Трансфикциональный метаперсонаж Жан-Батист Ботюль

Известия Саратовского университета. Новая серия. Серия: Филология. Журналистика. 2026. Т. 26. № 2. С. 200–209.

Kirichenko V.

This paper focuses on the fi gure of the fi ctional philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul and his role in the discourse of contemporary French literature. To analyze this character, the work employs the concepts of transfi ctionality and meta-character. Botul was invented by the French satirical journalist Frédéric Pagès. His creation gained a widespread popularity among various fi gures in science and art, who continued to invent studies and works supposedly written by Botul. The fi gure of Botul is of signifi cant interest from the perspective of literary theory, especially in the context of introducing such pseudo-real character into explicitly fi ctional works. For a closer examination of Botul, the article analyzes the novel La disparition de Perek by Hervé Le Tellier, in which this philosopher appears. Textual excerpts from the novel allow us to see Botul as a certain anomaly of the text, in which a non-existent philosopher is presented as an ordinary extratextual phenomenon, although such a person never existed in reality. It is concluded that the mentioning of Botul, being an artistic device in Le Tellier’s novel, has a number of functions. It contributes not only to the complexity of the main character`s motivation, but also to posing the question of fi ctional entities within a work of art. Botul serves as a kind of emotional and psychological support for the main character of the novel (Gabriel) in critical moments, helping him make decisions and verify their correctness. Thus, Botul is not only an ironic game with the reader, playing on the ephemerality of literary creation and the possibility of working with the “non-existent”, but also an active technique used by the author to explain the behavior of the hero.

Keywords: мистификация, трансфикциональность, transfictionality, meta-character, mystification, French literature of the 20th century, Hervé Le Tellier, Frédéric Pagès, Jean-Baptiste Botul, метаперсонаж, французская литература ХХ в., Эрве Ле Теллье, Фредерик Пажес, Жан-Батист Ботюль