Tuesday 15th November 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Lynn Nguyen (St. John’s College) — ‘Recovering memory through the archival  enquête: Christophe Boltanski and Alice Zeniter’ 

From the World Wars to the Shoah to decolonization movements, major twentieth-century upheavals have informed the so-called archival turn in literature: the contemporary rise of writing inflected by engagement with the archive as not just a source for historical research, but a subject worthy of storytelling and critique in itself. The archive’s figuration in literary narratives that often depict an enquête, an investigation, implies a concern with being able to access, understand, and recover unknown histories. Through a comparative analysis of two enquête narratives within the archival turn – Christophe Boltanski’s La Cache (2015) and Alice Zeniter’s L'Art de perdre (2017) –this paper examines the relations among historical knowledge, writerly creation, and the ethical recovery of memory. The texts are concerned with reconstructing the lives of predecessors marginalized or threatened by war and forced migration, and for whom preservation of memory is now precarious, as their experiences have been overlooked by existing official documentation. Though the archive allows for contact with the past, the writers critique its incomplete, fragmented nature through the use of fractured temporality and self-reflexive narration. Where the historical archive is silent, alternative archives of fiction that provide historical knowledge via analogy substitute, albeit imperfectly, for what is missing. Attuned to the nuanced capacity of these substitutions to capture lived realities, the writers incorporate silences into their narratives, their opacity revealing the illusion of overly simplified reconstructions of history. 

Tess Eastgate (Keble College) — ‘Trust or “confiance” in Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with Antoine Barnave’ 

From July 1791 up to January 1792, Marie-Antoinette corresponded with a politician named Antoine Barnave; this period is sometimes referred to as their ‘government by letter’ (Hardman, 2019: 242). While Marie-Antoinette and her family lived heavily guarded in the Tuileries, Barnave attempted to shape the new Constitution favourably towards the monarchy, and direct the king and queen’s behaviour in such a way as to improve public opinion towards them. Since the two correspondents could not speak in person, mistrust could easily develop: as Barnave put it, ‘il est trop facile de s’entendre mal lorsqu’on ne peut jamais se parler’ (ed. Lever, 2005: 589). In the letters, Barnave repeatedly pleads for Marie-Antoinette’s trust, and accuses her of losing faith in him because of a letter of 25 July: was he correct in this accusation? Meanwhile, Marie-Antoinette admonishes Barnave for not keeping her informed, and – while employing various methods to depict herself as trustworthy – is occasionally duplicitous.