Zayed Tayeb
The narration that the author of ”Walk in my past” has adopted consists of recounting his life in a linear, rectilinear, chronological, one-dimensional way, far from the conventional writing code of autobiographical novels. This form of narration gives the story a character of platitude and lack of relief and depth. If the narration is the essence that feeds and nourishes the autobiography in movement, the descriptions of characters, objects, places, animated scenes are ornaments that line and furnish the set of colorful and varied paintings. The narration is one, the description is plural. Narration is a line. The description a space. Narration is like walking, it requires the exercise of intellectual effort for the first and physical effort for the second; descriptions are rest areas and places of contemplation. They allow the reader to breathe, to regain his strength for a new stage in this long itinerary. Thus, on the linearity of the narration, are grafted breaks so necessary to rest. The reader is like the walker and the activity of reading is not very different from that of walking. Stride after stride brings the first closer to his point of his destination and word by word the second to his final goal. However, both the walker and the reader need small spaces, small tables, rest areas to relax and catch their breath.
Another point deserves mention. The author of an autobiography certainly needs a multiple and complex system of ”I” games to carry out the story or part of the story of his life. It seems to me that Mr. Zaid single-handedly took on all of the narration. The ”I” that he uses to tell refers directly to the author that he is. The absence of dialogical scenes that allow the character to express himself through direct speaking obscures the narrated “I”, which, in such circumstances, must be supported by a narrating “I” and the setting in abyss of a story carried, that of “I” child embedded in a story carrying the “I” adult gives to the whole an atmosphere of tyranny of the last on the first and of a hand placed on the together by an absolutist authority of the author over the character that he is and who remains sidelined. We note in this regard that the author Zaid can not detach himself from Zaid the child whose story he tells in what he calls an autobiography entitled ” walk in my past ”. The “I” that dominates is both that of the narrator and that of the author. The narration is by the narrator, the comments are by the author. But the boundaries between one and the other are difficult to draw with very precise limits.
Throughout the reading of the ”Promenade”, the reader discovers other breaches of the code of autobiography. As the author chose to take charge of the narration of his past by means of a single ”I”, he found himself faced with the impossibility of diversifying his modes of narration according to the different ” I” who act in their capacity as author, narrator or character. If the role of the author is to comment, criticize, or make value judgments, that of the narrator is to tell and describe and that of the character is to act out the scene by playing the role of the child that the author was. at a certain time. The distribution of roles gives rise to the distribution of modes of narration. In the ”Promenade”, the author and the narrator are one, and as such, they use a single ”I” which is that of both the author and the narrator and therefore use discourse as a mode of narration that allows him both to tell and to make judgments. This gives the whole an air of flatness and monotony. The alternation between narrative tenses and discourse tenses could have removed the ambiguity created by the use of a single mode of narration, namely discourse.
The last point concerns time. As I just said in the last paragraph, consistently applied chronological storytelling affects the narrative. Projections into the past, or as Gérard Genette calls them, analepsis or retrospections, give the story relief and depth. Their absence gives the story a flat chronological character without contours. The analepsis, so necessary in an autobiography, makes it possible to go upstream from the author and the narrator towards the character that the story can capture at a certain time, at a certain age, in a certain circumstance and to come back towards the author and narrator. Thanks to them, the reader can at any time abandon the first story to find himself in the second story which is attached to it.
Despite the many pitfalls relating to the pact of production and reading of the autobiography, of which I have just cited a few, Mr. Zaid Assis has been able to take us for a walk in his past outside the artifices of literature, and this, in a language healthy and rigorous which testifies to the sincerity of the author. In ”A Walk Through My Past,” reality prevailed over fiction and truth over verisimilitude.
Zayed Tayeb