Creep show suivi de "Je est des autres" : de l'esthétique borderline chez Marie-Sissi Labrèche
In Creep show, the narrator presents his creeps – some family members who are schizophrenics and inadequately appointed – and revives them by its words. By remembering certain moments when the insanity showed itself to him, he wants to dig up the buried and make them speak by lending them his writing. In a split narrative, which could evoke a collection of portraits in movement, the protagonists are presented as monsters, dreamers or sources of inspiration according to the narrator who literally dives back into the past. Presenting mental illness as the shame and the fear of the words, Creep show is a novel about silence and about the importance to understand adequately the insanity; it is a short narrative of seventeen scenes where the writing of a traumatism is experienced as a love story. The essay entitled “Je est des autres.” De l’esthétique borderline chez Marie-Sissi Labrèche describes the genesis of a “borderline” aesthetic. In a psychoanalytical and narratological approach established on the concepts of the melancholy, the kitsch and the crypt, the analysis tries to show which type of thematic and formal construction supports this aesthetic. With representative elements of the universe of Marie-Sissi Labrèche (the question of the limit, the death drive, the body obsession and the instability), the essay is interested in the way the narrator of Borderline ( 2000 ) offers a reading of the sedimentary identity and a misleading self-portrait. According to these elements of reflection, the hypothesis of a textual machine working in and by the instability (and the otherness) leads the analysis to the idea that writing the trauma could represent an attempt at reclaiming identity through the aesthetic called “borderline”.
Esthétique Kitsch Mental illness Childhood Borderline personality disorder Melancholy Aesthetic Kitsch