Expérience précaire du monde et représentation de la poésie dans La fissure de la fiction et Désâmé de Patrice Desbiens
Diverse pieces of modern and contemporary poetry offer representations of a lyrical subject’s attitude towards the act of writing. Studying such an issue in the works of Patrice Desbiens offers a distinctively interesting perspective, especially in the case of some of his publications from the 1990s and the 2000s wherein such representations appear quite clearly. Yet the treatment of the act of writing in his work has received very little research attention. The aim of this Master’s thesis is to shed further light on how Patrice Desbiens’s works deal with representations of writing and poetry. The thesis focusses on two of his published works, La fissure de la fiction (1997) and Désâmé, (2005), with greater emphasis placed on the former, as it is in my own perspective a key piece in his poetic legacy. To begin, my work puts forth the concept that the protagonists in La fissure de la fiction and Désâmé are both characterized by precariousness, but in different ways. In La fissure de la fiction, the character of the poet is understood from the perspective of an ironic revival of the literary curse myth. The meaning this myth confers to the main character of this poetical story is also discussed. Secondly, the thesis argues that the coherence and the plausibility of the universes of La fissure de la fiction and Desâmé are undermined. In light of these analyses, one can envision the role of a poetry which, ultimately and despite everything, bears a consolatory character. It does so in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, its grotesque aesthetic, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, in which it is written.
Patrice Desbiens grotesque poetry poet precariousness