The preterition is a well-known rhetorical figure that the Gradus defines as follows: “Pretend not to mean what you nevertheless say very clearly. » Bernard Dupriez presents following this definition a whole series of examples, including this ironic one, which is taken from theElectra by Jean Giraudoux: “I have no ulterior motives. I certainly don’t want to influence you… But if a sword like that killed your sister, we would be fine! »
It is the same literary process that Marie Hautval, “knowledge broker” at the Quebec Suicide Prevention Association (AQPS), uses when she presents the guide developed by this association to support authors who would like to address their works the question of suicide. “We don’t want to tell creators what to do,” she says. But all the advice given afterwards does help to tell them “what to do” and especially “what not to do”.
Especially since the guide in question plays the guilt card to the fullest, mentioning, for example, that the “contribution” of creators “is essential” to “building a suicide-free Quebec” and that we all support this regard to “a common responsibility”.
Obviously, preventing suicide is a laudable goal. At the same time, this approach by the AQPS, which follows the turmoil caused in 2022 by the warning from the Ministry of Health against the novel The boy with upside down feet by François Blais, is representative of a very current tendency to want, under the pretext of benevolence and concern, to enlist fiction and artistic creation in a permanent campaign for the prevention of all risks and the well-being of everyone.
However, it is perhaps not the role of art nor that of the fictional imagination, and even less the function of literature, to become a “vector of change”, as “a communication” could be. responsible” which “promotes awareness and prevention of this phenomenon”, by creating “realistic and authentic works” which bring “a better understanding of suicide”.
We would never stop listing the characters in literary works who commit suicide: Antigone, Dido, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, Othello, Phèdre, Werther, of course, just like Quasimodo, Javert, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and so many others. From Gérard de Nerval to Virginia Woolf, from Hubert Aquin to Nelly Arcan, writers who have taken their own lives are also legion. All this makes literature very suspect today.
But this discourse of all-out prevention, which wants to make it something “responsible”, in reality signs the death of any “authentic” literary work, that is to say in which a writer attempts to account for reality. with originality, sincerity and truth. By means of his writing, a true writer does not want to present reality as recommended by guides, research, studies, associations which are all at the service of noble causes and want our good, but as no one else other than he sees her. Without this commitment on his part, there is no work of value and literature is transformed into simple entertainment, or into another documentary medium.
This is the true and only responsibility of the writer. But it is also this unique status that he claims which is contested today, in the name of an incontestable Good which would be greater than him, greater than all of us. In contemporary therapeutic society, there is no longer any question for anyone of claiming their right to stand aside, even less of having the pretension of occupying an overlooking position. It is no longer seen as pride, worthy of dangerous irresponsibility. Like everyone else, those who write and create must then comply with the recommendations of specialists, adopt good behavior which promotes the safety of “vulnerable people”, make the discourse of imposed kindness their own.
In this world where the therapeutic approach is established as a cardinal virtue, the writer, renowned “creator”, therefore needs guides, sensitive readers and “knowledge brokers”. He no longer has the right to his freedom of creation, which is incompatible, Gide affirmed, with “good feelings” as with any “preventive aim of the work”. And if he persists in enjoying it, he will have to stuff his work with trauma warnings.
Zero risk is our last utopian hope. This utopia where the last fires of the idea of progress are consumed is completely foreign to this painting of the tragic condition of the man who made the heyday of literature. We want to believe that we have solutions for everything. In the absence of real ones, we multiply the warnings.
I try to imagine the cascade of trauma warnings that should be written in bold on the frontispiece page of the tragedies of Sophocles or those of Shakespeare: violence, verbal violence, sexist violence, feminicides, incest, toxic family relationships, misogynistic speeches, ageism, ableism, xenophobia and… numerous suicides. If the potential reader is not discouraged in advance, or even traumatized, by such a preamble, he will always be able to realize, as George Steiner writes, that asking “why Oedipus had to be chosen to suffer his misfortunes or why Macbeth had to meet the witches, is to ask a reason and a justification from the silent night.