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Abstract
Focusing on Pierre Michon's Vies minuscules (1984) and La Vie de Joseph Roulin (1988), this article analyses Michon's portraits of socially obscure lives and his reflection on what is generated when these 'small lives' and literature are drawn together. Michon works to foreground the mindset of society's subaltern figures and to practice a form of aesthetic redemption of lives that are lived and end in anonymity. The connection between the assumed backwater and perceived cultural centres is central to his reflection and his work seeks to cast as drama the prose composition spawned by the compulsion to reflect on the discarded life. The article also examines the connection between manual and intellectual labour and considers in particular Michon's romancing of van Gogh's encounter with the Roulin family in Arles in 1888. As with Michon, the depiction of 'small lives' was integral to van Gogh's art. The article argues for the link between the painter's social formation and vision and Michon's imbrication of the artistic and the banal.