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In this fascinating study, James Martell exposes the project of
obliteration inscribed in the modernist myths and manifestos
proclaiming the male writer’s arrival, originality, agency, and right to
speak. The Mother’s Son interprets the mother-son relation as
constitutive of male modernist literature’s sense of its identity and
possibility. We rediscover Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke,
Joyce, and Beckett as matricidal sons, their acts of separating from,
effacing and appropriating the mother’s body indissociable from their
coming to writing. This striking critical negotiation of sexual
difference is worthy to follow major theoretical studies of matricide
and the maternal by Elisabeth Bronfen, Barbara Johnson, Amber
Jacobs, and Elissa Marder.
Sarah Wood, Reader in Literature and Theory (Retired), University
of Kent, UK

James Martell’s The Mother’s Son: Modernism, Self-Creation, and the

Maternal is a recalibration of the family romance and the crisis of
modernist anxiety in terms of “a surviving mother with the power of
giving both life and death” and its manifestations among late 19th-
and 20th-century authors from Poe to Beckett. Set against a
background of Derridian explorations of violence, “the logic of
pregnancy,” the mother’s “generative traits,” and the “logic of
obsequence” developed in Glas, The Mother’s Son offers alternate
paths into issues of modern and modernist literary creation and
thereby affords fresh, thoroughly research insights and challenges in
almost every sentence.
S. E. Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of
English, Florida State University

Like every important text, James Martell’s first book, Modernism,

Self-Creation and the Maternal: The Mother’s Son, goes beyond its
object of study. Derrida, Beckett and others (Baudelaire, Poe…) are
certainly the main figures in this essay, but Martell’s ambition is not
only to do a new reading of them but also, and truly, to shake all the
limits: between literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and
poetics, rhetoric and gender studies. Ultimately, Martell invites us to
a new way of reading and interpreting texts, a new way of thinking.
Bruno Clément, Professeur des universités, Université Paris 8
Modernism, Self-Creation, and
the Maternal

Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother,

Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new
interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau,
Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through
this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an
“anxiety” rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence
done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through
writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study
analyses these authors in tandem with Derrida’s work on the gender-
specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition.
The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a
constant crisis vis-à-vis the mother’s body as site of both origin and
dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a
patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women
and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative
traits.

James Martell is an assistant professor of romance languages at

Lyon College. He is the co-editor—together with Arka Chattopadhyay
—of Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature
(Roman Books, 2013), and—together with Fernanda Negrete—of the
special issue of the bilingual journal Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujourd’hui titled “Beckett beyond Words” (2018). He has
published articles on Derrida, Deleuze, Beckett, and the cinema of
Béla Tarr.
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,

art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political,
social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the
Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited
to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures
and communities; and agitations and developments regarding
subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy,
democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal,
performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities,
transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities
between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent
responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic
novels, and film will also be considered.

13 Philanthropy and Early Twentieth-Century British

Literature
Milena Radeva-Costello

14 Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays

Edited by Jane Ford and Alexandra Gray

15 Fieldwork of Empire, 1840–1900

Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of
British Expeditionary Literature
Adrian S. Wisnicki
16 Threatened Masculinity from British Fiction (1880–
1915) to Cold-War German Cinema
Joseph P. Willis

17 Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal

The Mother’s Son
James Martell

For more information about this series, please visit:

https://www.routledge.com/Among-the-Victorians-and-
Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035
Modernism, Self-Creation, and
the Maternal
The Mother’s Son

James Martell
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of James Martell to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-19169-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-20086-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
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To whom we write on
Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Anxiety of the Son

Incorporating Metis
As Many Matricides as Sons

2 Baudelaire’s Mother as Counterfeit Coin

The Inherited Coin
The Conseil Judiciaire
Birth and Death of the Mother and Son
The Conseil as Purloined Letter

3 The Age of Grammatology and the Epoch of the Writer-

Son
We Were Born in 1967, 1712, and 1765–67
New Rule of Life
Morella Modernist Mother

4 Writing without Matricide

Who Writes (I) in Literature, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis
White Agony, Youthful Urgency, Dawn Itself
Sans Alibi: Without Other Place
The Tongue Rests In
5 The Logic of Pregnancy, Beckett’s Œuvre Inside Glas
After the Singular Step
Mothers Pregnant with Each Other
The Effects of AgGLutination
The Theatre of Theory and Its Procession
The Living Remains: The Proper Names
The Mimetic Rhythm as Theoretical Site
Blind Remains: Conceiving Thought

6 Writing as Image: The Maternal Tattoo

With Her Eyes
Idiomatic Images: Irezumi

Index
Acknowledgements

Since every book is a confluence of voices, writing a page of

acknowledgements where I give their names to all those who helped
me in the construction of this book appears as a daunting, almost
impossible task. However, since in one way or another this book
began when I started reading Samuel Beckett and Jacques Derrida
back in college, I want to thank first all the professors I had then
who helped me discover my intellectual path, among them:
Fernando Álvarez, Rodrigo Bazán, and especially Carlos Mendiola.
I want to thank as well all those who encouraged and helped me
during my graduate studies, people like Vicky Unruh, Olivier Morel,
Donald Crafton, the Nanovic Institute of European Studies at the
University of Notre Dame, and the folks at the IMEC (Institut
Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine) in France, as well as Karine
and Lorenz, who hosted me in Paris for a while.
I especially want to thank my advisers, Maud Ellmann, Alain
Toumayan, and the late Joseph A. Buttigieg for their guidance and
faith in my work.
There were also the occasional, impromptu, or indirect mentors
who, through the years, have supported my research with questions,
friendly discussions, or a simple nod, scholars and friends like Bruno
Clément, Sarah Wood, Stanley E. Gontarski, and David Pattie, as well
as colleagues and friends like Arka Chattopadhyay and Christopher
Langlois. I have been lucky also to find at Lyon College friends and
colleagues who, like Scott Roulier, Wesley Beal, Radek Szulga, Brian
Hunt, and Helen Robbins, have been kind enough to read parts of
this work, helping me with invaluable comments and observations.
 Finally, since without their chorus and support none of this work
would have been possible, I want to thank the friends who, in the
impossible and marvelous event of their friendship, have helped and
encouraged me since the beginning of my career, voices like
Guillermo Albert, Fernanda Negrete, Saí Tapia, Erik Larsen, Anna
Siebach, Damiano Benvegnù, and Hailey LaVoy.
Special thanks go to Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal for
letting us reproduce a modified version in Chapter 4 of a previous
article entitled “Derrida on Beckett or the Painful Freudian Mark,”
which appeared in Volume 44, Issue 4 (2011): 95–108, and to The
Oxford Literary Review for allowing us to reproduce in Chapter 6 an
amplified version of an article published as “Idiomatic Images:
Derrida and the Forgotten Japanese Film Irezumi” in Volume 39,
Issue 2, December 2017: 210–27.
To end, I want to especially thank my partner and reader, Emily
Riley, without whom this book would have never seen the light of
day.
Introduction

But look, the ghost (ψυχ ή)

of my mother came, my mother, dead and gone now…
Anticleia—daughter of that great heart Autolycus—
whom I had left alive when I sailed for sacred Troy.
I broke into tears to see her here, but filled with pity,
even throbbing with grief, I would not let her ghost
approach the blood till I had questioned Tiresias myself.
(252)

In Book XI of The Odyssey, “The Kingdom of the Dead” or Nekyia,

these are the lines that describe the hero’s only encounter with his
mother. In this surprising first and last encounter Odysseus, in spite
of his grief, initially does not let his mother drink of the sacrificial
blood and thus be able to speak. If we, surprised as well, wonder
why Odysseus did not allow her immediately—by drinking the blood
—to speak, the first answer we find is that Circe had told him to
“prevent any other poor ghost from coming near the spilt blood
before Tiresias.” Nevertheless, Tiresias is not the first ghost to speak
since Odysseus, surprised to see there one of his comrades, Elpenor,
forgets about Circe’s order and—together with Homer—about the
sacrificial blood, and cries to Elpenor asking for the reason of his
death. After this first conversation with a dead one comes his
mother. Even though Odysseus is moved to tears by this other
surprise, he refrains from talking to her and waits for Tiresias. Why
then did Odysseus, pained by this new sorrowful sight, not forget
also all commands and talk to her?
 Ἀντίκλεια, Odysseu’s mother’s name, literally means “without
(anti-) fame (kléos).” Contrary to Tiresias, she would not go down in
Greek and Western literature as a famous recurrent character of the
most defining texts of our cultures (The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex,
Antigone). However, her name does survive in another kingdom
since it is also the name of a genus of flowering plants first
described in 1843 by Carl Sigismund Kunth in Enumeratio Plantarum
Omnium Hucusque Cognitarum (there is even one member of this
genus called the anticlea vaginata, which is endemic to Colorado,
southeast Utah, and northeast Arizona). This translation of a
matronymic, from the realm of literature and tradition, to the vegetal
kingdom is not uncommon. Nor is its inverted movement when a
flower gives the name to a character (i.e. Marguerite, Gretchen, Lily,
Flora, Hyacinth, Daisy, Viola, Églantine, Floris, Blanchefleur, etc.).
Nevertheless, with modernism appeared new complications and
knots of this gendered-genus-species-naming movement. One of the
best examples of this complication is the last paragraph of the “Lotus
Eaters” chapter in Ulysses:

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb

of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw
his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly
upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark
tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream
around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.
(86)

As Maud Ellmann explains in her insightful analysis of this passage:

“the term ‘limp father of thousands,’ (…) alludes to ‘mother of
thousands,’ the common name of Saxifraga stolonifera, a flower that
spreads through rhizomatic runners, like the telephonic navelcord of
‘Proteus’” (165–66). In this way, through the undecidable shifts
(riprippled) of this modernist, sexually-, gender- and genus-
ambiguous flower, almost growing out of his own navel, the ever-
growing biography of Odysseus/Ulysses, that is to say, of our
anthropo-phallogo-centric history became rhizomatic, suffered a
ripple, and unveiled perhaps why Anticleia, the non-famous (because
non-written) mother of Odysseus, had to be ignored, turned into a
common flower and told to wait for the time of its blooming. After
all, as Derrida wrote: “the essence of the flower appears in its
disappearance (…)” (Glas, 264; FR, 274).1
Because this movement from human to plant passes through the
navel, it necessarily alludes to birth and consequently to history and
temporality.2 Thus, this reflection on the flowering navel as the mark
of birth points to itself as a quintessential modernist gesture when
we understand modernism as Jean-Michel Rabaté and Jacques
Derrida examined it: as a hauntology or inescapable obsession with
the past.3 What is more, this literary or stylistic self-reflection
through the flowering navel and genitals in Ulysses acquires new
significance for our contemporary reality and horizon since, through
a floral conquering of the phallus and anthropos, it signals the
ultimate survival of the non-human over us and, thus, the
Anthropocene as the horizon of possibility of our own extinction. Like
the flower-spit in Glas that we will analyse in Chapter 5, this
modernist flower gets thrown over us, making us Narcissuses,
covering us simultaneously with love and oblivion.
As the death of every living specimen, extinction implies not only
the cancellation of any new birth but also the killing of all mothers,
together with motherhood and maternity. In this way, extinction is,
primarily, a matricide.4 Now if, as this book will try to show,
modernism has as one of its distinctive features—if not of its
foundations—a self-creation of the writer that implies an obliteration
of the mother and maternity, this modernist matricidal tendency
ultimately entails extinction as well. But is it an extinction of
everything living, of all of mankind, or is there something that
survives in this era of the Anthropocene? “But what if the
Anthropocene (…) is just another form of hubris” (Extinction Studies,
xiii), a purportedly apocalyptic sign disguising a restricted economy
as a general economy? After all, etymologically, the Anthropocene
spells a “new” (kainós) “man” (anthropos) in the same way that
modernism was supposed to mark the birth of the new.
 What the following chapters will try to show through an analysis
of some of the more representative male writers of modernism—
juxtaposed with an examination of Derrida’s oeuvre as the work of a
modernist writer—is how the rebirth of the writer-son in modernism
implies this matricidal tendency: the simultaneous and oxymoronic
effacement and remarking of the mother’s body. Chapter 1 will set
up the terms of the problem through an examination of Derrida’s
logics of obsequence and of pregnancy and a brief analysis of the
questions of self-creation and the maternal in authors like Arthur
Rimbaud, Herman Melville, Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke,
and James Joyce. Chapter 2 will focus on Baudelaire and on the
relation between his understanding of the economy of his work vis-
à-vis his mother and the conseil judiciaire imposed on him by her
and his stepfather. Chapter 3 will delimit the epoch of the modernist
writer-son, starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, passing through
Edgar Allan Poe, and continuing up to Samuel Beckett, and then it
will examine it through the effect that Derrida’s work has had in
literature and literary studies—what has been called “The Age of
Grammatology.” Chapters 4 and 5 are a comparative study of the
work of Samuel Beckett and Derrida, the first one focusing on their
shared desire of a new kind of writing, a “writing without matricide.”
The latter one focuses on the only explicit quote of a text by Beckett
in Derrida’s corpus, examining it carefully within the text where it
appears (Glas), underlining the effects that the Beckettian oeuvre as
a whole had in Derrida’s work and showing how, read together,
Derrida’s and Beckett’s oeuvres reveal the modernist writer-son’s
aporetic logic of self-creation and matricide. Finally, Chapter 6
focuses on the relation between words, images, and their bodily
surface of inscription by analysing a Japanese film about tattoos that
Derrida briefly described in a footnote to Monolingualism of the
Other, where he expressed his dream of making language speak
itself by itself, giving as a result “not necessarily an infant but a
tattoo, a splendid form, concealed under garments in which blood
mixes with ink to reveal all its colours to the sight” (51–52).
 As we know, in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud ascribes the
dreamer’s feeling of déjà vu in dreams of landscapes and localities to
the memory of the place—of all places—from which one could say
with the utmost certainty “I have been here before”: the genitals of
the mother. In our Western modernists’ traditions, this place as the
most certain location incarnates both the start and the end
(“wombtomb”) of all odysseys. Now, if Odysseus’ mother dies
precisely—unbeknownst to him—in medias res of his own journey,
what does this tell us about both the origin and end of his trip—
metaphorically incarnated in her womb? Perhaps this interruption
and the unanswerable doubt that it grafts in The Odyssey are
unsolvable, and this is what makes Homer’s The Odyssey the first
modernist text, haunted by the question of its own past and
especially by the body of the mother. In other words, the death of
the mother in the middle of the son’s trip might signify the question:
what if there never was a trip? Or, what is perhaps worse, what if
the trip never began? What if we are still in that most certain of all
places, the wombtomb,5 but, like Jung’s patient who became a
Beckettian character in All that Fall, we are there waiting uselessly
since in the most terrifying of the future perfect statements: we will
have never been born? After all, this was the dream transmitted
from Silenus through Nietzsche to the modernists: “The best of all
things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not
to be, to be nothing” (Birth, 22).
If the beginning of the modernist literary journey is a remaking of
oneself that implies a matricide, then, motherless and consequently
birthless, the son-writer will never have been born, and his
modernist text will be precisely the attempt at the narration of this
aporetic failure. The aporia of this failed or eternally interrupted
odyssey will assume different styles and recreate different stories,
attempts at self-making, or excursions of sovereign self-expression
into the outside (be this nature, the feminine, the other, etc.).
Nevertheless, according to the Derridean logics of pregnancy and
obsequence, all these attempts will never escape the mother they
tried to erase in order to have a “true,” sovereign beginning, making
these writer-sons in their obsession all the more modernist through
their aporetic relation to their maternal origin. In this way, perhaps
the quintessential modernist gesture is the attempt at this erasure,
the effacing of the ghost (ψυχή) of Anticleia who keeps coming back
as the forgotten, extended surface on which we write. This is
perhaps the unintended meaning of Freud’s late enigmatic
statement: “Psyche (ψυχή) is extended, knows nothing about it”
(300). Except that it is rather the writer-son who is in the unknown.

Notes
1 Unless otherwise stated, bilingual texts will be referred, first in its translation’s
pagination, then in the originals.
2 Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is another great example of this morphing
of the human into a plant as a way to express a change in temporality: “The
apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”
3 See Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity and The Pathos of Distance,
and J. Derrida, Specters of Marx.
4 I want to thank Sarah Wood for pointing this relation between matricide and
extinction to me.
5 Or as Angela Moorjani describes it with regard to Beckett’s oeuvre: “the
tomblike womb and the womblike tomb in the darkness of the mind in which
the living are unborn and the dead do not die” (“Beckett’s Devious Deictics,”
21).

References
Bird Rose, Deborah, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew (eds.). Extinction
Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.
Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Paris: Galilée, 1974.
———. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1986.
———. Monolingualism of the Other. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford UP,
1998.
———. Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & The New
International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Ellmann, Maud. The Nets of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 23. London: Hogarth P, 1964.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. London: Penguin, 1996.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: First Vintage, 1992.
Moorjani, Angela. “Beckett’s Devious Deitics.” Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of
Critical Essays, edited by Lance St. John Butler. New York: MacMillan, 1990, pp.
20–30.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Ghosts of Modernity. Gainesville: UP of Florida: 1996.
———. The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns. New York: Bloomsbury,
2016.
1 The Anxiety of the Son

Incorporating Metis
You gave birth to me because you could only
give me what you are.
Mother, you gave birth to my death.
Ever since, I live and die in you,
who are love.
Ever since, I am reborn of our death. (70)

These lines from Jabès’ The Book of Questions describe the theme
of this book in their expression of the writer-son’s realisation—and
possible acknowledgement—not only of a certain debt towards his
mother but also of a continuous containment within her, an
enveloping beyond life and death. In the tradition to which these
lines belong, they are related to other mother-son figures and their
aporetic, inseparable relations, like Death and his mother Sin in
Paradise Lost, where she describes their mortal mother-son relation
thusly:

Before my eyes in opposition sits

Grim Death my Son and foe, who sets them on,
And me his Parent would full soon devour
For want of other prey, but that he knows
His end with mine involved; and knows that I
Should prove a bitter Morsel, and his bane,
 Whenever that shall be; so Fate pronounced. (48)

While these two examples, as well as those that will follow, provide
us with literary expressions of the son’s anxiety vis-à-vis his mother,
especially with regard to the possibility of creation, The Mother’s
Son’s proper theoretical interrogation begins with the question: what
if Derrida’s enigmatic “law of obsequence” was the law of
modernism, or even more, the law of modernity? A neologism
composed of the French term obsèques and sequence, but with an
inexhaustible anasemic proliferation due to its signifying and
material particles (ob, sequor, funeral, following, according to, etc.),
this law is one of Derrida’s most enigmatic terms.1 Its description in
Glas—where it first appeared—is less a definition than a short
narrative, almost a Baudelairian prose poem:

As she follows, absolutely, she always survives—a future that

will never have been presentable—what she will have
engendered, attending, impassive, fascinating and provoking;
she survives the interring of the one whose death she has
foreseen. Logic of obsequence. (116–17b; FR 134b)

As a short story about a mother that, tautologically, precedes her

infants but also, aporetically, buries them, its biggest resonances
seem to appear in modernist literature and not in philosophy. From
the inaugural role of the telegram that Joyce/Stephen Dedalus’
receives saying “Nother dying come home father” (Ulysses, 42) to
Beckett’s confession “I am what her savage loving has made me”
(Knowlson, 273), this law or logic of a surviving mother with the
power of giving both life and death embodies the inaugural anxiety
that creates the modernist text, especially when considered together
with Derrida’s logic of pregnancy:

This is what I call in English the logic of pregnancy and in

French the foreclosure of the name of the mother. In other
words, you are all born, don’t forget, and you can write only
against your mother who bore within her along with you, what
 she has borne you to write against her, your writing with which
she would be large. And full, you will never get out of it. (The
Post Card, 150)2

Putting these two laws together brings up the main subject of this
book: the modernist son writer. He is a son not because of a
biological determination but because he was born through a mother
that he cannot become in his turn. He is a son writer not because of
a profession but because everything that he writes—following the
logic of pregnancy—was already within his mother, and—according
to the law of obsequence—will continue its survival only through
hers. Finally, he is a modernist son writer because these two laws
betray the ambivalent stance in front of tradition that makes writers
modernist, except that their “anxiety of influence” is not transposed
into a fathers and sons only genealogy but shows instead an original
maternal daemonic ground, especially in the anxious equivalence of
these last four words.3
Now, this book comes also in the wake of a growing tradition of
thinkers who have been working on the links between modernism
and its writers’ relation to the mother for a few decades now. It
owes much to works like Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body
(Routledge, 1992) and The Knotted Subject (Princeton, 1998), Elissa
Marder’s The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(Fordham, 2012) and Dead Time (Stanford, 2001), Barbara
Johnson’s Mother Tongues (Harvard, 2003), Amber Jacobs’ On
Matricide (Columbia, 2007), Maud Ellmann’s The Nets of Modernism
(Cambridge, 2010), and Lynne Huffer’s Maternal Pasts, Feminist
Futures (Stanford, 1998).4 In these works—and many others—
theorists have examined the complex question of mother and
maternity vis-à-vis writing. But while they analysed both male and
female authors, the question of the particularity of the writer-son in
front of the notions of mother and maternity as he writes and thinks
them has, for very understandable reasons,5 received less attention.
The most direct recent attempt to tackle this question has been
Andrew Parker’s The Theorist’s Mother (Duke, 2012). While Parker
focuses mostly on the mother as this notion and body appears and
works through the theorist or philosopher (focusing on Lacan, Freud,
and Marx), in this book I focus first on some of the “strongest”
modernist authors of our evolving canon and later on the crossroads
between the author who is seen as the closure or ultimate
consequence of the logics of modernism, Samuel Beckett, and
Jacques Derrida’s work. Analysing Beckett and other authors next to
and through Derrida’s oeuvre, I try to continue on Parker’s steps and
add to what he, Elissa Marder, and Gayatri C. Spivak understand is a
tremendous and fortunately unending task: to understand the role of
the mother in Derridean deconstruction.6 As we know, this task
cannot be tackled only from philosophy, theory, literature, or
psychoanalysis. As the modernist texts examined here, Derrida’s
work is written throughout all these discourses, and his writing and
style themselves weave continuously in and through these disciplines
and regimes of discourse.
To look into these two Derridean logics, obsequence and
pregnancy, as they are incarnated in modernist literature, Elisabeth
Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body gives us a first systematic view of the
issues involved. In this rich volume, Bronfen gives an extensive
account of the ways in which women’s bodies are sites of inscription
for the writer-son, where he can negotiate not only his birth and
separation from all that presided him (tradition included) but also his
death. While her focus is not directly on the writer-son’s mother’s
body but on different kinds of feminine bodies affected by desire and
masculine apotropaic tendencies, she presents clearly the significant
importance of the maternal body for the writer and gives us an
explanation of the anxiety that the obsequence of the mother can
generate:

Because the “mother” grounds and confirms subjectivity and

culture given that she is always already dead, renounced from
birth on (as the navel indicates), and present as an endlessly
receding entity, her death can not be reversed or repeated. It is
not a question of killing maternity but of avoiding the
 resurrection of the maternal into a fully present body. (ODB,
137)7

This description of the continuous danger of the resurrection of the

maternal body as the site of the grounding of the subject introduces
the essential reaction of the writer: matricide. However, as we will
see in Chapter 4, it is not clear if this murderous attempt is at killing
maternity itself, the mother, or both—nor if we can ever clearly
distinguish between them within these texts.
Bronfen’s exposition of matricide as an essential signifying knot of
modernist literature exposes a link that Amber Jacobs analyses in
great detail in On Matricide: the relation between phallogocentric
matricidal tendencies and the founding of knowledge, or at least of
the male subject supposed to know. Through a comparative
examination of different Greek myths within the writing of
psychoanalysis and theory, Jacobs exposes a foreclosure of matricide
within the male foundation and claim to knowledge and wisdom. She
examines the repression of the matricidal crime of Oedipus, and
then the path and destiny of Orestes as an enactment of the
forgiveness and erasure of the crime of matricide. But it is by
focusing on the enigmatic birth of Athena that Jacobs presents what
may be the reason for attempting to erase this foundational crime.
While it is custom to think that Athena was born directly and only
from Zeus’ head in the most intellectual of births, Jacobs points out
how before birthing Athena, Zeus had eaten Athena’s true mother,
the Titaness Metis: “Zeus put her away inside his own belly so that
this goddess should think for him, for good and for evil, then from
his head, by himself, he produced Athene of the gray eyes” (Hesiod,
quoted on Jacobs, 63). As Jacobs shows, this inaugural repression of
the maternal origin of Zeus’ favourite child exemplifies and begins a
series of continuous incorporations attempting to deny not only said
origin but also and especially the intellectual dimension of the
maternal body, underlined by Metis’ significant wisdom and cunning
knowledge.
 Zeus achieves his power through rape, incorporation, and
appropriation of the woman/mother. He cannibalizes Metis in
order to rob her of her knowledge and wisdom, together with
her reproductive capacity. From then on, she is silent and
invisible, an internal source of power that Zeus will claim as his
own. Her existence is obliterated so that not even her daughter
will ever know of the maternal body in which she was originally
conceived. Zeus, in his violent operation, succeeds in taking
total possession of the (m)other, whose power he both envies
and desires. His initial lust or desire for Metis quickly turns into
aggression that results in rape, followed by incorporation. He
moves the womb of Metis into his brain. (Jacobs, 63)

As we know, this displacement of the womb into the male’s brain

can be translated into that old trope according to which the writer or
artist gives birth to his works as a mother would her children. Thus,
through Zeus’ murderous incorporation of Metis, the maternal
metaphor of artistic and intellectual creation avows its violence and
denial. In other words, “giving birth” to artistic works is not just a
metaphor but also a reaffirmation of a continuous murderous
violence and a constant attempt at its repression. According to
Derrida’s logic of pregnancy, this continuous violence against and
repression of the mother cannot but return to the writer-son
following the surface of a maternal Mobius strip where he himself is
inscribed. Thus, if the logic of birth and death is inextricably linked
to the mother, it is because through the inescapable logic of
obsequence that makes us always follow her who will follow us, all
the writer-son’s attempts at capturing and incorporating her revert
back to him, bespeaking his non-existence and disappearance. And
since the writer-son’s attempts at crimes and repression are done
through language, this return and mortal folding, or invagination,8 of
the writing surface signify for the writer the unnameable or
unaccountable knot of his existence as both son and creator. This is
the crux of the writer-son in front of his birth and death as they are
necessarily spoken in his mother tongue and this is what makes his
attempts at naming or describing this condition modern, or in other
words, attempts at rebirth.
In this light, Rimbaud famous decree that “one must be
absolutely modern” (“il faut être absolument moderne”), usually cut
off from its context in Une saison en enfer, can be read again and
better within its originating work:

J’ai essayé d’inventer de nouvelles fleurs, de nouveaux astres,

de nouvelles chairs, de nouvelles langues. J’ai cru acquérir des
pouvoirs surnaturels. Eh bien ! je dois enterrer mon imagination
et mes souvenirs ! Une belle gloire d’artiste et de conteur
emportée !
(…)
Oui, l’heure nouvelle est au moins très sévère.
Car je puis dire que la victoire m’est acquise: les grincements
de dents, les sifflements de feu, les soupirs empestés se
modèrent. Tous les souvenirs immondes s’effacent. Mes derniers
regrets détalent, —des jalousies pour les mendiants, les
brigands, les amis de la mort, les arriérés de toutes sortes.—
Damnés, si je me vengeais!
Il faut être absolument moderne. (Poésies…, 203–04)

I’ve tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new
tongues. I believed I had acquired supernatural powers. Well! I
have to bury my imagination and my memories! A fine
reputation of an artist and story-teller lost sight of!
(…)
Yes, at least the new hour is very harsh.
For I can say that victory is mine: the gnashing of teeth, the
hissing of fire, the reeking sighs abate. All filthy memories fade
out. My last regrets scamper off: envy of beggars, brigands,
friends of death, backward creatures of all sorts.—You who are
damned, what if I avenged myself!
One must be absolutely modern. (Complete Works, 303)9
To be modern is thus to triumph, to conquer, to be victorious at the
new hour, over memories and regrets. This attempt at the new
includes, however, a burial, the internment of memory and its
counterpart, the imagination (the famous madwoman in the attic).
In this way, all the novelty of the artist, his creations—just as any
new Athena—involve a failed introjection, an incorporation that
remains a haunting.10 Creation and the modern artwork are, thus, a
revenge on this haunting. However, not every modern writer-son
writes like Rimbaud. In other words, not all writer-sons face the crux
of the mother tongue and the incorporation of the maternal power
of creation in the same way. Even if all modernist writing attempts a
rebirth of its authors and, with it, repeats the matricide and its
repression as it writes on the mother’s body, each author and texts
perform this in a different way. In some way, we can say that their
styles are the ways in which they deal with the matricide, as well as
with the more or less conscious perception of Derrida’s two logics:
the obsequence and the pregnancy.

As Many Matricides as Sons

The different kinds of attempts at rebirth that we find in modernist
authors explain the variety of notions of modernism that we have, as
well as their complex semantic and cultural connections with
conceptions of modernity. For example, in an excellent analysis of
the tradition of vital-masculine reproduction as it appears in Ahab’s
fantasy of a “complete man” in Moby Dick, Erik Larsen shows how
Melville’s writing simultaneously betrays a consciousness of the
matricidal crime in Ahab’s attempt at auto-logical masculine rebirth,
and an awareness of its erasure:

Thus the male is the “unbegotten” or “unbegun,” an eternally

self-sufficient principle of unity without antecedent, although
Ahab abruptly questions this arrogation of sublime
independence. The fatherly fire is ignorant, it appears, of some
vital predecessor that would call into question its position—a
 position about which Ahab claims contrastingly to have special
knowledge. Given that he begins this passage by including, if
problematically, the maternal in the story of his “genealogy,” it
follows that the flame’s faulty arrogance lies precisely in its
forgetting of a female “begetter” that would interrupt the
presumed continuity of vital-masculine reproduction. In other
words, it is Ahab’s partial identification of genealogy with a
different female element that seems to support his claim to a
superior gnosis. (137)

What is particularly interesting about this identification of a female

element is that it is an incorporation that allows Ahab the claim to a
superior knowledge. In other words, it is as if Zeus-Ahab recognised
for a second the criminal swallowing of Metis only to immediately
deny it keeping it only as a symptomatic mark, i.e. the giant yonic
scar that runs through his body. Ahab’s famous scar would present
to us thus the symptomatic remnant of the erased maternal element
that, as Larsen points out, appears symptomatically through the
reversal of natural and animal metaphors in their role as masculine
or feminine traits through Ishmael’s voice (note 42, 138).
In another example of conscious rebirth through knowledge,
Proust describes in Sodome et Gomorrhe II a rebirth Marcel
experiences [“a new and terrible and well-merited life”) (“une vie
terrible, méritée et nouvelle”) 702, 1593, my italics] through an
image triggered by Albertine’s confession of her friendship with Mlle
Vinteuil, confirming thus the third element of the triad woman-
death-image that both Bronfen and Marder analyse in their work11—
and that we will examine in Chapter 6 in the context of a Japanese
film in Derrida’s corpus. The content of the image is also very
significant for a consideration of the sexual difference within Proust’s
modernist tradition, since it is the image of Albertine sleeping with
another woman. As we know—and as we can see exposed and
complicated throughout Baudelaire’s work—the figure of the lesbian
appeared in the 19th century and at the turn of the century as a
threat to the traditional order of signification and reproduction
because she represented both a negation of the woman as mother
and of the woman’s role as counterpart to and completion of man.
Consequently, within such a society Marcel can logically associate
Albertine’s Sapphic desire with the “funest,” the “noxious,” and “evil
acts” in general.12 However, what is particularly striking in this image
of À la recherche is not only that it triggers the beginning of a new
life for Marcel as a kind of rebirth but also that the life-giving image
is equated by Marcel with Orestes, who is kept alive within Marcel,
for the day when he has to punish his mother’s crime and commit
matricide. As we can see in the quote—just one long sentence in the
French original—the dashes barely contain the Orestian crime and
punishment from spilling and becoming Marcel’s own. What is more,
there is a kind of invagination of the crime and matricide when the
comparison makes Marcel guilty, not for allowing the father’s murder
but rather for the death of the grandmother.13 After which, it is
unclear what exactly “comes suddenly out of the bottom of the night
(…) striking like an Avenger” (a Fury) and creating the new life of
Marcel. Is it the recently seen Sapphic image, Orestes, or the ghost
of the grandmother? Here is the complete image:

At the sound of these words, uttered as we were entering the

station of Parville, so far from Combray and Montjouvain, so
long after the death of Vinteuil, an image stirred in my heart, an
image which I had kept in reserve for many years that even if I
had been able to guess, when I stored it up long ago, that it
had a noxious power, I should have supposed that in the course
of time it had entirely lost it; preserved alive in the depths of my
being—like Orestes whose death the gods had prevented in
order that, on the appointed day, he might return to his native
land to avenge the murder of Agamemnon—as a punishment,
as a retribution (who knows?) for my having allowed my
grandmother to die; perhaps rising up suddenly from the dark
depths in which it seemed for ever buried, and striking like an
Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new and terrible and
well-merited life, perhaps also to make dazzling clear to my
 eyes the fatal consequences which evil actions eternally
engender, not only for those who have committed them but for
those who have done no more, or thought that they were doing
no more, than look on at a curious and entertaining spectacle,
as I, alas, had done on that afternoon long ago at Montjouvain,
concealed behind a bush where (as when I had complacently
listened to the account of Swann’s love affairs) I had perilously
allowed to open up within me the fatal and inevitable painful
road of Knowledge. And at the same time, from my biggest pain
I derived a feeling almost of pride, almost of joy, that of a man
whom the shock he has just received has carried at a bound to
a point to which no voluntary effort could have brought him.
(702–03, translation modified; FR 1593)

As we can see, the matricidal and life-giving image gets even more
complex through the Proustian logic of entanglement and mirroring
of different times and impressions (the train, Combray, the
voyeuristic moment at Mountjouvain, the death of the grandmother,
the listening of Swann’s love adventures, etc.). What is most
important for us in our consideration of the role of the mother and
matricide in the creation of the Proustian modernist project is that
the image links the matricide (through Orestes and the
grandmother’s death) with the new life, and more importantly, with
a special kind of knowledge marked by pain [“the fatal and inevitably
painful road of Knowledge” (“la voie funeste et destinée à être
douloureuse du Savoir”)], a guilty knowledge that, like Metis for
Zeus, was gained through suffering. The epistemological role of this
pain is again remarked shortly afterwards when Marcel—still
reflecting on the effects of the discovered image within him—inverts
the common trope according to which one needs to suffer in order
to create, remarking instead the need of a great capacity for
creation in order to attain certain levels of suffering: “It is often
simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far
enough in suffering” (“C’est souvent seulement par manque d’esprit
créateur qu’on ne va pas assez loin dans la souffrance”) (703, FR,
1593). As we will see in the next chapter, for Baudelaire suffering
and pain are also the marks of the ultimate justification for poetic
creation, and these marks have to be inscribed on the body of the
mother as well.
We find in Rilke’s Book of Hours another instantiation of these
links between pain, poetic creation, motherhood, and pregnancy.
They appear in a poem from the third book, “The book of poverty
and death.” Like Baudelaire’s “Bénédiction,” the poem has the form
of a prayer, in this case to the “powerful provider.” The first four
verses of the poem start the pleading by unifying three different
actions or events in one: the happening of “the last sign,” the
apparition of the “powerful provider,” and the giving of “human’s
serious motherhood.”

Das letzte Zeichen laß an uns geschehen,

erscheine in der Krone deiner Kraft,
und gib uns jetzt (nach aller Weiber Wehen)
des Menschen ernste Mutterschaft. (97)
Let your last sign happen to us;
shine in your crown of power;
give us now (after/according to all the pain of women)
mankind’s grave motherhood. (171)

Because the next verses demand the rising of “death’s bearer,” in his
commentary of this poem in The Literary Space, Maurice Blanchot
focuses on the birthing of death. He disregards, however, not only
the previous literal “motherhood” (Mutterschaft) but also the female
body who carries the god (Gottgebärerin).

Erfülle, du gewaltiger Gewährer,

nicht jenen Traum der Gottgebärerin, –
richt auf den Wichtigen: den Tod-Gebärer,
und führ uns mitten durch die Hände derer,
die ihn verfolgen werden, zu ihm hin. (97)
But do not fulfill, O powerful provider,
 each dream of the female god-bearer,
but raise the Important one, death’s bearer,
and lead us, passing us through the hands of those
who tread his path with him, to him. (171)

As I have pointed out elsewhere,14 what complicates here further

the “serious” or “grave motherhood” demanded by the poet is that
the parenthetical remark “(nach aller Weiber Wehen)” can be read,
according to the preposition “nach,” not only as a question of
temporal priority (as “after”) but also as a question of modelling and
mimesis (as “according to”). In other words, mankind’s serious
motherhood demanded by the poet—and equated with the event of
the last sign and with the appearing of the powerful provider—can
be seen either as a second motherhood coming after all the pains of
women, which could imply that this time it would not involve those
pains, or that women would not necessarily participate. Or, it could
mean that whatever this serious motherhood is—which nevertheless
is the last sign and the apparition of the provider—, it would have to
be a copy or at least a following of all women’s pains. However we
understand this question of secondarity, derivativeness or priority,
there’s still a restriction of the female maternal body in the plea not
to fulfil “each dream of the female god-bearer.” What is even more
significant is that, through the juxtaposition of this feminine god-
bearer (Gottgebärerin) with the masculine death-bearer (Tod-
Gebärer), a reflection is made that exemplifies again Derrida’s logic
of obsequence, making of death and birth analogous gifts given
always through a pregnancy and delivery—the gift of a motherhood
that precedes and follows it all. And since this birth as “serious
motherhood” is the “last sign” and the divine “apparition,” the poet
equates his activity as sign producer with a Marian annunciation and
conception. But this is far from an immaculate conception. On the
contrary, it is a conception whose sign of truth or seriousness would
have been the particular female pains (all of them) that both
precede and, as constant model, follow and survive each birth.
 But what are all these female pains or sufferings? And why do
they have to be all (at the same time that “each dream of the female
god-bearer” should not be fulfilled)? Is their completion or
comprehension a condition of the serious motherhood (ernste
Mutterschaft)? This desired wholeness or absolute comprehension
brings us to the question of motherhood in Mallarmé’s work. Here
also we have an attempt to incorporate or bring forth motherhood or
the maternal in literature. In some of his later notes this
incorporation is described as a movement of release or freeing of
that—the maternal hymn—which creates the hero:

Le Drame est causé par le Mystère de ce qui suit—l’Identité

(Idée) Soi—du Théâtre et du Héros à travers l’Hymne //
opération //

—le Héros dégage—l’hymne (maternel) qui le crée, et se

restitue au Théâtre que c’était—du Mystère où cet hymne était
enfoui (OC, 428)

Drama is caused by the Mystery of what follows—the Identity

(Idea) Self—Theatre and the Hero through the Hymn //
operation //

—the Hero disengages—the (maternal) hymn that creates him,

and gives himself back to the Theatre that was—of the Mystery
where this hymn was buried15

As we can see, this creation or birth is not final, and the role of the
maternal (hymn) is like a medium for the mystery of the identity (or
idea) of the self that is played in the theatre. The link between death
and the mother is however maintained when, in the last section of
the scholia to Igitur called “In spite of the prohibition of his mother,
going to play at the tombs” (“Malgré la défense de sa mère, allant
jouer aux tombeaux”), the descent into the Mystery is described as
both forbidden and commanded by the mother: “(Prohibition of his
mother to come down like that, —his mother who told him what he
had to accomplish. For him he is going too into a childhood memory,
this advised night if he killed himself, he would not be able, as an
adult, to perform the act)” [“(Interdiction de sa mère de descendre
ainsi, — sa mère qui lui a dit ce qu’il avait à accomplir. Pour lui il va
aussi dans un souvenir d’enfance, cette nuit recommandée s’il se
tuait, il ne pourrait pas, grand accomplir l’acte)”] (OC, 450). And if
there is anything left to be done before dying and disappearing
(before meeting Nothingness), it is just to give back to his own the
reason for which they have given birth to him: “I do not want to
know Nothingness before I have given back to my own that for
which they engendered me” [“je ne veux pas connaître le Néant,
avant d’avoir rendu aux miens ce pourquoi ils m’ont engendré” (OC,
451)]. This reason, this “that for which” (ce pourquoi), has to be
given back as a debt through language, that is to say, through the
releasing of the mother tongue or maternal hymn. Because of the
logic of pregnancy this giving back as revenge and payment has
been thought and ordered before the poet’s birth by the mother
herself, who both commands and prohibits it. Because of the law of
obsequence, this why, the reason for the poet’s birth and existence
[“the absurd act that proves the inanity of their madness” (“l’acte
absurde qui atteste l’inanité de leur folie” OC, 451)] will be and
remain the madness and absurdity of his own writing as an attempt
to capture the mother as witness and medium of his birth. This is
the conundrum of the modernist writer-son, born unto his mother,
reborn through his mother tongue:

To be born is to be born into language and to be exiled from the

mother. In this sense, the word “mother” is profoundly
meaningless and can be read only as a figure of speech, even
as the figure from which speech necessarily springs. How can
the word “mother” speak the unaccountable event of our birth,
which we can neither remember nor bear to forget? (…) The
desire to speak recalls an impossible desire for the mother, a
desire that she bear the burden of our birth by remaining the
silent witness to a time we can only imagine but never know, a
 time before we needed to speak our alienation from her. (The
Mother in the Age…, 196)

Thus, as Elissa Marder remarks above, this written “mother” is

ultimately meaningless, a figure of speech or the matrix from which
speech springs. Nevertheless, the desire to speak and, what is more,
to write cannot be split from the desire for the mother and for her
confirmation and countersigning of the existence and—as we will see
in the next chapter with Baudelaire—the worth of the modernist
writer-son.
Let us close this chapter by looking briefly at one of the most
important mothers of high modernism, May Joyce.16 On 17
December 1902, she wrote to her son James:

My dear Jim if you are disappointed in my letter and if as usual I

fail to understand what you would wish to explain, believe me it
is not from any want of a longing desire to do so and speak the
words you want but as you so often said I am stupid and cannot
grasp the great thoughts which are yours much as I desire to do
so. (Letters II, 22)

We can track this desire of the mother to understand her son

through Joyce’s major works, for example on the last page of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Mother is putting my new
secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may
learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart
is and what it feels” (275).
While many scholars have examined the question and figure of
the mother in Joyce,17 Maud Ellmann’s analysis of the omphalos or
navel in The Nets of Modernism gives us the best example of the
aporetic questions of mother, maternity, and birth in Joyce (and
other modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Freud).
Particularly significant for our examination of the knot between the
mother, birth, matricide, and creation in modernism is one of Joyce’s
early epiphanies as analysed by Ellmann, where “the author’s
mother bursts into the room where Joyce is playing the piano to
announce that his dying brother Georgie is hemorrhaging from the
navel” (Ellmann, 5):

Mrs. Joyce: (crimson, trembling, appears at the parlour door) –

Jim!
Joyce: (at the piano) … Yes?
Mrs. Joyce: Do you know anything about the body? … What
ought I to do? … There’s some matter coming away from
the hole in Georgie’s stomach … Did you ever hear of that
happening?
Joyce: (surprised) … I don’t know …
Mrs. Joyce: Ought I send for the doctor, do you think?
Joyce: I don’t know … what hole?
Mrs. Joyce: (impatient) … The hole we all have … here (points)
Joyce: (stands up)18

It is difficult to describe completely the semantic displacements of

the writer-son’s anxiety embedded in this scene. However, perhaps
the most important trait is that the mother, here, is not giving birth
but is—as Ellmann remarks—a witness to birth, or at least to a
“monstrous inversion of the process of gestation, the body vomiting
its ‘matter’ out of the same ‘hole’ through which the foetus fed upon
the mother’s matter in the womb” (Ellmann, 148). As a maternal
witnessing of this gestation giving figure to the artist’s monstrous
giving birth to his own self, this scene told by the mother could be
the words that Joyce as a son wanted from her. But “as [he] so often
said [she is] stupid and cannot grasp the great thoughts which are
[his]” (Letters II, 22). Was this want for words really due to her
stupidity? (And whose and what is the stupidity here, where the act
of birth is concerned, the primordial act of “stupor,” amazement,
numbness, the inenarrable act par excellence?) Instead of exploring
here all the figures the mother took in Joyce’s work, let us see briefly
how this, his mother took shape, not on a character or
personification of the mother (be it Stephen’s or Leopold’s mothers,
or even Molly Bloom), but on James Joyce’s own writing to her while
she was alive.
Disregarding the incomprehension she described on her 17
December letter as her own fault, Joyce wrote to her in another
letter, on 20 March, what seems like an attempt to make himself
understood by her through a full description of himself in the present
and future. This description, in its listing of authors, interests, and
personal traits, could be seen as an early key for all Joycean
scholars, working to this day tirelessly and obsessively on Joyce’s
work’s connections to Aristotle, Spinoza, Yeats, and Balzac; on his
interest in aesthetics and music; on his representations of women,
and especially, on his topo- and geography of Dublin. However, what
is more important here for us are not the clues and names that point
towards the literary corpus to come, as well as to the gigantic and
endlessly growing body of Joycean commentary. What calls our
attention as a demand to the mother, a demand written for her, is
the closure of the letter, where he asks her to write and tell him
what she thinks of him, who is he in her eyes and through her
hands.

Synge says I have a mind like Spinoza! (Spinoza was a great

Hebrew philosopher): I am at present up to the neck in
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and read only him and Ben Jonson (a
writer of songs and plays). Gogarty wrote to me a day or two
[ago] and tells me that “John Eglinton” said the other day
(Stannie will tell you who he is) “There is something sublime in
Joyce’s standing alone.” My book of songs will be published in
the spring of 1907. My first comedy about five years later. My
“Esthetic” about five years later again. (This must interest you!)
Yeats (who is impressionable) said he knew me only a little time
and in that time I had roared laughing at the mention of Balzac,
Swinburne & c. I have more than once upset a whole French
café by laughing. And old woman shook her umbrella in my face
one day in Dublin—I was laughing so loudly. Come what may I
will lunch tomorrow. You will oblige me very much if you will
 write to me and tell what you think of me. I shall read your
letter with great anxiety. JIM (Letters II, 38)

As an answer to this letter—a response that he would read “with

great anxiety”—we have only a short letter from a few days
afterwards, (possibly) 27 March. In this letter, there is no direct
answer to the son’s demand. She does not write and tell him what
she thinks of him. Instead, she sends him some money, asks him to
give her news about a possible publication, tells him that she’s still
waiting for his measurements to get him a suit, and finally signs with
the classical: “Love from all. Your loving / MOTHER.” But after the
signature, she adds an odd postscript: “don’t take any wrong
meaning from this writing.”
After this letter, as far as we know, he will receive no more letters
from her. On 10 April, he writes to her: “Dear Mother Please write to
me at once if you can and tell me what is wrong.” That same night,
when he comes home, he finds the telegram “NOTHER DYING COME
HOME FATHER.” On 13 August, May Joyce, James Joyce’s mother,
dies.
In “Circe,” in Ulysses, Joyce staged a continuation of their
interrupted dialogue—and, consequently, of the one between
Odysseus and his mother, Anticlea:

THE MOTHER
(Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted
ashes) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men
in the world. You too. Time will come.

STEPHEN
(Choking with fright, remorse and horror) They say I killed you,
mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.

THE MOTHER
(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth) You sang
that song to me. Love’s bitter mystery.
 STEPHEN
(Eagerly) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word
known to all men. (580–81)

“The word known to all men” is perhaps “The hole we all have.”19
This is why as an answer to this epistemological and universal plea,
THE MOTHER just asks more personal questions, pointing back to
her (“Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey
with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among
the strangers?”) and, finally, demands from him not exactly a word
or an action, but something in between, a speech act: “Repent,
Stephen” (581).
Even if Joyce exposed it exuberantly in his work, making it the
surface of its writerly performances—as for example in the Anna
Livia Plurabelle figure of Finnegans Wake—the realisation of
matricide as an inherent trait of certain modernism will find its
ultimate exponent in Beckett’s trilogy. However, my contention is
that the necessity of this matricidal violence20 for male modernist
writing does not appear clearly until we read Beckett’s work through
a thinker like Derrida. In other words, the figure of the mother and
birth, as well as the anxiety of the writing son that ends up in
matricide do not appear clearly until we read the utmost conclusion
of modernist writing through the writer-son-philosopher who
explained—drawing out the conclusions and aporias of modern
philosophy in what we call deconstruction—two logics of modern(ist)
thought and writing: obsequence and pregnancy.

Notes
1 As Elissa Marder explains it with regard to Derrida’s oeuvre as a whole:
There certainly remains more to be said, for example, about the strange ‘law
of obsequence,’ set forth in Glas, which traces the mother’s survival as a
form of remainder of that which was never present and hence escapes all
ontology. One might wonder if—or how—this law of ‘obsequence’ might
underwrite mourning work in later texts and inflect the notion of inheritance
(between fathers and sons) that he pursues in Specters of Marx and
 elsewhere. At the very least, it bears observing that this spectral presence of
a primordial mother “watches over” all his mourning texts. (The Mother in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 39)
2 The Post Card from now on referred as PC, and its original French version, La
carte postale, referred as CP.
3 “This anxiety, this mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and
daemonic ground upon which we now enter” (Bloom, 25). Related to the
mother and the maternal body instead of to the fathers and their influence,
this anxiety is linked to birth at least as the writer (re)constructs it afterwards.
In this way, as Mauro Senatore explains, writing does repeat the anxiety of
birth, but, I would add, only as a reconstruction: “anxiety is a trait inherent in
the act of writing as well as in the inscription, to the extent that the latter
repeats the experience of birth” (5). This reconstruction implies the effacement
of the first birth and, with it, of the mother, making of the anxiety also guilt.
4 Another recent work, Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty
(2018) underscores not only the importance of the role of the mother in
human’s own understanding of themselves, but also the crisis in which mothers
and motherhood find themselves in our current global situation (immigration,
climate change, accelerated extinctions, etc.).
5 One of the main reasons, of course, being to try to give a voice to or to hear
the already existing voices of female authors constrained within a ubiquitous
and far from dead phallogocentrism.
6 Already in 1997 Spivak had commented on the possibility of a whole rereading
of the Western tradition in Derrida’s work through the relation between the son
and his mother: “An interpretation of Derrida’s interpretation of the intellectual
history of European men, in terms precisely of sons’ longing for mothers, can
perhaps be made” (“Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” 70).
7 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, from now on OBD.
8 Linked to other Derridean notions like “supplement” and “dissemination,”
Derrida’s notion of “invagination” shows—and performs through his own writing
—the impossibility of determining a work’s or text’s clear origin or beginning
and, consequently, its frame. He describes it in “Living On” as “the inward
refolding of la gaine [the sheath, girdle], the inverted reapplication of the outer
edge to the inside of a form where the outside then opens a pocket. Such an
invagination is possible from the first trace on. This is why there is no ‘first’
trace” (Bloom et al., 97). In The Truth in Painting he relates it to the frame:
“What is the topos of the title? Does it take place (and where?) in relation to
the work? On the edge? Over the edge? On the internal border? In an
overboard that is re-marked and reapplied, by invagination, within, between
the presumed center and the circumference?” (24). Through its bodily
figuration, it not only underscores a complication in phallogocentric logic, but,
as a reference to the difference between the female and the maternal body, it
also underlines the complex desire-incest vis-à-vis any attempt to circumscribe,
 especially through its origin, any phenomenon. We will examine further this
gaine in Chapters 4 and 5.
9 Unless otherwise stated, I modified all French and German translations in order
to make them more literal.
10 As I mentioned in the Introduction, I find the best examples of this notion of
modernism as a haunting of the past not only in Derrida but also in the work
of Jean-Michel Rabaté, specifically on his books The Pathos of Distance and
The Ghosts of Modernity, where he develops a theory of modernism as
hauntology very close to the one of Derrida in Specters of Marx.
11 While Bronfen investigates this link especially in relation to both portraits of
females by lovers-artists (in On Her Dead Body), and with regard to hysteria
as a question of representation (in The Knotted Subject), Marder focuses on
the links between the mother, technology, and photography.
12 What is more, Proust himself makes the connection between the jealously he
felt of Albertine and her lovers and the one he felt for his mother. This
assimilation between the two objects blends the body of Albertine with that of
the mother and retroactively makes of the memory of the waiting for the
mother a waiting for Albertine:
It was Trieste, it was that unknown world in which I could feel that
Albertine took a delight, in which were her memories, her friendships, her
childhood loves, that exhaled that hostile, inexplicable atmosphere, like the
atmosphere that used to float up to my bedroom at Combray, from the
dinning-room in which I could hear, talking and laughing with strangers
amid the clatter of knives and forks, Mamma who would not be coming
upstairs to say good-night to me; like the atmosphere that, for Swann, had
filled the houses to which Odette went at night in search of inconceivable
joys. (Volume IV Sodom and Gomorrah, 710; FR 1597)
For an analysis of the mother vis-à-vis the figure of the lesbian in Proust see
Elizabeth Richardson Viti, “Mothers, madams, and ‘lady-like’ men: Proust and
the maternal.”
13 The links between Orestes and the Proustian hero are well described by
Jacques Géraud:
The ambivalence with regards to the mother’s imago will be perfectly
handled in the Recherche through a division: to the mother in the
sanctuary, the eternal adoration of the eternal boy from Combray: we are
here in the overly known and thousand-fold surveyed realm of the Freudian
Oedipus; to the maternal grand-mother (always presented as an ersatz of
the mother, sharing communion both of them through their pious reading
of the Marquise de Sévigné), a whole spectrum of affects including a
recurring ‘irritation’ that will only subside in the long mise-en-scene of her
agony, of her staging of death by the writer that begins with the scene
where the narrator goes with her to the ‘petit pavillon treillisée de vert,’ i.e.
 the public toilet in Champs-Elysées, where he will take pleasure sadistically
in giving her ‘a little fit’ (but isn’t Proust the attacker?), tragicomic overture
to the big opera of her death (…). (143). My translation
14 “Absolute Modernism and The Space of Literature” in Christopher Langlois’
Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism.
15 Unless otherwise stated, all translations of Mallarmé’s texts are mine.
16 For an excellent analysis of the question of the mother in Joyce’s work, see
Christine Froula’s Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce.
17 Just to mention some of the most directly engaged with the question of the
mother: Benjamin Boysen’s “The Mother and the word known to all men:
Stephen’s Struggle with amor matris in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Ellen Carol
Jones’ “Textual Mater: Writing the Mother in Joyce,” and a work that is of the
utmost importance for our consideration of Derrida’s thoughts on the relation
between the mother, the maternal, and modernism: Jacques Trilling’s Joyce ou
l’écriture matricide.
18 James Joyce, “Epiphany 19” (March 1902) in The Workshop of Dedalus: James
Joyce and the Raw Materials for “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” eds.
Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1965),
29. Quoted in The Nets of Modernism, 5.
19 Coincidentally, this “word known to all men” as a universal and essential term
appears in Beckett’s work also related to the maternal. In “Rough for Radio II”
the term demanded from the prisoner, Fox, is described as “the one… thing
remain unsaid (…) that can give [him] back [his] darling solitudes” (Collected
Shorter Plays, 121), as well as what might free everybody else in the play. The
only hopeful sign that this word might be coming is Fox’s mention of a woman,
Maud, who offers to breastfeed Fox’s twin who lives inside of him. At the end,
the Stenographer remarks the maternity of this character: “S: And the milk, sir,
don’t forget the milk” (123).
20 For a detailed consideration of this matricidal violence and obsession in Beckett
sans Derrida, see Graley Herren “A Womb with a View: Film as Regression
Fantasy.”

References
Beckett, Samuel. The Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Bloom, Harold, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Paul de
Man, editors. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1979.
Boysen, Benjamin “The Mother and The Word Known to All Men: Stephen’s
Struggle with amor matris in James Joyce’s Ulysses.” Neophilologus, vol. 94, no.
 1, June 2010, pp. 151–63.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body. New York: Routledge, 1992.
———. The Knotted Subject. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.
Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Paris: Galilée, 1974.
———. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1986.
———. La carte postale. Paris: Flammarion, 1980.
———. Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & The New
International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 2006.
———. The Post Card. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
———. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1987.
Ellmann, Maud. The Nets of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Froula, Christine. Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce. New York: Columbia
UP, 1996.
Géraud, Jacques. “Immortelle Orestie. Du côté de chez Sade… Zola… Céline…
Proust.” L’Esprit du temps. Champ psychosomatique, vol. 4, no. 32, 2003, pp.
137–46.
Herren, Graley. “A Womb with a View: Film as Regression Fantasy.” The Edinburgh
Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, edited by S. E. Gontarski.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014, pp. 237–50.
Huffer, Lynne. Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
Jabès, Edmond. The Book of Questions. Volume I. Trans. Rosemarie Waldrop.
Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1991.
Jacobs, Amber. On Matricide. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.
Johnson, Barbara. Mother Tongues. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.
Jones, Ellen Carol. “Textual Mater: Writing the Mother in Joyce.” Joyce: The Return
of the Repressed, edited by Susan Stanford Friedman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993,
pp. 257–82.
Joyce, James. James Joyce Letters II, edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: The
Viking P, 1966.
———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992.
———. Ulysses. New York: First Vintage, 1992.
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame. The life of Samuel Beckett. New York:
Touchstone, 1997.
Larsen, Erik. “American Vitalism: Life, Matter, and the Crisis of the Antebellum
Liberalism.” Diss. U of Notre Dame, 2015.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Œuvres Complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
Marder, Elissa. Dead Time. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
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and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Le Diable au Sahara

Author: Pierre Mille

Release date: August 27, 2023 [eBook #71499]

Language: French

Original publication: Paris: Albin Michel, 1925

Credits: Laurent Vogel (This file was produced from images

generously made available by the Polona digital library)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LE DIABLE

AU SAHARA ***
 PIERRE MILLE

LE DIABLE
AU SAHARA

ALBIN MICHEL, ÉDITEUR

PARIS, 22, RUE HUYGHENS, 22, PARIS
 DU MÊME AUTEUR

Chez Calmann-Lévy :

Sur la Vaste Terre ; Barnavaux et quelques Femmes ; La Biche

écrasée ; Caillou et Tili ; Louise et Barnavaux ; Le Monarque ;
Sous leur Dictée ; Nasr’Eddine et son Épouse ; Trois Femmes.

Chez P.-V. Stock :

Paraboles et Diversions (1913).

Chez Flammarion :

La Nuit d’Amour sur la Montagne.

Chez G. Crès :

En Croupe de Bellone ; Le Bol de Chine ; Mémoires d’un Dada

besogneux.

Chez J. Férenczi :

Histoires exotiques et merveilleuses ; L’Ange du Bizarre (1921) ;

Myrrhine, Courtisane et Martyre (1922).

Chez Albin Michel :

La Détresse des Harpagons ; L’Illustre Partonneau.

Aux Éditions de France :

La Femme et l’Homme nu, en collaboration avec A. Demaison.

 IL A ÉTÉ TIRÉ DE CET OUVRAGE

75 EXEMPLAIRES SUR PAPIER DE HOLLANDE NUMÉROTÉS A LA PRESSE

DE 1 A 75

125 EXEMPLAIRES SUR VERGÉ PUR FIL VINCENT MONTGOLFIER

NUMÉROTÉS A LA PRESSE DE 1 A 125

Droits de traduction et de reproduction réservés pour tous pays.

Copyright 1925 by Albin Michel.
 LE DIABLE AU SAHARA

LE DIABLE AU SAHARA

Ceci est encore une histoire, la dernière histoire peut-être, de

mon ami Barnavaux, que la guerre m’a tué. Mais, avant de la conter,
ne faut-il pas que j’explique ?…
Voici deux siècles déjà que Philippe d’Orléans, régent de France,
se plaignait d’avoir dépensé vingt mille écus pour voir le diable et de
ne l’avoir point vu. Mon regret est pareil. On dirait que, dans cette
misérable demeure qui est mon corps, ma sensibilité et ma raison
habitent deux étages différents, et qu’il n’y a pas, qu’il n’y aura
jamais d’escalier. Je ne sais quoi, tout au fond de moi-même, de
fabuleusement antique, venu d’ancêtres oubliés, sauvages,
frémissants, intelligents et ignorants, cherchant à comprendre
l’immense mystère du monde et ne sachant même pas qu’ils avaient
un cerveau — pensant, si je puis dire, comme des bêtes qui auraient
une manière de génie — je ne sais quoi de barbare, de rétrograde et
d’inquiétant voudrait me persuader que l’univers est peuplé
d’ombres, de forces puissantes, conscientes, malicieuses ou
bienveillantes ; que les morts vivent, près de moi, d’une autre vie,
que mes songes nocturnes sont vrais, d’une vérité magique et
magnifique, draguant mes yeux fermés vers un avenir obscur ; que
le mal, le bien sont des êtres, des satans ou des dieux, aux mains
amicales ou funestes, au visage accueillant ou sinistre… Là-dessus,
ma raison interroge, suppute, analyse, et ne trouve rien ! Rien que
fraude, mensonge, hypothèse, doute, doute, encore doute. Je ne
puis plus garder qu’une curiosité, que dis-je, une perversité littéraire,
et quelque autre chose qui n’est peut-être qu’un instinct primitif,
subitement remonté à la surface de mon désir, comme la jalousie ou
le besoin de verser le sang.
Pourtant, pourtant, il y a mes rêves. J’ai lu beaucoup de choses
sur les rêves, je sais à peu près tout ce qu’en ont dit ces savants qui
prétendent toujours tout expliquer. La dernière hypothèse, et la plus
séduisante — la plus séduisante, on ne sait comment, se trouvant
toujours la dernière, — est que notre cerveau pensant est composé
de cellules qui ne se touchent point, mais jettent les unes vers les
autres des tentacules qui se cherchent et peuvent entrer en contact.
On appelle ça des neurones. A l’état de veille, ces neurones
s’associent d’une façon normale, habituelle : alors on n’a que des
pensées et des images normales, habituelles. Dans le sommeil, ils
contractent d’autres mariages, étranges et désordonnés : c’est le
rêve. Mais alors ils ne peuvent vous donner que ce qu’on y a mis ; ils
n’inventent pas, ils ne prévoient pas, ils ne prédisent pas. Tout au
plus pourrait-on dire que, par un secret instinct, ils tendent à achever
dans le rêve ce qu’on avait laissé incomplet, ou volontairement
repoussé, dans la vie diurne ; ou bien qu’ils s’amusent à ressusciter
de très vieux souvenirs…
Je les connais, ces rêves-là, je les connais très bien… mais il en
est d’autres, et ce sont eux qui me hantent, par quelque chose
d’inexplicable et de mystérieux, parce qu’ils ne finissent rien qui fût
jamais commencé en moi dans l’espace connu du monde extérieur
— et qu’ils reviennent, qu’ils reviennent perpétuellement, toujours
aussi mystérieux, inexplicables. Phénomène assez caractéristique,
et singulier : alors que, le matin, la mémoire des autres rêves
s’efface, quelle qu’ait été leur intensité, quels que soient les efforts
qu’on fait pour les ramener à la surface de la conscience, ceux-là
demeurent présents, ils ne vous quittent pas, ils vous harcèlent,
comme l’introuvable solution d’un problème ; et l’on pense :
« Pourquoi, pourquoi ? qu’est-ce que cela peut signifier ? »
Ce qui me revient ainsi, aux heures où je dors, ce sont des
paysages et surtout des maisons — des maisons où je suis sûr de
n’être jamais allé, que je suis certain de n’avoir jamais vues. Une
maison particulièrement. Elle est située dans un parc où il y en a
d’autres, dont elle n’est séparée par nulle muraille, nulle clôture
d’aucune sorte, et qui, à mes regards, se présentent toujours dans le
même ordre, avec le même aspect. Je pourrais tracer la topographie
de ces lieux, que rien ne m’autorise, pourtant, à croire réels. Mais la
seule où je pénètre, avec l’idée que j’ai quelque chose à y faire, je
ne sais quoi, mais important, est toujours la même. Elle a un air
d’abandon et d’ennui plutôt que de tristesse, — et la pièce du milieu,
le salon probablement, est si vaste que le plafond en paraît bas. Il y
a deux colonnes de bois qui soutiennent la poutre qui le traverse, et,
sur une table de marqueterie, un vieux châle des Indes qui sert de
tapis. Mais je sais que la table est en marqueterie parce qu’on en
voit les pieds et une espèce de tréteau contourné qui les unit. Dans
un angle, un piano droit, très ordinaire, mais de physionomie
vieillotte ; et, sur les murs, des portraits de gens que je ne connais
pas, et dont je me souviens, d’ailleurs, plus vaguement. Je suis là
comme en visite, j’attends quelqu’un — et ce quelqu’un n’est jamais
venu, bien que je retourne là, dans mes rêves, deux ou trois fois par
an depuis dix ans, souvent davantage. La saison où je crois
accomplir cette visite est régulièrement la même ; c’est à la fin de
l’automne, un jour de pluie, lamentable, et, par les fenêtres de la
pièce, j’entends pleurer les branches d’un grand cèdre que j’ai déjà
vu sur la pelouse, avant d’entrer.
C’est, au contraire, en plein été que je vois — mais plus rarement
— deux grandes villes très lointaines. L’une se trouve, selon mon
rêve, dans une île très vaste, et je m’y rends en tramway, de la
campagne, par une route qui suit la mer. Les avenues sont très
larges, les demeures, spacieuses, sont cachées derrière des jardins.
Mais il y a aussi de petites rues très populaires, et dans l’une d’elles
se trouve une boutique où j’entre pour acheter des cigares très
longs, très noirs, déjà coupés en demi-losange à leur extrémité. Il y a
un arbre qui passe à travers le toit. L’autre ville a des maisons très
hautes, avec des colonnades à tous les étages, et l’entre-deux de
ces colonnades est rempli de fleurs ; il y a aussi des parterres de
fleurs devant les rez-de-chaussée. Mon idée est que je suis là par
méprise, et que je me suis trompé de quartier. Je cherche quelque
chose ou quelqu’un qui ne doit pas être là — et pourtant je suis gai,
ineffablement gai. Il me semble qu’il doit habiter partout du bonheur
dans ces rues, je voudrais rester… J’ignore pour quelle raison je me
figure que c’est quelque part dans les États-Unis du Sud, où je ne
suis jamais allé.
Le plus étrange, c’est que je ne rencontre jamais personne :
personne dans la ville exotique aux beaux jardins, sauf la négresse
qui me vend des cigares ; personne, pas une âme, dans la ville
somptueuse aux colonnades de marbre, aux parterres de fleurs :
c’est un silence illimité, sous un soleil qui n’accable pas, illumine
tout ; personne dans la maison triste, incompréhensiblement triste,
que je ne hante jamais qu’en automne et sous la pluie. Je passe
dans tout cela, éperdu de solitude, avec la conviction qu’il va
m’arriver, dans les deux premiers cas, quelque chose de délicieux ;
dans le dernier, je ne sais quoi d’angoissant, mais que je voudrais
savoir — Et il n’arrive jamais rien ! Je me réveille…
Et puis, quelques mois après, ça recommence.
Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire ? Je mène une vie très active, je ne
fume pas l’opium, je ne me suis adonné à nul poison, je ne bois
guère que de l’eau, je mange à peine le soir. Je n’ai aucune tare,
héréditaire ou acquise. Et deux ou trois fois l’an au moins, je le
répète, il me semble que je suis sur le seuil d’une autre vie, avec le
désir de franchir ce seuil — et puis, plus rien !…

Une seule fois, au cours de mon existence, j’ai cru découvrir une
raison à ces mystères. J’étais alors tout enfant. Je rêvais
fréquemment que ma bonne me conduisait à travers un corridor
jusqu’à une porte qui me causait une horreur indicible : pesante,
méchante, peinte d’un jaune hideux, avec une énorme serrure et de
gros verrous ; et je tirais sur le tablier de cette fille pour qu’elle
m’emmenât.
Cette porte n’existait pas dans la maison. Mais, après la guerre
de 1870, on termina une aile qui était en voie de construction avant
l’arrivée des Allemands. Et, quand je voulus pénétrer dans cette
bâtisse neuve, au sommet de trois marches qui donnaient sur
l’ancienne lingerie, je vis la porte. C’était elle ! Et j’eus la même
impression d’effroi, j’éprouvai le même besoin de fuir. Éveillé, je tirai
sur le tablier de ma bonne comme je l’avais fait dans mes rêves, un
an auparavant : et c’était une aile neuve, je le répète, un passage où
aucun souvenir ne pouvait être attaché !
Ce fait contribua beaucoup à me guérir de mes terreurs puériles.
Ce ne fut que beaucoup plus tard, quand je fus devenu presque un
homme, que je demandai par hasard à ma mère pourquoi on avait
mis à l’entrée de ce bâtiment neuf une porte si laide, et qui ne
paraissait pas être du même style que celui-ci.
— … Une économie, me répondit ma mère. On avait retrouvé
cette porte dans le grenier, en faisant des rangements, après le
départ des Prussiens. Elle y avait dormi plus de cinquante ans…
Jadis, c’était elle qui fermait l’escalier, du temps de Mme de
Normond.
— Du temps de Mme de Normond !
… Mme de Normond était l’une des anciennes propriétaires de la
maison, au début du XIXe siècle. Elle avait pour mari un homme qui
voulait l’assassiner et qui, du reste, finit par passer en cour
d’assises. Quand M. de Normond parvenait à s’introduire au rez-de-
chaussée, sa femme, folle de terreur, se réfugiait au premier étage.
Et elle avait fait barrer l’escalier d’une porte — cette lourde porte-là,
avec son énorme serrure et ses gros verrous.
… Mais comment ai-je rêvé cette porte avant de l’avoir jamais
vue, pourquoi me faisait-elle peur avant de la connaître ? Pourquoi,
d’avance, ai-je revécu les épouvantes de cette femme harcelée par
la haine ? Mais puis-je jurer, d’autre part que, tout enfant, je n’avais
pas entendu conter l’histoire de Mme de Normond, n’en gardant
qu’une impression d’effroi, non le souvenir, qui ne me revenait,
imprécis, diffus, qu’au cours de mon sommeil ?… Je suis ainsi ; tout
homme est ainsi ; il y a en nous un primitif pour lequel la seule
explication est l’explication mystique — et un sceptique
contemporain qui veut trouver à toutes forces autre chose — qui
trouve, n’importe comment.

Tout homme, je vous dis ! Même Barnavaux, qui a presque vu le

Diable, et n’y a pas cru. Il ne me l’avoua que par hasard ; c’est pour
cette cause que j’ai lieu de croire à sa sincérité.
Comme nous remontions, lui et moi, la rue Saint-Jacques, un
prêtre dont la soutane un peu usée luisait aux épaules, nous croisa,
venant en sens inverse. Je ne le vis qu’un instant ; c’est
inconsciemment, sans doute, que ma mémoire recueillit le regard
encore très jeune de son visage vieilli avant l’âge, tanné de ce hâle
rouge des peaux blondes qui longtemps ont recuit au soleil : le
regard pur, enthousiaste, ingénu, d’un enfant qui pense à son jeu.
Barnavaux — mon Barnavaux, en uniforme de la « coloniale »,
avec le passepoil jaune et l’ancre au képi — rectifia tout de suite la
position ; il salua. Le prêtre rendit le salut en levant son chapeau,
d’un geste doux et poli, puis, obliquant par la rue des Écoles, gravit
les degrés qui montent au Collège de France.
Barnavaux témoigne d’ordinaire moins de respect pour le
costume ecclésiastique. Ce n’est pas qu’il soit anticlérical : sur ces
choses-là, il n’a pas d’opinion ; il n’y pense que rarement, ou pas du
tout. Mais il a sa superstition, comme la plupart des hommes dont la
vie est livrée aux risques et aux périls ; sans se l’avouer peut-être à
lui-même, il demeure persuadé que les curés, ça porte malheur.
Association d’idées assez fréquente chez les âmes simples : de ne
rencontrer les ecclésiastiques, d’habitude, qu’au chevet des
mourants, les catholiques attiédis ou indifférents qui ont oublié le
chemin des églises induisent que ceux-ci ont conclu un pacte avec
la mort, et la provoquent. Barnavaux crut devoir excuser sa
faiblesse :
— C’est le père d’Ardigeant…
— D’Ardigeant, le spécialiste des langues touareg et berbères,
l’explorateur du Sahara, correspondant de l’Institut ?
— Oui, fit Barnavaux, dont les idées sur la philologie sont un peu
vagues. Un interprète, quoi ! C’est commode, les missionnaires, pour
faire interprète : ils restent tout le temps dans les pays, ils finissent
par savoir la langue, les usages, et tout. Ça n’est pas malin : ils n’ont
rien à faire !
Cette définition me parut manquer légèrement d’exactitude.
Toutefois je ne songeai pas à la discuter. Moi aussi, aux yeux de
Barnavaux, je suis un homme qui n’a rien à faire : du moment qu’on
ne fait pas les mêmes choses que lui, il ne comprend pas. C’est
naturel. Mais il ajouta :
— Ça n’empêche pas que celui-là, il m’a rendu tout de même
service, une fois !
— Il vous a soigné ?
— Soigné ? fit-il en haussant les épaules. Si on est malade, il y a
l’ipéca, la quinine, et des fois les majors. Si on est blessé, il y a le
pansement individuel, et des fois aussi les majors. Soigné ! Celui-là,
il aurait pu qu’il n’y aurait pas pensé. Il n’est pas porté à faire
infirmier, ça n’est pas son genre. Il veut toujours rester tout seul.
C’est pour ça qu’il s’est mis explorateur. Quand il arrive du monde
dans un endroit, que les militaires y créent un poste, il va plus loin,
ailleurs… Il m’a expliqué un jour que c’était plus économique d’être
tout seul, et que, dans le désert, quand il n’y a plus de civilisation,
qu’il n’y a plus rien, on peut vivre avec trente francs par mois, plus
dix francs au boy qui vous sert la messe. C’est un drôle de type ; je
crois qu’il est un peu marteau. Je me souviens qu’un jour il était avec
des officiers, à Igli. Et les officiers disaient : « Comme la vie va plus
vite, à mesure qu’on vieillit ; les années, c’est comme des mois ; les
mois, comme des semaines. Surtout ici, où on fait tout le temps la
même chose, et où on ne voit rien ! » Tout à coup, j’entends le père
d’Ardigeant qui crie : « On dit ça !… oui, oui, on dit ça, Mais pourtant,
ça dure ! Ça dure toujours, malheureusement ! »
Et il avait l’air si désolé, si désolé ! J’ai senti qu’il souhaitait la
mort tous les soirs, cet homme, que la mort lui ferait plaisir.
Pourquoi ? Je ne sais pas. Il n’a jamais rien fait de mal, même quand
il était lieutenant de chasseurs avant d’être curé. Car il était
lieutenant de chasseurs, pour commencer. Je me suis renseigné…
Enfin, c’est son opinion, il croit qu’il ne sera parfaitement heureux
que dans l’autre monde. C’est curieux, n’est-ce pas ? Moi, voilà
quinze ans que je risque ma peau pour pas cher et j’ai toujours
désiré vivre. Celui-là quand les officiers parlaient devant lui — ça
peut arriver, on ne faisait pas toujours attention qu’il était là — d’un
tas de choses qui auraient pu le scandaliser, et qu’ils lui disaient tout
à coup : « Pardon, père d’Ardigeant, il faut nous excuser ! » il
répondait, comme s’il sortait d’un rêve : « Vous excuser ? Ce n’est
pas la peine. Mais pourquoi faire ? Toutes ces choses-là, pourquoi
faire ? A quoi ça sert-il ? »
Je pourrais encore longtemps vous en conter sur lui : quand on
l’a vu une seule fois, on ne l’oublie plus ; il n’était fait comme
personne ; ses mots les plus simples n’avaient pas l’air de signifier
ce qu’ils auraient voulu dire dans la bouche d’un autre. Mais ce n’est
pas ça qui vous intéresse. Vous voulez savoir le service qu’il m’a
rendu ? Ça n’est pas grand’chose, si l’on veut, et ce n’est peut-être
pas vrai ! Quand j’y pense avec mon bon sens, je ne veux plus y
croire : mais quand je me rappelle ma peur, à ce moment-là !…

Et faut vous dire d’abord qu’on était parti d’Amguid, en plein

Sahara, pour conduire à In-Zize, où se trouvait le colonel Laperrine,
des chameaux qui venaient du Touat ; et on n’était qu’une toute
petite troupe, commandée par l’adjudant Tassart. Pas un véritable
officier parmi nous : vous savez comment il travaillait, le colonel : le
moins de frais possible, le moins d’Européens possible, et le plus de
gens du désert possible, Arabes ou Berbères, sachant soigner les
chameaux que les Européens laissent crever. Nous étions en tout
six Français : l’adjudant Tassart, déjà nommé, Muller, que vous avez
déjà vu avec moi, et qui est à Paris en ce moment — il pourra vous
dire si je vous ai dit la vérité — Barnavaux, ici présent, Malterre,
Coldru, simples soldats, et le père d’Ardigeant, qui ne devait faire
caravane avec nous que pendant la moitié de la route. Un peu plus
loin que Telloust — pas le Telloust de l’Aïr, un autre, qui est dans les
collines de l’Ahnet — il devait obliquer à l’Est pour aller tout seul
dans l’Ahaggar, tandis que nous continuerions au Sud, pour arriver à
In-Zize.
L’adjudant Tassart n’était pas un vieux pied-de-banc comme il y
en a en France, embêtant les hommes pour le service, et parlant
toujours de les f… dedans. Il n’en faut pas au désert, de ceux-là !
C’était un type assez jeune, qui avait de l’éducation, en passe de
devenir officier, mais peut-être un peu loufoc. Tout le monde a sa
marotte, au Sahara : pour les uns, c’est la photographie, pour les
autres l’histoire naturelle, la botanique ou la géologie ; mais pour lui,
c’était ce qu’il appelait les « sciences occultes ». Il recevait de
France des tas de revues et de bouquins sur le spiritisme, les
fantômes des vivants et des morts, les phénomènes de médiumnité,
qu’il appelait : et toutes ces machines-là, ça faisait comme sa
religion à lui ; il était tout le temps à faire de la propagande.
On n’a pas été plus tôt parti qu’il a commencé. Nous autres, on
ne savait pas. On avait eu, dans son existence, à s’inquiéter d’autres
choses que de ça. Moi, j’en avais entendu parler, j’avais bien lu des
histoires là-dessus, quand j’étais en France, mais ça ne m’intéressait
pas, ça ne m’inquiétait pas, et… je n’y croyais pas ! Ça m’avait
toujours paru des contes comme ma bonne femme de mère m’en
faisait pour m’endormir, quand j’étais petit. Mais je laissais parler
Tassart ; en chemin, ça tue le temps ! Et le père d’Ardigeant écoutait
comme il écoutait tout, avec l’air d’être ailleurs, bien loin. Tout de
même, à la fin, je lui ai demandé, et assez respectueusement, parce
que je savais que, avec son air de n’y pas toucher, c’était un savant
qui avait de la réputation à Paris dans les académies, comme qui
dirait le grand état-major des savants :
 — Vous croyez que ça peut exister, tout ça, mon père ? Vous
croyez que c’est arrivé ?
Il a répondu bien doucement, bien poliment :
— L’Église ne dit pas que ça ne peut pas exister. Elle professe
l’immortalité de l’âme… alors les âmes peuvent apparaître, hors de
leur corps, ou se faire connaître. Jusqu’au jour où Notre Seigneur
est venu, elles apparaissaient, et lui-même est apparu, après sa
mort. Et les hommes, avant lui, passaient leur temps à avoir peur,
atrocement peur des morts. Mais depuis qu’il a institué l’Église, ça
s’est arrangé. L’Église a pris ses précautions pour que les hommes
soient plus tranquilles ; les âmes qui sont sauvées vont au ciel, les
autres en enfer. Et saint Pierre a sa clef, Lucifer sa fourche, pour les
empêcher de sortir. C’est mieux ainsi, c’est bien mieux.
— Mais alors, je demande, il ne peut plus rien se passer,
maintenant ?
— Si ! fait le père d’Ardigeant, à cause du diable ! L’Église ne nie
pas que le diable existe. En Europe, et dans les autres pays
chrétiens, surtout les pays catholiques, il a perdu beaucoup de sa
puissance : il est combattu par la prière, par les sacrements. Ailleurs,
chez les hérétiques, il est déjà plus fort : c’est pour cela qu’il y a plus
de spirites, de médiums, de sorciers chez eux. Un jésuite anglais,
qui s’appelait Benson, je crois, a déjà expliqué ça très bien…
— Et dans les pays qui ne sont même pas hérétiques, pas
chrétiens du tout, les pays musulmans, comme celui-ci, et le pays
des nègres qui ont des fétiches ?
— Ces pays-là, répond le père d’Ardigeant, très sérieux, c’est à
Lui ! C’est son Empire. Il faut y faire attention, très attention, je vous
assure… »
C’était déjà beaucoup parlé pour lui. Il ne dit plus mot. Mais
Tassart haussa les épaules. Tout ça, selon lui, ne signifiait rien ; ce
n’était pas scientifique. Ce qui était scientifique, c’était de savoir si
les « phénomènes » existaient ou n’existaient pas. Telle est la seule
attitude qui convienne à un homme consciencieux. Une fois
démontré qu’ils existent, on peut s’occuper de savoir s’ils viennent
de Dieu, ou du diable, ou d’une force qui n’est ni l’un ni l’autre,
comme ça paraissait plus probable, à son avis.

C’est en discutant sur tout ça, entre nous, car le père d’Ardigeant
ne disait rien, qu’on arriva enfin à Telloust, un trou circulaire où il y a
toujours de l’eau, et qui a été autrefois le cratère d’un volcan, à ce
qu’on prétend. A côté, dans les anciens jours, les indigènes ont
construit un bordj, comme ils disent, une espèce de maison-
forteresse, carrée, en terre battue, sans fenêtres à l’extérieur : vous
voyez ça d’ici.
Le père d’Ardigeant devait nous quitter le lendemain avec le boy
qui lui servait sa messe — ce qui était d’autant plus drôle que ce
boy, je crois, n’était même pas chrétien : le père ne s’est jamais
soucié de convertir personne — et trois chameaux seulement : vous
voyez qu’il ne s’inquiétait pas de son confortable.
C’était grand, dans l’intérieur de la maison-forteresse. Nous lui
avons dit : « On pourra vous loger ici, il y a de la place ! » Mais il
secoua la tête : « J’ai une tente, dit-il, une toute petite tente. Je vais
la dresser dehors. »
Nous savions qu’il faisait ainsi toutes les fois qu’il pouvait ; ce
n’était pas mépris de nous : il n’était heureux que le plus seul
possible, j’ai déjà essayé de vous le faire comprendre. Mais il
accepta de souper avec nous, sur le toit de la maison, un toit en
terrasse, sans balustrade, à la mode arabe, où on aurait plus de
fraîcheur.
Ce fut d’abord un repas assez gai ; nous n’avions guère que des
conserves — les ressources du pays sont nulles — et nous
mangions sur une table en bois blanc. Je la vois encore, cette table,
je la vois trop, je n’aime pas me rappeler : elle avait été bâtie par je
ne sais quel charpentier à la manque, un légionnaire ou un
« joyeux », je suppose — ces gens-là savent tout faire à peu près —
qui avant nous avait passé quelques jours dans ce poste : le dessus,
des voliges de caisses d’emballage mal rabotées, et les quatre pieds
épais, massifs, pris à même une vieille porte arabe qu’on avait sciée
en long, dans le sens du fil du bois. C’était très lourd et ce n’était pas
beau : mais ça suffisait pour y étaler son assiette de fer-blanc et le
couvert en aluminium de Tassart, qui a des prétentions à l’élégance.
Lui, Tassart, qui avait l’air assez excité, bavardait toujours sur sa
manie : « Je ne vous dis pas que tout soit vrai ; je ne vous dis pas
qu’il n’y ait des fraudes, mais tout n’est pas faux ! Tout ne peut pas
être faux. Vous entendez ! Par exemple, c’est un fait que les tables
tournent, et répondent quand on leur pose des questions. Ce
qu’elles disent, il est possible que ça soit des blagues ; mais ça
m’est égal : l’important, ce qu’il faut admettre, c’est qu’elles parlent,
et qu’on n’a jamais pu expliquer pourquoi.
— Mon adjudant, fis-je sans presque y penser, vous ne feriez pas
tourner celle-là ! »
Je lui disais ça parce que cette table pesait bien dans les
quarante kilos : un monument ! Nous l’avions laissée là où nous
l’avions trouvée, à peu près au milieu de la terrasse ; elle avait l’air
vissée sur le dessus de ce toit plat. Et comme elle était plus longue
que large, nous étions assis sur les deux côtés longs tandis que
Malterre et Coldru se trouvaient seuls sur les côtés courts. Le père
d’Ardigeant était sur un des côtés longs, avec moi.
Le père me regarda comme si j’avais dit une bêtise, ou commis
une imprudence, puis il plongea bien sagement les yeux dans son
assiette. Il avait raison de se méfier, car Tassart déclara tout de
suite :
— Pourquoi pas ? On peut essayer. Et ce serait une preuve, ça,
une preuve : une table que vous auriez de la peine à remuer en vous
y mettant tous à la fois, avec toutes vos forces !
Nous autres, on ne demandait pas mieux. C’était une distraction :
il n’y en a pas tant, dans ces pays-là. Et puis on ne voulait pas
croire, mais Tassart avait quand même soulevé notre curiosité ; on
voulait voir. Je dis pourtant :
— Mon adjudant, attendez qu’on ait fini de manger : il faut bien
ranger la vaisselle !
 Le père d’Ardigeant me jeta un regard où il y avait de la
reconnaissance : il ne voulait pas assister à ça. Il prit tranquillement
le café avec nous, mais se leva tout de suite après. On ne le retint
pas. Ça nous aurait gênés, nous aussi, qu’il restât : on n’aurait plus
osé ; on n’aurait pas voulu lui faire de la peine.
Il descendit l’escalier, et nous le vîmes entrer dans sa tente, puis
en ressortir avec son bréviaire. Il s’éloigna dans le bled. Nous
distinguâmes assez longtemps sa longue silhouette mince, à cause
de la lune. Il avait pourtant l’air d’avoir un remords, il hésitait, il revint
sur ses pas, il cria :
— Ne faites pas ça ! Je vous assure que c’est dangereux ! Ne
faites pas ça !
Tassart répondit en rigolant :
— Revenez donc, M. le curé ! Nous vous donnerons des
nouvelles des âmes du Purgatoire !
Alors, puisqu’on se fichait de lui, il repartit et disparut derrière une
dune.

Vous les connaissez, les clairs de lune du Sahara ! C’est

extraordinaire… extraordinaire, magique, quoi ! Ça doit être à cause
de la sécheresse de l’air : la lumière est d’une blancheur bleue, pas
douce, méchante même, plus forte que celle des globes électriques
autour des Halles, à Paris. Et tout devient blanc, d’un blanc bleu
invraisemblable, dans le paysage : blanc comme de la neige, bleu
comme de la glace. On ne se croirait plus au Sahara, mais au pôle,
au milieu des ice-bergs ; c’est affolant, ça fait battre le cœur, quand
on n’a pas l’habitude : cette nuit-là, sans doute à cause de ce qu’on
allait faire, ça nous fit battre le cœur, malgré qu’on eût l’habitude.
On avait desservi la table. Elle aussi, quoiqu’il n’y eût pas de
nappe, était toute blanche sous la lune. Nous avions repris nos
places. Je dis à Tassart :
— Je suis tout seul de mon côté, maintenant que le père est
parti. Ça ne marchera jamais.