The End of Autobiography, the Opening of Self-Representation
Tom Smith
Dept. of English
Penn State Abington, USA
215 576-1102 trs8@psu.edu The End of Autobiography, The Opening of Self-Representation
Autobiography, as we have know it, is finished, closed, over, dead, expired, deceased, gone to its reward, kaput. Apart from the fun of imitating the Monty Python skit on the dead parrot, why do I say so? I would not be standing here now had I not read with surprise the following extraordinary announcement in the Call for Papers for this conference: “But in the same year as the publication of Lejeune’s Le Pacte Autobiographique (1975), Roland Barthes published Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes which signaled the end of the classical Enlightenment subject of autobiography and the beginning of a radical autobiographical practice.”1 Prospective submitters to the conference were invited to view 1975 as a watershed year in which the genre of autobiography was codified by Lejeune, whose analysis arguably remains an important touchstone in all discussions of the genre, at the same moment that Barthes was, so to speak, deconstructing Lejeune by writing an autobiography that, in not being a straightforward retrospective prose narrative, refused to display one of the genre’s supposed characteristics. Barthes’ book does, nonetheless, adhere to another of Lejeune’s criteria for autobiography, the identity of the narrator with the name on the title page; that identity mars the perfect opposition of Lejeune and Barthes we were invited to consider. Barthes was playing a game defined by Lejeune, whether or not Barthes knew that as he was writing Lejeune was laying down the rules of that game. In his title, however, Barthes plays with Lejeune’s requirement of identity between author, narrator, and protagonist in suggesting that his book is a biography written by its subject: One does not expect autobiographies to be titled with the autobiographer’s name, but we are not surprised when biographies are titled with the subject’s name.
Dept. of English
Penn State Abington, USA
215 576-1102 trs8@psu.edu The End of Autobiography, The Opening of Self-Representation
Autobiography, as we have know it, is finished, closed, over, dead, expired, deceased, gone to its reward, kaput. Apart from the fun of imitating the Monty Python skit on the dead parrot, why do I say so? I would not be standing here now had I not read with surprise the following extraordinary announcement in the Call for Papers for this conference: “But in the same year as the publication of Lejeune’s Le Pacte Autobiographique (1975), Roland Barthes published Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes which signaled the end of the classical Enlightenment subject of autobiography and the beginning of a radical autobiographical practice.”1 Prospective submitters to the conference were invited to view 1975 as a watershed year in which the genre of autobiography was codified by Lejeune, whose analysis arguably remains an important touchstone in all discussions of the genre, at the same moment that Barthes was, so to speak, deconstructing Lejeune by writing an autobiography that, in not being a straightforward retrospective prose narrative, refused to display one of the genre’s supposed characteristics. Barthes’ book does, nonetheless, adhere to another of Lejeune’s criteria for autobiography, the identity of the narrator with the name on the title page; that identity mars the perfect opposition of Lejeune and Barthes we were invited to consider. Barthes was playing a game defined by Lejeune, whether or not Barthes knew that as he was writing Lejeune was laying down the rules of that game. In his title, however, Barthes plays with Lejeune’s requirement of identity between author, narrator, and protagonist in suggesting that his book is a biography written by its subject: One does not expect autobiographies to be titled with the autobiographer’s name, but we are not surprised when biographies are titled with the subject’s name.