At the end of October 2025, a new adaptation of a literary work was released in theaters: “The Stranger,” by Albert Camus, revisited by François Ozon. This cinematic event reminded us, once again, that fictional characters can have a life that escapes their creator, to the point that we sometimes want to believe they are “autonomous.”

The autonomy of fictional characters is what French literature professor Pierre Bayard defends in his book The Truth About “They Were Ten” (2020) . He even proclaims himself a “radical” among the “integrationists,” that is, among those who, in commenting on and reflecting on fiction, assert that we can speak of literary characters as if they were living beings.

Giving a voice to silenced characters

Before Ozon’s film ( The Stranger , 2025), the writer Kamel Daoud, with the publication of Meursault, Counter-Investigation (2013), intended to give voice to the brother of the man who, in Camus’s story, doesn’t even have a name: he is referred to as “the Arab.” His project was to account for this silenced life
—and consequently, for the colonial character of this monument of Francophone culture—by giving it literary substance. In short, it was a matter of “rectifying” not a work, The Stranger (1942), but the reality of this fictional character who, reaching us solely through Meursault’s words, said nothing of his own and whose life trajectory consisted of nothing more than the accomplishment of his own murder.

More recently, American writer Percival Everett , winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for James (2024), gave voice to the eponymous secondary character of the slave appearing in Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1848). His project, in Everett’s own words, was to create for James a “capacity for action.”

Such endeavors are more frequent than they might seem. In his 2019 work, *L.’s Journal (1947-1952)* , Christophe Tison proposed giving voice to Nabokov’s Lolita, of whom the general public had previously known only what Humbert-Humbert—the novel’s pedophile—had chosen to reveal. This Lolita, who had come down to us as the archetype of the seductive “nymphet,” and whose image had become iconic—even though Nabokov had expressly requested that his book covers show neither photographs nor depictions of young girls  —manifests, through Tison, a desire to reclaim control over her own narrative.

The same was true for Antoinette Cosway, alias Bertha Mason, who first appeared as “the madwoman in the attic” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). When the British writer born in the West Indies, Jean Rhys, decided to tell the story of this white Creole woman from Jamaica in The Prisoner of the Sargasso Sea (1966), she intended to show that this madness stemmed from the patriarchal and colonial system that had broken her by depriving her of her identity.

Margaret Atwood , in her novel Penelope’s Odyssey (2005), focuses on recounting the ultimately very masculine journey of “the man of a thousand wiles,” particularly through Penelope’s eyes. The woman who until then had been merely “Odysseus’s wife” is revealed to be more complex and ambivalent than the Homeric notion of fidelity had suggested.

These unique works all operate according to the same presuppositions: 1. Literature is made up of lives; 2. However, those of certain characters from “early” works are poorly represented there; 3. a new work will be able to allow them to tell “their truth”.

I propose to group these texts together, without any regard to genre, under the heading “rectifying literature.” Their aim is not to provide a “response,” a “riposte,” or even a “refutation.” They do not, strictly speaking, establish a “dialogue” between the authors involved. Their sole ambition is to offer an alternative perspective—the perspective of one or another—on things (too little? too poorly?) already expressed in literature.

It is probably no coincidence that the texts of this corrective literature give voice to literary subjects who are victims of injustices and violence, whether racial, sexist and sexual or otherwise, because, at heart, they all seek to know who holds the literary voice over whom.

The case of “Consent”, by Vanessa Springora

Among them, a text that has considerably marked our era: Vanessa Springora’s Consent (2020). In this book, she recounts, in autobiographical form, her relationship with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, whom she met in 1986 in Paris, when she was 14 years old and he was around 50. She focuses on describing the mechanisms of control put in place by the author as well as the tacit acceptance of this relationship within a milieu where his reputation as an award-winning writer offered him social protection.

If we accept that it is more than a testimony with purely referential value and that it possesses literary qualities (or if we understand “testimony” in a literary sense), then it seems clear that Vanessa Springora’s “I” is a character. This is in no way to disqualify this “I” by claiming it is a fabrication, but rather to consider it as a literary construct, just as we can speak of characters in documentaries.

Vanessa Springora’s distinctive approach is that her text does not “rectify” the reality established by another text, but rather by a body of writings by Gabriel Matzneff. She elaborates (pp. 171-172):

“Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, a novel by G., in which I am supposed to be the heroine, was published in bookstores one after another at a pace that left me no respite; then the volume of his diary covering the period of our meeting, including some of my letters written at the age of fourteen; two years later, the paperback version of the same book; a collection of breakup letters, including mine […] Later still, another volume of his black notebooks followed, obsessively returning to our separation.”

Through all these texts, she writes, she discovers that “books can be a trap”:

“The panic reaction of primitive peoples to any capture of their image may seem amusing. Yet I understand better than anyone this feeling of being trapped in a deceptive representation, a reductive version of oneself, a grotesque and grimacing cliché. To seize the image of the other with such brutality is to steal their very soul.” (p. 171).

What she describes here, this confinement within a character that is not her, is reminiscent of gaslighting , a manipulative process by which victims, often women, end up believing they are going insane. It owes its name to George Cukor’s film, Gaslight ( 1944), which tells the story of a couple in which the husband tries to make his wife believe she is losing her mind by altering seemingly innocuous elements of her daily life and telling her, when she notices these changes, that it has always been this way (among them, the intensity of the gas lighting in their house, the ”  gas light  “).

Springora shows, in fact, that the “literary reality” constructed by M. led her precisely to doubt her own reality (p. 178):

“I was walking along a deserted street with a disturbing question looping in my head, a question that had crept into my mind several days earlier, without my being able to banish it: what tangible proof did I have of my existence, was I even real? […] My body was made of paper, only ink flowed in my veins.”

Consent is certainly a narrative of self-dispossession—of a power grab. However, it is also a form of performative act, since Springora (re)becomes the full subject of her own enunciation after having been deprived of it. Is this not the fully political scope of this corrective literature, namely, to give literary subjects the means of conquest that allow them to become full subjects of enunciation once again, that is, this “capacity to act” that Percival Everett so aptly described?

While literature is a formidable exercise in freedom (freedom to create, to imagine, to choose a language, a style, a narrative), it can also be an incredible exercise in power. Australian authors Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin had already demonstrated this in * The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Literatures * ( 1989, French translation 2012). Using the case of the British colonial empire, the book revealed how the literature of the core imposed itself (through its formats, styles, languages, and even its visions of the world order) on the empire’s authors and how these authors learned to free themselves from it.

In the age of “re-” (of “repairing the living” or so-called “restorative justice” ), corrective literature undoubtedly has a political role to play. First, it can help us continue our work of acknowledging our literary and collective blind spots. Second, it can demonstrate that our societies are strong enough not to have to erase from the public sphere works we deem disturbing. Corrective literature does not subtract texts as cancel culture might . On the contrary, it adds to them, allowing us to measure the distance that once separated us from this world order in which we failed to question these subordinate and silenced literary existences.

Author Bio: Hecate Vergopoulos is Senior Lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at Sorbonne University