E. E. SCHMITT: A JOVIAL SPIRIT IN THE SEARCH OF THE ABSOLUTE
E. E. SCHMITT: A JOVIAL SPIRIT IN THE SEARCH OF THE ABSOLUTE

Summary/Abstract: In the volume Felix and the Invisible Source, by E. E. Schmitt, the identity traits often meet the alterity attributes, and finally conciliate in the simple return to the origins, regressus ad uterum. The main characters, alogens in France from West Africa, from Senegal, try to become Parisians and fail in alienation. For example, after a very full and complicated life, Felix’s mother, named Fatou – Mamί, ends up having depression. In this sense, the maladies of modernity affect those who leave the African continent, the indirect reference to the fate of thousands of immigrants being in search for happiness. Treating such serious aspects in a double manner, a poetic one, on the one side, and an alternative comic, on the other side, the author touches a subtle thematic about the recovery of the lost coherence of the world in actuality, inclusively through the medium of animist believes, and also through the restoration of the connection with the absolute, in the wide sense of the term, re- experiencing the simple joys and by the retrieval of some notions almost compromised: identity, nation, family, maternity, filiation, paternity, divinity, love. The prose of the French writer is configured around the ontological dominant and his ambition is to redimensionate some metanarratives, who finally, however, does not take himself seriously.

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