The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

Abstract

In The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature, Alison James reconsiders the history of French literature through the lens of the document. This critical and literary history of the document begins in naturalism, moving through André Gide’s journalistic and travel writing and surrealist and early ethnographic experiments. It concludes with postwar self-writing and testimonial fiction from World War II and the Rwandan genocide. Broadly construed, the “document” can evoke any textual, visual, or material object that is understood as evidence or index of the real, whether intentionally mobilized as a part of an archival record or retrospectively understood as a trace of the past. Theoretically, anything can be a “document,” a concept that has become popular in information science, as James notes. Functionally, James privileges certain forms, such as photography, fait divers, and other quasi-journalistic forms (notably Gide’s account of being a juror in the Souvenirs de la cour d’assises), as well as historical archives and oral history (like Marguerite Yourcenar’s investigation of regional archives and family lore). James claims that the documentary imagination in French literature is neglected, particularly with respect to analogous avant-garde movements or genres in other national literatures (think of early Anglo-American documentary or direct cinema). In her view, the French literary field “was singularly hostile” to documentation, particularly writers like Stéphane Mallarmé or Paul Valéry, whose claims to “pure literature” relied on a rejection of journalistic writing, or universel reportage (3). Unlike pure literature, the documentary impulse maintains the boundaries between fact and fiction, or real and imaginary, but points to their porousness, buttressing literature with material facts. If naturalist writers establish the model of the “human document” or documenting humanity and making use of humans as document, surrealists will draw on document as an antiliterary principle. While surrealists and Gide work in parallel to early ethnography, albeit in different ways, postwar writers like Yourcenar, Marguerite Duras, and Patrick Modiano are drawn to the archive as a depersonalized record the self.The book is itself a master exercise in documentation and abounds in archival gems, from unsettling material objects (think surrealist Jacques-André Boiffard’s enlarged photographs of toes) to the postwar magazine Esprit and early debates around documenting life in concentration camps. (The infamous case of Blanche Monnier, la séquestrée de Poitiers, whose story reverberates throughout the minds of Gide, Roland Barthes, and Nathalie Sarraute, is another good reminder that popular forms like the fait divers are not as distinct from high art or theory as we might imagine.) While James delves into understudied, secondary writings by major authors, she frequently rereads the canon, insisting that texts like Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, André Breton’s Nadja, or Duras’s La Douleur are not mere novels or autobiographies, but need a different generic label. A reader of the book may wonder why the documentary impulse had been whittled down to this particular, and somewhat unusual, corpus; James herself muses on the oddness of dedicating a whole chapter to Yourcenar, while only alluding to Barthes or Georges Perec. (Anne Brancky’s recent The Crimes of Marguerite Duras suggest that Duras merited her own chapter alongside Gide, given her mediatized persona and her interest in fait divers and other pop culture forms.) In the late twentieth century, one wonders if documentary fiction was not so much neglected as it went by different names or was attached to specific groups or mediums, such as ciné-réalité, ethnographic or cartographic fictions, or the field of everyday life studies, studied by Vincent Debaene and Michael Sheringham, among others. James’s assertion that documentary fiction is its own genre poses perennial questions about the nature of genre. Are generic categories broad frames that can be applied generously (Is the “novel” not an intentionally capacious category?), need they be modes of self-identification by writers or groups themselves (Would Gide or Yourcenar call themselves “documentarians”?), or are they explanatory categories forged from the outside, permitting a historical gaze (Should we differentiate self-writing from autofiction, from self-documentation?). If James purports, in part, to uncover an avant-garde tradition or impulse, the corpus is itself fairly canonical, or perhaps even conservative (Modiano, for instance, has been aggressively canonized in recent years). One could imagine including other forms of self-documentation, like Hervé Guibert’s filmic and literary testimony of his own death from AIDS-related illnesses or Jean-Jacques Schuhl’s cult classic Rose poussière, itself an archive of 1970s popular culture. Likewise, journalist-writers, like Olivier and Jean Rolin or François Bon, arguably dominate today’s French literary field and engage in experiments that echo those of André Gide. James mostly leaves behind her history as an Oulipo scholar, but one wonders if Oulipo might have made an appearance here. The book’s concluding glance at the literature of the Rwandan genocide was intriguing but brief—perhaps an indication of what James will be exploring in the future.