Abstract
These two books – both somewhat left-field, academically speaking – make interesting contributions to contemporary French literary studies. Risques et regrets makes much of the ‘dangers’ of epistolary writing, but it is hard to see much danger here, though there are interesting essays on letters sent by people one would not normally think of as great letter-writers. For example, during her long incarceration in mental hospitals – from 1913 to her death 30 years later – the sculptor Camille Claudel wrote frequently to her family (her younger brother was the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel). She begged them to release her from custody, but to no avail. It is difficult to believe nowadays that she was really mad enough to justify her being sectioned for so long, and two films, Camille Claudel (1988) and Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), highlight the apparent injustice. But it is clear from Anna Norris’s chapter on Camille that it was her mother who was adamant that her daughter should never be released. Mme Claudel came from a family that numbered several Catholic priests; she had ‘married well’ (as the expression has it) and was not going to let her respectable standing in society be threatened by the presence of a daughter whom she saw as vicious and depraved. Camille was an artist of genius, but that cut no ice with her bourgeois mother. Camille had been Rodin’s pupil, model and lover, and had had an abortion. No wonder Mme Claudel wanted her locked up as far away from Paris as possible.
Karin Schwerdtner contributes a chapter on L’autre fille by Annie Ernaux, published in 2011. Ernaux, best known for novels based on her own life and that of her parents who were grocers in the Normandy town of Yvetot, wrote in L’autre fille a ‘letter’ to a dead sister, whose existence, for a time, she knew nothing of: the family had never spoken of a daughter who died of diphtheria at the age of six, some two years before Annie was born. (Until immunization of children became routine in the 1940s diphtheria was a frequent killer.) It is not uncommon for later-born children to speculate about a sibling who preceded them but did not survive long enough for them to get to know him or her. Ernaux has clearly thought a lot about her dead sister – the ‘other daughter’ – and this work of ‘faction’ is testament to that. But whether writing her letter amounts to the ‘beau danger de l’écrire’ as Schwerdtner maintains (p. 246) is perhaps, as they say, pushing it.
Andrew Asibong writes on the film Rois et reine by Arnaud Desplechin (2004) which deals with a lettre brûlante that, literally, burns the heroine on the chest when she conceals it under her blouse. Asibong offers a masterly analysis of the role of family correspondence in the works of a film auteur whose movies win prizes in France but have made little impact abroad. Impressive as the case made by Asibong is, it is hard not to see why. Other French writers discussed in this volume include Amélie Nothomb and Emmanuel Carrère, who are not exactly household names outre-Manche either.
A writer much better known than these – and far more widely read outside France – is Raymond Queneau. Iris Murdoch modelled her first novel Under the Net on Pierrot mon ami (1942), but it was Zazie dans le métro (1959) that brought him to the attention of readers in the English-speaking world after it was translated by Barbara Wright in 1960. That was no mean feat because, in the language that the precocious little girl speaks (characterized by colloquial French spelt phonetically), Queneau claimed to have invented a kind of ‘neo-French’. Zazie is such a beguiling heroine that it is no wonder the book was quickly made into a film (by Louis Malle in 1960) and later (in 2008) into a bande dessinée by Clément Oubrerie. These works – together with audiobook and illustrated-book adaptations of Céline’s masterpiece Voyage au bout de la nuit – are discussed by Armelle Blin-Rolland in Adapted Voices. The subject is more technical than is usual in scholarly monographs, and some readers may find it heavy going, but the issue is topical and readers familiar with that characteristically French genre, the literary bande dessinée, will find much to interest them here. Perhaps Blin-Rolland will next turn her attention to Gemma Bovery, a fine example of English bande dessinée that pays homage to a novel even greater than either Céline’s or Queneau’s: Flaubert’s towering masterpiece Madame Bovary.