On Delphine de Vigan’s novel, “Je suis Romane Monnier”
What would remain of us if we disappeared tomorrow leaving behind a single object: our mobile phone? This is the unsettling question that accompanies the reading of Je suis Romane Monnier, Delphine de Vigan’s latest novel (published by Gallimard).
Romane is the heroine of whom we will know nothing but a portrait sketched through the exploration of this intimate object. One evening, in a bar, she leaves her mobile (and its passcode!) with a stranger, before disappearing. Thomas thus finds himself the custodian of a life: a life to be reconstructed like a jumbled puzzle, thanks to all the digital traces Romane has left behind.
The idea is dizzying. For centuries, memories accumulated in clearly identified and circumscribed places: photo albums, drawers, notebooks, correspondence, sometimes in those famous shoeboxes where the remnants of an existence were piled up. In them you would find, pell-mell, love letters, postcards, holiday photographs, cinema tickets, and a few objects whose value remained essentially sentimental. These modest archives told an impressionistic story of our lives.
Today, this memory box still exists, but it has taken on a new form. It fits in the pocket of our jacket or at the bottom of our bag. And with a simple press of the finger, we have access to thousands of photographs and videos, years of conversations, hastily scribbled notes, searches made in the middle of the night, appointments, routes, shopping lists, messages never sent… Our smartphone has become the most complete archive we have ever built about ourselves. It contains far more information than the shoebox, and this information is not necessarily chosen, but both receptacles have in common that they present themselves as a puzzle that requires someone to put it together, to give it a shape, a meaning. Is the 100,000-piece puzzle more informative than the 50-piece puzzle? That is not certain. It is easier to get lost in it, it is dizzying to go through it all, you drown in it… just like what happens to us in our digital lives! And Thomas, custodian of Romane’s mobile, loses himself in this quest to pin down the young woman through this heap of disparate traces. He loses heart, dives in, catches his breath, loses sleep. “For some incomprehensible reason, a young woman he does not know, whom he had never seen, has entrusted him with her digital footprint in the vast world. It is an ocean, or a labyrinth, a puzzle with multiple unknowns, which it is up to him to solve. Perhaps simply the puzzle of a life.”
In Delphine de Vigan’s novel, the phone is not a mere narrative accessory. It becomes a secondary character, almost a silent narrator. Through its content, a personality gradually emerges. Habits appear. Links are revealed. Secrets surface. Each piece of data seems insignificant when considered in isolation. But their accumulation produces a striking effect: that of a presence.
The novel thus recalls something self-evident. We no longer merely use our phones: we deposit a part of ourselves in them. And all the people we interact with also deposit something of us there. Every photograph taken, every message sent, every note saved becomes a trace. These traces form a sort of digital double that grows with us over the years. This accumulation of fragments is like a picture made of pixels, whose final image we ourselves do not know.
Delphine de Vigan’s book thus questions our relationship to identity. Who are we really? What we tell about ourselves? What others perceive of us? Or the sum of the traces we leave behind without even realising it? The phone then becomes a sort of involuntary mirror. It preserves our intentions as much as our distractions, our chosen memories as much as our forgettings.
This reflection is particularly moving because it concerns each of us. Our smartphones have become the permanent witnesses of our existences. No family album, no diary has ever possessed such documentary richness. And yet, this documentary richness blurs things. How do we recognise the essential in this heap? In this superposition of multiple identities that are hard to bring together: family, romantic, friendly, professional, administrative… ?
Delphine de Vigan does not only deliver a novel about a disappearance or an identity investigation. She captures with great acuity one of the most striking realities of our age: our phones contain far more than a collection of data. They hold a memory. Ours. A memory we record day by day, without distance or construction, without a narrative thread. A memory by association and contiguity, by juxtaposition of the infinitely banal and the very important, without logic or hierarchy. A memory that others can barely make use of: like Thomas in the book, we could lose ourselves searching this object for the methodical reconstruction of an existence. But for each of us, this disparate memory constitutes a sedimentation of our scattered experiences. The fact remains that our ever-thinner smartphones are shoeboxes as deep as an ocean: who still knows what they have placed at the bottom? The memory of this singular object is there, solid, organised, systematic, whereas ours is fragile, subjective, volatile. And yet, what are we to do with this digital hypermnesia? “By dint of exposing ourselves, do we not risk disappearing? And by dint of leaving our traces everywhere, all the time, of leaving none? In 30 years, what will remain of our likes, our reviews, our virtual revolts, drowned in the infinite mass of digital data? What will remain of us?”
Summer is approaching, and with it holiday reading… “Je suis Romane Monnier” is a fine reflection on the plethoric footprint we leave on the world.
MNC
