1968 Lorette Nobécourt was born in Paris. She was educated in an Ursuline convent.
Before becoming a writer she studied Theatre, Business and Journalism,

In 1994 Nobécourt’s first novel La Démageaison was published by Sortilèges. The central character is a young woman who has suffered with psoriasis since early infancy. Her narration of the transformations and eruptions that the disease causes to her skin resonates with society’s rejection of others whose lives and bodies seem strange and without clear boundaries. The narrator says of herself ‘Folle, lèpreuse, suicidaire, ainsi fut mon rôle, oui, mais je restais donc étrangère’.1 The disease, while being an individual affliction also comes to symbolize the making visible of hidden hatreds and hypocrisies in groups related to the narrator, including her family and the wider society. Its onset is presented as ‘[l]a haine à fleur de peau, denoncée par mon corps’, and a cypher of the relationships of family members who ‘s’accrochaient les uns aux autres, se haïssaient, se dévoraient’.2 She also declares ‘Ma peau avait éclaté comme le monde que l’on m’a transmis’.3 In Nobécourt’s novels, this world is depicted as systematically oppressive to those who are different, as demonstrated most horrifically in Auschwitz and its subsequent forgetting, a theme explored in greater length in Horsita (1999).

Her texts lay bare the ways in which unaccepable bodies are removed from society, to hospitals or ultimately to death camps. Nevertheless the narrator of La Démageaison ultimately attempts liberation from the isolation of illness and difference through acceptance of and delight in her body’s leaky boundaries, and through sexual excess with her young lover Rodolphe of whom she says, ‘il pénétra ma peau et mon sexe ensemble’.4 This and other attempts in La Démageaison and La Conversation (1998) to ‘parler chair’ have led Nathalie Morello to raise and address the question of whether Nobécourt’s texts deploy feminist strategies similar to those advocated by Hélène Cixous and Annie Leclerc.5 Morello states ‘l’exploration du potential subversif de la sexualité et du corps féminins, le refus de l’ordre au profit du désordre, semblent encourager une lecture féministe’. Yet she also ultimately asserts that the texts encourage neither a feminist nor anti-feminist reading but present narrators constantly reflecting on ‘la nécesité de constamment repenser leur stratégie de résistance afin de déjouer les forces oppressives d’un système caracterisé par une puissance d’adaptation face aux évolutions sociales que est tout aussi surprenante que pernicieuse’.6

Violent incursions into the body and the extent to which the presence of unacceptable bodies and subjects both challenges and underpins the existing social order are themes that inform several of Nobécourt’s texts. Images of bodies being broken apart violently recur in seeming reality and in dreams. In La Conversation, for example, the narrator describes the rapes of herself and other women, dreams of being pierced and hung up like a piece of meat, and sometimes describes her alleged murder and flaying of her lover as a sublime moment. Flayed and burned bodies also haunt the pages of Horsita. At times these relate specifically to the victims of the Holocaust, whom Horsita in part represents. In this latter case atrocities are present in the family line as well as individual bodies, as the narrator’s father may have been implicated in the murders of Jews. The occurence of violent bodily interpenetration that may be both damaging and liberational (evoked in Irène and Rodolphe’s relationship) is represented in even more extreme form in this novel in the narrator Hortense’s ultimate assumption of Horsita into her own body.

The allegorical and more realistic portrayals of extreme violence in Nobécourt’s texts have been analysed within a number of frameworks. Didier Jacob names the author, (along with Christine Angot and others) as a new female De Sadean, using what dominant masculine society has deemed revolting to make revolt against it.7 Madeleine Borgomano argues that Horsita’s representations of the ‘échorché vive’ or flayed visionary reconfigure postmodern representations of violence in pursuit of an ethics that calls for reengagement with tragedy to replace social apathy.8 However, Bergamano also indicates that what might be claimed through such processes is not simply a new holism. Nobécourt’s invocations of the body would seem to support such a view. While narrators sometimes hail it in her texts as the final unity in a fractured, alienating world, ‘Nous somes des petits machins méprisés et rejetés à l’infini commes des particules superflues, main mons corps est une unité’ images of bodily fragmentation and abusive penetration are far more numerous and are mirrored by the use of fragmented narratives.9 Moreover, it is hard to position violent penetration as therapeutic even when it is sometimes presented as a type of freedom from the constraints of an oppressive society. This is because of a key tension raised by Nobécourt’s overall reflections on the breaching of bodily boundaries. How can violent penetration of the other, hailed as a freedom in some sexual narratives be seen as primarily liberational when it was also the central act of Auschwitz? Ultimately as the narrator ‘Irène’ suggests, having allegedly pressed flesh to the limit by killing her lover, it may be necessary to search for ‘la troisième voie entre la sensation et l’agonie’.10 The final passages of Horsita refer specifically to the search for new modes of expression in the face of the death camps claiming ‘ils ont assasiné la langue à Auschwitz and demanding ‘donnez-moi la langue nouvelle, cet avant-Babel que me tord’.11 In this respect, the text can be seen as one response to the famous question raised by Adorno of how literature can function after Auschwitz.12

A focus on the body also repeatedly informs Nobécourt’s considerations of the act of writing itself. A central theme is that through writing the word is made flesh and conversely flesh is made word. Christian metaphors inform such imagery, and Nobécourt plays with these, presenting Horsita in crucifixion pose, for example.13 Yet for several of Nobécourt’s characters, the development of a narrative voice is also represented as involving a violent intertwining of body and text. The suffering Irène, for example, describes her psoriasis as being written on her body, yet also claims that her own attempts to write, push back its boundaries, ‘Le meurtre commence. La chair devenait verbe. Et plus j’inscrivais sure mes pages d’ecolière l’horreur de miens, plus ma peau retrouvait son élasticitie première.[…] la langue me démangeait…je détournais un monde…et l’encre noire coulait…coulait comme le sang d’hier de mon tissu ouvert’.14 In L’Equarissage narrator Hélène’s possibility for self-locution is also tied up with the destruction of her flesh, ‘Je suis ce que je suis : c’est à dire pas grand chose, une particulière vision du monde qui m’est propre et qui s’achèvera lorsque mon corps décidera de mourir’.15

The most extreme and experimental exploration of the compounding of flesh and word occurs in the extended essay Substance (2001). Its narrator declares a multiple identity made flesh, ‘Je suis la substance présente, je suis la chair et le verbe mêlés, je suis l'homme vaincu au service du mystère, je suis le fou et la bête, la femme, le bègue et l'étranger’.16 The text adopts a highly-fractured poetic style, which has been likened to Mallarmé’s. According to Xavier Person’s critical analysis It allows Nobécourt to attempt to depict a myriad shifting phenomena, ‘les images des rêves, les sensations d'avant les mots, les mouvements de tous les hommes sur la terre. […] le sang qui coule dans les veines des hommes et du mouvement de l'amour la puissance de métamorphose, […] et [ce] qui dépasse ce que les mots peuvent dire’.17

Nobécourt’s latest novel Nous (2002) continues to explore themes of disturbing family secrets and violent sexual relationships. Told by multiple narrators, it focuses on Nathan and Yolande, who rent apartments in the same building. The former feels implicated in his brother’s death while the latter is involved in a damaging and overly co-dependent relationship with her mother. Both struggle to free themselves from what binds them in ways that threaten damage to their own bodies.

1 Nobécourt, Lorette, La Démangeaison (Paris: Sortilèges, 1994), p. 35
2 Ibid, p.20, p. 19.
3 Ibid, p. 101.
4 Nobécourt, Lorette, La Démangeaison, p. 103.
5 Nathalie Morello, ‘La Démangeaison et La Conversation de Lorette Nobécourt : Quand “le parler chair” devient révolte… féministe?’, Romance Studies, 20 (1) (June 2002); Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Meduse’ (L’Arc,1975),39-54; Annie Leclerc, Parole de femme ( Paris: Grasset, 1974).
6 This and preceding quotation Morello Op. Cit, p.75.
7 Didier Jacob, ‘Mesdames sans gêne’, Nouvel Observateur, Hors série (39) (1999).
8 Madeleine Borgomano, ‘Ouvrir Hortense ou l’écorchée vive: Horsita de Lorette Nobécourt’ in Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers (eds.), Nouvelles écrivains: nouvelles voix? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 233-251.
9 Lorette Nobécourt, La Conversation (Paris: Grasset, 1998), p. 191.
10 Lorette Nobécourt, La Conversation, p. 161.
11 Lorette Nobécourt, Horsita (Paris: Grasset, 1999), pp. 236-237.
12 Adorno’s famous assertion that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric occurs in a festschrift of 1949. A translation of the complete text has been published under the title ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ in Prisms (trans.Samuel and Sherry Weber) (MIT Press: Cambs. Mass, 1967).
13 See Borgomano Op. Cit.for further analysis of such imagery.
14 Lorette Nobécourt, La Démangeaison, pp. 68-69.
15 Taken from the opening section of Lorette Nobécourt, L’Equarissage (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2001).
16 Lorétte Nobécourt, Substance (Paris: Pauvert, 2001).
17 Xavier Person, ‘Substance’, La Matricule des Anges (037). Available online at <http://www.lmda.net/din/tit_lmda.php?Id=11716>

La Démangeaison (Paris: Sortilèges, 1994).

La Conversation (Paris: Grasset, 1998).

Horsita (Paris: Grasset, 1999).

L’Equarissage (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2001).

Substance (Paris: Pauvert, 2001).

Nous (Paris: Pauvert. 2002).

En nous la vie des morts (Paris: Grasset, 2006)

Borgomano, Madeleine, ‘Ouvrir Hortense ou l’écorchée vive: Horsita de Lorette Nobécourt’ in Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers (eds.), Nouvelles écrivains: nouvelles voix? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 233-251.

Czarny, Norbert, ‘Dans la langue de personne’, La Quinzaine Littéraire, (1-15 September, 1999).

Douin, Jean-Luc, ‘Lorette Nobécourt, la memoire à vif’, Le Monde des Livres, (27 August 1999).

Jacob, Didier, ‘Mesdames sans gêne’, Nouvel Observateur, Hors série (39) (1999).

Grenaudier-Klijn, France, 'Le don du soi: la place de l'autre dans les romans de Lorette Nobécourt', Dalhousie French Studies (special issue: 'Hybrid Voices, Hybrid Texts: Women's Writing at the Turn of the Millennium', ed. Gill Rye) (Fall 2004).

Jordan, Shirley Ann, Contemporary French Women's Writing: Women's Visions, Women's Voices, Women's Lives (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2004).

—'Figuring out the family: family as everyday practice in contemporary French women's writing', in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory, ed. Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp.39-58.

Morello, Nathalie ‘La Démangeaison et La Conversation de Lorette Nobécourt : Quand “le parler chair” devient révolte… féministe?’, Romance Studies, 20(1) (June 2002).

— 'Maudire, dire les maux ou chercher les mots pour le dire? L'ecriture du souvenir dans la fiction de Lorette Nobecourt', in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory, ed. Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp.59-79.

Robson, Kathryn,'L'Ecriture de peau: the body as witness in Lorette Nobecourt's La Demangeaison', Nottingham French Studies 45.3 (Autumn 2006).

Forthcoming

Morello, Nathalie, ‘La culpabilité dans la fiction de Lorette Nobécourt’, forthcoming in Dalhousie French Studies.

—‘Un coupable peut en cacher une autre : Lutte “à mort” avec la mère dans trois romans de Lorette Nobécourt – La Démangeaison, La Conversation et Horsita’, forthcoming in Nottingham French Studies.

A Propos de Nous http://www.e-litterature.net/rabat/messages/~alice_nobecourt_Lorette_Nob%C3%A9court_Nous.html Review of Nous by Alice Granger-Guitard (8 September, 2002).

Pauvert (Fayard): http://www.editions-fayard.fr Publisher's site.

Substance http://www.lmda.net/din/tit_lmda.php?Id=11716 Xavier Person's review of Substance for La Matricule des Anges (037).

Horsita http://ecrits-vains.com/critique/domeneghini4.htm Eva Domeneghini's critical analysis of Horsita.

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