Formalism Resurrected
A formalist reading of Assia Djebar’s symbolization of her melancholia
Jimmy de Leeuw (10034617)
Hanneke Stuit
June 24th, 2013
1. History of reading-methodologies
In this thesis I will undertake a formalist reading of Assia Djebar’s1 Nulle Part Dans La Maison De Mon
Père (2007). After I have situated formalism as a historical movement, I will follow its traces up to
current debates on methodologies of reading literatures The polemical stance which I have taken is
not against other interpretations of Djebar’s autobiography, but against other methodologies used
when reading her work, and the interpretations which are derived from this. One can thus say that
the choice for Djebar is arbitrary. Despite the contemporary scholarly climate in which formalist
approaches are avoided, it is my aim to illustrate the suitability of a formalist analysis in a
comparative translation study. It is for this reason that I will compare the original French and Dutch
versions.
The literary aspirations of formalism are unequivocal. The movement finds its origin in
French form-, that means “cut off from the rest” (Méthodique 1568, my translation). This proposed
aesthetic isolationism represents formalism’s artistic pretentions with their emphasis on the
importance of the form rather than the exterior rest. Formalism is a system-theory in which “the
validity of texts is strictly submitted to and determined by one’s observation of the forms and their
formative beauty” (597, my translation, my emphasis). The only relation that counts is that between
the reader and the form, which in this case is equated with words and grammar.2 The formalist
literary approach flourished between 1915 and 1930 in Russia, and around 1960 it was taken over by
French literary scholars who would prolong the focus on the isolated beauty within works under the
name structuralism. Formalism has often been accused of being too ignorant of the context of works,
thereby being allegedly reductive in its approach of literatures. 3 I believe, however, that the formalist
approach is a honorary one, that is most dedicated to literature. A formalist scholar engages in an
1
Pseudonym for Fatima-Zohra Imalayène, born 1936 in Cherchell (Algeria).
A famous formalist devise in the conception of aesthetics in general is l’art pour l’art. Stemming from the early 19 th century it means art
for art’s sake. This is emblematic for a formalist notion in which the only valid criterion to judge a piece of art, is the piece’s own intrinsic
quality, its form. Accordingly, it is unthinkable to judge it on its moral, utilitarian or didactical functions for an exterior public. The motto
captures formalism neatly, whereby art is detached from its creator (and his or her intents) and its reception by the public .
3
Among these critics are Sandra Bermann, Susan Bassnett and David Damrosch.
2
2
intimate relationship with the text under his eyes, and both reader and text are monogamous: what
counts is the direct relation between reader4 and text, with disregard of the author (and his or her
intent) and the cultural and temporal situatedness of the work (its origin and reception through
time). The formalist analyst does not arrogantly think that only he/she can read a certain text the
right way. Rather, he/she considers it the most faithful way to approach texts. To include -even
more- speculative and generalized factors like authorial intent and cultural reception, would only
enlarge the contingency of interpretation: in individualizing his/her interpretation, a formalist bears
all accountability for it. The formalists have received negative critiques, but their counter-argument
has always been that at least they were true adepts of literature because they converge all their
attention towards the text, without being distracted by factors that are too far from their bureaus.
This way, they thought to grasp the metaphysical meaning of any piece of literature, a truth that
transcends the temporality going on in the outside world.
A major critique on the formalist ideology has always been aimed at its tendency to isolate
works. Instead, critiques say, one should take into account the cultural context, which includes the
biography and intent of the author and the societal reception and origin of a work. Even attention for
a work’s diachronic position is mandatory. This means that one must look at factors that have
influenced the text in question and, in turn, which influences it caused itself. Likewise, as it is
propagated, one should take into account how a certain text was read in times far from our own. This
genealogical approach can be associated with positivism, literary Marxism and contemporary
reception studies.
A prominent figure against such a contextual approach of literature has been Roman
Jakobson.5 Of course, a cultural and temporal embeddedness is an undeniable proposition for
Jakobson as well: no book is sterile of contact. However he makes the strong argument that when
one reads a certain text, it happens in a “lived moment in the now” (Depretto,6 my translation),
which implies that moving through time only augments the speculative nature of reading. It is a
heartfelt rhetorical refusal of a distracted reading and as such is Jakobson’s synchronic argument
positioned against a diachronic one. Jakobson further distinguishes between poetic language and
colloquial speech which is a rather elitist way to say that it is almost perverse to situate works of
literature in a worldly setting (Tadié). 7 The reader’s concerns with the book’s relations with the world
outside his/her bureau, and back and forth in time, would be artificial and secondary ones. Certainly,
every book exists within a larger determinant, such as a canon, or an author’s personal repertoire.
Still, it would nonetheless be a severe mistake to equate or to automatically insert a specific work
4
Ultimately, even the reader itself shall disappear from the scene. I will come back to this.
Influential Russian linguist (1896-1982) in the 20th century who played a significant role in the development of a method for a structural
analysis of language, and hence in structuralism as a movement.
6
French professor at the university of Paris-Sorbonne. She is a specialist in literary movements in Russia during the 20 th century.
7
Jean-Yves Tadié (1936-) is a professor at the university of Paris-Sorbonne.
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into such broader categories from which it would then be read. While its critics accuse formalism of
the narrow-minded confiscation of works from their broader situatedness, both in culture and time,
a formalist would retort that this extraction from context is not only a proof of reverence to art. It is
especially the most valid method in terms of epistemology 8 and ontology9: the only thing I can know
is the paperwork lying in front of me; the only thing that is, is the book. This means that formalists
state that, first, their method leads to a less subjective knowledge of a work and, secondly, that that
meaning is less contingent and more absolute in a metaphysical sense. This implies that formalists
apply a “Poetical language” that is equipped to search for an eternal meaning of a work, while
scholars with a contextual approach are equipped with an “emotional language” which leads only to,
though broad, superficial and ephemeral conclusions (Tadié). Furthermore, the formalist discourse
can be described as less rhetorical and capricious and more poetical and empirical since it is backed
by eternal and undeniable form, rather than an ever changing world outside the covers of a book.
I will posit the formalism and its intellectual climate historically, though I do not miss the
irony considering the movement’s own reluctance of such context. With the death of Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy’s choice for a hermit’s life at the end of the 19th century, the hegemony of the literary
movement called realism extinguished whereupon a vacuum in Russia’s literary tradition was
imminent. To fill this emptiness, heads started to turn to France, where at that time symbolism
flourished with poets like Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and their prodigy Arthur Rimbaud.10
Hereupon, symbolism was imported into Russia.
This Russian solution was not satisfactory for everyone and thus formalism emerged as a
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reaction to and rejection of the successive realist and symbolist tradition. In the realist tradition, a
writer is poised to approach reality as it is. In order to produce art, one is ought to leave one’s
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bureau. The realist polygamous axiom is that aesthetics depend on something that is outside the
writer and its paper: Dostoevsky’s words are written in dependence on and are inextricably related
to the specific Russian societal condition at the end of the 19 th century, and are to be read at this
precise contextual level. Literature is not autonomous in realism and in a realistic study words are in
8
Besides the question what one can reasonably know, epistemology is also aesthetically concerned with what counts as important
knowledge. A formalist epistemology considers only knowledge extracted from the form of a text as meaningful, and knowledge of context
as trivial and distractive. In order words, in our scholarly activities, which always, in one way or another, entails the que stion of knowing,
we should give preference over intrinsic form above its external function.
9
Since I reason formalistically, I can deal with this metaphysical term when I talk about literature, as to determine the being of a text in
terms of its independency of particular (external) constituents. In reception theory, an ontological conception of literature is unthinkable
since there is no literature independent of relativizing constituents like cultural and temporal situatedness and the intents and biography of
its author.
10
One of Rimbaud’s posthumous editors, Louis Forestier, annotated Rimbaud’s archetypical symbolist poem “Voyelles” (1870). In the poem
Rimbaud tries to link all vowels to a color, which implies that letters lack autonomy. “The aim of the poem is not to know wh y A is black,”
Forestier tells us, “it is to admit that A is an object that can be played with, a sign to which multiple values can be attributed, a praxis we
only later began to label as semiotics” (255, my translation). What Rimbaud invites us to do, as he shows the fragility and a rbitrariness of
vowels (of form), is to engage in a symbolist “lecture plurielle” (255), which is an invitation to read form in its broader c ontext, which
undermines the formalist notion that any word is worthy to be read for its own sake: a formalist does not need “black” to arrive at a
comprehension of “A”.
11
Ré in French réalisme comes from latin rei that means something (1581) and ali- comes from Latin alius, that means else (1559). Words
read realistically do refer to things elsewhere.
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serfdom of a comprehension of the outside world, which negates a literature’s ontology as
something that is worthy to be read for its own sake. To read as a realist means to be engaged with
the world off-page, something formalists condemn as a disrespectful distraction from the more
sustainable beauty under one’s eyes.
Although symbolism is the successor of realism in Russia, the two are different in their
approach of literature. Symbolism is rooted in France, where it emerged as a reaction against
naturalism. The early French symbolists perceived the world out there not as something real or
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natural which could easily be converted into text, but rather as enigmatically ungraspable. They
developed an artistic method which allowed them to indulge in a continuous quest to find new
expressions that correspond with, or rather approach that ever eluding world outside in the most
beautiful way, which is clearly a more loose norm than the philological rigidity and full attention that
formalists deploy. Hence the symbol:12 a word only means something when it is suggested by and
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itself suggests another word, and as such any word is denied a certain nature. The main difference
with realism is that realists pretend to pin down the outside world, while symbolists do not. Despite
the differences, it is not difficult to see why they are both renounced with the same vehemence by
formalists: both movements deny the autonomy of isolated form.
Reciprocally, Russia thanked France decades later for the borrowing of symbolism: as soon as
formalism started to subside in Russia, French intellectuals adopted Russian formalism under the
name of structuralism. However, with the rise of post-structuralism13 in the sixties, even this
structuralist heritage of formalism started to crumble. This is not to say that formalism completely
lost its scholarly influence. There still was some resistance against the abolition of the movement.
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One of those preservers is René Wellek14 who asserted that the post-structuralist deconstruction of
literary form, to relativize it in cultural and temporal contexts, disavows the intrinsic beauty of art.
With his eloquence, Wellek spent a lifetime resisting the contextual contaminations of literature. He
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considered contextual factors irrelevant since there exists “what has rightly been called an
‘ontological gap’ between the psychology of the author and a work of art, between life and society
on the one hand and the aesthetic object” (World Literature? 136).
Following the same formalist argument, Harold Bloom15 pleads for a de-contextualized study
of literatures: “aesthetic authority,” he says, expresses “energies that are essentially solitary rather
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12
Sy- is derived from Greek sun that means together or with (1584), both prepositions that hint to the symbolist premise that a word
stands in an inevitable relation with the world outside its form.
13
Philosophical movement launched by Jacques Derrida, which opposes formalist intellectualism. Its adherents are engaged in a
deconstruction of literatures, that exposes the plurality and contingency of their meaning.
14
Austrian literary critic (1903-1995), who wrote an article of which the title overtly laments the emergence of the post-structural
approach: “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” (1963).
15
American literary critic (1930-) who renounced Marxist, feminist, neo-historicist and postmodernist readings.
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than social” (141). Nowadays, this is a controversial statement. David Damrosch,16 for example, partly
criticizes Bloom’s formalist approach of Dante. In a chapter about Dante in his The Western Canon
(1994), Bloom argues against any reading of Dante’s Divina Commedia within the religious context of
13th century Italy. Bloom sees Dante’s inventiveness, his pure genius, as a subversion of any alleged
theological and medieval paradigm in which he is read by most scholars. Damrosch is ambivalent
about this: “Bloom’s reading is an exercise in willed incomprehension, a systematic refusal to allow
Dante any creative engagement with his culture, forcing onto this deeply religious medieval poet a
model of secular poetic strife” (140). On the other hand Damrosch acknowledges the sincere
devotion that Bloom’s formalist conception of literature emanates. He understands Bloom’s
frustration towards scholars who project all their erudition on an author in a way that almost
perverts the intrinsic beauty of a work. Hence he quotes Bloom’s antipathy of scholars who read “a
doctrinal Dante, so abstrusely learned and so amazingly pious that he can be fully apprehended only
by his American professors” (140). Damrosch continues to give voice to Bloom who says that
literature “is altogether solitary, despite all of tradition’s 17 obscene attempts to socialize it” (141), but
finally, as he closes the discussion, cannot withhold his glib aversion of formalism: “society melts
away in a vast echo chamber of Bloom’s mind” (141).
To find formalist supporters in the contemporary debate is not easy.18 Although not as clearly
affiliated with formalism as Jakobson, Bloom and Wellek, Ossip Mandelstam 19 certainly shares
formalism’s aversion against symbolism’s tendency to relate words to other objects, and although he
is of course not contemporary, I wish to resurrect his ideas in order to substantiate my somehow
anachronistic argument in the current debate. Mandelstam’s perception of aesthetics differs from
scholars who perceive literature as essentially social. Like Goethe20 before him, Mandelstam believed
that beauty is universal, and that when one reads a text, one should look for that absolute quality of
a work. This conception of literature that transcends into a metaphysical sphere is at the heart of
formalism as well. Mandelstam had a neo-classicist dream. With his only consolation found in his
poetry, Mandelstam sought a way to write, read and think that escaped the morose confinement he
16
Professor in comparative literature at Harvard University (US) and author of the book What Is World Literature? (2003) to which I owe a
great deal of historical information about different reading methodologies, as well about translation -studies, both exemplified by detailed
case-studies.
17
Presumably, here is meant the post-structuralist method.
18
Although she does not engage with the scholarly debate on reading methodologies, I have been inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s
notions –as reflected in her autobiography- on herself as reader: “a story is a beautiful object which suffices in itself…where words and
phrases shine by their own brilliance, like the colors on a painting” (22, my translation, my emphasis). I also recognize a formalist tendency
when she explains her own authorship: “only books, not the raw world, could give me models” (23, my translation). Finally, I recognized in
Beauvoir her desire for monogamy with literature: “above all, I preferred the tranquility of being alone with the printed pap er” (24, my
translation).
19
Russian poet (1891-1938) who is one of the founders of acmeist poetry. Mandelstam is not a clear cut formalist but the acmeist tradition
is not alien to it. As they oppose the dominance of symbolism, acmeists demand a use of language that departs from the concre teness and
even simplicity of the words themselves, while symbolists tend to misuse the words as they always relate them to other dimensions off the
page. The heydays of the acmeist movement were around 1910 and it, as to honor the autonomy of the word, knows a philological
approach as its core utensil.
20
“Poetry is the universal possession of mankind” (quoted in Damrosch 14).
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found himself in. Something that did not only transcend the wired gates, but also something that
transcended from the harsh now into eternity. I certainly see the shortcomings of this philosophy.
One can contradict the formalist notion by, for instance, stating that it is a force of literature that its
meaning can change through the dynamics of time and place. It is, however, also very well possible
to characterize such contextual dynamics as producing contingent or even, as Mandelstam said, a
formless nihilistic meaning. Mandelstam’s neo-classicist dream entailed a search for the nature of
words, through which an everlasting meaning can be grasped. Hence, the difference between such
formalistic state of mind and a poststructuralist is an ontological one: the first sees literature as “a
primordial form of life, which in principle does not lend its laws from neither religion, nor morality,
science or politics” (Tadié, my translation). This implicates that literature precedes all worldliness if
one only dares to elevate and confront the pure form, which has existential value as something that
can sprout meaning for its own sake.
With post modernity the clear oppositions in the debate became blurred and one could no longer
speak of segregated traditions. However, there are still methodological debates that preoccupy
literary scholars. These are not so much polemical, but rather a collaborative exchange of thoughts
on how comparative literature as a discipline should develop, and on its position towards translation
studies. At this very moment, there seems to be a methodological vacuum in literary criticism caused
by the emergence of translation studies.
Sandra Bermann21 has written an essay called “Working in the And Zone” in which she
formulates her vision on how comparative literature and translation studies should combine their
strengths into one methodology. Bermann denounces an identity crisis of the comparative discipline.
The essence of comparative literature has always been clear in what is called the Great European
tradition: one compares –interlingually- a writer from country A with one from country B, both in
their original languages. However, the acceleration of globalization after the 1970s posed
exhilarating though challenging problems “as comparative literature has become progressively more
planetary in its reach and efforts at comparison across many geo-linguistic fields have expanded”
(434). An increasing curiosity started to grow for the brave “new” worlds these non-European
literatures had to offer. An exuberance shared by Bermann, who wishes to designate by her andzone an intensification, through a combination of translation studies and comparative literature, of
“linguistically and culturally specific dialogues” (435, my emphasis). In The Great European tradition,
research was based on canonical (European) works that stemmed from an almost heterogeneous
cultural context, and hence no comparatist had to deal with off-page elements and could maintain a
21
Professor in comparative literature at Princeton University (US).
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full focus on linguistic dialogues. However, globalism brought a deluge of works from times and
places unlike ours and thus increased cultural awareness in literary academia, with the contemporary
equation in research of linguistics and culture as a result. From 1960 onwards, a literary scholar was
no longer supposed to be solely interested in literature, but started to transform into an
interdisciplinary one in order to handle those works from far away.22 This was revolutionary after
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decades of formalist and structuralist readings. Hence, the initial reluctance to accept it and stubborn
attempts made to exclude extrinsic areas as politics, religion, economics, and philosophy from
reading a certain literature (435). However, structuralism’s resistance would soon give in.
The pain felt by the outnumbered structuralist scholars ever since lies in the contextual
approach of the newly proposed epistemology: if one wants to know a certain text, one must
understand it in the society in which it is produced, in all its facets. However this post-structuralist
replacement was not beatific, something Bermann admits: “throughout this period of evolving
disciplinary self-definitions, with their changing hierarchies of values and unifying aims, comparative
literature flourished in practice, yet also had difficulty explaining itself; unable to find a distinctive
theory” (436). Despite the exuberance to engage in cultural dialogues with worlds not our own, the
device of communication was lacking.
Comparatists hold high the axiom that meaning hides in contrast. The composition of
comparisons are dynamic, and since the affiliation with translation studies a new trend in the
comparative discipline can be discerned. Initially a comparatist wanted to grasp the essence of, say,
Dostoevsky’s Russian realism by comparing it to Stendhal’s French realism in a pure linguistic,
isolated sense. With the foregrounding of cultural awareness after the sixties, voices start to rise to
take into account, for instance, Russian and French culture at their respective places on the timescale. Finally, in the contemporary debate, and this is Bermann’s stance, it is perceived that the
comparison should happen between an original and its translation, with ultimate attention to the
respective cultural contexts. This latest mode suggests that nothing proves more of a cultural
dialogue than one culture translating a work from another culture, for translation is most telling
about the reception of a foreign work. To compare Dostoevsky’s Brat'ja Karamazovy (1880) not with
Stendhal’s Le Rouge Et Le Noir (1830), but with Brothers Karamazov, implies an engagement in a
cultural conversation. As scholars, with such a reception model, we must read like 19th century
Russians and contemporary Europeans at once. Through her and-zone, Bermann thus wants to reconceptualize a combination of comparative literature and translation studies in several ways. One
22
Besides feminist readings, Marxist readings of texts became popular. Marxist literary criticism views literary works as reflections of the
social situation from which they originate: literature always has a political function. With such readings, texts serve to gain access to the
intentions of the writer and to what extent his work reflects the economical situation as it really is (hence the Marxist preference for realist
works). To do so, this post-structuralist approach requires a deep understanding of the culture (economy) a work originates in. Hence,
Marxist criticism can also be called a sociology of literature.
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can think of the comparison of two different translations of the same novel, the focus on the act of
translating itself (translation criticism), but also an original and its already existing translation. Thus, it
is propagated that in order to execute any of these comparisons properly, a thorough knowledge of
the respective societies is mandatory.
Following the same notion of cultural reception, Susan Bassnett23 states that comparison
should take place on a cultural level. She gives the example of Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese
poetry. Bassnett recounts that the original poems stem from an ancient Chinese tradition, “but in the
way they were received they were transformed into war poems that spoke to the generation coping
with the horrors of the trenches of Flanders” (8, my emphasis). What is insinuated here is that
literary aesthetics are at the mercy of the caprices of a certain culture at a certain time: as soon as
the eyes of First World War veterans gleaned over the words, the age-old Chinese meaning is erased.
I agree that all aesthetics are by definition a contextual and social category: the reader’s social
background, his/her knowledge of the genre or author of the work, his/her intelligence, are all
determinants that influence the way we read and understand. It would however be a mistake to
assume that formalists are unaware of it. Just as it is a bit easy, as Damrosch attacked formalists, to
say that heads of formalists are resonating like echo-chambers, filled with willed incomprehension. I
would rather say that is quite the opposite: formalists acknowledge the contextual embeddedness of
literature, but instead of praising it they lament the fact. Its agenda is therefore not conservative and
ignorant, but progressive and ambitious: we must look beyond the confines of our own paradigm as
a reader, directed by time and place, as to reach the pure aesthetics in a work that is appreciated
with the same load by any reader from all over the world and from all over time. Unselfishness is a
good word to exemplify the art for art’s sake notion: as scholars we must not be so vain to confiscate
every word to its context, which will only lead to temporal and contextual, and hence superficial
reading. Rather one must be, while reading, deaf and only look at what lies before one. One must
also be deaf to oneself, in order to be completely unselfish. Not out of ignorance or laziness, but
because we can reach a deeper, not broader, understanding of the work.
If one focuses on the context of works, their meaning becomes ephemeral and arbitrary. This
implies, for example, that one cannot just pick Pound’s anthology Cathey (1915) from a shelf and
enjoy the intrinsic power of these poems without situating oneself in those trenches. Every word that
they contain necessarily corresponds with a time and place that is outside the book. Thus Bassnett
stresses the importance of reception: “rather than seeing comparative literature as a discipline, it
should be seen simply as a method of approaching literature, one that foregrounds the role of the
reader but which is always mindful of the historical context in which the act of writing and the act of
23
Translation theorist and professor of comparative literature at the University of Warwick (UK).
9
reading take place” (9-10). Were one to read Cathey comparatively, one should not only master OldChinese and English, but foremost posses a profound knowledge of the way they were read millennia
ago, as well as around the First World War. This is ambitious, but it makes me not at all insolent to
call such attention a distraction from what lays under one’s eyes waiting to be read.
Bassnett and Bermann do not reach a consensus about a definite methodology for the
comparison in translation studies, but certainly they have in common the focus on context, and
whatever the outcome of the ongoing debate, formalism is not about to be resurrected in a
mainstream discourse in literary departments.24 I think, however, that the formalist intentions are
done away with too easily, and I am worried about a comparative discipline that is threatened to be
assimilated by political sciences, anthropology, sociology, history and economics. Bermann might tell
us that “comparative literature is no longer a name that belongs to one particular department” (435),
but I believe this is a self-repudiation of her alleged love for literature. To bluntly state that we can
only read Pound’s renditions of Chinese poetry when we place ourselves in Belgian trenches a
century ago, is to insinuate that in, say, 500 years, when the First World War has been “forgotte n,”
25
Pound’s excellence might as well be locked away forever, since we tend to make its poetics, its pure
form, so dependent on factors that are outside literature itself.
Mandelstam resented contingent factors like culture and time in relation to literature, or as
Jean-Marie Bernaud26 typifies his philosophy and emanating “his love for the word, his respect for
the powers of the sign, for the cult of the form, for the belief in a universal culture” (my translation). I
interpret “universality of culture” to mean that true aesthetics transcend all temporal and spatial
boundaries. It transcends also the individual. Mandelstam writes in the early days of the 20th century
–when symbolism has started to fill the gap left by the realists in Russia-, and in turn he notices a
different gap himself. Although symbolism is flourishing, Mandelstam is worried about the way
Russian poetry is developing. With symbolism, a nihilistic condition has appeared in Russian
intellectual life: no word is any longer self-fulfilled, there is only an endless chain of suggestive
symbols. Mandelstam laments the loss of intimacy by readers with the words under their eyes.
According to him, symbolist poets betray their monogamy by seeking refuge, as to try to
24
Bermann’s text for example, has been a result of several MLA and ACLA summits from the past decade held all over the world, which
indicates that her ideas are prominent when scholars of comparative literature meet (432).
25
Another example why a contextual attention for Pound is inconvenient, is his fascist engagement with Mussolini’s regime between 1924
and 1945. Pound wrote several propaganda and anti-Semitic articles in fascist magazines. If I ought to read Pound’s work through the eyes
of his fascist receivers at the time, I could not probably take it seriously, since it would read like banal fascist propagan da. Rather, if I ignore
that fact, and just look at the eloquence, use of rime and meters, style and vocabulary, one could get, although not a broader, certai nly a
deeper understanding of his works, which are formatively beautiful works (one could think for example of Pound’s Pisan Cantos which,
when read simply as a hymn for Mussolini, which some of them in fact are, would likely reduce our appreciation of the pure ae sthetics of
the work).
26
This French literary critic (1937-) recognizes the search for certainty in Mandelstam’s poems. In fact Bernaud’s critique is fascinating in
addition to Pound’s case. Like Cathey, one could read Mandelstam’s poems in relation to his own biographical -tragic- context. For
criticizing Stalin he ended up in a Siberian gulag, where he died of starvation after a failed attempt to suicide. Nonetheless, Bernaud is still
moved by his poems as he disregards this context: “there is a confidence, calm certitude, unperturbed, a poem that is independent of the
painful circumstances in which they first saw the light of day” (Bernaud, my translation).
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comprehend a certain word, in other words. This causes Mandelstam’s “thirsts for the virgin soil of
time” and he confidently forefeels that “revolution in art inevitably leads to Classicism” (113). The
virgin soil refers to a desire for an approach of words that treats them as pure forms; classicism is
evoked to designate the necessary etymological methodology in order to escape the suggestive
formlessness27 symbolism brought about. Mandelstam, immediately after he has dropped this bomb
on his symbolist contemporaries, anticipated its criticism: “one often hears: that is good but it
belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday has not yet been born” (113). One article in his anthology is
appropriately called “Nature of the word” and it ends with an elegant critique on symbolism:
This is where professional Symbolism leads. Perception is demoralized. Nothing is real,
genuine. Nothing is left but a terrifying quadrille of “correspondences,” all nodding to one
another. Eternal winking. Never a clear word, nothing but hints and reticent whispers. The
rose nods to the girl, the girl to the rose. No one wants to be himself. (128)
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Met opmaak: Engels (Verenigde
Staten)
The quote is drenched with Mandelstam’s agony for the nihilistic alienation that comes with a
symbolist treatment of texts. A girl, strolling through a garden, is no longer able to enjoy a rose since
her innocent mind is corrupted by symbolist doubt. The rose has been uprooted by symbolists as
they always situate the flower in relation to other objects that are extrinsic to the rose. According to
symbolism, a rose can only exist when there is “snow surrounding it, moonlight shining on its bud
and a goddess that transcends to the deep heaven above it”.28 This confusion leads Mandelstam to
speak of nihilism (131): there is never a clear word about the rose itself. The identity of a rose should
not be conferred by other symbols, but hides in its (etymological) nature. We do not understand a
rose by letting it poetically be shined upon by the moon, but by digging for its roots. This
methodology originates in the idea of cleansing the arbitrariness that symbolists have attributed to
words; a purification of the dependency of words on the world off-page. This way the uneasy
nodding is stopped, and a girl can once more rejoice over a rose.
2. To be nowhere in the house of one’s father29
27
The fact that Mandelstam resents the world off-page, does not mean he lacks engagement, as already implied by his worries about the
nihilistic condition caused by symbolism: “the function of the poet is to make the people aware of their deep life, to offer them a sol of
origin, something that the madness of modernity [read symbolism] stole from them, one must arouse this music, for now still h idden in the
heart of language (Bernaud, my translation).
28
See for example Rimbaud’s symbolist poem “Accroupissements” (1871).
29
This is my free translation of the book’s title. I will try to link the title to the melancholia that I associate with Djebar’s memories about
her father. In order to do so I will employ an empiricism that comprises an (etymological) close reading. Anna Rocca, a literary critic
specialized in French literature and with special interest in Djebar, also speculates on the title and concludes that “generally, in Djebar’s
work, the concept of home as origin and belonging is problematic and that one of home as a safe place is absent. Female characters […] are
usually characterized by a necessity of escaping” (139, my emphasis). True as that may be, I would like to arriv e at such conclusions
through a foundation of references found in the roots of Djebar’s discourse, and thus avoid off-page distractions and generalizations, as are
evident in Rocca’s quote.
11
In order to illustrate my concerns about the way comparative discipline and translation studies are
developing today, I will take on Djebar’s Nulle Part Dans La Maison De Mon Père and analyze it
formalistically. This autobiographical book consists of memories of Djebar’s childhood in a colonized
Algeria, that starts at Djebar’s age of 3 and continues up to her high school graduation at the age of
17 and ends right before the start of Algeria’s bloody decolonization struggle in 1954. Finally, in an
epilogue, a contemporary Djebar retrospects to her life. If I were to read this autobiography30 with
reading-methodologies as opposed to in this thesis, I would start from the context that gave birth to
the book: a colonized Algeria right before a violent struggle for de-colonization that happened
decades ago and with patriarchic and Islamic rigidity31on behalf of women. Although I indeed will not
take these cultural “distractions” into account, I will, in footnotes, compare my formalist analysis to
two Djebar-scholars who analyze her oeuvre in terms of receptivity, authorial intent and cultural
embeddedness.
However, I have chosen three formalist utensils to analyze Djebar’s memories, which can be
divided in those that relate to her mother and those to her father. The first I consider to be nostalgic,
the latter melancholic; the theoretical paradigm for the first I base on a parable by Nietzsche, the
second on Freud’s pathology. In order to trace melancholia and nostalgia in different chapters,
certain directives are maintained. Predominantly, I shall analyze “suspect” French words according to
their formative (when appropriate, etymological) meaning in France’s most voluminous and
notorious dictionary Le Robert Méthodique (1990). I shall look also at the tenses used for verbs.
Finally, Djebar’s use of possessive and personal pronouns also enables an insight in the level of
melancholia in her memories.
I am charmed by the formalist notion of art for art’s sake and hence I consider the form, all that
exists between the two covers of Nulle Part Dans La Maison De Mon Père as autonomous. There can
of course be no doubt that most of Djebar’s thoughts in it are engaged with a specific time and place
and with certain intents. However, to read it like that would entail a broad reading, while I want to
disregard all context and engage myself in a deep reading. Indeed, the form does not belong to
Djebar any longer since I consider them evolved in a metaphysical sphere; in this thesis the form and
its meaning neither belongs to me. I perceive the meaning that I extract from the book as
independent from any person, time or place: it is surrounded by selfishness; it will be sustainable,
verifiable and “objective” rather than ephemeral, interpretative and subjective. It will be and sustain
as long as the form (in a tangible book) itself will sustain (which is clearly different from Bassnett’s
conception of Pound’s Cathey). To anticipate a little, the power of the book is, foremost, its
30
Another scholar with whom I will engage polemically because of her different reading-methodology of Djebar is Désirée Schyns (literary
scholar at Utrecht University and Djebar-specialist). Examplary for her contextual approach is that she calls Nulle Part Dans La Maison De
Mon Père non-autobiograpical, because “zo blijkt uit interviews die ze heeft gegeven en uit de vele boeken en artikelen die aan haar gewijd
zijn” (85).
31
To be sure, this is a stance taken by Djebar herself throughout the book.
12
feministic, anti-patriarchic eloquence and this can be found, as I shall show, in the language, and not
to the outside world with whom it corresponds. While I consider the French source text as
autonomous, I am curious to know what happens in its Dutch translation and I want to find out as to
what extent the translator has respected the original form. This is why I engage myself in a parallel
investigation, and the aforementioned formative directives will be compared with their equivalents
in the Dutch translation Nergens Thuis In Het Huis Van Mijn Vader (2010). I will consult both a
standard Dutch (Van Dale) and an etymological dictionary, and I am curious to know whether the
Dutch translator managed to maintain the implied melancholia or nostalgia from the original
version.32
Nostalgia
To recognize nostalgia in Djebars’s writing, I must first outline the concept itself, which will be done
through a specific parable by Nietzsche. Zarathustra is the name of the remarkable protagonist in his
magnum opus Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885). Zarathustra’s contempt for a too human, all too
human humanity has driven him into the Alps where he resides for ten years. The story starts ten
years later with a descending 40-years old Zarathustra who, solely accompanied by his eagle and
snake, is ready to reevaluate33 humanity in an odyssey situated in late 19th century modernist and
secular society in Western Europe. After having visited several villages however, he soon knows his
hopeful expectations to be in vain. This was not at all what he had hoped to find after 10 years of
voluntary exile. Nietzsche stages Zarathustra as the anti-Christ, who hoped to see that after centuries
of sheepishly following theological doctrines, men would have started to think for themselves, or
even became Gods themselves. Alas, despite the secular age and his boasting atheism, the average
man is still far from becoming the Übermensch Zarathustra had wished to encounter after a decade
of solitude.
In one of the parables in the book, Zarathustra sails across something he calls a grave-island,
where he finds the graves of his youth. Arguably, the reason for this visit is because he wants to
escape his present-day disappointment into a past in which he was still optimistic about the
evolution of mankind, and hence he sings a nostalgic song on the island. Aware of his inability to
actually revive those treasured moments of his past, he fatalistically accepts their pastness: “I think
of you today as my dead ones” (74). Zarathustra is surely sad in the now and longs for his much
sweeter past, but he has no illusion of ever turning back in time. He knows the memories are buried
for good on the island: “verily, too early did ye die for me, ye fugitives. Yet did ye not flee from me,
32
I choose to compare the Dutch and French words in their own etymological contexts, which is in line with the autonom y of the word that
my formalist conviction advocates. The other option -I excluded- was to translate the Dutch word back in French and then compare the
original French and the re-translated word.
33
“In my dream, in my last morning-dream, I stood to-day on a promontory- beyond the world; I held a pair of scales, and weighed the
world” (130).
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13
nor did I flee from you: innocent are we to each other” (74). Zarathustra conceives his past as
ontologically34 distinct from his present-day self –as a dead past- but nonetheless feels able to
encounter it, in all innocence, without pretentions. This certainty of being able to clearly separate the
present from past makes Zarathustra an agent in control over time. The past is not able to trouble
him since he knows it is dead, and it can only be resurrected when Zarathustra himself feels like
dancing35 with and singing to it. Whenever past and present are interacting in an innocent manner,
one remembers nostalgically.36
Melancholia and mourning
As an opposition to a nostalgic past, I posit a melancholic one. Sigmund Freud applies a pathological
discourse in which he contrasts melancholia with “normal”37 mourning. According to Freud,
mourning is not a disease because it is a linear process “overcome after a certain lapse of time”(243).
Melancholia, on the contrary, is a disease since it is cyclical and a “cure” uncertain. Although both
“conditions” are caused by some sort of loss, physically or ideally, the mourner is already on his or
her way to accept that loss, while the melancholic “patient” still clings to the lost object through a
“hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (244). To hold on stubbornly to something non-existent in the
present implies a turn away from present-day reality in which “the existence of the lost object is
psychically prolonged” (245). The loss that causes melancholia is mostly of an abstract kind, and
more than just the physical loss of a loved one. Precisely because one is unable to see exactly what
one has lost, to work through the loss –to mourn- seems impossible. In the melancholic “patient”
there is thus a lack of consciousness because “he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in
him” (245, my emphasis). Melancholia is a result of being unconscious about what exactly is lost, for
34
Throughout this thesis I will advance time in ontological terms. The Greek noun ontos means being (Méthodique 1573). When I apply
ontology to time I wish to address the degree of autonomy of a past, to see whether it is a being “that exists on its own terms and with its
vitality independent of its particular constituents” (965, my translation). My axiom is that a past is not an entity a priori that exists
unconditionally: its level of autonomy differs in melancholia and nostalgia. With nostalgia, the only thing that has an unconditional
existence is the present: the being of the past is at the mercy of the will of the present-day contemplator and his or her urge to remember
(to grant the past existence). Returning to the definition, in nostalgia present-time exists and the past is a subordinate particular
constituent that has no agential right to exist for its own sake. With melancholia both past and present exist independently, they are
juxtaposed and might collide. Here, the present tries to debunk (for example through autobiographical writing) the ontology of the past by
trying to understand the latter. My premise is that when a past refuses that its being is explained, it is a proof of agency and hence of
melancholia inflicted on the present-day contemplator.
35
“And once did I want to dance as I had never yet danced: beyond all heavens did I want to dance ” (75).
36
Nostalgia stems from Greek nostos which means retour (1576) and algos which means pain (1559): a nostalgic contemplator is at pains to
return home. If we take into account the title of the book, Djebar is nowhere in the house of her father. That is why I will interpret the
memories that relate to her father as melancholic.
37
Precarious terms as “normal” –like “patient”, “condition”, “cured”- are placed between inverted commas as to relativize the rigid
normativity that is applied in Freud’s discourse. In what follows, it is of course out of question to situate Djebar in such a medical paradigm,
nor to diagnose her.
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14
the loss leaves behind a terrain vague.38 This leads me to assert my premise that a melancholic
“patient” does not have agential control over time. Rather, it is the melancholic past that asserts its
own ontology, by penetrating into present-day reality. Such a past, or more specifically a prominent
figure like one’s father, subverts its own pastness and is thus the agent in time. In melancholia, the
past has the agential capacity to be obscure or empty (vague), and it is its elusive behavior, its
unwillingness to be known, that scars the contemporary contemplator. It is an ambivalence quite
different from Zarathustra’s certainty in knowing his past as buried.
The “patient” will of course not accept that anonymity, and hence the obscurity will be
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projected onto the conscious part of the ego, as an ultimate attempt to know what one has lost.
Freud noticed a paradox here: this projection of the loss on the contemporary ego, this introspection,
is the start of self-reproach. The situation a melancholic “patient” has to deal with is to clarify a
terrain vague,39 to illuminate an obscurity, but the past’s agency of remaining vague, prevents one
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from achieving enlightenment. Melancholy is therefore a cyclical and amorphous “crushed state”
(247), that refuses to settle into a steady mourning process.
Freud further uses the symbol of the “open wound” to illustrate the essence of melancholia
as a “condition” that is not ready to settle into a healing process of “normal” mourning (252).
Mourning, on the contrary, is a state of “reality testing,” in which the conscious self is capable, has
the agency, to submit the dark side of the ego from the past into a contemporary rational light (252),
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like Zarathustra, who was able to identify his past as a sweet but nonetheless dead corpse. A person
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that mourns successfully is eventually able to tell the haunting past that it is obsolete and that it
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should know its proper place in the past -or its grave. This is not to say that the result of “normal”
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mourning will be that the object of the past is thrown into oblivion, but rather that its ties with the
contemporary are ontologically severed. After mourning, the ties are only reconstructed if the
contemporary agent wants them to be. This agency is also found in nostalgia. In mourning and
nostalgia alike, the past has no agency since it is not capable to trouble the contemporary self at its
own will. In melancholia, in turn, the past decides when to reconstruct ties, when to assert its
ontology. Despite the differences both melancholia and mourning are shaped as memories, in which
past and present do encounter each other in “the region of the memory-traces” (255).
According to Freud, melancholia is not a completely hopeless state and there seems to be a
“cure” for it. Foremost it is important “to kill” the object by “declaring it dead” (256). Like
Zarathustra, who knows his past as deceased. Once “cured,” “the ego may enjoy in this the
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38
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Derived from sociologist George Steinmetz’ study, which applies the Freudian notion of melancholia to the experience of ruins in
Namibia, the former German colony. Present-day German-Namibians, who now live in a postcolonial Namibia, let the ruins that remind
them of their final defeats in 1915 return to nature, as an attempt to forget. However, even the most severe eroding forces w ill not
obliterate their painful memory. Even when completely eroded and thus psychically absent, that emptiness (terrain vague) will not stop to
make the former colonizers aware of the pastness of their supremacy. Such a melancholic terrain vague is still able to torment the presentday self by not letting itself be known, by staying vague, by not offering the Germans any acceptance and certainty.
39
Stems from Latin vacuus which means empty and unoccupied (1586).
15
satisfaction of knowing itself as the better of the two, as superior to the object [loss]” (256). To kill is
equated by Freud with successful mourning. Although nostalgia is a term left unmentioned by him, I
suggest that the process of mourning is a necessary one in order to eventually become able to have a
nostalgic relation with one’s past. Freud does not tell us how to perpetrate the assassination, but I
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presume that autobiographical writing is certainly an attempt. Melancholia is a result of the
cannibalization of the lost object, which makes the “illness” a narcissistic one, and thus only
“curable” through introspection: the solution to overcome this trouble is within the self. I consider
autobiographical writing such a form of introspection as to achieve a reconciliation of the ego, for the
moment still temporally split in a conscious (writing) and a subconscious part. As the title suggests, it
is essentially an attempt to seek the proper place in the house of Djebar’s father, to determine which
role he actually played in her life and to nostalgically return home.
The young mother
In the Algerian city Césarée, Djebar’s mother lives a constrained life, only “permitted” to go outside if
fully veiled and accompanied by a small child. Djebar is that 3-year old child. In the following memory
involving her mother, it is my aim to substantiate my hypothesis that these motherly memories are
nostalgic.
In the first chapter of the book Djebar remembers her mother on a certain day, on a hot early
afternoon. She describes her mother’s veil and the tension that reigns right before they are about to
affront the streets together, which are filled with masculine eyes.40 Both stand in the dusk of a
vestibule, while Djebar holds her hand. She feels the tension and grasps the corner of her mother’s
veil, and stays nigh to her mother’s masked and young body. She remembers asking herself whether
she will be able to guide her mother once outside. Once out of the vestibule they traverse the
ancient city, and outside Djebar feels that her role is to guide her mother, passing before the
masculine eyes (les regards masculins).
Although this scene stresses the constrained movement of her mother, which might give the
reader a morose impression, Djebar’s writing about this walk is optimistic and she uses a lot of
positive adjectives. For instance: her mother’s veil is immaculate and she looks like a mysterious idol
wearing precious ornaments, has eyes with glitter-make-up and attractive high cheekbones. Djebar
feels, maybe in contrast to the tension felt by her mother herself, complacent during their walk: “I
feel so proud to appear at her side” (15, my translation). Despite the alleged somberness, with the
omnipresent tension of Islamic men who gaze at them from their shops, Djebar depicts her mother
40
Rocca noticed that the gaze of men is a central theme in Djebar’s oeuvre: “the power of the gaze, usually associated in Djebar’s work to
voyeurism, possession, power and objectification” (138, my emphasis). I agree, but I am not pleased by the adverb usually: I want to
demonstrate that there is undeniable empirical proof for such a conclusion to be found in the form.
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16
not as a victim, but rather as a strong woman. If remembered melancholically, those eyes would be
haunting, with their essence left unexplained and vague, which makes one unable to write about
them affirmatively. However, Djebar knows pretty well what those eyes are, since she is able to
question their ontological power in the present. Such consciousness proves that the contemporary
Djebar controls the past, which is unable to trouble her. This makes it a nostalgic memory, which
does not taunt Djebar with tormenting questions but, conversely, provides her with answers about
her contemporary feminism.41 To substantiate my argument, I will look at how such nostalgia is
reflected in the form. Let us start with a passage from the first chapter:
Il m’arrivera de penser (mais plus tard) que ces voyeurs, je pourrais les braver –pour elle,
pour nous deux! (15)
It will happen to me to think (but later) that these voyeurs, I would be able to defy them - for
her, for both of us! (15, my translation)
42
Central in this retrospection is the verb braver (to defy) and the tenses of the verbs arrivera and
pourrais. Let us begin with braver: “to defy with pride by showing that on does not fear; to scorn and
mock fear” (163, my translation). To defy (défier), to scorn (mépriser) and to mock (narguer) are here
actorial qualities on behalf of Djebar’s contemporary writing self. Freud argues that melancholia
originates in an unspecified loss, something that cannot be identified. In this case the loss, if we
consider the term in a broad sense, is the entire situation: Djebar besides her refrained mother being
gazed at. If one is not sure how to designate a loss –a scene from the past- one keeps being occupied
by it in an unpleasant manner. To be occupied in this fashion is what Freud sees as “the present-day
libido projected onto the past” (244). In the case of melancholia, the libido, or more generally
attention, does simply not move on and by abducting one’s attention, the past controls present-day
reality. Considering the etymology of the word ontology, the loss is not a mere particular constituent
of the contemporary, but it asserts its own being (ontos). The present-day subject is powerless, and
to overcome such lack of control over the past, the present –desperately- incorporates it into the
ego: it cannibalizes it (249). It is clear who is the agent after the incorporation, as Freud notes that
41
I follow Schyns here in her assertion that there is definitely a thematic core in Djebar’s oeuvre: “het isolement van moslimvrouwen ten
opzichte van mannen in een patriarchale samenleving” (83). There is however a clear difference between how I arrive at such a conclusion
and the way Schyns does. I derived the feminist undertone from the nature of the words used within the covers of Nulle Part Dans La
Maison De Mon Père, Schyns did so, in her article “Tastend voortgaan in een donkere tunnel,” by paying intensive attention to Djebar’s
biography and her entire oeuvre. Charting her career, Schyns sees that Djebar’s successive publications La Soif (1957), Les Impatients
(1958) and Les alouettes naïves (1967), slowly take a feministic shape through which “de mogelijkheid van politieke en sociale gelijkheid
van mannen en vrouwen in het onafhankelijke Algerije van na 1962” (84) is critically questioned. Besides that Schyns takes into account the
biography of the author and the cultural setting in which she worked, there is also an attempt made to clarify Djebar’s intents.
42
I am aware of the “stiffness” of my English translations. However I considered a literal, word for word translation, instead of a functional
one, the best way to illustrate what is said in French. I consider Djebar’s French discourse autonomous, hence the English translation only
serves to clarify which words I will investigate etymologically.
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17
the “shadow of the object [loss]” employs “a special agency”43 (249): the past asserts its own
ontology, regardless of the contemplator’s will to remember it. Now, according to Djebar’s discourse
this agency of the past is lacking and the only reason it is granted ontology is because Djeb ar wants
so. She defies, scorns and mocks those eyes, which are unable to gaze at her unless she lets them.
Now let us have a look at the Dutch translation of that retrospective phrase: “soms denk ik
(maar pas later) dat ik er, ten behoeve van haar, van ons allebei, het beste aan zou doen me niets van
die gluurders aan te trekken!” (15). If I compare both phrases, braver, arrivera and pourrais are
respectively translated as niets van aantrekken, soms denk ik and er het beste aan zou doen. Let us
start with soms denk ik. The first conspicuous thing is the adverb soms, which has absolutely no
possible equivalent in the French phrase. If determinacy and certainty are results of successful
mourning, that do facilitate an affirmative and nostalgic state of mind, then soms contradicts this.
The French indicatif future simple44 arrivera lacks any such conditionality. When I reiterate my
ontological conception of time, in the Dutch sense the ontology of the present is conditional (soms),
and it is hence suggested that the present-day contemplator seems to have no full control over
his/her will to remember, and thus to master the past’s ontology. In turn, in French the remembering
will happen (arrivera), not soms but whenever one feels like it.
As pourrais (conditionnel présent45) is concerned, I would say that the rendition of this verb
as zou doen is accurate, and both are supportive of my assertion that the contemporary Djebar is the
nostalgic agent here. The agential nostalgia is suggested by the conditional way of formulating: if it
ever would happen that I walked alongside my mother before those masculine eyes again, I would
defy them. This conditionality suggests the contingency of those masculine eyes: they are able to
pierce the present-day self only when one chooses to go back there. Here, Djebar is the agent that
moves through time and who takes matters in her own hands in going back to those days in Césarée;
the past is a mere static object unable to penetrate into, or gaze at, present-day reality for its own
sake.
Djebar introduces this memory of her walk alongside her mother symbolically, and when one
looks at the pure form of these symbols, they seem drenched with nostalgia. This is how Djebar
describes this motherly memory:
Un ancrage demeure: ma mère, présente, grâce à Dieu, pourrait témoigner. Dix-neuf ans
seulement me séparent d’elle. (13)
43
I use an English translation of Freud’s statements on melancholia. In the original German version, the term agency is used as die Tatkraft,
which has a similar connotation.
44
This tense is used when the actualization of the verb is, although not necessarily specified when, determined in the future (620):
something will definitely take place.
45
A tense in which the actualization of the verb depends on conditions and eventualities of which it is uncertain that they wil l take place. It
is hence a hypothetical tense (278).
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18
An anchorage rests: my mother, alive, thank God, would be able to testify. Only nineteen
years separate us. (my translation)
The noun ancrage (anchorage), derived from the noun ancre (anchor), here symbolizes the memory.
If we look at the unequivocal image it evokes, the powerlessness of the past becomes clear: this
memory rests at the bottom of the ocean (of time) and will only be pulled up (granted ontology at
the surface of the present) when the captain wants it. The past is here only able to retain the boat
when jettisoned, something it cannot do out of its own will. Then, it is worth to look closer at the
qualities of the object itself. An anchor is made of steel, that as a kind of metal (an alloy) consists of
iron and carbon atoms. Hence it is stronger than iron alone, which is a mere single atom. Steel has
the following qualities, relevant to the designation of nostalgia in this memory: it is rust-proof, but
still malleable. Let me recall Freud by saying that a non-melancholic, mourned-over past is always
“met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists” (255). Here the memory, which is
arguably unpleasant since situated in a hostile, patriarchic setting of gazes, can always be molded as
to impose on it the verdict that those eyes are subordinate to the ontological supremacy of the
present. Besides, the fact that this memory is rust-proof, shows that the feminist46 pride that speaks
through this memory can always be evoked when wanted by Djebar. In both instances the presentday contemplator is in control.
The Dutch translation became: “Eén houvast blijft: mijn moeder, die goddank nog leeft, zij
zou kunnen getuigen” (13). Houvast is a laatmiddelnederlands word (Etymologisch Woordenboek
176), and as such far from a Latin equivalent of ancrage (as the Dutch noun verankering might have
been). Etymologically, houvast is a more modern lexical variant of “ijzeren kram” (176), which initially
seems to match symbolically with ancrage, since both are made of metal. It must be said however
that the nostalgic firmness related to an anchor is downplayed when replaced by a kram, which is
visibly a more modest and less impressive object. In addition, a kram is made of iron, which is much
weaker than steel. My interpretation of the motherly memory in French is that it is a nostalgic one,
46
Scholars like Schyns and Rocca display a far broader and contextual understanding of Djebar as an author. The amount of “secondary”
information they bring along to substantiate their argument about Djebar’s feminism is impressive. However, such a method also has its
pitfall of neglecting Djebar’s feminism as reflected in the form, which, in fact, I consider way more interesting and sustainable. In the
postscript for example, Djebar starts to refer to herself as “l’auteur(e)” (403). In French, auteur is by definition a masculine substantive and
if one wants to make clear that is about a woman, one has to, rather cumbersome, use “une femme auteur .” To come up with the
neologism auteur(e) really tells something about how Djebar perceives the position of (intellectual) women: as if it is not right that a
woman writer does not have a category of her own, besides a mere derivative of a masculine word. What is further remarkable is that
Djebar starts using the term auteur(e), but after a while removes the brackets and refers to herself as an auteure (404), which is a nonexistent word in French, and hence, I interpret, an appealing engagement through pure form. To leave behind the parenthesis can be read
as a subversive attempt to canonize the word. This reminds me of Bernaud’s interpretation of how Mandelstam covertly dealt with the
Stalinist oppression of his time: «Mandelstam’s political resistance is clearly, fundamentally and necessarily of a poetical nature: he found
the source and confidence in language itself” (my translation).
19
that becomes clear in Djebar’s symbolism. That nostalgic certainty47 is diminished in Dutch. Although
I see the risk of overly indulging in a chemistry discourse that might seem out of place, I want to
prolong and even deepen the difference in symbolism after the translation. Whereas the adding of
the atom chrome can make the steel of an anchor rust free, iron, being an atom in itself, clearly has
different characteristics. If one wants to control the past, symbolized by the anchor, it helps that it is
available whenever the contemplator wants it to be. Let me reiterate that with a melancholic past
one does know whom he has lost, but not what was lost in this person. The clearness of a nostalgic
memory is threatened when corrosion48 is imminent, which is inherent when something is made out
of iron. Thus, in Dutch it is suggested that Djebar might one day no longer be able to remember and
thus master those masculine eyes. Further, once chrome is added to the iron and carbon to make
something rust-free, thus forming steel, this new alloy loses its magnetic capacities. This seemingly
marginal detail significantly charges Djebar’s symbolism. The designation of the past in Dutch, being
made of iron, which is idiosyncratically magnetic, could, theoretically, be able to at least cause
friction with the present if it wants to. In contrast, a rust-free steel anchor does not have the
magnetic agency to make the boat of the present sink, to pull it to the bottom of the ocean.
Besides the fact that melancholia and nostalgia exhibit themselves in Djebar’s symbolist discourse,
there are also a lot of words that are feministically loaded. These semantically provocative words
form an intelligent, sometimes covert, critic on gender-inequality. I continue to recount the stroll
Djebar makes with her mother. It is interesting to compare how the lack of freedom in her mother’s
walking –veiled, not “allowed” in the center of Césarée, in need of the hand of a child in order to be
outside, gazed at- is designated in French and in Dutch. In the source text Djebar speaks of their walk
as unfolding according “le trajet codé” (16). In French the verb coder has the essence of “proceeding
according to a code or law” (252-253). In Dutch, in turn, Djebar and her mother are walking
according a “vaste route” (16), where the adjective vast means here “onveranderlijk” (521). What is
hence at stake is whether Djebar’s mother’s gait is conditioned by codes or whether it is just
invariable. Coder implies that there is an exterior, almost unchallenged ontological prohibition to
walk as one pleases, while in Dutch the restriction still seems to be in the hands of the walker who, if
wanted, can easily change her path. The difference, again, although not related to the topic of
melancholia this time, is in the attribution of agency. Djebar’s argument in French is a much stronger
complaint against the patriarchal society in Algeria, which takes agency away from women by coding
47
I arrived at my conclusion that this memory is a nostalgic certainty by looking at the form of the chapter. Rocca wrote an article called
“Assia Djebar’s Women” in which she situates Djebar’s feminism in her entire oeuvre. This is what she says about the intercon nectedness
of women in Djebar’s works in which a “revolution from isolation to the recognition of reciprocal needs and the conversion from passivity
to self-awareness” takes place (134). However, rather than to found this feministic awareness –which I term as nostalgic certainty- on a
close reading, Rocca derives this conclusion from Djebar’s –assumed by Rocca- Marxist intents, in which feminist solidarity “needs to be
defined in terms of mutuality, accountability and the recognition of common interest” (Mohanty quoted in Rocca 134).
48
Or eroded, in Steinmetz’ case.
20
their movement. In Dutch, the situation is less urgent, and it is suggested that there is always a
possibility, if desirable, to change one’s tread.
The Freudian metaphor of a melancholic past as an open wound – which could here be read
as the constrained life of Djebar’s mother - has been cured in this chapter: this wound does not have
the agency to fester. Rather, this memory is affirmatively nostalgic. Here is another retrospection by
Djebar:
La mère et sa fillette. Ombre fluette, je transporterai ce duo au-dedans de moi, tant de
décennies plus tard (16).
Met opmaak: Frans (Frankrijk)
The mother and her little girl. Delicate shadow, I will transport them within me, still decades
later (my translation).
Let us look first the adjective by which Djebar designates herself coupled with her mother. Fluette:
“mince et d’apparence frêle”49 (590). Although mince could also be interpreted as weak or vague, I
interpret it here as delicate or fine; harmless and sweet. This interpretation is one, however, that
cannot be made in the Dutch translation, in which ombre fluette is translated as “een vaag beeld”
(16). Vaag is derived from latin vagus, which means “zwervend, onvast” (369). In French, the
memory of mother and daughter walking through Césarée is given an aesthetic quality of being
delicate, and remains rather passive. In making it a vaag beeld, however, besides the less positive
connotation alone compared to fluette, the memory gains a capricious and unpredictable
characteristic, qualities that are in this thesis ascribed to a melancholic past. An erring past is a
melancholic past, since it is an agent that is able to come up whenever it pleases. Further, translated
as vaag, this memory loses the nostalgic decisiveness of not only knowing whom one has lost, but
also what one has lost with her, as if this memory, after translative intervention, turned from a lucid
delicacy into a blurred view.
The chapter that relates of her stroll with her mother draws to its end but Djebar is not done
with her unambiguous reflection on this memory, in which she perceives the younger version of her
contemporary self as a:
Fillette de Césarée qui serait l’esquisse d’un moi effacé, quoique écrit, qui me semble
soudain fantôme. Mes larmes couleraient encore, mais douces à cause de cette distance en
années. (28)
49
“Slender and tender appearance” (590, my translation).
21
Little girl from Césarée who would be a sketch of an erased me, although written down, who
seems to me suddenly a phantom. My tears would still flow, albeit sweet ones because of the
distance of years. (my translation)
Thus Djebar considers that little girl as erased (effacée). The adjective effacé can be defined as
“something that does not show itself and stays humbly in the shadow” (452, my translation). In my
application of a melancholic past as a capricious agent, humbleness and staying in the background
are not its properties. The expected sadness because of the constrained movement of her mother is,
in the Freudian sense, not incorporated in the contemporary ego, and hence does not cause a
troubling temporal mixture called melancholia. Rather, it stays in the shadow (l’ombre), and only,
when wanted by the contemporary, conscious and writing self, does it enter the stage. Further, there
is the introspection of her erased self as a fantôme, which can have the meaning in French of a
“person or thing that haunts the spirit” (563, my translation), and in which the quality of haunting
hints to the melancholic quality of being able to disturb the conscious self. There are, as I remarked
earlier, reasons to think so: Djebar admits that, while walking proudly, she also feels “thwarted by an
ambiguous responsibility that surpasses me” (28, my translation), which refers to the given that
without her, her mother would not be ‘allowed’ outside. However, I assume that, here, fantôme has
the other, more finite, connotation of “a supernatural appearance of a dead person, enveloped in a
shroud” (563, my translation). I venture to guess that with this interpretation of something from the
past as irreversibly dead and covered in a shroud, this introspection points more to Freud’s idea of
‘normal’ mourning, than to ‘pathological’ melancholia. If I recall mourning as something that is
conceived of as “we rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time” (244), this finite aspect
of being overcome is evident in Djebar’s conclusion to her own memory: nothing is more finitely
symbolized than when retired under a shroud. That ghost (the mother-daughter couple gazed at)
does not have the agency to unveil itself: the agency lays in the picking up of the pen by the presentday writer.
The Dutch translation, in turn, lets Djebar memorize herself as:
het meisje uit Césarée dat, hoewel op papier vastgelegd, misschien een schets van een
verdwenen ik is die me opeens als een geestverschijning voorkomt. Mijn tranen zullen
opnieuw vloeien, maar het zullen zoete tranen zijn vanwege die afstand in jaren (27).
Now, effacé and fantôme are respectively translated as verdwenen and geestverschijning. Earlier, I
interpreted effacé as something that remains in the shadow, but the adjective verdwenen (to
22
disappear), derived from the verb verdwijnen is more radical, since nothing remains. This definite
connotation is visible in the modern application of verdwijnen which means “onzichtbaar worden”
(Van Dale 527). The eventual pain that slumbers in this memory of her walk alongside her mother,
defying masculine eyes, is not a melancholic one, since these eyes are not autonomously able to
penetrate present-day reality by asserting their own ontology. However, this does not mean that
they are verdwenen. They should not even be, since Djebar knows what they are, as an affirmation of
a self-confirmative femininity, as I have hoped to make clear by looking etymologically at the symbols
used in this memory. Were it to be that these eyes had completely disappeared (verdwenen), that
would mean that Djebar would lose her nostalgic control over them.
Although the Dutch has a corresponding word for the French fantôme, namely fantoom, the
translator picked geestverschijning. Although phantoms can haunt, I associated this symbol with
death, since they wear shrouds. Instead of choosing a Latin equivalent, the translator chose a noun
containing geest, which is derived from the West-Germanic verb usgeisnan, which means
“afschrikken” (141, my translation). Some ostensibly minor, but nonetheless significant difficulties
arise. In Dutch, those episodes containing the holding hands with her restrained mother, are
suggested to be capable of emerging autonomously (as verschijning) and subsequently might do
what is idiosyncratic to malevolent ghosts (geesten), namely to frighten one (afschrikken). However,
in French, in my opinion, there is nothing to be scared of. In sum, a nostalgic phantom is less scary
than a melancholic ghost.
The Dutch target text thus seems to be more melancholic, or better less nostalgic than the
source text. According to Freud, mourning is a linear process, whereupon I induced that after it, one
is able to engage nostalgically with one’s past. A nostalgic past that is not hauntingly enigmatic, but
assuring and under control by the contemplator. I have read these sections in which Djebar
remembers her mother as signs of an ego that, instead of having cannibalized a past, is free and
uninhibited. I came to that conclusion by paying attention to the nature of the words used in Djebar’s
discourse, which pointed, in French at least, to the qualities I attribute to nostalgia. In Freud’s sense,
Djebar does not only know whom, but foremost what she lost by those strolls with her mother,
during which they defied all those masculine eyes. Djebar thus seems to be able to find her mother’s
house, to go in and feel comfortable and reassured. I will however argue that she will not meet such
complacency in her father’s house.
The father
As the title already suggests, Djebar’s relationship with her father plays, a central role in the book.
The difficulties she describes in relation to him are not done away with in the present, and hence I
interpret the fatherly memories not as confirmatively nostalgic, but disturbingly melancholic. These
23
memories have not been mourned over. In the Freudian sense, a regression50 has taken place in
which the lost object (father) is “cannibalized” and “devoured” (249-250), after which Djebar seems
to be tormented from the inside. Her contemporary ego still seems to struggle with an obscure part
that slumbers in her subconscious, and Djebar, I argue, tries to elucidate it in the process of writing
about it. The success, however, I consider to be highly doubtful.
I will start with chapter 3, “Le Tout Premier Livre.” Djebar was an ardent schoolgirl, and won
a lot of prizes. At the last day before summer vacation on elementary school around 1941, with
Algeria fully colonized51 by France, she “wins” a book: a biography of Philippe Pétain, of she was
unaware that he was the leader of France and its colonies. 52 Eager to show it off to make her father,
who is a teacher as well, proud, little Djebar hastens to the school where he teaches, waving the
book to him. Naively, she believes her father will be happy to see it, but after he recognizes the face
of the colonist, he smiles at her ironically. This makes her now still feel very uncomfortable although
at the time she does not understand why her father is not thrilled.
There is a remarkable tendency noticeable in this chapter. When Djebar begins her story, all
personal and possessive pronouns are in the first person (29-30). These pages recount the initial
happy memory of the reception of the book, which she then considered to be a “prize” that certainly
would make her father proud. For example: I had, I never read, I brought along, etc. This full
identification with that girl from the past is also reflected in the possessive pronouns, that still refer
to the happy occasion of receiving the book: between my finger, my hands, my dad etc. In this
exhilaration, Djebar continues to relate that after her last day of school that year, she runs to the
school where her father works, full of expectations. At that moment he is walking on the school yard,
watching over his pupils during their break:
Me voici me hâtant avec ce livre volumineux entre les mains. Je monte sur un muret, face au
grillage, dans le coin, où je peux m’approcher de mon père qui fait les cent pas, là-bas…(30)
50
Although she does not name it melancholia, Rocca likewise notices a struggle in Djebar’s autobiography: “Declaring to be also the author
and the reader of herself, the narrator witnesses and denounces her internalized self-hatred as the effect of multilayered and intermingled
processes of patriarchal oppression” (139). Here, the notion of self-hatred can be equated with my assertion that a melancholic past has
the agency to affirm its own ontology by intruding in present-day reality, letting itself be cannibalized, hereby making, viciously, the
contemporary self torment itself with incertitude. However, as said, Rocca arrives at her conclusions without any close readi ng.
51
I do not take into account Algeria’s political upheavals at the time. This is in opposition to Schyns, who pays specific attention to the
cultural embeddedness of Nulle Part Dans La Maison De Mon Père and, something unthinkable for a formalist mind, uses this book to read
her other works: “door een ‘vérité intime’ uit haar leven te tonen krijgen alle andere romans ook meer relief” (85). On a met aphysical level,
Schyns only confirms the work’s ontology, when situated in a certain culture, time and the oeuvre of the author. Another interesting aspect
is that Schyns compared the Dutch and French version quite different than me. She does , for example, not agree that the genre designation
of being a roman is left out in the Dutch version. However, Schyns does not find this wrong because the roman-genre is evident in the form
of the original book, but because she remembered Djebar saying that it is a roman rather than an autobiography in an intervie w (85).
52
Le Maréchal Pétain- (1856-1951) was a former French military leader, diplomat and head of state. He played a dominant role in the
colonization of northern Africa.
24
see me here, hasting myself with the voluminous book in my hands. I climb a wall, next to the
grill, in the corner, from where I can approach my father who is pacing up and down over
there […] I give him a sign, not without some exuberance… (my translation, my emphasis).
Although she hopes for warm fatherly compliments, little Djebar learns a hard lesson on colonial
politics. One should especially pay notice to the three points (following exuberance) which
enigmatically hint at a total transition of the happiness by creating tension. This moment marks a
turning point; during the rest of the chapter (30-33) the narration switches to the almost exclusive
use of personal and possessive pronouns in the second and third person.
Initially, Djebar, as made explicit by the use of pronouns, fully identifies with that little girl,
but suddenly seems no longer able to do so. A change in grammar occurs that implies a distancing
from this unpleasant memory: the little girl waves her prize, her father approaches, she announced
almost triumphantly, she believes to do good, etc. In her childish naivety, Djebar thought to make her
father proud, but of course he recognizes the marshal on the cover and as a socialist and republican
himself, profoundly hates the colonizer. Djebar expects a warm reaction from her father, and since it
is quite the opposite of a cold smile, it is truly an ironical anti-climax: “the thing that hits me, is the
weird semi-smile on the face of the father” (31, my translation, my emphasis).
This distanced use of pronouns53 in the painful part of the story, I argue, suggests
melancholia. As explained by Freud, melancholia is characterized by a struggle in the region of the
memory-traces, where the conscious, contemporary part of the ego battles with the absorbed loss
from the past. Instead of certitude, the ambivalence that surrounds her father, the not knowing what
is lost54 in him, is unpleasantly elusive, and hence a regression ensues. The struggle that follows, with
the aim to explain the absorbed enigma from the past, can be described as such: after the regression,
in the region of the memory-traces, the part of the ego which is related to consciousness tries to
detach the loss from present-day reality, as to regain control over time in the present. However, the
obscure past refuses to be detached and stubbornly keeps disturbing the contemporary. In other
words, the contemporary part of the “patient” tries to undermine the ontology of the past, while this
latter wants to autonomously ascertain its own being as a melancholic agent. The outcome is not as
53
I see here a clear difference between my formalist reading and Schyns contextual one. Although Schyns also notices “een veelvuldig
gebruik van zij als de verstelster het over zichzelf heeft,” she analyzes this observation through other essays written by Djebar. In Ces voix
qui m’assiègent (1999), Schyns tells us, Djebar states “dat ze paradoxaal genoeg bij het schrijven van L’amour, la fantasia haar persoonlijke
wereld (het autobiografische deel) wilde beschermen met ramen die uitzicht boden op de geschiedenis” (85). Convincing as this
explanation might sound, authorized through refuge in the author herself, Schyns neglects the stylistic function that the remarkable use of
pronouns has within the book itself, and even within a certain chapter. It surprised me even more to read that Schyns exp lains the
alternate use of pronouns, drawn from one of Djebar’s interviews, by the fact that Djebar’s artistic vision is to confide wor ds to the paper,
after which it “een eigen leven gaat leiden waardoor het “ik” een personage wordt in een eigen universum met eigen wetten waarop de
auteur op een gegeven moment geen antwoord meer heeft” (86). Djebar herself seems to admit that the opportunity to find the ‘answers’
is in the text itself, and not in the author who simply admits not to fully control her charac ters.
54
In contrast to her mother, who was still alive when the book was published, Djebar’s father was already dead. Although Freud himself
uses the term loss in a broad term (for example a loss of an ideal), here the loss has both a physical and ideal connotation.
25
certain as in ‘normal’ mourning, which Freud theorized as a process that ends with the successful
detachment of the lost object by eventually knowing what one has lost. How to relate, then, Djebar’s
detached use of grammar in the second and third form, to melancholia? If detachment is a sign of a
“cure” of melancholia, then this memory ostensibly is not, despite my claim, a melancholic one.
However, there are counter-arguments to maintain my argument.
As said, Freud equates melancholia with pathological mourning. The lack of consciousness
about what has been lost in the past is the reason why it is not “normal”. This initial frustration of
not-knowing, however, is visible with every loss, and “normal” mourning also starts with the
incorporation of the loss (regression) as to clarify what has been lost. The difference is, then, that
after a linear process of mourning, a non-melancholic person is able to abort the loss. He is indeed
able to subvert the past’s ontology. The use of the second and third form indicates such a lack of
detachment55 and successful result of mourning. Nonetheless, it can also be argued, as I will indeed,
that regression is a necessary step to eventual detachment. The “patient” first needs to draw in the
loss, to be able to exorcise it eventually. So with this interpretation one could argue that the
distanced use of grammar points to Djebar’s impossibility to incorporate that young girl, who is so
hurt by her father’s ironical smile. It is no achievement to speak of happy things (receiving the
“price”) in the I-form and identifying with them; but it is to do so in the face of harsh ironical smiles. I
reason that if Djebar ever wants to be in full control over that smile, like she was over those gazes
that spied on her mother, she first needs to be able to say I received an ironical smile form my father.
Next to exploring how melancholia is reflected grammatically, I would also like to find out
how this is done in a lexical sense. I will look at the (etymological) pretentions that are carried by
some words used by Djebar to give a better insight in the relation between the contemporary,
conscious and writing Djebar and the past that refuses to be written about, that wants to stay
unknown. Again, I will investigate to what extent my conclusions will hold when compared to the
Dutch translation.
Let us return to that disillusioning turning point in the scene, in which little Djebar painfully
becomes aware that something is not right with her “prize”:
55
Schyns studied Nulle Part Dans La Ma Maison in a strict contextual sense. For example, she consulted what the author herself had to say
about the work. However, it seems that those arguments derived from the author are more undermining than supporting Schyns’ nonformalist approach. For instance, Schyns tells that Djebar feels “dat zij als schepper afstand moet doen en op een totaal onverwacht
moment het nakijken heeft omdat het ik een personage is geworden” (91). Schyns continues her conclusion as she states herself that the
protagonist in the book is thus more than just the alter-ego of the author: “het is geen personage dat zich laat vastpinnen, maar een figuur
die het kader van de romanruimte wil ontvluchten en naar de horizon rent” (91). I do follow Schyns in her assertion that the protagonist’s
motives are ultimately unfathomable and can only be interpreted, but I feel she falls short in finding a solution for that assumed
intangibility, and that to seek refuge in the author herself is not helpful, something Djebar seems to admit. Rather, in trying to explain
those motifs, I believed it more fruitful to pin down the protagonist by looking for the roots of the words she uses.
26
En vérité, moi qui me souviens, si longtemps après, je ne cherche pas vraiment à préciser les
dates: je revois la scène comme si elle datait d’hier ou de l’année dernière, et ce qui me
frappe, c’est l’étrange demi-sourire sur la face paternelle. (31)
In fact, I who remembers, such a long time after, I do not attempt to specify the dates: I look
again at the scene like it took place yesterday or last year, and that which hits me, is the
weird semi-smile on the face of the father (my translation).
If melancholia hints at a temporal collision between past and present, is engaged in an ontological
struggle, then the violence is certainly present in this key-citation in which the weird smile of her
father hits her. Frapper is the verb used to characterize this turn in her memory, and means “to
touch, more or less roughly, through one or more blows” (609, my translation). Now let us look how
this key passage is translated in the Dutch version: “wat me treft is het merkwaardige glimlachje op
het gezicht van mijn vader” (30). Before I will look at the respective translations of frapper and
étrange, I would like to point out the strange grammatical change that occurs in the Dutch
translation of the work. Originally, the face emitting the smile is a noun (face) that is only
recognizable as Djebar’s father’s through an adjective (paternelle). The original ommision of a
possessive pronoun to face is in accordance with the previous paragraphs, in which I talked about the
expected distance (no writing in the I-form), as associated with melancholia. In Dutch, suddenly a
possessive pronoun (mijn) is placed before vader, which is also now a noun instead of an adjective. In
the translation Djebar seems to be comfortably close to that smile, even able to posses it and identify
with it, which hints at mourning, rather than melancholia.
In a lexical sense, other discrepancies can be discerned. Frapper is equated with the Dutch
verb treffen: derived from Old Germanic “treffan” which signifies “slaan, raken”, and the Old English
“drepan” which even means “doden” (389). In translation, this memory seems to physically hurt
Djebar at least as much as in French. However, in a “modern” sense, and I presume used as such by
the Dutch translator, the verb treffen means here: ontroeren; tegenkomen; vinden (Van Dale 503). If I
read treffen as such, the force of the original version is downplayed. In French, Djebar is hit by the
ironical smile of her father, which symbolically denounces a degree of corporeality. This might even
explain her impossibility to incorporate this loss and to mourn, for to say my father’s smile hurts
simply too much. Treffen could, etymologically speaking, also connote a physicality. However, in the
Dutch language, it would be highly unlikely to use the verb treffen to designate the act of hitting
someone. Either way, this ambivalence is not possible in French: if Djebar wanted to use a less
physical and more abstract word, she probably would not have chosen frapper, the primary
connotation of which is associated with unmistakable physicality. In Dutch, the memory between the
27
contemporary, writing Djebar and that ironical smile of her father suggests an encounter that is
(emotionally) moving. However, this encounter is indecisive: in a rather visual way one could read
frapper as letting Djebar recoil, whereas treffen suggests an undecided face-off. The French is here
more coherent with the melancholic tone throughout the chapter.
Then there is also the adjective étrange (weird), which is translated as merkwaardig. “Merk-“
is derived from Old Norwegian “marka-“ which is a word related to borders (249). Further,
merkwaardig means: opvallend, bijzonder and vreemd (Van Dale 305). The French adjective étrange
means: “something quite different to what one is accustomed to experience; something that amazes
and surprises” (526, my translation). Although in Dutch there is an equivalent for étrange –vreemd I
would argue- I think the translator’s choice for merkwaardig is defendable. If I recall that the
painfulness of the scene resides in the ironic anticlimax56 (Djebar expected fatherly pride, but meets
contempt), the notion of a border is certainly there, since the scene, as remarked, is characterized by
a clear transition in the usage of personal pronouns. Although the use of merk- does justice to the
ironic transition in the scene, I do not find this choice a totally satisfactory one. The reason for this is
that grens only denotes a transition, whereas étrange also denotes the reaction of the subject
(Djebar) by means of the aspect of surprise. The fact that irony causes pain in this scene only
happens because the irony affects Djebar. In Dutch, the sudden transition may be merkwaardig, but
does not imply an effect or maybe even affect, as if Djebar stays unimpaired, which she clearly does
not.
Chapter 5 is called “La Bicyclette” and it resembles the melancholic structure of “Le tout premier
livre” as discussed above. Djebar’s family lived in a kind of resort for teachers in the centre of town.
Like the previous chapter in which she thought to receive a grand prize, this one also starts joyful.
Djebar describes how she played all sort of games with her peers –French and indigenous alike- in
the serene courtyard of the place. One day, at the of age 4 or 5, she tries to master riding a bike in
that courtyard, assisted by one of their neighbors’ young son. During that rite de passage, her father
returns from the centre of the village and enters through the gates. Djebar hopes that her brave
56
Irony is indeed evident since her father is mocking her expectations. Irony: “a way to mock somebody by acting the opposite of how one
actually wants to act” (Méthodique 763, my translation). Djebar’s father wants to be angry but instead he smiles at her. Djebar only
understands this irony while she writes in the present, since she only realizes afterwards that her father must have been angered by seeing
the colonist Pétain. The real melancholic pain when she memorizes is however inflicted by a reversed irony : she now expects anger, but
meets a taunting smile from the past. Hence, irony could be seen as an agential tool from the past.
Anna Rocca states that irony is a recurring figure of style in Djebar’s work, through which she lets her characters deal with a ll
sorts of pain: from feminine subjugation to the loss of loved ones in Algeria’s bloody struggle for decolonization. Rocca sees irony for
example reflected in Djebar’s essay “La Nuit Du Récit De Fatima” (2002) and the book discussed in this thesis. However, there is a crucial a
difference between my formalist reading of Djebar’s irony and Rocca’s contextual findings on it. The latter sees irony as a tool for Djebar’s
characters to distance themselves from painful patriarchal conventions (for example to be married at the age of 14 to a man of 40) (139).
She notices that the female characters use irony -think and act discontinuously as to manipulate their own painful feelings- [unclear] as a
way to make it through the day. This is a conclusion Rocca makes when she takes into account Algeria’s patriarchic societal structure and
other works by Djebar. Whereas I observe a melancholic irony (practiced by an agential past) in Nulle Part Dans La Maison De Mon Père
from the nature of the words, Rocca in turn ascribes irony to the characters on the basis of factors that are outside the text. Rocca’s
contextual approach focuses on Djebar’s biography (and her oeuvre) and even speculates on her –feministic- intentions.
28
endeavor, like the “prize”, is met with pride by her father, but she will be disillusioned again: her
father does not even look at her, walks straight to the staircase that leads to their apartment, and
once at the top summons her to come home. As soon as she arrives, her father starts to repetitively
shout at her mother: “I do not want it, I do not want it […] I do not want it that my daughter shows
her legs while riding a bike!” (49, my translation).
As throughout the whole book, Djebar’s writing style reminds me of that of symbolism: there
is a pain –a symbol- that she cannot describe or know, unless through a cumbersome suggestion
through other symbols.57 This symbolist style of writing is evident in the fourth paragraph, where,
again, there is a transition from happiness to pain:
Mais, lorsque je voulus à mon tour –à quatre ou cinq ans, je ne sais plus- apprendre à monter
à vélo, de ce passé quelque chose vrille dans ma mémoire, devient blessure, griffure. (48)
But, when I wanted at my turn –at four or five years old, I do not know anymore- to learn to
ride a bike, from this past something drills in my memory, becomes injury, scratch. (my
translation)
What, then, drills so disruptively into Djebar’s initial blissful memory? There are many symbols with
imaginative semantic connotations to symbolize the pain: vriller, blessure and griffure. First vriller:
“to pierce with a drill; to demolish” (1522, my translation). If Freud symbolizes a melancholic
memory as an open wound, we now have the utensil that arguably causes it: a drill. Further, the
concluding symbol Djebar assigns to this memory is a griffure, which is a “scratch derived from a
claw, or a sharp and hooked nail of certain animals” (658, my translation). Although a symbolist58
denies a fixed reality, and resigns in the acceptance that the world outside us can only be
approached imperfectly and indirectly through other symbols, his/her choice of symbols is never
arbitrary. Indeed, I have noticed a pattern in Djebar’s symbolic writing. This is first of all most obvious
concerning the physicality of the pain, since a scratch can only be understood as inflicted on the skin.
Although this does not necessarily mean that it will leave behind a melancholic scar, or a perpetual
festering open wound, I will interpret it as such. Secondly, the symbols are consistently feministically
loaded. The symbol that causes the scratch is a claw (griffe). As Djebar tries to explain to herself why
her father forbade her to ride a bike and exerted his subsequent rage that still makes her ashamed of
herself, Djebar says: “there was an intrusion of another non-human nature in my father” (50, my
57
Symbolists wants to make (textual) art, with the acceptance that art can never reflect a reality. The epistemological –cumbersome- way
to know one symbol, is through other symbols. This suggestive way of writing is exactly what Mandelstam condemned as nihilism, since
there is never a clear word -something for which he coined the term eternal nodding.
58
Of course I would not call Djebar a clear-cut symbolist, which would mean I would speculate on her intentions. Nonetheless, I argue that
her style of writing, and more concretely her use of words, at least resemble symbolist tendencies.
29
translation). Although Djebar adds that this intruder was not completely bestial, one cannot help but
link this reference to some level of her father’s bestiality to the scratch. What might be deduced here
from looking purely at the roots of the symbols, is that, together they form an intelligent feministic
complaint on “the clawed patriarch”, who inflicts scratches on innocent little girls just wanting to ride
a bike. What these words symbolically suggest, then, is that men are not only voyeurs, but also
beasts.59
Let us look at how the transit is translated into Dutch: “Maar toen ik –een jaar of vijf, ik weet
het niet meer precies- wilde leren fietsen, schrijnt er van dat verleden iets in mijn geheugen, als een
wonde, een schram” (44). The translator used the corresponding word schram to translate griffure,
but its effect of piercing is subdued60 into schrijnen. To decide, and this is important in tracing
melancholia, whether the schram is merely ephemeral or will be preserved in a scar (or festering
open wound), it makes a difference whether a scratch is caused by a claw (griffe) that pierces (vrille)
one’s skin or if there is a mere scratch scratched (geschrijnd) on it. The first is more likely to leave a
scar.
Another translational discrepancy exists in the designation of the fatherly voice that
summons Djebar from atop the staircase. In French it is “une voix métallique” (a metallic voice) (48);
in Dutch “een harde stem” (45). The adjective hard is derived from the Greek “kratus” which means
“sterk” (163). It is a rather general term compared to the starkly symbolic métallique which provokes
an interesting trope, as shown before in relation to the anchor, if we conceive this adjective as
derived from the noun metal, which has two physical qualities that both contribute to an
considerable allegorical effect here. Generally, disregarding sub-metals as iron and steel for the
moment, metal conducts (electricity and heat), reflects (light) and resonates (sound). Now, if
melancholia entails a manifestation of the past that asserts its own ontology in present-day reality,
then the actorial qualities of conducting, reflecting and resonating bear such agency in them. The
reason, then, why this quality is subdued in Dutch is because of the hyperonymical conservatism in
the translation.61 In this case hard is the hyperonym, that might, or might not, encapsulate more
59
Anna Rocca notices the sometimes covert or parable-like feminist-agency –something she calls “multilayered interactions” (131)- that
Djebar employs her characters with. Rocca arrives at this conclusion by attending to Djebar’s “analytical framework within which she
explores human relationships” (131). As much as I agree with her, Rocca just drops this conclusion without any close reading of how that
multilayered feminist agency functions within the text. This leads me to employ the formalist device that prevents such distractions by offpage factors. Had I sought refuge primarily in biographical or intentional information, I would not have arrived at my conclusion that the
slumbering feminist agency resides in the nature of the words themselves. Of course I realize that there is no proof for my interpretation,
though I feel that my empiricism gives more foundation to my conclusions.
60
Here I must note that this choice is on the other hand defendable as to make it correspond with the noun schram. For schrijnen, from
Frisian skrine, indeed means schrammen (335). Moreover, Djebar’s use of vriller is a French idiom, in which the verb is used to designate an
emotional pain, like “la douleur me vrille” (the pain hurts severely) (1522). Usually however, idioms are difficult to translate. It is for
example not common for a Dutch speaker to say een pijn doorboort me.
61
As mentioned in the following footnote, the authors use the term le hyperonyme which means “meer omvattende term”. Also le
hyponyme: “minder omvattende term”. Both are exemplified as such: a cow (hyponym) is an animal (hyperonym) (Van Dale Fr.-Nl. 350).
30
specific categories such as metallic, which is in this case the hyponym.62 A possible reason for this
generalized, or abstract, translation is that in French une voix métallique is an idiom that has the
(negative or somber) connotation of a cold echoic repetition, like Djebar’s father’s voice, deprived of
empathy or affection. To translate idioms properly is one of the most difficult tasks of the translator.
Here, the translator could have used the Dutch expression met een kille stem, which would
nonetheless leave out the melancholic qualities of metal. Another option would have been to
translate it literally with een stem van metaal. However, this non-existent idiom would probably be
frowned upon by its Dutch readers.
After having left her bike Djebar accompanies her father, who, after ascending the staircase,
loses himself in a frantic tirade inside their apartment. While she is merely 4 years old, Djebar is for
the first time confronted with patriarchal (and Islamic) gender-norms: a girl should not show her legs
while she is riding a bike. In this memory, Djebar does not know the exact words he shouted in Arabic
besides the enraged –“bestial”- repetition that concerns her exposed legs:
Je n’ai retenu de sa phrase vibrante, comme une flèche d’acier qui résonne entre nou s, que
ces deux mots en arabe: «ses jambes» (49).
I only retained from his vibrant phrase, like an arrow of steel that resonates between us,
these two words in Arabic: “her legs” (my translation).
What is conspicuous is the word acier (steel), which is here is a hyponym of métallique (since steel is
a subcategory of metal). This reference above all gives coherence to the chapter, and proves that
Djebar does not symbolize arbitrarily. Further, the designation of emotions through chemical
elements captures the imagination of the reader as they make Djebar’s pain physical. In the Dutch
translation une flèche d’acier may be literally translated as “stalen pijl” (46), but since the preceding
métallique was translated with the hyperonym hard, at least some coherence regarding the
phenomenological or physical writing, by using chemical references, is weakened, and therefore
becomes less convincing.
I wish to conclude this scene by looking closer at the symbols through which Djebar
characterizes this painful and, I argue, melancholic memory: an arrow of steel. As said, the metal
product steel is coherent with the metal voice, but this symbol of steel offers other interesting
62
J.P. Vinay and J. Darbelnet have analyzed 7 so called translation shifts, as 7 phenomena that are prominent in the act of translating. The
problem of hyperonyms is, alike metonyms, part of one of the 7 and to deal with them as a translator is called modulation. Another 1 of 7
problems is the issue of how to translate idioms. Despite the challenge, according to Vinay and Darbelnet, a good translator is able to solve
these difficulties eloquently. See Vinay, J.P. & Darbelnet, J. “Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais.» Revue belge de philologie et
d’histoire 38.2 (1960): 451-452.
31
insights regarding the coherence of this chapter and the melancholia in it. Le Robert Méthodique
exemplifies acier with a lot of contextual examples. It is therefore interesting, in relation to the main
subject (and title) of this chapter, that it gives the example of “the frame of a bike of chromed steel”
(14, my translation, my emphasis). Furthermore, the quality of steel is predominantly associated by
terms as solid and lasting and above all, as said when produced with chrome, it is rust-free: her
father’s insulting voice, associated here with rust-fee steel, is not ready to let its ontology corrode.
Ultimately, he refuses to open the door of his own house for Djebar.
3. Conclusion
In my analysis of Nulle Part Dans La Maison De Mon Père I have used a formalist method. No
attention has been paid to the context of the text, Djebar’s biography and intents. I started this thesis
with an elaboration on the contemporary debate on different reading methodologies in the
comparative discipline and translation studies. Despite formalism’s marginalized position in the
ongoing discussions, I nonetheless hope to have shown its viability. In what has passed I have tended
to assert the aesthetic validity of Djebar’s autobiography solely through my attention for its form. It
should be recalled that formalism proposes an epistemology and ontology in which any art-form
should be cut off from the outside world. This means that the only thing that is worth knowing is the
tangible form under one’s eyes, which exists for its own sake. In opposition to my formalist reading, I
have tried to show -in footnotes- that other, more contextual approaches, such as Rocca and Schyns
have executed, are different from mine. It is certainly true that my conclusions on Djebar’s
autobiography are concentrated on the same themes, predominantly patriarchal oppression and
femininity, as Rocca and Schyns have highlighted. However, while these scholars have arrived at their
conclusions by stressing Djebar’s intents (as for example expressed in interviews), her biographical
information (she grew up in a colonized Algeria) and the reception of the work (generally received as
feminist), I have tried to, in turn, substantiate my conclusions on Djebar’s feminism by empirical
reference to the form. In concentrating all my focus on grammar (pronouns), etymology and style
(symbolism), I feel that I have gained access to the book in an ontological sense; a meaning derived
from the form that transcends all contextual contingency; that transcends also other ephemeral
factors like myself as the analyst and even Djebar herself. It is a meaning beyond everything but not
beyond the two covers of the book. A meaning, further, that is beyond time (Algeria’s colonization)
and place (Césarée). One certainly has the right to dislike my conclusions, and to rather look for
meaning on “the surface”. However, it is unthinkable to refute my conclusions, since there is hard
empirical proof for them: to attack them is not attacking me, since they are beyond me; it would be a
repudiation of the book itself. Hence, I feel that these are not really “my” conclusions.
32
If nostalgia is a painful longing (algos) to return (nostos) home, then Djebar has reached her
mother’s home. That is to say that the memories about her mother do provide a confirmation of the
person Djebar is today: it is indeed a complacent home, in which she knows her way. In the motherly
memories Djebar has proved above all an agent in time. Although the memory in which Djebar
recounts her walk throughout Césarée alongside her mother is not a happy one because of the
restrained movement of her mother by the masculine eyes, Djebar is still capable of denying the
ontology of those eyes from the past. They simply do not have the agency to gaze at her as they
please: they are only granted existence whenever Djebar feels like remembering them, and when she
does, she uses them to confirm her contemporary notion of femininity. On the contrary, the
memories that involve her father are melancholic. If one knows whom she has lost but not what she
has lost in him, the past has the agential advantage of remaining unknown, of being a terrain vague.
Djebar is still not able to master her father’s ironical smile, emanated while she triumphantly waved
the book with the colonizer on the cover at him. This is why I conclude that Djebar, after over 400
pages of trying to know her father, still has not made any progress – she still is nowhere in his house.
Finally, my formalist reading has helped me arrive at an interpretation of Djebar’s writing as
resembling symbolism. It is important to stress that this is a conclusion derived from the form which
is beyond the author; I consider it highly unlikely that Djebar wrote with symbolist intents, but the
form of her autobiography certainly lends itself for this interpretation. Scholars focusing on Djebar as
an author, would not even think of such an interpretation, since it would probably not correspond
with Djebar’s expressed intents. If I would have been distracted by contextual factors, I would
certainly have missed, for instance, the numerous chemical and physical tropes. Subsequently I have
compared the Dutch rendition of these allegories with their French equivalents, and I have concluded
that the Dutch translator has not been sensitive enough to Djebar’s symbolism. It is for that reason
that the translator has achieved a functional equivalence, but not an aesthetic one: on the surface
both versions evidently emanate feminism, nostalgia and melancholia, but a closer look shows us
there is a mutual friction between the French and Dutch.
Djebar herself betrays her fondness of symbolism on multiple occasions in the book.
Throughout, and especially in the sections in which she relates of her first encounters with literature
in high school, she speaks of her admiration for the symbolist poets Rimbaud and Baudelaire. In one
memory, her teacher recites “L’invitation du voyage” by Baudelaire and during which little Djebar is
astonished and breathless: “And thus I received an invitation for the voyage, but more than that: an
invitation to the beauty of French words; but still more than that, to the respiration under the
words” (103, my translation). Even bigger is her admiration for Rimbaud –who she persistently and
caressingly addresses with his nickname voyou (rascal). Rimbaud is one of the central figures of
poetical symbolism and his “Voyelles”, according to Forestier, expresses Rimbaud’s exhilaration after
33
he discovered “all that one can extract from one single word: which is ultimately a sign or object
without a fixed meaning, but is part of a development of multiple images” (Poésies 255, my
translation). This archetypical symbolist idea of words in development and connected by multiple
layers has invited me to look for the consistency of the symbols Djebar uses herself. As it turned out
in my interpretation, they indeed are all but arbitrary; rather they are consistently chemical and
physical, which in turn enabled me to distinguish nostalgic and melancholic patterns. Although I
consider certain sections written by a symbolist hand, I most certainly did not read them like a
symbolist. Rimbaud, admired by Djebar, wanted to extract from words, which of course hurts one’s
formalist heart since a word seems to be abused this way, to be drained, while it is already so rich in
itself. This is why I dug for the nature of the word by concentrating not on the emanations but
foundations of the form.
In the introduction I quoted Mandelstam who volubly agitated against the symbolist notion
that a word is without a fixed meaning and, instead of being autonomous, according Rimbaud, only
has value when read in its development of multiple images; in a chain of suggestions. Mandelstam
envisioned that Russian poetry could only overcome this formlessness by a “Hellenistic concept of
the world” and a true “interrogation of the Russian language through the attitude of respect called
‘philology,’ as to accord to the Russian language, which has become irrational by symbolism, a being
of words” (Bernaud, my translation, my emphasis). This quotation neatly captures my applied
method, against, not only symbolism, but contextual studies in general. If Mandelstam tried to
overcome this worrisome condition through his poems, I did so in comparing etymologically
(Mandelstam’s “Hellenistic concept”) two versions of Djebar’s work. My starting point was the
French source text from which I drew the conclusion that Djebar’s memories of her mother are
nostalgic; those of her father melancholic. Next I looked at how these conclusions, derived from the
form of the source text, are respected in the Dutch version.
I share the exuberance of the increasing intensification of comparative literature and
translation studies around which the contemporary debate in search of a convenient methodology to
combine them revolves. However, I hope to have shown, as I resurrected formalism, thereby refusing
to think of it as an anachronism despite the hegemony in the academia of literary sciences, that its
philosophy can truly help us to think about literature in a more aesthetic, non-contingent and deep
ontological way. I agree with the fact that it is important to know how literature is related to world,
however there are anthropologists or sociologists who are more apt to look at what lives outside the
covers of a book. This does not mean that there is simply one –formalistic- way to arrive at one
definite meaning. Neither do I wish to say that my method will lead always to the same meaning,
regardless the reader, time and place that is concerned with the act of reading. Rather, I would like
to state that the meaning of literature exists on different levels, and I do certainly organize them
34
hierarchically. What I have tried to propose is that a meaning which is arrived at through a formalist
method is indeed an individual one. But at least it is a non-contingent meaning: whoever comes after
me can, when applying a philological method, arrive at the same conclusions. That likeminded
formalist reader will arrive at an eternal meaning, and he/she will arrive at it whenever and wherever
he/she reads a particular text since its conclusion is consolidated in the form.
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