Pigscripts The Indignities of Species in Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This essay is for D. 1. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal [2002], trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p.30. 2. Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’ [1967], in The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, trans. by Joachim Neugroschal (London: Penguin, 1979), pp.83–118 (p.89). 3. ‘Truie’ is French for sow. Although the compactness of the French pun ‘Truismes’ does not quite survive the English translation, human/animal duality is maintained in the phonetic play between ‘tale’ and ‘tail’. I shall be using the English title, except in quotations that stick with the French title Truismes. 4. Jeanette Gaudet provides details of the novel's popular success in France and beyond. A best seller in France, Pig Tales was translated into several languages. Jean‐Luc Godard bought the rights to the film version of the book which, perhaps thankfully, has not yet materialized; Jeanette Gaudet, ‘Dishing the Dirt: Metamorphosis in Marie Darrieussecq's Truismes’, Women in French Studies, 9 (2001), pp.181–192. 5. Shirley Jordan, ‘Saying the Unsayable: Identities in Crisis in the Early Novels of Marie Darrieussecq’, in Women's Writing in Contemporary France, ed. by Gill Rye and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp.142–153 (p.142). 6. Frédéric Badré, ‘Une nouvelle tendance en littérature’, Le Monde (3 October 1998). Although Houellebecq, not undeservedly, holds court here, the 1990s saw an incredibly energetic resurgence of writing by women. See Gill Rye and Michael Worton's illuminating introduction to Women's Writing in Contemporary France, pp.1–26. See also Didier Jacob's piece ‘Mesdames Sans Gêne’, in Le Nouvel Observateur at: http://www.nouvelobs.com/hs_pudeur/mediatique/media5.html. Despite the differences and variety amongst these writers (in addition to Darrieussecq, a partial list includes Linda Lê, Annie Ernaux, Christine Angot, Nina Bouraoui, and Virginie Despentes), Jacob underscores the shared preoccupation with the body and with graphic violence and sex of these ‘nouvelles marquises de Sade’. Badré calls this new tendency ‘post‐naturalist’, which, posited against the avant‐garde novel, returns to the fabric of everyday experience. Although it is possible to link Darrieussecq to this (post) naturalist method, she owes as much to the anti‐realist experimentalism of the nouveau roman. 7. Jeanette Gaudet, ‘Dishing the Dirt’, p.183. 8. Gill Rye and Michael Worton, Women's Writing in Contemporary France, p.14. 9. Shirley Jordan, ‘Saying the Unsayable’, pp.143–144. 10. For a reading of the linkage between the rhetoric of animality and femininity, see the work of Carol J. Adams, primarily The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum, 2002), and The Pornography of Meat (New York: Continuum, 2003). 11. Shirley Jordan, ‘Saying the Unsayable’, p.146. 12. Shirley Jordan, ‘Saying the Unsayable’, p.146. Jordan quotes from Lidia Curti's Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity, and Representation (London: Macmillan, 1998), p.107. 13. For a first‐rate discussion of the indictments of liberalism in general and of ‘sexual liberation’ in particular in contemporary French literature, see Jack I. Abecassis' ‘The Eclipse of Desire: L'Affaire Houellebecq’ MLN, 115 (2000), pp.501–826, available online at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mln/v115/115.4abecassis.html. I return to Abecassis' article in the last section of this essay. Two other works, each differently pitted against French liberalist philosophy, are relevant in this context: Dominique Lecourt's The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid‐1970s, trans. by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2001), and Cary Wolfe's assault on Luc Ferry in ‘Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism’ in Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp.21–43. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Four Great Errors’, in Twilight of the Idols [1888], trans. by Duncan Large (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.26–32. 15. For a similar critique of anthropomorphism, see Tom Tyler's ‘If Horses Had Hands’, Society and Animals, 11.3 (2003), pp.267–281. Available online at: http://www.criminalanimal.org/people/writings/cyberchimp/horses.htm. Another useful discussion of anthropomorphism and its vicissitudes can be found in Erica Fudge's Animal (London: Reaktion, 2002). 16. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, trans. by Linda Coverdale (London: Faber, 1998), p.1 (emphasis added). ‘Piggle‐squiggles’ in the English translation replaces ‘écriture de cochon’, literally ‘pig writing’. I will be using the French expression throughout this piece. In the epigraph to her essay, Gaudet cites Antonin Artaud as a reference point for Darrieussecq's écriture de cochon. Artaud asserts that ‘Toute l'écriture est de la cochonnerie’ [‘all writing is piggery’; my translation] (qtd. in Gaudet p.181). At the end of her essay, Gaudet lists the possible interpretations of écriture de cochon: beyond the immediate or literal sense of the pig who writes, the phrase could also mean ‘writing that is good only for pigs’ (Gaudet p.190). The pigs for whom the narrative is intended are therefore none other than us. And so, from the outset, Pig Tales is written simultaneously by and for pigs. 17. Darrieussecq's punning use of ‘truisme’ recalls Derrida's similar play on ‘bête’ and ‘bêtise’ in ‘The Animal that Therefore I am (More to Follow)’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2002), p.398. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [1980], trans. by Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum, 2004), p.262. 19. For a survey of Deleuze's various notions of ‘becoming’, see the chapter ‘Becoming’ in Claire Colebrook's Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), pp.125–145. 20. Giorgio Agamben, The Open, pp.26–27, emphasis added. See Ron Broglio's review of The Open, this issue. 21. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.32. 22. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.28. Other examples of mirrors, reflections, and photographs include scenes in the apartment of her first lover Honoré (pp.37, 44); a photo on the campaign posters ‘for a healthier world’ (pp.55, 74); a passing reflection in a shop window (p.65); a hotel room mirror (p.76). 23. The only glimpse of interiority that we get in Pig Tales is of the disembowelled entrails of a young girl during an orgy at Edgar's Palace on the eve of the third Millennium. The girl is suspended by her hair from a chandelier with her insides hanging out. Here is another truism for the gentle humanist: inside meat there is only more meat. This scene is Darrieussecq's most explicit evocation of Sade. But the novel as a whole remains true to the pornographic principle of the extinction of personality and psychology. 24. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, pp.61–62 (my emphasis). 25. This point concerning naïveté carries over to the novel's social/political dimension. As a parody of liberal humanism the deadpan narration makes perfect sense. For Pig Tales' is a world defined through rampant consumerism, violence, and sex, from which the traces of friendship and love have all but disappeared. If, however, this fictional world is really our world, then it is our own (humanistically‐biased) reading – with its emotional and moral inflections – which is outdated and out of touch. In an ironic reversal, it is no longer the protagonist who is dim or delusional, but the reader. 26. For another reading of Darrieussecq which applies a gendered perspective to Agamben's central idea of ‘bare life’, see Andrew Asibong's ‘Mulier sacra: Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq and the Sexual Metamorphoses of “Bare Life”’, French Cultural Studies, 14.2 (2003), pp.169–177. 27. The face is, as the saying goes, the gateway to interiority; it is what most personalizes, as is evident from the artistic form most suited to the revelation of personality: the portrait. The uncanny proximity between apes and humans lends itself particularly well to the portrait form. One recent example of the use of the portrait to convey individuality is the exhibition ‘Face to Face’ by photographer James Mollison at London's Museum of Natural History. A discussion of kinship is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is worth noting that one problem with animal – and human – rights discourse lies in the refusal to problematize the concept and space of ‘kinship’. For kinship is, in fact, a paradoxical and embattled zone. Although violence requires a gesture of distancing between perpetrator and victim, neither torture nor violence is thinkable within the purview of complete otherness. From Yerkes to Abu Ghraib, in other words, a (qualified) recognition kinship is necessary for violence to take place. One can only wreak violence on he who – like me – is recognised as capable of suffering: my kin. Pig Tales' interspecies economy crucially shifts the discussion away from the register of kinship to that of power. On the complex view of kinship for which I am arguing see Michael Nichols' book of photographs Brutal Kinship (New Jersey: Aperture, 1999). I thank Erika Rundle for this last reference. Mollison's exhibition and book are reviewed by Steve Baker in this issue. 28. Carol J. Adams, The Pornography of Meat (London: Continuum, 2004), pp.112 and 118. 29. On Levinas' humanism see, for example, Derrida's ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am’, p.381. 30. Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, p.89. 31. ‘My novel is anything but psychological’, in Shirley Jordan, ‘Saying the Unsayable’, p.147. 32. Additionally, one can read bestiality in the novel following Derrida's ironic lead in ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, which makes bestiality the only thing which is truly ‘proper to man’, since animals are by definition exempt from this transgression (p.409). 33. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, pp.25–26. 34. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.27. 35. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.28. 36. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.32. 37. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.38. 38. For a reading of the overlap between gender and species in Pig Tales see Naama Harel's ‘Challenging the Species Barrier in Metamorphosis Literature: The Case of Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales’, forthcoming in Comparative Critical Studies, 2.3 (2005), pp.397–409. Harel makes a similar point to the one made here, that whilst ‘interpretations of Pig Tales as a political or a feminist fable are well established, they all ignore the interspecies aspect of the story’ (p.1). The feminist focus of the novel must not, then, overshadow the importance of the identity of species. 39. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.25. 40. Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, p.89. 41. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.58. 42. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.68. 43. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, pp.84–85. 44. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.87. See also the scene in which the pig‐woman is discovered reading in the attic by the pack of cannibalistic human inmates, led (not surprisingly) by the ‘religious fanatic’ (p.85), the narrator's former client in Perfumes Plus: ‘[i]t was while I was reading one evening that they tried to catch me. There wasn't anything at all to eat in the asylum any more, so naturally, by comparison, I must have still seemed rather appetizing. They hesitated when they found me in the attic reading’ (p.85). 45. Nietzsche's ‘transhumanism’ is another important reference point. See A Nietzschean Bestiary, eds. Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), in particular Jami Weinstein's bibliographical essay at the end of the collection, ‘Traces of the Beast: Becoming Neitzsche, Becoming Animal, and the Figure of the Transhuman’, which tracks Nietzsche's impact on the rethinking of humanity and animality (pp.301–318). I review A Nietzschean Bestiary in this issue. 46. Jack I. Abecassis, ‘The Eclipse of Desire: L'Affaire Houellebecq’ MLN 115 (2000), pp.814–815. 47. Georges Bataille, ‘My Mother’, in My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. by Austryn Wainhouse (London: Marion Boyars, 1996), pp.23–134 (p.25). 48. Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, p.91. 49. Adolf Hitler, ‘Nation and Race’, Mein Kampf (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1933), pp.120–131 (p.122). 50. I have not so far come across critical commentaries that address Hamsun's significance in the novel. Hamsun is both within and without the narrative: his epigraph frames the novel from without (a passage that brings to mind the famous pig scene in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, another, if less obvious ‘pigscript’ precursor to Pig Tales). The porcine heroine later comes across Hamsun's book and delivers it to the censorship bureau as potentially ‘subversive’ (p.88). Ironically, it is the discovery of Hamsun's Nobel Prize that earns him the ban. The layered ironies here are difficult to disentangle: where do we locate Hamsun – and Darrieussecq – in this interweaving of the (meta‐) fictional and the historical? How to balance the truisms of Europe's historical trauma with our interpretation of the novel's fictional‐political allegory? It seems to me that to read the regimes of Pig Tales as simply ‘fascist’ (or Nazi‐like) is misleading, for it neutralizes the novel's contemporary politico‐cultural implications. The ‘neo‐authoritarianism’ of Social Free Progressionism reads more as a psychotic extension of late capitalist democracy (a mutation whose early flowering is arguably currently detectable in Europe and the US), than as a return to (Hamsun's) fascist or reactionary (sentimentalist, aestheticized, anti‐modern) ideology. 51. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive [1999], trans. by Daniel Heller‐Roazen (New York: Zone, 2002), p.62. 52. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, p.135.