Abiding by the truth. Crèvecoeur’s fiction-less narratives

As a result of 18th century European interest in the geographical explorations of the New World and America’s political independence, Truth-the access to it, the duty to preserve it and its inevitable distortions-became the age’s ultimate by-word in all fields of knowledge. Travel literature was one of the most affected genres when it came to truth-telling, particularly towards the end of the century, when European markets had been flooded with works declaring their truthfulness about America. One of the most famous examples is Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) which was a massive success in Europe. Despite its popularity, however, the most common criticism moved against Crèvecoeur’s work was the co-existence of real-life elements alongside fictional ones which, coupled with the author’s own ambivalent biography, undermined his credibility as a spokesmen for the New World. In this presentation, I argue that Crèvecoeur’s Letters can be arguably read as an auto-fiction, while his later work, Voyage dans le Haute Pensylvanie et dans l'état de New York (1801) can be considered an encyclopedic narrative of sorts. The comparison of the two works, under the lens of Gerard Genette’s concept of paratexts and Longolius’ perfomative authorship will demonstrate how Letters thrives with fictionality while Voyage makes a conscious withdrawal away from it. I argue that, after being criticised by readers such as Samuel Ayscough who circulated his own satirical and accusatory pamphlet, Remarks on the Letters from an American Farmer (1783), Crèvecoeur avoided all uses of fictionality in Voyage, making it a strictly fiction-less and objective representation of America. Possibly enough, Voyage’s steer away from fiction through the use of anonymity, blatant plagiarisms and ample recourse to notes, served to make Crèvecoeur the authoritative writer he aspired to be.