Carrère: Calais

We have recently learned that the 2021 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature has been bestowed on the French writer Emmanuel Carrère, author of a literary work that has been widely disseminated among the Spanish-speaking public, a fact to which the work of the publisher of all his books in Spanish, Anagrama, is undoubtedly not unrelated.

Carrère is one of the cultivators of what is known as the "non-fiction novel" or "documentary novel", that is to say, stories which, employing the narrative mechanisms and rhetorical devices of fiction, have their direct origin in real people, events and situations (and which, in many cases, include the author himself as the protagonist).

The reason for talking about Emmanuel Carrère in this section, which is usually devoted to migratory narratives, is because he has also dealt in his work with the subject of the migratory flows present in today's Europe. Specifically, in the report 'Calais' (published in the collection Nuevos Cuadernos de Anagrama, in 2017), he recounts the two weeks he spent in this French coastal town in January 2016 to recount the impact that the migrant settlement established there (known as the Jungle, "the largest shantytown in Europe", made up of 7,000 people and finally dismantled in October 2016) had on the city and its inhabitants.

Shortly after arriving in the city, Carrère, a character in his story, receives a long letter from Marguerite Bonnefille (the pseudonym, as we learn at the end of the story, of a local journalist, Marie Goudeseune). This letter allows Carrère to analyse the media impact of the migrant settlement and to explain to readers the approach he wants to take in his reportage: it is not a matter of describing the camp and the migrants settled there, but of showing the repercussions of this fact on everyday life in Calais. Thus, Carrère's visit to the Jungle is omitted from the readers, in the manner of a great ellipsis whose non-mention is always present over the facts that appear explicitly in the text.

In the same way, the report closes with another literary device: Carrère takes up a fact from the story that he had previously left undeveloped ("the story of Ghiziane Mahtab's blinds") in order to orientate the end of his story in a certain direction.

Reading Calais also shows the parallels established between migratory transit settlements: places that receive migrants (such as Arguineguín, Lampedusa or Lesbos) in transit towards a desired destination (the European continent or, in this case, the British Isles).

In short, 'Calais' is a literary reportage that allows its author to show one of the different facts motivated by migratory movements in Europe today (specifically, the grouping of migrants in Calais, in the town known as the Jungle, with the intention of boarding the transport trucks that cross the English Channel and reach England), in a truthful and carefully elaborated narrative manner.

The reader who is a fan of journalism and interested in Carrère can enter the literary universe of this author by reading 'Conviene tener un sitio a donde ir' (Anagrama, 2017) (Words: Essays, partial translation into English by John Lambert, 2019). The thirty or so journalistic texts collected in it, published between 1990 and 2015, include some that are at the origin of his best-known novels, among them the chronicles 'The Romand Case' and 'The Last of the Demons' (the seeds of The Adversary and Limonov, respectively).

One of the pieces included in the collection, 'Capote, Romand y yo' (2006), as well as being linked to the character that inspired 'The Adversary', reflects on the documentary novel, on the model that 'In Cold Blood' was for Carrère, and on how he found his narrative mould by a different path to that of Truman Capote, not by eliminating the author's presence in the work but, on the contrary, by incorporating him into the non-fictional story and accepting the first person narrative in a natural way. 

Luis Guerra, Professor of Spanish Language at the European University of Madrid, is one of the main researchers of the INMIGRA3-CM project, financed by the Community of Madrid and the European Social Fund.