Christine Angot or the Autofiction as Apneic Literature

Abstract

A new literary genre is theorised in the seventies in France, autofiction, which combines characteristics of autobiography (especially what is called the nominal pact, the fact the the first person narrative has the same name as the author’s) and of fiction (especially what is called symbolic conversion), in that the facts are not entirely realistic. There are in fact two kinds of autofiction : one which emphasizes on fiction (for instance a novel called Truismes by Marie Darrieussecq) and the other one whose interest resides on encoding the “author’s” voice. The last kind of autofiction, illustrated here by Christine Angot’s books published from early 90’s, has not been clearly defined by narratologists, because its definition requires a deeper commitment of scholars in social description that formalist literary studies are not able to give. The signification of this literature is not to be established by a post-romantic aesthetics, and one proof would be Christine Angot’s novel Inceste: a “her-story” told in direct speech, to which the reader listen more than he reads it. What is transmitted is more an emergency of talking underlining a forgotten force of literature: the “immediate” expression of a psyche, of a human energy. Is that literature or not? Is it “for real” or only a literary convention made to impress the reader and to suspend all “aesthetic judgment”?

Keywords

• autofiction
• Christine Angot
• narratology
• expression