«Reproduire la vie»: l’influence d’Octave Mirbeau sur la dernière mouture du roman “Le Livre de Goha le Simple” d’A. Adès et A. Josipovici

Résumé 0

Octave Mirbeau met Egyptian francophone writers Albert Adès and Albert Josipovici in 1914, while they were living in the neighbourhood of his villa in Triel, a small town on the banks of the Seine, west of Paris. During their frequent conversations between 1914 and 1916, Mirbeau conveyed his strong convictions about authentic contents and purified style in literature: an author must reproduce real life without interpretation and moral judgement from his own side. These conversations had an influence on Adès and Josipovici’s still unpublished novel, Le Livre de Goha le Simple. The young authors reworked it on the basis of the new ideas about literature they were discovering with Mirbeau. This paper identifies and analyses the impact of Mirbeau’s ideas on the final text of the novel (published in 1919 by Calmann-Lévy, Paris) by comparing it with a complete manuscript conserved at the French National Library in Paris, written before meeting Mirbeau. It emerges that in the final text detailed descriptions are often removed or shortened, and moral and psychological analysis avoided, as Mirbeau advocated. The change is more evident around the description of the main characters: scholar Cheikh-el-Zaki “loses” extensive theological considerations, while the complex psychology of El-Zaki’s young wife Nour-el-Eïn and Goha himself is presented quite unexplained to the reader’s intuition in the final text. In 1916 Mirbeau, obviously pleased with the book that the authors only shared with him after reworking it, signed the foreword of Goha.