Sonia Déchamps hosted a meeting on Saturday afternoon, as part of Lire à Limoges, with three authors, Pascal Fioretto, Jérôme de Verdière and Guillaume Clicquot on the theme of humor in literature. Not sad !
This meeting at the Petit auditorium of the Jean-Gagnant cultural center this Saturday afternoon went by too quickly.
In the room, many women. On stage, three men, three authors: Pascal Fioretto, Jérôme de Verdière and Guillaume Clicquot. At the same time funny, caustic, humorous, serious, they shared their vision of humor in literature.
Pascal Fioretto is a French journalist, writer, columnist, screenwriter and writer. He is best known for his pastiches of novels including Gay Vinci Code (2006), And if it was silly (2007), The elegance of the skinny (2009).
“As Proust said, pastiche has purgative and releasing virtues,” he explains. This is literary criticism in action. It’s a way of taking an amused and amusing look at the literary scene. Me, I make contemporary pastiche. I write books in the style of. When doing this exercise, you must first read the writer’s work. Then, we restore it with an original story. And in this story, when we concentrate all the tics and tocs of an author, it turns out that there is a humorous effect… if all goes well. We discover a portrait which is a caricature. And there are often caricatures that are more similar than portraits! »
In his latest pastiche, that of Annie Ernaux Sales at aim, by Annie Ernox, Nobel Prize winner for literature (2024), he continues to “falsify, mystify and demystify” brilliantly. And he adds: “Annie Ernaux, I hope she appreciated her pastiche because I still wrote her a book, thicker than the ones she wrote and in which there is still all her artwork. ! She explains how she got her Nobel Prize and I send her to the United States where she teaches flat writing. I didn’t invent it. She is for flat writing. For her, you have to write like you would write an insurance report or a toaster user manual…”
Guillaume Clicquotoriginal screenwriter of the films Dad or Mom et Happy retirementis also the author of Take me for a fool and of The digger’s daughter. For him, the strength of the story comes through the well-crafted dialogue and the interesting characters. His nature to laugh, to de-dramatize everyday life through laughter, is often found in his writing. And to find out if it works, he has his method: “When the story gets into my head, I start writing and I can do writing sessions for 12, 15 hours straight. I am withdrawn, autistic. I am there, but not there. It clears my head. But when I stop, I don’t remember what I wrote. I have a memory like a goldfish. So, I read again and at times, I make myself laugh! “.
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Jérôme de Verdièrejournalist, radio and television presenter, and author of The Dress and Bad Sea. Nothing funny a priori. In The dress, he questions the upheavals in our society and couple relationships, making fun of both the progressives and the reactionaries to whom, he says, he belongs. With Bad seahe deciphers mother-daughter relationships on the theme of buried pain and unsaid things.
“I think,” he confides, “that the most comparable thing to an author is an actor. Actors when they play must not “act funny”, because it is always a tragedy at the start. A writer is the same. We don’t write to make people laugh. Laughter comes. You have to be as fair as possible. Laughter can happen where it has not been decided. It is often the readers who give us feedback. »
And when Pascal Fioretto concludes: “Are any of you taking part in paid writing workshops? “. It’s to sting one last time, to make the audience laugh and make fun of these writing masterclasses which, according to him, “are useless”. “It’s in our nature to write bullshit, you can’t learn it! »
Anne-Sophie Pédegert
