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Performance Research (2013) - Falling into the River with Albert, Madeleine and James

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Abstract

All the same, The Fall is literature and D'Entre Les Morts is pulp -- or was doomed to remain so until Alfred Hitchcock's writers transferred the plot to Fort Point and dislocated its morbid eroticism from the moral turbulence of the Seine to the San Francisco bay. In one book, a woman never seen, her leopard neck only sensed in the dark by a passer-by, plunges into the river water and drowns; in the other, she is pursued down river and pretends to try to drown herself, but only in order to be embraced and rescued.

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Everything must fall, and everything that falls must drag along with it in its fall, in an indefinite movement of growth, all that tries to remain. From time to time, we perceive that the fall far exceeds our measure and that we must, in a sense, fall more than we are capable of falling. Here begins the dizziness through which we divide ourselves, becoming, for ourselves, companions in our fall. Maurice Blanchot[1]

To be honest, cher, I'm unlikely to tell you anything that you couldn't just as soon find out for yourself. When you get back indoors, try keying in faure, facet or flavieres, then vertigo, vega or villeblevin - a few effs and vees in some such combination - that should do it; follow the clues. But, for the moment, now that we're both up here in the thin air above the broadband layer, let's stick together, shall we - at least as far as the next parapet.

See down there - I expect they have a name for it - half way up the 'droop' of the Seine, let's say, over to the west where avenue Charles de Gaulle enters Courbevoie, is the Pont de Neuilly, and in the opposite direction, in the heart of the city, by the Tuileries, is the Pont Royal. And between the two, returning west and then south and then north, are another twenty crossings - Gasrigliano, Apollinaire's beloved Mirabeau, de Grenelle, d'Lena - an over-abundance of jump-off points.

Now, let's zoom in and take a closer look at the Pont Royal. See there please, at the Ouai Voltaire end with rue de Bac straight ahead. There's a beige Citroen Picasso on the bend, and next to the first lamp standard, where a young man is standing astride his bicycle making a phone call, two men are just starting across to the north bank. Look there, both are wearing tweed overcoats with upturned collars, both under brimmed hats, one puffing at a Gauloise. You'd think it was the Glienicke Bridge, the way they're behaving, shiftlessly as Cold War goons, gazing left and right away from each other as they speak. Actually, they're both lawyers. The one with the cigarette is Jean-Baptiste Clamence. In this uncertain light he looks like Albert Camus; he might be an anagram! The other - regard the stumbling gait - a tell-tale sign of erotic energy unexpressed - looks like James Stewart the film actor, but his name is Roger Flavieres, usually just the one word, Flavieres, as if to describe a bad fish soup.

Listen. They're talking about women. It's quite a speech. The Baptist says (or is it Flavieres? Sound travels so much more slowly than light):

A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose, cher maitre, that we should be taken literally? We'd have to go through with it. Brr...! The water's so cold! But let's not worry! It's too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!

What a dreadful gimmick! We're looking down on the plan of two thin books. That's to say, if both books had been published with a map in the front to show the main theatre of events so to speak, each would include an identical map of Paris with the Seine running through it and the streets named and oriented as they were in 1940. The way I see it, the narratives collide and overlap around the time of the Defeat, with the result that a kind of dizziness affects them both - dizziness for one thing, anyway.

Here they are (one in each pocket!): The Fall of Albert Camus (1956) and D'Entre Les Morts (1954), the pulp novel from the French team, Boileau-Narcejac (nom de plume by which the French crime-fiction writers Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud - aka Thomas Narcejac - published). It was on D'Entre Les Morts that Alfred Hitchcock based his San Francisco mystery, [[Vertigo]...

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Notes

  1. ↑ See Note 15.
  2. ↑ Thomas Narcejac acknowledged that this obsession with the violence, strangeness and horror of the world was of its time: ‘si le roman contemporain est noir, c'est parce que l'humanite vient d'entrer dans l'age de l'angoisse.’ He compared the works of Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase (the first writers in the Serie noire) to Malraux, Camus and Sartre, French writers whom he considered to have invented a penetrating and incisive form of roman noir. See Narcejac cited in Gorrara (2003).
  3. ↑ Sartre was wisest after the event. ‘All around us clouds were gathering. There was war in Spain; the concentration camps were multiplying in Germany, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia. War was menacing everywhere. Nevertheless analysis - analysis a la Proust, a la James - remained our only literary method, our favorite procedure. But could it take into account the brutal death of a Jew in Auschwitz, the bombardment of Madrid by the planes of Franco? Here a new literature presented its characters to us synthetically. It made them perform before our eyes acts which were complete in themselves, impossible to analyze, acts which it was necessary to grasp completely with all the obscure power of our souls’ (Sartre 1946: 114-118).
  4. ↑ See Barnes (2001) in which he mourns the loss of thousands of arbres d'alignment to French road safety policies following the death of a motorcyclist who hit a tree in the Pyrenees that summer. Barnes quotes from The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly: ‘Peeling off the kilometres to the tune of “Blue Skies,” sizzling down the long black liquid reaches of the Nationale Sept, the plane trees going sha-sha-sha through the open window, the windscreen yellowing with crushed midges, she with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair.’ Barnes adds: ‘Not since Reagan blamed the forests for air pollution have trees received such high-level political condemnation.’
  5. ↑ The mid-Atlantic ‘Vega’ in the name was suggested by the brother of Jean Daninos, the journalist and novelist, Pierre, who is better known as the inventor of an eccentric Colonel Blimp-like caricature, Major Thompson, and as such for being to blame for the long survival in post-War France of the spectre of the bowlered, pin-striped, moustached, buttoned-up Englishman. Pierre was prolific. In 2005, his obituary in The Times remembered how ‘in 1967, after a near-fatal car accident, he went into a seven-day coma yet continued talking, as if dictating his newspaper columns to some imaginary secretary’.
  6. ↑ De Gaulle is credited with the destruction of the Facel business in 1962 by refusing to allow Daninos to import American engines for the Facellia, his 1960 mass-market sports car. The untried French engines he resorted to fitting led to the company being overwhelmed by warranty claims. See, for example: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/motoring/features/facel-vega-facel-ii-419364.html#
  7. ↑ Two decades afterwards, when Olivier Todd traced Mi through the telephone book, she would still only be identified by her pet name. To coincide with the publication of Todd's biography in 1997 when James Kent's ‘Bookmark’ TV documentary, Camus: The madness of sincerity was broadcast, she said this about the rescue that did not arrive. ‘I was here and I was waiting for Albert who was coming to see me. I was waiting in vain. I mean...I had no idea...no premonition. Someone rang at the door and I thought it was him. It was a friend who heard it on the radio. I didn't have a radio. I didn't listen to the radio, so he came to tell me there had been an accident. At first he hadn't the courage to tell me he was dead.’ See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkOCJp0m7b8
  8. ↑ Towards the end of his life and under the direction of his wife, Catherine Sellers, the comic actor, Pierre Tabard, performed the role of Jean-Baptiste Clamence in a stage adaptation of The Fall. He did the same thing for James Kent's film, working up to the scene in which Clamence fails to rescue the woman who jumps from the Pont Royal.
  9. ↑ Marfa Casares reprised the role at some point in 1959, in other words in the year before Camus died, when Jean Cocteau was filming The Last Testament of Orphee by which year or thereabouts Cocteau's own Orphee, his former lover Jean Marais was driving a Facel Vega (No. FA B113).
  10. ↑ See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOCsSuj3LgA&list=UUDaSGGvdyN8lcT-qLr2QVUQ&index=2
  11. ↑ ibid. The Socialist politician Roger Ouilliot, who was a minister in three governments between 1981 and 1983, committed suicide in July 1998 after being overtaken by ill-health. In the letter that he and his wife, the essayist Claire Ouilliot, left for their family and friends explaining the reasons for their suicide pact, he quoted from Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘Nous avons fait notre temps. Je n'ai pas un temperament de spectateur!’ Claire Ouilliot was resuscitated from their shared overdose, emerged from a coma, and became an advocate for the Association pour le Droit de Mourir dans la Dignite. She lived on until August 2005 when she took an overdose and walked into Lake Tyx near Saint-Avit in the Dordogne.
  12. ↑ Catalogues of the literary appearances of L'Inconnue de la Seine have multiplied in recent years and a French study by Bertrand Tillier, La belle noyee: Enquete sur le masque de l'Inconnue de la Seine, was published in 2011 by Arkhe Editions. Key sources in English remain in Al Alvarez's study of suicide, The Savage God, Anja Zeidler's online paper ‘Influence and authenticity of l'Inconnue de la Seine’ at http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/inconnue/index.shtml and the paper ‘L'Inconnue de la Seine and Nabokov's Naiads’ by Barton Johnson (1992). Johnson explains the influence on Nabokov of the dreadful novella Die Unbekante by Reinhold Conrad Muschler, which sold 100,000 copies in 1934 and was brought out in English two years later by Putnam. ‘The heroine,’ Johnson writes, ‘is Madeleine Lavin, 21, a provincial orphan on her way to Paris to make her fortune, perhaps by opening a dress shop. At Marseille, she thwarts the theft of the purse of an elegant young woman about to board a liner. Lord Tom Bendon, the young lady's fiance, gratefully takes Madeleine to dinner, then on a leisurely motor tour to Paris where he puts her up in his luxurious Paris flat.’ She falls for him; he spurns her and rejoins his fiancee in Egypt. ‘After his departure, Madeleine goes to his favorite spot by the Seine and walks into the water: “When they found her, she was still smiling,”’ Muschler reported.
  13. ↑ There is a paradox in the (no doubt hotly contested) memoirs of Gerhard Heller, who was recruited in 1940 to run the Referat Schrifttum or literature section of the Propaganda Staffel in occupied Paris. ‘My instructions were simple: to read everything and decide what could appear.. I was the first member of the public to read Camus's LEtranger. Madeleine Boudot- Lamotte, the secretary of Gaston Gallimard brought the manuscript to me.. She handed it over at six in the evening. I took it home, read it until four in the morning, and was carried away. Next day I phoned Madeleine to say there was no objection, that it was a highly original work and would provide a point of departure for new fiction.. But then the Propaganda Abteilung criticized me because objections were coming from the French side. How could the Germans, the French were asking, allow something like this to be published?' (Heller cited in David Price-Jones 1981: p 252).
  14. ↑ See Boddaert cited in Zeidler 2005.
  15. ↑ Zeidler. op.cit.
  16. ↑ See: Ellison (1983: 322-48), where he draws on Maurice Blanchot's collection of essays, L'Amitie: ‘In the final paragraph of his essay, Blanchot touches upon the theoretical implications of the recit's dialogic form. Although the goal of the protagonist is quite obviously to implicate the reader in his own personal degradation, to draw him into the tightly constricted space of an individual discourse, the textual process of fuite [escape] is precisely the opposite: it forces Clamence into a strange realm of transindividual generality that surpasses his egocentric limits; it thrusts him into dizziness [vertige].’

Notes & References

  1. Alvarez, Al (1974), The Savage God: A study of suicide, London: Penguin Books.
  2. Buckley, Martin (2006) ‘Facel Vega Facel II’, The Independent, October 10, 2006, published online at: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/motoring/features/facel-vega-facel-ii-419364.html, accessed 26 September 2013.
  3. Barnes, Julian (2001) ‘The plane trees massacre’, The New Yorker, 23 July, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/07/23/010723ta_TALK_PYRENEES_POSTCARD.
  4. Blanchot M L'Amitie Paris: Gallimard, 1971, quoted in Ellison David R, ‘Camus and the Rhetoric of Dizziness: La Chute’ Contemporary Literature Vol 24 No 3 Autumn 1983 322-348.
  5. Blanchot, Maurice (1971) LAmitie, Paris: Gallimard.
  6. Boileau-Narcejac, Sueurs froides, Editions Denoel, 1958. (originally published as D'Entre Les Morts).
  7. Boileau-Narcejac (1997) Vertigo, trans. Geoffrey Sainsbury, Bloomsbury Film Classics.
  8. Camus, Albert (1963), The Fall trans. O'Brien, Justin, London: Penguin Books.
  9. Clifford, Manlove (2007) ‘Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey’, Cinema Journal 46:3, 83-108, University of Texas Press.
  10. Ellison, David R. (1983) ‘Camus and the rhetoric of dizziness: La Chute’, Contemporary Literature 24(3): 322–48. doi: 10.2307/1208081 [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]
  11. ‘Encyclopedie sur la mort’ entry on Ouilliot Roger et Claire, published online at: http://agora.qc.ca/thematiques/mort/dossiers/quilliot_roger_et_claire, accessed 26 September 2013.
  12. Gorrara, Claire (2003) ‘Cultural intersections: The American hard-boiled detective novel and early French roman noir’, The Modern Language Review 98(3): 590–601, http://www.jstor.org.libaccess.hud.ac.uk/stable/3738287, accessed 26 May 2008. doi: 10.2307/3738287 [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]
  13. Johnson, D Barton (1992) ‘L'Inconnue de la Seine and Nabokov's Naiads’, Comparative Literature, 44(3): 225-48. doi: 10.2307/1770855 [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]
  14. Lacapra, Dominick (1988) History and Memory after Auschwitz, Cornell University Press, p76.
  15. Muschler, Reinhold Conrad (1936) Die Unbekannte, Dresden: Wilhelm Heyne.
  16. Price-Jones, David (1981) Paris in the Third Reich: A history of the German Occupation, 1940-1944, London: Collins.
  17. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1946) ‘American novelists in French eyes’, Atlantic Monthly, http://www.sartre.ch/American%20Novelists.pdf, accessed 23 June 2013.
  18. Tillier, Bertrand (2011), La belle noyee : Enquete sur le masque de l'Inconnue de la Seine, Paris: Arkhe Editions.
  19. Zeidler, Anja (2005) ‘Influence and authenticity of l'Inconnue de la Seine’, published online at http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/inconnue, accessed 26 September 2013. www.falmouth.ac.uk/postgraduate

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