Commemoration, initiation and art in Pierre Bergounioux: La Mort de Brune and Kpélié 1

Abstract

La Mort de Brune and Kpélié were published in successive years — 1996 and 1997 respectively — and cover largely the same or related biographical material drawn from Bergounioux's childhood in Brive.2 Both texts evoke the dreariness of life in a small French provincial town in the 1950s and the inhospitableness of the surrounding landscape. Both describe in detail the principal coordinates of the young Bergounioux's life. Most notable among these coordinates is the H6tel Labenche, which adjoined the family home and which housed various administrative and educational establishments, including the junior section of the author's primary school, his music school and the dispensary he attended for painful weekly injections. Also described in both are the library where he spent his Saturday afternoons, the museum, certain noteworthy artworks (in particular, Jean Jacques Scherrer's 1881 painting, Assassinat du Maréchal Brune), certain of the town's public monuments and some of its inhabitants (the suicidal photographer/painter who lived next door to the Bergounioux family, the woman whose son had brought back shrunken human heads from his rain forest travels). This overlap between the two texts, which is all the more conspicuous since they are both relatively short, should, however, come as no great surprise to the reader who is already familiar with Bergounioux's work. Indeed, his texts return repeatedly to the same characters, locations and situations; his childhood and adolescence are retold again and again, and he revisits almost obsessively his relationships with other family members, as he tries to understand the impact that both immediate family dynamics and ancestry have had on his temperament and to accommodate the more painful memories of childhood, especially the death of his maternal grandfather and his very difficult relationship with his morose and hyper-critical father.3