Le récit de vie comme trajectoire. Une comparaison des (auto)biographies de Jean Paul et de Stendhal

The notion of trajectory is relevant to understand how Jean Paul’s and Stendhal’s (auto)biographical narratives work (Konjektural-Biographie, 1799; Leben Fibels 1811; Vie de Henry Brulard, 1835, 1890). The reading of these literary life-narratives through the astronomical metaphor sheds light in return on the notion of trajectory. Two drawings in Stendhal’s narrative represent the possible “roads” of life as many trajectories. Jean Paul compares his biographical narratives with “revolutions” or with “comets”. We argue that the overlap of heterogeneous life trajectories create a tension between reality and fiction into the narrative. The ambiguity of memory appears: remembering the past can’t do without the creative activity of imagination and without imagining the future. Life-narrative links together the real trajectories and the imaginary ones. These trajectories become intermingled in Stendhal’s but the imaginary one is rejected in the end as a fictional temptation. It represents a narrative’s possible junction : the desired novel is the absent center that generates the autobiographical writing. On the contrary, in Jean Paul’s, real and imaginary trajectories endlessly combine to describe a continuous revolution around the figure of the author and around death. As metaphor of life and life-narrative, the trajectory seems to be open to another potential one.