Le Père silencieux: la métaphore paternelle chez Eugène Savitzkaya

Author: Igboemeka A.

Source: Neophilologus, Volume 85, Number 4, October 2001 , pp. 519-527(9)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Eugène Savitzkaya, the Belgian writer of Ukrainian origin, was born in 1955 and lives today in Belgium. He has published several novels and collections of poetry at Éditions Minuit and in 1977 he wrote a short novel entitled Mentir. The work – said to have been written from photographs of the author's mother – is a series of fragmented scenes and descriptions that detail the words and movements of the mother of an unidentified narrator.

The father is curiously absent from this family romance. Yet his glaring absence occupies a fundamental "place" in the narrative. I will show how a silent paternal signifier establishes itself as the cause of the enunciator's problematic relationship with his utterances, affecting also the relationship of the subject to the story he attempts to construct. I begin by describing the Oedipal desire – the narrator's attachment to the mother – that circulates in the text through ambiguities in narrative time and changes in the position of the narrator's gaze and subjectivity. I suggest that a paternal metaphor establishes itself in the text as a force that forbids the subject's incestuous desire for the mother, the metaphor taking shape through the nightmarish image of a black panther. Yet the unstable relationship of the narrator to his narrative – the contradictions, uncertainties, obsessive lists and details – evokes the paternal deficiency that cannot be filled. The text is read then as the subject's confrontation and struggle with castration, desire and the law of the father.

Language: English

Document Type: Regular paper

Affiliations: 1: Department of French, University of Toronto, Canada; c/Skillshare Africa Mozambique Country Office, C.P. 2634 Maputo, Mazambique

Publication date: 2001-10-01