Muriel, or the Disappearing Text of the Algerian War

Muriel, or the Disappearing Text of the Algerian War Suzanne Gauch A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner, Under it wisdom stands, and I alone— Of all Arabia's lovers I alone— Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost In the confusion of its night-dark folds, Can hear the armed man speak —W. B. Yeats, "The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid"1 IN THESE LINES Kusta ben Luka, the fictional-historical narrator of a narrative poem by William Butler Yeats set during the reign of the Caliph Harun Al-Rashid, proclaims his exclusive ability to see beyond a woman's looks in order to hear the utterances of a man dressed in the accoutrements of battle.2 Ben Luka's debt to his beautiful wife—the "gift" of the poem's title— is thus that she acts as a conduit for a knowledge that exceeds herself, a knowledge that unites the scholar with the warrior. The words his wife utters and the signs she writes on the sands during her nocturnal trances enunciate long-hidden truths that forever unlock hitherto impenetrable mysteries. That these truths issue from the mouth of an armed man personifies their power, but also indicates mat they are under constant attack. Yeats's poem plays further upon the tension between unspeakable verities and the forces of annihilation when Kusta ben Luka declares that he has placed the document containing his wife's revelations in Parmenides' great treatise on the unchanging nature of being, that same treatise of which only fragments subsist today. Kusta ben Luka has thus ironically consigned the words and symbols that have permitted him not only to overcome an individual crisis of representation , but also to arm other perceptive readers against such crises, to the protection of a text whose elucidation of unchanging being has fallen into ruin. Even long before that, the possibility of rearticulating the words of the armed man vanished along with the beauty of the narrator's wife. Yet me final lines of the poem resist closure by intimating that any woman's looks may herald the truths of the armed man for that exceptionally perceptive reader able to resist being distracted and confused by superficial appearances. Although Yeats, writing in Ireland in the early twentieth century, set "The Gift of Harun al-Rashid" in an imaginary, spatially and temporally distant Vol. XLI, No. 4 47 L'Esprit Créateur "Arabia," its depiction of a woman's looks as the vanishing point that only one man sees clearly recurs some 40 years later in a visual, modernist text by Alain Resnais. Resnais's 1963 film Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour loosely deals with the very real war, spatially and temporally proximate, of Algeria.3 The title names a female "character," an Algerian woman tortured to death by French soldiers, who never appears in the film. This absence of the title character and of any direct portrayal of the issues central to the Algerian war has led a number of critics to chastise Resnais for his lack of engagement with one of the leading political questions of the time.4 Indeed, Muriel explores primarily the effacement of the war in the consciousness of ordinary French characters rather than confronting French audiences directly with the nature and repercussions of colonial military repression in Algeria. By never allowing viewers a look at the title character, the film gives rise to an uneasy sense of the misperception or occultation of some essential truth. The film places the story of Muriel, of the apparently gratuitous torture and murder of an Algerian woman by the soldiers of a colonial presence that long held itself up as the model of civilization, among the fragments of French everyday experience. Muriel's lost text consequently emerges as the definitive text, and it seems to underlie the film's images, though endlessly deferred by the very character—an "armed man" who participated in her destruction— who has assumed the task of bringing her story to public attention. With the Algerian war everywhere yet nowhere present in Muriel, the film hints at the facts of the war beneath the mundane realities of its characters, and...