ANDREA OBERHUBER, BODIES OF PAPER. RESONANCES.WITH ACCOMPANIMENTS BY CATHERINE MAVRIKAKIS, NICOLE BROSSARD AND VERENA STEFAN, QUEBEC

Andrea Oberhuber has gathered under the title Bodies of Paper. Resonances both critical and delightfully learned essays, literary "addresses" in the form of intimate journal, letter and book of hours and texts by Catherine Mavrikakis, Nicole Brossard and Verena Stefan, all augmented with eight illustrations from her own fabrication workshop to celebrate the dialogue between the arts. The book, which is therefore of unusual make and radically refractory to the orthodox limits of the essayist genre, proposes to deepen the question of writing the body. It is a matter of demonstrating to what extent the body is "from the outset a surface of inscription, a text" (14), and by what means or scriptural strategies Claire de Duras, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn and Élise Turcotte call into question "the normality of a conventional femininity" (14) – each in reaction to her era and drawing inspiration from different aesthetics. In doing so, they contribute to remodeling generic conceptions of sexual and literary order.

The admirably dialogical text by Catherine Mavrikakis placed at the beginning of the volume ("For a Theatricality of the Book", 23-28) becomes Cassandra and orients, perhaps too much, it seems to us, a reading that has not yet taken place. But at the same time, it relieves us of routine university work, namely to attest or refuse the book the necessary qualities for it to be resolutely of our time, that is to say on the side of the "hybrid," the "heterogeneous," the "mixture," the "entanglement," the "difference," the "disconnected," the "drift" or the "improper," so many qualifiers whose inflationary use calls into question their affirmative force. We prefer the notion of "theatricality" or "theatrical representation" (28), or even the image of "theater of ideas" (27), and it is indeed of its skillfully orchestrated theatricality that we must speak if we want to do justice to the pedagogical excellence of Bodies of Paper. It results notably from the dramatic tension between critical discourse, on the one hand, and fictive ebullition, on the other, between knowledge and empathy, between what wants to be, in fact, acquired and the groping approximation of some truth forever inaccessible or, why not, nonexistent.

This is especially true for the first part ("Social Differences and Gender Issues in Claire de Duras", 31-57) devoted to the Durassian work successively republished during the past decade. In the same place, Andrea Oberhuber opens wide a skylight ("Was ist das?"/"What is it?"), if not a door, inviting us to discover the literary and contestatory eminence of a "feminine romanticism" (31) whose names were doomed to oblivion: Louise Ackermann, Marie d'Agoult, Louise Colet, Sophie Gay, Delphine de Girardin, Barbara de Krüderer, Marie Nizet. (32-33) "Ourika and Édouard highlight," she tells us, "the rooting of the author [Claire de Duras] in Enlightenment ideology, on the one hand, and the traits that contribute to forming the romantic state of mind, on the other." (33) She elucidates this particularity from the constant marriage, in Claire de Duras, of enlightened egalitarian ideals with "the powerlessness of the subject, confronted with the social barrier, which takes different forms" (45), from the eccentricity of the subject, its marginality and finally its self-destructive resignation. The subtle and rigorous analysis of the works, and more specifically of the staging of the body struck by racial, sexual and social prejudices, takes on an even more complex dimension alongside the fragments of a "Journal of Claire de Duras" (61-70). In the fictive journal, Andrea Oberhuber puts herself in the place of an aging, exhausted and grieved Claire de Duras, and creates, between the characters of the Durassian texts and the invented voice of their creator, a reflexive margin. Very briefly but very pertinently, some questions are articulated there and hypotheses are deployed. All these questions, these hypotheses, as well as their illustrations, refer back to the hackneyed debate concerning feminine creation and condense the wounds of a woman's and author's life of the era: "Why want to reduce the works of a woman to simple reminiscences and autobiographical memories?", asks the fictive voice of Claire de Duras (63). They highlight, moreover, the literary and reflexive potential of the intimate genre, in addition to opening possible reading paths and postures that transcend the usual academic discourse. As Andrea Oberhuber herself suggests, they also reconnect with "the practice of a theory-fiction dear to feminine writing." (16-17)

The second part opens with a sort of family constellation gathering three of the most illustrious surrealist creators: Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn who, as we know, push to the extreme the staging of the feminine body. They deform and transform it, put it to death to resurrect it and probe, without any compromise, the scope and resistance of the fantasy of self-generation. In a second essay entitled "Subjects Adrift: Writing of the Self and Corporeality in Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn" (81-110), the author of Bodies of Paper exposes what motivates the creators to the fictionalization of self "between the traditional identity quest proper to all auto(bio)graphical writing and the attempt to confront one's ghosts – past or present –, in order to better be able to imagine the future." (81) She demonstrates there how these "surrealist women" put lived experience to the test of fiction, erase the boundaries between the self and its mask and make auto(bio)graphy a theater scene, an experimental ground where suffering espouses pleasure and lived experience presents itself in collage, montage, bricolage, in excess and excess of itself. "The body," Andrea Oberhuber reminds us, "is here the cradle and the tomb of the most unusual subjectivity [...] The body of the narrators is similar to a surface on which are inscribed the physical manifestations of the pleasure of conceiving oneself in ever-changing identities and those of suffering, at least punctual, linked to the metamorphosis experienced by body and mind." (100-101) Respectively addressed to Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn, three letters signed by Andrea Oberhuber follow the analysis of the autobiographical practice of the three surrealist creators. They associate, in a completely original way, the biographical portrait (of the three creators) with the self-portrait of the epistolary writer as academic. If, in this second part, the letter replaces the intimate journal, the approach, however, seems to join the idea inaugurated by the fragments of Claire de Duras' journal, namely to enlarge the essay and critical reading of the work to another dimension, autobiographical (fictive) for Claire de Duras and biographical for Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn. Summarizing the path of the creators to whom they are addressed, describing their works, the author of the letters says "I." It is the voice of the academic, geographically situated and caught in a professional and friendly network. She reveals her point of view, shares her wonderments and hesitations. A voice that writes itself and trusts us, and that perhaps also invents itself?

The "Book of Hours of Andrina" which, in the third part of Bodies of Paper, completes the essay "Intimacy Saved from the Waters in The Foreign House by Élise Turcotte" (161-189), pushes even further the autographic adventure of the academic. The story of Élisabeth from The Foreign House tells of the loss of the feminine subject in a hostile external environment, an accumulation of non-places in the face of which only the house ensures the "fragile equilibrium" (162) of the protagonist. The body itself, Andrea Oberhuber warns us, can become a non-place there, and for lack of landmarks in the present, the narrator anchors herself in the past by working on "the representation of the body in medieval literature." (165) The erasure of the present by the past goes so far as to inspire her "own amorous gestures allowing her to link, through jouissance, the memory of an idealized love to that of the enjoying body." (171) The real body is blurred, in Élisabeth, by the image of the mystical body until she learns, from her father's mouth, an "essential and positive" life lesson, namely that "it's not banal at all to want to be touched by someone. On the contrary. It's living." (184) Like the "Book of Hours of Élisabeth" where the protagonist of The Foreign House becomes copyist-diarist, dialoguing with Jim, the one who deserted her life, and Hildegarde of Bingen, Andrea Oberhuber prolongs her essayist reading of The Foreign House with a personalized book of hours. She seems to begin a dialogue with The Foreign House there, the story of the novel serving as a catalyst for some fragments of her own life. In the "Book of Hours of Andrina," she questions her work as academic and teacher, tells us about her "exile" in Quebec and her destiny which would consist in living elsewhere (elsewhere than in Austria, her country of origin). In a few words, she also sketches the tender portrait of her son: "Life belongs to him, waiting is for others, adults." (202) The search for the body – in the mirror of Élisabeth's character – is omnipresent there. However, delving deeper into this mirror game would be indiscreet. Let us content ourselves with invoking what we read on the back cover: "Writing is an attack on the 'skinosity' of the boundaries between what I judge sayable and what seems indecent to me given the idea I have of myself. It's a matter of words that fully involves my being-in-the-body, place of resistance to letting-go. Saying I doesn't go without saying."

The eight illustrations of this theatrum mulierum et corporum – for it is indeed, in this book, about theater and theatricality, disguises and masks, games and dramas – dialogue, sometimes in a readable way, sometimes in a suggestive way, with the texts that surround them. Colored X-rays of breast open (9) and close (227) the work. We also find photomontages and collages that make full room for the author's son, since his watercolors and oil pastels ally with old photographs, probably family photos (59, 77). On page 191, a collage of cut-out photographs where we recognize the author, earlier, on page 113, a photomontage in a nod to Claude Cahun's work that stages mother and son. How to read these illustrations? How to orient oneself in this web of references and allusions? Certain elements retain our attention more than others: the image of a gray heron (in an ensemble showing two women, a fragment of house and an open window, among others) that could evoke the phoenix and the theme of self-generation, the cycle of time, death as well as immortality (59); elsewhere, a turtle with a serpent's tail, the bearer and the seductress, inseparable, welded to each other, caught in Arachne's web (207). Neither the illustrations nor the magnificent and deeply touching texts by Nicole Brossard and Verena Stefan are simple decorative additions: they add to the corpus other strata of reflection on the body.

In Bodies of Paper, the entrances and exits of scenes follow each other at such speed that we surprise ourselves, like Catherine Mavrikakis, "squinting, seeing double or being blinded." (25) The fifteenth indication on the body by Jean-Luc Nancy, used as epigraph, takes on all its resonances: "The body is an envelope: it therefore serves to contain what must then be developed. Development is interminable. The finite body contains the infinite, which is neither soul, nor spirit, but indeed the development of the body." (7) This book could also be compared to an envelope. Everything is aspirated there and concentrates there, and at the same time disseminates. The idea of dialogue that is inherent to it demands, in any case, an attentive and engaged reading, interminable, perhaps.