Bourdonnements de l’Autre. Trois jours chez ma tante d’Yves Ravey

Abstract

The novel Trois jours chez ma tante (2017) by Yves Ravey presents a main character who fits well in the tradition of the narrators in the author’s work: untrustworthy and in the throes of a mania which leads him to betray the people who are close to him. I propose to explain the strange behaviour of this narrator, a certain Marcello Martini, with reference to psychoanalysis, and in particular to Jacques Lacan’s theories pertaining to obsessional neurosis. We shall see that Marcello’s tendency towards betrayal and self-destruction reveals itself to be a “jouissance,” an effect of the position he occupies within the family structure, where he finds himself alienated from the mother and subject to the paternal law. More broadly, this study examines the presence of evil in Ravey’s work, which can be seen to be less an arbitrary or an intrinsic phenomenon than the consequence of a psychological structure which puts the very existence of the human subject into question.