Stolen Limelight

Margaret E. Gray

Description

Who has not, in a favored moment, ‘stolen the limelight’, whether inadvertently or by design? The implications of such an act of display – its illicitness, its verve, its vertiginous reversal of power, its subversiveness – are explored in this book. Narrative crafting and management of such scenarios are studied across canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras, as well as by African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. As manipulated within narrative, acts of display position a viewer or reader from whom response (from veneration or desire to repugnance or horror) is solicited; but this study demonstrates that display can also work subversively, destabilising and displacing such a privileged spectator. As strategies of displacement, these scenarios ultimately neutralise and even occult the very subject they so energetically appear to solicit. Powered by gendered tensions, this dynamic of display as displacement works toward purposes of struggle, resistance or repression.

Preface
Introduction
Part I: Embodied Display and Effects of Displacement
Ch. 1: Staging the Hyperfeminine: Colette
Ch. 2: ‘Stripped Naked’: Dismantling Gender in Oyono’s Une vie de boy
Ch. 3: Disappearance as Display: Beyond the Strait Gate in Gide
Part II: Narrating Display, Narrating Displacement
Ch. 4: Framing Monstrosity in Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux: ‘Buried Hearts’ and ‘Filthy Bodies’
Ch. 5: ‘Girl Stuff’: Genre, Masquerade and Displacement in Japrisot’s Piège Pour Cendrillon
Ch. 6: Spectacular Scripts: Transgendering the Mad Mother in Duras’s Different Lover(s)
Conclusion
Bibliography

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• European
• French
• France

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786838612
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

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FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

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Series Editors
Hanna Diamond (Cardif University)
Claire Gorrara (Carversity)


Editorial Board
Ronan le Coadic (Université Rennes 2)
Colin Davis (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Didier Francfort (Université Nancy 2)
Sharif Gemie (University of South Wales)
H. R. Kedward (Sussex University)
Margaret Majumdar (University of Portsmouth)
Nicholas Parsons (Cardif University)
Max Silverman (University of Leeds)


Also in Series
Audrey Evrard, Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French
Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century (2022)
Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye (eds), Women’s Writing in
Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature (2013)
Fiona Barclay (ed.), France’s Colonial Legacies: Memory,
Identity and Narrative (2013)
Jonathan Ervine, Cinema and the Republic: Filming on
the margins in contemporary France (2013)
Kate Grifths and Andrew Watts, Adapting Nineteenth-Century
France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (2013)
Ceri Morgan, Mindscapes of Montréal:
Québec’s urban novel, 1950–2005 (2012)Stolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page iii
FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES


Stolen Limelight



Gender, Display and Displacement
In Modern Fiction in French





Margaret E. Gray

















UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
2022Stolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page iv
© Margaret E. Gray, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium
by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to
some other use of this publication) without the written permission
of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the
copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this
publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press,
University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardif CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-860-5
eISBN 978-1-78683-861-2

The right of Margaret E. Gray to be identifed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Front Cover: Larry Rivers (1923–2002) VAGA @ ARS, NY. I Like
Olympia in Blackface, 1970. Oil on wood, plastic, plexiglas. 182 x 194
x 170 cm. AM 1976-1231. Photograph: Philippe Migeat. Musée
National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
Digital image copyright CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN Grand-Palais/
Art Resource, NY.






Typeset by Gary Evans
Printed byStolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page v
For Of-the-Deep-End Oz,
with whom it all began
For Joseph and Nathan,
with whom it almost ended
And in memory of my mother
Hazel Ward Burton Gray
1931–2020Stolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page vi
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Contents





Preface xi

Introduction 1


Part I: 23
Embodied Display and Efects of Displacement

Chapter 1 Staging the Hyperfeminine: Colette 25

Chapter 2 ‘Stripped Naked’: 51
Dismantling Gender in Oyono’s
Une vie de boy

Chapter 3 Disappearance as Display: 71
Beyond the Strait Gate in Gide


Part II: 97
Narrating Display, Narrating Displacement

Chapter 4 Framing Monstrosity in Mauriac’s 99
Thérèse Desqueyroux: ‘Buried Hearts’
and ‘Filthy Bodies’

Chapter 5 ‘Girl Stuf’: Genre, Masquerade and 121
Displacement in Japrisot’s
Piège Pour Cendrillon

Chapter 6 Spectacular Scripts: Transgendering 153
the Mad Mother in Duras’s Diferent
Lover(s) Stolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page viii
Conclusion 177

Notes185

Bibliography235

Index251Stolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page ix
Series Editors’ Preface





This series showcases the work of new and established scholars
working within the felds of French and francophone studies. It
publishes introductory texts aimed at a student readership, as well
as research-orientated monographs at the cutting edge of their
discipline area. The series aims to highlight shifting patterns of
research in French and francophone studies, to re-evaluate
traditional representations of French and francophone identities and
to encourage the exchange of ideas and perspectives across a wide
range of discipline areas. The emphasis throughout the series will
be on the ways in which French and francophone communities
across the world are evolving into the twenty-frst century.

Hanna Diamond and Claire Gorrara Stolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page x






Je t’ai longtemps, longtemps, gardé
Sur ma table et j’ai retardé
Le moment de te laisser suivre
Un chemin brumeux ignoré …
Va-t’en, mon livre.

[I have, for a long, long time, kept you
On my table and I’ve delayed
The moment of letting you follow
A misty unknown path …
1 Of with you, my book.]

Jules Supervielle Stolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page xi
Preface





Time and again – that is, for a long time – rather than going to bed
early, I used to work on Proust. And then one fne day, resolved to
be post-Proust and fnding myself in a small brasserie on the rue
de Vaugirard with a gentleman of my acquaintance, I was eating a
potato omelette and talking about my various post-Proust projects.
It came to me that they all had something in common; I was
halfway through a book before I realised it. And yet, in its sudden
illumination of such an organic, inadvertent link binding disparate
pieces into an unexpected whole, this resolutely post-Proustian
endeavour had been neatly anticipated by the Proustian narrator
himself. In his description, such a retrospectively established
federation results in an ‘unité qui s’ignorait, donc vitale et non
logique, qui n’a pas proscrit la variété, refroidi l’exécution’ [‘unity
unaware of itself, thus vital and not logical, a unity that has not
forbidden variety, nor chilled execution’]. Pointing to Wagner’s
Ring cycle and the many works of Balzac’s vast Comédie humaine
[‘Human Comedy’], the Proustian narrator views each collection
as emerging from a moment of belated discovery on the part of its
creator, each enthused by such a sudden intuition: an illumination
uniting ‘des morceaux qui n’ont plus qu’à se rejoindre’ [‘fragments
2that have only to join each other’]. I was less post-Proust than I
had imagined, and yet, somehow, found this not only comforting,
but afrming. How could I ever have wished it otherwise?
My appreciation extends well beyond the potato-omelette
gentleman of that long-ago lunch, and the two beloved sons who
were to follow. Audiences hearing various early versions of these
pages at an array of conferences on both sides of the Atlantic
provided helpful reactions, as did an invitation to speak at the
University of London’s (then-named) Institute of Germanic and
Romance Studies; a September week at the Rockefeller
Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como was both blissful and Stolen Limelight 1-258.qxp_Layout 1 17/05/2022 5:12 pm Page xii
xii Stolen Limelight
inspiring. More specifcally, sustaining me through this project
were the constant friendship and support of my Indiana
University/Bloomington departmental friends and colleagues; my
Bloomington friends beyond the department; fellow Proustians
Emily Eells, David Ellison, Eddie Hughes, Adam Watt and others;
my through-thick-and-thin Aix-en-Provence friends and colleagues
Jeannine Féral and Patricia Refay; my childhood friend and college
roommate, Christie King. Susan Harrow’s kind invitation to speak
at the fabled Gregynog allowed me to push further certain
arguments in my introduction, while Sianne Ngai’s visit to campus
under the auspices of our Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the
Humanities prompted insights for the conclusion. My lasting,
profound gratitude goes to the peer reviewer for the Press,
Prof. Diana Holmes, whose probing, judicious and insightful
reading greatly improved these pages; their pernicious remaining
faults can only be my own. I owe much to the unfailing support,
encouragement, attentiveness and professionalism of the Press’s own
Sarah Lewis, Head of Commissioning. But as Virginia Woolf
wrote, ‘the list threatens to grow too long and is already far too
distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the pleasantest
kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the
3book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude’.
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Introduction





Who has not, in a favoured moment, succeeded – whether
deliberatel