Abstract EN:

This two-fold research involves a theoretical interrogation of temporal structures in autobiography conducted through readings from twentieth-century author violette leduc (1907-1972). Leduc's works are remarkable in that they give rise to a reading as autobiography while consistantly putting into question the touchstones of the genre: self-identity, the proper name, the relation of language to the real, the notion of a unique, global and retrospective narrative. The thesis first confronts theories of autobiography (lejeune, marin, doubrovsky, de man. . . ) and narrative time (genette, ricoeur, weinrich, banfield. . . ). Secondly, it is shown that autobiography can only establish a relation to reality through non-linear temporal structures related to the graphic nature of the text. Both philosophical and psychoanalytical theories are considered (derrida, freud, abraham and torok). Since autobiography is always, by its very nature, left incomplete, the autobiographical project, usually based on a chronological plot, can never meet its goal; the autobiographical narrator can never recount his or her own death -that moment at the end of the text when author, narrator and character should finally reunite. Paradoxically, in order to succeed, the narrative project must fail through a "death" of the narrating subject. The text becomes a crypt where the author is metaphorically buried alive, and where the proper name is (cryptically) inscribed, this "signature" becoming the writer's epitaph. The possibility of such a moment implies a temporality foreign to linear narrative structures, chronological circularity or the heideggerian notion of the future perfect and relies on a temporal heterogeneity specific to written narrative related to the freudian concept of deferred action. While all writing may have an autobiographical potential, autobiography strictly speaking is born of the tension between the chronology of an impossible narrative project and the temporal structures at play in the written text.