Le discours de l'impasse: Allegories de l'assujettissement dans 'L'avalee des avalees' et 'Moi, l'interdite' (French text, Rejean Ducharme, Quebec, Ananda Devi, Mauritius)

This essay compares two novels, L'avalée des avalées (1966) by the Quebec author Réjean Ducharme, and Moi, l'interdite (2000) by the Mauritian writer Ananda Devi. Why bring together two books separated by such a great distance in time and geography? Because it is through their differences that their similarities are most striking, for the changes that have occurred in thirty-five years—from decolonization to globalization—make their thematic similarities even more pertinent. Subjection, so powerfully and creatively evoked by Ducharme, had already been much discussed, though in other terms, by such thinkers as Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud, and was being debated, in 1966, by Michel Foucault and Franz Fanon. Today we can add such critical voices as Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha and Judith Butler. Devi's fiction is no less an important and original contribution to this debate.; There are differences between these two authors, in form, content and context, all reflecting their own historicity. What joins them, however, are their strategic methods for representing subjection. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...