Joseph Kessel

« Les œuvres complètes, testament éditorial de l’écrivain. Joseph Kessel ou le triomphe de l’œuvre vie », article dans L’intervention du support. Médiation esthétique et énonciation éditoriale, volume dirigé par Pascal Durand et Christine Servais paru aux presses universitaires de Liège en 2017, p. 77-92.

Les récits et les œuvres contemporaines s’inspirant du conte de La Belle au bois dormant reproduisent de nombreux stéréotypes issus de la culture du viol en les cachant sous le prétexte du merveilleux. Les auteurs et artistes reprennent par ailleurs les images médiatiques du vrai viol. Ainsi, l’atonie dans laquelle l’héroïne est plongée n’est plus un fait merveilleux mais un moyen de faire croire au lecteur que celle-ci se délecte des violences masochistes à son encontre. En réponse, des œuvres ultra contemporaines (pédagogiques, militantes, etc.) invitent à élargir la question du consentement au droit de consentir.

The contemporary stories and works inspired by Sleeping Beauty reproduce many stereotypes of rape culture, hiding it behind the marvellous topic. Authors and artists moreover utilize the images of “real rape” transmitted by the media. Thus, the atony in which the heroine is immersed is no longer a marvellous fact but a way to make the reader believe that she luxuriates in the masochistic violence committed against herself. Consequently, ultra-contemporary works (pedagogical, militant, etc.) invite us to widen the question of consent to the right of consent.

Analysis and comparison between three different works establishing a mutual dialogue: the novel by Joseph Kessel Belle de Jour (1928) and the two films related to it, Belle de Jour, by Luis Buñuel (1967) and Belle Toujours by Manoel de Oliveira (2006), with the aim of understanding the several dimensions implied in the process of semiotic transcodification operated by both filmmakers. A sliding of meaning, together with the formal changes happening in the passage from the book to the first film are intensified in the film by Oliveira, who, although explicitly wishing to establish a dialogue with Buñuel’s film, finally reveals a continuity going back to the literary origin of the whole process. Thus the final work testifies the intertextuality already present in the film preceding it, by rendering more complex the referred dialogue, through the response given both to the suggestions embodied in the film and to the hidden meanings it carries. This way a new dynamics of exchange is established between all three works which favours a permanent re-reading of each one, at the same shedding new light on the phenomenon of film adaptation and interarts relationship, namely between literature and film.

The article aims to expose and contest the gendered representation of betrayal in resistance movements. For a theoretical framework, I draw on Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of masculinist myths of femininity in The Second Sex, combined with contemporary feminist scholarship on the oppressive constructions of female subjectivity in debates on war and violence. I trace how the hegemonic visions of virile resistance tend to subsume the grey zones of women’s resistance activity under two reductive myths of femininity – the self-sacrificial mother and the seductive femme fatale – while obscuring the complexities of betrayal arising from women’s embodied vulnerabilities. I demonstrate the political relevance of this theoretical exploration on the example of two representative French Resistance novels, Joseph Kessel’s Army of Shadows and Roger Vailland’s Playing with Fire.

Joseph Kessel’s Army of Shadows paints a searing portrait of resistance in France during World War Two. It was written to serve propagandistic purposes, to help, in its way, the Free French win the war. The occasionally bewildering space Kessel explores is simultaneously that of moral outrage and moral compromise. Moreover, Kessel presents the book as both factual and, in a curious way, fictional, as a work of literature. The book, in short, embodies many things at once, held often in uneasy balance. Reading it now, almost 75 years after it was written, presents further problems, though also new opportunities for reflection on these themes.