Archival novels have been written in two distinct paradigms - legitimation and challenge. While in the former paradigm the archive guarantees the novel's verisimilitude, in the latter the archive is questioned as a hierarchized and politically biased system for establishing truth. Narrating from the Archive describes the historical development of the archival novel, a fictional genre in which the narrative stores records, bureaucratic writing informs language, and the archive frames the readers' apprehension of the text. In this book, Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, Honor-6 de Balzac's Ursule Mirouet and Le Colonel Chabert, are examples of novels written within the paradigm of legitimation; while Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet permits the transition between the two paradigms, George Perec's La vie mode d'emploi and Don DeLillo's Libra represent cases of archival fiction written within the paradigm of challenge.
Narrating from the Archive, written by Marco Codebo, Assistant Professor of French and Italian at Long Island University in Brookville, aims to prove that novelistic writing's goal is the creation of permanent records of ordinary human beings' life and that tools forged in archives for storing and arranging information have been instrumental to the fulfillment of this objective. The archival novel os the genre that turns the novel's archival, subterranean component into the key feature of its own novelistic world; what is hidden in traditional novels instead emerges in the open in archival fiction. As they are published throughout modernity, in different traditions and distinct cultural contexts, archival novels prove that a link between the archive and novels does exist and plays a key role in determining the epistemic goal and means of novelistic discourse: telling the truth about empirical individuals by observing and recording their lived experiences. Reaching this conclusion archives the greatest significance in our time when the digital database has replaced the archive as the chief tool for managing stored information. In this context, the novel's epistemic and technological reliance on cognitive instruments forged during the paper age, such as the record and the bureaucratic archive, appear with utmost clarity.
Codebo analyzes the mediating strategies, aimed at building narrative structures and achieving cognitive goals, novelists implemented whenever they applied the archive's epistemology to the production of fictional works. Because these strategies functioned within distinct cultural environments - to use a kind of shorthand, early eighteenth-century England realism, and postmodernism - his investigation does not progress linearly from Defoe to DeLillo. Rather, as it moves through specific historical contexts, it is interrupted by necessary discontinuities. Within this interpretive framework, the six texts Codebo discusses in depth illustrate two aspects of the archival novel: (1) its generic dimension, or the way its textual features and its links to other (non)literary genres frame the reader's approach to the text, and (2) its affiliation with history, i.e., the specific encounters between its generic properties and the historical situations within which they operate.
All six novels Codebo discusses in Narrating from the Archive embody significant features of the archival novel while tying the tradition to some of its neighbor genres. These texts epitomize the hybridity inscribed in the very term 'archival novel,' in the fact that by simply naming the genre we invoke the miscegenation of two distinct and cooperating discourses.
In chapter 1 of Narrating from the Archive, he begins to analyze this hybrid by discussing the development of the archival novel in eighteenth-century England. In chapter 2, Codebo examines the two paradigms of archival fiction, legitimation and challenge. In chapter 3, he looks at historical writing, records, and fiction in Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1840) and Storia delta colonna infame; in this chapter, he also takes on an issue of relevance to the entire book, the relation between archival and historical novels. Chapter 4 deals with the archival components of Honore de Balzac's La Comedic humaine (1842-47) and explores the interaction between the archival novel, the law, and the identification of citizens in nineteenth-century nation states. Chapter 5 takes on Gustave Flaubert's criticism of ninteenth-century knowledge in Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), along with the relation between the archival novel, the encyclopedia, and literary realism. Chapter 6 examines Georges Perec's approach to the archive as a game, along with the relations between archives, libraries, and memory in La Vie mode d'emploi (1978). Chapter 7 analyzes Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) as a division as a discussion of the archive's senescence in a context defined in a context defined by the achievements of post-Newtonian science and the inception of the digital database.
|
