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Gabrielle Wittkop |
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Préface de Jean-Baptiste Del Amo
« En un périlleux acte d’équilibre, il m’a fallu trouver un moyen terme entre mon refus de n’être que le strass voulant frauduleusement imiter le diamant, et le désir de préserver “ce grain de faux qui est peut-être l’idéal d’une œuvre”. »
On pénètre ici comme par effraction dans la bibliothèque intime de Gabrielle Wittkop où l’esprit des Lumières et du libertinage voisine avec le romantisme européen, ainsi que d’autres grands classiques et modernes admirés. Ces vingt pastiches font ressurgir certains motifs propres à son esthétique de la cruauté, dont le dernier, qui délivre un supplément inédit à son célèbre Nécrophile.
La page Facebook dédiée à Usages de faux. |
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If the pastiche is a minor art, Gabrielle Wittkop succeeds in giving it anew its badge of honor in Usages de faux. By this literary subterfuge, we penetrate into the author’s ideal library where, as we might expect, the spirit of the Enlightenment and libertinage in all its forms (Voltaire, Casanova, Sade and Choderlos de Laclos) is placed side by side with European Romanticism (E.T.A. Hoffmann and Aloysius Bertrand), the French classics (Jean de La Fontaine, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, the Goncourt brothers and Victor Hugo), but also Petronius with Alfred Jarry, Lewis Carroll with Jan Potocki, Ambrose Bierce with Jean Genet, Marcel Schwob with Alain Robbe-Grillet... Far from a simple exercise of style, for her it is a matter of putting on the masks of a heteronymic carnival to inhabit, from the inside, all those she admires by adding on a chapter, a scene, an epilogue, to their existing works.
As for the last text closing the volume, in the form of an auto-pastiche, she pretends to apologize for it at the end of the preface: “If I have permitted myself to add, at the end of the collection, a supplement to my Nécrophile, I beg the reader to see neither impertinence nor ridiculous presumption on my part.” This challenge – adding an original chapter to the cult novel that made her known in 1972 – would in itself be enough to justify the existence of this anthology, where black humour rivals the most wicked slants. |
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