Protean Selves: First-Person Voices in Twenty-First-Century French and Francophone Narratives ed. by Adrienne Angelo and Erika Fülöp (review)

This well-crafted collective volume comprising thirteen rich chapters has its roots in a Women in French (US) panel at the 2011 Northeast Modern Languages Association Annual Convention. As the editors explain, the ‘voices’ of the title is a contested term, one that for some critics is too bound up with the spoken word to be applied usefully to writing. Yet, as the volume clearly demonstrates, this interplay between written and spoken could be said to mirror the fissures and fractures that emerge when attempting to articulate a ‘je’ in contemporary writing. The succinct Introduction encompasses familiar key contributions to autobiographical/autofictional literary criticism, such as those made by Benveniste, Lejeune, and Doubrovsky, and therefore serves as a helpful overview of developments in writings in the first person. In this way, we are mindful that terminology is especially problematic in this field where genres overlap, resisting categorization, and the volume succeeds in going beyond texts more easily recognizable as ‘autofiction’ and its complex fusion of fact and fiction, even if such exponents of the genre as Chloé Delaume and Christine Angot are represented via analyses by Dawn Cornelio and Nathalie Edwards respectively. As Frédérique Chevillot reminds us in her examination of the prolific if enigmatic Amélie Nothomb, Proteus not only assumes multiple forms but is also privy to the past, present, and future — precious knowledge that is reluctantly divulged. This is a coherent volume inasmuch as all the texts studied here seek to uncover stories and, in the process, grapple with heterogeneous, protean subjectivities, as France Grenaudier-Klijn contends in relation to Patrick Modiano, for example; such narratives simultaneously lay bare the porosity of the boundaries between author, character, and narrator, giving rise to what Aimie Shaw terms ‘chimeric narrators’ with reference to Éric Chevillard. Some of the texts discussed are more self-consciously experimental, evinced by the playful paratext used by Brice Matthieussent to highlight the narratorial disjunctures occasioned by the translator figure who comes to rival the author, a phenomenon explored by Erika Fülöp. This volume suggests that discerning a single subject behind any ‘je’ is a troublesome task, one complicated further still by the fragmented narratives engendered by trauma and mental illness, as Katie Jones, Helen Vassallo, and Laura Jackson demonstrate. A particular strength of the book is its highlighting of lesser-known writers from francophone contexts, as in Samia I. Spencer’s analysis of Iranian born Chahdortt Djavann and Julia L. Frengs and Jean Anderson’s respective studies of French Polynesian writers. What is salient in this section is the extent to which these transcultural texts reclaim the ‘je’ and imbue it with the political, thus making writing, as Spencer notes, ‘un acte social de transformation personnelle’ (p. 118). The theme of the creation and mutation of selves runs throughout this thought-provoking collection, which does much to re-evaluate current trends in first-person writing. As such, this book will be of interest to the specialist literary scholar but also, more broadly, to the student of contemporary French and francophone culture.