Le Carnet Pour Lui-Même ed. by François Dumont

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le Carnet Pour Lui-Même ed. by François Dumont Douglas L. Boudreau Dumont, François, éd. Le carnet pour lui-même. PU de Laval, 2019. ISBN 978-2-920949-77-5. Pp. 202. In this collection, the writer's notebook, or carnet, is considered as a literary genre in its own right and not merely as a rough draft or proving ground for ideas to be used in future works. The first four articles consider the degree to which Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, eleventh-century Japanese writer Sei Shōnagon, Michel de Montaigne, and Joseph Joubert may be read as carnettistes avant la lettre. The next several articles study more recent authors who published works labeled as carnets or cahiers during their lifetime, or whose personal notebooks became posthumously [End Page 219] available to the public as published works or in archives. These are Julien Gracq, Henri Thomas, Henry Bauchau, Aimé Césaire, Austrian Peter Handke, André Major, and Pierre Issenhuth. The last article in the issue looks at the overlap between the carnet and digital publishing formats such as blogs. The exploration of the carnet as a genre is enhanced by the chronological presentation of the articles, the works explored in the first four chapters appreciable as precursors to the carnet proprement dit. It is notable, for example, that Montaigne's comparison of his Essais to marginal grotesques is evoked in several of the articles to describe the kind of writing typically found in carnets. The carnet is revealed to be a genre of notable diversity. Some incorporate images and others do not. Some display genuinely spontaneous writing and in others the apparent artlessness is in fact the result of careful refining and curating of earlier writing. Despite this variety, there are common threads that run throughout this issue and which may define the carnet as a genre. The informality, real or apparent, of the carnet is shown to be part of its appeal and so, too, is the implied intimacy of the genre. The contributors note that this artlessness and spontaneity are reinforced by the form of the notebook as an object, bound blank pages upon which one is encouraged to scribble, and by its portability. The contributors place the informal qualities of the carnet in contrast to genres such as novels and poetry, in which the more formal or artistic use of language is seen as creating an undesirable distance between writing and lived experience. The articles on Major and Issenhuth highlight this aspect, which calls to mind the idea of vécrire from Jacques Godbout's Salut Galarneau!, notable in this context as a novel written in the form of two cahiers. The articles argue that acts of writing, editing, and rewriting that occur in a carnet contribute to an intriguing blurring of the line between writer and reader. The individual articles of this collection are fairly concise but meaty and thought-provoking. Some of the articles are more easily accessible to non-specialists than others, but the collection as a whole reveals the carnet as a genre ripe for further exploration. Taken altogether, this is a fascinating contribution to the field of French letters and should be of interest to a wide range of scholars. Douglas L. Boudreau Mercyhurst University (PA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French