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

Abstract

Robson, Kathryn. I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women’s Writing. Cambridge: Legenda (Research Monographs in French Studies, 56), 2019. 140 pp. £75.00 / $99.00 / €85.00. ISBN 978–1–7818–8675–5. Kathryn Robson’s excellent I Suffer, Therefore I Am appears very timely in the light of ongoing debates surrounding representative and existential ‘authenticity’, and the degree to which those of us with no knowledge or experience of particular life events can profess to have any (empathic) understanding of them. This study examines the representation of suffering in a range of contemporary female-authored texts in French and how readerly empathic responses to it ‘are shaped by constraints around the ways in which suffering can be articulated and framed’ (p. 2). It discusses the ethics of portraying suffering through the slippery prestidigitatory self of autofiction and the degree of readerly resistance and identification possible when interpellated within such a ‘personal’ account of pain. Robson examines the different political readings of empathy: does it incorporate a prosocial impetus or, rather, a solipsistic smugness that ‘there but for the grace of God...’? The work has four chapters dealing with narratives of anorexia, accidental child deaths, maternal filicide and autofictional accounts that self-reflexively lay bare the textual intricacies of the writer/reader relationship. I Suffer, Therefore I Am is striking in its nuanced approach to the emotional and linguistic semantics of empathy, in its refusal to accept easy answers or interpretations, even if there is an occasional sense of an overly contestatory or qualified stance vis-à-vis existent exegeses. This approach can also be attributed to Robson’s interest in ‘empathic unsettlement’ (p. 15), a term she borrows from Dominick LaCapra, and in what renders the readerly experience of a narrativized suffering uncomfortable – including that of her own readers. This assured study convincingly concludes by emphasizing that textual empathy is perhaps less about acts of bridging between two discrete individuals, than about ‘the relation between self and other founded in mutual woundedness and dispossession’ (p. 119), a relationship characterized by an incomplete and vulnerable opening-up of oneself to the other in order that they too may inhabit that space with their own lives/stories. [https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac014]