Temporal Rupture in French Life Writing: Memory and Historical Time in Four French Authors

This article compares four postwar French works of autobiographical and autofictional writing: Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur (1985), Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975), Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils (1977), and Annie Ernaux’s Les Années (2008). It defines temporal rupture narrowly as a marked interruption in the relation between narrated time and the time of narration: a return, omission, pause, repetition, or displacement that changes how a past event is available in the present. Voice shifts, documents, and self-commentary count only when close reading shows that they alter this temporal relation. A comparative model links four prominent operations affective suspension, archival montage, allegorical alternation, and metafictional reflexivity to temporal rupture and to its effects on memory and autobiographical authority. The works do not represent one equivalent trauma: Duras and Perec engage directly with wartime violence and loss; Ernaux organizes personal recollection within social history; Doubrovsky examines remembered selfhood through psychoanalytic narration and language. Short, edition-specific readings show both the explanatory reach and limits of the model. Temporal discontinuity can register uncertainty and mediation, but it can also obscure context or narrow testimony. Its ethical value therefore depends on what the form makes legible and what it leaves out.