La plage comme espace de l’écriture intime dans La vie pieds nus d’Alan Pauls

Authors : Mélanie Maillot

Pages : 19-40

Doi:10.26650/LITERA2019-0008

View : 27 | Download : 10

Publication Date : 2019-06-27

Article Type : Research

Abstract :The beach motif has been explored many times in literature: from Proust to Camus,  it has often embodied a place of interaction between a character’s internalised  experience and the reality of the outside world. In this round trip between the  intimate and the collective, Alan Pauls uses the beach as a tool for autobiographical  writing, thus creating a real "phenomenology” of the beach and revealing in his  text a stratified and textured meta-literature, like the grains of sand in which the  swimmer’s feet sink. The beach becomes a multidimensional space that allows  him to dissect his plural identity and reconnect with the memories of a childhood  spent in Argentina in the sixties and seventies. Pauls sets up this spatio-temporality  particularly through visual memory and a play on images, whether directly through  his writing or by inserting photographs and cinematographic references. Barefoot  life is both a dive into the depths of the mind and a serene siesta in the quicksands  of intimacy. Pauls takes us on a journey of discovery of his self in a story that takes us  like the wave and lets us float in the spume of our own lives.
Keywords : Alan Pauls, autobiographical writing, Argentine literature, philosophy, beach