Temps traumatique, temps impossible. Une lecture magico-réaliste du Livre des Nuits de Sylvie Germain
Trauma Time, Impossible Time. A Magical-Realist Reading of Le Livre des Nuits by Sylvie Germain

Summary/Abstract: We aim at analysing Sylvie Germain’s 1985 novel from the perspective of the narrative features of magical realism, namely the simultaneous construction of the text on two different fictional codes – the real and the unreal. We thus base our analysis upon the 1985 narratological contribution and results of the Canadian researcher Amaryll Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy. The objective of our paper is to establish a connection between the particular magical realist writing and the presence of collective and individual trauma in Germain’s novel. Our hypothesis is that the specificity and the poetical stakes of Magical Realism helps, in the case of Sylvie Germain’s text, a reassessment of the recent past (of the wars in particular) by a compensation of the sense of the absurd within the fictional world – the narrative “disequilibrium” of Magical Realism calls into question – and thus tries to heal, by reconsideration – the traumatic disequilibrium of wars.

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