Écrire le je(u) de l’histoire : la confrontation générique de l’autofiction doubrovskienne et l’écriture de l’histoire

Abstract

Telling an individual lived story; unravelling the knots of national History: this is how the vast literary project of Serge Doubrovsky (a Parisian academic living in the USA) might be summarised. Doubrovsky’s writing is a literary attempt to translate the wounds that WWII left on him and on his writing. Usually reduced to the controversial genre of autofiction, his œuvre, just like the definition of history proposed by Michel de Certeau, “opens up a specific space within the present: “to mark” the past means making room to the dead one, but also redistributing the space of possibilities.” This paper deals with the “space[s] of possibilities” that Serge Doubrovsky’s autofiction makes possible. When analysed in parallel with de Certeau’s understanding of writing, Serge Doubrovsky’s autofiction appears to offer a space for an experimentation and expansion of language, which is grounded in personal and shared experiences of French history. De Certeau affirms that “to the extent that our relationship to language always is a relation to death, the historical discourse is the privileged representation of a ‘science of the subject’ and of the subject ‘caught into a constitutive division’ – but through the staging of relations that a social body has with a language.” What to conclude about the Doubrovskian experience of writing? Could an autofictional work claim to be a historical narration? Between history and autofiction, which narration precedes the other? This article studies the possibility of the co-existence between History and the man who makes the story.

Keywords

• Doubrovsky
• autofiction
• writing
• history
• hybridity
• autobiography