L'humour littéraire : le fond tragique dans Zazie dans le métro, Midnight's Children et Crèvematin : étude du mouvement humoristique et de son rapport au tragique dans la littérature
For a long time, humor as a literary device has been neglected in both the academic and critical spheres. However, it is to be found in some major works from beginning to end, and sometimes it even dictates the path of the entire story. But laughter in literary works was first considered a frivolous action, before being relegated to its social functions. Indeed, in literature, humor can convey the most serious aspects of life and shows itself to be a formidable writing tool. It is precisely what I want to explore here, in describing the tragic undertone of three novels of different times and/or cultures. Through those novels, we will see the various types of tragedy that literary humor can mobilize, before coming to articulate what they have in common, the theme underlying them all. A certain schema guides this process in the three works under consideration: a movement which consists in masking humor’s dramatic aspects before exposing them, whether directly or indirectly. In that sense, the most traditional mechanisms of literature are made use of and subverted. In order to establish the study’s analytic framework, it will thus be a question of determining the characteristics of literature’s humoristic action. In attempting to understand the emergence of a chaotic structure necessary for producing the movement that characterizes humor, we will examine its specific temporality in relation to the time allowed in the act of writing. In tracking the will to destroy as a desire to create, we will see how humor undermines the literary illusion as well as how it inhabits language to exploit its possibilities and means of expression that go beyond mimesis. After examining the workings of humor, I will turn to the role of the tragic itself and its interaction with the humor that characterizes these novels. Following this reflection to its conclusion leads to the question of whether tragic humor ultimately cancels itself out. As it unfolds, then, this study comes to examine the intimate relationship between humor and the tragic, how they work together and which of these two poles assumes a greater importance. In this context, this study shows how the comic alters the dramatic that, without disappearing completely, appears in unexpected ways.
comparative literature humor tragic dark humor language movement