چکیده:
La littérature a toujours été la scène d’éclatement des conflits sociaux. Or, elle ne s’est jamais contentée de les mettre en scène tels quels, ni rester indifférente par rapport à eux. Car la vocation principale de la littérature est de réagir aux discours et aux représentations sociaux et de les mettre en question. La vie devant soi de Romain Gary est l’une des œuvres dans lesquelles on peut voir la confrontation de deux discours sociaux. Celle-ci donne naissance à une forte tension idéologique qui peut être étudiée dans la perspective réceptionniste et sociocritique. Dans cette étude, ayant recours aux concepts réceptionnistes proposés par Jauss, ainsi qu’à la sociocritique présentée par Duchet, Zima et Bakhtine, nous nous proposons de faire une lecture du roman et nous tenterons de répondre aux questions suivantes : En quel sens l’œuvre de Gary pourrait-elle être considérée comme une relecture de Les Misérable et comment peut-on interpréter cette relecture dans une perspective sociocriticienne ? Comment le roman prend position par rapport à la tension idéologique présentée ? Comment l’univers garien parvient-il à déplacer et à redéfinir la frontière des représentations sociales ? Afin de répondre à ces questions, nous allons partir d’abord d’une étude réceptionniste du roman. Nous allons ensuite nous concentrer sur son analyse sociocritique et finalement, nous allons aborder le fonctionnement de l’esthétique carnavalesque dans le roman. On verra comment l’œuvre choisie agit sur les représentations sociales. Cette étude révèlera le positionnement critique de l’œuvre par rapport à la tension sociale mise en scène.
— ادبیات همواره صحنهٴ منازعات اجتماعی بوده است. اما هرگز صرفا به بازنمایی این منازعات اکتفا نکرده و در برابر انها بیتفاوت
نبوده است. زیرا رسالت اصلی ادبیات واکنش به گفتمانها و بازنمودهای اجتماعی و زیر سوال بردن انهاست. زندگی در پیش رو اثر رومن
گاری ) 1975 ( یکی از اثاری است که در ان میتوان برخورد دو گفتمان اجتماعی را دید. این برخورد منشا ظهور یک کشش ایديولوژیک
میشود و میتوان ان را با دیدگاه نقد دریافت شناختی و جامعهشناختی مورد مطالعه قرار داد. بنابراین، در مطالعه ٴحاضر، با بهرهگیری از
مفاهیم یاوس در باب تحلیل دریافتشناختی و همچنین نقد جامعهشناختی دوشه، زیما و باختین، قصد داریم این اثر را مورد بررسی قرار
دهیم و در نظر داریم به سوالات زیر پاسخ گوییم: چگونه اثر رومن گاری را میتوان خوانشی نو از بینوایان دانست و چگونه میتوان این
خوانش را از دیدگاه جامعهشناختی تحلیل کرد؟ موضع رمان در برابر این نزاع ایديولوژیک چیست؟ چگونه جهان گاری، مرز بازنمودهای
اجتماعی را دستخوش تغییر و انها را بازتعریف میکند؟ در راستای پاسخ به این سوالات ابتدا به مطالعهی دریافتشناختی اثر میپردازیم.
سپس اثر را از دیدگاه نقد جامعهشناختی مطالعه میکنیم و در نهایت به بررسی کارکرد زیباشناسی کارناوالسک خواهیم پرداخت. خواهیم
دید که چگونه اثر منتخب، با به تصویر کشیدن شخصیت های پارادوکسال، به بازنمودهای اجتماعی عصر خویش واکنش نشان میدهد.
پژوهش حاضر موضع انتقادی اثر را در برابر نزاع اجتماعی مورد نظر اشکار خواهد کرد.
Literature has always been the scene of the outbreak of social conflicts and the
space for confrontation between ideology and humanity. However, she has never contented herself with
staging them as they are, nor remaining indifferent to them. Because the main vocation of literature is
to react to social discourse and representations and to question them. In the twentieth century, the
outbreak of wars all over the world, especially the two world wars, encouraged the tension between
ideological and humanist discourses, spoken for or against human rights, their condition and their
destiny. Twentieth-century literature is thus known for the image it reflects of these social tensions and
also for the way in which it problematizes, confirms or questions them.
Among the writers of the past century, Romain Gary is one of those whose positions are very critical;
as much with regard to ideological discourses as with regard to pseudo-humanist discourses. Known for
its diversity and its undeniable richness, the Gary’s artwork is indeed one of those artworks that opposes
the ideological to the human in a dark universe marked by the author's fatalistic vision. The Life Before
Us (1975) is a novel that shows how fatality and constraint can threaten the boundaries of social
representations and discourses. The work depicts the story of Belleville, the small society of immigrants
from Paris during the 1970s. The novel owes its originality to its numerous references to Les Miserables,
the work Gary parodies in order to tell the story of a new generation even more miserable than that
described by Hugo. Indeed, in The Life Before Us, Gary gives birth to a parodic universe where the
absence of a rebellious and saving figure like Jean Valjean has caused the passivity of a new generation
that is even more miserable. Left to their own devices, the inhabitants of Belleville succumb unjustly
under the weight of the ideological distancing between whites and blacks without being able to protest
or act on this social injustice. Indeed, the ideological constraint weighs on their will and prevents them
from reacting until they lead them to their total downfall. So this parodied universe is built around a
strong social tension between the ''ideological'' and the ''human''.
Thanks to its parodic character, as well as to this tension which shares it, The Life Before Us can
interest at the same time a receptionist and socio-critical study which go, one and the other, in a single
direction. Indeed, both join the sociology of the "literary" in the broad sense of the term: sociocriticism
deals with the formal and thematic textualization of social representations and thus tries to find a
significant relationship between society of the text and that of the referent. Whereas the receptionist
analysis deals with the social status of the work upstream and downstream; that is, the social conditions
of its first production and its public reception. So, receptionist analysis is a sociological analysis which
Akbari N.; Esfandi E. —Retour d’une Generation Lecture Receptionniste … | 3
deals with before and after the production of the work while sociocriticism is the sociological analysis which deals with the work from within and is done in parallel with the work. However, today, there is no longer a single receptionist or socio-critical approach: these encompass a very rich methodological variety that allows the reader to adopt the perspective most relevant to his analysis. Regarding reception, we will therefore adopt the critical terminology proposed by Hans Robert Jauss in his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982) based on three main stages, namely "aisthesis", "poiesis" and "catharsis". The "aisthesis" consists of identifying and describing the gap that a later work presents compared to an earlier work. The "poiesis" consists of studying this gap in sociological and sociocritical terms because it was born of a sociohistorical and sociolinguistic evolution. Finally, the "catharsis" aims to discover the critical positioning of the work in question, not only in relation to previous works, but also in relation to the social context in which the object of study is produced. In order to study this gap, it will therefore be essential to have recourse to sociocriticism which has at its base the analytical concepts proposed by Claude Duchet in "The sociocritical method, example of application: the sociogram of war" (1995) and those proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin that Pierre V. Zima takes up and reinterprets in Manuel of sociocriticism (2000).
Since the interest of the socio-critical analysis of our corpus resides primarily in its parodic form, we proposed to formulate a receptionist and socio-critical problematic considering The Life Before Us as a parody of Les Miserables and we will attempt to answer the following questions: In what sense could Gary's work be considered as a rereading of Les Miserables and how can we interpret this rereading from a socio-critical perspective ? How does the novel take a stand in relation to the ideological tension presented? How does the Gary’s universe manage to shift and redefine the frontier of social representations? In order to answer these questions, we will start with a receptionist study of the novel which will consist of three parts: the study of the aesthetics of referentialization and its parodic and critical impact, that of the characters and their oxymoronic statuses and finally, that of the reconstruction of the space-time of the novel and its ideological symbolism. This first part will allow us to identify and describe the gap between the two works. Based on our first results, we will focus, in the second part, on the socio-critical analysis of the novel: we will study the different configurations of ideological tension and we will seek, in the attitude and the metamorphosis of the characters, the reaction to this tension. We will therefore try to interpret the gap in sociohistorical and sociolinguistic terms. The novel's critical positioning cannot be seen simply in the characters; it also resides in the carnival aesthetic whose romantic style largely benefits to reinforce the critical impact. So, in the final analysis, we will be looking for the critical positioning of the novel through the functioning of the carnival aesthetic: this analysis will be based first on the identification of the true narrative-enunciative “I” and then on the discovery of other carnival elements and their impact.
By way of conclusion, we will see in what lies the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic complexity of The Life Before Us, the novel in question: on the one hand, it is articulated around certain dichotomies which arise from distancing and domination in order to impose ideological boundaries. On the other hand, it is based on the total rejection of a medical discourse which gradually finds its importance in social debates and shares the sociolinguistic and socio-political situation in pros and cons. However, this discursive situation is called into question through both stylistic and thematic issues. Regarding the stylistic issue, the novel chooses a parodic form and takes full advantage of all the resources of the carnival aesthetic; indeed, it shows that despite any other reaction, laughter is the most effective attitude to question ideological dichotomies. Regarding the thematic issue, the novel attempts to stage the impact of ideological constraints on the contours of humanism by presenting two oxymoronic characters. Indeed, the whole of this study will reveal to us the critical positioning of the work in relation to the staged social tension.