Sur la mer primordiale des deux rivages, Ys et Carthage, du mythe de la ville engloutie à l’émergence de la Mère des profondeurs
There is no obvious connection between such opposite cities. Ys and Carthage are settled on ends apart, one from the Mediterranean Sea, and the other from the Atlantic Ocean. Both fed from different traditions, one’s reality is related to legend, the other to history, and yet they manage to mix toge...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Université du Sud Toulon-Var
2014-01-01
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| Series: | Babel: Littératures Plurielles |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/babel/3714 |
| Summary: | There is no obvious connection between such opposite cities. Ys and Carthage are settled on ends apart, one from the Mediterranean Sea, and the other from the Atlantic Ocean. Both fed from different traditions, one’s reality is related to legend, the other to history, and yet they manage to mix together in the depths of the sea, where fiction and symbols meet physics to overhaul the myth they have in common. The myth, according to Plato, is a narrative fiction with an intricate truth which can’t be expressed abstractly by reason. Only the narrative text can make it emerged, here with Georges-Gustave Toudouze’s story, Les Derniers Jours de la ville d’Ys (The Last days of the city of Ys) and with Flaubert’s novel, Salammbô. This ambiguous truth sends waves of imagination always carried away when touched by the sea and the mystery of the feminine principle which is held captive in her own body to be possessed. It’s possession is symbolized by the cities that end up destroyed or engulfed as she tries to get her dispossessed being’s sovereign power back. The power is inherent to every indomitable transcendence like this tumultuous space, infinite and unfathomed forces progressing into water elements. Then, imagination becomes a place to spout a new quest for origins. The quest is a modernized myth which comes from an older cosmogonic myth that returns sovereign power and transcendence to the feminine, to the one that hides the possibilities of creation and nothingness. Then, the sea represents the aggregating element that fertilizes imagination. Thanks to it, the text can resonate from this bicephalous feminine principle, rekindling into the depths of unconscious an expectation which undulates between fascination and repulsion. Thus, we will show how imagination brings the Mediterranean closer to the Ocean. According to Bachelard, water is the feminine element, that’s why the myth of these two cities benefits from the presence of the sea. It offers mythical resurgences with the primordial Mother. |
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| ISSN: | 1277-7897 2263-4746 |