Hervé Guibert: Vers une esthétique postmoderne (review)

This study of Hervé Guibert, based on an exploration of 16 of his works, fictional, autofictional, photographic, videographic, has two underlying pre-occupations: the reorientation of critical thinking made possible by the posthumous publication, in 2001, of Guibert’s journal intime (1976–1991), Le Mausolée des amants; and what Guibert’s output might tell us about postmodern writing and the ‘return of the subject’. The first chapter considers the ways in which Guibert’s work is self-generating, its various parts acting on, and interacting with, each other to produce a single, rhizomatic corpus; in particular, the published works are redistributions and re-workings of materials in Le Mausolée des amants. The intratex-tual networks thus developed are the intricate itineraries of thematic preoccupations, principally with the body and its textualization, but equally with its opposite, the sacred and abstinent, and their reciprocal inversions. In Chapter 2, we turn from the intratextual to the intertextual and interdiscursive, to Guibert’s writing by phagocytosis, to his need for Other in order to be Self. After individual studies of the varied presences of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Thomas Bernhard, Genon moves on to an exhaustive study of a single text, Les Lubies d’Arthur (1983), to explore the verbal and pictorial library that Guibert draws upon. Here, the repetitive structure tends to obstruct argumentative momentum; and when conclusions are drawn about the meanings of intertextual practice, they are elusively multiple (pp. 142–7). Chapter 3 opens with an exploration of the uncertain waverings of generical boundaries in Guibert’s journal writing, the intrusions of fiction, the literary falsifications of the authentic. The remainder of the chapter traces the curve from L’Incognito (1989), with its ‘carnavalisation de l’identité, du genre et du sida’ (p. 190), to the central ‘trilogy’ of the Aids sequence, in which Guibert acts against self-dispossession, against Aids as metaphor of postmodern self-disaggregation, by increasing doses of fictional doubling. Photography, the initial subject of Chapter 4, even while it provides access to a posthumous self, an ultimate laying bare, also practises a passage from je to il, from self to ‘personnage de roman’ and mise-en-scène. A fascinating review of Guibert’s photographic self-portraits prepares the way for an analysis of the video La Pudeur ou l’impudeur, a ‘journal filmé’ whose voice-over reads extracts from Le Mausolée des amants. Here again, the processes of autofiction insinuate themselves into an enterprise that allows the body to be re-appropriated while identity dissolves. Finally, in Mon valet et moi and Le Paradis, Guibert adopts a new tactic: not self-representation but self-invention, not autofiction but the creation of experimental egos. Postmodern features, adverted to periodically throughout the study, are drawn together in the Conclusion; it is a pity, perhaps, that Genon does not use Guibert’s work to develop his own version of a postmodern aesthetic; but his own findings are persuasively shown to fall in line with the definitions of others. It is a pity, too, that the book contains no visual materials. But this is an engrossing, carefully conducted and extremely valuable re-assessment of Guibert.