8 - Levinas the Novelist

Summary

Comment admettre la guerre?

(Levinas, OEuvres 3, p. 39)

The previous chapter discussed how the Second World War and the Holocaust echo through Levinas's post-war writing even though he mentions them only sparingly. ‘Levinas's philosophy is one of the cinders of the Holocaust’, as Eaglestone puts it (The Holocaust and the Postmodern, p. 255). Levinas's texts do not theorize or seek to explain the Holocaust, but they bear its terrible imprint. This chapter brings together two issues in the understanding of Levinas's work: his reticence about the Second World War, and his much-discussed hostility to art. These issues come together because his posthumous archive gave unexpected evidence that he aspired to be a novelist even while condemning the mystifications of art; and, moreover, that the novels he attempted to write were concerned, precisely, with the experience of war.

In a nutshell, Emmanuel Levinas, perhaps the greatest philosopher of ethics in twentieth-century France, wanted to be a novelist. The publication of the third volume of his OEuvres in 2013 reveals that he drafted substantial fragments of two novels, both concerned with the experience of the Second World War, entitled (perhaps) Éros and La Dame de chez Wepler. A number of questions immediately spring to mind. Why did he begin these novels, and why did he abandon them? And why, to those of us who have been concerned with Levinas's work, is this so surprising?

There are a number of reasons why it should not be surprising. Literature played an important part in Levinas's education and intellectual development. Studying the dark metaphysical investigations contained in Dostoevsky's novels as a child in his native Lithuania initially awoke his interest in philosophy. Moreover, Levinas's early work on phenomenology suggested at least the possibility of a link between philosophy and literature. Levinas was instrumental in introducing Husserlian phenomenology into France, first with his thesis Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (1930) and then with his translation of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (1931), undertaken with Gabrielle Peiffer. Phenomenology, with its interest in the sensory experience of the material world, readily lends itself to fictional exploration, as Sartre had magnificently demonstrated in his novel La Nausée (1938).