ABSTRACT
A certificate tells me that I was bom. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.1
L’acte d’6crire est un voyage dans l’inconnu; c’est se laisser faire par l’Scriture. C’est savoir et ne pas savoir ce que Ton va écrire. Ne pas le croire qu’on le sait. Avoir peur.2 [The act of writing is a voyage into the unknown; it is letting oneself be made by writing. It is knowing and not knowing what one will write. Not believing that one knows. Being afraid.]
G enre G am es and the Novel
In L \Amant,3 Duras returns to an already fictionalized period o f her adolescence in order to inscribe previously hidden, obscure secrets onto the palimpsest which began, most notably, with Un barrage contre le P acifique4 In autobiographical style, an anonymous narrator, adopting in turns a first or third person perspective, focuses on (herself as) a fifteen-and-a-half year old French girl in colonial Indochina o f the 1930s. Is the spuriously straightforward book to be considered an autobiography, a confessional novel, a romance or a Kunstlerinroman ?
