Abstract

Novelist, playwright, performer, and musician, Chloé Delaume presents herself as most fundamentally a “chercheuse” who conceives of her writing as a laboratory for experimentation with autofiction. This essay focuses on her experimentation with a citational construction of an autofictional identity in her 2009 play, Éden matin midi et soir. It examines her innovative mobilization of the citational strategies that are both a defining feature of postmodernism and, post-Doubrovsky, omnipresent in contemporary autofiction in the creation of a highly distinct and unconventional autofictional voice.

At stake in her work is self-deliverance from a horrifying genealogy by means of a literal replacement in 1999 of her original identity with that of an autofictional character with a first name borrowed from Boris Vian’s L’écume des jours and an invented surname taken from Artaud’s L’Arve et l’aume. At age ten she witnessed at close hand the murder of her mother by her father, who then committed suicide: “J’étais pleine de cadavres en mon fort intérieur, Le Moi était en gelée, une terrine de vers blancs. Le Je vacillait tellement qu’il recouvrait son crêpe d’une posture amidon pour rester vertical….Il existait un genre qui pouvait héberger la démarche de mon Je qui se voulait souverain. Il existait un mot, onze lettres : autofiction” (La Règle du je 72). As this traumatic event has played out in her writing in a highly referential dialogic form haunted by recurring echoes of Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras and allusions, in its resonant alexandrine rhythms, to Racinian tragedy, Chloé Delaume’s autofictions have been much solicited for performance as reader’s theater. In her current work, as she locates her experiments more and more beyond the confines of the printed page, mobilizing the creative interfaces of cyberspace to link traditional print media, musical scores, and performance, she has turned increasingly to writing directly for the theater. This essay approaches her dramatic representation of traumatic identity in Éden matin midi et soir as exemplary of her commitment to developing the practice of autofiction into a highly unconventional exacerbation of the rawness of psychic and physical wounds, as opposed to a cathartic confessional or transgressive exposé.

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