Abstract
20th-century French author, Marguerite Yourcenar, prefaces the first volume of her autobiographical/genealogical trilogy, Dear Departed with a 13th-century Zen koan: What is your original face before your parents were born? In the context of the meticulously researched family history of her maternal line, Yourcenar examines the foundations and major resources of individual and collective self-writing in light of Buddhist discourses on the nature of self, while offering an incisive critique of and alternative to the function of genealogical inquiry.
Highlights
20th-century French author, Marguerite Yourcenar, prefaces the first volume of her autobiographical/genealogical trilogy, Dear Departed with a 13th-century Zen koan: What is your original face before your parents were born? In the context of the meticulously researched family history of her maternal line, Yourcenar examines the foundations and major resources of individual and collective self-writing in light of Buddhist discourses on the nature of self, while offering an incisive critique of and alternative to the function of genealogical inquiry
Yourcenar came of age as a writer just as the fascination with Alexandra David-Neel’s descriptions of magic and mystery in Tibet swept through
Unlike many writers of the same period, who either imitated Buddhist-inflected thought and stylistics or used them to critique Western modernity, Yourcenar’s literary experiments with Buddhist texts and teachings functioned as a mode of contemplative inquiry set in the context of her particular intellectual and cultural idiom and lived experience. Yourcenar turned her attention from historical fiction to her own place in genealogical, literary, and spiritual lineages
Summary
In her first attempt to weave the text together, Yourcenar adopts the usual strategy of autobiographical writing: narrative coherence through the medium of the narrative voice, primarily in the form of repeated interventions. Despite the attempt to create the illusion of agency, control, or center, the narrative voice falls back upon its own insubstantiality The shattering of these illusions allows Yourcenar to move beyond the boundary of self and other and to realize a kind of empathic interconnection with Fernande, which foreshadows the rest of her text: “Today, my current effort to recapture and recount her history fills me with a sympathy for her that I have not felt heretofore. She is much like these characters, imaginary or real, that I nourish with my own substance to try and make them live, or live once again” She is much like these characters, imaginary or real, that I nourish with my own substance to try and make them live, or live once again” (Yourcenar 1991, p. 53)
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