a ransom from dailiness: adele blanc-sec, situationist

The Modern Language Association's Office of Research finds that, without significant deviation, one of the major, on-the-ground effects of gender de-segregation in U.S. higher education has been seen in French departments: namely, women have taken over. As female students achieved parity in enrollment, they conquered first academic Francophonia, constituting 80% of all French literature and language students. With a hat-tip to feminist literary critic Maria Bustillos, Alice Kaplan’s memoir French Lessons may contain a clue as to why. Kaplan, who heads Yale’s French department and is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers on France’s influence in the globalizing West, concludes in her “Afterwards” afterword that “people want to adopt another culture…because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't name them” (pg. 209, French Lessons)

Adèle Blanc-Sec may be a prime example of what women need to turn to another language and culture to find: Tardi was accounting for a paucity of strong female protagonists/roles in the mid-70s rather than the aughts. But I think more than just gender is at play here. Adèle’s extraordinary adventures are inextricable from her gender but not enjoyable merely because of them. There is, as discussed in class, a sense of whimsy and camp to the visual and lexical language of her romps (personally, what sticks out to me here is the heavy-inked HAs which start on pg. 5 and never seem to leave).

Tardi was drawn to draw works which involved the criminal world: on other projects, he worked writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette and Léo Malet, the celebrated French surrealist poet cum popular crime novelist. Malet, friends with figures such as Andre Breton and Rene Magritte, claimed Tardi alone visually understood his writing. Tardi’s work with Manchette, also a super star of the crime genre, has recently been reissued by Fantagraphics in English. Machette also felt a certain kinship with Tardi. Upon the re-issuing of their collaboration, James Sallis in the New York Review of Books highlighted to extent to which the 1968 Paris insurrection, and Situationist thought in general, influenced Machette’s approach. I’d argue that Situationist strain is present in Blanc-Sec as well, in a way that (pilfering Sallis’ observations further) might evade immediate American recognition but at the same time instinctually resonate.

It’s hard to find much mainstream academic writing on Situationism. Sadie Plant’s The Most Radical Gesture was the first major English-language study and wasn’t published until 1992 (it remains one of, if not the, best). Plant posits that “what has really written the Situationists out of intellectual history is their own determination to avoid recuperation within existing channels of dissent and critical theory…shunning the academy, the media, and orthodox conceptions of art and politics” (pg. 4, The Most Radical Gesture). What remains so foreign to even America’s professionalized dissenter class is that situationist analysis abandons both enumerating strategies of survival within contemporary capitalist reality and traditional calls for administrative revolution. Rather, it sought to indicate the possibility of transformation, and serve as a “theoretical transcription of attempts to have as much fun as possible changing [modern reality]” (pg. 7, The Most Radical Gesture). Those influenced by this strain of futurecultural thinking (such as Machette and Tardi), both countered and exposed alienation through a variety of tactics which sought to underline that “liberation might be found in fashioning moments that reawakened authentic desires, a sense of adventure, a ransom from dailiness.” (Sallis, Manchette: Into the Muck). Adele’s adventures, I’d argue, read as such ransom; Tardi’s ligne claire in service of a ideology which offers for us a new and better name.