Jean Sénac et les jeux du « je »

Jean Sénac and the games of “I”

Abstract

In his Journal Alger. Janvier-Juillet 1954, written in French, Jean Sénac tries to renew the practice of diary writing in the Algerian literary field. This work is written in an extremely subtle exercise in style, exploring the contradictory relationships between a real author, Jean Sénac, the person who keeps this diary, and an imagined writer, a character also called Jean Sénac, whose day-to-day life is told in detail by the former throughout this diary. This script features the I of this writer. His intimacy, his emotions, his moods
are described, in the moment, outside of any apparent intention. This approach to diary writing raises a number of questions. A complex game is indeed established between the different facets of the writer, between his real I who writes and the imaginary I that he attributes to himself with this act of writing itself. Keeping the diary indeed gives the opportunity to the author to observe himself, but also to analyze and rebuild himself. A number of textual entities then confront each other. It is this paradoxical game on this I that is studied.