Discerning Necessity Behind Contingency: The Fiction of L.-R. des Forets and Robert Musil

Louis-René des Forêts’s studies in law and political science were brief, and if one believes his biographers, had little impact.1 Nevertheless, the questioning of the law that underpins his literary oeuvre is worthy of consideration. At first glance, the author’s preoccupation with the limits and particularities of the law is not unusual. A similar perplexity before the law and its manifestations can be seen in several of his contemporaries, from Kafka to Artaud or Céline—each summoned to appear before the tribunal of history that is constituted by the twentieth century.2 However, readers of des Forêts cannot miss the persistence of the muffled, underlying preoccupation with the law, which bursts forth in ways that interrupt the fluidity of the text. In Le bavard, des Forêts practices a form of “citationism”3 that exposes the stakes between the sovereignty of the writer and the appropriation of his word. The contrary lyricism of the narrator of Ostinato, who is both a guardian and condemned to death, recalls the severest Jansenist and theological injunctions.4 The accounts of Le malheur au Lido, of Le jeune homme qu’on surnommait Bengali, or of La chambre des enfants show this abundantly; alongside the classical construction of des Forêts’s form and language there is a corresponding mortal anxiety when confronted with questions of the legitimacy of a law, with rules and regulations, with specific cases and with difficulties in reconstructing experiences. If des Forêts did not become a lawyer, but rather a writer who ponders the law, it is perhaps because literature opened up a space from which he could observe life in a much more heightened way than was possible through the practice of law. He used the law to crystallize the contingent character of life, transforming the contingency of events into necessity. His work is nourished by the observation of these new and empirical necessities (“so many insignificant images that perhaps assume an abusive role in this periodic inventory [End Page 106] […] but whose very insignificance lends authenticity” (“Une mémoire démentielle,” in La chambre des enfants, 126). Des Forêts’s oeuvre is read today as the record of a trial in which testimonies, perjuries, proxies and verdicts succeed each other in a series of vertiginous reversals.