Les Paysages dans Sylvie

The meaning of the landscapes in Sylvie is examined in terms of a series of homologous contrasts: remembered landscapes, characterized by feminine presence and nature-culture continuity, contrast with the landscapes of "reality," marked by degrees of feminine and cultural "absence" and disharmony. But memory, as a phenomenon of plenitude (feminine presence and nature-culture continuity) is like the theater, where this effect is also produced, but also as an illusion; hence the remembered landscapes contrast, by their theatricality, both with the somber "real" landscapes and with the original childhood experience, which was not theatrical but festive. The sense of life as a "lendemain de fête," characterized only by different ways of recalling the lost festivity (the magic of nocturnal recall vs. the melancholy of diurnal memory) thus appears as a fundamental meaning of the text. (In French) (RC)