The Paris Métro and urban experience in Annie Ernaux’s Journal du dehors and Céline Curiol’s Voix sans issue

Abstract

According to Marc Augé, contemporary urban life generates non-places, meaningless spaces of transit and anonymity. I discuss the form taken by the idea of the non-place in contemporary representations of the Paris Métro, with a focus on women’s urban experiences in Annie Ernaux’s Journal du dehors and Céline Curiol’s Voix sans issue. I argue that there are no fixed non-places; the experience of place is always subjective. The Métro can be seen momentarily as a non-place when it reflects the character’s state of mind, but it can also be a meaningful place, connected to the character’s identity and history.

On the move in the (post)colonial metropolis: The Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic fiction

“…Fictional African users of the Metro may be excluded from the public space of public transport, and many of them remain detached from the potential conviviality which the mobile public space might ideally engender. While a sense of alienation defines literary portrayals of the Paris Metro more generally (see Ahonen, 2015), in African fiction this alienation is grounded in the (post)colonial entanglements between Africa and Europe. In first-generation narratives the feelings of alienation also spring from the shock of modernity typical of urbanisation, and the Metro is far from being an everyday element of urban life.…”

“…That said, the questions of race, colonial history and the global inequalities informing African representations of the Metro cannot be ignored. Allusions to (post)colonial entanglements and experiences of racial othering differentiate African portrayals of the Paris Metro from their French counterparts featured, for example, in Queneau’s (1959) Zazie dans le métro , which presents the adventures of a girl from provincial France in Paris and its Metro, or in Maspero’s (1990) urban travelogue Les Passagers du Roissy-Express , in which the author and the photographer Anaïk Frantz take the Parisian suburban train RER (Réseau Express Régional) to ‘explore’ life as outsider-observers in the marginalised suburbs of Paris (see Ahonen, 2015: 7).…”

“… 1. On the Paris Metro in literature, see Wrona (2008), Sweeney (2011) and Ahonen (2015). For specifically postcolonial readings, see Anyinefa (2003), Mullen (2012) and Rosello (2016). …”