Le Ventre de Rebecca. Ou de l’hétérocryption du descriptif

Abstract

According to Philippe Hamon, the descriptive, much more than saying reality, gives us a guess at another reality. The descriptive’s attention to detail digs into referentiality to unearth some latent knowledge. I argue that the detective novel, a rather neglected sub-genre of the realist novel, allows us to best articulate this conjunction of the descriptive and the “decryptive”, as Hamon calls it, while at the same time inviting us to “queer” the implicit assumptions of Hamon’s essay.

My reading of Rebecca, a novel I consider as the very prototype of modern detective writing, endeavors to identify these descriptive operations whereby referentiality swells, bulges with its buried knowledge, and becomes a belly. The descriptive goes into “labor,” as Hamon says, by which I understand that it literally becomes a uterus, a gestation pouch, thus breaking with the tradition of a descriptive pen which would also be a penis, to use Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s famous comparison. No longer an instrument of violent inscription, the pen is made by Du Maurier into a “pennant” – flag, banner, ensign, mark, and as we shall also see, “buoy” or beacon. The pen marks – remarks – reality as a body pregnant with embryonic knowledge, a pouch always aborted of its secret, and suddenly returned to its function. At the bottom of the pouch, or pocket, thanks also to it, occurs Rebecca’s rebirth, the dead woman’s untimely return, in the form of a properly grammatical trace, defying oblivion despite its status as scrap, refuse, waste. Appearing everywhere in the novel, the letter arrives to recall the dead.