Conflicting relations in Christine Angot’s Un amour impossible [‘An Impossible Love’]

Abstract

As a force that both sets apart and drives together, impelling a relationship even as it impedes it, conflict pervades Christine Angot’s œuvre. The incestuous abuse that she figures so insistently seems to encapsulate the violence of this double bind, and in narrative terms, its ‘victor or vanquished’ outcome. In several of her polemical works, which both invite and unsettle an autobiographical reading, the narrator ‘Christine’ compulsively articulates the harrowing details of her abuse. Her speaking out has the effect of suppressing her mother’s perspective, and the latter supplants the father as the focus of Christine’s hostility. Angot’s 2015 publication, Un amour impossible, by contrast, marks an attempt to accommodate the mother’s side of the story. By unpicking the narrative dynamics of the text, this article evaluates the success of this endeavour, and considers how the conflicting relations Angot portrays cut through illusions of balance and concord in relational life-writing.