| |
A SHORT HISTORY
In its first version,
the objective of “L’Un et l’autre”
was to gather works that revealed “people’s
lives as invented by other people’s
memory”. “L’Un et l’autre”
is a dialogue, a coming and going game,
building a complicity between writer and
topic, one feeding off the fiction and searching
of the other. Meditation on people, on writing
or any other form of monument to memory
(understood as that which keeps alive and
exciting the memory of a person), biographical
daydreams, scholarly fragments, drafts of
novels… the imprint lends itself especially
well to the fusion or the superimposition
of particular styles of writing, befitting
a new form of biographical imagination that
flourished in the 1980s. The idea then is
to explore one’s own identity, from
the outside, through the memory of others.
A few earlier works might be seen as forerunners
of the concept: Pierre Michon’s Vies
minuscules and Gérard Macé’s
Vies antérieures – both
writers have also published novels in the
“L’Un et l’autre” imprint
- and even J-B. Pontalis’s books.
Although “the other”
is usually a famous character from the past
– a writer, an artist, a politician,
a fiction character even, it may also just
be a stranger, a close friend (the son-in-law
in Face à Face by Drillon;
the grandfather in Le Passeur de Loire
by Catherine Lépront), but also a
work (J’écris ‘Paludes’
by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, Le Roi miniature
by Jean Michel Delacomptée), a special
childhood place (Aller aux mirabelles
by Jacques Réda; Le Petit Casino
by Colette Fellous), an animal (the dogs
in Les Larmes d’Ulysse by Roger
Grenier), a field of activity (L’Art
de la pointe by Pierre Lartigue) …
It can be about the remote past or on the
contrary the recent and intimate past. The
titles, usually monographs, are mostly stories,
although some are essays that manage to
remain faithful to the core theme of the
imprint, the work of memory (Jusqu’à
Faulkner by Bergounioux) or memoirs
(Le Partage des mots by Claude Esteban;
Fidèle au poste by Roger Grenier)…
|
