February 14, 2018
In November of last year, as charges of sexual abuse filled the news, the English translation of “L’Inceste,” by the French writer Christine Angot, arrived in American bookstores. First published in 1999, the book describes, with unsparing precision, a woman’s incestuous relationship with her father, which began when she was fourteen and continued into her late twenties. The narrator, also a middle-aged writer named Christine Angot, embarks on an obsessive relationship with a woman (her first), suffers a manic-depressive breakdown, and recalls, in the process, her father’s abusive coercion. In interviews, Angot has repeatedly—if obliquely—claimed this experience of incest as her own. She told a French journalist that, when she was twenty-eight, she attempted to file charges against her father, but the officer said that too much time had passed. "The only thing worthwhile is literature,” she told the writer. “Justice, the police, it's nothing.”
In France, the book sold seventy thousand copies in the first three months of its release—a huge number there—and vaulted Angot to literary celebrity. French Elle published a joint interview with her and Michel Houellebecq, accompanied by a photograph of the two writers in bed: the irreverent darlings of the fin-de-millénaire Parisian literary scene. Today, Angot remains a prominent public intellectual, notorious for her operatic outbursts. On a recent TV talk-show panel, Angot had a furious disagreement with Sandrine Rousseau, a politician who had recently accused an M.P. of sexual harassment, which left both women in tears. Earlier this month, she lambasted the recent crop of actors who have disavowed their work with Woody Allen, dismissing them as hypocritical opportunists who should have refused to act in his movies from the start.
In her writing, Angot appears to aim her vitriol at family and friends along with enemies. In 2013, the ex-wife of Angot’s then boyfriend sued the writer for two hundred thousand euros, claiming that Angot’s most recent book, which featured the woman as a thinly fictionalized character, had nearly driven her to suicide: “It’s my life,” the woman said. “She wishes me dead; she wants to destroy my children.” But Angot, a genre-bender in the spirit of Marguerite Duras and Hervé Guibert, has rejected tidy autobiographical readings of her work—in a 1995 interview, when asked about the Christine Angot in many of her books, she said, “I do not consider them to be the same narrator. I believe that they represent different personas of the writer Angot.” In 1998, while writing “L’Inceste,” she defended her style in Le Monde: “People seem to think that I am feeding off others; but, when I write, I’m the one who is being consumed.” Shortly after the book was published, she said, “There is neither morality nor responsibility in literature.”
Throughout “L’Inceste,” Angot describes extremes of cruelty in a voice that itself bristles with cruelty. The book is full of heady meta-narratives about authorship and genre, and dominated by a repetitive interior monologue in which the narrator circles through manic fixations, endlessly contradicting herself. She compels the reader to sympathize with her, doubt her, and resent her, sometimes simultaneously. She also confounds preconceptions about sexual abuse and its aftermath. “This book will be seen as a shit piece of testimony,” she writes. “What else could I do? What else?”
Angot begins the book by declaring that she was “condemned” to homosexuality for three months, but doesn’t say who, exactly, was condemning her. Her ex-husband, her mother, and her daughter all condone the relationship, and yet she meets this acceptance with even deeper self-loathing: “Everyone understood. It was perfectly clear. I slunk along the walls, the barriers, like slicing them, with a razor, slicing veins and my luck. A razor in the rock wall, pierre, my father’s name is Pierre, and on this rock I will build my church, that’s literature, I will carve it out, a wall of books, a wailing wall, incest, insanity, homosexuality, holocaust, start strong, my jacket, my big shoes, and my razor.” (Given Angot’s antagonism toward conventional syntax, the English translation, by Tess Lewis, is a feat of perspicuity.)
“L’Inceste” can be maddening, and even repulsive, but it is a remarkably accurate evocation of a troubled mind. Reading it is like watching Angot feel around in a drawer of blades, ready to attack anyone who draws near—her lover, her critics, her readers, herself. She fears that any relationship might reduce her to a formulaic identity—just as, in the eyes of society, her relationship with her father has made her a mere victim. Her work, above all, is about rejecting these codified narratives.
When “L’Inceste” was published in France, it prompted widespread alarm among critics. Many derided Angot as a provocateur who mined personal tragedy for profit. In a review for L’Express, titled “This Girl Is Dangerous,” the writer Christine Ferniot excoriated Angot for her “panting exhibitionism.” After attending an Angot reading in 2000, a critic for Le Parisien remarked that Angot represented a “kind of obscenity that everyone seems to feast on.” Michel Braudeau, then the editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française, referred to Angot’s writing on incest as “a scandalous theme perfect for getting column inches in the weeklies.”The book’s arrival in the U.S., nearly twenty years later, has been a quieter affair. But the timing is apt—not only because of the swarming headlines but because it follows the release of “The Incest Diary,” a memoir published last summer by an anonymous American author. “The Incest Diary” is a raw, relentless text, filled with unflinching descriptions of the author’s sexual abuse at the hands of her father, which began when she was three years old. The book alternates between scenes from childhood and adulthood, all of which cohere around a searing confession: because her father conditioned her to endure his abuse, the author came to crave it, to solicit it without his coercion, and to reënact it with subsequent partners. In her head, she holds two thoughts about him. She writes, “I want him to think that I’m sexy. And I want to savagely mutilate his body and feed his corpse to the dogs.”
“The Incest Diary” is carefully wrought. Compared with “L’Inceste,” it reads like a straightforward treatise: an argument that complicated, confusing desires, even desires born of abuse, can be channelled into consensual sex—like the father-daughter role-playing that the author acts out with her current partner—rather than cleansed through the healing rituals we expect victims to want. “The Incest Diary” is much more sexually graphic than “L’Inceste.” Though Angot makes it clear that her experience of incest informs each part of her life, she writes comparatively little about sex itself—even her encounters with her girlfriend are drained of any eroticism. In “The Incest Diary,” the writing is often feverish, communicating the confusing, involuntary pleasure that the author felt alongside the psychic and physical pain. “Writing this arouses me,” she tells us. “I can’t help it. If I think about my father, the blood rushes between my legs.”
Despite these differences, reviews of the two books, written decades and continents apart, have much in common. Again and again, critics pick apart the authors’ methods and motives rather than engage with the thornier issues of taboo and transgression. The author of “The Incest Diary” took pains to preserve her anonymity, and was derided as a likely fraud. (David Aaronovitch, in the Times of London, writes that “a very well-respected psychotherapist, when I told him in detail what was in the book, was sceptical.”) Angot defended with equal vehemence her right to expose people, and was pilloried as a shameless exhibitionist. Both women have been criticized for profiting from their stories. In the Telegraph, Allison Pearson charges that “The Incest Diary” was written to make headlines and sell “a shedload of copies,” as if the author “sat down to write the publishing sensation of The Summer of ’17.” In Newsweek, Lisa Schwarzbaum described the book as a work of “brutal sensationalism, discreetly packaged in a quietly designed product (almost the brown paper bag that men used to wrap around porn).”
Reviewers of “L’Inceste” avoided calling it porn, but, as with “The Incest Diary,” it provoked severe discomfort: Is there any part of this that we enjoy reading? Just as Angot and the author of “The Incest Diary” struggle with the question of whether they were complicit in their own abuse, readers of their books may grapple with the same question. Are we voyeurs or witnesses? Do we judge the women’s behavior, and, if so, according to what ethical standard?
These are not conventional redemption narratives; neither woman emerges as a survivor. Halfway through “L’Inceste,” Angot declares herself insane, and vows weakly to reform her mind and her writing: “Everything will be in the proper order from here and maybe even make me happy some day. And I’m going to try to be polite.” She reads through a dictionary on psychoanalysis and paraphrases its descriptions of incest, paranoia, narcissism, suicide, and schizophrenia. But once she begins to incorporate other definitions—of homosexuality, perversion, Nazism—her playacting of the dutiful psychoanalytic patient breaks down. Psychiatry, after all, exists within a specific, evolving cultural framework. Growing up, why was she taught that homosexuality was a mental illness, while Fascism wasn’t? Psychotherapy is valuable to her, but literature is what saves her; as Angot wrote in Le Monde, in 2008, “The time when I nearly went mad, everyone was saying, ‘She’s not mad, she’s a writer.’ Being published and getting coverage is important, it’s a gauge of mental health.” In “L’Inceste,” she calls writing a defense against madness.
The unnamed author of “The Incest Diary” avoids psychiatric categorizations altogether. She cites research drawn from psychology and behavioral science—mice abused in their nests are just as likely to return home as those that aren’t; prisoners raped by their captors learn to find pleasure in the sex in order to survive—but stops short of diagnosing herself. Like Angot, she is ambivalent about cures. (She loves her first husband, who provides her with a safe, caring home, but, after six sexless years, is relieved to leave him in order to pursue her repressed desires.) Perhaps her sexuality isn’t a poison to be flushed out, or a spell to be broken. So much of what happened to her evades comprehension: “Maybe all of the things I do are about my father raping me before I knew how to read or write.” By the end of the book, she seems no closer to a life unchained from the memory of her abuse.
There is something bracing about this refusal of resolution. Both women insist that the reader enter a moral labyrinth rather than watching the writer navigate it from afar. It is a painful experience but also one that makes us feel, viscerally, how easy definitions of victimhood can obscure the complex, often paradoxical realities of actual victims. When “L’Inceste” was first published, an interviewer asked Angot what she hoped to achieve. “My ambition is to be unmanageable,” she said. “That people swallow me and at the same time cannot digest me.”
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