Criterios de asignación y mecanismos de transferencia de

In the introductory part of this chapter, I identified two moteurs to Nothomb’s literary project – (the fear of) childhood’s end, and monstrosity – and the ensuing investigation of the multiple and traumatic metamorphoses of adolescence. The difficulty of

maintaining or recovering (the body of) childhood revolves around the need to slow down or reverse the maturation process: dieting would seem to offer just the answer. As Catherine Rodgers explains,

Dieting enables the anorexic to reverse the maturation process: womanly fat is lost, periods are suspended. Unable to face the conflicting demands made on adult women in patriarchal society, the anorexic regresses to pre-puberty.171

The themes of dieting and anorexia emerge as prominent features in Nothomb’s texts from the outset of her literary project. Her first novel Hygiène de l’assassin portrays two children’s extreme devotion to retain their childish physiques through lifestyle and

170 _{Foucault, Surveiller et punir, p. 236.}

dietary control.172 _{Since 1992, the theme of anorexia has been a recurring motif in}

Nothomb’s oeuvre, and critics have even remarked on the omnipresence of anorexia and the issues it raises (as subject matter, background and driving force for the narration).173 In Robert des noms propres, dieting is a component part to the daily life of the

ballerines at the Opera School. Plectrude is a docile body whose extreme self-

discipline, as I explain later, takes her from (apparent) total control to absence of control over her body and her food intake. Barbara Brook explains,

The woman exhibiting anorexic behaviour would seem to be one of the most exemplary docile bodies of our society in terms of exerting an inexorable will over recalcitrant flesh. Yet she is penalised by being classified as psychiatrically disordered when she has most obeyed society’s injunctions. In her attempt to erase her body she seems to expose the ultimate logic of being a “good girl” and a “dutiful daughter”.174

Brook underlines the disconnection between the display of complete discipline (in the form of excessive bodily control and taming) and society’s excluding response, despite being its initiator. The question of obedience/dutifulness has been analysed by Shirley Jordan in Nothomb’s Antéchrista. She writes that Blanche, the teenage heroine, ‘demonstrates her compulsion to conform to a pre-ordained bodily appearance as well as her inherent resistance to such tyranny’. In her article, the dualistic response

(acceptation-rejection) to the imposition of bodily standards is deployed via the motif of separation between the body and the self.175 In this chapter, I would argue that the monstrous is a creative and powerful response to the dualism between acceptance and rejection of the rules of the institution. Plectrude’s anorexia – a direct consequence of her contentious environment – is in turn a form of (bodily) disappearance that I shall investigate in conjunction with the loss of boundaries and the eruption of the monstrous. My analysis draws from Brook’s and similarly explores anorexia as a paradox;

following her position, the paradox lies within society’s simultaneous instigation and

172 _{Amélie Nothomb, Hygiène de l’assassin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992). The whole story is}

(about) a painful “retour en arrière”: Yolande Helm notes that, ‘le récit n’est pas chronologique mais à contresens.’ See: Helm, ‘Amélie Nothomb’, p. 2. Moreover, the successful pursuit of childhood dreams seems dependent on bodily transformation. As is often the case with Nothomb, behind (childish) naivety hides (body) manipulation. See for instance Mercure (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998) in which a naïve young girl has apparently been saved by an old man who keeps her captive on a remote island.

173 _{G. Séné and B. Kabuth, ‘Anorexie mentale et fantasmes. À propos de l’œuvre d’Amélie}

Nothomb’, Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence, 52 (2004), 44–51 (p. 51).

174 _{Barbara Brook, Feminist Perspectives on the Body (London and New York: Longman,}

1999), p. 70. See also: Corporealities: dancing knowledge, culture and power, ed. by Susan Leigh Foster (London : Routledge, 1996).

rejection of it. The issue of situating society’s position with anorexia remains

unresolved today, in France and in other cultures and nations,176 _{and it has become a}

recurrent motif within literary investigation amongst French women writers.177 Just as anorexia can entail a multitude of responses, Damlé explains that the different

approaches to interpret it have ‘ranged from the medical to the media, the

psychoanalytical to the sociological, the feminist to the postmodern, not to mention various intersecting and interdisciplinary combinations of approach’.178 With regards to Nothomb’s oeuvre, critics have read anorexia in conjunction for instance with themes of control and beauty images,179 the fairytale, trauma, the troubled mother-child

relationship and bodily violence,180 and as a platform to explore the literary expression of phantasms.181 Concerning anorexia in Robert, Damlé writes:

Catalysed within the environment of the ballet school, Plectrude’s anorexia invites other interpretations in testifying to stringent demands to achieve the dancer’s athletic body […] that aspires to a superhuman state attained through control and resilience.182

The interpretation she proposes is in line with Deleuzian feminism, as she reads the anorexic body in a conversation between notions of becoming, resistance and

representation.183 Because of the potentially “shocking” association between anorexia and becoming, she explains that, ‘To think through anorexia as a bodily becoming, or a form of invention, is not to commend it, merely to attempt to open out the complexities of its signifying (designifying, resignifying) practices’.184 _{In accordance with this}

precept, I expose in my study another facet to anorexia. I read it as an expression of

176 _{Amaleena Damlé, ‘The Becoming of Anorexia and Text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des}

noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jour sans faim’, in Women’s Writing in Twenty-First- Century France, ed. by Damlé and Rye, pp. 113-26 (p. 113). She also notes that anorexia ‘has

become the (gendered) turn-of-the-millennium epidemic to rival late nineteenth-century hysteria’. (p. 113).

177 _{Damlé provides an overview of some of these authors: Nina Bouraoui, Othilie Bailly,}

Geneviève Brisac, Claudine Galea, Marie Darrieussecq, Anada Devi, Sabrina Kherbiche, Nathalie Maciel, and Delphine de Vigan. See: Damlé, ‘The Becoming of Anorexia’, p. 114.

178 _{Damlé, ‘The Becoming of Anorexia’, p. 114.}

179 _{Rodgers, ‘Nothomb’s Anorexic Beauties’, p. 58. Moreover, Rodgers raises the following}

interrogation: is Nothomb’s restriction to only one type of ‘anorexic beauty’ a symptome of (creative) starvation/exhaustion? (p. 61).

180 _{Siobhán McIlvanney, ‘“Il était une fois...”: trauma and the fairytale in Amélie Nothomb’s}

Robert des noms propres’, Dalhousie French Studies, 81 (2007), 19-28.

181 _{Séné and Kabuth, ‘Anorexie mentale et fantasmes’.} 182 _{Damlé, ‘The Becoming of Anorexia’, p. 118.}

183 _{On the relationship between the anorexic body and spectacular representation, see for}

instance: Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook, ‘The haunted flesh: corporeal feminism and the politics of (dis)embodiment’, Signs, 24 (1998), 37-67.

bodily and psychological transformation (Damlé’s ‘becoming’), which sits at the

crossroads between submission and resistance to the disciplinary institution. Indeed, the monstrous subject is born at this juncture, and born of the unsustainable bodily (and psychological) state of anorexia. I will also investigate whether anorexia may be read alongside notions of salvation of the subject, interrogating what may bring about

salvation, and whether this would offer instances of liberation of the subject. Expanding from Damlé’s presentation of the environment of the ballet school as a catalyst to Plectrude’s anorexia, I have focused first on the functioning of the disciplinary

institution in order to explain that it not only propels but also inculcates in Plectrude the methods that essentially cause anorexia. As discipline regulates daily routine and infiltrates the dancers’ lifestyle at the School, power penetrates all strata within the establishment, reaching all bodies in the most intimate degree. The institution

simultaneously encapsulates the place and the means that “fabricate” the docile anorexic body which eventually drifts into monstrosity.