“Oh ! Fuir, partir !ˮ Maupassant au Maghreb : reportage ou écriture de soi ?
Résumé
In Au Soleil (1884) and La Vie errante (1890), Maupassant tackles Maghreb and its realia. Extracted from journalistic chronicles, these two narratives of journey describe the customs and landscapes of the regions gone through. But these reports –that fall under the category of ethnography– are imbued with poetry and literary references. Between reality and representation, the author sometimes undertakes intimate writing, where his obsessions of illness and madness are looming. You need to go beyond the mere report, read between the lines the uneasiness of the travelling writer and his fear of death, omnipresent in his pages, as he fled France so as to forget his anxiety and suffering.