Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory by Oana Panaïté

Abstract

This rich comparative analysis of literary works on death delves into the performative act of writing death, first as an act of remembering turned to the past, then as an intimate trajectory turned to the future, by installing a post-mortem textual monument, à la Mallarmé. When writing is rendered visible as a process rooted in the present, the text is revealed as an “act of mourning, not a fiction of mourning” (3). The French and Francophone writers chosen by Panaïté as case studies—Linda Lê, Patrick Modiano, Assia Djebar, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Maylis de Kerangal—form a literary canon investigating death as an event to be reactualised by the literary text, creating “narratives of the aftermath” (2) as they convey the chaos of our current world. These authors also favor an experimental approach against the hegemony of linear storytelling. For each instance of necro fiction, Panaïté relies on precise close reading to analyze the textual installation and its effects on time, space, memory, and narrative, thus resisting reading as a monolithic gesture. Drawing its interdisciplinary approach from narratology, trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary French thought, the author defines necrofiction as an ensemble of narratives emphasizing memorialization as the search for an ethical account of the past that weaves together the personal and the political (29-30). Through a “thematized, ritualized, enunciative, and meta narrative engagement with the event of death,” (30) necrofiction reassesses the meaning of finitude and memory, going beyond the dichotomy of life and death. Inhabiting this “duality” (178) and focusing on the metanarrative level of her corpus, Panaïté challenges the notion that literature’s representational power is its center of gravity, and addresses the failures of literature by exploring what lies at the threshold, at the intersection of genres, and embracing hybridity. Embracing the diversity of francophone cultures and territories, the author analyzes spectres, ghosts, zombies, and other forms of haunting in the craft of literature: the plastic nature of “the dead as a collective entity” in Linda Lê (36), the “literary cenotaph” (54) that unfolds “literal duplications and mirror images” in Patrick Modiano (74), the polyphonic artificial crypt favoring hesitation over blind faith in Assia Djebar (106), the narrative zombification endowed with negative poetics in Patrick Chamoiseau (130), and the aesthetics of local and global crisis in Maylis de Kerangal’s migration-inspired text, which calls for a form of “attentional activism” (172). The conclusion of each chapter replaces the examined novel in the overall corpus, thereby advancing the author’s reflection on the genre of necrofiction. This book could be a valuable addition to a survey course on genres of storytelling in twentieth-century and contemporary literature, and could be included in seminars on narration and trauma.