Fiction et essais historiographiques : entrelacs et croisements de l’écriture byattienne
Keywords:
Historiographie, A.S. Byatt, Michelet, Jules, Barthes, Roland, essay, fiction, thanatophilia, neo-Victorian cultureAbstract
La fiction byattienne entretient un rapport étroit avec l'essai. Les sujets de prédilection de la romancière sont l'écriture, la science et l'Histoire. Cet article envisage le traitement de l'historiographie conjointement dans Possession et Passions of the Mind. Il montre en particulier comment A.S. Byatt aborde l'historiographie Romantique de Michelet (Hayden White), étudiée par Roland Barthes dans Michelet par lui-même, à la faveur d'un va-et-vient entre fiction et essai. Cette hybridation de l'écriture entre roman et réflexion suscite le fantasme byattien d'une écriture sans sutures, dont le pendant historiographique serait le continuum entre passé et présent décliné sur tous les modes : la matière, la temporalité et le mythe, pour traduire la figure de la possession.
Byatt's fiction-writing is closely bound up with her essay-writing. Amongst the novelist's favourite subjects, writing, science and History feature prominently. The following essay sets out to establish how historiography is treated jointly in Possession and Passions of the Mind. It shows more especially how Byatt tackles Michelet's Romantic writing of History (Hayden White) by drawing from Roland Barthes' Michelet par lui-même, and in so doing interweaves fiction-writing and essay-writing. Such hybridization between the novel and the essay serves Byatt's own quest for a seamless, suture-free type of writing, whose counterpart in historiography could be found in the perfect continuum between past and present expressed in all its guises: matter, time and myth, as a form of possession.
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