Philippe Lejeune - The Autobiographical Pact

Reading Journal – Session 5 – 22/11/2016

Philippe Lejeune – The Autobiographical Pact

·         relations btw biography/autobiography and novel/autobiography

·         attempt of a definition from the reader’s perspective, starting after 1770

·         autobiography:

o   Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality

§  form of language (narrative; in prose)

§  subject treated (individual life, story of a personality)

§  situation of the author (author/narrator are identical)

§  position of the narrator (narrator/principal character identical; retrospective point of view of the narrative)

o   mainly narrative, but with consideration to discourse

o   mainly retrospective, but can also take other shapes in part (self-portrait, journal of the work ...)

o   primarily individual life, but chronical and social or political history as well

o   question of hierarchy

o   but author, narrator and protagonist must be identical:

·         I, the Undersigned

o   reference

o   utterance

o   oral discourse

§  quotation

§  oral from a distance

·         autobiographical novel: reader has reason to assume that author and narrator/character are the same, while author/narrator deny this

o   personal, impersonal narratives; different degrees

·         autobiographical pact: story told is that of the author, however they choose to tell it

·         biography, autobiography are referential texts, resembling the truth

·         biography: resemblance grounds identity

·         autobiography: identity grounds resemblance

·         phantasmatic pact: revealing phantasms of the individual

·         autobiography: lacks complexity, ambiguity ...

·         novel: lacks accuracy

This text goes to great lengths to establish the differences btw autobiography, biography and the modes in between by focusing especially on the relationship btw the author, narrator and protagonist, how identical, different or ambiguous it is on what degrees are possible. I certainly never thought in detail about these varying degrees and was not aware that so many are possible.  Lejeune does try to explain his claims, tables and models, but since some distinctions are rather minimal, it is sometimes hard to follow what exactly he is trying to establish. But it is certainly a helpful text when examining another one in detail and trying to determine which category it best belongs to because the criteria established by Lejeune seem easy enough to apply.