The AQPS Guide denies the sovereignty of literature

In his text published on Wednesday April 10, Patrick Moreau rightly denounces the publication, by the Quebec Suicide Prevention Association (AQPS), of a support guide intended for fiction authors. He notes the fact that in the “contemporary therapeutic society”, the writer must “comply with the recommendations of specialists, adopt good behavior which promotes the security of “vulnerable people”, make the discourse of imposed benevolence their own”. I would add that what is infuriating about this guide is also that it equates literature with other types of artistic and media production, as if we could compare the journalistic coverage of Gaétan Girouard’s suicide to the way Flaubert depicts Emma’s death in Madame Bovary. This amalgam denies the fundamental ambiguity which characterizes the great works of universal literature. However, the polysemy of the literary text is one of the reasons why emotional appropriation and the effect of imitation are more difficult. Furthermore, by putting this guide online, the AQPS suggests that it is the only one to have the legitimacy to address suicide, which it also reduces to a social issue. Is it not just as much a vast theological, philosophical and literary problem? How does the balance of the heart work in someone who definitively turns his back on the living? In his essay Carry your hand on yourself (1976), Jean Améry presents voluntary death as a mystery that literature should be able to approach with complete sovereignty: “We have the right to speak obscurely about what the light of clear language does not illuminate. »

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