Sylvie Germain: les essais — un espace transgénérique by Mariska Koopman-Thurlings (review)

Since the publication of her first novel, Le Livre des nuits, in 1985, Sylvie Germain has rightly become one of France's best-respected and most studied authors. Critical interest in her work has largely focused on her novels, but Germain has also written a significant body of essays, which include discussions of poetry and art as well as spiritual meditations. The twelve studies collected here aim to give Germain's essays the place they deserve in the consideration of her oeuvre. While many of the contributions take particular texts as their starting point (such as Bruno Blanckeman on Céphalophores, Toby Garfitt on Bohuslav Reynek à Petrkov, Ria van den Brandt on Etty Hillesum, Matthew Moyle on Les Échos du silence, and Élisa Bricco on Patience et songe de lumière), they also reflect more generally on Germain's distinctive practice as an essayist. In a key chapter in the volume, the editor Mariska Koopman-Thurlings traces Germain's activity as an essayist to her 'texte fondateur' (p. 46), the unpublished doctoral thesis 'Perspectives sur le visage: transgression, dé-création, trans-figuration' defended at Paris X-Nanterre in 1982. Koopman-Thurlings describes the thesis as 'un ouvrage de prose poétique, un assez curieux document du point de vue générique pour une thèse universitaire' (p. 45). Even before Germain had begun her career as an author of fiction, her writing was marked by 'l'éclatement des genres' (pp. 45-46). As the subtitle to this collection suggests, the insistence on the genre-bending nature of Germain's essays is one of the principal points that unites the otherwise diverse contributions. Koopman-Thurlings characterizes the style of Germain's thesis, and by extension her later essays, as 'lyrique, incantatoire, fort éloigné de la démonstration analytique et logique propre au discours scientifique' (p. 46). Some of the essays in the volume, such as those by Koopman-Thurlings and Garfitt, stand out as stimulating, informed, and informative studies of Germain's work. Others, however, show a tendency to become too bound up (for this reviewer's liking) with the methodological question of how to write on essays that do not follow academic conventions. Should an essay on a 'transgeneric' author be itself transgeneric? Should one reproduce Germain's lyrical style or analyse it in a colder academic prose? Writers of the stature of Germain can turn an art of suggestion into something genuinely creative and moving, but most critics might be well advised to stick to a less ambitious and more precise use of language. The temptation to adopt the poetic style of the subject sometimes gets in the way of the overall aim of the volume to promote understanding of a relatively neglected but increasingly substantial aspect of Germain's work. Even so, one of the strengths of this collection is that it encourages readers to think about what it is they want from academic criticism. A short essay by Germain herself, 'Variations autour du verbe tester', completes the volume. The writer, she suggests, is someone who inherits, bears witness, and transmits. Her own legacy is already substantial, and it merits further study.