La polyphonie narrative dans Citadelle d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Abstract

Citadelle is a work by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which illustrates the characteristics of the interwar period literature concerning la condition humaine and anticipates the main themes of existentialist philosophy of the postwar period. The influence of the First World War on literature and philosophy appeared in the form of a deep mistrust towards the humanist values that had existed since the Renaissance. Citadelle is a work in search of new values through a pursuit of a new language. What differs Citadelle from those individual pursuits that we observe in author's contemporaries is his effort to build a universal system of values, not through an orthodox dogmatism, but through a polyphony of a heterodox nature. In our study, we set out from the hypothesis that the narrator speaks with two different voices, the voice of the son and of the father, and that the architectonic design of the work presents a polyphonic structure which we have sought to study in accordance with narratological and dialogical approaches in two parts which constitute the two parts of our thesis. In the first part of our study, we analyzed the narratological forms in relation to the dialogism. Through the narrative categories of Gérard Genette, we tried to show that the anomalies concerning the narrator type and the timelessness are pointers of plurality of voices. Citadelle, being a deep investigation on the language’s itself in addition to having a fictional context, offers us three different utterances produced by the narrator. We observed that these utterances belong to three different narrative levels, which are (1) the particular utterance in the diégèse, (2) the universal utterance in the moment of narration, and (3) the metalinguistic utterance performing a linguistic investigation at the metatext level. We analyzed the alterations of focalization and discovered that the polymodality deriving from the autobiographical form plays an essential role in the production of these alterations. Additionally, we saw that multiple internal focalizations occur in certain situations during the speaker changes in the diégèse and observed in what way this kind of focalization contributes to the dialogical polyphony. In the second part, we applied a polyphonic and dialogical analysis according to the theory of dialogical polyphony of Mikhail Bakhtin. First, we discussed the dialogism under two separate sections: interdiscursive and interlocutive. In the analysis of the interdiscursive one, we probed the way in which the dialogical relations between the literary genres collide with each other on the object of discourse and determine the architectonic design of the work. We saw that the conception of the world as a grotesque body structures the relationship between general (universal) and individual (particular) discourses in the work. As for the interlocutive dialogism, it was treated in our study according to two distinct axes: the vertical and horizontal. On the vertical axis, we observed the overlap of two different points of view representing the universal (the top) and the particular (the bottom) in the same word; while on the horizontal axis, we searched for the indications of the intertwining of the discourses that belong to the characters responsible of the plurality of voices in the social context. Through these analyses, we identified different forms of the orientation towards the other’s word. Our objective was to test the possibility of a universal discourse that does not establish a dogmatic hegemony over the meaning despite its authoritarian character. We have observed that the narrator's discourse in Citadelle allows for a plurality of particular values, despite the fact that the same discourse is the source of production of a universal meaning. Thus, we have concluded that universal discourses producing great metanarratives do not necessarily have to be conceived in a monological way. We are considering this literary work, Citadelle, as an attempt to create an original alternative to mistico-political discourses that resist modernity and market an aspiration of returning to old values, which is one of the biggest problems today. We believe that our study may provide new horizons for fields such as literature, linguistics, sociology, and political sciences.