Life by the Letter

Abstract

Contemporary French literature testifies as a whole to a rhetorical consciousness-or, to be more precise, a nonconsciousness-in the grip of autobiography. Beyond the merely conventional distinction, nothing differentiates it any longer from the novel. And for its part, the novel is subjected, sometimes retrospectively, to the injunction of experience. Take, for example, the case of someone like Robbe-Grillet, who, in the wake of Claude Simon or Marguerite Duras, no longer hesitates to make staggering revelations about the autobiographical nature of a swing bridge at the origin of The Erasers, or of a door described in Projet pour une revolution a New York. (That door belongs to the house where I was born. It is thus an object that must be highly tainted, if not by the unconscious, then at least by the relationship to the mother.)' Even new novelists finally grow old; they eventually have the right to a life, an unconscious, and a mother. It is increasingly difficult to find differences between fiction, autofiction, and autobiography; and the author, once buried with such pomp and ceremony by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Blanchot, among others, is really not faring so badly. His powers of resurrection were, it seems, seriously underestimated. We are undergoing-oh joys of democracy-a constant blackmail in the name of human rights. Since the important thing is my freedom of expression, or more precisely my right to express myself, what does it matter if I tell the story of my life or of someone else's? It's not because nothing happens to me that I'm going to keep my mouth shut. Moreover, Rimbaud and Freud-and even before them, Stendhal-are there to justify the ambiguities and trafficking