Anecdotes, Faits Divers, and the Literary

Abstract

Anecdotes, the dictionaries tell us, are narratives that concern a singular event. They are supposed to be memorable or at least interesting.1 Although they are supposedly based on real life, they are not considered fit to be a serious basis for a philosophical discussion or scholarly elaboration, though they could open the way for one. In fact, one could apply to the anecdote what Roland Barthes says about the fait divers: it is total, immanent information.2 Anecdotes do not formally make a point, they simply tell somethingafter them, nothing more needs to be said. Anecdotes have a kind of so-what? quality to them. But at the same time, anecdotes capture an essential truth about something; they are often supposed to be in some sense exemplary. For instance, Hegel's anecdotal evidence about Italian women's susceptibility to dying of love is meant to capture an essential truth about the Italian national character.3 The anecdote and the fait while not identical (the fait divers belongs to a more specialized cultural context, that of the daily press with its hierarchy of bigger vs. smaller news items),4 obviously have significant overlap. One could propose that anecdotes are little stories about big people, while faits divers are stories about little people made big by publicity or the press. Voici un assassinat: s'il est politique, c'est une information, s'il ne l'est pas, c'est un fait divers, states Barthes (188). This essay will attempt to bring to light some points about anecdotes, fait and their connections to the larger formal question of the literary, in relation both to narrative (litterairement ce sont des fragments de roman, Barthes observes about faits divers [189]) and to publication, since the etymological meaning of anecdote is unpublished (American Heritage Dictionary). The first example is Felix Feneon's Nouvelles en trois lignes, a genre of ultra-brief narrative he created for the daily newspaper Le Matin, where his three-liners appeared from May to November 1906. Terse, laconic, exuding a dark humor and a subversive wit, these minuscule faits divers tell stories of crimes, accidents, tragic loves and absurd deaths, abuse, strikes, and social illsall in the fewest words possible. Here are a few samples: