Pascal Fioretto

“As an art form, pastiche can be a rich vein to mine but it has its hazards, too. Pascal Fioretto excels at it, though, with a supreme elegance. You can have fun with his delicious imitations even if you haven’t read all of his victims Better yet, he dispenses with the need to read them. With such a successful book on his hands, there’s no longer anything to protect this literary chameleon, however, from his own rude awakening someday: a literary prize, for example, to teach him some publishing manners.”
Frédéric Pagès, Le Canard enchaîné

The Speaker

Biographical note

Pascal Fioretto was born on April 30, 1962. Although he was a math whiz early on, having majored in chemistry at the Ecole normale supérieure of Chemistry, he also displayed a strong interest in literature and writing, which he finally gave in to. After creating a student newspaper, he joined the verbal tricksters at Jalons Press, where pastiche reigns supreme among the staff (who produces numerous mock editions of widely read French magazines, such as Paris-Match, which in their parody becomes Pourri-Moche). Catching the attention of cartoonist Marcel Gotlib, Fioretto then lent his wit to Fluide Glacial, a French monthly appealing to any and all lovers of truly tasteless jokes and irreverent humor taken to the nth degree.

After publishing several works as a ghostwriter, he became a journalist and finally came out with a first book published in 2006 with his own name, Gay Vinci Code (Chifflet & Cie) under a pseudonym and leading readers to believe the author was black, he finally allowed his own name to appear on the cover of a book published in 2006 called The Gay Vinci Code;

He followed up with another bookfrom the same Paris publisher (Chiflet & Cie) in 2007, having some fun with take-offs of books by eleven of France’s most renowned contemporary authors, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, Fred Vargas, Bernard Weber, Anna Gavalda, and Amélie  Nothomb. In each case, Fioretto creates an amusing approximation of the author’s real name. Amélie Nothomb, for example, becomes Mélanie Notlong, and three of her novels suffer the indignities of Fioretto’s wicked imitations.  Even his publisher, Chiflet & Cie, is skewered in the book.

Forty-five thousand copies were published and sold to high schools and middle schools in France under the heading of “Classic and Contemporary” works.  In 2008, his pastiche of methods of personal development, Joys of the Pleasure of Being Happy, from publisher Chiflet & Cie, got him listed among the bestsellers for several months, in the “Health and Wellness” section.
Also in 2007, he released Le pacte secret [The Secret Pact], co-authored with Albert Algoud, with publisher Albin Michel.

Lectures

Pastiche, Simple Literary Amusement or “Criticism from Within”?
Racine, Boileau, Diderot, Marivaux, Balzac, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Courteline, Proust, Queneau, Modiano . . . among all these writers, which ones have been practitioners of pastiche? Every one of them! Light literary fare, perhaps, but these imitations nonetheless go right to the core of the style of the authors parodied. Pastiche is as old as the literature it looks at and distorts. Moreover, for Proust, who pulled off a number of fake specimens of brilliance, pastiche was nothing more than literary criticism in action, from inside the parodied works.

While pastiche is an art that exaggerates, it is also one where caricatures are more true to life than portraits. However, for an exaggeration to be comical, it has to avoid appearing as an end in itself but rather as simply a way of revealing something else. By looking at various original texts along with their pastiches, Pascal Fioretto will have a bit of fun by revealing the clever tricks and the verbal tics of some contemporary authors. We will also take the good Dr. Proust’s advice: “Rx for a hangover . . . purge well with pastiche’s healing powers.” Castigat ridendo mores . . . a claim often associated with Molière, meaning “Comedy criticizes through humor.”

You Thought That Was Funny?
“Humor by its very nature is supposed to bring about laughter, at least a smile of complicity,” according to Georges Duhamel. In that sense, humor may be considered as the crucible of an identity, or, at least, of a cultural community.

From Molière to Desproges, to Rabelais, Rimbaud and Feydeau, is there a sense of humor that is typically French? And, from Laurence Sterne to Ricky Gervais, to W.C. Fields, Mark Twain and Seinfeld, is there a humor that is particularly Anglo-American?

If these traditional classifications are losing their meaning today and if, as Woody Allen has said, “life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon,” humor remains more than ever, on both sides of the Atlantic, “the politeness of despair,”as Boris Vian once said.

Farce and vaudevillian word play versus understatement, situational comedy and nonsense are two somewhat diverse ways of laughing and perhaps of seeing the world that Pascal Fioretto will feature in his talk. To highlight the principal constants of each, he will draw examples from literature and theater but also from cinema and television.

Link to interviews of Pascal Fioretto:
http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podshows/2287268
http://www.zone-litteraire.com/entretiens.php?art_id=1287

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