Le soi dans le silence de la mort de l’autre : les Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques de Catherine Mavrikakis

"When the narrator of Catherine Mavrikakis’ novel A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning (2000) learns of the consecutive passings of several of her close friends, she transforms this experience into text. In this paper, we analyze Catherine Mavrikakis’s textualization of the ineffable death and loss of the other as a condition of awareness of one’s own finitude. By applying several narratological and theoretical tools to the text, we show how, using the writings but also the life of Hervé Guibert as a hypotext, the narrator articulates her own understanding of death by gathering the multitude of the dead under the banner of a single Hervé."