Spaces of Belonging: Home, Culture and Identity in 20th-Century French Autobiography

Abstract

Elizabeth Jones's stimulating study of the intersections between place and identity, principally in the self-writings of Hervé Guibert, Serge Doubrovsky and Régine Robin, ranges over fertile ground as it interrogates the extent to which ‘life writing could be said to constitute a form of “postmodern cartography”’(p. 294). Postmodernity and questions of place are not uncharted territory in autobiography studies (notably being covered in Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir's recent but here unreferenced monograph). Yet, this contribution, based on the author's doctoral thesis, has a distinct originality, deriving partly from the interdisciplinary ambition behind Jones's project: to provide a bridge between geographical and literary studies. Jones amply illustrates the value of analysing the writing of space and place in autobiographical texts; she, furthermore, aims to demonstrate that such texts are invaluable in ‘deepening our understanding of the experience of space itself’ (p. 294). Jones explores the wilfully subjective, postmodern relation to space that her chosen writers articulate: examples include labyrinthine space in Guibert and intercontinental migrations through space in Doubrovsky and Robin. Postmodern autobiographical writings constitute exercises in self-consciously selective ‘wayfinding’, rather than ostensibly objective, totalizing acts of ‘mapping’. For Jones, this approach to knowing and writing space in contemporary French autobiography indicates the impact on personal identity of a changed relation to space in an increasingly globalized and transnational era. The analyses of space are often the most satisfying aspects of Jones's work. There are rich, thought-provoking readings of Guibert's autofictional protagonists occupying and being dispossessed of specific spaces, and of Robin's representations of Montreal as a hybrid space. Jones's study also very persuasively establishes the usefulness of interrogating notions of home and belonging that emerge in autobiographical texts. This study has many merits, but there are also weaknesses. In particular, the ambitious and commendably interdisciplinary theoretical framework buckles at times; notions of ‘mapping’ and ‘space’ can slip from the carefully theorized to the metaphorical. Overall, the central argument is somewhat lacking in force, in part hampered by a tendency to repetition and excessive recapitulation, itself reflecting shortcomings in the distribution of material between chapters. There are also, disappointingly, conspicuous errors and inconsistencies in the copy. An important question is raised by Jones's assertion that her study deals with autofiction rather than autobiography: that of referentiality. Jones justifiably adopts Doubrovsky's definition of autofiction, but less restrictive conceptualizations exist. Autofiction is a broad church, and allows for the writing of invented space, or at very least the re-invention of real spaces in writing. This complicates Jones's argument that life-writings function as postmodern cartographies in ways which are not fully resolved. Jones appears to retain the notion that cartography involves the representation – however subjective – of an externally existing space (albeit not necessarily a pictorial representation), but autofiction exists precisely to refuse such clear-cut groundings in referentiality. Thus, while the volume makes an important contribution to French autobiographical studies, widening its purview, claims for the interdisciplinary usefulness of interpellating postmodern life-writings as what Jones must have been tempted to call autobiocartographies may not entirely convince.