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Kertojan tunnustukset ja itsepetokset Marguerite Yourcenarin pienoisromaaneissa

• Pia Livia Hekanaho Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74607

Abstract

Marguerite Yourcenar’s deceptive narrators and récit genre

One of the most characteristic features of Marguerite Yourcenar’s oeuvre is her recurrent interest in the distinctly French literary genre of récit. Typically, a récit is a very concentrated, rather short piece of fiction related to novella and dominated by the narrator’s ”voice” and point of view. The elliptical narration of récit questions the reliability of the narrator and the confessional mode. The three texts, addressed in this article, are Alexis (1929), La Nouvelle Eurydice (1931), and Le coup de grâce (1939). In each one of the texts, the unreliability of the narration functions on several levels, the central feature being the inevitable acts of self-deceit of the narrators.

The present article explores the various textual strategies of confession and concealment throughout the narratives. In these texts by Yourcenar, modes of confession and disclosure function actually in order to deceive and conceal, and to elaborate upon the intertwined concepts such as truth and untruth, honesty and dishonesty or knowing and unknowing. Questions related to ethics of reading and interpretation are combined with an analysis of the dialectic of the textual closet, in other words a complex relation between veiling and unveiling (especially and typically) a sexual secret. Furthermore, the article maintains that both narration and interpretation are activities characterized by control and power relations. Thus, the self-reflection concerning the ethics of reading relates also to theoretical approaches and ideologies present in the critical community. Especially, the ethics of reading is a topical issue when the critical community encounters various anti-normative, counter-hegemonic theories and approaches.