Elämät sanoissa. Eletty ja kerrottu epäjatkuvuus Sarrauten, Durasin, Robbe-Grillet'n ja Perecin omaelämäkerrallisissa teksteissä

Abstract

Sisältö: I Johdanto II Epäjatkuvan kirjoituksen koekenttä: sodanjälkeiset uudet romaanit III Elämäntarinan repeämät IV Katkonaiset elämänkulut ja omaelämäkerran vakiohetket V Kaksi epäjatkuvuuden tyyppiä: leikkaus ja kirjailu VI Neljä myöhäismodernia elämänkulkua: koominen, traaginen, romanttinen ja ironinen VII Lopuksi

My aim in this study is to analyse aspects of discontinuity in French autobiographical texts from the 1970's and 1980's. The corpus consists of four late modern autobiographies - Nathalie Sarrautes's Enfance (1983), Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984), Alain Robbe-Grillet's Le miroir qui revient (1984) and Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975) - which question the linear form of modern autobiography. Instead of following the modern ideal of autobiographical narration these texts dialogue with another modern autobiographical line, rooted in Stendhal's digressive autobiographical text, Vie de Henri Brulard (1980), and along with it the whole marginal Western tradition of discontinuous literary forms: analytic biography from the Antiquity; medieval short forms (fabliau, conte), Renaissance autobiography (Montaigne's Essays); parodic tradition of novel (Cervantes, Sterne); romantic fragments (Novalis, Schlegel); French 'Petits Romantiques' from the 1830's; modernist literature (Proust, Joyce, Woolf); different types of Nouveau Roman; postmodern fragmentary autobiographical literature (autofiction).

The landscape of postwar French discontinuous autobiographical writing, the landscape of 'white literature', constitutes subject of this investigation - Lives in Words. Lived and Narrated Discontinuity - and my aim is to map it by imitating various perspectives of different surveyors unequal in size. The standpoint of this study is Benoit Mandelbrot's (1975) idea of the variety of length of the littoral of Brittany (Bretagne) in accordance with the methods of measuring. According to this theory of fractals my study is structurally divided in two parts: the first part (chapters II-V) in which the idea of discontinuity - e.g. digressive and fragmentary autobiographical landscape - constitutes the perspective of my textual analysis, and the second part (chapter VI) in which I strive for adopting the perspective of continuity. Appropriating Northrop Frye's (1957) theory of myths I sketch out four late modern models of life course: comedic, tragic, romantic, and ironic.

In the textual analysis of autobiographical discontinuity I adopt perspectives of different scope, following the idea of going from bigger contexts towards the smaller ones. Thus, in the second chapter, discontinuous autobiographical texts are situated in the general framework of French literary history, and particularly of three postwar literary avantgarde movements (L.G, Oulipo, Nouveau Roman) these authors adhered, and their respective concepts of 'new realistic literature', that shaped ground for the reception of their autobiographical books published later, in the 1970's and 1980's. In the third and fourth chapter, the reference framework is more particularly modern autobiography, its history and rhetorical figures (autobiographical intention, turning point, closure) from the 18th century onwards. In the fifth chapter my analytical perspective is very close to what could be called the 'perspective of an ant'. In other words, I study both short autobiographical forms (anecdote, incident, souvenir, fragment), by means of which these texts aim at creating effect of discontinuity, and some modern compositions corresponding to these forms (puzzle, collage, montage). Finally, in the sixth chapter the whole perspective is reversed, and autobiographical fragments are studied as parts of some hypothetical wholeness. In this chapter the analytical reader is accompanied by pathetical reader, who cannot help plunging into the autobiograhical stories.

Based on my textual close readings of these texts I elaborate the idea of discontinuous autobiographical writing quite simply as another way of writing. In other words, I propose that these postmodern fragmentary autobiographical texts cannot automatically be seen as representing transgressive or revolutionary meanings and values - thesis that can be read in many contemporary studies. Neither cannot discontinuity be reduced to the idea of lost meaning of life in our postmodern societies. Rather, discontinuity is seen as a convention of writing, nevertheless obeying to what I call the verisimilitude of discontinuity. In other words, when reality is understood as fragmentary, contingent, processual and/or chaotic, the horizon of meaning of the postmodern realistic autobiographical text is reduced - as if naturally - to fragmentary self-writing.

Nevertheless, these four autobiographers adopt quite different strategies vis-a-vis of discontinuity. Discontinuity has different functions and effects in their texts. Alain Robbe-Grillet, for instance, sticks to the idea of subversive discontinuity that he aims to translate into the form of autobiographical collage made up of heterogenous ready-made fragments. The discontinuous text of Marguerite Duras, on the contrary, can be understood as more personal and perhaps even more as an a-political solution. The fragments of her autobiography, as well as its personal form of autobiographical montage, succeed in creating an illusion of fluent writing (écriture courante) that has the particular effect of creating the impression of continuity. The autobiographical montage of Nathalie Sarraute - even if in a very personal way - can be seen more cleary serving ideals of literary modernism: indeterminacy and relativity. The ground of elliptic montage of Georges Perec is much the same as for the other three autobiographers - the postwar possibilities of the autobiographical project - but his is a solution of constrained writing, the use of formal technique (montage) whose application is understood to able to produce a sense of its making text by itself, if need be without any previous 'autobiographical idea' from the writer.