‘Little bits of life’: Literary rendering of collected words by Perrine Le Querrec and Jane Sautière

Starting with a common approach, which consists in writing a book with words recorded by the author, this article examines the attempts of two contemporary French female authors at rendering voices and accounts collected from people in socially and psychologically vulnerable situations. In Fragmentation d’un lieu commun (2003), Jane Sautière records her memories of encounters with prisoners during her work as a prison social worker; in Rouge pute (2018), Perrine Le Querrec renders the voices of domestic violence victims she met at a community centre. The aim is both to highlight the listening practices shared by these authors (ways of meeting people, recording what they say, adjusting the author’s position in relation to the collected voices) and to emphasize the uniqueness of the poetic choices made, which depart from a raw transcription of the collected words in favour of fragments for Sautière and poetic rendering in verse for Le Querrec. Comparing these two books of voices allows us to gauge the shifts in a literary approach to listening over the course of two decades, highlighting the different terms of the authors’ commitment.