Aloof and flooded: Marie Redonnet's girl-places and their watery end

Abstract

The swamp smell invades the garden of the Splendid Hotel. Mountains are reflected on the surface of the reservoir where Forever Valley used to be. And in the Markers Street in Ôat there are no houses left, having all been carried away in a flood. In Marie Redonnet’s triptych of fictional novels, composed of Hôtel Splendid (1986), Forever Valley (1986), and Rose Mellie Rose (1987) (all translations by Jordan Stump, 1994), the apocalypse does not come at once: it happens every day. And it most often is embodied by water. As the waterline comes closer and closer, or rises higher and higher, the protagonists of these stories (most often teenage girls) grow not only resigned, but busy. Their monotone inner monologues chug along, and they carry on with their daily tasks: plunging, digging, clerking. There is always something to do, even as the worlds they inhabit change unrecognizably. Others move away, die, adapt, but Redonnet’s protagonists develop complex, parous relationships with their sites, and simply plough on - heroic, foolish, or possibly both. This creative-critical paper will study Redonnet’s triptych as an alternative to the understandable and common dramatic associations with apocalyptic scenes. By following and juxtaposing these girl-places and their toils, we can learn more about the relationship between impassibility and the apocalypse. Can the apocalypse ever be normalised? What does it mean to maintain a sense of normalcy when the world around us is changing radically? Can one’s normalcy and others’ distress ever be reconciled? If Žižec proposes that an event does not occur “within” the world, but in our perception, what do these character’s dispassionate behaviour say about the apocalyptic event and experience?