DU PEDEPHORE AU PEDEVOLE : LE CHAMP MYTHIQUE DANS LE ROI DES AULNES DE MICHEL TOURNIER
FROM PEDEPHORE TO PEDEVOLE: THE MYTHICAL FIELD IN THE KING OF THE AULNES BY MICHEL TOURNIER

Summary/Abstract: Of his first novel entitled on Friday or the limbs of the Pacific ( 1969 ) in his last novel being entitled Eléazar or the Source and the Bush (1996), Michel Tournier does not stop using under several forms of elements borrowed from the literary, artistic, mythical, biblical fields and philosophic. It is the reason why the novels of Tournier are the object of the more and more frequent studies of the intertextuality since his birth in the literary and discursive researches. Certainly the intertextuality is not a raw process of loan or rewriting, as underlines Marc Eigeldinger in his work title Mythology and Intertextuality (1987), but it assumes 228three major functions inside the works into which are transposed the borrowed elements: repository and strategic, transformative and semantic, descriptive and esthetic. The title of this novel sends back directly to a poem of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe entitled Erlkönig (King of Alders) where it deals with a theme of the Germanic mythology telling the flight of the children of an air ogre. Michel Tournier starts from the chapter Saint Christopher of the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Varagine who tells the port of the Child-Christ of Outcast (become Christophe after his baptism) and arrives little by little at the flight of the children by this ogre. Her protagonist, Abel Tiffauges, becomes, through the events to which he exposes himself, at first a pédéphore (child carrier), then a pédévole (kidnapper). Our work is to analyze the mythical field of this novel in its reports with the other fields which Tournier borrows in strategic, semantic and descriptive perspectives.

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