Land Art and Expanded Cinema in Marie Darrieussecq’s Expanding Fictional Fields

“Traces: a trench below the horizon, expanding [s’élargissant] over the circle of beaten snow.” The verb s’élargir, extracted here from the opening of Darrieussecq’s White (2003 [2005]), in fact spreads out throughout a story of anticipation set in a near future: 2020. This novel concerns a mission to construct a permanent European Base at the deserted heart of Antarctica. After its appearance in the first line, “s’élargir/élargir” recurs as Darrieussecq narrates atmosphere and bodily perceptions. Through language, Darrieussecq expands—and at time contracts—visions and mirages, sounds and acoustic hallucinations, expanding or suspending time, making a real and possible scientific mission into something strange. At several moments, the shades of colors and the tension between blurred and precise visions seem to acquire, through language, the mental texture of video art. The novel, which has already acquired a place in Antarctic Studies, reinvents the fictional realm, entangling in its unfolding not a generic intermediality but, more precisely, expanded artistic and cinematic practices. This article places the singularity of White in a wider artistic context that spans not only 1960s and 1970s Land Art but also expanded cinema to very contemporary artistic mixed-medium practices.