Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Incest
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Schwartz, Pierrette Marie-Clotilde
BIRTHDATE: 2/7/1959
WEBSITE: http://www.christineangot.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: French
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 93058474
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n93058474
HEADING: Angot, Christine
000 00835cz a2200229n 450
001 1249724
005 20161209074003.0
008 930621n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 93058474
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca03395737
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC |d OCoLC |d DLC |d UPB |d IEN
046 __ |f 1959-02-07 |2 edtf
053 _0 |a PQ2661.N4624
100 1_ |a Angot, Christine
370 __ |a Châteauroux (France) |c France |2 naf
374 __ |a Authors |a Dramatists |a Novelists |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a fre
670 __ |a Her Not to be, c1991: |b t.p. (Christine Angot)
670 __ |a Normalement, c2001: |b t.p. (Christine Angot) back cover (b. 1959)
670 __ |a Wikipedia, via WWW, October 23, 2012 |b (Christine Angot born 7 February 1959 is a French writer, novelist and playwright. She was born in Châteauroux)
953 __ |a sa02 |b lf44
PERSONAL
Born February 7, 1959 (some sources say 1958), in Châteauroux, France.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of Reims.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Le Sexe, edited by Emmanuel Pierrat, Decouverte (Paris, France), 2003. Coauthor of film Let the Sunshine In, 2017.
SIDELIGHTS
Christine Angot is a French writer and novelist. She is considered “one of the most controversial authors writing today in France,” commented a writer on the French Culture Website. Her novels frequently deal with controversial subjects, such as incest, homosexuality, and sexual violence, the writer continued. “Her books are an incantation, biblical in their onrush of verbs, nouns, names, and deliberate repetitions (yes, I, too, repeat myself) in the service of rhythm and camouflage, compelling you to read on, for sound, for cadence, for poetry,” commented reviewer Tsipi Keller in Asymptote Journal.
Perhaps more notably, Angot’s novels are often a blend of both autobiography and fiction, with the divisions between what is factual and what is made up often difficult to determine. “Her novels of “autofiction”—a genre in which one’s own life is used as a basis for a tale in which fact and fiction are mixed without distinction—have seen her recount real or imagined incest with her father and torrid sex sessions with her rapper ex-boyfriend in a lift, mixed with musings about whether to have coffee,” commented Henry Samuel, writing in the Telegraph (London). Samuel called Angot “France’s queen of shock fiction,” and noted that she has “appalled, titillated and delighted readers in equal measure for more than a decade.”
Incest, first published in France as L’Incest, is “Angot’s most taboo work, a cyclone of language and raw emotion that explores, among other things, an incestuous relationship with her father. There’s the sense that things—traditional narrative structure, linear time, and so-called “healthy” boundaries, to name a few—have been breached. It probes at ideas and emotions that feel untouchable,” commented Millions reviewer Elizabeth Baird. In the book, Angot tells the story of a character named Christine who is “for all purposes inseparable from the author,” noted a Publishers Weekly writer. The early part of the story describes the three months Christine spent in an emotionally intense relationship with another women. Their breakup, when it comes, is devastating, and it sends Christine plunging into mental illness. She seeks to regain her equilibrium by exploring her life and her relationships, which includes an incestuous relationship when she was a teenager. From this deep and intensely personal self-examination, the “mind that emerges is vivid, painfully human, and indeed fascinating,” commented the Publishers Weekly reviewer.
Angot’s novel is “rich, intimate, and pulls you in, as you recognize her private inner workings as your own, even if, unlike her, you’d never fully admit them to yourself or to another person,” observed Keller. The book is “insanely alive, jolting the reader awake,” commented David Pratt on the website Lambda Literary.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Goumarre, Laurent and Jacques Henric, Christine Angot, preface by Laurent Goumarre, IMEC Editeur:Artpress (Paris, France), 2013.
PERIODICALS
Economist, December 4, 1999, “French Novels: Past Reflections,” review of L’inceste, p. 14.
Publishers Weekly, September 11, 2017, review of Incest, p. 38.
Telegraph (London, England), March 26, 2013, Henry Samuel, “France’s Queen of Shock Fiction Christine Angot Sued for 200,000 Euros over ‘Pillaging the Private Life’ of Her Lover’s Ex.”
ONLINE
Asymptote Journal, https://www.asymptotejournal.com/ (May 15, 2018), Tsipi Keller, review of Incest.
Electric Lit, https://www.electricliterature.com/ (December 6, 2017), Heather Scott Partington and Ian MacAllen, “Can a Book about Incest Be Greater Than Its Shock Value?,” review of Incest.
French Culture Website, http://www.frenchculture.org/ (May 15, 2018), biography of Christine Angot.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (November 16, 2017), Lauren Friedlander, review of Incest.
Lambda Literary, https://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (April 4, 2018), David Pratt, review of Incest.
Millions, https://www.themillions.com/ (January 31, 2018), Elizabeth Baird, review of Incest.
Christine Angot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christine Angot nineties.JPG
Christine Angot (born 7 February 1959) is a French writer, and novelist
Contents
1 Life
2 Novels
3 Plays
4 References
Life
Born Pierrette Marie-Clotilde Schwartz (Schwartz being her mother's name) in Châteauroux, Indre, she is perhaps best known for her 1999 novel L'Inceste (Incest) which recounts an incestuous relationship with her father.[1] It is a subject which appears in several of her previous books, but it is unclear whether these works are autofiction and the events described true. Angot herself describes her work – a metafiction on society's fundamental prohibition of incest and her own writings on the subject – as a performative (cf Quitter la ville).[2]
Novels
Vu du ciel (1990)
Not to be (1991)
Léonore, toujours (1994)
Interview (1995)
Les Autres (1997)
Sujet Angot (1998)
L'Usage de la vie incluant Corps plongés dans un liquide, Même si et Nouvelle vague (1998)
L'Inceste (1999)
Quitter la ville (2000)
Normalement suivi de La Peur du lendemain (2001)
Pourquoi le Brésil ? (2002)
Peau d'âne (2003)
La désintox et mes problèmes avec l'alcools (2004)
Une partie du cœur (2004)
Rendez-vous (2006)
Othoniel (2006)
Le marché des amants (2008)
Les Petits (2011)
La Petite Foule (2014)
Plays
Corps plongés dans un liquide (1992)
Nouvelle vague (1992)
Même si (1996)
L'Usage de la vie (1997)
Arrêtez, arrêtons, arrête (1997)
Mais aussi autre chose (1999)
La Fin de l'amour (2000)
Meinhof/Angot (2001)
Normalement (2002)
La Place du singe (2005)
References
"Christine_Angot". Igrs.sas.ac.uk. 6 November 1999. Archived from the original on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 24 April 2011.
"France-Diplomatie". Diplomatie.gouv.fr. Retrieved 24 April 2011.
About the Author
AUTHOR: Christine Angot is one of the most controversial authors writing today in France. Born in 1958 in Châteauroux, Angot studied law at the University of Reims and began writing at the age of 25. After six years of rejections, Angot published her first novel, Vu du ciel, the story of woman named Christine told from the perspective of an angel who died after being raped as a little girl. Her subsequent novels have dealt with a variety of taboo topics, including homosexuality, incest, and sexual violence, and have continually blurred the line between autobiography and fiction. Ever since gaining widespread notoriety with the 1999 publication of Incest, Angot has remained at the center of public debate and has continued to push the boundaries of what society allows an author to express.
Christine Angot
When
From Oct. 28 to Nov. 4
Christine Angot is one of the most controversial authors writing today in France. Her novels deal with a variety of taboo topics, including homosexuality, incest, and sexual violence, and have continually blurred the line between autobiography and fiction.
About Incest
Translated from French by Tess Lewis
Upcoming at Archipelago November 7, 2017
The narrator is falling out from a torrential relationship with another woman. Delirious with love and yearning, her thoughts grow increasingly cyclical and wild, until exposing the trauma lying behind her pain. With the intimacy offered by a confession, the narrator embarks on a psychoanalysis of herself, giving the reader entry into her tangled experiences with desire, paranoia, and, at the core of it all, incest. In a masterful translation from the French by Tess Lewis, Christine Angot’s Incest audaciously confronts its readers with one of our greatest taboos.
HOME»NEWS»WORLD NEWS»EUROPE»FRANCE
France's queen of shock fiction Christine Angot sued for 200,000 euros over 'pillaging the private life' of her lover's ex
Celebrated and controversial French author Christine Angot has been accused by her lover's ex-partner of "pillaging her private life' for a novel, to such an extent that the woman attempted suicide.
Christine Angot
Christine Angot has won as many literary plaudits for being a pioneering writer challenging social and literary taboos Photo: WIREIMAGE
By Henry Samuel, Paris5:30PM GMT 26 Mar 2013
Elise Bidoit is suing Miss Angot in a criminal court in Paris for the "invasion of the intimacy of private life". She is demanding 200,000 euros in damages.
France's queen of shock fiction, Miss Angot has appalled, titillated and delighted readers in equal measure for more than a decade.
Her novels of "autofiction" - a genre in which one's own life is used as a basis for a tale in which fact and fiction are mixed without distinction - have seen her recount real or imagined incest with her father and torrid sex sessions with her rapper ex-boyfriend in a lift, mixed with musings about whether to have coffee.
Slammed as a narcissistic navel gazer by her detractors, she has won as many literary plaudits for being a pioneering writer challenging social and literary taboos, and suffering for her artistic courage.
This time, however, Miss Bidoit - who claims to be the real-life inspiration for the main character of Miss Angot's novel Les Petits (The Little Ones) - says the author has gone too far.
Related Articles
Why the French should put the accent on English 26 Mar 2013
The female noir that puts 'Fifty’ in the shade 27 Mar 2013
Queen of shock fiction 'pillaged private life' of lover's ex-partner 28 May 2013
Gone Girl: have you read the book? 08 Oct 2014
'Fagin' of Paris 'masterminded city's biggest ever child pickpocketing ring' 26 Mar 2013
Sarkozy denounces 'unfounded' decision to investigate him 25 Mar 2013
"I want you to understand the suffering that my children and I have endured because of Christine Angot," Miss Bidoit, who was clad in a black dress and high boots, told the court on Monday. The novelist was also present in court, also dressed in black.
"When her book was released (in January 2011), I tried to end my life," said Miss Bidoit. "Everything is true in that book. It's my life. She wishes me dead; she wants to destroy my children."
Miss Bidoit had four of her five children with her ex-partner Charly Clovis, who is now Miss Angot's partner.
Miss Bidoit's lawyer said it was blatantly clear that the novel's main protagonist, Hélène Lucas, was his client, and that the book recounted her tumultuous affair with Mr Clovis, given the pseudonym Billy.
The author had "poached savagely from the intimacy of this woman's private life and that of her underage children, who she houses every other weekend," said William Bourdon. "There is a perversity, an irresponsibility, a hatred in relentlessly pursuing people like that."
Speaking to rue89 website before the trial, Miss Bidoit said: "This book destroyed me. I am denigrated and her version (of my life) is not the right one. Everything has been twisted."
In the book, Miss Angot claims her central character was violent with her ex-boyfriend. "What denial," Mr Bourdon told the court. "The truth is, that she (Miss Bidoit) endured years of conjugal violence for which her partner was handed a six-month suspended sentence."
Miss Angot claimed that the character's eldest daughter from another partner had been raped by her father. "Totally false," said Mr Bourdon.
The author also published long extracts of the family magistrate's social report on Miss Bidoit's children. "Where is the literature in that, Madame Le Juge?" asked the lawyer.
Her actions were all the more reprehensible as this was the second time Miss Angot had inserted Miss Bidoit into a work, he said. The first was in her 2008 book The Lover Market, in which she did not even bother to change or her children's first names. Miss Angot paid a 10,000-euro settlement.
"I thought that meant I was protected with this agreement. I never imagined she would do it again," Miss Bidoit said.
Miss Angot's lawyer countered that "autofiction" was a long-held tradition in France from Stendhal to Flaubert, and that his client's freedom of "literary creation" must be upheld.
"Christine Angot, like (Emile) Zola (the 19th century novelist), describes reality," said Georges Kiejman.
Nobody would have recognised Miss Bidoit bar close family had she not given a high-profile interview to Nouvel Observateur magazine, he added, pointing out that the book sold 20,000 copies while the weekly sells 400,000.
The lawsuit follows the release last month of Beauty and Beast, Marcela Iacub's novel recounting her seven-month affair with disgraced IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whom she dubbed a "poet of filth". Despite being ordered to pay 50,000 euros in damages and to insert a ruling into every copy, the book has become a bestseller, with 38,500 copies sold.
Justine Lévy, daughter of France's best known philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, also accused Carla Bruni, wife of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, of stealing her husband in her 2005 work Nothing Serious.
In 2011, France's best-known TV newsreader was found guilty of breaching his former mistress's privacy for publishing her love letters in a novel, after a court ruled it could not be qualified as fiction.
The effects of revealing one's private life has been a subject of controversy in France since author Serge Doubrovsky wrote his 1989 "autofiction" The Broken Book. His wife drank herself to death after reading the manuscript.
Two years ago he admitted: "To write is a profoundly immoral act, but the writer must accept the risks."
4/12/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1523595946026 1/7
Print Marked Items
Incest
Publishers Weekly.
264.37 (Sept. 11, 2017): p38+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Incest
Christine Angot, trans. from the French by Tess
Lewis. Archipelago (PRH, dist.), $16 trade
paper (208p) ISBN 978-0-914671-87-9
In this difficult work of autofiction-that is, stylized memoir--controversial French writer Angot recalls the
"three months and change" during which she (or rather a writer and single mother also called Christine and
for all purposes inseparable from the author) pursues a passionate relationship with a woman named MarieChristine.
The book opens in the aftermath of their devastating breakup and is written in a frantic prose that
captures the trauma of an affair so painful that it leads to an unspecified nervous ailment over the Christmas
holiday. ("Writing is impossible. When you're not yourself. My sexuality suffered. In the beginning I was
dissatisfied. Then. I wasn't anymore.") Searching for some foundation for her identity, Christine goes over
her life and relationships, developing a taxonomy of human conditions ranging from paranoia and
narcissism to suicide and perversion. At the base of all her pain is her father, who had an incestuous
relationship with her when she was a teenager. As she struggles to acknowledge her father, everything else--
her daughter Marie-Christine, her wild mood swings, and the mental isolation she compares to having
"locked-in syndrome," in which a person cannot speak or move, only blink their eyes--comes into sharp
relief. The mind that emerges is vivid, painfully human, and indeed fascinating. That said, this is an untidy
book, as Angot's writing is as erratic as it is cathartic, covering content so personal that it can be difficult to
decipher. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Incest." Publishers Weekly, 11 Sept. 2017, p. 38+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505634863/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a1c049d4.
Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505634863
4/12/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1523595946026 2/7
French novels: Past reflections
The Economist.
353.8148 (Dec. 4, 1999): p14.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
L'INCESTE. By Christine Angot. Stock; 217 pages; FFr105.
HORSITA. By Lorette Nobecourt. Grasset; 245 pages; FFr100.
BERG ET BECK. By Robert Bober. P0L; 249 pages; FFr110.
JE M'EN VAIS. By Jean Echenoz. Les Editions de Minuit; 253 pages; FFr95.
LE COEUR DE MARGUERITE. By Vassilis Alexakis. Stock; 427 pages; FFr135
SCANDAL hovers over the literary-prize season in France like a smell. Last year's controversy was about
Michel Houellebecq and his best-selling "Les Particules Elementaires". This year, with 334 new novels
clamouring for attention, it is another author and another book. Christine Angot possesses a sanguine
temperament, but she has written a provocative book about incest and homosexuality, so it can come as
little surprise that the French media have been swarming over her.
Ms Angot's literary effort, "L'inceste", is certainly ambitious as well as complex. And honest, too, in its
intentions: to tell the whole truth, however taboo, repressed or unsayable, about herself and those with
whom she is involved. In a crudely physical, though occasionally humorous style, "L'inceste" tells of a short
homosexual relationship the author has with an older woman. No detail of the jealousy and physical disgust
she feels is too intimate to be left out, even her bad conscience towards her daughter. Marguerite Duras
referred to homosexuality as "the illness of death". Here it becomes a fatal disease and is compared with
incest.
Ms Angot accounts for this "impossible" love by relating with unrelenting clarity every detail of her
incestuous relationship with her father. And through it, she also attacks all forms of conformity. Her book is
as compulsively shocking as a Bacon painting; she wants her readers to question their desire to know about
incest. And yet she concludes: "I wish I could have written about something else". Ms Angot says that
writing is a safeguard against madness. Readers bring her comfort, the feeling she is understood. Whether
"L'inceste" becomes a classic in gender studies is somewhat irrelevant; Ms Angot has already found her
readers. More than 70,000 copies have been sold since early September.
Lorette Nobecourt's "Horsita", too, reflects a clear-sighted rage in its quest for truth and self-knowledge.
Hortense, the tormented heroine, questions her father's past during the Vichy period, tries to understand the
roots of evil and how to live with the Holocaust: "I would like to understand how a man could have been a
collaborator 20 years ago and my father now," she says. "Horsita" is a complex narrative, that patches
together passages that rail against Hortense's harsh family and narrow- minded convent upbringing,
dialogues with her Jewish lover, her father's incomplete diary and her letters addressed to Horsita, a sort of
"purified" version of the heroine, a debunked christic figure, in turn eroticised, tortured, and martyred.
Despite the stilted if not commonplace dialogue about evil and the Holocaust, Ms Nobecourt asks the right
questions. Can we judge our parents? Is reconciliation possible? "It is when we have forgiven our parents,
that we become adults," reminds Ms Nobecourt, quoting Brecht.
4/12/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1523595946026 3/7
"Berg et Beck" by Robert Bober, is also about the consequences of the Holocaust, though, by contrast, the
tone is sober and discreet. The book, which develops Mr Bober's much acclaimed "Quoi de neuf sur la
guerre?" (What's new on war?), winner of the Livre Inter prize in 1995, reflects upon loss, bereavement and
the destiny of the surviving children who have to construct their lives without family. Mr Bober, a
documentary writer who also worked with Francois Truffaut and Georges Perec, shows rather than analyses,
and convincingly so. The narrator, Joseph Berg, tells about his work in 1952 at an orphanage for children of
the Holocaust. He describes comforting unconsolable "children whose tears last longer, having no words
with which to make themselves understood". He sketches moving portraits: a girl who ages her doll to make
it resemble her absent mother; a conscientious young clerk, who instead of preparing the shoe-shop
window, suddenly makes a heap of shoes, like in the camps.
Meanwhile, Berg writes to Beck, his childhood friend, a Jew like him, who disappeared ten years earlier,
and tells him of the world in an effort to deny his death, yet all too conscious "that it is only in vain that we
pretend to keep alive by words and writing, those who are absent". Both remembering and forgetting are
part of bereavement and survival. Mr Bober's humanity and humour, his euphemistic style, all the more
poignant for what remains unsaid, make this a remarkably beautiful book.
It is modesty as well that pervades the novels of Jean Echenoz. When deservedly awarded the much envied
Prix Goncourt for his novel, "Je m'en vais" (I am leaving), he claimed unassumingly that he had merely
written a "geographical novel". Mr Echenoz has always parodied popular genres and this time intertwines
an adventure and a detective story. Felix Ferrer, the protagonist, is an indolent and sceptical art dealer who
has recently divorced.
To boost business he sets off for the North Pole to recover the spoils of a shipwrecked Eskimo art
collection. The polar journey, with its endless and silent whiteness, does not offer much exoticism, except
for a fleeting affair with an Inuit girl. Central heating, phone and fax, porn movies and Ikea-like furniture
are as readily available up north as elsewhere; global sameness is the modern disease.
Nor does art do much to redeem the gloom, even though the book contains some hilarious scenes, like the
ones in Ferrer's gallery which exhibits, amongst other things, a giant asbestos bra. Mr Echenoz's comic
close-ups make routine events seem preposterous. Ferrer changes apartment and woman as easily as he does
subway lines, yet "he continues to wash from left to right and from toe to top". His characters do not appear
to enjoy much interior life--they are what they do (intensely smoking or phoning) or what they possess (a
picture of a collective rape framed in wire, for those who can afford it). Mr Echenoz is foremost a humorist.
Yet behind his seductive and delicately ironic prose hides a moralist who highlights the fake, the absurd, the
loneliness of modern lives and invites his readers to laugh about it rather than at it.
Vassilis Alexakis, a Greek writer who lives in France and won the Medicis prize in 1995, is an equally
playful and quixotic voice who does not mind going against the grain. His latest novel, "Le Coeur de
Marguerite" (Marguerite's heart) makes for a delightfully entertaining love story. The narrator is in love
with Marguerite. A womaniser by nature and scriptwriter by profession, he prefers words over images.
"They know how to be silent." Why do human beings love and why do they write are two questions that run
hand in hand through the suspense of delayed love. The obstacles are not so much Marguerite's past and her
family as the egotism of a narrator engrossed in the sweet torments of his autobiography. Given this, it is
surprising that the novel is devoid of heady introspection and has, instead, the charm of a true comedy. The
narrator is a sort of Buster Keaton- like Ulysses, who hops from one island to another, the Cyclads or
Australia, learning to live and and to observe before he comes home from his journey, ready to write and to
love. Mr Alexakis is casually philosophical, and his book is a celebration of wit, humour and imagination.
The current crop of women are the more demanding writers. They explore new forms of literature, and test
their readers' compassion in the face of trauma. Meanwhile, the Vichy period and the years that followed
continue to evoke interest, while Mr Echenoz and Mr Alexakis reflect playfully on the vagaries of space
rather than time, at the close of a century that has been dominated by Proust's figure of past lost and
regained.
4/12/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1523595946026 4/7
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"French novels: Past reflections." The Economist, 4 Dec. 1999, p. 14. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A57950807/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=665cf002.
Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A57950807
4/12/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1523595946026 5/7
French lessons
Turi Munthe
New Statesman.
134.4731 (Mar. 14, 2005): p53+.
COPYRIGHT 2005 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Politics of Love
Alina Reyes; translation by Claus von Bohlen
Marion Boyars, 104pp, [pounds sterling]8.95
On the Parisian literary scene, the Latin lover has changed sex. La vie sexuelle de Catherine M (2001), a
diary of active, lifelong phallophilia by Catherine Millet, director of Art Press, sold 400,000 copies, was
translated into more than 30 languages, and is now available on CD. Baise-moi (1997), by Virginie
Despentes, topped the bestseller charts and has been made into a cult film.
4/12/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1523595946026 6/7
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
More than 80 per cent of modern erotic fiction (which differs from pornography, according to one French
publisher, in that it can be read with both hands) is written by women. Casanova, the Marquis de Sade and
Georges Bataille have been replaced by Regine Deforges, Francoise Simpere and Ovidie (a 24-year-old
philosopher/porn star).
The body has played a central role in French literature since Michel de Montaigne. However, it was not
until the publication of Pauline Reage's Histoire d'O in 1954 that women began to colonise erotic literature.
Feminism taught men to damn and dam the extremes of their sexual impulses, while opening the way for
women. Writers such as Christine Angot, Camille Laurens and Sophie Cadalen, escaping the heavy
intellectualism of French literature, have tried to make sexuality their literary language, gesturing to the
metaphysical through the body.
Alina Reyes is part of this movement. Her first novel, Le Boucher (1988), was raw and well written, and
was one of the first of this genre. But in The Politics of Love, Reyes has opted for a tone closer to a guru's
than an observer's, and the result is an obstacle course of platitudes.
Love, Reyes declaims, is "like dawn between parentheses, the tips of the parentheses extended upwards
until they meet, tracing the shape of the viewer's blind eye". A lack of imagination and puritanism are the
4/12/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1523595946026 7/7
"sad manifestations of our modernity". The author's "politics" of love--half-digested Sade--read like a
parody: "The orgasm is revolt--total, intimate, solitary ... Whoever is having an orgasm becomes king of the
world."
It can't just be the translation that makes all this sound so pretentious. Equally jarring is Reyes's New Age
convention. At times she reads like the Jose Bove of the gender world. She writes of "this moment in time,
when the image of the real world has become confused and blurred by the media", and tells us that "the
denial of femininity as of virility also appears to be a consequence of the deconstruction of human identity".
Once a promising writer, Reyes has become a sex prophet. And sex is precisely not what the best books of
this kind are about. It is a pity that The Politics of Love has been translated, when there are so many better
books of the same genre that are yet to appear outside France.
What Millet, Cadalen and even Catherine Breillat (the director of such films as Romance and Anatomy of
Hell) have helped to develop is a new language, defined not by its fellatio-to-word-count ratio, but by its
insistence that sex can be used as a total metaphor, because sex, like words, gestures to what it is impossible
to describe. Reyes, it seems, has forgotten the point she helped make: that Frenchwomen still have a lot to
teach us Anglo-Saxons.
Turi Munthe, a Middle East analyst, has lectured on erotica at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Munthe, Turi
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Munthe, Turi. "French lessons." New Statesman, 14 Mar. 2005, p. 53+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A131076485/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6f9b3517.
Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A131076485
Tsipi Keller reviews Incest by Christine Angot
Translated from the French by Tess Lewis (Archipelago Books, 2017)
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
—Muriel Rukeyser
Literature, Christine Angot has said in an interview, has no other purpose than to persuade the reader of the veracity of the telling, even if implicit in every affirmation is the shadow of doubt. Ever since her books began to appear, she’s had to fend off accusations and criticisms that her books are not novels, they are not literature, she is using her “real” life and the lives of those around her—and she has been suitably punished by being sued for it. These are her detractors, readers who demand a different kind of literature, preferably the familiar, plot-driven variety. Precisely the kind of readers Angot foresees in her very first novel, Vu du ciel (1990), which she addresses to angels and to God, hoping that no mortal opens it accidentally. (“Alors, je destine ce livre aux anges et à Dieu et ne souhaite à aucun mortel de l’ouvrir accidentellement.”)
Those who appreciate the kind of literature that engages the intellect and the imagination (think writing by Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhardt) do not consider or judge a novel in terms of biographical truths or untruths. They do not look for a plot. A plot actually bores them. Nor do they look for neat constructions and solutions. Their pleasure lies elsewhere, in a deeper truth, in a mind that does not recognize limits and borders and “good manners.” For such readers, the sublime, and the less sublime, are equally fine if honestly and bravely explored. Céline, one of Angot’s cherished models, would have been in this group: “All that is interesting happens in the shadow. We know nothing of the real history of men” (Journey to the End of the Night). Another model is Hervé Guibert, who strove for simplicity, stripped his texts to the bare bone, and used his own life as raw material for his work as a writer and photographer.
Angot is a versatile writer. In addition to the novels she has published in the past twenty-five years, she has also written plays, and has co-written Claire Denis’s new film, Let the Sunshine In (2017). She is prolific and controversial. And demanding of the reader. Which may explain why it took so long for her writing to appear in English. Translated by Tess Lewis, Incest is Angot’s first novel to be published in the Anglophone world—by the pioneering Archipelago Books—but it is certainly not the last. There is no plot in the usual sense, and no “order” and no “structure.” She offers no moral or meaning; indeed, it is up to the reader to pay attention and bring his or her sensibilities to the text. Angot is not in the business of logic making, of elucidating, explaining, or consensus-building. There are deliberate repetitions of words, phrases, names, obsessions, fears, and the occasional “Yes, I know, I’ve already said it, let me repeat myself if I want.”
Still, this is not to say that Angot’s Incest lacks a plot altogether. Rather, it suggests a different kind of plot, of tension, of conflict. It is rich, intimate, and pulls you in, as you recognize her private inner workings as your own, even if, unlike her, you’d never fully admit them to yourself or to another person. You witness your own mind hurling itself against others, against you, and worse, against itself. Angot uses facts, sometimes names from her life (she’s more circumspect now—more about this later), puts them in a blender, and the result is a mosaic, some parts coherent, some not. Call it technique, call it artistry. The book is a paean to life, a torrent of words, a love letter to Love, to Gratitude for Being in Love, puncturing the wall of the Now with details and incidents of the Quotidian, and “a few minor worries from time to time.”
Her books are an incantation, biblical in their onrush of verbs, nouns, names, and deliberate repetitions (yes, I, too, repeat myself) in the service of rhythm and camouflage, compelling you to read on, for sound, for cadence, for poetry. I’m a woman of no convictions, she says. I’m a woman of strong convictions, she also says. It’s as if she were saying: The two of us (you and I, reader) are in a maze of my creation; let’s see how you, we, fare. She puts everything on the line; she is not embarrassed. She tells us, “Incest is the book in which I present myself as a real shit, all writers should do it at least once.” She lays herself bare and invites us to take a bite.
At the center of Angot’s first-person narration is an intense, volatile, fascinating three-month affair between Christine and a woman named Marie-Christine (a friend says: “It’s crazy how pretty the name Christine is and how ugly Marie-Christine is”). We also hear about Léonore, Christine’s six-year-old daughter, the love of her life to whom she dedicates all her books; Claude, Léonore’s father, who is Christine’s former husband and now a close friend; Pierre, the perpetrator of the titular incest thirty years before, and now ill with Alzheimer’s, like his father before him; Christine’s former and current analysts; and friends and acquaintances in Christine’s orbit. As the pages begin to accumulate on the left (assuming you’re holding a book in your hand), you begin to recognize the names, to make connections, to form opinions, and you realize you’re part of the constellation, you’re a listener, a participant, you are not a passive reader, since Angot engages you directly. You are her savior; she relies on you (“It’s the clinic or talking to you. To you. Writing is a kind of rampart against insanity. I’m already very lucky that I’m a writer”). There’s a present tense, and a past tense, and there are flashbacks that are in the present, that are the present, that are present now and always will be.
“I was never homosexual. I was never interested in breasts. Mine included.” Still, when she meets Marie-Christine, “I immediately fell in love with her mouth, her eyes, the way she walks. Her smell, her sex, the way she moves, her voice. More than anything, the way she looks at me.” She goes on:
My mother said to me ‘love takes all forms.’ Léonore told everyone at school ‘X and Mama are homosexuals.’ Everyone understood. It was perfectly clear. I slunk along the walls in my jacket and big shoes. Slunk along the walls, the barriers, like slicing them, with a razor, slicing veins and my luck. A razor in the rock wall, rock, pierre [stone in French], my father’s name is Pierre, and on this rock I will build my church, that’s literature, I will carve it out, a wall of books, a wailing wall, incest, insanity, homosexuality, holocaust, start strong, my jacket, my big shoes, and my razor.
There’s no attempt to shock and titillate with salacious descriptions. If anything, it’s a cri de coeur. At times she ventures into the sexually explicit, and yet is never pornographic, but simply and plainly descriptive, and, associatively, always aware of the vulnerability of the female sex and the potential for abuse:
Fine, I put my finger in. You never get a chance to touch something like that otherwise. [ . . . ] To touch, to stick your finger in, turn it, take it out again, put it in your mouth, make the vagina’s wetness go into the anus, what you can’t bear isn’t that, but what you saw on Sunday, in broad daylight, the light was streaming in through the wide-open window, I was looking at her sex, the day before I’d read excerpts from Desert Flower, by an infibulated African woman, you could cut it off, I said to myself, with a razor [ . . . ] The open water lily also repeats itself on my daughter.
Propelled by the Christine/Marie-Christine affair, the first section, entitled “No Man’s Land,” runs straight through to page ninety-two. Thereafter, Angot tells us that she needs to put things in order, to take a deep breath:
I’m not Nietzsche, I’m not Nijinsky, I’m not Artaud, I’m not Genet, I’m Christine Angot, I have the means that I have and make do with them. [ . . . ] Time to calm down, to try to be what I am, that is to say, not much. Putting all this less or more in order would already be something, not bad. Everything will be in the proper order from here and maybe even make me happy some day. And I’m going to try to be polite.
Indeed, the following sections are shorter, separated by headings. We witness not self-pity or self-indulgence, but a sharp intelligence at work, one that observes the facts like a lawyer (Angot specialized in European law at the College of Europe in Bruges); there’s bitter humor, and self-deprecation, and passion—relentless, brutal, and honest.
With authors who are thinkers—authors like Angot—interpretations and extrapolations won’t serve a reader. Incest defies norms of expression, working on multiple levels, making use of associations, leaps, regressions. For this reason, the best way to convey Angot’s style and voice, in Tess Lewis’s fluent translation, is to quote her. Extensively.
“Writing is impossible,” Angot says. “When you’re not yourself.” Were she to lie to herself, to deny herself, this book, and others, would be impossible. Would it be better, she asks, if she were to try to please everyone, to turn herself into “a piece of Kréma candy?” A friend advises: “You should put yourself to the side a bit.” Another friend says: “You have a sadomasochistic relationship with the public.” And maybe she does. She knows that her book will reach only lunatics like herself, and, she asserts: “my little audience of lunatics is my life preserver.” She also knows that: “This book will be seen as testimony about the sabotage of women’s lives. The groups that are fighting incest will be all over it. Even my books are sabotaged. To take this book as a shit piece of testimony will be an act of sabotage.” Having read a draft of her manuscript, her lawyer details in a long letter all the instances of “serious invasion of privacy of persons mentioned, described, etc., whether they are explicitly identified, as is often the case, or identifiable.” Dutifully, reluctantly, Angot changes a few names, but toward the end of the book, in parentheses, she tells us: “I’m annoyed that I changed the names. It makes the book less good. But better that than paying damages.” And so, reader, do yourself a favor and don’t bother your head with questions like, is she telling the whole truth and nothing but? Are these real names or real people?
Pierre, the incestuous father, is mentioned in passing throughout the book, but we get a fuller measure of him toward the end, when, with near clinical precision, Angot finally gets it—or him—down on paper. Calmly. Trying, as she says, to “be polite.” Pierre Angot, married to wife Elizabeth, and a father of two young children, a boy and a girl, Christine’s half brother and sister, who don’t even know she exists until much later. Pierre Angot, a respected linguist, a lover of languages. Suave. Worldly. A man who knows the names of plants, of animals. Who knows everything. Who reads Le Monde religiously, fanatically, every day. Pierre, who reprimands and lectures his fourteen-year-old daughter about the “basic rule of politeness,” “the laws of hospitality,” when she spends a week in his home. The home of his family. Pierre, who thinks nothing of sleeping with his daughter in the marriage bed while his family is away on Easter vacation. (In her 2014 book, Une semaine de vacances, Angot returns to that week when her father, for the first time, “ventured to [her] genitals.” A fact she kept secret until it burst out of her a couple of years later.) Marie-Christine informs Christine that Lacan called perversion “père-version”—the version of the father.
Angot tells us that when she met Pierre for the first time, she thought he was extraordinary. “I, who had never had a father to introduce to my friends, all of a sudden I’d be able to tell them how extraordinary he was. I was charmed. [ . . . ] Charmed. Like you can be by someone you love.” Eight days later, disillusionment sets in. He comes into her room to kiss her goodnight, like a good father would, and kisses her on the mouth. “I didn’t understand. I understood very well.” In eight days he goes from an ideal, unhoped-for father, to a father who tells her he loves her and kisses her on the mouth. He tells her that he finds her extraordinary. She dazzles him, and she, the child, wanting to please him, wanting “desperately to be nice” to this new father, keeps her disgust to herself. She tells us she “seduced” him. She seduced him, inadvertently, simply by being herself.
“I’m very sorry to tell you about this, I’d so much rather be able to talk about something else,” she apologizes to the reader. Léonore, it dawns on her, “is his granddaughter, she could have been his daughter, that’s enough.”
During the three months of her affair with Marie-Christine, Christine thinks she is going insane. She even considers having herself committed to a clinic, like Robert Walser did. Instead, she leans for support on Foucault, who, like her, “refuses to make any diagnosis but finds in the madness of Artaud, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Hölderlin the final instance of the work of art: ‘Where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates its time of truth.’” She keeps saying: “We love each other. I’m sure we love each other. Why is it we don’t know how to be together? The two of us? Peacefully, happily.” Her life has been infected by Pierre, who “left a mark” on her. Christine remarks, “what with the incest I can’t manage to feel like I’m anything much.”
She describes writing as “an act of exorcism, an attempt to expunge from the heart, the soul, all the filth and pain inflicted by others.” “Writing,” Angot says, “is not choosing your narrative. But taking it, into your arms, and putting it calmly down on the page, as calmly as possible, as accurately as possible. [ . . . ] It can take an entire lifetime for a writer to take in his arms something that doesn’t concern anyone.” She is resolved to make the reader understand. If she fails in this book, she’ll write others. “And in the end, all the readers will have understood.”
It is time for me, too, to slow down the pace and suggest that you, reader, take Incest into your arms and let yourself experience Angot as you would music, or an image of great evocative power. Put aside your resistance. As Nabokov noted, the author does battle with the reader, but it’s a battle without winners or losers. It’s a battle of persuasion, of bringing two strangers together. Angot won me over because I favor authors who reveal themselves. As a writer, I envy her freedom, her great spirit and courage, her ability to open up, come what may. It’s as if she is saying: One day I will die and be no more. But now, alive, no one and nothing will stop me from saying what I need to say. And here, again, is Céline: “When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty.”
And a final note on the translation. In my view, the best translators are dedicated practitioners in intuition, and Tess Lewis is one such translator. Reading Incest, it feels as though Angot, so very French, is speaking to us directly in English. Such fluidity in translation comes from accumulated practice and familiarity with various forms of composition. Lewis, the recipient of many translation awards, also translates from the German (most notably another Archipelago book, The Angel of Oblivion, 2016), and is equally at ease translating poetry, prose, and drama. May we be blessed with more of her kind.
Read bio
Tsipi Keller is a novelist and a translator of Hebrew literature. She is the recipient of several literary awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships and New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction grants. Her most recent translation collection, Futureman, a volume of selected poems by the late David Avidan, was published by Phoneme Media in 2017. Her novel Nadja on Nadja will be published in 2018 by Underground Voices.
Print this article
Christine Angot’s ‘Incest’ Is a Radical Act of Confession
REVIEWS Elizabeth Baird January 31, 2018 | 2 books mentioned 4 min read
Related Books:
Mid-way through Christine Angot’s pioneering, genre-bending novel, Incest—originally published to shock and acclaim in France in 1999 and newly translated into English by Tess Lewis—Angot’s lover laments, “I think of love and I feel invaded.” Angot is known for using the facts of her life as the basis for her fiction, and it seems that to love her is, indeed, to invite a kind of invasion. (She was sued for literally “pillaging the private life” of a different lover’s ex-partner in her 2011 novel Les Petits). The line also evokes what it feels like to be immersed in Angot’s most taboo work, a cyclone of language and raw emotion that explores, among other things, an incestuous relationship with her father. There’s the sense that things—traditional narrative structure, linear time, and so-called “healthy” boundaries, to name a few—have been breached. It probes at ideas and emotions that feel untouchable. I think of this book, and I feel invaded.
The first and longest of the book’s three sections, titled “No Man’s Land,” drops us into Angot’s free-associative thought-spiral during the aftermath of her breakup from Marie-Christine Adrey, sometimes referred to as X, sometimes as MC or MCA, in a seemingly defiant nod toward protecting the innocent. After dating for three months—or in Angot’s phrasing, after having temporarily “contracted” homosexuality—some unexplained event has caused a rift. Angot copes by calling Marie-Christine incessantly to dissect their relationship, and ruminating on scenes from their time together in dizzying prose. “A lack of balance doesn’t scare me, there are others who can’t cope. Like her. People like her. Who have limits. I have none. Her, she has them. Me, I don’t. She can’t stand it. When things get so…neurotic.”
This neurosis is palpable throughout “No Man’s Land.” Certain images and trains of thought circle through the narrative like a carousel: lyrical, visceral descriptions of sex with Marie-Christine; mentions of Angot’s daughter, Leonore, who she often linguistically conflates with Marie-Christine (“I call Leonore Marie-Christine and I call Marie-Christine Leonore.”); Marie-Christine’s dog, Pitou; mysterious hatred for a woman named Nadine; water lilies, in an explicit homage to Charles Péguy’s theory of repetition: “It’s not the last water lily that repeats the first, it’s the first that repeats all the rest and the last.” The implication, of course, is that there’s some root to this apparently rootless turmoil, a first water lily that is only clarified by the ones that follow. The cyclical presentation of images in meant to provide understanding, but only in retrospect. More than once, Leonore is described as “the last water lily,” and the question naturally becomes: what, or more precisely who, is the first?
The answer doesn’t come as a shock, since the title never shies from being taken literally. The second section of the book, titled “Christmas,” starts to reexamine what came before in a more linear fashion, detailing the trigger that led to the unraveling of the narrator’s relationship with Marie-Christine. It hinges on Marie-Christine’s last-minute decision to spend Christmas at her cousin Nadine’s house, a change of plans that leaves Angot feeling abandoned—the makeshift family is forsaken for biological ties. Images from the first section begin to gather more context and depth: with disgust, she describes Marie-Christine’s loyalty to Nadine as that of a “lap-dog,” for example.
Interspersed throughout this section are elaborated clinical definitions of various psychoanalytic terms—paranoia, hysteria, madness. She links homosexuality and incest by citing them both as examples of “structural perversion.” When she defines madness as logic’s other, the non-linear jumble of events that comprised the first section comes to be seen, paradoxically, as a carefully constructed expression of insanity.
The third and last section (also the shortest, comprising roughly 50 pages of the book’s 200) finally takes us into the eye of the storm, and relates details of the incest that animated the previous action. Called “Valda Candy,” it’s what Angot is told to spit out before engaging in sex acts with her father, which she did periodically from the time of their first meeting when she was 14 until she was 26. The narration morphs into something more focused and urgent, bordering on lucid, which underscores her lament for the coherent self that could have been, had the incest not taken place:
It wasn’t his brains I was sucking, do you realize, I could have had very handsome men, I could have loved Nadine’s movies, I could have spent Christmas Eve with you…But no…I’m weeping like the dog that I am…Dogs are stupid, you can get them to suck on a plastic bone, and they’re stupid, dogs believe you. They don’t even notice what they’re sucking on. It’s horrible, being a dog.
It can take patience to stick with Angot through this structurally perverse expression of suffering. Early on, she describes calling Marie-Christine 200 times in the span of a few days “to see if she loves me to exhaustion, as she claims.” At times, the reader feels similarly tested when trying to make sense of the repeating images and narrative chaos. But submitting to the logic (or illogic) of Angot’s world ultimately gives the thrilling sense of having melded with another consciousness, since it requires an almost complete abandonment of your own—in another nod to incest, this book often feels like its own referent.
Given this utter singularity, to call it a novel, or even a work of autofiction, feels reductive, though I’m not sure of a better term to describe the book’s rolling boil of playful, poetic tangents, psychoanalytic definitions, and biographical details that can be verified by a quick Google search. But the very paradox inherent in autofiction—something that simultaneously announces itself as both true and false, so as to expose the limitations of both labels—makes it a fitting categorization for a work that revels in inconsistency, contingencies, and the self-aware dissolution of structural conceits.
Another label that inevitably comes to mind when considering this book is “confessional.” The word has come to have a pejorative slant, used to strip first-person accounts—particularly, first-person accounts written by women—of art and intention. But Angot’s writing reclaims the confession as a radical act—spiritual, even. The word captures her fevered desire to write as a form of absolution: “How I went insane, you will understand, I hope. And if it’s not enough I’ll write more books.” By performing her insanity, she forces us to make it our own, to taste the plastic bones that we suck on. At its core, Incest is a true testament to the subversive power of literature, in that it transmutes the violation of incest into connection with the reader. It the ultimate narrative and biographical paradox, it makes redemptive the thing that destroyed her.
FacebookTwitterShare
The Millions' future depends on your support. Become a member today.
ELIZABETH BAIRD is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis. You can contact her here.
Can a Book About Incest Be Greater Than Its Shock Value?
Two writers discuss Christine Angot’s memoir-novel of sex, obsession, illness, and incest
Double Take is a literary criticism series in which two readers tackle a book’s innermost themes, successes, failures, trappings, and surprises. In this edition, Heather Scott Partington and Ian MacAllen explore Christine Angot’s memoir-inflected novel, Incest.
The central relationship in Christine Angot’s autobiographical novel Incest, translated from the French, is not an incestuous one. It’s a brief, intense love affair between the narrator (also “Christine Angot”) and another woman—an affair that, as the book opens, has fallen apart. But, as one might expect from a book literally titled Incest, the specter of incest—Christine’s earlier sexual relationship with her father—hangs over the narrator’s experience of love, grief, motherhood, illness, and trauma. It’s a provocative book from a consistently provocative (though rarely translated) writer. Our readers ask: is there deeper value beyond the shock? And in what sense is sex, and incest, kind of like writing?
Heather Scott Partington: From the start, I was struck by Angot’s direct, fragmentary sentences. In the beginning, when she’s introducing her romantic obsession, I think it works particularly well to convey her desperation. “Even at this very moment,” she writes, “Have to stop myself from calling her… I call back to say, ‘above all, don’t call me again.” She binds the idea of homosexuality as a choice with her inability to gracefully let the relationship go. She says, “I was homosexual for three months… I was homosexual the moment I saw her.” At first I wondered if this posture on homosexuality — as optional, binary — was intended for shock value. But after reading the entire novel, I don’t think this is a piece of work that gets its value just from jarring its reader. (Though it’s certainly intended to provoke.) Incest is a raw examination of desire and obsession, but I think to reduce it to words like brave would undercut the complexity of Angot’s work.
What was your initial reaction, Ian? Do you think Angot intends her reader to recoil, a bit, from her approach and subject matter?
Ian MacAllen: My first thought was that this book was one about frustration. It manifests itself in multiple ways. Creatively, she is frustrated, but there is also constant tension between concepts like sex and love between both abusive and healthy relationships. There is frustration in expression of these emotions and the cognitive dissonance required to process them. She says, “‘Everything can always be mashed together’ could have been my motto,” and I think that gets to the heart of these conflicts. I’m not sure I see her view of homosexuality as a literal choice, but moments where she is allowing a truth to emerge, one that must coexist with other desires. I see that as an extension of her frustrations as well as part of her recognition that everything is linked.
HSP: I saw it less as frustration and more as an innate inability to change who she is. For me, her true self keeps rising to the surface of both her relationship and her sentences. The “mashing together” gave this text interesting layers. While the narrator reminded the reader continually of the limited term of this relationship, she is unable to leave her love or escape her stylistic tendencies. It is worth noting that Angot rejects interpretation, rejects the idea of readers codifying the narrator’s beliefs or identity in any way, writing, “To take this book as a shit piece of testimony will be an act of sabotage, but you’ll do it. It screws up a woman’s life, it screws up a writer’s life, but, as they say, it doesn’t matter.”
In fact, when the text becomes metacognitive, when — in the second half — she begins to comment on her choices as a writer and try to make different ones, she seems to fall back into the same patterns of layering the story back into itself. She calls it “a miracle of logical disorganization.” I agree with you particularly about the way she links healthy and unhealthy relationships, deliberately crossing a reader’s boundaries.
IM: She feels immutable in that way — and overall there wasn’t much of a change in her through the duration of the narrative other than coming to terms with that inflexibility. I’m not sure I agree that she is actually rejecting interpretation, though. She says, “I associate things others don’t associate, I bring together things that don’t fit together… I highlight opposites.” To consider those relationships demands a level of interpretation. Consider the examples she cites like “blonde-bitch” or “money-hate.” These are fairly abstract associations. Also, the irony is that in a translated work, the whole thing is to some extent already interpreted for us by the translator. As readers of the English, we don’t have the opportunity to read Angot without a level of interpretation imposed on the text. There is no pure text here, unless we go back to the original French.
Who Gets to Write About Sexual Abuse, and What Do We Let Them Say?
Criticism of ‘My Absolute Darling’ and of memoirs about incest suggests that there are some stories we’re not ready to…
electricliterature.com
Angot is being most truthful when she is discussing her choices as a writer. On one level, I see this book as a treatise on writing itself.
She is struggling to organize the world — or her interpretation of the world. This is the challenge of any writer, and that’s why talking about sex can be so relevant. So much of sex is having control. A writer has absolute control, something that seems to have been lost through abuse, but that she is struggling to recapture through writing. I think this is partly why she includes the definitions of incest and narcissism and desire to seize control of this language — like when she gives a concrete and specific definition of incest:
We call incest a sexual relation without force or constraint between blood relatives to a degree prohibited by the laws of each society. In almost all societies, except for a few cases including Egyptian Pharaohs or the ancient nobility of Hawaii, incest has always been severely chastised then prohibited. That is why it is so often kept secret and experienced as a tragedy by those who engage in it.
So much of sex is having control. A writer has absolute control, something that seems to have been lost through abuse, but that she is struggling to recapture through writing.
HSP: I found myself thinking about the French a lot, too. Many of her linguistic tricks seemed like near-puns (my French is pretty rusty, though). I also had the feeling that a lot of this worked on a different level in the original text.
Again, here we see how two different readers approach a narrative differently. I read the passage you cite — about highlighting opposites — as indicative of how she places objects together without analysis. To me, the novel resists interpretation so stubbornly. Angot underscores this with her flat affect when writing of difficult or taboo circumstances. The narrator’s paired opposites represented a microcosm for how she tells this story. She juxtaposes dissimilar things to provoke. I suppose it’s more accurate to say she juxtaposes in such a way that forces her reader to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time — particularly the idea of parent/child relationships with sexual relationships. This brings me back to my original thought:
I wonder if Angot’s desire to be provocative supersedes the story she wants to tell. She definitely makes me question whether there are some topics that the human mind cannot (and, for reasons of survival, should not) compute.
She definitely makes me question whether there are some topics that the human mind cannot (and, for reasons of survival, should not) compute.
What do you make of this book being labeled a novel, rather than nonfiction? Does genre affect the way you read the work?
IM: I agree; Angot is reaching to be provocative. You don’t title a book Incest without looking to get a rise out of people. There are definitely moments where she the language is designed to incite like when she says to “make the vagina’s wetness go into the anus” or “I move the cock, I see the spot. I penetrate. My fingers become a cock.” Its tapping into a kind of raw emotion as a catalyst to feel. Yet there are these other moments — like when she reflects on the Barbie doll put under the tree — that feel much more controlled. It’s another example, as you say, of two oppositional ideas being forced upon the reader. There is this unabashed discussion of sex acts and desire, and she wants us to have this sense of sweet loving coziness of family, but I take it as Angot pushing us towards discomfort rather than the impossibility of contemplation.
Genre is a curiosity. The idea of a novel as a genre for a bookstore means something very different than it does for the author of a book. I can’t help but think of another French writer, Adrien Bosc, who’s “novel” Constellation was translated last year. Americans are more thoughtful of the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, while in French the flexibility always existed. I’m paraphrasing what Bosc said, the moment information is organized by chapters, there is a kind of fiction that exists. In Angot’s case, even if this was based on memoir, there is an inclination to fictionalize due to the nature of the material. Also, she insists that “I don’t have the right to use real names, the lawyer has forbidden it, not even real initials.”
You don’t title a book ‘Incest’ without looking to get a rise out of people.
If we consider this as nonfiction, albeit nonfiction as a metaphor, it strikes me that she is making linkages between unconnected ideas, the mashing up she talks about. Also in context to sexual abuse, that writing is about power and vulnerability. Do you think I’m reading too much into this?
HSP: I’m less concerned with trying to figure out how true something is than I am trying to figure out how I understand it or experience it while reading, anyway, since that’s the only part of this I control. The author writes it down, choosing details and edits certain things out, so even a memoir becomes a representation. That goes to what Bosc is saying with his ideas about imposing a narrative structure. Angot seems to want to muddy things — her deliberate choice of, conflation of, and emphasis on names from her actual life draws attention to the fact that readers look for autobiographical connections, or truth. In the passage you mention, she calls her own work “serious invasion of the privacy of the author’s father, as she recounts their incestuous relations in precise detail.” She wants to push the genre button, too. Pushing readers toward autobiographical details feels like it’s in line with how she wants to shock.
I don’t think you’re reading too much into it. Sex is transactional, and so too is writing. Writing is manipulative; asking a reader to feel things while their eyes look at words on a page. There’s power changing hands in both scenarios. Both involve vulnerability, and incest is a perversion of healthy boundaries. It makes sense to me Angot wants to push boundaries in her writing, too. Angot’s mimetic style forces a reader to be in her narrator’s head and I would argue it’s not a comfortable space — but that she doesn’t want it to be. She says, “my mental structure is incestuous… I associate things others don’t associate” and “I suffer from hypermesia, too strong a memory.” She wants us to feel uncomfortable, to feel too much. She wants us to feel what her narrator feels.
Sex is transactional, and so too is writing. Both involve vulnerability, and incest is a perversion of healthy boundaries.
I love when she writes, “writing is not choosing your narrative. But taking it, into your arms, and putting it calmly down on the page, as calmly as possible, as accurately as possible.” There’s a sense that this story was unavoidable, that she had to tell it this way, that even if she’s, as she says earlier, “touching garbage,” she has to treat this story with accuracy. Which, of course, I see takes me right back into discussions of genre, fictionalization, truth.
This book is an infinite loop of connected ideas.
IM: To the success or failure of the book, it’s worth considering we are now almost two decades after it was first published in the French and many of the topics she confronts don’t seem nearly as shocking or abnormal. The book was first published in France in 1999, the same year same-sex civil unions were legalized. Now marriage equality is rule of law both in France and the United States. The English translation is entering into a very different world than Angot’s original text. I think the internet has changed our perception also by making available and normalizing a great number of sexual fantasies, inadvertently devaluing the original shock value of certain taboos.
I agree — juxtaposition is where the novel wants to thrive. The book spoke to me as a metaphor of creative process, the frustration of that experience. The idea of the author becoming her own obstacle to the story could even be intentional. I could understand Angot making some conscious choice to disrupt the narrative to convey the irritations and limits of creative expression.
The internet has changed our perception by normalizing a great number of sexual fantasies, inadvertently devaluing the original shock value of certain taboos.
HSP: Incest is certainly always going to be taboo (for good biological reason, right?) The other topics she touches on, less so. I think it will still have appeal in 2017 to readers who want their assumptions challenged, or for whom traditional notions of family, romance, or story don’t hold enough appeal. I am not that reader, though, and Angot doesn’t do enough innovation in how she tells the story to make this a captivating thought-journey. It disturbed me. Even knowing that was the aim of the author, it’s not one I’m likely to pick up again or recommend. The point at which I start to feel manipulated as the reader is usually the point when I check out. This one felt too contrived, too constructed in service of a response.
IM: Every author is manipulative to some extent, but the magic happens when authors trick us into believing we aren’t being manipulated. Maybe the problem with this text is with the voice. The attempt to be provocative is disrupting the ability to mask the manipulation, and so we are conscious of these efforts and put off by it.
November 16, 2017
Incest – Christine Angot
by Lauren Friedlander
Incest cover[Archipelago Books; 2017]
Tr. by Tess Lewis
Incest, Christine Angot’s incendiary 1999 performative autofiction now translated into English for the first time, documents the mental breakdown of a Frenchwoman, also named Christine Angot. The inciting event of her madness appears at the start to be an obsessive three-month relationship with another woman, though the novel ultimately stakes the breakdown on a formative incestuous relationship she had with her biological father, whom she did not meet until she was a teenager. Angot relates the way her father shifts wildly and unpredictably from protector, to abuser, to victim helpless against his own desire. The desire drives him mad with guilt, which he pins on his daughter, for which he punishes her gravely, near fatally, even as she clings to him.
Incest is Angot’s way out of her guilt, a way to escape the voice in her head by banishing it to paper. The first half of the novel races in an unbroken chunk of text nearly 100 pages long, sentences unraveling, repeating, curling in on themselves and sprouting tendrils there onward, of self-hatred and acute self-awareness: “For three months, I thought I was condemned to be insane. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’ll just tell this anecdote, I’m not Nietzsche, I’m not Nijinsky, I’m not Artaud, I’m not Genet, I’m Christine Angot, I have the means that I have and I make do with them. There will be an anecdote, too bad, an account of a trigger, it will be Christmas time, it will be descriptive. I’ll describe my insanity through a sudden insight. I was barely conscious of it until the previous page.”
In this story of incest, the Daughter lives in two worlds. In one, the good world, the abuse is a figment. It never happens, even as the bruises remain. In the other, the bad, He is all, the abuse is all. It is the daughter’s alpha and omega. Stockholm syndrome, the only way to cope.
In the good world, there are those who who peer into the insular world of incest, who know, who see the abuse, but for whatever reason cannot or will not act. If the daughter does reach out, she is not believed. Angot writes, after she finally confides in her half-brother about their father’s abuse: “His tone was impassive, he didn’t know whom to believe, his father had spoken to him about it, he had said I was making things up.” The incest world has its own parameters. Adheres to its own logic. In this world, the Daughter is nothing. She is only her father. So in the real world, the good one, she must write herself down. To see, objectively, the pain, the horror. The book is the only path from the bad world to the good. The only way to be believed. Angot continues after her half-brother’s apathy: “OK, fine, doesn’t matter. I’m fed up with talking about it. I’m happy the book is finished, happy.”
The first language the Daughter learns in the bad world, the language of self-hatred. The father injects her with this language, and hatred of womankind. This makes everyone in the bad world feel better. Then, the verbal abuse that objectifies the Daughter — bitches, slits, dogs — also functions as protection. She comes to see herself as an object. As a beast. Succubi, scum, single-celled organism who cannot help herself, and who cannot be helped. Angot turns to the language of self-hatred and women-hatred:
‘“I love women,’ how many times did we hear that? Saying “I love women” when you’re a man is easy. ‘I love animals’ is easy for a human.”
“When I was little, I would wrap my arms around my mother’s neck and she would say, ‘my most beautiful necklace.’ Yeah, sure, a necklace of garbage. Which goes to show you what my father made of me and my mother, of our relationship, which was beautiful before we knew each other. When Leonore was born, I had a premonition of all this. That two women were garbage showing itself.”
“I’m a dog looking for a master, no one wants to be my master anymore. And he, would he be willing to be my master again? Would I still know how to obey him? Would I know how to suck his old cock again right now, maybe his memory would come back?”
The 1999 recounting of Angot’s incestuous relationship shrouded the novel and the author in controversy, so much so that Angot was prompted to write a hasty follow-up in 2000, called Quitter la ville (Leaving the City). Here she insists that the statements of the work of autofiction are more performance than reality, autofiction instead of fact. A metafiction on society’s fundamental prohibition of incest. In fact, Angot describes her entire oeuvre as performative utterance. (For instance: throughout the novel, she equates her three-month lesbian affair with infections, sin, specifically, AIDS. But crying AIDS is her performative utterance. What she means is AIDS as in, a three-month stint of AIDS. That is, “for three months I believed I was condemned to die of that mortal illness called AIDS.” She performs AIDS. Her AIDS in turn performs queerness, her errant sexuality, and her hatred of it and her hatred of her queerness. She wishes to shake it like a cold.)
The male intellectuals who developed the theory of performative utterance in the philosophy of language and speech acts define them as sentences describing a subjective reality. Examples include: “I now pronounce you man and wife;” “I accept your apology;” “I do;” “I promise;” “I swear;” “I apologize;” “You’re fired.” Performative writing like Angot’s is derived from performative utterance. Performative writers attempt in their work to reflect the fleeting and ephemeral nature of a performance, the inherently flawed mechanisms of memory and referentiality of performance, before, during, and after. The performer is a new person in each stage. Worlds are divided, unrelated. The world at the beginning is not that of the end. Performance art theorist Peggy Phelan explains the appeal of a performative style as: “a statement of allegiance to the radicality of unknowing who we are becoming.” Performative writing promises no buttoned-up endings, no achievement of perfection. It refutes the notion of a progression, of a moving forward, the reaching of a completed end-point. It instead “enacts the death of the ‘we’ that we think we are before we begin to write.”
Because so little of her work is available in English, I must turn now to a surely-botched Google translation of Angot’s defense of her work and the duality of truth/lie within it. In Quitter la ville she says (I think): “I never want to hear again that the lives of writers are unimportant. They are more important in any case than books. It is the life of writers that counts. Know what it is. We hear the lie and we hear the truth, we hear the outside and we hear the inside . . . It is an act when one speaks. It is an act, it is not a game . . . It is not a testimony of shit as they say.”
But some contest (those male philosophers, again) that performatives are successful only if the recipients infer the intention behind the literal meaning. Therefore, the success of the performative act is determined by the receiving side.
And Angot’s work has rarely been received the way she says she intends it. In 2013, a woman sued her for €200,000 for invasion of her personal life for Angot’s novel Les Petits (The Little Ones). The tawdry details were culled directly from her life and “twisted,” almost causing the subject to commit suicide. Though Angot cried performativity, the subject insisted: “Everything is true in that book. It’s my life. She wishes me dead; she wants to destroy my children.” In the trial, Angot’s lawyer explained to the court that “auto-fiction” is a long-held tradition in France from Stendhal to Flaubert. “Christine Angot,” he claimed, “like Zola, describes reality.”
Her reality. Or the reality she wishes was actuality. In Incest, Angot writes an alternate ending for herself:
Control of this story and now I have it (let’s say). He’s lost his mind, Alzheimer’s. Me, I’ve got an edge over the incest. The power, the sadistic penis, that’s it, thanks to the pen in my hand, confidently, fundamentally. If I say “the hell with those who’ll read it” it’s because I’d rather have had something else to write about. That’s all. Writing is not choosing your narrative. But taking it, into your arms, and putting it calmly down on the page, as calmly as possible, as accurately as possible. So that he will turn over in his grave yet again, if my body is his grave. If he turns over again, it’s because I’m not dead. I’m insane, but not dead. I’m not completely insane either.
Angot is desperate for definitions, but the definitions are fickle and ever-changing. She returns to tentpoles of her stories like talismans, “licking,” the affair, her child, “Leonore, l’or,” “dog,” the clementine she ate from her father’s penis on a road trip. She searches for the reality in them, so that by returning to them, she will change with them, they will have changed within her. Even as she tells herself she will break free from these language anchors, (“I won’t write anymore, for example, ‘I licked her, this woman, whose child is a dog,’ I won’t write that anymore, what’s the point?”) she cannot help herself.
Perhaps the second language the Daughter learns then, after the language of hate from the bad world, the good language that she must learn in order to live, is the language of performativity. Of the subjectiveness of objectivity, and how living in the mind is and is not the external world. I cannot be that which I can observe, the Daughter tells herself. I am not this abuse. I am not him. I am many. This too shall pass.
Performative writing is an innately female act, because it has to do with being believed. Or disbelieved. And the ramifications of that truth. The gaze is too much for daughters. They cannot trust themselves before it. They must write themselves down, commit themselves to an object, and burn it.
“Incest is the book in which I present myself as a real shit,” Angot writes, “all writers should do it at least once.”
The objectivity of proclamation. Searing truth.
“Writing may only be doing that, showing one’s inner shit.”
But then, the Daughter questions. How can she be right, when she has been told for so long that she is not?
“Of course it isn’t. You’re ready to believe anything. Writing is not just one thing. Writing is everything. Within limits. Always. Of life, of one’s self, of the pen, of height and of weight.”
She changes with the pen. She is never all one. The word is talisman. But words, too, shall pass.
‘Incest’ by Christine Angot
Review by David Pratt
April 4, 2018
In her reflexively titled novel, Sujet Angot, French author Christine Angot quotes her ex-husband Claude, telling her, “Your writing is so unbelievable, intelligent, muddled, but always luminous, accessible, direct, physical.” Whether Claude actually said this (in l’univers Angot the possibility that a real person really said something is about the same as the possibility that they didn’t), the assessment is spot on: perhaps the best, most accurate review Angot could possibly receive. Angot works the spirit over. One is exhausted, but one also cries, Finally, an authentic experience! Rude and raw, artful but brash and unpredictable, like fighting with an animal. Not necessarily pleasant but of great value. Authors that write with clarity and decorum may never do it for you again.
Now, nearly two decades after its publication in French, we finally have Angot’s turbulent and controversial metafiction Incest (L’Inceste, 1999) in a translation by Tess Lewis (the only English translation I can find of any Angot book), published by Archipelago, a Brooklyn nonprofit whose list includes works by Breytenbach, Cortázar, Kafka, Laxness, Joseph Roth, and many others.
That brouhaha around Incest comes from its probably-pretty-much-total-but-maybe-not-quite-but-you-can’t-be-sure correspondence to reality, specifically the reality of the heterosexual Angot’s turbulent six-month liaison with the French lesbian actress Marie-Christine Adrey. “Performative” is Angot’s word for her autofiction, characterized as it is by obsessive self-examination and unbridled, visceral, nearly deranged emotion. The concept is explored again in her metafiction, Quitter la ville, which recounts the personal and media brouhaha that surrounded the publication of L’Inceste.
In L’Inceste, most of Angot’s rage and anxiety centers on what the couple will or won’t do for Christmas, and Marie-Christine’s breezy declaration that Angot is not welcome at her family’s holiday celebration. The details of Angot’s obsession with Marie-Christine are expressed as a deep, ragged, open, and very bloody wound. It is a sight mesmerizing and horrifying, but in spite of its horrors, the reader does not turn away from the muscles, tendons and bone Angot says are there and makes the reader believe are there, but whose bloody, agonizing vulnerability are routinely denied. (Fittingly, the Archipelago cover image is a blood-colored and frankly erotic abstract watercolor by Louise Bourgeois.) Angot flays herself alive, in the process making the reader as guilty as the allegedly demanding and insensitive Marie-Christine.
Angot’s agonizing over Marie-Christine ultimately turns out to be a long but necessary prelude to something simpler and more horrifying—the author’s youthful molestation by her father. Angot turns from rage and paranoia to a laser-focused slow burn. Her prose becomes somewhat easier to navigate, though her emotions and her self-abasement, along with her father’s abuses, appall the reader so frankly that the effect of these passages is almost cleansing.
For her raw rage and talent Angot is immensely admirable, but she is never cuddly or affable. Queer readers of L’Inceste might bristle immediately at her repeated insistence that she was “homosexual” for only three months. In the book’s second sentence she actually says she was “condemned” to be so. Angot often analyzes feelings and situations until her words disintegrate into a Gertrude Stein–like babble. In disintegrating and attempting desperately to reintegrate, Angot examines the process of writing—of expression—itself, along with every twist and turn of an obsessed, violated, powerless mind. The book is insanely alive, jolting the reader awake, daring to the reader fight to it; the reader emerges from these challenges dazed but uncertain who has “won.”
Claude was absolutely right: “unbelievable, intelligent, muddled, but always luminous, accessible, direct, physical.” This is what we might all hope to write, to make, to communicate. This should be everyone’s letter to the world. Let us hope more of Angot’s work reaches the English-speaking world, and soon.
Incest
By Christine Angot
Translated by Tess Lewis
Archipelago Books
Paperback, 9780914671879, 160 pp.
November 2017
ABOUT : DAVID PRATT
David Pratt is the author of three novels, Wallaçonia (Beautiful Dreamer Press), Looking After Joey (Wilde City) and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Bob the Book (Chelsea Station). David's story collection, My Movie, (Chelsea Station) includes new work and short fiction published in Christopher Street, The James White Review, Velvet Mafia, and other periodicals. David has directed and performed his work for the theater in New York City at HERE Arts Center, Dixon Place, the Cornelia Street Café, and other venues. He was one of the first directors of work by Toronto playwright John Mighton, and he is currently collaborating with Michigan-based performance artist Nicholas Williams.