Relating Someone Else’s Story: A Comparative Reading of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Everything I Don’t Remember and Édouard Louis’ Histoire de la violence

Per Myren-Svelstad

doi:10.16993/rnef.35

Abstract

The article is a comparative reading of Everything I Don’t Remember by Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and Histoire de la violence by French author Edouard Louis. The main theoretical framework is Deleuzian/Guattarian affect theory, coupled with Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of storytelling and selfhood. Both novels depict a narrative situation where a person has their story told by someone else, and thus provide striking accounts of how individuals relate and affect each other. Moreover, the narrative form of the novels presents identity, solidarity, and love not as predefined categories language can represent, but rather as troubled and unstable phenomena produced and altered through stories.

Highlights

How does it feel when someone else narrates the story of your life? How may narrative form produce, and challenge, one’s understanding of oneself? Swedish novelist Jonas Hassen Khemiri (b. 1978) and French author Édouard Louis (b. 1992) both treat vexed questions of individual and collective identity, the inescapability of politics, and how to remember and accurately portray someone’s life story
The first part of the article consists of a short discussion of the two works and their authors. While both are often read from the perspective of identity politics, the part argues that affect theory and the philosophy of Cavarero provide a more useful approach for discussing how Khemiri and Louis depict identity as a question of relational storytelling, constantly affecting and being affected by the stories of others
The crucial point, is that such “autofictional traces” (Karlsson, 2014) can be understood as an artistic device that fundamentally questions the possibility of controlling one’s own life story

Summary

Literature as Identity Politics

The plot of Everything I Don’t Remember revolves around a triangle of desire involving three Swedes of mixed ethnic background. A stranger sits down next to him to try and comfort him, but Vandad is unable to answer – the grief he feels cannot be put into words This is how he describes the scene to the main narrator: It felt good to have his arm there, I felt his warmth, smelled his sweat smell, in the background I heard the guide voice starting over, the actor’s voice welcoming the tourists to this guided tour and when the train was meant to be crossing the Djurgården bridge instead of sitting at the edge of the road in Solberga, the voice said ‘Stockholm. Vandad’s love for Samuel never appears in verbal categories, in whats, but exclusively in the affects and constantly shape-shifting relation between them This assemblage continues even after Samuel’s death, as Vandad retrospectively reveals the meaning of Samuel’s life to him. Conceptualised emotions, the novel seems to say, merely amount to a tenuous and imprecise verbalisation of affects

A Genderless Love Story

Concluding Remarks