Séditions infrapaginales: poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (XVIIe–XXIe siècles) by Andréas Pfersmann (review)

According to Nathalie Sarraute, in order to see whether a work of literature is great or mediocre it is enough to open it at random and read a few sentences. Would such a quick look also help us decide whether the work in question belongs to literature rather than, say, scholarship? Not necessarily, argues Andréas Pfersmann in this highly original, elegant, and persuasive book. Fiction can take many shapes and playfully borrow a wide range of features from other kinds of text. To take a well-known example: Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot: A Biography (London: Dent, 1983) is a work of fiction perfectly disguised as an erudite biography of a musician. As Pfersmann’s book argues, games of this kind, far from being the invention of recent, postmodern writers, have a long history. Pfersmann focuses on scholarly references, for a long time believed to be a defining feature of learned discourse. Its multiple roles in the history of academic disciplines were rediscovered by Anthony Grafton in his influential book The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Pfersmann shows that scholarly references were also part and parcel of creative literature since at least the early seventeenth century. From Lope de Vega’s scores of notes added to some of his narratives, and Jean de La Ceppède’s biblical and theological references in support of his religious sonnets, to the endnotes in Boissy d’Anglas’s poem Bougival (1825) and the footnotes of Eugène Sue’s popular novels, authorial explanations emphasized the links between literature and existing knowledge about the world. By contrast, those who opposed their use, from Cervantes to August Wilhelm Schlegel and Balzac, either believed that literature, being founded on artistic illusion, needs no factual justification, or included explanations and justifications in the literary text itself rather than relegating them to the notes. In the second part of the book, Pfersmann’s detailed examination of early modern novels that supplement the text with notes, and of nineteenth-century literature that incorporates large amounts of social and historical knowledge, leads him to criticize contemporary theories of fiction that separate it drastically from non-fiction, thus failing to take into account the hybrid, fictional/factual nature of many literary genres and texts. The last section is a fascinating review of lesser-known contemporary writers who playfully cross generic borders, mix fiction with philological commentary, invent historical non-realities, or arrange the text’s layout in unexpected ways. The use of notes in literature, Pfersmann concludes, does not belong to a single, coherent textual genre: it can adopt at will didactic length or aphoristic brevity, demonstrative weight or provocative lightness, refinement or insignificance. Pfersmann’s erudition and intellectual flexibility invite the reader to discover and appreciate a host of forgotten or unknown writers. Astonishingly non-conformist in its theoretical choices and hypotheses, written in a seductively ironic style, this book is, in spite (or rather because) of its unexpected topic, a splendid success.