Hasard et destin dans le Anton Reiser de Karl Philipp Moritz

Résumé En Fr

The distinction between literary chance and chance as experience (E. Köhler) allows the originality of Moritz's autobiographical novel to be disengaged. This study of the motif of chance in book II ofAnton Reiser shows the establishment of a narrative method characterized by repressing the literary treatment of chance and maintaining of chance as a category of lived experience. In this text, the fortunate and unfortunate chances do not found the literary necessity of an exemplary destiny, but are the occasion for throwing light on the double determination, exterior and interior, that affects the character's existence, an existence that is experienced under the sign of a radical contingency. It is in this first obscurity that psychological analysis operates, not to establish the horizon of Providence, but to disengage the general lessons of an existence, and to give to its hero, at this moment, the consistency of a novelistic character.

La distinction entre les deux catégories du « hasard vécu » (erlebter Zufall) et du « hasard littéraire » (literarischer Zufall), empruntée à Erich Köhler, permet d'aborder l'étude du roman autobiographique de Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser, en faisant ressortir l'ambivalence d'un projet "romanesque" en un sens nouveau. On montre ici comment le recul de la figuration du hasard littéraire au profit de la figuration du hasard vécu exprime la remise en cause du roman traditionnel et la recherche de nouvelles formes permettant de saisir et de donner forme à la consistance de la vie intérieure.