Scenarios of Desire in the Fiction of Pascal Bruckner

Abstract

Pascal Bruckner's polyvalent novels constitute a compendium of discourses on desire, stretching from antiquity to the present. Our discussion focuses on a French legacy that features Laclos, Rousseau, Charles Fourier, Benjamin Constant, and René Girard through a reading of Bruckner's Lunes de fiel (1981). In particular, we identify several scenarios of desire whose failure is dissected in the course of the narrative. From the elective affinities of Romanticism to the exotic attraction of the other, from today's conventional bourgeois couples to serial lovers, all forms of monogamous relationship are set aside. In imitation of Constant's Adolphe, one protagonist (Franz) invests in "desiring desire," while a second (Didier) is characterized by his susceptibility to mimetic or triangular desire. The essay demonstrates also how Bruckner's essays on contemporary society (sexuality, consumerism, bourgeois worldviews) are rearticulated within his fictional frameworks, with a noteworthy shift from Rousseau's promises to the quirky critiques of Fourier. Finally, a look at the novel's narrative technique reveals a practice of mise-en-abyme where the author's apparent absence from the text is parried through a sleight-of-hand not unlike that of the novel's villain Franz.