Si la tradition herméneutique ne semble pas avoir joué un rôle de première importance dans la critique littéraire française au XXe siècle, les questions d’interprétation qui ont toujours à la fois hanté et fondé l’herméneutique se posent pour le lecteur du roman français du XXe siècle. L’étude de Miller revoit ces questions dans le cadre de l’herméneutique de Hans-Georg Gadamer et de la pratique herméneutique de quelques interprètes modernes (Szondi, Gadamer, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno).
À travers une lecture de huit romans français du milieu du siècle (Triolet, Bernanos, Malraux, Chabannes, Gary, Sartre, Blanchot) ces mêmes questions mènent le lecteur à une méditation sur les sens possibles (ou parfois impossibles) du discours littéraire moderne.
Robert Miller, Hermès et Aminadab: essai d’herméneutique littéraire, Toronto: Paratexte, 1999.
ISBN: 0920615449
This book examines various aspects of the poetics of desire in Maurice Scève’s Délie, objet de plus haute vertu (1544), which is often described as the first French canzoniere (or collection of poems inspired by Petrarch’s Rime). The author’s approach to this collection of hermetic poems and emblems is to elaborate a set of reading strategies inspired by Lacanian and post-structuralist theories that help us to understand that the poetics of indeterminacy and indirection in the text are bound up in gaps and resistances, in the opacity of the signifier, whether at the verbal or visual level. Like Délie, the Poet-Lover’s multifaceted object of desire, meaning proves elusive, tortuous, hard to grasp. Yet, as with the Lacanian unconscious, resistance itself can be seen as meaningful in the fragmentary, circular text that is Délie. The very gaps that form obstacles to a linear narrative, to a discourse of mastery, turn out to be sites of potential meaning. Like the analyst, the reader of the Délie must therefore learn to listen to the discourse that slips through the interstitial spaces and resistances in the text. There can be no end to desire, however. Its fulfillment remains elusive and tantalizing, propelling both the poetic persona and the reader ever forward in a ceaseless search for a kind of ultimate meaning, for a sense of closure and contentment that are always beyond reach or endlessly deferred, as if in some inaccessible otherness.
Nancy Frelick, Délie as Other. Toward a Poetics of Desire in Scève’s Délie, French Forum, Publishers, 1994.
ISBN: 917058887
Robert Miller —
