Abstract
Motherhood andmadness are recurring concerns in women’s writing in French. In LydieSalvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997)the depiction of the mother as ‘madwoman’ takes centre stage in herlinguistically bold text. Whilst disturbed predecessors have appeared inwritings by Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Cardinal, Jacqueline Harpman, MarieDarrieussecq, and Marguerite Duras, amongst others, the text also belongs, inits treatment of the Holocaust and its traumatic legacies, to a corpus thatincludes writings by Georges Perec, Sylvie Germain, Nancy Huston, and Philippe Grimbert,to name a few. A deranged mother and her disturbed daughter are central to thestory, and have much to tell us, it would seem – about history and trauma,about contemporary society, and about the vicissitudes and complexities ofintimate relationships in less than favourable circumstances. This articleexamines theories of transgenerational transmission of trauma in La Compagnie des spectres, a fictionalwork in which history, legacy and trauma intersect. In the novel two seeminglyunreliable, unstable narrators highlight through their stories the challenges inarticulating and understanding legacies of heritage and loss. Their portraits raisequestions about the positioning, function, and reception of the ‘madwoman’ inthe text, and, indeed, beyond the text, where such a figure, as noted byFoucault and others, is often destined to carry projected, unbearable ‘madness’of and on behalf of others. Selected theoretical frameworks from psychology,psychoanalysis, and trauma studies underpin this analysis, which problematises readingsof transgenerational hauntings to account for moments where apparent insanitycould be understood as a legitimate response to an apparently ‘insane’ world.
Highlights
In works by Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Cardinal, Jacqueline Harpman, Marie Darrieussecq and Marguerite Duras, for example, we do not have to look far to find powerful mother figures, often accompanied by rebellious daughters, caught in the fraught dynamics associated with the processes of identification and separation
We find out in the companion text, Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers, that the process server is a supporter of Pétain, and is intolerant of any kind of difference
The terms ‘transmission’ and ‘legacy’ can be read in various ways in the text, and these open up possible readings of haunting transmissions of trauma and of the passing on and integration of knowledge, including the articulation of a type of heritage that is framed in more positive terms, and where apparent insanity could be understood as a legitimate response to an apparently ‘insane’ world
Summary
It is difficult to read Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres, in which a mother and daughter in crisis feature centre stage, without being reminded of predecessor mother–daughter pairings in women’s writing in French. In works by Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Cardinal, Jacqueline Harpman, Marie Darrieussecq and Marguerite Duras, for example, we do not have to look far to find powerful mother figures, often accompanied by rebellious daughters, caught in the fraught dynamics associated with the processes of identification and separation. Mother Rose Mélie (her name an echo perhaps of Marie Redonnet’s Rose Mélie Rose3), the ‘madwoman’ in Salvayre’s text, ‘avec son visage de folle, son regard de folle et sa voix de folle’ (14), is reminiscent. The publication of the article is shown to function as a particular trigger in the story for the deterioration in Rose’s mental state, in the wake of the unleashing of memories of numerous unresolved experiences in which the grieving process has been arrested (156) Her traumatic experiences are further dramatized through the lens of a later unexpected visitation to the family home by a bailiff, as. Mother and daughter are central to the story, and have much to tell us about history, and how it is told, about contemporary society, and about the vicissitudes and complexities of intimate relationships, especially in less than favourable circumstances This analysis engages with the challenges posed by these two seemingly unreliable, unstable narrators and their stories. The significance of the inventory will be considered alongside theories on narration (by the likes of Dori Laub), and I will question to what extent Louisiane manages transmissions of trauma by her own ‘taking stock’
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