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This co-written text is a testimony to Alain’s musical tastes. The rigorous and methodical professor of linguistics was also a well-informed music lover and a passionate accordionist. The Apollonian order that governs linguistics was counterbalanced by the Dionysian effusion that characterizes the musical world. Alain metamorphosed into Marcel every time he played his instrument. We retrace not only his formative years as a musician, but also the events that must have played a fundamental role in his awakening to music. The first part centers on his musical tastes, in particular his passion for Georges Brassens and Boris Vian. It also evokes his love of Haitian and Brazilian ballads as well as classical music. The second part conveys to the reader what it was like to attend a performance given by Alain/Marcel as a guest lecturer and musician in the context of a university French course.
Keywords: Alain Thomas, Alain Thomas, Vian, Vian, Brassens, Brassens, Accordéon, Accordeon, Chanson engagée, Protest Songs
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Although Henri Lopes regularly expressed his views at some length on the genesis of his novels and on his work as a writer, he was long reluctant to hand over his rough texts and preparatory work and make them available to researchers in textual genetics. He finally relented when Une enfant de Poto-Poto came out, on 12 December 2011, when he gave all the files he still had about the conception of his novel to the « French manuscripts » research team at the ITEM. Then, immediately after sending the approved proof copy of Le Méridional to his publisher, he also gave them all of his files on this novel, i.e. two autograph typescripts, the first and second versions of the text corrected by his own hand. A first reading of these documents, which focusses more specifically on the incipit and the explicit as strategic sites of writing, confirms Lopes' theoretical declarations about his own practice : his first sentence remains absolutely unchanged throughout, and he never stops editing and re-editing his text with each successive, unrelenting reading and proofreading. Taking those changes into consideration, however, it seems that the textual geneticist may suggest that Lopes' auto-fictional novel owes its singular character to the fact that the writer has integrated, or even incorporated, this genetical questioning into the private cabinet of his own « métis » mode of writing, whether it be to forestall it, or to screen itself from its prying eyes. Even as it is conceived, the textual fruit has already been infected by the worm of genetics.