“Nothing that is So is So”: Fiction and Detachment in Philippe Lançon’s Le Lambeau

Abstract

In tracking his slow recovery from the facial injuries that he sustained in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Philippe Lançon develops two distinct and conflicting senses of the word “fiction:” on the one hand, fiction as the imagination, construction, and organization of a possible world; on the other, fiction as the irruption of the unimaginable and the unreal in the midst of everyday life. In writing Le Lambeau (2018)—indisputably a work of nonfiction—Lançon aims to restore meaning to a life that feels fictional, through a narration that itself inevitably fictionalizes the experiences it recounts. Lançon’s nonfiction narrative thus incessantly explores the category of fiction. It also engages deeply with works of fiction, as Lançon finds in reading Kafka, Thomas Mann, Henry James, and especially Proust, the possibility of a displaced, meditative, and distanced relation to his own present. Whereas writers of nonfiction often claim to capture an immediacy inaccessible to fiction, Lançon seeks instead a form of reparative detachment that finds an essential resource in fictional immersion.