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

Cette thèse en création littéraire se divise en deux parties, un roman et une"étude critique" portant sur le roman d'apprentissage moderne. Le Coeur-de-la-Ville n'est pas uniquement le récit racontant les péripéties d'un enfant, Justin. Il est celui de ses parents, de leurs amis et des clients du dépanneur, sans oublier que le grand-père de Carl et son père ont grandement contribué à la construction du Coeur-de-la-Ville, de cette forteresse en mer anglaise. Il y a Patrice, un romancier; Michel, un nageur qui se qualifie pour les Olympiques et qui vit mal avec ce qui se cache dans le tréfonds de son être. Carl tente d'être un père et ami exemplaires, il aime de tout son croeur son fils et n'accepte nullement sa maladie. Le Coeur-de-la-Ville donne également vie à André qui gagne sa croûte d'une étrange manière et à l'homme aux cigarettes qui les regarde vivre du haut de son balcon en jouant du violon. Tous ces personnages et quelques autres forment une communauté d'éprouvés qui s'entraident pour surmonter les difficultés de la vie. Ils partagent leurs joies et leurs malheurs en tentant d'habiter l'ici et maintenant. Contrairement au roman d'apprentissage réaliste, le roman d'apprentissage moderne est peu théorisé.Cette thèse vise à montrer que le garant moderne, par l'expression de sa corporalité et de son caractère, est un personnage Autre et que la quête qu'il poursuit est le contraire de celle de son prédécesseur de l'époque réaliste. La trilogie de l'enfance de Réjean Ducharme sert de corpus afin de jeter les bases d'une poétique de ce type de roman. Toutefois, l'oeuvre ducharmienne appelle des nuances. Bérénice Einberg subit son avalement dans un ton de colère, tandis que Mille Milles se résigne plutôt à son sort et qu'Iode Ssouvie semble plutôt l'accepter. Il est impossible de vivre complètement coupé du monde, mais il y a une différence entre la façon dont déambule un Eugène de Rastignac, chez Balzac, dans l'univers sociétal et un Mille Milles ou bien un André ou une Nicole, dans l'oeuvre de Ducharme. Ses enfants sont loin d'être de jeunes héros qui veulent gravir les échelons sociaux pour y briller. Ils souhaitent plutôt fuir en se tenant en marge de la société.