Christine Angot

Biography

Christine Angot was born Christine Schwartz in Châteauroux on February 7 1959, and brought up by her single parent mother. They subsequently moved to Reims. Later Christine took her father’s surname Angot. She went to university in Rheims, specialising in English and Law, but gave up after a year, in order to pursue her writing career. She lived in Nice with her then husband Claude, before moving to Paris after their split. Her first novel Vu du ciel was published by L’Arpenteur-Gallimard in 1990. From Léonore, toujours (1994) on, Angot’s texts have been mostly associated with the genre autofiction, despite the author’s rejection of the term to describe her work. Nonetheless, 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’ in her texts 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. Yet, as in autofiction, it is always possible that, although multiple and penetrated by other voices and experiences, the literary construct ‘Christine Angot’ is connected to the real-life Christine Angot in some measure that is nevertheless hard to define. References to an incestuous relationship with her father Pierre Angot appear throughout Angot’s oeuvre. Yet, Angot has steadfastly challenged the reading of her work as therapeutic autobiography. Indeed, her text Interview (1995) attacks journalists who collapse the author/narrator distinction and reduce her texts to simple confessionals. Performance is also an important element in Angot’s work: some of her texts are categorized as ‘theatre’; others have been performed, and Angot frequently gives public readings of her work. Her media interviews are also often performances, to the extent that the truth-value of what she says is never certain. Critical responses to Angot’s work are starkly polarized: some critics reject it outright, often in quite violent terms, as narcissistic, boring and lacking in literary quality, while others are enthusiastic about the complexity of her writing, and its engagement with the media, the literary establishment, wound culture, power relations, reading, the boundaries between literature and reality, and with literature itself.