Evading the Subject: Narration and the City in Ananda Devi’s Rue La Poudrière

Evading the Subject: Narration and the City in Ananda Devi’s Rue La Poudrière Françoise Lionnet Rue de la Poudrière, la luminosité de ce dimanche matin métamorphosait en temples solaires les ponceaux vermoulus, les maisons rapiécées tassées par l’âge et la pauvreté. Robert-Edward Hart, Cycle de Pierre Flandre . . . seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Childhood is the divining rod of melancholy, and to know the mourning of such radiant, glorious cities one must have been a child in them. Walter Benjamin, “ Marseilles” U RBAN SPACES have been used as emblems, symbols, and cor­ relatives for a wide range of emotions and feelings, from the noblest to the most perverse, the metaphysical to the sexual. From the Greek polis to Baudelaire’s Paris and Sartre’s or Baudrillard’s New York, the city has been read as utopian or dystopian, and has played an important role in the political, fictional, and imaginary landscape of many cultures. Images of cities and images of women have often been linked, their conspicuous beauty or hidden charms idealized by the nostalgic myths and sentimental geographies of a writer’s recollections, his travel and autobiographical impulses.1 Because opportunities for casual sex or anonymous eroticism are widely available in the city, this contingent aspect of the urban experience has been used to conflate the part and the whole, to describe the city in terms of unrestrained sexuality or deviant femininity. Such images feed dangerous fantasies, engender allegories of perversity and atavistic evil, desire and depersonalized long­ ing; they provoke expressions of pleasure or disgust, inspire tales of love or abjection, or represent both extremes simultaneously—what Baude­ laire called l’azur et la boue.2 In a state of constant change and perpetual motion because of popu­ lation migrations, changing topographies, and evolving skylines, cities have been used to signify either dynamic transformation or decomposi­ VOL. XXXIII, NO. 2 9 L ’E spr it C r éa teu r tion, progress or decay, abundance or violence. In our own postcolonial fin-de-siècle, such dichotomies have become commonplace from Singa­ pore to Kinshasa, London to Los Angeles. The growing urban prole­ tariat and the destabilization of familiar forms of social arrangements create situations that reproduce age-old conflicts between the archaic and the modern, the refined and the corrupt. The city has thus become a figurative as well as a literal crossroads, a visual and linguistic site that functions, in the words of V. Y. Mudimbe, as a “ locus of paradoxes that [call] into question the modalities and implications of modernization.” 3 This locus is often identified with a narrative of loss, despair, and marginality , especially for the female subject who must negotiate the perils of urban life, the demeaning roles in which it casts her. As V. Y. Mudimbe notes in The Invention o f Africa, Marginality designates the intermediate space between the so-called African tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism. It is apparently an urbanized space . . . [that] reveals not so much that new imperatives could achieve a jump into modernity, as the fact that despair gives this intermediate space its precarious pertinence and, simultaneously, its dangerous importance. (5) One of the obvious dangers of that space is that it can fix meaning, assign roles, and imprison the female subject in a web of significations that severely limit her narrative functions, confining her to conventional and stale plots. The female protagonist who is linked to a narrative of urban decline finds herself, ipso facto, associated with the idea of the fall, of a loss of innocence that inexorably leads to ruin and perdition; novelistic closure is conveniently provided through her demise. This tra­ jectory from luminous madonna to shadowy whore, with its numerous intermediate possibilities, is frequent in literature from Antiquity to the Romantic and modern periods.4 What can the postcolonial woman writer do with these lieux communs of literary practice? Can she use and transform these conventions inher­ ited from the nineteenth century and European modernity? How does she...