour le lavement, les linges ultimes et les rites de l’ensevelissement. (Djebar, 1991, 13–14)

Even as Abu Bakr, ʿAʾisha’s father, proclaims in one breath the death of the Prophet and the enduring life of Islam, this momentous gesture only serves to draw up the lines of verbal and physical confrontations between different factions claiming the right to succession. The struggle will also obscure the very fate of the body from which the rivals draw their legitimacy, generating contradictory versions of the burial itself. Seeing her own right to inheritance denied, Fatima herself addresses the community of believers gathered in the sacred space of the mosque with the same accusation that comes to amplify her complaint: “Vous avez laissé le cadavre du prophète entre nos mains, tandis que vous vous êtes occupés de tout régler entre vous seuls!” (Djebar, 1991, 76–77). However, Djebar’s literary tomb does not seek to bring closure to the issue of who has authority over the Prophet’s material and spiritual inheritance – ʿAli, the son-in-law, or Abu Bakr, the father-in-law, and their followers. Nor does it does purport to settle “le problème de la

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succession,” which, in the immediate aftermath of his death caused men to abandon Muhammad’s remains and give in to “querelles, […] des discours véhéments, peut-être même […] des violences” (Djebar, 1991, 13). If anything, by revisiting and reimagining the documented past, it complicates the notion of inheritance, illustrating the way it manifests among the daughters of Hagar in different, contradictory, yet coexisting forms. The novel also indirectly but effectively restages the well-known conflict between Sunni and Shiʿa Muslims by shifting the focus onto the two women, Fatima and ʿAʾisha, who find themselves in warring camps but who share their love for the Prophet and for each other: “Silence, six mois durant, entre les deux femmes car le pouvoir soudain oscille entre femme et fille. Qui est vraiment l’héritière?” (Djebar, 1991, 293). The inevitability and senselessness of this rift is captured by the striking image of the daughter and the wife praying on the Prophet’s tomb while separated by a wall. What binds them beyond the grave is the solitude of their final sorrow, not only for the loss of the one they both loved but also for each other. When denied entrance to the mortuary room that holds Fatima’s body, ʿAʾisha feels alone (“se sent seule désespérément”) and powerless before “Cette aprêté de la volonté de la morte” (Djebar, 1991, 295), an inflexible will that extends beyond the grave to separate what love and faith had brought together. Seized by doubt, she, the “mère des Croyants,” questions the very grounds of the conflict that pitted “la fille de l’Aimé contre la fille de son premier vicaire” and more generally the “rivalité des parents de l’époux envers l’épouse préférée de celui-ci” (Djebar, 1991, 295). While Fatima calls for an ethical application of the new order of Islam, ʿAʾisha is the voice of a solidarity born of a shared condition. “Ce serait si dérisoire!” she exclaims, referring to the religious and political rift: “Ne sommes-nous pas, nous, Musulmanes à Médine, préservées par notre foi, par notre faiblesses aussi, de ces divisions?” (Djebar, 1991, 294). Fatima’s death as a disinherited daughter also marks the end of ʿAʾisha’s life as a living woman. In losing Fatima, the last “living part” of the Prophet, his favorite surviving wife is truly widowed, separated from herself and frozen in time: “Fatima est morte, et c’est comme si, cette fois, mon cœur, tout entire, est gelé. Mon veuvage – veuvage definitif – est vraiment commencé” (Djebar, 1991, 295). She then becomes the first rawiyata, the storyteller of the words and deeds of the inaugural time to which she was a privileged witness. The reactions elicited among men by the Prophet’s disappearance are as telling as the event itself. On the one side, there is denial from those

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who, like ʿUmar, the future second caliph, declare themselves ready to put to death any mortal who dares to say the Prophet is dead. The Prophet is seen as immortal by those bonded to him by faith, and also, as Djebar’s text often highlights, through the very human bonds of love, family, and friendship: “Il n’est pas mort! gronde-t-il parmi les arrivants en émoi. Je tuerai qui dira qu’il est mort!” (Djebar, 1991, 12). On the other side, there is the performative proclamation of the Prophet’s father-in-law and eventual successor who, by announcing his passing, allows the advent of his own authority while also establishing Islam as a living legacy. The legacy originates but does not end with its founder’s corporeal disappearance: Abou Bekr revient de Médine, entre dans la chambre de sa fille. Il baisse les yeux fermés du Messager, son ami: – Mohammed est mort, déclare-t-il en sortant de la chambre. L’Islam n’est pas mort! (Djebar, 1991, 13)

Between these two, ʿAli, Fatima’s husband and the Prophet’s cousin, the other presumptive heir who is nonetheless left out of the debate for succession, is the only man who accomplishes the gestures associated with the act of mourning by manifesting his sorrow and allaying it through prayer, just as, years later, upon his wife’s death, he will use his eloquence to express through “une poésie ample, lyrique, qui chercha à consoler” his sadness at the compounded loss caused by “la perte de ‘l’un’ après la perte de ‘l’autre’” (Djebar, 1991, 89). Celebrated as a lion on the battlefield, ʿAli comes to occupy here an intermediary position between his male and female contemporaries. He shows acceptance of the undeniable reality of loss, yet overcomes it by relying on the legacy of the one who has been lost: “Seul Ali, silencieux et figé, ne quitte pas le mort. Il prie, il ne cesse de prier, comme si, depuis ce jour où tout enfant il s’est précipité avec élan dans la foi toute neuve, vingt-trois années s’étaient écoulées comme un seul jour!” (Djebar, 1991, 12–13). Fatima, the dispossessed daughter, emerges as a fourth figure of mourning. Where her husband may be deprived of the symbolic inheritance that would afford him authority over the Islamic community, she is denied both the spiritual and material recognition of her filial rights. The novel shows Fatima imagining herself as a son, a scribe to whom the father could have confided the inscription of the divine word and his own wisdom. The Prophet refused to dictate his final words to any of the scribes present at his deathbead. Could this silence be due to

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the lack of a male heir, itself the sign of a life unfulfilled? The narrative draws on many chronicled instances of exemplary love between the prophet and the child who is not a son. Chief among these is a moment when ʿAli requests permission to take a second wife: a critical moment when Muhammad is moved to choose between what the laws of Islam allow and what his affection for Fatima prohibits.19 In the “différend entre la fille du Prophète et le vicaire du Prophète,” Fatima asserts her equal standing as the sole remaining living “part” of the Prophet: “Ne serait-ce donc pas la vérité, qu’une ‘partie’ vivante du prophète s’adresse au Prophète mort?” (Djebar, 1991, 85, 77). If Fatima cedes the spiritual succession to men, nonetheless she is brought to bear the full weight of atavism as the “seule héritière en ligne directe du sang du Prophète” (Djebar, 1991, 80–81). Her atavistic status extends to her textual presence; she is portrayed in indirect free speech that makes her voice and the narrator’s indistinguishable. She states before the entire community that “Mohammed pour sa succession temporelle, ne laisse aucune descendance vivante, sinon elle!” (Djebar, 1991, 80). Abu Bakr uses the Prophet’s own words to refute the very possibility of his inheritance: “Nous, les prophètes […] on n’hérite pas de nous! Ce qui nous est donné nous est donné en don!” (Djebar, 1991, 78). Before the transcendental law that knows no exchange and no transmission other than the absolute self-dispossession of the gift, Fatima’s material demands concerning her birthright seem petty and mundane, relegating her to the immanent plane to which religious laws and common wisdom have often confined women. However, they also force the community to face its internal political, ethical, and legal contradictions, a truth that Abu Bakr will recognize on his death bed when he confides to his wife, Asma, his regret at having “dépouillé Fatima” (Djebar, 1991, 245). The daughter warns of the danger that after the Prophet’s death his lessons could be forgotten, and the community of 19 In shedding light on these moments that show the struggle between the man and the prophet, the novel may be inspired by “the four principal voices or moods” or “the four principal colors in which Muhammad’s portrait is painted in the Qurʾan: visionary, narrative, homiletic/legal, and situative” (Khalidi, 2009, 24). The scholar also remarks that “from the Qurʾan’s viewpoint, the personality of Muhammad takes second place to his role; the personal name retreats behind the divinely appointed universal missionary,” and it is precisely this precedence of the prophet over the man that contemporary fiction sets out to question or contest in ways that range from irreverential and satirical to, in Djebar’s case, meditative but nonetheless subversive.

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believers revert back to the situation before what the narrator calls “the revolution”: La révolution de l’Islam, pour les filles, pour les femmes, a été d’abord de les faire hériter, de leur donner la part qui leur revient de leur père! Cela a été instauré pour la première fois dans l’histoire des Arabes par l’intermédiaire de Mohammed. Or, Mohammed est-il à peine mort, que vous osez deshériter d’abord sa propre fille, la seule fille vivante du Prophète lui-même! (Djebar, 1991, 79)20

Anachronism functions here not only as a compensatory strategy that allows the narrator to fill in the blanks left by the chronicles and restore the progressive content of a past commonly used to justify the denial of women’s rights. It raises the question of Islam as a shared legacy by querying the relation between religion and ethics, between the bonds of faith, or its coming-together, and the bond of common values, or living-together. Doubting Fiction An intricate texture of myth, history, and heretofore silenced stories opens up onto a world as hieratic as it is real. The world of Loin de Médine is filled with characters and places that have transcended history and been transformed into sacred symbols of loyalty, bravery, authority, or resistance, while also becoming the unfolding place of their own historicity and the historicity of the events that they ushered in. Moreover, through the elaborate use of devices like polyphony, fragmentation, metalepsis, and authorial comments, the novel reminds us that in this dual historicity the symbolic meaning of sacred or profane figures is negotiated, contested, and reconstructed.21 Some of them are 20 Djebar: “Souvenez-vous, il vous a avertis avant sa mort, car il vous a dit: ‘Mohammed n’est qu’un Prophète qui a été précédé par d’autres prophètes!’ Est-ce qu’après sa mort, qu’elle soit naturelle ou violente, vous allez revenir à votre situation de départ? Est-ce que vous allez changer d’opinion comme vous changez de vêtement?” (1991, 82). 21 Émilie Cappella brings together Rancière’s theorization of the politics of aesthetics and Said’s notion of postcolonial counterpoint strategy to examine the ever-shifting place(s) and forms of utterance in Djebar’s novel: “c’est dans la relation entre les paroles représentées (citées et réinventées) et la voix narrative que prend forme la scène d’énonciation – scène qui va donner lieu aux paroles

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anonymous, such as the queen whose story is contrasted to that of a “Judith arabe” (Djebar, 1991, 27, 28), who becomes God’s instrument chosen to kill a false prophet; others are named, such as Nawar, the wife who accompanies her husband to war, Salma, a warrior herself, or the prophetess Sajah; each comes out of the shadows and footnotes of history to find her place in an intricate, kaleidoscopic network of relationships that weave together the tapestry of the legend. Rather than using narrative closure to settle the debate, Djebar opts instead for a rhetoric of interrogation, doubt, and self-doubt. This rhetorical choice supports the authorial project of enabling female figures to emerge from the shadows endowed with form, character, attitude, and even agency over the history and tradition of Islam, starting with the story of its foundational moment. The juxtaposition of different possibilities – sometimes mutually exclusive but more often than not coexistent – introduces multiple layers of meaning to an interpretation of history that moves the accent from its object (the facts surrounding an event) to its manner (the lived experience of the event). This transcends the one-dimensional realism of totalizing narratives and offers instead a paradoxical rewriting that can be considered both heretical and consenting. A metalepsis of this problematic choice is offered earlier in the book, through the seminal narrative of the queen of Sanaʿaʾ whose momentous intervention in the spreading of Islam is accomplished through lies, ruse, and deceit. The text gestures towards a mise-enabyme when it emphasizes the role of invention and imagination through which the character recovers her historical agency in the recounted past. This foregrounds the writer’s own gesture of uncovering, centuries later, the hidden layers of the chronicle: Peut-être que, de cette fabulation qu’elle échafaudait devant l’amant païen, elle retire une propension plus grande à imaginer, et par là à trouver le salut … Elle invente, au cœur de cette nuit de son destin, mais elle invente avec promptitude, en nourrissant ses mensonges de l’expérience des nuits d’amours précédentes. (Djebar, 1991, 26)

While fiction could be considered intrinsically heretical, insofar as it represents an invention potentially at odds with the canonical version ‘sans lieu’, c’est-à-dire celles auxquelles l’ordre social ne donne pas lieu d’être. En réinventant la généalogie d’une parole féministe islamique, cette fiction des origines apporte une voix cruciale dans le désaccord féministe et lui donne ainsi le pouvoir de résonner dans n’importe quel lieu” (2015, 85).

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of the past sanctioned by orthodox Islamic theology, many of the explicative passages interspersed among the narrative sequences (as if to guide their reception) also seem to soften their polemical edge by calling attention to the inextricable connection between memory, action, and intention in historical fact and its fictional recounting. The queen’s own use of the past (the nights of love) provide the substance of her invention (explaining away the last cry of her “pagan” husband through a comparison with the revelations received by the Prophet) that helps her cover up a political assassination and return her people to the right path of Islam. On the one hand, the mixture of deceit bordering on heresy (conflating the cry of a dying man at the hands of his assassin with the ecstasy of religious revelation) and the bloody deed itself condemns the heroine to an infamous destiny as an unscrupulous murderess; on the other, at a historical level, the result of her actions seems to warrant her deadly choice. The contradictory nature of the heroine parallels the writer’s own actions, which combine the heresy of invention, extending even to the symbolic killing of revered religious figures, with the desire to redress past wrongs and to reintroduce unjustly forgotten characters into the spiritual community (umma).22 22 Smith and Haddad: “Man operates in his ethical life from inside the umma or community. As he is not independent from the divine will, neither is he independent from his fellows. The community of Islam is the only valid context from which individual Muslims can respond to the divine commands. One cannot be a Muslim outside of the umma; it is, in that understanding, the vehicle for or context of individual salvation. The Qurʾān is absolutely clear that no person is responsible for any other at the day of resurrection, but contemporary Islam is also extremely careful to underscore the importance of the collective life. All persons together are God’s vicegerents, and in the common attempt to live according to the divine precepts each individual will find support and assistance. Thus in community, in the effective functioning of the social system, all persons are able to realize more fully the potential given them for movement towards lives of fuller ethical responsibility” (2002, 30). If one were to situate this discussion in the global contemporary context, one could follow Esposito’s arguments against the “destructive and self-destructive logic of immunitas” to “the open and plural form of communitas.” He writes: “The world, which is at this point inextricably united, should be not only thought but ‘practiced’ as an ensemble of differences, or a system of distinctions, in which distinction and difference are not points of resistance or residues of the processes of globalization but their very form […] we have to find a way, a form, or a conceptual language that converts the immunitary declension that all political fundamentalisms have taken into a singular and plural logic in which differences become precisely what holds the

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Loin de Médine makes the case for an Islamic community where religious bonds and personal ties intersect to create a space for submission based on love and respect as well as dissent. Tradition and “revolution” stem from the same roots, precisely because revolution (“l’insupportable révolution féministe de l’Islam en ce VIIe siècle chrétien,” Djebar, 1991, 79) lies at the foundation of tradition, a foundation too often interpreted as being monolithic and immutable: The centrality of the idea of unity, both of the divine and of human response to the divine, is also reflected in the importance of the community in Islamic understanding. The earliest questions of Islamic theology were framed in terms of their implications for the community as a whole, and one of the great tragedies of Islam is that often this very concern for preserving the integrity of the umma led to ruptures within it. (Smith and Haddad, 2002, 13)23

In emphasizing hesitation over unquestioning belief, and doubt over totalizing truth, Loin de Médine exhibits its own artifice (as an avowed work of fiction), which is precisely what enables it to recast the foundational event of the Prophet’s death as an ongoing process. In this telling, world together” (2013, 64–65). However, he also points out the ideological and historical stumbling blocks that may prevent such a vision from being realized, despite its deep roots in what he calls “the Western tradition”: “The West can do so despite its recurring temptation to make the world over into one model. Ever since Heraclitus, the idea that we may be joined together not by what we share but by distinction and diversity is part of the Western tradition, but it’s an idea that was never achieved. Repression and oblivion mark much of the violent history of the West. The tragic paradox that we are living today lies in the fact that those who declared war on the West have reproduced and strengthened to the point of paroxysm the very same phobic obsession, the same conviction that no community or relationship among different peoples exists that is not an autoimmune, mortal encounter” (2013, 65). 23 Esposito reflects on the Latin etymology of “community” as a shared gift or obligation (munus), which leads him to redefine the term by inverting the relation between the individual and the collective: instead of designating “belonging, identity, and ownership – that is, the community as something that identifies someone with his/her own ethnic group, land, or language,” he invites us to consider that “common is the exact contrary of one’s own; common is what is not one’s own, is what is unable to be appropriated by someone” (2013, 48). He underscores the fact that, “Rather than being identified by a common belonging […] the members of the community are bound instead by the duty of a reciprocal gift, by a law that conducts them outside of themselves in order to address the other, to the point of nearly expropriating himself in favor of this other” (2013, 49).

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the death of Muhammad does not seal his fate or enclose the meaning of his legacy, but rather opens it up to constant struggle. Working in the margins of canonical texts, Djebar’s narrative opens itself up to new readings that operate alongside or against the grain of authoritative interpretations, teasing out neglected hermeneutical strands and shifting the focus from binary structures to multiple configurations. For instance, the author-narrator homes in on both the gaps and the convenient but unconvincing explanations offered by traditional texts. In the story of the Yemeni queen, she notes that the historian Tabari glosses over the possibility that her actions were well considered, or even heroic, instead attributing her lack of resistance and temporary renunciation of Islam to fear (“par crainte”), while the narrator adds “par calcul, par curiosité” (Djebar, 1991, 20). When the woman does away with the false prophet – “La chronique préfère insister sur l’ivresse de l’homme, sur son péché d’avoir été maudit par le Prophète en personne” – she diminishes her own part in the plot – “Comme si les voies qu’emprunte la comploteuse si assurée n’étaient que provisoires” (Djebar, 1991, 23). Djebar’s narrator notes in an analepsis earlier in the text that the Yemenite queen’s deed accomplishes Muhammad’s own deathbed prophecy, which, regardless of her motivations, makes her God’s instrument, a term that connotes both meekness and saintliness: “Avant de mourir, Mohammed apprend la victoire du faux prophète. Il prédit: ‘Dieu le fera périr bientôt!’ puis il le maudit […] Ce sera elle l’instrument de Dieu; par elle Aswad périra, comme l’a prévu Mohammed” (Djebar, 1991, 20). Later on, the story of Umm Hakim offers another nexus of contradictions that are difficult to reconcile with an orthodox version of coming to faith and living in faith as a woman: unlike the Yemeni queen, she is a “musulmane d’emprunt” (Djebar, 1991, 145), a native of Mecca who agrees to convert or, etymologically, submit (the word muslim meaning one who submits to God) out of love for her husband, but who refuses to pray because “elle ne peut pas, ou […] elle ne veut pas se soumettre continûment à Dieu” (Djebar, 1991, 152). Yet her encounters with “l’Envoyé” or God’s messenger strike a deep chord within her, most notably through the work of empathy as she witnesses a relative’s reaction to Muhammad’s faith and becomes herself “contaminated” by it, subject to a “contagion irrésistible” (Djebar, 191, 151), in a highly visual scene that focuses on the bodily manifestations of the religious experience (what she perceives as sweat on the Prophet’s face is revealed to be tears on the reflecting face of the believer). Eventually, despite new

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personal trials (her husband’s absence on the battlefield, his refusal to take her along, and his unsuccessful attempts to take another wife), she becomes a warrior for Islam as the chronicle singles her out among the women who fought “le sabre à la main” (Djebar, 1991, 155) in the successful battle of the Yarmuk against the armies of the Byzantine Empire in 634 (or the fourteenth year of the Hijra). It is precisely this unexplained or underexplained inner journey that, in the eyes of Djebar’s narrator, is lacking in Umm Hakim’s portrayal, indicative of a greater or graver indifference: Au terme de quel amour, de quelle ardeur calcinée de femme, la jeune Oum Hakim se mue-t-elle à nouveau en guerrière? Tabari ne se soucie guère du levain obscur qui transforme les destinées féminines. Simplement, il ne peut s’empêcher de croquer la silhouette indomptable de Oum Hakim s’exposant au soleil et à la mort désirée. (Djebar, 1991, 156)

But the book’s fictional elaborations are never put forth as peremptory truths; the narrative regularly uses the interrogative form to probe a character’s motivations and parallel structures. This technique allows the narrator to lay out various narrative outcomes and interpretive possibilities: “La Yéménite est-elle victime soumise ou fausse proie consentante?” (Djebar, 1991, 20) in the story’s conclusion, “Ou, seconde possibilité, elle n’ouvre pas” (Djebar, 1991, 26). The chapter dedicated to Umm Hakim, even as it supplies some information about the rest of her life, exhibits a similar indeterminacy: “Oum Hakim a-t-elle voulu mourir ce jour-là à Yarmouk et, de même, l’année suivante […] dans les combats d’el Quadissiya, en Iran? Se consolera-t-elle par la suite? […] Elle rêve; rêve-t-elle qu’elle guerroie encore, si loin de Médine?” (Djebar, 1991, 156). The reader will remember that the first story recounted in Loin de Médine places at its center an exemplary woman, in both senses of the word: a character who could be seen as a model to follow in the defense of the Islamic faith but also, because of her anonymity, a figure that evokes the situation of any or every woman caught between warring men and their opposing powers, and forced to clear a path for herself – to find her own salvation. Foregrounding women’s capacity not only to react to the conditions that shape their lives, but to act, determine, and decide in some cases even the manner of their own death clashes both with the idea of fate or predestination, mistakenly associated with a fatalist view of human existence in Islam, and with that of female powerlessness expressed by male characters (“Que peut une femme?”;

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Djebar, 1991, 37). While the choice to set the emphasis on women can be attributed to a secularized, Westernized view of religious history and of its lessons for our current period, the overlooked importance of free will, especially as it is illuminated by the question of death, also finds its confirmation in Islamic scholarship: What is most striking in the eschatological story of Islam is that in spite of the fact that the verses of the Qurʾān can lend themselves to different understandings of the extent to which man is the author of his own acts, never is the underlying theme of human accountability compromised. The battle over human free will was waged not on the grounds of whether or not we will be called to account at the final rendering – an issue never debated – but rather of whether or not the implication of free choice in any way impugns the understanding of God as absolutely free in His own actions and knowledge. (Smith and Haddad, 2002, 13)24

At the same time, Djebar’s authorial exegesis portrays Umm Hakim and other women in a minor key:25 “Elle ne sera pas une Judith arabe […] La Yéménite n’a pas à venger tout un people; elle n’a qu’à se sauver, elle, et peut-être même pas, seulement se réconcilier avec elle-même, petite aventurière perdue dans la fresque guerrière” (Djebar, 1991, 27). By de-emphasizing their heroism, it can be argued that the author makes an indirect case in her own defense, should she be accused of falsifying from a historical perspective or of committing blasphemy from a theological standpoint. Even though they may be related to major events, her narratives are concerned with minor characters – as viewed by canonical Islamic history – in a literary work that is more concerned with their 24 Smith and Haddad: “This is of crucial importance in looking at the overall picture Islam has drawn of the events occurring from bodily death to the final dispensation. As the story unfolds, one sees at every step a clear indication that individuals are held to account for their deeds and for the degree of their faith. The very process of dying illustrates this accountability, as do the events of the questioning of the grave, the situation in which one finds himself while awaiting the resurrection, and the various occurrences of the day of judgment itself” (2002, 14). 25 Alison Rice concludes her examination of books by writers such as Cixous, Bey, and Djebar with the observation that their works represent “minor notes” that succeed in striking “major cords within us” (2012, 193). If the minor/major binary may be perceived as reductive since it confines women’s writing to categories such as secondary or marginal, this distinction could prove fruitful in the case of works like Loin de Médine that engage with on “major” (religious, political, etc.) themes using “minor” generic or formal strategies (polyphonic and fragmented narratives attributed to secondary historical characters).

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daily lives, personal dilemmas, and inner psychological workings than with their actions construed on a grand scale. Yet in showing Fatima, Salma, and ʿAʾisha predominantly in the sphere of their private lives, where they deploy the gestures of domesticity and perform hospitality, filial devotion, maternity, and spousal and household duties, the narrative increases the dramatic effect of the intrusions of the political into their private realms, as well as the drama of their own excursions into the public sphere. The sudden shifts in narrative scenography when a character is propelled into an unfamiliar situation, by external circumstances or by her own volition, create a discordant tone that sounds not only the sense of loss oftentimes associated with a death, but also the artificial nature of the separation between public and private. At least, that is, as it applies to female characters; the male ones can move freely between these spaces. Such is the case of Nawar, whose husband, the would-be prophet Tulayha who expects to be miraculously visited by Gabriel, brings her to the battlefield to enhance the courage and bloodthirst of his men with her beauty. She is a historical “unknown,” relegated to the condition of a child prone to fantasy (“enfant assoiffée de légende”), whose story is bookended by “un silence compact” that seems to close like a lid over her grave. Her depiction as a “Fleur fanée, fleur fermée” and “bédouine cernée dans une ville de Syrie” (Djebar, 1991, 33) accentuates the elegiac features of her portrait. Even though – or precisely because – she only makes a fleeting appearance in the chronicles, Djebar’s narrator endows her with a perspective that ties together the themes of (self-)presence and destiny usually reserved for male heroes. In the midst of the battle, Nawar witnesses the carnage: “Elle voit les morts, les blessés, les assauts multiples […] Elle est présente,” but instead of being frightened, as her name (meaning “flower”) might imply, her strength inherited from her ancestry and her upbringing is awakened: “Qu’importent la poussière de la bataille, l’odeur des morts au soleil: de cela, elle a l’habitude. Elle est bédouine; elle a le cœur haut” (Djebar, 1991, 32). Here the narrator goes one step further – some would say one step too far – engaging in a hermeneutic process that gradually moves from explaining Nawar’s courage through her desire to partake in her husband’s revelation to attributing it to her intimate belief that the angel will come for her. The text betrays this volitional slippage that gradually transforms her into the central subject of the event in two ways. First, through the narrative discourse that uses the modal verb of possibility and/or duty – “elle doit attendre” – and the mystical term “annonciation.” Secondly, in the

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internal focalization, which progresses from “Pourquoi, sinon parce qu’elle espère, elle aussi, l’Archange!” (in which “elle aussi” confirms the woman’s secondary place), to the imperative “Elle n’a pas peur, elle désire voir l’Archange!”, to the affirmative “Gabriel viendra pour elle” (Djebar, 1991, 32, 33). The decision to focus on the women’s inner lives even when they are depicted, like Salma the rebel (whose name means “saved,” as the authornarrator underscores), in the heat of action, warring alongside men, suggests the quest for a new writing model, one in which history “writ small” traverses, illuminates, and queries great canonical narratives while neither invalidating nor submitting to their authority.26 Salma’s story is traditionally presented as an exemplary tale of a prophecy that comes to pass. She is a prisoner of war converted by ʿAʾisha, and enjoys ʿAʾisha’s close friendship for a time before fulfilling Muhammad’s prediction by leaving the faith and taking up arms against Islam. In Loin de Médine her position as the first female leader militarily to oppose Islam becomes a narrative of awakening through facing death. Its account serves as a crucible for the entire novel as it reprises or announces others’ awakenings, for example in the “narrèmes” of the character’s physical and symbolic proximity to the Prophet and the comparisons between Salma and other men or women. Unlike Nawar’s husband, “elle n’a que faire d’attendre l’aide de l’Archange Gabriel” (Djebar, 1991, 36); like Kahina, she does not hesitate to lead men into war. 26 Andrade: “Male novelists have customarily told their tales in allegories of colonial resistance or national consolidation – or have been understood to do so – and like their female counterparts, they have often used the family as the sign of the body politic. These national allegories have either unselfconsciously put themselves forward or have been interpreted as allegorical in the narrow sense, wherein the literal meaning becomes subsumed into the figural. The literal or less important entity, such as woman, child, or family, thereby necessarily stands a part of the larger, national one” (2011, 20–21). She continues: “Female writers themselves excluded from the hierarchies of national politics and historically perceived as unable to engage nationalist and feminist politics simultaneously, have often deployed one fiction to expose another. To invert a cliché, in the narratives of many African female writers, the family become the nation writ small” (Andrade, 2011, 21) – in other words, the development of domestic stories confirmed the separate status of the domestic sphere. “If one comes to these novels by women with this understanding of the domestic in the public, and with a knowledge of the highly allegorical texts that dominated the literary scene and out of which these women wrote, then one may better perceive how domestic life functions both literarily and allegorically in relation to nationalism” (Andrade, 2011, 21).

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Salma begins her metamorphosis upon receiving news of her brother’s death. This death brings with it both sorrow and a legacy which, the narrator hypothesizes, she would have felt bound to honor: “Selma n’a qu’un seul frère. Celui-ci, mort, la voici devenue chef de tribu. Reine de clan […] Le frère mort dans les poursuites du désert, elle a à prendre sa place. À combattre, elle” (Djebar, 1991, 35). The concise, elliptical formulation that separates nominal and verbal structures and relies on parallel constructions to enhance its rhetorical effect operates on the threshold of consciousness, suggesting the character’s internal debate and emotional confusion without pretending to render her inner life fully transparent to the reader. Despite the sweet memories of feminine friendship, Islam is now to Salma a synonym of captivity. The narrator imagines her in the fateful moment when she decides to identify with her brother, taking on his religion, his duty, and his role as warrior: “Elle revient à son paganisme premier, sans doute est-ce pour se dire: ‘Je deviens à mon tour Hakama!’” (Djebar, 1991, 36). However, the narrative’s emotional tone rises as one woman’s decision comes to reflect the ethos of an entire group: “Comme si toutes les femmes arabes alors, saisies d’une ferveur sororale, ne pouvaient que s’identifier au frère. Chaque bédouine se dresse libre, ressuscitant le héros mort au combat!” (Djebar, 1991, 36). Returning to its signature hypothetical style (“Mais si, cette fois, la responsabilité en incombait à la victime? Ce pourrait être elle qui, à terre, refuse l’agenouillement”; Djebar, 1991, 39), the novel imagines an ending where Salma chooses her own death, thus transforming her last act of military defeat into a triumph over her adversary. This framing is not devoid of sexual connotations carried by the lexicon of bodily materiality (“le sang gicle”), seduction (provocative laughter, fascination), and domination: “Elle, peut-être, qui bondit comme une panthère. Une arme dans la main, ou même sans arme visible, elle a pu, de ses yeux, de son rire, provoquer: ‘Tue-moi!’ Et Khalid, fasciné, n’a pu cette fois qu’obéir” (Djebar, 1991, 39–40). By commanding her enemy’s attention, she enters the realm of public imagination, leaving behind the expression “la guerre de Selma,” an idiom “riche de sens, de sang et de couleurs” and claiming a place in memory alongside the exploits of Khalid ibn al-Walid (le “glaive de l’Islam”), which become inseparable from, and perhaps even defined by, “cette mort de lionne au soleil” (Djebar, 1991, 40). When men die, their death, natural or tragic, in battle or through assassination, is witnessed and sometimes caused by women. Their dead bodies are tended to by women like Asma, “la laveuse des morts,”

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who seem to move in a time outside of time and who, because of their privileged relation to death, find themselves at the heart of history: “Frôlant à sa façon la frontière de la mort […] quelque mois après, la mort frappe […] Il y aura tant de morts glorieuses, inoubliables, dans les parages de cette femme” (Djebar, 1991, 223, 225). Death seals the ties of love, friendship, or hate between men, but these are always formed through the intercession of women, who serve as intermediaries through marriage, as instruments of prophecies, as witnesses or caregivers. Upon Abu Bakr’s passing, the circle between him and Muhammad is closed thanks to the presence of three women: ʿAʾisha, Fatima, and Asma: Mohammed a rendu l’âme dans les bras de Aïcha, fille aimée de Abou Bekr, et maintenant celui-ci va être lavé par Esma qui a lave l’autre fille préférée, Fatima […] la mort […] deviendra vraiment fraternelle, rapprochant les deux hommes, si proches de leur vivant, par double, par triple intercession féminine. (Djebar, 1991, 214)

At the heart of Salma’s story lies the question that her adversaries ask time and again: “Que peut une femme?” (Djebar, 1991, 35). To this, Loin de Médine brings a whole host of answers, all of which are tied together by one common thread: a woman can die in a memorable way, as a traitor or a faithful follower, gruesomely on the battlefield or serenely in her home. Moreover, Salma’s legend begins in the immediate aftermath of the Prophet’s death, which makes her actions possible on the political level while also compelling her or, rather, instilling her with the energy necessary to claim her departed brother’s legacy: L’agonie de Mohammed est longue. À sa mort, les nouvelles circulent dans la péninsule. Certes, au Yémen, Aswad a été tué; mais les autres tribus demeurent en ébullition. Selma écoute. Elle, elle n’a que faire d’attendre l’aide de l’Archange Gabriel. Le souvenir de son frère mort l’enveloppe; elle se sent de l’énergie pour deux. (Djebar, 1991, 36)

Loin de Médine draws a narrative chiasmus between the image of the Prophet who finds his place of comfort when dying in the arms of his beloved wife, cast as a maternal, protective figure, and that of Salma who, enveloped in and enlivened by her brother’s memory, takes her rightful place in history.27 27 In her analysis of Djebar’s 1997 semi-autobiographical novel, Les Nuits de Strasbourg, through the prism of palimpsestic memory, an idea developed by Max Silverman (2013) conveyed through intertextual strategies (most notably

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Truth Decrypted “Le corps est un chiffre en attente de décryptage” writes De Certeau (1975, 9) of the modern, scientific, and predominantly medicalized construction of intelligibility that shapes how historical writing views the body and, through it, the subject who occupied it at one time. Fiction also seeks to decrypt the body in the etymological sense, by searching for it in the hidden corners to which it has been relegated by tradition, ideology, or oblivion. Djebar does so by adhering closely to the model provided by canonical historians, a model both described in detail and carefully decoded in her text: Tabari, dans la partie de sa chronique relative aux quatre premiers califes, utilise un procédé qui touche autant affectivement qu’esthétiquement: c’est au moment où le héros meurt, une fois livrées les circonstances banales ou tragiques de cette issue, que le calife [Abu Bakr] nous est présenté dans les détails de sa personne physique, de sa biographie familiale: nombre de ses épouses légitimes et éventuellement des épouses esclaves, décompte des fils et des filles qu’il a eus de chaque femme, quelquefois mention des femmes qui n’ont pas voulu épouser le héros en question. (Djebar, 1991, 212)

From the perspective of narrative temporality, it is interesting that the author should provide this potential interpretive key at the end of the text, having already both mimicked and deconstructed it in its initial pages: Il est mort. Il laisse neuf veuves, une fille chérie éplorée, deux petits-fils en bas âge […]; il laisse également un gendre-cousin-fils adoptif qui descendra le corps dans la fosse et qui ne sera pas, pour l’instant, l’héritier. (Djebar, 1991, 14)

While the scene of the Prophet on his deathbed does begin in a formulaic fashion, with a list of his heirs and descendants, the narrator’s attention moves away from the domestic, genealogical, and tangible legacy the diegetical references to Antigone by Sophocles), Debarati Sanyal remarks on the defining role of the dead for establishing a relation to the past: “the imperial past continues to haunt Djebar’s diasporic characters precisely because so many have been deprived of a burial that would declare them ‘really dead’ and thereby establish them as irreplaceably singular by the living. Creon’s anxiety of dissolution is resolved by his refusal of burial rites in a politicization of death itself” (2015, 234).

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towards the intangible, unsayable, and unwritable testament. Despite having called for a faithful scribe “qui puisse écrire fidèlement ses recommandations,” Muhammad changes his mind, declining the three choices presented to him: “Il a eu un regard de désolation et il a tourné la tête vers le mur. Il n’a rien voulu dire” (Djebar, 1991, 11). “Vouloir dire” signifies here both the intent to deliver a clear message and the idea of an arrested, definitive meaning. In his moment of agony, the “man of the Book” finds comfort not in the word but in the faith of the community gathered to pray around him and in the sensuality of shared love: “Sa contemplation de la petite communauté d’hommes en ferveur l’a réconforté: sa face s’est illuminée […] dans les bras de l’aimée […] sa tête posée sur la poitrine de sa jeune femme, avec la faiblesse d’un enfant, il s’est abîmé dans un long moment d’inconscience” (Djebar, 1991, 11, 12). Whose literary tomb, then, is Loin de Médine? Is it the Prophet’s? Does it belong to the men, either his male companions who stood by him and for him in his Hijra or the historians and writers of the Hadith who have collected, both scrupulously and erroneously, the words and deeds of those originary times? Or does it belong to the daughters of Hagar, or rather, “Hajjar” (Djebar, 1991, 305), the forsaken woman, the original immigrant who constantly comes and goes between submission and rebellion, between doubt and faith, between the threat of death and the miracle of life? On the threshold of the text, Djebar defines her project as ijtihād, an inner struggle to find the truth: “effort intellectuel pour la recherche de la vérité – venant de djihad, lutte intérieure, recommandée à tout croyant” (Djebar, 1991, 6). The novel allows her to render the complex and polyvocal sense of a word trivialized in the global discourse, misunderstood and manipulated both by fundamentalists and Islamophobes, and to underscore her filiation within the tradition of Islam. Her book commemorates the past by creating a plurivocal, asymmetrical, and enigmatic stele that queries the very nature of its legacy and the kinds of people who may lay claim to it – in other words, the many afterlives of a legacy inaugurated by a prophet’s death.28

28 In his recent book, Après Ulysse, André Benhaïm reads Assia Djebar's entire œuvre as a form of writing “à tombeau ouvert” (see Benhaïm, 273–346).

chapter four

Remains Grasping the Void with Patrick Chamoiseau Remains La sépulture amorcera le comblement du vide, la confrontation créative au mystère de la mort. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 40)

Patrick Chamoiseau’s 2016 book inspired by his mother’s passing narrates the mourning process, “le deuil,” as the crossing of a threshold, “le seuil,” while affirming their irreducible plurality: “ces deuils […] devenaient des seuils” (358). La Matière de l’absence can be read as an extension of the autobiographical cycle inaugurated by Antan d’enfance (1990) and followed by several volumes published over the following two decades which move back and forth between childhood and the early adult years that saw the burgeoning of his literary career (Knepper, 2012, 18–21). However, it is also a work that confirms and develops a new direction in the Martinican writer’s œuvre, following the early auto-ethnographic debut and the middle period defined by the manifesto In Praise of Creoleness and his 1992 Goncourt for the novel Texaco. Without suggesting a clear-cut division in the work of a writer who has been preoccupied with issues of identity, memory, and community while constantly reassessing and reframing their meaning and manifestations, this recent stage of his work could be defined, using Esposito’s distinction, as one in which “community [is] not a locus of identity, belonging, or appropriation but, on the contrary, […] a locus of plurality, difference, and alterity” (2013, 55). More than the other titles that recount the childhood of a “Négrillon” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 16) and his transformation first into a “Marqueur de paroles” (Chamoiseau 1988, 30) and, eventually, into a “Guerrier de l’imaginaire” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 31) La Matière de l’absence assembles fictional projection, personal recollection, collective practices, and historical

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narratives, together with literary and artistic commentary that reaches on occasion the level of self-exegesis to create a literary tomb founded on the quest for “une poétique pour vivre le monde, pour vivre au monde” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 290). It is a book that, at the level of diegesis, atones for the absence of a Creole storyteller at his mother’s funeral while, at the level of authorial discourse, it encompasses a wide range of scriptural genres, literary forms, and poetic voices and stances. Chamoiseau’s text draws on both the traditional forms of posthumous evocation of a beloved family member or friend stretching back to Montaigne’s writings on the death of La Boétie or to Sophocles’ Antigone, and from the postcolonial genre of the return to the native land that has inspired other recent texts such as Dany Laferrière’s L’Énigme du retour (2009) or Alain Mabanckou’s Lumières de Pointe-Noire (2013).1 Like his previous works of fiction, from Texaco to L’Empreinte à Crusoé, the book draws its inspiration from a discounted narrative tradition in order to reinhabit and replenish types of literary writing (novel, memoir, autobiography) threatened by extinction, either by their own formal exhaustion or by the depletion of the imaginary sources that have sustained them. Chamoiseau’s poetics of creolization (see Panaïté, 2008) has morphed into a world-making poetics (Cheah, 2016, 6) that rejects and dismantles both the modern narratives of national identity, whether they are used as ideological tools of domination or identitarian isolation, and the neoliberal discourses of globalization with their 1 In his book which performs the work of mourning in the immediate aftermath of the “fatal” news of his father’s death, Laferrière uses reading and writing as ways of coping with different forms of loss that move the narrative between anthropological (the loss of childhood) or personal experience (exile) and historical and political disenchantement (the postcolonial societies of the Caribbean islands such as Martinique or his native Haïti, which are portrayed as “sinistrement échouées” (2009, 8)). Césaire looms large, both as a paternal figure that is commemorated alongside that of the biological father – “Césaire se superpose à mon père” – and a literary model that enables the descendant to cope with grief and maintain the ties that death threatens to sever – “Le poète m’aide à faire le lien entre cette douleur qui me déchire et le subtil sourire de mon père” (Laferrière, 2009, 34, 62). By contrast, Mabanckou’s volume is predicated on the idea of prolonged absence and denial (the opening sentence of the text is “J’ai longtemps laissé croire que ma mère était encore en vie” (2013, 11)), his narrator returning to his native city in the Republic of the Congo after more than two decades during which he lost his mother and adoptive father without attending their funerals. This autobiographical book reveals itself as a literary grave and a place of resurrection, terms that are explicitly used by the author.

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attendant contradictory combinations of profit-maximization policies and self-gratifying humanitarianism: La globalisation du monde a entraîné la rencontre (massive, accélérée) de peuples fragmentés, de civilisations fragmentées, de cultures fragmentées, d’imaginaires fragmentés, d’individus emportés dans un maelström anthropologique bien plus complexe que le simple métissage. Chocs. Hybridations, synthèses, symbioses, répulsions, antagonismes et interdépendances se produisent sans fin. Ce maelström anthropologique et environnemental s’appelle la créolisation. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 289)

Necrofiction describes here an act of mourning and revival. It mourns what has been severed (links with the home country during the slave trade), erased (constitutive memory and sense of self on the plantation), put to death (the Creole storyteller in the modern colony), and lost (close family and friends who are the repositories of memorial and experiential traces). Yet it is also an inaugural act, an event that forces the ones who are left behind to see the world anew and pay careful attention to what remained hidden in the past. For the author, the loss of the mother means both a personal coming of age and a maturing in relation to a past for which she represented a living archive, leaving him free to focus on the present of his needs and the future of his desires: “Tant qu’elle avait été là, il nous avait été possible d’être encore des enfants. L’archive était restée vivante.” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 90). Funereal Tectonics The tripartite structure of the book highlights the commonalities between natural catastrophes such as hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes (most notably for Martinique, the devastating 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée that erased the city of Saint-Pierre), and man-made disasters such as colonialism, slavery, neocolonial political violence, and ongoing economic domination. While this linkage raises issues of trauma and vulnerability, it also evokes the possibility of recasting lives and reinventing communities in a post-catastrophe context. “Impact,” “Éjectats,” and “Cratère” are each divided into smaller sections all beginning with the word “Légendaire,” an anaphoric technique that binds together the different threads of an eclectic, multidirectional, and almost imploding text. Thus necrofiction emerges as an attempt to map out “les paysages d’un invisible” and to perform a “saisie du vide”

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(Chamoiseau, 2016, 212). Rendering sensible what is neither visible nor tangible prolongs and echoes within the book the apparent oxymoron of its title, while the title itself pays homage to the figure of the mother, Man Ninotte, as a living site of contradictions: both strong and feeble, courageous and terrified, invincible and defeated (Chamoiseau, 2016, 210). The text’s incipit belongs not to the narrator, “le Négrillon,” but to the tutelary figure of the older sister, “la Baronne.” The social and economic dynamics of their Creole family have transformed her not only into a mother-substitute but a co-maternal figure who shapes the narrator’s individual digenèse: “Notre commencement est une déflagration que Glissant appellera Digenèse, une genèse qui ne vous assigne pas à une communauté mais vous ouvre à devenir” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 144). The older sister’s voice brings the lexicon of vulnerability, loss, and mourning together with those of survival and enchantment; she evokes the “ces deuils, ces ruptures et ces manques, qui assaillent nos survies ordinaires, qui nous abîment ainsi” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 15), that is, the wounds which cause an internal abyss within “us,” ordinary people. These experiences do not affect in the same way the guardians of memory, those who live for a long time and who draw from this experience an unexpected wealth: “ils en sont riches” since they draw their improbable strength from a “source impossible,” that is the “mémoire magicienne” which allows them to live in “célébration” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 15). Yet, at the same time, those whose lives span generations are also “grignotés par l’absence” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 15), their bodies slowly thickening into invisibility and foretelling – or even becoming – their own erasure. They transform into “ce trou noir des pertes, des ruptures, et des manques” out of which they learn how to wrestle the startling paradox of their own lifetime (“durée”) and how to approach its mystery (“se rapprochent d’un mystère”; Chamoiseau, 2016, 16). The brother’s reply reminds her and the reader of the task of the narrator and scribe – or the warrior of the imaginary – when faced with the silent language of life experience, which is to make the silence resonate, to manifest emotion, and to probe the mystery by asking “bondieu seigneur, mais quel est ce mystère?!” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 17). Thus, the book’s tone is set from the very beginning: Man Ninotte’s necrologue will alternate between recollection and projection, between individual reminiscences and communal experiences, between the familial and familiar and the collective and the global, between ontogenesis and philogenesis. Their interlacing is thematized in the text

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by the constant shifts between the experience of the family collective, the community to which the family belongs, and humanity at large. Death acquires its own generative grammar that allows it to move between absence and abundance, loss and memory, nothing and something (“cette chose”): Ma chère Baronne, l’absence nous frappe toujours […] Et si nos vies s’ébrouent quand même dans un flot d’abondance […], rien ne comble vraiment l’immensité de ces pertes. Elles ouvrent d’étranges passages, à tout jamais ouverts, au bord desquels nous restons interdits. Que chantent ces béances sans adresse qui ne s’ouvrent que vers nous, en nous-mêmes et pour nous? Et que diffusent-elles au plus sensible de nous? Et quelle est cette chose que produit la mémoire autour de ce qui manque? Cette nacre, sans quintessence connue, qui, sitôt les premières frappes, nous habite pourtant et que nous habitons? (Chamoiseau, 2016, 16–17)

The opening of La Matière de l’absence offers a reflection on existence both as presence in the world and experience of what no longer is, of the invisible and the unsayable that are lodged at the heart of being. Taking place on the threshold of the cemetery, itself a liminal place where the living come to meet the dead, the siblings’ elusive, almost incongruous conversation conjures up the figure of the zombie as a form of existence neither absent nor present, both living and dead, behind whom looms the image of the slave, a being who is also “mort tout en restant catastrophiquement vivant” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 31). In her study of the “Transatlantic zombie” as both a resistive, positive and a spectral, doomed figure, Sarah Juliet Lauro retraces the historic and philosophical genealogy of the former meaning back to colonial narratives and Hegel’s dialectics of the master and slave, itself inspired by the Haitian revolution, as Susan Buck-Morrs has also demonstrated.2 Guilt over the mother’s last moments, spent away from her beloved 2 Of the ties between slavery and the zombie imaginary, Lauro writes: “When we think more broadly about what constitutes slavery and what constitutes resistance, the zombie’s living dead state suggests the difficulty of separating the slave from the slave-in-revolt, an idea that has had traction in the field of slavery studies for some time, with the suggestion that demonstrations of agency aside from overt rebellion are worthy of consideration as acts of resistance, no matter the political or social impact. The zombie’s dual metaphorization of slavery and rebellion continually conveys that the roles are not crystallized, forgive the expression, in black and white: even the docile slave is sometimes a rebel and the free man, sometimes still a slave” (2015, 31).

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home in a state that made her see her children as strangers, prompts the fear of her reproachful return in an early section entitled “Légendaire du retour”: “J’avais donc pensé qu’elle serait revenue au detour d’un vieux rêve pour nous le reprocher.” This is immediately followed by the equally haunting regret over her absence: “j’avais été surpris qu’elle ne me visite pas” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 19). The mother’s zombification, both feared and desired, appears to be inevitable in a culture where the dead populate every corner of the invisible and constitute the fabric of an absence that ties together generations and epochs on a continuum of life and death. Zombies and the Living Work of the Dead A commonplace of colonial literature that used to suggest the otherworldly, savage, dangerous, and irresistible nature of the Antillean colonies, the figure of the zombie has been reclaimed by postcolonial writers from René Depestre, Frankétienne, Émile Ollivier, Édouard Glissant, and Maryse Condé to Edwige Danticat, Lyonel Trouillot, and Anthony Phelps. Taking its cue from René Depestre’s famous statement: “The history of colonization is the process of man’s general zombification” (qtd. in Lauro, 2015, 34), postcolonial scholarship has engaged with the ideological and political duality of this figure, working to unpack the disparities between the zombie’s significance in specific contexts and local cultures, on the one hand, and the stock representations that characterize its reappropriation in Western culture. Lauro’s work on the current fascination with monster culture and the popularity of the living dead in literature, cinema, and other media explores this duality from the premise that “at various points in its mythology, the figure of the zombie clearly represents one or the other: the history of a people’s enslavement or that of their fierce resistance to oppression” (2015, 29). La Matière de l’absence offers a different perspective, however, one that challenges the straightforward but reductive assumption that “the zombie is not a figure of resurrection but only of living death” (Lauro, 2015, 29).3 Unsettled both by the possibility of his mother’s return and 3 For Lauro, this distinction carries political implications which ultimately diminish the zombie’s ability to be mobilized as a significant figure of liberation, despite its rebellious connotations: “the zombie is not a figure of resurrection

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by her failure to appear, the narrator adopts a mentor’s stance (“Mais laisse-moi te parler des zombies”; Chamoiseau, 2016, 20), in order to educate his interlocutors (his sister, the reader) about the different types of zombie. There are the living who make a pact with demons, the dead who come back as spirits, and the ancestors “sans noms ni adresse” who remain attached to the living for good or for ill (Chamoiseau, 2016, 20). It is this last image of the zombie that the narrator favors, the one that has taught him ever since childhood that the living are never alone: “Pas une maille de ce que nous croyons qui ne tienne son socle d’une lignée d’ancêtres” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 20–21).4 As Achille Mbembe points out: “In ancient African traditions, for example, the point of departure for the questioning of human existence is not the question of being but that of relation, of mutual implication, that is to say of the discovery and the recognition of a different flesh from mine” (2019, 28). While never forsaking the relation between the undead and the slave, particularly the rebellious slave who becomes a maroon and then a “Mento,” Chamoiseau incorporates it into a larger necrofiction – which in this instance means not a fictional necrologue, a literary grave, a symbolic place of rest and commemoration, but a fiction of the work the dead perform on and among the living, as historical and moral mediators, messengers, intercessors, protectors, and also judges. An all-encompassing literary grave that threads the metaphor of loss from family to community to humanity, the book is replete with philosophical statements such as: “le visible commence son cirque dans l’invisible” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 26). These might signal Chamoiseau’s engagement with Heidegger or Presocratic thought, or his refusal of a dialectical resolution to the unfathomable contradictions of the Chaos-World as envisioned by Glissant. They also help relate his project to that of the Creole storyteller, keeper of a secret language that can

but only of living death, and insofar as the zombie metaphorizes both slavery and slave rebellion (an argument I’ve been making since the publication of my coauthored piece ‘A Zombie Manifesto’ in 2008), its ability to represent not merely enslavement, but liberation from that state, is tempered by its irresolvable dialecticality” (2015, 29). 4 Instead of duality, Garraway emphasizes the metamorphic, plastic, and multiform quality of the zombie, which cannot therefore be contained within a binary symbolic, or political, system: “the zombie accrues meaning as a frightful entity in the colonial imagination, one that is believed to shape shift, or metamorphose, in myriad ways” (2005, 180).

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heal a broken world, and connect the fragments of a non-totalizing but encompassing narrative.5 In this first-person text, grammatical shifts between je, tu, nous, and il along with the repeated insertion of entire sections attributed to the narrator’s primary interlocutor, his sister, create a polyvocal effect. Direct address plays a particularly important role at both narrative and rhetorical levels, reactivating past moments into the narrating present and filling them with a projective force that turns the reader from a distant witness into a participant in the scene: “Quand, deux-trois temps avant sa mort, l’effondrement de sont esprit, l’usure de sa mémoire l’avaient déjà anéantie, nous n’avions pu que confronter une impuissance face à laquelle toi, notre Baronne en personne, sœur-aînée toute-puissante, omnipotente, de haute autorité, tu restas désarmée” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 19). Chamoiseau’s sentence is all-encompassing, made of seemingly opaque folds while drawing its energy from a breath, a cry, an utterance that cannot be contained or inscribed on the written page. The narratorscriptor does not switch back and forth between his two roles but holds them together simultaneously, which creates a constant tension between the need to be inhabited by the chaotic polyphony of the world and the desire to make it intelligible by affixing to it a stable meaning. Parataxis supports and informs a hybrid rhetorical apparatus that combines oral expression and memorial writing, bringing together the spontaneous rhythms and mnemotechnic devices (repetition, brevity, syntactic simplicity) of the former with the complex cadences, the elaborated phrastic progressions, and the stylistic density of the latter. This leads to often paradoxical associations that indicate a refusal of dialectical solutions – death itself is not a way of resolving the struggles and contradictions of life, but an aberration, etymologically an act of wandering, of going astray, harkening back to Glissant’s “errance enracinée” (1990, 49) that perpetuates the very questions that have made it both possible and unbearable: “La nouvelle n’est pas une surprise mais une totale aberration de possible-impossible. C’était prévu et c’était impossible. 5 The way in which Chamoiseau’s necrofiction negotiates the temptation to provide a definitive answer to the haunting pain caused by death and the awareness that such an answer would be a death in itself could be described in these terms from Le Discours antillais: “L’écriture semble liée à une philosophie transcendentale de l’Être, qui aujourd’hui serait investie et relayée par une problématique de la Relation” (Glissant, 1981, 410).

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C’était souhaitable, c’était inacceptable” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 68). The free concatenation of sentences in the absence of connecting pronouns or conjunctions suggests rather than elucidates a narrative progression, making the text available – and vulnerable – to the sounds and echoes of the world: “La domination esclavagiste vous amenait à intérioriser le déshumain sans rémission qui était imposé […] Le seul moyen de s’en sortir: changer d’imaginaire! … Devenir un guerrier de l’imaginaire” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 31). Moreover, the prose opens itself up to a variety of other forms such as poetry, music, and even dance as the discontinuous flow of the text is interrupted by sections that look and sound like stanzas, song lyrics, or typographical gesticulations (italics, capitals, blanks, etc.) that instill a sense of movement. In the stylistic gradation of the book, the poetic sections stand out not as rhetorical embellishments or signifiers of the author’s understated lyric talent but as necessary ways of conveying what could not be expressed otherwise, compelling both author and reader to receive “chaque forme non comme un commencement mais comme incommencement” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 69). Typographic variations like italics or blanks are occasionally used to draw attention to them: “Le bois courbaril coule / Mais en ton nom / Et dans ton lieu qui hèle le monde / Le rêve du courbaril défie l’éternité” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 211). But the most effective strategy is their insertion in direct continuation yet apart from the prose text, as if poetry were both a natural extension of and a pause in the process of writing and grieving. There is an in-betweenness about these stretches of text supported by their visual appearance as columns of lines that could be read as either prose or verse. They are semantically dense and syntactically lapidary (in both the French sense of concise and the English sense of elegantly engraved, as if in stone). On the same page as the stanza quoted above, a series of lines appear which break the continuity of the text but display an internal continuity thanks to the use of symmetrical structures, anaphora, and occasional rhymes: Il y a des choses qu’il est difficile de fermer. Il y a des choses ouvertes qui ne peuvent le rester. Il y a ces impossibles que nous devons dissoudre. Il y a des silences qui sont indépassables. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 211)

If these lyrical moments form a series of small worlds within the larger world of the text, operating like autonomous spheres or monads inside the larger sphere of the book, they nonetheless remain connected to it. For instance, the four lines rife with contradiction between what cannot

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be closed and what cannot stay open, what must be solved and what cannot be said,6 are immediately followed by another statement that negates the very possibility of saying anything about certain forms of loss through “ordinary language”: “C’est vrai qu’il n’y avait rien à dire. Rien à chanter, rien à crier. Les choses se trouvaient désormais en dehors du langage ordinaire” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 211–212). Poetry creates a hiatus in the narrative flow that invites reflection not only on the narrative subject but also on its very object.7 At the same time, as oratio ligata, it embodies a relation (between idea and language, between subject and object, between the speaker and the audience) that prose can only be about but not be. It offers a direct, unmediated contact with the substance of things that does not aim to mitigate this fundamental deficiency of language, searching instead, inside that very deficiency, for a “saisie du vide”: “Cependant, une énonciation cherchait ses pistes en chacun de nous, un désir de formuler les choses, de saisir le monde avec un rien de voix, un baume de parole, une magie du verbe” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 212). In La Matière de l’absence, this takes part in a larger anthropological interrogation that threads narrative connections between individual and collective, historic and transhistoric death. At the diegetic level, generalization functions as a coping strategy; the plural pronoun “nous” designates both the family gathered at the dead mother’s side and the prehistoric “cluster” (“la grappe”) of hominids whose very humanity originated in their manner of facing death, not only as a biological necessity but also as a surfeit of life. An enduring metaphor in Chamoiseau’s writing, used in Chronique des sept misères (1986) in an ethnographic and historical sense, it now crosses over into the realms of anthropological reflection and metaphysical speculation. The original cluster’s experience testifies to and dissolves into a millennialong behavior of encountering that which remains incomprehensible: “Sapiens avait dû améliorer son langage dans les moments où l’indicible 6 In Glissant’s words: “Le poème du même coup prend en charge l’indicible” (1981, 423). 7 This line of thought in Chamoiseau dovetails with Cheah’s understanding of literature as a “world-making activity.” Creative writing accomplishes this by reworking established, hegemonic ideas of temporality, thus building the world rather than merely reflecting it and allowing the colonized to break free from the restrictions placed on them by the colonial world. In La Matière de l’absence, when his sister wonders whether it could really be possible to live in such an all-encompassing world, the narrator says, “Je crois juste que ces poètes l’ont fait …” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 239).

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portait des coups de boutoir à ses capacités d’expression. L’informulable et l’indicible, vrais amis des poètes, sont les trésors du sommet de langage” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 212). At the metanarrative level, poetry not only directs but arrests the reader’s gaze onto images that mere prose descriptions could not capture by giving them deliberate attention, as if creating a textual ceremonial around them.8 The writing mirrors “the fragmented nature” (Vergès, 2014, 463) of Caribbean history and its ambiguous relationship to invisibility and unsayability as processes of social and historical putting-to-death.9 Chamoiseau uses what has become a commonplace in his own literary and political imagination and, before him, that of Glissant, to convey the radical violence of the Atlantic Triangle culture. Simultaneously, he reveals the possibilities that it inadvertently opens up for the uprooted and enslaved and their heirs: “Certains durent oublier l’Afrique, d’autres connaître le tourment du retour et la plupart bâtirent de nouvelles existences entre le manque et le don – manque d’un pays perdu, don d’une terre natale … Dès lors, ils ne produisent aucun mythe fondateur” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 100). The movement away from the atavistic 8 Yves Citton analyzes the approach of an organization called “The Order of the Third Bird” whose entire purpose is to pay attention to forgotten works of art and other cultural artifacts by standing and gazing at their object of interest for a set period of time. Citton uses the terms “attentional performance” and “attentional activism” to describe the process and outcome of such gazing. The use of poetry in Chamoiseau’s book evokes this sort of gazing that makes space for what Citton calls the “re-stabilization of the image”: “experiment[ing] in a reflective way with the processes by which information is stabilized into a meaningful image” (2017, 150). Of course, this type of approach can also be found in traditional gatherings like “les veillées créoles” that call for a suspension of ordinary time and direct the participant’s attention to certain visual, verbal, gestural, or musical objects trivialized, overlooked, or absent in everyday life. 9 Vergès underscores the deliberate and ongoing forgetfulness that characterizes mainland France’s relationship with the culture of the islands and the history of slavery in which it played a part (that it fails to acknowledge or confront today), pointing out that the discourse on slavery remains limited to denunciations or justifications means that the “cultural history” has been overlooked. This history, she argues, continues to exist in the “living history” (i.e., the language, traditions, religious beliefs, etc.) of the heirs of this community. This idea of “living history” is represented in Chamoiseau’s novel, particularly in the way that he describes the traditions around Creole storytelling and how the tradition arose from the lived reality of the slaves working on the plantations. Does this mean Chamoiseau’s focus is to help restore some of this overlooked or forgotten cultural history?

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condition founded by an “identité-racine” towards a plural, archipelagolike root, or “identité-rhizome,” operates as a commonplace, both in the sense of a location of spiritual gathering and the sense of an unthinking stereotype. La Matière de l’absence maintains the tension between these two tendencies as it attempts to strike a balance between the discursive critique of Martinique’s political and ideological apparatus of domination over the centuries, and the narrative representation of the strategies of resistance, survival, and reinvention that have allowed the dominated – the maroon, the storyteller, Man Ninotte – not only to endure but to create new communal and nonidentitarian modes of being. Whereas the first approach emphasizes the need to deconstruct the universalist Western models of perceiving, recording, and evaluating history, the second seems to gloss over issues such as alienation, mimicry, and unacknowledged needs for recognition and reparation (“Toute vie étant une vie, tout tort causé à une vie exige réparation” writes Glissant in Le Discours antillais (1981, 55) that come to be buried under or within the idea of opacity. However, not as a heuristic tool but as an ethical principle, opacity emphasizes the need to challenge universalist history, bound to the territory of the nation, by holding up the “unique history” (Vergès, 2014, 468) of those who are both citizens and descendants of slaves. Françoise Vergès draws attention to the need to study the history of slavery as a “living” process and to create and foster disciplinary methods apt for doing so, such as “a cross-reading of sources, [that] takes into account both the multi-territoriality and the long-term evolution of the phenomenon, and blends micro-history with general analysis” (2014, 470). She calls for a modernization of the stance and the tools of the French historian, who must overcome the current attitudes of obfuscation and marginalization of the colonial past and its postcolonial continuations, to acknowledge that “the burden of history must be shared” and “the French imaginary must be decolonized” (Vergès, 2014, 472). Vergès shares a common vocabulary with Glissant’s writing on opacity when she invites her peers and the reader to think “beyond binary oppositions,” to consider that “territories are no longer unequal,” that citizenship is defined by “new strategies for solidarity” (2014, 471). For postcolonial historians and writers alike, the test is the Haitian revolution, which, as La Matière de l’absence reminds us, remains a symbolic nexus of political, ideological, and theoretical contradictions with very real consequences. When confronted with the dominant Western

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model, the event is reduced to a local episode, its world-forming singularity shrinking to a mere regional specificity: Un historien d’ici s’est insurgé contre cette appellation [révolution haïtienne] qu’il jugeait abusive. Il disait en substance qu’il n’y avait là rien d’autre qu’une jacquerie, que cela ne concernait que quelques dizaines d’individus d’une partie du pays, le reste des esclaves étant demeuré parfaitement silencieux, parfaitement attentiste. L’historien, ici, courbé sur l’autel de sa discipline, brandit le modèle des révolutions européennes et cherche à l’appliquer aux formulations foudroyantes de la grappe. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 86)

Opacity enables not the reversal of the value-system, but a different type of attention for what the binary system renders silent or invisible, that which Chamoiseau in his own “opaque” style calls “the stunning fulminations of the cluster” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 86). Rendering silent and invisible the humanity of the slave is the key instrument of the slave trade and the plantation culture. This repression incites forms of hidden resistance (music, dance, storytelling) and open rebellion (marooning) from those relegated to the realm of the “déshumain”: “La domination esclavagiste était […] faite d’un invisible qui vous brisait l’esprit et vous amenait à intérioriser le déshumain sans rémission qui était imposé. La lutte fondamentale ne pouvait se déployer que contre cet invisible” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 31). Yet, paradoxically, the most enduring traces of this fight are found in the opacity of Creole storytelling, which identifies with the nocturnal regime of language and existence and whose ethos is defined by indirectness, obscurity, and mystery: Pas de paroles le jour! Ils sont conscients qu’il est difficile de modeler de l’invisible dans le visible très affirmé du jour. La nuit s’y montre bien plus propice, habitée d’ombres, d’étoiles vivantes, remplies des machins de l’esprit, et colorée du rougeoiement génésique des sèbi … – La nuit, ce n’est pas la Raison qui voit, c’est tout le reste! Et ce n’est pas le visible qui ordonne, c’est tout le reste … me soupire la Baronne. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 28)10 10 The empty/full dichotomy is mirrored and also complemented by the diurnal/ nocturnal opposition. As the narrator recounts the tradition according to which a daytime storyteller is cursed to become an empty basket, his skeptical sister, la Baronne, criticizes his search for meaning as an unnecessary overinterpretative move while providing her own interpretation: “tu tentes de tricoter des épaisseurs à ce qui n’en a pas! Le panier t’intéresse parce que ce n’est d’abord qu’un creux, une

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Following a well-known anthropological structure, it is the Majolè’s closeness to the realm of the non-living, the half-living, the livingdead, or the dead-alive that grants him the power “de vaincre la mort elle-même et d’installer la vie … Ou plutôt: de transmuter le vide apparent que suscite la mort en un espace de vie!” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 32). Chamoiseau traces back the genealogy of the Creole storyteller as forced master of the wor(l)d, that is, as a being who can salvage the remains of a humanity devastated by utter alienation and dispossession, who can recreate a livable imaginary space. But he is also a being forced to conceal his own creation, which the writer reflects by favoring the lexicon of nothingness rather than that of fullness and plenitude. Such considerations could also be applied to Chamoiseau’s writing or to that of any other writer situated in the Creole context, an issue that has been hotly debated and contested especially around the publication of Éloge de la Créolité in 1989, leading to questions not only about his or her authenticity or ability to remain loyal (and how?) to specific forms of expression but also about his or her responsibility to manifest what has been repressed or has remained hidden without altering, misrepresenting, or alienating it. The storyteller’s forced poetics, to use Glissant’s vocabulary, a recurrent reference in Chamoiseau’s text, emanates from a nonrational knowledge that errs and wanders, folding and unfolding its own compactness, and drawing its strength from the impossibility of its existence.11 Writing about the mother’s disappearance does not cause the writer to reprise the topic of the storyteller’s death; instead, he weaves a negative poetics – as one would negative theology, using negation as a rhetorical strategy to posit an undeniable ontology – that affirms the conteur’s necessary and inevitable existence beyond and, even because of, his corporeal transience: “Parler en face ou auprès d’un mort, c’est comme se trouver à l’aplomb d’un abîme, il faut se débrouiller au maximum car on se bat presque pour sa propre vie, et pour la vie sorte de vide, dont la vertu est d’être rempli […] Condamné à rien, et condamné par rien, fout!” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 28). The story found its space in the funeral wakes as a nocturnal and funereal practice par excellence: “Il parlaient en face de la nuit mais cette nuit se tenait, elle, en face de la mort” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 29). We are also reminded, with a nod to the one whose shadow looms large over the whole work, that Glissant wrote at night (Chamoiseau, 2016, 214). 11 Glissant: “Le conte créole est le détour emblématique par quoi, dans l’univers des Plantations, la masse des Martiniquais développait une poétique forcée […] où se manifestaient en même temps une impuissance à se libérer globalement et un acharnement à tenter de le faire” (1981, 412).

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tout court! La tâche du conteur est de dire: ‘Venez du côté de la vie!’” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 29). As masters of “tous ces riens sur rien,” the conteur handles “des non-dits,” “un indicible” and, free of all the descriptive and psychological burdens that weigh down the art of his Western peers, weaves his story and his history around “ce qu’il ne dit pas” rather than “ce qu’il expose” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 20): Les conteurs anciens étaient les maîtres de tous ces riens sur rien. Ils maniaient plus que des non-dits, mais bien un indicible qui se voyait travaillé avec soin. Ils avaient surgi dans les habitations esclavagistes. Il est convenu de dire que leur verbe contestait avec ruses et détours ce crime légalisé. Sous le joug de l’oppression totale, d’une déshumanisation hors normes, ils dessinaient un horizon qui ne devait relever en rien de l’ordre esclavagiste. Dans cet ordre dominant, tout était biaisé, faussé, étalé sur le piège d’une déshumanisation. Par la grâce d’un langage pas clair, éclaté sur lui-même, nos conteurs originels devaient réinventer un autre monde. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 23)12

A scarcity of information opens up the imagination and a surfeit of impractical things piques the curiosity; the listener’s mind is set free to wander around objects suggested but never fully described and it is compelled to wonder about the excess of seemingly incongruous or unnecessary details. Here, Chamoiseau’s text echoes Glissant’s analysis of “forced poetics” down to the almost literal but exaggerated quotation of the predecessor’s text. Chamoiseau writes: Pour installer une maison luxueuse dans son récit, [le conteur] dira par exemple: Elle avait trente douze mille cabinets! … et c’est tout ce qu’on

12 This description may seem to favor a structuralist interpretation of the storyteller’s work, pure signifier or infinite semiosis devoid of any identifiable, ascertainable meaning; yet, even though it may be generated as a purely formalistic artifact, the story carries with it a responsibility that it transmits to the audience: “les rafales de sonorités disposés sur un fond de non-dits. Ces non-dits du conteur étaient soutenus par de suggestives structures spatiales qui vous forçaient à puiser en vous-même ce qui, de l’effroi au plaisir, vous convenait le mieux. Il vous tourneboulait ainsi jusqu’à vous laisser rédiger votre propre ordonnance” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 22). Another passage also emphasizes the freedom made possible by the storyteller’s opaque language: “Par la grâce d’un langage pas clair, éclaté sur lui-même, nos conteurs originels devaient réinventer un autre monde, donner des élans sans mots d’ordre, ouvrir des pays dessous les terres à canne, les désigner sans les montrer et les laisser agir sans prescription en nous” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 24).

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saura. Seulement, si la fonction la moins noble était autant pourvue, on ne pouvait qu’imaginer la démesure du soin qui, dans cette maison soudain de féerie, se verrait apporté aux fonctions les plus hautes. (2016, 21)

Glissant states: Une autre constante est la mesure du recensement des “richesses” […] Un ‘château’ est décrit tout d’un coup […] quand il est dit d’un souffle, et sans autre signalement, qu’il a deux cent dix cabinets. (1981, 416)

Mimicking the traditional storyteller’s technique, the literary heir borrows and adapts, repeats and embellishes, pays respectful homage but, not content to remain in the shadow of his forebear, also establishes his own voice and vision. Another, almost iconic example, given the importance of the topic in Glissant’s poetics, is the elusive treatment of the landscape that the philosopher associates with a lack of natural connection between the people and the surroundings which their ancestors were forced to inhabit and which they construed as a place of transience, struggle, and survival but not of dwelling: “la description du paysage n’est pas un moment du conte. Le plaisir ni la jouissance de décrire n’y sont en acte. C’est que le paysage dans le conte n’est pas destiné à être habité: lieu de passage, il n’est pas encore un pays” (Glissant, 1981, 414). Chamoiseau initially agrees: “Le conteur créole ne dépeint jamais rien, aucun paysage” (2016, 21). But, as he builds his literary grave, “légendaire” after “légendaire,” he implicitly contests the uninhabitable nature of the island’s landscape. The mother’s departure has left behind a “panthéon de paysages” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 252) and here the text does not differentiate between the symbolic and the physical, the personal and the historical, the individual and the collective. Careful and generative work transforms the transitory and the external into an enduring place of lived memory.13

13 After being compared to Klee and Malévitch, Man Ninotte also fantasmatically joins the company of great poets who have been able to “espouse” a place without possessing it, shaping, embracing, and letting themselves be shaped by its internal contradictions and contrasts, and thus to witness its transformation from an objective and objectal landscape into a felt, lived, and living pays: “Les grands poètes seuls, de Césaire à Glissant, devineront cette manière d’épouser un ‘Lieu’ qui n’est pas un territoire considéré comme exclusif à la manière ancienne, mais un mélange de pays perdu, de pays rêvé, de pays deviné, de pays composé, de pays enfin mis en projet” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 239).

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Much like the mother, Chamoiseau’s narrator becomes an anthropological invariant that manifests the latent energies of a historical condition. In doing so he creates a community, and indeed a world insofar as a world is what is revealed in the coming-together of disparate, previously unrelated people. The passages that describe the work of the storyteller are strikingly similar to those dedicated to the son’s belated discovery of his mother’s looming presence in the memories of her peers, her gift for weaving relations in the least likely places. Furthermore, Chamoiseau’s text manifests the impossibility of freeing oneself, as a writer or simply as a person, of the burden of a loved one’s absence, or what Glissant calls in the case of the conteur créole, “un acharnement à tenter de le faire” (1981, 417). Writing as mettre-à-l’embellie Literature as a laboratory of values and a repository of memory requires paying “reflexive attention” to different types of cultural practices and artistic forms, from the most familiar to the most foreign. While presenting all the pitfalls of an “auto-referential circle,” it “is only ‘vicious’ insofar as it must be selectively ‘virtuous’ – I give my attention to what I value and I value what I give my attention to” (Citton, 2017, 1).14 Yet the learning process that shapes this type of attention entails turning the unfamiliar into an everyday event and perceiving the ordinary through a distant lens. The mother’s legacy also lies in attuning her son to strange images (images bought or brought from strangers) that protect

14 In his essay “The Ecology of Attention,” French cultural critic Yves Citton describes the discursive and social mechanisms of attention, insisting on their hermeneutic circularity. He focuses in particular on the concept of “attentional erosion” which affects to various extents the fields of humanities, education, or politics and is defined by a “collective inability to pay attention” (2017, 136) to the important issues of our time (ecological threats or migration crises). In our contemporary world, when we are flooded with information from big data to frivolous anecdotes to fake news, how can we decide what is important and what has value? Literature’s answer is to create the possibility for “meta-attentional engagement [through which] the spectator’s attention is found to be plugged into the attentional experience of another more or less strongly subjectivized perception of the world, through which a certain reality is revisited” (Citton, 2017, 18).

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him from “attentional erosion” and instill in him, unsuspectingly, the habit of contemplation: Dans la salle, Man Ninotte avait suspendu deux tableaux de chez les Syriens. Durant ces temps d’enfance, mon regard se promena souvent sur L’Angélus et Des glaneuses de Millet. Presque impossible de ne pas les voir […] Leur ensemble constituait un monde à la fois étranger et terriblement proche. Je pouvais passer des mois sans les regarder, puis soudain les contempler à l’infini. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 167)

Man Ninotte’s manner of being in the world, which saw her transform mere survival strategies into moments of beauty, need into joy, and misery into relationality, presents a latent matrix for the future writer’s engagement with the world. Her washing technique of “mettre-àl’embellie” knowingly harnesses the power of the elements, “la science [du] rien” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 269, 271), to achieve what is at once a coveted social result (the appearance of means) and a rebirth of the dead matter: the humble bedsheet’s passage from “la gamme du blanc mort au concert splendide du blanc redevenu vivant” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 269) is akin and equal (if not superior)15 to Klee’s metaphysical or Malevitch’s Suprematist transfiguration of reality. Just as poetry does not merely serve as an embellishment, the mother’s activities – making artificial flowers and sweets to sell, caring for the home – do more than supplement the family’s welfare in an economic sense. As the narrator describes, her choice of art to decorate the family home is motivated by a desire to “capter une énergie contre la misère identique à la sienne” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 168). Acknowledging “misery” as a condition that is both human and historical, as the dual inheritance of the prehistoric ancestor (the fear and awareness of death) and of the slave left to die in the hold of the ship (identity erasure, memory loss, exclusion, déveine or “unluck,” sheer and unrelenting poverty), Man Ninotte understands that it 15 The siblings’ dialogue colors the memory of their mother’s feats of domestic maestria in a tenderly humorous way that sets her washing art as a template for – and therefore above – that of her more celebrated “peers”: “Pense aussi à cette force de Paul Klee, cet artiste qui d’un même trait de plume sut capturer du vide, structurer du blanc, et laisser deviner la circonstance d’un ange! Ou encore à ce Kasimir Malévitch qui réussit à traverser les barrières de la couleur […] et à nous offrir l’infini paysage d’une forme blanche sur fond blanc! … Ils auraient pu être des lavandières! … Comme Man Ninotte? me demande la Baronne. – Comme Man Ninotte … je lui dis” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 271–272).

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is not time that grants us life but the fact of living itself: “C’est de vivre qui donne vie” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 168). Time here is taken as a metonymy of exteriority, of what lies outside one’s mastery over things. To transform Sunday into a day of flowers or a Creole home into a gallery of paintings by Millet means to create, economically but also emphatically, as the text expresses it, “Une transparence” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 169), that is, to craft something out of character: “Cette poésie du dimanche, Man Ninotte la créa durant des décennies. C’était un art de vivre à la beauté. Une telle délicatesse bien étonnante chez une guerrière” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 169). Man Ninotte’s “fleurs en papier” or “fleurs factices,” which went unnoticed by her young son during her lifetime, exhibit their artificiality and strike a discordant note against the natural abundance of the market. It is however their fleeting and fictional image that engenders the memorial reconstruction of the mother within the son (“en moi”). Under the combined effects of time and the continuous sharpening of his unthinking, attentional engagement with the world, the mother “se mit à exister, existe encore, et sans même que j’y pense, dans les bouquets de fleurs blanches qui traversent ma vie, et me donnent accès à cette part d’elle que les rigueurs de la déveine, ses sacrifices pour nous n’avaient jamais autorisé à passer les barrières” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 170). Specks of memory, called in the text a “caprice d’écriture, une dièse poétique, […] une nuance de mémoire,” seemingly useless and incongruous when taken in and of themselves, provide the links that transform a “géographie d’un manque” into a “plénitude” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 170). They do so neither by populating a landscape nor by providing material to fill a void, but by creating relations (“relier”); in these flowers, the remembering narrator sees himself (“je me regarde moi-même”; Chamoiseau, 2016, 170–71), perhaps as both an artifact of Man Ninotte’s maternal ingeniosity and heir to her artistic genius. The mother’s memory is strongly associated with incongruity, discordance, not fitting. Her passion for the radio, “jamais elle n’éteignait le transistor” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 205), reveals her modern attachment to a culture of orality that communicates as much as it connects. This facet of her personality is described with the genitival turn “elle était de la radio”; her custom of making artificial flowers is designated with a preposition indicating both the manner and the direction of action in the expression “vivre à la beauté”; both these grammatical choices suggest that Man Ninotte’s activities signify both an origin and a destination. Memories surrounding her attachment to the radio are nonetheless

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associated with death, with what severs and separates; her favorite pastime is listening to the necrologues, discerning in the carefully coded “avis d’obsèques” those variations that speak to class or race distinctions, to how a humble life asks to be rendered in rich detail while a comfortable one finally betrays its internal poverty. Since this occurs through the means of audio transmission devoid of any visual support, the absence conveyed by the distant voice fills the space that separates the destination from its source. To mirror this phenomenon, a quasi-poetic interlude is used to introduce the news of De Gaulle’s passing as it reached Martinique in 1970: La radio annonçait la mort du général de Gaulle. De Gaulle était un bout de la radio. Un invisible. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 206)

The news of the former French president’s death creates an emblematic moment of incongruity that stems from the contrast between the familiarity of his voice to the people of Martinique, who know it in minute detail thanks to his historic “appel du 18 juin,” and his simultaneous invisibility, for he reaches the island only through radio, without print or newsreels to provide a visual dimension. The BBC radio broadcast created what could be called, to borrow Chamoiseau’s vocabulary, a “légendaire de la présence,” persuading the colony’s population that De Gaulle was addressing them directly, naming them, and pulling them out of oblivion and obscurity: feeling “nommés,” believing that he “nous avait rendus visibles,” “les vieux-nègres d’ici demeuraient persuadés que de Gaulle s’adressait à eux, qu’il les avait appelés directement à son secours” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 206). Thus, in November 1970, Man Ninotte listens petrified to her transistor as the speaker announces what is to her the end of an era that began with De Gaulle’s Second World War address. Attached to that inaugural past that recognized her and many like her as equal political subjects and dignified human beings, she fears a future full of dangers for France, which, if occupied by “barbarians” once again, could in turn abandon Martinique. Man Ninotte’s reaction leaves its imprint on her son, who confesses that “bien souvent les transistors me chantent encore la mort de ce monsieur de Gaulle” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 207). He is struck by the contrast between Man Ninotte’s life, which was shaped by countless injustices stemming from colonial and postcolonial domination, and the bond she forms with an absent figure who, independently of the reality

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of his actions, comes to symbolize to her her own freedom and dignity. This incongruity between historical reality and its subjective experience crystallizes into a powerful yet untenable paracolonial moment. It is not a compensatory dream, nor a self-delusional tale, but a fleeting fiction that reconstructs the enduring connection between the oppressed (Martinican slaves and their descendants) and the land and people of France as they were imagined from the colony. It displays the affective bonding powers of a reparative fiction that cuts through the colonial maze of racial laws and hierarchies to imagine a gesture of care directly uniting the black people of the colony to a compassionate motherland absolved of all abuse. For the heir – the one who remains – the mother’s death is a fundamental event, “l’absence fondamentale” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 18), that has no equivalent in the past but provides the foundation for many possible futures. It does not require explanation or clarification but represents an invitation to join the familial and verbal circle that her disappearance has left open: “entrer dans cette ronde restée comme grande ouverte, […] risquer une parole même sans mander de répondeurs, juste soucieux de respirer et de sourire aux souffles de ce qui n’est nulle part et qui pourtant subsiste” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 18). Nothingness and abundance, the two oppositional series that organize the text, are ultimately not incompatible; it is the always untimely arrival of death that forces one to face and experience “la stupeur plénière,” an expression that appears at the end of the first section describing the initial shock caused by the news of the mother’s disappearance (Chamoiseau, 2016, 83). In stupor one is left senseless and vacant, empty of oneself and open to receiving an object lesson in haute compassion, a feeling that holds together “une tristesse sans peine et une joie sans imbecillité” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 347). The survivors try to salvage whatever is possible, as the narrator puts it, “sauver ce qui pouvait l’être” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 210), through acts of caring, such as choosing the most beautiful casket, accomplishing various funeral rituals, and sharing personal memories. This latter effort is not limited to the family circle but, following a social custom in which Man Ninotte herself loved to partake, includes publishing and radio broadcasting the dearly departed’s avis d’obsèques. Nonetheless, the family must accept what “une vieille lucidité” teaches them: que plus rien de ce qu’elle avait été n’existait plus nulle part, et que nous ne pouvions en guise de réponse, et de refuge aussi, que célébrer la vie: la vie en elle, elle dans la vie, la vie sans distinction soudain devenue elle.

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La mort nous dévoilait ainsi d’impérieux paysages d’une vivacité claire. (Chamoiseau, 2016, 211)

In a self-ironic contrast with the author’s ornate style, this simple reawakening to life is best captured in one of Man Ninotte’s signature phrases borrowed from the formulaic language of radio necrologues: “Ni fleurs, ni couronnes, seuls les billets de banque seront acceptés” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 237). During the funeral service, the narrator’s imagination takes flight, retracing a path towards the place of his mother’s birth, the La-Bélème neighborhood, and then on to the river Lézarde (evocative of Glissant’s eponymous novel) and the church of Lamentin. When one of his brothers likens this site of memory to a “pantheon of landscapes” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 252), which the mother left behind in the double sense of withdrawing herself from it but also of bequeathing as a legacy, his comment conjures up Man Ninotte’s physical portrait. Bringing her to life in flesh has not only a consoling function but a corrective power against past wrongs, most importantly against a humiliating experience of racial discrimination, or, to use Mbembe’s term, “nanoracism,”16 that once estranged her from the church: “J’imaginai cette petite négresse ronde, pénétrant dans cette église avec ses belles chaussures, suivant l’office, écoutant le prêtre comme sans doute au cours de cette ultime cérémonie où elle dut réentendre toutes les paroles divines” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 253). In death, the mother’s spirit is brought back to witness her own last religious service through an offering of fictional redress made not just to one individual but to an entire matriarchal line: “Je la vis dans les travées auprès de Man Manotte sa mère, ou de Man Douro sa grand-mère” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 253). The event itself then transcends the limits of genealogy and history, reaching the levels of a cosmogony, the birth of a new world, as the narrator’s imagination takes flight and wanders from Egypt and the biblical Magi to China, Syria, ancient Greece, and Rome (Chamoiseau, 2016, 255).

16 Mbembe: “Nanoracism, in its banality and capacity to infiltrate into the pores and veins of society, is racism turned culture and into the air one breathes” (2019, 59).

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The Plenitude of Death Chamoiseau’s meandering but persistent narrative complicates the linear story of overcoming trauma, loss through mourning, and the restorative power of writing. It alternates between emptiness and plenitude: the one represented by the radical, “naked” loss of the mother, the total erasure of individual and collective identity in the crucible of the slave ship, the destruction of the city of Saint-Pierre in the 1902 earthquake, and the “déshumain” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 31) visited upon today’s migrants, on the one side; the other expressed in the keen awareness of life’s eternal rhythms. What the book calls “plénitude” refers to the energy of what remains and continues to connect mother and children, past and present, individual and collective existence. In the funeral scene, when the mourners are reminded that the casket must be closed, they are left bereft and listless, coming face to face with “rien” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 211). The literary tomb then becomes “le seul moyen de ne pas rester dans le cercueil” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 255), an act of rescue for the one who is no more and an act of solace for those whom she has left behind. The theme of energy is associated first and foremost with Man Ninotte’s entelechial figure. References to energetic and magical living and the rendering of life delineate an ecology of the living that encompasses human and animal existence alike, supported by the motifs of “présence,” “plénitude,” and “joie” that crisscross the book and achieve their greatest intensity in one of the almost philosophical dialogues between the narrator and la Baronne: “La joie! Il y a un fond de joie dans ces souvenirs, un indéfinissable que les misères ne parviennent pas à évacuer” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 208). These tidal waves of energy can be occasioned by ordinary memories like the photo of the mother cleaning fish whose “éclat rieur” reveals “un contentement de vivre qui monte du plus profond” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 208). As with the experience of art as familiarization with the unfamiliar and a laboratory of attention, the mother’s posthumous lesson comes from the most unexpected place. Her being in the world reveals that behind the most banal of life’s moments there is a “vitalité soulevée par un ravissement de vivre” and teaches her children that “Cette plénitude du vivre palpite autour de nous […] toute vie est une vitalité du vivre, chargée d’une exaltation sans cause, […] de la plus pure des joies” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 208). Such considerations reach an almost Kantian level of disinterestedness combined with a vitalistic vision of life as self-sustaining and selfless joy, a combination mirrored in the excessive use of repetition (phonetic, graphic, and

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lexical) and self-generative tautology. In this, the narrator discerns a sui generis principle of survival and evolution, remarking that the most active animals are the richest in life experiences, and those most adept at happiness are the most successful at transmitting their genes: “une félicité qui s’est toujours maintenue, à basse ou à haute intensité, et qui traverse les épreuves et le temps.” This speculative arc finds its earthy conclusion in the sister’s religious quip: “Il y avait de la joie! – Deo gratias, exulte la Baronne” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 209). The argumentative structure of the book appears clearly here: the thought begins with a personal experience, which is amplified through familial and communal stories, until it reaches a human dimension, before being folded back into a personal statement. Self-citation and intratextuality also include allusions to what Chamoiseau called elsewhere, in an essay dedicated to three of his spiritual fathers (Césaire, Perse, Glissant), “magnetic” relations or “liaisons magnétiques” (2013). While prompted by the mother’s passing and the need to understand why “Man Ninotte, en ce 1er janvier de cette année 2000, vraiment partie, n’était pas revenue” or why “Tout était atteint, mais rien n’avait change,” the book also serves as an overview of the author-narrator’s own intellectual genealogy, Césaire and Glissant occupy a central place in Chamoiseau’s literary work and ars poetica: “Glissant est un Papa Legba, me soupire la Baronne, il assure les passages!” (Chamoiseau, 2016, 19, 210, 144). In La Matière de l’absence, the texture of the book carefully directs – without determining – the reader’s perception by combining guiding strategies (the periodic resurfacing of the leading thread, the disposition of the parts, intratextual references that allow Chamoiseau’s readers to draw meaning from their knowledge of his other works) with strategies of disorientation (the heterogeneous nature of a text that mixes together autobiography, essay, and fiction without clearly delineating them; the wide array of topics discussed, from literary criticism to anthropology and from art history to contemporary migration and climate change). In contrast with the circularity of Linda Lê’s revenant necrofiction, the text works its way outward, always returning to its point of origin but each time at a different level. Following a spiral movement, it proceeds by amplification similarly to Patrick Modiano’s reconstitutive approach, while wandering much farther away from its starting place to explore an ever-growing number of geological, historical, and anthropological topics. Yet their vastness is always grounded in specific scenes (the cemetery conversation, the funeral, the mother’s habits, the destruction

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of the city of Saint-Pierre) or particular figures (the prehistoric cluster, the Creole storyteller, the gravediggers, the women who wash the dead), reminiscent of Assia Djebar’s intimate exploration of history through a series of lived events. Alternating between distance and closeness, between himself and the beings, events, practices, and lived memories that form the substance of his book, the author exposes both reader and himself to the “matter of absence” which constitutes at once a deadly threat and the only salvation in a textual labyrinth with no exit.17

17 The material treated in this chapter and, to some extent, the next, could be read from the perspective offered by Valérie Loichot in her monograph Water Graves which is “concerned with rituals or rites of passage, healing, and remembrance, specifically as those of the kind that help the departed, the living, and the interaction thereof, to transition into an afterward or a hereafter” (Loichot, 7) and puts forth the beautiful concept of “living graves” (Loichot, 17).

chapter five

Recovery Maylis de Kerangal’s Anonymous Litany Recovery Je rassemble et organise l’information qui enfle sur les ondes, bientôt les sature, je l’étire en une seule phrase: un bateau venu de Libye, chargé de plus de cinq cents migrants, a fait naufrage ce matin à moins de deux kilomètres des côtes de l’île de Lampedusa; près de trois cents victimes serait à déplorer. (Kerangal, 2014, 8)

In Maylis de Kerangal’s À ce stade de la nuit (2014), news of the shipwreck that killed more than 300 migrants on October 3, 2013 off the coast of Lampedusa conjures up cinematic and literary images of loss and nostalgia. The polysemy of the word “Lampedusa” sparks a series of intertextual and intermedial reminiscences, most notably about Luchino Visconti’s 1963 adaptation of The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. In À ce stade de la nuit, the author-narrator’s interpretation of this tragic event, filtered through her personal memories and experiences, weaves an intricate and at times disturbing narrative of loss and nostalgia informed by the lesson of the aristocratic “Leopard”: that only by accepting its own demise and embracing the arrival of the “barbarians” can a dying world – at one time, the old aristocracy, now Europe itself – survive. Maylis de Kerangal’s literary career began in 2000 and was solidified in 2010 when she won the Prix Médicis for her novel Naissance d’un pont. Several other publications allowed her to reach an international audience thanks to the translation of her work into other languages, including English, and to the screen adaptation of Réparer les vivants, a medical narrative centered around a heart transplant which provided the basis of the script for the 2016 movie Heal the Living. Kerangal, the

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youngest writer examined in this book, has been hailed as one of the most original French writers of the past decade because of her talent for crafting stylistically ambitious novels that engage with current themes such as bioethics, urban expansion, and the disappearance of ecological systems and social groups under the pressures of globalization through narratives that are at the same time deeply concerned with individual affective landscapes and perspectives. While garnering critical praise and media attention, she has also been the subject of attacks, the most vitriolic of which came from fellow writer and controversial polemicist Richard Millet.1 Her writing can be associated with contemporary, post-Sartrian forms of artistic commitment that have emerged in the wake of a shift identified several decades ago by Roland Barthes as “l’engagement de [l]a forme” (1953, 9). It reflects the features that Alison James and Dominique Viart ascribe to “littérature de terrain” which draws on the theoretical and formal connections between literary writing and social sciences like cultural anthropology, history, sociology, and social psychology. Kerangal’s focus on human and nonhuman objects that are approached in quasi-scientific ways through the use of a highly specialized vocabulary is one example; her style often employs technical terminology to convey a particular state of the world “from within” the very object on which it has trained its gaze. Such aesthetic choices signal the writer’s engagement with the material reality of the world. This quest for an internal perspective has less to do with questions of narrative focalization and point of view and is instead more akin to contemporary philosophy’s grappling with an object-oriented ontology that tries to transcend anthropological limitations and authorial subjectivity in order to reflect the world itself in its infinite contingent forms. For writers and readers of literature alike, this gesture represents an acknowledgment of the material unknowability and spatiotemporal immensity of the world around us, and a necessary and humbling corrective to the CartesianBalzacian-Proustian project of exhaustive self-knowledge depicted as a human triumph-in-defeat. Yet contemporary narratives also delve into the granular and opaque substance of the world, moved by the desire to “réparer le monde,” a phrase inspired by Kerangal which Alexandre Gefen borrowed for the title of his 2017 book on the reparative value of contemporary literature. This circularity between fiction and exegesis is 1 On Frédéric Beigbeder’s and Richard Millet’s attacks on Kerangal and her book, see Motte (2017).

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in itself a testament to the fact that even in our posthuman and postcolonial era, literature is still defined by an intrinsically humanist creed. This paradoxical phenomenon places Maylis de Kerangal’s works, À ce stade de la nuit in particular, at the intersection of two contradictory “aesth-ethics.” On the one hand, an ethics of reticence is manifested in the formal practice of neutral or flat writing, called “écriture blanche” or “plate,” which underscores the distance between subject and object; this mode is mindful of the author’s position in relation to but also removed from the world and its contents, and demonstrates a keen awareness of the limits of representation. On the other hand, an ethic of care entails attention to the subject matter and involvement in its textual unfolding without seeking to offer an ideological solution or claiming the right to speak for a victimized or subaltern group.2 The ongoing immigration crisis has engendered an abundant literary and artistic production which mirrors and critiques the contradictory political debates and media representations surrounding it. As Debarati 2 On the concept of “écriture impliquée,” see for instance, Brun and Schaffner (2015); Chaudet (2016). Bruno Blanckeman provides the following definition: “L’implication, ce n’est pas renoncer à rendre compte du monde autant qu’à en exiger des comptes quand il se doit, mais tester ce qui serait, passé l’âge mythologique des engagements, une nouvelle disposition éthique et politique de la littérature, mettre en dispositifs un nouvel agir de l’écriture, plus humble quoique ambitieux, à l’image tout à la fois relative et résistante de ce que représente la littérature elle-même, immergée dans une société qui ne lui accorde plus de souveraineté particulière mais où elle s’affirme toujours comme un lieu de création et une discipline de formation” (2017, 161). Drawing on Debarati Sanyal’s analysis, one could situate this type of involved but not committed (that is, not partisan or ideologically informed) writing in the context (and often against or in answer to) the idea of humanitarian governmentality: “As Didier Fassin has argued, in recent decades the political right to protection enshrined by asylum has been replaced by an appeal to moral sentiments such as compassion and empathy. Humanitarian governmentality, it follows, relies on the asymmetries of compassion rather than the reciprocities of justice and equal rights. When they are not dismissed as economic migrants or reviled as potential threats, asylum seekers are frequently positioned as ‘speechless emissaries’ whose wounds speak louder than the words they say. In the words of a Bangladeshi refugee I interviewed in Paris, ‘We have to show that we are victims, pure victims.’ Humanitarian reason capitalizes on trauma, suffering, and victimhood, reducing refugees to supplicant bodies in need of intervention and protection. It yields an impoverished view of asylum seekers’ subjectivity, narratives, and political energies, in a preemptive gesture of exclusion from equal citizenship” (2017, 4–5).

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Sanyal points out in an article dedicated to Sylvain Georges’s documentary film Qu’ils reposent en révolte about the so-called “jungle” of Calais, art offers a space of resistance against the “humanitarian language [that] masks securitarian violence” along with conceptual and fictional (visual, verbal) tools for contesting “the aporia of border security practices” that position “the ‘irregular’ migrant as both a security threat and threatened life in need of saving” (2017, 2). Furthermore, in the French context, literature inspired by “la crise migratoire”3 has reached a critical mass, which has in turn come to transform its practice and institutions, most notably by informing the works of Hexagonal writers who until about a decade ago (at least until the publication of the 2007 manifesto “Pour une littérature-monde en français”) would not have been directly associated with postcolonial, identitarian, or humanitarian concerns. Consequently, the recent plethora of texts concerned with issues of immigration, transnational dynamics, and the irresolvable tensions between global pressures and local struggles have received increased media attention and institutional legitimacy, bringing together “a heterogeneous corpus of authors: French and migrant, elite and popular, consecrated and emergent, postcolonial and nonfrancophone” (Sabo, 2018, 9), writers as distinct in style, ideological leanings, and thematic scope as Milan Kundera, Andreï Makine, Laurent Gaudé, Alice Zeniter, Mathias Énard, Dany Laferrière, and Maylis de Kerangal.4 In this chapter, I situate À ce stade de la nuit in the larger context of contemporary migration-inspired literature by raising a series of questions such as: Can one establish a morally sound relation between, on the one hand a Western individual’s desire to regain an illusory primal happiness by purifying oneself though the chosen ordeal of an arduous trip (as is the case with experiential or limit-testing tourism) and, on the 3 Nuselovic: “La migration dépasse la seule dimension sociale pour devenir un phénomène pleinement politique. Or les pouvoirs et les gouvernements, ne voulant pas lui accorder cette dimension, utilisent le lexique de la gestion: ‘On va gérer la crise migratoire.’ La migration n’est aucunement en crise – les migrants ne cessent d’arriver et ne cesseront d’arriver. Lorsque les gouvernements européens refusent de voir la dimension politique, cela leur permet d’éviter le débat et de désarmer toutes les oppositions en réduisant le tout à une question humanitaire. La situation est extrêmement grave – cessons d’utiliser comme une litanie le seul lexique de la solidarité, de l’hospitalité, de l’accueil.” (2018, n. pag.). 4 As Oana Sabo demonstrated in her study The Migrant Canon in TwentyFirst-Century France.

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other, the life-threatening urgency (war, state-sponsored or anarchic violence, various form of dispossession) which deprives migrants of any form of agency other than the quest for safety and security? What are the limits of empathy when it comes to writing for a stranger. Does the Other, in order to warrant our care, have to reach the liminal stages of humanity? I also contend that through the free and seemingly irresponsible association of human conditions, memories, and a rich web of cultural references, À ce stade de la nuit runs the risk of aestheticizing death while also allowing for a non-foundational narrative to emerge, one that does not follow any of the established poetic or rhetorical models of a migrant narrative (humanitarian, empathetic, traumatic, or polemical). Disaster Literature, Humanitarian Pre-Texts The event that inspired Kerangal’s book has a tragically exemplary value in both senses of the term, being at once extraordinary and typical of a situation that has been ongoing for almost a decade. On October 3, 2013, a small boat carrying about 500 African migrants, which had set sail from Misrata, Libya trying to reach Europe via Italy, capsized and sank close to the shores of Lampedusa following a fire on board, leaving only 155 passengers alive. At the time, the shipwreck was highly publicized as the first major migrant disaster off the Italian coast; years later, it has become just one example among many others, each new tragedy surpassing the previous ones in the headlines, fueling political and humanitarian debates, but also rendering the spectacle of migrant death at sea a regular and, therefore, trivialized and even acceptable event. At the time, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that around 1.4 million non-EU (mostly African and Middle Eastern) refugees had arrived on the continent following the Central Mediterranean Sea route over a three-year period. During 2015 and 2016, considered the peak years of what the UNHCR terms the “Mediterranean situation” and the European Parliament calls the “EU migrant crisis,” over 2.3 million “illegal crossings were detected,” the numbers having dropped to several hundred thousand in subsequent years.5 Despite the significant drop in attempts to 5 For detailed reports and statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner

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enter Europe, mainly through Italy, Greece, and Spain, the number of victims remains high, especially among those undertaking the sea voyage. The “peak” year of 2015 saw a loss of 3,771 lives for 1,015,877 arrivals by sea; in 2017, among a mere 172,324 arrivals, the number of dead or missing reported was barely lower, at 3,139.6 A 2018 article published by a team of Italian scientists in the journal Forensic Science International admits the difficulty of gathering such information while situating the “continuous flow of death” in the Mediterranean on a worldwide scale: The precise number of deaths occurring globally is not yet well documented, but according to what has been reported by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has tried to track and estimate the worldwide fatalities occurring during the transnational migration flows, the Mediterranean sea is the area where in the last three years most of the migrant deaths occurred: out of the total worldwide migrant deaths 62.3% (3279), 65.9% (3777) and 75.7% (3972) respectively for 2014, 2015, and 2016 occurred in the Mediterranean. It is likely that these numbers are underestimated. The emergency represents a continuous flow of deaths: some in accidents with tens of victims, others with hundreds. (Olivieri et al., 2018, 121)7

for Refugees, see The Mediterranean Refugees/Migrants Data Portal, https:// data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean; the European Parliament website presents similar information while emphasizing specific political measures and regional policies for answering the crisis (“Asylum and Migration in the EU: Facts and Figures,” 2019). The overall narrative and statistics on the European situation must also be placed in the global context that has seen almost 70 million people displaced, the highest number since the Second World War, according to the UNHCR report. 6 See the UNHCR report for 2018, “Desperate Journeys: Refugees and Migrants Arriving in Europe and at Europe’s Borders.” 7 If the reliance on data seems to be a requirement in both humanitarian and governance discourses, albeit for different purposes (to highlight the magnitude of a crisis, buttress calls for political action, support various narratives of compassion and/or security, etc.), numbers also underpin ethical or philosophical analyses by lending not only accuracy or veracity but also a sense of scale to reflections on the duty to remember and the role of the dead in shaping history: “On oublie trop souvent que l’Histoire se fait aussi en fonction de la mémoire de ceux qui ne sont plus là. Depuis l’année 2000, ce sont plus de 32 000 personnes décédées aux portes de l’Europe, auxquelles il faut rajouter les 32 000 morts du Sahara et les jeunes femmes et les enfants passés dans les réseaux de prostitution ou de traite humaine.

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In this context, À ce stade de la nuit emerges as a doubly circumstantial piece. First, the text was commissioned by a small niche publisher, Guérin, based in Chamonix, for the series/collection “Paysages écrits” seeking to create a “mosaïque de paysages intimes et littéraires.” Second, it draws its inspiration not only from the current refugee crisis as a general phenomenon but from one of its most tragic events that captured the attention of the public and the media due to its magnitude and, in retrospect, its timeliness, as it occurred before “attentional erosion” (Citton, 2017, 136) set in. The second edition of the book’s back cover (it was reissued in 2015 by Éditions Verticales, currently a small subsidiary of Gallimard), shifts the focus from the events that brought the text into being to its experiential and aesthetic dimension, highlighting its function and value for the author’s literary trajectory. The blurb all but invites a close reading that would reveal the subtle balance between a poetics of authenticity anchored in a deeply personal experience and the desire to place the book and its author in a shared cultural and political tradition … or between the risk of instrumentalizing a tragic event and a duty of memory inseparable from a necessarily critical stance towards Europe’s migration politics: Lampedusa. Une nuit d’octobre 2013, une femme entend à la radio ce nom aux résonances multiples. Il fait rejaillir en elle la figure de Burt Lancaster – héros du Guépard de Visconti et du Swimmer de Frank Perry – puis, comme par ressac, la fin de règne de l’aristocratie sicilienne en écho à ce drame méditerranéen : le naufrage d’un bateau de migrants. Écrit à la première personne, cet intense récit sonde un nom propre et ravive, dans son sillage, un imaginaire traversé de films aimés, de paysages familiers, de lectures nomades, d’écrits antérieurs. Lampedusa, île de littérature et de cinéma devenue l’épicentre d’une tragédie humaine. De l’inhospitalité européenne aussi. Entre méditation nocturne et art poétique, À ce stade de la nuit est un jalon majeur dans le parcours littéraire de Maylis de Kerangal. (Kerangal, 2014, back cover)

What transpires from the rhetoric of editorial marketing is a modern commonplace: the desire to extract artistic achievement out of tragedy, or, to use Patrice Loraux’s vocabulary about traumatic disappearance, to hasten the reparation of a traumatic event by transforming it into sublime utterance (2001, 43). Yet the verb “raviver” takes here as C’est aussi au nom de tous ceux-là que le politique doit se faire, ce que Walter Benjamin appelle la mémoire des vaincus” (Nuselovic, 2018, n. pag.).

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its object not the migrants dead at sea, but an artistic and cultural “imaginary” – a surprising, even shocking choice that seems to betray the absence of a “sensate democracy” (Butler, 2006, 151), one in which art can and should account for overlooked forms of vulnerability and bear testimony to grievable lives discounted in the political and media discourse. From this perspective, Kerangal’s book appears to participate in what Butler calls “The derealization of the ‘Other.’” By merely using the migrants’ death as a pre-text, that is, an inspiration and an excuse for delivering a mixture of autobiography, essay, political pamphlet, and artistic creed that focuses not on the event itself, the shipwreck, nor on those whose lives were lost because of it, but on a French writer’s reaction to it, this literary exercise is condemning them to a transitional state, “neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral” (Butler, 2006, 33–34). Yet, by not fictionalizing the migrants’ plight in a narrative of heroization or victimization, Kerangal also refuses to practice a poetics of representation and visibility that would frame, contain, and make their experience intelligible and, ultimately, tolerable. In À ce stade de la nuit, she creates a conceptually intermedial object which remains within the confines of verbal expression but draws on a whole host of auditory and visual figures and relies on a rhetoric of ellipsis and accumulation to summon a seemingly inexhaustible and fluctuating wellspring of personal memories and cultural references (mass media, books, movies, worldwide traditions). Answering a nomadic impulse, the book is formed of different stages or “stades,” each crystallizing around a name or an aggregate of names. The migrants, whose names are unknown to the author and whose lives will forever remain inaccessible, do not become the subject of the book. Instead of being about the dead, the book is “un tout autre récit” (Kerangal, 2014, 76), as the excipit declares: that is, it is written without them, with their deaths as the origin and destination of a narrative of disappearance. The strongest commonality between the shipwreck and the text itself lies not in the unfathomable subject matter, nor in the discourse about migration, the instituting power of names, or hospitality, but in the narrator’s drifting focus on a disappearing object, as if the very structure of the text were replicating the swaying movement of the boat as it struggles to stay afloat before sinking, in a motion that is both painfully slow and horrifyingly sudden: “c’est lent un naufrage, c’est lent un bateau qui coule et dans le même temps incroyablement rapide, soudain il passe sous la surface des eaux, comme le soleil se couche, il disparaît, c’est toute

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la singularité de l’événement, sa morbidité extrême” (Kerangal, 2014, 72–73). Thus, confronted with the death of what the text, mimicking the cynical language of bureaucracy, calls “un nombre indeterminé d’anonymes” (Kerangal, 2014, 70), À ce stade de la nuit does not set out to represent the dead but instead to imagine dying itself, both as an unfolding process and a singular event, by adopting a nonrepresentational artistic form that “reconfigure[s] our understanding of what it means to see and be seen beyond the regime of visibility, recognition, and control” (Sanyal, 2017, 5).8 Mourning the (Dis)comforts of Home À ce stade de la nuit opens onto a setting of nocturnal domesticity that portrays the narrator in her kitchen surrounded by the comforts of everyday life, as if sketching the self-portrait of the writer in her hour of reflection and repose when “tout le monde dort” and only she, awake, allows for a moment of reverie that makes creation possible.9 She “traîne,” lies around, “assise de travers sur la chaise de paille,” slowly reading the paper and savoring her coffee “lentement 8 Sanyal: “How do cultural forms such as cinema or photography frame the figure of the refugee and provide a symbolic platform for those denied the right to appearance and movement in traditional conceptions of the polis? […] perhaps more urgent than the gesture of symbolic reparation, or ‘visual asylum,’ is art’s capacity to give more complex accounts of the conditions and constraints of a refugee’s politicization. Aesthetic forms open supple and reflexive frames for envisioning modes of capture and flight both past and present. Representations of borderscapes offer heuristic figures that remain on the move, thus conveying the lived itineraries and symbolic resources of those in flight. These figures give visible and audible form to the singularities of refugees’ experience, sometimes by challenging normative conceptions of what it means to appear and to have a voice in traditional conceptions of the polis” (2017, 5). 9 Aside from the more obvious mythological or psychoanalytical interpretations, the nocturnal regime can also be read here through a political lens aimed at bringing forth the hidden duality of modern democracies: “The history of modern democracy is, at its bottom, a history with two faces, and even tow bodies the solar body, on the one hand, and the nocturnal body, on the other. The major emblems of this nocturnal body are the colonial empire and the pro-slavery state – and more precisely, the plantation and the penal colony” (Mbembe, 2019, 22). The contemporary immigration crisis stems directly from and mirrors the effects of these two modern assemblages.

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bu” (Kerangal, 2014, 7). The media is present in its various forms (newspaper, radio, television), connecting this space of interiority with the world at large without disrupting the calm but offering instead a reassuring confirmation of the normal order of things: the newspaper is “bien étalé à plat sur la table” and “la radio diffuse un filet sonore qui murmure dans l’espace … comme un ruban de gymnaste” provided by “une voix correctement timbrée” (Kerangal, 2014, 7). This verbal flow and semantic homogeneity is mirrored in the typographical continuity of the opening section which becomes disrupted by the intrusion of the outside world foreshadowing a series of oppositions that drive the entire narrative: inclusion/exclusion, inside/outside, strange/familiar, foreign/ domestic, hospitable/inhospitable. With this formal and thematic shift, Kerangal reframes the reader’s attention and displaces her expectations and assumptions. The rhetorical crescendo of the incipit moves from a slow-paced nocturnal reverie punctuated by sparse domestic gestures into a sense of unease caused by the intrusion of a foreign element called “quelque chose” or “il,” terms associated with the vocabulary of the uncanny. Although undefinable at first, the disruption is associated with acceleration, infiltration, and contagion. The texts taps into the semantic networks of immunity and security that have come to define the current political paradigm where immigrants are perceived to carry “The risk of contamination” which “immediately liquidates contact, relationality, and being in common” (Esposito, 2013, 59).10 Moreover, as John T. Hamilton observes in respect of the privative etymology of both immunity (immunitas, without duty) and security (securitas, sine-cura, without care), the latter purports to protect life, that is, individual life, the life of the one who is relieved of duty, “by means of negating life,” this time referring to its communal forms, standing in opposition to “community,” which implies a shared obligation:

10 Esposito: “The fact that the growing flows of immigrants are thought (entirely erroneously) to be one of the worst dangers for our societies also suggests how central the immunitary question is becoming. Everywhere we look, new walls, new blockades, and new dividing lines are erected against something that threatens, or at least seems to, our biological, social, and environmental identity. It is as if that fear of being even accidentally grazed has been made worse, the fear that Elias Canetti located at the origin of our modernity in a perverse short circuit between touch [tatto], contact [contatto], and contagion [contagio]” (2013, 59).

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[T]his exemption preserves propriety in the strongest sense, for it permits the individual to hold on to a possession or property instead of surrendering it to the realm of the ‘common’ (commune); it prevents the singular entity from being subsumed into the collective […] In this regard, the principle of the common resembles a kind of contagion that, from the standpoint of the individual, poses the risk of disintegration and entropic dissolution […] Whereas the community is formed by means of a sacrifice or expenditure, by giving something away, the private individual is preserved by a refusal of that gift. (Hamilton, 2013, 39)

Kerangal’s writing stages the confrontation between immunity and community, between the protection of the individual exempt from duty and the duty to care for the other, by alternating between two narrative sites: one that is familiar, comfortable, and comforting and another that is foreign, distant, unknown, and unsettling. Every section of the book begins with the incantatory anaphora of the title, written without a capital initial (“à ce stade de la nuit”), that provides a reassuring leitmotiv, a stylistic common thread, a narrative temporal and/or spatial device, but also serves as an indirect reference to the alchemical stages of anabasis or catabasis or the stages of spiritual enlightening as featured in many religious texts, most famously in the Western Christian tradition in Dante’s Divina Commedia. Similarly, every section returns to the domestic space, deploying a variety of interior scenes that take place in the narrator’s home with its different rooms, among which the kitchen or the hearth occupies a central place. These passages are ruled grammatically by the first person, the “je” of the narrator, who describes herself listening to the radio, watching television, reading, smoking, walking, or lounging around, but above all thinking about the shipwreck while recalling memories of past travels, movies watched, books read, and her own experience as a woman, lover, mother, and writer. Much like the islands, “formes finies au milieu de l’infini, formes dont on peut saisir les contours […] créant aussitôt un dedans et un dehors” (Kerangal, 2014, 57), they offer a dwelling place, a protective harbor against the countless perils of the sea. Domestic scenes anchor the narrative as it repeatedly drifts away, swept up by the narrator’s thoughts about other times, places, and people, and becomes driven instead by the third person singular or plural (Burt Lancaster or the character of Angelica, Australian aboriginal culture or the islands of the world). This highlights another thematic polarity central to Kerangal’s text, that between land and sea. An ancient dichotomy opposes hodos and poros, the marked road on which one can travel assuredly and methodically and leave

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traces that allow for a safe return, on the one hand, and the perilous seaways that leave travelers vulnerable to an untraceable, elusive route that tests the limit of the possible.11 The introductory section evokes a vague but persistent and multifarious threat which is eventually crystallized in the image of a natural disaster, a volcanic eruption: “coulée de lave brûlante plongée dans la mer.” The tumult of sensorial experiences underscores the passivity of the subject who witnesses – “je perçois” or “il est là, devant moi” – without reacting (“je ne réagis pas”; Kerangal, 2014, 8, 7). When she does attempt to gather and organize the information, to adopt, as it were, a stance of “interpretative attention” (Citton, 2017, 156), she does so by transcribing the content of the news flash, as indicated by the use of italics in the text and confirmed by the conditional turn of phrase in a formulaic structure that connotes both impersonality and uncertainty: “un bateau venu de Libye, chargé de plus de cinq cents migrants, a fait naufrage ce matin a moins de deux kilomètres des côtes de l’île de Lampedusa; près de trois cents victimes seraient à déplorer” (Kerangal, 2014, 8). Under the danger of intrusion, infection, and landscape-altering destruction, all attempts at a psychological or even logical analysis fade behind the flow of information, as if the world spoke for itself: “Erythrée, Somalie, Malte, Sicile, Tunisie, Libye, Tripoli – tandis que les nombres prolifèrent, se chevauchent, s’additionnent ou se fractionnent, tandis qu’ils comparent: 283 noyés lors d’un naufrage à l’aube de Noël en 1996, près de 3000 morts ou disparus depuis 2002, environ 350 aujourd’hui, ce 3 octobre 2013” (Kerangal, 2014, 9). The beginning of the second section is flooded by a cacophony of voices creating a sense of disorientation, intensified by the visual effect of the fluorescent spectrogram of the radio, with its “bâtonnets vert fluo qui avancent et reculent” (Kerangal, 2014, 9). This synaesthetic image suggests both overcrowding by external elements (voices, sounds, colors) and sensorial saturation as the narrator internalizes these stimuli but fails to extract meaning from them. At first broadcast on the radio, then amplified on television, the event dubbed a “sinister tragedy” is quickly claimed by a serial logic that underlines both its banality and its singularity, expressed through 11 Hamilton: “Humanity may derive its basic orientation from its terrestrial, sedentary standpoint, but it turns to sea as a realm that urges passing ‘through’ (L. per). In brief, the poros could be conceived as the ‘limit’ (peras) of the possible, as the ‘boundary’ (peirar) within the apeiron, determining a path through the lawless origin of law” (2013, 95).

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the use of superlative adjectives that suggest something unprecedented, unparalleled, or unthinkable. This contradiction is made clear in a passage that describes the commercial strategies used to draw attention to the headline while at the same time drowning it with a repetitive drone: “les jingles du Flash Spécial catastrophe de Lampedusa bruitent à intervalles réguliers comme des sonneries d’ascenseur” (Kerangal, 2014, 55). She finds herself petrified, as the image of the erupting volcano suggests, voided of her own words, and populated instead by the biopolitical terminology of data or the sensational language of media headlines “qui enfle[nt] sur les ondes” (Kerangal, 2014, 11). As the affective and verbal flow of the text becomes unmoored, one word manages to anchor the narrator’s attention to the familiar and the known: [J]e perçois seulement une accélération, quelque chose s’emballe, quelque chose de fébrile. Bientôt un nom se dépose: Lampedusa. Il résonne entre les murs, stagne, s’infiltre parmi les poussières, et soudain il est là, devant moi, étendu de tout son long, se met à durcir à mesure que les minutes passent – coulée de lave brûlante plongée dans la mer. (Kerangal, 2014, 8)

The word itself undergoes a process of reification and sedimentation, consistent with the seminal metaphor of volcanic land formation and thus sustaining the book’s antithesis between mineral and aquatic imagery. In “Lampedusa,” the signifier becomes signified, an idea turns into matter, and a mere accident sparks a series of reminiscences that carry the narrator back in time (in her own personal story but also the world’s history) and far into space, where her travels intersect with other forms of journeying and migrating. Through direct or indirect references to the cultural memory of Europe and the world, stretching from the Bible to Proust, Bruce Chatwin, Lacan, and Foucault (whose definition of heterotopy12 is expressly cited in a passage about the sea 12 Nuselovic: “Cette neutralité dans la conception de l’asile est très intéressante. Un lieu ne pense pas et cette neutralité n’est pas moralisée. C’est aussi une certaine neutralité du politique: il y a des sujets et ces sujets doivent vivre ensemble, et c’est à eux de trouver les règles d’un vivre-ensemble qui n’est pas présupposé […] L’arrivée des migrants nous enjoint de réinventer la démocratie autour de ce nouveau sujet qu’est le migrant […] Le migrant qui arrive est porteur de ce droit au secret, et il nous enseigne que nous aussi y avons droit […] Le droit d’asile s’accompagne d’un droit à l’opacité, pour reprendre le terme de Glissant. Le migrant est aujourd’hui, parmi d’autres, ce subalterne à qui est refusée l’identité politique et, partant, la participation au fonctionnement démocratique […] Rien

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as a space of contestation), the book exploits erudition and incites polysemy. Polysemy addresses the questions of doubt and intelligibility raised by a narrator who is trying to make sense of the undifferentiated, even hermetic, abundance of information about the event. It also offers a literary response to the mass-media strategies of differentiation in an escalating competition for the spectator’s (reader’s/listener’s/viewer’s) attention: “le montage des articles, d’une logique cryptée, agence différentes focales et la lisibilité du monde est une aventure disloquée tandis qu’une voix radiophonique densifie graduellement l’information essentielle de la nuit” (Kerangal, 2014, 17). Against the media’s mutually cancelling techniques of relentless refocalization and parceling up of the world, literature and film offer not a unifying narrative, which Kerangal’s poetics rejects, but ways (or methods, as suggested by the ancient Greek methodos)13 of making the world readable and intelligible by recording everydayness or revealing the transformative potential of memory: “J’aime l’idée que l’expérience de la mémoire, autrement dit l’action de se remémorer, transforme les lieux en paysage, metamorphose les espaces illisibles en récit” (Kerangal, 2014, 54). Imagined Shipwrecks: A View from the Shores of Art The text makes strategic use of multilingualism, toponymy, and typographical conventions. English is featured in rare but telling moments: the word “mug” appears on the first page, associated with creature comforts, while “songlines” is at the center of an extensive episode about the narrator’s journey by train across Siberia, the emblematic episode of “la femme nomade” (Kerangal, 2014, 45). Through this otherworldly experience that takes her away from the familiar and the domestic into an anabasis of sorts, “Emportée sur les rails à travers la taïga verticale,” she undergoes a creative awakening during which, thanks to Bruce Chatwin’s volume The Songlines, she learns to listen to the secret chant of “aborigènes australiens” and to imbue herself with the creative power of this “grand récit cosmogonique” (Kerangal, 2014, 40).14 Intratextual de moral dans le droit d’asile, que du politique, et c’est donc sur ce terrain-là qu’il faut le défendre” (2018, n. pag.). 13 OED: method < μετα- meta- prefix + ὁδός way >. 14 See the discussion around the semantics and pragmatics of concepts such as “autochtonous” and “aborigènes” in Detienne (2010).

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hints enable the reader familiar with her work to infer that this led to the birth of the author’s 2010 novel Naissance d’un pont. English – the language and its world literature – functions here as the lingua franca of global and free travel, where “free” means both unburdened and irresponsible, that is, unthinking and exploitative, following an unscrutinized dynamic that allows the exploratory, even conquering, movement of certain bodies through spaces and in ways that are foreclosed to others. Italian expressions offer glimpses of official speeches reflecting what the narrative calls the panicked (“catastrophé”) reactions of the political class to the Lampedusa shipwreck: “dramma senza precedente; uno primo di ed uno dopo; esprimiamo la nostra tristeza e la nostra solidarietà” (Kerangal, 2014, 27). The narrator comments on how these terms “enchâssent Lampedusa dans sa langue d’origine.” The verb enchâsser could be translated as “to frame” but also “to embed” or “to entrench,” signaling a critical stance against a nativist gesture: “le nom propre est indifferent à la phrase où il se place et roule entre les mots comme un caillou qui, pourtant, propagerait sa poésie” (Kerangal, 2014, 28). The text itself calls attention to the interplay between real and fictional name, to its movement from one context to another, from one function (designating, denoting a reality) to another (suggesting, connoting a potentiality): “le nom réel appelle et se déporte dans le nom fictionnel, migre de l’état civil au roman, du registre historique des titres de noblesse à celui de la littérature; […] le nom fictionnel peut ressaisir le nom réel” (Kerangal, 2014, 31). Overdetermined, the name “Lampedusa” is a story in itself, and one with many plotlines – a supernova of artistic references, an island with its unique landscape and culture, a metonymy for other islands in the Mediterranean and around the world, a site of tragedy, and a place of hospitality on the inhospitable borders of Europe: Lampedusa: J’explore ce nom, j’en fais le tour, je le soupèse et le décompose, j’y entends in fine ce toponyme, ces quatre syllabes qui font surgir un espace, catalysent le soleil et l’histoire, le sec, la poudre, la guerre, l’or et le rouge, le délabrement, quelque chose d’archaïque et de langoureux. Ce nom est déjà un récit. (Kerangal, 2014, 28–29)

Indeed, the word and its connotations of deep material history, but also of decomposition and decay, set the narrator off on an imaginary journey. First, she encounters the image of the face of Burt Lancaster, who played Prince Salina in the 1963 film The Leopard, based on the novel

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by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, himself a twentieth-century scion of the island’s aristocracy. The story takes place in Sicily during the tumultuous years of the Italian Risorgimento, in 1860, when Garibaldi and his Red Shirts (le Giubbe Rosse) took the south of Italy by storm and conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Played by Burt Lancaster, the protagonist is Prince Salina, an awesome patriarch whose elemental force stands in contrast with the outdated refinement and impractical nature that are the inherited traits of a dying aristocracy. The solution voiced by his dashing young nephew consists of an alliance with their social inferiors, who represent the wealth necessary to maintain the material traces of past glory as well as an emerging political force with the power to perpetuate their bloodline into the next generations of leaders, according to the principle “que tout change pour que rien ne change” (Kerangal, 2014, 12). An individual sacrifice is necessary for collective survival, represented fictionally by the death of a body, the prince’s, in exchange for the perpetuation of his family. Both the success and the limitations of this exchange are embodied in the novel itself, which functions as a eulogy written by the character’s own descendent. Thus, Kerangal’s narrator, after first hearing about the tragedy of the shipwreck, suddenly takes a detour to elegant scenes of the Italian aristocracy from the middle of the twentieth century. A long process of onomastic daydreaming ensues, reminiscent of the Proustian reveries around the Guermantes and activated by the name itself, to which the narrator relinquishes her initiative, to paraphrase Mallarmé’s famous formula, content to follow its free flow: “le mouvement qu’il déploie” (Kerangal, 2014, 29). In Tomasi di Lampedusa’s name, she singles out the genitival preposition indicative not only of a symbolic but a physical bond with the place, “un homme issu, surgi, venu de cette île,” while also reflecting on his fate as an author whose only novel was a twofold literary grave: his own, as a posthumous publication, but also that of his entire lineage, since the book was inspired by what Kerangal calls “l’autobiographie de sa famille” (2014, 29, 30). This turn of phrase that submerges the individual subject in a collective identity defined by shared land and blood seems somewhat paradoxical but reflects the narrative’s exploration of the interpenetration between names, places, and bodies. In À ce stade de la nuit, their shared agency and mutual erosion are constantly revisited, most tellingly in the case of colonial conquest described in the mineral destruction (crushing, cementing, covering) of local names – which then haunt the space thus divorced from the land:

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[L]’acte de conquête, la prise de possession d’un sol, d’une terre que l’on offre à Dieu, au roi, à l’Église, la conquête d’un territoire que l’on réinitialise, et les noms qui s’y trouveront y seront écrasés, on les concrétionnera, on les recouvrira, si bien qu’ils s’effaceront de la surface du sol mais continueront de hanter l’espace. (Kerangal, 2014, 37)

In revisiting her memories of the story, the narrator favors its cinematic adaptation filtered through her experience of watching the remastered movie in the theater while taking a break from her own creative work. As is often the case in À ce stade de la nuit, her interest in the movie is anchored in a familiar, personal relation, the fact that it received the highest prize at Cannes in 1967, the year of her birth: “Le chef-d’œuvre, la palme d’or 1967 – je vais bientôt naître. Je m’étais décidée au dernier moment, par raccroc, afin d’étirer la journée, et peut-être de la clore en parachevant sa forme – une forme d’outre, des heures compactes agglomérées en une seule séquence de travail” (Kerangal, 2014, 18–19). Held together by a minimal connective grammar, the majority of the text moves swiftly between ideas and temporal lines, allowing them to collide and overlap without explanation. This stands in contrast with the immersive feeling that emanates from her description of the movie. The portrayal of the aristocratic society is elaborate and excessive, overloaded with matter (landscapes, houses, objects) and symbolism (gestures, words, images) to the extent that it becomes fragile, brittle, ready to crumble at any moment. She focuses on two iconic scenes: Don Fabrizio walking down the stairs to greet the ascending Don Calogero, “un paysan du village désormais plus riche que lui-même”; and the famous ball scene, which seems to revolve around Angelica, the up-and-coming man’s daughter, “ce corps qui illumine et contamine l’assemblée” (Kerangal, 2014, 12, 23). The scene that shows the old “leopard” greeting the nouveau riche is described in terms better suited to a siege or a battle: “cet homme dont il sait l’ascension, dont il sait l’assaut” (Kerangal, 2014, 13). Meanwhile, the prince salutes the harbinger of his death with a warm voice while his gaze does more than foreshadow his demise: “voilé de mélancolie, il est déjà dans la mort” (Kerangal, 2014, 13). Delving into Visconti’s iconic ballroom scene, the narrator’s own gaze follows and overlaps with that of the character as it scrutinizes the signs of decrepitude and decay in the people and the place they inhabit: “j’ai scruté la décrépitude qui signe la lente dépose du temps tout autant que le manque d’argent, le manque de force” (Kerangal, 2014, 21). At first glance, the young woman’s laughter

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is interpreted as the brutal action of a conquering intruder, the barbarian’s deadly irruption in the midst of age-old refinement, in a framing that aligns the audience’s sympathies with the aristocrats: “le rire d’Angelica […] ce rire de gorge, excessif et sexuel, d’une durée obscène, ce rire qui pulvérisait la bienséance d’une société pétrifiée, cassait l’ordre social […], un rire en forme d’exécution” (Kerangal, 2014, 22). A second viewing allows for a new interpretation that foregrounds not nostalgia, but an empathy with an even participation in the “violence paradoxale” of this intrusion that, in the medicalized language of immunity, “contaminates” and “asphyxiates” the dying collective body of the Sicilian aristocracy: “ce corps qui illumine et contamine l’assemblée, ce corps qui prend le pouvoir, et enfin, elle est l’étrangère –, se métamorphose inéluctablement en scène de crépuscule, en description quasi anatomique d’un monde qui sombre […] une danse macabre, ritualisée comme une mise à mort, lente manœuvre d’encerclement qui peu à peu finit par asphyxier son objet” (Kerangal, 2014, 22–23). Here the textual use of asyndeton mimics the sweeping and shifting movement of the camera that migrates from one room, one body to another, capturing the prince’s unraveling as he is nauseated, suffocated, and choked by the spectacle that surrounds him. He flees the ballroom in an attempt to escape the fate of his class, collectively corroded by endogamy, vanity, and emptiness, only to find himself before a Greuze painting that presents him with the image of his own end. While remarking that Prince Salina becomes the physical manifestation of “la mort et la fin d’un temps,” the narrator undergoes her own awakening: she realizes that Visconti filmed the scene as a shipwreck and its soundtrack, a waltz, was meant as a swan song for “ce movement qui bascule entraînant l’engloutissement de l’ancien monde, l’instant où l’aristocratie sicilienne chavire” (Kerangal, 2014, 24, 26). Cinema makes possible the endless metamorphosis of the same body, the actor’s, who becomes an empty signifier lending itself to various meanings, much like a name migrating through space or time: “Soudain, l’aristocrate immobile, majestueux en son île, s’efface sous une autre figure, mobile celle-là, d’un homme en maillot de bain surgi à l’orée d’une forêt américaine” (Kerangal, 2014, 14). The “vacuité” and “vanité” of the Italian aristocracy leads the narrator to another stage in her cultural journey: the luxurious superficiality of the high society of the northeastern United States portrayed in the 1960 film The Swimmer, in which Burt Lancaster embodies the protagonist once

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more. The character he plays in this film displays in his tired, naked body (as he obsessively swims in all of the pools in the county) the pain of the emptiness that lurks behind all that society has built: “son corps fatigue, souffre et se détériore à mesure que croît la sensation d’être étranger au monde qui l’entoure, et doutant de sa réalité” (Kerangal, 2014, 14).15 This description of Ned Merrill becoming a stranger to his community by migrating through it in water reminds the narrator of Angelica in the Leopard, who is also described as a stranger, or, rather, a strange body “qui prend le pouvoir” (Kerangal, 2014, 23). Moreover, she finds it particularly interesting that Burt Lancaster, the mid-twentieth-century actor who was regarded as a cinematic “aristocrat,” was in fact the offspring of Anglo-Irish immigrants to the US or, as Kerangal writes in the text using a contested but deeply engrained French idiomatic phrase, “issu de l’immigration” (2014, 16). Thus, a narrative emerges in which migration seems to be both a death sentence for the aristocracy, and the antidote to the violence of this very death. The visible site of the various imaginings and stagings of death is the body of the actor. Even though it marks a border between fictional and real worlds, it is a porous one, both belonging to this world and outside of it, both memorable and fluctuating. As John T. Hamilton points out, the word porous is related to “trial” and “attempt” (peira) and its Indo-European roots encompass a semantic field that extends from experience to peril and perhaps even to the hostile pirate. In ancient Greek, poros designates a waterway, a concept that excludes security, traceability, and memorialization: “Assured conveyance, convertibility, and memorialization were functions denied to a poros, the word for ‘way’ that was commonly associated with water. The waves’ surface admitted no inscription. A sea journey could never be perfectly retraceable” (Hamilton, 2013, 94). Shaped by an internal struggle between reassuring fixity and fascinating malleability, the actor’s strong, athletic, grounded body is belied by his liquid eyes: “trop clairs, d’un bleu liquid, ces yeux qui sondent l’envers du monde, cette zone intérieure de vacillement et de trouble” (Kerangal, 2014, 13). While his muscular physique recommends him as a product of the Hollywood 15 Sanyal: “Both humanitarian and securitarian approaches, however opposed in intention, envision the irregular migrant as a body to be saved, contained, policed, moved around, encamped, kept out, or expelled; in short, as a body to be managed” (2017, 5).

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commercial machine, his face is a palimpsest of fantasmatic projections under which the actor’s own identity disappears: “recouvert d’écritures, les compulsant une à une et les fusionnant toutes en un seul récit dont Burt Lancaster serait absent” (Kerangal, 2014, 14). In him, Prince Salina and Ned Merrill become one and the same, a two-dimensional, reversible figure of humanity. Through this juxtaposition, Kerangal casts Ned as a migrant. Ned’s world is one where all known powers are collapsing, causing him to lose his marriage, familial authority, financial stability, social class, even his sexual appeal despite his “Hollywood body,” and, eventually, his place on earth. Despite his wish to go “home,” he wanders randomly and finds himself at other people’s homes, left with nothing but a general sense of direction that leads him along a directionless water route. The pivotal theme of the body reactivates the text’s own memory, bringing back to the fore the thoughts sparked by the original event about the exhausted, suffering, and alienating body of the migrant: “le migrant abîmé dans une trajectoire de plus en plus douloureuse, un parcours où son corps fatigue, souffre et se déteriore à mesure que croît la sensation d’être étranger au monde qui l’entoure, et doutant de sa réalité” (Kerangal, 2014, 15). The ethical implications of such associations are clear. So is the danger of a (false) conflation of the two men’s conditions through the state of “insondable tristesse,” the unfathomable sorrow that would bind together “le prince et le migrant” (Kerangal, 2014, 16), an emotional connection further reinforced by the two characters’ identification with the body of the actor that gave them life, Burt Lancaster. The trite argument of the common humanity of Prince Salina and Ned Merrill disregards and erases their differences while also mirroring Kerangal’s own poetics of indistinctiveness, accumulation, and conflation. One of the most dizzying moments of the text features a list of different shipwrecks on a desert island that stretches from Ulysses to Robinson Crusoe to Finbarr Peary (her own character from the 2006 book Ni fleurs ni couronnes) to Adèle H. and the sinking of the cruise ship Costa Concordia in January 2012. In another problematic passage, when realizing that Salina, the surname of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s protagonist, is itself a toponym designating a different island, north of Sicily in the Eolian archipelago, the narrator confesses her utter satisfaction. This manifestation of physical pleasure before a verbal coincidence that supports her own quest seems incongruous with the serious context of her story: “Je

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tremble de plaisir et frotte mes paumes l’une contre l’autre: deux noms pour deux îles. D’un nom à l’autre, d’une île à l’autre, la migration se poursuit” (Kerangal, 2014, 31). The primal pleasure of playing with the names, bouncing them around, reversing them, setting them in pairs or in opposition, drawing boundaries – “Lampedusa/Salina. Salina/ Lampedusa” (Kerangal, 2014, 31) – is an affirmation of verbal mastery over the world and its meaning.16 This seems closer to Lucretius’ Suave, mari magno aesthetic of the sublime rooted in witnessing the immeasurable suffering of humanity than to Adorno’s view on the unsayable and the traumatic burden of poetry after Auschwitz. Far from being the only jarring shift or association in the book, it defines Kerangal’s approach to writing about migration as a necessary death. The poetics of the list, extensively deployed in À ce stade de la nuit, illustrates the world-making power of migration, taken both in its symbolic and material forms. An enumeration of real and fictional places culminates in a vision of her own name and surname written on road signs in red, black, and white and in capital letters as if rising from the surface of the text: Je songe maintenant à ces noms propres qui sont des toponymes, à ces anthroponymes qui désignent des lieux, à ces villes qui s’appellent Athènes ou Lisbonne sous différentes latitudes, à ces personnages qui se nomment Quichotte ou Gargantua, Guermantes ou Meaulnes, je pense au Havre et à Bouville, à la route des Flandres et à Ellis Island, aux Cards et à Lascaux, je prononce lac Baïkal et Wyoming, je prononce Sahara et cap Horn, et encore détroit de Gibraltar et delta du Mékong, je murmure Zanzibar […] les noms se bousculent, ils vibrent et prolifèrent, et parmi eux, sur une route des Landes, dans l’été qui bourdonne, ce panneau 16 The slash between the two island names can also be interpreted as a shore. Hamilton: “The experiential shore is a paradigmatic boundary. In dividing the land from the sea, it provides the model for determination, for that which produces meaning by imposing structure, by extracting something definable from the murky confusion that lies outside. Secure – immovable, unassailable – knowledge begins where solid ground differentiates itself from the flowing waters of the restless, boundless, and sterile sea. Unlike a property line, whose validity and legitimacy rest on social conventions or ultimately, as Rousseau surmised, on the force of language itself, the shoreline’s status as border would appear to be independent of verbal representation, cognitive mediation or legal fiat. We do not need to be told that the beach marks a frontier; we can simply be shown that this is the case, concretely and immediately. Here the land ends; here the sea begins. Here you are safe, able to breathe; there you must swim if you are not to drown” (2013, 90).

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rectangulaire liseré de rouge et ces lettres noires inscrivant MAYLIS sur un fond blanc, ou cet autre, photographié en novembre, en Finistère, signalant KERANGALL sous un ciel noir. (Kerangal, 2014, 34–35)

Inscribing her name, the author asserts her presence in the landscape of the text while also recognizing the ways in which real and imaginary landscapes shape it: “Je pense à ces noms inscrits dans les paysages et je pense aux paysages véhiculés dans les noms” (Kerangal, 2014, 35). The author’s name as a site of polysemy, dissemination, loss of self but also recovery of many possible selves through communal experience is also saliently featured in Patrick Chamoiseau’s work. In the context of a poetics of the literary tomb, this widespread practice of self-inscription in the work stretches, as Agathe Sultan explains, at least as far back as the Middle Ages.17 The split between the name and the surname, seen in different regions of the country, and the dark skies hanging over “Kerangall” suggest that the signature can also be read as a self-epitaph, à une lettre près. Names appear as both harbingers of death and instruments of survival in another fantasmatic passage that recreates through ekphrasis the transatlantic journey and colonial conquest. The text shifts into a narrative present evocative of the anxiety and anticipation, the mortal dangers and the life-giving hope associated with the adventure of the seafaring men who set out “en ce jour de l’an de grâce 1492” to find the promised land.18 “[L]es hommes avaient déposé les noms sur la Terre” (Kerangal, 2014, 35) – colonization is portrayed here as the action of disseminating and inseminating the land with new names, and, indeed, new laws while concealing the old which nonetheless continue to exist as a ghostly presence. It is the narrator’s task to find a way to recover what has been wiped off the map 17 As “[une] époque qui mène une vaste réflexion sur la mort en général et sur celle de l’écrivain en particulier,” the medieval period “pose le problème de la survie d’un nom à travers ce qui deviendra l’œuvre” (Sultan, 2005, 155). 18 Hamilton: “The sea’s untrustworthiness creates a gap in the future, which could also constitute an opportunity […] fundamental, anthropological fear of the high sea’s many obvious perils [but also] testing ground for heroic feats […] Seafaring might lead to a horrific death or to utter disappearance into an unmarked grave, but it might also generate profit and power” (2013, 85). In his glossing of Hegel’s reflection on the sea, Ladha observes: “Where an attachment to the land creates bonds of ‘dependence,’ tying an individual to the obligations of family, the ‘infinite’ sea offers ‘limitless’ [unendliche] possibilities for material gain, not only through colonization and migration, but also through commerce and piracy” (2019, 216).

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but continues to resonate in the name, what lives on within it and calls out to be heard: “J’ai pensé aux fantômes qui logeaient dans les noms, et je me suis demandé comment les entendre, comment les percevoir” (Kerangal, 2014, 38). In 2015, the death of little Alan Kurdi laid bare the absurd urgency of such questions. When recounting her memories of a trip to Stromboli, the narrator casts herself as a traveling stranger, a migrant landing on an unknown island, taking in every detail of its volcanic landscape: “j’y suis arrivée comme une étrangère, exactement comme j’arrive dans un livre” (Kerangal, 2014, 52). Yet she also takes possession of the place by being able to return to it and transform it into an extension of her familiar space. Her experience is that of a tourist who enjoys the initial mix of anxiety and excitement, followed by the pleasure of (self-)discovery and newfound intimacy with a formerly unknown place: “je traîne dans l’archipel […] Petites migrations bouclées sur une journée, parfois deux” (Kerangal, 2014, 51).19 When leaving the island, however, the tone reaches an unusual level of pathos as she portrays herself as torn, grappling with nostalgia, trying to reach a place that feels as if it belonged to her precisely because she is a foreigner (Kerangal uses one of her stylistic signatures, the verb rallier, which usually means “to gather or collect,” in a lesser known sense of “reaching” a place): “quelque chose me déchire, une forme de nostalgie, et quand j’y reviens, j’ai le sentiment de rallier un lieu qui est le mien, où je suis chez moi quand pourtant j’y suis une étrangère – qui est peut-être le mien précisément parce que j’y suis arrivée comme une étrangère, exactement comme j’arrive dans un livre” (Kerangal, 2014, 52). With this to and fro between migrant and tourist, foreigner and local, free and forced migration, Kerangal’s poetics traces an asymptotic curve to paracolonial empathy, gesturing towards the possibility of imagining herself as the suffering Other without crossing over into humanitarian self-identification. 19 elhariry and Talbayev: “For de Kerangal, who like any other North-Western European visitor to the Mediterranean engages the grand narrative of history from the privileged perspective of agency, the instant purveys delightful disorientation, and exhilarating loss of coordination conducive to an affective rerooting of her distressed, modern subjectivity in the nurturing strata of Mediterranean ‘memory’” (2018, 2). Here the writer’s “dual temporal mode” is perceived as a marker of inclusion or exclusion from history, a consequence of his dichotomy between a linear teleology associated with the “West” and the tyranny of the instant prevalent in the “East.” But what if her narrative’s “jerky, fragmented, unsynchronized temporality” (elhariry and Talbayev, 2018, 4) were an attempt at envisioning a plural, or, to follow Cheah, heterogenous historicity?

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The Graveyard of Memory Constantly alternating between autobiographical sections that plumb the depths of the narrator’s personal and cultural memory and essayistic portions that offer cultural and anthropological reflections, the text is rooted in experience without allowing itself to be limited to a self-indulgent intellectual exercise or textual model: autobiography, autofiction, writer’s journal, or travel diary. The focus shifts constantly between intense and intimate personal recollections and larger reflections that provide a sense of scale that can “connect and even conflate what is geographically, geopolitically, temporally, or morally ‘near’ while simultaneously distinguishing that nearness from that which is ‘far’” (Carr and Lempert, 2016, 3). À ce stade de la nuit can be envisioned as a literary “scalar process” insofar as it reconfigures foundational experiences (traveling, having a name, facing death) by shifting them from individual to global or transhistoric contexts.20 Such is the case of the trans-Siberian travel episode in which personal reverie morphs into a dream that blends together clanic songlines, collective memory, and world cartography: 20 In their Introduction to Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life, Carr and Lempert explain: “As an inherently relational and comparative endeavor, scaling may thus connect and even conflate what is geographically, geopolitically, temporally, or morally ‘near’ while simultaneously distinguishing that nearness from that which is ‘far.’ Similarly, scaled hierarchies are the effects of efforts to sort, group, and categorize many things, people, and qualities in terms of relative degrees of elevation or centrality. Think, for example, of the way one entity or domain seems to encompass another, as with maps that subordinate localities within higher order administrative units, or of the way nation-states are commonly thought to hover ‘above’ communities. The fact that scaling involves vantage points and the positioning of actors with respect to such vantage points means that there are no ideologically neutral scales, and people and institutions that come out ‘on top’ of scalar exercises often reinforce the distinctions that so ordained them. In other words, the scales that seem most natural to us are intensively institutionalized, and that is why collectives readily accept that the leviathan of the State or God hover above landmen, or that one realm of political or ritual authority encompasses another. Yet people are not simply subject to pre-established scales; they develop scalar projects and perspectives that anchor and (re)orient themselves. Working from the premise that scale is process before it is product, this volume is dedicated to explaining how, why, and to what ends people and institutions scale their worlds” (2016, 3–4). I would like to thank Gaya Morris for making me aware of this work.

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Plus tard, bercée, je me suis endormie et j’ai rêvé sur ces songlines qui résorbent l’ADN d’un clan, jouant comme des noms propres: lignes de chant figurant un parcours terrestre, récit mythique ou poème de remémoration, ces psalmodies cartographiques décrivent une identité. Appartenir au clan, c’est connaître et transmettre le chant de l’ancêtre, c’est actualiser et léguer la mémoire d’un parcours singulier; appartenir au clan, c’est chanter son paysage. (Kerangal, 2014, 43)

It is an atavistic fantasy that once more seems to bring Kerangal’s writing dangerously close to a nativist discourse of belonging based on a natural, organic connection between people and their land, “la terre et les morts.” But the songlines create instead a man-made, artful, and fictional relation to the land: belonging to the clan means learning to sing about its landscape, to acquire and convey a system of representations, learning to perform an identity. In the final sections of the book the on of the shared perspective replaces the monological je. Attempting to imagine what travelers drifting at sea might experience when their lives hang in the balance, the narrator describes the frightful fight to survive using the future perfect, the hypothetical tense of events that have not yet occurred and whose existence depends on other events just as improbable: “on aura nagé,” “on aura gémi” (Kerangal, 2014, 59). The emphasis on shared vulnerability is apparent as the text moves from an individual to a collective experience. These passages are followed by others in the historical present of a successful outcome, but the actions of the survivors presage a world that seeks to eliminate the very vulnerability which made it possible: “on y survit, on est comme dans un rêve, parfois on y recrée le monde […], on y repense la politique, le régime de pouvoir et de propriété […] on rencontre […] une autre créature humaine, un monstre, des êtres anthropophages, des indiens” (Kerangal, 2014, 59).21 As if heeding the call of a voice that casts shame and summons the whole world to come and see what has happened, the narrator leaves the room (the domestic, familiar place and also the space occupied by mass media) and turns her focus, one last time, to the original event: “Soudain, une voix comme une boule de feu affole la cuisine, elle est archaïque et 21 The allusions to such encounters suggest the use of colonization in Western history as a “technology for regulating migratory movements” particularly as colonial powers “considered that this form of migration would ultimately be of advantage to the country of departure” (Mbembe, 2019, 10) by relieving them of the social, economic, and moral burden represented by the idle and depraved poor.

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déplacée, vergogna, vergogna! Elle demande au monde entier de venir voir, de venir voir ce qui se passe ici, à Lampedusa. Pile à cet instant, j’ai décidé de quitter la pièce” (Kerangal, 2014, 60). A narrative crescendo shows her at first playing with the written names of places, getting lost in their iconicity: “si long, si étirés, que la dernière lettre migre à des centaines de kilomètres de la première” (Kerangal, 2014, 62). She further conjures up the referent hidden behind the sign when, trying to calculate the distances between Lampedusa and Tunisia and Sicily, she burns her fingertips on her electric globe trying to reach the places represented on it. This tactile cartography leads her to observe the island’s solitude – “Lampedusa est seule au monde” – and the vagueness of the sea, where time is abolished and all attempts at controlling the space are doomed to fail –“la mer floue où s’abolit le temps et la topographie” (Kerangal, 2014, 63, 64). Citing Foucault, the narrator remarks that, even though timeless and measureless, the sea is not a non-place but a place of contestation: a contestation, as the text implies in an increasingly feverish, accelerating tone, between law and lawlessness, between licit travel and illegal, “hors la loi” migration.22 This has transformed the sea into an immense graveyard: “à mesure que s’intensifie la violence, que s’amplifie la pauvreté, que se répand la guerre; elle aussi est habitée d’épaves, peuplée de cadavres, hantée de fantômes” (Kerangal, 2014, 67). The law grants immunity or carelessness to some while condemning others to an anonymous and anomic mass: “Le droit de la mer impose de venir en aide aux bateaux en détresse quand d’autres au contraire avaient dû s’affoler, informés des dernières dispositions des États en lutte 22 Ladha infers from his analysis of Hegel’s concept of state and cosmopolitanism, that open borders are the true realization of the Hegelian state and a critique of “abstract cosmopolitanism”: “The traversal of boundaries by peoples adapting to the universality of the mature state thus marks a laudable effect of cosmopolitan ethicality” (2019, 242). He applies his conclusions to the current global state of affairs: “The abstract cosmopolitanism of the current global order allows citizens of rich states almost unfettered access to any country on earth; millions travel abroad for leisure, education, research, or business annually. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of human beings escaping privation and violence risk their lives annually to enter the world’s rich states. Tens of thousands have perished in the waters of the Mediterranean and Pacific and the deserts of North America. Rich states incarcerate thousands of migrants, sometimes in facilities resembling concentration camps. Tens of millions of undocumented and even documented migrants living on the soil of the world’s most free states frequently do not have the same rights as citizens” (Ladha, 2019, 265).

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contre l’immigration illégale, avertis qu’en ce qui les concerne, le droit n’existait plus, justement, ils étaient hors de la loi” (Kerangal, 2014, 73). Kerangal captures here the absurdity of a situation in which the political assumption of the migrants’ “outlaw” status encourages or intimidates those who should act lawfully into forsaking their duty. Moreover, in a context in which the very framework of the law (its principles, its coherence) ceases to exist, “le droit n’exist[e] plus,” the very meaning of duty is contested between the duty to care for another that founds a political community and the duty to obey the rules that ensures its survival. The extended ekphrasis of the shipwreck imagines the event both inside and outside this anomic and amorphous condition. Its vivid scenes are filled with physical details that do not coalesce into any one particular portrait. Faces are disintegrated into pupils and mouths, bodies are only conveyed through sensory perceptions like hearing the sound of the sea, listening to the radio and to the sound of the motor sputtering, smelling gasoline and seeing the fire erupt, and feelings are dominated by fear and exhaustion (Kerangal, 2014, 71–72). In a highly cinematic style, the narrator alternates between close-ups of cold damp clothing on shivering bodies packed close together or the rust and salty crust of the boat’s flanks and the distant view that reduces the bodies to tiny dots or specks (“petits grains noirs”) on the surface of the sea. The tragic conclusion is condensed in a disconnected enumeration of sensorial stimuli: “pagaille de ploufs, cris, désordre” (Kerangal, 2014, 72). The shipwreck’s contradictory speed, at once very slow and very fast, endless and definitive, likens it to a natural event, a sunset: “C’est la toute la singularité de l’événement, sa morbidité extrême” (Kerangal, 2014, 73). Fragmentation and indirectness evoke lived experience without pretending to duplicate it; they offer the writer a means to recover “something” of the order of the event, while indicating the impossibility of recovering any one thing. Contrary to the narrator’s declarations about the seminal importance of the word “Lampedusa,” an attentive reading of À ce stade de la nuit reveals that “quelque chose” may be its key lexeme. This is consistent with the text’s recurrent use of deixis, such as indefinite or demonstrative pronouns, to designate objects that are not fully graspable. Earlier in the text, the local Australian population foreseeing their own death upon the arrival of the colonizers is designated as “ceux-là tapis dans le sous-bois” (Kerangal, 2014, 37). Later on, as the narrator begins to imagine the shipwreck scene, in one of the rare

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overtly political comments in the book, she refers to “l’innombrable, la multitude, la foule, les pauvres, tout ce qui grouille et qui a faim, tout ce qui fuit sa terre” (Kerangal, 2014, 69). At the end, when she sketches the encounter between the survivors and the inhabitants of the island who host them, she calls the former “ces êtres qui n’avaient plus rien et ne pouvaient plus prononcer leur nom” and the latter “ceux de l’île, isolés et pauvres eux-mêmes” (Kerangal, 2014, 74).23 Even though the text does feature names and adjectives such as aboriginal, native, migrant, and poor, deixis allows the writer to avoid finite designations that can enclose people into fixed and overdetermined labels. Indexicality supports an open semantics, allowing a word to change its reference from one context to another. It suggests a situational, not absolute, universality that can shift with the speaker/ reader’s point of view while also awakening and guiding the listener/ reader’s attention, the sole corrective at her disposal when faced with an event that demands clarity against the confusion of its media representations: Le flou du nombre des victimes est une violence révoltante, quand le désir de précision, à l’inverse, signe une éthique de l’attention – l’approximation fait voir la paresse, désigne vaguement l’innombrable, la multitude, la foule, les pauvres, tout ce qui grouille et qui a faim, tout ce qui fuit sa terre. (Kerangal, 2014, 69)

While it may seem paradoxical to use desemanticized terms in support of an ethics of precision, it is reflective of what I would call, drawing on Hamilton’s philological inquiry, a “shoreline semantics.” On the one hand, it suggests “a measure on earth that precedes any naming or signification, a line or caesura that is in itself prehistorical and prehuman” (Hamilton, 2013, 90). The shipwreck scene suggests both the fragility and strength of Agamben’s “bare life.” This does not invite an outraged or a pitying humanitarian stance, which is often the result of an event glossed in terms of a historical or experiential rift. Instead, it invites reflection on the limits and conditions of our coexistence by directing attention to our collective vulnerability, simultaneously here and there, near and far, as if seen from a “prehistorical and prehuman” 23 By foreground the economic commonality between the two groups, Kerangal foregoes any questioning of the ethnic and racial distinctions (such as petits Blancs vs. “visible” migrants) rooted in colonial history and perpetuated in neo-colonial discriminations.

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shoreline. This reading is further supported by the intransitive use of reflexive or transitive verbs, the action of which is not directed inwards or at an inanimate object, affecting instead the human subject who is transformed in a process of mineralization and archeologization: “l’événement cristallise doucement, il instaure une scène qui se précise, tranchée, épouvantablement nette […] le nom de fiction […] avait fini par sédimenter en moi” (Kerangal, 2014, 70, 76). On the other hand, “deixis could be regarded as already belonging to a semanticizing process – the coast furnishes a limit that functions as a phenomenon – that is, an image for a subject” (Hamilton, 2013, 90).24 In choosing to forego common or proper nouns in favor of indexicality, the writer also mutes without entirely silencing the salvific pathos and preempts any underlying political theology embedded in the scene of the migrants’ rescue by the island’s inhabitants: “ils les avaient relevés et l’humanité entière avec eux. Hospitalité” (Kerangal, 2014, 74). It frames hospitality as an act of recovery equally important to the guests and the hosts, who all share in the humanity that has been “raised” from the sea. This humanity, however, does not indicate a (new) blood tie, an original unity, or a contract obtained as an expression of combined wills.25 There is no collective or intersubjectivity, but rather a relation between “ils” and “eux,” two neutral terms indicating openness and reversibility: Étrangement, le toponyme insulaire n’avait encore jamais recouvert le nom de fiction qui avait fini par sédimenter en moi – ce nom de légende, 24 Hamilton: “On the one hand, deixis would suffice and render semantics superfluous. In pointing to the shore – however irregular it may appear, however much it may shift with the tide – we seem to indicate a measure on earth that precedes any naming or signification, a line or caesura that is in itself prehistorical and prehuman. On the other hand, deixis could be regarded as already belonging to a semanticizing process. In constituting a perceptible edge, the coast furnishes a limit that functions as a phenomenon – that is, an image for a subject – and thereby articulates any number of extrapolations and interpretations that necessarily take place in time, within history. In this regard, the physical immediacy of the shoreline can only be posited as that which has already been sublated into meaningful space. Theorists of social space have long acknowledged the dialectical process that obtains between pure reference and signification” (2013, 90). 25 The collective is not a work or œuvre, but a neutral object: “L’être-en-commun signifie que les êtres singuliers ne sont, ne se présentent, ne paraissent que dans la mesure où ils com-paraissent, où ils sont exposés, présentés, ou offerts les uns aux autres” (Nancy, 1986, 146).

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ce nom de cinéma – , mais ce matin-là, matin du 3 octobre 2013, il s’est retourné comme un gant, Lampedusa concentrant en lui seul la honte et la révolte, le chagrin, désignant désormais un état du monde, un tout autre récit. (Kerangal, 2014, 76)

Constant Crisis, Cyclical Commemoration The event of October 3, 2013 alters the state of the world by turning inside out the very language used to describe and think about migration, loss, and the duty to remember those whose names will never be known. Through the free and seemingly irresponsible association of facts and memories, and by running the risk of wandering into the wrong ideological territory, À ce stade de la nuit signals a moment of crisis, a decisive moment (from the Greek κρίνειν, to decide), that can also mean a turning point in a disease which could be followed by death or recovery.26 However, instead of framing crisis as an either/or and the event as before/after, it forces us to consider the two simultaneously, and to hold together their life-and-death potentiality. Through this refusal or negative choice, À ce stade signals that when crisis is posited as the very condition of contemporary situations, certain questions become possible while others atre foreclosed (Roitman, 2013, 41). Naming a situation a “crisis” implies, according to Janet Roitman, that what was once perfectly intelligible and construed as productive (debt is a credit) is now taken to be without basis and construed as a negative value form (debt is a toxic asset). Answers to the question, what went wrong? are devised according to the “is” versus “ought” distinctions inherent to paradox. This means that post hoc analyses in terms of crisis necessarily entail an assumed teleology. (2013, 93–94)

Instead of subscribing to an “assumed teleology” of migration crisis narratives, Kerangal’s text invites a form of “attentional activism”

26 OED: “Etymology: < Latin crisis, < Greek κρίσις discrimination, decision, crisis, < κρίνειν to decide […] 1. Pathology. The point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; the turning-point of a disease for better or worse; also applied to any marked or sudden variation occurring in the progress of a disease and to the phenomena accompanying it.”

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(Citton, 2017, 146)27 by opening up the event, taking it out of its forbidding isolation which, by making it appear unthinkable, would give license not to think about it, to simply be carried on by the flow of everyday life, domestic comfort, travel memories, and art’s alleviating and redemptive power. Lampedusa becomes a stumbling stone, a Stolperstein, standing for but also standing out among the litany of “names on earth” around which Kerangal’s writing crystallizes and takes shape. In his 2017 essay-manifesto, Frères migrants, Chamoiseau compels contemporary consciousness to consider the enormity (to be siderated, that is, etymologically, to experience the necrosis) of the continuity between slavery and migration whose crimes are memorialized in the immense cemeteries of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean: “Le continent des Africains du fond de l’Atlantique […] rejoint dans une exacte sidération son double en Méditerranée.” (Chamoiseau, 2017, 23–24). The mutability of the name brings forth the ways in which the nonhuman physicality of the world encounters the ideality of human action. In a sea of potential existence, it marks the lasting trace of an action and the sign of an intentionality but cannot deliver the meaning of the event it commemorates – this burden falls on the passerby.28

27 In practicing attentional activism, “one makes a conspicuous demonstration of one’s joint attention so as to draw collective attention to an unjustly ignored object” (Citton, 2017, 146). 28 In the last section of his book, entitled “The Ethics of the Passerby,” Mbembe completes his own theoretical tomb, dedicated to Frantz Fanon, by defining the terms of the Martinican thinker’s living legacy: “To traverse the world; to take the measure of the accident represented by our place of birth, with its weight of arbitrariness and constraint; to wed the irreversible flow comprising the time of life and existence; to learn to assume our status as passerby as the condition, in the last instance, of our humanity, as the base from which we create culture – these are perhaps, ultimately, the most untreatable questions of our time, questions that Fanon will have bequeathed to us in his pharmacy, the pharmacy of the passerby (passant)” (2019, 186). He launches into a thorough and imaginative political semiology of the term “passant” that accounts for its manifold relations with words such as pas (“not” but also “step”), passé (“past”), passeur (“smuggler”), and passage.

Conclusion From Dead Letters to Literary Tombs Conclusion the first three nights in the grave are the saddest. only then do the dead know they have left behind their families, and there is no comfort to bury such loss. we sit with our dead the first night to show we are not afraid to go on and then we set them free. we must not burden our dead. those first three nights are carriage enough. and we want to be well-remembered even among the graves the walled cities of the dead. (Osbey, 2015, 107)

Necrofiction offers contemporary writers singular yet recognizable ways of engaging critically and creatively with other forms of memorialization such as family genealogy, historical writing, and hegemonic national, ethnic, or religious discourses. It is used to challenge the social, cultural, and political doxa in the name of a personal, intimate, lived engagement with death, the dead, and their legacy. Necrofiction seeks to instill meaning into the symbolic body of the dead but, in so doing, is always on the verge of erasing their radical difference and taming their alterity. This contemporary form allows writers to reclaim fiction’s powers of recovering sensate forms and sensible meanings from the semiotic and ethical paralysis of trauma writing. Yet it constantly tests literature’s representational and expressive ability to convey the experience of death and to pass on the memory of the dead. Readers of contemporary literature thus find themselves involved in acts of remembrance

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and commemoration that constantly vacillate between the private and the public realms, attending to the traces of the past and shaping the future, honoring others and asserting one’s artistic and moral authority. They are also invited to appreciate the proximity and distance between necrofiction and other forms and genres such as trauma writing, archival narratives, historical novels, biofiction, or field literature all the while remaining vigilant to the aesthetic and philosophical affordances and limitations that define the commemorative literary practices of our times. In 2019, Didier Daeninckx published a volume with Éditions Verdier entitled Le Roman noir de l’Histoire, a collection of 77 novellas with topics covering over 150 years of “d’histoire contemporaine française,” as the back cover’s blurb states. This intriguing resemantization of the term stretches the limits of the contemporary all the way back to the Paris Commune and the Berlin Treaty. Offering a retrospective and comprehensive look at the work of a writer whose commitment to unearthing and revisiting hidden, forgotten, or willfully ignored moments of French history as world history (the slave trade of the first colonial empire, the conquests and “civilizing mission” of the second, the Nazi Occupation along with the French Collaboration and Resistance movements, the colonial wars in “Indochina” and Algeria …), the volume evinces the size and scope of a contemporary literary tomb. Of monumental aspect, it comprises more than 800 pages organized according to a complex literary chronology aimed at performing a gesture of “reconnaissance et […] reparation” (Boucheron, 2019, 12). Featuring a foreword signed by the historian Patrick Boucheron, the book also contains a critical apparatus indicating not only the original sources (Daeninckx’s previous publications) from which the texts are reprinted but also a list of his other works, novels in particular, alongside which these short texts can be read and interpreted. All these paratextual gestures point to a resolve to curate a literary legacy. But the meaning of this legacy is inextricably tied to the content and the ethical mission of the stories featured in Le Roman noir de l’Histoire, with titles such as “Cimetière d’Afrique” or “Fatima pour mémoire” (reminiscent of the writer’s remarkable 1984 volume Meurtres pour mémoire). Boucheron captures the necrofictional when he notes of one of the short stories featured in the volume: C’est comme s’il accompagnait le cadavre de l’adolescente jusqu’à son cénotaphe de mots, ce monument aux morts que l’on doit à l’universel singulier des existences sacrifiées, “des dizaines de lignes à remplir pour

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rendre leur identité à chacune des victimes, afin que l’oubli ne soit plus possible.” (Boucheron, 2019, 12–13)

Necrofiction thus grapples with the symbolic figure that Quentin Meillassoux calls “le spectre essentiel,” a dead person whose untimely, horrific, or unfathomable disappearance prevents them from leaving the realm of the living: Qu’est-ce qu’un spectre devenu spectre essentiel, spectre par excellence? Un mort dont la mort fut telle que nous ne pouvons en faire le deuil. C’est-à-dire: un mort sur lequel le travail de deuil, le passage du temps, n’a pas suffisamment prise pour qu’un lien apaisé entre lui et les vivants puisse être envisagé. Un mort qui clame l’horreur de sa mort non pas seulement à ses proches, à ses intimes, mais à tous ceux qui croisent la route de son histoire. Les spectres essentiels, ce sont les morts terribles: morts précoces, et morts odieuses, mort de l’enfant, mort des parents sachant leurs enfants voués au même sort, et autres encore. Morts de mort naturelle ou criminelle, morts d’une mort qui ne pouvait être assumée ni par ceux qui la subirent, ni par ceux qui leur survivent. Les spectres essentiels sont des morts qui refuseront toujours de regagner leur rive, qui se désenveloppent obstinément de leur linceul pour déclarer aux vivants, contre toute évidence, que leur place est toujours parmi eux. Leur fin ne recèle aucun sens, n’accompagne aucun achèvement. (2006, 105)

The French philosopher’s language is quite revealing: he has recourse to personification to emphasize the agency of the dead, their refusal to “cross over,” to “reach the other side of the river,” with an allusion to the mythological Lethe, which functioned not only as a boundary but also a source of oblivion on their passage into the underworld. Obstinately shedding their shroud to “declare” their presence among us despite all evidence to the contrary, these specters require a singular kind of mourning that transcends the mere disposal of corporeal remains and attendant ritual gestures. The catachresis calls attention to the fact that it is the living who find themselves unable to let go of “senseless” deaths that have brought a life to an (abrupt or early) end without, however, fulfilling a destiny. Forced to find ways of healing what seems like an incurable psychological wound caused by the constant breach of the boundaries between orders of being and communities of existence, the ones who are left behind – but not alone – must learn to perform a new type of mourning, which Meillassoux calls a “deuil essentiel” (2006, 106). This process is aimed neither at accepting the separation nor excluding or taming the ghosts; instead, it intends to cultivate a living,

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“non-morbid” relation between the living and those who have died a “terrible death”: On appellera deuil essentiel l’accomplissement du deuil des spectres essentiels: c’est-à-dire la relation vivante et non plus morbide des vivants aux morts terribles […] Accomplir le deuil essentiel signifierait: vivre avec les spectres essentiels, et non plus mourir avec eux. Faire vivre les spectres au lieu de devenir, à leur écoute, un fantôme de vivant. La question qui se pose à nous est donc la suivante: le deuil essentiel est-il possible – et si oui, à quelles conditions? (Meillassoux, 2006, 106)1

Linda Lê’s writing brings an anti-representational answer to this question. In refusing to part with the dead, who therefore are never truly departed but only transformed, her texts scrutinize the symbiosis between the essential specter and the ghost of a living being without seeking the closure brought about by the dialectics of a narrative of mourning. One could say with Caruth that at the core of these stories is “a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of the event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (1996, 7). But Lê’s writing neither resolves this dichotomy nor does it ultimately sink into its vertiginous melancholy spiral; instead, it chooses to inhabit its duality. Just as the imaginary worlds she creates constantly teeter between the disturbingly oneiric and the poignantly realistic, her writing offers a singular example of prose-poetry. It does not overcome but instead draws its living substance from the dead letters of the past. Patrick Modiano adopts a meta-representational approach to necrofiction. As his work grapples with a buried yet ever-present past, his writing lays bare the reasons why a literary project predicated on 1 In his discussion of the possible answers to this question, Meillassoux delves into the ontological and ethical considerations of the issue, framing it in terms of God’s existence or non-existence, a matter that, albeit extremely interesting and with vast implications for literature’s ways of envisioning death, falls outside of the purview of my argument: “Ce dieu futur et immanent doit-il être personnel, ou consister en une ‘harmonie’, une communauté apaisée des vivants, des morts, et des renaissants? Nous croyons que des réponses précises à ces questions sont envisageables, et qu’elles déterminent un régime original de pensée, en rupture avec l’athéisme comme avec la théologie: une divinologie, encore à constituer, par laquelle seraient tissés, peut-être, de nouveaux liens entre les hommes et ceux qui les hantent” (2006, 115). The Covid-19 pandemic context has brought new inflections to the term “essential” as a political, existential, and ontological modifier whose implications might become the object of future literary exploration.

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storytelling may be fraught with peril and perhaps even destined to fail. He does not, however, forsake narrative devices and fictional strategies such as blurring temporal lines, withholding information through analepses and prolepses, maintaining uncertainty through unexpected shifts in perspective, creating a dramatic effect through direct address, ekphrasis, or theatralization of key scenes. Instead, he calls upon their projective and energetic powers to bring into view and into being, as it were. By refusing to subscribe to a thanatographical poetics that would become fascinated with the mechanisms of death and the processes of putting-to-death that have come to be associated with the “universal trope” (Huyssen, 2003, 14) of the Holocaust and its artistic representations, Modiano’s necrofiction demands that we remain focused on life’s enduring nature, on its being there. This also explains the diegetic and discursive importance afforded to photographs in Dora Bruder. The photograph’s own fatality, as Roland Barthes puts it in La Chambre claire, signals its fundamentally referential nature: “pas de photo sans quelque chose ou quelqu’un;” or, more specifically avowing the photo’s link to the object which is not merely represented but present, “La photo est littéralement une émanation du referent” (1980, 18, 126). Every photograph is, therefore, a still life; not (just) a mnemonic or evocative object, it is material evidence of past life’s presence here and now. To use Barthes’s vocabulary, then, Modiano’s writing construes itself as a literary punctum that seizes upon a detail, a partial object randomly encountered in order to create a piercing, bruising, poignant effect that tears the fabric of a comforting narrative.2 The choral or polyphonic nature of necrofiction in Assia Djebar’s novel plumbs the depths of historical inscription and memorialization (through foundational narratives, inaugural legends, authorized vs. vernacular circuits of transmission and tradition) while foregoing the epic genre’s saturated tapestry of details, transitions, and connections among individual characters’ stories, places, and eras. Rather than employing those devices that would help fill in all the gaps left by the 2 One recalls the well-known distinction in La Chambre claire between the symbolic sharpness of punctum (the French critic uses the term “poigner,” which shares its etymology with the English “poignant,” from the Lat. pungere, “to prick” or “to sting”), which transcends narrativization, by contrast with the libidinal and narrative compliance of studium: “Le punctum d’une photo, c’est ce hasard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meurtrit, me poigne) […] Très souvent, le punctum est un ‘détail’, c’est-à-dire un objet partiel”; “Le studium, c’est le champ très vaste du désir nonchalant, de l’intérêt divers, du goût inconséquent” (Barthes, 1980, 49, 73, 50).

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chroniclers and provide an exhaustive and definitive version of the past, she offers an alternative to the incomplete or biased official narrative by displaying silences and ambiguities. But it is because fiction knows itself to be incomplete – by virtue of its constitutive condition qua fiction and because of the author’s choice to forego the more comprehensive form of the historiographic novel – that its silences and imperfections are exposed, rather than concealed, providing a fertile ground for reflection on the afterlives of an inaugural event. In penning her own funerary stele to the memory of the Prophet, Djebar invites us to reconsider the relation between fact and literary fiction from a perspective that is not limited to the strict ontological criteria of veracity and verifiability, or even the anthropological or aesthetic criteria of verisimilitude and propriety,3 but one that attends to its alethic substance. The term stems from the ancient Greek alētheia, truth, which shares its lexical root with the term referring to the mythological river of oblivion, Lethe, also a seminal image in Meillassoux’s theorization of essential mourning. As philologists like 3 For a comprehensive discussion of the current terms of this debate that emphasizes the anthropological universality of fiction and seeks to free its study from the limits imposed upon it by the Western modern literary paradigm, see Françoise Lavocat’s Fait et Fiction. Pour une frontière. The book’s agenda is laid out in its author’s opening statement: “Nous ne croyons quant à nous ni à l’utopie du réel, ni à l’autotélisme de la littérature, ni à l’indifférence générale pour la différenciation entre le factuel et le fictionnel, mais bien plutôt à une relation entre les artefacts fictionnels et le monde qui tient certes du jeu, mais aussi de la négociation et très souvent du conflit. Pour l’appréhender, il faut bien comprendre ce qui se joue dans la définition de la fiction, c’est-à-dire dans la précision de ces contours, ce qui a des enjeux poétiques, anthropologiques, culturels, historiques, légaux, politiques, psychologiques et cognitifs. Ce sont ces aspects que nous proposons d’explorer dans cet ouvrage” (2016, 15). She argues in favor of an extension of the chronological timeline (from Antiquity to the twenty-first century) and an expansion of the geographical span (from Ancient Greece to Japan and Central America), and of a corpus that includes religious and traditional narratives, television series, and video games: “Ces recherches récentes, menées dans plusieurs disciplines, nous amènent donc à plaider pour une approche admettant la possibilité, parmi les effets de la fiction, d’affecter les croyances, voire de les créer, du fait qu’elle dispose de moyens propres à insinuer le doute. Nos croyances sont, de fait, largement inspirées par des fictions” (Lavocat, 2016, 223). At the end of her study, Lavocat draws the following sobering conclusion: “Associée à une posture particulière, la fiction comme compétence culturelle est alors limitée à une période très réduite de l’histoire occidentale (pour certains, le XIXe et le XXe siècle). Nous avons montré pourquoi nous rejetions une conception étroitement moderne et occidentale de la fiction” (2016, 525).

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Marcel Detienne have shown, such an idea and its attendant practices are not only shaped by notions of judgment and authority, or associated with that of the Heideggerian unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit), but also and more importantly with the inherent fragility of memory (see Detienne, 1967). To accomplish an alethic literary gesture therefore does not mean to assert an authoritative truth but to use one’s authorial stance to lead one’s own war against forgetting. In The Work of Mourning, Jacques Derrida writes: “I promised myself never to […] write following the death, not after, not long after the death by returning to it, but just following the death, upon or on the occasion of the death, at the commemorative gatherings and tributes” (2001, 49–50). Having uttered these words a year and a half after Roland Barthes’s passing,4 and finding himself in an in-between position, both keeping and breaking his promise to himself, he goes on to wonder whether silence itself in such a moment would not be a wound, the pretense of a gift. Between denying death in order “to convince ourselves that that the death never took place, or that it is irreversible and we are protected from a return of the dead,” and masking it with eulogies that allow us to “to take him by our side, or even inside ourselves, to show off some secret contract, to finish him off by exalting him, to reduce him in any case to what can still be contained by a literary or rhetorical performance,” what kind of ruse will one employ “to dialectize death which Barthes called undialectical (Camera Lucida 72)” (Derrida, 2001, 50)? The reluctant eulogist then proposes his ad hoc classification of the rhetorical “solutions” to this dilemma, from the worst offenses to the more acceptable yet still flawed. The worst “solution” of writing following a death is the attempt “still to maneuver, to speculate, to try to profit or derive some benefit, whether subtle or sublime, to draw from the dead a supplementary force to be turned against the living, to denounce or insult them more or less directly, to authorize and legitimize oneself” (Derrida, 2001, 51). A lesser offense would be to try and “pay homage” by treating a theme associated with the departed: “Such a treatment would indeed point out the debt, but it would also pay it back” (Derrida, 2001, 51). Finally, the funeral oration can offer “a supplementary fiction,” which has the benefit of allowing “one to call out directly to the dead,” but only because “it is always the dead in me, always the others standing around the coffin whom I call out to” (Derrida, 2001, 51–52). 4 The text was originally published in French under the title “Les Morts de Roland Barthes”, Poétique, vol. 47, Sept. 1981, pp. 269–292.

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Even though he published his book years after the death of his mother, Patrick Chamoiseau appears guilty of all of these offenses. Man Ninotte’s passing, the apparent impossibility of the return her son first fears and then hopes for, prompts him as narrator to delve into her legacy as a world-making, cosmic phenomenon.5 While seemingly calling out to the absent entelechial figure of the mother, he cannot help but reach out to his own memories as her sad but proud heir, and to all those around him (siblings, community members, the living and the dead, nature itself) who have been touched by the “présence,” “plénitude,” and “joie” which she gave as gifts to her family and the world. Attempting to cloak his own authority behind the object of his writing, he evokes a debt to Man Ninotte, which is ultimately paid off by the literary tomb erected around her. However, Chamoiseau stays true to his un/writable or “inscriptible” poetics (Panaïté, 2017b, 291),6 that is, to his own work as a “Marqueur de paroles” which both fulfills and precludes the finality of inscription and closure – of the world, of the debt, of memory. The seminal image of his narrative is that of “la grappe” or the ever-becoming-human cluster faced with the stunning phenomenon of death not as an ending to be 5 Moreover, as Chamoiseau’s narrator reminisces about his mother’s unique presence in the world, he seems to share Barthes’s hesitation on how to memorialize the maternal figure. Despite Barthes’s protestations that he does not seek to draw the image of “the Mother,” but of “one’s mother,” singular and irreplaceable, Derrida nonetheless detects what he calls the “metonymic force” of his writing, which entails both a call for identification and a call for alterity to remain intact, pointing out that this prohibits the reader from putting herself in the place of the one who reminisces while becoming a witness to the process of reminiscence. In a striking contrast, although perhaps not in antithesis, with the forms of relationality (“mise en relation,” “mise sous relation”) envisioned by Chamoiseau in the wake of his predecessor, Glissant, this type of memorialization creates a “relation without relation” (Derrida, 2001, 58). 6 In the context of a traumatic disappearance such as genocide, Patrice Loraux also uses the term “inscriptibilité” to describe the attempt by one human or group of humans to eradicate another group’s existence root and stem, both biologically and symbolically, along with the deadening effect this action has on both victim and perpetrator: “J’appelle insupportable […] la capacité de pouvoir assister sans broncher à la déliaison radicale du rapport à l’autre où l’autre est en même temps extirpé dans sa souche: non seulement sa vie est anéantie, mais la souche et son ‘inscriptibilité’ dans un symbolique, cela est extirpé, ce qui produit immédiatement, en retour, sur l’agent d’exécution une pétrification de l’affectivité” (2001, 48). Loraux’s examples are inspired by recent historical events, above all the Holocaust, but similar mechanisms are present in the case of slavery.

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explained away – obfuscated, buried, alienated – but as a surfeit of life. Of the preoccupation with catastrophic or apocalyptic forms of death, Mbembe writes: When it is all said and done, this obsession may well be specific to Western metaphysics. For many cultures, the world, simply, does not end […] This does not mean that all is eternal, that all is repetition, or that all is cyclical. It seems that the world, by definition, is opening, and that time arises only in and through the unexpected, the unforeseen. (2019, 29)

Yet the author of Necropolitics redirects our attention from the circularity of the past to the open futures this seemingly unique phenomenon makes possible by situating it on a worldwide cultural and historical scale: [A]t another level, and for a larger share of humanity, the end of the world has already occurred. The question is no longer to know how to live life while awaiting it; instead, it is to know how living will be possible the day after the end, that is to say, how to live with loss, with separation. How can the world be recreated in the wake of the world’s destruction? (Mbembe, 2019, 29)

In an essay that attends to the distinction between natural, spiritual, and traumatic kinds of disappearing (“le disparaître”), Patrice Loraux offers the following reflection on the petrifying, paralyzing, and contaminating nature of the “disparaître traumatique.” By perpetuating the past into an ever-disappearing present, trauma introduces an “ordre nouveau” of the world and of the self characterized by an “impassibilité” towards traumatic events: “Le traumatique, c’est ce scénario d’un “nous” figé, pétrifié, sidéré devant …, au bord de …, sans intermédiaire, sans médiation, au bord sans marque du non-marquable, autrement dit ce qui ne peut pas être repris dans un symbolique quel qu’il soit, à savoir l’anéantissement” (Loraux, 2001, 42).7 In À ce stade de la nuit, Maylis de Kerangal situates her necrofiction on the threshold that separates 7 Loraux: “Ce que j’appelle trauma, ce n’est pas la trace de la violence – précisément il n’y a pas de trace – mais l’éradication de la souche en celui qui ne peut plus dès lors s’inscrire, je veux dire inscrire sa différence dans une langue, un espace, un environnement, des rites, des vêtements, des coutumes. L’éradication de la part passible est accompagnée d’une reconfiguration immédiate du réel, une reconfiguration essentielle qui fait que le réel devient ultracompact, total, et que son fonctionnement repose intégralement sur des fonctionnaires […] Le trauma, c’est essentiellement ce scénario, donc, encore une représentation. Une scène à des fins d’endurcissement” (2001, 49).

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instrumentalization and recognition, narrative representation and critique. Taking as pre-text one of the deadliest events of the early twentyfirst century’s global immigration crisis, she delivers a meandering narrative that blends together autobiography, essay, political pamphlet, and artistic reflection, and that often digresses both discursively and thematically from the originating event. Such a literary tomb holds together both the considerable danger of condemning the object of its commemoration to a spectral condition, always secondary and subaltern in relation to the Eurocentric subject (the author, a fictional character, the faded glories of history, or Europe itself) and the modest promise of bringing it into focus. Kerangal’s writing does not frame the event in a fiction of victimhood or heroism but instead underscores the ways in which our individual and collective attention is solicited by it. À ce stade de la nuit suggests a view from the shoreline that witnesses the disappearance of those whom Achille Mbembe has called “Les cadavres vivants qui peuplent la face ombreuse de notre monde” (2010, 120) and refuses the illusory freedom – in Loraux’s terms, the apathy or anesthesia (2001, 56) – afforded by a narrative of repentance or recovery. Instead, it channels textual, cultural, and symbolic energies that make possible the work of “intact active trauma.” It brings face to face two different and equally petrifying representations of the end of the world: that of the host and that of the guest, of the so-called migrants and of the ones who see their own death prefigured in those of the migrants.8 This is perhaps the most important work not of but made possible by what I have proposed to call necrofiction: a work that moves from the dead letters of trauma to the projective energy of the literary tomb. Neither complacently mimetical nor laboriously archival, neither locked in aphasia nor elegiacally loquacious, necrofiction does not imply a history of salvation or a symbolic teleology. It suggests, instead of paralysis or apathy “devant l’absence,” and instead of attempting to produce a rhetorical “substitut de retour” (Loraux, 2001, 41, 42), that one can reach out to grasp, fathom, and shape “la matière de l’absence” itself. 8 Loraux: “Donc, un trauma intact et, néanmoins, actif, c’est-à-dire précisément capable de se déplacer. Et pour cela, pour qu’un trauma soit actif, c’est-à-dire trouve les moyens de proposer des chemins qui ne sont pas de retour, de repentance, de remontrance, mais qui sont des chemins où on retrouve une certaine énergie, il faut mettre en place un dispositif de représentation où un trauma rencontrera un autre trauma” (2001, 57).

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Index Index

aftermath 2, 3, 9, 15, 100, 113, 118n1, 194 Aïcha, ʿAʾisha 97–100, 110–111, 113 Algeria, Algerian 5, 9, 15, 18, 24, 86, 90, 176, 193 Andrade, Susan 24, 111n26, 185 Ariès, Philippe 6, 10n15, 28n36, 38n12, 42n17, 81n23, 185 Aristotle, Aristotelian 16n22, 34n6, 72, 95, 185, 195 Atlantic 19, 127, 173, 188 autobiography 4n5, 7n11, 17, 30, 31n1, 118, 140, 150, 166, 184 autofiction 2, 3n4, 17, 54n2, 166, 190 autothanatographique 7n12, 195 autothanatography 7 Barnes, Leslie 3n4, 36n10, 185 Barthes, Roland 2n2, 16n23, 19n28, 67, 68n11, 144, 179, 181, 182 n5, 185, 188 biofiction 2, 54, 60, 82n24, 176 biopolitical 19n27, 30, 32, 39, 41, 49, 62, 65, 83n26, 155 biopolitics 13, 19n27, 186, 188, 189, 194 Bouju, Emmanuel 9, 28, 186 burial 6, 27, 34, 45, 51, 85, 98–99, 114 Caribbean 118, 127 Caruth, Cathy 9, 14, 178, 187 Castonguay-Bélanger, Joël 9, 11, 187 Cavarero, Adriana 23n32, 187 cemetery 121, 140, 173

cenotaph 54–55 cénothaphe 176 Césaire, Aimé 9n14, 14, 118n1, 132n13, 140, 187, 194 Chatti, Mounira 88n7, 89n10, 90–91, 94–95, 96n17, 187 cimetière 176 Citton, Yves 127n8, 133, 149, 154, 173, 187 Cixous, Hélène 58n4, 109n24, 187, 193 colonialism 9, 29, 119, 194 colonization 5, 122, 164, 167 commémoration 2n2, 5, 73 commemoration 14, 16, 21, 27, 35, 38n12, 59n4, 66, 73, 81n23, 123, 172, 176, 184, 192 crisis 21, 145, 147, 148n5, 148n7, 149, 151n9, 172, 178, 184, 188, 193 dead letter 34, 37, 175, 178, 184 De Certeau, Michel 1, 17n25, 18, 24, 27–29, 88n8, 89n9, 114, 187 Derrida, Jacques 1, 7n11, 7n12, 68n11, 75, 181, 182n5, 188 deuil 2n2, 3–4, 16n22, 67n10, 117, 120, 177–178, 188, 192 devoir de mémoire 56 epitaph 28n36, 74, 164 Esposito, Roberto 13, 19n27, 48n20, 49, 83n26, 105n22, 106n23, 117, 152, 188

198

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exile 3, 5, 22, 32, 38, 40–42, 49, 51, 118n1 fantôme 33, 35, 51, 74, 165, 168, 178 Fatima 97–102, 110, 113, 176 feminist 91, 111n26, 195 filiation 34, 52, 96–97, 115 filiation narratives 82n24 Forter, Greg 17, 20, 188 Foucault, Michel 13, 36, 39, 155, 168, 188 Freud, Sigmund 34n6, 50, 188, 195 funeral 9n14, 28n36, 37, 38, 42, 49, 118, 130n10, 137–140, 181 funerary 10n15, 16, 24, 27, 45, 55 funereal 119, 130n10 Gefen, Alexandre 4, 14, 54, 82n24, 144, 189 genealogical 5, 40, 49, 114 genealogy 34, 52, 96, 121, 130, 138, 140, 175 genocide 3, 182n6 ghost 2, 35, 48, 51, 67, 90, 177–178 ghostly 16, 32, 37, 58, 164 gisant,-e 47–48 Glissant, Édouard 20, 29, 120, 122–124, 126n6, 127, 128, 130–133, 138, 140, 155n12, 182n5, 187, 189 grave 5, 6, 10n15, 25n34, 34, 37, 38n12, 46, 83, 98n18, 100, 109n24, 110, 118n1, 123, 132, 141n17, 158, 164n18, 177, 191 gravestone 22 graveyard 166, 168 Hamilton, John T. 19n27, 22, 152, 153–154, 161, 163–164, 170–171, 189 hantologie 75 Haraway, Donna 48–49, 189 Hartog, François 14, 21, 56, 71, 73, 189 Holocaust 4, 15, 18, 23, 54, 58n4, 59, 78–79, 81–82n23, 179, 182n6, 187, 188, 189, 193, 194

hospitalité 146n3, 171, 186 hospitality 110, 150, 157, 171 Hugo, Victor 16n22, 20, 70n12, 73, 189 immigrant 16, 58, 115, 152, 161 immigration 22n31, 145–146, 151n9, 161, 169, 184 immunity 49–50, 152–153, 160, 168, 188 Islam, Islamic 18, 24, 85–87, 89, 91–109, 111–112, 115, 187, 190, 194, 195 Jablonka, Ivan 3–5, 190 James, Alison 54, 144, 190 Jew, Jewish 58, 61, 62n7, 66, 73, 75, 78, 80, 83n26, 97 Ladha, Hassanaly 11n16, 24n33, 38n13, 65n8, 164n18, 168n22, 190 Lampedusa 26, 143, 147, 149, 154, 155, 157, 163, 168, 169, 172–173, 192 Lauro, Sarah Juliet 121–122, 190 lettre morte 31–32 living dead 8n13, 13, 37, 121n2, 122 loci dubitativi 82n24 Loraux, Patrice 149, 182–184 MacPhail, Eric 10–11, 191 Malabou, Catherine 36n10, 191 Mallarmé, Stéphane 2, 12n18, 14 Martinique, Martinican 9n14, 15, 17, 19, 117–119, 128, 136, 137, 173n28 Mbembe, Achille 8, 13, 29n40, 39n14, 41, 65, 78, 81n22, 83n25, 123, 138, 151n9, 167n21, 173n28, 183, 184, 191 Mediterranean 147–148, 157, 165n19, 168n22, 173, 188, 191, 192 memorial 9n14, 10n15, 11, 14, 17, 22, 23, 24, 35, 37, 54, 56n3, 67, 72, 75–77, 79, 90, 119, 124, 135 Merlin–Kajman, Hélène 14, 192

Index Mezentius 193, 32–34 migrant 26–27, 148–150, 154–155, 161n15, 162, 165, 168n22, 169–171, 173, 184, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194 mourning 3, 15, 16, 19, 30, 34, 36–37, 41, 44, 47, 50–51, 101, 117, 17–120, 139, 151, 177–178, 181–181, 188, 193 Muhammad 17, 86, 91–92, 97–98, 100, 102, 107, 111, 113, 115, 187, 190 Muslim 18, 85, 90–91, 98, 100, 105n22, 107 Nancy, Jean-Luc 48n20, 171n25, 191, 192 necrologue 43, 78, 120, 123, 136, 138 necropoetics 15, 30 necropolitics 8, 13, 14, 76, 183, 191 Nora, Pierre 21, 54, 79n21, 192 Occupation (Nazi) 55, 58, 72, 73, 75, 80, 83, 176, 194 outre-tombe 34, 43, 67 Paris, Parisian 5, 23, 53, 58, 60–61, 64, 67, 70n12, 72–78, 80, 83, 145n2, 176 Qurʾān, Qurʾan 91, 95, 96n18, 102n19, 105n22, 109, 193 Quranic 86n3, 90n11, 94

199

security 22, 27, 66, 146–148, 152, 161, 189 Segalen, Victor 14, 66–67n9, 194 shipwreck 19, 26, 40, 143, 147, 150, 153, 156–158, 160, 162, 169–170, 192 slave 10n15, 19, 65n8, 81n22, 119, 121, 123, 128, 129, 134, 137, 139, 176 slavery 119, 121n2, 123n3, 127n9, 128, 151n9, 173, 182n6, 190 specter 11n16, 30, 43, 47, 177–178 stèle, stele 24, 66–67, 115 Stolperstein,-e 58n4, 173, 192 thanatographique 7n12 thanatography 83 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe 158, 162 tomb (literary) 5, 9–12, 14, 18–19, 21, 24, 27–28, 32, 70n12, 79, 91, 99, 115, 118, 139, 164, 175, 176, 182, 184 tombe 6, 34 tombeau 1, 80 tombeau (littéraire, musical, poétique) 2, 8–12, 27, 115n28, 187, 188, 191, 193, 194, 195 tombstone 28n36, 45, 56, 80 transatlantic 121, 164, 190 trauma 3, 6, 9, 16, 21, 29, 32, 35n8, 48, 61n6, 82, 119, 139, 145n2, 175, 176, 183–185, 187, 195 umma 105–106

Rancière, Jacques 17, 103n21, 193 refugee 145n2, 147–149, 151n8, 185, 188, 191, 194 Rice, Alison 109n25, 193 Rumeau, Delphine 9, 12n17, 193, 194 Sanyal, Debarati 14, 61, 114n27, 145–146, 151, 161n15, 194 scale 14, 22, 110, 148, 166, 183, 186

Vergès, Françoise 127–128, 195 Viart, Dominique 19n26, 54, 82n24, 144, 190, 195 Vichy 15, 55, 62n7, 72, 80, 195 Vietnam, Vietnamese 15, 17, 22, 32, 35n7, 39–40, 44n19, 185, 190 violence 23n23, 27, 32n4, 39, 52, 61n6, 65n8, 78, 85, 89–90, 99–100, 119, 127, 146, 147, 160–161, 168, 170, 183, 187

200

Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memor

wake (funeral) 24, 130n10 war 3, 5, 7n11, 15, 22n31, 23, 27, 32, 38, 39n14, 49, 54, 79, 82n23, 90n11, 104, 106n22, 111, 136, 147, 148n5, 181, 194

Watthee-Delmotte, Myriam 2n2, 12, 16n22, 32n3, 195 zombie 37, 121–123, 190