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‘Curiouser and curiouser’ : Childhood Figures to Live By, in Writings in French by Lydia Flem and Philippe Forest – Susan Bainbrigge

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J’y revenais pour tenter de saisir quelque chose de l’expérience que j’étais en train de vivre, des évocations, des interrogations qu’elle suscitait. Qu’est-ce que la séparation, qu’est-ce qui lie les parents aux enfants, les enfants aux parents, pourquoi cet amour se teint-t-il d’ambivalence, de conflits, de blessures narcissiques? (CSF, 102)

[I came back to it to try to grasp something of the experience I was having, the recollections and questions it prompted. What is separation? What links parents to children, children to parents and why is this love tainted with ambivalence, conflicts, narcissistic wounds?]

Attempts to gather together notes and feelings are described as a chaotic and disturbing process, part of an ‘écriture contaminée’ (CSF, 103) [a contaminated writing]. Neither novel nor personal journal, the closest phrase the narrator finds to describe her newfound hybrid genre is a ‘non-fiction novel, un roman qui ne serait pas une fiction, une vérité qui serait de la littérature’ (CSF, 103, emphases in original) [non-fiction novel, a novel which would not be fictional, a truth that would belong to literature]. The writing of the text in the narrative present, which the narrator terms the ‘bébé de papier’ (CSF, 108) [the paper baby], is juxtaposed with the journal kept by both parents when their daughter Sophie was a baby. In essence the book demonstrates its narrator’s central line of argument: ‘L’art nous transforme’ (CSF, 19) [Art transforms us]. The dynamic interconnections of the stories of Alice with the narrator’s experiences strike a parallel with Cohen’s analysis, evoking multilayered internal and external realities in imaginative ways.

‘L’Enfant éternel’: Peter Pan, endings and beginnings

Forest’s L’Enfant éternel has affinities with Flem’s ‘non-fiction novel’ genre, and his work also contains extensive explorations of figures from childhood literature and popular culture more generally.51L’Enfant éternel adopts a similar structure to Flem’s narrative: each chapter of the book is prefaced by a quotation taken from Barrie’s novel. The epigraph is also an extract from this text, and it announces Peter Pan as a central figure: ‘There were odd stories about him; as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened’ (EE, 10).52 Similarly, the epigraph to the first chapter – ‘Two is the beginning of the end’ – also underpins the presence of this intertext by introducing Wendy and her thoughts as they appear at the start of Barrie’s story, which begins:

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.53

Wendy articulates the fact that with the passage of time usually comes separation by way of growing up – except for a few. Barrie’s opening sentence ‘All children, except one, grow up’ features early on in the reflections of Forest’s narrator on family life. It announces the central narrative, in which he and his family face the terrible knowledge that their young daughter Pauline will share the same fate as Peter, never to grow up, following the diagnosis of a fatal cancerous tumour. Loss is to be found at the heart of both narratives.54

The narrator introduces his perspective on this devastating experience amidst reflections on stories and storytelling, and within the familiar frames of stories and beginnings (and endings):

Notre histoire est un conte semblable de terreur et de tendresse qui se dit à l’envers et commence par la fin: ils étaient mariés, ils vivaient heureux, ils avaient une enfant… Et tout commence encore, écoute-moi, puisqu’il était une fois… (EE, 14)

[Our story is a similar tale of terror and tenderness, told the wrong way round, and starting at the end: they were married, living happily, they had a child… And then everything starts over again, now listen, for once upon a time…]

In his story, the expectation that older generations will be succeeded by younger ones is challenged by the fact that the parents will outlive their child, and this fact dramatically subverts a more familiar life course. The Peter Pan story runs in parallel with Pauline’s; like Peter Pan, she is destined to remain a child who never grows up. Through Peter Pan, she learns about the realities of birth and death in terms of exceptions to the rule, in a way that anticipates her own unusual trajectory (EE, 168), as the narrator confirms: ‘Dans la vraie vie, les enfants meurent rarement. Dans les livres, l’événement est plus improbable encore’ (EE, 193) [In real life, children rarely die. In books, it is even less likely to happen].

In addition to Peter, there are references to Wendy, Captain Hook and the pirates. These intertextual references run alongside the narrator’s depiction of the family’s experiences of medical investigations, the diagnosis and subsequent treatments and interventions. The latter prove to be ultimately unsuccessful, and the narrator depicts his daughter’s premature death in a text which highlights the upturning of expected norms. Descriptions of ordinary family routines and events – school, work, bedtimes, excursions and holidays – take on new meaning and significance when they are juxtaposed with the increased presence, and intrusion, of hospital environments. Narratives of daily life are also interspersed with reflections on reading and writing, with thoughts and associations made to a range of authors, including Shakespeare, Hugo, Zola, Mallarmé and Joyce. There is an emphasis on these writers’ capacities as parents, including of children who die young. The narrator explores literature more broadly, precisely to examine living and dying, beginnings and endings.

References to Peter Pan in particular provide ways of connecting the concrete and the metaphysical in order to broach existential questions through a familiar children’s story. These questions include, for example, the facing of mortality, and especially here, the processing of the unwelcome and unexpected intrusion of death in early life:

La mort est ce par quoi nous découvrons le temps. L’anticipation de cet instant est ce par quoi prend forme sous nos yeux la conscience que nous avons d’exister. Alors, nous nous retournons et nous comprenons que c’est par la naissance que la mort est entrée déjà dans notre vie. (EE, 139)

[Death is how we discover time. The anticipation of this moment taking shape before our eyes is how we become aware that we exist. So we look back and we understand that by the fact of our birth, death has already entered our lives.]

These painful confrontations are broached through references to Barrie’s story, not least the crocodile with its repeated reminders of time passing, as well as more general references – ‘le tic-tac glouton du temps’ (EE, 374) [the greedy ticking of time].55 The narrator refers to the voice of the child who cries – ‘L’enfant qui crie règne dans ce domaine où l’on ne grandira plus’ (EE, 26) [The child who cries reigns in this domain where no-one grows up] – in the context of Peter Pan, but also in relation to the narrator’s memories of childhood. The reader is invited to take in the landscape of Barrie’s island and to hold in mind both dream states and nightmares.56 Both daughter and father connect to the imaginary figures via related stories and dreams. From Pauline’s dreams, the narrator then connects to his own: ‘Rêvant son rêve, je prends Pauline par la main et l’emmène jusque dans les jardins de Kensington, un peu plus loin. Là où Peter, une nuit […] est entré’ (EE, 30) [Dreaming her dream, I take Pauline by the hand up to Kensington Gardens, a bit further away. There where, one night, Peter […] came in]. The narrator links the story of Peter Pan with imaginings of other worlds. These include his own internal world, which figures in the detours in the text in which he rejoins his own child self. ‘On imagine’ (EE, 65) [We imagine], the narrator writes of his and his daughter’s story times as a shared experience of co-construction arising out of the familiar retellings of Neverland:

Pauline nous demande […] de lui parler du Pays Imaginaire. Elle nous demande de lui redire encore l’histoire de Peter. Nous inventons de nouveaux récits mais nous avons du mal à lui faire le portrait de l’enfant qui ne grandit pas. (EE, 151)

[Pauline asks us […] to tell her about Neverland. She asks us to tell her the story of Peter again. We make up new tales but we find it hard to sketch the portrait of the child who never grows up.]

As father and daughter replay scenes from the story (EE, 332), Pauline chooses fearless Wendy, who is not afraid to die (‘n’a pas peur de mourir’, EE, 333). Pauline’s identification with Wendy opens up a space in which the containment of anxieties about living and dying might be possible: ‘Pauline ne s’identifiait pas à Peter. Elle était Wendy […]. Elle était l’enfant calme et gracieuse qui découvre, émerveillée, la farce absurde de vivre’ (EE, 372–73) [Pauline did not identify with Peter. She was Wendy […] the quiet, graceful child who is amazed to discover the absurd farce of living]. Pauline is described as becoming increasingly attached to the story of Peter Pan. Like Cohen’s description of the significance of childhood literature, this story, and the physical object of the book itself, anchor its reader through difficult moments and offer an accompanying and sustaining presence through challenging realities. The story offers both father and daughter a means to tell their own story in the company of familiar literary figures, and to make sense of their experience (EE, 370). It also offers a place of collective belonging, through the particular remark that ‘Peter Pan appartient aux enfants malades’ (EE, 370) [Peter Pan belongs to sick children].

The passages describing family life in L’Enfant éternel thus foreground storytelling and imaginative space as important opportunities for connecting and making meaning (EE, 194). Poignantly, from the stories of Peter the narrator describes the emergence of his own story for Pauline as one way to attempt to capture in words an internal presence:

Il [le conte] contient en lui tous les livres que nous lisons. J’écris. L’enfant a laissé son ombre dans ma chambre. Je l’ai rangée dans le tiroir où dort le manuscrit que je sors à la nuit tombée. Elle quitte le Pays Imaginaire et vole jusqu’à moi. (EE, 152)57

[It [the story] contains within it all the books we read. I write. The child has left her shadow in my room. I put it away in the drawer where the manuscript lies dormant until I take it out after dark. She leaves Neverland and flies back to me.]

In the narrator’s description of Pauline’s last hours, this image of a figure in flight returns in the text to speak to the experience of transition from one realm to another, holding a narrative tension between the concrete and symbolic. A shared story (referenced in the extract below through a shared ‘nous’), with its familiar narrative features, contrasts with an unknown and uncertain reality ahead. The narrator calls to the image of a guiding star in the night sky, in the face of separation, loss and the thought of oblivion:

Rappelle-toi ce dont nos livres te parlaient à mi-voix. […] Et ce lit est une barque de fête, glissant entre les pierres, les nénuphars, les étoiles reflétées. Je n’ai pas su trouver de lanterne qui soit à la mesure de ta nuit. Il n’y en a pas. Pardonne-moi… Alors, prends tout ce qui brille et se détache sur le fond bleu sombre de l’oubli. […] La deuxième étoile allumée dans le ciel puis tout droit jusqu’au prochain matin… Mais que le matin est loin et incertain pour nous qui vivons cette douloureuse traversée de tristesse. (EE, 390, emphasis added)58

[Remember what our books quietly spoke to you about. […] And this bed is a little festive boat slipping between the rocks, the water lilies, the stars reflected in the water. I was unable to find a lantern bright enough for your night. There is none. Forgive me… So take everything that shines and stands out against the dark blue background of oblivion. […] Past the second star shining in the sky then straight onto the next morning… But how far and uncertain the morning is for those of us going through this painful journey of sadness.]

Following this description of a grieving process underway, the final paragraph of the book then presents a vision of both the child and a literary creation, ‘un être de papier’, whose possible recreation through words is both affirmed and disavowed: ‘J’ai fait de ma fille un être de papier. […] Le point final est posé. J’ai rangé le livre avec les autres. Les mots ne sont d’aucun secours’ (EE, 399) [I have created a paper being out of my daughter. […] I have reached the final full stop. I put the book away with the others. Words are of no help].

Ten years later, in 2007, the publication of subsequent writings, Tous les enfants sauf un, Le Nouvel Amour [The New Love] and a collection of essays entitled Le Roman, Le Réel et autres essais [The Novel, The Real and Other Essays], brought forth further reflections by Forest on his lived experience and its relationship to the writing project. Forest commented in this latter volume that following the death of his daughter in 1996 it had taken ten years to articulate why he had come to write what he did. He writes:

Je n’ai le sentiment d’avoir fait aucune vraie découverte dont je puisse me prévaloir. Mais il faut un vrai travail pour s’en revenir à l’évidence. Je l’ai accompli pour moi mais je ne désespère pas qu’il puisse servir à autrui. En littérature comme en n’importe quel autre domaine, chacun doit refaire pour lui-même et en son nom propre la même démonstration. Elle le reconduit devant la vérité à laquelle l’appelle l’expérience partagée de l’impossible qui inexplicablement exige à chaque fois d’être dite. C’est fait.59

[I do not feel that I have made any real discoveries that I can claim. But it takes real work to come to terms with the obvious. I have done it for myself, but I do not despair about whether it could be useful for others. In literature as in any other domain, everyone has to rework this experience for themselves and in their own name. This brings them face to face with the truth to which the shared experience of the impossiblecalls them, which each time inexplicably demands to be told. It is done.]

Forest emphasizes here, as he does in the aforementioned lines from the last section of L’Enfant éternel, the importance of a shared experience with the reader and of an impossible endeavour, one which is never fully satisfied. The implication of the reader in this shared experience is a recurring feature of Forest’s writing, as is his conviction that although literature cannot cure, it remains necessary all the same. In L’Enfant éternel the narrator expresses this sentiment with specific reference to the loss of his child. Again, there is a challenge to the assumption that literature necessarily carries a redemptive function:

La poésie ne sauve pas. Elle tue quand elle prétend sauver. Elle fait mourir à nouveau l’enfant quand elle consent à son cadavre, prétendant pouvoir la ressusciter sur la page. Les mots n’ont de pouvoir véritable qu’à condition de mettre à nu leur fondamentale impuissance à réparer quoi que ce soit du désastre du monde. (EE, 219)60

[Poetry does not save. It kills when it claims to save. It makes the child die again when it consents to its corpse, claiming to be able to resuscitate her on the page. Words have no real power unless their fundamental inability to repair any aspect whatsoever of the disaster of the world is clearly exposed.]

Forest also returned to these ideas in Après tout, in which he restated his scepticism about any reparative function associated with literature:

La doxa d’aujourd’hui nous dit que la littérature est là pour réparer le monde, réparer les vivants, soigner les plaies, sécher les pleurs. Elle a tort! […] Pour moi, la littérature n’est pas là pour réparer la réalité mais pour porter témoignage de la part d’irréparable, d’irrémédiable que comporte l’existence et à laquelle il nous faut rester fidèles si nous voulons demeurer humains.61

[Nowadays the general consensus tells us that literature exists to repair the world, repair the living, heal wounds, dry tears. This is wrong! […] To my mind, literature does not exist to repair reality but to bear witness to the irreparable and irremediable aspects of existence which demand of us to be truthful about them if we want to remain human.]

Writing, he argues, emerges from an experience of longing, and literature cannot save by offering any final definitive satisfaction:

On écrit toujours avec le désir de trouver le dernier mot et c’est parce que ce dernier mot manque et manquera sans fin que l’on recommence. […] Quelque chose cloche que l’on voudrait changer – tout en sachant bien sûr que l’on n’y parviendra pas.62

[You always write with the desire to have the last word and it is because that last word will be missing, and will always be missing, that you begin again. […] Something does not ring true that you would like to change – all the while knowing, of course, that you will not succeed in doing so.]

In his 2007 interview in Le Monde Forest had also captured this state of affairs: if literature could cure, you would only write one book and then you would move on:

Je crois que la littérature ne sauve pas. Elle est un des modes possibles de la survie pour un individu qui traverse une épreuve. On écrit pour se souvenir et ne pas oublier. […] Vous savez, si la littérature avait des vertus vraiment thérapeutiques, on écrirait un livre et puis après on passerait à autre chose.63

[I believe that literature does not save. It is one of the possible modes of survival for an individual going through hard times. You write to remember and not to forget. […] You know, if literature had truly therapeutic qualities, you would write one book and then move onto something else.]

Flem’s ‘bébé de papier’ and Forest’s ‘être de papier’

In Flem’s and Forest’s selected writings, the narrators explore their experiences as parents, as well as remembering and examining their child selves. These various encounters open up imaginative spaces that emerge through their repeated engagements with Alice and Peter. The harnessing of creative curiosity produces texts in which childhood literary figures, and the stories with which they are associated, provide a means to engage with longing, loss and grief. Psychoanalytically oriented studies by the likes of Cohen and Rose help to flag up the dynamic tensions between the adult and child perspectives. For Flem, as we have seen, literature and living are intimately interlinked; memories come alive through the act of reading, which is understood as a dialogue with absent significant others. As Flem remarked in an interview: ‘Lire une histoire, c’est un peu comme découvrir de vieilles correspondances: c’est dialoguer avec des absents qui sont tout de même encore présents, par leurs mots et leur écriture’ [Reading a story is a bit like discovering old correspondence: it is a dialogue with those who are absent but still present all the same, through their words and their writing].64

From these experiences, Flem’s ‘bébé de papier’ and Forest’s ‘être de papier’ emerge. In a process similar to Freud’s après coup, an experience in which events are reviewed retrospectively and through a belated process, new insights are gained and hitherto unknown connections can be made between childhood, literary figures and familiar stories and the self who (re)turns to writing. Via imaginative writing, it is possible to find out, belatedly, in the après coup, what you did not (consciously) know you knew. As Forest has observed, ‘Mais il faut un vrai travail pour s’en revenir à l’évidence’.65 Forest alludes here to the required resources necessary for the task. The quality of perseverance that is demanded for the business of writing is further echoed in his comments in Le Roman, Le Réel et autres essais:

Chacun écrit le roman de sa vie et, devant l’irrémédiable, ce roman – sans rédemption ou rémission, ni parole de pardon ni parole de salut –, je l’imagine à la manière d’une sorte d’accommodement ému et amusé avec l’impossible, un encouragement ironique à persévérer encore un peu parmi les mots.66

[Everyone writes their own life story and I imagine this novel, in facing the irremediable, without redemption or remission, with neither words of forgiveness nor words of salvation, as a kind of emotional and amused reconciliation with the impossible, an ironic encouragement to persevere a little longer amongst words.]

Forest’s wry observation reveals a hopefulness associated with the paradoxically impossible task he describes. Towards the end of Flem’s Comment je me suis séparée de ma fille et de mon quasi-filsthe narrator’s reference to experiences of farewells and departures also includes the prospect of possible new beginnings: ‘Pivoter sur soi-même, faire demi-tour. Mettre un pied devant l’autre. Poursuivre. Commencer’ (CSF, 169) [To pivot towards oneself, turn back. Put one foot in front of the other. Keep going. Start]. From the concrete actions described here a more symbolic meaning could also be inferred, which speaks to the process of beginnings, endings and new beginnings of the writing project, as well as to the repeated returns to childhood figures more generally. Flem and Forest explore the possibilities and inherent limits of literature understood as consolation, alongside a paradoxical acknowledgement of the creative project as a valued and necessary aspect of living.67 Against the background of a critique of a normative ‘travail de deuil’ [work of mourning], which Forest equates to an unquestioned received idea, he presents his own understanding of the novel’s capacity to express something of the human condition in terms of grief and loss:

A cette superstition triomphante, le roman oppose comme une contre-parole […]: dans le cas de mon premier livre, cette contre-parole est une parole enfantine […]: aux mythes qui la condamnent, la petite fille de L’Enfant éternel oppose ses propres fables façonnées à partir d’un folklore puéril, féeries où la souffrance et l’angoisse viennent se dire dans les mots des contes. Cette parole d’enfance guérit-elle? Non, elle ne guérit pas. Elle laisse juste opérer sur l’horreur un charme de tendresse et de douceur, provisoire et mélancolique. À la fois, cette parole se tait. Et c’est son silence même qui détermine l’écriture du roman, en un geste de transmission par lequel c’est tout l’horizon génealogique qui se trouve paradoxalement renversé, la parole paternelle venant prendre la suite de la parole enfantine afin de ne pas consentir tout à fait à ce silence auquel elle se rend.68

[The novel contrasts with this triumphant superstition as a counter-response […]: in the case of my first book, this counter-response is the child speaking […]: the little girl of The Eternal Child confronts the myths that condemn her with her own fables, created from childish folklore, fairy tales in which fear and suffering come to be expressed in the words of the tales. Does this speaking from childhood heal? No, it does not heal. It simply allows a temporary and melancholic charm of tenderness and sweetness to operate on the horror. At the same time, this child’s speech goes quiet. And it is its very silence that determines the writing of the novel, in a gesture of transmission by which the whole genealogical frame is paradoxically reversed, the paternal speech now coming to replace the child’s speech so as not quite to give in to this silence to which it surrenders.]

The ‘parole enfantine’ is presented as a key figurative and symbolic space within the writing project, offering the possibility for the generation of words as well as allowing a space for silence, against which a ‘parole paternelle’ finds voice. The process is shadowed by Rose’s reminder of the place of the adult’s memory and desire.69

This analysis has sought to bring into focus for both Flem and Forest the place of the childhood literary figure in informing, enlivening and enriching this process of dialogue and transmission. The (re)turn to literature, in particular here via Alice and Peter Pan, is not because it saves or consoles, these writers insist; they each describe the compelling and paradoxically sustaining functions of reading and writing as they precisely fail to offer up any certain resolution. Literature’s capacity to sustain a curiosity about human experience means that writing, for these writers, is life; literary figures live with and in us. In a similar spirit to Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography’, the authors here attest in their autobiographically inspired works to the need and the desire to write in an engaged way, a characteristic of a writing practice that encompasses both concrete and imaginary worlds, reality and fantasy, and which promotes new spaces for the universal experiences of transition and loss to be expressed.70

Footnotes

1

Philippe Forest and Jean-Marie Durand, Après tout (Paris: PUF, 2021), p. 10.

2

In this article, all translations into English are my own.

3

Lydia Flem, ‘Sur le divan. Dernière séance’ (1992), in Lydia Flem: Table d’ecriture: Littérature et photographie, 27 December 2015, <https://lydia-flem.com/2015/12/27/sur-le-divan> [accessed 16 April 2023]. In this short text, a narrator recounts the last session of a long psychoanalytic treatment. The text refers to the enduring appeal of fictional characters from childhood reading, and to the lifelong attachment that figures from childhood might hold.

4

Josh Cohen, How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves and Literature (London: Ebury, 2021).

5

For analysis of La Reine Alice, see Valérie Dusaillant-Fernandes, ‘Le Cancer au pays d’Alice: Lydia Flem et son conte à ne pas mourir debout’, Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 18 (2016), 251–67; and Karin Schwerdtner, ‘Lydia Flem: “L’imagination est ma seule maison”. Entretien autour des lettres (et) objets’, Nouvelle Revue Synergies Canada, 13 (2020), 1–9.

6

A book of photographs by Flem, entitled Journal implicite (La Martinière: Maison européenne de la Photographie, 2013), complements La Reine Alice in terms of the subject matter, with further emphasis on visual perspectives via photo montages.

7

Three fairly recent French-language publications present an overview of Forest’s œuvre to date: Maïté Snauwaert, Philippe Forest, la littérature à contretemps (Nantes: Éditions nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 2012); Sophie Jaussi, Philippe Forest, l’autre côté du savoir (Paris: Kimé, 2022); and the publication arising out of the 2016 Paris conference proceedings, Philippe Forest: une vie à écrire, ed. by Aurélie Foglia, Catherine Mayaux, Anne-Gaëlle Saliot and Laurent Zimmermann (Paris: Gallimard, 2018). See also the series of interviews by Jacques Henric and Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, Philippe Forest (Paris: Artpress, 2016).

8

Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up was first produced and staged as a play in 1904 at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, and was first published by Penguin in book form as Peter Pan in 1928. Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was first published in 1865, followed by Through the Looking Glass in 1871.

9

Philippe Forest, L’Enfant éternel (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 370. Subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the main text as ‘EE’.

10

In these works Levy explores art, philosophy, identity and relationships. Discussions of literature intersect with more concrete details of lived realities, including experiences of change and loss. See Levy’s reference to ‘living autobiography’ in an interview with Lisa Allardice, ‘Deborah Levy: “The New Generation of Young Women Can Change the World” ’, The Guardian, 7 April 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/07/deborah-levy-memoir-interview-cost-of-living> [accessed 16 April 2023].

11

[Anon.], ‘Deborah Levy on the Art of Living’, Penguin, 14 May 2021, <https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2021/may/deborah-levy-real-estate-living-autobiography-interview.html> [accessed 16 April 2023].

12

Nathalie Prince analyses in more detail the question of the transmediation of children’s literature across languages, genre conventions and cultural/academic contexts: see her ‘Introduction’, in La Littérature de jeunesse en question(s), ed. by Nathalie Prince (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 9–24.

13

Peter Rickard, ‘Alice in France or Can Lewis Carroll Be Translated?’, Comparative Literature Studies, 12.1 (1975), 45–66 (p. 65).

14

Isabelle Nières-Chevrel, ‘Alice dans la mythologie surréaliste’, in Lewis Carroll et les mythologies de l’enfance, ed. by Pascale Renaud-Grosbras, Lawrence Gasquet and Sophie Marret (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), pp. 153–65.

15

Lecture series on the theme of childhood at the University of Nantes entitled ‘L’Enfance et son imaginaire’. See Philippe Forest, Autour de Lewis Carroll, online video recording, YouTube, 12 November 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72-wePCkHJs> [accessed 21 April 2023], and Philippe Forest, Autour du ‘Peter Pan’ de James Barrie, online video recording, 19 November 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgQmedGanI> [accessed 21 April 2023].

16

Monique Chassagnol, ‘Prologue’, in Peter Pan, figure mythique, ed. by Monique Chassagnol, Nathalie Prince and Isabelle Cani (Paris: Éditions Autrements, 2010), pp. 6–11 (p. 6). The genre called ‘littérature de jeunesse’ [children’s literature] in French contexts has been increasingly studied within an academic context. See, for example, Stories for Children, Histories of Childhood. Vol. II, ed. by Rosie Findlay and Sébastien Salbayre (Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2007); La Littérature de jeunesse en question(s), ed. by Prince; and Les Personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse, ed. by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015). Jutta Fortin’s Camille Laurens, le kaléidoscope d’une écriture hantée (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2017) connects the imagery of Barrie’s Peter Pan as eternal child to Forest’s novel and the writings of Laurens, focusing on Philippe (Paris: POL, 1995) and Romance nerveuse (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).

17

Lewis Carroll, Œuvres, ed. by Jean Gattégno, Véronique Béghain, Alexandre Révérend and Jean-Pierre Richard (Paris: Gallimard Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1990). See also the more recent publication Lewis Carroll et les mythologies de l’enfance, ed. by Renaud-Grosbras, Gasquet and Marret.

18

Forest, Autour du ‘Peter Pan’ de James Barrie.

19

Régis Loisel, Peter Pan, 6 vols (Issy-les-Moulineaux: Vents d’Ouest, 1990–2004). See also the recent interview with Nathalie Prince and Régis Loisel on the Radio France programme ‘Les Ombres de Peter Pan’, France Inter, 14 February 2021, online radio recording, <https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/barbatruc/les-ombres-de-peter-pan-1901900> [accessed 21 April 2023].

20

See Monique Chassagnol, ‘Le Dieu et l’oiseau: Peter Pan dans tous ses états’, in La Littérature de jeunesse en question(s), ed. by Prince, pp. 84–115 (p. 112).

21

See Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984). Critical literature in English on the significance of childhood literary figures also includes Jackie Wullschläger, Inventing Wonderland (New York: The Free Press, 1996); Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. by Daniel Hahn, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Kiera Vaclavik, Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll’s Icon, 1860–1901 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

22

Forest, Autour du ‘Peter Pan’ de James Barrie.

23

Gavin Bowd, review of Philippe Forest: une vie à écrire, ed. by Aurélie Foglia, Catherine Mayaux, Anne-Gaëlle Saliot and Laurent Zimmermann (2018), French Studies, 73.1 (2019), 144–45 (p. 145).

24

Ibid.

25

Maïté Snauwaert, ‘D’une infamie l’autre: la mort de l’enfant en régime de fiction’, Captures, 4.1 (2019), 1–16. Snauwaert notes Forest’s earlier research on the representation of the figure of the dead child in his study, Le Roman infanticide: Dostoïevski, Faulkner, Camus. Essais sur la littérature et le deuil (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010), cited in Snauwaert, ‘D’une infamie l’autre’, p. 13.

26

Snauwaert, ‘D’une infamie l’autre’, p. 1.

27

Franck Nouchi, ‘Philippe Forest, “Il faut une littérature révoltée” ’, Le Monde, 8 March 2007, <https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2007/03/08/philippe-forest-il-faut-une-litterature-revoltee_880518_3260.html> [accessed 21 April 2023].

28

Ibid.

29

Lacan describes the relationship between three states: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Dylan Evans presents a brief summary of this tripartite structure as follows: ‘It is not until 1953 that Lacan elevates the real to the status of a fundamental category of psychoanalytic theory; the real is henceforth one of the three ORDERS according to which all psychoanalytic phenomena may be described, the other two being the symbolic order and the imaginary order […] the real emerges as that which is outside language and inassimilable to symbolisation’: Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 162–63.

30

Nouchi, ‘Philippe Forest’, p. 12.

31

Rose precisely challenges the idea of ‘children’s literature as something self-contained’ in order to examine the interconnecting impact of historical, social and cultural narratives and the display (and concealment) of child and adult perspectives: The Case of Peter Pan, p. 143.

32

Lydia Flem, Comment je me suis séparée de ma fille et de mon quasi-fils (Paris: Seuil, 2009), pp. 33–34. Subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated into the main text as ‘CSF’.

33

Schwerdtner, ‘Lydia Flem’, p. 1.

34

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. by Andreas Mayor (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), p. 452.

35

Flem also draws upon other characters from well-known stories including Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, Tom Thumb, Hansel and Gretel, Ali Baba and Scheherazade from the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

36

Cohen, How to Live, p. 2.

37

Ibid., p. 5.

38

Ibid., p. 10.

39

This enduring appeal of Alice is confirmed by the recent exhibition ‘Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington in London, which ran from 22 May to 31 December 2021. See ‘Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser’, V&A, <https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/alice-curiouser-and-curiouser> [accessed 21 April 2023].

40

Ignês Sodré, ‘Through the Looking Glass: On Trauma and Unreality’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 100.6 (2019), 1171–83 (p. 1171).

41

Barrie, the ninth of ten children, experienced the loss of his older brother when he was six. In later life and he and his wife would become guardians to the five boys of the Llewelyn Davies family after their parents died. All these losses informed his creation of the Peter Pan story. See Ian Riches, ‘A Glimpse into the Life of J. M. Barrie’, National Trust for Scotland, 8 May 2020, <https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/a-glimpse-into-the-life-of-j-m-barrie> [accessed 21 April 2023].

42

See J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (London: Penguin Classics, 2018), p. 7.

43

Cohen, How to Live, p. 337.

44

See Louise Joy, ‘Children’s Literature: An Escape from the Adult World’, University of Cambridge Research, 24 September 2011, <https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/childrens-literature-an-escape-from-the-adult-world> [accessed 21 April 2023]; Sodré, ‘Through the Looking Glass’. See also Louise Joy, Literature’s Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

45

See, for example, CSF, pp. 61, 89.

46

On storytelling, see also CSF, pp. 103–05.

47

See Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, illustr. by John Tenniel (London: Penguin Classics, 2015), p. 31. Flem’s narrator also muses on the etymology of the word ‘séparation’ in relation to ‘parent’ in Chapter 6 of Comment je me suis séparée de ma fille et de mon quasi-fils.

48

See Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, p. 39.

49

See ibid., p. 19.

50

See ibid., p. 31.

51

Note, for example, the references to Casimir and the French children’s TV programme L’île aux enfants, an adaptation inspired by the American show Sesame Street (EE, 180).

52

See Barrie, Peter Pan, p. 9.

53

Ibid., p. 1.

54

Chassagnol notes that Barrie’s life history involved the death of his older brother, and that his story of Peter Pan would remain infused with death by way of multiple motifs and events, including the originating experience of abandonment for Peter by his mother upon the arrival of a younger brother. See Monique Chassagnol, ‘De l’enfant mort à l’éternel enfant. L’histoire sans fin de J. M. Barrie’, in Stories for Children, Histories of Childhood, ed. by Findlay and Salbayre, pp. 353–67 (p. 353).

55

See further references to the ticking clock: EE, pp. 75, 128, 166. Carroll’s Mad Hatter also provides a link to the theme of time, its relentless nature and the desire to have control over its passing.

56

The text describes dreams that connect the narrator to his own childhood landscapes: EE, p. 247.

57

See also the reference to a dream in which the narrator carries his daughter downstairs, and registers her embrace. At this moment he articulates a feeling of belonging and presence: ‘Me tenant à la rampe, la portant, je l’emmène avec moi’ (EE, p. 399) [Holding onto the banister, carrying her, I take her with me].

58

The image of the stars also appears in the context of the medical environment, with its ‘clignotement fou d’étoiles des appareils’ (EE, 391) [crazy flashing stars of the devices].

59

Philippe Forest, ‘Avant-propos’, in Le Roman, Le Réel et autres essais (Nantes: Editions Cécile Defaut, 2007), pp. 7–16 (p. 16, emphases added).

60

See also the narrator’s comment that ‘Ecrire ne rend pas la vie aux morts, ne les fait pas se dresser hors des tombes ouvertes’ (EE, p. 229) [Writing does not bring the dead back to life, does not raise them from their open graves].

61

Forest and Durand, Après tout, p. 20.

62

Ibid., p. 12.

63

Nouchi, ‘Philippe Forest’, p. 12. See also Forest’s comments in Après tout: ‘On écrit parce que quelque chose manque au monde’ [You write because something is missing in the world]: Forest and Durand, Après tout, p. 13.

64

Schwerdtner, ‘Lydia Flem’, p. 6.

65

Forest, ‘Avant-propos’, p. 16 (emphasis added).

66

Forest, ‘Le Roman entre irrédimable et irrémissible’, in Le Roman, Le Réel et autres essais, pp. 221–32 (p. 232).

67

Flem has also written about moments in her life when she has turned to images, rather than words, for self-expression: ‘Quand, dépossédée de tout, je me sens hors du monde, anéantie […], alors je n’aspire ni à la parole ni à l’écriture, mais seulement à la composition d’images’ [When, dispossessed of everything, I feel cast out of this world, annihilated […], then I do not aspire to speech or writing, but only to the composition of images]: Lydia Flem, La Reine Alice (Paris: Seuil, 2011), p. 160.

68

Forest, ‘Le Roman entre irrédimable et irrémissible’, pp. 226–27 (emphases added).

69

Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, pp. 5, 10.

70

For ‘living autobiography’, see Allardice, ‘Deborah Levy’. See also Forest’s commentary in his lecture series about the creation of the Alice and Peter Pan books in relation to their authors’ lives and relationships (and, in particular, ways in which to consider the potentially problematic dynamics) with the uses of sublimation, seduction and subversion of relationships in operation through their respective writings: Forest, Autour du ‘Peter Pan’ de James Barrie.

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

A propos d’une oeuvre de Maurizio Cattelan

Lydia Flem Art, english , 0 commentaire

Monnaie de Paris, exposition 2016

Maurizio Cattelan

Sans titre, 2007

Résine de silicone, cheveux naturels, caisse en bois, tissu d’emballage, vis

240 x 140 x 70 cm

Courtesy Galerie Perrotin

 » Vous ne pouvez pas me voir de là où je regarde en moi. »

Francesca Woodman


La Donna Crocefissa est-elle le double féminin, l’alter-ego christique de Maurizio Cattelan ? Cette gémellité s’est nourrie d’une fascination pour l’autoportrait, en noir et blanc, de la photographe new yorkaise Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), Untitled, Rome, 1978, suspendue par les bras à un linteau de porte.
Trente ans plus tard, travaillé par la question du corps, (objet et sujet de sa démarche), de la mort, de la pérennité du créateur, Maurizio Cattelan métamorphose l’artiste suicidée et l’expose, telle une résurrection, à la Kunsthalle de Bregenz. Destinée ensuite à l’Art Project Synagogue Stommeln en Allemagne, la sculpture de résine est emballée, de dos, les membres et le tronc attachés par des planches de bois, face contre le fond de linceul blanc de la caisse, les deux mains clouées.

L’œuvre porte désormais les stigmates de son transport.

Maurizio Cattelan fait sien ce nouvel avatar, y projette ses fantasmes, pour transfigurer notre histoire occidentale chrétienne : le sacré, les imageries de la Crucifixion, entre ferveur et blasphème, l’idéologie fasciste et le génocide des Juifs au cœur de l’Europe, la guerre des sexes où la perversité masculine joue du féminin entre mère-martyre et objet sexuel de consommation.

Et si cette Donna incarnait Maurizia Cattelan ?

Lydia Flem
Ecrivain, psychanalyste, photographe

************

Maurizio Cattelan
Untitled, 2007
Silicone resine, natural hair, wooden crate, clothes packing fabric, screws240 x 140 x 70 cm
Courtesy Galerie Perrotin


“You cannot see me from where I look at myself”

Francesca Woodman


Is La Donna Crocefissa (The Crucified Woman) a double female, the Christ-like alter ego of Maurizio Cattelan? This twining derives from a fascination with the black and white self portrait of New York photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), Untitled, Rome, 1978, showing her hanging from a doorway, arms outstretched.
Thirty years later, obsessed by the question of the body (object and subject-matter of her work), death and the eternalness of the Creator, Maurizio Cattelan metamorphoses the artist who committed suicide and puts her on display, like a resurrection, at Kunsthalle Bregenz. Intended next for the Synagogue Stommeln Art Project in Germany, the resin sculpture is wrapped, the back, arms and legs and the trunk pinned down with wooden boards, the face pressed against a white shroud at the bottom of the crate, both hands nailed down.

The work has now stigmata as the result of its transport.

Maurizio Cattelan makes this new avatar his own, to project his fantasies, to transfigure our Western Christian heritage: the sacred, imagery of the Crucifixion between fervour and blasphemy, Fascist ideology and the genocide of the Jews in the heart of Europe, the war of the sexes where male perversity plays the female, between mother-martyr and a mass-produced sex object.

And what if this Donna embodied Maurizia Cattelan?

Lydia Flem
Writer, Psychoanalyst and Photographer

Yves Bonnefoy : The Photographs of Lydia Flem

Lydia Flem Comment j'ai vidé la maison de mes parents, english, Etudes sur Lydia Flem, photolittérature , 0 commentaire

en français : https://lydia-flem.com/2020/11/17/yves-bonnefoy/

I

Lydia Flem’s photographs take their place within the history of photography only by inscribing a difference there.

Let us begin by understanding the dialectic underlying the work of photographers since Daguerre’s day.  Their first impulse drew them to the world around them, where they perceived things and wanted to place them in their new images. But, in those same images was inscribed an aspect of reality that had never appeared in any image before, and had indeed been excluded on principle: chance.

For what were paintings, drawings and statues, as they had been produced since the earliest times, and still are today? The work of an artist who, consciously or unconsciously, controlled every aspect of his image. And if essentially material realities were evoked in that work – mountain slopes strewn with boulders, cloud formations, or even bits of wood gathered and used in collages – the chance factor that had remained active within these things, for example in the scattering of stones, was only imitated, used with an intention, and in any case neutralised, becoming lost behind the projects, desires and fatalities signified by (and about) the artist through the image; and, with these, what appears as the real, what is given as being itself, is thought, an idea of the world. The only uncontrolled chance event that we encounter in the creation of these images, which we can call classical, is one that is left outside them, being the circumstances that led the artist to make the work, to embark upon it under such and such an influence. Everything in The Flagellation of Christ is under control, but Piero della Francesca could also have not been born, or not at some moment in his life have come to Urbino.

The only real random occurrence that is active as such in the Flagellation is the fine, chaotic lines of the cracking paint on its aging panel. But if we take a photographic portrait, it is as if the cracks, that random event inherent in the forces at play in what is only matter, had migrated from outside the image into its core. Where a painter would have imitated or interpreted the materiality of a piece of a fabric in a way that, simplifying it, would have kept it within the field of his will, there is now, on the coat worn by this unfamiliar person shown in the photograph I have picked up, the weave of the threads in the wool fabric, with this fold, this tear that the photographer could only register, if indeed she paid them any attention. And in this wall here is the inimitable disorder of its opus incertum. In photography, chance enters the image from the outset, enters this field of consciousness where everything was done to abolish it.

Historically, man invented the image in order to abolish chance. To substitute an external world indifferent to the human project with the meaning that institutes an order that will be felt as actual being, to be opposed to the nothingness of derelict matter. And the intrusion – with Daguerre, with the first photograph – of chance into this mental space whose doors had been closed to it, was an event that was bound to be intensely experienced in every part of society, even if in most cases this was not articulated. Nothingness invited itself to the already ransacked banquet table. God was dying there more obviously than anywhere else in the West’s relation to the world. If images could no longer ensure meaning, then what, apart from material reality, was left to the man and woman of the new age? Mallarmé, the great witness of this epiphany of non-being, could indeed pronounce his “funereal toast” in front of all these “scattered shadows on vain walls.”

But it was then, in the second moment of the dialectic, that resistance was organised to this invasion of the image by the outside, by the abyss. A resistance that secured photography’s extraordinary future. A handful of artists thought that the non-sense of the photographic could be countered by making it imitate the work of painters. This was naïve and it was futile. Their pseudo-painting only welcomed chance to a higher level in the conception of the image. But from the depths of the spirit there came a decisive realisation, which was that in photography something other than matter had made its first appearance. Another reality was absent from the old kind of image, or appeared there only in the artist’s interpretation, where it was deprived of what it actually was: an act, the direct manifestation of an effective existence: it was the gaze of the persons represented in paintings, in statues. True, what life there is in the gaze of Baldassare Castiglione, and what truth, too! Raphael wonderfully captured all the things he perceived in that intellect, in that heart. But even so, is the gaze fully itself? No, because there is nothing unknown behind those painted eyes, no thoughts unknown to us, no decisions about to be taken, no future already begun that we immediately perceive, unpenetrated but alive, a fullness, an immediate presence, on the faces of men and women we simply pass in the street.

Whereas, when Baudelaire sat for Nadar, and Rimbaud for Carjat, it was this uninterpreted gaze, and therefore this direct relation with the person existing in his de facto non-being but also in his desire-to-be that appeared in the photograph of them. And that, too, was a historical first, except that it is now with a contrary kind of meaning and virtualities. With the materiality of the fabric, the grain of marble, the scattering of stones on a slope, it was the totally negative transcendence of the outside that penetrated the image, fully denoting the randomness that ruins the illusion of being. And these gazes, this other kind of transcendence, were certainly not proof that what faced the photographer there was a reality that we might victoriously hold up against the nothingness discovered within the human condition. It was, though, evidence that a person is no nobody; is not simple nature. That in this nothingness there is a consciousness, a will.

To the pessimistic suggestions of the first photographer, to the nihilism that the new technology risks spreading or increasing in our future society, the photographic portrait thus opposes, with equal radicalism, a memento, at the very least, of the person as a presence to themself and to others, as a consciousness of being, illusory or otherwise. And that is what enabled Nadar and many others, later on, to make that same photographic act that devastated being in the world the occasion and the place of a resistance to its deleterious suggestions, by their attentiveness to the gazes that appeared before them, and to the faces that these gazes lit up. Some of Nadar’s portraits, such as the one of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, are admirable because, under the sign of this first fundamental reaffirmation of the idea of being – of presence to the self of the person as being – they are able to observe in faces what matter does not know, what denies their randomness, such as the fold of suffering around an aging mouth, or the weight of an eyebrow weary yet held open.

Many of the photographers of those first years and of the centuries that followed were thus great “resistants” who sought to preserve the option of being within the visual obviousness of a world that is no more than its materiality, even if this needed to be understood in a new way, and decided rather than simply observed. And, of course, it is to this resistance that photography owes its status as an art, joining other kinds of images in a concern that, alongside poets and painters, gives them access to the problematics of existence. This has given us some great portraits but also street scenes captured, as the expression puts it so well, in the moment, and even landscape photographs.

II

I would like to go further with this reflection on what, to put it simply, is the nature of poetics in photography, but today I have sketched out these few ideas only to introduce – to come back to the subject – to the very singular concerns of Lydia Flem. It seems to me that her researches can be understood from the viewpoint that I have adopted here, but when it is it becomes an incitement to a new way of thinking about the relation between photography and the photographer.

With a word, first of all: the feeling of non-being, as insinuated by photography, is something that Lydia Flem perceives just as acutely as all those I have just described as great “resistants,” but she does not try to refute it in her works, one by one; it is in the experience of her own existence, at difficult moments, that she seeks to triumph over it; and in her photographs, which remind her of it, she seeks, rather, to speak with it, and to understand its arguments.

Certainly, she knows where things stand, and didn’t need a photograph of a field of stones or the starry vault to gauge the impermanence and insubstantiality of all things. Writing Comment j’ai vidé la maison de mes parents,[1] an autobiographical book, she shows how sensitive she is to the unstoppable displacement that keeps the vestiges of an existence – objects from ordinary life, clothes, traces of various kinds of interests, the most humble are the most touching – from continuing their life in the future of another person, however attached they may be to these fading souvenirs. Grieving is a metaphysical experience, it teaches us that nothing is merely the froth of foam on unconfined sand nor high nor low nor light. And for Lydia this thought is all the more painful in that before her birth her parents, in a world at war, in a world of displacements and deportations, of the flouting of law, had to fight, not only for their lives but for the meaning that a life can have. To empty the house of the dead is indeed to approach the abyss.

But what is remarkable is how she reacted to his lesson which in fact is an ordeal. These hundreds of things in the family home, always familiar, often beloved, but which lose their place and reason – must we try to keep them with us, at the risk of letting the absence of which they now speak insinuate itself into present existence, at the expense of current attachments and the commitments that these demand? No, their heiress, though always loving, decided to give them to strangers, numerous strangers. Why? So that these things would regain meaning and value in lives other than her own, so that they would take up position again in the being that human society, whatever its degree of disintegration, nevertheless desires. An offer that makes it possible, therefore, not to betray a heritage: by this sweeping gesture of giving to close strangers she puts back in circulation the meaning that had been her parents’ fundamental experience, the hard-won good that, however, was now in the process of disappearing in those humble possessions from their lives that had ceased.

Now – and it is in this regard that light is shed on Lydia’s photographs – this offer that is made in giving things that risk no longer being, this reiteration within the evanescence of all things of the cup or the scissors that had been used so that they can again be used and meaningful, is precisely what these images do or, rather, suggest that they can do, in an even broader and more radical way, and do so through meditation on this grieving, but also, no doubt, because of the other ordeal that Lydia had to face a little later, illness that can be a discouragement it is important to overcome. This work on the image begun, if I am not mistaken, when this new ordeal was at its most intense, is, figurally, what was required of her by this heritage from her parents of which she knew not to register the fleeting possession but to record the imperishable being. But this was also what helped her overcome illness.

Will Lydia Flem agree with my interpretation of her work? I hazard it, in any case, because I have no doubt that it at will at least keep me fairly close to the questions that this photographer asks in her work, questions which are surely not of an aesthetic nature. For example, she is not concerned with assorting colours, with opposing or joining forms.

Reflecting on what she does, I am mindful that Lydia does stress what could seem in a rather specific way a problem concerning these aspects. “I need to compose,” she writes. Composition, that concern of Renaissance painters and of musicians, extended to poetry by Edgar Allan Poe – is that also, still, her concern?

But she also says that composition “helps me to live,” and we can therefore assume that what she means by this word cannot necessarily be reduced to considerations on space glimpsed through the window of the work and the relation between forms and volumes in that space. What are Lydia Flem’s oppositions about? Let us begin by observing that in these photos nothing  – colours, effects of light, the play of shadows, singular framings –comes between the person looking and the objects that Lydia has photographed. There is nothing here to help us imagine a space where these things might be, a room or natural setting, and not the slightest light from the sky or a lamp that we would see bathing them. They seem to be thrown towards us from the depths of the image, except that this image has no ground, it is all there in a foreground behind which nothing opens and nothing is even conceivable. Violent, these figures which seem to want to leave the image, to be graspable by all, force their way into our world. And what are these figures? With the exception here and there of an apple that in fact is so brutally red or green that it looks like an industrial product, the objects are only manufactured ones, and most of them are small. Magnifying glasses, scissors, binoculars, playing cards, little wooden figures, rosettes, pins, rubber bands, boxes, bottles, embroideries, the kind of things you’d find on a bric-a-brac stand, or chance upon at home, in drawers, or the kind of things that can catch your eye, ask to be adopted by the person who has undertaken to empty an apartment that is at once familiar and overflowing with surprises.

These things are offered up for adoption, which is understandable, since, being manufactured, they are not rooted in life like a plant or an animal, in that succession of births and deaths thanks to which mere day-long existences can, in disappearing, be absorbed into the whole, finding a degree of happiness in that. The objects photographed by Lydia Flem exist only by and through us, they are of the same kind as those she found in her parents’ home, where they asked her to be able to go on being, and that she should do so herself. This way of photographing has grasped in the thing itself the yet invisible movement whereby it withdraws into itself, and thus falls completely into this space of matter that is repressed by the places we institute but, from the depths of this abyss, reaches out to us.

And what, in these conditions, can “composing” mean? Nothing that is not an acute awareness of this randomness that composition, this bid for the timeless, seeks constantly to abolish. For chance is the other name of that outside in the night of which are dissolved those relations that, in our desire for day, we wish to believe are true bonds between things. And so Lydia tells that she “unreflectingly” sets out the various objects she takes up on surfaces that in themselves are indifferent: for she wants to pre-empt the thought that would yearn for those relations. She no longer proposes to serve intentions, desires or projects. On the contrary, by dismissing all these she is trying to bare the thing that these aims and these views cover with their always-simplified idea of them. Lydia’s “composition” means – when we see the magnifying glass near the scissors on the table – perceiving in that proximity the chance that is on the same level as their nature as magnifying glass or scissors without consciousness of self or will; it means reaching them in their en-soi, which is nothing. This composing, this passage into the outside, is no longer, as in the classic image, something that can abolish chance, or at least dream of doing so; it is its manifestation. It is the immediate perception of this withdrawal of meaning and of the non-being that choke those who sort through the vestiges of a family home. It is also the intuition of the teaching that we must learn to accept from the wreckage from a great crash, despite all these meanings, such loving meanings, that we bestowed on them in the dream that is our life.

III

This is a lesson, indeed, that Flem has admirably articulated. All those familiar with her work have been struck by her interest in the keys to hotel rooms, specifically the ones hung from the board at reception in an “old palace hotel” in Sils-Maria. Lydia placed thirty-two of these keys upright on a checkerboard, side by side with their numbers and their chains well visible, and the meaning that this decision makes apparent in all her works, the experience of life that she shows to be active there, in the relation to the object, could not, in my view, be clearer. With Lydia objects speak their nothingness only by proclaiming our own at the same time, their sudden appearance without earth or sky in unbordered spaces makes us see, as if in a mirror, the nothingness that we all are too: and here are the keys to say it explicitly. What more are we, indeed, than residents for only a few nights in the rooms of an old hotel, less durable than these keys that will continue to hang from the board with “216” or “103” written on their tab in their size or nearly to metaphorise with all the brilliance of their shiny matter the evanescence of all things? The house that Lydia Flem had to empty is already a hotel room.

And, for Lydia, to this thought is added the ineradicable, obsessive memory that the inhabitant of the house, her mother, a former deportee who still cried out from the depths of her nights, indelibly wore, a number on her arm, which gave the room numbers of the hotel keys another reason to signify meaninglessness, but this time redoubling it with the fear of the irreducible nature of evil in society, in our lives: an incitement to more despair. When we think of the death camps, that project of emptying the human being – the speaking being – of its interiority, we are very close to renouncing what this work by Lydia desires: by reinitiating objects from her life in the becoming of other people’s lives, to found a new kind of meaning, a second degree in the faith in being through the lessons of the illusory. This obvious overdetermination of the keys in the photos of Sils-Maria makes the image a coming-to-the-limits but also the expression of the need for a decision.

Now, this is the centre, or, to put it better, the heart of the photographer’s search, if not of this existence. The decision is already taken under the gaze of these keys whose meaning the earlier work makes it easier to recognise. Lydia lays out the keys of the rooms to the “old palace hotel” on the squares of a chequerboard, that is to say, in that space of both law and desire, the scene, over the centuries, of the clash between the side of evil, of potential despair, and the equally eternal desire to try to be, the will to be that Hamlet was unable to live out. These keys, Lydia places them upright on so many squares, side by side, basically in battle formation, making these sad, clearly visible numbers the assembled army of non-being, and thus what is presented here is a combat, against the pull of nothingness, and hope reviving. “Pawns and pieces of an unnamed and hopeless catastrophe, fascist army,” pushing forward “the innocent with figures tattooed on their metal skin,” writes Lydia, very lucidly.

What remains – and this is the lesson as well as the wish of this photo of keys, representative of an entire body of work – is to play this part in life, for it can only be there, with, around us and in us, all the desires we feel and all the affection of which we are capable, that the great revival may take place, that confidence may revive, and the world begin anew. A “nameless catastrophe” that is constantly coming into being? Yes, because, at death, matter surges back into existences, reducing them to names now lived from the outside, their house emptied of what gave meaning and raison-d’être to their life. But is there “no way out”? Perhaps, but no, it is the revival to which Lydia is summoning us, without our having fought this battle that consists, precisely, in giving names to new lives in order to make them, for a moment, new beings. Being is only an act that we decide, that we revive, a flame in a relay that, as such, does not cease, or must not do so. Such is the lesson of Lydia Flem’s photographs, which do not close up over their appearance and take their place alongside others with a different aim, in an artistic becoming on the margins of life, but intervene in life itself, question it, await its answer – and help it, if need be, to rally.

Yves Bonnefoy

BONNEFOY Yves (2014) : « Les photographies de Lydia Flem », Les Photographies de Lydia Flem. The Photographs of Lydia Flem, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Maison de l’Amérique latine, Institut français de Berlin, p.31-45.

CASANOVA the man who really loved women

Lydia Flem english , 0 commentaire

translated by Catherine Temerson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ed.

« Between Casanova’s time and ours stretch two centuries of ignorance and misunderstanding. This remarkable man has been thought of as a Don Juan of the salons, cold and indifferent to women, but in this new book Lydia Flem rediscovers him as he really was, an ardent man of the Enlightenment, a true friend and lover of women. In Paris, Rome, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and London, this comedians’ child could be found in aristocratic milieus or low dives, in convent alcoves, at gaming tables and in the libraries of the philosophes: Casanova was everywhere and knew everyone. A generous, spirited man, he gave of himself without stint, and men and women alike rejoiced in his company. He was learned, amusing, helpful, wise – and something of a scoundrel, for in the class-bound European circles he moved in, he was always on the point of being « found out » as an impostor, a low-born nobody. He hated the snobbery but he loved his freedom. Ms. Flem gives a deliciously entertaining account of Casanova’s adventures with women young and old (sometimes mother and daughter), with friends both fierce and loyal, interspersing her own witty narrative with quotations of apt passages from Casanova’s amazing memoirs – which he wrote when, slowed by old age and illness, he was exiled from Venice and living in a Bohemian castle. »

Review : New York Times

The final reminder : How I Emptied My Parents’ house

Lydia Flem Comment j'ai vidé la maison de mes parents, english , 0 commentaire

Souvenir Press, 2005, translated by Elfreda Powell

This taboo-breaking book deepens the understanding of the death of one’s parents through the experiences of the author, a daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her parents never communicated their imprisonment experiences, causing Lydia Flem to grow up in a stifling silence that was finally broken upon their deaths as she emptied the old house. She discovers that the lonely process of bereavement is not only one of grieving, but a chaotic jumble of emotions that range from anger and oppressive, infinite pain to revulsion, remorse, and a strange sense of freedom.

Review

« Elegant, poignant and profoundly honest, The Final Reminder is a rumination on ageing, bereavement, solitude and ancestry. » — ‘Times Literary Supplement’

« Lydia Flem has used the process of clearing out her parents’ home after her mother’s death to explore her grief. » — ‘Jewish Chronicle’

« In the process of clearing the house Lydia… gets to know her mother more truly after death. » — ‘Spectator’

« This painful but poignant and taboo-breaking book… explores the process of bereavement and the curious mix of emotions it brings. » — ‘Tribune’

« Deserves to take its place in that select library, alongside Tennyson’s In Memoriam and CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed. » — ‘Sunday Times’ –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Freud the Man

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Other Press, 2003, translation Susan Fairfield

The world knows Freud as a thinker–one of the founding giants of modern culture. Now Lydia Flem paints a unique and unforgettable portrait of Frued the man: a father, husband, and friend, a secular Jew with passion for classical antiquity and European culture, torn between his need to be fully accepted in an anitsemitic society while remaining fatihful to his orgins.

Flem enters into the depths of Freud’s creativity, showing how his thinking is connected to his immersion in the arts, the history of religions, and mythology. The intimate details of his daily life, his relationships with women, his poetic gifts, his travels, his dreams, his letters to family, friends, and colleagues: all reveal his vision of the unconscious. We accompany Freud on his walks through Vienna and Rome; look over his shoulder as he writes to his fiancee; learn the significance of the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian figurines that stand before him on his desk as he conceives his groundbreaking ideas; and discover the books, read in childhood, that later shape his self-analysis and his theoretical development.

Flem draws on an unusually broad range of sources, but she wears her learning lightly: her biography of Freud reads like a novel, full of vivid details and captivating human interest. From the 6-year-old gleefully tearing up a book illustrated with pictures of Persia; to the young doctor balancing his scientific training with his love of Shakespeare; to the psychoanalyst in his prime, conquering the resistance to his theories; to the old man, ravaged by illness, forced to flee into exile in England, Lydia Flem leads us deep into the life of a genius.

Makers of Jewish Modernity – Freud – Princeton University Press

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Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Lydia Flem

TRANSLATED BY CATHERINE TEMERSON

When Sigismund Schlomo Freud turned seven, his father, Jakob, opened the family Torah for him. The biblical story he presented for Sigmund to read was from the remarkable bilingual German-Hebrew edition, the Israelitische Bibel. The stories in this edition were illustrated and included commentaries by the Reform rabbi Ludwig Philippson in the spirit of the Aufklärung, the Judaism of the En- lightenment. This exceptional version of the Bible is subtitled Den heiligen Urtext, and for Freud this first book of stories and images was a fundamental, founding text.

From the time he was nine and a half, when his maternal grandfather, Jakob Nathansohn, died, the archaeological engravings from Philippson’s Bible served as the backdrop to the only anxiety dream that Freud talked about and analyzed over thirty years later in The Interpretation of Dreams, the dream he called “beloved mother and bird-beaked figures.” On his thirty-fifth birthday, his father gave him the copy of his childhood Bible, newly rebound, or perhaps bound for the first time, for it is not impossible that Jakob Freud acquired this Bible in its first edi- tion, in fascicules, between 1839 and 1854. He added an inscription in Hebrew to this symbolic gift:

Son who is dear to me, Shelomoh. In the seventh in the days of the years of your life the Spirit of the Lord began to move you [Judges 13:25] and spoke within you: Go, read in my Book that I have written and there will burst open for you the wellsprings of understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. Behold, it is the Book of Books, from which sages have excavated and lawmakers learned knowl- edge and judgment [ Numbers 21:18]. A vision of the Almighty did you see; you heard and strove to do, and you soared on the wings of the Spirit [ Psalms 18:11]. Since then the book has been stored like the fragments of the tablets in an ark with me. For the day on which your years were filled to five and thirty I have put upon it a cover of new skin and have called it: ‘Spring up, O well, sing ye unto it!’ [Numbers 21:17] And I have presented it to you as a memorial and as a reminder of love from your father, who loves you with everlasting love. Jakob, Son of R. Shelomoh Freid [sic]. In the capital city Vienna, 29 Nisan [5]651, 6 May [1]1891. (….) »