IN PURSUIT OF PAST LIVES: FOUR BIOGRAPHIES

Abstract

It is now eighteen years since Roland Barthes declared the 'Death of the Author'. The deconstruction of the 'work' as unified whole transparent to the subjectivity of its author and intimately interwoven with his 'life' J'las had a considerable impact on literary studies over the last twenty years. Yet, just as God continues to exist in the minds and institutions of the West over a century after Neitzsche's half-agonised, half-jubilant revelation that the development of Western thought and society had rendered belief in the Prime-Author untenable, so too has that God-head of modern Western Individualism-the Author-survived the demonstration by Barthes of his absence from the text: one that was no longer to be seen as 'a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the Author-God) but [as] a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. '2 For, to the extent that the literary-critical establishment has strategically ignored the challenge, at once logical and ideological, posed by the notion of 'texuality', the Author has been vouchsafed a ghostly after-life-not least in the pages of literary biographies, the production of which has, if anything, increased in recent years. Barthes' displacement of the category of Author by that of Reader as (provisional) determinant of textual meaning was, in part, a call for a more self-conscious critical practice: one that was aware of the way in which all reading is interpretation, all interpretation, appropriation. Although the 'reader-revolution' has nevertheless