Silence, Talk, and Voice in the Ritual Encounter: François Bon’s L’Enterrement and Laurent Mauvignier’s Loin d’eux

Abstract

In Loin d'eux and L'Enterrement, Laurent Mauvignier and Francois Bon offer ostensibly quite different treatments of the same basic subject: the suicide of a young man and its aftermath. Loin d'eux has a three-part structure, each section of the novel corresponding to a different period in the characters' attempts to accommodate this family tragedy: the first part is devoted to the days following the funeral, the second records the thoughts and feelings of the characters two years later, and the third returns to the day on which news of the suicide reaches the young man's relatives. L'Enterrement also has a three-part structure; however, Bon has opted for a fugal or canonic arrangement, the accounts of different stages of the funeral interrupting and relaying each other and establishing a complex imitative and contrapuntal dynamic. (2) Loin d'eux is composed of a series of monologues that chart the shifting relationships within a single family and through which the survivors obsessively rehash the prehistory and the aftermath of the suicide, picking over remembered snippets of conversation, moving back and forth between sympathy, bewilderment, hurt, reproach, and self-recrimination. L'Enterrement is recounted by a single narrator, a school friend of the deceased who is attending the funeral and whose account is characterized by a quasi-phenomenological attention to sensory data, a highly developed graphic awareness of the complexity of human movement and gesture, and an acute alertness to conversational and comportmental incongruities and to both the humor and the poignancy inherent in those incongruities. Loin d'eux is set in the small town of La Bassee in the industrial north; L'Enterrement takes place in the village of Champ-Saint-Pere in the Vendee, a region dominated by agriculture and tourism. Finally, the situations and interests of the two young men at the center of these drames familiaux were very different: Luc, the son of a factory worker, left home to work in a Paris bar in order--he hoped--to pursue his passion for cinema; Alain, the son of a carpenter, had read widely in astrophysics and cosmology, was an expert seaman, and worked for a specialist agency in Sables d'Olonnes as a convoyeur bringing ships back from far-flung parts of the globe. However, despite these very evident surface differences in approach, the two texts are characterized by a number of common concerns and features. Like their nouveau roman forebears, Bon and Mauvignier share a fascination for the human drive to make sense of the world and for the mechanisms by which man tries to signify. They also differentiate themselves from that literary ancestry by their focus on characters of working-class and paysan origin who, for various reasons, are socially marginal. Indeed, it might be argued that Mauvignier and Bon democratize the nouveau roman's preoccupation with meaning, code, and convention. In Loin d'eux and L'Enterrement, this exploration is conducted through an examination of the impact that suicide has upon a community and its sense-making constructs and practices. In both texts, the evocation of ritual encounters--the quotidian rites of commensality, aggregation, and congregation, the rites by which life-cycle events are solemnized--provides the framework for an examination of the ways in which family and, in the case of L'Enterrement, the wider social group attempt to accommodate an event that radically transgresses the codes within which it normally operates. Among the most striking features of both texts is the complex role played by silence, (3) speech, and narrative voice, as individuals and groups of characters, many of whom have only very basic levels of education, struggle to interpret both the said and the unsaid, to find words for emotions that refuse to be contained within their limited vocabulary, to give voice to feelings that have long been repressed and to repress feelings that threaten to breach the normal limits of acceptable self-expression. …