Écrire l’écrivain: formes contemporaines de la vie d’auteur (review)

The explosion of life-writing in French and, to a lesser extent, in other literatures since the 1980s provides the context within which this study explores the particular phenomenon of writers’ lives by other writers. A corpus of some hundred texts illustrates the various ways in which ‘la figure de l’écrivain réel [est placée] à l’horizon de la pulsion scripturale de l’écrivain-biographe’ (p. 13). The much-trumpeted return of the subject is demonstrated not just in the concern that these texts show with the person of the established writer, but in the presence and self-affirmation of the writing subject (exemplified in the L’Un et l’autre series edited by J.-B. Pontalis). A brief Introduction takes the reader through these points and sets up the framework for the ensuing survey. The basis for this is the principle of ‘transposition’, which Robert Dion and Frances Fortier present as the means whereby the original biographical données are handled by the écrivain-biographe. Their approach is broadly formalist and the four chapters outline the variants they find within each of the four transposing practices they identify. The analyses of individual works are not pursued in any great depth, their function being largely to justify and provide examples of the range of strategies within each of the four transpositional dimensions. The first of these is ‘le vécu transposé’, in which biographical subjects may be relocated to a different historical moment, ascribed fictional experiences, or appear in fictional versions of themselves. The second form is ‘la transposition de l’œuvre’, where the writer-biographer’s fascination with the writer-subject’s work takes him (or occasionally her) from being reader to writer, and where ‘il s’agit [. . .] de comprendre l’écriture de l’autre pour faire advenir la sienne’ (p. 50), as in Philippe Sollers’s Casanova l’admirable, or Dominique Noguez’s Les Trois Rimbaud — though this last example could equally well be a candidate for inclusion in ‘la transposition du vécu’, as it could in the following mode, ‘la transposition critique’. Here the biographer-writer offers his or her account as a substitute for, or rather an improvement on, critical discussions of the work, implicitly denigrating the critics (as in the work of, Pierre Michon and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot) or playfully integrating critical strategies into their creative enterprise (Jean-Benoît Puech). The chapter on ‘la transposition générique’ explores the by now widely recognized fact that contemporary forms of life-writing blur generic boundaries or resuscitate older genres (‘lives’, tombeaux). This leads into a Conclusion which argues that the practice of writing the writer — ‘le processus intersubjectif [. . .] qui lie, et fait advenir, deux écrivains’ (p. 169) — is a powerful affirmation of literature itself and a means of countering its ‘désacralisation’ (p. 175). Dion and Fortier have convincingly established the existence of a corpus — although it sprawls back in time (for example, to De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant) and across national boundaries in ways that call for further clarification — and their conclusion makes some suggestive points for continuing exploration. This could fruitfully move beyond formalist categorization and address more substantively what is at stake in the relation between the writer writing and the writer written about, and why France has been its epicentre.