I and the Other: André Baillon’s Un homme si simple (1925), A « Schéma L » avant la lettre

André Baillon (1875-1932) is a modernist French-writing Belgian author. Voluntarily interned twice in the famous French psychiatric hospital of “La Salpêtrière” (where Charcot, Janet, and even the young Freud carried out some research), his stay there as well as his own psychic sufferings gave him the material for three of his major works: Un homme si simple (1925), Chalet 1 (1926), and Le Perce-Oreille du Luxembourg (1928). However, far from being madman notebooks, these productions show an extreme awareness of his psychic conflicts. In this communication, focusing on the incipit of the novel Un homme si simple in which the character of Jean Martin relates (the reasons of) his interment at the Salpêtrière to a psychiatrist, I will show that, half a century before Jacques Lacan’s famous “Schéma L”, André Baillon astonishingly already underlines the paradoxical consequences of alterity. Relying on Lacan’s aforementioned model, and Geneviève Hauzeur’s major Freudo-Lacanian reading of Baillon’s work, I will show how the Belgian writer masterly plays on French signifiers, seemingly monologal narration, and fusion of multiple narratees to powerfully depict the conflict of a subject in distress, seeking himself in and out of another who simultaneously makes him happen and locks him in. Finally, I will briefly explain how this conception of identity, although surprisingly visionary, is also a consequence of the various upheavals of the turning of the century.