De la « pudeur d’un malade » (La Foire) à la « gouaille » du Printemps des éclopés : Robert Reus, mon père, et ses autobiographies romancées

Abstract

Abstract Some of the published or unpublished works of my father, Voltaire Deronne alias Robert Reus (1909-1988), display a strong autobiographical character. Robert Reus thus adopted several attitudes towards the treatment, modest or immodest, reserved or “exhibitionist,” of important elements in his life (his first marriage in 1943, his wife’s death in 1953, and other deaths in his family between 1945 and 1948). This article describes the writer’s strategies, ranging from silence to exhibitionism. His practices (or his conscious choices) as well as his theoretical aesthetic positions send us back to the writer’s personal history and to the way in which he reconstructs or reinvents it several times, in an opaque manner that suits him and which can be deciphered only by a family member exegete-editor.