99 IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 20, No.4 (2019)
Dépasser la mort. L’agir de la littérature
Bram Lambrecht
Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, Dépasser la mort. L’agir de la littérature. Essai Arles: Actes Sud, 2019, 272 p.
ISBN: 9782330118044
Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, professor of modern French literature at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, has longstanding expertise in the relations between literature and ritual. In 2010, for instance, she published the book Litterature et ritualité, which not only analyzes contemporary literature’s representations of ritual but also approaches the writing and reading of literature as a ritualistic act. Within the broad scope of literature’s rituality, Watthee-Delmotte has, in the past few years, explored (French-language) literature’s expressions of death and grief. This research interest has led to numerous papers, and, perhaps ultimately, to a book entitled Dépasser la mort. L’agir de la littérature [Going beyond death: The influence of literature]. Dépasser la mort is not a monograph, but a collection of 24 essays on literary texts that all address death and grief as a topic. The separate essays are rather short (the longest counting only 15 pages) and each deal with different literary case studies. This heterogeneity of cases does not obfuscate the clear ambition of Watthee-Delmotte’s book, which is to demonstrate literature’s strong role or influence (l’agir) in society or in individual lives in the face of death. Watthee-Delmotte shows, among many other things, how literary texts are often used by individual readers in grief, how they model processes of grief with which readers can identify, how they defend the importance of rituals in a secular world, or how they break taboos with which grief often goes along.
One of the great values of Watthee-Delmotte’s book is the rich diversity of authors it discusses. Apart from a few highly canonized French writers (such as André Malraux, Alphonse de Lamartine, or Marguerite Duras), Watthee-Delmotte presents many authors who do not necessarily occupy a prominent position in the contemporary international field. Their literary approaches to death and grief are nonetheless highly valuable, even often unique. Dépasser la mort allows us to discover, for example, the poetry of Béatrice Bonhomme, who has long hesitated to publish the very personal poems written after her father’s death – illustrating, in doing so, the difficult tension between the privacy and publicity of grief that seems so typical of our age. The chapter on journalist Sorj Chalandon’s novel Le Quatrième mur (The Fourth Wall, 2013), focusing on the war in Lebanon, raises the question of subjectivity in the genre of the novel and the genre of journalism, which both very often thematize death. These few examples also already show the variety of genres which are under scrutiny. Watthee-Delmotte analyzes novels and poems of grief as well as funerary speeches, non-fictional works, or stage plays.
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Dépasser la mort is to be read as an essay (rather than an exclusively scholarly book). Even though it contributes refreshing insights to the academic study of modern literature of mourning, Watthee-Delmotte’s book is, in the first place, an openly personal reflection. The title of the introduction, which could also be interpreted as a dedication (“À toi, qui n’as pas cessé de manquer” [“To you, who continues to be missed”]), already makes explicit the personal motivation for this book. The idea for the book arose, indeed, after the suicide of an intimate friend of the author. In this way, Dépasser la mort aims to show, through an analysis of several individual cases, what the author has experienced herself: “Et oui, la littérature peut être utile. Le vieil Hugo, qui avait le sens de la formule, clamait: Quoi ! l’art décroîtrait pour s’être élargi ! Non. Un service de plus, c’est une beauté de plus, et pour l’avoir expérimenté dans l’épreuve, je pense comme lui” (p. 251). Watthee-Delmotte’s personal voice is also audible in the several evaluations of the literary texts she discusses, or in the societal stances she adopts in the course of her book (for instance when she advocates the importance of rituals, or, more subtly, when she paradoxically describes the typically French preponderance of laicism as a new sacred value).
Watthee-Delmotte’s highly subjective tone makes this an enthusing book, yet it also constitutes one of the book’s flaws. Although the author seeks to highlight literature’s steady value in contemporary society, she mostly sticks to her own reading experience. To give but a few speaking examples, Watthee-Delmotte writes that “[o]n ne peut qu’être touché par un tel texte en lambeaux, singulièrement de la main d’un virtuose du langage [Stéphane Mallarmé]” (p. 29) or that “[l]’écrivain ne nous délivre pas de la mort, mais de la boule d’informulés qu’elle provoque” (p. 65). Despite the rhetorical use of general pronouns, Watthee-Delmotte does not convince me of the broader societal importance of literary texts, precisely because her approach restricts itself to an overtly subjective, often intuitive reading of isolated case studies. The few chapters which break the boundaries of a subjective experience include ‘Forces et limites de la citation’ (which touches upon personal uses of literary texts, but certainly not as exhaustively as, for instance, Joan Shelley Rubin’s Songs of Ourselves) and ‘Panthéoniser’ (which partly analyzes the effect on the audience of Malraux’s eulogy for resistance hero Jean Moulin). Watthee-Delmotte presents processes and rituals of grief in an equally universalizing fashion, whereas state-of-the-art research in the field of death studies offers ample evidence for the importance of differences in mourning between individuals and cultures.
The shortness of the chapters, moreover, excludes in-depth readings of the discussed case studies. Although the central aim of the book is to show literature’s unique and necessary role in humanity’s confrontation with death, the author unfortunately barely takes the time to highlight the specificity of literary form. While the analyses remain restricted to paraphrase and thematic readings, the (ideological) force of narrative structure or the added value of poetic form lie outside the book’s scope.
Apart from these slightly critical notes, which testify to the though-provoking potential of Watthee-Delmotte’s book, Dépasser la mort remains a must-read for many of us – for those who are interested in literature’s variegated responses to bereavement, for those who are eager to discover fascinating French-language literary authors and oeuvres, and especially for those who strongly doubt the prominent role of literature in our age.
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Although Watthee-Delmotte does not manage to transcend her personal experience as an exceptionally intelligent reader, she offers us a reference point to which we can all relate. And even those who stubbornly refuse to accept the necessity of literature can content themselves with a selection of funerary music, which the author has made available online to accompany the reading of her book.
Bram Lambrecht is a postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation of Flanders at the Department of Literary Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium (https://kuleuven.academia.edu/BramLambrecht)
