Le songe dans le roman Mémoires d’Hadrien de Marguerite Yourcenar
The dream in the Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Mémoires d’Hadrien

Summary/Abstract: The main characters of M. Yourcenar’s two historical novels are dreamers of high calibre, observers of the oneiric show and theorists of dream, as the author herself is. Not by chance, two ample quotations from her novels, Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Œuvre au Noir, are included in the second edition’s preface of her collection of oneiric transcriptions, Les Songes et les Sorts (1991). These quotations illustrate two parallel perspectives on dream, developed during her lifetime and based on the constant observation of her own oneiric adventures. The first part of the present article suggests an analysis of the observations on dream, attributed by M. Yourcenar to the main character of the novel Mémoires d’Hadrien; these observations are related to the author’s oneiric theory from the preface of her collection, Les Songes et les Sorts (1991). It is mainly about the dream’s aesthetic and affective dimensions. The second part of the paper analyzes the novel’s oneiric episodes and the writing style of their recording.

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