The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature : Writing with Facts 9780198859680

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Acknowledgments If the recent proliferation of documentary narratives in French literature made it challenging to find an endpoint for this project, it is an even more difficult task to acknowledge, in just a few words, the essential and varied contributions of the many colleagues, friends, and students who have played a role in the writing of this book. I am lucky to work with an extraordinary group of colleagues at the University of Chicago who offered feedback and criticism at various stages of the project: thanks to Philippe Desan, Khalid Lyamlahy, Robert Morrissey, Larry Norman, and Thomas Pavel. Special thanks go to Daisy Delogu for her constant encouragement and support, and her attentive readings of chapters. Conversations and writing exchanges with Jennifer Wild helped shape the project from its early stages, and she has long guided my thinking on the connections between literature and film. Beyond my department, many other colleagues have offered ­pointers and insights. Maud Ellmann helped me connect my work to broader issues in European modernism. Haun Saussy gave essential reading suggestions. Berthold Hoeckner challenged me to think through key aspects of my argument on questions of evidence, traces, and sources. I am grateful to Maria Anna Mariani for the intensity of her intellectual engagement with my work, and for our ongoing conversations on theory and contemporary literature. Thanks also to Rachel Galvin (with whom I most frequently wear my Oulipian hat but who is a generous interlocutor on all things literary), and to Mark Payne (with whom I generally discuss poetry, but who also encouraged me to pursue this project). Jan Goldstein and Paula Iovene offered key insights and advice on a chapter presented at the University of Chicago’s Workshop on Modern France and the Francophone World. I would be remiss to leave out my students, who have participated in lively seminar discussions that have challenged me to think critically about many of the works I study here. A special mention should go to Bastien Craipain, Veerle Dierickx, Chiara Nifosi, and Brenna Rice. I am very grateful for the institutional support offered by the University. I began to develop ideas for this book many years ago during a stimulating fellowship year at the Franke Institute for the Humanities (2008–2009). More recently, the Neubauer Collegium supported a collaborative and interdisciplinary faculty research project on Fact and Fiction (2016–2017) which allowed me to explore broad theoretical questions in the company of colleagues, including Dominique Bluher, Anne Henly, Patrick Jagoda, Julie Orlemanski, Andrei Pop, Victoria Saramago, and Salomé Skvirsky. A Humanities Visiting Committee Faculty Research Grant (2017–2020) has provided me with direct support for my research, facilitating the completion of this book.

vi Acknowledgments Looking beyond Chicago, I owe an immense debt to colleagues and friends who encountered early formulations of this work in conferences, workshops, and lectures, both in the United States and Europe. I offer what is bound to be an inadequate list of scholars who have contributed questions, suggestions, and references on these and other occasions. Thanks to: Christine Armstrong, Cécile de Bary, Emmanuel Bouju, Patrick Bray, James Cahill, Aline Caillet, Laura Chiesa, Peter Consenstein, Nathalie Dupont, Jonathan Eburne, Clémentine FauréBellaïche, Maggie Flinn, Alexandre Gefen, Andrea Goulet, Maryline Heck, JeanLouis Jeannelle, Marcus Keller, Laurence Mall, Philippe Met, Armine Mortimer, Warren Motte, Jacques Neefs, Oana Panaïté, Jean-Jacques Poucel, Gerald Prince, François Proulx, Christelle Reggiani, Christophe Reig, Rob Rushing, Debarati Sanyal, Michèle Vialet, Dominique Viart, Priya Wadhera, Christophe WallRomana, and Marie-Jeanne Zenetti. I would like to express special gratitude to Françoise Lavocat, whose expertise on questions of fact and fiction has been immensely important to this book. I have been fortunate to benefit from her intellectual generosity, careful reading, and unwavering support. Somewhat paradoxically, given my topic, I did not conceive of this book primarily as an archival project; my concern is with the function of documents within literary works rather than with the genetic study of manuscripts. Tracking down authors’ sources made me feel like a fact-checker, engaged in a process of verification which brought some reassurance and occasional surprises. I am grateful to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet in Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Agence photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN), and the Cinémathèque française for assistance with locating and accessing materials. For their help with images and permissions, thank you to Laurence Braunberger of Les Films du Panthéon, Charles Gil at Gallimard, Joan E. Howard of the Petite Plaisance Trust, and Fatima Louli at the RMN. I am grateful to Jacqueline Norton, my editor at Oxford University Press, for her support for this project and to the two anonymous readers whose perceptive, challenging, and detailed comments were invaluable for fine-tuning the manuscript. Ella Capel-Smith and Aimee Wright at OUP expertly guided me through the publication process. Thank you to Fiona Barry for her meticulous copyediting, and to the entire production team for their care and attention. A final word of appreciation goes to my family, including my parents, Howard and Dianne James, and especially the three people who have lived most patiently with this project alongside me: Marc Downie, who has been my closest intellectual interlocutor (and rapid-response reader!) for this and other writing projects; Imogen, my aspiring writer who always inspires me; and Isabel, who tells me when to close the laptop.

Note on Permissions An earlier version of part of Chapter 1 appeared as the article “Le fait divers aux frontières de la fiction: la rhétorique documentaire d’André Gide,” in Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide, 177–78 (2013): 75–86. I am grateful to Pierre Masson for permitting me to publish a revised and expanded version of the article. The passage from Éric Vuillard’s L’Ordre du jour that opens the Epilogue is reproduced courtesy of Actes Sud. Copyright information and permissions acknowledgments for illustrations are provided in the captions.

List of Illustrations 0.1 Page from Nathalie Quintane, Saint Tropez—Une Américaine © P. O. L, 2001.

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Source: Nathalie Quintane, Saint-Tropez—Une Américaine © P. O. L, 2001.

1.1 Photograph of Blanche Monnier [Mélanie Bastian] in L’Illustration, June 1, 1901

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Source: © L’Illustration, 1901.

1.2 Film still from Marc Allégret, Voyage au Congo, c. 1927

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Source: picture from Voyage au Congo, by Marc Allégret © 1929 Films du Panthéon.

1.3 Film still from Marc Allégret, Voyage au Congo, c. 1927

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Source: picture from Voyage au Congo, by Marc Allégret © 1929 Films du Panthéon.

2.1 Article from La Liberté, March 23, 1924, as presented in Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (1926)

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Source: image from Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris © Gallimard, 1926.

2.2 Page from La Liberté, March 23, 1924

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Source: courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

2.3 Map from Aragon, “Le Paysan de Paris (2e partie—II),” La Revue européenne 26 (April 1, 1925)

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Source: courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

2.4 André Breton, “Ses yeux de fougère,” in Nadja, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1963)

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Source: Breton, “Ses yeux de fougère,” in Nadja, 2nd edn © Gallimard, 1963 © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

2.5 Jacques-André Boiffard, “Big Toe, Male Subject, 30 Years Old,” 1929

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Source: Jacques-André Boiffard, “Big Toe (Male Subject, 30 Years Old),” 1929. Gelatin silver print, 31 × 23.9 cm. Repro-photo Philippe Migeat. Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Image © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

3.1 “Souvenir pieux” for Fernande de Crayencour

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Source: document conserved at Houghton Library and reproduced by permission of the Petite Plaisance Trust. All rights reserved.

3.2 Second “souvenir pieux” for Fernande de Crayencour Source: document conserved at Houghton Library and reproduced by permission of the Petite Plaisance Trust. All rights reserved.

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xii  List of Illustrations 4.1 Rubric “D’Hier à aujourd’hui” with missing person announcement for Dora Bruder, Paris-Soir, December 31, 1941

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Source: courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France. 

5.1 Kurt Schuschnigg in his apartment in Geneva, 1934 Source: courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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List of Abbreviations AF/ML

Breton, André, L’Amour fou (1937), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, ed. Marguerite Bonnet. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), trans. by Mary Ann Caws as Mad Love (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 673–785. AN/HMY Yourcenar, Marguerite, Archives du Nord (1977), in Essais et mémoires. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 951–1184, trans. by Maria Louise Ascher as How Many Years (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). AR Gide, André, L’Affaire Redureau (1930), in Ne jugez pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 95–136.

CG

Duras, Marguerite, Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes, ed. Sophie Bogaert and Olivier Corpet (Paris: P.O.L/IMEC, 2006).

D/TW

Duras, Marguerite, La Douleur (Paris: P.O.L, 1985; repr. Paris: Gallimard Folio, 2007), trans. by Barbara Bray as The War: A Memoir (New York: The New Press, 1994). Modiano, Patrick, Dora Bruder (Paris: Gallimard, 1997; rev. edn, Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1999), trans. by Joanna Kilmartin as Dora Bruder (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999).

DB/DBr

FM/C

Gide, André, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), in Romans et récits, Vol. 2, ed. Pierre Masson. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 173–517, trans. by Dorothy Bussy as The Counterfeiters (New York: Vintage, 1973).

J1

Gide, André, Journal. Vol. 1: 1887–1925, ed. Éric Marty. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Gide, André, Journal. Vol. 2: 1926–1950, ed. Martine Sagaert. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Gide, André, Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (1926), in Romans et récits, Vol. 2, ed. Pierre Masson. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 519–82.

J2 JFM

LF LPP/PP

Modiano, Patrick, Livret de famille (Paris, Gallimard, 1977; repr. Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1981). Aragon, Louis, Le Paysan de Paris (1926), in Œuvres poétiques complètes, Vol. 1, ed. Olivier Barbarant. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), trans. by Simon Watson Taylor as Paris Peasant (Boston, MA: Exact Change, 1994), 143–301.

xiv  List of Abbreviations LSP/CWP Gide, André, La Séquestrée de Poitiers (1930), in Ne jugez pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 199–266, trans. by Benjamin Ivry as “The Confined Woman of Poitiers,” in New England Review 24(3) (July 2003): 99–132. MH/MoH

MS

Yourcenar, Marguerite, Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951), in Œuvres romanesques. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 285–555, trans. by Grace Frick as Memoirs of Hadrian (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). Breton, André, Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 1, ed. Marguerite Bonnet. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 309–47.

N/Nj

Breton, André, Nadja (1928; 2nd edn 1963), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 1, ed. Marguerite Bonnet. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), trans. by Richard Howard as Nadja (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 643–753.

OI/SI

Tadjo, Véronique, L’Ombre d’Imana, Voyage jusqu’au bout du Rwanda (Arles: Actes Sud, 2000), trans. by Véronique Wakerley as The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda (Oxford: Heinemann, 2002).

QE

Yourcenar, Marguerite, Quoi? L’éternité (1988), in Essais et mémoires. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 1185–433.

RT

Gide, André, Le Retour du Tchad: suite du “Voyage au Congo” (1928), in Souvenirs et voyages, ed. Pierre Masson, Daniel Durosay, and Martine Sagaert. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 515–707.

SCA

Gide, André, Souvenirs de la cour d’assises (1914), in Souvenirs et voyages, ed. Pierre Masson, Daniel Durosay, and Martine Sagaert. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 7–67.

SP/DD

Yourcenar, Marguerite, Souvenirs pieux (1974), in Essais et mémoires. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 705–949, trans. by Maria Louise Ascher as Dear Departed (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991).

TC

Gide, André, Travels in the Congo, trans. Dorothy Bussy (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1994) [includes translation of both Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad].

UP/P

Modiano, Patrick, Un pedigree (Paris: Gallimard, 2005; repr. Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 2014), trans. by Mark Polizzotti as Pedigree: A Memoir (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2015).

VC

Gide, André, Voyage au Congo: carnets de route (1927), in Souvenirs et voyages, ed. Pierre Masson, Daniel Durosay, and Martine Sagaert. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 331–514.

Note on the Text When not otherwise cited, translations are by the author, Alison James.

Introduction Speaking Facts

Facta, facta, nihil praeter facta, sera un jour l’épigraphe de tout ce qu’on écrira sur l’homme. Facta, facta, nihil praeter facta, will one day be the epigraph of everything written about mankind. —Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, Vol. 2 (Paris: D. Didot,1817) In 1943, when preparing his 1924 poetry collection Kodak for republication, Blaise Cendrars changed the title to Documentaires, alleging legal pressure from the Eastman Kodak Company. Cendrars thus preserved the visual connotation of the original title while shifting the emphasis from the model of the photographic snapshot—via the handheld camera that had become synonymous with the Kodak name—to the broader and more ambiguous category of the “documentary.” As he explains in his preface to the new edition: La poésie n’est pas dans un titre mais dans un fait, et comme en fait ces poèmes, que j’ai conçus comme des photographies verbales, forment un documentaire, je les intitulerai dorénavant Documentaires. Leur ancien sous-titre. C’est peut-être aujourd’hui un genre nouveau.1 Poetry is not in a title but in a fact, and as in fact these poems, which I imagined as verbal photographs, form a documentary, I will henceforth entitle them Documentaries. Their former subtitle. Perhaps this is a new genre today.

Evoking both photography and cinema, this new generic label is subject to slippage. Cendrars’ prefatory text bears the title “Document” and affirms that the poems “form a documentary,” in the singular, while the collection as a whole is called “Documentaries” in the plural. What is elided, in this move from document to documentaire to documentaires, is the precise relation of part to whole, of the instant of the verbal image to the temporal and thematic composition of the

1 Blaise Cendrars, “Document,” preface to Documentaires [Kodak] (1924/1944), in Du monde entire au cœur du monde: poèmes (Paris: Denoël, 1987), 126.

2  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY collection. Are the individual poems to be seen primarily as documents that, taken together, compose a documentary sequence? Or does the adjective “docu­ mentary” designate both the part and the whole, characterizing the text’s mode of reference while preserving the poem’s status as primarily a poem? What is the relationship between the documentary as an adjective naming an attribute of a work and documentary as a noun designating a genre? Cendrars’ referential claim for these poems is open to question; in fact, the book’s verbal landscapes are often rewritings of previous descriptions.2 But what interests me here is less this possibility of faking a document (after all, this can also be done with photography), than Cendrars’ hypothesis of a “new genre” modeled on photographic and filmic practice. Cendrars does not posit this genre confidently or unequivocally. I would argue that this lexical and conceptual uncertainty, and Cendrars’ shuttling between the terms document and documentary, point to the constitutive ambiguity of the documentary as an aesthetic cat­egory—and above all, as a literary category. By the 1940s, “documentary” as a noun had come to describe a class of film (even if not everyone was favorable to what Raymond Queneau would derisively call the “docucu”3). Documentary as a “new genre” of literature is another matter, and even the adjectival term poses problems. Over and above the common conflation of the categories of literature and fiction, the French literary field has arguably been singularly hostile to the documentary impulse. Mallarmé’s famous distinction between literature and “l’universel reportage” (“universal reporting”) proclaims a rift between journalistic and poetic language, testimony and creation, the documentary and the aesthetic.4 Yet French literature is haunted by the specter of the document, from the “human documents” evoked by the naturalist writers of the nineteenth century to the proliferation of documentary narratives in twenty-first-century literature. Focusing on the period bookended by these two moments, this book deals with factual literature. More specifically, it identifies the emergence in twentieth-cen­tury French literature of a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so, it contests the widespread assumption that literature simply abandons the realist enterprise in the twentieth century—that modern literature, as Michel Foucault puts it, retreats from the world into “radical intransitivity,” cut off from the discourse of ideas.5 But rather than focusing on

2  See Michel Collot, “Les vrais-faux paysages de Documentaires,” in Cendrars, Le bourlingueur des deux rives, ed. Claude Leroy and Jean-Carlo Flückiger (Paris: Armand Colin, 1995), 121. 3  “Les gosses ça les emmerde le docucu, et comment” (“The docucorny really bores the kids stiff ”). Raymond Queneau, Loin de Rueil (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), 38. Queneau’s neologism combines docu­ mentaire and cucul (“cheesy,” “corny,” “silly”). 4  Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers” (1897), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 213. 5  Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 313.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  3 realism as such (that is, on mimesis within fiction), I consider how writers ­renegotiate the realist legacy outside the fictional space of the novel. By document, I mean in the first place an actual object—a textual, visual, or material piece of evidence—that gains a literary use through its insertion, transcription, or description within a text. But the document also becomes a figure, standing for literature’s confrontation with the real. As such, it accrues a set of mythical connotations linked to the desire for direct contact with the world. It is this fantasy of the document as unmediated truth conjoined with the concrete possibilities of documentary inscription that constitute what I call the “docu­ mentary imagination.” That is, writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, even as they grapple with their recognition of its constructed and mediated nature and attempt to articulate and interpret it within a discourse. The works studied here represent different genres, and some resist generic classification. They nevertheless have in common the elaboration of a paradoxical figure, which I call the speaking fact. This is the material document that seems to speak the truth directly, but must in reality be spoken—given voice, elaborated, and put to work in a larger discursive structure. But what exactly is a document? While the word’s etymology leads back to the Latin docere (to teach), it has come to mean (in both French and English) a piece of evidence or proof (OED and TLF).6 Documents are often written inscriptions, in which case the linguistic medium favors their permeability with literature. But they can also take visual or material form, as long as they serve to record or substantiate a fact or set of facts. In a treatise that has proved influential for information science, the librarian and documentalist Suzanne Briet defines the docu­ment as “tout indice concret ou symbolique, conservé ou enregistré, aux fins de représenter, de reconstituer ou de prouver un phénomène ou physique ou intellectuel” (“any concrete or symbolic indexical sign, preserved or recorded toward the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon”).7 Anything can become a document, argues Briet, including an antelope in a zoo; once it is catalogued and presented as a specimen of a species, the individual animal becomes an indice, an indexical sign.8 If Briet’s useful def­in­ition of the document will guide my analysis in the following chapters, the antelope example also signals a central problem, describing the reduction of a living being to the status of a sign. Not only animals, but human beings too 6  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “document, n.” (1989). https://www-oed-com.proxy.uchicago.edu/view/Entry/56328?rskey=2nsueW&result=1&isAdvanced=false; Trésor de la langue fran­ çaise informatisé, s.v. “document, subst. masc.” (CNRS and Université de Lorraine 1994). http://www. atilf.fr/tlfi. 7  Suzanne Briet, Qu’est-ce que la documentation? (Paris: Éditions documentaires, industrielles et techniques, 1951), 7, trans. by Ronald E. Day, Laurent Martinet, and Hermina G. B. Anghelescu as What is Documentation?: English Translation of the Classic French Text, (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006), 10. 8 Briet, Qu’est-ce que la documentation?, 7.

4  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY can be subjected to such treatment: notoriously, the ethnological exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries performed the same operation upon the bodies of indigenous peoples through practices of display that offered spectacle in the guise of pedagogy.9 As we will see, the history of documentary forms is entangled with this colonial context. More generally, documentary art can entail the problematic epistemological framing of beings as specimens. The naturalist novelists’ ambiguous concept of “human documents”—referring to the documentary materials of the novel, the novel as document, or even, potentially, human beings as documents—is not exempt from this operation, although the passage from document to fiction defuses the issue somewhat (that is, the novel’s specimens are fictional characters). Whether as text or object, the document couples intentionality (it is deliberately preserved and mobilized as evidence or testimony), and the lack of intentionality (as a material trace open to interpretation).10 As Lisa Gitelman argues, “docu­ ments are epistemic objects; they are the recognizable sites and subjects of interpretation across the disciplines and beyond, evidential structures in the long human history of clues.”11 The individual document is causally linked to the moment and conditions of its production. It is already a piece of evidence and yet, until its relationship to a larger whole has been established, it often appears as an obstinate fact. Facts, as Lorraine Daston observes, “are robust in their existence and opaque in their meaning”; they are brute things that must be “hammered into signposts” in order to become evidence.12 The document thus appears as an intermediary form between the fact and the archive; it is already identified as a piece of evidence, but not yet incorporated into an archive or articulated as part of a larger configuration.13 As we shall see, the inclusion of documents within the literary work inscribes layers of intention and multiple temporalities by pro­du­cing a gap in enunciation, an orientation toward an exterior instance and a relationship either to a recent or distant past. The documents favored by writers can be a

9  See Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, and Charles Forsdick, eds, Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). 10 On the distinction between source (i.e. intentional, and therefore unreliable testimony) and trace (unintentional inscription) in historical scholarship, see Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 25–6. In defining documentary (which he sees as an exclusively cinematographic genre), Gregory Currie draws a similar distinction between traces, which are independent of belief, and testimony. Currie, “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57(3) (Summer 1999): 285. I return to this trace/testimony dichotomy in Chapter 4. 11 Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Sign, Storage, Transmission) (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 1. 12  Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18(1) (1991): 93. 13  On the document versus the archive, see Tiphaine Samoyault, “Du goût de l’archive au souci du document,” Littérature 166(2) (2012): 3–6.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  5 component of a historical archive, but they can also be a form of actualité, a way of approaching the present moment.

Realist Notations: From Detail to Document The dimension of French literary history that interests me here is defined on the one hand by the naturalist legacy of the “human document,” and on the other by the photographic paradigm. It marks a departure from the legacy of realism even as it maintains the latter’s concern with grasping the real. The difference lies in the place of fiction. The realist novel of the nineteenth century produces a regime of fictionality that is taken by some to constitute the very definition of fiction as a modern category: that is, fiction as credible narratives that are non-referential but nevertheless function as models or analogies of reality.14 This view distinguishes fiction proper from earlier works that present themselves as found documents: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for instance, are fictions offered as eyewitness testimonies; Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (1780/1796) and Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) present themselves, albeit playfully, as edited collections of letters. Lennard J. Davis explores the emergence of the novel in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “a factual fiction which denied its fictionality,” before the subsequent dif­fer­en­ti­ ation of these categories.15 Catherine Gallagher argues that “the novel discovered fiction,” and links “the rise of fictionality” (as a conceptual category and a practice) to modernity’s encouragement of “disbelief, speculation, and credit.”16 Also focusing on the status of literary characters, Nicholas Paige distinguishes between three regimes of fiction: the plot-based articulation of poetry and history (with attested protagonists) theorized by Aristotle’s Poetics; the “pseudofactual” regime that presents fictions as real documents in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­tur­ies; and the “properly fictional” regime that asks that readers “accept the writer’s inventions as a kind of model of reality.”17 In this book I will work with a broader definition of fictionality, following JeanMarie Schaeffer to see it as a universal psychological capacity for engaging in “shared pretense”—a competency that pre-exists its varied realizations in given contexts.18 This definition does not preclude a historical understanding of the 14  Nicholas Paige, Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 17–18. 15 Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 36. 16 Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, Vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 337 and 345. 17 Paige, Before Fiction, x. 18 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction? Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1999). See also Françoise Lavocat (ed.), Usages et théories de la fiction: le débat contemporain à l’épreuve des textes anciens,

6  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY modern differentiation between fact and fiction. It is certainly the case that the nineteenth-century novel lays claim to the idea of a fictional truth that is not equivalent to factual reality—Balzac’s claim in Le Père Goriot that “all is true”; Stendhal’s insistence on “l’âpre vérité” (“the bitter truth”)19—while it also grounds this analogical truth in the accuracy of minute particulars. These particulars may indeed be facts; they are instances of what Stendhal calls, in an expression later taken up by Flaubert, “le petit fait vrai” (“the little true fact/detail”).20 Details of this kind cannot be reduced to the role of plot filler or to the notion of mimetic illusion or “reality effect.”21 Rather, they are stubborn fragments of the real, “sparks” of contingency that resist conventions and hierarchies of representation.22 In this respect, factual details can be allied with the “democratic” aspect of modern literature analyzed by Jacques Rancière. Rancière argues that the aesthetic revolution inaugurated at the end of the eighteenth century breaks with the earlier Aristotelian distinction between poetry and history.23 The emergence of the realm of “Literature” (distinct from the earlier realm of “letters”) means, according to Rancière, that “écrire l’histoire et écrire des histoires relèvent d’un même régime de vérité” (“writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth”).24 However, this convergence of logics (meaning that fiction and history can deal with the same kinds of event) does not erase the border between factual and fictional narrative. As Alexandre Gefen and René Audet argue, “by proposing that literary fiction submit itself to the question of reality [. . .] the 19th century erased the de facto borders separating fiction and nonfiction, and thus imposed the constitution of de jure borders.”25 In other words, the distinction relies less on a difference in kind between fictional and factual chains of events and entities (as in the Aristotelian model that imposed a certain kind of rationality on fictional plots) than on a contractual distinction between modes of reading. Balzac, for instance, treats the fictional discourse of the novel as 16e–18e siècles (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004); Françoise Lavocat and Anne Duprat, eds, Fiction et cultures. Poétiques comparatistes (Paris: Société française de littérature générale et comparée, 2010). 19  Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, in La Comédie humaine, Vol. 3, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–1981), 50; Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1983), 11. 20  See Ann Jefferson, Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 34–6; Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 16 January 1852, in Correspondance II, ed. Jean Bruneau. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 30. 21  Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel” (1968), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 3, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 25–32. 22  Ann Jefferson aptly relates Stendhal’s petit fait vrai to the punctum of photography according to Roland Barthes (Jefferson, Reading Realism in Stendhal, 35–6). 23  For Aristotle, “poetry tends rather to express the universal, history rather the particular fact.” Aristotle, Poetics, trans James Hutton (New York and London: W. Norton, 1982), 1451b. 24  Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000), 61. 25  Alexandre Gefen and René Audet, “Présentation,” in Frontières de la fiction, ed. Gefen and Audet (Quebec and Bordeaux: Éditions Nota Bene; Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2002), xi.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  7 equivalent to the description of social phenomena, even as his events and characters are invented. Yet this ambition to describe society also entails the mixing—although not the fusion—of referential regimes. Thus Victor Hugo, in the opening chapter of the third book of Les Misérables (1862), prefaces the fictional story of Fantine with a long and bewildering jumble of facts about “the year 1817”: notes on the political situation, technological developments, the fashion in hats and snuff-boxes, the subject of an essay competition of the Académie Française, a sketch of Chateaubriand cleaning his teeth at his window while dictating a manuscript to his secretary, ironic observations on contemporary literary taste, and the mention of various events (crimes, quarrels, trials) of no historical significance—“mais il n’y a ni petits faits dans l’humanité, ni petites feuilles dans la végétation” (“but there are neither small facts in humanity, nor small leaves in vegetation”).26 Hugo’s list presents us with a simultaneous vision of a historical moment, juxtaposing snapshots without linking them chronologically or causally. The total “physiognomy” of the year 1817 is set in opposition to an official “history” that has no choice but to ignore these small yet crucial details. This chapter adopts a form of notation that is also found in Hugo’s posthumously published text Choses vues (Things Seen, 1887), a diverse collection of anecdotes, portraits, and snapshots, which later becomes a model for literary journalism in the twentieth cen­ tury.27 In Les Misérables, however, these facts both exemplify the literary prerogative of attention to the particular, and are integrated into a fictional world that exceeds reference (Fantine does not have the same ontological status as Chateaubriand28), yet claims to present a truth of the real world. Hugo’s fictional world can accommodate both factual and fictional documents; these include, among the latter, the royalist banknote nailed to the wall of the convent, presented in the text as an “exact facsimile.”29 These examples reveal a pull toward facts, even within fiction. This factual impulse has a complex history in modern literature, as writers increasingly draw narrative inspiration from anecdotes reported in the daily press while at the same time trying to distinguish their approach from that of the journalists. In this context, the border between the particular and the general, and also between fact and 26  Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Vol. 1 (Paris: Pagnerre, 1862), 292. 27 On this last point, see Myriam Boucharenc, L’Écrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004), 26. 28  Here I follow Catherine Gallagher in maintaining a distinction between fictional and nonfictional characters in the novel, against Lubomír Doležel’s argument that all characters in a fiction must be fictional. Gallagher, “What Would Napoleon Do? Historical, Fictional, and Counterfactual Characters,” New Literary History 42(2) (2011): 318; Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 18. It is true that Chateaubriand, in Hugo’s chapter, is not a character in the same sense as Tolstoy’s Napoleon (who participates in the action of the novel); we are nevertheless required to switch “referential gears” (to borrow Gallagher’s expression) when reading. 29 Hugo, Les Misérables, Vol. 2, 300.

8  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY fiction in literature, becomes both fragile and crucial. The invention of new technologies for recording reality is also a contributing factor; Lilian Furst links the “thrust on the part of the realist novel toward documentary status” in the nineteenth century with the invention of the daguerreotype—a term that Balzac appropriates in a 1844 preface to Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes.30 The daguerreotype, in this context, becomes a model for the document. From the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the term document was used in historical contexts (Taine, Tocqueville, Guizot), and by autobiographers and memoirists (Saint-Simon, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Las Cases). Its main collocations include “authentic document,” “historical document,” “legislative document,” and “official document” (“document authentique,” “document historique,” “document législatif,” “document officiel”).31 The term is thus used in both scholarly and official contexts, or in factual genres such as essays and memoirs, to designate a piece of evidence drawn from the archival record. It also points to the establishing of an official public record. Here we might recall the dilemma of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, unable to find a place in an increasingly bureaucratic world because his supposed death at the Battle of Eylau has been clearly docu­ mented and recorded in the history books. The novelist who aimed to “faire concurrence à l’État-Civil” (“compete with the civil register”)32 explores in Le Colonel Chabert the impact of the documentary apparatus deployed by the modern state in alliance with scholarly discourses.33 Literature’s reflection on the social function of documents is also part of the story I will tell in this book. Increasingly encyclopedic in their approach to social reality, writers are drawn to conduct extensive fieldwork exemplified most notably by Flaubert’s pre­lim­in­ ary documentation on fashions, artworks, and earthenware factories, or Émile Zola’s detailed fieldwork notes on the site of the Sedan battlefield, the employees of the Paris department store Le Bon Marché, or the underground labor of miners in Anzin.34 The Goncourt brothers and Zola literalize Stendhal and Flaubert’s quest for “le petit fait vrai” when they proclaim their fidelity to the “human document”—a term that Edmond de Goncourt claims to have invented, while Zola also uses it in the articles of Le Roman expérimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880). What characterizes this moment of naturalist “experiment” is not

30 Lilian  R.  Furst, All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 6–7; Balzac, “Preface,” in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (Paris: L.  de Potter, 1844), xiii. 31  Search for “document*” in the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database, which includes more than 3,500 French-language texts from the twelfth through to the twentieth centuries. http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu. 32 Balzac, “Avant-propos de la Comédie humaine,” in La Comédie humaine, Vol. 1, ed. PierreGeorges Castex. Bibliotheque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 10. 33 Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert (1832; 1844), ed. Pierre Barbéris, in La Comédie humaine, Vol. 3, 291–373. 34  Gustave Flaubert, Carnets de travail, ed. Pierre-Marc de Biasi (Paris: Balland, 1988); Émile Zola, Carnets d’enquêtes: une ethnographie inédite de la France, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris: Plon, 1986).

Introduction: Speaking Facts  9 only the development that Auerbach calls “the advance of the realistic mixture of styles” to embrace “the common people in all its ramifications.”35 In addition, this change in subject matter entails the development of a method and a discourse that justify representation via reference to the document. The naturalist novelists theorize their approach as a practice of collecting evidence on social life or human psychology, based on a method of observation and deduction. The notion of the “human document” emerges, then, as a paratextual concept, elaborated in prefaces and essays as a form of epistemological and ethical val­id­ ation.36 The preface to Germinie Lacerteux (1864), signed by both Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, justifies the authors’ choice of subject in terms both of “truth” (“ce roman est un roman vrai” [“this novel is a true novel”]) and of the “right” of the lower classes to representation.37 After Jules’s death, Edmond de Goncourt’s preface to Les Frères Zemganno (1879) presents a different account of the nat­ur­al­ ist project, arguing that the latter’s triumph requires a “realism of elegance” developed through an elevated style of artistic writing (what the Goncourts call “écriture artiste”).38 He and his brother had begun, Goncourt states, with the simpler project of representing “la canaille” (“the rabble”); but depicting the more complicated world of civilized Parisian society requires more effort: Ces hommes, ces femmes, et même les milieux dans lesquels ils vivent, ne peuvent se rendre qu’au moyen d’immenses emmagasinements d’observations, d’innombrables notes prises à coups de lorgnon, de l’amassement d’une collection de documents humains, semblable à ces montagnes de calepins de poche qui représentent, à la mort d’un peintre, tous les croquis de sa vie. Car seuls, disonsle bien haut, les documents humains font les bons livres: les livres où il y a de la vraie humanité sur ses jambes.39 These men, these women, and even the circles in which they live, can only be rendered by means of immense stockpiles of observations, innumerable notes taken through a magnifying glass, the amassing of a collection of human docu­ ments, similar to those mountains of pocket notebooks that represent, upon a painter’s death, all the sketches he has drawn in his lifetime. For, let us say it out loud: only human documents make good books: those that contain true humanity on its feet.

Goncourt’s preface affirms a key tenet of the naturalist approach: its grounding in the document. Yet it also introduces a tension between the text’s documentary 35 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 497. 36  On the paratext—the textual materials that surround, present, and make present the literary text—see Gérard Genette, Seuils, Collection Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 37  Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux (Paris: Charpentier, 1864), v–vi. 38  Edmond de Goncourt, Les Frères Zemganno (Paris: Charpentier, 1879), viii. 39  Edmond de Goncourt, Les Frères Zemganno, x.

10  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY value and the aesthetic aspiration to écriture artiste. This incongruity is rendered in cruder terms in the Goncourts’ Journal, where an entry from August 1875 bemoans the fact that an essentially aristocratic being—the novelist—should have to go in search of “le document humain” among the lower classes—the terms used are plèbe and canaille—in the name of constructing truthful books.40 The phrase “human document” is literalized here in dehumanizing fashion, reducing human beings to the status of walking documents for the novelist’s collection and use. In the Frères Zemganno preface, Edmond de Goncourt attempts to resolve this problem by returning to the hierarchy of styles and subjects previously rejected in Germinie Lacerteux; his new claim is that the extension of docu­ mentary methods can correspond to a refining of style and of subject matter. It is precisely this attempt to reconcile the documentary and the aesthetic by scorning the rabble that Zola rejects in his response to Goncourt’s preface. Zola asserts that every aspect of reality has the right to be studied, and adds that the discovery of human truth (or as he puts it, the “dissection” of “human cadavers”) will always take the writer beyond the artistic expression of decorative niceties.41 Zola’s more democratic use of the expression “documents humains” entails a scientistic claim to observation and explanation.42 In this sense, as David Baguley notes, the theories of naturalism constitute, if taken seriously, “a formidable antipoetics, in their emphasis on method and in their denial of the thematic, generic, specifically literary essence of naturalist literature.”43 Or, as Zola puts it: “Plus de lyrisme, plus de grands mots vides, mais des faits, des documents” (“No more lyricism, no more big empty words, but facts, documents”).44 Of course, the actual practice of naturalist fiction is more complex than this. The theories of literary naturalism, as Henri Mitterand points out, insist on the text’s status as historical or social document but remain curiously silent on crucial questions of fiction and narration.45 In this light, we should make a threefold distinction: between the documentary notes that precede the naturalist novel; the theoretical discourse developed by the authors around such keywords as méthode, enquête (inquiry), and document; and the novel itself, which elaborates a coherent fiction that more or less erases the traces of the preparatory work. In Zola’s RougonMacquart cycle, the documentary work is always oriented toward the construction of a monumental fiction.46 We might find a mise-en-abyme of this process in the images of combustion that close the final novel of the Rougon–Macquart cycle, 40  Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, ed. A. Ricatte, Vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion, 1959), 1081. 41  Zola, Émile, “Les Frères Zemganno 1: La Préface” (1879), in Le Roman expérimental (1880), Œuvres complètes, Vol. 9, ed. Chantal Pierre-Gnassounou (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2004), 443. 42  Zola, Émile, “Les Documents humains” (1879), in Le Roman expérimental, 437–41. 43  David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 46. 44  Zola, “Lettre à la jeunesse” (1879), in Le Roman expérimental, 370. 45  Henri Mitterand, Zola et le naturalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 32. 46 Mitterand, Le Regard et le signe: poétique du roman réaliste et naturaliste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 91.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  11 Le Docteur Pascal (1893): Pascal Rougon’s fictional genealogical and medical documents go up in flames, but they survive in the form of the novel we are reading.47 The document is sacrificed to the monument. Nevertheless, the development since the early 1980s of “genetic” criticism (the study of writers’ preparatory notebooks, plans, drafts, and proofs) has brought new attention to the initial, documentary phase of writing.48 Essentially, preparatory documents have become readable as literary texts in their own right. As Jacques Neefs points out, such writers’ notes fascinate us not only because they are already orientated toward a future fictional space, but also because they express the intensity of a gaze that seeks to grasp the world in its “raw” state.49 Thus Zola’s systematic and coherent approach to preparing his novels allows Henri Mitterand to present Zola’s field notebooks as an “ethnography of France.”50 The act of recording and transposing, which both expresses and disrupts the author’s scientistic pretensions, produces fieldwork notes and “ethnographic” observations, as well as collecting information from existing documentary sources. In readings that register the link between the documentary ambitions of literature and the history of the photographic image, several scholars have related this documentary activity to Zola’s interest in photography,51 and have even described Zola’s works as protocinematic in their organization of visual description.52 At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the discourse of the document was all too easily turned against the naturalist novelists by their detractors, such as Ferdinand Brunetière and Léon Bloy, who use it to deny the works’ aesthetic value.53 In 1891, Jules Huret’s Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire reveals the consensus that the heyday of naturalism is over.54 Even so, the notion of the “human document” and the use of documentary materials retain their appeal for writers. The 47  Zola, Émile, Le Docteur Pascal (1893), ed. Jean-Sebastien Macke, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 15, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007), 560–1. 48  See in particular the work of the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM), and its review Genesis, http://www.item.ens.fr. On the transformation of the document into the work, see Raymonde Debray-Genette and Jacques Neefs, eds, Romans d’archives (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1987). 49  Jacques Neefs, “Carnets de romanciers (Flaubert, Zola, James),” Littérature 80(4) (1990): 56–70. 50 Zola, Carnets d’enquêtes. 51  See Leszek Brogowski, “Zola fuit hic. Le documentaire: dispositif photographique, dispositif littéraire,” in Littérature et Photographie, ed. Jean-Pierre Montier, Liliane Louvel, Danièle Méaux, and Philippe Ortel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 127–52. 52  Henri Mitterand compares Zola’s capacity to grasp everyday life at its source to the later techniques of cinéma-vérité (Le Regard et le signe, 68). Gilles Deleuze also refers to the “cinematographic genius” of naturalist writers. Deleuze, “Introduction” in Zola, La Bête humaine (Paris: Cercle du livre précieux, 1967), 18. 53  Ferdinand Brunetière, Le Roman naturaliste (Paris: C. Lévy, 1883), 118; Léon Bloy, Les Funérailles du naturalisme (1891; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001), 39, 220. Later, Georg Lukács’ Studies in European Realism (1948; New York: Howard Fertig, 2002), 90 disparagingly compares Zola’s attitude to that of a newspaper reporter. 54  Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1891). See, e.g., the responses by Anatole France (2) and Jules Lemaître (10). On the decline of naturalism (and its “death” around 1891), see Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman: des lendemains du naturalisme aux années vingt (Paris: José Corti, 1967).

12  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY early twentieth century still sees the creation of documentary novels in a realist vein; for instance, Roger Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois (1913) integrates ma­ter­ial from the Dreyfus trial into a fictional narrative. The naturalists were too pessimistic, asserts the surrealist André Breton in Les Vases communicants (Communicating Vessels, 1932); yet he praises their attention to detail and their ability to see and feel reality.55 The crux of the matter, for later authors, is the relation between documentary inquiry and fictional form, between the accumulation of data on social life and the emplotment of these data within novels (which, in the naturalist case, often fused tragic destiny and biological determinism). One possible reaction, certainly, is the rejection of the “documentary” approach in favor of alternative conceptions of the novel. But another is to reject the fictional form of naturalist works in favor of a mode of writing that remains closer to the raw materials of lived reality. Two brief examples will suffice here to indicate the complexity of this counternaturalist discourse. The first is the opening of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Là-Bas (Down There, 1891), which presents in decisive form a familiar set of accusations: naturalism is narrow and materialistic; it has rejected the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of literature; it has stifled imagination and dreams; it has glorified “the democracy of art.”56 This attack on naturalism, voiced by the character des Hermies, dramatically marks Huysmans’s own break with Zola’s circle. Less often noted, however, is the fact that the novelist’s protagonist, Durtal, is more ambivalent: he believes that literature should explore spiritual mysteries but preserve “la véracité du document, la précision du détail, la langue étoffée et nerveuse du réalisme” (“the veracity of the document, the precision of detail, the solid and vigorous language of realism”).57 Durtal’s own idiosyncratic solution—conducting research on Satanism and Gilles de Rais—is in fact an attempt to extend the study of the “human document” in new directions. My second example of post-naturalist ambivalence is Marcel Proust’s pastiche of the Goncourts’ Journal in Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained, 1927). While the narrator is staying at Tansonville, Gilberte lends him an unpublished volume in which the Goncourts recount their dinners with the Verdurins and their circle. The journal’s details and portraits do not correspond to the narrator’s observations of the Verdurin salon, but instead attribute great interest to figures whom he had judged insipid. On the level of the novel’s story, this moment marks a crisis in the narrator’s faith—either in the value of literature, or in his own powers of observation—and immediately precedes his retreat into a sanatorium. The narrator’s admiring yet bitter response to his reading—the exclamation “prestige de la

55 André Breton, Les Vases communicants (1932), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 158–9. 56  Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas (1891; Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1985), 27–8. 57 Huysmans, Là-Bas, 30.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  13 littérature!” (“prestige of literature!”)58—crystallizes his previous doubts about his own literary vocation.59 Yet Proust’s narrator, as Michael Lucey demonstrates, is in fact not inattentive to social situations, but rather undertakes his own kind of “fieldwork” into the pragmatic and social features of language-in-use.60 On the level of Proust’s own practice, the pastiche of the journal is the site of a stylistic confrontation with the Goncourts’ mode of écriture artiste, as well as a ne­go­ti­ation with the naturalist approach to social observation and literary fieldwork. The legacy of naturalism is therefore complex. Michel Raimond has shown that the “crisis of intelligence” after naturalism entails the rejection of an ideal point of view on the real. Nevertheless, he argues, there persists a “passion for the instant, a cult of the hic et nunc” that writers continue to seek through behaviorist techniques, interior monologue, or the exploration of psychological depths.61 I would add that this “direct grasp” of experience is also sought outside the novel, in an approach to writing with facts and with documents. It is this turn to a factual treatment of the “human document” that I examine in the present book. My focus is not on the preparatory documents studied by genetic criticism. Rather, I argue that the legacy of naturalism determines the subsequent emergence within many literary works—no longer merely in a novel’s paratext or preparatory dossier—of the document as both a discursive category and an object of documentary practices. The chapters that follow, therefore, focus on approaches to factual writing (which may sometimes integrate local forms of fictionalization) and are only indirectly concerned with works of fiction proper.

Literature, Photography, and the Filmic Imagination It is my contention that the theories and practices of naturalist literature contain the seeds of a subsequent divide between fictional and factual representations: that is, between documented novels, which integrate documentary research, and documentary works, which present documentary material. The twentieth century also reconfigures the legacy of the naturalist “human document” in the light of the new documentary possibilities associated with cinema. Cinema, as Christophe Wall-Romana has shown, becomes an “imaginary medium” in literature, functioning on the basis of homology between components of cinema and poetry.62 On 58  Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 4, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. Bibliothèque de la Pléaide (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–1989), 295. 59  Adam Watt observes of this passage that the narrator is caught between two conclusions: “Life devalues reading and thereby devalues itself; reading valorizes life, and indirectly devalues itself, by necessitating its own abandonment in favour of the empirical.” Watt, Reading in Proust’s À La Recherche: “Le délire de la lecture” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 96. 60  Michael Lucey, “Proust and Language-in-Use,” Novel 48(2) (August 1, 2015): 261–2. 61  Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman, 14. 62  Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1–3.

14  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY the conceptual level, this cinematic imaginary often serves as a discursive countermodel, as when the narrator of Proust’s Recherche rejects the reduction of literature to “une sorte de défilé cinématographique des choses” (“a sort of cinematographic parade of things”).63 Relegating to film the representation of external appearances (also associated with naturalist observation), this account assigns to literature the expression of the inner truth of experience. The opposition between literary interiority and cinematic exteriority is an enduring commonplace, even a cliché, echoing Baudelaire’s anxiety about the public’s worship of “external reality” in the form of photography.64 Yet, as a number of critics have shown, the filmic, and especially the photographic image give rise to more nuanced reflections and stylistic practices in Proust’s novel as a whole, since they become analogies for the revelation of temporal processes.65 In any case, there emerges alongside modernist subjectivism the fantasy of a pure recording that Raymond Queneau denounces in 1946 as “the myth of docu­ mentary”: “Le documentaire pur n’existe pas, même si l’on promenait la caméra au hasard (car l’homme ne peut imiter le hasard). Le documentaire ne parle pas le langage de la science (qui est, idéalement, la mathématique), mais celui du cinéma, c’est-à-dire des images mouvantes” (“Pure documentary doesn’t exist, even if one moved the camera along randomly, because man cannot imitate chance. Documentary doesn’t speak the language of science [which is, ideally, mathematics], but the language of cinema, that is to say, of moving images”).66 I would argue, however, that this myth of documentary is an operative one for the arts and literature of the twentieth century, motivating a reflection on modes of representation and mobilizing new aesthetic strategies across media. Furthermore, it is not wholly naïve to hold that photographic images are, in a sense, “transparent”67—which does not mean that they are unmediated. What André Bazin calls the “ontology” and Roland Barthes the “essence” of the photographic image stems from the real connection between the photographic image and its referent. For Bazin, the realist power of the photographic image (and hence of cinema) lies in its “essential objectivity,” achieved through the mechanical reproduction that accomplishes a transfer of reality beyond any human efforts to create resemblance.68 Rosalind Krauss usefully links this notion of transfer to the linguistic 63 Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 4, 461. 64  Charles Baudelaire, “Le public moderne et la photographie,” Salon de 1859, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, ed. Claude Pichois. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 619. 65  Suzanne Guerlac, “Visual Dust. On Time, Memory, and Photography in Proust,” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 13(4) (2009): 397–404; Patrick Mathieu, Proust, une question de vision. Pulsion scopique, photographie et représentations littéraires (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); Martine Beugnet and Marion Schmid, Proust at the Movies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 66  Raymond Queneau, “Le mythe du documentaire,” Labyrinthe 22–23 (1946): 28. 67 Kendall  L.  Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11(2) (1984): 251. 68  André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), 11–19.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  15 category of “shifters” or deictics—signs, such as pronouns, whose referent is ­context-dependent—and by extension to Charles Peirce’s notion of the in­dex­ic­al sign. Unlike icons, which refer through resemblance, or symbols, which depend on conventions and norms, “indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents.”69 Examples are footprints or medical symptoms, traces of a cause that becomes their referent. Photographs, as “the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface” are both icons and indexes, since they both resemble and are physically connected to their object.70 Roland Barthes describes this connection as an “em­an­ation” of the referent, the delayed transmission of light from a real body.71 Despite recent attempts to reconceptualize photography as “analogy” or to foreground its fictional potential,72 this understanding of photography as indexical-iconic remains relevant as an account of our relation to photography. Yet, as Tom Gunning suggests, these semiotic terms are perhaps insufficient to account for our “phe­nom­eno­ logic­al fascination” with photography, which seems to open up a world in a way that exceeds signification.73 Drawing on the language of indexicality or causal impression, Christian Metz argues that the cinematographic image, by virtue of its movement, has a pro­ject­ ive power greater than that of photography, so that the “this has been” of the photo­graph (Barthes) becomes “there it is”: “In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of the impression, the real presence of motion.”74 My point here is to do with the way in which the indexicality of the photographic-cinematic image, by determining a certain conception of film as documentary in itself, exerts a fascination that extends beyond cinema. Since the camera always records something that is already there, Bill Nichols is able to assert that “every film is a documentary,” even as he gives a special status to documentary images that “not only provide visible evidence, they pack an emotional punch, boosted by the indexical whammy of our own belief in their authenticity.”75 François Niney affirms, similarly, that “le cinéma est né documentaire” (“cinema was born as documentary”); that is, “documentary” designates first and foremost a property

69  Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (1977): 70. 70  Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” 75. 71  Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (1980), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 5, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 854. 72  On the photographic image as analogy, see Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy: Or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). On photography as fiction, see Paul Edwards, Soleil noir: la photographie et la littérature: des origines au surréalisme (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 23. 73  Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs,” NORDICOM Review 5(1–2) (September 2004): 45–6. 74  Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 6, 9. 75 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1 and 57.

16  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY of the camera.76 Certainly, from the earliest “actualités,” film fascinates for its capacity to grasp visible reality. Nevertheless, the term “documentary” covers different conceptions and practices of nonfiction film, from “actualités” based on the visual presentation of a view or object, “to a film form which embedded its images in a larger argument and used those images as evidence to substantiate or intensify its discourse.”77 The application of the term “documentary” to film is usually attributed to John Grierson, who in a 1926 review referred to the “documentary value” of Robert Flaherty’s film Moana (but only in order to subordinate this value to the film’s poetic one),78 and who later defined documentary, first in 1932, as “arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings” of “natural material,”79 and then in 1933 as “the creative treatment of actuality.”80 Complicating this story, Olivier Lugon shows that the French word documentaire referred at the beginning of the twentieth century to a relatively neutral understanding of the photographic document as archival record, then crossed over quickly into the English docu­ mentary, and finally returned to France in the 1920s and ’30s, bearing the idea of a certain social content and moral engagement.81 If the category appears more stable today, it still “occupies no fixed territory,” as Bill Nichols puts it.82 The genre includes Robert Flaherty’s staged narratives, the Kino-Pravda (“cinema-truth”) of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, the cinéma-vérité of Jean Rouch, historical docu­ mentary (Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, Marcel Ophuls), North American direct cinema, and the more recent work of Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Errol Morris, and others. Literature sometimes directly borrows the photographic/cinematic conception of documentary. Thus Cendrars’ Kodak/Documentaires (discussed at the start of this chapter) or Pierre Mac Orlan’s “poésies documentaires” (“documentary poems”) invoke the logic of the snapshot (instantané).83 Paul Morand uses the term “documentaire” to designate travel writings such as Paris, Tombouctou (1928). In the broader realm of nonfiction, the interwar years bring to prom­in­ence the figure of the writer-reporter (Cendrars, Morand, Soupault, Kessel, Simenon, Malraux), who becomes the bearer of what Myriam Boucharenc calls “le mot d’ordre du vécu” (“the watchword of lived experience”), precisely at a moment 76 François Niney, Le Documentaire et ses faux-semblants. 50 Questions (Paris: Klincksieck, 2009), 19. 77  Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic” (1997), in The Documentary Film Reader, ed. Jonathan Kahana (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 60. 78  John Grierson, “Flaherty’s Poetic Moana” (1926), in Kahana, The Documentary Film Reader, 86. 79 Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy, rev. edn (London: Faber, 1966), 146. 80  Grierson, “The Documentary Producer” (1933), in Kahana, The Documentary Film Reader, 216. 81  Olivier Lugon, “L’anonymat d’auteur,” in Le Statut d’auteur dans l’image documentaire: signature du neutre (actes du colloque organisé par le service culturel du Jeu de paume le 3 décembre 2005), ed. Emmanuelle Chérel and Olivier Lugon (Paris: Jeu de paume, 2006), 6–14. 82 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 12. 83  Pierre Mac Orlan, Poésies documentaires complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1954).

Introduction: Speaking Facts  17 when a number of thinkers deem literature to be in crisis.84 These ex­amples nevertheless seem to be marginal,85 in that we do not see the emergence of a recognized literary genre of documentary, either poetic or narrative, in the twentieth century. Instead, it is the category of the document that becomes central within literature, both expanding and calling into question the realm of the literary. It does this effectively precisely because the document functions as a counter-idea to the notion of literature. That said, the literary work does not usually present itself as a document per se, which would entail an ambiguous play between the documentary origin of the work and its final status—that is, as at once an autonomous document in its own right and a realist work dependent on other documents.86 Rather, I argue, it is through a particular use and organization of documents— which are recorded, assembled, and investigated—that the work presents itself as documentary—where the latter term serves as an adjective rather than a noun. The documentary imagination, in literature, is not limited to any single genre and can encompass various types of factual material.

Evidence, Index, Imprint Documents are not restricted to photographs, even if photographs tend to be a privileged instance of indexicality. But photographs are not purely indexical, nor is the indexical limited to the photographic. The documents I consider in this book range from locks of hair to newspaper clippings. In the case of verbal docu­ ments, linguistic indexicality is present in deixis—those shifters that “organize spatial and temporal relations around the ‘subject’ taken as a reference point.”87 The indexical dimension of language is thus anchored in the problem of sub­ject­ iv­ity and its constitution in language. But the subject’s relationship to the document is not just a linguistic construction but also an embodied connection; it entails contact with tangible or perceptible evidence that is held in hand or visible before one’s eyes.

84  Myriam Boucharenc, L’Écrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004), 37. 85 Michel Murat judges the expression “poésie documentaire,” unlike the “poetic document” (“docu­ment poétique”) of the surrealists, to have had only a limited effect on prevailing conceptions of the poem (constituting only a “subgenre”). Murat, “Le Jugement originel de la réalité,” Communications 79 (2006): 125. 86  This doubling of reference defines Jean Bessière’s concept of the “œuvre document.” In my view, however, the documentary work does not usually present itself as a document per se, but as the result of composition with documents. Jean Bessière, “Littérature: l’œuvre document et la communication de l’ignorance: d’une archéologie (Daniel Defoe) et d’une illustration (Norman Mailer),” in “Des faits et des gestes: le parti pris du document, 2,” ed. Jean-François Chevrier et Philippe Roussin, special issue, Communications 79 (2006): 319–35. 87  Émile Benveniste, “De la subjectivité dans le langage,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 262.

18  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY At another level, as Renaud Dulong argues, it is the body of the witness that provides the material foundation for the evidential function of testimony, allowing attestation to function as an “operator of factuality” in the same way as other forms of material evidence.88 This point complicates the frequent opposition between the non-intentional trace (whose unconscious truth must be revealed by the interpreter/expert) and intentional testimony (the subjective account of an experience). Literature reconnects disembodied traces to the voice of the witness, aiming to make facts speak. As Hannah Arendt observes, “Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.”89 In this sense, the docu­ mentary relation becomes an interpersonal one, linking different speakers; documents are often used to produce a form of vicarious testimony. This necessary relation of written documents to a speaking subject often produces an ambiguous documentary posture in literary works, whereby the author attempts self-effacement behind the supposedly self-evident facts, yet must constantly intervene to authorize these facts, which do not speak for themselves. To the concept of the document as index—a sign that points to its cause—it may be helpful to attach the notion of the empreinte, as analyzed by Georges DidiHuberman. The imprint, track, or trace is a reproduction of the real that implies both contact and distance, resulting from a singular gesture of capture that produces a durable mark: “each imprint liberates a paradoxical species of efficacy or magic—that, in particular, of being at once singular as a corporeal grasp and universalizable as serial reproduction; that of producing extreme resemblances that are not mimesis but duplication.”90 Compatible with the notion of the index and the practices associated with the “evidential paradigm,” as analyzed by Carlo Ginzburg (conjectures based on the circumstantial analysis of animal tracks, symptoms, clues, involuntary marks, traces of various kinds),91 the idea of the empreinte has the advantage of emphasizing an awareness of forms and the ma­ter­ ial presence of the object, allowing us to conceive of a phenomenology, as well as a semiotics, of the document. The document is a thing that takes on a particular form, as well as a sign that points in a certain direction. Moreover, the para­dox­ ical conjunction of singularity and reproducibility, contact and distance, is central 88  Renaud Dulong, “Les opérateurs de factualité. Les ingrédients matériels et affectuels de l’évidence historique,” Politix 10(39) (1997): 65–85. 89  Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 6. 90  “Chaque empreinte libère une espèce paradoxale d’efficacité ou de magie—celle, notamment, d’être à la fois singulière comme emprise corporelle et universalisable comme reproduction sérielle; celle de produire des ressemblances extrêmes qui ne sont pas mimèsis mais duplication.” Georges Didi-Huberman et Didier Semin, “Faire une empreinte,” in L’Empreinte, ed. Didi-Huberman (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), 11. 91 Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (1986), in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 87–133.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  19 to literary treatments of the document. As Didi-Huberman notes, the role of contact in producing imprints also usefully counteracts the tendency to privilege photography as a “trace lumineuse” (luminous trace) that captures truth by escaping bodies and beliefs.92 For my purposes, it thus restores to the notion of the document its human dimension—taking us back precisely to the “human docu­ ment” that is the main concern of literature. The philosopher Maurizio Ferraris theorizes the document as the paradigm of the social object, defined as an “inscribed act.”93 From this point of view, docu­ ments are not only traces of the real, pointing back to a material cause, but also inscriptions that are constitutive of social reality (but not of reality in general, since not all facts are socially constructed). Ferraris’s social ontology, based on his theory of “documentality,” is allied to a philosophical “new realism” that rejects the excesses of postmodern constructivism by distinguishing between the unamendability of the external world and the amendability of conceptual schemes— while also allowing for a necessary continuity between facts and interpretations.94 Literary uses of the document, however, complicate Ferraris’s distinction between the “strong document”—“the inscription of an act”—and the “weak document”— “the registration of a fact.”95 In literary works, documents are removed from their original context and repurposed: acts become evidence, but the factual record also becomes the object of a reanimating act. If documents attest, rather than represent, as Ferraris argues,96 then documentary literature also departs from a realism understood as representation or mimesis—even if documents can give rise to representations, or be treated as such. Reflecting on the distinction between documentary and fiction film, Jacques Rancière notes that the former, “instead of treating the real as an effect to be produced, treats it as a fact to be understood.”97 The document, whether it is produced or found, mediates this fact of the real. Such approaches to fact abound in twentieth-century literature. In the “Case d’Armons” section of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918), composed at the front in 1915, one of the poems appears in the form of a handwritten postcard, complete with postmark.98 The surrealists appeal to the document as an anti-fictional principle: in his preface to the 1963 revised edition of Nadja (1928), André Breton emphasizes that his narrative is a

92 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008), 192. 93  Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces, trans. Richard Davies. Commonalities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 49. 94 Ferraris, Manifesto of New Realism, trans. Sarah De Sanctis (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014), 34, 51. 95 Ferraris, Documentality, 267. 96 Ferraris, Documentality, 267. 97  Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 159. 98  Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (1913–1916) (1918), in Œuvres poétiques, ed. Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 226.

20  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY “document pris sur le vif ” (“a document taken from life”),99 while the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille and his associates produce the review Documents (1929–1930), which stages a dialogue and conflict between the artistic and the ethnographic document (see Chapter 2). In the period following World War II, the emergence of a literature of testimony on the one hand and a suspicion of fictional modes of narration on the other raise the specter of what Nathalie Sarraute calls the “document vécu” (“the lived document”) as a real alternative to the fictional worlds of the novel (see Chapter 4).100 Still, in the 1950s and ’60s, Sarraute and other writers identified with the nouveau roman (New Novel) remain largely in the realm of fiction, even as they experiment with narrative form. In a 1967 lecture that assesses the possibilities of French literature after the nouveau roman, the novelist Georges Perec describes the document as a kind of “relay”—not a fragment of reality but an interface between literature and the world.101 A member of the experimental group Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), Perec experiments not only with fiction but also with forms of factual writing, attempting in the 1970s to document the “infra-ordinary”—the background noise of daily life.102 In the 1980s, the poet Emmanuel Hocquard defines his conception of “negative modernity” in terms of techniques of sampling, duplication, and “literality,” citing as one of his models Charles Reznikoff ’s Testimony: The United States, 1885–1915: Recitative (1934–1978)—a multi-volume compilation-collage of court records.103 The so-called return to the real in contemporary French literature since the 1980s is at once the latest chapter in this history and an attempt to rethink literature’s relationship to facts in a world saturated by both information and noise. As these examples indicate, literary uses of documents participate in a complex tradition where documents are at once indexical signs of the real—giving the impression of immediacy—and objects of practices of collage, montage, repurposing and détournement that draw our attention to the multiple ways in which reality is mediated. Documents possess a kind of self-evidence and may provoke spontaneous belief, or conversely an attitude of suspicion that leads to a process of evaluation and verification. They mediate individual voices, while they are also shaped by larger social and institutional structures. This book takes as its subject a documentary tendency and a “literature of fact” that has been neglected in French literary studies, even as its presence in other national contexts is more readily recognized. For instance, the Russian avant-garde’s notion of faktura, adopted in the first decades of twentieth century by visual artists 99  André Breton, “Avant-dire (dépêche retardée),” Nadja (1963 rev. ed.), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert, and José Pierre, Vol. 1, 646. 100  Nathalie Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 66. 101  Georges Perec, “Pouvoirs et limites du romancier français contemporain” (1967), in Entretiens et conférences, ed. Dominique Bertelli and Mireille Ribière, Vol. 1 (Nantes: Joseph K., 2003), 86. 102  Georges Perec, L’Infra-ordinaire. La Librairie du XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1989). 103  Emmanuel Hocquard, La Bibliothèque de Trieste (Asnières-sur-Oise: Fondation Royaumont, 1988), 32–3.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  21 and then by futurist poets, designated a concern with the working of material, before the futurists (along with formalist critics) espoused a practice of “factography” that reoriented techniques of collage and assemblage toward documentary representation.104 In German modernism, literature engaged in what Andreas Huyssen calls “remediation in reverse”: a refashioning of an older medium in the light of new techniques, in this case photography and film, and a critical working through of the possibilities of each medium.105 The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) of Weimar Germany gives rise to documentary practices (in the work of writers such as Brecht, Döblin, and Piscator) that later find an echo in postwar confrontations with the national past: the documentary theater of Peter Weiss, the mixed-genre works of Alexander Kluge; the documentary fictions and essays of W. G. Sebald.106 The American “nonfiction novel,” as practiced by such writers as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, adopts a reportorial model while also harking back to the modernist techniques of John Dos Passos.107 As for the related tendency of “New Journalism,” championed by Tom Wolfe and others,108 its fusion of factual reporting with techniques drawn from realist fiction has led some to define it as a new form of fiction109 and others to defend nonfictional narrative’s specific way of implicating its writers and ­readers in history.110 The documentary impulse in French literature, while often in dialogue with these traditions, might at first glance appear more muted. Undoubtedly, the idea of literature as intransitive and autotelic resonates strongly in the French context. Yet this ideal is in tension with actual practices—a contradiction exemplified in my corpus of works by the cases of Gide and Yourcenar, whose fascination for documents pulls against their (modernist) conception of the autonomous literary work (see Chapters 1 and 3). These cases may be seen as instances of a more general dilemma in aesthetic theory and practice on a global scale. In 1978, for

104  Vahan D. Barooshian, “Russian Futurism in the Late 1920’s: Literature of Fact,” Slavic and East European Journal 15(1) (1971): 38–46; Benjamin  H.  D.  Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (October 1, 1984): 83–119; Maria Gough, “Faktura: The Making of the Russian AvantGarde,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (October 1, 1999): 32–59. On the longer history of factual writing in Russia and the development of factographic writing in the 1920s and 30s, see Leonid Heller, “Le Mirage du vrai: remarques sur la littérature factographique en Russie,” in “Le Parti pris du document,” ed. Jean-François Chevrier and Philippe Roussin, special issue, Communications 71(1) (2001): 143–77. 105 Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 8; On “remediation,” defined as the refashioning of older media by new media, see David J. Bolter, and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 106  Mark M. Anderson, “Documents, Photography, Postmemory: Alexander Kluge, W. G. Sebald, and the German Family,” Poetics Today 29(1) (2008): 129–53. 107  See John Hollowell, Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). 108  Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, eds, The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). 109  John Hellmann, Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 24–7. 110  Daniel Wayne Lehman, Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 4–5.

22  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY instance, the American photographer Allan Sekula asserted the need to “dismantle” modernism in the name of documentary, in order to break with the idealist aesthetics that elevates the artist as genius and locates art in a “mystified, vaporous, and ahistorical realm of purely affective expression and experience.”111 To position documentary as simply the countermodel to modernist purity, however, is to miss the ways in which modernist practices have encompassed techniques for assembling and presenting documentary material, in ways that profoundly reconfigure the realist legacy. In this respect, a focus on documents calls into question the supposed gap between a high modernist aestheticism and the avantgarde practices that aim to reintegrate art into daily life.112 At the very least, the disjunction between the original document and its integration into the work of art becomes the site of a negotiation between these tendencies.

Fact and Fiction The neglect of documentary practices in literature can be attributed in part to the assumptions of literary theory and criticism. Structuralism, introducing “a moratorium on representational topics,”113 bracketed the question of reference; more recently, while theoretical work on fiction has flourished, factual genres continue to suffer from what Jean-Louis Jeannelle calls a “theoretical deficit.”114 More than critical neglect, it is the very definition of the literary field that is at stake. At issue is the demarcation of literary art from what Hegel calls the “common prose of life”—meaning both the “prosaic” dimension of experience and consciousness, and the prose signs that are continuous with this experience.115 Or to put things more pragmatically, fiction, according to Gérard Genette, is “constitutionally” literary, whereas nonfiction prose, since it lacks both the formal features that distinguish poetry and the thematic dimension of fictionality, can only attain a “conditional” literary status, dependent on a subjective criterion: its perceived aesthetic value.116 However, this account leaves aside important historical vari­ ations in the status of factual texts,117 as well as the possibility, suggested by Leona Toker, that the reader’s very hesitation about the literary status of a documentary 111  Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” The Massachusetts Review 19(4) (1978): 859. 112  This opposition is formulated by Peter Bürger in his influential Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 113  Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 6. 114  Jean-Louis Jeannelle, “L’acheminement vers le réel. Pour une étude des genres factuels: le cas de Mémoires,” Poétique 139 (September 2004): 284. 115 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 245. 116 Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction, précédé de Introduction à l’architexte (1991). Collection Points. (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 88. 117  Jeannelle, “L’acheminement vers le réel.”

Introduction: Speaking Facts  23 narrative “also belongs to the realm of aesthetic experience.”118 Nevertheless, the theoretical difficulties are manifest at the level of terminology. Nonfiction is a “very awkward” term (très gauche), notes Genette.119 “Documentary” is a “clumsy description,” states John Grierson, even as he applies the term to an emerging cinematic genre.120 These awkward, clumsy, or slippery terms nevertheless designate recognizable objects and practices. Indeed, as the following chapters show, this conceptual fuzziness is a constitutive part of the documentary imagination: it allows writers to treat documents as facts, to explore the relationship between cinematic and literary “documentaries,” and to set up alternatives to fiction. “Nonfiction” is a broad descriptor used for informative prose writing, generally narrative in form. It is in part a commercial category used by publishers, though it may also encompass the even vaster realm of what Daniel Fabre calls “écritures ordinaires” (“ordinary writings”) scribbled notes, lists, and letters, writing on official forms—anything whose main function is to leave a trace.121 In the literary realm more specifically, the category of nonfiction encompasses genres ranging from the essay to various forms of life-writing (biography, autobiography, memoir, testimony) that have tended to occupy the margins of literature, outside the dominant genres of the novel and poetry. The fiction/nonfiction binary is also a distinctively Anglophone one, which tends to identify the former term with the novel and the short story. French usage, by contrast, has until quite recently preferred genre classifications (novel, poetry, essay, theater) to designate literary works. If this situation is now changing, and the terms “fiction” and “nonfiction,” have become more central in the French literary landscape, it is in part to account for the profusion of “Objets verbaux non-identifiés” or OVNIs (unidentified verbal objects) that populate the scene of recent literature (see Epilogue).122 The very morphology of the term “nonfiction,” of course, acknowledges the cultural dom­ in­ance of the novel. The Anglophone tradition of the “nonfiction novel” or “cre­ ative nonfiction” functions both within and against the literary norm, ex­pli­cit­ly taking the novel as its narrative model even as it looks to journalistic techniques for assembling its factual “content.” If “nonfiction” defines its object negatively in relation to fiction, the alternative designations of “serious” or “referential” statement carry the assumption that fiction is modeled on, but departs from, ordinary discourse. Theorists have therefore focused on the special characteristics of fiction. At the level of the utterance, which tends to be the focus of analytic philosophers, the problem centers on the 118 Leona Toker, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose—From the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies.” Poetics Today 18(2) (July 1, 1997): 214. 119 Genette, Fiction et diction, 110. 120 Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, 99. 121 Daniel Fabre, “Introduction,” in Écritures ordinaires, ed. Daniel Fabre (Paris: P.O.L/Centre Georges Pompidou, Bibliothèque publique d’information, 1993), 11. 122  The term is modeled on the French acronym for UFO and was first proposed by Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alféri in 1995. See Christophe Hanna, Nos dispositifs poétiques. Forbidden Beach (Paris: Questions théoriques, 2010), 1–2.

24  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY propositional content of assertions about the world.123 Thus for John Searle, fictional utterances are “non-serious” in that they do not commit the author to the view they express; their identifying criterion is the “illocutionary intention” of the author, not any property of the text itself.124 Focusing instead on the level of narrative structures, Genette distinguishes between factual and fictional narrative, while denying that there is an “apriori difference of narrative regime” between the two.125 Dorrit Cohn draws a line between “referential” and “non-referential” narrative, but argues against Searle and Genette that there are in fact “signposts of fictionality” internal to the text: the “synchronic bi-level” model of narrative (separation into story and discourse), certain narrative modes for the presentation of consciousness, and the “doubling of the narrative instance into author and narrator.”126 The difficulty is that nonfiction narrative often integrates the first two of these signposts. The last one can be mapped onto Philippe Lejeune’s notion of the fictional pact, in contrast with the autobiographical one that (explicitly or implicitly) asserts the identity of author, narrator, and character. A broader version of the autobiographical pact is the “referential pact” that entails a claim to provide information on the real and the possibility of verification.127 My understanding of factual narrative is grounded in this notion of a referential pact, while I also draw on Renaud Dulong’s account of “operators of factuality”; that is, the processes and conditions (the dispositif ) that give material evidence the force of self-evidence, making it function as testimony even as it may also be subjected to rational evaluation and verification, as a trace.128 The document, which speaks facts or is made to give up its truth, is perhaps the emblematic operator of factuality. By focusing on the processes that allow factuality to function in ordinary communication, Dulong’s pragmatic approach has the advantage of allowing for historical and cultural variation, while bypassing the epistemological skepticism that holds, following Nietzsche, that “facts [. . .] do not exist, only interpretations.”129 In that Nietzschean vein, the strong constructivist claim is not only that facts are constructed but that the notion of fact itself is bound up with the operations of power. Thus Bruno Latour proposes the world “faitiche” or “factish,” a com­bin­ation of fact and fetish, to critique the Western dichotomy between the superstitious 123  For an account (and a rejection) of the claim that literary (i.e. fictional) texts contain propositional truth, see Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); especially ch. 13, “The Propositional Theory of Literary Truth.”. 124  John R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” New Literary History 6(2) (1975): 320–1, 325. 125 Genette, Fiction et diction, 141, 166. 126 Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 130. 127  Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 36. 128  Dulong, “Les opérateurs de factualité,” 68, 79. 129 Friedrich  W.  Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1883–1888), ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann, trans. R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), n. 481.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  25 beliefs of others (projected onto objects) and “our” own discovery of “facts” in these objects.130 Attempts to trace the social construction of facts include Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact,131 while Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, and James Chandler, among others, have examined the emergence of concepts of evidence and objectivity in the light of scientific practices.132 Without denying that the concept of “fact” has a history, my own position is closer to the “moderate differentialism” advocated in Françoise Lavocat’s Fait et fiction: pour une frontière (2016), which brings together perspectives from narratology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, law, and cognitive science to define a plural set of borders between fact and fiction.133 However, I will also consider certain forms of factualization and fictionalization which call these borders into question, beyond the kinds of internal metalepsis (the crossing of ontological levels within fictional worlds) which are Lavocat’s privileged mode of border crossing. Documentary narratives, while establishing an overall referential context, often explore the uncertain zone between fact, interpretation, and imaginative projection, between the recording of facts and the elaboration of fiction. Nevertheless, I heed Eric Heyne’s important warning against two forms of confusion: between the factual status of a text and its factual adequacy; and between fictionality and literary merit.134 That is, nonfiction prose does not have to become fiction to be read as literary; and factual inaccuracy does not in itself produce fiction. The notion of the “documentary imagination,” as I understand it here, respects the distinction between fact and fiction while acknowledging the interweaving of the imaginary and the real, the affective and the epistemological—including the pleasure in knowing that Bill Nichols calls “epistephilia,” as well as the “desire for reality” as knowledge and as spectacle analyzed by Elizabeth Cowie.135 The docu­ mentary imagination encompasses conjectures and fictionalizations inspired by documents, but also ways of imagining the document itself as a fragment of reality to be rescued, or to be animated as a voice that speaks across a divide. The document becomes the site of a desired encounter with the real—an impulse that inevitably runs up against constraints of verification and the practical challenges of interpreting documents within a larger discourse.

130  Bruno Latour, Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches; suivi de Iconoclash. Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond (Paris: La Découverte, 2009). 131  Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 132 Lorraine  J.  Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010); James K. Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry N. Harootunian, eds, Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 133  Françoise Lavocat, Fait et fiction: pour une frontière (Paris: Seuil, 2016). 134  Eric Heyne, “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 3(3) (1987): 480–3. 135 Nichols, Representing Reality, 31; Elizabeth Cowie, The Spectacle of Actuality,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19.

26  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY Attempts to define “documentary realism,” or “documentary fiction,” often reassert the primacy of the realist novel as a model and treat documentary value as something that is “added on” to fiction or to traditional narrative modes.136 There has nevertheless been important recent work on the territories of the factual and the documentary in literature: Jean-François Chevrier and Philippe Roussin’s journal issues on works that “take the side” of the document;137 Jean-Louis Jeannelle’s call for the re-evaluation of factual genres;138 and Marie-Jeanne Zenetti’s study of contemporary “factographies”: texts that abandon narrative in favor of fragmentary modes of recording and documentary montage.139 In the introduction to their edited volume Un art documentaire (2017), Aline Caillet and Frédéric Pouillaude argue for an interdisciplinary, cross-media use of the notion of documentary. They also offer a useful distinction between the notion of nonfictional representation in general and the idea of the documentary work; the latter proposes a specific kind of empirical anchoring in the real and is oriented toward exteriority rather than the self.140 Taking up Caillet and Pouillaude’s restriction, my book does not seek to exhaust the realm of literary nonfiction in France, but focuses more specifically on the conceptualization and uses of the document (and, by extension, of the documentary) in a literary context. In this respect, the documentary narratives that concern me here are to be distinguished both from documented fictions that use documentary background in the service of fictional stories, and from nonfic­ tion novels that incorporate documentary research into a seamless narrative whole. Documentary literature, as I understand it here, involves the presentation of documents. As such, it intersects with various kinds of factual writing (trav­el­ ogue, autobiography, testimony) rather than corresponding to a particular ­genre.141 This book is thus at once broad in scope and focused on a specific discursive and thematic constellation within twentieth-century literature. It also 136  See Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Lars Ole Sauerberg, Fact into Fiction: Documentary Realism in the Contemporary Novel (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991). The former discusses novels from the eighteenth century to the present, and the latter focuses on postwar American literature; both essentially treat the “documentary” as a variant or extension of realist fiction. 137 Jean-François Chevrier and Philippe Roussin, “Présentation,” “Le Parti pris du document,” Communications 71 (2001): 7; Roussin and Chevrier (eds), “Des faits et des gestes. Le parti pris du document,” Communications 79 (2006). 138  Jeannelle, “L’acheminement vers le réel.” 139  Marie-Jeanne Zenetti, Factographies: l’enregistrement littéraire à l’époque contemporaine (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014). See also Marie-Jeanne Zenetti and Camille Bloomfield, eds, “Usages du document en littérature,” special issue, Littérature 166(2) (2012). 140  Aline Caillet and Frédéric Pouillaude, eds, Un art documentaire: enjeux esthétiques, politiques et éthiques (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes: 2017), 10–11. 141  In this sense, my approach differs from Marielle Macé’s study of the twentieth-century essay, Jean-Louis Jeannelle’s analysis of memoirs, or Sam Ferguson’s work on diaries. See Marielle Macé, Le Temps de l’essai: histoire d’un genre en France au XXe siècle (Paris: Belin, 2006); Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Écrire ses Mémoires au XXe siècle: déclin et renouveau (Paris: Gallimard, 2008); Sam Ferguson, Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Introduction: Speaking Facts  27 extends over a different historical period than other studies of factographic or documentary literature, which tend to deal with literature after 1960.142 I highlight the fundamental continuity between the naturalist “human document,” modernist and avant-garde conceptions and practices of the document, and the new forms of factual literature that begin to proliferate at the end of the twentieth century. Unlike approaches that oppose factography to narrative forms, this book takes narrative as a privileged axis. This is not to discount the important tradition of “poetic documents,” which extends from Apollinaire to Emmanuel Hocquard and Nathalie Quintane, and is theorized in Franck Leibovici’s Des documents poétiques (2007) and Christophe Hanna’s Nos dispositifs poétiques (2010).143 But factual narrative interests me because it brings literature into close proximity with history writing, journalism, and various forms of storytelling. My aim in this regard is not to systematically compare historical and fictional narrative, often treated as the two main classes of “narrative discourses”144—although I reject the claim that “all stories are fictions” which conflates narrative construction and invention.145 Rather, my focus is the complex relationship that is woven between narratives and documents—or what Carlo Ginzburg calls threads and traces—within those literary works that adhere to an overall factual pact.146 As a historian, Ginzburg is concerned with the use of traces to tell true stories, “untangling the strands of the true, the false, and the fictional which are the substance of our being in the world.”147 This is, of course, not a new concern in historiography. In L’Archéologie du savoir (The Archeology of Knowledge, 1969), Michel Foucault argues that the questioning of the document is at the heart of the modern transformation of history: History has altered its position in relation to the document: it has taken as its primary task, not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what is its expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it: history now organizes the document, divides it up, distributes it, orders it, arranges it in levels, establishes series, distinguishes

142  One exception is the varied set of case studies on the “documentary impulse” in French literature assembled by Buford Norman in the edited volume of conference proceedings The Documentary Impulse in French Literature. French Literature Series, XXVIII (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001). 143  Franck Leibovici, Des documents poétiques. Questions théoriques/Forbidden Beach. (Marseille: Al Dante, 2007); Hanna, Nos dispositifs poétiques. 144  Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, 3 vols. L’Ordre Philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 1:123. 145 Hayden V. White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 9. 146  Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012). 147 Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 7.

28  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY between what is relevant and what is not, discovers elements, defines unities, describes relations.148

While literature also gives itself the task of working on and with the document, I would argue that it simultaneously resists or questions the procedures that transform documents into monuments.149 Literary texts often radicalize the distance that, according to Michel de Certeau, separates “the analytical apparatus, which is present,” and the materials analyzed, the documents.150 In the literary works that I consider in this book, the confrontation between narrative, analysis, and docu­ ment is not simply part of the writing process but is staged within the final text, producing a layered and reflexive structure that also places the narrating subject—identified here with the author—in a dynamic and troubled relation to the documents analyzed.

A Typology of Documentary Insertions The modes of documentary insertion involved in these works are distinct from the act of quotation, in that the materiality of the document is foregrounded. This is true even in the case of textual documents, which are at once visible and legible as discrete entities. The documentary relation is thus not equivalent to practices of intertextuality, although it may coincide with them. The document also functions as an intermedial contact zone, offering a vector for media transposition (the adaptation of a work from one medium to another), media combination (the presence of more than one medium), and intermedial references (including attempts to imitate techniques from another medium).151 The following brief typology summarizes the main ways of reproducing or referencing documents that are considered in this book, in order of decreasing proximity to the object: 1. Documentary collage: derived from the long tradition of the illustrated work, but also influenced by collage techniques in the visual arts, this is the

148  Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 14; trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Archeology of Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 6–7: L’histoire a changé sa position à l’égard du document: elle se donne pour tâche première, non point de l’interpréter, non point de déterminer s’il dit vrai et quelle est sa valeur expressive, mais de le travailler de l’intérieur et de l’élaborer: elle l’organise, le découpe, le distribue, l’ordonne, le répartit en niveaux, établit des séries, distingue ce qui est pertinent et ce qui ne l’est pas, repère des éléments, définit des unités, décrit des relations. 149 Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, 8. 150  Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1975), trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 10. 151  I borrow these three categories from Irina  O.  Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 51–2.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  29 introduction of the visual form of the document into the text. The object retains its autonomy and is visually distinct from the surrounding text, as in Aragon’s insertion of a newspaper column into Le Paysan de Paris (see Chapter 2). The insertion functions iconically, as a facsimile of the original object, even as it is also indexical in that it points to the original context from which it has been detached. Media combination may be involved, as in the inclusion of photographs in a literary work (Breton’s Nadja; see Chapter 2). 2. Documentary transcription: the literary text reproduces the words of a docu­ment (e.g., the words of a newspaper article or a letter) in their textual form. Yourcenar quotes the text of her mother’s souvenir pieux or death notice, for instance, but does not reproduce the typographical layout or other aspects of the visual appearance of the missive (see Chapter  3). In other words, the document is quoted but not reproduced in its original visual form. 3. Documentary transposition: the literary text “remediates” a document produced in another medium, attempting to produce a textual equivalent. I consider an (ironic) example of this practice below. 4. Documentary description: this is a verbal representation of a document that is not fully adapted from another medium or quoted verbatim. Ekphrasis, the detailed description of an object or visual image, falls into this category, but so does Gide’s summary of witness testimony in Souvenirs de la cour d’assises (see Chapter  1), when this testimony is not directly quoted but narrativized. These operations can be combined, for instance when a photograph is both inserted into the text and described. Transposition may introduce an ironic play on the notion of documentation itself. In Nathalie Quintane’s Saint Tropez (2001), for instance, a fragment of text enclosed in a rectangular frame stands in for a photograph of Roger Vadim’s and Jane Fonda’s legs on a beach, mimicking the cropping of the photo by cutting off the edges of the text (see Figure 0.1).152 One of several such pseudo-documents in Quintane’s book, this is not an instance of ekphrasis—there is no detailed description of the photograph. Rather, Quintane designates a document that is at once familiar in type (given the proliferation of celebrity images) and possibly non-existent. With its paradoxical spatial deixis “ici figure” (“here appears”), the text brings our attention to the specificity of both the linguistic and the photographic media, while it linguistically and visually performs both the presence and absence of the cited (or fictional?) document. Quintane conjures up the emblematic visual imaginary associated with the seaside resort of Saint-Tropez, while distancing us from the spectacular images of celebrity culture. The Vadim-Fonda couple is at several removes—reduced to

152  Nathalie Quintane, Saint-Tropez—Une Américaine (Paris: P.O.L, 2001), 56.

30  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY

Figure 0.1  Page from Nathalie Quintane, Saint Tropez—Une Américaine (P.O.L, 2001) Source: Nathalie Quintane, Saint-Tropez—Une Américaine © P. O. L, 2001.

faceless bodies in a missing photograph. This is a limit case that reroutes and undercuts the documentary operation itself, while iconoclastically transposing the visual into the textual, the beach (plage) into a page. In this respect, it differs from most of the examples I consider in this book, which generally depend on the authenticating function of the document, even as the latter is subject to in­ter­pret­ ation and re-elaboration.

Chapter Summary Each of my chapters focuses on a particular category or genre of documentary preoccupation in literature. Chapter  1, “Outrageously Real: André Gide’s Documentary Modernism,” dismantles the divide between modernist aestheticism and documentary reference by studying a subset of 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 collection “Ne jugez pas” (“Judge Not,” 1930), Gide’s ostensibly impersonal organization of testimonial evidence produces a complex polyphonic construction that aims to make documents speak. This work also casts light on the ethical stakes of his novels, both by underscoring the author’s attachment to the real and to questions of justice, and by revealing the possibility of fictional responses to the demands of fact. In Voyage au Congo (Travels in the Congo, 1927) and Le Retour du Tchad (Return from Chad, 1928), Gide’s politically engaged account of his ­travels in French Equatorial Africa enter into dialogue with the (largely apol­ it­ical) documentary filmmaking practices of his travelling companion, Marc Allégret. Allégret’s film (also titled Voyage au Congo), which played a role in the development of French ethnographic cinema, merits consideration in its own right. In his comments on Allégret’s cinematic process, Gide both reflects on the limitations of documentary and attempts to rival film’s spontaneous visual capture of living gesture.

Introduction: Speaking Facts  31 Chapter 2, “ ‘Pris sur le vif ’: The Surrealist Poetics of the Document,” examines the surrealists’ deployment of the verbal or photographic document as an antiliterary principle that nevertheless preserves the descriptive ambition of the nat­ ur­al­ist novel. 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 multilayered ethnographic discourse, whether in prose texts that attend to urban experience (Aragon, Breton), or, on the margins of “official” surrealism, in the work of Bataille’s magazine Documents. Finally, Michel Leiris’s reflections on ethnographic display both reveal the importance of con­text­ ual­iz­ing isolated evidence and highlight the colonial collection practices that transform indigenous artifacts into cultural “documents.” Chapter 3, “Family Relics: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Archival Autobiography,” turns to the use of documents in life-writing, specifically autobiographical narrative. Marguerite Yourcenar’s Souvenirs pieux (1974); Archives du Nord (1977), and Quoi? L’éternité (1988)—which make up her larger project Le Labyrinthe du monde (The Labyrinth of the World)—exemplify a more general archival tendency in postwar autobiography, as works by Perec, Barthes, and others supplement personal testimony with documentary materials. Yourcenar’s trilogy also 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. The result is a distinctive synthesis of material mementos and personal recollections, historical documents and family relics. Yourcenar gives her own memories limited space 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. The role of the document in mediating between personal and collective memory is further developed, but from a different perspective, in Chapter 4, “Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory after World War II.” The years immediately following World War II see the emergence of a literature of testimony, but a broad opposition between document and literature remains in force in literary journals and elsewhere. In a later moment, however, the document becomes more central to explorations of the national past. In Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur (The War, 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). Finally, I consider some later works, both French and Francophone,

32  THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGINATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY that experiment with documentary or hybrid forms to address historical trauma—especially in cases where fictionalization is perceived to be ethically risky, such as the Rwandan genocide. An epilogue serves as a counterpoint to the history traced in this introduction. While my opening pages point forward from realism and naturalism to the complex legacy of the “human document,” my closing reflection invites us to reread literary history retrospectively, from the point of view of the current obsession with facts, and in the context of the proliferation of information and data in the digital age. The historical trajectory of the book brings to light important continuities and unexpected connections. It remaps the literary landscape of the twentieth cen­ tury, offering a corrective to predominant critical discourses that place the novel at the center of the field. To set out this constellation of works, I consider texts usually treated as secondary to an author’s fictional work (such as Gide’s docu­ mentary writings and Yourcenar’s autobiographical trilogy), but also works that are undoubtedly landmarks of modern and contemporary literature (Breton’s Nadja, for instance, or Duras’s La Douleur), but which remain difficult to classify in generic terms. These are works that integrate the “human document” into the text, assert or evaluate its authenticity, and mobilize various operations of “factualization.” Challenging the dominance of fiction, the literary document becomes a crucial site of reflection on the possibilities of representation and reference. The works considered here turn away from the quest for realist resemblance toward a fascination with facts.

1

Outrageously Real André Gide’s Documentary Modernism

In a well-known passage of André Gide’s 1925 novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), the writer Édouard preaches to a skeptical audience his view that the novel should liberate itself from its subordination to the real: “ ‘Est-ce parce que, de tous les genres littéraires, discourait Édouard, le roman reste le plus libre, le plus lawless [. . .] que le roman, toujours, s’est si craintivement cramponné à la réalité?’ ” (“Is it because the novel, of all literary genres, is the freest, the most lawless,’ held forth Édouard, [. . .] ‘that the novel has always clung to reality with such timidity?’ ”) (FM, 311/C, 185). Later, in the novel’s closing chapter, Édouard professes a dislike of the fait divers—brief sensational news stories, drawn from the daily press—which he describes as having “quelque chose de péremptoire, d’indéniable, de brutal, d’outrageusement réel” (“something peremptory, undeniable, brutal, outrageously real”) about them (FM, 464/C, 394). Shockingly, the “outrageously real” event thus dismissed is the climactic event of Gide’s novel: the suicide of the young Boris La Pérouse, for which Édouard himself bears some responsibility. Gide’s fictional alter-ego banishes from his own novel—also titled Les Faux-Monnayeurs—a reality that is incomprehensible and unexpected, one that does not obey his aesthetic vision. Gide is not Édouard: it is precisely the outrageous reality of the fait divers that appeals to him. Indeed, Les Faux-Monnayeurs takes its inspiration directly from such real-life events. The murder-suicide of Boris is based on the t rue story, reported in the Journal de Rouen on June 5, 1909, of an adolescent boy driven to suicide by a malicious gang of his peers; it also draws on case history written by the Polish psychoanalyst Eugenia Sokolnicka (the model for Gide’s character Sophroniska).1 Other sources of factual inspiration include two separate stories involving counterfeiters: the case of the Luxembourg Gardens gang (1906) and that of an anarchist group of counterfeiters based in Choisy-le-Roi (1907). Reflecting on the composition of his novel in his Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (Journal of the Counterfeiters, 1926), Gide reveals some of these sources and

1 David Steel, “Gide et Freud,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 77(1) (January 1977): 70–1; Alain Goulet, Fiction et vie sociale dans l’œuvre d’André Gide (Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1985), 464–7.

34  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century includes a few press cuttings in the appendix (JFM 525, 559–60).2 In publishing the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs shortly after the novel, Gide transforms a set of genetic sources into part of the novel’s paratext, the apparatus that presents a work to its readers.3 Furthermore, he makes the journalistic fait divers legible as a text in its own right. It is in November 1926, shortly after the publication of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, that Gide begins publishing a chronicle of faits divers in the literary journal La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). Transcribed directly from newspaper cuttings, these anecdotes concern suicides, murders, thefts, cannibalism, shipwrecks, boxing matches, and divorce cases. The stories continue to appear at irregular intervals in the NRF until July 1928. The factual stratum of Gide’s novel is thus in tension with the theory of the “pure novel” expounded within the text by the character of Édouard. As Frank Lestringant points out, Gide indicts the quest for literary purity even as he attains it in his own way, via the reflexive structure of the mise-en-abyme—the embedded mirror narrative of Édouard’s writing process.4 The fait divers in Les FauxMonnayeurs also serves to challenge received ideas about history, as Alain Goulet argues: “Ce que Gide récuse dans l’histoire, c’est la notion de document non problématique. À l’histoire positiviste, événementielle, datée [. . .] son roman substitue l’histoire anecdotique, celle des ‘faits divers’, l’histoire ambiguë en train de se faire” (“What Gide objects to in history is the notion of the non-problematic document. In the place of positivist, chronological, dated history, his novel gives us anecdotal history, that of ‘faits divers,’ an ambiguous history in the making”).5 In other words, Gide values the fait divers precisely as a problematic document, a fragment that has not yet been neutralized and its edges smoothed by its incorporation into a narrative. What literature makes possible is the dramatization of this friction between experience and the stories that we construct from it. As Emily Apter notes, Gide’s faits divers, “both published and unpublished, illustrate the cliché that life imitates and even outstrips art in its configurations of the grotesque and bizarre.”6 Although the fait divers might then seem to be on the side of life against art, I would argue that the fait divers is for Gide always potentially literary precisely because it tests the boundaries of narrative representation. At the same time, Gide’s fascination for the fait divers is bound up with ambivalence about the function of literature. This ambivalence plays out in Gide’s works not only via the fait divers but also through a testimonial impulse that is a key driving force in 2  There are also sources that Gide does not reveal; see Goulet, “En remontant à la source des Fauxmonnayeurs,” Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 33(146) (April 2005): 185–211. 3  On the paratext, see Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 4  Frank Lestringant, “Du souci de pureté à la réalisation du roman pur. La généalogie symboliste des Faux-Monnayeurs d’André Gide,” in Puretés et impuretés de la littérature (1860–1940), ed. Didier Alexandre and Thierry Roger (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), 273. 5 Goulet, Fiction et vie sociale, 96. 6  Emily  S.  Apter, “Allegories of Reading/Allegories of Justice: The Gidean fait divers,” Romanic Review 80(4) (1989): 564.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  35 his writing: a desire to bear witness both to his own personal experience and to the pressures of current events.

Literature and Current Events This moment in which Gide writes should be situated within the longer history of French literary modernity, defined, according to Pierre Bourdieu’s influential account, by a claim to autonomy that emerges in nineteenth-century cultural production: the literary field is constituted by the affirmation of specific aesthetic principles that are independent of economic ones. A logical correlative to this (relative) autonomy is “the primacy of form over function, of mode of representation over the object of representation.”7 Obviously, this development does not rule out the representation of social reality—whether it is the provincial Normandy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, or the mining community of Zola’s Germinal. Still, as we have seen, the end of the nineteenth century sees a “crisis of the novel,”8 born in part of the tension between aesthetic principles and the democratizing impulse that makes anything a worthy object of representation. This is not to say that narrative realism does not persist in fiction through the twentieth century (for instance in the novels of André Malraux, Georges Simenon, or Simone de Beauvoir), at least until the authors of the nouveau roman launch a full-frontal attack on it in the 1950s (and even then, it is not that realism disappears, simply that its place in the literary canon is diminished).9 Nevertheless, we can identify a modernist moment that emerges after the 1890s as writers seek alternatives to the realist/naturalist model. While the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century (starting with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 futurist manifesto) urge a break with the past, Apollinaire’s notion of the esprit nouveau (new spirit), as he formulates it in 1916, attempts to reconcile audacious literary experiments with the legacy of French classicism.10 Gide, along with a group of intellectuals including Jean Schlumberger and Jacques Copeau, would found the NRF in 1909, followed by the NRF 7 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 299–300. 8  Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman: des lendemains du naturalisme aux années vingt (Paris: José Corti, 1966). 9  See Jacques Dubois, Les Romanciers du réel: De Balzac à Simenon (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Dubois claims that the realist enterprise comes to an end around the middle of the twentieth century. But this is a matter not only of literary production but of critical reception. Diana Holmes has challenged the dismissive (and gendered) relegation of plot-based, immersive, and mimetic fiction to the rank of the “middlebrow” (as opposed to the demanding, experimental works that have come to signify high culture). Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). 10  Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’esprit nouveau et les poètes,” Mercure de France 491 (1 December 1918): 385–96.

36  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century publishing house in 1911 (the forerunner of the Éditions Gallimard). The NRF defends the specific value of literature in a spirit of seriousness, openness, and innovation close to that of Anglo-American modernism.11 At its post-WorldWar-I relaunch, in 1919, the editor Jacques Rivière proclaimed (against nationalism and moralism) the need for intellectual and political disinterestedness.12 The interactions and overlaps between these different tendencies belie any neat sep­ar­ ation between a modernism committed to aesthetic autonomy, on the one hand, and avant-gardist attempts to reintegrate art and life, on the other.13 Indeed, part of my aim in exploring the documentary impulse within modernism is to challenge this distinction. It should also be noted that NRF in the 1920s and 1930s published a number of writers generally associated with the avant-garde (André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris). Nevertheless, a certain strain within French modernism does defend the idea of literary purity, arguing for a separation of literature both from other linguistic discourses (from what Mallarmé calls l’universel reportage) and from the artistic possibilities of other media. Thus Paul Valéry, in a 1939 lecture celebrating the centenary of photography, underlines both the concurrent emergence of literary realism and photography and the subsequence separation of “poetic fiction” and reality. In an account that parallels contemporaneous art-critical arguments for medium specificity,14 Valéry hopes that photography’s conquest of the real can lead to the purification of literature: “Une littérature se ferait pure, qui délaissant tous les autres emplois que d’autres modes d’expression ou de production remplissent bien plus efficacement qu’elle ne peut le faire, se consacrerait à ce qu’elle seule peut obtenir” (“A literature would become pure, which, leaving behind all the other uses that other modes of expression or production fulfil much more ef­fect­ ive­ly than it can, would devote itself to what it alone can achieve”).15 For Valéry, who is largely hostile to the novel and dedicated to an ideal of pure poetry, literature’s function is to express abstract thought or (in the symbolist tradition) to produce poetic resonances. But novelists, too, can pursue literary purity. The aforementioned novelist character of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Édouard, hopes to “dépouiller le roman de tous les éléments qui n’appartiennent pas spécifiquement au roman” (“strip the novel of every element that does not belong specifically to the novel”)—leaving dialogues to the phonograph, outward events to the cinema, 11  See Anna-Louise Milne (ed.), “La Nouvelle Revue Française in the Age of Modernism,” special issue, Romanic Review 99(1–2) (2008). 12 See Gisèle Sapiro, “The Writer’s Responsibility in France: From Flaubert To Sartre,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25(1) (2007): 13. 13 Cf. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 14  See Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review 7 (July–August 1940): 296–310. 15 Paul Valéry, “Discours du centenaire de la photographie” (1939), Études photographiques 10 (November 2001). https://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/265.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  37 and descriptions to the photographer (FM, 227/C, 73–74). That is, Édouard defines modernist closure in literature against the realm of the documentary and reassigns the task of recording reality to supposedly mechanical forms of inscription and reproduction. Even if, as we have seen, Gide ironically distances us from Édouard, this character’s idea of the “pure novel” is only the most extreme version of an ideal of literary autonomy expressed by many authors in the years between the two world wars—and specifically those writers who are involved with or close to the NRF. Nevertheless, the NRF would give progressively more space to current events and to the publication of “textes et documents” in the 1930s16—one notable example being Gide’s own chronicle of faits divers. Gide’s own interest in the fait divers does not prevent him from expressing similar sentiments to Édouard’s. Some of the notes in his diaries—the Journal that he would partially publish at intervals starting in 1939—define literature against its other, variously cast as reportage or testimony (témoignage), and criticize those who would reduce literature to its documentary interest. In January 1943, for instance, Gide predicts that literature will now finally separate itself from realism: “Cette guerre aura sans doute pour effet d’arracher l’art au réalisme. Le reportage, qu’on exigera le plus documentaire, délivrera la littérature, de même que la photographie a pu délivrer la peinture, par une sorte de ‘catharsis’ ” (“This war will doubtless have the effect of wresting art away from realism. Reportage, that will be expected to be as documentary as possible, will deliver literature, just as photography was able to deliver painting, through a kind of ‘catharsis’ ”) (J2, 892). This is not quite what occurred in the postwar period. On the contrary, there emerged a demand for a politically committed literature (littérature engagée), most famously articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (What is Literature?, 1948). In a lecture delivered in April 1946 in Beirut, “Souvenirs littéraires et problèmes actuels” (“Literary recollections and con­tem­por­ary problems”), Gide expresses the concern that “littérature engagée” can become a form of opportunism—a danger illustrated by the right-wing nationalism and antisemitism of the novelist Maurice Barrès (1862–1923). By contrast, Gide argues, Stéphane Mallarmé’s intransigent commitment to poetry went hand-in-hand with a humanist love of justice, leading the poet to take the right side in the Dreyfus affair.17 As Frank Lestringant points out, Gide’s aestheticism thus has an ethical dimension, uniting moral and artistic integrity as part of the same dedication to truth.18 In a journal entry dated January 19, 1948, two months after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gide contrasts the pol­it­ical preoccupations of a younger generation of writers with the contempt for “current events” (“actualité”) that he 16  Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains: 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 384. 17  André Gide, Souvenirs littéraires et problems actuels, Beirut (12 April 1946), in Souvenirs et voyages, ed. Pierre Masson, Daniel Durosay, and Martine Sagaert. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 914. 18  Lestringant, “Du souci de pureté à la réalisation du roman pur,” 265–6.

38  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century shares with a number of his contemporaries: Valéry, Proust, Suarès, and Claudel (J2, 1057). Looking back on his literary career, Gide presents himself as the voice of a generation of writers attached to a certain conception of literary autonomy— even as he recognizes that this conception may have become outdated. But this conception of literature does not mean oblivion to current events. In the same 1948 journal entry, Gide reflects back on his own role as a politically engaged intellectual, in his own way: Toutefois, lorsque besoin était de témoigner, je n’avais nullement craint de m’engager [. . .]. Mais les Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, non plus que la campagne contre les Grandes compagnies concessionnaires du Congo, ou que le Retour de l’U.R.S.S. n’ont presque aucun rapport avec la littérature. Nevertheless, when there was a need to bear witness, I was not at all afraid to commit myself. But the Recollections of the Assize Court, or also the campaign against the large concession-holding companies of the Congo, or the Return from the U.S.S.R., have almost nothing to do with literature.  (J2, 1058)

The notion of “bearing witness” (“témoigner”) likely has religious connotations for Gide, whose Protestant background shaped his moral preoccupations; nevertheless, he presents himself as morally independent. Gide thus adopts an ambiguous but not unusual authorial posture (in the sense defined by Jérôme Meizoz as a “singular manner of occupying a position in the literary field”19). As Gisèle Sapiro shows, writers from Zola to Sartre, and including Gide, grounded their political interventions precisely in their “professional values” as writers and intellectuals, free from moral and political constraints.20 Thus, Gide constructs his own public image and literary identity as a figure whose moral authority derives from his aesthetic disinterestedness. However, his public interventions and moral duty as a witness run the risk of eroding the autonomy of literature by attaching literature too closely to current events. One solution to this difficulty, as we see above, is his division of his own writings between a pure literature detached from con­tem­por­ ary concerns, and a set of—“almost”—non-literary texts—memoirs, travelogues, testimonial writings—that take a moral or political stand. In a late text published in 1950, he gives the title Littérature engagée to a collection of miscellaneous writings dating from 1930 to 1938: letters and lectures on anti-fascism, pro-communist engagement, and colonialism. This is a curious retrospective move; if the 1930s had seen Gide become a communist sympathizer, as well as joining other intellectuals in rallying in the name of anti-fascism, the period from the eve of World War II to his death in 1951 is for Gide a time of political ambivalence, hesitations,

19  Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires (Geneva: Slatkine Érudition, 2007), 1:18. 20  Sapiro, “The Writer’s Responsibility in France,” 4.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  39 and repositioning.21 The title of Littérature engagée simultaneously acknowledges and resists a recent shift in the territory of literature, while reaffirming Gide’s moral authority and influence as an intellectual. In doing so, it also points toward Gide’s particular way of investing the edges of literature—or the contact zone between literature and reality—with both social and aesthetic significance. The autobiographical is one such site of contact; the factual document is another, and it is this less-studied aspect of Gide’s body of work that I consider in this chapter.

Gide’s Documentary Space Gide’s own insistence on the boundary between (pure, disinterested) literature and committed writing, the aesthetic and the actual, does not hold for his own complex body of work. Still, some critics have identified Gide’s political engagement with a particular moment in his career, specifically his period of communist fellow-travelling.22 Others have given privileged place to his fictional works as the site of his investigation of social life.23 Beyond the fictional space that includes the “soties” (“satirical works”) Paludes (Morasses, 1895) and Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars, 1914), the novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs, various récits (firstperson fictional narratives), and works of theater, but also such unclassifiable prose texts as Les Nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth, 1897), Gide also deploys a range of factual modes throughout his career. These include an extensive collection of critical essays, the daily notes of Gide’s personal diary (destined for partial publication in the 1940s), and the retrospective autobiographical accounts of Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die, 1926) and Et nunc manet in te (1947). Gide’s autobiographical writings have rightly been seen as a key site of ethical engagement, specifically in their reflection on sexuality and truth-telling. Beyond the directly autobiographical works such as Si le grain ne meurt, Philippe Lejeune identifies in Gide’s body of work an “autobiographical space,” emerging from “an architecture of texts, some of them fictional, others critical, others undoubtedly personal, to which Gide assigns the task of revealing his image.”24 Michael Lucey has shown how Gide’s homosexuality and his reflections on his sexual identity inflect both his politics and aesthetics, shaping his forms of narrativization, his literary treatment of colonialism and communism, and his ambivalence toward

21 On Gide’s intellectual and political trajectory from the moment of the Munich Agreement through the postwar purges, see Jocelyn Van Tuyl, André Gide and the Second World War: A Novelist’s Occupation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006). 22  See Daniel Moutote, André Gide: l’engagement (1926–1939) (Paris: SEDES, 1991). 23 Goulet, Fiction et vie sociale. 24  Philippe Lejeune, “Gide et l’espace autobiographique,” in Le Pacte autobiographique (1975; Paris: Seuil, 1996), 171.

40  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century the feminine.25 While I am also concerned with the interface between literature and experience, my focus here is not on the autobiographical but on another dimension of Gide’s writing, which implies a different relationship to reference and to subjectivity. My claim is that a number of Gide’s works participate in the construction of a documentary space that is most present in several of his factual works, but also inhabits his fiction. In contrast to the self-revelatory but bewildering hall of mirrors explored by Lejeune, Gide’s documentary space places the autobiographical subject in the background and gives primary place to evidentiary material, whether in the form of factual reporting or documentary insertion. This use of documents encompasses the fait divers but is not limited to it. Although a documentary component can also be present in Gide’s fiction (an example being the real faits divers incorporated into Les Faux-Monnayeurs), my focus here is on texts that are governed by a referential pact (that is, they are grounded in the identity of the narrator, character, and author of the book), yet do not adopt the confessional or self-revelatory mode of his autobiographical works. While these factual works may entail forms of testimony, testimony is to be distinguished here from confession. This is because the authorial “I” serves in this case chiefly as witness or guarantor of authenticity, while bearing, as we shall see, a problematic enunciative agency (since the facts presented supposedly speak for themselves). If sincerity is the watchword for Gide’s autobiographical writing, and if he also believes in the possibility of a kind of fictional truth,26 authenticity is the guiding principle for his documentary texts. This authenticity of the document concerns not the candor of its originator but rather the indexicality of the trace, its causal connection to a given context or a particular instance of language use. Gide’s factual writings include a number of publications initially serialized in the NRF that critically address the French judicial system, journalistic discourse, colonialism, and the Soviet Union. In the following pages, I analyze five of these works: three accounts of criminal cases, and two travel narratives. The first, Souvenirs de la cour d’assises (Recollections of the Assize Court), is based on Gide’s experience as a juror at the assizes of Rouen from 13 to 25 May 1912. The text first appeared in the NRF in November–December 1913 and was published in revised form as a book in 1914 (with some passages omitted). The next two texts, L’Affaire Redureau and La Séquestrée de Poitiers, are accounts that Gide presents merely as “collected documents” (“documents réunis”) in his short-lived book series with

25  Michael Lucey, Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 26  “Les Mémoires ne sont jamais qu’à demi sincères, si grand que soit le souci de vérité: tout est toujours plus compliqué qu’on ne le dit. Peut-être même approche-t-on de plus près la vérité dans le roman” (“Memoirs are never more than half sincere, no matter how great their concern for truth: everything is always more complicated than one says. Perhaps one even comes closer to truth in the novel”). Gide, Si le grain ne meurt (1924) in Souvenirs et voyages, 267.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  41 Gallimard, “Ne jugez pas” (“Judge Not”).27 L’Affaire Redureau (The Redureau Affair), which deals with a murder case, was published first in the NRF of June and July 1928, then in book form in June 1930 (along with some “faits divers”). It was followed in July 1930 by La Séquestrée de Poitiers (The Confined Woman of Poitiers), based on a particularly shocking fait divers from 1901.28 The series title of “Ne jugez pas” is a biblical phrase that already appeared in the Souvenirs de la cour d’assises; it later serves as the title of a posthumous volume that appeared in 1969 and brought together Gide’s three nonfiction texts on crime and justice (Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, L’Affaire Redureau, and La Séquestrée de Poitiers), along with some “faits divers.” Although the first of these texts predates the others by over a decade (and is sometimes placed with Gide’s autobiographical writings because it involves personal testimony29), I will follow the logic of the 1969 collection by grouping them together, as cases where the fait divers becomes the working ground for the elaboration of documentary strategies. My final two examples are the travel journal Voyage au Congo (1927) and its sequel Le Retour du Tchad (1928), both also pre-published in the NRF. These are not Gide’s only noteworthy travelogues; after a visit to the Soviet Union in June 1936, Le Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (Return from the U.S.S.R.  [November 1936]) recounts Gide’s disillusionment in the face of the conformism, “depersonalization,” and suppression of critical voices under Stalin’s regime.30 If I have chosen to focus instead on Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad, however, it is because they can be seen as literary companion pieces to a documentary film (also called Voyage au Congo), made by Gide’s lover and traveling companion, Marc Allégret. Considering the works of Gide and Allégret together allows a reflection on the respective possibilities and constraints of documentary representation in literary and cinematic media. By giving renewed emphasis to texts that are usually placed at the periphery of Gide’s literary accomplishments, I offer a broader reassessment of his work as a whole. Despite his enduring fantasy of literary purity, Gide’s body of work brings to light what Jeff Allred calls the “aesthetic zone wherein documentary and modernism meet.”31 But perhaps modernism and documentary should not be seen as distinct modes; rather, certain documentary forms lend themselves 27  André Gide, L’Affaire Redureau, suivie de faits divers: documents réunis par André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1930). 28  André Gide, La Séquestrée de Poitiers (Paris: Gallimard, 1930). Although the back cover of the 1930 edition of La Séquestrée de Poitiers announces a number of forthcoming dossiers in the same collection, the third and last volume in the “Ne jugez pas” series is a translation of Cecil Henry Walsh’s 1929 true crime account, The Agra Double Murder: Cecil Henry Walsh, Le Double crime passionnel d’Agra, trans. Charles Jacob (Paris: Gallimard, 1930). 29  The most recent Pléiade edition of Gide’s complete works places Souvenirs de la cour d’assises among the Souvenirs et voyages, along with Gide’s autobiographical texts and travel writing. 30 Gide, Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (1936) in Souvenirs et voyages, 765, 774. 31 Jeff Allred, American Modernism and Depression Documentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13.

42  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century well to modernist practice, allowing the questioning of aesthetic conventions and ­common-sense assumptions, and reflexively laying bare the devices whereby facts are constructed. This convergence is perhaps less visible in the French context than in other traditions (such as the American modernism that is Allred’s focus); it might appear especially paradoxical in the work of a writer apparently so committed to the autonomy of literature. Nevertheless, factuality traverses Gide’s work. His efforts to write of and with facts, whether in the realm of the fait divers, the judicial document, the personal journal, or the travelogue, open a space for writing beyond the realm of either autobiography or fiction. Gide’s factual texts aim to reveal key truths about the contemporary world, and to confront deep concerns about justice, crime, and human motivation. These concerns are often also present in his novels, of course. But in writing in nonfiction forms, as we will see, Gide bears witness to the contemporary world in order to intervene directly in the present. This mode of writing also opens literature up to other kinds of discourse—reportage, ethnography, travel writing. It brings aesthetics into contact with politics, and it introduces forms of representational hybridity via inter­ actions with film and photography. In this respect, Gide’s factual writings reveal the specific possibilities of a documentary modernism that places literature in dialogue with other discourses and media. It also casts light on the ethical stakes of Gide’s fiction by making visible the boundaries and border crossings between literary invention and the demands of fact.

Facing Facts: The fait divers and the Limits of Literature As Gide acknowledges in a journal entry dating from April 1943, literature cannot avoid having a subject, being “about” something (J2, 937). In the case of the novel, literature often finds this something—the seed of its plot—in the “petit fait vrai” (in Stendhal’s terms) or the fait divers, drawing its story from life even as it subjects it to aesthetic elaboration. Factual anecdotes provided the inspiration for Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir (1830) and (allegedly) Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856).32 As a fact that validated and legitimized fiction, the fait divers later became assimilated with the naturalist “human document.”33 During the Belle

32  Stendhal drew inspiration for the story of Julien Sorel from the separate cases of Adrien Lafargue and Antoine Berthet, reported in the newspapers. According to his friend Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert based his story on the case of Delphine Delamare, a doctor’s wife who accumulated debts before committing suicide. See Victor Del Litto, “Commentary,” in Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, ed. Del Litto (Paris: Libraire Général Française, Livre de Poche, 1983), 546–7 ; Thierry Laget, “Notice,” in Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Laget (Paris: Gallimard/Folio classique, 2001), 453–4. 33  “After 1870, the influence of Taine’s preface to L’Intelligence, with its insistence on the importance of “ ‘de touts petits faits bien choisis’ in scientific investigation, was [. . .] to determine an approach to the fait divers that saw it above all as a ‘document humain’, validating the fictions of day-to-day realism

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  43 Époque, which saw a more general obsession with crime narratives,34 the isolated fait divers became a literary-journalistic object. Félix Fénéon’s “Nouvelles en trois lignes” (“Novellas/News in Three Lines”), were composed for a column in the newspaper Le Matin in 1906, before being collected and published in book form, rendered increasingly literary by its editorial presentation.35 This possibility of isolating the facts, as fragments drawn from reality without extensive fictional elaboration, indicates a shift: in twentieth-century French literature, the appropriation of the fait divers both continues and departs from the realist tradition. Linking literature to the journalistic discourse denounced by Mallarmé as l’universel reportage, the fait divers is a peculiar kind of fact that escapes normative grids and systems by virtue of its utter singularity. For Roland Barthes, the fait divers is defined by its immanence; that is, its structural closure and self­containment.36 As a fragment isolated from any context that determines its meaning, it establishes a purely internal relationship between the constituent parts of its structure, especially by positing a causal relationship or coincidence that is deviant or paradoxical.37 This is to say that despite its self-containment, the fait divers articulates a causal deviation by departing from norms of explanation— and indeed narration. David Walker notes that the notion “is located in a zone where the facts challenge verisimilitude, and thus do not necessarily command credence.”38 The sensational news item combines the lure of the “brute fact” with the psycho-sociological enigmas of crime and criminality.39 It links haecceity— the “thisness” of a unique thing or event—to the puzzles of human action. The fait divers is a stubborn and recalcitrant fact not easily assimilated into discourse. It thus represents a point of both conjunction and divergence between actuality and the novel. It is a raw form of “human document” that confronts us directly with the question of the limits of fiction. Of course, the supposedly pure factuality and immanence of the fait divers are illusions, to the extent that the facts in question are produced by a historically situated model of information production and mass communication, and by a and naturalism.” David H. Walker, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the “Fait Divers,” (Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg Publishers, 1995), 5. 34  See Dominique Kalifa, L’Encre et le sang: récits de crimes et société à la Belle Époque (Paris: Fayard, 1995); Dominique Jullien, “Anecdotes, Faits Divers, and the Literary,” SubStance 38(1) (2009): 66–76. 35 Félix Fénéon, “Nouvelles en trois lignes,” in Œuvres, introduction by Jean Paulhan (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 307–434. See Jean-Michel Adam, “La Brève comme récit minimal: Les ‘Nouvelles en trois lignes’ de Félix Fénéon (Le Matin, 1906),” in Le Récit minimal: du minime au minimalisme, Littérature, arts, médias, ed. Françoise Revaz, Sabrinelle Bedrane, and Michel Viegnes. Fiction/Nonfiction XXI (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2017), 33–44. 36  Roland Barthes, “Structure du fait divers,” in Essais critiques (1964), repr. in Œuvres completes, Vol. 2, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 442. 37  Barthes, “Structure du fait divers,” 442. 38 Walker, Outrage and Insight, 20. 39  On surrealism and the fait divers, see Walker, Outrage and Insight, Chapter 5; Jonathan P. Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

44  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century journalistic discourse that aims to scandalize and fascinate. In a letter to the editor (Jean Paulhan) published in the NRF in November 1926, Gide requests that the journal open a “fait divers” rubric, but also insists that not all anecdotes of this kind are equally illuminating: L’originalité est aussi rare ici qu’ailleurs; et plus encore, car il y faut le concours de deux valeurs, celle du fait et celle du journaliste qui le raconte. Je tiens pour certain que le journaliste, souvent, ne sait pas voir ce qu’il y a d’intéressant, d’important, dans tel fait dont il peut prendre connaissance.40 Originality is as rare here as elsewhere; even more so, since it requires the concurrence of two values, that of the fact and that of the journalist who recounts it. I think it is certain that the journalist is often unable to see what is interesting or important in such and such a fact that he happens to learn about.

In another letter to the NRF in February 1927, Gide expresses his disappointment at most of the readers’ letters he had received on the subject. He distinguishes between good and bad faits divers, the latter being those that are merely sensational, picturesque, or curious. Produced by the encounter of an event and a point of view, the good fait divers involves new insight into human psychology, “bouscule certaines notions trop facilement acceptées, et [. . .] nous force à réfléchir” (“disrupts certain notions that we accept too easily, and [. . .] forces us to think”).41 Paulhan himself, in a 1945 text, will caution that it is often the journalistic presentation of the fait divers, rather than the factual information it contains, that distorts our perception of causal connections.42 The point of the fait divers for Gide, as he tells Paulhan, is not to keep up with the news: “L’actualité, vous le savez, n’est pas mon fort” (“You know that topicality/ the news is not my strong suit”).43 Rather, it is to activate curiosity and challenge conventional understandings of psychology.44 This psychological concern is exemplified by, but not limited to, the problem of the acte gratuit—the unmotivated action that furnishes the central dilemma of Gide’s novel Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars, 1914).45 More generally, Gide is preoccupied with the abnormal case, the exception, and psychopathology. His fascination with

40  Gide, “Lettre sur les faits-divers,” Nouvelle Revue Française 158 (November 1, 1926): 611. 41  Gide, “Seconde lettre sur les faits-divers,” Nouvelle Revue Française 161 (February 1, 1927), repr. in Ne jugez pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 146. 42  Jean Paulhan, Entretien sur des faits divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 53–6. 43  Gide, “Lettre sur les faits-divers,” 610. 44  On curiosity and the fait divers, see Victoria Reid, André Gide and Curiosity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 25, 84, 149, 238. 45  Clarifying his theory of the acte gratuit, Gide notes in the NRF of June 1, 1928 (no. 177, the issue that also contains the beginning of L’Affaire Redureau), that he does not believe in the unmotivated act, merely in acts that escape ordinary psychological explanation and are not determined solely by self-interest (Gide, Ne jugez pas, 143).

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  45 criminal psychology owes a great deal to Dostoevsky, to whom he devoted a book in 1923.46 He is also aware of developments in psychoanalysis; however, as both David Steel and Claude Foucart point out, Gide refuses to adhere to any theory and prefers to maintain an open form of reflection on psychological phenomena.47 Gide maintained a lifelong interest in journalistic faits divers, gathering over 600 press cuttings over a period of around fifty years (from the time of his earliest literary writings to 1940).48 The selected faits divers that Gide publishes in the NRF are also taken from newspaper accounts, either sent by correspondents or selected from Gide’s own collection. While they are framed by Gide’s description of the kind of interest he takes in the fait divers as a genre, most of these stories involve minimal authorial input. Limiting himself in his NRF chronicle to the role of compiler, Gide notes that he leaves the responsibility for these texts to the newspaper of origin—while reserving, but generally not exercising, the right to comment.49 At the opposite extreme to this “degree zero” of authorial intervention, Gide’s fiction is often based on an extensive reworking of particular faits divers. This is true of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, as we have seen. Les Caves du Vatican, too, has its origin in two anecdotes: first the 1893 story of a crusade organized to rescue the Pope, falsely rumored to have been imprisoned by a group of freemasons; second, the case of a freemason, Solutore Avventore Zola (wrongly believed by Gide to be a cousin of Émile Zola) who had abjured his order in 1883 and converted to Catholicism.50 But my focus in this section, as I have noted in the section “Gide’s Documentary Space,” will be three documentary narratives that can be read as a trilogy united by the themes of crime, human motivation, justice, and judgment: Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, L’Affaire Redureau, and La Séquestrée de Poitiers. All three involve complex forms of documentary composition that transcribe and comment on portions of police and court reports, as well as newspaper accounts. Read in the larger context of Gide’s interest in the fait divers, these texts represent an inter­ medi­ary point between the “raw” journalistic anecdote of the isolated fait divers and Gide’s fictionalization of fact in his novels. In the 1969 posthumous collection Ne jugez pas, all three are aptly placed under the sign of a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, which Gide cites at the beginning of the Souvenirs (and takes up again

46 Gide, Dostoïevski (1923), in Essais critiques, Vol. 2, ed. Pierre Masson. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 555–655. 47  Steel, “Gide et Freud,” 73; Claude Foucart, “Gide: le crime ou la ‘vie étrangère’,” Crimes et criminels dans la littérature française, ed. Claude Foucart (Lyon: Université Jean Moulin, C.E.D.I.C., 1991), 230. 48  On this extensive unpublished collection, see Elizabeth  R.  Jackson, “André Gide et les faitsdivers: un rapport préliminaire,” Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 20(93) (January 1992): 83–91; and Jackson, “André Gide’s Collection of Faits-Divers,” Computers and the Humanities 28(3) (1994): 153–64. 49  Gide, “Lettre sur les faits divers,” 610. 50  Alain Goulet, “Notice,” in Gide, Les Caves du Vatican, in Romans et récits, Vol. 1, ed. Pierre Masson. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 1466–8.

46  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century when he publishes the second two texts in a series in 1930): “Assis sur le banc des jurés, on se redit la parole du Christ: Ne jugez point” (“Seated in the jury box, one repeats to oneself Christ’s words: Judge not”) (SCA, 9). Under the sign of this negative imperative, Gide links problems of psychology, justice, and judgment to formal concerns with narrative voice and point of view. These concerns are also present in his fiction, of course. David Walker, who emphasizes Gide’s knowledge of criminological discourse, highlights “the intimate connection between the preoccupations which inform his fictional narratives and those which draw him to the fait divers and legal procedure.”51 The judicial procedure, he adds, is also linked to the narrative techniques developed in Les Faux-Monnayeurs, such as multiplicity of points of view and “quotation from letters, diaries, and other documents.”52 Sandra Travers de Faultrier demonstrates that Gide both criticizes the artifice of legal fictions that are hostile to the complexity of life and affirms their necessity of such fictions as a conceptual grid for confronting the real.53 Emily Apter reads Gide’s interest in reportage, along with his long-term collection of faits divers, as a symptom of repressed realism and as the site of a belated engagement with the naturalist tradition.54 Looking beyond Gide’s novels, my concern here is to highlight the specificity of Gide’s experiments with a docu­men­ tary mode that is distinct from both fiction and autobiography.55 While the role of authorial voice within these texts varies, it is Gide’s first-person attestation that provides their referential ground. The fait divers becomes the terrain for a mode of writing that is documentary, in the sense that Gide reconstructs the elements of a real situation through the compilation, organization, and interpretation of a range of recorded materials that offer various views of this situation. Gide’s involvement and implication in the material is slightly different in each case. In all these texts, however, we encounter the paradox of an authorial voice that simultaneously proclaims its own effacement, in favor of letting documents speak, and reasserts the authority of the author as the guarantor of authenticity. An examination of the place of voice and subjectivity in these three texts brings to light Gide’s ambivalent elaboration of a documentary rhetoric.

51  David  H.  Walker, “Gide et le discours criminologique,” La Revue des lettres modernes 1452–7 (1999): 123–46; Outrage and Insight, 55. 52 Walker, Outrage and Insight, 56, 58. 53  Sandra Travers de Faultrier, “De la fausse monnaie à la fiction,” Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 29(131–2) (2001): 513–22. 54  Emily Apter, “Stigma indelebile: Gide’s Parodies of Zola and the Displacement of Realism,” MLN 101(4) (September 1986): 857–70. 55  Walker pairs Gide’s documentary treatment of the séquestrée case with its fictional development in François Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927). Travers de Faultrier argues that the inflections of Gide’s discourse on law “do not depend on the traditional divide between works of fiction and works of nonfiction or testimony, but rather on the place of the author’s name” (Travers de Faultrier, “De la fausse monnaie,” 513–14). Surely, however, it is precisely the place of the author’s name that marks the fiction/nonfiction divide.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  47

Voice and Verification: Souvenirs de la cour d’assises Based on Gide’s 1912 experience as a juror, Souvenirs de la cour d’assises offers a personal testimony: Gide’s own presence and participation in the court de­lib­er­ ations attests to its factual basis. This does not mean that Gide simply publishes his courtroom journal. As Pierre Masson points out, the text is actually quite carefully composed and oriented, based on a selection of cases and a modification of their order.56 A retrospective account based on Gide’s notes, but recounted in the present tense, the Souvenirs includes transcribed or described testimony from the court, as well as selections from letters and newspapers. With this use of docu­men­ tary transcription and description within a first-person account, Gide bears witness to others’ acts of witnessing as well as to the operation of the just­ice system. Roman Wald-Lasowski describes Gide’s jury duty and subsequent written testimony as “the occasion for a new encounter with himself beyond the ruses and detours of fiction,” and this is no doubt the case.57 However, if Gide breaks with the ironic doubling of his fictions in the name of documentary transparency, we are very far here from the direct self-expression and self-judgment that characterizes Si le grain ne meurt.58 Beside fictional distance and autobiographical sincerity, documentary writing opens up a third space of subjective articulation and disarticulation. It represents another type of response to the dilemmas of the first person, by this writer who ignored the advice (allegedly) proffered by both Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust: never say “I.”59 The realm of the documentary also opens up another kind of interdiscursive territory, well suited to an author who described himself in Si le grain ne meurt as “un être de dialogue” (“a being of dialogue”), full of inner contradictions.60 The Assize Court is a theater where voices compete to be heard within a space of utterance that is inherently political. The situation might be accurately characterized using Jacques Rancière’s concept of mésentente: not simply a misunderstanding, but a fundamental disagreement about what it means to speak; in Rancière’s terms, “disagreement over what speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation.”61 For Rancière, the problem concerns not only what speaking means—what the definition of justice is, for instance, but also, and 56  Pierre Masson, “Notice,” in Gide, Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, in Souvenirs et voyages, 1083. 57 Roman Wald-Lasowski, “Souvenirs de la cour d’Assises,” Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 25(114–15) (1997): 176–7. 58 On Gide’s strategy of ambiguity in autobiographical writing, see Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, 171. 59 Gide, Oscar Wilde, in Essais critiques, ed. Pierre Masson (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 852; Gide, J1, 1124. On Gide’s “experiments with ways of saying ‘I’ ” and, more generally, the relationship between narrative voice and same-sex sexuality in French literature, see Michael Lucey, Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 60 Gide, Si le grain ne meurt, 267. 61 Rancière, La Mésentente. Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), trans. by Julie Rose as Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xi.

48  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century above all, the right to speak of those who are subjects and objects of the discussion. In Gide’s account, the outcome of the trials hinges on the speech of defendants, witnesses, presiding judge (président) and jurors, in an inherently unequal situ­ ation in which the right to speak and be heard is determined by a hierarchical distribution of roles, as well as by a system of delegation and representation. In the second case recounted by Gide, that of two accused thieves, Alphonse and Arthur, the latter offers a complicated and confusing defense that involves the Le Havre postmark on a postcard sent to his mistress, which may or may not place him at the scene of the crime. The judge interrupts constantly, and the jury loses interest—with the exception of the juror Gide, who is drawn precisely by the lack of plausibility in the accused’s story to formulate a question about the postmark. Later in the text, Gide even asserts a causal principle that is a kind of anti-Occam’s razor: “La version la plus simple est celle qui toujours a le plus de chance de prévaloir; c’est aussi celle qui a le moins de chance d’être exacte” (“The simplest version is the one that has the highest chance of prevailing; it is also the one that has the least chance of being exact”) (SCA, 34). Yet to openly question the prevailing version of events is no simple matter, even if Gide attempts to intervene on behalf of Arthur: “On n’imagine pas ce que c’est troublant de se lever et de prendre la parole devant la Cour . . .” (“One can’t imagine how unsettling it is to stand up and speak before the Court”) (SCA, 13). Mustering up his courage, Gide addresses the judge in a wavering voice (“d’une voix trébuchante”) (SCA, 13). In vain, since for the judge and the rest of the jury, the content of Arthur’s speech carries less weight than his physical voice and appearance: “Il a une sale tête, un physique ingrat, une voix déplaisante; il n’a pas su se faire écouter” (“He has a nasty face, an unattractive appearance; he couldn’t make himself heard”) (SCA, 14). Gide himself is relieved to have found Arthur unsympathetic; nevertheless, he adds: “Il me paraît monstrueux qu’on n’ait pas prêté l’oreille à sa défense. Et plus j’y réfléchis, plus elle me paraît plausible” (“It seems monstrous to me that no one lent an ear to his defense. And the more I think about it, the more plausible the defense seems”) (SCA, 15). After receiving a letter from Arthur requesting a personal visit, and after seeing the postcard with its stamp in Arthur’s dossier, Gide gives up on the case, while remaining uncertain and unsatisfied. Later, Gide reads out another question with a choked voice (“d’une voix étranglée”) in an attempt to determine the relative guilt of the defendant Cordier (SCA, 51), on whose behalf he later intervenes in writing (SCA, 53–54). The human voice, as Sandra Travers de Faultrier argues in her insightful reading of Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, is for Gide always constructed, mediated, and hindered—by the body, by language, by received opinion.62 The organization of 62  Sandra Travers de Faultrier, “Nudité de la voix sans voix: Gide (Souvenirs de la Cour d’assises),” in Les Voix du peuple dans la littérature des XIXe et XXe siècles: actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 12, 13 et 14 mai 2005, ed. Corinne Grenouillet and Éléonore Roy-Reverzy (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2006), 291–300.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  49 speech within the court makes visible both the rifts within the institution of ­just­ice, and the gap between language and experience. An example is the case of the defendant Marceau: “À plusieurs reprises j’ai remarqué chez Marceau un singulier malaise lorsqu’il sentait que la recomposition de son crime n’était pas parfaitement exacte—mais qu’il ne pouvait ni remettre les choses au point, ni profiter de l’inexactitude” (“On several occasions I noticed in Marceau a curious uneasiness when he felt that the reconstruction of his crime was not absolutely correct—but that he could neither correct the account nor benefit from the in­accur­acy”) (SCA, 23). Neither material signs nor spoken testimony allow a definitive reconstruction of the facts of the case. If the document speaks, its message is not always clear. Witnesses are unreliable, and the judge often asks questions in terms that are unintelligible to them. As for the defendants, the innocent do not necessarily speak better than the guilty (SCA, 34). Those who can speak well may find themselves led astray by their own desire for eloquence, as in the case of the defendant Conrad, who, “très soucieux du beau-parler, s’est laissé entraîner pour faire phrase” (“very anxious to speak well, let himself be carried away by a fine turn of phrase”) (SCA, 37). Gide himself is not always eager to hear the voice of all witnesses, as evidenced by his account of several “affaires de mœurs”—trials of sexual assaults where the victims are often children and the proceedings are conducted in camera. Gide’s repulsion at the questioning of the terrified young witness on the second day of proceedings is dramatized using a free indirect discourse that conveys, through punctuation and direct address, the immediacy of his emotional response: “Par pitié, Monsieur le Président, abrégez un peu les interrogatoires! Qu’avons-nous besoin d’insister, puisque les faits sont reconnus déjà, que le médecin a fait les constatations nécessaires, et que l’accusé a tout avoué?” (“For pity’s sake, Your Honor, please shorten your interrogation! Why the need to insist, since the facts are already known, the doctor has made all necessary observations, and the accused has confessed everything?”) (SCA, 17). Later, in a case where the victim has been infected with gonorrhea, Gide reiterates his point about the uselessness and cruelty of making the young girl testify (SCA, 38). As Naomi Segal observes, the female body appears as “its own evidence” in Gide’s account of rape trials, whereas the victim’s speech or silence are both ambiguous signs.63 Gide generally displays compassion for those children who are too traumatized and bewildered to speak: “La petite, du reste, ne peut pas répondre, ou que par monosyllabes” (“The little girl, moreover, cannot reply, or only in monosyllables”) (SCA, 19). However, he also describes the depositions of women and children as suspect, at least in the eyes of the court: a footnote tells us that the child of the previous day made a bad impression by laughing and offering contradictory statements

63  Naomi Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 246–8.

50  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century (SCA, 18–19). In another case, the crime remains in doubt partly because the alleged victim won’t—or can’t—speak (SCA, 32). In the light of Gide’s autobiographical disclosures of his own sexuality, and his defense of homosexuality that extends to pederasty in the dialogues of Corydon (1924), it is tempting to read these troubling scenes of double victimization as symptomatic of personal anxieties. Allegorizing Souvenirs de la cour d’assises as a form of self-prosecution and possible self-exoneration, Emily Apter draws parallels with scenes of sexual exploitation elsewhere in Gide’s work and argues that “Gidean allegories of justice [. . .] deconstruct into self-implicating erotic mise-en-scènes.”64 But in the specific judicial scenario of the court, where allegory is constrained by reality, Gide’s position is not that of witness or accused; his role as juror assigns him a precise social function and sets limits to his self-implication. As a writer, he bears witness not to the initial crime but to the judicial process itself. In this context, where questions of verification and judgment are at the forefront, what emerges is a complex semiotics of voice, body, and document. Gide’s careful transcription nevertheless calls into question the efficacy of testimonial speech and evidentiary processes, and even the legitimacy of legal or moral judgment (“judge not”). Gide’s own voice as a narrator combines detached observation with a sense of immediacy, creating the impression of a spontaneously recounted set of mem­or­ ies: “J’oubliais de dire que, la veille, [Marceau] s’était muni d’une bougie” (“I forgot to mention that the night before, [Marceau] had taken along a candle”) (SCA, 21). Recounting events in the present tense and on a day-by-day basis, Gide recreates the drama of the trial by juxtaposing segments of dialogue, narrativized discourse, and free indirect discourse. On occasion, the text moves away from narrative reconstruction to fragmentary observations, apparently a transcription of Gide’s notes as written on the fly. These reflections, although presented as immediate responses to the situation they describe—and thus as snippets of unprocessed documentation—sometimes offer generalizations that link courtroom roles to types of behavior or speech: “L’accusé, qui parle le plus vite possible, par grande peur que le Président ne lui coupe la parole (ce qu’il fait du reste constamment), et qui cesse d’être clair—et qui le sent . . . le malheureux qui défend sa vie” (“The accused, who speaks as fast as possible, for great fear that the presiding judge will cut him off [which he does constantly, as it happens], and who is no longer clear— and is aware of this . . . the unfortunate man who is defending his life”) (SCA, 34). In presenting individual cases, Gide develops a compelling narrative in part through mimetic effects of presentation: “Le voici donc, dans la nuit du 27, à pareille heure, qui se trouve à ***” (“Here he is then, on the night of the 27th, at the same hour, at ***”) (SCA, 22). As Roman Wald-Lasowski notes, Gide uses a

64  Apter, “Allegories of Justice,” 563.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  51 number of naturalist techniques, such as detail and short dialogues.65 At the same time, Gide points out the obstacles to representation, notably the difficulty that the jury has in imagining (se représenter) the scene of the crime on the basis of witness testimony alone (SCA, 36). He also laments the artificial simplification of the facts by the terms of the indictment (SCA, 37); that is, the production of a narrative that translates human actions and experience into the terms of legal norms. Yet the cases Gide recounts also echo the plots of naturalist fiction, as if confirming the latter’s basis in real life. For instance, the story of a servant girl accused of infanticide bears uncanny similarities to an episode in Zola’s PotBouille (1883), where the maid Adèle gives birth alone and abandons the baby before returning to her work. In Zola’s novel, the magistrate who made Adèle pregnant boasts of having condemned a woman to prison for infanticide, to the great approval of his dinner companions.66 In Gide’s narrative, it is the son of the house who impregnated the servant girl Bertha Rachel. The proceedings bring to light a twist on the Zolian anecdote, in the form of a mise-en-abyme. The defense lawyer reveals a detail whose significance escapes the judge but not the jury: the respectable family read faits divers involving infanticides out loud every evening, thus effectively inciting the murder (SCA, 28). In this episode, which unmasks the hypocrisy of the supposedly virtuous family, Gide no doubt attacks the “bourgeois foundations of the criminal justice system.”67 Yet I would argue that Gide’s overall stance is (characteristically) more ambivalent, in that he acknowledges both the legitimacy of the judicial system and the precariousness of the boundary that separates the innocent and the guilty. This ambiguity is illustrated by his transformation of a different kind of fait divers into a polyvalent social and moral allegory. Tormented by the case of Cordier (a thief whose sentence he would work to have commuted), Gide remembers a story told to him by a survivor of the wreck of the ocean liner La Bourgogne, in 1898: those who had reached the lifeboats hacked at the hands and wrists of those trying to join them. It is best not to fall in the water, Gide comments, but adds, “ce soir je prends en honte la barque, et de m’y sentir à l’abri” (“tonight I am ashamed of the boat, and of feeling safe in it”) (SCA, 53). The boat represents those who are on the right side of the law but serves more broadly as a political metaphor for a society that violently excludes undesirable elements. Gide does not fully develop the implications of the metaphor in the Souvenirs, but the repeated references to shipwrecks in his work

65 Wald-Lasowski, Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, 181. 66 Zola, Pot-Bouille (Paris: Charpentier, 1883), 474–77, 486–8. On Gide’s ambivalence toward Zola, see Apter, “Stigma indelebile.” In his Journal, however, Gide notes his admiration for Pot-Bouille in particular, and the childbirth episode is one of the scenes he praises for its immense power (Gide, J2, 375). 67 John Lambeth, “Gide and Justice: The Immoralist in the Palace of Reason,” in André Gide’s Politics: Rebellion and Ambivalence, ed. Tom Conner (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 74. For a similar reading see Goulet, Fiction et vie sociale, 364.

52  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century (spe­cif­i c­al­ly the Bourgogne case) link an exemplary ethical dilemma both to real historical situations and to multiple fictional and allegorical elaborations.68 Gide combines the directness of testimony with a curious distance from the group of jurors of which he is a member, but whose “incompetence” and lack of education he sometimes attacks (SCA, 44). This simultaneous proximity and distance find consummate expression in his use of free indirect discourse as a mode of documentary description, either to summarize the words or present the thoughts of the jurors. Sometimes Gide uses this device to present his own thoughts, particularly at moments of keen emotional involvement. Thus, as we have seen, he registers his objection to the questioning of the child victims, or addresses a reproach to the judge: “Hélas! mon Président, est-ce donc si difficile à comprendre? ou n’admettez-vous pas que Cordier ait pu vouloir épargner une honte à sa mère? Si vous pouviez voir la pauvre femme, comme j’ai fait ensuite, sans doute vous ne vous étonneriez plus” (“Alas, Your Honor, is it so difficult to understand? or can’t you accept the fact that Cordier might have wanted to spare his mother shame? If you could see the poor woman, as I did later, doubtless you would no longer be surprised”) (SCA, 50). Gide oscillates here between the immediacy of the present-tense address to the presiding judge, and the retro­ spect­ive perspective introduced in the last sentence (“as I later did”). A footnote introduces further textual and temporal complexity by narrating Gide’s subsequent visit to “Cordier’s” mother in Le Havre (SCA, 55).69 At other times, free indirect style voices the thoughts of the jury as a whole, while not necessarily including Gide in this group. For instance, when the bored jurors imagine acquitting a group of people accused of petty thefts, they anticipate their own pleasure at the scandal: “Quelle belle fin de session ce sera! Les journaux vont en parler pour sûr!” (“What a fine end to the session it will be! The newspapers will surely talk about it!”) (SCA, 58). Free indirect discourse establishes a mode of internal focalization that Dorrit Cohn considers one of the “signposts” of fictionality.70 Gide’s use of this device in a nonfiction narrative produces an effect that is not precisely that of fictionality, but instead indicates an ambivalent positioning of the author. This is a kind of “doubling of the narrative instance,”71 not into author and narrator, but rather into outsider and participant

68  Lilian Griffith in Les Faux-Monnayeurs, speaking to her lover Vincent, uses her experience of the Bourgogne shipwreck to justify unashamed egoism in the name of self-preservation (Gide, FM, 218–20/C, 62–4). Commenting on Gide’s two references to the Bourgogne, John Lambeth observes: “Gide [. . .] arrives at a complex moral position: he has saved the young man from a longer prison sentence, yet saved him for what? The effect of the same fait divers on Vincent is even more complicated and far darker” (Lambeth, “Gide and Justice,” 85). Among the “faits divers” that Gide publishes in the Nouvelle Revue Française, we find the 1905 shipwreck of the steamboat Hilda (Gide, Ne jugez pas, 177–80). 69 Gide’s Journal reveals that he remained in contact with “Cordier” (real name Lebrun), who was sent to fight in Africa after serving his prison sentence (J1, 947, entry of 26 April 1916). 70 Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 117. 71 Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 130.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  53 in the judicial scene. Wary of moral certainty as a form of violence, Gide prefers to present himself as elusive and multiple—even when he does say “I.”72

Gide as “Naturalist”: L’Affaire Redureau Souvenirs de la cour d’assises develops ambiguous rhetorical strategies that make the narrative voice difficult to situate. This authorial retreat is more extreme in other cases; writing of Gide’s private collection of press cuttings, Elizabeth Jackson notes with disappointment that Gide very rarely annotates his documents.73 In fact, Gide adopts different modes of withdrawal or self-protection in his fictional and documentary writings. His presence in his fictions takes the form of ironic doublings and mises-en-abyme. As Gide notes in the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (a text that is itself a partial reflection of Édouard’s considerations on the novel in Les Faux-Monnayeurs): “Il m’est certainement plus aisé de faire parler un personnage, que de m’exprimer en mon nom propre” (“It is certainly easier for me to make a character speak, than to express myself in my own name”) (JFM, 548). However, this attempt to “pousser l’abnégation jusqu’à l’oubli de soi total” (“push abnegation to the point of total selflessness”) (JFM, 548) has different consequences in factual texts, where Gide’s proper name is necessarily identified with the first-person narrator. In these cases, Gide develops a mode of presentation in which his interventions are subtle or disguised. This is not merely authorial subterfuge; rather, it results from an ethical commitment to self-erasure behind the facts of the case. This ethical posture notwithstanding, Souvenirs de la cour d’assises can still be grouped among Gide’s autobiographical writings (as it is in the 2001 Pléiade volume Souvenirs et voyages). L’Affaire Redureau is more difficult to classify because it presents itself simply as “documentation”: Nous nous placerons en face des faits, non en peintre ou en romancier, mais en naturaliste. [. . .] Nous présenterons, en nous effaçant de notre mieux, une documentation autant que possible authentique; j’entends par là non interprétée, et des témoignages directs. We will confront ourselves with the facts, not as a painter or a novelist would, but as a naturalist. [. . .] We will present, while doing our best to stand back, as authentic a documentation as possible—by which, I mean that it is uninterpreted—and direct testimony.  (AR, 98)

72  On the polyvalent, Protean aspect of Gide’s thought, see Germaine Brée, André Gide, l’insaissable Protée: étude critique de l’œuvre d’André Gide (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 1953). 73  Jackson, “Gide et le fait-divers,” 97.

54  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century In confronting facts while effacing himself, this “naturalist” writer claims once again to withhold judgment. The word “naturalist” is used here as a scientific term, apparently without reference to the literary school of Zola and the Goncourts, to designate someone whose activity bears on natural history. The study of “human documents” is thus placed on the same level as the study of animals and plants. Zola also made scientific claims of this kind; however, Gide’s narratives resist the naturalist determinism of heredity and environment to emphasize psychological idiosyncrasy. Gide’s naturalism, as Claude Foucart observes, involves an attachment to the exceptional, to the formless, and to the uniqueness of a given experience.74 The philosopher Gabriel Marcel, reviewing L’Affaire Redureau along with La Séquestrée de Poitiers in 1931, suggests that Gide’s unstated ambition might be to inaugurate a kind of “human entomology” (indeed, as his travel writings show, Gide was in fact an amateur entomologist, chasing butterflies on his trip to Africa).75 By this, Marcel means that Gide’s attention to the minute details of human behavior ruins the very notion of character (caractère) in its traditional sense.76 In this regard, Gide anticipates later developments in the history of French literature, such as Nathalie Sarraute’s focus on the almost imperceptible psychological movements that she designates by the bo­tan­ic­al term tropism.77 L’Affaire Redureau deals with the case of Marcel Redureau, a fifteen-year-old boy who in 1913 murdered an entire family. Gide’s text presents itself at first glance as a set of assembled documents, the transcription of a criminal dossier. It begins as a dry factual account presenting the bare facts of the case: the dates, persons, events, and social situation of those involved: Le 30 septembre 1913, le jeune Marcel Redureau, âgé de quinze ans, et domestique au service des époux Mabit, cultivateurs en Charente-Inférieure, assassinait sauvagement toute la famille Mabit, et la servante Marie Dugast: en tout sept personnes. On September 30, 1913, the young Marcel Redureau, aged fifteen years, and a servant employed by M.  and Mme. Mabit, farmers in the region of Lower Charente, savagely murdered the whole Mabit family, and the maidservant Marie Dugast: seven people in all.  (AR, 99)

74  Foucart, “Gide: le crime ou la ‘vie étrangère,’ ” 231–3. 75  Gabriel Marcel, “L’Affaire Redureau, suivi de faits divers. La Séquestrée de Poitiers, documents réunis par André Gide [Collection Ne jugez pas]. Paris, Nouvelle Revue Française, 1930, 2 volumes,” La Quinzaine critique 25 (10 January 1931): 17. 76  Marcel uses the term caractère to designate the personality traits of an individual, but the notion is difficult to separate in this context from the idea of the novelistic personnage (both designated by character in English). 77  Nathalie Sarraute, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1996), 1553–4.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  55 In this opening sentence, only the words “assassinait sauvagement” (“savagely murdered”) convey a moral evaluation of the act. We might, however, deduce even from these bare details a possible reading of the murder as a social drama, as an explosion of resentment directed by a servant against his masters—similar in this respect to the later case of the Papin sisters (which would inspire writers from the surrealists to Jean Genet).78 Gide is certainly far from unaware of the class distinctions involved in the case: he emphasizes the youth and poverty of the accused, who has to depend on a court-appointed lawyer, and he cites comments from the defense lawyer that suggest Redureau had been overworked by his employers during the season of the grape harvest (AR, 105, 125). Gide’s principal interest in the case, however, stems from the psychological enigma of the apparently unpremeditated crime. Thus, after a long quotation from the statement of charges against the accused, Gide intervenes to question, at some length, the testimony of a certain Chiron, who claimed that Redureau had spoken two months before the event of his desire to kill his employers (AR, 103–6). Gide states that the trial documents—kindly provided by a reader of the NRF—discredit Chiron’s testimony, and adds that it is “monstrous” that the presiding judge did not call on those character witnesses who would have been unfavorable to Chiron. A footnote in the text’s conclusion further insists on Chiron’s “mythomania” (AR, 133). Gide’s interpretative grid comes into view here; indeed, his comments make it explicit. If the Redureau case interests him, it is for the challenge it poses to our ordinary frames of reference and to our understanding of normal psychology versus pathology. Above all, the case has affinities with the problem of the acte gratuit—the unmotivated and thus completely free human act. Here and elsewhere, Gide emphasizes that no human action can be truly “gratuitous,” since there is no effect without a cause. Nevertheless, he adds, “Nous serons forcés de convenir ici que les connaissances actuelles de la psychologie ne nous permettent pas de tout comprendre, et qu’il est, sur la carte de l’âme humaine, bien des régions inexplorées, des terrae incognitae” (“We will be obliged to agree here that our current knowledge of psychology does not allow us to understand everything and that there are, on the map of the human soul, many unexplored regions, terrae incognitae”) (AR, 97–8). He therefore wishes to interpret the murder as the un­pre­ medi­tated act of an apparently normal person: “l’intérêt psychologique du cas Redureau serait grandement affaibli s’il était prouvé que l’idée du crime habitait depuis longtemps l’esprit du jeune assassin” (“the psychological interest of the Redureau case would be greatly weakened if it were proven that the idea of the crime had long dwelled in the mind of the young killer”) (AR, 109). The second chapter quotes press reports, with added italics and editorial punctuation that 78  In February 1933, in Le Mans, Christine and Léa Papin brutally killed their employers. Jean Genet’s play Les Bonnes (The Maids, 1947) is loosely based on this fait divers. On surrealist responses to this crime see Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, 176–98.

56  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century either emphasize Gide’s views on the killer’s normal psychology or mark his ­ istance from specious conclusions about motives—for instance, a reporter’s cond clusion that because Redureau didn’t steal, he “a donc (!) tué uniquement par vengeance” (“therefore (!) killed uniquely for revenge”) (AR, 108). The third chapter presents the report of the medical examiners, where Gide again emphasizes the evidence for Redureau’s normality: “ce n’est pas dans la psychopathologie, mais bien dans la psychologie normale de l’adolescent qu’il faut chercher le véritable déterminisme des actes commis par l’inculpé” (“it is not in psychopathology, but rather in normal adolescent psychology that the causes of the accused’s actions should be sought”) (AR, 128). Transcribed portions of the defense lawyer’s speech dominate Chapter 4, in which Gide also refers back to the Souvenirs de la cour d’assises in order to criticize the judicial system, which forces jurors to give answers that contradict their sense of justice (AR, 129). Redureau, found to have acted while in full possession of his faculties (“avec discernement”), received the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. Gide’s fifth and final section cites the appendix to the medical report, and within it a final “psychological document”: a naïve letter sent by Redureau to his parents, which serves as further evidence of the killer’s normality (AR, 136). Gide’s authorial interventions are thus crucial, however minimal they might seem to some readers. Thus John Lambeth can claim that Gide presents his judicial dossiers with practically no commentary, “in a simple ordering of documents from court records and newspaper accounts.”79 David Walker describes Gide’s authorial intrusions as a means of “injecting interest into the telling.”80 I would argue that Gide’s approach is epis­temo­logic­al as much as it is aesthetic, injecting narrative interest, certainly, but above all seeking to elucidate the motivations behind the crime—and behind its telling—as well as the nature of the instruction the story offers: “Que l’on m’entende; que l’on me comprenne bien: je ne prétends nullement atténuer l’atrocité du crime de Redureau” (“Let me make it clear, let me be well understood: in no way do I presume to mitigate the atrocity of Redureau’s crime”) (AR, 105). Such highly rhetorical statements of intention serve to authorize and le­git­im­ate the narrative, providing the ground for the referential contract while putt­ing forward an ethical disclaimer. Still, Gide evades the reader’s grasp. We must surmise his personal attitude toward Redureau from second- or third-hand accounts. In the conclusion to L’Affaire Redureau, for example, we learn that Gide’s correspondent tells him that Redureau’s lawyer grew to feel for his client “une sympathie un peu analogue à celle que Mauriac éprouve pour ses héros ‘criminels’ ” (“a sympathy analogous to that felt by Mauriac for his ‘criminal’ heroes”) (AR, 136). Gide’s own probable sympathy for the real criminal Redureau is thus mediated by different voices as well as by an analogy with another writer, François Mauriac, who feels sympathy

79  Lambeth, “Gide and Justice,” 74.

80 Walker, Outrage and Insight, 58.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  57 for his (fictional) characters.81 If Gide emphasizes the connection with fiction (and we recall here his interest in Dostoevsky), he does not place himself in the position of the novelist. Indeed, L’Affaire Redureau anticipates such historical projects as Michel Foucault’s, Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère . . . (I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother . . . , 1973). Inspired by a similarly shocking murder case from 1835, Foucault’s book confronts readers directly with the materiality, the contradictions, and the polyvocality of the archive: legal documents, medical reports, newspaper articles, the murderer’s own memoir.82 Gide also preserves the tensions of the archive even as he nudges us toward interpretation and sympathy.

Dismantling Documents: La Séquestrée de Poitiers Like L’Affaire Redureau, Gide’s La Séquestrée de Poitiers opens with a disclaimer: J’ai quelque scrupule à signer la relation de cette singulière histoire. Dans l’exposé tout impersonnel que je vais en faire, je n’eus souci que de mettre en ordre les documents que j’ai pu recueillir, et de m’effacer devant eux. I have some scruples about putting my name to the narrative of this strange story. In the wholly impersonal account I am going to present, my only concern was to organize the documents that I was able to collect and stand back, out of their way.  (LSP, 201/CWP, 99)

The foreword’s insistence on authorial discretion is to be distinguished from the silence of those Poitevin neighbors who, as the newspaper report in La Vie illustrée puts it, “se sont férocement tus” (“were fiercely silent”) for a quarter-century (Gide, LSP, 203/CWP, 100). Combined with an insistence on making the hidden visible, the Gidean suspension of judgment is not ethically equivalent to the withdrawal of those who refuse to see—although it does involve its own moral ambiguity. Nevertheless, Gide’s presentation of his documentary material is more

81  The most famous of Mauriac’s sympathetic criminals is doubtless the eponymous heroine of his novel Thérèse Desqueyroux. We might note here that Mauriac’s Thérèse, confined to her home after attempting to poison her husband, is compared to a newspaper image of “the sequestered woman of Poitiers” (la séquestrée de Poitiers). François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2 (Paris: Fayard, 1950), 270. 82  Michel Foucault, Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère . . . Un cas de parricide au dix-neuvième siècle présenté par Michel Foucault, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Michael Sheringham contrasts Foucault’s strategies with those of his contemporaries Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, and Nathalie Zemon Davis, historians who also draw attention to the “material specificity of the evidence they had disinterred in far-flung provincial archives,” but still produce a coherent narrative from these materials. See Michael Sheringham, “Michel Foucault, Pierre Rivière and the Archival Imaginary,” Comparative Critical Studies 8(2–3) (September 27, 2011): 236.

58  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century complex than a simple act of retreat behind the facts of the case, even if his ­rhet­oric­al presence is even more discreet than in L’Affaire Redureau. La Séquestrée de Poitiers is perhaps the most compelling and certainly the most influential of Gide’s documentary texts. It investigates the case of Blanche Monnier—renamed Mélanie Bastian in Gide’s account83—who was confined by her family for twenty-four years in squalid conditions until an anonymous letter alerted the police in 1901. Gide’s text opens with a documentary transcription: a sensational and indignant report from the weekly newspaper La Vie illustrée in 1901. Giving expression to a sense of public outrage, the newspaper presents the case as a scandal of bourgeois prejudice and hypocrisy. According to this initial version of events, Mélanie’s family, with the complicity of a number of witnesses, imprisoned her as a punishment for becoming pregnant: “C’est un drame effroyable, un drame de préjugés, de respectabilité, de vertu exaspérée—une vertu basé sur la convention hideuse” (“It was a horrible drama of prejudices, respectability, and excessive virtue—a virtue based on hideous conventions”) (LSP, 203/CWP, 100). This fait divers fascinates and horrifies because it reveals the hidden horrors behind apparent bourgeois respectability. It is tempting to read Mélanie’s story as the most extreme case of the physical and moral confinement that Gide associates with the family, and which is denounced by his character Ménalque in Les Nourritures terrestres (1897): “Familles, je vous hais! foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur” (“Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes; closed doors; jealous possessions of happiness”).84 Once again, however, Gide’s docu­ men­tary account refuses to take the path of straightforward moral or political denunciation. Rather, his ordering and presentation of the various reports and pieces of evidence have the effect of gradually dismantling the self-evidence of the newspaper account, complicating the sensationalism of the press. The first chapter offers a narrative reconstruction of the police superintendent’s discovery of Mélanie’s existence, beginning with a second piece of documentary evidence, the anonymous letter to the prosecutor denouncing Mme Bastian (LSP, 205). Gide alternates narrative framing with abundant documentary transcriptions from the court documents, including a detailed inventory of the objects found in Mélanie’s room. Thus far, the tone of the report is neutral, although a footnote of almost absurdly positivist precision introduces a critical comment on journalistic sensationalism: only [!] two species of larva were found in Mélanie’s bedding, Gide notes, not the fantastic fauna implied by the newspapers (LSP, 212). Gide’s supposedly impersonal approach involves a process of composition and editing that sets documents against each other to destabilize our view of the case, but also to guide us, ultimately, toward a particular kind of reflection and 83 Benjamin Ivry’s English translation restores the real names of the people involved: Mélanie Bastian is Blanche Monnier. 84 Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres (1927) in Romans et récits, Vol. 1, 382.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  59 interpretation. For instance, the footnotes of Chapter 2 offer corrections to statements by the presiding judge and even suggest Mélanie’s attachment to her prison—as evidenced by her nostalgic allusions to her “chère petite grotte” (“dear little grotto”) (LSP, 215n1/CWP, 131)—while also revealing Pierre Bastian’s apparent concern for and frequent visits to his sister (LSP, 216n1). The narrative “I” becomes increasingly present from Chapter 3 onward, where it often indicates Gide’s proximity to his documentary evidence: J’ai sous les yeux une grande photographie prise aussitôt après son entrée à l’hôpital, photographie que reproduisirent les grands périodiques illustrés de l’époque. On n’imagine rien de plus impressionnant que le regard de cette pauvre fille, et son sourire—car elle sourit, d’un sourire angélique, mais comme futé, presque narquois. I have in front of me a large photograph taken immediately after she entered the hospital, a photograph that was reproduced by the great illustrated periodicals of the day. It is impossible to imagine anything more striking than this poor girl’s glance and her smile—for she is smiling, an angelic, idyllic smile, but somehow crafty, as if mocking.  (LSP, 223/CWP, 109)

This passage multiplies indexical markers: the narrative/authorial instance of the “I,” positioned as viewer of the image and as the point of reference that anchors the narrative in a given spatio-temporal configuration; the description of the photo­graph­ic image of the emaciated Mélanie; and finally, the inclusion of the image itself (a photograph from the newspaper L’Illustration) within the text, so that it is placed before the eyes of the reader as of the author (see Figure 1.1).85 This textual-visual doubling reinforces the evidential force of the impression, also emphasized by Gide’s account of the striking (impressionnant) glance (what Roland Barthes would later call the punctum, the piercing detail of the photograph86). Yet it also registers the gaps between evidence, immediate emotional response (“this poor girl”) and interpretation. Invoked initially as a sign that speaks for itself, Gide’s description of the photograph gives rise to a curious interpretation, which might well be questioned by the reader, who can also see the image. While Mélanie’s body, as captured in the disturbing photograph, displays obvious evidence of starvation and neglect, Gide focuses on the more ambiguous signs of the 85  The 1930 edition of La Séquestrée de Poitiers contains three photographs: the aforementioned image of the emaciated séquestrée, placed before Chapter 1 (see Figure 1.1); a portrait of the mother, “Madame Bastian de Chartreux,” placed near the end of Chapter 2, and a photograph of the brother, “Pierre Bastian,” which appears just before Gide’s detailed description of the same image (which, once again, he has right before him, “sous les yeux”). Gide, La Séquestrée de Poitiers, in Ne jugez pas, Vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1930). The version included in the posthumous 1969 volume Ne jugez pas augments this photographic evidence with additional photographs as well as reproductions of newspaper art­ icles devoted to the case, grouped together between the title page and Gide’s foreword. 86 Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (1980), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 5, 809.

60  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century

Figure 1.1  Photograph of Blanche Monnier [Mélanie Bastian] in L’Illustration, June 1, 1901 Source: © L’Illustration, 1901.

glance and the smile. Gide’s reading of the facial expression as simultaneously “angelic” (“angélique”) and “crafty” (“futé”) casts Mélanie/Blanche as a double being, full of contradiction. Gide’s comments on Mélanie’s words similarly highlight the inconsistencies of her character: “Je n’ai pas à faire ressortir l’extraordinaire inconséquence des réponses de Mélanie Bastian. Le lecteur s’en apercevra bien de lui-même” (“I need not emphasize the extraordinary inconsistency [inconséquence] of Blanche Monnier’s replies. The reader will observe them for himself ”) (LSP, 227/CWP, 111). Gide’s recourse to paralepsis (“I need not emphasize”)—the rhetorical device of emphasizing something while seeming to pass it by—is characteristic of his paradoxical documentary rhetoric. The author intervenes to bring our attention to points that are supposedly self-evident, to highlight facts that supposedly speak for themselves. In doing so, he risks reducing Mélanie/Blanche herself to the status of a “human document.” But what Gide tells us, ultimately, is that facts and bodies resist interpretation. We should note that “inconséquence”—meaning thoughtlessness, incoherence, inconsistency, or an absence of logic—is one of Gide’s

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  61 favorite words for human psychology, since it indicates the disruption of our causal or motivational assumptions. In fact, Gide’s treatment of his documentary materials rests on a systematization of illogic and contradiction as his main interpretative principles. Gide’s first-person interventions directly draw our attention to contradictions in speech and behavior: Mélanie expresses both delight at her salubrious new conditions of life, and nostalgia for her “dear little grotto.” The testimony of the servants, too, presents contradictions that the author wishes to accentuate rather than resolve (LSP, 244). To lead us toward some counterintuitive inferences, Gide frequently moves from the “je” to the first-person plural, “nous,” which brings greater discursive distance while also drawing the reader into an implied consensus. Commenting, for instance, on Mélanie’s phrase “chère bonne maison de grand fond Malampia” (“dear fine house in great-Back-Malampia”), Gide states: “Nous croyons que Mélanie désignait par ces mots [. . .] sa chambre sordide, ou, du moins, l’extraordinaire transposition qui s’était faite de cette chambre dans son esprit” (“We think that Blanche meant, by these words [. . .] her filthy room, or at least the extraordinary transposition that was made of the room within her mind”) (LSP, 228/CWP, 112). Gide ultimately develops a curious interpretation of the case based on the illogic and idiosyncrasy of the personalities involved (LSP, 233). Systematically undermining the rumor-based version offered in the initial newspaper report, he insists on what might seem unimaginable: Mélanie’s adaptation to and even acceptance of her reclusion (LSP, 253/CWP, 259). Gide’s novelistic imagination is doubtless at work in the Séquestrée de Poitiers. As Celia Britton points out in her study of Gidian intertextuality, Gide’s text offers a reworking of the literary figure of the imprisoned mad woman, influenced “by the preceding fictional figures of Bertha [in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre], Gertrude [La Symphonie pastorale], and to a lesser extent Lucile [La Porte étroite]. That is, the usual hierarchical relation between fact and fiction is inverted, insofar as here a factual account is to some extent determined by a fictional discourse.”87 In this respect, Mélanie represents a point of conjunction of fact and fiction, as well as “a passive point of intersection of a number of different discourses: journalistic, medical, legal, and so on.”88 But the facts of the case matter, even if, more than a hundred years later, they remain far from clear: was Mélanie/Blanche imprisoned by her family for some transgression, or was she a troubled, anorexic young woman who voluntarily secluded herself? A 2001 book by the historian Jean-Marie Augustin purports to tell the true story of the séquestrée, while asserting that Gide lacks rigor and objectivity.89 Augustin reads Gide’s text as an 87 Celia Britton, “Fiction, Fact, and Madness: Intertextual Relations among Gide’s Female Characters,” in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 168. 88  Britton, “Fiction, Fact, and Madness,” 168. 89  Jean-Marie Augustin, L’Histoire véridique de la séquestrée de Poitiers (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 9.

62  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century im­agina­tive, “novelistic” transformation of the facts that aims primarily to indict bourgeois society. However, this reading overlooks the polyphonic structure of Gide’s text and wrongly aligns Gide’s point of view with that of the sensational report in La Vie illustrée.90 In fact, while Augustin’s historical account fleshes out some details already present in Gide’s documentary narrative, the main elements of his interpretation coincide point by point with Gide’s. Both texts emphasize Blanche Monnier’s anorexia, mystical crises, and taste for reclusion, as well as the coprophilia of her brother (who was eventually acquitted) and the family’s general liking for dirt. Gide’s account succeeds in conveying the shocking facts of the case while re-examining them in a questioning spirit, resisting both novelistic simplification and journalistic sensationalism. Indeed, Gide may even go too far in this direction. That is, he risks indulgently suspending moral judgment in the name of human complexity and inscrutability. This is the concern that Gabriel Marcel raises in his perceptive review: “On ne peut qu’apprécier la conscience avec laquelle M. Gide dépouille devant nous les documents dont il dispose; mais il est également permis de se demander si son goût de la complexité ne l’égare pas quelquefois” (“One can only appreciate the conscientiousness with which M. Gide dissects in front of us the documents that he has to hand; but one might also wonder if his taste for complexity doesn’t sometimes lead him astray”).91 It is certainly the case that Gide sets the shock of the real against received notions of plausibility and verisimilitude, sometimes to the point of illogic. “Quelle histoire inventée pourrait rivaliser avec celle de la séquestrée de Poitiers [. . .] ?” (“Where is the invented story that could compete with that of the Séquestrée de Poitiers [. . .]?”), asks Nathalie Sarraute in her 1950 essay “L’ère du soupçon” (“The Age of Suspicion”).92 The figure of the séquestrée in fact haunts twentieth-century French literature, not least in Sarraute’s own novel Portrait d’un inconnu (1948). After its publication in 1930, Gide’s text becomes the intertextual point of reference for the story, mediating between literature and reality. Sequestered characters reappear in Georges Simenon’s Le Bourgmestre de Furnes (1939) and in Sartre’s play Les Séquestrés d’Altona (1959).93 In Raymond Queneau’s Saint Glinglin (1948), the most fascinating character is Hélène, a strange sibylline figure who has been locked away by her father in a tower, and who identifies more strongly with the insects that accompany her imprisonment than with other human beings.94 The continuing fascination with the confined woman of Poitiers has much to do with the shocking aspects of the case, which exposes the violence of family life and the interplay of gender and power. Furthermore, the spectacle of 90 Augustin, L’Histoire véridique, 11, 44, 55. 91  Marcel, “L’Affaire Redureau,” 17. 92  Nathalie Sarraute, “L’Ère du soupçon,” Les Temps modernes (February 1950), repr. in L’Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956; Folio), 69. 93  On some of these intertextual echoes see especially Walker, Outrage and Insight, 126. 94  Raymond Queneau, Saint Glinglin (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  63 inhumanity and horror captured by the photographs of her suffering body later awakens associations with other atrocities committed against human bodies in the twentieth century. The séquestrée makes an appearance in Roland Barthes’ lecture course for the Collège de France in 1977, the notes of which were published in 2002 as Comment vivre ensemble: simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens (How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of some Everyday Spaces). Mélanie’s solitary room in La Séquestrée de Poitiers and the desert in Palladius of Galatia’s Lausiac History form the “documentary” component of Barthes’ spatial typology, alongside three fictional cases that also exemplify ways of adapting to living spaces: the hotel-sanatorium of Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the island den of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and the bourgeois apartment building of Zola’s PotBouille (the latter is also an intertext for Gide, as we have seen).95 Barthes’ discussion of spaces for living is thus not limited to the question of “simulations romanesques” (novelistic simulations)—despite the book’s subtitle—but acquires an important basis in recorded fact. Gide’s narrative also finds an eerie echo in the twenty-first century, which sees a number of books based on true stories of imprisoned and abused women (such as Emma Donoghue’s Room [2010], or Régis Jauffret’s Claustria [2012], both inspired by the Fritzl case in Austria). The séquestrée is a real person. But I would suggest that she also comes to represent the specter of the “true fact” that haunts literature throughout the century. Such “facts” as the history of Mélanie Bastian/Blanche Monnier are always mediated by voices and discourses, by documents that inscribe and investigate the real within a narrative and discursive context. In all the texts of Ne jugez pas, Gide’s ostensibly impersonal organization of documentary testimony involves a complex staging of texts and voices. In his factual writings, Gide draws attention to the way in which documents both speak and fail to speak, to the gap between language and experience, and to the space of conflict between discourses. Documentary transcription and montage allows the reconstruction of an event in its complexity, from multiple points of view. Gide’s “documentary” work casts light on the ethical stakes of his fiction, not only by revealing the author’s profound attachment to the real, but also by making visible the boundaries and border crossings between literary invention and the demands of fact. At the same time, the documentary text produces its own rhetorical modes. These hinge on the complex positioning of a narrative voice that aims to speak through, or behind, the voices of others, but ultimately cannot avoid taking a stand on the facts of a case. Oscillating between self-effacement and self-assertion, Gide attempts to occupy the contradictory role of the non-judging juror, adopted in

95  Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble: simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens. Notes de cours et de séminaires au Collège de France, 1976–1977, ed. Claude Coste (Paris: Seuil/ IMEC, 2002), 221.

64  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century Souvenirs de la cour d’assises—the juror whose social function is at odds with his ethical motto: do not judge.

Recording the Congo (Gide/Allégret) In the factual writings considered so far, the relationship between first-person testimony and documentary evidence is a complex one: Gide develops a rhetoric of self-erasure that is at odds with the self-disclosure of much of his autobiographical writing, even as the first person anchors the act of attestation. This is the case for all three works analyzed in this chapter, even if Souvenirs de la cour d’assises is directly connected to Gide’s personal experience, while L’Affaire Redureau and La Séquestrée de Poitiers are not. Gide’s travel writings, which I turn to now, offer a different case. They are closer to autobiography in the focus on the author’s experience and direct observation, yet still oriented toward the external world. If I focus here on the episode of Gide’s journey to the Congo, it is because it produces a heterogeneous set of documentary materials in different media. These are writings: Gide’s travelogue, as well as Marc Allégret’s Carnets du Congo, notebooks that were not originally destined for publication but appeared posthumously in 1987. We must also consider images: Allégret’s film Voyage au Congo, as well as the photographs by Allégret that illustrate the 1929 luxury edition of Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad.96 In July 1925, after completing Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Gide embarked with his lover and protégé Marc Allégret on a journey to the Congo—or to be more precise, what was at that time the territory of French Equatorial Africa (a federation comprising French Chad, Cameroon, French Congo, Ubangi-Shari, and French Gabon), with a detour through the Belgian Congo. The two men were traveling in a semi-official capacity, on a “mission officielle gratuite”—that is, a self-funded trip, but with the approval of the Ministère des Colonies, a status that gave them access to material and logistical support. Gide’s connections to Marcel de Coppet, a Protestant intellectual then working as a high-level administrator in Chad, also facilitated the journey. Gide’s account of his travels, in journal form, appeared under the tile Voyage au Congo in June 1927 following a serial pre-publication in the NRF; the sequel Le Retour du Tchad (The Return from Chad) appeared the following year. The twenty-five-year-old Marc Allégret, for his part, began his career as a filmmaker with the 101-minute documentary Voyage au Congo. During their nine months on African soil, Gide and Allégret learned of the regime of forced labor put in place by the Grandes concessions, the concession-holding

96 Gide, Voyage au Congo suivi du Retour du Tchad, et illustré de soixante-quatre photographies inédites de Marc Allégret (Paris: Gallimard, 1929).

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  65 companies to which the French colonial administration had granted the right to build infrastructure and exploit the colony’s resources. This led Gide to engage in a concerted campaign against the companies, with some success: Léon Blum’s socialist newspaper Le Populaire also took up the cause; the matter was debated in the Chamber of Deputies, and many of the companies did not have their privileges renewed upon their expiration. Marc Allégret’s film, which bears (upon Gide’s insistence) the same title as Gide’s travelogue, was produced by Pierre Braunberger. It was first shown privately to influential figures, starting in March 1927, and then screened publicly at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in June and July 1927.97 The film has not completely fallen into oblivion: it is the subject of a number of excellent articles by Daniel Durosay, while the film itself was restored and digitized in 2017 by Les Films du Panthéon and Les Films du Jeudi.98 Still, Allégret often falls under the famous author’s shadow, and the film is sometimes presented by critics as the “film of the book.”99 When Gide introduces Allégret’s film, he comments on its affinity with the preoccupations of his own writing.100 The confusion is compounded by the film’s subtitle, which suggests a collaboration: (“Scenes of in­di­ gen­ous life in Equatorial Africa, reported by André Gide and Marc Allégret” (“Scènes de la vie indigène en Afrique équatoriale, rapportées par André Gide et Marc Allégret”). Certainly, the film was subsumed into Gide’s political strategy upon his return to France, as private and public screenings were associated with his campaign against the exploitative system of the Grandes concessions. But Gide’s actual contribution to the film was mostly limited to the intertitles, and Gide’s own text indicates his detachment from the filmmaking process: “Je laisse Marc cinématographier un feu de brousse et reste tranquillement assis en compagnie de Goethe” (“I let Marc go to cinematograph a bush fire and stayed behind quietly sitting with Goethe as a companion”) (VC 457/TC, 140). It is tempting to insist on the contrast: bored by the monotony of the landscape, Gide takes refuge in European literary classics, while Allégret observes and films African reality. The figure of Gide in Africa is an easy target for the Barthes of Mythologies, who describes Gide’s as the quintessential “writer on vacation” (“écrivain en vacances”)— someone who reads Bossuet while descending (or in fact, ascending) the Congo river.101 Still, Barthes’ target is less Gide himself than a particular kind of media representation (specifically in the newspaper Le Figaro). More spe­cif­i c­al­ly, Barthes 97  Daniel Durosay, “Images et imaginaire dans le Voyage au Congo: un film et deux ‘auteurs’,” Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 80 (1988): 19–22. 98 Hervé Pichard, “La restauration du Voyage au Congo,” Cinémathèque française website, 24 November 2017. https://www.cinematheque.fr/article/1130.html. 99  David H. Slavin, “French Cinema’s Other First Wave: Political and Racial Economies of ‘Cinéma Colonial,’ 1918 to 1934,” Cinema Journal 37(1) (October 1, 1997): 26. 100 Gide, “Conférence de Bruxelles” (1928), Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 16(80) (October 1988): 31. 101 Barthes, Mythologies (1957), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 1, 693.

66  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century takes aim at a certain modernist posture that has become a stereotype, one that fuses aesthetic autonomy, the cultural prestige of the writer, and the political cluelessness or indifference of the Western traveler in the colonies. If this image crystallizes the apparent opposition between documentary recording and literary purity, an examination of Allégret’s film alongside Gide’s text offers a more complicated picture. While documentary recording often functions in the modernist imaginary as the fantasized other of literature (a fantasy to which Gide sometimes seems to subscribe, as we have seen), the technical and aesthetic realities of documentary realism in 1920s film are in fact quite different. Like the documentaries of Robert Flaherty, which Gide and Allégret both admired,102 Allégret’s film involves the staging and organization of cinematic material.103 Moreover, the fantasized literature/cinema opposition is in fact reversed in the relationship between Allégret’s film and Gide’s Voyage au Congo: it is the film that presents an ahistorical, almost mythical vision of Africa, while the writing records the awful colonial reality. In this respect, Allégret’s images give some indications of why anthropology, that “discipline of words” (as Margaret Mead puts it) is often suspicious of the visual. Allégret’s photographs and films illustrate the contradictions of a “visual anthropology,” that falls prey to aesthetic temptation even as it claims to produce an objective record.104

Strange Beauty: Staging Africa Allégret’s film is often overlooked in histories of ethnographic cinema and docu­ men­tary film alike. John Grierson, in a 1932 essay, mentions Voyage au Congo derisively, contrasting the “shimmying exoticisms of the Vieux Colombier” with the aesthetic and moral achievement of Robert Flaherty’s documentaries Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926).105 Other accounts unjustly identify Allégret’s film with the productions of “colonial cinema,” such as Léon Poirier’s La Croisière noire (1926; on the Citröen expedition), which had the goal of

102  Gide praises the “admirable” Moana in his introduction to a screening of Voyage au Congo in 1928. Gide, “Conférence de Bruxelles,” 32. See also C. D. E. Tolton, “Réflexions d’André Gide sur le cinéma,” Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 20(93) (January 1992): 66. 103  Commenting on the relationship between Gide’s Voyage au Congo and Allégret’s film, Jeffrey Geiger notes that “documentary films such as those of Flaherty or Allégret rarely made the sort of claims to truth and immediacy that later came to define that genre,” but instead aimed to produce realism through “elaborate fabrications and simulacra.” Geiger, “Sightseeing: Voyage au Congo and the Ethnographic Spectacle,” in Tom Conner, André Gide’s Politics: Rebellion and Ambivalence (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 123. 104 Margaret Mead, “Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words,” Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 3rd edn (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 3–10. 105  John Grierson, First Principles of Documentary (1932) in Grierson on Documentary, 99.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  67 documenting “French exploits” while capturing the life of indigenous people.106 In fact, Allégret’s film is categorically not a film about the French colonial presence, beneficial or otherwise; and this too, helps explain its problematic reception. The filmmaker Jean Rouch, who would become known for his experimental “cineethnography” in the 1950s, grants Allégret only a marginal place in the history of ethnographic film, claiming in a 1962 essay that Allégret’s film offers a set of “naïve but pretty pictures” that give precedence to aesthetics over “ethnographic and social documentation.”107 Had the film been the “cinematic mirror” of Gide’s book, Rouch continues, with its “violent testimony against the excesses of colonialism,” the ethnographic cinema of the 1930s might have taken on a different orien­ta­tion and directly confronted the problem of imperialism. For this, he suggests, it was necessary to wait for the anti-colonialist films of the 1950s, beginning with René Vautier’s Afrique 50 (1950) and including Rouch’s own collaborative ethnofictions, such as Moi, un noir (1958). Rather than following Rouch’s lead in regretting the failure of Allégret’s film to adequately “mirror” Gide’s book, I argue that it is productive to consider the gaps between filmic and written travelogues, and between image and text, as indices of key problems of ethnographic representation in the colonial context. Rouch’s critique notwithstanding, Allégret’s film undoubtedly has an ethnographic dimension—but here the ethnographic gaze is inseparable from a combined aesthetic and ethical stance. Composed of scenes from the daily life of four tribes (the Baya, the Sara, the Massa, and the Fulbe peoples), it is structured as a sequence of scenes and tableaux, showing food preparation, bathing, dances, and athletic competitions.108 We should also consider Allégret’s photographic plates, which illustrate the 1929 edition of Gide’s travelogue, and attempt to study and display the beauty and harmony of human bodies in a natural setting—what Allégret calls “le jeu libre des membres et des muscles” (“the free play of limbs and muscles”).109 In addition to portraits of statuesque human figures in stately poses, Allégret’s photographs invite us to admire natural landscapes and the harmonious architecture of indigenous villages.

106  Slavin, “French Cinema’s Other First Wave,” 27. Aside from feature-length movies, docu­men­ tary or docufiction shorts that (positively) depict colonial exploits include the Gaumont “série Rouge” docufiction Les Bois du Gabon (1925). (I am grateful to Jennifer Wild for bringing this example to my attention.) 107 Jean Rouch, Ciné-ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 52. 108  Marc Allégret (with André Gide), Voyage au Congo. Scènes de la vie indigène en Afrique équatoriale. Documentary, black and white. 101 minutes, c. 1927 (Société du Cinéma du Panthéon/Pierre Braunberger, Les Films du Jeudi, 1927). For a synopsis of the film, see Daniel Durosay, “Analyse synoptique du Voyage au Congo de Marc Allégret avec l’intégrité des inter-titres,” Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 101 (1994): 71–85. 109 Marc Allégret, “Voyage au Congo (explications sur le film),” in Cahiers de Belgique (May 1928), 141.

68  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century

Figure 1.2  Film still from Marc Allégret, Voyage au Congo, c. 1927 Source: picture from Voyage au Congo, by Marc Allégret © 1929 Films du Panthéon.

Gide’s text sometimes attempts to offer a literary equivalent of Allégret’s filmic images, for instance in his detailed description of the Massa huts (see Figure 1.2): La case des Massa ne ressemble à aucune autre, il est vrai; mais elle n’est pas seulement “étrange”; elle est belle: et ce n’est pas tant son étrangeté que sa beauté, qui m’émeut. Une beauté si parfaite, si accomplie, qu’elle paraît toute naturelle. Nul ornement, nulle surcharge. Sa pure ligne courbe, qui ne s’interrompt point de la base au faîte, est comme mathématiquement ou fatalement obtenue; on y suppute intuitivement la résistance exacte de la matière. Un peu plus au nord, ou au sud, l’argile, mêlée à trop de sable, ne permettra plus cet élan souple, qui s’achève sur une ouverture circulaire, par où seulement l’intérieur de la case prend jour, à la manière du panthéon d’Agrippa. [. . .]. Sa couleur est celle même de la terre, une argile gris rose, semblable à celle des murs du vieux Biskra. The Massas’ hut, it is true, resembles no other; but it is not only strange; it is beautiful; and it is not its strangeness so much as its beauty that moves me. A beauty so perfect, so accomplished, that it seems natural. No ornament, no superfluity. The pure curve of its line, which is uninterrupted from base to summit, seems to have been arrived at mathematically, by an ineluctable necessity; one instinctively realizes how exactly the resistance of the materials must have

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  69 been calculated. A little farther north or south and the clay would be too mixed with sand to allow of this easy spring, terminating in the circular opening that alone gives light to the inside of the hut, in the manner of Agrippa’s Pantheon. [. . .] Its color is the very colour of the earth—a pinkish-grey clay, like the clay of which the walls of old Biskra are made.  (RT, 528–9/TC, 217–218)

In the precise calculation of their form, the huts appeal to Gide’s classical sensibility, to his taste for an art that is complex in construction yet seems natural in its simple perfection and harmonization with the environment. On a stylistic level, the rhythm and shape of Gide’s periodic sentence evokes the rising and falling curve of the hut, its élan (spring) and its return to the ground, as well as its symmetry: for instance, “sa pure ligne courbe” (“the pure curve of its line”) is the opening protasis, “la résistance exacte de la matière” (“the exact resistance of the materials”) the apodosis or cadence. The aestheticization of the African other, however problematic in its evocation of a supposed state of nature, functions here as a universalizing humanist strategy that counters the caricature of the African “savage.” Shortly afterwards, the ethnographer Georges-Henri Rivière similarly sets the beautiful against the exotic in a review praising Walter Futter’s 1930 film Africa Speaks.110 On the necessity of acknowledging beauty within cultural difference, Gide’s text and Allégret’s film (and photographs) are unanimous. Allégret’s aestheticism in the Voyage au Congo film, however, also requires isolating supposedly “authentic” documents from the complications of a messy and sordid colonial context. In an article presenting his film, Allégret emphasizes his suppression of traces of the journey and of the presence of the observer: Nous souhaitions que le spectateur fût aussitôt enveloppé, comme nous l’avions été nous-mêmes, par l’atmosphère de ce pays mystérieux; et qu’il devînt indiscrètement l’observateur secret d’une humanité sans histoire. We wanted the spectator to be immediately enveloped, as we ourselves were, by the atmosphere of this mysterious land, so that he would indiscreetly become the secret observer of a humanity without history.111

While the images acknowledge the diversity of peoples and customs, they also reveal the quest for an untouched humanity in the state of nature—a mythical Africa, spied on by the “indiscreet” camera. Allégret comments on the technical challenges involved in trying to capture people “au naturel,” describing the use of 110  Jean Vincent-Bréchignac and Georges-Henri Rivière, “Toute la vie de la brousse et de la forêt évoquée par ses bruits et ses images: ‘L’Afrique vous parle’,” Pour vous: l’hebdomadaire du cinéma 124 (April 2, 1931): 9­. Futter’s film uses footage shot by Paul L. Hoefler in central Africa. 111  Allégret, “Voyage au Congo (explications sur le film),” 140.

70  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century a long focal length and a telephoto lens to create distance and to help “tame” (“apprivoiser”) the local people, who are wary of being captured by the camera. What is almost wholly erased is the historical situation and the colonial presence—that is, all of the messy reality that invades Gide’s journal and Allégret’s notebooks. To be sure, the film opens and closes with scenes of the arrival and departure of the European travelers, but the journey itself provides only a min­ imal narrative frame for the series of tableaux. Most significantly, none of the atrocities that are recorded in Gide’s book appears directly on the screen. One sequence shows the rubber harvest and the weighing of the latex but offers no commentary on the regime of forced labor which is documented in detail in both Gide’s Voyage and Allégret’s notebooks from October 1925. In fact, the concessionholding companies had been given the right to all latex harvested from the bush; the African workers received insufficient payment, were mistreated, and were imprisoned when they did not produce enough.112 Leaving this context of coercion and exploitation in the background, Allégret simply presents the curious spectacle of the weighing. There are, nevertheless, a few incongruous moments in the film where the European presence reveals itself: a white man wearing a pith helmet wanders across the frame; Gide’s head appears on a boat. These moments, while isolated, are discomforting intrusions that reveal the situation of filming and the artifice at work in the film, both reminding us of the travelogue frame and abolishing the distance created by the scene or tableau. In his letters on the film, Allégret insists that his images humanize their subjects, especially in contrast with earlier footage of Africans.113 The ambiguity of this exoticized humanism perhaps becomes most evident, as does the artifice involved in the staging of the film, in an episode that integrates a fictional narrative. The love story between Djimta and Kadde attempts to win over the Western public by combining a familiar plot with sociological details. Djimta et Kadde was in fact one of the titles that Allégret envisaged for his film, before being overruled by Gide. Despite Allégret’s insistence on the naturalness of his filming, his notebooks record his selection of “actors” and rehearsals for these scenes. Significantly, Gide’s travel journal expresses dissatisfaction with this staged aspect of Allégret’s documentary: Somme toute il me paraît que ce qu’il y aura de mieux dans ces vues prises (et sans doute il y aura de l’excellent), sera plutôt obtenu par un heureux hasard; des gestes, des attitudes sur lesquelles précisément l’on ne comptait pas. Ce dont on convenait par avance restera, je le crains, un peu figé, retenu, factice. Il me semble que j’eusse procédé différemment, renonçant aux tableaux, aux scènes, mais gardant l’appareil tout prêt, et me contentant de prendre, par surprise et sans qu’ils s’en doutent, les indigènes occupés à leurs travaux ou à leurs jeux; car toute la grâce est perdue de ce qu’on prétend leur faire refaire. 112 Gide, VC, 387; Allégret, Carnets, 89.

113  Durosay, “Images et imaginaire,” 21–2.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  71 On the whole, it seems to me that the best part of these photographs (and there will no doubt be a great deal that is excellent) will be things that have been taken by a happy accident—gestures, attitudes, that were just those one did not expect. The parts that were prepared beforehand will be, I am afraid, a little stiff, a little made-up. I feel as if I should have gone about it differently, and given up all idea of scenes and tableaux, but kept the camera in constant readiness to take the natives unawares, busy at their work or their play; for all the grace goes from anything when one tries to make them do it over again.  (RT, 572–3/TC, 273)

The conception of documentary film articulated here incorporates openness and improvisation and converges with Gide’s own aesthetics of the natural in literature. It expresses a desire for an unmediated relation to things and people. In a 1928 introduction to Allégret’s film, Gide asserts that films are works of art that can do without translation, intermediaries, or interpreters.114 The filmic image speaks for itself. Documentary film is no longer, in this instance, a foil to literary autonomy; it represents an aesthetic ideal. At the same time, as Gide’s misgivings show, Allégret’s film does not fully correspond to his documentary ideal. The obstacles are no doubt partly technical; Allégret used a Debrie Sept 35 mm camera (possibly along with other cameras), which could take both still pictures and cine sequences (17 seconds/roll), but the full development of “candid” photography, possible thanks to the progressive improvement and lightening of photographic equipment (and notably the use of 16 mm handheld cameras), only occurred later.115 Allégret expresses frustration at missing opportunities as he scrambles to assemble props and actors;116 both Gide and Allégret note their disappointment at the failure to capture the gesture of a mother using her hand and thumb to offer water to her child (RT, 573).117 Gide’s disagreement with Allégret’s filming methods does not exactly correspond to the difference that emerges in the 1920s between the approaches of Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty, where for Vertov film is “a vehicle for the expression of [the filmmaker’s] sensibility,” while for Flaherty the filmmaker should “seek the response of the subject he films to his vision.”118 Rather, Gide’s desire to capture images unawares in some ways anticipates the later aesthetics of direct cinema (Albert and David Maysles, Frederick Wiseman), where the claims to “pure observation,” however problematically, rest on an attempt to erase traces of the filmmaker’s presence and avoid direction of the filmed subjects.119 114  Gide, “Conférence de Bruxelles,” 31. 115  See Durosay, Introduction to Allégret, Carnets du Congo, 46. 116 Allégret, Carnets, 229. 117  Allégret, “Voyage au Congo (explications sur le film),” 143. 118 Jay Ruby, “Speaking For, Speaking About, Speaking With, Or Speaking Alongside: An Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma,” Journal of Film and Video 44 1/2 (1992): 43. 119  On this point see Tolton, “Réflexions d’André Gide sur le cinéma,” 66; Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary. Visible Evidence, Vol. 16 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xx, 174.

72  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century Allégret, while he does direct his subjects, does so in order to erase the colonial presence and stage customs that are imagined to stand outside civilization. The film thus confronts us with the ethnographic predicament analyzed by James Clifford: that is, the way in which “fieldwork-based anthropology in constituting its authority, constructs and reconstructs coherent cultural others and interpreting selves.”120 The history of documentary film, as it has developed since Robert Flaherty, is bound up with the problematics of the Western ethnographic gaze. The response of Allégret’s “actors,” however, is not entirely invisible; Voyage au Congo does contain striking moments when the African subjects look directly at the camera, and thus at the viewer (see Figure 1.3). Writing on early nonfiction films more generally, the film scholar Paula Amad analyzes the return of the gaze as a “privileged figure of representational disruption” embedded in cross-racial exchanges; nevertheless, she cautions that interpreting the gaze as resistance may reflect above all the Western postcolonial viewer’s own desire for “the ir­re­cov­er­ able reverse shot of the Other’s view of the world.”121 Still, even if it is difficult to attribute a clear meaning to the gaze of Allégret’s subjects, such moments give the latter a strong presence in the film. Where we can identify clear resistance on the part of the indigenous subjects is in one of the episodes recorded in Gide’s text: Marc tâche de filmer des scènes ‘documentaires’, cela ne donne rien de bien fameux. Il s’agit d’obtenir certains groupements de nageurs, et principalement de nageuses. Si triées qu’elles soient, celles-ci ne sont pas bien jolies. Impossible d’obtenir un mouvement d’ensemble. On nous fait comprendre qu’il n’est pas décent que femmes et hommes nagent en même temps. Ceux-ci doivent précéder de dix minutes celles-là. Et comme celles-là restent sur la rive, les hommes, pris d’une soudaine pudeur, se couvrent, se ceinturent et enfilent des pantalons. [. . .] Tout cela, grâce aux simagrées, donne un spectacle assez raté. Marc tried to film some “documentary” scenes, but was not very successful. He wanted to get some groups of swimmers, and principally of women swimmers. In spite, however, of their being carefully chosen out, these particular ones were not very good looking. It was impossible to get any concerted action from them. We were given to understand that it is improper for men and women to swim together. The men must start ten minutes before the women. But, as the women remained standing on the shore, the men were suddenly seized with shyness and slipped on their trousers and belts. [. . .] All these absurdities gave very poor results. (VC, 492–3/TC, 178–9) 120  James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 112. 121  Paula Amad, “Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory’s Gift to Film Studies,” Cinema Journal 52(3) (2013): 52, 56.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  73

Figure 1.3  Film still from Marc Allégret, Voyage au Congo, c. 1927 Source: picture from Voyage au Congo, by Marc Allégret © 1929 Films du Panthéon.

With apparent detachment (although perhaps not without some anxious awareness of Marc’s particular attention to the women), Gide records the limitations of the documentary process. The attempt to choreograph a harmonious display and performance of beautiful primitive bodies—a vision of prelapsarian nudity and of a natural, unsegregated social space—ends in a farcical spectacle, because of the filmmaker’s ignorance of the social codes that usually govern the visibility of those bodies. In this respect, Allégret’s film no doubt reveals the contradictions of early ethnographic film, attempting to record cultural specificity only to erase social context under the guise of a mythical state of nature.

“I Must Speak”: Relaying Voices However, an alternative documentary aesthetic emerges in written form. Both Allégret’s own notebooks and Gide’s travelogue incorporate heterogeneous ma­ter­ ials and varied styles in order to present a complex, multi-layered view of the landscape, indigenous peoples, and current political situation in the Congo. Allégret’s notetaking is documentary in the most pragmatic sense; in his official role as Gide’s secretary he is a documentaliste before he is a documentariste: that is,

74  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century he is a researcher and information-gatherer, charged with assembling maps, practical information, and details on the place and people. As for Gide’s text, it is shaped in the first instance by narrative models; ostensibly motivated by a personal desire to escape civilization, his journey is also inspired by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (indeed, Voyage au Congo is dedicated to Conrad). Fictional pre­ cursors and present-day reality come to converge as he is faced not only with a sinister Kurtz-like doctor (VC, 418), but more generally with “l’extraordinaire complication, l’enchevêtrement de tous les problèmes coloniaux” (“the extra­or­ din­ary complication, the convolution of all colonial problems”) (VC, 345). This realization gives his book a new mission. As others have noted, Gide’s vision of Africa remains bound up with imperial ideology, with the belief in a hierarchy of cultures and races, and with his con­ tinued attachment (which he would later repudiate) to the very colonial system whose abuses he brings to light.122 He targets the concessionary companies, but is more hesitant to accuse colonial administrators. Criticisms of Gide’s position are therefore understandable.123 It is tempting to compare his attitude unfavorably with that of Michel Leiris, who, as secretary archivist for Marcel Griaule’s DakarDjibouti mission of 1931–1933, was acutely aware of his role as a “participant observer” and attempted to see himself as other.124 Nevertheless, Gide is not lacking in self-awareness or in attention to the complexity of the facts on the ground. He acknowledges the difficulty of grasping African reality, the gap between his expectations and his perceptions, and the limitations of his understanding. Above all, he is motivated by the desire to unveil and untangle the complex reality of French Equatorial Africa on the spot, as he finds it, day by day, and to engage with it in its totality: politics, society, culture, infrastructure, and public health, but also fauna and flora. In this intense observation we see Gide’s “naturalist” side— an aspect that is no doubt problematic since, as Michael Lucey notes, African people are also subject to Gide’s entomologist’s gaze.125 But we might also read the image of Gide chasing African butterflies (VC, 348) somewhat differently, as the allegory of an impossible contact with a fleeting reality, of the gap between literature and the world. Furthermore, Gide’s travelogue is not just about seeing; it reveals his capacity to listen to the voices of others, and a willingness to relay these 122  In a letter to Jean Schlumberger dated March 1, 1935, Gide notes that he did not return from Africa an anti-colonialist, but later came to attach the abuses he had witnessed to the colonial system (Gide, Littérature engagée, 81). 123  Anny Wynchank, “Fictions d’Afriques: les intellectuels français et leurs visions,” in Afriques imaginaires: regards réciproques et discours littéraires, ed. Anny Wynchank and Philippe-Joseph Salazar (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 73. 124  Marja Warehime, “Exploring Connections and Rediscovering Difference: Gide au Congo.” The French Review 68(3) (February 1, 1995): 459. On Gide vs Leiris, see also Anny Wynchank, “Fictions d’Afriques.” 125 Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 159. But this problem is not only Gide’s; the Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène allegedly charged Jean Rouch: “tu nous regardes comme des insectes” (“you look at us as if we were insects”). Quoted in Amad, “Visual Riposte,” 49.

Outrageously Real: ANDRÉ GIDE’S DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM  75 voices—by exploiting his own moral authority as a writer—in order to make them audible to a broader public. Along with transcribed interviews and dialogues, the musical notation of indigenous songs he overhears bears witness to this Gidean art of listening (RT, 535). Uncertain of his reasons for traveling to the Congo, Gide discovers a moral duty: Quel démon m’a poussé en Afrique? Qu’allais-je donc chercher dans ce pays? J’étais tranquille. À présent je sais; je dois parler. Mais comment se faire écouter? Jusqu’à présent, j’ai toujours parlé sans aucun souci qu’on m’entende; toujours écrit pour ceux de demain, avec le seul désir de durer. J’envie ces journalistes dont la voix porte aussitôt, quitte à s’éteindre sitôt ensuite. What demon drove me to Africa? What did I come out to find in this country? I was at peace. I know now. I must speak. But how can I get people to listen? Hitherto I have always spoken without the least care whether I was heard or not; always written for tomorrow, with the single desire of lasting. Now I envy the journalist, whose voice carries at once, even if it perishes immediately after. (VC, 401–2/TC, 72–3)

The attitude that Emily Apter calls Gide’s “purist contempt of ‘journalism’ ”126 is evident in this passage, but so is the countermanding desire for a writing of immediate action. It is this quest for immediacy that motivates him to publish his travel journal, recording his experience of Africa as it unfolds and preserving a certain disorder, rather than reorganizing it for publication. Gide also adds to his first-person narrative appendices that present corroborating evidence, in the form of a set of documents on the concession-holding companies. The writer Philippe Soupault highlights the significance of these documentary supplements in his positive review of Le Retour du Tchad: “ces pages sont les véritables fruits de son voyage, la partie la plus précieuse parce que la plus humaine de ce livre” (“these pages are the real fruit of his journey, the most precious, because the most human, part of this book”).127 Gide brings into the public sphere information that would otherwise, as Soupault puts in, be lost “dans les sables de la bureaucratie coloniale” (“in the sands of colonial bureaucracy”)—filed away in the archive.128 If Allégret aims to produce idealized visual images of the Congo with his film and photographs, Gide’s textual account contains description but focuses above all on testimony, on gathering various oral accounts which he confirms as best as he can, and on repurposing other records as evidence for his indictment of colonial practices. Despite his misgivings, what is apparently a simple travel logbook 126  Apter, “Stigma indelebile,” 864. 127  Philippe Soupault, Review of André Gide, Retour du Tchad, in Europe (October 15, 1925); repr. in Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 65 (January 1985): 132. 128  Soupault, Review of Retour du Tchad, 133.

76  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century becomes an exemplary work of littérature engagée, as well as a document of primary importance in European debates on the colonial system, discussed in inter­ nation­ al conferences and familiar to the readers Gide meets in the Soviet Union.129 Tellingly, the Gide of Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad is praised for his critical lucidity and commitment to justice in the pan-African magazine Présence africaine in 1948, by the Martinican-Guyanese writer René Maran (himself the author of a novel set in French Equatorial Africa, Batouala, which had won the Prix Goncourt in 1921).130 The voice that Gide adopts for the purpose of facing facts is not precisely that of the journalist. Rather, as we have seen, he adopts hybrid, polyphonic forms that place themselves near the borders of literature as he conceives of it. For if Gide or his fictional doubles sometimes express the hope that literature will one day be delivered from its subordination to reality, the exigencies of the present mean that the choice is not available; nor is it even desirable given the pressure of circumstances. Despite Gide’s desire to maintain a distance from current events (actualité), literature cannot preserve its purity in relation to reality; but it can question the ways we construct our understanding of this reality, and it can even attempt to intervene directly to change it. It is in this sense that the writings considered here exemplify a form of documentary modernism that critically interrogates documents as both records and constructions of reality. During the same period, the surrealists more aggressively place the notion of the document and practices of documentary insertion at the very heart of their writing, as an anti-aesthetic principle that aims to reshape the territory of literature.

129  J2, 45; entry of October 2, 1927; see also Retour de l’URSS, in Souvenirs et voyages, 758. 130  René Maran, “André Gide et l’Afrique noire,” Présence africaine 5 (1948): 739–48.

2

“Pris sur le vif ” The Surrealist Poetics of the Document

When Man Ray invited his fellow photographer Eugène Atget to publish some of his work in the journal La Révolution surréaliste, Atget reportedly requested ano­ nymity on the grounds that his images were “mere documents” (“de simples documents”).1 The documentary function erases the author/artist. For the sur­ reali sts, however, documents are far from simple. First of all, surrealism deploys the document as an anti­literary and anti­fictional principle: while the surrealists are in favor of delving into dreams and the imagination, they are resolutely opposed to fiction as represented by the genre of the novel. Second, the surrealist attempt to transcribe the operations of thought involves gestures of documenta­ tion that claim to bypass conscious authorial control, according to a fantasy of spontaneous and direct linguistic or visual expression. Photography plays a role in this utopian conception of the document, serving both as a medium in its own right and as a paradigm for writing. Finally, the incorporation of documentary materials participates in a generalized practice of collage: the selection and juxta­ position of materials produce unexpected connections, while the insertion of fragments drawn from outside the text destabilizes the space of literary represen­ tation. While the appeal to the document expresses the fantasy of a recording that bypasses representation altogether, in practice the surrealists develop a complex documentary mode in which documents serve as intermedial vectors as well as a site of contact between the text and its outside. To characterize surrealist works as “documentary” might seem counter­intuitive, given the group’s rejection of realism, fascination with the dream and the mar­ velous, and praise of the imagination. However, studies of surrealist photography have attempted to recover the role of the documentary image in avant­garde practice.2 With respect to surrealist film (in particular Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes 1 “Ce sont de simples documents que je fais,” quoted by Laure Beaumont­Maillet in her introduc­ tion to Eugène Atget, Atget Paris, ed. Beaumont­Maillet (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1992), 16–17. The phrase is often attributed to Atget without reference to an original source. Three uncred­ ited Atget prints appear in La Révolution surréaliste 7 (1926): cover, 6, 28. 2 See in particular John Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998) and Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002).

78  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century (Land Without Bread, 1933), Tom Conley has argued that “the oneiric camera seen in the immense field of unmediated contradictions [produced by loose mon­ tage], yields documentary reality.”3 As for surrealist writing, critics have revisited surrealism’s apparent rejection of realism in order to trace some significant areas of continuity.4 However, the case still needs to be made for the significance of an expanded, transmedial poetics of the document in surrealist practice, encom­ passing but also extending beyond the photographic image; this is what I will attempt here. To be sure, the surrealists’ fascination with the document does not go unrecog­ nized by early commentators. Walter Benjamin, in his 1929 essay on the sur­real­ ists, observes that “the writings of this circle are not literature but something else—demonstrations, watchwords, documents, bluffs, forgeries if you will, but at any rate not literature.”5 Benjamin means that surrealist writings are concerned primarily with experience, revolt, and the “materialistic, anthropological in­spir­ ation” that he calls “profane illumination.”6 Less favorably disposed toward the anti-literary postures of the avant-garde, Jean Paulhan notes in Les Fleurs de Tarbes (1941) the similarity in the “documentary” claims of realist and surrealist writers. Paulhan, the longtime director of La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), identifies a particular kind of attempt to use language innocently: the claim by authors to simply report the facts. On the one hand, this is the position of realist novelists who claim to be a simple “recording device,” presenting the world as it goes by. But it is also the position of poets who lay claim to sincerity and spon­tan­ eity in their self-expression: writing is simply the exteriorization of “something other within” the writer. And if the author then produces clichés and common­ places, it is not his or her fault: something else is speaking or showing itself. Realism and surrealism have this much in common: “Tous deux mettent en code un curieux système d’alibis. Simplement, l’écrivain s’efface ici devant le document humain, là devant le document surhumain” (“Both encode a curious system of

3  Tom Conley, “Documentary Surrealism: On Land Without Bread” (1986), in The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Jonathan Kahana (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 202. 4  On the connection between realism and surrealism, see the two special issues of the surrealist studies journal Mélusine: “Réalisme/Surréalisme,” ed. Henri Béhar, Mélusine 21 (2001); and “L’Universel reportage,” ed. Myriam Boucharenc, Mélusine 25 (2005). The first includes articles on description, collage, the surrealist object, and the continuities between naturalism and surrealism. The second examines the conflicted relationship between surrealism and journalism in terms of the move­ ment’s views on reportage, the incorporation of journalistic procedures, and the directly journalistic practice of several surrealist writers (René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Péret, Philippe Soupault, Roger Vitrac). 5 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael  W.  Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 208. 6  Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 209.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  79 alibis. Simply, in the former the writer disappears behind a human document, and in the latter behind a superhuman one”).7 Benjamin and Paulhan thus highlight two aspects of the surrealist notion of the document. The first involves an anti-literary stance common to twentiethcentury avant-garde movements: these writings are not literature but “something else.”8 The avant-garde opens a new chapter in the history of the art–document relation by conferring value precisely on the anti-aesthetic connotations of the term document. The second aspect is a rejection of rhetoric in favor of pure expression. The latter, interestingly enough, links the surrealists on the one hand to symbolist efforts to give poetic expression to thought, and on the other hand (as Paulhan recognized) to the naturalist discourse of the “human document.” This links surrealism to a larger modernist ambition that Laurent Jenny calls “the figuration of thought,” and that involves the attempted exteriorization of psychic space.9 In fact, I argue, the surrealists propose a synthesis of the symbolist and naturalist traditions when they theorize the expression of interiority not as fig­ur­ ation but rather as documentation. This conception of the document explains how surrealism develops a significant ethnographic component after an initial em­phasis on the unconscious, via a dissolution of the boundary between the cre­ ated document and the found document. The documentary mode in surrealism, as I understand it here, represents a site of continuity and synthesis—combining Dadaist practices of collage with the naturalist notion of the “human document”—while also bringing to light a num­ ber of tensions within the surrealist project, particularly around the problematic notion of directly transcribing thoughts. Early surrealist “documents,” presented as records of psychic activity and dreams, ultimately reveal themselves inadequate to the intellectual and poetic ambitions of the group. Subsequently, these docu­ ments are recaptured and repurposed by extended authorial commentaries that attempt to explicate and mediate their relation to the self. This interpretative operation extends to the poetic image that is initially produced by spontaneous association, but then transformed into an object of knowledge. It is here that the document of the unconscious comes into contact with the ethnographic impulse: first in those prose texts of the mid-to-late 1920s that turn their attention to daily experience and to the city, beginning with Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926), soon to be followed by Breton’s Nadja (1928). These works herald a shift from the surrealist document, understood as inherently poetic, to the docu­ mentary; that is, to a mode of prose presentation that reflexively frames, 7  Jean Paulhan, Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou La Terreur dans les Lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1941; repr. Folio), 48–9. 8  On the avant-garde and “anti-literature,” see Adrian Marino, “Antilittérature,” in Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle, ed. Jean Weisgerber, 2 vols (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984), 2, 678–84. 9  Laurent Jenny, La Fin de l’intériorité: théorie de l’expression et invention esthétique dans les avantgardes françaises (1885–1935) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), 14.

80  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century interprets, and acts on documents. The surrealist document (dream text, ­ hotograph, or found object) retains its indexical power even as it is inscribed p within a reconfigured documentary space. The notion of the document forms a bridge between the experiments of André Breton’s surrealist group and the work of the movement’s “dissident” writers (particularly Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris) in the 1930s, who at once radicalize the notion of the document and depart from the surrealist mode of documentary writing, developing a diverse set of practices at the edges of literature.

Automatism and Surrealist Documents Any text or object can become a document when it is read as a record of an ex­peri­ence, as a source of knowledge, as evidence of the importance of certain associations, or as an illustration of the operations of the mind. In this sense the surrealists engage in a documentary reading of all literature. For instance, Louis Aragon describes Lewis Carroll’s works as “documents de l’histoire même de la pensée humaine” (“documents of the very history of human thought”).10 When Robert Desnos, at a moment when he has distanced himself from Breton’s group, describes his own poetry collection Corps et biens (1930) as “un document d’une indiscutable importance” (“a document of indisputable importance”), he is at once presenting his work as an exemplary overview of the poetic innovations of the 1920s, and turning the page on his years of surrealist experiment.11 Aragon turns the same term against his former surrealist comrade in a virulent review of Corps et biens, accusing Desnos of dishonestly publishing as poems what are essentially clinical documents.12 It is difficult, however, to read this attack as good-faith criticism; the surrealists often laud the documentary value of their own writings, while falling back on the privilege of poetry over documents when it suits them. In the group’s early years, the expression “surrealist document” designates the automatic text. Surrealist automatic writing supposedly occurs without premedi­ tation or correction, producing texts that are conceived as the external con­cret­ iza­ tion of unconscious processes. From Breton and Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) in 1920 to Breton’s surrealist manifesto of 1924, the emergent surrealist movement defines itself largely in terms of this “automatisme psychique pur” (“pure psychic automatism”) and “dictée de la pen­ sée” (“dictated thought”), transcribed without any moral or aesthetic intention

10  Aragon, “Lewis Carroll en 1931,” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 (1931): 26. 11  Robert Desnos,“ ‘Prière d’insérer’ to Corps et biens” (1930) in Œuvres, ed. Marie-Claire Dumas (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 589. 12  Aragon, “Corps, âme, et biens,” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 1 (July 1930): 14–15.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  81 (MS, 328). This understanding of automatism is also connected to the surrealist emphasis on the image, since automatism produces unexpected associations; here we might take one of Breton’s own most memorable poetic images, which he cites as a piece of textual evidence in his manifesto: “Sur un pont, la rosée à tête de chatte se berçait” (“On a bridge, the cat-headed dew rocked back and forth”) (MS, 339). Automatic texts appear under the rubric “Textes surréalistes” (“surrealist texts”) in the journal La Révolution surréaliste (1924–1929), indicating the im­port­ance attributed to this practice. Breton adopts a telling metaphor when he describes automatic writing in a 1921 text on Max Ernst as “une véritable photog­ raphie de la pensée” (“a true photography of thought”).13 In his 1928 Traité du style (Treatise on Style), Aragon develops the same analogy in more circumspect terms. Observing that those surrealist texts produced by automatism are highly uneven in their degree of poetic interest, Aragon nevertheless defends their “docu­men­tary” value as records of mental events: On peut dire en quelque sorte qu’un texte surréaliste, en fonction de son auteur, atteint à une objectivité analogue à celle du rêve, qui dépasse de beaucoup le degré d’objectivité relative des textes ordinaires, où les défaillances n’ont aucune valeur, alors que dans le texte surréaliste elles sont encore des faits mentaux, intéressants au même titre que leurs contraintes. La valeur documentaire d’un tel texte est celle d’une photographie. One might say in some sense that a surrealist text, depending on the author, attains an objectivity similar to that of the dream, which surpasses by far the degree of relative objectivity of ordinary texts, where lapses have no value, whereas in the surrealist text they are still mental events, just as interesting as their determining constraints. The documentary value of such a text is that of a photograph.14

In this sense, the notion of the document serves as an aesthetic alibi for a text that is not quite poetic but stands as an objective, depersonalized trace of an event (although curiously, Aragon also says that the degree of objectivity depends on the author, suggesting that such “photographic” practice is not so simple). Looking back at surrealism’s history in a 1952 interview, Breton also registers a degree of disappointment with the results of automatism, but repeats the claim that automatic texts are documents.15 The alternative between poem and ­document—or rather, the conception of the document as at once inherently poetic and potentially unaesthetic—reveals an equivocation on the status of literary 13 Breton, Max Ernst (1921) in Les Pas perdus (1924), Œuvres completes, Vol. 1. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1988–2008), 245. 14  Louis Aragon, Traité du style (Paris: Gallimard, 1928), 188–9. 15 Breton, Entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 234.

82  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century judgment and tensions in the surrealists’ conception of writing—between the mundane and the marvelous, objectivity and subjectivity, expression and creation. As Michel Murat has shown, the surrealist insistence on the document or dic­ tée is in some respects misleading, since it obscures both the diversity of surrealist automatic practices and the constitutive heterogeneity of the automatic text.16 The appeal to documentary value nevertheless remains central to surrealist the­ ory and practice. It affirms the continuity both between the visual and the verbal, and between the subjective and the objective. But it produces a dilemma for the reader who attempts to approach the “documents” produced by automatism as literary objects: are they to be read literally or figuratively, as narrative objects or as images? What do we make of Breton’s cat-headed dew on the bridge? Anne Reverseau responds to this question by extending Aragon’s photographic analogy to the cinematic model, in order to make a strong case for the reading of the sur­ realist automatic text as a vision-narrative (récit-vision) that presents us with a series of animated images, often characterized by a striking visual simplicity.17 This reading allows Reverseau to find an affinity between surrealist automatic writing and the modernist “poetry of notetaking” (“poésie de notation”) that develops from the pre-World-War-I period through the 1920s, in the work of such poets as Valéry Larbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Mac Orlan, Henry JeanMarie Levet, or Pierre Albert-Birot; the key difference is that the documentary approach of the surrealists is directed not to external reality but to inward ­ex­peri­ence.18 We might recall here the “objectivity” that Aragon attributes to the “texte surréaliste,” despite the latter’s origins in the psychic reality of the author. According to Aragon’s account, automatic writing materializes and transforms the inner experience by postulating thought as a voice to be registered and recorded. Paradoxically, it registers personality only by circumventing subjectivity, or at least by announcing, as Laurent Jenny puts it, a utopia of “de-subjectivized” utterance: by refusing to ground linguistic utterance in a rhetorical contract or pragmatic situation, automatic writing announces a mode of utterance that is “atemporal, non subjective, total, and undecidable.”19 This conception of automa­ tism produces some surprising displacements of utterance. Writing in Minotaure in 1934, for instance, Breton praises the teenage poetic prodigy Gisèle Prassinos for writing without conscious intention, while claiming that her poetry— described as “ce document essentiel” (“this essential document”)—speaks for him 16  Michel Murat,“Jeux de l’automatisme,” in Une pelle au vent dans les sables du rêve. Les écritures automatiques, ed. Michel Murat and Marie-Paule Berranger (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1992), 5–25. 17  Anne Reverseau, “Microlectures des textes automatiques surrealists: complexité, simplicité et complications,” in “Complications de texte: les microlectures,” special issue, Fabula LHT (Littérature, histoire, théorie) 3 (September 1, 2007): para. 37. http://www.fabula.org/lht/3/Reverseau.html. 18  Reverseau, “Microlectures des textes automatiques surréalistes,” paras 46–47. 19  Laurent Jenny, “L’automatisme comme mythe rhétorique,” in Murat and Berranger, Une pelle au vent, 28.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  83 and for the surrealist group as a whole.20 Documents speak, but not necessarily for those who write them. Another type of surrealist document is the dream narrative, which is given privileged place along with the automatic “textes surréalistes” in the early surreal­ ist journals (under the rubric “Rêves”). Other documents are records of collective surveys or investigations. La Révolution surréaliste publishes reports of three such “enquêtes”: on suicide (January 1925), on sexuality (March 1928), and on love (December 1929).21 These conversations and debates illustrate surrealism’s efforts to explore aspects of experience beyond the realm of the aesthetic, and they also reveal the collective dynamics of the group. From October 1924 to January 1925 (when it became a private space), the Bureau de Recherches surréalistes (Office of Surrealist Research) at 15, rue de Grenelle, also collected “des récits de rêves et quantité d’autres documents” (“dream narratives and many other documents”) from the public at large.22 Automatic texts and dream narratives are closely related in that they sup­ ly aim to capture, by different means, the pre-rational functioning of posed­ thought. Of the two, the dream narrative is more readily integrated into existing models of reading, notably the interpretative method of Freud that directly influ­ ences surrealist practice and shapes the analytic enterprise of Breton’s prose text Les Vases communicants (Communicating Vessels, 1932). Although the notion of psychological automatism has a scientific history in the psychiatry of Pierre Janet, Michel Murat observes that Breton’s appropriation of the concept both moves it toward Freud (via the choice of the adjective “psychique” rather than “psy­ chologique”), and neutralizes the theoretical in favor of the poetic.23 Nevertheless, insofar as they are simultaneously documents of thought and poetic creations, the automatic text and the dream narrative have a double, or even triple status: they are at once illustrations of a principle or procedure, autonomous poetic entities, and objects that can be subordinated to their subsequent elucidation (a ra­tion­al­ iza­tion of the kind that Breton offers for his own associative images and dreams). Murat argues that the “poetic document,” understood in this sense, is ultimately taken charge of by “a metadiscourse that constructs its reception, but that mar­ ginalizes and reduces it to a role of illustration.”24 This illustrative reduction is doubtless one of the risks incurred by the surrealist document. However, I will

20  Breton, “La Grande Actualité poétique,” Mélusine 6 (1934): 62. 21  Collective, “Enquête: le suicide est-il une solution?,” La Révolution surréaliste 2 (January 1925): 8–15; Collective, “Recherches sur la sexualité,” La Révolution surréaliste 11 (March 1928): 32–40; Collective, “Enquête sur l’amour,” La Révolution surréaliste 12 (December 1929): 65–76. 22  Breton, “Le Bouquet sans fleurs,” La Révolution surréaliste 2 (1925); repr. in Œuvres completes, Vol. 1, 897. See also Paule Thévenin (ed.), Bureau de recherches surréalistes: cahier de la permanence, octobre 1924–avril 1925 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). 23  Murat, “Jeux de l’automatisme,” 8. 24  Michel Murat, “Le Jugement originel de la réalité,” Communications 79 (2006): 130.

84  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century read this explanatory metadiscourse differently, as one component of a complex documentary mode in which the initial document both inspires and resists the interpretative discourse that seeks to frame it.

The Photographic Paradigm As already noted, the documents that make up the issues of La Révolution surréal­ iste fall under several general rubrics—“surrealist texts,” dream narratives, records of investigations, chronicles. The journal’s pages also accommodate various add­ ition­al insertions and quotations, both textual and visual: reproductions of draw­ ings, paintings, and photographs (documentary collage); faits divers quoted directly from newspapers (documentary transcriptions that also create a collage effect).25 Different documents are organized by category or else simply juxta­ posed, according to a generalized logic of collage that continues the Dadaist prac­ tice of applying to writing a technique that originated in the visual arts. For Dada, the method of assembling and repurposing materials takes its impetus from bist collage—the revolutionary use of the papier collé that Tristan Tzara cu­ describes both as a visual equivalent of the repurposed linguist commonplace, and as a fragment of reality placed into the painting.26 The surrealists, however, tend to prefer the metaphor of photography when it comes to defining their use of documents. Photography, as we have seen in the section on “Automatism and Surrealist Documents,” serves as an apt analogy for surrealist writing; it is also celebrated as a surrealist medium in its own right, either exemplifying the realm of the docu­ mentary or opening up possibilities of manipulation that disrupt representation. Scholarship on surrealist photography (often post-structurally inflected) has tended to focus on the second tendency, for instance by privileging the visual experiments of Man Ray. In an influential essay, Rosalind Krauss locates pho­tog­ raphy at the center of surrealist aesthetics, basing her account precisely on the special status of the photograph as “an imprint or transfer off the real; [. . .] a photo­chem­ical­ly processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables.”27 Having established this initial importance of the imprint, however, Krauss goes on to emphasize the introduc­ tion of techniques of doubling and spacing that constitute reality as representa­ tion or sign, and on the manipulations of the image that place surrealist

25  On the relationship of faits divers and collage in surrealism, see Nathalie Piégay-Gros, “Collages et faits divers surréalistes,” Poétique 159 (2009): 287–98. 26  Tristan Tzara, “Le papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture,” Cahiers d’art 6(2) (1931): 61–73. 27  Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (December 1981): 26.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  85 photography at odds with “the congregation of Straight Photography.”28 That is, Krauss places the indexical force of photography at the heart of surrealism only to re-inscribe écriture, in the poststructuralist sense, at the heart of the photographic image; presence is “transformed into absence, into representation, into spacing, into writing.”29 In counterpoint to this view, more recent scholarship on the docu­ mentary image has offered more positive accounts of “straight” photography. Thus John Roberts sets out to “recover the critical place of the photographic archive within the avant-garde, and to present a dialogic defense of the docu­ mentary image.”30 Ian Walker argues for a reorientation of our understanding of surrealism away from photographic manipulation toward a tradition of docu­ mentary practice “which often intersects with other areas of practice, be they artistic movements such as Neue Sachlichkeit and Surrealism or modes of enquiry such as anthropology.”31 Work in text-image studies and on the history of “photo­ literature” also belong to this relatively new critical tendency, which rehabilitates notions of reference and representation while remaining sensitive both to the specificity and the interactions of different media.32 But an exclusive focus on photography as such can distort interpretations of surrealism’s documentary poetics. Emphasizing the primacy of writing in surreal­ ism, Olivier Lugon has argued that the surrealists merely instrumentalize docu­ mentary photography, mythologizing the document as a pure fragment of reality (as in the case of Atget), and using it as a pretext for subjective associations rather than elaborating their own “documentary art.”33 But this argument (which is based primarily on a single article by Dali34), overlooks the fact that the sur­real­ ists also treat textual materials (including poems) as documents, and develop a set of complex documentary discourses and practices around image and text alike. The photographic paradigm in fact extends beyond uses of the photo­ graphic medium and illuminates the literary discourse on, and deployment of, various “documents.” Furthermore, the motivation for the photographic analogy runs both ways: if surrealist writing presents itself as photographic, Dawn Ades reminds us that photography’s place in surrealism (and particularly in the early issues of La Révolution surréaliste) is also determined by the search for a “pro­ced­ ure equivalent to automatic writing” within the realm of the visual arts—a place

28  Krauss, “Corpus delicti,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, ed. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone (New York: Abbeville, 1985), 91. 29  Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” 28. 30 Roberts, The Art of Interruption, 2. 31 Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 3. 32  See for instance Jean-Pierre Montier, Liliane Louvel, Danièle Méaux, and Philippe Ortel (eds), Littérature et photographie (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008). 33  Olivier Lugon, Le Style documentaire: d’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945. Le Champ de l’image (Paris: Macula, 2001), 27–8. 34  Salvador Dali, “Psychologie non-euclidienne d’une photographie,” Minotaure 7 (1935): 56–7. Focusing on a single detail of an uncredited photograph, Dali applies to it his method of “paranoiaccritical activity.”

86  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century also occupied by the automatic drawings of André Masson.35 In its analogical thinking, surrealist writing seeks formal equivalents for various techniques of image production and manipulation, from photographic multiple exposures to cinematic projection.36 Even if the verbal document arguably remains primary (to the extent that Breton’s Manifesto casts automatic writing as surrealism’s point of origin), the surrealist conception of writing is fundamentally determined by its relation to the image. Here I propose not to refute but rather to reverse Krauss’s analysis by privileging not absence or spacing, but rather presence and (indexical) causal connection; and not the inscription of writing within the image, but the notion of writing as image. In his prose text L’Amour fou (1937), Breton takes up Man Ray’s caption “explosante-fixe” (“explosive-fixed”), used for the image of a flamenco dancer, as a partial definition of his conception of “convulsive beauty” (an excerpt prepublished in the journal Minotaure further illustrates this theory with additional Man Ray photographs and several close-ups of coral and minerals by Brassaï).37 This association again emphasizes the centrality of photographic capture as a model for surrealist writing. Yet it is not only the fixed image, but also the cinematic image-in-motion that offers a useful analogy for understanding surrealist prac­ tices. In this sense, surrealist texts belong to the tradition of “cinepoetry”—poetic texts with cinematographic features—as defined by Christophe Wall-Romana, even if (as Wall-Romana argues) Breton’s Manifesto attempts to “sublimate” cinepoetry, retaining the “light of the image” while dispensing with the screen.38 In broader terms, Jennifer Wild has analyzed the impact on Dada and early sur­ realism of the formal parameters and sensory environments associated with film projection and exhibition.39 My point here is that cinema modifies the notion of the document, and in the process transforms the legacy of the documentary claims of naturalist literature; at the same time, film analogies express a fantasy of a direct documentation that would somehow escape technological mediation. In the 1920s, as we have seen in the Introduction (section on Literature, Photography, and the Filmic Imagination), the notion of “documentary” comes to be associated with the cinematic. When Breton, responding to his communist 35  Dawn Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, ed. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art; New York: Abbeville, 1985), 159–60. 36  On multiple exposure in surrealist texts and photographs of urban landscapes, see Héloïse Pocry, “Surimpressions naturelles et volontaires chez les surréalistes. Un regard multiple sur Paris,” Articulo— Journal of Urban Research 2 (October 24, 2009). http://journals.openedition.org/articulo/1162; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/articulo-1162. 37  Breton, “La Beauté sera convulsive,” photographs by Brassaï and Man Ray, Minotaire 5 (1934): 8–16.; Breton, AF, 680–7. 38  Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 149. 39 Jennifer Wild, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900–1930 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015).

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  87 critics in the pamphlet Légitime défense (1926), describes Henri Barbusse’s realistic World-War-I novel Le Feu (Under Fire, 1916) as “un documentaire passable” (“a passable documentary”), he acknowledges the book’s objective accuracy while dismissing it as an aesthetic achievement. But at the same time he defines the proper place of documentary: a “real” cinematic film that reproduced the same scenes of carnage, he adds, would necessarily be superior to Barbusse’s ­textual representation.40 This judgment should not be taken as a blanket dismissal of naturalism; on the contrary, Breton argues that Zola succeeded, where Barbusse fails, in exteriorizing his inner sense of social wrongs. However, the possibilities of cinema pose a challenge to the literary representation of external reality, push­ ing literature to seek new methods for documenting subjective reality.

From Documents to Documentary Prose Recording mental processes is not surrealism’s only concern. Breton’s attack on the realist attitude in his 1924 manifesto is directed less at the realist and natural­ ist tradition as a whole, than at contemporary writers such as Anatole France. Breton’s Les Vases communicants (Communicating Vessels) even contains a paren­ thetical tribute to the naturalist descriptions of Zola, the Goncourt brothers, and Huysmans (up to En route [1895]), who are all remarkable for their capacity of seeing and touching the real.41 Dominique Combe argues that Breton’s approach can be characterized as “phenomenological realism”: a desire to present the mani­ festation of things.42 It is in this sense that the term “document” retains a positive connotation for the surrealists, who use it not only to refer to psychic automa­ tism, but also to the detailed and immediate recording of external phenomena. This is what Breton, in the preface to the revised edition of Nadja (dated 1962), calls “le document pris sur le vif ” (“the document taken from life”)—which we might distinguish from the subjective records of “spoken thought” (“pensée par­ lée”) that characterized earlier surrealist practice. “Neither literary nor political in the first instance,” observes Michael Sheringham, “surrealist practice operates in the everyday—the street, the café, the hairdresser’s; in speech, desire, and chance.”43 Chance, for the surrealists, is objective; that is, it involves precisely a passage or mode of communication between the inner and the outer. There is a crucial connection here between “objective chance” and surrealist description/ documentation: while the automatic text claims to “photograph” thought through a process of exteriorization, surrealist descriptions of the external world seek to 40  André Breton, Légitime défense (1926) in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, 286. 41  André Breton, Les Vases communicants (1932) in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, 158. 42  Dominique Combe, “L’Œil existe à l’état sauvage,” Mélusine 21 (2001): 22. 43 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67.

88  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century interiorize what seems objective. Surrealist documentary narratives then c­ onstitute a record of this dynamic, dialogic process. The surrealist record of “lived experience in concrete space”44 often links the verbal and the visual, the found document and the made document. It also entails a turn away from the initial surrealist document as such—the automatic text that records thought—to a form of documentary prose that stages and questions the writer’s relationship to documents. This evolution corresponds roughly to Maurice Nadeau’s account of the move from the “heroic” to the “reasoning” ­periods of surrealism, around 1925, and it predates the crisis that shakes the group in 1929.45 The work that spectacularly inaugurates this shift from the docu­ ment to the documentary is Louis Aragon’s hybrid and highly descriptive prose work Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant, 1926), which refashions realist descrip­ tion in documentary terms.

Between Document and Myth: Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris Le Paysan de Paris, pre-published in installments in Philippe Soupault’s Revue européenne in 1924 and 1925, combines detailed description, philosophical digressions, and lyrical flights of fancy.46 It presents itself as an effort both to exhaustively document urban space and to create a modern mythology. Aragon does not include photographs, but his descriptions multiply markers of docu­ mentary precision. They offer elaborate topographical detail and develop a nomenclature that gives prime place to proper names: the Passage de l’Opéra with its three galleries, the café Certa, the Théâtre moderne. Aragon describes the lay­ out of the stores and cafés in the Passage de l’Opéra (LPP, 153–4); he specifies the exact color of a woman’s dress (LPP, 206–7); he offers a precise geographical sur­ vey of the Buttes-Chaumont park (LPP, 245–7.) Many of the factual details in the text are verifiable. Thus, Margaret Cohen confirms the “documentary function” of the first part of Aragon’s text by compar­ ing its architectural account to what she calls “the only nonfictional description” available of the Passage de l’Opéra: Charles Fegdal’s 1934 Dans notre vieux Paris.47 44 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 74. 45  Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme (1945; Paris: Éditions Maurice Nadeau, 2016), Parts 2 and 3. 46  The preface and “Le Passage de l’Opéra” appear as “Le Paysan de Paris (1),” in La Revue europée­ nne 16–19 (June–September 1924); “Le Sentiment de la nature aux Buttes-Chaumont” appears in La Revue européenne 25–8 (March–June 1925). The last section of the volume, “Le Songe du Paysan” incorporates texts published in La Révolution surréaliste 3–5 (April–October 1925). The book was published with Gallimard/ Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française in September 1926. 47 Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surreal Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 95.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  89 Factual accuracy of this kind, of course, can also be found in fictional texts that  anchor their narratives in a real setting; this is one of the features of the nineteenth-century novel. However, Le Paysan de Paris is not a work of fiction, even if it does contain elements of verbal illusion.48 It is a first-person account in which a certain “Louis,” a former Dadaist and now member of the surrealist movement, presents himself as the subject of his discourse. While the book is not an auto­biog­raphy (in the sense of giving a retrospective account of the author’s life), it does establish a referential pact based on the identity of author, narrator, and character. In this context, the semantic dimension of the text—the internal coherence of its propositions—is not strictly separable from its deictic context; that is, its gesture outward toward the speaker’s situation, as a surrealist writer wandering in the Passage de l’Opéra and in the Buttes-Chaumont in 1924. In addition to description, Aragon’s methods of notetaking include documentary transcription (for instance of conversations with the concierge of the Passage de l’Opéra [LPP, 156–7]) and documentary collage or pseudo-collage: newspaper cuttings and pamphlets (LPP, 164–5) the box office notice of the Théâtre moderne (LPP, 192), a table displaying the prices of the drinks available at the Café Certa (LPP, 200), and images of store signs and advertisements (LPP, 216–17). One example of documentary collage is presented as the visual snapshot of a page from the newspaper La Liberté (dated Sunday March 23, 1924). The image includes the vertical cropping of the columns to the left and right of the central section (LPP, 164; see Figure  2.1). The text of the central column, titled “Les Ruines du Boulevard Haussmann” (“The Ruins of Boulevard Haussmann”) sup­ plements Aragon’s account of the pending demolition of the Passage de l’Opéra, describing a tumultuous scene at the Palais de Justice and the outrage of the arcade’s storekeepers at the expropriation proceedings that will drive them away. Cited by Aragon as one of the rare echoes in the press of the affected parties’ legitimate indignation, the newspaper cutting serves as textual evidence that sup­ ports Aragon’s own account. The cropped and partially legible columns to the left and right reinforce this evidential function not in their content but in their index­ ical function, offering contextual confirmation of the newspaper source. But they also produce an effect of incongruity: through semantic juxtaposition, with the left-hand column apparently referring to stocks in the chemical industry and the right-hand column (with its title “Sucreries” [either sugar refineries or candy]) seeming to have little to do with the text below it (“l’or gomme assass meurtrier” [“gold, gum, kill[er] murderer”] being one of the most striking series of terms). 48  André Gavillet argues that the multiplication of references to the real is ultimately subsumed into an art of verbal illusion, where reference serves primarily to verify the narrator’s flights of fancy. André Gavillet, La Littérature au défi: Aragon surréaliste (Neuchatel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1957), 172–3, 272. I would argue, however, that this function of verification requires maintaining the referen­ tial level as the ground for our reading.

90  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century

Figure 2.1  Article from La Liberté, March 23, 1924, as presented in Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (1926) Source: image from Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris © Gallimard, 1926.

They provoke curiosity by providing tantalizing or titillating snippets of informa­ tion: what is happening at Dabrowa, mentioned in the left-hand column? What cures are being proposed for venereal diseases in the article or advertisement to the right? The excerpt is iconic in its physical resemblance to the page, even if the ellipsis and the “etc.” at the bottom of the central column introduces an authorial intervention that both marks a cut in the text and breaks the mimetic illusion. The collage effect here is so convincing that few readers would verify Aragon’s source (see Figure  2.2). In fact, the page from La Liberté is not simply cut and

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  91 pasted into the book; the text in the main column has been slightly modified in terms of typography, font, capitalization, and justification (which in fact varies between editions of the work), and it is framed by two truncated columns that are not next to it in in the original source, but probably copied from elsewhere. Even if we allow for modifications that can be attributed to the typographer, as well as to authorial revisions (there are in fact differences in the organization between

Figure 2.2  Page from La Liberté, March 23, 1924 Source: courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

92  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century Aragon’s manuscript and the published version49), Aragon still presents as a “raw” document what is in reality a fabricated visual composition—involving not just collage, but transcription and rearrangement that still mimics but does not repro­ duce the visual appearance of the original. This is not quite the cut-up technique used by Tristan Tzara to make Dadaist poems, since the main unit of prose is preserved in its original syntactic order. The manipulation may seem rather gra­ tuitous, since it is likely to pass unnoticed. But Aragon exacerbates the newspaper layout’s capacity for producing incongruous, amusing, or salacious juxtapositions, and he introduces an element of Dadaist mockery into what might otherwise seem a straightforward documentary procedure. Even if it is constructed, the newspaper cutting appears to the reader both as a transcription of evidence (indeed, Aragon mentions the article as a reference cited by the shopkeepers of the passage [LPP, 163]) and as a visual object that interrupts our reading—a fragment of the everyday that intersects with our field of vision. It positions the writer-flâneur as an investigator and a collector of visual impressions, who explores the “royaumes de l’instantané” (“realms of the in­stant­ an­ eous/of the snapshot”) (LPP, 183)—including, voyeuristically, the public baths—equipped with “un esprit positif. Et un petit Kodak” (“a practical mind. And a little Kodak”) (LPP, 183/PP, 56). But the gesture of documentary collage also places the affair of the Passage de l’Opéra among a multitude of other events and discourses, gesturing toward social reality more broadly—even as it rein­ forces Aragon’s judgment of the economic injustice suffered by the storekeepers to the benefit of the corrupt concession-holding company L’Immobilière du Boulevard Haussmann. Both iconic and indexical (or in some cases, creating an indexical effect), Aragon’s collage and pseudo-collage practices combine spatial disposition and typographical imitation with photographic devices of framing. His approach reflects an ongoing fascination with techniques of collage that had already claimed a central place in the visual arts, from cubism onwards. As Aragon notes in a 1923 text on Max Ernst, collage is used by cubist artists as a way of directly borrowing materials from reality, but becomes (with Ernst) a poetic procedure.50 The collages of Le Paysan de Paris combine these two functions, involving both the intrusion of external reality into representation and a transformation of the written word. Presented as fragments of concrete reality (even when they are ­subject to manipulation), the store signs, advertisements, and newspaper cuttings 49  See Daniel Bougnoux’s notes on the variants (Aragon, “Notes and Variants,” in Œuvres poétiques complètes, Vol. 1, ed. Daniel Bougnoux (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 1269). For instance, “Sucreries” is in the original manuscript “Sucreries d’Egypte,” (“Egyptian sugar refineries”) referring to stocks, and appears in the left-hand column. The manuscript of “Le Passage de l’Opéra” prepared for La Revue européenne is conserved at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris. 50 Aragon, Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1965), 29.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  93 become the formal model that determines the visual appearance of other poetic insertions. These include: a playful decomposition of the word pessimisme (LPP, 177–8); an ironic “fable” on the word réalité (LPP, 182–3); the self-addressed call, “LOUIS!” printed at the center of the page in bold, large capitals for the author’s sheer pleasure at seeing his (rarely used) first name clearly printed (LPP, 184); an imagined street sign introducing readers to the “Arcade of the Opera of Dreams” (“Passage de l’Opéra onirique”) (LPP, 208); and a poem inspired by Desnos, pre­ sented in the form of a store sign, which plays on the word “éphémère” (LPP, 209). As the film theorist and literary critic Jean Epstein puts it (albeit with refer­ ence to a different text, a poem) Aragon’s writing “affirms a single intellectual plane,” by projecting everything—in this case images drawn from the reality and from the imagination—“on the same square of screen.”51 Crucially, this practice produces a continuity between the made document— the surrealist text that expresses and transforms an inner reality—and the found document that is a kind of readymade, a fait accompli (or in Breton’s terms, a “trouvaille,” a lucky find [AF, 682]), inserted into the text and repurposed within a larger discourse. Both made and found documents simultaneously serve as evi­ dence and undermine the unity of representation, subjecting fragments of reality to a mode of ironic distancing. Related to documentary collage, although less visual in nature, is Aragon’s use of quotation and pastiche—including a pastiche of automatic writing voiced by the personified figure of l’Ennui (Boredom) (LPP, 237–8). Aragon’s expanded practice of collage is not simply a path to realism, as Aragon will later claim52—or in any case it is not only a deictic gesture toward the real. It operates, rather, as an “art of interruption,” to borrow the term that John Roberts uses for documentary photography and associated practices of montage.53 Materials taken from the real jostle up against snippets of poetic play and allegorical projection (as in the conversation between man and his faculties [LPP, 187–91]). This heterogeneity of modes produces a critical relation to reality. Aragon’s practice of descriptive notetaking thus does not strictly adhere to the factual, but instead combines precise documentation with the uncertainties of subjective vision. In Le Paysan de Paris, immediate perception is continuous with imaginative transformation: the arcade can turn into an underwater grotto, a prostitute into a mermaid (LPP, 158–9), or gasoline pumps into statues of mod­ ern divinities: “Texaco motor oil, Eco, Shell” (LPP, 229). These moments of fic­ tionality—or rather, of what Aragon calls “modern mythology”—mark the emergence of the surreal, to be understood as a territory distinct from the

51  Jean Epstein, La Poésie aujourd’hui, un nouvel état d’intelligence (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921), 143; quoted in Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 122. 52 Aragon, Les Collages, 18–19. 53 Roberts, The Art of Interruption.

94  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century construction of an autonomous fictional universe. In this sense, the discursive mode of Aragon’s description differs fundamentally from the “realist” mode con­ demned by Breton in his 1924 surrealist manifesto. Still, Aragon’s self-proclaimed “don d’observation” (“gift for observation”) (LPP, 207) connects him back to the realist tradition. It involves a particular kind of attention to the material object and a transformation of ordinary perception, which Aragon evokes via a number of optical figures: mirror, microscope, kaleidoscope, Kodak camera, cinema. As Luc Vigier has argued, Aragon uses the analogy of the microscope to transform tiny details of daily reality into deformed, luminous, close-up images.54 But the close-up is also present in Aragon’s writings on cinema, where he admires film’s ability to capture, through a restricted field of view, “l’obsédante beauté des inscriptions commerciales, des affiches, des majuscules évocatrices, des objets vraiment usuels, de tout ce qui chante notre vie” (“the haunting beauty of com­ mercial inscriptions, posters, evocative capital letters, truly everyday objects, all that sings of our life”).55 One example of this “microscopic” or close-up observation concerns the way that coffee is served in the Café Certa, a former haunt of the Paris Dada group: Je n’aime pas beaucoup la façon dont on y sert le café filtre: pour enlever le filtre, qui est un pot de métal, sans se brûler il faut se servir de deux petites cuillers croisées placées dans la poignée et ce n’est pas sans difficulté. De plus le consom­ mateur solitaire n’en a pas la possibilité. Ensuite, où poser le filtre qui continue toujours à goutter un peu? On n’a guère à sa disposition que la soucoupe de verre guilloché dans laquelle se trouvait le sucre, et si on aime le café peu sucré, on y a laissé un morceau. Alors, ou l’on salit la table, ou l’on gâche un morceau de sucre. (LPP, 201–2) I don’t much care for the way they serve their café filtre: to remove the filter, which is a little metal pot, without burning one’s fingers, one has to perform a complicated manoeuvre with two crossed coffee spoons inserted through the handle. And a solitary customer, lacking the extra spoon, cannot even do that. Then, where can one deposit the filter which is continuing to dribble slightly? The only thing available is the cut-glass saucer which held the sugar, and if one prefers one’s coffee not too sweet then it still contains a lump. So you have a choice of dirtying the table or wasting a lump of sugar.  (PP, 80)

The rhetorical address to the reader and the apparent gratuity of the detail strike a humorous, conversational note. Aragon’s coffee spoons are not the source of an 54  Luc Vigier, “La Métaphore optique dans quelques romans d’Aragon,” Recherches Croisées Aragon/ Elsa Triolet 5 (1994): 136. 55  Aragon, “Du Décor,” Le Film 131 (September 16, 1918): 8–10; repr. in Chroniques (Paris: Stock, 1998), 24.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  95 epiphany; unlike, for instance, the spoon that accidentally knocks against a plate in Marcel Proust’s Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained), thereby awakening an involuntary memory that leads to the final revelation of the narrator’s literary vocation.56 The Proustian moment emerges from inattention; it enters awareness only by chance, and produces attention not to the present, but to the past, dis­ placing felt experience along the axis of similarity. Aragon’s spoons take their place in the account of an everyday scene, in a passage that records, in an iterative present tense, the poet’s intense participation in one of the ordinary rituals of a culture. (That said, Proust is also aware of the role of spoons as cultural sig­ni­fiers.57) We are at the intersection of collective and personal habits, between the social convention of table manners and individual ways of being and doing in the world. It is possible, nevertheless, to read the references to filters and sugar as an oblique allusion to less mundane beverages; Aragon’s surrealist manifesto “Une Vague de rêves” (“A Wave of Dreams,” 1924) mentions the perforated spoons formerly used to sweeten absinthe, the banned drink whose “cult” Aragon’s friend Roger Vitrac would like to reinstate (LPP, 94). This comparison, however, merely accen­ tuates the banality of the café scene in Le Paysan de Paris. Even if Certa’s method of serving filter coffee is idiosyncratic, the coffee spoons are not collectors’ items or remnants of a past invested with nostalgia. Yet, the Café Certa itself is about to become a thing of the past with the demolition of the arcade in which it is situated—and which had in fact already disappeared by the time Aragon’s text appeared in book form in 1926. Although Aragon does not adopt the melancholic tone of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”58), his spoon does offer a way of measuring life. But it is also very ordinary (if not entirely suited to the function of removing filters); it does not possess the uncanny aura of the wooden spoon that attracts André Breton’s attention during a visit with Alberto Giacometti to a Paris flea market. In L’Amour fou (Mad Love, 1937), Breton offers us both a photograph of this object, by Man Ray, and the following description: “Une grande cuiller en bois, d’exécution paysanne, mais assez belle, me sembla-til, assez hardie de forme, dont le manche, lorsqu’elle reposait sur sa partie con­ vexe, s’élevait de la hauteur d’un petit soulier faisant corps avec elle” (“A large wooden spoon, of peasant fabrication but quite beautiful, it seemed to me, and rather daring in its form, whose handle, when it rested on its convex part, rose from a little shoe that was part of it”) (AF, 700 and photograph 704/ML, 30). 56  Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 4, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. Bibliothèque de la Pléaide (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–1989), 446–7. 57 For instance, Robert de Saint-Loup comments on the authority that transforms his uncle Charlus’s every foible into a law of manners: if Charlus eats his cake with a fork, or with some utensil of his own invention, rather than his spoon, everyone else must do likewise (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 2, 110). 58 T.  S.  Eliot, “The Lovesong of J.  Alfred Prufrock,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1991), line 51.

96  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century Interpreting the spoon-shoe using the method of association, Breton comes to understand it as an emblem of the Cinderella story, and to link it both to everyday life—the wooden spoon stands for Cinderella’s daily chores—and to the magical transformation of this existence, via the slipper that allows her to attend the ball (AF, 702–3/ML, 33–4). Breton’s found object has a similar status to a dream image and is a concretization of surrealist objective chance. By contrast, Aragon’s coffee spoons are closer to a certain “ethnographic” perspective, exemplified in a differ­ ent context by the sociologist Marcel Mauss’s attention to spoons rather than artworks;59 as Vincent Debaene points out, Mauss’s attitude involves the notion that every aspect of a culture is worthy of being recorded and transformed into a “document.”60 We can imagine a study of the origins of spoons (their material, their fabrication), of the different forms they take (absinthe versus coffee spoons), of their functions and affordances in serving bodily needs and social rituals (eat­ ing, drinking, meeting others); we might think of an investigation, inspired by Mauss’s notion of “techniques of the body,” of the ways in which our apparently natural ways of using spoons reveal the social and cultural character of habitus.61 Extending this sociological connection, Aragon’s attention to the modes of use of ordinary objects anticipates Michel de Certeau’s emphasis on “arts de faire” (“ways of doing”) in his work on the quotidian,62 as well as Georges Perec’s sug­ gestion, in a programmatic text on the “infra-ordinary,” that we question our cof­ fee spoons.63 Aragon’s approach to description does not so much resist the oriented dyna­ mism of narrative, as in Philippe Hamon’s account of the descriptive,64 as com­ pose its own temporal dynamic based on minute variations and repetitions. The poetic qualities of the text, its rhythm and its tonal variations, are intertwined with an investigation of the formal means of recording. Le Paysan de Paris stages a confrontation with the real that makes visible the possibilities and limits of rep­ resentation. Aragon’s attempts at exhaustive description run up against his sense that the world is never fully accessible: Que le monde m’est donné, ce n’est pas mon sentiment. Cette marchande de mouchoirs, ce petit sucrier que je vais vous décrire si vous n’êtes pas sages, ce

59  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Routledge, 2002), 56. 60  See Vincent Debaene, “Les surréalistes et le musée d’ethnographie,” Labyrinthe 12 (June 2002): 71–94. https://journals.openedition.org/labyrinthe/1209; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/labyrinthe.1209. 61 Mauss, “Les Techniques du corps” (1936), in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 362–86. 62  Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien I. Arts de faire (Paris: 10/18, 1980. 63 “Questionnez vos petites cuillers.” Georges Perec, “Approches de quoi?” (1973), in L’Infraordinaire (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 13. 64 Hamon, Du descriptif (Paris: Hachette, 1993), 5.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  97 sont des limites intérieures de moi-même, des vues idéales que j’ai de mes lois, de mes façons de penser, et je veux bien être pendu si ce passage est autre chose qu’une méthode pour m’affranchir de certaines contraintes, un moyen d’accéder au-delà de mes forces à un domaine encore interdit.  (LPP, 207–8) I do not subscribe to the idea that the world can be had for the asking. This hand­ kerchief saleswoman, this little sugar bowl which I will describe to you if you don’t behave yourself, are interior boundaries of myself, ideal views I have of my laws, of my ways of thought, and may I be strung up by the neck if this passage is anything else but a method of freeing myself of certain inhibitions, a means of obtaining access to a hitherto forbidden realm that lies beyond my human energies.  (PP, 88)

The passage is an architectural form (the arcade) that organizes an ambiguous interior–exterior space. It is also metaphor for the narrator himself and the move­ ment of his writing: “Je suis le passage de l’ombre à la lumière, je suis du même coup l’occident et l’aurore. Je suis une limite, un trait” (“I am the transition [pas­ sage] from darkness to light, I am at one and the same time occident and dawn. I am a limit, a bearing”) (LPP, 225/PP, 111). The “lueur glauque” (“murky gleam”) of the arcade produces a shifting space of both licit and illicit activity (LPP, 152), compared to an aquatic cave where the walker oscillates between external reality and subjective vision (LPP, 176/PP, 47). This is a strange zone where the subject confronts the gulfs that open up within himself, “sollicité également par les cou­ rants d’objets et par les tourbillons de soi-même” (“attracted equally by the cur­ rents of objects and the whirlpools of his own being”) (LPP, 177; PP, 47). As Pierre Ouellet argues, the body becomes the site of this constant tangling and disentangling of subject and object.65 Perception is subordinated to the “la dictat­ ure de la sensualité” (“dictatorship of sensuality”) (LPP, 147/PP, 13). In this context, the visual or verbal document is simultaneously a boundary— in its resistant materiality—and a means of “passage.” If Aragon’s descriptions are themselves inherently documentary in the sense that they repeatedly highlight their deictic connection to a particular time, place, and object (this saleswoman, this sugar bowl), Le Paysan de Paris combines these indications with visual insertions that establish a link to reality both through causal connection and physical resemblance. As a mode of reproducing perception and attempting to shortcircuit the process of symbolic mediation, the documentary image is in close proximity to Aragon’s definition of surrealism (voiced by the personified figure of Imagination): “l’emploi déréglé et passionnel du stupéfiant image” (“the uncon­ trolled and passionate use of the narcotic image”) (LPP, 191/PP, 82). Dream image and documentary image merge in the recording of an experience. This 65  Pierre Ouellet, “Métaphysique de la vue: passages du Paysan de Paris,” in Écrire et voir: Aragon, Elsa Triolet et les arts visuels (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1991), 205.

98  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century mode of writing stretches the bounds of decorum and coherence in its attention to the concrete, and is constantly aware of the concrete itself as a limit to descrip­ tion: “le concret, c’est l’indescriptible: à savoir si la terre est ronde, que voulezvous que ça me fasse?” (“the concrete is the indescribable: why should I care two pins whether the earth is round or not?”) (LPP, 295; PP, 205). Aragon’s entire project rests on the tension between the atomizing pull of the concrete detail and the operation of sense-making that transforms reality into a coherent collection of signs. The notion of “modern mythology” is one locus of this second operation, suspending the text just on the threshold of daydream, or fiction. In its link to collective memory, mythology has as its obverse the figure of the monument, whether in the doomed architectural form of the arcade, or the con­ structed landscape of the Buttes-Chaumont park (the focus of the second main section of the Paysan). This park, as Yvette Gindine notes, is for Aragon sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly a ridiculous projection of the individual’s desire for the marvelous, and an outlet for the systematic repression of the irrational by the world in which it exists.66 In the Buttes-Chaumont, Aragon discovers a monument that bears sev­ eral documentary inscriptions: a quadrangular column that enumerates and cele­ brates the characteristics of the nineteenth arrondissement: its neighborhoods, its markets, its churches, its post offices . . . Exploiting, once again, the practice of col­ lage or iconic quotation, Aragon reproduces the textual and visual form of the column’s markings, including two geometric forms he finds on the base: two rect­ angles of slightly different dimensions, the first bearing the heading “Plan du 19e arrondissement” (“Map of the 19th arrondissement”) (LPP, 263/PP 162), and the second “Plan de Paris” (LPP, 265/PP, 165). The empty space within the outlines reveals the monument’s incompletion. Visible reality is not transformed into readable marks according to an established code but remains absent from the site where it is supposed to be inscribed. Aragon mockingly addresses the unfortu­ nate Eugène Payart, the engineer who built the column: “Tel est l’esprit de lésine des hommes que ton monument restera toujours inachevé, avec ses deux grandes lacunes avides de géographie locale et de bon mouvement de la part d’une munic­ ipalité excentrique” (“Such is the stinginess of men that your monument will remain forever incomplete, with its two large gaps eager for local geography and for a kindly gesture from an eccentric municipality”) (LPP, 263/PP, 162–3). Aragon’s attitude to both the monument and the park is one of ambivalent fas­cin­ ation. The park is characterized as “cette aire folle née dans la tête d’un architecte du conflit de Jean-Jacques Rousseau et des conditions économiques de l’existence parisienne” (“this mad eyrie born in the head of an architect out of the conflict between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the economic conditions of Parisian exist­ ence”) (LPP, 242/PP, 133). Both the public garden and the embarrassingly incom­ plete obelisk are the fruit of an effort to organize and represent urban space and 66  Yvette Gindine, Aragon prosateur surréaliste (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 63.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  99 the life of the neighborhood at a given moment, yet they have been insufficiently invested by the official or collective will. The art historian Raymond Spiteri emphasizes surrealism’s ambivalent fas­cin­ ation with the monuments and statues of the Third Republic: the surrealists sat­ir­ ize the ideological function of these sites of memory, while also celebrating their irrational potential.67 But Aragon’s historical consciousness of urban space also involves a more general critical reflection on the possibilities and limits of repre­ sentation. The empty rectangles call to mind the equally blank “Map of the Ocean” in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark—a text that Aragon would translate into French in 1928. In Carroll’s story, the “perfect and absolute blank” of the map is a semiological joke: the intrepid explorers of the poem fail to see the utility of traditional maps because tropics, zones and meridian lines “are merely conven­ tional signs!”68 At the same time, Carroll’s map is a space of openness, a point of departure and a screen for the projection of an imaginary territory. Similarly, the incompletion of Payart’s column makes space for Aragon’s surrealist description of the park, which both incorporates and replaces the column’s pompous homage to the neighborhood. Nevertheless, the absence of the map is curiously doubled by a second absence, or erasure: the first published version of Aragon’s text, in La Revue européenne, supplements verbal description with a hand-drawn map of the park and its surrounding area (see Figure  2.3); but the 1926 volume does not include this visual substitute for the failure of Payart’s monument. The empty rectangles that Aragon reproduces insert a fragment of reality—that is, of a real absence—directly into the text, while at the same time functioning as a mise-en-abyme of representation, and giving visual expression to the limits of the descriptive project: Tu te crois, mon garçon, tenu à tout décrire. Illusoirement. Mais enfin à décrire. Tu es loin du compte. Tu n’as pas dénombré les cailloux, les chaises abandonnées. Les traces de foutre sur les brins d’herbe. Les brins d’herbe. (LPP, 277–8) You think, my boy, you have an obligation to describe everything. Fallaciously. But still, to describe. You are sadly out in your calculations. You have not enu­ merated the pebbles, the abandoned chairs. The traces of jism on the blades of grass. The blades of grass.  (PP, 182)

In this passage, Aragon ironically deflates his own exaltation of both desire and the concrete, directing aggression both at the reader and at the writer who

67  Raymond Spiteri, “Surrealism and the Irrational Embellishment of Paris,” in Surrealism and Architecture, ed. Thomas Mical (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), 192–3. 68  Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (New York: Macmillan, 1876; repr. 1898), 19; Aragon, La Chasse au snark, in Œuvres poétiques complètes, Vol. 1, 393.

100  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century

Figure 2.3  Map from Aragon, “Le Paysan de Paris (2e partie—II),” La Revue européenne 26 (April 1, 1925) Source: courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

pursues a futile task. The mythological construction of modern life deteriorates into the sordid traces of bodily fluids, while the monumental site of memory dis­ solves into derisory signs of human presence. The figure of the ruin evokes this collapse of the monument into a mere document, yet it also rescues the human trace by bestowing on it a poetic aura.69 Thus the doomed “human aquariums” of the arcades, precisely because they are about to fall prey to the pickaxe, become “les sanctuaires d’un culte de l’éphémère, [. . .] le paysage fantomatique des plaisirs et des professions maudites, incompréhensibles hier et que demain ne connaîtra jamais” (“the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral [. . .] the ghostly land­ scape of pleasures and of condemned professions, incomprehensible yesterday and that tomorrow will never know”) (LPP, 152/PP, 21). It is this dimension of Aragon’s text, which records the traces of the past in the present while transforming these marks into a readable hieroglyph, that appeals so strongly to Walter Benjamin. In particular, Aragon’s description of the Passage de l’Opéra plays a decisive role in Benjamin’s conception of the Arcades Project. 69  In his 1930 text “La peinture au défi,” Aragon describes Picasso’s use of collage as a way of in­corp­or­at­ing the waste material of human life into art; the artist fixes a dirty shirt onto his canvas precisely because he seeks “something poor, soiled, despised.” Aragon, Les Collages, 67.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  101 Although Benjamin criticizes Aragon’s mythology as an “impressionistic ­elem­ent” that traps reality “within in the realm of dream,”70 Jacques Leenhardt has shown that Aragon’s conception of “modern myth” is close to Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image: both offer a fleeting constellation of present and past.71 Essentially dynamic and unstable, always in motion, modern myths take form and then dissolve. Aragon’s reformulation of myth bears witness to a form of disenchantment—“On n’adore plus aujourd’hui les dieux sur les hauteurs” (“Man no longer worships the gods on their heights”) (LPP, 151/PP, 12)—just as collage appears as a mark of despair, an acknowledgment of the inimitable.72 In this con­ text, the poetic “document” attempts to grasp the concrete, but also always marks the limits of representation and carries the threat of the dissolution of meaning: “Tout se détruit sous ma contemplation” (“Everything is crumbling under my gaze”) (LPP, 177/PP, 48). Nevertheless, Aragon’s pessimism is matched by poetic exuberance, humor, and descriptive vitality, and by the development of what has aptly been called a “philosophy of the image” that draws on and rewrites aspects of German idealism.73 The surrealist image appears here not as an escape into a dream, but rather as what is most concrete. As such, it presents itself as a poetic document, which confers on the subjectivity of perception the necessity of con­ crete fact: “L’image poétique se présente sous la forme du fait, avec tout le néces­ saire de celui-ci” (“The poetic image presents itself in the form of fact, adorned with all fact’s necessities”) (LPP, 292/PP, 201). Le Paysan de Paris is a major work of avant-garde literature but it has faced an ambivalent reception. Neglected by critics when it first appeared,74 it was met by the other surrealists (according to Aragon) with “consternation.”75 Its descriptive and documentary excess both implements and destabilizes the surrealist project of uniting dream and reality. The work also has an uncertain place within Aragon’s own trajectory, since the author later both lauds and disavows it as a confused

70 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 458. 71  Jacques Leenhardt, “Le passage comme forme d’expérience: Benjamin face à Aragon,” Walter Benjamin et Paris, Colloque international 27–29 juin 1983, ed. Heinz Wismann (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1986), 166; on Aragon and Benjamin, see also Christine Dupouy, “Passages—Aragon/Benjamin,” Pleine marge 14 (1991): 41–57; Daniel Bougnoux, “Aragon et Walter Benjamin dans le Passage de l’Opéra,” in L’Atelier d’un écrivain: le XIXe siècle d’Aragon, ed. Édouard Béguin and Suzanne Ravis (Aixen-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2003), 71–8. 72 Aragon, Les Collages, 112. 73 Nathalie Piégay-Gros, “Philosophie de l’image,” Recherches croisées Aragon/Elsa Triolet 5 (1994): 149–68. 74  On this early reception, see Franck Merger, “La Conspiration du silence autour du Paysan de Paris: essai de bilan,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 102(6) (2002): 977–99. 75  Aragon retrospectively recounts, first in his 1930 text “Critique du ‘Paysan de Paris’ ” and again in Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire ou les incipit, the surrealist group’s reaction to the first version of Le Paysan de Paris (Aragon, Œuvres poétiques complètes, Vol. 1, 298; Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire ou les incipit [Geneva: Éditions Skira, 1969], 57).

102  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century early attempt at realist writing.76 While the text’s descriptive dimension recalls the realist novel, its lyrical digressions seem to bring it closer to poetry. Cultural his­ torians and literary critics often dismiss this work in favor of Breton’s approach to the everyday.77 Their reservations arise from the status of myth and dream in a work that attempts to grasp the real; Aragon’s concept of the “merveilleux quoti­ dien” (“the marvelous in the everyday”), according to this critical view, implies the transmutation of ordinary life into an aestheticized dream world. At stake here, in other words, is the relation of the real to the surreal, but also the function of the aesthetic/poetic realm itself in its ontological separation. In response to these critical readings, we might turn to Jacques Rancière for another way of understanding the relation between the ordinary and the mytho­ logical in surrealism. People, things, and societies, according to Rancière, come to function within the “aesthetic regime” of the arts as hieroglyphs to be de­ciphered. This mode of social visibility emerges first in literature but is later inherited by the emerging social sciences. However, the discipline of history then attempts to separate out its new object—ordinary life—from its original aesthetic and literary logic: What scholarly history abandons—and what cinema and photography take up— is this logic that the novelistic tradition reveals, from Balzac to Proust and to surrealism; this reflection on the true, inherited by Marx, Freud, Benjamin and the tradition of “critical thought”: the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And it becomes a trace of the true if it is uprooted from its self-evidence and made into a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagorical figure.78

Or to put the point slightly differently, literary truth entails the transformation of the documentary trace into a readable figure. The real is made readable, but only in the form of a figurative enigma that must be deciphered in terms of its col­lect­ ive meaning (as sign, as myth). History loses this critical dimension when it turns to positive concepts that flatten out its object, ordinary life. In Rancière’s account, 76 In Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire ou les incipit, Aragon designates Le Paysan de Paris as a novel and insists on its realist value (Aragon, Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire ou les incipit, 58). Yet he includes it in his Œuvre poétique rather than his collected Œuvres romanesques. 77  Henri Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne (Critique of Everyday Life, 1947) singles out Le Paysan de Paris for special criticism: Aragon promises a new world but delivers only “the mysteries of Paris.” Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne (Paris: L’Arche, 1947; 2nd edn, 1958), 127. Along the same lines, Michael Sheringham claims that Aragon remains “trapped in his own myth-making,” whereas Breton “maintains a better sense that the real mystery of the everyday world resides in its impenetrability” (Sheringham, Everyday Life, 75, 78). 78  “Ce qu[e l’histoire savante] laisse tomber—et que le cinéma et la photo reprennent—c’est cette logique que laisse apparaître la tradition romanesque, de Balzac à Proust et au surréalisme, cette pen­ sée du vrai dont Marx, Freud, Benjamin et la tradition de la “pensée critique” ont hérité: l’ordinaire devient beau comme trace du vrai. Et il devient trace du vrai si on l’arrache à son évidence pour en faire un hiéroglyphe, une figure mythologique ou fantasmagorique.” Rancière, Le Partage du ­sensible, 52–3.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  103 the task that links the modern novel to the constitution of the social sciences finds even greater power in cinema, which is able to ally the mute impression with the signifying powers of framing and montage. For Rancière the consum­ mate expression of this logic is found in documentary cinema.79 As we have seen, however, the interactions between media are complex; Aragon makes use of framing and montage techniques to translate the photographic and cinematic model into literary form. I propose, then, to follow Rancière in positioning surrealism within a tradition that leads from Balzac to documentary cinema. Also relevant is the parallel that Henri Mitterand draws between Zola’s use of symbolism, analogy, and myth— and above all his lyricism and powerful creation of images—and Aragon’s approach to reality in Le Paysan de Paris (strikingly, it is above all in Zola’s pre­ paratory notebooks that Mitterand finds a foreshadowing of Aragon’s text).80 In Zola’s carnets, as in Le Paysan de Paris, the surreal intervenes at the level that is closest to the recording of reality, apart from the elaboration of a fictional narra­ tive. Michel Murat suggests that surrealism occupies, in the French intellectual context, “the space where a critique of naturalism might have been developed.”81 That is, according to Murat, what this critique should have targeted was not the “exemplary” documentary inquiries of the kind perfected by Zola, but rather his “narrativization of the social” and his “epic and novelistic rhetoric.”82 I would contend that Le Paysan de Paris does in fact engage in just such a crit­ ic­al development of the naturalist tradition, prolonging naturalism’s documentary approach while turning away from the fictional mode. Le Paysan de Paris is not a novel, even if its appeal to myth registers the pull of fiction and resists the positiv­ ist flattening of purely documentary description. Myth, generally speaking, is not the equivalent of fiction, but instead depends on what Thomas Pavel has called a “two-level ontological structure [.  .  .] which accounts for both myths and fictions.”83 Aragon’s confrontation with naturalism plays out on the level of description, while “mythology” and oneiric transformation take the place of fic­ tion. We should note here that Aragon’s mythological treatment of the streets of Paris is contemporaneous with the emergence in the 1920s of the “city symphony” film, or more broadly a set of documentary practices that take to the streets and develop complex depictions that are often steeped in myth and symbolism, 79  With reference in particular to Chris Marker’s Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1993), Rancière makes the paradoxical claim that “le cinéma documentaire, le cinéma voué au ‘réel’ est [. . .] capable d’une invention fictionnelle plus forte que le cinéma ‘de fiction’, aisément voué à une certaine stéréotypie des actions et des caractères” (“documentary film, film devoted to the ‘real’ is [. . .] capable of greater fictional invention than ‘fiction’ film, which is readily devoted to a certain stereo­ typical set of actions and characters”) (Rancière, Le Partage du sensible, 60). 80 Mitterand, Zola tel qu’en lui-même (Paris: PUF, 2009), 112. 81  Murat, “Le Jugement originel de la réalité,” 126. 82  Murat, “Le Jugement originel de la réalité,” 126. 83  Thomas Pavel, “The Borders of Fiction,” Poetics Today 4(1) (January 1983): 86.

104  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century sometimes incorporating fictional storylines and dream sequences.84 Aragon, for his part, appeals to mythology in order to investigate the zone of tension or circu­ lation between reality and fiction. His text constantly oscillates between these two modes. Mythology appears as a figure of poetic excess, that rescues the real from its status as mere document. For this dialectical relation to function, however, the mythological and the documentary must first coexist.

Uncanny Documents in Breton’s Nadja “Ce que nous réclamons à cor et à cri, ce sont, n’en doutez pas, des réalités, des RÉ-A-LI-TÉS” (“What we are all clamouring for, make no mistake about it, is realities, yes, RE-A-LI-TIES”) (LPP 1:182; PP, 55). Aragon’s ironic phrase singles out for attack the “reality” that “we” (in the context of this passage, the cinemagoing masses) demand, suggesting that it is an ossified domain of commonplace images that lead us to neglect our desires. This echoes Breton’s attack in his 1924 manifesto on realist descriptions, seen as clichéd and commodified products, “catalogue images” and “postcards” that the author constantly tries to slip to us while soliciting our agreement (MS, 314). Breton contrasts such standardized descriptions with surrealism’s belief in the “réalité supérieure de certaines formes d’association” (“superior reality of certain forms of association”) (MS, 328). In his 1925 text, “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité” (“Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality”), the limits of our conception of reality are again Breton’s target, while he attributes to poetic creations the ability to shift the boundaries of “le soi-disant réel” (the so-called real) (MS, 273). The status of “reality” in the group’s writings is variable, however, and a degree of ambiguity attaches to the movement’s name itself—as Breton acknowledges in Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme? (What is Surrealism? 1934): Une certaine ambiguïté immédiate contenue dans ce mot peut en effet conduire à penser qu’il désigne je ne sais quelle attitude transcendantale, alors qu’au con­ traire il exprime — et d’emblée a exprimé pour nous — une volonté d’approfondissement du réel, de prise de conscience toujours plus nette en même temps que toujours plus passionnée du monde sensible.

84  While the feature-length city symphonies of Walter Ruttmann (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927) and Dziga Vertov (Man With a Movie Camera, 1929) are the most well-known examples, the 1920s saw a proliferation of poetic documentaries dealing with the city. On 1920s documentaries of Paris, see Myriam Juan, “Le cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne,” Sociétés & Représentations 17 (2004): 291–314. On the hybrid genre of the “documentaire romancé,” see Margaret  C.  Flinn, “Documenting Limits and the Limits of Documentary: Georges Lacombe’s La Zone and the ‘docu­ mentaire romancé’, ” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 13(4) (2009): 405–13. DOI:10.1080/17409290903096269.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  105 A certain immediate ambiguity contained in this word can indeed lead people to think that it designates some kind of transcendental attitude, whereas it expresses on the contrary—and from the outset expressed for us—a desire to explore the real in greater depth, to reach an ever sharper and ever more impas­ sioned awareness of the world of the senses.85

In this 1934 text that looks back at the history of the group, Breton attempts to present himself as a good materialist and to emphasize surrealism’s political com­ mitment. More generally, the surrealists offer a critique of the notion of “réalité” as it is preconceived—that is, reality as always already representation, a screen that blocks our access to things themselves. Yet they continue to value the con­ crete, the immediate, the world as it is accessible to the senses. Breton’s surrealist enterprise is less a rejection of realism, then, than it is an attempt to preserve the immediacy of naturalist vision from the distortions of fictional representation. As he states in Nadja: “Je persiste à réclamer les noms, à ne m’intéresser qu’aux livres qu’on laisse battants comme des portes, et desquels on n’a pas à chercher la clef ” (“I insist on knowing the names, in being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys”) (N, 651/Nj, 18). Citing an anecdote about Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet, he suggests that critics should seek the truth of literature in this kind of “document privé” (“private docu­ment”) that expresses something essential about the personality and pre­ occu­pa­tions of an author (N, 649). Nadja is presented as a quest for openness and transparency, which places the writer in a “maison de verre” (“glass house”) (N, 651). By 1928, Breton’s focus is no longer the direct psychic document of the automatic text, but neither is it the construction of a fiction; rather, his text con­ fronts the subjective and the objective in its attempt to record the circumstances and consequences of an encounter—with the mysterious and unstable Nadja. In his foreword to the 1963 revised edition of the text, Breton further emphasizes the documentary nature of the work, noting that it was composed in accordance with two “anti-literary” principles: first, photographic documentation abolishes description; second, the book’s tone is modeled on that of medical observation, even when Breton speaks of himself: “Cette résolution, qui veille à n’altérer en rien le document ‘pris sur le vif ’, non moins qu’à la personne de Nadja’s applique ici à de tierces personnes comme à moi-même” (“This resolution, which takes care not to alter in any way the document ‘taken from life,’ applies here—no less than to the person of Nadja—to third parties as well as to myself ”) (N, 646). It is also these anti-literary principles that determine the text’s doubly docu­ mentary aspect, one that gives prominence to the photographic image (though verbal description is not, in fact, entirely abolished). This approach stands in

85 Breton, Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme? (1934), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, 230–1.

106  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century contrast to Aragon’s descriptive efforts to produce verbal photographs (not merely metaphorically, but through specific typographical and visual techniques that operate a kind of cross-medium transfer). Nevertheless, the composition of Nadja is more complex than Breton’s account suggests. It certainly contains photo­ graphic “documents” that serve to authenticate the narrative: photographs of places taken by Jacques-André Boiffard (but uncredited in the original edition) as well as portraits by the surrealist photographer Man Ray and the portrait photog­ rapher Henri Manuel. In fact, the book presents us with a complex intermedial configuration, primarily through its use of media combination (the presence in the book of “conventionally distinct media,” in this case writing, photography, and drawing), and secondarily through intermedial references (to film, theater, or photography).86 Breton punctuates his text with collaged insertions of different kinds, exploiting photographic reproduction as an intermedial means for in­corp­ or­at­ing not only urban scenes but also several portraits, ten drawings by Nadja, reproductions of paintings by Uccello, Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Ernst, and miscellaneous materials (cinema and theater playbills, the picture of a strange semi-cylindrical object found in a flea market, a vignette from George Berkeley’s Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, a drawing on the history of France sold by a print seller). Nadja is thus a collaborative work as well as a hybrid one. If Boiffard’s images of Parisian monuments, streets, and storefronts, offering topographical anchors for the narrative, are folded most seamlessly into Breton’s “phototext,” the other photographs are repurposed images whose presence is jus­ tified by causal or coincidental connections to the story (the causal and the coin­ cidental being imbricated, in a surrealist context). On the one hand, Breton offers a complex, layered work; on the other, his narration has a flattening effect, confer­ ring on the heterogeneous documentary evidence both an evidential function and an inner logic of association. We saw that Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris is characterized by tonal variation, descriptive exuberance, and an ironic authorial posture inseparable from the text’s discursive and visual heterogeneity. In Nadja, by contrast, Breton cultivates a more uniform and serious “medical” tone. His documents do not produce text­ ual interruption as much as they create an uncanny space for, and through their interaction with, Breton’s narrative. Breton’s visual evidence does not offer prolif­ erating traces of reality (as was the case in Aragon), as much as it confronts us with a set of mysterious signs. “Qui suis-je?” (“Who am I?”) asks Breton at the outset of his narrative (N, 647). The photograph of the author, taken by the wellestablished portrait studio of Henri Manuel, appears toward the end of the book not as an answer to this question, but as an outward marker of identity, indicating the enigmatic unity of the “I” of the text and the man in the picture (N, 745). 86  Irina O. Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 51–2 (see Introduction, n150).

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  107 Boiffard’s photographs of the city, showing places that appear in Breton’s ­narrative, provide the personal account with an indexical anchor in the real. But these images, in all their apparently “banal realism,”87 also offer themselves up as visual texts which, as Ian Walker has shown, are subject to “shifting readings”; for instance, the photograph of the front of the Humanité bookstore, where Breton stops to buy a copy of Trotsky’s latest book, bears a large indexical sign “ON SIGNE ICI” (“One signs here/Sign up here”) that offers a double instruction, indi­ cating Breton’s path to Nadja as well as inviting the passerby to sign up for the Communist Party.88 We might add that in 1926, the year of his encounter with Nadja, Breton had in fact rejected a call from the paper’s literary editor, Henri Barbusse, to sign on to the agenda of the L’Humanité, an organ of the French Communist Party that Breton describes in “Légitime Défense” as puerile and unreadable.89 There is thus a political and autobiographical subtext to the place and its image. At the same time, I would suggest, the pointing arrow on the build­ ing serves here as a mise-en-abyme of documentary indexicality itself, along with the deictic “here,” now displaced from its original location into the pages of the book. Walker argues that the photographs of Nadja offer in this sense a guide­ book or even an anti-guidebook, in which “the physical geography of Paris is replaced by an affective topography.”90 This does not mean, as some have sug­ gested, that we need to read such photographs as fictions; it is a false alternative to set the fictive possibilities of photography against the supposedly naïve “myth” of photography as an imprint of the real.91 Rather, Nadja presents us with docu­ ments that assert authenticity, while also functioning as surrealist images. Exemplifying the operations of chance as determining the crucial events of a life (N, 651), they unite inner and outer reality to offer both the record of an ex­peri­ ence in the world and the expression of its personal meaning. And they invite, not a meta-discourse that instrumentalizes them, but readings that remain provi­ sional and non-exhaustive. As Michael Sheringham notes, “Nadja is not a work of art but a log-book, the register of an experience.”92 Dawn Ades rightly analyzes Breton’s use of pho­tog­ raphy “as record and verification”: “The very irrationality of the events described in Nadja necessitated the strict authenticity of a document: the choice of photo­ graphs as illustration, therefore, obeys the same need: they could have the value of a fact in a way a drawing never could.”93 At the same time, we should not establish 87 Marja Warehime, “Photography, Time, and the Surrealist Sensibility,” in Photo-Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature, ed. Marsha Bryant (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1996), 46. 88 Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 53. 89  Breton, “Légitime Défense,” 283. 90 Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 53. 91  For an example of this privileging of the “fictive” dimension of photography over documentary naivety, see Paul Edwards, Soleil noir: la photographie et la littérature, des origines au surréalisme (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 9–11. 92 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 81. 93  Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text,” 161.

108  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century too rigid a distinction between photographs and other kinds of documents in Nadja. While the indexical status of the photographs gives them a crucial eviden­ tial function, this is also true for Nadja’s drawings, which authenticate her exist­ ence and presence in the narrative, even as her participation in the story is overshadowed by Breton’s voice. Nadja’s drawing of the “La Fleur des amants” (“The Flower of Lovers”), for instance, offers a disquieting poetic assemblage (of eyes, hearts, and snakes) that is a graphic symbol for the time the couple spend together. It is presented as one of many efforts by Nadja to manually transfer onto paper the essence of a powerful mental image. Other compositions are produced through decoupage, including the enigmatic overlapping figures of a face and a hand (N, 721). Decoupage appears here as both a practice and as a metaphor for the transfer from the mental image or apparition to its manual and material tran­ scription. The dehumanized, botanized, eyes of the “Flower of Lovers” can be read alongside the photomontage that Breton adds to the 1963 revised edition of the book, and which he created by reproducing, cutting up, and assembling an uncredited photograph (apparently a photograph of the real Nadja, by her real name Léona Delcourt).94 This is the only photographic image of Nadja in the book (which contains portraits of Breton, Éluard, and Desnos, among others). The gesture literalizes a metaphor in the original text (“her eyes of fern”) and refigures the woman’s face as a frond. In both Nadja’s drawing and Breton’s photo­ montage the human body undergoes an uncanny metamorphosis into plant form, with the eyes isolated as both subject and object of the gaze (see Figure  2.4). Placed in relation, these images present themselves as records of an experience even as they are partially legible in symbolic and psychoanalytic terms. However, as Breton’s later revisions show, Nadja is not simply a direct logbook, but involves a complex process of narrative and visual composition. The documentary component of Nadja, then, cannot be reduced to the presence of photographs; rather, the photographic paradigm inflects our reading of the text as a whole, imposing a documentary reading while producing a dialogue between image and text, and between different kinds of image. Despite the difference in medium, Breton’s tone of “medical observation” serves the same documentary goal as the photographs. The narrative cultivates a deliberate neutrality in its recording of events: Breton goes to a bookstore, wanders in Paris, meets Nadja, goes to the theater, talks to his surrealist friends . . . This account itself then becomes a document subject to reinterpretation and rewriting; Nadja will offer her own “irrational” version of the same events, while the text as a whole pro­ duces a sense of the uncanny from the juxtaposition of events and associations, text and photograph, neutral observations and striking images. Even if the 94  On Breton’s additions and modifications of the images and their order for the 1963 edition, see Magali Nachtergael, Les Mythologies individuelles. Récit de soi et photographie au 20e siècle (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012), 73–4.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  109

Figure 2.4  André Breton, “Ses yeux de fougère,” in Nadja, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) Source: Breton, “Ses yeux de fougère,” in Nadja, 2nd edn © Gallimard, 1963 © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

written text does not possess the chemical indexicality of the photographic trace, its referentiality is nevertheless guaranteed by what Michel Murat calls the “verid­ ictional pact of the ‘glass house’. ”95 In other words, the authenticity of the literary document is guaranteed by the position and posture of the subject in relation to his text and to the reader—even as the subject is precisely what is at stake in the text. The question, “Who am I?” is reformulated as an appeal to another subject and to the possible relation between them: “Qui vive? Est-ce vous, Nadja? [. . .] Est-ce moi seul? Est-ce moi-même?” (“Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? [. . .] Is it only me? Is it myself?”) (N, 743/Nj, 144). At the heart of the work, as Murat shows, is the place of the other, and the reader’s belief in Nadja’s voice.96 Documents inscribe this dialogic possibility within the text—even if Breton’s nar­ rative ultimately subordinates the other voice to his own. 95  Murat, “Le Jugement originel de la réalité,” 134. 96  Murat, “Le Jugement originel de la réalité,” 138.

110  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century Breton’s approach is both documentary and meta-documentary, since the docu­ments he presents are always framed, described, and analyzed. These docu­ ments do not in fact replace descriptions, despite Breton’s claim to the contrary, but they become the object of an interpretative process that includes description. More problematically, they are subsumed in Nadja within a dominant discourse on surrealism, madness, and beauty, which partially erases Nadja’s voice behind Breton’s theories. Nevertheless, Nadja offers a compelling combination of the docu­men­tary and the dialogic that finds a weaker echo in Breton’s later prose works. Documents of different kinds are still present, though to a lesser degree, in these other texts. Published in 1932, Les Vases communicants contains docu­ mentary photographs, images of works of art, and a film still (from Murnau’s Nosferatu). L’Amour fou, published in 1937, punctuates its narrative with photo­ graphs by Man Ray, Dora Maar, and Brassaï, and reproductions of paintings by Picasso, Max Ernst, and Cézanne. It also confers on one of Breton’s own earlier poems, “Tournesol” (“Sunflower”), composed in 1923, the status of a prophetic document that must be reinterpreted in the light of the poet’s encounter with Jacqueline Lamba (AF, 724/ML, 61). Yet in contrast with Nadja, the voice of the woman herself—and her role in generating poetic and visual documents—is absent in L’Amour fou, despite Breton’s insistence on reciprocity. Furthermore, while Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris had maintained a clear sense of the concrete world as challenge and limit, Breton’s notion of “hasard objectif ” (“objective chance”) as a manifestation of necessity, indicated in Nadja and theorized more fully in L’Amour fou (AF, 690/ML, 23), tends to simply erase any friction between subject and object, bringing his approach closer to Dali’s “paranoiac” method that risks reducing the document to a pretext for subjective associations.97 In Arcane 17 (Arcanum 17, dated 1944), Breton’s last major prose work, the practice of docu­men­tary insertion is limited to the inclusion in the original edition of the book (published in New York in 1945) of four tarot cards designed by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta.98

Between Aesthetics and Ethnography: Documents and Beyond The years after the publication of Nadja thus see a shift in surrealist documentary practice, which may be attributed in part to tensions within the group. These con­ flicts culminated, in December 1929, in Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism, which excluded a number of members of the group; it was followed by a virulent anti-Breton pamphlet, “Un cadavre” (“A corpse”), with texts by Bataille, Desnos, Prévert, Boiffard, Queneau, and others. Among other points of contention, both 97  See Dali, “Psychologie non-euclidienne d’une photographie.” 98 Breton, Arcane 17 (New York: Brentano’s, 1945).

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  111 political and aesthetic, the conception of the document is one of the central stakes in the quarrel. Bataille had turned this term into a watchword for his conception of “base materialism,” which Breton singled out for special attention in his attack on the group’s dissidents.99 The short-lived magazine Documents (1929–1930), funded by the art collector Georges Wildenstein and directed by Bataille in the guise of “general secretary,” attracted a number of surrealists who were distancing themselves from Breton (among them Michel Leiris, André Masson, and Jacques-André Boiffard; Bataille himself had maintained a certain distance from Breton’s group). Subtitled first “Doctrines–Archéologie–Beaux-arts–Ethnographie”(“Doctrines–Archeology–FineArts–Ethnography”) then (from the fourth number onward) “Archéologie–Beauxarts–Ethnographie–Variétés” (“Archeology–Fine-Arts–Ethnography–Varieties”), Documents promises to place side by side “les œuvres d’art les plus irritantes, non encore classées” (“the most irritating works of art, as yet unclassified”) and “cer­ taines productions hétéroclites” (“certain heterogeneous productions”), and to submit them all to the same precise scientific study.100 The magazine’s title ­justifies the wildest eclecticism—anything can become a document—while also connot­ ing methodological rigor: documents are objects of intellectual investigation. The magazine’s apparently innocuous title thus disguises the disciplinary jumble that combined with the mix of personalities involved to produce what Michel Leiris calls a properly “im­pos­sible” project.101 The “documents” presented and analyzed include cultural artifacts of various kinds, including ancient coins (reflecting Bataille’s background in numismatics), Sumerian sculpture, Hollywood films, works by Picasso or Braque, Eli Lotar’s photographs of slaughterhouses, and, most famously, Boiffard’s photo­graphs of big toes, accompanied by a text by Georges Bataille.

Bataille and the Document as Fetish It has become a critical commonplace to contrast the banal, straight or “deadpan” urban scenes that Boiffard produces for Nadja with the disquieting images of enlarged big toes by the same photographer that appeared in the December 1929 issue of Documents, and that “deflect the customary or conventional meaning of the things photographed.”102 Both kinds of photograph, however, present them­ selves primarily as documents. Boiffard’s Nadja photographs take on an uncanny dimension in their enigmatic relation to the text as well as having something of 99  Breton, André, Second Manifeste du surréalisme (1929), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 1, 825–6. 100  Publicity text for Documents (1929), quoted by Michel Leiris in Leiris, “De Bataille l’Impossible à l’impossible Documents,” Critique 195–6 (1963), repr. in Brisées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966), 261. 101 Leiris, Brisées, 260. 102  See Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text,” 163 and 175.

112  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century the vacant, “cleared out” quality that Walter Benjamin sees in Eugène Atget’s photo­graphs of the city.103 The big toe photographs are more immediately shocking.104 In what sense are Boiffard’s three photographs of big toes documents? The three pictures are captioned simply “Gros orteil. Sujet masculin, 30 ans” (“Big toe. Male subject, age 30”) (two images) and “Gros orteil. Sujet féminin, age 24” (“Big toe, female subject, age 24”) (one image). The close-up, enlargement, and lighting stage the big toe as a grotesque, even monstrous form detached from the rest of the body (see Figure 2.5). The photographs function as evidence less of the reality of toes than of our relation to them; what is “documented” here is in a sense the response of the viewer. Beyond simple defamiliarization, the image produces a fascination that Bataille’s accompanying text connects to the fetishist gaze, subject to the operation of a “base seduction” that is also a “return to reality” (here Bataille implicitly rejects the poetic idealism of the surrealists).105 In this sense, Boiffard’s photographs stand for the real as such, even as they question the notion of resemblance and effect a technological transformation of perception. They are anti-aesthetic objects—“raw material” both in their ugliness and their status as mere documents (a recording of visible data)—but they become aesthetic objects insofar as their formal (and deforming) strategies produce an aesthetic judgment and affective response. Yet it is this very response, we have seen, that constitutes their documentary status—their function as evidence for Bataille’s argument on “base seduction.” Bataille’s text, which cites various cultural examples of attitudes to feet and toes, frames and determines our interpretation of the images and con­ stitutes them as documents—even as the power of the photographs themselves, in their apparent self-evidence, wrenches us away from anthropological comparison. As Denis Hollier notes, a document is by definition an object that either lacks, or has been stripped of, its aesthetic value. Its interest lies not in its intrinsic beauty but in the information that it provides about a particular time, place, and culture.106 It is in this sense that Documents is an ethnographic project. Nevertheless, as Georges Didi-Huberman has argued, the friction between the two terms of 103  Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael  W.  Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, (Cambridge, MA and London: Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 519. 104  For readings of the big toe images, see Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text”; Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, Chapter  3; Sheringham, Everyday Life, 96–9; and Jodi Hauptman and Stephanie O’Rourke, “A Surrealist Fact,” in Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949, An Online Project of The Museum of Modern Art, ed. Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014). http://www. moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Hauptman_ORourke.pdf. 105  Bataille, “Le gros orteil,” photographs by J.-A. Boiffard, Documents 6 (December 1929): 302. 106  Denis Hollier, “La Valeur d’usage de l’impossible,” introduction to Bataille et al., reprint of Documents, Vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1991), viii.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  113

Figure 2.5  Jacques-André Boiffard, “Big Toe, Male Subject, 30 Years Old,” 1929 Source: Jacques-André Boiffard, “Big Toe (Male Subject, 30 Years Old),” 1929. Gelatin silver print, 31 × 23.9 cm. Repro-photo Philippe Migeat. Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Image © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

114  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century “fine-arts” and “ethnography” operates a double critical intervention, a subversion of both the aestheticism of artistic forms and the positivism of ethnographic facts.107 The double status of Boiffard’s big toes as documents and artistic repre­ sentations—indeed, the entanglement of these two functions–exemplifies this strategy. Documents thus renders the boundary between the aesthetic and the documentary undecidable. Significantly, it also positions itself outside the realm of the literary, presenting its textual interventions as interpretative commentary at the intersection of art criticism and ethnography. Here we encounter the complicated history of the avant-garde’s relationship with the still emerging discipline of ethnography. Using the term surrealism in an expanded sense to refer to an “aesthetic that values fragments, curious collec­ tions, unexpected juxtapositions,” James Clifford links this attitude “to a more general cultural predisposition that cuts through modern anthropology,” and that entails a play of the familiar and the strange.108 Vincent Debaene has told the story of the convergences but also, crucially, the divergences between literature and ethnography between 1925 and 1938: the divergence finds expression in the curious phenomenon of French ethnologists’ “double books”—the production by such figures as Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, Alfred Métraux, and Claude LéviStrauss of both scientific and literary accounts of their fieldwork.109 The term “ethnographie” (which James Clifford calls the “wild card” in the subtitle of Documents) does not refer to a well-defined social science in the 1920s and ’30s, as Clifford and others have pointed out. Nevertheless, the years 1925–1938 can be seen as the period of the birth of the discipline of ethnology in France. The Institut d’Ethnologie was founded in 1925; in 1929–1930, the ethnologist Paul Rivet and the museologist Georges-Henri Rivière (who was also on the editorial board of Documents) took on the task of reorganizing the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (founded 1878), which would give way to the Musée de l’Homme (The Museum of Man) in 1937.110 In the context of Documents, according to Clifford, “ethnographie” “denoted a radical questioning of norms and an appeal to the exotic, the paradoxical, the insolite.”111 Serving as an alternative to art primitif, ethnographie is also an agent of leveling: the ethnographic gaze can be turned back on Western culture in order to destabilize categories and hierarchies. This occurs in such texts as Bataille’s commentary on a “monstrous” photograph of a 107 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe, ou, le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Editions Macula, 1995), 18–19. 108  James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 118, 121. 109 Vincent Debaene, L’Adieu au voyage: l’ethnologie française entre science et littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 110  See Debaene, “Naissance d’une discipline,” Chapter 1 of L’Adieu au voyage. In 2006, the collec­ tions of the Musée de l’Homme would largely be transferred to the more aesthetically than anthropo­ logically oriented Musée du quai Branly. 111 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 129.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  115 provincial wedding in France around 1905: the oddness of these human figures to contemporary eyes belies our belief in a stable human nature.112 Within Documents itself, an important tension emerges between the con­text­ ual­iza­tion and decontextualization of the document. Many of the magazine’s con­ tributors (for instance the art critic Carl Einstein, a specialist of African sculpture) call primarily for the contextual treatment of art works.113 Bataille’s project appar­ ently entails a more thorough disruption of Western aesthetic values. Yet in doing so, it involves a practice of decontextualization, fragmentation, and estrangement that is at odds with emerging ethnological/anthropological methods. It also entails an attachment to the base, the low, or the degraded, valued for its power to undo all categories. The result is what Vincent Debaene rightly calls a “fetishism of the document”:114 cut off from context, the document is treated as a material embodiment of the real, an object that exerts a magical fascination of its own. Didi-Huberman observes that the “document” in the Bataillian sense is “une façon, pour l’image et le rapport imaginaire, d’atteindre leurs propres limites” (“a way for the image, and the imaginary relation, to reach their own limits”); it is “vision de réel” (“a vision of the real”) that aims, through a particular mode of presentation or construction, “à produire dans l’image une ‘insubordination matérielle’, un symptôme capables de briser l’écran (l’appareil refoulant) de la représentation” (“to produce within the image a ‘material insubordination’ and a symptom capable of breaking through the screen [the repressive apparatus] of representation”).115 Paradoxically, however, Bataille’s approach also produces a metadiscursive excess, in the form of his own verbal description and analysis that instrumental­ izes a given object of knowledge—a move that is, in fact, necessary in order to constitute this object as a document. Breton seizes on this aspect of Bataille’s pro­ ject in his second surrealist manifesto of 1929. Breton argues that Bataille burdens his chosen documents with his own obsessions (and favorite adjectives) rather than describing them objectively, thus producing a “faux témoignage” (“false testimony”).116 That is, Bataille’s supposedly raw material does not speak for itself; it is in fact the product of his erotic fascination. The writers and artists in Bataille’s circle are often called “dissident,” “renegade,” or “undercover” surrealists—a designation that usefully attests to the fraught nature of the relation to surrealism, but also somewhat unjustly privileges the subversive approach of Bataille over the “official” surrealism of Breton. However, as Michael Sheringham notes, “What makes the project of Documents and its 112  Bataille, “Figure humaine,” Documents 1(4) (September 1929), 195–6. 113  See for instance Carl Einstein, “À propos de l’exposition de la Galerie Pigalle,” Documents 2 (1930), 104. 114  Debaene, “Les surrealists et le musée d’ethnographie,” 71–94, para. 26. 115 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe, 62–3. 116 Breton, Second Manifeste du surréalime, 826.

116  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century treatment of images continuous with Bretonian Surrealism is precisely the docu­ mentary impulse, central to La Révolution surréaliste and to Nadja, and its links to experience (a key word in Bataille’s writing) and to the real.”117 Despite—or perhaps because of—this commonality, Bataille’s critique of surrealism opts pre­ cisely for the document as its ground of intervention, favoring “base materialism” over Breton’s alleged (poetic) idealism.118 (Breton, in response, attacks Bataille’s notion as a regression back to anti-dialectical materialism.119) Clifford sees Documents as an exemplary point of convergence: “Documents reveals [. . .] in its subversive, nearly anarchic documentary attitude an epistemological horizon for twentieth-century cultural studies.”120 As we have seen, Bataille’s project also reveals an aesthetic horizon, producing its curious fascination through a double movement that, by turns, reduces art to documents and elevates documents to the status of art. Yet what Bataille’s fetishization of the document closes off, in its focus on materiality and the fragment, is the possibility of literary documents or literary uses of documents—that is, precisely the complex and developed forms of documentary-narrative configuration that were attempted by Aragon and Breton. It is perhaps partly for this reason that Breton is so hostile to Bataille and Documents; operating at the margins of surrealism, Documents also positions itself outside literature. The fetishization of the document, as I have noted, also decontextualizes it to present it as raw material that somehow escapes representa­ tion. By contrast, Breton’s notion of objective chance, while it produces fetish objects in its own way (we might recall the spoon-shoe of L’Amour fou discussed in the section “Between Document and Myth: Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris”), allows the integration of documents into a narrative form.

Collecting Documents: Science, Missions, and Museums The surrealist attitude to “littérature” was ambivalent from the outset. What emerges in the 1930s, however, is a particular tension between the (social)­ scientific and literary aspirations of surrealism. For instance, Roger Caillois, who was close to Breton in the early 1930s before associating himself with Bataille’s Collège de Sociologie in 1937, imagines a scientific surrealism that would move away from literature. In a series of texts written between 1933 and 1935, Caillois proposes replacing Breton’s automatic writing with an “automatic thought” that

117 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 100. On the common ground and dynamic proximity that struc­ tures literary debates around transgression, engagement, automatism, and pure art from the 1920s to the 1950s, see also Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 118  Bataille, “Le bas matérialisme et la gnose,” Documents 2(1) (1930): 6. 119 Breton, Second manifeste du surréalisme, 825. 120 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 134.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  117 would adapt surrealism to scientific method, and that he defines as “la suite des associations spontanées de représentations ou d’idées évoquées en vertu du déter­ minisme lyrique des idéogrammes et en dehors de [. . .] toute activité finale consci­ ente” (“a set of spontaneous associations of representations or ideas evoked by virtue of the lyrical determinism of the ideogram and outside [. . . ] any conscious final activity”).121 The surrealist preoccupation with exploring unconscious thought is preserved in this definition, but what is rejected is the idea of automatic writing as a direct “snapshot” of thought. We can only transcribe images and associations, according to Caillois, before subjecting them to scientific analysis; specifically, he applies his analysis to the fascination exerted in different cultures by certain fig­ ures that constitute “lyrical ideograms” such as the praying mantis which, at once a reality and a troubling image, determines across various human cultures a “prim­or­dial affective constellation.”122 Caillois links the “objectivity” of poetic docu­ments to phenomena of mimicry and metamorphosis in nature.123 He thus modifies and depoeticizes the notion of the document even as he claims to account for the very essence of the lyrical imagination. Ultimately, he presents his own writings on this topic as “une série de documents non falsifiés sur le fonc­ tionnement de l’esprit, [. . .] documents surtout dont l’interprétation elle-même est, à son tour, à tout prendre, un document” (“a series of non-falsified documents on the functioning of the mind [. . .] documents above all whose interpretation is, in turn, all things considered, a document”).124 This “scientific” (and recursive) conception of the document still poses a num­ ber of difficulties, which are perhaps most clearly articulated by ethnographers. The question of “What belongs with what?” was already central to Documents,125 but takes on a renewed urgency with the rise of ethnography as an institutional­ ized discipline in the 1930s. In 1933, Albert Skira’s surrealist-oriented artistic and literary journal Minotaure publishes writings and documents from the Dakar– Djibouti mission, a journey led by the ethnographer Marcel Griaule from 1931 to 1933, which resulted in the gathering of thousands of objects for display in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. The Minotaure issue insists both on the contemporary significance of ethnography and the danger of separating science from life; in presenting the material results of the expedition, it is crucial to offer a variety of different kinds of documents and to situate these documents in the ­correct “atmosphere.”126 The poet and sometime surrealist Michel Leiris offers a more personal account of the Dakar–Djibouti mission (in which he participated as secretary-archivist) in 121  Roger Caillois, La Nécessité d’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 48–9. 122  Caillois, “La Mante religieuse,” Minotaure 5 (1934): 26; Caillois, La Nécessité d’esprit, 100–9. 123 See Joyce Cheng, “Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis: Roger Caillois, Walter Benjamin and Surrealism in the 1930s,” Modernism/Modernity 16(1) (2009): 61–86. 124 Caillois, La Nécessité d’esprit, 19. 125 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 132. 126  “Mission Dakar–Djibouti, 1931–1933,” special issue, Minotaure 2 (1933): introductory page.

118  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century his travel journal L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa, 1934), of which I will say more in a moment. He also returns to the question of contextualization in an article on the inauguration of Paul Rivet’s Musée de l’Homme in 1938. Once transformed into an object of knowledge, observes Leiris, the document risks los­ ing its value as a sample of life, and is incorporated into the abstract institutions of Art and Science: Comment procéder pour que les documents (observations, objets de collec­ tions, photographies), dont la valeur est liée au fait qu’ils sont choses cueillies sur le vif, puissent garder quelque fraîcheur une fois consignés dans des livres ou mis en cage dans des vitrines? Toute une technique de la présentation devra intervenir comme suite à la technique de la collecte, si l’on tient à ce que les documents ne deviennent pas de simples matériaux pour une érudition pesante et ne se dépouillent pas de tout contenu humain, eux qui n’avaient de plus grand intérêt que, précisément, cette qualité d’être des choses ‘humaines.’ How do we proceed so that documents (observations, collector’s objects, photo­ graphs) whose value is linked to the fact that they are things taken from life, can keep some of their freshness once they are consigned to books or caged in dis­ play cabinets? A complete technique of presentation must intervene following the technique of collection, if we do not want these documents to become mere materials for a cumbersome erudition stripped of all their human content— since their greatest interest lay precisely in this quality of being “human” things.127

Leiris proposes some solutions to this danger of dehumanizing “human docu­ ments”; he stresses the role of photography in recreating the missing links between objects, and advocates techniques of juxtaposition that put together objects, printed texts, and iconographic documents, with a view to the ultimate constitution of “universal archives.” Leiris’s worry about contexts of presentation echoes Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility: like the reproducible artwork (transformed into a document detached from the “sphere of tradition”128), the document itself risks losing its “aura” once it is decontextualized, detached from its place in a particular space and time. The isolated and devalued document is a negative version of the Bataillian document, which also operated through fragmentation. But it also, cru­ cially, raises the possibility of archival and curatorial strategies that preserve the 127  Michel Leiris, “Du Musée d’ethnographie au Musée de l’Homme,” Nouvelle Revue Française 299 (August 1938), 344–5. 128  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” (1936), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 104.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  119 indexicality of the document (as a thing “taken from life,” and produced in a given context) even as they constitute it as an object of scientific inquiry. Arguably, this is precisely what Aragon and Breton had tried to achieve by literary means. Significantly, as Vincent Debaene shows, the anthropologist Marcel Griaule also imagines literature as a technique of contextualization capable of restoring the atmosphere of a society, even as he rejects it in the name of the objectivity of the document.129 The term “document” gains a further troubling dimension in the context of ethnographic expeditions and museums. The word not only erases the differ­ ences between the type of materials involved (photographs, objects, field notes); most seriously, it obscures the process whereby these materials were acquired, the techniques of collection. The surrealists were vocally opposed to the Exposition Coloniale internationale held in Paris in 1931, distributing the anti­ colonial tract “Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale” (“Don’t Visit the Colonial Exhibition”)130 and even organizing a counter-exhibition in a rare collaboration with the French Communist party, in which they organized their own display of indigenous art objects, juxtaposed with Western objects and accompanied by explanatory information.131 Of course, these surrealist practices of collection and display are not exempt from their own form of exoticism; but they do involve a critical reflection on, and protest against, colonial treatments and presentations of “native” cultures. At the same time, as we have seen, members of Bataille’s circle set an ethno­ graphic conception of the document against the surrealist focus on the art object. The scientific, contextualizing approach, however, does not mean detachment from the colonial context. Leiris makes this very clear in L’Afrique fantôme (1934), when he describes Griaule’s (and his own) practices of collection. Although Leiris describes the “ambiance parfaitement idyllique” (“perfectly idyllic atmosphere”) that surrounds the beginning of the process (the inhabitants of a village near Dakar are amused by the visitors’ interest in buying their ordinary utensils),132 later journal entries recount skirmishes over purchase prices,133 scenes of coer­ cion, and even the theft of a sacred Kono figure in Kemeni (today in Mali) by the visiting ethnographers—an act condemned by Leiris even as he admits (perhaps

129  Debaene, “Les ‘Chroniques éthiopiennes’ de Marcel Griaule. L’ethnologie, la littérature et le document en 1934,” Gradhiva 6 (2007): 86–103. 130 “Ne visitez pas l’Exposition coloniale” (1931), May 1931, https://www.andrebreton.fr/ work/56600100711050. The tract is signed by André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Georges Sadoul, Pierre Unik, André Thirion, René Crevel, Aragon, René Char, Maxime Alexandre, Yves Tanguy, and Georges Malkine. 131  On this protest exhibition, see Janine Mileaf, “Body to Politics: Surrealist Exhibition of the Tribal and the Modern at the Anti-Imperialist Exhibition and the Galerie Charles Ratton,” in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 40 (2001): 239–55. 132 Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme (1934 and 1951; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 41. 133 Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, 62.

120  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century in a Bataillian spirit of transgression?) having taken pleasure in the gesture of ­sacrilege.134 The production of ethnographic documents and data is bound up with colonial institutions, practices, and discourses. Even as it recounts the collection process that reduces cultures to ethnographic documents, L’Afrique fantôme is itself a documentary work, illustrated by photo­ graphs from the mission (Griaule and Georges-Henri Rivière, we might note, had envisaged making a documentary film based on the expedition135). However, similar in this respect to Marc Allégret’s photographic and filmic images for Voyage au Congo (discussed in Chapter  1, section on “Strange Beauty: Staging Africa”) the book’s photographic plates, and arguably Griaule’s ethnographic mis­ sion as a whole, tend to isolate African people and objects while erasing the tensions of the ethnographic encounter. It is precisely these tensions that are documented in detail by Leiris’s narrative. A literary object that is difficult to classify, L’Afrique fantôme is also a highly personal text, anticipating Leiris’s ethnographic approach to his own life in the autobiographical work L’Âge d’homme (Manhood, 1939) and the four-volume La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1948–1976). In line with this orientation toward autobiography (or auto-ethnography?), Leiris’s preface to the second edition of L’Afrique fantôme (dated 1950), looks back at the earlier travelogue as both a “confession” and a “document” of the experience of a thirtyyear-old European man in the early 1930s.136 Writing retro­spect­ive­ly in the con­ text of anti-colonial struggles, Leiris deplores the incompatibility of ethnographic detachment (which is entangled, in fact, with exoticizing ideas of the “primitive”) and the possibility of political solidarity with current struggles. Even later, in a 1981 preamble, Leiris reflects on the uselessness of his testimony for the inhabit­ ants of contemporary Africa, and modestly describes his book, destined for a limited audience of readers, as essentially “une succession de flashes relatifs à des faits subjectifs aussi bien qu’à des choses extérieures (vécues, vues ou apprises)” (“a succession of clips/newsflashes (flashes) relating to subjective events as well as exterior things [experienced, seen, or learned]”) but still worth reading “sous un angle mi-documentaire mi-poétique” (“from a half-documentary, half-poetic angle”).137 This retroactive framing of the journal invites a historicizing reading

134 Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, 103–4. 135 See Éric Jolly, “Les missions Griaule et le cinema ethnographique,” in À la naissance de l’ethnologie français. Les missions ethnographiques en Afrique subsaharienne (1928–1939) (2016). http://naissanceethnologie.fr. In L’Afrique fantôme, Leiris mentions in passing Rivière’s review in the cinema magazine Pour vous of Walter Futter’s 1930 documentary film Africa Speaks (Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, 37). Rivière’s review, which I discussed in Chapter  1, in the section on “Strange Beauty: Staging Africa,” mentions the project of creating a similar film based on the Dakar–Djibouti mission. See Jean Vincent-Bréchignac and Georges-Henri Rivière, “Toute la vie de la brousse et de la forêt évoquée par ses bruits et ses images: ‘L’Afrique vous parle’,” Pour vous: l’hebdomadaire du cinéma 124 (April 2, 1931): 9. 136 Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, 14. 137 Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, 9.

“Pris Sur Le Vif”: The Surrealist Poetics Of The Document  121 that gives an additional documentary dimension to the original, producing a multi-layered text. Leiris’s reflection on the social-scientific document thus exists alongside a complex practice of documentary writing—one that not only falls outside the norms of an academic discipline but can also function as a critique of those norms. More generally, the notion of the document itself becomes an object of analysis in the social sciences of the 1930s and ’40s, for instance in Marc Bloch’s reflection on the historical source.138 Nevertheless, during this same period, the surrealist group around Breton arguably becomes progressively less attached to the notion of the document. This is perhaps in part a reaction against Bataille and Documents, in part a result of the group’s reconfiguration around figures such as Salvador Dali, whose “paranoiac-critical method” focused more on subjectivity than objectivity.139 As I noted at the end of the section “Uncanny Documents in Breton’s Nadja,” Breton’s prose texts after Nadja give a reduced place to docu­ ments, which become occasional illustrations. Breton’s circle also increasingly focuses on the traditional art object, for instance in writings and images for Minotaure. Although Breton still defends the practice of automatic writing as a foundational practice for surrealism, it is above all though the association with photography, as practiced by Man Ray, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, and others, that the documentary dimension of the group’s practice remains active. As for Aragon, after renouncing surrealism in the name of communism in the early 1930s, he turns away from a directly documentary practice back to the novel in the name of socialist realism.140 He turns back to the naturalist model with his “Monde réel” (“Real World”) cycle of five novels: Les Cloches de Bâle (1934), Les Beaux Quartiers (1936), Les Voyageurs de l’impériale (1942), Aurélien (1944), and Les Communistes (1949–1951). Later, he describes fiction as a form of “mentir-vrai,” true lying—deviation from facts that nevertheless reveals truths about reality.141 Documents have a place in this conception of fiction, to be sure (since Aragon incorporates historical detail); but rather than being exhibited and questioned as such, they are subsumed into a fictional work. The surrealists’ spectacular deployment of documents reconfigures literature’s relationship to reality and to realism. At stake here is not only the depiction of reality, but also modes of intervention that take up Rimbaud’s injunction to “changer la vie” (“change life”). Documents allow the surrealists to challenge and reconceive literature’s relationship to experience, turning away from a practice of 138  Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire, ou, Métier d’historien (Paris: A. Colin, 1993). 139  On Dali’s method and the new inflection that it gives to surrealism in the 1930s, see Breton, Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme?, 255–6. 140 Aragon, Pour un réalisme socialiste (Paris: Denoël and Steele, 1935). 141 Aragon, “C’est là que tout a commencé” (1964), preface to Les Cloches de Bâle (1934), ed. Philippe Forest, in Œuvres romanesques completes, ed. Daniel Bougnoux, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 692 and Aragon, Le Mentir-vrai (1964), in Œuvres romanesques complètes, ed. Daniel Bougnoux, Vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 1319–51.

122  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century literary mimesis grounded in fictional representation while still seeking ways of presenting the real. From this perspective, the real is always the condition and the ground for the surreal. The surrealist document is the “communicating vessel” par excellence: the document “taken from life” mediates between the subjective and the objective, and between concrete reality and the continuing quest for poetic transcendence of the mundane. Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris and Breton’s Nadja attempt to confront reality as it is found and experienced, rather than to produce a reality effect. In this sense, surrealism literalizes the naturalist appeal to the “human document,” while it also reformulates this documentary aesthetic in both psychological and visual terms, under the influence of new technological developments. Surrealist documents are both anti-realist and hyperrealist, re­placing realist description with the fantasy of unmediated access to unconscious thought or external reality. However illusory this ideal of transparency (whether in its literary, photographic, or cinematic versions), it ultimately gives rise to a complex set of practices that take the document as both medium and object of inquiry. At its most effective, the surrealist poetics of the document becomes a multi-faceted and intermedial documentary style. Surrealism aims to confer on subjective expression the objective status of the document, depersonalizing the omnipresent subject, while ultimately blurring the boundaries between inner and outer. It is this approach that separates Breton’s response to the question, “Who am I?” in Nadja from autobiography, understood as a retrospective account of a person’s life; the concern here is the fundamental relationship of self and world, but not the development of a personality.142 Still, the literary use of documents implicates multiple temporalities (even when, as in surrealism, the document is valued precisely for its immediate relationship to the instant). Autobiography in the twentieth century also sees a turn to the docu­ ment, this time sought in family or historical archives, in order to contextualize and even depersonalize individual memory. Chapter 3 turns to the document as a tangible memorial that concretizes and encapsulates the past even as it also repre­ sents an interpretative enigma. In the process, it becomes the locus of memorial practices that imbue “dead” objects, however fragmentary, with the power to speak in the present.

142  I refer here to the preliminary (and much cited) definition of autobiography which is Philippe Lejeune’s starting point for Le Pacte autobiographique: “Récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” (“Retrospective narrative in prose that a real person makes of his/her own existence, when s/he emphasizes his/her individual life, and in particular the history of his/her per­ sonality”). Lejeune, Philippe Le Pacte autobiographique (1975; repr. Paris: Seuil, 1996), 14.

3

Family Relics Marguerite Yourcenar’s Archival Autobiography

In Marguerite Yourcenar’s Le Coup de grâce (1939), the narrator Éric von Lhomond acknowledges possible gaps in his own confessional narrative, evoking the fallibility of memory via an analogy with the document. “Celui qui prétend se souvenir mot pour mot d’une conversation m’a toujours paru un menteur ou un mythomane. Il ne me reste jamais que des bribes, un texte plein de trous, comme un document mangé des vers” (“Anyone who claims to remember a conversation word for word has always struck me as a mythomaniac, or a liar. I can never recall more than shreds, a text full of holes, like a worm-eaten document”).1 Both memory and documents are remainders, fragile traces eroded by time. From a formal point of view, however, as Yourcenar herself acknowledges in the preface that she adds in 1962, Le Coup de grâce does not have the fragmentary and confused c haracter of real testimonies, but follows the literary convention of detailed first-person narratives (or récits); Yourcenar cites Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) as a precursor.2 That is, Éric’s narration as rendered by Yourcenar is coherent and uninterrupted—not a “text full of holes”—even if its perspective is untrustworthy. In reality, memory does not allow such smooth and complete reconstruction; but fiction does. Still, in presenting the past as a shredded document, the protagonist of Le Coup de grâce voices a preoccupation that would later become more central, both thematically and formally, to Yourcenar’s work. Moreover, the analogy between memory and documents can also be read in more positive terms, both here and elsewhere in Yourcenar’s work. That is, Yourcenar attributes to material documents, in all their fragility, a corporeal and quasi-sacred dimension, as remains and as relics. Yourcenar’s own art of memory is grounded in archival documents, whether as a means to access a distant past or to remedy the limits of personal recollection. More than for the unreliable firstperson narratives of her first work Alexis, ou le traité du vain combat (Alexis, or the Treaty of Vain Combat, 1929), or of Le Coup de grâce, Yourcenar is better known for the historical novels she writes after World War II: Mémoires d’Hadrien 1 Marguerite Yourcenar, Le Coup de grâce (1939), in Œuvres romanesques (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1982), 128, trans. by Grace Frick as Coup de grâce (New York: Noonday Press, 1981), 90. 2 Marguerite Yourcenar, “Préface” (1962) to Coup de grâce, in Œuvres romanesques, 81. In the same preface, Yourcenar describes her novel as a “document humain” (“human document”) (83).

124  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century (Memoirs of Hadrian, 1951) and L’Œuvre au noir (The Abyss, 1968).3 The first is a fictional memoir of a (real) Roman emperor, the second the story of a fictional physician, philosopher, and alchemist living in sixteenth-century Flanders. In both cases, fiction serves to reanimate the past while filling in the gaps in the his­ tor­ic­al record. In the later works I focus on in this chapter, however, Yourcenar takes a different approach to her archival materials. Her three-volume work Le Labyrinthe du monde (Souvenirs pieux [1974], Archives du Nord [1977], and Quoi? L’éternité [1988]) develops a discontinuous familial and historical saga that priv­il­ eges the presentation of documents over fictional reconstruction, dramatizing the work of investigation and reconstruction while giving only a small place to Yourcenar’s own recollections. Drawing on official documents, newspaper art­ icles, family correspondence, photographs, and oral testimony, Yourcenar delves into her mother’s family history in the first volume, Souvenirs pieux (1974; trans. as Dear Departed); then turns to the paternal branch of her family in Archives du Nord (1977; trans. as How Many Years). The unfinished final volume, Quoi? L’éternité (trans. as Eternity Regained), published posthumously in 1988, is more conventionally autobiographical, since it integrates the author-narrator’s own childhood memories; it is also more fictional, in its recreation of the lives of others. For some readers, my turn to Yourcenar after a chapter on surrealism may seem incongruous. Although she is recognized as a major writer (and was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française, in 1980), Yourcenar is sometimes difficult to place in literary history, and may seem especially distant from the modernist and avant-garde lineage I have explored so far. This is in part because of her departure from Europe (and from Parisian literary circles) for Mount Desert Island, in Maine, where she lived with her partner Grace Frick from 1950 until her death in 1987. Above all, however, it is because she is often perceived as an elitist and conservative writer, both aesthetically and politically at odds with the avant-garde and experimentalism, and hostile to mass culture and film. Erin Carlston, Elaine Marks, and Michael Rothberg, for instance, have offered critical accounts of Yourcenar’s politics, especially (but not exclusively) in the pre-war moment; still, Carlston casts Yourcenar as modernist (albeit a “reactionary” one).4 It is not my intention here to enter into these debates; even so, Yourcenar’s postwar interest in the US civil rights movement, her anti-war 3  Yourcenar herself rejects the label “historical novel,” calling Mémoires d’Hadrien a “treatisemonologue.” “Marguerite Yourcenar, The Art of Fiction No. 103,” interview with Shusha Guppy, Paris Review 30(106) (Spring 1988). http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2538/the-art-of-fictionno-103-marguerite-yourcenar. 4  Marks, Elaine, “ ‘Getting Away with Murd(h)er’: Author’s Preface and Narrator’s Text. Reading Marguerite Yourcenar’s Coup de Grâce ‘After Auschwitz’,” Journal of Narrative Technique 20(2) (April 1, 1990): 210–20; Michael Rothberg, “Coup de Grâce as Male Fantasy: On the Sexual Politics of Fascism,” in Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar, ed. Judith Holland Sarnecki and Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey (Madison, WI and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 125–47;

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  125 activism, and above all her environmentalism should lead us to re-evaluate her socio-political stance and legacy. But my main point here is that it is worth resituating Yourcenar among her contemporaries, and within the documentary constellation I have been mapping out here. Le Labyrinthe du monde is by no means an antimodern work. Nor is it an attempted historical novel that Yourcenar somehow fails to properly construct.5 In its treatment of documents within a nonfiction form, it develops an innovative autobiographical practice that departs from Yourcenar’s earlier historical fiction and aligns her with the documentary modernism of Gide (a writer whom she revered, and not only for his fiction; in fact, she cites Gide’s title Ne jugez pas in Souvenirs pieux [SP, 855]). At the same time, the trilogy reflects a more general cultural shift from the document as snapshot of the present to the document as an index to the past. Furthermore, Le Labyrinthe du monde participates in a broader archival/documentary turn that characterizes life-writing in the 1970s and 1980s, while also anticipating twentyfirst-century experiments in impersonal or “transpersonal” autobiography.

Externalizing Memory The analogy between memory and documents—and by extension between auto­ biog­raphy and the archive—is not self-evident. On the contrary, an important strand of philosophy, literature, and historiography insists on the difference between the dynamic, transformative processes of human memory and the accumulation and organization of material records—between, that is, the dead document and living memory, external information and internal knowledge, temporal rupture and continuity. Concern about the interference between the internal ­faculty of memory and external technologies for recording and exteriorizing information goes back, to be sure, at least as far as Plato’s Phaedrus. In Socrates’ story of the Egyptian god Theuth and King Thamus, the latter objects to the former’s invention of written letters. Writing will “introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it,” serving as a remedy not for memory (mneme) but for mere reminding (hypomnesis).6 Operating a characteristic reversal of Plato’s argument, Jacques Derrida argues that a process of repetition and substitution Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 87, 89–91. 5  Writing an overview of Yourcenar’s work in the New Yorker, Joan Acocella calls the Labyrinthe “basically [. . .] another historical novel” with “wonderful parts” that remain only parts. “Yourcenar, it seems, had finally tired of constructing her books.”Joan Acocella, “Becoming the Emperor,” The New Yorker, February 14 and 21, 2005. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/14/becomingthe-emperor. 6 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1997), 275a.

126  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century necessarily inscribes the “dangerous supplement,” of writing, the externality of reminding, within the organization of memory itself.7 In associating repetition in memory with the iterability of writing, Derrida in some respects echoes the ancient and medieval texts that, as Mary Carruthers notes, do not make “the slightest distinction in kind between writing on the memory and writing on some other surface.”8 Nonetheless, Derrida’s insistence on the primacy of writing may also be read as symptomatic of the difference, noted by Carruthers, between medieval memorial culture and modern documentary culture.9 To treat memory as writing, in the Derridean vein, collapses distinctions between the mental and the textual based on the structural element of repetition, indicating the difficulty of completely detaching the processes of memory from techniques of external representation. Historically, other analogies and as­so­ci­ ations have emerged with the invention of new devices for recording experiences. As Alison Winter points out, the new technologies for recording and transmitting sounds and images that developed from the second half of the nineteenth century “became identified with memory processes in a series of associations that shaped both how these processes were understood and how the technologies themselves would be used.”10 The counterpoint to this identification between memory and technology is the way in which writers and thinkers repeatedly return, especially in the twentieth century, to the essential difference between memory and the external document. The boundary between interior and exterior nevertheless remains unstable since, as Derrida notes, the tension between mneme and its “outside,” hypomnesis, is already found within memory itself.11 A case in point is Henri Bergson’s distinction between spontaneous memory—the true memory that recovers the past through specific images—and the memory of habit that works through learning and repetition.12 A similar tension comes into play in Proust’s narrator’s account of involuntary memory, his rejection of cinematic analogies for literary representation, and his preference for the analogy of the x-ray over that of the photograph to describe the deep truths of the artistic process. The comparison between imaging technologies seems directly linked to the rejection of a certain documentary aesthetic, as the narrator asserts the superior truth of personal recollection, recreated through narrative and style, over externally observed reality. 7  Jacques Derrida, “La Pharmacie de Platon” (1968), in La Dissémination (1972; repr. in Points Essais, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), 135–8 . 8 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 34. 9 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 9. 10  Alison Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3. 11  Derrida, “La Pharmacie de Platon,” 135. 12 Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (1896; Paris: Quadridge/Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 83–9.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  127 In reflections on history, the question of collective memory complicates, but does not eliminate the dichotomy between memory and the documentary record. Pierre Nora’s analysis of the relationship of history and memory, for instance, contrasts the phenomenon of living memory with the institutionalized study of historical materials; the archival and representational work of the historian is understood to be distinct from the community’s creative forging of a relation between past and present.13 The archive thus signals a rupture between the present and the dead past, and can even mean the mutilation of the living memory of a community. Recently, with the rapid development of digital recording and storage systems, an intensified debate centers on the perceived antagonism between “true” memory and our omnipresent technologies for information storage. A full account of this question would entail reviewing scholarship from multiple dis­cip­ lines, from psychological research on transactive memory (the combination of individual memory systems with systems that allow collective encoding and retrieving of memories) to the philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of the technical exteriorization and industrialization of memory.14 In any case, approaches to memory emphasize the complex connections between internal memory ­processes and the social and technological extensions of memory. Memory and docu­ments are understood to be fundamentally interrelated, yet distinct in their functioning. Although memory is neither an archive nor a linear record of events, it constantly interacts with the reading of archival materials and with our use of external devices to document our lives. This dialectic of the memorial and the documentary plays out in various ways in literary treatments of memory. Generally speaking, modern literature tends to dissociate memory from older forms of mnemotechnics (the voluntary management of memory) and instead ground it in spontaneous subjectivity. Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu presents one possible version of this relationship by privileging involuntary memory—even as ultimately, the latter is insufficient and must be given external written form. However, this question is especially crucial in autobiography and memoir. Works in these genres may be said to fall on a spectrum where the documentary and the memorial represent the two poles; writers tend toward the documentary in their reference to the objectivity of his­ tor­ic­al events, or toward the memorial in their emphasis on subjective experience. The complexity of this personal-inner/historical-outer relation becomes increasingly evident in twentieth-century literature, when the turn to the archive either determines or is motivated by a problematization of both the subject and the event. 13  Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire: la problématique des lieux,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, Vol. 1. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 23–43. 14 Daniel Wegner, “Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind,” in Theories of Group Behavior, ed. Brian Mullen and George  R.  Goethals (New York: Springer-Verlag; 1986),185–208; Bernard Stiegler, La Technique et le temps, 1: La faute d’Epiméthée (Paris: Galilée, 1994).

128  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century

Autobiography and the Document As Philippe Lejeune notes, autobiography shares with all referential texts the ­possibility of being subject to verification.15 Nevertheless, unlike works that ­systematically cite their sources, the autobiographical “pact” or “contract” depends at the most basic level on a specific mode of utterance and reception. Therefore, quite apart from the practical difficulties involved in verifying an autobiographical account, strict factual accuracy is not indispensable.16 Rather, readers are asked to take on trust the identity of author, narrator, and character, which is the point of departure for accepting the truthfulness of his or her memories. The specific form of referentiality involved in autobiography thus allows for a high degree of vari­ ation in its treatment of internal and external memory. Even as autobiographies themselves constitute a kind of personal document, they often claim merely to offer a subjective account of facts, authenticated by the promise of sincerity, even as they explore the limits and possibilities of subjective recollection. Rousseau claims to write “absolument de mémoire, sans monuments, sans matériaux qui puissent me la rappeler” (“absolutely from memory, without monuments, without materials that can recall it for me”); he can acknowledge the presence of gaps and small errors while nevertheless insisting on the essential fidelity of his narrative.17 For Rousseau, the past is immediately present to the narrating subject in all that really matters: that is, his account of himself. The genre’s reliance on the fundamental authenticity of personal memory is inflected in the twentieth century by Freud’s theories of the unconscious and his concept of screen memories. While the first half of the twentieth century sees an exploration of the epistemological limitations of autobiography (in Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt [If it Die, 1924]) or of the psychological significance of personal obsessions (in Leiris’s L’Âge d’homme [Manhood, 1939]), in the postwar period, memories are increasingly subject to verification, tested against historical facts. The 1970s, when Yourcenar begins publishing her trilogy, is also a moment of experimentation in autobiographical forms. Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (W or The Memory of Childhood, 1975), for example, alternates fictional and autobiographical narratives that together tell the story of Perec’s childhood. The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants to France, Perec lost both parents during World War II: his father on the battlefield, and his mother at Auschwitz. W alternates fictional and autobiographical sections, the first tending toward allegory (the story of an island dedicated to sport that becomes the image of a concentration camp), the second toward the documentary (descriptions of photos, news­ paper reports, and layering of personal accounts written at different moments). In 15  Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (1975; repr. Paris: Seuil, 1996), 36. 16 Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, 37. 17  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, Vol. 1 (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 166–7.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  129 the autobiographical section, archival research and recourse to the testimony of others substitute for the absence of personal memory; they both confirm and compensate for his opening assertion: “Je n’ai pas de souvenirs d’enfance” (“I have no childhood memories”).18 In Chapter  6, in order to fact-check an earlier auto­bio­graph­ic­al text of his own, he turns “par acquit de conscience” (“to put my conscience at rest”) to newspaper articles published the day of his birth, inserting headlines into his narrative from Le Temps of March 7–8, 1936.19 That the headlines have been selected and sometimes recomposed, as critics have shown,20 does not invalidate their role as referential indices that connect the personal and the collective. Other documentary traces in W encompass a range of materials including the narrator’s earlier personal writings, birth certificates and official decrees, and descriptions of photographs, all of them presented in a highly mediated fashion. The temporal layering of Chapter 8, which includes fragments dating from 1959 or 1960 and critical footnotes from fourteen years later, does not merely undermine the reliability of personal memory. Rather, it foregrounds the gaps and errors themselves as part of Perec’s story; that is, as the mark of the traumatic encounter of private experience with the historical cataclysm of World War II and the Holocaust, which claimed Perec’s parents. This distance between the documentary and the memorial is addressed in a different way in the film that Perec created with Robert Bober, Récits d’Ellis Island (1980), where the immigration stories of others stand for a past potentiality, a historical counterfactual that can now never become present for the subject.21 Taking stock of the archival reorientation that marks life-writing in the second half of the twentieth-century, Michael Sheringham notes that the archive becomes a figure, and is “shorthand for a certain kind of encounter between subject and memory, where memory, even one’s own, has become other.”22 This does not mean that the recourse to documentary supplements is universal in post-WorldWar-II autobiography, but it does come to play a central role both as a response to historical trauma (as illustrated by the case of Perec) and as part of a widespread questioning of the subject. The document also serves as a link between individual and collective memory. The question is complicated, of course, by the special status of testimonial literature from the 1960s onward, when personal memory takes

18  Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975; repr. in collection L’Imaginaire, Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 17. 19 Perec, W, 36–8. 20  Eva Pawlikovska, “Insertion, recomposition dans W ou le souvenir d’enfance de Georges Perec,” in Penser, Classer, Écrire: de Pascal à Perec, ed. Béatrice Didier and Jacques Neefs (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), 171–9. 21 “Our parents or grandparents might have been here” (“nos parents ou nos grands-parents auraient pu s’y trouver”). Georges Perec and Robert Bober, Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir (Paris: P.O.L, 1994), 56. 22  Michael Sheringham, “Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing,” French Studies 59(1) (January 2005): 47.

130  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century on special authority via the privileged voice of the witness. As I argue in Chapter 4, the document then often stands in for the irrecoverable voices of absent witnesses. But the archival turn in autobiography is not limited to these postmemorial narratives; it is arguably one side of a split within the genre itself. The contemporary tendency labelled with the ambiguous term “autofiction” moves in the opposite direction in that it often claims the right to invent or to embellish elements of the story, disregarding or downplaying strict factual accuracy in the name of telling the subject’s personal truth.23 In the second half of the twentieth century, photography also takes on a central role in autobiographical writing, whether or not the images are directly in­corp­or­ ated into the text. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) includes photographs yet suggests that the text is spoken by a fictional character, while Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant (The Lover, 1984) opens with the evocation of an absent p ­ hotograph. In a different vein, other autobiographical experiments turn back to a concern with interiority, but without sharing Rousseau’s confidence in the full presence of past events to the subject. One example is Jacques Roubaud’s auto­bio­graph­ic­al prose cycle ‘Le Grand incendie de Londres’ (The Great Fire of London,’ 1989–2009), which brings together the Bergsonian memory-image and medieval mnemotechnics in order to develop a “prose of memory” that situates memory in the “real-time” progression of the present, but also associates the work of memory with method, form, and constraint. Memory, in this view, is not just spontaneously present but requires a specific form of organization and expression.

Memory’s Materials in Yourcenar The examples mentioned above are undoubtedly referential and auto­bio­graph­ ic­al, but they also exist in a zone of generic uncertainty. This ambiguity results in part from the document’s function both as a counterweight to subjective retrospection and as a point of resistance to the very narrative that it authorizes. Yourcenar’s Le Labyrinthe du monde trilogy represents an exemplary case in that it collapses the distinction between personal memory and external documents. This occurs for two related reasons. First, both memories and documents are merely fragile, fallible traces of the past (texts “full of holes”). Second, Yourcenar’s ethical commitment to impersonality leads her to treat her own history and that of others as equally remote and difficult to grasp, approachable only from the 23  The notion of “autofiction” raises methodological problems in that it sometimes seems to confuse the fictive and the false, while attempts to theorize it variously emphasize free fictional invention or a minimal form of referentiality. On this impasse, see Richard Saint-Gelais, Jean-Louis Jeannelle, and Karen Haddad-Wotlin, “Du métatextuel au métafictionnel: états de la fiction occidentale aux XIXe et XXe siècles,” in Fiction et cultures. Poétiques comparatistes, ed. Françoise Lavocat and Anne Duprat (Paris: Société française de littérature générale et comparée, 2010), 276.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  131 outside through recourse to multiple forms of evidence. The autobiographical subject is not wholly absent from Yourcenar’s trilogy, however. The “I” finds its place within a complex discursive and narrative configuration, which is assembled of “bribes de faits crus connus” (“odds and ends of reported truths”) (SP, 708/DD, 4), but also draws on the resources of fiction to reanimate figures and events from the past. With this possibility of reanimation, the document is transformed from a dead residue of the past or piece of historical evidence into a relic or talisman— an object that produces a form of cathexis, an emotional investment that links us to the past.

What’s Hadrian to Her? Yourcenar, History, and Fiction Yourcenar’s fictions, too, are often grounded in factual materials. The historical novel is not in a category apart, she insists in her notes to Mémoires d’Hadrien: “Le romancier ne fait jamais qu’interpréter, à l’aide des procédés de son temps, un certain nombre de faits passés, de souvenirs conscients ou non, personnels ou non, tissus de la même matière que l’histoire” (“What every novelist does is only to interpret, by means of the techniques which his period affords, a certain number of past events; his memories, whether consciously or unconsciously recalled, whether personal or impersonal, are all woven of the same stuff as History itself ”) (MH 527/MoH, 329). Yourcenar insists on the same point in her afterword to L’Œuvre au noir (1968): even though that novel does not recreate a real historical character but invents a fictional one, Zénon, the two novels involve a similar approach to the past.24 Mémoires d’Hadrien, Yourcenar’s most acclaimed work, is often cited as a borderline case in studies of fictionality, biography, or memoir. This novel, which presents itself as an autobiographical letter by a historical figure, the emperor Hadrian, exemplifies for Käte Hamburger the phenomenology of the first-person narrative in its avoidance of fictionalizing techniques (such as interior monologue and free indirect discourse). It is thus a kind of literary “feint” (in Hamburger’s terms) rather than a fiction, illustrating Hamburger’s claim that “[first-person] narrative is a nonfictional literary type occurring within the epic-fictional sphere.”25 Dorrit Cohn departs from Hamburger’s view on the grounds that the criterion for differentiating between real and fictional self-narration is the ontological status of the speaker—“his identity or nonidentity with the author in whose name that narrative has been published.”26 Marguerite Yourcenar is not 24 Yourcenar, L’Œuvre au noir (1968), in Œuvres romanesques, 839. 25  Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn  J.  Rose, 2nd edn (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 337. 26 Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, MA and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 32.

132  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century really “feigning” to be Hadrian. More relevant for examining the border between fact and fiction, Cohn argues, is the “referential apparatus” that Yourcenar and other authors of historical novels include in their works.27 In his study of twentieth-century memoirs, Jean-Louis Jeannelle describes Yourcenar’s novel as an innovation in the genre of “imaginary memoirs,” alongside Roger Martin du Gard’s Le Lieutenant colonel de Maumort (left unfinished at Martin du Gard’s death in 1958). Commenting on Yourcenar’s turn away from the historical disasters of the twentieth century to recreate an exemplary life from the past, Jeannelle argues that the spiritual and ethical dimension of the character becomes more important, as a source of general truth, than rigorous conformity to his­tor­ ic­al fact.28 Mémoires d’Hadrien certainly exploits the resources of fiction to highlight the exemplary status of its narrator. The possibility of recovering the past truthfully, through “la fidélité aux faits” (“fidelity to facts”) (MH, 543), is nonetheless crucial to Yourcenar’s enterprise. In the case of Mémoires d’Hadrien, the novel’s referential basis is asserted first by the “Carnets de notes” (translated by Grace Frick as “Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian”)—a set of fragmentary notes reflecting on the novel’s process of composition, and included at the end of the novel since the 1958 edition. This is followed (or preceded, in the English translation) by a bibliographical note, less personal in tone, which lists sources and carefully distinguishes invented episodes and characters from those that have a basis in fact. These paratextual supplements frame the reader’s reception of the work by carefully grounding the narrative in documented reality, even as they acknowledge departures from the factual. As Christophe Carlier points out, this referential apparatus also contributes to the multiplication of voices in the work, after “Hadrian’s” narrative.29 In her bibliographical note, Yourcenar links certain gaps in the historical record to a profounder existential uncertainty, that of the individual immersed in the contingency of the present: “On a tâché de laisser planer sur le récit une incertitude qui, avant d’être celle de l’histoire, a sans doute été celle de la vie elle-même” (“I tried to let hover over the narrative an uncertainty that, before becoming that of history, doubtless belonged to life itself ”) (MH, 546). The documentary record does not fix history in stone; rather, in its fragility it opens history up to the unknown. The “Carnets de notes” foreground the dual role of erudition and invention in establishing contact with the past, employing the sculptural metaphor of recreating a monument in a new form using “des pierres authentiques” (original stones) (MH, 536/MoH, 341) or more vividly, describing the transmutation of dead stone 27 Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, 115, 116. 28  Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Écrire ses mémoires au XXe siècle. Déclin et renouveau (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 159, 161–3. 29  Christophe Carlier, “Une œuvre à la première personne,”in Analyses et réflexions sur Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien, ed. Maryse Adam-Maillet (Paris: Ellipses, 1996), 98.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  133 into living flesh: “Poursuivre à travers des milliers de fiches l’actualité des faits; tâcher de rendre leur mobilité, leur souplesse vivante, à ces visages de pierre” (“Through hundreds of card notes pursue each instant to the very moment that it occurred; endeavor to restore the mobility and suppleness of life to those visages known to us only in stone”) (MH, 528/MoH, 331). Whereas Yourcenar’s insistence on her extensive research highlights the necessary mediation of Hadrian’s story via existing historical, archeological, and artistic evidence, fictionalization is associated with the “sympathetic magic” of communication with the dead (MH, 526/MoH, 328–9), and with the visionary dimension of the novel that transforms reconstituted facts into unmediated access to the past. In a comment on the communicative (and even necromantic) powers of fiction, Yourcenar evokes an episode from Shakespeare, namely Hamlet’s astonishment at an actor’s ability to shed tears for the Trojan queen Hecuba: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba/That he should weep for her?” This reaction, Yourcenar argues, must be understood in the light of the Danish prince’s own failure to respond ­adequately to his father’s death (or indeed, to his ghost) (MH, 529/MoH, 332). For Yourcenar, inhabiting Hadrian’s voice and his vision of the world, recreating the past from within in the first-person form of the narrative, is crucial to the passage from mediation to immediacy, from history to literature. In the “Carnets,” Yourcenar recounts the moment that motivated her return to the project of the Mémoires after a long hiatus: her discovery of an early misplaced manuscript among old family papers. The fictional letters written (as Hadrian) to Marcus Aurelius mingle with long-forgotten exchanges between family members, so that the Roman emperor suddenly reappears as “Marc” among a Marie, a François, or a Paul, without any clear separation (MH, 524). According to this view of literary creation and its archive, there is no unbridgeable gulf between the historical and the personal (“on peut rétrécir à son gré la distance des siècles” (“one can contract the distance between centuries at will”) (MH, 527/MoH, 330)), or even between the fictional and the factual. Yet this situation may produce a curious reversal of the expected relations of proximity and distance—we recall Hamlet’s dismay at the player’s tears for Hecuba—whereby the nearest realities of our lives actually become more remote to us than ancient history: Tout nous échappe, et tous, et nous-mêmes. La vie de mon père m’est plus inconnue que celle d’Hadrien. Ma propre existence, si j’avais à l’écrire, serait reconstituée par moi du dehors, péniblement, comme celle d’un autre; j’aurais à m’adresser à des lettres, aux souvenirs d’autrui, pour fixer ces flottantes mémoires. Ce ne sont jamais que murs écroulés, pans d’ombre. We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father’s life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to

134  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?  (MH, 527–8/MoH, 330)

This project of reconstituting her own life from the outside, presented hypo­thet­ic­ al­ly in the “Carnets de notes” is precisely the one that Yourcenar later takes up in Le Labyrinthe du monde. In this sense, there is a fundamental continuity between Yourcenar’s novelistic projects and Le Labyrinthe, as well as between historical research and personal experience; as Yourcenar puts it, life itself involves “l’épreuve perpétuelle de soi à la pierre de touche des faits” (“the perpetual testing of oneself against the touchstone of fact”) (MH, 523/MoH, 325). The problem of historical distance also comes down to the problem of the self; she attributes the difficulty of writing the Mémoires to the need to bridge the distance that sep­ar­ ated her from her true self, as much as from Hadrian (MH, 524). The differences between Yourcenar’s fictional and autobiographical works are nonetheless crucial. Mémoires d’Hadrien is a novel, even if Yourcenar observes in her “Carnet de notes” that it would have been a tragedy in the seventeenth century, or an essay if written during the Renaissance: “le roman dévore aujourd’hui toutes les formes” (“In our time the novel devours all other forms”) (MH, 535/MoH, 339). The form of the novel also devours Yourcenar’s preparatory materials, weaving historical research into the seamless production of a narrative and a voice—the construction of a fictional world that, in the case of Mémoires d’Hadrien, also presents itself as a reimagined historical world, as seen from the inside by a central subject. Writing a novel entails the effacement of the authorial presence behind the characters’ thoughts, and in Yourcenar’s case behind the narrative voice of Hadrian—even as the Mémoires also tell the story of the emperor’s own progressive detachment from his private self in the name of constructing a public figure. Yourcenar’s genealogical project, by contrast, seems to have presented an obstacle to fictional form. According to the biographical outline that she herself sketches for the 1982 Pléiade edition of her novels, one of her earliest projects, dating from 1921, was to be a vast novel of family ties spanning four centuries, inspired by her reading of genealogical documents from her father’s side of the family.30 This project gave rise to a number of fragments that were later published in the form of short stories (whether in the collection La Mort conduit l’attelage [Death Drives the Cart], in 1934, or later as “Anna, soror . . .” [1981], “Un homme obscur” [“An Obscure Man”, 1981] and “Une belle matinée” [“A Lovely Morning”, 1982]), or else integrated into L’Œuvre au noir. But the genealogical novel would never be realized, or only in another form, one that is not fiction and not quite autobiography: Le Labyrinthe du monde.

30 Yourcenar, Œuvres romanesques, xv.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  135 Despite the prominence of a few main figures (notably the author’s father and, later, the substitute maternal figure Jeanne de Reval), Le Labyrinthe du monde does not recount the life of a great historical individual. It does not even tell the story of the writer, Marguerite Yourcenar. For this reason, although the work poses the question of the individual’s place in history, it is difficult to classify as an “egohistorical narrative,” following Jean-Louis Jeannelle’s distinction between the autobiographical and egohistorical poles of first-person life stories.31 The narrator of Le Labyrinthe du monde does share her identity with the author, thus fulfilling the basic requirements of the autobiographical contract. Yet she remains curiously distant from her own story, a narrative center more than an actor in history. The historical material, on the other hand, moves to the foreground of the narrative, in the form of transcribed fragments, descriptions of archival documents and memorial objects, and forms of montage that construct stories out of the available evidence, while leaving the seams visible.

“This is Not about Me”: Selfhood and Self-Erasure The relationship between memory and documents is emblematized by Yourcenar’s successive titles for the three volumes of Le Labyrinthe du monde. Souvenirs pieux, the title of the first volume (1974), misleadingly suggests an autobiographical project based on reminiscence (its title, literally “pious memories,” is rendered in Mary Louise Ascher’s English translation as Dear Departed). The understated irony of the phrase lies partly in the ambiguity of the term souvenir—as an act of memory or an external object to incite memory—and partly in the evocation of a religious and familial piety that Yourcenar, in the course of her narrative, both upholds and resists. As we shall see, the souvenirs pieux stand less for Yourcenar’s own memories than for material mementos that take the place of personal memory, those objects and documents whose initial social function is partially retained, partially lost; the reminder has often become untethered from memory. Souvenirs pieux relies mainly on private family records, objects, and transmitted stories. The title of the second volume, Archives du Nord (1977; trans. as How Many Years) establishes Yourcenar’s project as a historical one, focused not only on family papers but on the intersection of the general and the personal in regional archives (namely the Archives départementales du Nord in Lille). The title of Quoi? L’éternité (Eternity Regained, 1988), the unfinished third volume of the project, refers to a poem by Rimbaud,32 while also recalling Proust’s notion of

31 Jeannelle, Écrire ses Mémoires au XXe siècle, 375. 32  “Elle est retrouvée./Quoi?—L’Éternité./C’est la mer allée/Avec le soleil.” Arthur Rimbaud, “Vers nouveaux et chansons,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Antoine Adam. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972), 79.

136  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century time regained and transformed. It is this last volume that comes closest both to traditional autobiography—since it integrates the author-narrator’s own childhood memories—and to fiction—since Yourcenar reimagines the life story of Jeanne de Reval (her mother’s friend and, later, her father’s lover). But it also gestures toward the transcendence of time that ultimately arises from the uncovering of documentary traces and the immersion in multiple temporalities. Le Labyrinthe du monde is in many respects a paradoxical, even contradictory work. It is written against biography and against autobiography; yet Yourcenar’s careful organization and selection of her own documents—both in this project and in her plans for her own archives—is arguably motivated in part by the desire to stay one step ahead of her future biographers, to manage her own posterity.33 The trilogy is structured in part by genealogy, suggesting at first glance an aristocratic preoccupation with ancestry; yet it insists on the vanity of the genealogical enterprise. The genealogist par excellence in the work is Yourcenar’s disliked halfbrother, Michel-Joseph, who is obsessed with associating with “good families” (SP, 926–7/DD, 308) Archives du Nord, by contrast, opens with an epigraph from the Iliad: “High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation?/As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity” (AN, 953/HMY, 1). All three volumes claim to be rigorously founded on documents yet are subject to frequent flights of fiction. The trilogy presents an ideal of self-effacement and self-transcendence but develops a metanarrative commentary that imperiously asserts the authority of the authorial voice. In this last respect it is consistent with Yourcenar’s practice elsewhere, particularly in the paratexts of her fictional works,34 except that in this case authorial discourse invades the main body of the narrative in order to both authorize the referential contract and to develop essayistic digressions. This commanding narrative voice, however, does not make the work an egocentric one. Rather, the opening sentence of Souvenirs pieux emphasizes the noncoincidence of the narrating subject with her past existence: L’être que j’appelle moi vint au monde un certain lundi 8 juin 1903, vers les 8 heures du matin, à Bruxelles, et naissait d’un Français appartenant à une vieille famille du nord, et d’une Belge dont les ascendants avaient été durant quelques siècles établis à Liège, puis s’étaient fixés dans le Hainaut. The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about 8 in the morning, in Brussels, and was born of a Frenchman belonging to an old northern family and a Belgian woman whose forebears had lived for centuries in Liège and later settled in the province of Hainaut. (SP, 707/DD, 3; translation modified) 33  Josyane Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life, trans. Joan E. Howard (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7–8. 34  On this point, see Carole Allamand, “Reading Prohibited: The Politics of Yourcenar’s Prefaces,” in Sarnecki and O’Sickey, Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar, 77–100.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  137 The factual specificity of place and date contrasts with the generality of the r­ eference to the parents, who figure simply as “un Français” and “une Belge,” and above all with the narrator’s uncertainty about the continuity of the self. The meditative opening of Souvenirs pieux does not exactly undermine the identity of author and narrator, but it calls into question the autodiegetic status of a narrative that struggles to find a connection between the narrator/author and the “bout de chair rose pleurant dans un berceau bleu” (“speck of pink flesh wailing in a blue cradle”) (SP, 707/DD, 3). Yet identification with one’s past self is essential not merely for autobiography but for the very possibility of knowledge: “Que cet enfant soit moi, je n’en puis douter sans douter de tout” (“That the child is in fact myself I can hardly doubt without doubting everything”) (SP, 707/DD, 4). The necessary link between these temporal moments can only be constructed by assembling fragments of “secondhand or even tenth-hand memories” (“bribes de souvenirs reçus de seconde ou de dixième main”) (SP, 708/DD, 4), information from bits of old letters and notebook pages, or “des pièces authentiques dont le jargon administratif et légal élimine tout contenu humain” (“original documents whose legal and bureaucratic jargon is devoid of all of human content”) (SP, 708/DD, 4). These documentary traces provide “la seule passerelle viable” (“the only bridge still standing”) between past and present selves; they are also “la seule bouée qui nous soutient tous deux sur la mer du temps” (“the only buoy that keeps both of us afloat on the ocean of time”) (SP, 708/DD, 4). Rather than establishing a continuous identity through memory and self-narration, as in most life-writing,35 Yourcenar attempts to locate selfhood within a network of connections, woven from factual odds and ends, between present and past, self and other. Yourcenar emphasizes the fragment in order to convey the fragile nature of life and of our connection to the human past: the newborn baby is a scrap of flesh, while the narrative is a patchwork composed of scraps of facts and anecdotes ­filtered through multiple memories, perspectives, and interpretations. The fragment, in its isolated specificity, nevertheless leads us to the perception of the ungraspable totality of life, expressed through the twin metaphors of the “ocean of time” and the tangled web of history: “l’inextricable enchevêtrement d’incidents et de circonstances qui plus ou moins nous déterminent tous” (“the hopeless tangle of incidents and circumstances which to a greater of lesser extent shape us all”). (SP, 707/DD, 3). Drawing on this opening passage, Georges Nonnenmacher demonstrates that Yourcenar develops an understanding of the trace at three l­evels: the trace as remainder of a past moment, the trace as a creative act of reanimation that opens up time, and the trace as the reverse side of a swerve into the

35  On the unity of self and self-experience as “the primary fiction of all self-narration” but also “an existential fact, necessary for our psychological survival amid the flux of experience,” see Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 93, 94.

138  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century atemporal—making possible the experience of the absolute.36 Certainly, the dynamics of Yourcenar’s text opens up dizzying shifts of perspective between the particular and the universal, as the assemblage of documentary fragments leads simultaneously to the reconstructed and reanimated image of the past and to “une échappée momentanée sur ce qui est sans nom et sans forme” (“a fleeting glimpse of something nameless and formless”)—leading beyond history (SP, 708/DD, 4). Yet this vertical movement toward transcendence, the quest for fusion with the All (which is informed, as Simone Proust demonstrates, by Yourcenar’s encounter with Buddhist thought37), is always countered in Le Labyrinthe du monde by a return to the particular: the locale, the individual, the material document. It is these particulars that anchor individual experience and identity, according to Yourcenar’s metaphors of the bridge or the buoy that keep us from drowning in the ocean of time. The point here is not to demystify Yourcenar’s quest for totality, but to emphasize that it is inseparable from the construction of multiple material, textual, and spiritual links between the self and the world. In this sense, the questions behind Le Labyrinthe du monde remain fundamentally autobiographical (Where do I come from? How do I relate to the rest of the world?), as Sjef Houppermans points out.38 But they also lead Yourcenar to test the limits of autobiography. The beginning of Souvenirs pieux, as Béatrice Didier notes, confronts head-on what is a limit point in all life-writing: the impossibility of recounting one’s own birth.39 This birth story is also, for Yourcenar as for Rousseau before her, the site of a tension between life and death; it coincides with the story of the death from puerperal fever of Fernande de Crayencour, Marguerite’s mother—the first of a series of pregnancy and childbirth-related deaths recounted in the trilogy. Of the whole of Le Labyrinthe du monde, it is the first section of Souvenirs pieux, “L’Accouchement” (“The Birth”) that has attracted the most critical attention, thanks to Yourcenar’s highly ambivalent account of her mother and of maternity more generally. Feminist and psychoanalytic readings of Souvenirs pieux have focused variously on Yourcenar’s ideological denunciation of both the condition of women and human reproduction as a threat to the planet;40 on Yourcenar’s supposed hostility toward her own mother and to femininity in general, read as

36 Georges Nonnenmacher, “Trace et Temps dans Le Labyrinthe du monde,” in “Marguerite Yourcenar: une écriture de la mémoire,” ed. Daniel Leuwers and Jean-Pierre Castellani, special issue, Sud: revue littéraire bimestrielle 32 (1990), 237, 244. 37 Simone Proust, L’autobiographie dans Le Labyrinthe du monde de Marguerite Yourcenar. L’écriture vécue comme exercice spirituel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 167–205. 38  Sjef Houppermans, “L’être dans le temps (Yourcenar autobiographie),” in Leuwers and Castellani, “Marguerite Yourcenar,” 224. 39 Béatrice Didier, “Le récit de naissance dans l’autobiographie: Souvenirs pieux,” in Marguerite Yourcenar, biographie, autobiographie. Actes du IIe colloque international, Valencia, octobre 1986, ed. Elena Real (Valencia: Departamento de Filologia Francesa, Universitat de València, 1988), 156–7. 40  Didier, “Le récit de naissance dans l’autobiographie,” 149–50.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  139 the symptom of a traumatic and disavowed loss;41 or, on the contrary, on her revalorization of the feminine.42 While these approaches bring out important fa­cets of the text, their focus on either the presence or the disavowal of personal memory entails a reading of Souvenirs pieux (in particular), as a work of auto­ biog­raphy that is flawed or lacking, in that Yourcenar is unable to fully emerge as a subject of her own discourse (whereas adopting the masculine voice of Hadrian posed a lesser difficulty).43 But this erasure of subjectivity is hardly inadvertent or unconscious. As Elena Real observes, Souvenirs pieux starts and ends with a reference to the being called “me”; it is a curious exploration that “starts from the self and leads to the self,” while also effacing Yourcenar’s presence as a character.44 Yourcenar is in fact very deliberate in her turn away from the author’s individual destiny and from personal memory toward what has been called the “heterobiographic”: a plural narrative in which Marguerite can only be a center of narrative cohesion, a perspective rather than a real character—a point at the center of the labyrinth.45 “Mais ce n’est pas de moi qu’il s’agit” (“Yet the point here does not have to do with me”) notes Yourcenar immediately after making the surprising claim that her mother’s death had very little impact on her own life (SP, 744/DD, 52). Although Yourcenar’s relationship to her mother has been of most interest to critics, it is not the primary issue for Yourcenar herself. Instead, she sets out to understand what Fernande’s life was for Fernande—and what it might have continued to be were it not for the fatal “accident” that accompanied Marguerite’s birth. Yourcenar’s autobiographical counter-model in this respect is perhaps her detested paternal grandmother Noémi, whose name almost always appears in the company of disobliging epithets: she is “insupportable” (“insufferable”) or “redoutable” (“formidable”) (SP, 709/DD, 5, 6), and even “cet abîme mesquin” (“that abyss of pettiness”) (AN, 1057/HMY, 164). Noémi’s most intolerable trait is her fondness for possessive pronouns and adjectives: “mon salon” (“my drawing room”), “mon jardinier” (“my gardener”), “ma pendule” (“my clock”) (SP, 709/DD, 5); “mon hôtel” (“my townhouse”), “mon château” (“my château”), “mon landau” (“my landau”), “mon mari” (“my husband”) (AN, 1062/HMY, 171). By contrast, Yourcenar’s writing engages 41  Pascale Doré, Yourcenar, ou le féminin insoutenable (Geneva: Droz, 1999); Carole Allamand, Marguerite Yourcenar: une écriture en mal de mère (Paris: Imago, 2004). 42  Charlotte Hogsett, “Giving Birth to Marguerite Yourcenar,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15(2) (October 1996): 333–47. 43 According to Leakthina Ollier, Yourcenar falls victim to her own matricidal impulse, and “unconsciously creates a discourse in which her own subjectivity is lacking.” Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier, “Autobiography and Matricide: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Dear Departed,” in Sarnecki and O’Sickey, Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar, 74. 44 Elena Real, “Le voyage dans l’œuvre narrative de Marguerite Yourcenar,” in Leuwers and Castellani, “Marguerite Yourcenar,” 209. 45  See André Maindron, “L’Être que j’appelle moi”, in Real, Marguerite Yourcenar, biographie, autobiographie, 173; Valeria Sperti, “Le Pacte autobiographique impossible,” in Real, Marguerite Yourcenar, biographie, autobiographie, 179.

140  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century in deliberate and systematic self-erasure. Among her unpublished preparatory papers for Le Labyrinthe du monde is a spiral-bound notebook containing notes on her father, which also lists all the mentions of “M.Y.” in Archives du Nord: about 100 in total, amounting to fewer than ten pages of 374.46 In a sense, the text is constructed around this absent or subdued narrated self even as the subject of enunciation—the narrating I—is omnipresent (and sometimes even peremptory in its claims) and constitutes the grounds of narrative authority. In this respect, Yourcenar’s autobiographical practice comes close to the essay form. The borders between the two genres were already porous, as Julie Hebert points out, since they adopt a similar enunciative position (a non-fictive I-origine that takes responsibility for the narrative), and a similar striving toward truth.47 Le Labyrinthe du monde is not, then, only about Marguerite Yourcenar; nor is it just the story of her family. The general title of the trilogy gestures toward a kind of universal history, attributing general significance to a narrative that, at first glance, concerns only a few aristocratic or wealthy bourgeois families in northern Europe (Yourcenar’s maternal ancestors, the Cartier de Marchienne family, in Souvenirs pieux, and the paternal branch of the Cleenewerck de Crayencour family in Archives du Nord). Visiting the part of the Liège region in Belgium where her mother’s ancestors lived, Yourcenar tells us, offers insight into a particular part of the world at a particular point in history: “Il n’y aurait presque aucun intérêt à évoquer l’histoire d’une famille, si celle-ci n’était pour nous une fenêtre ouverte sur l’histoire d’un petit État de l’ancienne Europe” (“There would be hardly any point to evoking the history of a family if it did not offer us a window onto the history of a small state of old Europe”) (SP, 750; DD, 63). As Fabienne Viala argues, autobiography only interests Yourcenar insofar as it is reinvested with a documentary mission that gives historical density to the family story.48 The historical significance of this account does not depend on the social status or moral exemplarity of its actors. Unlike Mémoires d’Hadrien, Le Labyrinthe du monde generally treats characters as types rather than exemplars; that is, as p ­ eople who are at once singular individuals, with their own joys and sufferings, and representatives of a moment and milieu. Although none of them has a place of great public significance (none of them is Hadrian),Yourcenar’s account of the past challenges the opposition between memorable lives and lives lived in private. In this respect, Yourcenar’s project belongs to a larger contemporary phenomenon, while its focus on the history of mentalities also brings it into close 46  Yourcenar, “Notes sur Michel pour servir Quoi l’eternité et déjà en partie utilisés dans Archives du nord,” unpublished notebook, undated, Marguerite Yourcenar Additional Papers, 1842–1996, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Fr 372.2, 327). 47 Julie Hebert, L’Essai chez Marguerite Yourcenar. Métamorphoses d’une forme ouverte (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012), 30. 48 Fabienne Viala, “Le Labyrinthe du monde de Marguerite Yourcenar: un testament pour une généalogie universelle,” in Transmission/héritage dans l’écriture contemporaine de soi, ed. Béatrice Jongy and Annette Keilhauer (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2009), 264.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  141 proximity with the work of the Annales school of historiography.49 Furthermore, Elisabeth Snyman has related Yourcenar’s practice of self-representation in Le Labyrinthe du monde to Foucault’s approach to historiography, in that both move in the direction of a decentered subject that is constituted by historical contingencies and discursive structures.50 Another point of affinity between Yourcenar and Foucault lies in their treatment of the apparently insignificant lives revealed by the archive. Archives du Nord appeared in the same year as Foucault’s “La Vie des hommes infâmes” (1977), and its chapter “Le Réseau” (“The Network”) opens the story of Yourcenar’s paternal ancestors thus: “Vers le début du XVIe siècle, un petit personnage nommé Cleenewerck devient visible, minuscule à cette distance comme les figures que Bosch, Breughel ou Patinir plaçaient sur les routes à l’arrière-plan de leurs toiles pour servir d’échelle à leurs paysages” (“Toward the beginning of the sixteenth century, a minor personage named Cleenewerck becomes visible, tiny from this distance like the figures that Bosch, Breughel, and Patinir inserted along the roads in the background of their landscape paintings to give a sense of scale”) (AN, 968/HMY, 27). Yourcenar, like Foucault, is fascinated by the way in which brief life stories flicker into view through chance encounters with documents, the latter constituting, in Foucault’s words, “des fragments de discours traînant les fragments d’une réalité dont ils font partie” (“fragments of discourse that drag along fragments of the reality to which they belong”).51 Both hesitate between the integration of the document into larger interpretative structures and the presentation of the document in its raw state, as a fragment that offers the sense of an immediate connection to the past. On one level the document is already an intervention into and a discursive staging of everyday life, while on another, fiction fills in the gaps between these scraps of information.52 Admittedly, Yourcenar’s universalizing humanism is quite different from Foucault’s anti-humanist critique of the structures of power.53 Furthermore, the vantage point of the family archive leads her to consider individuals from a priv­il­eged social class, far from the “hommes infâmes” whose existence Foucault discovers in prison and hospital archives (with the possible exception of a certain Martin Cleenewerck, executed for heresy in the sixteenth century, whose name Yourcenar finds in the historical record but not the family archives). Yourcenar’s concern

49  On possible connections between Yourcenar and the Annales school, see Viala, “Le Labyrinthe du monde,” 266–8 and Jacques Body, “M. Yourcenar et l’école des Annales: Réflexions sur le ‘possibilisme’,” in Roman, histoire et mythe dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar: Actes du colloque tenu à l’université d’Anvers du 15 au 18 mai 1990, ed. Maurice Delcroix and Simone Delcroix (Tours: Société internationale d’études yourcenariennes, 1995), 49–57. 50 Elisabeth Snyman, “Marguerite Yourcenar’s Le Labyrinthe du monde: Autobiography of an Absent Self?” Literator 21(1) (April 2000): 21–36. 51  Michel Foucault, “La Vie des hommes infâmes” (1977), in Dits et écrits, Vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 240. 52  See Foucault, “La Vie des hommes infâmes,” 142. 53  Snyman, “Marguerite Yourcenar’s Le Labyrinthe du monde,” 24.

142  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century with her family lineage no doubt has an aristocratic dimension; her docu­men­tary sources trace alliances of noble families, describe coats of arms and collections of family portraits, locate châteaux and family burial plots, and record the social political and social fortunes of her ancestors. That is, her research is facilitated by the pedigree that gives the lives of her forebears a particular institutional status and visibility. But Yourcenar is well aware of her own socially priv­il­eged status, reflecting on it explicitly in the last pages of Archives du Nord (AN, 1181/HMY, 358). Nonetheless, she notes that genealogy teaches humility, distancing us from our own lives to reveal how small a place we have amid the multi­tudes; she also remains skeptical of notions of biological transmission and heredity (AN, 973–974/HMY, 35). Yourcenar evokes the fragility of the existences that are rescued from complete effacement by the unpredictable survival of a few recorded words, and she shows that these fragmentary traces, by dint of their very rarity, bring reality into contact with fiction. Michel de Certeau notes that the writing of history, in its work with docu­ ments, both requires and works against death.54 Arlette Farge’s Le Goût de l’archive (The Allure of the Archives, 1989) offers a moving account of the historian’s plunge into the past and effort to recover the enigmatic presence of the voices of the dead.55 The archive appears as a breach in the fabric of life; it singles out events that disrupt the continuity of ordinary existence and in doing so makes this existence visible to the future historian.56 Thus the encounter with the historical document both marks a rupture between past and present and produces a powerful presence of the past—creating the impression, however illusory, of an unveiling of life, and of a direct and unmediated apprehension of the real.57 Yourcenar shares Certeau’s and Farge’s sense of the paradoxes of the archive, which at once calcifies moments and voices from the past and turns these fragments and traces into figures of the real.58 While this historical fascination marks all Yourcenar works, what is most striking in Le Labyrinthe du monde is the visibility it gives to the process of uncovering and interpreting the past. The presence of the archive is no longer relegated to the book’s paratextual apparatus, as in Mémoires d’Hadrien, but instead becomes a central object of representation and reflection within the work. Le Labyrinthe du monde thus directly confronts the problem of the narrator-researcher’s position as mediator, organizer, and authenticator of the archive. It offers a profound investigation of the relationship between the individual and history, archive and memory. The document comes to the forefront of the work both as the necessary condition for access to the past and as an obstacle to this contact—for, as the dead letter that marks a rupture with the past, it constitutes a

54  Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 12. 55  Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire,” 10, 145. 56  Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 13. 57 Farge, Le Goût de l’archive, 14–15. 58 Farge, Le Goût de l’archive, 18.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  143 site of resistance to the plenitude of memory. Yourcenar’s narrative, composed of documentary montage and reflective digressions, articulates traces of the past within a series of relations even as it preserves their enigmatic character.

Mementos and Relics The genealogical project requires, first of all, a process of documentary reconstruction, of piecing together information about the past. As already noted, Yourcenar’s narratives cite a range of documents: official paperwork, newspaper articles, family correspondence, photographs (including an image of Fernande just after her death [SP, 732]), oral testimony transmitted within the family, and announcements of births and deaths. Characteristically, Yourcenar provides a detailed note on her sources at the end of both Souvenirs pieux and Archives du Nord. She insists on the factual basis for her narrative, while also noting the limits of documentation and verification. These practical limits also entail weighing the significance of details: it matters little to Yourcenar (and even less to the reader, she notes) whether an uncle of one of her distant relatives was called Jean-Louis or Jean-Baptiste (SP, 945). Which facts matter, and how are they used? Yourcenar makes use of documents recorded for other purposes: the genealogical work of her half-brother Michel-Joseph and other family archivists, her grandfather’s travel journals, and above all, stories told by her father. In reshaping these ma­ter­ ials, Le Labyrinthe du monde departs from the unified narratives of Yourcenar’s novels in order to incorporate documentary materials and a metanarrative commentary on their interpretation. Some textual documents are directly transcribed and incorporated, the most chillingly factual being Michel de Crayencour’s noted record of Fernande’s heart rate and rising temperature in the days preceding her death (SP, 727). Others are included in the form of illustrations to the first, limit­ed edition of Souvenirs pieux (published with the Éditions Alphée in 1973), collected under the heading “L’Album de Fernande” (“Fernande’s Album”). Selected illustrative plates—photographs of people and places, portraits, and reproductions of documents such as souvenirs pieux—are also included in the English translations of the first two volumes, Dear Departed and How Many Years. (The Gallimard editions do not contain illustrations.) The title of Souvenirs pieux refers primarily not to Yourcenar’s own mem­or­ies— largely absent in this text—but rather to a paper document. A “souvenir pieux” is a religious missive sent to family members and close friends after a death, presenting on the front a devotional image and prayers for souls in purgatory, and on the back a request to the recipient to remember the deceased person, followed by quotations from Scripture or devotional works (SP, 741). Yourcenar transcribes elements from a number of these documents, most significantly the souvenir pieux sent out shortly after her own birth to commemorate Fernande. Fernande’s

144  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century souvenir pieux includes along with a banal prayer an awkward phrase of homage, presumably written by her husband: “Elle a toujours essayé de faire de son mieux” (“She always tried to do her best”), giving the impression that Fernande had not always succeeded (SP, 742/DD, 49). Among Yourcenar’s source materials in her unpublished papers, there are in fact two souvenirs pieux for Fernande; the one cited in the book (with the phrase assumed to be by Michel de Crayencour) but also another version, more pious and conventional (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2). The autograph note that accompanies these documents sets out two alternative hypotheses: either the family disliked Michel’s souvenir pieux and made their own; or Michel initially left the task to his family then composed another one more to his liking.59 As we have seen, Yourcenar opts in Souvenir pieux for what she takes to be her father’s version; but the coexistence of the two documents poses an enigma, hinting at a story without telling it. Later in the book, Yourcenar describes and transcribes part of the souvenir pieux of her maternal grandmother, Mathilde, noting that its text seems drawn from a romance novel (SP, 807). Opting in another case for collage, she reproduces the typographical layout of the “pieux souvenir de Monsieur Octave-Louis-Benjamin Pirmez,” her great-uncle on the maternal side (SP, 869). Part of a set of customary mourning practices and a gesture of religious and family piety, at once memento and memento mori, the souvenir pieux carries a message from beyond the grave, via a form of ventriloquism. It is a document that layers multiple voices, from devotional or novelistic quotations to (sometimes ambivalent) praise formulated by the bereaved. A counterpart to the souvenir pieux is the commonplace book, which appropriates, assembles and repurposes the voices of the dead for use by the living. A few examples of this practice are conserved among Yourcenar’s source materials: these include a notebook belonging to Gabrielle, Yourcenar’s paternal aunt, mentioned in Archives du Nord, which contains “l’histoire du monde depuis Adam que lui avait dictée son père” (“the history of the world from the time of Adam, as her father had told it to her”)—a narrative that is cut short by Gabrielle’s death as an adolescent (AN 1086/HMY, 120). The original notebook contains transcribed poems that Yourcenar added to the pages left blank by Gabrielle.60 Yourcenar’s father also collected poems in a notebook, and again she uses the blank pages for her own selection.61 Piety in the religious sense, Yourcenar notes in Souvenirs pieux, is traditionally the province of women (SP, 717). It involves certain material practices: Fernande, 59  “Faut-il croire, A) que la famille, peu satisfait du ‘Souvenir Pieux’ fait faire par Michel, a de son côté fait le sien?; B) que Michel avait laissé à la famille le soin de ce détail, et que peu satisfait du résultat, il a fait faire un ‘souvenir pieux’ plus à son gré?” Yourcenar, “Le labyrinth du monde: miscellaneous sources I,” undated, Marguerite Yourcenar Additional Papers, 1842–1996 (MS Fr 372.2, 207). 60  Gabrielle de Cleenewerck de Crayencour, “Histoire sainte, histoire de France,” undated (c. 1866), Marguerite Yourcenar Additional Papers, 1842–1996 (MS Fr 372.2, 842). 61 Michel de Cleenewerck de Crayencour, “Poèmes copies par Michel,” with poems copied by Marguerite Yourcenar, undated, Marguerite Yourcenar Additional Papers, 1842–1996 (MS Fr 372.2, 843).

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  145

Figure 3.1  “Souvenir pieux” for Fernande de Crayencour Source: document conserved at Houghton Library and reproduced by permission of the Petite Plaisance Trust. All rights reserved.

in the course of her illness, asks her husband to bring her some relics from the church of Carmes, even though she has other relics closer to hand: a seventeenthcentury crucifix from the family chapel, containing bone fragments from martyrs whose names have now become illegible (SP, 729). The sacred relic, as Renaud Dulong points out, is an exemplary factualizing apparatus: as a piece of material that is invested with belief through a set of collective practices, it “flagrantly

146  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century

Figure 3.2  Second “souvenir pieux” for Fernande de Crayencour Source: document conserved at Houghton Library and reproduced by permission of the Petite Plaisance Trust. All rights reserved.

demonstrates the element of magic that enters into the operation of factualization.”62 Although Yourcenar does not share her mother’s religious faith, it is perhaps a metonymic association with her mother’s church relics that leads 62  Renaud Dulong, “Les opérateurs de factualité. Les ingrédients matériels et affectuels de l’évidence historique,” Politix 10(39) (1997): 81.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  147 her to extend the category of relic to various kinds of object and document. After her death, Fernande’s husband Michel engages in a poignant ceremony that Yourcenar calls “l’occultation des reliques” (“the occultation of relics”): the hiding away or disposing of the material traces of Fernande’s life (SP, 745/DD, 54). Clothes are donated to the poor, but other “débris disparates” (“odds and ends”) (SP, 745/DD, 54) are put away in a box and later exhumed by the author: photographs, notes, letters, locks of hair (identical in color to her daughter’s), jewelry, dance cards, books, and even a notebook containing a literary composition that Yourcenar judges to be “lamentable,” but which nevertheless testifies to Fernande’s legitimate need to “romancer sa propre vie” (“romanticize her own life”) (SP, 746/DD, 54). These material, bodily, and textual debris prompt in the author a range of emotions, from pity to horror, and a range of reactions. The plaited bracelets made from the hair of Fernande’s mother or grandmother are discarded—these “reliques capillaires” (“capillary relics”) are no longer recognizable as organic matter (SP, 746/DD, 54). Jewels are sold off, religious medallions and the crucifix reliquary are given away, a purse is used and then lost, a card holder serves as a container for Yourcenar’s own notes (SP, 746–8/DD, 55–7). These various remainders—“épaves” (“flotsam and jetsam”), “pieux déchets” (“pious odds and ends”) and “brimborions” (“knickknacks”) (SP, 747–8/DD, 55–7)—become forms of vanitas, signs of the transience, fragility, and futility of individual life, and evidence for the need to detach ourselves from material possessions. Once treasured by the now deceased individual as elements of their self-definition, these objects may be revered, but they are also in the realm of the abject—literally, in that they have been “cast off,” and also in the sense that Julia Kristeva gives to the term; they are disturbing and fascinating because they exist in a liminal space between the subject and the object, defying our sense of boundaries.63 The document in Yourcenar always possesses this ambiguity: as a trace, it serves as evidence for the past; it may be subject to a duty of preservation and inspire practices of commemoration; but it is also detritus, one of the waste products of human life. Yourcenar is ambivalent, then, expressing her desire to rid herself of these material objects and traces even as she also values them as threads connecting her to the past. In Archives du Nord, she recounts her sale in 1929 of a seventeenthcentury Flemish silver and ebony crucifix left by her father, an object that is “à la fois conventionnel et lugubre” (“at once conventional and lugubrious”), and whose religious meaning she rejects (AN, 986/HMY, 54). Her classical tastes determine her greater attachment to a Roman cameo depicting the head of Augustus, an object passed down to her from her grandfather. She nevertheless gave it away in 1935 to a man she loved, perhaps in part because it had been damaged:

63  Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 12.

148  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century une légère fêlure, due à je ne sais quel choc, s’était produite sur l’extrême bord de l’onyx. Il me semblait ainsi devenu moins précieux, imperceptiblement endommagé, périssable: c’était alors pour moi une raison d’y tenir un peu moins. C’en serait aujourd’hui pour y tenir un peu plus. the outermost edge of the onyx had been marred by a slight crack, the result of some careless blow. To my eyes, the object thus seemed to have become less ­precious, imperceptibly damaged, perishable. In those days that was, for me, a reason to cherish it a bit less. Today it would be a reason to cherish it a bit more. (AN, 1042–3/HMY, 138–9)

The fragility of the artifact now makes it all the more precious, a sign of its ­passage through time and its connection to human life. It is for this reason that Yourcenar keeps some imperfect objects, such as the iron ruler forged by Yourcenar’s father, mentioned in Quoi? L’Éternité. This handmade trace of Michel’s existence, which itself serves to trace lines, has not rusted but is almost imperceptibly warped. A miraculous relic that has stood the test of time, the ruler (“règle”) is also a symbolic object, signifying measure and regularity; ironically, however, it was made by a man who never lived his life according to a rule (“règle de vie”) (QE, 1201–2). Yourcenar’s documents, then, are not limited to textual records but encompass a range of objects from strands of hair to albums of dried flowers (AN, 1043) Yet verbal traces have the advantage of allowing Yourcenar to integrate the voices of others directly into her text—via documentary transcription rather than description. For instance, Yourcenar’s source materials include scribbled, almost illegible, notes written by Fernande to Michel, while the former was unable to speak because of dental neuralgia and had to transmit requests in writing. The book includes the following transcribed exchange: –Baudouin a déjà eu cela. … . . . … . . . –Quatermann est intelligent, actif et gentil . . . différence avec le Dr Dubois hier. … . . . … . . . –Je suis comme Trier, sans parole. … . . . … . . . –Avec cela, ça me fait mal de sucer même une biscotte. … . . . … . . . –Il n’est pas dans l’eau bouillante. … . . . … . . . –Sonne . . . Fais chercher un bouchon . . . Du vin . . . … . . . … . . . –Dans la chambre à côté, sur le feu?

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  149 Baudouin has already had that. … . . . … . . . Quatermann is intelligent, alert, and kind . . . different from Dr Dubois yesterday. … . . . … . . . I am just like Trier [Fernande’s dog]—wordless . . . … . . . … . . . With this, it hurts to even suck on a bit of biscuit . . . … . . . … . . . It’s not in the boiling water . . . … . . . … . . . Ring . . . Have someone look for a cork . . . Some wine . . . … . . . … . . . In the next room, on the fire? (SP, 720/DD, 19)

The words are banal, certainly. Leakthina Ollier argues that the inclusion of this “relic which reflects nothing but platitudes” along with the exclusion of some of Fernande’s other writings (notably the literary composition), expresses Yourcenar’s matricidal desires: “It is as if she attempts to show that even when Fernande was able to speak, she had absolutely nothing intelligent to say.”64 However, I would argue that the value of such a document lies precisely in its banality—its status as a form of “ordinary writing” embedded in the everyday,65 and the record it ­provides of the tone and the rhythm of an ordinary conversation between two individuals. It offers a glimpse of the domestic intimacy of Fernande and Michel. This is, to be sure, only a glimpse; the jotted notes range from the obvious to the enigmatic, given the lack of contextual information and the absence of the responding voice in the dialogue (marked by ellipses). While the nature of her parents’ relationship remains opaque to Yourcenar, the very existence of this scrap of paper nevertheless bears witness to Michel’s attachment to his wife: “qu’il l’ait conservé donne à croire qu’il n’avait pas de ces soirées de Bruxelles que de mauvais souvenirs” (“the fact that he saved it leads one to believe that those evenings in Brussels had not left him with only unpleasant memories”) (SP, 720/DD, 19). For Yourcenar, the work of documentary reconstruction serves as a substitute for absent memories and for an attachment to her mother that she was not able to form. Her unsentimental but compassionate account of Fernande’s life is a work of filial piety, like her attention, attested in her personal papers, to renovations of

64  Ollier, “Autobiography and Matricide,” 73. 65  See Dominique Fabre, Écritures ordinaires (Paris: P.O.L/Centre Georges Pompidou, Bibliothèque publique d’information, 1993).

150  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century the family burial plot at Namur.66 More generally, it indicates what Renaud Dulong calls a “piété du passé” (“piety toward the past”), which, replacing her mother’s religious piety, constitutes the affective ground for Yourcenar’s quest for historical truth.67 Used sylleptically to designate both mental recollections and material mementos, the word souvenirs links documents and memories while also indicating the gap between them: the documentary record serves as a substitute for the absent relation. On the one hand, documents give rise to suspicion, since they are far from a source of infallible truth. In Souvenirs pieux, for instance, Yourcenar identifies mistakes in her own birth certificate, including errors in the transcription of names and in the indication of various family members’ precise relationship to the newborn child: “Petites bévues, ou simplement inexactitudes, mais de nature à faire damner des générations d’érudits quand il s’agit d’un document plus important que celui-là” (“Small blunders, or simply inaccuracies, but of a kind likely to damn generations of scholars when they are found in a more important document than this one”) (SP, 727/DD, 28). On the other hand, this opacity of the document becomes productive, giving rise to innumerable conjectures about the past. As a mediated account, the document is not a straightforward record but a nexus of multiple memories. This is most obviously true for the second- and third-hand family stories that Yourcenar hears from her father then transcribes and reworks, but it also applies to the most apparently straightforward official records.

The Novelist as Necromancer But errors and lacunae in documents are not the only difficulty that Yourcenar faces. More fundamentally, the gathering of information on the past does not ­suffice to forge a link even where there was once a bodily connection: “J’avais traversé Fernande; je m’étais quelques mois nourrie de sa substance, mais je n’avais de ces faits qu’un savoir aussi froid qu’une vérité de manuel” (“I had traversed Fernande; I had nourished myself for several months on her substance, but the facts I had gleaned were cold knowledge to me, as if they had come from a textbook”) (SP, 739/DD, 44–5). It is here that the imagination intervenes, whether simply proceeding by hypotheses and inference—the young Fernande “must have” (“avait dû”) visited the Citadel in Namur (SP, 738/DD, 44)—or by fleshing 66  Family cemetery records, 1971–1986, Marguerite Yourcenar Additional Papers, 1842–1996 (MS Fr 372.2, 554). Notes by Yourcenar also record her indignant reaction to an uncharitable portrait of Fernande traced by her half-brother Michel-Joseph. “Carnets de route de la famille Cleenewerck de Crayencour” (1967), with annotations by Yourcenar, Marguerite Yourcenar Additional Papers, 1842–1996 (MS Fr 372.2, 556). 67  Dulong, “Les opérateurs de factualité,” 82–3.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  151 out the details of key narrative episodes. Yourcenar combines, to varying degrees throughout the three books, authenticating or “factualizing” procedures—notably the citing of documents—with the use of narrative devices that are for Dorrit Cohn markers of “the distinction of fiction”: specifically, techniques for presenting the inner life of characters.68 Both the documentary and the fictionalizing procedures in Le Labyrinthe du monde seem to entail a movement away from the self and from personal memory; yet they also establish a link between the narrating subject and the lives of others. What is at stake is an expansive conception of memory, which connects the individual to the whole of human history. Structurally, Souvenirs pieux and Archives du Nord form a kind of diptych flanked on both sides by the birth of the narrator. The former begins with the story of the author’s birth, only to move back in time, tracing the genealogy of her mother’s forebears back to the fourteenth century, then focusing on her maternal grandparents, her great-uncles Octave and Rémo Pirmez, and finally Fernande. Archives du Nord opens with an evocation of prehistorical times and the beginnings of humanity, before resuming the family narrative with the barely visible figure of a sixteenth-century paternal ancestor. This story also encompasses the painter Rubens (via a very distant family connection), before turning to the lives of Yourcenar’s paternal grandfather, Michel Charles, and her father, Michel, and continuing up to the summer following Yourcenar’s birth; the volume concludes with an image of the author as a sleeping baby, described in the third person as someone whose story cannot yet be told: “Mais il est trop tôt pour parler d’elle, à supposer qu’on puisse parler sans complaisance et sans erreur de quelqu’un qui nous touche inexplicablement de si près” (“But it’s too soon to speak of her, even supposing it were possible to speak without complacency or error of someone who inexplicably touches us so closely”) (AN, 1182; HMY, 359). Only the third volume, Quoi? L’éternité follows the chronology of Yourcenar’s own life, but its treatment of personal memory is reticent: “J’ai longtemps cru avoir peu de sou­ venirs d’enfance” (“For a long time, I thought I had few childhood memories”) (QE, 1327). Whether inadvertent or not, the echo of Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance is worth noting; both works problematize memory, although the circumstances of the authors’ childhoods (and respective maternal losses) are very different. In any case, although Yourcenar recants her earlier belief, the space devoted to Yourcenar’s childhood memories and her travels with her father is limited, and once again memories are not privileged over documentary evidence. Thus the chapter “Les Miettes de l’enfance” (“Scraps of childhood”) begins with some evocations of plants and animals from her childhood home, the Mont-Noir château near Bailleul, France, but soon turns to the description of a photograph showing “une petite fille typique de ces années-là” (“a typical little girl of the

68 Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, 16.

152  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century time”)—the trace of “ce Moi disparu” (“that vanished self ”) (QE, 1330). Although this last volume is the most autobiographical of Le Labyrinthe du monde, it is a hybrid work that fuses autobiographical elements and a fictional reimagining of the past. The latter focuses on the figure of her father Michel as well as on the relationship between Jeanne de Reval and her husband Egon—the latter being the model for the homosexual narrator of Yourcenar’s first novel, Alexis. The project as a whole is organized by a double movement of ascent and descent in time, although its genealogical structures are disrupted by what Carole Allamand aptly calls “growths” (excroissances) on the genealogical tree69—that is, stories of distant members of the family or even individuals outside the family. A number of key dramatic episodes are not only reconstructed, but reinvented: in Souvenirs pieux, Yourcenar’s birth and the honeymoon of her parents Michel and Fernande; in Archives du Nord, the young Michel Charles’ (the paternal grandfather’s) narrow escape from a serious train accident in 1842, the death of Michel’s sister Gabrielle, Michel’s turbulent love affair with the Englishwoman Maud; and in Quoi? L’éternité, the death in a hunting accident of Michel’s remaining sister, Yourcenar’s aunt Marie; and, in Quoi? L’éternité, the life, marriage, and love affairs of Jeanne de Reval, the woman who becomes an idealized mother figure.70 A striking example of Yourcenar’s fictionalizing procedures is the section of Souvenirs pieux dedicated to the brothers Octave and Rémo Pirmez, two greatuncles (or rather her maternal grandmother’s cousins): “Deux voyageurs en route vers la région immuable” (“Two travelers journeying toward the eternal region”). Rémo is a heroic and tragic figure, an idealist and social reformer who committed suicide. Octave, a poet and essayist, serves as a literary ancestor as well as an eth­ic­al model. Commenting on Octave’s experience as a juror, and on his “Dostoevskian” reflection on crime and justice, Yourcenar explicitly makes him a precursor of the Gide of Souvenirs de la cour d’assises: “Nous touchons déjà au ‘Ne jugez pas’ d’André Gide” (SP, 855/DD, 204). Yet the reasons for focusing on Octave are practical as much as they are psychological and literary; Yourcenar simply has access to a certain quantity of documentary materials concerning him, given his position in the history of Belgian letters. Her sources include a scholarly book and articles devoted to Octave’s life and work, but she also notes that the dispersal and loss of crucial documents makes a comprehensive biography impossible (SP, 947). Assembling information while trying to fill in gaps, Yourcenar mixes narrative and discursive registers. The section devoted to the Pirmez brothers opens with the account of Octave’s journey on horseback on October 23, 1875, to visit his dying uncle Louis Troye (Yourcenar’s great-grandfather on the maternal side). This narrative frame serves to reassert the genealogical connection to Yourcenar 69 Allamand, Marguerite Yourcenar, 9. 70 On Jeanne’s role, see Sally Wallis, “The Adoptive Mother in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Quoi? l’éternité?,” in Thirty Voices in the Feminine, ed. Michael Bishop (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 14–22.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  153 of this rather distant relative and allows Yourcenar to reanimate her documentary materials by way of novelistic techniques. Octave himself described the conversation with his uncle, and Yourcenar claims only to supplement his notes by using fragments taken from his other works (SP, 810). After recounting this day, Yourcenar once again insists on both the factual basis of her narrative and the limits of her knowledge: Les pages qui précèdent sont un montage. Par souci d’authenticité, j’ai fait le plus possible monologuer Octave en empruntant à ses propres livres [. . .] Là même où je n’ai pas joué des guillemets, j’ai souvent résumé des notations du poète trop diffuses pour être insérées telles quelles. Un seul détail est décidément inventé: rien n’indique que le poète, ce 23 octobre 1875, fit à cheval la route d’Acoz à La Pasture. The preceding pages are a montage. Out of a concern for authenticity, I have allowed Octave himself to speak as much as possible, through excerpts from his own books. Even where I have not used quotation marks, I have often sum­mar­ ized the poet’s notes, which are too diffuse to be inserted as they are. [. . .] One single detail was definitely invented: nothing indicates that on October 23, 1875, the poet rode his horse from Acoz to La Pasture.  (SP, 840/DD, 185)

That is, the only wholesale invention is a “detail” that is crucial to the narrative frame for the whole episode, the horseback ride that sets the scene for the encounter. Otherwise, Yourcenar condenses and displaces Octave’s own words—as far as possible—in order to produce a coherent focalized narrative. Yourcenar justifies such fictional interventions both in terms of their probability (Octave often made long journeys on horseback) and in terms of their formal role as a “faufil” (“tacking thread”), a provisional device for holding together factual fragments (SP, 840). They are also much more than this, since they function as a narrative strategy for immersion and psychological realism. They reconstruct the state of mind of an upper-class Belgian writer in 1875, concentrating into one day feelings that he expresses elsewhere (although, Yourcenar insists, certain thoughts and feelings recur too insistently in Octave’s writings not to have been present that day). This work of concentration includes such techniques as using direct quotations from Octave’s writings—particularly from Octave’s book on the life and death of his brother Rémo, introduced into the fictionalized account via the pretext that Octave was remembering his brother that day. Yourcenar transposes these materials into the third person and into a narrative form that shifts between the past and the present tenses, privileging the latter in her attempt to transform the “pâle phantôme” (“pale phantom”) (SP, 845; DD, 191) of Octave into a real human presence. Her account presents Octave’s impressions and emotions on his journey using devices such as free indirect discourse that are usually seen as the prerogative of fiction: “En arrivant au château, une angoisse l’étreint:

154  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century les persiennes de la chambre de son oncle, au premier étage, sont baissées: s­ erait-il arrivé trop tard?” (“Arriving at the château, he is filled with anxiety: the window blinds in his uncle’s room, on the second floor, have been lowered. Has he arrived too late?”) (SP, 813; DD, 149) Yourcenar also employs techniques of dramatization and direct speech, for instance in presenting the encounter and dialogue between Octave and his uncle: “Quelle joie, mon cher Octave, de vous revoir avant de mourir!” (“What joy, my dear Octave, to see you before I die!”) (SP, 814; DD, 150). Even if the dialogue is supposedly based on direct quotations from Octave’s writings, this is clearly a fictionalized (and even a melodramatic) account, which turns to the narrative techniques associated with fiction (direct dialogue, free indirect discourse) both to flesh out a historical hypothesis and to immerse the reader in the reimagined past. However, we should resist the temptation to ­conclude—as literary critics are perhaps wont to do—that historical reality can be wholly subordinated to the imaginary meaning of the event.71 Yourcenar offers us a form of fiction that is inspired by but also constrained by the available evidence, and her preparatory manuscripts bear witness to her constant concern for factual accuracy.72 If fictional devices are part of the imaginative effort required to communicate with the past, they do not negate the documentary aspect of the text. The reliance on established facts always sets limits to what can be affirmed. It is always possible to imagine potential stories for characters, but Yourcenar holds these scenarios at a distance: “je n’écris pas un roman” (“this isn’t a novel”) (AN, 1166/HMY, 331). This isn’t a novel, but it still calls on the resources of the novelist to engage in what constitutes, as Yourcenar herself acknowledges, an “entreprise quasi-nécromantique” (“almost necromantic enterprise”) (SP, 841/DD, 186). “Necromantia” is in fact the title of one of the chapters of Quoi? l’éternité. It recounts her uncle Paul’s attempt to contact his dead wife Marie (Michel’s sister, killed in a hunting accident) via a medium. Yourcenar’s father Michel remains skeptical and finds a rational explanation for the apparent communication with the dead. But while Michel is not a spiritualist or a necromancer, perhaps his daughter is, in her own way. As in Mémoires d’Hadrien, Yourcenar deploys fictional devices as means of summoning up the dead. Nevertheless, Le Labyrinthe du monde always returns to problems of evidence and verification, returning the dead to their phantom status. Still, a passage from a typescript version of Archives du Nord, not present in the published

71  “La réalité historique importe peu à l’auteur.” Proust, L’Autobiographie dans Le Labyrinthe du monde, 329. 72  For instance, she makes additions and modifications to the second galley proofs for the Éditions Alphée version of Souvenirs pieux to take into account “documents received at the last minute” (“des documents reçus au dernier moment”), at the risk of disrupting the carefully crafted spacing of the paragraphs. Yourcenar, “Souvenirs pieux”, corrections to galley proofs, 13 June 1973, Marguerite Yourcenar Additional Papers, 1842–1996 (MS Fr 372.2, 453).

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  155 text, evokes the writer’s ability to conjure up a multitude of faces and landscapes—a power that Yourcenar relates to the “hypnagogic visions” that occur in the transition from wakefulness to sleep.73 Yourcenar’s conscientious fact-checking, and her acknowledgment of both error and invention, thus go hand in hand with an elaborate and deliberate work of fictionalization, with an uninhibited form of storytelling that surges forth at particular moments in Le Labyrinthe du monde and sometimes seems to leave behind—if only momentarily—all documentary grounds. The procedures of invention go beyond the mere disguising of proper names, more or less ­easily deciphered by the author’s biographers.74 They also lead us away from Yourcenar’s own life to spaces of projection and identification. Yourcenar is not a surrealist—far from it—and these spaces remain governed by rules of verisimilitude and probability. Still, they allow her to develop a network of connections and as­so­ci­ations that reach beyond the arborescent structures of genealogy. Above all, this approach serves to convert documentary information into memory, to allow both Yourcenar and the reader to live and think with others for the space of a narrative episode, even as this experience evidently rests on an act of fictional transformation. As Hélène Jaccomard points out, it is also via inter­ text­ual­ity within Yourcenar’s body of work that fiction invades autobiography.75 Thus the section on the Pirmez brothers uses geographical connections to relate their lives to that of the sixteenth-century alchemist Zeno—the fictional pro­tag­ on­ist of Yourcenar’s L’Œuvre au noir—and it concludes with an observation on her relation to the three men: “J’ai pour Rémo une brûlante estime. ‘L’oncle Octave’ tantôt m’émeut et tantôt m’irrite. Mais j’aime Zénon comme un frère” (“For Rémo I feel an ardent respect. ‘Uncle Octave’ sometimes moves and sometimes irritates me. But Zeno I love like a brother”) (SP, 880/DD, 239). The work of documentary assemblage and imaginative reanimation thus succeeds in establishing an emotional link to ghostly ancestors, but the fictional character remains emotionally closer, like Hecuba for the actors of Hamlet. In her reading of the Pirmez episode, Kay Gordon claims that fictional creation is primary, and that Octave is only interesting insofar as he has been “assimilated into Yourcenar’s imagination.”76 However, as Sjef Houppermans persuasively argues, we can read this passage as situating Yourcenar’s entire body of work, including her fiction, within an “auto­bio­graph­ic­al space” (as defined by Philippe Lejeune)—that is, the 73 Yourcenar, “Archives du nord”, typescript with author’s annotations and revisions, undated, Marguerite Yourcenar Additional Papers, 1842–1996 (MS Fr 372.2, 23(5)). 74 For instance, the real names of Egon and Jeanne de Reval were Conrad and Jeanne de Vietinghoff. Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar, 25. 75 Hélène Jaccomard, Lecteur et lecture dans l’autobiographie franc̜aise contemporaine: Violette Leduc, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Serge Doubrovsky, Marguerite Yourcenar (Geneva: Droz, 1993), 414. 76  Kay Gorman, “Fact and Fiction in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Le Labyrinthe du Monde,” Essays in French Literature 23 (November 1986): 66.

156  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century realm that links the author of Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Œuvre au noir to the narrator of Souvenirs pieux.77 The construction of this autobiographical space allows imagined characters and real people to coexist in an expanded ontological realm—and an expanded family. But I would also draw attention here to the resistance of the real: that is, the invented Zeno is naturally more accommodating to his creator than the occasionally irritating Uncle Octave, who is not easily assimilated into a coherent story. This is the challenge of nonfiction.

Time Regained Le Labyrinthe du monde uses fragments and traces to open up numerous paths for exploration. Marguerite herself appears in the opening pages of Souvenirs pieux as an as-yet indeterminate being who is nevertheless already caught in an inextricable web of historical and social determinations. Her task is then to untangle the specific circumstances that determine the individual’s place in the history of the world at a given moment. The obverse of this focus on the particular, however, is a movement of historical telescoping that superposes different moments. For example, Yourcenar compares a 1312 massacre inside a church in Liège to the Oradour massacre of 1944, in Nazi-occupied France (SP, 753). The historical calamities that lie in Yourcenar’s past and her parents’ future color the description of Fernande and Michel’s honeymoon visit in 1900 to Dachau, then only a “charmant petit village bavarois si cher aux peintres” (“charming little Bavarian village so beloved of painters”) (SP, 935/DD, 321). The palaces of Dresden and Würzburg, as captured in Michel de Crayencour’s sepia photographs, seem “déjà déjetés par les bombardements de l’avenir” (“already distorted by the bombardments to come”) (SP, 938/DD, 326). It is as if the document captured not just the past but also a future already contained in the past; on a his­tor­ic­al and even cosmic scale, the mass of traces connects and fuses moments, abolishing human time and potentially submerging the individual.78 This vision of history can also have the effect of collapsing fact and fiction, as when Yourcenar, in her description of her parents’ time in Belle Époque Paris, imagines her father meeting a version of Proust’s salon hostess Mme Verdurin (SP, 941). It is difficult, then, to inhabit the past as if it were present. In Souvenirs pieux, Yourcenar likens the task to reinvigorating a dried-out leaf: La vie passée est une feuille sèche, craquelée, sans sève ni chlorophylle, criblée de trous, éraillée de déchirures, qui, mise à contre-jour, offre tout au plus le 77  Houppermans, “L’être dans le temps,” 225. 78  On cosmic time and achrony in Le Labyrinthe du monde, see Blanca Arancibia, “ ‘Mythe’ de l’histoire, ‘littérature’ et autobiographie,” in Roman, histoire et mythe dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar, actes du colloque tenu à l’université d’Anvers du 15 au 18 mai 1990, ed. Maurice Delcroix and Simone Delcroix (Tours: Société internationale d’études yourcenariennes, 1995), 11.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  157 réseau squelettique de ses nervures minces et cassantes. Il faut certains efforts pour lui rendre son aspect charnu et vert de feuille fraîche, pour restituer aux événements ou aux incidents cette plénitude qui comble ceux qui les vivent et les garde d’imaginer autre chose. Life gone by is a withered, cracked leaf, without sap or chlorophyll, riddled with holes, frayed and torn, which, when held up to the light, reveals at most the skeletal tracery of its slender, brittle veins. Certain efforts are required to give it once more the fleshy green appearance of a new leaf, to restore to events and incidents that fullness which satisfies the people who live them and which keeps these people from imagining anything else.  (SP, 790/DD, 115–16)

Interpreting the record of the past, then, like the process of memory, requires the reanimation of dead traces. Underlying the image is the sense of the loss of a vital principle—an absence that, in fact, determines Yourcenar’s relation to her own history, and specifically the “cold knowledge” that connects her to the life of her mother (SP, 739). Cold knowledge, dry documents, snippets of facts, bits of dead wood: the obsessive reworking of these tropes in Le Labyrinthe du monde seems to offer a strikingly dysphoric counterpart to the Proustian ecstasy of time regained. Yourcenar has a predilection for organic metaphors that strike a chord with her ecological concerns; so that the bits of dead wood evoke the destruction of the natural landscape so often deplored in the same work. Yet this understanding of memory also has a positive side, in that there is little distance in Yourcenar’s approach between personal memory and history, or even between history and literature. The laborious work of restoring plenitude to the traces of the dead past involves a process of both historical reconstruction and imaginative effort. The plenitude of the present, on the other hand, can stifle imagination; Yourcenar suggests that her maternal grandparents Arthur and Mathilde were incapable of conceiving alternatives to their own form of existence (SP, 790). Reanimating the past then allows a certain transcendence of time, a vision of time as eternity, but achieved by non-Proustian means: not as spontaneous recollection, but through a plunge into the archives. Toward the end of Quoi? L’éternité, Yourcenar uses another organic metaphor, this time to caution the reader against confusing the functioning of memory with the structure of historical archives: La mémoire n’est pas une collection de documents déposés en bon ordre au fond d’on ne sait quel nous-même; elle vit et change; elle rapproche les bouts de bois mort pour en faire de nouveau de la flamme. Dans un livre fait de souvenirs, il fallait que ce truisme fût énoncé quelque part. Il l’est ici. Memory is not a collection of documents deposited in correct order deep within some kind of self; it lives and changes; it brings together bits of dead wood to produce flame once again. In a book composed of memories, this truism had to be stated somewhere. It’s stated here.  (QE, 1384)

158  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century Adopting a characteristically defensive tone, distancing herself from the supposed banality of her remark while proclaiming its necessity, Yourcenar repeats the Proustian axiom that memory is a living component of our experience (distinct from inert documents). However, Yourcenar also reformulates this literary commonplace in a development that evokes both the archival work of the historian and the creative work of the novelist. In context, the passage contains a warning against trusting to memory. Yourcenar has just acknowledged a relatively minor factual error of her own: she had long believed that the composer Enrique Granados died when his ship was torpedoed only a few days after she and her father had traveled the same cross-channel route in 1915; however, biographical dictionaries place Granados’ death in 1916 (QE, 1383). Thus, to the extent that Quoi? L’éternité is a work composed of memories, we are warned that its narrative is fallible. At the same time, the metaphor of rekindling the fire evokes Yourcenar’s literary project of reanimating the past. The bits of dead wood that correspond to traces of the past—whether personal memories or written documents—must be assembled and organized, but also transformed through a process of combustion. The image suggests both creative vitality and a process of destruction, life, and death combined. Memory is certainly not already organized as an archive, but it might be understood as the process of constituting a living archive by working with and transforming documents—an alchemical process, or a necromantic one. Still, this process is never complete. Unlike Yourcenar’s historical novels, Le Labyrinthe du monde displays the holes in the fabric of the past by exhibiting the work of research and re-composition, drawing attention to the seams in the narrative. The metaphors of the dried leaf and the bits of wood echo the reflections in Yourcenar’s 1954 essay, Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur (Time, that Great Sculptor) on the beauty of ruins that reveal the workings of time.79 Yourcenar attributes value to the skeletal remnant, in all its deathly strangeness. While she attempts through research and imagination to restore this lost plenitude, she also deliberately preserves a sense of distance from the past. For it is precisely this detachment that allows us to perceive the complex structure of the world, like the veins of the dead leaf held up to the light. As Yvan Leclerc points out, Yourcenar prefers the metaphors of intersecting threads, knots, spider’s webs, the plexus, or the network, to the linear and hierarchical figure of the family “tree.”80 Dead documents reveal webs of connections, making visible the labyrinthine intricacy of the world; they allow us to transcend the limitations of the present and of the self, to imagine forms of life outside our own temporal destiny. If there is a personal quest guiding Yourcenar’s peculiar autobiography, it is precisely this attempt to go beyond the particularity of time and place, to leave behind the agitated surface of the century in order to remain afloat on the currents of time, beneath which lies the immobile 79  Yourcenar, “Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur” (1954), in Essais et mémoires, 312–16. 80  Yvan Leclerc, “Le Labyrinthe du moi,” in Leuwers and Castellani, “Marguerite Yourcenar,” 219.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  159 ocean: “Par ces courants, elle essayera de se laisser porter. Sa vie personnelle, pour autant que ce terme ait un sens, se déroulera du mieux qu’elle pourra à travers tout cela” (“She will strive to let herself be borne along by those currents. She will live her ‘personal life,’ insofar as this term has a meaning, as best she can in the midst of all this”) (AN, 1182/HMY, 358–9). But it is documents that keep her afloat.

Yourcenar’s Modernism Yourcenar’s autobiographical trilogy fuses intense archival investigation with the workings of personal memory. Her documentary insertions create narrative ruptures yet also serve as a bridge between the impersonal and the personal, self and other, the historical and the everyday, historical recomposition and imaginative recreation. Unlike the surrealists, Yourcenar does not mobilize the document against the aesthetic. She is closer to Gide in her adherence to a certain classicism and ideal of formal elegance, while her universalizing ambition nevertheless leads her to cross the boundaries assigned to the literary. The direct influence of Le Labyrinthe du monde on later literature is somewhat difficult to gauge. Still, as Michael Sheringham points out, Yourcenar’s “confrontation between an individual subject and the products of a quasi-archival practice” anticipates later works by Annie Ernaux, Assia Djebar, Pierre Michon, and Patrick Modiano.81 In an interview on her book La Place (A Man’s Place, 1983), Ernaux contrasts her own factual account of her father’s life to Yourcenar’s family chronicle: “ce ne sont pas mes Souvenirs pieux” (“these are not my Pious Memories”).82 In seeming to dismiss Yourcenar as a pious memoirist, and placing her own work in the feminist lineage of Simone de Beauvoir, Ernaux no doubt registers a divergence in the two writers’ experience and understanding of social class (Ernaux writes of her working-class background and is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses of social distinction). But we should recall here the doubly ironic nature of Yourcenar’s title (Souvenirs pieux does not focus on personal memories, but on documents, and Yourcenar is critical of familial and religious piety). In fact, Ernaux’s emphasis on the “transpersonal” nature of her writing brings her remarkably close to Yourcenar’s impersonal autobiography.83 Ernaux describes her own approach to her family history as ethnological rather than autobiographical; as she puts it in La Honte (Shame, 1997), she treats images from memory “comme des documents qui s’éclaireront en les soumettant à des approches

81  Sheringham, “Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing,” 49. 82  Annie Ernaux, “Annie Ernaux ou la femme blessée,” interview with Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde des Livres, 3 February 1984. 83  Ernaux, “Vers un Je transpersonnel,” Autofictions et Cie, Cahiers RITM 6 (1994): 218–21.

160  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century différentes” (“like documents that will become meaningful when investigated from different angles”).84 Ernaux is not alone among contemporary writers in hinting at an ambivalent debt to Yourcenar. Emmanuel Carrère also compares Yourcenar’s writing—and specifically, her treatment of documents—to his own practices of nonfiction. However, he bases his judgment only on Yourcenar’s most famous work, Mémoires d’Hadrien. In Le Royaume (The Kingdom, 2014), Carrère states that he prefers Yourcenar’s postface on the writing of Mémoires d’Hadrien to the novel itself (which he admits to never having finished). That is, he approves of Yourcenar’s preparatory method of research, but objects to her stance on erasing the traces of the present in order to immerse the reader in the past: “Là où je me sépare de Marguerite Yourcenar, c’est à propos de l’ombre portée, de l’haleine sur le tain du miroir” (“What I can’t go along with has to do with keeping your shadow out of the picture and leaving the mirror clean of your breath”).85 It is best to accept and even foreground the writer’s shadow, Carrère goes on to say, illustrating his point by contrasting two approaches to documentary filmmaking: one that erases the presence of the filmmaker in the name of transparency; and one that admits that the act of filming itself changes the situation filmed.86 Carrère characterizes the latter position, his own, as more authentically “modern” in its skeptical ac­know­ ledge­ment of what occurs behind the scenes—in contrast with Yourcenar’s “prétention à la fois hautaine et ingénue” (“at once lofty and naïve claim”) to step aside and show things as they really were.87 But I would point out that Le Labyrinthe du monde comes closer than Mémoires d’Hadrien to Carrère’s project of uncovering history while reflecting on his own relationship to the traces of the past. In some respects, Ernaux’s and Carrère’s ambivalence reflects commonly held assumptions about Yourcenar, who is often dismissed as an antimodern figure and a lofty defender of literary prestige even as aspects of her work—indeed, precisely those that are most in evidence in Le Labyrinthe du monde—are actually in tune with the modern and contemporary questioning of the scene of representation. At the same time, Yourcenar reveals the persistence, and even the necessity, of a fas­cin­ ation with facts. More than Yourcenar’s historical novels, the multifaceted project of Le Labyrinthe du monde continues a vein of documentary modernism that extends the realm of the literary into the factual domain (as we saw in Gide), and it anticipates contemporary experiments in factual writing. Animated by a profound piety toward the past, the trilogy can also be considered part of the postwar 84 Ernaux, La Honte (1997; repr. Gallimard Folio, 2008), 38. 85  Emmanuel Carrère, Le Royaume (Paris: P.O.L, 2014), 384; trans. by ; trans. by John Lambert as The Kingdom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). 86 Carrère, Le Royaume, 385; The Kingdom, 232. 87 Carrère, Le Royaume, 385; The Kingdom, 232.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR ’ S ARCHIVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY  161 reorientation of literature toward the “duty of memory” (“devoir de mémoire”). But it is distinct from the literature of testimony that emerges more directly from World War II, and which considers the document a necessary but problematic externalization of the embodied authority of the witness. It is to the question of the document as testimony that I turn in Chapter 4.

4

Paper Witnesses Documentary Memory after World War II

“Les faits ne parlent pas d’eux-mêmes, c’est une erreur de le croire. Ou, s’ils parlent, il faut bien se persuader qu’on ne les entend pas, ou, ce qui est plus grave encore, qu’on les entend mal.” (“Facts don’t speak for themselves, it’s a mistake to think they do. Or, if they do speak, we don’t hear them, or, what is even more serious, we don’t hear them properly”).1 Georges Perec’s critique of the fallacy of the “speaking fact” occurs in an essay published in the review Partisans in 1963 (two years before his first published novel L es C hoses would win him success), and devoted to Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine (The Human Species). Antelme was a Resistance member who had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and deported to the camp Gandersheim (a subcamp of Buchenwald) and later to Dachau. He published his survivor’s account in 1947 with the Éditions de la cité universelle (a small press that he ran with his wife Marguerite Duras from 1945 to 1947). Republished in 1949 by Robert Marin, then reissued in a revised edition by Gallimard in 1957, L’Espèce humaine came to take on a pre-eminent position in French thought, inspiring readings by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others.2 But where Antelme affirms a co mmon humanity that resists all attempts to deny it, those thinkers tend to emphasize negativity and the impossibility of representation.3 Perec’s reading of Antelme’s text, by contrast, is surprisingly redemptive, even triumphant: for Perec, Antelme’s text reveals the truth of literature. Still, the truth of Antelme’s testimony is not straightforward. “Les faits ne parlent pas d’eux-mêmes” (“Facts don’t speak for themselves”); the French phrase hints at a necessary reflexivity of the spoken/ speaking fact. Making facts speak requires a specific framing, an investigation, or even, Perec suggests, a betrayal of reality: “Entre son expérience et nous, il interpose toute la grille d’une découverte, d’une mémoire, d’une conscience allant 1 Georges Perec, “Robert Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature” (1963), in L.G. Une aventure des années soixante (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 93. 2 On the various responses to Antelme, see Martin Crowley, Robert Antelme: Humanity, Community, Testimony (Oxford: Legenda, 2003). 3 For an attempt to rethink Antelme’s humanism, see Bruno Chaouat, “ ‘La mort ne recèle pas tant de mystère’: Robert Antelme’s Defaced Humanism,” L’Esprit Créateur 40(1) (2000): 88–99. Martin Crowley makes a convincing case for the specificity o f A ntelme’s m odel o f “ residual h umanism,” w hich b oth anticipates and resists certain tendencies in contemporary thought, positioning the human as “something which remains within and against its attempted abolition” (Crowley, Robert Antelme, 25).

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  163 jusqu’au bout” (“Between his experience and us, he interposes the whole grid of a discovery, a memory, and a consciousness seeing things through to the end”).4 For Perec, the distancing effect of Antelme’s account has an epistemological and critical function, as a way of interrogating experience. Testimony provides authority for the literary, for the guarantee of the truth of the work rests ultimately on the subject of its utterance—Robert Antelme, a person who saw and suffered, and who insists on speaking, exploring, and knowing. The literary, in turn, produces a critical reflection on experience. Antelme’s narrative reveals the ­ ­con­tinu­ity between literature and experience, yet also an essential discontinuity. “Literature,” for Perec, signifies not a narrative unification of an original disjointed, formless experience, but fragmentation, analysis, dismantling of the given and the self-evident. Facts don’t speak, they must be spoken; or rather, it is through this act of speaking them that they are produced as truth. It is significant that Perec, in taking stock of the literary landscape of the early 1960s, turns to survivor testimony as a model for literary creation, thus heralding a larger cultural shift. In L’Ère du témoin (The Era of the Witness, 1998), Annette Wieviorka traces the emergence in the 1960s, following the 1961 Eichmann trial, of the image of the witness as a “bearer of history” (“passeur d’histoire”); this development has accelerated since the 1970s with the proliferation of testimony projects that place memory at the center of historical discourse, and privilege emotional identification over critical distance.5 The word “testimony” has come to designate not just a personal attestation of perceived facts, but also a particular relationship to history, and specifically the individual or collective experience of historical catastrophe. It implies an experience of trauma, while removing the latter term from a strictly clinical setting to designate a broader phenomenon: the consequences of war and atrocity in the twentieth century, but especially during and after World War II.6 If history is a reconstruction of the past, notes Pierre Nora, “memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present.”7 It is 4  Perec, “Robert Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature,” 95. 5  Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998), ), trans. by Jared Stark as The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 88. 6  For Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, testimony is “a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times—our relation to the traumas of contemporary history: the Second World War, the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, and other war atrocities.” Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5. Frédérik Détue and Charlotte Lacoste argue that testimony as a mass social practice was inaugurated at the beginning of the twentieth-century, when responses to World War I and the Armenian genocide turned to the narrative model of legal deposition. Détue and Lacoste, “Ce que le témoignage fait à la littérature,” in “Témoigner en littérature,” special issue, Europe 94(1041–2) (2016): 3. 7  Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire” (1984), in Les Lieux de mémoire, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), trans. by Marc Roudebush as “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 8. Writing in 1984, Nora claims that the promotion of memory to the center of history has as its counterpart a vogue for historical novels and personalized documents which are “the last stand of faltering fiction” in a period in which “there are no real novels” (“Between Memory and History,” 24). While I disagree with his pessimistic conclusions about the end of lit­era­ture, I would argue that Nora is responding to a real shift in the relationship between fiction and history.

164  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century tempting to place literature, with its connection to the imagination and to i­ndividual experience, firmly on the side of memory—and thus on the side of the witness as an embodied connection to the past. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, literature can engage in forms of historical reconstruction, while mediating between the present and the past. In this chapter, I argue that the literary use of documents gives a voice to absent witnesses, yet also complicates the notion of direct testimony. Understood as a paper witness, removed from its human speaker and its initial context of communication, the document is always at a distance from the event and its immediate expression. My aim is not to argue for the impossibility of bearing witness. On the contrary, I want to resist succombing to the seductive paradox that insists on witnessing as at once essential and im­pos­sible; this view of testimony tends both to absolutize both the event (as sacred and unsayable) and the figure of the witness (as an annihilated yet absolutely authoritative subject), while foreclosing the possibility of representation and even, in extreme cases, denying the need to establish facts in the face of historical crisis. Against this refusal of representation, I consider literary texts that treat docu­ments as material traces of experience, acknowledging the complexities of testimony and transmission without closing off our access to empirical evidence about the past. Literature, in its dialogue with history, aims to forge an immediate relation to the past and to link individual and collective memory. But it also reveals the difficulties involved in this process and registers the resistance of docu­ments—as paper witnesses—to interrogation.

The Document between History and Memory The literary works that I analyze in this chapter use the archival or the not-yetarchived document as a site of interplay and exchange between history and memory. Literature does not compete with the writing of history as much as it offers stylistic and formal resources for mobilizing the historical document in the ­present. By following traces in order to revive the voice of the witness, literature also stages, through the first-person encounter with the witnessing document, a confrontation with the past and a critical relation to the present. What I call “documentary memory” is a mediating category between self and other, past and present, interiority and exteriority. The preoccupation with witnessing and factuality of course has a longer history, part of which I will outline here with reference to the immediate postwar moment. But experimental documentary forms have proliferated in French lit­era­ture since the 1970s and ’80s, while the twenty-first century has seen intensified debate around the entanglements of literature, history, and memory.8 As in previous 8  While I focus here on France after World War II, an important tradition of testimonio emerges from different political circumstances in Latin America, where testimony is linked to national

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  165 chapters, my concern is specifically with uses of documentary material; in this case, this means with a type of factual literature that mobilizes and ­investigates documents as witnesses. These works are to be distinguished from those firstperson, first-hand narratives that generally define the genre of literary testimony, specifically autobiographical war and deportation narratives such as that of Robert Antelme. This is not to deny that Antelme’s account, along with those of David Rousset, Charlotte Delbo, Jorge Semprún, and Elie Wiesel (to name but a few) can be, and indeed have been, productively read both as literary works and as first-hand eyewitness documents,9 and that they sometimes directly investigate the conflict between testimony and fiction (as is the case for Semprún’s L’Écriture ou la vie [Writing or Life, 1994]). However, I focus on more indirect forms of testimony that mobilize pre-existing documentary evidence. Nor will I directly deal with works of fiction, even if these can also engage with questions of testimony and the figure of the witness. Previous scholarship on trauma and Holocaust remembrance has productively investigated these fictional stagings of testimony: Robert Harvey has argued that fiction (notably Beckett’s late works) can enact what he calls “witnessness,” the unfolding of the innate human potential for eth­ ic­al consciousness;10 Shoshana Felman turns to Albert Camus’ novels La Peste (1947) and La Chute (1956) as emblematic fictions of witnessing and its failures;11 Marie Bornard adapts the testimonial paradigm to discuss both factual and ­fictional narratives that share a particular enunciative posture: simultaneously adopting the position of witness, and calling on the reader as witness (“prendre à témoin”) in order to guarantee the transmission of memory.12 My focus is on a

lib­ er­ ation movements and social struggles and involves a confrontation with orality. See John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press, 2004). 9  On the literary status of testimony, see Catherine Coquio, “L’émergence d’une ‘littérature’ de non-écrivains: les témoignages de catastrophes historiques,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 103(2) (January 2003): 343–63; and François Rastier, “Témoignages inadmissibles,” Littérature 159 (2010): 108–29. Borrowing from Henri Meschonnic’s definition of poetry, Coquio defines the literary in terms of the rhythmic inscription of a subject and a situation in discourse (351–2). For Rastier, literary testimony sets itself apart from simple deposition through its aesthetic elaboration, its ex­em­ plar­ity, and its mode of address to the reader. 10  Robert Harvey, Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and The Foundations of Responsibility (New York: Continuum, 2010). 11  See Shoshana Felman, “Camus’ The Plague, a Monument to Witnessing” and “Camus’ The Fall, or the Betrayal of the Witness,” Chapters 4 and 6 in Felman and Laub, Testimony; Dominick LaCapra, “Reading Camus’ The Fall after Auschwitz and with Algeria,” Chapter 3 in History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 98; Debarati Sanyal, “Concentrationary Migrations in and around Albert Camus,” Chapter 2 of Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). Setting Camus’ two texts against the writings of Sartre but also against each other, Felman contrasts the narrator’s successful act of witnessing in The Plague to the failures of witnessing in The Fall. LaCapra criticizes Felman’s insistence on the unrepresentable. Revisiting La Peste, Debarati Sanyal’s analysis of Holocaust remembrance gives ­privileged place to Camus’ allegorical treatment of historical catastrophe. 12  Marie Bornard, Témoignage et fiction: les récits de rescapés dans la littérature de langue française (1945–2000) (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 9.

166  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century different form of literary transmission that depends, crucially, on the documentary record. My view of postwar literature thus differs from accounts that identify a progressive shift from testimony to fiction, or that privilege the imaginative resources of fiction over the supposedly limited possibilities of factual writing.13 On the contrary, and without denying the relevance or the possible value of fictional representations of history, I consider the place of factuality within literature, focusing on narratives that interrogate both literature and testimony by giving expressive force to documents. Here, literature operates a reciprocal and reflexive movement, in its capacity to render the past present (necessarily running the risk of “presentism” in its insistence on the immediate14), but also to operate a critical reflection on itself as an object. The document, in its material presence and temporal/enunciative remoteness, becomes the site of this dialectic between distance and proximity. Contemporary debates over literature and testimony can be traced back to the years immediately following World War II. It is this moment of reckoning that constitutes the first main episode of this chapter; here I focus on debates in and between literary journals that articulate questions of narrative authority around the dual figures of the witness and the document. Despite some appeals for a new literature of testimony, the most visible tendencies from the late 1940s through to the 1960s are nevertheless the turn to a Sartrian literature of “situation,” on the one hand, and the quest for new fictional possibilities by the writers of the nouveau roman (New Novel), on the other. The 1970s and 1980s see the emergence of stratified documentary narratives characterized by secondary witnessing, which confront memories of war and occupation from a certain distance. Georges Perec’s combination of allegory, autobiography, and documentary narrative in W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) and Marguerite Duras’s fiction of the found manuscript in La Douleur (1985) belong to this moment of transition, and produce original forms of literary testimony. Another moment in this history can be associated with the works of Patrick Modiano, in particular Dora Bruder (1997), which has been influential in its staging of documentary investigation. Finally, I look beyond France to consider documentary treatments of other historical

13  For instance, Alexandre Prstojevic describes the gradual emergence in literature of a “non-factual historicity” that operates an aesthetic capture of history. Prstojevic, Le Témoin et la bibliothèque: comment la Shoah est devenue un sujet romanesque (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2012), 13. In her comparative study of Holocaust literature, Ruth Franklin argues both that there is no such thing as “pure testimony,” and that literature (i.e. fiction) offers unique resources for representing the Holocaust: “an imaginative access to past events, together with new and different ways of understanding them that are unavailable to strictly factual forms of writing.” Fiction, in this account, is identified rather broadly both with narrative mediation as such, and with the cognitive and ethical virtues of the literary imagination. Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 11, 13. 14  See François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003).

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  167 traumas, and in particular the Rwandan genocide. Faced with such events, fiction appears at once as ethically problematic and as necessary for the cultivation of imaginative empathy. Writers respond to this dilemma by developing hybrid, partially documentary modes that reconfigure the relationship between fact and fiction.

The Document as Witness While first-person testimony carries an affective charge derived from embodied experience and speech, documents allow testimony to circulate in new contexts. When deployed as a literary figure, the document is positioned between the “cold” historical archive and the living voice of the survivor. Speaking in the place of an absent person, it is a mediating term between history and memory. Historians often establish a separation between these two realms, as has been noted in the section “The Document between History and Memory,” and a concomitant distinction between types of documentary evidence: sources and traces. Allan Megill distinguishes them thus: “A trace is anything remaining from the past that was not made with the intention of revealing the past to us, but simply emerged as part of normal life. A source, on the other hand, is anything that was intended by its creator to stand as an account of events.”15 Megill argues that the contemporary confusion between history and memory leads to an overreliance on sources.16 Historical practice, according to this account, emphasizes the ob­ject­iv­ity of the material trace, which emerges from reality uncontaminated by human intentions. Nevertheless, part of the testimonial paradigm is the idea that any kind of document, including sources, can be read as traces; that is, as inadvertent testimonies that reveal their truths when subjected to proper scrutiny. Felman observes that psychoanalysis reveals the possibility of “unconscious, unintended, unintentional testimony,” and even argues that “speech as such is unwittingly testimonial.”17 Carlo Ginzburg, taking up Marc Bloch’s privileging of non-intentional evidence over voluntary testimony, argues for reading multiple types of text, both fictional and nonfictional, against the grain in order to uncover “involuntary historical testimonies.”18 From this point of view the historian—but 15  Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 25. 16 Megill, Historical Knowledge, 25–6. 17  Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching” in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 15. 18  “By digging into the texts, against the intentions of whoever produced them, uncontrolled voices can be made to emerge: for example, those of the women or men who, in witchcraft trials, eluded the stereotypes suggested by the judges. In medieval romances we can trace involuntary historical testimonies relating to habits and customs, isolating fragments of truth within the fiction.” Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne  C.  Tedeschi (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 5.

168  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century also the psychoanalyst or the literary critic—is tasked with making texts speak truthfully by revealing what they inadvertantly tell us.19 There is nevertheless an ambiguity to this conception of testimony: although historians and others may privilege traces, the special authority of the witness still depends on the production of intentional speech. Yet this embodied link between lived experience and attestation is also a limitation of testimony’s evidential force, since such witnessing depends on an individual’s commitment and capacity to recall and recount the facts reliably. Furthermore, testimony can lose its authority when it is detached from its bodily origin and recorded and materialized in docu­ments. In US law, for instance (although the situation is different in France), “paper witnesses” have less force than live testimony, even as the latter is in­ev­it­ably consigned to text in the form of depositions, affidavits, sworn statements, attestations, reports—understood to stand in for a human presence.20 From one perspective, this question maps onto the problem of writing itself: at issue is the gap between memory and text, produced in part by the gesture of recording that objectifies speech as a material trace. Yet eyewitness testimony involves a specific mode of personal attestation, address, and revelation, which is bound up with particular social practices.21 Historical testimony can be linked to modes of commemoration as well as the ethical notions of the “duty to remember” (“devoir de mémoire”) and the (moral and juridical) right of victims to have their claims heard.22 Debates over testimony and trauma thus reveal a site of tension between historical narrative and lived experience, distance and immediacy, writing and voice. The current preoccupation with memory does not treat epistemological questions of accuracy and reliability as irrelevant (as Megill suggests23); rather, it attributes a special truth-value to testimonial speech as the bearer of epistemological, ethical, and juridical authority. Indeed, it has been argued that the contemporary memorial culture, with its testimonial obsession, responds precisely to the crisis of truth provoked by both philosophical constructivism and historical revisionism.24

19  Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire, ou, Métier d’historien, ed. Étienne Bloch (Paris: A. Colin, 1993), 109. 20  Such documents are less problematic in the context of French law, which gives more weight to written proof, than in the US context where, as the Supreme Court has ruled, the sixth amendment guarantees the right of the accused “to be confronted with the witnesses against him,” and thus relegates paper witnesses to the realm of hearsay unless their author appears at trial. See Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U. S. 305 (2009). 21  See Renaud Dulong, Le Témoin oculaire: les conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1998). 22  On the role of the law courts in the “coming to expression of what has historically been ‘expressionless’,” see Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 12. 23 Megill, Historical Knowledge, 20. 24  Felman, “Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” 5–6; Catherine Coquio, Le Mal de vérité, ou l’utopie de la mémoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015).

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  169 Beyond the juridical understanding of eyewitness deposition, the testimonial turn in history and literature also depends on a quasi-religious conception of the witness, understanding the latter as an embodiment of the truth contained in the testimonial speech act.25 This sacralization of witnessing is associated above all with the Holocaust; paradoxically, it often treats the alleged impossibility of bearing witness as the very paradigm of testimony. Influential here is Primo Levi’s assertion that those who have not returned from the camps, or who have returned mute, are “the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance.”26 Dori Laub offers a more extreme, and also highly contestable, version of the paradox: “the event produced no witnesses. Not only, in effect, did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims.”27 For Laub, witnessing from the outside is impossible, yet the insider witness is a damaged subject irreparably contaminated by the event. This idea of the impossibility of witnessing recurs in various forms: thus, Sara Horowitz argues that the trope of the mute witness in Holocaust fiction expresses the “radical negativity” of the event itself, its rupturing of history, memory, and the self.28 It is Giorgio Agamben who presents the aporia in its most dizzying form when he connects the absent subject of witnessing to the lacuna that is the condition for all potential speech. Linking Levi’s comments on the “complete witness” to Émile Benveniste’s account of subjectivity in language, Agamben argues that “in testimony, the empty place of the subject becomes the decisive question.”29 He defines testimony in terms of the relation between the sayable and the unsayable—in opposition to the archive which, borrowing from Foucault’s terms, is understood as relation between the said and the unsaid (actual, rather than potential language), and is the object of archeology.30 Testimony then comes to be defined at its core by the impossible speech of the desubjectified subject, with its absolute authority depending on its pure potentiality—cast in negative terms as the capacity not to speak. Making the concentration camp into a general biopolitical paradigm, and positing desubjectification as the condition for the subject’s unarchivable but irrefutable truth,31 Agamben radicalizes the opposition between the witness and the archive.

25  On this religious dimension of the witness, see Coquio, “L’émergence d’une ‘littérature’ de nonécrivains,” 350. 26 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage International, 1988), 84. 27  Dori Laub, “An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival” in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 80. 28 Sara  R.  Horowitz, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 38. 29  Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 145. 30 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 145. 31 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 158.

170  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century From this point of view the document, consigned to the realm of the already said, is distinct from the defining value of the testimonial speech act. Even outside Agamben’s deconstructive mode of analysis, it is not rare for the authority of the eyewitness to be pitted against the material traces offered by documents. For instance, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) is a documentary without archival images, composed of words and gestures “exclusively in the present tense.”32 Lanzmann is a staunch enemy not only of the “transgression” of fiction when it comes to the Holocaust, but also, more radically, of any visual representation of the event.33 Criticizing an exhibition of photographs taken at concentration camps, he attacks what he considers to be a fetishization of the document, especially the photographic document, described as a mere reproduction of the visible that tells us nothing new.34 Responding to Lanzmann in Images In Spite of All, Georges Didi-Huberman persuasively defends the importance of the archival image and the role of the document by emphasizing their status not only as fragments snatched from the real world, but also as speech acts. Focusing on a few photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, he argues that even images that seem to be without meaningful historical content, indecipherable as visual representations of the camps, have a phenomenological value as “pure ‘utterance’ [“énonciation”], pure gesture, pure photographic act.”35 That is, unlike in other accounts of photography, the images do not derive their authority primarily from their status as mechanical reproductions. They are not only recordings but also acts of testimony, asserting the agency of the pho­tog­ raph­er and materializing the extreme conditions of their production despite—or indeed through—the insufficiency of the represented content. These debates over documentary or testimonial value are symptomatic of deep anxieties in the face of both the demands of testimony and its historical status. The insistence on the authority and authenticity of the witness is in part a response to Holocaust denial, which casts a sinister shadow over any demand for documentary proof and factual verification. One extreme reaction to this situation is to de-emphasize factual discourse as such, as in Lyotard’s attempt to situate the truth of Auschwitz—and the form of justice that it demands from historians—beyond the confines of the “cognitive regime” for establishing historical facts.36 I argue, however, that foregrounding the document is not to fall back on a 32  Claude Lanzmann, with Marc Chevrie and Hervé Le Roux, “Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah” (1985), trans. by Stuart Liebman, in The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Jonathan Kahana (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 787. 33  Claude Lanzmann, “Holocaust, la représentation impossible,” Le Monde, March 3, 1994. 34  Claude Lanzmann, “La question n’est pas celle du document, mais celle de la vérité,” interview with Michel Guerrin, Le Monde, January 19, 2001, 29. 35  Georges Didi-Hubermann, Images malgré tout (Paris: Minuit, 2003), 54, trans. by Shane B. Lillis as Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 37–8. 36  Lyotard, Jean-François. Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 57–8.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  171 narrow positivism, but rather to resist the pull of aporia and maintain the central role of traces in our relationship to the past. Paul Ricœur’s account of the trace as a connector between temporal perspectives, and as the source of the document’s authority, is helpful here. In Temps et récit (Time and Narrative), Ricœur analyzes the trace as a “sign-effect” that combines a relation of significance and a relation of causality; it exists as both a thing in the world and a marker of a passage in time.37 In La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Memory, History, Forgetting), he priv­il­eges testimony as “the fundamental transitional structure between memory and history,”38 but reintegrates it, via Marc Bloch, into the “higher concept” of the trace as the basis for the construction of historical fact.39 He then combines this understanding of testimony with Ginzburg’s notion of the clue, under the heading of the concept of document.40 Ricœur thus insists on the fundamental con­ tinu­ity between memory and history, testimony and trace.41 Also useful is his division of the historiographical operation into three phases. The documentary phase “runs from the declarations of eyewitnesses to the constituting of archives, which takes as its epistemological program the establishing of documentary proof.” This is followed by the explanation/understanding phase, which establishes the causal interconnectedness of the documented facts; finally, the representative phase is “the putting into literary or written form of discourse offered to the readers of history.”42 Literary texts, of course, are not subject to the same operational and dis­cip­lin­ ary constraints as history writing. But they can use documentary insertions to stage the relationship between these three phases, to uncover the temporal stratifications and the silences of the archive, to question procedures of verification and representation, and to interrogate our relationship to the remembered and documented past. One way they do so is by dramatizing the interaction between testimony and documentary proof via the figure of the paper witness or speaking fact. Michel de Certeau argues that the document marks the break between past and present, and is constituted by the space of this separation that makes historiography possible—a separation that both presupposes and defies death.43 But historical narrative, generally speaking, does not make the confrontation of the speaking subject and the depersonalized document into its central drama. We do find this confrontation in a number of literary texts that attempt to tell stories by 37  Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, Vol. 3. Ordre Philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1985), trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer as Time and Narrative, Vol. 3 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 116–20. 38  Paul Ricœur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer as Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 21. 39 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 169–70. 40 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 175. 41 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 160. 42 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 136. 43  Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 17, 47 , trans. by Tom Conley as The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 47.

172  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century giving voice to documents, and in which both narrative and memory are t­ roubled by the fantasy of the speaking document.

The Invention of the Witness (1944–1950) The genealogy of testimonial literature can be traced back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially to the aftermath of World War I. Examples range from Henri Barbusse’s 1916 war novel Le Feu (Under Fire) to Jean Norton Cru’s collection of rigorously verified eyewitness accounts in Témoins (Witnesses, 1929)—the latter already revealing some of the difficulties that arise in treating literary works as acts of testimony.44 However, it is World War II and the occupation of France that provoke an ongoing preoccupation with the relationship between literature and the figure of the witness. Significantly, the year 1945 already sees one example of the documentary-testimonial con­fig­ur­ation that would later become more prominent: Jacques Darville and Simon Wichené’s Drancy la juive ter­ ials and data on the combines witness testimonies with documentary ma­ French internment and transit camp of Drancy, where Jews were held before being transported east to extermination camps.45 Still, the text presents itself as a “document” rather than a work of literature. In the post-Liberation moment, Emmanuel Mounier’s “personalist” journal Esprit proclaims most clearly the need for a new literature of testimony, though not without a certain ambivalence. The editorial to the December 1944 issue (the first issue of the “nouvelle série,” after the journal’s banning by Vichy in August 1941) promises to focus on the future; none of the contributors desires to make a public display (“faire parade en place publique”) of their experiences in the maquis or in the camps.46 Still, the same issue includes a piece by Jean Maigne on “La Résistance comme expérience et volonté” (“The Resistance as experience and decision”) and a story of a clandestine Resistance intelligence operation, “Nuit blanche” (“Sleepless Night”) attributed to an anonymous deportee. The latter was in fact written at the end of 1943 by Jean Gosset (1913–1944), a Resistance fighter who died in the Neuengamme concentration camp on December 21,

44  Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: journal d’une escouade (Paris: Flammarion, 1916); Jean Norton Cru, Témoins; essai d’analyse et critique des souvenirs de combattants édités en français de 1915 à 1928 (Paris: Les Étincelles, 1929). Cru includes novels, but not poetry, among his comparison of more than 300 eyewitness accounts, on the grounds that most war novels are in fact barely disguised memoirs (Témoins, 11). But he subordinates the literary value of these works to their documentary value (Témoins,12), and takes novelists—including Barbusse—severely to task for their lack of accuracy (Témoins, 555–65). 45 Jacques Darville and Simon Wichené, Drancy la juive, ou la deuxième inquisition (Cachan: A.  Breger Frères, 1945). The text presents itself both as a “document” and as a voice given to an oppressed minority (123). 46  “Esprit, nouvelle série,” Esprit 105 (December 1944): 1.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  173 1944—the same month his story was published.47 These circumstances give his text the eerie status of a voice from the dead. Subsequent issues of Esprit include several reflections on survivor testimonies and on the “univers concentrationnaire.”48 Issue 159, published in September 1949, contains a series of articles bearing on the question of literature and testimony, in response to the question “Littérature de dérision ou littérature de résurrection?” (“A literature of derision or of resurrection?”) Bertrand d’Astorg opens his article “Repères pour une littérature de dérision” with the following proc­lam­ ation: “La littérature d’imagination (au sens banal du mot) est morte, celle du témoignage ou au moins de situation lui succède” (“Literature of imagination (in the banal sense of the word) is dead; it is succeeded by literature of testimony or at least of situation”)49 Here, Astorg takes up the Sartrian term “situation,” a notion that involves both the facticity of existence and the ability of the individual to transcend this facticity through free choice. The literature of testimony is thus associated with the representation of human agency within a given set of circumstances. Astorg mentions the works of René Char, Vercors, David Rousset, Jean Cayrol, Robert Antelme, Rémy—all writers who had experienced resistance and sometimes deportation. In a certain sense, Astorg goes on to assert, literature has become impossible, for totalitarian violence has sullied the image of humanity and made it impossible to give spiritual or aesthetic meaning to suffering. However, against the prevailing image of human degradation (“the literature of derision”), he lauds authors such as Cayrol who offer the more optimistic view of a literature of resurrection. Astorg’s conception of testimony, we should note, is not purely factual, but encompasses fictional works (by Kafka, Graham Greene, or Camus) that bear witness to the contemporary situation. The next article, by Cayrol (a survivor of the Gusen concentration camp who would later write the script for Alain Resnais’s documentary film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956), argues for an “art lazaréen” (“Lazarean art”), with reference to the raising of Lazarus. This involves a “concentrationary” form of fictional imagination (romanesque concentrationnaire) born of the experience of ­survival. While drawing parallels with texts from earlier periods (citing examples of “Lazarean” narrative in the Abbé Prévost and Stendhal), Cayrol argues for the emergence of a new kind of literary imagination based on the solitude of 47  Jean Maigne, “La Résistance comme expérience et volonté,” Esprit 105 (December 1944): 4–18; [Jean Gosset], “Nuit blanche,” Esprit 105 (December 1944): 92–106; Danielle Rioul-Gosset, Sur les traces de Jean Gosset (1912–1944) (Jouaville: Éditions Scripta, 2013), 147–68. 48  See Paul Fraisse, “Les prisonniers dans l’attente de vivre,” Esprit 106 (1945): 185–93; Bertrand d’Astorg, “Témoignages sur la Résistance,” Esprit 121 (1946): 654–7; Adrian Miatlev, “Nouveaux témoignages de prisonniers,” Esprit 133 (1947): 883–6; Astorg, “Réflexions d’un survivant,” Esprit 139 (1947): 691–6; Yefime, “L’expérience des camps et ses témoins,” Esprit 139 (1947): 685–91; Albert Béguin, “Le choix des victimes,” Esprit 139 (1947): 696–705; Rabi, “Méditations au sortir des ténèbres,” Esprit 156 (1949): 823–39. 49  Bertrand d’Astorg, “Repères pour une littérature de dérision,” Esprit 159 (September 1949): 330.

174  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century the individual, the experience of evil, and the confrontation with arbitrary ­power.50 While Cayrol presents certain concentration camp testimonies as exemplary (the two privileged works in this regard are by Resistance deportees: David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946) and Antelme’s aforementioned L’Espèce humaine), the idea of Lazarean art also encompasses fiction. In both Cayrol’s and Astorg’s articles, then, despite Astorg’s initial opposition between imagination and testimony, the key distinction is not between factual and fictional narrative, but rather between a pre-war and postwar vision of the human ­condition. Indeed, both cite the work of Camus, specifically his novel La Peste, as exemplary testimonial fiction. (As we have seen in the section “The Document between History and Memory,” later scholars of testimony also give a special place to Camus’ allegorical version of historical catastrophe and human resistance.)

“The Document Alone Matters” (Sartre, Tournier, Sarraute) For Astorg and Cayrol, the testimonial has fundamentally transformed the literary, but without necessarily undermining fiction. The question of the document is present, but not central, in these articles. It emerges more clearly in a series of exchanges between Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes and François Mauriac’s right-leaning rival publication La Table ronde.51 Les Temps modernes, from its first issue in October 1945, privileges literary and historical studies while according a special place to what Sartre calls “documents bruts” (“crude or raw documents”), backed up with surveys (“enquêtes”) and reportage.52 In the same editorial text, Sartre goes on to assert that reportage may become one of the most important literary genres, citing works such as John Reed’s 10 Days that Shook the World (1919), and Arthur Koestler’s Spanish Testament (1937)—eyewitness accounts of the Russian October Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, re­spect­ive­ly.53 Tellingly, the December 1947 issue of Les Temps modernes contains a translated excerpt from James Agee and Walker Evans’s depression-era photographic and journalistic work on the lives of sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).54 The dominant journal of the pre-war era, La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), had attempted to guarantee the autonomy and even the purity of literature (until this principle was hijacked by the fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, the 50  Jean Cayrol, “D’un romanesque concentrationnaire,”Esprit 159(9) (1949): 348. 51  My account of these debates is indebted to Bruno Curatolo’s article “Le Romanesque comme enjeu esthétique et politique (1945–1953),” in Récit d’enfance et romanesque, ed. Alain Schaffner (Amiens: Centre d’études du roman et du romanesque de l’Université de Picardie, 2004), 115–41. 52  Jean-Paul Sartre, “Présentation,”Les Temps modernes 1 (October 1945): 21. 53  Sartre, “Présentation,” 21. 54  James Agee and Walker Evans, “Louons maintenant nos grands hommes” [excerpt from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941], trans. Michelle Vian, Les Temps modernes 27 (December 1947): 1004–27.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  175 director of the review from 1940–1944, who claimed to continue the journal’s ­values of “l’art pour l’art” [“art for arts sake”] even as he collaborated with the occupying regime).55 Les Temps modernes, also published (initially) by Gallimard, rejects the notion of literary purity in favor of “engaged” or politically committed literature (although, as Gisèle Sapiro shows, Sartre’s reformulation of the notion of the writer’s responsibility also depends on the principle of literary autonomy, which he now connects to his philosophical conception of freedom56). Among its philosophical and literary essays, Les Temps modernes also publishes “témoignages,” “documents,” and “vies” (“testimonies,” “documents,” and “lifestories”), although the distinction between these sections is not always clear. In issue number 6 (March 1946), for instance, the main section includes an excerpt from David Rousset’s Les Jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death), while the Témoignages section has Entre leurs mains (In their Hands) by Stéphane Hessel— both narratives of deportation by members of the Resistance. Another occasional section of the journal is devoted to faits divers collected by Roger Grenier (we might recall here Gide’s similar chronicle for the NRF in 1930). In his article “Utilité du fait divers” (“Utility of the fait divers”), published in the January 1947 issue of Les Temps modernes, Grenier describes these sensational factual anecdotes as a form of “lived literature” (“littérature vécue”) that reflects the complexity of human existence. He distinguishes between two kinds of faits divers, psychological and situational, that he associates with novels of Dostoevsky and Kafka, respectively.57 The fait divers, for Grenier, is inherently poetic and dramatic; it isolates a criminal in splendid solitude, and creates the impression of an inexorable fate.58 As we saw in Chapter  1, the use of the fait divers as literary inspiration is not unusual, especially as a point of departure for fiction; tellingly, the 1946 Goncourt prize was awarded to Jean-Jacques Gautier’s Histoire d’un fait divers (Story of a fait divers), a novel inspired by a real murder.59 The brief thirdperson anecdotes called faits divers, as we saw in Chapter 1, may be considered as a genre in their own right, distinct from first-person testimony. Yet both of these factual modes imply a judicial context: an event that is observed and recounted, preparing the ground for a judgment to come. A subsequent exchange, which pits authors associated with Les Temps modernes (Grenier, Sarraute) against Jacques Tournier in La Table ronde, associates the figure of the witness directly with the poetics of the fait divers. In the first issue of La Table ronde, in January 1948, Tournier’s article “Du témoin” (“On the Witness”) deplores the significance accorded to the witness in recent literature 55  See Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains: 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 378. 56  Sapiro, “The Writer’s Responsibility in France: From Flaubert To Sartre,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25(1) (2007), 21–3. 57  Roger Grenier, “Utilité du fait divers,” Les Temps modernes 17 (1947): 951. 58  Grenier, “Utilité du fait divers,” 954–5. 59  Jean-Jacques Gautier, Histoire d’un fait divers (Paris: Julliard, 1946).

176  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century and film: “Chaque époque invente les personnages qui lui sont nécessaires. Le nôtre a créé le Témoin. Chaque trottoir en est encombré, qui attendent que l’accident se produise pour le conter à l’assurance” (“Each era invents the characters it needs. Ours has created the Witness. Every sidewalk is obstructed by them, as they wait for an accident that they can report to the insurance company”).60 Surprisingly, Tournier’s key examples are not wartime testimonies, but two works of fiction (albeit ones that evoke the experience of war): René Clément’s film Les Maudits (The Damned, 1947) and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Tournier’s attack on the witness figure conflates factual testimony with fictional eyewitness accounts, seeming to denounce first-person narration as such. The first-person camera in Clément’s film and Waugh’s narrator illustrate, according to Tournier, a contrived use of the witness character as justification for the telling of the tale. In film, the presence of the witness is used to justify the indiscreet presence of the camera.61 In Clément’s film, the witness is a French doctor who is trapped in a German submarine. In Waugh’s novel, Captain Charles Ryder is the witness who provides an excuse for the book, adopting a posture of impartiality and indifference to recount the story of the Flyte family.62 Aside from being a clunky narrative device, according to Tournier, this use of the witness figure serves as a pretext and alibi for the author or filmmaker, who can avoid taking responsibility for his or her own creation.63 In short, the witness is always a témoin à décharge, a defense witness who exonerates the author. Above all, the fault lies with a public that is hungry for photographs, testimonials, evidence, and documentary films: Personne aujourd’hui ne s’engage. Plus personne n’ose avouer qu’il invente. Le magazine est roi. Le document seul importe: précis, daté, vérifié, authentique. L’œuvre d’imagination est bannie, parce qu’inventée. Plus rien ne compte que le petit fait vrai. No one today commits themselves. No one any longer dares admitting to invention. The magazine is king. The document alone matters: precise, dated, verified, authentic. The work of imagination is banished, since it is invented. All that counts now is the little true fact.64

Tournier merges the questions of truth, focalization, and factuality, to argue that the right of creative invention—which he links to narrative point of view—is under threat. In the claim that no one any longer commits themselves (s’engage) we find an implicit attack on Sartre’s concept of littérature engagée, as well as an oblique response to Sartre’s 1939 attack on Mauriac. (In an essay for the NRF on the latter’s La Fin de la nuit, Sartre had accused Mauriac of wielding God-like 60  Jacques Tournier, “Du témoin,” La Table ronde 1 (January 1948): 143. 61  Tournier, “Du témoin,” 143. 62  Tournier, “Du témoin,” 144. 63  Tournier, “Du témoin,” 143–4. 64  Tournier, “Du témoin,” 145.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  177 authority over his characters in the form of narrative omniscience. He had also, we might note, defined the novel as a form of testimony, or a coordination of multiple testimonies.65) For Tournier, however, the witness is not an exemplary, situated consciousness, but a mask and an alibi. Nathalie Sarraute’s well-known essay “The Age of Suspicion” (“L’ère du soupçon”) first published in Les Temps modernes in February 1950, responds directly to Tournier’s essay on the witness. Tournier is mistaken, she asserts, to lament the public’s taste for true stories; it is not surprising that readers reject novelistic convention in favor of factual accounts: Le “petit fait vrai,” en effet, possède sur l’histoire inventée d’incontestables avantages. Et tout d’abord celui d’être vrai. De là lui vient sa force de conviction et d’attaque, sa noble insouciance du ridicule et du mauvais goût, et cette audace tranquille, cette désinvolture qui lui permet de franchir les limites étriquées où le souci de la vraisemblance tient captifs les romanciers les plus hardis et de faire reculer très loin les frontières du réel. Il nous fait aborder à des régions inconnues où aucun écrivain n’aurait songé à s’aventurer, et nous mène d’un seul bond aux abîmes. Quelle histoire inventée pourrait rivaliser avec celle de la séquestrée de Poitiers ou avec les récits des camps de concentration ou de la bataille de Stalingrad? The “true fact” has indeed an indubitable advantage over the invented tale. To begin with, that of being true. This is the source of its strength of conviction and forcefulness, of its noble indifference to ridicule and bad taste, and of a certain quiet daring, a certain off-handedness, that allows it to break through the ­confining limitations in which a regard for likelihood imprisons the boldest of novelists, and to extend far afield the frontiers of reality. Where is the invented story that could compete with that of Gide’s Séquestrée de Poitiers, or with those of the concentration camps or of the battle of Stalingrad?66

In a rare historical allusion, for this writer who is generally reticent about her own Jewish identity and wartime experiences in hiding, Sarraute diagnoses literature’s historical situation via a direct reference to the concentration camps. Yet she also situates the problem of representation within a longer modernist trajectory, ­connecting the recent fascination with facts to the twentieth-century’s privileging of first-person narrative, from Proust onwards. Literature, asserts Sarraute, must develop new techniques in response to the suspicious question readers now

65 Sartre, “Monsieur François Mauriac et la liberté,” La Nouvelle revue francaise (February 1939): 221–2. 66  Nathalie Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956; repr. Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essais, 1987), 69, trans. by Maria Jolas as The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel (New York: G. Braziller, 1963), 63.

178  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century address to narratives: “Qui dit ça?” (“Who said that?”67). Beyond this question of narrative voice, Sarraute also points to a shift in the relationship between fiction and fact. The “true fact” (“le petit fait vrai”) she implies, no longer refers (as it did in the nineteenth century) to the small, authentic detail that produces a “reality effect” within a larger fiction. Rather, as Sarraute’s historical examples suggest, even the smallest fact carries an affective power stronger than that of any fiction. As David Walker observes, for Sarraute, “documentary fact disrupts conventions of verisimilitude and propriety, liberates the novelist from accepted tenets of realism, takes her and her reader into unknown regions and unexplored depths of experience where they would not have thought to go otherwise.”68 In this respect she shares Gide’s concern with the complexities of human psychology and its representation, as explored in La Séquestrée de Poitiers. Finally, while Sarraute’s response to Tournier focuses on the act of telling, both authors insist on the place of the document. Sarraute acknowledges readers’ preference for the “document vécu” (“lived document”)—a term that points to the constitution of experience as an external object of knowledge. While it is usually interpreted as a manifesto for the nouveau roman, a t­ endency with which Sarraute would become associated, “L’ère du soupçon” also offers an important articulation of the relationship between immediate postwar debates on  testimony and emerging problems in the novel. Referring back to Gide’s La Séquestrée de Poitiers, she takes seriously the challenge that factual narratives pose to the literary imagination. But this does not mean that Sarraute herself turns to documentary forms as a solution. The problems of witnessing and documentary evidence are, for her, essentially correlates of the dilemma of narrative voice and authority more generally, which she attempts to resolve through the multiplicity of tropismes—that is, the minute and hidden inner movements of consciousness. This also involves a turn away from problems of testimony through a simultaneous problematization and depersonalization of narration. Arguing that the ­contemporary reader’s preference for the documents is justified by the timidity and conventionality of most novels, Sarraute proposes in her own novels a bold new approach to fiction. More generally, it is worth noting that the emerging tendencies that coalesce as the nouveau roman generally involve experiments with narrative form and a rejection of novelistic conventions, but not a rejection of fiction as such. Indeed, fictionality might seem to be a necessary ally of the autotelism and textualism espoused by some of these writers. That is, fiction helps guarantee the non-­ referential autonomy of the text. This point should be nuanced, given the variety of approaches within the nouveau roman: Sarraute, as noted above, remains 67 Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon, 71; The Age of Suspicion, 66. 68 David  H.  Walker, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the “Fait Divers” (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 125.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  179 attached to a certain psychological realism, while Claude Simon incorporated historical materials into novels such as La Route des Flandres (The Flanders Road, 1960), Histoire (History, 1967), and La Bataille de Pharsale (The Battle of Pharsalus, 1969). Nevertheless, Simon’s interest in such documents, as well as in letters from readers attesting to the veracity of his representations, led the nouveau roman’s strict textualists Jean Ricardou and Alain Robbe-Grillet to attack his outdated “referentialist” tendencies at the Cerisy conference on the nouveau roman in July 1971.69 Another exception can be found in Michel Butor’s genre-defying works, notably Mobile: étude pour une représentation des États-Unis (Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United States, 1962), an unusual documentary travelogue compiled from place names and miscellaneous materials (newspaper accounts, advertising slogans, signs, history books). These cases notwithstanding, the nouveau roman as a whole is, as the name indicates, primarily a tendency within the novel, and to a large degree it tends toward an anti-documentary, metafictional, self-referential mode. The moment of its cultural prominence in the 1950s and 1960s marks a hiatus in the history I am tracing here.

Postmemory and Documentary Distance (1970s–1980s) The preoccupation with testimony registered by Tournier and Sarraute re-emerges strongly among the next generation of writers—precisely those who break with the concerns of the nouveau roman. In Perec’s account of L’Espèce humaine, as we have seen, Antelme’s book is at once a document, an act of testimony, and a work of literature, because of the way in which it articulates the facts, in the sense of voicing them and joining them together. Perec, for his part, belongs to a different generation, but has reasons to be drawn to Antelme’s account; Perec’s mother Cyrla Perec was murdered at Auschwitz, leaving only two docu­ments attesting to this event: a deportation record and an “acte de disparition” (“certification of ­disappearance”). Perec, then, finds in survivors’ narratives a form of direct testimony that is linked to his own family history. Orphaned by the war and lacking memories of his parents, Perec writes work that may be characterized as “postmemorial,” if we follow Marianne Hirsch’s definition of postmemory as “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.”70 As I noted in Chapter 3, Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) develops a complex configuration of the relationship between documentary narrative and fiction, allegory and testimony, fantasy and memory. It is a paradoxical

69  Claude Simon records these comments in his autobiographical novel Le Jardin des plantes (Paris: Minuit, 1997), 356–8. 70  Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.

180  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century work of testimony based largely on fantasy, in the absence of the impossible ­testimony of the victims. It gathers unstable memories that are sometimes backed up with documentary evidence, and at other times cross over into a fabulous tale unanchored in the real. I argued in Chapter 3 that W is part of a broader archival moment in autobiography. It is also symptomatic of a larger generational shift in the modes of lit­era­ ture’s confrontation with history and national memory. The turn to documentary forms is admittedly less pronounced in the French than in the German context, where postwar writers take up the legacy of Weimar-era New Objectivity.71 For instance, Alexander Kluge’s The Battle (1964) evokes the defeat of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February 1943, using a montage of authentic docu­ ments (authentic, at least, in the first version of the text; the 1978 version adds fictional documents).72 The playwright Peter Weiss developed his conception of documentary theater in the wake of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–1965, using verbatim material from witness testimony as the basis of his theatrical “Oratorio in 11 Cantos,” The Investigation (1965).73 More recently, W. G. Sebald’s works offer a continuation of this documentary tendency, sometimes with recourse to documentary collage and transcription within a fictional frame (The Emigrants [1992], Austerlitz [2001]), at other times preferring a “synoptic and artificial view” and “plain facts” to the vagueness and clichés of witness accounts (On the Natural History of Destruction [1999]); it is worth noting that in the latter case, documents function in part as a critique of testimony.74 In France, this kind of documentary approach to recent history is arguably slower in emerging, but it does appear. If it is influenced on occasion by the German example (in a 1967 lecture, for instance, Perec mentions Kluge’s The Battle, published in French translation in 1966, as a possible model for French literature), it is also shaped by the specific context of French judicial and historical debates over the wartime past.75 The move from direct testimony to documentary or hybrid works corresponds, then, to the generational shift from memory to postmemory, and to a particular 71  On this “modernist-inspired form of documentary literature” in Germany, which has connections to the Weimar experiments of Brecht, Döblin, and Piscator in the 1920s and early ’30s, see Mark M. Anderson, “Documents, Photography, Postmemory: Alexander Kluge, W. G. Sebald, and the German Family,” Poetics Today 29(1) (2008): 132. 72  Alexander Kluge, Schlachtbeschreibung (1964), trans. by Leila Vennewitz as The Battle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). On the various editions of this text, see Marie-Jeanne Zenetti, Factographies. L’enregistrement littéraire à l’époque contemporaine (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), 13. 73 Peter Weiss, Die Ermittlung (Berlin: Surkamp, 1965), trans. by Alexander Gross as The Investigation: Oratorio in 11 Cantos (London: M. Boyars, 1996); see also Weiss, “The Material and the Models. Notes towards a Definition of Documentary Theatre” (1968), trans. by Heinz Bernard, Theatre Quarterly 1 (1971): 41–3. 74 W.  G.  Sebald, The Emigrants (1992), trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996); Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001); Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2011), 26, 51. 75  Perec, “Pouvoirs et limites du romancier français contemporain,” in Entretiens et conférences, ed. Dominique Bertelli and Mireille Ribière, Vol. 1 (Nantes: Joseph K., 2003), 85–6.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  181 state of historical consciousness (Rousso’s “Vichy syndrome”). Documentary ­cinema, in particular, plays a pioneering role in confronting the legacy of war, occupation, and atrocity. Thus the inaugural film of cinéma-vérité, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), is also one of the first works in France to introduce the figure of the Holocaust survivor (albeit in a rather awkward juxtaposition of contemporary decolonization struggles and the history of the Occupation).76 As for the murky history of collaboration, Henry Rousso dates the first “explosion” in the attack on the Gaullist “resistantialist” myth to the screening of Marcel Ophuls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity)—released to cinema audiences in 1971 after French television had refused to show it in 1969. Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary Shoah (1985), composed of witness testimonies, is also an important chapter in this history. Literature responded somewhat belatedly to these cinematic confrontations with history, and it substitutes for the embodied presence of the witness on screen a poetics of the documentary trace that uncannily speaks to us in the present. Distance from the past is central to this figuring of the literary witness, mediated via the material trace of the document. Documentary memory, in this sense, is not identical with postmemory, since even those who have first-hand experience of events may use documents as a mode of externalization of memory, and to expose the levels of interpretation that shape our access to facts. This is what happens in Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur.

Documentary Resurgence (Duras) The otherness of memory, figured by the encounter with the document, reaches in the most extreme cases a point of wholesale repression. Such is the scenario that opens Duras’s La Douleur (literally: Pain; translated as The War). Duras, although often associated with the nouveau roman, rejected this label and often maintains her writing in what Martin Crowley has aptly called a state of “tangential referentiality,” which traces a delicate “line of contact” with lived experience.77 This is especially true of her later works, with their experiments in journalism (Outside, 1981) and self-writing (L’Amant, 1984; L’Amant de la Chine du Nord, 1991). We will consider below one work, La Douleur, where the line of contact with reality is not just tangential. While Duras’s earlier works had appeared with Gallimard or Les Éditions de Minuit (the first carrying literary prestige since its early association with the NRF, the second, run by Jérôme Lindon, associated

76  See Michael Rothberg, “Le témoignage à l’âge de la décolonisation: Chronique d’un été, cinémavérité et émergence du survivant de l’Holocauste,” Littérature 144 (January 1, 2010): 56–80. 77  Martin Crowley, Duras, Writing, and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 20.

182  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century with many writers of the nouveau roman), La Douleur appeared in 1985 with P.O.L, the young publishing house founded by Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens in 1983, and which had already reissued her 1981 collection Outside in 1984. P.O.L would develop an idiosyncratic catalogue based on Otchakovsky-Laurens’ literary tastes, including novels, poetry, and theater, as well as experimental works that fall outside genre conventions. La Douleur contains six texts that are all related to aspects of Duras’s wartime experience, both before and after the Liberation, including her Resistance activities and the deportation of her husband Robert Antelme (“Robert L.” in the text). The first four texts in the book (“La Douleur,” “Monsieur X. dit ici Pierre Rabier,” “Albert des Capitales,” and “Ter le milicien”) are presented as factual accounts, or at least accounts that have some claim to testimonial authenticity. The last two, “L’Ortie brisée” (“The Crushed Nettle”) and “Aurélia Steiner” are fictions, and declared to be such. There is in fact a progression in the volume from the overtly autobiographical, where narrator and author seem to be identical (“La Douleur,” “Monsieur  X.”) to the avowedly invented—“C’est de la littérature” (“This is literature”), states Duras in intro­du­ cing “L’Ortie brisée” (D, 194)—via the partially fictionalized “Albert des Capitales” (“Albert of the Capitals”) and “Ter le milicien” (“Ter the Militiaman”), which are recounted in the third person but framed by Duras’s declarations of identity with the protagonists. La Douleur has been read as an an exemplary reflection on the difficulties of witnessing and of representing trauma.78 I will deal here, more specifically, with the way in which the document figures in Duras’s narrative both as a vehicle for testimony and as an agent of its displacement and disruption, whereby Duras is never fully the subject of her own testimony. The document also becomes the site of a problematic factuality that does not allow any settled reading of the text. My analysis focuses on the eponymous opening text of the collection, a diary-form account of events taking place in liberated Paris in April 1945, as the narrator seeks information on deportees, desperately awaits the return of “Robert L.,” then cares for Robert after he returns from the camps in a debilitated state. The italicized preface to the journal text is a curious disavowal: J’ai retrouvé ce Journal dans deux cahiers des armoires bleues de Neauphlele-Château. Je n’ai aucun souvenir de l’avoir écrit. Je sais que je l’ai fait, que c’est moi qui l’ai écrit, je reconnais mon écriture et le détail de ce que je raconte, je revois l’endroit, la gare d’Orsay, les trajets, mais je ne me vois pas écrivant ce Journal. Quand l’aurais-je écrit, en quelle année, à quelles heures du jour, dans quelle maison? Je ne sais plus rien. 78  See Camila Loew, The Memory of Pain: Women’s Testimonies of the Holocaust (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 145–83.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  183 Ce qui est sûr, évident, c’est que ce texte-là, il ne me semble pas pensable de l’avoir écrit pendant l’attente de Robert L. [ . . . ] La douleur est une des choses les plus importantes de ma vie. Le mot “écrit” ne conviendrait pas. Je me suis trouvée devant des pages régulièrement pleines d’une petite écriture extraordinairement régulière et calme. Je me suis trouvée devant un désordre phénoménal de la pensée et du sentiment auquel je n’ai pas osé toucher et au regard de quoi la littérature m’a fait honte. I found this diary in a couple of exercise books in the blue cupboards at Neauphle-le-Château. I have no recollection of having written it. I know I did. I know it was I who wrote it. I recognize my own handwriting and the details of the story. I can see the place, the  Gare d’Orsay, and the various ­comings and goings. But I can’t see myself writing the diary. When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house? I can’t remember. One thing is certain: it is inconceivable to me that I could have written it while I was actually awaiting Robert L.’s return. The War [Pain/La Douleur] is one of the most important things in my life. It can’t really be called “writing”. I found myself looking at pages regularly filled with small, calm, extraordinarily even handwriting. I found myself confronted with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling that I couldn’t bring myself to tamper with, and beside which literature was something of which I felt ashamed.  (D, 12/TW, 3–4) Although the use of the “found manuscript” topos to disavow authorship has a long literary history, Duras does not actually deny having written the text, but simply cannot remember or even imagine having done so. Duras thus establishes an unbridgeable distance between the “I” of the journal and the “I” of the present, between knowledge and recollection, the lived and the thinkable. Her uncertainty does not concern the origins of the document, which is unmistakably inscribed on paper by her own hand, and recounts recognizable personal experiences. Rather, the problem is the text’s status. “Le mot ‘écrit’ ne conviendrait pas”: it can’t really be called writing (something “written”), and its relationship to what it records is not clear. Moreover, the text is in an initial moment unreadable, perceived as a purely material presence—pages bearing markings. In Duras’s account, this “thing,” the text as object, is a material confrontation with an experience that seems to be in excess of the possibility of its expression. Yet the experience of the witness is expressed—a paradox conveyed by the gap between the even, regular handwriting and the disordered thought and feeling that this written trace contains, and which somehow lies outside literature—making literature itself appear shameful.

184  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century As Martin Crowley puts it, the preface positions the journal, “La Douleur,” as a “quasi-mystical irruption of the past into the present.”79 But this mode of irruption also calls the status of the account into question. Duras presents us with a document that, unlike Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine, is no longer an act of direct witnessing, since its forgetting undermines the “attestation of presence” that usually grounds the veracity of testimony.80 What Leslie Hill calls Duras’s “rhetoric of self-dissociation”81 is present both in the framing and the body of the diary entries. This rhetoric goes hand-in-hand with an absolutization of the document as both an event in itself and a record of an experience that itself reveals the precariousness of selfhood. La Douleur, at first glance, privileges the force and the immediacy of the raw document of experience over the constructions of lit­era­ ture (such “littérature” being relegated to the back of the volume). The opening journal text thus exemplifies the fantasy of the speaking fact—the document not as a mere trace of an experience but an embodiment of thought and feeling. Yet it also dramatizes the impossibility of such a pure document, in the narrator’s in­abil­ity to recognize the document as her own. Of course, readers might hesitate to take Duras’s preamble at face value and doubt the authenticity of the document. However, the existence of the original “cahiers” is confirmed by the existence of four notebooks written between 1943 and 1949, left to the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) upon Duras’s death in 1996, and later published as Cahiers de la guerre (Wartime Notebooks) in 2006 (CG). Still, the precise dating of each draft remains uncertain, and the journal that opens La Douleur is not a verbatim transcription of these notebooks. There are in fact three notebooks (called in the published volume “Cahier Presses du XXe siècle,” the “Cahier de cent pages,” and the “Cahier beige”) that contain portions of what will become the journal text, “La Douleur”: two accounts of the experience of waiting, dated up to 29 April 1945 (CG, 175–204, 209–39), and a description of Robert Antelme’s condition upon his return (CG, 283–9). Duras revised the text and also prepublished a portion in the review Sorcières (in 1976), which she then included in the collection Outside (1981).82 Some of these revisions can be detected in the text of “La Douleur,” for instance in certain shifts in temporal perspective; others only become visible through comparison with the notebooks. If Duras partly fictionalizes her account of the text’s genesis, she does so in order to effect, as Hill puts it, “a shift beyond the apparent confines of fiction.”83 This framing of the text also points beyond the confines of 79 Crowley, Duras, Writing, and the Ethical, 173. 80 On the necessity of this attestation for the testimonial contract to function, see Détue and Lacoste, “Ce que le témoignage fait à la littérature,” 7. 81  Leslie Hill, “Marguerite Duras and the Limits of Fiction,” Paragraph 12(1) (1989): 7. 82 Duras, “Pas mort en deportation,” Sorcières (February 1976); repr. in Outside (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981; P.O.L, 1991), 288–92. On Duras’s revisions, see Jennifer Willging, “Toeing the Party Line in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre.” The Modern Language Review 108(2) (April, 2013): 459–74. 83  Hill, “Marguerite Duras and the Limits of Fiction,” 4.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  185 autobiography, since the lost/found document is both analogous to and separate from personal memory. Nevertheless, the changes inevitably unmask Duras’s claim to testimonial authenticity as a partial deception. Faced with such an ambiguous text, critics often emphasize sheer negativity— the alleged inability of the subject to bear witness84—or else highlight Duras’s rhetorical creation of a narrative persona. The status of La Douleur as a whole is further clouded by Duras’s equivocal (to say the least) relationship to facts and evidence in her other autobiographical and journalistic writings. The most no­tori­ous example is her article on the Grégory Villemin murder case, published in Libération in 1985 (the same year as La Douleur), in which Duras claimed to have intuited the mother’s guilt in the death of her four-year-old son.85 When Duras asserts that the second text of La Douleur, “Monsieur  X.  dit ici Pierre Rabier,” is “une histoire vraie jusque dans le détail” (“a true story down to the last detail”) (D, 90), and when she declares that “Albert des Capitales” and “Ter le milicien” are “textes sacrés” (D, 138) we might wonder whether “truth” implies factual accuracy, emotional accuracy, or even some kind of mystical transcendance. La Douleur thus presents us with a confrontation, within its very structure, between what Dominique Denes calls Duras’s “politico-poetic” gamble on the impunity and sovereignty of literature,86 with the demands of a reality that put literature to shame. Even if this confrontation is not fully resolved, I would argue that reality wins out: for readers, the most memorable and influential section of the book is certainly the collected diary fragments of “La Douleur.” The latter can still be read, despite everything, as a powerful act of testimony that allies immediacy and hindsight. Both a found text and a reconstruction of the past, the text bears witness to the complexity and the confusion of the historical moment, while also responding to the changed context of the 1980s.87 “La Douleur,” as already noted, is the harrowing story of the wait for and return of “Robert  L.,” and his subsequent slow recuperation following his rescue from Dachau by François Mitterrand (a.k.a. Morland). While the text presents itself as a document, it is also a story about documents—identity papers (both authentic 84  Arguing that Duras shows that there is no neutral testimony, Leslie Hill claims that La Douleur is “a work that bears witness to the sheer impossibility of bearing witness.” Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (London: New York, 1993), 129. For Emma Wilson, this preface is at once a “testimony to the annihilation of memory” and an “analysis of the impossibility of testimony.” Wilson, “La Douleur: Duras, Amnesia, and Desire,” European Memories of the Second World War, ed. Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 142–3. Élise Noetinger speaks of the “failure of representation.” Noetinger, “At the Sharp End of Waiting: A Study of La Douleur by Marguerite Duras,” L’Esprit Créateur 40(2) (2000): 72. 85  Duras, “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.,” Libération, July 17, 1985. 86  Dominique Denes, “La gageure politico-poétique de Marguerite Duras,” in L’Engagement littéraire, ed. Emmanuel Bouju (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 173. 87  Claire Gorrara argues that Duras offers a “redefinition of testimony” that responds to the revisionist attacks of the 1980s while also countering “résistancialiste” constructions of the war years. Gorrara, “Bearing Witness in Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine and Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur,” Women in French Studies 5 (Winter 1997): 243–51.

186  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century and false), official and unofficial registers, dossiers, and journalistic reports of varying reliability. In the post-Liberation moment that Duras describes, such documents play a crucial role in the transmission of information and the consolidation of knowledge about recent events and the current situation. But they are also bound up with political discourses, and in particular with the struggles between right and left over the legacy of the Resistance and the future of France.88 For instance, the narrator attempts to gather information on returning soldiers and deportees, to publish in her newspaper Libres. Having used false identity papers to gain access to the Centre d’Orsay, where the intelligence service (the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action or BCRA), has claimed pride of place, she is told that she does not have the right to collect and disseminate details (D, 21). The BCRA’s task, she learns, is not to transmit news to the families of returning prisoners, but rather to establish dossiers on Nazi atrocities (D, 22). These official records are intended to serve judicial ends as well as a specific political narrative. The individuals charged with this mission call into question the narrator’s ability to verify her sources: “Qui vous a dit qu’ils vous disent la vérité? C’est très dangereux ce que vous faites” (“How do you know they’re telling you the truth? What you’re doing is very dangerous”) (D, 22/TW, 13). Of course, the narrator cannot engage in a strict verification process, and the text conveys the confusion that results from the chaotic circulation of reports and rumors. But the struggle here is not just over the determination of facts, but ­primarily over ownership of the truth. Duras describes the mobilization of docu­ ments by a Gaullist bureaucracy that asserts its authority over the country’s past and future, begins constructing its own narrative around the Resistance, and attempts to erase the suffering of victims and survivors from national memory (D, 44). Duras’s text, while itself openly partisan in its anti-Gaullist commentary, thus registers the complex mediation of documentary information and the possibility of its ideological manipulation.89 Documents, then, are not neutral, and Duras’s text itself warns us of this fact. They can also be false or fabricated, though it is important to be precise about what, exactly, is invented. If we return to Duras’s own testimonial “document,” the evidence of revision does expose the documentary frame of the preamble as partially fictional—or more accurately, as Martin Crowley argues, “somewhat duplicitious,” since its reading pact is not clear.90 Still, a comparison of La Douleur with 88  “The Gare d’Orsay, set up by the Gaullist Mission de Rapatriement to receive returning soldiers and deportees, becomes a battleground in the war between right and left to lay claim to the Resistance and to determine France’s political future.” Willging, “Toeing the Party Line,” 462. 89  For Lawrence Kritzman, Duras’s anti-Gaullist animosity contaminates her testimony with “the fictions of an uncritical leftist propaganda machine.” Kritzman, “Duras’s War,” L’Esprit créateur 33(1) (1993): 69. However, perhaps no testimony can be entirely free of ideological “fiction,” in this sense. I would argue that La Douleur bears witness to the emergence of competing ideological constructions of the past, which are powerful precisely because they are not wholly detached from reality. 90 Crowley, Duras, Writing, and the Ethical, 177.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  187 the drafts contained in the Cahiers de la guerre shows that Duras’s revisions to the text do not, for the most part, concern factual details. Other overtly fictionalizing moves are rather minor, such as the designation of Robert Antelme as “Robert L.,” probably in reference to Antelme’s Resistance code name, Leroy.91 The change carries little weight, since the Robert L. is still presented as the author of L’Espèce humaine. However, as Nathalie Heinich points out, it is not only fiction but also “diction” that can interfere with the perceived transparency of a testimonial ­discourse.92 In this sense, Duras’s reworking of her text inevitably raises suspicions of artifice, even as the reasons for it can be understood. For instance, Jennifer Willging persuasively argues that the differences in tone, register, and content between the notebooks and La Douleur reveal Duras’s Communist commitment in the 1940s and her attempt to shape a working-class persona in that first moment of writing, while also giving expression to her later distance from these earlier positions (the anti-Gaullist position remains, but some of the Cahiers’ more intemperate attacks on De Gaulle and the Catholic church are ­softened or excised).93 Some additions to the text add clarifications for the reader (Duras explains what her journal Libres is) or an element of (probably retrospective) exposition: “D. [Dionys Mascolo] me dit: La Droite. La Droite c’est ça. Ce que vous voyez c’est le personnel gaulliste qui prend ses places” (“D. says, ‘The Right. That’s what it’s like. What you see here is the Gaullist staff taking up its positions’ ”) (D, 23/TW, 14). Most revealing of the shift in context are those additions to the text that emphasize the fate of the European Jews, whereas earlier drafts focused on the suffering of political deportees and German communists (Duras, CG, 196, 235; D, 36, 58, 61, 64). Moments of narrative prolepsis expose the fictional dimension of the text’s diary form and undermine the impression of immediacy, while also drawing our attention to shifts in historical consciousness. A striking example is the narrator’s observation (with its curious present tense): “On ne parle pas encore des juifs à Paris” (“In Paris, people don’t talk about the Jews yet”) (D, 64/TW, 44). By presenting testimony in a semi-fictionalized form, framed in a way that at once demands adherence and invites suspicion, “La Douleur” undoubtedly problematizes witnessing and testimony (perhaps, however, to a lesser extent than the next story in the collection, “Monsieur  X.  dit ici Pierre Rabier,” which shows Duras giving contradictory testimony in the trial of a Gestapo agent). It also addresses witnessing directly, first of all in its documentary frame and second in its treatment of witness figures. Ordinary eyewitnesses, for their part, often appear as voyeurs, as in the crowds that rush to the Gare d’Orsay to behold the 91  Laure Adler, Marguerite Duras: A Life, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 142. 92  Nathalie Heinich, “Le témoignage, entre autobiographie et roman: la place de la fiction dans les récits de déportation,” Mots 56 (September 1998): 35. 93  Willging, “Toeing the Party Line.”

188  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century “spectacle” of the returning prisoners and the waiting women (D, 26). Most ­problematic and controversial, however, is Duras’s treatment of the survivor’s testimony offered by Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine. In another proleptic comment that breaks out of the immediacy of the journal form, Duras calls into question the relationship between Antelme’s writing and his experience, or else (perhaps even more puzzlingly) between experience and belief about the experience: “Il a écrit un livre sur ce qu’il croit avoir vécu en Allemagne: L’Espèce humaine” (“He wrote a book about what he thought he had experienced in Germany: The Human Race”) (D, 82/TW, 65). Duras seems to cast Antelme here as a naїve believer in the transparency of writing (although this is far from the case; on the contrary, Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine reflects on the disproportion between the survivor’s experience and the story that can be told about it94). Furthermore, as critics have noted, La Douleur as a whole inflects Antelme’s thesis of the indestructible unity of humanity, by developing the disturbing and questionable implication that there is no essential difference between victims and torturers.95 Duras is no doubt a troubling writer, in many respects, and one of the notions that she transgresses— both by supplementing and even supplanting Antelme’s testimony, but also by framing her own testimony as documentary material—is the idea of direct testimony as the location of truth. In its displacement and delay, the document undermines the enunciative authority of testimony, even as, in somewhat contradictory fashion, Duras proclaims her texts to be sacred and entirely true. Despite all this, the document remains the locus of fact. That is, I think it excessive to read Duras’s questioning of testimony in terms of a radical failure of representation, or as an “abolition of historical truth,” that frees her work from reference at the expense of Antelme’s testimony.96 Nor should Duras’s account be read as a work of pure fiction due to its unreliability. This would, in effect, be a way of absolving Duras of her more troubling or dubious claims and making ­falsification into a literary virtue; we should not confuse factual inadequacy with fictionality, or with literary value. On the contrary, the inevitable criticisms and corrections that La Douleur has provoked (including from Duras’s former Resistance comrades97), and even those interpretations that are

94  Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 9. 95  As Colin Davis observes, Duras rewrites Antelme’s emphasis on the unity of the human species in terms of a blurring of boundaries between victims and perpetrators. Colin Davis, “Duras, Antelme and the Ethics of Writing,” Comparative Literature Studies 34(2) (1997): 173, 176. For Davis, this is a significant distortion of Antelme’s humanism, and ultimately reveals Duras’ writing to be “an art without ethics” (182). Martin Crowley offers a different reading, arguing that Duras forces us “to think through the full consequences of [Antelme’s] position,” while still acknowledging that she does so in a “willfully provocative” way that must remain troubling and even distressing (Duras, Writing, and the Ethical, 166). 96  Alain Vircondelet, Duras: A Biography, trans. Thomas Buckley (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994), 332. 97 Adler, Marguerite Duras, 354.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  189 based on the text’s factual discrepancies,98 indicate its reception as a referential text—that is, as ­testimony that can and should be cross-checked against other sources of evidence.99 Tensions nevertheless remain between the text’s testimonial and literary statuses. To illustrate this point, I will conclude my discussion of Duras with a consideration of one small, apparently insignificant, referential detail in the text: the presence of the clafoutis aux cerises, a baked cherry dessert that is prepared to celebrate Antelme’s return to Paris on May 13, 1945, but that Antelme is too weak to ingest. The text of the wartime notebooks refers simply to a clafoutis (CG, 284); La Douleur specifies the use of cherries and adds that the fruit are in full season (D, 70). It is a minor point, but the factuality of this dessert has been called into question: Jean Vallier’s biography of Duras states, on the authority of another source, that the dessert was in fact a tarte aux fraises;100 Jennifer Willging finds this second version more plausible, and attributes the mistake to the transformative processes of memory.101 We might note here that cherries also appear earlier in the narrative. In the notebook, the narrator observes on an April day that “il y a déjà quelques cerises” (“there are some cherries already”) (CG, 194), which becomes in La Douleur: “Il y a déjà quelques cerises, c’est pourquoi les femmes attendent” (“There are some cherries already, that is what the women are waiting for”) (D, 34/W, 23). Women in La Douleur wait, whether for domestic provisions that are in short supply, or for the return of loved ones. We might read this mention of cherries either as corroborating evidence for the fruit in fact being in full season by May 1945 (and thus available for the ill-advised clafoutis prepared for Antelme), or else as the sign of a literary procedure coupled with possible fictionalization: the association of the arrival of the cherry season and the end of waiting (by women), and the dramatization of the shock of the return in the painful scene of the ripe yet inedible cherries. Ultimately, this minor fact remains undecidable: the cherries may be a factually accurate detail, a mistake attributable to a memory lapse (but still documentary in intention), or else a fictionalized element that lends symbolic weight to the fruit. “La Douleur” confronts us with the tension between these readings, without allowing us to comfortably locate the facts.

98  Gabriel Jacobs, “Spectres of Remorse: Duras’s War-Time Autobiography,”Romance Studies 30 (Autumn 1997): 47–57. 99  In fact, readers generally treat the autobiographical sections of La Douleur not as a work of fiction but as a historical source, which can be tested for reliability via the usual procedures of verification. Particularly controversial is the second part of La Douleur, “Monsieur  X.  dit ici Pierre Rabier,” in which Duras recounts her involvement with and role in the condemnation of the Gestapo agent Charles Delval. See Jennifer Willging, “ ‘True Down to the Last Detail’: Narrative and Memory in Marguerite Duras’s ‘Monsieur X’,” Twentieth-Century Literature 46(3) (2000): 369–86. 100  Jean Vallier, C’était Marguerite Duras, Vol. 1, 1914–45 (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 683. 101  Willging, “ ‘Real’ Places in Marguerite Duras’s Wartime Paris.” Studies in Twentieth and TwentyFirst Century Literature 35(2) (Summer 2011): 202.

190  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century

Documentary Disjunctions at the End of the Century (Modiano) The time lapse that separates Duras’s initial wartime notebooks from the publication of La Douleur in 1985 can be read as symptomatic of a larger, collective repression of a traumatic past; that is, as part of what Henry Rousso calls the “Syndrome de Vichy” (“Vichy Syndrome”): a set of symptoms in political and cultural life that respond to the trauma of the Occupation and are linked to France’s internal conflicts.102 For Rousso, the subsequent period of collective “obsession” began around 1974. This period was marked by the 1987 trial and conviction for crimes against humanity of Klaus Barbie, who had been Gestapo chief in Lyon between 1942 and 1944 (on the basis of La Douleur, Duras was asked to testify— for the defense[!]—and declined103), and subsequently, and significantly, of French collaborators: the Vichy militia leader Paul Touvier in 1994 and the civil servant Maurice Papon in 1998.104 The work of Patrick Modiano exemplifies the obsessive mode of memory in­aug­ur­ated in this era. Born in 1945, Modiano belongs to the postwar generation of writers who had no direct experience of the war. His father, of Italian-Greek Sephardic origin, had survived in occupied Paris through his black-market activities and possible Gestapo connections. It is often this shadowy, morally ambiguous aspect of the Occupation years that is explored in Modiano’s works, starting with his initial “Occupation trilogy,” La Place de l’Étoile (1968), La Ronde de Nuit (The Night Watch, 1969) and Les Boulevards de ceinture (Ring Roads, 1972). While there is a shift in tone between the explosive send-up of anti-Semitic discourses in La Place de l’Étoile and the understated, ambivalent tone of subsequent works, until 1997 his books are all novels, refracting history through fiction. Published in 1997, Dora Bruder marks a departure and indeed an exception in his body of work, turning away from fiction to present a documentary investigation into a real case. Modiano’s “art of memory” has been much praised, notably by the committee that awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014.105 This art nevertheless contains disjunctions, gaps, and resistances, which reveal themselves most clearly in Modiano’s treatment of documents. Even before the publication of Dora Bruder, he thematizes the document as the site of an uneasy conjugation of the 102  Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 à nos jours, 2nd edn (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987; 1990), 18–19. 103  Gorrara, “Bearing Witness,” 243. Duras had never encountered Barbie, but the defense lawyer Jacques Vergès believed that Duras’ ambiguous (and self-implicating) portrayal of the Resistance in La Douleur—in particular her account of the torture of collaborators in “Albert des Capitales” and “Ter le milicien”—might help relativize German atrocities. On Duras’ own occasional indulgence of such claims of moral equivalence, see Crowley, Duras, Writing, and the Ethical, 168. 104 Rousso, Syndrome de Vichy, 174. 105  “Patrick Modiano—Facts,” Nobelprize.org, Nobel Media AB 2014. https://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2014/modiano-facts.html.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  191 personal and the impersonal, the individual and the collective, presence and absence. In this sense, Modiano’s work offers a paradigmatic case of the documentary impulse in contemporary French literature. It develops a compelling account of the postmemorial subject, as evoked in the semi-autobiographical Livret de famille (1977): Je n’avais que vingt ans, mais ma mémoire précédait ma naissance. J’étais sûr, par exemple, d’avoir vécu dans le Paris de l’Occupation puisque je me souvenais de certains personnages de cette époque et de détails infimes et troublants, de ceux qu’aucun livre d’histoire ne mentionne. Pourtant, j’essayais de lutter contre la pesanteur qui me tirait en arrière, et rêvais de me délivrer d’une mémoire empoisonnée. I was only twenty years old, but my memory preceded my birth. I was sure, for example, of having lived in the Paris of the Occupation, since I remembered certain characters from that time and tiny, troubling details, of the kind that no history book mentions. However, I tried to struggle against the heaviness that pulled me back, and I dreamed of delivering myself from my poisoned memory. (LF, 116–17)

Here, postmemory appears as a kind of haunting, even an illness, that could be healed only by an impossible forgetting.106 Between memory and amnesia lies the document as a depersonalized record of the past. Significantly, the title of Livret de famille, which refers to the official family record book given to couples in France upon marriage or the birth of their first child, aligns Modiano’s own narrative account with documentation. A similar documentary style characterizes the later, directly autobiographical work Un pedigree (2005), which transcribes the writer’s own childhood and adolescence into the simultaneously cold and violent register of the bureaucratic record, while re-grafting elements of Modiano’s earlier fiction (episodes, names of characters from novels) onto the factual narrative. It is in part Modiano’s mixed national origins but above all his troubled childhood, marked by parental neglect, that lead him to liken himself to “un chien qui fait semblant d’avoir un pedigree” (“a dog who pretends to have a pedigree”) (UP, 13/P, 5). The document defines and dehumanizes. However, Modiano also adopts the documentary register as a paradigm for writing. He treats his narrative not as an act of self-reflection but as a record of descent, a CV, an official statement:

106  On Modiano and “postmemory,” see Johnnie Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory: The Writing of Patrick Modiano.” French Studies 59(1) (January 1, 2005): 39–45; and Sven-Erik Rose, “Remembering Dora Bruder: Patrick Modiano’s Surrealist Encounter with the Postmemorial Archive,” Postmodern Culture 18(2) (2008). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v018/18.2.rose.html.

192  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century J’écris ces pages comme on rédige un constat ou un curriculum vitae, à titre documentaire et sans doute pour en finir avec une vie qui n’était pas la mienne. Il ne s’agit que d’une simple pellicule de faits et de gestes. [. . .] Les événements que j’évoquerai jusqu’à ma vingt et unième année, je les ai vécus en transparence—ce procédé qui consiste à faire défiler en arrière-plan des paysages, alors que les acteurs restent immobiles sur un plateau de studio. I’m writing these pages the way one compiles a report or résumé, as documentation and to have done with a life that wasn’t my own. It’s just a simple film of deeds and facts. [. . .] I lived through the events I’m recounting, up to the age of twentyone, as if against a transparency—like in a cinematic process shot, when ­landscapes slide by in the background while the actors stand in place on a soundstage. (UP, 44–5/P, 41).

By writing personal testimony in the mode of documentary depersonalization, Modiano both imitates and resists the ways in which narrative accounts might conform to pre-established models of formatted individuality, such as the résumé or the official report. The metaphor of the pellicule, photographic or cinematic film, further complicates the question of factuality by introducing the thematics of transparency. Transparency in this case does not connote unmediated access to the real: rather, the film records life while robbing it of volume, opacity, and even authenticity. That is, the flimsiness of the documentary record produces a kind of unreality, one that reflects Modiano’s own sense of his early life as lived “en transparence” (“in transparency”/“against a transparency”); that is, placed in the foreground of a pre-filmed scene. The cinematic technique of the process shot, or rear projection, serves as a metaphor for the sense of disjunction between self and world, recorded events and experience, while it also highlights the manipulation involved in the act of recording. The opposition between documentation and self-reflection is thus a complex one. Modiano uses a documentary register to reproduce a sense of self-estrangement, fusing facts with a sense of fraudulent existence (UP, 114/P, 116), and aligning his autobiographical account with the notion of the false document or the faked pedigree. We should note, too, that the process of documentation is in this case not just a gesture of appropriation but above all an attempt to complete a process of dispossession, to “have done with” the past, to file it away. What accounts for the unsettling nature of Un pedigree is not only the absence of boundaries between Modiano’s autobiographical and fictional narratives, but also the epistemological and affective ambiguity of documentation itself. In his own way, Modiano takes up Balzac’s notion of the novel’s task as competition with the civil state (“faire concurrence à l’état civil”)—insofar as “civil state” means civil status, official identity as it is defined by institutions and attested by documents. As Lisa Gitelman notes, documents in general “belong to that ­ubiquitous subcategory of texts that embraces the subjects and instruments of

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  193 bureaucracy or of systematic knowledge generally.”107 In Modiano’s work, the ­official document is bound up with questions of national and ethnic identity, parental origins, and filiation (pedigree), and thus with problems of legitimacy and belonging. At the level of structure, Modiano composes his narratives using already existing documents—diaries, schedules, letters—in a way that produces a layering of the narrative voice, a split within the subject and between subjects, between the voice of the documents and their articulation in a narrative and ­discursive configuration. Yet Modiano’s narratives also incorporate speculation, autobiographical elements, reflective digressions, and absences. If the historian’s task is to offer explanations, the writer Modiano emphasizes the senselessness and/or violence of bureaucratic interventions into individual lives. Modiano’s documents are never just a neutral set of facts and gestures. They are a vehicle for multiple voices, while they also mark a distance from direct speech. They even mark a sense of separation from life: Tu es à Paris, chez le juge d’instruction, comme le disait Apollinaire dans son poème. Et le juge me présente des photos, des documents, des pièces à conviction. Et pourtant, ce n’était pas tout à fait cela, ma vie. “You are in Paris with the examining magistrate,” as Apollinaire said in his poem. And the magistrate shows me photos, documents, evidence. And yet, my life—that wasn’t exactly it.  (UP, 126/P, 129)

The reference here is to Apollinaire’s poem “Zone,” which in turn alludes to the moment in 1911 when the poet was accused of having stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Modiano’s own biographical evidence is thus aligned with the false documents used to implicate the suspicious foreigner (Apollinaire was of Polish descent and was born in Italy). While insisting on the primarily documentary value of his own text, Modiano registers the gap between a life and the collection of records of that life. He also hints at the underlying violence of bureaucratic knowledge, associating the document with the sinister function of the “pièce à conviction”—incriminating evidence for an unspecified prosecution. I will concentrate here on the most clearly documentary and referential of Modiano’s works. Dora Bruder recounts Modiano’s quest to track down details of the life of a Jewish girl who was murdered at Auschwitz, at age sixteen. Published (in its first version) in 1997 (the year, as it happens, that the Papon trial would begin), Dora Bruder is a hybrid documentary work that, as Sven Erik Rose notes, “marks an emphatic turn toward a more direct engagement with history and referentiality” after the nebulous wartime atmosphere of Modiano’s previous

107  Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press Books, 2014), 5.

194  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century works.108 It is also the work that most directly links documents to the dehumanizing power of bureaucracy, recalling Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Nazi as bureaucrat in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).109 The document, in this context, whether personal correspondence or a birth certificate, is the surviving trace of a life. It guarantees the possibility of remembering but is also connected to destruction and forgetting. Its excavation or chance discovery struggles against what the media historian Lisa Gitelman calls the “no-show” function of the document. That is, the document’s role as an epistemic object, its function of knowing and showing (“know-show”), is closely related to “the work of no show”—“documents are flagged and filed away for the future, just in case.”110 In Modiano’s investigation, access to documents is blocked by officials whom he calls the “les sentinelles de l’oubli” (“the sentinels of oblivion”) (DB, 65). We encounter here a paradox articulated by Jacques Derrida in Mal d’archive (Archive Fever): the institution of the archive allies a desire for both conservation and destruction, and the archival drive is closely linked to the death drive.111 As Catherine Coquio observes, nowhere is this incongruity more apparent than in the bureaucracies put in place by genocidal regimes, which produce mountains of decrees and dossiers even as they attempt to carry out a program of total ex­ter­min­ation that would leave no traces.112 In Dora Bruder, the official document is the instrument of a bureaucratic power that prefigures and enables physical violence against human bodies: the police report; the “dossier juif ” (“Jewish ­dossier”); the register of the Tourelles women’s prison where Dora is held before being transferred first to the Drancy camp, and then to Auschwitz. Racial and national categorizations, and the act of inscribing a name on official records and in official categories, amount to a death sentence: “On vous classe dans des catégories bizarres dont vous n’avez jamais entendu parler et qui ne correspondent pas à ce que vous êtes réellement. On vous convoque. On vous interne. Vous aimeriez bien comprendre pourquoi” (“You were placed in bizarre categories you had never heard of and with no relation to who you really were. You were called up. You were interned. If only you could understand why”) (DB, 37–8/DBr, 31). The second-person address, coupled (in the original French) with the present tense, operates generically here to refer not only to Dora’s fate but to a collective one, as well as evoking a more general disjunction between lived experience and forms of state regulation. Preceding the exercise of this bureaucratic violence, however, and at the origins of Modiano’s own memorial project, is a more ambiguous document: a missing-person announcement that he transcribes in the text:

108  Rose, “Remembering Dora Bruder.” 109  Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London and New York: Penguin, 2006). 110 Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 34. 111  Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 38. 112 Coquio, Le Mal de vérité, 60.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  195 Il y a huit ans, dans un vieux journal, Paris-Soir, qui datait du 31 décembre 1941, je suis tombé à la page trois sur une rubrique: “D’hier à aujourd’hui.” Au bas de celle-ci, j’ai lu: “PARIS On recherche une jeune fille, Dora Bruder, 15 ans, 1 m 55, visage ovale, yeux gris-marron, manteau sport gris, pull-over bordeaux, jupe et chapeau bleu marine, chaussures sport marron. Adresser toutes indications à M et Mme Bruder, 41 boulevard Ornano, Paris.” Eight years ago, in an old copy of Paris-Soir dated 31 December 1941, a heading on page 3 caught my eye: “From Day to Day.” Below this, I read: PARIS Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1m 55, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M.  and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.  (DB, 7/DBr, 3) Modiano isolates the initial document from its original context, where it appeared inconspicuously among miscellaneous faits divers—unrelated crimes and accidents (see Figure 4.1). Triggering an immediate identification for the author-narrator, who is familiar with the Boulevard Ornano, it is a trace that gives precarious visibility to a moment in the Bruders’ history. It bears the weight of multiple tragic ironies: the announcement’s intent to produce recognition and localization gives dangerous conspicuousness to this family of non-French origins; Dora’s attempt to escape institutions (her flight from boarding school) ends in imprisonment and deportation; the attempt to track down a missing person culminates in that person’s annihilation. These layers of causality, intention, and signification help explain Modiano’s own “documentary” ambivalence. That is, the evidential and memorial role of the document is never entirely separable from technologies of bureaucratic regulation that control and, in some cases, destroy, via the dehumanizing gesture that reduces a life to a paper form or a name on a list. The violence of the document also explains the positive value given to certain gaps in the historical record: J’ignorerai toujours à quoi elle passait ses journées, où elle se cachait, en compagnie de qui elle se trouvait pendant les mois d’hiver de sa première fugue et au cours de quelques semaines de printemps où elle s’est échappée à nouveau. C’est là son secret. Un pauvre et précieux secret que les bourreaux, les ordonnances, les autorités dites d’occupation, le Dépôt, les casernes, les camps, l’Histoire, le temps—tout ce qui vous souille et vous détruit—n’auront pas pu lui voler. I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when

196  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century

Figure. 4.1  Rubric “D’Hier à aujourd’hui” with missing person announcement for Dora Bruder, Paris-Soir, December 31, 1941 Source: courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

she escaped for the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History, time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to take away from her.  (DB, 144–5/DBr, 119)

Silence and secrecy provide a space for the truth of Dora’s past, beyond the forces of regulation and destruction. By ending on this lacuna, Modiano marks the

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  197 ­limits of his historical inquiry, but above all he takes an ethical stance, refusing to fully constitute Dora as an object of biographical knowledge. The compilation of documents remains an essential act of restitution and commemoration (against the aforementioned “sentinelles de l’oubli”). The document is singular but can be inscribed in a series: the initial found document individualizes the members of the Bruder family as victims; while, as Susan Suleiman observes, “the flurry of documentation and the proliferation of names that follows the account of Ernest Bruder’s arrest put the individual story into a collective context.”113 More problematically, Modiano does not reveal all of his sources for these documents, and in particular the book conceals his debt to the documentarymemorial work of Serge Klarsfeld. Klarsfeld’s Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France (Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1978) and Le Mémorial des enfants juifs déportés de France (French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, 1994) assembles factual information on French victims of the Holocaust: names, birthdates, photographs, deportation details. This work of commemoration accompanies efforts by Klarsfeld and his wife Beate to bring war criminals (such as Klaus Barbie) to justice, although the Klarsfelds emphasize “the restoration of the names and faces of the victims” over their role as “Nazi hunters.”114 In a newspaper article that appeared in 1994, six years after his discovery of the Paris-Soir announcement, Modiano recalls the transformative effect on him of Klarsfeld’s 1978 Mémorial: Après la parution du mémorial de Serge Klarsfeld, je me suis senti quelqu’un d’autre. [. . .] Et d’abord, j’ai douté de la littérature. Puisque le principal moteur de celle-ci est souvent la mémoire, il me semblait que le seul livre qu’il fallait écrire, c’était ce mémorial, comme Serge Klarsfeld l’avait fait. After the publication of Serge Klarsfeld’s Memorial, I felt like a different person. [. . .] And first of all, I doubted literature. Since literature’s principal driving force is often memory, it seemed to me that the only book that should be written was this memorial, as Serge Klarsfeld had done.115

We might be reminded of Duras’s feeling of shame at literature, when confronted with the force of the document. In the same article, Modiano notes that that Dora’s name and deportation date appear in the Mémorial, and adds: “Grâce à Serge Klarsfeld, je saurai peut-être quelque chose de Dora Bruder” (“Thanks to

113  Susan Suleiman, “ ‘Oneself as Another’: Identification and Mourning in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder,” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature 31(2) (June 1, 2007): 339. 114  Peter Hellman, “Foreword” to Serge Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, trans. Glorianne Depondt and Howard M. Epstein (New York: NYU Press, 1996), vii. 115  Modiano, “Avec Klarsfeld, contre l’oubli,” Libération, November 2, 1994.

198  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century Serge Klarsfeld, perhaps I’ll know something about Dora Bruder”).116 Klarsfeld subsequently responded to this appeal by tracking down photographs, docu­ments, and witnesses, and helping Modiano reconstitute the timeline of the Bruder family’s arrest and deportation. However, Dora Bruder attributes to Modiano the role of principal investigator, mentioning Klarsfeld only as an an­onym­ous “friend” who found a document in the archives of the Yivo Institute in New York (DB, 101). This concealment, which Klarsfeld himself suggests might be a “procédé littéraire” (“literary procedure”) designed to aggrandize the author,117 certainly allows Modiano to construct himself as the principal researcher-investigator of his narrative; it also, as Mireille Hilsum has suggested, helps Modiano to generalize his homage to the dead beyond the historiography of the Holocaust.118 This move raises more general questions about the ethics of documentary literature: what is the writer’s responsibility to his or her sources? Or to put this differently, does the construction of a literary work allow the erasure of traces and debts? While this problematic erasure entails a degree of (unacknowledged) fictionalization, it does not transform the book as a whole into a work of fiction. We might note that the missing-person announcement that Modiano discovered in 1988 made its first literary appearance in a novel: it is transcribed in Modiano’s Voyage de noces (1990), where Dora becomes the fictional Ingrid Teyrsen.119 In Voyage de noces, the overarching fictional contract is clear, despite the presence in the novel of a documentary component (that is not singled out in the text as factual). In Dora Bruder, fictionality remains an occasional resource within an overarching documentary frame. Fictional interventions are often marked out as hypotheses, as when Modiano offers conjectures on Dora’s state of mind or fills in gaps in the story. The boundary between fact and fiction is erased most dramatically in explicitly intertextual passages, for instance when Modiano notes the (almost) perfect coincidence between the location of the convent in Hugo’s Les Misérables where Cosette and Jean Valjean find refuge (62 rue du Petit-Picpus) and the location of the boarding school that Dora Bruder attended (62 rue de Picpus) (DB, 51–2). Hugo’s novel, as Modiano also observes, already operates a transposition of fact and fiction when his two characters initially traverse streets whose names correspond to those of the real Paris, before suddenly crossing over into the fictional “quartier du Petit-Picpus.” In Modiano’s text, such moments appear as surreal coincidences that justify Modiano’s belief in a “don de ‘voyance’ ” (“gift of ‘clairvoyance’ ”) in novelists—an intuition about details that allows imagination to correspond to reality (DB, 52–3). In speaking of his project, Modiano describes 116  “Modiano, “Avec Klarsfeld, contre l’oubli.” 117  Serge Klarsfeld, Letter to Patrick Modiano, April 3, 1997, in Patrick Modiano, ed. Maryline Heck and Raphaëlle Guidée (Paris: L’Herne, 2012), 186. 118 Mireille Hilsum, “Serge Klarsfeld/Patrick Modiano: enjeux d’une occultation,” in Heck and Guidée, Patrick Modiano), 190. 119 Modiano, Voyage de noces (Paris: Gallimard, 1990; repr. Folio, 1996), 153.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  199 fiction as a last resort when facts are missing. Fiction thus supplements his efforts to write a biography, an enquête, a work of reportage—something other than a novel.120 Nevertheless, Modiano himself clearly remains ambivalent about the usual protocols of factual verification. Alan Morris has shown that Modiano’s revision of the text between the 1997 Gallimard Blanche and the 1999 Folio edition integrates some corrections but continues to omit important details.121 The factual ambiguities, however, generally do not bear on the status of the documents inserted in the work or on the figure of Dora herself, but instead on elements such as the non-linearity of the narrative, the omission of some information, and the role of imaginative speculation. That is, to borrow Ricœur’s terms, the uncertainty does not generally concern the “documentary phase” of the writing, “which takes as its epistemological program the establishing of documentary proof.”122 Ambiguity intervenes mainly in the explanation/understanding phase, where Modiano must often have recourse to speculation and imagination, and in the representative phase of putting the evidence into narrative form. However, what is literary about Modiano’s work, I would argue, is not primarily its occasional recourse to fiction, but rather its reflexivity and its temporal juxtapositions; that is, the way in which it dramatizes the mediation between the phases of writing, and constitutes the document as a witness speaking in the present, thus operating a “surimpression” (“superimposition” or “double exposure”)123—of historical moments outside any linear chronology. Documents thus take on a ghostly presence even as they retain their evidential force.

Beyond France: Fiction and Testimony at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century The tendency I am outlining here is not restricted to French literature. The award of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature to Modiano is arguably indicative of a broad, transnational cultural preoccupation with documentary and testimonial narrative—a trend confirmed even more clearly by the award, the following year, of the same prize to the Belarusian writer and investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich, whose work collects and orchestrates witness testimonies from those affected by the Soviet–Afghanistan war, the Chernobyl disaster, or the downfall of 120  See, e.g., Olivia de Lamberterie and Michel Palmiéri, “Patrick Modiano dans la peau d’une femme,” Elle, February 8, 1999, 66. 121  Alan Morris, “Avec Klarsfeld, contre l’oubli: Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder,” Journal of European Studies 36(3) (2006): 274. On the various versions of Dora Bruder, and a reading of Modiano’s project as a “work in progress,” see Jennifer Howell, “In Defiance of Genre: The Language of Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder Project,” Journal of European Studies 40(1) (March 1, 2010): 59–72. 122 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 136. 123  See Modiano, Voyage de noces, 26.

200  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century the Soviet Union.124 France is part of a larger story, and French documentary works are of course shaped by influences beyond France. For instance, recent texts that work in a postmemorial mode of autobiographical-documentary investigation often follow the influential model of Daniel Mendelsohn’s international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (which was published in 2006, translated into French by the following year, and very well received).125 Examples include Marianne Rubinstein’s C’est maintenant du passé (It’s Now in the Past, 2009), the historian Ivan Jablonka’s Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, 2012), and Christophe Boltanski’s La Cache (The Safe House, Prix Femina 2015).126 In these works, the document is the privileged site for negotiating the tension between historical distance and personal involvement in the story. As these examples indicate, World War II and the Holocaust are still a focus of memorial obsession. But this is not the only historical moment whose resistance to fictionalization gives rise to experiments in a documentary mode. The Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, while she does not reject fiction, interweaves it with history. L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), for instance, alternates autobiographical narrative with an archival (and counter-archival) exploration in order to reconstruct the history of Algeria, from French conquest to independence. The 1994 Rwandan genocide is another case that continues to confront French and Francophone writers with the consequences of France’s colonial and neocolonial interventions (including, in this instance, the controversial role of the politics of “Françafrique”— French control over its former colonies—in the run-up to the genocide127). In this difficult territory, the fault lines between “French” and “Francophone” literature become particularly visible, including in their friction and shifts; writers from Metropolitan France, Africa, and the African diaspora occupy different positions in relation to the event. There are, of course, first-hand memoirs by Rwandans themselves, such as Scholastique Mukasonga’s Inyenzi ou les Cafards (Cockroaches, 2006), which deals with the period preceding the genocide. For the most part, however, accounts of the genocide have been collected and relayed by 124  See, e.g., Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997), trans. Keith Gessen (New York: Picador, 2006); Alexievitch, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2013), trans. Bela Shayevich (New York: Random House, 2016). 125  Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: Harper, 2006), trans. into French by Pierre Guglielmina as Les Disparus (Paris: Flammarion, 2007). 126 Marianne Rubinstein, C’est maintenant du passé (Paris: Gallimard Verticales, 2009); Ivan Jablonka, Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (Paris: Seuil, 2012) ; Christophe Boltanski, La Cache (Paris: Stock, 2015). 127  On France’s alleged role in the unfolding of the genocide, see Nicki Hitchcott, “A Global African Commemoration—Rwanda: Écrire par devoir de mémoire,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 45(2) (April 1, 2009): 154–5. A report commissioned by the Rwandan government and published in December 2017 accused France of supporting the Hutu militias that carried out the genocide. In April 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron ordered an investigation into France’s role. See “Rwanda Accuses France of Complicity in 1994 Genocide,” New York Times, December 13, 2018; and “Rwanda, vingt-cinq ans après le genocide: la guerre fratricide des idées,” Le Monde, April 5, 2019.

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  201 outsiders, through acts of secondary witnessing often based on travel and ­fieldwork.128 For instance, the French war reporter Jean Hatzfeld ­gathers eyewitness testimonies from both victims and perpetrators, in order to compose the works of his Rwandan trilogy Dans le nu de la vie (Life Laid Bare, 2000), Une saison de machettes (Machete Season, 2003), and La Stratégie des antilopes (The Antelope’s Strategy, 2007). Hatzfeld distinguishes this work from journalistic reportage, emphasizing the importance of encounter and exchange with survivors over the long term.129 The work of literary composition does not aim to fictionalize, but rather to orchestrate and make audible the voices of others. This is not to say that fiction cannot still serve as a legitimating mode for ­literary treatments of real events, even historical catastrophe on the scale of a genocide. Novels undoubtedly have both cultural prestige and popular appeal. Mukasonga’s novel Notre-Dame du Nil (Our Lady of the Nile, 2012), a work of fiction that draws on the Tutsi author’s own experiences at a majority-Hutu school, was the first of her books to win her widespread recognition (including the Kourouma and Renaudot prizes), after she had already published several autobiographical accounts. In 1998, when the Lille-based Fest’Africa project, “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire” (“Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory”) invited ten African writers to a residency in Kigali, the emphasis was on the creation of fiction. Of the participants, only the Rwandan writer Vénuste Kayimahe had direct experience of the genocide and wrote a work of factual testimony (and an indictment of the role of the French authorities): France-Rwanda: les coulisses du génocide. Témoignage d’un rescapé (France-Rwanda: Behind the Scenes of the Genocide, 2001). The other Rwandan writer of the group, Jean-Marie Vianney Rurangwa, also opted for nonfiction in the form of the essay Rwanda: le génocide des Tutsi expliqué à un étranger (Rwanda: the Genocide of Tutsis Explained to a Foreigner, 2000). Other works of fiction include the Senegalese writer Boubakar Boris Diop’s Murambi: le livre des ossements (Murambi: The Book of Bones, 2000), the Burkinabé writer Monique Ilboudo’s Murekatete (2000), and the Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo’s L’Aîné des orphelins (The Oldest Orphan, 2000). These texts, conceived as monuments to the dead, are what Emmanuel Bouju has called istorical novels [sic]—that is, fictions of the eyewitness, which operate via the imaginary incarnation of a witness-participant (istor) in a narrative that ac­tual­izes historical time as lived time in the present.130 Fiction appears in this 128  On the position of “witnesses from outside,” see Virginie Brinker, “Figures de témoins: médiations littéraires et fictionnelles du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 20(2) (March 14, 2016): 227–32. 129  Jean Hatzfeld, “Je ne ferai jamais le journaliste au Rwanda,” interview with Franck Nouchi, Le Monde, September 6, 2007. 130  Emmanuel Bouju, “Force diagonale et compression du présent. Six propositions sur le roman istorique contemporain,” in “Présent (1),” ed. Sylvie Aprile and Dominique Dupart, special issue, Écrire l’histoire 11 (2013): 51–60. Bouju aims to reactivate the archaic Greek istor, the eyewitness (from the verb idêin), as opposed to the later Attic histor, the historian as defined by Herodotus.

202  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century case as one possible response to the problem of secondary witnessing, although assumptions about the nature of the literary are also at play in this choice (e.g., Diop characterizes the nonfiction contributions to the project as “non-literary,” even as he worries about the implications of fictionalizing genocide).131 Without entering into the debate on the possibilities of such fictional witnessing, I will only note that fiction operates here on sensitive ethical territory, transforming real witnesses into characters. In response to his own misgivings about a fictional approach, the Djiboutian author Abdourahman Waberi contributes to the Fest’Africa project the fragmentary, hybrid text Moisson de crânes (Harvest of Skulls, 2000), “texts for Rwanda” that include short stories, travel notes, and essayistic fragments. However, the work from this project that comes closest to the documentary aesthetic that I have explored in this chapter is the contribution of the Franco-Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo in L’Ombre d’Imana: Voyage jusqu’au bout du Rwanda (The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda). Published by the Arles-based French publisher Actes Sud in 2000, L’Ombre d’Imana is part travelogue, part witness testimony, part fiction. It incorporates different voices and perspectives: those of survivors, perpetrators, prisoners, and refugees, as well as lawyers, journalists, and writers. As one of these voices asserts, the reality of the genocide “dépasse la fiction” (“exceeds fiction”) (OI, 38). It is the reality of absolute evil, but this evil cannot be identified with a single country (the “heart of Rwanda”) or continent, but concerns all of humanity (OI, 13). We find here another version of the position set out by Antelme and modified by Duras: that is, the notion of a humanity affirmed precisely in the face of its denial, but also the acknowledgment of a disturbing proximity (and even, in some cases, ­intimacy) of perpetrator and victim. Humanity is thus always shared but always urgently endangered: Comprendre. Disséquer les méchanismes de la haine. Les paroles qui divisent. Les actes qui scellent les trahisons. Les gestes qui enclenchent la terreur. Comprendre. Notre humanité en danger. We need to understand, to analyse the mechanisms of hatred, the words that create division, the deeds that put the seal on treason, the actions that unleash terror. We need to understand. Our humanity is in peril.  (OI/SI, 118)

131  Boubakar Boris Diop, “African Authors in Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory,” trans. Jane Alison Hale, in Literary Responses to Mass Violence, ed. Daniel Terris (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2004), 123. The books were mostly published in a special series, “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire,” with the Malian press Le Figuier in association with the Fest’Africa festival based in Lille (France); a few appeared with Parisian publishers (Éditions du Seuil, Stock, Actes Sud, Le Serpent à Plumes, Dagorno).

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory After World War II  203 It is also the form of Tadjo’s book that drives this universal point home; but it does so precisely in its attention to the particular, and in its focus on the intimacy of the encounter and the uniqueness of individual voices—those of witnesses but also the author’s deeply personal contemplation. At the same time, documentary montage allows the maintaining of a critical distance from the words of others, which is particularly crucial for the encounters with perpetrators of violence. This ethical concern with the mediation, transmission, and confrontation of voices is one that Tadjo shares with the French writer Jean Hatzfeld as well as with the Belgium-based theater collective Groupov, which also incorporated direct testimony into the play RWANDA 94, une tentative de réparation symbolique envers les morts à l’usage des vivants (RWANDA 94, an attempt at symbolic rep­ar­ ation to the dead for the use of the living).132 First performed in 2000, and influenced by the political theater of Brecht and the documentary theater of Peter Weiss, RWANDA 94 integrates images, music, fiction, and eyewitness testimony delivered onstage by actual survivors of the genocide. Direct acts of witnessing and the inclusion of Rwandan participants guard against the danger of Europeans speaking for Africans. In this theatrical context, the role of the material document shifts to a secondary one, a backdrop for the real presence of the witness on stage. But the notion of live performance (“représentation vivante”) is far from straightforward, and the staging of testimony also produces a distancing effect precisely by troubling the boundary between reality and fiction. As the Groupov directors put it, the very nature of the event obliges the collective to operate in the “fluctuating boundary space” (“la limite fluctuante”) between reality and representation, the live and the simulated.133 These literary and dramatic approaches, intervening only a few years after the event (and, in the case of the Groupov project, involving the physical presence of survivors), offer particular configurations of the relationship between direct testimony and the mediation of documents, while also bringing fiction into the mix, whether for the purposes of immersion or distancing (for fiction can indeed function in both ways). We move here beyond the document as a paper witness that both speaks and is spoken (for). The space of the documentary becomes a capacious one, not reducible to the presence of discrete documents but rather involving multifaceted modes of mediation and composition that are nevertheless grounded in an indexical connection to reality, rather than functioning in purely mimetic terms. Still, the role of the document as indirect, mediated testimony 132  Groupov (collective), RWANDA 94, une tentative de réparation symbolique envers les morts à l’usage des vivants (Paris: Éditions théâtrales, 2002). On documentary theater, see Jean-Marie Piemme and Véronique Lemaire (eds), Usages du “document”: les écritures théâtrales entre réel et fiction,” special issue, Études théâtrales 50 (2011). 133 Jacques Delcuvellerie and Marie-France Collard, “Rwanda 94: Transgresser une limite / Produire de la limite,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 20(2) (March 14, 2016): 209.

204  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century remains crucial in all of these responses. As we have seen in this chapter, the literary reanimation of documents stages an encounter between the investigating subject and more or less distant voices from the past, operating what Walter Benjamin calls a “telescoping of the past through the present.”134 At once giving voice to experience and framing documents as objects of knowledge, literary memory actualizes history as testimony, while also inviting us to question the processes of constituting and confronting facts. 134 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), N 7a, 3.

Epilogue Documents in the Digital Age

Éric Vuillard’s L’Ordre du jour (The Agenda/The Order of the Day), which won the Goncourt prize in 2017, opens with an account of Adolf Hitler’s meeting with twenty-four heads of industry on February 20, 1933, then traces the events leading up to the German annexation of Austria in 1938. Vuillard attempts to reinvest a moment in the past with its contingency, describing it as if it were present. However, as the narrator wryly observes, this approach can also have the effect of petrifying time, making historical figures turn in an endless circle like puppets on a Penrose staircase.1 In this context, documents (photographs, newsreels, films) become at once the components of an absurdist spectacle that is a substitute for knowledge,2 and the source of a truth that precedes ideological manipulation. A striking instance of this ambiguity is a digression on a photograph of the Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, in a chapter that recounts this politician’s meeting with Hitler on February 12, 1938. C’est en 1934, à Genève, dans ses appartements, que cette photographie fut prise. Schuschnigg se tient debout, inquiet peut-être. Il y a dans ses traits quelque chose de mou, d’indécis. On dirait qu’il tient à la main une feuille de papier, mais l’image est floue et une tache sombre mange le bas de la photo. Si l’on regarde attentivement, on remarque que le revers d’une poche de sa veste est froissé par son bras, et puis on aperçoit un étrange objet, une plante peut-être, qui fait à droite intrusion dans le cadre. Mais cette photographie, telle que je viens de la décrire, personne ne la connaît. Il faut aller à la Bibliothèque nationale de France, au département des estampes et de la photographie, pour la voir. Celle que nous connaissons a été coupée, recadrée. Ainsi, à part quelques sousarchivistes chargés de classer et d’entretenir les documents, personne n’a jamais vu le revers mal fermé de la poche de Schuschnigg, ni l’étrange objet—une plante ou je ne sais quoi—à la droite de la photo, ni la feuille de papier. [. . .] Il a suffi de supprimer quelques millimètres insignifiants, un petit morceau de vérité, pour que le chancelier d’Autriche semble plus sérieux, moins ahuri que sur le cliché d’origine; comme si le fait d’avoir refermé un peu le champ, effacé quelques 1  Éric Vuillard, L’Ordre du jour (Arles: Actes Sud, 2017), 12. 2 Vuillard, L’Ordre du jour, 122.

206  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century éléments désordonnés, en resserrant l’attention sur lui, conférait à Schuschnigg un peu de densité. It was in 1934, in Geneva, in his apartments, that this photograph was taken. Schuschnigg is standing, perhaps worried. In his features there is something feeble and hesitant. He seems to be holding a sheet of paper in his hand, but the image is blurry and a dark stain swallows up the bottom of the photo. If one looks attentively, one notices that the flap of his jacket pocket is being crumpled by his arm, and then one notices a strange object, maybe a plant, which intrudes into the frame on the right. But no one knows this photograph as I have just described it. To see it you have to go to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, to the department of prints and photographs. The one we know has been cropped and reframed. Thus, apart from a few sub-archivists in charge of classifying and conserving documents, no one has ever seen Schuschnigg’s unclosed pocket flap, or the strange object—a plant or whatever it is—on the right of the photo, or the sheet of paper. [. . .] It was enough to suppress a few insignificant milli­ meters, a little bit of truth, to make the Austrian chancellor seem more serious, less dazed than in the original shot; as if the fact of having reduced the field of view, erased some untidy elements, tightened the focus on him, conferred on Schuschnigg a degree of density.3

Two facets of the document come into view here: on the one hand, the document that has been manipulated for public consumption, absorbed into institutions and transformed into common knowledge; on the other, the document as a trace that captures the truth of a given moment. To take up Lisa Gitelman’s terms, the document hovers between “know-show” and “no-show”; that is, the epistemic function of the document as proof has as its counterpart a gesture of cutting and concealment.4 The photograph in question even contains a mise-en-abyme of the documentary function (or dysfunction), in the form of the illegible piece of paper in Schuschnigg’s hand, an object deprived of any significance that it possibly once bore. But above all, what the original photograph of Schuschnigg seems to reveal is a body that cannot adapt to its situation. The crumpled pocket flap becomes a clue to a character flaw or a sign of the disorder of reality. The Schuschnigg photograph itself does not figure visually in Vuillard’s text, which has as its only direct photographic insertion the image on the book’s dust jacket, representing Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach (a diplomat, industrialist, and Hitler supporter). On the level of its documentary strategies, then, Vuillard’s book repeats the gesture of concealment that keeps Schuschnigg’s image at a remove, mediating our access to it through the gaze of the intrepid researcher 3 Vuillard, L’Ordre du jour, 44–5. Passage reproduced courtesy of Actes Sud. 4 Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC  and London: Duke University Press Books, 2014), 34.

Epilogue: Documents In The Digital Age  207

Figure 5.1  Kurt Schuschnigg in his apartment in Geneva, 1934 Source: courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

who rummages through the archives for buried truths. This authorial posture remains discreet, hidden behind the impersonal pronoun “on” and the modest figure of the sub-archivist. However, a quick internet search reveals that the uncropped photograph of Schuschnigg has in fact been available online since 2011—in Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale (see Figure 5.1). What, then, are we to make of the tale of the author-investigator descending into the archives? My point is not to argue that Vuillard fictionalizes his methods of historical investigation (although this is certainly possible), but rather to invite reflection on the transformations of the documentary imagination that accompany changes in our modes of recording and transmitting information. What happens when documents become virtual? In 75 (2016), a work she presents as a “roman sans fiction” (novel without fiction), Anna-Louise Milne describes her discovery of a previously unpublished photograph by the American photographer Frank Scherschel, showing the ruins of Saint-Lô, Normandy, after the Allied bombings in 1944. The image had been filed away in the archives of Time magazine, but “la mise en ligne de toutes sortes de documents oubliés permet depuis des résurgences inattendues” (“the online publication of all kinds of forgotten documents has since allowed unexpected resurgences”).5 But this proliferation of digital material also 5  Anna-Louise Milne, 75 (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), 104.

208  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century gives rise to some rather dubious and facile practices, such as Michel Houellebecq’s use of Wikipedia for La Carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory, 2010), a method that skirts plagiarism by turning a familiar and socially widespread method of sourcing information into a literary resource.6 However, other writers respond to the excessive quantity of available data—the noise produced by constant acts of inscription—by undertaking immersive investigations, fieldwork, or extensive archival research.7 They also focus their attention on the discrete existence of the individual document, celebrated as a singular imprint of the real. They remind us that information always has a material basis—that, as N.  Katherine Hayles notes, it “must always be instantiated in a medium”8—and they insist on our embodied relation to these material traces. Maurizio Ferraris argues that the proliferation of documents and the “massive return to writing” in the twenty-first century do not herald a new age of communication and information. Rather, they reveal the very essence of the social world: the constitution of social objects through inscription and registration.9 Be that as it may, the overabundant and sometimes oppressive “documentality” of the present doubtless helps explain the allure of the more traditional figure of the archive as an institutional repository of paper knowledge. In Histoire de la littérature récente (History of Recent Literature, 2016), Olivier Cadiot mocks writers’ fascination with documents: “N’hésitez pas à vous documenter. Un livre est assez généreux pour supporter des informations détaillées. C’est même excellent dans les romans de donner des chiffres, des listes, et même, si l’on peut, de reproduire des documents. Passez à la mairie pour prendre des notes” (“Don’t hesitate to gather your materials. A book is generous enough to handle detailed information. It’s even an excellent thing in novels to give figures, lists, and even, if possible, to reproduce documents. Stop by city hall to take notes”).10 It is certainly the case that contemporary French literature has seen an explosion of works with a factual basis, which have inspired the use of various

6 Michel Houellebecq, La Carte et le territoire (Paris: Flammarion, 2010); Vincent Glad, “Houellebecq, la possibilité d’un plagiat,” Slate.fr, September 2, 2010. http://www.slate.fr/story/26745/ wikipedia-plagiat-michel-houellebecq-carte-territoire. 7  On literary investigations and fieldwork in contemporary French literature see Marie-Jeanne Zenetti, “Paradigmes de l’enquête et enjeux épistémologiques dans la littérature contemporaine,” in Les formes de l’enquête, ed. Danièle Méaux, special issue, Revue des sciences humaines 334 (April–June 2019), 17–28; Dominique Viart, “Fieldwork in Contemporary French Literature,” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 20(4/5) (September 2016): 569–80; Laurent Demanze, Un nouvel âge de l’enquête (Paris: Corti, 2019). For a reflection focused on the visual arts and film, see Aline Caillet, L’Art de l’enquête. Savoirs pratiques et sciences sociales (Sesto San Giovanni: Éditions Mimésis, 2019). 8  N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 13. 9 Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces, trans. Richard Davies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 182, 282. 10  Olivier Cadiot, Histoire de la littérature récente (Paris: P.O.L, 2016), 161.

Epilogue: Documents In The Digital Age  209 generic terms to describe them: factual literature, factography, documentary narrative, autofiction, biofiction, exofiction, nonfiction, “novels without fiction.”11 A continued obsession with history, memory and witnessing is in evidence in works by Yannick Haenel, Laurent Binet, Hélène Gaudy, David Foenkinos, Laurent Mauvignier, and others. These intersections between literature and history have sparked controversy on more than one occasion, for instance in the cases of Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones, 2006) and Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski (2009). The former, which won the Goncourt prize, is a historical (and extremely documented) novel, with a fictional SS officer as its protagonist and narrator. More relevant for my concerns given its nonfiction components, Haenel’s Jan Karski is based on the true story of the eponymous Polish resistance operative and courier who tried to inform the Allies of the fate of the European Jews. The book is composed of three parts: the first is a retelling of Karski’s 1978 interview with Claude Lanzmann in Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985); the second is a summary (and transposition into the third person) of Karski’s 1944 book Story of a Secret State (which was translated into French in 1948 and republished in 2004); the third is an overtly fictional first-person reconstruction of Karski’s attempts to convey his message to the world. Understandably, it is the last section—the fictional testimony—that has received most attention. At first glance, the authorial paratext seems clear: “Les scènes, les phrases et les pensées que je prête à Jan Karski relèvent de l’invention” (“the situations, words and thoughts that I attribute to Jan Karski are pure inventions”).12 The difficulty arises when the fictional “Karski” claims to speak in the place of the Karski of the previous sections, in order to reveal the hitherto concealed truth: “Moi-même dans mon livre, j’ai dissimulé mon point de vue. À l’époque où le livre a été publié, c’est-à-dire en 1944, il était impossible que je dise la vérité” (“in my book, I concealed my point of view. At the time when the book was published, in 1944, it was impossible for me to tell the truth”).13 In attempting to make fiction speak for the silenced or unheard Karski, Haenel’s text lays claim simultaneously to the freedom of fiction and to the authority of testimony in order to voice a questionable ideological interpretation of history: the claim that the Allies were complicit in the extermination of the Jews. The problematic aspect of Haenel’s novel, then, lies less in the mixing of fictional and factual regimes, which are rigorously demarcated in the preface, than in the way in which the fiction purports to reveal a truth concealed by the previous documentary sections. That is, rather than

11 See Marie-Jeanne Zenetti, Factographies: l’enregistrement littéraire à l’époque contemporaine (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014); Lionel Ruffel, “Un réalisme contemporain: les narrations documentaires,” Littérature 166(2) (2012): 13–25. 12  Yannick Haenel, Jan Karski (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 9; trans. by Ian Monk as The Messenger: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2011), x. 13 Haenel, Jan Karski, 123–24; The Messenger, 113.

210  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century making documents speak, or adding another dimension to the documentary accounts, the fiction seems to flatly negate their documentary value. My intention here is not to revive the polemics around Haenel’s book, which led an outraged Claude Lanzmann to release the remaining footage of his original Karski interview under the title The Karski Report (2010).14 I would point out, rather, that Haenel’s novel illustrates the risk of ventriloquism involved in all literary attempts to make documents speak. Yet the book’s first two sections, which have attracted less critical attention than the fictional final section, also demonstrate the rich possibilities of this mode of attention to documents. In particular, the first section offers a haunting reflection on the problems of witnessing, historical interpretation, and the possibilities of documentary form. Haenel’s re­medi­ation of the Karski interview from Shoah is not a mere transcription, but rather an in-depth interrogation of the meaning that Karski’s voice produces alongside Lanzmann’s images, as Karski recounts the message he was given by Jewish leaders in Warsaw. Haenel focuses on the film’s disjunctions: between word and image, between what Karski’s words say and what his eyes tell us, between the presence and absence of Karski’s message. The broken voice of the witness and the repeated question, “Do you understand it?”15 (whether addressed to Karski about his mission, to Lanzmann, or to us) are part of the “message” even as they leave it partly unarticulated. Haenel challenges us to interpret Karski’s “report to the world” and to examine our own relationship to the figure of the witness. Constructed very differently, as a first-person exploration of the historical archive, Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010) thematizes the tension between documentary investigation and novelistic invention. Binet scrupulously reconstructs the story of the life and the assassination in Prague of the Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, within a narrative that does not conceal—although it often resists—the temptation to reinvent the past. Hesitating over matters of style and organization, constantly worried that “l’épaisse couche réfléchissante d’idéalisation” (“the thick reflective layer of idealization”) will obscure historical truth,16 Binet’s narrator nevertheless offers a sense of the powers and limits of imaginative identification in connecting us to the past, or in making the past present—both through the reanimation of the document as witness and via the authorization of a (limited) degree of reinvention. The book’s final sentence is a tentative formulation that situates the narrator (Binet?) as a potential eyewitness within a reimagined 14  On the Jan Karski controversy, see Claude Lanzmann, “ ‘Jan Karski’ de Yannick Haenel: un faux roman,” Marianne (January 23, 2010). . https://www.marianne.net/societe/jan-karski-de-yannickhaenel-un-faux-roman Claude Lanzmann, director, The Karski Report, documentary 2010, 49 minutes, in Shoah (1985), DVD special edn, 6 DVDs, Disc 5, Les films Aleph and Historia Films, with the participation of the Ministry of Culture (France) (New York: The Criterion Collection, 2013). Annette Wieviorka, “Faux témoignage,” L’Histoire 349 (January 2010): 30–1. 15 Haenel, Jan Karski, 19; The Messenger, 9. 16  Laurent Binet, HHhH (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2010), 1.

Epilogue: Documents In The Digital Age  211 historical scene, at once maintaining documentary distance and rendering the past present: “Moi aussi, peut-être, je suis là” (“Perhaps I’m also there”).17 “Peutêtre” (“perhaps”) is a frequent term in the book, serving to demarcate documented fact from the narrator’s speculation. At the book’s conclusion, however, it moves into the world of autobiographical assertion and marks a possible transition, a fusion of the past and present. This is not a triumph of fiction over facts, however, but rather an expression of the desire for contact with history. These literary approaches to the historical record find a counterpoint in social scientists’ rethinking of questions of narrative form and style, exemplified by the work of historians such as Philippe Artières and Ivan Jablonka.18 This turn to literature by historians, as well as the inscription of historical archives in literary and artistic works, has nourished an interdisciplinary dialogue on the writing of the archive.19 Another trend in contemporary literature is the proliferation of various forms of life-writing, whether focused on forgotten lives (in the wake of Pierre Michon’s Vies minuscules of 1984), the mythologized existences of celebrities,20 or the self. “Autofiction” (practiced in various ways by Christine Angot, Gwenaëlle Aubry, Catherine Cusset, Chloé Delaume, Delphine de Vigan, Hervé Guibert, Camille Laurens, Édouard Louis, Catherine Millet, or Régine Robin—to list just a few names) encompasses works written in varying proximity to the author’s life. Still, what terms such as “autofiction” or “exofiction” risk obscuring is the extent of the factual turn in French literature at the end of the twentieth century. This point may be illustrated by noting a parallel shift in the work of three influential authors. In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Annie Ernaux, François Bon, and Emmanuel Carrère—very different writers in many respects—all take a turn away from the novel. Ernaux begins her writing career by publishing auto­ bio­graph­ic­al novels (Les Armoires vides [1974], Ce qu’ils disent ou rien [1977], La Femme gelée [1981]). Starting with La Place (1983), however, she rules out the fictionalization of events: “Depuis peu, je sais que le roman est impossible. Pour rendre compte d’une vie soumise à la nécessité, je n’ai pas le droit de prendre d’abord le parti de l’art, ni de chercher à faire quelque chose de ‘passionnant,’ ou d’‘émouvant’ ” (“I realize now that a novel is out of the question. If I wish to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic 17 Binet, HHhH, 441. 18  Philippe Artières, Rêves d’histoire: Pour une histoire de l’ordinaire (Paris: Verticales, 2014); Ivan Jablonka, L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine (Paris: Seuil, 2014). 19  See the articles collected in Annick Louis (ed.), Les écritures des archives: littérature, discipline littéraire et archives, Conference proceedings, Fabula Colloques, September 2019. https://www.fabula. org:443/colloques/sommaire6299.php. 20  Arno Bertina is inspired by the life of Johnny Cash for J’ai appris à ne pas rire du démon (Paris: Naïve, 2006); Lydie Salvayre’s Hymne (Paris: Seuil, 2011) explores both the broader cultural significance of and the author’s personal response to the music of Jimi Hendrix; the Inculte collective writes a novel devoted to the model Anna Nicole Smith: Inculte, Une chic fille (Paris: Naïve, 2008).

212  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century approach, or attempt to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’ ”).21 Ernaux rejects fiction on ethical and political grounds: turning her father’s life into a novel would be an act of manipulation and betrayal. François Bon also starts out writing novels in the 1980s (Sortie d’usine [1982], Limite [1985]), Le Crime de Buzon [1986], Décor ciment [1988], and Calvaire des chiens [1990]), but increasingly experiments with documentary forms in the 1990s. His 1998 text Impatience seems to voice a farewell to the novel: Le roman ne suffit plus, ni la fiction, les histoires sont là dans la ville qui traînent dans son air sali, suspendues aux lumières, ou très haut qui résonnent dans les rues vides. On préférerait un pur documentaire, on préférerait la succession muette des images [. . .]. The novel is no longer enough, nor is fiction; the stories are there in the city hanging in its dirty air, suspended on the streetlights, or loudly reverberating in the empty streets. One would prefer a pure documentary, one would prefer the mute succession of images [. . .]22

Here, the term “documentary” evokes two possible alternatives: between novel and nonfiction, and between text and image. This does not mean that all of Bon’s subsequent works can be classified as “pure documentary.” They are often hybrid docufictional works; for instance, Daewoo, 2004, based on the closing of factories belonging to the eponymous electronics conglomerate in the Lorraine region, integrates documentary components into a fictionalized account.23 Bon has since made his website tierslivre.net into his principal site of literary experimentation and publication. As Marie-Ève Therenty has argued, contemporary writers who use blogs capitalize on the screen’s effect as a “filtre générateur de fictions” (“filter that generates fictions”).24 At the same time, the blog form intensifies the documentary aspect of writing, which circulates via networks of information. Bon’s works reformulate the relation between fiction and document within a reconfigured space of writing, in constantly shifting approaches that are closely tied to the internet’s ongoing alteration of the social and cultural landscape. Emmanuel Carrère, for his part, publishes novels in the 1980s and 1990s: Bravoure (1984), La Moustache (1986), Hors d’atteinte (1988), and La Classe de neige (1995). But in the L’Adversaire (The Adversary, 2000), he investigates a shocking case of true crime, and places himself explicitly in the tradition of the

21  Annie Ernaux, La Place (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 24, trans. by Tanya Leslie as A Man’s Place (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 13. 22  François Bon, Impatience (Paris: Minuit, 1998), 12 (italics in original). 23 Bon, Daewoo (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 13. 24  Marie-Ève Thérenty, “L’effet-blog en littérature. Sur L’Autofictif d’Éric Chevillard et Tumulte de François Bon,” Itinéraires. Littérature, textes, cultures (2010): 53–63. DOI: 10.4000/itineraires.1964.

Epilogue: Documents In The Digital Age  213 American nonfiction novel, in particular Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966).25 In Un roman russe (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2007), D’autres vies que la mienne (Lives Other Than My Own, 2009), and Limonov (2011), Carrère combines journalism, autobiography, history, and spiritual quest. In his bestselling work Le Royaume (The Kingdom, 2014), Carrère offers a history of Christianity that draws on an eclectic and sometimes provocative set of documents: biblical sources and scholarly works, but also Carrère’s own notebooks, dating from his period of Christian faith in the 1990s, and—most incongruously, but also symp­tom­at­ic­ al­ly—pornographic images found online.26 These writers’ works are stylistically very different—Ernaux’s écriture plate (“flat writing”),27 Carrère’s conversational tone, and Bon’s complex syntax represent distinctive ways of positioning the writing subject in relation to the reader and to the language of others (including to the language of the various documents they incorporate). Nevertheless, their common turn away from fiction reveals a more general phenomenon at play—a suspicion of the novel and a factual tendency of which the use of documents is only a part. It is a significant part, nonetheless: the document is simultaneously an object of knowledge, the raw material from which a literary work must be extracted, and a figure for the resistance and singularity of reality—the “opacity of the real” (Carrère), the “friction” of the world (Bon), or the “shock of the real” (Ernaux).28 It is what Dominique Viart calls an “éclat de réalité”—both a “sliver” and a “flash” of reality, a luminous fragment.29 It gives rise to a work of narrative composition, theatrical presentation, or montage, even as the writer attempts to present it in its isolated and immediate manifestation. The turn away from the novel is not universal, of course. Many works of fiction continue to operate in a broadly realist mode, and other writers reject the fiction/ documentary binary altogether. The hybrid category of docufiction might be taken to encompass works as varied as Martin Winckler’s medical novels, Lola Lafon’s feminist re-imaginings of real lives, or Sabri Louatah’s political-familial sagas. If these novels share a broadly realist ambition, they often subordinate documentary elements to mimetic representation or counterfactual scenarios (one of Lafon’s [fictional] narrators has conversations with the gymnast Nadia Comăneci; Louatah imagines an election pitting Nicholas Sarkozy against a

25  Emmanuel Carrère, “Capote, Romand et Moi,” Télérama, March 11, 2006. 26  Emmanuel Carrère, Le Royaume (Paris: P.O.L, 2014), 389. 27 Ernaux, La Place, 24. 28  Emmanuel Carrère, “Emmanuel Carrère, le journalisme et ‘l’opacité du réel’,” interview with Fabrice Arfi, Mediapart, 22 February 2016. https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/220216/emmanuel-carrere-le-journalisme-et-l-opacite-du-reel?onglet=full.s; François Bon, Tumulte: roman (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 7; Loraine Day, “ ‘Entraîner les lecteurs dans l’effarement du réel’: Interview with Annie Ernaux,” Romance Studies 23(3) (2005): 229. 29  Dominique Viart and Jean-Bernard Vray (eds), François Bon, éclats de réalité (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2010).

214  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century fictional Arab politician).30 The writers associated with the Inculte group (Emmanuel Adely, Arno Bertina, Mathieu Larnaudie, Maylis de Kerangal, Emmanuelle Pireyre, Joy Sorman) remain attached to the possibilities of the novel but also emphasize the various documentary materials and discursive registers integrated into their fictions. While they create a fictional world, works such Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants (The Heart, 2014) or Un monde à portée de main (A World within Reach, 2018) bring into the novel specialized technical vocabularies that draw readers into new ways of relating to the world.31 The Inculte group thus renews the documented novel of the nineteenth century, while still retaining fiction as the privileged vehicle for animating and inhabiting het­ ero­ge­neous discourses and modes of knowledge. Still, fiction may be understood in a very broad sense here, extending beyond the realist novel. Thus Emmanuelle Pireyre, in defining “fictions documentaires” (“documentary fictions”), argues that such works are often primarily poetic rather than narrative.32 In the col­lect­ ive volume Devenirs du roman 2: écritures et matériaux (2014) the Inculte writers focus specifically on this question of writerly materials. Arguing for the need to disrupt the division between the document and the imaginary, they advocate not a transcription of reality, but rather a productive rivalry between fiction and the real.33 The document takes on multiple functions in this context: as an intrusion of the “extra-literary” that produces defamiliarization, as a textual intermediary between literature and the world, and as a way for literature to get hold of or “hook onto” unexplored regions of the real.34 Always already written, the document is nevertheless a piece of reality, as Emmanuelle Pireyre puts it: “de la matière écrite de monde, prélevée et collée dans le livre” (“written world-matter, sampled and pasted into the book”).35 Whereas the “human document” of the naturalists had grounded the legitimacy of fiction in the discourses of the human sciences, writers now operate in a world of digital dissemination that is reorganizing the transmission of knowledge. This environment can produce anxiety: “Comment ne plus être data victim?” (“How do we stop being data victims?”) asks Pireyre, offering literary form as one possible means of resistance.36 Fiction

30 See Martin Winckler, Le Chœur des femmes (Paris: P.O.L, 2009); Lola Lafon, La Petite Communiste qui ne souriait jamais (Arles: Actes Sud, 2014); Sabri Louatah, Les Sauvages, 4 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 2012–2014). 31  Maylis de Kerangal, Réparer les vivants (Paris: Verticales, 2014); Un monde à portée de main (Paris: Verticales, 2018). 32  Emmanuelle Pireyre, “Fictions documentaires,” in Inculte, Devenirs du roman (Paris: Inculte/ Naïve, 2007), 121–37. Pireyre cites Enrique Vila-Matas, Jean-Charles Masséra, Jacques-Henri Michot, Nathalie Quintane, Daniel Foucard, W. G. Sebald, and Pascal Quignard among her examples (123). 33  “Avant propos,” in Inculte, Devenirs du roman, Vol. 2, Écritures et matériaux (Paris: Éditions Inculte, 2014), 6–7. 34  See Vincent Message, “Écrivain cherche matériaux,” in Inculte, Devenirs du roman, Vol. 2, 19–34. 35  Emmanuelle Pireyre, “Un environnement assez contraignant pour les datas,” Inculte, Devenirs du roman, Vol. 2, 42. 36  Pireyre, “Un environnement assez contraignant pour les datas,” 35.

Epilogue: Documents In The Digital Age  215 persists, but the confrontation with data has unarguably transformed its place in the literary landscape. This change does not herald the end of literature (as is sometimes claimed), but rather an expansion of its concerns in an age dominated by documents. The obsession with facts in the present moment invites us to look back at and re-evaluate the literary production of the twentieth century, which is too often seen as the culminating point of an idea of literary autonomy and intransitivity. Against accounts of literature’s “return to the real,” I have set out to trace some important continuities.37 Thus Gide’s La Séquestrée de Poitiers finds an echo in Régis Jauffret’s Claustria (2012), based on the Josef Fritzl case in Austria. Surrealist investigations of urban space and its margins, as well as lesser-known narratives such as Emmanuel Bove’s Bécon-les-Bruyères (1927), and later, Georges Perec’s writings on the “infra-ordinary” in the 1970s, can be read as precursors to fieldwork texts such as François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz’s Les Passagers du RoissyExpress (Roissy-Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs, 1990), Annie Ernaux’s Journal du dehors (Exteriors, 1993), Jean Rolin’s Zones (1995), François Bon’s Paysage fer (Iron Landscape, 2000), Philippe Vasset’s Un livre blanc (A Blank Book/A White Paper, 2007), or Joy Sorman’s Paris Gare du Nord (2011). Indeed, some contemporary writers explicitly position themselves as the inheritors of a modernist or avant-garde concern with recording and investigating the real. For instance, François Bon claims in a 1997 text that Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris inaugurates a “prose of the real world” (“prose du monde réel”) far more significant for subsequent literary history than Aragon’s later, more overtly realist novels (the “monde réel” cycle).38 For Bon, Le Paysan de Paris is not a flawed experiment in the middle of the writer’s journey toward socialist realism (as the older Aragon frames it). Nor is Aragon’s book precisely realist, although it exemplifies a mode of writing that is continuous with the world—a narrative prose that grapples with the demands of poetic expression, while remaining “hooked” onto reference. According to this view, Aragon inaugurates an alternative literary legacy to realist fiction. Similarly, in an interview given in 2001, Annie Ernaux suggests that contemporary literature is elaborating forms of writing closely related to the great works of the first half of the twentieth century: “Je tiens Nadja pour le premier texte de notre modernité” (“I consider Nadja to be the first text of our modernity”).39 Yourcenar’s influence is less visible, but still present; I noted in Chapter  3 that both Ernaux and Carrère refer to her work. As for Duras’s La

37  For a nuanced account of this “return to the real,” see Dominique Viart, “Le Moment critique de la littérature: Comment penser la littérature contemporaine?,” in Le Roman français aujourd’hui: transformations, perceptions, mythologies, ed. Bruno Blanckeman and Jean-Christophe Millois (Paris: Prétexte éditeur, 2004), 12. 38  Bon, “Où l’homme a vécu commence la légende,” in Jamel Eddine Bencheihk, Jamel François Bon, Michel Chaillou et al., Aragon: le mouvement perpétuel (Paris: Stock, 1997), 15. 39 Ernaux, L’Écriture comme un couteau: entretien avec Frédéric-Yves Jeannet (Paris: Stock, 2003), 56.

216  The Documentary Imagination In Twentieth-Century Douleur, it is now considered one of her major works. The contemporary writer Olivia Rosenthal, in an article evoking the influence of Duras’s book on her own writing, describes her sense of revelation that “le document brut” (“the raw document”) could find a place in literature, and that emotion could be conveyed so powerfully through facts.40 Rosenthal’s own works follow a documentary path, from her exploration of Alzheimer’s disease in On n’est pas là pour disparaître (We’re Not Here To Disappear, 2007) to texts composed from collected tes­ti­monies or documents: Viande froide (Cold Meat, 2008), based on interviews with funeral workers, and “Maison d’arrêt Paris–La Santé, 42, rue de la Santé 75014 Paris,” (2009), originally a sound installation created for an exhibition on Paris prisons.41 The role of the document in giving voice to the voiceless becomes particularly salient in these works. To highlight these literary affinities and continuities is to run the risk of constructing a retrospective account of literary history, viewing the past through the deforming lens of the current enthusiasm for facts. But histories are always constructed from the present, and, like Yourcenar’s unorthodox genealogical project, they can bring to light striking family resemblances in unexpected places. In the preceding chapters, I emphasized both the constant presence of the documentary imagination since the beginning of the twentieth century and the changing conditions that have shaped the production and reception of factual writing. Today, the literary landscape gives a central place to documentary practices that were previously marginalized. Some see this shift as a sign that literature has become more fragile—that the thirst for “true stories” is a threat to the im­agin­ation and to the aesthetic realm.42 But, as I have argued here, the document has long been the locus of tension between literature and its outside—and thus, the site of a reflection on literariness itself. Because the document functions not only as an index of the real but also as the ground for a formal strategy (a material insertion or interruption in the text), it reconfigures the realist legacy while appealing both to a modernist literature that “lays bare the device,” to use Viktor Shklovksy’s term (or looks “behind the scenes,” as Emmanuel Carrère puts it),43 and to an avantgardism that troubles the norms of representation in the name of life. With an increasingly fragmented information landscape and the advent of social media that favor the transmission (and confusion) of true and false stories, 40  Olivia Rosenthal, “ ‘La Douleur’ de Marguerite Duras interroge la frontière entre l’humain et l’inhumain,” interview with Sabine Audrerie, La Croix, July 20, 2011. http://www.la-croix.com/ Culture/Livres-Idees/Livres/Olivia-Rosenthal-La-Douleur-de-Marguerite-Duras-interroge-la-frontiereentre-l-humain-et-l-inhumain-_EP_-2011-07-20-691048. 41 Rosenthal, On n’est pas là pour disparaître (Paris: Verticales, 2007); Viande froide: reportages (Paris: Centquatre; Nouvelles éditions Lignes, 2008); “Maison d’arrêt Paris–La Santé, 42, rue de la Santé 75014 Paris,” in L’Impossible photographie: prisons parisiennes 1851–2010 (Paris: Paris Musées, 2010), 122–7. 42  See Luc Lang, Délit de fiction: la littérature, pourquoi? (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 43  Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 149; Carrère, Le Royaume, 385.

Epilogue: Documents In The Digital Age  217 the first years of the twenty-first century have brought into sharp relief both the necessity and the difficulty of disentangling facts, fiction, and fakes. Characterized by what the American author David Shields calls “reality hunger,”44 this moment is witnessing a renewed questioning of fiction’s capacity to engage with the world. As the postmodernist conflation of narrative with fiction gives way to an urgent concern with authenticity and verification, literature renegotiates its own place by finding fresh uses for fiction and new ways of integrating facts. As a response to the epistemological anxieties of the present, the possibility of reanimating documents—of translating a trace into a voice—intensifies the ethical impetus for a literature of fact. In this context, reality continues to challenge the verisimilitude of fiction. But factual information is also fragile, mediated, and increasingly nontangible. In the face of this proliferation and this fragility, literature’s task remains, more than ever, to rescue and revive those human documents that record our passage through the world.

44  David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ” following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. actualité in film (actuality film)  15–16 (see also documentary) as current events, news, topicality  4–5, 37–8, 43–5, 132–3 Adely, Emmanuel  213 Ades, Dawn  85–6, 107–8, 111n.102 Adversaire, L’ (Carrère)  212–13 Affaire Redureau, L’ (Gide)  40–1, 45–6, 53–8, 64 as “documentation,”  53–4 psychological interpretation in  55–7 Afrique fantôme, L’ (Leiris)  117–21 Agamben, Giorgio  169–70 Âge d’homme, L’ (Leiris)  120–1, 128–9 Agee, James  174–5 Aîné des orphelins, L’ (Monénembo)  201–2 “Albert des Capitales.” (Duras) See Douleur, La Alexievich, Svetlana  199–200 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)  156 and cinema  13–14, 126 memory in  126–7, 135–6, 157–8 on naturalism  12–13 Allamand, Carole  152–3 Alexis (Yourcenar)  123–4, 151–2 Algeria 200–1 allegory and autobiography  128–9 of history  165n.11 of justice in Gide  50–2 as projection of interiority in Aragon  93 of quest for reality in Gide  74–5 and testimony  166–7, 173–4, 179–80 Allégret, Marc. See also Carnets du Congo; Voyage au Congo (Allégret) photographs by  64, 67 as secretary for Gide  73–4 Allred, Jeff  41–2 Amad, Paula  72 Amant, L’ (Duras)  130, 181–2 Amant de la Chine du Nord, L’ (Duras)  181–2 Amour fou, L’ (Breton) documents in  110

“explosante-fixe” image  86–7 found object in  95–6, 115–16 and objective chance  115–16 “Tournesol” poem in  110 Amour, la fantasia, L’ (Djebar)  200–1 Anderson, Mark M.  21n.106, 180n.71 Angot, Christine  211 Annales school  140–2 Antelme, Robert. See also Espèce humaine, L’ deportation to Dachau of  162–3 in Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre  184–5, 189 in Duras’s La Douleur  181–3, 185–7, 189 Resistance activities of  162–3, 186–7 anthropology. See also ethnography authority of  72 and fiction  24–5 and literature  114–15, 118–19 methods of  115 and surrealism  78–9 and visual images  66, 84–5, 112 Apollinaire, Guillaume  19–20, 27, 35–6. See also Calligrammes; “Zone” Apter, Emily  34–5, 45–6, 50, 75 Aragon, Louis  80, 90–104 on automatic writing  80–3 and collage  28–9 “mentir-vrai” 121 “Monde réel” cycle  121, 215–16 and urban experience  31, 79–80 See also Paysan de Paris, Le; Traité du style; “Vague de rêves, Une” Arcades Project, The (Benjamin)  100–1, 203–4 Arcane 17 (Breton)  110 Archive Fever (Derrida), see Mal d’archive archives Agamben on  169 archives and autobiography  112, 125–6, 129–30 archives and bureaucracy  8, 75, 137, 186, 191–5 Certeau on  142–3 Derrida on  194 vs. documents  4–5 family records as  122, 133, 140–2

248 Index archives (cont.) Farge on  142–3 and genetic criticism  11 hidden  193–4, 206–7 historical  122, 127, 140–2, 167–8, 197–8, 210–11 material vs. digital  207–8 versus memory  125–7, 142–3, 157–8, 164, 167–8 paradoxes of  142–3, 194 personal notebooks as  31–2 photographic 84–5 universal 118–19 voices of  56–7, 142–3, 167–8 and witnesses  169–72 Archives départementales du Nord  135–6 Archives du Nord (Yourcenar)  31, 123–4 genealogy in  136, 140–2 “hypnagogic visions” in  154–5 and paternal ancestry  123–4, 140 references to self in  139–40 sources for  135–6, 143–4 material objects in  147–8 narrative structure of  151–3 transcendance of time in  158–9 Arendt, Hannah on facts and testimony  18 See also Eichmann in Jerusalem Aristotle 5–7 Artières, Philippe  211 Ascher, Mary Louise  135–6 Astorg, Bertrand d’  173–5 Atget, Eugène  77, 85–6, 111–12 Aubry, Gwenaëlle  211 Auerbach, Erich  8–9 Augustin, Jean-Marie  61–2 Aurélien (Aragon)  121 Auschwitz  128–9, 170–1, 179–80, 193–4 Austerlitz (Sebald)  180 authenticity assertion of  32, 106–9 author as guarantor of  39–40, 45–6, 142–3 doubts regarding  184–5 of documentary images  15–16 and indexicality  15–16, 39–40 of memory  128–9 of witness testimony  170–1, 181–2, 184–5 See also factualization; verification autobiographical pact  23–4, 39–40, 89, 128 See also Lejeune, Philippe autobiography and documents  128–61 vs. documentary writing in Gide  39–42, 45–6, 64 as genre of life-writing  23, 26–7

and impersonality  124–5, 159–60 in Le Labyrinthe du monde (Yourcenar)  130–61 by Leiris  120–1, 128–9 by Modiano  191–3 by Perec  128–9 and postmemorial narratives  129–30 in post-World-War II period  31, 128–30 by Rousseau  128 vs. surrealist first-person prose  89, 122 autofiction  129–30, 208–9, 211 automatic writing vs. automatic thought  116–17 vs. documentary prose  88, 105 pastiche of by Aragon  93 as “snapshot” of thought  31, 87–8 as surrealist document  80–6, 121 Baguley, David  10 Balzac, Honoré de  5–8, 102 on the novel and the civil register  8, 192–3 on the novel as daguerreotype  7–8 Barbie, Klaus  190, 190n.103, 197 Barbusse, Henri  106–7. See also Feu, Le. Barrès, Maurice  37–8 Barthes, Roland autobiography by  31, 130 on the fait divers 43 on photography  14–16, 59–60 on La Séquestrée de Poitiers (Gide)  62–3 on the “reality effect”  6 See also Comment vivre ensemble; Mythologies; Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes Bastian, Mélanie. See Monnier, Blanche Bataille, Georges and the Collège de Sociologie  116–17 and Documents  19–20, 31, 111–22 and surrealism  79–80, 110–11, 121 Batouala (Maran)  75–6 Battle, The [Schlachtbeschreibung] (Kluge)  180 Baudelaire, Charles  13–14 Baya people  67 Beauvoir, Simone de  35, 159–60 Beaux quartiers, Les (Aragon)  121 Bécon-les-Bruyères (Bove)  215–16 Beckett, Samuel  164–6 Benjamin, Walter on the dialectical image  100–1, 203–4 on photography  111–12 on surrealism  78–9 on technological reproducibility  118–19 See also Arcades Project, The Benveniste, Émile  17n.87, 169 Bergson, Henri  126, 130 Bertina, Arno and Inculte 213–15

Index  249 Bienveillantes, Les (Littell)  209–10 Binet, Laurent  209–10. See also HHhH biofiction 208–9 biography  23, 131–2, 136, 152–3, 198–9 Blanchot, Maurice  162–3 Bloch, Marc  121, 167–8, 170–1 Bloy, Léon  11–12 Blum, Léon  64–5 Bober, Robert  128–9 Boiffard, Jacques-André big toe photographs  111–14, 113f break with Breton  110–11 and Documents 111 photographs for Nadja (Breton)  105–7, 111–12 Boltanski, Christophe  199–200 Bon, François on Aragon  215–16 fiction and documentary narratives  212–13 online literature  212 See also Daewoo; Impatience; Paysage fer Bornard, Marie  164–6 Boucharenc, Myriam  16–17 Bouju, Emmanuel  201–2, 201n.130 Bourdieu, Pierre  35, 159–60 Bove, Emmanuel  215–16 Braque, Georges  111 Brassaï  86–7, 110, 121 Braunberger, Pierre  65–6 Brecht, Berthold  20–1, 180n.71, 203 Breton, André  31, 104–10, 118–19, 121–2 on automatic writing  80–6, 121 on Documents  110–11, 115–16 and the everyday  102 on realism and naturalism  11–12, 86–8, 93–4 on reality  93–4, 104–5 on surrealist documents  19–20, 79–80, 86–7, 93 on the “trouvaille”  93 See also Amour fou; Arcane 17; Champs magnétiques, Les; Légitime défense; Manifeste du surréalisme; Nadja; Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme?; Second manifeste du surréalisme; Vases communicants, Les Briet, Suzanne  3–4 Britton, Celia  61–2 Bruder, Dora, see Dora Bruder Brunetière, Ferdinand  11–12 Buñuel, Luis  77–8 Bureau de Recherches surréalistes 83 Butor, Michel  178–9 Buttes-Chaumont park  88–9, 98–9 Cache, La (Boltanski)  199–200 Cadiot, Olivier  23n.122, 208–9 Cahiers de la guerre (Duras)  184–7, 189

Cahun, Claude  121 Caillet, Aline  26–7, 208n.7 Caillois, Roger  116–17 Calligrammes (Apollinaire)  20 Camus, Albert.  164–6, 165n.11, 173–4. See also Chute, La; Peste, La Capote, Truman  21, 212–13 Carlier, Christophe  132 Carlston, Erin  124–5 Carnets du Congo (Allégret)  64, 69–71 Carrère, Emmanuel nonfiction novel, turn to  211–13 true crime in  212–13 on Yourcenar’s methods  160, 215–16 See also Adversaire, L’; D’autres vies que la mienne; Royaume, Le; Limonov Carroll, Lewis  80, 99 Carruthers, Mary  125–6 Carte et le territoire, La (Houellebecq)  207–8 Caves du Vatican, Les (Gide)  39, 44–5 Cayrol, Jean  173–5 art lazaréen (Lazarean art)  173–4 romanesque concentrationnaire 173–4 Cendrars, Blaise poetry of notetaking  82–3 See also Documentaires Certeau, Michel de on historical documents vs. analytical apparatus 28 on past and present  142–3, 171–2 on the quotidian  95–6 C’est maintenant du passé (Rubinstein)  199–200 Chagrin et la pitié, Le (Ophuls)  180–1 Champs magnétiques, Les (Breton and Soupault) 80–1 Chandler, James  24–5 Chaouat, Bruno  162n.3 Char, René  173 Chevrier, Jean-François  26 Choses vues (Hugo)  7 Chronique d’un été (Rouch and Morin)  181 Chute, La (Camus)  164–6, 165n.11 cinema and automatic writing, analogy for  82–3, 85–6 the close-up in  93–4 documentary beginnings of  15–16 as imaginary medium in literature  1–2, 13–14 montage in  77–8, 102–3 process shot in  192 and proto-cinematic description in literature 11 realism in  14–16, 36–7, 86–7, 104, 126 See also documentary film cinepoetry 86–7 Claudel, Paul  37–8

250 Index Claustria (Jauffret)  62–3, 215–16 Cleenewerck de Crayencour, Fernande de “Album de,”  143 death in childbirth of  138–40 photograph of  156 reimagined life of  150–3 “relics” of  144–7 souvenirs pieux of  143–4, 145f, 146f writings by  148–50 Cleenewerck de Crayencour, Gabrielle de  143–4, 152–3 Cleenewerck de Crayencour, Marguerite de. See Yourcenar, Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour, Marie de  154–5 Cleenewerck de Crayencour, Michel de  143–7, 152–6 Cleenewerck de Crayencour, Michel Charles 151–3 Cleenewerck de Crayencour, Michel-Joseph de  136, 143 Clifford, James  72, 114–16 Cloches de Bâle, Les (Aragon)  121 Cohen, Margaret  88 Cohn, Dorrit  23–4, 52–3, 131–2, 150–1 collage Aragon on  100–1, 100n.69 cubist 84 Dadaist  79–80, 84 documentary  20–1, 28–9, 213–15 in Le Labyrinthe du monde (Yourcenar) 143–4 in Nadja (Breton)  105–6 in Le Paysan de Paris (Aragon)  88–93, 98–101 pseudo-collage  89, 91–2 and quotation  93 in La Révolution surréaliste 84 in Sebald  180 surrealist 77 Collège de sociologie  116–17 Colonel Chabert, Le (Balzac)  8 colonialism in Algeria  200–1 and cinema  66–7 criticisms of  66–7 and documentary forms  3–4 and ethnographic practices  31, 119–20 and exhibitions  119 in French Equatorial Africa  64–6 Gide’s attitude toward  38–41, 64–6, 74–5 Leiris’s attitude toward  70 in Rwanda  200–1 surrealist opposition to  119 in Voyage au Congo (Allégret)  66–7, 69–70, 72 in Voyage au Congo (Gide)  66, 73–6 Combe, Dominique  87–8

Comment vivre ensemble (Barthes)  62–3 communism Aragon and  121 Duras and  186–7 Gide’s attitude toward  38–41 and L’Humanité (newspaper)  106–7 and surrealism  86–7, 119 Communistes, Les (Aragon)  121 concentrationary literature. See “romanesque concentrationnaire.” Congo. See French Equatorial Africa; Voyage au Congo (Allégret); Voyage au Congo (Gide) Conley, Tom  78–9 Conrad, Joseph  73–4 Coppet, Marcel de  64–5 Coquio, Catherine  165n.9, 169n.25, 194 Corps et biens (Desnos)  80 Corydon (Gide)  50 Counterfeiters, The. See Faux-Monnayeurs, Les (Gide) Coup de grâce, Le (Yourcenar)  123–4 Cowie, Elizabeth  25 Crayencour. See Cleenewerck de Crayencour; Yourcenar, Marguerite. crime against humanity  169, 190, 197 and the fait divers  42–3, 195, 212–13 in L’Affaire Redureau (Gide)  55–7 in Le Labyrinthe du monde (Yourcenar)  152–3 in Souvenirs de la cour d’Assises (Gide)  40–2, 45–52 criminology 45–6 Croisière noire, La (Poirier)  66–7 Crowley, Martin  162nn.2,3, 181–2, 184, 186–7, 188n.95 Cru, Jean Norton Témoins  172, 172n.44 cubism  84, 92–3 Curatolo, Bruno  174n.51 Currie, Gregory  4n.10 Cusset, Catherine  211 Dachau (concentration camp)  156, 162–3, 185–6 Dada and collage  79–80, 84 cut-up techniques  91–2 and film  86–7 Paris group  89, 94 Daewoo (Bon)  212 Dakar-Djibouti Mission  74–5, 117–18, 120n.134 Dali, Salvador  85–6, 110, 121 Darville, Jacques  172 Daston, Lorraine  4–5, 24–5 D’autres vies que la mienne (Carrère)  213

Index  251 Davis, Colin  188n.95 Davis, Lennard J.  5 Dear Departed. See Souvenirs pieux (Yourcenar) Debaene, Vincent  95–6, 114–15, 118–19 De Chirico, Giorgio  105–6 decoupage 107–8 Defoe, Daniel  5 de Gaulle, Charles  180–1, 186–7 deixis  14–15, 89, 93, 97–8, 106–7 See also indexicality. Delaume, Chloé  211 Delbo, Charlotte  164–6 Demanze, Laurent  208n.7 Denes, Dominique  185 Derrida, Jacques  162–3 on reminiscence and writing  125–6, 162–3 See also Mal d’archive Desnos, Robert  92–3, 110–11. See also Corps et biens Détue, Frédérik  163n.6, 184n.80 Devenirs du roman 2 (Inculte) 213–15 diaries in Duras’s La Douleur  182, 184–7 as genre  26n.141 Gide’s  37–9, 45–6 in Modiano’s works  192–3 Diderot, Denis  5 Didier, Béatrice  138–9 Didi-Huberman, Georges on Documents 112–14 on the empreinte  18–19, 115 on photographs of Auschwitz  170 Diop, Boubakar Boris  201–2 Djebar, Assia  159–60. See also Amour, la fantasia, L’ Docteur Pascal, Le (Zola)  10–11 docufiction 212–15 Documentaires (Cendrars)  1–2, 16–17 document, definition of  3–5 documentality (Ferraris)  19, 207–8 documentary film  160, 192 and autobiography  128–9 cinéma vérité  15–16, 180–1 “city symphony,”  103–4 definitions of  2, 4n.10, 15–16, 19–20, 22–3 direct cinema  71 and ethnographic cinema  30, 66–7, 69, 72, 74n.125, 76, 120–1 and exoticism  66–7, 69–70, 73 vs. fiction film  19–20 history of  2, 13–17 as “imaginary medium” in literature  13–14, 71 Kino-Pravda 15–16 myth of  14–15

and the photographic image  14–15 presence of filmmaker in  71, 160 and remediation  20–1, 209–10 and surrealism  77–8, 86–7, 92–3 and testimony  173–4, 180–1, 209–10 See also actualité; Chronique d’un été; Chagrin et la pitié, Le; Flaherty, Robert; Grierson, John; Rouch, Jean; Récits d’Ellis Island; Shoah; Voyage au Congo (Allégret) documentary imagination  3, 16–17, 22–3, 25, 207–8, 216 documentary theater  20–1, 180, 203 document humain and dehumanization  9–10, 60–1, 107–8, 118–19 and factual literature  18–19, 26–7, 32, 54, 121–2 the fait divers as  8 Goncourt brothers on  9–10 and naturalist literature  3–5, 8–11, 79–80, 213–15 Paulhan on  78–9 Yourcenar’s Le Coup de grâce as  123n.2 Zola on  10–11 document poétique  17n.85, 27, 83–4 Documents (journal)  19–20, 110–22 Donoghue, Emma  62–3 Dora Bruder (Modiano)  190–1, 193–9 and the bureaucratic archive  193–5 and commemoration  197 fictionalization in  198–9 and the “found text,”  31–2, 194–5, 196f and investigation  166–7, 190 reflexivity in  199 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  44–5, 56–7, 152–3, 175 Douleur, La (Duras)  181–90 “Albert des Capitales,”  181–2, 185 and Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine 184, 185n.87, 186–9 “Aurélia Steiner,”  181–2 documentary dossiers in  185–6 “Douleur, La,”  181–9 externalization of memory  181 fact and fiction in  184–9 the “found text” in  31–2, 166–7, 183 “Monsieur X dit ici Pierre Rabier,”  181–2, 185–7 “Ortie brisée, L’, ”  181–2 Rosenthal on  215–16 “Ter le milicien,”  181–2, 185 and war crimes trials  190 Drancy internment camp  172, 194 Drancy la juive (Darville and Wichené)  172 Dreyfus Affair  37–8 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre  174–5

252 Index Dubois, Jacques  35n.9 Dulong, Renaud  18, 23–5, 144–7, 149–50, 168n.21 Duras, Marguerite  31–2, 130, 162–3, 166–7, 181–90, 197–8, 202, 215–16 autobiographical writing  130, 181–2, 185 wartime experience  181–2 See also Amant, L’; Amant de la Chine du Nord; Cahiers de la guerre; Douleur, La; Outside; “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” Durosay, Daniel  65–6 Eakin, Paul John  137n.35 Eichmann, Adolf  163, 193–4 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt)  193–4 Einstein, Carl  115 Eliot, T. S.  95–6 Éluard, Paul  35–6, 105–8 ekphrasis 29 Emigants, The (Sebald)  180 empreinte 18–19 Epstein, Jean  108–9 Ernaux, Annie “ecriture plate” (flat writing)  213 fiction, rejection of  211–12 “transpersonal I,”  159–60 on Yourcenar  159–60 See also Honte, La; Journal du dehors; Place, La Ernst, Max  80–1, 92–3, 105–6, 110 Espèce humaine, L’ (Antelme) and deportation narratives  164–6, 173–4 Duras’s La Douleur, compared with  184, 185n.87, 186–9 humanism in  162–3, 162n.3, 188n.95 influence of  162–3 Perec, read by  162–3, 179–80 Esprit (journal)  172–4 Eternity Regained. See Quoi? L’éternité (Yourcenar) ethnography and cinema  66–7, 69, 72–3 and Documents (journal)  110–22 and documentary writing  41–2 and ethnology  114–15 and museum collections  117, 119–21 and surrealism  79, 95–6, 114–15, 117 Zola’s notebooks as  11 See also anthropology; ethnology; Dakar–Djibouti Mission; Documents; Griaule, Marcel; Leiris, Michel, Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro; Musée de l’Homme ethnology. See ethnography Et nunc manet in te (Gide)  39 Evans, Walker  174–5

evidence in L’Affaire Redureau (Gide)  55–6 collection of  8–9 construction of  19, 75–6 in Documents 112 documents defined as  3–5, 8, 80 forensic 49–50 historical  130–1, 167–8 identity records as  193 images as  15–16, 106–7, 112 materiality of  18 in Dora Bruder (Modiano)  195, 199 in La Douleur (Duras)  185, 188–9 in Le Labyrinthe du monde (Yourcenar)  135, 144–7, 151–2, 154–5 in Mémoires d’Hadrien (Yourcenar)  132–3 in Nadja (Breton)  105–7 narrativization of  199 in Le Paysan de Paris (Aragon)  92–3 perception and  17 and self-evidence  23–4, 58 in La Séquestrée de Poitiers (Gide)  58–60 in Souvenirs de la cour d’Assises (Gide)  49–50 textual  80–1, 89–92 in Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad (Gide) 75–6 See also witnesses and testimony “evidential paradigm” (Ginzburg)  18–19 exofiction  208–9, 211 Exposition coloniale internationale (1931)  119 eyewitness. See witnesses and testimony Fabre, Daniel  23 factographies  20–1, 26–7, 208–9 factualization  24–5, 144–7, 150–1. See also verification faits divers Barthes on  43 in Gide’s works  33–64, 52n.68, 175 Grenier on  175 in literature  42–3 in the press  42–3, 50–2, 58, 195 in La Révolution surréaliste 84 Sarraute on  177–8 in Les Temps modernes 175 Tournier on  175–6 fakes and falsification  2, 116–17, 188–9, 192, 216–17 faktura 20–1 Farge, Arlette  142–3 Faux-Monnayeurs, Les (Gide)  39 mise-en-abyme in  34–5 narrative techniques of  53 reality and the fait divers in  33–7, 39–40, 45 Fegdal, Charles  44

Index  253 feint, feigning  131–2 Felman, Shoshana  163n.6, 164–6, 165n.11, 167–8, 168n.22 Fénéon, Felix  42–3 Ferraris, Maurizio  19, 207–8 Fest’Africa Festival  201–2 Feu, Le (Barbusse)  86–7, 172, 172n. 44 fictionalization of documents  25 in Dora Bruder (Modiano)  198–9 in La Douleur (Duras)  181–2, 184–9 within factual writing  13, 24–5, 207–8, 211–12 of faits divers in Gide’s works  45–6 of genocide  31–2, 200–2 in Le Labyrinthe du monde (Yourcenar) 150–5 in Mémoires d’Hadrien  31, 132–3 narrative techniques of  131–2, 150–4 fieldwork in ethnography  72, 114–15 in literature  8–9, 11–13, 200–1, 207–8, 215–16 film. See cinema; documentary film Films du Jeudi  65–6 Films du Panthéon, Les  65–6 Flaherty, Robert  15–16, 66–7, 71–2 Flaubert, Gustave  5–6, 8–9, 35, 42–3 Foenkinos, David  209–10 Foucart, Claude  45, 54 Foucault, Michel. See also Moi, Pierre Rivière; “Vie des hommes infâmes, La” on the archive  169 on history and the document  27–8 on intransitivity in literature  2–3 Françafrique 200–1 France-Rwanda: les coulisses du genocide (Kayimahe) 201–2 Franklin, Ruth  166n.13 Frantz, Anaïk  215–16 French Equatorial Africa  30, 64–6, 74–5 Frères Zemganno, Les (Goncourt, Edmond de) 9–10 Freud, Sigmund  83–4, 102, 128–9 Frick, Grace  124–5, 132 Fulbe people  67 Furst, Lilian R.  7–8 Futter, Walter  69 futurism (Italian)  35–6 futurism (Russian)  20–1 Gallagher, Catherine  5, 7n.28 Galison, Peter  24–5 Gaudy, Hélène  209–10 Gautier, Jean-Jacques Histoire d’un fait divers 175 Geiger, Jeffrey  66n.103

Genet, Jean  55 genetic criticism  11, 13 Genette, Gérard  22–4, 34n.3 Germinal (Zola)  35 Germinie Lacerteux (Goncourt brothers)  9–10 Gestapo  162–3, 187–8, 189n.99, 190 Giacometti, Alberto  95–6 Gide, André autobiographical space vs. documentary space 39–40 and the fait divers  33–64, 52n.68, 175 and modernism  21–2, 35–7, 41–2, 65–6 See also Affaire Redureau, L’; Caves du Vatican, Les; Corydon; Faux-Monnayeurs, Les; Immoraliste L’; Journal; Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs; Nourritures terrestres, Les; Retour de l’U.R.S.S.; Retour du Tchad, Le; Séquestrée de Poitiers, La; Si le grain ne meurt; Souvenirs de la cour d’assises; Voyage au Congo Gindine, Yvette  98–9 Ginzburg, Carlo on clues and evidence  18–19 on involuntary testimonies  167–8, 167n.18 on threads and traces  27, 57n.82 Gitelman, Lisa  4–5, 192–4, 206 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de  8–10, 12–13, 87–8. See also Frères Zemganno, Les; Germinie Lacerteux; Journal Gordon, Kay  155–6 Gorrora, Claire  185n.87 Gosset, Jean  172–3 Goulet, Alain  34–5 Gratton, Johnnie  191n.106 Greene, Graham  173 Grenier, Roger  175–6 Griaule, Marcel  74–5, 114–15, 117–21 Grierson, John  15–16, 22–3, 66–7 Groupov (theater collective) RWANDA 94 203–4 Guibert, Hervé  211 Gunning, Tom  14–15 Haenel, Yannick  209–10. See also Jan Karski Hamburger, Käte  131–2 Hamon, Philippe  96 Hanna, Christophe  27 Hartog, François  166, 166n.14 Harvey, Robert  164–6 Hatzfeld, Jean  200–1, 203 Hayles, N. Katherine  207–8 Hebert, Julie  139–40 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  22–3 Heinich, Nathalie  186–7 Hessel, Stéphane  175

254 Index Heydrich, Reinhard  210–11 Heyne, Eric  24–5 HHhH (Binet)  210–11 Hill, Leslie  184–5, 185n.84 Hilsum, Mireille  197–8 Hirsch, Marianne  179–80 Histoire de la littérature récente (Cadiot)  208–9 Histoire des grands parents que je n’ai pas eus (Jablonka) 199–200 Hitchcott, Nicki  200n.127 Hocquard, Emmanuel  19–20, 27 Hollier, Denis  112–14 Holocaust denial of  170–1 fictionalization of  166n.13, 169–70 remembrance of  164–6, 197–8, 200–1 representation of  170 trauma and  128–9, 163n.6 witnesses and survivors of  169, 180–1 See also Auschwitz Honte, La (Ernaux)  159–60 Horowitz, Sara  169 Houellebecq, Michel  207–8 Houppermans, Sjef  138–9, 155–6 Howell, Jennifer  199n.121 How Many Years. See Archives du Nord (Yourcenar) Hugo, Victor  105. See also Choses vues; Misérables, Les human document, see document humain Humanité, L’ 106–7 Huret, Jules  11–12 Huysmans, Joris Karl  12, 87–8 Huyssen, Andreas  20–1 Hymne (Salvayre)  211n.20 Ilboudo, Monique  201–2 IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine) 184–5 Immoraliste, L’ (Gide)  123 Impatience (Bon)  212 Inculte (collective)  211n.20, 213–15 indexicality and collage  28–9, 92–3 and contextualization  118–19 of documentary film  15–16 of documents  3–4, 17–20, 39–40, 124–5, 216 iconicity and  14–15 vs. mimesis  203–4 linguistic  17, 59–60 of photographs  14–17, 59–60, 84–6, 106–9 of surrealist texts  79–80, 89–91, 107–8 See also deixis; empreinte; traces “infra-ordinary” (Perec)  19–20, 95–6, 215–16 Institut d’Ethnologie (Paris)  114–15

internet  206–7, 212 Investigation, The (Weiss)  180 Jablonka, Ivan  199–200, 211 Jaccomard, Hélène  155–6 Jackson, Elizabeth  53 Janet, Pierre  83–4 Jan Karski (Haenel)  209–10 Jauffret, Régis  62–3, 215–16 Jean Barois (Martin du Gard)  11–12 Jeannelle, Jean-Louis  22–3, 26, 131–2, 135 Jenny, Laurent  79, 82–3 Journal (Gide)  37–9, 42–3 Journal (Goncourt brothers)  9–10, 12–13 Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (Gide)  34–5, 53 Journal du dehors (Ernaux)  215–16 journalism vs. literature  2, 7–8, 44–5, 75–6 literary  7, 20–1, 23, 27, 174–5, 181–2, 185, 199–200, 212–13 sensationalism in  33–4, 43, 58–9, 61–2, 175 See also faits divers; New Journalism Kafka, Franz  173, 175 Karski, Jan  209–10 Karski Report, The (Lanzmann)  210 Kayimahe, Vénuste  201–2 Kerangal, Maylis de  213–15 Klarsfeld, Beate  197 Klarsfeld, Serge  197–8. See also Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France; Mémorial des enfants juifs déportés de France Kluge, Alexander  20–1. See also Battle, The Kodak (Cendrars). See Documentaires. Koestler, Arthur  174–5 Krauss, Rosalind  14–15, 84–6 Kristeva, Julia  144–7 Kritzmann, Lawrence  186n.89 Labyrinthe du monde, Le (Yourcenar)  31, 135–61 as archival autobiography  124–5 documentary modernism of  160–1 as family saga  123–4 personal memory and external documents in 130–1 relationship to novels of  134–5 See also Souvenirs pieux; Archives du Nord; Quoi? L’éternité LaCapra, Dominick  165n. 11 Laclos, Choderlos de  5 Lacoste, Charlotte  163n.6, 184n.80 Lafon, Lola  213–15. See also Petite communiste qui ne souriait jamais, La Lamba, Jacqueline  110

Index  255 Lambeth, John  51n.67, 52n.68, 55–6 Lang, Luc  216n.42 Lanzmann, Claude  15–16, 170, 180–1. See also Karski Report, The; Shoah Larnaudie, Mathieu  213–15 Latour, Bruno  24–5 Laub, Dori  163n.6, 169 Laurens, Camille  211 Lavocat, Françoise  24–5 Leclerc, Yvain  158–9 Leenhardt, Jacques  100–1 Légitime défense (Breton)  86–7, 106–7 Leibovici, Franck  27 Leiris, Michel  36–7, 79–80, 114–15, 128–9 and the Dakar-Djibouti Mission  74–5, 117–21 and Documents 111 on ethnographic display  31, 117–19 on the Musée de l’Homme  117–18 See also Afrique fantôme, L’; Règle du jeu, La Lejeune, Philippe on the autobiographical pact  23–4 on the autobiographical space  39–40, 47n.58, 155–6 definition of autobiography by  121n. 124 on the referential pact  23–4 on verification in autobiography  128 Lestringant, Frank  34–5, 37–8 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans) 174–5 Levi, Primo  169 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  114–15 Liberté, La (newspaper)  89–91, 90f, 91f Lieutenant colonel de Maumort, Le (Martin du Gard) 131–2 Limonov (Carrère)  212–13 Littell, Jonathan  209–10 littérature engagée  37–8, 75–6, 174–7. See also Sartre, Jean-Paul Livret de famille (Modiano)  190–1 Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, The (Mendelsohn) 199–200 Lotar, Eli  111 Louatah, Sabri  213–15, 214n.30 Louis, Annick  211n.19 Louis, Édouard  211 Lucey, Michael  12–13, 39–40, 74–5 Lugon, Olivier  15–16, 85–6 Lyotard, Jean-François  162–3, 170–1 Mac Orlan, Pierre  16–17, 82–3 Maigne, Jean  172–3 “Maison d’arrêt Paris-la-Santé” (Rosenthal) 215–16 Mal d’archive (Derrida)  194 Mallarmé, Stéphane  2, 36–8, 43

Manifeste du surréalisme (Breton)  80–1, 85–7, 104 Manuel, Henri  105–7 Maran, René  75–6 Marcel, Gabriel  54, 61–2 Marks, Elaine  124–5 Martin du Gard, Roger  11–12, 131–2 Mascolo, Dionys  186–7 Maspero, François  215–16 Massa people  67–8 Masson, André  85–6, 111 Masson, Pierre  47 Mauriac, François  56–7, 57n.81, 174–5, 176–7 Mauss, Marcel  95–6 Mauvignier, Laurent  209–10 Mead, Margaret  66 Megill, Allan  167–8 Meizoz, Jérome  38–9 Mémoires d’Hadrien (Yourcenar) and autobiography  155–6 Carrère on  160 distance and proximity in  132–4 exemplarity in  140 fictionalization of history in  31, 123–4, 131–2, 134, 154–5 “referential apparatus” of  131–2, 142–3 Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France (Klarsfeld) 197–8 Mémorial des enfants juifs déportés de France (Klarsfeld) 197 Mendelsohn, Daniel  199–200 Message, Vincent  214n.34 Messenger, The (Haenel). See Jan Karski Métraux, Alfred  114–15 Metz, Christian  15–16 Michon, Pierre  159–60. See also Vies minuscules Millet, Catherine  211 Milne, Anna-Louise  36n.11. See also 75 Minotaure (journal)  82–3, 86–7, 117, 121 Misérables, Les (Hugo)  7, 198–9 Mitterand, Henri  10–11, 103 Mitterrand, François  185–6 Mobile (Butor)  178–9 modernism Anglo-American  35–6, 41–2 and the avant-garde  20–1 vs. documentary  21–2, 30 French 35–7 German 20–1 Gide’s 76 Yourcenar’s  124–6, 158–61 Modiano, Patrick  159–60, 166–7, 190–9 on the bureaucratic record  31–2, 191–5 as postmemorial subject  190–1 See also Dora Bruder; Livret de famille; Pedigree, Un; Place de l’Étoile, La; Voyage de noces

256 Index Moi, Pierre Rivière (Foucault)  56–7, 57n.82 Moisson de crânes (Waberi)  202 “Monde réel” cycle (Aragon)  121 Monénembo, Tierno  201–2 Monnier, Blanche  57–64, 177 Morand, Paul  16–17 Morin, Edgar  180–1 Morris, Alan  199 Mounier, Emmanuel  172–3 Mukasonga, Scholastique  200–2 Murambi: le livre des ossements (Diop)  201–2 Murat, Michel  82–4, 103, 108–9 Murekatete (Ilboudo)  201–2 Murnau, F. W.  110 Musée de l’Homme  114–15, 117–18 Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro  114–15, 117 Mythologies (Barthes)  65–6

Œuvre au noir, L’ (Yourcenar)  123–4, 131, 134, 155–6 Ombre d’Imana, L’ (Tadjo)  202–3 perpetrators in  202–3 testimony and fiction in  202 witness voices in  202–3 On n’est pas là pour disparaître (Rosenthal) 215–16 On the Natural History of Destruction (Sebald) 180 Ophuls, Marcel  15–16. See also Chagrin et la pitié, Le Ordre du Jour, L’ (Vuillard)  205–8 Otchakovsky-Laurens, Paul  181–2 Ouellet, Pierre  97 Outside (Duras)  181–2, 184–5 OVNI (objet verbal non-identifié) 23

Nadeau, Maurice  88 Nadja (Breton)  32, 104–10, 115–16, 121–2 documentary collage in  105–8 as “document pris sur le vif,”  19–20, 87–8 Ernaux on  215–16 photographs in  28–9, 105–9, 111–12 (see also Boiffard, Jacques-André) photomontage in  107–8, 109f subjecthood and dialogism in  108–10, 122 transparency in  105 urban experience in  79–80 naturalism (literary) and the document humain  2–5, 8–11, 13–14 legacy of  12–13, 54, 86–7 preparatory materials in  11–12 Neefs, Jacques  11 Nichols, Bill  15–16, 25 Niney, François  15–16 Nobel Prize in Literature  37–8, 190–1, 199–200 Nonnenmacher, Georges  138–9 nouveau roman  19–20, 166–7, 178–82 mimesis. See realism Neue Sachlichkeit  20–1, 84–5, 180 New Journalism  20–1 New Objectivity, see Neue Sachlichkeit Nietzsche, Friedrich W.  24–5 Noetinger, Élise  185n.84 nonfiction novel  20–1 Nora, Pierre  127, 163–4, 163n.7 Notre-Dame du Nil (Mukasonga)  201–2 Nourritures terrestres, Les (Gide)  38–9, 58 Nouvelle Revue Française, La  30, 78–9, 176–7 faits divers rubric in  33–4, 36–7, 43–5 and literary autonomy  174–5 modernism and  35–7 serial publications in  40–1 NRF, see Nouvelle Revue Française

Paige, Nicholas  5 papier collé. See collage Papin sisters  55 Papon, Maurice  190, 193–4 Paris Gare du Nord (Sorman)  215–16 Paris-Soir (newspaper)  195, 196f, 197 Partisans (journal)  162–3 Passage de l’Opéra  88–93, 97, 100–1 Passagers du Roissy-Express, Les (Maspero and Frantz) 215–16 Paulhan, Jean  43–4, 78–9 Pavel, Thomas  22n.113, 103–4 Payart, Eugene  98–9 Paysage fer (Bon)  215–16 Paysan de Paris, Le (Aragon)  79–80, 88–104, 106–7, 110, 115–16, 121–2 collage and pseudo-collage in  28–9, 89–93, 90f, 98–9, 100f description in  94–7, 99–100 François Bon on  215–16 “mythology” in  88, 93–4, 97–104 reference and illusion in  89, 93–4 subjectivity and objectivity in  97–8 Pedigree, Un (Modiano)  191–3 documentary depersonalization in  192 Peirce, Charles  14–15 Perec, Georges on documents and literature  19–20, 180 and the “infra-ordinary,”  19–20, 95–6, 215–16 on Robert Antelme  162–3, 179–80 See also Récits d’Ellis Island; W ou le souvenir d’enfance Père Goriot, Le (Balzac)  5–6 Peste, La (Camus) as historical allegory  165n.11 as testimonial fiction  164–6, 165n.11, 173–4

Index  257 Petite communiste qui ne souriait jamais, La (Lafon)  213–15, 214n.30 petit fait vrai  6–9, 176–8 photographs  1–2, 11, 20–1, 119 of atrocity  71, 170 and autobiography  128–30, 143–7, 156 documentary  15–16, 21–2, 118, 120–1 in Documents 111–15 indexicality and  13–19, 59–60 interactions with literature of  13–17, 28–30, 41–2, 205–8 vs. literary representation  36–8, 126 as paradigm for surrealism  31, 77–8, 80–8, 92–3, 102–3 in surrealist works  95–6, 105–10, 121–2 as witnesses  170, 175–6 See also Allégret, Marc; Atget, Eugène; Boiffard, Jacques-André; Brassaï; Lotar, Eli; Ray, Man Picasso, Pablo  100n.69, 105–6, 110–11 Pireyre, Emmanuelle  213–15 Pirmez, Octave  143–4, 151–6 Pirmez, Rémo  151–6 Place, La (Ernaux)  160, 211–12 Place de l’Étoile, La (Modiano)  190 Plato 125–6 poetic document, see document poétique Poirier, Léon  66–7 P.O.L (publisher)  181–2 Poovey, Mary  24–5 postmemory documentary memory and  181 generational distance and  179–81, 199–200 in Modiano  190–1, 191n.106 See also Hirsch, Marianne Pot-Bouille (Zola)  50–2, 62–3 Pouillaude, Frédéric  26–7 Prévert, Jacques  110 proof. See evidence Proust, Marcel  37–8, 47, 102, 177–8. See also À la recherche du temps perdu Proust, Simone  137–8 Prstojevic, Alexandre  166n.13 Queneau, Raymond break with Breton  110–11 on documentary film  2, 14–15 See also Saint Glinglin Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Sartre)  37–8 Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme? (Breton)  104 Quintane, Nathalie  27, 29–30, 30f Quoi? L’éternité (Yourcenar)  31, 123–4 fictionalizing procedures in  152–3 material mementos in  148

memory and history in  157–8 personal memory in  151–2 spiritualism in  154–5 transcendence of time in  135–6 Raimond, Michel  13, 35n.8 Rajewsky, Irina O.  28n.151, 106n.86 Rancière, Jacques  6–7, 19–20, 47–8, 102–3 Ray, Man  77, 86–7, 95–6, 105–6, 110, 121 Real, Elena  138–9 realism (literary) documents in  8–13, 26 factual detail in  5–8, 12, 42–3 vs. factual literature  2–3, 5, 21–2, 26–7, 35 fictionality and  5, 26 and modernism  33–8, 45–6 and naturalism  8–9 and surrealism  77–9, 78n.4, 101–2, 104–5, 121–2 realism (philosophical)  19 realism (photographic)  14–16, 37–8, 84–5 Reality Hunger (Shields)  216–17 Récits d’Ellis Island (Perec and Bober)  128–9 Reed, John  174–5 Règle du jeu, La (Leiris)  120–1 remediation  20–1, 28–9, 210 Resistance (French)  162–3, 172–5, 181–2, 185–9 Resnais, Alain  15–16 Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (Gide)  41 Retour du Tchad, Le (Gide)  30, 41, 64 on Allégret’s filming process  70–1 description in  68–9 reception of  75–6 See also Voyage au Congo (Gide) Reval, Jeanne de  135–6, 151–3 Reverseau, Anne  82–3 Revue européenne 88 Révolution surréaliste, La  77, 80–1, 83–6, 115–16 Reznikoff, Charles  19–20 Ricardou, Jean  178–9 Ricœur, Paul  27n.144, 170–1, 199 Rimbaud, Arthur  121–2, 135–6 Rivet, Paul  114–15, 117–18 Rivière, Georges-Henri  69, 114–15, 120–1, 120n.134 Rivière, Jacques  35–6 Robbe-Grillet, Alain  178–9 Roberts, John  84–5, 93 Robin, Régine  211 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Barthes) 130 Rolin, Jean  215–16 “romanesque concentrationnaire” (Cayrol) 173–4 Roman expérimental, Le (Zola)  8–11

258 Index Rosenthal, Olivia on Duras  215–16 See also “Maison d’arrêt Paris-la-Santé”; On n’est pas là pour disparaître; Viande froide Rose, Sven Eric  191n.106, 193–4 Rothberg, Michael  124–5, 181n. 76 Roubaud, Jacques  130 Rouch, Jean  15–16, 66–7. See also Chronique d’un été Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  98–9, 128, 130, 138–9 Rousset, David  164–6, 173–5 Roussin, Philippe  26 Rousso, Henry  180–1, 190 Royaume, Le (Carrère)  160, 212–13 Rubinstein, Marianne  199–200 Ruffel, Lionel  209n.11 Rurangwa, Jean-Marie Vianney  201–2 Rwandan genocide  31–2, 200–4, 200n.127 “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire” (Fest’Africa project)  201–2, 202n.131 Rwanda: le genocide des Tutsi expliqué à un étranger (Rurangwa)  201–2 RWANDA 94 (Groupov collective)  203–4 Saint Glinglin (Queneau)  62–3 Saint-Tropez–Une Américaine (Quintane)  29–30, 30f Salvayre, Lydie  211n.20 Sanyal, Debarati  165n. 11 Sapiro, Gisèle  38–9, 174–5 Sara people  67 Sarraute, Nathalie  19–20, 179–80 “Ère du soupçon, L’, ”  62–3, 177–9 tropisme  54, 178 Sartre, Jean-Paul  38–9, 174–7 Camus, compared to  164–6 littérature engagée  37–8, 176–7 “situation,” notion of  166–7, 173–4 See also Qu’est-ce que la littérature?; Séquestrés d’Altona, Les Schaeffer, Jean-Marie  5–6 Scherschel, Frank  207–8 Schuschnigg, Kurt (Austrian chancellor)  205–7, 207f Searle, John  23–4 Sebald, W.G.  20–1, 180 Second manifeste du surréalisme (Breton)  110–11, 115 Segal, Naomi  49–50 Sekula, Allan  21–2 Sembene, Ousmane  74n.125 Semprún, Jorge  164–6 Séquestrée de Poitiers, La (Gide)  40–1, 45–6, 54, 57–64, 60f authorial presence in  59–61

influence of  62–4, 215–16 Sarraute on  177–8 Séquestrés d’Altona, Les (Sartre)  62–3 Shakespeare, William  132–3, 155–6 Sheringham, Michael  57n.82, 87–8, 107–8, 115–16, 129–30, 159–60 Shields, David  216–17 Shklovsky, Viktor  216 Shoah (Lanzmann)  170, 180–1, 209–10 signposts of fictionality  23–4, 52–3. See also Cohn, Dorrit Si le grain ne meurt (Gide)  39–40, 40n.26, 47 Simon, Claude  178–9 Simenon, Georges  16–17, 35, 62–3 Skira, Albert  117 Snyman, Elisabeth  140–2 75 (Milne)  207–8 Sorman, Joy  213–16 Soupault, Philippe  75, 80–1, 88 Souvenirs de la cour d’assises (Gide)  47–53, 55–6, 63–4, 152–3 and the fait divers  40–1, 45–6 narrativization in  29, 50–3 and political engagement  38 publication history of  40–1 voices in  48–50 Souvenirs pieux (Yourcenar)  29, 31, 135–6 autobiography in  136–40, 155–6 fictionalizing procedures in  152–4 history and memory in  140, 156–7 maternal ancestry in  123–4, 140 material mementos in  144–8 source materials for  135–6, 143, 148–52 souvenir pieux document in  143–7, 145f, 146f “speaking facts,”  3, 18, 162–3, 171–2 Spiteri, Raymond  99 Steel, David  44–5 Stendhal  1, 5–7, 42–3, 173–4 Stiegler, Bernard  127 “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” (Duras)  185, 185n.85 Suleiman, Susan  197 surrealism  31, 76 and crime  55, 55n.78 dissident  19–20, 79–80, 110–11, 115–16 document, conception of in  17n.85, 77–84 documentary prose in  88 photographic paradigm in  84–7 realism and  78–9, 105 Syndrome de Vichy, Le (Henry Rousso)  180–1, 190 Table ronde, La (journal)  174–7 Tadjo, Véronique  202–3. See also Ombre d’Imana, L’

Index  259 “Temps, ce grand sculpteur, Le” (Yourcenar) 158–9 Temps modernes, Les (journal)  174–7 Testimony (Reznikoff)  19–20 testimony. See witnesses and testimony Therenty, Marie-Ève  212 transcription  29, 47, 50, 54, 58, 63–4, 84, 89, 91–2, 148, 150, 180, 184–5, 210 transposition  28–30, 209–10 Travels in the Congo (Gide). See Voyage au Congo; Le Retour du Tchad Travers de Faultrier, Sandra  45–6, 48–9 Toker, Leona  22–3 Tourelles (prison)  194 Tournier, Jacques  173–80 traces  14–15, 18–19, 39–40 automatic texts as  81–2 embodied relation to  99–101, 181, 183, 193–4, 207–8 erasure of  10–11, 69, 72, 160, 194, 197–8 of filmmaker’s presence  69, 71, 160 historical documents as  123, 128–31, 135–7, 142–3, 158 material objects as  144–7, 156 ordinary writings as  23 photographs as photochemical  18–19, 84–5, 108–9, 151–2 vs. sources  4–5, 4n.10, 23–4, 167–8, 170 and threads  27, 31–2, 137–8, 156–7, 170–1 and voices  142–3, 168, 216–17 See also empreinte; evidential paradigm; Ginzburg, Carlo, indexicality Traité du style (Aragon)  80–3 Tzara, Tristan  84 “Vague de rêves, Une” (Aragon)  94–5 Valéry, Paul  36–7 Vases communicants, Les (Breton) documents in  110 Freudian methods in  83–4 on naturalism  11–12, 87–8 Vasset, Philippe  215–16 Vautier, René  66–7 verification autobiographical pact and  128–9 limits of  143, 154–5 Holocaust denial and  170–1 photography as  107–8 processes and protocols of  20, 25, 89, 171–2, 199 referential pact and  23–4, 89n.48, 128 of witness testimony  50, 172, 188–9 See also authenticity; factualization verisimilitude and facts  43, 61–2, 155, 177–8, 216–17

Vertov, Dziga  15–16, 71, 104n.84 Viala, Fabienne  140 Viande froide (Rosenthal)  215–16 Viart, Dominique  208n.7, 213, 215n.37 Vichy government  172–3, 180–1, 190 “Vichy syndrome,”  180–1, 190 Vie des hommes infâmes, La” (Foucault)  140–2 Vie illustrée, La (newspaper)  57–8, 61–2 Vies minuscules (Michon)  211 Vigan, Delphine de  211 Vigier, Luc  93–4 Villemin, Grégory, murder case  185 Vircondelet, Alain  188n.96 Voyage au Congo (film by Allégret)  30, 68f, 73–6, 73f, 120–1 and ethnographic cinema  66–7, 73 exoticism in  66–7, 70 filming methods of  71 gaze of actors in  72 staging in  70 Voyage au Congo (travel narrative by Gide)  30, 73–6 and Allégret’s film  41, 64–7, 70–3 and campaign against concession-holding companies  41, 64–5 voices and evidence in  74–6 See also Retour du Tchad, Le Voyage de noces (Modiano)  198–9 Vuillard, Éric  205–8 Waberi, Abdourahman  202 Wald-Lasowski, Roman  47, 50–2 Walker, David  43, 45–6, 62n.93, 177–8 Walker, Ian  84–5, 106–7 Wall-Romana, Christophe  13–14, 86–7 Weiss, Peter documentary theater of  20–1, 180, 180n.73, 203 See also Investigation, The White, Hayden  27n.145 Wichené, Simon  172 Wiesel, Elie  164–6 Wieviorka, Annette  163 Wikipedia 207–8 Wild, Jennifer  86–7 Wilde, Oscar  47–8 Wildenstein, Georges  111 Willging, Jennifer  184n.82, 186–7, 186n.88, 189 Wilson, Emma  185n.84 Winckler, Martin  213–15 Winter, Alison  126 W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec) absence of memory in  151–2 documents and fiction in  128–30, 179–80 secondary witnessing in  166–7

260 Index Wiseman, Frederick  71 witnesses and testimony attestation and factuality  18, 45–6, 160–1 authority of  129–30, 160–1, 163, 166–8, 170–1, 187–8, 209–10 in criminal cases  47–53, 55, 58 era of the witness  163 fictional 5 from authors  39–42, 74–5 impossibility of  129–30, 169 Yivo Institute for Jewish Research  197–8 Yourcenar, Marguerite. Gide, affinities with  152–3, 159–61 and modernism  124–5, 159–61

See also Alexis; Archives du Nord; Coup de grâce, Le; Labyrinthe du monde, Le; Mémoires d’Hadrien; Œuvre au noir, L’; Quoi? L’éternité; Souvenirs pieux; “Temps,ce grand sculpteur, Le” Zenetti, Marie-Jeanne  26, 180n.72, 208n.7 Zola, Émile field notebooks of  10–11 on the “human document,”  8–11 as public intellectual  38–9 and science  54 and surrealism  86–8, 103 See also Docteur Pascal, Le; Germinal; Pot-Bouille; Roman expérimental, Le “Zone” (Apollinaire)  193