On Diary

Auto-Genesis: Genetic Studies of Autobiographical Texts

AUTO-GENESIS: GENETIC STUDIES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TEXTS How does one become a “geneticist?” Why didn’t I become one earlier? And have I really become one? It is a fact that for nearly five years I have been working on the avant-textes of contemporary autobiographies: Sartre’s Les Mots (1964), Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975), Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983), and, more recently, the Diary of Anne Frank. I did not begin these studies with any overall plan—it was a series of chance occasions: an invitation to be part of a Sartre team at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, a seminar on Perec, hearing a lecture by Georges Raillard on the manuscripts of Enfance, a new edition of the Diary (or rather Diaries) of Anne Frank. But there’s no such thing as chance. A glance backward reveals that my curiosity has deep roots. My first essay on Proust’s “petite Madeleine” was part of a comparison of two drafts of that famous episode (“Écriture et sexualité,” 1971). Next, I studied the transformations of childhood narrative in Rousseau (Le Pacte autobiographique, 1975) and Vallès (Je est un autre, 1980). I tried to “undo” some finished products: Victor Hugo’s “biography,” written by his wife (Je est un autre), the film Sartre par lui-même (see “Ça s’est fait comme ça, 1978), the ethnographic narrative of Adélaı̈de Blasquez, Gaston Lucas, serrurier (Moi aussi, 1986). I have also rummaged through archives for the truth about my great-grandfather’s memoir (Xavier-Édouard Lejeune, Calicot, 1984). A glance inward reveals something about my own motivations. First of all, of course, intellectual curiosity: can one fail to think that the history of a text will illuminate its structure? Yet I also felt a detective’s curiosity—the desire (as naı̈ve or fruitful as it may be) to see if and how the autobiographical “pact” was respected. Finally, deep down was the curiosity of a fetishist and a lover. These are the books that I love, and I was very pleased to partake of a little more of their intimacy. I had the occasional joy of being treated like a “favorite.” Or else the impression of being initiated into a secret, of bearing witness to a sort of “primal scene” of literature. Without strong motivations like this, one cannot overcome the doubts and discouragements of a long, dreary, unrewarding, trivial, and sometimes fruitless task. Trans. Jed Deppman. Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes. Ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer , and Michael Groden. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. 193–217. From “Autogenèse: L’Étude génétique des textes autobiographiques.” Genesis 1 (1992): 73–87. 214 On Diary I would like to offer here two essays on the activities of geneticists, both of which raise the same problems: Do generic specificities exist for the work of literary creation? Is the avant-texte of a fictional work strictly comparable to that of an autobiography or a diary? Or, put slightly differently, do generic specificities exist for the study of such a work? The first essay deals with autobiography. It suggests that there really is something particular to it, even if this something is not everything. Above all, it shows that genetic study deals with a new terrain on which to treat the thorny questions theorists of autobiography ask themselves about the relations between the self and language, art and truth. The second essay deals with diaries. This is a very special case: diaries, by definition, seem incapable of having avant-textes. Yet they do, and this little study, written as an introduction to the analysis of the Diaries of Anne Frank, is something akin to a future research program.1 AUTOBIOGRAPHY The first thing to notice is that from the reader’s point of view the autobiographical text has a different relationship to its avant-textes than do texts of fiction, poetry, or thought. Knowing something about a novel’s or a poem’s avant-textes may be of interest to specialists who think about creative mechanisms , but it changes nothing about how these texts function for a reader. It may even annoy readers if it ruins the pleasure of reading. The opposite is true for an autobiography. Far from being a parasitical element, knowledge of the avant-textes is relevant and relates directly to the central purpose of the text and to the reader’s expectation. This is...