Drieu la Rochelle'in yapıtına özkurgusal bir yaklaşım : L'Homme couvert de femmes ve Gilles örnekleri

This master's thesis focuses on an autofictional analysis of the work of the early 20th century writer: Drieu la Rochelle. We examined Drieu la Rochelle as an example of a collaborationist author from the Second World War since we find the idea of the cursed author intriguing and assume that there is something new or truth to be discovered when we set aside political-social ideas that are arguably problematic. We aimed for an understanding of Drieu through his works and his double, his creature Gille/Gilles. For this, we used the method of autofiction and we tried, through the latter, to try to explain what the "experimental self" is in Drieu la Rochelle. Our work therefore focuses on the analysis of the self which is used as a "laboratory of experience" as Frederic Grover calls it. With similar intentions, we called this phenomenon the "experiential self". In an analysis whose subject is Drieu la Rochelle, the concept of "self" had to be included. In the first chapter of our study, we introduced Drieu's life. First, we tried to examine the author's personality in detail by discussing about his childhood. We then mentioned his adolescence and his years at Science Po, his failure in the final exam and his enlistment in the army a few months before the First World War. We also cited the time of the First World War when he fought in the war and was wounded several times. We subsequently discussed the return from the war and the author's adaptation to Parisian society which was more laudatory and luminous than ever in the 1920s. We mentioned his participation, which lasted a short time, in the group surrealist, and of his separation from this group with three different open letters he wrote against them. Subsequently, the interwar period where Drieu found himself, especially after the events of February 1934, politically positioned himself on the fascist right like a large number of Europeans of his time. We then focused briefly, and once again chronologically, on the work of Drieu la Rochelle in order to subsequently understand the numerous parallelisms which appear between he and his work. We observed Rêveuse Bourgeoisie, L'Homme couvert de femmes, La Comédie de Charleroi and Gilles as examples. In this chronological analysis, divided into different themes, we have matched a part of Drieu la Rochelle's life through each work. We began with Drieu's childhood through Rêveuse Bourgeoisie, continued with the character of Don Juan through L'Homme couvert de femmes, then explored his warrior side through the stories in La Comédie de Charleroi, and his final years and the political position of his last decade through Gilles. It should be noted at this point that we have paid special attention to two of these works ; L'Homme couvert de femmes and Gilles, which we analyze in detail in the third chapter. The reason for focusing on these two works, whose main characters are Gille (L'Homme couvert de femmes) and Gilles (Gilles), for the rest of the study was to provide a panoramic view of the author's literary and personal life by pairing his first novel, L'Homme couvert de femmes, with his youth, and one of his last novels, Gilles (his third to last completed novel), with his later life. To conclude the first part, we focused on how Drieu was received by his contemporaries and later generations. VIII In a second chapter, we focused on the method of analysis, autofiction, that we approached in the study of the work of Drieu la Rochelle. We began first by explaining how the world of literary theory reached this concept by first introducing Lejeune and his famous theoretical work Le Pacte autobiographique which is the first work introducing the analysis of autobiography and these sub-texts. genres in literary theory. We then argued the real appearance of the word autofiction and what it meant for its creator who is Serge Doubrovsky. Subsequently we observed the real implementation of the concept through Vincent Colonna's doctoral thesis entitled L'Autofiction, essai sur la fictionalisation de soi en littérature, an essay on the fictionalization of the self in literature directed by Gérard Genette. This thesis allowed us to analyze the place and differences of the concept of autofiction compared to autobiography or even an autobiographical work. In addition, we were interested in the differences between the three related concepts: autofiction, autofictionalism and self-narrative. In this way, we aimed to better understand the idea behind autofiction by distinguishing it from its counterparts. Simultaneously, this study enabled us to analyze Drieu through the "experimental self" approach and to evaluate the works of Drieu's contemporaries according to the method of analyzing autofiction. As Drieu la Rochelle's contemporaries, we have chosen André Malraux and Louis Aragon from the left-wing tendency and Louis Ferdinand Céline and Henry de Montherlant from the right-wing tendency. This choice is confirmed by the preface to Gilles written by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle three years after its publication (1939). In this preface, which is very important for our study, the author positions himself literarily among these authors with the exception of Louis Aragon who is mentioned in the previous paragraph where the authors' names are mentioned. However, the main feature of this section is that it serves us as a transitional sub-section that justifies the adaptation of these four authors, among others, of course, to the method of self-fiction. In the third chapter, the final part of our study, in which we draw on all the data used so far, we aim to provide an explanation for the distinction between Drieu la Rochelle and his work, which some consider to be artificial. We therefore mainly talked about the Journal which he wrote without any desire to publish during the Second World War from 1939 until his death in 1945. After we examined the Exode, which is a kind of open suicide letter, in order to analyze Gille and Gilles, the main characters of Drieu la Rochelle, we went deeper into L'Homme couvert de femmes and Gilles. We talked about the letters signed by Drieu under the pseudonym "Gille", which are essential to the concept of the "experimental self". These are letters written to Victoria Ocampo, an Argentina woman dear to the author. And the fact that some of them are signed by the name of one of his fictional characters is extremely important for our thesis and proves the irrefutable link between him and this fictional character of his. In the second sub-section, we made a more detailed study of this character and tried to relate him to his author. Through the differences between these two characters, we introduced the concept of the experimental self, influenced by Frédéric Grover's concept of the "laboratory of experience". The "self" we add to this concept gains significance once it is inferred that it is Drieu la Rochelle's own identity that she uses as literary material. As a conclusion to our third part, we analyzed how Drieu's works are read and how this, and many other parameters, influence the interpretation of the author. In this chapter, we have tried to show how Drieu's contemporaries, then the new generation, and finally the generations after him, read Drieu la Rochelle. At this point, we observed that the generation between the two wars understood and admired Drieu's work, while the next generation, dominated by Sartrean thought until the IX 1980s, was completely against everything and everyone that reminded them of those days. Unlike their predecessors, the generation that knew, understood and judged Drieu only through his works painted a portrait of him as misogynist, anti-Semitic and above all collaborator. It was only in the late 1970s that France rediscovered these collaborative writers, and Drieu in particular, through the work of Frédéric Grover and Pierre Andreu. This led to interviews and reports with people who knew Drieu la Rochelle and are now deceased. These reports and interviews have indisputably helped us to understand the kind of man Drieu la Rochelle was. Finally, we have also mentioned the author's reception up to the present day and his image after this rediscovery. It is clear that this rediscovery and publication should not be seen as a simple coincidence. Just as the repeated rise of the right-wing tendency in different geographies and times around the world should not be seen as a coincidence. Surely, both of these situations have many interrelated economic and sociological causalities. We concluded our study by showing Pierre Drieu la Rochelle through his works, what he said about himself, what researchers said about him, what his contemporaries said about him, what the generation that came after him said about him and what today's generations say about him. In our study, we tried to define the author as a whole, and even though Drieu's works are intensely autofictional, as we have mentioned many times in our study, we pursued whether we can understand a person through his works. And at the end of this study, the following question emerged: Does a work of art have the function of representing its creator, or should it be considered as a separate entity? Key words : Drieu la Rochelle, 20th century French literature, Fascism, Selfliterature, experimental self, autofiction