Long suspected of being frivolous, of cultivating bad taste and of encouraging its reader's chimerical daydreams, the novel, at least after Cervantes, curiously turned against itself in the name of the reality it was once accused of fleeing. In doing so, it changed radically, of course, since it separated itself from the old idealistic romances which it now named as its enemies; but it also remained, more discreetly perhaps, faithful to its origins, i.e. to the lies and illusions whose profound and secret necessity novelists have never ceased to reaffirm. / This dissertation is a meditation on the paradoxical foundation of the novel, which can be defined according to the classical theories of Rene Girard and Mikhail Bakhtin. The former, by assigning the novelist the task of revealing the "novelistic truth", insists on the critical function of the novel, and on the decisiveness of the change brought about by Cervantes; Bakhtin, by placing the character rather than the author at the heart of his reflexion, and by making dialogical "openness" to this character a positive value, subtly defends the necessity of the "romantic lie". / Girard and Bakhtin are both right, as the examples of the three novelists whose "poetics" are analyzed here in light of this paradox illustrate. Paul Valery, though not a novelist in the usual sense, is the creator of Mr Teste, a strange character who lives in perfect conformity with the requirements of the "novelistic truth", but whose life is inconceivable, which makes him a comic figure. Flaubert, enclosing himself in a kind of quiet lucidity, keeps his characters at a distance but still shows a sort of subtle sympathy for them. Finally Balzac, whose posture at first seems more romantic, is no less quiet and distant than Flaubert, albeit in a more discreet way. / These reading exercises, together with theoretical considerations inspired by Bergson's definition of the comic and Kundera's metaphoric definition of the novelist's work as the exploration of being, lead to the idea that the novel is subjected to contradictory requirements between which it does not propose a synthesis, except that of humour -- which is not truly one.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.115642 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Roy, Yannick, 1971- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Département de langue et littérature françaises.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 003132376, proquestno: AAINR66672, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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