Is literature meant to heal us from the world? Alexandre Gefen examines the passion of the novels of XXIe century for the concern, and questions the motives.
“Repairing the world”, writing and reading to heal individual and collective wounds, these are the main characteristics of contemporary French literature according to Alexandre Gefen. It is a sort of robot portrait of this therapeutic literature that the author, a specialist in French literature of the XXIe century, research director at CNRS and founder of the site Fabula. Research in literature. The book, taken from a thesis byHDRaims to encompass a corpus of novels that is, if not exhaustive, at least extraordinarily vast, as evidenced by the thickness of the bibliography (45 pages) and the density of the critical apparatus (49 pages).
The notion of reparation on which A. Gefen relies is borrowed from Joan Tronto, a theorist of the ethics of care, which she defines as: “a generic activity that includes everything we do to maintain, perpetuate and ‘repair’ our world”. This ethical theory, at the crossroads of philosophy and psychology, forged by the feminist Carol Gilligan in the 1990s, has enjoyed growing popularity in the human sciences for about twenty years, from philosophy to literature. In France, it is mainly the philosophers Sandra Laugier and Fabienne Brugère who have taken it up, attempting in turn to identify the fertility of this notion, readily translated as “solicitude” (although the care (means both solicitude and care) and to highlight its political issues.
Some novelists, such as Maylis de Kerangal, have endorsed it in turn. Repairing the living (2014). The title of this magnificent novel, widely cited here, awarded many times, and brought to the screen in 2016 by Katell Quillévéré, is in fact taken from a phrase from Platonov Chekhov’s phrase – “Bury the dead, repair the living” – which the author curiously does not repeat in his essay, but which has nonetheless become the credo of a whole generation of writers.
This essay seeks to highlight a simple observation that underlies its epistemological bias, as the author says in the introduction: whether we disapprove of it or despise it, this strong trend in contemporary French literature deserves to be thought about rather than systematically denigrated under the pretext that we would not make “good literature with good feelings”, according to the scathing, now famous, phrase of André Gide. It is therefore a “mapping of contemporary sensibility” (p. 269) that Alexandre Gefen attempts through a very rich, abundantly nourished and referenced presentation.
An eschatological literature?
The author subtly shows that not all the texts of this literature that confronts the din of the world and the wounds of man have exactly the same therapeutic stakes. Thus Philippe Forest, for example, distinguishes himself by an obstinate refusal to “mourn”, to bury, so to speak, his deceased little girl, and even more, to comfort those who remain to mourn her, thus assuming a rejection of resilience:
The psychoanalytic conception makes repetition a way of incorporating the dead object, generating a melancholy that is itself deadly, but instead of refusing this repetition (…), Philippe Forest clings to it by affirming that “the writer retains within himself the hallucinated form of what has been”. (p. 140)
If the essay focuses on the existential crack that the loss of a loved one represents for man, through the topoi of illness and mourning, his chapters actually display a remarkably broad range of the great trials that man faces. XXIe century is confronted: traumas (of war or “catastrophes”), ecology (“facing the territory”) and history (“facing time”). Seeking to understand the reasons for the mobilization of such topoiit synthesizes the ideas that have (re)become commonplaces in a few years on literary facts:
that literature fosters empathy and makes one better, that the literary expression of trauma liberates by allowing an inventive reappropriation of the experience, that writing and reading allow for the reconstruction of oneself, that the fictional representation functions as a laboratory for thought, that one of the primary functions of literature is memorial and commemorative. (p. 257)
This investigation leads him to analyze some of the most obvious characteristics of contemporary narrative literature, such as the “age of hypermnesia” (p. 240), which designates all the texts relating to the “memorial obsession” (p. 239), namely biographies, testimonies and all types of texts tied to the archive. He then offers a convincing interpretation of the advent, even the triumph, of texts relating to this “archival fever” (archive fever) to use the words of art theorist Hal Foster, who, 15 years ago, already saw it more broadly as a contemporary trend characterizing all artistic fields. According to A. Gefen, contemporary French literature would become the ultimate mouthpiece of the only eschatological discourse still audible in our secularized society where it would no longer suffer from competition with the sacred word:
Literature is conceived as a secularized transposition of the hope of eternal life at the heart of Christianity (…). It presents itself as a form of assumption.
He thus adopts Dominique Rabaté’s analysis, for whom the book “takes the place or relay of the religious” (Rabaté quoted by A. Gefen, p. 241), and concludes that the common point between the writings of testimony (notably those focused on trauma) and the stories of field investigation is to “propose, in place of a religion and its priests, rituals of accompaniment and commemoration, if not an eschatological horizon in the form of a library, as if the fear of death generalized that of injustice” (p. 249).
The blind spots of care
As noble as the quasi-thaumaturgic objective that this literature sets itself is, it does not come without setting some ethical limits. Indeed, by dint of offering tribute and tombstone texts as if to defy finitude and incessantly heal the wounds of suffering souls, does this literature not run the risk of confiscating the words of those in whose name it claims to speak? In other words, as Alexandre Gefen writes, borrowing a formula from Jacques Rancière:
the memorial then runs the risk of resembling a patronage charity (…) and of offering this form of trapped ennoblement consisting of an “art of making the poor speak by silencing them”. (p. 235)
The interpretation, by psychoanalyst Laurie Laufer (a specialist in the question of mourning and herself inspired by the idea of vulnerability), of Mallarmé’s literary silence in the face of the mourning of his son Anatole allows A. Gefen to go further in the criticism of this literature. As a result, corroborated by the publication of a poem to Anatole posthumously by Jean-Pierre Richard in 1961, A. Gefen posits that
Far from being useless or autotelic, the writing of negativity is a self-therapeutic psychic device that participates in a remediation of mourning (…); the distance or intransitivity of art are also responses to traumas. (p. 265)
Should we therefore conclude that all literature would, by definition and as if intrinsically, have a vocation to be therapeutic? That the authors would be more or less aware of this, even if it means abusing it for much more prosaic purposes, as this acerbic line from Jules Renard reminds us:
Beauty of literature. I lose a cow. I write about her death and it brings me enough to buy another cow. (Quoted p. 266)
While several passages in the book thus clearly reveal the author’s perplexity regarding the intentions of certain authors (readable both in their texts and in their meta-literary discourse), the book nevertheless presents itself more as a cameo of the different modalities of “repairing the world” than as an in-depth critical analysis. It is true that the exhaustive ambition of the bibliographic review (truly impressive) is difficult to reconcile with the possibility of developing a very in-depth critical analysis, unless one writes a thesis in several volumes. However, the strength of this work lies precisely in the rigor of its structure and its conciseness. The different parts are well balanced, none of them is too long, nor obscurely verbose. On the contrary, one will appreciate not only the educational nature of this book, but also the lively, precise and elegant pen of the author, which makes reading particularly pleasant and fluid. The fact that each part is also accompanied by a very rich critical apparatus and embellished with a very useful index, makes it a reference work for all those interested in this theme and in the theories of careor simply to the health of contemporary French literature.