‘Looking’ Autobiographically: Rethinking the Mirror Metaphor and the Enigma of Autobiography

Abstract

My article revisits the critical difficulty in defining autobiography. The majority of scholars have registered the semantic variability of the term ‘autobiography’ as an ‘enigma’. I relate this critical uncertainty to a desire to establish autobiography's intelligibility as positive, and to a nostalgia for that illusory identification which has shaped ideas about the mirror image and its original. I think about autobiographical mirroring as a Lacanian scenario of subjectification in which identification becomes misidentification and meaning becomes an illusion. I attempt to write back into our thinking about autobiography the idea of difference; the idea that has erroneously been assumed to constitute a difficulty in attempts at an autobiographical definition. I demonstrate that Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse and Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire consciously problematise the idea of a metaphorically mirroring relationship between the author and his or her autobiography by representing themselves not in terms of similarity (metaphor) but of contiguity (metonymy, symbol).The accidental specularity of their fictional autobiographies emphasises the self's alterity and provides the context in which autobiography's encounter with difference constitutes its definition.