Vers une conscience elargie du territoire: retour au pays natal dans Le Pays de Marie Darrieussecq

As part of a broader literary trend centred on narratives of social mobility, Le Pays by Marie Darrieussecq revisits the topos of returning to one’s homeland, involving a process of spatial mapping that proves unexpectedly complex within a small and seemingly insignificant country. The narrative adopts a dual mode of enunciation – both homodiegetic and heterodiegetic – to capture the intricate entanglement of personal, familial and collective stories. This article examines this dual narrative structure and argues that the juxtaposition of voices offers a deep dive into the protagonist’s interior subjectivity, creating a narrative doubling that relativizes the scale of the country. Gradually, an expanded consciousness of the territory emerges, imbued with a sense of cosmopolitan universality and closely tied to the experience of social mobility. This consciousness may also be interpreted through the lens of Deleuze’s metaphor of the fold. Despite its modest size, the country is revealed as a stratified space, shaped by both internal and external connections, which enhances its habitability beyond mere geographical appeal.