Activism and Autofiction: Chloé Delaume's Response to the Patrick Le Lay Affair

ABSTRACT

This article offers a close analysis of Chloé Delaume's 2006 novel, J'habite dans la télévision, written as an autofictional, experimental response to French TV channel president Patrick Le Lay's remark that the primary job of television is to sell “available human brain time” to sponsors. In it I argue that the novel responds to the Le Lay scandal through two intertwined strands. First, by comparing it to the film Super Size Me, I show that it is a means of attention-attracting activism through a responsive gesture; second, I demonstrate that it is an integral part of Delaume's autofictional project, as a text where she lives her writerly project as opposed to writing her life.

KEYWORDS:

• Delaume
• Le Lay
• autofiction
• activism
• screens
• scandal

Notes

1. Le Lay's remarks were published in the collective work Les Dirigeants face au changement (Éditions du Huitième jour, 2004). They were spread through such French media outlets as Le Figaro, L'Express, and Le Nouvel Observateur. They are archived on the media watch dog site Acrimed, http://www.acrimed.org/Le-Lay-TF1-vend-du-temps-de-cerveau-humain-disponible. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise noted.

2. Hereafter abbreviated as JHT.

3. Delaume's more detailed description of the project and five of the ‘pièces sonores’ can be accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20070905002440/http://www.chloedelaume.net:80/chantier-sonores/j-habite-dans-la-television.php (accessed 5 June 2017).

4. Hereafter abbreviated as SSM.

5. The novel Certainement pas (2004) was published after the first two, but before JHT.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dawn M. Cornelio

Dawn M. Cornelio is Professor of French Studies at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on contemporary French women's writing and the theory and the practice of literary translation. In addition to giving many conference papers and authoring a number of articles on Chloé Delaume, she is currently creating a critical website analyzing the author's work, and translating her novel Certainement pas, into English for publication at the University of Nebraska Press.