" Writing life "

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After two years devoted to Proust, this year's lecture moves away from this theme, while continuing on from the previous year's lecture, which focused on the ethical analysis of behavior in À la recherche du temps perdu. The reflection is broadened in two ways: on the one hand, towards a more general, more theoretical questioning, which considers the conflict and possible reconciliation of writing and life; on the other, towards a more extensive corpus which, to Proust, adds Montaigne and Stendhal. There are two ways of approaching a literary subject: the first, which we'll call allegorical, consists in interrogating texts from our present - this is the path we'll take first; the other, more philological path, which we'll follow later, attempts to restore a text to its own present.

For the time being, the aim is to draw up a kind of present state of the relationship between life and literature, to grasp what the expression chosen to entitle this lecture refers to. We have thus identified three directions in which this title points.

First of all, "writing life" translates the scholarly term biography : "writing life" can be understood as "writing a life", and thus raises questions about literature as biography, in the broadest sense of the word, which includes all related forms of life writing such as autobiography, diaries, memoirs, testimonies, letters, hagiography - in other words, writings about the self in general.

But "writing life" can also be understood as a translation of "life writing", which designates a contemporary literary genre in its own right, encompassing not only biography and autobiography, but also testimony, which, in the literary sense, refers to a survivor's account of the tragedy he or she has witnessed. The French equivalent of "life writing" would be "l'écrire-la-vie", or "les écrits personnels", according to the phrase used by Philippe Lejeune, a specialist in the genre, which covers much of today's literary output, and whose egalitarian and democratic dimension runs counter to the hierarchy imposed by the more traditional genres of biography and autobiography, considered scholarly and elitist. "Écrire la vie" thus takes on the value of a euphemism for "telling your life story", blurring the narcissistic dimension of self-writing to better highlight its demand for authenticity and testimonial scope: "speaking of oneself to better speak of the times", as it were.

Finally, "écrire la vie" evokes Roland Barthes's lecture at the Collège de France: "La préparation du roman". In three unspoken notes entitled "La vie comme œuvre" (Life as a Work), Barthes proposed a dialectical solution to the modern conflict between life and literature: to turn one's life into a Work, and gave as examples of the realization of this postulate Montaigne's Essais , Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe , Stendhal's Souvenirs d'égotisme , Gide's Journal and Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu . These three pages introduce the theme of Vita Nova, in and through literature, which closes this development with a section entitled "l'écriture de vie", in reference to Proust and the idea that writing transforms life. for Proust, "writing life" is also, according to Barthes, "thanatography", as Le Temps retrouvé shows .

When Barthes launched the idea of his Vita Nova in 1980, in his search for a possible way out of the essential disagreement between life and work , the project of writing life was caught between two antinomic types of criticism, whose effects were cumulative: on the classical right, represented in his time by Julien Benda, it was the abuse of personal literature that was denounced, while the literary left, behind the figure of Maurice Blanchot, denounced the aporia of life writing - Benda and Blanchot illustrating two figures of anti-modern moderns, whose aesthetic biases were at odds with their political positions.

In 1945, in La France byzantine ou le triomphe de la littérature pure (Byzantine France or the Triumph of Pure Literature) , Julien Benda condemned the drift of literature since Romanticism, and especially Bergsonism, towards the individual and the unique rather than the general and the commonplace. This criticism was nothing new in 1945: in an article in the Revue des deux mondes entitled "La littérature personnelle" (1888), he denounced the ascendancy of Rousseau over French literature; referring to this "sickly and monstrous development of the self" as a "very French vice", he cited the Goncourts' Journal , Amiel's Journal intime , Barrès's Le Culte du moi , and Vallès's trilogy(L'Enfant, Le Bachelier, L'Insurgé ). Repeating Pascal's case against Montaigne, he argues against the invasion of the plebeian in literature, in a context of democratization of society where the scope of everyone's life experience has widened, with narratives no longer legitimized by the author's place in history or literary history. In so doing, he gives the historical and social reasons for the flourishing of personal literature: with modernity, the "type" ceased to exist, giving way to the individual. However, Brunetière does not criticize the writing of the self, provided that individual experience is placed at the service of a science of the human: he is the defender of rationality, thus opposing the aesthetic modernity represented by Baudelaire, in whom he saw the staging of the dissemination of the self. Benda, for his part, castigated Bergson and the "stream of consciousness" literature of the interwar period.