Broken fantasias? Jacques Ferrandez and the chimeric quest for disillusionment

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe bande dessinée artist Jacques Ferrandez was born in Algiers in late 1955, but his family moved to France in 1956. His illustrated travel-writing project, Retours à Alger [Return journeys to Algiers], closely tied to his bande dessinée series Carnets d’Orient [notebooks/sketchbooks of the Orient], attempts to produce disillusioned representations of the “reality” of his birthplace but ultimately delivers a commixture of myth and reality. Drawing on theorists such as Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek, this article argues that Ferrandez’s reality is inevitably a construct of the psyche that depends on the intermediaries of fantasy and ideology. Thus, though Ferrandez in both Carnets d’Orient (2008) and Retours à Alger (2006) attempts to produce forms of disillusionment through multi-modal representation, his work is coloured by a particular ideological fantasy of what will be termed a “multiple Mediterranean”, a fantasy that is paradoxically subtended by his critical representations of the ideological interpellation of others and of himself. Focusing on the formal and conceptual peculiarities of the two projects, this article demonstrates how Ferrandez’s disillusionment — staged in fictional and non-fictional travel — is in fact shown, through his manipulation of text and image, to be constituted through the institution of “a primordial form of narrative, which serves to occult some original deadlock” (Žižek 2008, 11) and that this structural deadlock is disruptive of the core of his Pied-Noir post-memory identification.