« My dear audacious Moore » : les poses de l’artiste décadent dans Confessions of a Young Man
Résumé
In George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man, published in 1886 at the beginning of Moore’s career, audacity, which is manifested both in the story and in the telling, verges on iconoclasm yet also appears as a pose. The discovery of Impressionism, of Naturalism and of the Decadent movement constitutes an original moment in Moore’s artistic experience in Paris, a time of learning and initiation amidst the French avant-garde. The autobiographical persona plays with rhetorical positions and intertextual references, both integrating and imitating literary influences and going beyond them through parody. The distance between narrating I and narrated I is constantly foregrounded and reinforces the somewhat artificial nature of the young artist’s poses. A considerable degree of ambiguity characterizes these confessions which can be considered as a form of heterotopia, a space of resistance in which boundaries between genres and tones are blurred and in which images of metamorphosis and flux abound. If audacity is constitutive of Moore’s literary stance, Confessions of a Young Man does not just display audacity for audacity’s sake but also offers a reflection on its essential function and value in artistic creation.