En 1957, Julio Cortázar rédigea une lettre à Roger Caillois encore inédite à ce jour. Il y fait l’analyse critique de L’incertitude qui vient des rêves, essai de Caillois publié en 1956. L’objet de cette thèse est de contextualiser la rédaction de cette lettre ainsi que la théorie onirique qui y est exposée par Cortázar. Adoptant une méthodologie génétique et intertextuelle, on propose une première analyse de ce document, qui peut être défini comme une « lettre-essai », afin de lui accorder la place qui doit être la sienne au sein de l’œuvre cortazarienne. On démontre ensuite que cette lettre peut être lue comme la synthèse d’une théorie et d’une pratique des rêves clés dans les premiers textes cortazariens, notamment à travers le personnage alter ego et récurrent de Gabriel Medrano, et qu’elle est l’avant-texte d’un rêve de ce personnage dans Los premios. La mise au jour de points de convergence et de passages parallèles entre la « lettre-essai » et ces premiers textes révèle que le complexe onirique cortazarien s’associe à un complexe de l’Autre, à travers les images de la main tendue et du double nocturne. Enfin, le désaccord qui oppose Cortázar à Caillois sur la question des rêves est replacé au sein d’une relation personnelle et professionnelle complexe et dans le contexte d’une opposition intellectuelle plus large autour des concepts de raison, de fantastique et de langage. On se demandera ainsi dans quelle mesure l’œuvre de Cortázar a pu se construire à l’épreuve du dissentiment qui l’opposa à Caillois sur ces différents sujets. / In 1957, Julio Cortázar wrote to Roger Caillois a letter still unpublished to date. He conducts a critical review of L’incertitude qui vient des rêves, an essay by Caillois published in 1956. The subject of this thesis is to contextualise the writing of this letter as well as the oneiric theory which is exposed by Cortázar in this letter. An initial analysis of this document, which can be defined as a “letter-essay”, is proposed by adopting a genetic and intertextual methodology, in order to give this letter its rightful place in Cortázar’s works. It is then demonstrated that this letter can be read as the synthesis of a theory and a practice of the key dreams in the first cortazarian texts, particularly through Gabriel Medrano's alter ego and recurrent character, and that it constitutes the “avant-texte” of a dream of this character in Los premios. The coming to light of areas of convergence and parallel passage between the “letter-essay” and these first texts reveals that the cortazarian oneiric complex echoes a complex of the Other through the figures of the helping hand and of the nocturnal alter. Finally, the disagreement between Cortázar and Caillois over the issue of dreams is placed within the context of a personal, professional and complex relationship, and of a larger intellectual opposition about the concepts of reason, fantastic and language. It will then be pondered to which extent Cortázar’s works was built in the test of the dissent between him and Caillois over these different issues.

Many anthropological studies have shown the prevalence of the sacred in primitive societies, manifested primarily in significant gestures such as exchanges, rituals, festivals, and the use of time and space. Some studies, in particular those of Roger Caillois and Mircea Eliade, have demonstrated that traces of the sacred, though seemingly displaced, remain present in modern and secular societies. This thesis will examine and bring to light these remnants of sacred behavior in the contemporary settings of the stories of Gabrielle Roy, focusing primarily on food-sharing, gift-giving, and festivals. Each analysis presented will detail how different aspects of the sacred are manifested in contemporary, though fictional, society, and each will permit individuals to identify ways in which modern man, whether religious or secular, is still very connected to sacred practices.

My research on Victor Brauner’s work in the first two decades of his affiliation with the Surrealist group in Paris re-establishes the role played by the Romanian Jewish artist in the definition of automatic Surrealist procedures of painting and mixed-technique objects that relied upon a new and unconventional understanding of the occult. In the three chapters of this study of Victor Brauner’s work in the 1930s and early 1940s, I analyse key notions, such as the fantastic, animal magnetism, and the occult practices of art making in a Surrealist context. The fantastic is discussed in the first chapter of the thesis from a literary perspective with political connotations in Surrealism, which resulted from a debate engaged in nineteenth-century French literature on the issue of the marvellous versus the fantastic. Due to the Surrealists’ interest in the fantastic a new category emerged, the fantastic art, which is examined in this first chapter in connection with Brauner’s artworks in the 1930s. The incursion into the fantastic, with focus on the premonition of the painter’s left eye loss in his artworks of the 1930s is completed with an approach to spiritualism that had a revival at the time. The second chapter of the thesis investigates the doctrine of animal magnetism and the state of magnetic somnambulism in eighteenth-century scholarship and shows how this experimentation had influenced the development of a new branch of the science, metapsychics or psychical research at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth one. I take into account and demonstrate that these outdated and modern domains of enquiry into the unknown and beyond reality were appealing to Surrealists, in particular to Brauner, due to their research into unconscious processes of the mind. I argue that through the attainment of a condition similar to the one of the somnambulist in sessions of magnetic sleep, the Surrealists aimed to generate automatic procedures of painting and object making. In the third chapter of the thesis I discuss Victor Brauner’s technique of drawing with a candle, or le cirage, as an automatic procedure of art developed in connection with the occult. This final part of the thesis makes also manifest the association of Brauner’s artworks in the early 1940s with practices of the occult in the near and centuries before past.