Remapping Autobiographical Space: Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Self-Effacing Self-Portraits

Abstract

This essay considers how Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Autoportrait à (l’étranger) and Mes Bureaux: Luoghi dove scrivo represent a counter-discourse to the exhibitionism and voyeurism that underpin the contemporary phenomenon of extimité, constitute a meditation on the limits of self-representation, and shed light on what Paul Gifford has called the “highlighted question mark” (226) of the subject returned from structuralist and deconstructionist exile. Self-effacing in their minimalist stance and their recourse to fiction, Toussaint's self-portraits draw attention to the transparency fallacy of autobiographical discourse as well as underscore the elusiveness of the self. As much as self-portraits these texts are literary manifestoes that assert literature's illuminating powers, not only its capacity to show the metaphysical in the mundane but also its ability to reveal a self through absence as much as presence.

Keywords:

• Jean-Philippe Toussaint
• Self-portrait in literature
• Minimalism
• Autofiction
• Autoportrait (à l’étranger)
• Mes bureaux: Luoghi dove scrivo.

Notes

1. Translations are mine, here and throughout.

2. Tisseron examines the 2001 French reality television program “Loft Story” to argue that a cultural shift toward exhibitionism and voyeurism is occurring in France.

3. In addition to Toussaint, Motte includes Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Christian Oster, Christian Gailly, Marie NDiaye, and Eric Chevillard in this new generation. Emerging on the literary scene in the mid-1980s, their novels, at once highly unconventional and thoroughly readable, constitute a way out of the “dead end in literary research” of the experimental writing of the 1960s and 1970s in which the metadiscursive “buried” the discursive (217).

4. In the 1950s and 1960s with structuralism and subsequently poststructuralism and deconstructionism, critical engagement with the subject took a negative turn. The subject “returns” in the mid-1970s but bears the marks of its problematization. As Gratton notes, “the subject which “returns” from structuralist exile is neither pejoratively overspecified nor neutrally unspecified, but a concept and a value open to various forms and degrees of positive re-specification in the light of its preceding critique” (5).

5. For more on the minimalist dimension of Toussaint's writing and of the contemporary French novel, see Motte's Small Worlds. Toussaint prefers the neologism “infinitesimalist” to “minimalist,” as it captures his preoccupation with both the small and the infinite, the everyday and the metaphysical (Demoulin interview).

6. For more on the paradoxical epistemology of the intimate, see Mura-Brunel's “Intime/Extime – Introduction.”

7. The focus on Japan is due in part to the fact that many of the narratives originated as commissioned essays in which Toussaint was to write about his impressions as a Western writer in residence in Japan. The narrative that problematizes Japan as a locus amoenus shows Toussaint being coerced into entering a strip club wherein he witnesses the dehumanizing effects of sexual commerce.

8. The Doubrovskian autofictionneur accrues, as Hughes observes, “seductive powers […] as he renders himself compelling, through his enriching self-reconfiguration as a ‘héros de roman’” (568).

9. For a more detailed consideration of this text, see my “Inside the Writer's Studio: Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Mes bureaux: Luoghi dove scrivo.”