Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Andrea Loselle (bio) Our collective endeavor in this special issue centers on perhaps the least respected of narrative forms: the anecdote. A minimalist tale, a contingent curiosity, a marginal artifact, a humorous aside subject to quick dismissal, the anecdote cannot even, we suspect, really be classed as a genre. And yet it came close to achieving this status as a crucial component of New Historicist criticism during this movement’s heyday in the 1980s. Anecdotes back then brought readers to a greater historiographic awareness of the literary.1 Although vulnerable to distortion and error, they are, generally speaking, factual narratives, their special gift to the literary being this soupçon of the real. Just one of these can also be the kernel from which a whole novel grows. Tracking anecdotes across genres, periods, languages, and disciplines, we explore them as constitutive elements of texts that are also paradoxically disruptive. Where anecdotes work their minor magic from within essays, biographies, poems, memoirs, novels, philosophical works, and so on, they threaten the self-containment of these, placing their status as circumscribed genres or as finished texts on less stable ground. For, as Malina Stefanovska pooints out here, anecdotes lend themselves to collections.2 They bend genres in the direction of potentially endless lists of facts, events, and observations; as examined by Dominique Jullien, they are, indeed, the very substance of the open-ended works dedicated to the nooks and crannies of those places where something is always happening: cities. It could not have been by chance alone that the contributors to this issue chose mainly works that resemble collections or are tasks of accumulation and analysis that threaten never to come to completion. Whence the aptness here of Marcel Hénaff’s discussion of Freud’s injunction to his patients “to tell everything,” no matter how trivial. And as Helen Deutsch has remarked, anecdotes are portable, communal literary property; we carry them across cultures, languages, and historical eras to reassemble them in new settings both literary and critical. Thus these little collectibles cause texts and our readings of them to burst at the seams; some hint at the real, others present a hard fact—Montaigne’s painful bladder stones, the stone that Dr. Johnson emphatically kicks, the uneven paving stones over which Proust’s narrator trips—of experience. Lyric thus stumbles across the [End Page 3] prose of the everyday, philosophy across (auto)biography, the novel across the inventory, fiction across history, haiku across the fait divers, essay across emblem, automatic writing across the photograph, narrative across still life. Inasmuch as anecdotes are also clues to character or symptoms of certain social, political, or conceptual ills, their singularity and sometimes their very inanity or offensiveness—the grounds on which they are more frequently dismissed than responsibly refuted—tell us more about the whole than do the histories and treatises that eschew their evidence. They often serve as a sign of the real’s being grievously in error; they give the lie to reigning certainties.3 Anecdotes can, then, also diagnose a wrong to therapeutic effect, form, as John McCumber tells us, an anecdotal philosophy whose aim is to be refuted, or, in Tom Conley’s words, to be an “operative remedy” to received ideas, restrictive binary propositions, and bland verisimilitudes. In being thus undisciplined, they are scattered about the paths of reading, raising points of difference, contention, and interest along the way. Andrea Loselle Andrea Loselle teaches in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. She has published on Céline, gender and fascism, travel, and French theory in American culture. She is the author of History’s Double: Cultural Tourism in Twentieth-Century French Writing (St. Martin’s/Palgrave 1997). Footnotes 1. See Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction” in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989). 49–76. 2. Anecdotes were themselves the object of French collections once named in the seventeenth century “ana.” See also Malina Stefanovska, “L’anecdote dans les ana et les mémoires du XVIIième siècle” in John D. Lyons and Cara Welch, eds., Le Savoir au XVIIième siècle (Tübingen...