The Traumatic Structure of the récit de mort: Camille Laurens’ Philippe

Abstract

One year after the perinatal death of her son through medical negligence, Camille Laurens published Philippe (1995), a brief récit de mort detailing the conditions which led to his loss, and her own grieving process. This article proposes that the immediacy of the scriptural act gives the reader direct access to the traumatic scene. Through pronounced hybridity and fragmentation, Laurens reproduces in textual form her own experience of trauma. The text is a site which replicates the incomprehensibility of the traumatic encounter in a twofold manner, for both writer and reader. The death of a child as a “limit-experience” (Wilson) exceeds the bounds of representation and challenges the strictures of a flowing narrative.

Keywords:

• Trauma
• Camille Laurens
• récit de mort
• child death
• loss
• inexpressibility

Notes

Notes

1 Born at 1:10 p.m., the infant was declared dead at 3:20 p.m. (see Laurens, Philippe 14). The diagnosis established following the autopsy, together with a specialist’s report, identified an untreated foetomaternal infection which degenerated into pulmonary and cardiac complications for the baby, whose manifestations included tachycardia, bradycardia, and pneumonia.

2 The original edition of Philippe, published by P.O.L, is seventy-two pages long.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adina Stroia

Adina Stroia is a Teaching Fellow at University College London and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, IMLR. Her research focuses on life-writing, psychoanalysis, thanatography, and visual studies. Her current project investigates the ways in which Agnès Varda mobilizes the tension between photography and moving image to represent her own aging process in her late documentaries.