Wandering Women in French Film and Literature

A Study of Narrative Drift

Kenneth A. Loparo, Mariah Devereux Herbeck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137339980
• eBook ISBN: 9781137339997
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

How and when can a narrative agent or voice be considered unreliable? What happens when narrative authority fails and, just as importantly, why does it? As a means to answering these questions, Wandering Women in French Film and Literature examines the phenomenon of 'narrative drift' through in-depth analysis of twentieth-century novels and films.

1

AN INTRODUCTION TO NARRATIVE DRIFT

Over the course of the twentieth century, the novel and film grew and transformed along similar lines in France. Although unlike film the novel was not a nascent art, both knew an era of “rebirth” during the 1950s and 1960s when literary authors wrote “New Novels” often described as having cinematic qualities¹ and filmmakers used their cameras to “write” New Wave films.² As the names of these moments in novel and film history suggest, both novelists and filmmakers chose to break with convention in the name of innovation.

Throughout the twentieth century—even prior to and following these “new” movements—standard practices in storytelling were questioned, traditions were abandoned, and artistic freedoms were sought. In his seminal essay, “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema,” François Truffaut calls for the repudiation of the “Tradition of Quality” that dominated French film production in the late forties. A cadre of young directors—for example, Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Agnès Varda, to name only a few—were linked by a rejection of mainstream cinematic practices. Their work was often characterized by a predilection for writing their own scripts and abandoning the enclosed studio in favor of on-location shooting with unknown actors in low-budget productions.

In her essay “The Age of Suspicion” (1956), New Novel author Nathalie Sarraute characterizes this innovative artistic period as one during which narrative, while freeing itself from tradition, also faced new challenges—in particular what she perceives to be the ever-growing need on the part of the modern reader/spectator to find the “truth” in a work of fiction: “The ‘true fact’ has indeed an indubitable advantage over the invented tale [ . . . ] today’s reader prefers accounts of actual experiences (or at least having the reassuring appearance of such) to the novel” (63–64). Additionally, if only cursorily and perhaps condescendingly, Sarraute recognizes the analogous challenges that filmic narratives faced:

The cinema too would appear to be threatened. It too is infected by the “suspicion” from which the novel suffers. Otherwise, how may we explain the uneasiness which, after that of the novelist, is now being evidenced by certain “advanced” directors who, because they feel obligated to make films in the first person, have introduced the eye of a witness and the voice of a narrator? (73)

Sarraute suggests that to avoid mistrust, the author must “dispossess the reader and entice him, at all costs, into the author’s territory” (71). Accordingly, the most effective means to effacing doubt is to rely on character-based narrative agents³ to tell their own stories, in other words, a “first-person narrative”: “A story told in the first person satisfies the legitimate scruples of the author. In addition, it has the appearance, at least, of real experience and authenticity, which impresses the reader and dispels his mistrust” (66).

Sarraute’s theory is logical: How better to know the “truth” in a work of fiction than to get it directly from the proverbial “horse’s mouth”? However apt this description of narrative authority and authenticity may be, twentieth-century French novelists and directors continue to bestow upon character-based narrative agents (often men) and external narrative voices the right to recount other characters’ life stories, thus distancing the reader or spectator from the “truth” about these characters. In the following analyses of novels and films that span a 70-year time period, from André Breton’s 1929 novel, Nadja, to Laetitia Masson’s 1998 film, À vendre (For Sale), I question the veracity with which narrative voices or (character-based) narrative agents tell another character’s story—in particular, a wandering woman’s story—and what a mise-en-cause of narrative authority means for the representation of female drifter characters. Despite the agents’ and voices’ distance from the woman’s story and consequent lack of knowledge—precisely what Sarraute claims as a source of suspicion on the part of the reader—these narrative agents and voices persist in purporting that they can tell and/or possess the stories of wandering women, to the extent of practically presuming authorial status. It is at such moments that narrative drift becomes apparent, as the limits of narrative agents’ and voices’ knowledge and access to the wanderer’s story are revealed and they thus drift to other topics or admittedly lie, invent, or imagine information about the woman.

Hence, the textual analyses in the following chapters examine the strategies employed to tell a fictional character’s story from a perspective other than her own. Existing theoretical works have analyzed how wanderers tell their own tales. For instance, Ross Chambers’s Loiterature (1999) examines drifter tales—and among those, some that feature female wanderers. The films and novels examined in this current study, however, are not included in the purview of Chambers’s literary category because, as he states, “loiterature is overwhelmingly a first-person genre” (45). Chambers briefly analyzes and then dismisses Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi from his categorization of loiterer literature, since, as he states, “Mona parts company with loiterature [ . . . ] She cannot or will not write; she must therefore be written about” (45). Precisely because Mona is “written about”—or more accurately, because her story is “narrated by” other characters—Varda’s film provides an excellent example of narrative drift and will be examined at length.

Conversely, Chambers examines Colette’s La Vagabonde because the main character, Renée Néré, is a writer and the “narrator-protagonist” (70) of her own story of vagabondage. Colette’s novel (and all others in which the primary drifter character narrates her own story) is not of interest to this current study because the intent here is to examine how a narrative agent or voice may assume the right/ability to narrate and essentially possess a wanderer’s tale and not how the said wanderer writes/narrates her own story of vagabondage (a story she knows/invents/alters because it is her own). Thus, the current study explores how and for what purposes character-based narrative agents and external narrative voices appropriate and tell a wandering woman’s story and the challenges that their choice of subject reveals about ever-evolving twentieth- (and presumably twenty-first-) century French narrative strategies. In this transfer of ownership of the wandering woman’s story from the wanderer herself to a third party (agent or voice), the present study of films and novels questions inherent limits of authenticity and authority in modern narrative.

Thus, this study of narrative drift—as both a phenomenon of the mimesis when the female character physically wanders and of the diegesis when the narrative agents/voices stray from the story of the wanderer—provides a new and informative lens with which to approach this germane line of inquiry with respect to knowledge claims. As will become evident, narrative drift can paradoxically underscore the heavy-handed actions of stifling male narrative agents who choose to forcibly move the narration of the woman’s story in directions that flatter their own masculine image while, at the same time, and due precisely in part to displays of self-aggrandizing egoism that put into question their narrative objectivity, undermining the attempted appropriation of the wanderer’s story by calling attention to the female subject’s at once inherent and unpredictable movement and agency. Analyzing narrative drift can thus both reveal the inefficacy of outdated and unfounded claims to knowledge and give prominence to new and innovative narrative tactics that evidence the unintended autonomy of the wandering woman and her story.

NARRATIVE DRIFT AS NARRATOLOGICAL TOOL

The following chapters consist of analyses of narrative drift—its causes, manifestations, and consequences for wandering female characters and the narrative voices and agents who tell their stories. For each work studied, the following questions are posed: Who is narrating? Who is the wandering woman whose story is told? Where does the wandering woman go and why? What is the motivation for telling her story? When and why do the narrative agents and voices not know information about the wanderer and how do they compensate for their lack of knowledge? Essentially, where is narrative drift apparent in these works about wandering women and what can these instances tell us about trends in narration of wandering women’s stories in twentieth-century France and, perhaps more globally, about the veracity with which anyone can claim to know or possess the story of another individual.

In this same vein, “narrative drift” can and in fact does occur in works that do not feature a wandering woman character. In any tale, a narrative agent or voice must admit to a lack of knowledge or skip over certain elements of a story. However, in what follows, we will focus our attention on a study of wandering female characters and the effects of their ambulation on narrative strategies as “extreme” cases of narrative drift. As characters who were previously rendered submissive to (often masculine) narrative voices and character-based narrative agents (e.g., Zola’s Nana and Mérimée’s Carmen mentioned in the Introduction), these wandering female characters reject socially accepted and often static (i.e., stationary) roles assigned to their gender (namely that of wife, mother, or nun). In so doing, these characters provide us with what is perhaps the most strident step beyond the traditional male narrative gaze and thus, presumably, the most radical cases of narrative drift.

In works about female drifters in which narrative drift is present, conventions of continuity, coherence, and authority that once determined the form and content of so many written narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as many Hollywood-style films, are turned on their head. Narratives examined in this study do not necessarily adhere to Aristotle’s definition of a story as “that which has a beginning, a middle and an end” and according to which the plot “imitate[s] a single, unified action—and one that is a whole” (13–15). A clear presentation of the beginning, middle, and end of a story is not necessarily a requirement for twentieth-century French films and novels—especially, I would argue, when the primary character in the work is a wanderer. As demonstrated in the following analyses, when a wandering woman’s story is narrated in the third person by other characters or voices, narrative reliability and coherence are often lost. Consequently, when analyzed in this light, these “new” drifter narratives free the wanderer character from textual constraints as she literally walks away from the narrative agent’s or voice’s sight and/or grasp.

Although discrepancies between the story told by a narrative agent or voice and the reality of the character’s story have been pinpointed as a trend in modern narrative, these differences have often been viewed as harbingers of narrative’s demise. In his text, Reading Narrative, J. Hillis Miller states that for narrative to exist there must also be a “preexistent or supposedly preexistent line of real historical facts” (50). However, according to Miller, when the two narrative lines—the story told and the supposed “real story”—collide, narrative authority is lost:⁴

With this doubling [ . . . ] comes death, an experience of the uncanny, a vanishing of the generative source, and a putting in question of the authority of the author. For male authors or narrators this means emasculation or the fear of emasculation, according to the Freudian law that says a doubling or division means an absence, an attempt to ward off a loss that creates the loss. (50–51)

In contrast with Miller’s conclusions, the analyses in subsequent chapters will argue that doubling (or multiplying) narrative lines—and the questioning of narrative authority that results—does not necessarily lead to narrative death but instead to narrative drift. To quote Mikhaïl Bakhtine, “la mort [ . . . ] fait lever la vie nouvelle” (“death gives rise to another life,” 325). Morbidity may exist in modern narrative fiction, not as death of the narrative, but as the demise of the all-powerful narrator, or of, by extension, as Miller states, the “authority of the author.”⁵ The “death” Miller perceives and the Freudian terms that he employs to describe masculine competition underline what I perceive to be aspects of modern narrative that prefigure not death, but new beginnings. In particular, the works studied in the following chapters demonstrate the birth of new freedoms for the wandering woman character who experiences a life separate from that of the “emasculated” narrative agent or voice—or from new female narrative voices—who no longer enjoy the benefits of unrestricted knowledge. For the wandering female characters whose tales are recounted in these works, when a narrative agent’s or voice’s shortcomings are revealed, and when the story consequently drifts from one plot line to another, the possibility of liberation from traditionally male-dominated narrative control is made evident.

Furthermore, I argue that the generative source to which Miller refers, or the impetus for narrating—in this case, the story of the wanderer—has not vanished, but rather that our access to it, through the narrative agent or voice, has been altered since the unrivaled authority to narrate another individual’s story in a coherent and continuous manner has been put into question. To illustrate this point, I return to an example from the Introduction to this book. After the screen falls and the Wizard of Oz is exposed for who he really is—arguably, an emasculated man as he is smaller than expected and he speaks “meekly”—Dorothy’s story does not disappear. Her desire to go home, the “generative source” of the narrative, does not vanish. What does cease is belief on the part of the reader/viewer that the Wizard will accomplish tasks of superhuman strength. Similarly, in the novels and films studied in chapters 2 through 5, the story of the wanderer is not lost. When the authority of the narrative agent or voice is put into question, it is the reader’s or viewer’s faith in the narrative agent’s or voice’s superhuman, “omniscient” power that is rendered suspect, not the wanderer’s existence. In other words, the narrative strategies of these novels and films do not lead readers and viewers to believe that the narrative’s source—the drifter character’s story—has vanished. The female wanderer exists in the fictional universe, but the narrative agent’s or voice’s knowledge of the character is at times questioned as it, he, or she tries to both interact with the wanderer (hence at the level of the mimesis) and narrate the drifter’s story from the level of the diegesis.

The fallen “screen of authority” manifests itself in the novels and films studied in subsequent chapters as the realization that a distance separates the character from the narrative voice/agent and that yet another separates the narrative voice/agent from the reader. Narrative drift consists of (failed) attempts at overcoming these distances. In this sense, narrative drift, when recognized by the reader, can be understood as having metatextual qualities: the innards, so to speak, of narrative are exposed to the reader as she or he becomes conscious of the precarious nature of fictional “knowledge.”

As intimated above, in response to a study of narrative distance, a narratologist should rightly argue that gaps in knowledge and distances between narrative agents or voices and the reader are common—even essential—to all narratives. In her Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan underlines the ubiquitous presence of narrative gaps:

No matter how detailed the presentation is, further questions can always...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 An Introduction to Narrative Drift
• 2 “Qui suis-je?”
• 3 “Impersonal” Narrative: Fade to Lack—Detachment and Discontinuity
• 4 “Personal” Narrative: Taking It Personally—Men Telling the Stories of Wandering Women
• 5 “Pluralized” Narrative: More Is Less? The Paradox of Pluralized Perspectives
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index