L'Anatomie de la mort : Une étude de l’effet-de-personnage de la mort dans les romans de Claude Simon

Abstract

This thesis, consisting of five chapters, studies descriptions and images in the novels of Claude Simon which show death as an “effect of character”, in other words, as a sort of character endowed with the same traits as actual literary characters. The first chapter examines how theoreticians define literary characters. Due to the fact that death materializes as a quasi-character during the act of reading since the reader needs to decipher textual clues in order to visualize death as an effect of character, I refer to Vincent Jouve’s theory of the character-effect. The chapters that follow seek therefore to demonstrate that death possesses an anatomy which resembles that of literary characters. The second chapter concentrates on images of the dying body which are reminiscent of themes in the artistic works of the Dance of Death, of Vanitas, and of the grotesque, and which produce in the reader the impression that death has a physical body. The third chapter also analyzes descriptions of the suffering body, as well as metaphorical language in order to show that death possesses a speaking body. The fourth chapter focuses on the presence of the life drive in the representation of death. It seems that death desires life in the same way as the other characters, therefore I envision death with a body composed of drives. The fifth and final chapter pursues the affective body of death by studying descriptions of intense bodily experiences. By accumulating all the images of the different bodies, one sees the sketch of a character that I identify by the designation “the effect of character of death”.