Art Of Commemoration In Michel Tournier's Midnight Love Feast

Michel Tournier,a representative member of France's New Fable writing,is primarily known for his ability to borrow from Classical literatures,offering them a unique and postmodern rebirth that is diametrically opposed from the originals.For this reason,academics often put forth effort to reveal the intertextuality of his works and analyze how he reconstructs myths,the Bible,and other Classic works.Using Tournier's short story collection Midnight/Love Feast/as central text,this paper seeks to examine the potential reasons behind why Tournier would be so obsessed with recreating and altering the Classical canon,which is an aspect that the current research overlooks.The most consistent theme in Midnight Love Feast is that of"commemoration",which serves to prove the author's own longstanding creative principle,that of original works being only slightly less important than the works that transmit and commemorate these Classical texts."Commemoration" recalls Classics,and "commemorators" become new Classics,This thesis is divided into three chapters:The first chapter will propose some definitions of the term "commemoration" from different angles in order to deduce the main features attributed to "commemoration":the recall of memory,repetition as a form of heightened ritual,and the present as paying tribute to the past.Studies of commemoration always accompany studies of "memory",because commemoration is the physical manifestation thereof.The second section of this chapter will discuss the relationship that the commemoration maintains with the collective and individual memory,so as to show commemoration's constructive role.The second chapter will first of all indicate some of the specificities reflected in Midnight Love Feast:the evolution from novels characterized by hermetic language and often impenetrable philosophy,towards a shorter and more concentrated stylization utilizing more succinct language and characterized by a predilection for the short tales.This chapter will then argue why the "commemoration" is the recurring theme of Midnight Love Feast,and analyze how the "commemoration" is manifested in this collection,in order to justify that the stories in Midnight Love Feast are consistent with the theme of "commemoration" in terms of both substance and form.The third chapter will explore reasons behind why Tournier seeks to give Classical works commemorative value.One reason is to destigmatize "repetition" by justifying that the repetition of a work far from having less value than the original,has on the contrary more and repetition is also part of creation.Another motive analyzed is that of an attempt to liberate traditional novels from the clutches of the New Novelists that might otherwise fall into oblivion without subsequent commemorators,which in itself would confront the second crisis of the novel after the decline of the New Roman by recourse to tradition.Yet another would be to pay a humble tribute to the predecessors in order to establish one's status as a legitimized heir to Classics,while underscoring an ambition to use commemoration as a way to become one of the new Classics.Through Midnight Love Feast,Tournier shows that "commemoration" has not only the capacity of multiplication through repetition,but also that an original work and its rewriting constantly embellish each other,and will furthermore allow for the mutual accomplishment between the subject and object of commemoration.This dialectical meaning of commemoration reveals a process of mutual influence:commemoration perfects and canonizes earlie:r works,thereby giving them a sacred dimension,while commemorators appropriate and transform Classical works according to their own needs,thereby expanding their own potential by realizing the possibilities of Classics.