Pierre Michon: Autobiographical Fiction and the Creation of Identity

Pierre Michon: Autobiographical Fiction and the Creation of Identity David J. Bond ALTHOUGH IT PRESENTS ITSELF PRIMARILY AS HCTION, the published work of Pierre Michon contains an important element of autobiography. Critics refer to "oblique autobiography," "une sorte d'autobiographie," and "une manière d'autobiographie" when discussing his work, while Michon himself admits that he puts much of his own life and experiences into his writing because "je suis la personne du monde que je connais le mieux."1 There is, of course, nothing particularly startling in this, for the frontier between autobiography and fiction is often blurred in contemporary texts. What is interesting in the case of Michon is the point at which the two genres intersect. His fiction deals principally with the problem of artistic inspiration, of what causes (or fails to cause) the artist (whether writer of fiction and autobiography, painter or musician) to become a creator of art, and this is clearly a problem that Michon has had to confront in his own life. Beyond this lies the problem of what constitutes the artist's identity as an individual and as an artist: obviously a matter of major concern to all creators, but particularly to the writer of autobiography, which deals with the life and identity of the writing subject. A brief summary of Michon's fiction will serve as a useful starting point from which to examine these elements of his work. Michon's first published work, Vies minuscules (1984), describes the lives of several humble and unimportant people whom the narrator has known or whose lives affect his own.2 This is set against the narrator's own struggles to become a writer. Several of the lives that he recounts reflect his own failure to produce literary texts. André Dufourneau, for example, finds in literary texts a core of mystery and inspiration that he is unable to reproduce, and the narrator says of him: "Mais parlant de lui, c'est de moi que je parle" (19). Roland Backroot is haunted by his discovery of great literature, but cannot recapture what he sees in these texts. The narrator comments on this character's experience: "Je le sais, pour être lui" (125). Le père Foucault, an old man dying of cancer, refuses to go to a Paris hospital where he might be cured because he is illiterate and cannot bear the shame of not being able to do the necessary paperwork. The narrator sees in this illiteracy an image of his own failure to write. "J'étais en quelque façon illetré," he points out (157), and concludes: "Le père Foucault était plus écrivain que moi: à l'absence de lettres, il préférait la mort" 58 Winter 2002 David J. Bond (158). The abbé Bandy abandons his beautifully crafted sermons and turns to alcohol because they do not provide the perfection that he seeks. He too reflects the narrator, who refers to "notre fraternité" (180). Behind the narrator of this novel stands Pierre Michon himself. He has admitted that his own life was, for many years, a struggle to produce texts that he considered worthy of himself. Vies minuscules was written, he says, "après avoir été si longtemps immobile, inapte, attendant que Ie vent souffle" (Bayle 98). While not representing himself directly and unchanged in this novel, he has put a important part of his own life and experience into it, and he describes the narrator as "cet écrivain-qui-n'écrit-pas, et que j'étais" (Bayle 101). In short, as one critic aptly puts it, "le filigrane de Vies minuscules esquisse une autobiographie."3 It is the same mysterious emergence of the creative subject that forms the basis of Michon's subsequent fiction. La Vie de Joseph Roulin (1988) is the story of a postal worker who becomes a friend of Van Gogh and sits for a portrait by him. Many years later, he is puzzled to learn that this apparently simple and slightly deranged man is now a famous painter. In L'Empereur d'occident (1989), the same mystery is examined in the life of Attalus, a musician and player of the lyre who serves the Visigoth general...