Abstract
French Studies
Most dictionaries, even those with entries by many hands, have a reasonably precise focus, usually the result of careful editorial guidance. With its 457 entries by 192 contributors this volume, despite its title, is an exception. According to the blurb on the cover its principal aim is to go beyond straightforward autobiography to open up a field of different forms, practised since the Middle Ages, which primarily have personal or first-person writing (‘écritures de soi’) as a common feature, to introduce its readers to unknown or neglected writers and to provide relevant social, cultural and historical contexts for such writing. Prompted by the pioneering work of Philippe Lejeune, straightforward autobiography – the account by a real person of his or her personal history – quickly became fashionable in France as a subject for critical study from the 1970s. Such a basic definition would not last, however, and was rapidly modified by such variants as, for example, Serge Doubrovsky’s ‘autofiction’ or what Annie Ernaux has recently termed ‘autosociobiographie’. But if such variants are precisely defined with the personal element remaining essential, this volume invites us to see auto-biography as much more complex: indeed, even as a collective experience. For example, the entries on guerre and guerres coloniales or camps present us with accounts of writers whose works illustrate a shared involvement. A similar approach is used for, among many others, Catholicisme, Communisme, féminisme or Islam, as it is for France, arbitrarily subdivided into nine historical periods, and for various French colonies in West Africa, or for countries like Québec, Switzerland or Russia especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, the kinds of writing on which such collective participation is based – letters, diaries, memoirs, confessions, interviews and even fiction – take us far beyond the strict definition of autobiography. To be fair, this is recognized by the ‘écritures de soi’ of the volume’s title and fully illustrates the editors’ ambition to create what Françoise Simonet-Tenant terms ‘une hypergenre’ opening the way for further investigation. But this tends to leave us with good deal of uncertainty and confusion. For conceptual boundaries may be modified as needed, but is there not a point in drawing them somewhere? Furthermore, as Michel Foucault once remarked, any attempt to record or reveal what is real or true inevitably results in transformation, whether conscious or not. Hindsight deforms. Memory can be faulty. To what extent do authors shape their texts to meet a publisher’s demands or the public’s expectations? To what degree do they play with their readers? How significant are écritures ordinaires – writing which can include lists, notes, manuals or recipes, for example, with no literary merit but which none the less may provide important factual information? These are some of the questions which regularly surface, and which this volume goes some way to address, in discussions of both major ‘autobiographers’ (Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Sand or Leiris, for example) as well in those of minor or unknown writers, though the latter are often treated to no more than potted biographical sketches with a brief account of the kind of autobiographical writing they favour. Not surprisingly the overall impression to be gleaned from this volume is that there is no simple definition of autobiography, and that Albert Camus’s conviction that all writing inevitably has its roots in the author’s own life would be challenged only with difficulty. But if this question remains central there are many entries which also invite us to consider such related subjects as publishing, prizes, copyright and intellectual property rights, or the use of illustration and documents. Others such as those which examine the use of personal pronouns or tenses are highly technical and clearly belong to the worlds of poetics, linguistics or even sociology. Others again such as those on album, entrée or cahier but also blog, Facebook and ordinateur personnel ensure that we are fully up to date with contemporary and evolving methods of recording personal data.