4 - Image and Text

Summary

Since L'Homme blessé served as point of departure for Guibert in his quest towards the novel, this chapter begins with a study of that experiment and links it with the text ‘Les escarpins rouges’, which tells the story of the writing of L'Homme blessé and provides us with important information about the process of literary creation. Les Lubies d'Arthur is the first of Guibert's books to bear the subtitle ‘roman’ (‘novel’), so I will be asking if this text, which was to have been issued in instalments with illustrations, is really a novel, and linking it to a text entitled ‘L'Ours’ (PA, pp. 139–48), which tells how Les Lubies d'Arthur came to be written. I will then turn to the texts in La Piqûre d'amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraîche published in 1982 and 1983 to see if their analysis reflects the writer's preoccupations and tallies with the Guibertian thematic. Since in Le Seul Visage and Lettres d'É gypte we have two different ways of combining image and text, I shall be asking if these two projects lead Guibert away from the novel or whether, on the contrary, they share the same perspective as the other books. So as to make my study more synthetic, I will be analysing the last three works together.