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Kathryn Robson, "Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
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They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly.
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B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network New Books in French channel. I'm your host, Gina Stam, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama, and with me is Katherine Robson, who is here today to talk to me about her new book, beyond the Happy Ending Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film, out this year from Liverpool University Press. Dr. Robson is a reader in French at Newcastle University and the author in 2019 of I Suffer, Therefore I Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's writing and in 2004 of writing the inscription of trauma in post1968 French women's life writing. Dr. Robson, thank you so much for being with us today.
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A
Thank you very much for inviting me, Gina. It's a pleasure. Thank you.
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B
So how did you come to the topic of happiness in general and why do you think it's necessary or productive to focus on this topic in contemporary writing and film, and in particular in women's contemporary writing and film.
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A
Well, actually, I came to the subject of happiness very reluctantly. I'd previously worked, as you've just said, on trauma and then on empathy, and I'd always focused mainly on literature dealing with difficult experiences and the so called negative emotions. I suppose the subject of happiness seized me while I was planning to work on something else, and I was absolutely fascinated by how prevalent it was, even in the most unlikely texts. And then once I saw how often the subject came up, I couldn't let it go and I kept looking for it, but I still resisted exploring it further for a while because I couldn't see myself working on happiness. And I almost felt awkward about telling people that I was working on happiness because it felt like a topic that didn't suit me in a way. So happiness was, well, by the time I began working on it, already quite a big topic in academic and in political and social discourses, from the very popular self help manuals to philosophical treatisers to obviously political speeches as well as. But it was very rarely considered in relation to women's writing or film. This is probably because, if I'm being fair, it's rarely the main theme and obviously other issues, so violence, for example, are more prominent and also possibly more urgent. What really struck me when I began to look at it was how happiness remained an underlying theme or a goal, even in those texts and films where it seemed most unlikely and most difficult. So in Banlieu film, for instance, or in the context of aging, and crucially, where nobody seemed to think that it might even matter. My aim was to take happiness seriously and to assume that it does matter, even though it is obviously problematic and even though its dominant narratives are often incredibly coercive and controlling. It's important, I think, to think about happiness in places where nobody looks for it, which means pivoting away from stereotypical ideas about marriage and motherhood, et cetera, and thinking about how women writers and filmmakers have rethought happiness quite differently. In terms of why I took the gendered angle, the question of happiness is very clearly gendered. This doesn't mean that all women's experiences or representations are the same, obviously, but just that one cannot really think about happiness in a gender blind fashion in contemporary French culture, literature and cinema. And obviously that's not to say that gender is the only factor to bear in mind. I would say that in terms of gendering narratives of happiness, there are various strands to Unpick. So the gendering of expectations about happiness, the gendering of texts about happiness within literary and cinematic traditions that are obviously themselves also tightly gendered, and the gendering of responses to texts about happiness too. Imbricated here in messy ways are attitudes towards female sexualities and female bodies, race and ethnicity, the maternal body, the aging body, amongst others. Ultimately, I try to argue that contemporary French women writers and filmmakers do approach happiness differently. So they're both highlighting how limited and coercive its dominant discourses are, but they're also offering different ways to think about what it might mean and offering up space for discussion.
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B
And so you've just touched on the difficulty of picking out one meaning for happiness, and in your introduction you talk about this difficulty of definition. Could you tell us a little bit why it's so complicated and about what aspects of a definition or circumscription you decided to use in your analysis?
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A
Sure. I think it's difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, it's such a hazy concept and so many thinkers have tried to define it that there are almost too many competing definitions. Because fundamentally, ultimately, no one can agree if it's an emotion or a state. For example, arguments over definitions of happiness can be traced right back through philosophical writings. Well, from Socrates onwards, really. There's no agreement over whether it should be tracked by what one philosopher, Julia Annes, calls the number of episodes of smiley face feeling or a more holistic overall state. And of course the former, so the episodes of smiley face feeling are likely to be influencing the latter. So that more holistic overall state of happiness, if you like. Anyway, there's also disagreement over whether it should be seen in somewhat moral terms, as a state you can strive towards through self improvement for your own good and the good of other people, or whether it is closer to hedonism and pleasure. And then, of course, whether the division between these two options is even sustainable. Then there's overlap between definitions of happiness and definitions of well being, particularly recently. And there are also overlaps, somewhat oddly perhaps, between happiness and unhappiness, and these often become messily intertwined. As a result, I argue it is more productive to understand happiness in its intersecting and sometimes contradictory narratives instead of settling for one singular definition. So I suppose I decided to focus less on a singular definition, which would necessarily be reductive and also might not fit some of the very varied representations of happiness in contemporary French women's writing and film. Instead, I choose to see happiness as embedded in different, sometimes conflicting, but always very powerful socio cultural narratives. And in my work I seek to track those narratives, but also to unpick them, tracing their fault lines and contradictions. I'm sort of conscious that I haven't defined happiness for you here, but I think that's kind of intentional. It changes slightly as the book goes through. Sorry, that probably wasn't a very helpful answer.
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B
No, I think it's very helpful. And to pursue the framework that you're using here. Your theoretical interlocutors are primarily Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant. In particular, could you tell us a bit about the theories you're here and why you find them to be so illustrative?
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Yes. So what I find compelling in both of those writers is that they both critique social models of happiness and also they take the subject of happiness seriously, particularly focusing on people who are in different ways disadvantaged, marginalized or economically deprived. Both writers explore how the promise of happiness, or the law of happiness, if you like, traps people into making particular life choices that can often be damaging and prevents them from choosing different paths. If I begin with Saira Ahmed, her book on happiness is also very much about unhappiness. So it highlights how pervasive the promise of happiness is and how it is stickily associated with certain life choices and positions. For example, the heterosexual family. And Ahmed argues about how difficult it can be to admit to feeling unhappy in a position which society assumes to be unequivocally happy. For Ahmed, words are sticky, and this is a theme that threads through all of her work, not just the promise of happiness. And she sees us as getting stuck in their promises and associations. She also shows how unhappiness gets stuck to other positions, for instance, her concept of the melancholy migrant. These offer the promise of happiness if they integrate, as long as they can try to forget cultural conflicts or loss or racism. Ahmed's writing, I think, is incredibly productive and accessible. It's very readable as well, and her ideas are so useful. But I would say that whilst the theory is brilliant, it does sometimes get a little stuck to unhappiness. I think footfoot for good reason. But I was a bit conscious when. When working through the text. I didn't want a book about happiness to turn into a book about unhappiness. And so while I was working with Ahmed, I was also trying to think through the focus on unhappiness to try to open up other possibilities. Berlant is both similar and very different and possibly a little bit more difficult to read as well. So Belant's concept of cruel optimism, which highlights how in contemporary neoliberal societies, individuals end up trapped and over attached to destructive choices. That concept of cruel optimism in many ways mirrors Ahmed's critique of how the promise of happiness is destructive and trapping. So in many ways the two theories work very well together. But I would also say that Ahmed's theory is different from Balant's because Balant argues that our current social climate is one of what Balant calls crisis ordinariness, a sort of perpetual state of trauma or crisis caused really post economic crash, where individuals are floundering frantically. Dog paddling is how Berlant puts it, unable to look forward and make choices that will help them in the long term. So where are Med sees individuals trapped by promises of future happiness that they can never quite access, although they're told how to access them. And it involves behaving in certain prescribed ways. Bellant shows individuals stuck in what you could see as an unending present tense, unable to look forward or make future focused decisions because it's all they can do to keep going in the crisis of the present. Bellant is writing about the US this century post economic crash, but does also refer to Europe. And I think the context that Berlin is writing about does also fit the context in France quite well. But there are also some differences there too, obviously. And the same goes for Ahmed, who's writing more about the uk. Belant portrays a social impasse, but does, I think, also try to open up that empress. And following Balant, I also try to think about how the texts and the films that I'm studying seek to open up discourses differently, to try to move beyond being stuck in sort of prescriptive models of happiness.
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B
Thank you. Your first chapter is called Faking Masks and Images of Happiness in Consumer Culture. What is the relationship you draw out of the text between happiness and authenticity? And could you maybe give us an example of this?
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A
Yeah. So happiness is often figured in relation to a binary opposition between sort of authentic and inauthentic happiness. And the former is implicitly seen as somehow morally superior. And the latter is usually associated with hedonism or with faking it, or with something that isn't quite true in some way. Now, this opposition persists not only in discourses on happiness in advertising, consumerism, social media, for example, but actually it's also sustained in some academic discourses too. It seems very sticky, it's a sticky opposition, etc. Ahmed would put it. So I look at how the promise of happiness is fantasized and shaped by consumer culture, and of course I also look at how consumer culture itself is often assumed to be somehow inauthentic and yet also, interestingly, repeatedly promises authenticity in the shape of some sort of. Sort of return to an imagined authentic time like childhood. So I argue that the notion of authentic happiness is itself a fabrication or a mask, and that happiness itself is performed and actually also performative. And by that I don't mean that it isn't somehow real or authentic, I just mean that the division between authentic and inauthentic is somehow also part of the performance, if that makes sense. To give you an example, Yasmina Raza's so Happier the Happy. It's actually all about palpably very unhappy characters. And these characters can find happiness or believe they can find happiness only through fantasy and through faking it, as the chapter title puts it, in such a way that other people might believe it too. So again, through a kind of performance, and it's that way they think they can recognise themselves and that other people will recognise them as happy. And here I think it helps to go back to Bullant, who talks about recognition in quite a useful way. So Berlant talks about recognition as actually the misrecognition you can bear. So bearable misrecognition. What Balant means by that is you'll never authentically be recognized, because every recognition is effectively a misrecognition. But sometimes we can fantasize that as a. As a bearable, acceptable recognition. And that's when we feel recognized. We're not actually being recognized, we're still being misrecognized, but it's a misrecognition that is acceptable to us and that we can see ourselves in, if you like. And in this text by Yasmina Reza, characters cling to bearable misrecognition with cruel optimism, even as they are very repeatedly shown that what they're clinging to is an illusion. The point here is that there's no authentic state or authentic relationship beneath the illusion. But I think what I was trying to argue is that negotiating happiness seems to believe performatively believing in the fantasized performance of happiness, and somehow negotiating that in relation to others and how others see you and view your happiness as well. I hope that makes sense.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And in the corpus of this chapter, you focus on the way social media shapes our images of happiness and our ability to retain it. This is a relatively new arrival in literature, at least in literary fiction. Could you talk about how social media is figured in your corpus?
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A
Yes. So it figures primarily in two novels in the study Delphine de vie grande enfants en Roi and Camille Laurence's Selcouvre, although in fact it does appear in other texts in other chapters. So Nina Bohawi's Bohrivash, for example, has some examples of social media in it, and I presume it's going to appear more and more in literature anyway. However, I only really focus on the social media aspect in the first chapter. I point out in the first chapter that social media and so called virtual reality, and of course that term is so interesting in itself, are often viewed as somehow fake as opposed to what we call the real world, and particularly because it is so obvious that we can hide to some extent on social media, at least hiding names, faces, etc. But what I show in the chapter through reading the novels I'm looking at is that those binaries are themselves shown to be constructs. In Selk vu Kway, which is to summarise a multi layered narrative figuring an older woman who speaks to men on social media, that's an incredibly reductive description, but if I try to describe it properly, we'll be here all day. In this text, nobody is who they seem, but there's no peeling off the social media masks to reveal the real person underneath. There's just layer upon layer of masking in this text. Writing works like social media. Hiding, masking, dissimulating. And it is also impossible to look beneath the mask, to see any kind of authentic subject underneath it. Drawing again on Berlant, I argue that happiness is shown not to be bound up in somehow unraveling fantasies or peeling off masks, if that were even possible, but in constructing fantasies that shore up intelligible identities and relationships. And here I suppose I'm going back to the bearable misrecognition that I was talking about just now. In Selk Voukoye, happiness is shown to be a fantasy rooted in a desire for bearable misrecognition, and this is made possible through the anonymity of social media. But it also generates violence. This is quite incredibly violent text. In Les Enfrans en Roi by Darphine de Gigant, a mother sets up a YouTube channel to post endless videos of her children without their consent, for example, unboxing gifts that are sent by subscribers before one of the children goes missing. This text exposes the myths underlying images of happiness performed online, but it also shows the extent to which everyone, and here it's even the detective who seeks to find and then support the child who goes missing is complicit in these misrecognitions of intimate happiness. And again, this text shows how unboxing never reveals some sort of authentic self underneath. Both of these texts show how much is invested in bearable misrecognition on social media and what the violent consequences can be. But I do think it's worth pointing out that the texts also highlight that the masking and hiding and violence are not actually products of social media itself. So they do occur in social media, but they occur elsewhere too, and they exceed the limits of social media in both of the texts and sort of bleed into real life if you want to keep up that binary opposition. But obviously both of the texts sort of blur that opposition anyway.
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B
And you've brought this up in your last answer there. But in our society, we're often promised happiness through our intimate relationships, and this pairing is central in your second chapter. How does the literature that you evoke trouble the different. Sorry, trouble. The relationship between intimacy and happiness?
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A
Thank you. So I focus mainly in chapter two on the family home as fantasized space of intimate happiness. To the text I look at and the films show characters projecting fantasies of happiness through familial intimacy in the home. And that's the kind of primary driver. However, repeatedly, the home is also shown to be a site of violence, a violence that is figurative but is also very literal, as we see, for example, a nanny killing the two children that she is meant to be looking after in the family bathroom in the evening while she's bathing the children before bed. What I think is striking is that the violence in the home or in the family is shown to be generated by very entrenched fantasies about happy families and intimate family units. Intimacy, then, in these texts is repeatedly figured as a fantasy and a promise that individuals cling to and they will inflict violence on themselves or others rather than give it up. This is obviously an example, another example of what Valent calls cruel optimism. This can be seen, for instance, in the international bestseller Chansend Douce by Leslie Magny, which I already referenced briefly just a minute ago, in which the nanny becomes over fixated on staying with the family that she works for. And what she's obsessed with is becoming part of what she sees as a happy family. Above all, all she wants is to be in that family. And she's brought completely into all the powerful cultural fantasies of happy families and happy family homes. Above all, she's absolutely obsessed with the idea that the mother will have another child so that she can stay with the family. Otherwise the children will grow old and she won't have her place in the family anymore. And when that fantasy is punctured, she can't cope with the reality of losing that home, so she ends up killing the children she looks after. That's not a spoiler. It happens right at the beginning of the book, so I don't feel bad about giving it away. And there are other examples of how the quest for intimate happiness within the family unit take place in the other texts as well, but they do work quite similarly. In other words, violence is always at stake here. Now Belant asks in her article called Intimacy, what kind of collective personal future can be imagined if, for example, sexuality is no longer bound to its narrative, does not lead to stabilizing something, something institutional like patriarchal families? While this question obviously does not explicitly relate to happiness or actually even to intimacy, although the article is entitled Intimacy, I argue in in this chapter that it is useful to rethink intimate happiness beyond the concomitant desire for stability, because there's obviously something in intimate happiness that does create joy and, well, I suppose does make people happy, so it's worth taking it seriously. But it's also an incredibly damaging fantasy. So I argue that what matters really is exploring other stories about intimacies that destabilize subjects who are treading water in what Balant calls crisis. Ordinariness, in a kind of low level, constant trauma, could pursue without being completely worn out. And drawing on Claude and Yu's film 35 Rums, I argue that the narrative templates that define intimate happiness need to be opened up to different subjects and possibilities, so they cannot enable alternative perspectives that are no longer bound, as Berlant puts it, to established narratives. So I suppose my point here is I don't think we should throw away the idea that intimacy can come hand in hand with happiness. It's that we need to make space for alternative versions of the stories. And that's kind of what the texts I was looking at are pointing towards.
- [25:04]
B
Thank you. And also at the end there, with 35 realms, you're looking at what might be the first glimpse of a sort of positive construction of happiness in your book. And this continues in your next chapter, which you call Queering Happiness. And keeping in mind that queer figures have for a long time been represented as structurally unhappy, how do the queer writers or characters you discuss offer the possibility for happiness or joy?
- [25:30]
A
Yes, so I did say earlier I was trying to avoid a book about unhappiness, but there is a lot of unhappiness in there anyway, in this chapter, I do indeed point out, as you say, there's been a persistent cultural insistence on happiness as implicitly heteronormative, because the stories told about happiness have been extremely heteronormative, and any deviation from the straight line is always assumed to be unhappy or has traditionally been assumed to be unhappy. And I will say the texts I explore in this chapter do feature a lot of unhappiness, just like the text that Sara Ahmed looks at in the Promise of Happiness. But they do also feature happiness. Now, most often it features as some sort of prescriptive, heteronormative constraint. Again, as we see in our med chapter, which is called Unhappy Queers. And in that chapter she deliberately allows queer queer unhappiness to be spoken. I do also show the queer unhappiness in this chapter, but I want to go beyond that, looking at how the texts that I was working on work to queer these straight narratives about happiness and as. As Jack Halverston puts it, to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space. To give you an example, this can be seen in Celine Sciamma's films Tomboy and Portrait de Legion fien Feu, which present happiness as a kind of interlude or a parenthesis in time. In Tomboy, it's a summer holiday from school in which the main character, Laure, can present as a boy, Michael, to new friends, supported by their sister before their mother finds out and unmasks Laure and imposes a female identity on Laure. Once again, in Portrait, the parenthesis is slightly different. It's a lesbian affair taking place on a remote Breton island between a woman and her female portrait artist before she's compelled again by her mother to marry the man that her mother has chosen to portray queer happiness as a sort of irrelevant, trivial interlude not quite. Part of real life is, of course, another part of the the very heteronormative script of happiness. But I argue that these films also disrupt that script as they queer the temporal frames at play, and they actually also allow queer happiness to exceed its prescribed limits. Thus, I argue that Siama's films go beyond presenting queer happiness as a sort of spatial and temporal parenthesis. And what they do is they queer temporalities and narratives offering alternative narratives of happiness that are flickering and fleeting, but not completely extinguished or contained in these films, as in the other texts I explore in this chapter. Actually, the point seems to be to think happiness beyond the future focused, heteronormative script exploring happiness in the present tense, but not in one fixed Time and space only. And what I would say is that these texts gesture to possibilities of queer happiness through movement, disruption, disorder, and also through a sustained focus on the body, on breathing, for example, on swimming, and on sensory interactions with others. So I suppose that's how I see what you said in the chapter as the possibility of happiness and joy. It comes through disruption, fundamentally, and the kind of opening up of different narratives.
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B
Yes. And in the next chapter you focus on other kinds of marginalized subjectivities, and in particular migrant, exiled or otherwise geographically marginalized subjects, notably in film related to the banlieues, but also in the fiction of Nina Brauy and Marine Dailles, and related to what you just said about the possibility of happiness or joy through sensory experience. This is another place where you see some positive possibility for happiness. And specifically as it relates to movement. How do you envision that?
- [29:32]
A
Yes. So movement does come up again here in this chapter. I was really struck by how often happiness seems to feature in relation to dance in particular, for example. But I would also say there's literal movement which is shown to offer transient moments of happiness. But there's also an emphasis on moving towards others, on embodied encounters which can open up to tentative possibilities of happiness. This is very different from the narrative around. Prescriptive notion of happiness is more fluid, more open ended, less straightforward to locate and pin down. And it's also more relational. To be fair, there is little implication of finding happiness via social integration in any of the texts that I look at in chapter four. They predominantly highlight disconnection and estrangement, even violence. But there are glimpses and possibilities of moments of happiness here always associated with opening up to someone else, even if this crucially means staying exposed to unhappiness, alienation, discomfort, for example. And we can see this very much in Nepal Hawaii's novels. Tomboy, for example.
- [30:44]
B
And secondly, as you note yourself, one of the authors that you picked, Marin J, is not someone we might automatically associate with writing about happiness. Why is it that she was important to include in this chapter for you?
- [30:58]
A
Yes, she is an unlikely presence here, isn't she? I included her because, despite the relentless dystopian misery of the novel La Duine, and it really is relentlessly miserable, this novel includes a very surprising number of references to happiness which I think are worth exploring, even if they have rarely received any critical attention. And again, being fair, I would say that's not surprising because other themes are much more dominant. And certainly I'm not trying to argue that characters in this text are happy in any way. Or that there's a straightforward happy ending. But there are so many references to happiness, and therefore I wanted to look at this text and take those seriously. In a way, what I argue in Lady Huin, and it comes at the start of the chapter for a reason, really. I argue that the text displaces and interrogates standard narratives of happiness, specifically those associated with migration, multiculturalism, and integration, as charted by Ahmed in the Promise of Happiness. That is, there's no integration shown into a multicultural ideal of happiness. Nor actually is there unmitigated unhappiness related to failed cultural integration. What's interesting, actually, in La Divine is that in this novel, intimacy, integration and reconciliation do not bring happiness. Instead, they're shown to be dystopian fantasies of cruel optimism. So my reading of La Divine highlights a need to rethink multicultural happiness differently and to explore it in terms of displacement, difference and disconnection. And so I use this as the basis for approaching the other texts and films that I look at in that chapter. Thinking about happiness in relation to displacement, movement, disruption. Really.
- [32:53]
B
Thank you. Your final chapter deals with happiness and aging. Why is this such a difficult thing to talk about, even as it is an increasingly studied relationship? And how is this difficulty portrayed in some of the texts that you discuss here?
- [33:07]
A
So even defining aging in old age is not easy. Part of the difficulty here is that conceptions of happiness are so narrative driven. The old age with the inevitable specter of death, but also with decreasing mobility and increasing health issues. I know that's not the case for everyone, but it is, unfortunately, the case for most people necessarily challenges those narratives. And I think that's why it's so important to think about happiness in relation to old age, because it can also help us to think about happiness and the way we talk tell stories about happiness more generally differently. The other thing that struck me is that old age is looked at very much from the outside in academic study and actually also in fiction. So so many representations of old age are not from the point of view of people who are in old age themselves. And old people are sort of repeatedly seen as other, even to themselves, actually. So I think we have to consider the position that we're thinking about happiness in old age from too, and be mindful about the assumptions we make here. Another problem, of course, though, is that there are some very real mental, physical difficulties in old age. What I find striking about the text I was looking at for this chapter, including Radha's films that I'll come back to, is that they don't shy away from the difficulties of growing old. They include mobility problems, eyesight problems, and more. But they also perform moments of happiness in old age that lighten its weight and burden and work to reconfigure or maybe even open up space within balance and pears. So for me, these representations of happiness in old age don't only challenge assumptions about old age, but also about happiness itself. They shift the narrative terms, and they emphasise the need for different, what I would call grammars and temporalities of happiness. I'd like here, just briefly, to take the example of Helene Cic? Su, who is unusual in that she writes about her mother's old age while herself also being relatively old. So her mother around 100 years old, Cixi a generation below, which is still, broadly speaking, in a category of old age. Although it's her mother who is the primary point of focus in Efsuvada, for instance, and Sigy, the narrator in each text seeks a very playful intimacy with her mother's aging. Other French women writers have notably othered their aging mothers, Simone de Beauvoir being an obvious example here. But in Cixi's work, the mother's olderity seems to seep into the narrator herself. But also there's some humor there, and that keeps the narrative open and keeps possibility of happiness open too. So Zahra Ahmed says that happiness can be defined as those moments where you're brought to life by the absurdity of being reminded of something. And those moments define Siksi's texts with their repeated references to absurdity, which relate, I think, to an intimacy reinvented in old age. To give you a little example, the narrator in Efsuvad complains that when her mother's mobility gets worse, she gets a cane that she doesn't want, and she complains about it all the time. So her mother refuses to allow the cane to be what she calls the personage principarde, and she sticks on it a note with the telephone number of her daughter, thereby projecting the cane effectively onto someone else and refusing to allow it to define her or mark her identity in any way, even while she does recognize that she needs to use it. The cane then gets described as a family member, and it keeps falling over or getting knocked over and makes a loud noise that disturbs everyone. Well, it disturbs everyone except Ev herself. So Eve is hearing impaired, thanks to old age. She said she didn't want to, she didn't like the noise it made, but in fact now she can't hear the noise so the cane that initially seemed to threaten her independence, identity and happiness becomes part of the family. And Eve's hearing loss, which is obviously another symptom of old age, protects her actually from its irritations. So what you can see here is how the text both recognizes the limitations of old age and also shows how they can be navigated differently, more bearably, I'd say, through the intimate and often quite amusing love between mother and daughter. So the playfulness that characterises Cixu's accounts of her mother and actually also of her own, depending on where you draw the age line, old age offers an alternative articulation of the Empress, in which intimate happiness may be possible, even if the physical difficulties of aging are not erased. Balant asks what happens when futurity splinters as a prop for getting through life? What is fascinating is the very notion of a prop is taken literally in these texts, with walking aids, spectacles, hearing aids, and so on that are almost turned into characters in their own right, to quite amusing effect. So these texts draw on these props, allowing us to rethink possibilities of happiness in old age and also to expand the impasse of our own limited discourses on what it might mean to be happy even as we grow old.
- [38:26]
B
And in particular, some of this chapter looks at the work of Agnes Varda, who, for me at least, and perhaps for some of our listeners, has always seemed like a beacon of happiness and joy and being at peace with aging. And she's both an exemplary and a limited figure in some ways. For you, how does Vardha represent a certain vision of happiness and maybe also its limits?
- [38:51]
A
So, interestingly, Berlant analyzes Varda's work Les glenneres la Glneze very briefly, but in quite a lengthy footnote, and comments critically that Varda makes her positive portrait of old age from a very privileged perspective, her class, health, race, et cetera. So this is true, obviously, in this film and in the other films I look at. But I also argue that Valda challenges conventional narratives of old age and happiness, notably through opening up spaces, bringing in other people, through recigured hospitality, also through dance and movement. Again, so I'd argue that Valda's films reconfigure, or at the very least stretch the Empress, creating what I see as representations of happiness, as playful performances in the present tense. But also what is important here is her films. Do you still remember and mourn losses in the past? And they also confront the end of life, even as they celebrate present relationships and commemorate happy memories. So varda's cinema, like CXi's novels about her mother, is playful, joyful, makes space for the moments of happiness, the possibility of happiness. But it doesn't shy away from the reality and the difficulty of old age either.
- [40:12]
B
Thank you. And you have a coda to your book which evokes the idea of a relationship between happiness and inconvenience. Why do you think it's important to think about these two phenomena together?
- [40:23]
A
Okay, so as a scholar of trauma originally, and later of different types of suffering, and then of empathy, my own research, turn to happiness, if you like, has at times felt quite inconvenient, quite hard to justify and explain. And I've often felt really awkward talking about it, as if I need to explain immediately that I'm not some sort of naive Pollyanna looking for joy in unlikely places. And I think that set me off down the route of thinking about inconvenience. And that did then actually strike me as germane. So my analyses highlight two possibly contradictory points. The first being that our assumptions about what will make other people and ourselves happy tend to generate unhappiness. That is shown by Ahmed in the Promise of Happiness too. The converse point here is that these assumptions are nonetheless bound up in associations that, like the presumed link between intimacy and happiness, are not actually completely contradicted by my readings of the texts and films in the study. So where it is often through forging relationships, not necessarily conventional ones, that characters can find the possibility of happiness, it's not lasting, nor is it guaranteed. What's interesting is that it is very often shown to be inconvenient. Most surprisingly, the text I analyze suggests that inconvenience can enable an unscripted and often surprising happiness, actually through the friction with others, and also through a kind of imposed immobility or the kind of this blocking of one route that forces a change in direction and a renewed relationship with other people. So in these texts and films, inconvenience marks the condition for intimacy with others. Intimacy is shown to be literally inconvenient, not what we intended, but that inconvenience is also how we establish intimacy, and it also how we prove it somehow to ourselves. So I suppose the idea is not to reject the connection between happiness and intimacy, but to use inconvenience to rethink that relationship. And when you do that, you start wondering, why would being inconvenienced be a way to experiencing happiness? And of course, it's partly because it offers the proof of intimacy and connection, but it's also because it disrupts the prescribed narratives. It Opens up the impasse a little and offers up alternative possibilities. And that's kind of where I saw the different parts of the different chapters coming together with that sort of tentative conclusion.
- [42:58]
B
And finally, as we come to the end of our time, do you have any new projects you would like to tell the listeners about?
- [43:03]
A
Yes. So my new project is another shift, this time to think about the notion of speaking out and feminism in contemporary French culture, literature and film. France has a rich cultural history, obviously a feminist protest and demonstrations. And feminism has been particularly high on the political and cultural agenda in recent years. You can see this in political manifestations, in demonstrations, in online activism, on social media, Obviously the international MeToo movements at balance d' Empire in France. A veritable explosion actually, in best selling feminist literature in recent years. So legislative changes as well. And then we've seen speeches and walkouts at prestigious film award ceremonies. My interest then is how women have spoken out since the 1970s in France. What spaces the speaking out has occupied, cultural, literary, cinematic, political, both literal and figurative. So literature, the courts, the press, the award ceremonies. I've already mentioned, for example, and how the women who speak out have been positioned as variously hysterical troublemakers, criminals even, or heroines, actually. And it is quite interesting how it changes over time. So if you go back to the Aix en Provence trial in 1978, the women were really vilified, whereas if you go to the Pelico trial in 2024, she's very much seen as a national international heroine. So things have changed over time, but a lot hasn't changed as well, and I'm interested in that. So I suppose my research questions are thinking about what it means to speak out, how women have spoken out, from what position, how do they position themselves, how are they seen? How is speaking out specifically French, or what is specifically French about how it's happened in France? And how does speaking out differ in France to how it's worked elsewhere, notably the UK and the US for example? And how is emotion mobilized in speaking out? How does this position the speaker, and how does it position the people responding and listening? And how does it change the narrative? So basically, that's what I'm interested in, but it is fairly early days, so I can't give you much more detail than that, but that's where I'm going now, hopefully.
- [45:27]
B
Well, I'm sure that we will all look forward to that. Thank you so much, Dr. Robson, for being with us today.
- [45:34]
A
No problem. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.