La fiction hantée par le passé/le passé hanté par la fiction : les spectres de la Grande Guerre dans Douze lettres d’amour au soldat inconnu d’Olivier Barbarant et Visites aux vivants de Cathie Barreau
Fiction haunted by the past/the past haunted by fiction: the spectres of the Great War in Douze lettres d’amour au soldat inconnu by Olivier Barbarant and Visites aux vivants by Cathie Barreau

Summary/Abstract: The return of the theme of the Great War in literature imposes on the contemporary reader a double heritage: that of grief and guilt. The post-memory rediscovery of loss is therefore accompanied by a prise de conscience of forgetting or indifference, in family memory and History, in relation to war’s anonymous victims. In the fiction compared in this paper, Douze lettres au soldat inconnu by Olivier Barbarant and Visites aux vivants by Cathie Barreau, loss is thematized by deconstructing the specter of the Great War. The two authors attempt to liberate the specters from the aura of anxiety, on the one hand in the hope of taming the past, on the other to give voice, as well as individual integrity, to the forgotten subjects of the Great War.

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