Women writing in contemporary France

Anatomical writing: three works by Detambel 97
and literary references too. For example, Baudelaire’s ghost appears in the
precious jewellery adorning the man who is greatly attached to his ‘chaîne
d’or’ (p. 38) (gold chain). Elza Adamowicz has highlighted the dual pleasure
of recognition and displacement experienced by the reader of surrealist
blazons in Breton’s ‘L’Union libre’. 15 Detambel makes the familiar
images truly uncanny: the return of stereotypes of female roles in the text
recalls the Freudian joke because of the latent malaise it creates. Detambel
displaces the clichés of gendered identity and activities as a means of giving
an ambivalent sex to the male: the man’s foreskin is washed ‘comme un col
de chemise’ (p. 42) (like a shirt collar), but his hair is washed too and his
head wrapped up in a turban (‘elle l’enturbannait’ (p. 42)) so that he might
pose, in front of the television, as an odalisque by Ingres. She also fleshes
out the male breasts and highlights their mineral or ‘metallic’ flavour, to
borrow Brenda Hillman’s adjective on the subject of ‘male nipples’, 16 as
part of a rare description of male breasts: ‘Ses mamelons étaient entourés
de poils. Ils lui saisissaient la langue comme l’eau gazeuse’ (p. 42) (His
nipples were surrounded by hair. They stung her tongue like sparkling
water.)
For Detambel, language makes the body visible and makes it new:
exploring words means rediscovering the body:
Et savoir l’aida beaucoup à sentir. Avec l’abaca, elle osa évoquer les arbres.
Abandonnique lui fit penser à ce qu’elle était. Aréole lui donna, pour la
première fois, l’occasion d’illuminer le sein d’une femme et celui d’un
homme et fit surgir par la même occasion des épaules, un visage. 17
(To know helped her a great deal to feel. With abaca, she dared to think
of trees. Abandonnique (fearing abandonment) reminded her of what she
was. Areola gave her the opportunity, for the first time, to highlight a
woman’s and a man’s breast, and at the same time to make shoulders and
a face loom up.)
Blazons of the masculine body occur less often than might be expected.
The enigmatic Diane wrote hers in 1995, in a rather conventional style
which mimics old-fashioned syntax and vocabulary, set in rhyming
couplets, while she adopts a more modern terminology for her
‘Contreblasons’. 18 Paradoxically, if she states that she aims to glorify the
‘neglected, male body’ (p. 9), she also expresses disgust at the ‘queue’ ‘pendouillant(e)’
(dangling tail) with its indescribable ‘bouts de peau-là’ (p. 26)
(bits of foreskin). Diane’s ultimately negative and dismissive tone echoes
the preface to another edition of Les Blasons du corps féminin, which not