Jacques Abeille
He has named a number of influences in his overall writing and storytelling including Gérard de Nerval, Blaise Pascal, Leonora Carrington, Jean Ray, Gustav Meyrink, and Julien Gracq.
Abeille originally wanted to study ethnology but he mentioned his economic conditions and the state of the field at the time as the reasons for which he chose psychology instead and in turn leaving that for philosophy.
The shock of the contrast between this city and the seaside environment where he had lived before, associated with literary reminiscences of Kafka's and especially Gustav Meyrink's Prague, was key to the creation of Terrèbre, the capital of the empire of the Contrées, as it appears in Le Veilleur du jour (1986).
[2] Jacques Abeille frequented the literary and artistic circles of Bordeaux connected with surrealism, in particular the Parapluycha movement, led by Pierre Chaveau, the Mimiague brothers and Alain Tartas.
Jacques Abeille was one of those who refused to dissolve the group, and he joined the editorial committee of the Bulletin de liaison surréaliste, which was formed around Micheline and Vincent Bounoure and Jean-Louis Bédouin.
[9] Abeille published thereafter a set of erotic texts, under his own name or under pseudonym, the most frequent and the most constant being that of Léo Barthe, who also appears as a character in his famous cycle of novels.
Becoming a novelistic cycle, this second instalment is the counterpart of Jardins statuaires: the action of the two novels is more or less simultaneous, and that of the last one is situated at the other end of the empire imagined by Abeille, in the capital city of Terrèbre.
A smooth existence requiring efforts that, to be bearable, had to be tempered by "the need to cultivate a secret garden", which took for Abeille, once painting was abandoned, the form of writing.
[20] In his speech written in 2015 on the occasion of the Jean-Arp Prize for French Language Literature, Abeille specified what, in his opinion, differentiates his aesthetic from what he considered dominant in France since the classical period, exemplarily embodied by Nicolas Boileau's L'Art poétique: the fundamental value given to verisimilitude - of which propriety is a corollary - is assimilated to a censorship rejected by Abeille, noting that this work is situated outside of all verisimilitude, places its action in an indeterminate time and does not even care to maintain a unity of action.
According to Abeille, the refusal to register "on the ground of reality" and to mark "against the dictatorship of the verisimilitude and the novelistic canvas" explain why his books "took so much time before collecting a weak echo."
Recalling a remark by Gaëtan Picon on this subject, Abeille explains in a 2013 interview that works of pure imagination are only well received in France if written by foreign authors, such as Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll or Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.
"[21] Now, not only was the novel Les Jardins statuaires conceived against this idea of the omnipotence of work to the detriment of the imagination, since it was a question of defending the primacy of inspiration over style considered as a set of technical procedures in the form of a philosophical tale, but also Abeille's practice of writing is at the opposite end of the spectrum.
This creative process, which places the writer at the service of inspiration rather than seeing him as a demiurge creator, leads to the writing of texts sometimes much longer than expected (Les Jardins statuaires was originally envisaged as a fable of about fifty pages), sometimes interrupted without the images appearing "secreting an interstitial tissue that draws them together into a narrative"; these images which "remain, being sufficient to themselves, in their disparate state" are named by Abeille his "more or less broken proses."
In a non-exhaustive list of influences confessed by the author during various interviews, Daniel Launay also mentions the names of George du Maurier, Julien Gracq, Jean Ray, Wilhelm Jensen, Blaise Pascal, Alain-Pierre Pillet and Gustav Meyrink.
Certain figures gravitating in the surrealist orbit are also cited by Abeille as having contributed decisively to his entry into writing: "If I am a storyteller," he explains in a 2000 interview, "it is to Gisèle Prassinos, Leonora Carrington, Greta Knutson or Nora Mitrani that I owe it".
As far as the Cycle des contrées is concerned, the most frequently mentioned comparisons are, for obvious thematic reasons, with Gracq and Dino Buzzati, both of whom described the dull oppressive climate that the expectation of an increasingly probable and imminent barbarian invasion brings to bear on an imaginary country.
to those used by Antoine Volodine, and the ethno-anthropological concern that animates the narrators of the Cycle des Contrées to the anthropologist's approach to the secondary worlds of its creation by Ursula K. Le Guin.
From this point of view, the "challenge" of pornographic literature, which consists in "bringing language back from the concept to sensation" is not fundamentally different from the function that the author assigns to poetry.
This collection of short stories, which was to play a role in the fiction as one of the elements in the trial of the nameless master of La Barbarie, was published in 1995 under the name of the "hyponym" Léo Barthe, who thus belongs to both the extradigetic and the intradigetic universe in the Cycle des Contrées.
The most constant and recurrent is that of Léo Barthe (in principle reserved for the publication of works of an erotic nature), but he also published under the pseudonym of Bartleby as well as under that of Christoph Aymerr (or Aymeric).
The most complete bibliography to date, although not exhaustive according to its author, is that established by Arnaud Laimé and which appears in the work devoted to Jacques Abeille Le Dépossédé.
