La Partie émergée de l’iceberg: Frédéric Beigbeder

Even before publishing his first novel in 1990, the writer, literary critic, publisher, writer-editor for the advertising agency Young and Rubicam, and French filmmaker, Frédéric Beigbeder, has always appreciated America and many of its novelists. One can just read his interviews, correspondence, and works to see that Beigbeder’s loyalty to American authors as well as his attraction to the United States and Americans in general have never wavered. Among the writers which Beigbeder claims, we will see that F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway occupy a special place. Nevertheless, due in large part to the eclecticism of the author’s activities and to his personal and professional genealogy, Beigbeder’s relationship with America is not limited to mere intertextual incursions into his writings. This article shows that while the reasons for Beigbeder’s attraction to America, its culture, and its writers were both legitimate and natural in the beginning, they were later incorporated into a writing strategy in keeping with the advent of cultural globalization.