چکیده:
L’objet de cette étude porte sur la structure narratologique de Jonas ou L’artiste au travail d’Albert Camus, une nouvelle tirée d’un recueil de nouvelles intitulé L’Exil et le Royaume, la dernière œuvre littéraire éditée du vivant de l'auteur, publiée en 1957. Cette nouvelle met en scène la vie de Jonas, artiste-peintre parisien, de sa réussite jusqu’à son impuissance dans la création artistique et sa dépression profonde. La méthode d’analyse adoptée dans cette recherche est celle de Gérard Genette, critique français qui a joué un grand rôle dans l’avancée des études formalistes et structuralistes à l’échelle mondiale.Nous nous concentrerons dans notre analyse sur l’étude de trois catégories proposées par Genette: temps, mode et voix, dont chacune se subdivisent à des sous-catégories ; la première, le temps, se ramifie en ordre, durée, fréquence ; la deuxième, le mode, se répartie en distance et perspective ; et enfin la troisième, la voix, se classifie en temps de la narration, niveaux narratifs et différents types de narrateur.
هدف از این نوشتار تحلیل ساختار روایی ژوناس یا هنرمند مشغول به کار، یکی از داستان های مجموعه تبعید و سلطنت، منتشر شده در سال 1975، از نویسنده فرانسوی، البر کاموست؛ مجموعه داستانی که اخرین اثر ادبی ویرایش شده نویسنده درزمان حیاتش است. داستان ژوناس، زندگی هنرمند نقاش پاریسی با همین نام را_ از زمان موفقیتش تا ناتوانی اش در خلق هنری و افسردگی عمیقش_ به تصویر می کشد.روش تحلیلی انتخاب شده برای این اثر، روش ژرار ژنت، منتقد فرانسوی ست که نقش بزرگی در پیشرفت مطالعات فرمالیست و ساختارگرایی، در ابعاد جهانی، ایفا کرده است. در این واکاوی به مطالعه سه سطح روایی ارايه شده توسط ژنت می پردازیم: زمان، وجه، صدا یا لحن که هر کدام از این سطوح به زیرشاخه هایی تقسیم می شوند؛ سطح روایی زمان به مطالعه ترتیب، تداوم و بسامد می پردازد، وجه شامل بررسی فاصله و کانونی شدگی و بالاخره صدا یا لحن در پی تحلیل زمان روایت، سطوح روایی و انواع روای هاست.
HE subject of this study is the narrative structure of Jonas or The Artist at Work, a short story by
Albert Camus from Exile and the Kingdom, a collection of short stories, the author’s last
completely published work in 1957. This story depicts the life of Jonas, a Parisian painter, from
his success to his incapacity in artistic creation and his deep depression.
The method of analysis adopted in this research is that of Gerard Genette, a French critic who played
a great role in the progress of formalist and structuralist studies on a global scale. We will focus in our
analysis on three categories proposed by Genette: tense, mood and voice, each subdivided into various
subcategories; the first, tense, treats the order, duration and frequency; the second, the mood, includes
distance and perspective; and finally the third, the voice, is classified in narration time, narrative levels
and different types of narrator.
Faced with the infinity and multitude of stories, how can we find a model common to all in order to
be able to describe them? This is the objective of structuralism, the first concern of which, in seeking
the structure of the narrative, is the narrative form. The structural analysis of narrative works aims to
access global and structured models of narration. Internal narrative analysis is therefore characterized
by its tendency to study narratives “as independent linguistic objects” in order to show a “basic structure”
common to different narratives.
According to Genette, every work is made of universal elements assembled in a singular totality. “The
general is at the heart of the singular” (“Figure III” 69). “Analysis of a work is not going from the
general to the particular, but from the particular to the general” (68). He therefore developed, from an
analysis of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, in his Figure III, a terminology that has become universal
for describing the functioning of a story. Genette distinguishes three aspects of narrative reality:
The story which is "signified or narrative content" (72), includes a series of events, actions and words.
- The narrative which is “significant, statement, discourse or narrative text itself” (72), corresponds to the representation of said events, actions and words by a narrator.
- Narration, which consists of the "productive narrative act" (72), designates the act by which the narrator tells the story in the form of an oral or written narrative.
We can say that the analysis of narrative discourse is the study of the relationships between these three categories.
This research work aims to consider a short story by Albert Camus, Jonas or the artist at work, taken from the collection Exile and the Kingdom, from the narratological angle by adopting the method proposed by Gerard Genette in Figure III .
Our study, less focused on the irreducible specificity of the Camusian work which has been the subject of so much previous research, aims above all to treat the short story Jonas considered as a story in general to show that the work of Camus, as every work is composed of so-called universal elements united in a “singular totality”. (68)
In fact, by analyzing the narrative structure of Camus' short story, we will see if it obeys the universal grammar of narrative that structuralists like Genette seek to discover. In addition, we will try to establish a certain relationship between the narrative techniques implemented by the author and the theme of the work (the climate of the absurd and the passivity of the hero). In this way, this work could offer a line of thought on the place of style which comes under the “individual” in a structural type analysis which emphasizes “the common”.
Camus' narrative tells the story of Gilbert Jonas, a Parisian painter, who enjoys the support of a devoted friend named Rateau, married to the equally devoted and industrious Louise. He only believes in his star which helps him to achieve a lot without special effort. Jonas thinks that all the events of his life are marked by luck and chance; showing great passivity, he exercises no control over his decisions and attributes his good fortune in life to his star. Around the age of thirty-five he suddenly experienced great success and decided to leave his father's publishing house to devote himself entirely to his art. Success, however, brings its own decadence; Jonas is so surrounded by adherents, followers, critics, dealers, friends and even family that he no longer has the time to paint or the space to work. His inspiration fails little by little, his vogue fades. He finally builds a loft in the hallway of their apartment so he can get away from people and be able to create again, spending more and more time there, until he hardly ever comes down again. Eventually, he paints a blank canvas with a single indecipherable word that is either 'solitary' or 'solidarity'.
Genette organizes problems of narrative discourse analysis according to three fundamental categories: tense, mood and narrative instance or voice. The study of two modalities "tense" and "mood" aims to account for the relationship between story and narrative and the study of "voice" is interested in the relationship between narration and narrative, narration and story.
The application of the Narratological Structure Method of Genette to this story has shown that this one like any other narrative, includes characteristics of a system and that its creation is the result of a set of identifiable and descriptive operations; We have seen that any narrative text has a structure, common to all stories.
After examining the narrative processes in Jonas, we concluded that:
The omniscient narrator of Jonah, an extraordinary narrator, although absent from history, by the functions he assumes, has a very sensitive presence in his subsequent narration and not entirely in accordance with chronological order. To tell about forty years of the artist's life in some 40 pages, the narrator often uses the summary story to tell the years that precede its success, and the repeating narrative to describe the years of success. The elimination of redundant details in order to obtain condensation,
and the predominance of reported and indirect speeches prove that the representation of this story is rather diegethetic than mimetic.
Finally, it should be noted that the story of Camus apparently characterized by the simplicity of the narrative construction seems to have distanced from the traditional model of the story inherited from the 19th century. The author presents us a hero who has nothing to do with the traditional hero, it is a more and more passive hero who seems to be relevant to the inertia. We have tried to show how this passivity of the hero appears in the narrative structure of the story which is characterized by the brevity of the action, the limited number of direct speeches of the characters and especially that of the hero and their laconism, an evaluative narrator discrediting the passivity of the hero with an ironic tone, the use of free indirect speeches, ...