L’écriture de soi : genres discursifs, mode discursif ? Le récit des internements de Janet Frame : Faces in the Water, An Autobiography

Abstract

This paper is an attempt at defining self-writing, in fictionalized texts or not, as a mode of communication. In Faces in the Water (1961) and An Autobiography (1991), Janet Frame depicts psychiatric hospitals as prisons. We examine the denominations and the descriptions of places, doctors and nurses, patients to show that metaphorical language, highly present in the fictionalized narrative, enables the reader to gain access to the experience the implied author made of it. From the point of view of the reader’s expectations, authenticity opposes fictionalized and non fictionalized self-writing. However, it is stylistic devices (similes, metaphors, metonymies) that best enable the reader to feel a reality that can only be symbolically represented, be it in a fictional narrative or in a narrative that claims to conform to the authentic. The fictional acts as a reflector of self-consciousness, the world of the text as a reflector of the real word.