The reader of autobiography

The centrality of reading to the workings of Stendhal's writing extends beyond the domain of the novel to include that of autobiography; and just as the mirror held up to reality in Le Rouge requires the reader to make it operate like a bow, so the reader is integral to the autobiographical project of the Vie de Henry Brulard. The lessons learned from the novel are adapted and applied to the writing of the life. In some ways this connection is made more obvious by the fact that recent critical approaches to autobiography have given enormous emphasis to the reader (more than is generally accorded to the reader of fiction); but in general this critical preoccupation with reading in autobiography has been used primarily to legitimate the generic distinctiveness of autobiography. Indeed, it would seem that if there wasn't a reader to say so, autobiography (as a genre if not as a practice) would not exist. As Philippe Lejeune puts it, ‘le genre autobiographique est un genre contractuel’, dependent upon a pact or ‘contrat de lecture’. The function of the reader of autobiography has, however, been almost exclusively limited to the staking out of the generic terrain, and there has been relatively little critical concern with any other aspect of the reader and the reading of autobiography.

This is all the more surprising in view of the fact that much contemporary critical and linguistic theory regards subjectivity (of which autobiography is supposedly one of the most direct expressions) as necessarily entailing intersubjectivity.