Posthumous Resonances

memory, imagination, and death in Annie Ernaux's L'autre fille

Abstract

This essay proposes an analysis of the interweaving of the concepts of memory, imagination, and forgetting, as theorized by Paul Ricoeur, with the narrative elements of L’Autre Fille (2011) by Annie Ernaux. The work, written in the form of a letter to her sister Ginette, who passed away two years before her birth, explores the construction of a fragmented personal memory, in which old photographs and reminiscences interact with fictional elements. Ernaux uses imagination to fill the gaps left by forgetting, creating a hybrid narrative that transcends traditional autobiographical conventions, characterized as “autosociobiographical” writing. The analysis is based on Ricoeur's concepts, especially those in Memory, History, Forgetting (2007), which address the interaction between individual and collective memory, and the role of forgetting in identity formation. In L’Autre Fille, fragmented memory is not presented as a limitation but as a creative space that allows the author to revisit her past and reconstruct her identity in relation to the absence of her sister. The research concludes that Ernaux's narrative transforms absence and forgetting into tools to explore the relationship between life and death, highlighting literature as a space for the experimentation of the "self" in contact with otherness. The work thus reveals that memory, mediated by imagination, not only reconstructs the past but also redefines the present and contributes to the understanding of the author's own existence.