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Evil in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/kns013

1468-2931

Sara Kippur,

Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research

The task of delineating a literature of evil, even one that is confined to a particular historical era and linguistic tradition, is no small feat. In taking on such a task, Scott M. Powers's edited volume writes itself into a wider body of recent scholarship — Françoise Aubès and Marie-Madeleine Gladieu's Le Mal et les mots (Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2010), Michael Butter's The Epitome of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Mary Evans's The Imagination of Evil (Continuum, 2009), Ronald Paulson's Sin and Evil (Yale University Press, 2007) — that understands evil as a central literary trope worthy of an ethical, psychoanalytic, and political read. The essays comprising this collection locate representations of evil in a host of literary texts written in French that span a variety of contexts, from the Communist era, the Holocaust, and the Algerian War up to the Rwandan genocide and the events of 9/11. All but one of the articles centre on very recent novels and authors, the exception being Cristian Bratu's opening essay, which critiques Sartre's inconsistent positions on violence via a reading of Les Mains sales alongside the author's political and philosophical writings. Beth Gale demonstrates convincingly that Amélie Nothomb's novels undermine the notion of moral absolutes through characters that break down the boundary between good and evil. Bernadette Ginestet-Levine traces the plots of several works by Algerian novelist Latifa Ben Mansour to suggest the difficulty of writing about pain or national evils as a result of trauma. Mamadou Wattara defines evil in the context of genocide studies to examine the rhetorical strategies — flashbacks, cynicism, speech errors — characteristic of children narrators writing about genocide. In her essay on Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World Marie-Christine Clemente asks the peculiar question of whether the novelist can be considered evil for imagining and depicting the events of 9/11 with such gruesome details, and concludes that he cannot. The last two contributions are devoted to Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes: Nadia Louar's smart essay argues that Littell's ironic stance undermines the authority of his narrator/protagonist and thus requires a mode of reading distinct from that of Holocaust testimonies, while Scott Powers contends that Littell articulates a postmodern ethics through irony, the use of an unreliable narrator, and a critique of his character's refusal to acknowledge human agency in evil. The strength of the volume lies in its richness of examples and diversity of approaches — a strength that also, at times, undermines the sense of a clear and rigorous theorization of the term ‘evil’. Why, for instance, use this term and not ‘violence’, ‘pain’, or ‘trauma’, which many of the essays slide between as synonyms? Does ‘evil’ mean something different when it is capitalized, pluralized, or put in quotation marks? Nevertheless, the intriguing questions that this collection of essays raises testify to its contribution to the field of contemporary French and francophone literature.