Abstract
There should be, by now, no problems with beginning autobiographically.1 The first person is, after all, only another mode of address. It slips as easily or as hardly from the pen as any other person. And that, too, is where we begin, with the idea of a person or two flowing from the pen, from the grammatological creation of the person — first or third.
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Notes
Slow Learner: Early Stories (Boston: Little Brown, 1984), p. 8. Subsequent page references, shown in parentheses, are to this edition which has the same pagination as the British clothbound edition by Jonathan Cape.
R. Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973).
J. Forrester, ‘Who is in analysis with whom? Freud, Lacan, Derrida’, Economy and Society, 13 (1984), pp. 153–77.
M. Foucault, ‘What is an author?’ in his Language, Counter-memory and Practice, trans. D. Bouchard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 113–38.
D. Williamson, Authorship and Criticism, Occasional Paper 7 (Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 1985).
R. Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–8.
Williamson, p. 13. See also our paper ‘The late(r) Barthes: constituting fragmenting subjects’, Boundary 2, 14 (1986), pp. 261–78.
J. Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. R. Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 22.
J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 307–30.
F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Fontana, 1974).
A. Schütz, Collected Papers Vol. 1: Studies in Social Theory (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 39.
Fictional autobiographies would seem to provide critical marginal cases for the examination of theories of meaning and author in fiction. The ones referred to here are: G. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Bodley Head, 1933); D. Defoe, The life & strange and surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, mariner,: who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an un-inhabited island …/written by himself (Oxford: Blackwell/Shakespeare Head Press, 1927); M. George, The Autobiography of Henry VIII (London: Macmillan, 1987). How fiction is constructed in each case is quite different. Pynchon’s ‘Introduction’ could be compared with all three. Other contenders would be those instances of autobiography which are not done, for the most part, in the first person and act more as comptes rendus or historical summaries of academic disciplines, artistic movements or rock bands (‘The Autobiography of Super-tramp’ being an interesting theft in point). See: F. R. Moulten and J.J. Schifferes (eds), The Autobiography of Science (London: J. Murray, 1963); M. Jean (ed.), The Autobiography of Surrealism (New York: Viking Press, 1980). In the first of these texts, we found the following passage which is not without its relevance to the present case: But what is the life of a literary or scientific man, and where are we to find the history of it? In his works. Newton and Euler are their own best biographers (Henry Hunter, Preface to The Letters of Euler (London, 1802)).
R. Barthes, ‘Writers, intellectuals, teachers’ in Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 190–215. Whether language produces writing or vice versa is, by this stage, a moot point: either way his argument re science writing still holds.
N. Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (London: Deutsch, 1961).
S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1976), p. 716; see also p. 289.
V. Brome, Ernest Jones: Freud’s Alter Ego (London: Caliban, 1982).
R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 26–7.
Cf. A. McHoul, ‘Announcing: a contribution to the critique of information processing models of human communication’, Human Studies, 6 (1983), pp. 279–94.
‘Mortality and mercy in Vienna’, Epoch, 9, Spring (1959), pp. 195–213.
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© 1990 Alec McHoul and David Wills
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McHoul, A., Wills, D. (1990). Almost But Not Quite Me …. In: Writing Pynchon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2_6
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