Contenu du sommaire : La Frustration

Jason Schwartz's two books so far, A German Picturesque (1998) and John the Posthumous (2013), have garnered very little criticism, which is no wonder if, as stated by Ben Marcus in his foreword to A German Picturesque, Schwartz's fiction “slips from apprehension,” written as it is in “aphasic English cleansed of obvious meaning” (A German Picturesque viii, ix). The overly descriptive nature of the prose might in part account for this, lending the books ekphrastic contours that deprive them of properly narrative contents. Yet, far from making Schwartz's books more transparent or immediate, this ekphrastic bias rather tends to obfuscate the texts, frustrating the reader's understanding as soon as the descriptive belies its own pretenses and artificiality. By radicalizing its ekphrastics, Schwartz's fiction enhances its own materiality, not to say ontology, and eventually foregrounds its brokenness, as it were.

Reading Laird Hunt's In the House in the Dark of the Woods is an experience of frustration, as the text offers a tentative formulation of various traumas. As the reader discovers the unreliable narrator's punctured text, she may feel a destabilizing tension between an almost necessary sympathy towards the narrator as the oversensitive victim of violence—both physical and psychological, which caused her lasting frustrations—and the rejection of the morally reprehensible aspects of her behavior. As writing is ostensibly given as a source of freedom in the novel, what kind of light does it shed upon Hunt's literary enterprise? This paper explores the staged questioning of freedom at different levels: the freedom offered to the characters by writing, the freedom offered to the writer through embedded writing practices that highlight their own limitations; the reader's freedom at last, of adopting the right distance towards the narrator who appears alternately as the aggressor and the victim, and thus of endorsing the responsibility of the ethical questioning carried by writing―and reading.