Surrendering to the foreignness in Alexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux
Alexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux occupies a strange space between worlds and between languages. His background as a writer-translator imbues the text with a foreignness so that it sits between French and German traditions, and his characters, unable or not-wanting to fit in or understand t...
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| Pubblicato in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/trans, |
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| Autore principale: | |
| Natura: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lingua: | Anglais |
| Pubblicazione: |
TRANS-
2017
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| Accesso online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Riassunto: | Alexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux occupies a strange space between worlds and between languages. His background as a writer-translator imbues the text with a foreignness so that it sits between French and German traditions, and his characters, unable or not-wanting to fit in or understand their world, depict their otherness with foreign and otherworldly art. I present the rich and strange in-between space that the text and its characters inhabit as the source of its wonder, that threshold of the legible. Representative of the novel as a whole, the title “battling le ténébreux” is obscure but brilliant ; the language switch destabilises and enriches. Following this title across languages and literatures, through the intertextual trope of the beau ténébreux, through the romantic despair and the battle against melancholy, the foreign shows itself not as a veil to be lifted but as a materiality in the darkness. In this paper, I explore a foreignness of language as a means of depicting and revealing that inescapable multiplicity and uncertainty. |
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