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Ma vie. Tout le monde croft la connaitre. la me donne parfois des fous rires.1
Aragon was a prolific commentator on the relation of truth to writing. In essays, interviews, and prefaces to his own work, he explored the problematic borderlines between historical fact and novelistic invention. These borderlines also became subjects treated in his late novels and stories; among the latter, the short text titled "Le Mentir-vrai"-first published in 1964 and then reprinted as the title story of a volume of short fiction in 1980-stands out because of its provocative title.2 Published among Aragon's "oeuvres romanesques," this short story is a metafictional meditation on the "true lying" that fiction accomplishes, reminiscent of other postmodernist metafictions such as John Barth's "Life-Story"; but by its subject matter, "Le Mentir-vrai" is also about the problem of autobiography, or to be more precise, about the problem of writing retrospectively, from a great distance, about one's self and one's life.
I would like to read this text not in relation to the rest of Aragon's oeuvre or life, but rather for what it suggests about the possibility (or impossibility) of knowledge about one's self and one's origins, and knowledge of the difference between truth and invention in writing about them.3 The explicitness, and at the same time the evasiveness, with which Aragon handles this question may make some readers wince; but from a theoretical perspective, both his clarity and his evasions are instructive.
"Le Mentir-vrai" consists of two series of fragments, arranged in mostly regular alternation: A1-Bl-A2-B2 and so on. The A series is the first-person narrative of an 11-year old boy, Pierre, who recounts his life more or less simultaneously with living it during the 1908-1909 school year; the B series consists of commentary about Pierre's narrative by an unnamed author, who is writing in 1963 or 1964 ("fifty-five years later" ). 4 Is the Author (let the capitalized noun designate his identity in lieu of a name) the same person as the boy, grown up? Yes and no, in more ways than one-and it is in the multiple ways in which this text performs that "yes and no" that I think its real interest lies. "Pauvre gosse dans le miroir. Tu ne me ressembles plus, pourtant tu...