Des constructions. L’architecture du corps, de la mémoire et du récit dans La Rénovation de Dominique Rolin

The narrator of La Rénovation (1998), whose name and features refer explicitly to its author Dominique Rolin, is an elderly woman who attends, from her "window-armrest", the restoration of the building in which she lives. Meanwhile she writes a book, whose title is La Rénovation and which is the equivalent, in mise en abyme, of the novel that the reader is reading. That's not all. To be successful, the text must also go through a process of demolition and recovery, which affects two different areas: memory and scriptural activity. On the one hand, in order to write, the novelist must undergo the violence of her alter ego, Lady Memory, whom she is tempted to strangle, but who will eventually rejuvenate and soften her manners; on the other, writing must undergo a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, through a perpetual discussion (at the level of meaning) and a whole series of exclamations, interrogations, repetitions (at the formal level). The last pages of the novel celebrate the success of this triple enterprise: 1) the building abandons its scaffolding, actually renovated; 2) the work of memory is accomplished and it made possible 3) the realization of the book, La Rénovation.