FIGURATION, DÉFIGURATION, CANNIBALISME. CONFLITS DE CULTURE DANS LE PEINTRE DÉVORANT LA FEMME DE KAMEL DAOUD

In Le Peintre dévorant la femme (2018), Kamel Daoud recounts his solitary, night-time visit to the Musée Picasso in Paris, during the exhibition 1932, l’année érotique, a series of erotic paintings that the Spanish painter produced while in a passionate relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter, his 18-year-old model and lover. The reflection goes far beyond the experience of artistic fruition. I propose to analyse this complex text by drawing on the reflections of Magali Nachtergael and Françoise Vergès on ‘museum narratives’ and on postcolonial studies, supplemented by the research tools developed for the rewritings. Indeed, as he did in Meursault, contre-enquête (2014), in Le Peintre dévorant la femme Daoud constructs his discourse by exploiting the strategy of the ‘gaze of the other’ as well as intertextual interference with a major text in the Western literary canon: in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The result is a rich and fertile expression of a conflict, explored in all its intricacies.