Women writing in contemporary France

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Subversion of the gaze in Sebbar’s fiction 197 and popular beliefs attached to the evil eye and measures to avert it, for instance, the use of Fatima’s hand and other types of amulet. 4 It also relates to the role of the visual in Islam. In Sebbar’s short piece ‘Père et fils, mère et fils’, father and son are killed because the son is an artist who has depicted human figures. 5 Sebbar’s treatment of the gaze is thus rich and complex. It is addressed not only in a direct, unmediated form – with her characters engaged in the act of looking – but also in a variety of mediated forms, in which it is focused on an image. In the latter case, a number of visual media forms appear as a recurrent feature in the texts, including painting, cinema, objets d’art, artefacts, advertising and pornography. However, it is the photograph that has pride of place in her visual universe. Sebbar often uses the unmediated gaze to convey something about a particular moment in a personal relationship. These relations may be those of friendship as well as, at least potentially, sexual, but very often concern problematical relationships between different generations of the same family. In relationships which involve sexual desire, it is the power of the gaze which is highlighted; indeed, ‘seeing’ women can sum up the whole relation. 6 The eyes become the most important feature and are frequently the only physical characteristic noted to describe the beauty, and power, of the woman concerned. 7 Eye colour is especially significant. Shérazade’s green eyes signal her out and also provide the basis for identification with one of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger. Roland thinks of ways to save Lise ‘with the blue eyes’ from prison, because of her ‘regard’ (J. H. cherche, pp. 202–3). Blue eyes are sometimes associated with the French and, as such, can portend ill, as when they are seen as the eyes of the devil, particularly by a mother who warns her son against marriage to a blue-eyed woman (Parle mon fils,p.42). Yet they may also be the object of desire. Indeed, this mother will later try to interest her son in marrying his cousin with eyes which are coloured blue like the sea (Parle mon fils, p. 79). Chance encounters usually start with the gaze, often with the object unaware that he or she is being looked at. Whether the relationship develops or remains at the voyeuristic stage depends on successfully negotiating the stage of reciprocal eye contact, as when Eve first sees the boy known as ‘Le Chinois’ peering into her bookshop window (Le Chinois, p.205), or when Jaffar has the following encounter: Il sent le regard de la femme sur lui, elle a tourné la tête en s’éloignant de la vitre . . . Il la regarde, elle non. Pourtant, il est sûr qu’elle sourit, elle lui
198 Transgressions and transformation sourit sans chercher son regard, à qui elle sourirait, personne ne l’a remarquée au bout de la banquette, pressée contre la vitre. Elle ne sourit plus. Elle a posé sa main contre son front comme pour dormir en cachant son visage. Jaffar renverse la tête contre le dossier haut et ferme les yeux. (J. H. cherche, pp. 163–4) (He felt the woman’s gaze upon him, she turned her head as she moved away from the window . . . He looked at her, but she did not look at him. Yet he was sure that she was smiling, she was smiling at him without trying to catch his eye, who might she be smiling at, no one was paying any attention to her at the end of the bench, face pressed against the glass. She stopped smiling. She had covered her forehead with her hand as if she was hiding her face to sleep. Jaffar threw his head back against the high back of his seat and closed his eyes.) In other relations, the gaze may express a move towards knowledge or understanding. Indeed, seeing things with one’s own eyes is stressed as the only reliable source of knowledge, although in fact other channels, including the traditional transmission of knowledge through the generations, can also have their role (Parle mon fils, p. 47). The mother explicitly links her knowledge with her seeing: Je sais tout, je ne ferme jamais les yeux . . . je ne sors pas beaucoup, mais je vois tout, j’écoute tout, je sais sur la vie peut-être plus que toi et ceux qui sont allés très loin pour voir les autres. (Parle mon fils, pp. 72–3) (I know everything, I never close my eyes . . . I don’t go out much, but I see everything, I listen to everything, it may be I know more about life than you do, as well as those people who have travelled a long way to look at others.) A passage from Le Chinois vert d’Afrique reinforces this. Lounès says that he saw a neighbour rinse her mouth out with disinfectant after she was told that she had unwittingly eaten pork; his whole credibility rests on whether he was an eyewitness, whether he had actually seen the label on the bottle, with his own eyes (Le Chinois, pp. 23–4). The gaze may also be a vehicle for an implicit judgement of its object. Where this is a positive judgement, it can lead to pride on the part of the object. However, another reaction is to avert the eyes. This refusal to reciprocate the gaze can be explained, in Sartrean terms, through the notion of shame at being the object of the other’s defining, judgmental gaze. Gazing at oneself in a real or imaginary mirror can also lead to self-knowledge and self-assessment. This typically happens when prisoners visit the barber’s
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WOMEN’S WRITING IN CONTEMPORARY F
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Copyright © Manchester University
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vi Contents 10 Saying the unsayable
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viii Contributors SHIRLEY JORDAN is
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to t
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2 Introduction introduce to English
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4 Introduction became more and more
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6 Introduction French ‘difference
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8 Introduction essential issues to
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10 Introduction Indeed, much contem
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12 Introduction phototextual projec
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14 Introduction about the body or e
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16 Introduction European Union) has
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18 Introduction Béatrice de Jurque
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20 Introduction and the group, the
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22 Introduction Feminist Perspectiv
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24 Introduction Barthes, Image, Mus
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26 Introduction 33 This is a wider
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1 VICTORIA BEST Louise L. Lambrichs
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Lambrichs: trauma, dream and narrat
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Memory and identity in Redonnet’s
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3 KATHRYN ROBSON The female vampire
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Chawaf ’s melancholic autofiction
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4 GILL RYE Lost and found: mother-d
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Mother-daughter relations in Consta
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5 ELIZABETH FALLAIZE Puzzling out t
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Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 79 for o
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Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 81 attac
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Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 83 Howev
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Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 85 fathe
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Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 87 other
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Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 89 propr
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II Writing the dynamics of identity
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94 Writing the dynamics of identity
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100 Writing the dynamics of identit
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7 SARAH ALYN STACEY ‘On ne s’en
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8 GILL RYE Textual mirrors and unce
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9 SIOBHAN MCILVANNEY The articulati
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10 SHIRLEY JORDAN Saying the unsaya
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Page 157 and 158: 146 Writing the dynamics of identit
Page 166: III Transgressions and transformati
Page 169 and 170: 158 Transgressions and transformati
Page 193 and 194: 13 MARGARET-ANNE HUTTON ‘Il n’y
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Page 233 and 234: GILL RYE AND MICHAEL WORTON Conclus
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Page 237 and 238: INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR BIBLIOGRAPHY Chri
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248 Individual author bibliography
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GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Nicol
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252 General bibliography Cottenet-H
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254 General bibliography Irigaray,
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256 General bibliography Roudinesco
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INDEX Literary works can be found u
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260 Index fiction(s) (cont.) detect
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262 Index Sebbar, Leïla (cont.) Pa
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Women writing in contemporary France

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