Intertextuality between reminiscences and significance in Amélie Nothomb’s travel story
Jawad HazımTravel literature, like other literary productions, draws from both real and imaginary experiences in order to develop a narrative representative of the author’s significant events, events that are grafted on aesthetics and culture at work as inspirations flow. It seems appropriate for us to study Amélie Nothomb’s travel account, La biographie de la faim, which seems to articulate not only memories and events of the past, but also literary reminiscences that are part of his act of creation. The narrative in this perspective sets in motion the literary memory and considers the earlier texts as a matrix of creation. The text maintains a dialogue with literary memory and exploits what we might call literary reminiscences. This process of creation thus collides with the notion of intertextuality in that literary reminiscences -and hence reading stereotypes and reader experience - enter into aesthetic dialogue in more than one title. Starting from the premise that the textual relations maintained constitute the passage from reminiscences to meaning, we will show the extent to which Amelie Nothomb’s novel is nourished by the experiences of the author and the reader. The starting point will be a terminological precision of intertextuality and its relation to meaning. Then comes the presentation of Amélie Nothomb’s novel La biographie de la faim before highlighting the dialogues that the latter maintains with other texts.
L’intertextualité entre réminiscences et signifiance dans le récit de voyage d’Amélie Nothomb
Jawad HazımLa littérature de voyage, comme d’autres productions littéraires, puise aussi bien des expériences réelles qu’imaginaire afin d’en élaborer un récit représentatif des événements marquants de l’auteur. Événements qui se greffent sur l’esthétique et la culture à l’œuvre au gré de flux des inspirations. Il nous parait opportun dans cette optique d’étudier le récit de voyage d’Amélie Nothomb, La biographie de la faim, qui semble articuler non seulement des souvenirs et des événements du passé, mais également des réminiscences littéraires qui font partie de son acte de création. Le récit dans cette perspective met en branle la mémoire littéraire et considère les textes antérieurs comme une matrice de création. Le texte entretient un dialogue avec la mémoire littéraire et exploite ce que nous pourrions qualifier de réminiscences littéraires. Ce processus de création se heurte de ce fait à la notion d’intertextualité dans la mesure où les réminiscences littéraires et par là même les stéréotypes de lecture et l’expérience de lecteur entrent en dialogue esthétique à plus d’un titre. Partant du postulat que les rapports textuels entretenus constituent le passage de réminiscences à la signifiance, nous allons montrer dans quelle mesure le roman d’Amélie Nothomb se nourrit des expériences de l’auteur et celle du lecteur. Le point de départ sera une précision terminologique de l’intertextualité et sa relation avec la signifiance. Vient ensuite la présentation de roman d’Amélie Nothomb La biographie de la faim avant de mettre en évidence les dialogues qu’entretient ce dernier avec d’autres textes.
Real events such as imaginary stories are often a matrix of literary productions, especially in travel stories. The latter describes the author’s autobiographical or fictional journeys, highlighting all the routes covered and the routes explored. However, these journeys embody for a large part literary topoi, reminiscences of reading or aesthetics at work. The act of writing is also a journey in action that transposes the event and virtual scheme of the author/narrator/scripter. This article retraces, in an intertextual approach, the links forged between lived historical elements and virtual journeys transfigured in Amelie Nothomb’s travel story La biographie de la faim (The Biography of Hunger). The author seems to draw from Greek mythological heritage in order to trace the itineraries of her journey. In other words, Amélie Nothomb’s story mobilizes Homeric intertexts in the elaboration of the autobiographical framework in which the imagination mixes with reality This crossexamination between the elements borrowed from Greek mythology and the tests of the author’s life inscribes the author’s creative approach in an intertextual continuum. This poetic journey reveals a passage from the memory of the creator to the significant construction of the reader: we postulate that Amélie Nothomb’s story embodies an interaction between literary reminiscences for the author and the actualization of meaning in the reader, hence the presence of intertextuality between a co-presence relationship on one side and significance on the other. Intertextuality embodies the link that a text has with other texts and that the heterogeneity of it is only an avatar of this intertextual dynamism. Dynamism which often takes the pace of transformation of previous or future texts, it can even function as a mode of transposition of texts. We start with the definition of intertextuality and its relationship to meaning. After this, a sketch of the novel La biographie de la faim, a focus on the different interferences and dialogues with other texts. Our intention to address the issue of reminiscences as an integral part of the memory of literature and the relationship with meaning in our work is to show what is the relational relationship as well explicitly that the intertextual practices are allusive: the rewrites, the misappropriations and even the preliterary writings contain a history, an aesthetics, a philosophy and a position with regard to the literature of a given epoch. Intertextuality, it is necessary –he recalls it sets in motion the literary memory by questioning the unconscious of the empirical object –text –and positions the reading with regard to the historical background by opening the way of meaning. Beyond a psychoanalytic perspective, the unconscious text must be understood as “the product of a writing, but also of a subjective history. Lived and written history, history of writing” (Collot, 1985), which shows its traces in textual relationships. Unless the literary language denies the relationship of the text to the world, to the real or, in short, to the referentiality, the construction of meaning encourages us to project ourselves into memory, and to enhance reading with data relating to literary history and the history of forms. Thus, Antoine Compagnon emphasizes the conflicting relationship between literature and the representation of the world. He denounces the fragility of the anti-mimetic conception of Barthes and the validity, in some respects, of the Aristotelian mimesis by leaving a way for the intertextuality to connect the texts, product of the Semiosis, and the reality of the world – intrinsic given – proper to the reader Amélie Nothomb’s travel story embodies this mediation between the real and the imaginary, between the reminiscences and the meaning and the notion of travel remains a motif that abounds with literary topoi. Amélie Nothomb’s travel story is akin to a literary memorial in its own right, where literature refers to itself. The intertexts in this case crystallize the different anchors of the memory and serve as a relay both between the texts, and between the texts and reality itself. These textual gears embrace cultural, if not intercultural, interactions.
