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A New Genre in the Making?

At first, I have to admit I was taken aback when I was asked, “What’s next?” The question reminded me of the embarrassment we find ourselves in every time we complete a study, publish a book, finalize anything. Because they have not (yet) read what you just published, people who are close to you, your family and friends, make friendly inquiries about your projects. You are stricken by the unavoidable: there are no more projects for you! You are empty, exhausted; it was truly your last book. When you make plans for future work, you realize that you will only repeat yourself, over and over again. The future is now, but it is a bleak field full of repetitions and variations on a theme. This is normal. You have to let time pass, to forget a little what you have done, become sensitive to the strangeness that comes with new things. I said “strangeness.” It is the feeling I had as soon as I started studying autobiography in the 1960s. I felt doubly amazed. First, before the immensity of the field of autobiography in the past, in the complete indifference of academic scholars and researchers to it, in France at least: autobiography was not a noble discipline. It was suspect from a psychological viewpoint (in France, the self is loathsome, as Pascal proclaimed), not viable as a historical source (you had to test its validity), literarily mediocre (because it did not use the techniques found in fiction and poetry). We read it avidly; we did not study it much. In France, there was no book on autobiography. It was a rich tradition, but dormant. In sum, a new territory to explore, a new frontier. We did not ask, “What’s next?” but “What’s first?”: everything was to be done: define, catalogue, theorize. I started working, with my friend Jacques Lecarme. We felt like pioneers. The second surprise was different. I had, at the same time, the feeling that autobiography—which had a long history already—was nevertheless a genre in the midst of being born. The same adventure the seventeenth-century novel had was happening in autobiography: it was feeding off all the other genres!