You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is not uncommon in the French publishing tradition for works of fiction to be presented with a mark of the literary genre to which they belong: roman (novel), théâtre (drama), contes (short stories), poésie (poetry), etc. So when I first picked up a copy of the original French version of Sibylle Lacan’s delicate little volume, back in September 1994, its presentation as a “puzzle”—the word is identical in French and English—immediately caught my attention, sparking my curiosity and indeed inducing a certain degree of puzzlement. Since the word also carries the same connotations in both languages, it could refer to a mystery story, or even a work of hardboiled detective fiction, and to some extent it would not be entirely inappropriate to apply these designations to the quiddity of this text, if only because the entire narrative is driven by the unresolved question marks that loom large over the figures who provide the book’s subject matter—the father of the main title, and his daughter, the author. Yet in an introductory note to the central part of her work, which is also entitled “A Father,” Sibylle Lacan explains that the word “puzzle” refers more to her creative modus operandi than to the “genre” in which her work ought to be situated: “The subtitle puzzle derives from the fact that I did not write this text in a consistent manner. In the midst of disorder, I have written what I would call “bursts” [bouts] … I have written, so to speak, blindly, without any precise design, whether in the formal sense, or as forethought; without knowing which scene, which image, I would wind up with once the bursts, the morsels, the pieces were assembled” (2). Taking into account that she opens this note with the affirmation that her book “contains not an ounce of fiction,” one thus needs to conclude that the puzzle is first and foremost a tentative assemblage of scattered crumbs of truth—singularly subjective truth, yet truth all the same—which emerged intermittently in the au