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Writing Fonctionnaires, Functions of Narrative

IT IS A SIMPLE ENOUGH MATTER to establish the importance of bureaucracy as a theme in nineteenth-century French fiction, but I would like to suggest that the bureaucratic phenomenon gradually becomes a model for narrative itself. Bureaucracy moves from a source o f thematic, discursive material to a structuring paradigm for fictional écriture. Whence the ambiguity of the title of my essay, which is con­ cerned both with the bureaucratic act o f writing as a model for nineteenth-century literary aesthetics, and with the creation o f fictional bureaucratic characters and narratives symptomatic of a more general crisis of representation (in both the political and mimetic senses of the word). Finally, I hope to suggest that in the bureaucratic phenomenon one finds the shopworn dichotomy o f the mimetic and the textual (dis)solved once and for all. Bureaucracy enables us simultaneously to discuss fonctionnaires who write and the writing, or literary creation, o f the fonctionnaire as an important type, even a literary myth, in the nineteenth-century imagina­ tion. Anne-Marie Bijaoui-Baron has underscored the existence of