La transmission de la mémoire dans les romans de Marie-Claire Blais

• Main Author: Eva Pich-Ponce
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Conserveries Mémorielles 2013-03-01
• Series: Conserveries Mémorielles : Revue Transdisciplinaire de Jeunes Chercheurs
• Subjects: displacements; filiations; memory; Quebec literature; space; Memory
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cm/1391

Mary-Claire Blais is one of the most important writers in Quebec literature. In Le Sourd dans la ville (1979), Visions d’Anna (1982) and Soifs (1995), an important number of voices are juxtaposed in order to highlight the dramas of the XXth century. Memory and its transmission constitute the central themes of these texts, which mix times and places in a wish to reveal the ‘excesses of memory’ as defined by Todorov in Les abus de la mémoire (1995). The selection of the facts that are transmitted or forgotten, the institutional and social usage of memory, the importance which this one acquires within identity is put in an obvious place in these novels. Ricoeur has highlighted the link between ‘corporal memory’ and the ‘memory of places’, between the ‘here/now’ and the geographical and historical ‘there’. I aim to analyze the relationship between the ‘now’ constituted by the space where the protagonists live and the international and historical space that haunts their thoughts. I will examine the confusion of places and temporalities and I shall see how the texts weave a memory marked by personal recollections and the stories of other times. The violence of the past is associated to the brutality of the modern world, and suggests an apocalyptic future. Only art and human solidarity seem to bring a certain light of hope to the characters.