For the last two decades, archives have been present on fictional and non-fictional literature as well as in the literary discipline, a phenomenon that leads us to interrogate their epistemological inscription on our work as researchers. We, literature specialists, are now part of the wide « public of the archives » (specialized and non-specialized). But what do we do with and at the archives?

In the literary discipline this incorporation of archives which are not used as “sources” stems from a specific conception of the work on literature, that considers the text not as an isolated ontological realization, but as a material object, constitutive of its identity, since it reintroduces the anchoring of the literary text in its present and in the present of interpretation. As specialist of literature, my practice of the archives do not consider them as a place of reflection, or of evidence, but as a building space, were the object is generated, in a form of exchange that involves a confrontation with materials that are often opaque (Farge 1989 : 90).

This incorporation of archives changes several aspects and methods of our work: at the level of disciplinary writing protocols, and at the level of the definition of our objects of research. Classic works such as Arlette Farge’s Le goût des archivesand Natalie Zemon-Davis’Fiction in the Archives (1987) from Natalie Zemon-Davis, remind us that working with the archives we are confronted to a crowd of characters that take shape through their writing, and build a kind of human comedy; their fragmentary destinies fascinate us, and encourage us to build hypotheses that take them into account. These « archival characters » are henceforth incorporated into our work, and coexist with fictional and historical ones, but they have a specific status.

In order to develop these postulates, I will expose a recent research in the archives of Heinrich Schliemann (Neubukow 1822-Naples 1890), the autodidact and polyglot archeologist, whose name evokes the extraordinary destiny of a child fascinated by the ancient world, that, once he became an adult and a millionaire, used his fortune to make his dream come true: to discover the place of the ancient city of Troy.