“Life Writing” n’est pas français: The Year in France

Napoleon is reputed to have said, “impossible n’est pas français” (“Lettre” 296), but he also exclaimed, “Quel roman que ma vie!” (Mémorial 342)—“My life, what a novel!” In France today, life writing seems impossible, and for all intents and purposes does not exist as such, unless it appears as another one of these ideas from le monde anglosaxon—the English-speaking world—that is to say the USA and its cultural epigones. In the extreme, the fact that there is an academic practice called life writing in other countries proves nothing else than the facility with which American cultural products export themselves to the rest of the world. The same thing has long applied to cultural studies, from which life writing derives in many ways: we have very recently begun to witness the blooming forth of a few master’s degrees in études culturelles, although much of the ideological agenda of cultural studies—the trespassing across and at times the erasure of boundaries between high and low culture, as well as between disciplines, and between academic and market productions (between l’Université and la société civile)—has been lost in the process of acclimatization. Much in the same way, creative writing has never really had droit de cité in French universities, although there are a few sporadic ateliers d’écriture. No pasarán seems indeed to be the word. What we are witnessing here is a case of resistance to cultural transfer. To begin with, life writing is untranslatable into French: écriture de vie is simply not said; it is just not a concept. We do have récit de vie and récit de soi, but these refer to objects and methods of academic practices in the social sciences, and do not evoke cultural productions like mémoires, autobiographies, autofiction, biographies, and biofictions, which are regarded as literary genres or categories. Les récits de vie denotes a widely developed practice of social scientists who, moving away from the methods of Durkheimian sociology very much as some nouveaux historiens, close to the Italian school of la microstoria, swerved from the longue durée perspective of the École des Annales such as it was in the days of Fernand Braudel, and taking stock of the end of great narratives—“la fin des grands récits” that Jean-François Lyotard (63) has posited as defining the postmodern condition—revisited the “methodological individualism” and “observant participation” that, back in the 1930s, had characterized the Chicago School in the US and Mass Observation in the UK. Since Daniel Bertaux’s Le récit de vie: perspective ethnosociologique (1996), sociologists have challenged Pierre Bourdieu’s indictment of “l’illusion biographique” to adopt the “méthode biographique,” using interviews and life stories whose narrators, situated within particular networks of social relations, are viewed as the mouthpieces of social groups. This is a road on which historians had preceded them, from Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie’s bestselling Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975), retracing the lives of persecuted Cathars in a remote village in the south of France, to Pierre Nora’s Essais d’ego-histoire (1987) where seven authors write their own life stories as historians.

Those were also the days when Philippe Lejeune published his seminal Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), before he founded the Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique (APA) in 1992, located in the small town of Ambérieu-en-Bugey, which has the particularity of collecting a rich archive of unpublished memoirs, diaries, autobiographies and autofictions (the word is said to have been coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977), academic research on autobiographies, and other life writing. At the turn of the century, Frédéric Regard published two important critical anthologies, La biographie littéraire en Angleterre (1999), and L’Autobiographie littéraire en Angleterre (2000), whose specialization in English literature is another indication of the strong anglophone tropism of life writing. Quite recently, Regard has coedited Les Nouvelles écritures biographiques (2013) with the Canadian Robert Dion, also the editor of Vies en récit...