Tirer son épingle du jeu : La Vie de Marianne ou le récit qui n’appartenait à personne
Getting Out of the Game: The Life of Marianne or the Story that Belonged to No One

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the way in which Marivaux, in The Life of Marianne, plays at “making it true” by deploying a set of rhetorical and narrative devices: from the old trick of themanuscript found by chance to the call of prestigious witnesses ready to guarantee the authenticity of the episode, all means are good to produce the effect of veracity expected by the reader. However, in an opposite movement, Marivaux constantly violates the reading pact which he instituted: the reader ends up wondering about the composition of what he reads and realizes that the text exhibits too much negligence for the story to be true. Fiction is thus staged, and Marivaux underlines the processes which force the reader to question his own credulity. This paper examines the consequences of this double movement and offers a few theoretical hypotheses to account for this paradoxical poetics of play.

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