La revanche de l’auteur

Abstract

Fiction would be distinguished from lying or deceit by being a "shared pretense" (Schaeffer) between the author and the reader, cooperating partners bound by a reading pact where everyone respects the rules of the game. However, some fictions question this relationship of complicity by refusing to share with the reader the precise place or nature of the pretense, which would then not be shared but rather hidden, and therefore not playful but serious. Modern fiction has largely exploited the figure of the unreliable narrator as a source of errors, even lies, of which the reader falls victim. But what can we conclude when this narrator, the author's scapegoat, does not exist? We will explore a corpus of Quebec novels where apparent fiction is a lure behind which lies the true place of pretense. These broken reading pacts cannot be blamed on a scapegoat narrator but rather on the real author - cunning, cheating - who imposes himself as the final authority, pulling the strings not only of the story, but of its reader.