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Le Feu follet: The Drug Addict as a Tragic Hero

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Allen Thiher
Allen Thiher*
Affiliation:
Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont
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Abstract

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, like Malraux and other French writers of the nineteen thirties, saw the forces of history as a form of tragic fate. In Le Feufollet he sets forth the tragic destiny of a decadent drug addict who is a victim of his era's decline. Drieu's use of a Racinian structure creates a sense of overwhelming tragic inevitability, but, in the final analysis, his attempt at creating a tragedy based on the decadent's self-destruction is not entirely successful. Rather, the novel appears as an inversion of tragedy in which the glorification of nonbeing foreshadows Drieu's adherence to fascism.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 1 , January 1973 , pp. 34 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 Naissance d'une culture (Paris: Rieder, !936), p. 115.

2 Brandon might well be compared to Malraux's Ferrai in La Condition humaine. Like Ferrai, Brancion has used foreign adventure as a way in which to satisfy his will to power, though it would appear that he is more successful than Ferrai. In either case imperialism provides an outlet for the adventurer's energies.

3 L'Esprit et l'histoire (Paris: Colin, 1954), p. 17.

4 Drieu La Rochelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 125. One might also consult his Drieu La Rochelle and the Fiction of Testimony (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1958) and Pierre Andreu, Drieu, témoin et visionnaire (Paris: Grasset, 1952).