Statut et trajectoire d’un personnage « hors‐norme » : la figure de l’anti‐héros dans La Fable du nain de Kamel Daoud
Status and Trajectory of an “Out‐of‐the‐Ordinary” Person: The Anti‐Hero in Kamel Daoud’s La Fable du nain

Summary/Abstract: In this article, we attempt to unravel the scriptural strategies used in La Fable du nain (« The Fable of the Dwarf ») in order to make a fictional character be the opposite of the classic, heroic, conventional model. Kamel Daoud, a contemporary French-speaking Algerian writer, produced indeed a fiction inhabited by an anti-character, whose heroic status and trajectory fall dramatically within an isotopy of the écart. This is a fictional character whose image is fractured and whose values are wrecked, who is both a marginal and a shattered being, both atypical and alienated, whose restlessness has an impact on the narrative that is fractured itself. The protagonist wants to appear both contentious and provocative, posing as an anti-subject, fighting his own deep ego and society. Thus, the marginal’s manner of writing opens towards a new poetics lying under the sign of transgression, reflected as fragmentation and imbalance in the scriptural universe. Therefore, Daoud changes marginality into an aesthetic and stylistic device, resulting in a revolutionary way of writing which shakes the literary conventions, to bring uncanny, extraordinary beings on the stage. Daoud proves subversive by constructing a new type of character holding a strange status, corresponding to a new kind of narrative. Thus, the writing is forged in disrespect of the norms, but in line with the evolution of thought, man and his History.

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