Écrire par-delà le visible : imprégnation magrittienne et poétiques de l'entrevoir dans les lettres francophones de Belgique

From the outset, French-language literature in Belgium has cultivated an offbeat relationship with both the normative frameworks of reality and the realist canon of French literature. Rather than assamilating this trait to a national specificity, this thesis considers it in the light of an imaginary promoted from the end of the 19th century, and revived, updated and then perpetuated by the surrealist "groupe de Bruxelles". Although Paul Nougé, the group's leader, deliberately undermined the visibility of his writings, the aesthetic principles he defended nurtured René Magritte's painting, which has become part of the heritage of the "land of surrealism". The hypothesis is that this work contributed to the simplification and promotion of Surrealist poetics, as well as to its gradual imprint on Belgium's "imaginaire", particularly its French-speaking writers. At the convergence of historiographical and aesthetic considerations, the thesis studies this impregnation by situating it at the foundation of "poétiques de l'entrevoir" at work in the texts of Paul Willems (1912-1997), Guy Vaes (1927-2012), Dominique Rolin (1913-2012) and Jean-Philippe Toussaint (1957-). These writers resort to the register of the image (insofar as it is uncertain, approximate or truncated) less to make us see than to scuttle representation. Their narratives enable a glimpse beyond the visible into the mysterious side of reality, whether it appears in the form of fantasies, dreams or memories, and proceeds from modalities akin to magical realism (by alienating reality or revealing a surreality) or logics specific to the technologies of the visual age (by misappropriation or offhandedness).