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Freudâs 1927 essay on the acquisition of a screen memory, or fetish, allows the subject to come to terms with the traumatic truth that, for him, dominates the present moment (in Freudâs scenario, the truth of motherâs sexuality) by maintaining, alongside and not in place of it, a parallel story of the past (the myth of the phallic mother). In this book Freudâs theory of the fetish, and in particular this way of allowing two opposed and ostensibly mutually exclusive narratives to co-exist, is used to provide a number of Parisian crime texts with radical new solutions. The fetishistic world-view of Charles Baudelaireâs poetics will be shown to provide the template for all overvalued instances of women passing by; notably, it will be seen how the famous assault on one of Christian Diorâs models as she displayed the New Look for the first time in Montmartre in 1947 depends on a fetish erected in the poem âà une passanteâ. The same Paris streets allow red herrings to be raised to the status of truth in novels by Fred Vargas, Léo Malet and Frédéric Cathala. In these texts the discovery of a primal scene allows doubt to be cast over authorial solutions and new murderers or victims to be found. In the case of Jean-Paul Sartreâs La Nausée, the fetishism at work is shown to have harboured a serial killer where no crime was previously considered to have taken place. In these analyses, fetishism is mapped onto prose poetics, intertextuality and deconstruction in order to challenge the way we read text. More importantly, rereading these texts allows us to see fetishism in a new light as a force for positive, creative acts of meaning-making.
Alistair Rolls is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of The Flight of the Angels: Intertextuality in Four Novels by Boris Vian (Rodopi, 1999) and, with Deborah Walker, of French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Paris, Capital of Fetishism: The Fashion of Looking (Again and Again) at the Woman Passing By
Deciphering the Hieroglyphic in Frédéric Cathalaâs LâArbalète: La vraie vie commence
Not Seeing (and Seeing) the Wolves for the Trees: Unrepresenting Hyperclarity in Fred Vargasâs LâHomme à lâenvers
Roquentinâs Primal Scene, Or What is and What is Not Seen in La Nausée
Léo Maletâs Troubled Waters, Or How to Have Your Femme Fatale and Kill Her
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Paris, Capital of Fetishism: The Fashion of Looking (Again and Again) at the Woman Passing By
Deciphering the Hieroglyphic in Frédéric Cathalaâs LâArbalète: La vraie vie commence
Not Seeing (and Seeing) the Wolves for the Trees: Unrepresenting Hyperclarity in Fred Vargasâs LâHomme à lâenvers
Roquentinâs Primal Scene, Or What is and What is Not Seen in La Nausée
Léo Maletâs Troubled Waters, Or How to Have Your Femme Fatale and Kill Her
Bibliography
Index