Formes binaires, monstre et monstruosité dans La Part de l’autre d’Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Binary forms, monster and monstrosity in La Part de l’autre by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Summary/Abstract: This article offers a reading of La Part de l’autre, an uchronistic novel by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (2001). Taking as its starting point the announcement of the results ofthe entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1908, the storyalternates between two distinct narrative threads: on the one hand, we have the fictional lifeof Hitler, who was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts, and on the other, his fictionalisedreal life. So, even though he sets two alternative scenarios in parallel, Schmitt does not adopta simple Manichean vision of the two paths by presenting the reader with a "good" and a"bad" Hitler. On the contrary, he represents humanity in all its complexity, while notobscuring the monstrous side of this historical figure known as a genocidal tyrant. The aimof this article is to exploit the actantial and structural binarity of this narrative in order tomake a cross-reading of these two alternating and intertwined paths to show, on the onehand, the inherence of the monster and the monstrous (as opposed to the human), and onthe other hand, the philosophical conception of monstrosity to which one of these two pathsleads. The theoretical-methodological framework that accompanies this analysis is PierreNdemby Mamfoumby’s (2017) semiotics of the double.

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