The Adversary (2022) or the Seduction of a “Black Hole”

Abstract

Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary (2022) is a non-fiction novel that recounts the series of homicides perpetrated by the fake French doctor Jean-Claude Romand in the 1990s. In order to prevent the deception, he had subjected his intimate circle to being discovered, he decided to murder his wife, his children, and his parents. Carrère's text thus constitutes a broad and complex approximation to the underlying motives of the perpetrator. This article aims to study, first, the literary mechanisms used by the French author, who defines his project ethically and aesthetically in opposition to the model established by Truman Capote in A sangre fría (1965). Secondly, it analyzes the connection between the writer and the criminal from the perspective of affective and cognitive empathy, concepts derived from contemporary psychology and neuroscience. Both perspectives—literary and psychological—allow us to establish that Carrère constructs a “strange” and “novel” non-fiction literary text about a real crime, which also stands out for its effective use of empathy as a mechanism for exploring Romand's behavior throughout the text.