Le sujet de l’expression dans “Pas pleurer” de Lydie Salvayre

Résumé

Mots-clés : Salvayre; énonciation; mémoire; narration; hétérolinguisme; intertextualité

In a polyphonic prose that blurs the boundaries between the speaking subject and the spoken subject, and thus resists the formal (that is, written) conventions of narrative, Lydie Salvayre, a former psychiatrist, plunges the reader into the “raw” stories of her narrators, as they would present themselves in a psychoanalytical session.

In her latest novel Pas pleurer, the narrator, the daughter of Spanish refugees, sets out to grasp the extraordinary singularity of a historical event that conditioned her own existence, that is the beginnings of the civil war in Spain, elucidating the emotions excited in her by the highly contrasted testimonies of her mother and of the writer Georges Bernanos, of whom she is literally the spokesperson throughout the novel. On the basis of an analysis of enunciation in reported speech and of the related phenomena of  intertextuality and heterolinguism, this article seeks to highlight the narrative processes that make it possible to “trace” the narrator as the narrative evolves. Thus, this study tries to show that, paradoxically, it is in a certain letting-go of writing, or in escaping towards an exterior perspective that the narrator of Pas pleurer demonstrates her 'interiority', creating that place of narration of inter-individual experience where literature happens.