Autobiography in the Third Person

HE IDEA Of an autobiography in third person may seem as paradoxical as that of a biography in first person. In both ]cases there appears to be a contradiction between saying he when one is I, and when one is he. This contradiction can only be reconciled with reading contract [contrat de lecture] of genre in question if one sees it as afigure.2 I propose to examine some of these figures, because they enable one to study the use of personal pronouns in autobiography, as Michel Butor would put it. I have chosen marginal, somewhat exceptional situations, in which an author pretends to speak about himself as someone else might, by using third person, or by inventing a fictive narrator to present author's point of view or tell his life story. Naturally, this takes place within framework of a text controlled by an autobiographical pact [pacte autobiographique].3 The discussion will therefore center on modern or contemporary French works. I could have added older texts to this corpus, or modern texts corresponding to different horizons of expectation. For instance: historical memoirs such as those of Caesar, religious autobiographies in which writer styles himself the servant of God, or seventeenth-century aristocratic memoirs like those of President de Thou; or highly coded short genres such as preface, thirdperson publisher's blurb, or biographical notice composed by author, all of which are related to publishing practices. While occasionally referring to above kinds of texts, I have focused on modern autobiography in order to give greater coherence to my study, for use of figures depends on reading contract and on genre's horizon of expectations. The sophisticated games, by means of which modern autobiographers express identity problems or seek to charm their readers, are revealing kinds of borderline cases. They allow us to bring out what is