Wandering discourses, lost subjects: (Trans)Fictions of madness in Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam

Abstract

Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam’s novels, populated by marginal characters with multi-ple psychopathologies, constitute a privileged object of the reflection on the inscrip-tion of madness in literature. In the footsteps of Foucault, the writer problematizes the social and discursive production of madness ; in her texts, she unfolds a dis-course not only on, but also of madness or rather of (polyphonic, plural) madnesses, staging an excessive and transgressive, lunatic and lyric speech that oscillates be-tween silence and song. This analysis focuses on the novel Hymen (2003), mosaic of several « mad » discourses. Yet, Bayamack-Tam’s œuvre forming a complex transfictional network, it also retraces, from one text to another, the trajectories of her protagonists, lost in more than one way, carriers of (and carried by) wandering discourses that defy novelistic chronology and the logic of identity, as well as rea-son as « the madness of the strongest » (Ionesco).