The Mirage of Autofiction
MIRAJUL AUTOFICTIUNII
Keywords: Sacrificial writing; Autofiction; Memoirs; Monica Lovinescu; Rewriting; Identity
Tension rises, in Monica Lovinescu’s La apa Vavilonului, as the pathetic declarations of having burnt the journal pages from adolescence and, in general, all written pages that no longer satisfied her exigence appear throuought the book. Lovinescu furiously renegates a scriptical past where her own image is no longer convenient. We would not risk any psychoanalytic speculations, since she offers herself only some extremely subjective ones – the old writings are either „stupid” or „imature”, parts of a category of the detestable that speaks of an identity crisis. The second book from La Apa Vavilonului does not change the conduct of this sacrificial paradigm, making a huge use of the self and consolidating the „edifice by sacrifice”. And it is obvious that it is exactly this Poetics of writing by self-sacrifice that creates the esthetic value of Monica Lovinescu’s memoirs. Memoirs that are not simple acts of managing the data of the past, or a pure Mathematics of the relationship between them, of the memory in its brutal, preserved form. On the contrary, they are acts of literary creation, containing her own being and, equally, the history she had to put up with.
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