Écrire la lacune, le blanc et le reste. Les enjeux littéraires du paratexte documentaire dans Un monde sans rivage d’Hélène Gaudy

The aim of the article is to examine the relationship between the literary layer and the documentary paratext in Hélène Gaudy’s novel Un monde sans rivage (2019), which describes the catastrophic expedition to the North Pole of three Swedish travelers in 1897. Authentic documents present the flow of events, the growing struggle between the waning power of travelers and nature, the entropy of resilience and motivation, which is visible in the laconic and incompleteness of the quoted materials (interrupted or illegible sentences), destroyed in the middle of the photo. The manner of presenting these documents reveals the writer’s method of work, which does not hide their progressive degradation, but on the contrary, treats them as a trigger for the imagination, because her story seems to draw narrative momentum and strength from this lack and incompleteness. Gaudy’s way of working with a documentary allows us to understand why the author needs this formal heterogeneity, why she has not decided on a documentary account or fictional novel. The skillful intertwining of these two formats generates a synergistic dynamic of forces that makes literature better embody life, and the documentary comes to life in contact with the literary imaginary.