La vieillesse ou comment revisiter le spleen dans Le dernier des Snoreaux d’Abla Farhoud

Abstract

This article proposes to revisit the rich synonymy of “spleen” (sadness, regret, nostalgia, melancholy, boredom, unhappiness, fatigue, lassitude, languor, anguish, neurosis, pessimism, despair, or depression), in order to see how that word can be attached to a 21st century novel and to a specific age group, the elderly. Le dernier des Snoreaux was published in 2019 by Abla Farhoud, a Canadian writer of Lebanese origin. As the title suggests, the novel concerns a sibling, whose only living brother, Ibrahim Abou-Snobara, known as Snoreau, is dying in hospital. After a first crisis suffered at the age of eighteen as a consequence of an incomplete mourning for his brother who died in an accident, Ibrahim’s life will be made up of stays in hospitals or in prison, until today, when he is old and very ill. Talking about the human condition will be done by borrowing the aesthetics of the great splenic poets of the French 19th century in order to demonstrate how the finitude of the human condition can be sublimated through a literary work.