The Body into Words: Violette Leduc's La Folie en tête

Mais je n'ai jamais ressemblé à cela!

—Comment le savez-vous? Qu'est-ce que ce "vous" auquel vous ressembleriez ou ne ressembleriez pas? Où le prendre? A quel étalon morphologique ou expressif? Où est votre corps de vérité? Vous êtes le seul à ne pouvoir jamais vous voir qu'en image, vous ne voyez jamais vos yeux, sinon abêtis par le regard qu'ils posent sur le miroir ou sur l'objectif (il m'intéresserait seulement de voir mes yeux quand ils te regardent): même et surtout pour votre corps, vous êtes condamné à l'imaginaire.

Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes

I

Roland Barthes's self-questioning comment to a younger picture of himself seems to be an appropriate epigraph in the present study, the intention of which is to investigate the ways the subject views itself as a bodily instance. As Barthes suggests, this image does not necessarily correspond to a recognizable self. On the contrary, his questioning of identifying oneself with a given representation of one's own body gives rise to a series of highly interesting—and, indeed, creative—results. The object of my study will be to explore the narrative dynamics that allow the writing subject to obviate the impossibility of representing itself as a corps de vérité. This will be the magnifying glass through which to look at Violette Leduc's autobiographical oeuvre, where the failure of self-recognition engenders a series of highly ingenious moves. Moreover, autobiography, with its interest in self-representation and its ongoing search for the subject's coincidence with language, appears to be the privileged domain in which the translation of the subject's body into words takes place.

The figure of Violette Leduc (1906–1972) remains at the margins of Existentialism, and her writing is constantly haunted by issues revolving around the body. In her times, Leduc's focus on an unveiled and unconventional representation of the body and of sexuality contributed to a misinterpretation of the scopes of her writing and to a precarious though strong public success. Through this study of La Folie en tête (1970), the second of the three volumes of autobiography¹ written by Leduc, I intend to show how rich in theoretical complexity and narrative craftsmanship Leduc's depiction of the body is. The textual analysis of her work will illustrate how revealing her achievements are for a better understanding of the creative potential resulting from the writer's apprehension of the limits of language in representing herself.

In recent theory, the body has been seen as taking part in the constitutive process of the subject in its own right, and as acting in conjunction with other processes of subjectivity-building such as language. In the Cartesian legacy of Western thought, language and the body have been viewed as separate entities pertaining the former to the domain of discursivity and the latter to the domain of corporeality. In opposition to this view, recent notions of the body have forwarded an idea of subjectivity where the traditional predominance of the mind over the body is challenged. As a result, the ontological roots of the belief in the binary constitution of the subject have been undermined.²

My analysis is founded on a notion of the subject as the unfinished outcome of interactive processes between interior and exterior that constantly displace its position as well as its definition. According to this view, the body is not to be seen as a pure, natural corporeal entity, nor is it to be viewed as the effectual product of a social, historical, and cultural context. Interior and exterior are not conceived as fixed and unchangeable entities, but as participating elements in processes of making meaning through their very interaction, interdependence and interchangeability. It is also important to premise that any attempt to find an origin in such processes, or a starting point, or to establish a cause-effect relationship between what has usually been viewed as a distinctly two-term postulate is doomed to failure. Instead, my intention is to analyse the dynamic nature...