The autopsy of amorous disenchantment to which Brigitte Haentjens invites us in Dark is the night captive. The author stages a woman captivated by a high-flying intellectual, a happy rooster in the midst of those he bewitches.
Pure Parisian, this novel crosses a Saint-Germain-des-Prés shrouded in a university aura, a jewel of often vain palavers. Writers, philosophers and great clerics from Sorbonne rub shoulders there. It also disintegrates the hopes raised by May 68.
“Brigitte Haentjens records here the chronicle of the shipwreck of a man, a couple, an entire generation”, announces the back cover. It is above all about the slow introspection of a woman who submits to a tyrant, apparently full of gentleness, who renounces her lucidity.
This novel should not be reduced to what might seem like the nth dissection of the hold of a man on a woman. Above all, we must remember the difficulties of this accomplished and brilliant woman faced with her own bankruptcy, her submission. The author does not spread the sharp wounds, the blows or the psychological tortures in a frontal way, but invites us on the contrary to a very slow, sinuous accompaniment, following the meanders of a bewitchment, of a thought which slowly opens to its own reality, to its disillusion.
The pages of this novel are rarely full, as if the short paragraphs were enough to give rise to troubles punctuated by sorrows and doubts. Coming from a childhood weighed down by the violence of the father, the narrator knows what it is all about and, nevertheless, lets herself fall straight into this haunting discourse of power and seduction.
We teach at Vincennes, we meet Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Hélène Cixous or Samy Frey, we are psychoanalysts and professors, we work in hospitals or in private practice, we also rub shoulders with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (as he must), thus sowing exoticism in a story that remains of a formidable banality by its frequency in any place as in any environment.
Yet, what is not trivial is the use of italicized questions that punctuate the novel. Because the narrator questions herself during her narrative confession. The reader can then see how this intellectual was able, over the years, to achieve full awareness of her condition and, while knowing the drift that was drowning her, let herself be carried away to the abandonment of the one whom she will never have learned to leave: “Has this dread of which you speak been renewed? Were you afraid of him or of your servility? »
It could be that those who love the novels of Annie Ernaux find their account in this story where the woman listens to the slightest noises of her lover, tries to keep his attention so strong is her pain of loving, sees the slow decline of the lover drunk on alcohol and artificial satisfaction.
This is a novel that continues the analysis of a soul on the edge of the abyss.