Tradition Et Modernité: Histoire, Narration Et Récit Dans Les Fous De Bassan D'anne Hébert

Abstract

The notions of tradition and modernity can be said to function like Jakobson's shifters, as Jespersen originally defined them: A class of words … whose meaning varies with the situation. These two terms are a function of 1) a situation in space and time; 2) they are semantically interdependent; and 3) they cannot ignore the notions of tradition and modernity that preceded them. In order to remain, today's modernity must evolve into tomorrow's tradition. In this study, I propose to show how in Anne Hebert's Les Fous de Bassan, the three aspects of the narrative reality as Gerard Genette defines them in Figures III-namely, the story (the signified), the text (the signifying) and the narration (the act of telling itself)-are a perfect literary illustration of the mechanisms that condition the notions of tradition and modernity. In Hebert's novel, the story defines a situation where the dialectic between the traditional and the modern is shown to be impossible. It is at the level of the narration that thi...