Conquest’s Spectacle: Djebar’s L’amour, La Fantasia and Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musica Ficta

Ce petit combat offrait un coup d’œil charmant. Ces nuées de cavaliers légers comme des oiseaux, se croisent, voltigent sur tous les points, ces hourras, ces coups de fusil dominés, de temps à autre, par la voix majestueuse du canon, tout cela présentait un panorama délicieux et une scène enivrante.

—Assia Djebar (1985c, 67)

Writing Voice

It might seem paradoxical to suggest a reading of music and voice as a critique of certain postcolonial discussions of the representation of Algeria in colonial discourse. But voice, according to Assia Djebar, is written as song, and articulation of it displaces the desire for a photographic image.¹ In her texts, writing voice as song in a musical context is a recurrent trope. Further, Djebar is interested in musical formulations, and this interest displays itself in the musical references utilized in her texts. For example, she titles entire sections of her novels following musical scores. To be sure, many sections of Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia are devoted to the writing of voice, which splits itself to encompass murmurs, whispers, soliloquies, clamors, tzarl-rit, and cries. I will argue that the description of the capture of Algeria in L’amour, la fantasia² is imagined and illustrated in the writings of the French artists and colonial officers as a theatrical and musical event. According to the French chroniclers, what took place in June 1830 in Algeria, it appears, was not only a colonizing event but also a victorious landing similar to an operatic overture; interestingly enough, their written sketches invite us to observe a vivid yet complicated collapse of the distinction between conquest and aesthetics. In turn, Djebar reads these accounts rhetorically, pointing out their aporetic position and displacement. She exposes the foundation of the colonial discourse by uncovering its attachment to Western aesthetic values, frequently referenced in the written accounts that she cites in her novel. I will also show that for Djebar, écriture involves many acts: it is a simultaneous listening to, reading, and rewriting of what had been inscribed in the colonial archive. Indeed, the theatricality of the battle scenes is mimetically revisited in her reading of the French archive while she deappropriates the musical, inscribing Algerian women’s stories in an attempt to retrieve forgotten scenes of the history of Algeria. To be sure, the musical cannot be analyzed without a perpetual reflection on its occurrence in the scene of writing since the musical has been already produced and imagined in the French chronicles, which conflate the colonial encounter with highly aestheticized accounts that compare the scenes of war and conflict with ballet, opera, music, poetry, and painting, among many artistic images. In the novel, Djebar’s deappropriation of these inscriptions becomes a reemergence of the musical, which is not an identical process but rather a differentiation since she traces, exposes, reenacts, and evokes the violence of war in painstaking descriptions. Her reading of these phantasmic depictions and her text’s elaboration on the musical can be addressed according to Lacoue-Labarthe’s analysis of music in Musica Ficta. He demonstrates that music has been suppressed in the history of philosophy, relating it to something else, more precisely to a theatrical principle. Explicitly and paradoxically, the notion of something else is staged in the aestheticized French descriptions, and Lacoue-Labarthe’s theoretical exploration of the political with respect to the philosophical and literary perception of music will explicate and elucidate Djebar’s deappropriation of music. The circularity of her novelistic approach is not only a subversive gesture but is significant because it produces other musical figures that interrogate the French accounts of the colonial warfare; her gesture ironically illustrates the regressive approach to representing Algeria as part of Western aesthetics. In this sense, Djebar’s novel does not limit itself to associating music with the perplexing colonial descriptions of the conquest; on the contrary, it opens up Western aesthetics to other Eastern musical traditions, chants, oral rhythms, instruments, and epigraphs.³ It is also worth noting that...