Autobiography as Identity Quest: Todorović and his Book of Revenge
Brian Finney
“autobiography specifically presents the writer with an opportunity to pursue the truth about himself, from himself”
Storm Jameson:
“I have tried not to lie, but no doubt I have told more lies than truth”
3 Elements of Autobiography:
Non Fiction Story
subject of the account must be the author himself
a. “someone’s life-story written by the person him or herself; this may be a real or fictional person.” (Longman)
3. Records the process of self-analysis
a. introspective character
b. Self-reflection
c. “a retrospective prose narrative that someone writes concerning his own existence, where the focus is the individual life, in particular the story of his personality”
“a particular approach to autobiography emphasizes the influence of group affiliation – the group may be gender, race, ethnicity, religion – on the writer’s development”
Autobiographies
a form of identity quest
offers a clear mirror in which an author can see himself, in a way, recognize and identify himself as an individual.
deals with the elements of
Self-invention
Self-discovery
Self-representation
Self-realisation
discovering meaning in the chaos of life experiences.
✖ mirror in which he saw himself clearly reflected, offering a vivid image of himself to the public.
It is rather a mosaic, the pieces of which need to be retrieved from memory and then pasted together so that they create a pattern previously indiscernible.
This process involves both the author and the reader and it is more often than not identity forming rather than identity revealing.
autobiographical act must simultaneously transform the life it is describing and externalise it
Lopičić, V. (2008) ‘Autobiography as identity quest : Todorović and his Book of revenge’, The Central European journal of Canadian studies, vol. 6, c. [1], p. 123-132. Available at: https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/116072/2_CentralEuropeanJournalCanadian_6-2008-1_15.pdf?sequence=1
Character and Self in Autobiography
Writer and subject ⟺ self and character
3 strategies to relieve the self-consciousness inherent in writing about themselves / throw attention forward to the truth of their meaning:
present themselves as impersonal historians, as objective self-biographers and self-interpreters with special access to interesting inform
a. Memoirist
i. often a person who has occupied a position of importance in the world
ii. Or a person whose very social submergence makes for interesting
testimony and is now
b. subtle sense by: biographers, critics, and philosophers
i. write about themselves through others or through ideas but suppress most
personal references in an effort of objectification
2. to overtly dramatize an individual history through the use of scene, situation, and developing narrative.
a. The veridicality of such historical facts as may be used is only presumed to be testable, for our interest is directed to the subjective truth, the truth of self- definition and self-understanding.
3. autobiographer can move away from the narrative of a remembered life and discursively engage the very project and problem of self-representation.
a. reduce action and character to significant moments and images, and correspondingly intensify a narrative monologue that probes and circles these moments and images.
b. In such discursive and poetic forms of self-writing, self-consciousness is offset by a more abstract handling of the material.
Northrop Frye
➜ Autobiography = "form which merges with the novel by insensible gradations. Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse, to select only those events and experiences in the writer's life that go to build up an integrated pattern"
Albert Stone
➜ Autobiography = an imaginative act of "re-inventing a plausible and satisfying history”
Paul John Eakin
➜ Autobiography = "a mode of self-invention that is always practiced first in living." Thus, "the self that is the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive structure”
Autobiography
Many critics have classified as autobiography even poetic and essayistic texts which hardly resemble novels at all:
Protagonist vs Author
Protagonists of these texts resemble characters in a fictional sense but they are not quite so autonomous because they are tied closely to the narrator and thence to the author.
Narrators of these texts = authorial selves, in an ambiguous sense.
The writer is both narrator (a being in the text) and author (a person outside it), not exclusively one or the other.
The writer of autobiography cannot escape his or her own literary presence, and the resultant self-consciousness will be manifest in a range of ways.
reflexivity, a deliberate rather than naive self-consciousness.
In trying to create character (self-image, self-characterization), the writer suppresses or pushes away his reflexive consciousness.
But will also be pulled back, and in, by the sense that character and self cannot be separated from one another.
And in seeking formal means of dealing with this tension, writers may contribute creatively to the art of autobiography, even though they cannot achieve the harmony of a work of fiction.
Gordon, D. (1988). ‘Character and Self in Autobiography’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, 18(2), 105-119. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30225210.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%
Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories
“I don't think anybody should write his autobiography until after he's dead” — Samuel Goldwyn
If fictional narrative ends with the last event in the story, and historical narrative has no definitive end, autographical narrative (autobiography) ends with writing the narrative itself
End of autobiography = writing of it
Discourse = narrative action
The discourse is transparent / semi-transparent; it is featured not as a part of the life but as a medium through which the life is seen.
All autobiographies are corrupted by the present
rather than any real or presumed factuality of the events in the narrative, that makes for a meaningful difference between autobiography and its textual neighbors, history and the novel.
"writer's life is necessarily still in progress," "sense of perspective and integration”
Paul Jay
➜ focuses on how autobiographical writers cope with the
⬥ "dissimilarity between identity and discourse”
⬥ “the ever-present ontological gap between the self who is writing and the self- reflexive protagonist of the work."'
➜ autobiography in much the same way as psychoanalysis stresses the construction of personal
history, not as an exercise in historical accuracy but as a therapeutic event in the present, a "talking cure."
Autobiography vs Novel
The difference lies not in the factuality of the one and fictiveness of the other but in the different orientations toward the text that they elicit in the reader.
When an autobiography is read as factual (as a biography of the author) with the reader displacing or making transparent the act of writing, it is read in some respects much like conventional fiction.
As in the well-made novel, the world in the narrative is accepted as given, it has a satisfying wholeness, it gives a sense of perspective and integration.
Abbott, H. (1988). ‘Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories’, New Literary History, 19(3), 597-615. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/
Other References:
Cavaliero. G. (2008) ‘Autobiography and fiction’, Prose Studies, 8:2, 156-171, July 16. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01440358508586248?journalCode=fprs20
Maftei, M. (2013) ‘The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity’, Bloomsbury, Available at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-fiction-of-autobiography-9781623561758/