Unidentified narrative objects: Approaching instant history through experiments with literary journalism in Beppe Sebaste’s H. P. Lady Diana’s Last Driver and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World

Abstract

The subjects of the two texts analysed in this article are two highly significant recent historical events: the death of Lady Diana in a car crash after being chased by paparazzi on 31 August 1997 and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001, which are addressed by the Italian writer Beppe Sebaste and the French writer Frédéric Beigbeder, respectively. An analysis of each text shows that they not only examine the events in question through reportage, but they are also strongly personal and subjective. Both texts also put forward literary writers to help ‘read’ extensively mediated events, provoking reflection on how news travels and is mediated in increasingly immediate ways in today’s world, while also harking back to New Journalism. They could be called ‘unidentified narrative objects’, a label I borrow from the Italian writer Roberto Bui, alias Wu Ming 1, who has applied it to a corpus of recent Italian texts (including that of Sebaste), that combine modes of writing – such as journalism, history, detective fiction and life-writing – often blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, in order to more effectively draw their readers’ attention to the national and global issues they address. Here, I extend the term unidentified narrative objects beyond Italy’s borders to the work of Beigbeder and others, suggesting that such hybridity is connected to how we process the world around us today and a new iteration of literary journalism.

What is narrative journalism? A systematic review and an empirical agenda

“…This account of subjectivity as at once engaging the audience and endangering journalism's claim to truth is a recurring notion in analytical research on narrative journalism (e.g. Soares, 2009;Thérenty, 2016;Willman, 2017).…”