Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros23.1Power Dynamics in Speculative FormsPower Dynamics in Fantasy: Adam J...

Power Dynamics in Speculative Forms

Power Dynamics in Fantasy: Adam Johnson’s “Interesting Facts”

Amélie MOISY

Résumés

“Interesting Facts” (« Le saviez-vous ? ») d’Adam Johnson, publiée en 2015 dans Fortune Smiles (La chance vous sourit, 2020) et dans The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, est une nouvelle d’une grande puissance. Cet essai démontre que la double impulsion du fantastique et de la mimèsis en fait une fiction « incroyable, mais qui dit la vérité » (Koelb 33) : remettant en question le pouvoir, elle reflète les potentialités de notre monde.
« Le saviez-vous ? » porte apparemment sur la perte de pouvoir de la narratrice alors qu’elle est traitée pour un cancer du sein et que celui-ci se propage : les médicaments censés la guérir lui nuisent, les femmes en bonne santé ont des vues sur son mari, et tous semblent l'ignorer au point de la rendre invisible. Bien qu’elle s’imagine dotée des pouvoirs d'un fantôme pour se venger des autres femmes ou protéger ses enfants, et qu’elle croie que le cancer lui donne des superpouvoirs de perception, l’incapacité de ce personnage à entrer en contact avec les autres est un indice qu’elle est « vraiment » un fantôme, interprétation merveilleuse qui semble logique dans le cadre de l’histoire.
Ainsi la nouvelle soulève la question de la dynamique fiction/ réalité, comme le suggère le titre original, qui détonne dans une anthologie de fiction spéculative. De fait, Johnson narre le cancer de sa propre épouse en mêlant les faits de leur vie familiale au fantastique, en une œuvre de non-fiction créative. Une réflexion sur le fantastique et la mimèsis montre que le mystère de ce récit, faisant écho à celui de la condition humaine, et le pouvoir de l'amour qui s’y manifeste donnent profondeur à l’univers de l’histoire et convainquent de sa vérité.
Enfin, « Le saviez-vous ? » est un conte fantastique qui favorise l’éveil des consciences, car Johnson remet en question la dynamique du pouvoir. Il prend la voix et le savoir de sa femme pour interroger la société qui l’aliène, ouverture sur la conscience d'une minorité qui fait de cette œuvre une contre-littérature au sens où l’entend Anthony Mangeon, par exemple. Son art, animé par l’espoir que le pouvoir du destin change, permet au monde sur lequel s’ouvre le texte d’accueillir de nouvelles énergies et de créer de nouveaux espaces, possibilités inhérentes à notre univers réel.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

1San Franciscan Adam Johnson (b. 1967) is the author of two short story collections, Emporium (2002) and Fortune Smiles (2015), and of two novels, Parasites Like Us (2003) and The Orphan Master’s Son (2012). Fortune Smiles earned the National Book Award for Fiction and the Story Prize, and The Orphan Master’s Son received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Anya Johanna Deniro of Fantastic Metropolis has listed him among the contemporary “mainstream” writers whose stories are rich in science fictional content: indeed, many of his works have an oneiric quality and stretch the rules of reality, although they are always recognizably about humans in crisis. The protagonists of Parasites Like Us and The Orphan Master’s Son are both haunted by a sense of personal loss as they grieve a loved one’s disappearance. The first novel, set partly in academia, and partly in the no man’s land following a mass epidemic, depicts shifts in power and values; the second, set in North Korea, stages and questions the intricate power dynamics of the individual versus the state. In a much more concise form, the novella “Interesting Facts,” also pervaded with loss, shows a woman dwindling in strength, and the push and pull of interactions that she must reckon with. It is a “truthful though incredible fiction” (Koelb 33) that represents forces at work in writing and in life, and attests to the power of speculative prose.

2“Interesting Facts” appeared in Harper’s Magazine in June 2015 and was collected in Fortune Smiles. It is also featured in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. In his foreword to the collection, series editor John Joseph Adams proposes a definition of both science fiction and fantasy, or speculative fiction: “[S]tories that start by asking the question What if…?” He distinguishes fantasy stories from science fiction, stating that in fantasy, the impossible happens, the most common example being, according to him, that “magic is real” (26). The editor of the volume, Karen Joy Fowler, has designated “Interesting Facts” one of the best fantasy stories published in 2015; this ranks it as “apistic,” to use the term coined for incredible fictions by Clayton Koelb in The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief for fictions not meant to be believed (from the Greek apistos, “incredible”) (32). Yet Johnson’s story, in which he describes, from her point of view, the experience of a woman suffering from cancer, does not necessarily strike one as fantastic, and in a personal email, Johnson told me he does not consider it to be: “To me that story is more nonfiction than anything” (personal email to Amélie Moisy, Sept. 6, 2024). He argues that “Nirvana,” also in Fortune Smiles, strikes him as much more speculative: written while his wife was in hospital for breast cancer, it is also about a spouse, with a degenerative illness, but set in a world where humans interact with holograms, and more clearly, to him, pertains to the fantasy genre (Johnson and Moisy). Yet Margaret Atwood described her handling of speculation in one novel in terms of “What if we continue down the road we’re already on?” (285-286, emphasis in the original). In this perspective, then, “Interesting Facts,” too, is a speculative, apistic tale: it centers on the question “What if we continue down the road we’re already on?” as well as on the obviously impossible speculation, “What if I were in my wife’s place?” and on the quasi-magical hope, “Maybe the inevitable doesn’t happen” (Johnson and Moisy). Johnson, who like the husband in the story “didn’t in real life ever once let [him]self consider a real loss,” says “that’s why I had to write it--to feel that” (Johnson and Moisy). He maintains that “That’s the funny thing about fantasy […] it was of course just not fiction too, at least on the detail level” (Johnson and Moisy). In view of Johnson’s statements that the story is “not fiction,” this essay considers his text as creative nonfiction, more precisely as speculative nonfiction—in which, according to Michael Buckley, “[w]riters explore ‘what if’ scenarios, imagine different outcomes, or challenge conventional thinking within the confines of reality.” I posit that the power of the story comes from Johnson’s skill in turning fantasy into what Koelb terms “alethetic,” i.e., “truthful though incredible” fiction (33), in which nonfictional creativity pushes mimesis to its utmost limits.

3The first part of this essay, “The Dynamics of Powerlessness,” argues for viewing the loss of power which “Interesting Facts” is apparently about as belonging to the fantastic. Describing her interactions with her entourage, the narrator, a cancer sufferer, depicts/ chronicles her decline. Medicine’s power does not make her well but worse; she believes that the powerful (the healthy) are “ghosting” her, and she fears the hold of other women over her husband. Although the narrator boasts of some fantastic powers, her powerlessness/ inability to connect with the living as the story progresses seems to justify an interpretation of the story in which she is a ghost that has died and is a ghost haunting her family. The second part, “The Powerful Dynamics of Fiction and Reality,” explores Johnson’s novella in the currently developing context of creative and speculative nonfiction. It considers the interaction of ghost story, fantasy and mimesis, drawing on the works of writers, academics and critics Ben Marcus, Tzvetan Todorov, Margaret Carter, Kathryn Hume and Bent Nordhjem. The story’s authentic, heroic and marvelous aspects eloquently convey love and respect, and contribute to the “truthfulness” of the text, for they “move the mind of the reader from the world they live in, with its perceivable rules, to the storyworld, which has different perceivable rules” (Martine). The third part, “Questioning Power Dynamics,” has a double focus. It shows that Johnson uses his wife’s voice and the power of literature to raise consciousness, as Fredric Jameson said was accomplished by “radical fantasy” (280). The text is envisaged as counter literature: it can/ could enrich disability studies, for example, insofar as it questions overly mechanistic allopathic approaches. But it also questions the dynamics of reason and the logic implied by the expression “interesting facts,” that would lead one to expect normal time references or a linear storyline. Here scholarship by Rosemary Jackson, Jean-François Lyotard, Laurent Jenny and Paul Ricœur are brought to show what truths hidden “under the surface” of the fiction the alethetic apistic mode may bring forth (Koelb 36)—the revelation of such truths being perhaps “the most interesting” radical gesture accomplished by any text (Hassler and Wilcox ix-x).

The Dynamics of Powerlessness

4“Interesting Facts” is apparently about loss of power: cancer turns the narrator ––a writer, wife and mother–into a ghost of herself. From the outset, the narrator puts the implicit reader at a loss with a statement that makes no sense, and admits her powerlessness: “Interesting fact: Toucan cereal bedspread to my plunge and deliver. […] I can’t grasp it, either” (105). The narrator informs the reader on the second page that she has had cancer, explaining that in a story about a widower, “I sympathized with the dead wife. […] This was a year after my diagnosis, surgery, chemo and the various interventions, injections, indignities and treatments” (106); yet it is only 28 pages on, when she spells out, “Do you see the can in uncanny or the cer in concern? […] ‘Sorry, I have some uncanny concerns right now’” (133) that we can decipher her code and meaning as, “Sorry, I have some cancer right now,” and the opening phrase, retroactively, as indicating that the cancer has metastasized to her lungs and liver (“Toucan cereal bedspread to my plunge and deliver,” 105—italics my own).

5Her husband and daughter replace her in her tasks as a mother: “He gets the kids to music lessons, martial arts, dental appointments” (122); “Our daughter takes on my voice as she admonishes her brother and [sister] to take their asthma medicine and do their silent reading before bed” (134). Other women become suspect, as the power of breasts asserts itself—of phantom breasts (107), of the “monstrous chests” on the site “bigboobsalert” before which the husband prepares to masturbate, and which she believes represent the “superpower of motherhood” (132) that she has lost. And, of course, there is a great deal on the fascination of other women’s breasts:

The problem is school, where a cavalcade of chatty moms loiter away their mornings. […] These moms are single, or single enough. Meet Liddi […]. She’s without an ounce of fat, but placed upon her A-cup chest is a pair of perfectly pronounced, fully articulated nipples. […] And don’t forget Salima, a UCSF prof who’s fooling nobody by cloaking her D’s under layers of fabric. (122)

6She fears the charms of other women, who are all after her husband—“They would come after him when he was weak, I suddenly understood, when I was no longer there to fend them off” 128)—and who will hate her children: “No new wife cares about the old wife’s kids. They’re just an unavoidable complication to the new wife’s own family-to-be. That’s what vasectomy reversals and Swiss boarding schools are for” (126). She trembles with the knowledge that she can harm her children through her illness and if she dies: “The thought of them moving forward in life without me, the person whose sole mission is to guide them–it’s not tolerable” (120).

7Medicine, powerless to cure, seems to become a force of bodily destruction:

[H]ere are some of my interesting facts. Lupron, aside from ceasing ovulation, is used to chemically castrate sexual predators. Vinblastine interrupts cell division. It is a poisonous alkaloid made from the purple blossoms of the periwinkle plant. Tamoxifen makes your hips creak. (107)

We don’t hold hands. I still feel the itch of vinblastine in my nail beds, one of the places, it turns out, that the body stores toxins. Have you ever had the urge to peel back your fingernails and scratch underneath, to just wrench until the nails snap back so you can go scratch, scratch, scratch? (108)

Interesting fact: Cytoxan is a blister agent related to mustard gas. When filtered from the blood, it scars the bladder, which is why I wake, hour after hour, night in and night out, to pee.
Can you see why it would be hard for me to tell wake from sleep, how the two could feel reversed? (111)

8In illness, the individual’s loss of physical power warps ordinary contact. Just as her initial medical protocol is comprised of “various […] indignities” (106), suggesting a lack of respect for her as a human being, she understands that instinct goes against fellow feeling with cancer sufferers. “Interesting fact: My best friend, Kitty, died of cancer. Over the years, the doctors took her left leg, her breasts, her throat and her ovaries. […] As the end came, I became afraid to go see her. What would I say? What does goodbye even mean?” (120). She describes the “hagged-out and battered woman” in the hospital chemo IV bay next to hers:

I could tell she wasn’t going to make it. Who would greet a dead woman, who would make small talk with death itself? I didn’t let my eyes drift to her, even as our identical bags of Taxotere dripped angry into our veins.
That’s how people would later treat me. (114)

9As the story progresses, a hesitation takes hold of the reader: do the powerful (the healthy) ghost the narrator, as she believes?

I come home to find my husband sitting on the couch with Megumi, a mom from the girls’ grade school. […] On the coffee table is chicken katsu in a Pyrex dish. […] She has a hand on my husband’s shoulder.
[…] “Just what’s going on here?” I ask them.
They brazenly, brazenly ignore me. (114-115)

10The narrator admits that she has been acting distant, and sees the ghosting as metaphoric:

A health issue can be hard on a family. And it breaks my heart to hear them talk like I no longer exist. […] No, this is just a sign that I’ve drifted too far from my family, that I need to pull my act together. If I want them to stop treating me like a ghost, I need to stop acting like one. (125)

11But there is a case to be made for envisaging her as “real” spirit revisiting her home where her family cannot see her. There are clues that she is dead and unable to perceive it: “The most vital things we hide even from ourselves” (106).

12For one, she mentions the three Kayser Hospitals which she and her family know, including the Kayser on Divisadero, “for when the end is near” (120). That is most likely where she has an “in-the-body” experience of death as she and her family—“my brother, my sisters and my parents, and so on, all of us chatting away like old times” (117)—stand beside the bed of a “strange woman” (118). “I’ll admit I bore a resemblance to her. But only a little—that woman was all emaciated and droop-eyed and bald” (118). As she feels sucked in by the dying woman, “the past, the present and the future became simultaneously visible” (118), and she can see “the insides of this woman’s body” until “there’s nothing but the still, the gathering, surrounding still of this woman you’re in” (119). But she believes, “It was some serious brain-bending business, the illusion of being in that dead woman” (119).

13In another episode, she sees her own “memorial,” with people telling stories and crying, and the children, bereft in the canoe that was supposed to distract them from their grief, make her feel her impotence: “and we onshore can only wrench at the impossibility of reaching them” (128). Later, she refers to the women who make casseroles for her husband as “widower-clingers” (134). He begins to give away her clothes (Megumi selects the dress he first “noticed” the narrator in, 131). And the final clue is the ghosting itself, how Megumi and the narrator’s husband do not hear or see her although she is in the room with them: “I stand there and do nothing” (131).

14Complicating the way the story can be read is the treatment of time. In the opening lines , the narrator mentions that, “The topic of dead wives actually came up not too long ago” (105), and we learn that this was a year after she first got sick (106). But when she looks back on her first chemotherapy session, she wonders, “Was that a year ago? Three? What is time to you […]?” (114). Sufficient time must have elapsed for her cancer to get worse and the three hospitals to become familiar. Scenes run together: in the passage beginning, “The truth is, though, that you don’t need to die to know what it’s like to be a ghost,” a party at which her husband meets with a sexy producer segues into the call with the diagnosis from her doctor, into her best friend’s death from cancer years ago, then her own funeral years after, and then into the function again (126-129). This unrealistic rendition of time contributes to making the story a fantasy, in which it seems that the narrator has been speaking from a liminal position from the beginning, with her insistence on dead wives and her statement, “I feel alive right now, though […] I can’t be sure” (113).

15As a spirit clinging to this world, the narrator is a supernatural being, and this entails both drawbacks and strengths. Seeing the past, the present and the future simultaneously is a handicap rather than an empowering supernatural force—“how will you ever know again the difference between what’s past and what’s to come, let alone what is?” (119); yet— she claims that she has developed superpowers of perception since her “Vulcan mind-meld with death” (120): “I can see a gull soaring past and know exactly where it will land. I develop an uncanny sense of what the weather will be. Just by gazing at a plant, I can tell its effects upon the human body” (121). Moreover, from the start, she has held sway over her husband, who wouldn’t hear of her dying, imagining instead the whole family going off a cliff:

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says. “I won’t let you leave without us. We do everything together, so if someone has to go, we go together. […] We’re headed to Pacifica, hugging the turns on the Devil’s Slide, and then we go through the guardrail, all of us, you, me, the kids, the dog, even.” (113)

16She knows that other women want “what I had: a man who was willing to go off the cliff with you” (128). Her hold over her husband continues after her experience of death: although there is no dialogue, he seems at times to be an automaton. “He obeys” when she whispers for him to release an arrow (124); she calls to him as he is sleeping and he wakes, looks at her, and nods at what she tells him (137). But while she imagines her power as that of a ghost taking revenge on other women, or protecting her children—“If I were a ghost mom, my job would be to stab these rivals in the eyes, to dagger them all. Dagger, dagger, dagger” (126)—, she never does get a chance to defend her children and her place: “I do not dagger [Megumi]. I stand there and do nothing” (131).

17Moreover, she qualifies herself as “failed wannabe writer” (112) and is upset by the power of the writer husband to take over her work and her story. She says “Dark Meadow,” the title of one of Johnson’s stories in Fortune Smiles, was inspired by one of her texts: “I can’t even say the name of this novel without getting angry” (132). She sees him type “Toucan Cereal,” the first words of “Interesting Facts”: “‘No!’ I shout at him. ‘I’m the one who got cancer, I’m the one who was struck. That’s my story. It belongs to me!’” (133). As he continues “stealing [her] story” over time, he incorporates material from her “third, unfinished novel,” and she becomes reconciled to being a ghost writer of sorts: “I think this is good for him” (136). In the end, she realizes she is powerless/ unable/ it is impossible for her to leave behind her own testimony.

18In her brief connection with her husband, she echoes the sentence which announced her tumor in a dream—“It’s happening” (136)—and which preceded her experience of death in the hospital (117). The mood is fantastic, as legend and dream resonate in the present: “The Miwok believed the advancing fog could draw one into the next world” (135); “Through the bay windows, troughs of fog surge down Frederick Street. ‘I think it’s happening.’ […] Later, this will only have been a dream” (137).

19The reader may feel as though the narrator will vanish into the fog at the end of the story, and be gone when the dreamers wake. As she hovers near her sleeping children, she tarries by her youngest daughter, who has pretended to be a horse so as to avoid facing up to her mother’s illness, and asks, “Who will explain what she missed while she was a horse? Who will hold her and tell her who I was and what I went through?” (138) The story’s ending poses the question of the trace that we leave and conveys a devastating sense of loss: the narrator says that for her children, all she will have been is “a story from when they were little,” apparently accepting a future that contains the eradication of the core of their life together (138).

20If a superficial reading allows for the interpretation that she has been “ghosted” by friends and family and, helpless in the face of death, is looking down on her husband and child with regret, the clues point to her already being in the afterlife—and regretting her impotence as a ghost. Johnson has so creatively blended fiction and reality that the narrator’s powerless transition from suffering patient to spirit revisiting the home where her family cannot see her, and never will, awakens in the reader a sense of sympathy rather than the rejection of disbelief. As Coleridge put it in his Biographia Literaria, we “transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Ch. XIV). Koelb states that in trying to interpret an apistic story,

The alethetic reader swims with the current. Though he or she may disbelieve the letter of the text being read, this reader seeks and indeed finds an ‘interior,’ some semantic structure related to the text by analogy or another definable relationship, and thus finds ‘truth.’ (39)

21Progressively discovering the truth of the narrator’s passing, which she was keeping from herself, and having it confirmed at the end, makes sense.

The powerful dynamics of fiction and reality

22The narrator’s last line (“And that, I suppose, is all I will have been, a story from when they were little,” 138) justifies the author husband’s enterprise in writing her story, while suggesting that the truth manifested there will never render the full reality of her existence. However, the writer’s stylistic and thematic choices encourage the finding of an “interior” and the expansion of the reader’s reality.

23Johnson has asserted that the story was not intended as a fantasy. “Interesting Facts” questions the dynamics of fiction and reality, and the title stands out in a speculative fiction anthology. The facts of the Johnsons’ family life are indeed laid out (her treatment, his Pulitzer novel, its Japanese translation and the promotional tour, their children, her thesis, their bed, his origins, hobbies and habits, his writing “Toucan cereal” on the computer). But fantastic content in a text need not invalidate a factual basis: fiction and nonfiction are not necessarily antinomies, and the writer’s craft has always blended reality and imagination. Commenting on the recent notable increase in works of creative nonfiction, Ben Marcus wrote in “The Genre Artist”: “Some of the best fiction these days is being written as nonfiction,” and he considers that genre nomenclatures are moot: “Once upon a time, there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect and its formal originality.” The writer’s formal creativity reveals what is most striking in reality, and in using his wife as a narrator, Johnson worked a rich vein of idiosyncratic expression and developed a common metaphorical expression, to “ghost” someone, into the ghost character. In this respect, and in its fanciful “what-if?” inception, the story is a good example of creative, speculative non-fiction. In the writer’s concern for the real is a liberation from the real, according to Brenda Miller, who remarks that “honesty, authenticity and bravery” in nonfiction “emerge under cover of form, voice, metaphor, syntax. The brave writer is the one who cares more about words, about sentences, about discovering significant detail, than about the feelings or experiences that engendered these words in the first place.” She sums up the evolution of creative nonfiction thus: “[A]rtifact owes a debt to experience, but […] experience itself no longer has the upper hand” (Miller 109). In their 2018 “Manifesto” in the e-journal Speculative Nonfiction, Robin Hemley and Leila Philip argue that “Any definition of nonfiction will include some variation of the idea that, foremost, literary nonfiction considers what is ‘informative’ and ‘factual’.”

24Thus, they were spurred to “propose the lens of speculative nonfiction”:

Essays that tilt more towards metaphor than fact exist in a crack between genres that has as yet remained unclassifiable. Nonfiction narratives that use speculation as methodology and content are equally hard to classify under the current semantics. [...] [W]e aim to set aside that tired dog of truth vs. fiction and consider afresh the literary territories nonfiction is charting in the 21st century. (Hemley and Philip)

25Johnson made his “nonfiction” work into a ghost story—a genre charged with loss, grief, mortality. Johnson says that in writing the text and examining for the first time the reality of his wife dying, he was overcome with grief (Johnson and Moisy). The need to resolve the story’s ambiguity, the hesitation about whether the wife is simply “ghosted,” or whether she “really” is a ghost, brings it into the realm of what Tzvetan Todorov termed the marvelous trend, reflecting the “What if?” the narrator and Johnson could not face.

26Todorov makes hesitation a condition of fantasy, arguing that the genre is evanescent as the reader opts for an uncanny or a marvelous solution:

  • 1 “The fantastic [...] lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and (...)

Le fantastique […] ne dure que le temps d’une hésitation : hésitation commune au lecteur et au personnage, qui doivent décider si ce qu’ils perçoivent relève ou non de la « réalité »,» telle qu’elle existe pour l’opinion commune. À la fin de l’histoire, le lecteur, sinon le personnage, prend toutefois une décision, il opte pour l’une ou l’autre solution, et par là même sort du fantastique. S’il décide que les lois de la réalité demeurent intactes et permettent d’expliquer les phénomènes décrits, nous disons que l’œuvre relève d’un autre genre : l’étrange. Si, au contraire, il décide qu’on doit admettre de nouvelles lois de la nature, par lesquelles le phénomène peut être expliqué, nous entrons dans le genre du merveilleux. (46)1

27Margaret Carter, developing Todorov’s notion that the reader’s hesitation is represented within the work (13), makes ambiguity and hesitation the essence of the fantastic “mode of discourse” rather than genre (14). The apparently powerless wife, that unreliable first-person narrator, stimulates reader identification through cues from the beginning, as when she sets the reader on an equal footing at the start, in a direct address: “It’s okay if you can’t make sense of that. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t grasp it, either.” Elsewhere, the examples she gives of her experience are listed “You”: “But sometimes you’ve got chemo brain and your balance is all woo-woo and your nails are itching like crazy and you don’t want to talk to anybody” (133). She does not seem unreliable, for she conveys the power of life, insisting “If I’m so dead, where’s my grave, why isn’t there an urn full of ashes on the mantel?” (125). As the interpretation of the fantasy’s ambiguity is steered towards the marvelous, it is the narrator’s realistic, natural voice that has the power to convince the reader so that new laws of nature are admitted.

28Such new laws are not necessarily so marvelous, considering the mystery of the human condition, in which we can only fantasize about the unknown that is death. Vladimir Jankélévitch stresses the fantastic nature of death itself, when life mysteriously and miraculously disappears:

  • 2 “[D]eath is a void that suddenly opens up in the midst of the continuation of being; that which exi (...)

[L]a mort est un vide qui se creuse brusquement en pleine continuation d’être ; l’existant, rendu soudain invisible comme par l’effet d’une prodigieuse occultation, s’abîme en un clin d’œil dans la trappe du non-être. Et d’autre part ce « miracle » n’est pas une interruption rarissime de l’ordre naturel, une déclinaison exceptionnelle dans le cours des existences […] ; à sa manière, qui est miraculeuse, la féerie de la mort est une féerie toute naturelle [.] (18)2

29The inclusion of both realistic and fantastic elements in “Interesting Facts” reflects our shared experience of living with and often dreading such a “prodigious occultation,” while it gives the reader access to a specific reality, Johnson’s vision of his wife’s battle with cancer. The focus of his tale is finally on love, which can lift what Jankélévitch calls the “trapdoor of non-being” over the dead kept alive in fond hearts—and can see past the preliminary occultations, such as feeling ghosted or not up to speaking, that a malignant illness engenders.

30Kathryn Hume holds that fantasy and mimesis go hand in hand as the “two impulses” behind all literature; mimetic verisimilitude allows others to “share your experience,” while fantasy, which “change[s] givens and alter[s] reality, helps activate whatever it is our minds that gives us the sense that something is meaningful” (20). So many readers feel for the narrator of “Interesting Facts,” I believe, because the realities of life may be changed but the realities of love appear all the more meaningfully in that fantastic tale.

31Danish professor Bent Nordhjem has elaborated on Kathryn Hume’s points, stating, “Whatever is tragic or comic in fiction is mimetic,” and “Whatever is heroic in fiction is fantastic” (186):

What fiction is about is always, metaphorically speaking, a kind of obstacle race. In mimetic fiction the emphasis is on the difficulty of certain obstacles and on somebody’s failure to clear them (with comic or tragic or tragicomic effects). Fantastic fiction always magnifies the danger and difficulty of certain obstacles and at the same time the ease (courage, cleverness, resourcefulness) with which somebody clears them (thus achieving heroic status). (186)

32Mimesis can thus become heroic in fantasy. In “Interesting Facts,” the narrator demonstrates a form of heroism in the ease with which she discusses the fatal changes she is undergoing, and in her refusal to leave her family. Rendering the struggles in which she is apparently powerless, Johnson actually reveals her great courage and strength of character. He limns an authentic character, whose humorous vision comes through in her mode of expression despite her tragic situation. Asking her husband how soon there was another woman after her, she says “‘How many months before you went and got yourself some of that twentysomething kayak sex?’ I shouldn’t say shit like this, I know. He doesn’t know a teaspoon of the crazy in my head” (109). She is humorously down-to-earth in her criticisms of others and of herself: “[P]eople want to make chitchat with you—even though, if they took the time, they could see that under your bandana you have no hair” (133); “something about the surgery pooches your tummy” (131). Moreover, she is one to stand firm—intercourse with her husband is not going to happen while she is feeling so tired, though he buys condoms— “It’s his subtle way of saying, For the love of God, give up some sex” (110). The treatments described so realistically suggest that the character is heroic for bearing them; she even describes the hospital experience as yielding a “beautiful thing,” the presence of her family (117), and she heroically bears being invisible around other women—so that we accept the marvelous interpretation that she is haunting those she loves.

33The authenticity and courage of the narrator convey both her maternal love and her love for her husband, as well as the love and deserved respect of the writer for his wife—he portrays her dismissing the producer interested in the husband’s work for lack of soul: “You tell me who the fucking ghost is” (129). The storyworld is accepted with its marvelous rules, for much of the reader’s emotion on reading the story stems from the human longing for love. What Rosemary Jackson calls fantasy’s “desire for absolute truth or unity [,] impossible to realize in the modern world” (179) may echo within the reader. Andrew Milner points out that Amitav Ghosh’s contrasting of “serious prose fiction” to the “generic outhouses” of science fiction or fantasy in 2016 “seem[s] oddly dated;” Milner might well have added Johnson to his list of the numerous authors of contemporary literary fiction “who make extensive use of tropes and topoi derived precisely from those generic outhouses” (“Viral Science Fiction”). Johnson takes elements of genre literature to produce a text that is highly personal. Yet it may also speak to, and for, others and provide unifying truths, as in the best “serious literature.”

Questioning power dynamics

34Johnson’s disregard for genre is counter-literary, as are his choice of a marginalized character and his depiction of the world of the story, which question the existing order. In this section, we consider the storyworld of “Interesting Facts” as casting doubt on the power of those integrated in modern society over those who are alienated by circumstance, and the more fluid and open reality that this apistic tale reveals.

35In “Radical Fantasy,” Fredric Jameson mentioned “consciousness-raising” among the “possibilities and potentialities” of the fantastic form, notably when it depicts a social world of alienation (280). As early as Emporium, Johnson presented characters not ordinarily given a voice in fiction. In 2015, he said, “I tell my talented students that they have a duty to tell the stories of others who for whatever reason aren’t able to tell their own stories,” adding: “I’m no saint, but as a person who has found a fortunate place to work from, I do feel a duty to capture and help to find audience for other voices that aren’t in that place” (Scutts). He has explained that when his wife would not talk about her illness, he felt the full dimension of her trial could only be measured in a fictional narrative: “It took me a while to wrap my head around the fact that even in my own house there was a story that couldn’t be told. […] Only fiction, only creation can get to that human thing” (Rose).

36Johnson adopts his wife’s voice and knowledge to question the prevailing mode of thought, beginning with her husband’s certitudes: “My husband […] does not think that, in my forties, after cancer, chemotherapy and chemically induced menopause, I can get pregnant again, but sisters, I know my womb” (110). She questions the understanding of friends, preferring to “[s]mile blankly” and use her deflective code, responding “Vulcan silencer” when they say “Hey, what’s new?” (133). She questions fidelity, opening her story on how long her husband would take to replace her, and is ironic about the healing power of modern medicine—when the “strange woman” is dying, no one can stand to bring in the disruptive nurses (118), and as she sums up the physicians’ treatment of her best friend, the uselessness of the cure is evident— “the doctors took her left leg, her breasts, her throat and her ovaries. In return, they gave her two free helpings of bone marrow” (120). Through the storyworld, the reader understands that such aggressive treatment represents the only hope for cancer patients, and that the physical pain adds to the alienation of being, like the narrator, in a liminal position between life and death, between acceptance and loss, between adhesion to the social culture and mistrust of it.

37In “Medical Humanities and the Place of Wonder,” Martyn Evans cautions against total opposition to mechanistic views of health and illness, yet feels the characteristics of our bodily experiences “defy ordinary understanding” and should engender “a sense of wonder at embodied human nature” (339). Evans agrees with Fritjof Capa on the inappropriate application of mechanistic thought in modern medicine, which “concentrat[es] on smaller and smaller fragments of the body, […] loses sight of the patient as a human being, and […] is no longer able to deal with the phenomenon of healing” (Evans 342). In “Interesting Facts” the doctors’ focus on blasting the patients’ cancerous parts makes them lose sight of the patient’s overall wellbeing, and neither the medical community nor the community of “friends” seem to attempt any healing measures for the narrator, or to view her and encourage her to view herself with the wonder that the author conveys in his view of her character/person. Yet the tale would not be unfit reading for other cancer sufferers.

38Anthony Mangeon, in his preface to Bernard Mouralis’s Les Contre-littératures, insists on the value of counter-literature in making the dominant culture conscious of some difference, hitherto ignored or denied; and in enabling that difference to manifest itself and perceive itself as such (9-10). Johnson’s fantasy is “radical” in that he presents an alternative rationale and knowledge, but especially, an alternatively functioning body. The story will, no doubt, illuminate disability studies, for it conveys some of the wonder of our embodiment. It is debatable whether its description of an “inner-body experience” or a tumor announced in a dream, for example, is fantastic or as realistic as a straightforward listing of symptoms and side effects—so little is known about the full range of corporeal experience. Meg Elison states that “Worlds and works that hold the body as irrelevant make me […] think the author has assumed […] that there is a right way to have a body and certainly no one here is having theirs wrong.” As in many other of his works, Johnson takes into account the reality of a minority character with compassion. “Interesting Facts” is counter-literary for it allows one who would have remained voiceless to speak out, and gives power to the vision of a cancer sufferer, whose body is not perceived as cells and tumors to eradicate, or simply as a body no longer extant. Many passages present instead, in Evans’s words, “a confrontation with our embodiment that does justice to its mystery,” so that cancer patients may feel vindicated that he portrays the full range of their experiences, and that they can be seen for the persons that they are.

39The act of writing is powerful. Johnson, who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, says that narrative allows him to explore the meaning of his Native American heritage. He remembers that when his wife fell ill, he felt he needed to write about it, as putting things into a narrative had brought him a measure of comfort in the past. But he was not comforted in this case (Johnson and Moisy). Like Johnson did, the reader may hope that “Maybe the inevitable doesn’t happen” (Johnson and Moisy) and that the narrator does not die, sharing the sadness the author says he felt is shared by the reader at the end. Unsurprisingly, the story solicited an overwhelming response. Johnson recounted on Idaho Public Television in 2018 that “Hundreds and hundreds of people have reached out to me to say, ‘You captured something in that portrait that just rings true.’” The story questions the power of “interesting facts” such as the order imposed by time, space, or conventional logic, and opens onto a different realm, one perceived to contain truth as well. According to Rosemary Jackson, questioning the existing order of things is the raison d’être of fantasy:

The modern fantastic, the form of literary fantasy within the secularized culture produced by capitalism, is a subversive literature. […] Structurally and semantically, the fantastic aims at dissolution of an order experienced as oppressive and insufficient. (180)

  • 3 “[The figural] guarantees the possibility of referring to a world in the making (i.e., a real world (...)

40Though death and loss are contemplated, one may feel pleasure on reading the tale, which restores the sense of a fuller existence—in a world which the poetically affective work can teach us to love beyond the limits of our personal fantasies, as Jean François Lyotard argues in Discours, Figures (322). I have cited Fredric Jameson’s belief that fantasy can be radical; in “Interesting Facts,” the dead, the dying, the sickness-marked, the failed artist or writer, presented as ghostly figures, serve to raise consciousness—I have mentioned the wife as “ghost writer”: Johnson shows the depth of meaning and richness of her research and her writing for her and her Pulitzer-winning husband. But fantasy is also “a celebration of human creative power and freedom” (Jameson 278). In “Interesting Facts,” the set expression “to ghost someone” becomes a vital figure, a “real” ghost, bringing to mind Laurent Jenny’s tenet that creating novel semantic combinations, through figurative language, for example, illustrates the potentialities of the world: “[Le figural] garantit la possibilité de référer à un monde en devenir (c’est à dire à un monde réel) non sur le mode d’un étiquetage fini, mais en tant qu’il s’y produit quelque chose” (31-32).3 And through his craft, the writer shows that all-powerful fate does not block out possibility.

41Paul Ricœur’s argument that a reader’s perception of the meaning of a text comes not from identification with a writer or characters but from the reader’s understanding of self in the face of the storyworld also speaks for the possibilities of renewal a work offers:

  • 4 “[T]he reader understands himself before the text, before the world of the work. To understand ones (...)

[L]e lecteur se comprend lui-même en face du texte, en face du monde de l’œuvre. Se comprendre en face de…, en face d’un monde, c’est tout le contraire de se projeter, soi, ses propres croyances et ses propres préjugés ; c’est bien plutôt laisser l’œuvre et son monde élargir l’horizon de la compréhension que je prends de moi-même. (108-109)4

42For Ricœur, mimesis is Greek for that opening and discovery of the world, in which human actions can be magnified and the heightened possibilities of language appear (110-111). The difference with the established order of experience is, as Jenny puts it, that new events and outcomes seem possible. This is a realistic vision of the world. In real life, Johnson’s wife, Stephanie Harrell, did get better. She is a successful author in her own right–at the time “Interesting Facts” was written, she had won a prize for speculative fiction of exceptional literary quality (“Girl Reporter,” 2006 Fountain Award), and has since launched a contemporary romance series. Johnson reports that Harrell dislikes the story because it reveals too much that is personal (Johnson and unidentified interviewer). But the truths brought forth under the surface of the alethetic text, as the reader’s horizons widen through the world of the story, concern our common reality. Thus, Johnson’s speculative (non)fiction may lead us beyond our ordinary limitations and towards a greater world. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox write, in their Preface to New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction (2008), that in the blending of reality and fantasy a true questioning of power is made possible: “And even from the time of Aristotle, the most interesting political thought is what goes ‘beyond’, stretching the limits of practical and historical politics in what can be thought about or speculated about in fictions” (ix-x).

Conclusion

43In her introduction to The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, Karen Joy Fowler wrote that the stories she read while preparing thevolume were primarily concerned with war (“the current moment in the current world” then being the war in Iraq) and the theme “where and when does our empathy run out?” (37, 42). Johnson shows a body at war, the individual and family involved, the sufferer’s fears, anger, frustration and courage. He arouses the reader’s empathy and understanding despite, and arguably because of, the story’s fantastic elements, mystery, and ambiguity, its “hesitation” between alternative interpretations of events.

44Interesting Fact: Time passes in an instant that most of us cannot focus on. But in “Interesting Facts,” Johnson’s narrator can make us feel an instant’s full richness, and the ambiguity it comprises. The story mentions “the painful fragility of life” enriching our experience (106). The juxtaposition of love and death, the consciousness of transience and suffering may encourage a quest for meaning not just in the text but in life. Johnson makes ghosting reveal dynamics of power and possibilities in life and art, and if the narrator’s last spoken words to her husband, “[I]t’s happening” (137) seem mysterious, they remind one that life is always “happening,” is fleeting and must be savored. In one interview, Johnson said that his concern for the transient and fleeting moment explains his realistic, “scene-based” style:

I think there are a couple traps that are just part of existing. One is that we are trapped in time, that we know the past intimately through memory, but we can never access it again. And you can never go backward. And the future is absolutely unknown. All we have is the moment. That is why I think scene-based realism is so powerful and it is not a trend in writing. (Johnson and Rakowski)

  • 5 “The original desire for beauty […] presided at the advent of the universe, the adventure of life. (...)

45In “Interesting Facts,” Johnson makes ghosting reveal dynamics of power and possibilities in life and art. The suffering narrator who is the focalizer in his impossible but truthful fiction highlights the power of the moment, as the rendition of her appreciation of the forces harrowing her leads to a sympathetic understanding of her reality. And readers may find spiritual fulfillment in matching their horizons to those of the world of the story, modifying their apprehension of the inevitable. For Chinese-born philosopher François Cheng, art encourages us to follow an open life of growth, the Taoist goal of all striving, mirroring the beautiful movement of the universe. « [L]e désir originel de beauté […] a présidé à l’avènement de l’univers, à l’aventure de la vie. […] Chaque expérience de beauté, si brève dans le temps […], nous restitue chaque fois la fraîcheur du matin du monde » (44). The instants depicted in the text in fresh and evocative language bring an appreciation of the beauty and potential of life, in a movement which another culture might see as the soul’s communion with the universe.5

Haut de page

Bibliographie

ADAMS, John Joseph, and Karen Joy FOWLER, eds. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Atwood, Margaret. “Writing Oryx and Crake.” Writing with intent: Essays, reviews, personal prose: 1983-2005. Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005, p. 284-286.

BUCKLEY, Michael. “Why Speculative Nonfiction is the Ultimate Form of Creative Writing.” Medium.com, 2014. https://medium.com/musewell/why-speculative-nonfiction-is-the-ultimate-form-of-creative-writing-7db70912e582. Accessed 7 Oct. 2025.

Carter, Margaret L. Specter or Delusion? The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction. University of Michigan Press, 1986.

CHENG, François. Cinq méditations sur la beauté. Albin Michel, 2006.

CHENG, François. The Way of Beauty: Five Meditations for Spiritual Transformation. Translated from the French by Jody Gladding. Inner Traditions, 2009.

COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 1817. Project Gutenberg, 2004. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm. Accessed 6 July 2025.

DENIRO, Anya Johanna. “The Dream of the Unified Field.” Fantastic Metropolis, 2003. https://fantasticmetropolis.com/i/unified. Accessed 6 July 2025.

Elison, Meg. “The One Body Problem.” Uncanny Magazine 44, January-February 2022. https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-one-body-problem/. Accessed 6 July 2025.

EVANS, Martyn. “Medical Humanities and the Place of Wonder.” The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Eds. Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods. Edinburgh University Press, 2016, p. 339-355.

HASSLER, Donald M. and Clyde WILCOX, eds. “Preface: Inside and Outside”. New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. University of South Carolina Press, 2008, p. vii-x.

HEMLEY, Robin and Leila PHILIP. “Manifesto.” Speculative Fiction, 2018. https://www.speculativenonfiction.org/manifesto. Accessed 6 July 2025.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. 1981. Routledge, 1988.

JAMESON, Fredric. “Radical Fantasy.” Historical Materialism, vol. 10, no. 4, 2002, p. 273-280.

JANKÉLÉVITCH, Vladimir. La Mort. 1977. Flammarion, 2017.

JENNY, Laurent. La parole singulière. Belin, 1990.

JOHNSON, Adam. Emporium. Stories. 2002. Penguin, 2003.

JOHNSON, Adam. Fortune Smiles. Stories. Doubleday, 2015.

JOHNSON, Adam. Parasites Like Us. 2003. Penguin, 2004.

JOHNSON, Adam. The Orphan Master’s Son. Random House, 2012.

Johnson, Adam. Personal email to Amélie Moisy, Sept. 6, 2024.

JOHNSON, Adam, and Amélie MOISY. Personal interview on Zoom, Dec. 13, 2024.

JOHNSON, Adam, and Joseph Rakowski. “The Rumpus Interview with Adam Johnson.” The Rumpus, September 28, 2015. https://therumpus.net/2015/09/28/the-rumpus-interview-with-adam-johnson-2/. Accessed 6 July 2025.

JOHNSON, Adam, and unidentified interviewer. “Adam Johnson on his Short Story ‘Interesting Facts.’” Dialogue on Idaho Public Television. November 1, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/dialogue/videos/adam-johnson-on-his-short-story-interesting-facts/908835259306460/ . Accessed 6 July 2025.

Koelb, Clayton. The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief. 1984. Cornell University Press, 2020.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Discours, figures. 1971. Klincksieck, 1985.

MANGEON, Anthony. “Avant-propos.” Les Contre-littératures. Bernard Mouralis. Hermann, 2011, p. I-XI. https://hal.science/hal-03129586v1. Accessed 6 Oct. 2025.

MARCUS, Ben. “The Genre Artist.” The Believer 4, July 1, 2003. https://www.thebeliever.net/the-genre-artist/ . Accessed 6 July 2025.

MARTINE, Arkady. “Narratology, Or Why We Need Stories to Make Sense.” Reactormag, September 12, 2019. https://reactormag.com/narratology-or-why-we-need-stories-to-make-sense/. Accessed 6 July 2025.

MILLER, Brenda. “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My! Courage and Creative Nonfiction.” Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. Eds. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Milner, Andrew. “Viral Science Fiction: Five types of Pandemic Fiction.” Extrapolation 63, no. 1, 4 Jan. 2022. https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2022.3. Accessed 6 July 2025.

Nordhjem, Bent. “Reality and the Novel, or The Meaning of Fiction.” Orbis Litterarum, no. 42, 1987, p. 178-187.

RicŒur, Paul. “La métaphore et le problème central de l’herméneutique.” Revue Philosophique de Louvain, no. 5, 1972, p. 93-112. https://www.persee.fr/doc/phlou_0035-3841_1972_num_70_5_5651. Accessed 6 July 2025.

RICŒUR, Paul. “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics.” Translated from the French by Jeff L. Close. New Literary History 6, no. 1, Autumn 1974, p. 95-110.

Rose, Sean. “Best Books of 2015: Adam Johnson.” Kirkus Reviews. November 16, 2015. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/best-books-2015-adam-johnson/. Accessed 6 July 2025.

SCUTTS, Joanna. “National Book Award Winner Adam Johnson: ‘Storytelling isn’t a game to me.’” The Guardian, November 20, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/20/national-book-award-adam-johnson-storytelling-isnt-a-game-to-me. Accessed 6 July 2025.

TODOROV, Tzvetan. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Seuil, 1970.

TODOROV, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973.

Haut de page

Notes

1 “The fantastic [...] lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and the character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from “reality” as it exists in the common opinion. At the end of the story, however, the reader, if not the character, makes a decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous” (Todorov 41).

2 “[D]eath is a void that suddenly opens up in the midst of the continuation of being; that which exists is suddenly rendered invisible as if by the effect of a prodigious occultation, and in the blink of an eye plunges into the trapdoor of non-being. And on the other hand, this “miracle” is not a rare interruption of the natural order, an exceptional variation in the course of existence [...]; in its own miraculous way, the enchantment of death is entirely natural” (Jankélévitch 18, my translation).

3 “[The figural] guarantees the possibility of referring to a world in the making (i.e., a real world), not along the lines of finite labeling, but in the sense that something is happening in it” (Jenny 31-32, my translation).

4 “[T]he reader understands himself before the text, before the world of the work. To understand oneself before, in front of, a world, is quite the contrary of projecting oneself and one’s own beliefs and one’s own prejudices; rather, it is to let the work and its world enlarge the horizon of my own self-understanding” (Ricœur 107).

5 “The original desire for beauty […] presided at the advent of the universe, the adventure of life. Each experience of beauty, so brief in time […], restores to us the freshness of the dawn of the world” (Cheng 35).

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Amélie MOISY, « Power Dynamics in Fantasy: Adam Johnson’s “Interesting Facts” »e-Rea [En ligne], 23.1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 17 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/20961 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15cjg

Haut de page

Auteur

Amélie MOISY

Université Paris Est Créteil
IMAGER – TIES
Amélie Moisy, recently retired from a position of Associate Professor of Applied Foreign Languages at Université Paris Est-Créteil University, is a member of the TIES/IMAGER research group there. She is the author of a doctoral thesis, of numerous articles, and of a monograph on Thomas Clayton Wolfe (Thomas Wolfe, L'épopée intime - Belin, 2002). Her work on Wolfe led her to study autobiographical fiction and the literature of excess, and she has communicated and published articles on other American writers, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jack London to Tennessee Williams, Anne Sexton, Grace Paley, Barbara Kingsolver, and George Saunders.  She has written on Wolfe's contemporaries, such as Erskine Caldwell and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and was drawn to the more recent work of Edward P. Jones, writing several articles on his short stories. She is currently writing a second book on Thomas Wolfe. This will be her first essay on Adam Johnson’s fiction. Closest in her experience to this proposed approach to “Interesting Facts” may be an article on haunting in George Saunders’ short fiction which she wrote several years back. Johnson was good enough to speak with her on zoom about his story and has given her permission to quote him (she will also be referring to published interviews).

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search