Colloque

Mise en scène d'une mercière mercenaire : le temps de la justice poétique dans La mercière assassinée

Michel-Camille Bordeau

Membre a labase

Michel-Camille Bordeau

Résumé du colloque

In « Dominici », Barthes wrote about the famed murder trial arguing that language varieties of the educated judge and the farmer were at best dissimilar and at worse mutually unintelligible. Telling differently was to the other not telling at all. Barthes explains how the illiterate man did not stand a chance since at his own trial « il y a eu aussi le spectacle d’une terreur dont nous sommes tous menacés, celle d’être jugés par un pouvoir qui ne veut entendre que le langage qu’il nous prête ». In La Mercière Assassinée, Anne Hébert staged this terrorizing form of prejudicial diglossia but up-staged it as well. As a result, the haberdasher’s case gets a new audience (hearing/public). In this presentation, I will argue that Hébert’s staging approach calls attention to a form of poetic justice that means due process and due time whether the victim is innocent or turns out to be a mercenary haberdasher.