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Contemporary Women's
Writing in French
| Christine Angot |
1959 Christine Angot was born in Châteauroux on February 7. Her early childhood was spent with her mother and grandmother as her father, a translator, left the family home before Christine was born.Nevertheless, the surname Angot is taken from her father’s family. Her mother’s family name is Schwartz. 1973 Angot’s mother moved to Reims for professional reasons and took Christine with her. Christine recalls reading avidly as a child. Her mother’s library provided her with nineteenth century classics. She cites Victor Hugo as an author that made a particular impact on her, because of his strong, rhythmic writing style. She also drew on the bookshops and libraries of Rheims, buying Gallimard’s new Folio editions as soon as they appeared in her favourite bookshop window and developing a particular interest in theatre classics. She claims not to have engaged with twentieth century literature until after her Baccalaureate. Angot attended a
private girl’s lycée in Reims. Although she was
an intelligent pupil, she did not feel completely at ease with her stolid,
middleclass companions. Her fatherlessness set her apart to some degree.
She has said of this period 'J'étais décalée, mais
en même temps, je n'étais pas d'une famille pauvre. Je suis
toujours entre deux quelque chose'.1 1984-5 She developed a particular interest in International Law and gained a bursary place at a prestigious and exclusive international school in Bruges. However, she found the culture of the school too inward-looking and unliterary, ‘[n]ous vivions en vase clos dans l'école. Tout le monde se destinait à remplir des fonctions internationales et personne ne lisait’.2 Concerned that her passion for literature and writing might atrophy in this atmosphere, in early 1985 she took a major life risk, giving up her place after only a year to pursue her ambition to become a published writer. Angot has identified 1983 as the year in which she began to trust that she could write.. A moment of revelation occurred after a disastrous weekend she and her Dutch husband Claude spent in Amsterdam. After leaving Amsterdam for a new hotel in [le]Touquet, Angot claims that she couldn’t engage with the awfulness of the experience without writing about it. In this tale of authorial origins, Angot began her account on a chocolate wrapper, and then begged the hotel staff for more paper. Her piece included the phrase that became the opening line of Vu du ciel(1990), ‘[L]es anges ne sont pas tout blancs’. According to Angot, Claude’s approval of her writing gave her externalised permission to seek to become a published author. Despite this early encouragement, she worked out a literary apprenticeship of four and a half years, during which she submitted novels but none was published. Some of the critical readings she received were bruising, but she benefited from the advice of Pasqual Quignard of Gallimard. In this period she lived in Nice, supporting herself through a series of short-term jobs. Her first published novel Vu du ciel was accepted by L’Arpenteur-Gallimard in 1989 for publication in 1990. However, she subsequently left Gallimard in 1994, when they refused to publish Interview. Angot has said that her desire to become a writer was also linked to her wish to find a voice for herself, to ‘chanter trois notes au milieu de [la] cacophonie [sociale].3 She has also associated it with a need to differentiate herself from her multilingual father, 'Je ne pouvais Je ne pouvais pas être plus forte que lui. Je ne pouvais pas parler quarante langues. Mais je pouvais parler la mienne, ma langue. L'écriture permet ça, se forger sa langue. La vraie matière brute de mes livres, c'est ma langue. Et ce n'est ma langue que si je suis dans l'intime'.4 Ironically given this stated desire to find a voice, much of the critical analysis of Angot’s novels has centred on the question of whether the voice and experiences of the literary construct ‘Christine Angot’ can be equated with those of the author. The construction of the texts themselves resists such a closure on many levels. Their intertextuality is complex. Any given texts tends to refer not only to the growing number of works in Angot’s own corpus, but also to many others, from novels, to legal letters and newspaper interviews. In many cases intertextuality is used to confound the notion that the ‘Christine Angot’ of the novels has the distinct voice of a unified subject. Memories and experiences first attributed to other literary and real subjects are re-attributed to this subject, creating ‘false memories’. For example, it has been claimed the childhood memory of the figurative weather-predictor that Angot describes in Interview (1995), actually originated in Proust’s work.. In several texts, other voices striate ‘Angot’s’. The most notable are those of ‘Léonore’ and ‘Claude’ - constructs that resemble and yet differ from her actual husband and daughter. Texts produced in real-life contexts are also inserted into her novels in a new fictional context. These include a letter from a Stock lawyer warning her against using the names of real people, reproduced in L’Inceste(1999) and extracts from Claude’s personal diary inserted into Sujet Angot(1998). Paradoxically, given such a high use of intertextuality, Angot has suggested that she mistrusts the strong postructuralist view that literature refers only to literature. She has also stated 'l'écriture et l'être humain, c'est la même chose. Si c'est une écriture juste, vraie, il y a concordance entre l'être humain et la littérature'.5 This leaves open the possibility that, although multiple and penetrated by other voices and experiences the literary construct ‘Christine Angot’ may be connected to the real-life Christine Angot in some measure that is nevertheless hard to define. Speculation on the nature of this connection increased with the publication of the group of texts Léonore, toujours (1994), Interview (1995), Les Autres (1997), Sujet Angot (1998) and L’Inceste (1999), which, Alex Hughes notes, ‘constitute a cohesive textual corpus [that plays] with and on the tension between fictional and referential discourse, and contribute[s] to a tale of sexual abuse’ whose subject might be Angot herself.6 At the end of L’Inceste Angot has claimed that when she was fourteen she and her father Pierre Angot were involved in an incestuous relationship that has inflected her identity ever since. Similar claims are made at the start of Interview. The disclosures in L'Interview are claimed as more directly autobiographical, however. The author states ‘[v]oilà ce que je vous propose. Pour les curieux, dix pages suivants, très autobiographiques’.7 Yet, Angot has steadfastly challenged the reading of her work as therapeutic autobiography. In Sujet Angot she reproved journalist Carole Vantoys for collapsing the author/narrator distinction and for representing her work as a simple confessional.8 Certainly neither Angot’s oeuvre nor her handling of 'Sujet Angot’s’ experiences of incest can be reduced to such a level. Indeed sophisticated literary skills are needed to manage the tensions inherent in Angot’s deceptively direct writing. For example, as both Hughes and Sylvain Marcellli note, she repeatedly explores the character of ‘incestuous daughter’, while at the same time most pointedly revealing the role’s fragmented, fabricated nature as a literary construct.9 Some of the most perceptive critical analysis of this tension has been offered by Hughes and by Alex Le Dauphin.10 Both have suggested that in her novels Angot has traced the complex outlines of a subject- both literary and real- that has already been fragmented by traumatic life experiences, yet whose fragments are partly re-assembled at the level of the text. Angot’s own commentary on her writing can be as cut through with oppositions as the novels themselves. For example, she has famously stated,'je n’ai jamais écrit sur l’inceste. Le sujet ne m’intéresse pas'. Yet, in interview with Le Dauphin, she began to reveal some of the passion she has invested in writing as a complex form of (re)construction of subjectivity, ‘Je ne suis pas Christine. Le texte, c’est moi…Ma place est théoriquement là où je ne devrais pas être. Mais là où je suis, cette place, je n’y suis bien que lorsqu’elle est écrite’.11 Angot has written theatrical texts as well as novels. Several of these have been produced in prestigious French theatre festivals, and in the Théâtre Ouvert, Paris. 1 Angot, quoted in Guichard, Thierry, 'Christine Angot: La bâtarde libre', Le Matricule des Anges, 21 (November-December 1997). Available online at <http://www.lmda.net/mat/MAT02125.html>.
Not to be (Paris: L'Arpenteur-Gallimard, 1992). Léonore, toujours (Paris: L’Arpenteur-Gallimard 1994; Fayard, 1997). Interview (Paris: Fayard, 1995). Les Autres (Paris: Fayard, 1997) L'Usage de la vie (Paris: Fayard, 1997). Sujet Angot (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 'Ecrire n'est pas une vie', Sites: The Journal of 20th-Century/Contemporary French Studies 3.2 (Fall 1999), 267-72. L’Inceste (Paris: Stock, 1999). ‘La Page noire’, Libération (6 November, 1999). ‘Sujet: l’amour’, L’Infini, 68 (1999). Quitter la ville (Paris: Stock, 2000). Normalement followed by La Peur du lendemain (Paris: Stock, 2001). Pourquoi le Brésil? (Paris: Stock, 2002). Peau d'Ane (Paris: Stock, 2003). Les Désaxés (Paris: Stock, 2004). Une partie du coeur (Paris: Stock, 2004). Rendez-vous (Paris: Flammarion, 2006) Guichard, Thierry, '"En littérature la morale n'existe pas"', Le Matricule des Anges, 21, (November-December 1997). Available online at <http://www.lmda.net/mat/MAT02125.html>. Le Dauphin, Axelle, 'Christine Angot', Têtu (October 1999). Available online at < http://tetu.com/archives/1999-10/1/>. Cornelius, Nathalie G., 'Christine Angot: Quitter la ville', French Review, 75(2) (December 2001), 380-1. Faeber, Johan, 'Le bruissement d'elles ou le questionnement identitaire dans l'oevre de Christine Angot' in Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers (eds.), Nouvelles écrivaines: nouvelles voix? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). Guichard, Thierry, 'Christine Angot: La bâtarde libre', Le Matricule des Anges, 21 (November-December 1997). Available online at< http://www.lmda.net/mat/MAT02125.htm>.. Hughes, Alex, ‘“Moi qui ai connu l’inceste, je m’appelle Christine” [I have had an incestuous relationship and my name is Christine]: Writing subjectivity in Christine Angot’s incest narratives’,Journal of Romance StudiesI, 2(1) (spring 2002), 65-77. Le Matricule des Anges, special issue on Angot, 21(November-December 1997). Lindon, M., 'Trois, deux, un...Angot', Libération (26 August 1999). Marcelli, Sylvain ‘Un mélange incestueux’, L’Interdit (February 2001). Reader, Keith, 'Phallic narrative transvestism: Christiane Rochefort and Christine Angot', in The Abject Object: Avatars of the Phallus in Contemporary French Theory, Literature and Film (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp.135-163. Rye,Gill 'Registering trauma: the body in childbirth in contemporary French women's writing', Nottingham French Studies 45.3 (Autumn 2006) Rye, Gill and Michael Worton (eds.), Women's Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002). — '"Il faut que le lecteur soit dans le doute": Christine
Angot's Literature of Uncertainty', Dalhousie French Studies
('Hybrid voices, hybrid — (ed.) L'Esprit Createur ('A new generation: sex, gender and creativity in contemporary women's writing in French', special issue) 45.1 (Spring 2005). — 'In uncertain terms: mothering without guilt in Marie Darrieussecq's Le Mal de mer and Christine Angot's Leonore, toujours', L'Esprit Createur ('A new generation: sex, gender and creativity in contemporary women's writing in French', special issue, ed. Gill Rye) 45.1 (Spring 2005). Sadoux, Marion 'Christine Angot's autofictions: literature and/or reality' in Gill Rye and Michael Worton (eds.), Women's Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 171-181. Savigneau, Josyane, 'La Force Angot', Le Monde (3 September, 1999).
Christine Angot<http://eva.domeneghini.free.fr/>The current most extensive site dedicated to Angot's work. It contains references and links to newspaper and journal articles, literary reviews and website. Christine Angot [Interview] < http://tetu.com/archives/1999-10/1/>. Interview by Axelle Le Dauphin, Têtu (October 1999). 'Christine Angot: La bâtarde libre',<http://www.lmda.net/mat/MAT02125.html> Article by Thierry Guichard in Matricule des Anges, 21(November-December 1997). 'En littérature la morale n'existe pas'<http://www.lmda.net/mat/MAT02127.html>Article/Interview by Thierry Guichard, Le Matricule des Anges, 21, (November-December 1997). ‘Un mélange incestueux’< http://www.interdits.net/2001fev/angot.htm>Article by Sylvain Marcelli, L’Interdit (February 2001). |
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