Que reste-t-il de ce beau poème que tu m'as lu derrière un meuble ?
Book Presentation and discussion with Alain Rivière and Jean-Yves Jouannais.
Listen to the conference on France Culture plus.
Félicien Marbœuf is « the greatest writer with no work to his name. » So goes Jean- Yves Jouannais’s essay on artists without works. In 2009 the author, who wanted to give renewed substance to this tutelary figure of withdrawal, commissioned artists for an exhibition he organized on the master of absence at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard. Alain Rivière’s contribution consisted in a series of photographic portraits of French and foreign writers, all with their eyes closed. Their dates of birth or death all implied that their lives overlapped with Félicien Marbœuf’s: all of them could have been read by him or could have met him. For each, the artist produced a new portrait, sampling contemporary prints to produce the material needed for these grafted eyelids—and for the ghostly compositions they helped create. Rivière thus attributed a strange fad to Marbœuf: accumulating portraits of writers on their deathbed, or simply asleep. The collection gives a plastic form to the great silence that shapes Marbœuf as a figure: he did not leave an œuvre but dreamed literature.
On the occasion of this publication, the gallery of portraits is augmented with a second collection facing it, pieces of paper accumulated by the odd character throughout his life. His literary abstinence means that time alone has left its trace on these, smudged, torn, scribbled over, marked with undecipherable traces and signs. Finally, four letters, kept preciously by the master in his red-edge pocket cabinet, have been selected by Jouannais from the correspondence between Félicien Marbœuf and Marcel Proust. They provide information on the origin of the collection, shedding light on the intentions of the former and their reception by the latter.
