To this day, Boz remains a mystery.  Yet if we would illustrate him, we would conjure up a brand new religion instigated by artists.  Essentially monotheist, this religion would blend with other spiritualities.  Crossing the Rubicon – the three monotheisms – Boz will be concerned with the Yogis, the Boddhisattvas, the Vedas and the Brahmans.  For Boz contains them all, as well as the rabbis, the priests, the pastors or the mullahs (non-exhaustive list).

From Jerusalem to Benares, Boz will advance like a nebulous fantasy, fertile with legends.  There is something of Alice in Wonderland in Boz.  As for the officiating priests, they will be subdivided into four distinct groups: Men, Characters, Angels, and to lend spice to it all, the poorer classes of the appurtenances (dolls, scissors, frames, stuffed animals, brushes, glue, pencils, varnish, cameras, easels, suitcases, etc.).  Slaves among slaves, those will join with the Implements to fight their enemies.

For the matter is far from serious.  It will even be comical.  So funny that a pumpkin will be transformed straightaway into a carriage, to the great joy of the kiddies who will clap to beat the band.

Our article of faith will be the following: that Present Day Art finishes off and puts an end to Contemporary Art.  The aforementioned phenomenon will be identified by a reference based on Childhood.  This will sweep away artists as diverse as Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons or Takash Murakami.  Or even Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, the Chapman brothers, Annette Messager, Alain Séchas – even a painter as out-of-date as Balthus.

Therefore, Boz will bring about this overthrow: that this appeal to childhood is at one and the same time a return to THE CHILDHOOD OF ART.  Boz will mean a pure eruption in the heart of a decadent aesthetic.  Minimalist colors, baroque sculptures, and mannerist performances are going to disintegrate, shatter and die, before being reborn differently.  For inherent in the artist is a yearning for the void.  This will spur him on, force him to go beyond himself, despite the surrounding negligence.

As such, Boz will contain all the books written in the world.  He will also contain the sum of all works of art produced since late prehistory.  Even better: possessing a prodigious memory, it will include the internal experience of all humanity.  For such is Boz: all human knowledge and experience ever since the start.

Aware of his responsibilities, he will also work on the Other Side.  For there, in the world of Men, the situation was hardly encouraging.  A falling birthrate.  Profligacy.  A weakeed nation-state.  Decline of the family.  Death of the great utopias.  Standardization of psyches.  A rise of radical Islam.  Evil taking over the whole planet.

Yet Boz won’t give up.  He will forge ahead.  He will have his temples, his heroes, his clergy, his rituals, his prayers and even his tablets of the law.  Considering his success, Boz will be sold out.  Immense crowds will follow him, singing hymns to his glory.  Multicolored flowers will mark his path.  For Boz is good!

Endowed with a thousand faces, subject to many metamorphoses, he will work especially on that colossal thing: the redemption of the Artist.

That will be his challenge.

His whim.

His ultimate wager.

That will also be the opportunity for a long narrative full of adventures and twists and turns.  It will be perceived as an initiatory journey or going through the looking glass, fated to play a joke on the horror that dwells in us.

Now, enough talking!

Let the adventure begin!

We’ll proceed here as in other categories : slowly and carefully, in order to introduce the traveller to our own course.

The Book of Boz was designed as a founder text. Its structure is an hypertext, justiciable to a nonlinear reading. Hence its elusive and vertiginous nature, intended to introduce the reader into an always moving universe. Putting it online won’t thus go smoothly. Indeed how to preserve its richness, while remaining educational ? How to give it to reading without betraying it ? Thinking twice about it, we will be careful, guarantee of an accurate slowness. So we will proceed in the following way : a progressive unveiling of the account per se, in a traditional form finally (the Tree), matched on the margins with the network of associations, resonances, repetitions and references that forge  its true frame (the Roots). Thus "Word-tracks" will be underlined which course will reveal adjacent texts providing in turn other "links", designing little by little the image of an infinite rhizome. A rhizome the internet user besides will be able to dissect, reverse, divert or crush as he like, following its own desires. Doing so, he will rebound "elsewhere", in a different place he will have to redefine, to design, to reshape in order that others can also alter it, refining their own tour of it.

I found my first character in the bottom of a match box.

He was fast sleeping.

His name was Jack Balance and I had known him a long time.

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In 1985, Julien Friedler published his second book, L’Ombre du Rabbin (Rabbi’s Shadow), a collection of short stories. On this occasion, the Belgian newspaper "Le Soir" published an enthusiastic review.
First, the journalist is amazed the book has been written in French rather than in English or Yiddish, comparing Friedler to Singer and raving about "the freedom of imagination", the humour, the "absolute trust in the language" Julien Friedler shows  in these tales, impregnated with Jewish traditions.  He promised then to the author  a brilliant future.

Julien Friedler writes now :

Other articles would follow, raving for the most of them. However, the promise won’t be held.
For anecdotic reasons, first (a marriage, a child, the necessity to earn his daily bread) but also for deeper causes, due to our relation to litterature. The structure we were looking for, which could make the traditional novel (we already thought obsolete) explode, was escaping us. We were trying, in vain : our accounts were still running in a classic way, telling stories which were desperating us.

Weary, we changed our plans. A book would result, of another kind : Psychanalyse et neurosciences (Psychoanalysis and neurosciences) (Paris, PUF, 1995). The year before, we had founded "La Moire" (a research center on the psychic apparatus) in purpose of reworking the idea of a psychoanalytic institution. This without  prejudging the essential, that is : the research of a modern spirituality, fitting our mutating societies

The matter is recurring in the Boz and will constitute a chain which strongest link will be  a “star killer” whom project will be quite witted : kill artists to free their works. The lattest, duly demonized and sent off without any directions, will happen, in the end of the track, to confront Future (a character in his whole) in a titanic clash during the Great War. In fact, it’s in the Great Commentary Book that the metaphor finds its whole meaning : setting the enigma of  “a representation of void” meant as the only shape fitting Transcendence.

By Denise Lachaud, psychoanalyst :

- The search for the rightest word, the most accurate, from the quietest to the strongest.
- The air is vibrating with a strange light, between glittering and dark flames.
- Blood, death, Devil, hell, etc. are covered with writing or, more precisely, with the ink of writing.
- This book shows a kind of torrid beauty, striped with scars, a pier to hope, a cemetery of burned dreams.
- The author is working hardt to imagine the litterature to which he offers a reprieve.
- This book can’t lack readers.
- Laughs, fears, tears, angers are always fecund
- The narrator can embody all his characters, real or virtual, human and mineral, vegetal or animal.
- This string of short stories, going from story to story, without being history, would be one of the most beautiful ones, if it was only the fruit of imagination. But the writer knows you can’t escape history’s claws; they eat you away but can also sharpen your pen. More, the writer sculpts space where reality is apparent until the style devices.
- It’s an off-screen account. An account trying to probe wounds.
- The writer can make the difference between a litterary essay and a scathing attack thrown away.
- Powerful writing that doesn’t exclude elegance in service of rage.
- An insoluble puzzle and it’s right. A puzzle composed of this hero’s song key whose behaviour is painted with gentle strokes.
- As an erudite expert, he reworks myths. The work is monumental.
- The spirituality or the death ; anyway, only spirituality could one day deliver men from their sad condition.
- Dramatic action, in the Greek meaning, for better or for worse.
- The writer, sparkling with mischief, knows human soul’s fragility better than anyone.
- The work invits us, like the mermaids’ song, and we enter it with delight.
- The irony is sometimes scathing but never cynical.
- An account ? Better : a string of characters and events. We meet…
- The virtuosic writer creates an hurly-burly from the world, then dares to shove history.
- With this or these phantasmagorias, he presents us History as very close of the people’s life.
- The cut up movement of the accounts subverts the genre of this monumental work, animated with a certain logic, presented in a true litterary whirlpool, with the disconcerting style of weaved legends.
- Here, there is no end to History. The experience is everyday where surprise comes stunningly. Another way of questioning the reader and the interlocutor.
- An intimate book going universal, gliding from a world to another.
- This work’s life comes within the long term; the book is there and we can take it whenever we want. This way, it becomes revolutionary.
- A labyrinth of deep considerations, social, political, religious, mystical, philosophical, flirting with metaphysics. Fine art.
- It’s life, with its joys and blues, hopes, spleens and death.
- The writer is tirelessly probing mankind’s open wounds, which can be, as shown by Stoics, as many open doors on hope.
- He connects Antiquity (story, heroes, time, events, …) to authenticity; a very modern authenticity.
- His strength lies in the research and analysis of the facts and discourses, which he dismantles, searching for truth in avoiding to be lost causes’ lawyer.
- A rendez-vous experts shouldn’t miss, on no account; for these words are to litterature what dreams are to life : some essential narrow escapes and aspirations. With them, we dive in the deepest of existence, where the quiet laught and the stealth tear are born.
- We travel through these words which, unider his pen, get their golden glow back.
- His worlds arise, meet, fight, die in a rythmed topology which provokes images and catch gazes.
- An extraordinary care for details caused by an exaggerated sensibility.
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This article was published in Journal du médecin, 10 may 1996 :

"Founded in january 1994 by Julien Friedler, "La Moire", a research center on the psychic apparatus, is mostly a place of reflexion boasting more than 60 activities.
From the Greek "moira", meaning destiny, La Moire comes from Julien Friedler’s practice, a writer and the director of this research center (…). In his book titled Gimp’s Legend, but published, in 1995, under the main title Psychoanalysis and neurosciences, the author speaks for psychoanalysis opening itself to other disciplines and for the possibility of a new questioning about castration. The lacanian elaboration has a great part in it.
He is interested in a series of pathologies, as the neurological phenomenon of the ghost member, Parkinson’s disease and obsessional nevrosis. Through these varied pathologies, J. Friedler tries to go from the signifiant to its background, in the purpose of showing the psychic apparatus is related to invariants, explaining the repetition of som structures and from which we could find biological sources today.
La Moire is mostly a place of reflexion, which vocation is to confront psychoanalysis to other disciplines, so the lattest could bring to the first their contributions, knowledges and experiences. So, the tuesday’s seminar about the encephalon structures tackled the subject of melatonin, mechanisms of vision and the obsessional-compulsive troubles pathology.
The thursday’s seminar, for its part, is an incursion in the field of oriental philosophies. The Sunday’s seminar about moral law wors in the light of Freud’s latest book, Moïse and monotheism.
Eventually, working groups were formed, in one hand,  around themes from the encephalon structures seminar and, on other hand, around the global theme of the profane psychoanalysis and, especially, the question of analysts’s education and practice. But La Moire wants also to be a place of inforamtion and develops in this purpose a library and a documentation center

If we intend to compare and confront the Book of Boz to monuments of literature, three masterworks can be invoked right away. (Many others could probably be examined, from Goethe to Nietzsche or Kafka, through Nerval and even Proust…, but choices have to be made).

Here are these three elected works, in my opinion, seemingly responding to the complexity of the Book of Boz :

The Divine Comedy (1314-1320) by Dante (1265-1321), Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Cervantes (1547-1616) and finally, more recenty and maybe less known too, Albert Cohen’s (1895-1981) fiction work, which builds up in its whole, like Julien Friedler’s, an one and only always rewritten book, indeed even a cycle, formed by Solal (1930), Mangeclous (1938), Belle du Seigneur (1968) and Les Valeureux (1969). (For the record, Les Valeureux was a part of Belle du Seigneur; the publisher Gallimard arbitrarily choosed to separate them, duplicating the author’s dilemna, quartered between the goy world and his dear tribe’s one, in the intend of reducing the already substantial amount of pages of Belle du Seigneur).

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In fact, this locution is resonating with many scattered fragments in our book. From associations to associations, it creates a string of which we can point to the main terms : Hell - fire - smoke - a “sultry heat” - even “crematorium furnaces”, correlated with a holocaust. Each term in the series proving besides to be a “track-word”, we will de facto consider “matchbox” as a signifier lending itself to a progressive derivation of the whole Work. Oppositely to the “extinguished candle”, we will then sense the existence of a very blazing  and blinding luminous power. This will draw a kind of demarcation line between Good and Evil, unknown at first.

In this case, in avoiding to make the thesis heavy, only a text will be quoted. Evocative of a “sultry heat”, this text will exemplify , in a litterary way, the idea exposed in “the Boz and the Net”.

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