Recently published French works or works in French on Hemingway

Abouddahab, Rédouane. La mort à l’œuvre dans les nouvelles de Hemingway, une poétique de la cruauté. 3 vols. Lille, A.N.R.T, Université de Lille III, 1992.

This three-volume study intends to renew the reading methodology of Hemingway’s (short) fiction. Indeed, it goes against the grain of critical opinion, rejecting all kinds of referential interpretations of Hemingway’s fiction and the correlated notions of style as communication, intentional fallacy, representation…, to highlight and celebrate the internal and self-sufficient verbal reality of the Hemingway text. The study develops also “a poetics of cruelty.” Cruelty is not considered as an emotion with psychological and moral extensions, but as a creative energy including the inseparable energies of life and death, whose work affects the very basis of the verbal texture: the letter. Hence, more than the poetics of the signifier, the study explores Hemingway’s poetics of enunciation. Elaborating a methodology drawn largely from Jakobson, Benveniste, Artaud, Bataille, the “Tel Quel” post-structuralist authors, but heavily indebted to Lacan, the work highlights the poetic force of the Hemingway text, to the detriment of the imaginary all-powerful so-called Hemingway-Code, as Hemingway’s writing stages finely otherness and makes the careful reader hear the multiple voices of otherness that intimately speak from within.

—-. “Écriture de soi et soie de l’écriture dans ‘Now I Lay Me’ de Hemingway.” La Lettre et l’écrit, Psychanalyse et recherches universitaires 1 (1994): 165-181.

The paper deals with a story that has usually been associated with Hemingway’s supposedly traumatic experience while at war in Italy. Here “Now I Lay Me” is not read as an autobiographical recollection in disguise, but as the dramatization of the writer’s both tragic and epic confrontation with the forces of jouissance (in the Lacanian sense). Nick’s intense mental activity is considered indeed a metaphor of writing, which simultaneously unleashes and contains the attractive and repulsive forces of jouissance.]

—. “ ‘Indian Camp’: Nick Adams et l’entre-deux.” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 67 (janvier 1996): 90-98.

This narrative elucidates an Oedipus situation through metonymic displacement and metaphoric substitution. The other side of the lake is not seen as the place of the Indian, but as a scene where Nick’s unconscious perception of his own parents is staged in a radicalized guise, through the figure of the Indian possessing mother and suicidal father. Theme and structure are considered from the angle of enunciation and poetics.

—. “Hemingway et l’écriture du silence.” In Valeurs de contrôle. Ed. M. Vénuat. Clairmont-Ferrand: Centre de Recherche sur les Littératures Modernes et Contemporaines, Université Blaise Pascal, 1999, 165-182.

Hemingway’s practice of omission implies the esthetic and intuitive consciousness of two dimensions of silence: the unsaid, which is the author’s private secret (esthetic, neurotic, erotic) and falls within the logic of reception; and the unspeakable, which implies the text’s staged awareness of the limits of language.

—. “Scène américaine et scène textuelle: Hopper et Hemingway.” Les Cahiers du GRIMH 1 (2000): 235-250.

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks can be interpreted as a pictorial quotation of Hemingway’s “The Killers.” The article explores also the structural elements that account for the misleading naturalistic “transparency” of the works of both artists, and unfolds the complex network of their surface simplicity.

—. “L’Œil et le soleil: Bataille avec Hemingway.” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 84 (mars 2000): 61-76.

The French philosopher not only appreciated Hemingway’s work, but was also inspired by it while writing his early novel Histoire de l’œil and other later works.

—. “Poétique et érotique de la mort chez Bataille et Hemingway.” In Études de poétique. Ed. Josiane Paccaud-Huguet et Michèle Rivoire. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2001, 79-98.

The essay analyses the structures of the erotic narrative and the poetic narrative through a comparative study of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil. Hemingway’s poetics is heavily based on the process of sublimation, Bataille’s is rooted in the violence of perversion.

—.“Le Sombre jardin d’Hemingway: jouissance et écriture dans The Garden of Eden.” La Recherche à l’heure de la psychanalyse, Psychanalyse et recherches universitaires 7 (2004): 139-159.

David’s writing is situated in between two forms of jouissance: Catherine’s, a symbolical figure of the aggressive seducing and daring mother, and the father’s, a figure of the violent Other. The embedded fiction attempts to elucidate the father’s jouissance; in the frame narrative, David goes through Catherine’s jouissance and so doing goes through his own fantasy.

Hily-Mane, Geneviève, Ernest Hemingway in France: 1926-1994. A Comprehensive Bibliography, Reims : Presses Universitaires de Reims, 1995.

Kundera, Milan. “À la recherche du présent perdu.” L’Infini 37 (mars 1992): 22-34.

Focusing on “Hills Like White Elephants,” the writer decries the moralizing readings of Hemingway’s work, premised upon unrelenting and so injudicious biographical interpretations.

Liny, Marie-Pierre. “Le Récit de la mort chez Hemingway.” Études de poétique. Ed. Josiane Paccaud-Huguet et Michèle Rivoire. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2001, 65-77.

The theme of death in Hemingway’s fiction in the light of Freud’s theory on the death drive and Bataille’s theories on eroticism and death.

Mathé, Sylvie. “ ‘Qu’as-tu fait de ton talent?’: Hemingway et ‘The Snows of Kilimandjaro.’ ” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 73 (juin 1997): 91-105.

The article focuses on the play of enunciation in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and shows how the narrative stages the theme of metafiction.

Naugrette, Jean-Pierre. “The Sun Also Rises:  Hemingway  et  la problématique de la citation picturale.” Lectures aventureuses. La Garenne-Colombes: L’Espace Européen, 1990, 197-222.

The essay deals with the way Hemingway uses a different generic code (painting) as his work refers implicitly and explicitly to Cézanne and Picasso. Hemingway learned how to use Cézanne’s post-impressionism and Picasso’s cubism for literary purposes, especially in The Sun Also Rises. Yet, beyond the notion of influence, what is of interest is to see how Hemingway uses in an original manner the same techniques as cubist painters to create his own style.

Pozzi, Francesco. “Vie dans l’après-midi: essai psychanalytique sur Hemingway.” Gradiva: Revue Européenne d’Anthropologie Littéraire 2.1 (1997): 41-60.

Applies psychoanalytical theories to Hemingway and his work, focusing mainly on the relation between death, emptiness, and the maternal figure.

Salati, Marie-Odile.  “La  Blessure  dans  A  Farewell  to  Arms  de Hemingway.” In   Écriture(s)  de  la  guerre  aux  États-Unis des années 1850  aux  années  1970. Ed. Anne Garrait-Bourrier and Patricia  Godi-Tkatchouk. Clermont-Ferrand : Presses  Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2003, 97-110.

The article analyzes the triple significance of the war wound in the 1929 novel: an individual experience in fragmentation and alienation, the inscription of the period’s shattering event in the soldier’s flesh, and the irruption of contingency and irrationality into the old world.

—. “La cartographie de la surface dans les premières œuvres d’Ernest Hemingway.” In La surface. Écriture et représentation. Ed. Mathilde La Cassagnère and Marie-Odile Salati. Chambéry: Laboratoire Langages, Littératures, Sociétés, 2005, 251-273.

Surfaces are viewed as special zones of significance, the scene of the event in the Deleuzian sense. They prove to be the mind’s rampart against the destructiveness of emotion, a safeguard against nothingness, as they are the only recordable testimonies of the protagonist’s unspeakable experience and a way to restore meaning to the shattered self.

—. “Hemingway et l’obsession de la perte après la première guerre mondiale.” In Les formes de l’obsession. Ed. Marc Amfreville and Claire Fabre. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2005, 59-71.

The vicarious expressions of the obsession of loss in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms: narrative displacement, repetition with its twofold effect of setting the fatality of loss into motion and stalling it, and the metaphorical representation of the act of writing as courting self-loss through ever-renewed attempts to glimpse the traumatic horror scene.