A Thousand and One Voices

Mieke Bal

University of Amsterdam.

When the collective Cinema Suitcase began to present its first film, Mille et un jours (2003), it ran up against the question of narrative voice. From the filmmakers’ perspective, the film was so closely situated “between” overlapping cultures that it seemed impossible to “give” it a voice – to attribute, implicitly or explicitly, the narrative to a speaker. Instead, the story asked to be multivoiced. Yet, for potential viewers it was precisely that situatedness and the resulting intermediation that was perceived as a lack of clarity, including political clarity. For a narratologist, it is a commonplace that every narrative is “uttered” by a voice, belonging to an explicit or implicit narrator. Having been a proponent of this one-narrative, one-speaker thesis myself, and having been involved in the making of Mille et un jours, I considered this an interesting and challenging contradiction.¹

In narrative theory, it seem obvious that any speech act, including visual or mixed media speech acts, originates from a “speaker” who utters it. Moreover, the question of voice raises the reasonable question of narrative responsibility. My argument in this paper is not meant to deny the linguistic, or semiotic or, indeed, ethical aspects of that belief. Nor do I wish to make a case for the possibility of “sentences without speaker” (Banfield) on the basis of strictly philosophical arguments. Instead, I wish to question the implications of the assumption that all narratives originate in a speaking subject – one that, on principle, would be singular – and I propose a provisional suspension of this assumption. While film is a mostly narrative genre, it does not so easily fall under the voice assumption. Therefore, I deploy film in this essay to look at the very common concept of voice in order to de-naturalize it.²

The motive for this analysis is threefold. First, scrutinizing the mode of analysis – not the theorizing of the concept of voice itself – I wish to reconsider, indeed question, the felicity of the idea that the systematic application of analytical terms should always be a sound academic practice. Compelled by the current world of intercultural relations, I am therefore subjecting my own earlier work on narrative theory to a critical re-examination.

Second, the concept itself is at stake. As I have insisted elsewhere, concepts cannot be rigidly determined; they “travel.” One way in which concepts “travel” is in their every-day back-and-forth commute between theory and object. I will consider this travel in the confrontation of the concept of voice with cinematic narrativity. Mille et un jours tells a story of events that happen to many, shown through the intimate life of one. As such, it seems very classically narrative. Confronting the narratological notion of voice, I will attempt to place the film in relation to three aesthetic traditions: documentary film, classical tragedy, and “oriental” fairy or folk tales. As a collective of filmmakers, we sought to address these traditions at a moment when they were tested to their limits, in a time when they were not quite obsolete but no longer vital either. It is the travel of the concept of voice in its encounter with cinematic narrativity, more than the concept of voice for its own sake, that is at the heart of my argument in this essay.³

Third and foremost, the film Mille et un jours is a film on migration. Hence, thematically as well as structurally, it is situated in a space not reducible to a specific culture (only). Consequently, the film resists unquestioned concepts from the Western tradition, such as voice. As a narrative theorist as well as a filmmaker, I knew intuitively that this tension was a productive one, but only if I were to work out how the concept of voice can be revised so as to live up to its encounter with cinematic narrativity. In so doing, this analysis is fuelled by the desire to reunite the two parts of my intellectual persona.⁴

Migratory Aesthetics and the Trouble with Voice.

In Mille et un jours we celebrate the outcome of a long and intricate journey, of the anguish, struggle, loneliness and financial constraints of Tarek, a young “sans-papiers” in Paris. Three days of the joyful celebration of his wedding establish the here-and-now of this documentary, which is organized through an Aristotelian unity of time, space and event. But from within that same event, pockets of history weigh in with darker times, tougher spaces. As if bound by elastic ties to the present of the festive moment in which the film is anchored, the characters descend into memories of fear and uncertainty, only to bounce back again and rejoice in the outcome.

If I were to tell the story in my own voice, this is what it would sound like. Once upon a time, in 1999, Tarek (27) came to Paris from Tunisia to pursue education. Despite the difficulties of his status as “illegal immigrant,” he made a living doing odd jobs, taking a course in computer science and obtaining his diploma. As he was pursuing this double life of earning a living and studying, the French authorities tried to expel him. They did not succeed. After some 1,001 days, his marriage to Ilhem (21), a young woman belonging to the second generation of Tunisian immigrants, finally established him in the ordinary life of a legal resident of Europe. But, as in so many films, this story – the sequence of events – is never really told.

This lack of a traceable act of story-telling is partly a simple thematic issue. Tarek’s is a complex story, which cannot be offered as a coherent or full narrative in the film; nor is the content mediated by a unifying, identifiable subject, or “voice.” Instead, the film tells a story through the voices of the people involved – while at the same time providing closure through visual celebration. Like the collection of Arabic tales from which the film’s title is derived, the film organizes a multiplicity of stories around a single event, a wedding. Through a great intimacy with the characters, the film invites the viewer to become acquainted with the ins and outs of their situation – to be a guest at the wedding.

With the wedding celebrations in full swing, we witness how four generations of Tunisian immigrants give shape, each in their own way, to their predicament of migration, and the different opportunities and hardships they have encountered. The politics of immigration thus never cease to haunt the present. However, not all generations talk about this constantly present and pressing theme. Consequently there is no unified or collective narrative voice that tells this story. Instead, what narratologists would call the film’s voice is dispersed through a multitude of voices and images, none of which can be considered unifying.

For reasons I will explain later, the usually expected unifying voice is not only “not there” but actively foreclosed. Let me give an example of one issue that foreclosed the use of a unified narrative, a mediating voice or a “narrator”. Against the backdrop of political machinations, the film offers a consideration of what is easily dismissed as an “arranged marriage.” This is presented through the voices of the bride and her parents, the groom and his future brother-in-law, in a mixture of denial, endorsement, and doubt. Importantly, the issue, while frequently presented, is never “voiced,” never even put in so many words. If anywhere, the topic suggests itself in the many concerns for the bride’s future life. Western viewers, considering arranged marriages a token of cultural foreignness, and thus a theme, might have expected an explicit discussion – and perhaps demanded political “clarity,” a position for or against. But it is the very “naturalized” status of arranged marriages in the culture from which the parents migrated which in fact precludes a clear voice that addresses this issue.

In addition to the politics of immigration and arranged marriages, a third theme that is highly present but not “voiced,” is time. Cast against the shadow of his father’s failure as an earlier immigrant to cope with capitalist time, Tarek seems obsessed with time’s frightening speed, on which more later.  Meanwhile – and this makes matters worse – other elements of the film do appear to solicit more straightforward identificatory viewings. For example, a picture of the social fabric of immigrant life is given, as well as a tender portrait of a young woman and her friends reflecting on the transformation of one of them from schoolgirl into adult woman. The profound grief of loving parents about to see their eldest child leave home and move to the city – a change they barely seem able to confront – alternates with the joyful anticipation of, and preparations for, a wedding that gives expression to their love for, and pride in their daughter. Short of calling these expressions of emotions, or the emotions themselves, “universal,” I assume they speak to Western viewers as much as to the community of Arabic immigrants. These parts of the film could be assumed to have a voice– except that that “voicedness” itself stands in tension to the necessarily “de-voiced” – or rather, multivoiced – parts described above.

A third attack on narrative voice stems from the voices of a misguided official and a “faux” journalist. Their contrary views open up – rather than shut down in consensus and prejudice – the question of how the administration ought to deal with situations where rules and people appear no easy match. Here, the contradictory views cannot, indeed must not be resolved in a higher truth. As I will argue below, the contradictory nature of much of the film’s speeches constitutes the film’s performativity.

Taken together, these cases, while undermining the self-evident nature of voice, also serve a constructive purpose. For, these forms on problematization of voice reflect a thematic concern that is essential yet not explicit at all.  Rife with bureaucratic violence but also with the characters’ vitality, determination, honesty and intelligence in outsmarting “the system,” the film’s content and aesthetics together constitute a plea for a world without borders. Time, it appears, constitutes a border. None of the characters is aware of this, and no connection is therefore made – through a voice – between, for example, time and borders. Yet, the unliveable nature of Western time comes to the fore with the insistence borne of repetition.

This is the cinematic situation. Now, why would I bother with the concept of “voice” at all? As it travels from its solid anchoring in theory to confront this object, Mille et un jours, I contend that the concept is useful to the extent that it fails. By this I mean that the situation for which it fails to adequately account, stakes its claim for a “migratory aesthetics” that honors this failure. This migratory aesthetics affects the theoretical status of the concept.

The concept of voice refers to the “narrator,” the allegedly speaking “I” whose utterances constitute the story. It is the concept that, in the wake of Roland Barthes, killed the author while enabling critics to continue to analyse texts by positing a “speaker” who allegedly uttered them. At the time, I was preoccupied with the French tradition and interested in emending Gerard Genette’s theory of narrative, along with Shlomith Rimmon Kenan and others. I do not wish to disavow that legacy now. Instead, I want to give some opacity to the perhaps overly transparent veil of Genette’s, my own, and other alternative approaches to voice, of which Bakhtin’s joint notions of polyphony and heteroglossia would be the most obvious ones. Mille et un jours will help us cast an “amazed” look at that key concept of voice.


Voice and the Documentary Tradition

In another paper on this subject (2004) I have argued that the concept of voice is bound up with the development of sound film. My emblematic case, there, was the film Singin’ in the Rain (1952). In view of the fiction that proclaims the dis-incarnation of narration, I wish to take a position in relation to such an attitude towards voice as disincarnated – a view Singin’ in the Rain first casts, then betrays. In Mille et un Jours, narration, likewise, is fully embodied. Yet, no voice can be said to do the narrating. On the one hand, the concept of narrative voice is constructed on the presupposition of spatial distance. By not matching the images in any obvious way, the voice seems to lose its body. In Singin’ this mismatch is staged in the discrepancy between actress and voice, the one visible, the other behind the curtain. This loss brings the object into the present of reading, where it partakes of the strong perceptual and affective experience. This happens in Mille et un Jours, where affect and voice are strongly connected, whereas narration as such is dispersed. This, in turn, re-incarnates the voice. On the other hand, narrative theory cannot deal with the fact that, in the very attempt to incarnate it, to give it body – for example, by marking its gender, age, and other social positions – the voice is de-individualized by the analyst who uses the term “voice.”

By way of a shortcut through that argument, let me just say that the relation between the narratorial, not diegetic voice and the body contains the regulation through rhythm, including in the narratological sense (what Amittai Aviram calls the “telling rhythm,” (1994)). This aspect of narrative keeps us aware of the rhythmic bond between voice and the movement of the body. It affects more than decipherable language. Importing body, music, and space as frames of affective-perceptual experience into the text, such a notion of voice indicates that narrative cannot be severed from the other domains of culture. This aspect of narrative also comprehends “accents”: those little signs that de-naturalize the dis-embodied neutral voice of classical narrative and its theory.

In Mille et un Jours, rhythm is a strongly narrativising element, including the fast-paced rhythm in which bodies move. But the concept of voice cannot be applied to this rhythmic narration.  The immediate reason for this is that this film is anchored in what I call a “migratory aesthetics.” This term concerns the utterly small, yet significant aspects of everyday culture as well as academic thought, which are “foreign” in origin, but not any more. In a sense these aspects are “beyond” identity but carry visible and audible traces of “foreignness” that are sometimes called “accents.” This makes any concept that unifies and grants authority impossible to use in a straightforward way. What appears as the narratological “messiness” of Mille et un jours is precisely where the classical Western tradition of narrative intersects and interacts with the profound hybridity of migratory aesthetics through which migrants’ home and host cultures mutually enrich each other. Hence, this “messiness” appears so only from within the one tradition when that western gaze is not engaged with the mixture that is the de facto cultural situation, and the mechanical application of the concept of “voice” is the theoretical version of this clinging to habit.⁵

For example, most people speak in a second language, constantly reflecting their efforts of translation. This intensifies their body language while slowing down their speech, both physically and through the deployment of metaphors unusual in French. The editing attempted to espouse that peculiar rhythm, in order to preserve and convey this mixed temporality of the resulting narrativity. But this narrativity cannot be assigned to either the characters, who gave no reason to be aware of their mixed rhythm of story-telling, or to the filmmakers who could only be as loyal as possible – “documentary-wise” – to their interpretation of these story-tellings.
“Voice” reinforces our habit of perceiving reality through linear narratives. But reality (in films) is not linear. Nor is it singular. Rather, the disorderly reality in which we live, including when we are watching a film, constantly bleeds into our field of vision. What would happen if, instead of streamlining events retrospectively into a story, we position the moment of storytelling in the unpredictable present and allow the past to creep in, like an apparition of what is both insignificant and decisive?

When making Mille et un Jours, three difficulties related to voice in the documentary tradition faced us, and became the guidelines for our work:

We aimed to make a documentary based on the culmination of a story full of trauma and shock, the memories of which impinged on the joyful outcome – the wedding celebration. But how do you document the inner truths of memory where memory is notoriously the biggest liar of all?

Given the need to do this, how do you represent past and present at the same time?

And finally, and most importantly, on the level of emotion and the medium’s work with affect (affect as a medium), how do you render joy and grief, relief and anxiety, trust and mistrust, within a threshold situation between private and public, as well as, again, within the same moment?

These three challenges constitute precisely the ambiguity of documentary as a genre, that is, its mission of trying to reduce the heterogeneity between the language of film and the world it signifies, symbolizes and necessarily betrays. Voice-over is, therefore, the primary tool of documentary we had to cast out. For, as Shoshana Felman cautions in a different context, the very familiarity of narrative renders events familiar, thus lessening their affective impact. If truth can lie, it is on this affective level that it does so most readily. (2002) It is easy, all too easy, to flatten out emotions or, by contrast, to arouse them unwarrantedly through sentimentality. Hence in the preferred use of a narrative voice-over lies the deceit inherent in documentary.

Linear narrative and its explanatory voice-over seemed an unsuitable form for our story, composed as it had to be of the bits and pieces, the fragmentary strands that constitute memories. Reportage alternated with testimony, while the witnesses, all too aware of the public nature of that which they support, are emotionally restrained. As a result, the grief and anxiety, the impact of the small violence as well as the more positive emotions of relief, love and happiness barely surface. Through this avoidance of sentimentality on the part of the characters, the small tips of icebergs are, we find, more affectively powerful. One such moment can be glimpsed when Tarek, instead of complaining, mentions the prohibitive phone call that called off the wedding at 4 pm the day before. Asked if she was afraid, Ilhem first says that she was surprised. While putting on lipstick, her mother says Ilhem became more decided when the prohibition came.

Instead of a story of collective emotion, then, these tiny moments form an imotional “rhizome” (Deleuze). A second sense in which the model of the documentary seemed less straightforwardly suitable for this film is the absence in it of a clear, unambiguous political position. It is not a one-issue film, nor is there a single answer to any of the questions that come up. First of all, narratologically speaking, there is no one-issue through which, and no one-position from which, the story is being told. For example, there is no loud-and-clear indictment of the French police. This is not because we wished to make an a-political film. To the contrary: in a situation where ambiguity and tension are more “normal” than a clear-cut right and wrong, and where such values are contingent upon the power of who does the speaking, a de-fetishization of right-and-wrong decisions seemed appropriate.

This issue came up around the police intervention lying at the heart of the story. This intervention was both extremely modest, in that no physical violence was used, and extremely hurtful, in that it violated the safety of the domestic sphere, it set up trusting people against one another, it nearly ruined both the marriage and the groom’s ticket to legal residency, and it scared the daylight out of a young boy who was home alone. At the same time, no one was beaten up and no one was put in gaol (although they tried hard). In fact, the police’s powerlessness to act, due to their lack of insight into the culture they were assaulting, is pathetic, and even, at times, comical.

This does not mean that there is no voice in this film; only that there are many, and no one has the last word on any of the story-lines. The characters are the narrators of their own stories. The characters you see in the film are not only “being themselves,” but also “speaking themselves,” and, to a certain extent, “playing themselves.” But, like everyone else’s lives, theirs are complex, and not reducible to a single preoccupation. As a result, the many strands of stories that are interwoven here show lives in a way whose very truthfulness, to respond to Felman’s concern, must go against the grain of traditional documentary.

To give one example, the anxiety in Tarek’s constant preoccupation with time is just something that accompanies him, but is surely not a topic for his conscious pondering. Yet, as he goes about the everyday business of getting an education, earning a living, renovating his future home and participating in a culture of gift and exchange, time is constantly “on his mind.” It is a factor that is almost personified into an enemy in his struggle to get his apartment ready for his bride. It is also a personal and cultural legacy tied to the memory of – and relationship to – his father, who did not manage to pre-empt time’s passing because he was chained to hourly wages that barely fed him and that foreclosed the opportunity of saving for his return home. So, how can we “tell” this relationship to time?

Time is not a theme in the film, because it would be falsifying the lived reality of the characters to theorize it. Yet, it is perhaps the most present element, constantly if laterally evoked in Tarek’s comments, and visualized by his frequent looks at his watch, his gestures of despair over his lack of control, and even his haggard face, hollowed cheeks and frantic eyes, a face that has changed dramatically due to exhaustion during the weeks preceding the wedding. This difference is visible in the close-ups of his face, from the earlier moment of the police intervention and the civil marriage, to the later images where he looks either ill or years older. Between Tarek and his father’s past failure, post-colonial time struggles with colonial time. Explaining this in any voice, including Tarek’s own, would betray the lived reality of this temporal discrepancy. Yet, migratory aesthetics requires that these “accents” be made visible. For, time is a topos where the two cultures intersect most acutely.

Intimacy and Hybridity Within

It is here, therefore, that the idea of “migratory aesthetics” comes in. If a film modelled according to such an aesthetics is to avoid an exteriorised, even eroticised othering, a constant negotiation between outside and inside perspectives is needed. This negotiation can be seen as an exchange between the two perspectives, rather like the exchange so prominent in the gift culture we are looking at and involved with. In terms of narration, the exchange between the perspectives of the filmmakers and that of the characters embodies such a gift culture as it has insinuated itself in the host culture. Cinematic form, thus, espouses the hybrid situation aesthetically. One aspect that the concept of migratory aesthetics clarifies is the unusual intimacy of the film, which encompasses the filmmakers themselves, addressed and evoked discretely but persistently as part of the party. There is indeed a consistent situating of the filming inside the ambiance of the group of people concerned.⁶

This sympathy is not a simple expression of sympathy and political partiality. Instead, it is deeply connected to the “messiness,” the attempt to convey the sense of multiplicity beyond singular narrative strands. The intimacy in the mode of filming and editing might wrongly suggest that our lack of narratorial intervention entails total endorsement of the political positions represented. But, in fact, the way the film has locked itself inside the group serves another purpose. It is from the inside that it becomes possible to bear witness to what I call, for lack of a better term, the “hybridity-within” that characterizes migrant situations. The outside world comes inside the home, the family life, and installs itself there.⁷

Two central and clear manifestations of this principle run throughout the film. One is the presence-absence of the police, already evoked, of which the memories continue to shape the relationships between the groom and his future in-laws, and of the bride’s family with their neighbours. Rather than to highlight the outward, public manifestation of the intervention, we wanted to show the impact of this police intervention inside the home, in the private sphere, where the small violence, as the phrase has it, “hits home.” More important than having police officers say they had a job to do, it seemed to us important to show the bride’s father’s doubt about the groom, the direct consequence of the police intervention. Shifting from the bride’s father to the groom, visible grief over the absence of his beloved mother and uncle overruled the anxiety over his status. But this overruling occurred, hence, could only be perceived against the backdrop of the that anxiety.

But the film is not an attempt to do justice to the perspective of the “insiders,” the people concerned. Nor are they passive victims. For, conversely, it is through interviews with two wedding guests, each of whom attempted to play a part in getting the marriage approved, that we can see how the outside world of politics is being manipulated from inside the party. First of all – perhaps to the shock of those with binary expectations – a Magrebhine woman defends the state with arguments appealing to French republican, democratic values, and to sentimental talk of “love” – spoken, suddenly, in the administrative plural “we”! It is a French man who speaks up against the state, sensitive as he is to the real albeit non-physical violence committed in the name of the law. This reversal of expected, pre-judged positions alone makes for a kind of political “messiness” that, we believe, is best suited to generate fresh discussions. One of the tools to keep that messiness in view is the suspension of the unifying voice.⁸

Less conspicuous, but also in a reversal of the focus of questioning and probing, is the second manifestation of the principle of intimacy as opening up debate rather than endorsing positions. This is the issue of the “arranged marriage,” also mentioned a propos of the multiplication of voices. This is at stake but never named as such. Here the arranged marriage is the object, not of a discussion “for” versus “against,” as a public debate would have it, but an object of sentiments that install themselves within the fundamentally hybrid cultural situation of migrancy: of doubt, denial, uncertainty, and of a desire to explain and justify.  As the bride’s brother phrases it: “This is often done, even here.” And where he seems to contradict himself blatantly when he says, in the same sentence: “Yes, it’s a cultural thing, but be careful, it’s not part of the culture,” he is neither simply stumbling into denial nor being confused, but giving expression to the difficulty of knowing what “the culture” really is. Here, a voice speaks, yet two “voices” collude in his speech.

But Mille et un jours was “authored” by five filmmakers of different cultural backgrounds. As we have seen, in narratological analysis, the concept of voice stands for phantom images of authorship. If “voice” is a term invented to eliminate authorship as the prime preoccupation of literary studies yet to let it in again through the back door, the speakers in the film cannot be discarded as its (collective) “voice” without assessing the position of those who wielded the camera, the editing program, and, most importantly, and visibly in the film, the position of “second person” to whom the characters speak.

Wayne Booth, professor of English at the University of Chicago, published a book in 1961 called The Rhetoric of Fiction. As the title indicates, two elements of what constitutes the field or object “literature” in the common understanding, orient it away from the author’s primacy: “rhetoric” and “fiction.” The first element indicates that whoever “speaks” the words in the text does not speak straightforwardly in a direct, reliable, constative mode of language use, but may be caught in acts of seduction, deviation, figuration, or outright lying. In our film, there is no denying that stories and speeches respond to the presence – and projected expectations – of the filmmakers. Any voices that “speak to” do so in a rhetorical merging of anticipated expectation and a desire to be understood. The second element of literature, “fiction,” takes it away not only from the author but also from the world within and for which she writes: appealing to a mode of reading still most adequately defined as “the willing suspension of disbelief,” fiction takes the substance, content, or reality of the literary work out of the hands of the author. The latter can wash her hands of everything that shocks, disturbs, annoys, or dangerously entices the reader. As the definition has it, the reader is responsible for willingly giving up on the author’s epistemic answerability. This willing suspension of disbelief takes the form of an a priory confidence that the speakers say what they desire to disclose – that they speak their inner truth. This confidence, in turn, leads to a confidentiality described above as intimacy. This intimacy is noticeable in, for example, the bride’s mother’s willingness to share her anxiety for her daughter and her faith in the groom. She openly speaks about these things with interviewers she had rapidly grown close to. The intimacy is also visible in both parents’ open expression of their distress about their child’s departure. “Fiction,” then, is congruent with a political “suspension of disbelief” that opens up communication and yields truths other, and more reliable than, political “facts.”

Booth’s book title, then, helps overcome stultified notions of documentary’s allegiance to truth, replacing these with that intimate truthfulness only the best of fiction writers are able to achieve. Moreover, Booth’s book introduced a term – the “implied author” – that from that moment on was so widely used that it became a cliche. The term is deceptively straightforward. It suggests that the biographical author has a textual delegate behind which she can hide, a guarantee of discretion and cultural politeness morphed into a methodological de jure argument. But what the term really does is much more fundamental. This concept de facto operated the switch, not really from author to text as was the overt claim, but from author as speaker of the text to reader who construes an image of that figure of the author. The reading, the concept promised, would give all information, relevant and desired, about who “spoke” the narrative. Any further questions were indiscreet and redundant.

Who can be construed as the implied author, for example, in the repeated scenes of girls chitchatting on a bench? When Ilhem’s girlfriends tease her about her previous lack of interest in boys, for example, no authorship can be meaningfully claimed for the filmmakers, as this teasing came out of the conversations among the schoolgirls themselves. Nor can, however, the complicity be disallowed of those who decided to edit this bit in, a complicity made visible by the explicit address to the camera operators. Attributing this to either the speaking young woman and her diegetic addressee, Ilhem, or to the filmmakers to whom she explains her friend’s personality – a figure also internal to the diegesis – would make no sense and would destroy what this speech so preciously demonstrates: that no voice operates outsides of the “rhetoric” of address and the “fiction” of an agreement to believe.

In theory, after the malady of bio-criticism, the “implied author” offered a bonus the author as corpse did not offer, a bonus, however, too attractive to turn down. In a quite literal double sense, it authorized the interpretation one wished to put forward without taking responsibility for it. The phenomenological edge of the concept wore off. What was left was the authority of the constative statements that speaking of – but simultaneously for – the implied author afforded. Judgments based on the idiosyncrasies of individual readings could be presented with the aura of having detected what the author, willy-nilly, “meant to say.” Meaning thus collapsed into intention, as it had before Booth came along. Although the filmmakers, obviously, did have a purpose in making this film, and no amount of disavowal can eliminate this “intention,” the characters also had a purpose – why else would they have allowed, and cooperated almost eagerly with, this intrusion in an important moment of intimacy? Attributing the interpreted meanings to the filmmakers, as the film’s “implied author” and his or her “voice,” would be an obliteration of the speakers who decided what to reveal and what to obscure. This already goes to show how fundamentally authoritarian these twin concepts are. No wonder, then, that the “implied author” never quite satisfied.

In search of reliable concepts yet intent upon conceptualising agency “beyond” the author, literary studies turned to linguistics, and the question of “who speaks” became the question of “voice” alone, without implied author to authorize it. The word “voice” is naturalized, a near-catachresis, to account for the fact that a story doesn’t come out of the blue, and that someone is responsible for it. That “someone” may be a collective, as is routine in cinema and theatre, but the struggle to acknowledge filmmakers beyond the director shows the difficulty to accept shared responsibility. It is even more unusual to come across the acknowledgement of subjects – fictional or documentary characters – as “authors” whose voices co-structure the text. Given the importance of responsibility, it seems indispensable to circumscribe the subject of the text. But when we use words like “responsible,” we enter the domain of the ethical. And this domain becomes active when the “object” of narration is the audience’s culture’s “other” – a term as problematic as hybridity but one that is hard to avoid.

The “Other” Tradition and Cultural Belonging

In our film, the persistent presence of “cultural background,” of North-African or, larger, Middle-Eastern traditions, to which, at various moments and in varying degrees, the characters wish to belong, makes a disembodied or one-sided voice impossible. The use of home and historical footage underscores the active contribution of the characters’ culture in a variety of ways. Early in the film, where footage from home videos of the children’s early years shows a good degree of assimilation, the parents express a longing for their background, as well as regret that for their French-born children, Tunisia is just a holiday destination. At the end of the film, this view is turned upside-down when it turns out that the daughter had insisted on a traditional wedding, whereas her mother, while happy to comply, doesn’t know the meaning of some of the traditions involved. The film ends with the mother’s expression of limited knowledge, when she is both clearly pleased that the traditional after-wedding meal is being served, while actually unable to explain its meaning.⁹ Meanwhile, what, for the parents, is a lived past, marks for the children a possible future, potentially filling an emptiness or gap in their genealogy. For this generation, there is a hybrid belonging to a culture that was never theirs to begin with, yet one that is always present in their lives through their parents’ nostalgia – “remembered” in what is somewhat problematically called post-memory.¹⁰

The reference to the canonical work of Arabic literature in the film’s title suggests a claim to a traditional genre or form. This claim is made no more literally than the claim to classical Aristotelian tragedy. It is, instead, called upon to establish genre. It helps, that is, to insert into the film the discourse of the fairy tale. This is literally an inter-discourse, as a discursive inter-locutor. It is present as an antecedent, but also, and at the same time, as the discourse of post-commentary, a la Bahktin’s ‘heteroglossia’.¹¹

The clearest aspect of the film that the title, and its referent, foreground is, of course, the multiplicity of narrative strands. As I have argued above, the story of the police intervention that triggered the desire to make this film in the first place, could not remain isolated. It could not be foregrounded as a primary story, since the oppressive effect of administrative violence does not dis-empower the characters as totally as is easily assumed. Attributing a narrative “voice” to this intervention would have erased the people’s resilience. Thus, it might erase their continued commitment to the intimacy of their lives, which they defend explicitly albeit subliminally. As individuals, as a family, and as a cultural group, they claim not only a “voice” only partially yielded to them, but also “the right to remain silent.”  Thus, episodes from the other stories follow each other in rapid succession – the arranged marriage, the help from peers, the wedding preparations and the renovation work – so as to weave a fabric within which the police activity is simply absorbed, perhaps even caught, entrapped in a spider web of everyday life.¹²

But the interdiscursive resonances with Mille et un jours are more specific than this structural starting point suggests. In the tales of The Arabian Nights, to use the alternative title of the collection, a standard narrative structure prevails: the prince travels, falls in love and encounters obstacles. Authorities attempt to subvert his happiness, and the heroism of the prince consists in defeating authority through cunning. In the story of Tarek’s attempt to become legal, this skeletal story is clearly present: the prince of Remada embarked on a journey over high seas and mountains, even if a few hours’ plane ride considerably condensed the adventure. The remainder of the story is spread over the 1,001 days that it took him to go from Charles de Gaulle airport to legal residency in the 18th arrondissement of Paris.¹³

Similarly, as it happens in the original tales, a woman shows up. But whether or not Tarek fell in love with her, as the prince in the tales, is never made explicit. The obstacle is set up, in a big way, and, like the hero in the tales Tarek vanquishes it through cunning. He pulls it off with the help of collective actions: the family, the friends, the uncle, even a “traitor,” the official who deals with the authorities; each person makes his contribution. The collective action, however, is also the gearshift through which the traditional story is recast. There, heroism is rendered in the form of a lone struggle. Here, no sign of Tarek’s struggle is shown; only the anxiety and the massive opponent, an incomprehensible bureaucracy that condemns him to passivity. Only by means of his own collective, his group of peers – whose unlimited readiness to help is astonishing in Western eyes – can the hero withstand this anonymous pressure. His heroism, then, is to be able to direct the group, to invent what needs doing, and to persevere. The meaning of heroism itself is thus reversed, again through de-individualization.¹⁴

Masculinities Revisited

The question of “Who speaks?” is not so easily dismissible, however. Its ongoing relevance lies in its aesthetic implications. It connects the two domains that make literature and art matter: the way ideas are presented to us in shapes, that is, the formalizations that produce inter-subjective access, and the political, ethical, and ideological impact of that questioning.¹⁵ Here, then, the question “who?” asks about the meaning of the verb “to speak.” This question implies two questions about meaning. The first concerns the construction of meaning. “What does this mean?” and “What does she mean (to say)?” are two different conceptions of meaning that the metaphors of authorship conflate, namely signification – the production and processing of publicly accessible meaning – and intention – that inevitable urge to identify meaning with the mind of the genius-artist who made that meaning public. The former has no bearing on authorship; the latter does. Conflating them, then, begs the question of meaning.

The second question implied in the “who” question concerns agency. “What are the consequences?” is perhaps the best way of phrasing the matter. This question raises two other questions: on the one hand, that of the effectivity measurable only in terms of reception, in other words, what does the work “do” to its readers or viewers? For Mille et un jours, the impossibility to determine who speaks translates into a dispersal of “voices,” which facilitates a reception equally diverse: each viewer can both recognize their own cultural “voice” and encounter voices less familiar to them.  On the other hand, there is the question of the social relevance of the work, that is, “what does it do to the public domain in which it functions?” In our case, the facilitation of what I call in short “intercultural encounter” helps further such encounters for both groups that give shape to the European public domain – say, “Western” and “Arabic.” These two questions, I hasten to add, must be asked in the positive but also in the negative form. What meanings and critical possibilities are repressed when we use a concept of the “who?” kind, such as narrative voice?

Let me make this relevance of a multiplied “voice” more concrete. It is in the framework of the literary legacy of Arabic culture in the West that I like to see what is perhaps the film’s most significant move against stereotypes: the play with masculinities. To be sure, there are ways in which Tarek is not only the main character of the story of his voyage to legitimacy, but also a rather macho type of man, who directs the production of the wedding-as-theatre with his eyes and his mobile phone. But in several ways, this macho image, which the Western cliche tends to attribute to Arabic men – in order to comfortably overlook it in its own – is constantly undermined. The most important moment when this happens is at the opening of the film, when Tarek is followed by what appears, from the back, an army of guys ascending the stairs to fetch the bride.

At first, this view might seem frankly scary: more than a dozen men about to “take” a twenty-one year old woman. But arriving upstairs, the shot is reversed, in a classical move to suture the people we see to what they face. And in that reverse-shot we see Tarek’s face in all its gentle nervousness, biting his lips, looking at his friends for support and one friend patting his shoulder in encouragement. For me, this is one of the most touching moments, where I am confronted with my own prejudice and drawn into empathy with “the other side.”

This image stays with us throughout the film, interspersed with other moments where men take on caring activities. For example, during the final preparations of the wedding, an uncle combs the hair of Ilhem’s young brother; at another moment, during the ritual meal the day after the wedding, this uncle feeds a baby; in the credit sequence, Tarek’s father helps his son dress for the traditional wedding in Tunisia. Meanwhile, the bride’s brother comes up with a very ambivalent expression of gender politics when he emphasizes that his father allowed his sister to marry whom she pleased, without mentioning the mother’s opinion at all. Yet, when a Western viewer might still be reeling over this double talk, he continues to predict that his father will be crying at the imminent departure of his daughter – as he might himself, as well.

Most strikingly, and perhaps unsettlingly, during one of many singing sessions in the apartment where the festivities are being prepared yet already savoured, a humorous event occurs that highlights the way masculinity is constantly revised. Ilhem’s father lets his youngest daughter put on a scarf on his head. Then, he looks into the camera. His somewhat shy but accepting and affirming look at the camera shows that for him, being “feminized” is nothing to be ashamed of. Yet, the scarf-wearing neighbour sitting next to him cannot bear it, and takes the scarf off him. Here, as in many other moments, reflections on cultural customs go hand in hand with reflection on the processes of trans-generational cultural transmission, as well as collusion and contestation. This visual moment of cultural negotiation is impossible to utter in any voice at all.

Together, then, these moments in which diverse forms of masculinity are enacted, shown, and subliminally evaluated are at the heart of the film’s relationship to the dual tradition of heroic, erotic, and adventurous fairy-tales, on the one hand, and tales of prejudice, rigidity and contempt on the other. As with the more overtly political issues – of the confrontation with the law and of the arranged marriage – the visibility of the clash between these two traditions is facilitated, not imposed; its evaluation as well as the possibility to bridge the gap through empathy are rigorously limited to visual enactment and participation, not commentary. And, since the characters have no reason to reflect on what is their own “natural” masculine behaviour, no spoken words are called for; no “voice” has explanatory promise.

Beyond Aristotelian Time

Earlier on I made the somewhat hyperbolic claim that this film is, also, classical in the sense of the rules of Aristotelian tragedy. The visual focus on time, place and event – the three wedding days – alludes to classicism, but, of course, with a wink. In some respects, I am interested in earnest to maintain this claim. For the concepts of theoretical and historical analysis help articulate those aspects that might otherwise pass unnoticed. One such aspect is the distribution of moods. Our film, most emphatically, is not a tragedy but a celebration. But, importantly, it could have been a tragedy. Indeed, the anxieties surrounding that possibility accede to representation, albeit discretely packaged in off-screen commentary.

Seen as a chorus, the voices of relatives and friends highlight the question, asked but never resolved: is this a “good” marriage, a “real” one as conceived by the standards of Western culture, romantic and inspired by love, or, is it, after all, a dubious case of a green-card marriage for him, an arranged marriage for her, an escape from confinement into lovelessness? In the end, there are moments when it seems as if this question does receive an answer. But whether or not we believe that answer and take it as our clue to forming a political opinion depends, in turn, on how far each viewer accepts the invitation extended by the film’s intimacy. Ultimately, the alternative of this either/or question seems bizarrely out of place. Hence, it makes us rethink both arranged as well as romantic marriages.

Another aspect of the film that the model of classical tragedy usefully illuminates is the reticence of psychological analysis. In classical tragedy, the general validity of big questions concerning the relationship between humanity and destiny precludes an in-depth psychological analysis of characters, in spite of Freud’s influential apparent overruling of that reticence. Instead, in that pre-psychology age, a quasi-psychological moral appeal to the viewing audience was embodied in what has famously been termed catharsis. This alleged “purification,” or “cleansing” of the viewer by means of empathy, that wavering between admiration and pity, was supposed to improve the observing citizen’s moral character. It is no coincidence that psychoanalysis itself modelled much of its insights on a similar procedure. Were it not that there, the process changed from collective to individual.

This film does return to the classical tradition in that it does not endorse individual psychology, the predominant model of realism in novel and film. In our individualistic age, it seemed inappropriate to dig into the interiority of motivations of the characters inhabiting this film. This decision determined the mode of interviewing, or should I say, the performativity of the interviews. We let the individuals be as personal as they wished to be, and we refrained from asking further probing questions. Hence, whereas we often felt that the intimate, personal conversations were like gifts given to us from within a gift-culture and entrusted to us for an appropriate and decent recycling, some characters, in particular the main character, whose difficulties are so central that he could easily have taken them as a starting point for an emotional appeal, are not inclined to do so.¹⁶ The “opaque generality of destiny,” taking the form of a close-knit cultural group with its decisive modes of behaviour, constitutes the interiorized vraisemblance of Tarek’s ways.¹⁷

A second cluster of features imported by the metaphor of voice concerns not the subject of the work but the conception of art that underlies it. The privilege mostly unreflectively accorded to narrative voice easily entails an extreme mimeticism, an assumed and endorsed, albeit disavowed, seamless match between social relations and literature – a match that is literature’s and art’s very mission to question. The relevance of literary narrative resides, precisely, in its refusal to obey the pressure of realism as “trompe-l’?il.” The question of “who speaks?” can only escape that trompe-l’?il if its other, the question of “who doesn’t speak?” is systematically co-present, like a parasite. The question which character, in what social position, does not have access to speech, is, on the one hand, one of voice, but on the other, one that undermines the belief in and obedience to the text as “account.”

The addictive attachment to realism is rooted in the need to protect the aspect of the metaphor of voice that most badly needs scrutiny, namely, authority. Authority is both obliterated and protected – and abducted by a criticism that nevertheless derives its own authority from it. The presence of authority in humanistic studies allows the authorization of interpretation to be naturalized. The concept of narrator is part of that authorizing impulse. As a phantom presence, the author continues to lurk in the wings as long as the major analytical concepts partake of the author’s anthropomorphic shape. The attribution of intention that this concept of narrator facilitates is a weapon in the service of subordinating the reader. The latter, brainwashed by education to interiorise the taboo on exercising her function of second person, is too easily submissive to the intention that clothes the text as long as it is conceived as the unquestioned product of voice. But, I contend, “below” or “behind” the thematic of narratorial sincerity, authenticity, and competence, lies an alleged and naturalized unity of cultural memory in which those features are given the status of virtues.

The film alludes to that classical model, then rejects it as too limited for this open and disorderly situation. Take, for the last time, the issue of time. The concentration on the wedding days is only superficially unifying, enough to suggest the possibility of classical condensation that did not materialize. There is a constant tension between “too early” and “too late.” This tension makes Tarek both energetic and nervous, thus turning him into the ambivalent kind of “hero” I described above. The triumph that the wedding constitutes is, in a sense, the triumph over linear time.¹⁸

This defeat cannot be narrated by any one voice, for it remains entrenched below the threshold of awareness. Instead, it is given visual shape in the film through its work with faces. Slow close-ups defeat linear, measurable time – because they endure. This becomes most obvious when the voice of the authority, embodied in the woman who served as the liaison with the Town Hall, is, first, herself visually isolated from the wedding of which its speaker is a member. But, second, this woman’s voice, and specifically, her statements concerning persons and their rights – statements defending France’s republican values – are visually accompanied by a range of close-ups of the principal members of the wedding, incarnating their status as persons with such rights. Since, as a cinematic form, the close-up challenges linear time, the series of close-ups counters the official’s Enlightenment discourse, specifically her implicit claim that the democratic values and individual rights she alleges go against the characters’ attempts to exercise their own rights in performing this marriage. On the contrary: these close-ups contribute to the temporal confusion, thus undermining the development narrative that casts cultural “others” in a different time (Fabian 1983). Each face we see says “no” to her voice insofar as it proclaims a humanist superiority of France over the countries it has so thoroughly exploited.

Third, the ultimate defeat of linear time is constituted by the belatedness of these Western humanistic claims. For long before she utters these claims, two screen-filling close-ups had already stipulated that different interpretations of personhood are available and have, so to speak, equal rights. A first one is the rather long close-up of the bride, whose right to choose her life-course has been stolen from her under the pretext of the condescending protection that, precisely, undermines her status as person. The second close-up is the shot when the bride’s mother’s face – warm, personally engaging and utterly reasonable – fills the screen. She says it is difficult to explain what happened to them because “we” – her group, her culture – “have never, anywhere, experienced such things [as this police intervention].”¹⁹

Linear time is undermined in yet another way that is also at odds with the classical model. This is through the performative aspect of the film itself, a performativity that is grounded in belatedness. The concentration on the moment of the wedding locks into times past all the events that make this wedding different from an ordinary wedding: the threat, the intervention, the fear that underlies the festivities. The audience is informed, from the outset, about what has happened. This retrospectivity transforms the performance itself – the moment of viewing the film – into a quest for a knowledge that foregrounds its own irrelevance. It is striking, for example, that it remains extremely hard to keep track of which wedding is being witnessed – of the four weddings this couple had to go through in order to be “really married.”  Of the four weddings, there is no single one that can be considered a marriage, Oddly, at some point, one abandons the attempt to figure out which wedding one is witnessing.

This is, in fact, precisely the moment of performance. For the “migratory aesthetic of time,” so to speak, resides in that very confusion. Everywhere within the current wedding are the two failed, forbidden weddings: the civic marriage (and its celebration), which was, for one of the characters, “only an engagement” and, for the other, his ticket to freedom (a wedding that comes belatedly, in the wake of the police intervention); and the post-wedding, made necessary by the administratively-induced absence of the groom’s mother. As a result of this play with time and knowledge, the film becomes “intransitive”: rather than offering an account of the story, this story happens only when, performatively, the audience can let go of the linear story.²⁰

There is one last temporality that resonates with, then counters the analogy to, classical tragedy. Because of the redundancy and insufficiency of the information – we know it all from the start and yet are constantly confused – a space opens up for another, forward-moving, temporality. The emphasis put on preparations displays a desire to make things happen, a vitality that no bureaucracy can paralyse; the urge to declare, not in words but in actions, “we are here to stay.” This forward movement puts time back into the equation, whereas migrancy tends to be perceived mainly in terms of space.

Time is a constant pain, perhaps disease, for Tarek who feels his time is out of joint. Westerners tend to think that migrants lag behind – hence the pervasive use of concepts of development. The social ideal of sharing time, in what anthropologist Johannes Fabian famously termed coevalness, is thus denied to migrants (1983). But by denying coevalness to migrants, Westerners deny themselves, at the same time, coevalness with migrants.²¹

Against the backdrop of this politics of time, there is one moment, one shot, that visualizes this temporality most poignantly. Mediated through a cut-away shot of their shoes and the seam of the bride’s dress, the bride and groom step forward – she, after having shed the white wedding dress, in a festive ballroom dress that recalls debutante balls of the 1950s. Right after this shot, the couple make another parade-like re-entrance, this time with the bride in the traditional costume of Tarek’s town. As the couple step forward, the costume can also be seen as a step backward, to a tradition this wedding – which definitively establishes Tarek in France – moves away from. This step “back” in time, back to the tradition in which the bride, as a second-generation migrant, never lived, is, paradoxically, the major step forward. For it is how, with her as a mediator, the viewers share time with this group, in a short time of coevalness.

In light of this brief moment of visualized coevalness, the fact that the so-called “authentic” wedding – the fourth one, celebrated in Tunisia, after the “main” wedding – is shown only after the film, during the credit sequence, is an appropriate answer to the ethnographic question that this film also raises. If this is an ethnographic film, of what “ethnos” does it write ‘ethnography’? This question is unsettling yet inevitable, since ethnography is the genre par excellence of the Western unified voice. Turning the “authentic” into an after-thought, a supplement, the film places “authenticity” beyond the boundaries of the world of the film. It is there, but not quite. Let’s face it: this most traditional of the four weddings does not constitute a regression, a substantiation of the temporal lag that will always place migrants “behind.” On the contrary, this event too was induced by the French authorities, who refused the mother a visa. In a very precise sense, it is, thus, a step back in a step forward – a wilful and playful anachrony born out of a newly conquered liberty to travel back.²²

Conclusion

Travelling: this qualifier I proposed to use for the deployment of concepts in interdisciplinary cultural analysis, also stands for the culture of migrancy. Travel can no longer be translated as tourism, that model of cinematic entertainment in the medium’s early days. Under the aegis of travel with unknown returns I have proposed putting the concept of voice “under erasure” in a confrontation with an object not quite placeable, but “accented”.²³ I wished to question voice and, while not rejecting it prematurely, make it liable to produce its own alternative. I aimed to morph the anthropomorphic question “Who?” into a spatial question “Where?” Where does meaning come from, where does it go, and which paths does it follow?

The metaphor of the path has two advantages over “voice,” advantages that sum up the points of this paper. First, it de-naturalizes the individual genius “behind” the work of art as the source, origin, and authority of its meanings and effects. Second, it facilitates travel between the disciplinary fields involved, the text-based ones of which literary studies is the primary but not only representative, and the visually oriented ones represented by film studies and art history. In this travel, I prefer to suspend answers we tend to desire too quickly, and instead to listen to representation where “speaking in tongues” is the standard, and unification of voice a particular, perhaps deviant, manifestation.²⁴ For cultures, including Western European culture, speak in many voices.

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References