I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing by Kathryn Robson

Abstract

Reviewed by: I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing by Kathryn Robson Didem Alkan Robson, Kathryn. I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing. Legenda, 2019, 140 pp. ISBN 978-1-781886-75-5. $99 (cloth, paper, and eBook). In this remarkable study of contemporary French women's writing of pain and suffering, Robson explores the notion of empathy focusing on the relationship between the reader and the text. Analyzing a variety of texts depicting anorexia, the death of a child and maternal filicide, Robson not only reflects on empathy and its limits, but also challenges the ways in which the reader is positioned and negotiates this positionality. The first chapter explores anorexia and subverts the idea that the anorexic performance enables a response from its spectator (the reader). Juxtaposing multiple narratives to demonstrate the performativity of anorexia, Robson [End Page 149] emphasizes the complexity of the relationship between the text and the reader. She argues that these texts invite neither empathy nor identification with the characters, but rather, they alienate the reader in order to destabilize the relationship between self and other. The second chapter explores the articulation of the traumatic loss of a child and the reader's response to these narratives. Robson problematizes the notion of "knowledge" which is accessible to the bereaved parent only through fantasies. Referring to Cathy Caruth's trauma theories, including Derrida and Freud, she demonstrates to what extent the reader's experience is also similar to the parent's, since he/she can only grasp the suffering of the parent in a similar mediation process, through dreams. In this sense, the texts on the death of a child do not promote empathy as a shared experience but emphasize that knowledge is "rooted in fantasy" (67). In Chapter Three, Robson explores the fictional representations of maternal filicide, questioning at the same time the limits of empathy in relation to the reader's response. She argues that although it is easy to communicate the infanticide for the narrator, the ethical concerns allow us to rethink the notion of empathy since the reader maintains a distance from the violent act. Yet, Robson suggests that reflecting on one's own relationship with these texts allows one to establish new boundaries with them. Taking as point of departure Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself, Chapter Four explores the ethical demands of autofictional texts, reflecting at the same time on the role of the reader. Adding into her reflections the reader's active engagement "as part of the production of giving account to oneself" (119), she suggests that one should rethink the notion of empathy from a larger perspective, and consider taking certain measures which could be a violent process. She emphasizes the importance of taking responsibility for one's own reading and thinking critically, which could enable new approaches for understanding the suffering of the other. In this outstanding analysis on the representations of pain and suffering in contemporary French women's writing, Robson challenges the notion of empathy as a way of putting oneself in someone else's shoes, destabilizing at the same time the reader's fixed positions. In doing so, she invites us to rethink empathy as a possibility for creating alternative approaches and challenges our ways of approaching others' pain. Didem Alkan Connecticut College Copyright © 2020 Women in French Studies