The Woman Who Would Not Die: Voice, Mirror, and the Failed Metalanguage in The Double Life of...

Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics 28.1 (January 2002): 29-62

The Woman Who Would Not Die: Voice, Mirror,

and the Failed Metalanguage in The Double Life of Véronique

Hsiu-chuan Lee

National Taiwan Normal University

Abstract This paper studies Krzysztof Kieślowski’s portrayals of woman in The Double Life of Véronique. It explores the dialectic between Kieślowski’s ambition to capture the essence of womanhood on the one hand, and his female characters’ survival qua signifiers of a constraining (masculine) cinematic metalanguage on the other. The first part of the paper explores how, through their disembodied voice, the female characters escape the specular and sound regimes of the film. The second and the third parts analyze the characters of Weronika and Véronique to demonstrate their “ex-sistence” (existing outside) or “exile” vis-à-vis the narrative symbolic of the film. Finally, I look at Kieślowski’s employment of alternative narratives and point out that his need to tell his story repetitively renders his film self-deconstructive in its attempt to express femininity. Briefly, this paper suggests that the male gaze/narrative of The Double Life of Véronique may, following the topographical logic of the Moebius strip, arrive at its obverse “surface,” showing the underside of a masculine cinematic language and casting into question an attempted male metalanguage.

Keywords Krzysztof Kieślowski, The Double Life of Véronique, woman, voice,

metalanguage, Lacan, alternative narratives, jouissance

Now women return from afar, from always: from “without,” from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond “culture”; from their childhood which men have been trying desperately to make them forget, condemning it to “eternal rest.”

— Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” [. . .] for psychoanalysis, the auto-affective voice of self-presence and self-mastery was constantly opposed by its reverse side, the intractable voice of the Other, the voice that one could not control.

— Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice”

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The films of Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941-1996) have been noted for their mystery

and mysticism. A film portraying the enigmatic stories of two identical women

inhabiting Poland and France respectively, The Double Life of Véronique (1991,

hereafter abbreviated as Véronique) not only reiterates Kieślowski’s interest in probing

the shadowy aspects of reality but also appears to reinforce the idea of woman as

mystery (to be solved) prevalent in classic cinema. In effect, Véronique is not simply

a film about woman but a film made out of Kieślowski’s ambition to right the wrong of

not adequately portraying women in his earlier films. Accused of creating women as

“one-dimensional characters” and failing to understand “the essence of womanhood,”

Kieślowski proclaims his ambition: “Right, I’ll make a film about a woman, from a

woman’s point of view, as it were, from the point of view of her sensitivity, her world”

(Stok 174). According to Kieślowski, No End (1984) is his first film about woman

and The Decalogue (1988) gives equal treatment to men and women (Stok 174).

However, in view of the secondary and mostly passive female characters in even No

End and The Decalogue, it is Véronique that initiates his more subtle and complex

portrayals of woman.1

Telling the stories of two women, starring intrinsically attractive actresses, and

celebrating, in Kieślowski’s own words, women’s “greater sensitivity” and “greater

intuition” (Stok 173), Véronique is doubtlessly a film about woman.2 But as is already

quite clear from many feminist studies of classic cinema, a film about woman is not

necessarily a film for women or one made from a woman’s perspective. Kieślowski’s

1 Alicja Helman considers Véronique the “major caesura” in Kieślowski’s career (Coates, Introduction 10). She perceives in Véronique a “deep-seated transformation” of Kieślowski from “an author of ‘masculine’ films” who “constructs his representational world from a strictly male viewpoint” to an author who favorably credits women’s special sensitivity and intuition (118). According to her, women in Kieślowski’s films prior to Véronique “seem to exist exclusively in terms of their biological role,” serving little or no real function (119). This argument accords with Slavoj Žižek’s opinion that The Decalogue, though introducing female characters that prefigure those in his later films, is “male-centered,” with its female characters “reduced to the standard role of agents of hysterical outbursts who disturb the male hero’s calm” (The Fright of Real Tears 156). 2 The “plot” of the film is fairly simple in a sense: in the first part, Weronika in Poland has extraordinary singing talent but suffers from a heart disease. She decides to give up her love affair and leave home in pursuit of a singing career. She sings beautifully but eventually dies on the stage due to a heart attack. The film then shifts to the French part in which Véronique, looking identical to Weronika and also possessing a beautiful voice and a heart condition, decides to give up singing and become a school music teacher. She falls in love with Alexandre, a marionettist and storywriter, but ends up breaking up with him when Alexandre attempts to solve the mystery of Weronique/Véronique by writing it into a story.

Lee: The Double Life of Véronique

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transformation from shooting male-centered scenarios to creating female-predominant

plotlines is obvious, but what concerns many critics is to what extent this

transformation bespeaks Kieślowski’s moving away from his “chauvinist” position.

Elli Ragland and Elizabeth Wright, for example, worry that in “pinpoint[ing] the

difference between a normal woman and a hysteric,” Véronique presents a picture of

woman “inculcated in man,” a picture reflecting man’s “symptoms,” with which “real

women have to cope” (486). Realizing one cannot expect Kieślowski to change all of

a sudden from a “male chauvinist” to a “feminist” and admitting that this accounts for

the disappointment evident in most feminist analyses of Kieślowski’s late

female-centered films, Alicja Helman yet suggests a more favorable reading of

Kieślowski’s transformation and particularly of his attempts to “present female

otherness as a gift” (126). She claims that although Kieślowski “continues to view

women as first and foremost other than men,” he nonetheless starts to portray them as

“endowed with a female talent which men completely lack, an extra-rational insight

below the surface of things, a gift of illumination that permits an instantaneous

penetration of the heart of a matter” (126). This celebration of women’s intuition and

emotion, however, is deemed dangerous from another viewpoint. Slavoj Žižek, for

instance, indicates that readings like Helman’s reinforce the ideology that excludes

women from the symbolic: “in its very elevation of the ‘female,’ it reduces women to a

pre-rational intuition” (The Fright of Real Tears 157). Indeed, a mere assertion of

feminine power does not “[amount] to an actual threat to the patriarchal universe” (The

Fright of Real Tears 158). Enacting no symbolic change, it only reconfirms woman’s

position as the mysterious and unknown “other.” Here, as if intent on making his

portrayal of woman even more problematic, Kieślowski vividly stages in Véronique the

plotline of a male marionettist, Alexandre Fabbri’s attempt to tie the mystery of

Weronika/Véronique to a neat and totalizing narrative. Moreover, despite the fact that

women are supposed to hold the central stage in Véronique, the early death of their

mothers leaves Weronika/Véronique among male figures ranging from their fathers and

lovers to their singing teachers. As Jonathan Romney points out, Weronika/Véronique

“inhabit a male world, without mothers and with an over-abundance of fathers” (43).

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With all this, it seems that Kieślowski’s determination to explore the essence of woman

in Véronique at best presents a femininity beyond rational reality and at worst

perpetuates the myth of women qua objects serving male fantasies.

Setting out as an inquiry into Kieślowski’s portrayal of woman, this paper intends

nonetheless to read Véronique as more than a conventional Western film that upholds a

masculine regime. First, though claimed to be Kieślowski’s first film produced in the

West, Véronique straddles the borders of Eastern and Western Europe, shifting between

the Polish and French cultural spaces.3 And just as Kieślowski remains ambivalent

toward the Western cinema market, Véronique is far more complex than one would

expect vis-à-vis Western cinematic codes and Hollywood’s stereotypes of woman. An

interesting illustration of these complexities can be located in a comparison between

Véronique and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Kieślowski makes clear that

Véronique alludes to Psycho as the Polish Weronika “die[s] 27 minutes into the

film—like Janet Leigh in Psycho” (Interview with Pierre Murat, qtd. in Insdorf 194n6).

Yet, a close reading of Véronique reveals that under the guise of an echo to Psycho, the

story of Weronika/Véronique in fact deviates from that of Marion (Jane Leigh). First,

while Marion dies unequivocally and we see her corpse buried under the darkness of

the swamp, not to be recovered until the last moment of the film, Weronika’s shadowy

body, as well as her voice and gaze, keeps intruding into the film after she “dies.”

Secondly, while Sam as a powerful male signifier in Psycho successfully defeats

Norman/Mother, saves Marion’s sister, solves the mystery of Marion’s disappearance

and thus reconfirms male power as in classic Hollywood cinema, Alexandre’s

seemingly tell-all narrative only results in the French Véronique’s leaving him. As we

shall see, while Psycho in general follows the masculine codes by which women are

killed and saved by men, Weronika/Véronique—in mimicry of Toni Morrison’s

norm-defying heroine Sula—“live their own life and die their own death.”4

3 Colin W. Nettelbeck reads the story of Weronika/Véronique as a reflection of Kieślowski’s own shift between the Polish and French cultural spaces. He contends that Véronique, “while no doubt translating Kieślowski’s own uncertainties in face of the change of direction that he had undertaken, also points to an ambivalent attitude, on his part, towards ‘europeanization’ more generally” (143). 4 The analogy between Weronika/Véronique and Sula sheds light on Weronika/Véronique’s deviation from heterosexual norms. Like Sula, Weronika and Véronique do not live or die for a man. Sula’s rebellion against heterosexual relationships is known through her insistence that her desire, her loneliness,


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In addition to deviating from its Hollywood model, Véronique also challenges

masculine codes through Kieślowski’s failure—be it accidental, inevitable, or

intentional—in carrying out his ambition to present the essence of woman. As

allegorically embodied by Alexandre’s failure in the film, Kieślowski’s attempt to fixate

on women’s sensitivity results in women’s breaking away from a centralizing male

language. Without creating a privileged male signifier, Véronique allows the

proliferation and intermixing of (female) signifiers. An intriguing—and hopefully

also fruitful—way of reading Véronique is not to read it as a story of two women

intuitively connected with each other but as a story of multiple, shifting, indeed

intractable signifiers of woman—Weronika’s and Véronique’s mothers with

disembodied voice, Weronika whose faltering voice eventually slips away from the

male conductor’s control, the phantasmatic apparition of the dead Weronika, the

wandering Véronique ascending a flight of stairs, pacing down a corridor, or driving

from one place to another. On the one hand, Kieślowski appears to test ways of

revealing the essence of woman; on the other, his repetitive failure in symbolizing

women renders male fantasies self-destructive. The male gaze/narrative of Véronique

may, following the topographical logic of the Moebius strip (bande de Moebius ),5

arrive at its obverse surface to reveal the underside of a masculine cinematic language

and cast into question an attempted male metalanguage.

I. Disembodied Voice and the Woman Who Would Not Die

The voice is boundless, warrantless, and, no

and her life are all her own. She declares: “[w]hatever’s burning in me is mine”; “[i]t’s mine [my life] to throw away”; and “my lonely is mine” (Morrison 93, 143). Even her death is different from that of other colored women: colored woman are all “[d]ying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world” (Morrison 143, sic). 5 With the appearance of having two sides, the Moebius strip features actually only one side and one edge, with each point on it leading in a full circle to its obverse side. The topology of the Moebius trip is of interest because it overturns our traditional conception of space by showing the continuity of a surface and its obverse. A figure of Lacanian topology, the Moebius strip introduces a logic that problematizes opposed terms (such as inside/outside, love/hate, consciousness/unconscious, etc.) in psychoanalytic theory. See Evans 116-17.

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coincidence, on the side of woman. — Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice”

At first sight it is risky to propose that women in Véronique do or would not die.

First, the mothers of Weronika/Véronique are already “dead” before the film’s titles

sequence. Moreover, Weronika dies, right on stage in front of the dazzled eyes of the

diegetic spectators. Also, as an attempt to ensure the viewers—especially those

shocked by the fact that the female protagonist should die so early in a film—of

Weronika’s decease, Kieślowski arranges to have an authoritative male voice proclaim

her death and stage a funeral scene afterwards. Even Véronique, who is supposed to

have learned from her double’s experience and escapes death, may be interpreted as

having experienced an “implied death.” As Ragland and Wright suggest, “[w]hen she

revisits her father in the last scene, her hand on the bellpush suddenly rigidifies and

drops” (486). In one way or another, Véronique seems to be a film in which women

are doomed in a world populated by men.

The death of women, however, may receive a new understanding in light of the

Lacanian idea of the “second death.” Drawing examples from popular culture and

literature, Žižek deliberates on the idea that one may die more than once. He asserts

that if a person is “not properly buried,” namely, if s/he is not given fair symbolic

treatment, s/he may return after “death,” “materializ[ing] a certain symbolic debt

persisting beyond physical expiration” (Looking Awry 23). An inadequate

symbolization is therefore like a “symbolic murder” (Looking Awry 23). The

murdered would insist on “living on” despite the fact that they are physically dead

because they find no anchorage in the symbolic texture. Or, one may understand these

returning “living dead” as signifiers sliding away from a failed symbolization. Be it in

the form of ghost, memory, music, or voice, the return of the dead enforces, between

one’s physical death and her/his “real” death, a domain wherein the apparition emerges

to enact symbolic changes.6 Here, drawing upon the theory of the “second death,” a

6 The “return of the dead” is a commonplace in literary and cultural texts. Among the examples mentioned by Žižek are the famous return of the father’s ghost in Hamlet and the return of the murdered ancestors in the form of the intractable historical memory of the holocaust and gulag. To Žižek’s list we


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central argument of this paper is that despite/because of their physical death, the

women in Véronique may return like unbounded (feminine) signifiers to exert a

disrupting force vis-à-vis the male symbolic, a force even greater than if they were

physically present.

The mothers of Weronika/Véronique are more powerful figures of the “returning

dead.” As already made clear by more than one critic, the opening mother-daughter

sequence is essential to one’s understanding of the film. Annette Insdorf suggests that

the “opening sequence presents visual keys to unlock the meaning” of Véronique and

considers the unseen mothers to be guiding Weronika/Véronique toward an awareness

of the universe (128). Ragland and Wright, furthermore, contend that the “lost

mother” is “the structural cause of the desire” of Weronika/Véronique: if each woman

“wants to create through the voice or through singing a feeling of spiritual or affective

oneness with something beyond the experience of everyday life,” it is because they

both attempt to recover their original choric relationship with their mothers (482). In

fact, a possible feminist reading of Véronique would assert that the doubling relations

of Weronika and Véronique hark back to their pre-symbolic relations with their mothers.

Maintaining an emphasis on the importance of the mother figure, I focus less on how

the opening sequence provides a pre-Oedipal and pre-symbolic space of nostalgia than

on how the (dead) mothers exert power over the symbolic existence of their daughters

despite (or, ironically, because of) their death. As noted, the physical death of the two

mothers does not in the least diminish their symbolic power in the film. Rather than

turning into objects that can be easily disposed of, the mothers remain Weronika’s and

Véronique’s true guides into the world, for whom the two fathers as well as other male

figures serve as inadequate, if not somewhat awkward, replacements.

In effect, the larger-than-life status of the mothers is in no small part due to the

fact that they are dead. In a sense reversing the myth of the primal father, according to

which a father assumes his omnipotent position after he dies, in Véronique it is the two

mothers, introduced before the titles sequence and hence before the cinematic narrative

can add the return of the baby’s ghost in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the return of the undying past in the form of music in Kieślowski’s Blue (1993), and, as this paper is going to demonstrate, the return of the dead women through voice in Véronique. Regarding the Lacanian idea of “real” and “‘real’ death,”

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really begins, who take up the mythic position of the primal. Moreover, the narrative

arrangement by which the mothers are heard but not seen effectively enhances their

mythic power. Given the fact that a conventional film is built upon a specular regime

that subjects women to the male gaze, to remain invisible is to evade the fate of being

an “object” of scopic control, escape the violence of symbolization, and, metaphorically,

avoid a “real” death.7 To quote from Žižek: “voice vivifies, whereas gaze mortifies”

(“I Hear You with My Eyes” 94). That is, while to expose oneself to the Other’s gaze

marks a person’s surrender to the symbolic order, the voice as intractable remainder of

a dead body survives symbolic death. Significantly enough, the French mother’s

voice is that of Irène Jacob, which enables this voice to literally survive her physical

death and sound throughout the film.

It is my claim that the disembodied voice bears witness to women’s “existence” in

Véronique. Although the argument that “women exist” even after their physical death

apparently contradicts the Lacanian motto, “The Woman does not exist,” what Lacan

really means by this is that The Woman does not exist in the phallic symbolic—women

do not exist in the manner in which men think they should. To be more precise, The

Woman who does not exist is the ideal woman of male fantasies, the woman qua the

object a, an object supposed to be able to fill in man’s inborn lack and uphold the

phallic order. Interestingly, women in Véronique do not inhabit male fantasies; they

“live” out-side these fantasies, harking back to exert their spectral presence with their

voice.8 In her influential study of the female voice in cinema, Kaja Silverman

deliberates on the threatening force of women’s disembodied voice vis-à-vis the

dominant:

see note 7. 7 The word “real” employed in this paper refers to the Lacanian “real,” an undifferentiated space of impossibility. It is beyond symbolization and beyond reach, but is known through the failure of the symbolic. Of course the idea of “real” death is conceived in contrast to the idea of “symbolic” death. While “symbolic” death refers to a declaration of one’s physical death in the symbolic order, “real” death implies a death at the level of the “real,” a death signaling the return of the “real” in the form of the ceaseless mechanical demands on the symbolic. 8 Indeed, “voice” is the leftover of symbolic quilting in the Lacanian graph of desire. According to Lacan, any statement (enoncé) has to go through a “quilting process” in order to become an enunciation (énonciation); or, in simpler words, in order to become a signified, a signifier has to be “quilted” into the signifying chain through an “anchoring point” (point de caption). Here, the leftover of this quilting process is precisely “voice.” See Lacan’s discussion of his graph of desire in “The Subversion of the


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To permit a female character to be seen without being heard would be to activate the

hermeneutic and cultural codes which define woman as “enigma,” inaccessible to

definitive male interpretation. To allow her to be heard without being seen would be

even more dangerous, since it would disrupt the specular regime upon which dominant

cinema relies; it would put her beyond the reach of the male gaze [. . .] and release her

voice from the signifying obligations which that gaze enforces. (164)

According to Silverman, together with the visual regime in classic cinema we get the

sound regime with which the dominant relentlessly holds the female voice within

“normative representations” (viii). As women tend to remain passive in relation to

gaze and sound in a film, women who speak without being seen become the most

subversive. In Véronique, the two mothers’ “voice” is a voice “apart”—“a voice

which asserts its independence from the classic system, and which is somehow a part of

what it narrates” (Silverman 131). The placement of the mother’s scenes before the

film’s titles sequence further justifies this idea of “apart” (both “apart” and “a part”).

On the one hand, the mothers are located out-side the main narrative; on the other hand,

this out-side is obviously essential for the events in-side. The mothers’ voice remains

integral to the film. It even attains the status of a fetishistic maternal voice that

resonates in the film in the form of a choric intrusion into the symbolic.9

And as the two mothers “survive” the cinematic narrative with their voice, so

does Weronika. Although it appears to be the most definite event in the film, on

second thought there are plenty of reasons for one to question the “reality” of

Weronika’s death. First, immediately after she falls from her singing “pose” (where

she is under the cinematic specular regime, seen as a woman qua object of desire), the

camera takes on an unstable and mysterious point-of-view as it flies over the audience

of the music hall for a few seconds before resuming a stable position to show the

audience’s reaction to the incident. It is as if for at least a while the camera loses its

object of focus, which is as usual a woman, and in this case Weronika. The cinematic

language deviates from its designated route with a stolen point-of-view. Yes, the

Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits 292-325. 9 Regarding the idea of a “fetishistic maternal voice,” see Silverman’s discussion in Chapter 3 and 4 of

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point-of-view is stolen, yet by whom? The answer seems to be suggested by the later

funeral sequence in which a gaze is ventured from the perspective of the coffin to look

at the people attending the funeral. Does it not look like that the “dead” Weronika

possesses a certain kind of subjectivity, allowing her to see? Is it not possible that she

simply sees from a place from which none of her viewers is able to see as their

visibility is always already constituted and confined by the (phallocentric) cinematic

language?

To make Weronika’s death even more questionable, a male figure feels the pulse

of Weronika and then proclaims her death emotionlessly. The viewers are indeed told

of a death without seeing the body. By contrast, Hitchcock spares no effort in Psycho

to show how Norman dumps Marion’s body. The prolonged sequence in which

Norman pulls Marion’s body out of the bathroom, wraps it up in the shower curtain,

and squeezes it into the trunk of Marion’s white car makes one feel the heaviness and

lifelessness of her body. It successfully endows this body with an object-like quality.

In the case of Weronika, however, not only does the corpse remain invisible but also her

coffin is given a mysterious “subjectivity.” That her singing voice keeps coming back

to greet us after her official death furthers the idea that she still survives between her

physical decease and a projected “real” death. Like her mother, Weronika as a woman

who would not die does not give up exerting an influence after her physical death.

II. Wanton Mirrors and the Ex-sistent Woman

[. . .] reflection always fails, that the subject always encounters in a mirror some dark spot, a point which does not return him his mirror-picture—in which he cannot “recognize himself.” — Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do

Weronika would not die, nor is she ever fully integrated into the symbolic reality

even before her physical decease. Ever since the beginning of the film, she has

maintained a problematic relationship with the symbolic order. Many critics have

noted her distance from the symbolic law. Ragland and Wright contend that Weronika

The Acoustic Mirror.


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is “brought up short by the arrival of the symbolic (law)” (484). Nettelbeck describes

her as a “carefree girl weaving through a colonnade, oblivious to the events around her”

(142). Or, in Romney’s words, “Weronika walks through a political demonstration,

oblivious to all but her own mirror image [namely, the French Véronique]” (43). He

also notices that in an earlier shot among other choir girls she runs giggling away from

the rain, paying no attention to “a huge statue being towed away” (43). In claiming

Weronika’s “existence” in this paper, I mean more precisely her “ex-sistence,” to

borrow a Lacan’s neologism.10 Weronika is presented as a part of the symbolic reality

but is never fully integrated into the symbolic diegesis. She is both “in” and

“ex-centric to” the symbolic reality. An “ex-sistent” woman under the incessant

interpellations of the symbolic law, Weronika is never completely symbolized because

she does not comply with the dominant law or gaze.

Fundamental to the Polish part of Véronique are actually the seesaw struggles

between enforcements of the law and Weronika’s resistance to these enforcements.

On one side, the images of the law keep intruding into her life: the huge Socialist statue

incongruently towed onto the screen where it blocks the way of the running choir girls,

the lawyer introduced into the house of Weronika’s aunt, the demonstrators bumping

into the self-absorbed Weronika, the riot police unit lining up around her at the Kraków

marketplace. Moreover, echoing Kieślowski’s attempt to track down the “essence” of

womanhood, Weronika’s boyfriend, Antek, follows her to Kraków. The orchestra

conductor is another embodiment of the law. It is he who recruits Weronika into his

musical group and authoritatively holds her voice under his control for at least a

moment in the concert sequence.11

The intrusion of the law, however, is counteracted by Weronika’s ex-sistence

vis-à-vis the symbolic. For example, despite the seeming largeness of the Socialist

statue that obtrudes on the screen, the fact that it is towed away and the choir girls’

10 The Lacanian neologism “ex-sistence” expresses the idea of an “existence” that resists symbolization. It is an existence that remains ex-centric to the symbolic. Lacan talks about the “ex-sistence” of the “real,” the “ex-sistence” of a human subject, and the “ex-sistence” of desire in the dream, etc. For details, see Nasio 55, Žižek, Looking Awry 136-37, and Evans 58. 11 It is worth noting that prior to her being recruited into the orchestra, Weronika has no experience of public singing and has received no formal schooling in vocal performance. The film emphasizes that the only diploma she has is in piano. Her voice thus remains ex-sistent to the symbolic control.

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apparent neglect of it make this not so much a sequence upholding authority as a

sequence mocking the collapsed law. Similarly, despite the large number of

demonstrators and the armed policemen at the Kraków marketplace, they soon recede

into the background and are perhaps rendered irrelevant; the focus of this specific

sequence is on the uncanny encounter between Weronika and Véronique. Antek

tracks down, but never traps, Weronika. Even the orchestra conductor’s power over

her is questioned. In a pivotal sequence, Weronika practices singing with a female

teacher while the male conductor paces outside the practice room. He is so fascinated

by Weronika’s voice that he gestures in pantomime as if the voice he hears is coming

from his own mouth and can be held in his hand. Indeed, Weronika’s voice embodies

what he desires, that is, what he does not have. The conductor, a man who lacks,

urgently needs to recruit a woman qua object a to sustain his fantasy of narcissistic

self-mastery. His appropriation of Weronika’s voice ends in failure, though. In the

climactic concert sequence, the gaze of the seemingly authoritative conductor is

intercut with close-ups of Weronika as if the two were in a power struggle. Although

Weronika’s singing initially harmonizes with the orchestra’s music, gradually her voice

loses its stability; it falters in the rising chromatic scale and finally slides into an abrupt

silence under his baton.

Indeed, significant in this concluding moment of the concert sequence is not only

the sudden suspension of Weronika’s voice but also her abrupt falling away from the

spectators’ gaze. Weronika’s ex-sistence throughout the film owes largely to her not

being seen clearly and directly. In the opening shot, the two-year-old Weronika is

presented in an upside-down reflection. Instead of seeing the “real” Weronika, the

viewers spot a mediated image from which the “real” Weronika has slipped away.

Following this, the image of Weronika during the titles sequence is even more

problematic. As if shot through a magnifying glass attached to the camera lens

(Insdorf 129), the image of Weronika here is not only mediated but also distorted and

unstable. Moreover, since this sequence is a “flash-forward” to a later episode which

presents the encounter of Weronika and Véronique, the viewers are probably not sure

what they are seeing or to whose viewpoint the image is registered the moment they are


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shown this sequence (Insdorf 129, Wilson 12-13). Obviously, the placement of this

sequence before it actually happens disrupts the linearity of Kieślowski’s narrative;

furthermore, the possibility that the sequence issues from Véronique’s unconscious

further confounds the actual and virtual in the film.12

One does not catch a clear glimpse of Weronika until after the credits and it seems

the film as a linear narrative starts at this point. It is ironic that while Weronika is now

presented in a clear image and sometimes even in close-ups, one still cannot help

questioning her relation with the symbolic reality because the camera keeps letting the

image of the outside world recede from her surroundings. In the first close-up of

Weronika, she looks upward, ignoring the downpour and the dispersing choir. As the

camera draws in closer on her, the images of other people and noise fade behind her,

leaving her image and voice alone on screen. In the sequence portraying her running,

moreover, Weronika runs from far away and as her image is supposed to become larger

and clearer, she runs into a shadow so that the viewers lose sight of her. Then she

takes a turn and runs across the screen. This time she runs so fast that the scenery

around her grows indistinct. All of a sudden, she runs into the sunlight as her feet hit

the water on the ground and her profile is for one moment lighted up as if plunging into

a spotlight. However, this moment is so brief, the sunlight so bright and iridescent,

and the splash of the water so loud that when the viewers realize what has happened

and try to get a clear look at Weronika, she has already run away from the focus of the

camera.

That Weronika is usually presented against a dark background in a wavering light

and a kind of “inexact” space also bears witness to her ex-sistence. In the sequence

concerning her conversation with her father, she is seen most of the time in shadow.

At the moment she states that she has the strange feeling of not being alone, she is even

immersed in darkness so that one can only hear her voice. Moreover, the sequence

12 This possibility is suggested by Emma Wilson. In her detailed analysis of the titles sequence, Wilson points out that although Véronique apparently does not notice Weronika in their encounter in Kraków, “we realize that the opening image in the titles sequence, the view of the young woman we now come to recognize as Weronika in the square, is shot supposedly from Véronique’s point of view” (12). In a sense, Véronique may not realize what she sees. Given the fact that she possesses a snapshot of Weronika, she does see Weronika, at least through her camera, but remains unconscious of what she sees.

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significantly ends with her pulling up the curtain that screens her image, not only from

her father’s but also from the cinema spectators’ gaze. Another example is the scene

where she converses with her aunt. As if intent on positioning Weronika and her aunt

in two different realities, the sequence is so arranged that Weronika and her aunt never

appear on the same screen.13 Whereas her aunt is shown to talk against a background

of the everyday interior of a house, Weronika speaks against a darkness in which

objects are barely distinguishable. And this idea of their being located in different

realities is reinforced if one takes into account the tone and content of their

conversation. Weronika is describing her attempt to make love with Antek in the

hallway under a downpour. Her tone and facial expression bespeak her entering into a

state of ecstasy unbounded by the reality principle. On the contrary, concerned about

law and waiting for the arrival of a lawyer to draft her will, her aunt remains calm,

situated in a solid reality. This sequence concludes with the lawyer’s arrival and the

interruption of Weronika’s narrative. The aunt emotionlessly reminds Weronika to get

out of bed “because the lawyer has come” as an attempt to pull her back into the

everyday reality.

Weronika’s entrance into reality, however, is never simple and direct.

Ambivalent vis-à-vis the symbolic reality she inhabits multiple spaces, spaces most

interestingly produced through the film’s frequent use of mirrors and glass. Indeed,

Véronique is a film filled with mirrors and glass and these mirrors and glass become

“wanton” in that, instead of loyally reflecting the symbolic reality, they multiply it into

intractable spaces of alterity.14 Perhaps one of the most interesting examples of the

13 A similar arrangement is found in the concert sequence. Whereas the other female soloist is seen clearly on the same stage with the conductor in several shots, Weronika and the male conductor are never placed on the same screen except for a very brief moment when the viewers can see the conductor’s moving hands and his slightly bald head, shown unclearly at the margin of the screen as the foreground of Weronika’s performance scene. A somewhat uncanny effect of the disembodied voice is produced when the camera focuses on the conductor and Weronika’s voice seems to come up automatically with the movement of the conductor’s hands without our seeing Weronika. In the French part of the film, the conversation between Véronique and her singing teacher also reminds us of the one between Weronika and her aunt. While the teacher speaks from the well-lighted interior of a house, Véronique’s background remains dark. The two never appear on the same screen and the concluding shot of Véronique’s closing the door, shutting herself off from the cinematic gaze, is further correlated with the scene in which Weronika pulls up the curtain after her conversation with her father. 14 The frequent use of mirrors and glass, with its disturbing effects, in Véronique is marked by Romney: “Foremost in the film’s system of objects is the mirror, as befits a story about duality and specularity.


43

“wanton mirror” in the film is the way in which Weronika’s words—“I am not

alone”—are uncannily illustrated literally and visually: “almost every time we see

Weronika she is not alone, but shadowed by her reflection in photographs, in glass

doors, in windows” (Wilson 15). And whenever Weronika is with her double, her

mirror reflection, she is cut off from the symbolic reality. When Antek makes love to

her, for instance, she turns her face away from him, looking instead at her own picture

on the wall. Her silent relationship with her mirror image in a way displaces her

relationship with Antek, formulating an alter space of sexuality.

In another episode, Weronika presses her face against a glass window, gasping as

she recovers from a slight heart attack. Suddenly she sees a feeble old woman

carrying heavy bags and hobbling across the field outside her window. Intuitively

responding to what she sees, she opens the window and yells for help to the old woman.

At the moment she opens the window we observe an abrupt separation of Weronika

from her reflected image, and when she closes the window again—since the old woman

does not seem to want to be bothered—we see the reflected image reoccur and join her.

In a sense, the glass window draws the line between an imaginary space of spectrality

and the symbolic reality. When Weronika presses her cheeks against the window she

is united with her mirrored image and the viewers can only see her face in a slightly

distorted shape through the window. In opening the glass window, she responds to the

interpellation of the symbolic, an interpellation embodied by the feeble old lady, and is

thus separated from her mirrored double. By the same logic her act of closing the

window reenacts the existence of her reflected self and the spectators’ mediated view of

her.

Another example of Weronika’s traversing of different realities can be located in

the bus-ride sequence. When she stands at the rear of a bus, wearing earphones,

absorbed in the music she hums to herself, the image of her double reflected in the bus

window joins her in unison. However, as the bus takes a left turn, the street suddenly

comes alive with the rising noise of traffic. It is at this moment that Weronika’s

Mirrors are everywhere, splitting up the screen, reflecting and refracting gazes, multiplying space” (43). Moreover, Wilson connects Kieślowski’s obsession with the use of mirrors and glass to Véronique’s self-reflexive and self-deconstructive character. See Wilson 13.

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reflected image disappears and the window becomes transparent so that the viewer can

see—together with Antek, who is following the bus riding on a motorcycle—her face

clearly through it. A possible interpretation of this episode is that as Weronika notices

Antek, she is responding to the symbolic reality. The rising noise of cars illustrates

her increasing attention to the symbolic. Breaking away from the unity with her

mirrored double, Weronika enters the symbolic order to become an object to be seen,

especially when she gets off the bus and runs after Antek’s motorbike. An interesting

shot here shows a number of pedestrians turning their heads around to gaze at the

running woman. Following this, Weronika rides together with Antek through the

streets of Kraków on the way home. The street scene during this ride is so vividly

presented that it seems to be the only sequence throughout the Polish part of the film in

which Weronika is situated in a solid reality.

In contrast to the motorbike sequence that for a while weaves Weronika into the

symbolic network, the famous train episode witnesses Weronika’s invention of

alter-realities through a “balle magique,” a “wanton mirror.” At first presenting the

distorted view of the countryside Weronika sees through an uneven window frame, the

train episode then “focuses” this distorted view when she sees instead through her

“balle magique” which, according to Irène Jacob, is “a toy, a small plastic transparent

sphere which can bounce, but also diffuse light in the most surprising ways” (xv). A

simple Lacanian interpretation of this episode is that one needs a “screen” in order to

see. The “balle magique” here serves as an excellent example of the “screen” that

focuses one’s eyesight so that one may catch a glimpse of the reality. A more

profound understanding of Lacan, however, would suggest that what Weronika sees

through the ball is less a part of the symbolic reality than an alternative reality. As

Žižek points out, the train sequence demonstrates the Lacanian tenet that the roles of

reality and of the “anamorphic stain”—that in a sense enables us to see—are reversed:

the “anamorphic stain” does not make the reality visible but it produces a (false) reality

of its own.15 Weronika “perceives clearly the ‘magic’ interior of the ball, while

‘reality’ around it dissolves into a formless smear” (The Fright of Real Tears 50).

15 Regarding Lacan’s theory of the “anamorphic stain,” see his papers on gaze and object a, particularly


45

And if seeing through a plastic ball grants Weronika an alternative vision, doesn’t

the fact that she wears contact lenses have a similar effect? In the sequence in which

she puts on her contact lenses, the memorable close-up of one of her eyes reminds one

of the close-up of Marion’s eye in Psycho after she is stabbed to death. Whereas

Marion’s eye is presented as a picture-like object deprived of any trace of life,

Weronika’s eye is alive and shiny, its eyelashes slightly fluttering. More importantly,

after a veil of light, or spot, dissolves from in front of her eye, there is a moment when

the spectators see the eyeball’s movement and are actually under Weronika’s gaze. A

similar shot occurs in the train episode right before she takes out her plastic ball. In

this shot she looks into the camera for a moment with a light smile on her face. Does

she see beyond the screen at her spectators? What does she see exactly? The

threatening power of both shots lies in the fact that the woman who is supposed to be

seen on the screen not only gazes back but, as one may suspect, gazes back in her own

way, through the lenses attached to her own eyes.

The Polish part of Véronique culminates in the concert sequence. In view of the

formula of conventional narrative cinema in which the female protagonist is finally

either married or dead, the death of Weronika in the climax of the film may not be

surprising. What is surprising is rather that her death does not promise a reenactment

of the symbolic order, or at least her personal compromise with the symbolic reality.

To be more precise, whereas Marion in Psycho dies at the moment of her famous

“shower baptism,” a moment marked by her feeling of repentance after stealing money

from a father figure and her decision to offer the money as well as herself up to the

symbolic order, the death of Weronika marks her sliding away from the (paternal) law.

Marion is murdered in a private bathroom and her death “scene” is soon cleaned up,

order restored; by contrast, Weronika’s decease not only incurs turmoil in the concert

hall but also defies in public the authority of the male conductor. The physical death

of Weronika cannot be understood in terms of the narrative formula of traditional films.

Her death in a sense reconfirms her “ex-sistence.” No wonder her apparition keeps

intruding into the story of the French Véronique, haunting the second part of the film

“What Is a Picture?” (105-19), in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.

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with the effect of the uncanny.

III. The Uncanny and the Hysterical Woman in Exile

This unheimlich place [. . .] is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.

— Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”

While Weronika is an “ex-sistent” woman, Véronique, as I am going to argue, is a

woman “in exile.” The idea of “exile” employed here is double-edged. For one

thing, Véronique is exiled from Weronika’s voice. Not only does the out-of-tune

melody played by Véronique’s students serve as an awkward and obviously ineffective

mimicry of Weronika’s perfect voice but the “nearest” Véronique comes to singing, as

Ragland and Wright point out, is “her fragile and birdlike cries of sexual joy” (485).

Moreover, Véronique is “exiled” in the sense that she, like her double, is never fully

integrated into the symbolic reality.16 Véronique is presented in the film most

frequently as a wanderer, always on the move from one place to another. The viewers

see Véronique driving to visit her father and her friends, ambling across the playground

among school children, shambling alone after school, shuffling through the hospital

corridor with her shawl trailing on the floor, treading toward her apartment, climbing

up stairs, roaming through bookstores, hesitating among crowds near the train station,

or floating through a dream-like space of numerous doors and windows to reach

Alexandre’s marionette studio. Throughout her wandering, it seems that Véronique is

seeking clues to tie herself back to the symbolic. However, just as the symbolic

interpellation fails in the case of Weronika, it hardly succeeds in that of Véronique.

The spectral apparition of Weronika keeps bringing the “uncanny” into Véronique’s

16 While both “exile” and “ex-sistence” bespeak woman’s problematic relation to the symbolic, I distinguish one from the other in order to note the differences between Weronika and Véronique. Whereas the woman “in ex-sistence” ignores or challenges the constraining law of the dominant, the woman “in exile” is victimized with her uncertain position vis-à-vis the symbolic. Weronika is a woman “in ex-sistence” because she is either oblivious or resistant to the law, and Véronique is a hysterical woman “in exile” as she suffers from her failed efforts to be re-integrated into the symbolic


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story, exposing the inadequacy of any self-enclosed narrative. The French part ends

significantly into Véronique’s story, breaking away from Alexandre.

Essentially, like a hysteric torn between her erotogenic and heterogenic bodies,17

Véronique is pulled one way by the symbolic force that attempts to bind her back to an

authoritative male (analyst’s) narrative and the other way by the intrusion of the

pre-symbolic “real,” incarnated in the disembodied voices of her mother and Weronika.

And it is precisely due to her being caught between two forces that Véronique remains

in a state of limbo, marked by her hysterical hesitancy and uncertainty. Žižek’s

reading of Véronique as manifesting the theme of a choice between vocation and life

can be further complicated if one takes into account that Véronique’s choice of life is

neither absolute nor final. While in appearance Véronique gives up her singing career

in order to live “a quiet satisfied life” (The Fright of Real Tears 137), she is not free

from the haunting voice originating from the space of Weronika’s “ex-sistence.”

Véronique reminds one of Julie, Kieślowski’s female protagonist in Blue (1993). Just

as Julie’s attempt to block herself from the memory of a traumatic encounter with death

is continuously undermined by a piece of music intruding into her consciousness,

Véronique cannot rid herself of a mysterious link to an alter self, to the “real.” Taking

the cue from Žižek’s reading of Citizen Kane (1941), instead of saying that Véronique

gives away her voice qua “real” object so as to yield to the symbolic mandate, I would

argue that she “never really lost this object” (The Fright of Real Tears 51)—she sticks

to it through her uncanny connections to Weronika and thus remains in a state of

“floating” in her everyday life.

network. 17 The idea of erotogenic body vs. heterogenic body in hysteria is introduced by David-Ménard. My reading of Véronique as a hysteric, then, is indebted to Ragland and Wright. In a comparison between Weronika and Véronique, Ragland and Wright remark:

The film poses the question about Woman’s existence in two different modes. The first Véronique is more on the side of normality, inclined to close off lack and live in the precarious plenitude of the moment; the second Véronique is clearly on the slope of hysteria, speaking her lack through her body, knowing there is no plenitude to be had. (485)

The suggestion that Weronika is more “normal” than Véronique is questionable; yet to read Véronique as a hysteric living in a state of inadequacy and uncertainty, not knowing what to desire or what the symbolic Other desires from her, is enlightening. In contrast to Weronika’s apparent self-confidence and enthusiastic pursuit of her singing career, Véronique is noted for “her tentativeness, her wish to please others, her unsure apprehension of a ground for being” (Ragland and Wright 485).

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As we shall see, despite Véronique’s seeming willingness to enter into the

symbolic reality, throughout the French part of the film she lives in a state of psychic

instability, open to any fantasies but finding no “real” mooring among them. At first

sight, Véronique seems to deviate from Weronika in her pursuits. Hers is like a

“‘wise’ repetition” of her double so as to escape physical death (The Fright of Real

Tears 138): she gives up her singing career and becomes a school music teacher; she

accedes to the law insofar as she answers her friend’s request to agree to testify in the

court against the friend’s husband; she keeps returning home in an attempt to look for

fatherly guidance, an act opposite to Weronika’s leaving home for Kraków;18moreover,

where Weronika leaves Antek behind, Véronique seems to look forward to a new

experience of heterosexual love. However, whatever Véronique’s choices are, they all

end up intensifying her remembrance of her alter self. Her dialogue with her father

leads to her mentioning a dream about a painting of a red church, a painting apparently

beyond her father’s knowledge but bringing to one’s mind what Weronika sees on her

train ride to Kraków. Nor does music teaching shield her from the apparition of her

double. First, it is her teaching job that leads her to the marionette show—a show

narrating a story that strongly echoes Weronika’s life story. Moreover, since the music

she introduces to her students is exactly the piece sung by Weronika before her death,

music teaching becomes for Véronique a reminder of her loss of something she cannot

know or remember. In one sequence, when introducing to her students this music for

the first time, instead of riveting her attention on the students’ performance she falls

into a meditative state, looking instead at the colorful poster for the marionette show on

the departing truck of Alexandre. In another memorable episode, she sees a

hunchbacked old lady walking alone outside her classroom, a scene echoing what

Weronika sees out of the window of her aunt’s house. As if being reminded of

something, Véronique suddenly becomes so annoyed by the out-of-tune music

produced by her mini-orchestra that she shouts for the music to stop.

18 In a significant dialogue between Véronique and her father, Véronique attempts to convey her sense of loss by associating it with the loss her father might have felt when her mother passed away. She seems touched when her father mentions that when her mother died she was “small” and he had to “take her hand.” Probably what Véronique looks for through her wandering in the symbolic is some fatherly figure who can “take her hand.”


49

Of course as spectators we do not “see” what Véronique is reminded of. Except

in the episode of Alexandre’s midnight call, where the distorted and out-of-focus image

of Weronika, as if shot through a magnifying glass, is presented on the screen together

with the voice recording from her last performance, the French part of Véronique is

primarily about making the viewers feel what is invisible. It renders present what

appears to have been repressed by the dominant cinematic narrative. Or, as I am

going to suggest, it is about the presentation of the “uncanny,” an effect produced,

according to Freud, when something “that ought to have remained secret and hidden

[…] come[s] to light” (225). Associated with “something repressed which recurs,” the

“uncanny” is “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and

old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the

process of repression” (241). In Véronique, the “uncanny” is first generated by the

motif of “the double.” The presumption that the woman “would not die,” that

Weronika literally survives her physical death through her double’s (unconscious)

remembrance of her, vividly reflects Freud’s idea of the double as a return of one’s

primordial wish to overcome death.19 In addition, the blurring of the boundary

between reality and the imaginary also elevates the effect of the “uncanny.”20 The

“interface” of reality and fantasy is made evident, for example, in the love-making

sequence that initiates the French part. The camera lovingly caressing Véronique’s

naked body is held still when she is suddenly too overwhelmed by an outburst of

melancholy to continue her love-making. The intrusion of a sadness out of nowhere

not only interrupts a sexual relationship but also heralds Véronique’s entry into a space

of imaginary alterity, marked by the rising of Weronika’s singing voice in the

background.

Voice and music thus play pivotal roles in generating the “uncanny” in Véronique.

The previous discussion has made clear how a disembodied voice brings about the

19 For Freud, “the double” is “originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’ […] and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body” (235). 20 As Freud states: “[…] an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on” (244).

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spectral presence (or ex-sistence) of woman. Suffice it to add how music furthers the

“uncanniness” of the voice. Indeed, while voice marks the signifying leftover that

resists meaning in the Lacanian model, the position of music vis-à-vis the symbolic is

ambivalent. On the one hand, music serves to conceal the object-nature of voice.

Mladen Dolar points out that “with all its seductive force and irresistible appeal,” music

is “an attempt to domesticate the object, to turn it into an object of aesthetic pleasure, to

put up a screen against what is unbearable in it” (10). In Žižek’s words, the beauty of

music is “a lure, a screen, the last curtain, which protects us from directly confronting

the horror of the (vocal) object” (“I Hear You with My Eyes” 93). On the other hand,

since the lure of music has to be sustained by the fact that it is strictly regulated, that it

“shouldn’t stray away from words, which endow it with sense” (Dolar 17), it is not

uncommon for a piece of music to be cracked open, not to conceal but to evoke voice:

[…] whatever the attempted regulations, there was always a crack, a loophole, a rest that

kept recurring, a remnant of a highly ambiguous enjoyment. It could take, for example,

the form of iubilus, the space allotted to “alleluia,” where the general principle of one

syllable to one note was omitted, the voice taking over in its own jubilation, the melisma

without a support. (Dolar 21)

Music as such may be dangerous, and singing could be even more threatening because

the human voice may easily take over the music or, as in the case of Weronika, slide off

away from the designated scale. Besides, the position of music in Véronique is

problematic because the lyrics Weronika sings are from Dante’s poetry. As

Kieślowski notes, not only do the words “have nothing to do with the subject” of the

film but also they are “sung in old Italian and even the Italians probably can’t

understand them” (Stok 179). In other words, the music in Véronique does not “make

sense.” From the beginning it is a music that strays away from textual anchorage,

music that conjures up the “uncanniness” of voice.

Interestingly, while most directors use music to illustrate what is already present in

the film, Kieślowski suggests that Zbigniew Preisner’s music in Véronique “say[s]

something that’s not there in the picture”: “You can describe something which perhaps


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isn’t there on the actual screen but which, together with the music, starts to exist” (Stok

179). What is this something that “starts to exist” with Preisner’s music? Does

Preisner’s music help embody what Kieślowski’s cinematic narrative fails to capture?

If what Kieślowski has tried but failed to pin down in Véronique is the essence of

femininity, to what extent has Preisner’s music helped achieve Kieślowski’s goal? Or,

is it possible that under the guise of incorporating womanhood into a seemingly

beautiful melody, the music in Véronique in effect exposes the uncanniness of women’s

voice so powerfully that it renders Kieślowski’s cinematic narrative self-deconstruc-

tive?

Kieślowski’s attempt to portray womanhood is best illustrated in the film by

Alexandre’s efforts to solve the mystery of Weronika/Véronique.21 In a sense it is not

hard to understand Véronique’s love for Alexandre. Presented as a woman of

hysterical uncertainty, Véronique has been searching for a mooring in the symbolic.

The appearance of Alexandre as a marionettist who seems to have complete power over

his marionettes then sets him up in the position of an analyst, of a subject who is

supposed to know. Besides, as a story–writer, he knows how to create plots and

provide answers that can interpellate Véronique into his fantasies. More importantly,

he is a man who knows how to appropriate (the feminine) voice to his use. An

intriguing episode in the film has Alexandre overhearing the music Véronique teaches

her students. He then plays the same music—this time the version sung by

Weronika—during his midnight phone call to Véronique. But Weronika’s voice, as

we know, embodies what Véronique is deprived of after she gives up her singing career;

it embodies the “object” she tries but fails to re-possess through her music teaching.

21 The correlation between the role of Kieślowski as a film director and that of Alexandre as a master of marionettes is noted by several critics. Wilson, for example, contends that “Alexandre’s virtual puppy show relates closely to Kieślowski’s actual film” (19). Žižek also proposes to read Kieślowski’s “self-portrait” in the puppeteer-figures in his films, figures including the protagonist in Camera Buff (1979), the judge in Red (1994), and of course Alexandre in Véronique, (The Fright of Real Tears 72-73). It is true that Kieślowski usually portrays himself as an artist in his films. In addition to finding in Alexandre an allegory of himself, in Blue he is “under the guise of Olivier, the composer with the ambition to finish the great concerto for the unification of Europe”; in White (1993) he “hides behind the mask of Karol, the prize-winning hairdresser”; in Red “he is Kern, the repentant judge” (Nettelbeck 149). Considering Kieślowski’s cinematic works his “concealed autobiography,” Paul Coates further suggests an autobiographical reading of Kieślowski’s films in general (“Kieślowski and the Crisis of Documentary” 32).

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Now, it seems that Alexandre has control over that specific singing voice. His

“having” the voice which Véronique lacks confirms his position of mastery.

Alexandre is powerful because he is, in the terms of Dolar, the “father” of voice:

If the Law, the word, the logos, had to constantly fight the voice as the other, the senseless

bearer of jouissance, feminine decadence, it could do so only by implicitly relying on that

other voice, the voice of the Father accompanying the Law. Ultimately, we don’t have

the battle of “logos” against the voice, but the voice against the voice. (27)

Dolar’s idea of “voice against voice” enhances our understanding of what Silverman

claims to be the “sound regime” in classic cinema. Indeed, is the female voice not

usually appropriated by the male in order to uphold the law? Is there not here, innate

to Véronique’s problematic representation of woman, a confrontation between the

father’s seemingly authoritative voice and the disembodied female voice flowing

beyond the film’s diegetic unity?

The transferential love Véronique develops for Alexandre can in no small part be

attributed to the latter’s skillful manipulation of voice and sound. In an earlier scene

Alexandre uses his car horn to “hail” Véronique, calling her out of her absent-minded

wandering about in a car. He successfully draws her attention, points out that she is

lighting up the wrong end of her cigarette, then nods and smiles. The effect of

Alexandre’s “hailing” is immediately seen as Véronique’s eyes become focused after

this incident and follow Alexandre’s car to the end of the road. Besides, the idea of

sending Véronique a recording tape again demonstrates Alexandre’s excellence in

manipulating sounds. In a long sequence, Véronique is absorbed in listening to the

tape. The fragmentary and mysterious recordings successfully elicit her desire to

figure out what Alexandre already knows about her. No wonder it is after Alexandre’s

midnight phone call that Véronique declares to her father that she is in love.

In contrast to Antek’s apparent failure from the beginning in his interpellation of

Weronika, Alexandre’s interpellation of Véronique almost succeeds. In light of the

theory of psychoanalytic practice, it is nonetheless not hard to understand why

Véronique eventually breaks away from Alexandre. Assuming the role of a


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psychoanalyst, Alexandre commits at least three mistakes that are responsible for the

disruption of Véronique’s transferential love for him, three mistakes all due to his

ignorance of the fact that a good analyst should ask more than answer, listen more than

impose meaning. Alexandre makes his first mistake when he answers explicitly

Véronique’s question as to why he expends so much effort to draw her to him. The

declaration of his desire to perform an experiment for his novel arouses from

Véronique strong resistance. The second mistake Alexandre commits is to point out to

Véronique the image of her double in one of her snapshots. By telling her “this is

you,” Alexandre does not succeed in imposing upon Véronique a clear sense of identity;

rather, this act of pointing out the mirror-image double drives Véronique into her

hysterical interrogation of her own self-identity. The existence of a double heralds

one’s entry into the alternative and uncanny possibilities of self. Echoing Weronika’s

turning around to look at her own photo in a love-making scene, Véronique turns

around to look at the image of Weronika in the snapshot when Alexandre makes love to

her. The intrusion of the double pulls both women from their designated feminine

roles. It disrupts their sexual relations with men.

Alexandre’s third mistake is even more detrimental. Contriving a story narrative

to solve the mystery of Weronika/Véronique, he is too proud to notice the signifying

limits of his language. He deifies his language as a “metalanguage,” a language

assumed to possess absolute objectivity and totality to tell the story of

Weronika/Véronique. Véronique feels betrayed by Alexandre’s narrative. She is

not willing to accept the limit Alexandre’s words set upon her life. To mimic Lacan,

Véronique is a woman who is “not whole” (pas toute) in Alexandre’s narrative of

totality: she is “not wholly his. Some remains” (“On Jouissance” 8). Véronique ends

with Véronique’s breaking up with Alexandre, leaving behind a failed male

metalanguage.

IV. Encore Jouissance and the Lost Metalanguage

[. . .] in order not to attain the jouissance of the Other, however we may desire it, the best thing is to

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constantly desire and to content oneself with substitutes and illusions, symptoms and fantasies.

—Juan-David Nasio, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan

When Lacan claims that there is “no metalanguage” (Écrits 311), what he means is

that there is no final signified to anchor meaning, that one signifier always points to

another signifier and self is always under the call of a spectral other. As Nasio puts it:

[t]he statement that there is no metalanguage means that there is no meta-language or

object-language. In effect, from the moment when a language attempts to externalize

itself and speak of an object-language, it fails. It can never entirely complete itself and

close itself on itself. The metalanguage cannot escape the weakness which opens any

language to the outside: and this is why it fails to envelop and contain a supposed

object-language. ( 68)

In my reading of Véronique, it is Alexandre’s narrative that does not “complete itself”

or “close itself on itself” and it is Kieślowski’s attempt to narrate womanhood that

“fails to envelop and contain a supposed object-language.” Véronique stages a loss of

metalanguage. It “dwells on the perils of representation” (Wilson 20) and “draws into

question the very ontology of the cinematic language” (Wilson 21). Although a film

director is usually assumed to have the power to tie together all the images on his/her

screen, in fact there are traces and images beyond his/her control. Perhaps the director,

as illustrated by Alexandre, sometimes speaks too much, imposes too much, or simply

does not know why, what, or when to say. Perhaps the director ends up presenting

something s/he does not intend the viewers to see or know. Perhaps, as was vividly

shown in Kieślowski’s last film, Red (1994), it is not the seemingly all-knowing

“Prospero-like” old judge who determines the fate of everyone (Coates, “The Sense of

an Ending” 25). The intervention of the female protagonist Valentine changes the

course of events. One is tempted to be the judge who possesses language and operates

the law, but it is a woman as simple as Valentine who takes power here, opening up the

judge’s life story into not-yet-known possibilities.

Obviously, neither Alexandre nor Kieślowski is the person who knows all. On


55

one occasion Kieślowski confesses that his “goal is to capture what lies within us, but

there’s no way of filming it” (Stok 194); on another he admits: “We know no more than

you. But maybe it is worth investigating the unknown” (qtd. in Rayns, “Kieślowski

Crossing Over” 22). He further describes Véronique as a film about “a certain

sensibility which is really impossible to express in a film” (Stok 189), a film narrated

through “a weak and vague storyline, and that’s the way the story stayed—not very

clear to everybody” (Stok 188-89). We notice also the shift in the style of narration as

the film enters the French part: the linear narrative in the Polish part gives way to the

“analytical” style in the French part that presents more than synthesizes.22 Neither of

the two styles, however, seems successful in achieving Kieślowski’s goal of embodying

femininity. Just as the linear narrative that tries to pin down a (visible) woman fails

when Weronika falls out of the camera’s focus, the analytical narrative that attempts to

capture the (invisible) essence of femininity also fails since Alexandre is unable to

solve the mystery of Véronique’s hysteria. From the Polish part to the French part, it

seems that Kieślowski is testing different narrative styles to represent what he cannot

clearly express. This may also account for his desire to make “as many versions of

Véronique as there are cinemas in which the film was to be shown” (Stok 187).

Kieślowski ends up creating seven possible endings for Véronique, “none of which […]

struck him as being fully adequate” (Rayns, “Kieślowski Crossing Over” 22).

Kieślowski’s “trouble with endings” (Rayns, “Glowing in the Dark” 10), as well as

his need to repetitively test his scenarios, has become itself an interesting subject of

study.23 Wilson considers Kieślowski’s “a cinema of hypothesis which attempts to

22 This shift of style is marked by Kieślowski himself: “The Polish part of Véronique is narrated synthetically […]. The French Véronique is narrated […] analytically […]. It’s an analysis of Véronique’s state of mind, and it can’t be narrated in individual groupings, or sequences of scenes. It’s narrated in long scenes. A glimpse of a passage, a corridor, some one running, ambience and there’s another long scene” (Stok 185-86). 23 “Alternative narratives” have become one of the most important motifs in our understanding of Kieślowski’s works. In addition to the “double life” of Weronika/Véronique, obvious examples of “alternative narratives” can be found in Blind Chance (1981), which enacts three possible outcomes for its protagonist, and in Red, which presents the old judge’s alternative past through the story of his young double, Auguste. It is also noteworthy that the character of Weronika actually develops from a minor character in Decalogue 9 and Blue is a re-telling of the story in No End from the widow’s perspective. Indeed, Kieślowski is so interested in creating alternative narratives that it seems he is haunted by a “desire for continuance,” with “No End” as “his most characteristic title” that bespeaks his commitment to re-telling one story and re-addressing one issue (Coates, “Kieślowski and the Crisis of Documentary”

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project our ‘image-rêve’ and ‘image-souvenir’ while reminding us, ironically, of their

specific ephemerality” (24). Žižek further connects the fragments, disconnections,

and alternative stories in Kieślowski’s late fiction films to his earlier documentary

approach: Kieślowski

treats his footage [of fiction films] as documentary material which, consequently, should

be decimated, so that all that remains are fragments which are never fully comprehensible

[…]. The very notion of alternative realties is also grounded in the excess of

documentary material which resists incorporation into a single narrative: it can only be

organized as the texture of multiple narrative lines. (The Fright of Real Tears 76-77)

Besides, Kieślowski’s interest in querying into different points of view also provides

the ground for his repetitive experiments with different scenarios: “Differing points of

view are inherently more interesting than one point of view. Since I don’t have any

answers but do know how to pose questions, it suits me to leave the door open to

varying possibilities” (Rayns, “Glowing in the Dark” 9). Instead of offering a sense of

completeness, Kieślowski’s features are frequently caught in a tension between the

actual and the virtual. Rather than being synthesized into a single narrative, the excess

of the materials doubles or triples the storylines. The introduction of multiple

positionalities further collapses any potential master’s voice. Kieślowski’s films teem

with unbounded signifiers. Žižek contends that in Kieślowski’s “eternally repeated

rewriting, the ‘quilting point’ is forever missing” (The Fright of Real Tears 95).

As one of Kieślowski’s most important features dwelling on the themes of double

and spectrality, Véronique manifests precisely a loss of “quilting point” among the

teeming of signifiers, and so the loss of explicit signification.24 Although starting with

an ambition to capture the essence of femininity, the film ends with women qua

signifiers taking over the narrative. With its gaps, inadequacies, and particularly

Kieślowski’s need to re-tell the story, the cinematic narrative of Véronique in a sense is

caught in women’s demand for an “encore” of jouissance—“encore” first because it is a

33). For a detailed discussion of Kieślowski’s alternative narratives, see Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears 78-84. 24 See note 9 for an explanation of the Lacanian idea of “quilting point.”


57

jouissance not in words but “in body” (encorps) and secondly because it is a jouissance

that “never cease[s]” (ne cesse pas) its demand.25 In Lacanian theory, the feminine

jouissance marks the point at which thoughts and words fail. It is beyond any attempt

at (phallic) symbolization. Yet it also serves as the driving force of narration by

positing the mystery (yet) to be solved. Isn’t Véronique created out of Kieślowski’s

desire to break away from his earlier male-centered scenarios? Does the fact that

woman remains “not whole”—not “wholly his” in his cinema—not make inevitable his

endless testing of different narratives? Is Kieślowski not so fascinated by the mystery

of womanhood—the unsignifiable feminine jouissance—that he has to follow its

command of “encore”? Finally, isn’t an “encore” of jouissance revealed in Véronique

most vividly through Kieślowski’s self-admitted (repetitive) failure of symbolization,

which bears witness to Lacan’s famous claim that jouissance can be approached only

through the inverted ladder of castration?26

Ragland and Wright conclude their analysis of Véronique with the contention that

Kieślowski’s “fascination with Woman ends in the impasse that Lacan […] described in

his axiom, ‘The Woman does not exist’” (486). Their reading of the death of both

Weronika and Véronique—one in an explicit and the other in an implied way—grants

their argument strong support. Yet, since the beginning of this paper I have been

reiterating that Véronique may not necessarily prescribe or predict women’s “death.”

At least, one must admit that women in the film do not die by being reduced to nothing,

excluded completely from the symbolic reality. If there is an “impasse” in

Kieślowski’s representations of woman, it must be an “impasse” that generates pure

possibility. To be clear, to follow Kieślowski’s alternative scenarios is like following

a Lacanian Moebius strip which leads one to the opposite “side” of her/his point of

25 Nasio designates the three states of jouissance in the Lacanian thinking structure: phallic jouissance, surplus-of-jouissance, and the jouissance of the Other. The feminine jouissance discussed here is aligned with the jouissance of the Other. It refers to a state beyond the law, “an ideal case in which the tension would have been totally discharged without the impediment of any limit” (Nasio 28). See Lacan, “On Jouissance” for details. 26 According to Lacan, it is impossible to achieve (feminine) jouissance via phallic sexuality; instead, it is castration that points to (though never arriving at) jouissance: “there is no chance for a man to have jouissance of a woman’s body, otherwise stated, for him to make love, without castration (à mois de castration), in other words, without something that says no to the phallic function” (“God and Woman’s Jouissance” 71-72). In fact, the Lacanian superego, qualified as based on “the (imperative) ‘Enjoy!’” is

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departure. Véronique is a surface that leads to its underside and presents a symbolic

that does not as much conceal as evoke the “real.” Through the inverted ladder of

Kieślowski’s desire, although the viewers are not shown “femininity” in terms of its

essence they do experience the uncanny power of woman. Despite the fact that none

of the women in the film is fully integrated into the symbolic order, those surviving in

their spectrality—namely, those who would not die—do exert influence and effect

changes in the symbolic.

Essential to our reading of Véronique is therefore not the capturing of femininity

within a metalanguage that speaks (for) all; more significant than this is the tracing of

the subject effect of femininity in and through the operation of the symbolic. This is

why Lacan declares that “[c]astration means that jouissance must be refused, so that it

can be reached on the inverted ladder (l’échelle renversée) of the Law of desire” (Écrits

324). The “jouissance” that has to be refused is “jouissance” as pure object, the

“jouissance” that remains external to the symbolic. Ironically, it is only when

“jouissance” as primal object is refused that one is able to approach it through the

drama of the symbolic. Véronique allows us glimpses of jouissance in numerous

moments when the symbolic is opened, revealing its crevices, moments when the

disembodied voice rises up in our ears, when the mirror not only reflects but also

distorts, when the glass refuses to be transparent, when the object supposed to be seen

slips away from the scope of specularity, or when Weronika looks back into her

spectators’ eyes and when Véronique hides herself behind a door to watch—with an

intriguing smile on her face—Alexandre’s futile attempt to locate her, his apparent

lapse in blowing his nose in public. The loss of metalanguage paves the way for the

play of the symbolic and furthermore the phantasmatic apparition of the “real.” The

controversial last sequence in the American version of Véronique makes sense in this

light.27 Véronique’s embrace of her father does not necessarily signify her surrender

to the symbolic or denote her death. It can be read positively as the embracing of a

man of lack, a symbolic of gaps. It is to embrace a woman’s chances of life both in

“a correlate of castration” (“On Jouissance” 7). 27 To the ending of the European version in which Véronique touches a tree, Kieślowski adds the embrace-of-father sequence in the American version. See Stok 188.


59

and beyond symbolic realities. Leaving Alexandre and his totalizing narrative behind,

Véronique opens herself to more choices rather than exiting the symbolic completely

through death. Véronique refuses to associate femininity with death. Through this

final embrace Véronique says “yes,” giving her life a Cixousian affirmation.28

Works Cited Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” 1976. New French Feminisms: An

Anthology. New York: Harvester, 1980. 245-264.

Coates, Paul. Introduction. Lucid Dreams: The Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski. Ed.

Paul Coates. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1999. 1-18. _____. “Kieślowski and the Crisis of Documentary.” Lucid Dreams: The Films of

Krzysztof Kieślowski. Ed. Paul Coates. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1999.

32-53. _____. “The Sense of an Ending: Reflections on Kieślowski’s Trilogy.” Film

Quarterly 50.2 (1996-1997): 19-26.

David-Ménard, Monique. Hysteria from Freud to Lacan. Trans. Catherine Porter.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Dolar, Mladen. “The Object Voice.” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Ed. Renata

Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 7-31.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York:

Routledge, 1996.

Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” 1919. The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. Vol.

XVII. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955. 217-52. 24 vols.

Helman, Alicja. “Women in Kieślowski’s Late Films.” Trans. Paul Coates. Lucid

Dreams: The Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski. Ed. Paul Coates. Trowbridge:

Flicks Books, 1999. 116-135.

28 It is Cixous’s argument that femininity does not have to be associated with death or negativity: “[t]he feminine […] affirms: ‘. . . And yes,’ says Molly, carrying Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing; ‘I said yes, I will Yes’” (255).

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Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Psycho. Pref. Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. Shamley

Productions (Universal Pictures), 1960. VHS. Taipei: San-Ying, 1993.

Insdorf, Annette. Double Life, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski.

New York: Miramax, 1999.

Jacob, Irène. Foreword. Insdorf xv-xvi.

Kieślowski, Krzysztof, dir. Blue. Pref. Juliette Binoche and Benoit Regent. MK2

Productions SA/Tor Production/CAB Productions/France 3 Cinema, 1993.

VHS. Taipei: San-Ying, 1999. _____. The Double Life of Véronique. Pref. Irène Jacob and Philippe Volter. Sidéral

Productions/Tor Production/Le Studio Canal Plus, 1991. VHS. Taipei:

San-Ying, 1999. _____. Red. Pref. Irène Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintignant. MK2 Productions SA/Tor

Production/CAB Productions/France 3 Cinema/CED Productions, 1994. VHS.

Taipei: San-Ying, 1999.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. 1966. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:

Norton, 1977. _____. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. 1973. Ed.

Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. _____. “God and Woman’s Jouissance.” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX

Encore 1972-1973 (On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge).

1975. Trans. and Preface Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998. 64-77. _____. “On Jouissance.” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX Encore 1972-1973

(On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge). 1975. Trans.

and Preface Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998. 1-13.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plume, 1973.

Nasio, Juan-David. Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan.

1992. Trans. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul. Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1998.

Nettelbeck, Colin W. “Is There a ‘European’ Cinema?: The ‘French’ Films of

Krzysztof Kieślowski as Case-Study.” Australian Journal of French Studies


61

36.1 (1999): 136-51.

Ragland, Ellie and Elizabeth Wright. “The Double Life of Véronique: An Enquiry into

the Existence of Woman.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 10.3 (1993): 481-486.

Rayns, Tony. “Glowing in the Dark.” Sight & Sound 4.6 (1994): 8-10. _____. “Kieślowski Crossing Over.” Sight and Sound 1.11 (1992): 22-23.

Romney, Jonathan. “The Double Life of Véronique.” Sight and Sound 1.11 (1992):

42-43.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and

Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Stok, Danusia, ed. Kieślowski on Kieślowski. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

Wilson, Emma. “Image in Crystal: La Double Vie de Véronique.” Memory and

Survival: The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski. Oxford: University of

Oxford, 2000. 1-31.

Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor.

New York: Verso, 1991. _____. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory.

London: British Film Institute, 2001. _____. “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, the Invisible Master.” Gaze and Voice as

Love Objects. Ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Durham: Duke

University Press, 1996. 90-126. _____. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Literature.

Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991.

About the Author Hsiu-chuan Lee is Assistant Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, women’s literature, Asian American literature, films and cultural studies. Her recent publications include “Transnational Love-Letter, Simulated Nation-State: Nation, Woman, and Narrative in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters,” Chung Wai Literary Monthly 29.11 (2001): 63-97; “Out of America/Out of Mirrors: The Traveling Self in David Mura’s Turning Japanese,” Chung Wai Literary Monthly 29.6 (2000) 49-76; “‘Momotaro’ in the Other’s Desire: Fantasy, ‘Americanness’ Complex, and John Okada’s No-No Boy,” Studies in English Literature and Linguistics 25 (1999): 59-77; “Sailing for the Imperial Border: Women’s Travel and the Mapping of Desire in Woolf’s The Voyage Out,” Chung Wai Literary Monthly 27.12 (1999): 50-78. [E-mail: [email protected]]

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[Received 18 November 2001; accepted December 20 2001; revised December 26 2001 ]

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