PIERRE MICHON, L’HISTORIEN
PIERRE MICHON, L’HISTORIEN

Summary/Abstract: Since the 80s, we speak about a return to the narrative which would define the contemporary French literature. In fact there was no return to the narrative, this had always performed well and so its readers. The real phenomenon of the 80s is not the return to the narrative but the rediscovery of this literary gender by those who thought they had buried it once and for all, namely the authors affiliated previously to avant-garde and a part of University. In other words, the 80s do not inaugurate a period of return to the narrative but they give back to this literary gender the intellectual legitimacy it had lost. This so-called return was carried out by means of autobiography. The example of Small lives is interesting in this respect. This book (1984) tells about eight lives, mainly pitiful, allegories of a writer whose autobiography is shown just beneath the surface. The life of the narrator of Small lives is reduced to a geographical and sentimental wandering registered in an imagination of curse : the origin darkly rustic, a runaway and alcoholic father, the unfulfilled wish to write with the certainty of unworthiness strongly attached. Yet the reader feels that this miserable condition is overcome the moment it is expressed, by the simple fact of being written : it is necessary that something is being produced, something which is not mentioned or expressed in the text. This something is an appeal to the history ant to the novel. The temptation of illegibility was substituted for a sumptuous writing in prose which does not neglect neither its reader nor the reference to the tradition, even if this is often farcical in Small lives.

• Details
• Contents