La mise en fiction du retour au pays natal chez Émile Ollivier, Anthony Phelps et Dany Laferrière
The purpose of this study is to explore the scriptural mechanisms of literary works that thematize the return to the homeland. Based on a corpus of novels published by expatriate writers, it aims to demonstrate the adequacy of their form to their content. In this regard, La contrainte de l'inachevé by Anthony Phelps, Pays sans chapeau by Dany Laferrière, Les urnes scellées by Émile Ollivier meet the criteria of fictions which closely associate theme and structure, meaning and composition, substance and form. These three novels are based on structural and thematic choices that stem from the principle of return, defined as the propensity to submit to a regressive movement or, to put it more clearly, to evolve backwards in time as well as in space. Two axes are thus chosen to highlight the main theme of our research: the definitive return to the country of birth and the return alternately between the host country and the country of origin. The first axis takes into consideration the will for permanent resettlement in their society from certain exiles, the investigation, the repetition, the interpretation, the ritual, the affiliation constituting the textual manifestations of what animates these migrants. As for the second axis, it is focused on the round trip between two territories of fictional characters and is reflected in the stories by the outcrop in the narratives of the motif of the double, the in-between, self-referentiality, of the mise en abyme and by the place reserved for zombies, doppelgangers, dreams, mirrors, etc. This research has thus managed to establish that return as meaning goes hand in hand with return as a principle of composition in the novels analyzed. In Ollivier, Laferrière and Phelps, with the regressive gesture of the fictional characters, on the level of the statement, always echoes in the texts, on the level of the enunciation, the scriptural processes characterized by the principle of return.
Anthony Phelps Dany Laferrière Émile Ollivier Exil Haïti Return to homeland Exile Haiti Narrative device Fictionalization