Serializing Sullivan: Vian/Sullivan, the Série noire and the effet de collection

Abstract

In 2010, 51 years after his death in 1959, Boris Vian entered the canon of French literary immortals: he was published in Gallimard’s prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection. Arguably, however, these are the complete fictional works of two authors: French writer Boris Vian and his black American pseudonymous creation, Vernon Sullivan. For critics like Edmund Smyth this must have represented long overdue recognition of the qualities of the latter’s work. As Smyth notes:

[a]lthough for many years critics tended to downplay the significance of Vian’s ‘paraliterary’ works, preferring the more literary L’Écume des jours (1946) and L’Automne à Pékin (1947), in recent times there has been a reappraisal of his noir novels, to the extent that they have been thoroughly assimilated into his varied and substantial œuvre. (2006, 48)

There is, however, a rub in this repatriation of Sullivan: it erases the identity of this creative Other. In the Pléiade edition the Sullivan novels are interspersed, chronologically, among the Vian novels. Our aim here is to reveal how the creation of a powerful Vian series has stifled Sullivan’s authorial identity. This process has included a complex relationship with Gallimard’s Série noire, translation and branding. To understand the impact of this relationship we will briefly compare his case with that of Douglas Kennedy, a contemporary example of another authorial identity forged and then reforged in French translation.