Traces of Proust in Michel Tremblay
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Slovo a Smysl |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | Domovská stránka Slovo a smysl |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.14712/23366680.2024.2.8 |
| Keywords | Marcel Proust; Michel Tremblay; birth of a writer; total art poetics; French novel; Quebec novel |
| Attached files | |
| Description | At first glance, Marcel Proust’s aristocratic spirit and ambiance are entirely dissimilar to the plebeian milieu of the Quebec playwright and prose writer Michel Tremblay, whose poetics involve raising the joual slang of the Montreal suburbs to the tones of ancient Greek tragedy, medieval religious drama or/and the social novel. Proust is also largely absent from the cultural references and allusions that sprinkle Tremblay’s works, which include Balzac, Zola, Camus, Vian, Sartre and Genet. Yet Marcel Proust seems to underlie Tremblay’s first major novelistic project — the hexalogy Chronique du Plateau Mont-Royal (1978–1998), which in the form of a family chronicle traces the birth of the future author. In this rewriting of Marcel Proust, albeit in the third person, the future writer in the making — the storyteller of these novels, designated as a ‘little boy’ or ‘the child of the fat woman’ — appears merely in the background, as a convergence of the other characters, who initiate and represent the fundamentals of Michel Tremblay’s art. My analysis of this specific configuration of characters in the hexalogy will be completed by one of the novels in the Traversées cycle, La Traversée du continent (2007), the first volume of the Diaspora des Desrosiers, in which the journey of the future author’s mother Nana represents a discovery and an apprenticeship in art. Implicit references to La Recherche du temps perdu can be delineated throughout the text. A characterization of Tremblayan poetics will complete the presentation of the narrative strategy. |
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