French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

For Albert Thibaudet, writing in the 1920s, to think of literature in geographical terms “as a human landscape where everything calls out to us” was to underline the coherence and longevity of a national tradition. The French literary past featured “the same mountain ranges, the same peaks, the same valleys,” taking on various colorations according to changing climatic conditions.¹ The unchanging character of French topography was reflected in the essential continuity of its literature. A very different sense of the interactions of the literary and the geographical is to be found in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope,” the varying space-time ratio that defines literary forms, and can underpin an historical poetics: “space,” writes Bakhtin, “becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”² Yet the “chronotope,” a concept indebted to Einstein’s relativity theory, remains relatively abstract. The space constructed within the text, while bearing the imprint of history, becomes the site for narrative developments that are not necessarily themselves rooted in the spatial specificities of a given era or location. Acknowledging the importance of Bakhtin’s insights, Franco Moretti insists, “Geography is not an inert container, a box where cultural history ‘happens,’ but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth.”³ Bakhtin and Moretti are among those thinkers who incite us to think about literature geographically, in terms of “charged spaces” and “active forces.” Accordingly, this chapter will consider how, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, the globe, the extrametropolitan world, and the global, in the sense of a wider field constituted by the existence and interaction of multiple spaces, make their presence felt through geographical motifs and devices where difference is articulated in the handling of space, identity, and language within explicitly geographical frameworks.⁴

As many contributions to this book indicate, French literature did not wait for the modern age to feel the impact of a wider world. Yet in broad terms we can say that nineteenth-century French literature, while often preoccupied with the Orient, was primarily local rather than global. If, as Moretti’s work testifies, it is fruitful to look at the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, or Zola in terms of space, the categories involved will usually be capital and provinces, rich and poor, north and south. From the turn of the twentieth century onward it is otherwise: the challenge of difference, and the need to connect the near and the far, are felt keenly by writers who travel extensively, like Segalen, Claudel, Malraux, and Michaux, or writers who, like the surrealists, looked on the non-Western world as an antidote to the malaise of their own society without experiencing it at first hand.

At a conference on Artaud and Bataille held at Cerisy in June–July 1972, organized by the avant-garde Tel Quel group in its Maoist phase, Jacques Henric gave a paper entitled “Artaud worked over by [travaillé par] China.” Situating Artaud’s surrealist work of the 1920s, and his writings on theater of the 1930s influenced by non-European models, in the context of the “repression of the Orient” in European culture, Henric credits Artaud with having grasped the concrete materialist basis of Chinese thought. Pitting the apparently apolitical Artaud against the card-carrying communist surrealists who expelled him from their group in 1927, Henric contrasts what he considers (polemically) to be the mystifying idealism of Breton’s armchair orientalism with the violently materialist character of Artaud’s ideas, and particularly with the way Artaud’s writing registers directly the impact of difference:

Tel Quel’s retrospective invocation of Artaud and the surrealists betrays the pressure of the geographical as a shaping force in literary practice and history. It underlines belatedly the enduring significance of Artaud’s writings on the non-Western signifying practices of Balinese theatre and his insistence on the concrete space of the stage. But it also connects with the question of topographic and ethnographic surrealism, especially Michel Leiris’s engagement with Africa from the early 1930s onward, which gave rise to his remarkable travelogue L’Afrique fantôme, and Breton’s journeys to the Canary Islands, Mexico, Martinique, New Mexico, and Quebec, which inspired, in Mad Love, Arcane 17, and other texts, new ways of writing about the mythic and symbolic resonances of specific geographical sites, a genre that would later find expression in such works as Butor’s five-volume Le génie du lieu, and the writings of the Swiss travel writer Nicholas Bouvier, among many others. (The rise of a new literature of travel is a key symptom of the global concerns of recent French culture.) Following Henric’s intervention, a member of the conference audience claimed that it was Claudel’s volume of prose poetry Connaissance de l’Est (Knowledge of the East) (1900), rather than Artaud’s writings, that had brought China into French literature, thus invoking a slightly earlier moment in the twentieth century when literary form was inflected by the global and geographic. In fact, Claudel’s discovery of the east was itself roughly contemporaneous with that of another writer, Victor Segalen, whose theory of the exotic, directed against the colonialist orientalism of Barrès and Loti, was rooted in his extensive travels in China. But Segalen, long relegated to the dusty corners of the library, was only fully rediscovered in the 1980s, brought into play by Edouard Glissant and others as the model for a “de-exoticized’ writing based on the recognition of otherness and on what Segalen called “le divers.” If boundary-crossing and cultural exchange figure frequently in twentieth-century French literature, especially in the context of successive avant-garde movements where the encounter with difference fosters formal innovation and generic hybridity, French literary culture and theory, with its waves of novelties, such as the nouveau roman, absurdist drama, structuralism, and deconstruction, has often tended to lose sight of this fact. The rise to prominence of Francophone and postcolonial writing and theory has, as in the case of Segalen, done much to remedy previous neglect. Yet this can lead to new kinds of blindness. To be sure, the emergence of writing in French by the indigenous inhabitants of France’s colonies and spheres of influence was a crucial context for fruitful if sometimes fraught cross-cultural exchanges. From Sartre’s pioneering essay “Orphée noir” (1948) onward, a sense of how, in the hands of a Senghor or a Césaire, or later an Assia Djebar or a Dany Laferrière, French linguistic and literary conventions could be upset, troubled, or ironized has been central to the overall literary and cultural landscape of recent “French” literature and culture. Yet it is important not to lose sight of how the work of a significant number of metropolitan writers, especially from the 1950s onward, registers, in intellectual, thematic, and formal terms, the impact of cross-cultural encounters.

One example is the novelist, playwright, and filmmaker Marguerite Duras. Born in Vietnam in 1914 to parents who had left France to work in French Indochina, Duras came to live permanently in France in 1934. While her first two novels were set in the French provinces, her third, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall) (1950), was based on her adolescence in rural Vietnam, where her mother, widowed, eccentric, and ultimately deranged, sought to bring up her children amid the disastrous consequences of a series of unwise agricultural investments. The handling of space and the impact of geography are central to the novel, which comprises numerous journeys between the rural outpost and the westernized colonial city, juxtaposing extreme poverty with the conspicuous wealth of the city’s central areas, the ugliness of shanty towns and blighted concessions with the luxuriance of the tropical forest and its fauna. The vectors of the plot derive from the mother’s manic urge to remedy her financial situation even at the cost of prostituting her daughter Suzanne, and from the daughter’s desire, in common with her brutish older brother Joseph, to find a way out of the grinding poverty and boredom engendered by their situation. For both brother and sister erotic longing and passion are the privileged routes to emancipation, and throughout the novel desire itself is spatialized, both metaphorically, as a zone lying on the other side of a threshold to be crossed with trepidation, and literally, through its link to the movie theatres where both siblings encounter passion. Not to be confused with sentiment, desire is cast as a force that transcends individual psychology, involving a loss of self and an encounter with an otherness that parallels encounters with death or total absence. As her subsequent work will attest, Duras makes a connection between access to the radical “space” of desire and exposure to extremity in the form of poverty and deprivation as revealed and sustained by colonial exploitation. Un barrage contre le Pacifique invites a spatial, geographic mode of reading in terms of literal and metaphorical spaces that are juxtaposed, imbricated, and traversed. In many subsequent works, Duras draws on, recycles, and recasts the novel’s motifs and structures to build a compelling literary world where a highly spatial and geographic vision articulates the encounter with different but interconnected types of difference and otherness, psychical, metaphysical, and political. Indochina gives way to other geographical regions in the important script Hiroshima mon amour (filmed in 1959 by Alain Resnais), and in Duras’s so-called India cycle, inaugurated in 1966 by the novel Le vice-consul (although also drawing on Duras’s seminal 1964 masterpiece Le ravissement de Lol V Stein). The India cycle comprises a further novel, L’amour (1971), a play, India Song (1973) and three films made by Duras herself, the most successful being a version of India Song. But the Indochinese setting recurs in the immensely successful autobiographical memoir L’amant (1984) and its follow-up or alternative version L’amant de la Chine du Nord (1991), works that draw in elements from the India cycle, and thus bond together a major part of Duras’s output into a multifaceted unity. One overarching motif, already present in Un barrage, then reprised and developed in Le vice-consul, India Song, and L’amant, is that of the beggar woman who places her baby in the keeping of the French mother before departing on an epic journey across Southeast Asia, and then, in the India cycle, to Calcutta. This underlines the fact that the geography of Duras’s texts is both real and imaginary, rooted in geopolitical actuality while at the same time avoiding the limitations of documentary realism, privileging the interplay of fantasy and desire, and reminding us of the phantasmatic nature of the writing process itself. This is particularly clear in Duras’s films, especially in India Song, where the French Embassy in Calcutta (which in any case is not the capital of India) is represented by a dilapidated mansion in the Paris suburbs. The real action of India Song takes place in the gap between the voices on the soundtrack and the images on the screen, which enact a fantasy of death, desire, and revolt, in counterpoint with the terrible poverty of the subcontinent. Duras’s characters are not presented as sovereign agents but as part of a landscape whose geography is charged with powerful forces that encompass the personal and the political. The encounter with otherness is both indissolubly linked to the contact with the extra-European and internalized as a discovery of regions of existence that question established models of experience and identity. This equation is not without its problems, and while by no means eschewing politics, Duras’s “apocalyptic” visions sometimes risk reproducing the colonialist outlook they certainly repudiate. If, from Un barrage onward, Duras’s treatment of colonialist officialdom is uncompromisingly negative, her fascination with the figure of the colonial femme fatale, incarnated in the India cycle by a character called Anne-Marie Stretter who was based on a real woman Duras had glimpsed in her childhood, tends to push the non-European world into the background, associating it, sometimes questionably, with absolute alterity.

As is the case with another writer of the same period, Michel Tournier, Duras’s commitment to exploring the encounter with otherness within and without the individual involves experimentation and risk.⁶ Like those of Duras, Tournier’s fictions are highly spatial and geographic, and at the same time phantasmatic. Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, his version of Robinson Crusoe, plays with the idea of existence without the mirror of the other, particularly the European other, while Le roi des Aulnes combines myth and topography to probe the phantasmatic roots of Nazism. In La goutte d’or, the central character, Idriss, leaves his North African village community and makes his way to Paris after an encounter with a European woman who takes his photograph and drives off in her Jeep. His subsequent quest brings out a contrast, which for Tournier has implications in the sphere of identity, between the European, Judeo-Christian culture of the image, and the abstract signs epitomized by Islamic calligraphy.

Duras and Tournier are two important later-twentieth-century writers in whose work a questioning of established boundaries and identities occurs within frameworks where textual geography (the geography deployed in the text, but also the text’s own alignment of spaces) plays a role that we do not find in nineteenth-century literature. With some exceptions, boundary-crossing textual geography does not feature in the same ways in the modernist works of Proust, Gide, Céline, or Queneau, or in the philosophical fiction of Sartre and Camus, even if location is often central to their work, as it is of course in such writers as Giono or Mauriac. Although the vistas opened by postcolonial and Francophone studies have sponsored new pathways of reading, underlining what is at stake in Gide’s North Africa, Camus’s Algeria, or the Africa of Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night, these works do not typically use their geographical dimension as a means of opening up issues of cross-cultural exchange. If in different ways the non-European signals the encounter with alterity, the perspective, in Gide or Camus, tends to be very much tilted toward the European subject rather than toward interaction.

The same is to some extent true of Georges Perec, by comparison with Duras and Tournier at any rate. Yet questions of space, and the impact of the geographical on literary form, are of central importance in his work. In Perec’s first novel, Les choses (Things) (1964), the young couple Jérôme and Sylvie, addicted to consumer articles they read about in glossy magazines, spend some time in Tunisia but remain cocooned in the stereotyped and entirely westernized fantasies generated by advertising. Perec’s formally innovative autobiography, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975), comprises alternating chapters devoted, firstly, to piecing together, from numerous fragmentary memories, an account of his French Jewish childhood scarred definitively by his mother’s deportation and death in Auschwitz, and secondly to reconstituting a story he had composed during psychoanalytic therapy at the age of thirteen. This story, focused on the imaginary island of W. in the South Atlantic, progressively turns into an allegory of Nazism although, as Perec notes, it also has echoes of Pinochet’s vicious regime in Chile. Ultimately, the highly original form of Perec’s autobiography serves to connect his own particular life history to much wider, indeed global, horizons. Similarly, Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces) (1974), a ludic treatise on space, moves progressively from the microscopically domestic to the global, culminating in a moving enumeration of the many factors, political, social, and ecological, that threaten to make our planet uninhabitable. In Perec’s masterpiece, La vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) (1978), which takes a Parisian apartment block as a microcosm through which to celebrate everyday life in all its generally unacknowledged extraordinariness, the life histories of the building’s inhabitants involve innumerable parts of the globe and sectors of experience. The hilarious account of how one resident, an anthropologist, devotes years to studying an apparently nomadic African tribe only to discover eventually that their wandering is a strategy for evading anthropologists, reflects how, throughout this cornucopia of stories, the interactions and imbrications of innumerable “species of spaces” are at the heart of Perec’s approach to human reality and to exploiting the possibilities of literature.

One might say, then, that Duras, Tournier, and Perec, as well as some of the avant-garde figures we began with, herald the advent in the later twentieth century of a postmodern sense of space where the blurring of boundaries is accompanied by a blurring of identities. Alterity is not located outside, in an exotic elsewhere, but in the overall field opened by the dissolution of clear oppositions between reality and representation, East and West, male and female, the everyday and the extraordinary, and so on. The spatial and the geographic become active constituents rather than passive receptacles. To flesh out this proposition, I will look in turn at two works, a play by Jean Genet dating from the 1960s, and a novel by Marie NDiaye published in 2007.

Written while the fight for Algerian independence was going on, and reflecting the beginnings, escalation, organization, and progressive success of the revolt, along with its violent repression, Les paravents takes the resources of Genet’s theatricality to a new level by projecting various constituencies of Arabs and Europeans into a phantasmagorical spectacle that combines the concrete and the imaginary, with the tragic and the farcical. The play enacts what Moretti calls “relations among locations,”⁷ presenting us with a highly charged set of geographical tensions between, but also within, distinct European and Arab groupings. Of the play’s sixteen tableaux, the first ten introduce us, via screens on which elements of décor are roughly drawn (sometimes before the audience’s eyes), to discrete spaces identified either with the Arabs, the Europeans, or with both: the Arab brothel in the middle of the village (frequented by French soldiers), Saïd’s rickety cabin, the village square, cemetery, Quranic courtroom, as well as various bits of rough terrain near the ramparts (where there are relics of Roman antiquities), the palm grove and rose garden of the colonial masters, Sir Harold and M. Blankeensee. In the last six, progressively longer, tableaux (which make up three-fifths of the play) platforms are used to split the playing area into three or more horizontal spaces across which the action can shift and cut contrapuntally, between the prison, a colonialist household, and a French military unit; or between the brothel, the village watering place, and the underworld where we witness the arrival and accumulation of characters on all sides, regardless of ethnicity, after they have died. The shifting spaces reflect key demarcations in the colonial world’s social geography, which, as Derrida observes, ascribes vital significance to spatial delimitations.⁸

In scenes combining Arabs and Europeans the interplay of linguistic and geographical markers includes argot and place-names. When at the start of the fourth tableau Saïd fails to understand Sir Harold’s jocular injunction: “Spit on your mitts [pognes], it gives you courage,” another Arab worker excuses him, saying, “He hasn’t been to France yet. He hasn’t seen the Eiffel tower or Massy-Palaiseau.”⁹ In fact, at this point, Saïd aspires to a job in the métropole, which would give him the familiarity with France possessed by the local prostitutes who have gained experience in French garrison towns such as Nancy and Toul. In the tenth tableau, Sir Harold is reluctant, when some workers have ostracized Saïd for stealing a jacket, to distinguish between different types of Arab: “how can we—we!—make subtle distinctions—aren’t all Arabs by definition thieves?” By contrast, M. Blankeensee proudly enumerates the innumerable rose varieties in his garden, musing that no Arab would be able to name them. This is the key to colonial mastery—“We are the masters of language”—and a justification for colonial power: “things rightly belong to those who improve them.” The irony here is that as the overdressed, overfed colonialists pace up and down the stage, Arab actors with paintbrushes sneak in and daub flames on the screens depicting the gardens and orchards.

Where the colonial landowners are depicted as caricaturally aristocratic by Genet’s elaborate stage directions for each scene, the ordinary officials of French Algeria are working-class Frenchmen lost in translation. When the Gendarme in the ninth tableau arraigns Leila for the theft of a fancy clock, she claims that her husband brought it back from Maubeuge. But when the Gendarme catches her slipping away, he accuses Leila, and Saïd’s mother, of exploiting his generosity in addressing them in the formal vous form. This leads to a wonderful exchange involving an amalgam of phantasmatic sociolinguistics, social stratification, and existential mirroring (which threatens throughout the play to break down the demarcations it probes), building up to a crescendo of anarchic communal hilarity curtailed when the Gendarme suddenly senses he is being taken for a ride. Referring to the official instruction to address Algerians in the vous form, the Gendarme says:

Laughter engenders a dangerous evacuation of identity linked to shitting, and elsewhere in the play, to the passage into death, which is imagined and enacted in similar terms of leveling. A parallel can be made with Duras, who, in her Indian cycle and elsewhere, invents fusions of desire, imagination, revolt, passivity, death, madness, and laughter. Several scenes in Un barrage anticipate or echo Genet in this respect: the twin scenes where Suzanne and Joseph separately undergo a radical experience of self-dissolution in the darkened space of a movie theater, for example, or the scene where a pith-helmeted colonial official is ousted by the subversive power of laughter wielded by the mother, daughter, and son (a trio similar to Saïd, Leila, and Leila’s mother, a trio Genet designates collectively as la famille des orties [the family of nettles], associating them with a noxious plant that grows on waste ground between communities). Having come to demonstrate the superiority of colonial officialdom over poor white abjection, the official in Un barrage ends up beating a hasty retreat in order to escape the power of the family’s hilarity: he wanted “to stop them laughing, to halt at all cost the unexpected collapse of all his authority in their laughter.”¹²

When Les paravents was eventually staged at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1966 (with Jean-Marie le Pen prominent in the violent demonstration against it on the first night) the most controversial scene was the one where a group of legionaries mount an impromptu funeral for their lieutenant by breaking wind, claiming that their farts preserve something of the air of their native regions. “For the fatherland [patrie] to be with me,” proclaims Roger, “I release a fart. . . . Lot-et-Garonne, Gironde, Tarn. . . . Before I left I filled up with the air of my local region.”¹³ So, with their “spare gases,” the legionaries ensure that their lieutenant dies in the midst of “un petit air de France.”

The spatial and linguistic devices through which France and Algeria interpenetrate in Les paravents produce an uncanny geography where borders and demarcations are subject to an endless process of ironic revision and reversal. As so often in Genet this is linked to the power of the image. Alluding to the coussinet (little cushion) he wears around his middle to give him plump haunches and belly, a garment he thinks his servants are unaware of, M. Blankeensee observes that “we need all this fakery to be imposing.” For the Lieutenant, who leads the little band of French soldiers that features prominently in the latter parts of the play, the image is paramount, and this means that paradoxically he urges his men to aim not at victory but at the preservation of their own image (the Lieutenant keeps getting them to straighten their kepis and comb their hair by looking in each other’s eyes—in the absence of mirrors, the white man needs to see his countenance mirrored in those of his racial counterparts). France, he says, has won the real war because, in the conquest of 1830, “She proposed an ineradicable image,” greatly superior to France’s current one. For the Lieutenant, Algerian victory is inevitable, and French honor lies in glorious defeat. The threat to the French stems from the Arabs developing an image repertoire of their own (he tells his men that Arabs must be kept away from mirrors). And so the plot of Les paravents progressively turns on the question of which Algerian camp will be victorious. All the signs are that the victors will be the westernized, assimilated, organized, Arab militias, who bear little resemblance to the villagers from the back of beyond. Yet, in a beautiful, powerful and perhaps rather sentimental way, it is the abject family of nettles—the caterwauling Mother, the hideously ugly Leila, and the malodorous Saïd—who represent for Genet a kind of resistant bedrock against historical and geographical challenges. By a brilliant stage device, the last tableau has as one of its playing levels a space into which, as they die, often violently, the protagonists burst through plain white screens to find themselves in a cozy area where Arabs and Europeans, prostitutes and soldiers all mingle. As they burst through the screen and take cognizance of this new realm, the newcomers all exclaim: “Ah I see . . . Well, well, well! . . . So this is it! And people make such a fuss!” Figured this way, death, like laughter, involves less the abolition of difference than the eradication of fixed hierarchies and categorizations across the whole field of politics, geography, and identity—ethnic, sensual, and social.

Born in France in 1967 to a French mother and Senegalese father, Marie NDiaye is the prolific author of a dozen works, including novels, plays, and short stories. Questions of social and ethnic difference, and the mechanism of exclusion, are central to her work, which, like that of Duras and Genet, eschews realism and gives a significant place to the ways her characters’ fantasies and desires shape the worlds they inhabit. Yet, in common with many writers of her generation (that of the 1980s and 1990s), NDiaye follows Perec’s example by combining close attention to the real, everyday world of contemporary France with elements of the fable and the fantastic. If the work of Genet and Duras involves the interactions of spaces that have pertinence to the real worlds of geopolitics, we never feel in reading them that we are squarely in a locality we could visit. With NDiaye, on the other hand, rural France and the drab universe of the Parisian banlieues are palpably present though innumerable details (as is the case in such writers as Jean Echenoz and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, whose work also combines, like Perec’s, the hyperreal and the unreal). Nonetheless, with NDiaye we can suddenly find ourselves whisked off to a country that seems more like Africa or North Africa, without explicit, realist, substantiation being offered.

As in all NDiaye’s work, geography is fundamental to her 2007 novel Mon coeur à l’étroit (My Straitened Heart). Like the earlier En famille (1990) and other works, the novel presents us with a female character, here called Nadia, enclosed in a carapace of self-delusion with regard to the real dynamics of social and probably racial difference. It progressively becomes obvious that Nadia, a fifty-something elementary-school teacher, may be of North African parentage, but her ruthless desire to obliterate what she experiences as a taint has led her to sacrifice her parents, abandoned to their miserable low-income housing project—the cité des Aubiers on the edge of Bordeaux—and her first husband. Now living with her second husband, a fellow teacher, in a classy area of town, Nadia harbors a rage for assimilation that leads her to construct her identity as a model teacher, and to despise anyone who fails to meet her exacting standards. Above all, she shies away from recognizing any affinity with those people (poor and often visibly nonmetropolitan) she refers to as “that type of person.”¹⁴ Drawing on the genre of the Kafkaesque fable, the novel begins when Nadia’s second husband, Ange (Angel), is the victim of a violent assault that leaves him with a gaping wound in his side. Ange, it seems, is the scapegoat for society’s refusal of Nadia’s jumped-up haughtiness. Various parties advise Nadia that she must leave town if Ange’s wound is to heal. Eventually, she does make the journey to her son’s Mediterranean house, situated ambiguously in either Corsica or a North African country (the inhabitants speak a language Nadia has “forgotten”), and in the last third of the novel she undergoes a progressive transformation as we discover the terrible psychic impact of her obsessions on her son, Ralph.

As in NDiaye’s previous novel, Rosie Carpe (2001), social and ethical issues are handled through the treatment of genre, narrative voice, and topography. Mon coeur à l’étroit articulates its themes of exclusion, contamination, isolation, denial, and hypocrisy via its handling of geographical motifs, first through the treatment of the city of Bordeaux, and second through the shift from gray, inhuman Bordeaux to a Mediterranean setting.

NDiaye’s novel is extremely precise in its topography and many of the streets of downtown Bordeaux are mentioned. In a way reminiscent of Sartre’s La nausée, itself indebted partly to Kafka, the novel builds on the initial premise of a transformation in the protagonist’s relations with the surrounding world. In Nadia’s case, this means feeling that the city she thought she had made her own is conspiring in her downfall. In a chapter titled “Ma ville déloyale” (my disloyal city), the fog that envelops the town, reminiscent of the blurring of clear boundaries in another topographical fable, Camus’s La chute, disorients Nadia so that she gets lost in her own neighborhood: “the city itself is trying to throw me off track.” The only person around is a woman running a newspaper kiosk, from whom Nadia characteristically recoils when she recognizes that the woman openly flaunts the shared social and ethnic origin Nadia has done so much to suppress (mirroring here is as crucial as it is in Genet). Further on, in a chapter called “Tombée aux mains de Fondaudège” (fallen into the hands of Fondaudège), the rue Fondaudège, where Nadia had once lived, seems to have mutated telescopically, its uncanny new length reflecting the distance and forgetfulness in which she had sought to shroud it. The interactions between city space and mental space are concomitant with the breaking down of Nadia’s carefully constructed and profoundly inhuman world, as her controlled present-tense, first-person narrative is increasingly traversed by italicized passages rendering less avowable recognitions; gradually, Nadia comes to acknowledge her presumptuous heartlessness.

By a brilliant stroke, NDiaye makes Nadia’s place of residence a Bordeaux street whose name is unusual in commemorating a famous author’s work rather than his person—the rue Esprit-des-Lois, after Montesquieu. A passage where the word loi (law) keeps resonating, as in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” brings out some of the ironies involved in this conjunction of place and character, ethics and space: Nadia whispers to the recumbent and apparently moribund Ange:

When she finally departs, Nadia again has a sense of Bordeaux conspiring against her, this time in the shape of the tram that consistently ignores her as she trots along dragging her wheeled suitcase on the dirty pavements. As the tram keeps failing to stop, she feels humiliated, but for the first time begins to recognize her affinity with “faces and bodies like mine,” people with whom she had previously acknowledged nothing in common. She wonders if she is more like “the people I resemble” “as opposed to those I thought I belonged with, but who, in all good faith it seems, no longer recognise Ange and me as such.”

In the last third of the novel, Nadia’s progressive transformation—working via a train of recognitions—includes her acknowledgment of the terrible psychic impact her obsession with self-denial and self-betterment have wrought on her son, Ralph. His foursquare Anglo-Saxon forename seems to invoke intertextually another fable, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which, like Mon coeur à l’étroit, is concerned with the blurred border between the human and the inhuman, and the thin veneer of bourgeois civilization. As Golding made clear, Lord of the Flies was designed to be a darker version of R. M. Ballantyne’s Victorian romance Coral Island, where the narrator, called Ralph, is shipwrecked on a tropical island with two other boys. While in Ballantyne’s colonialist idyll the protagonists are smug and doughty little Christians who triumph over pirates and cannibals, Golding’s children, especially the oldest boy, also called Ralph, discover the evil and inhumanity of which all human beings are capable. Ralph is party to the scapegoating of the ungainly cockney boy, Piggy, whose corpulence, short sight, and fragile eyeglasses are transferred by NDiaye to her Nadia. For in the end Nadia is as much a victim of her delusions and self-deceptions as Ralph—stiff and self-torturing in his leather coat—whose life has been blighted by his mother’s endless manipulations.

Ralph whisks his mother away from the sunny coastline to a sepulchral house in perpetual shade and cold where Nadia discovers that he does not live with his (probably North African) wife Yasmine, whom Nadia had snubbed in Bordeaux, and their baby daughter Souhar, whose name Nadia had found repugnant, but with the sinister gynecologist, Wilma, who encourages his passion for guns and hunting, and appears to eat only meat. To Nadia’s astonishment it turns out that Ralph has rescued his elderly grandparents (Nadia’s parents) from Les Aubiers, where—as Ralph reminds her—Nadia had left them to die, never once visiting them in thirty-five years. It is they who are bringing up baby Souhar in a coastal village, where Nadia, we feel, will now decide to stay. If in the shift from the gray city to the sunny coast, Mon coeur à l’étroit does constitute an ontological journey, the novel’s various tones and devices do not suggest an unequivocally happy ending. Even if Nadia seems to reconnect with her origins, the enduring consequences of the damage her upbringing inflicted on Ralph remain all too evident.

In its treatment of the spaces of Bordeaux and their relation to a Mediterranean other, Mon coeur à l’étroit deals in the charged geographies with which we have been concerned. As in Genet, mirroring, the power of images, and that of rigidifying identifications and disidentifications, are played out in terms of “relations among locations,” and when, as in Rosie Carpe, we move from alleged center (Bordeaux) to alleged periphery (the Mediterranean village), the reversal of expectations makes geographical relations the carriers of profound historical ironies. Creating a framework that can no longer be usefully described as colonial, or postcolonial, but rather as simultaneously local and global, Duras, Genet, Tournier, Perec, NDiaye, and many other contemporary writers (one could also mention Patrick Modiano, Marie Darrieussecq, and François Bon) create literary works (and worlds) that are characterized less by boundary crossing than by a redistribution of boundaries: frontiers become multiple and ubiquitous, but also blurred, evanescent, and impalpable. Putting death, desire, laughter, irony, alterity, and spatial dislocation into the mix, along with politics and history, postmodern writing has by no means questioned the pertinence of boundaries but has radically queried the possibility of delimiting or stabilizing them. The charged geographies of latet-wentieth and twenty-first-century literature introduce us to provisional borders and border zones, receding horizons, and a constant reversibility in the relations between self and other, East and West, North and South, reality and fiction, the near at hand and the apparently (or formerly) remote.