Abstract EN:

In their agonistic family novels fraught with demystifying irony, Thomas Bernhard, Claude Simon, Juan Benet, and António Lobo Antunes write both against and along the lines of national epics. Genealogical fiction turns into a critical prism that, though its novelesque excess, allows the authors to make sense of collective history. The four writers debunk the mystical heritage and moral norms linked with the biological relationships which essentialize the national body. Such debunking necessarily implies a dismantling of the traditional narrative understood as a delusive monument resting on the development of a plot ; it thus reinvents the writing of history, which simultaneously resorts to an epos (understood as a reciting voice), assumes its fictional status, and elaborates other strength of these novels, which shift the issue of genealogy as they rethink the family and the community by undermining the grand narratives and their symbolic commonplaces. The novels suggest that mortality is a shared experience founding the community, thus inventing an ethics of vulnerability and highlighting historical violence as a singalur memory to pass on. They also unfold a multiform poetics of relation, in which an interplay of inherited relationships, but also inventive affiliations, elective affinities, and unpredicted networks are at stake. Such shifts have political, ethical, and esthetic import : as opposed to the models of narrative closure and organice whole, the novels aim to rephrase and invent forms of subjectivation and ways of listening, as well as they aim to imagine new ways of living together and create textual devices that craft forms of commonality.