French Autobiography: Devices and Desires, Rousseau to Perec (review)

REVIEWS 437 writing the self can be recognized as a social and political act" (133). The embodied self, Perreault urges, articulated in the context of a feminist community , is not only essential to that community but can slowly change the world. The process of life writing, for Perreault, is recursive. The selves that are written are also transformed in the doing, even as the communities they change likewise change them. Perreault enthusiastically affirms the processes the texts and their writers perform. A similarity in subject matter suggests that this book grew out of "Writing the Self," Perreault's 1989 doctoral dissertation on feminist autography in the United States, but refreshingly unpedantic though respectably scholarly, her book is more articulate and otherwise readable than dissertations usually are. A slim volume in pages, it resonates in the mind because of its overall intelligence and refusal of extremes. Whether or not one shares Perreault's faith in what the processes of autography can accomplish, one will find her close readings of texts engrossing. HARRIET BLODGETT California State University, Stanislaus MICHAEL SHERINGHAM, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires, Rousseau to Perec. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 350 pp. $60.00, cloth; ISBN 0-19-815843-2. "Far from being unequivocally triumphal, the apotheosis of the sovereign ego, autobiography is an anxious genre," writes Michael Sheringham in his study of French autobiography. Autobiography might appear a "self-centred business," but it actually involves "a constant negotiation with different forms of otherness." The central thesis of Sheringham's book is that otherness pervades the autobiographer 's project, that writing about one's life is as much about self-estrangement as self-retrieval. After all, the autobiographical self is a textual construct, constructed in language. This textual self is enclosed in a book, an external object with its own history, quite removed from the autobiographer's. And the writer is engaged in dialogue with an imagined reader. ("C'est nécessairement à d'autres qu'un discours sur soi s'adresse," writes the psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis.) Memory too is a process that ultimately makes us split subjects, multiple selves. "The ultimate subject of any narrative is its narrating," writes Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, a text which Sheringham finds helpful in analyzing the autobiographical process. For Sheringham, autobiography is not a fixed structure but a dynamic process, a narrative process. He has no time for the school of thought (with its "post-modern commonplaces") that simply categorizes autobiography as fiction. This approach, he says, impoverishes the texts rather than illuminating them. Sheringham favors Lejeune's concept of autobiography as a contractual genre, based on a pact with the reader, in which the reader is made to understand from explicit authorial discourse in the text itself that the author, narrator, and protagonist are "one and the same." The great advantage of this understanding of autobiography is that it places emphasis on the act of narration, rather than on the content or shady notions of "truth." It ties autobiography to reference but not resemblance. 438 biography Vol. 19, No. 4 Critics have tended to view autobiography as a conservative genre which upholds traditional assumptions about identity, individuality, and self-coherence . Sheringham sees it differently. One of the hallmarks of French autobiography , he says, is its "critical insight and self-conscious lucidity" (ix), and he believes this is precisely because of the problems and contradictions built into the enterprise. Far from perpetuating a belief in the old stable ego, autobiographers have produced "some of the liveliest and most inventive writing to have emerged from France in the last two centuries" (x). In an excellent chapter called "The Otherness of Memory," Sheringham describes the notion of memory as a unifying factor, crucial to self-unity and personal identity, as a fundamental myth in western culture. "Is autobiography," he asks, "necessarily tied to a smoothing over of the disruptive, discontinuous work of memory, to the victory of unity, however mythic?" (293) Rousseau had faith that his memory sieved out the significant from the trivial, and Proust's famous instances of "mémoire involontaire" in A la recherche du temps perdu further reinforce the notion of memory as a guiding force through...