L’étude sur l’engagement littéraire : le cas de Marguerite Yourcenar

• Main Authors: En-Chieh SUN, 孫恩潔
• Other Authors: Teng-Hueh HONG
• Format: Others
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/zd6pem

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 法國語文學系 === 106 === Time and History are two major themes in the creative universe of Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987). Many of her most renowned works, whether it be the life of the 2nd-century Roman emperor or her family history trilogy, demonstrate her endless questioning and meditations on human history. This tendency to have a retrospective look in her writing often gives us an impression that she is always “elsewhere” temporally. However, among all Yourcenarian novels, Denier du rêve (English title: A Coin in Nine Hands), published in 1934, has a noticeable singularity, because this work that depicts Rome in 1933 is a testimony of the present time facing the auther, who then often had a long stay in Italy and who was a witness to the rise of Italian Fascism. Besides, as Yourcenar indicates herself, this novel, which centers on the story of a failed attack on Mussolini, is one of the first French novels to manifest an anti-fascist political position at that time, and such a statement reveals a kind of attempt at “literary engagement.” This may be surprising to many readers, since Yourcenar is generally considered to be apolitical. In addition, given the “engagements” practiced by her contemporaries, she doesn’t really qualify as a typical “engaged writer.” That is why some literary critics don’t agree that she took a political stance through her writing of the novel, and they even deny its political dimension. Such a debate is the starting point for our reflection, because, in fact, we have found in Yourcenar’s description of Fascist Italy many political allegories and revelations of this dictatorship. We can’t help wondering why our author’s “political engagement” in this case was neither perceived nor understood. As to this question, our hypothesis is that it has much to do with the definition of “engagement” and a general impression that it has on us. In order to have a better grasp of the question of “literary engagement,” we divide our research into two major parts. One is the evolution of the concept of “literary engagement,” and the other is an analysis of Yourcenar’s “engagement.” In the first part of this thesis, we examine various examples of how literature intervenes in the politics, which has prevailed in the French literary world since the Dreyfus Affair occurring in the late nineteenth century. Our purpose is to know how certain writers reacted to the great events of their time and how they bore witness to their era. Through different authors’ “engagements,” we try to understand how the notion of “engaged literature” has been progressively determined, and then theorized, reaching its peak after World War II. From Émile Zola to Jean-Paul Sartre, especially in the cases of some French authors during the interwar period, we can see the possibility of different forms of “literary engagement,” which thus makes us believe that “literary engagement” is not just as defined and practiced by Sartre and his colleagues. Next, the second part of this thesis intends to prove that the Yourcenarian (re)presentation of Fascist Italy could be one of the possible forms of “literary engagement.” We mainly study the final version (1959) and the theatrical version (1961) of the novel mentioned above, with an eye to discovering the political meanings of the works. By analyzing the symbolic elements in the narrative, we find that our author’s method of using a lot of myths aims to reveal a Fascist regime which was working on its mythification, in the hope of demystifying the myth of Fascism, and this constitutes one of the pillars of her “literary engagement.” We want to further indicate that such an “engagement” is not only related to the politics, but it is also based on Yourcenar’s humanist preoccupation and her vison of History. With these two parts which seem autonomous but actually inseparable, our thesis ends with Yourcenar’s views on several authors already mentioned in the first part and a comparison between Sartrean and Yourcenarian “literary engagement.”