The third lecture extended the examination of the biases that have fuelled the debate on life writing since the 1980s. Despite the criticisms and prejudices levelled against it, some writers have worked to legitimize it, using a variety of tactics to circumvent it. We have selected three examples, presented in reverse chronology.
Alain Robbe-Grillet's autobiographical-romantic Le Miroir qui revient (1983) is an example of the Nouveau Roman's reconversion to personal literature - as are Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984) and La Douleur (1985), and Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance (1983), whose prologue responds to her contemporaries' grievances against personal literature. The tendency of new novelists to return to life writing in the 1980s, marked by a discourse of self-justification, sounds like a renunciation, a regression to a form of literature that the Nouveau Roman claimed was outmoded. The approach taken by Robbe-Grillet, whose autobiographical project dates back to 1976 but only came to fruition in 1983, at a time when the bans on life writing were beginning to ease, is a good illustration of the contradictions that accompany the new novelists' move towards autobiography. The self-justification he undertakes in Le Miroir qui revient aims to present the work in continuity with his novels of the fifties and sixties, which he integrates after the fact into his personal writing enterprise, thus giving them a subversive dimension, breaking with the dogmas laid down by the Nouveau Roman. This contradiction, this distortion of the facts - more chronological than logical, after all - enabled him to boldly transgress the prohibitions of the previous era, taking up the clichés of a style of writing that affirmed its belief in representation, taking pleasure in reviving the traditional form of the autobiographical narrative, without, however, being fooled by its "ease" - according to the prejudice against personal literature, abundant and effortless. Robbe-Grillet adopts the autobiographical form, the better to denounce its clichés and the inadequacy of a narrative form whose framework, through the selection and simplification of details taken from the thicket of life, fails to convey its thickness. The constraints imposed by the linear, causal and deterministic narrative model constitute, in his view, an "ideological weight" that gives the life story an almost exemplary historical dimension. On the one hand, the novelistic model, on the other, that of the historical narrative: life writing, by virtue of its inclusion in the literary field, fails in its aim of authentically capturing existence. Faced with the inability of literary language to express the inner life without transforming it into a "received life" - as we commonly speak of a "received idea" - Robbe-Grillet chose to take on the fable, organizing fictional devices as so many operators of truth.
