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Ar. Eissen, V. Gély (dir.), Lectures d’Ismail Kadaré

Ar. Eissen, V. Gély (dir.), Lectures d’Ismail Kadaré

Publié le par Vincent Ferré (Source : Véronique Gély)

Ariane Eissen & Véronique Gély (dir.), Lectures d’Ismail Kadaré

Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, collection "Littérature et poétique comparées", 2011, 372 p

23 €

EAN13 : 978284010816.

 

Lorsque, au début des années 1980, avant la chute du rideau de fer, les romans de Kadaré commencèrent d’être traduits et connus en France, puis en Europe et ailleurs, ils fascinaient certes, mais ils ne satisfaisaient vraiment personne sur le plan de l’idéologie. Car il y avait dans ces textes trop de marxisme et trop de nationalisme pour que leur auteur ne soit pas suspecté, à droite, d’être le produit du communisme albanais, en clair, de ne pas être un authentique dissident, et il y avait en même temps en eux trop d’archaïsme, pas assez de réalisme socialiste pour que, à gauche, les nostalgiques de l’utopie albanaise ne se sentent pas trahis par lui. Or, depuis 1990, l’hypothèque n’a pas été levée. Au contraire, c’est un véritable procès qui a été peu à peu instruit : les soupçons étrangers rencontraient les soupçons albanais, et réciproquement. L’auteur était sommé de se justifier d’être toujours vivant et d’avoir pu publier. L’homme et son oeuvre étaient suspectés d’ambiguïté, de défaut de clarté : trop d’ombre. Or, précisément, ce qui caractérise l’écriture de Kadaré, c’est qu’il ne cherche pas le centre, la pleine lumière, mais explore les zones d’ombre et de brouillard. Pour cela, son choix est d’être en permanence à la frontière…


Sommaire

Avant-propos, par Ariane Eissen et Véronique Gély : « L’ombre, la lisière, la reprise »

La ville de pierre : entre la nation et le monde

— Ardian Marashi : « Gjirokastra, un pays fertile en mythes de pierre »

— Gilles de Rapper : « Ismail Kadaré et l’ethnologie albanaise de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle »

— Anne-Marie Autissier : « Ismail Kadaré, analyste de la société communiste albanaise »

— Ketrin Leka : « Kadaré et Kafka »

— Alketa Spahiu : « Les figures féminines chez Ismail Kadaré (Dans les romans épiques et les romans de la période impériale) »

— Ilir Yzeiri : « Ismail Kadaré et la tradition littéraire albanaise »

— Ornela Todorushi : « Politique de Kadaré: l'écrivain et sa reconnaissance européenne »

Le poids de la croix : une dissidence intérieure ?

— Alexandre Zotos : « De l’écrivain Kadaré au personnage Kadaré et retour »

— Jean-Paul Champseix : « Zeus, référence du totalitarisme chez Kadaré »

— Dashnor Kokonozi : « L’embrassade avec les dents »

— Vasil Qesari : « Le phénomène  Ismail Kadaré dans la société albanaise des années  ’70 »

— John Cox : « Entre l’universel et l’unique : modes et thèmes dans l’évolution de l’expression du stalinisme historique chez Kadaré»

— Peter Morgan: « Sacrifice, modernité et perte dans Le Pont aux trois arches de Kadaré »

— Catherine Coquio : « Kadaré ou le grand survivant. Poétique et politique de l’autocensure. »

L’atelier de l’écrivain 

— Bruno Clément : « Réécrire »

— Ariane Eissen : « Les Prométhée de Kadaré : enjeux de la réécriture »

— Pierre-Yves Boissau : « Kadaré et les tragiques grecs : roman, tragédie et guerre des textes »

— Sandrine Cambou : « Paysages dans le brouillard : Le Dossier H. d’Ismail Kadaré »

— Ledia Dema : « Sur quelques spécificités de la narration dans l’oeuvre d’Ismail Kadaré »

— Tomorr Plangarica : « Le temps du discours, le discours sur le temps et la temporalité dans La Pyramide d’Ismail Kadaré »

Bibliographie

Présentation des auteurs

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Abstracts

Anne-Marie Autissier, “ Ismail Kadare as a perceptive observer of Albanian society”

According to Raymonde Moulin (1999), artists appear to be « spontaneous sociologists ». This assertion is confirmed when reading those of Ismail Kadare’s works written during the Communist period. From his first novels – among which The General of the Dead Army (1963) - up to The Palace of Dreams (1981), including The Great Winter (1977), most characters experience a burdensome alienation, within their work as well as within their private lifes. As a metaphor of this uneasiness, characters hide from sunlight and shelter in closed and dark or hazy refuges, which allow them to escape unbearable realities, as in The General of the Dead Army. Only motherhood seems to be able to bring them back a sense of their dignity as leaders of their own lifes. Furthermore, it is interesting to wonder whether Kadare’s novels express what Bernard Stiegler (2004 – 2005) would call desindividuation - what he describes as symbolic poverty - in our current world. Long after Albanian jails have been opened, Kadare’s novels keep alerting us to our dangerous illusions about bringing intangible Reality under control with blinded and overproduction rationality.

Pierre-Yves Boissau, “Kadare and Greek tragic authors : novel, tragedy and texts in conflict”

Our analysis is based on a parallel which may be drawn between The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare and Euripides' Alcestis. The main theme of this work is the descent into Hell (in a broad sense) as a scheme which allows for the emerging of the hero, more specifically the tragic hero. We aim at showing that once again Kadare's style should be understood as an effort to correct a foreign work. Here the correction is about the very nature of tragedy: the optimism typical of Greek tragedy fades away in favour of the true tragedy of Albanian novels.

Sandrine Cambou, “Landscapes in the fog: Ismail Kadare’s File on H

In the novel called Le Dossier H. (The H. file), Ismail Kadare shows two Harvard students, specialists of Homer (to whom the "H" of the title refers), going to the North of Albania, next to the mysterious and misty mountains "Cimes maudites", in order to penetrate the secret of epic creation. They discover a dual Albania : on one side, the sublime world of rhapsodes and mountain dwellers and, on the other side, the grotesque universe of spies and city dwellers. The description of King Zog's reign, in the 1930s, is a veiled criticism of Enver Hoxha's regime. But not only that : in Le Dossier H., partly tale, partly thriller, Ismail Kadare rewrites the famous episode of the Odyssey nekyia, the evocation of the dead, in a most original way. He also contributes to the elaboration of a literary myth, that of Homer.

Jean-Paul Champseix, “Zeus, a reference to totalitarianism in Kadare’s work”

Mythology occupies a pivotaI place in Kadare’s works. Zeus incarnates totalitarianism, and the leader, Enver Hoxha, is compared to the king of Olympus. He has absolute power, he uses doubles, he fears his wife Nexhmije-Hera, he is haunted by conspiracy and he wishes to destroy humankind. Kadare tries, in The Great Winter, as Aeschylus did in the Eumenides and Prometheus, to civilize the tyrant. Relations between Albania and China deteriorate. Kadare describes the dictator as an intellectual and romantic character, an outsider in the Soviet world. The writer hopes that Hoxha, at last, will become reconciled with Europe. This strange project falls through. Kadare is accused of compromising with the dictatorship… but, in 1982, this stalinist regime denounces him as an “enemy”…   

Bruno Clement, “Rewriting”

This paper is a reading of Le Grand Hiver, which Kadare himself presents  as a re-writing of L’Hiver de la grande solitude. It tries to compare, as closely as possible, some excerpts from the two versions of the novel, and finally expresses the hypothesis that the version supposed to be the previous one must probably be considered as the second one. The paper is nothing else than a theoretical thought about the practice of rewriting.

Catherine Coquio, “Kadare the Great Survivor. Poetics and politics of self-censorship”

In this text the work of Kadare is read in light of three different writers who explore the survival of literature under totalitarian regimes (George Orwell) and the human and literary effects of self-censorship (Leo Strauss, Danilo Kiš). Kadare’s “miracle” is distinguished from the “miracle” which L. Strauss uses to speak of, the “oblique way” of literatures written under persecution: this model of a writing “between the lines” could only survive through a mutation in the context of Hoxha’s regime and of Albanian society.  In Kadare’s work, the negotiation takes the form of a duel with the tyrant, which is conveyed in an atmosphere of fear transposed into the ambivalent universe of myth.  The author has constructed a personal and national “destiny” from the totalitarian “Fatum” by creating a Promethean mythomania and a nationalist kitsch, which are the unfortunate consequences of the dangerous game of self-censorship: the resulting poetics carry the seal of a “shame” lived as a “catastrophe.”

John Cox, “Between the Universal and the Unique: modes and themes in the evolution of Kadare’s idiom of his historical Stalinism”

The Albanian intellectual Ismail Kadare has, over the decades, written fiction in a number of modes. Having lived through one of the world's most brutal Stalinist regimes, Kadare has always produced work dealing with power and oppression, but since the fall of communism he has moved ever more boldly towards an accounting of the methods and cost of ideological dictatorship. Kadare's works (such as The Eagle, The Life, Death and Game of Lul Mazrek, and Spiritus) because of their combination of classical themes with the grotesque, achieve unique force among the many international and regional attempts to understand Stalinism through literature.

Ledia Dema, “ Toward some specificities of Ismail Kadare’s  Narration”

As one reads Kadare, one is struck by an unusual, surprising phenomenon: breaches and gaps in the narrative, which create a “fragmented chronicle”, italicised passages, or the “words of strangers”, to name but a few of these idiosyncrasies to be found in many of Kadare’s novels. Our goal is to highlight how these textual breaches correspond with an enunciating strategy consisting in manipulations of shifters, in changes of narrators or of perspective, viewpoint and focalisation, in collages and juxtapositions of genres which altogether result in a fragmentation of the enunciating agency. In studying five polyphonic narratives we have endeavoured to explain how the reader constructs meaning in apparently fragmented narratives. Our study also includes an analysis of Kadare’s literary subversion of the doctrine of socialist realism.

Ariane Eissen, “ What is at stake when Kadare alludes to Prometheus”

This paper scrutinizes the appearances of Prometheus throughout the work of Kadare. Roughly speaking, a three-step evolution may be noticed. In the first texts, Prometheus is quite a stereotyped character, who accepts self-sacrifice in order to free mankind, whereas the latest works put the stress upon the necessity of coming to terms with ancient rulers and finding the path for a new political system.The second step is both most personal and complex. Kadare projects himself as a Promethean character, torn apart between compromise and rebellion. On the one hand, he needs to protect himself and be accepted in order to go on writing and publishing ; on the other, he must keep his distance, without which his work would be meaningless. Therefore rewriting the story of Prometheus is not a matter of neo-classicism, but a vital issue with political and ethical implications.

Dashnor Kokonozi , “The kiss with the teeth”

This article deals with the very complicated relationship that the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare had with the dictatorial regime that ruled Albania in the second half of the last century. Provided with genius, Kadare had to find different forms of concession to express and make known his judgment on the nature of the dictatorship. Of course, he had to do so through parables, topics and metaphors, which were interpreted in various forms. On the one hand, there were non indoctrinated intellectuals, in whom hope for better days was kept alive with the rhythm of Kadare's works. On the other hand, there was the dictatorial regime which took them at face value. But Kadare sometimes failed in his ability to maintain this balance. In many of his books, his ideas became more explicit for the Dictator’s censors, who immediately took reprisals against him, systematically stopping the circulation of his books. In this sense, what to others seemed like a kiss between the writer and the regime was only a double bite, the expression of reciprocal hatred and bad blood.

Ketrin Leka, “Kadare and Kafka”

This study does not aim at showing the totalitarian reality as in Franz Kafka’s novel, The Castle, and the one by Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams, but at scrutinizing the trace of human existence in the twentieth century, in an industrial era when man was trying to frame his life style using science and techniques, totally different from homo faber man. Men of the industrial age were becoming more powerful than those of previous eras. In this study we see that these humans who think they are fulfilling themselves are instead only rendering every aspect of their souls barren.

Ardian Marashi, “Gjirokastra, a country fertile in myths of stone”

In the Kadarean geoliterary space, the hometown of Gjirokastra occupies a modest place, associated essentially with childhood. Kadare speaks directly about his city only in Chronicle in Stone (1970), A Climate of Lunacy (2005) and The Wrong Banquet (2008). Gjirokastra, however, is omnipresent in the symbolic field of the whole work of Kadare. The universe of childhood was transformed over the years into a network of signs of the "gjirokastrien" field, allowing the writer to elaborate a work built on what we call "myths of stone". The work will be made of substantial physical material, it will develop a symbolism of solidity and resistance. Inserting stone into his writing is for Kadare the way to give heaviness to his work, to make it indestructible in time, just like the “city of stone”.

Peter Morgan , “Albanianism, Allegory and Double Coding in Kadare's The Three-Arched Bridge

The image of Albania in Ismail Kadare's work has aroused considerable controversy, especially in the light of the writer's later claim to have presented an alternative vision of his nation's history to that propagated by the regime. Far from voicing a different view, write some critics, Kadare merely corroborated the regime's presentation of history. In this paper I examine the literary representation of Albanian history in The Three-Arched Bridge. Kadare foregrounds critical themes of modernization and sacrifice in this work set on the eve of the Ottoman conquests in the late 14th century. In suggesting parallels between past and present, he implicitly questions official historiography. Kadare's image of 'eternal Albania' in The Three-Arched Bridge thus represents a finely-tuned dissenting view of Albanian history to that of the regime.

Tomorr Plangarica, “Tense in narrative, writing about time and temporality in Ismail Kadare’s Pyramid

 While reading and perceiving Ismail Kadare’s novel The Pyramid, the reader will be able to grasp the message of the novel, through the harmoniously given information on the period when it was written, the time when the events of the novel occur and the time when it is read. By means of this reference process, the reader will be able to associate the pyramid with another mental reality, naturally characterized by the new pyramid-totalitarianism-dictatorship-tyranny relationship. As the relationship established among these elements marks not only a specific period or a time span, but also various periods of time, then the synchronous-asynchronous relationship becomes a main characteristic in organizing the text, giving it the pyramid shape with sequential steps that reveal the typical events of respective times, which are repeated from one period to another.

Vasil Qesari, « Ismail Kadare as a phenomenon in the Albanian society of the seventies »

This paper gives an eyewitness account about Kadare, including memories as one of his students.

Gilles de Rapper, “Ismail Kadare and Albanian ethnology of the second half of the 20th century”

This article explores the complex relationship established between the work of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and albanological research. Due to its evocation of events of Albanian history, legends and institutional features of Albanian society, the work of Ismail Kadare draws a picture of Albania which often meets the concerns of Albanology. In that matter, it relies on work conducted by foreign and Albanian scholars from whom the writer draws themes and ideas on the cultural characteristics and history of Albanians. Particularly striking is for example the literary treatment Kadare makes of the customary law of northern Albania (kanun) and of the institution of blood vengeance in the novel Broken April, or the transposition of ballads from popular literature in the novels Doruntine and The three-arched bridge. Moreover, beside his literary production, the writer does not refrain from taking part in discussions related to albanology, in essays or prefaces about folklore (relations between Albanian and Slavic folklore), ancient history (relations between Albania and Greece) or more recent events (Kosovo).

Alketa Spahiu, “Female figures in Ismail Kadare’s epic novels and novels on the imperial period”

The paper brings forth arguments around the feminine characters in Kadare’s work. Despite the masculine discursive tone of most novels, woman remains a haunting presence. More than that, the papers shows how several women characters serve as a principal cause or force to motion, making the narration possible. They also exist between legendary worlds of the past and the distorted appearance of the present, as many Kadare characters do. But his feminine figures often oscillate between motherhood and death spell, portents of ancient tragic fate.

Ornela Todorushi, “Kadare’s politics : the writer and his European recognition”

The paper considers the politics of literature in Ismail Kadare's work and its reception among French critics. The expression politics of literature is not taken here as “political involvement" but rather in Ranciere's meaning : a way to define a distribution of the sensible in his work. Thus, Kadare identifies Albanian literature in a new way (speech vs. noise), giving it back its universality and underlining its membership of the European family. Once considered by critics as a politically committed writer, Kadare is now recognized for his main commitment, i.e. literature, which makes him prominent among his European famous counterparts.

Ilir Yzeiri, “Ismail Kadare and Albanian literary tradition”

How does Kadare’s work relate to Albanian literary tradition? In order to understand this better, we have to know that the Communist dictatorship adopted a class-based differentiation vis-à-vis Albanian literary tradition. The works of some of the most eminent authors of the Renaissance and Independence periods, such as Fishta, Konica, or Koliqi, were removed from circulation altogether and were erased from collective memory. This paper shows how Kadare established relations with and revived this forbidden tradition. On the other hand, through his work, Kadare established another tradition, different from the tradition of socialist realism. He did so by paying a high price, several times. Almost all his works were removed from circulation and were reprinted. Paradoxically, Kadare denies Albanian literary tradition, more specifically the tradition of socialist realism, and establishes a tradition of his own, bearing his name and talent. 

Alexandre Zotos, “From Kadare the writer to his character and back again”

The following view relies mainly upon a reading of Ismail Kadaré’s autobiographical work Le poids de la croix. One is somehow surprised, in spite of the complaining tone of this title, to find scarcely any trace of a real « tax », as he says, which he had to pay, not even an allusion to some article or speech, should it concern a mere literary question, and not a political one. The comment about his novel L’hiver de la grande solitude, first announced as a debt he was required to pay for not praising the Party and its chief enough until then, appears to be, in fact, a « pro domo » speech. Besides, it seems that the true national dimension he effectively acquired with his previous works (mainly in poetry) and which was confirmed with this fresco gave him a prestige which would put a limit to the attacks he suffered from a regime well known as a form of national-communism.