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A contribution to: Myth

Edited by John McKeane and Joanna Neilly

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 5

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  In this essay, as part of a larger project on the role and status of myth in her writings, I shall examine the ways Sylvie Germain employs two mythical narratives – the narrative of the Titan Cronus from Greek mythology, and the story of Jacob’s fight with a man (usually thought to be God, or an angel) in Genesis 32, in her first two novels, Le Livre des Nuits (1985) and Nuit-d’Ambre (1987). Taking Socrates’s desire to offer censored versions of certain myths for the education of the guardians of the city (in Plato’s Republic) as a starting point, I ask whether sanitized versions of myths would provide useful models for a reader. In Germain’s novels, a character does indeed try to use the Cronus story as a model, with disastrous results. But the story of Jacob’s fight with the angel, reenacted in Nuit-d’Ambre, results in a newfound perception that accounts for that which is usually imperceptible. As such, the novels use myth to expose the absences and the gaps within mythical narratives. Such narratives cannot thus serve as models for behaviour unless one is aware of those gaps. The novels eventually redirect the striving and struggling of their characters toward an attentive seeking of that which is hidden, an attention that is also a space for an ethical relationship with another person and with the world.

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