Abstract EN:

The aim of this study is to compare Franz Kafka's Das Schloß (1922), Andrei Platonov's Cevengur (1929) and Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), at the crossroads of literary hermeneutics and political thinking. Wandering, a central theme in all three novels, is the starting point for this comparison, which then proceeds to highlight the similar way in which the authors reflect on the problem of living together with other individuals - an issue which is all the more urgent and radical in view of the European historical context after the First World War. In the first place, the theme of wandering, which reverberates on the level of characters (giving birth to vagrants, surveyors or outcasts) as well as plot structure (marked by abortive quests, a temporal order of permanent delays, and problematics of incompletion), generates an inquiry concerning the philosophy of fictional forms. In turn, this spurs us on to decipher the philosophical and sociopolitical questions at stake in these three novels, namely a profound crisis in the foundations of the social pact ; a shifting in the frontiers of the political body, made explicit by fictional variations around the process of exclusion ; an investigation into the figure of the outcast, throughout various extreme situations ; and a crisis which threatens the individual itself, through various conflictual dialogues. Finally, the fact that this course peters out in philosophical and political irresolution invites us to question those three types of ambivalent writing, by examining the strategies which the authors deliberately set up in these three novels in order to blur any possibility of arriving at a definite judgement on political or philosophical issues.