Danièle Sallenave et le don des morts

Abstract

By Bruno Thibault. (Collection monographique Rodopi en littérature française contemporaine, 40). Amsterdam — New York, Rodopi, 2004. 158 pp. Pb $44.00; €34.00. Danièle Sallenave's œuvre consists of novels, récits, travel diaries, essays, interviews and articles, and she has been on the editorial board of various French intellectual journals, including Les Temps modernes. Publishing her first novel, Paysage de ruines avec personnages, in 1975, she is a contemporary of women writers as different as Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Jeanne Hyvrard, Julia Kristeva and Leïla Sebbar. Of these, she is perhaps most readily compared to Ernaux — though Sallenave is a more (Beauvoirian) politically engaged writer. However, although some critical work on Sallenave's œuvre has been published through the years, her texts are not so well known or widely taught in the UK as Ernaux's and her work has not been so frequently translated into English. Bruno Thibault's monograph engages with the full range of Sallenave's writing. His title is taken from Sallenave's Le Don des morts (1991), a text that is in part an apology for literature, and the organizing principle of his approach to her work is the relation to the past and to the dead. For Sallenave, not only is literature redemptive — turning the betrayal of survival and forgetting into remembrance — but it also has existential power. Thibault's careful and nuanced reading of the heritage of the past in Sallenave's work provides an illuminating context for those coming belatedly to her œuvre. Thibault's monograph takes a classic chronological and thematic approach and the first and second chapters are devoted to Sallenave's first three novels and to the move from the nouveau roman style of the first two to the more realist — though still innovative — form of her subsequent work, focusing, in the final chapter of the book, on the polyphonic Les Trois Minutes du diable (1994), inspired by Kundera's L'Art du roman. In between, Thibault turns first to some of Sallenave's short texts before engaging with her feminist politics through a reading of her fourth novel, La Vie fantôme (1986), and her anti-parity polemics in the public debates of the late 1990s. For Thibault, Sallenave is above all an intellectual engaged in the contemporary world, and discussion of her travel journals on Eastern Europe in the 1970s and on the third world in the 1980s and 1990s admirably demonstrates this, as do her novels and her essays and articles. The book concludes by bringing Sallenave's œuvre up to date with a short discussion of two texts published in 2002, including the autobiographical récit, D'Amour. Many of Thibault's readings draw on the notion of Jungian archetypes, to the extent, in the case of L'Amazone du grand Dieu (1997), of criticizing the author for not developing a Jungian approach herself. This text — Sallenave's biographical treatment of a seventeenth-century traveller-nun — is discussed in the section on Sallenave's own travel diaries but Thibault's attempts to justify its inclusion are not wholly convincing. Overall, however, this monograph functions as a useful introduction to Sallenave's work and offers many reasons why we should read her texts if we have not already done so.