Les articles et billets concernant les pseudos, en ce moment, font florès sur Mediapart. Et de façon bizarre, c'était aussi un sujet de thème proposé aux élèves professeurs dans une faculté londonienne connue.
Le plus jeune de mes fistons qui avait rencontré Katy Price lors d'une signature de bouquins, avait obtenu d'elle une dédicace signée de son ancien pseudo réapparu à l'occasion : "Jordan".
Pour ceux qui pratiquent la lange de Shakespeare, je ne résiste pas au plaisir de vous livrer copie du texte qu'il a remis hier et qui me parait savoureux, tant l'égérie bien connue des britanniques nous est étrangère .
Chacun aura remarqué que Mediapart s'est mis partiellement à l'Anglais, alors pourquoi pas les billets de blogs ?
Before arriving in the UK, one is often told about the quality of the food, the getting used to it takes to always look right first when trying to make it to the other side of the road in one piece and about the pub culture. What no one tells you though is that you will also have to welcome Katy Price in your life.
On the cover of every single tabloid, every single week for several years in the row (except when Jade Goody bid her farewell looking better than ever in the terminal phase of a bowels cancer), Katie Price, most talked about woman in the UK (and totally unknown to the rest of the world) managed to have every detail of her eventful “private” life shoved down British throats for half a decade.
Maybe the most confusing thing for someone new to the buzz is when eventually having to read something about her (there is no way you can escape) or when seeing her on the front covers, you realize that she is referred to by two names, Katy Price, her real name, and Jordan. And that’s when this big and elusive question mark starts to rise: who is that woman?
Many celebrities use a pseudonym. A pseudonym is not a nickname, for it has professional implications which involve a form of performance, either on a stage or another artistic medium, but always with the presence of a public. There is a presentational aspect in relation to a public.
In the case of Katy Price, “Jordan” is a pseudonym that was given to her while she started her career as a topless model because it would supposedly be more appealing to the male audience. She was destined to encounter huge success. At the time she even posed for Playboy, spending several weeks at the infamous Playboy mansion and getting to meet the legendary Hugh Hefner who advised her about good plastic surgery!
It is interesting to see here how a certain name will tell a certain story and will act as a channel to various clichés and mainstream conceptions. So here the pseudonym purely is a marketing device. Some might have lived that as a demeaning and depersonalizing experience… Not Miss Price however as she totally embraced the concept, and from the name, (as it often happens with entertainers) blossomed a persona, coming complete with the attitude, the lifestyle and the existence. This creation (and creature) came to live a life of its own, manifesting itself through modern media, a 2-D (magazines) and 3-D (reality TV) entity that hundreds of thousands people, women or not, could identify with and be mesmerized by: Jordan, a no-nonsense, to the point woman, making the most of her assets and of the modern world, and the mastermind of her own fate.
But, and this is quite specific to her again, with the years passing by, Katy Price accomplished a feat that few celebrities managed in their careers. She was able to transcend her own public persona. And this is truly remarkable. Many stars, from Marylin Monroe to Michael Jackson tragically ended up being imprisoned and alienated by their own public persona, the poor Norma Jean being for example relinquished to a ghost of the past, whereas Michael Jackson saw the human being in him ending up ignored and overlooked... From the “Jordan” chrysalis, a brand new feminine persona emerged. And this is where the fight between Jordan and Katie Price actually started.
Jordan gradually emerged as an alter ego, in the wider perspective of the (complex) Katy Price human being. The papers started attributing certain quotes or actions to the evil Jordan, and others to the more reasonable Katy Price. Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde… Or more accurately maybe, Dr Jordan and Misses Price. In the case of Katie Price, what is unique and fascinating, truly is the coexistence of these two equally famous names referring to one same person, and these two names both carrying two very different identities and mythologies chronicled through the papers and other media.
This coexistence probably is the result of the fact that as the years passed by, Katy Price seemed to be able to transcend this “Jordan” identity. Affirming herself as an acute business woman, a respectable mother of three children, including her disabled son Harvey, and seeing her breast size decreasing as she was more and more referred to by her real “Katy Price” name, she was able to morph into another persona. An archetype killing another archetype. Being the undisputable modern cultural phenomenon that she is, she rose to the level of a feminine icon. So if the pseudonym was less and less there, the performance however remained. Katy Price as a modern icon found her window to shine through in modern culture, that is magazines (tabloids more specifically) and reality TV programs (numerous series following her every move), everything being under scrutiny and performed in front of the cameras. But is it finally the real Katy Price or another persona? What’s true, what’s false, what is authentic, what is fake, only Miss Price seems to know (or does she?) as the line between reality and fiction is being brutally blurred. Is the Katy Price we finally get to see another invention, a new marketing product? As far as pseudonyms could be considered as a form of brand, one thing is for sure, it’s that one couldn’t really think of a better name than Katy Price… It certainly serves her main activity which is now to sell merchandise (from fake eyelashes to an equestrian clothes range) emblazoned with the instantly recognizable “KP” and to add to her reputed 40 million£ fortune…
More than just a pseudonym, “Jordan” as well as retaining a persona with its own identity, (well-documented) lifestyle, glittery two-dimensional universe, ended up being put in perspective through Katy Price’s ability to evolve and renew herself and so emerges as an archetypal figure of femininity among other possible impersonations. Apparently Katy Price was even stronger than her own persona…
As a result of this evolution, it would be “underestimating the Pricey” to think she would have left it to anyone to put Jordan to history, declaring in January that she wanted to go to India to take a bath in holy waters thus sending her creation “Jordan” RIP. But the question remains: is Jordan really dead? Or is she just creeping in the shadows waiting to come back with a vengeance? Nobody can predict even though as I met her last October and after she had signed her latest autobiography “You Only live once” for me, I was very surprised to turn the cover and to read:
“To Thomas, love,
Jordan.”
Et comme preuve de ce qu'il avançait, il joignait copie de l'ouvage et de la dédicace :