Récit et identité narrative. Fragment, totalisation, apories. Étude des récits de Michel Tremblay et de Gilles Archambault

Abstract

This article explores the hypothesis that the contemporary is a synthetic experiment of a hermeneutic nature that aims at provisionally reconfiguring narrative identity (Paul Ricoeur). The author analyzes Michel Tremblay's recit cycle (Douze coups de theâtre, Les vues animees, and Un ange cornu avec des ailes de toile), and Un apres-midi de septembre by Gilles Archambault. Tremblay's recits are like precipitates of memory that, in their complex entanglements, are components of a burgeoning identity that gestures toward myth. Archambault's recit, on the other hand, is marked by the inscrutability of figures of Self and Other that cannot be dissociated from an asceticism of forgetting. In both cases, however, there is a structural kinship with the concept of narrative identity. The study is thus concerned with questions that are tied to the radically hermeneutic nature of experience, of which each is a trace.