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 .
