From the Magico-Mythical to Reality-Congruence: Models and Anti-models in Pierre Bergounioux's La Mort de Brune

This article analyzes Pierre Bergounioux’s La Mort de Brune and argues that its structure and treatment of secondary characters offer strong evidence of debt to two ostensibly very different sources: the Arthurian quest narrative and traditional early learning materials. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s social theory, the article seeks to show that Bergounioux exploits these textual and visual sources in order to chart the shifting balance in the child-protagonist’s thinking between magico-mythical views of his world and a rational perspective on it.