The Ugliness of Banal Truths

Abstract

The paper deals with an analysis of the controversial novel Truismes by Marie Darrieussecq. In this work, the author sensitively maintains an oscillation between the plausibility of truth, hidden behind metaphors and symbols, and the implausibility of the whole story in its individual components. The occurrence of ugliness as a decisive aesthetic dimension is continual, graded into almost all its shapes and forms, until it finally fills in the entire space and time of the fictional story. The astonishing horror of the author’s aesthetic world does not lie in the brutality of the language she uses, but rather in the similarity of the real and the imaginary, in the way she makes cruelty appear visible though the fictional narrative. The paper thus shows that classical aesthetic views fail when used as tools for understanding the nature of the aesthetic world modelled by Darrieussecq.