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The Author of Autobiography: A Self, the Mother, and the Community

Who writes an autobiography? The traditional autobiography has been written by male authors in an Enlightenment spirit, and they show the way in which the authors, like St. Augustine and Rousseau, become a coherent and rational self, having undergone an aberrant past. But this unified "I" in the orderly progression is at large a fiction―the so-called "mirror image" in Lacanian sense. This fictive or false self is brought up by one's adopting the law of father as he grows, sacrificing the body of mother. In contrast, such postmodern authors as Barthes and Derrida, when writing autobiographies, resuscitate their mothers from their symbolic death. Derrida reminisces his mother's involvement in his own circumcision, and Barthes at his mother's demise looks at her childhood photo. In this way they call the mother back from their symbolic death for the first time since they have grown up. Recently, authors from minority groups, including females and the Holocaust survivors, tend to increasingly produce autobiographical writings. Thinking they have been excluded from the right of language, they now reclaim the lost voice. Their writings are not a "confession" which guarantees them the reintegration into the normal life, but rather a "testimony" of the traumatic life. They need another's story to utter their own story, and thus become collaborative authors in an intersubjective relationship with each other. This essay aims at exploring such different strands of autobiographical subjects as introduced above: a male self, the mother, and the community.