L'Art de la catastrophe chez Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Abstract

In Faire l’amour, Jean-Philippe Toussaint engages in a playful dynamic with the occurrence of “catastrophe” turning this very notion upside down by questioning it and making it emerge from multiple angles which pervade the story as much as the narration. The author keeps shifting scale between the minuscule and the gigantic nature of the disaster, moving from the inner sphere of intimacy to the outer sphere of natural disasters. Indeed, the incipit of the novel predicts the end of the narrator’s relationship with Marie while in the meantime a seemingly natural catastrophe is taking place via an earthquake of low magnitude. Although the seismic events in the novel remain minimal, causing no material damage, they lead to an intense internal crisis through the violent desire of pleasure and destruction experienced by the narrator. This article aims to demonstrate that the site of the actual catastrophe lies mostly in the prophetization of a break-up that never materializes and immobilizes the narrator in a posture of perpetual fear of the end. Thus, the author expands the scope of catastrophe to the status quo and the absence of real change that paradoxically encompasses any type of disaster whether it be objective or subjective.

Keywords:

• Catastrophe
• separation
• crisis
• inside
• outside
• shift

Notes

1 Ce cycle se compose de quatre volumes : Faire l’amour (2002), Fuir (2005), La Vérité sur Marie (2009) et Nue (2013).

2 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l’impossible est certain. Paris, Seuil, 2002.

3 Bachelard en conclut que l’homme ne peut être qu’un « être entr’ouvert » animé de multiples mouvements contradictoires d’ouverture et de fermeture (247).

4 Selon la définition du dictionnaire Larousse.

5 La discontinuité participant de la catastrophe dans la théorie mathématique de René Thom : « La catastrophe est un type de discontinuité qu’un système dynamique doit franchir pour passer d’une région de son déploiement à une autre » (Godin 3).

6 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, “Blackwell,” 2000.

7 Ulrich Beck, La Société du risque. Sur la voie d’une autre modernité. Paris, Champs-Flammarion, 2008.

8 Tel que souligné par Blanchot dans L’Écriture du désastre.

9 Christophe Meurée, “Le Temps à l’Épreuve Du ‘Désastre Infinitésimal.’” Les Vérités de Jean-Philippe Toussaint, edited by S. Chaudier, PU de Saint-Étienne, 2016, N.p.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Rodriguez Bontemps

Sandra Rodriguez Bontemps is a Ph.D. candidate in French at Wayne State University. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature and the themes of travel, space, mobility, and globalization. Her dissertation, Global Wanderings: Revisiting Space and Mobility in the Novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Jean Echenoz, explores the relation between humans and space, place, and mobility in today’s globalized world as a reflection of the complex nature of our postmodern existence.