In keeping with the 2020 Presidential theme, “Being Human,” this panel seeks to interrogate embodiment and corporeality, as a particularly intractable contour of what it means to be human, from a literary perspective, exploring how literature shapes the body and the body, literature. We propose to do so within a French and Francophone framework—the canonical authors Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and Marguerite Duras—and from within a postwar temporality. This panel addresses works on the page, stage, and the television screen from the particularly fraught period after World War II, which required a confrontation with the unprecedented atrocities of the Shoah and the subsequent shattering of the human subject and human history. They do not necessarily represent or speak to the trauma of war—at least not explicitly or directly. But as they were all created in the aftermath of an event that made producing literature seem impossible even as it continued to be produced, recalling Beckett’s oft-cited “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” they cannot help but bear the marks of and weight of their particular historical moment, in which humanity itself, in its cultural objects and in its bodies, had to be reconstituted.
We are interested, in particular, in the question of genre and medium when it comes to how bodies write and how bodies are written, as theater (represented by Ionesco) deploys language, speech, and corporeality differently than does fiction (represented by Beckett). And television (represented by Duras), through the technological conditions of its production and dissemination, diverges from theater despite similarly casting bodies. Our goals for the panel are twofold. First, to speak to the specificity of French as a language for thinking and figuring the body. Second, to start a conversation around the interrelation between genre and corporeality: can the body be genred the way it can be gendered (both terms represented by the single word genré, in French), and if so, what are the genres engendered by the body?
PAPER PROPOSALS
Anne Brancky
As Tamara Chaplin has shown, during the postwar period, television served a critical role of educating the French public and renewing a sense of national identity through the creation and promotion of homegrown intellectual “celebrities.” Indeed, Marguerite Duras’s writing career and public persona were fostered by the growing audio-visual medium. She conducted captivating and quirky interviews during this period for various state-funded television shows like Dim dam dom, Le monde en quarante minutes and Pour le plaisir that give voice to marginalized individuals and bring them into the mainstream of a changing French society. She foregrounds both her writerly persona and her growing public image in order to film what amount to literary productions in themselves that would fascinate viewers while simultaneously educating them about social issues.
In analyzing some of these interviews, I will consider the following questions: how can the TV screen restore humanity to these disenfranchised voices? How is the writer’s body staged to humanize her subjects? How does this newly genred body represent an extension of (rather than departure from) her literary voice?
Julia Elsky
Ionesco’s postwar theater is populated by sick bodies learning languages and healthy bodies speaking French. In The Lesson (1951), a student develops a horrible toothache as her lesson on linguistic philology turns into a scene of sexual violence. In the 1951 radio play, Salon de l’automobile, a female voice asks a customer if he has come to the car show for French lessons. She turns out to be a car, her language skills as smooth as her enticing, healthy metal form. Finally, four of Ionesco’s sketches for an American textbook, Mise en train (1959), revolve around Marie-Jeanne’s visit to the hospital after fainting during a French lesson. In these texts, sickness and health indicate a violence, one that lurks under the thin veneer of classroom civility or postwar prosperity. In light of Ionesco’s training as a French teacher, as well as his work under the Occupation to promote Romanian language teaching in France, I read these plays as a comment on the violence of language as well as theater’s unique ability to enact it.
Annabel L. Kim
Beckett’s œuvre is filled with failing bodies—dirty, ill, broken, malfunctioning, incomplete—anchored in an excremental universe. These bodies are often cast as abject figures that represent the meaninglessness of existence and the ponderous pull of mortality, or as the means for elucidating a Beckettian model of subjectivity and its relation to its environment. I read Molloy—Beckett’s first novel written in French and the first of his so-called trilogy, credited with fundamentally reshaping the novel—however, to explore the question not of what excrement represents but why Beckett’s writing requires it. The failing bodies of Molloy’s narrators, Molloy and Moran, and the excrement that surrounds them but that they themselves do not produce, elaborate an ars poetica that reveals how Beckett’s textual economy and structure are built on the novel’s excremental economy, in which excrement is one of the few sites of exchange and interrelation open to the novel’s characters. Beckett ties together corporeality and writing in such a way that the failing, excremental human body expresses its limits, which turn out to be the limits of narrative itself, embodied in the prose fiction of the novel.