A reflexion on the nature of Vraie Fiction

For a start, I will quote Anthony Burgess (in the first book of his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God):

"The delineation of oneself at such length must look like egocentricity, but an autobiography has to be egocentric. On the other hand, what do we mean by the ego? It is an existential concept, I believe, and the ego I examine is multiple and somewhat different from the ego that is doing the examining."

I recently did an entry (in French) about the nature of this blog. It was bound to happen, as I don't feel always very inspired to write about my uneventful life (the heat, the heat of this Summer just turns me numb), so self-analysis was the way to go. I want to freely rewrite in English this entry here, as my life is still uneventful and I am a bit of an egocentric.

On the 25th February 2008, I started this blog. Strange thing a blog, I learned that quickly. First no one knows who will end up reading it, and quite often you end up writing to yourself. it is a form of personal journal or autobiography, something that will interest nobody, or just a few people. I started to blog wanting to tell the story of an experience that I considered (and am still considering ) of interest: the life of a Quebec expat in England. I had no idea what I was going to write about or if I was going to be able to sustain this blog. It seems that I managed to write quite a lot, about practically anything, and if I sure don't have much of a readership, I at least gave the virtual world something to read. Then again, I did get some readers. My rant against Christian fundamentalists gave me a bit of exposure, my entries on Paul McCartney got the attention of a troll and a couple of random entries got visited quite often. That said, I didn't create this blog to start and take part in controversies. My main intention was to write about myself...sort of. I say sort of, because my life in itself, as lived, is not very interesting. That said, once told, through the exercise of rewriting, when the meaningless has been taken off, when the boring stuff has been excised or transformed by the account/writing, it can be of some interest. There is no such thing as a truthful autobiography, that genuinely says what happened, how it happened, exactly . All autobiography is fiction, because the memory of the writer is faulty, because he twists a few things to make a better story, because he interprets his life, because he reconstructs the events to give them significance. In effect, this is what I am doing here on this blog. So I gave it the name "Vraie Fiction" as it is not reality, yet it is a genuine account of fragments of my life, fragments that I made meaningful. Anyway, that's what I tried to do, that's what I managed to do between entries about beer, food and weather.

I also tried to make this blog about fiction itself. As I studied literature, it keeps me connected with my studies, and I think I can make people discover or rediscover works such as the Fantômas stories, Nero Wolfe or the TV series Omertà. Because it promotes works that deserve to be better known and because it is fun to write about such things, I want to keep this aspect.

Okay, enough about the egocentric and pseudo-philosophical observations, let's try to write about something more concrete next time.