{"id":14862,"date":"2009-10-05T06:37:52","date_gmt":"2009-10-05T06:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=14862"},"modified":"2009-10-05T06:37:52","modified_gmt":"2009-10-05T06:37:52","slug":"the-man-who-wasnt-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/the-man-who-wasnt-there\/","title":{"rendered":"The man who wasn’t there"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"marboeuf\"<\/div>\n

3:AM<\/i>‘s Andrew Gallix<\/a> in the TLS<\/i>:<\/p>\n

With his bovine-sounding surname, F \u00e9licien Marboeuf<\/a> (1852-1924) seemed destined to cross paths with Flaubert<\/b>. He was the inspiration for the character of Fr \u00e9d \u00e9ric Moreau in L’Education sentimentale<\/I>, which left him feeling like a figment of someone else’s imagination. In order to wrest control of his destiny, he resolved to become an author, but Marboeuf entertained such a lofty idea of literature that his works were to remain imaginary and thus a legend was born. Proust<\/b> \u2014 who compared silent authors \u00c3\u00a0 la<\/I> Marboeuf to dormant volcanoes \u2014 gushed that every single page he had chosen not to write was sheer perfection.<\/p>\n

Or did he? One of the main reasons why Marboeuf never produced anything is that he never existed. Jean-Yves Jouannais planted this Borgesian prank at the heart of Artistes sans oeuvres<\/I> when the book was first published in 1997. The character subsequently took on a life of his own, resurfacing as the subject of a recent group exhibition and, more famously, in Bartleby & Co.<\/I>, Enrique Vila-Matas<\/b>‘s exploration of the \u201cliterature of the No”. Here the Spanish author repays the debt he owes to Jouannais’s cult essay (which had been out of print until now) by prefacing this new edition.<\/p>\n

Marboeuf has come to symbolize all the anonymous \u201cArtists without works” past and present. Through him, Jouannais stigmatizes the careerists who churn out new material simply to reaffirm their status or iinflate their egos, as well as the publishers who flood the market with the \u201clittle narrative trinkets” they pass off as literature on the three-for-two tables of bookshops. In so doing, he delineates a rival tradition rooted in the opposition to the commodification of the arts that accompanied industrialization. A prime example is provided by the fin-de-si\u00c3\u00a8cle<\/I> dandies who reacted to this phenomenon by producing nothing but gestures. More significantly, Walter Pater’s contention that experience \u2014 not \u201cthe fruit of experience” \u2014 was an end in itself, led to a redefinition of art as the very experience of life. A desire to turn one’s existence into poetry \u2014 as exemplified by Arthur Cravan<\/a>, Jacques Vach \u00e9<\/b> or Neal Cassady<\/b> \u2014 would lie at the heart of all the major twentieth-century avant-gardes. \u201cMy art is that of living”, Marcel Duchamp<\/b> famously declared, \u201cEach second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral; it’s a sort of constant euphoria.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3:AM‘s Andrew Gallix in the TLS: With his bovine-sounding surname, F \u00e9licien Marboeuf (1852-1924) seemed destined to cross paths with Flaubert. He was the inspiration for the character of Fr \u00e9d \u00e9ric Moreau in L’Education sentimentale, which left him feeling like a figment of someone else’s imagination. In order to wrest control of his destiny, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buzzwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}