From the Magico-Mythical to Reality-Congruence: Models and Anti-models in Pierre Bergounioux's La Mort de Brune
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00111619.2013.782784
ISSN1939-9138
Autores Tópico(s)Psychology of Social Influence
ResumoAbstract This article analyzes Pierre Bergounioux's La Mort de Brune and argues that its structure and treatment of secondary characters offer strong evidence of debt to two ostensibly very different sources: the Arthurian quest narrative and traditional early learning materials. Drawing on Norbert Elias's social theory, the article seeks to show that Bergounioux exploits these textual and visual sources in order to chart the shifting balance in the child-protagonist's thinking between magico-mythical views of his world and a rational perspective on it. Keywords: BergouniouxArthurian romanceearly-learning materialsNorbert Elias Notes 1His publications also include numerous mixed-genre works and collaborations with artists and photographers. 2Bergounioux has been awarded the following: Prix Alain Fournier et Prix François Mauriac de la Région Aquitaine (1985), Prix France Culture (1996), Prix Charles Brisset (2001), Grand prix littéraire de la Société des gens de lettres (2002), Prix Virgile (2002), and Prix Roger Caillois (2009). 3It is also worth noting that Michon, Millet, and Bergounioux have also all acknowledged their debt to William Faulkner. 4Jacquet's Fiction Bergounioux provides an excellent introduction to Bergounioux's work, identifies a wide range of recurrent thematic patterns and motifs and offers perceptive readings of individual texts, but its chosen corpus is explicitly limited to the novels and récits produced between 1984 and 1995 and, consequently, does not include La Mort de Brune. In his comparative study, Demanze has selected those texts that center on family dynamics, filiation, and on the narrators' relationship with the natural landscape. 5With the publication in 2006, 2007, and 2012 of three volumes of Pierre Bergounioux's notebooks (950, 1,260, and 1,280 pages, respectively), covering in total thirty-two years, rare and unusually immediate and detailed insights have been offered into the life and working methods of a living author. 6All translations of extracts from Bergounioux are my own. 7Compare: In fact, the relationship between the peripheral and the central remains a defining characteristic of the romance, if not the defining characteristic of the genre. The process of aventiure, which structures this movement between the center and the margins, provides a background for experiences to occur away from the court […] Through the travels of the "chosen" hero, the margins of fictional geography "become the central loci of signification" in the romance, creating tension between the conventional center (namely the Arthurian court) and the geographically peripheral "centers of attention." (Sterling-Hellenbrand 42) 8See Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus (53, 56, 136, 283, 337); La Mort le roi Artu (232); Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal (ll. 438–49, 1709–73, 4675–83, 6168–71); La Suite du Roman de Merlin (§209, §210 l. 8, §401 l. 14); Première continuation de Perceval (ll. 13508, 13358–72, 13558); La Queste del Saint Graal (204, 21); L'Estoire del Saint Graal (2: ll. 566); Sone von Nausay (ll. 4841–56). See Kennedy "Punishment in the Perlesvaus," and Bloch for fuller discussion of the Waste Land topos in the Arthurian quest narratives. 9See Boron (§179); Première continuation de Perceval (ll. 13508, 13358–72, 13558); Sone von Nausay (4777–853); Malory, Morte D'Arthur (2: ch. 8, 11, 15, 19). See also Vinaver (56–67, 59, 108); Kennedy, "Punishment in the Perlesvaus." Note that Laurichesse draws a passing comparison between the evocation of the Corrèze in La Toussaint and the Waste Land of the quest narratives (32). 10See Lyons's comments on the scoffing female characters of Arthurian romance (141). Note also the "magical" transformation from "fillette" to "grandes perches" that the music pupils of La Mort de Brune appear to the narrator to have undergone: "I was on my way back once again to the attic and I thought I had got the wrong door, then, a second later, the wrong era, when I discovered, sitting on the bench, instead of the little girls from June, half a dozen beanpoles who, having shot me a disdainful glance, resumed their sniggering and whispering" (34–35). 11That is, he gives him access to an imaginary/magical world. 12Note, too, that the "inconnu" keeps company with "an elderly eccentric who has spent his life in Paris and then withdrawn, with nothing but his archives, to a disused shop where he survives as well as he can compiling, by himself, at eighty years of age the weekly bulletin in which he calls for Freedom, Justice, Revolution" (La Mort de Brune 137–38). In the few lines devoted to these two characters, Bergounioux sketches out the quest on which the "inconnu" has embarked and identifies his principal helper. The "elderly eccentric" can be seen, of course, as a variation on the hermits who figured so prominently in Arthurian romance. See Kennedy ("Hermit's Role" and "Punishment in the Perlesvaus") on the hermits' roles in Arthurian romance. 13The Editions Rossignol, founded in 1946 by André Rossignol, produced maps and educational posters from primary schools. Among the series was "Les Commerces." See, for example, the images of the grocer, the poultry-butcher, and the tailor (http://collectionsrossignol.com). See also Rossignol and Cordebæuf; Rossignol; Cavanna. 14Note, too, the passage describing the visits of other local citizens to the family home: I'd go down to open the door and would bring in a bunch of anglers, music-lovers or veterans. We'd invite them to sit down and I would finish my dessert sitting between a lisping police-inspector and a massive dental technician […] or else between a garage mechanic who was no bigger than I was […] and my French literature teacher […] or the fire-captain or the shoe-shop owner or the funny, vehement, generous, extremist elementary school teacher. (La Mort de Brune 71–72) See also the description of Jean-Jacques Scherrer's painting of the assassination of Brune in which the key members of the mob that attacks him are identified by profession (cloth-maker, porter, renderer; 83–85) and the references to the various professional, union, and veteran bodies that have premises in the Hôtel Labenche (11, 22, 43). 15That is, by paradigms that are complementary by virtue of the fact that, while they may contain both naturalistic and fantasy elements, the former tend to be associated more strongly with myth and magic and the latter are generally more obviously rooted in the real. English language equivalents would be books of the "When I Grow Up"/"Jobs People Do" format. 16The "lady" and, indeed, the "ears" are both variants of the imaginary companion. As Taylor has shown, the imaginary companion serves a wide range of functions in the child's life, including helping him or her to overcome fear (in this case of darkness), to deal with traumatic experiences (here, the painful clinic visits), and, by demonstrating a competence that the child does not have, to bring about a result that is beyond the latter (here, to get the better of the mocking girls) (62–85). 17Mind-over-matter magic is defined by Subbotsky as "the direct effect of consciousness over matter, such as affecting or creating physical objects through the effort of will" (5). 18 Un Peu de Bleu dans le Ciel (15); La Cécité d'Homère (9–10); L'Héritage. Entretiens avec Gabriel Bergounioux (75, 82, 127); Bréviaire de Littérature à l'Usage des Vivants (35); Carnet de Notes, 1980–1990 (160); Carnet de Notes, 1980–1990 (120, 299, 367). 19Note also Elias's use of a passage from Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon as epigraph to Involvement and Detachment (3) and the citation in The Society of Individuals of the narrators of Sartre's La Nausée, Camus's L'Etranger, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint's La Salle de Bain as instances of the "we-less I" (199–200). See also Kuzmics. 20Critics have rightly drawn attention to the pivotal role played in Bergounioux's intellectual development of his discovery in his teens of Descartes's Méditations. However, if Descartes's detachment of the mind from senses suggested to him the possibility of surmounting les choses, of achieving the distance from and perspective on contingent circumstances that permit conceptualization and understanding of the world and of one's relationship to it, Bergounioux's thinking is, nevertheless, not idealist or antimaterialist. His conception of the relationship between man and his world is much closer to that of Elias and the latter's stress on the dynamic interplay between involved and detached modes of being. 21Compare the unexplained hostility of the hatter to whom the narrator attributes mind-reading powers (La Mort de Brune 64–65). 22However, it should be noted that the books he reads in the library are not just a source of factual information but also a trigger to his imagination. 23As Taylor points out, imaginary companions tend to disappear when the child no longer needs them (120). 24Note again the difference between Bergounioux and Descartes, notwithstanding the impact that the Méditations had on the former's development. 25The traditional ABC book or grand imagier, by virtue of the fact that it aims to help the child to acquire a code and to develop classification skills is based on normative principles, assumes a social/cultural consensus, and can, therefore, be seen as a potentially powerful tool of social conditioning. As educationalists and gender studies scholars have demonstrated, the presentation of gendered occupational stereotypes implicitly delimit expectations and choice. More generally, the traditional grand imagier des métiers might be seen as an instance of very early anticipatory socialization. In La Mort de Brune, the format has been reworked to suggest the push–pull dynamic of socialization and individuation: while the occupations presented in each chapter offer an indicative sample of the roles open to the brivois, Bergounioux's detailed portraits of the individuals concerned allow him to explore the ways in which these characters have each, quite inadvertently, also contributed to the protagonist's individuation and his development of a sense of a relative personal autonomy. 26Compare: "The images that we leave along the way, that stand guard in the corridor of forgotten things, amount to very little, but not exactly nothing. If a part of ourselves lingers in bygone times, it is because it hinged on those times that there were other times, a way out, a future that negated the unhappiness, the past, the absence of which the present consisted" (132). See also: "[This account] denounces what it pronounces, in defiance of the conditional causality that made those of whom I speak what they became. They could not be other than they were. That is how it was. But the annoyance, the fear, the corrosive weariness, the animosity that I developed in consorting with them was something else altogether […]" (Citation Carnet de Notes 1991–2000 , 530). 27The "prince of entomology" Latreille remains an intellectual point of reference for the narrator, who, as an adult, visits for the first time the library of the local archaeological society in order to consult Latreille and Dejean's Histoire naturelle et iconographique des insectes coléoptères d'Europe (29–30). As he leaves the library, he speculates that Latreille had perhaps deposited this copy in the collection for the "edification" of the locals—i.e., he had maintained a presence among the community and had offered a means of access to knowledge.
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