Investigative Writing. Family Narrative in/with History

Abstract

In A History of the Grandparents I Never Had Ivan Jablonka examines the narrative of his grandparents and reflects on the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge. Two years later, in History is a Contemporary Literature, he continues his thinking on ‘investigative writing’ and endorses ‘the fictions of method’ inviting his readers to think about writing as an amalgam of literature, sociology and history in which a reflection is at stake on how truth is not something that is represented but is created in writing. This article explores investigative writing as a methodological concept while reading and juxtaposing family narratives of Ivan Jablonka and Annie Ernaux as historical, sociological and literary perspectives on reality culminating in a transpersonal positioning in time and place. Both the historian and the literary author (if these qualifications are still relevant today) by telling their family narrative pursue an understanding of collective history, time, and individual consciousness, while connecting epistemological and ontological dimensions of literature.