My dissertation demonstrates how representations of schizophrenic characters in novels can combat widespread misuses of psychiatric terms and help readers empathize with mentally ill people if we read these novels with some understanding of psychiatry and the psychoanalysis that influenced them. I undertake a critical genealogy of the schizophrenia concept's migration from the mental health professions to fiction, concentrating on the period from the German invasion of Paris in June 1940 to the events of May 1968, with some attention to contemporary uses of the schizophrenia concept by cultural theorists. Experimental novelists writing during the apogee and aftermath of National Socialism from the 1940s to the 1970s represent schizophrenia as they understood it to express the painful emotions produced by World War II's challenge to the value of experimental writing. In the postwar fiction of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Georges Perec (1936-1982), imitating schizophrenia results in careful disclosures of disintegrating life-worlds: in Beckett's case, the dissolution of the James Joyce circle and the communities of modernist exiles it exemplified, which the German invasion of Paris destroyed; in Perec's case, the deaths of his parents in the defense of France and the Holocaust, and the annihilated six million Jews including his mother. Reading Beckett and Perec's novels develops readers' abilities to empathize with both schizophrenic people and the loved ones of Holocaust victims. While those who avoided the concentration camps like Perec did not experience their horrors firsthand, losing relatives and other loved ones transformed their lives, just as losing two thirds of its Jewish population devastated European culture despite reticence to acknowledge the Holocaust's monstrous effects in the postwar years. Late modernist fiction can thus both help readers understand the Holocaust's cultural impact and foster the skills necessary to understand experiences of severe mental disorder. Such empathic understanding is more humane than romanticizing or stigmatizing schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, and it helps us register the Holocaust's degradation of humanity anew rather than walling off this event in the past or regarding it solely as a Jewish issue. Late modernist fiction provides a more precise, caring alternative to the romanticizing/stigmatizing binary perpetuated by postwar cultural theorists because, from the 1930s to the 1970s, the fiction gradually transitions from reinforcing that binary to enabling empathy for traumatized and mentally ill people. Such fiction anticipated recent phenomenologies of schizophrenia - real experiences of distress and impairment rather than socially constructed concepts of madness - and traumatic shame, an emotional experience of oneself or one's community as inadequate in response to failure, especially the Holocaust as a failure of European culture and modernity. Both traumatic shame and severe mental disorder can make the body conspicuous, alienate people from their cultures, and disintegrate structures of salience and belonging that make sustained relationships and projects possible. Recent existential-phenomenological theories of mental disorder enable reintegrating schizophrenia representation in fiction into the history of literary modernism, especially its concern with historical forces disrupting the minds of individuals. These theories explain changes in mentally ill people's sense of possibilities for developing themselves and relating to others, from the way they experience their bodies to the way they use language. Hence I use these theories to demonstrate how knowledge of schizophrenia enabled post-Holocaust novelists to travesty and transform earlier novelists' uses of fictional minds to interrogate cultural change. / English

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Ce mémoire présente une réflexion sur la mise en récit de l’indicible. Essentiellement insaisissable parce qu’inexprimable et / ou inexprimé, son étude consiste en une tentative de le démasquer, et de comprendre quelle(s) architecture(s) littéraires en permettent la révélation. Cette analyse approfondira le sens littéral des textes : il s’agira d’en investiguer les différentes interprétations possibles afin d’en définir le noyau originel. Cette entreprise ne peut s’effectuer que de manière indirecte, le sens totalisant ne s’inscrivant jamais dans l’instant présent. De ce fait, le médium artistique du langage se trouvera au centre de ma recherche, notamment avec le concept de la Différance derridienne comme point d’ancrage. L’indicible sous-tend nécessairement un mouvement précédant le texte et allant au-delà de celui-ci, signifiant une impossibilité d’arriver en présence de l’événement traumatique, ou du référent originel. Le mouvement même du discours, de sa structure, génère et fait ressurgir l’indicible. Je penserai le langage (et les mouvements le constituant) comme socle de l’indicible : ironiquement, il en est à la fois la source (soulignant son incapacité à produire une représentation du réel) et ce qui en permet le dévoilement. Nous nous concentrerons sur trois formes d’indicible, à travers trois œuvres distinctes : les conséquences d’un traumatisme et ses temporalités (W ou le souvenir d’enfance, George Perec), la mise en image des affects (L’Écume des jours, Boris Vian), et le récit de soi (Orlando, Virginia Woolf). Ces trois cas de figure témoignent – malgré leurs divergences thématiques – d’une déstructuration de la temporalité, de l’espace et du langage, signifiant l’inaptitude de l’écriture normative à retranscrire le réel, ainsi qu’une remise en question des codes littéraires traditionnels. / This master’s thesis explores the narratives poetics of what in French is called the indicible – a noun that, in English translation, hovers between the “unsayable” (i.e., that for which there is no precise or prehensible language) and the “unspeakable” (i.e.; that which concerns affects that are not easily expressed). As a thematic or affective content that slides between the inexpressible and unexpressed, the indicible generates various literary architectures of indirect story-telling. The goal of this thesis is to illuminate these innovative signifying structures. Accordingly, the analytical project that unfolds here is a necessary movement beyond and beneath the literal thematics of the texts. Within a range of possible interpretations, the text will reveal something of its original conception, its traumatic mark or primal scene. Language as an artistic medium is the essential focus of this work – language, or discourse, as a matrix informed by Jacques Derrida’s model of Différance is, above all, a theory of the movement of narrative or expository language in time. The very movement of discourse around a thematic project – that of bearing witness, of conceptualizing desire, or of mapping identity – is itself generative of the unsayable. Ironically, language is at once the matrix of representation’s limits and incapacities, and the medium of its unveiling and illumination. This mémoire explores three distinct narrative examples of the unsayable by way of three radically different texts : trauma and its temporalities (W, of the memory of childhood, by George Perec), the image-structure of the affects (Froth on the Daydream, by Boris Vian), and the gendered metamorphosis of the self (Orlando: a biography, by Virginia Woolf). Although these narratives vary in form, subject, and thematic content, they collectively dismantle the linear sequence of events and the familiar contours of space; they deconstruct the referential certainties of language; and they point to the limitations of traditional narrative codes in the encounter with reality and the real.