Jişa, Simona2022-06-102022-06-102014"Quêtes littéraires" 2014, nº 4, s. 156-163http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12153/3154Jean Echenoz’s text presents Victoria’s story, who runs away from Paris, believing that she has killed her lover. Her straying (that embraces the form of a relative deterritorialization in a Deleuzian sense) lasts one year, and it is built up geographically upon a descent (more or less symbolical) to the South of France and, after that, she comes back to Paris and encloses the spatial and textual curl. From a spatial point of view, she turns into a heterotopia (Foucault) every place where she is located, a fact that reflects her incapability of constituting a personal, intimate space. The railway stations, the trains, the hotels, the improvised houses of those with no fixed abode are turning, according to Marc Augé’s terminology, into a « non-lieux » that excludes human being. Her vagrancy is characterized through a continuous flight from police and people, and through a continuous decrease of her standard of living and dignity. It’s not about a quest of oneself, but about a loss of oneself. Urged by a strong feeling of culpability, her vagrancy is a self-punishment that comes to an end when the concerns of her problems disappear, and she finds out that her lover is alive.frAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/vagrancyheterotopiasnon-placesculpabilitynovelinfo:eu-repo/semantics/article10.31743/ql.4583