Introduction

Introduction Lieve Spaas T HE TITLE OF THIS ISSUE, “ Death in French Literature and Film,” is of such magnitude that it requires clarification. The title inevitably raises questions: is death not too general a theme to allow for any kind of meaningful grouping? Even if the references were limited to eighteenth-century French literature, the examples abound: Prévost’s amoral Manon who, fleeing with her desperate lover Des Grieux, succumbs to fatigue and dies in the desert; Rousseau’s Julie and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Virginie, who both drown, although the “ natural” cause of Julie’s death (she dies several days after the event) and the “ moral” cause of Virginie’s death (she drowns in a shipwreck because she refuses to take off her clothes) remain suspect to literary critics. It is tempting to search for different phases of attitudes and represen­ tations of death or to discern in it different beliefs and patterns of thought, but one would at best paint only a very crude picture in a volume of this size. A few excellent books have, however, succeeded in offering valuable insight into attitudes to death. Most readers may have read or come across such studies as Michel Guiomar’s Principes d ’une esthétique de la mort (Paris: J. Corti, 1967), John McManners’ Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), Elisabeth Bronfen’s Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) or Richard Boothby’s Death and Desire: Psycho­ analytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (London: Routledge, 1992). These studies highlight the inexhaustibility and complexity of the subject. Can one, then, in an issue comprising a few articles, offer anything more than an eclectic grouping of discrete approaches? We have applied two criteria in an endeavour to give conceptual coherence to the whole. Firstly, the articles concern two forms of art, literature and film. The invention of cinema occurred at the transition of the nineteenth to the twentieth century and cinema’s centenary has just been celebrated; it seemed, therefore, appropriate to delineate a period in which cinema would be centrally located, hence the limitation to the present century and the last. Secondly, and more importantly, the emphasis of the arti­ cles is on death as a narrative device, and portrayals of death which take Vol. XXXV, No. 4 3 Spaas the reader/spectator beyond the immediacy of representation to ques­ tions of stylistic or aesthetic importance. In film as well as in literature death occurs with such frequency that it tends to become the cliché for the closure of a narrative. Through the telling of stories we try to order experience by imagining our forgotten past and our unknowable future, the ultimate future which is inevitably that of our own death. It is then not surprising that death occupies a cen­ tral place in so many stories. But what seems to occur, starting in the eighteenth century, is the assignment of a meaning to death itself, either by its use as a metaphor, or by its manipulation as an aesthetic or nar­ rative device. It is this perspective which the following collection of arti­ cles emphasizes. To begin with film, Dudley Andrew’s inquiry into death takes the reader across the twentieth century. Andrew shows how the meaning of death exceeds individuality: death is employed as an aesthetic/antiaesthetic device, as a metaphor for social structures or a metaphor for cinema itself. For Truffaut, as for Bazin, Andrew writes, cinema “is a temple of death mummified.” Ultimately, Andrew argues, the dramatic borders of death are breached: the story flows over into history, private death into public death. Andrew perceives a profound difference between the Hollywood and the French aesthetic of death. This difference, exemplified in A bout de souffle, is examined in Trista Selous’s article. For her, Michel Poiccard’s death in Godard’s film provides a non-realistic closure of a credible nar­ rative. This imitation of death goes beyond parody, both questioning and using the narrative cliché of death in order to put forward a new aesthetic. The contributions related to literature open with Balzac. One might expect one of Balzac’s illustrious cases, Pére...