Épiphanies symboliques: Masques, altérité et fictions identitaires dans la chanson de geste

Far from being a monochromatic discourse that stands in secular liturgy celebrating the eternal return of the Same, the chanson de geste is a dynamic structure in perpetual tension between myth and history, symbolic and semiotic, imaginary and ideology. In this perspective, the encounter with the Other (Saracen, Infidel or traitor) does not always arise from a simple radical bipolarization of values; it involves a triple movement of deconstruction, exchange and transformation in poetic and ontological terms. As in other Chansons de geste, the use of the mask in Le Charroi de Nîmes attests an imaginary of otherness where the Other does not always reflects the Same: it inaugurates a space that collapses, even if only temporarily, the order of the world and progressively transforms the nature, the status and the becoming of the epic narrative that, on the other side of the mirror, questions its own rhetoric, cultural and symbolic foundations.