The question of the father and the son in the fiction (S. Doubrovsky, A. Robbe-Grillet, H. Guibert)
This thesis will study the construction of fantasy in autofictional writing from a psychoanalytical perspective, focusing on Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Miroir qui revient and Hervé Guibert’s A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie. Taking up a phrase by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s, this study will rely on two different axes to inform autofictional discourse: firstly, the autobiography writer is bent on “creating an own statue of himself” while, on the other hand, the autofiction writer sets out to “project an image out of himself”, as it were. Gradually, there emerges the teenage imaginary construction of a son caught up in his aporias when faced with the analyst-father of the doctor-father — one becomes the rival and twin figure of the other as constructed around this drive-discourse. Through its addiction to the Law, which is distanciation and irony as much as nostalgia and allegiance, the autofictional gynogenre seems to exist only as a mirror image of the autobiographical phallogenre. Through irony that is meant as liberation, the autofiction writer keeps referring to the autobiographer in him. Using a deliberately simple psychoanalytical rhetoric, he portrays himself as a son with a hysterical structure having to sidestep his father’s censorship and restraint. This figure of an ultra-autobiographer — which is more reliable than the father — gestures towards autobiography as a Don Juan-like promise with a view to arousing the author’s desire. The autofiction writer who plays at being a more ultra autobiographer than the father, creates luring but gratuitous figures and gives away true but insignificant confessions, as a way of trying to seduce the reader into participating in a mechanism of desire whose purpose is to dominate his victim through ontological undecidability. He is both the one who masters the enigma and the one who writes it. He does not so much reveal the reader’s desire as sustains it. Therefore, a blank text is being built which is that element of secrecy of a text that has yet to come, the whole game consisting in letting it slip from memory.