Fiction in the First Person, or Immoral Writing

Abstract

complete “rejection of imitative poetry”—in other words, fiction. 1 Which speaks, he says, in the place of “those who have gone to war”: the real people, who have suffered in their flesh, who actually know the weight of words and the burden of the dead. 2,400 years ago, the idea that fiction could present a vision of reality as accurate as—or even truer than—a factual account was already subversive. I am a writer of metaphors, and of fiction; indeed, I have no choice. I write with familial mantras that are like damnations, but above all, I write with my imaginaire: my imaginary. If there is a particular strength to my fiction, which has been described as “empathetic,” it is that this writing offers a textual locus of identification. It’s astonishing, the power of the real-effect, which can provoke confusions, sensitivities, and outbursts, even the accusation of “psychic plagiarism” in the case of my latest novel, Tom is Dead. 2 This accusation sprang from the idea that to write in the first person about a period of mourning, one must have endured such an ordeal oneself. Otherwise, this narrative is of necessity usurped, or even copied outright. As if fiction were never anything but the plagiarism of a factual account. In slipping into the fictional skin of Tom’s mother, in searching for that aria’s voice, if I was thinking of a real person, it was my own mother, even though the story I invent in Tom is Dead has nothing to do with us. My books, and especially this one, are almost always—and deliberately—fiction. As it happens, the violent polemic that followed the publication of this novel in France compelled me to make public certain autobiographical facts to justify my having written a work from my imaginaire. There have been several attacks recently in France against other firstperson novels described as “extreme fiction.” In 2007, Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat accused Jonathan Littell of “plagiarizing the dead” and “plagiarizing the Nazis” for The Kindly Ones. 3 In late 2009, Claude Lanzmann accused Yannick Haenel of usurpation and plagiarism because the novelist presented his own version of a historical figure, Jan Karski (interviewed by Lanzmann in Shoah), and did so by speaking for the character of Karski in a fictitious