Fictions of "la tournante": Fallacies, Facts, and Effects

Dylan Sebastian Evans (1)

1 Department of French and Francophone Studies

The distinction from which this article departs — as restated by Sigmund Freud in the first of his "Contributions to the Psychology of Love" — sets science against literature: the former, having totally renounced the improper, because "unreasonable", influence of affect ("die vollkommenste Lossagung vom Lustprinzip"), deals only with the facts, leaving to the latter the production of certain (emotional, aesthetic, literary) effects. Analysis of Édith Wolf's "En réunion" (2003), Élisa Brune's "La Tournante" (2001) and Fabrice Genestal's "La Squale" (2000), however, reveals the convergence of ontological and discursive facts to be the product of signifying effects. By laying bare the performative processes by which fictional depictions of gang-rape in France came to be "taken as", as if having "the force of", scientific fact, this article explores (and explodes) Freud's science-literature opposition. What is more, the absolutist terms upon which Freud's assessment stands imply that the primary use of language is to convey meaning, and that words bear an originary relation to things. By demonstrating, with reference to each of the three texts under consideration, how the correspondence of words and images with real things in the world is achieved, this article trenches upon (and troubles) this commonplace misconception. For the denial and/or the dispossession of this potential — not of the representational power to describe, but of the performative power to construct, relations of correspondence with reality — is to perpetrate that which John Langshaw Austin, the British linguist and father of speech-act theory, calls the "'descriptive' fallacy". In the final part of this article, I problematize this particular use of language — this inwrought pattern of locutionary usage — further. For, by insisting upon those elements which are, by different definitions, "constative", "literal", and "representational", and by establishing such firm correlations between their fictional depictions of "la tournante" and the scientific discourse of facts, Wolf's "En réunion", Brune's "La Tournante" and Genestal's "La Squale" conceal that which is ideological and allegorical through the efficacy of their discursive effects.

Mots clés: Narrative Matters 2014; science; literature; fictions of "la tournante" (gang-rape); rhetoric; narrativity; epistemology; correspondence theory of truth; descriptive fallacy; performativity

Domaines: Littératures

Dylan Sebastian Evans. Fictions of "la tournante": Fallacies, Facts, and Effects. Narrative Matters 2014: Narrative Knowing/Récit et Savoir, American University of Paris; Université Paris Diderot — Paris-VII., Jun 2014, Paris, France. ⟨hal-01079319⟩