« Car on ne saurait mieux dire » : la mémoire des noms et des visages dans l’œuvre de Romain Gary

Résumé

We will examine the largely ethical vocation of Romain Gary's memorial writing project, which leads it to metamorphose itself into a literary tomb of the forgotten dead. We will then discuss, from a more narratological point of view, how this memory emerges untimely in the narrative and sometimes frees itself from it to signify the transcendent character of the name and the face. Finally, we will show that Gary goes beyond the somewhat naive vision of the memory as a mere recorder of events or images by associating it with the imagination to give it a poetic and counter-historical use.