Abstract
In a world that has never seemed so dangerous, why read literature ? Many would say, including Pope Francis : to better understand this world, to better penetrate its reality. This is particularly true when we place ourselves under the realist regime of literature. But literature is also a means of escape, of seeing another world. Like all artistic expression, it offers us a place where we are at home, in our inner universe. This is the pathology from which Don Quixote suffers, except that the unreal world seen by the ingenious hidalgo is merely distorted reality. The process that conversely enables us to pass from the unreal to the real has a name : it's reading or interpretation, which is the subject of this lecture.
Let's enter the Arcadia represented by the joy of reading with a painting about both Arcadia and reading : Nicolas Poussin's Les Bergers d'Arcadie ou Et in Arcadia ego, housed in the Musée du Louvre. While the myth of Arcadia developed from Greek and Latin pastoral poetry, modernity has given this region of Greece, which was not yet a mythical place, a second dimension : that of time. The Arcadia of the Renaissance is not only distant, but ancient : this double distance makes it an even more inaccessible universe. There's no way to travel there. Poussin's painting, one of the most famous and talked-about in the history of painting, was recently hijacked for a perfume advert. It was used earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, in a comic verse by Paul-Jean Toulet. No misappropriation can be accomplished without relying on the properties of the misappropriated work. To divert is to take hold of one or more of the work's parameters in order to reinforce, deviate from, cancel out or invert them. By exploiting the properties and characteristics of the work, détournement also signals them. Although they are not themselves interpretations, détournement, parody and pastiche, which are all forms of reference to the work, are based on a prior and more or less explicit interpretation of the latter, so that the study of their effectiveness and modus operandi, by comparison with the original work, has an interpretative value.
