The unfindable authenticity of the worker's narrative
Starting with Henry Poulaille’s 1930s definition of the genuine proletarian writer, this article questions the durability and validity of such a concept today. The worker writer is called upon to narrate, to bear witness—and this social request, which is sometimes spelled out, is first put back in “the age of the witness” or “the age of storytelling”. But it turns out, on the one hand, that most worker stories published at the turn of the 21st century favour other configurations than the narrative arrangement ; they mix discourse and stories, choosing other forms instead of the story (such as the diary, the fragment, the portrait). On the other hand, the readability and dissemination of these stories require the support of smugglers : sociologists, journalists, teachers, the men and women of publishing who work in the shadows, without which these stories remain useless, a fact that invalidates the idea of a spontaneous or fully genuine production.