Métaphore et autofiction chez Chloé Delaume

Abstract

If metaphor cannot be reduced to a descriptive category characterized by deviance since it conveys the subject's point of view towards the world on the basis of a relation between words, codified norms, interlocutors and the real (cf. Détrie 2001), then its realization proves to be crucial in autofictional texts where a narrating subject tells his own story. Metaphorization plays a central role in the autofictional narrative practised by Chloé Delaume: through the use of metaphors, the narrator attempts to name for the others (cf. Détrie 2001) the family trauma that marked her childhood and the following process of identity formation. Thus metaphor turns out to be the main argumentative device (cf. Bonhomme, 2005) of a discursive strategy that aims at saying the unspeakable twice – as far as the inexpressible nature of both the traumatic event and the unstable subject that experienced it are involved. I intend here to show how the metaphorical statement shapes Delaume’s autofiction in some texts where the narrator is engaged in a restless and laborious search for identity studded with references to memories impossible to repress (La Vanité des Somnambules, 2002; La Dernière Fille avant la guerre, 2007; Dans ma maison sous terre, 2009).