Relating Someone Else’s Story: A Comparative Reading of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Everything I Don’t Remember and Édouard Louis’ Histoire de la violence

Abstract

The article is a comparative reading of Everything I Don’t Remember by Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and Histoire de la violence by French author Édouard Louis. The main theoretical framework is Deleuzian/Guattarian affect theory, coupled with Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of storytelling and selfhood. Both novels depict a narrative situation where a person has their story told by someone else, and thus provide striking accounts of how individuals relate and affect each other. Moreover, the narrative form of the novels presents identity, solidarity, and love not as predefined categories language can represent, but rather as troubled and unstable phenomena produced and altered through stories.