Mensonge intime, soupçon collectif : la Notion de péché dans Before, During, After de Richard Bausch

Abstract

Like any major catastrophe, that of September 11, 2001 was followed by chain aftershock, which triggered a new era of suspicion, between disquieted incredulity and paranoid conspiracy theories. In Richard Bausch’s 12^th novel, the traumatized US nation echoes the intimate story of a young woman struggling with feelings of guilt, anguish and revulsion common to all rape victims. While she is on vacation on an idyllic beach of Jamaica, very far from the tumult occurring at the same time on Ground Zero, the heroin is carried away in another fall, that, shameful, of the violated body. In this intertwining of national and intimate hardships, Bausch stages a proliferation of silent gaps, blank questioning and unformulated suffocation, in the depths of which lie venial shams and heavy secrets. Far from any hysterical treatment, he brings to life the hours following the attacks on the World Trade Center, and while letters carrying pathogens spread panic across America, other poisons—that of suspicion, lying, introversion—disseminate between the lines of the novel. The author describes a world in political, personal and spiritual crisis. The apparent simplicity of his narration covers dark voids, internal struggles ensnared by the Puritan mind that prevents the truth from being told, or even thought. Through the unstable prism of its characters, the novel instills doubt at the heart of their faith, and makes the convictions of the most zealous believers falter. Through the biblical figure of sin, we propose to study these wavering bearings which question intimate and collective traumas: our analysis will endeavor to bring to light the schism between faith and doubt which contaminates Richard Bausch’s whole novel.