Timing "I": An Investigation of the Autofictional "I" in Gail Scott's Heroine

[T]o say that narrative is the production of Oedipus is to say that each reader—male or female—is constrained and defined within the two positions of a sexual difference thus conceived: male-hero-human, on the side of the subject; and female-obstacle-boundary-space, on the other.

Teresa de Lauretis

Nicole Brossard opens a short piece entitled "Autobiography" with the following statement: "I have just finished writing this short autobiography and now I feel like starting all over again, in the present tense this time, because the present tense is the only time-space where I have the impression of existing" (FA 117). Where does the writer of the autobiography exist, once it is written? The eponymous heroine of Gail Scott's novel, G. S., spends the duration of the narrative in her bathtub. She is suspended in time and space, a skipping record, a stutter unable to break memory's stranglehold. Her life is a fiction waiting to be written. Not surprisingly, perhaps, at its inception psychoanalysis was conceived of as "talk therapy." The hope was that if the patient could narrativize her heretofore-unspeakable ailments, then she could create a fictional self, a fiction of her self, and through that story she could heal. Psychoanalysis, then, may be considered a productive means of interrogating the subject and her psychical construction. For Peggy Phelan, "psychoanalysis is the performance in which the doctor and the patient interpret a symptom that gives the body temporal coherence. Part of the burden of establishing temporal order for the body … often falls to narrative since one of the things that narrative generates is temporal order" (55). However, as Lynette Hunter notes, deciphering the unconscious is not an easy task; rather, it requires "a kind of training" that is specific to each distinct reader-writer relationship (in Forsyth 209). If, as Barbara Godard puts forth, "writing and memory become irrevocably intertwined, creating an archive of texts and affects," then I agreed with her when she evinces that recognizing the past, recognizing memory is a "visceral sensation" that occurs in the continual movement of becomings (in Forsyth 192). In other words, writing and memory—autobiography—not only requires a body ("visceral sensation") but is also partially planted in the present stretching toward the future. What to do, then, with a heroine stuck in the past?

In this article I will take up both autobiographical writing and psychoanalytic critiques in an attempt to posit that Gail Scott, a creative writer who engages in semi-autobiographical writing, writes in a particularly performative way that gestures toward a new literary language for theorizing the formation of the female self and subjectivity.¹ In her article, "Love in a Cold Climate: Queer Belongings in Quebec," Elspeth Probyn notes that in Quebec "identity is an institutional project," where "constant appeals to belong" continue to be unavoidable (27). Following this, I would agree with Bina Toledo Friewald, who posits that Scott's subject-in-process in Heroine is not merely G. S. but also the Canadian nation itself ("Nation and self-narration" passim). Further, Scott herself has noted that, "The more we grasp that in a sense all of us have a double, perhaps multiple relationship towards the culture that surrounds us, the more we will be able to acknowledge differences, oppressions, hierarchies" (54). Psychoanalysis, itself predicated on the concept of a split or fractured primordial self, becomes a particularly useful metaphoric methodology for deciphering Scott's text.

Freud can be credited with the "corollary discovery" that "all autobiography is fictional" (Flieger ix). Reading Freud's postulation from a slightly different angle, I would suggest that autobiography enacts a fictionalization of the self on the part of the author as an attempt to capture on the page— to textualize—the self-in-process. In this formulation the "thematization of memory" and the construction of an ever-present present tense "I" work to fix the author's self-in-progress within the space and time of the page. Nancy Miller forwards that autobiography functions as a blurred snapshot...