Christine Montalbetti’s Unreasonable Mission

Abstract

In Mon ancêtre Poisson (2019), Christine Montalbetti looks through her family tree in order to find the oldest ancestor whom she can identify, one Jules Poisson (1833–1919), her great-great-grandfather. The book is quite unlike any other that she has written to this point, and it bears the traces of a variety of techniques. A great deal of documentary, archival research certainly went into it, but so did a lot of speculation. Hard fact and objective, even scientific data rub elbows with very personal considerations. Flatly declarative narration gives way to an impassioned intergenerational conversation, and vice versa. Montalbetti’s project is not merely biographical in character. It is a novel, after all, and if its main protagonist often occupies the center of the narrative stage, the book is not solely and uniquely about him. For if Montalbetti is manifestly concerned with understanding who her great-great-grandfather was in his life, she is also concerned with what that very understanding might mean in her own life. In other terms, this is a book about him, but it is also a book about her—and about the vexed notion of contact between one person and another, across a gap measuring several generations.

Keywords:

• Montalbetti
• Mon ancêtre Poisson
• biography
• autobiography
• ancestry
• botany
• mourning

Notes

1 Umberto Eco characterizes that latter process as “constructing the reader,” and devotes a chapter to it in his Postscript to The Name of the Rose: “What model reader did I want as I was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game” (50).

2 See Barthes, “Un nom propre doit être toujours interrogé soigneusement, car le nom propre est, si l’on peut dire, le prince des signifiants; ses connotations sont riches, sociales et symboliques” (“Analyse” 34).

3 See Schwerdtner: “Car, de mon point de vue, l’écriture est toujours un geste adressé, qui n’a de sens que dans l’idée que le texte en cours sera lu” (173).

4 See Jonathan Cohen: “The hallmark of a rational pursuit of knowledge is not pessimism but skepticism about dogmas and an insistence on theories that move closer and closer to reality” (222).

5 See Comment parler des faits qui ne se sont pas produits? “La notion de vérité subjective est inacceptable au regard de celle de vérité factuelle et ne saurait lui être substituée. Elle est pourtant déterminante dans nos comportements. Refuser d’y prêter attention, c’est prendre le risque de ne rien comprendre à la manière dont nous mêlons sans cesse dans nos vies imaginaire et réalité, et aux raisons pour lesquelles nous aimons disserter inlassablement de faits qui ne se sont pas produits” (26).

6 See Bayard, who speaks of “le droit imprescriptible de l’être humain à raconter des histoires” (154).

7 See Marc Le Bot, Les Yeux de mon père: “Nos oeuvres, et nos écritures, n’accompagnent pas la vie afin d’en conserver pieusement des fragments. Elles accompagnent la vie parce qu’elle part, qu’elle ne cesse de partir et que, nécessairement, on l’accompagne. À sa suite on erre” (12–13).

8 See for example: “Je lis par-dessus ton épaule, tiens, quelque chose sur l’usage militaire des pigeons voyageurs, et je me plonge avec toi dans ces histoires de volatiles auxquels on confie des missions d’État” (215).

9 On strategies of engagement in Montalbetti’s writing, see Motte, “Christine Montalbetti’s Engaging Narrations.”

10 Montalbetti’s “Japanese cycle” includes works like L’Évaporation de l’oncle, Love Hotel, and the short story “Hôtel Komaba Éminence.” Her “American cycle” includes Western, Journée américaine, En écrivant Journée américaine, and Plus rien que les vagues et le vent.

11 See Philippe Lejeune’s remark about Georges Perec’s writing: “Il y a dans tous ses textes une place pour moi, pour que je fasse quelque chose. Un appel à moi comme à un partenaire, un complice, je dois prendre le relais” (41).

12 See Narrative as Theme: “More specifically, we are all familiar with the category of the unnarratable or nonnarratable, which evokes the topos of the inexpressible without being limited to it and which comprises everything that according to a given narrative cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating—either because it transgresses a law (social, authorial, generic, formal), or because it defies the power of a particular narrator (or of any narrator), or because it falls below the so-called threshold of narratability (it is not sufficiently unusual or problematic: that is, interesting)” (28–29).

13 See “Mourning and Melancholia”: “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (243).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Warren Motte

Warren Motte is Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. In 2015, the French Republic named him a Knight in the Order of Academic Palms for career service to French culture. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), Mirror Gazing (2014), French Fiction Today (2017), and Pour une littérature critique (2021).