Esquisse d’une réception critique de l’œuvre d’Hervé Guibert en deux moments: 1990/2001

Résumé 0

Initially confidential, Hervé Guibert’s work was revealed to the general public with the publication of À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie in 1990. The confession of his illness and the indiscretions about Michel Foucault’s life made the writer a media phenomenon, and there were few literary pages in French and French-speaking weeklies and dailies that did not report on this novel. However, the treatment of the novel in the newspapers goes beyond the simple literary debate and is crossed by moral and ethical considerations. More than ten years later, in 2001, Le Mausolée des amants, the writer’s diary, appeared posthumously. This shorter media period, circumscribed to this single publication, really gives us a purely critical view, detached from the emotional impact of the author’s illness and imminent death. A more distant view, therefore, but also, perhaps, more accurate in that it focuses more on the work of an author than on the author of a work. It is these two periods of reception of Hervé Guibert’s work that the present article wishes to examine, in order to study the way in which critics seize upon subversive texts that destabilise the bourgeois order and the political correctness.