The contents of the stomach—which not even the possessor usually sees—is put on public display. The common reaction to vomiting, both producing it and witnessing it, is disgust. Julia Kristeva specifically mentions vomit as a material producing the situation of abjection. To abject literally means to “throw away.” For Kristeva, this concept helps us understand how we create ourselves in opposition to other things we deem not-us and radically unacceptable. Food and vomit occupy a middle space between me and not-me. As Kristeva writes, when I vomit, “I spit myself out.” The act of vomiting, as well as seeing vomit, reminds the vomiter or viewer of her own implication in the not-me, even as vomiting represents an attempt to draw a bright line between self and other. In this sense, abjection is both an action and a relationship, tying the self to the not-self. Vomiting, then, like the place of the neighborhood in the city, marks a zone in between private and public. Following Kristeva, that zone is paradoxical: it is both undeniably me and undeniably not-me. In Rue Ordener, rue Labat, the space of the neighborhood is both the symbol and the stage for the enactment of this paradox. Kofman’s family apartment on rue Ordener also performs an act of abjection. When Kofman and her mother return to their apartment on rue Ordener, they find that the Gestapo, “dans leur fureur d’être venus pour rien, . . . avaient, nous dit le concierge, jeté les meubles par la fenêtre. Les fauteuils et le divan de la chambre de mon père, tout avait été cassé, brisé. Ils avaient fait le vide.” [“In their anger at coming up empty-handed, . . . had thrown the furniture out the window, the concierge told us. The armchairs and the sofa from my father’s room—everything had been broken, smashed. They’d emptied it out” ] Like Kofman herself when she vomits on the street, hydroponic rack system her apartment is made to disgorge its contents so that the private furnishings of the house are made public. With Mayol’s help, we can see how destructive the “abjection” of Kofman’s apartment on rue Ordener is.
The apartment is a bounded space that allows the dweller to lead a life: within one’s four walls, one can know one’s personal space and organize one’s furnishings. The bounded space of the neighborhood allows the inhabitant to negotiate between the perfectly private and the perfectly public outside world. When the apartment on rue Ordener is made to vomit its contents onto the street, that “interdependent” relationship between home and neighborhood is destroyed, making, as Mayol writes, daily life impossible. The “device” of the neighborhood negotiates between home and not-home so that you can understand your place in society. If you do not have a home, if your home is suddenly public and lying in the street, such a negotiation is impossible. If your home is not private, or is gone entirely, how do you know where your neighborhood is? After the violent abjection of her family’s belongings and the loss of her home, Kofman stands as open to the depersonalizing environment as that bombed out building. The prominence of the public/private environment of the neighborhood underscores the importance of space, particularly the space of the city, in Kofman’s text. In fact, the neighborhood is not the only intermediary space Kofman addresses in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. After describing how her father would light a cigarette as soon as the sabbath was over, and how she used to love to purchase Zig-Zag rolling papers for him, she writes, “Plus tard, dans un rêve, je me représentai mon père sous la figure d’un ivrogne qui traversait la rue en zigzaguant” [“Later, in a dream, my father appeared to me as a drunk zig-zagging across the street” ]. This dream inscribes her father, and the smoke that symbolizes the fragility of her memory of him, onto the street, creating a path in space from her memory of her father. The zig-zag shape, usually two parallel lines with a slanted line connecting them, is a visual rendering of intermediate space; the slanted line mediates between one parallel line and the other.
Kofman’s narrative about her father, and about her own life, cannot move straight forward in textual space; it must zig zag.Zig-zagging occurs at several levels of Kofman’s narrative: at the level of chapter organization, narrative structure and diction. All of these levels create an image of the mental space that Kofman asks the reader to experience. In addition to the image of zig zagging, I will use the concept of the crossroads and Kofman’s term, voie de traverse, to consider the way space functions at these three levels of the text. Kofman employs zig-zagging to “spatialize” her text, creating a 2-dimensional plane instead of a straight narrative. Her story does not move straight from the beginning to the end. Instead, hers is of a dual identity, of a woman who is simultaneously the daughter of her mother and the daughter of mémé. Because a linear, chronological text makes such simultaneity difficult to convey, spatialization allows the reader to experience more than one moment in time concurrently. Freud begins by discussing children’s tendency to fantasize about having a different set of parents, one that is higher in social class . The “romances” Freud describes— perhaps of having been switched at birth, or of being secretly adopted—allow a child to envision him or herself as separate from his or her parents. Because, according to Freud, these fantasies occur before a child knows about the mechanics of sexual reproduction, the child does not necessarily see a reason why he or she could not be the child of another couple, or the product of a secret liaison between their mother and another, superior, man. In fantasy, then, the child is able to leave the family and create an identity of his or her own, a step towards maturity and independence. Rue Ordener, rue Labat is a very literal “family romance.” Kofman’s childhood experience of persecution is the peacetime child’s experience writ large. Freud mentions that, as “intellectual growth increases, the child cannot help discovering by degrees the category to which his parents belong” .
Kofman becomes aware of her “category”—Jewish, a child of immigrants—not by degrees, but rather all at once. And unlike the child in Freud’s essay, Kofman does not need to fantasize that she has another mother—she actually has one. mémé, like the fantasy parents in “Family Romances,” is “of higher social standing” insofar as she is a full French citizen and a Christian. In order to discover the “category” to which his or her parents belong, the child must develop the ability to look at his or her parents from the perspective of an outsider, a step towards imagining him or herself as separate from the parents. For Kofman, her survival depends upon imagining herself from another’s perspective well enough to actually inhabit a different, Christian, identity. In Freud’s formulation, the child escapes from the suffocating triad with the parents by way of fantasies in narrative, employing the texts of others to build a new story. In a sense, they write their own Bildungsroman, their own story of their origins and maturation. Children’s fantasies of being adopted, he says, are “usually a result of something they have read” . These narratives offer escape routes by which the child may strike out on his or her own, independent from the family. In using others’ texts to create a genealogy, the child builds a bridge to the biologically unrelated fantasy parents, a crucial step towards becoming an independent person. Separating oneself from the private realm of the family, even in fantasy, means entering the public outside world as an individual. Like the child in Freud’s essay, Kofman’s also uses others’ texts to escape from her family and operate as an individual in the public world, rolling tables grow charting a movement from private to public via a coming of age story involving multiple parentage. Kofman has a deep relationship to these texts, and description of a new living situation seldom comes without a note about what books she read there. While the people who gave her the books disappear from her life, she carries the books they gave her from place to place.Kofman’s intertextual escape routes are not confined to passing textual references. At two points in Rue Ordener Rue Labat, Kofman breaks the narrative thread of her story to dwell on the work of others that seems, at least on a very superficial level, to be tangential to the story at hand. Chapters 18 and 19 point outside of Kofman’s text, allowing both Kofman and the reader to escape her story. Chapter 18, “Les deux mères de Léonard”, discusses Leonardo’s “carton de Londres” and Freud’s analysis of it. Chapter 19 remains separate from the narrative thread, this time allowing Kofman to discuss “un de [s]es films préférés” [“one of [her] favorite [films]” ], Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. These two intertextual chapters come in the last third of the text, directly after the chapter recounting the “Liberation” of Paris and her mother’s liberation from the house of mémé. A story only about Kofman’s experiences during the war would end there, implying her relationship with mémé ended with the war and perhaps implying a slightly happy ending as she becomes again her mother’s daughter and is reunited with her siblings. Chapters 18 and 19 offer the reader a chance to pause before diving into the unhappy ending that awaits, as well as a chance to reflect on the resonances Kofman’s story has with these three works that mean so much to her.
While these chapters allow Kofman to meditate on her own story through resonances with these other texts, they also accomplish a meta-textualization, in which not only Kofman-the-subject of the text, but also Kofman-the-writer of the text seeks to escape the story. The intertextual chapters, insofar as they create “escape routes” from Kofman’s story, puncture the text, unsealing it, making it less hermetic. Through these intertextual references, which, on the one hand, import others’ texts to create a path out of the text and, on the other hand, enlist the reader for the creation of the text. The reader must do his or her own work when faced with intertext, using previous knowledge to unpack the significance of the reference. One way to envision the particular relationship of Kofman’s text to space is to imagine a Möbius strip, with Rue Marcadet, or the intertextual moments, as the twist. A Möbius strip is merely a loop with a twist in it, but tracing a path on one side will bring you to the other. If you begin at the interior of the strip and follow the loop through the twist, you get to the exterior side. Similarly, Kofman begins in the interior, in her family home, and takes rue Marcadet to a life on the exterior in which she can be seen on the street as the Christian daughter of mémé. Rue Marcadet, in this formulation, is an intermediary space between the public and private realms. Like the two sides of the Möbius strip, rue Ordener and Rue Labat do not intersect without the voie de traverse of rue Marcadet. Thus Kofman’s public and private lives, represented by the two streets, take place simultaneously but do not intersect. The intertextual moments in the text make it clear, however, that the public and private realms do not merely share an ambiguous liminal space. The intertextual sections of the text, which make reference to shared culture beyond that text and are thus in a sense public and outward-facing, paradoxically lead the reader more deeply into Kofman’s private domain. When Kofman seems to move from private to public, as when she addresses a work of art or a film, she is always also moving in the opposite direction, towards intimate mental consequences of her story that she does not address directly. Chapter 18 works in this way, enabling Kofman to examine facets of her mother’s experience that she cannot or does not discuss in the course of the memoir. She begins the chapter by mentioning that she chose the “carton de Londres” as the cover image for her first book , L’Enfance de l’Art. After introducing the guest speaker , the rest of the chapter is given over to Freud’s analysis of Leonardo’s drawing. Freud hypothesizes that the Virgin and St.