Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

while nostalgically imagining that someday they will be abolished: like an intermittent outsider, I
can enter into or emerge from the burdensome sociality, depending on my mood of insertion or of
distance. (130-1)
This passage certainly poses a problem of reading in that it would appear to posit a multiplicity of
subjects. Yet, were we to substitute first person pronouns for the third person, and to convert
reported speech into direct speech, the above fragment would read quite simply as an
autobiographical meditation distinguished mainly by its author's acuity, and gift for self-analysis. It
is, therefore, in its pronominal economy that Roland Barthes is most markedly set off from
conventional forms of autobiography: 'The so-called personal pronouns: everything happens
here, I am forever enclosed within the pronominal lists: ''I'' mobilise the image-repertoire, "you"
and "he" mobilise paranoia.' (168) However, in subverting this autobiographical etiquette, Roland
Barthes does not break with the deep structures of the autobiographical récit. Rather, it engages
with them in a more direct manner than does the customary autobiographer. That the author of
the autobiography and the subject of the autobiography should cleave from one another is
inevitable. The author of an autobiography cannot plainly be the subject of his past. As Mikhail
Bakhtin puts it:
Even if the author-creator had created the most perfect autobiography, or confession, he would,
nonetheless have remained, in so far as he had produced it, outside of the universe represented
within it. If I tell (orally or in writing) an event that I have just lived, in so far as I am telling (orally
or in writing) this event, I find myself already outside of the time-space in which the event
occurred. To identify oneself absolutely with oneself, to identify one's 'I' with the 'I' that I tell is as
impossible as to lift oneself up by one's hair . . . 78
Even given an ideal autobiographical scenario—that of the author who is engaged in a continual
and self-reflexive autobiographical writing, a perennial diarist whose only concern is with the act
of diarising—there would always be a hiatus, both spatio-temporal and ontological between he
who writes, and what is written. This division is inescapable. Obviously, this is not to say that
there is no possibility of commerce between the two subjects—far from it—only that these two
subjects cannot be regarded as consubstantial in space and time. Bakhtin is not the first to realise
this, nor is Barthes the first to incorporate this problematic division into the actual act of writing an
autobiography. The great autobiographers, Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire, all took
some account of this bifurcation. Montaigne writes:
I cannot fix my subject . . . I do not portray his being; I portray his passage; not a passage from
one age to another or . . . from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to
minute. I must suit my story to the hour, for soon I may change, not only by chance but also by
intention. It is a record of various and variable occurrences, an account of thoughts that are
unsettled and, as chance will have it, at times contradictory, either because I am then another
self, or because I approach my subject under different circumstances and with other
considerations. Hence it is that I may well contradict myself, but the truth . . . I do not
contradict.79
In order to stay within the truth of self-writing, Montaigne must accept that the self written about is
no longer present to the self writing. If we take account of the personal pronouns in this passage,
it is quickly apparent that they twist between Montaigne the author, and Montaigne the subject of
the autobiography. The only substantial difference between this operation and the pronominal
extravagances of Roland Barthes is that Montaigne does not deem it necessary to telegraph this
separation by substituting 'M.d.M.', or such like, for those personal pronouns that signify the
Montaigne as theme of the Essays. That Montaigne then sought to bring these two subjects into a
certain accord does not mean that he had become any less aware of their requisite divergence,
no more than Augustine ever lost sight of the fact that the writer of the Confessions was not of
one substance with the seventeen-year-old who entered the cauldron of Carthage. 80 But whilst
Montaigne sought to think his way through this division, and Augustine contained it within a
narratonial distance, Barthes directs all energies to maintaining this breach at the level of the
utmost visibility. The fragments or (auto) biographemes are subjected to the strategy of
alphabetical ordering, and the alphabetical sequence is syncopated so as to ward off the
possibility of any unintentional narrative emerging from the concatenation of fragments. This
regimen of randomness is programmed to prevent any naive identification of the Bartheses. Yet
the text admits that this strategy is not successful: