“Hé, du gorgonzola!” Food and Transmutation in Pierre La Police’s Les Praticiens de l’infernal

In Pierre La Police’s iconoclastic works, food and its consumption often contribute to the absurdist sense of humor that is the author’s trademark. They are recurrently employed to disturb conventional logic and social norms through intentional deviations of all kinds. Such semantic and conceptual alterations constitute the central humoristic device of Les Demoiselles de Vienne (2008), which offers altered photographs of unappetizing dishes accompanied by discordant captions and nonsensical recipes. This paper focuses more specifically on the use of food as a disjunctive mechanism in La Police’s narrative works, the 3-volume series entitled Les Praticiens de l’infernal (2012-2021). In these incoherent stories, La Police systematically wields food as a logical and narrative disruptor, by which his characters consume the most improbable and often inedible fares (from night butterflies to pelican ice cream), suffer bizarre consequences and odd metamorphoses as a result, or interrupt their quests due to the unforeseen appearance of random foods (giant raviolis or grapes from space). By deliberately dismantling and undermining the most basic underpinnings of storytelling, La Police’s experimentation, despite its apparent inanity, methodically employs food humor as a metanarrative strategy.