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David Samuels nous propose dans ce texte inédit, écrit à l’occasion des Assises Internationales du Roman 2015, une réflexion saisissante sur le principe d’ « auto-imagination » en dressant un parallèle entre l’autofiction et la montée des extrémismes politiques et religieux.

If it’s true that we use narrative as a frame to make sense of the randomness of our human experience, then the story of romantic love might be seen as reflecting our profoundest anxieties about who and what we are, about what happens to us and why. The love narrative is ostensibly a story of progress, yet its true goal is to achieve an ending, a place of finality where nothing further needs to happen and the tension between fantasy and reality can cease. At the wedding of man and woman a veil is drawn, an ending arrived at: the reader closes the book, for marriage as it is lived represents the re-assertion of reality over narrative. Having committed this public act of participation and belief in the notion of life as a story, man and woman are left to order and confer meaning on their private experiences as best they can...

"Human beings are forever explaining themselves to themselves. This is the nature of our self-consciousness. We are not only awake and aware of the world around us, but are able to reflect on ourselves as actors in that world. We reason and we tell stories. Unlike our mammalian relatives who do not narrate their own lives, we become characters in our own tales, both when we recollect ourselves in the past and imagine ourselves in the future. Our ability to represent our experience in language - in those sounds and signs of our essential intersubjectivity - allows us the necessary symbolic alienation required for mental time travel..."

This article analyses the construction of voices in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies, in which the paradoxical relationship between printed signs on a page and phonemes uttered by human bodies is fore-grounded. Auster revels in creating lively dialogues that are carefully inscribed within a particular voice through the use of didascalia, but he also celebrates the physicality and euphony of a narrative voice which navigates between elegiac lyricism and sharp-witted humour. The Brooklyn Follies, like all Auster’s books, is a book about books, but this one is also a book about tales and story-telling, about speech and silence, and the very American tradition of tall tales.