Le "Pacte" de Philippe Lejeune ou l'autobiographie en théorie: Édition critique et commentaire by Carole Allamand (review)

Carole Allamand's book on Philippe Leujene's groundbreaking work was published in 2018, the same year that the French autobiography scholar celebrated his eightieth birthday. Allamand's essay is at once an apology, or rather a defense, and a theoretical contextualization of Lejeune's scholarship within his wider opus and within the debates in literary theory of his time. In that respect, her enterprise not only coincided with the celebration of the author's eightieth birthday, but also the thirty-fifth birthday of the concept of the autobiographical pact by measuring its critical legacy, the debates it provoked, and the further research it inspired.

However, the importance of this project extends far beyond a simple act of commemoration: the book serves as a call to reread The Autobiographical Pact and to correct the illegitimate metonymical replacement of Lejeune's rich and colorful opus by his early theoretical research. Allamand argues that the notion of the autobiographical pact is rightly associated with the name of Lejeune, and its inversion, associating Lejeune's work with the theorem of the autobiographical pact, significantly reduces Lejeune's contribution to the theory of autobiography. Allamand proposes discussing the temporal evolution of the French theorist's ideas from his first publication, L'autobiographie en France (1971), to more recent reformulations to elucidate common reductions and misunderstandings of his work. Lejeune's research method, which involved continually revising his theoretical positions on certain important subjects, might falsely suggest a degree of amateurism—as if only statements formulated immediately in their definitive form deserved to be called true, with corrections and revisions seen as signs of weakness. Allamand points out that many readers of Lejeune forget, sometimes deliberately, that the author of the autobiographical pact revised, refined, and corrected his original position through a series of papers in which he responded positively to certain objections, demonstrating the evolution of his scholarship.

Despite its subtitle, Allamand's book is not a critical edition as usually understood as a philological genre: its aim is not to establish the definitive textual form of The Autobiographical Pact with scholarly commentaries and annotations, with the presentation of its philological genesis, and with the comparison of its different textual versions. Indeed, the republication of "Le pacte autobiographique" did not require a complicated philological apparatus, as only minor differences exist between the 1973 version of Lejeune's programmatic paper published in the journal Poétique and the 1975 version published as a theoretical introduction to the eponymous book. However, if a philological apparatus has been overstated to present the slight textual differences between the two versions, commentaries are more than welcome to understand the importance of the pact within the changing theoretical frame in Lejeune's oeuvre and to serve as a reminder that the "autobiographical pact" refers to both publications and the theoretical concept positioning autobiography as a contractual literary genre. Allamand proposes a reading that follows Lejeune's theoretical positions in their temporal development, and in the logical order of the theoretical problems they raise.

How does the notion of autobiographical pact evolve during Lejeune's career? The concept of pact occurs for the very first time in L'autobiographie en France (1971), where it functions as a textual identifier to circumscribe a coherent corpus within the personal literature that contains the oath to tell the truth about one's own life (272). The first book also serves as an anthology of such authorial commitments, indicating that French literary history contains a strong tradition of retrospective narratives, and that therefore, the practice of first-person narrators bearing the name of the authors deserved to be studied as a distinct literary genre. However, Lejeune did not want to limit his ambition to a mere thematic (and aesthetic) definition of the genre. The definition appearing at the beginning of The Autobiographical Pact remains a source of seemingly ineradicable misunderstandings in...