Abstract EN:

In spite of a radical reluctance against the novelistic genre, Roubaud’s trilogy intricates the wittingly romanesque adventures of an ingenuous beautiful heroin named Hortense with some detective plots lead by Blognard and his sidekick Arapède. In overall terms, the "Hortense Series" melts the flowers of romance with personal, collective and, above all, literary allusions of the eighties. Brimming with references and reverences as well, overflowed with intertextuality, these poet and mathematician’s novels mix calculated games and brilliant wordplays led by a self-avowed homo lisens. The trick is to mimic most of the novel’s conventions and simultaneously undermine – or mock – them with perpetual and distancing confusions between narrative levels, fictions of science, and oblique indications about the “work in progress”. But beyond riddles, puns and conundrums, as the author and the reader – as a detective – are getting part of the play, the aim is clearer and clearer: liable and poetic rules and regulations can deeply shape the novels as required, for Roubaud like oulipians, use self-imposed formal "constraints". Now, the most enjoyable reading lectures can begin.