- Title
- Boris Vian's eternal sunshine, or the truth about mother's textuality
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 47, Issue 3, p. 289-303
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqr001
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- This article investigates the possibility of combining the traditional biographical tendency of Vian criticism with the now dominant one that seeks to put the text centre-stage. By focusing on the key figure of the mother, which dominates both Vian’s biography and his corpus, it demonstrates the deeply fetishistic negotiation of myth and reality that ties Vian’s four major novels together while appearing to mark their autonomy. A close analysis of Vian’s incipits and endings shows that the novels return to, as well as depart from, each other. To test the internal coherence of the novels, and especially the way in which the myth of the phallic mother runs through them, an interesting case of intertextual resonance with a contemporary filmic text is revealed. A reading of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind thus confirms the textual interdependence of Vian’s corpus via the real-life presence of the mother.
- Subject
- Roland Barthes; biography; circularity; Freudian fetishism; intertextuality; linearity; mother figure; tetraology
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1055557
- Identifier
- uon:15898
- Identifier
- ISSN:0015-8518
- Language
- eng
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