CASTANT ALEXANDRE, AESTHETICS OF THE IMAGE, FICTIONS OF ANDRÉ PIEYRE DE MANDIARGUES

par Thierry Aubert

This study is in keeping with our time, combining meticulous exploration and the search for a dynamic. Alexandre Castant thus analyzes the different aspects of the image (mental, visual, rhetorical) from Mandiargues' works, fictions or reflections. As keys for approaching the corpus, he also uses texts where Mandiargues presents another artist, insofar as these presentations rest on the sympathy that associates the artist and his commentator, the latter revealing as if by reflection his own approach. The first part is alert and reads easily, inventorying different actualizations of the image, quite immediate. It will no longer be the same in the two following stages, Castant bringing out more tenuous, more secret traits of Mandiargues' approach, the analysis becoming more tight; the reader is led onto more arid lands, and yet no less important as to the scope of what is brought to light.

The first element is the observation of the rupture between plastic arts and literature, established by Lessing in the 18th century in a study on the sculpture of Laocoon. Castant studies how Mandiargues, who sometimes observes, records, sometimes writes or rather transcribes, will stretch threads across this rupture, the text becoming the receptacle of the seen, fruit of the "vision [which] must precede words." (Un Saturne gai, cited p. 138). From there, two forces confront each other within the text.

First, the text can highlight the impossible mimetic grasp of the real. The image resolves in disaster, image of memory, of vanished time, which leads to hallucination and emptiness, to a page where words prove vain. Castant names this phenomenon the "white image" and associates it with the traumatic announcement of paternal death during Mandiargues' childhood. In this case, the will to make image pushes the word to reveal a gap, close to the often announced death of the protagonist.

In parallel, another constellation emerges within the work, that of the "open image." The text imagines itself, anchors itself in the image. Castant reveals how writing, narrative, in their functioning, in their texture, become the very material of the image, to let a new space, a new time, marked by suspension, be elaborated. The novel is no longer a path toward disappearance, but a "mirror" (p. 201) of oneself, in the sense that the novelist projects into it the experience of which he is himself the reflection, so that it takes on a new dimension there, which Castant associates with the surreal marvelous, since it participates in overcoming the contradictions that undermine the real, the lived experience of the real.

The "white image" and the "open image" haunt Mandiargues' works, exhibiting in the same textual universe the ineluctable biological disappearance of self and access to the doubling that extracts the Self from the catastrophic visible. But Castant does not identify what Mandiargues does with such an overcoming. Is it reduced to a diversion that would mask the term of existence? Is it the sign of an assured overcoming toward an ineffable?

Nevertheless, the analyses conducted by Castant are strong in that they show how a work, beyond questions of belonging and orthodoxy, can nourish itself on surrealist discoveries. Finally, they form precious work for the layperson who approaches Mandiargues' strange work.