De Paul Valéry (« découvrir quel problème l’auteur s’est posé ») à une lecture de Michaël Ferrier

AbstractThis article considers Valéry’s postulation (Cahiers, 1923) that critics should work on discovering the « problem » experienced by the author consciously or unconsciously and decide whether it was successfully resolved. Three years later, Valéry added that critics should therefore concentrate their attention on the work itself and try to decipher all its meanings through close reading (Cahiers, 1926). Through interviews and multiple exchanges with readers, Ferrier, the author, himself a seasoned critic, provides many reading clues. Such practices, however, threaten to kill critics’ efforts by turning them into parrots, less good than their master, and perhaps kept away from offering new perspectives. Also, another trap for critics is to take their own reading problems for those the writer might have had. The only solution is to reject the « affective fallacy » denounced by The New Critics, and to consider texts between author, narrator, contexts and critic. This article deals with François, portrait d’un absent, and Scrabble. Une enfance tchadienne. The conclusion briefly examines Valéry’s negative attitude towards novels, wondering what his reactions might have been, if confronted, for instance, with Glissant’s or Ferrier’s poetic novels.Keywords: ValéryFerrierclose readingaffective fallacyFrançoisScrabble Notes1 Mes précisions en italiques.2 Voir les deux essais écrits par William Kurtz Wimsatt et Monroe Beardsley, « The Intentional Fallacy » et « The Affective Fallacy. » Parmi les critiques adonnés à la « Reader-Response Theory, » on compte Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes, Walter Slatoff, Norman Holland. D’Edward W. Said, voir The World, the Text and the Critic, en particulier le premier chapitre du même titre.3 Je reprends ici une expression utilisée plusieurs fois par Édouard Glissant dans ses essais où il commente les techniques narratives de William Faulkner, à savoir le « détour » et le « différé, » ainsi que la vision d’identités morcelées. Voir les articles de Michael Wiedorn, Hugues Azerad et Celia Britton dans American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South.4 Photo choisie par Martin Munro pour la couverture de son livre traduit.5 Entre autres instruments, Ferrier étudiera le piano. Il écrivit sa Maîtrise sur les chansons de Georges Brassens; plus généralement, il aime les chansons françaises et autres. Il consacra sa thèse de doctorat à la Chanson chez Céline, thèse qui devint un livre: Céline et la chanson.Additional informationNotes on contributorsBernadette CaillerBernadette Cailler is professor emerita at the University of Florida. She received degrees from the Universities of Poitiers, Paris, and Cornell (PhD in Comparative Literature, 1974). A member of the African Lliterature Association from 1975 to 2015 and of the International Council for Francophone Studies from its foundation (1987–2022), she received the 1999 Maurice Cagnon Prize (now I.C.F.S. Prize) for her contributions. She has published books (and articles) on Aimé Césaire (1976) and Édouard Glissant (1988), articles on other French-writing authors, and is the author of Carthage ou la flamme du brasier. Mémoire et échos chez Virgile, Senghor, Mellah, Ghachem, Augustin, Ammi, Broch, et Glissant (2007). She is currently working on Michaël Ferrier and Lorand Gaspar.