I have suggested that the relationship between the real self and the performative self of autobiographical performance implicates notions of authorship in ways that existing theories don’t fully account for. Certainly a simplistic understanding of the death of the author is undermined by a reliance on the physical presentness of the author’s body (as opposed to another speaker’s) in autobiographical performance--anyone else, even Karen Finley, performing Preaching to the Perverted would fall flat. And Foucault’s author-function only partially explains the imbricated nature of these multiple conflated identities. While none of these genres suggests a return to a simple one-to-one-to-one understanding of the relationship of the body that experiences, the body that writes, and the body that performs, theories that deny that the identities of the body of experience and the writing body are important are confounded by these genres.

Of course, since biographical drama ultimately posits that transgressive performances (often transgressive performances of writing itself) can and must be recovered without the historical body that first performed them, we can neither harbor the old humanist notion that the author and the performing voice are precisely the same--Carmelita Tropicana's multiple identities show us this fact just as clearly. We must then account for authorship in a way that neither completely discounts the life experience of the historical body, nor works too hard to conflate it with the laterary or dramatic performance with which we might otherwise associate it.

Oral history performances are again revealing in the challenge they pose to this theoretical question. Critics are often hard-pressed to call Anna Deavere Smith a playwright (although most ultimately agree that she is). This is true because the bodies who experience the narratives she retells are also the ones who authored the text she performs. Yet her performance, and the political efficacy of that performance, proves that even narratives that are praised for their truth-value can be enhanced by the very performativity of that life-writing: it is precisely Smith's ability to "be" all of her interview subjects, and to do so "truthfully" that garners her acclaim and allows audiences to read themselves into the communal subjectivity she conjures.

But to suggest that the identity, the experience of those orginal speakers is worthless to us as readers is to fall into the same potentially hegemonic ethical traps that Ensler falls into: the obfuscation of the power of the performing "I." The material bodies and identities of the interview subjects of Twilight come to bear in crucial ways on how we read the power structures of that play, even as we acknowledge that it's political effectiveness relies on the fact that Smith as performer stands in for those absent bodies. While death of the author theories ultimately seem to want to read the written text as a discreet entity separate from an orginary writing body as a means of avoiding the intentional fallacy, Smith's performances provide an example in which Derrida's "father of logos"--the origin of the spoken word--is no longer inherently privileged over the reproduced graphein, the written, or at least reproduced linguistic sign, but that the material body of the original speaker remains crucial to an understanding of the context of that speech and its relationship to power.

More to come on why it's important that this conclusion comes about in a study of feminist drama.