Degenerative Realism by Christy Wampole

Author:Christy Wampole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

THE GLOBAL EVENT: BEYOND THE FAIT DIVERS

With its long-winded stamina and descriptive fervor, the kind of reportage favored by the New Journalists and New Social Novelists is excellent at producing atmosphere and fleshing out “characters,” but how do journalists deal with singular events, and what can novelists learn from them? The place where the event receives its most pithy treatment—often with powerful effect—is that journalistic microgenre known as the fait divers. Dominique Kalifa describes faits divers as “a multitude of lifeless occurrences: brawls or altercations, pickpocketing or fraud, minuscule and often ordinary conflicts” and “assaults, burglaries, and family dramas.”74 Their power, he argues, resides in part in their accumulation and repetition (1348), which reveals essential behavioral patterns of the human. Most operate in the factual register, although some occupy a space “between fiction and information” (1349). Typically, these local stories do not reach far beyond their site of occurrence. They have no global impact and involve mainly the individual perpetrators and victims, who function as characters in these narratives. Jean Touzot created a laundry list of the various faits divers out of which François Mauriac constructed his novels, the tragedies somehow made small in the pages of the daily paper: “Many cases of suicide by hanging, drowning, jumping out of windows, using barbiturates or, more often, by gunshot; we occasionally encounter murderous villains, a sexual crime perpetrated against a teenager, road accidents, in short everything that belongs, by metonymy of the species for the genre, to the rubric of crushed dogs [a French term for small town news].”75

Kalifa has further noted that in late-nineteenth-century France, the faits divers and the roman criminel76 “signaled the country’s progressive entry into the mediatic regime.”77 In other words, journalistic media and the novel began to recognize the permeability of the membrane between life and literature and to readily exploit it. In these two forms, fictionality and facticity were easily and often blended together. What complicated the faits divers further was the demand on the part of the publishers to have their writers not only entertain readers by injecting “literarity” into the descriptions of the events but anticipate the events to come, in order to outflank the competition.78 The master of faits divers in France was Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), who elevated this small journalistic form to the status of literature. The collection of his writings called Nouvelles en trois lignes, rendered in English by Luc Sante as Novels in Three Lines, illustrates the compressed beauty of the human drama in all its police blotter perfection. Here is an example of his talent: “Pauline Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a hatpin, the face of the inconstant Luthier, a dishwasher of Chatou, who had underestimated her.”79 And another: “Atop the station in Enghien a painter was electrocuted. His jaws could be heard clacking, then he fell on the glass roof” (56). While we’ve seen examples in which the material of the fait divers can be useful for practitioners of degenerative realism,80 the proportions of the fait divers are far too small to accommodate the expansive, global-scale worlds they create.

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