Comic strips

With the comic trips which the Art&fact issue tackles next, the tone changes completely. Here there is no wish to provide an overall summary, and even less an attempt to provide a census. No, here the reader is invited to dive into the world of young Liège ‘fanzine freaks,’ these disciples of small low distribution reviews such as Höla. Several covers of this crazy, self proclaimed humorous publication are in particular reproduced, embellished by a series of riotous dialogues produced by budding comic strip practitioners, most of whom have graduated from the Liège Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Tribute is all the same made, almost in passing, to several Professors of this institution with whom these cub rebels cut their teeth and produced their first cartoons. An irrefutable observation is made here also: after the disappearance of the figurehead reviews Charlie, Métal Hurlant, Tintin, Circus and Pilote – bought by large publishing groups geared towards a hyper-standardisation of contents – the time is ripe for a ‘DIY’ publishing philosophy. Watch this space.

Literature

Literature for its part experienced a genuine proliferation over the course of the 1980s. Numerous of its representatives have their names scrupulously logged in the very detailed article devoted to them. In the teeth of the extreme diversity which characterises them, does there nevertheless exist a certain kinship between these Liège authors? At least relatively with the relationships they develop with their city, their region, Brussels and...Paris. The gravitational model developed by Emeritus Professor Jean-Marie Klinkenberg to a certain extent casts light on this problematic: after the independent phase – called ‘centrifuge’ – which ran from 1830 to 1920 and over the course of which Belgian writers laid claim to the ‘Nordicity,’ there followed a phase of dependency – called ‘centripetal’ – running from 1920 to 1970 and during which it was considered good form to become assimilated within the French sphere. The third, within which the 1980s decade is inscribed, can be termed ‘dialectic’: with the emergence of the concept of ‘Belgitude’, there was no longer any question of repudiating national identity. At Liège nevertheless, a Principality city as everyone knows, things were not so simple, from the very fact of the insularity which infuses it and which takes multiple forms amongst its writers. A complex tangle which is indeed difficult to unravel, to tell the truth, so rich are the individual natures such as the poets Jacques Izoard and François Jacqmin, the novelists Paul Biron, Conrad Detrez and René Swennen, to mention only the main protagonists cited here – the case of Eugène Savitzkaya is for its part the subject of a particularly attentive examination.

Poetry is once again considered in the chapter which succeeds the more general one which is set aside for letters. There as well a transition is marked out: the major figures, in particular Marcel Thiry, Elise Champagne and Robert Vivier, died one after the other, giving place to a certain turning inward, characterised by a both impoverished and scattered creative and publishing field. It was thus that, despite the publication of Anthologie 80. Bilan et perspectives de la poésie franco-belge-québécoises (1981) and the rude health of the journal Mensuel 25 (the organ of the L'Atelier de l'Agneau publishing house, founded in 1973), masses of others did not make it beyond the 1980s – Quetzalcoatl (1973-1978), Panique (1974-1976), Varech (1975-1977), Odradek (1973-1979) – in the same way as several small publishing houses devoted to poetry. Appreciable exceptions to this dark picture are the journals Ecritures Multiples, born in Amay in 1981, and L'Arbre à Paroles, which succeeded it two years later and is still going; Le Tétras Lyre, for its part, has been publishing in Liège from 1989 onwards. We cannot thus talk of a dead season, above all if we remember the intense activity deployed by Jacques Izoard during the time frame considered, activity which he without standing on ceremony placed at the service of young poetry talents such as Eugène Savitzkaya and so many others such as Joseph Orban, Béatrice Libert, Karel Logist, Frédéric Saenen, Serge Delaive, etc.