Outrageously Real

This chapter dismantles the common distinction between modernist aestheticism and documentary reference by studying André Gide’s factual writings. In his recollections of his experiences as a juror (Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, 1914) and his reports on court cases in the Nouvelle Revue Française series “Ne jugez pas” (“Judge Not,” 1930), Gide’s ostensibly impersonal organization of testimonial evidence produces a complex polyphonic construction that claims to let documents speak for themselves, while in fact articulating them within a larger discourse. In Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le Retour du Tchad (1928) Gide’s politically engaged writing on French Equatorial Africa enters into dialogue with the largely apolitical documentary film-making practices of his travelling companion Marc Allégret. Commenting on Allégret’s cinematic practices, Gide both reflects on the limitations of documentary and attempts to rival film’s visual capture of living gesture.

“Pris sur le vif”

This chapter examines the surrealists’ deployment of the verbal or photographic document as a model that is simultaneously poetic and anti-literary. The surrealists eventually depart from their initial understanding of automatic writing as a “snapshot” that captures uncensored thought. Instead, their writings of the late 1920s and 1930s increasingly frame a range of poetic and visual documents within a multi-layered ethnographic discourse, whether in prose texts that attend to urban experience (Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, Breton’s Nadja), or, on the margins of the official surrealist group, in the work of Bataille’s Documents magazine. Finally, Michel Leiris’s reflections on ethnographic display simultaneously reveal the importance of contextualizing evidence and highlight the problematic collection practices that transform indigenous artifacts into cultural “documents.”

Epilogue

This closing reflection reconsiders the book’s argument retrospectively, from the point of view of the current obsession with facts. It offers evidence that a number of contemporary writers (Annie Ernaux, François Bon, Emmanuel Carrère) directly repudiate fiction in the 1980s and 1990s and turn to experiments with documentary or factual narration. The writers associated with the Inculte group (Maylis de Kerangal, Emmanuelle Pireyre) privilege documentary investigation without rejecting fiction, while Éric Vuillard, Yannick Haenel, or Laurent Binet mobilize the historical archive in documentary or docufictional works. This proliferation of documentary forms reconnects with and expands the earlier documentary practices studied in this book, while also responding to the omnipresence of data and information in the digital age.

Family Relics

Chapter 3 studies Marguerite Yourcenar’s distinctive synthesis of material mementos and personal recollections, historical documents and family relics. Yourcenar’s three-volume work Le Labyrinthe du monde (1974–1988) exemplifies a more general archival tendency in post-war autobiography; works by Perec, Barthes, and others also supplement personal testimony with documentary materials. Yourcenar’s trilogy marks a shift in her own practice from works that fictionalize history (Mémoires d’Hadrien, 1951), to a project that integrates “snippets of facts” within a factual composition. Yourcenar herself has a paradoxical place in this unusual autobiography, developing a family chronicle that attempts self-erasure even as it is organized around her relationship to the past. Developing a form of literary “necromancy,” Yourcenar’s writing mobilizes fictional devices to reanimate dead fragments of the past, while laying bare the work of research and reconstitution.

Paper Witnesses

This chapter traces the emergence of a literature of testimony in the years following World War II. However, this new tendency does not immediately reshape the literary field, which was dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by the (mostly) anti-documentary approach of the nouveau roman. Later, however, the document becomes central to explorations of the national past. In Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur (1985) and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997/1999), the “found text” is a figure of the personal and cultural repressed, before becoming a site of simultaneous identification and separation. Written traces set in motion a quest for the past, while narrative reconstruction aims to restore immediacy to the personal archive (as in Duras’s war notebooks), or to point to intimate truths beyond the impersonality and violence of the bureaucratic record (as in the documents collected by Modiano). In the wake of these experiments and at the turn of the twenty-first century, French and Francophone works alike experiment with documentary or hybrid approaches to historical trauma—especially in cases where fictionalization is perceived to be ethically risky, such as the Rwandan genocide.

Introduction

The introduction challenges prevalent accounts that see French literature turning away from realist concerns in the twentieth century. While the realist and naturalist novels of the nineteenth century give an increasingly central place to documentary materials, they integrate these documents into autonomous fictional worlds. Both continuing and breaking with this tradition, many twentieth-century writers make the document into the nexus of their experiments in nonfiction form. Also shaped by developments in photography and cinema, literature reflects on the referential status of images versus text, as well as questioning the ontological status of facts. The twentieth century sees the emergence in French literature of a documentary imagination that simultaneously idealizes documents as fragments of reality that speak for themselves (the “speaking fact”) and reveals their mediated and constructed nature (facts must be spoken).