Abstract
The fundamental question of this essay is: what effect does Oulipian writing have on the telling of History? Most of the time, Oulipian writing falls under the rubric of experimental writing. However, the members of the group Oulipo often address events considered historic. There exists at the moment a theoretical discussion that is taking more and more seriously the relationship between History and fiction; sometimes the authors of fiction succeed at telling another version of History. From the perspective of fiction, we look at Comme une rivière bleue by Michèle Audin and on the theoretical side we look at the latest texts by Ivan Jablonka and most specifically, L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine. Does Audin’s writing respond to the criteria Jablonka proposes for considering fiction a serious telling of History? These are the stakes of this essay.
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Notes
1 « J’ai deux amours », 16 novembre 2011–24 juin 2012, Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration (Paris, France), https://www.histoire-immigration.fr/agenda/2011-03/j-ai-deux-amours.
2 http://irma.math.unistra.fr/∼maudin/poldevie.pdf. Accessed 8 Nov. 2019.
3 Voir Nicolas Graner, “Page d’accueil de Nicolas Graner,” http://graner.name/nicolas/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019 et Éric Le Calvez (editor), Texte(s) et Intertexte(s), Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1997.
4 Voir Jacques Roubaud, “Le Pen est-il français ?” [texte publié le 11 février 1992], https://www.humanite.fr/node/27001. Accessed 23 Nov. 2019.
5 « Poème à forme fixe, emprunté à la poésie malaise, composé d’une série de quatrains à rimes croisées, dans lesquels le deuxième et le quatrième vers d’une strophe sont repris par le premier et le troisième vers de la strophe suivante, le dernier vers du poème reprenant en principe le vers initial » (Ortolang).
6 Voir Laurent Demanze, “Fictions d’enquête et enquêtes dans la fiction,” COnTEXTES, no. 22, 2019, http://journals.openedition.org/contextes/6893. Accessed 19 Nov. 2019.
7 Mes traductions: « […] following levels of conceptualization in the historical work: 1) chronicle; 2) story; 3) mode of emplotment; 4) mode of argument; 5) mode of ideological implication ».
8 Voir Michèle Audin, “Comme une rivière bleue,” Ma commune de Paris et al., https://macommunedeparis.com/2017/08/24/comme-une-riviere-bleue/. Accessed 6 Nov. 2019.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Peter Consenstein
Peter Consenstein is a French professor on two City University of New York campuses: Borough of Manhattan Community College and The Graduate Center. He is working on the works of Anne Garréta, another member of the group Oulipo and is also doing more translations. His last publication is the English version of Petit traité invitant à la découverte de l’art subtil du go by Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud, published by Wakefield Press (2019).