The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time by Freadman, Anne (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time by Freadman, Anne Catherine Slawy-Sutton (bio) Freadman, Anne. The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time. Research Monographs in French Studies 33. London: Legenda, 2012. 178pp. ISBN 9-781906540937. £55.00. In the past thirty years, much has been written on Colette and the genres of autobiography or auto-fiction in French. Scholarship has reexamined, for instance, Lejeune’s theories on the autobiographical pact in relation to early exclusion of Colette from the canon. Many critics have been intrigued by her use of elements of her life either to create works of fiction or to inscribe herself obliquely as a woman. In spite of different interpretations, all concur concerning the generic complexities of her writings. In The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette—Genre and the Telling of Time, Anne Freadman also acknowledges Colette’s constant mixing of strategies, but for her Colette never wrote a true autobiography or real memoirs—not only because a chronological structure, “the hallmark of the genre of memoirs” (20), is missing from her narratives, but also because she never truly revealed herself and did not offer a bilan, an assessment of her life. Indeed, Freadman considers Colette “the most discreet of writers” (22–24). Reminding us of her resistance to the confusion of her person with her characters, Freadman argues that Colette actually gives little away and even “refuses the plot of the life-story,” simply construing her life as a source of memories (14). Freadman does not purport to propose a new genre under the term livres-souvenirs but conveniently gathers some of Colette’s writings under this rubric. As she focuses on specific distinctions between the writing of memoirs and the writing of memories, she studies the author’s ways of writing fragments of her past, developing her argument across “The First Subject” (looking at texts that work on a relation with the genre of autobiography) and “The Second Subject” (turning to texts that adapt various genres for the purpose of writing memories). As she considers the livres-souvenirs creative “adaptations” not governed by historical chronology, the critic illuminates Colette’s modernity. The book is divided into five sections. In the first two, “Exposition” and “First subject: Colette and Autobiography,” Freadman redefines the terms “autobiography,” “story-telling,” “fiction” and “fable,” before proposing that Colette is above all a story-teller. Rather than comparing her personal works to men’s, as others have, Freadman suggests that it is more productive to read her in connection with her work as a journalist (7). Also leaving to other critics the task of checking archival sources to verify where the writer invents or mis-remembers, she stresses both how Colette’s career in journalism did indeed shape her mastery of the short form, and how the memory-books “short-circuit [the] process of re-inscription and hence avoid the historical vocation of standard autobiography and memoirs” (12). Having established that memory [End Page 453] is essentially non-linear, fragmented, and therefore not ruled by the time of the world (14), Freadman explores Colette’s alternative and imaginative variations on telling time. Freadman is herself uninterested in a chronological treatment of the texts. After incursions into the earlier Claudine series, Les Vrilles de la vigne, and later writings, her study of Mes Apprentissages elaborates the distinction between autobiography, memoirs, and memories. Some earlier commentators had questioned Colette’s use of biography in that text from 1936, which looked back onto her initiation into married life and the Parisian milieux of the 1900s. But Freadman links other critics’ remarks in praise of Colette’s art of the portrait and of her voice as “the true memorialist” of that period (42) to argue that Mes Apprentissages, although it is the closest among Colette’s writings to an autobiography, goes beyond an autobiographical plot and does not truly belong to the mode of memoirs either. Freadman concedes that the text certainly has a historical dimension: because it is “resistant to the generalisations of social history” and gives sketches of the journalistic milieu of the 1900s, together with insights into “the specific texture of daily life...