'Un Crépuscule d'Islam d'André Chevrillon : du positivisme tainien vers une mélancolie romantique

Abstract

Chevrillon's trip to Morocco was for him the occasion of an experience which is more of an initiatory quest which allows him to reconnect with his deep being than of a travel relationship which would relate to an orientalist vision of world.

The orientalism which is very significant at the beginning of the novel is justified by the confrontation with a radical otherness which repels the traveler and by the influence that Taine had on Chevrillon's imagination by strongly inflecting his reading of Moroccan realities and by leading him to focus on the aging of Islamic civilization in Morocco.

However, Chevrillon paints the image of an Islamic civilization which has its own consciousness of time, a temporality above all haunted by the contemplative life. And it is this dimension that interests the romantic Chevrillon. When he looks at nature, it allows him to draw from his soul the resources capable of re-enchanting the world, he who comes from a Europe having suffered the full force of the effects of rationality. Nature and its contemplation are for him the pretext for a reflection on the human condition which is tormented by a painful feeling of incompletion and which aspires to the ontological completeness which it had lost following the fall and original sin.