25

« The Practical Heart », a Gurganus novella whose action starts in Chicago in the 1870s, teases its reader with an elusive portrait of the heroine pretendedly painted by John Singer Sargent. This painting, the focus of a narrative built on a complex network of deceptions on the part of the homodiegetic narrator, the heroine’s grand-nephew, becomes more and more ungraspable for the reader, who finds himself caught into a fool’s game. An iconotext constantly playing on truth and falsehood and inviting a reflection on the gaping hole seminal to representation, the novella also asserts the creative energy of falsification, this power of falsehood underlined by Gilles Deleuze in L’Image-temps. Overvivid imagination and jubilant mystification prove the true heartbeat of the text.