Carnets (Nov 2015)
Guerre d’outre-fiction ?
Abstract
If we follow the dynamic tension between document and fiction in the war narrative, three trends dominate the period following the Golden Age of French pop War fiction. Firstly, several collections organized by publisher Jeannine Balland are central to war narrative publishing. They propose a formula which is characterized by non-fictional narrative and its very explicit presentation, articulating information and epic narrative, national preference as a selective principle, ex-soldiers as writers, assembled as a team, sharing the same far-rightist tropism, publishing very explicit stories where information and epic are interwoven, in voluminous books, often reprinted in pocket book format. Secondly, against that non-fiction core are pitted US technothrillers and French military anticipations and uchronies. Thirdly, the cinema combines in retrospective ambivalence documentary and fictional effect – less well-known episodes, forgotten wars, decolonization wars, and WW1 consequences. Neither Balland’s formula nor emulation of the previous American model led war narrative into the field of comics. Fiction resists and dominates despite minoritary documentary turn. Yet tradition is not as affected by de documentary turn than by innovative displacements. So, besides a nostalgic anglomania, Le Trou d’obus becomes the symbol of an epoch, and an Italian tropism and a Hispanic tropism are dominant.
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