Narrating from the Archive

Book excerpt: 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.