Le retour du balancier : les modalités narratives du récit de vengeance dans Le Comte de Monte-Cristo d’Alexandre Dumas et dans J’irai cracher sur vos tombes de Boris Vian
Vengeance, by definition, is the act undertaken by a victim who, following an offense, decides to get justice by his own means. This narrative topos is not without representation in literature. Quite the opposite, it lays at the heart of numerous fictions from the antiquity, in which the gods avenge man’s hybris, through roman noir, where the archetype of the detective attempts to bring his own justice in a somber world, up to our contemporary fictions.  Thinkers, philosophers and theoreticians from all eras have attempted to identify the pillars which support vengeance in order to apprehend its (im)possibility to be “Just”. Such debate similarly reaches the literary world, where narratives go both ways. On the one hand, certain narratives idealize vengeance by representing the journey of a protagonist who succeeds, continuing through the vindictive quest, in achieving a transcendental Justice which proves cathartic for the reader. On the other hand, some narratives highlight the limits of personal justice by staging a protagonist unable to bring about vigilante redemption, thereby confronting the reader with an insoluble and problematic story.  This literary study will examine these two categories of the vindictive story to define their respective narrative modalities and to discern the ethical and affective meaning each category attributes to vengeance. In doing so, this research project will consider canonical works (Le Compte de Monte-Cristo et J’irai cracher sur vos tombes) as well as films (Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, Memento, etc.), which provide contemporaneity to this reflection. Building on works by Aristotle, René Girard, Umberto Eco and Michel Erman, I will situate the ethical debate and circumscribe the relations between catharsis and vengeance.  Ultimately, this research project addresses two intermeshed concerns: the ethical questions which emerge from revenge and the role of literary (or mediatic) representation in displaying vengeance thought. This dual reflection constitutes the originality of this project.
Vengeance Justice Affect Ethics Cathartic Acathartic