Jean-Jacques Schuhl

Jean-Jacques Schuhl's "Les apparitions" and Simon Liberati's "Performance" (both 2022) revolve around aging writers whose physical decline becomes the starting point for a radically renewed literary experience. In "Les apparitions," Schuhl portrays a narrator who, after a severe internal hemorrhage and cerebral hypoxia, is haunted by so-called "apparitions": autonomous, highly present visual events that refuse to be either dreams or hallucinations. The text unfolds a poetics of montage, quotation, and desubjectification, in which the self increasingly recedes behind alien images, voices, and fragments. "Performance," on the other hand, tells the story of a 71-year-old author who, after suffering a stroke, finds renewed creative energy through a commission about the Rolling Stones. This energy, however, is largely fueled by a scandalous relationship with his young stepdaughter, who serves as a projection screen for an excessive desire. Liberati's novel combines illness, decadence, pop culture, and transgression into a provocative staging of aging as an aesthetic experience at the limits of human experience. – The review reads both novels as paradigmatic works of old age, which understand aging not as a phase of taking stock or moderation, but as an aesthetic extreme. It argues that Schuhl and Liberati develop two contrasting but complementary models of the "aging creative": a receptive, disempowering imagination in Schuhl's work, which almost dissolves the self in the act of writing, and an aggressive, transgressive imagination in Liberati's work, which asserts a final form of artistic sovereignty precisely in moral and physical decline. At the heart of the analysis is the thesis that pathology, illness, and proximity to death become "material for thought" in both texts, from which new forms of literary intensity emerge. The review thus shows how the late work functions not as a swan song, but as a laboratory in which literature radically re-examines its own limits in the face of mortality.