Authorial Inscription and Its Subversion in the Novels of Camille Laurens

Abstract

Camille Laurens is a complex writer. Her novel Dans ces bras–là (Prix Femina, 2000) openly declares itself as a feminine text, in which a number of aspects of gender roles within and outside the family are explored in autofictional form. However, this text can be seen both to reflect and deflect the autobiographical project of many French women writers, such as (in very different ways) Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux and Marie Cardinal. For if Laurens's writing overall engages specifically with the issues of language, gender, the body and transmission, it does so in a variety of ways, many of them ludic and humorous. This article proposes that reading Dans ces bras–là through the prism of Laurens's earlier novels leads to a fruitful problematizing of the questions of gender and gender(ed) relations in the novelist's works. Indeed, in Index (1991) and L'Avenir (1998) (the first and fourth novels of a loose tetralogy), Laurens explicitly writes herself into her plot and her characters (both male and female). In addition, her texts pick up on and subvert different 'genres' (the detective novel, the erotic episode, autofiction). Gender and genre thus go hand in hand, and, through a range of linguistic and narrative techniques (wordplay, plot, changes in tense and focalization), their specific configuration in Laurens's texts frequently de-stabilizes the relation of reader to text.