The Fabrication of the Story Line: Fantasy and Creation of Narrative Fiction in Patrick Corillon’s Work

by | Vol 32 (1) 2014

Le Benshi d’Angers (The Benshi of Angers, 2011), a performance by the contemporary artist Patrick Corillon, during which the artist tells the story of a fictive daydream, constitutes the starting point of this contribution. The author’s analysis of the work has led him to consider whether Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1908e [1907]), in which he postulates a relation between “phantasy” and literary creation, may clarify the creative process that generated the artist’s work. In answer to this question, the author refines Freud’s hypothesis, for Corillon’s work, by arguing for a relationship between the creation of narrative fiction and sleep fantasy, as conceived by Pierre Fédida. The artist benefits from moments of insomnia in order to transform them into creative moments and during this creative process the “potential space” may engender itself. This hypothesis is consolidated by the study of a second work by Patrick Corillon, La Forêt des Origines (The Wood of the Origins, 2008).

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