The Performance of Illegitimacy: Signing the Matronym

Abstract

B ASTARDY GOES hand in hand with myth making.' It is regarded as an exception to the rule, an ex-centric phenomenon, and the excentric always generates myths of excess, whether for good or for evil. This rule applies whether the myths are those of whole social groups, products of whatJung would call collective unconscious,2 or merely those of the individual psyche and its phantasms. Personal narratives of illegitimacy and delegitimation should throw light on the relationship between the written texts and the phantasmic mise-enscene which govern both individual performance and social prejudice. Any reading of so-called reminiscences leaves one with profound admiration for the human capacity to shape past events to present needs. Facts mutate in accordance with the laws of perspective. The constructive power of memory necessary to recreate depends not only on the selective capacity of forgetting, but also on the structural demands and assertions of the stories it performs. Personal narrative is discursive mise-en-scene, in which self emerges from the shifting interplay of signifiers and utterances. The process of mythopoeisis is also one of intertextuality, where the personal narrative, by the very fact of being written, is enmeshed in the dominant myths of particular society. But the process works in two ways. On the one hand the mise-en-scene of the letter, the memoir, or the confession transforms lived experience into fiction, a more or less probable novel, but no longer history,3 where the process of representation irrevocably transmutes life into art, even without any apparent cosmetic attempt by the writer. On the other hand, the myths produced can be so potent, and the narrative structures so compelling, that fictional performances have real consequences and that life follows the path which myth has traced for it. Modern French culture offers rich paradigm of such myths and antimyths of bastardy, due in part to major historical shifts in the status of the illegitimate, and in part to stronger polarization of social prejudices and attitudes than those typical of, say, England in the same time frame. By following series of personal narratives of bastards or would-be bastards mostly taken from the last two hundred years of modern