(Said at the evening organized at the L'Harmattan bookstore, on the occasion of the release of German Metamorphoses and Avant-gardes in the 20th Century. Tribute to Georges Bloess, under the direction of Françoise Py.)

What relationships can there be between a Germanist, professor of plastic arts, and a literary man, a professor of French literature who has never learned German and has, by definition, never expressed himself on German-language literature?

One can always conceive of institutional relationships, since they both belong to the teaching body, that of university professors.

Knowing that the first has conducted research on expressionism, that the second has written much on Jarry, Dada, surrealism, one can conceive that they questioned each other, less on the poets of these respective groups than on the painters.

It is indeed, on the occasion of a colloquium on Jean Arp, in Strasbourg, where we both intervened, that I let myself be guided by you, in search of a restaurant in the Petite France. And it is thus, during a lunch, around a carafe of gewurztraminer, that I learned to know the man who will become, through our care, this evening, a honoree, still as youthful if one listens to his disarrays.

In fact, you are one year younger than me, and we have been able to observe a certain parallelism of our respective career (Bourdieu would have said "trajectory").

The Henri IV prep

My dear Georges, we could have met in the khâgne of the lycée Henri IV, where you landed from your outer province. It was a year after me, as is logical. I had already left the establishment to find myself in what was then called, out of modesty, the University of snows. But it was not so long after my brief passage in this prestigious establishment which only remembered me to invite me to be part of the alumni association, once their secretary spotted my name in the Who's who!

I did not know the dormitory. But I have a precise memory of the miche and the winter zob (thus were baptized Laurent Michard, of whom you spoke to me at length during this lunch, and it is quite true that he was memorable when inspiration came to visit him in his class, and the pitiful Audibert, inveterate anti-Semite); of the geography professor, André Labaste, who invited us to travel France by bicycle, at most by Solex for the weakest, of Méthivier, future general inspector of history, of R. Larrieu, Spanish professor, who did me the grace of lending me his New Spanish Grammar, and pushed the care to the point of asking me for it back in June, at the sanatorium, without fearing the microbes. As a Germanist, you could not benefit from his attention.

Imagine that, like Louis Guilloux, whom I was to know later in the corridors of the NRF, we could have been the students of another Cripure, Louis Guillermit, who delivered to us his Lessons on the Critique of Pure Reason of Kant before publishing them at Vrin. Shall I evoke this other philosopher who, at the end of a test, advised me to abandon my popular examples (Roger Vercel, Allain and Souvestre) in favor of Balzac or Proust?

More interesting were our fellow students. Imagine that there were among them penta, failed 4 times at the competition, consequently, who did not despair of triumphing one day. And I cannot forget this apprentice philosopher who discoursed so well on the nature of a glass of wine (oh yes, we were served wine in the canteen, without additional cost) that he forgot to eat.

I know that some, like you, remember with anguish the hazing, obligatory passage ritual. For me, I have memory of a good laugh, since, as newcomers, we had succeeded in turning the situation to our advantage, and in making the old ones execute the dirty work! It must be recognized that the day students that we were accorded themselves all rights, up to that of taunting the Censor, pipe in mouth!

ENS Saint-Cloud

Obstinate, you therefore integrated the ENS Saint-Cloud three years later, while I saw any academic career moving away from me, since I had benefited from an illness which, at the time, forbade me from public service. My revenge came in 1967-68, when I frequented the school as a free auditor, which allowed it to count me among its students who became agrégés of the terrible year.

Vincennes 68-69

Subsequently, you integrate the experimental university of Vincennes from its foundation. Imagine that, there again, we could have rubbed shoulders, since I was there, briefly, as a lecturer, in French literature, of course. I never understood why Dean Las Vergnas, to whom I was to succeed at the head of Paris III, who had been charged by Edgar Faure with recruiting the teachers of this experimental establishment, did not want to appoint me there. Perhaps I had displeased his secretary, whom I was going to make work hard afterwards in memory of her ungracious welcome.

Collaboration within the Center, Mélusine

It therefore took about fifteen years for our trajectories to meet. It was by the grace of a fairy who inspired German poets as much and more than French ones, and especially by the virtue of an Alsatian painter and poet, Jean-Hans Arp, who brought us together in 1986. Your intervention, "Arp's work after 1945", is found in Mélusine IX, Arp, plastic poet, 1987.

Once you figured on my file, you could no longer escape my obstinate solicitations. At the Strasbourg colloquium on surrealist Europe, you entrusted us with "Passages of Max Ernst and poetics of the encounter", published in Mélusine XIV, Surrealist Europe, 1994.

Then, you intervened again in a dossier of our journal on a curious painter, who was formerly classified among the mad: "Art of madness or madness of art? Adolphe Wölffli, the fountain of metamorphoses.", Mélusine XXVI, Metamorphoses, 2006.

Then there were, with Françoise Py, your "Visions of Princess Marsi", during these mornings that she organizes for our association at the Halle Saint-Pierre. Then, in the same framework, you spoke to us of "Magical bodies, tragic bodies: the destructive creation of Unica Zürn", available online on the Mélusine page.

Finally, it is well because of your youthful reading of Nietzsche that I was able to offer you this reading of Tzara's poems, himself a great reader of the philosopher in his youth, in Zurich. This by which we really meet, for the first time.

H.B. October 11, 2015