Les récits de filiation de Fleur Jaeggy: remonter les silences hérités du lexique familial

Abstract

Fleur Jaeggy was born in Zurich in 1940 and she lives in Italy since the 1960s. The family reminiscences that spring from her autobiographical works – “I beati anni del castigo” (1989) and “Protelerka” (2001) −, are often detached, fragmentary, veined with melancholy and dominated by introspection, converging in the category of “filiation stories”, defined in 1999 by Dominique Viart. In fact, the author’s family history seems not to exist − it is broken up; it is incomplete and unknown for both the narrator and her reader. It is only once her parents have died and the heritage of objects, notebooks, photos, portraits and papers gathered that the construction of the family building can take place, by tracing the memories’ thread of the daughter. The desire of the narrator to go back up her genealogy without following a chronological thread and by trying to fill in the silences, the ellipses and the omissions, responds less to a poetics of representation than to a need for answers or to a questioning that became imperative at the time of writing. The work is, in this sense, less a portrait than an analysis.