Le Complexe d’Ève: la pudeur et la littérature. Lectures de Violette Leduc et Marguerite Duras by Anaïs Frantz (review)

Anaïs Frantz’s monograph certainly challenges the reader. Engaging with its complexities, however, is immensely rewarding, not least by virtue of the finely wrought, probing analyses contained in its final section, which focuses principally on Duras’s Aurélia Steiner and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord and Leduc’s La Bâtarde and L’Affamée. Her study begins by attending to the ‘complexe d’Ève’, construed as that which ‘appréhende l’humain non pas à partir du vu ou du connu, mais du nu-voilé’ (p. 13), and to an understanding of pudeur, emblematized in the story of Eve, as a matter of an unveiling and veiling, of an oblique engagement, of a withdrawal of/from representation pertinent to a number of domains, including the literary. It articulates its own investigative project as an exploration of the scène de la découverte (p. 13), whose paradigm is Eve’s act, as it is transcribed and performed in the works of authors representative of postmodernity but inflected by the legacy of biblical culture. These works, Frantz proposes, deconstruct and redefine a pudeur allied to the feminine and exemplify a franchise littéraire (p. 14) that is not a practice of, or vehicle for, confessional truth-telling, but is, rather, an enactment of the unveiling/veiling habits and structures of literary discourse, an enactment of textual, poetic, and authorial working that disturbs narrative convention and logic and readerly expectation and invites, and inhibits, knowledge. The first section of Frantz’s essay, ‘La Pudeur et la littérature’, explores definitions of, and reflections on, pudeur offered in a variety of texts, historical and contemporary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary, culminating in reflections on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Her second section returns to the notion of the Eve complex and to the construction of pudeur emergent from the parable of the Garden of Eden, tracing its legacy through biblical and philosophical texts before returning to the literary arena and to manifestations of the dynamic between pudeur and travail littéraire. The third section, working from the premise that ‘il n’y a pas de littérature sans pudeur, c’est-à-dire sans scène de la découverte’ (p. 155), brings together a series of readings of texts by Leduc and Duras that variously communicate ‘le sentiment littéraire d’une pudeur’ (p. 214) by virtue of the practices of display/disclosure and veiling/withdrawal — of résistance poétique (p. 214) — in operation within them, not least on the level of narrative and textual practice. These readings, richly inter-implicated, offer compelling insights into the works with which they are engaged, and make a significant and valuable contribution to scholarship on Duras and Leduc. The style of Frantz’s study is characterized here and there by a habit of assertion, which can be a little jarring, but her critical practice is exemplary and well worth the effort of engagement.