After the literary prize of ” the World “, the writer was again distinguished, on November 2, for “Laëtitia or the” end of men “(Threshold), a “non-fiction” incandescent.
World | • updated | By
Ivan Jablonka, already awarded with the literary prize of the World on September 7, receives the prix Médicis du roman French for Laëtitia, or the end of men (Threshold). In front of him, a set of competitors who do déméritaient not, that this is Nathacha Appanah, for Tropic of violence (Gallimard), Denis Michelis, with The Good Son (Notabilia) or Céline Minard for The Great Game (Shores), among others.
Read the review of “Laëtitia, or the end of men’: Blood, ink
The choice of Laëtitia comes reward, among all these fictions, a text of the “non-fiction” incandescent, the reading of which it is difficult to break and forget it just as hard. It is, in addition, a book on the ridge, both because the sociological investigation that he leads is in a form that is highly literary, using all the charms of the traditional narrative and the modern, blurring subjectivity and objectivity, but also because the narrator, Ivan Jablonka, quenching his shirt psychoanalytic and intimate in the soul of a victim of a fact various, and in that of his executioner.
With this second literary prize, the test of social science that is a priori Laëtitia (it is published in the famous collection ” The library of XXIe century “, directed by Maurice Olender), based on the ” fictitious method “, and exploring the limits of humanity, continues, therefore, to move the rows of “kind” in the field of contemporary writing.
” A depth of human and a certain state of society “
the Contemporary, the book of Ivan Jablonka is also in this sense that it ” receives in the face the beam of darkness that comes from his own time, “ – in the words of Agamben. The author, a historian by training, has written much, among other things, in The story is a contemporary literature (Seuil, 2014), this impurity that he called the ” fiction of method ” and which he defines here as ” assumptions, capable, by their very nature imaginary, to penetrate the secret of a soul and to establish the truth of the facts.” The fact various will be an opportunity for him to touch ” a depth of human and a certain state of society “ : ” A story emerges, is born in the public consciousness, because it lies at the intersection of a history, a field media, a sensitivity, and political context. “The program of Laëtitia, or the end of men is to tell the France of the beginning of this century.
While the police, throughout the text, finding the body missing Laëtitia, the author seeks the heart out of the man, in a project almost messianic : ” I would like [...] issue men and women to their deaths, rip to the crime that caused them to lose life and even their humanity. Not honoring them as "victims", because it is still returning them to the end ; simply restore their existence. Testify for them. “
To do this, Jablonka questioned all the witnesses of the tragedy, and especially Jessica, the twin sister of Laëtitia. It traces the investigation, portrays sociological of victims and executioners, attempts to establish the genealogy of an evil that always comes later : the biological father of Laëtitia, Franck Perrais, which ” has been successively an apprentice carpenter, an apprentice baker, apprentice mechanic, apprentice learning “, and the adoptive father of the two girls, ” Mr. Boss “, full of a ” sense of power and social superiority which aims to highlight all at once, the failure of parents and incompetence of teachers “. We learn later that the Boss has violated Jessica and four other victims. He will be sentenced to eight years in prison in 2014.
Read the interview with Ivan Jablonka, “The World” delivers its literary prize to “Laëtitia or the” end of men “, Ivan Jablonka
soon Enough, no doubt, Jablonka realizes that Laëtitia is unknowable. Identifying the musical tastes of the young girl (Rihanna, Sexion Assault, the B. O. of the’Avatar…), he deduced, first, that ” Laëtitia is the incarnation of the general public, the opposite of the undisciplined “.
But, doing it as soon volte-face, he plunges into his own memories of ” junk culture “ and recalls the cartoon Candy, ” which [he] did today bring tears to your eyes “ : as grotesque as the rating may seem, it means the effectiveness of the transfer, in any way, which will allow Jablonka to title his last chapter ” Laëtitia, this is me ” : ” This culture of mass beating of my heart. My childhood formatted I miss, because it is my childhood, and that she gave birth to the adult that I am, the individual within a generation. “ And concluded : ” I’m wrong about Laëtitia [...]. She kept her distance from what she was watching. “
The bad father and the bad president
The child lack therefore. It is through this defect that makes the link between the author and his subject. A victim whose childhood has been slain, to one side, a historian recognized, as an adult, the other, who has written a Story of the grandparents that I have not had (Threshold, 2012).
Orphelinage general : ” I would like to [...] find the blur, the wave, the propensity to be forgotten, the feeling of helplessness and incomprehension that there is in the mind of a child, Laëtitia, Jessica or toddler as we were. “
By this emotion of loss, of the archaeology cannot be so, Ivan Jablonka in then comes what seems to be his real subject, after Foucault : the report of power, and of the people. It establishes gradually a parallel between the bad father that was Mr. Boss, and the figure of a poor chair that was, according to him, Nicolas Sarkozy.
The reality it facilitates the task : the former president of the Republic had seized the objurgations of Boss to question the judges, whom he accused of laxity, and to which he promised the penalties : ” Mr. Boss has an ambiguous relationship with the media. However, the vocabulary of pain is not neutral. "Do it justice", "make them pay", the fight against recidivism, lock up-for-life sex offenders : Nicolas Sarkozy receives, from the Boss, with a substantial support. “, But the Boss will turn out to be a criminal : ” We will understand that the president of the Republic has fought the sex offender to the sides of a pedophile. “
A crime against the people
For an interesting rhetoric of tears, the story of a crime against a young girl, the “people” becomes, under the pen of Jablonka, the analysis of a crime against the people as a whole. Where we see a juror crying at the details of the misdeeds of Tony Meilhon, and a few pages later, a judge cry listening to Nicolas Sarkozy on television, that declares that ” the magistrates are responsible. “ : ” The criminopopulisme years Laëtitia, historian, suggests that the research of the division, the instillation of distrust and hatred in the social body – the president of the Republic, injuring the Republic. “
beyond the figure of Laëtitia and a feminine victim of the ” masculinities abused in XXIe century “, it is the question of the power of the book in fine stumbles : how to govern well, that is to say, how to be a father without patriarchy. But this question of law also extends to the one who takes the word and witness : facing the ” end of men “, what’ s” authorizes ” the author of this kind of story ?
No comments:
Post a Comment