Étrangeté et étranger dans l’univers de Philippe Claudel

• Main Author: Dominique Bonnet
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Portugaise d'Etudes Françaises 2014-05-01
• Series: Carnets
• Subjects: Claudel (Philippe); strangeness; foreign; xenophobia; abandonment
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/carnets/1145

In Brodeck’s Report, Philippe Claudel addresses the theme of the regard of a community towards the alien. In a small border town, a local resident, Brodeck, is charged against his will by the rest of the community to prepare a report on a dramatic event. By means of this forced writing about the lynching of a foreigner by the rest of the villagers, Brodeck plunges back into his recent past, in the suffering of the prisoners’ camps in his own experience of xenophobia. It is then that in Brodeck’s writing, anonymous text and intimate confession are joined and take us towards the unspeakable pain, to appease it through the writing of survival. In our article we will attempt to show how Philippe Claudel built in this timeless tale, in this anonymous reconstruction of the facts, what the Brodeck’s Report is: a plea against xenophobia.