Anatomia di un trauma culturale. Emmanuel Carrère corrispondente dal processo Bataclan

Abstract

Anatomy of a cultural trauma. Emmanuel Carrère correspondent from Bataclan trial

It is not the first time that a professional writer has been given the task of telling reality. Some novelists have dealt with judicial news; others have narrated the war zones, the genocides, the bombs, later participating in the writing of subjects and cinematographic scripts inspired by reality that they had previously told with the register and the typical stylistic features of the writer. And yet, Emmanuel Carrère’s weekly report on the Bataclan bombing trial struck us in a particular way. It is not just a matter of style, of the way of writing that guides the aesthetic experience of the reader. From a historical-cultural point of view, it is interesting to underline how this judicial chronicle is placed in our collective experience and in the profile of the writer Carrère, who in his literary production often moves from biographical cues to build fictional plots capable of describing the logic of transformation of society. Secondly, from an empirical point of view, the essay aims to show how a sort of social novel of terrorism emerges from the French novelist's writing, with its characters, logics, purposes, rules of engagement, conflicting values, heroes and antiheroes: the representation of a civil counterculture that only writing can reveal, allowing identification in the collective drama even for those who are not French and did not watch the news in 2015.The method of analysis for reflecting on these two problems lies in an exercise hermeneutic of excerpts from the text that constitutes the reportage of the writer as correspondent for the press.