Comment devient-on écrivain? Sartre, Aragon, Perec et Modiano by Mireille Hilsum (review)

This thought-provoking account of four key twentieth-century autobiographers attempts to relate them to their historical situations with a view to answering the question posed by the title, whose ‘full’ version, indeed, should have been ‘Comment devient-on écrivain au vingtième siècle?’ Choosing her four authors from different parts of the century, Mireille Hilsum explores in each case the autobiographical work in the context of the œuvre, its relation to previous autobiographies, and its effects on the genre itself. For Aragon, Perec, and Modiano, Sartre is a precursor. In Chapter 1 Hilsum analyses his text Les Mots (1964) in conjunction with Aragon’s autobiographical writings, all of which she considers to be ‘indirectement politique’; in the case of both authors they are responses to the communist ideal and, for Aragon, to its destruction after the Prague Spring. But she also compares and contrasts the two authors’ attitudes to the possibility of recovering the child’s point of view in an adult text; she concludes that Aragon, in ‘Le Mentir-vrai’ (1964), accepts that this cannot be done, and that he takes it upon himself to invent such a voice. Hilsum is an Aragon specialist and her readings of ‘Le Mentir-vrai’ and Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire, ou, Les incipit (1969) are particularly instructive, especially in their discussion of André Breton as the absent addressee of Les incipit. The journey through the twentieth century continues with a chapter on Perec. Much has already been written on W ou le souvenir d’enfance, but Hilsum chooses to concentrate on another absence in the book — that of Robert Antelme, whose L’Espèce humaine was fundamental to Perec’s understanding of his own prehistory. Antelme is just one of the many key absentees and omissions in W ou le souvenir d’enfance, which Hilsum therefore characterizes as an ‘open’ book that cannot properly exist without the reader. The study concludes with Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) and Un pedigree (2005), both of which are read as works of ‘reaction’. Dora Bruder, according to Hilsum, is a work written against history, as a challenge to the passing of time in its unification of past and present and of Dora and Modiano, a book that therefore offers the reader a fictional but reassuring sense of freedom from the otherness of history. Un pedigree, on the other hand, is said to be a work written ‘contre Sartre’; it is a denial of autobiography in general, and of Modiano’s own autobiographical novels in particular. Hilsum’s reading of Un pedigree as Modiano’s dismissal of the past, as well as of his mother, who is never named in the book, puts the work in the same category as Les Mots and Les incipit, while Dora Bruder and W ou le souvenir d’enfance, by contrast, are attempts to link the past and present even in their evocations of catastrophic events. Although one may disagree with the thrust of Hilsum’s historico-literary narrative, her readings of the individual authors writing their selves self-consciously are rewarding and convincing. This is an illuminating study for scholars of autobiography in our century.