The Writer’s imaginary biography as a modality of the essay: "Rimbaud le fils" by Pierre Michon

Abstract

Situated halfway between fiction and diction, the writer’s imaginary biography is a particular form of the fictional biography genre, whose enunciative, semantic and pragmatic characteristics are interweaved, to a varying degree, with those of the essay. In addition to the imaginary recreation of a writer’s life offered by fiction, this type of text has also a critical and polemical purpose, as it intends to deliver an original and revitalizing view of literature as such. This hypothesis is verified in the analysis of Rimbaud le fils, a work that occupies a prominent position in the aesthetic break-up of the last decades of the 20th century, due not only to its reinvigorating approach to biography conventions, but also to its heterodox stance regarding the current explanatory systems of the literary edifice.