Love, pain and texting

By Goran Gocić

 

In her novels written between 1990 and 1998 – Index (1990), Romance (1992), The Labours of Hercules (1994), and The Future (1998) – the French writer Camille Laurens stuck to fantasy. But something happened in the mid-90s, and she decided to open her private chambers wide to the public. She felt a need to address the audience more honestly, directly – and daringly.

This embrace of a new kind of expression – what in the 1970s the writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky christened ‘autofiction’ – in Laurens’ case was rather dramatic. In the penultimate paragraph of her novella Philippe (1995) she confesses:

Every writer has an impossible sentence. For a long time, an impossible sentence for me started with I. Until recently, I would have cited as an example, ‘I gave birth on the 7th of February.’ When I re-read the pages of this book, what dominates is a sense of tremendous effort. Until now, I always thought it unimaginable, or better still, unfeasible, to write I in a text which is going to be published, made public. For me, I is the pronoun of intimacy: its place is in love letters.

Philippe: A Confession About Motherhood

Obviously, something was going to change – Laurens would leave some readers bewildered by the intimacy of her beating her head against an invisible wall in front of them. It probably has to do with the subject of Philippe: the loss of her own child in 1994. The works of Camille Laurens have been translated into 30 languages, but Philippe hasn’t appeared anywhere outside France for 28 years, except once.

The sole translation was published in 2022 in my native language, Serbian, and Laurens came to Belgrade in May 2023 to mark its publication. We met up for lunch. She prefers to listen to people rather than speak about herself. So I confessed that my fiction started out using the first person. Camille asked me why. I suggested that the public sphere had changed significantly in recent decades, and that social networks normalised the use of I. Nowadays, the first person seems the only possible way of storytelling, of addressing others. Writing in the third person is dated, I said, even somewhat artificial, good as dead. Camille nodded her head. 

Laurens has taught a colloquium on autofiction at New York University and has fought for the method bitterly. She criticised Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Tom is Dead (2007) about the death of a child, accusing her colleague of a mimicry of pain. They shared the same Parisian publisher, P. O. L. Editeur, which sided with Darrieussecq. Laurens eventually packed her manuscripts and moved from P. O. L. to its parent company, Gallimard. 

Autofiction proved to be even more legally and emotionally costly in another dispute. Laurens was sued by her ex-husband for breaches of privacy. She eventually won the case.

In Camille’s Arms: Encounters with Men

Laurens’ writing about the emotional quirks of men is revealing, and recalls parallel male reports from a carnal battlefront or sexual underworld. Inverting sexual roles, she offers an imaginative structure erected within the underbelly of the opposite sex. Laurens’ heroines are self-conscious, intelligent, active – demanding. In a word, what men consider dangerous. My personal favourite among her books is In Those Arms (2000). Here, we experience in emotional close-up a sensual woman, craving love, and talking about men. The book, which won the prestigious Femina and Renaudot awards, made Camille Laurens famous.

‘It was an easy novel to write’, Camille told me over that lunch, ‘once I decided on the approach’.  Easy, perhaps, but not facile: it takes a brave person to come up with such an original concept. In Those Arms recounts a steady procession of men in the writer’s life. Father, husband, lover, publisher, shrink, then father again. More than anybody else, he marked her life. ‘If you don’t have anything to say, then be silent,’ her father commanded. It was advice Laurens followed to the letter. Never in her writing, nor in her public appearances, have I heard her babble or give way to verbosity. Her speech is ascetic, witty and to the point – just like her novels. They are poetic and touching, and at the same time succinct and true. 

 

Who Do I Think I Am?

We first met back in 2017. I had the pleasure of speaking at one of Laurens’ exciting book launches, which often turn into happenings. It was dedicated to her novel Who You Think I Am (2016). I did not know much about her, but we had something in common: the same publisher in Serbia.

Who You Think I Am returns to my favourite subject of hers – men and women measuring each other up, keeping afloat in an eternal ocean of love, sex and texting. I find the book a dynamic, exciting read. As with all her novels, it is unpredictable. This time, the heroine is not the married woman, Camille, from Philippe and In Those Arms. She is as free as a bird, with a taste for men younger than herself, and must be ready to develop social media skills.

The book was a bestseller, twice adapted for stage and eventually turned into a movie starring Juliette Binoche. I still hesitate to check the film out – but when it comes to reading Camille’s prose, I don’t beat around the bush. I have devoured four of her novels so far. Reading them, I feel privileged to experience a female viewpoint of such disarming clarity and insight. Indeed, I feel both flattered and blessed by the encounter. If I knew French, I would probably become one of her translators.

Call Me by My Pen Name: Being a Girl

The tragic event narrated in Philippe returns in gradations: it springs up in In those arms, and more gaps are filled in Girl (2020). Laurens reached ever deeper into her own gender and personal traumas. Girl is her own contribution to the ‘#MeToo’ movement. 

And what a reckoning it is! The coming of age in Girl has rarely been depicted with such a touching tenderness and exacting cruelty. How does one remember childhood so vividly? Girl contains a groping incident which Laurens experienced when she was 9, along with the subsequent cover-up masterminded by – who else? – the all-female council of the family. It is, in short, a masterpiece.

Laurens’ real name is Laurence Ruel-Mézières. Her pen name was chosen because it could be given to both sexes – a Camille Saint-Saëns or Camille Paglia. The pen-surname Laurens is a step away from her real name. Both are versions of the English Lawrence. Was it perhaps D. H. Lawrence who caught the imagination of her mother? Was it Lawrence of Arabia who made an impression on her father? Laurens clears up the issue in Girl:

Your father goes to the town hall to certify the birth. In front of the clerk, he cannot remember the name that was chosen if, unluckily, in case of… What was it, now? Juliette, like your godmother? No, impossible, Juliette is Romeo’s lesser half … Then? Nathalie? Annie? Sophie? – he waltzes with female names ending with e … Martine? (All I need!) Jeannine?  (Eek) Josette? Nah (ugh!). He’s completely at sea. Eventually, he remembers a movie he’s just seen, The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier… So, Marilyn? … But what if you turn out ugly when you grow up? … ‘Name of the child?’ the clerk repeats … ‘Laurence,’ he says.

In 2020, Laurens became a member of the Académie Goncourt, a jury of ten that awards the most prestigious French literary prize. They are elected for life, so ‘Laurens’ is now etched on a seat at the table where the wise wine, dine and gossip about scribes in ancient Greek symposium style. As a literary critic, Laurens can be direct, if not harsh. She regularly contributes to leading French newspapers L’Humanité and Le Monde, the magazine La Revue littéraire and the radio station France Culture. I count seven books of her essays, covering a range of subjects from analysis of language to representations of women in art.

The last of these books, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’s Masterpiece (2017), is dedicated to Marie van Goethem, child-model for the notorious 1880 sculpture by Edgar Degas. Behind the gracious artwork lurks a devilish backstage story from the 19th century Parisian slums, about a Belgian girl who worked like a dog from the age of eight and was pimped by her own mother. The book won the Ève-Delacroix Prize, and in April 2023 the sculpture was defiled by environmental activists in Washington DC. Laurens does not shy away from controversy, and controversy seeks her in return.

In May 2023, Inventing Desire: Selected Works was published. It is a thousand-page long collection of Laurens’ fiction in a single volume with interviews. ‘So, what are you working on now? It seems you have already covered a lot,’ I joked over our lunch. ‘I am writing about the end of love,’ she replied seriously.

If there is something to be learned from her work, if Camille Laurens’ books have a common moral purpose, if they recommend anything – it is sense and sensibility. A writer should be a person of their own epoch, and their task is to tackle the human condition by observing their contemporaries. What Homer, Boccaccio and Balzac did in their time, Laurens is doing now.

Photo from Who You Think I Am – courtesy of Diaphana Films