Ephemeral identities, blurred geographies, and social media in twenty-first-century French fiction: a reading of Licorne by Nora Sandor and Un amour d’espion by Clément Bénech

Abstract

While digital tools and platforms have become part of our everyday life, authors of fictional narratives voice the emerging hopes and fears resulting from interactive digital media. In this paper, I analyze two recently-published French novels, namely Un amour d’espion by Clément Bénech (2017) and Licorne by Nora Sandor (2019), in terms of how social networks affect in new ways the processes whereby identity is built and negotiated. Both novels focus on characters whose development as human beings is prevented by the contrasting illusions of ephemerality and digital hypermnesia. I show that the way characters use social media entails a sense of virtual disembodiment that shapes their perception of their physical bodies and surrounding spaces. I also argue that their online activity as represented in the novels invites reflections on the archival values of images and on social networks as fragmentary repositories of the self. In conclusion, I discuss how issues of ephemerality and disembodiment affect narrative choices in both novels.