In this paper, we aim to show that the shape of reality is so far from us that any intent to say it is doomed to failure. A nice approach to fiction as the seamy side of language leads us to consider that the question of reality should be asked in terms of fiction : what does fiction tell us about how we deal with reality? The answer to this question reveals that existence is not the guarantee of what we are used to call genuine knowledge. Indeed, knowledge should be understood as a type-identified set of propositions in ontology which basis is the same as the one of fictional terms ; with this basis always lingering out of reach.

In this article, we approach, in the footsteps of Maurice Blanchot's works, the intimacy of the bond which links the word to the thing, bond inscribed in a double relation, reality / thought and possibility / impossibility. There is no question of assessing their adequacy, but of digging into the intimacy of what exists between them. The between interrogates both the (im)possible of the real to exist and of the thought to designate. His/her writing illustrates this impossibility of the word to translate a real which is, itself, impossible to become true. Does it mean that the real only exists as a transformed reality, in the same way that the word would only exist as an impossible designation? The deformation of thought through the word and of reality through the thing might be connected to a movement which we interrogate beginning with the question of the (im)possible deformation of real through writing.

Unreliable narration by definition involves deformation of the represented world. The narrator tells the story in the manner that makes the reader suspect that he / she is perverting the facts, manipulating the data, omitting details or simply lying. The narrative situation of this type can be observed in Tanguy Viel’s debut novel Le Black Note, published by the prestigious Minuit publishing house. The aim of this essay is to analyse unreliable narration as a modality of deformed representation of reality and to assess its impact on the reading process. This typically destabilising narrative technique reflects the condition of the deranged mind and thus depicts the distorted view of reality filtered through diseased consciousness. Subverting the traditional author–reader pact as well as the narrator’s authority, it constitutes one of the narrative paradigms typical of contemporary fiction.

In La Vérité sur Marie, the fantasized development shaping the narrative is clearly rendered visible: the narrator confesses to using his imagination and his intimate knowledge of Mary in order to picture her relationship with a Jean- Christophe de G. in detail – he reminds it on various occasions – which he knows nothing of. The aim of this present article will, therefore, be more than merely dismantling this work of arrangement revealed by the narrator himself, but will also consist in questioning the implications of this transgression on the rightfulness that is the act of storytelling. What matters, is to effectively understand how a narrative which explicitly self-designates as a fantasy, namely one which has no pretention whatsoever in reproducing the reality of described events but on the contrary proclaiming itself as a distortion of a real it cannot miss, nevertheless inclines to create an ordinary truth.

Naturalism is based on the sense of Reality. But Zola broke this one in the second part of his novel La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, by the description of the garden named « Paradou ». As usual, he used numerous documents and he inserted lists of names (flowers, plants, trees) into his novel ; but the result is not the same as in the other novels containing lists of names of foodstuffs (Le Ventre de Paris) or clothes (Au Bonheur des dames). The reference vanishes because Zola often accumulates names of plants unknown although existing ; besides, he multiplies metaphors, so that it is impossible to visualize Paradou, which is a strange creation. The description of the garden distorts and even destroys reality but builds a poetic object.

In Jonathan Littel’s “The Kindly ones”, Aue, the nazi homodiegetic narrator, affected with a forehead wound, feels as if he were endowed with a third eye, a pineal one, which would enable him to see beyond the opacity of things. This third eye leads him to direct a particular look on reality, which is apparently distorted: seized with hallucination, Aue comes to see, in Hitler, a Jew who would dissimulate his earlocks. Similarly, at the end of the novel, this pineal eye leads him to capture nothing more than a single aspect of reality: the Führer’s nose, which he has a sudden urge to twist. What causes this distortion of reality, this surge of incoherence in the midst of a work reflecting the nazi argumentation? The hypothesis of our reading consists in maintaining that this pineal eye turns Aue into the puppet of the author, who is thus addressing a cryptic discourse to his reader. Beyond the theme of resistance, an ontological reflection is coming to light: with Hitler merging into his antithesis, namely the Jew, mankind can only be perceived as one and the social Darwinism upheld by the supporters of nazism as empty of meaning.

The oeuvre of M. Blanchot belongs to “the age of suspicion”: it explores various relations between reality and our capacity to report it. “Thomas l'obscur”, “Au moment voulu” and “Celui qui ne m'accompagnat pas” are “réсits” (event story), where the logic of narration is completely perturbated : while the language is very subjective (modal verbs, verbs of opinion, affectif adjectifs and adverbs etc.), the narrator is looking for its disappearance. It's the paradoxe ot the subjectivity in absentia. The instance of discourse is omnipresent in “réсits” of Blanchot and it seems to dislodge such traditional narratif structures as plot, hero or time and space of narration. The text is always in reciprocal relation with itself, so that creates nonsolvable space between the writing and the representation, between the signification and the text in its materiality.

Metamorphosis is an essential way of being in poetry for Supervielle : transform himself in objects, animals or fictive persons, it is exploring the real in its infinite forms, creating a world funded on imagination rather than on a false unic knowledge of the truth, and having the fabulous possibility to find himself transported in the invisible place of the dead. Deform the real, it is convocating the power of images, which reinforce the forbidden access to the Real : sexual metaphors, horrible visions of organs and sudden appearance of things from a silent and obscure atmosphere contribute to a representation of the invisible Real. Supervielle is drived from the desire to connect the living and the dead ; therefore he uses hypotyposis and prosopopeia and maintain the memory of the disappeared, even though he finally accepts to let them quiet by writing just the print of their passage.

Moi, l’interdite written by the Mauritian Ananda Devi and Femme sept peaux, written by the Reunionese Monique Séverin represent in original manner subalternities due to color line and gender in hierarchy colonial discourse. These novels stage female narrator’s “agency” as a ghost and as a werewolf. The ghost Mrs Joseph changes other female Black character’s colonial ideology. So she obtains the discourse of power, the discourse of knowledge in the creole songs. In narrative Moi, l’interdite, Indian narrator mixes several type of narrative, diary, werewolf legend and tale in order to represent her subalternity, her monstrosity. She inverts the orientalist vision and presents another face of Indian woman in Mauritius Island. Consequently, these texts account for complexities in postcolonial realities as concerned the women black, indian, creole, chinese and metis subaltern.

The perspective of the distortion of reality in writing introduce the issue of a genre apparently “condemned” to the reproduction of reality “as it is”, to the blind enslavement to the referential illusion – literary travelogues. Both authors, one French, André Gide (1869-1951), and the other Croatian, Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981), wrote about their USSR, retelling the story of a Barthesian fascination that doesn’t necessarily lead to disappointment. The infatuation creates a reality that isn’t one, but that doesn’t confine it to a mere exoticism. The differences between the two texts are both structural and ideological, cultural and historical. Hence both U.R.S.S. constructed by the text are necessarily individual and other, somewhere in between a utopian and a heterotopian (Foucault) discourse, both figures of the “mobled queen” of Hamlet. Reality, constructed and deconstructed, remains eminently unreal.

During a lecture delivered in Warwick in 1967, Georges Perec said that he had been influenced by Brecht’s aesthetics. According to Perec, he borrowed from the playwright the notion of “alienation effect”. This article analyzes the importance of this loan for the spatial composition that organizes the distancing games present in the novel La Vie mode d’emploi, written by Perec in 1978.

This article proposes to analyse Francis Ponge’s work during the war in the light of « La leçon de Riberac », published by Aragon in 1941. Contrary to the widely held view that the poésie de Résistance deserves no critical attention because it is subordinated to politics it is argued that the question of the social function of poetry is in fact necessary to understand the full complexities of poetic form. The article concentrates on how the problem of « hermétisme » becomes invested with contradictory meanings that contaminate the notion of « realism ». I hope that exploring these multiple connotations will help reveal a historical subtext which will provide us with insights into poetic practices.