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A literary challenge that reverberates widely, not least for psychoanalysis, is the ironic predicament whose evolution from the Romantic age to the present Paul Jay traces in Being in the Text. Choosing to objectify the “psychological ‘self’” as a “literary subject” is becoming an ever more self-defeating project; indeed finding that self may entail losing it as Proust does in A la recherche du temps perdu by “forgetting, interpreting, and fictionalizing” or in Barthes's way of ultimately negating the power of “both memory and biography.” For whether “literary self-representation” is a stock-taking, a celebration, or, more likely, an intricate rescue mission to revivify or transfigure the self, it has recently come to seem unfeasible without “the abandonment of a kind of therapeutic hope” still available to the Romantics and indeed to Joyce and Proust. Even these artists, however, we are reminded, had to forego the “belief in the mediating powers of a transcendant ‘helper’” sustaining a work such as Augustine's Confessions. Jay's initial chapters, devoted to Wordsworth's involuted charting of his poetic development in The Prelude and to Carlyle's odyssey of rebirth, Sartor Resartus suggest how that loss shadows efforts at transcendence—through the medium of the word but not of the Word.
Yet, as Jay notes, the literary undertaking has grown ever more paradoxical for the Moderns. After Hegel's injunctions about artistic self-forging, after Nietzsche's assertions about the subject as construct and his challenge to historical authenticity, assuming the self as a given entity amenable to objective biographical treatment grows so dubious a proposition that in Paul