Scribing and De-scribing History: Marie, Queen of Romania, The Story of My Life (1934-1936)

By considering “subjective” literature to be a “factual story” that transforms existence into a conscience and biography into a destiny, the present study focuses on the memoir The Story of My Life, written by Marie, Queen of Romania (1875-1938), translated into Romanian and published between 1934 and 1936. In order to favour a dialogue with history, the narrator, as a credible witness to history, by raising the great issue of the meaning of History to the level of the personal story, slides across the borders between the narrative texts claimed by the “biographical” genre and the memories give way to journal-type insertions that are autobiographical in nature. As an apologetic discourse, a historical story and an anthropological act that can resuscitate the mythical thinking, this memoir is also the space of a hermeneutical fiction in which different interpretations of the text can be identified: intentio auctoris, intentio operis and intentio lectoris. However, we will also support the interpretive conjecture of the retrospective narration with an applied poetical analysis, in order to identify and decrypt the autobiographical pact, the historical pact and the reading pact. By entering the field of literarity through a “quota of aesthetics” conditioned by the circumstances, the discourse of the factual story The Story of my Life realises and favours the relation between the time lived and the time of the confession-narration or, in other words, between scribing history (the narrative past) and de-scribing history (the commenting present).

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