‘Tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux.’ Een onderzoek naar de dunne scheidslijn tussen fictie en non-fictie en de plaats van autobiografictie hiertussen in de literaire werken van Maurits Wagenvoort

Abstract

Although Barthes advocated for disconnection between authors and their work, authors are still associated with the values of their work. This connection fades the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, because novels are compared to the author’s lifecycle. Authors themselves contribute to this fading as well. They fictionalize to determine their postures and to reflect the reality in a better way. In this context, the genre autobiografiction is interesting because it integrates both the non-fictional part (factual lifecycle) and the fictional parts (like thoughts and romanticizing). In this paper, a normative analysis, based on the theory of Greimas and Jouve, is applied to the autobiografiction De Vrijheidzoeker and to two novels of Maurits Wagenvoort. The main character’s worldview of De Vrijheidzoeker largely corresponds with the worldviews of the novels. Because the autobiografiction and the novels share a lot of values, I suppose they are the author’s values. It seems that Wagenvoorts novels are also fictionalised in order to reflect the reality in a better way. Therefore, his novels cannot be considered to be purely fiction, because it seems they contain autobiographical values. Fictionalization in Wagenvoorts writings were also used to determine the intellectual posture of Wagenvoort.