March 7, 2025
Thanks to Ibrahim Nureni, a 2025 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
There is a widespread conception or misconception of autobiography as a retrospective prose narrative focusing on personal life and existence of a real person, who is believed to stand behind the narrative under the mask of a proper name. Autobiography is viewed as a chronological representation of authorial desired subjectivity. However, the radical interventions of poststructuralists within the premise of autobiographical discourse (as represented in the critical essay of Paul de Man “Autobiography as De-facement”) have undermined the commonsensical study of autobiography as “real-life-in-writing,” the unproblematic connections between writing and author and the conception of language as representational. This essay explores the various ways Paul de Man has critiqued the received tradition of the conventional reading of autobiography.
Paul de Man’s essay on autobiography entitled “Autobiography as De-Facement” is considered a dissolution of autobiography as one genre among others in the literary canon. For de Man, the obvious end of autobiography could be discerned in a series of approaches and unanswerable questions plaguing the discourse on autobiography. The first problem of autobiography is the question of definition and the overall attempt to treat it as a separate literary genre. To treat autobiography as a distinct “genre” is to subscribe to programmable, calculable form of aesthetic and of history. This generic definition of autobiography does not only make autobiography “always look[s] slightly disreputable and self-indulgent,” but it is also “pointless and unanswerable” (de Man 919). Autobiography, therefore, lacks the stature of epic, lyric, and tragedy, the classically defined genres.
In the view of Derrida, the moment a generic definition is established, “one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (Law of Genres 57). On the other hand, de Man argues that autobiography is a special case and that every attempt to pin down its generic identity brings about intermixing or mixing of genre (de Man 920). In this case, the generic definition of autobiography needs to be established. The literary genre has to be autonomous in its “aesthetic” and “history,” without mixing with previous and surrounding genres. Theoretically speaking, the self-constitution of a literary genre is impossible. Autobiography is a genre that overturns or cannot be comprehended within a genre, but all texts must have a genre if they are to be readable. Thus, every text draws from one or several genres; there is no genreless text. While Derrida foregrounds that a text must draw from one genre, de Man rather argues that every text records a life just as a photograph depends upon the living model. This is why autobiographical discourse needs to deconstruct the widespread misconception of proper name. Hence, autobiography is a figure of reading, and to a large extent, all texts that carry a proper name are autobiographical.
For de Man, a text is painted as autobiography at the moment the writer reads his text as self-referential, of his own reading or understanding; the written I and the writing I “determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution” (de Man 921). The specular moment of “a substitutive exchange” between the pair – “the author of the text and the author in the text who bears his name” (de Man 923) – is the “interiorized” linguistic dilemma one finds when “the author declares himself the subject of his own understanding”; that is when one settles in for the traditional notion of autobiographical text as the author takes himself as his own subject (de Man 921). The title page of a book is an epitaph because it bears the author’s name, which allows a reader to classify it “to some extent, autobiographical,” to bestow upon it the “wider claim of authorship,” as well as the act of reading and understanding that follows (de Man 921-922). As such, a title that bears a proper name makes all texts autobiographical; this “imposes upon the reader the hypothesis of a genetic causality in which the metonymy functions as cause and the metaphor as effect, and not the teleological causality in which the metaphor is the end [fin] and the metonymy the means toward this end, a structure which is always possible within a hypothetically pure fiction” (de Man 921).
It is worth stating that some first-person fictional narratives present themselves in the mode of autobiography. What undermines the self-representation is that the authorial name on the title page “differs from the name of the character narrating the tale” (Smith and Watson 11). Contrarily, Derrida argues that there is no significant relationship between the authorial signature on the title page and the narrator in the text. The moment a writer releases his work to the public, he enters into his “death:” autobiography as a ‘heterothanatographical’ (Derrida, The Post Card, 273). Death, in practice, suggests that no identity or metaphysical subjectivity can return to the bearer of the name. In Derrida’s words, “you will never be your name, you never have been, even when, and especially when you have answered to it. The name is made to do without the life of the bearer, and is therefore always somewhat the name of someone dead” (Derrida, The Post Card, 39).
Another problem plaguing autobiographical discourse is the conceptualized borderline that separates autobiographical writing from fictional representation. Although the distinction between factual and fictional representation of subject and object of writing might seem less problematic. The simplicity of this distinction is rooted in the conventional reading of autobiographical writing as a transparent, verifiable “mode of referentiality, of representation, and of diegesis” of events, actions and personal experience “in a less ambivalent way than fiction does” since such writing creates an inextricable connection between the author and the narrator or the protagonist (de Man 920). The place of imagination in autobiographical discourse is relegated as “phantasy and dream” (de Man 921); the main task of criticism is to find a common ground between the proper name and the narrator of the text. One might venture for a moment to ask: Is the proper name strictly proper to the person of its bearer? The name of a character or speaker or narrator cannot be equated with that of the author. Hence, the author is not in control of the logic at work in his text, nor can he predetermine the way and manner his work will be interpreted. In Derrida’s words, “I love this name [Derrida], which is not mine of course (the only possibility of loving a name is that it not be yours)” (As If I Were Dead, 219).
In summary, this paper has discussed, through the critical lens of de Man, the plagues that exist in discussing autobiography both as a literary genre and as a factual representation of life. To de Man, autobiography is not a genre but a figure of reading. It does not have some established conventions or styles that genres – like epic, lyric, and tragedy – have and cannot maintain the purity and integrity of a genre. The act of considering autobiography as a genre or reliable life story is nothing but a misreading. The mission of autobiographical writing is not to reveal reliable or factual information about oneself; what this study views as a literary execution of impossibility. This is because there is a fictional label attached to every genre of literature. More so, the use of a proper name as a label to identify the self in autobiography does not differentiate it from fictional work, as “I” exists beyond the writer’s presence. The fact that every text exists beyond the writer’s lifespan depicts that every autobiographical writer is mortal. To this end, the idea of writing about oneself relies solely on language (figurative tropes) for the construction and deconstruction of identity.
Works Cited
De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” MLN, vol. 94, no. 5, 1979, pp. 919–30. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2906560. Accessed 2 Oct. 2022.
Derrida, Jacques. “As If I Were Dead.” Applying: To Derrida, edited by John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys, MacMillan, 1996.
——. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated by Alan Bas. University of Chicago, 1987.
——-. “The Law of Genre.” Translated by Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, 1980, pp. 55–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343176. Accessed 2 Oct. 2022.
Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001.
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