The porosity of narrative, memory and spatial boundaries in Anne-Élaine Cliche's Jonas de Mémoire

Abstract

What happens when our reconstruction, our capacity to imagine ourselves, can only occur through the mediation of the Other? More than a self-discovery through reflection, Jonas de Mémoire is a proof of the possibility of self-writing outside the self. Writing makes the experience of oneself possible while at the same time it transgresses and undermines the boundaries between oneself and the Other. The porosity of the narrative, the memorial and spatial boundaries between author, narrator and character immediately raises a singular relation to the act of writing, which results in a sustained work on the concept of separation. The frenzied use of the semicolon and of coordinators manage to formally represent the particular work of memory at work in this novel. These processes of juxtapositions succeed in giving a sensation of collage between the sentences, in an image of a true patchwork where borders come together and dwindle. Paradoxically, they also mark the inadequacy of memories by establishing a typographic border between the two. The present study therefore envisages studying the role of writing and the aesthetic and formal elements specific of the novel that act on the frontier of the here and there, the self and the Other, the present and the past, which affirm this separation in same time they deny it.