Autobiography and “explosion”. Ways of erecting and overcoming the boundary between the author and the hero (the story of J.-P. Sartre “Words”)

Abstract

This article attempts to define the boundary between the author and the hero, which is declared as the leading intention in J.-P. Sartre’s autobiographical novel “Words”. The boundary – category, as one of the central ones in the semiotics of culture, seems to be a convenient tool for analyzing the autobiographical narrative, a conventionally borderline literary genre, and is understood as an area of collision of two different spheres – nature and culture. The boundary that does not separate the text from the reference which he describes, and as a consequence the image of the author or character from the Author-Creator, but connects them. The article identifies such boundary markers as: theatricalization of the life experience, ironic distance as a technique, reflection on the achievable limits of the truthfulness in an autobiographical narrative and on the content of individual memory, the use of cultural memory as an explanatory context. Summarizing the article conclusions are drawn about how the explicit contouring of the boundary allows the author to distance himself from personal experience, but not completely exclude himself from the written text and preserve documentary as a certain quality.