9 Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine
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Insook Webber
Abstract
Marie NDiaye’s oeuvre is known for, among others, its ‘strangeness’ attributed to narrative holes and the blurred frontiers between reality and the dream. Ladivine (2013) – whose (post)colonial motif and the trauma associated with it is perhaps the most explicitly treated to date by the author famous for being evasive about the race of her protagonists – is no exception. In this article, I examine two distinct dimensions which in effect merge and entwin in the novel: the enduring, and transgenerational (as depicted in Ladivine in particular), trauma of (post)colonialism and its oneiric or phantasmatic manifestations since its extreme nature escapes not only a realistic narration but the conscious. I analyse this aspect of the novel in light of Fanon’s psychoanalytical theories of the ‘lived’ black experience as well as theories by Freud and Lacan. Rejecting his earlier assertion of the dream as wishful or driven by the pleasure principle, Freud proposes the repetition compulsion to explain traumatic dreams and equates repetition with the death drive. Lacan reframes the Freudian death drive as the real, part of the trilogy of the imaginary–the symbolic–the real, by positing that the real of trauma is that which resists symbolization, that is, the impossible to say or name. The writing style of Ladivine exemplifies, I argue, such impossibility, which lends the novel an aura of strangeness, filled with narrative jumps and gaps.
Abstract
Marie NDiaye’s oeuvre is known for, among others, its ‘strangeness’ attributed to narrative holes and the blurred frontiers between reality and the dream. Ladivine (2013) – whose (post)colonial motif and the trauma associated with it is perhaps the most explicitly treated to date by the author famous for being evasive about the race of her protagonists – is no exception. In this article, I examine two distinct dimensions which in effect merge and entwin in the novel: the enduring, and transgenerational (as depicted in Ladivine in particular), trauma of (post)colonialism and its oneiric or phantasmatic manifestations since its extreme nature escapes not only a realistic narration but the conscious. I analyse this aspect of the novel in light of Fanon’s psychoanalytical theories of the ‘lived’ black experience as well as theories by Freud and Lacan. Rejecting his earlier assertion of the dream as wishful or driven by the pleasure principle, Freud proposes the repetition compulsion to explain traumatic dreams and equates repetition with the death drive. Lacan reframes the Freudian death drive as the real, part of the trilogy of the imaginary–the symbolic–the real, by positing that the real of trauma is that which resists symbolization, that is, the impossible to say or name. The writing style of Ladivine exemplifies, I argue, such impossibility, which lends the novel an aura of strangeness, filled with narrative jumps and gaps.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors viii
- Foreword xiii
- Acknowledgements xviii
- Introduction 1
- I Dream images 17
- 1 Dream images, psychoanalysis and atrocity 19
- 2 Dreaming and collecting dreams in occupied France 39
- 3 Dreams and thresholds 60
- 4 Condemned to oblivion 79
- ii Dreams as sites of resistance 97
- 5 Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann 99
- 6 The Third Reich of Dreams 120
- 7 Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom 139
- 8 Dreams, justice and spectrality in Rêver peutêtre (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg 160
- III Violent states 179
- 9 Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine 181
- 10 Dreaming the unthinkable 199
- 11 ‘My hell dream’ 220
- 12 Shit, blood and sperm 238
- Afterword 258
- Index 263
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors viii
- Foreword xiii
- Acknowledgements xviii
- Introduction 1
- I Dream images 17
- 1 Dream images, psychoanalysis and atrocity 19
- 2 Dreaming and collecting dreams in occupied France 39
- 3 Dreams and thresholds 60
- 4 Condemned to oblivion 79
- ii Dreams as sites of resistance 97
- 5 Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann 99
- 6 The Third Reich of Dreams 120
- 7 Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom 139
- 8 Dreams, justice and spectrality in Rêver peutêtre (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg 160
- III Violent states 179
- 9 Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine 181
- 10 Dreaming the unthinkable 199
- 11 ‘My hell dream’ 220
- 12 Shit, blood and sperm 238
- Afterword 258
- Index 263
