"Nothing That Is So Is So": Fiction And Detachment In Philippe Lancon'Sle Lambeau

In tracking his slow recovery from the facial injuries that he sustained in theCharlie Hebdoattacks, Philippe Lancon develops two distinct and conflicting senses of the word "fiction:" on the one hand, fiction as the imagination, construction, and organization of a possible world; on the other, fiction as the irruption of the unimaginable and the unreal in the midst of everyday life. In writingLe Lambeau(2018)-indisputably a work of nonfiction-Lancon aims to restore meaning to a life that feels fictional, through a narration that itself inevitably fictionalizes the experiences it recounts. Lancon's nonfiction narrative thus incessantly explores the category of fiction. It also engages deeply with works of fiction, as Lancon finds in reading Kafka, Thomas Mann, Henry James, and especially Proust, the possibility of a displaced, meditative, and distanced relation to his own present. Whereas writers of nonfiction often claim to capture an immediacy inaccessible to fiction, Lancon seeks instead a form of reparative detachment that finds an essential resource in fictional immersion.