- Title
- Spleen noir: images de Marianne dans les petits poèmes en prose de Léo Malet et Frédéric Cathala
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- France and Australia Face to Face = Australie/France Regards Croisés p. 143-160
- Relation
- http://www.lesindessavantes.com/db/record.php?id=171
- Publisher
- Indes Savantes
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2008
- Description
- This chapter establishes how the traumatic period of the years immediately following the Liberation of Paris in 1944 is represented allegorically in the crime novels of Léo Malet, and especially in the transition from his Occupation novels to his Liberation novels, with the latter being far more fetishistic in their world-view. This Parisian literary response to psychological trauma recalls that of the mid-nineteenth century, which saw Charles Baudelaire create his new prose poetics in response to the Haussmannization of the city. By revealing how Baudelaire's prose poems offer a fetishistic world-view, via their maintenance in parallel of two mutually exclusive entities (abstract values and the real world; poetry and prose), it will be seen how the fetishistic ploys in post-war French noir hinge, intertextually, on prose poetics. This scenario will finally be re-mapped onto Frédéric Cathala's contemporary Paris, revealing that the Paris-based plot with which readers are presented in L'Arbalète ou la vraie vie commence simultaneously veils another plotline, whose absence is symbolized by a number of key fetishes in the text. Again, the key to Paris-based, fetishistic crime fiction is seen to lie in nineteenth-century prose poetics.
- Subject
- Léo Malet; crime fiction; French literature; prose; Frédéric Cathala; Charles Baudelaire
- Identifier
- uon:6728
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804781
- Identifier
- ISBN:9782846542067
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