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  • Genetic Studies of Life Writing
  • Philippe Lejeune (bio)

The "work" of life writing should consider how Life writing is produced as well as what is produced—its textual genetics. For twenty-five years I have been part of a Genetics Laboratory where, in 1995, I set up a team known as "Genetics and Autobiography." Over the course of those twenty-five years, I have personally worked on nine sets of autobiographical texts. Let me mention a few that you may be familiar with. I have tried to understand the composition of Les Mots (or "Words") by Jean-Paul Sartre, Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance ("Childhood"), the Diary of Anne Frank, and W ou le souvenir d'enfance ("W, or, the Memory of Childhood") by Georges Perec. But I have also worked on lesser-known authors: Eugénie de Guérin and Marie d'Agoult, from the nineteenth century, as well as Paul Léautaud, Claude Mauriac, and a seven-year-old girl, Ariane Grimm.

What is textual genetics? It is not, to be precise, the study of drafts, or "avant-textes," which are merely research tools. Drafts may have special significance, but they are just one possible source among others. A "composition file" may also include letters, work journals, interviews, accounts recorded by other people, and so on. The purpose of textual genetics is to understand why and how someone created something, whether that thing is a text, a painting, a symphony, or a film. It is not a "critical method," like psychological, sociological, literary, or other approaches, though textual genetics can use those methods among other descriptive or interpretative tools. What makes textual genetics unique is its diachronic aspect: it is a study of the history of a composition. Like all historical research, it has its own requirements and methods: finding all of the traces left by the process of composition, describing them in painstaking detail, and establishing their chronological order. This is an enormous task in which you can become so absorbed that you lose sight of the goal, which is to understand. You cannot work on textual genetics for one week, or for one paper, or for one conference: it requires a long-term commitment. And you do not make that commitment unless you place great value on the end product. No one is going to spend years to explain how something mediocre was created. But while this fetishizing of the work is necessary, it involves the risk of retrospective illusion. That is why it is healthy to study an author's failed or abandoned pieces as well as his successful works. What came [End Page 162] at the end was not there in the beginning: the goal one has in mind is not always the goal that is reached. Creation often means gradually discovering what you wanted to do, by doing it.

Viewed in this way, is textual genetics a science? It is, to the same degree that history itself is a science—meaning that it has its methods but no credo or doctrine. It sees patterns, categorizes how one author, or several authors, or a particular genre works. The dream of textual genetics would be to establish general laws. For the time being, it is far from doing that, which may be just as well. It has taken over where the old study of "philology" left off. Philology was developed at a time when manuscripts were copied and recopied, a time when people analyzed "variants" or "readings" of a text. It became possible when creators themselves began to see their creative process as having particular significance and began keeping careful records of that process, which happened in the early nineteenth century. What we do is to step into the creator's workshop. It would be overreaching to say we're looking for laws of creativity; what we might say is that we want to learn some lessons. Doing a genetic study is like apprenticing with a craftsman. By the end of the apprenticeship, you should at least be more skillful if not more creative.

Let me put it another way: this is detective work that you do out of love. You begin following the trail of...

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