Héritages et exotismes dans The Christmas Tree de Jennifer Johnston
Résumé
In this novel, Jennifer Johnston explores many faces of exoticism. First, through the escapist plunge in a hot country, and then through what the French poet and traveller Victor Segalen called “essential exoticism”.
Indeed, he defined the latter species as “the aesthetics of the diverse”, a perception only attainable to those individualities who are capable of enjoying anything which is other than themselves. An experience which proves to be both sensual and intellectual.
This is the kind of proposition Jennifer Johnston makes in this novel, where the narrative is focussed on the last days of a female would-be writer, in a Dublin family house. Her account of her last Christmas is both minimalist in terms of the familiar institutional associations of this predicament, and fraught with a sense of the fading barriers between the protagonists of the scene. (protestant, catholic and jewish)