Quand L'écriture D'une Préface Se Dédouble. L'"Avertissement" Et Le "Prologue" Des Contes Drolatiques De Balzac

Abstract

The romantic writing employed by Balzac to represent the real world in Contes drolatiques requires that the reader is given directions. That is what Balzac achieves in a dual preface "Avertissement" and "Prologue", published at the same time as the first "dixain" (1833). We can see the author manipulate identity, relying on the pragmatics of the grammar of the preface, in order to suggest a displacement, which is also a coalescence, of the past and the present, the remote and the nearby, the same and the other, the positive and the negative. The setting of the speech act – literary, turned into "droll" – is first of all a questioning of the act of reception.