| Summary: | International audience Romain Gary, born in Vilnius in 1914, is not only the most Lithuanian of French writers: both his life and his work are an invitation to a constantly renewed meditation on Frenchness and its mythologies. To become a writer, did you have to become French? In any case, Gary was brought up abroad in a "naive adoration for France" (La Promesse de l'aube), where d'Artagnan, Victor Hugo and Arsène Lupin mingled. Naturalized in 1935, he soon became a hero of Free France, before pursuing a career in diplomacy and literature, twice winning the Prix Goncourt. At the same time, however, the "Tartar with Jewish roots" kept being sent back to his origins by certain Parisian critics, as he deplored in Pour Sganarelle, a pamphlet against the narrowness of French literature, which lacked the breath of the Russian novel. Assuming his image as the "Cossack of letters", Gary set out to confront French mythography with reality, in a deliberately ironic and buffoonish style.Is "the genius of France" gastronomy? At the end of Les Cerfs-volants, a Wehrmacht general treats himself to turbot grilled in mustard and washed down with Château-laville, before committing suicide: "He was a great Frenchman," dares the cook. Is France the idealism of the Enlightenment? Europa suggests their decline in the face of the pragmatism of European construction. In his Ode à l'homme qui fut la France (De Gaulle), Gary shows that the man who "had a certain idea of France" - a "mythological France" - was also the man who modernized it, notably through decolonization. And yet La Tête coupable, whose hero, based in Tahiti, shamelessly exploits the memory of Gauguin, shows that "myth" remains in all things "infinitely more powerful than reality". But it was above all in becoming Ajar that the writer took note, in a carnivalesque mode renewing the language itself, of the ultramarine hybridization of French identity: in Gros-Câlin, Mlle Dreyfus is "a negresse" from French Guiana - "she owes her name to la francophonie"; and La Vie ...
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