"Woman's Voice": The Autobiographical Form in Three Australian Filmed Novels

Kate look up (Patrice Umphelby's) journal. And to think, we supposed we her; we all there was to know. Archer, Herbert, Sarah, me. And now there is this. We never know it all; we only make up stories about it, and sometimes our characters seem TuIIy developed; but they have only fooled us again. And if we call ourselves biographers, we call the stories and the characters we have invented biography. ' The view of biography as simply another form of fiction, expressed here by academic and amateur detective Kate Pansier,2 is now widely accepted, but it is a comparatively recent view. It was not so long ago that everyone knew that the characters and events of which biographers wrote existed independently of their writing, and that the truth of the resulting biography depended only upon the degree of access to these characters and events that any individual writer could establish, together with his or her personal honesty or bias. An autobiographer obviously had greater access to the facts (or access to a greater number of facts) than any mere biographer, so, unless the writer set out deliberately to lie and deceive, the relation of an autobiography to truth could confidently be expected to be greater even than that of a biography. To accept that (auto)biography is fiction is to lose that confidence, as well as to blur the distinction between pure autobiography and autobiographical novel. It is not, however, to deny that the writer of an autobiography has a special relationship to the story being told. Without returning to the idealist position which sees texts as expressions of consciousness, and their authors as individual creative geniuses, the concept of autobiography can only be sustained by an admission that the is not quite as dead as Roland Barthes would have it.3 The problem is, rather, to locate that author. One way is to distinguish between the author (the flesh-and-blood person whose story is being told), the author (the one constructed by the text), and the (the character within the fiction, who tells the story).4 This allows us to admit that despite the special relationship of the real to the autobiographical text, readers have access only to the other authorial incarnations-the implied and narrator. Linguistic theory has now also alerted us to the possibility of confusion between the speaking subject at the level of enunciation and the subject of speech at the level of the fiction. Though these functions are always logically separate, the distinction may be disguised for the reader by the use of direct address, which locates the subject of the enunciation (the implied author) within the fiction, as a character (the narrator). Combined with a narrative image6 which apparently also identifies the real author, autobiographies, written as they are in the first person, invite the reader to assume that the real author, the implied author, and the narrator are one, providing the reader with an illusion of being in direct communication with another consciousness. It is a very intimate experience, like overhearing a confession, and one which it is extremely difficult for an analyst to disentangle. If the autobiography is written by a woman the problems are again compounded. To write about oneself is not only to claim knowledge, it is also to claim selfhood, or at least the possibility of or desire for a self. Like truth, the idea of the self was once unproblematic: western civilization was built upon the value of the individual, and the consequent principle of individualism, which stressed each person's separate existence with rights and responsibilities. Psychoanalysis has taught us differently, with its concept of the divided self, the split subject, the endless search for a coherence and unity once assumed to be innately human. From this position, autobiography is understood less as the objective description of the facts of an individual life, than as the subjective exploration of an inner world. …