Le vagabond et ses avatars chez Apollinaire
The wanderer and his avatars at Apollinaire

Summary/Abstract: Passionate about mundane details and singular beings, Apollinaire deploys throughout his stories and novels quite a collection of mysterious and paradoxical characters. A central place in his collection is occupied by the wanderer which illustrates the propensity of the writer towards the occult and the picturesque, towards the anecdotal and the extraordinary. As a being always on the run he is sometimes associated with a bohemian spectator, jouisseur of the street and sometimes a marginal presence bordering on antisocial. Versatile character, the apollinarian wanderer does not refer to a specific social type. Wanderer, bohemian, chiffonnier, antique dealer, he has a rather metaphorical position that allows him to expose multiple identities at once. His multivalent nature makes it difficult for a true literary taxonomy. Always seeking innovation and surprise, Apollinaire was able to refine the ambivalence of the wanderer and often relates it to the image of the artist. Marginal and mystifying, the apollinarian wanderer is yet lacking any pejorative sense because its uniqueness is only a sign of originality. With its attractive heterogeneity, the apollinarian prose creates a vast and fine repertoire with a wanderer who is constantly redefining the concept of wandering. With its multiple facets, it actually becomes a living metaphor of a work that is looking through a hybrid and plural writing, mixing genres and composite images. Exploring the prose of Apollinaire, however, we can detect multiple lines of coherence that ultimately reveal a rich array of the wanderer. Despite the nature of the chameleonic apollinarian wanderer, our challenge is to analyze his literary metamorphoses and thus arrive at a definition that surprises in its many urban disguises.

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