The Author Is Dead, Long Live the Author: Autobiography and the Fantasy of the Individual

At least since the moment autobiographies were taken up as objects of study by literature departments, discussions about them have been plagued by heated debates regarding their uneasy relation to fiction. Can one read, for instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and his Julie, or Franz Kafka's Letter to His Father and his Castle in the same mode? Are they the same sorts of texts, or irreducibly different? Should they be read against, together with, or in opposition to each other? Such dilemmas often revolve around the problem of referentiality—that is, do the contents of the book correspond to a life lived, or only to the contents of an author's imagination? What, in fact, is the relation between a life and a text? This introduces another question: what is the difference between the two, and between a text that purports to be about a life—the life of the one writing, no less—and one that does not? How much, if anything, should be invested in differentiating between them? Or perhaps more pertinently: why should this investment be made at all? The study of autobiography has a long history of engaging such questions.¹ This essay attempts not to answer them, but to investigate why they have remained so tenacious and so intractable.

Written language is a system of signs and signifiers, and always, by its form, exists in the absence of the thing to which it refers. And yet in the asserted relation between signifiers and signifieds, it holds out the promise of referentiality. It insinuates that it might paint an accurate and transparent picture of that to which it refers. A text that calls itself autobiographical, in turn, suggests that it might present a "true" (even if not always accurate) representation of the author's life. And yet language—also by its very structure—also always contains the possibility of lying.² Because it exists in the absence of its referent—or, in the case of autobiographical writing, exists in the absence of its referent and emerges from the subjective reminiscence of its author—there is rarely, if ever, any way to conclusively determine language's accurate fit to its referent.

Autobiography has thus been caught in the tension between language's referential promise and its threat of mendacity, and of the compromises that language—and readers—make of this tension: negotiating among the seeming contradictions between truth and accuracy, memory and history, objective and subjective truth, and so on. The very category of autobiography requires readers—consciously or not—constantly to engage in these mediations in their practices of reading. They must decide whether what they are reading refers to what had once existed in the world, in the life and/or the mind of the author; whether it is an entirely self-contained textual universe; or whether it exists in some middling ground between the two. Thus, although the name of the author influences the practice of all kinds of reading, in autobiography, the figure of the author, as a ghostly presence animating and providing the life for the text, has pressured reading practices in sometimes difficult and troubling ways. The figure of the author is the pivot around which questions of autobiography's relation to or difference from fiction finally turn. I will investigate this figure and its inescapable influence on the category of autobiography.

The field of autobiography studies in the United States emerged in literature departments in the 1970s largely as a response to such literary schools of thought as New Criticism and Deconstruction, which jettisoned the notion of authorial intention as a primary factor in the interpretation of a text's meaning, even proclaiming, as Roland Barthes did in 1968, "The Death of the Author."³ Thus, since its inception as a formalized field of study, autobiography studies has been preoccupied with whether an autobiographical text can communicate to its readers the reality of its author's experiences. One side of the debate—typified by theorists such as Paul de Man—has held that it is impossible for language...