Écritures contemporaines 10: nouvelles écritures littéraires de l’Histoire (review)

This is the tenth book in the écritures contemporaines series of edited volumes, inaugurated by Dominique Viart in 1998 and flourishing under his editorship for the past decade with a mixture of single-author studies on current writers and genre overviews of contemporary poetry, drama, and prose fiction. Aside from a single essay on the drama of Bernard-Marie Koltès, the focus here is on the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novel, exploring the representation of history in recent French writing. The sixteen contributions come from research groups at the universities of Ghent, Rome, La Sapienza, and Lille, and the book is one of four publications on different aspects of history and French literature arising from their collaboration. Viart himself opens the collection with an overview that attempts to discern trends in the historical fiction of the last thirty years. He sees in contemporary writing the abandonment of the historical frescoes of the existentialists, whose confidence in the objective truth of their historical backdrops has been shaken by the enduring legacy of Michel Foucault, and a return to more direct engagement than that of the postmodernists of Oulipo and the nouveau roman. Passing briefly over the récit de filiation, such as Jean Rouaud’s genealogical investigations, real and fictional testimony of historical events, and allegorical rewritings of history like those of Antoine Volodine, Viart chooses to dwell instead on one particular avatar of the historical novel in contemporary French writing, which he dubs le roman archéologique. This category, which includes Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire as well as Olivier Rolin’s Tigre en papier, differentiates itself from classic historical fiction though its present-day setting, from which point the protagonist conducts a highly subjective investigation into historical events that must be laboriously disinterred from confusion and obscurity: history as mystery, as it were. The remainder of the collection takes its lead from this essay, often employing Viart’s terms and with an emphasis on novels that might be described as archaeological in approach. Inevitably, revisionist fiction concerning France’s wars of the twentieth century dominate the book: three essays deal with representations of the Algerian War, four examine the Second World War, and five the First World War, which is accorded its own section of the study. Only two essays discuss pre-twentieth-century history: one on Gérard Macé’s depiction of the Spanish conquistadors, and another on Pascal Quignard, Michel Caillou, and Pierre Michon, which includes discussion of Roman and early modern history. But while the historical focus may be limited, the literary focus is broad, taking in science fiction and crime novels alongside literary fiction from three generations of writers. As a whole, the collection is a further valuable contribution to an enlightening series of studies.