Reenacting Rape in Édouard Louis’s History of Violence

Abstract

At the core of the French writer Édouard Louis’s second novel Histoire de la violence (2016) is a traumatic episode experienced by the writer himself: a physical and sexual assault by a young man of Kabyle1 origin, named Reda, whom the writer met on his way home from a Christmas Eve dinner with his best friends Didier and Geoffroy. As Édouard2 crosses Place de la République in Paris by foot, a smiling young man starts following him. Struck by his beauty and attracted to his breath, Édouard gives up his initial impulse to ignore the stranger and the two men start a conversation. After a few minutes, Édouard ends up inviting Reda into his apartment and they make love repeatedly. As Reda gets ready to leave Édouard’s apartment, Édouard realizes his telephone is missing. When he spots his iPad in Reda’s jacket, he confronts him about his now missing phone. This unleashes Reda’s uncontrolled anger and violence: Reda first strangles Édouard with a scarf, then threatens him with a gun, and finally rapes him before leaving the apartment at dawn. Histoire de la violence is constructed as a fragmented, polymorphous, and polyphonic web of renditions of what happened from the moment Édouard left his friends on Christmas Eve to the night of 25 December, when the criminal police left his apartment after securing fingerprints and DNA evidence. Édouard’s sister, Clara, recites in front of her mysteriously silent husband what Édouard told her about the fateful hours before, during, and after the rape. In a mesmerizing narrative mixing her own popular vernacular with standardized language, Clara gives direct and indirect quotes from her brother’s narration. She also makes digressions in which she narrates episodes from Édouard’s earlier life and comments on her brother’s personality, decisions, gestures, and reactions.