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This essay describes a double deconstruction: that which Marguerite Yourcenar operates upon the traditional autobiographical discourse through modem philosophy and biology, as well as that of a conventional image of Yourcenar as a classical and backward-looking writer. The absence of an autobiographical object in Marguerite Yourcenar's trilogy Le Labyrinthe du monde is a standard assumption in today's criticism,1 as she is said to have achieved "a tour de force by writing an autobiography in which she is absent".2 Some theological, philosophical or literary explanations have been advanced, all traditional and based on sporadic textual reference.3 However, far from constituting autonomous explanatory systems, they are intertextual signs of an isotopy of the non-Self, all of which point to a new reality, that of the dawn of the twentieth century.
Let me first recall the basic axioms of traditional autobiography as Philippe Lejeune has condensed them: "a retrospective account in prose a real person makes of their own existence, when it focuses on their individual life and especially on the history of their personality."4 Lejeune also postulates that the Self exists as an absolute reality and that the presumption of sincerity in the autobiographical project is linked to a kind of proven reality.
The first modem attacks against the fallacy of the Self can be considered as coming from Friedrich Nietzsche. For the German philosopher, ontology isolates the Self inside the fallacious world of appearances, and by means of the reason's interpretive authority, constructs a petrified Being believed to survive everything. Any reader of Nietzsche - and Yourcenar is no exception5 - is aware of this fundamental conviction of the German philosopher, which he defends vehemently in his works. The polemical style of Nietzsche is very apparent in the vocabulary of Yourcenar, with, for example, the derogatory adjectives she uses to express her contempt for this most common illusion. Yourcenar confirms Nietzsche when chastising "this human individuality to which we cling so much" or "the stupid concept that we are somebody".6
Hence, if, for all the above-mentioned reasons, the Self does not exist for Marguerite Yourcenar, how then can it utter a first-person discourse? A lead towards an answer is seemingly given in the epigraph to Souvenirs pieux, the first book of the trilogy, in the form...