“The Absolute Genre”

Abstract

The field of biography in France elicits a notable degree of reflection on genre, which is expressed either implicitly, by the prolixity and diversity of sometimes experimental productions, or explicitly in at least two books published in 2019 with very different, if not radically opposite, approaches to the question: Pascal Quignard's La vie n'est pas une biographie and Dominique Bona’s Mes vies secrètes. Quignard’s argument against “biographical narration” is that “On ne saurait faire un tissu si continu de ses désirs, ni des actions où ils se projettent ou qu’ils inventent, qu'il puisse passer pour vraisemblable” [One cannot make of one’s desires, or of the actions into which they project themselves or which they invent, a fabric so continuous as to pass for verisimilar] (21).