The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time

Abstract

Freadman, Anne. The of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 33.) Oxford: Legenda, 2012.The paradox and the oxymoron are figures central to Colette's writing: they convey her lively disregard for established dichotomies, and they are inseparable from the humour as well as the lyricism of her style. A paradox lies, too, at the heart of one important strand of her literary project, for although she is a writer whose own is extensively recounted to her readers, she persistently warns against any assumption that this constitutes straightforward autobiography (Imaginez-vous, a me lire, que je fais mon portrait? Patience! C'est seulement mon modele (epigraph to La Naissance du jour). Anne Freadman captures splendidly Colette's distinctive ways of representing time and her own course, pointing out the inventive, skilfully crafted nature of her life-writing and its modernity: although Colette is not normally classed as a modemist, her experimentation with genre coincides with modernism's assault on nineteenth-century literary forms, and also takes on the material realities of modem publishing by perfecting the short form for literary columns, then connecting these creatively in book form. Using the interesting structure of afive-part sequence modelled on the sonata (Exposition, first subject, bridge, second subject, with the analysis of that meditation on life-writing itself, La Naissance du jour, forming the recapitulation), Freadman traces Colette's different uses of genre in the books she broadly categorises as Livres-Souvenirs. Beginning with Colette's separation from her Claudine alter ego, notably in Miroir (in Les Vrilles de la vigne), she then reads Mes apprentissages as the closest Colette comes to a memoir, with its portrait of personal experience within a social context. But this account of her early life and times is also the beginning of a move away from as narrative, towards recounted as a collection of moments, fragments, anecdotes, stories - souvenirs, in the senses of both memory and keepsake. In the main Livres-Souvenirs {La Maison de Claudine, Sido, L'Etoile Vesper, Le Fanal bleu, and La Naissance du jour), Freadman characterises Colette as a collector more than as the narrator of her own linear story, and her written memories thus take the form of a bouquet, an album, or (one might add) in visual terms the nicely chosen collection of glass paperweights on the book's cover, each containing some fragment of the 'real' world: a flower, a scrap of material or tapestry, what look like tiny shells, each also reflecting the light of their surroundings when the photograph was taken, and thus fusing different moments of time. …