Les désancrés par Marie-Thérèse Humbert

Abstract

Reviews 265 dos pour qu’elle se tienne droite, suit le mouvement, s’éveille à la vie par ses discussions avec George sur Thomas Hardy et Joseph Conrad,ressent même des pulsions criminelles et sexuelles—auxquelles elle ne se laisse toutefois pas aller. Le dérèglement du temps saisi par Hochet ne signifie pas comme dans Shakespeare “le début de la tragédie” (131), et contrairement aux pièces du barde, après le topsy-turvydom provoqué par George, l’ordre ne sera pas rétabli. La fin du roman laisse entrevoir, avec Jack dans la RAF en 1940, un autre dérèglement socio-historique. Jouant de l’inspiration première de ce roman, la vie de l’auteure de A Room of One’s Own, un article paru dans le magazine Elle titrait“Si vous aimez Virginia Woolf, vous aimerez Stéphanie Hochet”— titre racoleur pour un roman certes agréable à lire mais qui n’exploite pas complètement le potentiel et la force de son personnage principal et le laisse disparaître alors qu’il se libère, nous abandonnant avec un épilogue hâtif et peu convaincant. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Bošković Humbert, Marie-Thérèse. Les désancrés. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ISBN 978-2-07014744 -1. Pp. 656. 25 a. After a fifteen-year hiatus, Humbert offers an epic family saga that begins in a real, yet ghostly Louisiana and continues to Vesania, an imaginary island.Artfully revealing via the intermingling of past, future, and conditional tenses where characters’ paths cross at one time or another, Humbert builds a multi-dimensional mind map in which one follows the characters’ memories, emotions, obsessions, fantasies, desires, and frustrations. The heroine, Jane Harcourt, is fleeing a rich southern family by finding refuge on Vesania with her son Vincent, her friend Abigail Dodds (a large and very elegant black woman, daughter of Jane’s father Keith W. Canning and the Canning family cook Betty Dodds) and Abigail’s daughter Sarah. Bound by love and blood, they seal their fate in Jane’s wild hope of finding William, Jane’s second husband, who is nine years her junior, and Vincent’s father. Yet when a detective locates him, Jane claims he is dead. The reader is then left to wonder what exactly Jane seeks while on Vesania and what she is attempting to escape. Forewarned by Humbert in the novel’s “Avertissement”that her goal in writing Les désancrés was not to bear witness to events nor to denounce them. Rather, she takes great inspiration from painting, an art she admires despite her inability to paint. Thus, the reader comes to understand Humbert’s literary motives: “Alors je me suis servie de mon matériau privilégié: les mots” (9). Continuing to speak directly to her readers, Humbert elucidates that what one holds in one hand is “une manière de tableau romanesque, constitué de lieux autant que de fantasmes, et où s’entrelacent un certain nombre de trajectoires humaines imbriquées les unes dans les autres” (9). A family tree of the principal characters originating in Louisiana immediately follows Humbert’s warning. It is key to navigate the troubled, choppy waters of the narrative as the novel opens with “Vestibule: la fille de Kubla Khan,” which could be the beginning or the end of the story as the action takes place in Riverside Home, Louisiana, a few years before or after the stay on Vesania. Born in 1913, Jane is already senile at the age of fifty-four years and ends her days regularly visited by her friend Abigail. In the segregationist Louisiana, the relationship of these two women, one white and one black, is intriguing. The “vestibule” is also the place where Jane’s fantasies and memories are formed. For example, her father, Keith, the great seducer, was nicknamed“Kubla Khan”for having built a palace of Asian inspiration ; and, when she was only five, Jane witnessed the death of her mother, Marie Dufour, by the intermediary of a mirror, which has the long-term effect of Jane always needing some type of intermediary, such as Abigail, to...