“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University Iasi Faculty of Letter Doctoral School of Philology Studies PhD thesis THE POETICS OF CORINNA BILLE’S SHORT-STORY Ŕ Abstract Ŕ Scientific Supervisor Prof. Univ. Dr. Marina MUREŞANU PhD Student Brînduşa-Petronela IONESCU Iasi 2012 1 Table of contents INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................8 CHAPTER I: FROM REALISM TO IMAGINARY...................................................18 Introduction: Problematics.................................................................................19 I.1. Predilection for the novel..........................................................................23 I.2. The Realism of the 50s: Douleurs paysannes and L’enfant aveugle........................................................................................29 Reappropriating space and introducing the people...................................................29 The traditional Valais society (family, society, costumes)..........................................31 I.3. Emerentia 1713 (Deux passions): setting free of writing........................48 The Emerentia 1713 Universe ŕ a social-historical perspective................................48 Emerentia 1713 ŕ the sources of the text................................................................53 I.4. Configuration of a cruel reality................................................................62 CHAPTER II: TEMPTATION OF THE FANTASTIC..............................................78 Introduction: The real facing the unreal..........................................................79 II.1. Preference of the fantastic.......................................................................84 II.2. Ambivalence of the dream.......................................................................88 II.3. Transgressing the real through metamorphosis.................................108 II.4. Hiding behind masks.............................................................................125 CHAPTER III: SPACE(S) AND TIME.................................................................135 Introduction: Space and time in the short story..................................................136 III.1. The exterior space – comforting outdoors, disturbing outdoors........................................................................................140 Mountain, valley, water, earth..............................................................................140 2 Vegetation. The role of the forest..........................................................................149 III.2. The intimacy of the interior space.......................................................157 The house Ŕ regression towards the self. Returning to childhood.............................157 The labyrinth Ŕ a space of the quest......................................................................171 III.3. From chronological time to fantastic atemporality...........................175 CHAPTER IV: THE CHARACTERS....................................................................183 Introduction: Main characters, secondary characters.........................................184 IV.1. Women and men, animals and objects, as intermediaries of an animation and of the identity visual.............................................................188 IV.2. Corinna Bille’s peasant between Good and Bad. The religious spirit of the characters.............................................................................................200 IV.3. Looking for a morality outside morality............................................208 IV.4. At the heart of nature, the emergence of the wild instinct.............................................................................................................221 CONCLUSIONS..................................................................................................232 APPENDIX I ŕ Iconographical sources..........................................................239 APPENDIX II ŕ Personal documents of S. Corinna Bille.............................266 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................304 3 Key words: realism, Valais, fantastic, strange, dream, mask, metamorphosis, forest, house, atemporality Summary The Swiss French-language literary setting has been the main point of interest in various research and critical works. The will to further investigate this topic represents the impetus of our current research. The Swiss literature represents a specific case study mainly because of its official multilingualism which has given rise to multiple debates concerning the French-speaking identity. This identity issue, which has not been entirely clarified, could explain some writer’s orientation towards exploring the imaginary. Such is the case of Corinna Bille, who explores the limited space of dream and fiction, which gives her the opportunity to accept the otherness and to put forward multiple forms of otherness. Author of a series of novels, poems, theatre plays and short stories, she became known namely for her tales and short stories which also brought her various literary prizes: Prize of the short story, awarded by the Geneva’s Institute (1938); Grand Prize of Rhodain’s Academy (1969); Schiller Prize for her entire work (1974); the Goncourt grant for short stories (1975). All Corinna Bille’s manuscripts, personal documents and letters were donated between 1981 and 1990 by Maurice Chappaz to the Swiss Literary Archives of the National Library of Bern. Since his death, the person who took over Corinna Bille’s collection of works and, at the 4 same time, the person who also facilitated our access to the archived documents which we consulted during our research traineeship in 2009, is Stéphanie Cudré-Mauroux. The collection has been completed with photo albums, old snapshots, the film entitled La Demoiselle sauvage, press articles about the writer and her work, as well as a few versions of BA, MA or PhD thesis devoted to this topic. For example Maryke de Courten’s thesis, L’imaginaire dans l’œuvre de Corinna Bille (The imaginary in Corinna Bille’s work), also containing a detailed description of Carnets de rêves (Dream notebooks), is one of the most valuable doctoral researches. The letters exchanged from 1923 to 1958 between Corinna Bille and her parents were published by Gabrielle Moix, revealing multiple aspects about the personality of the writer and her creative mind. Post mortem, various magazines published special issues on her work, such as Écriture and Mon rêve a su. Mon œil a vu (1989), Quarto (1995). The first biography of the author was written by Gilberte Favre: Le vrai conte de sa vie, paraphrasing thus the title that the Swiss author intended to give to her autobiography (Le vrai conte de ma vie). In Romania Corinna Bille did not remain anonymous to the researchers interested in literature written in the French language. Professor Mihaela Toader from University of Cluj has made the first steps towards further studying the works of this writer from Valais, dedicating, in 2002, a doctoral thesis to the author’s entire literary activity (Nature et nature humaine dans l’œuvre de S. Corinna Bille). Besides these extended studies, a series of short articles about her work and life, published in different anthologies of French-speaking 5 writers, in dictionaries of Swiss and French-language literature, as well as in literary magazines, in journals and in papers of various conferences which we have studied ourselves for our own research, have thus kept alive the memory of Corinna Bille, making her stand a special place in the French-language short-stories. Initially we were doubtful whether a new thesis on the French- language literature and particularly on Corinna Bille’s short novels was indeed justified and relevant. However, later on we discovered new perspectives of research, since no hermeneutical approach is ever complete. We consider that our current work, The poetics of Corinna Bille’s short-story, is relevant in the context of bringing a new perspective on Bille’s short stories, in its realistic and fantastic dimension. Our research started a few years ago, during our MA classes on French-language literature. For our MA paper we studied the strange and the fantastic in a series of representative short-stories of Bille. The perspective, the approach, the analysis tools and the conclusions of this paper proved to us that there were a lot of other things to say, that the studied texts offered an endless opening. While moving forward with our documentation, we decided to extend the corpus of our research to the entire work of Bille’s short-stories, our aim being this time to analyse the logic and coherent evolution from realistic to fantastic narrations. Therefore, we have identified at least two types of short-stories: one realistic, containing elements of cruelty and another one, strange and fantastic, with surrealistic and baroque influences. Thus, we had to study the evolution from the first to the second type of short-stories, 6 while using a set of methodological concepts of analysis and a corpus of textual applications. A poetics of Corinna Bille seemed therefore possible. Compared to the initial stage of our research, the current study contains a lot more studies than the first corpus. We particularly focused on nine volumes : Douleurs paysannes, L’enfant aveugle, Deux passions, La fraise noire, La demoiselle sauvage,