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Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Une Révolution tranquille : l’évolution de l’image du père dans la dramaturgie québécoise

Renata Jakubczuk

Date de publication: | Résumé

In spite of the implications of its name, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec seems to be rather tempestuous at the family level. The conflict between generations, set in a historic context, puts into question the functioning of the entire society, especially the dominant role of the father. The objective of this article, therefore, is to analyze the position of the father in the social context. Thus, I discuss various types of fathers: a farmer father, the patriarch who leaves the household chores to the wife; a worker father, subservient to both his wife at home and to his boss at the factory; a bourgeois father who works for himself; and finally, an immigrant father who seeks his place within the new society.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Doctor doctor, please, oh, the mess I’m in : la figure paternelle et le père figurant en tant que signe identificateur du fils nazi dans Les Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell

Magdalena Łachacz

Date de publication: | Résumé

The article proposes a critical reading of the father figure in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. While taking into account various interpretative contributions to the analysis of the
theme, formerly neglected and subjected to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abject mother, this article explores an alternative, esthetic, culturally oriented approach to the phenomenon. By grouping together father and a man who, in the absence of the former, takes power over the son, the story’s protagonist, the figure of the father can be understood as a key-symbol of a Nazi perpetrator’s identity. However, the article aims to show that this image can stem from the specific cultural context of contemporary representations of Nazism and influence today’s perception of the perpetrators.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Le père rejeté, le père rejetant chez Hervé Guibert et Yves Navarre

Anca Porumb

Date de publication: | Résumé

The first-person narrative novels, Mes parents by Hervé Guibert and Biographie I, II by Yves Navarre, are part of the characters’ crisis writing where the reason of evil is always the father’s presence. Without hiding behind fictitious names, both writers reveal personal stories centered on the inevitable conflict between father and son. The family theme brings them together while their behavior makes them different. The first part of our study, “The Rejected Father,” focuses on Hervé Guibert’s violent language and attitude towards his father he will never accept. The second part, “The Rejecting Father,” is an analysis of Yves Navarre’s struggle of reconciliation with his father disappointed by his sexual preferences.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

La figura del padre en el teatro de Carlos Arniches

Maria Falska

Date de publication: | Résumé

This paper aims at examining the figure of the father in the dramas of Carlos Arniches, an author highly valued by directors, whose plays were frequently staged in Spain and Spanish America in the first half of the 20th century. Family relationships, and, above all, the figure of the father as a recurring element and an important dramatic motif in selected texts, are studied in detail. Among the father figures of Carlos Arniches there are: a despot father or a father-tyrant, an overindulgent father abused by his spendthrift family members, a father who sacrifices himself for the family, and a benevolent and spiritual father. In this article, these father figures are examined and classified according to their characteristic features, as well as the way in which they are introduced and how they function within the dramatic structure of the selected plays. This paper also offers an explanation of the ideological function of the author’s message conveyed by the analysed dramas.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Religion of the Father? Judaism, Anti-Judaism, and the Family Romance

Agata Bielik-Robson

Date de publication: | Résumé

One of the most common clichés of our culture defines Judaism as the “religion of the Father.” For some this is just a neutral description referring to the fatherly aspect of the Jewish
God; for others this is the very epitome of the patriarchal prejudice which privileges the masculine Father Figure at the expense of everything maternal. In my essay, however, I would like to challenge this staple association, by pointing to the simple fact that Jews themselves very rarely – if ever – describe their religion in openly patriarchal terms. In fact, when described in psychoanalytic terms, the role of the Father is here merely transitory: he is to inaugurate a series of subsequent detachments, starting from the disintegration of the first bonds of love (to maternal body and, more generally, to the body of nature) and ending with the complete neutralisation of the “family romance.” The Father Figure, therefore, is called upon only to counteract the power of the primordial “attachments” and initiate a process of separation which will allow the subject to establish himself as a free and mature moral agent, truly “born” into the world.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Bio‑graphies. De la figure paternelle à la pratique scripturale dans La place d’Annie Ernaux

Jolanta Rachwalska von Rejchwald

Date de publication: | Résumé

Over the years Annie Ernaux has been trying to deal with the theme of her father’s death. And yet she could not find the appropriate form to express a specific distance that emerged
at some point when her father was still alive. By experimenting with various novel literary forms she came to a realization that only the departure from fiction would allow her to convey a kind of “truth” about her father and this unique distance (supposedly attributable to her leaving the social class she had been born and raised in). Consequently, Ernaux decides to reject “literature” and to write an autobiographical piece in the first person, which is somehow flat because it is stripped of all rhetoric layers. In this article I endeavour to show that a deeply engraved thirst for telling the truth about one’s father simultaneously becomes a story about one’s ambitions and about seeking one’s identity. Primarily, however, A Man’s Place is a story about searching for one’s own form of expression and growing up to writing.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Entre le père biologique et le père spirituel : le choix de la rupture chez les personnages de Boubacar Boris Diop

Serigne Seye

Date de publication: | Résumé

This article is aimed at analyzing the break between fathers and their children in the texts of Boubacar Boris Diop, in which another figure often replaces that of the biological parent. Participating in the identity construction of his foster son, the spiritual father grants him memory which is contradictory to the official history. This clash, omnipresent in Boubacar Boris Diop’s novels, testifies of a change of paradigm revealing a deep crisis of the father figure in African postcolonial societies. We are indeed very far from the mythicized image of the pater nobilis which used to be omnipresent in African literature.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Padri incapaci nella letteratura italiana femminile (Cardella, Ginzburg)

Anna Natkańska

Date de publication: | Résumé

The father figure in twentieth-century novels usually appears only as a part of the family. It is rare for a father to become the main protagonist of the book; he is frequently presented as an “addition” to the mother. Rightly or not, the father figure is, however, a symbol of authority and power in the family, hence writers have a tendency to present the parent-child relationships as difficult, bitter, and very, very complex. The situation is not much different in modern Italian literature, in which relationships with fathers during childhood are often a starting point for adult problems. In this article, I try to analyze this phenomenon on the basis of two novels written after 1950: Caro Michele by Natalia Ginzburg and Volevo i pantaloni by Lara Cardella.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Father and Daughter: A Recovered Link in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams

Laurence Gouaux‑Rabasa

Date de publication: | Résumé

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an English-speaking writer who was born in India in 1956 and is currently living in the United States. In Queen of Dreams published in 2004 she depicts the conflicts between Rakhi, a young American in her thirties living in California, and her India-born parents. Rakhi reproaches them for refusing to initiate her to Indian culture, particularly blaming her father for not being able to communicate. However, the mother’s death is the trigger for the father’s story. The father becomes the one who tells his daughter about life in India, thus embodying the missing cultural link in Rakhi’s family tree. The aim of this article is to offer an analysis of the father-daughter relationship as presented in Queen of Dreams. It intends to put into light the part played by the father in helping his daughter understand the way transgenerational loyalties work, and create a new identity of her own.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Le père et sa fille : le sceau paternel dans la prose colettienne et beauvoirienne

Anna Ledwina

Date de publication: | Résumé

The character of the father in French literature, especially in the works of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and Simone de Beauvoir, is significant. He may be perfect or not without faults, withdrawn or authoritative, fascinating or disgusting, but invariably – even if he is overshadowed by the mother – the father inspires his daughter. The latter treats him as a kind of spiritual guide, a confidant who gives her life energy, is an example to follow, and passes on his value system and the need to write on his daughter. Love for the father or the lack thereof allows an adolescent daughter to find her own identity and define herself, and in the case of a mature woman it allows her to revisit her own childhood and youth through writing, so as to resurrect the image of the father and reflect on her own life and the writer’s vocation.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

“White World, Not a Sound.” Paternal Spaces in Samuel Beckett’s Embers

Michał Kisiel

Date de publication: | Résumé

This paper aims at the interpretation of the father as an empty figure of authority in Samuel Beckett’s radio play entitled Embers. Through the close-reading of this play and the analysis of the relations between the protagonist and the two feminine characters, Ada and Addie, it demonstrates how the father figure coincides with the classical impasse of Beckett’s oeuvre: the subject unable to manifest itself. Due to that fact, the father is presented in the constant process of wearing his authorial space out. It is eventually demonstrated that in Embers the subject is coerced to balance between its self-deconstruction and the paternal violence: its focus on its own materiality results in the collapse of language, whereas overt attention on the linguistic cognition puts forward the logic of remnants resisting father’s orders, be it in the form of sound collage, or material element immune to symbolisation.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Za m’eskuze… Za vous emmerde : entre le colonial et le postcolonial, le travail de mémoire dans la prose de Jean-Luc Raharimanana

Izabella Zatorska

Date de publication: | Résumé

The combination of two traditional Malagasy genres, kabary and sovâ, to produce the monologue of a desperate father named “Za” — whose name signifies an intimate, familiar “Me” — engenders the narrative situated between two realities: the world of the living and the world of the dead. This intersection serves to describe the banally apocalyptic reality in which today’s Madagascar is immersed. Surrounded by characters drawn from legends and from his own previous works, Raharimanana — a novelist, poet and playwright who was born in 1967 and has lived for the past twenty years in France — begins a work of memory by confronting the emblematic shadows of Malagasy history. Everything is expressed through the author’s language, which, via lisping, reveals unsuspected meanings and imposes on words the mutilation that Raharimanana’s narrator had to endure. It also elicits images of injuries inflicted on the author’s father in 2002. Following in the path of Frankétienne and Sony Labou Tansi, the initial narrative denounces taboos, such as respect for ancestors. Garbled French becomes a neology appropriate for an analysis of the postcolonial reality as well as for defining the attitude of one who fervently refuses to adopt a monolithic approach towards it.


Key words: Madagascar, kabary, sovâ, postcolonial literature, memory.

The combination of two traditional Malagasy genres, kabary and sovâ, to produce the monologue of a desperate father named “Za” — whose name signifies an intimate, familiar “Me” — engenders the narrative situated between two realities: the world of the living and the world of the dead. This intersection serves to describe the banally apocalyptic reality in which today’s Madagascar is immersed. Surrounded by characters drawn from legends and from his own previous works, Raharimanana — a novelist, poet and playwright who was born in 1967 and has lived for the past twenty years in France — begins a work of memory by confronting the emblematic shadows of Malagasy history. Everything is expressed through the author’s language, which, via lisping, reveals unsuspected meanings and imposes on words the mutilation that Raharimanana’s narrator had to endure. It also elicits images of injuries inflicted on the author’s father in 2002. Following in the path of Frankétienne and Sony Labou Tansi, the initial narrative denounces taboos, such as respect for ancestors. Garbled French becomes a neology appropriate for an analysis of the postcolonial reality as well as for defining the attitude of one who fervently refuses to adopt a monolithic approach towards it.


Key words: Madagascar, kabary, sovâ, postcolonial literature, memory.

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