La construction de l’indécidable dans une nouvelle de Leon Rooke

The essay examines the ways in which the construction of Leon Rooke’s stories prevents the reader from reading them referentially. Analyzing «The Birth Control King of the Upper Uolta», it demonstrates the various procedures of «defamiliarization» employed by Rooke : the use of metalogisms, the handling of time, the lability of the character’s identity, the resort to clichés and the ensuing parodie and comic function of speech. Ultimately disorientation, however, is the only prerequisite for re-orientation. Rooke withdraws from the reader the comfortable certainties of the realistic story, only to open to him another world in which dreams and the irrational play a much larger role.