Women writing in contemporary France

146 Writing the dynamics of identity
indicator of change or emancipation the conclusion may otherwise have
held.
In short, the identity crisis dramatised in Truismes does not lend itself
easily to a single interpretation. On the one hand the novel seems deeply
pessimistic, a study of the worst in women’s experiences, riddled with softporn
images and sexual violence, and with a narrator who is unpardonably
light-hearted and too insouciant to denounce the social order. From this
perspective the ultimate outrage is that as Darrieussecq takes us ‘back to
the future’, she appears to indicate that bodies of feminist knowledge have
not percolated down to ordinary women: it is as if they were an irrelevance
of history. Reading the text as ironic, oppositional practice, however,
Truismes could be said to exemplify Lidia Curti’s equally persuasive argument
that the freakish body can be ‘a derisive counterpoint to stereotypes
of the feminine’. 8
Darrieussecq’s following novels retain an intensive focus on the body,
but in a less controversial and more ambitious way. They are almost
entirely unconcerned with sexuality or erotic experiences and far from
being a key to identity physical appearances become practically irrelevant.
The metamorphoses with which these novels are concerned are invisible
ones, and the bodily changes they describe are not a source of, but a
response to, crisis. If bodies here may be defined as monstrous this is
because they are shown to be beyond our control, eluding interpretation
and eluding language. Darrieussecq’s emphasis on the physical is a particularly
original feature of her work. The novel, she contends, has focused
too heavily on the psychological, on the mind at the expense of the body,
and her own fiction shifts the balance with an unrelenting examination of
trauma through close-up, slow-motion studies of the physical sensations to
which it gives rise. Building on the ground cleared by the nouveau roman,
Darrieussecq eschews conventional notions of plot and character. She
gives her protagonists no face, no pre-history, no curriculum vitae and no
name, and although we may sense that they are rounded, real individuals,
their function is more important than their character; the author’s aim is to
give expression to generic experiences, not to leave us with indelible
impressions of unforgettable personages. Thus in Naissance des fantômes
the heroine’s initial experience of unity as she watches swallows cut across
the early evening skies is physical: ‘j’avais l’impression d’être moi-même
une grosse chose vibrante et chaude . . . entière, pleine et ramassée’ (p. 13)
(‘It was as though I too were some large, trembling, hot thing’ (p. 7)), and
the transformation through which her sense of self is progressively splin-