Le jeu récurrent de la norme et de la transgression dans Erasure de Percival Everett

Abstract

The protagonist and narrator of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure sells his soul to the devil when he accepts that his parody of the Afro-American novel be taken seriously and rewarded by a jury he despises but of which he is one of the members. Right from the start Everett’s narrative unfolds according to the norm/transgression dynamics. This paper shows that the movement that carries this dynamics throughout the whole narrative reproduces the cinetism of the system of the English article – discovered by the French linguist Gustave Guillaume – and that the existential position of a man as rebellious as he is conformist can be grammatically declined according to the potential uses of the substantive « writer ».