Pierre Michon's Vies minuscules (1984) recounts a provincial young man's Proustian journey toward literature in the second half of the twentieth century, for whom becoming a writer is an undertaking ridden with guilt, desire and despair. The beginnings of Vies minuscules take the form of a rhetorical question pointing to the phantasmatic projection of a romantic genealogy and adventure-filled family saga in which the colonial past plays an ambivalent role. It is both central, as one of the key reasons for the writer's project of recasting the humble lives of his ancestors in a new light, and marginal, since it is never fully addressed in the literary work that it has engendered.

This study has originated in an observation: the subtle yet persistent presence of the colonial in narratives not directly concerned with colonial history or issues such as immigration, multiculturalism or neocolonialism. In works written by metropolitan or French continental writers such as Claude Simon, Pierre Michon, Laurent Gaudé, Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq or Régis Jauffret, the reader is surprised to discover references to colonial or postcolonial history, geography and civilization. “Ces images, fugaces et évanescentes” (Havard and Vidal 9) are disseminated throughout the narrative and dialogues and discreetly woven into the fabric of the authorial discourse, indicating that the process of colonization and its aftereffects are not the main focus of these books. Nonetheless, they engage with colonization in oblique and ambiguous ways. This is epitomized in this excerpt from Régis Jauffret's Microfictions in which a Frenchman's empathy with the gendered, racial and historical subaltern paradoxically and sarcastically paves the way to solipsism, moral relativism and indifference: