8 - Sense of Planet: Marie Darrieussecq's Le pays

Summary

Mais le monde est une sphère dont le centre est à pic sous l’écorce, loin sous le gravier jaune et les squares.

– Marie Darrieussecq, Le pays

Jean Rolin's counterintuitive novels offer a welcome refuge from ready-made portrayals of the globalized world. Rolin writes to us from the edge or periphery of things, from a refreshing remove that makes it possible to re-evaluate what is truly central to the territories he wanders. If this remove remains an ironic, refreshing one, this is partly because his narrator is never in need of making a home in the places he eternally passes through. His own sense of belonging and wellbeing are effaced so as to better allow the places he observes to voice their own already existing micro-ecologies and modes of existence. If Rolin makes room, therefore, it is not so much a space in which to situate his narrating subject; rather, it is a matter of situating the world he encounters as a confluence of larger processes within broadened temporal frames. We sense the (existential) homelessness, loneliness, and restlessness that animate Rolin's narrator, but we do not enter that abyss. And yet, would not that abyss, too, provide a space in which a kind of room might be made? Such a wager is taken up by fellow mainstay of the P.O.L publishing house, Marie Darrieussecq, whose narrators intensely live the realities they inhabit, via ‘une exploration de sensations qui naissent à partir du corps et aident à la reconstruction d’un sujet fluide’ [exploration of sensations originating in the body and facilitating the reconstruction of a fluid subject] (Trout, Marie Darrieussecq, ou voir le monde à neuf, 4–5). The power of Darrieussecq's portrayal of such sensations in all their (animal) ambivalence was resoundingly manifested in her highly successful first novel, Truismes (1996). The title's wordplay also connotes what is for Darrieussecq the fundamental gesture of the novel as she would write it: to break down what are perceived to be the truisms of society, to, as Darrieussecq puts it in an interview, ‘inventer de nouvelles formes’ [invent new forms], and ‘écrire de nouvelles phrases’ [write new sentences], since this is the ‘seul moyen de rendre compte du monde moderne, dont le mouvement sinon nous dépasse sans cesse’ [only way to understand the modern world, whose movement we could otherwise never keep up with] (cited in Trout, 6).