<i>L’Expression de la culpabilité chez Jules Supervielle</i> . Par <scp>Anne Lainard-Nutini</scp> <i>L’Expression de la culpabilité chez Jules Supervielle</i> . Par Lainard-NutiniAnne. (Critiques littéraires.) Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018. 332 pp.

Critical studies of Jules Supervielle’s writings have underlined his naïve vision of the world and his predilection for ideas and images surrounding nature, innocence, nostalgia, and childhood, as well as the presence of the fantastical. This work focuses on the hitherto unexplored theme of guilt, of its overarching presence as a consequence of tensions between remorse, a quest for purity and transcendence, and recognition of mortality. The trauma of losing his parents, who died from drinking contaminated water, it is believed, while on a family trip from Uruguay to France when he was eight months old, and his discovery at around the age of nine that those whom he thought to be his parents were in fact his uncle and aunt, had a profound and lasting effect on the child and future writer. According to Anne Lainard-Nutini, ‘[c]e traumatisme, susceptible d’engendrer un déséquilibre psychique fatal, est à l’origine du besoin d’écrire’ (p. 21). Consequently, Supervielle’s works display a discourse of compensatory optimism whose aim is to achieve reparation in the face of guilt. Works studied include Supervielle’s poetry, novels, tales, plays, autobiographical writings, and correspondence. Stylistic analyses and the symbolic dimension of his works reveal the driving forces of the avowal of his perceived guilt, and its assuagement, rooted in his status as orphan belonging to two cultures, that of Uruguay and France. History plays an important role in the development of a dialogue between guilt and innocence, in that Supervielle’s attempts at redemption are expressed through the compassion that he expresses, for example, for the plight of the Boers at the hands of the British in the Boer War, in his poetry collection, Les Brumes du passé, and his revulsion at Franco’s bloody repression of republicans in the Spanish Civil War. In this way, a universal repentance expressed across the backdrop of the Western collective conscience serves to elucidate and condemn evil in an attempt at universal solidarity. Supervielle’s early poetry reveals a young man yearning to be whole, to be forging his own way in the literary world, liberated from the shadow of those whom he admired and who preceded him, such as Villon, Hugo, and Baudelaire. This avowal of his weakness underlines his desire to affirm his own capacities and talents, and leads to ‘la conquête libératrice de soi’ (p. 154). Supervielle’s quest for the assuagement of his guilt produces liberating images and ideas which are born, however, by deforming a normally realistic representation of the world in order to achieve redemption. An example of this is the description of the butchered animal in ‘La Vache de la forêt’, in which ‘l’imaginaire transgresse les frontières du vécu en convertissant l’abattage cruel en un cérémonial sacré’ (p. 238), according to Lainard-Nutini. The bloody act is elevated into a sacred ceremony. Supervielle’s works are steeped in self-doubt followed by self-affirmation, and in a sometimes fantastical creativity; above all, they offer a glimpse into his ‘mythologie personnelle’ (p. 318). This study eloquently elucidates, with evidence of significant research, the myriad forms of guilt expressed in his work, and makes an original and useful contribution to Supervielle studies.

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