L'été au Parc Belmont ; suivi de, Cartographies du père
L’été au Parc Belmont is a collection of fragments that combines narrative prose, family archive photographs, handwriting and drawings. In this story, the narrator is investigating her father’s identity. The narrator gathers all the information she can ﬁnd and remains the sole enunciator of the story in her attempt to exhume the paternal past. The plot unfolds in an overwhelming, melancholy and non-linear temporality; between the father’s childhood along the Rivière des Prairies, his adolescence in Cartierville and his adulthood in a suburban town, the narrator’s investigation periodically bursts in. The use of family archives in the form of photographs and videos problematizes the relationship between text and image. Thus, photographs are used in various ways : photos which appear in the text without being directly referred to, photos which are given an elliptical or falsiﬁed ekphrasis, photos accompanied by diverted legends, etc. Cartographies du père oﬀers a reﬂection on the links between topography and biography in contemporary literary texts. In this essay, I am studying a corpus that is both Québécois and American, as well as narrative and graphic. The study focuses on three authors : Alison Bechdel (Fun Home : A Family Tragicomic, 2006), Hervé Bouchard (Harvey ou Comment je suis devenu invisible, 2009) and Catherine Mavrikakis (La ballade d’Ali Baba, 2014). Beyond the relationships between transmission and locales, the texts of my corpus are linked by the father’s death, an unsurpassable loss, an event that is yet to be investigated by the narrators. While this essay focuses on the way in which these texts thematize paternal absence –namely through the diﬃculties and shortcomings of the transmission resulting from this loss – it is also questioning the ways in which the authors represent various locales, play with the space of the page, mobilize mapping tools and describe routes. For these heirs, the reconstruction of a family event or history necessarily involves a reconstruction of the setting, whether it be the Pennsylvania countryside, the Bouillon family home or the road between Montreal and Key West. The analysis of the reconstruction of the locale informs the reader of the relationship that the heir maintains with the father ﬁgure. Cartographies du père also oﬀers a reﬂection on the act of remembering and talking about another person and on the inevitable ﬁctional shifts that this action provoke.
Roman XXIe siècle Quebec literature American literature 21st century Creative writing Photographs Comics Novel Father ﬁgure Place studies Intertextuality