Darrieussecq's Pig Tales: Marianne's misfortunes at the turn of the millennium

Romanic Review, Nov 1999 by Lantelme, Michel

Then my children are old enough to ask me what France looked like at the turn of the millennium, I will tell them-as I do now with my American students-to read Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales.1 A best-seller in France in 1996, the year of its publication, this unassuming book provides a look at France on the eve of the twenty-first century, in the form of a delightful and humorous story that unites social satire and political fiction. Combining her own personal history and the history of a France given up to its evils, Darrieussecq describes the birth of a writer in a country that is not only the prey of a xenophobic party, but also the victim of an openly fascist government, led by a man known as "Edgar," a thinly veiled disguise for Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is as if the French had lost their minds and turned their backs on democracy.

Very present throughout the novel, sexuality increases the scandal. By making sex and politics share front stage, the narrator warns us this novel will shock some of its readers. However provocative, graphic and indecent, this book could prove to be appropriate for any literature and culture course, or for anyone interested in France. In the spirit of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Pig Tales describes the progressive transformation of the principal character, a woman who changes species before our very eyes. We see a constant preoccupation with skin, breathing and motherhood, as the character explores her new self. This metamorphosis is first characterized by physical symptoms. Noticing she has gained weight, the narrator realizes her skin has a new "pneumatic" quality. The growth of "long, thin hairs, tough and translucent" (42) leaves her dermatologist somewhat puzzled and is at first considered the result of an hormonal dysfunction. Later, a third breast appears that no cream can manage to conceal. Soon, the heroine cannot swim anymore, her joints being "locked into a right angle." (55) The symptoms become even more precise with a new kind of eating behavior: ham and sausages cause her a new disgust, while she has new cravings for fresh vegetables, uncooked and unpeeled potatoes, and chestnuts. More sensitive than ever to odors, she dreams of ferns and wet soil. Speech itself is affected: having difficulties getting words out, she finds herself grunting. In the back of the perfume shop where she works, the customers who visit her for massage sessions do not refrain from displaying all their fantasies and fall into "barnyard ways" (19) with her. Behind the scenes, surrounded by perfumes and creams, they "bray," "grunt," often times "crawling," turning the massage table into a sort of "haystack." They are only half wrong when they call her names such as "bitch in heat" or "fat cow" (55)! Our heroine definitely attracts dirty names.

From the beginning, the narrator points out the urgency of writing this book. She complains about her handwriting and her increasingly indecipherable "giggle-squiggles" (2): "Simply holding a pen gives me terrible cramps." (1) Pig Tales resembles the autobiography of a pig-woman, endowed with two distinct modes of being and at times surprised to count only three fingers at the end of her hands. The autobiographical dimension is made even more obvious when she distinguishes between two eras in her life, separated by mysterious "events." The reader finds out that the narrator, looking for a job, has filled out a "job application form" for a big perfume and cosmetics chain. In the account of her meeting with the manager of the store, the word "contract" appears three times, against a background of transformation. The narrator makes retrospective comments on the unusual quality of her skin: "Now I understand that this extra weight and the wonderful quality of my flesh must have been the first symptoms. The director of Perfumes Plus was holding my right breast in one hand, the job contract in the other. I could feel my breast heaving with the emotion of seeing that contract so close to being signed [ . . . ]." (3)

The scene between the employee and her boss implies another type of "contract," a characteristic of every novel, a reading contract. Pig Tales proposes a remarkable reading contract in which everything is said metaphorically. This novel is the story of a transformation: the metamorphosis of Marie Darrieussecq into a writer. Should we be tempted to interpret otherwise, both the French and the American publishers, giving us a hint, draw our attention on the fact that this is Darrieussecq's "first novel." The manager of the perfume store stands at the center of the stage as a metaphor for the publisher, the true agent of the metamorphosis, the contract about to be signed being nothing less than a publishing contract. The first pages of the book confirm this, staging the writing process, and enumerating the writer's instruments: notebook, pen, ink-nothing is missing. Logic is respected since after the publisher, the first character of the novel, comes the "manuscript," which precedes the "book," while the "reader" comes last. From now on the narrator will not abandon the metaphor, stubbornly sticking to it, pigheaded for that matter. Pig Tales is the portrait of an artist as a young sow.