Mise en scène de soi Cours

Childhood is a key stage in individuals' self-development, because it is when they are little that they discover the world and learn to decipher it thanks to language.

Children however have a unique way of relating to their environment as playfields or unknown territories. Because it is such an important and enjoyable period in people's lives, almost everyone writing their autobiography likes to recall and relate their boy- or girlhood. Retrieving the little boy or girl within means conjuring up a myriad of childhood sensations and impressions to transcribe as faithfully as possible, sometimes with the help of fiction. It is a self-exploratory journey into the past.

English writer Laurie Lee undertook to render his childhood in a Cotswold village in Gloucestershire, just after the First World War, in his autobiographical book Cider with Rosie. He tried to adopt the perspective of the little boy he used to be in order to stick to what his life and environment where like back then. This doing, he also revived the traditions and life styles gradually disappeared as a result of post-war mechanization and social changes. The book opens on the young boy's somewhat traumatic arriving in the village. 

Memoirs are an autobiographical form of writing in which the author-narrator-protagonist narrates his or her experience of a specific period of time and his or her involvement in the events that took place then.

Most memoirs were written by politicians, intellectuals or soldiers wanting to bear witness to what they lived through and accomplished during difficult times. Their autobiographical writings constitute invaluable historical documents in which battles are re-enacted, governments decisions explained and successes and failures accounted for. The author puts himself in the shoes of a historian, offering readers an insider's interpretations of what took place in the past. 

In his Memoirs of the Second World War, published in 1948, Winston Churchill, who stood at the sharp end, shares his own experience of the global conflict.

Some writers may also want to write their autobiographies to retrace the gradual process through which they became writers, highlighting their motivations, sources of inspirations and accomplishments.

The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, co-author of the path-breaking Lyrical Ballads, wrote a peculiar poet's autobiography which is also a guide to reading and understanding his poems. 

Authors and filmmakers are known to have very eventful personal lives that represent ideal material to write novels or screenplays.

Many of them, like Woody Allen, have made it a habit and an art to act as fictional versions of themselves in their movies. One may think of Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) as illustrations. 

Manhattan takes place with the rather closed circle of the pedantic New York elite Allen knew best because he was part of it. The story of a Jewish writer named Isaac Davis, who is divorcing his wife and seeing a teenage girl, echoes Allen's own life situation at the time he made this film. The analogy is made all the more obvious since Allen himself is performing the role of Davis. Allen's favourite stock character is that of the tormented artist going through existential crises, because he identifies with this archetype. The opening scene of the movie, in which Isaac Davis keeps rewriting the incipit of his new book, matches Allen's physical and psychological description. 

Self-fiction consists in the transformation by the author himself of his or her life experiences into a fictional story or account. It is a type of fiction in which everything is at the same time entirely true and totally fictitious.

Charles Bukowski, for example, made a literary career out of transposing his life as a promiscuous alcoholic and politically incorrect outcast into novels. Bukowski mostly wrote about homeless pariahs, addicts and lecherous losers who like nothing better than to wallow in promiscuity and mediocrity. The places and characters' names might be different but the people and the situations are all adapted from real life, a conception of literature Bukowski vindicated in a letter. 

The autobiographical play Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams is closely based upon the playwright's own life. It deals with concealing one's homosexuality to avoid shaming one's family and with the lobotomy of his sister, who was considered a lunatic. The play is a cathartic attempt to come to terms with traumatic experiences. 

A writer's personal life can also be used as material to carry out literary experiments.

It is with the case of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a novel written in the style of a biography. It recounts the life and quandaries of an Elizabethan poet who transformed into a woman overnight. The eponymous character was modelled after her lover, cross-dressing novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West. This daring story of gender transformation is set against the backdrop of Shakespeare's England, where it would have been quite impossible to succeed for a woman with literary aspirations or intellectual ambitions. That's what Virginia Woolf is demonstrating in her fictional biography, along with the fact that gender is a social construct. She makes it quite clear in a short demonstration about clothes, towards the end of the novel, when Orlando is beginning to realise that being a woman comes with quite a few impediments and limitations. 

Singers hardly ever show their true personalities, which they prefer to keep away from the limelight to distinguish between their public and private lives. This notwithstanding, singers' personae reflect some of who they are.

The English singer and songwriter Kate Bush, for instance, kept changing her style to reflect her musical compositions. She also enjoyed impersonating literary characters, like Catherine Earnshaw from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Bush wrote a song based upon the novel, which soon became a hit that launched her career. Kate no doubt identified herself with Catherine's passionate and indomitable nature, as is evidenced by the following extract from the lyrics. 

In 1973, the eccentric British singer and actor David Bowie created a character for himself; Ziggy Stardust fighting stellar wars was born on stage. He would remain Bowie's imaginary twin brother for five years. Acting as someone else enabled him to invent a new name and story for himself, thus leading a double life on stage and at home. 

Poetry, which mostly tackles death, love and the passage of time, is often highly emotional. To write poetry is to write both for oneself and to other people, which implies having empathy.

It actually involves being able to put oneself in the shoes and minds of someone else whilst sharing very personal feelings or private thoughts. Poets have to be lovers, mourners and philosophers in order to lend their voices to other people. The poems that are the most famous and read are those which resonate with everyone's feelings and experiences. It is worth mentioning that poems are often read at weddings or funerals. 

Shakespeare's sonnets are among mourners' and spouses' favourites, because they deal with love, desire and the transience of life. They were anonymously addressed to a fair young man and a dark woman, but are vaulted in such language as speaks timelessly to any reader. Shakespeare also partook of the poetic tradition of lamenting the passage of time to woo a young woman or persuade her to produce a child.

Coleridge's lengthy narrative poem "Kubla Khan: a Vision in a Dream" is a good example of the poet acting as inspired genius. The poem recounts how Kubla Khan represents the poet blessed with inspiration, as is evidenced by the following extract from the end of the poem.