Régis Jauffret's Microfictions: A Radical Experiment in Collective Narration

Régis Jauffret's 'Microfictions' (Éditions Gallimard) is a 500-story novel that challenges conventional narrative form. The book's epigraph, 'Je est tout le monde et n'importe qui' (I is everyone and anyone), signals its ambition: a single narrator, 'Here Comes Everybody' à la Finnegans Wake, speaks 500 times across 1000 pages, adopting incompatible identities to create one continuous, all-encompassing story. Jauffret positions the work as a critique of autofiction, arguing that first-person writing is not narcissistic but a depersonalizing enterprise that multiplies and dissolves identity. The novel's structure is strictly formal: each microfiction is exactly two pages long, arranged alphabetically by title, echoing Roland Barthes' fragmentary ordering and Jauffret's previous 'Univers, univers'. This protocol reactivates the grand modern novel tradition from Balzac to Joyce, aiming to capture the noise, fury, and multiplicity of reality. Jauffret's 'microfictions' function like street interviews ('microtrottoirs'), offering snapshots of life's sublime and grotesque, from criminals to outcasts, in a 'court of miracles' where monsters are also wonders. The book was published in 2007.