Configurations spatio-identitaires dans Le Boulevard périphérique de Henry Bauchau

Abstract

Henry Bauchau is a writer whose work and life cover the most important events of the 20th century. There are two ways of reading History in his novels, plays and poetry anthologies: firstly, there is a personal story, secondly, there is “la grande Histoire” (the great History), as the writer likes to call it. On the canvas of the world, history “weaves” individual charming stories, very often auto- and allo-biographic plots, where the writer dedicates a lot of importance to space. Le Boulevard périphérique is a novel published in 2008 in which the author, on a biographical background of exciting and varied stories, often fictionalized, questions the two major faces of history: the individual and the collective one, highlighting their dramatic dimension, the importance of writing and the salvation through art. One of the most important aspects of the novel is the very poetic analysis, where autobiography and fiction merge, of the space-identity relation in the becoming of the person.