Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing

Borderlines

Postmodern Studies 33

Series edited by

Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens

Borderlines Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1145-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2003 Printed in The Netherlands

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Sheringham for his invaluable support and encouragement. Many thanks for their insightful comments and suggestions go to Nicholas White, John O'Brien, Johnnie Gratton, Laura Marcus, Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, Orri Vésteinsson, Halldór Guðmundsson and Patrick Crowley. I am also grateful to Thomas Munch-Petersen for giving me the opportunity to develop this material in teaching. A special thanks for inspiration and companionship go to Emma Kemp and Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir. And, of course, as ever, to without whom... Örbrún Halldórsdóttir, Guðmundur Georgsson and Dagur Gunnarsson.

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Contents Introduction: Autobiography and Fiction 1

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Memory and the Autobiographical Process Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, Paul Auster

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The Use of Narrative in Autobiography Suzannah Lessard, Peter Handke, Jenny Diski

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Gender and Fiction in Women's Autobiographical Writing Janet Frame, Marie Cardinal 97

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Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, Kyoko Mori

141

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Biography in Autobiography

183

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Photographs in Autobiography

221

Conclusion:

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Postmodernism and Borderlines

Bibliography

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Index

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Introduction Autobiography and Fiction The field of contemporary life-writing offers many avenues for exploration. In the last thirty years or so, theoretical writing on autobiography has blossomed, autobiographies written from a specifically female perspective or from the perspective of members of ethnic minorities have proliferated, and the genre, or - as we shall see - cluster of genres and sub-genres, has been a fertile ground for experimental writing. The reasons for this interest in life-writing are many and varied, but one important factor is that autobiography - in its various guises - can capture and address many contemporary concerns, for example the status of the subject, the relations and representations of ethnicity and gender, and perhaps most importantly questions the individual's relationship with the past. Autobiographical writing can thereby reflect some of the main preoccupations of postmodernism,1 which has often been defined in terms of questions about our knowledge of the past and the difficulty of articulating our relationship to it.2 Such issues abound in recent life-writing. Postmodernism has also been described as a pluralistic art which 'blurs the boundaries between 'high' and 'popular' culture, as well as between art and every-day experience'.3 This work concentrates specifically on the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in 1

See for instance Leigh Gilmore's discussion where she sees postmodernism as being the perfect mode to 'free' autobiographical discourse in 'The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 3-21. But note also Michael Sheringham's review of Autobiography and Postmodernism where he explains that some of the qualities Gilmore finds in postmodern autobiographies are intrinsic to autobiography itself in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 20 (1997) 472-478. 2 See for instance Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988). 3 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. vii.

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postmodernist life-writing. The aim is to see how by demarcating and investigating these borderlines we can come to a better understanding of the role of fiction in autobiography, and this can then enable us to examine the representation of the past in current life-writing. It is not my aim here to pinpoint one definitive border between autobiography and fiction,4 rather I attempt to outline various areas where autobiography and fiction interact in a number of key texts. The term autobiography in this work is used to denote any text which is clearly published as such, whether through its title or subtitle, or through the way its status as non-fiction is indicated by the circumstances or manner of its publication and presentation. In most cases this entails that the texts have the same author, narrator and subject, thereby following Philippe Lejeune's definition,5 which excludes autobiographical novels. But my definition is also wider than Lejeune's, as I include not only: 'Récit[s] rétrospectif[s] en prose qu'une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu'elle met l'accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l'histoire de sa personnalité',6 but also texts where the author writes on the life of his or her parent(s), as these types of text constitute a large part of current life writing.7 The vogue for memoirs and non-fiction, so apparent in recent years - especially in Britain, has meant that this kind of text is widely published and discussed as part of autobiographical writing. I 4

Suzanne Gearhart has questioned the existence of fixed borders between history and fiction, and maintains they are always in some ways fluid. See especially her introduction to The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 5 See Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique: Nouvelle édition augmentée (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), pp. 27-28. 6 Ibid., p. 14. 'A retrospective prose narrative by a real person on his own life, with emphasis on his individuality, in particular a story of his personality.' 7 As in the tradition of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907). Many such 'memoirs' have been published in Britain for instance in recent years, for example Blake Morrison, And when did you last see your father? (1993), Tim Lott, The Scent of Dried Roses (1996), Susan Wicks, Driving My Father (1995) and Linda Grant, Remind Me Who I Am, Again (1998).

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would maintain that these texts must also always be to a large extent autobiographical and therefore of relevance to our enquiry. Generic differences and questions about the definition of the genre of autobiography are inevitably constant preoccupations for anyone writing on autobiography. I work in this study from the premise that there are generic differences between autobiography and the novel. This has, of course, been contested, most notably by Paul de Man,8 but I would hold with Ann Jefferson when she argues that it is necessary: to presuppose that there are generic distinctions between novels and autobiographies, even while the fiction is being revealed as autobiographical and the autobiographies as fictional, since in this sphere (if not in all others) generic differences need to be respected as an effect of reading, even if they cannot be defined as intrinsic qualities of the texts in question.9

In accordance with this view I specifically examine the relationship between autobiography and fiction in autobiographical works, but do not attempt to extract the autobiographical from works of fiction. From Philippe Lejeune's Le Pacte autobiographique (1975) onwards, a strand runs through autobiographical theory which claims that there is a difference between autobiography and the novel, and that this difference lies in the referentiality of autobiography, as Paul de Man's assertions in 'Autobiography As De-Facement' have been rigorously refuted.10 Autobiography is, therefore, considered here as a referential art, without denying the complexities involved in that referentiality. 8 See Paul de Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement' in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 67-81. 9 Ann Jefferson, 'Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute, RobbeGrillet', in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, eds. Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 108129, p. 109. 10 Michael Sheringham claims that: 'To eliminate the question of literal truth and reference in autobiography is to pay insufficient heed to a difference perceptible to most readers and which conditions different kinds of reading.' French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec (Oxford:

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The question of fictionality is a constant preoccupation throughout this work. The word 'fictional' is used here to designate conventions and practices one associates with creative writing - such as structure, poetic or literary descriptions of people and places, ordering of events to create certain effects - rather than simply things that are 'made-up'. This follows Johnnie Gratton's view: The non-existence of my life story also makes it necessary for me to produce 'fiction' in a good sense: fiction as making and not just making up; fiction as the corollary of imagination, fantasy and desire; fiction as the supplement of memory (a supplement probably always already in memory). In short, fiction is coextensive with the idea of a performative dimension. It affirms the increasingly highlighted 'act-value' of autobiographical writing at the expense of its traditionally supposed 'truth-value'.11

I consider here fictionality to be a necessary part of the autobiographical process itself and not something external to it, or incompatible with it. It is not my aim to enter into any simplistic 'fact' versus 'fiction' debate, but rather to examine how autobiographers Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 18. And Paul John Eakin points out that 'the critic's concern with reference, with the author and his intention, is built into the very structure of autobiography considered as a figure of reading.' 'Philippe Lejeune and the Study of Autobiography', Romance Studies 8 (1986) 1-14 (p. 11). Reference in autobiography is Paul John Eakin's main theme in his two books, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). He not only examines biographical reference, but also historical, social, and cultural reference. What brings him to this subject is the basic assumption that what differentiates autobiography from the novel is exactly this question of truth and reference. See also John Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 11 Johnnie Gratton, 'Postmodern French Fiction: Practice and Theory', in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the present, ed. Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 242-260, p. 253.

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negotiate the borders and boundaries between autobiography and fiction. This type of negotiation, I maintain, is especially apparent in any autobiographical text where the autobiographer deals actively with the problematics of the writing process itself. Life-writing can be said always to contain both autobiographical and fictional aspects, but an awareness of the problematics involved means the writer has constantly to negotiate the way in which the autobiographical and the fictional aspects of the writing process interact in the text. In discussing how one critic of Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984) wanted to emphasise the text's literary quality over its referential aspects while continually referring back to Duras's own comments on the text, (thereby at once removing the author from the text and reinstating the author's presence), Leah D. Hewitt points out: What surfaces in this paradox is autobiography's slippery relation to distinct conceptual models - traditional and modern - as it stirs its mixtures of literature in life and life in literature, making it difficult to keep the 'purely' literary and the 'purely' referential in their 'proper' (opposed) places. Autobiography, particularly in the postmodern era, balances precariously on the mobile borderline between opposing conceptions of literature.12

Autobiographical writing clearly invites this kind of confusion and hence there is no intention here to differentiate between the 'purely' literary and 'purely' referential, rather to attempt to identify aspects of the fictional within the autobiographical. Fictionality here, therefore,

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Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 1. Robert Smith explains that: 'there appear to be three enclosures within the field of autobiographical theory: 1. Theories and surveys of the theory [. . .] showing perhaps the tendency of much recent work on autobiography to cancel out both itself and its subject. 2. Suspicions as to whether autobiography can be theorised as a genre since as Candace Lang points out, it seems to get everywhere, like sand. 3. Positivist definitions of autobiography, merging with quasi-existentialist claims about self-knowledge.' Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 55-56.

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can denote not only conventions in creative writing but also conventions deployed in autobiographical writing. Autobiographies can, for instance, create the illusion that we are present to something that happened earlier. This happens for instance when autobiographers attempt to write from the viewpoint of the past, as for instance Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes (1996). This method implies fictionality, as we can never speak authoritatively from the past, and it highlights the problem of the representation of the past, as the past is always in one way or another already mediated. Autobiographers often attempt to retrieve a sense of the past, and the method they choose for that retrieval can involve a degree of fictionality. Fiction also plays a part in the dichotomy between the universal and the individual always present in autobiographies. As the individual autobiographer writes on universal experiences, such as motherdaughter relationships, experiences of crossing cultures, or the death of a parent, he or she has to deal with the universal structure of these experiences. Universal structures necessarily contain a component deriving from conventions of representation, so they are in some sense always already 'made-up'. When many texts follow similar patterns in relating such experiences this invites questions about the role of the public versus the private, about how individual experiences fit in with universal structures. Autobiography is, of course, always about stating an individuality while at the same time making it public, thereby giving individual experiences universal connotations. The approach I have chosen in this work allows me to address many issues, such as gender, cultural transplantation, memory, narrative, the relationship between autobiography and biography, and the use of photographs in autobiography. There is no attempt here to cover each of these issues in full, rather continually to focus on how the autobiographer constantly encounters borderlines between fiction and autobiography when tackling these issues. I hope to throw light on the role of these borderlines through close readings of key texts, while also examining recent trends in autobiography theory. But the traditional areas of study in literary theory, namely theme and genre, will also have a place in my work, although they have a problematic

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relationship with postmodern theory.13 The issue of genre has already been touched upon, and themes - such as gender and crossing cultures - are examined in terms of the fictional aspects at work within certain thematic concerns in the genre of autobiography. I bring together a number of texts from the last thirty years written in English, French, and German. This study is, however, not based on cultural comparisons, but aims at a broader understanding of recent autobiographical writing. My contention is that autobiographies in the West have followed similar patterns, whether they are written in English, German, or French, and the autobiographers have to grapple with similar concerns and ideas. I believe it, therefore, to be of value to look at these texts together, without minimising the differences between them, in order to establish a broad base from which to examine the different ways in which autobiographers wrestle with the borderlines between autobiography and fiction. The choice of texts has been guided by a sense of the vital importance of borders. I have, therefore, based my choice on texts that experiment with autobiography, more than on any similarities such as language. The authors discussed include the Austrian Peter Handke; the British J. R. Ackerley and Jenny Diski; the Americans Paul Auster, Lillian Hellman, James Ellroy and Suzannah Lessard; the Canadians Michael Ondaatje and Eva Hoffman; the New Zealander Janet Frame; and the French writers Marie Cardinal, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux. In choosing these texts I am not claiming them to be directly representative of postmodernist autobiographical writing, but rather contend that in one way or

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Ralph Cohen explains why genre theory poses a problem in postmodernism: 'Postmodern critics have sought to do without genre theory. Terms like "text" and "écriture" deliberately avoid generic classifications. And the reasons for this are efforts to abolish hierarchies that genres introduce, to avoid the assumed fixity of genres and the social as well as literary authority such limits exert, to reject the social and subjective elements in classification.' 'Do Postmodern Genres Exist?', in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 11-27, p. 12.

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another these texts negotiate the borderline between autobiography and fiction in ways that reflect postmodernist tendencies. Despite the fact that all the authors are literary figures - playwrights, novelists, or critics - the texts cover a wide range of types of autobiographical writing: from Peter Handke's short memoir of his mother, to Janet Frame's three-volume account of her life from childhood to the time of writing; from Michael Ondaatje's descriptions of his travels in his home country, to Marie Cardinal's account of her mental illness and treatment. The texts I have chosen are therefore not all what one might call 'straight-forward' autobiographies, since some of them have as their primary subject not the writer him- or herself but his or her parents or parent. It could be said that my sample of texts is not representative of mainstream or indeed popular autobiography, but my task in this work is to look at what literary experimentation with borders can bring to autobiographical writing. Transgression is probably a good term to apply to these texts as they straddle the borders between travel writing and autobiography (as in Michael Ondaatje's case), biography and autobiography (where people write on their parents such as Annie Ernaux and Paul Auster), and different research methods, such as sociology, history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. These writers all in one way or another challenge our perception of the role of fiction in autobiographical writing by transgressing borders, thereby highlighting the existence of these borders and questioning conventional modes of autobiographical practice. My work is divided into six main chapters. The first chapter studies the role of memory in the autobiographical writings of Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, and Paul Auster. It examines how writing an autobiography involves negotiation between the public and the private, and between individual histories and history writ large. I also investigate the other side of memory, i.e. forgetting, in order to look more closely at the role fiction plays in the texts. Of interest here is the treatment of memory and history, and manifestations of the process of remembering in the texts and what these tell us about the process of writing autobiography.

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The questions I raise in the second chapter on narrative in autobiography concern the way in which autobiographers organise their memories, and how narrative structure affects the relationship between autobiography and fiction in the works of Suzannah Lessard, Peter Handke, and Jenny Diski. I examine the use of narrative structure, that is how the ordering of events produces meaning, and what the autobiographers' experiments with narrative structure tell us about the role narrative plays in representing the past. In the third chapter I explore the role of gender and its relationship with personal mythologies. I examine how self-invention works through narrative and structure in women's autobiographies. The status of the autobiographical process is highlighted here as a means of controlling, creating, and projecting an identity in the works of Janet Frame and Marie Cardinal. Two themes are touched upon that surface again and again in autobiographies by women writers: becoming a writer and the relationship with their mother. I focus on how the writers represent these two elements in their lives and the role gender has in that representation. In the fourth chapter I look at how autobiographers who describe cultural crossings - Michael Ondaatje, Eva Hoffman, and Kyoko Mori - can highlight the fictional elements of autobiography in their awareness of two cultures, and two languages. I examine the structure they use to represent their experiences, and the special importance of their use of language. I look at how they use descriptions of landscape to represent the difference between the old and the new world, and their use of other genres, such as travel writing. I explore how their unique problems can highlight the general in autobiography, that is the struggle between the past and the present. The past in autobiography is always to some extent an imaginary past, and this is even more prominent when autobiographers are writing on a past in a different country, a different culture. The fifth chapter centres on the relationship between autobiography and biography in texts where autobiographers write mainly on their families, most often one parent. I explore the difference between writing about oneself and writing one's autobiography via the biography of a parent, or via a search for identity through exploration

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of family history. The aim is to see what writing biography through autobiography adds to the discussion of the borderline between autobiography and fiction. In the first part of the chapter I look at several writers who have written on their families, such as J. R. Ackerley, Suzannah Lessard, James Ellroy, Margaret Forster, Annie Ernaux, Henry F. May amongst others, but in the second part I focus mainly on Paul Auster's work which explores many issues about writing on an other. In the sixth chapter I examine what the use of photographs can tell us about ideas on the past and how they can highlight the main themes and preoccupations of autobiographies, such as memory, relationship to parents, to the past, fictionality, self-invention and self-image. Discussions of Roland Barthes's autobiography, and his book on photography, make up the first part of this chapter, with a specific emphasis on his thoughts on the image and the truth-value of photographs. In the next section I look at the links between memory and photographs in Georges Perec's autobiography, at photographs as clues to the past in Auster's text and finally at Ondaatje's use of documents in his book on Billy the Kid and in his autobiography, Running in the Family. In attempting to demarcate the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in recent life-writing I hope to show that these borderlines exist at the level of both theme and structure, and that in negotiating them autobiographers grapple with how they can represent the past. They not only face the problem confronted by historiography with regard to the representation of the past, but also more private issues appropriate to the nature of autobiography, such as the role of memory, and the place of the unique, and the private, in the public sphere.

Chapter One Memory and the Autobiographical Process Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, Paul Auster It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child [. . .] At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth[. . .] At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain..1 Longtemps j'ai cherché les traces de mon histoire, consulté des cartes et des annuaires, des monceaux d'archives. Je n'ai rien trouvé et il me semblait parfois que j'avais rêvé, qu'il n'y avait eu qu'un inoubliable cauchemar.2

1. Introduction: Recollection as Investigation Writing an autobiography involves a dialogue with, in Paul Auster's terms, the voice of memory, since, as some critics have stressed, autobiography is inherently the genre of memory. In this chapter I will examine the role of memory and how it marks out one of the borderlines between fiction and autobiography. There are three main areas, I believe, where memory and fiction interact in autobiography: firstly in memory's relationship to writing, secondly in the role of forgetting in life-writing, and thirdly in the connection between private memories and public events. In her study of the role of memory in medieval culture Mary Carruthers explains that in the memory schemes so common in that era, iteration - or reciting texts in 1

Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) p. 124. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) 2 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d'enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975) p. 10. (Hereafter quoted in the text with David Bellos' translation in footnotes.) 'For years I sought out traces of my history, looking up maps and directories and piles of archives. I found nothing, an it sometimes seemed as though I had dreamt, that there had been only an unforgettable nightmare.' W or The Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (London: Harvill, 1988) p. 3.

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a parrot-like fashion - was not considered vital, but the 'crucial task of recollection is investigatio, 'tracking-down', a word related to vestigia, 'tracks' or 'footprints''.3 In writing an autobiography writers embark on this kind of 'investigation', tracking down memories that have left tracks or footprints, and attempt to lend these memories form and coherence. The underlying theme of this chapter is the relationship between writing and memory. In the first section I focus specifically on that relationship, asking, for example, what are the connections between writing and memory and what processes are at work in writing memories, and how do we remember in writing? The writers I discuss in this chapter are all very much concerned with an aspect of memory one can term recollection as investigation. In this context the investigation is twofold: on the one hand the writers investigate their own memories and on the other they investigate the possibilities of writing these memories. One could say that memory is what is crucial to autobiography and must, therefore, help define the border between autobiography and fiction. The statement 'I remember' has an unimpeachable status, others can challenge facts, not 'memories'. It is also what makes autobiography a unique genre. It is not only the memories themselves that are the autobiographer's subject, but also memory itself and the process of remembering is engaged with in all of the texts examined here. That process becomes visible in the way the autobiographers display a willingness or unwillingness to remember, as in some cases they voice a need, either to forget or to remember. The writing process reveals a need to confirm or deny memories, and the memories themselves are embellished, interrogated, or conjured up. Writing an autobiography signals a drive towards remembering, but I maintain that the autobiographical process must also involve forgetting, as the writer chooses one memory and discards another, writes one version of that memory at the cost of another, probably equally valid, version. This leads to the second section of this chapter 3

Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 20.

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and its central question: to what extent does writing one's memories constitute a process of forgetting? I attempt to pinpoint moments of forgetting in a number of key texts and explore how these moments affect their structure and what this tells us about the role of forgetting in life-writing. If the autobiographers display a need to remember, do they also long to forget? The relationship between private memories and public events can highlight some questions autobiography raises about our relationship with the past, and our representation of it, and in the third section I look at how that relationship manifests itself in the texts. I examine how each author has forged a unique conjunction between their own memories and public events and how that connection impinges on the borderline between fiction and autobiography. The attempt to hear the sometimes unclear voice of memory is a theme common to the texts examined here: Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975), Lillian Hellman's autobiographical works and Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude (1982). It is not only the imperfection of human memory that concerns them, but more fundamentally the sense that the past will not, in simple terms, explain the present. Nevertheless, what unites these otherwise very different works is the emphasis on the importance of remembering even if one fails to come up with the 'truth'. Although they could not be more different in style and structure, these works are also fine instances of the complex dialogue between public and private memory and the individual's relationship to history. While the authors show a considerable distrust towards their own memories there are at times powerful moments of memory in the texts. These moments of memory do at times overcome the doubts the writers express towards remembering. They can illuminate some points in their lives and to some extent their reasons for writing their lives. Paul Auster's autobiographical work, The Invention of Solitude, was written shortly after the death of his father, and the first half 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', which I will discuss in a later chapter, is mainly a memoir of his father. The second half is called 'The Book of Memory'. Here Auster ruminates on themes such as chance, father-son relationships, memory, and writing, among other things. The central

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theme is how and why we remember, how remembering connects to other aspects of our lives and how remembering relates to writing. The narrative is by no means linear, rather Auster travels through other stories, other works of art, literature and philosophy, his childhood memories, and recent events in his life and in the life of his son, in order to examine the role of memory in his existence. The autobiographical project of the American playwright and scriptwriter Lillian Hellman can shed light on the complex relationship between memory and forgetting in autobiography. Hellman wrote four autobiographical works: An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973) and Scoundrel Time (1976), which were later collected in one volume, Three (1979) with new comments by the author, and a year later Maybe: A Story which chronicles Hellman's relationship with a woman called Sarah. An Unfinished Woman is the work that most resembles a 'conventional' autobiography. It is a relatively straightforward account of her life, although Hellman moves backward and forward in time, and includes excerpts from her diary. As the title suggests, Hellman not only feels that she herself was unfinished, but also that her autobiographical project was just starting: her memories were unfinished. So she continued with Pentimento, a series of portraits of people and places from her past and a chapter on the theatre. Some of the people Hellman writes about in this volume had not been mentioned in the first work, as if they had been forgotten, and their importance only now comes to light; others are people she revisits and reappraises. Scoundrel Time is an account of what happened to her during the McCarthy era, when she was called before the House Committee of Un-American Activities. Here, she is at once writing about public events and her own private history. Maybe: A Story is the most curious work of the four as Hellman charts her relationship with a woman she does not seem to know much about, but whose life has been strangely intertwined with Hellman's life. Throughout these works she questions, interrogates and rewrites her past.4 The texts are all marked with the belief that her explanations 4

Maurice F. Brown describes these works as follows: 'In brief, the sequence of volumes suggests an underlying philosophical concern which

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and analyses of the past will not yield as much as she hopes for. What is interesting for our purposes is her constant questioning of the past, of her own and other people's motives and actions, and how she covers significant events of the twentieth century, such as the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the McCarthy era. Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance is also pertinent to my enquiry. Here, the mixture of childhood memories and an adventure story constitutes a remarkable attempt at writing the painful, almost forgotten, past, a private loss that has been overshadowed by public events and the death of millions. Perec's unique way of intertwining fictional chapters and autobiographical chapters, shows that an investigation of memory can be a fertile ground for experimental lifewriting.

2. Writing and Memory: The Presence of the Past Writing and memory have long been entwined in people's perception and Carruthers traces this connection from Plato through Cicero to St Augustine.5 But what kind of process does remembering entail? David F. Krell explains that: Remembering instigates a peculiar kind of presence. It 'has' an object of perception or knowledge without activating perception or knowledge as such and without confusing past and present. For while remembering, a man tells himself that he is now present to something that was earlier.6

increasingly dictates autobiographical form. Hellman's life-writing turned into a quest for her "true" life - a quest which pushed both her historical and poetic commitments to their ragged edges.' 'Autobiography and Memory: The Case of Lillian Hellman', Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 8 (1985), 1-11, (p. 3). 5 Carruthers, op. cit., p. 21. 6 David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 15.

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Autobiographers often attempt to capture this peculiar kind of presence of the past in writing.7 They not only write on memories, but on the process of remembering, and on that presence which, although it does not confuse the past and the present, still blurs the edges of the present. Paul Auster in his 'Book of Memory' proclaims more than once that he feels he is no longer living in the present: 'His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. [. . .] Later, in a time of greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as 'nostalgia for the present'' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 76). And later he claims: His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. Each time he saw a child, he would try to imagine what it would look like as a grown-up. Each time he saw an old person, he would try to imagine what that person had looked like as a child. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 87)

The borderline between the past and the present is blurred, on some level they seem to co-exist. The present has receded, as the presence of the past invades its space. Auster describes seeing things in the present only to be reminded of the past: And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play on him, this constant turning of one thing into another thing, as if behind each real thing there were a shadow thing, as alive in his mind as the thing before his eyes, and in the end he was at a loss to say which of these things he was actually seeing. And therefore it happened, often it happened, that his life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 135)

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A good example of this occurs in Virginia Woolf's 'A Sketch of the Past' when she explains: 'Those moments - in the nursery, on the road to the beach - can still be more real than the present moment [. . .] At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there.' Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978), pp. 75-76.

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Memory has become an almost overwhelming force. It is as if the present transforms into the past before his eyes, turning one thing into another, children into old people, and old people into children. The past and the present have become interchangeable, as memory is allinvading. The structure of the text is marked by this sensibility as Auster connects the present events he recounts to past events. The time of Auster's writing he describes consists in a couple of years following the death of his father and the break-up of his marriage, when he lives alone in a tiny room away from his young son, and for a time takes care of his dying grandfather. This is a time of difficulty, change, and transition, and in the way that he describes it, it is as if the past is more real to him than the present. In writing, he fills his loneliness with memories, removing himself from the present and, in one sense, from himself. He writes the 'Book of Memory' in the third person: it is the story of 'A.' he writes, not 'I'. In Auster's attempt to rebuild his life, his sense of identity and memory, he connects different parts, people, and places in his life leading up to this moment. Thus, the reader is not introduced to one event or one memory, but to the connections between these events and follows the way in which Auster's memory works in the writing.8 In An Unfinished Woman Lillian Hellman describes feeling the presence of the past acutely. She visits Moscow for the first time in twenty years since she spent a few eventful months there during the Second World War. On the aeroplane coming into Moscow she is overcome by sadness. She is apprehensive about meeting people she has not seen in over twenty years so she hides away in her hotel room that night to be alone with her memories: 8

Auster also mentions memory systems: 'To follow with a detailed description of classical memory systems, complete with charts, diagrams, symbolic drawings. Raymond Lull, for example, or Robert Fludd, not to speak of Giordano Bruno, the great Nolan burned at the stake in 1600. Places and images as catalysts for remembering other places and images: things, events, the buried artefacts of one's own life. Mnemotechnics. To follow with Bruno's notion that the structure of human thought corresponds to the structure of nature. And therefore to conclude that everything, in some sense, is connected to everything else.' The Invention of Solitude, p. 76.

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They were not bad memories, most of them, and I was not disturbed by them, or so I thought, but I knew that I had taken a whole period of my life and thrown it somewhere, always intending to call for it again, but now that it came time to call, I couldn't remember where I had left it. Did other people do this, drop the past in a used car lot and leave it for so long that one couldn't even remember the name of the road?9

What Hellman describes in these pages is a physical need to remember, to be by herself and ruminate on this period she claims to have thrown away. Surprisingly the period in question is not the time she spent in Moscow during the war but what happened to her after the war, events which have marked her life ever since, so that she finds herself incapable of explaining it to her Russian friends, who were not there to witness it. The sudden resurgence of these memories invades the present. Moscow recedes and the memories take over. The difficulty which Hellman faces is that of explaining one's past; how life has affected one. It is by writing an autobiography that Hellman attempts to explain the past, and tries to let the past explain her present. One can speculate that this 'moment of memory' was one of the reasons why she started writing on her past as An Unfinished Woman was published only a few years after her return from Moscow. This physical need to remember can include a need to write down what one remembers, and to see if that can explain the present. In her description of her experience in Moscow Hellman emphasises the need to be alone with her memories. The past is there with her to the extent that she cannot meet people who were not there and do not know of this past. Hellman indulges in this presence and describes her feelings in some detail but she does not tell the reader what she remembered as she sat in the hotel room. It is the process of remembering rather than the memory itself that is her subject. The

9

Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman in Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979) p. 184. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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reader is drawn in by the descriptions of the effects of remembering without knowing what the memory is about. For the period Hellman claims to have thrown away is the McCarthy era and although she refers to it in passing in An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento she does not write about it in any detail until her third autobiographical work Scoundrel Time. She still has not retrieved it from the used car lot and when she does so it is with a mixture of trepidation and a conviction that she must write on it. This presence of the past never causes nostalgia or any kind of longing for the past in Hellman's text, neither does it induce a sense of peace with the past. Her constant doubt and criticism of the past are much in evidence throughout her work. She explains her relationship with the past in the last paragraph of An Unfinished Woman: But I am not yet old enough to like the past better than the present, although there are nights when I have a passing sadness for the unnecessary pains, the self-made foolishness that was, is, and will be. I do regret that I have spent too much of my life trying to find what I called 'truth', trying to find what I called 'sense'. I never knew what I meant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for. All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time. However. (An Unfinished Woman, p. 300)

This paragraph can also be read as a comment on the text itself Hellman's constant search for 'truth' and her attempts at making 'sense' of the past and her dissatisfaction with what she comes up with. The last word in the book, 'however' signals some optimism, as if it (the text/the life) was worth it - but it leaves the text open-ended (as autobiographies are wont to do). It is clear that this is what drives Hellman's autobiographical process: the search for 'truth' and 'sense' invites her to interrogate and investigate her memory. All through her autobiographical works Hellman describes the people in her life, close friends, casual acquaintances and strangers alike. The descriptions are coloured by a constant questioning of her own and other people's motives. The book contains anecdotes of

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people who have at some point or another been important to her, some from her childhood, some from her adult life. Pentimento is a series of portraits of other people but through writing on others Hellman investigates the formation of her character, her beliefs, sexuality, and friendships. She tells anecdotes of other people so they come alive as characters but at the same time she tells us what her relationship to those people meant to her.10 Hellman has moved from a rather straightforward, albeit questioning, account of her own life in An Unfinished Woman to a series of portraits of people close and not so close to her in Pentimento. The writing of Pentimento seems to have been conditioned completely by memory. Here, it seems as if Hellman is waiting for the voice of memory to speak. In a note added to the text in the Three edition she explains: 'Pentimento' was written by what psychoanalysis calls, in now weary semi-accuracy, a kind of 'free association'. I did not know from one portrait to another what I would do next, with the exception of 'Julia' where, without much hope, I wanted to try once more. I had not, for example, consciously thought of Bethe for perhaps thirty years; the man I call Willy has been dead for over twenty-five years and in those years I remember only one conversation about him, with his son-in-law, a few minutes of nothing. When I finished one portrait there was always a long wait. All kinds of people and places came back, of course, but I knew I was waiting each time not for what had been most important to me, but what had some root that I had never traced before.11 10

Marcus K. Billson and Sidonie A. Smith point out: 'Nowhere, perhaps, is this latent self-revelation more intriguing than in Lillian Hellman's memoirs, An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento. By eschewing conventional autobiography and focusing on the people and historical circumstances of her past, Hellman invites the reader into a world of "others" who, as they come together in her memory, become significant in the articulation of her 'self'.' 'Lillian Hellman and the Strategy of the "Other"', in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 163-179, p. 163. 11 Pentimento in Three, p. 586. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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Having written An Unfinished Woman, Hellman turned, it seems, to the not so obvious, to the people and events she had forgotten, waiting for her memory to help her trace the roots.12 These portraits are connected to some trait in Hellman's character, to aspects such as her sexual awakening, but not necessarily to specific periods in her life. The people Hellman writes about in 'free-association' are people she has only tenuous links with, and vague knowledge of, as for instance Bethe and Willy. They are not there because they played a large role in Hellman's life, but they represent a period, episode, or an event that can help her trace some aspect of her character, her identity or sexuality. It is, therefore, a different form of autobiographical writing from An Unfinished Woman, and memory seems to perform a different role; from recollecting the past in An Unfinished Woman to rumination, free-association and letting the forgotten and not-thoughtof take control. It is an investigation of the smaller things, the details, the overlooked. It is a different form, but the tone remains as questioning and searching as before. This awareness of the gaps and unexplored spaces of memory is very obvious and the gaps are of great importance in themselves in Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance. The focus, in the chapters on 12

It is worth noting here that the chapter on the woman Hellman calls 'Julia' which was later made into a film, has caused some controversy. Muriel Gardiner Buttinger has come forward explaining that her life matches in detail what Hellman describes as the life of her childhood friend Julia, but Buttinger claims she never met Hellman. See William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (London: Sigdwick and Jackson 1987), pp. 402-412. Hellman's memoirs have been fiercly criticised for lack of accuracy and fictionalisation of events by a number of people, for instance Martha Gellhorn and Mary McCarthy, but for some reason not until many years after their publication. Hellman sued McCarthy for libel after one particular attack, but died before the case came to trial. Wright also gives a detailed account of their feud. Why Hellman specifically has come under such scrutiny is not quite clear, but one can infer that as she handles many sensitive events and people's connections to those events, there are bound to be resentments and a resistance to giving her the last word on events that affected many people's lives.

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childhood memories, is on its gaps - the family Perec lost and hardly remembers, his father in the war and his mother in the camps, and the childhood memories that often prove to be wrong. The moment of memory is here strongly linked to writing, it is almost as if memory were not possible without writing and writing impossible without memory. As Perec explains in a short introduction to his book: Le récit d'aventures, à côté, a quelque chose de grandiose, ou peut-être de suspect. Car il commence par raconter une histoire et, d'un seul coup, se lance dans une autre: dans cette rupture, cette cassure qui suspend le récit autour d'on ne sait quelle attente, se trouve le lieu initial d'où est sorti ce livre, ces points de supension auxquels se sont accrochés les fils rompus de l'enfance et la trame de l'écriture. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, back cover)13

The structure of W ou le souvenir d'enfance is a complex one. Perec mixes his few, and in some ways insubstantial, childhood memories with a strange and ominous fictional tale (or two fictional tales) in alternating chapters in an intriguing juxtaposition.14 The second fictional part is a story of an island society that is completely organised around the cult of sport. The fictional chapters and the childhood memories seem very different at first sight but there are sentences that are almost interchangeable. This one is from the fictional narrator in the first chapter: 'Quoi qu'il arrive, quoi que je fasse, j'étais le seul dépositaire, la seule mémoire vivante, le seul

13

'Next to it, the adventure story is rather grandiose, or maybe dubious. For it begins to tell one tale, and then, all of a sudden, launches into another. In this break, in this split suspending the story on an unidentifiable expectation, can be found the point of departure for the whole of this book: the points of suspension on which the broken threads of childhood and the web of writing are caught.' Preface, no page number. 14 See a very stimulating study by Philippe Lejeune on the reading of W ou le souvenir d'enfance in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993), 88-98.

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vestige de ce monde. Ceci, plus que toute autre considération, m'a décidé à écrire' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 10).15 To be 'la seule mémoire vivante' is also Perec's lot but it seems that he writes not because of that fact but almost despite it: je n'écris pas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n'écris pas pour dire que je n'ai rien à dire. J'écris: j'écris parce que nous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j'ai été un parmi eux, ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps; j'écris parce qu'ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que la trace en est l'écriture: leur souvenir est mort à l'écriture; l'écriture est le souvenir de leur mort et l'affirmation de ma vie. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 59)16

To remember can be a call to write; an impetus to erect some kind of monument to the memory or the event, but also to call on others to remember, to raise a monument to the remembering process itself. It is to make concrete the peculiar presence of the past, and the importance of memory. As Michael Sheringham observes: the inevitable failure of [Perec's] attempt to write about [his memories] is itself a memento mori, a repetition of absence and annihilation. Regardless of its relative success or failure, the act of writing - in its inherent endlessness, its eternal severance from the concrete, its intrinsic incapacity to grasp the real, its basis in absence - is attuned to the reality of loss.17

15

'Whatever may happen now, whatever I may now do, I was the sole depository, the only living memory, the only vestige of that world. That, more than any other consideration, was what made me decide to write.' p. 4. 16 'I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.' p. 42. 17 Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 323.

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But the question why one writes is notoriously difficult and one that Perec has addressed elsewhere: 'to the question of 'why I write', which I can never answer except by writing, and thus deferring forever the very moment when, by ceasing to write, that image would visibly cohere, like a jigsaw puzzle inexorably brought to its completion.'18 Amidst the gaps and absence there are powerful, physical memory experiences that may have contributed to the urge to write. Perec describes being rewarded with a medal at school only to have it taken away from him, unjustly, after a fight: la sensation cénesthésique de ce déséquilibre imposé par les autres, venu d'au-dessus de moi et retombant sur moi, reste si fortement inscrite dans mon corps que je me demande si ce souvenir ne masque pas en fait son exact contraire: non pas le souvenir d'une médaille arrachée, mais celui d'une étoile épinglée. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 76)19

This belief that what we remember clearly must be erroneous and therefore significant has been prevalent from Freud onward. Perec here gives a new meaning to this rather innocent memory of a child unjustly treated, believing it to conceal another much more terrifying memory with much broader implications. This is a good example of one of the processes at work when writing on memory; the initial memory is connected to something else, thereby giving it greater emphasis, and a broader significance for the reader. All the writers discussed here avoid making direct causal links between past events and their present situation. They do make connections, but often surprising ones, and the reader can never be sure where the memories will lead.

18

Georges Perec, 'Statement of Intent' trans. David Bellos in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993) 21-22, (p. 22). 19 'the sensation in my whole body of a loss of balance imposed by others, coming from above and falling on to me, remains so deeply imprinted on my body that I wonder if this memory does not in fact conceal its precise opposite: not the memory of a medal torn off, but the memory of a star pinned on.' p. 54.

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Moments of interpretation and analysis of the past are strongly linked in these texts to almost overwhelming memories. These points of luminosity, these powerful memory experiences seem to invite the authors to write on them, to attempt to make sense of them. They are like sparks of creativity that open up new ways into the past. Writing and memory here become so closely linked that it is difficult to tell the two apart. Such moments of memory become all the more powerful given that the authors we are considering are very sceptical of the power of memory. This does not mean that these moments allow us clear and unobstructed access to the past, what is interesting about them is that they seem to invite rich interpretation and analysis and serve to some extent as catalysts for the writing of a life. Maurice Halbwachs's work on memory provides insights into, among other things, how memories change: Recollections which have not been thought about for a long time are reproduced without change. But when reflection begins to operate, when instead of letting the past recur, we reconstruct it through an effort of reasoning, what happens is that we distort the past, because we wish to introduce a greater coherence.20

In this view the past is not in itself coherent and we inadvertently distort it by making it so. This, of course, is very much apparent when we write on the past. But it seems to me that Auster, Perec and Hellman show a distinct awareness of this in their writing. Hellman attempts to make the past cohere, while constantly reminding herself that this is what she is doing. Perec, on the other hand, does not attempt coherence to the same extent, and Auster's search for coherence is always marked by the belief that if one gives meaning to connections, coincidences and chance, one makes up an imaginary world inside the real world; a method he rejects (The Invention of

20

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 183

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Solitude, p. 147).21 Rather Auster points to possible meanings, possible connections, while at the same time warning against a simple meaning-making process, which would lead him to some absolute truth about his past. Hellman's autobiographical works, with the exception of Maybe, all include excerpts from her diaries. She turns to them when she needs a detailed account of some event, or to check dates of events. But it seems that she is mostly unsatisfied with what she finds there. One of those diaries is from her stay in Moscow in the winter of 1940: In those five months I kept diaries of greater detail and length than I have ever done before or since, but when I read them last year, and again last week, they did not include what had been most important to me, or what the passing years have made important. (An Unfinished Woman, p. 144)

The diary is an everyday form, often occupied with the domestic, the detail, and usually free of any hierarchical interpretation of events; the mundane and the eventful are all allocated the same space and form.22 The diary seems to disappoint Hellman with its lack of interpretation, lack of clarity, omissions of what she has later to come to view as important and its inability to capture what it was 'really like', as she complains of her diaries from her visit to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. All the same Hellman includes excerpts from them, and that reminds us that remembering is an active, ever-changing process that can never be cast in stone. The entries are there as relics from the past which carry documentary value, but not the 'truth'-value Hellman seeks. Memory, then, is never complete both in the sense that it never 21

Dennis Barone points out that creating an imaginary world inside the real world is what Auster's characters in the New York Trilogy do and it leads to their downfall. See 'Auster's Memory' in Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14 (Spring 1994) 32-34. 22 A helpful account of the diary and its relationship to gender can be found in Rebecca Hogan's essay 'Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form', in Autobiography and the Question of Gender, ed. Shirley Neuman (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp. 95-107.

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tells one exactly how things were and in the sense that it can never be 'completed'. That is also why Hellman includes more notes on the texts in the later edition. The reader feels closer to the events in reading the diary entries, they seem to invite the reader to be present to the past. But time, distance, remembering and rewriting all offer if not quite another version of events, then at least a different interpretation and analysis of what was important and what was not. The main difference between the excerpts from Hellman's diary and the rest of the text is the analysis and the critical inquiry for some deeper or different meaning of past events that give the autobiographical text a sense of overall unity of purpose. The text is layered here; it is comprised of a description of a memory; description of remembering; note on the description; diary entry; note on the diary entry; interpretation of the memory, and finally a note on the text. Writing on memory takes place on different levels, with different degrees and types of analysis and interpretation, and instigates different levels of presence of the past. Auster's work is also comprised of layers of text. His memories are intertwined with memories of stories and numerous quotations from other texts, spanning a wide range of texts, from the Bible to Pinocchio, but all corresponding to or elucidating on a theme in the text. 'The Book of Memory' includes thirteen books of memory (each a few pages long), each a variation on a theme, similar to a musical work. In the first book Auster mentions in elliptical sentences all the main themes that he then enlarges on in the text. It is only the last book, book thirteen, which is different and contains a list of sentences all starting with 'I remember', reminiscent of Perec's work Je me souviens (1978), a collection of just such sentences. Auster is fascinated by all kinds of chance occurrences and coincidences. For Auster there is a very clear correlation between writing and memory, he sees 'the act of writing as an act of memory' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 142). This partly accounts for the structure of the text: each memory corresponds to another memory, or a piece of text from elsewhere, or a recent event, or all of those things, and writing calls forth these connections. Some texts for him are also clear instances of memory, as he is certain that Collodi's Pinocchio

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must be a book of memory (The Invention of Solitude, p. 163). The understanding of childhood and the magical father-son relationship described in Pinocchio must be from Collodi's own childhood Auster concludes; as if it was not possible to write such a book without remembrance: 'The puppet had become the image of himself as a child. To dip the puppet into the inkwell, therefore, was to use his creation to write the story of himself. For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 164). This is the third thread that Auster weaves with writing and memory: solitude. His own solitude, the general solitude of the writer, the solitude of madness and writing (Auster mentions Hölderlin and Dickinson). The solitude of those in hiding and exile (he includes Anne Frank, and his Jewish friend's father who hid in an attic room in Paris during the war), and Jonah's solitude in the whale. He also maintains that one shares another man's solitude by translating his work, which is also the work of memory as one word is turned into another. These three areas: chance, father-son relationships, and solitude, are so intimately linked in this text, that it is nearly impossible to talk about one aspect without mentioning the others. Auster writes on the places of memory: rooms that are filled with memory. His own room, Anne Frank's room, Dickinson's room, these are the concrete spaces of memory, writing and solitude. Places of remembrance that have now (or some of them at least) become monuments to this remembrance and writing. This investigation of solitude in 'The Book of Memory' is what links it to 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' and gives new meaning to the title as he invents not only his father's solitude (see chapter 5), but also his own. Auster writes on his life by remembering other lives, other writers, other stories, other texts. He writes about himself in the third person, thereby putting himself beside other characters in other texts he has read. But while writing on these connections and coincidences he emphasises strongly that they have a completely different meaning in fiction from their place in life-writing. Anything that forms a pattern is a collection of meaningless coincidences in real life, whereas if it was part of a plot in a novel the pattern would point to a subtext or

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symbolism. But looking for patterns and correlations in his life is still an important activity for him, it is his way of making sense of the past, and, of course, all these patterns he charts accumulate and become meaningful, even though they never achieve the status of a symbol. As he explains, the meaning of a life can never be as neatly deposited as a life of a character in a novel: people do sometimes try to understand their lives in terms of historical conditions, it does not have the same effect [as in a novel]. Something is missing: the grandeur, the grasp of the general, the illusion of metaphysical truth. One says: Don Quixote is consciousness gone haywire in a realm of the imaginary. One looks at a mad person in the world (A. at his schizophrenic sister, for example), and says nothing. This is the sadness of a wasted life, perhaps - but no more. (The Invention of Solitude, pp. 146-147)

For Auster, then, creating such a pattern of a life in autobiographical writing would only be an illusion as it would move to the level of fiction, although by pointing to these connections in his life, he comes very close to creating a 'pattern' of his life. The 'Book of Memory' is an account of his life, his work, his reading, his fatherhood, his being a son: all linked together in one room, and the distinction between past and present becomes blurred. It is as if everything existed simultaneously in the text, as chronological order is absent. What matters is not just the events themselves, but the connections between them and what makes this connection possible is memory; hence the title 'Book of Memory'. Auster connects many disparate things in this text; his own father-son theme with other fathers and sons in history and literature, which he then connects to other things, just as in Sherzad's stories, which he quotes, where she never tells what is in front of her eyes, but always a parallel story. 'The Book of Memory' is a collection of parallels, connections and coincidences that hang together by the thread of writing and acquire meaning through association. The text starts with the phrase 'it was, it never will be again', which is repeated time and again throughout the work. But it is a phrase

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Auster in a way sets out to disprove as he later describes memory as being 'the space in which a thing happens for the second time' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 83). He also speaks of the importance of memory in and of itself. He commemorates a day each year on which he and his friend had decided something 'big' was going to happen. Although nothing 'big' ever happened that day, he still remembers the date. Other people's writing and paintings can just as well trigger his own memory. Just as reading other people's memoirs always brings to mind some incident from one's own childhood. Van Gogh's paintings trigger Auster's memory of the first poems he wrote after having seen an exhibition of Van Gogh's work with his first love. He does not remember the poems themselves, but he remembers everything else. 'The Book of Memory' is not linear but circular. It does not move from one point to the next, but back and forth continuously, in the same room, very much like memory works. New associations are found, new glimpses of the same topics, and the constant underlying theme is losing a father or losing a son. There is one moment in time, but it could be a hundred years, it could be tomorrow. On the first page he says: 'It was. It never will be again' and on the last page he adds to that sentence: 'Remember' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 172). In Auster's work the past is thrust into the present by a place, a face, a text, or a story, which he then connects to a memory, much as in the memory systems he mentions. In his text there is a mixture of literary and historical consciousness, and although he firmly links memory and writing, they are never quite simultaneous acts: Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance[. . .] And yet, the telling of it is necessarily slow, a delicate business of trying to remember what has already been remembered. The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 139)

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For Auster writing on memories is therefore an attempt to recreate the process of remembering, 'to remember what has already been remembered'. In recreating this process, the memories are looked at again, interrogated and investigated once more, as the writing process by definition has to be more selective than remembering ever can be. The editing that is evident in these three texts involves corrections of the autobiographers' faulty memories, the results of forgetting, or notes that add some information that they have only learned much later. It serves to remind us of the difficulty of writing on memory and the complex relationship we have with the past. The editing process is a long one. First it is at work as one remembers, then there is the editing that goes on when the memories are written down, and the last stage - very visible in these texts - as these writers re-read and/or rewrite their memories. This highlights the fact that remembering is a never-ending process and so is writing one's memories. These texts with their footnotes, corrections, diaries and notes make this process visible and remind us that the remembering process is never 'complete'.

3. The Role of the Forgotten After describing her first memories Virginia Woolf goes on to explain: 'These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.'23 In this section I am concerned with what part the forgotten plays in autobiography. If writing is an act of memory, is it perhaps also an act of forgetting? Thomas Butler says in his essay 'Memory: A Mixed Blessing' that: nonretrieval, forgetting, even limited amnesia under acute stress seem to be an integral part of a normal intelligence, 23

Woolf, op. cit., p. 78.

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This can be reversed to say that any study of forgetting has to take into account remembering. This is the central problem one faces when writing about forgetting. The two terms, remembering and forgetting, are interlocked in such a way that it is almost impossible to discuss one without the other. Another problem one faces in this discussion is that forgetting represents something that is not there, a void, an absence, and is therefore unsayable. All the same I will attempt to locate areas of forgetting in autobiography. Autobiography can be described as an active process of remembering, but it does not always represent a smooth flow of memories. There are stumbles, hesitations, doubts, where it seems the forgotten has become visible. This can be seen in some texts as gaps in the narrative, or when the text moves from one specific childhood memory to a more general picture of childhood, or when autobiographers include evidence that contradicts their own memory of events. These gaps, or oddities in the texts alert the reader to the part forgetting plays in the process of remembering and in the broader instance to the part it plays in the autobiographical process. Hellman writes in the opening paragraph of Pentimento: Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged 24

Thomas Butler, 'Memory: A Mixed Blessing', in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 1-31, p. 16.

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now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now. (Pentimento, p. 309)

This image is reminiscent of Auster's voice of memory, which is always in the background. What was once forgotten has resurfaced through the passing of time. A point that is illustrated in many autobiographical works is that it is possible to retrieve what was once forgotten. The writing in Pentimento is constantly informed by this knowledge, as Hellman includes a whole chapter on a man whom she claims not to have thought about in twenty-five years. She has no illusions that what she writes is an exact account of how things were. Hellman is constantly aware throughout her writing of the complicated relationship between the past and present. Nothing is easy, straightforward or obvious. Everything could have happened differently and could be told differently. This is a constant theme in Hellman's work; seeing again, reading again, writing again. It is the repetition itself that changes how one sees things. What she looks at as important now she did not view as significant then and there are a number of unanswered questions about the people she met. Her experience in Moscow is also a kind of 'pentimento'. When she sees her old friends she sees behind them herself before the McCarthy era and then sees herself as she is now and realises how much has changed, it 'is a way of seeing and then seeing again'. But it only happens with the passing of time, as the paint ages, that what was there before becomes apparent. As Auster's text clearly demonstrates, our memory consists of layers and underneath the first layer there are other texts, other stories, other lives, and all exist simultaneously in our memory. Hellman's book on the McCarthy era, Scoundrel Time, brings in a more public aspect of forgetting. She was blacklisted and her longtime partner Dashiell Hammett was sent to prison. Despite the devastating effect this episode had on her life, it is only mentioned in passing in the first two volumes. But in Scoundrel Time she has decided to remember, coming to the conclusion that forgetting was dangerous. It is a work that points to the political implications of forgetting.

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The last autobiographical work is intriguingly titled Maybe: A Story. Hellman chronicles her relationship with a woman called Sarah, who is not mentioned in the other works. A woman she knows very little about, and what she knows is contradicted by other people's accounts. This is Hellman's last work and in it all her doubts about memory and the difficulties of representing the past culminate. Here she describes a process of remembering and forgetting: The piles and bundles and ribbons and rags turn into years, and then the years are gone. There is a light behind you certainly, but it is not bright enough to illuminate all of what you had hoped for. The light seems shadowed or masked with an unknown fabric. So much of what you had counted on as a solid wall of convictions now seems on bad nights, or in sickness, or just weakness, no longer made of much that can be leaned against. It is then that one can barely place oneself in time. All that you would swear had been, can only be found again if you have the energy to dig hard enough, and that is hard on the feet and the back, and sometimes you are frightened that near an edge is nothing.25

The 'unknown fabric' Hellman mentions we might call forgetting, and here forgetting the past is countered with the fear that there might be nothing to remember. Hence the title Maybe. Hellman emphasises an important point in this segment, that of being lost in time, a feeling that forgetting the past seems to generate. Georges Perec in W ou le souvenir d'enfance describes a period in his life when he lived without a thought of his past: 'Il y avait plus de passé, et pendant très longtemps il n'y eut pas non plus d'avenir; simplement ça durait. On était là' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 94).26 Forgetting induces a feeling of timelessness and the sensation Hellman expresses of losing a sense of identity. Maurice Halbwachs 25

Lillian Hellman, Maybe: A Story (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 42. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) 26 'There was no past, and for very many years there was no future either; things simply went on. You were there.' p. 69.

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in his study of memory makes an interesting point when, discussing aphasia, he claims that: 'In less severe cases of aphasia the patients, because they cannot tell of their past owing to their lack of words [. . .] are likely to maintain only a vague sense of time, persons, and places.'27 In this sphere of forgetting, then, where there is only 'now', writing is almost impossible. But, although forgetting can therefore be seen as anathema to autobiography, it is often a fertile ground, even a starting point for autobiographical writing. As Perec explains in his foreword the point of departure for the whole book is 'ces points de suspension auxquels se sont accrochés les fils rompus de l'enfance et la trame de l'écriture'.28 We can see in this how writing, memory and forgetting are all inextricably linked in the autobiographical process. Not only can forgetting influence the whole structure of the text, it can also be the very reason for starting to write, as an attempt to retrieve what has been lost. The first fictional part of W ou le souvenir d'enfance describes a quest, and autobiography can be seen as a quest for the forgotten or the half-remembered, a quest that always remains partly unfulfilled. At the start of the first chapter of his childhood memories Perec says: 'Je n'ai pas de souvenirs d'enfance': je posais cette affirmation avec assurance, avec presque une sorte de défi. L'on n'avait pas à m'interroger sur cette question. Elle n'était pas inscrite à mon programme. J'en étais dispensé: une autre histoire, la Grande, l'Histoire avec sa grande hache, avait déjà répondu à ma place: la guerre, les camps. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 13)29

27

Halbwachs, op. cit., p. 45. 'the points of suspension on which the broken threads of childhood and the web of writing are caught.' Preface, no page number. 29 '"I have no childhood memories": I made this assertion with confidence, with almost a kind of defiance. It was nobody's business to press me on this question. It was not a set topic on my syllabus. I was excused: a different history, History with a capital H, had answered the question in my stead: the war, the camps.' p. 6. 28

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Public history and memory have here replaced the need for personal or private remembrance. The personal has been forgotten in the terrifying History with a capital H. His childhood memories seem redundant in comparison. But with this autobiography Perec attempts to come to terms with, and to accept the importance of, his private memories. He has decided not to forget. And to accept that even though he has forgotten much about his parents, he still remembers being a shadow among their shadows. Throughout her autobiographical works Hellman writes and rewrites the past. She frequently expresses doubts about her memory as she says that 'the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted' (Pentimento, p. 412). What characterises her work is her constant doubt about her own memory, her rewriting and comments on her own diaries, and a reappraisal of the past, both her own and other people's actions. As I mentioned above Hellman adds notes to the Three edition and in the introduction to that volume she writes: What didn't I see during the time of work that I now see more clearly? [. . .] Or what did I see in the past that I could not now duplicate? [. . .] Or maybe just the act of writing it down, then and then only, turned it into the past, and nothing can or will bring it back.30

This leads to another connection between writing and forgetting. Writing an autobiography entails choosing some memories and discarding others. More than that, it also means choosing a form for these memories, a narrative structure. In doing so the autobiographer consciously forgets (if that is possible) other interpretations of the same event, other memories that might contradict the one he or she writes about. If remembering is being present to something that was earlier, 'the act of writing it down turns it into the past' and the past is irretrievable. In both Perec's and Hellman's works there are quite obvious instances of editing. Both add notes to earlier texts, correct, explain or give more detail. They leave these examples of editing there, and do 30

Lillian Hellman, 'On Reading Again', in Three, pp. 3-11, p. 4.

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not rewrite once more to be rid of them. One may think that what the autobiographer has forgotten simply is not there, but sometimes what is forgotten is a part of the memory he or she is writing on. It is in what I call here 'editing' that the presence of the forgotten is most obvious. Perec's text is riddled with footnotes, corrections and gaps. His memories are practically non-existent, or at least implausible, supported by very little evidence, and they need to be conjured up. David Bellos believes that this absence is central to all of Perec's work: [it] is explicitly built on nothing, on the absence that lies at the heart of language, and which is the truest expression of the self. Perec described himself as being like a child who does not know what he wants or fears the most: to stay hidden, or to be found. In fact, there is no tension in Perec's work between self-affirmation and denial. What he achieved through intense reflection on the writer's material [. . .] is the paradoxical assertion of the self by the conscious construction of its absence.31

There is a constant movement in the text between what Perec remembers and what really happened. He tells us of a memory and then withdraws it or corrects it. There is a sense in which these gaps, these false memories are important to his sense of identity even though they may be false. Occasionally he discovers that what he believed had happened to him really happened to someone else. But the reader is still left in doubt which of the two, the original memory or the later version, is true. So in a sense the editing offers only another version, not a 'truer' version. It adds more layers to the original childhood memory, so the past becomes ever more obscure. As Philippe Lejeune points out: The whole of the childhood memory part seems to have been written to disappoint the specific horizon of the 'childhood memories' genre [. . .] He refuses to write 31

David Bellos, 'The Old and the New: An Introduction to Georges Perec', Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993) 8-17, (p. 13).

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Borderlines decoratively in any way, to embellish the memory or to make it echo. The narrator is a hypercritical presence in the text, pinning down mistakes, approximations, elaborations, stripping memories bare, questioning them like an inquisitor, blinding them with spotlights of truth.32

One could say that the awareness of the elusiveness of memory, the presence of the forgotten, causes a constant questioning in the texts, 'a hypercritical presence' that is apparent to a greater or lesser degree in most autobiographies. Fiction is, of course, a good device to gloss over memory lapses. But that is not the role of the fictional chapters in Perec's text, or if it is, it is in a much more subtle way than we usually presume. He does not fill in memory lapses and make up stories. Instead he includes a horrific fictional tale of a fascist society. The process of editing is made so apparent that it becomes an obstacle course in the chapters on childhood memories but it is nowhere evident (or is at least discreet) in the fictional tale. As Lejeune describes it: 'The ever-obstructed path of memory stands in contrast to the smooth slope of the fiction into nightmare.'33 The second fictional part in W ou le souvenir d'enfance is a story of an island society that is completely centred on sport, a story that grew out of one Perec made up as a child. In fascist societies, memory must be controlled. The state controls what knowledge, or memory, is passed down the generations. The children in W have no idea what kind of life awaits them. They think it is glamorous and exciting until they are brought into the adult world and are broken down. The only memory that survives is the legacies of great athletes that give their name to the victors in their sport. Lejeune quotes the version of the story of W published in La Quinzaine littéraire: 'the reader opens it to find episode 7 of Perec's bizarre serial, and lights upon an announcement worthy of Dante. Not 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter,' but 'Abandon all memory.''34 It brings us back to the political implications of forgetting that both Hellman and Perec draw to our 32 33 34

Lejeune, op. cit., p. 91. Ibid., p. 92. La Quinzain littéraire no. 87 quoted in Lejeune, op. cit., p. 94.

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attention. To abandon all memory is to be lost in time, not only without a past, but also without a future. When there is only one way of living, one goal for everyone, when there is so much destruction, individual needs and thoughts are superfluous and so is memory. Perhaps that is why Perec writes on his memories, to assert that he has a past. He survived the Holocaust so he has 'no alternative' but to write, to remember. Peter Burke in his essay 'History as Social Memory' addresses the question of the politics of forgetting: It is often said that history is written by the victors. It might also be said that history is forgotten by the victors. They can afford to forget, while the losers are unable to accept what happened and are condemned to brood over it, relive it, and reflect how different it might have been.35

Both Hellman and Perec engage in this process of remembering. They cannot afford to forget, both on a public and a private level. Perec's text is an experiment in writing on what has been forgotten. And Hellman continued to rewrite her life, remembering and forgetting in writing for most of her adult life. Perec's text crosses large gaps and blanks in his memory. This is most notable in what he writes on his parents. This passage in W ou le souvenir d'enfance might give some idea why he writes on things that he believes he has forgotten: Même si je n'ai pour étayer mes souvenirs improbables que le secours de photos jaunies, de témoignages rares et de documents dérisoires, je n'ai pas d'autre choix que d'évoquer ce que trop longtemps j'ai nommé l'irrévocable; ce qui fut, ce qui s'arrêta, ce qui fut clôturé: ce qui fut, sans doute, pour aujourd'hui ne plus être, mais ce qui fut aussi

35

Peter Burke, 'History as Social Memory', in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, pp. 97-113, p. 106.

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His memories are practically non-existent, or at least 'improbable', supported by very little evidence, and they need to be conjured up. There is a constant movement in the text between what he remembers and what really happened. Perec includes in his text two passages that he wrote on his parents fifteen years earlier. He adds many footnotes that are mostly factual corrections. He explains why he did not rewrite them: Quinze ans après la rédaction de ces deux textes, il me semble toujours que je ne pourrais que les répéter: quelle que soit la précision des détails vrais ou faux que je pourrais y ajouter, l'ironie, l'émotion, la sécheresse ou la passion dont je pourrais les enrober, les fantasmes auxquels je pourrais donner libre cours, les fabulations que je pourrais développer, quels que soient, aussi, les progrès que j'ai pu faire depuis quinze ans dans l'exercice de l'écriture, il me semble que je ne parviendrai qu'à un ressassement sans issue. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 58)37

The story Perec tells ends in a loss: his parents' absence. Memory cannot help since he hardly remembers them. The refusal to rewrite is a confirmation of the absence of memory and of the loss he suffered. This reaffirms the close relationship between memory and writing. 36

'Even if I have the help only of yellowing snapshots, a handful of eyewitness accounts and a few paltry documents to prop up my implausible memories, I have no alternative but to conjure up what for too many years I called the irrevocable: the things that were, the things that stopped, the things that were closed off - things that surely were and today are no longer, but things that also were so that I may still be.' pp. 12-13. 37 'Fifteen years after drafting these two passages, it still seems to me that I could do no more than repeat them: whether I added true or false details of greater precision, whether I wrapped them in irony or emotion, rewrote them curtly or passionately, whether I gave free rein to my fantasies or elaborated more fictions, whether or not, moreover, I have made any advances in the practice of writing, it seems to me that I would manage nothing more than a reiteration of the same story, leading nowhere.' p. 41.

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Perec shows us the process of writing childhood memories. They are laid bare and so are his memory lapses. The reader does not get a chance to get drawn into the story of his childhood as there are so many versions of what happened. As I have mentioned earlier memories can change meaning with time or with something that happens to us later. Perec gives a very poetic version of this. He remembers when his mother got him out of Paris, wearing his arm in a sling (a memory which he later disputes) and reading a magazine with a parachute on the cover: Un triple trait parcourt ce souvenir: parachute, bras en écharpe, bandage herniaire: cela tient de la suspension, du soutien, presque de la prothèse. Pour être, besoin d'étai. Seize ans plus tard, en 1958, lorsque les hasards du service militaire ont fait de moi un éphemère parachutiste, je pus lire, dans la minute même du saut, un texte déchiffré de ce souvenir: je fus précipité dans le vide; tous les fils furent rompus; je tombai, seul et sans soutien. Le parachute s'ouvrit. La corolle se déploya, fragile et sûr suspens avant la chute maîtrisée. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 77)38

It is as if Perec believes his past to be lost, 'tous les fils furent rompus', and only much later he realises the 'fragile et sûr suspens' that the past offers in spite of the loss he suffered. As Theodore Plantinga claims: 'our memories are not inert but undergo a process of editing, whereby they are regularized, rendered more retainable, and reshaped with an eye to subsequent circumstances and events.'39 The past undergoes 38

'A triple theme runs through this memory: parachute, sling, truss: it suggests suspension, support, almost artificial limbs. To be, I need a prop. Sixteen years later, in 1958, when, by chance, military service briefly made a parachutist of me, I suddenly saw, in the very instant of jumping, one way of deciphering the text of this memory: I was plunged into nothingness; all the threads were broken; I fell, on my own, without any support. The parachute opened. The canopy unfurled, a fragile and firm suspense before the controlled descent.' p. 55. 39 Theodore Plantinga, How Memory Shapes Narratives: A Philosophical Essay on Redeeming the Past (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), p. 45.

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revision constantly through different periods in our lives and revision, of course, is activated when people write on their past. 'The light behind' her and the difficulty in getting it to illuminate properly past events is one of the themes of Hellman's autobiographical works. The comments she adds are small additions to the text and do not give completely different versions of events, as is the case in Perec's text. Her questioning of the past is an integral part of the text from the start. She doubts if she remembers things correctly, she questions her analysis of events at the time and gives a different perspective as she writes. She mentions doing research on some of the people she writes about, but usually does not find out anything new. There is one person Hellman refuses to do research on, her long-time partner Dashiell Hammett. She claims she does not want 'to be a bookkeeper of [her] own life' (An Unfinished Woman, p. 279). She does not want to distance herself from her private life to that degree. It is the fear of finding something that you do not want to find or finding nothing. It is a refusal to be systematic and scientific in the most private realm of your past. It is as if with objectivity and 'scientific method' she would become a mere 'book-keeper' and not be able to capture the 'truth'. There seem to be two types of 'truth' at work here: on the one hand facts and dates, 'what really happened', but also emotional truth, what this relationship meant to her. The same can be said for Perec's 'false memories'. Even though he finds out that they are false, they are still his memories and therefore at some level 'true'. The prevalent impression the reader gets is that Hellman is not only trying to explain her past to the reader but to herself as well. As if she is constantly looking and searching for some truth or some incident that could give meaning to her life in the autobiographical process. Memory is her tool but it is not always comforting, sometimes she moves 'near an edge'. Richard Poirier points out in his introduction to Three: [Hellman's] capacity in any given situation or conversation to carry in her head and in her heart analogous moments from the past and, perhaps as a consequence, to allow

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positions she does not immediately share to have the last word - it is this which helps make a positive virtue of that 'indecision and vagueness' which irritated one theatrical director about her. 'Indecision and vagueness' is the sure sign of her near total saturation in the always elusive, random, sometimes resistant materials, including the people, about which she writes.40

But it also seems to me that Hellman feels that she is running a risk by questioning her own memory, by dwelling on things past, as she has an extremely ambivalent relationship with the past. It is physically demanding and a psychological turmoil for her to delve in the past, trying all the time to come up with the 'truth', while at the same time being aware that there is never one clean-cut version of events. If Pentimento was controlled by unconscious memory, Maybe is controlled by forgetting. Hellman claims not to know much about Sarah and that she was of no importance in her life and she has stopped searching for the truth and sense she tried so hard for in her other works: It goes without saying that in their memoirs people should try to tell the truth as they see it or else what's the sense? Maybe time blurs or changes things for them. But you try, anyway. In the three memoir books I wrote, I tried very hard for the truth. I did try, but here I don't know much of what really happened and never tried to find out. In addition to the ordinary deceptions that you and others make in your life, time itself makes time fuzzy and meshes truth with half truth. But I can't seem to say it right. I am paying the penalty, I think, of a childish belief in absolutes, perhaps an equally childish rejection of them all. I guess I want to say how inattentive I was - most of us, I guess - the whole damned stew [. . .] When I talk to myself I can say it clear to me, about Sarah and other people, and places and dates, but I cannot seem to sort it out here [. . .] What I have written is the truth as I saw it, but the truth as I saw it, of course, doesn't have much to do with the truth. It's as if I have fitted parts of a picture puzzle and then a child 40

Richard Poirier, 'Introduction', in Three, pp. vii-xxv, p. xv.

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Borderlines overturned it and threw out some pieces. (Maybe, pp. 5052)

The story of Sarah is interspersed with passages like the above in italics. What Hellman calls her childish belief in absolutes, her search for truth, has gone and in these pages she charts something else; people she has not mentioned in her other works, affairs she has not written about before. Hellman and Sarah seem to have lived at times parallel lives, seeing each other every few years and discovering they have had affairs with the same men. In the book, therefore, Hellman charts her sexual life to a certain extent by writing on Sarah. But many things have been forgotten, truth has meshed with half-truth, pieces from the puzzle are missing. The text is, therefore, full of blanks and unclear anecdotes which seem to fit Sarah's character, as Hellman describes how Sarah lied about most things in her life, even going as far as to stage her own death to claim insurance money. So not only does Hellman's memory play games with her, Sarah's life was so full of deception it is well nigh impossible to make any sense of it. The original deceptions, the passing of time, Hellman's rejection of absolutes all serve to make this a fragmented portrait of an elusive character. The research so evident in Auster's text is literary, it is a search for parallels, and not so much an examination of documents from his own life. There is not a sense of turmoil or fight to recapture memories in Auster, only a fight to preserve them and how best to do so in writing. Auster sees forgetting not as the opposite of memory, but as a necessary part of it. Seeing, remembering and writing are a continuous process as he realises when he meets a French poet who describes in exact detail a room he had seen only once many years earlier: Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one's life so that nothing is ever lost. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 138)

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The only way to write and remember is therefore to forget oneself, as only then can memory work freely. Areas of forgetting in autobiography introduce gaps in the narrative and indicate doubts about the power of memory. Forgetting informs the structure of autobiography, it can be fertile ground for experimentation and the public and private politics of forgetting are a powerful force. It illustrates the problems autobiographers face in representing the past. And it echoes Hellman's statement that 'the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted', but also reminds us that we have little else to lean on.

4. Remembering History: Private Memories and Public Events 'You have a history,' she said, 'that you are responsible to.' 'What do you mean by responsible to?' 'You're responsible to it. You're answerable. You're required to try to make sense of it. You owe it your complete attention.'41

Remembering is not only a personal matter necessary for our sense of identity and mental well-being, it is also a very public matter, formed by social situations and often politically contentious. Our lives are intricately and sometimes drastically linked to and/or inseparable from what happens in the society we live in. And the same is true for our memory: 'it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories.'42 History plays an important part in Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance. It is so strongly linked with his memories of his own past that sometimes he cannot tell the two apart: 41 42

Don DeLillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1998), p. 512. Halbwachs, op. cit., p. 38.

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Longtemps j'ai cru que c'était le 7 mars 1936 qu'Hitler était entré en Pologne. Je me trompais, de date ou de pays, mais au fond ça n'avait pas une grande importance. Hitler était déjà au pouvoir et les camps fonctionnaient très bien [. . .] Ce qui était sûr, c'est qu'avait déjà commencé une histoire qui, pour moi et tous les miens, allait bientôt devenir vitale, c'est-à-dire, le plus souvent, mortelle. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, pp. 31-32)43

Perec's life was so much formed by what happened to him during the Second World War that he thinks it started the day he was born. It also has to an extent replaced his own memories. Here the public and the private spheres have become one. At the start of the first chapter of his childhood memories he claims he did not have any childhood memories, that History with a capital H had answered all his questions. When events of this magnitude take place the private is completely invaded by the public, and there does not seem to be any room for private reminiscence. The reader is immediately made aware of this relationship and the consequences for Perec's memory. But by setting out to write on his childhood Perec is reiterating the importance of the private memory. W ou le souvenir d'enfance can be seen as an admission that perhaps history after all did not answer all the questions. It seems that History with a capital H still leaves room for the individual to assert himself and his past. But Perec cannot do so without engaging with the history as well, and his method is unique. Mixing his childhood memories with a fictional tale of a fascist society, it addresses the question of living without the private sphere; the individual, the family. The dystopia is a powerful, frightening picture of a brutal society without memory or history. In the childhood part Perec reinstates memory and 43

'For years I thought that Hitler had marched into Poland on 7 March 1936. I was wrong, about the date or about the country, but that's of no real importance. Hitler was already in power and the camps were working very smoothly [. . .] What is certain is that a story had already begun, a history which for me and all my people was soon to become a matter of life and for the most part a matter of death.' p. 19.

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history and puts the importance of the private and the individual back in the picture. This use of fiction does not make Perec's account less truthful, what it does is to allow him to address the real and almost unsayable horror of those years and, by basing it on a story he wrote as a child, he links it firmly to his childhood, to his origin. There is a constant movement between the public and the private in this text, and between public and private memory, as he remembers the medal torn off him as perhaps being the physical memory of the star pinned on. Here fiction plays a role in linking the public and the private; the memory and the environment. Peter Burke talks about the complexities of remembering and writing: Remembering the past and writing about it no longer seem the innocent activities they were once taken to be. Neither memories nor histories seem objective any longer. In both cases we are learning to take account of conscious or unconscious selection, interpretation and distortion. In both cases this selection, interpretation and distortion is socially conditioned. It is not the work of individuals alone.44

There is a different dynamic between public and private memory in Hellman's work. She is sometimes an eyewitness, and sometimes a direct participant but her involvement usually stems from her political affiliation. The tone is at once political and personal, as she charts her own political beliefs through public events she still has not come to terms with. What was for her, as for many others, the turning point and what formed her political beliefs after that, was the Spanish Civil War. She went to Spain as a journalist and includes in the text diaries from the period, but still finds it hard to capture the significance of it all. Her diaries from the time describe ordinary people she met in extraordinary circumstances: And yet and yet. My pieces here about Spain do not say all or even much of what I wanted to say. I knew it when I first wrote them, I knew it when I included them in this book, and I knew it last week when I read them again. I wish I 44

Burke, op. cit., p. 98.

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Borderlines understood why. Somehow they do not include the passion that I felt, my absolute conviction that when the Spanish War was lost, we were all going to be caught in a storm of murder and destruction in another, larger war. (An Unfinished Woman, p. 129)

Negotiating the line between the private and the public proves difficult, which is perhaps the reason why Hellman did not write on her dealings with Senator McCarthy until her third work Scoundrel Time. The passing of time has complicated the picture and in Pentimento she says: 'I could not write a history of those years as it seemed to us then' (Pentimento, p. 422). The McCarthy era is a contentious issue in American politics. When Scoundrel Time was published the Cold War was still at its peak and the divisions which characterised that era were still as great as ever. The prosecution of artists and intellectuals under the guise of patriotism and Cold War scare-mongering managed to divide liberals and left-wingers in the USA and ruined many careers in the entertainment industry. Dashiell Hammett was sent to prison and Hellman herself was called before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and blacklisted. The committee found a new concept to describe people like her, they were called 'premature antifascists', a phrase designed to manipulate memory and history. Hammett lost his health and Hellman her livelihood. But much more was lost in those years and Hellman writes about that loss in Scoundrel Time. Hellman does not attempt any kind of objectivity in writing this history. She directs her anger not at the politicians but at the intellectuals and artists who did not stand up and protest but collaborated with the politicians: It is eccentric, I suppose, not to care much about the persecutors and to care so much about those who allowed the persecution, but it was as if I had been deprived of a child's belief in tribal safety. I was never again to believe in it and resent to this day that it has been taken from me. I had only one way out, and that I took: to shut up about the whole period. (Pentimento, p. 525)

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But to shut up, forget, would be for her to admit defeat, so she writes a highly personal account of her appearance before the House Committee, describing her fears and emotions, including details on what she drank, what she wore and her meetings with her lawyer deciding on her strategy, which could have landed her in prison. Hellman moves constantly between the political and historical to the personal and private memories. A strategy that makes historians uneasy and readers of autobiography suspicious. Hellman's main tool in writing on the past are anecdotes. She has witnessed many important events and met many powerful people, but what she tells us are personal anecdotes of people and events, of little ordinary things in the midst of the extraordinary. This anecdotal writing suffered much derision from her political opponents when Scoundrel Time was published, who accused her of political naiveté and lack of admission of her 'communist' past.45 This opposition to her writing is not only the result of her far from conciliatory tone, her anger and criticism of those who collaborated, but also because of her style: her peculiar mixture of the personal and the political and the way her private memories do not seem to support the collective memory of events. Another reason for the difference in opinion towards the past is explained by Halbwachs: It is in this way that history does not limit itself to reproducing a tale told by people contemporary with events of the past, but rather refashions it from period to period not only because of other testimony that has become available, but also to adapt it to the mental habits and the type of representation of the past common among contemporaries.46

It is not only that different generations look at the past differently. Time itself often changes people's perception of events. Hellman 45

A full account of the controversy surrounding the publication of Scoundrel Time is given in Doris V. Falk's Lillian Hellman (New York: Frederick Unger, 1978). 46 Halbwachs, op. cit., p. 75.

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comments on this change in attitude in a footnote about her stay in Moscow: This was the word [easiest winter of the war] in 1944. In 1966, three Muscovites told me it had been that hardest winter of the war. I think this conflict of memory came about because in 1944 they knew they were on the way to victory and an end. In 1966 they remember only the deprivation and the misery. (An Unfinished Woman, p. 148)

It is clear from all this that people's attitudes and perceptions of the past are very much formed by changing perceptions in society, by whether they have lost or gained something, by the political climate and, of course, personal experiences. There is a constant dialogue between public and private memory, and each forms the other. The difference between Perec's and Hellman's approaches to the same period in history is influenced by their circumstances at the time. Hellman was an American radical fighting fascism, while Perec was only a child at the time who lost his family to fascism. There is a sense of inevitability in Perec's text, while Hellman has in some ways still not accepted what happened and still argues with the past. In some ways she is also arguing with the present. She has very little use for the morality of the politicians of the day. She describes the attitudes in the middle of the Cold War: 'They condemn Vietnam, we condemn Hungary. But the moral tone of giants with swollen heads, fat fingers pressed over the atom bomb, staring at each other across the forests of the world, is monstrously comic' (An Unfinished Woman, p. 189). Places, people and political events all provide Hellman with material to question, doubt, criticise and explain the past. Her kind of liberalism has failed, she believes, and she does not believe in any other political system. But she is still relentless in her quest for answers. She feels the need to communicate what she once believed in so that the reader is not quite convinced that she has completely lost the need for what she calls 'truth'. Halbwachs explains this dialogue between the public and the private thus: 'On peut dire aussi bien que l'individu se souvient en se plaçant au point de vue du groupe, et que la mémoire du groupe se réalise et

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se manifeste dans les mémoires individuelles.'47 History impinges in this way on Auster's memory. The connections he makes are not only to other writers, but to Jewish history. There is an underlying awareness that his story might have been very different, or more to the point might not have been at all. His part of the Auster family left Eastern Europe in the early years of this century, whereas another part of the family went to Israel (he mentions one Auster who became mayor of Jerusalem), but some stayed. This sense of history is always there, just under the surface. But his sense of the link between public and private memory is a rather idiosyncratic one: As he sat through those long summer days in his grandfather's apartment, he began to see that the power of baseball was for him the power of memory. Memory in both senses of the word: as a catalyst for remembering his own life and as an artificial structure for ordering the historical past. 1960, for example, was the year Kennedy was elected president; it was also the year of A.'s Bar Mitzvah, the year he supposedly reached manhood. But the first image that springs to his mind when 1960 is mentioned is Bill Mazeroski's homerun that beat the Yankees in the World Series. He can still see the ball soaring over the Forbes Field fence - that high, dark barrier, so densely cluttered with white numbers - and by recalling the sensations of that moment, that abrupt and stunning instant of pleasure, he is able to re-enter his own past, to stand in a world that would otherwise be lost to him. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 116)

It is a type of mnemonics that not only serves his own past, but also his memory of public events. In Auster's writing these strands are intricately linked and cannot be separated out, just as his memory is linked to literature. Whenever he thinks of a time when his son became gravely ill he thinks of Mallarmé's poems on the death of his Ibid., p. xi. 'One may say that the individual remembers by placing himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories.' p. 40. 47

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son, which Auster translated. And so his story is also linked to the lives of those who perished. In his autobiography Coming to Terms (1987) Henry F. May applies the method of historical research when writing about his parents.48 There is the underlying notion in May's work that the two are fundamentally different, so he completely separates personal reminiscences and the 'history' of his parents. This is very different from what happens in the works of Auster, Perec and Hellman. There, through the individual's sense of the past, whether it is personal reminiscences, fiction, diaries, comments or footnotes, the private memory makes the public event its own. Paul John Eakin examines the relationship between the historical and personal in autobiography and in his discussion of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time he says that the lesson of the structure of that work is that: 'private and public event equally belong to the fabric of life 'in our time', for the convention by which we deem the two to be separate and distinct is just that, a convention.'49 It is this convention which these texts all challenge. These autobiographies might not tell us very much about specific historical events but they do shed light on the relationship between the individual and history in their time.

5. The Quest for Memory Memory is the subject of all three texts we have studied in this chapter, and not just their driving force, whether it be the processes of remembering Hellman describes, Perec's emphasis on the importance of remembrance, or Auster's play with mnemonics. With their very different structure and style these texts all offer insights into the relationship between writing and memory. Hellman's doubts about her 48

Henry F. May, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley: University Of California, 1987). 49 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 141.

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own memory and her questioning tone highlight the fact that memory and the writing of memory are always conditioned by the passing of time and our emotional connection to these memories. Her works demonstrate that there is no one true absolute version of the past, however much we would like to believe that there is. But her works also leave us with a sense that the effort is worth it; that re-reading, remembering again, seeing again will yield new insights, and that the writing process is an integral part of this process of seeing again. Perec's text is an example of writing as an act of memory. It is an acknowledgement of the past, in his case an acknowledgement of loss, and this writing of a loss. It is a text that renegotiates the border between life-writing and fiction. Auster is very much attuned to this border between fiction and life-writing. He claims to stay firmly on the side of the 'real', but by making the connections he does, by virtue of his literary and historical consciousness, he inevitably strays into the realm of fiction, without ever becoming what one might call 'novelistic'. These texts all show an awareness of the workings of the writing and remembering processes, and that writing on the past is no more about duplicating the past than remembering is. Both activities involve reworking the past. This reworking requires imagination, but memory can also be a starting point for creative writing, and as I tried to show in the second section, so can forgetting. Gaps in the narrative - the space where forgetting impinges on the writing - are an inevitable feature of any text of remembrance. These areas of forgetting all point to the fictional process at work in writing an autobiography. The admission that things might have happened differently from what the autobiographers remember, or might even have happened to someone else, highlights the complex workings of memory and the impossibility of rendering it straight into words, in some kind of free flow of memory. The texts also demonstrate that remembering does not happen in some splendid isolation. It is a process marked by our surroundings and our society. These texts show three very different ways of writing on the private and the public: Hellman with her mixture of history and personal anecdotes, Perec with a fictional tale and childhood memories, and

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Auster in his method of connecting each of his own memories to other texts or events, be they literary or historical. These attempts at connecting the public and the private, show that autobiography can be a fertile ground for writing on the individual and history, and that how one views one's connection to public events can be a creative force in life-writing. Writing an autobiography constitutes one type of remembering: ordering memory, and making it cohere. This means that not only will the memories resonate with the writer but perhaps more importantly with the reader. There are many different ways to achieve that, whether it be the poignancy of Perec's gaps, the hesitations amid the flood of many disparate memories in Hellman's works, or Auster's connections and coincidences. But they all emphasise the importance of remembering, and specifically remembering in writing, while at the same time pointing out the difficulties that involves. Memory and fiction can be looked on as two strands in autobiographical writing that constantly negotiate the space of writing. Fiction is in a way inherent to memory, as remembering constitutes a continuing process that changes with time. Memory is always a product of circumstances, experience, the passing of time, memory's public aspects, its connection to other people, and the changing perspective of the remembering self. Memory is the raison d'être of autobiography, so therefore one must conclude that the fictional processes accentuated by Hellman, Perec, and Auster, are inherent to the autobiographical process itself. The need to remember, forget and tell is obvious in autobiography, but how is it possible to structure one's many and varied memories and vague recollections into a coherent text? In the next chapter I will look at the role narrative structure plays in this process on the borderline between autobiography and fiction. As Peter Brooks explains memory is the 'key faculty in the capacity to perceive

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relations of beginnings, middles, and ends through time, the shaping power of narrative'.50

50

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 11.

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Chapter Two The Use of Narrative in Autobiography Suzannah Lessard, Peter Handke, Jenny Diski Au début, je croyais que j'écrirais vite. En fait je passe beaucoup de temps à m'interroger sur l'ordre des choses à dire, le choix et l'agencement des mots, comme s'il existait un ordre idéal, seul capable de rendre une vérité concernant ma mère - mais je ne sais pas en quoi elle consiste - et rien d'autre ne compte pour moi, au moment où j'écris, que la découverte de cet ordre-là.1 Narrative gives form to what is unformed.2

1. Narrative and Knowledge In this chapter I examine the role of narrative structure and narrative organisation in the interplay between autobiography and fiction in life-writing. I focus mainly on two autobiographical texts, Suzannah Lessard's The Architect of Desire (1996) and Peter Handke's Wunschloses Unglück (1972), as I believe they show two distinct methods of dealing with narrative structure and are therefore pertinent to this enquiry. Lessard's text involves a complex ordering of events, and a concentrated effort to use intricate narrative structures to tell a life and 1

Annie Ernaux, Une Femme (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987), pp. 43-44. 'Initially, I thought I would find it easy to write. In actual fact, I spend a lot of time reflecting on what I have to say and on the choice and sequence of words, as if there existed only one immutable order which would convey the truth about my mother (although what this truth involves I am unable to say). When I am writing, the only thing that matters to me is to find that particular order.' A Woman's Story, trans. Tanya Leslie (London, New York: Quartet Books, 1990), pp. 32-33. 2 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, London: University of Chicao Press, 1984), p. 72.

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family history. Lessard's work concentrates not only on her own life but also on her family background. She tells of the lives of her greatgrandparents, grandparents, and parents, in between recounting her own life story. The two central events of the book are firstly the story of the murder of her great-grandfather, the architect Stanford White, and the consequences that followed. The second event is her father's sexual abuse of her and her sisters. The latter event is not revealed in full until very late in the text, but the story of Stanford White's murder, at the hands of a jealous husband, is told many times in different ways and from various perspectives. I examine how Lessard's use of narrative - her way of ordering events - produces meaning, and how different temporal levels meet in the text. I look at how she handles terms such as presence and absence, past and present, silence and telling, in her autobiography and how that influences the narrative structure. The second section is concentrated on Handke's work. In this short text Handke tells his mother's story, and how she came to take her own life. Thus the text stands on the border between autobiography and biography as Handke tells little of his own life.3 Throughout the text there is evidence of a strong suspicion of narrative, a critical distance from it, and a belief that creating a narrative structure inevitably involves a degree of fictionalisation of events. I look at how this distrust affects the way Handke recounts the story of his mother, and how he deals with the meaning-making process of narrative. It is interesting to see how the text moves back and forth from a desire for narrative to a refusal to let the flow of narrative take over. Handke's mother came from rural Austria and Handke represents her in terms of her social circumstances, and thereby questions about the interaction between the public and the private, telling and explaining, inform the text, and play a central role in Handke's use of narrative structure. Narrative structure in autobiography can be seen as an attempt to order the chaos and confusion that is life. This presupposes what 3

I have chosen this text despite it not being 'pure' autobiography and I discuss in more detail this issue of the relationship between biography and autobiography in chapter five.

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narrative theory has long maintained, that narrative is made up of two elements: fabula and sjuzet or histoire and discours. In the case of autobiography the fabula is comprised of the events of the life recounted and the sjuzet is then the order - or form - in which the events are recounted.4 The two quotations at the head of this chapter offer two different versions of the way in which this ordering of events takes place. Ernaux is looking for the order that she presumes to be already there. She believes she only needs to find it, and she maintains that this order will in itself bring forth the truth. Ricœur's notion is that narrative forms something that is unformed, transforming fabula into sjuzet. Narrative involves the organisation of time; it establishes causality and continuity and allocates meaning to events. The question that is widely debated is whether narrative is tagged on after the event or whether it is intrinsic to all knowledge and therefore of major importance to one's sense of identity.5 Telling one's life is a basic human practice and narrative is there to provide beginnings, middles and ends as Peter Brooks points out:

4

See for instance Jonathan Culler's analysis of narrative theory in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 169-170. 5 David Carr maintains: 'For if I am right in thinking that narrative structure pervades our very experience of time and social existence, independently of our contemplating the past as historians, then we shall have a way of answering the charge that narrative is nothing but window-dressing or packaging, something incidental to our knowledge of the past.' Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 9. Hayden White also explains: 'To emplot real events as a story of a specific kind (or as a mixture of stories of specific kinds) is to trope those events. This is because stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a 'real' story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a 'true' story, this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which means, of course, that they can be 'true' only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure of speech can be true. Is this true enough?' ''Figuring the nature of the times deceased': Literary Theory and Historical Writing', in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 19-44, p. 27.

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Narrative structure is then of prime importance for the way in which the autobiographer establishes causality and meaning in his or her lifestory. One way of exploring the role of narrative organisation in autobiography is to compare autobiographies with diaries. In the preceding chapter I mentioned Lillian Hellman's use of diaries and her dissatisfaction with the picture they gave of her past. She regards them as incomplete and feels that they do not mention events or people that she later came to regard as significant. The crux of the matter is that the diary form lacks knowledge of the future much in the same way as Paul Ricœur's 'Chroniqueur Idéal'.7 Retrospective knowledge is necessary to establish a narrative, and it is a vital part of the meaningmaking process of narrative: For whoever visits the birthplace of a famous person, this site is meaningful or important only in light of subsequent 6

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 323. 7 'This Ideal Chronicler would be gifted with the faculty of being able to give an instantaneous transcription of whatever happens, augmenting his testimony in a purely additive and cumulative way as events are added to events. In relation to this ideal of a complete and definitive description, the historian's task would be merely to eliminate false sentences, to reestablish any upset in the order of true sentences, and to add whatever is lacking in this testimony. The refutation of this hypothesis is simple. One class of descriptions is missing from this absolute chronicle, the one precisely in terms of which an event cannot be witnessed; that is, the whole truth concerning this event cannot be known until after the fact and long after it has taken place. This is just the sort of story only a historian can tell. In short, we have neglected to equip the Ideal Chronicler with a knowledge of the future.' Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 145.

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events. In this sense, the category of significance lacks meaning for the Ideal Chronicler, even though he is a perfect witness.8

The problem for autobiography is that there is always a certain lack of retrospective knowledge, as the subject is writing his or her own life and the natural ending is therefore not available. Endings in autobiography must then, in one sense, always seem incomplete, if not arbitrary, and in the last section of this chapter I will look at how Lessard and Handke deal with that problem. I also bring in a third text, Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica (1997), which offers insight into the connection between endings and the reader's expectations. I attempt to throw light on the use of narrative structure in autobiography and how it inevitably straddles the borderline between fiction and autobiography, whether we believe narrative to be intrinsic to knowledge or not. Writing an autobiography tends to raise the question what type of knowledge the autobiographical process offers. If we take Stendhal's and Rousseau's preambles to their respective autobiographies at face value then Rousseau claims to write to show us who he is, whereas Stendhal writes to discover himself.9 And in one way or another autobiographers still wrestle with that question, that is whether the process involves writers showing their lives to others or to themselves, and here I examine the specific issues this question raises in recent autobiographical writing.

2. Narrative as Organisation: Suzannah Lessard's The Architect of Desire As I mentioned in the introduction, Lessard's text takes place on several different temporal levels. She tells of her own past, her greatgrandparents', grandparents', and parents' past and her present. All 8

Ibid., p. 146. See for instance John Sturrock's discussion in his introduction to his translation of Stendhal, The Life of Henri Brulard (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. vii-xxvii, p. xviii. 9

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these temporal levels interact in the text. Autobiography, of course, always involves a meeting of at least two temporal levels; the past and the present, hence Ricœur's importance to our discussion. Not only does Lessard's text recall the remembered past, but also the historical past; that is, what happened before she was born. These different temporal levels meet in the text in an ingenious way. The family home, the large piece of land in upstate New York (simply called the Place), which the family has owned for generations, and the houses on it, most of which Stanford White built, where the four generations have all lived, become the meeting point of generations and eras. Thus space is used as an entity that stands outside time and grounds Lessard's story firmly by giving it a unity of place. A place is used to unite the generations, the distant past, recent past and the present, and it is used as a vehicle for the telling of Lessard's own life story. The chapters alternate between accounts of her family's past and her own past. Stanford White's life takes up the majority of chapters. His story is told from the viewpoint of his contemporaries, from newspaper accounts, and from information gathered from biographies of him. Lessard's grandparents' and parents' stories are told from what Lessard remembers, from what they told her, and what she finds out from their own written accounts, where they exist. She moves from documents such as letters, photographs, memoirs, and newspaper clippings, to White's architecture and to her own memories: memories comprised both of images she remembers from her youth and of stories she heard. In between recounting the family history and her own life, Lessard ruminates on how the family history influenced her life, on architecture, on landscape, and on writing, and on how these four important influences in her life connect and interact. She describes how her grandmother (rather confusingly called Mama in the text)10 told stories:

10

Lessard's great-grandmother she calls Grandma, her grandparents Mama and Papa, thus skipping one generation, as if she was her mother's sister, blurring even more the sense of time passing on the Place. (The wording 'on

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I would feel her presence and my presence in combination deeply [. . .] she was apt to be thinking about an event of the past that had come to mind, or perhaps about current events: it was that she was present on a variety of levels[...] In these instances, it was not what she said so much as the ruminative way she said it and how that conjured up time as a space in which one could move backward and forward, rather than as a oneway, linear condition that was running out. Or she might be thinking about Richard Nixon and the Watergate fiasco. Or she would blend memories with reflections on contemporary affairs, comparing the experience of waltzing with a count in Vienna, for example, with the popularity of the Beatles. At such times, she seemed to float in her life - to be searching for the continuousness of the historical line with that of her own life, or for the continuousness of her life and mine, or for the connection between public events and private life.11

This could just as well serve as a description for parts of Lessard's text. She is searching for a continuum, a line that runs through the generations and would explain the two tragic events she recounts; Stanford White's murder and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. She 'floats' in the family history, and in her own life, but has a clear strategy; her moves backwards and forwards are not arbitrary. She connects the public and the private in the story of White's murder, his fame - or infamy - and his family, and she uses the Place to move back and forth in time. Lessard explains how she feels connected to past generations and feels their presence. She uses the Place as a location where many temporal levels exist simultaneously and thereby connects generations and events, making the causality she establishes seem inevitable. This is Lessard's main tool for looking at more than one generation, more than one temporal level. Using a place allows the Place' is one that I take up after Lessard as 'the Place' denotes a large piece of land.) 11 Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 199. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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her to travel in time freely, according to what her interpretations of her family history dictate, rather than letting the chronology - and the causality that implies - take over. Autobiographers employ different strategies to travel in time. One can for instance think of Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984) where Duras uses photographs to travel in time and differentiates between temporal levels by using different pronouns. Margaret Forster in her family history Hidden Lives (1995) uses a city to unite different generations and descriptions of the cultural and social changes in the city to illuminate women's lives. On another level, the level of language, Frank McCourt tells of his Irish upbringing in Angela's Ashes (1996), with prominent use of dialogue and thereby captures a way of speaking in order to locate time and place. Lessard uses architecture and landscape to forge connections between people and events. But landscape is more than that to her, at times it seems to stand in for her own story: 'the landscape [. . .] for a long time would be what I remembered of my childhood - would become what I thought of as my real life' (The Architect of Desire, p. 3). There is a constant oscillation between inner life and environment in this text, landscape stands in for her memory of her inner life, and architecture and a sense of place stand in for her family history. Family history as architecture is the central metaphor of the text, as Lessard explains early on: I have come to see family history as similar to architecture in certain ways. Like architecture, it is quiet. It encompasses, but does not necessarily demand attention[. . .] Like architecture, too, family history can suddenly loom into consciousness. For example, you can sit in the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street - designed by Carrere & Hastings, and perhaps the greatest building in New York - with your nose in a book, or busy with the catalogue and transactions with clerks, all the while oblivious of the splendid interior around you. You can forget it utterly, or perhaps not have noticed it at all that day, and then, casually looking up, be astonished, even momentarily disoriented by what you see. So it is with family history. One can go about one's life with no thought

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of the past, and then, as if waking from a dream, be astonished to see that you are living within its enclosure. (The Architect of Desire, p. 4)

Lessard's project involves describing things for the first time that have remained hidden and with narrative cohesion give them meaning. The power of family history lies, for her, in this absence/presence dichotomy. Writing her autobiography puts the family history firmly into view; she pays attention to what is around her and uses narrative as a means to emulate the power family history has when it suddenly 'looms into consciousness'. Lessard uses architecture not only as a metaphor for her relationship with her family history, she also describes some of White's buildings in detail and looks to their style to explain what happened to him and his family. Buildings hold the past within them and Lessard claims to have discovered the correlation between life on the Place and the layeredness of time that can be seen in architecture at an early age. It is when she visits Rome as a child that she discovers this metaphor, and feels that it can represent her feelings about her own family history: it was the manifest layeredness of Rome and the complexity of its imagery that empowered and awakened me. Here, at last, was a metaphor that was the equal of my situation. The confusion of different periods, sometimes even in a puddingstone way - ruins growing out of the back of the Pantheon - was profoundly satisfying. (The Architect of Desire, p. 208)

Rome is full of traces of its own past and so it is with the Place, there are traces there of other generations, other eras. On the Place there is a sense in which time can slip; remnants of different eras live there side by side in almost too close quarters, so it becomes difficult to differentiate between the generations.12 Everywhere there are traces of 12

'In this atmosphere it didn't matter as much as it usually does whether a person had died or not. Since people were embodied in the landscape, it was easy to forget that a person had actually gone, and sometimes it seemed that

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the past, so the present loses some of its primacy. The houses, the gardens, the trees, the artwork, and the roads and pathways between these points, all denote some event or person from the past. Parts of it deteriorate to reveal older constructions underneath, all with their own history and meaning. There is a sense in which Lessard's whole family history is there, she only needs to look for it for the past to 'loom into consciousness'. This presence of the trace brings forth interesting questions about presence and absence and reminds us of Ricœur's notion of the trace: Here is the heart of the paradox. On the one hand, the trace is visible here and now, as a vestige, a mark. On the other hand, there is a trace (or track) because 'earlier' a human being or an animal passed this way. Something did something. Even in language as we use it, the vestige or mark 'indicates' the pastness of the passage, the earlier occurence of the streak, the groove, without ' showing' or bringing to appearance 'what' passed this way.13

people who were still alive had died long ago, because they had passed so completely into the landscape that actually seeing them would have been a shock. It was an easy step further - almost a matter of course - for me as a child to experience the presence of people in the landscape who had died before I was born. In a sense everybody in the community - dead or alive was both there in the landscape and not there, and it was perhaps this mixture of presence and absence that made the landscape susceptible to suddenly slipping out of ordinary time so that, for a moment, you would have no idea what the date or the year was: for a moment it could be very long ago. Anything could do it: a coincidence of angles, the light on a field, an unexpected glimpse of the harbor through a scrim of oaks, and especially a shift in sound, like wind rising - or falling - or crickets or birds falling silent. In that slippage, it would seem that something was uncovered that was always present but only out of mind.' The Architect of Desire, p. 42. Sometimes these slippages are represented as ghostly: 'Ghostly overlappings of history that undermine the primacy of the present are also common in New York. Half-built buildings and buildings in a state of demolition are a part of the cityscape always, so that what is there and what is not there can easily get mixed up.' The Architect of Desire, p. 284. 13 Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 119.

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The trace itself is present but reminds us of something that is absent, something that is part of the past, but the trace cannot tell us exactly what it is a trace of. Older generations are present on the Place both in the younger generation's memories and the 'vestiges' or 'marks' they left on the place. So even though different temporal levels meet on the Place, thereby blurring the line between presence and absence, the traces that have been left are clearly a part of the family's past, although they linger on in the family's present. And in and of themselves the traces do not tell the complete story. Lessard's use of narrative structure reproduces this sense of temporal experience - of past events influencing more recent events - as she juxtaposes her own story with that of her ancestors, chapter by chapter, and as she moves backward and forward in time, while staying in the same place. The text is layered in the same way as the buildings and ruins in Rome, and in the same manner as the generations have left their mark on the Place. Ricœur claims that: what is ultimately at stake in the case of the structural identity of the narrative function as well as in that of the truth claim of every narrative work, is the temporal character of human experience. The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world. Or, as will often be repeated in the course of this study: time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.14

The temporal experience described in Lessard's text is one where many temporal levels connect and influence each other. The narrative structure mirrors this by alternating historical past, remembered past, and the present, in an effort to give meaning to the connections between the temporal levels and to explain the events described in relation to each other. Stanford White's life and death is the primal scene in Lessard's text that explains and predicts the life of the family - both its past and its present. Lessard emphasises the significance of 14

Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 3.

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White's life by constantly referring back to him, and by including chapters on him in between chapters about herself and other people in her family. But White's story remained almost completely outside her experience during her childhood and that is another reason why the Place seems to exist in a kind of timelessness, with its blurred borders between the past and the present, simultaneously denoting absence and presence. This, Lessard explains, is a result of the silence that shrouded her family history: there was for me a correlation between the architecture of my family history and my inner life. In both something was hidden. In the beautiful environment of the family past, there was a magnificent figure who had gone out of control in ways destructive to those on his course - including his family - and ultimately to himself. Behind my memories of a blissful childhood in a beautiful place, there were also destructive forces that were blind and out of control, but unacknowledged. Yet to this inner truth and all its ramifications I had no access. This was the great role of family history to me. It made my hidden experience resonate, and by so doing delivered to me a whole self. (The Architect of Desire, p. 5)

The main source for this silence is White's murder, and the scandals that came to light after his death. The family had decided to say nothing about those events and remained silent for a long time. The destructive, unacknowledged forces remained hidden, and therefore outside time and history. Even at the intersections where Lessard's remembered past and White's life meet, there is silence: Stanford remained a living part of our history through the large presence on the Place of Grandma. Stanford was murdered in 1906, and I was born in 1944, but Grandma White lived on until 1950; we overlapped for six years, I can feel even now that my great-grandmother loved me. It is, perhaps, indicative of how deeply that history was muffled in silence that Grandma, who embodies the history,

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was oddly without narrative in our family life. If she had had a 'story' - even a girlhood story - it would have led too easily to the story of Stanford, in an unravelling way. (The Architect of Desire, pp. 38-39)15

The family resists narrative, it maintains its silence, and Stanford White's presence is denied. He is nevertheless a living part of their history because of Grandma (who is in fact Lessard's greatgrandmother), yet despite this he remains outside the family narrative. His presence is also felt in that he built most of the houses on the Place.16 The stories of White's compulsive womanising and complicated financial affairs remained hidden in the family legends. He is present, yet absent, silenced, though reverberating through the generations. Lessard explains his life not only in terms of her family history but in terms of White's Beaux-Arts architecture. The story of her great-grandfather's murder is the starting point for this text and everything refers back to it. It is as if Lessard is reclaiming the story of Stanford White, and attempting a resolution to that story by writing her own version.

15

Ricœur explains what happens when historical past and remembered past meet: 'An ancestor's memory partly intersects with his descendants' memories, and his intersection is produced in a common present that itself can present every possible degree, from intimacy of a we-relationship to the anonymity of a newspaper clipping. In this way, a bridge is constructed between the historical past and memory by the ancestral narrative that serves as a relay station for memory directed to the historical past, conceived of as the time of people now dead and the time before my own birth.' Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 114. 16 'There were nodes on the Place - a temple in a laurel wood, a statue among pines on a hill - connected, either explicitly, by roads and pathways, or implicitly, by the way they were placed in relation to each other. The harmony and symmetry and the balanced interrelation of spots created an atmosphere of providential protection. This rationality and integration is typical of Beaux-Arts design, in which the landscape is an extension of the architecture and the smallest detail is connected to the vision of the whole. Thus, the silence notwithstanding, there was hardly a spot on the Place in which Stanford was not present.' The Architect of Desire, pp. 2-3.

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But the silence in the family does not stop at White's life, as her father's abuse was also a 'destructive unacknowledged force' which was not only kept hidden and silent for a long time, but is also mostly kept hidden in the text until near the end. In that way the silence of her family influences the structure of the narrative. Lessard describes the silence that ruled their family home, the Red Cottage: It can happen anywhere that an abrupt silence can develop for no discernible reason - the crickets stop chirping or the traffic ceases - and in that silence your ears seem to pop and you momentarily forget not just the date but even what your name is. The Red Cottage was in such an unmoored stillness all the time. (The Architect of Desire, p. 20)

Silence is here represented as being without memory and outside time. The silence that dominated the Place meant that time there passed differently from how it passed in the outside world: 'Some of us born into that sanctuary could not easily find our way into the open, moving river of continuous time outside the family, into the world' (The Architect of Desire, p. 115). So not only does Lessard's merging of temporal levels serve the purpose of explaining the interconnectedness of generations, it also points to the idea that because of its silence, the family remained outside time.17

17

Beaux-Arts architecture is here used as a symbol of these silences, this stillness, and this feeling of being outside time: 'But in the architecture itself, especially in the interiors, there is a stillness that arises out of the combinations of textures, often unusual and often in rich dark colors that are altogether expressive, amounting to a form of personal presence that is outside time; it is this stillness that is seductive. Sometimes the stillness borders on eeriness because of the unstill context - the onrushing wave, the destructiveness of the age - of which it is a part. But the architecture survives its historical context, because the stillness in it is the stillness of fantasy and, in that, is apart from history and the world. The true context of Stanford's work is not high society or the imperial nation but a celestial dream, a dream arising out of his own immersion - his drowning - in aesthetic delight. In his interiors the onlooker drowns a little and becomes lost in the world too.' The Architect of Desire, p. 129.

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For some reason catastrophe never seems to register in the family. Even when Lessard hears that her cousin William has raped her cousin Pamela it still remains unregistered: 'like a fox killing rabbits in the woods, it was somehow not a part of history. My knowledge of it disappeared into the old family silence, in which the world appeared unchanged in a nitroglycerine air' (The Architect of Desire, p. 335). Being outside time is to be outside history, and thus to exist without narrative. Lessard's text breaks that silence, both by telling the family's story and by her ruminations on the meaning of that silence, both on what caused it and what effect it had. Thus the story of Stanford White's murder and how it influenced the family, and the story of her father, become part of history when the silence is broken, and what consequences it had marks the structure of the text. The story of Stanford White's murder is told repeatedly throughout the text from different viewpoints. It is told through newspaper clippings; from his son's viewpoint; from a biographer's viewpoint; even from White's viewpoint; and that of the murderer's wife. It is told with the story of the trial, and once more with the story of the funeral. It is repeated again and again to show how it influenced many people in many different ways. And as Lessard claims at one point, while breaking the silence may not be that difficult, the art is in maintaining that break. Here Brooks's account of repetitions is useful: Repetition creates a return in the text, a doubling back. We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of: for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed. Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or oscillation that binds different moments together as a middle that might turn forward or back. This inescapable middle is suggestive of the demonic: repetition and return are perverse and difficult, interrupting simple movement forward.18

18

Brooks, op. cit., p. 100.

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The repetition of the story of the murder means that Lessard maintains the break of silence. It 'suspends temporal process' and thereby points to the strange flow of time in the Stanford White family. It gathers momentum in each telling, and constantly reminds the reader of the significance she allocates to the event. Hence, White's demonic presence is felt throughout the text. The silence prevalent in the family meant that the relation between environment and inner life became ever more closely knit, until landscape replaces the narrative of Lessard's inner life. Landscape 'was a substitute for an interior to which I had no other means of approach: it was a map of me' (The Architect of Desire, p. 244). It echoes Lessard's main method for bringing narrative to her family. She starts with an image; a photograph at the start of each chapter; or a memory; or a description of a landscape or a piece of architecture, and then moves on to explain the significance of that image. A paragraph that is typical of this text - and I therefore quote at length - is where Lessard tells of an image she remembers hearing about. It was when her grandfather (called Papa or Larry) came home in the middle of the night to tell his mother (Grandma or Bessie) about his father's murder, and sat outside Grandma's door until she woke up, so as not to disturb her sleep: I used to search the picture of this vigil for the story of Stanford and Bessie and Larry. I used to search the scene of Papa sitting in a chair outside Grandma's door in the night for the family story inside the public one which was so big and yet elusive. Certainly there was drama in the fact of Papa sitting there, containing the shock of the murder until his mother woke. The picture perfectly captured the selflessness in the form of good manners which structured Papa's life - it captured Papa's character - but it also suggested an imminent climax in which the pent-up truth of Stanford's dangerous and destructive character, a hidden family truth, would burst into the open with the news of his violent death reaching Grandma. But that sense of impending drama was forever unsatisfied, because my sense of what happened next was that when Papa finally spoke to his mother she took the news in a resigned way. The idea that came down to me was that even Papa himself,

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though he was in turmoil throughout the night, was not completely surprised by what had happened either. My impression of the moment when he told Grandma was of calm, like the calm after a hurricane has passed and the damage can be finally assessed. Over the years, that calm translated into a strange indifference to Stanford's death. A major figure in the family had been slain and yet about that violent ending of an important life the family was numb. That Stanford had been murdered did not seem to rate as a story in the family. Certainly there was no resolution of the terrible incident - none at all. (The Architect of Desire, pp. 214-215)

Lessard talks about the elusiveness of this image, and from that image she makes her deductions; her 'sense of what happened'; 'the idea that came down' to her; her 'impression' that her great-grandmother took the news calmly, because that is the 'sense' of how the family received the news, as the murder did not 'rate as a story' and was therefore without 'resolution'. Lessard spins her own narrative out of images of events which happened before she was born. The fact that it is impossible for her to know exactly what happened is clearly signposted. Her narrative is therefore not necessarily the only one, but one that stands in strong relation to what happened before and after Larry's vigil took place. This primal event that has not rated as a story in the family comes to her first through the image, an image that she attempts to bring to life, and to which she tries to give meaning through narrative. The deductions she makes from this image - despite her lack of first-hand knowledge of it - make sense in the overall meaning she gives to her family history through her narrative. The family's silence meant that the 'sense of impending drama remained forever unsatisfied', but here Lessard attempts some form of resolution by telling that family history. The causality Lessard establishes between her family history and her own story seems almost inevitable. The weight and significance she gives to White's murder, how she reads into it a predetermined force of destruction, she then translates into a destruction that runs in the family, and therefore the sexual abuse she suffered seems almost inevitable. The plot of the narrative thereby gives meaning to the

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events in her life. As Brooks explains: 'Plot as a logic of narrative would hence seem to be analogous to the syntax of meanings that are temporally unfolded and recovered, meanings that cannot otherwise be created or understood.'19 What Ricœur calls 'narrative identity', as Michael Sheringham explains, is thus established: 'L'identité narrative' does not reduplicate and externalize a process inherent in consciousness: prior to the act of narrative is only the need and demand for narrative understanding, akin to the patient's need for the work of analysis. Narrative identity is not the product of organic unfolding based on passive intuitive understanding, but a dynamic modelling process driven by active, constructive processes at work in our engagement with the vestiges and enigmas of temporal experience.20

The act of narrating itself is therefore of importance. The narrative structure of Lessard's text is intimately bound up with her understanding and interpretation of the family history. Lessard comes to realise that the newspaper stories and the film that was made about White's life, that her family always maintained to be a travesty, had more truth in them than the family version of events: 'Ever so minutely but with fatal significance, the cosmos shifted, and in that moment I knew: it was the family melodrama about lies and betrayal, and not the Hollywood one, that was untrue' (The Architect of Desire, p. 77). The 'cosmos shifts' and Lessard attempts to build her own picture of events, by telling a different narrative of events. But at the same time she distances herself from her family - at least from her family's version of events - as she believes that she has come closer to the actual family truth. It is not just that Lessard learns more about her family's past, it is also that her ordering of events has come up with a different kind of reality than the one that was accepted, silently, in the family. It is one more indication of the importance of ordering the events of a life in 19

Ibid., p. 21. Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: From Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 26.

20

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order to create one's sense of identity. It is similar to Andrei Codrescu's experience at the start of his autobiography America's Shoes: In the first chapter (of America's Shoes) the agent in charge of my case is looking through my voluminous file. I see my life passing through the policeman's eyes, arranged in an order alien to me, alphabetized by offences and suspicions, a life that resembles mine in all but the structure of the narrative.21

The events can be the same, the facts all there, but the order is different, and the events, therefore, look alien. The identity Lessard represents is one that occurs in the writing process, it is dependent upon the order she establishes, but as Sheringham notes: Whatever the autobiographical goal, autobiographical identity is the construct of intentions embedded in the activity of narrative itself - the transfusions between énonciation and énoncé, documentary referentiality and fictional speculation - and it is marked by an 'instabilité principielle'. In Ricœur's terms it remains a problem as much as a solution.22

Lessard's blend of documents, gossip, speculation, and memories inform the narrative structure of the work. Her handling of temporality and causality brings forth her central point that when one finally notices family history it can give one back one's whole self. The family tree at the beginning of the book has served as the blueprint for her narrative. The organisation and ordering of events, the continuity of the plot and her use of metaphor all serve the same purpose: to expose the layers of meaning in her family history and how it

21

Andrei Codrescu, 'Adding to My Life', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley et. al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 21-30, p. 24. 22 Sheringham, op. cit., p. 27.

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profoundly affected her life. Form and content constantly interact and inform each other. By keeping her final revelation for the end of the text, Lessard gives the reader an inkling of the power that the revelation had in her life. She meets her sisters one day at the request of one of them. She was forty-four years old when they first acknowledged that the abuse had taken place. Her sister Madeleine tells her story: Her plain words were spoken calmly. But as she spoke I had a sense of something like a sound barrier breaking, a psychic reverberation that reached to the edge of the cosmos and down to the subcellular level at the same time. With it, the world cracked open. And inside was the world. (The Architect of Desire, p. 342)

Lessard's whole project is to make, through narrative, something that has been silent, outside history, become part of history. Her aim is to break the 'sound barrier' and to examine the 'world cracked open'. Being outside history in this text denotes being without consciousness, and thereby without meaning, as the result of this revelation makes clear to her: A far more surprising and clearly direct consequence of our meeting was that the very next day a paralysis that had crippled my writing for years disappeared. Soon I embarked on the narrative that has come to fruition here. Another paradox of a story that turns on grace is that the moment of grace is what makes it possible to tell the story at all. Without that moment there would be no consciousness, no understanding - no story therefore, because there would be no one to tell it. (The Architect of Desire, pp. 347-8)

Lessard's notion of godly grace adds another layer to her narrative understanding. This - what she calls grace - is what lends her the authority and also ensures an acceptance of the story. Lessard's autobiography makes full use of the fictional conventions and the narrative techniques at her disposal. There is clearly a strong belief, that is emphasised throughout this text, that narrative is strongly

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linked to knowledge, that without it there would be no consciousness, no understanding. Lessard's interpretation of her family history is clearly grounded in the way she tells her story. It is a tightly plotted work, which experiments with chronology and causality, in order to make sense of a life. By contrast, the Austrian writer Peter Handke is much more ambivalent in his use of narrative and in the next section I will look at how his ambiguity towards the explanatory powers of narrative informs his text.

3. Avoiding Narrative: Peter Handke's Wunschloses Unglück Does narrative by its use of literary conventions always fictionalise, and do people one writes about inevitably become types? And is that something one needs to avoid, or can it be desirable and even be of help in writing about tragic events? Handke voices these concerns time and again in the text about his mother. The text is more in the vein of biography than autobiography.23 Handke claims that he does not want the narrative to take over, that he does not want his mother's life and death to become an archetypal story and he chiefly blames narrative conventions for constituting this danger. But at the same time he voices a need, even a desire, for narrative to commemorate his mother's life. This reflects the reasons why we tell stories in the first place, as Ricœur points out: We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the

23 Handke wrote later other autobiographical essays: Versuch über die Müdigkeit (1989), Versuch über die Jukebox (1990), and Versuch über den geglückten Tag (1991). It is interesting to note that Walter Benjamin also uses this word Versuche (attempts or experiments) for the segments in his autobiography Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987).

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Handke's text is concentrated around a tale of suffering and the necessity of telling that tale. The text is written shortly after Handke's mother committed suicide (interestingly, she remains nameless), and it tells of her life, and what lead to her death. Handke focuses, in the main, on the environment she grew up in: rural Austria after the First World War. He chronicles her circumstances, her marriage and children, the implication being that a woman's life was (and in many places still is) completely dependent upon her environment and the men around her. It is clear from the start that the politics of the public and the private play a part in this text. Suicide, as an action that is performed privately but is at the same time public, inevitably questions the borderlines between the public and the private. The story begins with one of the few quotations in this text, the notice of his mother's death. With this public announcement Handke immediately sets the stage for a debate on the public and private aspects of narrative by using the text from the newspaper rather than his own words to announce his mother's death. This connection between the public and the private is clearly of importance as very early on in the text Handke recounts his reasons for writing about his mother: Wenn ich schreibe, schreibe ich notwending von früher, von etwas Ausgestandenem, zumindest für die Zeit des Schreibens. Ich beshäftige mich literarish, wie auch sonst, veräußerlicht und versachlicht zu einer Erinnerungs- und Formuliermaschine. Und ich schreibe die Geschichte meiner Mutter, einmal, weil ich von ihr und wie es zu ihrem Tod kam mehr zu wissen glaube als irgendein fremder Interviewer, der diesen interessanten Selbstmordfall mit einer religiösen, individualpsychologishen oder soziologischen Traumdeutungstabelle wahrscheinlich mühelos auflösen könnte, dann im eigenen Interesse, weil ich auflebe wenn mir etwas zu tun gibt, und schließlich, weil ich diesen FREITOD geradeso wie irgendeiner

24

Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 75.

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außenstehener Interviewer, wenn auch auf andre Weise, zu einem Fall machen möchte.25

Handke wants to have something to do, to keep busy, to write, to act within the literary dimension, and activate his memory and the formulating capacity of writing. He claims to want to do this because he knows his mother better than anyone else, but he also wants to view her from the outside, although differently from the way a journalist or writer would. He states here that he wants to try to see his mother's death as a 'case'. He does not claim that he will be objective, as is clear when he calls her death a voluntary death rather than suicide, and emphasises this by putting it in capital letters. This tension between standing inside or outside, between the public and the private, is evident throughout the text. It gives primacy to his inside knowledge, but he uses the power of the literary to view things from the outside. Handke voices a desire to make her story a 'case', possibly to alleviate the pain, to distance himself from her suffering, but by calling her death 'voluntary death' he already qualifies it, as it is a word with much more positive connotations than the word 'suicide'. This paragraph alerts the reader to the different aims, even at times paradoxical aims, Handke voices in this text. He wants to be intimate

25 Peter Handke, Wunschloses Unglück (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 10-11. (Hereafter quoted in the text with Ralph Mannheim's English translation in footnotes.) 'When I write, I necessarily write about the past, about something which, at least while I am writing, is behind me. As usual when engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine. I am writing the story of my mother, first of all because I think I know more about her and how she came to her death than any outside investigator who might, with the help of a religious, psychological, or sociological guide to the interpretation of dreams, arrive at a facile explanation of this interesting case of suicide; but second in my own interest, because having something to do brings me back to life; and lastly because, like an outside investigator, though in a different way, I would like to represent this VOLUNTARY DEATH as an exemplary case.' A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Souvenir Press, 1976), p. 5.

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and private, but at the same time he wants to view his mother from the outside and to use the literary capacities he possesses. By looking mainly at his mother's life in terms of her environment Handke emphasises one of his central points in this work, that his mother never had any choices, or any independence from others, or any route out of her environment or her upbringing. The course of her life was decided at her birth, when she was born into a very oldfashioned and traditional, patriarchal, rural society. It is a narrative almost without any possibilities, everything is already 'vorgesehen': Keine Möglichkeit, alles schon vorgesehen: kleine Schäkereien, ein Kichern, eine kurze Fassungslosigkeit, dann zum ersten Mal die fremde, gefaßte Miene, mit der man schon wieder abzuhausen begann, die ersten Kinder, ein bißchen noch Dabeisein nach dem Hantieren in der Küche, von Anfang an Überhörtwerden, selber immer mehr weghören, Selbstgespräche, dann schlecht auf den Beinen, krampfadern, nur noch ein Murmeln im Schlaf, Unterleibskrebs, und mit dem Tod ist die Vorsehung schließlich erfüllt. So hießen ja schon die Stationen einer Kinderspiels, das in der Gegend von den Mädchen viel gespielt wurde: Müde/Matt/Krank/ Schwerkrank/Tot. (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 17)26

It is a life without possibilities; the outcome is already decided. There is no dramatic tragedy here, only the grind of everyday living. This paragraph encapsulates that kind of life as an everyday story - an everywoman's story. His mother's life is reduced to a few lines of kisses, cuddles, marriage, the kitchen, children, illness and death. Handke reduces the tale even further to only a few words when he 26

'No possibilities, it was all settled in advance: a bit of flirtation, a few giggles, brief bewilderment, then the alien, resigned look of a woman starting to keep house again, the first children, a bit of togetherness after the kitchen work, from the start not listened to, and in turn listening less and less, inner monologues, trouble with her legs, varicose veins, mute except for mumbling in her sleep, cancer of the womb, and finally, with death, destiny fulfilled. The girls in our town used to play a game based on the stations in a woman's life: Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead.' p. 10.

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compares it to stations in a game that was played in his mother's area: 'Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead'. It reduces his mother's bleak story to only a few situations, over which she had no control, and is therefore almost without narrative, where death is only the longforeseen outcome. But Handke emphasises by calling her suicide 'voluntary death' that she in the end finally exercised her free will, it was almost the only choice she made in her life. In the end she had a choice, although it led to the same conclusion. Her life is time and again described in these terms, as reducible to a few sentences, even to lists. Handke describes her marriage that way: Zu Untermiete in einem großen Zimmer in Berlin-Pankow, der Mann, Straßenbahn-Fahrer, trank, StraßenbahnSchaffner, trank, Bäcker, trank, die Frau ging immer wieder mit dem inzwischen zweiten Kind zum Brotgeber und bat, es noch einmal zu versuchen, die Allerweltsgeschichte. (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 34)27

The story becomes universal, predictable, and repetitive. A woman without choices, no chance of education, no destiny other than marriage, and when the marriage fails in drink and depression, there is no way out. But Handke is not satisfied with this account of his mother. In roughly the middle of the text he devotes four pages to ruminations on the writing itself. He claims there are two main dangers in writing this story: 'einmal das bloße Nacherzählen, dann das schmerzlose 27

'They lived in a sublet in Berlin-Pankow. The husband worked as streetcar motorman and drank, worked as a streetcar conductor and drank, worked as a baker and drank. Taking with her her second child, who had been born in the meantime, his wife went to see his employer and begged him to give her husband one more chance, the old story.' p. 21. This condition is described several times: 'Sie war also nichts geworden, konnte auch nichts mehr werden, das hatten man ihr nicht einmal vorauszusagen brauchen.' Wunschloses Unglück, p. 36. 'And she was nothing and never would be anything; it was so obvious that there was no need of a forecast.' p. 22.

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Verschwinden einer Person in poetischen Sätzen' (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 44).28 On the one hand there is the danger of simply recounting events, on the other that the person will disappear in poetic phrases. For Handke the facts are so overwhelming in their everyday drabness that they leave nothing to think through or interpret. So he moves from the facts to an attempt at formulating them, but when formulating events from her life he feels removed from the facts, so he constantly moves between the two, in an attempt to find a balance between the unique story of his mother and a universal story of a woman's life at the time. These four pages of meditations on the writing of the text break up the narrative of his mother's life. It is as if Handke feels the need to explain the problems he encounters in the writing, as if the narrative itself could not. As the story moves inexorably to the end, the writer intervenes to break up the relentless flow of the narrative more and more often, to claim his mother's uniqueness, and to emphasise the terrifying aspects of the story. But the breaks in the narrative are evident from early on in the text. They seem to serve the purpose of alerting the reader to the inadequacies of the narrative. Its conclusion is so inevitable that the narrative almost tells itself. Handke describes possible ways to begin his mother's story: Die Lust, jemandem davon zu erzählen, heiterte mich richtig auf. Es war ja so ein heller Tag; der Schnee; wir aßen Leberknödelsuppe; 'es begann mit . . .': wenn man so zu erzählen anfangen würde, wäre alles wie erfunden, man würde den Zuhörer oder den Leser nicht zu einer privaten Teilnahme erpressen, sondern ihm eben nur eine recht phantastische Geschichte vortragen. (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 12)29 28

'the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences.' p. 28. 29 'The desire to tell someone about it cheered me up. It was such a bright day; the snow; we were eating soup with liver dumplings; 'it began with... '; if I started like this, it would all seem to be made up, I would not be exhorting personal sympathy from my listener or reader, I would merely be telling him a rather fantastic story.' p. 6.

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The thought of telling someone excites him, but that excitement is immediately countered with the inadequacy of the formulations. Handke claims that if he were to begin by describing the day it happened, formulating the story 'it all started with. . .' it would become a fiction, he would not press the reader into a private participation but only tell a fantastic story. Despite this statement he starts his mother's story with 'it all began with . . .' (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 12). The movement between his thoughts on the writing and the story he tells is therefore an interesting one. He mentions again and again the dangers and pitfalls he faces in writing this story, how formulating it can take him away from the facts, while at the same time he uses these formulations to tell the story. The reader is made conscious of the fact that the story is always in some way a construction, made up of literary conventions and modes.30 At the same time, there is a sense in which there is no other way to tell this story - the facts of his mother's life call for a certain type of narrative. As Ricœur points out: 'If, in fact, human action can be narrated, it is because it is always already articulated by signs, rules, and norms. it is always already symbolically mediated.'31 Although Handke claims to move between the facts and the structuration of these facts, he seems in the final analysis to acknowledge that the facts themselves carry within them a certain type of narrative construction. This brings us to the problem of divorcing fabula from sjuzet; in Peter Brooks's words: 'We must, however recognize that the apparent priority of fabula to sjuzet is in the nature of a mimetic illusion, in that the fabula - 'what really happened' - is in fact a mental construction that the reader derives

30

Handke refuses to be consoled by form which Frank Kermode maintains is possible: 'having found [form] you have a right to be consoled by it, for the good reason that it is authentic, and reflects, however imperfectly, a universal plot, an enchanting order of beginning, middle, and end.' The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 132. 31 Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 57.

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from the sjuzet, which is all that he ever directly knows.'32 Or as Paul John Eakin explains it in terms of autobiography: 'the problem of structure in autobiography is a function of the relation between experience and its representation in language, I would want to argue that 'the picture' is an intrinsic part of 'the thing itself' and cannot be separated out of it.'33 There is another aspect to Handke's treatment of narrative in this text. Not only does he move between doubting the constructing aspects of narrative, while at the same time using these formulations; he also voices a need, or even a desire for writing and for narrative.34 As a lament to his mother's life and death, it answers a deep need to commemorate, to tell, to avoid the silence that surrounded his sorrow when he first heard of her death. Not only does he describe his own need for writing on his mother, the importance and the need for telling someone about oneself is also emphasised in the story of his mother. He explains that in her environment one was not expected to talk about oneself until: 'das Ich einem wahrhaftig fremder als ein Stück vom Mond erschien' (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 51).35 And because one was denied one's story and feelings, until they became alien to oneself, people became shy like horses, withdrew and screamed inside their houses (p. 52). It was only when his mother started reading that she began to describe her own life: 32

Brooks, op. cit., p. 13. Paul John Eakin, 'Narrative and Chronology as Structures of Reference and the New Model Autobiographer', in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 32-41, p. 35. 34 'Es ist inzwischen fast sieben Wochen her, seit meine Mutter tot ist, und ich möchte mich an die Arbeit machen, bevor das Bedürfnis, über sie zu schreiben, das bei der Beerdigung so stark war, sich in die stumpfsinnige Sprachlosigkeit zurückverwandelt, mit der ich auf die Nachricht von dem Selbstmord reagierte.' Wunschloses Unglück, p. 7. 'My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide.' p. 3. 35 'the word 'I' seemed stranger to the speaker himself than a chunk out of the moon.' p. 33. 33

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Sie las jedes Buch als beschreibung des eigenen Lebens, lebte dabei auf; rückte mit dem Lesen zum ersten Mal mit sich selber heraus; lernte, von sich zu reden; mit jedem Buch fiel ihr mehr dazu ein. So erfuhr ich allmählich etwas von ihr. (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 67)36

Only then does Handke learn something about her, after her literary experiences seem to give knowledge of fiction, something more than the 'Allerweltsgeschichte'. Writing and telling are represented as necessary and useful activities, it is the formulating that is represented as a problem. Despite this need or desire, Handke again and again tries to stem the flow of the narrative. When the story nears the time of her death Handke explains: '(Ab jetzt muß ich aufpassen, daß die Geschichte nicht zu sehr sich selber erzählt)' (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 91).37 But as with many of his claims, it is one that is immediately countered, as the narrative takes over and he recounts the story of her death. Such paradoxes are also apparent in his attempts to capture his mother's uniqueness. To be represented as a type, the result is described as both desirable and repulsive: 'In einer solche Beschreibung als Typ fühlte man sich auch von seiner eigenen Geschichte befreit, weil man auch sich selber nur noch erlebte wie unter dem ersten Blick eines erotisch taxierenden Fremden' (Wunschloses Unglück, pp. 40-41).38 At the centre of the text is the feeling that this is a story the narrator would rather not have to tell. It is both a lament and a eulogy, but one without flourishes, embellishments or glorifying nostalgia after a life lost. Rather it is a sparse, sorrowful account, which attempts to put off 36

'To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she came to life, for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something about her.' p. 44. 37 '(From this point on, I shall have to be careful to keep my story from telling itself.)' p. 61. 38 'In thus becoming a type, she felt freed from her own history, because now she saw herself through the eyes of a stranger making an erotic appraisal.' pp. 25-6.

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the terrible outcome, hence the reluctance to give in to narrative conventions while at the same time attempting to fulfill the need to 'tell'. By constantly moving between trying to represent his mother as an individual and telling a universal story, the central event, the suicide, is represented as a terrifying event, but at the same time as an inevitable end to her story. The type of narrative mode Handke chooses is firmly tied to the explanation he gives. On the one hand it is the only possible conclusion to her story, her only possible reaction, on the other there is the horror of his mother's suicide. Her life is viewed throughout in terms of its end. Every step in the narrative is a step towards suicide. It is this crushing inevitability that is the most powerful force in this short text. This doubt of the possibilities of narrative is linked to the thought in this work that his mother seems without identity. In his discussion of Robert Musil, Ricœur links these two notions, when he claims that in the breakdown of narrative form is parallel to the characters' crisis of identity. That it is not a coincidence that in contemporary autobiographies, such as by Leiris, the narrative form is deliberatly disjointed and comes to resemble another literary genre; the essay.39 It is this loss of identity of the character that corresponds to the loss of configuration of narrative, and in particular a crisis of closure, that one also sees in this text.40 The strictures put on his mother's life by her environment, her lack of choice and possibilities, is represented by a very simple chronological narrative structure. This short text has an essayistic quality in a similar vein to Handke's later autobiographical works. The strong sense of inevitability pervading this text translates 39

Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), p. 177. 40 As Linda Hutcheon also explains: 'Recently historiography, like much postmodern theory and fiction, has concentrated its efforts on rendering problematic the nature of narrative in particular. There are many reasons for this focus, but Lyotard's postmodern questioning of the legitimacy and legitimating power of narrative as a totalizing scheme of explanation is certainly one of them.' A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 55. This link I discuss in more detail in the concluding chapter.

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into a simple narrative structure and accompanied by doubts about the possibilities of narrative to represent a life without diminishing that life's uniqueness. Despite this feeling of inevitability, Handke does not claim to have the authoritative, final word, or answer, to his mother's story. From both Lessard's and Handke's texts we can gather that narrative structure plays a large part in the meaning-making process in autobiograhical writing. But how do they end their stories, and does autobiography inherently pose problems for narrative endings?

4. Endings in Autobiography Peter Brooks claims that 'if the motor of narrative is desire, totalizing, building ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end'.41 This desire for the end, where the ultimate determinants of meaning lie, is inherently problematic in autobiography. If as Walter Benjamin has proclaimed 'death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death',42 endings in autobiography must always in some sense be based on contingency rather than authority as the life that is narrated has not finished, except in exceptional circumstances, such as the suicide note at the end of Stefan Schweig's Die Welt von Gestern (1942). The autobiographer lacks knowledge of the future and assumes the limited narrative powers of Ricœur's 'Ideal Chronicler'. Nevertheless, narrative in autobiography always builds towards some kind of ending, albeit in some cases arbitrary or inconclusive.43 As Barbara Herrnstein Smith points out: 41

Brooks, op. cit., p. 52. Walter Benjamin, 'The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov', in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 83-107, p. 93. 43 D. A. Miller maintains that such is the fate of narrative even in the traditional novel: 'In the last analysis, what discontents the traditional novel is its own condition of possibility. For the production of narrative - what we called the narratable - is possible only within a logic of insufficiency, 42

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It is easier to point to something that exists than to something that does not; and the difficulty here is increased by the fact that, like closure itself, closural failure is an effect, a quality of the reader's experience - and one that is particularly likely to vary among readers.44

As our discussion has demonstrated, in The Architect of Desire Lessard attempts to make sense of her life and the life of her family through narrative. She attempts a resolution to the terrible events that were without narrative in her family. She literally re-writes her family's history so it can encompass her own experience of it. But in the last paragraph she claims: Each one would write a history different from this one some so different that it might be hard to connect them at all. I myself would write differently if I took on the task ten years hence - it would already be slightly altered if I started tomorrow. We live as irrevocably subjective in a changing perspective of time. This history, like all histories, can only be fathomed definitively by the true architect of desire, whose intentions, even in constructing infernal disequilibrium, and deferral, and traditional novelists typically desire worlds of greater stability and wholeness than such a logic can intrinsically provide. Moreover, the suspense that constitutes the narratable inevitably comes to imply a suspensiveness of signification, so what is ultimately threatened is no less than the possibility of a full or definitive meaning.' Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 265. But Brooks maintains that we still believe in the power of endings: 'If the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic. We have no doubt forgone eternal narrative ends, and even traditional nineteenth-century ends are subject to self-conscious endgames, yet still we read in a spirit of confidence, and also a state of dependence, that what remains to be read will restructure the provisional meanings of the already read.' Brooks, op. cit., p. 23. 44 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 211.

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predicaments at the heart of our most tender relations, are, we have to trust, to serve love. (The Architect of Desire, p. 354)

Lessard freely acknowledges that hers is not the authoritative version of the family history; it can always be written differently, we are always subject to the changing perspective of time. Nevertheless, her narrative has reached an ending that mirrors the logic of the narrative she tells. God, her true architect of desire, must in the end provide the final meaning. The title, therefore, refers not only to Stanford White and his destructive desires, but to a higher being who will in the end provide the authority for this story. Lessard shows that the writing itself is the goal in claiming that finally admitting to her father's abuse meant that she gained some balance in her life and, more significantly for our enquiry, that after the revelation she was finally able to write. This is where narrative desire is realised; it is a product of the resolution of her troubles and the expression of her troubles. It is the breaking of the silence that shrouded her family, and in the process a construction of her own narrative identity, that can be claimed to be the 'ultimate determinant of meaning'. It therefore does not matter significantly to this text that it could be written differently; Lessard places the emphasis on the fact that it could be written at all. Writing is where the beginning and ending meet, it is the reason for writing, and where the narrative of her life ends in the text. The circular structure of this argument (once writing is possible the writing starts but the story ends) and Lessard's own narrative model for it work side by side.45 In Brooks's discussion of Rousseau he claims: In claiming the need to tout dire, Rousseau makes explicit that the contradictions encountered in the attempt to

45

Brooks maintains: 'These arguments from the end are at least apparently paradoxical, since narrative would seem to claim overt authority for its origin, for a 'primal scene' from which - as from the scene of the crime in the detective story 'reality' assumes narratability, the signifying chain is established.' Brooks, op. cit., p. 96.

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Lessard's text is in part a narrative of writing, a narrative of making public what has been silenced. It opens up the possibility of narrative and points to the fact that each has his own narrative that would be different from the official family narrative. It is a denial of the claim that there is only one true story of her life and her family's life. It is, therefore, a logical and almost inevitable conclusion when she claims that 'each one would write a history different from this one'. Each moment of the past can produce more narratives. The last sentence in Peter Handke's Wunschloses Unglück similarly opens up the possibilities of more narratives when he claims: 'Später werde ich über das alles Genaueres schreiben' (Wunschloses Unglück, p. 105).47 Both Handke and Lessard keep alive the possibility that the past can be written again and again, differently each time, although Lessard's religious note - that there is some higher power which is the definitive authority on all histories - is different from Handke's apparently dissatisfied tone. His last sentence reveals a dissatisfaction with his text, since it has only led to the inescapable conclusion of his mother's death. It is a lament - the ending is always long foreseen rather than a narrative construction with surprises and revelations, and essayistic in nature. His mother's suicide has closed possibilities, and Handke's text reveals a compulsion towards one definitive account of her life, constantly moving from the inevitability of the narrative to a refusal of the generalised 'woman's life' tone of that narrative. His claim that he will write more accurately on this later throws doubt on the text we have just read. It enhances the feeling that has been prevalent throughout the text, that the narrative he tells can never do 46 47

Ibid., p. 33. 'Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail.' p. 70.

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justice to what happened to his mother. This inconclusive ending nevertheless represents a logical movement within the text itself. As Ricœur points out: An inconclusive ending suits a work that raises by design a problem the author considers to be unsolvable. It is nonetheless a deliberate and a concerted ending, which sets in relief in a reflexive way the interminable character of the theme of the whole work.48

Although one might presume the lack of closure in contemporary autobiography to be a mark of non-fiction - as real life does not allow neat closures - in reality one might say that this lack follows the general trend in contemporary art and fiction. The endings to both Lessard's and Handke's texts bring to the fore questions of time. Both imply that with time their story would be different. Lessard makes that clear with her sense of the changing perspective of time and Handke voices a similar concern when he claims that later he will be able to be more accurate. Endings in autobiography in general highlight another aspect of time in autobiography as in some cases the time of the writing and the time the events took place come together, as is the case for instance in Lessard, Handke, and Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude. But in some the end of the narrative takes place long before the time of the writing, as for instance in Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory (1967). So even if autobiography does pose problems for endings, it is still possible to see patterns and configurations common to many of them, and it is not sufficient to see the endings simply as arbitrary. The conclusions Lessard and Handke offer to their stories are not completely arbitrary. They are, at least in part, inconclusive, though this is more the case in Handke's text than in Lessard's. Lessard tries to tie all the strands together, but she leaves much unspoken (especially her parents' reactions to the revelations). She has chosen her narrative strands carefully and selectively, there is no attempt to

48

Time and Narrative, vol. 2, p 22.

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tell 'everything', which underlines the fact that there never can be any complete, or definitive conclusion, which would mean there would be a solution to the 'crime', a solution to a life, which Handke equally resists. If there were such a solution we would have travelled not only away from autobiography to fiction - since novelists have long since been aware of the problematics of ending, perhaps especially contemporary fiction, as for instance the alternative endings in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) attest to - but we would have travelled to the realm of fairy-tales and myth. A recent text that raises interesting questions relevant to my discussion of conclusions and solutions in autobiography, is Jenny Diski's autobiography Skating to Antarctica. Diski tells the story of her difficult childhood, her problems with depression from an early age, and how she became estranged from her mother at the age of fourteen, and had not seen or heard from her since. It was Diski's daughter who in her late teens decided to search for her grandmother, to at least find out whether she is still alive. That story is intertwined with a tale of a trip Diski made to Antarctica during her daughter's search. The first chapter is entitled 'Shrödinger's Mother'. As Diski explains: 'For the most part, quantum theory has been of little practical use in my life'49, but she goes on to replace Shrödinger's cat with her mother. The cat in the box, according to the theory, can be both dead and alive; it is only when it is observed that it is either/or. Keeping her mother in this superposition of states suits Diski. As long as she does not look, her mother is both dead and alive (p. 23), and can have no influence over her life since she last saw her. This is the state her mother remains in for the reader till the very end of the text. As Kermode puts it: it is possible to tell a story in such a way that the principal object of the reader is to discover, by an interpretation of clues, the answer to a problem posed at the outset. All other

49

Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica (London: Granta Books, 1998), p. 22. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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considerations may be subordinated to this interpretative, or, as I shall call it, hermeneutic activity.50

The text immediately engages the curiosity of the reader as the problem Diski poses at the outset is fourfold: firstly whether her mother is still alive; secondly will she be the same as Diski remembers her; thirdly will Diski want to find out; and fourthly what effect will this knowledge have on her. Even the dedication is designed to get the reader interested and aware of the many possible outcomes of this quest as Diski dedicates the book to her daughter Chloe, 'without whom', leaving the sentence open and the outcome unpredictable. This autobiographical text has, therefore, a very clear goal, and works throughout towards some kind of conclusion. The epigraph from Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies then serves to confuse the reader: ''I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject?'' Leaving the reader with the sense that even though a conclusion might be reached, it might not be as clear-cut as one assumes at the outset. When her daughter first suggests looking for Diski's mother by searching for a death certificate, Diski realises how easy (in practical terms) it would have been to find out: 'Funny how easy and obvious it was, and what a nonsense it made of 'I don't know if my mother is alive or dead'' (Skating to Antarctica, p. 31). The reality of the easy access to information and Diski's own reluctance to find out, to open the lid, is a constant theme in this text. She has claimed throughout her life not to care to know about her mother, not even being curious. This highlights another strand in the text; what her psychoanalysts have called her denial of her unconscious, a trait in herself that she cherishes, as she claims to be a person who would always rather do nothing than to be active. It also puts in stark relief the reader's expectations of the outcome and Diski's own relative indifference. The hermeneutic activity Kermode mentioned is thereby qualified by Diski's reluctance to engage with her daughter's quest.

50

Kermode, op. cit., p. 179.

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In the tale of Diski's trip to Antarctica being active or staying still becomes a constant theme. She constantly wonders whether to go on the day trips or stay in her cabin, as she discusses how 'being active' is always assumed to be a positive thing. These doubts become a metaphor for her satisfaction with her lack of knowledge about her mother's whereabouts. It becomes apparent that the dedication is to be taken literally, not simply in the usual 'emotional support' sense. Without her daughter there would only have been inactivity, and the whiteness and emptiness that she seeks so hard to find in Antarctica (without ever finding it in the landscape, but only in her white cabin). At the end of the first chapter her daughter has found a death certificate of someone with at least a similar name to Diski's mother. It still has not answered the question with any certainty, but Diski goes on her Antarctic journey having realised that she will soon know the truth. It is only in the very last pages that it is revealed that her mother died in 1988. Diski describes finding papers that her daughter had left for her when she gets back from her trip. But it is not her mother's death that shocks her most, it is the fact that she had been alive for so long after they lost contact: It was is if the painting of my past had acquired a shadow, a new presence, separate but lurking darkly around corners in doorways [. . .] There had been the possibility all along up to 1988, the retrospective possibility, that she might have made contact; might, as in my worst early hours anxiety, have turned up in my life. She hadn't; she might have. (Skating to Antarctica, pp. 242-243)

The shock is to discover that when she looks she sees not only the state of her mother as it is now (as in quantum theory), but what was before, and all the 'retrospective possibilities' that offers. The power of the might-have-been becomes almost tangible. This is, though, not the only thing Chloe discovers. Chloe talks to her grandmother's neighbours in Hove and soon the picture emerges of the same difficult and troubled woman Diski remembers and avoided all this time. The possibility that her mother might have been a 'nice old lady' has once and for all been laid to rest and thereby some of Diski's feelings of

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guilt. It serves as a confirmation for her own view of her childhood, and that she would not have been able to have any kind of relationship with her mother. The last sentences in the book depict a dialogue between Diski and her daughter. Her daughter asks if Diski is pleased that she (Chloe) went to Hove to talk to the neighbours: 'Very. Very pleased. Thank you.' 'That's OK. Good to know about your mother at last, eh?' 'Mmm. Yes, I think it is.' (Skating to Antarctica, p. 250)

At least one of the questions posed at the outset has been answered. Diski's mother is no longer in some 'superposition of states' but the question remains whether it was worth knowing. Finding out has changed some of Diski's perception of her own past, reinforced others. The ending therefore echoes Brooks's view that: 'the tenuous, fictive, arbitrary status of ends clearly speaks to and speaks of an altered situation of plot, which no longer wishes to be seen as end determined, moving toward full predication of the narrative sentence, claiming a final plenitude of meaning.'51 Diski's text stands somewhere in between. It does answer the central question, and by leaving it to the very end, uses conventional narrative means to keep the reader interested. But although the question whether her mother is dead or alive might seem the most obviously important one, Diski raises other questions throughout the text. That fact makes the reader think of why we take the importance of the original question for granted. Why is it better to act, rather than not to act? Why is it always better to know? Therefore, although the ending is clearly not arbitrary, it has lost some of its importance and weight by being constantly questioned and its significance doubted throughout the text, so the text does not acquire a 'final plenitude of meaning'. One could say that in each of the texts discussed here the ending is in keeping with the unfolding of the narrative. All these texts in one way or another attempt an interpretation of a life. They all use 51

Brooks, op. cit., p. 314.

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narrative conventions - whether it be with the relish and deftness of Lessard, or with Handke's suspicious tone - to render that life. In Lessard's case she investigates her family history in an attempt to explain her past. Handke commemorates his mother, while at the same time voicing doubts about the possibilities of such a task. And Diski gets us to reconsider the outcome - the ending of a story - and with that the idea that all problems and questions asked in the text will be resolved by the ending. It is clear from these texts that narrative structure is a meaningmaking process, establishing causality and continuity. Lessard finds solace in this, while Handke is wary of imposing narrative causality on something as complex and fragmented as a life story. There are clearly conflicting attitudes towards the use of narrative in autobiography in these texts. On the one hand there is Handke's fear that the narrative structure will take over his mother's life, while at the same time he constantly returns to this structure. On the other hand Lessard's acknowledgement, that the story could have been told differently, seems to imply that the same event can call for different narratives, which contrasts with the sense in this text that her narrative structure delivers true self-knowledge, and clearly serves for her as an explanation of what happened in her family. All the texts discussed here attest to the fact that autobiography can offer a base from which to examine the role of narrative structure as a meaning-making process. The ambivalence towards the possibilities of narrative structure voiced in these texts shows that the question whether or not narrative is intrinsic to knowledge is a preoccupation in recent life-writing and that autobiographical writing has plenty of scope for this kind of debate. The type of narrative structure and organisation autobiographers choose is clearly linked to the autobiographical identity they create. Doubts in these texts about the causality narrative structure establishes reflect doubts about the possibility of writing a definitive account of one's life and an awareness of the fictional aspects of all narrative.

Chapter Three Gender and Fiction in Women's Autobiographical Writing Janet Frame, Marie Cardinal From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.1 To judge from recent trends in scholarly as well as popular literature, three crucial questions can be seen to stand at the forefront of today's preoccupations: the question of mothering, the question of the woman writer, and the question of autobiography.2

1. Introduction: Writing on Women's Autobiography In this chapter I look at autobiographical texts by women writers with the specific aim of seeing where and how the subject of gender raises questions about the borderline between autobiography and fiction. I have marked out two areas that I believe to be of special relevance, namely accounts of how the authors became writers, and how the autobiographers write on their relationship with the mother. My central question is: how can gender illuminate or inflect the relationship between autobiography and fiction? As always, my approach is centred on how different facets of the autobiographical text interact, in this case autobiography, gender, and fiction.

1

Janet Frame, To the Is-Land (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 9. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) 2 Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 144.

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The texts examined here are Janet Frame's three works that form her autobiographical trilogy To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1984) and Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire (1975). I examine how the authors structure their autobiographies around the moment of becoming a writer and around their relationship with their mothers. I will focus specifically on how these themes manifest themselves in terms of their relationship with language, how they engage with the question of madness, and with feminist discourse. Frame's and Cardinal's texts are of value to any such enquiry as both authors engage - in different ways - with these issues, but other autobiographical works by women are also pertinent to our discussion, specifically with reference to fictionalisation of the themes of writing, madness, and the mother. Janet Frame's 'Third Place' in the above quotation, can be seen as a metaphor for the world of fiction and of special interest here is how the women writers arrive at this 'third place' through writing on their lives 'with their mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths'. Writing on women's autobiographies has proliferated in the last fifteen years or so. Theories on women's autobiographical writing concentrate mainly on three areas: self-representation, questions of identity (collective versus individual), and the public and the private (male versus female). Patricia Meyer Spacks voices a view that is prevalent in many of the earlier studies: Women, for obvious social reasons, have traditionally had more difficulty than men about making public claims of their own importance. They have excelled in the writing of diaries and journals, which require no such claims, more than in the production of total works offering a coherent interpretation of their experience.3 3

Patricia Meyer Spacks, 'Selves in Hiding', in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 112-132, p. 112. Other theorists have also pointed out how writing an autobiography is a claim of authority and puts the marginalised woman in the centre. Sidonie Smith explains: 'The mythologies of gender conflate human and male figures of selfhood, aligning male selfhood with culturally valued stories. Autobiography is itself one of the forms of selfhood

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The central claim that diaries and journals are inherently a woman's pursuit is problematic as are any claims that women's autobiographies are inherently different from men's autobiographies. Such claims seem to me to limit the study of autobiography and are not open to the many possibilities life-writing offers; a mode of writing which has always been a hybrid one. Many of the theorists claim that women's autobiographies are more experimental; that women are bound to question the genre more than male autobiographers.4 When describing women's autobiography some of the theorists use words such as fragmented, formless, anecdotal, disruptive, subversive,5 while others point out that these words can also be used to describe autobiographies by men and want to focus on other things such as the importance of collective identity versus individualism in women's writing.6 Felicity Nussbaum argues: Women's autobiographies, [Jelinek] claims, are fragmented, interrupted, formless, and even when basically linear are anecdotal and disruptive. Such reasoning, however, fails to account, on the one hand, for the large number of diaries and journals written by men and, on the other hand, for many women's autobiographies (such as conversion narrative, for example) that display narrative closure - a

constituting the idea of man and in turn promoting that idea. Choosing to write autobiography, therefore, she unmasks her transgressive desire for cultural and literary authority' A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 50. 4 See for instance Shari Benstock, 'Authorizing the Autobiographical', in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 10-33. 5 E. C. Jelinek, 'Introduction: Women's Autobiography and the Male Tradition', in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, pp. 1-20. 6 Susan Stanford Friedman, 'Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice', in The Private Self, pp. 34-62.

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This argument I believe to be valid, as I maintain that one has always to be aware of the conventions of fiction deployed in autobiography and how these conventions are not gender based, even though the themes might be. When it comes to the question of the public and the private most of the theorists repeat the same private/female versus public/male binarism and claim that by writing an autobiography women move the private into the sphere of the public,8 but this ignores the fact that autobiography almost by definition moves the private to the public. More to the point would be to say that autobiography can be a potent tool for women's voices, as feminists have long insisted on the politics of the private. Other theorists want to focus on how women represent their individual lives in connection with the cultural construction of the female.9 What is often blurred in these discussions is the distinction between the text and the life, and they sometimes fail to recognise the problematics of referentiality and representation in autobiography. I do not intend to study the texts in order to make claims about the difference between women's and men's autobiographies but rather to look at how feminist discourse is incorporated in individual texts and how that can illuminate the complex relationship between autobiography and fiction. Feminist theories have, of course, focused on ideas on mothering and writing, and ideas about the mother and writing are strongly linked with écriture feminine. As Colette Hall explains: 'The story of mother and daughter hidden in 'the depths of literary texts' constitutes the inner structure upon which l'écriture

7

Felicity A. Nussbaum, 'Eighteenth-Century Women's Autobiographical Commonplaces', in The Private Self, pp. 147-171, p. 153. 8 See for instance Linda Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures (London: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997), p. 12. 9 See Friedman, op. cit., p. 40.

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féminine feeds itself.'10 I examine Frame's and Cardinal's texts in this context, as both authors are preoccupied with writing and the mother. But theories of écriture feminine will not be specifically applied in examining the structure of the texts, rather I aim to compare the vocabulary of feminist discourse with the vocabulary of the autobiographers. My aim here is not to look for specific examples of écriture feminine - which Morag Shiach explains with reference to Hélène Cixous's ideas, claiming that it 'involves an exploration of the subversive, and the political, possibilities of a writing practice that sets itself up in opposition to such cultural categorization: a writing practice that Cixous describes as 'feminine''11 - but rather to investigate how ideas of the feminine are given shape in these autobiographies. The symbolism and myths surrounding mother-daughter relationships are of interest here. In the first part I look at how the authors grapple with the relationship with the mother. The writers represent the mother as an obstacle on the way to self-representation and they tend to define themselves against the mother. One can see how the descriptions of the autobiographer's feelings toward her mother follow a similar pattern: the mother is a constant presence; then evokes repulsion or even hatred; and finally denotes an absence of strong feelings or pity. Moreover, I am interested to see how this pattern interacts with the descriptions of the start of a writing life, and what that tells us about fiction in autobiography. The second part is an examination of how women writers describe in their autobiographies how, why, and when they became writers, and how fictional strategies are used in these accounts. Becoming a writer, in these texts, is usually linked with freedom from the mother, from madness, and/or from traditional female roles. The pattern the 10 Colette Hall, 'L'Ecriture féminine and the Search for the Mother in the Works of Violette Leduc and Marie Cardinal', in Women in French Literature, ed. Michel Guggenheim (Saratoga, CAL: Amna Libri, 1988), pp. 231-238, p. 231. See also Marianne Hirsch, 'Mothers and Daughters', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (1981) 201-220 (p. 204). 11 Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 9-10.

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accounts often follow can be described in terms of unhappiness, struggle, or depression until they start writing. (This pattern is reminiscent of the conversion narrative.) The move the writers describe is from being defined by others (family, tradition, doctors) to self-expression and liberation (an epiphany of some kind). I will focus on how the writers represent this period in their lives and the role gender has in that representation and what status this period has in the autobiography as a whole.

2. On Words and Language Janet Frame's autobiography is in three volumes, To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City. In trilogies it is often the case that the middle part is the high point and the first and third parts can be seen to serve as introduction and epilogue respectively and Frame's trilogy is no exception. That in itself should be enough to alert the reader to this autobiography's strong engagement with conventions of fiction writing. For there to be a high point the autobiographer must take an event in her life and give it, or explain, the significance such high points need. The decisive event in Frame's life, which constitutes the middle part of her autobiography, is when she was declared insane and spent nine years of her life in and out of mental institutions. The story of how this came about is told in the first part of the second volume, An Angel at My Table, in four chapters called '1945 One, Two, Three, and Four'. Frame does not describe in any detail her stay in the mental homes, but places the emphasis here on how she ended up there and how she eventually got out. The first volume describes Frame's childhood and the third volume her life as a writer. The middle volume is in fact a condensed version of the trilogy structure, as it recounts how Frame came to be sent to a mental home and how she eventually managed to live outside them and become a writer. Her struggle to become a writer runs through the whole autobiography and reaches its high point in the last volume. Frame's autobiography is a story of a woman losing and then very

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slowly regaining control over her own life. The work describes a process of being (wrongly) labelled by others and a liberation through self-representation and writing. It is a story with a clear structure, a logical progression from beginning, middle and end, nearly all of it told in chronological order. Frame hardly makes any references to the future in the first volume which covers her childhood, though the stories she tells often anticipate to some extent what will happen later. It is only when she leaves childhood that she makes occasional references to the future, as she explains at the end of the first volume: adolescent time now became a whirlpool, and so the memories do not arrange themselves to be observed and written about, they whirl, propelled by a force beneath, with different memories rising to the surface at different times and thus denying the existence of a 'pure' autobiography and confirming, for each moment, a separate story accumulating to a million stories, all different and with some memories forever staying beneath the surface. (To the Is-Land, p. 161)

Frame still tells her story mostly in chronological order, but the reader becomes more aware of the importance of the structure she gives her story. The denial of the existence of what she calls 'pure' autobiography moves her toward fiction, as the memories do not allow simply to be told. She has to sort them out, choose which stories to tell, so they will have a direction, a structure. This choosing and sorting highlights the fact that Frame's narrative is a meticulously constructed narrative.12 One of the themes that is prevalent throughout the autobiography is Frame's preoccupation with words. She writes about how she was fascinated with words from an early age, a fascination which prefigures her dream of becoming a writer. She describes how excited 12

As W. S. Broughton also points out in his essay, '"With Myself as Myself": A Reading of Janet Frame's Autobiography', in The Ring of Fire: Essays on Janet Frame, ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney: Dangeroo Press, 1992) pp. 221-232, p. 225.

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she became by certain words and how they served as a blueprint for a story: I was enthralled by their meaning and by the fact that all three seemed to be part of the construction of every story everyone was deciding, having a destination, observing, in order to decide and define the destination and know how to deal with adventures along the way. (To the Is-Land, p. 44)

The way Frame's choice and treatment of childhood memories subtly anticipates later events is one of the major characteristics of her autobiography. It is not overly emphasised and the reader has no warning of what is going to happen to her. It is only when rereading the text that one sees the subtle, sometimes obscure, pointers, as in a meticulously constructed novel. 'Everyone deciding' would, for a long period in her life, mean someone else deciding for her what her 'destination' would be. With this early feeling for plot, we see the plot of her own story, her 'adventures' and how she became a writer. We see a child obsessed with words, stories and poetry she often misunderstands: 'I read a story, To the Is-Land, about some children going to an Is-Land.' 'It's I-Land,' Myrtle corrected. [. . .] In the end, reluctantly, I had to accept the ruling, although within myself I still thought of it as the Is-Land. (To the IsLand, p. 41)

On the surface Frame accepts her older sister's authority but in her own mind 'island' remains an 'is-land', thereby stating her own identity, and she emphasises the fact by using the title of this story as a title for the autobiography's first volume. It is as if she has reclaimed the right to use words in the way she wants, and no longer has to accept outside intervention and authority. Hence, Frame reasserts her private symbolism and myths, which others looked at as misreadings and misunderstandings. The title of the first volume refers to her fascination with words, but also denotes a journey from the 'was-land'

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(the past) to the Is-land (the present), a journey to another place, 'third place', 'a mirror city', which refers to her life as a writer but also to her homeland, New Zealand. And by using 'is-land' in the title of her autobiography, Frame reasserts her authority over words, and her private understanding of them. Frame constantly reiterates how we experience events through words. There are forbidden words that dramatic events suddenly make commonplace. She describes her reaction to her sister's early death thus: 'This sudden intrusion of the word morgue into our lives, where before it had been a forbidden word, with us now saying it openly, made me feel grown-up, accomplished, and alone' (To the Is-Land, p. 107). Frame describes her sister's death in terms of the weight and importance of new words; how that tragic event meant that words were suddenly allowed which previously had been forbidden. Thus it is the acceptance of the word 'morgue' into their lives which denotes how her sister's death made her feel 'grown-up, accomplished, and alone'. Frame captures in this one sentence all her ambivalent feelings about her sister's death, as she both loved her and was frightened of her behaviour. Frame's longing for peace, for being a 'good girl', not to 'make trouble', make her at times almost invisible in the narrative. We read many stories about other members of her family; her brother's epilepsy, her sister's dreams of fame and her sister's disobedience. It is only when it comes to poetry that Janet as a character comes alive. She often talks about her childhood wish to be special and her very romantic notions of the life of a poet. Frame is certain she needs imagination, something she does not believe she has, but 'imagination' is after all only a word: 'My life had been for many years in the power of words. It was driven now by a constant search and need for what was, after all, 'only a word' - imagination' (To the Is-Land, p. 140). Years later, after having spent time in a mental hospital, another word enters her life, which is going to have dramatic effects on her whole existence:

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Frame finds this out after being in hospital and does not know what it means. Her sense of fear and alienation is expressed poignantly in this instant of mis-pronunciation. The diagnosis (perhaps a better word would be 'the verdict' as it has all the power of a condemnation), she finds out by accident, turns out to be only a word since in fact she never was schizophrenic. Frame inscribes some words, for instance 'destination', 'adventure', 'morgue', 'imagination', 'schizophrenia' with almost omnipotent power. They come to symbolise her inner life, her dreams, and her aspirations. We see in this text also the darker side of this fascination with words. Words do not only denote freedom and expression but can also be used by others to define one, and this labelling can relegate one to the third person. Thus language in this text both frees and binds. Frame talks throughout her autobiography about moving between the first, second and third person, describing her student days, when her timidity and lack of confidence left her by herself, thus: - all of my family were part of the shared 'we' which I knew to be lost. I tried to use 'we' when I talked of my life as a student, but I knew it was futile, that I was describing what 'they', the students did, where they went, how they felt, what they said, and in order to survive I had to conceal my 'I', what I really felt, thought, and dreamed about. I had moved from the second person plural to a shadowy 'I', almost a nothingness, like a no-woman's land. (An Angel at My Table, p. 27)

Frame would inhabit this 'no-woman's land' for some time to come. She is denied the possibility of a collective identity - a substitute 13

Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 72. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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family - but she is still not an individual. Here 'I' denotes a ghostly nothingness rather than a presence. Frame is fascinated with words, she is defined and labelled and a prisoner of words, but words in the end free her. Her treatment of these stories about words follow the same pattern throughout the autobiography. The stories are not a freeflow of fragmented thoughts, but describe a struggle to control words and to control language. All these stories about fascination, labelling, and freedom serve to highlight some aspects of her life and character: the child who wanted to be a poet; the young woman who clung to labels and words even though they were harmful, as long as they gave her an identity; and the freedom the writer exercises by using words to serve her own ends, her own poetic language. It is by becoming a writer that the power shifts, from words that had power over her, to her having power over words. Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire is also, although with different emphasis, very much concerned with language, as it recounts Cardinal's slow recovery from mental illness through psychoanalysis. Cardinal describes her mental health in terms of the relationship she had with words and language. At the start of the book she has great difficulty with words and then gradually she gains more control over them instead of letting them control her. The structure of the book is reminiscent of the English detective story. The book starts when Cardinal's health is at its lowest point (the crime) when she goes to see the doctor (the detective) for the first time. From then on she goes backward in time to explain the reasons why she got to this point (the motive) and forwards in time to explain how she was eventually cured (the detection and solution). She, therefore, holds the reader in double suspension; how did this happen? and how (as the reader knows she is cured) will she be cured? Cardinal's main worry at the start of Les Mots pour le dire is how she is going to find the words to talk to the doctor: 'Prostrée comme je l'étais, recluse dans mon univers, comment trouver les mots qui passeraient de moi à lui?'14 It is vital to her to 'trouver les mots qui 14

Marie Cardinal, Les Mots pour le dire (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1975), p. 11. (Hereafter quoted in the text with Pat Goodheart's translation in

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passeraient de moi à lui'. Communication is of great importance; it is almost a matter of life and death, as she has to find the words in order to find a way out of her chaotic universe. The book starts in a wordless muddle. Cardinal lives in a world where words have a life of their own, they are dangerous and do not communicate or express anything: Pour moi, à cette époque, un mot, isolé de la masse des autres mots se mettait à exister, devenait une chose importante, devenait peut-être même la chose la plus importante, qui m'habitait, me torturait, ne me quittait plus, reparaissait dans mes nuits et m'attendait à mon reveil. (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 16)15

This is an even starker example, compared to Frame, of the destructive power of words. Cardinal works very hard to get away from this over-emphasis on isolated words, words that in the end do not make sense. This tortuous relationship with words is gradually reversed in the psychoanalysis: 'Parlez, dites tout ce qui vous passe par la tête, essayez de ne pas faire de tri, de ne pas réfléchir, essayez de ne pas arranger vos phrases. Tout est important, chaque mot.' C'était le seul remède qu'il me donnait et je m'en gavais. Peut-être que c'était ça l'arme contre la chose: ce flot de mots, ce maelström de mots, cette masse de mots, cet ouragan de mots! Les mots charriaient la méfiance, la peur, l'incompréhension, la rigueur, la volonté, l'ordre, la loi, la

footnotes.) 'Prostrate as I was, withdrawn into my own universe, how to find the words which would flow between us?' The Words to Say It: An Autobiographical Novel, trans. Pat Goodheart (London: The Women's Press, 1993), p. 3. 15 'For me at that time, a word isolated from the mass of other words started to live, becoming an important thing, becoming perhaps even the most important thing, inhabiting me, torturing me, never leaving me, reappearing in my dreams, waiting for me to wake up.' p. 8.

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discipline et aussi la tendresse, la douceur, l'amour, la chaleur, la liberté. (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 82)16

Cardinal moves from being a prisoner of words to being able to use them to her own ends. The hurricane of words that sweeps away everything in its path is not reflected in the text we have before us. Cardinal explains that psychoanalysis cannot be written down, it would take thousands of pages, so the text before us is a structured, formal account of the meaning this flow of words had for her. But it was also a flow of words that made Cardinal ill in the first place as she explains in her book Autrement dit (1977): Dans mon enfance puis dans ma jeunesse j'ai reçu un maximum d'informations, de vocabulaire, toute la gamme des signes qui servent aux femmes occidentales protégées à se reconnaître, à profiter du monde, à se débrouiller. Tout ça m'a rendue folle comme tu sais, je l'ai avalé de travers.17

It is the power of words and how they shape our lives, our ideas about gender, and our identity that Cardinal is interested in. If you swallow it wrong you go mad. But perhaps the interesting question that comes up here is how is it possible to get all this information and not go mad? And sometimes Cardinal's madness is presented as the inevitable lot of women.

16

'"Talk, say whatever comes into your head; try not to choose or reflect, or in any way compose your sentences. Everything is important, every word." It was the only remedy he gave me and I gorged myself on it. Perhaps it was my weapon against the Thing: that flood of words, that maelstrom, that mass of words, that hurricane! Words swept away distrust, fear, lack of understanding, severity, will, order, law, discipline as well as tenderness, sweetness, love, warmth and freedom.' p. 65. 17 Marie Cardinal, Autrement dit (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1977), p. 64. 'In my childhood, then in my adolescence, I received a maximum of information, words, the entire gamut of signs protected western women use to recognize themselves, to get by with, to profit from the world. All that caused me to go mad, as you know. I swallowed it wrong.' In Other Words, trans. Amy Cooper (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 50.

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Cardinal's relationship with words gradually changes throughout the book. She learns to understand the importance of communication and she learns to say words she could not say before. She accepts and iterates words about bodily functions and her own body and therefore accepts her own body: 'J'étais une dame rouge dans un château des cartes. Suffisait de dire le mot 'merde', de penser sans honte et sans dégoût à ce que ce mot contenait, pour que le château s'écroule!' (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 264).18 This is an intense relationship with words that is slowly transformed into a more creative mode as she starts writing. The text is a carefully structured account of the chaos that was her life. Her handling of words is not like it was in the psychoanalysis itself, but at one remove from the process of psychoanalysis because now taken up into the process of writing.

3. The Discourse of Madness and Liberation Frame's and Cardinal's descriptions of the mental illnesses they suffered from seem to have one thing in common. The illness is somehow 'unsayable'.19 Cardinal searches for the 'words to say it' while Frame describes madness as isolation from the world because of her inability to express herself. Neither of them finds in mental illness any source of creativity. In her study of the metaphors and myths 18

'I was a red queen in a castle of cards. It was enough to say the word 'shit' free of shame and disgust before what was contained in the word, for the castle to fall down!' p. 243. 19 The relationship between madness, gender, and writing has preoccupied feminist discourse as this passage by Shosana Felman illustrates: 'If, in our culture, the woman is by definition associated with madness, her problem is how to break out of this (cultural) imposition of madness without taking up the critical and therapeutic positions of reason: how to avoid speaking both as mad and as not mad. The challenge facing the woman today is nothing less than to "re-invent" language, to re-learn how to speak: to speak not only against, but outside of the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of masculine meaning.' 'Woman and Madness: The Critical Phallacy', Diacritics (Winter 1975) 2-10 (pp. 9-10).

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surrounding cancer and tuberculosis Susan Sontag claims: 'Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.'20 This could also be applied to mental illness (perhaps even more so), and the stigma attached to it. Mary Elene Wood points to the central problem that women who have been declared insane face when writing about their experiences: All of these writers were faced with the problem of how to create self-narratives that would be read as legitimate, as sane, when they themselves had been labelled insane [. . .] Insanity was that which literary form was not, that which acceptable literature contained or excluded. To make an argument or to tell a story was to spin out a logic. How could these women use these forms to tell their stories without recreating the very categories of sane and insane that had meant their own ostracism and incarceration and that continued to rule the lives of women left behind in the asylum?21

This is at the centre of both Frame's and Cardinal's works; the loss of authority and legitimacy they experienced because of their mental problems. And they attempt to regain authority and selfhood in writing. What distinguishes them from the nineteenth-century autobiographers Wood writes about is that Frame and Cardinal are both experienced and established writers when they write their autobiographies. Frame wrote her first novel, Owls do Cry (1961) which many readers thought was autobiographical - on a woman who was 'left behind in the asylum'. Distinguishing herself from the woman who did not get out, Frame gained control over her own life, her own story.22 20

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), p. 6. 21 Mary Elene Wood, The Writing on the Wall: Women's Autobiography and the Asylum (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 11. 22 Wood mentions this as well: 'The control over her life lost in the asylum is regained in the telling of the narrative.' Ibid., p. 10.

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Mental illness carries a stigma that no other illness has. Frame explains how the mentally ill were viewed in her community: The train drew into the station. Yes, the loonies were there; everyone look out at the loonies, known in Oamaru as those who were sent 'down the line', and in Dunedin, 'up the line'. Often it was hard to tell who were the loonies. A few people left the train here - they'd be relations, visiting. We had no loonies in our family, although we knew of people who had been sent 'down the line', but we did not know what they looked like, only that there was a funny look in their eye and they'd attack you with a bread knife or an axe. (An Angel at My Table, p. 13)

If madness is not represented here as 'morally, if not literally contagious', it is nevertheless dangerous to come into contact with the insane as they will attack you. You were 'sent' there, and were distinguished by a menacing gaze. Many years later Frame becomes one of the 'loonies', and one of 'them'. After a time in her 'no-woman's land' Frame is almost relieved to have a label: schizophrenia. She does not recognise any of the symptoms but after having been intensely lonely she is suddenly noticed, and she has a word that explains away all her troubles: 'My consolation was my 'talks' with John Forrest as he was my link with the world I had known, and because I wanted these 'talks' to continue, I built up a formidable schizophrenic repertoire' (An Angel at My Table, p. 78). What Frame describes here is a 'fake' psychoanalysis: the words do not free her as they do Cardinal; Frame makes them up to keep John Forrest interested, to get the attention she so badly craves. Forrest tells her of artists who suffered from mental illnesses and Frame believes that finally she has what it takes to become a writer (even without 'imagination'). Frame tells a story of her childhood that prefigures how she clings to her 'schizophrenia' later. She listens to performances from 'crippled' children on the radio: 'I came to link the two. I perceived that in a world where it was admirable to be brave and noble, it was more brave and noble to be

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writing poems if you were crippled or blind than if you had no disability' (To the Is-Land, p. 98). The need to be special, the dreams of some recognition, only gain their terrifying significance half-way through the book when we learn of her stays in mental hospitals. Disability is noble, makes one a better artist, gives one access to the world of the mind, just as 'imagination' was her ticket to that world. Frame constantly expresses ambivalent feelings toward her predicament. On the one hand she likes the attention and being able to get rid of all external pressures and responsibility by going into hospital, but on the other hand the hospitals are dreadful places where she almost comes to spend the rest of her life, and where she is relegated to the third person: My previous community had been my family. In To the IsLand I constantly use the first person plural - we, not I. My time as a student was an I-time. Now, as a Seacliff patient, I was again part of a group, yet more deeply alone, not even a creviced 'I'. I became 'she', one of 'them'. (An Angel at My Table, p. 70)

Frame becomes one of them, the people on the outside, who are not viewed as individuals, but as a collective group of others. It is impossible to assert any individuality and thereby any authority over one's experience. It is only when we re-read the autobiography that we realise how carefully structured it is both in terms of its form and content. The stories from Frame's childhood have a subtle connection to the main theme of the second volume: writing and madness. When she describes a piano lesson where her teacher tells her mother, 'Jean's brilliant'23, she describes her ambivalent reaction: This judgement pleased, confused, and frightened me with an intrusion of opinion and expectation that would now deny me the world of making music as a place of private escape [. . .] Therefore, although I was proud of being thought 'brilliant', I wanted to hide, and, noting this, Jessie 23

Janet Frame was called 'Jean' as a child.

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Her use of the phrase 'identity-destroying third person' only becomes significant in the second volume where the 'praising, blaming scrutiny of others' eventually lands her in hospital. In the first chapters of An Angel at My Table it is stated repeatedly how scared she is of other people, of other groups to which she does not belong, of the opinions of others. She longs for a 'private escape' but she also dreams of becoming a published writer: '[I] dreamed of seeing my poems printed, myself speaking out boldly, brilliantly, in denial of my timidity, isolation and fear of The World' (An Angel at My Table, p. 29). The story of the piano lesson follows the same structure; the confusion when someone praises her, followed by longing for a place of private escape, which is what she eventually finds in writing. So the cyclical structure of the trilogy is repeated in other stories within the trilogy. The theme of being denied her 'own' self, of being silenced and then finally speaking out is repeated again and again. Most of her life, until she is sent to the mental hospital, has been spent 'being a good girl', being 'no trouble at all', a part of family or school. But like most of her masks, her ways of coping with the world do not work in the end. There are always the oppositional drives between the desire to 'be no trouble at all' and the fear of denying her own self: What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated. (An Angel at My Table, pp. 62-63)

This is how she explains her great need for self-expression and her only way of self-expression is writing. It is a tortuous route for her on her way to 'live as herself, as she knew herself to be'. It is a fight that takes many years, most of them spent in mental homes. She does not describe her stays in them in any detail and it is not until years later in

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London that doctors finally try to find out the nature of her problems. That process is no less traumatic: The loss was great. At first, the truth seemed to be more terrifying than the lie. Schizophrenia, as a psychosis, had been an accomplishment, removing ordinary responsibility from the suffered. I was bereaved. I was ashamed. How could I ask for help directly when there was 'nothing wrong with me'? How could I explain myself when I could no longer move cunningly but necessarily from the status of a writer to one of having schizophrenia, back and forth when the occasion suited?24

Her whole world and identity is shattered once more. Frame has to rebuild her life, knowing that she has lost ten years needlessly. The restraints of the verdict of having schizophrenia were great but it also offered freedom from ordinary responsibilities. As 'imagination' was once taken from her so is 'schizophrenia'. Frame's central problem is that others were allowed to define her and her life. That is, of course, one of the ways in which minorities are kept marginalised. The same power structure is at work, the same binarism: healthy versus ill, especially in the cases of mental illness, real or otherwise. That is also Cardinal's problem; it was not until somebody came along who allowed her to define herself that cure was possible. Masks, lies and problems with identity are also themes in Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire. Cardinal describes how she 'hid' behind a physical problem so as to mask the mental problems: Tout cela justifiait - me semblait-il - mon dérangement, le rendait acceptable, moins douteux. On ne mettait pas en asile une femme parce qu'elle saignait et que cela la terrifiait. Tant que je ne parlerais que du sang on ne verrait que lui, on ne verrait pas ce qu'il masquait. (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 14)25 24

Janet Frame, The Envoy from Mirror City (London: Flamingo, 1993), pp. 115-116. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) 25 'All that - it seemed to me - vindicated my troubled mind, made it acceptable, less suspect. They wouldn't put a woman in an asylum just

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This relationship between body and language has been very much central to theories on écriture feminine, both for Luce Irigaray and Cixous. As Irigaray points out: 'Women do not manage to articulate their madness: they suffer it directly in their body.'26 This is at the heart of Cardinal's problem. There is one clear distinction to be made here between the two texts. Cardinal's mental problems were of a much more serious nature than Frame's problems which were mostly caused by long stays in mental hospitals. Cardinal's work is about how psychoanalysis cured her of her very real and frightening problems. The scenes Cardinal remembers are transformed in psychoanalysis and then again in writing. The relationship between madness and writing in both texts is that one negates the other in the sense that writing is a cure, and madness is not a point of creation. Writing is not possible in the isolated world of mental illness, neither is describing that illness possible in writing. It is only after Frame and Cardinal overcome their troubles that it is possible for them to speak out, to communicate with others. Mental illness for them is a denial of self-representation, it is a denial of the contradictions in their lives, the self-contradiction Barbara Johnson believes to be 'vigorously repressed in women'.27 It is these contradictions in their lives, in their feelings toward others, that they are finally able to express without fear of 'the world' in Frame's case, fear of the 'thing' (which is how she describes her illness) in Cardinal's case. It is also at times the case that these stories of mental illness are parallel to the role gender plays in their lives. Wood says about her nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors: because she was bleeding and it terrified her. As long as I would only speak about the blood, only the blood would be seen, not what it masked.' p. 6. 26 Luce Irigaray in an interview with Diana Adlam and Couze Venn in 'Women's Exile: Interview with Luce Irigaray', Ideology and Consciousness (Summer 1978), quoted in Mary Jacobus, 'The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss', in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 37-52, p. 52. 27 Johnson, op. cit., p. 153.

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As each writer tells a story of diagnosis, incarceration, and transformation, she discovers and engages the ways that definitions of 'woman' and the 'feminine' intersect with notions of madness. She comes to question the boundary she was taught to see between normality and abnormality, legitimate religious belief and mental disease, lay experience and expert knowledge, the inside of the asylum and the outside.28

Frame's and Cardinal's texts echo this description. Frame in her attempts to avoid traditional female roles - becoming a teacher or having a family - and this struggle against expectations, and in some sense her own feelings, is what drives her into the mental homes. Cardinal refuses throughout her work to use the jargon of psychoanalysis. She emphasises the 'lay experience', and gives it authority and at the same time emphasises the uniqueness of each individual's experience of psychoanalysis.29 Madness and the feminine have been equated in the past, for example in the form of the strong link between women and hysteria.30 Breaking away from madness can signify a breaking away from any relegation, such as doing what is expected of you as a woman: being a good girl and taking on the role (the mask) that you are expected to. Selfcontradiction is also a large factor in the representation of motherdaughter relationships. The autobiographies we are concerned with are about the reclaiming of lives, through stories, and in the next section I

28

Wood, op. cit., p. 21. As Lucille Cairns explains: 'Cardinal's style is often highly poetic, but it never mystifies, making instead a virtue of limpid clarity. Like Annie Ernaux or Danièle Sallenave, she shuns the obfuscation risked by the densely poetic style characteristic of écriture féminine, instead prioritising communication over the attractions of esotericity.' Marie Cardinal: Motherhood and Creativity (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992), p. 6. 30 See for instance Elaine Showalter's discussion in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), especially pp. 49-62. 29

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will look at how this manifests itself in the descriptions of the crucial mother-daughter relationship.

4. The Mother and Sexuality The relationship with the mother is a theme handled in many autobiographies by women.31 It is a crucial element in Cardinal's work, but not as prominent in Frame's autobiography. The motherdaughter relationship has also been analysed by many feminist theorists and is clearly an area of great importance in any discussion of gender and autobiography. I examine the pattern these narratives follow, look at similarities and differences and see what it tells us about fiction and autobiography. Marie Cardinal's autobiography describes a complex and disastrous mother-daughter relationship. Cardinal describes how after a mental illness she went through psychoanalysis and was slowly liberated from her illness (and her mother) through talking and writing. Cardinal's tale is one of rebirth as if she was never 'completely' born because of what her mother did to her. The representation of the mother as a force of repression of sexuality and desire is common in women's writing. The main obstacle on the road to the freedom the woman desires is her mother, and her feelings toward her mother. The central problem in mother-daughter relationships, according to some theorists, is the mother's denial of her sexual being that causes the daughter's repression of sexuality and desire. Nancy Friday claims: Saying one thing about sex and motherhood, feeling contrary emotions about both at the same time, mother presents an enigmatic picture to her daughter. The first lie the denial that a woman's sexuality may be in conflict with

31

For instance in Marguerite Duras, L'Amant (1984), Annie Ernaux, Une Femme (1987), Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance (1983), Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1975), and many others.

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her role as a mother - is so upsetting to traditional ideas of femininity that it cannot be talked about.32

One can find instances of this in quite a few women's autobiographies. Marguerite Duras says in L'Amant: 'La mère n'a pas connu la jouissance'.33 And Cardinal describes an instance of seeing her mother enjoy pleasure: J'épiais ma mère. Elle était seule et elle arpentait la longue pièce. Si bien qu'à chacun de ses passages je pouvais voir nettement l'expression de son visage et cela me flanquait un coup au cœur. Ses traits étaient libres. Ses yeux presque fermés, sa bouche entrouverte, laissant filtrer un plaisir, une satisfaction, intenses. Je la trouvais indécente. (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 276)34

32

Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: A Daughter's Search for Identity (London: Sheldon Press, 1979), p. 7. Julia Kristeva explains the same problem in Des Chinoises: 'Between this historical constraint and the myth of the Virgin impregnated by the Word there is still a certain distance, which will be bridged by two psychoanalytical processes, one relating to the role of the mother, the other to the workings of language. The first consists in ceasing to repress the fact that the mother is other, has no penis, but experiences jouissance and bears children. But this acknowledged only at the pre-conscious level: just enough to imagine that she bears children, while censuring the fact that she has experienced jouissance in an act of coitus, that there was a 'primal scene'. Once more, the vagina and the jouissance of the mother are disregarded and immediately replaced by that which puts the mother on the side of the socio-symbolic community: childbearing and procreation in the name of the father.' 'On Chinese Women', trans. Seán Hand in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 139-159, p. 146. 33 Marguerite Duras, L'Amant (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984), p. 50. 'Their mother never knew pleasure.' The Lover, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Collins, 1985), p. 43. 34 'I was spying on my mother. She was alone, pacing the long room. So that each time she went by I could see clearly the expression on her face and it dealt me a blow to the heart. Her features were relaxed. Her eyes, almost closed, her mouth partly open, let out intense pleasure and satisfaction. I found her indecent.' p. 256.

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Cardinal spies on her mother, sees her in a state of pleasure and finds her indecent. It is evident from many of these texts that the daughter finds it difficult to imagine that the mother is a sexual being with her own desires. When they are glimpsed in a fleeting moment of pleasure, it offends and disturbs the image of the mother's body. But it is precisely this denial of sexual desire that inhibits the daughter's pleasure as well. Annie Ernaux has written on her mother in Une Femme. She attempts there to look objectively at her mother by looking at her status in society. She describes the difficulty this poses: En écrivant, je vois tantôt la 'bonne' mère, tantôt la 'mauvaise'. Pour échapper à ce balancement venu du plus loin de l'enfance, j'essaie de décrire et d'expliquer comme s'il s'agissait d'une autre mère et d'une fille qui ne serait pas moi. Ainsi, j'écris de la manière la plus neutre possible, mais certaines expressions ('s'il t'arrive un malheur!') ne parviennent pas à l'être pour moi, comme le seraient d'autres, abstraites ('refus du corps et de la sexualité' par exemple). Au moment où je me les rappelle, j'ai la même sensation de découragement qu'à seize ans, et, fugitivement, je confonds la femme qui a le plus marqué ma vie avec ces mères africaines serrant les bras de leur petite fille derrière son dos, pendant que la matrone exciseuse coupe le clitoris.35

35 Annie Ernaux, Une Femme (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987), p. 62. 'As I write, I see her sometimes as a 'good', sometimes as a 'bad' mother. To get away from these contrasting views, which come from my earliest childhood, I try to describe and explain her life as if I were writing about someone else's mother and a daughter who wasn't me. Although I try to be as objective as possible, certain expressions, such as 'If you ever have an accident. . .' will always strike a sensitive chord in me, while others remain totally abstract, for instance, 'the denial of one's own body and sexuality'. When I remember these expressions, I experience the same feeling of dillusion I had when I was sixteen. Fleetingly, I confuse the woman who influenced me most with an African mother pinning her daughter's arms behind her back while the village midwife slices off the girl's clitoris.' A Woman's Story, trans. Tanya Leslie (London, New York: Quartet Books, 1990), pp. 50-51.

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This violent image of the mother, which objectivity and sociology cannot free her from, is very different from ideas some feminist theorists have about the mother as a benevolent source of creativity. Toril Moi explains Hélène Cixous's ideas thus: What [Cixous] describes as some tentative comments turn out to be no less than a lyrical, euphoric evocation of the essential bond between feminine writing and the mother as source and origin of the voice to be heard in all female texts.36

And later on Moi explains: 'Cixous's mother-figure is clearly what Melanie Klein would call the Good Mother: the omnipotent and generous dispenser of love, nourishment and plenitude.'37 There is a conflict between descriptions of mother-daughter relationships in many of the texts and some feminists' ideas about the 'good mother'.38 Not that the autobiographers never describe the mother as generous and loving, but they all describe the conflicts inherent to the relationship. Barbara Johnson asks: 'Is autobiography somehow always in the process of symbolically killing the mother off by telling her the lie that we have given birth to ourselves?'39 It seems that one 36

Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 114. 37 Ibid., p. 115. 38 It is interesting to note that this conflict between the positive aspects of the 'feminine' described by theorists and the violence in the texts can also be seen elsewhere. Leah D. Hewitt points out in her discussion of Sarraute: 'And yet, despite these resemblances, there remains one crucial aspect of the tropism that sets it apart from Irigaray's fluids, Kristeva's semiotic, and Chodorow's concept of female identity. Whereas the latter are positive forces advocated by the authors, the tropism appears openly confrontational in nature. Sarraute's readers rarely fail to recognize the negativity of the tropism: it involves them most often in the pain and anguish of missed contacts, of failed attempts at communication, or of violent forms of interaction. In Sarraute's world, the possible fusion between people is always threatened.' Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 69. 39 Johnson, op. cit., p. 147.

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could look at that as part of the function of autobiography. Writing an autobiography is in one sense to give birth to yourself, your story. It renders the mother's role obsolete and therefore symbolically kills her off. Most of the writers discussed here talk about the mother in terms of denial of desire and as an obstacle on their way to become writers. It is not because of her they are what they are, but despite her. Admitting to the violence of this strong relationship, often depicted in bodily images and metaphors, usually leads to an attempt at getting rid of the mother. The most violent moment in Cardinal's work is when her mother tells her, as a part of her warning speech about what happens when girls become women, that she tried to abort her: Là, dans la rue, en quelques phrases, elle a crevé mes yeux, elle a percée mes tympans, elle a arraché mon scalp, elle a coupé mes mains, elle a cassé mes genoux, elle a torturé mon ventre, elle a mutilé mon sexe. Je sais aujourd'hui qu'elle était inconsciente du mal qu'elle me faisait et je ne la hais plus. Elle chassait sa folie sur moi, je lui servais d'holocauste. (Les Mots pour le dire, pp. 1534)40

Again Cardinal uses a bodily metaphor to describe a psychological state as in the blood episode; her body is literally torn apart. As her mother tells her how she tried to get rid of her, Cardinal pays her back in kind by writing the autobiography. In her case she exists literally despite her mother. She has long since given birth to herself. And when she realises how she was the sacrifice of her mother's madness, she is slowly cured of her own madness. This struggle between mother and daughter is a dangerous power conflict, and is reminiscent of the danger Cixous sees as inherent in

40

'There on the street, in a few sentences, she put out my eyes, pierced my eardrums, scalped me, cut off my hands, shattered my kneecaps, tortured my stomach, and mutilated my genitals. Today, I know she was unaware of the harm she did me and I no longer hate her. She was discharging her madness onto me; I was the sacrifice.' p. 135.

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any binary categories, such as culture/nature, as they are dependent upon power and exclusion. Shiach explains: Each couple is based on the repression of one of its terms, yet both terms are locked together in violent conflict. Without 'nature', 'culture' is meaningless, yet culture must continually struggle to negate nature, to dominate and control it, with obvious deadly results.41

If we substituted 'mother' and 'daughter' for 'nature' and 'culture', we can see how dangerous this relationship can be. But this struggle is usually not maintained throughout; it is only one phase in this often most important of relationships. The mother-daughter relationship also provides a different structure that I look at in the next part.

4.1. A Presence, a Monster, an Absence: Writing on the Mother The pattern the narrative of the mother-daughter relationship often follows can be summarised thus: a constant presence, the mother's nurturing side; feelings of hatred, repulsion, guilt, described as monstrous; and finally an absence, echoing Nancy Chodorow's ideas on feminine identity.42 In the first volume of her autobiography Frame describes her mother as a constant, loving presence. She describes other mothers as 'thin mothers with no lap and no titties; all the other mothers except our own who was soft and went on about nature and God but who would never be cruel to anything or anyone' (To the IsLand, p. 73). Again the mother is described in terms of her body. The

41

Shiach, op. cit., p. 7. 'Because mothers are the primary love object and object of identification for children of both genders, and because fathers come into the relational picture later and differently, the oedipus complex in girls is characterized by the continuation of preoedipal attachments and preoccupations.' The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 133. 42

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mother seldom becomes a character in her own right in these autobiographies. It is the relationship between mother and daughter, and how the daughter perceives her mother that is all important. Virginia Woolf's mother died when Woolf was very young. She explains how that makes it difficult to see her as a person in her own right: 'And of course she was central, I suspect the word 'central' gets closest to the general feeling I had of living so completely in her atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as a person.'43 The mother is a body, a presence that is always there. If there is one word that sums up the general state of the motherdaughter relationship it is contradiction. It is the mixed feelings of love and hatred, violence and comfort that mark these narratives. Duras writes in L'Amant : Dans les histoires de mes livres qui se rapportent à mon enfance, je ne sais plus tout à coup ce que j'ai évité de dire, ce que j'ai dit, je crois avoir dit l'amour que l'on portait à notre mère mais je ne sais pas si j'ai dit la haine qu'on lui portait aussi et l'amour qu'on se portait les uns les autres, et la haine aussi, terrible, dans cette histoire commune de ruine et de mort qui était celle de cette famille dans tous les cas, dans celui de l'amour comme dans celui de la haine et qui échappe encore à tout mon entendement, qui m'est encore inaccessible, cachée au plus profond de ma chair, aveugle comme un nouveau-né du premier jour.44

43

Virginia Woolf, 'A Sketch of the Past', in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976), p. 92. 44 Duras, op. cit., p. 34. 'In the books I've written about my childhood I can't remember, suddently, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about out love for our mother, but I don't know if I wrote about how we hated her too, or about our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can't understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a new-born child.' p. 29.

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There is no simple resolution to these strong feelings; being objective does not lessen them, and distance and time seem to do little, they still have a remarkably strong hold on the autobiographer. Duras says of her mother: 'elle est à enfermer, à battre, à tuer', and calls her 'la saleté, ma mère, mon amour'.45 The emotions of love and hate are characterised by need and repulsion, moving constantly between identification and alienation. Cardinal talks about the structure of her relationship with her mother as she explored it in psychoanalysis: Je me suis mise à parler de ma mère et cela ne s'est pas arrêté jusqu'à la fin de l'analyse. Au cours des années je me suis enfoncée en elle comme dans un gouffre noir. Ainsi aije fait la connaissance de la femme qu'elle voulait que je sois [. . .] De ma mère, maintenant, j'ai le souvenir de l'avoir aimée à la folie au cours de mon enfance et de mon adolescence, puis de l'avoir haïe et enfin de l'avoir volontairement abandonnée très peu de temps avant sa mort qui a d'ailleurs mis un point final à mon analyse. (Les Mots pour le dire, pp. 83-84)46

This is exactly what happens in many of the autobiographies: first love and then hate and finally an absence of feelings or in some cases pity. On their way to becoming their own persons the authors' relationship with the mother follows the same pattern. When they refuse to play the 'good little girl' the conflict starts, and when the conflict cannot be sustained it ends either in distancing or acceptance. There is a fear shared by Cardinal, Frame, and Duras of becoming like their mothers. This is portrayed as the very worst thing that could 45

Ibid., pp. 31-32. 'she ought to be locked up, beaten, killed'. 'The beast, my mother, my love.' pp. 26-27. 46 'I began to speak of my mother, never stopping until the end of the analysis. Over the years I explored the very depths of her being, as though she were a dark cavern. Thus did i make the acquaintance of the woman she wanted me to be [. . .] What I now remember of my mother is having loved her to distraction in childhood and adolescence, then having hated her, and finally, having abandoned her just before her death, which moreover, put a stop to my analysis.' pp. 66-67.

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happen. Frame's mother wrote poetry but Frame does not want to identify with that at all, she resents her even more because of it: Aware now that Mother had turned increasingly to poetry for shelter, as I was doing, I, with an unfeelingness based on misery of feeling, challenged the worth of some of her beloved poets, aware that my criticism left her flushed and unhappy while I felt a save joy at her distress. I had begun to hate her habit of waiting hand and foot, martyrlike upon her family. When I was eager to do things for myself, Mother was always there, anxious to serve. (An Angel at My Table, p. 159)

The presence that was once comforting has now become cloying and repressing. There is a 'save joy' in seeing her suffer. Any thought that the mother is a person with needs and desires is repressed. The uncontrollable rage toward the mother - because she is what they think they will become, or because they know they cannot ever break away from her, that she will always be there in one way or another - is constantly reiterated. This rage also stems from a fear of losing themselves, of never being able to say 'I', to be independent from her all-encompassing embrace, that can suffocate as much as comfort. There is a constant fear of the moment of identification as this quotation from Frame illustrates: I enjoyed waiting on people, attending to their comfort, doing as they asked, bringing the food they ordered. I had no impatience, irritation, anger, to subdue: I seemed to be a 'born' servant. The knowledge frightened me: I was behaving as my mother had done all the years I had known her, and I was enjoying my new role: I could erase myself completely and live only through the feeling of others. (An Angel at My Table, pp. 77-8)

In this complete erasure of 'herself', she sees her mother and that moment of identification frightens her. It is not that her mother was without character, what Frame realises is that the family has robbed the mother of her personality; that being a mother killed her as an individual. Frame asks: 'What had we done to her, each of us, day

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after day, year after year, that we had washed away her evidence of self?' (An Angel at My Table, p. 105). But it is too late as Frame knows that her path leads her away from her mother: 'I knew, also, that I would never be close to her, for my past and my future life were barriers against the intimacy that grows between mother and daughter' (An Angel at My Table, p. 112). Frame's denial of her mother's role, of what her mother had hoped she would be, distances her from her mother's dreams and expectations, and thereby denies the mother a role in her life. At the end of Les Mots pour le dire Cardinal visits her mother's grave: 'Je vous aime. Oui, c'est ça, je vous aime. Je suis venue ici pour vous déclarer ça une fois pour toutes. Je n'ai pas honte de vous parler. Ça me fait du bien de vous le dire et de vous le répéter: je vous aime, je vous aime' (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 312).47 When Cardinal's mental health improves she frees herself from the strong feelings she had towards her mother. At the end of her mother's life she pitied her and, when she has been dead and buried for a while she finally expresses her love for her.48 She is in some ways even grateful to her mother, for giving her the chance of giving birth to herself: 'Si je n'étais pas devenue folle je n'en serais jamais sortie' (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 313).49 Frame, Cardinal and Duras all describe similar mother-daughter relationships. They are characterised by comfort, struggle, violent feelings, contradictions in the constant oscillation between identification and alienation. The mother is her body, but without desire or pleasure, relegated to the third person in the daughter's autobiography. The descriptions are coloured by feelings of guilt, hence the declarations of love and pity. The authors have fought their battle and in some sense they have told themselves that they have 47

'I love you. Yes, that's right, I love you. I came here to declare it to you, once and for all. I am not ashamed to speak of it. It does me good to say it to you and repeat it! I love you. I love you.' p. 292. 48 See for instance Cairns, op. cit., p. 94. Hall also mentions that Cardinal texts 'represent a search for one's voice and a breaking away from an oppressive system of values which her mother embodies.' op. cit., p. 234. 49 'If I had not become insane, I would never have emerged.' p. 293.

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given birth to themselves. One could say that that is one of the myths, or fictions, of autobiography. What it means to be writing on their mother, is not only claiming to have given birth to themselves, it is an attempt to give birth to her, to be finally in control of that relationship, not be the 'good girl' and behave, but make them behave. Ernaux claims: 'Il me semble maintenant que j'écris sur ma mère pour, à mon tour, la mettre au monde.'50

5. Becoming a Writer The direction of Frame's narrative is always toward her ultimate goal, which is to become a writer. Her interest and fascination with words, her fight against isolation and mental institutions, her travelling after she finally gets out of the asylum, are all steps on her way to become a writer. There are not many people who know from an early age what they want to become and then follow that path ceaselessly. This is the theme that gives an extra dimension to Frame's tale of going into and getting out of mental homes, and lends an added layer to the text. Autobiography is, of course, a good standpoint for discussing selfrepresentation and that is what Frame, Cardinal and Duras all do. By emphasising the importance of self-representation and writing they add an extra dimension to the autobiographical project. For if writing and being able to express yourself freely and independently can change your life, autobiography must offer that kind of liberation as well, since it is the ultimate tool for self-representation: telling your own story, giving birth to yourself, and thereby claiming agency and uniqueness. As I discussed above, the mother is seen by these autobiographers as an obstacle on the path to becoming a writer. Duras describes it thus:

50

Ernaux, op. cit., p. 43. 'I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.' p. 27.

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Je lui ai répondu que ce que je voulais avant toute autre chose c'était écrire, rien d'autre que ça, rien. Jalouse elle est. Pas de réponse, un regard bref aussitôt détourné, le petit haussement d'épaules, inoubliable. Je serai la première à partir. Il faudra attendre encore quelques années pour qu'elle me perde, pour qu'elle perde celle-ci, cette enfant-ci. Pour les fils il n'y avait pas de crainte à avoir. Mais celle-ci, un jour, elle le savait, elle partirait, elle arriverait à sortir.51

There is a belief here that if one becomes a writer, one escapes from the family, and from traditional female roles. Writing constitutes an escape from the reality of women. It is to retreat from the world only to speak to the world. The emphasis in Frame's and Cardinal's texts is on how writing constituted a liberation from a life they did not want, a liberation from 'madness'. Public recognition is of importance for both of them, but even more so writing is seen as an opportunity to have a private space, echoing earlier instances of this as in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) and Simone de Beauvoir's emphasis in her autobiographical writings on her route to become a writer and intellectual. Domna C. Stanton points to the importance of gender to the act of writing: Beyond professional aspirations there was, I believed, a fundamental deviance that pervaded autogynographies and produced conflicts in the divided self: the act of writing itself. For a symbolic order that equates the idea(l) of the author with a phallic pen transmitted from father to son places the female writer in contradiction to the dominant

51

Duras, op. cit., p. 31. 'I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She's jelous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I'll be the first to leave. There are still a few years to wait before she loses me, loses this one of her children. For the sons there's nothing to fear. But this one, she knows, one day she'll go, she'll manage to escape.' p. 26.

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One can link this idea that, by writing, women somehow become 'usurpers of male prerogatives' to how it often means freedom from domesticity and allows women self-expression, space, and public recognition. Ideas about écriture feminine presume that women always have to battle with a male-dominated discourse. But Toril Moi criticises Cixous's theory: 'It is just this absence of any specific analysis of the material factors preventing women from writing that constitutes a major weakness in Cixous's utopia.'53 Frame and Cardinal certainly voice a need of liberation through writing. It constitutes a step away from the mother and the mother's role. But it is seen as an area of freedom where they are no longer labelled or relegated to the third person. The writing process itself is not seen as in any way problematic. For Frame finding her own world in her writing comes early. This is where she claims her authority, where she expresses herself. She describes being criticised by her sister for a word she uses in a poem: I disagreed with Myrtle, who then insisted that there were words and phrases you had to use, and when you were writing about evening shadows, you always said 'tint', just as you said that stars 'shone' or 'twinkled' and waves 'lapped' and the wind 'roared'. In spite of Myrtle's insistence, I preferred 'touch' to 'tint' but in deference to her obvious wisdom and wider knowledge I changed the word to 'tint' when I took my poem to school. But later, when I wrote it in my notebook, I reverted to 'touch the sky', having my own way. (To the Is-Land, p. 83)

52

Domna C. Stanton, 'Autogynography - Is the Subject Different?', in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3-20, p. 13. 53 Moi, op. cit., p. 123.

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Frame builds up her private vision, despite opposition, despite tradition and expectations. The sister claims authority Frame accepts on the surface but then she goes her own way. 'Accepted' poetic discourse is therefore represented as authoritarian, the emphasis is on the importance of the private vision. Frame wants to be thought of as a poet from an early age. She believes that she needs something extra to do it, a disability, losing a parent, imagination, and the 'right' words. For most of her formative years she sees herself as always lacking, never having what it takes, despite continually writing poems, winning poetry competitions and getting published in magazines. Writing poetry is linked in Frame's account to being accepted by others and therefore she sees it as essential to use words that are accepted as 'poetic'. This is an ambivalent ambition; a true longing for poetry is mixed with her lack of confidence and longing for public acceptance. A feeling that also permeates this autobiography is how alert she is to 'adventures', or the epic possibilities of a life, as she explains: When we as children experimented with our identity and place by moving ourselves to encircle the planets, in our repeated inscriptions - name, street, town - Oamaru, North Otago, Otago, South Island, New Zealand, the Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Universe, the Planets and Stars, we were making a simple journey in words and, perhaps, a prophecy of being; we were lyric poets forced to realize the possibility of epics, and in a matter-of-fact way we included these epic possibilities in our ordinary thinking. I mention this because 1945, a year that began for me as a personal lyric, ended through accident of circumstance, of national and world events, as an epic embracing the universe, the planets and the stars, this time expressed in deeds, not in words. (An Angel at My Table, p. 54)

The dramatic events of 1945 both in Frame's personal life and in the wider world serve as the focal point of her autobiography. She uses them as the core around which she spins her tale. She does not discuss at any length the world events, it is enough that the reader has them in the back of his or her mind to be alert to the epic possibilities of a life.

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These possibilities are also kept open throughout the autobiography as she reminds us of what could have happened, what might have been, had she not become a writer. It is as if there are two alternatives, the 'first place': darkness/leucotomy, and the 'third place': myth/the mirror city. The event - being sent to the asylum - is subordinated by the narrative, its meaning is subsumed within the 'meta'-narrative of becoming a writer. Although Frame in her autobiography is always open to the fictional possibilities of reality, she does stop short of abusing those opportunities. She describes the first time she comes to London after a very long and difficult journey: 'In spite of fictional possibilities and enthusiasms, that first day in London was dreary and uncomfortable' (The Envoy from Mirror City, p. 19).54 Frame's writing was what saved her from having a leucotomy and spending the rest of her life in and out of mental institutions. Her doctor hears that Frame has won a literary prize and decides she does not need a leucotomy: 'It was my writing that at last came to my rescue. It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life. My mother had been persuaded to sign permission for me to undergo leucotomy' (An Angel at My Table, p. 106). This is something that haunts her throughout her life; the constant question 'what if?': When I was eventually discharged from hospital, Nola [who had a leucotomy] remained, and although she did spend time out of hospital, she was often re-admitted; over the years I kept in touch with her, and it was like living in a fairytale where conscience, and what might-have-been, and what was, not only speak but spring to life and become a

54

Henry F. May voices the opposite view that his writing could not encompass the excitements in life: 'I had been told that this trip would be a great experience and had resolved to keep a diary. In Chicago I duly and pompously recorded my awe at the huge crowds rushing about, and with great originality compared them to ants. This was the first and last entry in the diary - life was much too interesting for conventional literary sentiments.' Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 45.

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living companion, a reminder. (An Angel at My Table, p. 109)

This 'living companion' is an instance of counterfactual discourse in autobiography: the possibilities, the 'what if?' made flesh. Frame also writes the autobiography to dispel the myth that her first novel was autobiographical, explaining that it was a parallel life, the possible life she could have had, the life of Nola. This dramatic turn of events and the possibilities that were averted through coincidence rather than any rational cause, naturally lends itself very well to the dramatic account that is the centre of Frame's autobiography. Writing for her becomes almost a mythical activity, something that saved her life.55 Frame calls the world of fiction a 'mirror city' and describes her writing life as a chance to travel there: I could journey like a seasoned traveller to the Mirror City, observing (not always consciously), listening, remembering and forgetting. The only graveyard in Mirror City is the graveyard of memories that are resurrected, reclothed with reflection and change, their essence untouched. (A truthful autobiography tries to record the essence. The renewal and change are part of the material of fiction). (The Envoy from Mirror City, p. 167)

In the third volume Frame dwells to a great extent on this metaphor of the mirror city. It is a very personal myth and on occasion it is trying 55

Héléne Cixous writes a similarly mythical account of writing: 'It seems to me that the story of writing always begins with hell. Just like the story of a life. First with the hell of the ego, with this primitive primordial chaos that is ours, these darknesses in which we struggle when we are young and from which we also construct ourselves. On emerging from this hell, be it simply the hell of the unconscious or a real hell, there is paradise. But what is Paradise? Hell is incomprehension, it is dreadful mystery, and also the demonic or demoniac feeling of beeing nothing, controlling nothing, of being unformed, tiny, before the immense. And also being bad and sometimes evil. Our wickedness is one of vertiginous themes that opens the space of writing.' 'From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History', trans. Deborah W. Carpenter, in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1-18, p. 6.

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for the reader to attempt to follow her meanderings through it. But as a conclusion to her tale of troubles, and within the structure of the autobiography, it brings cohesion to the trilogy as the mirror city becomes her ultimate goal. It is 'the material of fiction' that records the 'essence' of her autobiography. When she is finally free from her troubles, she can at last start her writing career: 'No longer, I hoped, dependent on my 'schizophrenia' for comfort and attention and help, but with myself as myself, I again began my writing career' (An Angel at My Table, p. 129). The prerequisite is to be with herself as herself, to be accepted but independent. Frame often describes her problems as a question of finding an identity that will make her able to live with 'herself as herself'. One of the ways in which she attempts to find this after having lost so much in the mental homes is to have her photograph taken: The photograph was urgent, a kind of reinstating of myself as a person, a proof that I did exist. In my ignorance of book publication I had supposed that all books carried photographs of their authors and I remembered my feeling, when copies of The Lagoon were brought to me in hospital, that I had no claim to the book, that there was not even a photograph to help stake a claim. This, combined with my erasure in hospital, seemed to set me too readily among the dead who are no longer photographed; my years between twenty and nearing thirty having passed unrecorded as if I had never been. (An Angel at My Table, pp. 129-30)

Not only have the mental institutions eroded the little sense of identity that she had, but they actually make her doubt that she was a writer even though she had published a book.56 Cardinal's description of how she started writing half-way through her psychoanalysis also evokes a sense of freedom and a love of personal space:

56

six.

A discussion of the role of the photograph is further developed in chapter

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En dehors de cela, la nuit et le matin très tôt, j'écrivais. Cela se faisait simplement, facilement. Je ne pensais même pas que j'écrivais. Je prenais mon crayon, mon carnet, et je me laissais aller à divaguer. Pas comme sur le divan de l'impasse. Les divagations de mes carnets étaient faites d'éléments de ma vie que j'arrangeais comme cela me plaisait, j'allais où je voulais, je vivais des instants que je n'avais pas vécus mais que j'imaginais, je n'étais pas tenue par le carcan de la vérité comme avec le docteur. Je me sentais libre comme je ne l'avais jamais été. (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 234)57

All of Cardinal's descriptions of writing talk of joy, freedom, and independence. It is a continuation of the importance she places on words in her autobiography and how, as in psychoanalysis, one can use them to cure oneself and how writing her first book is a 'crystallization of 'les mots pour le dire' in prose: the creation of artistic form for her thoughts, feelings and discoveries'.58 This freedom in telling a story, whether it is moments one has only imagined or a 'mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths', can be seen to relate both to writing novels and autobiography.59 As talking and writing are part of Cardinal's cure, so is the life of writing that the doctors, who finally examine Frame in London and 57

'It happened simply, easily. I didn't think I was writing, even. With pencil and paper, I let my mind wander. Not like on the couch in the cul-de-sac. The divagations in the notebooks were made up of the elements of my life which were arranged according to my fancy: going where I pleased, living out moments I had only imagined. I was not in the yoke of truth, as in analysis. I was conscious of being more free than I had been.' p. 215. 58 Cairns, op. cit., p. 85. 59 This happens in other women's autobiographies as Michael Sheringham explains regarding Violette Leduc: 'Writing has also restored Leduc to the world, has helped her direct her attention to the beauty of the Provencal landscape in which she composes her autobiography, and has delivered her from 'engloutissement' in dead desires. The reader is asked to stand witness to this accomplishment by becoming the recipient of a gift, the beneficiary of the munificence Leduc is now capable of, after years of emotional avarice.' French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 152.

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conclude that she has never suffered from schizophrenia, recommend for Frame: Dr Cawley was clear: his prescription for my ideal life was that I should live alone and write while resisting, if I wished this, the demands of others to 'join in'. There had never been any question of my not being able to exist in the 'real world' unless that existence also deprived me of my 'own world', the journeys to and from Mirror City, either by the Envoy who is forever present, or by myself. (The Envoy from Mirror City, p. 128)

It is no wonder that writing for Frame takes on such mythical proportions, as it saves her from a life in mental institutions, and is what keeps her out of them, and lets her be 'herself'. It is not only writing that is important; it is the whole way of life that goes with it that for Frame is the only possible and desirable life. As for Cardinal, writing also touches other aspects of her life as she claims that writing her first book reunited her with her husband and gave her independence and happiness. She describes meeting the editor when signing her first contract: Et s'il avait su qu'il s'adressait à la folle! Je ne pouvais m'empêcher de penser à elle. Je l'imaginais telle qu'elle était il n'y avait pas si longtemps, nue, assise dans son sang recroquevillée sur elle-même dans la nuit de la salle de bains, entre le bidet et la baignore, grelottante, suante, terrorisée, incapable de vivre. Je t'ai tirée de là ma vieille, je t'ai tirée de là! Cela tenait du miracle du conte de fées, de la sorcellerie. Ma vie était éntièrement transformée. Non seulement j'avais découvert le moyen de m'exprimer mais j'avais trouvé toute seule le chemin qui m'éloignait de ma famille, de mon milieu, me permettant ainsi de construire un univers qui m'était propre. (Les Mots pour le dire, pp. 249-50)60 60

'If only he had known he was addressing a madwoman! I couldn't help thinking of her. I imagined her as she was not so very long ago, naked, sitting in her blood, doubled over, crouching in the darkened bathroom between the bidet and the bathtup, sweating, terrorized, incapable of living. It was me

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The writing brings to life a fairy tale, unreal and utopian. Cardinal's straight-forward and open account of what writing meant to her mirrors exactly Frame's description of her life as a writer as what saved her. It is not only full of love of freedom and independence and praise for the possibility of self-expression, it is also full of pride that they managed to come to this point where they can live on their own terms. For Cardinal, after having fought so hard just to be able to communicate with her doctor in those first tortuous chapters, she has reached the stage where she can communicate and give something of herself to others. It is a way of proving (to yourself and others) that you are sane, and capable of giving something of your sane and splendid self to others.

6. Utopia and Autobiography Lucille Cairns points out that Cardinal's autobiography poses questions about the relationship between fact and fiction and claims that it 'raises fecund issues about the borderlines distinguishing fact from personal mythology'.61 This, as I have already mentioned, is also the case in Frame's autobiography. They both build their stories around the notion of the liberation a life of writing offers and they pick and choose events from their lives and memories that support this structure. Cardinal's madness and her mother, inextricably linked, serve as the stumbling block she has to overcome to be reborn; to be able to give birth to herself. Frame's fight with doctors, institutions, traditions, and claims to identity, mark her struggle to become a writer. These stories in some sense offer personal mythologies of the writers' past. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese proclaims that: 'In all fairness, who pulled you out of there, my friend. I was the one! It was in the nature of a miracle, out of a fairy tale, magic. My life was completely transformed. Not only had I discovered a way to express myself, but on my own I had found a road which took me away from my family and my background, allowing me to build my own universe.' p. 230. 61 Cairns, op. cit., p. 77.

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sex and race more readily lend themselves to symbolization than does class, and thus they also more readily lend themselves to representation, fabulation and myth.'62 The representation of writing as liberation from madness and traditional female roles, and the representation of the mother-daughter relationship, are almost raised to the level of fabulation and myth in these works. Gender plays a decisive role in these stories. The autobiographers' lives, social positions, outlooks and relationships are all formed by it. But is the mode of writing formed by it? They use words known from the vocabulary of feminism to describe personal experiences. They represent the mother as the symbol of everything they do not want to be. She is the main obstacle towards the freedom they desire, but the writers show a sense of guilt over their feelings of hatred and repulsion. They are writing against the mother, but also for her and with her. If women have been denied access to their own discourse, and if by writing they take part in a male dominated field, the words the authors use to describe it tell of liberation and freedom and not of repression by that discourse. Both Frame's and Cardinal's texts are almost utopian in their attitude to the life of the writer. It is a utopia of wholeness and health against the horrors of madness and repression. Mary Jacobus concludes in her study of Irigaray and George Eliot that: The necessary utopianism of feminist criticism may be the attempt to declare what is by saying something else - that 'something else' which presses both Irigaray and Eliot to conclude their very different works with an imaginative reading beyond analytic and realistic modes to the metaphors of unbounded female desire in which each finds herself as a woman writing.63

The utopian tone of Frame's and Cardinal's description of writing are reminiscent of this. They structure their autobiographies toward what 62

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 'My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women', in The Private Self, pp. 63-89, p. 66. 63 Jacobus, op. cit., p. 52.

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Frame calls the 'third place' and 'mirror city'. The fictional aspects of these texts lie in their handling of the myth of the mother; and in the convention they embrace of the repressed talking in a voice of its own. Their writing is unmistakably theirs and constitutes a wonderful liberation, freedom, and independence. Their personal mythology interacts clearly with feminist discourse. Every other event in their lives is subordinated by the story of how they became writers. Laura Marcus points out that: In relation to autobiographical criticism more generally, I would argue that conversion narratives have become the staple of the genre because they control their reception by asserting the supremacy of an enlightened present moment, perspective and consciousness. In other words, there is no possibility of an oppositional reading, because the perspective from which the autobiographer writes is represented as the only one which renders the past intelligible.64

Both Frame's and Cardinal's texts contain this aspect of the conversion narrative. The trajectory the texts follow from madness to writing is represented in these texts as the only possible interpretation of their lives. Control over the reception is a large factor as they represent the writing as having saved them from madness, and oppositional reading becomes impossible, as their perspective is the only one that will explain their lives. These texts demarcate yet another area where autobiography and fiction interact. By representing their lives in such stark terms, creating such a myth of origin with its theme of struggle and liberation, the autobiographers inevitably highlight the fictional aspects of such a narrative. They create a personal mythology based in fact with the issue of gender at its core. 64

Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 168.

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Chapter Four Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, Kyoko Mori Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles.1 There is no point in my getting so excited. Of course, I will not convince these teenagers in this Vancouver classroom that Poland is the center of the universe rather than a gray patch of land inhabited by ghosts. It is I who will have to learn how to live with a double vision [. . .] The reference points inside my head are beginning to do a flickering dance. I suppose this is the most palpable meaning of displacement. I have been dislocated from my own center of the world, and that world has been shifted away from my center.2

1. Introduction: Writing with 'Double Vision' Life-writing by writers who have emigrated offers an interesting vantage point from which to view the relationship between autobiography and fiction, as the authors have to bridge a gap between two cultures, thereby highlighting the problem faced by all autobiographers of straddling the divide between the past and the present. Their 'long geographical perspective' and their displacement from their reference points force them to live with what Eva Hoffman calls 'double vision'. Salman Rushdie describes it thus:

1

Salman Rushdie, 'Imaginary Homelands', in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), pp. 9-21, p. 15. 2 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (London: Minerva, 1991), p. 135. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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The texts examined here engage in different ways with the possibilities of representing the lost country of the past. They are Eva Hoffman's autobiography, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), where she describes her experience of emigrating from Poland to Canada, and Michael Ondaatje's autobiographical work Running in the Family (1982), where he recalls two visits he made to his country of birth, Sri Lanka, many years after he settled in Canada. I also look at Kyoko Mori's account of her visit to her home country in The Dream of Water (1995). Hoffman describes the Jewish community in Cracow and life in Canada and the United States, and Ondaatje examines his Sri-Lankan origin from both a native's and a foreigner's perspective. The texts are very different in style and structure, but both authors write with what Hoffman calls 'double vision'.4 Both texts, therefore, offer a dialogue between two different cultures. In this chapter I look at how this 'double vision' engages with the borderline between fiction and autobiography. It seems inevitable that writers with an awareness of other cultural norms are bound to question what others might perceive as certainties. Race, nationality and identity gather different meaning and

3

Rushdie, op. cit., p. 12. William Boelhower explains that 'the autobiographical journey of the immigrant protagonist inevitably leads to the juxtaposition and interaction of two cultural topologies, due to the very mobility of the hyphenated protagonist.' Autobiographical Transactions in Modernist America: The Immigrant, The Architect, The Artist, The Citizen (Trieste: Del Bianco Editore, 1992), pp. 14-15. 4

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connotations as the immigrant writers move between two or more kinds of interpretations of these terms.5 I believe it to be of interest to see if these texts highlight the element of fictionality that is part of the construction of our ideas about race, nationality and identity. As I have mentioned, the texts deal with being foreign and native at the same time, but do they attempt to reconcile these two aspects in autobiography, and does the structure represent the ambivalence they describe? Does the structure aim for a balance between the two cultures, and also maybe between autobiography and fiction? This questioning and ambivalence is given different form in each text: Hoffman uses a model one could describe as a movement from 'paradise' to 'exile' to 'new world', while Ondaatje combines many different genres - a fragmented text to describe a fragmented life.6 It interesting to see how the authors write an autobiography for their new country. Autobiography is occupied with bringing a sense of the past to the present, but these authors are also bringing their old world to their present, new world, in both cases a very different culture. Rushdie is aware of the problems this can pose:

5

As Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi point out: 'Race is about everything - historical, political, personal - and race is about nothing - a construct, an invention that has changed dramatically over time and historical circumstance.' 'Introduction: Storytelling as Social Conscience: The Power of Autobiography', in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, ed. B. Thompson and S. Tyagi (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. ix-xvii, p. ix. 6 Sangeeta Ray maintains that 'the fragmented form of this narrative functions less as a postmodernist experiment, reflecting rather the material conditions of moving between cultures, nations, and generations.' 'Memory, Identity, Patriarchy: Projecting a Past in the Memoirs of Sara Suleri and Michael Ondaatje', Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993) 37-58 (p. 43). But Linda Hutcheon places this text firmly in a postmodernist context when she claims: 'Ondaatje's self-aware thematizing of the textuality of the past - when it comes to you through books, records, and even memoirs - places Running in the Family into the poststructuralist as wells as postmodernist context.' 'Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge', in Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed. Sam Solecki (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1985), pp. 301-314, p. 303.

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Borderlines It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties - that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.7

In looking at the 'imaginary homelands' the authors create, and how they search there for their identity, I hope to show how this inevitably involves a degree of fictionality. Language, in this context, is, of course, of major significance and that factor informs Hoffman's autobiography. Hoffman describes in her text, as the title suggests, her move from one language to another and the effect that move had on her life. Coming to Canada she attempts to 'translate herself' from Polish to English with great difficulty. One could say that in writing on her Polish past in English she is repeating that process of translation. But can the autobiographical process enable the authors to devise ways to bring together double identities - made up of two languages, two homelands? I look at how these texts represent the authors' experience of emigrating, and how the authors describe their travels back to their homelands. I examine what 'profound uncertainties' they come across when writing on their homelands, and whether they are creating 'imaginary homelands'. In this respect I focus on their descriptions of landscape and how it illuminates the difference between the native and the foreign. I explore what happens when the authors cross borders - from one country to another - in immigration or travel, and change from one language to another, and how that affects their identity, and their attempts at describing that identity in autobiography.

7

Rushdie, op. cit., p. 10.

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When writing on their homelands immigrant writers can become mapmakers as they introduce new areas of the world to other parts of it. They also seek to trace their identity in their original culture, which is a common pursuit for writers. In the previous chapter I discussed how Janet Frame's autobiography is centred around her battle to find the means and the confidence to speak out into the world. One aspect of that is how literature from her homeland was perceived. Coming from New Zealand, Frame is already marginalised, as there literature from England constituted the canon, the 'real literature', while native attempts were hardly discussed. Frame is troubled by a lack of identity not only because of the years spent in mental homes, but also because of her cultural background: 'There was such a creation as New Zealand literature; I chose to ignore it, and indeed was scarcely aware of it. Few people spoke of it, as if it were a shameful disease.'8 Frame equals the status of literature from New Zealand to her own mental problems; it is unmentionable and it is not until she is in her early twenties that she discovers stories from New Zealand: 'The stories [. . .] overwhelmed me by the fact of their belonging. It was almost a feeling of having been an orphan who discovers that her parents are alive and living in the most desirable home - pages of prose and poetry' (An Angel at My Table, p. 68). This discovery does give her confidence but when she comes to London she finds West Indian literature much more exciting and tries to pass her writing off as West Indian to get her poems published in London literary magazines. But she soon finds out that 'in a sense my literary lie was an escape from a national lie that left a colonial New Zealander overseas without any real identity'.9 When Frame decides to go back to New Zealand and become a writer in her homeland she describes the experience in terms of freedom and opportunity:

8

Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (London: Picador, 1993) p. 67. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) 9 Janet Frame, The Envoy from Mirror City (London: Picador, 1993) p. 29. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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Borderlines Living in New Zealand, would be for me, like living in an age of mythmakers; with a freedom of imagination among all the artists because it is possible to begin at the beginning and to know the unformed places and to help form them, to be a mapmaker for those who will follow nourished by this generation's layers of the dead. I was strongly influenced in my decision by remembering, from time to time, Frank Sargeson's words to me, 'Remember you'll never know another country like that where you spent your earliest years. You'll never be able to write intimately of another country'. (The Envoy from Mirror City, p. 166)

There are two points made here: the first one is that the chance to play a part in forming the literature of the 'new world', the chance to be a 'mythmaker', proves irresistible to Frame. She wants to be a mapmaker or mythmaker, which for her seems to be the same thing. Making up myths for a new literature means mapping out her culture; she sees it both as a challenge and as an inevitability.10 The other point Frame makes is that the writer is bound to write on his or her country of origin. The need to write about the country one grew up in is a strong one and can be seen in all the texts discussed here. Autobiography is, of course, the perfect field for that and at times it

10

Jack Hodgins describes coming from a remote part of Canada in similar terms: 'Gradually over the years of learning to read in school books I got a very distinct impression that I lived in an invisible place that hadn't yet found its way into the English language. Studying the literature of England and America in later years as we did in school, I learned there too that the real world was somewhere else and that we were not part of it, we were never mentioned. And yet I looked around and I saw that I was surrounded by people whose lives were every bit as interesting and exciting and joyful and tragic as lives of the people in the stories and poems and plays that I loved. And I had the feeling that later on when I tried to put some of the stories down on the page I was attempting to knock on the door and say "Eh, World! I know some very interesting people that you've never heard about and I'd like to introduce you to them. Because I like them"' Jack Hodgins in Anna Rutherford, 'Introducing the Writers', in Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian Fiction, ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney: Dangaroo Press, 1990), pp. 24-41, p. 31.

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can serve as a vehicle for bringing the old world to the new, as well as the past to the present. Paul John Eakin explains that 'one model for the history of the genre [of autobiography] in the United States might well be the ongoing interplay between dominant and marginal texts'.11 And in immigrant autobiographies one can see the interplay between dominant and marginal countries, languages and identities. But one needs to be careful not to see these authors as necessarily representative of their ethnic group or nationality as Betty Bergland points out: since ideologies are also embedded in metaphors and dreamwork, ethnics may also articulate prevailing ideologies in these terms. Thus I suggest we need to question any easy relationship between discourse and the speaking subject, particularly the assumption that experience produces a voice - that, for example, being woman means speaking in a woman's voice.12

Thus I will not approach the texts in the terms of which ethnic groups Hoffman and Ondaatje belong to, but concentrate more on how the experience of journeying between cultures informs the style and structure of the texts.

2. The Structure of Double Vision Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation follows to a large extent the pattern of what one could call conventional autobiography. It tells the story of Hoffman's life from her childhood up to the time of her writing the autobiography in a more or less chronological order. Born 11 Paul John Eakin, 'Introduction', in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 3-25, p. 10. 12 Betty Bergland, 'Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the "Other"', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 130-166, p. 134.

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in 1946 in Poland to Jewish parents, who through a mixture of incredible resourcefulness and luck had managed to survive the war, Hoffman emigrated with her family from Poland to Canada at the age of thirteen. The text is divided into three parts, entitled 'Paradise', 'Exile', and 'New World'. The book describes how unhappy Hoffman was leaving Poland, it depicts her struggle as a teenager in the new country, and finally how she slowly came to terms with her new world as an adult. The text revolves around her experience of moving between cultures through language and I believe, therefore, that it is relevant to discuss what structure she chooses for her story and how her story of living with 'double vision' has affected the writing of the autobiography. Andrei Codrescu points out how moving between cultures can offer the perfect structure for autobiography and how it influenced his own: I'd changed countries and languages at the age of nineteen, a neat break that could provide a thousand books with rudimentary structure. In addition, I had the numbers: born in 1946, became conscious with the Hungarian revolt in 1956, came to the United States in 1966. Initiatory structures in plain view, natural chapter breaks for the taking.13

These 'natural chapter breaks' are what Hoffman bases the structure of her autobiography on. William Boelhower claims that immigrant autobiographies all follow the same fabula which he describes as a chronological ordering of the plot made up of three central moments: 'anticipation of the New World, contact with it, and the contrasting of Old World and New World'.14 Hoffman's text follows this pattern as she consciously models her text on early twentieth century immigrant 13 Andrei Codrescu, 'Adding to My Life', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, pp. 21-30, p. 23. 14 Boelhower, op. cit., p. 14. Boelhower has been criticised for not differentiating between first and second generation immigrant autobiography, see for instance Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, 'Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach', in American Autobiography, pp. 142170.

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autobiography. The chapter headings are deliberate evocations of turnof-the-century immigrant autobiographies, for instance Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912). They also refer to the belief that leaving childhood is equivalent to being exiled from paradise, as Hoffman leaves Poland when she is thirteen. These connections to earlier works also highlight that Hoffman is describing what many others have experienced and written on before her, but her treatment of these experiences is more coloured by contemporary themes, such as dislocation, problems of identity, the psychological impact of crossing borders, and language, rather than by earlier themes of hardship, success and assimilation. Hoffman describes leaving Poland in very poetic terms as being thrown into exile, and she is full of longing and despair: I am suffering my first, severe attack of nostalgia, or tesknota - a word that adds to nostalgia the tonalities of sadness and longing. It is a feeling whose shades and degrees I'm destined to know intimately, but at this hovering moment, it comes upon me like a visitation from a whole new geography of emotions, an annunciation of how much an absence can hurt [. . .] Looking ahead, I come across an enormous, cold blankness - a darkening, an erasure, of the imagination, as if a camera eye has snapped shut, or as if a heavy curtain has been pulled over the future. Of the place where we're going - Canada - I know nothing. (Lost in Translation, p. 4)

This passage expounds many of the themes of the autobiography. The English language, which is to pose many problems for her, is of no use to her when she describes her feelings. It emphasises her acute sense of loss (of childhood and of country), and the 'enormous' but at the same time 'empty' Canada, and the 'whole new geography of emotions' she has to deal with. Hoffman's use of the present tense adds immediacy to this otherwise very literary description, perhaps too literary for a thirteen year old. This passage sets the tone for the chapter on her childhood that follows. The whole 'Paradise' section is coloured by tesknota, by the knowledge of impending exile.

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Another important factor in this transition is the difference between how Hoffman's parents felt about the event and the loss she felt. Her parents were going to the 'promised land' but she feels she is leaving paradise: Perhaps in another few years I might have come to feel the same way; perhaps the abstract issues of a collective identity would have developed an intimate logic that would have propelled me outward; perhaps. But for now, I hardly have an identity, except that most powerful one of first, private loves. (Lost in Translation, p. 88)

This first powerful identity is what Hoffman loses, as it cannot be sustained in a completely different culture, without the people and the places that formed that identity. For her parents the experience is very different. Their sense of identity is based on their experiences as Jews in Poland, and therefore they have no choice but to leave. Almost all of their Jewish friends in Cracow, or more to the point the few who survived the war, are leaving. For Hoffman's parents and their friends there is no sense in staying in Poland, it is only a question of where to go: Israel or America. This difference between public and private senses of identity, between childhood and adult identity, is emphasised in this text. So the descriptions of Poland as a childhood paradise, and the representation of moving to Canada as being thrown into exile, are all stated in private terms and not in a political context. Hoffman describes the move to Canada in terms of becoming an adult and, in an almost violent fashion, being robbed of her childhood. Hoffman's loss is acute and her sense of the past is rooted in that loss. It is her experience of being a child in Poland that is at the forefront, rather than the political ramifications of being a Jew in Poland after the war. Hoffman is well aware of the millions of others who have experienced this before her and she looks to literature to make sense of it. It is clear from the start, both from the structure of the work and direct references to other autobiographies that it is very consciously informed by other texts. She mentions another immigrant's autobiography to explain her experience of exile:

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In Speak, Memory, Nabokov makes the poetic, or the playful, speculation that Russian children before the Revolution - and his exile - were blessed with a surfeit of sensual impressions to compensate them for what was to come. Of course, fate doesn't play such premonitory games, but memory can perform retrospective manoeuvres to compensate for fate. Loss is a magical preservative. Time stops at the point of severance, and no subsequent impressions muddy the picture you have in mind. The house, the garden, the country you have lost remain forever as you remember them. Nostalgia - that most lyrical of feelings - crystallizes around these images like amber. Arrested within it, the house, the past, is clear, vivid, made more beautiful by the medium in which it is held and by its stillness. (Lost in Translation, pp. 114-15)

This corresponds to Rushdie's thinking on 'imaginary homelands'. The past becomes completely dislocated from the present, the images live on, but not the reality. The first part of Hoffman's autobiography is coloured by this. She describes places, people, and events in such nostalgic terms that her home country seems very unreal, almost a literary prototype for a childhood paradise, with the games, the loves, the neighbours, the friends all described with a constant awareness of the dramatic disruption to come. The first part ends aboard the ship to Canada, a journey that is described as a short respite from reality, and the second part starts on a train station in Montreal. In the second part Hoffman describes her first years in Canada in terms of feeling out of place, of lacking an identity, of not being able to express herself in her new language, of the constant sense of loss. And in the last part she describes how she slowly finds her way in the language and culture, accepts it and is accepted by it. Hoffman achieves a kind of cohesion by using this model, this literary device of stark opposites, to come to terms with her loss, her exile, her search for identity. But despite what at first seems a straightforward structure Hoffman is wary of simplifying the difficulties she encounters. Although she uses the paradise - exile - new world model or what Boelhower calls 'anticipation', 'contact', and 'contrast', she is aware of how the world

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has changed. The latter part of the twentieth century does not offer easy solutions to the fragmentation of identity, to the multiple perspectives on language and the self, and where purpose and meaning have become problematic concepts. At the end of the 'Exile' chapter where she is about to move to the United States to go to college, Hoffman talks about the world she is about to enter, the American campus in the sixties: I cannot conceive of my story as one of simple progress, or simple woe. Any confidently thrusting story line would be a sentimentality, an excess, an exaggeration, an untruth. Perhaps it is my intolerance of those, my cherishing of uncertainty as the only truth that is, after all, the best measure of my assimilation; perhaps it is in my misfittings that I fit. Perhaps a successful immigrant is an exaggerated version of the native. From now on, I'll be made, like a mosaic, of fragments - and my consciousness of them. It is only in that observing consciousness that I remain, after all, an immigrant. (Lost in Translation, p. 164)

Hoffman believes that it is only in her own consciousness of this fragmentation that she remains an immigrant, in her double vision. Here it is as if the cohesion offered by the structure of the work is denied in the text. She claims to be 'made of fragments', but the structure of the work does not mirror that claim. The structure has not got the contours of a mosaic, and even if one would be hard pressed to describe the text as having a 'confidently thrusting story line', it still describes a progress, albeit a tentative one, and not as simplistic as the chapter headings might suggest. Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family is a much more fragmented text and does not follow a straight-forward trajectory. From the first it focuses not on his life, but on his parents, their youth and their marriage. It describes two visits the author made to the country of his birth, Sri Lanka, many years after he emigrated. He goes there to visit relatives and to try to get to know more about his late father. Ondaatje left the country when he was nine years old and it is only many years later when he is already a writer in Canada that he decides to make the journey back. In Sri Lanka he talks to relatives

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and people who knew his family, looks at photographs, examines archives and church records to learn about his ancestors and he includes references to books on Sri Lanka by European travellers. The text includes snatches of conversation with his sisters and brother, stories about his family which his aunts tell him, photographs, and quotations from other travellers. The text is divided into six main sections, which are each divided into shorter subsections. Near the middle of the text there are four poems. This gives an indication of the many genres Ondaatje draws from in this work: the memoir, the travel-journal, diary, poetry, biography, and the novel. This text exemplifies the many possibilities of autobiography; how it can encompass different methods and genres and at the same time be unmistakably autobiographical. It is a portrait of a family, and of an era in a country's history, of its landscape and weather. It is also a study of how one can know and write on one's family and ancestors, and how one knows one's country instinctively while also being an outsider, a visitor, a traveller. The underlying concern is how one's identity is in part formed by a knowledge and understanding of one's family history. Ondaatje does not discuss his own life in any detail, but it is nevertheless an autobiographical text as he is searching for his roots, the childhood he claims to have forgotten, and the father he never knew as an adult. The biographical details about his relatives are not included for their own sake, but as a part of a quest for his own identity. The title suggests this as he is investigating what 'runs' in his family. Ondaatje goes about this search with all the literary facilities available to him; through the travel-journal, through poetry, through descriptions of dreams and visions, through biography, through storytelling. This text, therefore, can be seen as a quest not only for Ondaatje's roots, but also for the best medium in which to represent them. The word 'running' in the title also suggests his travels, and his running away from Canada. There are two main strands in this text: firstly a travel journal with descriptions of landscape and country, and secondly stories of his family. Some of the stories Ondaatje tells show clearly how he works with facts to make up a story or a passage of impressive prose. His

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grandmother Lalla died in a flood and he describes her death as if he had been floating with her toward her death: Below the main street of Nuwara Eliya the land drops suddenly and Lalla fell into deeper waters, past the houses of 'Cranleigh' and 'Ferncliff'. They were homes she knew well, where she had played and argued over cards. The water here was rougher and she went under for longer and longer moments coming up with a gasp and then pulled down like bait, pulled under by something not comfortable any more, and then there was the great blue ahead of her, like a sheaf of blue wheat, like a large eye that peered towards here, and she hit it and was dead.15

In this way the text constantly crosses the borderline between autobiography and fiction. The facts are there but they are made into passages of beautiful prose, exciting stories or tragic tales. The first indication the reader gets that this is not an 'ordinary' autobiography is the map of Sri Lanka on the flyleaf in the manner of a good travel journal. On the facing page there are two quotations that are important here. The first is from a fourteenth-century text by the Franciscan friar, Oderic: ''I saw in this island fowls as big as our country geese having two heads . . . and other miraculous things which I will not here write of.'' And another from a Sri Lankan newspaper from 1978: 'The Americans were able to put a man on the moon because they knew English. The Sinhalese and Tamils whose knowledge of English was poor, thought that the earth was flat.' It exposes an ignorance on both sides: the way Europeans represented foreign lands as full of 'miraculous things' and vicious natives, and the legacy of the colonial language, which is the key to all knowledge (and in which Ondaatje writes his autobiography). These two sets of views Ondaatje 15 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984), p. 129. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) Ondaatje's brother Christopher has disputed this description of their grandmother's death in his own book, claiming she died of alchohol poisoning and her death as therefore being more tragic than his brother describes it. See Christopher Ondaatje, The ManEater of Punanai: A Journey of Discovery to the Jungles of Old Ceylon (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 66.

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juxtaposes throughout the text. The views of Europeans who did not understand and could not cope with the country, and the views of the ones who stayed, intermarried and became part of the country. The inclusion of both views points to the conflicting feelings Ondaatje has about his home country, and to how his knowledge of it comes as much from other writings as from the people who live there and his own experience. It is clear throughout the text, not only in the poetry sections, that Ondaatje is a poet. One can see it in the many lyrical titles of the sections, and many of the sections are somewhere midway between poetry and prose. Dreams, fantastic stories, and visions, what is usually considered the stuff of fiction, make up a large part of this autobiographical text. Even Ondaatje's reason for going back is represented as a decision taken halfway between a dream and a drunken stupor. The text begins with a chapter called 'Asian Rumours' in a section called 'Asia' with a description of how he came to travel back to Sri Lanka: What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto. I was sleeping at a friend's house. I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape. The noises woke me [. . .] It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia. Once a friend had told me that it was only when I was drunk that I seemed to know exactly what I wanted. And so, two months later, in the midst of the farewell party in my growing wildness - dancing, balancing a wine glass on my forehead and falling to the floor twisting round and getting up without letting the glass tip, a trick which seemed only possible when drunk and relaxed - I knew I was already running. Outside the continuing snow had made the streets narrow, almost impassable. Guests had arrived on foot, scarved, faces pink and frozen. They leaned against the fire-place and drank. I had already planned the journey back. During quiet afternoons I spread maps onto the floor and searched out possible routes to Ceylon. But it was only in the midst of this party, among my closest friends, that I realised I would be travelling back to the family I had grown from - those relations from my parents' generation who stood in my

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This is a description of the birth of the text we have before us and I quote it at length as it seems to me to point to the themes and motifs that characterise Running in the Family. Ondaatje often starts a paragraph or a chapter with a description of a dream which then leads him to his themes. His drunken state points to the stories about his father that we hear later on. As Ondaatje tries to decide on the route to take to Sri Lanka, so he is also attempting to find a way back to his family and his childhood. Throughout the text the reader mainly sees the country in terms of his family, and his family as a product of the country. Ondaatje emphasises the romanticism of his decision as he quotes Austen and indicates how it is never possible to go back to childhood. The passage also reminds us of the difference between Canada, which has become 'impassable' in the cold winter, and his home country. It seems that there he describes living in two places at once; partying in Canada with his friends, but his mind is already in Sri Lanka, he is dreaming of Asia. He wants to bring the images that are frozen in time, in much the same way as Hoffman describes them, to life, by 'touching them into words'. Writing the autobiography itself is, therefore, an integral part of this quest, as the decision to travel and to write about his travels were partly one and the same. Ondaatje seems more interested in trying to find out what kind of people his relatives were, rather than in recording details such as dates. He does not describe in any detail his journeys to Sri Lanka. It is only at the end of the book that one learns that he took two separate journeys, one on his own and another he made with his wife and children. In the first sections of the text he describes visits to relatives to hear stories from the past to collect material for his book. It is interesting that the way he hears the stories of his family becomes as

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important as the stories themselves. It is only when spending time with his relatives that he finds what he is looking for on his travels. Ondaatje describes how his Aunt makes all his travels worthwhile, he calls her 'the minotaur of this long journey back' and 'the minotaur who inhabits the place one had been years ago, who surprises one with conversations about the original circle of love' (Running in the Family, p. 25). He quotes stories about other Ondaatjes; about intrigues, affairs, love, drink and death. The stories are all colourful, fantastic, shrouded in the mysteries of a bygone era: In half an hour the others will waken from their sleep and intricate conversations will begin again. In the heart of this 250-year-old fort we will trade anecdotes and faint memories, trying to swell them with the order of dates and asides, interlocking them all as if assembling the hull of a ship. No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized. (Running in the Family, p. 26)

The stories are told and retold, and then written down, and in 'this way history is organized'. His aunts hold the key to his family's past, and Ondaatje is fascinated by their stories. The relationship between fact and fiction and the part storytelling plays in that is of note here. Ondaatje often mentions this love of stories, of sitting with other people and trading stories and thereby sharing more than just facts about his relatives. It seems that the effect of the stories is to make him feel a part of something larger, that what he does (or what he is, being a writer) makes sense when he knows about his family background. He describes visions, or dreams, interspersed with humorous anecdotes but never tries to interpret these anecdotes or give explanations for them. He allows the images to speak for themselves. He illustrates his points with these dreams without ever giving a full explanation.16 Ondaatje describes being in the midst of the process of 16

A description of a vision he has about his family is typical of this style: 'That night, I will have not so much a dream as an image that repeats itself. I

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discovering his family and at this point the text is optimistic and joyful. Ondaatje is trying to understand the period when his parents were young. This period was for him an incomprehensible muddle. In a section called 'Tropical gossip' he tries to make sense of everything he has heard about the youth of his parents' generation, all the gossip about affairs and intrigues; all the time and money spent on parties and games, but in the end he is dissatisfied with the gossip: 'I still cannot break the code of how 'interested in' or 'attracted' they were to each other. Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships' (Running in the Family, p. 53). He gets caught up in the stories, but ultimately they are not sufficient. Ondaatje is in the end disappointed by the stories he hears, he cannot find the truth in them, he does not get to know fully what he came to find out: 'Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? [. . .] And why do I want to know of this privacy? [. . .] I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover' (Running in the Family , p. 54). The tone of the text is changing: he is becoming aware that perhaps he will not find out all that he hoped for at the outset, but the stories still hold a fascination for him. The reader can never be sure if Ondaatje is narrating the stories about his family as he heard them from his relatives or whether he has considerably added to them himself. His description above of how see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realise gradually I am part of a human pyramid. Below me are other bodies that I am standing on and above me are several more, though I am quite near the top. With cumbersome slowness we are walking from one end of the huge living room to the other. We are all chattering away like the crows and cranes so that it is often difficult to hear. I do catch one piece of dialogue. A Mr Hobday has asked my father if he has any Dutch antiques in the house. And he replies, 'Well . . . there is my mother.' My grandmother lower down gives a roar of anger. But at this point we are approaching the door which being twenty feet high we will be able to pass through only if the pyramid turns sideways. Without discussing it the whole family ignores the opening and walks slowly through the pale pink rose coloured walls into the next room.' Running in the Family, p. 27.

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history is organised should, however, give us a clue. Ondaatje does not usually give the reader much detail. His emphasis is on the poetic side of the lives he describes. But storytelling and fictionalising are part of his family tradition and Sri Lankan culture. He says about his mother: She belonged to a type of Ceylonese family whose women would take the minutest reaction from another and blow it up into a tremendously exciting tale, then later use it as an example of someone's strain of character. If anything kept their generation alive it was this recording by exaggeration. Ordinary tennis matches would by mythologized to the extent that one player was so drunk that he almost died on the court. An individual would be eternally remembered for one small act that in five years had become so magnified he was just a footnote below it. The silence of the tea estates and no doubt my mother's sense of theatre and romance[...] combined the edited delicacies of fiction with the last era of a colonial Ceylon. (Running in the Family, p. 169)

So the storytelling is not only a part of his upbringing and culture but a remnant of a specific era; the era Ondaatje tries to evoke in the text. He evokes that era not only by describing what life was like in those times, but also in the way he tells the stories. He achieves this evocation with exaggeration, as the stories of his eccentric grandmother illustrate perfectly, and with a sense of theatre and romance. He describes this type of storytelling as a characteristic of the family's women, but he has wholly appropriated it in this text. He has re-entered the role of story-telling. He adds a telling paragraph with the acknowledgements and references at the end of the book: While all these names may give an air of authenticity, I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or 'gesture'. And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a

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Ondaatje constantly points out the difficulties of autobiographical writing, the blurred borderline between fiction and autobiography, the difficulty of knowing an 'intimate' truth many years after the fact, and the problems of relating that truth to others. But it is not only by telling stories that he tries to get to know his family. It is almost as if he gets carried away with the stories of his colourful family; his grandmother's antics, the affairs, the loves and games these people played. His use of secondary material at times suggests the difficulty of knowing the past. In a section one and a half pages long entitled 'Honeymoon' which refers to his parents' honeymoon, he says nothing of their honeymoon but lists headlines from papers around the world from the period: 'The lepers of Colombo went on hunger strike, a bottle of beer cost one rupee, and there were upsetting rumours that ladies were going to play at Wimbledon in shorts' (Running in the Family, p. 37). None of this says anything about what his parents' honeymoon was like. It emphasises the difference between the public knowledge available in archives and libraries and the elusive nature of private truths.18 Near the end of the book Ondaatje quotes his sisters and brother. It shows how difficult it is to render faithfully anything about one's own family, the relationships and histories. His sister says: ''I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said 17

Geert Lernout connects this to ethnicity in the Ondaatje's novels: 'Literature has always positioned itself in the force-field between truth and lies, between curses and blessings, between the power of words and their impotence, between the familiar voice on the one hand and on the other the unfamiliar, unheimliche voice, the ethnic voice.' 'Unfamiliar Voices in Ondaatje's First Two Novels', in Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian Fiction, ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney: Dangaroo Press, 1990), pp. 91-102, p. 93. 18 As Linda Hutcheon argues in her discussion of what she calls 'historiographic metafiction': 'As readers, we see both the collecting and the attempt to make narrative order. Historiographic metafiction acknowledges the paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us today.' A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 114.

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what a wonderful childhood we must have had, and I said it was a nightmare'' (Running in the Family, p. 178). The one person Ondaatje is really interested to know more about is his father and the chapters about him are more sombre in tone than the others. His parents divorced when he was very young. His father drank, and when he did so became utterly uncontrollable. He took endless, and it seems aimless, train rides, and made every kind of mischief imaginable. Ondaatje describes an incident when his father jumped off a train and stopped it by running into the tunnel the train was approaching: My mother, clutching a suit of civilian clothing (the Army would not allow her to advertise his military connections), walked into that darkness, finding him and talking with him for over an hour and a half. A moment only Conrad could have interpreted [. . .] They had been married for six years. (Running in the Family, p. 149)

By mentioning Conrad, Ondaatje highlights that sometimes only fiction can fill in the gaps, only Conrad could have described what happened to these two people in that tunnel. Ondaatje tries hard to understand, to make sense of, this 'heart of darkness' in his parents' lives. But ultimately it seems impossible to make any sense of severe alcoholism other than to see how destructive it is. It ruined his parents' marriage and thereby cut him away from his father. The later sections in the text are preoccupied with his father and his parents' marriage. The tone is darker, the stories stop being fantastic and hilarious, they become overpowering and tragic. These are, I believe, the most poignant episodes in the book. Ondaatje left the country when he was very young and was never to see his father again. His father was destined to remain distant from his family: Before my mother left for England in 1949 she went to a fortune-teller who predicted that while she would continue to see each of her children often for the rest of her life, she would never see them all together again. This turned out to be true. Gillian stayed in Ceylon with me, Christopher and

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The text is a quest for his father, an exploration of the 'north pole'. Not only the journey itself, but writing the text as well. Ondaatje attempts to touch his father into words and with 'the mercy of distance write the histories': During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with 'the mercy of distance' write the histories. (Running in the Family, p. 179)

Ondaatje attempts to turn tragedy into history and thereby minimise the chaos with explanations, with words. This is his ultimate loss and one he can never compensate for. At times it is as if he is writing on behalf of his family, for his father, to let him know that he is remembered, though ultimately unknowable. What I find most interesting in the text, is how it grapples with the storytelling tradition and how Ondaatje uses it both to get to know his family and to understand the period they lived in. We must remember that this is an autobiographical text that mostly concerns itself with events that happened before the author was born. It still is not a biography of either his father or his mother, but an attempt at understanding where he comes from, both in terms of the country and the family. Ondaatje is interested in the way stories are told, how history is organised, how memory works, and what it means to be a foreigner and a native at the same time. The text is a fascinating study of the relationship between autobiography and fiction as the author experiments with the norms of genre to tell the story as he attempts to find out where he comes from. In some ways he fails in his task; he

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still does not know his father, intimate truths escape him, personal relationships get lost in the gossip and rumours. There is no final truth or neat ending, the literariness of the text does not extend that far.

3. ‘Life in a New Language’ The question of language is of special significance in autobiographies by immigrants, especially if the language they write in is different from their mother tongue.19 That is the case in Hoffman's autobiography, as she describes having to live her life in a new language from the age of thirteen. The title of the book refers to this transitional period in her life, when she loses one language before she has gained another. She describes this period as a very frightening experience; she associates losing a language with losing her 'self', her Polish identity, her life and loves in Poland, and her childhood. Paul John Eakin maintains that: if autobiographical discourse encourages us to place self before language, cart before horse, the fact of our readiness to do so suggests that the power of language to fashion selfhood is not only successful but life-sustaining, necessary to the conduct of human life as we know it.20 19

G. Thomas Couser says about Maxine Hong Kingston's and Richard Rodrigues's autobiographical writings: 'In both cases, the ethnic language is experienced as an obstacle to full selfhood as an American: in making the transition from private (family) life to public life (in school), from Chinese or Spanish to English, both suffered temporary speech impediments. Both eventually broke through the language barrier to become exceptionally literate and well-educated in English, as is demonstrated by their success as writers; however, both recognized that in writing autobiography, they broke powerful cultural proscriptions. (Indeed, both books are dedicated to parents who either cannot read or cannot accept their autobiographical writing.) Thus, while both are "success stories," both associate pain, loss, and confusion with their assimilation.' Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 213. 20 Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 191.

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Hoffman describes her loss of paradise in terms of loss of language. It is a border that takes her many years to cross, and it is the loss she finds most difficult to accept. On one level her loss of language bestows her with a linguistic knowledge - the relativity of language which for her is more than an abstract notion; it is a living reality. The words become dislodged from reality, they are not reality anymore, they could be anything. Hoffman explains that 'this radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances - its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection' (Lost in Translation, p. 107). This loss of connection, of significance, epitomises her experience of immigration.21 The loss of language stands in for what she lost when she left Poland; the living connection to the past, and writing an autobiography is one way of re-establishing that connection. She gives her childhood back the 'colors, striations, nuances - its very existence' by writing about it in her new language. On another level her loss of language means a loss of identity, a diminished sense of self, and she emphasises how an inability to express oneself can have dramatic consequences: Linguistic dispossession is a sufficient motive for violence, for it is close to the dispossession of one's self. Blind rage, helpless rage is rage that has no words - rage that overwhelms one with darkness. And if one is perpetually without words, if one exists in the entropy of inarticulateness, that condition itself is bound to be an enraging frustration [. . .] Anger can be borne - it can even be satisfying - if it can gather into words and explode in a storm, or a rapier-sharp attack. But without this means of ventilation, it only turns back inward, building and swirling like a head of steam - building to an impotent, murderous rage. If all therapy is speaking therapy - a talking cure 21

Other things also get lost in Hoffman's crossing: 'there's no doubt about it; after the passage across the Atlantic, I've emerged as less attractive, less graceful, less desirable.' Lost in Translation, p. 109.

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then perhaps all neurosis is speech dis-ease. (Lost in Translation, p. 124)

These two factors; losing a language, and thereby losing a connection to the life that was lead in that language, leads to a loss of a sense of self and identity. Hoffman describes that state before she has gained a new sense of identity, and being unable to express herself in the terms that come 'naturally'. At thirteen, Hoffman is silenced and she draws attention to this in various ways throughout the text: ''Shut up, shuddup,' the children around us are shouting, and it's the first word in English that I understand from its dramatic context' (Lost in Translation, p. 104). The loss of language is a powerful catalyst in Hoffman's text; it is what she suffers most in losing, and what she fights hardest to gain in the new world. She claims that her struggle with language formed her life in every way. She describes falling in love with a man because he spoke in ways that she envied. She studied literature and made her living as a writer and editor, so her new language in the end gives her a 'new world' identity. But as she writes her life in English, she has established an identity, even if a fragmented one, and thereby successfully translated herself.22 It is in the descriptions of losing a language and thereby losing a connection to the past and slowly regaining that connection that the text offers new insights, and introduces new territories on the borderline between autobiography and fiction. Hoffman's dramatic loss influences the structure of the autobiography, and her attempts at regaining that lost world in her new language, by bringing her Polish childhood to the new world, highlights how writing on the past demands an attempt to create a bridge between the past and the present, and in Hoffman's case between two different cultures, two different languages. She visits her 'imaginary homeland' conscious 22

Salman Rushdie argues much the same point: 'Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influence at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.' op. cit., p. 17.

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that she is forever cut off from it, and thereby emphasises the fictional element always present in writing on the past. In the last chapter, 'New World', she resolves the difficulties she describes in the 'Exile' chapter, her loss of identity and her loss of 'living connection' to her language. She describes attempts at building an identity, to be part of the new world without losing her past completely: The gap cannot be fully closed, but I begin to trust English to speak my childhood self as well, to say what has so long been hidden, to touch the tenderest spots. Perhaps any language, if pursued far enough, leads to exactly the same place. And so, while therapy offers me instruments and the vocabulary of self-control, it also becomes, in the long run, a route back to that loss which for me is the model of all loss, and to that proper sadness of which children are never really afraid; in English, I wind my way back to my old, Polish melancholy. When I meet it, I reenter myself, fold myself again in my own skin. (Lost in Translation, p. 274)

The text itself is proof enough that Hoffman has embraced her new language, if not entirely her new world. She still has reservations about the life she leads there, although she is fully aware that there is no turning back. In the last paragraph in the book she ties the final loose strand, her connection to the language, the living connection of it, the power of language to 'evoke', and in this way she embraces the new world: 'Azalea,' I repeat. 'Forsythia, delphinium.' The names are beautiful, and they fit the flowers perfectly. They are the flowers, these particular flowers in this Cambridge garden. For now, there are no Platonic azaleas, no Polish hyacinths against which these are compared. I breathe in the fresh spring air. Right now, this is the place where I'm alive. How could there be any other place? Be here now, I think to myself in the faintly ironic tones in which the phrase is uttered by the likes of me. Then the phrase dissolves. The brilliant colors are refracted by the sun. The small space of the garden expands into the dimensions of peace. Time

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pulses through my blood like a river. The language of this is sufficient. I am here now. (Lost in Translation, p. 280)

It is of note here that in this scene of 'finding' herself in English, the words she utters are plant names of Latin and Greek origin. The search for the childhood language, that was a complete part of her and not only a means of communicating, is over, and her writing on it confirms it to the wider world, to her new world. Hoffman describes herself as 'lost in translation', but the subtitle, A Life in a New Language, offers the hope that it is possible to translate oneself. Rushdie also entertains that notion: The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.23

The marriage of words and objects, of the Cambridge flowers and their names, also reveals a connection to the landscape of the new world. In the next section I examine what part descriptions of landscape play in the contrasting of two cultures, what they reveal of the themes of the autobiographies, and how it connects to ideas on identity and origin.

4. Familiar and Foreign Landscapes Kyoko Mori's autobiographical work, The Dream of Water, describes a trip to Japan, her country of birth, after a thirteen-year absence, following a move to the United States at the age of nineteen. Mori describes a difficult childhood; her mother committed suicide, and her father treated her very badly. Mori voices many ambivalent emotions about her home country, about her family, and about living 23

Ibid.

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in another, very different, culture. As in Ondaatje's case the text is reminiscent of a travel journal as she describes the landscape of her childhood. Both texts are structured like travel journals, but the difference is that Ondaatje and Mori are not searching for foreign countries, but trying to find their past. In the descriptions of her hometown Mori reveals all her ambivalent feelings, her 'double vision', that she finds difficult to bring together. The Japan Mori remembers and what she sees are two different things, but she attempts to reconcile the two different visions, feeling at home and being foreign: The bright glow of neon made the city look more like a Hollywood set than any real place. Now when I think of singing lights and musical vendors, this whole country reminds me of an amusement park, a big Disneyland with computerized lights and electronic wonders. The place I came back to seems absurd, comical, even silly. But how can I possibly feel that way after last night, when, lying in the dark a few miles from the house where my mother had chosen to die, I realized it was fear that had kept me away for so long - fear of this city, this country, of being plunged back into my mother's unhappiness? [. . .] I put the coffee cup in the sink and walk up the winding stairway toward my room. To the left of the stairway, the wall is solid with wood panels that are stained a dark brown. To my right, from between the lighter-colored cypress pillars, I can look down at the front entrance. The door is open to let in the air. A light breeze is moving the glossy leaves of the orange trees planted near the gate. Ascending the stairway, I am suspended in midair between these two views, between two separate pictures I cannot bring together.24

The texts discussed in this chapter all attempt in different ways to bring together two 'separate pictures'. One of the ways in which these different visions come across is in descriptions of landscape. They at times stand in for the authors' feelings about the culture they 24

Kyoko Mori, The Dream of Water: A Memoir (New York: One World/Fawcett Columbine, 1995), p. 37. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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encounter. In this passage Mori describes the city as if she were a tourist passing through, but at the same time the city holds the key to her decision to move away, and reminds her constantly of her childhood. She experiences the landscape in two different ways; as the tourist who is seeing a landscape, a view, and as an exile seeing his or her home country. Mary Louise Pratt argues that travel writers claim 'authoritativeness for their vision' and use three strategies in their descriptions, 'estheticization, density of meaning, and domination'.25 All these elements can be seen to be at work in these texts, but what makes them problematic is that it is only in part that they are tourists or foreigners, they are also describing their home countries, as they are also natives.26 This idea of being foreign and native at the same time is an important preoccupation in Ondaatje's text. He examines not only his own status, but the status of other writers who have written about the country, as well as other members of his family. The barometer Ondaatje uses to determine whether people are natives or foreigners is how much a part of the landscape they are. The part landscape plays is much more than as a decorative illustration in this book, it is inextricably linked to the people who inhabit it. He tells of his grandfather Bampa:

25

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 217. Susan Bassnett warns us that travel writing is never 'innocent': 'The map-maker, the translator and the travel writer are not innocent producers of text. The works they create are part of a process of manipulation that shapes and conditions our attitudes to other cultures while purporting to be something else. Map-makers produce texts that can be used in very specific ways, translators intervene in the interlingual transfer with every word they choose, travel writers constantly position themselves in relation to their point of origin in a culture and the context they are describing.' Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), p. 99. 26 Mori highlights this problem when she writes: 'I want to see the Japan I have never seen before - the Japan that truly is a foreign country - before I can deal with my hometown, my family, the Japan that has become foreign to me.' The Dream of Water, p. 11.

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It seems to be the ultimate test for all travellers and foreigners, whether they can become a part of the landscape, understand it, be awed by it, but not get irritated by it. His grandfather's 'Englishness' evaporates when he becomes a part of the landscape. His rituals go against the natural order of things, and therefore are almost impossible for others to keep up. Ondaatje's text is full of ambivalence towards his own status in the landscape: 'I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner' (Running in the Family, p. 79). The foreigner the text actively engages with is the figure of the Western writer. Ondaatje examines not only his own and his family's position in Sri Lanka, but also talks about the influence foreigners had on the country, and how they reacted to it: 'Ceylon always did have too many foreigners . . . the 'Karapothas' as my niece calls them - the beetles with white spots who never grew ancient here, who stopped in and admired the landscape, disliked the 'inquisitive natives' and left' (Running in the Family, p. 80). Ondaatje quotes mostly late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury writers, such as D. H. Lawrence and Leonard Woolf. These quotations emphasise what Ondaatje shares with them, coming from the West, travelling through a country and writing on it, but at the same time, it reminds us of the difference, of Ondaatje's status as an immigrant, of being part of both worlds, the 'old' and the 'new'. This duality in his relationship to the country colours all his descriptions of it. What drove the foreigners away is what Ondaatje

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loves about the place, and gives him a sense of belonging in the landscape: It is delicious heat [. . .] This is the heat that drove Englishmen crazy. D. H. Lawrence was in Ceylon for six weeks in 1922 [. . .] his cantankerous nature rose to the surface like sweat [. . .] Heat disgraces foreigners. Yesterday, on the road from Kandy to Colombo we passed New Year's festivities in every village - grease pole climbing, bicycle races with roadside crowds heaving buckets of water over the cyclists as they passed - everyone joining in the ceremonies during the blazing noon. But my kids, as we drove towards lowland heat, growing belligerent and yelling at each other to shut up, shut up, shut up. (Running in the Family, pp. 79-80)

If we examine his descriptions of his family, as I discussed above, much the same duality comes to light. The stories are exaggerated, and fantastic, but they are also a part of him, part of what made him, and he is therefore not satisfied with the stories, the gossip, he hears. Ondaatje is always trying to get at something deeper. He does not want to accept the surface reality, he wants to learn the 'intimate truths'. In the paragraph above he places himself not only as different from the writers that came here before him, but also as different from his own children. His dilemma is that his children are foreigners to the country, to the landscape. It leaves him in an in-between state, fluctuating between the old world and the new, between the past and the present. But his children are still a part of him and manage to be fascinated by the country, and feel that it is their place after all: 'And my daughter turned to me on the edge of the lawn where I had my first haircuts and said, 'If we lived here it would be perfect.' 'Yes,' I said' (Running in the Family, p. 146). The descriptions of landscape in the text are therefore intimately linked to his autobiographical project. They play a role in his search for his past, his family, his country, and they serve to remind the reader of his ambiguous status as an immigrant. By writing this text Ondaatje brings Sri Lanka to Canada, and he strives to do so without falling into the same traps as other travel-

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writers. At one point he describes having brought not only his thoughts on the country and his family to Canada, but also the sounds of the forest. In a section entitled 'The Prodigal' he describes how he has moved the Ceylon landscape to his home in Canada and how it changes: One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by [the animal noises] once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them inaudible then because they were always there like breath. (Running in the Family, p. 136)

It seems to me that this is part of Ondaatje's project in this text. To bring the unheard sounds, which people take for granted in one place, to another. In this different context they inevitably change. The unnoticed sounds of the place are what fascinates him, he listens to them as he writes, and so it is in that the stories he tells would only be thought remarkable outside Sri Lanka. He is therefore always writing as a foreigner, who is still native to the country. It is the problem as Salman Rushdie explains that 'it's my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time'.27 Ondaatje uses the landscape to find out truths about his family. Contemplating his parents' marriage while visiting what was once their home he says: 'I can leave this table, walk ten yards out of the house, and be surrounded by versions of green [. . .] This is the colour of landscape, this is the silence, that surrounded my parents' marriage' (Running in the Family, p. 167). Landscape gives the added colour to fill in the background to his parents' lives. But it also marks him as a foreigner, a traveller, as he writes on features of the landscape people who live in it take for granted, thus partaking in the aestheticization and domination Pratt describes. So this text moves constantly between 27

Rushdie, op. cit., p. 9.

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knowledge of the country and of the family, and a distance, a gap, between himself and the older generation, between himself and the country. It is his attempts at exploring this gap which the text describes. When Hoffman describes coming to Canada and travelling through it for the first time, she projects on to the landscape all her feelings of loss and bereavement. She is crossing borders into an unknown landscape she cannot fathom: By the time we reach the Rockies, my parents try to pull me out of my stupor and make me look at the spectacular landscapes we're passing by. But I don't want to. These peaks and ravines, these mountain streams and enormous boulders hurt my eyes - they hurt my soul. They're too big, too forbidding, and I can't imagine feeling that I'm part of them, that I'm in them. I recede into sleep; I sleep through the day and the night, and my parents can't shake me out of it. My sister, perhaps recoiling even more deeply from all this strangeness, is in a state of feverish illness and can hardly raise her head. (Lost in Translation, p. 100)

Describing the country in these terms, as vast and empty, Hoffman highlights how alienated she feels. It has a physical effect as she falls into some kind of coma, and her sister falls ill. The contrast with the idyllic landscape of her childhood is striking and it seems to work from the premise that landscape which one is used to and loves, is heimlich, the landscape that is foreign can be alien and frightening, unheimlich. This paragraph says more about feeling uprooted, feeling lost in a new world, than about the landscape of the Rockies. Language and landscape are intimately connected in Hoffman's text as for instance in the description of the Canadian flowers with the names that belonged to them which Hoffman uses as the ending to her autobiography, and as confirmation of her acceptance of the new world. In another instance she describes her parents' decision to move to Canada instead of Israel as having been influenced by descriptions of landscape:

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The word 'Canada' can mean freedom, a promise of a new life, but also a desert, a robbing of a childhood. The landscape can represent this promise, this freedom, but it can also alianate one and even make one ill. Hoffman's double vision not only signifies her awareness of another, different culture in the New World, it also signifies her knowledge that this move means one thing to her parents and another to her. It also reminds us that it was she who 'made it' in this new world, her parents had forever to struggle with poverty, and never came to grips with the new language.28 On the one hand one can say that Hoffman's and Ondaatje's use of landscape in their autobiographies is reminiscent of recent travel writing, such as the works of Bruce Chatwin, in their subjective descriptions and searching tone. On the other hand, as part of 28

Mori's feelings about leaving her country are as ambivalent as Hoffman's. Her trip has reinforced all her ideas about her family and has made her certain that she was right in leaving Japan. She tries to find in them a new lease of life, a logical conclusion to what has gone before, to see her past in terms of the inevitability of that move: 'I take a deep breath, trying to take consolation, however small in the inevitability of my situation. My leaving is the logical conclusion of everything that has happened to my mother and her family: the loss of our land, the choices she made because of that loss, her letting go of me in the end to die alone. Sitting here and waiting for my plane, I am continuing our legacy of loss, which might in the end, turn out to be a legacy of freedom as well. I am the daughter my mother had meant to set free into the larger world through her losses. That is the most essential thing about my past here. Having lost the city of my birth and childhood, I can go anywhere in the world and not feel the same loss again. My mother wanted me to move on, not to be afraid of uncertainty, not to be bound to old obligations.' The Dream of Water, p. 275.

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autobiographical texts, the descriptions highlight the problematic relationship every autobiographer has to the past, the 'lost home'. What sets these writers apart from most autobiographers is that they have crossed borders and as I conclude this chapter I will look at some of the ways this is engaged with in the texts.

5. Crossing Borders Emily Apter points out that: The current generation of exilic critics is often, as might be expected, deeply antithetical to their Eurocentric counterparts: non-German speaking, nonmetropolitan, nonwhite, antipatriarchal, and, in varying degrees, hostile to elitist literariness. And yet one could say that new-wave postcolonial literacy bears certain distinct resemblances to its European antecedents imbued as it often is with echoes of melancholia, Heimlosigkeit, cultural ambivalence, consciousnesss of linguistic loss, confusion induced by 'worlding' or global transference, amnesia of origins, fractured subjectiviy, border trauma, the desire to belong to 'narration' as a substitute for 'nation', the experience of a politics of linguistic and cultural usurpation.29

One of the questions autobiography often sets out to answer is 'where do I come from?' In immigrant autobiographies this question is of central importance. If the authors' descriptions of their homelands are inevitably in some ways fictional, the question of origin becomes problematic. When these authors place themselves ethnically they are aware of the complications of doing so, that there is no single answer to the question.

29

Emily Apter, 'Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of Comparative Literature', in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 86-96, p. 90.

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Ondaatje grapples with this question throughout the text. His grandfather wanted to be English, his father claimed to be a Tamil. In a section called 'Historical relations' Ondaatje explains the difficulty in mapping his ethnic background: Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations [. . .] Emil Daniels summed up the situation for most of them when he was asked by one of the British governors what his nationality was - 'God alone knows, your excellency'. (Running in the Family, p. 41)

This, of course, has added significance in a country where for the last thirty years politics has been drawn on ethnic lines; where the Tamil and Sinhalese have fought a bloody war. But for Ondaatje his mixed origin is what he highlights. Not only is he a native and a foreigner at the same time, living in the West while his past belongs to Ceylon, but he is also Sinhalese and Tamil, Dutch and British. It is completely alien to this text to pinpoint who belongs there in terms of ethnic background, the only criterion is whether you accept the landscape, the life there. This stance can be seen as naive, and to perhaps conveniently forget the politics which have shaped the country.30 But Ondaatje does not minimise the difficulty that can be involved in understanding a different culture, and is fully aware of the harm done to his country by Westerners through the centuries: The leap from one imagination to the other can hardly be made; no more than Desdemona could understand truly the Moor's military exploits. We own the country we grow up 30

John A. Thieme claims that the 'work very clearly locates itself within a postmodernist tradition, resisting unitary classification, closure and essentialist definitions of personality and the past, and suggesting that both individual and national identities are formed through a series of random, and frequently bizarre, accretions.' '"Historical Relations": Modes of Discourse in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family', in Narrative Strategies in Canadian Literature: Feminism and Postcolonialism, eds. Coral Ann Howells and Lynette Hunter (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 40-48, p. 41.

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in, or we are aliens and invaders. Othello's talent was a decorated sleeve she was charmed by. This island was a paradise to be sacked. Every conceivable thing was collected and shipped back to Europe. (Running in the Family, p. 81)

Hoffman also has a complicated relationship to her origin. As a Polish Jew whose parents survived the war by being constantly on the run (not least from the Polish), her ethnicity has long since been defined for her. But it was the war that gave her her 'true origin': My father almost never mentions the war; dignity for him is silence, sometimes too much silence. After a while, he finds it difficult to talk about many things, and it is not until the events have receded into the past that he recounts a few stories from those years - by that time so far removed that they seem like fables again, James Bond adventures. How will I ever pin down the reality of what happened to my parents? I come from the war; it is my true origin. But as with all our origins, I cannot grasp it. Perhaps we never know where we come from; in a way, we are all created ex nihilo. (Lost in Translation, p. 23)

This search for origin in the texts is in both instances followed by an awareness of how complicated the answer will be. Neither writer expects to find clues that will lead them to one simple answer. To support the view that the war is her true origin, Hoffman points to the way identity is shaped by events. To be Jewish in 1845 meant something completely different than it did in 1945. Immigration and exile can also be said to be their 'true origin'. Loss and search for origin is not tied to these texts alone, but is an integral part of autobiography, and these texts highlight how the answers to these questions about origin are 'created' by the autobiographer, no matter how much they are based in fact. Writing an autobiography is one way of creating an origin for oneself. In his book James Clifford claims: 'The general topic, if it can be called one, is vast: a view of human location as constituted by displacement as

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much as by stasis.'31 Hoffman seems to agree with Clifford that crossing borders is the norm in our time: Dislocation is the norm rather than the aberration in our time, but even in the unlikely event that we spend an entire lifetime in one place, the fabulous diverseness with which we live reminds us constantly that we are no longer the norm or the center, that there is no one geographic center pulling the world together and glowing with the allure of the real thing; there are, instead, scattered nodules competing for our attention. New York, Washington, Tehran, Tokyo, Kabul - they all make claims on our imaginations, all remind us that in a decentered world we are always simultaneously in the center and on the periphery, that every competing center makes us marginal. (Lost in Translation, pp. 274-275)

Hoffman has moved from the realisation that she has to live with 'double vision', as she will never be able to convince others that Poland is the centre, to discover that in a decentered world there is no one centre. The text moves from a thirteen year old girl losing her childhood, her country, her language, to a more general discussion of living in dislocation. This is one instance of how the text moves from a personal, private identity - her own loss - towards an acceptance that this loss is the general state of affairs. But it is in Hoffman's awareness of this that she remains an immigrant. Writing autobiography involves choosing to write about one event and not another, choosing one style and not another, thereby reminding us that there can always be another life, the one that is not described in the autobiography, or the one that 'might have been'. Living 'simultaneously in the centre and on the periphery' or with 31

James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 2. Boelhower also mentions this: 'Habitare, therefore, is an essential property of existence and as such is also the foundational dynamic behind the montage conventions of autobiography. But in our texts, one will recall, the topic is even more specific in that it centres on the crisis of habitare or on the fact that it is no longer possible to dwell in the modern world.' op. cit., p. 23.

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what Hoffman calls 'double vision' also implies an awareness of the possibility of having a different life, a fictional life. When one leaves a country to live in another, one leaves behind a possible life. Both Mori and Hoffman discuss this 'other' life. Mori describes a visit to her grandparent's village: How do I know what has changed and what remains the same when I live so far away? How can I feel comforted by the past when loss is the most constant thing in it? [. . .] I am leaving behind a village where all my life, under different circumstances, could have taken place. (The Dream of Water, p. 186)

This makes Mori's visit to her homeland all the more poignant as she meets friends, and watches their lives in this parallel universe. Hoffman often mentions this problem. Her first years in Canada she kept her 'parallel life' going by constantly imagining what she would be doing had she stayed. Soon that becomes impossible as she realises she does not know 'Cracow Ewa' any more. Later it is the friends she meets on a visit to Poland that call back these thoughts. But Hoffman realises at the end of the book that this is an impossible game: No, one can't create a real out of a conditional history; in the light of the simple declarative statement of actual existence, 'would have been' or 'as if' loses its ontological status. In a way, it doesn't count, though without it, we would have no imagination: we would be truly prisoners of our selves. But the shadow that this conjectural history casts over my real one is not a shadow of regret but of knowledge - to which we all must reconcile ourselves - that one is given only one life, even though so many others might have been. (Lost in Translation, p. 241)

What, for instance, would autobiography be without this possibility of something else, some other life that could have been led? The texts I have discussed here throw light on many preoccupations of autobiography: for example structure, language, origin, and the life that could have been. Hoffman and Ondaatje align themselves with

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other authors, travel-writers, autobiographers, immigrants. Hoffman writes on the experience of crossing cultures by using language as the key to her loss of her childhood and identity and to her acceptance of the new world, the key to her new identity. By using a tripartite structure the text moves logically between the descriptions of her paradise, her struggle with exile, and her life in the new world. She does describe some kind of synthesis in the last chapter, but it is one that comes from accepting her dislocation, rather than glossing over it, as many 'success' stories have a tendency to do. By using the almost generic titles to her chapters, 'Paradise', 'Exile', 'New World', she emphasises that what she describes is an experience felt by many and in no way unique to herself. Hoffman puts the question of writing on the lost past thus: To some extent, one has to rewrite the past in order to understand it. I have to see Cracow in the dimensions it has to my adult eye in order to perceive that my story has been only a story, that none of its events has been so big or so scary. It is the price of emigration, as of any radical discontinuity, that it makes such reviews and rereadings difficult; being cut off from one part of one's own story is apt to veil it in the haze of nostalgia, which is an ineffectual relationship to the past, and the haze of alienation, which is an ineffectual relationship to the present. (Lost in Translation, p. 242)

The autobiographical process itself is important to this text. Writing the autobiography Hoffman creates a homeland, she defuses the fright she experiences, or as Ondaatje puts it writes the histories to eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and resolves her ineffectual relation to the past and the present. She has been cured of her own speech 'dis-ease' and gains authority and power over her new world by writing on the old in her new language. Ondaatje's fragmented text draws attention to his fragmented life. By using different styles and techniques he emphasises how hard it is to know anything about the past, and even harder to write on that elusive knowledge. His use of metaphors, dreams and visions pierces the smooth surface of the entertaining stories of his ancestors and alerts us

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to the fact that although he is writing mainly on other people it is ultimately a quest for his own origin and identity. His travels are travels to his past, to the country whose landscape is an integral part of him, that sets him apart from other travel writers, other 'foreigners'. He attempts to reconcile two voices in this text, the foreign and the native, the past and the present. The fragmented structure represents the ambivalence he describes. Both texts are attempts at bridging the gap between the past and the present, a gap that is larger for them than for many autobiographers, as they are a part of two different cultures. They seem to have found, in their very different ways, a balance between the two visions that can be said to lie somewhere between autobiography and fiction. Both attempt to create in autobiography a homeland for themselves and in so doing they bring their old world, the other side, to their new world. They make their past, their culture heard in the new world. By writing on the Poland of her childhood Hoffman is attempting to put it back in the centre, to colour the grey, people it, and by putting her experiences there and in Canada and the United States together in one book she attempts some kind of fusion of the two different lives, cultures, identities. These autobiographical texts on journeys between cultures highlight some of the preoccupations of autobiography. The autobiographers' feelings of dislocation draw attention to the decentred world we live in. The gaps the authors have to bridge may be more pronounced than is most commonly the case, but by using fictional methods, such as Hoffman's paradise - exile - new world structure, or Ondaatje's fragmented experiments with different genres, they highlight the fictional element that is always necessary in autobiography to bridge the gaps, be it between the past and the present, or between remembering and writing.

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Chapter Five Biography in Autobiography It seems to me now that my family story was all there always, everywhere, layered away, as in the kernels of box, and that I absorbed it somatically - took it in through my pores with the gritty box dust.1

1. Introduction: The Question of Biography One thread in this study that has hitherto remained unexamined is the relationship between autobiography and biography; or more specifically, what I would like to call the presence of biography in autobiography. Many of the texts I have chosen for my enquiry are not only concerned with telling the life of the narrator, they also, and some even primarily, tell the life of the narrator's parent or parents, and in some cases grandparents. Peter Handke, Michael Ondaatje, Paul Auster, and Suzannah Lessard all interweave their own life story with their parents' story. I have included these texts in my study of autobiography as I believe this type of text to form a significant strand in recent life-writing. Writing on one's family constitutes a part of the more general search for origin and identity present in autobiographical writing. In the previous chapter I discussed Ondaatje's search for his family history in Sri Lankan archives. Here he describes a scene where he transcribes information from these documents: Sit down in my room and transcribe names and dates from the various envelopes into a notebook. When I finish there will be that eerie moment when I wash my hands and see very clearly the deep grey colour of old paper dust going down the drain.2

1

Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire (London: Phoenix, 1997), pp. 1-2. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) 2 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984), p. 68.

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In this chapter I examine in closer detail this presence of biography in autobiography. The texts I discuss all describe the authors' search for their backgrounds and their family history. They write about what was 'all there always, everywhere, layered away' and by writing on it they give these layers of family history a sense of coherence and they save the 'dust from going down the drain', and thus their family history from disappearing. By focusing not only on the narrator's own life but on that of the narrator's parents and/or grandparents, these texts all pose questions about the nature of the relationship between autobiography and biography. Autobiography and biography are often distinguished according to whether the narrator is the subject, but Laura Marcus explains how restrictive such a clear division between biography and autobiography can be: Very recently - and the impetus has come primarily from feminist critics - the inadequacy of this conceptual divide has been clearly revealed and far more exciting conjunctures occur, showing how autobiography and biography function together. Recounting one's own life almost inevitably entails writing the life of an other or others; writing the life of another must surely entail the biographer's identifications with his or her subject, whether these are made explicit or not.3

The genres clearly function together in the texts discussed here as the writers all devote substantial parts of their works to writing about an other or others. When writing on another's life within the framework of autobiography the writers inevitably have to deal with the borderline between biographical writing and fiction, as they face the difficulty of the ultimate 'unknowability' of others. As I have attempted to demonstrate in earlier chapters, autobiography, far from being a homogeneous genre, is a hybrid one. Throughout its history it has embraced many different types of

3

Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 273-274.

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narrative. It includes in its folds aspects of history, fiction, confession, conversion narrative, poetry, and the novel. It has been experimented with greatly in the past twenty-five years or so and these experiments are likely to continue as people's ideas about the self, about narrative, and about history continue to change. For some time now autobiography has been a space for experimentation and new voices, whereas biography has largely remained outside that field of experimentation. There are notable exceptions such as Peter Ackroyd's biographies of Charles Dickens (1990) and William Blake (1995) and fictional biographies such as Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1981), Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990), but by and large biography has not been as rich a field for experimentation as autobiography. Biography is still in many ways a positivist genre, with many unexamined assumptions at its core. Phyllis Frus McCord points out the difference between the two genres: Because the plot of an autobiography is the coming into being of the self that is narrating, autobiographies are frequently 'meta-autobiographical', telling the story of how the text has come into existence. Biography, on the other hand, is more influenced by the positivist tendencies of its parent genre, history, with all that implies: fidelity to documentation, realistic representation of a world posited as objectively present to the viewer, historical third-person narrator, and the progression of events in causal relation to one another toward closure.4

This is a broad division and as I mentioned above there are texts which do not fit into this scheme. Not all autobiographies are 'metaautobiographical' and biographers are not all as positivist as McCord would have us believe, any more than all historians are. All the same, this can be a helpful guideline and one that Paul John Eakin would subscribe to when he asks 'Can Autobiography Serve Biography?' He

4

Phyllis Frus McCord, '"A specter viewed by a specter": Autobiography in Biography', Biography 9 (1986), 219-228 (pp. 220-221).

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claims that biographers and autobiographers have much to teach each other: For biographers who tend to take reference too much for granted, the theory and practice of autobiography are instructive, for they demonstrate that simplistic notions of biographical fact need to be enlarged in order to include modes of fiction that often constitute the experiential reality of life history. At the same time, the example of biography can help to remind us that autobiography, for all the manifold fictions in which it is implicated, is nothing if not a referential art.5

Eakin makes two points here relevant to our enquiry; firstly he emphasises the modes of fiction that influence autobiography and secondly he points out the importance of referentiality to both these genres, implying that the constant movement in autobiography between fictional and referential modes of discourse also characterises the relationship between autobiography and biography. This is a concern here as I examine the modes of discourse autobiographers deploy in writing on their parents' lives. But what happens on the border of these two sister genres? What happens when autobiographers become biographers of their parents? And what happens when autobiographers experiment with the modes and conventions of biography? First let us look at William Bell's description of biography: Standard features of biography might include: chronology as an organising principle; a feeling for local colour; the purveying of fact; a reliance on documents (diaries, letters) to illuminate the private man; scholarly method and the panoply of scholarship; the forming of an image. In addition, the biographer is called upon to research,

5

Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 54.

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accumulate, select, order, interpret, discriminate, correct, judge, narrate.6

What McCord, Eakin and Bell all emphasise is the role of research in biography; the scholarship involved; the handling of documents; interpretation; and biography's strong 'belief' in the referent. In examining several texts that all, in one way or another, are concerned with 'an other', I hope to show how the relationship between autobiography and biography can illuminate the complex issue of the role of fiction in recent life-writing. There are two elements in these texts that require further investigation. The first is the relationship between the narrator and subject, and how that affects the writing of (auto)biography. There is always a certain power struggle involved when writing on someone else as Barbara Johnson explains in discussing Janet Malcolm's thoughts on the controversy surrounding Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: To be observed is to be dispossessed: our lives are precisely what we can never own. Knowledge of them is always already the other's. Yet Janet Malcolm goes on to compare biography to burglary, which suggests that, whoever owns the life, the biographer always seizes it transgressively. What this implies is that the biographer does indeed steal, but what is stolen is something not owned. That is perhaps why there is so much struggle around it.7

This struggle over the question of ownership are relevant here, as the autobiographers can be said to take control of their parents' lives by writing on them, and thereby instigating a reversal of the conventional power base in parent-child relationships.

6

William Bell, 'Not Altogether a Tomb: Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot', in Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, ed, David Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1993), pp. 149-173, p. 159. 7 Barbara Johnson, 'Whose Life is it, anyway?', in The Seductions of Biography, eds. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 119-121, p. 120.

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The second element that I believe plays a large role in the interaction between autobiography and biography is that in many instances the autobiographer is unearthing a family secret or looking for solutions to some problems and/or mysteries in his or her background. Autobiography thereby comes to resemble a quest, a search for something hidden in the family background, and I will look at how this affects the narrative structure of the works. The narrative structure most often applied in biography - thirdperson narrative in chronological order with a very clear causal structure - is often the very element critics of biography are most wary of.8 This type of narrative is then seen as glossing over the problematics of writing on someone else and hiding the ignorance of the biographer as John Worthen mentions. Worthen explains that because biographers have hindsight, all events in a life are explained in narrative terms: The fact that we want an emergent sense of the inevitable development suggests the enormously soothing quality which biographies have come to have in our age. Not only do biographies suggest that things as difficult as human lives can - for all their obvious complexity - be summed up, known, comprehended: they reassure us that, while we are reading, a world will be created in which there are few or no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) loose ends.9

Writing on one's family background can in these terms be seen to be an attempt to offer some cohesion to the 'muddled', 'unclear', and 'loose ends' of a parent's life and thereby create a solid base from which to view one's own life. Giving a sense of cohesion and closure to a parent's life can establish a sense of authority and meaning in the writer's own life story. But how far do the writers discussed here go

8

This is mentioned in several essays in The Seductions of Biography. John Worthen, 'The Necessary Ignorance of a Biographer', in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 227-244, p. 231. 9

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towards writing this kind of biography of their parents? And how does that influence the autobiographical aspects of the texts? In the two sections that follow, the first brings together several texts in an effort to establish a broad picture of the areas I have described. The second deals with one text in particular, Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude (1982), in order to examine the questions raised above in more detail.

2. Autobiography through Biography The subject of biography is 'a specter viewed by a specter' Saul Bellow10

2.1. The Relationship between Narrator and Subject David Ellis claims in his essay on Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage that: it may be that the reliable method of categorizing biographies, and bringing some semblance of order therefore to a vague and amorphous topic, is to consider not so much the subject as how biographers stand in relation to it.11

This, of course, is of prime importance in the texts discussed here. Many critics claim it makes for a more valid account of a life if the biographer has known his subject personally (Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is usually cited as the prime example), but what effect has it when the relationship is a very close one; i.e. a parent-child relationship? If we are looking for a balanced, objective account of the subject's life, such a relationship usually does not allow 10

Quoted in Mark Harris, Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 182. 11 David Ellis, 'Biography and Friendship: Johnson's Life of Savage', in Imitating Art, pp. 19-35, p. 19.

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for that kind of objective approach. It has been pointed out that biographies are in any event always to some extent also about the biographer.12 This interaction between narrator and subject has a special resonance when authors write about their parents. Their lives are so intertwined, the nature of family history is such that it envelops the subject's life, so that in autobiography the perspective inevitably shifts back and forth from autobiography to biography. This means that the relationship between narrator and subject is of even greater importance in texts about the author's parents, than in other types of biography. One could say that it is probably detrimental to objectivity but, nonetheless, a fertile ground for experimentation with the genre of biography. The parent-child relationship informs the texts structurally and thematically and this affects the relationship between autobiography and biography. Notably the texts are most often about the relationship between the narrator and the subject and how that affects the narrator, rather than a balanced account of their parents' lives. Writing on one's parent, as opposed to writing on a stranger from another era, generally means that easy access to the material needed is guaranteed. Also, as one knows one's parent primarily in the parental role, the writers tend to focus solely on that role. A relationship that is in its nature private, becomes public. The writer should know 'everything' about his or her parent, but precisely because of that the texts often point to the impossibility of knowing 'everything' about 12

Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) are based around exactly that premise. And as A. Robert Lee has pointed out in his discussion of Henry James's Hawthorne: 'James, througout Hawthorne, signals a range of further possibilities, above all the finding, the secreting even, of his own 'biography' in that of Hawthorne. Whether done instinctively or by design, in good faith or something rather less, he becomes the incubus within the biographical host. Another version, to give matters an image not quite so predatory, would be to say that Hawthorne discloses James as "teller" in equal proportion to Hawthorne as "tale". Under these rules of the game, and in phrasing which echoes James himself, the literary biography of one writer by another could rarely, if ever, be other than a house of mirrors.' 'The Mirror of Biography: Henry James's Hawthorne', in Imitating Art, pp. 67-80, p. 79.

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anyone else. More to the point, the texts expose the difficulty of writing about someone else. Worthen affirms that: Not only do biographers necessarily remain profoundly ignorant of many things in the lives of the subjects, but the narrative of a biography is in almost every case designed to conceal the different kinds of ignorance from which we suffer. As with all forms of knowledge we might roughly call 'historical', biographical knowledge exists simultaneously with (and I believe should never be allowed to obscure) inescapable ignorance: what I call necessary ignorance.13

This 'necessary ignorance' comes to the fore in attempts at writing on one's parent, be it highlighted or glossed over. For instance, in Ondaatje's text discussed in the previous chapter, it is ultimately his father's 'unknowability' that Ondaatje has to grapple with. His father remains outside: he is the 'north pole'. What often becomes more important in these cases is coming to terms with and/or situating oneself in relation to the parent, to compare and contrast. Italo Calvino wrote a short text on his father called 'La Strada di San Giovanni' printed in a collection of five autobiographical essays of the same title (published posthumously in 1990). It is a prime example of how this kind of writing is always in equal measure about the narrator and the subject. In the descriptions of his father it is Calvino's relationship with him that comes to be scrutinised. His father was a hardworking landowner who lived with and off the land. He knew every plant name, and all there was to know about growing them. Calvino rejects this knowledge as a child; he rejects this world, and the text recounts the story of this rejection. When describing his father's plants Calvino invents names for them in the text but then goes on to say: (And yet, and yet, if I had written some real names of plants here it would have been a gesture of modesty and devotion on my part, finally resorting to that humble knowledge that 13

Worthen, op. cit., p. 227.

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This illustrates that Calvino is not only describing a relationship he once had, with someone from his past, but an ongoing relationship, even long after the death of the parent. The plant names become an emblem of his father's world, symbolic of the knowledge Calvino rejected in order to forge a different path. Still he has never completely escaped from his father's road, even if he invents new names for his plants. The relationship Calvino describes is at once past and continually present, as it returns every morning to haunt him. Calling the reader's attention to the invented plant names, Calvino questions his own methods, alerting us to how the relationship he had with his father impinges on the writing. This text never pretends to be anything other than a highly subjective account of Calvino's relationship with his father. This paragraph also marks out the belief that the writing process itself could have changed this relationship, as if Calvino had used the correct plant names his father taught him he would have made peace with his father. The works discussed here deal actively with the narrator-subject relationship. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter when discussing the mother-daughter relationship, there is clearly evident a power struggle in that relationship which comes to the fore in the texts. There, the question of ownership and authority was clearly relevant. One can also see in Calvino's text, and in (auto)biographical texts by writers in general, a reversal of the literary biography, as it is normally the narrator who is the writer of the two. Literary biographies usually

14

Italo Calvino, 'The Road to San Giovanni', in The Road to San Giovanni, trans. Tim Parks (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 3-34, pp. 12-13.

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attempt to comment on the writing through a chronicle of the life. In these texts writers comment on their own life and work through writing on their parents, and that at times can give a sense of legitimacy to their own writing, as they trace the origin of the 'life of the writer' through writing on an other. In all these texts, prominent in some, but latent in others, there is a tension between the attempt to portray a life objectively and the attempt to convey the personal significance of the events for the writers. As I mentioned in the second chapter, Peter Handke voices the concern in Wunschloses Unglück at losing the private to the public, at individuals becoming types, of a personal narrative becoming a generic 'Woman's Life'.15 Annie Ernaux, in her book about her mother, voices a similar concern: J'essaie de ne pas considérer la violence, les débordements de tendresse, les reproches de ma mère comme seulement des traits personnels de caractère, mais de les situer aussi dans son histoire et sa condition sociale. Cette façon d'écrire, qui me semble aller dans le sens de la vérité m'aide à sortir de la solitude et de l'obscurité du souvenir individuel, par la découverte d'une signification plus générale. Mais je sens que quelque chose en moi résiste, voudrait conserver de ma mère des images purement affectives, chaleur ou larmes, sans leur donner de sens.16 15

'Ich vergleiche also den allgemeinen Formel vorrat für die Biographie eines Frauenlebens satzweise mit dem besonderen Leben meiner Mutter: aus den Übereinstimmungen und der Widersprüchlichkeiten ergibt sich dann die eigentliche Schreibtätigkeit. Wichtig ist nur, daß ich keine bloßen Zitate hinschreibe; die Sätze, auch wenn sie wie zitiert aussehen, dürfen in keinem Moment vergessen lassen, daß sie von jemand, zumindest für mich, Besonderem handeln - und nur dann, mit dem persönlichen, meinetwegen privaten Anlaß ganz fest und behutsam im Mittelpunkt, kämen sie mir auch brauchbar vor.' Wunschloses Unglück (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 45-46. 16 Annie Ernaux, Une Femme (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987), p. 52. (Hereafter quoted in the text with Tanya Leslie's English translation in footnotes.) 'When I think of my mother's violent temper, outbursts of affection and reproachful attitude, I try not to see them as facets of her personality but to relate them to her own story and social background. This

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This tension between the objective and the subjective - which can also be called the tension between the public and the private, or the typical and the individual - is apparent throughout both these texts. Handke attempts to get away from historical and social explanations, whereas Ernaux wants to see her mother's life in a larger context, but finds that it does not represent her own emotions. Ernaux is one of many writers to attempt to write on her parents objectively through the use of scholarly method, be it historical research, such as Henry F. May in Coming to Terms (1987) and Margaret Forster in Hidden Lives (1995), or as Ronald Fraser explains in In Search of a Past (1984): 'I outline the newly discovered aim of combining two different modes of enquiry - oral history and psychoanalysis - to uncover the past in as many of its layers as possible'17 or political and cultural changes as in Tim Lott's The Scent of Dried Roses (1996). Ernaux explains her motives: Je voudrais saisir aussi la femme qui a existé en dehors de moi, la femme réelle, née dans le quartier rural d'une petite ville de Normandie et morte dans le service de gériatrie d'un hôpital de la région parisienne. Ce que j'espère écrire de plus juste se situe sans doute à la jointure du familial et du social, du mythe et de l'histoire. Mon projet est de nature littéraire, puisqu'il s'agit de chercher une vérité sur ma mère qui ne peut être atteinte que par des mots. (C'est-à-dire que ni les photos, ni mes souvenirs, ni les témoignages de la famille ne peuvent me donner cette vérité.) Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon, au-dessous de la littérature. (Une Femme, p. 106)18 way of writing, which seems to bring me closer to the truth, relieves me of the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance by establishing a more objective approach. And yet something deep down inside refuses to yield and wants me to remember my mother purely in emotional terms - affection or tears - without searching for an explanation.' A Woman's Story, trans. Tanya Leslie (London, New York: Quartet Books, 1990), p. 41. 17 Ronald Fraser, In Search of a Past. The Manor House, Amnersfield 19331945 (London: Verso: 1984), p. 118. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) 18 'I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris. The more

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The use of scholarly method is an attempt at getting away from the writers' own relationship with their subjects, to prevent their parent's story from becoming subsumed within the private nature of the parent-child relationship, and to see their parents objectively as people formed by their environment and their times. It is a method the writers alternately seek and resist. Thus the texts constantly move between the public and the private spheres, between the subjective and the objective. They move between the sphere of biography and the sphere of autobiography, between historical and private knowledge. Ira Bruce Nadel points out that biography is a third-person narrative and explains: 'One must remember that, especially for biography, third-person narrative, on which it relies heavily, 'best produces the illusion of pure reference'. But, as Frank Kermode reminds us, 'it is an illusion, the effect of a rhetorical device'.'19 This rhetorical device, the use of the third-person narrative, is deployed in some of these texts, for instance by Forster and May. Both Forster and May use it to tell the story of their family before they were born and of events they had no connection with. This includes using alternately their parents' names in the chapters of third-person narrative and calling them Mother and Father in the sections of first-person narrative, as May explains: 'To reflect the shift from memory to history I have varied the names I use for them.'20 The texts, therefore, create the illusion of objectivity, but as they move from the third person to the first person, they undercut that illusion. objective aspect of my writing will probably involve a cross between family history and sociology, reality and fiction. This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. (Neither photographs, not my own memories, nor even the reminiscences of my family can bring me this truth.) And yet, in a sense, I would like to remain a cut below literature.' p. 13. 19 Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 3. See Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 117. 20 Henry F. May, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. x. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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But attempting objectivity does not only serve to give a fair account of a parent's life, it can also have more personal ramifications. Ernaux can here again enlighten us: Ceci n'est pas une biographie, ni un roman naturellement, peut-être quelque chose entre la littérature, la sociologie et l'histoire. Il fallait que ma mère, née dans un milieu dominé, dont elle a voulu sortir, devienne histoire, pour que je me sente moins seule et factice dans le monde dominant des mots et des idées où, selon son désir, je suis passée. (Une Femme, p. 106)21

Explaining a parent's behaviour in terms of history and circumstances can lessen the impact of this behaviour. One can see in all these texts attempts at objectivity, but at the same time anxiety over the effect of that objectivity; a fear that the individual will be lost, and the private taken over by the public. There is a tension between the fear of losing the sense of individuality and uniqueness and the longing to explain their parent's character and behaviour in terms of social and historical circumstances. This involves moving between two modes of discourse and two types of knowledge - between history and memory. Some autobiographical texts have the explicit purpose of examining the parent-child relationship, in the tradition of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907). J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself (1968) is one such text. Ackerley has to re-examine his relationship with his father following the revelation after his father's death that for most of his adult life he had led a double existence.22 This work sets out 21

'Naturally, this isn't a biography, neither is it a novel, maybe a cross between literature, sociology and history. It was only when my mother - born in an oppressed world from which she wanted to escape - became history that I started to feel less alone and out of place in a world ruled by words and ideas, the world where she had wanted me to live.' p. 91. 22 'Yet our relationship was never to be what I think he would have wished, close and confidential, the kind of relationship I fancy he might have had with my brother. After his death, when I knew more about him and believed he may have guessed about me, I regretted this. Whether I could have achieved a nearer understanding with him must remain a question; I was only sorry, when it was too late, not to have put it more boldly to the test. It is the

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explicitly to examine this father-son relationship. Descriptions of people and events are all there to serve that purpose. In the process Ackerley comes to examine not only his relationship with his father, but also comes to consider others who influenced that relationship. One of those is Ackerley's older brother who was killed in the First World War. Ackerley presents him as the favourite son, as the one who would have been capable of having a close relationship with his father, and even at one point claims that he would not have written this book (My Father and Myself, p. 52). This father-son relationship is the one that Ackerley continually refers back to. It becomes the ideal father-son relationship (it is largely imagined as his brother died so young), but it is what Ackerley measures his own failure by. Thus the relationships these texts describe are never clear-cut or obvious. They are complicated by other family members, by unexpected events, untold family stories or family secrets. Forster, May, Ackerley, Calvino and Ernaux all attempt, with different methods, to examine the parent-child relationship. Thus the narrator-subject relationship is actively explored in these texts and this sets them apart from more conventional biographical writing where this relationship often remains unexamined. It is in this exploration that autobiographical and biographical writing come together. And one can see, for instance in Calvino and Ackerley, the belief that the writing process itself will influence the way in which they view this relationship.

2.2. Auto/biography as Quest The autobiographical process is often seen as a process of discovery. Some writers claim to be attempting to get to know their parents through writing on them. The moment they most strongly feel the need to start writing is when a parent dies. They embark on a quest to purpose of the rest of this memoir to explore as briefly as possible, the reasons for our failure.' J. R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself (London: Bodley Head, 1968), pp. 75-76. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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find their parent, to 'touch them into words'. One can see in these instances a strong belief in the power of the writing process; they claim to have no choice, they have to write about their father or mother. Ernaux describes this need: Je vais continuer d'écrire sur ma mère. Elle est la seule femme qui ait vraiment compté pour moi et elle était démente depuis deux ans. Peut-être ferais-je mieux d'attendre que sa maladie et sa mort soient fondues dans le cours passé de ma vie, comme le sont d'autres événements, la mort de mon père et la séparation d'avec mon mari, afin d'avoir la distance qui facilite l'analyse des souvenirs. Mais je ne suis pas capable en ce moment de faire autre chose. (Une Femme, p. 22)23

This need is voiced by many authors, for instance by Peter Handke, Tim Lott, Paul Auster and Margaret Forster. In writing on their parents they become the voice of the parent, they have the last word, so to speak, raising their own monument to them. The subject is silent, except when in rare cases the texts include excerpts from letters or diaries. Texts written after the death of a parent are often attempts at coming to terms with the death: the illness, as in Susan Wicks's Driving My Father (1995), and watching a parent die or descriptions of suicide, as in Tim Lott's and Peter Handke's case.24 They describe the different 23

'I shall continue to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years. Perhaps I should wait until her illness and death have merged into the past, like other events in my life - my father's death and the break-up with my husband - so that I feel the detachment which makes it easier to analyse one's memories. But right now I am incapable of doing anything else.' p. 12. 24 Richard K. Sanderson and Rena Sanderson have this to say about writing on someone who committed suicide: 'Unlike, say, death by cancer, suicide allows for especially significant linkings of the death to the life. Not simply an act of self-destruction, suicide is also an act of communication, an attempt at self-fashioning and self-dramatization, and an expression of a need for control. Suicide, in short, has something in common with autobiography.'

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emotions they go through while writing about the death and by doing so discover something new about the parent, as in Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude or in Ackerley's work. Here we come to what is at the centre of many of the texts: the family secret. Much evident in for instance Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark (1985). The revelation of a family secret changes completely the way the authors have thought and felt about their families, it is something that casts a new light on the whole relationship. This is often at the centre of the texts; it provides the narrative thread, informs the structure and the writers' whole approach to their theme. May attempts in two ways to write about his parents: 'I will present them first as I remember them and then as I have learned to understand them by studying their papers, their origins, and their vanished worlds' (Coming to Terms, p. 18). There are two kinds of knowledge here; firstly the private memories and secondly the light that documents and research can shed on these memories. May also explains why he needs to write on them. It is not exactly a need to unearth some deep family secret, but a quest for understanding: 'This combination of memories - the strong but somewhat frightening father of my childhood and the sad, failing old man of my adolescence - was so painful that it was a long time before I could set about trying to understand my father' (Coming to Terms, p. 25). Writing one's family history does not always involve a family secret, but still the quest goes on to learn the truth behind family stories. Margaret Forster writes on four short episodes from her grandmother's life: Four fragments, full of facts but full of hearsay too, the very stuff of family history. Over and over again we get told stories by our parents and grandparents, and sometimes, if these stories are treated seriously and checked, that is all they turn out to be - stories, unsubstantiated and often downright contradicted by the actual evidence in records. But sometimes beneath the stories lurks the history of more 'Suicide and Literary Biography: The Case of Ernest Hemingway', Biography 20 (1997) 405-436, (p. 408).

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Forster never finds out her grandmother's secrets; she cannot find any documents that would explain what happened to her grandmother between the ages of two and twenty-three. The process itself is still a process of discovery, albeit an attempt at a more general understanding of the lives of working-class women in her grandmother's time, than a detailed account of her grandmother's life. As (auto)biographies often focus on the narrator's search for identity through writing on his or her family, the family secret revealed becomes pivotal to that search. The texts can therefore be seen as attempts at finding some clue or even explanation to what they see as the key to either their parent's character or their relationship with their parent. This attempt at putting the family stories into perspective, at learning the truth behind the family lore, can involve checking family records and documents in order to look for coherence and meaning. Through documents - public and private - interviews, and writing, memories and public and private events, the writers try to make sense of their own life and identity through the telling of their parent's life. Hence, these texts inevitably raise questions about both biography and autobiography. Biography is a branch of history and hence it often involves a fair amount of research; a search through letters, diaries, and official records. A good example of the research process and then creating something out of that research can be found in Alan Berliner's short film My Father (1996). Berliner, an American film-maker, made an hour long film on his father, Oscar Berliner. The film is built around an interview with his father, intercut with interviews with other members of his family; old photographs; 8mm films his father shot; shots of his father on his own in New York; shots of places the filmmaker visited to look for material; titles either with the name of the person speaking or stating a theme; and a black and white film of a 25

Margaret Forster, Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 13.

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boxing match. Oscar Berliner is a reluctant participant in his son's project and Alan uses the boxing match to illustrate their dialogue. He says to his father at the beginning of the film that he wants to know everything about him and his family. This is what drives the film. Berliner uses a great deal of secondary material, such as photographs, films, interviews, public records, and he travels to his grandfather's home country. The viewer follows him through all this. Berliner puts his own mark on the family story through the editing process. It is not only a film about his father, it is a film about the process of making a film about his father. This process can often be seen in the texts, although not all are as transparent as Berliner's film. Many include photographs, some letters and occasional journal or diary entries and some give a historical background to their parent's past. A popular form of novel writing includes using a family to provide the cast of characters, and the family can serve as a useful tool to examine cultural changes over a period of time. Often at the core is a family secret that provides a metaphor for comments on society at large.26 This convenient vehicle for narrative has not been overlooked by autobiographers. But the autobiographical nature of these works means that the story of the revelations of a family secret often becomes a type of quest, a search for a meaning, or sense of identity, through the author's family background, and the ultimate aim is to explain, or interpret, his or her own life. The question then of who is the subject - the child or the parent - becomes more complex. All biographies need a narrative structure as Nadel explains: 'In transforming the unselective moments of a life into a pattern, the biographer establishes both an explanation and a theme for his subject.'27 Family secrets are usually kept as the high-point of the narrative structure. Ackerley is unusually honest about his methods: The apparently haphazard chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as 26

See for instance Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Thomas Mann, Die Buddenbrooks. 27 Nadel, op. cit., p. 9.

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One can infer from this that when the narrative is focused on the revelation of a secret, chronology is often left behind. The chronology that is used is the chronology that will emulate the impact of the narrator's discovery, rather then the chronology of events in the subject's life. With this the author attempts to let the reader in on the shock they themselves felt on the discovery, but at the same time they leave any pure factual account behind. The authors explain two kinds of relationship with their family, before and after the shock. It comes therefore as a surprise in Suzannah Lessard's The Architect of Desire that she lets the reader in on the family tragedy right away: That Stanford [Lessard's great-grandfather] was a famous Beaux-Arts architect, notorious for being murdered in scandalous circumstances, was part of the environment too. He was, however, rarely mentioned on the Place. He was latent. The silence about him was something dark right there in the light. (The Architect of Desire, p. 2)

But it is not until near the end of the book that she reveals the truth about her family, as I discussed in a previous chapter. The truth about Lessard's abusive father, that she and her sisters had never discussed and thought it was partly their own imagination, is kept mostly hidden throughout. With that revelation Lessard changes completely the perspective the reader has had on her family. And, however minutely, re-creates her own sense of shock. Ackerley explains what a revelation like this can mean:

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The discovery of my father's duplicity gave me, I suppose, something of a jolt, not severe to a mind as self-centred as mine, but a jolt which gradually intrigued and then engaged my thought more and more as the years passed. It was the kind of shock that people must receive when some old friend, who has just spent with them an apparently normal evening, goes home and puts his head in the gas-oven. The shock, after the shock of death, is the shock to complacency, to self-confidence: the old friend was a stranger after all, and where lay the fault in communication? My relationship with my father was in ruins; I had known nothing about him at all. (My Father and Myself, p. 163)

A revelation of this kind calls for a reappraisal of the family relationship and many attempt that in the writing. The writing is an attempt as in Lessard's text to bring out in the open what has remained hidden, to notice the family history that is all around you, to investigate the 'complacency' with which we regard our family history. The 'hidden lives' of the past are what all of these texts are concerned with. Revealing secrets gives family stories a completely different meaning. Both Lessard and Ackerley expose the myth of their family. But that can by the same token lead to myth-making as Nadel explains: However, the ambiguity of 'myth' is a handicap: on the one hand it suggests the essence of a person and on the other, the legend that person has created. For biography this is especially problematic because it finds itself with a dual activity, one assigned, the other assumed. The first is the desire to correct or revise the myth; the second is its own unconscious creation of new myths.28

What is interesting in this process of destroying one myth and creating another, is that the writers seem almost reluctant to use their own words. Ackerley quotes from his father's letters to reveal his double life, Lessard the words of her sisters. Family secrets, like Stanford 28

Ibid., p. 176.

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White's murder, can echo the writer's own secrets, such as Lessard's memories about her father that she kept secret, or Ackerley's homosexuality he kept secret from his family or the suicide of Lott's mother and Lott's own problems with depression. Revelation of one secret seems to lead automatically to the revelation of the other. Lessard makes clear throughout that she believes the two events to be inextricably linked, one could not exist without the other, and both coloured her childhood. Ackerley's world is full of secrets. He learns that his father's other children did not know that he was their father, and Ackerley never reveals his father's secret to his mother. At one point it seems he almost avoids learning more, as his decision to throw away his father's desk without looking in it highlights. Ackerley does not know why he agreed to have it thrown away: high-minded state of desiring his posthumous wishes may have included a sense of scruple in invading further secrets of a life he had not thought fit to share with me. But perhaps the most likely formula for my feelings would be: I was then quite incurious about my father's history. (My Father and Myself, p. 159)

Years later, when helping his mother move house, Ackerley has become curious. He goes through his mother's belongings attempting to find out something new and all he finds is stacks and stacks of old newspapers and other wastepaper. This scene illustrates the fact that not every family hides a secret, not every document is of equal importance. James Ellroy's book on his mother, My Dark Places: An L. A. Crime Memoir (1996), touches upon many of these themes. Ellroy's mother was murdered when Ellroy was ten years old, and her murderer was never found. Ellroy became obsessed with detective stories and real life murder cases. Every woman murdered was potentially his mother. Many years later, after having become a succesful crime writer, Ellroy decides it is time he used his knowledge and his writing to find his mother's murderer. He had written about her before, most notably in Clandestine (1980), but it only 'superficially addressed Jean Ellroy. It

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was all about her son at age 32'.29 My Dark Places is divided into four sections: 'The Redhead', 'The Boy in the Picture', 'Stoner', and 'Geneva Hilliker'. In the first section Ellroy describes the events surrounding his mother's murder and throughout that section talks about himself in the third person: 'The victim's son was pudgy, and tall for 10 years old. He was nervous - but did not appear in any way distraught' (My Dark Places, p. 12). His mother in this section is a police case, nothing more and described as either 'the Redhead' or: 'The Jean Ellroy job - Sheriff's Homicide File #Z-483-362' (My Dark Places, p. 17). The text charts the slow process of Ellroy's attempt to find his mother's murderer combined with a gradual realisation that what he ought to be doing is getting to know his mother. In some places the text becomes a dialogue with his mother and at the start of each section there are paragraphs in italics where Ellroy addresses her and makes her promises: 'I won't give up your secrets so cheaply. I want to learn where you buried your love' (My Dark Places, p. 80). And at the start of the next section: 'I am determined to find you. I know I can't do it alone' (My Dark Places, p. 156). The text moves between pronouns - as in May and Forster - as Ellroy realises that his need to find his mother's murderer masks the real need to get to know his mother. The genre that has made Ellroy succesful and from which he draws in this text is not chosen arbitrarily. It is represented as the genre that has punctuated his life, described his fears (after his mother's death) and his dreams (of saving those murdered women): 'It was a literary formula preordained directly for me. It let me remember and forget in equal measure. I ate those books up wholesale and was blessedly unaware of the internal dynamic that made them so seductive' (My Dark Places, p. 95). His approach is nothing if not thorough; he prints in full transcripts of witness statements, charts in minute detail the original investigation and his own investigation. He is assisted by a Los Angeles detective, Stoner, who becomes a father figure, a symbol for his own feelings for detective work, and Ellroy even tells of some 29

James Ellroy, My Dark Places: An L. A. Crime Memoir (London: Arrow Books, 1997), p. 207. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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of Stoner's other cases. The investigation inevitably involves an investigation of Ellroy's own past and of prime importance here is his attitude towards his mother and her death. In the very last section, where he, significantly, uses his mother's maiden name in the title, he finally visits her relatives and finds out about her past. But trying to find her is not easy: 'I didn't want to place her in fictional settings or wrap my revelations up and call them her life summarized. I didn't want to write her off as complex and ambiguous. I didn't want to shortchange her' (My Dark Places, p. 321). He realises he has not tried to get to know her: 'I had to know her life the way I knew her death' (My Dark Places, p. 323). The crime story in the end proves inefficient - he never finds her murderer - and the (auto)biographical element gains importance over the detective story. Ellroy's use of documents, as when he quotes his mother's police file at length, denotes an attempt to get to know his mother objectively, through facts alone. But this in the end does not provide him with the answers he craves. He realises that viewing his mother only as a murder victim reduces her to one event in her life and denies her a past, a story. The transcripts of the investigation and the witness statements give the text an aura of a detailed factual account, so the reader feels as if he or she is participating in Ellroy's search. But as Richard Holmes points out: 'The biographer has always had to construct or orchestrate a factual pattern out of materials that already have a fictional or reinvented element.'30 So the use of diaries, letters, and other documentation in these texts involves an historical approach to biography, but putting one's trust in these documents and believing they can provide the 'truth', in the end proves that they tell only part of the story. Not all the writers mentioned here are satisfied with their search. Ronald Fraser attempted through oral history and psychoanalysis to understand his past. The last paragraph of Fraser's text describes an interview with his psychoanalyst and it reveals his disappointment with the results: 30

Richard Holmes, 'Biography: Inventing the Truth', in The Art of Literary Biography, pp. 15-25, p. 17.

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But still, in the silence, there's a secret doubt. Finally, I voice it: 'I've always thought that history served one purpose at least. By discovering the major factors of change one could learn from them. The same ought to be true of an individual's history.' 'Yes . . . You want to be the subject of your history instead of the object you felt yourself to be,' he replies warmly. 'The subject, yes - but also the object. It's the synthesis of the two, isn't it?' 'The author of your childhood then, the historian of your past.' 'That's what I intend - to write about it from inside and out.' 'I'm sure . . . ' He pauses. 'Well, we'll have to leave it there for today.' I find my glasses and swing my legs off the couch. 'I'll see you next Monday.' I turn to look at him for a moment, and his face is impassive. (In Search of a Past, p. 187)

But why this fascination with a secret, a hidden life, a family mystery? Perhaps it is because as Holmes points out: 'Biography finds it difficult to deal imaginatively with the mundane.'31 But one could also claim that biography is always a type of quest, an extreme example being A. J. A. Symons' The Quest for Corvo (1934). To be an historian of one's past then always includes some type of quest. Whether it be as in Lessard and Ackerley the revelation of a family secret, or in other instances a quest for understanding of a parent's character or behaviour.32 Writing a parent's biography is a not only a 31

Ibid., p. 19. Virginia Woolf explains: 'I am much nearer [my father's] age now than my own then. But do I therefore "understand" him better than I did? Or have I only queered the angle of that immensely important relationship, so that I shall fail to describe it, either from his point of view or my own? I see him now from round the corner; not directly in front of me. Further, just as I rubbed out a good deal of the force of my mother's memory by writing about her in To the Lighthouse, so I rubbed out much of his memory there too. Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him.' 'Sketch of the Past', in Moments of Being: 32

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quest in the usual biographical sense, it is also an autobiographical quest that marks the structure and theme of the texts. It becomes the narrative drive, and thus biography becomes a part of autobiography. The writers gain authority over the public representation of their parent, and at times they break down one myth only to create another. In the second half of this chapter I look closely at one text to see how these elements, the relationship between subject and narrator, and the revelation of a family secret, can tell us something about the genre of biography when it is lodged in autobiography.

3. Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude: An Autobiographical Attempt at Biography There is so much in life, especially though in the family, that a man doesn't want to understand with just his understanding alone, rather he decides in his subconscious to maintain unchanged what has been unclear or to know it only in part.33

3.1. A Father and a Son Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude is made up of two parts: 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' and the 'Book of Memory' which I discussed in the first chapter. They are both autobiographical texts, though they cannot in a conventional sense be called 'autobiography'. The central theme of both parts is father-son relationships. In the first part, Auster deals with his relationship with his father, and the second deals with his relationship with his own son. 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' is an account of his father's life, of his marriage, of Auster's Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), p. 119. 33 Guðbergur Bergsson, Eins og steinn sem hafið fágar (Reykjavík: Forlagið, 1998), p. 394 (my translation).

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relationship with him, of his life in his later years, and of his death. On one level then, this is a biography of Samuel Auster, but Auster's approach is not that of an objective biographer but that of a writer trying to understand his relationship with his father. The text is also interspersed with Auster's own story, his childhood, marriage, and career. Like many other writers Auster is prompted to write about his father after his father's death. Writing about his father is represented as something he had to do, as an inevitable reaction to his death: Even before we packed our bags and set out on the three hour drive to New Jersey, I knew that I would have to write about my father. I had no plan, had no precise idea of what this meant. I cannot even remember making a decision about it. It was simply there, a certainty, an obligation that began to impose itself on me the moment I was given the news. I thought: my father is gone. If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him.34

Here again we have the emphasis on the importance of the writing process. The 'obligation' to stem the fear of death, the fear of a life story disappearing, is represented as the only response the writer can have. This is further highlighted in the penultimate paragraph of 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' with a quotation from Kierkegaard: '... here it holds good that only he who works gets the bread, only he who was in anguish finds repose, only he who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved, only he who draws the knife gets Isaac. . . He who will not work must take note of what is written about the maidens of Israel, for he gives birth to the wind, but he who is willing to work gives birth to his own father'. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 68)

The act of writing is a debt that Auster owes to his father. Only work will save his father, if not actually from death itself, at least from 34

Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 6. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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disappearing without a trace. Auster is very concerned with avoiding this disappearance and as he explains: 'What disturbed me was something else, something unrelated to death or my response to it: the realization that my father had left no traces' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 6). Auster, as a writer, feels obliged to reverse this, which brings us again to the reversal of the literary biography. A life of writing leaves traces and as a writer Auster has to give these traces to his father. To give birth to his own father becomes a constant motif in this text and points to the authority involved in writing on someone else. As I mentioned earlier there is often a tension in such texts between attempts at being objective and preserving personal memories. Auster is not concerned with objectivity. What matters to him is not only to prevent his father from disappearing, but to examine in every detail their relationship. But he also explains, as he writes on himself in third person in 'The Book of Memory': 'It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 81). He therefore attempts not only to give birth to his father, but also tries to relive his own childhood, how it was being a son to his father. The father-son relationship is constantly reversed in this text, as Auster plays with the idea of that relationship. In this text Auster is both son and father, not only in the biological sense, but as he has the notion of becoming his father's father, and in the 'Book of Memory' when he tells his son the story of Pinocchio, who became his father's father, Auster becomes his son's son.35 He writes an autobiography as a son and as a father, and his story centres on these two roles in his life. The biography of his father is also centred on that role, his father as a father and as a son of a woman who murdered his father. The father-son relationship is not investigated here with reference to historical or cultural situations, but is much more concerned with its philosophical and literary aspects. Auster's text is interspersed with quotations and all are either from philosophy or literature. This gives 35

This idea of reversing the father-son relationship has preoccupied Auster in some of his other works, for instance in his script for the film Smoke. See Smoke and Blue in the Face: Two Films (London: Faber and Faber, 1995).

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the text an unmistakably literary feel; this is a writer situating himself and his relationship with this father in the world of literature. Auster tells in the 'Book of Memory' how he saves his son from near death by recognising that his illness was serious and getting him to hospital in time. In this text such acts are represented as the ultimate responsibility of a father. Pinocchio saves his father and thereby gives birth to him. Auster's son identifies with Pinocchio and is empowered by the thought of being able to save his own father. Auster could not save his father from death, and therefore the act of writing becomes even more urgent for him. The life of Samuel Auster in this text is looked at constantly from the perspective of his role as a son and a father. Every story Auster tells of him touches in one way or another on that subject. This is a complete reversal of what happens in texts where the autobiographers attempt to see their parents not as parents but as individuals, as May and Ernaux both attempt. It denies the possibility of giving an objective account of one's father. The text is made up of short anecdotes, lists of things Auster remembers about his father, and short paragraphs on his habits. The lists of things that remind Auster of his father are largely unexplained, as for instance he mentions 'tropical fish' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 29) without explaining what they have to do with his father. The reader is thereby denied access to many of the private memories of his father. The biographical part in this text is therefore always autobiographical. The reader nevertheless learns a great deal about Samuel Auster's life, but the emphasis is always on the father-son relationship. Discarding the usual requisites of biography, such as objectivity and chronology, Auster is free to experiment with the genre. Putting himself so firmly in his father's story, as he identifies with him as a father himself, he manages a synthesis between biography and autobiography. May, Forster, Lott, and Lessard, all divide their texts - to a different extent - into chapters on other family members - calling them in some cases by their names - and chapters on their own childhood, and all make a firm distinction between what they remember themselves and what they learned from other sources; between 'objective' accounts

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and personal memoirs. In May's and Forster's works autobiography and biography sit uncomfortably together. There is a sense in which fusing the two genres has not worked, mainly, I believe, because they try too hard to follow conventional biographical practices in writing on their family without acknowledging the inevitable influence of autobiographical practices in works of this type. Auster fuses the two together, his father's name is rarely mentioned, he is 'my father' throughout the text, their relationship, in the biological and emotional sense, is always in the foreground. 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' is a meticulously constructed text. It starts with Auster's need to write after the death of his father and ends on this note on his son: Past two in the morning. An overflowing ashtray, an empty coffee cup, and the cold of early spring. An image of Daniel now as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this. To wonder what he will make of these pages when he is old enough to read them. And an image of his sweet and ferocious little body, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 69)

Auster highlights in this text that he is always both father and son. He even becomes his grandfather's son when he nurses him through his illness. The death of his father leads him to examine his role as a father and a son. But his father's role as a son was a comlicated by extraordinary events, which leads us on to the family secret, and how that is treated in this text.

3.2. The Myth of the Family Secret As I mentioned above, the narrative drive in these texts is the quest for the truth behind the family lore or the reasons for a parent's behaviour or character. Lessard explains this curiosity family stories can ignite:

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The Chanler stories were light and, above all, funny, yet there was an urgency in the way the crazy things the Chanlers had done were recounted. It was as if somewhere inside these stories - which were for the most part little more than snatches, vignettes, and splinters - there was the flash of a grail-like truth. Something about our family that we needed to know. (The Architect of Desire, p. 170)

There is not necessarily anything hidden in these stories, but they carry with them some sense of the past, a possibility of deeper meaning, a feeling of being of great importance. At the centre of Auster's text on his father is a catastrophe - a family secret - that was kept very well hidden. There were not even the usual half-told family stories that gave any clue to the existence of a hidden event. It is only through a series of coincidences that Auster discovers the secret. The quotation on the title page from Heraclitus becomes all the more appropriate: 'In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it.' After his father's death, Auster feels that he did not know his father at all, and therefore embarks on a quest to try to understand him, with the firm belief at the start that writing will help him to do so. The text is centred around two moments; his decision to write after his father's death, and an earlier moment (in his life, later in the text) when he discovers how his grandfather died. The revelation that his grandmother murdered his grandfather when Samuel Auster was two years old is in exactly the middle of the text. Auster, like Lessard, Ackerley, and Ellroy, lets other people tell most of the story, in his case he quotes from letters and newspaper articles. He explains his difficulty in writing about this event: Now the moment has come to write about them, I am surprised to find myself doing everything I can to put it off [. . .] It is not that I am afraid of the truth. I am not even afraid to say it. My grandmother murdered my grandfather [. . .] The facts themselves do not disturb me any more than might be expected. The difficult thing is to see them in print - unburied, so to speak, from the realm of secrets and

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Auster claims early on in the text that he does not know his father, does not understand him, and that is one of the reasons why he has decided to write about him. So, when he reveals this terrible secret, the reader is set to believe that this explains his father's character. That here is the key to the whole text. But Auster has previously warned us that nothing can be taken at face value, least of all his father: If there is nothing, then, but silence, is it not presumptuous of me to speak? And yet: if there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place? [. . .] He was so implacably neutral on the surface, his behaviour was so flatly predictable, that everything he did came as a surprise. One could not believe there was such a man - who lacked feeling, who wanted so little of others. And if there was not such a man, that means there was another man, a man hidden inside the man who was not there, and the trick of it, then, is to find him. On the condition that he is there to be found. To recognize, right from the start, that the essence of this project is failure. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 20)

I quote this at length as it points to many important elements in this text. Auster's central premise is that his father is unknowable, but at the same time he will try to know him by writing about him. His father was a man who said nothing of his own thoughts and emotions, and when Auster reveals the secret of his past, the reader is therefore ready to accept that this is the solution to the problem. But Auster has warned us that 'the essence of this project is failure'. The revelation then works on at least two levels. Firstly, it is undeniably of great importance, it has undoubtedly formed his father's character, and therefore it is certainly one key to Auster's project. But at the same time it is completely outside Auster's experience of his father, completely outside their relationship, and can in itself not provide the solution to the question why his father never told him about it, or explain his character fully. Not because it was not a seminal event in

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his life, but because one can never put someone else fully into words. As Virginia Woolf points out, this problem is not a new one: On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality. And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it.36

The event, therefore, in part takes on the purpose of the false clue, that Auster used later in his New York Trilogy (1987-1988), and the first of many strange coincidences which occupy so many of his later works.37 Auster refuses to create what Nadel terms a biographical myth from this: In its process of demythologizing and creating myth, biography parallels the central archetype of death and rebirth. Reading lives both destroys and creates our image of the subject and is one of the great attractions to biography: even though the historical figure dies, the biography continues his presence - in itself a mythic, phoenix-like activity re-creating and perpetuating the self. Biography, in its gratification of wish-fulfillment, embodies a dream; in its stress on moral example, it becomes an allegory. In this way biography sustains its duality in mythic as well as generic ways.38

The murder does not become an allegory. Auster invades his father's solitude, but invents his own as a writer. He emphasises the difference between them by claiming his father's solitude was destructive and alienating, but his own is productive; it is part of work, it is writing. 36

Virginia Woolf, 'The New Biography', in Collected Essays, vol. 4, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 229-235, p. 229. 37 See especially Auster's The Music of Chance (1990). 38 Nadel, op. cit., p. 181.

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The expectation is when embarking on a quest that if one looks, one will find something, but as in the quotation from Heraclitus, not only is it difficult to find, but puzzling when you find it. Auster in this work points out the problematics of this quest, he uses it as a narrative drive, but at the same time avoids a simple solution. Peter Handke describes in his book on his mother that it is about moments that are unsayable, not a 'coherent story with a foreseeable, reassuring ending'.39 Auster echoes this feeling when he claims 'the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 32). But even though Auster does not believe that he will ever find one answer to his questions, it does not invalidate the quest itself. This thought carries over to the writing, he believes that the writing process itself will bring knowledge, but it is not necessarily accurate either; Auster has after all painted a portrait of an 'invisible man'. After his death Auster tries to make his father's past become a part of his life. He takes objects from his father's house to remember him by, but finds the exercise to be futile: But objects, it seems, are no more than objects. I am used to them now, I have begun to think of them as my own. I read time by his watch, I wear his sweaters, I drive around in his car. But all this is no more than an illusion of intimacy. I have already appropriated these things. My father has vanished from them, has become invisible again. And sooner or later they will break down, fall apart, and have to be thrown away. I doubt that it will even seem to matter. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 68)

The true intimacy is in the writing, as there Auster intertwines their lives in such a way that each becomes an indispensable part of the other, but because of the autobiographical nature of the text it does so without explaining his or his father's life fully. For as Michael Sheringham has pointed out: 'The subject of autobiography is a hybrid, a fusion of past and present, self and other, document and 39

'keine runde Geschichte mit einem zu erwartenden, so oder so tröstlichen Ende.' Wunschloses Unglück, p. 45.

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desire, referential and textual, énoncé and énonciation - not a product but a process.'40 Despite Auster's constant hesitations, doubts, his struggle with the story, the short paragraphs, etc., the text has a strong narrative drive; Auster makes the reader curious. He tries various methods to capture his father's character, to paint his portrait in words. He describes memories of isolated events, lists of characteristics, includes a description of his father's work, of how he maintained his house, his attitudes to money,41 to his daughter, to his grandson, his life before marriage, his family, brothers, mother and of course the centre of it all, his grandfather's death. But the individual memories and facts refuse to construct a whole picture, their significance is doubtful, at times contradictory, and Auster refuses to provide the links, to go in for clichéed 'pseudo'-psychoanalytic explanations. By saying his father was invisible, he is implying that there was more to his father than he can know, he refuses to believe that this is all there was.

4. Conclusion In including biography in their autobiography, authors have to grapple with the standard features of biography, such as chronology as an organising principle, historical research, and the creation of an image. Not all of the authors go to the same lengths in attempting an objective biographical account of their own parents. Woolf's distinction between biography and fiction is that: One is made with the help of friends, of facts; the other is created without any restrictions save those that the artist, for reasons that seem good to him, chooses to obey. That is a distinction; and there is a good reason to think that in the 40

Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 21. 41 Auster was later to write in more detail of this aspect of his father's character in Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (New York: Faber and Faber, 1997).

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As I discussed in the introduction, biography has lagged behind the more experimental autobiography, but these authors show that when included in autobiography interesting possibilities arise. It can allow authors to question elements that are taken for granted in biography. The special relationship between the narrator and subject, and the tension between the two, can be a fertile starting-point for getting away from Woolf's 'cruel distinction'. For the problem biography often has is an inability to question the possibility of writing about someone else. McCord explains some of the reasons why biography is still not taking on board changes that other genres have seen: It is probably not going too far to say that biography is the genre least affected by contemporary critical theories. We can swallow the deconstruction of our favourite realistic novels, and we don't mind the departure of the author from the text, but when it comes to 'real people', we find it difficult to accept a theory that would substitute textuality for clearly articulated presences whom we perceive as objectively real.43

Autobiographers have long since been conscious of the difficulty of their task, and the same kind of consciousness is what Nadel believes can help biography: 'As biographers become more self-conscious about their means of presentation, authorial presence will become more problematic.'44 Looking at these (auto)biographies as quests, and discussing the way they deal with family secrets, shows the narrative conventions usually deployed in biography, and some of the texts also point to the limits of these conventions. Despite Ellroy's unstinting accuracy and research, it does not deliver the knowledge he hoped for. And May's and Forster's intertwining of the historical and the 42

Virginia Woolf, 'The Art of Biography', in Collected Essays, vol. 4, pp. 221-228, p. 222. 43 McCord, op. cit., pp. 219-20. 44 Nadel, op. cit., p. 200.

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autobiographical shows the difficulty in maintaining any kind of objectivity in this type of life writing. Texts that leave the struggle for objectivity behind, or show an awareness of the problematics of such objectivity, can move biography to a different level, and create a fertile fusion of two modes of writing, based on both memory and history. Texts that cross borders, such as Auster's and Ondaatje's works, not only deal with both historical knowledge and memory, but also inevitably have to come to terms with the role of fiction always involved when writing on 'an other'.

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Chapter Six Photographs in Autobiography to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases - but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing . . . the fact of the very shadow of the person lying fixed forever!1

1. Introduction: Portraits in Autobiographies Photographs have become an inseparable part of biographies and autobiographies in the twentieth century. Almost every autobiography now contains some photographs, and even if they do not, many autobiographers discuss photographs from their past. Most often the images show the 'life in pictures' in chronological order. These photographs usually show the subject as a young child, parents and grandparents, and often look like excerpts from the family album. Others have attempted a more creative approach in their use of images, for instance Suzannah Lessard, who includes a few telling images strategically placed in her autobiography and lists a photographic editor in her acknowledgements. But usually the photographs do not seem to serve a specific thematic purpose, they are 'simply' illustrations, and have the effect of reminding the reader that these people existed and this is what they looked like. Some autobiographers, however, show an awareness of the complex power of photography and so the photographs (sometimes only mentioned and not included) are of a more thematic and structural importance and can serve a distinct purpose in the author's rendering of his or her life.2 1

Elizabeth Barrett in a letter from 1843 quoted in Helmut Gernsheim, Creative Photography (New York: Bonanza, 1972), p. 28. 2 Celia Lury points out: 'While there is a long-standing and growing literature on the subject-effects of narrative, the significance of the image for understandings of the self in modern Euro-American societies still remains

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In Doris Lessing's first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1995), one finds a good example of the most common manner in which photographs are used in autobiographies. There are three inserts of photographs, corresponding roughly to the text's chronology. The first insert shows pictures of Lessing's parents, of her as a baby, and of the house where she was born. The second insert shows pictures of her and her family on various occasions and the last photograph in that insert is of her as a young woman with her two children. The last picture in the third insert is of her without her children and the caption reads: 'In 1949, just before I left for London' which is exactly where we leave her at the end of the first volume.3 The photographs are not mentioned in the text so they do not register with the reader as being of any specific significance. But the last photograph gains new connotations as the reader discovers that Lessing left her children behind when she moved to London, therefore placing the photograph of herself where she does clearly denotes the significance of that event in her life. This is a good example of how the relationship between text and photographs defines the images' effect and meaning. When the complex relationship between text and photographs, in a work such as this, is not actively engaged with, the photographs' thematic importance is diminished, and where they have only very simple captions - a name and a date at the most - there is assumed a direct correlation between the text and the images; they appear as illustrations to the text. The photographs are there as definitive documents to prove the referentiality of the text. It seems as if their role is to point out that these are pictures of the world outside the text, to which the text constantly refers. The choice is simple, or 'natural'. They are the pictures of a life, containing all the important elements;

somewhat under-developed, tending to become subsumed within more general discussions of postmodern culture. And this despite the recent proliferation of technologies of visulisation and the widely accepted claim that visibility is an imperative of contemporary life.' Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory, Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 2. 3 Doris Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography: To 1949, (London: HarperCollins, 1994), photograph insert, no page number.

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parents, the childhood home, the summer holidays, the husband, children, etc., all in chronological order. It might be too simplistic to say that autobiographies that display this 'conventional' method of using photographs denote a 'conventional' text. But perhaps it would be more pertinent to say that they do not question the 'pure' referentiality of the photograph, and do not doubt its inherent meaning. For if Linda Haverty Rugg is right in claiming that photographs and autobiographies pose similar questions about referentiality, perhaps one could see the way in which photographs are used in autobiographies as symptomatic of the text's self-examination and its 'meta-autobiographical' quality.4 Rugg also explains the reason for the proliferation of photographs in autobiographies: the autobiographer must come to terms with the existence of photography in creating a textual self-image, for the mere presence of photography challenged traditional forms of autobiographical narrative by calling into question essential assumptions about the nature of referentiality, time, history, and selfhood.5

This, Rugg explains, has been a factor in autobiography since the inception of photography, and with photography's ready availability, it plays an important part in contemporary life-writing. These questions are at the core of our discussion here. Photography's seeming transparency is what makes it a continually challenging medium. Our perception of photography's power of representation has to be constantly re-examined and re-evaluated. John Tagg is one of those who maintains that photographs are without any intrinsic meaning: The indexical nature of the photograph - the causative link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign - is highly complex, irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at 4

See especially the introduction in Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 5 Ibid., p. 231.

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This might be a little too dogmatic for our purposes as, even though in some ways accurate, it does not account for people's perception of and their relation to photographs. What I want to look at here is how, through the process of autobiographical writing, photographs gain meaning and significance and how photographs can in return alter our understanding of the text. The significance of photographs in autobiographies manifests itself in a number of ways. For instance it is directly linked to how the subject sees him/herself in photographs, identifies with an earlier 'self' or self-image and inscribes it in the text. There are not as many photographs in Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory (1967) as in Lessing's Under My Skin, but they are carefully chosen with long and sometimes witty captions. There is a picture of the house he was born in, of his grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters, of him as a young man, his wife, his son, himself at his desk and of the butterflies he discovered. The photograph of him at his desk has an illuminating caption where Nabokov describes in minute detail every single object in the photograph. He gives the date, the place, what novel he was writing at the time, the family photographs one can see in the picture and even describes things we cannot see, such as how the moths used to fly in through the open windows. Nabokov writes in the caption: My wife took, unnoticed, this picture, unposed, of me in the act of writing a novel in our hotel room [. . .] Seldom does a casual snapshot compendiate a life so precisely. Many years ago, in St. Petersburg, I remember being amused by the Collected Poems of a tram conductor, and especially by his 6

John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan Education, 1988), p. 3.

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picture, in uniform, sturdily booted, with a pair of new rubbers on the floor beside him and his father's war medals on the photographer's console near which the author stood to attention. Wise conductor, farseeing photographer!7

The photograph, Nabokov claims, captures his life completely, but the reader would not necessarily see it that way if there were no caption. The image itself is in the classic genre of 'a writer at his desk'.8 So not only does this example raise questions about the relationship between image and text, but also about how we read images; how details and objects can serve as clues, memory aids (and memorials) to the past, and Nabokov voices the widespread opinion that the 'unposed' picture must somehow be 'truer' than the posed one. The snapshot that is reproduced in the book does not tell the reader very much; it is the caption that gives it meaning. Nabokov does not claim that this photograph captures his 'inner life' or some truth about his self. It captures the things he did at that time; his working life, his habits, his writing and his butterflies. All this becomes important years later in America when it serves as a spark for memories of his life in Europe. As Rugg points out: 'one might say that the inclusion of photographs 7

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (London: Penguin Books, 1969), photograph insert, no page number. 8 Rugg mentions the implications for autobiography when they include portraits of the author and thereby disclaims Paul de Man's contrasting of the role of the referent in photography and autobiography: 'It is precisely the insertion of photographs into autobiographical narratives that reveals why autobiographers would refuse de Man's suggestion: such images connect the image to the text and at the same time to the writer's body, employing the photograph to remind the reader of the hand holding the pen. In many cases, the author specifically chooses an image of the writing self to represent the body as writing subject. These gestures insist on the referential power of texts through drawing an association (rather than de Man's contrast) between autobiography and photography. We can dismiss the presence of the living subject in neither the photograph nor the autobiography, but we must at the same time attend to the deconstructive potential of both image and name.' op. cit., p. 36. See Paul de Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement', in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 67-81.

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envisions a revitalization of the corpse of the author, a remembering of the autobiographical self'.9 This photograph, therefore, is a starting point for Nabokov's memories and gains an almost symbolic resonance as every detail in it tells us something about his life. Nabokov 'reads' the photograph in such a way as to make the reader 'believe' in its complete referentiality; it refers to every facet of his life. It is this correspondance between the image and the life we inevitably look for in photographs in autobiographies. Photographs in autobiographies and biographies sometimes serve as clues to the past, to what things were 'really' like, and can often encapsulate how we view photographs. As David Ellis points out: 'If our means of access to the past were satisfactory, there would be every reason for turning our back on photographs. It is because they are not that photographic portraits remain invaluable.'10 This could well explain the significant role photographs play in contemporary autobiography, for despite Tagg's observation and the technological possibilities of digital photography, we still view photographs as important documents, not only for the individual's past, but for the historical past as well. The snapshot of Nabokov writing at his desk is reminiscent of a type of biographical portraiture where the subject is surrounded by significant items from his or her life: a coat of arms, books, a desk and writing material or some other paraphernalia that denote the subject's occupation or status. Richard Brilliant in his book suggests four categories of biographical portraiture: [Biographical portraiture] can preserve the fragmentary nature of human existence in a number of ways. First, this can be achieved through a series of portraits, made at different times and representing different stages in a person's life [. . .] In these cases, the portrait repertoire comes to constitute a figural record of the subject over the

9

Rugg, op. cit., p. 21. David Ellis, 'Images of D. H. Lawrence: On the Use of Photographs in Biography', in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), pp. 152-172, p. 171. 10

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years, providing, in the ensemble, a sense of the whole being as a changing constant. Or [. . .] only a significant aspect of a life may be chosen for representation in portraits, because of its special saliency or great historical importance in that life [. . .] Other prominent figures [. . .] seem to change very little with the passing years. At last, some portraits of public figures, such as Lenin, eventually, through repetition, become clichés or are so from their very inception; these latter images never seem to change at all, but through replication become in effect iconic. These four kinds of biographical portraits simulate very different patterns of reception, since the first group explicitly acknowledges the fact of change in human life, the second ignores it, the third varily accommodates it, while the fourth denies it altogether.11

The difference between Brilliant's last three categories may not be very great, but it is still a usable model. We can think of Doris Lessing's photographs as following the first model in the breadth of photographs printed and Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1986) following the second, where she focuses mainly on one image of herself and spins her stories around it, even though that photograph does not exist. But the difference between photographs in autobiographies and biographical portraiture has to be emphasised as it is the narrative in the autobiographies that is telling a life and can either work with or ignore the photographs that accompany it. Stendhal's diagrams and plans in his Vie de Henry Brulard serve much the same purpose. They are an integral part of the text, and are not only there as explanations for the reader, but as memory aids and sources of writing for the author. Besides illustrated autobiographies and biographical portraiture there is a third category that sometimes combines the two: photographers who represent their life photographically, as for instance Annette Kuhn, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence. As Brilliant says of selfportraits: 'With greater or lesser degrees of success, self-portraiture

11

Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), pp. 132134.

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always makes a concentrated autobiographical statement, the manifesto of an artist's introspection.'12 A book that includes both autobiographical writing and writing on photography and on portraits that capture a life is Roland Barthes's La Chambre claire (1980). The book's most salient feature is the way it combines critical discussion on photography with highly personal accounts of the writer's relationship with photographs. Barthes claims that his desire to write on photography 'reflétaient bien une sorte d'inconfort que j'avais toujours connue: d'être un sujet ballotté entre deux langages, l'un expressif, l'autre critique'.13 This tension is what drives Barthes's text and is therefore of importance to our discussion. Photography seems to pose problems for any critical discussion. The question whether it is 'Art', and doubts about its transparency, influence, and meaning seem to permeate all discussion on photography. As Richard Bolton explains: For every claim about the transparency and obviousness of the photograph, there can be found an opposing claim emphasizing the difficult language introduced by the photograph, a language based in the liberties of framing, montage, juxtaposition, and surreality.14

And since photographs are so much part of everyday reality, so readily available and often highly personal, it is often difficult to distance oneself from them (perhaps that is also unnecessary). They often straddle the elusive gap between the public and the private and

12

Ibid., p. 158. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Éditions de l'Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980), p. 20. (Hereafter quoted in the text with Richard Howard's translation in footnotes.) It 'corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical', Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 8. 14 Richard Bolton, 'Introduction', in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. ix-xviii, p. xi. 13

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are therefore important to any discussion of these matters in autobiography. In what follows I propose to examine what autobiographers say about the photographs in their texts; in other words, what use they make of them in the text. Do they use them to illustrate a point, or to aid their memory? What significance are they given, what impact do they have, and what meaning? I should stress that the artistic merit of photographs in autobiographies plays less of a role here than the context in which the photographs are placed and what the authors say about them in the text. The nature of the photographs is presumably such that the authors themselves do not base their choice on their artistic merit and so the question seems irrelevant, which in itself poses significant questions about what we expect from photographs in autobiographies. I focus mainly on four authors: I examine Barthes's relationship to photographs in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and La Chambre claire, the thematic importance of the photographs of Georges Perec's parents in W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975), Paul Auster's use of photographs as clues to family history and his father's character in The Invention of Solitude (1982) and Michael Ondaatje's important find in Running in the Family (1982) and how it relates to his use of photographs and documents in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1981).

2. Roland Barthes and the Meaning of Photographs Photography is the medium which most obviously displays our presence in the world. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, Janet Frame describes having her photograph taken when she gets out of the mental hospital: The photograph was urgent, a kind of reinstating of myself as a person, a proof that I did exist. In my ignorance of book publication I had supposed that all books carried photographs of their authors and I remembered my feeling, when copies of The Lagoon were brought to me in hospital, that I had no claim to the book, that there was not even a

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Photographs are often used as proof of our existence, validating our claim officially in passports and identity cards that we are who we say we are. For Frame not having been photographed for so long means that she has no proof she existed. She was in the land of the dead, did not have a claim to her own book and by going to have her photograph taken she reinstates her presence in the world. It is interesting to note, however, that she does not include this or any other photograph in her autobiography. But what kind of presence is the photograph? What does it tell us about the past? What is the fascination we have with photographs and how is it possible to link images and text? Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes is one of the most intriguing examples of the use of photographs in autobiography. Not that his choice of photographs is surprising, rather it is the relationship between the photographs and the collection of fragments that make up the text that pose important questions about our perception of photographs and the use of photographs in autobiography, especially with reference to the image and the truth-value of photographs.16 The photographs in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes are the usual fare: of Barthes as a child, as a young man, his parents, grandparents, the house he lived in, etc. What is interesting is that they are arranged at the start of the book, the first forty pages or so, and bear no direct 15

Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (London: Picador, 1993), pp. 129-30. As Barthes claimed later in an interview: 'Ce que j'aime au fond, c'est le rapport de l'image et de l'écriture, qui est un rapport très difficile, mais par là même qui donne de véritables joies créatrices, comme autrefois les poètes aimaient travailler à des problèmes difficiles de versification.' 'Sur la photographie', from interviews conducted by Angelo Schwarz (late 1977) and Guy Mandery (Dec. 1979), Le Photographe February (1980) in Le Grain de la voix: Entretiens 1962-1980 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981), pp. 328-334, p. 334. 16

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relation to the text itself. That is to say the events depicted are not described as such in the text. The photographs are printed in chronological order interspersed with captions and short texts. The text itself is a collection of fragments arranged alphabetically with headings either noting an idea or phrase. One could say that the fragments are almost like captions, not to images but to ideas or phrases, and reciprocally photographs are sometimes thought of as fragments of a life. What is of interest is the conventionality - even banality - of the photographs compared to the experimental nature of the text.17 The presence of the images at times contradicts but at other times confirms ideas stated in the text. Barthes is fascinated by his relationship to photographic images of himself, and he introduces them as an indulgence: Voici, pour commencer, quelques images: elles sont la part du plaisir que l'auteur s'offre à lui-même en terminant son livre. Ce plaisir est de fascination (et par là même assez égoïste). Je n'ai retenu que les images qui me sidèrent, sans 17

Despite the experimental nature of the text Sean Burke claims that it still maintains its status as autobiography: 'It is, therefore, in its pronominal economy that Roland Barthes is most markedly set off from conventional forms of autobiography [. . .] However, in subverting this autobiographical etiquette Roland Barthes does not break with the deep structures of the autobiographical récit.' The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 54-55. But Johnnie Gratton emphasises Barthes's anti-autobiographical stance: 'The pre-critical subject is the confessional, dissident, innocent "I" whose claim to recognition within or alongside the more austere regime of critical discourse introduces what I earlier deemed it appropriate to call an "autobiographical" factor. But by this stage I can no longer put off reckoning with Barthes's own patent boycott of the term 'autobiographical', most strongly signalled in his preference for the terms of fiction, which inevitably suggest an anti-autobiographical slant.' 'Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: Autobiography and the Notion of Expression', Romance Studies 8 (1986) 57-65, (p. 62). And Paul John Eakin points out that 'even at [Barthes'] most "anti-autobiographical", his most agressively fictional, he does not shake free from the pull of reference.' Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 23.

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It is interesting to note that he claims not to know why the images at the start of the book fascinate him as it is exactly this fascination and the difficulty of writing about photographs that concerns him in his later work La Chambre claire. Words such as 'plaisir' and 'fascination' give a picture of his relationship with images that is in some ways different from some of his claims in the text itself. On the first page of the text proper he claims: Il supporte mal toute image de lui-même, souffre d'être nommé. Il considère que la perfection d'un rapport humain tient à cette vacance de l'image: abolir entre soi, de l'un à l'autre, les adjectifs; un rapport qui s'adjective est du côté de l'image, du côté de la domination, de la mort. (Roland Barthes, p. 47)19

Are the photographs then not related to the 'image'? Do they not 'adjectivize'? There is no mention of pleasure or fascination with the 'image'. Domination and death are phrases sometimes heard in connection with the photograph, as I discuss below, but Barthes does not seem to link the two in the photograph section.

18

Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), p. 5. (Hereafter quoted in the text with Richard Howard's translation in footnotes.) 'To begin with, some images: they are the author's treat to himself, for finishing his book. His pleasure is a matter of fascination (and thereby quite selfish). I have kept only the images which enthrall me, without my knowing why (such ignorance is the very nature of fascination, and what I shall say about each image will never be anything but . . . imaginary).' Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (London: Papermac, 1995), p. 3. 19 'He is troubled by any image of himself, suffers when he is named. He finds the perfection of a human relationship in this vacancy of the image: to abolish - in oneself, between oneself and others - adjectives; a relationship wich adjectivizes is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.' p. 43.

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Barthes's difficulty is how to write on oneself without naming, adjectivising oneself. Paul Smith points out in his discussion of Roland Barthes: [Barthes's text] speaks to the possibility of a mobile and continual process of knowledge and its inscription. This process is accretive or ever expanding and, thus, open to the inscription of a changing history of the subject/individual. It is that continual process that Barthes's work registers, all the while recognizing not only the pull of interpellation in any of the objects of his study, but also the perhaps even more conservative pull - the temptation and the lure - of the imaginary.20

The photographs and fragments indirectly complement each other. The continual process Smith talks of is represented pictorially in that the photographs are of Barthes from various ages, as in Brilliant's discussion above they provide 'a sense of the whole being as a changing constant'. The fragmentary nature of the text, although an attempt to get away from the 'conservative pull of the imaginary', still does not satisfy that need as Barthes explains under the title 'Le fragment comme illusion': J'ai l'illusion de croire qu'en brisant mon discours, je cesse de discourir imaginairement sur moi-même, j'atténue le risque de transcendance; mais comme le fragment [. . .] est finalement un genre rhétorique et que la rhétorique est cette couche-là du langage qui s'offre le mieux à l'interprétation, en croyant me disperser, je ne fais que regagner sagement le lit de l'imaginaire. (Roland Barthes, p. 99)21

20 Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) p. 104. 21 'I have the illusion to suppose that by breaking up my discourse I cease to discourse in terms of the imaginary about myself, attenuating the risk of transcendence; but since the fragment [. . . ] is finally a rhetorical genre and since rhetoric is that layer of language which best presents itself to interpretation, by supposing I disperse myself I merely return, quite docilely, to the bed of the imaginary.' p. 95.

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Trying to escape narrative, Barthes only finds another type of rhetoric in the fragment. He has an ambivalent relationship to the imaginary, reverberating between fascination and a feeling of oppression but finds it in the end inescapable as he writes under the heading 'L'imaginaire': 'l'imaginaire vient à pas de loup, patinant en douceur sur un passé simple, un pronom, un souvenir, bref tout ce qui peut se rassembler sous la devise même du Miroir et de son Image: Moi, je' (Roland Barthes, p. 109).22 Barthes's problem with the image-system is closely linked to the autobiographical act. But this problem is not as apparent in the photographic section, although the split subject has its place there. This is what he says of his fascination with the childhood photographs: Embrassant tout le champ parental, l'imagerie agit comme un médium et me met en rapport avec le 'ça' de mon corps; elle suscite en moi une sorte de rêve obtus, dont les unités sont des dents, des cheveux, un nez, une maigreur, des jambes à longs bas, qui ne m'appartiennent pas, sans pourtant appartenir à personne d'autre qu'à moi: me voici dès lors en état d'inquiétante familiarité: je vois la fissure du sujet (cela même dont il ne peut rien dire). Il s'ensuit que la photographie de jeunesse est à la fois très indiscrète (c'est mon corps du dessous qui s'y donne à lire) et très discrète (ce n'est pas de 'moi' qu'elle parle). (Roland Barthes, pp. 5-6)23

22

'very frequently, the image-system creeps in stealthily, gently skating over a verb tense, a pronoun, a memory, in short, everything that can be gathered together under the very device of the Mirror and of its Image: Me, myself, I.' p. 105. 23 'Embracing the entire parental field, such imagery acts as a medium and puts me in relation with my body's id; it provokes in me a kind of obtuse dream, whose units are teeth, hair, a nose, skinniness, long legs in kneelength socks which don't belong to me, though to no one else: here I am henceforth in a state of disturbing familiarity: I see the fissure in the subject (the very thing about which he can say nothing). It follows that the childhood photograph is both highly indiscreet (it is my body from underneath which is presented) and quite discreet (the photograph is not of 'me').' p. 3.

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The photograph establishes our presence in the world, but it is always a past presence that is established, and the present remains elusive. It is a photograph of Barthes, yet it is not of the Barthes who looks at the photograph and writes on it. This problem of looking at and discussing photographs of oneself is highlighted in the paragraph opposite a page with two portraits of him, one taken in 1942, the other in 1970: Mais je n'ai jamais ressemblé à cela! - Comment le savezvous? Qu'est-ce que ce 'vous' auquel vous ressembleriez ou ne ressembleriez pas? Où le prendre? A quel étalon morphologique ou expressif? Où est votre corps de vérité? Vous êtes le seul à ne pouvoir jamais vous voir qu'en image, vous ne voyez jamais vos yeux, sinon abêtis par le regard qu'ils posent sur le miroir ou sur l'objectif (il m'intéresserait seulement de voir mes yeux quand ils te regardent): même et surtout pour votre corps, vous êtes condamné à l'imaginaire. (Roland Barthes, p. 40)24

In Barthes's attempt to escape the image, he illustrates his text with a plethora of images. Therefore one finds there is not only one image, or only one presence, but several different ones, although they are all of him. It seems that both in writing on oneself and looking at a photograph of oneself one is 'condamné à l'imaginaire' and returns to 'le lit de l'imaginaire'. This points to the notion that in this text the image-repertoire is both viewed as a necessary evil and as a safehaven. As Johnnie Gratton claims in his essay on Roland Barthes: the field of the subject is everywhere staked out by Barthes as the domain of the imaginaire [. . .] as to denote broadly 24

'"But I never looked like that!" - How do you know? What is the "you" you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image: you ever see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest ypon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.' p. 40.

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Thereby the photographs, which at first look like any photographs in any autobiography, gain a different meaning. They are images of Barthes but are not Barthes. They are from his past, but, as Barthes constantly reminds us, images are unreliable, although still fascinating. This question of what 'you might or might not look like' brings us back to the question of the meaning of photographs. Graham Clarke points out that: the portrait's meaning exists within a world of significance which has, in turn, already framed and fixed the individual. The photograph thus reflects the terms by which the culture itself confers status and meaning on the subject, while the subject as image hovers problematically between exterior and interior identities.26

This is what one continually comes back to in the text; the subject hovering between exterior and interior just as family photographs printed in a book always pose questions about the relationship between the public and the private. Barthes comes back to his problem with images in La Chambre claire: 'ah, si au moins la Photographie pouvait me donner un corps neutre, anatomique, un corps qui ne signifie rien! Hélas, je suis condamné par la Photographie, qui croit bien faire, à avoir toujours une mine: mon corps ne trouve jamais son degré zéro' (La Chambre claire, p. 27).27 What Clarke calls the 25

Gratton, op. cit., p. 62. Graham Clarke, 'Introduction', in The Portrait in Photography, pp. 1-5, p. 3. 27 'if only Photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing! Alas, I am doomed by (well-meaning) Photography 26

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hovering 'between exterior and interior identities' corresponds in some ways to Barthes's claim that his body 'ne trouve jamais son degré zéro'. Even if we have established that photographs are never 'us', that there is no essential 'I' that can be represented in photographs, we still continue to search for that essence. The photographs in Roland Barthes can be seen both as a playful addition to the problematic text of Roland Barthes but they are also a sign of things to come in La Chambre claire where the 'conservative pull of the imaginary' becomes even more apparent. The transition from the ideas in Roland Barthes to his writing on photography in La Chambre claire is well described by Paul John Eakin: 'When the austere tenets of poststructuralist theory about the subject came into conflict with the urgent demands of private experience, Barthes turned for solace [. . .] to photography, which he regarded as the supremely referential art.'28 This brings Barthes to a discussion of a more private and perhaps more conventional nature than the fragments in Roland Barthes. He claims in Roland Barthes that 'Il se sent solidaire de tout écrit dont le principe est que le sujet n'est qu'un effet de langage' (Roland Barthes, p. 82),29 but that feeling seems to diminish in La Chambre claire.

always to have an expression: my body never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me.' p. 12. 28 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 4. Jacques Derrida has also pointed out: 'Benjamin saw in the analytic enlargement of the fragment or minute signifier a point of intersection between the era of psychoanalysis and the era of technical reproduction, as seen in cinematography, photography, etc. (Moving through, extending beyond, and exploiting the resources of phenomenological as well as structural analysis, Benjamin's essay and Barthes' last book could very well be the two most significant texts on the socalled question of the Referent in the technological age).' 'The Deaths of Roland Barthes', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 259-296, p. 264. 29 'He wants to side with any writing whose principle is that the subject is merely an effect of language. ' p. 79.

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In La Chambre claire Roland Barthes discusses his ideas on photography which culminate in the search for a photograph of his mother that he feels compelled to perform after her death. The search for likeness is not bound to photographs of ourselves but also of others, as Barthes tries to find the photograph of his mother, a photograph of her in which he finds her. He goes through many pictures before finding the right one: Au gré de ces photos, parfois je reconnaissais une région de son visage, tel rapport du nez et du front, le mouvement de ses bras, de ses mains. Je ne la reconnaissais jamais que par morceaux, c'est-à-dire que je manquais son être, et que, donc, je la manquais toute. Ce n'était pas elle, et pourtant ce n'était personne d'autre. Je l'aurais reconnue parmi des milliers d'autres femmes, et pourtant je ne la 'retrouvais' pas. Je la reconnaissais différentiellement, non essentiellement. La photographie m'obligeait ainsi à un travail douloureux; tendu vers l'essence de son identité, je me débattais au milieu d'images partiallement vraies, et donc totalement fausses. (La Chambre claire, p. 103)30

This 'travail douloureux' performed by Barthes, 'tendu vers l'essence de son identité', is parallel to the autobiographical act, the attempt at self-expression, the explanation of an identity. The death of his mother and Barthes's search for her in photographs brings him to the conclusion that it is possible to find someone's 'true self' in photographs. What is remarkable here is that he finds this in a photograph of his mother as a child: 'devant la Photo du Jardin d'Hiver, je m'abandonnais à l'Image, à l'Imaginaire. Je pouvais donc 30

'According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therfore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not 'find' her. I recognized her differentially, not essentially. Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false.' pp. 65-66.

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comprendre ma généralité; mais l'ayant comprise, invinciblement, je m'en échappais. Dans la Mère, il y avait un noyau rayonnant, irréductible: ma mère' (La Chambre claire, p. 117)31. In this Barthes also effectively turns around Lacan's mirror-stage, which he refers to in the caption to one of the photographs in Roland Barthes of him as a baby in his mother's lap: 'Le stade du miroir: 'tu es cela'' (Roland Barthes, p. 25). Now he has found a photograph of his mother as a child which he can point to and say 'that is you'. Barthes talks about two dimensions of photographs, studium (cultural, social, or intellectual interest) and punctum (essential, emotional interest). He finds the punctum in only one photograph of his mother, all the others somehow fail to capture her. This splitting of the interest in photography is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's theory on works of art: Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out: with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view.32

If we can equate Barthes's punctum with Benjamin's cult value - at least in the instance of the photograph of Barthes's mother - it would explain why that photograph is not printed in the book. It is enough that it exists, it does not have an exhibition value and Barthes's interest is a one-man cult that could not include others. John Tagg in his discussion of Barthes maintains that Barthes finding his mother in a photograph is a complete illusion that denies the reality of photographs: 31

'when I confronted the Winter Garden Photograph I gave myself up to the Image, to the Image-Repertoire. Thus I could understand my generality; but having understood it, invincibly I escaped from it. In the Mother, there was a radiant, irreducible core: my mother.' p. 75. 32 Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 211-245, p. 218.

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This is not the inflection of a prior (though irreversible) reality, as Barthes would have us believe, but the production of a new and specific reality, the photograph, which becomes meaningful in certain transactions and has real effects, but which cannot refer or be referred to a prephotographical reality as to a truth. The photograph is not a magical 'emanation' but a material product of a material apparatus set to work in specific contexts, by specific forces, for more or less defined purposes. It requires, therefore, not an alchemy but a history, outside which the existential essence of photography is empty and cannot deliver what Barthes desires: the confirmation of an existence; the mark of a past presence; the repossession of his mother's body.33

This rather stern denial of the possibility of photographs is disproved in a way by all the authors I discuss here. In their discussion of photographs of their parents there is a constant acknowledgment of a certain confirmation of an existence. Writers like Barthes are certainly aware of the cultural influences in the production of meaning, but photography, which Barthes finds to be the supremely referential art, still seems to those writers and many others to have 'the mark of the past presence'. It must also be stressed that Barthes does not claim that photographs are the past: 'j'aime certains traits biographiques qui, dans la vie d'un écrivain, m'enchantent à l'égal de certaines photographies; j'ai appelé ces traits des 'biographèmes'; la Photographie a le même rapport à l'Histoire que le biographème à la biographie' (La Chambre claire, p. 54)34. And later in La Chambre claire Barthes has this to say on 33

Tagg, op. cit., p. 3. Lury claims: 'But Tagg's declaration is dubious not only because it is premised upon psychoanalytic diagnosis of a subject who is a construct of Tagg's own reading of the text, but because he presents a reductive interpretation of the way of seeing photographically that Barthes elucidates. As noted above, Barthes claims that the photograph justifies the spectator's desire, not that it satisfies it.' op. cit., p. 89. 34 'In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features

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likeness which highlights the fact that he is well aware of the cultural implications of photography: C'est ce qui se passe lorsque je juge telle photo 'ressemblante'. Pourtant, en y réfléchissant, je suis bien obligé de me demander: qui ressemble à qui? La ressemblance est une conformité, mais à quoi? à une identité. Or, cette identité est imprécise, imaginaire même, au point que je puis continuer à parler de 'ressemblance', sans avoir jamais vu le modèle. (La Chambre claire, p. 157)35

But Barthes also knows that his dream of signifying nothing cannot come true. As Elizabeth Barrett says in the letter I quoted above, it is not merely the likeness, but the very shadow of the person we feel is there, and whether that only happens through certain technical processes and history seems almost beside the point. At least it is something that is well worth writing on and something that Barthes feels critical language is not well equipped to deal with. The question of the referent is important to Barthes in two main areas: autobiography and photography. Barthes's move to photography in his most 'personal' work is prefigured in Roland Barthes, but in La Chambre claire the pull of the referent, the autobiographical pull has come to the fore, and it is a perfect example of the strong referentiality of photographs. Barthes's move to photography is also a movement to the autobiographical, it highlights how we can never distance ourselves completely from the referent either in photographs or autobiographies. Neither is simply an artefact, it is always lodged within someone's life. The photographs in Roland Barthes remind us of that referentiality, and although Barthes tries to escape the usual 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.' p. 30. 35 'This is what happens when I judge a certain photograph "a likeness." Yet on thinking it over, I must ask myself: Who is like what? Resemblance is a conformity, but to what? to an identity. Now this identity is imprecise, even imaginary, to the poin where I can continue to speak of "likeness" without ever having seen the model.' pp. 100-102.

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trappings of autobiography, the text is still ultimately autobiographical. To read La Chambre claire as a treatise on photography and ignore the autobiographical aspects of it, that is to look at the discourse as theoretical rather than autobiographical, is to miss a part of the point.36 The text poses problems to any theoretical reading when Barthes 'finds' his mother in a photograph of her as a child, but within the framework of autobiographical writing that moment is clearly recognisable. This text seen in the context of the use of photographs in autobiography can further illuminate the punctum, or the moment of recognition, which occurs frequently in autobiographies as I hope to show in the discussion below.

3. Photographs and Memory 3.1. The Absence of Photographs in Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance As I discussed in the first chapter Georges Perec's autobiography is very much concerned with the themes of memory and forgetting. I want to add to and expand that discussion here by looking at his treatment of photographs in the text. The book is not illustrated with photographs but photographs are nevertheless a part of Perec's tale of his childhood memories, even though his memory is not his strong

36

See for instance Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997). In these essays there is a notable lack of any discussion of the autobiographical features of La chambre claire in the writers' discussion of the meaning of the punctum and little mention of memory with the exception of Derek Attridge's essay 'Roland Barthes's Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the Responsibilties of Commentary' pp. 77-89 and Marjorie Perloff's '"What has occurred only once." Barthes's Winter Garden/Boltanski's Archives of the Dead' pp. 32-58, where she links Barthes's ideas and Boltanski's photographical project by emphasising the importance of memory, be it individual or collective.

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point, and the documentation insubstantial, and he has the help only of 'des photos jaunies'.37 These yellowing snapshots can be seen as symbols of Perec's lack of knowledge and memory of his parents. The photographs do not call forth any memories or images from the past. They are the material which exposes the gaps in the narrator's life. Perec has no abundance of photographs to choose from, no family album. The photographs mentioned in the text are described in extreme detail, right down to what is written on the back of them, in a rather cool though at times witty manner. The photographs are all of his parents who died when Perec was very young: Je possède une photo de mon père et cinq de ma mère (au dos de la photo de mon père, j'ai essayé d'écrire, à la craie, un soir que j'étais ivre, sans doute en 1955 ou 1956: 'Il y a quelque chose de pourri dans le royaume de Danemark.' Mais je n'ai même pas réussi à tracer la fin du quatrième mot). De mon père, je n'ai d'autre souvenir que celui de cette clé ou pièce qu'il m'aurait donnée un soir en revenant de son travail. De ma mère, le seul souvenir que me reste est celui du jour où elle m'accompagna à la gare de Lyon d'où, avec un convoi de la Croix-Rouge, je partis pour Villard-de-Lans: bien que je n'aie rien de cassé, je parte le bras en écharpe. Ma mère m'achète un Charlot intitulé Charlot parachutiste: sur la couverture illustrée, les suspentes du parachute ne sont rien d'autre que les bretelles du pantalon de Charlot. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 41)38 37

Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d'enfance (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1975), p. 22. (Hereafter quoted in the text with David Bellos' translation in footnotes.) 38 'I possess one photograph of my father and five of my mother (on the back of the photograph of my father, one evening when I was drunk, probably in 1955 or 1956, I tried to chalk: "There is something rotten in the state of Denmark." But I didn't even manage to scrawl to the end of the fourth word). I have no memory of my father other than the one about the key or coin he might have given me one evening on his return from work. The oly surviving memory of of my mother is of the day she took me to the Gare de Lyon, which is were I left for Villard-de-lans in a Red Cross convoy: though

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Perec's attempt at finding some subtext (Hamlet, Oedipus) to his relationship with his father is doomed, he cannot even finish the sentence on the back of the photograph. The fact is that he has only one vague memory of his father giving him something that he believes was a coin or a key. The memory of his mother is also proven to be partly wrong - apparently he was not wearing his arm in a sling, although he is right about the cover of the magazine.39 The very detailed descriptions of the photographs; of what everyone is wearing, their posture and the background, remind us of the lack the whole autobiography describes: a lack of memory, of name. The photographs for Perec do not invoke joy (as in Barthes), memory (as in Auster) or self-knowledge (or self-invention) as in Duras. They are historical documents that do not give out any information beyond their appearance, clues to a gap, a lack, to nothing. A key (like the one his father gave him) that opens nothing. In Barthes's terms there is no punctum, only studium. In a section written fifteen years earlier which is printed in the text with notes and corrections, Perec describes two photographs of his father. Of the first one he says: Sur la photo le père a l'attitude du père. Il est grand. Il a la tête nue, il tient son calot à la main. Sa capote descend très bas. Elle est serrée à la taille par l'un de ces ceinturons de gros cuir qui ressemblent aux sangles des vitres dans les wagons de troisième classe. On devine, entre les godillots nets de poussière - c'est dimanche - et le bas de la capote, les bandes molletières interminables. Le père sourit. C'est un simple soldat. Il est en permission à Paris, c'est la fin de

I have no broken vones, I wear my arm in a sling. My mother buys me a comic entitled Charlie and the Parachute: on the illustrated cover, the parachute's rigging lines are nothing other than Charlie's trousers' bracing.' W or The Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (London: Harvill Press, 1988), p. 26. 39 In a book of photographs from Perec's life, Georges Perec, Images by Jacques Neefs and Hans Hartje (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), the cover is reproduced along with the photographs Perec describes in his book.

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l'hiver, au bois de Vincennes. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 42)40

There are several things of interest here. The father Perec hardly remembers 'a l'attitude du père' and the photograph therefore becomes a proof that he in fact was Perec's father despite Perec's lack of memory. But the question remains how does one pose as a father when the picture does not include the child? A layer of objectivity is introduced by describing him as 'le père' as opposed to 'mon père' as it refers to the cultural image of the 'father'. His father's pose agrees with this cultural image and thereby proves his fatherhood. In the notes to this description Perec casts doubt on the two things that cannot be determined from the photograph itself, the time and the place: 'Dimanche, permission, bois de Vincennes: rien ne permet de l'affirmer' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 49).41 With these notes the atmosphere Perec has created in the description of the photograph is stripped away, and even the description of his father's clothes is corrected. What does at first sight seem a detailed, rather objective description of a photograph has become suspect like many of Perec's memories. Perec also describes photographs of his mother, and of one of them he says: La mère et l'enfant donnent l'image d'un bonheur que les ombres du photographe exaltent. Je suis dans les bras de ma mère [. . .] J'ai des cheveux blonds avec un très joli cran sur le front (de tous les souvenirs qui me manquent, celui-là est peut-être celui que j'aimerais le plus fortement avoir: ma 40

'The father in the photograph poses like a father. He is tall. He is bareheaded, holding his kepi in his hand. his greatcoat comes down very low. It is gathered at the waist by one of those thick leather belts that remind you of the window straps in third-class railway carriages. Between the polished military boots - it is Sunday - and the hem of the greatcoat you can just make out that there are interminable puttees. The father is smiling. he is a private. He is on leave in Paris; it is the end of winter, in the Bois de Vincennes.' p. 27. 41 'Sunday, leave, Bois de Vincennes: there's no basis for any of this.' p. 33.

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Again Perec distances himself from the photograph by not saying 'my mother' but uses the more generic description 'mother and child'. It points to the generic qualities of photographs, the conformity of photographs, as this one denotes the classic mother and child image, rather than Perec's mother specifically. But they do make a picture of happiness, reinforced by the creator of the photograph. Everything is described in minute detail, but here the photograph does not conjure up a memory, but a lack of memory, memory that Perec wished he had, but which the photograph in fact proves he does not have. The event photographed certainly took place, so it exposes Perec's lack of memory. The photographs Perec mentions are all described in great detail, and in one of them even the animals are described closely. Perec lists not only what can be seen in the photograph, but their size and shape and what is written on the back. The photographs are therefore not only a proof of one past moment, but they also carry with them the history of the family's ownership of them. They are material artefacts that have belonged to the family. The written details (sometimes wrong), and how they have been cut to fit frames or albums, all bear witness to a family history. A few bear Aunt Esther's handwriting, some Perec's own and in some cases a handwriting that he does not recognise: 'c'est peut-être celle de ma mère, et ce serait alors le seul exemple que j'aurais de son écriture' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 74)43. The photograph thereby becomes an even more important proof of his mother's existence.

42

'Mother and child make a picture of happiness, enhanced by the photographer's shading. I am in my mother's arms [. . .] I have fair hair with a very pretty forelock (of all my missing memories, that is perhaps the one I most dearly wish I had: my mother doing my hair, and making that cunning curl).' p. 49. 43 'perhaps it is my mother's, which would make it the only sample of her hand that I possess.' p. 52.

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The question remains why the photographs are not printed with the text. One can conjecture that it is perhaps because here it is the descriptions of the photographs that matter and not the photographs themselves. The descriptions are part of Perec's hunt for his past; his hunt for memories that are not there, for his parents who are not there. By not printing the images, but describing them in minute detail, Perec emphasises the tautology of photographs, mentioned by both Barthes and Susan Sontag. Barthes claims in La Chambre claire: 'Par nature, la Photographie [. . .] a quelque chose de tautologique: une pipe y est toujours une pipe, intraitablement' (La Chambre claire, p. 17).44 But as is evident in W ou le souvenir d'enfance this tautology only extends to people's physical appearance as Perec describes his parents' clothes in detail but knows little of their character, thoughts or emotions. Photographs, especially family photographs, are supposed to serve as memory aids, they are supposed to evoke memories of events, people and places of our past (as every Kodak advertisement affirms). Hence the poignancy of Perec's descriptions. Everything that is expected to be there - just as the reader expects the photographs to be there - is missing, it does not evoke memories, only absence. The documents are not important in themselves, only Perec's reading of them. Their status as documents is called into question, they have to invoke memories or they become only superficial shadows. The lack of identity is also apparent in the discussion on names and namelessness both in the childhood memories and in the story of the island of W. The sportsmen shed their identity and take on the names of others and Perec's own surname is a long story of misreadings and mispronunciation. As Marcel Benabou points out: 'In Perec's works, names not only serve to identify characters, they also serve to highlight the identity problems that face them, and that face their creator also.'45 Photographs do to a certain extent give people a name,

44

'By nature, the Photograph [. . .] has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe.' p. 5. 45 Marcel Benabou, 'Perec's Jewishness', The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993) 76-87, (p. 85).

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an outward identity. Richard Brilliant says of the connection between names and portraits: Namelessness, however, is not an unfamiliar condition in the twentieth century; it is characteristic of the dispossessed everywhere, of the prisoner and of the concentration camp inhabitant [. . .] The lack of a name and of the name's reference makes the visual representation, or portrayal, of such a subject both futile and pointless. Indeed, before long, one may expect that instead of an artist's profile the future will preserve only complete actuarial files, stored in some omniscient computer, ready to spew forth a different kind of personal profile, beginning with one's Social Security number. Then, and only then, will portraiture as a distinctive genre of art disappear.46

The decisive event in Perec's childhood was the loss of his parents. The descriptions of the photographs illustrate perfectly that loss and how important they were in his life even though they were not there, just as the photographs are not present in the book. It points to the tautology of photographs, but also to their problematical status as documents. It asks the question: what can photographs really tell us? What kind of clues are they to the past without the aid of memory or history? In this text the images are not sites of memory, signalling the beginnings of stories, they only denote absence and forgetting. There is no moment of recognition in Perec's description of the photographs, but that does not mean that photographs cannot provide such a moment, as one might say that the reason that Perec does describe them in such detail is exactly this search for a moment of recognition, even though it is constantly thwarted by his lack of memory.

46

Brilliant, op. cit., p. 174.

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3.2. Photographs as Clues: Reading Photographs with Paul Auster In Paul Auster's work the photographs not only work on a thematic level but on the level of narrative structure as well. Auster is more explicit than Perec in explaining what the photographs he discusses in his autobiography mean to him, and how they tell him something about the people they depict. In his autobiographical work The Invention of Solitude, the first part 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' is written after his father's death. Auster is in his father's house sorting out his father's possessions when he finds photographs of his father: Discovering these photographs was important to me because they seemed to reaffirm my father's physical presence in the world, to give me the illusion that he was still there. The fact that many of these pictures were ones I had never seen before, especially the ones of his youth, gave me the odd sensation that I was meeting him for the first time, that a part of him was only just beginning to exist. I had lost my father. But at the same time, I had also found him. As long as I kept these pictures before my eyes, as long as I continued to study them with complete attention, it was as though he were still alive, even in death. Or if not alive, at least not dead. Or rather, somehow suspended, locked in a universe that had nothing to do with death, in which death could never make an entrance.47

This echoes Barthes's find in the photograph of his mother. Auster has 'found' his father, and the photographs do in a sense keep his father alive. They are not on the side of 'domination and death' as long as he keeps looking at them. He uses the word 'presence' which the photograph seems to carry with it, whether it be to denote our own presence in the world or that of those who have died. These photographs offer Auster solace in the middle of the traumatic experience of having to pack away his father's life. 47

Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 14. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

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The photograph is intimately linked with death as it repeats endlessly one moment in time (that is, of course, always past when we see the photograph). We somehow crave that repetition; Auster needs to keep looking at the photographs to keep his father from disappearing. Susan Sontag claims that 'all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt'.48 Rugg also points to the photograph as cenotaph: 'Both photographs and autobiographies could be imagined as cenotaphs for they indicate through their presence what is no longer here - the body of the author.'49 In cases where the photograph is of someone who has died, as in Barthes, Perec, Auster and Ondaatje, the photograph is what keeps them alive. The images are all connected to the authors' attempts to bring some meaning or cohesion to their memories of their parents. Photographs are a material proof of the existence of these people, and are therefore constantly evoked when the authors attempt to prevent their parents from disappearing. The photograph's truth value is what we always come back to. As Vicki Goldberg points out: The photographic lie succeeds because photographs appear to be so truthful. The fake disrupts two dearly held expectations: that photographs report what was actually there, and that seeing is believing - for photography amounts to a surrogate for personal observation.50

I mentioned in my introduction that photographs in autobiographies often look like excerpts from the family album. The family album is in many cases at the centre of the family's memories, and can constitute the image people have of their families (parents who do not take photographs of their children are considered almost negligent). When 48

Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 15. Rugg, op. cit., p. 26. 50 Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How photographs changed our lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), p. 89. 49

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Auster explains in The Invention of Solitude that his family was not a very happy one, he mentions the family album: 'One very big album, bound in expensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover This is Our Life: The Austers - was totally blank inside' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 14). There had been good intentions, someone had gone to the trouble of buying the album but it was never filled with snapshots of the Austers. The implication is that they had no memories together. As Vicki Goldberg says in her discussion of the birth of the family album: 'The album [in late nineteenth century] offered families a cohesion that reality did not necessarily provide; the dream of the perfect family slumbered within its covers.'51 There is no such image available to Auster which illustrates his point about the sadness prevalent in his family and its eventual break-up. In a photograph of his father Auster finds what he considers to be the perfect likeness: From a bag of loose pictures: a trick photograph taken in an Atlantic City studio sometime during the Forties. There are several of him sitting around a table, each image shot from a different angle, so that at first you think it must be a group of several different men. Because of the gloom that surrounds them, because of the utter stillness of their poses, it looks as if they have gathered there to conduct a seance. And then, as you study the picture, you begin to realize that all these men are the same man. The seance becomes a real seance, and it is as if he has come there only to invoke himself, to bring himself back from the dead, as if, by multiplying himself, he had inadvertently made himself disappear. There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but seeing nothing, never able to see anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 31)

51

Ibid., p. 105.

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Auster allocates to this photograph his father's core: his father's tricks and invisibility. The description of it is at the centre of his writing on his father; it epitomises all that Auster writes about him.52 His carefree youth (symbolised by the entertainment mecca Atlantic City), his being absent from his life, his death, his multiple lives, how he eluded everyone, even the lady friends who all thought they were the only one. It becomes a highly symbolic photograph through Auster's writing on it. Yet, if it had only been included and not discussed this is not the conclusion the reader would have immediately come to. At most it may remind us of a similar photograph of Marcel Duchamp. Not only is it a photograph of a man who was invisible to others, but also of a man who sees nothing, who will never be able to see anything. So instead of affirming his 'physical presence' in the world, this is a photograph of death. Rugg points to this effect in photography when she claims: 'If we imagine in one sense photography as a record of the dead, we must also think of the psychological murder of the photographic situation, and the photographed subject's struggle to remain hauntingly alive.'53 This is the central theme of Auster's writing on his father. At first the photographs seem to bring him back. Auster believes he has 'found' him, just as by writing on him he thought he would 'find' him, but all he finds is an invisible man, one who was impossible to know and the photograph becomes a 'picture of death' as if he had always been in some sense 'dead', never 'present'. The trick photograph captures this quality of the man, something that was clearly individual to him, but it is a trick photograph, and the question remains whether or not we would all look like 'invisible men' photographed in this way (just as everyone looks like a criminal in 'mug-shots'). Just as autobiography always moves between the individual and the universal, so photographs have long been used not only to capture the 52

As Rugg points out: 'One might say that photographs embody Benjamin's historic moment, for the viewing of photographs always enacts the imbrication of past and present moments, forcing them into a constellation in the viewer's mind.' op. cit., p. 67. 53 Ibid., p. 114.

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individual but to assert the universal as Alan Sekula explains in discussing the role of photography in the nineteenth century: At the same time, photographic portraiture began to perform a role no painted portrait could have performed in the same thorough and rigorous fashion. This role derived, not from any honorific portrait tradition, but from the imperatives of medical and anatomical illustration. Thus photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look - the typology and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology.54

This is particular to photography. It can affirm or reinstate our presence in the world, while at the same time it makes us into types, whether it be for medical purposes, or to establish some kind of deviance, or conformity, as in the more mundane instance of the passport photograph. There is another equally significant photograph in The Invention of Solitude, and one that hides a dark reality, a terrible family secret. Auster's grandmother murdered his grandfather, but the description of a family photograph hides the awful truth: And then I realized what was strange about the picture: my grandfather had been cut out of it. The image was distorted because part of it had been eliminated. My grandfather had been sitting in a chair next to his wife with one of his sons standing between his knees - and he was not there. Only his fingertips remained: as if he were trying to crawl back into the picture from some hole deep in time, as if he had been exiled to another dimension. The whole thing made me shake. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 34)

This is, of course, what had happened; Auster's grandfather had been excised from the family's memories. He was never mentioned and each of his sons gave different versions of his death. It is not until 54

Allan Sekula, 'The Body and the Archive', October 39 (Winter 1986), 365 (p. 6).

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Auster is a grown man that he finds out, by coincidence, the truth. Everything is in the photograph: the whole horror of the murder repeated by cutting the grandfather out of the photograph, only his fingertips remaining as his story is finally told. It is one more proof of how seriously we take photographs, as when people cut up pictures of their lovers after a break-up. It is one more instance where a photograph is a part of the subject and not just a likeness and where the family album pretends to include the perfect family but in reality hides an awful truth; the ultimate family breakdown. It is as if by cutting the grandfather out of the picture the family could erase the past and restore the perfect family image. As Sontag points out: 'Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.'55 That is why they can play such a pivotal role in autobiographies. The two photographs reproduced in The Invention of Solitude operate as two types of clue. The trick photograph of his father is for Auster a clue to his father's personality and his life, and works in the text as a symbol for his father's life. The other photograph Auster uses as a clue for the reader to the dark family secret that sheds light on his father's character. Auster significantly only writes about the murder halfway through the writing on his father in order to invoke his own experience as he only learned the facts, by chance, as an adult. Both photographs serve to put the reader in Auster's footsteps and illustrate the relationship between the events themselves and the writing of the events. What is of interest, of course, is that both photographs have been tampered with in different ways. The trick photograph does not attempt a realistic capturing of its model but plays with our belief in the truth-value of photographs, still managing for Auster to 'capture' his father, whilst the torn photograph has been tampered with in an effort to hide a family secret. Again, the status of photographs as documents is questioned, but in this text they still serve as vital clues to the past. As Goldberg points out: 'The photograph, produced by a

55

Sontag, op. cit, p. 23.

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brief transaction between chemicals and light, is at once the most faithful and the most seductive of witnesses.'56

4. The Lost Photograph: Michael Ondaatje's Documents The issues discussed above - Barthes's ideas on likeness in photography and Auster's limited but highly conscious choice of photographs - illustrate how important photographs are to our perception of ourselves, our families, and our past. Photographs often have a deep personal significance for us (for instance photographs of dead relatives), much more so than paintings or drawings usually have. This denotes a similar importance letters can have (hand-written love letters for instance). As Sontag points out: Our irrepressible feeling that the photographic process is something magical has a genuine basis. No one takes an easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it.57

This attempt at gaining control over the subject is similar to the control over others one gains by writing about them. This is what the autobiographers discussed here attempt with their parents. Michael Ondaatje had dealt with photographs before he wrote his autobiography, especially in his book on Billy the Kid. It is quickly apparent that his use of documents in that text is highly unorthodox. On the title page of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid there is an empty frame and an accompanying text claiming it to be a photograph of Billy. There are several photographs included in the text, but none of Billy. Most of the photographs look as if they are from the period. They are of people and places, houses, interiors, landscapes. There is 56 57

Goldberg, op. cit., p. 19. Sontag, op. cit., p. 155.

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one of a couple dressed in clothes from the period inserted in the middle of a story about Billy's friends Sally and John Chisum. The photograph on the last page is a small one set in one corner of an empty frame of someone dressed in a cowboy outfit. Their presence gives a feeling of authenticity as only photographs can, providing local colour and feeling for the environment. None of these photographs have captions. In reality only a few of these photographs are from the period in question. Some Ondaatje took himself, the couple are friends of his dressed up, and the last photograph is in fact of Ondaatje himself as a boy. In this way our - some would say naive belief that photographs are proof: evidence of what things were really like, is played with and turned on its head, as it is not just the past one enters through the photograph, but also the present. And at the end Ondaatje has inserted himself in the empty frame of the title page. So it is with all the documents quoted in the text. Some are authentic and some made-up, but all are treated as equally valid. William Bell explains what effect the combination of the factual and the fictional has in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot: 'there are two kinds of discourse, one of them fact-led, the other not. The effect of juxtaposing the two is to sow confusion and to force on the reader a re-examination of what s/he believes historiography to be.'58 It forces us to look at the power of photographs, the effect of eye-witness accounts, and to re-examine how the past is always mediated to us. We have to look no further than to Ondaatje's own entry in Who's Who to realise that even what we think of as real and valid documents are not necessarily trustworthy as editions of Who's Who from 1969-1992 described Michael Ondaatje as the breeder of the famous Sydenham Spaniel. But why is there no photograph of Billy? Is the empty frame on the title page perhaps filled with the text? Is it a way to start with a clean slate, instead of the fixed image of a person? And is Ondaatje positing himself there as the last photograph is in the corner of a page-size 58

William Bell, 'Not Altogether a Tomb: Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot', in Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, ed. David Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1993), pp. 148-173, pp. 150-151.

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empty frame? How does a biographer enter his or her subject's life? Or perhaps a better question would be: How does a poet enter the life of a legendary outlaw? Ondaatje's Billy explains it thus: 'Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in.'59 It is not a story through 'their' eyes, and therefore there is no photograph taken through their eyes. But it is a story through Ondaatje's eyes. In biography there is always someone looking. As I mentioned in the previous chapter Saul Bellow once described biography as 'a specter viewed by a specter'. It is a maze to begin, not to get out of, but to be in. Billy's voice describes events from beyond the grave, becoming a true spectre. Ondaatje's autobiography Running in the Family is full of the writer's discoveries about his own and his family's life in Sri Lanka, as I discussed in an earlier chapter. He is a traveller coming back home after many years of exile to find out about his origins and the meaning of that origin. There are a few photographs in the book, the most important one being of his parents: My Aunt pulls out the albums and there is the photograph I have been waiting for all my life. My father and mother together. May 1932 [. . .] Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humour, and the fact that both of them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father's tanned skin, my mother's milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making. It is the only photograph I have found of the two of them together.60

It was a marriage marred by the father's alcoholism and they were divorced when Ondaatje was quite young. So Ondaatje naturally desires to find that they were in fact happy at some point, that his 59

Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed poems (London: Picador, 1989), p. 20. 60 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984), pp. 161-162.

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origin is not completely marked with unhappiness. So not only does Ondaatje desire to find this image/likeness, he wants it to correspond to the meaning he has given it, that his origin is not arbitrary, he wants it to have a specific meaning. The photograph is taken shortly after their marriage and it shows them making faces at the camera, and they have written on it: 'What we think of married life'. Ondaatje's parents are the creators of that photograph, not only because of their poses, but also because they gave it a title, and therefore for Ondaatje the 'evidence' he needed. W. J. T. Mitchell has posed this question of our belief in photographs: How do we account for the stubbornness of the naive, superstitious view of photography? What could possibly motivate the persistence in erroneous beliefs about the radical difference between images and words, and the special status of photography? Are these mistaken beliefs simply conceptual errors, like mistakes in arithemetic? Or are they more on the order of ideological beliefs, convictions that resist change?61

In his book on Billy the Kid Ondaatje experimented freely with photography: playing with the reader's expectation of photographs as documents: and with our belief that photographs offer proof of an existence. But when it comes to the autobiographical text the emphasis shifts. The photograph of his parents is one he claims to have been looking for all of his life. There is no doubt or suspicion of the meaning of that photograph, which echoes the way Barthes's move towards photography constituted a move towards autobiography. Ondaatje in his autobiographical mode discards his own previous attempts to alert us to the nature of photographs as witness. It is a staged photograph of his parents, yet 'true'. Perhaps its 'truthfulness' lies in its unconventionality as a wedding photograph, as conventional wedding photography is a very structured form where the individual is fitted into a universal structure. But Ondaatje's parents have staged 61

W. J. T. Mitchell, 'The Ethics of Form in the Photographic Essay', Afterimage 6 (1989) 8-13, (p. 8). Quoted in Rugg, op. cit., p. 80.

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their own photograph and written the caption, and it therefore is individual to them - their own creation rather than the photographer's and seemingly 'says' something about their marriage. And Ondaatje does not make any sweeping deductions, only that they shared the same humour, that perhaps they were happy. This need for evidence or clues, for what Tagg calls the 'confirmation of an existence', is evident in all the texts I have discussed. Whether or not these photographs have some intrinsic, essential meaning, is not for the reader to judge. What interests me far more is that that is how these authors look at them and write about them. The notion that photographs are a confirmation of an existence, and also a confirmation of memories is common to all of them. It is not to say that the authors believe that photographs can capture the inner life, the self, the identity (or whatever we want to call it) of their subjects, suffice it to say that these autobiographers use photographs to get closer to their subject. Rugg explains: Thus photographs, as our most natural sign, become the most troublesome [. . .] it would seem that there are certain aspects of photography and autobiography that are inherent in the media in their role as signs, that do not change appreciably over time: the relation of the sign to death, the problem of identifying a unique and/or integrated self in the flurry of signs, the desire to textualize (and thus control) photographic images, the sense of photography as a metaphor for memory, the relation of the photograph to the name or word, the publication of the private.62

Barthes's discussion of photography is an effect of his uneasiness with being torn between two languages, the expressive and the critical. For him photography allows for the two to coincide. The fascination for photographs that he talks about in Roland Barthes is explained in both critical and expressive terms, as studium and punctum. It also allows him to write on his mother and how her death affected him. Barthes 'finds' his mother in a photograph which confirms for him not only her existence, but also his memory of her, the way in which he knew her. 62

Rugg, op. cit., p. 234.

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In Perec's case his description of the photographs of his parents is consistent with the style of the book as a whole and the lack of memory he describes. His problem is that he did not know his parents so the photographs only serve as evidence of their physical appearance. He does not claim to 'find' them or remember them, but the photographs still offer proof for him that they once existed and that he once knew them, and their status as documents is never doubted. Auster and Ondaatje find a part of their family history in photographs, and clues about the character of their parents, and both use the photographs as a vehicle for writing on their parents. The use of photographs in these books is strongly linked to the problems these autobiographers wrestle with, Barthes on the subject, Perec on memory, Ondaatje's search for his father, and Auster on father-son relationships. All in all I believe the use of photographs in autobiographies can have much broader implications than is apparent at first sight. They can and often do highlight the main themes and preoccupation of autobiographies, such as memory, relationship to parents, to the past, fictionality, self-invention and self-image. At the same time they serve to remind us of our relationship to photographs: their truth value, transparency, their value as clues or evidence of the past. In all this it does not matter very much what the photographs look like, whether they are good or bad (we all know what a trying experience it can be to go through other people's family albums). It is what the writers make of them, how they use them in the text, whether as a source of memory, of creativity, or of new understanding, that counts. Yet photographs and text sit uneasily together, as one can never encompass the other. The photograph can never fully represent the text, just as the text can never exhaust all the image says, hence the decision by some autobiographers to leave out the photographs. The two do not come together in synthesis, there is always some kind of tension between them. So even when dealing with the most referential of art forms, the autobiographer has constantly to deal with the complex relationship between the autobiographical process and fiction. As the above texts demonstrate the meaning of the photograph

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in autobiography is to a large extent reliant on the context in which it is placed, in other words on the memory (or lack of memory) it represents.

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Conclusion Postmodernism and Borderlines Let me propose a simple myth of its genesis, a sort of Origin of the Species. The problematic, delightful, and disputed nature of biography derives from its original two forbears, who one secret, sultry morning formed an Unholy Alliance. Fiction married Fact, without the benefit of clergy. Or as I prefer to say, Invention formed a love-match with Truth. These are the Adam and Eve of our subject. The result was a brilliant, bastard form - Biography - which has been causing trouble ever since.1

Throughout this work my contention has been that one can locate borderlines between autobiography and fiction in various areas of autobiographical writing. These borderlines can be found in the relationship between remembering and writing, in narrative structure, in the treatment of gender, in writing on the experience of crossing cultures, in the presence of biography in autobiography, and in the use of photographs in autobiography. In locating these borderlines we have also seen how the relationship between the fictional and autobiographical aspects of life-writing can be a close one, as can be seen for instance in the close connection between memory, writing, and fiction, so that one would be hard pressed to define them as two distinct (and opposing) modes of discourse. The (trouble-causing) form, biography, and its sister genre, autobiography seem inevitably to oscillate between facts and fictions. A conscious transgression of borders and genres in life-writing can also be seen as a postmodern trait. But as Marjorie Garber reminds us the use of fiction in auto/biography is not a postmodern phenomenon in itself: 1

Richard Holmes, 'Biography: Inventing the Truth', in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 15-25, p. 15.

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For the biographer and the autobiographer, postmodernity means understanding that there is no secure external vantage point from which one can see clearly and objectively, can 'realize' the subject. As if biographers ever thought they were doing that. That biography - and, even more, autobiography - is a species of fiction-making is a truth so old that only a willed cultural amnesia can make it new.2

But despite this assertion Garber also points out that the borderline between fiction and non-fiction has been a specific preoccupation of postmodernism: If poststructuralism bequeaths to biography the question of the split subject, postmodernism acts out that ambivalent bequest, testing and transgressing the borderline between 'fiction' and 'reality' or 'fiction' and 'nonfiction' in novels, films, and popular culture.3

This feature of postmodernism is one Linda Hutcheon dwells on as well: 'The most radical boundaries crossed, however, have been those between fiction and non-fiction and - by extension - between art and life.'4 And Marjorie Perloff maintains that 'postmodern texts are regularly seen as problematizing prior forms, as installing one mode only to contest it'.5 So even though fiction has long been part of the genre of autobiography, this radical crossing of boundaries and negotiation of borderlines can be seen as specific to postmodern experiments with the genre.

2

Marjorie Garber, 'Postmodernism and the Possibility of Biography', in The Seductions of Biography, eds. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175-177, p. 175. 3 Ibid., p. 176. 4 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 10. 5 Marjorie Perloff, 'Introduction', in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 3-10, p. 4.

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But let us first look at another defining feature of postmodernism its relationship to the past - and how that can affect our ideas about the possibilities of representing the past in life-writing. Umberto Eco describes postmodernism's relation to the past thus: the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further, because it has produced a meta language that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.6

The response to postmodernism's 'revisiting' of the past varies between Linda Hutcheon's enthusiastic endorsement of postmodernism's view of the past to Fredric Jameson's harsh critique of its superficiality.7 What critics tend to agree upon is that

6

Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984), p. 67. 7 Linda Hutcheon claims: 'I offer, then, a specific, if polemical, start from which to operate: as a cultural activity that can be discerned in most art forms and many currents of thought today, what I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political. Its contradictions may well be those of late capitalist society, but whatever the cause, these contradictions are certainly manifest in the important postmodern concept of "the presence of the past".' op. cit., p. 4. See also Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review 146 (1984) 53-92. Hayden White charts how this affects historiography: 'Indeed, it is only by troping, rather than by logical deduction, that any given set of the kinds of past events we would wish to call 'historical' can be (first) represented as having the order of a chronicle; (secondly) transformed by emplotment into a story with identifiable beginning, middle, and end phases, and (thirdly) constituted as the subject of whatever formal arguments may be adduced to establish their 'meanings' - cognitive, ethical, or aesthetic, as the case may be. These three tropological abductions occur in the composition of every historical discourse, even those which, as in modern structuralist historiography, eschew storytelling and try to limit themselves to statistical analyses of institutions and long-term, effectively synchronic, ecological and ethnological processes.' '"Figuring the Nature of the Times

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postmodernism is preoccupied with the past, although the value of the outcome of this preoccupation is contested. This fascination with the past has, of course, implications for the genre of autobiography. It can both explain autobiography's popularity at the present time and can be said to inform many experiments with the genre, as autobiographers attempt new ways of representing the past, distrusting commonplaces and conventions. This great interest in the past is coloured by an awareness of the difficulty in representing it, and by the knowledge that the past is always already mediated. But there is also an acknowledgement that we can never escape the past, so we must carry on examining it and working with its influences in our cultural practices. Hutcheon points out that postmodernism 'does not deny the existence of the past; it does question whether we can ever know that past other than through its textualized remains'.8 This is an important issue in the context of how autobiographers negotiate the borderlines between autobiography and fiction. Many of the autobiographers discussed in this work show an awareness of these considerations, for instance Paul Auster with his attempts to make sense of the past while constantly doubting the possibility of such a task, and this is also apparent when Michael Ondaatje experiments with genres in order to represent a fragmented past. Hutcheon claims in her discussion of Ondaatje's Running in the Family that: To write self-reflectively of history as process in progress, instead of as a completed product, is to break down the finality of formal narrative closure. Such a self-conscious opening up of the borders of both history and narrative is a postmodernist restating of the traditional (and perhaps obligatory) mimetic connection between art and life.9

Deceased": Literary Theory and Historical Writing', in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 19-44, p. 26. 8 Hutcheon, op. cit., p. 20. 9 Linda Hutcheon, 'Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge', in Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed. Sam Solecki (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1985), pp. 301-314, p. 312.

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This process, this opening up of borders, is also apparent in Roland Barthes's use of the fragment in his autobiography, and in Jenny Diski's play on traditional closure in her memoir. One could say that autobiographers all have to search for a structure that would encapsulate their experiences, acknowledging, as for instance Eva Hoffman does, that these structures are human constructs that have to be constantly reworked to fit the shape of our experiences. Hutcheon calls texts that display this awareness of our problematic knowledge of the past historiographic metafiction: 'Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.'10 But as regards autobiography Johnnie Gratton points out the limits of Hutcheon's definition: In fact one begins to find it regrettable that Hutcheon did not leave her definition of the postmodern novel more open, for the paradoxical/complex form we encounter most prominently in the contemporary French domain is not so much 'historiographic metafiction' [. . .] as a mode we could justifiably call 'autobiographic(al) meta-fiction'.11

Hutcheon does not mention the rethinking and reworking of autobiographical features so prominent in the last years. Her definition, with its emphasis on history, leaves out elements that are of great import in autobiographical writing, such as the role of memory and the role narrative plays in the construction of a life story. Both are features that have been under much scrutiny in recent years in lifewriting and have not escaped the influence of postmodern trends.

10

Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 5. Johnnie Gratton, 'Postmodern French Fiction: Practice and Theory', in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the present, ed. Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 242-260, p. 245. 11

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The rethinking of the representation of the past necessitates a search for forms that would represent our connections to the past. Postmodernist writers are not attempting to establish completely new forms, but rather to rework and revisit old ones. And with that they constantly cross the borderlines of genres as Hutcheon points out: the categories of genre are regularly challenged these days. Fiction looks like biography (Banville's Kepler), autobiography (Ondaatje's Running in the Family), history (Rushdie's Shame). Theoretical discourse joins forces with autobiographical memoir and Proustian reminiscence in Barthes's Camera Lucida, where a theory of photography grows out of personal emotion with no pretence to objectivity, finality, authority.12

This crossover between genres is a constant feature of recent lifewriting. There is an alignment between postmodernism and autobiography in this instance, as autobiography has always been a notoriously 'fluid' genre, difficult to pin down and has always borrowed from other genres. This trangression also manifests itself in other areas. Fascination and experimentation with biographies, memoirs, and family histories have spilled into other genres, such as film (for example Frederico Fellini's Amarcord (1974), Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) and Alan Berliner's My Father (1996)), theatre (for example 'Ursula Martinez Presents a Family Outing'), and postmodern biographies, such as Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot. This fascination is, of course, part of postmodernism's constant tendency to look back, to re-examine, and to rework the past. There are also other aspects of postmodernism (especially as regards the novel) that do not impinge on autobiographical writing. For instance Gerhard Hoffmann maintains that: 'The postmodern author relinquishes the dialectics of both guilt and innocence, meaning and nonmeaning, and modifies the tragic into the absurd or in effect

12

Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 60.

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dissolves both in counterhumour.'13 The absurd, counterhumour, and such like, seldom have a place in autobiography, and autobiographers are hard pressed to give up completely the dialectics of meaning and non-meaning. But doubts about the possibilities of the representation of the past are common in the texts I have discussed. Doubts about the power of memory (Hellman, Perec), about the possibilities of narrative (Handke) and the breakdown of chronology (Auster, Ondaatje), all point to this questioning. A sense of inconclusiveness (Handke, Diski), and an opening up of the past by entertaining notions of retrospective possibilities, or alternative lives (Hoffman, Mori), are all attempts in some sense to revisit the past without innocence, that is with the knowledge of how the past is always already mediated, and how conventional form and structure can at times gloss over the problematics involved in writing on the past. This awareness of the problems involved comes to the fore in the autobiographers' treatment of memory. Marita Sturken claims: An understanding of the importance of biography in postmodernism must acknowledge that the 'truth' of biographical stories is as evasive as memory, but their shifting meaning in contemporary social formations is crucial. There is no original in memory, only its trace, its narrative. To think of memory in the context of postmodernism, we need to acknowledge that memory is claimed and produced in new forms and technologies sometimes it may even be disguised as forgetting.14

This, as I demonstrated in the first chapter, is characteristic of the treatment of memory, forgetting, and writing in the autobiographies I 13

Gerhard Hoffmann, 'The Absurd and its Forms of Reduction in Postmodern American Fiction', in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1986), pp. 185-210, p. 186. 14 Marita Sturken, 'Personal Stories and National Meanings: Memory, Reenactment and the Image', in The Seductions of Biography, pp. 31-41, p. 41.

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discussed, although I would not go as far as Paul Jay when he claims that: 'the autobiographical work has come to be based on conscious forgetting rather than on careful remembering and on fictional representation rather than on historical presentation.'15 Conscious forgetting and fictional re-presentation certainly play a part in recent life-writing, but this constantly interacts with careful remembering and historical presentation, rather than replacing it. The lack of finality and authority in autobiography, that I discussed in the second chapter, echoes postmodernism's suspicion of finality and closure. In acknowledging that their stories could have been told differently (as both Handke and Lessard do), there is implicit a suspicion of any authority that would claim finality and closure. This is entirely in keeping with the view that remembering is a continuing process, that will never be 'completed', displayed by Hellman, Perec, and Auster, as I discussed in the first chapter.16 However, this does not lead, in these works, to a complete breakdown of narrative as a meaning-making process, but rather to a degree of uncertainty, and a sense of inconclusiveness. The issues concerning gender and ethnic minorities have a prominent place in postmodernism. When the authority of the centre is questioned the margins play an increasingly larger role. Autobiography is a form that lends itself well to a discussion of these issues, whether it be to lend validity to a certain perspective (female, ethnic minority), or to represent a specific experience (repression/ liberation, crossing cultures). In tackling these issues the autobiographers come across borderlines between factual and fictional representations of these experiences. They navigate between the individual and the universal, thus highlighting some problems that face every autobiographer; how writing on one's past can lead to

15

Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 36. 16 This can also be linked to postmodernism's suspicion of universals, what Lyotard has called its refusal to belief in any 'grand récit'. See Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979).

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personal mythologies and the difficulty inherent in bridging the gap between the past and the present. Michael Ondaatje's book on Billy the Kid is a good example of transgressions of genre. It is a collection of poems and short pieces of prose, photographs and transcripts of documents - fictional and real which tell Billy's life story.17 This is a concerted effort to open up the boundaries of biography to a more imaginative approach.18 Writing on another in an autobiography shows us how the genres feed off each other and how biography can be revitalised when its borders are transgressed. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid also raises the questions about the documentary value of photographs that I discussed in the final chapter. The autobiographer's treatment of documents and history is clearly an area where the question of reference becomes prominent. Paul John Eakin has written extensively on reference in autobiography. Eakin attempts to answer the question 'why should it make a difference to me that autobiographies are presumably based in biographical fact?'19 He explains that this question has been sidelined in the last twenty years or so in the attempt to establish autobiography as imaginative writing: 'This shift in perspective from fact to fiction has been accompanied by the poststructuralist critique of the concept of the self (autobiography's principal referent) and of the referential possibilities of language'.20 Eakin sets out to disprove the poststructuralist presumption that 'an autobiographer's allegiance to referential truth necessarily entails a series of traditional beliefs about self, language and literary form'.21 He examines William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow to show that 'pursuit of a referential 17

Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems (London: Picador, 1989). 18 All of Ondaatje's works are in one way or another based on the lives of real people, as for instance his book about the jazz-player Buddy Bolden, Coming Through Slaughter (1976). 19 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 29. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 30.

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aesthetic need not preclude a prominent role for fiction in an autobiographical text'.22 Eakin's claim is that autobiography is a creator of both fact and fiction and that this double nature and this tension in the autobiographers' relationship with experience is an intrinsic part of the genre. He goes on to examine what kind of motivation lies behind the pursuit of a referential aesthetic, and mentions 'discovery' (the search for some form or principle in a life), 'invention' (repetition of events with a difference), and what he claims to be a deeper motive: 'a desire to assert the distinctiveness and the continuity of one's subjectivity'.23 One could say that this mirrors to a large extent how autobiographers use photographs in their works. Barthes and Ondaatje both search for a photograph that would allow them to 'discover' their parents. Auster and Perec write on photographs extensively, 'inventing' the character of their parents. Examining the use in autobiography of the ultimate referential art, photography, has therefore thrown light on the role of the referent in autobiography. Autobiography makes use of fiction not only on a superficial level but in its deep structure as well. I do not believe that it becomes fiction, but contend rather that it 'makes use of' fiction. Fiction in autobiography can be located in its structure, in the handling of memory, in self-invention, in structures of experience such as motherdaughter relationships and crossing cultures, in writing on someone else and in the use of documents, but as I hope to have shown in this work, all those elements, that we generally think of as fiction, can also be used as tools of knowledge and of self-creation. The autobiographers make use of these features for their own ends: to look at the past and to form an autobiographical subject. One cannot ever completely take the fictionality out of autobiography and the often very inventive strategies of these writers both point to the 'generic' possibilities of autobiography (fiction is an intrinsic part of this mode), and reflect the cultural preoccupations of the postmodern era (as the postmodern era is preoccupied with how we can know the past, 22 23

Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 52.

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what part language plays in our knowledge, and the problematics of a unified subject). Postmodern autobiography entails an opening up of the past. By avoiding chronology, dates and details, it opens a rich field for dealing creatively with issues such as the self, memory, writing, and gender, and allows the autobiographers to find their own structure which they believe can best represent their life and/or their ideas. The autobiographer interacts with the past, aware of how difficult it is to recapture it, and therefore uses all that fiction has to offer to let him or her effectively engage with that past. This means that in these texts there are retrospective possibilities, alternative lives and therefore alternative texts, an acknowledgment that this is not the only way the life could have been written, that there are other probably just as valid alternatives. Fictional practices impinge in various ways on autobiographical writing, such as in its structure, in creating personal mythologies, in recreating the past, in glossing over or embellishing one memory or set of memories and giving them, sometimes, an iconic status, at the expense of other memories. In my view, fiction is not a negative term in autobiography, it does not diminish autobiography's truth-value, or the referential aspects of autobiography. Rather, fiction is used in the texts discussed here as a vehicle for the telling of a life, as a tool for making memories come alive, and for fashioning some sort of selfimage. When used effectively, successful negotiation between the autobiographical and fictional strands of life-writing can open up the past, by acknowledging the impossibility of giving a definitive version of a life. Thus autobiographers in the last thirty years or so have tended to produce texts that exist on the borderline between autobiography and fiction as they attempt to find new ways to represent the past.

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Index Ackerley, J. R. 7, 10, 196, 197, 199, 202-204, 207, 213 Ackroyd, Peter 185 Anderson, Linda 100n Antin, Mary 149 Apter, Emily 175 Attridge, Derek 242n Austen, Jane 156 Auster, Paul 7, 8, 19, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 25-31, 33, 44, 51,-54, 91, 183, 189, 198, 199, 208217, 219, 229, 244, 249-255, 260, 266, 269, 270, 272 Barnes, Julian 185, 190n, 256, 268 Barone, Dennis 26n Barthes, Roland 7, 10, 228-242, 244, 247, 249, 250, 255, 258260, 267, 268, 272 Bassnett, Susan 169n Beckett, Samuel 93 Bell, William 186, 187, 257 Bellos, David 37 Bellow, Saul 189 Benabou, Marcel 247 Benjamin, Walter 77n, 87, 237n, 239, 252n Benstock, Shari 99n Bergland, Betty 147 Berliner, Alan 200, 201, 268 Billson, Marcus K. 20n Boelhower, William 142n, 148, 151, 178n Bolton, Richard 228 Boswell, James 189 Brilliant, Richard 226, 227, 233, 248 Brooks, Peter 54, 59, 71, 74, 83, 87, 88n, 89, 95

Broughton, W. S. 103n Brown, Maurice F. 14n Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 221, 241 Burke, Peter 39, 47 Burke, Sean 231n Burton, Tim 268 Butler, Thomas 31 Buttinger, Muriel Gardiner 21n Byatt, A. S. 185 Cairns, Lucille 117n, 127n, 135, 137 Calvino, Italo 191, 192, 197 Cardinal, Marie 7, 8, 9, 98, 101, 107-112, 115-120, 122, 125, 127-130, 134-139 Carr, David 59n Carruthers, Mary 11, 15 Chatwin, Bruce 174 Cheever, Susan 199 Chodorow, Nancy 121n, 123 Cixous, Hélène 101, 116, 121, 122, 130, 133n Clarke, Graham 236 Clifford, James 177, 178 Codrescu, Andrei 75, 148 Cohen, Ralph 7n Conrad, Joseph 161 Couser, G. Thomas 163n Culler, Johnathan 59n De Beauvoir, Simone 129 De Man, Paul 3, 225n DeLillo, Don 45 Derrida, Jacques 237n Diski, Jenny 7, 9, 61, 92-96, 267, 269 Duchamp, Marcel 252

292 Duras, Marguerite 5, 64, 118n, 119, 124, 125, 127, 128, 227, 244 Eagleton, Terry 1n Eakin, Paul John 4n, 52, 84, 147, 163, 185, 186, 187, 231n, 237, 271, 272 Eco, Umberto 265 Ellis, David 189, 226 Ellroy, James 7, 10, 204-206, 213, 218 Ernaux, Annie 7, 8, 10, 57, 59, 117n, 118n, 120, 128, 193, 194, 196-198, 211 Falk, Doris V. 49n Fellini, Frederico 268 Felman, Shosana 110n Forster, Margaret 10, 64, 194, 195, 197-200, 205, 211, 212, 218 Fowles, John 92 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth 137 Frame, Janer 7, 8, 9, 97, 98, 101108, 110-113, 115-118, 123, 125-139, 145, 146, 229, 230 Fraser, Ronald 194, 206 Friday, Nancy 118 Friedman, Susan Stanford 99n, 100n Garber, Marjorie 263, 264 Gearhart, Suzanne 2 Gellhorn, Martha 21n Gilmore, Leigh 1n Goldberg, Vicki 250, 251, 254 Gosse, Edmund 2n, 196 Grant, Linda 2n Gratton, Johnnie 4, 231n, 235, 267 Guðbergur Bergsson 208

Borderlines Halbwachs, Maurice 25, 34, 45, 49, 50 Hall, Colette 100, 127n Handke, Peter 7, 8, 9, 57, 58, 61, 77-87, 90-92, 96, 183, 193, 194, 198, 216, 269, 270 Hellman, Lillian 7, 8, 13, 14, 15n, 17-21, 25-27, 32-34, 36, 38, 39, 42-45, 47-50, 52-54, 60, 269, 270 Hemingway, Ernest 52 Hewitt, Leah D. 5, 121n Hirsch, Marianne 101n Hodgins, Jack 146n Hoffman, Eva 7, 9, 141-144, 147152, 156, 163-167, 173, 174, 177-181, 267, 268, 269 Hogan, Rebecca 26n Holmes, Richard 206, 207, 263n Hughes, Ted 187 Hutcheon, Linda 1n, 86n, 143n, 160n, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268 Irigaray, Luce 116, 121n, 138 Jacobus, Mary 138 James, Henry 190n Jameson, Fredric 265 Jay, Paul 270 Jefferson, Ann 3 Jelinek, E. C. 99 Johnson, Barbara 97, 116, 121, 187 Johnson, Samuel 189 Kermode, Frank 83n, 92, 93, 195 Kingston, Maxine Hong 118n, 163n Klein, Melanie 121 Krell, David F. 15 Kristeva, Julia 119n, 121n Kuhn, Annette 227 Lawrence, D. H. 170, 171

Index Leduc, Violette 135n Lee, A. Robert 190n Leiris, Michel 86 Lejeune, Philippe 2, 3, 22n, 37, 38 Lernout, Geert 160n Lessard, Suzannah 7, 9, 10, 57, 58, 61-77, 87-91, 96, 183, 202-204, 207, 211-213, 221, 270 Lessing, Doris 222, 224, 227 Lott, Tim 2n, 194, 198, 204, 211 Lury, Celia 221n, 240n Lyotard, Jean-François 86n, 270n Mann, Thomas 201n Marcus, Laura 139, 184 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 201n Martinez, Ursula 268 Maxwell, William 271 May, Henry F. 10, 52, 132n, 194, 195, 197, 199, 205, 211, 212, 218 McCarthy, Mary 21n McCord, Phyllils Frus 185, 187, 218 McCourt, Frank 6, 64 Miller, D. A. 87n Mitchell, W. J. T. 258 Moi, Toril 121, 130 Mori, Kyoko 9, 142, 167-169, 174n, 179, 269 Morrison, Blake 2n Nabokov, Vladimir 91, 151, 190n, 224-226 Nadel, Ira Bruce 195, 201, 203, 215, 218 Nussbaum, Felicity 99 Ondaatje, Christopher 154n, 162 Ondaatje, Michael 7, 8, 9, 10, 142, 143, 147, 152-162, 168172, 174, 176, 179-181, 183,

293 185, 191, 219, 229, 250, 254, 255-260, 266, 268, 269, 271, 272 Perec, Georges 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 21-25, 27, 34-42, 45-47, 50, 52-54, 229, 242-250, 260, 269, 270, 272 Perloff, Marjorie 242n, 264 Plantinga, Theodore 41 Plath, Sylvia 128 Poirier, Richard 42 Pratt, Mary Louise 169, 172 Ray, Sangeeta 143n Riceour, Paul 57, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 69n, 74, 75, 77, 83, 86, 87, 91 Rousseau 61, 87 Rugg, Linda Haverty 223, 225, 250, 252, 259 Rushdie, Salman 141, 143, 151, 165n, 167, 172, 268 Sanderson, Rena 198n Sanderson, Richard K. 198n Sarraute, Nathalie 118n, 121n Schweig, Stefan 87 Sekula, Alan 253 Sheringham, Michael 1n, 3n, 23, 74, 75, 135n, 216 Sherman, Cindy 227 Shiach, Morag 101, 123 Showalter, Elaine 117n Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 87 Smith, Paul 233 Smith, Robert 5n Smith, Sidonie A. 20n, 98n Sontag, Susan 111, 247, 250, 254, 255 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 98 Spence, Jo 227 Stanton, Domna C. 129 Stendhal 61, 227

294 Sturken, Marita 269 Sturrock, John 4n, 61n Symons, A. J. A. 207 Tagg, John 223, 226, 239, 259 Thieme, John A. 176n Thompson, Becky 143n Tyagi, Sangeeta 143n White, Hayden 59n, 265n White, Stanford 58, 62, 63, 65, 67,-72, 74, 89, 204 Wicks, Susan 2n, 198 Wong, Say-Ling Cynthia 148n Wood, Mary Elene 111, 116 Woolf, Leonard 170 Woolf, Virginia 16n, 31, 124, 129, 207n, 215, 217, 218 Worthen, John 188, 191 Wright, William 21n

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