Paratopie et entretien littéraire : Andreï Makine et Nancy Huston ou l’écrivain exilé dans le champ littéraire

Abstract

This article examines the exiled authors’ interviews, in order to analyze the specificity of the authors’ image that is worked out during the interview. Its objective is to demonstrate the connection between the authors’ interviews and the concept of “paratopy” defined as the impossible belonging of the exiled authors to the French society and the literary field in which they write in a foreign tongue. This analysis is based on two emblematic cases of writers who have immigrated to France, namely Andreï Makine and Nancy Huston, who write their works in French and thus contribute to the French literary field. We show that both writers construct a multi-faceted self-image, all united under the banner of “paratopy”: Makine’s ethos of “truth teller” and “vagabond”, Huston’s preference for multiculturalism and an “uprooted exile”, that places them in different kinds of “paratopies” - identitary, spatial, and creative . It is this non-place which allows them to turn their unbearable situation of exile into a situation where the fact that they are foreigners is not considered a defect or a disadvantage, but quite on the contrary, widens their field of vision and creative potential.

Keywords

• ethos
• exile
• identity
• literary field migration
• paratopy
• writer’s in exile