CHAPTER V
THE GENERIC INVENTION AND THE RELIGIOUS INTERTEXT
5.1 Michon and his archives: between history and fiction
Tiny Lives are not a biography in the traditional sense of the word. he
is more of an autobiography articulated in a sequence of eight “new
biographies “whose tone, and above all the title, evoke the hagiographies, or Lives of
saints, popular in the Middle Ages. Anyway, biography and autobiography rely
necessarily on an archival material to put into narrative an individual existence
(or, as in the case of prosopographies, to compare the lives of individuals who
lived at the same time to offer the reader a vision of what could be
example, life in the French countryside in the eighteenth century). The case that we
occupies is more complex. Indeed, the dissolution of generic boundaries in the Lives
appears to be matched only by the sources from which the
narrator. About the archive at Michon, Dominique Viart writes:
69
No infrapaginal notes but all underlying documentary material, which i
really nourishes the narrative and its perplexities: texts, critical works, gloss of the
“Vulgate” rimbaldienne, historical documents on the Post and Painting at the time of Van
Gogh and Roulin, photographs, archives of time … There is there the material necessary for the
implementation of this “restitution work” which Claude Simon had already
of his own family in The Georgics or what have been called “novels” or
Archive “stories” l

In the Lives, this jumble of archives that Vialt notes appears at random of the pages and
requirements of the time of writing. Already, in the “Life of André Dufourneau”, the
narrator poses one of the many dichotomies that partly melt the building of his
as if the writing obeyed, like Dufourneau himself, “to the haughty god
summary of “all or nothing” 2. This is actually the contradiction that splits into two parts
(unequal?) the totality of the real: on the one hand, the sensible world remains this place where destinies
in the silence of the word and, on the other hand, there is this writing,
the writer works to bring order into the chaos of existence, unpredictability and
the insignificance of a life. In short, there is the human who is thrown into the sensible world and, in
parallel, the writer confined to the “continent” of memory:
… I did not know that writing was a tamer and darker continent
that Africa, I write a species more eager to get lost than I explore; and, even though
explore memory and memorial libraries instead of dunes and forests, only to return
sewn with words like others are golden or die there poorer than before – in
to die – was the alternative offered also to scribe3
•
Although the writer explores, therefore, his peregrinations are on the side of memory where
the ink has replaced the blood that beats in the hearts of the peasants. The consciousness of death,
which appears in the preceding quote, is at the center of Lives as perhaps of all
autobiographical business. Whatever the nature of the archives it uses, the
narrator works in the neighborhood of memory. The latter, in a broad sense, is its
1 Domique Viart, “The” Critical Fictions “by Pierre Michon”, in Coll., Pierre Michon, writing

absolute, Agnès Castiglione (dir.), Proceedings of the first international conference Pierre Michon, Musée d’art

modern of Saint-Etienne, 8, 9, 10 March 200 l, p. 204.

2 Minute Lives, p. J9.

3 Ibid., P. 22.

70
library or its archive room: it extends into the memory of every person
alive as in the artifacts left by the deceased.
By artifact, we do not just hear the miles of written archives
Arlette Farge speaks in The taste of the archive, but any human product. he can
to be, as Viart points out, both photographs and pictorial representations
as glosses or critical texts bequeathed by scribes of earlier eras.
To define the Arlette Farge archive, quoting J. André, writes:
Set of documents, whatever their form or material support, of which
the increase took place in an organic, automatic way in the exercise of
activities of a natural or legal person, private or public, and whose conservation
respect this growth without ever dismembering it4
•
According to this scientific definition, we see that the archive can not be reduced to
of I write or text. And one of Michon’s original processes consists precisely in
the use of several forms and sources of archives. First, with respect to “Life
André Dufourneau “, mention the existence of letters sent by the traveler to Élise,
the narrator’s grandmother: “Other letters came, annual or biannual,
retracing from a life what his protagonist meant, and that he probably thought he had
lived: he had been a forestry worker, a “wood cutter”, a planter at last; he was rich. »We
can see here one of the narrator’s specific methods of naming the archive
first, then to decode it according to its dreams, its reading hypotheses and
needs of the work in progress: “I also think about what he did not say: some insignificant
secret never revealed […] some debauchery of the spirit around a derisory device, a
shameful delight in all that he lacked6

This type of narrator’s intervention in his work is reminiscent of the
third biographical paradigm mentioned by Madelénat in The biography, namely the
modern paradigm in which the biographer begins to get involved, to speak.
4 Arlette Farge, The taste of the archive, Paris, Seuil, coll. “The Bookshop of the Twentieth Century”, 1989, p.

S lowercase lives, p. 25.

6 Ibid., P. 25-26.

71
Flaubert wanted the writer to be at his work what God is in the world, a demiurge
omniscient. In the Tiny Lives, it would be necessary to speak of a modest god, conscious of his
limits, exaggerating them even until the pathos and the feeling of helplessness, but
Engaging body and soul in his writing process. It is in this perspective
Moreover, Viart notes with keenness:
Michon is a writer who utters the enunciative instance: his work is a
theater which is shown behind the scenes. All the narrative functions are exhibited:
the “governance” function that organizes the narrative, the “ideological” function that
comments on the ethics and axiology of the “metalittary” function which discusses the
poetic, “narrative” form that exhibits its enunciation procedures or the
communication function that challenges the reader, all that the canonical analyzes of the
narratology distinguish is here exemplarily manifested by the text7
To these functions that Dominique Viart lists, we could add, in the sense of a
Gaston Bachelard8
, the function of reverie (or defantasm) on which we will return, and
which is undoubtedly the one that conditions all the others here. Anyway, what we
interest here is to see how the epistolary archives (we spoke at the moment of
Dufourneau’s letters) constitute a kind of “gold thread” in the sense of Yvan Lamonde9
, and
how, therefore, considering the rarity of these archives, the narrator must constantly
to rely on the “white thread”, that is, on his own ability to formulate hypotheses
in order to seal up the archival cracks to give to his narrative – as to the existence
that it portrays – a unity of tone and style, above all the evocative power necessary for
resurrection of the dead, which the task of writing is to unearth.
The same goes for the other types of archives here in Game. Let’s think about the
photography, which appears frequently in the text as a support for scriptural work.
If the narrator’s written records are extremely rare, one of the
7 “The” Critical Fictions “by Pierre Michon”, Lake. cit, p. 213.

8  See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, Paris, PUF, coll. “Quadriga”, 2005,] 83 p.

9 Yvan Lamonde, based on a rich intervention at a master’s seminar

doctorate directed by Bernard Andrès, biography and imaginary of the archive, which took place in

UQAM in the fall of 2003, distinguishes two types of “son” which can be sewn from the archive,

the biographical text: the first, the “white thread”, constitutes the primary resource of the biographer, who

uses it to correct archival flaws. It is therefore less persuasive than the second,

“The golden thread”, which proceeds and testifies to unexpected, “extraordinary” archives, founded in credibility

and, therefore, empowered to question current knowledge of his subject.

72
silence of his ancestors, the “family museum” has many photographs that he will know
to speak:
The opportunity is beautiful [note the subordination to the present of writing] to trace
he [Dufourneau] the physical portrait that I differed: the family museum has kept one, where
he is photographed at the foot, in the blue horizon of the infantry; the quilted bands that the
I was able to imagine it downstairs Louis XV […]. […] Come on, this is
to a writer he looks like: there is a portrait of young Faulkner, who like him was
small, where I recognize this haughty air at once and sleepy … 10
In this passage, we see how character traits of the character
come from the paralleling of a unique photograph of it and a portrait of
Faulkner whose narrator remembers. The dream function mentioned above becomes
manifest. Without the “white thread” of reverie or fantasy, there is only one daguerreotype
figuring an ordinary character. However, in the present of writing arises a
comparison with the American writer and, consequently, the meaning attributed to the portrait of
the ancestor, as well as a truth of the ancestor himself, are emerging and settling,
crystallize in I write to restore the tiny character to the memory of men:
“… who, if I did not take note here, would remember André Dufoumeau, false noble and peasant
. [ ] He ? pervertI … »
5.2 From the biography to the “oblique autobiography”: the generic invention at Michon
“Biographical News” where the work on the archive predominates, the transition
towards Autobiography becomes more and more perceptible as the story unfolds. Moreover,
unlike Claude Simon, mentioned by Viart in a previous quote, the narrator
Michonian does not have the archives under the eyes at the time of the narrative. In fact, he
works from his own memory, from his own memories of photographs,
10 Minute Lives, p. 23.
11 1bid, p.31-32.

73
letters, trinkets and palavers from his grandmother. In this perspective,
Phantasmatic and phenomenological deformation of reality is hypertrophied.
However, as Michon’s work “is a theater which is shown behind the scenes” 12, this
Hypothetical character of the scriptural interpretation is always mentioned in the text.
Just like the archive that is shown, fantasy and imagination, the “white thread” and
the part of fiction are expressly assumed: “It is then necessary to imagine that one day, Toussaint
perceived in the son (…) something, gesture, word or more probably silence, which
displeased him13 … “In this excerpt, the narrator claims to imagine the scene. Further, he admits
crossing the border that Arlette Farge proscribes to historian l4: “… the fictitious observer, scattered
with the evening in the smell of the great elder facing the door, sees them enter, even silhouette and
cap ensué, necks evenly burned, vaguely mythological as always the
are father and son, double time overlapping in space here below. ”
If the first two “Lives” gave rise to a rather biographical narration, to
from the “Lives of Eugene and Clara” writing tends more towards gender
autobiographical. In fact, if each “Life” is an autotelic system and can be read
independently, it is mostly part of an overall composition that includes a very
strong internal cohesion.
To start the first “Life”, that of André Dufourneau already mentioned, the
Narrator writes: “Let’s move on to the genesis of my claims. Then he asks himself:
“Have I some ascendant who was a handsome captain, a young insolent sign or a slave
fiercely taciturn 16? The incipit, detailed in chapter 1, then raises the curtain on what
will be first of all a work of family archeology. After composing the biography of
Dufourneau, who by the way was not his biological ancestor (the character was adopted by his
maternal great-grandparents), he goes back generations to Antoine Peluchet. Over there
Afterwards, he returns to the beings he himself has rubbed shoulders to make the relationship of “Lives
of Eugene and Clara “, his paternal grandparents.
12 “Pierre Michon’s” Critical Fictions “, Lake. cit., p. 213.

13 Minute Lives, p. 42.

14 “In history, lives are not novels, and for those who have chosen the archive as a place where

can write the past, the stake is not in fiction. The taste of the archive, op. cit., p. 95.

5 Minute Lives, p. 43.
16 Ibid., P.13.

74
It is in this section that will be revealed the paternal fault, “default
autobiographical “17 fantasized as the cause of a hereditary sense of guilt
which only I write can help. In the absence of having known this absent father, the
narrator – as we have seen already – must rely on his grandparents: “To my father,
inaccessible and hidden like a god, I can not directly think. As to a faithful
[…], I need the help of his truchements, angels or clergy; and first comes to my mind
the annual visit […] that my paternal grandparents paid me as a child 18 ••. This
process, which consists in making the biography of the grandparents to discover the hidden face
of his father, immerses the reader in what Geneviève Noiray, taking up the expression
introduced by Jean-Pierre Richard in an article on the author I9, called “poetics
oblique of the autobiographical news “:
In this enterprise on the margins of the new and the autobiography, Michon
seizes and builds bias; he multiplies the mirrors to paint his infirmity to write and
position at the oblique of the traditions, perhaps out of anxiety to confront it, by indifference to
established forms, by congenital need of the pullout. It is at the oblique of the tradition of
He lives because he chooses tiny lives and not the lives of illustrious men; However, he
does not operate parody, derision, or reduction of this apologetic kind; it shows on the contrary
the glory of the humble and almost nothing 20.
To find oneself “skewed”, the narrator must first discover and create his own
ancestors. We know that for psychoanalysts, the subject can only be formed by
identification games. In the case of Least Lives, the problem is that these
representations are, a priori, either failing or completely absent. To build, the
The narrator must first develop these identificatory representations. And, to continue
17 We take the expression from the subtitle of a book by Simon HareJ, Restorative Writing: The

autobiographical defect (Leiris, Crevel, Artaud), Montreal, XYZ, coll. “Theories and literature”,

1994,231 p.

18 Minute Lives, p. 71.

19 Cf. Jean-Pierre Richard, “To read Rimbaud the son”, in Companies of Pierre Michol1, Lagrasse,

Verdier, 1993, p. 117-140.

20 Geneviève Noiray, “Minuscule Lives: An Oblique Poetic of the Autobiographical News”, in

French-language news at the borders of other genres from the Middle Ages to the present day, Vincent

Engel and Michel Guissard (dir.), Proceedings of the conference of Metz, 1996, p. 298.

75
the metaphor of oblique, to restore by writing the vacant paternal figure, he is forced
to rely on the memory of his grandparents.
To summarize this fundamental process, we will simply say that the “poetics of
the oblique autobiography “consists in making the biography of others to come to speak of
itself. We said that in the previous episodes, the narrator relies on sources
outside: in fact, the memories of Elise and the varied archives that provide her with material for
narrativization are those that emerge in his own consciousness at the very moment of
writing and according to the requirements of it.
In the “Lives of Eugene and Clara,” the narrator works more freely, if one
Can say; More and more, the “family museum” is emerging to listen to his
own memory. He thus gradually traded his biographer’s tins for those more
hypothetical and less certain (although, as we have seen, the precedents were not
more) of the autobiography. The miscegenation and the generic burst are thus manifested
from the tiny Lives, where the writing, oscillating between variable perspectives and very often
antinomies – the illiteracy of the father Foucault and the verb of the abbot Bandy, the turns
patois and the seventeenth-century declensions of the narrator, the hearty orality of the hinterland and
the language of angels -, blurs certain fundamental genres by making them coexist in
a composite work. By camping “tiny lives” in the form of the Lives of Saints;
seeking to highlight, from the biography of buried ancestors or mere mortals who
have upset his existence, the singularity of his own face, Michon rethinks – and we
invites to reconsider – both biography and self-writing, the possibilities offered by
) archive and the palt of fiction inevitable to the narrative of a human existence.

76
5.3 The religious intertext and the “rhetoric of hesitation”
It is difficult not to doubt!
Flaubert
Bouvard and Pécuchet
We have just observed two essential elements of Michonian poetics such as
that it is elaborated in the Lives: the recourse to the archive and the double diversion of the kinds
biographical and autobiographical in favor of what could be considered a genre
unpublished: ‘oblique autobiography’. The appropriation of canonical models for a
personal use translates, in the author-narrator, the hesitant desire to integrate into a whole
repository without being swallowed up. This game of hesitation – between genres, narrative processes
traditionally, the filiations claimed – is also manifested in a very casual manner
to use a religious intertext to, among other things, give his peasant world a
mythological dimension. Before questioning the reasons for this religious intertext, he
should be explored a priori how it manifests itself in the course of the story.
As Agnès Castiglione studies in an article entitled “The Beatitudes of Peter
Michon “21, the Cretan author refers both to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and to the
peasant traditions (magic, even witchcraft of the hinterland, superstitions, etc.) so
to develop his work. The Michonian theology, says Castiglione, is based first on
the use (appropriation or assimilation) of a religious discourse that always oscillates between
worship and outrage, so that the narrator’s word seems to be able to be fixed only within
a fundamental doubt. Anyone who has read the third text of the collection Abbots, published
in 2002 at the same time as Corps du roi, will remember this litany formula, for
not to say liturgical, which returns throughout the story: “All things are changeable and
near the inceltain22. ”
21 Cf. Agnès Castiglione, “The beatitudes of Pierre Michon”, in The religious discourse, its seriousness, its

parody in theology and literature, Le Cerf-University of Metz, June 2001, p. 313-329.

22 Pierre Michon, Abbots, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2002, p. 52.

77
Heiress of Flaubert as evidenced by a text of Corps du roi, daughter of
protagonists of Bouvard and Pécuchet 23, J’écriture de Michon translates the compelling need to
believe, the anguished aspiration to an unshakable faith that can counterbalance the emptiness
she proceeds. “The desert that I was,” says the narrator of the Lives, “I would have liked to populate it with
words, weave a writing veil to steal the hollow orbits of my face 24. }} Writing
Michonian, since the nothing that articulates it, since the Creuse where the man is such that he has
always been, track down the meaning of things under the veils that disguise them, doubting objects
to which it attaches, of its enunciation, of everything at last, beginning with its own reason
being. And if from this work of doubt there remains some truth admissible, I can not
only in the negative, namely: nothing is safe. It is in this sense, although in another
register, that the heroes of Flaubert’s novel, and that the novelist himself by his aesthetics
singular, prefigure what we could call the postmodernity of Pierre Michon.
Bouvard and Pécuchet, in L’ambiguité where Flaubert maintains them, succumb to a rage of
which operates backwards to the extent that, rather than to calming conclusions, their
Festering searches only confuse them further in a jumble of paradoxes and
epistemological flaws. We thus see them burdened with all disciplines, rubbing against each other.
agriculture, geology, archeology, then history, medicine, etc., until
that, little by little, cool them not so much their repeated failures (and God knows that they
live) that the overly relative, self-interested, subjective, arbitrary, intentional character of all
who people Creation. So the two friends do it, just like the Abbots of
Michon, a terrible experience that sums up the sentence: “All things are changeable and
close to the uncertain25. ”
On the subject of belief, where for the author resorbs the head of plural truths
and, in a sense, mutable, uncertain, even unreliable, we can report, from
same text of Abbots, the plot of the tooth of St. John the Baptist stolen by Theodelin to
confreres. In possession – or more precisely in secret – of this relic, a young
a pusillanimous and withdrawn monk, not very talkative, perhaps a fool, Hugues, of the abbey of Saint-Michel, suddenly sees himself living with a dazzling verb, a warmth, a pathos which
23 See Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard el Pecuchel, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Classic folio”, 1979,572 p.

24 Minute Lives, p. 89.

25 Abbots, op. cil., p. 52.

78
evokes that of George Bandy in the tiny Lives. Surprised first, soon
amazed, won at the power of that voice touched by Grace, the counterparts of the
fervent recruit choose her as new abbot. Hugues then carries the meaning for a while
Universal, until the day the fraud is unmasked, the tooth of the saint being false. The faith
of the abbot is immediately broken, in the same way as his verb that will never resonate between
the walls of the abbey. He will remain claustrated in his cell, silent forever.
This fable illustrates well this fundamental doubt which houses the heart of the work
michonian and which, perhaps, stimulates the writing. Moreover, the author says himself
“Rhetorician of hesitation”. In the aftermath of the age of suspicion, he is developing a true
poetic uncertainty already begun in the Lives, which are teeming with formulas
report it: “I doubt that …”, “I do not know if …”, “No doubt …”, etc. If he seeks
a truth, he knows he can only find it within the confines of literature, which, like
says Milan Kundera when speaking of the novel, is “wisdom of uncertainty” 26. And in this the
contemporary prose of Pierre Michon joins the wisdom of the Ancients, as evidenced by
this quote from a book by Daniel Madelénat: “Modern skepticism must here
join the ancient wisdom of Xenophanes: “Certainly the truth, no one knew it nor did it
will never know (…). Someone might, by chance, utter the ultimate truth, he does not
would know nothing himself. In all things the conjecture prevails, 27. ”
26 See Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, 199 p.

27 Daniel Madelénat, Biography, Paris, PUF, coll. “Modern Literatures”, 1984, p. 208.

79
5.4 Between worship and outrage
After all, he could come back believing,
born
com
refused
pleasure.
not to be, and yielded by
Flaubert
Bouvard and Pécuchet
To return to the Lives, it must be said that this doubt articulates the ironic representation
religious references to which the author-narrator maintains, without solution
continuity, a relationship of ambivalence. In fact, as with literature, the will
– or the desire – to believe is never manifested, in the work of Michon, that accompanied
of his own impossibility. The ironic distancing of the religious intertext seems to
even to have the function of emphasizing the deficient or unusable or even obsolete
primitive, of the Judeo-Christian faith.
In this regard, Agnès Castiglione adds:
It should be noted that allusions or religious quotations occur at Michon
in a very ironic way, in a maximum gap with a context that denies them
sovereignty.
This game of oscillation between worship and outrage, which evokes the ambivalence of the narrator to
with regard to its own origins, its center of gravity is that unquenchable
to doubt whose author speaks, as we have said, as a “rhetoric of hesitation”.
This fascination with doubt appears even in the choice of the cover of
I pocket edition of the Lives, for which I author opted for a photograph of the Apostle
Saint Thomas of Velasquez. In this respect, Michon explains himself as follows:
28 “The beatitudes of Pierre Michon”, loc. cit., p. 319.

80
– Why did you choose Saint Thomas Velasquez for the cover?
– Because St. Thomas is the figure of doubt. And his doubt is not doubt
methodical, but a much more devious doubt, which digs an individual by massacring in him
what he has most dear. And if there’s one thing I’m not sure of, that’s what’s the basis for me, that’s literature …
This fundamental doubt thus appears as the pivot between the two movements
the antagonism of worship and outrage, which again evoke those of the theory of
Melanie Klein, who sees in the need for compensation the counterpart of the attacks
fantasies of the infant against the maternal belly. It’s such a movement, such
tension between opposite poles that is articulated by the writing of minuscule Lives. First, the
weights of origins (and the debt that comes with them), we have discussed them extensively
in the first part, a lively “desire for release”, which is expressed among others in the
denial and outrage, even in the profanation of the native soil. In this case, hostility
manifested towards the original medium seems almost identical to that
which the narrator ironically desecrates the catch-all of beliefs that is inherent to him.
As for the desecration of ancestors, memory and ancestral places, this one will be followed
the desire to restore them to the fantasy of a “restorative writing”, omnipotent, even to quote a passage from La Grande Beune – by means of this “heavy sentence without
replica […], jubilant, suffocating, black, absolute writing “30.
Moreover, the imprecations made on the place of religion – as
the place of the work that integrates it – seem to lead to one of the vicious circles
observed earlier: the profanation of sacred texts is an attempt to destroy
authority, the established value and, like the infant’s fantasy attacks on the
maternal belly (Klein), it is inevitably followed by the feeling of guilt and
need for reparation which, in Pierre Michon’s case, as we shall see later, is articulated
in the terms of a written justification.
29 Thierry Bayle, “Pierre Michon: A Capitalist Author”), The Literary Magazine, No. 353, April 1997,
p.98.

30 Pierre Michon, The Great Beul1e, Lagrasse, Verdier, 1996, p. 50.

81
To this ambivalent posture of the writer with regard to the scriptures as of his own
religious intertext, Castiglione – always – pays special attention in the article
essential where she notes:
This practice, of which we see the frequency, which consists in ironically inserting a
citation of the sacred texts in a context which administers the exact denial, is at
sacrilege, a “theft of sacred objects” […], that is to say a displacement and more
irreverent. In this diversion which still borrows the ways of the grotesque belittling,
burlesque or theatricality, Michon practices “mesal ciances” in the understood sense
by Bakhtin, which consist of a combination of the high and the low, the sublime and
the insignificant, the sacred and the profane and goes into the prowess of what he calls
Carnivalization31.
This practice of “misalliance” appears very clearly in the dichotomy between
the smallness, the humility of the biographies of the narrative – and the “tiny” epithet by which is
their “life” – and the hyperbolic emphasis or tone of the prose that is
to sanctify in the manner (diverted certainly) medieval hagiographies.
In Tiny Lives, mediocre a priori characters are restored (repaired) by
a language that wants to be divine, sacred. Despite the ironic distance of the narrator compared
to his theological discourse, the language of the Father, this “impassible Dispenser of all Word”,
is not less incensed in a paradoxical drive of the writing subject that makes him say
(although one can, even here, perceive the irony): “Nothing surrounds me like the
miracle 32. ”
The ambivalence between outrage and (reparative) worship appears more clearly in
relationship between the narrator and his biographers. Indeed, the declared will of the
resurrect through writing contrasts with their previous desecration, which occurs at
multiple occurrences in the text, and in which we could read an attempt to
destruction of the mother’s womb (Mother Earth but also the father’s body) and the liquidation of this
which we will consider later as a genealogical debt.
Perhaps it is in the relation of “Lives of Eugene and Clara” that appears the most
clearly this motive of desecration of origins. Paternal grandparents, perhaps by
31 “The beatitudes of Pierre Michon”, loc. cil., p. 120.
32 Minute Lives, p. 247.
82
identification with the offending father, suffer in fact, sometimes indirectly, the lightning
of the narrator. Also in the last hours of Clara the narrator refuses to make it a
ultimate visit, as moved by a vindictive desire:
… I had scorned to follow the ashes of Eugene, I let her die and I kept quiet.
I was renouncing my childhood, I was eager to fill the hollow that had printed so much
absences and, allowing me foolish theories fashionable, I grieved those who more than
I had suffered.
A few pages earlier, remembering his childhood, he evokes the desire to laugh that
provoked in him the grotesque aspect, the foolish nullity of Eugene (which recalls that of
Professor Achille in the “Lives of the Bakroot Brothers”). But, soon after, it is repending:
This secret desire to laugh, I reproached myself; to wear a dubious, ironic eye
even, on “someone I had to love,” hide this scabrous thought: my grandfather
is very ugly, seemed to me a fault of the highest gravity (…); I was a monster?
Immediately, I promised myself to love him better34 …
This passage supports our hypothesis that denial and profanation
origins are, in a Kleinian perspective, followed by a keen need for redress, which
expresses itself here in the narrator’s promise to love his grandfather more. he
of course this promise is the result of a feeling of guilt (<< … so I was a
monster? “), As the need for compensation that arises. It is not otherwise with the
narrated by the narrator to be a beneficiary of the “Grace of the Scripture”, a heavenly gift
will redeem him for his degradation of “monster”. Moreover, this feeling of guilt is
not without mentioning that of the voluntary exile who, far from the native country, comes to
his fits of nostalgia, depressive anguish aroused by painful awareness
to have betrayed his. At Pierre Michon, Literature takes the place of country
Home. So is it about flirting with the Great Authors, the men of letters, the
“Reference”, what lies this betrayal.
33 Ibid., P. 89.
34 Ibid., P. 76.
83
In the Tiny Lives, it is for the narrator to resume where his ancestors
have failed (as evidenced by the “Lives” of Dufourneau and Antoine Peluchet).
The writing is therefore essential as the attempt to restore his ancestors, hereditarily excluded
places of discourse and power, subordinated to a primordial undifferentiation that makes
from them primitive beings isolated from the process of Culture and History – and, consequently,
remained (this is again the reason for the bogging) at an archaic stage of
symbolic development.
In order to atone for the betrayal of his own for having, like Dufourneau, trapped
desire to be elected, in other words: to have believed himself also a “called in secret” by a destiny
brilliant (compensatory), he relies on writing and, among other things,
fantasy of the resurrection of bodies, a central notion of Christian doctrine. On this subject
finally, Michon confides: “With some other concepts of the great catholic panoply,
that of the resurrection of the body is one of those dear to me, and I try to
to mimic in literature, perhaps to call it, to make it come35. ”
5.5 The shame of the origins and the coronation of the Letter
It is in the “Life of Father Foucault” that the Writing – the Letter – is placed in a
religious dimension. In Clermont-Ferrand hospital where the narrator is recovering from his
wounds inflicted by the “Don Juan Vili” of the Brewery of Strasbourg, the character of the
Father Foucault hovers an aura of mystery, an intriguing secret that makes
narrator:
This one had attracted me from the first day, without me daring to address him: his
sweet taciturnity intimidated me.
A few pages later, in a dramatic summit of tension, the old man
fulfills his heartbreaking revelation: “I am illiterate37
As a result of this admission, the
35 “Pierre Michon: a capitalist author”, loc. cil., p. ] 02-103.
36 Tiny Lives, p. 149.
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narrator conceives a paradoxical filiation with the old illiterate. Foucault, suffering from
cancer in the throat, is offered miraculous treatments in Paris, in this metropolis of
progress “where the walls themselves were literate, historic bridges […], this capital where the
hospitals were parliaments, doctors more scholarly in the eyes of doctors here, the
least nurse Marie Curie “38. The Paris metropolis, by the way, perhaps by
opposition to the house of Mazirat, acts here as a geographical metaphor while embodying
the very place of the “Reference”, borrowed term – remember – to Pierre Legendre,
jurist, disciple of Freud and Lacan as well as founder of dogmatic anthropology.
As for the aging old man, aware that such a cure could only be done “at the price
of his shame “39, who persists in staying in this provincial hospital to end his days
in order to atone for “the crime of not knowing” 40.
This shame of ignorance, carried by the biographer as the Christian wears his
burden to access the promised deliverance, is not without evoking the shame of the origins that
crushes the narrator as a sum of sins to expiate (that of his birth, first,
then, through the identifications that we know, of his father who has disappeared,
even the entire male side of his genealogical record).
This shame is part of the bogging down in this primitive world from which came the
narrator. From the first “Life”, that of André Dufourneau, appears this motive that pushes
André to flee for Africa. Ignoring the truth about the exact conditions of the
birth of Dufourneau, Élise, no doubt with the unconscious goal of sparing this burden
young orphan, invents him a kinship with local squires. Alas, this fiction well
intentional will rather cause the misfortune of the young man. Indeed, the biographer will conceive
a pride that will only increase his shameful consciousness, a sort of fantasy
of election will be able to compensate: that which consists in believing itself to be the “called in secret”, “the elected
calmly clenched in a destiny greater than the woman. “41
Ibid, p. 155.
Ibid, p. 157.
39 Ibid, p. 157.
40 Ibid., P. 157.
41 Ibid, p. 17.
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For Dufourneau, Africa represents the promised land. In the logic of the mind
Colonial, the European who lands there, even if he is a mediocre citizen or an orphaned peasant
like André Dufourneau, inevitably discovers an indigence greater than his own.
In the fantasies of the orphan, the dreamed wealth and glory can only wait for him
these countries populated with more humble than him. Nostalgia for a gain in power
manifest here as a defense against a sense of inferiority we could talk about
as an internalization of peasant failure.
In our analysis, in Chapter II of this memoir, of “Antoine’s Life
Peluchet “, we saw how the son is, thanks to the screaming speech of Fiéfié,
sanctified in a mythical destiny of American hero. In the same way as fiction
Élise affuble Dufourneau, this mythical existence (here we find the motive of
imposture) will fail: this nostalgia for a compensatory power, which
put a balm on the “permanence of misfortune”, will be reduced to nothing when
son Jouhanaut, to mention it again, will denounce the trickery: “To the chain and
two by two under the hisses of fishwives, he embarked on the port for the prison of Re42. ”
The relationship of this fall is part of the “aesthetic-religious” register
Jean-Pierre Richard. From Dufourneau’s father, the narrator writes:
The old man thought he was saving the cross: his story was premature perhaps, and certainly incomplete. At the glorious Ascension, the mirliflore, the peephole, offered
the bargain of an Ecce homo43.
The Judeo-Christian intertext makes the son Jouhanaut a Judas, a Pilate delivering Christ,
this “secretly called” by the Father to his accusers. This relationship between the Christ figure
and the poetic Michonian takes its fullest meaning in the narrator’s aspiration to the
“Grace of the Scripture”, leitmotiv towards which, by a kind of displacement of type
metonymic, is transferred to Michon the essential Christian figure, discussed
especially by Pascal in his Thoughts 44, of the Grace of the Father.
42 Ibid., P. 59.
43 Ibid., P. 60.
44 See Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, coll. “Paperback”, 1962,445 p.

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5.6 Freud, the religious need and the hinterland
In the future of an illusion, Freud places, in the mouth of a fictive interlocutor,
basic postulate:
It is the relationship between son and father that is everything, God is the exalted father, the desire for the father
is the root of religious need. Since, it seems, you have discovered the factor that are
human impotence and helplessness, to which the main role in
the formation of religion, and here you are transposing in terms of helping each other everything that was
previously paternal complex 45.
This notion of “desire for the father” as the origin of religious need, even
of the “oceanic feeling” that Freud, following a remark by his friend Romain Rolland,
resumes in The malaise in culture, is reminiscent of the nostalgia of the paternal body
and the eroticization of the relation to the father on which we have reflected. As to the notion of
“Helpless”, that which concerns the little human being in complete dependence on the
maternal care or better: parental authority, it seems to apply very exactly
to peasants who are destined to remain children, that is to say, to recall the lessons of etymology
mentioned al! chapter III, infans, Latin word meaning: “Who does not speak 46. Moreover,
no doubt we could read in the Lives the representation of a peasant desaid in that
the characters seem subordinate within Mother Earth, with whom we
as we have seen – they have ambivalent relationships of love-hate – relationships that are subtended by a state of dependence analogous to that of the infans subject, in order to survive
elementary.
We know that religious rites, superstitions seem, in the hinterland
michonian, to testify to a fixation with a primitive world where beings
practically unaware of themselves and the symbolic laws that bring them together. In
Tiny lives, the peasant world seems indeed to appear only as a depositary of the
45 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Paris, Quadrige / PUF, J999, p. 22-23.

46 Cf. Le Petit Robert: dictionary of the French language, Cédérom version J. 2, Paris, Liris

Interactive, 2000.

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traditions, myths imbued with popular magic whose transmission, from generation to
I even go to that of the narrating hero, was assured by the women. In such a
rooting (Richard talks about bogging), it’s easy to see persistence – and as
the durability – of a state of “helplessness” and, consequently, the survival of the religious need
which, in Freud’s sense, would proceed directly. The difficulty here is that these
peasant rites, this rustic witchcraft, are represented in a mechanical, private
of living faith, as if they obeyed only the force of habit and need
tiring to “fight with the essential”.
In the “Life of the little dead woman”, we can see Elise who, without really
to add faith, strives all the same to do all that is possible to ward off fate, that is, to repel the death of little Madeleine, by such rituals:
… she knew, in fact, old wizarding battles, what was the time
to stop women’s blood or to control the naked lightning on the wheels,
pawn of the horned gods […], procrastinate the inevitable, finally in all fatal circumstances
something, as we say when there is nothing left to do47.
This example gives an account of the mythological background of the peasant imagination of the Lives,
marked by the exclusion of places of speech and power where a subject can appropriate a
voice – a recognized, valid and even justified existence, a “founding story” – in
entering his name in the “Reference”. In the grip of this generalized “helplessness”,
banned as the birth of what Michel de Certeau called “the writing of
48, the characters have no other choice than those we know them: the
flight into silence, black liquor, exile, peasant fiction.
Apart from references to popular superstitions (or even to Greco-Roman mythology), it is especially in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures that Michon draws the source of
its religious aesthetic. The “Life of Antoine Peluchet”, for example, is developed under the
patronage of the “good Goussaud, hermit around the year one thousand”, including “a patron saint of wood
painted “takes the place of memory in the church that bears his name. This wooden figure, which
47 Minute Lives, p. 232.

48 Michel de Certeau, History and psychoanalysis between science and fiction, Paris, Gallimard, coll. «Folio

tests “,] 987,210 p.

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represents the hermit “sweeping the black side of a lying bull” 49, accompanies the faithful
in the procession of the seasons and assists women in their desire for begetting.
In this regard, the narrator writes:
Like me, Antoine, a child, was brought before these Lares; in the huge grip of the
father, his little hand was lost, tender, hazardous; the father lowered his voice, explained in a
breath the inexplicable world, how hot-haired herds depend on idols in
cold wood, how-things painted and impassive in the dark reign secretly over
large fields of summer5o …
This passage seems to clearly represent the insufficiency of the father to transmit what
part of the order or, to put it like Lacan, of the symbolic register. And furthermore,
this inadequacy seems to perpetuate, through the generations, ideological stagnation and
which condemns the peasant to remain in / in the state of “helplessness” of which we
spoke, the state to which André, Antoine, the Bakroot brothers – each in his own way – the
narrator especially, strive to remedy.
49 Minute Lives, p. 38.
50 Ibid., P. 38-39.

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