Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls’ College (Hovenden Room)

Tuesday 9^th February, 5-6.30pm

The Body of Ourika: The Doctor, the Patient and the Text

Sarah Jones (Oriel College, Oxford)

Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) is a powerful exploration of the psychological effects of social exclusion upon the novella’s eponymous heroine. This exclusion is justified with reference to Ourika’s body and the ways in which it is coded and deciphered by society: Ourika’s blackness debars her from fulfilling her supposedly natural role of maternal reproduction. Against this background of the body’s primacy, it is surprising that limited critical attention should have been paid to the frame-narrator of Ourika, the young doctor who encounters the protagonist on her death-bed and procures her story from her. My paper will argue that the body of the text and the body of the heroine are intimately linked, and that this connection brings the role of the doctor to the fore. I shall suggest that medical narratives of the body, and the characters who incarnate them, form an ideology which must perpetually be negotiated within the social relations that encircle and engender it. The doctor shows remarkable sympathy for Ourika which draws him into the nexus of social forces that centre on Ourika’s body. This demonstrates a complex web of relations between his sympathetic attitude towards his patient, the permutations of his medical discourse within Ourika’s narrative, and the ways in which Ourika can use her body, the instrument of her own marginalization and source of the doctor’s sympathy, to resist attempts to subject her narrative to the authority of the doctor’s.

Points de re-père: Paternal Hauntings in Marie Nimier’s Works

Adina Stroia (KCL)

At the age of five, Marie Nimier loses her father, writer Roger Nimier, in a tragic car accident. Nimier’s mourning process is problematized and deferred by the ontological uncertainty of the paternal figure who was ‘ni vraiment là quand il était présent, ni vraiment absent quand il nous quitta’ (Reine du Silence, 37) and is thus (dis)placed outside of a Freudian understanding of Trauerarbeit as finite. The ghostly materiality of the father as a figure of the entre-deux haunts Nimier’s writing through the point de re-père, a term the author advances in her debut novel, Sirène (1987), whose manifestations take the shape of a series of paternal avatars and attributes woven throughout the textual fabric of her corpus. I argue that the point de re-père is coherent with Derrida’s logic of spectrality through its dispersive qualities and repetitive structure. This paper will analyse the means through which the paternal hauntology refracts and insinuates itself in the interstices of the narrative in two autobiographically inflected works, Sirène and La Reine du silence (2004). I will trace the disorienting effects of the temporal shifts and of the gestures of material dislocation and analyse the means through which the spectral paternal configurations in the form of the re-père contaminate Nimier’s narrative and linguistic practices, installing a presence/absence aporia which traverses the author’s œuvre.