JOYCE MANSOUR, HISTOIRES NOCIVES

Review par Stéphanie Caron

Is Joyce Mansour about to finally emerge from the sulfurous limbo where posterity seemed to have relegated her until now? At a time when the very popular Têtes raides set her poetry to music, and when her biography appears at Jean-Michel Place editions, here is Gallimard reissuing her Histoires nocives in the "L'imaginaire" collection. A reissue that falls, it is true, all the better since the volume of complete works published by Actes Sud in 1991 under the title Joyce Mansour, prose et poésie, has become almost impossible to find. And the better being, in the circumstance, in no way the enemy of the good, let us salute Gallimard's enterprise which, however modest it may be compared to that attempted by Hubert Nyssen, at least makes available to the (general?) public a collection by the no less great surrealist poetess.

The happiness of (re)reading Joyce Mansour would almost make one forget the destitution of the volume, devoid of preface and notes, as well as the presentation that is at least laconic made of the author, if said presentation did not accumulate, in about ten lines, the grossest errors. Let it pass that Joyce Mansour is described there as "the only woman to belong to the surrealist movement" — one will forgive the editor for ignoring the existence of Jacqueline Lamba, Valentine Penrose, Claude Cahun, Toyen or Leonora Carrington, to cite only a few of those who participated, often very actively, in the surrealist adventure. But what one forgives him less easily is having manifestly verified none of his sources, in this case often erroneous. Thus André Breton did not call Joyce Mansour "the child of the Oriental Tale" but, which is quite different, "the tuberose child of the oriental tale," which child was indeed born in England, but "is raised" in Egypt, and not at Oxford, as this biographical notice claims. "Detail" of importance, insofar as memories of this Egyptian childhood swarm throughout Joyce Mansour's work, and in particular in Iles flottantes, the second of the Histoires nocives collected here.

Completed in May 1972, this "story" is the only one to be unpublished during the first publication of the collection in 1973, in Gallimard's Blanche collection. At the time, it is mainly a matter for the publisher of reprinting Jules César, Joyce Mansour's very first story, published in 1956 by Seghers editions. The text, then out of print, is indeed of an "offset wickedness" and "insolence," to use the terms that appear on the current back cover:

"They were born in Sodom to a cow and a gravedigger after two hours of work well
watered with beer. They found themselves between the humid and rarely washed sheets of the
paternal bed and almost immediately regretted the warmth of the uterine embrace. They tasted the
delights of continuous renal secretions, the freedom of the navel enchanted them and, clinging to the
honey-gorged teats of their nurse Jules César, they swore to each other with sugary babblings
to drink all the blood in the world. They were normal children." (p. 13)

Mimicking the chaotic advance of the twins' apprenticeship — who grow up "in an atmosphere of undisguised hatred" between a "lazy and naked" mother, an "often absent" father and Jules César, "wicked, old and more negress each year" — the story is constructed like a somewhat perverse bildungsroman, whose climax is the boys' sexual initiation by a lustful virgin named Lucie. After that the Flood, which, in accordance with the latent biblical model, engulfs chalets and goods this small village perched on a "mountain as big as France," but which looks exactly like Switzerland.

That such a text could be dedicated to André Breton, this is what no one would think of being surprised about today: this "tale for grown men" only responds, at a few years' distance, to the wish formulated by the author of the Manifesto of Surrealism: "there are tales to be written for grown-ups, tales still almost blue." More surprising perhaps seems its publication alongside Iles flottantes, with which its fiction seems to have little in common but a vague geographical proximity.

The second "harmful story" collected here indeed takes as its setting the cantonal hospital of Geneva, where the narrator visits her dying father before finding herself, without our knowing very well why, in the situation of a patient. Like the bodies it stages, the story decomposes into short fragments of writing, sorts of narrative islets where the author opposes to illness, here the weapon of black humor, there images of crude eroticism:

"The matron is the paragon of nurses: radiant with good health, the sex frank and open
like a can of sardines, she looks like she came out of a page from the Old Testament. "I want
to sit on your knees," she tells me. No use getting lost in clumsy advances. I stretched out
a big kick in the shins of the bearded man to make him scram, and I gobbled up the
babbling tongue of the matron." (p. 72)

However, this narrative ensemble is far from being reduced to the long series of erotic fantasies, or to the chronicle of the hospital world, to which one has sometimes tried to reduce it — even if it is, also, that. Unclassifiable text, autobiography, journal, but also poem, immense linguistic machine braiding and immediately untying a discourse leading implacably toward death, Iles flottantes assembles a vast corpus mixing memories, fantasies, reminiscences of readings or interviews, allusions to previous collections and to other writers, all accompanied by dreamlike sequences that give it its so singular atmosphere:

"A dead leaf falls on my mouth. Wild humidity of a mouth that awakens. A whole minute I search for myself among the rubber rings that surround the memory: it flees. I get up quickly. A book falls: "Le Monde désert". I leave rue des Aubépines, hurried to find "... the necklace that binds us. But who then holds the chain?" (Vigny)

I advance. I walk along the fence, noting in passing the granular blue of the neon on the hospital wall, the presence at my side of a black dog answering to the almost forgotten name of "Utique", and a sort of new jealousy at navel height.

I let myself fall from the top of the fence." (p. 57)

With this text, Joyce Mansour actually proposes a particular kind of autobiography, where it is not a matter of telling oneself, but of inscribing the I in a sphere where the indistinction between poetry and narration, dream and reality is realized.

And this is there, no doubt, one of the reasons for its joint publication with Jules César. Of her first story, the author indeed said: "The things I put in Jules César, I felt them, I dreamed of them, I knew them. Most are dreams, but certain characters were inspired by people I knew." And indeed, the numerous events borrowed from the author's experience are, in both stories, treated on an equal footing with dreamlike productions, creating a floating autobiographical space where the notions of real and unreal are confused. But where Jules César resisted, despite everything, the autobiographical temptation, Iles flottantes succumbs to it more visibly: assumed, this time, in the first person, the narration unfolds in the course of a tragic event, of which it records, day by day, the resonances on the author / narrator — the real death of Joyce Mansour's father.

Point of culmination, therefore, of a project of writing oneself that emerges from the poetess's entry into literature, Iles flottantes also marks the end of a whole part of Mansourian production: it will be Joyce Mansour's last narrative text, a form of writing to which she will never return. Thus is glimpsed, in this summary text that could, just as well, be read as an anthology, a sort of literary testament: a story of death, it secretly stages the death of a language that, reached in the very place where it is symbolically anchored, proceeds to its own liquidation. Liquidation that is, also, that of a long surrealist past. The definitive farewell to André Breton is doubled, indeed, by a leave given to surrealism, in its collective dimension: "Chance itself no longer has significant scope, it falls into banality from its appearance. First, are we not there to display our vices and our flaws, our extraordinary singularities? [...] It no longer moves. One forgets it." (p. 96)

Whatever one thinks of the title (which was chosen by Gallimard) and the insufficiencies of the proposed edition, Histoires nocives certainly opens a good gateway into the so singular universe of Joyce Mansour, where princesses are sadistic and kings feminine, where love is pursued by illness, and where the book, finally, remains the last refuge against the death that threatens. This small collection also retraces, in its main lines, the journey of a major figure of surrealism: from the enthusiastic beginnings, under the displayed aegis of Breton, to the final renunciation, seven years after the latter's death, these Histoires nocives tell in filigree the story of a novice become writer, who will have sustained to the end, and against all odds, the vitality of the surrealist movement.