Les masques de Saint-John Perse

"And those who have seen him pass will say: who was this man and what, his home?" Significantly asked at the end of the ambitious journey proposed by the Complete Works, the question consecrates the policy of the mystery led by an author who has tirelessly multiplying the screens between his social being, the diplomat Alexis Leger, and his literary double, the hieratic Saint-John Perse, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. Much more than just a pen name, this auctorial signature inaugurates a complex figurative system, a gallery of characters that we are dealing with here, closer to a text often presumed hermetic, to highlight. From the Child to the Lover, from the Exile to the Prince, from the Prayer to the Conqueror, the poet's masks speak of a singular, sensitive, transgressive and rare presence in the world. Act of birth of a myth, that of "the man with the golden mask", they offer him a condition of existence; a voice, a body, gestures, an ethics. The mask here no longer disguises the forger, no longer betrays the mystifier, so many misunderstandings that the reception of the work has not always been exempted; In the full field of his evidence in the poem, he signals, reveals and creates a unity, to become - self-portrait as well as autogenesis - a particularly advanced observation post of the Saint-John Perse factory.--Decitre.