"I is another". Pierre Louÿs' pastiche and parody

The paper deals with the work of the French poet and writer, dandy and libertine, Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) who devoted his entire life to erotic and pornographic writings. Throughout his life, Louÿs took a particular and very intense pleasure in pastiching or parodying the classical texts of French literature. Therefore, a number of stylistic exercises imitating the writing style of many great French writers emerged in Louÿs' work. Besides, one of his favourite activities was to sign his own pornographic poems with the names of his literary colleagues. It should be noted that even Louÿs' own literal work represents a kind of pastiche. The famous Songs of Bilitis (Les Chansons de Bilitis, 1894) were published as the lost works of a disciple of Sappho. What made them sensational is the fact that Louÿs claimed that the poems were the work of an ancient Greek courtesan and contemporary of Sappho, Bilitis; while to himself, Louÿs ascribed the modest role of a mere translator. The Woman and the Puppet (La Femme et le Pantin, 1898) is in fact the transposition of one episode from the life of Giacomo Casanova and there is also an evident inspiration by Carmen by Prosper Merimée. The pornographic Island of Women (L'Île aux dames, 1988) is a parody of The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne and at the same time a parody of The Adventures of King Pausole (Les Aventures du roi Pausole, 1901). Furthermore, all Louÿs' writings are heavily eroticised, sometimes even verging on pornography. For example, The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners for Use in Educational Establishments (Manuel de Civilité pour les petites filles à l'usage des maisons d'éducation, 1926) remains his most outrageous as well as a truly hilarious piece. As a matter of fact, the comic is an inseparable element of Louÿs' writings. Undoubtedly, this keen sense of the comic adds to the writings of Pierre Louÿs a character of originality, allowing him to create real masterpieces of the genre.

Keywords: Pierre Louÿs; Fin de siècle; pastiche; parody; literary mystification; erotic literature; pornographic literature; humor