To say that the simplest definition of autobiography involves a person writing about their own life would not be wrong. However, this genre, which is also referred to as “writing about one’s own life” or as the “I” narrative in the literary world, has been the subject of ongoing debate for many years. Recent literary theorists have argued autobiographical writing to perhaps not be completely possible due to reasons such as unconscious changes that may occur in memory (i.e., forgetting), as well as the voluntary censorship and conscious changes that can occur. The aim of this study is to show how the codes of autofictional narrative function in the novel by the famous Algerian novelist and history professor Assia Djebar titled L’Amour, La Fantasia, in which the historical and individual narratives intertwine within the framework of the concepts of autobiography, autobiographical novel, and autofiction. 

The cultural codes one is born into and grew up with obviously also influence the writings of a literary person. When considering the situation of the famous Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, the act of writing and saying “I” are a feature of a male-dominated field in Muslim-Arab societies. Clearly the role of women in such societies remains outside of social life, and women completely stay away from the act of writing, which exists only in environments where women are present. In Assia Djebar’s novel L’Amour, La Fantasia, translated into English as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, she undertakes rewriting Algerian colonial history from a new, female perspective. The main reason for this act of historical rewriting is that the work of historiography has been monopolized by men in a Western masculine field. While Assia Djebar carried out the act of reconstructing the Algerian colonial history from the perspective of an Algerian Muslim Arab woman, she included titled and numbered chapters in her novel. In the titled chapters of the novel, Assia Djebar appears as a girl starting primary school, while the numbered chapters describe the first French siege that had taken place in 1830. Thus, the historical narrative and the self-fictional narratives the author constructed based on her own life story follow one another in the novel. Therefore, while Assia Djebar’s act of writing was considered a violation of the male-dominated literary field, one meanwhile also observes how women have become subjects after having been in the position of object in Maghreb literature for many years.

This genre of literature, in which Assia Djebar has put women at the center, consciously abandons the harmony and equality of “author, narrator, and person,” as mentioned by the French theorist Lejeune (1996) in his book Pacte autobiographique. In this regard, mentioning a new concept that another theorist, Serge Doubrovsky (1980), mentioned in the preface of his novel Fils would be appropriate: This concept is autofiction, where reality and fiction are intertwined. Autofiction is actually an amalgam of the strategies used for autobiographies and novels. According to Doubrovsky, because no autobiographical narrative can build a real life, no narrative can possibly be complete and real from beginning to end due to gaps in memory, forgetfulness, and censorship (i.e., conscious and unconscious reasons). The purpose of the autofictional narrative is not to reconstruct a holistic and complete real life; on the contrary, its purpose is to give the impression that the life being told is real. In short, any text, being a field of referential reality, requires autofiction for reconstructing one’s life, a reinvention of an individual journey. Assia Djebar also used the autofictional narrative because of the patriarchal structure of Arab Muslim society, the reprehensible writing of women, the prohibition of the “I” with regard to Islam, and the lack of mastery regarding the Arabic language.