The Memoirs of a Survivor de Doris Lessing. Le récit passe-muraille

Abstract

Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor : through the Walls of Representation This paper aims at defining the nature of Memoirs of a Survivor as a fictional narrative. Through its formal structure and mode of writing, Lessing’s novel encroaches upon a certain number of literary traditions and conventions of discourse. The title (“ through the walls of representation”) refers to the plot of the book of course, but also (and to a greater extent ) to the notion of hybridization, as well as to that of threshold. Playing upon its very title, Memoirs of a Survivor places itself on the borderline between novelistic narrative and historical chronicle, thus questioning the validity, or at least the “scientificity” of some historiographical devices. Secondly, the particular relationship between the two rival universes of the novel calls for a development on the concept of heterotopia. This concept seems to constitute both the basis and the “ ideological ” outcome of the book : the somewhat unexpected combination of a religious stance (millenarianism and experience of the sublime - which Lyotard might see as a “postmodern” occurrence) and of a typically postmodernist practice (derepresentation).