A Creature Has Passed This Way: Devices of Generic Self-Situation in Colette's La Maison de Claudine

In authorial studies of Colette, La Maison de Claudine has persistently been read as the first of the "maternal cycle," followed shortly after by La Naissance du jour and Sido.¹ However, thematic commonality notwithstanding, the three texts mentioned as constituting this cycle are generically quite different. La Naissance du jour was written and marketed as a novel, and while some of its material draws on the biography, the plot in which the characters are caught up is clearly fictional; Sido is a three-chapter memoir, each chapter being devoted to one of three now dead members of the Colette family. La Maison de Claudine certainly draws on material from childhood memories, but is told as anecdotal vignettes. However, these differences have counted for very little in the recent scholarship on Colette, and the thematic approach—both psychoanalytical and more classically literary—has brought about the result that the question of genre in these texts has been settled by locating them somewhere on the continuum between the mentir-vrai and fictional autobiography, at the same time as relegating genre to the status of epiphenomenon in the business of reading and interpretation.

In this reading of La Maison de Claudine, my somewhat modest aim is to unsettle the fiction/autobiography pair. In its place, I shall search the text for its representation of the range of genres in relation to which it situates itself. This representation takes the form of generic mentions, in which the practice of storytelling deployed by Colette is set against allusions to analogous or contrasting genres. The objective of this enterprise is to restore the interest of generic questions in the reading of Colette.

"Autobiography" and "Fiction"

Besides the standard first-person narrative in which, by various means, narrator, personnage and author are established as mutually referring, "autobiography," the story of a hero in his times who happens to be telling his own story, displays a number of topical and formal features, each of which can be found in texts that do not conform with the conventional model described by Philippe Lejeune: allusion to the outline of "my life-story," certain topoi such as the scene of reading, some account of "how I came to be the person writing this book," the learning of language, and so on. La Maison de Claudine deploys several of these, and is positioned as autobiography by the fact that the first-person pronoun designating the narrator coincides with the authorial signature and with the first-person protagonist of the stories;² very roughly, the stories are arranged in an order that corresponds to the child's growing up (notated by the age of the child at the time of the events recounted), ending with her taking the place of the mother with her own children; the fun, as well as the désarroi occasioned by learning new words is the topic of "Le Curé sur le mur," and there is a key story, "Ma Mère et les livres," which fulfils the function of the scene of reading.

Written in the neighborhood of autobiography, La Maison de Claudine also appears to arise in the neighborhood of fiction. Take the title, which necessarily connects it to the Claudine novels and hence to the débuts of a young woman constrained to write for the salacious fiction market by her manager-husband Willy. Colette had spent the time since her divorce both claiming her authorial rights over the Claudine series and disassociating her public image from the persona they depict. The use of the name Claudine appears to do the opposite. What sort of a game is she up to? This is the true version, perhaps? But then, why "Claudine"? Or, given that the Claudine novels were read—inevitably, as Nancy Miller writes—for their part de vérité, are we now enjoined to read Colette's memories of her childhood for leur part de fiction?³—Such hypotheses have their place, but the important point about the title lies elsewhere. It is an intertextual reference to Colette's writing...