À chacun sa cicatrice : écritures de l'identité chez Romain Gary, Georges Perec et Patrick Modiano

This thesis aims to explore the theme of identity in the works of three French authors of Jewish origin, whose literary activity extends from the 1960s to the present day: Romain Gary, Georges Perec and Patrick Modiano. The three writers deal differently with the trauma of the Holocaust as a consequence of their different historical experiences: Gary was a hero of the Resistance, Perec survived the Holocaust as a Hidden Child and Modiano was the son of a Jewish collaborator. The theme of the Holocaust recurs in their works as a tormented and intimate interrogation to their origins. The three authors share the experience of being lost and researching into history. The difficult transmission of the memory of the past is accompanied by a problematic re-appropriation of the present. In this thesis, in accordance with Paul Ricœur, identity is conceived as a narrative that reconstructs and deconstructs the self, with no ultimate and clear definition of what it really is. Starting from Freud and the Trauma Studies, I study the relationship between identity and memory, focusing particularly on the principle of repetition as the traumatic result of the autobiographical and historical experiences of the three authors. In the second part of the thesis, following Foucault's studies on the “author-function”, I analyze how the search for personal identity is combined with and nurtured by the creation of an authorial posture and role, in reference to literary corpus of the three authors. In the third part, repetition is analyzed as an instrument of introjection of otherness, therefore considering each writer as an intertext of pre-existing words by other authors. Can rewriting and repetition be ‘‘form-sense’’ (H. Meschonnic) of the search for identity? Yes, provided that they are performed as aesthetic variations on a leading autobiographical theme.