Quelque membre de notre cercle by Danielle Mémoire

Abstract

Reviewed by: Quelque membre de notre cercle by Danielle Mémoire Warren Motte Mémoire, Danielle. Quelque membre de notre cercle. P.O.L, 2021. ISBN 978-2-8180-5234-1. Pp. 201. The most striking feature of Mémoire’s book is its formal organization. A rhopalic structure is involved here: the text is shaped a bit like a snowball, whose mass increases, then slowly melts. There are seventy-two chapters. The first chapter contains one paragraph, the second contains two, and so forth, until the middle of the book, at which point the chapters begin to decrease until the final one, which once again contains a sole paragraph. The volume’s publisher mentions that Mémoire was inspired by Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1980)—and indeed the final chapter of Mémoire’s book is composed of a quotation from Hejinian’s book. A life is involved here, too, as a female narrator closely resembling Mémoire herself looks back over the seventy-two years of her life, noting some salient events or impressions from each of those years, in turn. If I hedge a bit on the question of the narrator’s identity, it is because the speaking subject in this text is extremely elusive: “[P]arler de moi (par écrit) ne me plaît pas,” she confesses (164), and that reticence expresses itself in a variety of ways throughout the book. The narrative style is discursive in character, and fragmentary. Like in her other books, Mémoire expresses herself here in a very polished, almost hieratic French. Fully cognizant of that stylistic tendency, she shies away from commenting upon it: “Quant à la très particulière et inintéressante nature de mon combat avec la langue, ce qu’il faudrait, c’est n’en rien dire” (182). Certain themes recur insistently here, as Mémoire exploits the rhetorical power of repetition to her advantage. Some of those themes seem more banal than others—clothing and fashion for instance. Yet even there, Mémoire’s point is more serious than it might appear, involving issues of the presentation of the self. Other themes are more immediately recognizable as weighty ones. Mémoire reflects on the notion of shame on several occasions, both the shame we may feel for ourselves, and the shame we may feel for others. Along the way, she asks a series of intriguing questions, many of which involve literature and its conditions of possibility, its ontology. How can a writer negotiate the gap that yawns between words and things? What is the difference between lying and fiction? What is the status of the lie within a fictional world? How can one usefully compare the ways that real people (Proust, for example) and characters (Marcel) exist? What is the difference between a man of letters and a writer? What does it mean to be a woman of letters? How much attention may one legitimately accord to oneself in asking questions such as those? Whatever hesitation she may feel in that latter regard, this book puts on display a more carefully considered and detailed portrait of the artist than any of Mémoire’s previous works. In its subtle geometries, its intelligence, and its canniness, it invites us to think about a life and a lifework, simultaneously. [End Page 250] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French