| dc.description.abstract | The paper examines Marguerite Yourcenar’s memoir trilogy “Le Labyrinthe
du Monde”. The article is part of a broader investigation related to the
staging of different voices in the author's work. There is no clear differentiation
between the writer’s biographical and fictional écriture. Yourcenar uses
similar narrative and fictionalizing techniques; she incorporates her own
experience and inscribes it in a broader narrative frame. The present text
raises the question of the author's own imaginary genealogy – such a gesture
is recognized as a particular creation of a strong female image and voice,
which was not present in the works of the Belgian-French novelist prior to
the publication of the memoir triology “The Labyrinth of the World”. The
paper turns to both Julia Kristeva’s theory of imaginary father and Yourcenar’s
fantasy of her own genealogy. The following analysis articulates the
indirect question to Yourcenar’s late work of whether kinship is stronger and
more real than the imaginary worlds around us such as literature, fine arts,
one's own fantasy. In other words: who is Yourcenar’s imaginary father –
Proust and/or Michel de K.? | en_US |
