La pierre, l'eau, le sable: l'écriture sandienne dans les Lettres d'un voyageur

By refusing, as letters, to cut the maternal tie of interpellation, the Lettres d'un voyageur (1837) show Sand's resistance to the "uncanny" of literary space. The narrator's masculine identity introduces, however, the detour of fiction into the immediacy of epistolary communication; and the association of man with stone, solid but also sterile and cold, and of stone with monument, but also with tomb, gives deadly implications to the call of art. By imitating her master, the woman writer risks falling under his mutilating chisel. The horror of petrification forces the male voyager to recognize the existence of the female voyager and to say what she/he does not say: the femininity of her/his desire, turned away from stone to water, inspiring an aesthetics of dissolution rather than of erection. Sand as "sand," or the deconstruction of the masculine monument? Sand knows that there is neither art nor life without structures; and those structures, historically determined, are for her necessarily masculine. But why must "structure" be a synonym of "cut"? The unfolding of the Lettres d'un voyageur records Sand's backing off from the ablation of the feminine that mastery requires, and her longing for a truthful writing, which would be able to lift, at last, the veil of fiction. (YB-S)