Abstracts

Driss Aissaoui
Dalhousie University

Robert Challe utopiste

Dans ses Mémoires, Robert Challe (1659-1721) condamne avec vigueur les exactions des responsables politiques.  Fort de son expérience personnelle, il propose des formules de redressement pour le secteur administratif dont l’essentiel est énoncé à l’occasion de l’évaluation de l’établissement que Crozat entreprend de bâtir sur les rives du Mississippi.  Se substituant dans son esprit à son Acadie mythique, la colonie louisianaise sert de catalyseur à ses idées socio-politiques qu’il rêve d’appliquer aussi bien aux autres colonies qu’à la France européenne.  D’une description objective de ce qui est, le mémorialiste crée un monde selon son cœur qui prend toutes les allures d’une utopie:  « il s’y formerait une espèce de royaume aussi florissant que la vieille France européenne ».

« Mais ce ne sont que ceux qui se rebutent au travail, se défend-il, qui verront dans ce que je propose un royaume digne de Télémaque ».  On l’aura compris:  le projet de Challe n’est pas de rivaliser en invention avec les adeptes d’Utopia, mais de substituer un nouveau contrat social à un ordre périmé.  C’est sans surprise donc que, contrairement à un Veiras et à un Cyrano de Bergerac qui situent leurs royaumes dans un ailleurs imaginaire, Challe inscrit le sien dans un univers connu:  le Nouveau Monde.  C’est dire que ses plans de réforme se nourrissent d’un équilibre délicat entre réel et fiction.

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Colin Anderson
Massey University

Jean Rouaud à la recherche du roman

Jean Rouaud gained instant celebrity in 1990 when his first novel, Les Champs d’honneur, was awarded that year’s Prix Goncourt.  The work was a thinly disguised autobiographical reflection on the life of his family, and in particular his difficulty in coming to terms with the sudden death of his father, when the author was 11 years old.  Thereafter followed 4 other novels essentially revisiting the same themes, though viewed through different foci.  At the same time, Rouaud was exploring the function of the writer and his/her relation to the story (histoire) being told.  His ambition was to reassert the primacy of narrative, but where the text itself becomes auto-generative, with the author fulfilling the role of observer and recorder of where it is going.  « On fait avancer le texte devant soi, comme un âne à qui l’on confie le soin d\xE2\x80\x99inventer un chemin à travers le maquis. » (Sur la scène comme au ciel, 1999).

This paper considers Rouaud’s attempts since “leaving his dear family in peace” in 1999 to elaborate a new aesthetic for the novel.  In two works published subsequent to that date, significantly entitled La Désincarnation (2001) and L’Invention de l’auteur (2004), Rouaud explores the process of literary creation and the relationship of the author to the text.  With his newly published “roman d’invention” L’Imitation du bonheur (2006), Rouaud applies his theories to a substantial novel of the imagination from which specific autobiographical references are absent.  The paper concludes with an assessment of how well he may have succeeded in this transformation.

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Althea Arguelles-Ling
University of Sydney

Family Romance as Utopia in the plays of Olympe de Gouges (1745-1793)

The ideas of “nation” as represented in the plays of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793):  where do they fall in the continuum of utopia/dystopia?

The theatre in the French revolutionary period played a large role in the cultural landscape.  Jauffret finds 250 plays written in 1793 alone (202-203).  Marie-Olympe de Gouges wrote twelve plays from the mid 1780s to the mid 1790s, produced at the Théâtre National Comique et Lyrique, the Théâtre de la République, the Comédiens Italiens, Théâtre Montansier, Théâtre de l’Odéon, and at the Palais des Variétés.  I propose to look for signs of the mise en scène of the national imagination in the plays of de Gouges.

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David Bellos
Princeton University

Romain Gary’s New Frontier

Romain Gary (1914-1980) was not a systematic thinker, but through his large body of fiction and memoir in French and English he promoted the utopian idea that humanity might one day rise to a higher condition.  Gary’s tools of irony, antiphrase, provocation and sour comedy made his message difficult to recover from a first reading, and his contemporaries derided him as an old-fashioned humanist, or else ignored his thinking entirely.  The aim of this paper is to show that Gary’s isolation in the intellectual life of 1960s France was a natural consequence of his fidelity to an older and more deeply rooted tradition of utopian thought.

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Emma Carmody
University of Adelaide

That Wonderful Lacuna:  Creative Writing in French as a Second Language

This paper will focus on the production of creative texts (poetry, the novel, the short story) in a non-maternal language.  Drawing upon Roland Barthes’s notion of “neutral writing” and Samuel Beckett’s “literature of the unword”, I will seek to explore the creative potential existing in the space between “the word” and the writer’s experience of it as a non-maternal language.  As part of this process, I will interrogate the role of this cultural lacuna in the destruction of what Beckett termed “the terrible materiality of the word surface” and its implications for creative writers working in a second language, in particular French.

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Kay Chadwick
University of Liverpool

Philippe Henriot’s utopia:  propaganda and the last days of Vichy

Philippe Henriot (1889-1944) was the most influential and notorious propagandist of the Vichy Regime.  In 1940, he welcomed the Armistice, immediately becoming an ardent Pétainist and one of the great rhetoricians for Vichy’s programme of National Revolution, whose frequent broadcasts on Radio-Vichy earned him designation as the “French Goebbels”.  In January 1944, Henriot was elevated to the post of Secretary of State for Information and Propaganda in the Vichy government.  From then until his assassination by the Resistance on 28 June 1944, he spoke twice daily on Radio-Vichy.  In his broadcasts, he damned the Allies and the Resistance in equal measure, and outlined a utopian future for France based on collaboration with Germany.  This cause was nothing less than a crusade.  A Catholic himself, Henriot wielded great influence over Catholic opinion, and huge numbers listened to what were widely regarded as compelling broadcasts.  His strategy was to play on traditional Catholic fears and prejudices, raising the spectre of civil war, painting Communism as the monster of the modern age, and indulging in virulent anti-Semitism.

This paper will discuss Henriot’s reading of the last days of Vichy:  it will assess his utopian vision for France, the methods he employed to propagate his message, and its reception during the so-called “springtime of fear”, as Liberation became increasingly probable but long in realisation.

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William Dickson
University of Glasgow

 “La France profonde”:  Utopian nostalgia and present-day dystopia

This paper will be based on late 20th-century French “regional” fiction, which develops a dual attitude to a recent past, seen on the one hand as desirable but lost (pre-1914) and on the other as morally unacceptable and a warning for the future (pre-1945).

The novels and essays in question (written by Michelet, Tillinac, Duneton etc) evoke the rural world of the Third Republic and the transformation France has undergone, developing three points of rupture between the past and the present, namely the two World Wars and May 1968.

The rural past is therefore seen with a degree of nostalgia but gone forever.

However, the depiction of inter-war politics in Paris and especially the Vichy regime is seen in terms both of dysfunctionality and dystopia.  May 1968 is seen as a break with history and tradition, the breaking of the link between the land and the city, but it is also seen as being a catalyst with respect to attitudes regarding Fascism as well as Communism.  In particular, Michelet in his fiction will openly equate Occupied France with Pinochet’s Chile.

In a post-modern world, when those in the city have been “dispossessed” of land and history, these writers will argue that there are moral choices to be made, based on the values of rural France, and reject what they see as totalitarian philosophical or political solutions.  In this way, they reject left-wing ideologies and parties, while also refusing to follow extreme right-wing parties.  The choice ultimately leads to the re-creation of the self in a world characterised by disintegration.

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Jacqueline Dutton
University of Melbourne

Expiation in the Antipodes:  A Utopian Endeavour for the French?

During the first half of the 19th century, when the British had already established several penal colonies in Australia, the French were debating the relative merits of setting up their own bagne in the Antipodes.  Contrary to the specialist counsel of Alexis de Tocqueville, plans to create a penal colony based on the Australian model were finally put into practice in New Caledonia in 1863, following attempts to claim lands in Western Australia and the South Island of New Zealand.  In this endeavour, one of the most pressing concerns for the French was the rehabilitation of the condemned, a seemingly impossible venture in the harsh penitentiary system in France.  The ideal of expiation was therefore a deciding factor in the push for the penal colony.

This paper will examine how the notion of expiation influenced the French efforts to replicate the Australian penal colony in the Antipodes.  Drawing on Arthur McCalla’s theories relating expiation to progress in the work of Ballanche, I will seek to demonstrate the utopian vision of the ideal prison that permeates the 19th-century accounts of French travellers to Australia as well as the writings of the French historians and other authorities in support of a penal colony for France.

In addition to offering an opportunity for expiating the crimes of the convicts, and thereby progressing the project of the French utopian socialists, the establishment of a penal colony in the Antipodes may also represent an expiatory gesture for the French nation.  Atoning for the shameful loss of the entire Australian continent to the British, the penal colony in New Caledonia may also be interpreted as part of an ongoing mission to rewrite the history of the French presence in Austral waters.  Expiation will therefore be considered at two distinct levels in this study:  as a rehabilitating process for both the condemned prisoners and the unsuccessful colonisers.

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David Elder
Edith Cowan University

Réflexions préliminaires sur l’événement, le témoignage et la (fonction) politique chez Paul Valéry

Dans ce travail sur l’événement, le témoignage et la (fonction) politique il ne s’agit point de relever simplement une série de notions capitales (ce qui ne manquerait pas de piquant !) mais de les analyser dans le contexte d’un certain réseau de relations essentielles dans les Oeuvres et les Cahiers de Paul Valéry.

Il y a chez Valéry une méfiance radicale des mots et d’un nombre important de notions illégitimes.  Il faut ajouter à cette liste la fonction de sa méfiance de l’histoire, des événements et des témoignages.  Tout lecteur des textes de Valéry connaît son attitude critique à l’égard de l’histoire, des journaux et de la politique.

Pour Valéry, la description des « (grands) événements » ignore « la marche silencieuse et constante » de la vie mais aussi à quel point ce que nous appelons communément des faits sont toujours valorisés par un témoin—par un certain point de vue.

Rappelons que Valéry pratique d’ailleurs une sorte d’an-archie pure et appliquée—et qu’il se déclare beaucoup plus sociable que social.  Soulignons également cette manière chez Valéry de chasser les idoles et les mythes sociaux.  De plus, ses commentaires (souvent aphoristiques, lapidaires et laconiques) portent sur l’étonnante absence d’analyse derrière tant d’engagements au sein des partis politiques.  Valéry entreprend un puissant travail de démolition des idoles politiques.  Une lecture même cursive des réflexions sur l’histoire et la politique dans les Cahiers de Valéry peut servir de salutaire mise en garde pour tous ceux qui souhaitent s’engager trop hâtivement dans la vie politique.  Il y fait tabula rasa du mythe politique et ses réflexions tombent souvent comme un couperet.  Mais pas de projet ou de plan proprement politiques chez Valéry.  On trouve surtout dans les Cahiers une analyse et un dressage du pouvoir de l’esprit critique et un nettoyage du système verbal.  Valéry, ne l’oublions pas, c’est avant tout l’analyste de ce qui est fonction-fonctionnel.  Ce qui fut (l’histoire), sera, pourrait être ou aurait pu être (les spéculations utopiques) est de peu d’intérêt pour lui.  Pas de plan pour une Utopie—mais des spéculations humoristiques autour de la fiducia dans l’Île Xiphos et surtout des critiques sévères du Monde actuel et de la vie politique dans un nombre important de ses textes.  C’est ici que nous pouvons parler d’une sorte de désistance politique à la Valéry—même si ce mot, comme nous le rappelle Jacques Derrida, n’existe pas en français.

Au fond, chez Valéry, « toute politique implique quelque idée de l’homme » et surtout de l’homme en tant que système vivant fonctionnant dans un milieu.  C’est donc le le Moi et la bio-sphère, une étude du langage et de ses effets et une « critique » « de sa valeur de représentation des choses » qui sont à la base de ses analyses.  Et c’est ainsi que ses réflexions se situent en amont de la vie politique à l’intérieur d’une forme d’an-archie, à savoir « la tentative de chacun de refuser toute soumission à l’injonction qui se fonde sur l’invérifiable. »

Nous essaierons, dans notre présentation, de peaufiner ce tissu de liens.

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Maria-Suzette Fernandes-Dias
Australian National University

Une aveuglante absence de lumière:  Univers contre-utopique de Ben Jelloun

La fin du mois d’octobre 2005.  Les images des émeutes urbaines en France ont bouleversé le monde entier et ont obligé un pays qui s’enorgueillit de sa laïcité utopique d’accepter « la faillite de sa politique d’intégration de ses minorités issues de l’immigration, enfermées dans des ghettos suburbains, victimes de nombreuses discriminations, et ainsi en proie à des formes agressives de communautarisme.” (1)  Pourtant, une voix avait beau crier dans le désert, prédisant cette insurrection…  C’était la voix littéraire de Ben Jelloun.

Energumène qui œuvre implacablement pour soutenir le droit à la différence des marginaux (des femmes, des immigrés, des « hommes sous linceul de silence », des écrivains francophones arabes et africains, condamnés aux marges étiquetées « de l’hospitalité et de l’accueil » (2) de la critique littéraire française) et  défenseur invétéré de la laïcité face à la résurgence récente d’un islam extrémiste en Europe (3), Tahar Ben Jelloun incarne l’artiste exclu engagé au service du peuple.  Le recul procuré par sa position périphérique au sein de la communauté française et la distance spatiale vis-à-vis du vécu quotidien de la société maghrébine lui permettent de porter un regard lucide et critique sur sa culture d’adoption et celle de son origine.

Dans ma présentation, je vais démonter comment pour Ben Jelloun, le roman contre-utopique (dystopique) s’avère comme un outil virulent pour vilipender d’une manière poignante la fausse moralité, la corruption politique, le fanatisme et les mœurs misogynes qui règnent au sein de la société maghrébine;  pour démythifier la vision illusoire de « la terre promise » que les jeunes Maghrébins “diplômés-chômeurs” engendrent à propos de l’Hexagone en exposant l’utopie française de la devise:  Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité, à la lumière dévoilante de l’expérience d’aliénation et de déplacement des immigrés;  et pour dénoncer les immigrés qui, au lieu de s’intégrer au sein de leur société d’adoption, s’acharnent à créer les « ghettos » moraux où le blèd traditionnel maghrébin se reproduit à la périphérie de la société française.

1. Alain Morice, anthropologue, chercheur au Centre national de la recherche scientifique dans Pajol http://pajol.eu.org/article905.html
2. Tahar Ben Jelloun, Hospitalité Française, Seuil, Paris, 1997, p. 30.
3. Voir les articles récents de Tahar Ben Jelloun:  “Contamination” (paru dans Le Monde du 27/01/2004), “Laïcité”, “Traumatisme hollandaise” (posté sur son site web http://www.taharbenjelloun.org/menu.htm)

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Jeannette Granfar
University of Queensland

Mapping the topography of the Affaire du Foulard Islamique

This paper is part of a wider project on the Islamic Headscarf Affair which, by uncovering the rhetorical organisation of staged positions in the centre-left press, challenges received views of the affair in Anglophone and Francophone commentary.

It departs from commonplace usage of the term discourse and of its derivatives—the discursive “field”, “formation”, “space” and “terrain”—to explore ways of mapping the headscarf affair’s discursive terrain(s).  What might a mapping of the rather rugged terrain of laïcité, the battleground of headscarf debates, look like, and what theoretical apparatus would need to be assembled to account for this complex and slippery discursive field?  In contrast with the clearly delineated objects analysed by Foucault, laïcité as a contested discursive terrain cannot be unproblematically turned into a stable discursive formation.  The paper therefore opens with an examination and problematisation of Foucauldian “discourse” for the mapping project;  the second part of the paper sketches a provisional map of the affaire du foulard’s discursive topography.

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Françoise Grauby
University of Sydney

Une utopie/dystopie thérapeutique : la séance de magnétisme dans Le Protocole Compassionnel d’Hervé Guibert

Deuxième volet de la trilogie d’Hervé Guibert, Le Protocole compassionnel est presque exclusivement consacré à la confrontation d’un corps maintenant révélé sidéen, double textuel de l’auteur, et d’une médecine allopathique froide, pénible et peu sensible à la souffrance des malades.

Cette communication se propose de commenter le recours aux médecines parallèles, en particulier la scène de magnétisme au Maroc, qui offre le secours de ce qu’on pourrait appeler une utopie thérapeutique, car elle contient en germe les éléments d’un corps idéal et docile dans lequel s’énonce, dans des termes différents de la médecine conventionnelle, d’autres processus d’infantilisation et de surveillance des corps.  La référence sera faite ici non au Foucault de Surveiller et punir ou de Naissance de la Clinique mais à celui des textes sur la médecine alternative rassemblés dans Dits et Ecrits.

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Greg Hainge
University of Queensland

The Utopian Vision of Philippe Grandrieux’s Dystopias

The cinematic universe created by the two fictional feature-length films to have emerged from the imagination of director Philippe Grandrieux to date would seem, from a cursory reading, to be an eminently dystopian universe.  Indeed, Sombre’s tale of a misogynistic, brutal serial killer who, by day, is the puppet master of a Punch and Judy show would appear explicitly to foreground its allegorical function and thus the revelatory aspect so important in dystopian fiction.  Grandrieux’s follow up to Sombre, La Vie nouvelle, for its part, would seem at times to be a case study for all those aspiring to forge a truly 21st-century dystopian vision, since it appears to obey many of the fundamental principles of the genre:  it is set in an apocalyptic post-war landscape;  there is a concentration on characters from the underbelly of society and a concomitant shift of power to these forces; and there reigns a sense of otherworldliness that nonetheless in important aspects still resembles the world that we know.

This view, however, is over simplistic and we will here suggest that La Vie nouvelle actually presents us with a form of utopian vision.  Far from conforming to the commonly accepted view of what constitutes a utopian vision, however, we will contend that Grandrieux’s utopia is one that highlights almost exclusively its etymological fragment outopia over eutopia.  This is not to say, however, as some may be tempted to, that the dystopian elements of the film are exaggerated to the point where they become entirely unrealisable—and hence utopian since evoking a society which can never exist.  Rather, this is to say that in relation to the real against which both utopias and dystopias are held, the universe generated by La Vie nouvelle is, precisely, entirely new, having nothing to do with our Realpolitik.

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Alastair Hurst
University of Melbourne

Visions méditerranéennes:  Paul Valéry and the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen in Nice

Paul Valéry was the inaugural Administrateur of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen in Nice, which was founded by ministerial decree in 1933.  He held this position for some eight years until dismissed by the Vichy regime in 1941.  This paper will focus on Valéry’s vision for the establishment and future development of the Centre and the various factors which impeded its realisation as conceived by him.  It seeks to shed light on an aspect of his intellectual, cultural and broadly political activities which have received comparatively little close attention and will reveal “un Valéry engagé”, an intellectual figure caught up in, participating in, the Europeanist aspirations of his time.

Valéry’s intellectual vision for the Centre was truly prophetic and innovative in terms of its conceptual approach to the Mediterranean and, more generally, the European cultural dynamic:  representing a sustained attempt to define both the unity and diversity of this dynamic as a function of the Mediterranean crucible.  The Centre remains the only such interdisciplinary tertiary institution still active in Europe.  It represented a conscious and radical break on Valéry’s part with traditional French academic and institutional structures, authentically European in its conception of curriculum and its multi-disciplinary approach to teaching, research and the fostering of transnational co-operative ventures.  Valéry anticipated “la construction européenne”, laying down a conceptual foundation for a political and cultural evolution within Europe which continues to this day.

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Hélène Jaccomard
University of Western Australia

« Tu rêves ? »:  utopies à responsabilité limitée des écrits beurs

La littérature beur étant principalement une littérature de dénonciation et de contestation, il n’y a rien d’étonnant à ce qu’elle vise à changer le monde.  Pourtant, on n’y distingue aucune utopie globale.  Ce n’est qu’en creux qu’il ne s’y dessine des espérances.  Le but de cette présentation est d’étudier les textes selon le type de rêves bien circonscrits qui les mobilisent:  l’amélioration du sort de la femme;  la résolution de problèmes sociaux comme le racisme, la criminalité, la drogue et la crise du logement;  un système éducatif pour soigner le corps social malade.  Un seul texte va jusqu’à réclamer la pleine et entière citoyenneté pour les enfants d’immigrés maghrébins.  Ces utopies à responsabilité limitée des écrivains beurs sont toutefois dominées par un timide espoir:  être lues comme émanant de véritables auteurs, au-delà de toute étiquette.

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William Jennings
University of Waikato

Escaping from convention:  the role of the train in André Gide’s fiction

Rail transformed speed, distance, landscape and travel in a Europe where for centuries the horse had been the fastest means of transport.  The new physical space of the train became a new moral space where travellers could escape the rules of conventional society.  Nobel laureate André Gide (1869-1951), a constant traveller, was born into the first French generation for whom rail travel was ordinary, and grew up on the cusp of a nascent modernism that took its cue from acceleration and movement.  His fiction explores the new rules of the train, and plays on the popular fears of unconventional behaviour on trains.  Gide also creates a new narrative form, where scenes in different cities overlap through the almost instantaneous nature of rail travel compared to the days of the stage-coach.  This paper offers a new perspective of Gide’s fiction and extends into the twentieth century two recent studies of the literary consequences of improved transport networks in nineteenth-century France:  David Bell’s Real Time (2004) and Larry Duffy’s Le Grand Transit Moderne (2005).

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Sonali Joshi
Paris

Utopia and Dystopia in the films of Jean Eustache

Jean Eustache’s films provide reflections upon French society in pre- and post-May 1968 contexts, changing societal attitudes seen through the eyes of the “generation of Marx and Coca-cola” (so-called by fellow filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard).  In this paper I will look at how Eustache traces the shift from utopian ideals to a dystopian future within these contexts, looking at Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966) and La Maman et la putain (1973) in particular.  In tracing the progression of Eustache’s work from the mid 1960s into post 1968 France he presents the growing feeling of disenchantment cultivated within this youth generation, shifting from hope and ideals to a more contorted vision of the future.  Notions of utopia and dystopia sit side by side as do the contradictions of hope and despair, euphoria and hysteria, life and death.

In particular, La Maman et la putain reflects upon a post-1968 generation and the new sexual politics that came with it, as well as new representations of masculinity and femininity—a crisis of masculinity on one hand and “la prise de parole” of a new more liberated generation of women on the other, and the dystopian sentiments that came to symbolise the aftermath of 1968.

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Amanda Macdonald
University of Queensland

Le Portrait du Grand Chef

The New Caledonian Kanak independence movement seeks—by definition one would assume—indigenous sovereignty.  Certainly, it is an aim that is acknowledged and given institutional momentum in the autonomy-granting agreement, the Accord de Nouméa (1998).  However, it is now more than 20 years since the radicalised days of the événements of 1984–88, the extremity of which was eventually moderated into deferral of the 1998 vote on independence in return for the Accord’s institutionalisation of the sovereignty discourse.  The political irony is that indigenous sovereignty was, during the violent struggle over independence, both a more geopolitically improbable and a more unambiguously asserted cause.  It is not only cynics who nowadays say:  “Mais aucun indépendantiste ne veut de l’indépendance”.  Allowing that a genuine ambition for independence persists, but acknowledging that the vote on independence is a long decade away, one can ask how the movement will maintain its sovereignty ambitions in the shape of popular, vote-shaped conviction.

This paper considers what Louis Marin would have understood as a potent representational gesture of sovereignist power:  the culture of militant portraiture depicting the Kanak hero of the 1878 “Canaque” uprising, le Grand Chef Ataï.  Drawing on Marin’s semiotic analysis of the power of le portrait du roi, at a time of absolute monarchic sovereignty, the paper will describe how Ataï’s portrait was a highly significant figurehead element in early independentism, and will examine the way bus-shelter art, in particular, continues to represent Ataï to potent effect in a context of potential sovereignty.

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Jo McCormack
University of Technology, Sydney

Teaching, Reporting and Discussing the Algerian War in Contemporary France

Over fifteen years ago, the French historian Robet Frank argued that the Algerian War was an “occluded” or “repressed” but not forgotten event—it periodically reemerges in the present, often in polemical disputes (eg recent debates in Le Monde “discussing” the French army’s use of torture in Algeria) only to apparently subsequently disappear.  For most scholars the (traumatic) past is “worked through”—for example in Paul Ricoeur’s “work of memory”—but where is France up to in this work of memory on this most divisive of conflicts?  Has France “turned the page” yet?  Can we really talk of “la fin de l’amnésie”?  Drawing on a case study of French collective memory of the Algerian War in contemporary France in three crucial vectors of memory—the school system, the media and the family—this paper argues that this “work of memory” is necessarily a long and arduous process that is far from complete.  Transmission of memories in these three important vectors is far from ideal, and it can be argued that other ways of dealing with the past are urgently needed if France is to rebuild its national cohesion in the twenty-first century.

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Philippe Met
University of Pennsylvania

Connaît-on la chanson ? Singing moments in French Crime Cinema

This paper will look at the remarkable recurrence of diegetic singing moments or set pieces (rather than “musical numbers”), performed by professional artistes (rather than improvised by amateurs), in French polar.  Three films, covering the period from the immediate post-war era to the burgeoning New Wave and belonging to related, albeit distinct sub-categories of the crime genre (police procedural, heist film and noir pastiche, respectively) will be centrally examined:  Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres (1947), Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) and François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (1960).

Particular attention will be paid to instances of contrastive dédoublement of songs:  the brisk and plebeian “Tralala” with its both provocative and bon enfant emphasis on female derriere vs. the romantically languorous and glamorous “Danse avec moi” in Quai;  Bobby Lapointe’s dual fanfare style piece (“Framboise” and “Marcelle”) vs. Félix Leclerc’s courtly love song (“Dialogue d’amoureux”, with Lucienne Vernay) at opposite ends (and registers) of the Pianiste.  Word play will also be considered as an important point of commonality:  from the foregrounding of specific signifiers as social (diacritic) markers, especially in gangster flicks (“rififi”, or even the eponymous “grisbi” in Becker’s 1954 film which becomes implicitly associated with Max’s melancholy-tinged, admittedly wordless, personal signature tune on the juke-box) to the (intricately) free-associative fireworks of Lapointe’s lyrics.  Last but not least, erotic and gendered connotations will be highlighted within the misogynistic context of crime cinema:  the tantalisingly euphemistic “tralala” framed by a sleazy and sexploitative narrative;  rififi as rough sex;  Lapointe’s playfully obscene puns and spoonerisms (the “antibaise”, most infamously).

We should then be in a better position to determine whether these singing passages are mere instances of escapist fantasy detrimentally bringing the action to a grinding halt as some critics have argued in the past (including Truffaut himself, who found the Rififi piece “execrable” in an otherwise perfect film!), or actually enrich it by (not unlike a Greek chorus, but far more obliquely) commenting on its ideological underpinnings, especially in terms of gender and class.

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Hamid Mokaddem
Institut de Formation des Maîtres de la Nouvelle-Calédonie

Le Mot « indépendance » en Nouvelle-Calédonie:  Utopie ou contre-utopie ?

Le titre du premier essai de Jean-Marie Colombani, L’Utopie calédonienne (Paris, Denoël, 1985), visait clairement la vieille devise calédonienne:  « Deux couleurs, un seul peuple ».  Depuis la date de la signature de l’Accord de Nouméa, le 5 mai 1998, entre les trois légitimités politiques (France, Kanaky et Nouvelle-Calédonie), ce mot d’ordre « utopique » est substitué par celui de destin commun.  L’utopie demeure, malgré les changements de conjonctures politiques.  L’histoire contemporaine de la Nouvelle-Calédonie est rythmée par un mouvement contradictoire:  « Union de l’ensemble des communautés » versus « Scission de cet ensemble par une partie indépendantiste kanak ».  La scansion politique alterne entre l’utopie d’un destin commun et la contre-utopie des communautaristes.  Notre intervention étudiera, à partir de l’analyse de contenu d’un discours tenu par Jean-Marie Tjibaou en 1978, cette alternance historique dont la Nouvelle-Calédonie n’est pas encore sortie.  Cent ans après la commémoration de la naissance de Maurice Leenhardt et celle de la grande insurrection kanak (1878), ce discours inédit explique le différend et tente de surmonter celui-ci tout en maintenant le droit à la différence du peuple kanak.

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Alison Moore
University of Queensland

Revising Marie Bonaparte in Interwar France

The notion of feminine sexual frigidity has been widely mocked by recent feminist philosphers such as Luce Irigaray.  In gender theory more broadly, psychoanalytic notions of the infantile or phallic quality of clitoral orgasm have been rejected in favour of polyvalent or polymorphously perverse visions of feminine sexual potential.  But how, then, does one understand the work of Marie Bonaparte—a self-determined aristocratic woman who became one of the most important contributors to a psychoanalytic theory that condemned the clitoris to sublimation.  Defiant and wildly courageous in her research for both intellectual and personal understanding, Bonaparte now confronts scholars with an uncomfortable vision of female pleasure, a vision constructed at a time before feminist thought encoded the clitoral/vaginal dichotomy as a repressive model.  While this paper will not suggest Bonaparte needs reviving as an ideal of feminist understanding, it will suggest that she needs to be studied in the specific context that was Interwar France.  Anxieties about population decline, androgyny and colonial difference all fed into concerns of Marie Bonaparte.  A study of her work and life is therefore invaluable to our knowledge of French sexual politics of the nineteen twenties and thirties.

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Colin Nettelbeck
University of Melbourne

Kechiche and the French Classics:  On the Difficulty of Safeguarding an Outsider’s View

Tunisian born Abdellatif Kechiche is now, by all reasonable measures, fully integrated into the French film making community.  His first film, La Faute à Voltaire (2000), while it had limited box-office success, was warmly and widely received by the critics;  his second, L’Esquive (2004), again acclaimed by the critics, was awarded a César for best script and best film, and Kechiche’s career was guaranteed by a three-film contract with one of France’s most prestigious producers, Claude Berri.  From a personal angle, Kechiche’s itinerary validates the utopian dream of French cinema by which anyone, no matter how much of a marginal or outsider, can find salvation through art.  But Kechiche’s work tells a very different story.  Using canonical artifacts of French culture as markers, these films expose the social, psychological and cultural obstacles that stand in the way of those who dream of integration into French society;  and they demonstrate—with a lucidity that is no less acute for being laced with humour—the ragged systemic flaws that characterise life in France today.  L’Esquive seems to offer more hope than La Faute à Voltaire, but embedded within it is the most problematic of issues:  namely, now that he has become an insider, how can Kechiche maintain the urgent directness and integrity of the outsider’s experience and vision ?

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Judith Nicogossian
Queensland University of Technology

Le personnage du post-humain dans La Cité des enfants perdus

Dans le film La cité des enfants perdus, qui met en scène un univers urbain dystopique, nous proposons l’étude de l’objet en tant que prolongement du corps, et inséré dans des réseaux de production et d’échange.  Ce qui nous intéressera est moins la manière dont l’objet est incorporé aux organismes humains, que la façon dont l’organisme humain s’objectifie dans ces mêmes conditions de réseaux.  Dès lors, la difficulté de distinguer le corps humain de l’objet, produits ensemble, leur confère un statut commun:  ils sont appréhendés tantôt par leur valeur d’usage, tantôt par leur valeur d’échange, et l’arbitraire régule ces échanges.

L’apparatus technologique en tant que système de production des « prothèses » du post-humain, introduit dans le chaos de sa production entropique un système de l’ordre précaire.  Il exacerbe la dualité traditionnelle sujet/objet, humain/inhumain, et encourage un acte de médiation entre ces termes jusqu’alors antagonistes.

S’interroger sur l’émergence d’un sujet post-humain, défini par son rapport d’intimité à l’objet technologique, suscite deux réactions immédiates au sujet de:

- Sa rétrospection culturelle (du Frankenstein de Mary Shelley à la possibilité contemporaine d’un clone médicalisé).
- Sa projection effective, qui, dans la réalité, par le biais du matériel scientifique ou de la fiction, est un acte de création rationalisée;  il met en exergue l’un de l’ensemble des réels possibles, devenu effectif, souvent en négation des autres, restés simplement possibles.

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Peter Poiana
University of Adelaide

Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s Competing Caribbean Utopias

Since Aimé Césaire’s plans for achieving political emancipation by way of the promotion of the idea of négritude, generations of French Carribbean writers have engaged in what might be called a theatre of competing utopias.  The paper will discuss the models of a future Caribbean sociéty proposed by Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau in their novels and essays.  The robust and friendly rivalry between the two writers will be examined from a predominantly formal perspective.  Of particular interest is the way in which they engage in a competition for terminology (for example, Glissant’s créolisation versus Chamoiseau’s créolité), their attempts to find an effective mix of essayistic and literary discourse, their search for meaningful dosages of French and Creole, and the selection of the specific temporal and spatial determinations that inform their respective visions.  The paper will finally consider how Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s duelling utopias help us better to understand the theoretico-critical function of utopian discourses in general.

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Rémy Porquier
Université de Paris X - Nanterre

Les écrivains et les langues:  réalité et fiction
Sur l’apprentissage des langues et les interactions en langue étrangère

Si relativement peu d’œuvres littéraires portent spécifiquement sur l’apprentissage des langues et la communication en langue étrangère, nombre d’entre elles y consacrent des textes ou des passages, jusqu’à en faire parfois un thème récurrent.

A partir d’un large échantillon d’auteurs de langues diverses, on situera d’abord le thème dans le champ de la littérature (y compris par rapport à l’utopie et à l’imaginaire) puis par rapport aux sources d’information et de réflexion sur l’apprentissage des langues et les interactions exolingues.

On présentera ensuite quelques extraits commentés de textes (romans, essais, poésie, autobiographie) d’auteurs contemporains (Alexakis, R. Barthes, A. Kristof, V. Larbaud, H. Miller, A. Nothomb, R. Queneau, Armand Robin, N. Sarraute), diversement illustratifs du thème.

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Alistair Rolls
University of Newcastle

Spleen Noir:  The Little Prose Poems of Léo Malet and Frédéric Cathala

This paper will focus on the Baudelairian image of Venus and the Motley Fool, which, by recurring throughout Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma contre C.Q.F.D. (1945) and Frédéric Cathala’s first novel L’Arbalète : La vraie vie commence (2003), paves the way for an analysis of these two novels in terms of la flânerie.  In particular, it will be shown how Baudelaire’s use of la flânerie in his prose poems provides the reader with a fetishistic model for mythologising the past, which in turn allows us to re-evaluate the grey areas of noir mood in the context of both the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Questions will be raised as to whether the noir literature of these two periods may be understood through the dichotomy of utopian future/nostalgic past in the same way as that crucial period of French modernity and modernism that is Haussmann’s Paris of the prose poems.

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Charles Sowerwine
University of Melbourne

Patriotism Authoritarian and Democratic:
Nationalism and Republicanism in French Political Discourse, 1895-1914

La Ligue des patriotes was founded in 1882.  Its first President was the republican historian Henri Martin. The moving force behind it was the journalist Paul Déroulède.  In 1885 Martin resigned as president, writing to Déroulède, “you are an authoritarian patriot, I am a liberal patriot”. (1)  Thus began the shift from the republican patriotism which emerged from the great Revolution to an authoritarian patriotism increasingly based on notions of blood and soil rather than on the common republican cause.  The Dreyfus Affair, in contrast, provided the catalyst for a corresponding political realignment, which led those of hierarchical and racialist views to accept nationalism—the new right—and those of all shades of democratic and republican views to reject racialism and anti-semitism—the new “left bloc.”

This paper seeks to interrogate political writings and speeches of republicans and socialists to see to what extent this realignment was translated into discursive practice.  Did those using terms like “France,” “nation” and “Republic” use them in the same ways or did the emerging left and right use them differently?  When and how did the emerging new right pick up terms like these for its own use and what did they mean by them when they used them?  Did the reconsolidated left maintain the use of these and similar terms or did they cede ground to the right?  A reading of the discursive shifts around these key terms will inform our reading of the evolution of nationalist discourse and hence of the opening for trans-national discourse such as the Common Market.

1. Jean-Francois Sirinelli, Histoire des droites en France (Paris, 1992), I, 72.

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Karin Speedy
Macquarie University

Out of the frying pan and into the fire:  Reunion immigrants and the sugar industry in nineteenth-century New Caledonia

Enjoying the utopian conditions of the sugar boom in Reunion Island, the crisis of the 1860s came as a shock to the Grands Blancs and to their workers as economic conditions worsened.  The invitation to settle and set up the sugar industry in a new colony offered a solution to what was rapidly becoming a dystopia and proved a tempting one for both Reunion’s rich and dispossessed.  In the 1860s and 1870s, thousands of Reunion immigrants, Grands Blancs, Petits Blancs, Blacks, Métis and Indians, flooded into the port of Noumea in New Caledonia, keen to transform the convict isle into a new sugar-based utopia.  Motivated, hardworking and optimistic, they set to work planting cane and producing, for a time, quality sugar.  However, conditions in the new colony were harsh, even more difficult than back home, it would seem, as the new arrivals had to face a series of disasters that would spell the end of their utopian sugar vision.  Despite the challenges of adapting to a new land and coping with huge disappointment, many Réunionnais stayed in New Caledonia, forming an important part of the “foundation” population of the colony.  Based on extensive archival research, this paper relates the previously untold history of Reunion immigration to New Caledonia.

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Lyn Stocks
University of Adelaide

Thomas Couture’s Les Romains de la d\xC3\xA9cadence:  Republican Utopia or Decadence

In the twilight of the July Monarchy, when the intensity of the political, social, philosophical, moral and even artistic quarrels which characterised Louis-Philippe’s reign had almost reached its zenith, Thomas Couture caused a sensation at the 1847 Salon with his monumental work, Les Romains de la décadence or L’Orgie romaine.  In this climate of hotly contested political views but also views on the nature of art, its expression and its role in society, Couture had the extremely rare, if not unique honour of finding his work universally acclaimed, by the critics as well as by the public, and even purchased in advanced by the Institute.

Critical analysis of the work was, however, remarkably diverse and reflects, not surprisingly, the contemporary confusion of ideas even among like-minded critics.  Les Romains inspired passionate discourse from certain critics on the moral and political situation of the moment, inspired others to embark on in-depth analyses of the technical aspects of artistic development, carried some into the philosophical realm of social art and its role in the betterment of French society, and caused others to lament the loss of a Roman past perceived as utopian.  In fact, in this gigantic work (4m660 x 7m750) everyone seems to have managed to find something that corresponded to their particular artistic vision, but even more, to find a reflection of their particular philosophical or political penchant.

Thomas Couture succeeded, therefore, in creating a cleverly ambiguous work, while no less powerful for all that, at a moment in French history when any attempt at political reform, as well as any literary or artistic work that was openly socialist, republican, utopian or realist, was considered menacing.

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Anne Taillé
University of Melbourne

Écritures rebelles

Depuis 68 jusqu’à nos jours, la critique sociale du roman noir français implique souvent un rejet des vieilles utopies révolutionnaires et politiques.  Comment le polar assume-t-il sa vocation de “roman d’intervention sociale très violent”, d’après la définition de Jean-Patrick Manchette, tout en se dégageant des idéologies?  Notre étude portera sur les manifestations de cette double exigence dans les textes de Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean-Bernard Pouy et Maurice G. Dantec, qui couvrent la période qui nous intéresse.  L’esprit rebelle de nos auteurs se traduit par un jeu avec les limites du genre, indissociable de l’expression des limites de l’engagement.  Les trois auteurs se dérobent en effet à tout engagement idéologique:  tandis que Manchette et Pouy se désengagent de la gauche, Dantec déclare “vomir les utopies”.  De même, la dimension ludique de leur écriture résiste à une lecture idéologique des textes:  Manchette, en respectant la forme polar à 200%, joue ironiquement de ses mécanismes formels;  Pouy se livre à des exercices oulipiens et parodie également le genre dont Dantec fait éclater les limites, en basculant dans la science-fiction.

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Bonnie Thomas
University of Western Australia

Utopia and Dystopia in Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia

Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau’s autobiographical narrative L’Exil selon Julia provides a compelling insight into the questions of utopia and dystopia in literature.  The story focuses on Pineau’s Creole grandmother, Man Ya, who comes to live with the family in Paris while Pineau is growing up in the 1960s.  Man Ya suffers from deep alienation in this foreign environment and craves to be reunited with the country of her birth.  Through Man Ya’s eyes, Pineau explores the notion of an ideal Caribbean world rooted in nature versus the unforgiving climate in mainland France.  Pineau also reveals the way in which utopia and dystopia vary according to the individual—for Man Ya, rural Guadeloupe is utopian and Paris dystopian, but for her son, the categories are reversed.  These contrasting visions underscore the complex nature of French Caribbean identity and Guadeloupe’s troubled historical relationship with France.  By viewing this book through the lens of utopia and dystopia it is possible to draw some conclusions about ongoing identity issues in contemporary French Caribbean society.

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Tim Unwin
University of Bristol

Vernotopia (technotopia, heterotopia, retrotopia, dystopia)

Jules Verne is often seen as a writer who envisions a utopian future.  In this paper I intend to deconstruct an over-simplified perception by looking at a number of aspects of Verne’s “utopian” visions.  My intention is to show, using the four key terms of my title, that while Verne’s œuvre is deeply concerned with questions of utopia and dystopia, it is very rarely a straightforward vision of a sci-fi future (“technotopia”).  It is certainly the case that Verne’s political and social philosophy was influenced by various forms of utopian socialism in the mid-nineteenth century, and this is apparent in many of the communities that he represents in his novels.  The ideals of collective ownership and mutual collaboration are repeatedly suggested in the island or the maritime settings of many of Verne’s novels, where alternative communities are created in remote, displaced and often movable geographical locations (“heterotopia”).  However, while the notion of utopia often implies a project to build a new society for the future, Vernian communities can be either nostalgically reminiscent of an idyllic past, or involve fixation about past events that define and ultimately limit them (most obviously the case in Nemo’s underwater realm).  Even where Verne projects a vision of the future, the future itself remains turned towards its own past, in a process that I will term “retrotopia”.  It is, moreoever, rare in Verne’s work for such communities to function successfully for any length of time:  they are destroyed either by outside forces, or by inner divisions.  Dystopia in Verne, I will argue, is less a vision of technological alienation than of communities which destroy themselves through their own failure to agree on matters of principle.  In this context, I shall take the novel L’Ile à hélice as an exemplary case-study of the Vernian dystopia.

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Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan
University of Newcastle

Acier austral de l’Australienne Dymphna Cusack:  guerre, travers et misères ou la contre-utopie novocastrienne

Cette communication se propose de présenter brièvement l’auteure australienne Dymphna Cusack (1902-1981) et son roman novocastrien Southern Steel (Acier Austral), paru en 1953.  Dymphna Cusack, grande amie de Miles Franklin, se fit le chantre d’une littérature véritablement australienne par ses thèmes et par sa langue, et s’attaqua avec succès aux diktats des éditeurs londoniens.  Ce roman, situé à Newcastle en 1942 et peuplé de personnages truculents qui parlent la langue colorée des ouvriers ou des marins, est aussi une peinture acerbe des effets de la guerre sur la ville:  la présence envahissante et délétère des soldats américains, l’ambiance oppressante provoquée par le black-out, l’imminence angoissante d’une attaque japonaise.  A tout cela s’ajoute le portrait peu amène d’une usine sidérurgique qui donne son titre au livre et qui gouverna jusqu’à peu, sous son véritable nom de BHP, la vie de la ville.  De veine socio-réaliste, ce roman est moins connu que son prédécesseur Come in Spinner, qui fut traduit et publié en français, mais probablement plus ambitieux.  Il est représentatif de la démarche de cette écrivaine engagée, célébrée de son vivant, et dont l’oubli relatif dans lequel elle est reléguée aujourd’hui, s’il est en partie explicable, en dit plus sur le fonctionnement du « canon » que sur son talent, qui est à tort souvent minoré.

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Andrea M.L.Williams
University of Sydney

Structure Narrative dans les Romans du Graal

Les romans du Graal, surtout ceux qui datent du XIIIe siècle, se caractérisent par une structure narrative complexe;  qui plus est, les éléments symboliques qui peuvent se multiplier et se répéter d’un épisode à un autre créent une structure opérant à un niveau métaphorique plutôt qu’au niveau de l’intrigue.

La nature essentiellement ineffable, voire inexprimable de la matière de ces romans, c’est-à-dire des mystères divins, fait que les auteurs se trouvent obligés d’employer un langage profondément métaphorique, ce qui pose immédiatement des difficultés d’interprétation pour les personnages eux-mêmes mais également pour le lecteur.  Cependant, de temps à autre des explications nous sont fournies par des inscriptions ou le plus souvent par des personnages au statut privilégié, rencontrés au cours de leurs aventures par les chevaliers embarqués dans la quête.  Ce qui nous intéressera ici, c’est la présence ou l’absence de ces passages homilétiques et leur valeur explicative.

Ce que nous pouvons constater, c’est que dans le Perlesvaus les passages homilétiques, quand ils existent, sont souvent loin de fournir des interprétations complètes des passages hautement métaphoriques.  En fait, le lecteur averti peut souvent remplir lui-même les vides laissés par l’auteur, et nous voyons dans La Queste del Saint Graal que l’on peut discerner un développement systématique de l’interaction de ces deux modes narratifs, le mode métaphorique et le mode homilétique.

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