Although Réjean Ducharme is a major literary figure in Quebec, he is virtually unknown to English Canada. His novels L'Avalée des avalés and Le Nez qui vogue are important in the evolving literary tradition of Quebec because they foreground the functioning of language, but this tendency also explains why translation of Ducharme is a difficult undertaking. Thus, as of 1985, Le Nez qui vogue has not been published in English. The purpose of this study is to examine L'Avalée des avalés and Le Nez qui vogue from two complementary points of view: traditional and metafictional. Both of these novels diverge substantially from the norms of verisimilitude while presenting a wealth of psychological motifs. The psychological coherence of the first-person represented in these texts points out the individual subject's dependence vis-à-vis social and cultural values, the relativity of the concept "subject," and its status as a social construct or "text" in its own right. In other words, the psychological representation of subject evokes the latter's status as fictional or constructed, within the text, as character, and outside of the text, as writer/reader. At the same time, the divergence of the novels from the norms of verisimilitude constitutes an interpretation and critique of those norms and of literary and expository discourse in general. L'Avalée and Le Nez are metafictions, or novels about fiction. The image of subject in L'Avalée des avalés repeats the myth of schizoid deterioration presented in Laing's The Divided Self, while the subject in Le Nez qui vogue repeats Freud's obsessive self. In Part I, I discuss these rapprochements in the light of a traditional interpretation of character. The description of the subject assumes the first-person narrator to be the origin of the discourse which becomes the novel. In Parts II and III of my discussion I reverse this point of view. In Part II, I show how the language and structure of L'Avalée reveal the text as constituting a parody of the psychological novel, by using Linda Hutcheon's concept of parody as repetition with a difference. Semantic incongruity defines the parameters of the text, pointing to meaning as a complex or non-univocal structure, just as the schizoid subject caricatures the non-schizoid subject by never being at one with itself. The subject emerges as an image of the text as realized in the act of reading. Part III of my discussion addresses the relations of subject and text in Le Nez qui vogue, which conforms to verisimilitude more than L'Avalée, by representing its own inscription as the narrator's practise of keeping a journal. Passages of nonsense and word play in the journal gradually give way to a narrative account of the subject's cure and separation from his alter ego. The discourse which produces the cure also performs a critique of discourse itself as tautological, a critique outlined in Patrick Imbert's discussions of Ducharme. This discourse can be displaced only by a récit which is ultimately included within the closed conceptual universe critiqued. The narrative of the alter ego's endangerment and death displaces the narrative of the subject's cure. Instead of reaffirming his cure, the narrator's neglect of textual practise in favour of narrative constitutes his entrapment within a closed conceptual universe; and specifically within the ethos of castration which interprets the other as a degraded version of the same, the unknown as the already known. The possibility of this reversal of interpretation in Le Nez qui vogue accords a high-profile role to the reader by making overt the latter's responsibility in imposing closure on a text. The reduplicating of the narrator's conscious discourse by the unconscious discourse representing castration makes explicit his status as result rather than origin of discourse. The pursuit of psychological subject in L'Avalée des avalés and in Le Nez qui vogue leads one to appreciate subject as text, that is, as an interpreted plurality. It also leads one to recognize text as subject, that is, as realized by the reading process. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

Thèses (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 2003. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 28 août 2006). Publié aussi en version papier.

L'ecole selon Rejean Ducharme offers a new view of Ducharme's widely acclaimed novels. Through analysis of three of the author's major works (Le Nez qui voque, L'Hiver de force and Va savoir ), we will discover Ducharme's fascination with the function of formal education as embodied in the cultural structure of the school and we will see the central role that this issue plays throughout his various narratives. Although unexplored by academics, Ducharme's vision of the school touches an significant number of issues at various levels of complexity. In our introduction, we examine the challenge of defining the issues and the scope of the school, and we consider a variety of frameworks for our analysis. The initial portion of the thesis itself takes us through Ducharme's writings, following the thread of this theme and identifying important references. Following this inventory, our second section examines the ways Ducharme's school addresses issues of authority in popular culture through its vision of Literature and History. We also see links to the other classic ducharmian themes of "subversion and salvation". Finally, we propose a model of the fanciful ducharmian school as it emerges from the text of these three novels. Our summary looks at Ducharme's ultimate observation, that in his school, lessons are never fully learned and school is never over.

Heidelberg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2008.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Se donnant pour cadre les lieux et modes d'inscription d'une marginalité paradoxale, la présente thèse propose une (re)lecture transversale de l'œuvre romanesque de Réjean Ducharme de 1966 à 1976 (première période) et de 1990 à 1999 (deuxième période). La marginalité sert de fil conducteur et souligne la cohérence de l'ensemble du corpus, en témoignant de sa productivité à différents niveaux : place de l'auteur ; personnel romanesque et espace ; usage délibérément « violenté » de la langue et remise en cause des genres et des canons littéraires. Tous ces aspects sont observés sur le mode du dialogisme et d'un éclectisme théorique inspiré de la notion de bricolage de Lévi-Strauss, privilégiant la réappropriation et l'interpénétration des méthodes, au plus proche d'un texte confrontant trivialité et érudition. Ils font ressortir le caractère paradoxal d'une posture marginale érigée en modèle et en figure centrale de la littérature québécoise. Sont analysés : marginalité auctoriale et topos du grand écrivain ; marginalité des personnages et des lieux ; marginalité langagière : effets de diglossie, joual, bérénicien, langage des fleurs, équivoque et potentiel érotique et idéologique ; marginalité générique et narratologique : « maghanage », recyclage de formes anciennes (facétie, ménippée), intertexte d'Henry Miller et une narrativité essentiellement logodynamique fondée sur la parole, le quotidien, la musique et le désir. Espace d'expérimentation à l'écoute de tous les discours, l'œuvre procède d'un art manifestaire qui tend à élever la langue parlée à la dignité d'une langue écrite qu'elle revigore en consacrant le triomphe de l'oral. Le tout converge vers une poétique de convivialité ou de sympathie restaurant la fonction communicative de la littérature en fondant une « complicité communautaire » par le biais des codes narratif, culturel et affectif. Bref, du bilan de ce qui apparaît en marge des écrits antérieurs et de ce qui ressort de l'œuvre, ce qui en renouvelle la vision et permet de la comprendre « autrement », ce sont les différents modes d'expression d'une tendresse paradoxale manifeste à tous points de vue qui définissent un rapport au monde et à la littérature fondé sur de nouvelles affinités électives participant du compagnonnage.

La Fille de Christophe Colomb (Paris: Gallirnard, 1969) is a novel written by Rejean Ducharme in rhyming verse resembling an epic poem In this thesis, it will be shown that the form of the novel serves to emphasize the contestation of History evident in the novel's content. While this novel is certainly unusual in Ducharme's work it fits into the ambiant literary discourse of Quebec in the 1960's, where the theories of decolonisation influenced writers and critics alike. In particular, History was seen to be imposed on Quebec from the outside; Quebec must necessarily reject this History and begin to make its own. This underlying assumption for the analysis proposed in this thesis will be demonstrated in Chapter One through reflections by Ducharme's contemporaries, existing criticism of La Fille de' Christophe Colomb, and by current theories of postcolonial writing. In Chapter Two, the epic form of the novel will be studied in detail. On the surface, the author appears to respect the "rules" of the genre, but a close reading of the text will show that this respect is only superficial, and that the rules are subverted to create tension between literary norms and Ducharme's writing. It is the narrative structure of the novel, however, that proves to be the most subversive deviation from the norms of the epic poem: although the majority of the novel is narrated in the third person, a substantial fragmentation of the narrative voice occurs which will be demonstrated in Chapter Three. The net impact of this fragmentation is to produce a conflict between the codes of the epic poem and the novel. At the end of the analysis of the relationship between literary form and contestation of History in La Fille de Christophe Colomb, it will be shown that the form, as an element separate from the content, conveys a problematic relationship between this text and History. The novel contributes to the contestation of History as practised in the literature of Quebec in the 1960's by subverting the literary code, thereby linking literary history to History as colonizing factors that are questioned in this novel.

La Fille de Christophe Colomb (Paris: Gallirnard, 1969) is a novel written by Rejean Ducharme in rhyming verse resembling an epic poem In this thesis, it will be shown that the form of the novel serves to emphasize the contestation of History evident in the novel's content. While this novel is certainly unusual in Ducharme's work it fits into the ambiant literary discourse of Quebec in the 1960's, where the theories of decolonisation influenced writers and critics alike. In particular, History was seen to be imposed on Quebec from the outside; Quebec must necessarily reject this History and begin to make its own. This underlying assumption for the analysis proposed in this thesis will be demonstrated in Chapter One through reflections by Ducharme's contemporaries, existing criticism of La Fille de' Christophe Colomb, and by current theories of postcolonial writing. In Chapter Two, the epic form of the novel will be studied in detail. On the surface, the author appears to respect the "rules" of the genre, but a close reading of the text will show that this respect is only superficial, and that the rules are subverted to create tension between literary norms and Ducharme's writing. It is the narrative structure of the novel, however, that proves to be the most subversive deviation from the norms of the epic poem: although the majority of the novel is narrated in the third person, a substantial fragmentation of the narrative voice occurs which will be demonstrated in Chapter Three. The net impact of this fragmentation is to produce a conflict between the codes of the epic poem and the novel. At the end of the analysis of the relationship between literary form and contestation of History in La Fille de Christophe Colomb, it will be shown that the form, as an element separate from the content, conveys a problematic relationship between this text and History. The novel contributes to the contestation of History as practised in the literature of Quebec in the 1960's by subverting the literary code, thereby linking literary history to History as colonizing factors that are questioned in this novel. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

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