Re-reading Vian: a poetics of partial disclosure

Periodically a call is issued from academic circles to reread the works of Boris Vian, whose name has become synonymous both with the exuberance of youth and the haunting menace of death. This call to reread Boris Vian is due in no small part to the way in which his untimely and yet long foreseen death has singularly failed to curb his joie de vivre. To say that Vian was born again in death is, however, something of a misrepresentation: as an author, his success, in his own name at least, has been almost entirely posthumous.¹ As a man, working without respite to assuage an overweening drive to create, and thereby consigning himself to an even earlier death than might otherwise have been his lot, and as an author, determined to “coincide” with his published works, Vian exemplifies the conflation of Eros and Thanatos.² Our aim here is to reread the interplay of these two apparently mutually exclusive drives in the poems most commonly known by the title under which they were originally, and — as so often in Vian’s case — posthumously, published: Je voudrais pas crever (I wouldn’t wanna die). In so doing, it is our wish to offer a critical accompaniment to Maria Freij’s translations, thereby presenting readers with the various aspects of rereading that form the basis of Vian scholarship.