La Lecture de François le Champi dans À la recherche du temps perdu: Sand, Proust et l’“essence du roman”

Whether solitary or shared, childhood reading in the Recherche is a sacred experience, somewhere between ethics and aesthetics and, on the other hand, between nature and culture. With both the Sandian narrators and the mother of the Proustian protagonist, reading aloud flirts with censorship, as far as it is subject to a tension between sensuality and repression. The grandmother’s “aesthetics of gift”—that opens up to the historical potential of language—offers an alternative beyond binaries. As the maternal reading of François le Champi shows it, censorship is a repressive practice that produces gaps and inconsistencies, but it also stimulates the openness of the imaginary and the triggering of creativity. The tale becomes a “potential space” (Winnicott), a “play” that facilitates transiting from childhood to adolescence. This “play” invites a new understanding of literature, no longer based on easy communicability but on the expressive potential of what is incommunicable. (In French)