In his book How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton chronicles what is surely the best description of that half-conscious morning ritual, the reading of the newspaper:

"That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper" wrote Proust, "thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty fours hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of café au lait. "

John Berger has spoken, similarly, of the way news photos, particularly those of horror, tend to reinforce a certain type of alienation, a powerlessness disguised as engagement. Here Edward Said paraphrases Berger’s argument from Another Way of Telling:

"The contemporary world is dominated by monopolistic systems of order, all engaged in the extinction of privacy, subjectivity, free choice.... In advertising or journalism, photographs are used as if they belonged to the same order of truth as science or control systems; the communications industry would like to press viewers into accepting the photograph as evidence either of buyable goods or of immutable reality. Buy this product because it will make you happy; the poor are sick and hungry, and that's the way it is."

Proust was obviously all too aware of the injustice with which the concision, or at least the brevity, of "news" deals with its subjects. He was also, apparently, a close reader of the "news in brief"; those few-line ‘stories’ (not dissimilar from what The Age calls The Odd Spot, or the MX calls Boring But Important) which were a significant feature of many French daily newspapers of the time.

Alain De Botton does a very good job of showing how, upon closer inspection, these tiny, mostly tragic happenings, nevertheless contain the potential for great pathos, and even, in the right hands, for great literature, reducing a certain, quite famous story to this news clipping:

Tragic end for Verona lovebirds: after mistakenly thinking his sweetheart dead, a young man took his life. Having discovered the fate of her lover, the woman killed herself in turn.

The other night a friend gave me a book called Novels in Three Lines, by the little known French anarchist, art dealer, editor, critic and sometime writer Felix Feneon.

In 1906, Feneon was employed as the anonymous author of precisely such news, a column in the newspaper Le Matin called Novelles en trois lignes; The news in three line. Unlike his contemporaries in the "odd-spot" corner of the office, and despite the fact that his method was almost as far from Proust as literature allows, Feneon, was neverthless a sublime stylist. These little pieces, collected together in this book like photographs, "demonstrate in miniature", as Luc Sante puts it, Feneon’s "epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pin-point precision of language, his exceedingly dry humour, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. "

Consider for example, these:

Again and Again Mme Courdec, of Saint-Quen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields.

Near Saint-Mihiel, Lieutenant Renault was found uncon cious beneath a yew. He has not yet spoken and his major doesn’t know what to say.

For fun, Justin Barbier was scattering pistol shots in all di rections, in Stains. Jules Courbier, a roofer, caught one.

Both Proust and Feneon, it seems, were aware of the danger of this particular media form, by which unique and unequal events are flattened and reduced to the ubiquitous and consumable quality of ‘news’. Yet both were equally awake to the potential which the medium disguises. The potential for the imaginative leap, for the hidden illumination.

Perhaps it’s also the fact that newspapers are, by their nature, collages ( even if they pretend that they aren't) which makes them capable of such rupture: the soap ad directly beside the story of refugees dying in Africa, for example. The Herald Sun for one, quite openly utilises this tension on its front page, deliberately confusing the headline of one story with the picture from another. Perhaps it’s the very nature of the photograph and of language itself that the newspaper calls into question by miming objectivity with such flagrancy.

Perhaps the job of the newspaper is to situate us, at a safe distance and in a way which is comprehensible, amongst the otherwise incomprehensibly numerous lives of other people. Perhaps, the newspaper’s historic function is not thematic after all, but numerical, in that it allows us to calculate ourselves within the incalculable, by rendering the almost-infinite readable.

Which leaves the job of articulating the particular to Literature. Perhaps Felix Feneon, a (probably) militant anarchist, came the closest to doing both at once.