“A Necessary Collaboration”: Biographical Desire and Elizabeth Smart

I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse I peer into the mirror to find a distortion of my own image which would make my pain into a bearable legend. Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept WRITERS AND READERS OF FICTION ALIKE are susceptible to the pull Of biographical desire. Despite the decentring or dismissal of the author by various critical movements in the twentieth century, the notion of authorship has hardly withered away. Even in the case of fiction, a literary mode in which the author is the producer of the text but not, strictly speaking, its subject, there is often curiosity and debate about how it came to be written and whether or not it is based on its author's life. Biographical desire--the desire to treat a literary text as a way of coming to know its author--is not new, but it is particularly evident in the present day, when it is facilitated by a matrix of media offering writers diverse opportunities to make their faces known and to articulate the personal basis of their work. Confronted with a demand for self-disclosure both in and about their writing, it is not surprising if some authors should seem flirtatious by discussing their texts in ways that are alternately coy and confessional, sometimes explaining the autobiographical background of a particular text, sometimes emphasizing the role of imagination and invention in its creation. Meanwhile, their fiction can itself seem to court biographical readings. Whether by featuring a protagonist who resembles the author in appearance and background or by otherwise gesturing intratextually back to the author, fiction often appears to express the biographical desire of authors to be recognized not merely for but in their work. Such texts can seem to tease readers by inviting biographical readings even while featuring conventional disclaimers that any resemblance to real people, places, and events is purely coincidental. In this way, the presumption of non-reference entailed in the categorization of a text as fiction is thrown into dispute by the referential intimations of the text itself, not to mention the assertions of its referentiality that the author or others might make. Such contradictions abound in the case of the Canadian-born author Elizabeth Smart and her y945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. An unnamed woman's narrative about her passionate affair with an unnamed married man, By Grand Central Station has gained the status of a cult classic, not least because it has been taken by many readers to be a recasting of Smart's own affair with the English poet George Barker. However, the novel is spare in concrete details about the narrator that might consolidate a biographical reading. Instead, it is predominantly a poetic rendering of her inner life, which is characterized by her desire for her lover and her agony when he eventually abandons her. Moreover, because the narrator goes unnamed, the text implicitly proposes what Philippe Lejeune has called a "phantasmatic pact" with its reader, under which the narrator gains an ambiguous status akin to that of the speaker of a lyric poem: she may or may not be taken to be an incarnation of the author (27). Readers who feel uncomfortable with such ambiguity are left to adjudicate the novel's referentiality in the field of what Gerard Genette has called "paratexts": materials such as interviews, cover blurbs, and prefaces that inform readings of literature and that are produced by or with the aid of the author and her "allies" (editors, publicists, et al.) (2). More broadly texts such as reviews, critical biographies, and author profiles also fulfil this paratextual function. It is through such paratexts related to By Grand Central Station that the story of Smart and Barker's affair has become public, and in these materials the biographical desire of critics is clear. …