Over narrativiteit en fictionalisering in de (auto)biografische ruimte

Abstract

Stories on people's lifes play an ever growing part in postmodernism. This article discusses the way narrativity relates three fields: the autobiographical, the historical, and the psychological. Creative processes create accounts of happenings in which narrative structures are introduced en a story takes form. More interesting, however, are the moments in which narrativity is broken through and fictionalization happens. This takes place in every form of autobiographical and biographical writing, whether it is literature, ego documents or historiography. The narrative voice then becomes an unknowable, ingraspable transpersonal authority that speaks from a 'transitional' space: a complex mixture of pieces of memories, dreams, desires, and onconscious conflict. The narrative is constructed through the secondary processes of organization, temporality et cetera, while primary, unconscious processes play a part as well.