My life has already been written; or I can only read my own life by somebody’s words; or what we call “life” is a linguistic construct coming après-coup, and very belatedly. All very true. Here is what Barthes experienced:
[H]aving worked for some time on a tale by Balzac, I often catch myself spontaneously carrying over into the circumstances of daily life fragments of sentences, formulations spontaneously taken from the Balzacian text; it is not the memorial(banal) character of the phenomenon which interests me here, but the evidence that I am WRITING daily life (it is true, in my head) through these formulas inherited from an anterior writing; or again, more precisely, life is the very thing which comes ALREADY constituted as a literary writing: NASCENT writing is a PAST writing. (98)
Yes, it’s all past writing, recombined and rearranged, then transformed. It is in this act of (or at least attempt at) transformation that the “life” of writing resides.
Biography is a genre that has always interested me; sometimes we read biography not for its subject (human subject) but for many locutions (sentences, formulations) that we may pick up and later apply in explaining (telling, fabulating) our own lives.
I have long had a project in mind of writing a book on literary biography (something like Philippe Lejeune’s conclusive work on the genre of autobiography) but can’t still find a frame to theorize. It’s great fun to read Ellman’s Joyce, Painter’s Proust, White’s Genet, Blair’s and Knowlson’s Beckett, Bruce King’s Derek Walcott, or Michael King’s Janet Frame. But what do we read other than the ambiguous images offered by writing of the subject authors? A point to be considered.
