Ad augusta per absurda

Alphonse Allais's works are unjustly termed "funny" by some. His contemporaries regarded him as one of the best representatives of nonsense literature. Today, thanks to studies based on psychoanalysis, sociocriticism and more recent research on humour, his works can be considered as partaking of a certain commitment. As a result, jokes could be viewed as an aesthetic or political way to question reality and they could be reconsidered to be as highly esteemed as the ideas of great philosophers like Jeremy Bentham or Friedrich Nietzsche or the works of more "serious" authors like Jules Laforgue, Remy de Gourmont or Raymond Roussel. To make the reader know himself and to understand the world through nonsense - this is the paradoxical and original aspect of Allais'a works

Through absurd to greatness

Alphonse Allais's works are unjustly termed "funny" by some. His contemporaries regarded him as one of the best representatives of nonsense literature. Today, thanks to studies based on psychoanalysis, sociocriticism and more recent research on humour, his works can be considered as partaking of a certain commitment. As a result, jokes could be viewed as an aesthetic or political way to question reality and they could be reconsidered to be as highly esteemed as the ideas of great philosophers like Jeremy Bentham or Friedrich Nietzsche or the works of more "serious" authors like Jules Laforgue, Remy de Gourmont or Raymond Roussel. To make the reader know himself and to understand the world through nonsense - this is the paradoxical and original aspect of Allais'a works

"It is life that exaggerates": some remarks on Balzac's death in Octave Mirbeau's novel La 628-E8

In the novel La 628-E8 declaring his disgust with art, as if looking for a confirmation of his feeling, Octave Mirbeau dedicates three subchapters of his work to Balzac, in order to create a biography, taking into account only the figure of the writer as a man, leaving out his oeuvre. But while the text seems to be a farewell with literature and with its effect of artificiality, praising the virtues of the text-document containing elements which are exclusively the author's own, a fragment which describes Balzac's death makes the word emerge in all its complexity: the word as an evidence of reality or as an invention. Thus, through its nature of elusiveness, it becomes a reconciliation between literature and life

Chapitre IX. Les rituels de M. Bougran

La littérature entretient avec la religion une forte homologie rappelée, dans ses divers aspects, par la présentation qu’Emmanuel Godo a donnée en ouverture du volume Littérature, rites et liturgies. Plusieurs de ses thèmes, de même que la posture de certains écrivains, suffiraient à souligner le bien-fondé d’un tel rapprochement, mais les formes qu’elle revêt parfois et le jeu de relations entre les auteurs au sein du champ institutionnel en renforceraient implicitement l’évidence. Huysmans ..

L’émotion lyrique dans La 628-E8

« Et pourtant dans cet écroulement des formes, une grâce survivait… »Octave Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre L’incongruité formelle de La 628-E8 a suscité bien des commentaires, tantôt irrités devant la désinvolture de la composition tantôt, à l’inverse, soucieux de rendre justice à l’effort de formalisation auquel se livrait Mirbeau. Le romancier n’a jamais écrit de textes théoriques sur la littérature ni sur l’esthétique, mais s’il est vrai que « la plus secrète fonction de l’art ..

Philippe Dufour, La Pensée romanesque du langage

Le xixe siècle fut celui où s’accomplit la séparation entre les mots et les choses. Lorsqu’elles en rendent compte, les études littéraires traitent avant tout du discours poétique tant il est vrai que jamais autant qu’alors les poètes n’ont questionné le langage même. C’est donc le grand mérite de l’ouvrage de P. Dufour que de repenser cette mutation des Lettres en interrogeant le roman. La rupture dans l’imaginaire du langage qu’opère, selon lui, la Révolution française interdit désormais au..

"It is life that exaggerates": some remarks on Balzac's death in Octave Mirbeau's novel La 628-E8

In the novel La 628-E8 declaring his disgust with art, as if looking for a confirmation of his feeling, Octave Mirbeau dedicates three subchapters of his work to Balzac, in order to create a biography, taking into account only the figure of the writer as a man, leaving out his oeuvre. But while the text seems to be a farewell with literature and with its effect of artificiality, praising the virtues of the text-document containing elements which are exclusively the author's own, a fragment which describes Balzac's death makes the word emerge in all its complexity: the word as an evidence of reality or as an invention. Thus, through its nature of elusiveness, it becomes a reconciliation between literature and life

Mirbeau ou le papillon incendiaire

S’il est vrai que l’interview « oblige chacun à se révéler tout entier », comme le déclare Mirbeau à propos de L’Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (1891) de Jules Huret, alors celles que le romancier a délivrées seraient en mesure de nous livrer une part de sa personnalité comme une part de son esthétique. Tandis que les critiques avisés soulignent à l’envi le dogmatisme de l’écrivain et la brutalité de son style, ses œuvres, bien que polémiques, recèlent une complexité bien éloignée de l’évidence du roman à thèse, complexité qui prend sa source dans le recours généralisé à la parole. Omniprésente dans les récits, sous des formes aussi variées que la conversation, le dialogue ou l’anecdote, la voix est à la fois un élément privilégié de la composition du texte et une source d’ambiguïté pour le lecteur. Le dialogisme et le questionnement du rapport entre fiction et authenticité, divertissement et engagement que souligne l’oralité, sont autant de moyens d’interroger l’art du roman. Or, il semblerait que les interviews prolongent, quand elles ne l’alimentent pas, la réflexion sur les pouvoirs de la parole. Ainsi, plutôt que de faire de Mirbeau, à la suite de Lucien Daudet, un auteur « incendiaire », l’analyse de la voix mirbellienne livrée dans les interviews montrerait combien la parole vive et les papillonnements du dialogue servent, avec nuance, un idéal de justice et d’émancipationIf it is true that interviews “compel people to reveal themselves entirely”, as Mirbeau puts it about L’Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (1891) by Jules Huret, then those that the novelist gave would possibly show us some aspects of his character as well as of his aesthetics. Sensible critics insist on the writer’s dogmatism and on the brutality of his style. Nevertheless, even if his works are controversial, they conceal a certain complexity which is very far from the simplicity of a roman à thèse and which is rooted in Mirbeau’s generalized resorting to speech. Voices are omnipresent in his fictions and they are used in extremely various forms like conversations, dialogues and anecdotes. They are the privileged element in the composition of the text as well as a source of ambiguity for the reader. This oral character underlines the dialogism and the questioning of the relationship between fiction and authenticity, entertainment and commitment which are the different means of questioning the novel as an art form. Howewer, the interviews might extend and even feed reflections about the power of speech. So, instead of presenting Mirbeau as an “incendiary” writer, as Léon Daudet did, the analysis of Mirbeau’s voice as it appears in the interviews would show us how speech and the vivid character of the dialogues are subtly as the service of an ideal of justice and emancipatio