« Renouer avec la mémoire » : histoire et identités dans le roman francophone (del Castillo, Yourcenar, Aquin & les autres)

Abstract

In this essay are examined some novels written by Francophone authors (Aquin, Yourcenar) or by writers who come from other countries (“venus d’ailleurs”), such as Michel Del Castillo, and who chose the French language as the language of their writing. They are most of all novels set in the Sixteenth Century and they deal with crucial historical and religious themes, for instance the Inquisition and the extermination of the Moors. These topics are filtered through identity research and the twists and turns of the mind. The Renaissance characters offer to the contemporary authors an alter ego who enable them to compare the History and their own stories, in a dialectical tension between memory and oblivion, in a continual dialogue that allows them to survey the distant origins of their anxiety and to understand themselves and “the other within us”.