Le personnage dans l'oeuvre romanesque de J. Giraudoux
Institution:
Clermont-Ferrand 2Disciplines:
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Abstract EN:
Most of giraudoux's fiction was colpmeted between the two world wars. Contemporary with gide, and breton, giraudoux helped in his own way to alter the novel at the beginning of our century. Indeed, since the symbolist mouvement, the realistic pattern has been criticized, and particulary the hero of fiction. In the 19th century, he was conceived in a way that does not allow him to account for the complexity of mankind. For a long period of time, giraudoux refused to create characters and his first stories were written by an omnipresent narrator who deprived all those around him of any reality and prevented characters from existing. When he at last accepted to create heroes freed from the first person narrative, however, he didi not depict them very precisely - the portraits were just fake, the heroes were just stereotypes with no true-to-life features. Actually giraudoux tended to create archetypes assuming the anguish and the essential freams of mankind. That is why they are fraught with mytical refe- rences borrowed from various cultures. Giraudoux also wanted them to be above ordinary lives and tanked them as high as the great heroes of the epic and the tragedy. In stories which are often quite different from the ropmantic genre, we find "poetic characters"
Abstract FR:
Pour l'essentiel, les romans de giraudoux ont ete publies entre les deux guerres mondiales. Contemporain de gide et de breton, giraudoux participe a sa maniere au renouvellement du genre romanesque qui parcourt le vingtieme siecle. Depuis les symbolistes en effet, le modele realiste est conteste, et en particulier le personnage qui, trop nettement caracterise, ne peut rendre compte de la complexite humaine. Giraudoux a longtemps refuse de construire des personnages, et ses premiers recits sont le fait d'un narrateur omnipresent qui derealise les etres autour de lui et empeche l'existence de figures autonomes. Lorsqu'il accepte enfin de concevoir des heros liberes du "je" narratif, il ne leur donne pas pour autant des contours precis : les portraits sont illusoires, les heros depourvus de toute individualite, de toute psychologie. En fait, giraudoux cree plutot des archetypes qui portent les angoisses et les reves fondamentaux de l'humanite. C'est pourquoi ils sont charges de reference mythiques empruntees a de multiples culture. Giraudoux voulait aussi elever ses personnages au-dessous des existences communes, au rang des grands heros epiques ou tragiques. Ainsi, il s'agit plutot de "personnages poetiques", dans des recits qui sont souvent assez eloignes du roman