Face aux “ Épiciers du roman ” Raymond Guérin dit son mot. Relecture de l’œuvre : Alceste revisité à travers sa propre critique

Raymond Guérin (1905-1955) is a mordant author who at first disappeared to resurface again later on, thanks to an enlightened academic critique and by the word-of-mouth of his fond readers. A successful author in the years before the war, and a scandalous one after the war ("L’apprenti"), each and every book he published offers us a new writer, and a different style. His career comes to an end quite briskly, alas, with his masterpiece "Les Poulpes", which is today almost impossible to find. A friend of Henri Calet, Jean Grenier, Marcel Arland, Curzio Malaparte but of Jean Paulhan too, he is a writer endowed with a great style, capable of mixing linguistic registers, making use of an acrid sarcasm at its extreme. In a small book, published in 1948 (and republished in 1997), "Un romancier dit son mot", Guérin offers us a personal, intimate, unapologizing view on his work and on novel in general. Such a view is intentionally critical, explicative, and decidedly outside the rules. Guérin was a caustic, provocative, anti-conformist spirit, a sort of Girondist Alceste, truthful to his friends and ready to use his venom in his dialectic attack against his foes. He represents nonetheless a figure of a tormented artist, conscious of his talent, intolerant to criticism and yet open to discussion. The project will build its investigation from this book, in order to reconstruct the atmosphere of the period of its writing, and the points of view of a rather important - however undervalued - epoch as far as the novel goes. His grievances against a certain type of critique, which he deems as close-minded, will allow us to better grasp his vision about writing. Such a perspective will moreover turn this book into a sort of ‘anti-systemic’ pamphlet, which may shed light on the reasons why some 1950’s authors (that the research will also address) had disappeared from the literary scene to reappear once again only in the 1980s.