The Act of Being. A Study of the Nature of Self in Autobiographical Writing Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance and Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père

Abstract

The notion of autobiographical writing as a process of creating a new reality in the act of describing lived experience, and the implications of this for the notions of truth, fiction and selfhood are well recognized. Ricoeur sums up this situation: "As literary analysis of autobiography proves, the (hi)story of a life is constantly refigured by all the stories, factual or fictional, that a subject tells and believes about himself". Following an idea ('a hunch', in his own words) of Paul John Eakin in Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (2008), this thesis will consider this life writing scholar's juxtaposition of an 'autobiographical self' (a self based on thought and language) and an evolutionarily earlier, 'wordless', 'core self', as hypothesized by cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999). Recent research in the field of the cognitive sciences by Damasio and others contributes towards an underpinning from a cross-disciplinary perspective of the notion of a mutable self. It appears that the beginnings of selfhood and personal identity can be found in the core self's encounters, within the organism, with elements and sensations, which it recognizes as 'other' (Damasio, 1999). The organism experiences as 'self' that which is non-other. Self is thus predicated on the relationship with alterity, recalling Rimbaud's celebrated "Je est un autre". Damasio argues that a sense of self starts at a neurobiological level, which leads to his proposition that cognition of self is embodied. Eakin postulates that the extended, autobiographical self (or, more to the point, 'selves') that constitutes the subject of autobiographical writing functions in ways similar to Damasio's wordless self; that, like this earlier self, the autobiographical self is always in flux, in a state of becoming. The writer of autobiography is therefore a product of this process, a product of all his or her actions and experiences. This thesis initially examines these concepts of self-embodiment, self as process and self as other, as these emerge against the historical background of autobiographical studies and from the developing relationship between literary studies and cognitive theory. The second section considers their relevance for a close reading of Nathalie Sarraute's self writing in Enfance and that of Assia Djebar in Nulle part dans la maison de mon pére. This thesis argues that Damasio's concept of 'a bounded individual' is pertinent to an understanding of self as created in these novels. In spite of Damasio's hypothesis of a biological self that exists only in the act of being, it appears that some level of stability exists within the differing voices that play a role in the individual's process of identity formation, both in neurobiology and in literary expression.