Biography and the Question of Literature in France (review)

The centre-fold of this learned book is a series of linked essays on Hugo, Baudelaire, Nerval, Schwob, Proust, Gide, Leiris, Sartre, Genet, Michon, Max Jacob, Barthes, Laporte and Roubaud. Partly canonical, partly personal, this list of authors maps Jefferson's pursuit of Biography as a mode and a construct in creative dialogue with Literature. Any one of these illuminating essays could be used as secondary reading by students of French literature. However, this is not a survey-book, but a thesis about the nature of literature, conducted through close engagement with a wide range of texts. The immediate frame for the inquiry is a well-documented exploration of the early history of writing we now call biography. Balzaciens know the role of Michaud's Biographie universelle and the pamphlets of Eugène de Mirecourt, but here these monuments of the age of Sainte-Beuve are put in their full context. Jefferson is surely right to see the emergence of a modern idea of literary biography as a dynamic force in the emergence of the idea of literature. It is a pity that, once the nineteenth-century stakes are set, Jefferson abandons the history of the genre, save for an overview of the biographies romancées of the 1920s. The outer frame of this complex work is where the argument is to be found: Literature and Biography have long been seen as antonyms, yet Literature defined itself in the nineteenth century in contrast to its proximate 'Other', which was Biography. The measure of the one requires understanding the other. The place of Biography that Jefferson seeks out is not in consumer fiction but on the high peaks of the literary field. Her chapter on Hugo's Contemplations is a subtle elucidation of the relationship between Hugo's self and the subject of his poetry, the 'expanded I' whose life-experiences are mapped by the poems as in a biography of someone else. Similarly, Les Fleurs du mal lends itself to a reading that collapses the external frame of biography into a synchronic portrait of a soul, which is no less biographical for breaking the frame. However, even in these persuasive chapters, the contours of Jefferson's argument waver, and they dissolve entirely in the essays on twentieth-century authors. The later texts chosen are about writers' own lives, not about others'. Yet autobiography is radically distinct from biography. Autobiography cannot adopt the generic requirement of posthumous retrospection; it cannot only present sequence as cause; and it cannot capitalize in the same way on ignorance and knowledge. Jefferson's inquiry into twentieth-century 'self-writing' is engaging and perceptive, but not exactly, perhaps not at all, about biography. The disjunction between the project and its realization may have been inevitable. It may be that it is only in writing about the self that twentieth-century authors have engaged interestingly with the definition of the literary. It may also be that Jefferson's argument is dependent on the prestigious autobiographies she has chosen —the self-writing of Simenon, Gary and Perec would surely have led her along a different path. All the same, it would have served Jefferson's argument well had she explained more fully why these authors, and why this exclusive concentration on writing the life of the self. Jefferson's concluding pages are difficult and bewildering. Her last examples, Laporte and Roubaud, use the present tense to talk about writing as it happens. Is this biography? Jefferson corners herself into accepting that biography can be made to dispense with retrospection. But she could have said that reportage, even when applied to the writer, is not formally consistent with biography. Biography, in Jefferson's non-prescriptive approach, is ever different from itself, and in that sense like literature, which is always reinvented afresh by each author. This comes close to denying the possibility of a theory of literature and evacuating the theoretical pertinence of biography. Jefferson defends her tricky project of 'a history...