"You By The Other" is no exception to this rule. How many times have I heard sarcasm about him. It is therefore appropriate to put the record straight: This news is a fiction, just a parabolic extrapolation of history. Schmitt does not claim to tell what would have happened if Hitler had successfully entered the Beaux-arts, but imagine an alternate history on the theme of human ambivalence. In his narrative, history splits into two: The real found in books, and another where the events differed. In this second version, Hitler met Freud. This freed neuroses related to his past and his condition (in a snap) and the small Austrian was then emancipated. He passed the competition of Fine Arts, seduced women he coveted, became a great artist of the Surrealist movement, lived a life of passions, entered into a rich and fulfilling existence and, inevitably, history s' in radically altered.
Whenever I came up against the detractors of this work, their arguments were always the same: "But that's anything Psychoanalysis can also radically transform a person!" Or: "How can we pretend to issue such a theory, like what the story would have been so different on a simple point of detail? !!! ". And it is primarily on this second point I upsets me the lack of openness of some people: Eh! Oh !!! Why also the author pretentious show? !!! Does it not rather a parable? a metaphor? Do we forget that this is a fiction?
In composing this poem dedicated to the ambivalence of human nature, Schmitt never wanted to pretend that the story would go as this or that if Hitler had won its contest of Fine Arts (what a strange idea when even!). No. He simply imagined what COULD happen, at the opposite end, if a sufficiently significant event could develop at a decisive moment in his life, "You By The Other" in any human being. To illustrate this idea, what character would best lend it the Devil himself made man: Adolf Hitler ...
In conclusion, the author does not claim to define the facts as they are befallen if Hitler had won its competition, but how far historical events could differ (in a sort of "butterfly effect") if other more anecdotal events had radically changed the personality of a single person ... And Schmitt compose a beautiful picture of the relationship of man to his History, where everything is case subtly, events and people; but above all, the image of man in its infinite complexity, whose choices and personality stem from his experiences and his experiences ...
Ultimately, I think that is frankly unfair to boo an author of this caliber on foundations as inept.
And then my pop culture catches up with me, I think of this film where we see Sherlock Holmes undergo severe psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (The Seven Orient Express). This thought led me to this other movie where Holmes rubbed the Whitechapel murderer and solved the riddle of Jack the Ripper (Murder by Decree). And other thoughts fly to a whole part of the culture "steampunk", which are imagined the wildest uchronies, mixing history with the most picturesque literature either (Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker ), giving birth to final postmodern works that also overlooked by the elitist snobbery of worldliness because of their infamous medium! (Steamboy, Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell). And this popular side necessarily detectable in the work of Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, consolidate me on elitist nonsense and the pangs of snobbery ...