Skip to main content

Literary Drifts

In 1952, between 23rd and 28th August, Michèle Bernstein spent time in the French port of Le Havre, Normandy seeking out the places that had inspired Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, or so we learn from some fragments left by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent.  The Sartre novel which inspired Michèle Bernstein was from 1938; it was Sartre's first published novel. Sartre set the story in the port city on the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy where he had been a schoolteacher.  Nausea is written as diary entries, with street-names that should be easy to find for any literary dériviste; in the quotation from Nausea below, the narrator, Antoine Roquentin has just come out of the library. A bronze statue of Gustave Impetraz stands nearby:




Thursday, 11.30

I have worked two hours in the reading-room. I went down to the Cour des Hypotheques to smoke a pipe. A square paved with pinkish bricks. The people of Bouville [Le Havre] are proud of it because it dates from the eighteenth century. At the entrance to the Rue Chamade and the Rue Suspedard, old chains bar the way to vehicles. Women in black come to exercise their dogs glide beneath the arcades’   Jean-Paul Sartre 1938.


  Like Michèle Bernstein in 1952, Sonia Anton of the Université du Havre has been inspired to explore Sartre’s street-names in Le Havre and has published a web project to share her results through the Groupe de Recherches Identités et Cultures. 

Michèle Bernstein’s two novels have been re-issued in French and in English translations.  La Nuit, The Night, provides the literary urban detective rich street clues for a drift of détournement through Paris, for instance it opens:

A disused metro entrance sits at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain where it meets Boul'Mich; it's been abandoned a long time and is bordered by the railings of a private garden'. Michèle Bernstein 1961 La Nuit (translation mine)




The novels, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre and La Nuit by Michèle Bernstein are explored above for their literary geographies. The catalyst for this discovery came from the book of fragments by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent. 




Brittany Ferries have resumed their regular sailings from Portsmouth to Le Havre in Normandy. 






Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you. Please do a SHARE too...

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

AI Detector

I've been looking at AI Detectors that are now stable and easy to use. The first one to write about is from a company based in Montreal, and so, as you would expect from that bilingual city, it works on English and French texts. It's called Winston AI. The AI detector tells you if written copy is generated by a human or an Artificial Intelligence text generator robot. It uses a graphic sliding scale. The software also detects plagiarism and presents a thorough list of any copied content it has found. As a user of Winston AI you just paste text into the quick scan option. You can upload bigger documents in the following formats: .docx, .pdf, .png and .jpg for the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system to convert to electronic text from scanned documents or pictures. This also works on handwriting like Google Lens and the other handwritten text readers and convertors do. The Winston AI Detector works in projects, this lets you label or title pieces you are examining for plagi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference Paris

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference - Paris 19-21 June 2024 Aims of the Conference The conference aims to explore the links between tourism and fiction, and more precisely to consider tourism and tourists as fictions. It is part of a series of conferences organized since 2011 by researchers from the Universities of Geneva, Panthéon-Sorbonne and Berkeley to explore the links between tourism and the imaginary. The first four meetings had evoked how tourism mobilized imaginaries specific to destination countries, their landscapes, their cultures and their inhabitants. The fifth conference will focus on the imaginary that applies to tourists themselves. Imaginary tourists We will examine how the various actors of tourism, as well as the places and practices of tourism, appear in works of fiction. Literature, cinema, theater, song, advertising, etc., stage tourist configurations, which are sometimes at the very heart of these fictions.  Fictional tourists include those invent...
24 comments
Read more

The Space in Mill Bay

Millbay, Saturday 3 August 2024 Samedi. A decade has passed since Sam Ferguson published his question* on the innovative story by André Gide, called, Paludes . In English that book title could be rendered as Swamps, or, Sourpool, perhaps. Plymouth's Sourpool is recorded in 1439 when the town's boundary was fixed during its incorporation as a Devon borough. The record reads ‘between the hill called Windy Ridge – by the bank of the Sourpool – against the north all the way to the great dyke otherwise called the great ditch’.  Damp, mossy, ferny, even swampy boundaries blurred the edges of the space we call Millbay today. Paludes occupies a critical point of experimentation in the trajectory of published diary-writing […] exploring the possible relationship of the diary with the literary œuvre, and its capacity for addressing philosophical and aesthetic questions. The pertinence of this experimentation to the modern field of life-writing makes this a suitable moment for anothe...
12 comments
Read more