The liminal and apophatic voice of the writer in/as autobiography: a subjective academic narrative

In this paper, I engage with Roland Barthes' The grain of the voice (1985) to move into a discussion of the apophatic or liminal unknowable voice of the scriptor. The narrative of self claims a reality rather than a fictionality. Yet in a text proclaimed as an autobiography, there are multiple authorial voices available for the reader to obtain, just as there are multiple prisms that readers bring to the text itself. Critical elements emerge in the writing and the reading of an autobiographer. This paper does not accept the contention that a 'subject writer' engages an 'object reader' in the recorded life that aims to seduce the reader. Rather, it proposes the production of a liminal voice that is apparent to the reader, but unknowable for the writer. It looks at how the subjective self reveals itself through performance rather than self-analysis that is a type of translation of self on to the page. The Greek words 'apophasis' and 'liminal' are investigated in relationship to the proclaimed autobiographic text. The apophatic is shown as a way of indicating what is both said and kept away from saying yet indicated in the text, the liminal as being on the threshold of the expressed text. Both challenge views of textuality and discourse to deal with Roland Barthes' idea of the 'death of the author as god' that enlivens the role of the reader. The subjective academic narrative is the methodology I describe, apply and exemplify.