An off-centre pendulum: Neo-Japonisme and contemporary French identity in Michaël Ferrier's Sympathy for the Phantom

Abstract

This article analyses French novelist Michaël Ferrier's novel Sympathie pour le fantôme (Sympathy for the Phantom, 2010) as an instance of contemporary French neo- japonisme. Building upon the work of Edward Said, it argues that Ferrier's neo-japonisme inherits from the tradition of earlier French Orientalist romantic literature while disavowing this inheritance through a simultaneous application of universalist, social-science criticisms onto Japan. This universalism is then similarly discredited for its banality and ineffectiveness, leading the narrator to rediscover the original aesthetic, Orientalist vision of Japan through an adventure into the beautiful, anti-rational heart of the city. This rediscovery of authentic Japan is performed by the French flâneur through a planned promenade mediated by the night-time darkness, the choice of small alleyways, and alcohol. The confusion and disorientation experienced in this engineered authentic Japan is proclaimed to provide ready answers for French crises of value such as national historiography and immigrant memory. As the night clears, however, Japan returns to an ugly everydayness ready to be once again subjected to universalist critique. The swinging of this pendulum characterizes the style of Ferrier's neo- japonisme, which this paper refers to as "off-centre." Examples of this off-centre style are given in Ferrier's descriptions of Tokyo and the fictional character of Yuko, who transform from cosmopolites to premodern Japanese from day to night. Ferrier's literary use of Japan is also placed within the context of the novelist's larger œuvre. Understanding the structure and logic of neo-japonisme in Ferrier provides one example of how Orientalist discriminations persist in culture today, when Orientalist thought has become popularly and academically discredited.