Les Doublures (the provisional title of the novel Le Souffleur ou le Théâtre de société published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, in 1960) is an immersive examination of the manuscripts and archives of Pierre Klossowski, an author who died twenty years ago and whose unclassifiable and pictorial work spans the 20th century.
How do the characters in the novel develop through the narrator’s madness? Who are the figures from the literary world and the author’s private life who inspired him? What is the fiction’s relationship with history and the present day (e.g. the French resistance and collaboration during World War II, the colonial wars, the coup d’état of the generals, de Gaulle’s takeover, the revolution in social mores..)? How does the character of Roberte, after being the victim of a cruel husband in the two first volumes of the trilogy (Roberte ce Soir and La Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes), becomes master of the game and the instigator of a neo-Fourierist utopia? All theses questions will be answered in this collection of previously unpublished and little-known texts, drafts, letters, fragments of interviews, circumstantial writings, and a press pack.
In the manuscripts, whose narrative possibilities are untrameled, we cross paths with Gide’s ghostly figure, already recognizable in the prologue to Souffleur, as well as with Gilberte Lambrichs, Pierre Leyris, Gabriel Marcel, Jean Paulhan, maybe even with Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan, and above all with Jean Carrive, the “real souffleur”, a young surrealist poet turned scholar and translator, a writer without an œuvre whose “violent soul” inspires these “Nouveaux Mystères de Paris”.
“Qui me lisant, qui m’écoutant, pourra jamais me suivre dans le genre de nostalgie que je vais tenter de dépeindre? Qui de nous n’a pas connu la joie d’un attachement, n’a pas senti les forces lui revenir dans les pires détresses dès que le visage aimé en se penchant vers lui apportait la sourde promesse de ressources inespérées? Mais en est-il deux ou trois qui aient connu le souci insensé de faire partager à autrui l’émotion particulière que leur procurait le visage de la compagne élue, et ce souci, comment peut-il devenir à la longue aussi indispensable que la sensation que procure la dilapidation à pleines mains du trésor que l’on possède?” (Pierre Klossowski, project of preface)
