Entre mimétique du rien et réalisme traumatique

Abstract

This article is based on a series of contemporary British novels (Saturday by Ian McEwan, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro and Night Train by Martin Amis, among others) examined in the light of trauma theory and criticism. It postulates that such narratives belong to what is known as traumatic realism, a mode that relies on realism of effect more than on realism of aspect by presenting the symptoms of trauma. In so doing, those texts are intent on evoking a nothing—i.e. the traumatic content that escapes the consciousness of the traumatised subject—through the means of an excess of narrative matter. This is done by respecting the rules of what Christine Buci-Glucksmann has termed 'a mimesis of nothing’, which is characteristic of baroque aesthetics, and through the resort to the negative presentation inherent in the aesthetics of the sublime.

Keywords

• M. Amis
• K. Ishiguro
• I. McEwan
• baroque
• mimesis of nothing
• nothing