genealogize

In addition to inventing a writer, a certain Felicien Marbeouf, Jouannais presents and considers fictional characters in Artistes sans oeuvres such as Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet and Herman Melville's Bartleby on the same level as real people, and in doing so, could be said to genealogize an archetype.

The urge to act the connoisseur and genealogize in the face of these works is palpable as, somewhat counterintuitively, all these procedures result in unadulterated visual pleasure of the kind often associated with abstraction in its more luscious manifestations.