Fiction, l’expérience d’un univers transcendant ; Lecture de Réchauffe-moi tout l’hiver.
The literature has always been the meeting place of reality and fiction. It never stops redefining the referent, manipulating it and shifting its boundaries. In this sense, the city is one of the problematics inherent in literature that is gradually finding a central status. Urban literature attempt...
| Publicado en: | Recherches en Langue et Littérature Françaises Vol. 16; no. 30; pp. 35 - 57 |
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| Autores principales: | , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
| Publicado: |
University of Tabriz
automne/winter2023
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| Sumario: | The literature has always been the meeting place of reality and fiction. It never stops redefining the referent, manipulating it and shifting its boundaries. In this sense, the city is one of the problematics inherent in literature that is gradually finding a central status. Urban literature attempts to stage the relationship between the citizen and his city in order to problematize it; that is to say, to show how ideological discourses have changed this relationship. More specifically, urban literature tries to represent the future of the city and its citizens and seeks its causes and consequences while acting on the ideological hold that has transformed yesterday's heavenly city into today's hell. Written in 1374 (1995) by Ali Khodâî, Warm Me All the Winter is a short story chosen from a collection bearing the same title and presents a telling example of Iranian extreme-contemporary urban fiction which depicts the future of city and citizen. It is of particular interest to us for the way he looks at the question of “becoming urban”. The narrative “I” lives a monochrone and static relationship with the urban space-time in which he inhabits. Tired of the latter and obviously unable to react to this spatiotemporal reality that imprisoned him, he begins to write his own story where he brings his characters together in the same city. The transformation of the referential space-time into the fictional thus configures the quest for the desired space-time, for the utopian city. In other words, by using the technique of mise en abyme, the short story depicts the situation of today's citizen torn between the city as it is and as he imagines it. This feeling of sharing thus gives rise to a clear opposition between two forms of urban becoming: that of the real universe of the “I” and that of its imaginary universe. Indeed, this opposition of spatiotemporal becomings, which engages both the formal and thematic plan of the short story, constitutes our main problematic and presupposes some major questions to which we propose to answer: What are the origin and the consequences of emergence of the embedded fictional universe? To what extent can we consider the formal and existential becoming of the proposed worlds as a metamorphosis linked to the postmodern condition? What will ultimately be the fate of these worlds and how do they manage to act on geographical reality and upset its borders? In order to answer these questions, we will first study the manifestations of these becomings on the formal level of the narrative. In the second stage, we will tackle the problem of becoming urban of the universes and of the narrative “I” on an existential scale. In the last step, we will see how the lived experience of the imaginary universe is transformed into the transcendence of the "I" and to what extent this transcendental experience manages to react on the referential reality and to reconstruct it. The problematic of opposition between forms of urban becoming can lend itself to different critical perspectives. However, in order to carry out this study, we will mainly adopt geocriticism while having recourse to some analytical concepts proposed by the literary theory of possible worlds. In fact, these seem to us to be the most relevant perspectives for studying the interaction of space-time represented by the fictional world and that imposed by the real world. Both perspectives are part of the renewal of literary theory and criticism in the postmodern era. Indeed, their objective is to question the status of the referent as the only legitimate and acceptable proposition and to show that fictional entities and propositions can also be credible. The concept of possible world, which was first launched by Umberto Éco and Saul Kripke, designates a state or a representation of the real world offered by the fictional world. This concept, which experienced a new boom with the publication of The Literary Theory of Possible Worlds in 2010, insists on the difference between "reality" and "actuality": the first refers to the state of the object as it is in the real world of reference while the second takes on meaning in relation to the presence of the subject and his existential desires. Therefore, the first centralizes the status of referential reality while the second gives priority to the subject who perceives it. Nothing prevents the referent from being as real as actual; however, it happens that the latter is more real and less current. Similarly, the fictional world can be less real but more current for the instance that experiences it because it bears the traces of its subjectivity and configures its mental universe. Geocriticism can be considered as a perspective derived from theories of fiction focused on representations of time and space and their interaction with reality. This one, which develops in parallel with the theories of possible worlds, was first elaborated in 2000 by Bertrand Westphal in the collective work entitled Geocriticism Instructions for use. Later, in Geocriticism Real, Fiction, Space (2007), where he develops this perspective, he starts from the idea that the postmodern has upset the relationship of human beings with space and time: these no longer exist independently; they perceive and interpret each other. More precisely, time no longer progresses with space but in space and temporality has given way to spatio-temporality. The real world, which usually imposes a monochronic spatio-temporality, is located at the intersection of several fictional worlds that rethink and reconstruct spatio-temporality in different ways. This gives rise to a form of representational heterogeneity that interacts with the real referent, deconstructs and reconstructs it and transgresses its borders. “Spatio-temporality”, “transgressivity” and “referentiality” therefore constitute three major axes of geocriticism: the first studies different turns of the relationship between space and time; the second presents the interaction between real and fictional space-time and establishes the conditions where the fictional universe goes beyond the real referent; and the third proposes to show how the fictional space-time redefines the real referent or how it transforms itself into a legitimized universe of reference. In the present study, we will analyze these three concepts through several dichotomies namely “ideological-utopian”, “homogeneous-heterogeneous”, “monochronous-polychronous” and “synchronous-diachronous”. By way of conclusion, we will see that Warm Me All the Winter presents a telling example of postmodern literature because the formal and existential becoming of worlds is a necessity of the postmodern condition. Nowadays, even more than any time, we feel the need for eternity and to transgress the monochronous, synchronic and distressing space-time of our city, arranged according to ideological interests. It is in reaction to this ideological hell, represented by the real fictional world, that the ostensible fictional world emerges. Its emergence is indeed a requirement of the postmodern era, which largely calls into question the unity and homogeneity of the real world. Considered as the center of all fictional reference, the referential reality then begins to lose its centrality, bursts and its fragments are diluted in its fictional alternatives. Actualized by presence and subjective perception, the fictional replaces the non-actualized real: these fictional worlds become ontologically quite solid and therefore able to push referential reality to the margins. As soon as the fictional possible worlds occupy the center, nothing prevents them from becoming referents because they present versions of the world as credible as the referential reality. Having become a reference, each of these worlds can constitute the starting point for other fictional worlds. Indeed, the postmodern city becomes a fragmented, shared, plural and multidimensional space-time where the present, the past and the future are united. In this way, the citizen and the city read each other, understand each other and identify with each other. This is how the fictional city manages to act on the referential city, to manipulate it and to transgress its borders. La littérature urbaine, devenue depuis quelques décennies un genre à part entière, met en scène les différentes formes de rencontre et d’interaction entre la ville réelle et la ville fictionnelle dont Réchauffe-moi tout l’hiver présente un exemple parlant. Dans cette nouvelle, le narrateur parvient à franchir l’espace-temps homogène et décevant de sa ville en donnant naissance à un espace-temps imaginaire où il immigre. Donc, on est face à la reconstruction de deux univers, l’un dystopique et l’autre utopique, dont les devenirs s’opposent. Cette opposition révèle les variations et les contours du concept de « devenir urbain » ainsi que sa complexité. Dans cette étude, en ayant recours aux concepts analytiques de la théorie des mondes possibles et à la géocritique proposée par Bertrand Westphal, nous nous proposons d’étudier cette opposition qui constitue notre problématique principale et présuppose quelques questions majeures : Quelles sont l’origine et les conséquences de l’émergence de l’univers fictionnel enchâssé ? Dans quelle mesure peut-on considérer le devenir formel et existentiel des mondes proposés en tant que métamorphose liée à la condition postmoderne ? Quel sera finalement le destin de ces mondes et comment parviennent-ils à agir sur la réalité géographique et à bouleverser ses frontières ? Le résultat de la présente recherche sera une réflexion sur la condition du citoyen et de la ville à l’époque postmoderne. |
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