Déclinaisons du monstre dans Le Dixième cercle de Daniel Zimmermann
Declensions of the monster in Le Dixième cercle by Daniel Zimmermann

Summary/Abstract: While Daniel Zimmermann entered literary purgatory, his novel Le Dixième cercle: L’anus du monde remains one of the most singular rewritings of Dante’s Inferno. Because of the author’s will to revisit Dante through the scope of the Holocaust, we encounter both a paper monster and History’s monsters, monsters of nature as well as ideas of a monstrous nature. Every single chapter about concentration camps where some vile crime is depicted does put our endurance to its limits, to the point where we are left to wonder if the novel would not be, in addition to the Inferno, a rewriting of Sade’s Justine or Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome. In our study, we discuss the different representations of the monster in Le Dixième cercle, how the term itself encompasses quite a few meanings, and if the adjective monstrous is not a worthy term to describe Zimmermann, for having portrayed the tragedy of a people in a somewhat pornographic manner.

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