Le jardin, lieu esthétique d’un (dés)ordre humain : la naturalisation du politique et du littéraire chez Claude Simon et Patrick Chamoiseau

Abstract

This study examines the literary motif of the garden in the works of Claude Simon (Les Géorgiques, Le Jardin des Plantes) and Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco, Biblique des derniers gestes). Representative of a special relationship to the world, the garden reveals commonalities between the authors, however, it also requires replacing the texts within a specific context. The Simonian oeuvre bears the traces of the nouveau roman ; the texts from the Antilles are expressive of a post-colonial context. In contemporary literature the motif of the garden does not induce the evocation of an immutable pastoral ideal. On the contrary, the garden appears as a dynamic locus which destabilises the pre-designed arrangement of the gardener, thus representing a living disorder which dismisses man from his role as the sole creator and privileged beneficiary of the space created. The gardener must negotiate a balance ; he does not present himself as a collector of plants to be arranged, but as an artist intent on achieving “relational aesthetics” (Bourriaud, 1998). In the same way, the author, by referring to the garden, is working with the poetics of interaction. The garden appears in fine as the preferred lever for “naturalising” a literary aesthetic at the inception of a bio-heritage which is not simply the ekphrasis resulting from a planned representation but the execution of a gesture in the situational urgency of the kairos. The developed space always addresses the need for an equilibrium ; except that in this case it does not stem from an ordering and categorisation of species, but from a dynamic plant production, a biological profusion which landscapes the literary work in movement.

Keywords

• Contemporary literature
• garden
• Claude Simon
• Patrick Chamoiseau
• aesthetic
• poetic