LE VISAGE DÉTRUIT DE L’AMANT Sample Clauses

LE VISAGE DÉTRUIT DE L’AMANT. Ostensibly, L’Amant relates the story of Xxxxx’x childhood and adolescence in French occupied Indochina, her violent and volatile relationship with her mother and two 66 Of the centrality of this dark shadow in her work, Xxxxx comments in Les Parleuses “L’écrit est déjà dans la nuit. Ecrire serait à l’extérieur de soi dans une confusion des temps: entre écrire et avoir écrit, entre avoir écrit et devoir écrire encore, entre savoir et ignorer ce qu’il en est, partir du sens. L’image du bloc noir au milieu du monde n’est pas hasardeuse” (30). brothers, one adored and one reviled, and her liaison with a much older Chinese man.67 More important than the autobiographical je in the text, the first image that strikes the reader in the text is that of the narrator’s own face, “le visage détruit,” destroyed, devastated, and cut through with wrinkles. Despite its seeming correlation with Xxxxx’x own image as an older woman (due to her interviews and television appearances, readers were familiar with her distinctive countenance),68 the face that opens L’Amant reveals the complexity of Xxxxx’x alleged autobiographical project. L’Amant belongs to a unique subgenre of autobiography that could be termed autofiction. As a result, Xxxxx’x novel shares many of the same elements of works by Nouveau Roman authors, such as Xxxxx Xxxxx-Xxxxxxx, Xxxxxx Xxxxx, and Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx (Xxxxx, L’Autobiographie 28).69 Among several defining characteristics, the autofictive narrative confuses chronology and refuses to fix the identity of the narrator. Xxxxx’x L’Amant, for example, does not indicate the names of its characters or the dates of certain events, and it also switches between narration in the first person and in the third person. The narrator herself announces “L’histoire de ma vie n’existe pas” (134). Because her life story does not exist, 68 The dissemination of Xxxxx’x image as part of the publicity campaign for L’Amant encouraged readers to assume that the face in the text was none other than the author’s herself. Her portrait was not on the cover of the novel; however, a photograph of Xxxxx gazing upon her image in a mirror was distributed to book stores, reinforcing the idea that the novel was indeed a reflection of the author’s own life. Almost every article published about the success of L’Amant included an image of Xxxxx, an image of her “destroyed face.” Televised appearances also helped forge an evident link between the textual face and Xxxxx’x own face, the most n...