Women writing in contemporary France

52 Rewriting the past
4 Note that the French for memory is souvenir, so when Mélie takes down the sign
over the door of the Hermitage claiming that this is her only souvenir (Rose Mélie
Rose,p.15), her words can be read on two levels – the sign will act as a souvenir of
her life in the Hermitage and as her only memory.
5 Marie Redonnet, Nevermore (Paris: POL, 1994).
6 Milan Kundera, Identity (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 43.
7 Luce Irigaray, ‘Flesh colours’, in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 153–65 (p. 161).
8 Marie Redonnet, Le Cirque Pandor followed by Fort Gambo (Paris: POL, 1994).
9 Marie Redonnet, Seaside (Paris: Minuit, 1992).
10 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 5.
11 Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso,
1995), p. 12.
12 Mélie in Rose Mélie Rose is the best illustration of this as she takes twelve photographs
throughout the course of the text.
13 Marie Redonnet, L’Accord de paix (Paris: Grasset, 2000).
14 See Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Seuil,
1980), p. 123, where Barthes contends that ‘dans la Photographie, la presence de
la chose . . . n’est jamais métaphorique’ (in the Photograph, the presence of the
object . . . is never metaphorical).
15 See, for example, the photograph taken of Yem and Mélie by Cob, p. 112, in which
Yem and Mélie do not appear.
16 It should be pointed out, however, that my reading of the title ‘Sise Memories’ is
in direct opposition to that suggested by Fieke Schoots in Passer en douce à la
douane: l’écriture minimaliste de Minuit: Deville, Echenoz, Redonnet et Toussaint
(Amsterdam and Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 1997). Schoots reads ‘Sise Memories’ as
‘cease memories’, claiming that the title calls for an end to memory (p. 95).
17 In other of Redonnet’s texts such as Rose Mélie Rose and Seaside, bloodstains constitute
‘memory texts’.
18 Marie Redonnet, Silsie (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 125.
19 See Marie Darrieussecq, ‘Marie Redonnet et l’écriture de la mémoire’, in
Dominique Viart (ed.), Ecritures contemporaines 1: mémoires du récit (Paris and
Caen: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1998), pp. 177–94.
20 Christian Michel, ‘Le réel dort aussi: un panorama du jeune roman français’,
Esprit, 225 (1996), 43–67.
21 Marie Redonnet, ‘Réponses pour une question brouillée’, Quai Voltaire, 2 (1991),
45–8 (47–8).