This ‘Self’ Which Is Not One: Women’s Life Writing in French (review)

This collection comprises a thirteen-page Introduction and nine chapters. Its aim is to explore the construction of the female autobiographical subject in the late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century ‘postfeminist’ and postcolonial context, by means of analysis of a sample of authors representative of world literature in French: from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Belgium, and metropolitan France. Hybridity is the key term of analysis, reflected in the choice of writers covered in the volume: Nina Bouraoui, Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, Marguerite Duras, Maryse Condé, Ken Bugul, Amélie Nothomb, Suzanne Lilar, and Christine Angot. The editors’ Introduction situates the collection in the context of female autobiography as a relatively new field of enquiry, for which it provides an overview, culminating in the postcolonial, transnational, and transcultural present. The individual chapters explore, from a variety of perspectives, the textual strategies that create the hybrid, plural, often fragmented nature of the autobiographical selves in the works they analyse. Thus Ann-Sofie Persson’s discussion of Bouraoui’s work is three-pronged, considering the transcultural aspects, gender, and the author’s multiple narrative ‘I’s; and Amy L. Hubbell’s chapter posits Cardinal, Sebbar, and Cixous as cultural migrants, with their autobiographical selves divided and doubled, and in-between. For Névine El-Nossery, Djebar’s decentred self is in productive tension with a collage of multiple narrative voices, so that her work represents an ‘écriture des “multiplicités simultanées”’ (p. 58) rather than a traditional form of autobiography. Erica L. Johnson analyses shame as a critical term in Duras’s L’Amant in relation to colonial and racial ideologies, and looks especially at the role of the adult narrator. Colonialism and racism are also the subject of criticism in Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, which Lisa A. Connell approaches from a pedagogical perspective. She focuses on learning, reading, and writing in the text as offering a critical space, with literature giving voice to the subaltern writer. Christopher Hogarth’s chapter on Bugul, who migrated from Senegal to Belgium, identifies a longing for and the creation of a ‘home culture’ that never existed. The chapters on Belgian writers — Nothomb (Mark D. Lee) and Lilar (Carmen Cristea) — relate to a different kind of doubling. Lee analyses the misogynistic media constructions of Nothomb, who has even been accused of not being the author of her books, while Lilar’s techniques of doubling are considered not only to reflect the duality of her situation (Belgian culture and language itself being double, and Lilar was a lawyer as well as a writer) but also to be a technique of ‘automythification’ (p. 146), of unmasking herself in her writing. The collection ends with Natalie Edwards’s analysis of Angot’s Sujet Angot as autobiography in the second-person, focusing on the relation between reading and autobiography and the way in which Angot’s work tempts readers with the traps of reading a life, while problematizing their constructions of the author.