La biographie comme atelier commun. À propos d’Être ici est une splendeur de Marie Darrieussecq

Abstract

Standing apart from the rest of Marie Darrieussecq’s work, Being Here is Everything (2016) is, to date, the only ‘biography’ written by this author. It recounts the short life of a German painter, Paula M. Becker (1876 - 1907), whose work was largely unknown in France when this book was published. This text takes its place within a very broad contemporary literary movement – as everyone knows, ‘a fair number of today’s novelists grapple with that uncertain and unstable construct which is the story of a life’ and make it into a major ‘literary genre in the publishing landscape’ (Tadié & Cerquiglini, 339-340). Yet it stands out, in our view, thanks to the different possible levels of reading that it offers. Studying the details of Paula Becker’s life that are selected here, the words chosen and the construction of the text, makes it possible to show that Being Here is Everything also constitutes for the author an opportunity to dig down into themes and topics previously addressed in her fiction, such as feminism, the importance of travelling and of geography, the question of death and what remains after death, thus, as it were, turning certain features of this biography into mirrors. But this story also turns out to be - perhaps more than anything else - a fascinating locus of interrogation and reflection where the great questions arising in the polymorphous genre that is contemporary biography are worked through. It is such avenues that this article sets out to explore.