With Philipwhere she spoke of the death of her son, then In these arms (Femina Prize 2000), where she dissected her love life, Camille Laurens had established herself as a big name in autofiction. Since then, the genre has taken a turn for the worse and, although the autobiographical story is flourishing, Camille Laurens now prefers to go against the tide. His new book, Your promiseis more reminiscent of the brilliant narrative constructions of Philip Roth than the laborious laments of the wounded Narcissus that pile up in bookstores. She portrays an alter ego, Claire Lancel, a successful novelist accused of having tried to kill her companion, Gilles, who will turn out to be a terrible joker – in a series of flashbacks, she reconstitutes her personality to say the least toxic. Let’s disappoint the curious right away: Camille Laurens hasn’t smashed anyone’s skull in recent years. We are in fiction.
At the hotel bar where she arranged to meet us to discuss, the novelist distances herself from self-writing: “An autofiction, as it was defined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, is a text whose The material is entirely autobiographical and the manner entirely fictional. I have been classified as autofiction because elements of my life have been identified in my books, but what fascinates me are the novelistic forms. of the elaborate architectures, and I don’t understand why people insist on giving me this reductive label…” Could this reflex from critics hide a form of misogyny? “This is often confirmed. The term autofiction is pejorative, devalued because it is attributed to women. Men stand out from it, placing themselves above that. Philippe Sollers wrote autofiction; Emmanuel Carrère and Grégoire Bouillier write about it, but they pretend that they don’t… They are like Monsieur Jourdain of Bourgeois gentleman with his prose: they are creating autofiction without knowing it!”
On this, she raises a hare: “Slightly ambitious formal research is less interesting today than slices of life in which we can recognize ourselves. There is so much fake news, organized lies and dissimulation around us that we expect books to be sincere It’s naive to think like that… Since at least. The Confessions of Rousseau we know that a story presented as autobiographical can hide a lot of manipulation from the reader. I don’t believe in authenticity in literature at all – Rousseau boasted of not lying while he often disguised reality. What interested me in autofiction was never the factual truth but the intimate truth, the emotional truth. What happened to someone matters less to me than how they felt. I often take up this image from Proust according to which we must decipher our inner book.
We remember that, in 2018, The Lambeau by Philippe Lançon had been rejected by the Goncourt Prize because it was not a work of imagination – a criterion specified in the will of Edmond de Goncourt. Camille Laurens joined the jury in 2020 and, in 2023, we were surprised to see in the final Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, a pure story without the slightest imagination. Are the lines moving? “They change with each discussion, between the supporters of tradition and those who say that we have changed paradigms since the creation of the prize in 1903. There are several clauses that we no longer respect in the will. For example, jurors were once paid! How far does respect for final wishes go? Personally I think we must go beyond this obsolete notion of fixed literary genres and stop privileging the imagination. I myself have a lot even if I don’t get much credit for it. But why should it be a greater talent than that of telling what we have experienced? It is surprising that in the land of Montaigne? remains the master quality.” It is true that the author of Trials did not particularly stand out in the science fiction genre…
The mother of “other fiction”
Let’s return to a certain realism with Your promise and the twisted character of Gilles. Should we see a narcissistic pervert? “My references were Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons and movies like Haunting of Cukor or Suspicions by Hitchcock – it seems to me that the latter was not bad in the field, if not narcissistic, at least perverse. There are currently a lot of studies on narcissistic perverts. I am thinking first of the sociologist Marc Joly, who first published a book on narcissistic perversion in couples, where he discusses the work of psychiatrist Paul-Claude Racamier, before broadening the subject. According to him, narcissistic perversion is the new form that male domination takes. I don’t completely agree, because I think that there are also narcissistic female perverts. But this denial of otherness specific to narcissistic perverts seems to me symptomatic of our times. The more we focus on ourselves, the less consideration there is for others. It’s a contemporary development that everyone can observe, including in politics.”
In a very good passage of Your promiseGilles pushes his partner to take advantage of the podcast she hosts to take down a fashionable woman – but this departure from sorority backfires violently against Claire Lancel. How can we not think of the hilarious outburst that Camille Laurens had published against The Postcard by Anne Berest in The World of Books in 2021? Camille Laurens assures us that she was inspired by this experience without wanting to return to it. But she makes this remark for us to ponder: “In three years of collaboration at World of booksI only wrote three negative reviews, always reasoned. It is interesting to reread the comments from subscribers. When Eric Chevillard took down Modiano a week before his Nobel, no one flinched. For my part, I was treated to very violent attacks, animal comparisons – I was a ‘wasp’ trying to sting. Virginia Woolf, who wrote sometimes virulent literary criticism, had already made this observation, which remains true: a woman has no right to criticize too strongly publicly.
Page 239 of Your promiseGilles speaks of the “stuffed” who sit at the French Academy. Does Camille Laurens share the opinion of the narcissistic pervert or is it possible that she will one day run for a seat under the Dome? “It’s an expression of my character! For my part, I could be tempted by one thing: participating in the dictionary. Working on this site would please me.” In the meantime, she has created a new word, “autrefiction”, which no one has yet taken from her and which she defines as follows: “Autofiction is criticized for being navel-gazing. what interests me is not me, but the relationship with others Everything is imaginary, in a certain way: in our relationship with the other we never know who they are, we always project something, we are in. fiction… This is particularly the problem of the illusion of love, and this Proustian idea that we must know how to decipher the signs to arrive at the truth – little by little, we go beyond appearances and we see what we had not perceived at the beginning. Doubrovsky invented autofiction; in 2025, I’m launching Autrefiction, and without burying my head in the sand!
Your promise, by Camille Laurens. Gallimard, 358 p., €22.50.
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