Original scientific paper
The Character of a Monstrous Gourmet and Destructive Pantagruelism in Amelié Nothomb’s Novels
Miranda Levanat Peričić
; Department of Croatian and Slavic Studies, University of Zadar
Lucija Švaljek
; Zagreb
Abstract
In Amélie Nothomb's fiction the semantic complex of food appears frequently, and in two novels it is linked to the characters of gourmet-murderers. In her first novel Hygiène de l'assassin (1992) [Hygiene and the Assassin] it is the writer Prétextat Tach, and then in the subversion of the fairy tale Barbe bleue (2012) [Bluebeard] it is Don Elemirio Nibal y Milcar. Along with the love of food, the gourmet characters of Amélie Nothomb share a mysterious aristocratic origin, hidden crime, bizarre theories about women, lack of empathy and extravagant life in seclusion. Food in these novels is the dominant motif around which the character is built at the level of discourse (in the characterization of the gourmet character by indirect presentation through speech and appearance), but also at the level of story (at all thematic layers of the novel). Therefore, we will approach the literary characters of gourmets through the analytical model developed by Gajo Peleš in the interpretation of the novel. This means that we start from an assumption that the projection of food discourse on the psychical, societal and ontemic levels is crucial for the networking of narrative figures in the semantic substructure of the novels. Given that in these novels the body appears as a value of the ontological level by which all other ideological particulars– art, love, and faith – are measured, we will include in the interpretation her latest novel Soif (2019) [Thirst], which is a kind of manifesto of celebrating corporality through a religious topic. While the first two novels show the characteristics of the Rabelaisian chronotope, the last novel, although it does not have the characteristics of a parodia sacra, also affirms the values of the embodiment of the world. Namely, in this evangelical praise of the body and bodily experience as crucial for the complete realization of the meaning of life, Christ himself speaks in a monologue, accusing his disembodied father of not understanding his embodied offspring. In this sense, this last novel, like the previous two, can be read in the ambit of the novelistic tradition which Bakhtin calls the carnival line of development of the European novel.
Keywords
Amélie Nothomb; body; food semantics; gourmet character; Pantagruelism; semantic substructure of the novel
Hrčak ID:
260825
URI
Publication date:
22.7.2021.
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