Clin d’œil: intertextuality in Ben Jelloun’s Les Yeux baissés Mary B. Vogl * Abstract This essay examines how Ben Jelloun creates a multi-layered intertextuality in his novel Les Yeux baissés that parallels the critical work of Julia Kristeva. Ben Jelloun transposes sign systems so that the novel becomes the site and the catalyst for a reflexive meditation on the nature of fiction, the process of writing, and the use of language. Just as the main character embodies the fractured life of an emigrant, the prose incarnates a kind of double writing with multiple sub- and intertexts. Considering this novel through the lens of that multi-layered intertextuality allows for deeper and more pointed revelations of its richness. Clin d’œil: intertextuality in Ben Jelloun’s Les Yeux baissés Much of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s work probes how racism and xenophobia in France affect the psyche and emotions of North African immigrants. His piercing novel, Les Yeux baissés 1 , tells the story of Fathma, a Berber girl living in an impoverished village in the south of Morocco. After the tragic death of her younger brother, their father, an immigrant worker in France, decides to bring his family to live with him in Paris, at first in the Goutte d’or neighbourhood and then in housing on the city’s periphery. Les Yeux baissés traces Fathma’s struggles against deracination and her attempts to construct a cultural identity that incorporates the multiple aspects of her character and experiences and allows her to accept her diasporic life without having to fight the ‘foreigner’ inside herself. For Julia Kristeva, whose work comments on the complex relationship between host country and immigrants, the foreigner lives within us, and ‘lorsque nous fuyons ou combattons l’étranger, nous luttons contre notre inconscient - cet «impropre» de notre «propre» impossible.’ 2 That is, in living culturally fractured lives (in trying to fit in and yet hold on to a semblance of their native identity), immigrants internalize a deeply complicated disdain, sometimes hatred, of themselves. That hatred, a foreigner per se, becomes integral in their existence. Kristeva, Ben Jelloun’s contemporary and also an expatriate, argues that it is impossible to fight against that foreigner without dire consequences, since it is fighting a layer of one’s very self. That is the sort of potentially destructive emotional and psychological condition that marks the characters in Ben Jelloun’s work. Although some critics laud Les Yeux baissés as Ben Jelloun’s ‘richest’ novel and ‘probably his chef-d’œuvre 3 (it won the Prix des Hemisphères in 1991), most have focused almost exclusively on the sociological and psychological aspects of Les Yeux baissés. Eric Sellin, for instance, calls Les Yeux baissés a ‘gripping’ allegory that illustrates ‘the struggle between self-fulfillment and the estrangement from one’s cultural heritage, which may result from that fulfillment’. 4 Bengt Novén argues that language itself constitutes the ‘true experience’ of Ben Jelloun’s great novels, 5 but in his book-length study Novén virtually ignores Les Yeux baissés, mentioning it only in passing. A number of critics have called attention to Ben Jelloun’s own double cultural heritage and how it parallels the intertextuality in his novels. They have shown how he 1 Tahar Ben Jelloun, Les Yeux baissés. Paris: Seuil, 1991. 2 Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Fayad, 1988, p. 283. 3 Rachid Ameziane- Hassani, ‘The Father Figure in Tahar Ben Jelloun: La Nuit sacrée, Jour de silence à Tanger, and Les Yeux baissés’, Calalloo, 15: 4 (1992), p. 1106. 4 Eric Sellin, Review of Les Yeux baissés, World Literature Today, 66: 4 (Fall 1992), p. 760. 5 Bengt Novén, Les Mots et les corps: étude des procès de l’écriture dans l’œuvre de Tahar Ben 165 IJFS 5 (3) 165–172 © Intellect Ltd 2003 Keywords intertextuality metafiction reflexivity symbolic semiotic mise en abyme signification fragmentation reconciliation integration * I would like to thank Lisa McNee, Lynne Dahmen, Karen Bouwer and Dulce Gray for their helpful sugges- tions on this article.