Revue critique de fixxion française

contemporaine
6 | 2013
Fiction et démocratie

After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of

Facts
Alison James

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URL: https://journals.openedition.org/fixxion/7910
DOI: 10.4000/fixxion.7910
ISSN: 2295-9106

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Ghent University

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ISBN: 2033-7019
ISSN: 2033-7019

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 1

After Fiction? Democratic

Imagination in an Age of Facts
Alison James

1 Philosophical reflection on the relationship between democracy and literature tends to

take the novel as its privileged object of analysis, albeit for different reasons in the
Francophone and Anglophone contexts. For Jacques Rancière, the genre (or rather non-
genre) of the novel exemplifies the democratic disturbance that is the very principle of
literature : “La maladie démocratique et la performance littéraire ont même principe :
cette vie de la lettre muette-bavarde, de la lettre démocratique qui perturbe tout
rapport ordonné entre l’ordre du discours et l’ordre des états”1. In contrast to this
model of disruption to the existing order of representations, Anglophone philosophers
often locate the democratic dimension of the novel in its promotion of shared
understanding, a kind of training in liberal solidarity through imaginative
identification.
2 My aim here is not to detail the similarities and differences between these approaches,
but rather to confront these views with the current instability of the link between the
genre of the novel and democratic community. The literary field in the 21 st century is
increasingly troubled by a new kind of democratic disorder. With the proliferation of
information and narrative forms, factual modes of writing increasingly become the
privileged site of literature’s engagement with the real. This “factual turn”, which in
the Anglophone world has led to large claims for the powers of literary nonfiction, is
also visible, although differently articulated, in contemporary French literature. We
may wonder whether this development signals a renewed involvement of literature in
public discourse, or a failure of the imaginative capacity to transform the actual.

Democratic Imagination
3 An important current in recent American philosophy emphasizes the democratic
potential of literature, and more precisely the novel, as a genre that holds a central
place in public discourse and entails a set of ethical commitments. This is the view

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 2

developed by Martha Nussbaum, whose work on literature has moved from inquiry into
the ancient Greek ethical vision in The Fragility of Goodness (1986) 2, to a focus on the
value of the novel for democratic citizenship. Nussbaum’s work unites an Aristotelian
understanding of human flourishing with literature’s sense of the vulnerability of
human life and moral agency to the force of circumstance. The introduction to Love’s
Knowledge (1992) emphasizes the novel’s “attention to particularity and emotion”, its
involvement of readers in “feeling concerning their own possibilities as well as that of
the character”, and its keen awareness of “the small movements of the inner world” 3.
These preoccupations, in Nussbaum’s view, are inseparable from the formal features of
the works she examines (by Dickens, James, Proust, and Beckett). This approach to the
ethical dimension of fiction harmonizes, despite differences in particular readings,
with other philosophical studies of literature, such as Robert Pippin’s Henry James and
Modern Moral Life (2000)4, or Stanley Cavell’s study of literature’s inquiry into our
knowledge and acknowledgement of others5.
4 In Poetic Justice (1997), Nussbaum’s claims for the novel are more directly oriented
toward the place of the genre in contemporary public life, as well as toward an analysis
of the affinities between literary and legal judgment. Nussbaum’s argument for the
value of literature (or, more specifically, fiction) finds its basis in the Aristotelian claim
that literary art is “more philosophical” than history; the latter deals with the actual,
whereas “literature focuses on the possible, inviting its readers to wonder about
themselves”6. Yet Nussbaum is interested more specifically in forms of fiction that
combine the exploration of the possible with a commitment to the ordinary. Therefore,
although she does discuss the “democratizing vision” of Walt Whitman’s poetry (PJ
119), her main concern is “the realist Anglo-American novel”, and in particular “a
group of novels with social and political themes” (PJ 10): Dickens’s Hard Times, Richard
Wright’s Native Son, E. M. Forster’s Maurice. Within this realist framework, literature
explores the possible through the actual, offering a space of imaginary identification in
a world that is both distant (because fictional) and familiar—since the “others” with
whom we empathize can also be identified with our existing fellow-citizens. Hard Times
is the paradigmatic case for Nussbaum’s argument, since its critique of utilitarian
political economy directly thematizes the relationship between social justice and the
fictional imagination, providing clear evidence for Nussbaum’s argument that there is
“a deep connection between ‘fancy’ and democratic equality” (PJ 4).
5 Nussbaum’s approach extends beyond thematic analysis to argue that the novel, “on
account of some general features of its structure, generally constructs empathy and
compassion in ways highly relevant to citizenship” (PJ 10). However, it seems that the
bolder the claims for the public role of literature in a democratic society, the more
limited the field of politically valuable literature. The shift of emphasis in Nussbaum’s
work from the ethical to the political coincides with a narrowing of her focus to the
novel and then to certain types of novel. Thus the claims for literature’s social utility in
Poetic Justice entail leaving aside the modernist interiority of Proust and James (the
subject of intricate analysis in Love’s Knowledge) in favor of those realist narratives that
emphasize the drama of the individual within a concrete situation. The focus on
questions of pedagogical practice in Cultivating Humanity (1997) 7 and Not for Profit (2010)
brings a further narrowing of the literary field in the name of humanistic education.
Nussbaum presents a twofold role for the arts and humanities in schools and colleges:
“They cultivate capacities for play and empathy in a general way, and they address

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 3

particular cultural blind spots”8. Both tasks, however, “in order to be stably linked to
democratic values”, require a normative view of human dignity and thus a “careful
selectivity”, excluding works of literature that stigmatize groups of people 9.
Nussbaum’s concern about such “defective” forms of literature—defective because they
because they inhibit, rather than promote, “imaginative access to the stigmatized
position”10—extends even to fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel with its cheerful
incineration of the witch11. In its politically useful forms, then, the fictional realm is at
once identified with the free play of imaginative possibility, and strictly circumscribed
within a normative framework already defined by democratic consensus.
6 Not for Profit, even as it resists the creeping marginalization of literature in
contemporary democratic societies, thus reveals the difficulty of linking literature in
any stable way with democratic values. An instructive point of comparison is Richard
Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), which also argues that literature can
help create solidarity by “increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain
and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people”12. However, Rorty’s
acknowledgment that all literature does not function this way leads him to elaborate a
public/private division that is partially distributed along genre lines. While narrative,
by promoting “imaginative identification”, is largely on the side of the public virtues,
Rorty associates the figure of the “strong poet” with the “private” task of self-creation
(CIS 93, 97). Thus the expansion of sympathy and liberal solidarity finds its privileged
form in narrative, if not necessarily fictional narrative, via “genres such as
ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially,
the novel” (CIS xvi).
7 Despite their differences, Nussbaum and Rorty share a commitment to a liberal model
of democratic citizenship, in which some forms of literature connect the individual
with the community. Nussbaum highlights the congruence of the novel with a certain
political vision: “The vision of community embodied in the novel is […] a liberal vision,
in which individuals are seen as valuable in their own right, and as having distinctive
stories of their own to tell” (PJ 7). While individual autonomy and the demands of
solidarity are not reconciled so easily for Rorty, he nevertheless envisages their
coexistence as alternative “vocabularies” that can be used for different purposes (CIS
11). The more troublesome aspects of literature, like those philosophical values that are
not useful for liberal society, can be “privatized” (CIS 65). These optimistic claims for
the literary imagination, however, seem increasingly at odds with the actual position of
literature. In particular, we might wonder about Nussbaum’s claim that “the novel is a
living form and in fact still the central morally serious yet popularly engaging fictional
form of our culture” (PJ 6)—indeed, the phrase “in fact still” registers the shadow of a
doubt. In this respect, Rorty’s reference to the political potential of a plurality of
narrative forms (from the journalistic report to the novel) is prescient. The first years
of the 21st century have seen the rise of calls for forms of representation that are more
immediate than fiction, more urgently connected to present reality.

Nonfiction and Narrative Art

8 Contemporary writers increasingly express a suspicion that falls not only on
supposedly obsolete narrative techniques (as it did for the novelists associated with the
nouveau roman) but also on fictionality as such. The perennial debate on the “death of

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 4

the novel” thus takes a turn toward bold claims for the significance of literary
nonfiction. This tendency, perhaps too easily dismissed by critics as a “fashionable
anti-novelistic movement”13, is worth taking seriously as a symptom of larger
transformations of the literary field and its place in contemporary culture, both in
France and the Anglophone world.
9 Two examples, taken from the American and British press in 2010, will serve as a point
of entry into the pervasive discourse on the end of fiction in the Anglophone context.
The first is a column for the New York Observer, in which the cultural critic Lee Siegel
charges that fiction has been professionalized, has lost its former “existential urgency”,
and is now “culturally irrelevant.” Great storytelling, claims Siegel, now happens
outside the novel: “the most interesting, perceptive and provocative writers of our
moment write narrative nonfiction”14. As examples of innovative nonfiction, Siegel
cites a number of journalistic and biographical works, including David Remnick’s
biography of Obama, a report in The New Yorker by Janet Malcolm based on a murder
trial (“Iphigenia in Forest Hills”), Michael Lewis’s tales of contemporary finance, and
T.J. Stiles’ The First Tycoon (a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt). Siegel’s brief essay
provoked a number of responses defending the novel’s connection with “aspects of our
experience that are less timely, more universal”15, or offering market-based arguments
about the “extraordinary proliferation of new fiction”, “of all sorts”, that crowds
bookstores and emerges from writing programs16.
10 My second example is an essay on contemporary war reporting by the British author
Geoff Dyer, published first in the Guardian newspaper in June 2010, then in modified
form in the nonfiction collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011).
Adopting a narrower focus than Siegel, Dyer nevertheless also comments on the
inadequacy of fiction to deal with contemporary events: “Reportage, long-form
reporting—call it what you will—has left the novel looking somewhat superfluous” (the
qualifier “somewhat” is added in the second version of Dyer’s text) 17. Dyer discusses a
number of nonfiction books concerned with what he calls “the defining story of our
times—the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan” (OKHC 215)18. In their detailed recording of the horrors of war
and their unveiling of the complexities of historical circumstance, these accounts
provide a literary remedy for political (and journalistic) failure; Dyer quotes George
Packer’s observation that “[t]he press redeemed in Baghdad what it had botched in
Washington” (OKHC 216).
11 Novels offer no such immediate remedy, claims Dyer, because it takes too long to make
“imaginative sense” of real events (OKHC 216). Nonfiction accounts share the novel’s
ability to use character and narrative as “forms of cognition and understanding”, and
“it is difficult to see what the novelist might bring to the table except stylistic panache
[…] and the burden of unnecessary conventions” (OKHC 217). Dyer draws out contrasts
between different narrative possibilities within reportage—from the “narrative self-
effacement” of David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers to the digressive first-person voice of
Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, which Dyer sees as closer to the territory of fiction
(OKHC 219). He comments on the linguistic advantages of the American journalists,
who unlike the class-identified British writers share a common idiom with their
subjects through the “flexibility and versatility of American English as deployed by the
soldiers on whose lives they depend” (OKHC 222-223). Finally, citing Martin Amis’s
critique of the nonfiction novels of Mailer and Capote as lacking “moral imagination”

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 5

(OKHC 226), Dyer concludes by suggesting that we have reached a new moment in the
history of narrative nonfiction: “We are moving beyond the nonfiction novel to
different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and
political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honor, and protest the latest,
historically specific instance of futility and mess” (OKHC 227).
12 The charge of the novel’s “superfluity” adds to the charge of irrelevancy a suspicion of
fiction as surplus, an inessential supplement of style or convention added to a reality
that is already saturated with stories. Fiction seems unnecessary when stories are there
for the taking—and yet, Dyer insists that narrative construction retains a cognitive
function in its organization and presentation of events. The praise of the possibilities of
nonfiction thus does not entail a rejection of narrative form, but rather involves the
claim that nonfiction narrative can mobilize the traditional resources of the novel, such
as plot and character. Dyer and others celebrate a narrative art that leaves behind
convention, and eschews fictional distance, in order to explore the moral meaning of
current events. Perhaps most compelling in Dyer’s account is his description of the
gesture toward totality that results from the incomplete nature of referential narrative:
13 Just as characters interconnect with each other within a novel, so these nonfiction
books and real-life characters interconnect with and segue into each other to form an
epic, ongoing, multivolume work in progress. The name of this constantly revised,
unfinishable book, I guess, will eventually be History. (OKHC 225)
14 The strengths and weaknesses of particular works thus fade into the background of a
larger proto-book, as they shape a literary space that is continuous with reality itself.
The autonomy and completeness of fictional narratives19 are rejected, in the name of an
incomplete but infinitely extendible, interwoven, layered, and contradictory space of
“narrative art”.

Genre Trouble, Reality Hunger

15 Reportage, reporting, “call it what you will” (OKHC 216): Dyer’s hesitation indicates the
difficulty of demarcating a stable generic territory for the art of nonfiction. Siegel’s
“narrative nonfiction” is an even broader category that might encompass memoir,
biography, historical narrative, and journalism (and the works of Geoff Dyer), although
Siegel clearly has in mind a number of commercially successful books that elicit a broad
public response to current events20. The recent emphasis on creative nonfiction also
shapes the practice and reception of the literary essay, or what the American author
John D’Agata calls the “lyric essay”—a category that mingles genres, promising an
engagement with facts while giving primacy to art21. David Shields defends an aesthetic
of brevity and the fragment when describing his own preference for “prose poems/
lyric essays/short-shorts” that “hold the universal via the ordinary” 22. This
terminological hesitation points to the emergence of a new discursive configuration,
one that places the question of literature’s relationship to reality beyond definitions of
genre, in a realm structured primarily by the fiction/nonfiction distinction.
16 Nonfiction prose occupies a marginal place in theories of literature: Käte Hamburger’s
The Logic of Literature, in an analysis based on literature’s relationship to reality
statement, posits the fictional and lyrical genres as the major literary forms 23; Gérard
Genette’s taxonomic approach relegates nonfictional prose to the realm of conditional
literarity, subject to the “rhematic” criterion of its perceived aesthetic value 24. Yet the

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 6

position of factual writing in the literary field should be considered historically, as

Jean-Louis Jeannelle argues25. Contemporary arguments for creative nonfiction can be
viewed as a symptom of the shrinking place of literature in culture and intellectual life,
as suggested in Dyer’s humorous account of his own “Reader’s Block” (OKHC 378), or in
Shields’s assertion that the writer must “come to grips with the marginalization of
literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms” (HLS
129). More optimistically, what is occurring may be a transformation of the literary
system, as it lays claim to the public role of journalism or encroaches upon the
disciplinary territory of the social sciences. In either case, this shift is symptomatic of a
preoccupation with literature’s relationship to the common, with its ability to engage a
wide readership and shape a collective response to current events.
17 The generic multiplicity of literary nonfiction also involves a hybridization of genres,
in line with Dyer’s account of the ideal writer’s life as “one made up of all sorts of
different kinds of writing, including periods of fictioning” (OKHC 5). Dyer’s own
nonfiction works include essays on a range of topics (photography, literature, jazz,
travel) and works that blend criticism and autobiography, such as Out of Sheer Rage:
Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence (2009)26, and Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a
Room (2012)27, in which personal digressions emerge from a frame-by-frame description
of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. What emerges is a broad territory of investigation in which the
author, identified with the narrator, is resolutely present. Dyer’s novels appear as an
exception to this rule—a passing moment of “fictioning” within a larger nonfictional
world—yet even they are often characterized by a heightened concern with questions
of reference. “This is a work of fiction”, state both the copyright page and the “Notes
and Acknowledgements” section at the end of the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
(2009)28. Inverting those disownments of fictionality that often framed 18 th-century
novels, Dyer’s assertions of fictionality point to the possibility of a referential reading
even as they deny that “real” elements function referentially in the text. The
paratextual apparatus multiplies familiar disclaimers (“Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental”), while also
enumerating in meticulous detail the similarities and differences between real and
invented elements, and even including the dates of the author’s own visits to Venice
and Varanasi (JVDV 294-95). Real persons and places take on the same role as textual
sources in the acknowledgement of the novel’s borrowings, blurring the distinction
between the fictional and the metafictional, the referential and the intertextual.
18 Here we enter an ambiguous territory in contemporary literature, where the factual is
the ground of the text’s ethical authority but is constantly subject to fictionalizing. This
point of uncertainty is foregrounded in David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010), an essay-
manifesto composed of numbered fragments. Integrating borrowed material and
covering topics from reality television to hip-hop, the book calls for a literature that
offers the “lure and blur of the real” through “deliberate unartiness”, spontaneity,
openness, collage, the incorporation of “raw” material, hybrid genres—and, above all,
the blurring of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction 29. In advocating and
implementing a collage-based aesthetics, Shields reorients modernist techniques
toward an antifictional stance. Yet this argument hinges on somewhat contradictory
claims: on the one hand, Shields asserts that the border between fiction and nonfiction
has become irrelevant: “the facts of the situation don’t much matter” (RH 40). On the
other hand, he argues that it is crucial to maintain “that tightrope walk along the
margin between the newspaper report and the poetic vision” (RH 15). But how do we

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 7

define the place of the margin, and what is at stake in this tightrope walk if the facts do
not matter?
19 As Shields is aware, the history of the modern novel is bound up with that of the anti-
novel, and numerous authors have played on the ambiguity of the boundary that
separates referential and fictional narrative—Shields mentions Defoe’s 1722 novel A
Journal of the Plague Year. Scholarship on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novel
has argued that the genre emerges precisely as an ambiguous form of “factual fiction”,
determined by the “splitting of the undifferentiated matrix of news/novels into novels
on the one hand, and journalism and history on the other”30; some even argue that that
“the [English] novel discovered fiction” as a conceptual category 31. Whether we
understand “fiction” as a specific historical category tied to the evolution of the novel,
or more generally (following Jean-Marie Schaeffer) posit a universal “fictional
competence” that is subject to varying cultural “uses”32, it seems likely that a new
configuration of the fact/fiction divide is appearing as a result of the pressures and
discourses of the “information age”.
20 The political consequences of this development are not yet clear. In yet another plea
for new forms of “factual fiction” (or “faction”), the British novelist Ewan Morrison
approvingly quotes Walter Benjamin’s assertion in “The Storyteller”: in fully developed
capitalism, “there emerges a form of communication” which “confronts storytelling as
no less of a stranger than did the novel, but in a more menacing way, and […] it also
brings about a crisis in the novel. This new form of communication is information” 33.
However, when Morrison glorifies the fragmentation and rapidity of the digital age and
praises “multi-format, open-access, internet wiki-learning” as a way for the novel to
“let the world in” (and of course, remain “relevant”), he apparently does not share
Benjamin’s sense of menace. For Benjamin, we should note, “information” is at odds
with the force and amplitude of true storytelling: “Every morning brings us news of the
globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer
comes to us without already being shot through with explanation, in other words, by
now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits
information”34. Information comes pre-explained and pre-understood, whereas
storytelling leaves room for the play of imagination and interpretation.
21 The rise of literary nonfiction in the Anglophone world can therefore be seen either as
a sign of renewed moral and political engagement with reality, or as a symptom of
democratic conformity; here we encounter some familiar concerns about modern
democratic regimes. What is clear is that the contemporary hunger for authentic
stories is connected to anxiety about the truth-value of proliferating information.
Inevitably, this quest for unmediated truth brings with it highly public scandals—one
example is the furor in 2006 following the exposure of fictional elements in James
Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003), which in 2005 had became a “nonfiction”
bestseller after being selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. The media attention
given to John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), is also symptomatic,
since the book openly addresses the relationship between journalistic ethics and
creative license. A fictionalized version of an original exchange, the book dramatizes
the encounter between the fastidious queries of a newspaper “fact-checker” (Fingal)
and the writer D’Agata’s equally extreme stance on his right to manipulate the facts for
aesthetic or argumentative effect35. Although the book investigates the relationship
between truth and fact, and highlights the ethical problems of writing about reality

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 8

(the subject of D’Agata’s “essay” is the actual suicide of a teenager), the dialogic form
and combative tone firmly entrench the factual/ aesthetic divide, with the unfortunate
result of polarizing the debate between journalistic positivism and dubious claims for
artistic irresponsibility. The latter seem very far from Dyer’s view of the moral art of
reportage or even Shields’s arguments in Reality Hunger, in which the pull of reality
presents a challenge to literary form. Instead, D’Agata presents us with a seeming
impasse: artistic value depends on manipulating those very facts that supposedly
ground the text’s ethical commitment to the real.

Factual Fictions
22 Contemporary French literature has arguably seen a similar “factual turn”, albeit in the
absence of any established discourse on the literary claims of “non-fiction”. Since the
1990s, the novel has been cast as both victim and culprit in a more general narrative of
cultural decline. Thus Jean-Marie Domenach’s Le crépuscule de la culture française (1995)
gives privileged place to the novel as a cultural indicator while suggesting that the
genre, since it is coextensive with the leveling effects of democracy, contains the seeds
of its own banalization36. More recently, in Contre Saint-Proust (2006), Dominique
Maingueneau sees the end of Literature as in part the consequence of an immanent
process of autonomization and self-abolition ; but he also connects it to the
transformation of communication in the Internet age, which produces “une sorte de
laïcisation de la création, qui se dissémine dans une ‘créativité’ où il entre dans des
proportions variables une part d’expression de soi et une part d’intégration dans un
groupe”37.
23 Against these “tombeaux de la littérature”38, those counter-discourses that affirm the
vitality of recent French-language literature hail a return to earlier subjects and forms:
a return to narrative, to the subject and to the real. Dominique Viart offers the most
nuanced elaboration of this view, arguing that literature since the 1980s has absorbed
the lessons of the nouveau roman while turning back from intransitivity to transitivity,
from formal experiment and solipsism to the world39. The return to the real, however,
does not mean a return to the familiar forms of the realist tradition, or even to the
genre of the novel. Rather, contemporary literature accommodates a plurality of
narrative forms, often varieties of the récit rather than the roman. In an essay that
examines texts by François Bon and Patrick Modiano, Alexandre Gefen observes that
the contemporary form of literary engagement (engagement littéraire rather than
Sartrean littérature engagée ) tends toward testimonial or documentary modes 40. To
characterize such works as “fictions” or “fictions critiques” 41 is to acknowledge their
literary value and the complexity of their narrative structure. Yet the designation of
“fiction”, even broadly defined, also risks obscuring the resistance to fictionalization
that characterizes much contemporary narrative literature.
24 The place of the factual in contemporary French literature evidently varies in form and
degree. Within the tendency often described as the “récit de filiation” 42, the
reconstruction of a relation to the past necessitates fictional excursions into the realm
of the possible, within an overall autobiographical pact. Pierre Michon’s Vies minuscules
(1984) is a case in point. Annie Ernaux represents an extreme case in that she explicitly
describes her work (since La Place in 1983) in terms of “écriture factuelle” 43, and
develops a body of work that is deliberately anti-novelistic. Other writers incorporate

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 9

novelistic aspects within an overarching referential framework; this is Emmanuel

Carrère’s approach in D’autres vies que la mienne (2009) and Limonov (2011), with their
respective paratextual assertions: “Tout y est vrai”; “Limonov n’est pas un personnage
de fiction”44. Another kind of narrative posture involves provocative claims of
fictionality that both highlight and repudiate the recognizably factual origins of a
story, as in Régis Jauffret’s Sévère: “Ne croyez pas que cette histoire est réelle, c’est moi
qui l’ai inventée”45.
25 The historical novel presents a particularly complex case, but once again the
relationship of fact and fiction is highly variable; we need only compare Jonathan
Littell’s extensively researched and extravagantly mythologized novel Les Bienveillantes
(2006), to the anxious verifications and rejection of invention that dominate the
narrative inquiry of Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010). In the latter case, the narrator-
author’s diatribes against literature and fiction do not prevent him from attempting an
imaginative projection into the past: “moi aussi, peut-être, je suis là” 46. The scandal
surrounding Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski (2009) is partly a consequence of the
combination of factual and fictional elements. The work is divided into three distinct
sections: a description of documentary material (drawn in particular from an interview
with the Polish resistance fighter Karski in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah); a
summary of Karski’s 1944 book Story of a Secret State; and a first-person fictional
reconstruction of the meeting between Karski and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although the
generic division between the sections is explicit, the coexistence of these parts creates
an equivocal position that is reiterated by Haenel’s subsequent responses to his critics.
Laying claim simultaneously to the freedom of fiction and to the authority of
testimony, the author appropriates the figure of the witness in order to ventriloquize
an ideological interpretation of history, replete with anti-American caricature (the
portrait of a yawning, indifferent Roosevelt). The documentary material of the first two
sections serves to legitimize the unsubstantiated claims of the third section where,
under the cover of fiction, Haenel claims to possess a truth that Karski himself was
supposedly obliged to keep hidden47.

True Stories
26 It is possible to see the extension of the category “fiction” in France and the
extravagant claims for “non-fiction” in the Anglophone context as two sides of the
same coin. This is the view suggested by the novelist Luc Lang’s Délit de fiction (2011), an
essay that links the contemporary inflation of the term “fiction” to the marginalization
of literature. The contemporary tendency to insist on the factual in literature is, Lang
argues, an attempt to compensate for “l’effet dévasteur du mot fiction” 48. The erasure of
the historical consciousness of literary genres, and the division of literary production
according to a binary too easily mapped onto the true/false distinction, amount in
Lang’s view to an exclusion of literature from its place in the community (DF 21). While
locating the origin of this phenomenon in the “Anglo-Saxon” world, Lang nevertheless
describes it as a symptom of a more general cultural phenomenon, a reaction to the
proliferation of “histoires vraies” that saturate everyday life via newspapers, television,
books, and blogs (DF 22-23). Characterized by the naïve belief in the continuity between
the lived and the narrated, and by the unproblematic identity of the author-narrator-
subject, these “true stories” preclude in advance any inquiry into narrative

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 10

construction or point of view. This apparently democratic phenomenon, whereby each

person is authorized to be the subject of his or her own story, is for Lang a politically
insidious trend that instrumentalizes small narratives for the benefit of those who
control the larger story:
Nous sommes parvenus, grâce à notre environnement technique qui nous baigne
dans une vapeur […], un nuage narratif, à réaliser le rêve d’une démocratie directe –
ainsi nous parle l’idéologie – où bruit l’infini brouhaha, inutile et vain, des voix
narratives, celles des citoyens du monde que nous sommes tous, s’imaginant
accéder enfin à l’énonciation singulière et publique de nos récits personnels, qui ne
sont, se réjouit l’idéologie, que la polyphonie récitative d’un même texte. (DF 159)
27 The narrative regime of true stories thus appears as a version of Benjamin’s
“information” (or Christian Salmon’s account of “storytelling” 49).
28 It seems clear that the current fascination with the fiction/non-fiction divide is in large
part a response to a disturbance—either democratic or ostensibly so—of the territory of
literature. The claims for the democratizing force of literature also find themselves
displaced, from the imaginary identification with fictional characters praised by
Nussbaum, to the “direct” democracy of universal storytelling; or, to put it in more
Rancierean terms, the troublesome democratic objects of the realist novel become the
unruly potential subjects of a proliferating factual writing. While it is worth heeding
the voices that warn against the ideological manipulations behind this new regime, it is
also impractical to wish to return to the genre system of an earlier moment of literary
history. We might still need defenders of the novel, yet writers might also explore
spaces of possibility such as the elaboration of what Yves Citton calls “contre-fictions”,
as a way of imagining political alternatives to a world narrowly defined by the “given”
(data, but also the discourses that mobilize these data, and the products that are
“given” to us)50. Another possible direction is to accept that literature must now
function in a new technological space in order to renew its relationship to the world.
François Bon’s Après le livre (2011) examines some of the possibilities of this dislocation,
arguing that technological change has brought narrative into more immediate and
direct contact with the real, while the Internet re-inscribes literary practice within an
open, unstable space beyond the closed object of the book51. Bon’s own literary practice
is exemplary in this regard, as he has made his website tierslivre.net the center of a
literary activity that encompasses multiple forms of writing, from fiction to essay to
journal entries, and also extends to the digital publishing project of publie.net. The
result is the reinscription of literary practice into a territory that is continuous but not
undifferentiated, and the construction of a new public space of reception.
29 Are we witnessing the final dissolution of literature into what Hegel calls the “prose of
the world”, or simply one more configuration of the contradictions of literature
(Rancière)? In any event, it seems unlikely that these transformations of the literary
field mean the end of fiction, although it is necessary to rethink the democratic
possibilities of literature beyond a certain historical form of the novel. Yet fictional
invention may still be an ethical and political necessity, and an inevitable response to
the limits of the real. After all, thinkers as different as Martha Nussbaum and Jacques
Rancière share the conviction that fictional imagination is a requirement for
democratic politics, whether through its mediation of our relation to others or because
it enables us to posit a community that does not yet exist. Democratic politics requires,
in Rancière’s terms, “cette pratique du comme si qui constitue les formes d’apparaître
d’un sujet et qui ouvre une communauté esthétique, à la manière kantienne, une

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 11

communauté qui exige le consentement de celui-là même qui ne la reconnaît pas” 52.
Both philosophical approaches highlight the ways in which fiction and democracy
connect a political subject to a possible community, and they demonstrate that our
relation to the real cannot only be a matter of fact.

NOTES
1. Jacques Rancière, La parole muette, Paris, Hachette littératures, 1998, p. 97.
2. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
3. Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford and New York,
Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 46.
4. Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
5. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason : Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, 2nd Edition,
New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 476.
6. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Boston, Beacon Press,
1997, p. 6; henceforth PJ.
7. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: a Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997.
8. Martha C. Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton, N.J.,
Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 108.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 109.
11. Ibid., p. 147n8.
12. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 2nd Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999, p. xvi; henceforth CIS.
13. The phrase is used by the critic James Wood in his review of Laurent Binet’s HHhH: “It’s
possible to see HHhH as part of a fashionable anti-novelistic movement, made popular in the
Anglophone world by works like David Shields’s recent manifesto ‘Reality Hunger,’ and by the
essays of Geoff Dyer.” James Wood, “Broken Record”, The New Yorker, 21 May, 2012.
14. Lee Siegel, “Where Have All the Mailers Gone?”, The New York Observer, 22 June, 2010, URL:
http://www.observer.com/2010/culture/where-have-all-mailers-gone.
15. David Haglund, “Where Have All the Sontags Gone”, The Awl, 24 June, 2010, URL: http://
www.the awl.com/2010/06/where-have-all-the-sontags-gone.
16. Robert McCrum, “Why Lee Siegel is Wrong to Declare the Novel Dead”, The Guardian, 5 July,
2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jul/05/lee-siegel-death-of-the-novel.
17. Geoff Dyer, “The Human Heart of the Matter”, 12 June, 2010, URL: http://
www.guardian.co.uk/ books/2010/jun/12/geoff-dyer-war-reporting; repr. as “The Moral Art of
War”, in Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, Minneapolis,
Graywolf Press, 2011, p. 216; henceforth OKHC.
18. Among Dyer’s list of “the greatest books of our time” are David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers
(2009), Sebastian Junger’s War (2010), Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars (2004), Lawrence Wright’s The

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 12

Looming Tower (2006), George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate (2005), Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial
Life in the Emerald City (2006), and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War (2008).
19. As Dorrit Cohn observes, referential narratives are verifiable and incomplete, whereas
nonreferential narratives are unverifiable and complete. Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction,
Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 16.
20. Lee Siegel, “Where Have All the Mailers Gone?”, art. cit.
21. John D’Agata, “To the Reader”, The Next American Essay, ed. John D’Agata, Saint Paul,
Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2002, p. 1. In the French context, as Marielle Macé has shown, the
essay was the genre tasked with maintaining literature’s role in the construction of knowledge,
while existing in a complex relation to prose fiction. See Marielle Macé, Le Temps de l’essai : histoire
d’un genre en France au XXe siècle, Paris, Belin, 2006.
22. David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life, New York, Knopf, 2013, p. 181; henceforth HLS.
23. Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose, 2 nd edition, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 53.
24. Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction, précédé de Introduction à l’architexte, Paris, Seuil, 1979, 2005,
coll. “Points”, p. 88.
25. Jean-Louis Jeannelle, “L’acheminement vers le réel. Pour une étude des genres factuels : Le cas
des Mémoires”, Poétique no 139, September 2004, p. 279-297.
26. Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence, New York, North Point Press, 2009.
27. Geoff Dyer, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, New York, Pantheon, 2012.
28. Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, New York, Vintage, 2010, p. 296; henceforth JVDV.
29. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, p. 5; henceforth
RH.
30. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, 2nd Edition, Philadelphia, PA,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, p. 71.
31. Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality”, in Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 2006, vol. 1, p. 337.
32. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Préface, Fiction et cultures, ed. Françoise Lavocat and Anne Duprat, Paris,
Société française de littérature générale et comparée, 2010, p. 8.
33. Ewan Morrison, “Factual Fiction: Writing in an Information Age”, The Guardian, 2 March 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/02/fact-fiction-writing-information-age.
34. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New
York, Schocken Books, 1969, p. 89.
35. John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
36. Jean-Marie Domenach, Le crépuscule de la culture française ? Paris, Plon, 1995, p. 35, p. 52-53.
37. Dominique Maingueneau, Contre Saint Proust ou la fin de la littérature, Paris, Belin, 2006, p. 170.
38. See LHT (Littérature Histoire Théorie), no 6, 2009, “Tombeaux de la littérature”, ed. Alexandre
Gefen, URL : http://www.fabula.org/lht/6.
39. Dominique Viart, “Fictions critiques : la littérature contemporaine et la question du politique”,
Formes de l’engagement littéraire (XVe-XXIe siècles), ed. Jean Kaempfer, Sonya Florey, and Jérôme
Meizoz, Lausanne, Antipodes, 2006, p. 186. Viart designates as “fictions critiques” a range of
contemporary texts, including those of Jean Rouaud, Richard Millet, Pierre Bergounioux, Annie
Ernaux, and François Bon. These forms of writing are fictions, since they cannot be reduced to
documentary status ; they are critical in the kinds of social and historical questions they pose as
well as in the critical gaze they direct toward their own literary fashioning.
40. Alexandre Gefen, “Responsabilités de la forme. Voies et détours de l’engagement littéraire
contemporain”, in L’engagement littéraire, ed. Emmanuel Bouju, Rennes, Presses universitaires de
Rennes, 2005, p. 75-84.
41. Dominique Viart, “Fictions critiques”, art. cit.

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 13

42. Dominique Viart, “Récits de filiation” in Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier, La littérature
française au présent. Héritage, modernité, mutations, Paris, Bordas, 2005 ; Laurent Demanze,
Encres orphelines. Pierre Bergounioux, Gérard Macé, Pierre Michon, Paris, José Corti, 2008.
43. Michèle Bacholle, “Interview with Annie Ernaux: Ecrire le vécu”, Sites: The Journal of Twentieth-
Century/Contemporary French Studies vol. 2, no 1, 1998, p. 145.
44. Emmanuel Carrère, D’autres vies que la mienne, Paris, P.O.L., 2009 ; Limonov, Paris, P.O.L., 2011.
45. Régis Jauffret, Sévère : roman, Paris, Seuil, 2010, p. 9.
46. Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveillantes, Paris, Gallimard, 2006 ; Laurent Binet, HHhH, Paris,
Gallimard, 2010, p. 443.
47. Yannick Haenel, Jan Karski, Paris, Gallimard, 2009, p. 123-24, p. 128. Annette Wieviorka
comments on Haenel’s dubious appropriation of the voice of the witness in “Faux témoignage”,
L’histoire, no 349, January 2010, p. 30-31.
48. Luc Lang, Délit de fiction : la littérature, pourquoi ? Paris, Gallimard, 2011, p. 16 ; henceforth DF.
49. Christian Salmon, Storytelling : la machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits,
Paris, La découverte, 2007.
50. “On peut définir une contre-fiction comme un récit fictionnel visant à transformer la réalité
actuelle dans un projet de lutte contre la reproduction d’un donné perçu comme mutilant”, Yves Citton,
“Contre-fictions : trois modes de combat”, Multitudes, n° 48, March 2012, p. 72.
51. François Bon, Après le livre, Paris, Seuil, 2011, p. 267.
52. Jacques Rancière, La mésentente : Politique et philosophie, Paris, Galilée, 1995, p. 128.

ABSTRACTS
Le roman reste le genre privilégié dans une certaine réflexion philosophique, notamment celle de
Martha Nussbaum, sur les affinités entre littérature et démocratie : le roman prônerait des
valeurs libérales et démocratiques en favorisant le développement de nos capacités
d’imagination. Pourtant, le lien entre fiction littéraire et communauté démocratique devient de
nos jours extrêmement fragile. Dans le monde anglophone, l’effort pour restaurer cette relation
passe souvent par une délégitimation de la fiction au nom des pouvoirs de la “non-fiction”
littéraire, catégorie protéiforme qui permet d’ancrer l’invention dans l’actualité. Dans le contexte
français, ce “tournant factuel” s’articule autour de l’inscription ambivalente des pratiques
narratives dans une conception élargie de la fiction. On voit émerger des formes d’activité
littéraire en continuité avec la prolifération “démocratique” de l’information—sans que cette
transformation du champ littéraire exclue le recours à la fiction, capable d’ouvrir le régime des
“histoires vraies” à l’imaginaire des possibles.

INDEX
Mots-clés: non-fiction, philosophie et littérature, genres factuels

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 After Fiction? Democratic Imagination in an Age of Facts 14

AUTHOR
ALISON JAMES
University of Chicago

Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine, 6 | 2013