From melancholy to "The Kadabras'tree": how to modestly show and hide child suffering through the metaphor

Abstract

In the picture book L’arbre à Kadabras by Marie-Sabine Roger, little Tom has lost his dad. In order
to ward off absence and pain, he entrenches himself in a secret garden created by “his imaginative
interiority” and constructs, by leaning on the powers of language, a consoling metaphorical fable that
modestly hides and shows, to whoever wills to interpret it, the emotions that runs through him. This
paper analyses this metaphorical compensatory fable, its reasons, its forms and its effects.
Key words : mourning, figuration of absence, autosimulation, pathetic fallacy, metaphorized
emotions, play on words