“Cherchez la fiction”: Stories of Self-Realization in Anne Garréta’s Pas un jour and Leïla Slimani’s Sexe et mensonges

Faced with the hermetic interiority of post-structuralist narratives, twenty-first-century French literature tends to turn outwards and explore sociohistorical realities as a fertile source of fiction. In this article, I compare two contemporary writers rarely paired together—Anne Garréta and Leïla Slimani—to consider the enduring importance of discursive paradigms in realizing a sense of self. Although Garréta’s mechanised autobiographical aesthetic in Pas un Jour seems to jar with Slimani’s ethnographic journalism in Sexe et mensonges, I argue that both use heuristic narratives to conduct a survey of female desire whose reality is only legible in literature. Intersecting with narrative theories formulated by Barthes, Jameson and Cixous, this article argues that Slimani and Garréta perform their lived sexual experience through a carefully manufactured textual machine that grants them freedom. Only through the straitjacket of a fictional system can the reader glean the reality of female subjectivities so long obscured by myth.

Conclusion

The conclusion points forwards from the debates of the 1960s and early 70s, suggesting that if the group is to continue to engage with the intellectual concerns of its milieu, then these will be concerns of the politics of identity. In one, sense, in co-opting Anne Garréta the group now has a member who has used constrained writing to extraordinary effect to demonstrate the inescapability of declarative binary gendering for the speaking subject in French. At the same time, as Garréta herself has pointed out, the Oulipo remains very much an old boys’ club. The chapter also looks at the critique of the Oulipo delivered by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young at the CalArts Oulipo conference of 2005.

Être Oulipienne : contraintes de style, contraintes de genre ?

Résumé Sans poser l’hypothèse d’un caractère genré de l’écriture – si l’écriture oulipienne apparaît factuellement comme un métier d’homme, il n’en découle pas nécessairement qu’elle ressortisse pour autant à un genre déterminé, et stylistiquement identifiable comme tel – on se propose ici d’interroger les raisons de l’apparente difficulté à être une auteure « à contraintes », en considérant en particulier les stratégies à l’oeuvre dans quelques textes de Michelle Grangaud, Anne Garréta et Michèle Audin.

Autofiction Infiltrated: Anne Garréta's Pas un jour

Pas un jour, the 2002 novel by the French writer Anne Garréta, is a polemic against autoiction, the popular contemporary genre that experiments with the boundaries between autobiography and iction. Garréta lures the reader with the promise of access to some part of her real self and her lived experience by mimicking the conventions and tone of autoiction, only to reveal that the auto in autoiction is an empty concept and to insist that there is no real subject to be found in the iction. Pas un jour's iniltration of autoiction puts this subject into crisis and challenges readers to consider that who we think we are is as ictive as the novels that we read.

Georges Perec and Anne Garréta: Oulipo, Constraint and Crime Fiction

This article examines two novels written by members of the Oulipo group, exploring the ways in which Georges Perec's La Disparition (1969) and Anne F. Garréta's La Décomposition (1999) both use Oulipian constraints within a narrative infrastructure drawn from subgenres of crime fiction: La Disparition is a whodunnit, and La Décomposition a first-person noir narrative. I argue that Perec and Garréta use the alliance of constraint and crime fiction in order to articulate a probing account of their protagonists’ impossible quests for metaphysical certainty in the face of death and loss. The genre-constraint alliance is also the means by which Perec and Garréta express their dissatisfaction with aspects of contemporary literary culture and reception. The article examines why the tropes of crime fiction are of particular use to these Oulipian authors in their investigation of the purposes and potential of literature.

Narratology and translation

In their explorations of narrative, many narratologists distinguish between the narrated (the situations and events presented), the narrating (the way these situations and events are presented), and the concrete manifestation of narrated and narrating in a particular medium (linguistic, say, pictorial, balletic) or a particular form thereof (English or French, film or painting, classical or modern). By and large, narratologists focus on the narrated and the narrating rather than on the medium of manifestation. Still, they are not unaware of, nor insensitive to, the effects that specific means of expression can have on narratives and, more particularly, on their transpositions (from prose to canvas, from stage to screen) or on their translations (from English to French, for instance, and vice versa). Taking as examples a variety of fictional texts by Stendhal, George Eliot, Anne Garréta, Ernest Hemingway, and others, the article discusses some of the effects that translation’s inevitable nonequivalences, variances, or paraphrases have on narrating and narrated features. More specifically, it uses translation to revisit these features, to reconsider their basicness, centrality or indispensability, and to reassess the narratological models they bring about.