Flattering the Analyst: Julien Green's "Epaves" as Judgmental Mirror

Abstract

While considering Epaves to be the best of the books he had written up to that time, Julien Green comments that, hardly had the novel appeared, deja le trepigne (Journal 166). Disconcerted by the spinelessness the hero evinces, by a murky and meanderous intrigue, Andre Rousseaux, in his dismissive remarks, may have echoed his contemporaries' prevalent views: ces epaves sont decevantes, he remarks of the characters; on ne sait si elles irritent davantage quand ils deambulent pour ne rien faire et dialoguent pour ne rien dire, ou quand leur prend des velleites de catastrophe qui n'aboutissent (qtd. in Petit, Notes 1314).1 This immobilized novel, in which toute action avorte, as Jacques Petit has observed (Notes 1314), where the characters' moral ugliness precludes identification the part of a reader, would seem to condition in a negative manner the transactive process Norman Holland describes (Freund 118). Rather than eliciting variations the identity theme one might projectively bring to the novel, Green's text presupposes that the readers themselves act as the characters' judgmental mirror, dissociating themselves from the maladaptive strategies these narcissistically wounded figures devise. What this essay will argue is that assigning a meaning to this presumptively meaningless novel, a structurally circular story of characters who do nothing except fear to die, is made possible only by the superior stance of a reader detached from the work. As Henriette, Eliane, and are enslaved to, and are products of each other's opinions, are inscribed in a way that prevents them from acting in the capacity of successful self-authors, the reader as analyst sees the text as transposing the other that is being diagnosed. Like Philippe, who limits himself at the end to dipping his hand in the Seine, readers retreat from the textual surface, from the mirror which does not reflect them. In describing Philippe, Jacques Decour admonishes: il ne faut pas dire que nous n'ayons rien de commun avec cet homme antiheroique, and further inquires: n'avons-nous pas nos abimes de bassesse et de lachete? Yet having distanced himself from the figure he judges by his complacent and self-conscious modesty, Decour distinguishes himself as purposeful subject from the parasitical type he disparages: Philippe represente, avec son inutilite et son ennui..., la fin d'une periode sociale (qtd. in Petit, Notes 1316).2 If