L’UN CONTRE L’AUTRE, OR ECHOLALIA IN SERGE DOUBROVSKY’S AUTOFICTION

The article analyzes the linguistic specificity of Serge Dubrovsky’s (1928–2017) autofiction Fils (1977). It was in relation to the genre and language features of this text that the author proposed his neologism — autofiction, which is currently widely used both in practice and in theory. According to the founder himself, autofiction presupposes absolute factual accuracy of the author’s life, in particular, complete homonymy of the author, the narrator and the hero, and the fictionality of the presentation. The writer creates his special language —“antilanguage” where English inclusions play a special role. French defines the past (childhood, youth, parents, war occupation of France), English — the present (lecturer’s activity at New York University, family), French — the subconscious, the inner world, writing: all what is not expressed, implicit; English — the external, what is spoken, explicit. At the same time, both languages turn out to be inextricably linked: what first appears in one is duplicated in the other. The author himself defines his language as echolalia or reflective speech, which is characterized by significant repetition of arbitrary words and phrases. This technique also characterizes the key moment of autofiction — a dream about a monster, to which the hero-narrator repeatedly returns throughout the day during which the action takes place. Based on an interview with S. Dubrovsky, his notes on the first version of autofiction (which was published in 2014 under the name Monster), the article analyzes the features of the anti-language — the only one capable of expressing the hidden and leading to knowledge of the deep. Literature is “just a language”, as the author writes. The confusion of the languages determines not only the duality of the author-narratorhero, but also the duality of autofiction.