imagined America of Vernon Sullivan

201
Pornography, parody and paranoia — the
imagined America of Vernon Sullivan
KEITH SCOTT*
’Tout 6crivain refait le monde, soit parce qu’il est impuissant a restituer
parfaitement une realite dont la structure complexe échappe a la parole,
soit parce qu’il a envie de liberer ses demons familiers’1
The links between French and American culture are close, and nowhere
closer than in the case of the four novels written by Boris Vian in the
persona of the American author ’Vernon Sullivan’. Like so many French men
and women of his era, Vian was a lover of jazz and American popular
culture, and in the ’Sullivan’ novels his fondness for this culture reaches its
apogee; not content with reading about America and playing its music, he
recreates it, and more - he becomes American. In the process he created a
fictional America which I hope to prove strikingly prefigures the country
found in contemporary stereotype and popular culture; violent, sexual, racist
and paranoid.
In this article, what I wish to do is to examine certain issues - race,
sexuality, and paranoia - as they appear in the ’Sullivan’ novels, and show
how they chime with certain elements of the contemporary mythic (in a
Barthesian sense) America as it appears in fiction, cinema and cultural
stereotype. It cannot be argued that these novels ’created’ this myth, but they
share certain striking similarities with it. So striking, in fact, that the reader
might be forgiven for thinking at times that they were written, not in the late
1940s, but fifty years later. Raymond Queneau wrote that ’Boris Vian va
correspondence: Department of European Languages, Aberystwyth, the University
Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3DY.
1
Jacques Bens, ’Un langage-univers’, in Boris Vian, L’Écume des jours (Paris: 10/18, 1981),
177-87 (p. 177).
. Address for
of Wales,
202
devenir Boris Vian’;’ it may be the case that ’Vernon Sullivan’ has finally
into his own.
For Europeans, and in particular the intellectual community, America
seems to be less a state than a state of mind, a media rather than a physical
landscape, apprehended through its literature, cinema and film rather than
its actual existence. It could hardly be otherwise for the vast majority of
writers, given the inevitable fact of the Atlantic, but even those who have
visited the United States seem unable or unwilling to confront it in its
reality, preferring instead to use their experiences to confirm their preconceptions. So Eco, the semiologist, finds in America a land of signs and
appearances, while Baudrillard finds a land flooded with simulacra. Neither
writer views America as a real entity; for Eco, it is the realm of the
’hyperreal’, while Baudrillard goes even further, arguing that the country can
only be truly appreciated as an imaginary realm:
come
What you have to do is to enter the fiction of America, enter America as a
fiction. It is, indeed, as this fictive business that it dominates the world.3
Baudrillard displays more than a trace here of the horrified fascination with
American culture which runs through the relationship between the two
countries. On the one hand, America is the nation which gave France jazz
and John Ford, the state which was inspired by the example of the French
Revolution to seek its own independence, while on the other, it is a threat to
the precious heritage of la culture frangaise. Both left- and right-wing attack
what they see as American cultural imperialism, with some of the most
vitriolic, not to say paranoid, comments coming from the Front National. As
John Lichfield writes:
fear of swamping by la culture anglo-saxonne,
of French society. It co-exists with an insatiable
appetite for hamburgers, baseball caps and American movies on TV. The
Front has taken the two facts and plaited them into a conspiracy by ’Big
Brother’ America (...) to destroy the French nation and the French way of
life. The FN’s summer university last year became a Khomeini-like
denunciation of the Great Satan. Le Pen said the US had become the
’Wooden Horse’ of globalism attempting to impose the ’hegemony of a
rootless and globalist ideology’. His son-in-law Samuel Marechal said
that, once in power, the FN would re-impose ’croque-madames and
cognac-Schweppes instead of hamburgers and whisky-Coca’.4
Anti-Americanism,
exists in all
or
areas
This attempt to stem the flow of American culture
2
seems
This line appears in Queneau’s tribute to Vian, in the 1968 Livre de
doomed to failure,
poche edition of L’Arrache-
p.6.
3
Baudrillard, Jean, America
, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 29.
4
John Lichfield, ’Liberté? Egalité? Fraternité?’, The Independent on Sunday ’Review’ section,
23/3/97, 6-11 (p.8).
coeur,
203
but in its simple equation of French good, American bad, it neglects the
fact that the division between the two is not as clear-cut as it may initially
appear. The two most popular literary and cinematic genres of modern
times, the thriller and science fiction, owe an incalculable debt to Gallic
writers. The cultural tradition which is presented as so appallingly
’American’ is one which the French themselves have in part created, and to
which they have continued to contribute. The New York skyline inspires the
German Metropolis, which influences Blade Runner, which in turn produces
the New York of Besson’s Le Cinqui6me Element; the roman noir feeds the
film noir, leading in turn to the ’B’ movie, which inspires A Bout de souffle,
in turn remade as Breathless... et ainsi de suite.5
Baudrillard is right; the ’America’ so derided by the French is indeed a
fiction, but it is a fiction which the French themselves have helped to write.
More than this, at the same time as the French intelligentsia deride
American culture, the French public (and indeed the intellectuals
themselves) show a seemingly inexhaustible desire for it. From the idolizing
of Sidney B6chet and Josephine Baker (not to mention Charlot - his British
origins forgotten) in the 1920s to the baffling respect in which Jerry Lewis is
held, the French have shown themselves consistently devoted to American
popular culture. In particular, they have delighted in the roman noir, from
the dime novels of the early years of this century through to later hard-boiled
fiction. This appetite was never stronger than in the years immediately
following World War Two; following the lifting of the German ban on
American works:
=
=
La mention <traduit
de 1’americain> était en effet une garantie de vente, les
lecteurs voulaient du traduit de I’am6ricain, on leur en donnait et
souvent
There
was a
was more
n’importe quoi.’
huge demand for American
qualified to satisfy it:
crime fiction in France; Boris Vian
than
Grace a ses contacts avec les soldats et les musiciens de jazz am6ricains,
Boris Vian en 1946 est l’un des meilleurs connaisseurs en France de cette
litterature pseudo-policiere qui commence a susciter l’int6rdt du public et
qui va bientot obtenir le label <S6rie Noire>.7
He
was
to translate several American thrillers and science fiction
novels,8
5
For a discussion of American remakes of French films, see Lucy Mazdon, ’Rewriting and
remakes: questions of originality and authenticity’, in On Translating French Literature and Film,
ed. by Geoffrey T. Harris (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 1996), 47-64.
6
Jacques Duchateau, Boris Vian, ou les fac&eacute;ties du destin (Paris: La Table ronde, 1982), 67.
7
Michel Rybalka, Boris Vian, essai d’interpr&eacute;tation et de documentation (Paris: Minard, 1969),
100.
8
See the bibliography to Marc Lapprand, ’Les Traductions
French Review, Vol. 65, no. 4 (March 1992), 537-46 (pp. 543-4).
parodiques
de Boris Vian’, The
204
but this was merely the first step towards his most remarkable achievement.
In four novels - J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), Les Morts ont tous la
m6me peau (1947), Et on tuera tous les affreux (1948), and Elles se rendent
pas compte (1950)9 - Vian erased his own identity; the white French Boris
Vian was transformed into a black American. ’Vernon Sullivan’ was born.
From Boris Vian to ’Vernon Sullivan’
party early in 1946, Vian met the publisher Jean d’Halluin, whose
company had recently had great success with a novel by James Hadley
Chase. Chase’s No Orchids For Miss Blandish (so memorably dissected by
George Orwell) had been a highly lucrative title for Gallimard. Simultaneously, Vian was smarting from his failure in June of that year to win the
At
a
Prix de la Pleiade with L’Ecume des
jours. This had left him extremely
in general, and critical and
about
the
business
of
literature
jaundiced
taste
in
As
Anaik
Hechiche
writes:
popular
particular.
L’un des r6sultats les plus certains de 1’echec au Prix de la Pleiade est de
pr6parer Boris Vian a devenir Vernon Sullivan. (...) Il sait maintenant
que la gloire litteraire ne lui est pas assur6e et que s’il veut eviter
1’esclavage de son m6tier d’ingenieur, il lui faudra trouver autre chose
vivere>, dira-t-il plus tard.10
pour subsister. <Primum
Vian made a bet with d’Halluin that he could write exactly the sort of trashy
’American’ thriller the latter wanted in ten days; in the event, it took a
fortnight. Begun on the 5th of August 1946, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes was
finished on the 20th and went on sale on the 8th of November, a lurid tale of
inter-racial sex and violence set in a febrile version of the Deep South.
I have written elsewhere&dquo; about the way in which J’irai cracher mocks the
low tastes of its readers. One should note the wonderfully circular
complexity of a work which purports to be a bad translation by a French
author of a novel about a black American passing for white supposedly
written by an American black author who is in fact a white Frenchman; this,
to my mind at least, illustrates to perfection the true nature of the crosscultural, cross-fertilizing relationship between France and America.
In his preface to J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, Vian claimed that d’Halluin
9
All
quotations will be taken from the following editions:
Boris
Boris
Boris
Boris
10
11
Vian, Elles se rendent pas compte (Paris: 10/18, 1974).
Vian, Et on tuera tous les affreux (Paris: 10/18, 1970).
Vian, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (Paris: 10/18, 1983).
Vian, Les Morts ont tous la m&ecirc;me peau (Paris: 10/18,1981).
Ana&iuml;k Hechiche, La Violence dans les romans de Boris Vian (Paris: Publisud, 1986), 17.
Keith Scott, ’J’irai cracher sur vos a
tombes - two-faced "translation"’, in Harris, 209-25.
205
Sullivan at ’une esp6ce de reunion franco-americaine’;’2 a
that
could equally well be applied to the ’Sullivan’ novels
description
themselves. As Noel Arnaud says, ’Boris traduisait ce qu’un auteur
am6ricain aurait pu écrire. ’13 There can be no doubt that Vian adored
American literature as much as he loved jazz; Gilbert Pestureau cites as
writers Vian enjoyed Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, James M. Cain, Horace
MacCoy, Hemingway and Henry Miller. The similarities between the works
of these authors and the ’Sullivan’ novels are obvious; violence, sexuality
and machismo, and the way in which a ’serious’ author could use elements
more commonly found in ’popular’ literature. The adoption of the persona of
Vernon Sullivan allowed Vian to transcend the (to him) stultifying
conventions of contemporary French literature, allowing his imagination
free rein. Within the conventions of the roman noir, he was able to explore
areas that were strictly taboo in the literature of his day, most notably the
depiction of sexuality. He was also able to use America as a playground,
something he had previously done in his article Impressions d’Amerique,
intended for publication in Les Temps modernes.14 In this text (inspired
perhaps by Sartre’s travels in the States), Vian travels to America, meeting
the locals:
met Vernon
premiere personne que j’ai rencontr6e, c’etait Hemingway. Comme je
jamais vu, je ne 1’ai pas reconnu; lui non plus, aussi nous nous
sommes crois6s sans rien dire; quelle ville passionnante.15
La
ne
-
and
1’avais
taking in the sights:
On rencontre pas mal de voitures a anes poussees par des N6gres. Les
anes se pr6lassent sur des coussins en mangeant des ice cream au
chocolat, clairs ou fonc6s, suivant la couleur de leur peau.&dquo;
Finally,
in
encounters
a
remarkable meeting of the Old and New Worlds, Vian
of the fathers of Surrealism in somewhat unusual
one
circumstances:
J’ai fini par
boite
rencontrer Andr6 Breton
en
plein Harlem,
dans
une
petite
ga s’appelait Tom’s; pas de doute, c’6tait lui. Mais
Il s’est pass6 au noir; on dirait absolument un vrai
assez crasseuse,
quel camouflage!
N6gre, il a m6me les grosses levres
...
de
N6gre
et des cheveux
crepus,
et
il
12
J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, 9.
No&euml;l Arnaud, Les Vies parall&egrave;les de Boris Vian (Paris: &Eacute;ditions Christian Bourgois, 1981), 153.
14
Written 10 June 1946
two months before writing J’irai cracher sur vos tombes
), it was
turned down by Les Temps modernes
, and remained unpublished until 1974, with the first
13
(barely
edition of all of the Chroniques du menteur.
complete
15
’Impressions d’Am&eacute;rique’, in Boris Vian, Chroniques
(p. 83).
’Impressions d’Am&eacute;rique’, 84.
16
du menteur (Paris: 10/18, 1981), 81-102
206
N6gre. Il se fait appeler Andy, les autres n’ont pas 1’air
beaucoup de respect pour lui. Je lui ai demande s’il comptait
venir en France et il m’a r6pondu: <... man. Ah’ll stay wid ma black gal
and ma black kids. I’am’t no use, man, goin’ all’ round de world an’
catchin’ sea sick, crabs an’claps an’lookin’ always for fuck. Lawd don’t
parle
comme un
d’avoir
likes that man, sure Lawd don’t likes that.> C’est une perte pour le
surrealisme ..., a murmur6 Astruc. 17
Turning Andr6 Breton into Stepin Fetchit18 is an act of chutzpah, to say the
least (and I would argue that it cannot and should not be dismissed as
simple racism; one should also note that Vian shows Breton ’passing’ for
black, in just the same way as he would later do himself), but it shows how
the America of Vian’s text owes little if anything to the real country; the
same is true of the ’Sullivan’ novels. The setting of these works is:
une
pas,
It is not
Am6rique qui correspondait a des mythes, a un pays qui n’existait
un pays imaginaire confectionn6 de toutes pieces par Boris Vian.1’
quite correct to say that Vian ’invented’ this fictional America; he
develops a model drawn from popular thrillers and the ’Southern Gothic’
novels of such writers as Faulkner. It is a modern mythic America, replacing
the wide open spaces of the prairies and the freedom of frontier culture with
the claustrophobic environment of small-town and metropolitan America. It
is a world of corruption and violence, a world familiar to anyone who has
read Red Harvest or seen In the Heat of the Night. In Impressions
d’Am6rique, Vian uses America as a springboard for comic invention; in the
’Sullivan’ novels, the world of the American roman noir becomes a vehicle
for stylistic experiment, inspiration for pastiche and parody, and a terrain for
the exploration of deeper issues.
To summarize the four novels briefly: J’irai cracher and Les Morts ont tous
la meme peau are grim tales of race hatred and murder, where what humour
there is is at odds with the subject matter. In the first novel, Lee Anderson
passes for white in a small town in the Deep South in order to avenge the
lynching of his younger brother; he does this through the rape and murder of
two wealthy white sisters. Les Morts is equally cheerless, showing how the
protagonist, Dan Parked is driven to murder and ultimately suicide through
a fear that he will be revealed as black.
17
18
the
’Impressions d’Am&eacute;rique’, 88-9.
The character who embodied the stereotype of the
same
vein
as
Amos ’n’
(1987).
Shuffle
19
’comedy black’ in 1930s American films, in
Andy; devastatingly parodied by Robert Townsend in his film Hollywood
Hechiche, 17. It should be noted that this is remarkably close to Michel Rybalka, ’Boris Vian et
Vernon Sullivan’, in Boris Vian 2, Colloque de Cerisy (direction No&euml;l Arnaud et Henri Baudin)
10/18, 1977),
(Paris:
20
A
private joke:
341-53
.
against J’irai cracher
(p. 351).
Parker is named after the moral crusader who
brought charges
of
obscenity
207
These two novels are highly effective pastiches of the American ’hardboiled’ thriller, with added echoes of more ’serious’ works such as Richard
Wright’s Native Son and Sartre’s La Putain respectueuse (one may also detect
the influence of Sartre’s articles on his American travels). Generally
dismissed by critics as a regression to the juvenile burlesquerie of his earliest
novels, Trouble dans les Andains and Vercoquin et le plancton, the other
two ’Sullivans’ move from pastiche to parody, guying the conventions of
science fiction and the ’spicy’ detective novel respectively. In Et on tuera
tous les affreux, Rock Bailey and his friends battle the evil Dr Markus Schutz
and his dastardly plan to swamp the world with a master race of physicallyperfect androids. Elles se rendent pas compte, on the other hand, is the tale
of Francis Deacon, who with his brother infiltrates and breaks up a gang of
lesbian and gay drug smugglers; in order to enter the gang without arousing
suspicion, they dress as women, with a variety of (supposedly hilarious)
results.
Given the fact that these novels display such a wide variety of forms and
narrative genres, it may legitimately be asked why I should choose to study
the works thematically and neglect considerations of parodic versus ’serious’
novels. My response is straightforward; throughout the ’Sullivan’ novels, the
issues I am examining here recur incessantly, and I would argue that
although their presentation may differ from work to work, the thematic
concerns are
constant. Sometimes
America, like that of our own
sex,
and
day,
comic, sometimes nightmarish, Vian’s
is dominated by three central issues; race,
paranoia.
Race
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
-
Lewis
Allen, ’Strange Fruit’21
21
See David Margolick, ’Strange Fruit’, Vanity Fair, September
history of this song.
1998, 138-48 for
an
excellent
208
If one wished for appropriate background music for a dramatization of Vian’s
first two ’Sullivan’ novels, ’Strange Fruit’ would be the perfect choice. The
America of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes and Les Morts ont tous la mbme
peau is a land of racial segregation, lynch law, and bitter prejudice, where
the black population is kept firmly under the heel of white domination. In
both novels, violence erupts when the strict barrier between the two
societies breaks down, in J’irai cracher when Lee Anderson passes for white
in order to avenge the racist murder of his younger brother, and in Les Morts
when Dan Parker is driven to killing in the (mistaken) belief that he is in fact
black. As Michel Rybalka says:
Entre le noir et le blanc r6unis a l’int6rieur d’un m8me 6tre, il y a un mur
sans porte, une opposition qui ne peut se r6soudre finalement que par la
destruction de 1’6tre
qui les porte22
That both these characters commit horrific acts should not blind us to the
fact that Vian is showing us a world where their violence springs directly
from the racism of their society; this is not a reasoned, doctrinaire antiracism, but it is anti-racism nonetheless, the angry reaction of a man whose
love of American black music amounted almost to a religion:
Les difficult6s, les vexations que subissent quotidiennement aux ttatsUnis les musiciens noirs, la meconnaissance de leur talent, Boris sait
qu’elles sont la consequence d’une inegalite qui frappe toute la race et
trouve son fondement legal dans la politique de segregation. Cette
politique lui r6pugne. Vernon Sullivan la dénonce.23
Vian’s disgust at the total abnegation of American black culture is clear, the
way in which they are not even allowed to possess their own music:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
22
23
24
Tous les grands orchestres de danse sont blancs.
les
Blancs sont bien mieux places pour exploiter les
Certainement,
d6couvertes des Noirs.
Je ne crois pas que vous ayez raison. Tous les grands compositeurs sont
Blancs.
Duke Ellington, par exemple.
Non, Gershwin, Kern, tous ceux-1h.
Tous des Europeens 6migr6s, assurai-je. Certainement ceux-ci sont les
meilleurs exploiteurs. Je ne crois pas qu’on puisse trouver dans
Gershwin un passage original, qu’il n’ait pas copi6, d6marqu6 ou
reproduit. Je vous d6fie d’en trouver un dans la Rhapsody in Blue.
Vous Otes bizarre, dit-elle. Je d6teste les Noirs.24
Je ne crois pas.
Rybalka, ’Boris Vian et Vernon Sullivan’, 351.
Hechiche, 22.
J’irai cracher, 117.
209
There is an irony here which is surely unintentional; a black man pretending
to be white is upbraiding a white European for appropriating black
American and African culture, in a book which is itself just such an act of
cultural appropriation. Vian seems entirely unaware of this, just as he seems
not to have considered that the cause of black anti-racism might not have
been best helped by books which depict American blacks (no matter how
hard-pressed) as sexually rapacious psychopaths.
That said, on further examination, and on considering the first two
’Sullivan’ novels along with the works which followed them, another
suggestion comes to mind. Strictly speaking, the origin of J’irai cracher was
not a response to racism, but:
(...)
article d’une
avions trouve dans
un camp
de l’orchestre; cet article
donnait des statistiques sur le nombre des Noirs qui passaient la ligne,
c’est-a-dire devenaient blancs, et insistaient sur tous les dangers encourus
par ces nouveaux Blancs - enfants noirs, etc.: cela avait beaucoup
un
revue
am6ricain a l’occasion d’un
que
nous
deplacement
impressionn6 Boris.&dquo;
that is, an interest in those who transgress ’natural’ or ’God-given’
boundaries of race. In order to do this, Vian himself becomes ’un 6tre
hybride, un objet composite, (...) un negre blanc, un Am6ricain a culture
europ6enne (...)’.26 It is this question of transgression, or of the uncertain
nature of identity, which seems to me to lie at the heart of the ’Sullivan’
novels, as it recurs throughout them, whether on a racial level, as in J’irai
cracher and Les Morts, or on another plane altogether, as was to be the case
in Vian’s other two excursions into Americana.
As has been said, Et on tuera and Elles se rendent pas compte have none
of the seriousness of the first two ’Sullivan’ novels; they move from the
realm of Southern Gothic into the worlds of Science Fiction and sexual
comedy respectively. That said, they do share the common theme of
transgression; just as barriers of race are crossed in the first two novels, so
here the dividing lines between Nature and science are bridged, and the gulf
between the genders, and the seemingly irrevocably opposed categories of
’masculine’ and ’feminine’. I will discuss this in my next section, but in
closing this discussion of the issues of race and identity, it cannot fail to
strike the reader that there is little in these texts which could not be applied
to contemporary America, rather than the United States of the immediate
post-War years. As events as diverse as the Simpson and Clarence Thomas
trials, the rise of the right-wing militias and the recent spate of arson attacks
on churches have shown, racism is still endemic in America. Similarly, the
-
25
26
Michelle Vian, quoted in Duchateau, 68.
Rybalka, ’Boris Vian et Vernon Sullivan’, 351.
210
obsession with physical perfection found in Et on tuera tous les affreux has
our days assumed a quasi-religious status (given the West Coast setting of
the novel, it eerily prefigures the plastic perfection of the cast of Baywatch).
This leaves only the sexual fluidity of Elles se rendent pas compte, which
takes us into the next element of the ’Sullivan’ novels I wish to consider,
in
namely their depiction of sexuality.
Sex
The ’Sullivan’ novels
were
written
pornography,
as
and
even
by today’s
standards, they contain material which many would find shocking. This is
true at least of J’irai cracher and Les Morts, which as thrillers linking sex
with appalling violence read like the works of James Ellroy or Andrew
Vachss; in this at least, Vian/Sullivan is much more a writer of our day than
his own. In his lecture ’Utilite d’une litterature erotique’, Vian argues that in
order to enthral his or her reader, it is better to evoke a visceral, rather than a
cerebral response:
1’ecrivain tentera et doit tenter d’attacher son lecteur par les moyens de
son ressort; et l’un des plus efficaces est celui, sans aucun doute, de
produire sur lui une impression physique, de lui faire éprouver une
emotion d’ordre physique.27
Vian then argues that in order to achieve this response:
les sentiments et les sensations qui ont 1’amour pour commune origine
(...) sont sans nul doute, avec ceux qui se rattachent aux choses de la
mort, si voisins d’ailleurs, les plus intenses et les plus violemment
ressentis par l’humanité.28
hence, writing about sex will be the most captivating possible form of
-
literature. Leaving aside the questions of defining ’pornography’ and/or
’erotica’ and whether or not the ’Sullivan’ novels are indeed enthralling, let
us instead consider the depiction of sex within the novels. It would be
pleasant to say that the novels appear ludicrously dated in their attitudes
and depictions of sexuality, but sadly, such is not the case. As with the
racism within the texts, the sexism is still present; while there is more
debate about pornography in contemporary society, the nature of the beast is
unchanged. Essentially, the sexual relations in the ’Sullivan’ novels
exemplify to perfection Andrea Dworkin’s thesis:
THE
27
MAJOR THEME of pornography as
Boris Vian, ’Utilit&eacute; d’une litt&eacute;rature
10/18,
1981),
28
23-64
(p. 31).
’Utilit&eacute; d’une litt&eacute;rature
&eacute;rotique’,
34.
&eacute;rotique’,
a
genre is male power, its nature,
in Boris Vian,
&Eacute;crits pornographiques (Paris:
211
its magnitude, its use, its meaning. (...) These strains of male power are
intrinsic to both the substance and production of pornography; and the
ways and means of pornography are the ways and means of male power.29
Dworkin could be writing directly about J’irai cracher and Les morts; what is
remarkable is not the extent to which they prefigure contemporary mores,
but how little these mores differ from the values of post-War France. What
Hechiche has to say about these novels could equally well be applied to
present-day sexual writing:
Les h6ros de Sullivan sont des matamores du sexe, des phallocrates, un
peu comme le neolithique velu qui trainait les dames par les cheveux,
devant les aurochs
relief, la femme
pensifs, mais, adapt6 au gout du jour.
en creux
(...)
L’homme est
Le lecteur assimile par h6ros
interpose
en
du
a la tonne, des orgasmes-mitrailleuses, des erections
imperturbables, des cris, des soupirs et des pâmoisons.30
Donjuanisme
It is in the third and fourth novels that matters become more interesting,
in that they attempt the extremely difficult literary task of mixing sex and
humour, with arguably dubious results. The introduction of humour allows
Vian to subvert the conventions of pornography, creating protagonists in
both Et on tuera and Elles se rendent pas compte who have little in common
with the genre’s stereotypical sufferers from chronic satyriasis. In the former,
Rock Bailey, far from entering eagerly into the realms of sexual adventure, is
in fact desperate to maintain his virginity, and the plot thread of ’will he or
won’t he?’ is central to the novel (he will).
This overturning of the norms of pornography is greatest in Elles se
rendent pas compte, where the hero is in no way the typical hyper-macho
male; physically slight, he relishes his transvestism and the new persona he
is
obliged to adopt:
Je
suis tomb6
amoureux
de moi -
cette
fille
comme
ga
...
mes
enfants,
...
auriez
il fallait pas de la
vous
de tout la ou
qui me regardait avec mes yeux
de la hanche, du sein - (et du qui tenait, ma mere achbte
camelote) - et une allure a affoler tous les durs de Bowery.31
vu
It is elements such as this which strike me as fascinating; reading Elles se
rendent pas compte is like being exposed to two diametrically opposed
works. There is the work of entirely traditional phallocentric pornography,
when heterosexual men are firmly in control, and where any deviation from
the norm is viewed as an aberration to be cured or excised (a lesbian
29
Dworkin, Andrea, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1981),
24.
30
Hechiche, 31-2.
31
Elles
se
rendent pas compte, 14.
212
character is returned to the fold of heterosexuality through a course of
’therapy’ which amounts to gang rape). Then there is an implicit narrative,
where the protagonist learns that to be male does not of necessity imply
being masculine, and discovers that sexuality is infinitely less cut-and-dried
than he had initially thought. I find Elles se rendent pas compte a deeply
frustrating work on this account; it never develops the issues of gender
ambiguity and bisexuality which run through the narrative, latent but
unexpressed. That said, I feel it deserves a place in the history of debate over
sexual roles in this century; it is perhaps best seen as a precursor of Basic
Instinct, The Crying Game, and the finest of all works combining the crime
story with an examination of gender - Some Like It Hot. Moreover, in its
vision of a criminal subculture plotting even in the nation’s capital, it
displays the final aspect of contemporary American fears I wish to examine;
paranoia.
Paranoia
In his seminal essay, ’The
Hofstadter outlines:
paranoid style
in American
politics’,32 Richard
vital difference between the
paranoid spokesman in politics and the
paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the
a
clinical
clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he
feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the
spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a
culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of
others.33
Hofstadter
(writing in 1963) was attempting to show that contemporary fears
of conspiracies against the American state were merely one manifestation of
a trend of paranoid thought dating back practically to the founding of the
country; while this is undeniably true, it is also a fact that in our day,
paranoia has become a (if not the) dominant note in American cultural
discourse. Leaving aside the ever-growing plethora of books, magazines,
websites et al. devoted to revealing the alleged schemes of International
Jewry/Secular Humanism/The Bilderberg Group/the British Royal Family,34
contemporary American literature, film and television displays an obsession
with ideas of conspiracy. From DeLillo and Pynchon to JFK and The X-Files,
32
Richard Hofstadter, ’The
paranoid style
American Politics and Other Essays
in American
in The Paranoid
3-40.
politics’,
(New York: Vintage Books, 1967),
Style
in
33
Hofstadter, 4.
34
According to the American conspiratologist Lyndon LaRouche, Queen Elizabeth is running the
world heroin trade.
213
from Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus! to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles,
there is an omnipresent depiction of plotting, cover-ups, and attempts by the
powers that be to manipulate and dupe the general public.
Leaving aside any attempt to determine why this should be such a
conspicuous element of the Zeitgeist, a few comments can be made about its
origins; while Hofstadter is undoubtedly correct in tracing a tradition of
paranoid thought in American history, its present manifestation seems to
date from the events of Watergate, the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of
the Kennedys and, ultimately, from the witchhunts of Senator McCarthy and
the House Un-American Activities Committee. In other words, from the
years immediately following the Second World War until December 1954
(when McCarthy was condemned by the Senate for ’conduct contrary to
Senatorial traditions’); the years Vian was writing his ’Sullivan’ novels.
As we have noted, there is a clear difference between the first two
’Sullivan’ novels and the second pair, a difference which may be related to
Hofstadter’s distinction (quoted above) between ’the paranoid spokesman in
politics and the clinical paranoiac’. J’irai cracher and Les Morts are
essentially tales of clinical paranoia, where the protagonist, as Hofstadter
says, ’sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to
be living as directed specifically against him’. Both texts are driven by
de 1’homme
traque - bien plus, 1’angoisse de la proie fascin6e
gages a son bourreau. Vous n’avez jamais vu la souris, au
moment ou le chat retire sa patte du dos minuscule? Elle reste immobile,
ne cherche mame pas a s’enfuir et le coup de patte qui suit est plus leger
qu’une caresse - une caresse d’amour, 1’amour de la victime pour son
tortionnaire qui le lui rend d’une certaine façon.35
1’angoisse
qui
donne
ses
are tales of persecution, of an individual lost in a hostile world, to be
hunted down by the representatives of authority or the establishment (Lee
Anderson is tracked by the police, Dan Parker’s suicide is recorded by the
press), but there is no suggestion of an organized conspiracy; for this we
must turn to the latter two novels.
Et on tuera tous les affreux, in many ways a comic retelling of The Island
of Doctor Moreau, is also a conspiracy narrative. In the closing stages of the
novel, it is revealed that Dr Schutz has created in his laboratories a
Hollywood starlet, two presidential candidates, and the entire Yale football
team. At this point the heroes receive an order from their superiors to ’se
mettre a 1’enti6re disposition du docteur Markus Schutz ou de ses
representants’ (Et on tuera, p. 186); clearly, Schutz has succeeded in
infiltrating the highest echelons of government.
They
35
Les Morts ont tous la m&ecirc;me peau, 49.
214
Similarly, Elles se rendent pas compte unveils a plot à la Hofstadter,
’directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not
himself alone but millions of others’. In this case, a gang of homosexual and
lesbian drug smugglers is busily corrupting the nation’s youth, running their
criminal empire from Washington itself. Vian’s innate homophobia comes
across clearly; he is appalled by the transgression of sexual, not legal norms,
as is made clear by the narrator’s description of the source of his family
fortune:
gagne son argent en vendant de 1’alcool redistille aux
qui avaient soif pendant la prohibition, ce qui est une
action philanthropique a mon avis. Et puis, entre-temps, il est devenu
chef de la police de Chicago.36
In Vian’s fictional America, a heterosexual criminal may become the epitome
papa, il
pauvres mecs
mon
a
of moral probity; the ’Homintern’ must be wiped out.
Within these four novels, we can see a clear division between stories of
individual paranoia and tales of conspiracy; one explanation for the shift of
subject matter, if not narrative tone, may be historical. As I have argued, the
vision of an America haunted by conspiracy may be dated from the activities
of McCarthy and HUAC, neither of which was active until after the
publication of the first two ’Sullivan’ novels. J’irai cracher was published in
1946, Les Morts in February 1947. In October 1947, HUAC began the
hearings which were to lead to the blacklisting of the ’Hollywood Ten’. In
February of the next year, the first extracts of Et on tuera were published.
Finally, Elles se rendent pas compte was completed in June 1950, four
months after McCarthy declared before the Republican Woman’s Club that ’I
have in my hand a list of 205 individuals who appear to be either cardcarrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party’ ,37 marking the
beginning of the true ’McCarthy era’. It was also only five months after Klaus
Fuchs’s confession on the 27th of January that he had passed atomic secrets
to the Russians, and the novel came off the presses only three days before
David Greenglass confessed on June 15th that he had been recruited as a
Soviet spy by his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. We know that the
’Sullivan’ novels owe their origin to the contemporary vogue for American
thrillers, and that they drew on contemporary journalism and literature for
their source material; given the amount of worldwide press coverage of the
’atom spies’ and the rise of McCarthyism, it seems almost inevitable that
Vian should have altered his fictional America to take account of the changes
in the real country. This in itself is not particularly remarkable; what is
36
37
Elles se rendent pas compte, 189.
Cited online at URL: http://www.em.doe.gov/timeline/feb1950.html.
215
noteworthy
is
that,
as
nature should chime
so
with the sexual mores of the novels, their
well with the present mood.
paranoid
Conclusion
’Wer seiner Zeit
(’If
someone
day’)&dquo;
In Vian’s case,
is
nur voraus
merely
ist, den holt sie einmal ein.’
ahead of his time, it will catch up with him
Wittgenstein is right; time has indeed caught up with
one
’Vernon
Sullivan’. The America of these novels - riddled with racial and sexual
insecurity, afflicted with fears of conspiracy, violence and crime - is one
which we can all recognize. It is the America of the mass media, of film and
television, the fictional state to which we are all exposed, and of which we
are arguably all citizens. Vian was present at the birth of this era, but it is all
too easy to forget that these novels were written half a century ago; whether
this is due to authorial prescience or our own lack of development is a
question I leave for the reader. What cannot be denied is that the America
Vian created still exists today, in all the outpourings of American culture
which the French see as threatening their own patrimoine. As I hope I have
shown, the conflict between the two cultures is ultimately meaningless; they
are inseparable, the one feeding into and influencing the other. French
culture inspires American culture, which in turn inspires French culture
again; Vian’s metamorphosis into ’Vernon Sullivan’ is merely an extreme
(and the most logical?) example of the process. The greatest irony of Vian’s
excursion into Americana is that the fictional country he created, seen as so
extreme at the time of composition, now seems barely exaggerated. ’Vernon
Sullivan’ may perhaps best be read as an author who was not post-War, but
pre-millennial.
38
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, trans. P. Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980),
8-9.