Psychic Plagiarism: The Death of a Child in Marie Darrieussecq's Tom est mort and Camille Laurens's Philippe

Abstract

The notion of ‘psychic plagiarism’ was formulated in 2007 when Camille Laurens, the author of Philippe , a memoir recounting the death of her son, accused fellow writer Marie Darrieussecq of borrowing from it in her novel Tom est mort . In alleging that Darrieussecq had appropriated her loss, Laurens also suggests that any first-person fictional narrative of the death of a child necessarily appropriates others’ grief. Rather than debating the charge of plagiarism or determining the extent to which fictional narratives of child death might be deemed inappropriate, this article rethinks what it means to narrate the death of a child in the first person through the notion of ‘psychic plagiarism’. Psychoanalytic and trauma theory are drawn upon alongside close analysis of Tom est mort and Philippe to theorize a parent’s awakening to the death of his or her child as a ‘missed encounter’ engendering an imperative to give testimony to the child as inescapably ‘other’ to the self. My analysis explores how narratives of child death give voice to the Other precisely through a ‘missed encounter’ that is ultimately projected on to the reader, who is awakened to the realization of (having missed) someone else’s traumatic loss.