"Il faudrait cesser d'écrire des romans": The Paradoxical Influence of the Situationist International on Jean-Patrick Manchette

Abstract

The goal of this article is to examine the work of Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–95) as a form of case study that could highlight some of the contradictory effects and emotions that the Situationists provoked in writers of their time. Sincerely influenced by ultra-left politics and Situationist theory, Jean-Patrick Manchette, a crime fiction writer particularly active in the 1970s, was conscious quite early on that his work could be recuperated or that he was himself a recuperator, his novels being "récupérations feuilletonesques du mouvement social". This article summarizes the various aspects of this paradox, which he emphasized himself. It investigates how Manchette tried to develop a theoretically acceptable writing strategy inside this contradiction, a strategy that he would later consider faulty. This article also examines how, regardless of these unresolved preliminary conditions, Manchette experimented with different writing strategies that also bear the trace of political and formal questions sparked by his interest in this political current, thus reacting to it.