Autofiction and the Diary: The Radicalization of Autofiction in Works by Hervé Guibert and Christine Angot

Autofiction has often been viewed as a hybrid of autobiography and the novel. This chapter argues that a new generation of writers who emerged from the 1990s onward drew heavily on the diary instead of autobiography to develop their own innovative autofictional forms and practices. Whereas some critics have argued that the diary is fundamentally attached to truth and resistant to fiction, Hervé Guibert’s Voyage avec deux enfants (“Journey with Two Children,” 1982) and Christine Angot’s Léonore, toujours (“Léonore, Always,” 1993) provide two examples of experimental writing projects where the diary provides the means for new modalities of truth and fiction, allowing the authors to adopt a new relation to their writing and the real world.

Le soi dans le silence de la mort de l’autre : les Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques de Catherine Mavrikakis

"When the narrator of Catherine Mavrikakis’ novel A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning (2000) learns of the consecutive passings of several of her close friends, she transforms this experience into text. In this paper, we analyze Catherine Mavrikakis’s textualization of the ineffable death and loss of the other as a condition of awareness of one’s own finitude. By applying several narratological and theoretical tools to the text, we show how, using the writings but also the life of Hervé Guibert as a hypotext, the narrator articulates her own understanding of death by gathering the multitude of the dead under the banner of a single Hervé."

Hervé Guibert as Foucault might have imagined him

This essay attempts to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between Michel Foucault and the French photographer and writer Hervé Guibert. It contends that this relationship has been misunderstood inasmuch as it has been described in terms of a dynamic of confession and betrayal. In place of this familiar understanding, developed largely by James Miller, this essay seeks to create the grounds for a Foucaultian appreciation of Guibert’s work as both photographer and writer. On the basis of Guibert’s Ghost Image, as well as several clues scattered throughout Foucault’s corpus, this essay argues that Guibert’s work issues in an anti-realist aesthetics that allows for desire to be articulated outside of the deployment of sexuality. In the final section of the essay, I use these concepts in order to suggest a reading of some of Guibert’s most famous images, including the portrait of Foucault contained in Guibert’s 1990 novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In general, I aim to show that Guibert’s different works enact the Foucaultian notion of a friendship of between men, wherein the aim is to invent new ways of giving each other pleasure.

Forty years of HIV/AIDS narratives: what’s next?

This essay proposes to look across HIV/AIDS narratives in order to trace a larger relationship between the onset, development, and perceived disappearance of both HIV/AIDS and HIV/AIDS literature - what I dub its literary epidemiology. I aim to trace and compare both the literary transmission and depiction of HIV/AIDS in the major novels of this genre by authors like Hélène Laygues, Michel Simonin, Hervé Guibert, Erik Rémès, Guillaume Dustan, Tristan Garcia, and Camille Genton. Such a study affords a better understanding of the concepts of life, death, and what the future holds for a literature centered on a disease. This approach offers readers a novel perspective on the literary past and future of French HIV/AIDS literature.

El amigo invisible. Una aproximación al SIDA a través de la obra de Hervé Guibert

En plena pandemia de VIH/SIDA que asolaba de manera silenciosa el mundo, Hervé Guibert publicó en 1990 “Al amigo que no me salvó la vida”. Guibert plantea esta novela a modo de despedida personal. En ella, el autor pretende exponer la dureza de la enfermedad, narrando con total sinceridad y claridad cuestiones tales como causas de infección, sintomatología, tratamiento y pronóstico de la enfermedad y los aspectos socioculturales que implican estar enfermo de VIH en la década de los 80, en donde la ignorancia acerca del tema provocó una repulsa inmediata hacia los afectados. Hervé escribe la novela en una época donde millones de enfermos languidecían en sus casas apartados y repudiados con el objetivo de educar y visibilizar la situación de los enfermos de VIH. La incertidumbre, la ignorancia, el dolor y la falta de empatía son temas recurrentes en la narración, cuyo autor aborda a la par como, testimonio personal y acción reivindicativa. En definitiva, pretende con esta publicación remover conciencias y dar voz a los millones de almas que deambularon desamparados y sin más certeza que la de su futura muerte por una sociedad asustada por el desconocimiento acerca del VIH. Desconocimiento que el autor aspira a suprimir con su novela. Finalmente, Hervé Guibert, fallecerá a causa del SIDA a la edad de 36 años en 1991 dejando un legado que nos hace recordar la necesidad de luchar contra la estigmatización de los enfermos y las enfermedades.

O diário póstumo de Hervé Guibert como espaço de escritura, de decantação da gramática autobiografemática e ato final de um projeto autoficcional

Esse artigo propõe uma análise detida de Le mausolée des amants, considerado o último livro de Hervé Guibert, publicado dez anos após sua morte de AIDS como um diário. Problematiza-se aqui sua constituição genérica, visto tratar-se de um complexo constructo de notação e escrita diarística, processo e fonte de criação romanesca paralelo aos romances e um romance em si – que, por fim, abraça todos os procedimentos típicos da escrita autoficcional guibertiana. Da criação, o foco desse artigo recai na recepção: em meio ao que diz o autor-narrador-protagonista no próprio volume e Guibert, autor, em epitextos diversos, como o leitor recebeu e recebe ainda hoje uma obra como essa?

Literarische Krankheitserzählungen zwischen Fiktion und Realität

Krankheit ist nicht nur ein beliebtes Thema der Literatur, Krankheit ermöglicht Literatur, provoziert Narration. Konfrontiert mit ganz unterschiedlichen Krankheiten –Knochentuberkulose, AIDS, Alzheimer – suchen Schriftsteller wie Max Blecher (1909-1938), Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) und Olivia Rosenthal (*1965) nach Erzählformen, welche die verschiedenen Krankheitserfahrungen zum Ausdruck bringen können. Die oft radikalen Veränderungen der Wahrnehmung von Realität, der Beziehung zu sich und der Umwelt, des Verhältnisses von Körper und Geist, Erinnern und Vergessen, lösen tiefgreifende Sinnkrisen und verstörende Entgrenzungserlebnisse aus: Die Unterscheidungen von Wirklichkeit und Traum, von Wahrheit und Imagination, von individuellem und kollektivem Gedächtnis lösen sich auf und rufen – an der Schwelle von Sinn und Absurdität – physische, psychische, ethische aber auch kreativ-ästhetische Reaktionen hervor. In Konkurrenz zum medizinischen Expertendiskurs antworten Schriftsteller auf die Grenzphänomene, indem sie die Kategorien von (Auto-)Fiktion und (Auto-)Biographie, von Roman und Dokumentation, Prosa und Poesie im Medium der literarischen Narration unterlaufen und Strategien entwickeln, um die Wissensformen über Krankheit zu erweitern und die Deutungshoheit über «das Normale und das Pathologische» (Georges Canguilhem) infrage zu stellen.