L’écriture autobiographique ou l’horizon à reculons

• Main Author: Frédérique Amselle
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2011-05-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: J. Barnes; A. Christie; V.Woolf; autobiography; death; ending
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/2366

We would like to explore the notion of horizon in autobiographical writing. It is a common thought that the autobiographer never looks further than his own belly-button. Still, taking that the writer becomes his own territory when he writes about himself, how does he express it in the text ? When he undertakes writing his autobiography, the author is looking backward but actually pretends he is unfolding the thread from a beginning to an end (which can correspond to a symbolic end or which coincides with the moment when the writer is actually writing the book).Writing the end is like representing one’s own death : the end of the book can thus define a horizon one can only but pretend to have reached. We develop the concepts of artificial horizon and intermediary horizon to show the devices used by some writers such as Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Julian Barnes to deal with the impossible reunion of the end of the text and the end of life.