« Le brassage des choses » : Autobiographie et mélange des genres dans Le Labyrinthe du Monde de Marguerite Yourcenar

Abstract

In writing her autobiographic trilogy "Le Labyrinthe du Monde" the French author Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) constantly postpone writing about her own life. In stead of autobiography, she uses other genres such as family chronics, biography, essay or novel. Yourcenar refuses to reveal essential experiences tot her public. In writing about her family, her parents, or friends of her father, she wants to show her sincerity and authenticity. In mixing family chronics and biography with essay, Yourcenar desires to reveal her ideas on the world and on humanity. In inserting novel passages, she wants to give life to her characters in an historically authentic way. So genetic mixtures contribute to produce an image of the authors sincerity.

Nevertheless, in all gender mixtures appear illogical, hidden transitions from one genre tot another. These genetic transitions appear when Marguerite Yourcenar is suddenly confronted to heavy emotions such as anger, fear, or shame. In these cases, action changes in stagnation, past tense changes in present, and emotions are expressed by substantives, while individuality becomes anonymity and the human person mutes into an object. In this way, emotional conflicts appear to be still present in the psychology of the author. But the same illogical and hidden transitions occur in the fictive evocation of the lives of Jeanne and Egon de Reval, who become a sort of alter-Ego(n)s de Yourcenar. In these transitions we see an inverse movement: present becomes again past tense, verbs express actions, and the individuality of the characters comes back. In the same time, conflicts in former passages find a solution. Thus novel can be seen as the appropriate personal way of Yourcenar to resolve her own inner conflicts.

In this way, traditional stylistic analysis can reveal hidden psychological processes, in the tradition of French psychocriticism and of the German critic Leo Spitzer in his Exercises de style. We like to use for our research the term of psychostylistics in the signification of the study of permanent featuring stylistic abnormalities that reveal essential mental processes in the psychology of the author. In thus discovering her inner conflicts more than her well known ideology, Marguerite Yourcenar has become more human, nearer to us, and much more sympathetic.