Theories of Autobiography

If, for twentieth-century writers, the question of authorship and its relationship to the authority of a ‘writing subject’ has posed considerable problems, then writing the life of the self – encapsulated perfectly, if in reverse order, in the very term auto-bio-graphy – makes these issues even more acute. The practice of autobiography necessarily confers on the autobiographical text an implied truth value upon which the weight of contemporary theory since existentialism and structuralism has cast considerable doubt. Unmoored from the Cartesian certainties of consciousness, contemporary autobiography stages an interplay between facts and imaginative creativity, replacing the original ‘confessional’ status of autobiographical discourse – the revelation of some personal truth to a judging listener – with a process less of selfrevelation than of self-creation. Following the pattern of art since modernism, a movement that sought to turn the medium in on itself in order to examine its own premises, twentieth-century autobiography tends to focus on the act of writing, and shapes the past ‘by memory and imagination to serve the needs of the present consciousness’. Fiction is thus not necessarily a threat to the contemporary autobiographical project, but an inherent part of its creation.

For post-structuralist theory, the self is a fleeting, contingent, situated construct of language, a view that leaves autobiography as either impossible, or only provisionally possible insofar as it accepts and exploits this. Paul de Man, for example, starting from the structuralist rejection of a coherent subject, views autobiography's aspiration to knowledge as an illusion generated by the rhetorical structure of language. The ‘confessional’ gesture, the postulation of some truth about the self, is to his mind impossible. The self, rather than being the cause of language, is its effect.