Habiter l’espace chez Marie-Hélène Lafon. La maison en tant que métaphore de l’habitation de l’espace par l’homme

Abstrakt

The article is based on three theoretical concepts of space in a literary work, namely the poetics of happy space by the French philosopher and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard, then on the theory of the historical memory of places by the Czech literary scholar Daniela Hodrová, and finally on the geopoetic spatial approach to space by the French theorist Bertrand Westphal and the Quebec geocritic Rachel Bouvet, where the work is understood as a map in which individual characters leave their traces. The author is seen as a geographer mapping space with his work. Through the prism of these three theoretical approaches, we analyze the work of the French author from the Auvergne region Marie-Helene Lafon, who in her novels and essays maps the vanishing rural space of the mountain solitudes of the French Massif Central. We choose the specific motif of a rural mountain house as a metaphor for human habitation of space. Analyzing the novels Les Derniers Indiens, Sources, and Joseph and L'Annonce, we find and define a whole range of images of the house of different meanings, from the complete opposites of the house of Bachelard's happy space, to the absolute identification with its concept. We notice the ancestral memory of places and show how a modern person inhabits a traditional rural space.