THE QUEST FOR THE SELF IN LAMBEAUX BY CHARLES JULIET: TRAUMATIC MEMORY AND THE SYMBOLIC WRITING OF COLORS AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE UNSPEAKABLE

Abstract

Lambeaux is a deeply intimate text in which the narrator undertakes to reconstruct the story of his biological mother while simultaneously exploring his own identity. As part of my doctoral theses on the quest for self, and through an analysis of symbolic writing that gives shape to suffering, this article demonstrates how traumatic memory is transformed, through forms and colors, into a healing narrative. The study highlights two passages in which the narrator attempts to embody suffering in order to materialize it and, ultimately, to transcend it. This moving work evokes, in the first part, a memorial quest. The narrator reconstructs a life he scarcely knew: that of his mother, a psychologically fragile woman marked by suffering and solitude, who gradually falls into mental illness before being confined to a psychiatric hospital, where she died several years later. In the second part, the narrator recounts his adoption by a peasant family and his childhood marked by silence, as well as his search for meaning in the face of a persistent feeling of emptiness and abandonment.    Through this dual quest, writing becomes for him the space of an inner journey aimed at understanding and rebuilding himself. Armed with the “right word” as well as with symbols and colors, the narrator revisits the pain linked to the original rupture and transforms it into narrative material. Un this attempt to express the unspeakable, the scriptural joins with a pictorial mode of writing in order to convey what words alone are unable to grasp.