Although the Belgian writer Marcel Thiry is mostly known as one of the prominent poets of the last century, his literary achievements in the field of fiction have fascinated many readers. It is not easy to define the fiction in Marcel Thiry’s works, as they combine sub-types such as fantasy (fantastique or merveilleux) and Science-Fiction. For instance, very few specialists in literature are aware that the first novel dealing with parallel worlds might be Belgian, and yet Marcel Thiry’s Échec au Temps was written during the thirties, before a later publication in 1945 due to the writer’s refusal to have his work printed during the German occupation. A modest and self-ironic person by nature, Marcel Thiry lived a multiple life, from his enlisting as a soldier in a small Belgian troop trapped inside the future Soviet Union to the different social roles he had to comply with as a student in Law, as a merchant, as a Walloon political figure, as an academician, as a resistant, as an author
ity of the Francophonie movement, as the Secretary of the Royal Academy and as a Senator. His work as a writer and a poet should not obliterate the fact that he lived a full life (public as well as private) in the real world. Marcel Thiry’s work has been analysed in many articles and essays, but never as a university thesis. The present study investigates, from the point of view of the reader, a vast corpus of 40 texts and its ambition is to bring out a common feature that can be applied to all these stories. The key proposed to an original reading of Marcel Thiry’s works of fiction is the concept of inaboutissement, which describes the process of ”non-accomplishing” brought by the writer into the fictitious universe of his characters. Behind the vast notion of inaboutissement, different fields of research have been used, such as stylistics, enunciation, pragmatism and literature. The main idea is to sort out the means used by the writer to undermine the traditional reading of fiction: his stories embrace a consistent tendency to paralyze the action he describes. In the interacting orientation which is here constantly underlined, Marcel Thiry seems to consider the reader as a necessary part of this process of ”non-accomplishing” the traditional narration, hence the importance given to (self-)irony in this study. Once the different types of inaboutissement have been examined in their particular areas, the conclusion aims at gathering all the strings together in order to suggest different solutions to the reasons of the existence of this recurrent concept in the works of Marcel Thiry.
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