Unity and plurality of the autofictional character in the works of the belgian author Andre Baillon

Abstract

In this paper, the works of the writer André Baillon are presented under the sign of autofiction. First, the author introduces this Belgian writer still unknown in Brazil, situating his publishing in the beginning of the 20th century and how his works became an interesting object in the Belgian academic milieu, fact that generated the republishing of many of his texts in the 1980s. Then, the autofictional gender is presented, by mentioning authors such as Serge Doubrovsky, Régine Robin and Patrick Saveau. The ambiguous and multiple aspects of this gender, the need of the character to have the same name as the author are aspects discussed here as well. At last, it is André Baillon’s work that unravels before us, showing how the labyrinth made with those texts brings up the core questions to the study of autofiction: the author’s fragmentation that reflects on the fragmentation of the characters and how the multiplicity of characters and the recovery of the same themes and even the same episodes from one book to another is an essential element to testify the unity in the plurality of this work.