Marguerite Yourcenar’s Le Labyrinthe du Monde: autobiography of an absent self?

Abstract

Marguerite Yourcenar’s autobiography Le Labyrinthe du monde surprised readers by its lack of self-representation and by being mainly a lengthy exploration of the genealogy of her ancestors. This article pursues the hypothesis that although Yourcenar is considered an autonomous creator, uninfluenced by the Parisian avant-garde of the sixties and seventies, certain aspects of her practice of self-representation draw on a new approach to historiography of which Michel Foucault, for example, was one of the earliest practitioners.