Mémoire et création littéraire dans les romans de Toni Morrison

Abstract

The relationship between remembrance and literary imagination is the basis of Toni Morrison’s works. Willing to compensate the silence of the official History concerning Black experience in the United States, Morrison uses authentic facts. She contextualizes them in a precise way according to her inspiration, and in doing so, creates new meaning. The writing of the present in her prose derives from the fictionalization of fragments of History. Narrative focalization, which raises the question of who holds the memory, is central to her work. The use of memory aims at not only understanding an essence, but also at building an identity. Using subversive and innovative narrative techniques, the African-American writer depicts a saga of black people. Morrison criticizes in her novels a society that tends to forget about her cultural roots. She therefore opens the way to a collective memory that not only reconciles, but also brings perplexity because of the displacement of what Robert Hans Jauss calls the “horizon” of expectation of the reader.