Nathan Bracher

Écrire la (non-)violence : le cas de Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes d’Ivan Jablonka

Abstract This article analyses Ivan Jablonka’s Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes, which garnered three major prizes in the fall of 2016 (Le Prix Littéraire du Monde, Le Médicis et Le Prix des Prix) while also receiving quasi-unanimous acclaim from French press and media. My purpose is to explain how Jablonka’s writing contributes to exposing, denouncing and even, as far as possible ex post facto and by means of a text, undertaking a kind of reparation of the masculine violence inflicted on the 18-year-old young woman not only at the end, but throughout her entire life. To this end, the paradigm of violence laid out by Lévinas and Derrida will allow us to explore the ethics and poetics of non-violence. If on the one hand Jablonka’s text reveals the subjective involvement of the researcher and writer, we will see on the other hand that his project carries social, political and human stakes: his writing of a ‘crime story’ constitutes a manner of understanding the tragedy in the context of French society, with its social, judiciary and political institutions.

Ethics and aesthetics of World War II memory: The case of David Foenkinos, Charlotte

Winner of the 2014 Renaudot prize, David Foenkinos’s novel Charlotte recounts the tragic life and highly original work of the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, arrested in the south of France and deported to her death at Auschwitz in the fall of 1943. As is often the case in twenty-first-century narratives, Foenkinos engages in a highly personal mode of narration that plunges back into the most momentous aspects of World War II and the Holocaust. Charlotte thus links the quandaries of the narrator’s own life and times to those of this protagonist in ways that lead us to face key questions of ethics and aesthetics. These concern not only the destiny of Charlotte Salomon, but also our own manner of approaching and remembering the most momentous events of the twentieth century through the medium of the literary text.

Charlotte Delbo: Writing the Story of History

On the one hand, Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy Auschwitz et après aims to enunciate a factual reality and communicate to its readers a certain knowledge or analysis of that reality. On the other hand, beyond its disarming appearance of unadorned stylistic simplicity, it has a rich variety of textual forms and rhetorical figures that ultimately prove to be integral components of the text, which therefore features important literary and aesthetic dimensions. While these two fundamental qualities of Auschwitz et après would seem to be contradictory, if not mutually exclusive, Delbo’s writing seeks to bridge the chasm separating our everyday lives in the twenty-first century from the unspeakable horror of the Nazi camps precisely by mobilizing this complex set of sophisticated rhetorical and aesthetic devices. Since we necessarily approach the past by means of the knowledge, images, and intellectual categories provided by culture, her text provides us important avenues of interpretation by relating our present-day context with that of the historical events. Notwithstanding the pitfalls and obstacles that must be faced in all writing, Delbo’s textual constructions and literary figures connect one of the darkest chapters of history, Auschwitz, with our contemporary world.

Pour une histoire à l’imparfait du présent : La Dernière Catastrophe d’Henry Rousso

Cet article prend La Dernière Catastrophe : l’histoire, le présent, le contemporain de l’historien français Henry Rousso comme point de départ pour un essai sur le rôle de l’historien et la fonction de l’histoire dans le contexte de ce vingt-et-unième siècle naissant. Écrite par nécessité dans une époque encore et toujours secouée par les soubresauts et cataclysmes – c’est-à-dire les catastrophes, justement – du siècle dernier, l’histoire contemporaine se caractérise par une double « imperfection » : l’inachèvement des événements étudiés et l’implication de l’historien dans l’objet de son étude. Si cette imperfection résulte d’évolutions culturelles relativement récentes (de la fin XIXème siècle), le métier de l’historien du temps présent et la vocation de ses analyses et récits s’inspirent toujours de principes formulés dès la naissance de la discipline dans la Grèce antique et réaffirmés tout le long de son évolution selon les inflexions imposées par les événements et les contextes intellectuels. Or les prétendues « imperfections » se révèlent à la longue une richesse pour une histoire visant non seulement à nous faire mieux vivre et plus loin, comme le veut Nietzsche, mais aussi à répondre aux exigences de l’éthique, comme l’insiste Lévinas.

L'Histoire à l'épreuve de l'affabulation romanesque: HHhH de Laurent Binet comme cas de figure

Intent on paying hommage to the Czechoslovakian resistors who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, Laurent Binet devotes HHhH to narrating the feat in all its pathos. Yet Binet adamantly shuns the dangers of imagination, invention, and embellishment, considered as “childish” and “tacky” practices all too often exploited for literary or commercial ends, favoring hypotyposis to the detriment of History with a capital H. When analyzed closely, however, his own text proves to be thoroughly aesthetic, because his text deploys a full array of literary techniques to make his readers imagine that they are witnessing and even participating in this momentous event as it happens. Ultimately, HHhH hinges largely on the figure of preteritio, by which the narrator indulges in the very practices that he declares must be avoided. Subjected to critical scrutiny, the “History” piously invoked throughout HHhH carries highly debatable notions.

The Intellectual and ‘La Nation’ in Jean Guéhenno’s Journal des années noires

This article explores Jean Guéhenno’s perspectives on the role and function of the intellectual both in the context of the Occupation, and in relation to ‘la nation’, understood in the original revolutionary sense of the people constituted into the body politic. Clandestinely written, Guéhenno’s Journal des années noires seems at first blush a solitary exercise in thought and observation. Closer analysis reveals, however, that although Guéhenno takes pains to distance himself from the ambient confusion and propaganda, he understood both his writing and his career as a professor at the Lycée Henry IV to derive their full significance only as acts of a citizen in ‘la nation’. Contrasting sharply with the model of the ‘maître à penser’ or institutional iconoclast, Guéhenno’s conception of the intellectual proves to be consonant the contemporary reality of the French intellectual as observed by Michel Winock, Luc Ferry, Pierre Nora and Jacques Julliard.