Soi-même dans un autre: Hélé Béji, Proust et les portes de Tunis

Soi-même dans un autre: Hélé Béji, Proust et les portes de Tunis, “Bulletin Marcel Proust”, 66, 2016, pp. 145-156. Oneself in another. Hélé Béji, Proust and the Tunis’ doors. In her autobiographical novel L’oeil du jour (1985), Hélé Béji passes thrice through the Tunis’ doors, thus breaking through the barriers of her own identity, as a Tunisian and/or as a French woman. The frontiere can indeed be considered as an aesthetic category in this narrative of the North African writer, in which reality is represented by a moving Self, ceaseless caught in an interim space that situates itself at the edge of things and worlds, between times and spaces, on the borderline, above all, of writing styles. The stylistic dimension can actually be considered the very pathway through which Hélé Béji achieves her own identity as a woman and as a Tunisian. In effect, her systematic echoing of Proustian narrative and stylistic patterns is not meant to barely imitate a model. Instead, this conscious imitation process is chosen by Béji to develop an original resource, able to represent the image of the Self as it was defined by Paul Ricoeur in 1990, that is to say, possible only in the recognition and the acknowledgment of the Other (Ricoeur, 1990). This stylistic intertwining and its cultural implications are the main topics of this article. On the other hand, I intend to demonstrate that Béji’s relation to the French novelist’s work responds accurately enough to the notion of “hospitality”, as it has been formulated by G. Boruszko and S. Tötösy de Zepetnek (2013), and thus to contribute in building on new bases a remoulded theory of the World Literature. In effect, the cultural heritage that Béji receives by France and one of its greatest authors allows her to access her own identity, in a linguistic and stylistic reshuffle that is far from being a simple pastiche, but weaves in the thread of the discourse her presence in the “Other’s” world: Tunis, Paris and their ivory doors.