The Autobiography Effect

Writing the Self in Post-Structuralist Theory

Dennis Schep

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367330538
• eBook ISBN: 9781000497328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the advent of post-structuralism, various authors have problematized the modern conception of autobiography by questioning the status of authorship and interrogating the relation between language and reality. Yet even after making autobiography into a theoretical problem, many of these authors ended up writing about themselves. This paradox stands at the center of this wide-ranging study of the form and function of autobiography in the work of authors who have distanced themselves from its modern instantiation. Discussing Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and others, this book grapples with the question of what it means to write the self when the self is understood as an effect of writing. Combining close reading, intellectual history and literary theory, The Autobiography Effect traces how precisely its theoretically problematic nature made autobiography into a central scene for the negotiation of philosophical positions and anxieties after structuralism.

1 The Subject of Autobiography

Barthes’s Anti-Authorialism

In 1967, Roland Barthes wrote a short essay for an issue of the American magazine Aspen meant to introduce the French theoretical and artistic avant-garde to an American audience. The text received little notice until it was published in France a year later, where the events of May 1968 formed the perfect backdrop to its parricidal rhetoric and its gesture of intellectual revolt.¹ Yet, as so often happens, the history of this text’s reception proved to be a history of domestication, and when the English version was republished in 1977,² the grounds that sustained its radicalism had all but disappeared. Barthes’s text migrated from the art world to the world of academia, and by the 1980s it had become obligatory reading for students of literary theory. Today, while a simplified version of its thesis has become accepted wisdom, the text itself is primarily read as a historical document, indissolubly linked with the name of its author. And not without irony, for what it proclaimed was precisely the author’s death.

The argument of Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” is simple, and its political appeal readily apparent. In the literary trade, authors are the keepers of meaning. When an author writes a text, he gives form to this meaning, putting his ideas in words – working from signified to signifier. The critic works in the opposite direction: he goes back from signifier to signified, deciphering the text to reproduce authorial intention. In this configuration, all productive power lies on the author’s side; he puts meaning in his texts that the critic merely recovers. The author writes, the critic reads – and at best, he reconstitutes the intention hidden behind the words on the page. In a Foucauldian turn of phrase, the author serves as “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”³ If the highest attainable goal of the critic is to reconstruct what the author meant, criticism is a rather slavish activity incapable of producing any meaning of its own: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”⁴

1 For the publication history, see Molly Nesbit, ‘What Was An Author?’, in Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), 229–257: 240–243.

2 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ in Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 142–148.

3 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, trans. by Josué V. Harari, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, 101–120: 118.

4 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ 147.

Barthes’s text is often read as a post-structuralist manifesto, and indeed, its tone is proclamatory rather than descriptive, its vocabulary inflected by political radicalism. The liberation of meaning is the overt motive for Barthes’s authorcide: the author that is dismissed is a figure of authority, a figure that restrains the critic’s activity by providing a single yardstick to assess his readings. Killing the author and the “ultimate meaning” he embodies is a “truly revolutionary” activity – by demoting the author, the critic promotes himself from a decoding machine to a producer of meaning. The final phrases of the essay are all but prophetic in nature, the collective pronoun allowing Barthes to speak for his generation:

We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.⁵

Non-metaphorical death befell Barthes 13 years later, several weeks after he was hit by a laundry van crossing the Rue des Écoles near the Collège de France. But as several eulogists have noted,⁶ in the years preceding his death the author of the death of the author had written several works of autobiography. How can we bring this into agreement with his earlier anti-authorialism? Is autobiography not predicated precisely on the author being alive – at least at the time of writing? And if the author returns in Barthes’s late works, what died when he proclaimed his death, and what was resurrected in the years thereafter?

In his essay, Barthes presents us with four precursors of authorial demise: Mallarmé, Valéry, Proust and the Surrealists. While this appears to be a seductive lineage, it not only recruits Valéry and Proust to an anti-authorialist agenda with which they have little affinity, but also downplays a number of more likely influences.⁷ In fact, the anti-authorial ethos that found its most enthusiastic formulation in Barthes’s essay had been gestating in critical circles for half a century. The formalists in the East and the New Critics in the West had both methodologically sidelined the author to focus on the hermetic autonomy of literary language. The formalists attempted to disengage poetry from everyday language, and the New Critics famously denounced the intentional fallacy: once a text is written, its author no longer has any claim over its meaning.⁸ While these movements did not declare the author’s death, their analyses excluded him from the interpretation of his work.⁹

5 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ 148.

6 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes,’ in The Work of Mourning, ed. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 31–67: 52; Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Late Barthes,’ in Diana Knight (ed.), Critical Essays on Roland Barthes (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 2000), 123–128; Susan Sontag, ‘Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,’ in Susan Sontag (ed.), A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), vii–xxxviii: xxxviii.

7 Cf. Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author; Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, third edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 8.

8 W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and M.C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy,’ in The Sewanee Review, 54 (1946), 468–488.

9 In his essay, Barthes suggests that the work of the New Critics has often done no more than consolidate the figure of the author. That may very well be, but it hardly detracts from the shift in analytic orientation they represent.

In Europe, structural linguistics followed a similar anti-authorial impetus in analyzing processes of enunciation without recourse to a flesh and blood interlocutor. Where the “structurality of structure”¹⁰ had long been neutralized by referral to a point of presence (such as the author), structuralism embraced the play of signification set free by its erasure. Language was approached as a closed system, and although so-called “shifters” (certain indications of space and time, first and second person pronouns) indicate a subjective presence, the textual subject need not congeal into a biographical entity. Of the possible theoretical precursors to the death of the author, structural linguistics is the only one acknowledged in Barthes’s essay; his “je n’est autre que celui qui dit je”¹¹ clearly alludes to Benveniste’s “Est ‘ego’ qui dit ‘ego.’”¹²

The beguiling genealogy given by Barthes says more about his self-understanding as a critic than about the provenance of critical anti-authorialism. For, paradoxical as it may be, in constructing a genealogy of literary authors that culminates in the death of the author, Barthes lends weight to his argument for the dissolution of the boundary between literature and criticism. He reiterated this argument in many forms, affirming that the critic is a writer in Critique et verité, that the task of structuralism is to join literature as an activity of writing,¹³ and that “La science de la littérature, c’est la littérature.”¹⁴ In his final years, he even made plans to write a novel. Be that as it may, the claims made in “The Death of the Author” are not only part of Barthes’s ongoing attempt to demote the author and elevate the critic – they should also be read in the theoretical context from which they emerged.

10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 351–370: 352.

11 Roland Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur,’ in Le bruissement de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), 61–67: 63. In the English translation the allusion to Benveniste is less obvious (as is the echo of Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre”): “I is nothing other than the instance saying I,” in Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ 145.

12 Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 260. Benveniste’s book was published in 1966, a year before ‘The Death of the Author.’ Again, the allusion is less obvious in translation: “‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’” In Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971), 224.

13 Roland Barthes, ‘From Science to Literature,’ in The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 3–10: 7.

14 Roland Barthes, Le Grain de la voix; Entretiens 1962–1980 (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1999), 59. In English (my translation): “The science of literature is literature.”

As noted above, “The Death of the Author” was originally published in translation. Barthes wrote it on commission for a thematic issue of American multimedia publication Aspen. Curated by artist Brian O’Doherty in 1967, Aspen 5+6 was not so much a magazine as a box that contained vinyl records, film and printed matter. Other contributors included William Burroughs, John Cage, Sol Lewitt, Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michael Butor. Judging by the publication format and the list of contributors, it seems that Barthes was seen as part of a generation of theoretically minded artists and artistically minded theorists from the French and American avant-garde. At the time, none of his books were available to an American audience, though translations of Le degré zéro de l’écriture (1953) and Éléments de sémiologie (1964) were being prepared and would appear the following year. In France, his reputation had been firmly established by the influential study Mythologies (1957), which employs the structuralist method in a number of brief essays that attack French ideology by denaturalizing what appears self-evident in popular culture. However, his v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Subject of Autobiography
• 2 Bodies in Crisis
• 3 Eye Problems
• 4 Origin Algeria
• 5 How Not to Write about Oneself
• Bibliography
• Index