Fiche du document
2000
Copyright PERSEE 2003-2023. Works reproduced on the PERSEE website are protected by the general rules of the Code of Intellectual Property. For strictly private, scientific or teaching purposes excluding all commercial use, reproduction and communication to the public of this document is permitted on condition that its origin and copyright are clearly mentionned.
Citer ce document
Mathieu Duplay, « L’aspirateur de Socrate : l’électroménager dans Carpenter’s Gothic de William Gaddis », Revue Française d'Études Américaines, ID : 10.3406/rfea.2000.1813
Métriques
Partage / Export
Résumé
If the novel is indeed a house, as Hawthorne and James suggest, then Carpenter's Gothic is about what happens when no one does any housework there, least of all Madame Socrate with her useless vacuum cleaner : Gaddis 's text no longer seeks to reflect a transcendent Truth, and the metaphysical pattern invented by Plato thus loses its relevance. This is the logical outcome of the process by which Western culture has tended to eliminate the sacred aura that once surrounded writing and art, as Walter Benjamin explains. However, Gaddis 's refusal to subscribe to a theology of writing can also be understood as a response to the Puritan distinction between religion and art, and thus as a paradoxical endorsement of Puritan theology : words and the Word inevitably overlap, despite all attempts at severing the connection between them.