ABSTRACT
The fourth chapter developed the elliptical description of khōra initiated at the beginning of Chapter 3 in order to explode a stable autobiography to the narrative of ‘Hilary Mantel’. This interrogation involved confronting the contradictory position of interviews with the author, including my own, as sites for meaning, and developing the neologism ‘autho-biography’ as means to describe the oscillation of this process. This chapter introduced laughter as a trace in Mantel’s writing, and as elliptical, through exploring the vibrations of the ‘I’ of Giving Up the Ghost. Writing as ‘mask’, highlighted in Chapter 2, surfaced again through an engagement with de Man’s article ‘Autobiography as de-facement’. The analysis of the memoir elliptically described khōra as ‘marked’ by receiving all properties while in itself possessing nothing, which began to outline a silence in Mantel’s work to galvanise the subsequent chapters of the book. This sense of reception without possession as the working of autho-biography was strengthened by a comparison of Mantel’s writing with that of Janet Frame, through the former’s introduction to the latter’s novel, Faces in the Water. The chapter concluded with the oscillation of off-balance laughter in ‘Clinical Waste’, a text where the ‘I’ of autho-biography emerges independently of the author.
