Child Death in Recent French Literature

Family Tragedies: Child Death in Recent French Literature Gill Rye The death of a child throws a family into disorder, rocks its very foundations. It is what parents fear most. In the family, and in society more generally, a child’s death is almost always perceived as a wrongful death. For the parents, the experience of losing a child is a ‘limit experience’, an irreparable loss.1 All too fearfully imaginable before its occurrence, such a loss nonetheless proves unimaginable even in the face of its stark and tragic reality. In the wider socio- cultural sphere, the death of a child is so shocking – and, one might add, given its coverage in the popular media, so compelling – because it is felt to be a reversal of the natural order of things. In the UK, following the conviction in 2003 of Ian Huntley to life imprisonment for the Soham murders, the parents of the murdered 10 year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman spoke to the press of their own ‘life sentence’ – sentenced as parents to live (or rather survive) without their daughters.2 1 The term ‘limit-experience’ is used in Trauma Studies. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), p. 205, where it is used specifically in the context of the Holocaust. Emma Wilson uses the term ‘limit-subject’ in the context of the loss of a child, for which there is no repair or reparation (Cinema’s Missing Children (London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2003), p. 153). Similarly, Henry Krystal posits the loss of a child by parents as ‘an example of one [loss] that may not be capable of completion’ (‘Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-year Follow Up’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 76-99 (p.84)). 2 Paul Cheston and Patrick McGowan, ‘We are Living our own Life Sentences’ (report on Soham trial verdict), Evening Standard, 17 December 2003, p. 3. 268 Gill Rye In France, a number of literary texts have been published over the last decade dealing with the death of a child from the perspective of a bereaved parent, contributing to the genre referred to by Jacques Drillon as the récit de mort.3 This chapter analyses a group of four such récits de mort from the period: Camille Laurens’s Philippe (1995); Philippe Forest’s L’Enfant éternel (1997); Laure Adler’s À ce soir (2001); and Aline Schulman’s Paloma (2001).4 All very different from each other in form and in style and in the circumstances of the child’s death, they nonetheless display some striking similarities, which warrant their grouping together here. They are all autobiographical accounts, although Forest’s text is written as a novel, which won him the Prix Femina du Premier Roman in 1997. Two of the texts relate to recent loss and two are written some years afterwards. Laurens and Adler write about the loss of their baby sons; Laurens writing in the months following the death of Philippe which occurred just two hours and ten minutes after he was born, and Adler writing 17 years after the loss of her 9 month-old baby Rémi from a respiratory problem. Forest and Schulman both lost their young daughters to cancer; Forest, like Laurens, writing his novel soon after the death of his 4 year-old daughter and Schulman’s text, in a similar way to that of Adler, written 16 years after the death of her daughter at the age of 8. Interestingly, given the thrust of this article, Kevin Wells has published a book about his daughter’s death (Goodbye, Dearest Holly (Psychology News Press, 2005), translated into French as Ma fille s’appelait Holly (Paris: Privé, 2005). 3 Jacques Drillon, Face à face (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p.129; see also Emmanuel Bouju, ‘Romans et tombeaux: l’insoutenable indétermination du genre’, in L’Éclatement des genres au XXe siècle, ed. Marc Dambre and Monique Gosselin- Noat (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2001), pp. 319-30, for a discussion of genre with reference to Philippe Forest’s text. 4 Camille Laurens, Philippe (Paris. P.O.L., 1995); Philippe Forest, L’Enfant éternel (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Laure Adler, À ce soir (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); Aline Schulman, Paloma (Paris: Seuil, 2001). Other examples are Jacques Drillon’s Face à face about the death of his stepson, aged 25, from a brain tumour, in which he attempts to define their relationship; Janine Massard’s autobiographical novel, Comme si je n’avais pas traversé l’été (Vevey: L’Aire bleue, 2001), the account of losing both her husband and her 24 year old daughter to cancer within a short space of time. See also Hélène Cixous, Le Jour où je n’étais pas là (Paris: Galilée, 2000) on the death of a Downs Syndrome baby. The theme of child death has also been treated in recent fiction by Marie Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants (Paris: P.O.L., 2001), in which each member of a family is still haunted by the drowning of a little boy, many years after the event. .

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