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INTRODUCTION
This is the first publication of the 2001 Group, an inter-university
postgraduate community in French Studies. One of the principal roles of
the 2001 Group is to encourage exchanges between research students,
and indeed this book brings together articles from postgraduates from
around the world. Although devoted to the theme of the forbidden, the
publication was in fact produced in a spirit of open-minded collaboration.
Our book is not so much peer-reviewed as peer-edited, the result of a
publication workshop held at the University of Reading in March 2003,
in which each contributor participated in the editing process of all the
articles.
The articles collected here represent the diverse and
interdisciplinary nature of current research by postgraduates in the
notoriously broad field of French Studies. The title we have chosen Reading and Writing the Forbidden: Essays in French Studies - indicates
that the focus of our project is to explore the ways in which texts are
circumscribed by forbidden territory. We use ‘texts’ here in a very broad
sense, encompassing photography and film, as well as literary and nonliterary written works. Reading the forbidden involves examining the
constraints (aesthetic, linguistic, ideological, conceptual) which
inevitably delimit all texts. However, it is also appropriate to talk of
writing the forbidden, since texts are privileged sites for the articulation,
and indeed the breaking, of taboos. All of the articles included here deal
in one way or another with the curious nature of texts, which are both
constrained by the forbidden, and transgress its limitations.
The advantage of a collection of articles on a single, broad theme
is that it can, and must, embrace divergent perspectives and methods.
This is the best way to approach the innumerable ways in which writing
and reading the forbidden can be understood. The point is not to seek to
develop a single, transcendent sense of the forbidden, which would be a
hopeless task from the outset, but to explore a few of the ways in which
notions of reading and writing the forbidden shed light on French texts.
Study of the forbidden is bound to be sensitive to the historical
context of textual production. What is forbidden to one time and place
can be acceptable, even de rigueur, to another era. What was forbidden
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in the distant past may seem more easily recognizable than what is
forbidden to us now. Nonetheless, in their conscious and unconscious
articulation of what was forbidden to them, texts from the past are
necessarily foreign to us. The fact that the category of the forbidden in
past texts is both deceptively easy to identify and inevitably strange
accounts for the large number of articles on early modern literature here,
which make up almost half of the contributions to our book, and all of
Part I. Julia Horn’s article explores how the immense sixteenth-century
chivalric romance, Amadis de Gaule, is bound by generic limitations
which mean that certain events, particularly the death of the hero, are
forbidden in the narrative. While Horn reads the forbidden in Amadis,
Hugh Roberts looks at how early modern texts write the forbidden,
through reference to the distant pagan past of the Cynics. The scandalous
truth-telling of these ancient philosophers is used by writers, including
Montaigne, to open up difficult and dangerous ideas. Marilyn Cox
examines the ways in which Jean-Pierre Camus seeks to contain the
forbidden acts described in his narration of horrifying histoires tragiques
within a moralizing discourse, which sometimes seems to protest too
much. The capacity of texts to broach material and ideas they expressly
condemn is also explored by Ann Lewis, who argues that La Nouvelle
Héloïse contains within it the seeds of a forbidden reverse-reading, which
would have had Rousseau turning in his grave. Probably the most
wantonly outrageous text examined here is the Erotika Biblion of the
eighteenth-century libertin, Mirabeau. Isabelle Dotan-Robinet analyses
the philosophical criteria that lie behind Mirabeau’s defiance of taboos,
and how his essay falls into both incoherence and unconscious
expression of prejudice.
Plainly, however, the realm of the forbidden is not restricted to
early modern texts. Part II focuses on how the forbidden is framed and
frames photography and cinema. What should or should not be depicted
on film is in an obvious sense a uniquely modern phenomenon.
Nonetheless, revealing connections between text and image are as old as
writing itself. The ways in which juxtapositions of text and image can
illuminate the forbidden is an underlying theme of articles on such
diverse texts as Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, the works of Pierre
Loti, and the nineteenth-century right-wing political press in Paris. The
latter’s representation of the Commune, the memory of which it sought to
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mythologize and suppress, is the subject of Colette Wilson’s
contribution. Catherine Guy-Murrell draws on Barthes’s writings on
photography to illuminate the broaching of aesthetic and cultural taboos
in photographing of veiled women in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. The starting point of Libby Saxton’s article is that the real is in
a sense forbidden in filmic (and indeed textual) representation. However,
Saxton argues that what is ontologically forbidden to film implies that
some types of cinematic representation should be ethically forbidden.
Part III concentrates on the themes of transgression and
marginalization in modern French literature. As Morag Young argues in
her article, these two concepts are linked, since the transgressive person
is invariably marginal. Using insights drawn from psychoanalysis, Peter
Turberfield argues that Pierre Loti’s apparently exploitative, and
ostensibly forbidden, sexual treatment of ‘Oriental’ dress and individuals
symbolically reverses the power relations between colonizer and
colonized. Victoria Reid investigates how Gide tries to have his
forbidden fruit and eat it by seeking to displace his transgressive
sexuality onto predatory women. Joanna Shearer uses Kristeva’s
arguments concerning the ‘abject’ nature of women’s bodies to provide a
means of approaching Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Sang des autres. Morag
Young looks at how both literal and metaphorical border-crossing sheds
light on the quest for identity as expressed in the novels of Duras,
Modiano, and Darrieussecq. The search for identity both within and
outside the constraints of the forbidden is a recurrent theme in the
articles of Part III, whether it is Loti’s search for a self through
transvestism, Gide’s exploration of his sexuality, or Beauvoir’s attempt
to frame the female body. The ways in which selves are fashioned with
reference to forbidden frontiers mirrors the way in which texts are both
constrained by, and transgress, the limits of the forbidden.
While our book is most obviously relevant to specialists in each
of the areas covered by its three parts, it would also reward the reader on
the look out for unexpected connections between articles devoted to very
diverse subject-matter. Nothing is forbidden to the reader who is happy
to see Rousseau rub shoulders with transvestites, Simone de Beauvoir in
close company with macho eighteenth-century libertines, and The Matrix
alongside Rabelais. For each of the contributors, writing the forbidden
was a great opportunity to exchange ideas and to participate in unfamiliar
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areas of French Studies. Now we can only hope that reading the
forbidden proves as enjoyable, informative, and liberating as writing the
forbidden.
Hugh Roberts