Speaking volumes: Amélie nothomb's hygiène de l'assassin

Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 761–766, 2000Copyright © 2001 Elsevier Science LtdPrinted in the USA. All rights reserved

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SPEAKING VOLUMES: AMÉLIE NOTHOMB’S HYGIÈNE DE L’ASSASSIN

Claire Gorrara

Cardiff University, School of European Studies, University of Cardiff, P.O. Box 908,Cardiff CF1 3YQ, UK

Synopsis —

This article discusses the first novel of the Belgian writer, Amélie Nothomb, whose irrever-ent mixing of classical and contemporary models of writing has delighted literary critics in 1990s France.The main argument of this article will be that

Hygiène de l’assassin

playfully appropriates aspects ofboth Plato’s Socratic dialogues and the classic detective story to question the ways we approach textsand the reading strategies we adopt. Central to Nothomb’s concerns is the subversive effect of thewoman reader as a figure who contests (male) authorial intentionality. Bakhtin’s formulation of the“novelistic” also operates as an important critical reference point for my discussion. It offers a model forunderstanding the literary experimentation of Nothomb’s text as a means of creating “speaking vol-umes,” dialogised encounters, which unsettle our expectations of genre, literature and culture. © 2001Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

In 1992, Amélie Nothomb, a young unknownBelgian woman writer, erupted onto the liter-ary scene in France with


,a novel that shocked and delighted critics withits parody of the literary world. In the text, ahighly regarded and dying male author is inter-viewed by a female journalist who decon-structs his corpus of novels to discover thedeadly secret enclosed in his final unfinishedwork, entitled

Hygiène de l’assassin.

Gro-tesque, obese, and self-obsessed to the point ofpsychopathic delusion, Prétextat Tach, ahighly misogynist author, represented perhapsone of the most virulent and scarcely veiled at-tacks on the “cult of the (male) author” in con-temporary critical circles in the 1990s.

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Whilst targeting the rise of an industry inauthorial promotion, Nothomb’s first novelalso highlighted the 25-year-old’s accom-plished mastery of the conventions of classical“high” culture, as well as key debates in con-temporary critical theory. Written in the form

of a dialogic encounter,


draws on established rules of rhetoric andcomposition from classical Antiquity to repre-sent the feisty confrontation between the oldman and his young female adversary. Yet suchformal structures are traversed and subvertedby Nothomb’s awareness of the complexity ofthe narrative project, drawing, I would argue,on Bahktin’s formulation of the “novelistic” asa means of introducing popular culture into ca-nonical literary forms such as the Socratic dia-logue. In this article, I would like to investigateNothomb’s erudite textual play in more detailas she combines the classical and the contem-porary for spectacular literary effect. As the“enfant terrible” of Belgian literature, Noth-omb poses questions about the ways we ap-proach texts and the reading strategies weadopt. She challenges many of our presupposi-tions about genre, literature, and culture fromthe subversive viewpoint of a female interlocu-tor who contests the power and authority ofcanonised male writers.

Socrates, Bakhtin, and the “Novelistic”


is structured to imitatethe form of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, a modelof composition developed by Plato (427–347

Like the other contributions in this special issue, I dedicatethis article to Claire Duchen, whose own “cancer stories”also crossed generic boundaries and made her listenersthink about writing and narrative.

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BC) in fourth- and fifth-century Athens. TheSocratic dialogue, centred on Socrates as themain conversing figure, presented Plato’s ownteachings as a philosopher of education as wellas those of his late teacher Socrates, con-demned to death in 399 BC for corrupting oth-ers with his ideas. According to Bertrand Rus-sell, this charge served as a cover for aninstitutional hostility towards Socrates as onewhose example and teachings regularly ques-tioned the practice of power by the rulingclasses of the day (Russell, 1946, p. 103). To acertain extent, therefore, Plato’s presentationof Socrates in the dialogues can be interpretedas a defence of his former teacher and thequestioning mode he had come to symbolise.

Plato himself was largely ambivalent aboutthe formalised teaching of rhetoric, but he rec-ognised its importance for transmitting a rea-soning process designed to school the charac-ter and the intellect. Regarded at that time as ameans of promoting civic life and upholdingcollective and individual liberty, even thosehostile to the teaching of rhetoric could see itsbenefits as a means of marshalling others andpersuading them to adopt certain patterns ofaction. It was to this end that the rules of rhet-oric played a key role in Plato’s developmentof the Socratic dialogue as a pedagogical toolthat allowed ideas to be continually ques-tioned and refined as interlocutors tradedopinions. In Plato’s Socratic dialogues, this“testing procedure” (or dialectic) operateswhen two or more characters debate, review orset forth hypothesises, often by example, withthe aim of persuading or instructing the other.In Plato’s dialogic encounters, the figure of So-crates predominates, forever testing the logicalconsistency of his own positions as well asthose of other philosophers who are invariablyfound lacking. Indeed, the scope of Plato’s So-cratic dialogues for debating logical cases hasmade them a foundational form for contempo-rary Western philosophy, providing the readerwith “speaking volumes,” texts of intellectualsophistication presented as conversations andencounters between colleagues and friends.

Whilst philosophers may have focused onthe deductive process at work in Plato’s So-cratic dialogues, one of the most influentialtheorists of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin (1981),has analysed the innovation of the Socratic di-alogues in terms of form and genre. In his sem-inal essay “The Novel and the Epic: Towards a

Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” Ba-khtin cites the Hellenic period and Plato’s So-cratic dialogues as one of the first instances ofwhat he terms the “novelisation” of traditionalgenres. For Bakhtin, the novel, or rather indi-vidual examples of its presence, operates as aseries of rogue elements identifiable through-out the ages, which contaminate conventionalforms and their languages. Such a process of“novelisation” destabilises and contests estab-lished genres to revolutionary effect:

They [established genres] become more freeand flexible, their language renews itself byincorporating extraliterary heteroglossiaand the “novelistic” layers of literary lan-guage, they become dialogised, permeatedwith laughter and irony, humour and ele-ments of self parody and finally—this is themost important thing—the novel inserts it-self into these other genres as indeterminacy,a certain semantic openness, a living contactwith unfinished, still evolving contemporaryreality. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 7)

The “novelistic” in this perspective exposesclassical literary language and forms to influ-ences usually kept separate from it, what Ba-khtin terms “unofficial language and unofficialthought” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 20), commonlypopular culture, familiar language, and differ-ent forms of dialect, associated with oralityand the spoken word. The focus on laughter orparody identifies the aim of such writing to de-ride or ridicule authority, while Bakhtin coinsthe phrase “a certain semantic openness” tosuggest the multiplicity of meanings suchforms seek to convey. The connection of suchwriting with the contemporary culture and mo-res of the writer is pivotal, for it is from this im-mersion in the present that “novelistic” formsdraw much of their material and dynamism.

Bakhtin chooses Plato’s Socratic dialogueas an early example of this process of “noveli-sation” as comic elements, popular speech,and laughter jostle with the rules of classicalrhetoric. For Bakhtin, the formal innovation ofthe dialogues is provided by the image of aconversing man (Socrates), a figure enablingPlato to include elements of spoken languagein a text where the interplay of different regis-ters, styles, and dialects predominates. Interms of content or thematics, the counter-cul-tural effect of the dialogues comes from their

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ambition to mock lofty seriousness and pomp-ous pronouncements on hot topics of the day,such as the meaning of love. No one interpre-tation or argument is held up as an authorita-tive interpretation, and it is through exchange,debate, refutation, and counter-refutationthat interlocutors come often to a provisionalconsensus. For Bakhtin, this dialogic encoun-ter during the Hellenic period constituted apowerful challenge to the impersonal and sac-rosanct tradition of the epic and instituted a“serio-comical” spirit of laughter and subver-sion that continued to influence the Europeannovel of his day.

Hygiène de l’assassin: Reading strategies

Reading


in the light ofPlato and Bakhtin hints at the highly culturedbackground of its author. The child of Belgiandiplomats, Amélie Nothomb spent much ofher childhood as an outsider, a foreigner inother cultures, mostly in the Far East. Thismarginal position could be said to have co-loured her relationship to French languageprose fiction, giving her both a sense of linguis-tic belonging as a French speaker but also adistancing from the cultural context of a classi-cally French and Western literary canon.Nothomb’s ambivalence towards classicalforms of literature can be detected in her ap-propriation of Plato and Bakhtin’s work. Onthe one hand, Plato brings a reasoning model,a dialectic, to bear on the relations of the pro-tagonists within the text, whilst Bakhtin pointsto the subversive potential such an encountercould have, read against his concept of “novel-isation.” Philosopher and literary critic pro-vide models for an understanding of

Hygiènede l’assassin

as a hybrid form, a cuckoo-likenarrative that unravels and reformulates liter-ary forms and genres, disturbing the reader’sperception of what constitutes a novel andhow it should be read.


presents a dialogic en-counters between an older man, PrétextatTach, and a young woman journalist, Nina,who uncovers his murderous past. Nina’smeeting with Tach follows the failed attemptsof four male journalists to secure a scoop fromthe notoriously combative and obnoxious nov-elist before he dies of a rare form of cancer.Each one in turn enters the old man’s dark-ened apartment in the hope of immortalising

the work of this Nobel prize winner for litera-ture, and enhancing their individual reputationas literary critics. Yet they are all doomed tofailure as they radically misunderstand therhetorical strategies of Tach, who refuses toendorse any of the current interpretativeframes they apply to his work.

On one level, Nothomb’s text operates asan Absurdist rejection of commonly heldviews on literary interpretation. The work ofAlfred Jarry, famous for his 1896 play

UbuRoi

, and one of the founding figures of theTheatre of the Absurd in France, is an impor-tant intertextual reference for the novel. Thefigure of Tach as a murderous, obese tyrant,mouthing obscenities and focused obsessivelyon bodily functions, has obvious links to thefigure of Ubu, who murders the King of Po-land and embarks on a savage and farcicalreign of terror until his downfall in Jarry’s sa-tirical puppet play. For Tach, however, the ter-rain of battle and the object of derision israther literary criticism which he seeks to anni-hilate in his exchanges with the male journal-ists he encounters.

The first journalist attempts a metaphoricalreading of Tach’s work claiming that one couldidentify the writer with the character of the“vendeur de cire” (Nothomb, 1992, p. 19), thewaxwork seller, moulding his characters as theseller does his wax figurines. Tach roundly re-jects such an interpretation, dismissing closetextual reading as a subjective reading strategythat distorts any text out of all recognition.The second and third journalists are the vic-tims of a grotesque reworking of the trope ofwriting the body as Tach outlines his disgust-ing bodily habits and his image of his texts ashaving an “esthétique de vomissement”(Nothomb, 1992, p. 47), an aesthetics of vomit-ing. Indeed, he goes so far as to rehearse thewell-worn image of the pen as phallus, butadds the anus and the balls to make literarycreation a supremely masculine activity (Noth-omb, 1992, p. 68). The fourth journalist istreated to a long diatribe deriding the possibil-ity of any adequate reader response to Tach’snovels as the modern-day reader proves un-able to engage meaningfully with the booksthey read. Tach describes such readers as “lec-teurs-grenouilles” (Nothomb, 1992, p. 127)—frog readers—who jump from one part of thebook to another, never able to immerse them-selves in the real substance of the text. Yet un-

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derlying Tach’s rejection of interpretativestrategies such as close textual reading, readerresponse or gendered reading is an implicittrust in the highly dubious notion of authorialintention, the superiority of the (male) authorwho holds the key to the meaning of his ownworks. As an inverted figure of Socratic in-quiry, Tach demolishes not only his interlocu-tors’ arguments but also ridicules the enter-prise of 20th-century literary criticism and itsaim to investigate the interpretative act ofreading.

The fifth journalist, Nina, marks a break inthe tyrannical tactics of Tach. Unlike the otherjournalists, she adopts the confrontationalstyle of her interviewee. Refutation andcounter-refutation are not merely rhetoricaldevices in this context but indicative of thenovel’s presentation of contemporary societyas grounded in the psychology of modern war-fare. Written against the backdrop of war,

Hy-giène de l’assassin

highlights this fact as Prétex-tat Tach is interviewed between 14 and 18January 1991, the days surrounding the out-break of the Gulf War. Tach describes himselfas the Saddam Hussein of Nobel Prize winnersof literature (Nothomb, 1992, p. 92). He com-pares his literary output with nuclear missilesfor the corrosive and destructive effect theyhave on their reader: “Oui, mes livres sont plusnocifs qu’une guerre, puisqu’ils donnent enviede crever, alors que la guerre, elle, donne en-vie de vivre. Après m’avoir lu, les gensdevraient se suicider” [Yes, my books aremore toxic than war, since they make you wantto die. War itself makes you want to live. Afterreading my books, people should kill them-selves] (Nothomb, 1992, p. 54). War and writ-ing are presented here as uniquely masculineactivities and work to exclude and deny Nina,the female interviewer, any subject position.Yet just as Tach can see no other reading strat-egy to rival his own as author-critic, so he un-derestimates the force and tactics of his finalinterviewer as his ingrained misogyny blindshim to her counter-interpretative strategies.

By the time Nina enters the frame, thereader is prepared for another onslaught ofgrotesque and obscene exchanges, with thejournalist coming off a poor second. However,the situation is reversed in their dialogic en-counter as Nina contests and wrestles fromTach the Socratic position of mastery, whichhe has occupied throughout the narrative.

Nina’s starting point is a reading of the womencharacters in Tach’s large corpus of texts,adopting an “images of women” approach as-sociated with early Anglo-American feministliterary criticism. In so doing, Nina forces Tachto defend and review his novels along the lineof gender. This is an interpretative strategythat destabilises the authoritative position ofTach, and appears as very alien to a figurewhose extreme misogynist comments havepeppered the novel so far. Yet “cherchez lafemme” [search for the woman] proves to bethe key to Tach’s literary production, and goessome way to clarifying his deluded and obses-sive self-image. By focusing on the female fig-ures in Tach’s last unfinished novel,

Hygiènede l’assassin

, Nina proceeds to recount thestory of an adolescent murderer who kills hiscousin and lover. This is a story that journalistsand critics have spent little time analysing, anddismissed as an uncharacteristically tragic lovestory in Tach’s corpus of works. Yet, this story,and the figure of the young woman strangledby her cousin on the first day of her periods, isnot an Absurd literary conceit. In a comicswipe at deconstructive criticism, Nina revealsthis text to be the “literal” truth as it recountsTach’s murder of his own childhood sweet-heart and incestuous lover, Léopoldine.

Nina’s tracking down of Tach’s crime takesthe form of persistent questioning. Like So-crates, Nina utilises a classical “testing proce-dure” and established rules of rhetoric toprove the guilt of her interlocutor.

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She beginswith a prelude or prologue (proemium), set-ting the tone for the interview in her wagerwith Tach. Whoever submits in their exchangewill be forced to crawl across the floor of hisapartment. She moves on to introduce indi-rectly (exordium) her concerns by asking Tachabout the female characters in his books,drawing him to name his last unfinished work,


, in which Léopoldine’sdeath by strangulation is figured. She contin-ues by setting forth the facts and reconstructsthe murder in a retrospective narration (narra-tio) where Tach and Léopoldine make a pactto remain in an eternal childhood. She thenprovides proof and corroboration of her find-ings (confirmatio) as she claims to have a pho-tograph of Tach and Léopoldine on the stepsof the isolated chateau where they lived.Tach’s protestations that he was carrying outLéopoldine’s wishes are then rejected (refuta-

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tio) as Nina demands that he take responsibil-ity for his acts. The closing scene of the novel isNina’s strangulation of Tach himself (conclu-sio), an act that replicates Tach’s own crime.However, to present the dialogic encounterbetween Tach and Nina in such a classicalform only would be to ignore the multiplicityof interpretative plans in Nothomb’s hybridtext. A spirit of the Bakhtinian “novelistic”also infuses the literary experimentation of thenarrative and unsettles any clear-cut readingstrategy.

Detective fictions

On another level,


could be read as a detective story, with Nina asthe investigative journalist and private eyewhose task it is to confront Tach with proof ofhis guilt and to extract a confession. The mur-derer of his cousin-lover many years earlier,Tach has revealed his homicidal past only inhis prose, and even then has benefited fromcritics’ inability to read his text as a first-handaccount of real-life experience. Intertextualreferences to Patricia Highsmith (Nothomb,1992, p. 65) and Léo Malet (Nothomb, 1992, p.57), the father of the French hard-boiled de-tective novel, set up such a generic space.

Structurally, Nina’s reconstruction ofTach’s crime follows the format of the GoldenAge “country house” murder. In such a story,a crime or murder has been committed beforethe narrative proper begins, a crime that dis-rupts the bourgeois social order and trans-gresses traditional moral codes. It is the role ofthe detective or amateur investigator to recon-struct events in a linear narration that movesforwards in time to a point of resolution withthe capture of the criminal and back in time tothe events which precipitated the murder.Such a narrative schema depends for its effec-tiveness on eliciting a reader response thatidentifies with the intellectual game-playing ofthe text as the reader attempts to piece to-gether the “latent” narrative of the murder be-fore it is revealed directly by the detective oramateur investigator.

The primacy of the hermeneutic code in thetext, the resolution of the enigma, has madethe classic detective format a favourite literarynarrative for those critics like Barthes (1970)and Todorov (1971), who have explored thestructural parameters of literary texts. How-

ever, yet again Nothomb subverts readerly ex-pectations of the generic constraints and famil-iarity of the classic detective story.

Hygiène del’assassin

does not end with a social order re-stored and the murderer punished. Instead,the “semantic openness” of Bakhtin’s “novel-istic” comes into play, and Nothomb’s worksets up a plurality of possible endings, none ofwhich satisfy a reader’s thirst for textual clo-sure or retrospective justice for the murder ofLéopoldine.

Throughout


, the sub-versive voice of the female interlocutor oper-ates as an obstacle to the pompous self-delu-sion of Tach. He is presented as theincarnation of a grotesque misogynist, claim-ing that killing Léopoldine was her salvation asshe has thus avoided the horror of becoming awoman, with all the bodily functions that thatentailed. Tach’s defence of his murder is basedon a physical disgust for women’s bodies,which borders on the psychopathic and is co-loured by an exterminationist logic: “la vérité,c’est que dès l’instant où elles sont devenuesfemmes, dès l’instant où elles ont quitté l’en-fance, elles doivent mourir. Si les hommesétaient des gentlemen, ils les tueraient le jourde leurs premières règles” [the truth is that theminute they become women, the minute theyleave childhood behind, they should die. Ifmen were gentlemen, they would kill them onthe day of their first period] (Nothomb, 1992,p. 129). The association of the masculine withwar and conflict set up in the time frame of thetext is extended to incorporate an extremeform of “sex wars,” which posits any adultwoman as the enemy. One of the main aims ofNina’s interview is to ascertain whetherLéopoldine, the child-lover, tacitly acceptedher death sentence on the day of her first pe-riod, or whether Tach perpetrated the crime ina symbolic gesture that suppressed “woman”at the onset of adult sexuality. Tach’s sadisticremembering of his crime as a moment of“jouissance” or sexual pleasure makes the lat-ter seem the most probable, for even the re-ported voice of Léopoldine is absent from hisrecreation of her murder.

Yet if this female voice is absent, the samecannot be said for the voice of Nina. In thespirit of Bakhtin’s “novelistic,” her laughter,derision, and refusal to accept the scenario oftragic young love constructed by Tach is a les-son in submitting male authority to ridicule.

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She rejects Tach’s authorial interpretation ofevents, and proposes another reading focusedon identification with Léopoldine, the child-woman dominated by her cousin. Throughoutthe interview, Nina’s openness to other inter-pretative strategies and her rejection of a(male) authorial intentionality constitute herenduring point of resistance. For Nina’s ap-proach to the stories that Tach weaves is pred-icated on the notion that “il y [a] autant de lec-tures qu’il y a de lecteurs” [there are as manyreadings of a text as there are readers] (Noth-omb, 1992, p. 127). No reading constitutes thefinal word; no text can be reduced to a singleinterpretation. A multiplicity of voices, dis-courses, and interpretative frames traversewriting, and these rely on the competenciesand skills of the individual reader.

What is the reader to make of Nina’s mur-der of Tach by strangulation in the last fewpages of the novel? Within the text’s ownterms of reference, can we see her as exactinga kind of natural justice, murdering Tach in thesame manner as he murdered his youngcousin? Or rather is she, as Tach describes her,his avatar, a descendant from the gods whoseals his fate and renders him a posthumousnotoriety? The ultimate victor would seem tobe the publishing industry itself as the textends on the sardonic comment that “il y eut,suite à cet incident, une véritable ruée sur lesoeuvres de Prétextat Tach. Dix ans plus tard, ilétait un classique” [As a result of this incident,there was a rush on Prétextat Tach’s works.Ten years later, he was a classic] (Nothomb,1992, p. 181). On a more clearly gendered levelof analysis, we could read this ending as repre-sentative of Nina’s ultimate inability to “mas-ter” the classical (male) models of rhetoricthat have structured the text. There is a sensein which her move from a linguistic to non-lin-guistic strategy (murder) indicates how, as afemale interlocutor, she is unable to hold ontoa position of textual dominance.

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In the final analysis, the multiple interpreta-tive possibilities of

Hygiène de l’assassin’

s end-ing show Nothomb’s unwillingness to adoptfully either model, the Socratic dialogue or thedetective story. Classical and contemporarymingle and infuse one another in ways thatopen out rather than close down the readingprocess and demonstrate striking connectionsto Bakhtin’s “novelistic.” Nothomb’s subse-quent work in dialogic novels, such as

Péplum

(Nothomb, 1996), and plays such as

Les Com-bustibles

(Nothomb, 1994) further highlightsher innovation in challenging rigid distinctionsbetween different styles, models, and genres ofwriting. Her works constitute “speaking vol-umes” in a similar manner to Plato’s Socratic di-alogues because they deal with major issues,such as the politics of modern warfare, genderrelations, and the writing of history, in a formthat privileges the subversive potential of thespoken word. In


, this spo-ken word is very much associated with a womanreader who liberates the reading act from thesterile pontificating of a male figure, playfullyopening up the text to multiple readings and in-terpretations. Ultimately, Nothomb’s texts“speak volumes” about literary production as aprocess of transformation and exchange. Thismay be an unsettling proposition, but one thatmakes for stimulating reading encounters.

ENDNOTES

1. Ironically, it was of these cult male figures, Philippe Sol-lers, who was to review the manuscript of

Hygiène del’assassin

for the French publishing house, Gallimard.His response would surely have delighted Nothomb ashe is said to have rejected the manuscript on thegrounds that the novel could only be a hoax perpetratedby a disgruntled literary giant. For more details on thereception of Nothomb’s work, see Helm (1996).

2. I am drawing here on Brian Vickers’ (1988) formulationof the parts of speech used in classical rhetoric.

3. I am grateful to Carrie Tarr for proposing this sugges-tive reading of the text’s ending.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1981). The epic and the novel: Towardsa methodology for the study of the novel. In MichaelHolquist (Ed.),

The dialogic imagination: Four essays

(pp. 4–39). Waco, TX: University of Texas Press.Barthes, Roland. (1970).

S/Z.

Paris: Seuil.Helm, Yolanda. (1996). Amélie Nothomb: L’enfant terrible

des lettres belges.

Etudes francophones, 11

(1), 113–120.Jarry, Alfred. (1896).

Ubu Roi.

Nothomb, Amélie. (1992).

Hygiène de l’assassin.

Paris:Gallimard.


Les combustibles.

Paris: AlbinMichel.


Péplum.

Paris: Albin Michel.Russell, Bertrand. (1946). Socrates. In

A history of western phi-losophy

(pp. 101–112). London: George Allen and Unwin.Todorov, Tzvetan. (1971). Typologie du roman policier.

Poétique de la prose

(pp. 56–65). Paris: Seuil. [Trans-lated as: 1988. The typology of detective fiction. InDavid Lodge (Ed.),

Modern criticism and theory: Areader

(pp. 158–165). London: Longman.]Vickers, Brian. (1988).

In defence of rhetoric.

Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

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Speaking volumes: Amélie nothomb's hygiène de l'assassin