Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France by Claire Boyle

Abstract

1154 Reviews Coombes's convincing account of the complex unity of Sartre's work thus un dermines many of themore facile interpretations, notably Bernard-Henri Levy's much overrated Le Siecle de Sartre (Paris: Grasset, 2000), which seeks tomobilize Sartre's early existentialism against hisMarxist self, in a latter-day re-enactment of Cold War cliches. There are several detailed points on which Coombes's judgement could be queried?for example, his claim that the cultural policy of the French Communist Party was not crudely Zhdanovist' (p. 312). But that is simply an indication that his work will provide a stimulus for further research. No serious study of Sartre's philosophical, ethical, and political evolution in the futurewill be able to disregard Coombes's work. London Ian Birchall Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self inPost-War France. By Claire Boyle. London: Legenda. 2007. x+176 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-1 905981-10-6. In Claire Boyle's study of the autobiographical writings of Nathalie Sarraute, Georges Perec, JeanGenet, and Helene Cixous, theunifying principle ofher analysis is a view of self-writing as an agonistic field inwhich an anxious author is engaged in a struggle to fend offa voracious readership intent on consuming the authorial self in the gesture that gives the book its title. In each case, this struggle concomi tantly involves awriterly suspicion regarding what are taken tobe the norms of the autobiographical genre, but that suspicion and the generically disruptive strategies to which it gives rise take on a variety ofmanifestations. The dialogue form of Sarraute's Enfance attests to a conception of the self as inherently plural and inter subjective. The need to protect this plural self from the reductive commodification threatened by an appropriative reader occasions the challenge already posed to the autobiographical genre inEnfance, a challenge presented more explicitly in Tu ne faimes pas, and then effectivelyexacerbated by the polyphony of voices inher final work Ouvrez. Perec's traumatic experience of a dispossession of the self leads, prin cipally inW ou le souvenir dyenfance and Jeme souviens, to generically destabilizing strategies designed to foster an active reading process less likely to seek amonolithic authorial self that is simply not available. In the course of this analysis, it isdifficult to escape the feeling, a version ofwhich is confronted quite explicitly by Boyle, that the reader is to be treated like Rousseau's recalcitrant citizen: on le forcera d'etre libre'. Perhaps themost effective chapter is on Genet's Miracle de la rose, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, and Journal du voleur,where resistance to a subjectification threatened by both social and literary institutions (the prison and the confessional mode, respectively) is sought by tactics of abjection geared (not entirely success fully, Boyle argues) towards thwarting readerly identification. Finally, Cixous's autobiographical trajectory fromLe Livre de Promethea, through the (significantly) co-authored Helene Cixous: photos de racines, to Les Reveries de lafemme sauvage and Le Jour ou je netais pas la is characterized by a progressive self-estrangement, MLR, 104.4, 2009 ii55 in a process that also serves tomark the ethical danger of the readers quest for knowledge of the autobiographical subject. The principal weakness of this study is the rather banal model of traditional autobiography that is repeatedly invoked to point up the experimental self-writing of the authors addressed, and this despite an opening chapter reviewing recent developments in autobiographical theory. The nuances glimpsed in that review are not always in evidence later in the book. There are also some significant omissions in Boyle's reading of the critical literature on French autobiography: to take just one example, in the light of the importance here of fragmented self-representations thatdraw on impersonal cultural materials, itmight have been illuminating to refer toMichel Beaujour's conception of the autoportrait' elaborated in Miroirs d'encre: rhetorique de Vautoportait (Paris: Seuil, 1980). In terms of autobiographical practice, the twentieth-century literary context for the chosen writers' innovations seems a little sparsely drawn: such figures as Gide and Leiris do not even merit amention. Moreover, when Boyle observes, for instance, that thewriters she has discussed seem touse their autobiographical texts to inquire into,rather than set out, the selfand...