As if: rewriting and simulacrum in Éric Chevillard's and Tanguy Viel's novels

Tanguy Viel and Éric Chevillard wrote two very different novels that share a common goal: to fully retell existing stories of which neither of them are the author. In Cinéma, Viel creates a narrator obsessed by Joseph Mankiewicz's movie Sleuth. Instead of being an adaptation of Sleuth, Cinéma quickly becomes the story of an obsession for Sleuth. The attempt by the narrator to describe its plot is constantly balanced by the necessity not to betray its power of surprise. In order to achieve this result, he envisions, as a way of writing, a post-production process that mirrors the simulacrum that is used in the film. In Le Vaillant petit tailleur, Chevillard borrows from the genre of the fairy tale and uses its narrative tricks and functions - as described by Russian formalists - to subvert in any possible way the development of the story once told by the Grimm brothers. Although it retains in full the adventures of the folkloric character, Chevillard's Le Vaillant petit tailleur becomes the story of an aversion for the tale, and ends up looking like a perfect representative of Chevillard's prose. In both cases, but in two different ways, the transfer of narration goes along with the transfer of authorship, and the admission of the origin of the primary source. The purpose of this article is to analyze their respective strategies.

Keywords: Eric Chevillard; Tanguy Viel; rewriting; simulacrum