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The representation of everyday life cannot have a beginning. Everyday thinking cannot raise itself above everyday life without forgetting how to recognise the latter. Artists, particularly, have to be properly asleep to dream the everyday. Artists ordinarily oppose their wakeful day's business to the anonymous, abyssal nihilism of everydayness. Their vocation is to apprehend the everyday, countersign its statement and produce its conviction. The everyday, by the way, is noticeable as one's comportment just short of, or just ahead of, a kind of dying-of-boredom. Of everyday life there is a premonition, given in childhood, in which something impossibly severe but inevitable seems to have come about as the unspeaking solitude and neutral helplessness of one's being alive. Almost without delay, the city has appropriated this originary dismay and taken over the sky.
In Agnes Varda's film The Vagabond (1985), protagonist Mona's refusals (her no-sayings, her having "dropped out": like Melville's Bartleby she "prefers not. .. ") exist only as Varda's proprietary transcriptions-that is, as fictional , narrative art.
The film knows this and, surrendering willingly its purport of representing truthfully Mona's life, begins with the discovery of her dead body in a ditch (she has stumbled and died of exposure) and proceeds to present only various "secondhand" accounts of her movements up until her death.
Mona has discovered and spat out the everydayness of her life (she was once a secretary but now wanders, a vagabond). Reciprocally, she has been spat out because her corrosive uselessness is the recurrent nightmare of urban reason. Interpretation of her character must always already be too full of this reason. She thus appears as an unstable equivocation between thoroughly willful defiance and thoroughly passive