Narrating from the archive

de Marco Codebò

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. 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. In this book, Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, Honore 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 Perece'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 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 is 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 linguistic 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 achieves 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. --Book Jacket.