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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2015

Military games and fantasies of Valery Larboard and Marcel Proust

Olivia Leboyer
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Résumé

The novelist and poet Valery Larbaud has written very fine texts on military fantasies: in Enfantines, the short novel « La Grande Epoque » (1913) describes war games and fantasies of three children. The childish strategies, as subtle as the adults’ ones, reflect confusing expectations and grand ambitions that are still aligned with the war ideals of the period before the Great War. In the short text Questions militaires (1918), Valery Larbaud questions again the powers of imagination. In a few pages, he delivers a surprising reflection on his passion for tin soldier collection, which he considers a most precious pretext for dreams and fantasies. The compulsive game player ironically refers to real soldiers’pulsions. Through games and fantasies, it is thus possible to play war as if it were a kind of dream. In the same way, we will focus on the manner of Marcel Proust, who also wrote indirectly about war, through his characters’ conversations. Proust’s sensitive imagination lets him evoke war in an allusive way (for example, the descriptions of ladies’clothes during the war in Le Temps retrouvé, 1927). Larbaud and Proust represent two great attempts to make war unreal, by games or fantasies that keep violence at a distance (James der Derian).
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hal-01463677 , version 1 (09-02-2017)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01463677 , version 1

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Olivia Leboyer. Military games and fantasies of Valery Larboard and Marcel Proust. Congrès de l'EISA (European International Studies Association), Congrès de l'EISA, Giardini Naxos, Sep 2015, Giardini Naxos, Italy. ⟨hal-01463677⟩

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