L’Amitié à l’épreuve des faux-semblants : lecture rhétorique d’un extrait des Faux-Monnayeurs

Gide’s Counterfeiters are not only those who circulate false coins; they are also those who cannot help cheating with discourses and friendship. The fragment ‘After the exam / the bac’ (III, 5) articulates those different levels in an original way, which can be described in rhetorical terms. As pupils, Bernard and Olivier are supposed to write a spontaneous essay but, at the same time, they must conform to the jury’s expectations(level1: [pseudo] rational argumentation on values). The­refore, as soon as the youngsters escape from the teacher’s reach, they turn to their schoolfellows unashamedly boasting on their strategies to escape the double bind imposed by the school system (level2: strategical meta-argumentation). But the intellectual and moral disagreement almost leads to a quarrel between friends (level3: rhetoric as a negotiation on emotions and on the distance between individuals). If the two first levels can be contemplated through Perelman’s system, the third one should rely on a broader definition of rhetoric (e.g. Plantin and Meyer).