The Fascination With Autobiography

Joan Didion was an obvious choice for my post. One day I picked up Play It As It Lays and didn’t put it down. Though Maria has been criticized as an unlikable and often infuriating protagonist I was drawn to her. I had to know the women behind the protagonist but had forgotten that the author’s character is not necessarily the author. It is uncomfortable to be presented with a character that is a copy without an original. Maria feels familiar so I assume that she must be a representation of someone. Attaching her to Didion allows me to cop out of the anxiety caused by what is in fact my self-identification with Maria.

Attaching a text to an author places the consequences of the text onto an individual.  The individualization of the author functions to assign personal responsibility for the implications of a text onto the author while ignoring the greater cultural force that lies beyond the author. This individualization is accomplished by the glorification of the author, a choice that the Paris Review’s archive of author interviews pays testaments to.

I was absorbed by the 1977 interview between Joan Didion and Linda Kuehl but was disappointed by the 2006 interview between Didion and Hilton Als. It wasn’t Didion’s responses that had changed, it was the interviewer, or the force behind the interviewer.   

Both interviews begin with “the circumstances in which the interview was conducted.” These circumstances are meant to set the scene, presenting the interview as a story itself. Due to the untimely death of Kuehl, Didion herself describes the circumstances of the1977 interview, and offers her opinion of her interviewer. This individualizes Kuehl in a way that Als is denied. There is an artificiality to the 2006 interview that denies the interview as an interaction between two people, or two forces. It is problematic that the interviewer is briefly named at the beginning of the interview only to be thrown back into the safe anonymity of  “interviewer.” The status of the interviewer as anonymous privileges Didion’s responses while ignoring the agenda of the interviewer.  Why is the interviewer asking the questions she is? Why are these questions important? How do these questions function to the glorify the individual author?

Four questions struck me in particular.

1.)“Did any writer influence you more than others?”

Writer’s are of a different breed. They have been grouped into an awesome and exclusive club where all they ever seem to do is chain-smoke cigarettes, fuck, and write, of course. (I cannot deny the timing of my witnessing Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf smoking in The Hours and the start of my nicotine habit.) Authors are going to influence each other but an essentializing relationship amongst all writers is problematic. As Didion points out, when she was starting to write, male novelists had a particular role in the world while women novelists had no defined role.

2.)“When did you know you wanted to write?” 

A myth exists that there is always a moment in which the author realizes they want to be a writer. It is a glorified awakening to their calling, a theatrical event that mimics the seduction of drama. An epiphany.  

3.)“What are the disadvantages, if any, of being a woman writer?”

The interviewer turns to gender when Didion does not list any women writers as her influences. This attempts to individualize Didion through her sexual identity. Didion complicates this by stating that she doesn’t seem to recognize what a “feminine” writing style is.   

4.)“Was the book autobiographical?”

The author’s background is of the utmost significance to the interviewer. There is a longing to understand what compelled the author to write the text, as well as a tendency to bestow significance to every detail of a text though details are often arbitrary. For example, one could argue that the reason for the separation of mother and child in Play It As It Lays represents Didion’s own longing for a child. However, Didion asserts that the daughter is absent from the text simply because she was unsuccessful at writing the character. 

The fascination with autobiography is especially strong if you lie on the poles of hate or love of a given text. This is either an attempt to identify oneself with the author and text or to distance oneself from the author and text. A sloppy attempt at distancing is a hasty response to one's simultaneous attraction and repulsion to the text; you are horrified yet drawn to Maria.  In fact, Play It As It Lays itself demonstrates the reliance on setting and biography (“the facts”) while simultaneously suggesting that they do not apply.

There is an inclination to apply autobiographical meaning to a text whenever possible. However, a text is most fully experienced when we abandon the search for the author and allow ourselves to become intimate with the text. It is an abandonment of meaning and embracing of being. An intellectual “jouissance” perhaps.