Messies postmodernes ou messies fin-de-vingtième-siècle ? Résistances d’une figure mythique de fin de l’histoire chez Saramago, Palahniuk et Volodine

• Authors: Julie Schutz

Title variants

EN

Postmodern Messiahs or Turn-of-the-Twenty-FirstCentury Messiahs? Resistances of a Mythical End-ofHistory Figure in Saramago, Palhaniuk and Volodine

PL

Messies postmodernes ou messies fin-de-vingtième-siècle ? Résistances d’une figure mythique de fin de l’histoire chez Saramago, Palahniuk et Volodine

• Languages of publication: FR

Abstracts

EN

This article analyzes the permanence of mythical Messiah figures in three western novels of the twentieth century’s last decade narrating the end of the history: Ensaio sobre a cegueira by José Saramago (1995), Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996) and Des anges mineurs by Antoine Volodine (1999). While these three novels distance themselves from the religious Judeo- Christian tradition, their aesthetics are also hypercritical of modernism. These Messiah figures are then reconfigured to deconstruct traditional and modernist concepts, and to reject these old ideologies. Above all, they embody the essence of the fictional project, by putting an end to the linear and monosemic story metanarrative so as to develop new narrative possibilities. We will therefore characterize these figures as turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury Messiahs rather than postmodern Messiahs, to the extent that they relate the death of ideologies, but also try to propose new metanarratives.

PL

This article analyzes the permanence of mythical Messiah figures in three western novels of the twentieth century’s last decade narrating the end of the history: Ensaio sobre a cegueira by José Saramago (1995), Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996) and Des anges mineurs by Antoine Volodine (1999). While these three novels distance themselves from the religious Judeo- Christian tradition, their aesthetics are also hypercritical of modernism. These Messiah figures are then reconfigured to deconstruct traditional and modernist concepts, and to reject these old ideologies. Above all, they embody the essence of the fictional project, by putting an end to the linear and monosemic story metanarrative so as to develop new narrative possibilities. We will therefore characterize these figures as turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury Messiahs rather than postmodern Messiahs, to the extent that they relate the death of ideologies, but also try to propose new metanarratives.

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Gdański
• Journal: Cahiers ERTA
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 67-80

Dates

published

2014-01-01

Contributors

author

Julie Schutz