Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee.
Abstract
This article examines Christine Montalbetti’s novel Plus rien que les vagues et le vent (2014) (Nothing but Waves and Wind, 2017) to propose the ocean as a model to think about contemporary masculinities. This French road novel depicts homosociality in the post-2008 American landscape through the perspective of an outsider homodiegetic narrator. The ocean serves as a narrative model for the novel: its bodily connection with the characters embodies “hybrid masculinities” that emerge from a hybridity of patterns in an ongoing process of negotiation, appropriation and reformulation. In their travels, the characters eventually meet the ocean and testify to a fluid ontology that overturns the Modern detachment from the environment together with its humanist conception of “Man.” The ocean’s waves suggest a nonlinear timeline and an ongoing posthumanist reformation of subjectivities, like the ever-reshaping shorelines. In Montalbetti’s novel, the ocean as a model for hybrid masculinities accounts for novel forms of power relationships, where radical openness pairs with violence.
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Notes
1 While borrowing from the road novel genre, Nothing but Waves and Wind engages with filmic imaginaries of the United States by relying on “various processes, scenes, techniques or themes originating from Hollywood cinema.” (Thibault, B. (2021) Entre fascination et simulation: la fiction filmique de l’Amérique chez Tanguy Viel et Christine Montalbetti. French Forum 46(2-3): 151).
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Bédard-Goulet, S. “Le modèle bizarre qu’il devenait pour eux”: the ocean as a model for contemporary masculine (inter)subjectivities in Plus rien que les vagues et le vent (2014) by Christine Montalbetti. Subjectivity (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-024-00177-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-024-00177-y