• 2  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project. [Online] https://twitter.com/clarabdx [accessed 12 January 2018 (...)
• 3  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 7.
• 4  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project. [Online] http://madeleineproject.fr [accessed 12 January 2018]. (...)
• 5  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project. [Online] https://storify.com/clarabdx/madeleineproject [accesse (...)

1Clara Beaudoux is a journalist at Radio France and director of a number of web-documentaries. She lives in Paris, and on moving into a new apartment, she came across things belonging to Madeleine, the previous tenant, in the cellar. She investigated with heart and discretion, and for a week in November 2015, on Twitter,2 she told the woman’s life story, who was almost 100 years old: in a few words, with a few pictures, she slowly created a portrait of Madeleine, and of a bygone era. Variously dubbed a “2.0 soap opera” or a “tweet documentary,”3 the Madeleine Project tells the story of a life, tweet after tweet, like an open box or letter. The reader/ follower got to know Madeleine, an exceptional character, and her era in two ways. Either they followed the tweets as they were tweeted during the four seasons of transmedia, narrative writing orchestrated by Clara Beaudoux, with increasing acuity. Or the reader followed the Madeleine Project separately from this performance period through other sources such as the project’s website,4 Storify,5 a book that covered the two first seasons published by Editions sous-sol in 2016, and then a paperback edition in 2017 of the complete four seasons. The objects and archives that Madeleine kept in meticulously labelled boxes form the departure point for Beaudoux’s narrative. As such, the cellar’s contents correspond exactly to what Herman Parret said of archives, that, for him,

• 7  Herman Parret, “Vestige, archive et trace. Présences du temps passé,” Protée, no. 322, 2004, p. 43 (...)
• 8  Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris, Gallimard, 1980.
• 9  Herman Parret, “Vestige, archive et trace. Présences du temps passé,” Protée, no. 322, 2004, p.43. (...)

2“[…] Archiving, as a way of laying bare,”7 given the ethical dilemma Beaudoux found herself in, allows us to examine memory, but above all the trace, that here, becomes poetic. In Temps et récit 3, Paul Ricœur evoked the symbol of absence of our ancestors and our descendants, and saw traces as a blend and even a connector between physical time and experienced time that is disassociated in Heideggerian phenomenology. The mark left by something, by someone, a perceptible clue of a past presence, an emanation of the referent, the trace comes from that “which was there” outlined by Roland Barthes in La Chambre claire.8 Traces are what every document presupposes and as such, every archive, they are traced9 in the framework of the Madeleine Project, a journey that sets off Madeleine’s anamneses and in doing so, because the two are intrinsically linked, provokes the narrative. Memory and narrative fit together in the Madeleine Project in two ways: first, there is Madeleine’s memory, rebuilt by Beaudoux through the narrative of the discovery of her archive on social media; but there is also the very memory of the performance of the Madeleine Project. This duality is an opportunity to examine the trace in its physical and digital state, as both are the subjects of narratives, as the representation of and event, and a re-mediatisation. As Sybille Kramer puts it:

• 11  Jean Baudrillard, La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu, Paris, Galilée, 1991.
• 12  Paul Virilio, L'Écran du désert. Chroniques de guerre, Paris, Galilée, 1991.
• 13  Paul Virilio, L’Administration de la peur, Paris, Textuel, 2010, p. 8.
• 14  Cf. Roselee Goldberg, Performances. L’art en action, London, Thames & Hudson, 1999 ; Roselee Goldb (...)

3Jean Baudrillard11 and Paul Virilio12 showed us how, since the Gulf War, television and now, the Internet, have totally changed the way we relate the world due to their capacity to report on every event in real time, as it happens. Working backwards from this “temporal compression,”13 Beaudoux the reporter, takes an interest in the events of a life that has already happened. But she does so in the form of a writing performance that takes place on the micro-blogging, social-media platform Twitter, using 140 characters at a time, photographs, hyperlinks to songs or videos, thus creating an artistic happening and a journalistic-literary event in the form of a transmedia series. The Madeleine Project on Twitter is a performance. Without getting into the definitions of the variety of practices that make up a performance, or the wide range of disciplines that are covered by the term, we will use the term “performance” to designate any artistic event that produces gestures, acts, that take place mostly in public, and whose temporal occurrence constitutes the piece itself. The performance may be improvised to a greater or lesser extent, but each occurrence is unique. The presence of the performer (physically or through a medium) is, for the most part, key. Getting beyond the essential ambiguity of the term performance and referencing the ground-breaking essays by Roselee Goldberg, Cynthia Carr or Arnaud Label-Rojoux,14 we will concentrate on the way in which Beaudoux practices it in acts, or, more precisely in tweets.

• 15  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 9.

4Even though Beaudoux repeatedly declared in the press that nothing was premeditated and that her initial approach was entirely separate from her work as a journalist, and that she wasn’t intending to create a literary piece, the fact remains that the premise of Madeleine Project is a desire for a narrative: the inaugural tweet on Clara Beaudoux’s Twitter account clearly shows this, she is telling a story: “I’ve wanted to tell this story for two years. So, I’m going to try to do so this week.”15 This story unfolds as a work in progress, for the reader as for Beaudoux. During the first week of tweets, Beaudoux’s editorial plan took shape. During the morning of the first day (11:30) the #madeleineProject hashtag appeared, and started trending soon after (11:52). Then, on the last day, the writer seems to come to the realisation that the inquiry should continue and promises a second round of tweets. She then began to talk about season 1, like a popular television series, to describe her series of posts dedicated to Madeleine’s personal archive, that ran from November 2nd to 6th 2015. Season 2 premiered on February 8 2016, and saw Beaudoux leave her cellar to go and actually meet people who knew Madeleine: her godson, a couple of old neighbours, a shopkeeper. Season 3 ran from June 27th to July 1st 2016, and covered Madeleine’s working life, Beaudoux’s trip to Bourges, the old lady’s birthplace, and a deeper investigation into Loulou, her fiancé who died during the war. Season 4 described Madeleine’s life as a school teacher and attempted to find some of her ex-pupils.

• 16  Christian Salmon, Storytelling. La machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits, Pa (...)

7For those who did not follow the tweets in real time, as they were posted, traces of the performance are available in two aggregated forms: Storify on the Internet and two books. The website only provides a list of links to Storify for each season. Storify is an application that allows people to tell their stories, as is evident from the story. It provides a multimedia timeline of all of the social media posts and other sources in chronological order, as Twitter works backwards from the present. The narration includes hyperlinks to web pages, to images on Instagram or Flickr, to YouTube videos, and to content from other social media sites or websites. Storify is thus a tool for curating web content and a storytelling app.16

• 17  Anaïs Guilet, Pour une littérature cyborg ; l’hybridation médiatique du texte littéraire, doctoral (...)
• 18  Clara Beaudoux, “Préface éditoriale,” Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 7. (...)
• 19  Christoph Kümmel, “Wie weit trägt ein Indizienbeweis? Zur archäologischen Überführung von Grabräub (...)

9So, the book constructs a Twitter “effect,”17 that only works on the surface. The links, videos, SoundCloud clips are only there as figures of the story’s digital past as they are no longer clickable: they are just a trace, a manifestation of the absence of the original digital media. So, on page 42 of the book, we come across a link and a video to the song “Garde ton cœur Madeleine,” that is mentioned by the old lady in one of her notebooks, where she had written the lyrics. These effects are a way for Beaudoux and the publisher, to “retain the specific nature of the media, of the tweets, of the photo-report where the text works as a legend, rather than obliging the new format to adapt to the old one which would be misplaced, an anachronism that would misrepresent the initial project.”18 These effects underline the remediation of the Madeleine Project, and its narrative-media archaeology—as archaeology itself is defined as “a paradigm from the hint to the work.”19 The book, in fact, is there to leave a trace of the story told on Storify, that reconstituted the story told on Twitter, that itself created the portrait of Madeleine from her own archive. Any reading of the Madeleine Project involves this back-and-forth between media, and this makes it a work of transmedia. It builds its poetry on the trace of the de-contextualization/re-contextualization of the piece on several levels (thematic, narrative and media) and, as Bruno Bachimont tells us:

• 23  Cf. Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit 2, Paris, Seuil, 1984.
• 24  See Annick Dubied’s definition of narrative. A summary in 10 criteria: beginning, middle and end; (...)

12Everything Beaudoux does in her cellar, from the open suitcases, to the photos posted, to the tweets, are as trivial as they are transcendent in as much as they reveal and entire personality, an era, in the same way that Combray came, “town and gardens,” from the teacup of the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past. Journalistic, historical and fictional narratives, all rely on the same time configuration thanks to the act of narration.23 Beaudoux’s work harks back to the quasi-anthropological dimension of the narrative as a category of the way humans grasp the world. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also have to obey the definitions proposed by textual linguistics or narratology: all of the strictly structural criteria are present and correct: closure; a beginning, middle and end; unity of action and intention; causality and narrative necessity; congruent conclusion, etc.24

• 25  An example would be L’Hôtel (1981) or Le Carnet d’adresse (1983).
• 26  Clara Beaudoux, “Préface éditoriale,” Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 7. (...)

13So, the Madeleine Project plays out like a real investigation, with a plot filled with twists and dramatic reveals. The narrative was, in fact, organised in advance by Beaudoux, who carefully sorted through what she wished to reveal or not and, in that way, manage its progression. While, like a lot of Sophie Calle’s work25 from the early eighties—that Beaudoux often refers to in interviews, The Madeleine Project is about the poetry of the trace, Beaudoux wants to remain discreet as an artist. She protected Madeleine’s anonymity and that of her family, and chose, not to say censored, much of what she found in order to protect their privacy. As part of this attention to the narrative, in season one, she made efforts to outline Madeleine’s identity, she draws the character: what she looks like, then she gave information about her family, her parents. Season 1 ended with the discovery of a suitcase in which she found all of the documents relative to Loulou, mainly letters and photographs, and we find out as the tweets are posted that he was Madeleine’s fiancé, and that he died in the war. He was 31 years old. The story of Loulou and Madeleine, like all of the Madeleine Project is, like the title page of the book tells us, the “moving proof of the inventiveness of the real and the romance inherent in any life, even the most anonymous.”26 This romantic relationship with Loulou, brings a dramatic dimension, adding to the narrative tension, not only in the plot of season 1, but also between season 1 and 2. This narrative tension resolutely establishes the succession of tweets as a real plot. For Baroni, it is

• 28  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 118.
• 29  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 47.
• 30  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 63.
• 31  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 30.
• 32  Clara Beaudoux and Emmanuelle Hirschauer, “Entretien – grâce au Madeleine Project je me suis mise (...)
• 33  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016, p. 5.

15Loulou died at the age of 31, the age Beaudoux was when she made her discovery, as she tells us.28 Thus, we feel the presence of the narrator as the portrait of Madeleine is being drawn. The Madeleine Project doubles up the biographical side with an underlying autobiographical thread, showing, yet again, in a very Proustian manner, the role of narration in the quest and constitution of identity. Clara Beaudoux, gets more and more involved as the tweets go on, and begins to reveal information about herself, often in brackets, as a sort of sidebar: like Madeleine, she loves to go ice-skating29 and has a weakness for little notebooks.30 This proximity, not to say intimacy, between the two women is also felt in the dialogue that Beaudoux starts with Madeleine. From the second day of the first season,31 tweets appear in the second-person singular, at the same time as the first-person singular starts to feature more prominently. Beaudoux declares that, “thanks to the Madeleine Project I finally started saying I.”32 She literally slides into Madeleine’s life, and it seems to fit her like a glove. In one of her posts, she actually puts on the old lady’s gloves and takes a photo of her hand with a direct tweet to Madeleine: “A funny turning point in terms of my physical commitment to the project, Madeleine :).”33 Beaudoux’s writing thus links back to Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne is Memory, the Goddess mother of the nine muses, who presides over high poetry. Poetry and memory are so closely linked for Homer that, to write verse was to remember:

• 35  Herman Parret, “Vestige, archive et trace. Présences du temps passé,” Protée, no. 322, 2004, p. 40 (...)

16In Aristotle, remembrance is investigatio, a tracking process, of bringing memory “marks” up to date, that necessarily involved an interpretation, that in its wake leads to “all of the rhetoric of invention and mobilises the imagination’s creative faculties.”35

• 36  Clara Beaudoux, Madeleine Project, Paris, Éditions du sous-sol, 2016.
• 37  Narrative journalism itself follows on from French “grand reportage” as practiced by Albert Londre (...)

17The story Beaudoux proposes relies on a memory exercise, on reading through an archive, on an investigation and the creation of a narrative, and a transfer to a media: a truly creative process. Madeleine becomes a character, who through her anonymous contours, and Beaudoux’s mythologizing narrative, is more like a witness, in this case a historical witness, that narrative journalism is so fond of. She is both anchored in reality and a marker for the imagination. The Madeleine Project, in book form, is identified as “a report by Clara Beaudoux,” and on the title page is labelled “Series/ Non-Fiction.”36 It is published by the éditions du sous-sol, a publishing house that specialises in documentary writing and non-fiction. It is, in fact, a hybrid narrative, on the border between journalism and literature. As such, it is very much part of the current trend for narrative journalism,37 or in a broader sense, of the 21st century’s marked predilection for the document. As Philippe Daros, Alexandre Gefen and Alexandre Prstojevic tell us in their call for papers for a conference on non-fiction,

• 39  Marc Lits, “Quel futur pour le récit médiatique?,” Questions de communication, no. 21, 2012. [Onli (...)
• 40  Norman Sims, True Stories. A Century of Literary Journalism, Evanston, Northwestern University Pre (...)
• 41  Alain Lallemand, Journalisme narratif en pratique, Bruxelles, De Boeck, 2011, p. 23.
• 42  Alain Lallemand, Journalisme narratif en pratique, Bruxelles, De Boeck, 2011, p. 23.
• 43  Cf. Marc Lits, Du récit au récit médiatique, Bruxelles, De Boeck, 2008.

18To this, we must add newspapers and networks. Beaudoux’s piece of transmedia non-fiction thus contributes to this blurring of genres, discourse and disciplines. The very history of literary journalism comes from this very blurry place, as retraced by Marc Lits “since Tom Wolfe’s seminal articles and Truman Capote’s ‘true novel’ In Cold Blood (1966), via the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski or the French writer Jonathan Littell.”39 Indeed, the Madeleine Project corresponds perfectly to the characteristics of literary journalism as outlined by Norman Sims:40 immersion of the reporter, access to and connection with the subject, close attention to ordinary lives, factual accuracy and at the same time, the importance of having a voice, a style, a complex story construction and finally, paying attention to the story’s symbolic value. Alain Lallemand sums narrative journalism up in a few words: “action, proximity, involvement, with a certain critical distance; reliability, significant voice and structure,”41 what Lallemand means by involvement is that it is important that the journalist to be in the field, but also to take part in the action, to experience it—something that Beaudoux does, especially through the performance nature of her narrative. What Lallemand means by significant structure is the idea that the narrative leads to a “life lesson,”42 that it must have a social dimension, make a connection with society.43 It is here that the story and the history connect, that documentation and literary narration intertwine.

• 44  Jean Grondin, Paul Ricœur [2013], Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 2016.

19In the Madeleine Project, narrative journalism—according to Lallemand’s definition at least—is very much in line with Paul Ricœur; in as much as it expresses, “a visceral, tragic experience of our temporality”44 as the philosopher outlines in Time and Narrative, and a narrative activity that is fundamentally hermeneutic. Time can only be grasped through the narratives, stories and myths we tell:

• 46  Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit 3, Paris, Seuil, 1991, p. 115.
• 47  Jean Grondin, Paul Ricœur [2013], Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 2016.
• 48  Paul Ricœur, La Mémoire, l’histoire l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2000.
• 49  Bertrand Gervais, La Ligne brisée. Labyrinthe, oubli et violence, Montréal, Le Quartanier, 2008. (...)
• 50  Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit 1, Paris, Seuil, 1983, p. 542.
• 51  Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit 3, Paris, Seuil, 1991, p. 355.

20We read or tell stories, fictional or not, just like Madeleine’s, because they give meaning to the intrigue of our lives. As Ricœur declares in Time and Narrative 3, “Our life is a story that does not just need, but deserves to be told.”46 Madeleine, who has no tomb, no child to preserve her memory, deserves to have her story told—“here, writing means remembrance” as Jean Grondin47 said in his analysis of Ricœur. Beaudoux forms a barrier against “oblivion and forgetting,”48 despite the fact that critics on the Internet felt she had invaded Madeleine’s privacy. On the opposite end of the “broken line”49 that comes from “oblivion and forgetting” there is the happy memory, the happiness that comes when a scrap of the past is snatched from the jaws of oblivion.50 This is what Madeleine Project does. The story of this school teacher sheds light on our understanding of ourselves, of our identity, it brings what Ricœur called our narrative identity to life. “[…] To answer the question ‘who?’ is to tell the story of a life,”51 and that is what Clara Beaudoux did, one tweet after another.