Fantastic Elements in Djebar's La Femme sans sépulture
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Abstract
Todorov famously defined the fantastic genre as comprising texts set in a recognisably ‘real’ world that involve the possibility, but only the possibility, of a supernatural explanation underlying the events of the story related. Where the supernatural and the natural co-exist as hypotheses within the text, the reader enters a state of hesitation concerning the status of the story-events set before her (Todorov, 1975). If this hesitation is sustained to the end, according to Todorov the text can usefully be classified as belonging to the (pure) fantastic genre.
Is La Femme sans sépulture an example of the fantastic genre? Certainly the author plays with the conventions of that genre, skilfully juxtaposing two types of explanation for the events recounted and fostering a hesitation on the part of the reader. But this is not an end in itself for Djebar. Rather, the possibility of the supernatural seems to function as a metaphor; if the ghost of Zoulikha ‘haunts’ those who live on after her disappearance (her daughters and former comrades, the narrator herself, and all those for whose freedom she fought), this means that we all owe a duty to the past. Only once she has done her duty to Zoulikha in this way can the author-narrator feel that she has truly returned home. And it is entirely appropriate to represent this relationship to the past as a kind of haunting. This is the use to which Djebar puts the idea of the supernatural; whilst celebrating and continuing Zoulikha’s struggle for the liberation of Algeria and its women, she uses the possibility of the fantastic to convey the uncanny experience of a constant return to her own (cultural) self.
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