Autobiographical Tongues: (self-)reading And (self-)writing In Augustine, Nietzsche, Maya Angelou, Marie Cardinal, And Marie-therese Humbert (friedrich Nietzsche, Saint Augustine, Algeria).

Abstract

This study analyses the cross-cultural linguistic mechanisms which tend to colonize a writer's access to his/her mother tongue and his/her other culture. It thus attempts to uncover the patterns of self-dissimulation characterizing the textual production of writers who draw on many traditions while remaining unsure about the relative value of those diverse heritages. I have highlighted in particular those intertextual references which illuminate the polysemic nature of the linguistic self, thus favoring a rich and complex process of biological, cultural and textual metissage. Gender differences, in particular, tended to show variations in a certain perception of the maternal as well as in the writing of the (pro)creative body. My method borrows from current research in narratology in order to show that it is possible to read a work according to certain embedded paradigms which the critic takes as models or antimodels. Starting with Augustine, I was led to read otherwise, that is, to discover under the apparent structures of the text a different system of organization: in the Confessions, I establish the presence of a form of coherence that belies the initial impression of discontinuity. In Humbert's A l'autre bout de moi, I show how the autobiographical novel, which seems to foreclose interpretation if we remain in the realm of linguistic coherence and read it as a French text, is inhabited by another tongue which turns it into a palimpsest--a verbal rather than a visual one. When a verbal sign hides another, the most useful procedure for finding the underlying structure of a given work is not to look for it, but rather to listen for it, since speech-acts are a matter of parole and not of static visual signs. Augustine and Nietzsche both offer clues following which I develop the art of hearing. In my approaches to Angelou and Cardinal, I analyse the painful process of creativity for women writers who are also mothers and seem to have with words as complicated a relationship as they do with their real children, thus reproducing their initial ambivalent relationships to their own parents and to the literary tradition which shapes their access to language.