Bernadette Desorbay, Dany Laferrière: La vie à l'œuvre, followed by an interview with the author - Francophone and Oral Literatures

French Literature Reviews - 2026

Bernadette Desorbay, Dany Laferrière: La vie à l'œuvre, followed by an interview with the author
Francophone and Oral Literatures

Review published in Acta Fabula (November 2021, vol. 22, no. 9): Samia Kassab-Charfi, "A Genial Enigma Named Laferrière"

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Presentation

The work of writer and artist Dany Laferrière is an exuberant celebration of existence and a revisiting of the world. It yields a vision of the physical origin of thought and a vitalism whose sources and singularities this study sets out to examine.

The writer who brought the Code Noir to light as an epigraph to How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired has made his style the privileged space to anchor his truth along with the unexpected insights that stem from it. These include the strong tribute paid during his induction into the Académie française to the author of The Spirit of the Law, whom many critics have nonetheless ceased to credit with an anti-slavery stance regarding the Atlantic slave trade.

Two motifs bring psychoanalysis and comparatism together: semblance, referring to the division of the speaking subject, and revenance, relating to transgenerational phantoms born of the unburied dead who multiplied from the triangular trade to Duvalierist zombification. Superimposed upon these are the voices of the writers with whom Dany Laferrière has forged strong literary kinships—Diderot, Bashō, Lawrence, Faulkner, Roumain, Whitman, Carroll, Miller, Bukowski, Tanizaki, Mishima, Charles, etc. Attentive also to political issues, including the one concerning the fraudulent independence debt, this original study explores the aesthetics and the hontology that the writer has developed from Quebec, where he took refuge at the age of 23, as well as his preference for the elegance of shared consideration.

The analysis is followed by a rich interview in which the writer evokes, beyond exile and his work on myths, the hesitations of desire that accompanied his adolescence in Port-au-Prince.

The Author

Holder of a European Doctorate in Philosophy and Letters, Bernadette Desorbay started at the Department of Comparative Literature at UCL/LLN and pursued her academic career abroad before settling in Berlin. Her field at HU covers Francophone cultures and literatures.

Table of Contents

  • General Introduction
  • Part I: Reversibility of the Intergenerational Course. The Question of Jouissance
  • Introduction
  • Chapter I – The Proper Name
  • Introduction
  • The Jouissance of the Proper Name
  • The Question of the Father
  • Time Bombs
  • The Motives for Exile
  • Chapter II – Dehontology
  • Introduction
  • Dehontology
  • The Fallen King
  • The Master's Debt
  • The Hermetic Code
  • The Trap of Paternity
  • The Master's Jouissance
  • The Question of Origins
  • The Desire of the Other
  • Chapter III – Sense and Jouissance
  • Introduction
  • Doing Nothing
  • Crossing Over
  • Parthenogenesis
  • The Ordeal of Castration
  • The Motif of Inversion
  • Dandyism
  • Conclusion
  • Part II: The Floating of the Real. The Question of the Beyond
  • Introduction
  • Chapter I – Blur
  • Introduction
  • The List
  • Sex in the Inkwell
  • Pornography
  • Chapter II – The Mirror of the Dead
  • Introduction
  • The Dead
  • Wonderland
  • The Imago
  • The Mirror
  • Metamorphosis
  • Pilgrim
  • Yonder
  • On the Threshold of Death
  • The Bungled Act
  • Chapter III – The Beyond
  • Introduction
  • Dante
  • Possession
  • Animism
  • Automatic Writing
  • Conclusion
  • Part III: Life at Work. A Matter of Style
  • Introduction
  • Chapter I – Consideration
  • Introduction
  • The Pen-Sword
  • Montesquieu
  • The Joke
  • Seduction
  • Diderot
  • Céline's Style, Gombrowicz's Tone
  • Conclusion
  • Chapter II – Darkness
  • Introduction
  • Henri Matisse
  • Magloire Saint-Aude
  • William Faulkner
  • Borges
  • Laclos: The Hold
  • Condorcet
  • Chapter III – The Body
  • Introduction
  • Tanizaki, Mishima, and Japan
  • D. H. Lawrence
  • Henry Miller
  • Conclusion
  • General Conclusion
  • Appendix (1)
  • Interview with Dany Laferrière
  • Appendix (2)
  • The Work
  • Appendix (3)
  • Bibliography
  • References to the Work of Dany Laferrière
  • General Bibliography
  • General Resources
  • Index

Dany Laferrière has established a distinctive place in contemporary literature through an oeuvre that bridges Caribbean roots and exile in Quebec. His writing often engages with historical memory, the legacy of political trauma, and a vast network of literary affinities spanning European, Asian, and American authors. Scholarship on his work frequently explores how personal trajectory intersects with broader aesthetic and cultural motifs, touching upon questions of identity, diaspora, and the creative process within the Francophone literary landscape of the Americas.

This volume examines the sources and singularities of the author's vitalism, considering both his stylistic choices and the recurring themes present in his books. By bringing together psychoanalytic perspectives, comparative frameworks, and political issues, the study traces the contours of an aesthetic developed across diverse geographical and cultural horizons. Readers interested in contemporary Francophone literature and stylistic analysis may find this detailed commentary and the accompanying interview particularly relevant to their inquiries.