Camille Laurens’s Phantom Readings: Literary Allusions and Intertextuality in L’Amour, roman and Ni toi ni moi

Since the publication of Dans ces bras-là, which won the prix Femina in 2000, Camille Laurens has gained increasing literary and scholarly recognition for her complicated and complex strategies of life writing. Her literary project especially showcases labyrinthine narratives in which the boundaries between lived experience and fictional fantasy are not only slippery but indeed untenable. These multilayered texts offer a plethora of fruitful points of departure for considering her authorship, such as the onomastic play and significance of characters, word plays, and references to myths, cinema and other canonical works of French literature. Laurens’s writing thus creates a kaleidoscopic mise-en-abyme and literary trompe l’œil and mirrors the author’s own problematic self-reflection to reflect an author who is already a double. (Camille Laurens was, in fact, born Laurens Ruel.) Moreover, Laurens often scripts herself into her fictional works via the evocation of episodes from her other novels that may or may not have any connection to her own life. From a thematic perspective, with the exception of the autobiographical Philippe, in which she poignantly recounts the death of her newborn infant, Laurens’s literary works are richly imbued with narratives of failed romances. It is her preoccupation with heterosexual desire that sets the stage for a conflicted and problematized encounter between self and other in three distinct spaces: the space of the couple, the space of the text and the space of her implied readership.

Focusing specifically on L’Amour, roman (2003) and Ni toi ni moi (2006), this article considers the numerous literary allusions and playful intertextual references found in these two (mainly) first-person narratives. Such analysis necessitates a closer look at the act of reading; without it, of course, the significance of such literary games would be lost. Beyond our own readership, however, the female narrator’s literacy in these two works plays a key role both in the very construction of the text and also in her personal quest. In L’Amour, roman, for instance, the narrator traces her family history and family “romances” while facing the dissolution of her marriage; Ni toi ni moi documents the narrator’s failed romance and her collaborative film project with an unknown male filmmaker. In order to fully demonstrate the literary house of mirrors that Laurens (the author) artfully constructs in her writing, another key term warrants attention: the phantom text.

Put simply, as will be further explored in the analysis that follows, I consider a phantom text as an invented literary object whose only reality lies within the fictional parameters of the narrative.¹ Several qualities associated with phantoms—that which is haunting, vaporous, fleeting or even invisible—can surely be associated with the fictionally constructed texts in L’Amour, roman and Ni toi ni moi. In both narratives, however, these phantom texts have greater implications with regard to the female narrator/protagonist and her “phantom” readership. Additionally, the male reader/lover/other in both novels acts as an agent of provocation for the fictional female author. It is through an engagement with these phantom readings that the female subject realizes her agency.

The literary allusions to La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes and Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (in L’Amour, roman) and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (in Ni toi ni moi) are three examples of the wide array and citation of male writers’ texts in Laurens’s corpus. In the analysis that follows, we shall examine how they function in each text so as to highlight the fictional author’s engagement as a writer and, perhaps most significantly, as a reader. Thus, literacy and literature—specifically reading and rewriting—mirror a struggle for power and voice that Laurens seems to suggest lies at the core of any heterosexual coupling. In both novels, there is always an Other: a male intermediary, quite often a love interest, scripted into her works and positioned as the narrator’s/protagonist’s reader. These men, moreover, occupy positions of power within their respective arenas of employment: as filmmakers, psychoanalysts or playwrights. All...