Narrative drifters: Walking away from the male gaze in twentieth-century French novels and films.

摘要

By nature, wanderers move in and out of people's lives, leaving those who meet them with bits and pieces of their story. For as enigmatic as they may appear, their stories often remain untold and interest in them is arguably as limited as their role in society. However, what happens when others attempt to narrate the life story of a drifter? Can these retellings of wanderers' stories ever be reliable or even coherent? This dissertation examines the subversive role played by vagabond characters in twentieth-century French novels and films. In contrast to authoritative narratives of the nineteenth century whose characteristics I delineate in my first chapter, physical drifting renders omniscience impossible in the twentieth century, creating knowledge gaps that necessarily force new restrictions and transformations on elements of narration such as voice and focalization. Consequently, "Narrative Drifters" not only refers to the central characters of the works I have chosen to study, but to the destabilizing effect that these characters' movements have on traditions of narrative authority, reliability and cohesion.;In novels such as Andre Breton's Nadja, Maryse Conde's Traversee de la Mangrove and Marguerite Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein and Le Vice-consul as well as films including Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie , Agnes Varda's Sans toit ni loi and Laetitia Masson's A vendre, omniscient qualities that narrative voices and agents (often men) purport to wield are put into question as these voices and agents admit and/or reveal their ignorance concerning the wanderer (often a woman). When narrative agents or voices admit to not knowing all of a wanderer's life story, they admit to a lack of control over her story and in so doing, underline the absence of a traditional perspective that privileges a male gaze. Thus, this dissertation, in proposing and outlining the characteristics of three categories of narration ("impersonal," "personal," and "pluralized"), unveils the freedom that wanderer characters often possess, albeit unwittingly, in modern novels and films, and argues for a new and original feminist narratology of French literature and cinema.