Racconto, fabulazione e l’ambiguità del reale ne La Settimana bianca di Emmanuel Carrère/Claude Miller (1995-1998)

Abstract

Emmanuel Carrère’s La Classe de neige (1995), a watershed publication in his career as a novelist due to its partial departure from the field of fiction, is a complex and multifaceted work that leads to a meta-linguistic reflection on the very function of narration, reception, and the power of storytelling. Narration, as a device that elicits questions of perception and stages the spectres of the subconscious, is not only the centre of the character dynamics, but in this case, is also key to the solution of the story’s mystery. This article will analyse how a classical mystery story can be understood as a reflection of the symbolic functions of narration; a concept manifest in Claude Miller’s 1998 film adaptation of Carrère’s text. In Miller’s La Classe de neige (1998) the viewer is shown a reality that is totally dominated by the protagonist’s point of view, as they enter his imaginary universe built on questionable tales staged in the film through violent visual inserts. This article will therefore explore how both the literary and the filmic work effectively operate on the boundaries between the real and subjective in their narration, particularly when the latter has to deal with key plot points that remain both enigmatic and inaccessible.