Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing: Narrating the Male Self 9781032385044, 9781032385051, 9781003345374

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Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing

This book explores 21st-century uses of the second- and third-person perspective in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. Through detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the study demonstrates the multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narrative perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and autobiography theory, the book engages with questions and tensions of subjectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting from the narrative perspective, and its effects on the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. In addition, the book traces relevant guiding principles that the authors use to navigate their self-narratives in relation to others, such as questions of embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics, and politics. Situating the narratives in their socio-political and cultural context, the book uncovers to what extent these autobiographical narratives reflect the authors’ position between self-withdrawal and self-promotion as well as their response to questions of male agency, self-stylisation, and celebrity status. Christina Schönberger-Stepien is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Augsburg in Germany. Her research areas include life-writing, Victorian literature and culture, and working-class literature. She has published essays on autobiographical writing, on the feminist biopic, and on contemporary workingclass anthologies.

Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Series Editor: Ricia A Chansky

Trans Narratives trans, transmedia, transnational Edited by Ana Horvat, Orly Lael Netzer, Sarah McRae and Julie Rak Speculative Biography Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations Edited by Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging Nicole Stamant Engaging Donna Haraway Lives in the Natureculture Web Edited by Cynthia Huff and Margaretta Jolly Afropean Female Selves Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego Christopher Hogarth Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back Symptoms of Sincerity Charles Reeve Towards a Theory of Life-Writing Genre Blending Marija Krsteva Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing Narrating the Male Self Christina Schönberger-Stepien For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Auto-Biography-Studies/book-series/AUTO

Contemporary Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing Narrating the Male Self Christina Schönberger-Stepien

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Christina Schönberger-Stepien The right of Christina Schönberger-Stepien to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-38504-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-38505-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34537-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374 Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

1

Acknowledgements

vi

Towards a Poetics of Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing

1

2

Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal

46

3

Visuality and Self in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior

75

4

Personal and Exemplary Grief in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life

103

5

The Personal and the Ethical in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime

131

6

The Personal and the Political in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton

164

Perspectives and Conclusions

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Index

198

7

Acknowledgements

I owe genuine thanks to many people who have contributed to this book and who have enriched my (academic) life over the years. First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Martin Middeke for his critical eye on the project and his invaluable feedback throughout various stages of my research. I am forever grateful for his unbroken interest in my work, his unwavering motivational and intellectual support, and the encouragement to embark on my doctoral journey. I also thank the late Christoph Henke, who is dearly missed, for having been an incredible mentor and teacher, and who supported my academic endeavours from the very beginning. I want to thank Katja Sarkowsky for agreeing to cosupervise my thesis and for her helpful feedback, especially during the final stages. Thanks are also due to Mathias Mayer for agreeing to join the examination board for my viva, which proved to be a delightful and thought-provoking conversation on life-writing. Special thanks go to my lovely colleagues at the University of Augsburg – most of all to Martin Riedelsheimer, Eva Ries, Korbinian Stöckl, and Leila Vaziri – for their steady support and insightful conversations. I thank the editors and publishers of two edited collections for their permission to republish the following material: Parts of Chapter 2 appeared as “‘You’ Reconstructing the Past: Paul Auster’s Winter Journal” in the collection Auto/ Biography: Its Telescopic and Temporal Dimensions, edited by Beatrice Barbalato, published by Presses Universitaires de Louvain in 2017. Material from Chapter 6 originally appeared as “Rushdie’s Rebellious Joseph Anton or: Chronicling the Aftermath of The Satanic Verses” in the collection Aftermath: The Fall and the Rise after the Event, edited by Robert Kusek et al. and published by Jagiellonian University Press in 2019. I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the generous institutional support and funding which enabled the completion of this project. Thanks are due to the German Academic Scholarship Foundation for its valuable financial and intellectual support through a doctoral scholarship. My travels and research visits were generously funded by the Young Researchers Travel Scholarship Programme and the Women’s Advancement Programmes at the University of Augsburg. I would like to thank the Paul

Acknowledgements

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Auster Society in Copenhagen for valuable inspiration in the earliest stages of the project. Special thanks are due to the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing for awarding me a Doctoral Studentship and an incredibly beneficial research stay, and to the late Laura Marcus for her critical insights and invaluable feedback on my project. I also thank all the brilliant colleagues and scholars I have met at conferences, workshops, and trainings for excellent discussions and generous advice. To my wonderful friends: thank you for providing much-needed distractions beyond the thesis and for your steady and loving support throughout the decades of friendship. To my family: thank you for always believing in me and loving me for everything I do. And finally, my most heartfelt thanks go to my husband Vik, my love and best friend: thank you for everything.

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Towards a Poetics of Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing

Autobiography, life-writing, memoir: whichever term we use, we most likely associate it with a first-person narrative, which has always been the more common form of self-narration – so common that Paul J. Eakin called the genre a “literature of the first person” (“What Are We Reading” 124). Philippe Lejeune, whose work on autobiography is foundational to the field of life-writing, was quick to point out the existence and general “possibility” of autobiographies in the second and third person (On Autobiography; “Autobiography in the Third Person”). While autobiography has always been a genre that both polarised and attracted a vast and diverse readership (Schwalm, “Autobiography” 14), the critical engagement with life-writing in the wake of a still ongoing “memoir boom” (Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography 2) leads me to a variety of works which remove the “I” from the central focus of their narrative. While the third person was long considered the “standard” perspective in the novel and later challenged by the firstperson novel, life-writing seems to have developed in reverse order. I am especially interested in the question of how the second and third person in autobiographical writing impact the communicative situation, the role of subjectivity and relationality, the private and public self. To what extent does the use of the second and third person shape the self-portrayal and selfstylisation of the autobiographer, for example by helping the author gain some sort of “presence through absence” (with the absence of the subject being a technique to renegotiate the presence of the very same)? And to what extent does autobiography as the classical form of self-life-writing leave the scope of the individual, personal, exclusive and move towards the relational and public? This does not at all suggest that the status of a work as “autobiographical” depends on the personal pronoun or the narrative perspective used. Neither does it mean that a relational notion of autobiographical writing can only occur in second- and third-person texts. It means that the choice of narrative perspective may, as I argue, impact the rhetorical effect(iveness) of the work and the portrayal of the autobiographical self. The literariness of autobiographical writing and the question of aesthetics play a special role in the process of self-narration: “While literary autobiographers do not eschew exemplarity, they tend to privilege aesthetics; their DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374-1

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primary concern, finally, is how mind and memory make art” (Gunzenhauser 563). I argue that, especially in 21st-century autobiographical writing by celebrated, established male authors, the focus on aesthetics is not surprising but a deliberate choice to shape and shift the work’s communicative frame. What I hope to demonstrate is that this relational impetus does not eschew the author’s self-stylisation. The rhetorical and at times manipulative attempt at establishing common ground also works against the limits of life-writing, pushing the boundaries of self-narration. Which role does the use of the second and third person play in this process? The question aims at a necessary set of possibilities and forms of narrative strategies in contemporary autobiographical writing, its implied exemplarity, and the narrated life designs through the author. It seems that the use of the second and third person in autobiographical writing enables “an image of our exterior self […] that enables self-contemplation” (Folkenflik 215). An underlying and recurring point of reference in the case studies in this book is thus the interplay between distance and proximity, an effect and function of the second and third person, which plays a sustaining role in the configuration of the relation between autobiographer, text, and reader. In this book, I follow current conversations that, in today’s increased appreciation of readership, contemporary autobiographical writing in particular bears and determines an inherently ethical scope and a more communicative form of self-narration. The second and third person (as well as other features such as metaisation or visuality – aspects which I will address in the upcoming chapters) create an ironic, reflective, or emotional distance to the narration and thus constitute an oscillation between distance and proximity in autobiographical writing. Epistemological questions of memory and reliability, fact and fiction, and the particular and the general come to the fore. Embedding the book in current scholarly conversations within life-writing studies, this chapter contextualises the relevance, forms, and functions of narrative perspective and its impact on the relation between autobiographer, text, and reader. Pinpointing the core themes of the case studies in this book, the chapter focusses on questions of subjectivity, relationality, and reader-oriented life-writing. Given the striking occurrence of second- and third-person narration in autobiographical works by established male authors, the chapter comments on questions of authorial agency and traditions of gendered life-writing. Evaluating current theories and perspectives, this chapter discusses affective characteristics of the personal and the relational to outline the relevance for contemporary autobiographical writing in the second and third person. Drawing on rhetorical narratology and (relational) autobiography theory, the chapter elaborates on the forms and functions of autobiographical writing in the second and third person as well as potential effects of the narrative perspective. The book proceeds to a number of select case studies: Paul Auster’s Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013), Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013), J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (2012). The selected texts for this study stand out in their particular use of narrative

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perspective and style and their orientation towards a readership which is both critical observer and participant, voyeur and agent. To account for individual author positions, I will examine their historical and cultural environment and draw out the affective, ethical, and political concerns which are foregrounded in their works. Maintaining a focus on narrative perspective as a way of renegotiating the rhetorical, relational, and ethical function of autobiographical writing, my book contributes to contemporary conversations in auto/biography studies in that it makes a wider argument about the use of pronouns by established writers of selfnarrative: (1) My study brings together examples of contemporary second- and third-person self-narratives which negotiate male author-authority and enforce an affective and/or cognitive involvement of readers. (2) An underlying effect is the interplay of distance and proximity, which accounts both for an ambiguous reading and a consideration of formal and thematic structures of engagement and detachment. This interplay is revealed in the tensions between narrating and narrated self, individual and relational self, private and public self. (3) By drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and (relational) autobiography studies, the study aims to gain an informed understanding of the narrative strategies of the selected works. This book explores autobiographical texts by male and canonical literary figures who move away from autodiegetic narration by employing a narrative perspective that expands and transcends the scope of the first person. Emphasising their role and position in the contemporary literary landscape, I will have a closer look at the textual affordances and their un/ethical implications in the realm of the author-reader-text-relationship.

The (Dis-)Ambiguation of Autobiographical Writing: Terminology In the (still ongoing and never entirely resolved) debate about the distinction between fact and fiction over decades, it has become clear that the separation between the two “poles” does not benefit the literary engagement with autobiographical writing. One could even argue that an all too rigid categorisation of autobiographical writing as innately fictional is opposed by, as Martin Middeke writes, a “biographical desire essential to all human beings, the manifestation of an ineradicable subjectivity” (“Introduction” 5).1 Middeke thereby points towards two lines of postmodernist thought: an inherent scepticism towards self-narration, and the immense fascination with the very same. This study is neither concerned with the postmodernist claim that nonfictional life-writing is considered impossible nor with the by now widely accepted fact that autobiography and fiction cannot be categorically separated.2 In fact, I agree with Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, who state that an “autobiography […] is not a novel, and calling life writing ‘non-fiction,’ which is usually done, confuses rather than resolves the issue” (Reading Autobiography 9). It is a genre which asks for a more flexible understanding of its boundaries. Our knowledge about postmodernist thought is the ideal precondition for an emancipated engagement with self-narrative.

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The sometimes all-too sceptical attitude towards autobiographical writing is predominantly owed to the fact that generic definitions and characteristics are most often narrowed down to concepts which are not likely to “survive” a critical analysis of literary works and to the fact that generic boundaries are constantly blurred and subverted. With postmodernist thought as a driving force in the negation of the genre of autobiography – whose definition is per se selfreflexive (Schwalm, Das eigene und das fremde Leben 57) – the elusiveness of the term “autobiography” has challenged researchers and critics for a long time. Thinking of Paul de Man’s conception of autobiographical writing as “a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts” (921) (as opposed to a specific genre), it is, however, equally questionable to assume that every book with a title page follows an autobiographical function or rhetoric. According to de Man’s understanding, the subject in an autobiographical text is thus not a direct or reliable reference to reality but constructed in the narrative process (Jay 18). Traditional autobiographical writing predominantly served a confessional purpose and often emphasised a transformational force of self-writing (Jay 23), as is often associated with Saint Augustine’s Confessiones (397–398), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1772), or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811). Building on the Greek translation of the term’s constituents, Georg Misch defines autobiography as the “description (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (auto)” (5). Misch’s definition thus favours first and foremost a more literal understanding of?autobiography, namely, in its briefest version, “self-life-writing”. This approach also corresponds with Helga Schwalm’s terminological conception that autobiography, in a broader sense, “is used almost synonymously with ‘life writing’ and denotes all modes and genres of telling one’s own life” (“Autobiography” 14). In principle, life-writing is a term which has been introduced by scholars to “cover the protean forms of contemporary personal narrative, including interviews, profiles, ethnographies, case studies, diaries, Web pages, and so on” (Eakin, “Introduction” 1), often used in addition to the more traditional forms of autobiography, memoir, or confession. More suitably, Smith and Watson, who provide an insightful portrayal of the historical development of life-writing and life-writing research, define “life narrative” as “a set of shifting self-referential practices that, in engaging the past, reflect on identity in the present” (Reading Autobiography 1). They clarify that subjects write about their own lives predominantly, even if they write about themselves in the second or third person, or as a member of a community. And they write simultaneously from externalized and internal points of view, taking themselves as both subject and object, or thematizing that distinction. (5) Despite its origin in antiquity, the development of autobiography as a literary genre (and its research) roughly correlates with the emergence of the modern

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subject in the 19th century (Marcus, Autobiography 29). The beginning of the 20th century brought about “an increasing scepticism about the possibility of a cohesive self emerging through autobiographical memory. Modernist writers experimented with fragmentation, subverting chronology and splitting the subject” (Schwalm, “Autobiography” 19).3 Since the late 20th century, the increasing interest in autobiographical writing has particularly encouraged the emergence of research in the field and both thematically and stylistically experimental engagements with self-narration. New experiments and innovations raise the question as to what contemporary life-writing thus contributes to the traditional notion of autobiography, as developed by Augustine’s or Rousseau’s confessional mode of life-writing (or meditation and testimony). Apart from now already standardised categorisations such as autobiography, biography, memoir, life-writing, or self-writing, new terms for a variety of selfnarratives were designed to describe specific generic developments, such as autofiction or serial autobiography as only two of more than sixty genres of life-writing (Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 253–286). As most terms overlap or intersect, an absolute distinction between memoir, autobiography, and life-writing is an endeavour which is not only complex but, in fact, neither satisfyingly possible nor desirable (Brooker 375). It may prove more effective to consider autobiographical writing as a rhetorical principle and communicative act rather than a generic specification bound to strict characteristics. To be able to analyse and acknowledge the various forms of life-writing (to use the capacious term), the “rich and diverse history of selfreferential modes requires that we make some crucial distinctions among key terms – autobiography, memoir, life writing, life narrative – that may seem to imply the same thing” (Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 2). A most common discussion concerns the distinction between memoir and autobiography (e.g. see Rak), which “seems to have become less absolute than it was in previous centuries” (Marcus, Autobiography 7). While they are sometimes used interchangeably (e.g. by Eakin, How Our Lives 205), Laura Marcus also observes in recent times a “marked rise among authors in the use of the term ‘memoir’ or ‘memoirs’” (Autobiography 6). Smith and Watson describe memoir as “a mode of life narrative that situated the subject in a social environment, as either observer or participant” and “directs attention more toward the lives and actions of others than to the narrator” (Reading Autobiography 274). In contrast to autobiography, memoirs “tends to focus on the times in which the life is lived and the significant others of the memoirist’s world”, as “memoir writers are more concerned with making their lives meaningful in terms of the lives of others” (Buss 595). According to Marcus, memoirs “offer only an anecdotal depiction of people and events” (Auto/Biographical Discourses 3).4 Knowing that neither “autobiography” nor “life-writing” capture all elements and possibilities of self-narratives, I will use “autobiographical writing” or self-narration to provide a wider notion of autobiography without foregoing pivotal principles of self-life-writing. In its traditional use, “autobiography” has

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often been considered too narrow and has caused complicated generic distinctions. My use of the term “autobiography” is consciously juxtaposed with the term life-writing, thus stressing a broader understanding of autobiography in the sense of self-life-writing. A wider terminological understanding appears more suitable as the clear-cut differentiation between different modes of lifewriting (e.g. autobiography, memoir, autofiction, confession, autobiographical novel, bildungsroman, biography, journal, letter, diary, personal essay), as sometimes suggested by scholars, tend to be too detailed and exclusive in their generic scope. With a broad definition of autobiography, which “is not a single unitary genre or form” (Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 18), I will avoid a strict differentiation between generic terms and use “autobiographical writing” to denote a mode of writing (about) the self.

Subjectivities and Relationalities “[I]t is not unthinkable that after endless proposals for deconstructions, a desire to construct will break through” (Timmer 21; my emphasis).5 After years of postmodern playfulness, indeterminacy, and self-fragmentation, it has only been a matter of time for the contemporary literary scene to experience literary and generic developments which move to some extent beyond the postmodernist tradition and towards an increased communicative tendency. Irmtraud Huber observes a shift towards “a fiction that is no longer centrally concerned with unmasking, dissolving, subverting and unsettling, but sets out to gradually displace postmodernism’s fantastic paranoia by attempts to reconstruct, (re-)connect, communicate and engage” (24). Huber postulates “a revival of […] an authenticity that is often anchored in the subject of the author” (27) and argues for an “ultimate possibility of communication, established in intersubjective relations and based on a shared awareness of its own conventions and limitations” (28). It may thus be useful to assume a consequential reconsideration of the thematic and rhetorical scope of the genre to value the communicative and relational impetus of the autobiographical process. Exploring these ambivalences and attempts to move beyond postmodern uncertainties, I now turn to questions of genre, subjectivity, and relationality. Understanding identity as “a constant relation between the one and the many”, Lejeune suggests that “any sustained analysis of the interplay of pronouns and persons in enunciation is eventually faced with the vertiginous necessity of constructing a theory of the subject” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 30). To be able to tackle questions of the how, what, and why of narrative perspective in autobiographical writing, we need to unravel some basic concerns of subjectivity and relationality. Nick Mansfield describes subjectivity as intersubjective and inherently relational in that “our interior lives inevitably seem to involve other people, either as objects of need, desire and interest or as necessary sharers of common experience” and claims that “the self is not a separate and isolated entity, but one that

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operates at the intersection of general truths and shared principles” (3). Considering the now longstanding tradition of philosophical thought on the subject and especially poststructuralist theories of subjectivity (see e.g. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 205–206), there is an overwhelming similarity in all theories of the mid-1990s to the 21st century in that they “reject the idea of the subject as a completely self-contained being that develops in the world as an expression of its own unique essence” (Mansfield 13; Bruner, “Self-Making” 34–35). As we know, this assumption has a tremendous influence on the development of the genre of autobiographical writing and its conception as “perforce rhetorical” (Bruner, “Self-Making” 35). While, as Barry Olshen clarifies, “[i]t is the concept of self that is so dependent upon language, not the sense of self” (800), the ever-recurring and foundational problem seems to be the question of “how to use one medium – language – to represent another medium – being” (Jay 21). The idea that the self is constructed in the narrative process has been explored widely (e.g. see Ricoeur; Eakin, How Our Lives; Bruner, “Self-Making”).6 In his short but seminal essay “The Biographical Illusion” from 1986, Pierre Bourdieu vehemently rejects the common idea of life and biography as a journey and as “a coherent and finalized whole, which can and must be seen as the unitary expression of a subjective and objective ‘intention’ of a project” (210). He questions the idea of life as a “unique and self-sufficient series of successive events” (215) and assumes that this misconception leads to a biographical or rhetorical illusion. Galen Strawson, in his essay “Against Narrativity”, originally voiced his hesitation towards narrative identity as there must be people who do not perceive their lives as narrative (joined later by, among others, James Phelan, “Narrative Ethics”). Philosopher Dieter Thomä shares this perception of the incomprehensiveness of the self and states that life-writing should never claim to comprise one’s own life in its entirety (Erzähle dich selbst 25). Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Thomä claims that narration may also have an advisory effect, which “is not a conclusive instruction for action, but is based on the narration of an event, which does not exhaust the narration but offers it as a starting point” (Erzähle dich selbst 238; my translation). This thought (which reminds of Wolfgang Iser’s “gaps” and his conceptualisation of the implied reader) leads to an ethical dimension of autobiographical narration, a constructive function which involves the audience in the communicative process. This ethical perspective, as Thomä suggests, depends on methodological considerations and answers to the question of how to live, which of the resulting answers can be explored through narrative, and how to decide on the form of the narrative and its inner structure (15). According to Thomä, there are two opposing demands, as a life narrative aims at an experience of who I am, but also at a conception of what seems noteworthy or meaningful about oneself (15). Adhering to a fluidity and ambiguity of the self, Thomä suggests in a later essay that it is the “relational or reflective capacity that matters, not any definition of the self” (“Philosophy” 115).

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Interesting for the effect of pronominal distance, Thomä even claims that “[a]utobiography is a derivative from the distinctively human capacity to refer to oneself, to step aside, and to gain a fresh look at oneself” (“Philosophy” 115). This also implies a certain degree of self-estrangement but also allows for a closer look at the authors’ relation to the historical and political context and a critique of systems and structures of power (see Chapter 5 on Coetzee and Chapter 6 on Rushdie). In his introduction to The Philosophy of Autobiography, Christopher Cowley compares autobiographical writing to a philosophical endeavour in which the autobiographer first tries to understand an episode of her life, then tries to articulate it to the listener, and the listener then tries to understand that episode, within the context of her (the listener’s) broader understanding of the autobiographer’s life. (3) As this book demonstrates, these tensions become apparent in different uses of narrative perspective and formal distancing and attempts to establish a social and relational rhetoric of self-narration. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson famously hold that “relationality characterizes all autobiographical writing” (Reading Autobiography 279). To avoid accepting their perspective too readily, I emphasise that an inherent relationality in autobiographical writing does not explain, however, the role of form and narrative perspective in the process, which is where this book comes into play. I want to explicitly distinguish the autobiographical works in this book from so-called collective autobiography as a form of creating a space for self-and-other-narration, which is often referred to as “autoethnography” (see Eakin, How Our Lives, chapter 2) and which specifically problematises questions of collaborative life-writing, its ethical concerns, and the discrepancy between speaking as a member of a particular collective and speaking “for someone”. Especially for marginalised communities, the relationality in collective autobiographies is thereby a very different form of collective, which is mostly used “to describe people acting together” (Williams 60). Paul J. Eakin also writes that “all identity is relational, and that the definition of autobiography, and its history as well, must be stretched to reflect the kinds of self-writing in which relational identity is characteristically displayed” (How Our Lives 43–44). Drawing on Eakin’s assumption of an ethical responsibility and involvement of the other, we could say that selfnarration is always also other-narration. That this conception bears its pitfalls and dangers (not only but especially in narratives of trauma, witness, or loss) has been emphasised in Kay Schaffer’s and Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004) or Leigh Gilmore’s The Limits of Autobiography (2004). While Eakin’s work adheres to an inherent relationality in autobiographical writing as autoethnography,

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relationality has had a strong tradition in feminist approaches since the 1970s by e.g. Susan Stanford Friedman or Nancy K. Miller, as well as in women’s life-writing in general (Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 215–218, 278–279; Women, Autobiography, Theory; Sheetrit 6). When Susan Stanford Friedman introduced the term “relational life writing” in the 1980s, it was mainly used to contrast the individualism and authoritative agency of male life-writing (Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 278). Friedman writes that women’s life-writing portrays a “sense of shared identity with other women, an aspect of identification that exists in tension with a sense of their own uniqueness” (44). It is therefore necessary to emphasise that the developments of scholarship in relationality and the representation of relationality are entirely different to what we have witnessed regarding the European tradition of white and male authority, individuality, and autonomy. The starting point for authors is completely different as I am concentrating on four celebrated and canonised individuals who do not align with the struggles for self-representation of individuals who endure discrimination based on gender, race, or class. Sidonie Smith’s Poetics of Women’s Autobiography and Sidonie Smith’s collection Women, Autobiography, Theory are central studies to uncover the longstanding traditions of male autobiography and elaborate on the agency of female lifewriters. Many scholarly contributions such as Ariel M. Sheetrit’s A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography or Nicole Stamant’s Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging and many more African American, Latinx, Asian American, Indigenous scholars have enriched and shaped life-writing studies and have unsettled male over-representation in literary production and scholarly attention. Towards the end of the 20th century, the concept of relationality in autobiographical discourse has been re-theorised by several scholars, such as Nancy K. Miller (“The Entangled Self”), Susanna Egan, Shirley Neuman, Eakin (How Our Lives; “Introduction”), and in recent studies on relational autobiography (e.g. Rüggemeier; Sheetrit).7 Eakin claims that life-writing not only includes “the autobiography of the self but the biography and the autobiography of the other” (How Our Lives 58). He describes as the key characteristic of relational autobiographies that they “feature the decisive impact on the autobiographer of […] key other individuals, usually family members, especially parents” or, alternatively, “an entire social environment” (How Our Lives 69), and thus focusses more on actual textual others than on the dialogism between text and reader. Nancy K. Miller, however, emphasises that “[t]he reader […] is the autobiographer’s most necessary other” (“The Entangled Self” 545) and foregrounds the role of an audience in life-writing – a consideration which I find undervalued and which I will foreground in the case studies in this book. In her study Mirror Talk, Susanna Egan writes that the narration “takes the form of dialogue; it becomes interactive and (auto)biographical identification becomes reciprocal, adaptive, corrective, affirmative, as is also common in life among people who are

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close to each other” (7–8). The way I employ relationality in this book is twofold: I certainly dive into relationality as concerned with the literal other (see e.g. the interviewees in Coetzee’s Summertime or Barnes’s inclusion of fictional others in his grief memoir) but on the other hand establish what seems to me an affective-cognitive relationality which is partially aimed at an intended reception of the autobiographical self (e.g. in Paul Auster’s works and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton).

Male Selves – Male Celebrities Especially towards the end of the 20th century, life-writing by women and marginalised collectives (based on class or race) have received more and more (scholarly) attention and therefore encouraged a re-visitation of autobiographical writing as relational (Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses 219–222). Even though uses of the second and third person exist in women’s life-writing – Ilse Aichinger’s Spiegelgeschichte is one of the first secondperson autobiographical texts – it still seems historically relevant that after decades of being less visible than male authors, female life-writers are likely to have maintained the autobiographical I as a hard-won voice. At the same time, there are of course works by female writers – Mary Karr’s Cherry (2000), Laura Fraser’s An Italian Affair (2001), and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019) – which utilise the second person. Machado’s In the Dream House poses an interesting example of second-person narration as it uses the “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” style for her distanced revisitation of a physically and mentally abusive relationship. An intriguing form of memoir, the traumatic twists and tensions in In the Dream House are reflected in the use of first-person narration and a you which refers to the former self in a particularly malignant way. While these examples further undermine the dominance of the first person in life-writing, I deliberately concentrate on male, established, and even celebrated author figures to explore their strategies of discourse control as well as their attempts to either respond to claims of self-fashioning and egotism or to (rhetorically) withdraw their authorial selves from the centre of attention at a later point in their literary careers. In the long-standing tradition of male life-writing and over-valuing male lives in literature (going all the way back to Augustine), claims to universality and over-representation have played a central role for representations of the self. I find these tendencies in the works discussed in this book as well. Nevertheless, I see the contemporary turn away from the first person as an attempt by these established male authors to respond to ideals of authorship, self-promotion, and authorial agency. Autobiographical writing as a celebrated individual bears some major tensions. As “celebrity personas”, authors such as Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie are confronted with many expectations and ideals but also with the traditions of their own individual agency as authors. Celebrity

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studies in recent years have turned to the relation between life-writing and celebrity, e.g. Sandra Mayer and Julia Novak (2019). This is particularly relevant as the authors discussed in this book benefit from their visible celebrity status, their prominence and presence in the literary and cultural scene. I am aware that considerations of already prominent literary figures highlight processes of marginalisation based on gender and race over the past centuries. However, I find it striking that the writers in this book at some point in their later careers attempt to circumvent the self-centredness of the autobiographical I by introducing the second or third person and find additional aesthetic and formal ways to navigate their authorial selves in contemporary forms of autobiographical writing. The “famous life” (Mayer and Novak 150) is thereby the common denominator for my case studies. Are Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie “in need” of more scholarly attention? I think they are – precisely because of their unusual choices and autobiographical endeavours which are so much more than just self-narratives but also comment on their individual speaker positions and their attempts to share but also (forcefully) universalise experience, ethical or political convictions and thus also impose their perspectives on others. Sandra Mayer and Julia Novak’s useful overview of the contemporary state of the intersections between life-writing and celebrity studies holds that the two disciplines share some common concerns, including “notions of authenticity and intimacy; public and private selves; myth-making and revelation; cultural memory and identity politics” (150). Most of these contrasts feature, in one way or the other, in the case studies of this book. I therefore employ these general insights from celebrity studies to understand the tensions Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie encounter in their autobiographical endeavours as celebrated literary figures. What lies at the heart of celebrity studies is also “the shaping of an individual’s public image through socio-political and cultural frameworks, media industries, and ideological agendas” (Mayer and Novak 151). In the close readings I argue that, while Julian Barnes and J.M. Coetzee engage in a withdrawal of the authoritative self in their autobiographical writings, Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie navigate their literary and political personas more forcefully. Closely linked to celebrity studies (which up to this point still dominantly engage more with biography than autobiography) are persona studies – with persona being “a strategic identity, a form of negotiation of the individual in their foray into a collective world of the social” (Marshall and Henderson 1). This resonates with most of the authors in this study in that they too employ strategies for their self-narratives which aim for a specific author image. This strategic take on (public) personas is supported by John Sturrock, who claims that the “autobiographer’s wish is to single himself out by the writing of a book, to construct in prose an attractive identity for himself” (25). As life-writing is part of a long-standing tradition of authorial self-stylisation, self-centredness, and self-promotion, I

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argue that these tensions are embedded in the autobiographical narratives I selected for this book. The ambivalences of the second and third person allow these writers to subvert expectations and narrate or address those issues for which the autobiographical I would be too authoritative, or which would emphasise self-centredness. A prominent French example of autobiographical writing is Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008; Les Années in the original), which does not employ the first-person singular, only the more general “one”, the firstperson plural “we”, and the third person to account for a form of collective autobiography: “There is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’, as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before” (Ernaux 225).8 Susan Lanser’s work on women writers and communal narration comes to mind immediately as a study which discusses gender, narrative voice, and agency. Resonating with the relational scope of autoethnography, Ernaux’s example shows the altogether different impetus of narrative perspective in collective autobiography in contrast to – as this book aims to show – attempts by canonised writers to come to navigate their position in the cultural and political scene. Accordingly, the case studies in this book have more to do with narrative strategies by author figures who are not particularly associated with relational writing or who have mainly used relationality to engage with others (e.g. Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude). Trying to make sense of contemporary attempts to represent the male self and simultaneously circumvent a straightforward self-stylisation, I explore how the authors in this study – authors who we consider canonised and established – seem to maintain a focus on the self while at the same time tend to reach for formal ploys to construct exemplarity, to politicise self- and authorhood, and invoke shareable experience or concerns. Furthermore, I emphasise the rhetorical nature of self-writing and highlight the performative act of the genre, which becomes even more valuable when discussing the aesthetic choices made by authors who are predominantly known for their literary oeuvre. Performativity in autobiography criticism is most often associated with Judith Butler’s concept of performativity in gender studies.9 Their notion of socially constructed gender and the discursive negotiations of normativity and difference ties in with the negation of universal and fixed subjectivity in autobiographical writing. As Smith and Watson note, Butler understands identity as “enacted daily through socially enforced norms that surround us” (Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 57–58). Butler writes in Giving an Account of Oneself – though not exclusively related to autobiography – that “every accounting takes place within a scene of address” (50) and that the “deployment of language that seeks to act upon the other” (51) is consequently both relational and rhetorical. In contrast to Ricoeur and Bruner, Butler suggests that the self is unable to know itself and calls this conflict the “opacity in our understanding of ourselves” (21).10 In line with Emmanuel Levinas’s

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encounter of the Other, Butler considers the resulting ethical implication of giving an account of the self in that “we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, […] when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human” (136). Connected to Butler’s understanding of relationality is Mikhail Bakhtin’s consideration of language as dialogic and polyphonic (see The Dialogic Imagination). Again, drawing on Levinas’s understanding of the self and the other (a relational conception), Bakhtin’s theory of language as dialogism explores the discursive and social formation of identity. The possibility of a multiplicity of voices which exist apart from an authorial voice introduces a language-based relationality which complements Butler’s embodied relationality.11 I am both considering relationality for dialogic encounters (as for example in Paul Auster’s or Julian Barnes’s dialogic you or J.M. Coetzee’s polyphonic encounters) as well as an “embodied” relationality which is concerned with necessary others and reader-oriented appellations to responsibility as in Salman Rushdie’s text. 21st-century autobiographical writing is linked to an urge to reinvent the notion of subjectivity and “to create a discursive form that itself clearly registers, indeed, embodies, a ‘new knowledge’ of the subject” (Jay 180) while challenging the boundaries and theoretical conceptions of the 20th century. I argue that some authors use the aesthetic potential of the genre to construct subjectivity but also address the tensions of the relational impetus of autobiographical writing. While deconstructionists and poststructuralists such as Foucault, Barthes, de Man, and Derrida have particularly challenged the genre of autobiographical writing by “displacing the self as agent and referent of autobiography” (T. Smith 28), Smith and Watson observe a newfound agency of the subject: “How is this ‘writing back,’ this changing of the terms of one’s representation, a strategy for gaining agency? How might they gain agency through the very choice of life writing practices?” (Reading Autobiography 235). In addition, they state that agency “can also derive from acknowledging the limits of knowing ourselves” (236), thus accepting the possible un-representability of the self. Bruner argues that the deviations from certain patterns in narration – any type of genre-bending writing, that is – are always connected to an intention: “The function of the story is to find an intentional state that mitigates or at least makes comprehensible a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern. It is this achievement that gives a story verisimilitude” (Acts of Meaning 49–50). All in all, as the genre of autobiography itself is a stabilisation of subjectivity, it is foremost a genre of (gaining) agency. The distinctive roles of the male writers in this book as certainly prestigious and to a great extent privileged public figures impact their choice of narrative form as much as structural, discursive, or markeddriven factors. Despite attempts to generalise experience, the case studies also express a certain specificity of an autobiographical experience. This book is informed by the consideration of how this authorial and autobiographical agency is related to formal-aesthetic choices such as narrative

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perspective, as “[a]utobiographies effectively reveal agency or the desire for agency because they show how meanings are created for people, how people create meanings for themselves, and how people engage the world around them” (T. Smith 28). Thomas Smith explains that (traditional) autobiographical writing can mirror the writer’s agency “[b]ecause it makes lived experience accessible and seems relatively unmediated by literary concerns” and is thus able to “project a sense of a writer’s agency outside the text more directly than other forms of literature” (28). Observing a tendency towards a relational autobiographical practice, Alex Zwerdling also holds “that the memoir can record shared experience” (6). In fact, thematising the use of personal pronouns, Zwerdling observes a trend in memoirs to move away from the solipsistic and individualistic representation of experience – not just through a change of pronouns as such, but also through a transferability of experience presented by “an I [which] was speaking for an us” (6). Zwerdling highlights that these memoirs try to find a “strategy to combat the intrinsic dangers of the form: the imperial dominance of the ‘I,’ the idiosyncrasy of individual experience, the narrowness of focus, all threatening to lead us down a solitary path not wide enough for two” (6). This rhetorical and aesthetic gesture can also be observed in Arnaud Schmitt’s plea for a focus on the form and function of self-narration as a starting point for a more rhetorical notion of autobiographical writing – as “self-narration puts texts back in their context” (“Making the Case” 334). Schmitt concludes his argument by stating that, [a]t its best, self-narration can be a post-postmodern form of personal expression based on the reader’s decision to give a text the benefit of the doubt and open a dialogic interaction with a potentially empirical person through literary text. (“Making the Case” 335) With this “benefit of the doubt”, a reference to reality is no longer denied per se but encourages an affective text-world relation.

Affordance, Affect, and Rhetorical Narratives In his phenomenological study of autobiographical writing, Arnaud Schmitt argues that the autobiographical pact is not as done with as some might think and even upholds the critical distance between autobiographer and reader as “a reasonable reader of autobiography knows what to expect and is conscious that the author is only presenting a facet of her personality, one adapted to this narrative apparatus” (Phenomenology 67). While Schmitt at times leans towards manifesting how autobiographical texts are supposed to be read, he foregrounds the theoretical relationality of autobiographical writing, which, “as collaborative work and shared reenactment, that is to say at its very best, can be the resonance of another life” (Phenomenology

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130). In his foundational work Keywords, Raymond Williams holds that “communication” considers both the act of communicating (as in “telling”) and a shared activity, and even a sense of “mak[ing] common to many” (63). The expression “common” (and, accordingly, “commonality”) “can be used to affirm something shared or to describe something ordinary” (61) and may suitably express the shared qualities in the autobiographical works discussed in this book and attempts to universalise and transfer personal experience. The communicative and relational impetus re-values the reader in a genre which is per definition concerned with self-life-writing and favours an interaction between autobiographer, text, and reader. In the preface to Metaphors of Self, James Olney states that autobiography attracts “readers who are looking for an order and meaning in life that is not always to be found in experience itself” and that it “engages our interest and […] brings an increased awareness, through an understanding of another life in another time and place, of the nature of our own selves and our share in the human condition”. While I am aware of debates on the “compatibility” of rhetorical narratology and life-writing (see Paul J. Eakin’s engagement with James Phelan’s work in Eakin’s Writing Life Writing), I try to employ basic concerns in these approaches to operationalise rhetorical principles for the communicative setting of autobiographical texts. While rhetorical approaches have their roots in Aristotelian philosophy, they have moved from more generous conceptualisations (e.g. Wayne C. Booth) to more nuanced engagements with the communicative act and the way texts and textual characteristics may affect or impact readers. The ambivalence of the second and third person, as will be explored later, feeds into the communicative notion of narrative as it deliberately unsettles a straightforward reading in autobiographical writing. To account for the different forms of rhetorical narrative in my book, I draw on James Phelan’s concepts of rhetorical narrative theory to illuminate the ethical and processual nature of author-text-reader interaction. In major studies such as Narrative as Rhetoric (1996), Experiencing Fiction (2007), and Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017), Phelan has contributed profoundly to rhetorical narratology and defines narrative as “a multi-dimensional (aesthetic, emotive, ideational, ethical, political) invitation to a reader who, in turn, seeks to do justice to the complexity of the invitation and then responds” (Narrative as Rhetoric xi). As I suggest in my theorisation of second- and third-person autobiographical writing, a “potential efficacy of the cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of experiencing narrative” (Somebody Telling 259) may prove particularly operationalisable. The main reason for invoking Phelan’s rhetorical narratology here concerns what amounts to a reconciliation of text and world, in that “rhetorical poetics wants to break down the border between reading and living” (Somebody Telling 259).12 This breaking (or blurring) of borders resonates with the generic characteristic of autobiographical writing which is (seemingly) self-centred and authoritative.

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Phelan holds that “narrative is ultimately not a structure but an action, a teller using resources of narrative to achieve a purpose in relation to an audience” (Somebody Telling x). My readings of case studies in this book predominantly focus on a narratologically informed approach, as it ensures that the how of autobiographical narratives enables closer insights into the autobiographical selves in relation to others and an affective, cognitive, ethical, and/or political involvement of readers. The affordances (my starting point are, of course, pronouns) of the autobiographical text, as I argue in my readings in this book, create a more social and relational rhetoric. I argue that the rhetoric of autobiographical writing is decidedly communicative (with all its positive and negative implications) and is complicated by the particular uses of narrative perspective and other decisive factors such as embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics, and politics. One key principle of Phelan’s rhetorical paradigm (I am not invoking all of them here) is that “narrative is itself an event – more specifically, a multidimensional purposive communication from a teller to an audience” (Somebody Telling 5).13 The close readings in this book specifically cater to this “event” in that they take into account the, as Phelan calls it, “feedback loop among authorial agency, textual phenomena (including intertextual relations), and reader response” (6). Being informed by rhetorical narratology, my approach follows Phelan in that it is “interested not in the author’s private intentions but rather in his or her public, textualized intentions, and that interest entails locating authorial agency in the implied rather than the actual author” (Somebody Telling 204). I regard these considerations of rhetorical narrative as beneficial for analysing the characteristics of autobiographical writing and as preconditions for the engagement with the textual cues of autobiographical narratives in the second and third person. Before I move on to raise some questions about the affective potential of narrative, I invoke Hanna Meretoja’s useful conceptualisation of the Ethics of Storytelling, as they point to the problematics of and potential limitations to author-text-reader relations in narrative. While narratives (especially in the second person) may enable self-reflection, a display of shareable experience, and a more ethical understanding of the self in relation to others, they may also be too authoritative and patronising, or raise and cement stereotypes (e.g. based on gender, race, or class), or in general problematise the narrative’s politics of inclusion and exclusion: I suggest that in evaluating and analyzing narratives in ethical terms, it is helpful to distinguish, on a differentiating continuum, between subsumptive narrative practices that function appropriatively and reinforce cultural stereotypes by subsuming singular experiences under culturally dominant narrative scripts and non-subsumptive narrative practices that challenge such categories of appropriation and follow the logic of dialogue and exploration. (Meretoja 112)

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Furthermore, Paul J. Eakin holds that some autobiographers “are criticized not only for not telling the truth – personal and historical – but also for telling too much truth” (“Introduction” 3). In his introduction to The Ethics of Life Writing, Eakin sketches the implications of an ethics of life-writing, the line between one’s own and another’s life and about the ethics of transgression (as is illustrated, for example, in J.M. Coetzee’s metaautobiographical memoir Summertime). Keeping in mind these potentially problematic implications of storytelling, I will make sure to cater to the ambivalence and dangers of relational space. I will now briefly invoke current debates on some affective tendencies in autobiographical writing: Alison Gibbons argues that “while the postmodernist sense of subjectivity (as fragmented, socially constructed and textually fabricated) persists, it does so alongside a renewed desire to recognise personal feelings and interpersonal connections” (130). I am working with a concept of subjectivity that is unfixed, socially constructed and inherently relational. While autobiographical writing has been a major concern in postmodernist theory, the genre ended up being caught in the fragmentation of the self and in the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction (see Gilmore, “The Mark of Autobiography”; Gudmundsdóttir; Saunders). It seems to me that the general tendency towards more affective and communicative writing shapes contemporary life-writing. As Gibbons points out, Brinkema understands affect as “a post-poststructuralist or antipoststructuralist response to perceived omissions in poststructuralism” (Brinkema xi). Gibbons, elaborating on the concept of metamodernism in life-writing, writes that “reading life writing as a major form of postmodern individualism prioritises the writing subject at the expense of readers” (117). She continues to state that “readers want to be told how they should feel about an event – ethically, socially, politically – in place of authentically feeling” (117) – a central, problematic concern which reappears throughout the readings in this book with authors’ attempts to shape the reading and understanding of a text and to foreground the tensions between the personal and the general. Gibbons further regards identity as social and suggests that it “involves ongoing emotional and cognitive effort” (120). This ties in with my reconsiderations of narratives which complicate straightforward selfrepresentation and instead engage their readers in a process of affective and cognitive involvement. While Gibbons proclaims a “revival of affect” after a “postmodern waning of affect” (120), the general idea of rethinking of subjectivity, affect, and relationality may inform a more practicable approach to analysing literature and life-writing and to situating its value in a communicative frame of self-narration. Narrative perspective as it is discussed in this book necessarily implies a certain moment of rhetorical instrumentalisation and stylisation. This is where the question of ethics and the potentially unethical impetus of universalising or generalising experience comes into play. While a rhetorical approach to narrative perspective in self-narration affords a relationality

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between author, text, and reader that encourages proximity, intimacy, and identification, the opposite effects – exclusion and alienation through dominant or prescriptive generalisations – are inscribed as well. The poetics and politics of second- and third-person narration and the resulting tensions are displayed in relation to and within the thematic scopes of case studies: by a focus on the body (Paul Auster), visuality and intermediality (Paul Auster), love, loss, and grief (Julian Barnes), truth(fulness) and ethics (J.M. Coetzee), and the politics and power of literature (Salman Rushdie). The communicative function of the text seems more important than the postmodernist poetics and features the text may (still) offer. The implicit expression of distance and proximity on the formal-aesthetic level is predominantly established through the second and third person, but also through metanarration, justifications, and rectifications, or the thematisation of self-reflexivity.

Contesting the Autobiographical Pact Life-writing research has always been traversed by references to Philippe Lejeune’s foundational works on autobiographical theory. However, his initial perception and narrow reading of autobiography as a truthful and comprehensive narration of a life story in retrospective (On Autobiography 4) is prone to be contested when it comes to more “experimental” autobiographical forms that challenge the genre definition Lejeune postulates. In traditional autobiographies, the identity of author, narrator, and protagonist is commonly established through first-person – autodiegetic – narration, even though, as Lejeune generally registers, an author “cannot be reduced to any of his texts in particular” (On Autobiography 11). Philosopher Dieter Thomä’s equivalent distinctions are subsumed by the term “autobiographical triad” (“Subjectivity” 403; Erzähle dich selbst 25–26). This triad also includes the narrator or author of a story, the protagonist, and the actual person. Although all these instances seem to relate to one person, the identity of those three must be precarious, and can only represent different alter egos (Thomä, Erzähle dich selbst 26). In both Lejeune’s and Thomä’s cases, the use of the second and third person in autobiography must challenge and subvert this traditional perception of autobiographical writing and the unity of author, narrator, and protagonist both formally and rhetorically. Lejeune considers autobiography, in its most traditional sense, a “[r]etrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (On Autobiography 4). His concept of the autobiographical pact, the pacte autobiographique (1975), suggests that the identity of narrator, protagonist and author is predominantly indicated by the name that is written on the book cover – a precondition that supposedly establishes a contract between the author and the reader, who seems to be ensured that the identity of the author is mirrored by protagonist and narrator (Lejeune, On Autobiography 5). Lejeune furthermore claims that “biography and

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autobiography are referential texts: exactly like scientific or historical discourse, they claim to provide information about a ‘reality’ exterior to the text and so to submit to a test of verification” (On Autobiography 22). The idealised form of autobiographical theory has been re-quoted and contested for many years.14 However, autobiography nowadays challenges Lejeune’s framework of principles. In fact, the theorist himself has noticed the limitations of his approach. In a commentary essay on his original piece “The Autobiographical Pact”, Lejeune admits: “I apparently overvaluated the contract and underestimated (1) the very contents of the text (a biographical narrative, recapitulating a life), (2) the narrative techniques (in particular the play of voice and focalization), and (3) the style” (On Autobiography 127). These aspects will be incorporated in my readings. In his reconsideration of a definition of autobiography, Philippe Lejeune notes that the communication between author and reader is complicated and depends on multiple aspects, as there can be a shifting between the initial intention and that which the reader will finally attribute to him, either because the author misunderstands the effects induced by the mode of presentation that he has chosen, or because between him and the reader there exist other postures. (On Autobiography 126) The principles which Lejeune admits having underestimated are in fact indispensable for an analysis of autobiographical works in the second and third person. The readings in this book thus decidedly adhere to a wider principle of autobiographical writing and its characteristics, which is, in a way, also inherent in Lejeune’s later reconsideration of his approach to autobiography and which complicates the interrelation between author, narrator, and protagonist. Point of view or narrative perspective is both an essential feature of a narrative text and a crucial and complex choice on the part of the writer. This choice not only affects the narrative in terms of its tone or style but also shapes the triangular relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. The relevance of context and the social rhetorical function (i.e. purpose) of an autobiographical text informs the analysis of the narrative style and technique and its effects on the communicative situation in autobiographical writing. I will now relate the previous considerations and questions of subjectivity and relationality to the theoretical implications of second- and third-person autobiographical writing, which are often considered a rather unusual phenomenon (especially the second person). This makes the texts selected for this study particularly noteworthy examples of innovative contemporary life-writing and (at least in its literal sense) disqualifies Eakin’s diction that autobiography is a “literature of the first person” (Eakin, “What Are We Reading” 124). The use of personal pronouns and

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their communicative function are linked to an increased consideration of the context of autobiographical writing as a mode of self-narration. While the “simultaneous double reference of first-person autobiographical discourse to the present and the past masks the disruptions of identity produced by passing time and memory’s limitations” (Eakin, How Our Lives 93), the use of the second and third person afford to subvert this masquerade. The texts selected for this book predominantly adhere to one narrative perspective (except for Levels of Life, see Chapter 4, and its mix of first- and second-person narration). Marking such “disruptions of identity”, changes of pronoun seem to emphasise self-reflexivity in self-narration.15 Lejeune considers these changes of pronouns as “sophisticated games, by means of which modern autobiographers express identity problems” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 27). Autobiographical texts which work with pronominal changes reflect the multiplicity and fluidity of selves and participate in metaautobiographical strategies (see Struth).16 According to Patrick Madden, we are living in an age of the “new memoir” with a tendency to subvert itself, to suggest ways of reading that calls into question its own validity, or, at the very least, the validity commonly afforded the written accounts people have long been offering as representative and recreative of their lives. (229) Often, this subversion is accompanied by the development of metaforms. These two communicative levels are also at work in autobiographical writing. Janine Hauthal regards metaisation as a catalyst for genre development and innovation and defines it as “a transgeneric and transmedial type of selfreference. It occurs when a semiotic system reflects its own artifactuality and/or mediality, its inventedness and/or constructedness” (82). The selected texts in this book certainly entail some of these metaautobiographical challenges, not least of all due to their use of second- and third-person pronouns. The accentuation of a text-world relation is central as elements of metaisation most often take place in the actual reception of a text, in which the reader decodes textual cues of metageneric commentary. Smith and Watson claim that self-referential writing is an intersubjective process that occurs within a dialogic exchange between writer and reader/viewer rather than as a story to be proved or falsified, the emphasis of reading shifts from assessing and verifying knowledge to observing processes of communicative exchange and understanding. (16–17) They continue by stating that this very intersubjective process is linked to an intersubjective truth, a “benefit of a doubt”, which is the basis for an

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intersubjective agreement and the author-reader-text-relationship: “If indeed intersubjective truth, always tentative and provisional, emerges in autobiographical acts, its nurturance is a project requiring the care and active engagement of both readers and writers” (Smith and Watson 18). In their introduction to the compilation Pronouns in Literature (2018), Alison Gibbons and Andrea Macrae point towards the relevance of pronouns as a research desideratum in literary studies and state that “pronoun use is a fundamental part of the construction and manipulation of narratorial or poetic voices” and that pronouns “are used to delineate a narrator’s subject position in relation to objects/others. In effect, the pronoun simultaneously determines, designates, identifies, refers to and (re-) affirms a particular narratorial role and perceptual locus” (2).17 In autobiographical writing, this negotiation of the narratorial role is decisive for the text’s relationality and the positioning of the reader, as “pronouns are a key part of generating rhetorical structures of positioning, interaction and address within and across the diegetic and extradiegetic levels of narrative […] or different text-worlds” (Gibbons and Macrae 2). Gibbons and Macrae emphasise the “focalising function” of pronouns through which the reader may be led to identify with, or in other ways relate to, that position. Pronouns can therefore affect readers’ empathetic, emotional and ideological relations with and responses to narratorial, poetic and other speaking voices and characters in literature. (2–3) In life-writing, reader involvement has not always been of great concern, but both the narratological affordances and the communicative impetus of autobiographical texts play a decisive role for the autobiographical endeavour. As authors make use of the repertoire of narrative perspective, they seem to seize the possibilities and benefits of the genre to re-negotiate, communicate, and control self-representation. The deviation from the first-person pronoun is of course not entirely new to the field of life-writing. Especially in the second half of the 20th century, writers have played with the effect of narrative perspective in their self-narration and self-construction. The 20th century has offered multiple examples of autobiographical writing from another character’s perspective that unsettle the relationship between distance and proximity in a modernist fashion such as Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or other fictional autobiographies such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster. Lejeune holds “that when an autobiographer speaks to us about himself in the third person, or talks to himself about himself in the second person, he is certainly using a figure, so far as standard usage is concerned, but that this figure initiates a return to a fundamental situation, tolerable only if read as

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being figured” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 30). The deviation from the first person as an attempt to use oneself as a figure is not a discovery of postmodernist writing but also a result of modernist selfalienation and even has its roots in early problematisations of autobiographical naivety, models of pietistic self-awareness and a literary engagement with sensitivity, self-exploration, or introspection. The turn to the self in philosophy may explain why self-narration has become a dominant mode of writing during the 20th century, and probably continues to be considered as such in the 21st century. In this book, I focus on those works which seem to shed new light on both the possibilities of approaching the self and on the relevance of this particular form of writing for the self-stylisation and self-portrayal of male literary (celebrity) figures whose works are known for their postmodernist features and who employ their autobiographical narratives to – perhaps – overcome an increasing loss or lack of credibility or more critical views on their standing in the literary world.

The Second Person in Autobiographical Writing Wayne C. Booth’s famous diction that “[e]fforts to use the second person have never been very successful” (150) does not explain the recurring engagement of authors, readers, and scholars with this phenomenon and the significant increase in second-person texts over the past decades (Keen, Narrative Form 47). While second-person narration is not the first thing to come to mind when thinking of autobiographical texts, these autobiographical endeavours exist and engage with major questions of subjectivity and relationality and foreground humanist and ethical concerns. By pronouncing the gap between past and present I, between narrating and experiencing I, the use of the second person emphasises the difference and distance between the very same. Distance, dialogue, and a suggested universalisation and reader engagement are recurrent considerations in the analysis of second-person autobiographical writing. Tracing essential developments in the scholarship on second-person narration, I aim to pinpoint its relation to and implications for autobiographical narration but will mostly refrain from recounting existing elaborate models which predominantly describe the linguistic dimensions of you.18 While uses of second-person narration or occasional you-address have of course occurred long before, second-person narration has become much more prominent since the publication of Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957) and Georges Perec’s Un homme qui dort (1967), which are often referred to as early examples of (fictional) second-person narration (although Ilse Aichinger’s Spiegelgeschichte is from 1949). Since then, the second person has been used in novels such as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help (1985), Charles Stross’s Rule 34 (2011), Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (2021), or pop

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cultural media such as film, TV, or video games. As a phenomenon which has become more common in the late 20th century, second-person narration has not only been used in the novel but in contemporary life-writing as well. Examples of (consistent or partial uses of) the second person in autobiographical writing include George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1936), Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (1976), Christine Angot’s Sujet Angot (1998), Mary Karr’s Cherry (2000), Laura Fraser’s An Italian Affair (2001), Neil Patrick Harris’s Choose Your Own Autobiography (2014), Heike Geißler’s Saisonarbeit (2014),20 Rob Roberge’s Liar (2016), or Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019). The latter two works can be considered trauma narratives of drug abuse and of a physically and mentally abusive lesbian relationship, respectively. Systematic scholarly research on second-person narration has predominantly started in the early 1990s, with Monika Fludernik, Brian Richardson (“Poetics and Politics”), Uri Margolin, and Irene Kacandes as some of the most influential forerunners. Since then, many scholars have identified the second person as an ambiguous and complex phenomenon (e.g. Morrissette, Margolin, Hantzis, Kacandes, Herman, Richardson, Fludernik, Sorlin, Iliopoulou). As early as 1965, Bruce Morrissette highlights the formal and rhetorical relevance of narrative perspective in that it “determines to a great extent the receptive stance and esthetic involvement of the reader” (1). Noting that in early texts the second person was widely used for generalisation (i.e. one), Morrissette also holds that the present tense is common in you-narratives, “thus further generalizing the action into something which the reader not only might have done, but might conceivably do” (3). In her recent work on we-narratives (2017; 2020), Natalya Bekhta investigates forms of collective storytelling (as multiple first-person narrators), and engages with the affordances, limits, and ethics of their establishment of communal narratives. While I distinguish between younarratives and we-narratives, both forms render ambivalent readings. Although the second person functions differently in that it hovers between first and third person, the main problematics of inclusion and exclusion persist. In her early contributions to second-person criticism, Monika Fludernik contrasts the inherently personal perspective of the first person with the use of a more distanced second and third person. She claims that with the first person “the narrative is tied down with a personal viewpoint, frame of knowledge, physical manifestation within a verisimilar societal environment” and may thus be “much more restrictive, a marked option” (“SecondPerson Narrative as a Test Case” 467). Following Fludernik, the first person, be it singular or plural, has one distinguishing trait: a personal perspective which emphasises (or seeks to emphasise) the authority of the narrator and is thus both more definitive and authoritative in its rhetorical function. Mieke Bal states that “‘you’ is simply an ‘I’ in disguise, a ‘first person’ narrator talking to himself” (29). In fact, if we consider the function of 19

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narrative itself, Bal seems to have a point when stating that “only when speech is addressed to a second person can language fulfil its mission to communicate” (Bal 30). She demands that we “take seriously what the second person is: to be, to act out, the essence of language” (Bal 30) and even goes so far as to claim that “second-person narrators are not only logically impossible but also not manageable for a reader” (Bal 30–31). While scholars have provided insightful and systematic approaches to the use of the second-person perspective, the experimentality of this narrative situation seems to have been a major concern, much more so than an elaboration of its relational value and communicative function. In contrast to Brian Richardson and other scholars who describe second-person narrative as an unnatural narrative (Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology; Richardson, Unnatural Voices; Unnatural Narrative; Alber et al., A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative), or even as “extreme narration” (Richardson, Unnatural Voices), I will focus on the rhetorical implications of the narrative perspective in the context of autobiographical writing. Drawing on and extending Gérard Genette’s and Franz K. Stanzel’s typologies, Fludernik introduces the categories “homocommunicative” and “heterocommunicative” to determine the existence of a “link […] between the communicative level and the story level of the fiction” (“Second Person Fiction” 224). Fludernik assumes that the function of the second person is always a combination of the reference to the protagonist and the address function (“Second Person Fiction” 218; see Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric 137) and values the use of the pronoun you to create empathy on the part of the reader (“Second Person Fiction” 239).21 Brian Richardson, who defines second-person narrative as “any narration that designates its protagonist by a second-person pronoun” (“The Poetics and Politics” 311) differentiates between standard (i.e. you as protagonist), hypothetical or subjunctive (i.e. instructional uses of you), and autotelic forms of second-person narration (i.e. actual reader address) (Unnatural Voices 19–35). The “standard” form is thereby the most common one (while the other forms rather focus on instances of apostrophic and imperative you).22 Instead of finding a specific categorisation for the selected texts in this study, which oscillate and combine the different forms rather than adhere to one function, I will thus mainly consider the double address function of the second person and especially David Herman’s useful consideration of doubly deictic you for my analyses. Herman calls the paradoxical situation of being simultaneously both addressee and observer a form of doubly deictic you (“Textual ‘You’”) – to grasp the ambivalence and simultaneity of addressing the narrated authorial self and being addressed as narrated self and thus introduces, in his model of five functions of you, more of a continuum than distinct categories.23 Sandrine Sorlin works similarly, her continuum of different uses of you is an elaborate model to cover the personal and the general as well as ethical dimensions of the second-person pronoun (14–19). Her focus is also the pronoun’s hovering “between the first and third person in the pronominal paradigm” (9). Also, I

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agree with Sorlin’s “contention that the reader can potentially feel addressed in all cases of ‘you’ mentioned in the model” (21). While theorists have provided wide-ranging models to capture the various functions and effects of second-person pronouns, Sorlin holds that what most models have in common (e.g. Fludernik, DelConte) is their neglect of the author-reader relationship in the communicative situation (11).24 Suzanne Keen, who emphasises the two-sidedness of the effect of personal pronouns on reader reception in second-person narration (“Theory of Narrative Empathy” 225), defends the rhetorical and communicative function of the second person and holds “that second-person narration, though uncommon, is not simply the product of postmodern experimentation” (Narrative Form 48). In her brief account on second-person narration, Keen holds that the second person conflates the protagonist called “you” with the narratee, or even with the real reader, though the more specific information about the thoughts, actions, and speech of the protagonist accumulates, the less likely these features are to be confused with the reader’s. (Narrative Form 47)25 What is especially noteworthy in Keen’s summary is the clarification that readers “still possess the power to dissent or to cease reading” (Narrative Form 48). As a result, the second-person perspective “generates an alternating pattern of identification and displacement” (Hantzis iv). While secondperson narration “can function as a device inviting identification” (Keen, Narrative Form 48) and scholars often “emphasize the blurring of boundaries between protagonist and reader invited by the use of ‘you […]’” (47–48), I would agree with Keen that, at least after perhaps a minor irritation at the beginning of reading, it is unlikely “that readers are ever confused, though they may be entertained or enjoined to sympathize, by the technique” (Narrative Form 48). Readers may of course attempt to adjust the narrative situation, which conveys a “narratee-related dissonance, unless the reader simply converts the ‘you’ mentally into the third person ‘he’ or ‘she’, as can be done nearly automatically when reading an extended ‘you’ narration” (Keen, Narrative Form 48). Jarmila Mildorf’s literary-linguistic approach differentiates between aesthetic-reflexive involvement (i.e. intellectual or cognitive) and affective-emotional involvement (i.e. empathic) (148).26 I will draw on these two basic types of communicative and immersive involvement of the reader (146) as they emphasise the undisputed relevance of the communicative (as relational) function of autobiographical writing as well as the ambivalence of the second person and its potentially immersive effect. Many second-person texts are written in present tense (Richardson, Unnatural Voices 20), which emphasises the opposition between past and present self in the narrative. Brian Richardson regards the second person as “a playful form, original, transgressive, and illuminating, that is always

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conscious of its unusual won status and often disguises itself, playing on the boundaries of other narrative voices” (Unnatural Voices 23). The second person can of course be combined with other tenses, as Suzanne Keen holds, but the use of the present tense allows for an “imitation of what is sometimes called ‘guidebook imperative’” (Narrative Form 49). An imperative function of you, especially in the present tense “foregrounds the act of invention and illustrates how telling generates the story in the first place, rather than representing and reproducing in narrative shape a sequence of events that is prior to this act of linguistic creation” (Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology 262). In addition, the pronoun you has a generalising function in the sense of one, which, as Wales holds, is still “coloured by [the speaker’s] subjective attitudes and experiences” (78) and thus implies an inherent self-centredness. This generalising you (cf. on in French, as in Ernaux’s The Years) demonstrates an additional attempt to universalise (see Chapter 4 on Barnes’s Levels of Life). Identification, which may be encouraged by a generalising you and additional markers (e.g. present tense), depends on the degree of?universality the communicative situation establishes. This (intended) identification may be restricted accordingly, as Phelan suggests: [T]he fuller the characterization of the you, the more aware actual readers will be of their differences from that you, and thus the more fully they will move into the observer role—and the less likely that this role will overlap with the addressee position. (Narrative as Rhetoric 137) Phelan continues to state that “second-person narration almost always retains the potential to pull the actual reader back into the addressee role” (Narrative as Rhetoric 138). What seems crucial to note is, however, that the address function of the you can both evoke forms of involvement and forms of detachment depending on the differences regarding the background and experience of the actual reader (i.e. the more information we get on e.g. gender, race, class) and, as a universalising gesture, also raises ethical concerns. Now, how may the second-person perspective impact autobiographical writing? Smith and Watson’s definition of second-person autobiography as a text with a “subject talking to her- or himself” (Reading Autobiography 257) seems too simplified (although of course correct) as it neglects the reader as addressee in the process. As for autobiography in the second person, both Gérard Genette and Philippe Lejeune have provided insightful contributions. Lejeune for example draws a necessary line between the addressing subject and the subject being addressed and thus highlights the distance of narrator and narratee in a dialogic situation (On Autobiography 7) – despite his hesitancy towards calling second-person autobiography a genre. In his article on third-person autobiography, he hints at “the double

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nature of the receiver” and proclaims that the second person “offer[s] this enunciation as a spectacle to the auditor or reader, who is present at a discourse destined for him, even it if is no longer addressed to him” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 31). When discussing the distancing effect of the second person, the concept of the “Other” comes to mind. Carrol Clarkson has drawn this connection in an essay, in which she points out that the second person is particularly useful in autobiographical writing as it most convincingly covers Levinas’s conception of the “Other” (“Embodying ‘You’”). Although Levinas’s “Other” is most readily referred to the third person,27 Clarkson has a valid point when she emphasises that the communicative potential of the second person is, to an extent, more logical than of the third person. Regarding reader address, Lejeune claims further: [I]f I talk to myself while saying to myself “you,” at the same time I display this unfolded enunciation to a third party, the eventual listener or reader. The latter takes part in a discourse intended for him, even if he himself is no longer addressed. Enunciation is dramatized; it can only be unfolded in this way because imaginary footlights guarantee its unity and its relationship to its ultimate addressee. (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 34) Lejeune acknowledges the “theatricalized” enunciation (Lejeune “Autobiography in the Third Person” 31) as part of the dialogic situation and emphasises a disruption of the relationship between addressee and narratee. Gérard Genette, in his seminal work Narrative Discourse Revisited, also comments on Lejeune’s definition of second-person autobiography and problematises the complex relation between narrator, narratee, and author, while classifying the phenomenon as a “type of autobio-heterodiegetic narrative [which] seems less intensely figural or fictive than its third-person version” (Narrative Discourse Revisited 133). He further argues that “[b]y definition, every narrating that is not […] in the first person is heterodiegetic” and that the narrative is actually more complex, since it includes the narratee in its action: the character is the narratee, he is not the narrator, and again, we do not know where the author pretends to be, and of course we know or guess that he is everywhere. (Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited 133)28 In the end, the involvement of narrator, narratee, and addressee leaves room for an ambivalent dialogic situation, which will be discussed in my readings of Paul Auster’s two second-person narratives Winter Journal and Report from the Interior and Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life. Considering the various functions of and theoretical approaches to second-person narration and their relevance for autobiographical writing, this book explores the affective and

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un/ethical scope of self-narration in the second person as well as the impact of narrative perspective on the interplay of distance and proximity regarding narrating and narrated self and regarding text and reader.

The Third Person in Autobiographical Writing The first documented English autobiography is an autobiography in the third person: The Book of Margery Kempe was written in the 15th century – not by Margery Kempe herself (she was illiterate) but by a scribe who used the third-person perspective to put her accounts into writing for her (Marcus, Autobiography 12–13). Considering the very common use of the third person in fictional writing, the third person in autobiographical writing seems, at first sight, unusual and mostly corresponds with fictionalisation processes. In this book, I attend to its additional layers of meaning and deliberately distinguish early 20th-century forms of third-person self-narration which employ the pronoun because of writing the autobiography in someone else’s name, as is the case in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster or Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Although, of course, the first person only “conceals the gap between the subject of the enunciation and the statement” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 31) and therefore does not account for a unity of the subject either, the use of the third person dramatises this incongruence while it is, as I want to demonstrate, used to gain a more distanced view of the self for self-analysis, self-reflection, and/or self-narration, thereby establishing a presence of the author through absence. I argue that the third person seems to have two major functions: a withdrawal of the self (see Chapter 5 on Coetzee) and a decentring of the self (see Chapter 6 on Rushdie). In metaautobiographical texts, the narrating self is often opposed by the narrated, earlier self. Calling this process “active distancing” (Die Metaautobiographie 111; my translation), Struth claims the third person is a metaautobiographical tool to make this distance explicit (107). In fact, regarding the “alternating use of the first and third persons”, Lejeune values that the system of oscillation and indecision allows the writer to avoid the artificial incompleteness of each of these presentations. If “I” and “he” reciprocally eclipse one another, is it not best to use each alternately for the unmasking of one by the other? (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 39) This of course emphasises the questioning of a unified, one-dimensional self on the one hand and the benefits of writing the self from different perspectives on the other. In addition to the third-person narratives in this book (J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton), there have been quite a few more early examples, such as Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which

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upholds a heroic style that avoids perceiving the autobiographer as selfcongratulatory,29 or Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (1907), which is written in past tense to “make the work sound like history” (Martens 49). Regarding the use of pronouns, American author Mary Antin writes in her introduction to The Promised Land (1912): Physical continuity with my earlier self is no disadvantage. I could speak in the third person and not feel that I was masquerading. I can analyse my subject, I can reveal everything, for she, and not I, is my real heroine. (xi) Christine Brooke-Rose’s autobiographical novel Remake (1996) even creates a multiplicity of selves in an overall attempt to avoid pronouns altogether, which seems “to problematize the idea that a former self can be identified with the present self” (Martens 58) and “to problematize both personal identity and textual originality by using a multiplicity of invented proper names and epithets for herself, which echo each other and other texts” (60). Brooke-Rose’s take is a postmodernist one, negating the unity of the self and thus creating several characters to depict versions or alter egos of herself (Martens 61). Günter Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006) intersperses the otherwise autodiegetic autobiographical text with third-person narration to distance the narrating I from his young self. What is different in the case studies in this book? The examples selected for this study promise to provide an insight into different forms, functions, and effects (or effectiveness) of third-person autobiographical writing. The texts take a more relational scope regarding the interaction of autobiographer, text, and reader as the analyses of (meta-)communication in Summertime and the scope of the personal versus the political in Joseph Anton demonstrate. Distance as well as proximity shape the rhetorical outline of both texts on a thematic and aesthetic level. The rhetorical impetus of the texts seems to be an attempt to embed their self-narration into wider conversations which are not only and exclusively personal but address humanist, ethical, and political concerns as well as life beyond the auto in autobiography. While the ambiguity of the second person provides for a complex narrative perspective which oscillates between the first and the third person (Richardson, Unnatural Voices 22), the third person has a more common and seemingly straightforward tradition. The third person in autobiographical writing is also informed by a juxtaposition and intertwinement of self-disclosure, self-concealment, and self-observation. As the readings in this book will show, this interplay has a decisive impact on the relational and at times political outreach of autobiographical narratives. Philippe Lejeune hints at the seemingly unnatural or unusual way of writing about the self in the third person, as there “appears to be a contradiction between saying ‘he’ when one is ‘I,’ and ‘I’ when one is ‘he’” (“Autobiography in the

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Third Person” 27), but also acknowledges that the “sunderings, divisions, and confrontations are both expressed and masked by the use of a single ‘I.’” (30). He further notes that the shift of pronouns in autobiography is used for “internal distancing and for expressing personal confrontation” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 28). While the internal distancing emphasises the turn towards the self as an other (and thus the split between past and present self), this distancing may be used to approach an earlier version of the self from a more experienced perspective or to confront the self with problematic, personal, or traumatising experiences of the past. In fact, there is always a spatial and temporal distance between narrating and narrated self – independent of the use of pronouns in the narrative. The function of the name is thereby explained by Lejeune as follows: “The name guarantees the unity of our multiplicity; it federates our complexity of the moment and our changes in time” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 30). So, what to do with texts that subvert this unity? In the case studies in this book, the absence of names is particularly striking, as in Paul Auster’s and Julian Barnes’s works no names are used, while both J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie use aliases (Coetzee uses the first name “John”, Rushdie employs the name “Joseph Anton”). The use of the third person seems to create a certain distance to the self which encourages an increased space for self-reflection on the part of the narrating I (and an observation of the narrative from a distance). This distance allows for a “fuller” image of the self and provides the audience with seemingly objective or reflected insights. With the third-person pronoun, the unity of the self, which is implied by the pronoun “I”, is dissolved: [T]he “I” brings together again before our eyes the fictive unity which it imposes as a signifier. The first person, then, always conceals a hidden third person, and in this sense every autobiography is by definition indirect. […] [T]his indirectness is admitted, is boldly proclaimed. The procedure is felt to be artificial because it destroys that illusory effect of the first person which makes us take the indirect for the direct. (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 32) According to Lejeune, the personal pronoun can thus never capture the (unity of the) self, only “the tension between impossible unity and intolerable division and the fundamental schism which turns the speaker into a fugitive” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 32). The use of the third person thus subverts the traditional concept of autobiography as a firstperson narration. Despite the lack of a common experience, the audience participates in the decoding process from a seemingly neutral and critical perspective. The third person thus serves as a distancing device but at the same time encourages intimacy and introspection, as “[o]ne cannot really get outside oneself” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 41). Distance is therefore not to be understood as a lack of or a negative influence

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on the communicative process per se: both audience and autobiographer assume the position of the observer of the narrated I, (which leads to a “pact of observers”). Although the third-person pronoun does not involve the audience in the narrative just as the second person, metageneric commentaries and other characteristics of the case studies make explicit the tensions of the personal and the ethical or political and thus the relational scope and function of the autobiographical text. Despite the apparent distance created through the third person, a connection is upheld between narrator and protagonist: “The third-person figures provide a range of solutions in which distancing is more prominent, though always used to express an articulated connection (a tension) between identity and difference” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 32). Paul Auster remarks in a letter to J.M. Coetzee, which summarises the delicate relationship between characters in a literary work and the referentiality of the represented selves to real-life authors but also the relevance of fictionalising the self as third-person figures: “And then, too, we have both used ourselves as characters in novels […], even if those selves are not precise representations of who we are outside the pages of those books” (Auster and Coetzee 189). In contrast to the consistent focus on the limits of life-writing in postmodernist theory (see e.g. Gilmore, “The Mark of Autobiography”), the selected texts work against the limits of autobiographical writing by addressing both storyworld and referentiality and thus increase the possibilities of creating exemplarity in self-narration in their accentuation of humanist concerns. As a (necessary) result, the need for a differentiation between fact and fiction seems to become less and less important. With the personal life stories being not only thematically but also formally relational, the communicative function of the texts gradually challenges and at times even replaces the personal, individual, and exclusive. Still, while the status of the narration may not change, the narrative situation says a lot about the rhetorical impetus and influential strategies of the autobiographical endeavour. Lejeune at one point describes the third person as a figure of enunciation within a text one continues to read as firstperson discourse. The author speaks about himself as if another were speaking about him, or as if he himself were speaking of another. This as if concerns only the enunciation; the statement is still subject to the strict and distinct rules of the autobiographical discourse. (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 29) Even if “staged” in a process of fictionalisation, the third person is thus often used as a sign or an impression of humility – which ties in with this book’s focus on (seemingly) less self-centred forms of autobiographical writing attempting to deflect and universalise. Third-person pronouns “only serve as abbreviated substitutes [and] replace or relay one or another of the material elements of the utterance” (Benveniste 221).

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In her review of André Gorz’s Le Traître (1958), Laura Marcus highlights that the text portrays “the use of pronominal forms to chart the move from alienation to a kind of self-affirmation” and thus a “move from an anonymous ‘we’ to a self-affirming ‘I’” (“An Invitation to Life” 116). The different parts in Gorz’s text (entitled “We”, “They”, “You”, and “I”) combine both autobiographical and theoretical musings. Marcus holds that the author’s “method of intertwining the experiential and the theoretical is paralleled by a number of recent feminist texts, in which ‘autobiography’ is alternated with theoretical analysis as a way of embodying the links between the personal and the political” (“An Invitation to Life” 120). In metaautobiographies, the alternating pronouns may also demonstrate the transition between experiencing and narrated I and “the constructedness of [the autobiographer’s] textual self” (Struth, “Metaautobiography” 638). The third-person perspective renders visible the distinction between narrating and narrated I as it “destroys that illusory effect of the first person which makes us take the indirect for the direct” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 32). With the use of the third person, then, the distance between these two instances is no longer implicit, but explicitly displayed in the self-narrative. David Attwell, in an interview with J.M. Coetzee, holds that, in a way, “all autobiography is, in fact, autre-biography” (Coetzee and Attwell 216). This suggests that all selected works in this book can be considered autrebiographies, only that they portray the “self as other” in a more marked way by adding pronominal distance. Both second and third person seem to increase the formal distance between the narrator and the protagonist but promote a closer examination of the self. The “fabrication” of the self-narration is more explicit and more prominent the more experimental the text becomes. While uses of the second- and third-person perspective vary in their experimentality, they problematise the more common understanding of autobiographical writing as I-narration. The effects and the impact of the second and third person on the autobiographical process and the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader will be explored in the upcoming readings of contemporary male authors who, as established writers, employ aesthetic and rhetorical techniques which negotiate their attempts to come to terms with questions of credibility, authority, and autobiographical agency. The engagement with autobiographical subjectivity and relationality is thus intertwined with historical and socio-political (power-) structures and long-standing traditions of male self-narration. Moving beyond the postmodernist impetus of irony and play, all selected texts seem to promote narratives which are in tune with the current move towards an ethics of relationality and engagement. The interplay of dissociation and association is carried out on a formal, structural, and thematic level, which will be explored in the upcoming chapters. First, the relationship between narrating and narrated self is affected by the second- and third-person perspective. The distance towards the self through a refusal of an “I” seems to lead to self-observation and self-justification. Second, the perspective informs

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the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. The effects of the second- and third-person narratives can be aesthetic-affective, cognitivereflexive, and ethical. Rimbaud’s famous dictum “Je est un autre” captures the tension of distance and proximity resulting from a narrative perspective which is not I.

Methods, Corpus, and Chapter Outline Engaging with a phenomenon which has received little scholarly attention so far, this book systematically explores distinctive forms of second- and thirdperson autobiographical narration in Anglophone texts, bringing together insightful transnational examples of contemporary writing that particularly renegotiate male authorship and self-narration and promote an affective and cognitive engagement of the reader. The book draws on rhetorical-narratological theory and autobiography studies and elaborates on implications of autobiographical writing in the second and third person. A narratologicalrhetorical approach allows for an examination of the formal-aesthetic and narrative components of the texts, with a particular focus on their ethical and political implications of autobiographical narration. In the field of lifewriting studies, the ambiguities of narrative perspective may potentially unsettle an authoritative self-representation in autobiographical writing. Discussing four of the most prominent Anglophone male writers of world literature, the book interweaves close readings and an engagement with historical, political, and systemic structures of power. The book is attentive to both overarching concerns in autobiographical writing and the particularities and differences of the selected works. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and (relational) autobiography studies, this book positions itself at the core of pressing debates about how male (celebrity) authors negotiate subjectivity and relationality in literature. The readings in this book discuss the thematic dimensions of the selected autobiographical works and analyse, on a formal level, how the selected lifestories are narrated, and which textual characteristics authors use in their self-narration. I study the selected texts not out of narratological interest per se but rather in terms of their rhetorical and communicative function and the potential affective and cognitive effect of the chosen narrative perspective on the autobiographical text. The hermeneutical method intended for this study does not exclude the valuation of elements which may be attributed to the postmodernist tradition but differ in their functionality and intentional perspective and may thus move, if you will, beyond the postmodernist tradition. My study consists of close readings and focuses on text-intrinsic characteristics and therefore the affordances of autobiographical writing in the second and third person. In addition to the theoretical thoughts outlined in this chapter, a few concepts which may theoretically occur and recur in all forms of life-writing, namely memory and embodiment, visuality and intermediality, and metaisation, play an underlying role in the selected

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readings. They are all mostly interrelated or at times even overlapping and, together with the choice of narrative perspective, shape the tensions of distance and proximity. As guiding principles and to account for the ambivalence the second and third person entail in autobiographical writing, I address the thematic and formal interplays of the texts: the personal and the general in relation to embodiment (Paul Auster, Winter Journal), the personal and the general in relation to visuality (Paul Auster, Report from the Interior), the personal and the exemplary in relation to grief (Julian Barnes, Levels of Life), the personal and the ethical (J.M. Coetzee, Summertime), and the personal and the political (Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton). While the disadvantage of an all-too large corpus is often that the studies tend to reinforce and manifest tendencies without paying closer attention to the individuality of the texts, my focus on a selection of case studies allows for an in-depth discussion of and analysis of the complexities of all individual texts and leaves room for a multifaceted approach to possible workings of second- and third-person autobiographical writing. Another benefit of a focus on these case studies is that there is no urge to form an overarching typology of second- and third-person autobiographical writing and, as a result, no generalisation, of a large corpus of autobiographical writings in the second and third person. The body chapters are devoted to detailed and distinct case studies of five autobiographical texts from Great Britain, the USA, and South Africa, which have all been published in the last two decades by renowned literary writers, and which Kusek would thus describe as “writer’s memoir” (Through the Looking Glass). Laura Marcus writes in her introduction to autobiography: Not all autobiographers are writers by profession, though there is a widespread assumption that the literary writer’s autobiography best defines the genre, and that the particularities of the life-story may be less interesting than the ways in which they are remembered and recounted. (Autobiography 2; see also Brooker 375–376) The selected works have been read by a large body of readers, literary scholars, and critics and constitute textual examples that are revealing both regarding their exceptional aesthetics and their potential novelty in the field of life-writing. In this book, I turn to canonical male writers who at a later point in their careers turn to autobiographical writing in the second and third person. As case studies, I selected Paul Auster’s Winter Journal (2012), Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior (2013), and Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013) as examples of uses of you in autobiographical narration. As examples of two very distinct forms of third-person autobiographical writing, I selected J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009) and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (2012). I bring together several autobiographical accounts which have not all been

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widely discussed (apart from perhaps Summertime). The case studies are striking and noteworthy in terms of their (formal) experimentality, their (readjusted) thematic and relational scope, their extent of universalisation, or the political and ethical concerns of universalisation they convey. Chapter 2 discusses Paul Auster’s autobiographical work Winter Journal (2012), which is entirely written from a present-tense second-person perspective. The focus lies on the ambiguity of you and its oscillation between subjectivity and relationality, as it implies a dialogue between past and present self on the one hand and reader address on the other. Through this double (address) function, autobiographer, text, and reader are brought into a dynamic relationship which emphasises the affective and relational scope of self-narration, while the second-person pronoun foregrounds the ambivalence of the personal and the general. The chapter examines further meaning-making factors such as memory and embodiment, rhythmicity, and narrative style which are relevant for the text’s affective function. I argue that the subject of the male author and his engagement with death, mortality, and artistic creation in the second person further complicate the display of autobiographical agency, authority, and self-stylisation. Chapter 3 turns to Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior (2013) and explores the text’s focus on mind and memory and its impact on the doubly deictic you in the narrative. The text concreticises the interplay of the personal and the general through an eclectic engagement with visuality and intermediality (in the form of photography and film ekphrasis). The structural and medial diversity of the text, the narrative perspective (moving from present tense to past-tense second-person narration), and the fragmentary everyday style support both personal and generic readings of the text. Report from the Interior interweaves Auster’s intellectual development with memories that go beyond the personal and provide an insight into the socio-political, historical, and cultural past. Chapter 4 explores Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013) as a hybrid form of autobiographical and fictional writing as well as a first- and secondperson narrative. It considers the implications of interspersed secondperson narration and examines to what extent the interplay of distance and proximity in this generic hybrid negotiates memories, love, loss, and grief. The chapter shows that the second person is often used in generalising statements about grief and loss, while insights into the autobiographer’s own grief work are predominantly displayed in the first person. The tripartite structure of the text contrasts the personal narrative of the autobiographical self with historical and fictional perspectives on love, loss, and grief. The essayistic style supports Barnes’s philosophical narrative, in which the retracted authority of the grieving self allows for a seemingly objective yet affectively involving form of autobiographical writing. Multiple strategies of fictionalisation, literariness, and generic hybridity enable a philosophical engagement with intimacy and general experiences of grief.

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Chapter 5 discusses J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009) as a third-person metaauto/biographical text which negotiates a both formal and diegetic withdrawal of the autobiographical self. As the more complex part of Coetzee’s trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life, Summertime, the text features third-person notebooks and interviews in which the biographical self is announced dead – a twist which unsettles the ambivalent effects of the third person even more. Drawing on existing scholarship on Coetzee, this chapter shows that the third-person perspective in this autre-biography reflects the complex relationship between truth, self-knowledge, and self-narrative in an innovative way. My reading of Summertime is particularly informed by how the text involves readers cognitively and navigates questions of subjectivity and relationality, metageneric commentary, and questions of truth and ethical concerns. Putting the social before the individual, Summertime thus offers starting points for an affective and cognitive involvement of the reader, since the withdrawal of the autobiographical self and the polyphony of voices navigate core themes of post-Apartheid communities. Chapter 6 on Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012) discusses the personal and the political in third-person autobiographical writing. The chapter holds that the narrative perspective (in combination with the mostly consistent use of the past tense) creates a distance between narrated and narrating self and aims for a seemingly objective form of self-observation. It allows for a critical and self-reflexive distance from the narrated self, Rushdie’s alter ego and pseudonym “Joseph Anton”, and emphasises the split self during his time in hiding (prompted by the fatwa initiated in response to his novel The Satanic Verses). Decentring the authorial self, the text not only narrates Rushdie’s past but also a political and historical narrative. Building on Alain Badiou’s conception of the political event, I demonstrate how the event, the aftermath of the fatwa, and Joseph Anton’s archival function highlight the complexity of the interplay between the personal/private and the political/public. Joseph Anton thus predominantly attempts to generalise personal beliefs about the freedom of the arts and thus feeds into an ethics and politics of autobiographical writing. The chapter, consequently, comments on the impact of this attempt on questions of the autobiographer’s celebrity status and cult(ure), autobiographical agency and authority, and self-stylisation. Revisiting the book’s overall arguments and findings, the final chapter weaves together the main results by highlighting the productive and affective potential of narrative perspective in the autobiographical works of Auster, Barnes, Coetzee, and Rushdie. I argue that the thematic and formal diversity of the analysed texts provides insights into the particularities and functions of narrative perspectives in autobiographical writing for self-narration and self-stylisation of established male authors. The distance of narrative techniques creates a space for self-reflection and introspection as well as an enforced (dialogical) relationship with the reader on an affective and/or cognitive level. Epistemological considerations of memory and reliability,

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fact and fiction, the personal and the relational, come to the fore. Strategies of introspection, fictionalisation, metaisation, and intermediality as well as autobiographical proximity demand a nuanced engagement with self-narration in the second and third person. The interplay of distance and proximity provides a framework for the negotiation of formal and textual particularities and the accentuation of an affective and/or cognitive involvement of readers. I end by discussing the relevance of the book for auto/biography studies and of bringing together rhetorical narratology and (relational) autobiography theory to allow for a critical engagement with narrative strategies and their relevance for the autobiographical process. This book is centred around the literary analyses of male autobiographical writing in the second and third person. Creating a space for affective and cognitive engagement, the authors in the case studies seem to retract themselves from the centre of autobiographical narration. Acknowledging the rhetorical scope and the relationality of life-writing, I will make a wider argument about the relevance of narrative strategies and their relational and un/ethical implications and about their relevance as tools to reconcile male self-narration in the 21st century with authors’ attempts to establish relationality beyond the autobiographical subject.

Notes 1 Given the unbroken interest in life-writing, the “proclaimed ‘death of the subject/ author’ would seem to be nothing but a profound metaphor” (Middeke and Schwalm 350). With modernist reconceptualisations of subjectivity, autobiography seemed to have lost more and more of its normative frame and continuously served “for writers of postmodernist fiction as the last reference point, providing orientation and stability in a disoriented and unstable world” (Hornung 222). 2 See scholarly work on genres such as autofiction, which was coined by Serge Doubrovsky on the back cover of his work Fils (1977); see also Wagner-Egelhaaf; Zipfel. 3 For an insightful study of 19th- and 20th-century approaches to autobiography as well as the theory and criticism of autobiography at the time, see Laura Marcus’s Auto/Biographical Discourse (1994). 4 For a discussion of the “memoir” and its characteristics, see Thomas Couser’s Memoir (2012), Robert Kusek’s Through the Looking Glass (2017), or Alex Zwerdling’s The Rise of the Memoir (2017). Smith and Watson describe memoir as “autobiographical works characterized by density of language and self-reflexivity about the writing process, yoking the author’s standing as a professional writer with the work’s status as an aesthetic object” (Reading Autobiography 4). 5 Eakin already admits in his work Touching the World (1992) about poststructuralist thought that “we have been too ready to assume that the very idea of a referential aesthetic is untenable” (28). Irmtraud Huber, in her reading of Timmer’s work on post-postmodernist literature, subsumes its characteristics as the “return to the real”, “stylistic continuity”, “communicative bonding”, and “embarrassed optimism / strategic naïveté” (32–33), and thus as a desire for reconstruction. The “communicative bond beyond the dictates of referentiality” (Huber 40) – even though observed in a different setting – can also be of

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7 8 9 10 11 12

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Poetics of Second- and Third-Person Autobiographical Writing importance for an analysis of autobiographical texts. Timmer stresses that the post-postmodernist novel includes “a desire for some form of community and sociality […], ‘a structural need for a we’” and perceives a trend towards “sharing stories as a way to ‘identify with others’ (and to allow others to identify themselves with you)” (359). This is also expressed in a “direct appeal to the reader or narratee, a ‘you’ [which] is also a form of ‘sharing’” (Timmer 359). Just as Jerome Bruner’s suggestion “that autobiography is life construction through ‘text’ construction” (“Autobiographical Process” 55), Eakin argues in his work How Our Lives Become Stories that “the self in question is a self defined by and transacted in narrative process” (101). Eakin, who is known for his – particularly generous – perspective on narrative identity, i.e. the creation of the self in the narrative act, regards narrative as “an integral part of a primary mode of identity experience” (How Our Lives 137; see Bruner, “Autobiographical Process” 55). Anne Rüggemeier’s Die relationale Autobiographie (2014) gives an elaborate account on relationality in autobiographical writing, arguing for a subgenre rather than an (inherent) mode of autobiographical writing. Ernaux uses on in the original, which can be considered more colloquial than the English one. For a brief discussion of Butler’s theories and their relation to autobiography see Smith and Watson (Reading Autobiography 214) and Marcus (Auto/biographical Discourses 283–284). For a more detailed discussion of “opacity” and the impossibility of self-knowledge see Butler (31–40). For a similar connection and discussion of Bakhtin and Butler see Effe (113–116). Possible text-based resources include paratexts, occasion, narrator(s)/narration, characters/dialogue, free indirect discourse, voice, style, space, temporality, arrangement/gaps, narratee/narrative audience, genre/(non)fictionality, intertextual references, ambiguities, and more (Phelan, Somebody Telling 26). Interestingly, however, Phelan states that “narrative is less about its materials (narrators, characters, events, techniques, and so on) than about how tellers use them to influence their audiences in particular ways” (Somebody Telling vix). In her book on J.M. Coetzee, Alexandra Effe draws on Phelan, too, and describes “narrative as an act of communication (from author to reader) and creation (between author and reader)” (61). Among others, Helga Schwalm claims that even non-fictional autobiographical writing cannot be considered as a truthful account, as it has become more and more fictionalised over time (Das eigene und das fremde Leben 142–148). Autobiography thus cannot be pinned down to the autobiographical pact insofar as the strict differentiation between fictional and factual autobiography is no longer tenable. Smith and Watson even indicate that whatever narrators refer to, draw on, or even problematise in their narrative “life narrators inevitably refer to the world beyond the text” (Reading Autobiography 12). At the same time, they uphold the literariness of self-narration as “[t]o reduce autobiographical narration to facticity is to strip it of the densities of rhetorical, literary, ethical, political, and cultural dimensions” (13). Capturing the scope of possibilities of pronouns as well as their ambiguity in his own autobiographical writing, Roland Barthes holds: “The so-called personal pronouns: everything happens here, I am forever enclosed within the pronominal lists: ‘I’ mobilize the image-repertoire, ‘you’ and ‘he’ mobilize paranoia. But also, fugitively, according to the reader, everything, like the reflections of a watered silk, can be reversed: in ‘myself, I,’ the ‘I’ might not be ‘me,’ the ‘me’ he so ostentatiously puts down; I can say to myself ‘you’ as Sade did, in order to detach within myself the worker, the fabricator, the producer of writing, from the subject of the work (the Author)” (Roland Barthes 168).

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16 Works which alternate pronouns include, for example, Jenni Diski’s Skating to Antarctica (whose first-person narrator introduces the fictional character “Jennifer”), John Barth’s Once Upon a Time, Mary Karr’s Lit, Breyten Breytenbach’ The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Frank Kermode’s Entitled (Struth, Die Metaautobiographie 99–144). 17 For a linguistic and stylistic study of pronouns (in literature) see Katie Wales’s Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English (1996), Laure Gardelle and Sandrine Sorlin’s The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns (2015). 18 Emile Benveniste has dealt extensively with the pronoun as person deixis and as shifter, considering it a floating reference in dialogue which “is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself as I” (224–225). What Benveniste suggests here is that for there to be a second person, there needs to be a first person involved. Regarding autobiographical writing, this assumption emphasises the existence of a “first person” – an autobiographical self – behind the second person. We may also assume that, if the I is considered a shifter, it also bears the possibility of including others. 19 See also Monika Fludernik’s expansive and helpful bibliography of you-narratives and secondary literature (“Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography”) as well as her 2011 update in “The Category of Person”. 20 A contemporary German example in which the author uses “Sie” (formal you) as apostrophic you in an otherwise consistent first-person narrative. 21 Fludernik writes about the empathy effect: “Narrative you has as its distinguishing trait the closeness to generalizing you and the you of self-address, and for this reason its initial distancing effect […] can develop into an increased empathy effect, with the figural you (particularly in present tense texts) achieving maximum identification on the reader’s part” (“Second Person Fiction” 227). 22 I am excluding other uses of you in my book, such as the you in epistolary fiction, in remarks to (other) characters, or extended apostrophe. For a closer insight into apostrophic you, see Irene Kacandes’s work Talk Fiction (2001). 23 Herman’s continuum includes the following types of textual you: (1) generalized you; (2) fictional reference; (3) fictionalized (= horizontal) address; (4) apostrophic (= vertical) address; (5) doubly deictic you (381). 24 See Sorlin for another concise summary of you-narration and its development. 25 Fludernik suggests that with more details, “the status of this you as fictional persona becomes increasingly clear” (Towards a “Natural” Narratology 194; see “Second Person Fiction” 227). 26 Empirical research also shows the involving effect of you from e.g. a psychological viewpoint (Brunye et al.) and e.g. in Dutch literature (e.g. De Hoop and Hogeweg). 27 In his essay “The Indefinite You”, Eric Hyman Staels proclaims that the second person may become “just another third-person” (168). 28 Note that Genette’s early definitions on metalepsis in Narrative Discourse (234– 235) are later refined in his reading of Lejeune’s Je est un autre (On Autobiography) and only then entail direct references to the second-person pronoun. For further thoughts see also “Metalepsis in Autobiographical Narrative” (2019) by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. 29 Lejeune points to “historical memoirs such as those of Caesar, religious autobiographies in which the writer styles himself ‘the servant of God,’ or seventeenth-century aristocratic memoirs like those of Président de Thou; or highly coded short genres such as the preface, the third-person publisher’s blurb, or the biographical notice composed by the author, all of which are related to publishing practices” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 27).

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Lanser, Susan S. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voices. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Lee, Hermione. Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Lejeune, Philippe. “Autobiography in the Third Person.” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 27–50. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lenta, Margaret. “Autrebiography: J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Youth.” English in Africa 30.1 (2003): 157–169. Machado, Carmen Maria. In the Dream House. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019. Madden, Patrick. “The ‘New Memoir’.” The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography. Eds. Maria Dibattista and Emily O. Wittman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 222–236. Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Harraway. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Marcus, Laura. Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Marcus, Laura. Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Marcus, Laura. “‘An Invitation to Life’: André Gorz’s The Traitor.” New Left Review 1.194 (1992): 114–120. Margolin, Uri. “Narrative ‘You’ Revisited.” Language and Style 23.4 (1990): 425–446. Marshall, P. David, and Neil Henderson. “Political Persona 2016: An Introduction.” Persona Studies 2.2 (2016): 1–18. Martens, Lorna. “Autofiction in the Third Person, with a Reading of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake.” Autofiction in English. Ed. Hywel Dix. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 49–64. Mayer, Sandra, and Julia Novak. “Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections.” Life Writing 16.2 (2019): 149–155. Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Middeke, Martin. “Introduction.” Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama. Eds. Martin Middeke and Werner Huber. Rochester: Camden House, 1999. 1–25. Middeke, Martin, and Helga Schwalm. “The Return of Biography: Introduction.” Anglistentag 2005, Bamberg – Proceedings. Eds. Christoph Houswitschka et al. Trier: WVT, 2006. 349–354. Mildorf, Jarmila. “Reconsidering Second-Person Narration and Involvement.” Language and Literature 25.2 (2016): 145–158. Miller, Nancy K. “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir.” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 537–548. Misch, Georg. A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950. Moore, Lorrie. Self-Help. London: Faber & Faber, 2015. Morrissette, Bruce. “Narrative ‘You’ in Contemporary Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies 2.4 (1965): 1–24. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

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Olshen, Barry N. “The Self.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. 2. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 799–801. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction. Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. Phelan, James. “Narrative Ethics.” Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 531–546. Phelan, James. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Prince, Gerald. “Reader.” Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 743–755. Rak, Julie. “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity.” Genre 26 (2004): 305–326. Richardson, Brian. “The Poetics and Politics of Second Person Narrative.” Genre 24 (1991): 309–330. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Identity.” Philosophy Today 35.1 (1991): 73–81. Roberge, Rob. Liar: A Memoir. 2016. Portland: Future Tense Books, 2019. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. Trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Rüggemeier, Anne. Die relationale Autobiographie: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie, Poetik und Gattungsgeschichte eines neuen Genres in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. Trier: WVT, 2014. Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Schmitt, Arnaud. “Making the Case for Self-Narration against Autofiction.” The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader. Eds. Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen. London: Routledge, 2016. 330–335. Schmitt, Arnaud. The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making It Real. London: Routledge, 2017. Schwalm, Helga. “Autobiography.” Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 14–29. Schwalm, Helga. Das eigene und das fremde Leben: Biographische Identitätsentwürfe in der englischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Sheetrit, Ariel M. A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography: Between Dissociation and Belonging. New York: Routledge, 2020. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Metalepsis in Autobiographical Narrative.” European Journal of Life Writing 8 (2019): 1–27. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

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Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Smith, Thomas R. “Agency.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. 1. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 28–29. Sorlin, Sandrine. The Stylistics of “You”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17.4 (2004): 428–452. Struth, Christiane. “Metaautobiography.” Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Vol. I. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. 636–638. Struth, Christiane. Die Metaautobiographie: Theorie, Poetik und Typologie eines neueren Genres der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. Trier: WVT, 2016. Thomä, Dieter. Erzähle dich selbst: Lebensgeschichte als philosophisches Problem. 1998. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2015. Thomä, Dieter. “Philosophy.” Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Vol. I. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. 111–121. Thomä, Dieter. “Subjectivity.” Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Vol. I. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. 402–409. Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel It Too? The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Auto(r)fiktion: Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. Wales, Katie. Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Croom Helm, 1976. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiction.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman et al. London: Routledge, 2005. 36–37. Zwerdling, Alex. The Rise of the Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

2

Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal

As one of the most prominent and appraised contemporary American writers, Paul Auster, born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, is not only known for his fictional oeuvre (e.g. The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, or his most recent novel 4321), but also for his various works of non-fiction, poetry, screenplays, and literary essays. While Auster is very much celebrated for his work, literary critics have predominantly focused on his fictional oeuvre despite his various autobiographical endeavours in for example The Invention of Solitude (1982), The Red Notebook (1995), Hand to Mouth (1996), Winter Journal (2012),1 and Report from the Interior (2013). His experimental and genre-bending style becomes particularly apparent in his most recent autobiographical writing.2 With Winter Journal and Report from the Interior, Auster creates two (non-fictional) works of “autobiographical fragments” (A Life in Words 55) which are especially noteworthy for their use of the second-person perspective in that they exemplify some essential concerns and developments in life-writing.3 Being known for typically “postmodernist” techniques (such as fragmentation, self-referentiality, and intertextuality), Auster’s recent autobiographical writing seems to mirror – particularly due to the second-person perspective – the zeitgeist of the early 21st century.4 Winter Journal (and Report from the Interior) follows a trajectory which transcends postmodern irony and works towards a relational framework. Auster’s autobiographical works are neither full accounts of the author’s past nor coherent narratives, but rather experimental musings on the author’s experiences and memories: I think of it as a […] literary work shaped like a piece of music. So, it does not have a continuous narrative, it’s jumping around in time, and it’s not the whole story of any life, it’s certain parts of my life. (Auster, “Paul Auster in Conversation”)5 Winter Journal and Report from the Interior are connected due to their use of the second person but also due to their respective focus on memories related to the autobiographer’s (ageing) body and embodiment (as in Winter Journal) and to developments of the mind (as in Report from the Interior). DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374-2

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In both works, the writer literally redirects the focus from the egocentric autobiographical I to a dialogic you, deliberately pronouncing the gap between the narrating and experiencing I and employing the second person (in the form of Herman’s doubly deictic you) to establish a communicative situation with both the past self and the reader. To account for their unique approaches, I will discuss the two works in separate chapters, granting both texts equal attention. In contrast to other examples of recent autobiographical you-narratives, such as Rob Roberge’s Liar (2016) and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), which centrally deal with addiction and abuse respectively, Auster’s autobiographical works attempt to navigate the author’s sense of self and authorial agency. As a possible reaction to a tradition of male self-stylisation in autobiographical writing, Winter Journal uncovers the gaps and weaknesses of the author’s life. Despite attempts to generalise his experience, Auster’s text demonstrates a specificity revealing his engagement with discourses of male credibility in contemporary life-writing. In Winter Journal, the tension of distance and proximity that to some extent resonates through all the case studies in this book occurs, here, on a formal level (second-person perspective, style) and diegetic level (memory, body).6 Drawing on theoretical insights from Chapter 1, this chapter explores the ambiguity of the second person in Winter Journal by considering its approach to self and other, (affective) involvement of the reader, the relevance of memory and the body, as well as style and rhythm to foreground the tensions of second-person autobiographical writing.7

Embodying Yourself: You and Self-Dialogue “[T]he inner dialogue had begun, and you had crossed into the domain of conscious selfhood” (WJ 135–136). As an enthusiast of genre-bending writing, it comes as no surprise that Paul Auster chooses a more experimental way of autobiographical writing in the form of a second-person narrative. Scholars on second-person narration agree, as has been shown in Chapter 1, that the second person comes somewhere in-between the first and third person and thus allows for a negotiation of self and other, private and public, personal and general. Together with the consistent use of the present tense, the secondperson perspective in Winter Journal marks a (linguistically pronounced) relational form of life-writing. This subchapter concentrates on you as a form of self-dialogue between narrator and narratee without the detachment of the third person, as is expressed in the following use of the imperative: “Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said” (WJ 1). To begin with, I would like to evoke the form of the diary. Philippe Lejeune, in his study On Diary (2009), regards it as a form of antifiction (On Diary 201), which ties in with Auster’s overly persistent claim to non-fictionality in his autobiographical text (Auster, “Paul Auster Talks”). The second person in

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Winter Journal reminds of diary-writing, although the addressee is not the diary itself (as in “Dear Diary”) but the autobiographer’s past self. If one were to argue against the possibility of reader address through the second person, this you could be considered exclusively as the narrated author-self confined by the private space of the diary. The title of Winter Journal already gives away the book’s characteristic quality of the “journal” and thus relativises its diarylike status. The journal seems to be a symbiosis of diary and journal, while also being a sort of notebook. As Sonja Longolius aptly notes, “[j]ournals are personal, yet not necessarily private” (86) and Winter Journal certainly establishes both intimacy with the self and relationality. Accordingly, Winter Journal poses as a rhetorical act of communicative bonding which transgresses the boundaries between autobiographer, text, and reader in multiple ways. The second person in autobiographical writing involves a “subject talking to her- or himself” (Smith and Watson 66). Similarly, Lejeune describes the dialogue with the self as follows: “This type of narrative would show clearly, at the level of enunciation, the difference between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the utterance treated as addressee of the narrative” (On Autobiography 6). The distance created through this dialogue with the self may thus serve to approach the elusiveness and instability of subjectivity and memory and highlights the different possibilities of narrating the self from a (necessary) distance. This observatory role also becomes evident in the following passage, “You would like to know who you are” (WJ 115), in which Auster announces his agenda to explore his identity and gain self-knowledge.8 In an interview with Inge-Birgitte Siegumfeldt, Auster voices three desired effects of second-person narration, namely distance, exemplarity, and simultaneity, which the author renders relevant for his autobiographical writing: The more I thought about it, the more I realized that its effect would be to open up a little space between myself and myself in which I could engage in a kind of intimate dialogue with myself. I wanted to look at myself from a distance – but only a small one, and the distance of the third person would have been too big. (A Life in Words 55; see Kors 18) In this interview, Auster suggests that he does not want his own story to be the central focus. The slight distance of the second person may be a means to gain an external perspective of the self, while at the same time accounting for increased intimacy (Fludernik, “Second Person Fiction” 239). Providing a space for (critical) self-reflection, the second person is a means to enter a dialogue with the (other) self as narratee and addressee from a distance. Deciding against the even more distanced third-person perspective, Auster states that “it seemed too distant for this particular book, which focuses on the body” (A Life in Words 55). It demonstrates how physicality influences self-narrative in the second person and at the same time stresses the distance between narrating and narrated self.9

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In Winter Journal, the use of the present tense to narrate past events – the historic present – can evoke the impression of a self-mythologising narrative. The present tense seems to situate past events in the present to make them, again, more accessible and can thus be seen as a distinctive means which allows for (or enforces?) intimacy and closeness. The use of the present tense creates a more immediate narration due to the pronounced simultaneity, for example: You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else. (WJ 1) The simplicity of the passage, as well as the use of the present tense, support the attempt to create a general and relatable message and thus to proclaim a universalising moment which may be both applicable to the narrated self and the inscribed addressee. As both protagonist and observer, the narrated self thus oscillates between a distanced position of increased self-awareness, self-reflection, and intimacy and relationality. The present tense can also evoke the impression that the past is not completed or impacting the present in an ongoing process. Life-writing is about giving form to the past in light of the present [while] the past inextricably mingles with the present. In self-narrative, the construction of this synthesis of temporally different layers of experience takes place in what is usually called autobiographical remembering. (Brockmeier 877) Autobiographical writing in the second person may to some extent react to an incapability of observing the passage of time and provide a space for the subject to negotiate and observe temporality and change. It allows for a reconstruction of the past in the present, a reduced distance between past and present, and therefore induces a reliving of experiences and memories instead of a mere narration of the very same (Lehnert 785). The merge of present tense and past events as a result seems to reduce the distance between the memory and the narratee, which supports and increases the immediacy of memory and experience. This relation is particularly noteworthy in its approximation of past and present, e.g. in “You are five years old, crouched over an anthill in the backyard, attentively studying the coming and goings of your tiny six-legged friends” (WJ 3) or in “This morning, waking in the dimness of another January dawn, […] there is your wife’s face turned toward your face” (WJ 4). By recreating the moment and situating the narrative in the present, Auster creates the impression of being present in the moment of experience: “Time is a strange factor here, and by

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using the same tense through all the chronological shifts, I tried to produce a kind of simultaneity for the experiences I write about” (Auster, A Life in Words 55). Sandrine Sorlin calls this “the impersonating mode”, a way “to impersonate his own self […], re-enacting the event in a most vivid way” (61), which becomes especially evident in longer, detailed recollections of past events (e.g. WJ 23–24). In the following passage, the equation of past and present is directly pronounced: Whenever you find yourself slipping into a nostalgic frame of mind, mourning the loss of the things that seemed to make life better then than it is now, you tell yourself to stop and think carefully, to look back at Then with the same scrutiny you apply to looking at Now, and before long you come to the conclusion that there is little difference between them, that the Now and the Then are essentially the same. (WJ 181) Recovering childlike memories and contrasting his present perception with past sensations and observations, Auster narrates “how the things you no longer notice were once a constant presence and preoccupation for you: the little world of crawling ants and lost coins, of fallen twigs and dented bottle caps” (WJ 3) and “the bloody noses you both gave and received, the punches to the stomach that knocked the wind out of you, the inane headlocks […] that sent you and your opponent sprawling to the ground” (WJ 40). The aforementioned discrepancy between past and present in Winter Journal shows in the following statement, in which the narrating self is portrayed as a more experienced, older self while invoking relational others: Looking back on it now, you feel that these people were an essential part of your education, that without their presence in your life your understanding of what it means to be human would have been impoverished, lacking all depth and compassion. (WJ 193; my emphasis) A similar effect is achieved in the following passage: “No bad experiences, then, no encounter that filled you with regret or remorse, and when you look back on it now, you suppose you were well treated because you were not an aging man” (WJ 52; my emphasis). Sometimes Auster’s accounts are nostalgic, e.g. when he writes that “there are things you miss from the old days, even if you have no desire to see those days return” (WJ 183), and in other instances he recalls memories from a sensory point of view to materialise them in the present. Encouraging an atmospheric setting, Auster keeps coming back to the season of “winter”, which also resonates with Auster’s earlier piece “White Spaces” (162): “You are six years old. Outside, snow is falling, and the branches of the trees in the backyard are turning white” (WJ 1). And later:

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No snow of any significance since the night of February first, but a frigid month with little sun, much rain, much wind, hunkered down in your room every day writing this journal, this journey through winter, and now into March, still cold, still as cold as the winter cold of January and February, and yet every morning you go outside to peruse the garden now, looking for a sign of color, the smallest tip of a crocus leaf jutting from the ground, the first dab of yellow on the forsythia bush, but nothing to report so far, spring will be coming late this year, and you wonder how many more weeks will go by before you can begin searching for your first robin. (WJ 219–220) Having “entered the winter of your life” (WJ 230), Auster evokes sensory perceptions and creates a scene for his writing endeavour by reusing the setting for past and present and emphasises the evanescence of life and his autobiographical agency in a revisitation of the past. Furthermore, the distance created by pronouncing the gap between narrating and narrated I may help to approach shameful or uncomfortable memories and may thus become necessary to the autobiographical endeavour and Auster’s positioning as a flawed person. According to Laura Marcus, “trauma is now frequently understood as the aftermath and effect of a psychic injury so great that it exceeds the possibility of its ‘evidentiary’ narration” (Autobiography 28). This psychic injury may, for example, derive from experiences of war, violence, death, or terror. Katarzyna Kuczma observes in Auster’s fiction that trauma “is where the work of memory is perceived as if under a magnifying glass” (278).10 Although trauma in autobiographical writing is of course a complex field of research of its own, the term is used here as a wider reference to incisive experiences and memories which promote the need to establish a distance towards the experiencing self. In fact, traumatic experiences in Winter Journal feature regularly, for example, in the death of Auster’s mother (WJ 118–151) or his family’s car accident which was based on his own error of judgement (WJ 18–27). Narrating “the bleakest time you have ever gone through” and “the darkest moment of your life” (WJ 221), experiences of guilt, shame, and embarrassment may be easier to thematise through the detached second person. When Auster writes, “You took a chance you shouldn’t have taken, and that error of judgment continues to fill you with shame” (WJ 27), what becomes evident is a clash of what happened and his self-perception as a safe driver. As a complement to The Invention of Solitude, which is about Auster’s father, Winter Journal thematises the death of his mother in an account of eight pages, granting her a respectable part in the memoir.11 In a passage demonstrating the regret and incapability of understanding his reaction to his mother’s death, Auster writes: The question is why you couldn’t let yourself go in the minutes and hours that followed your mother’s death, why, for two full days, you

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Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal were unable to shed any tears for her. Was it because a part of you was secretly glad she was dead? A dark thought, a thought so dark and disturbing that it scares you even to express it. (WJ 129)

Auster deducts from his incapability, after having a breakdown later, that “[y]ou couldn’t grieve in the way people normally do, and so your body broke down and did the grieving for you” (WJ 129). Here, again, the past tense is used in reference to traumatic experience.12 The issue of responsibility and shame is apparent in the following passage: One memory haunts you above all others, and on nights when you are unable to sleep, you find it difficult not to go back to it, to rehash the events and relive the shame you felt afterward, have continued to feel ever since. (WJ 170)13 The reliving of the memory seems to be avoided by referring to these shameful experiences in the past, without approximating them with the present. Furthermore, Auster uses the second person for confrontational self-narration. As Lejeune holds, you “appears somewhat fleetingly in the speeches (discours) that the narrator addresses to the person that he was, either to cheer him up if he’s in a bad mood, or to lecture him or repudiate him” (On Autobiography 7). This can be exemplified by the following passage: Yes, you drink too much and smoke too much, you have lost teeth without bothering to replace them, your diet does not conform to the precepts of contemporary nutritional wisdom, but if you shun most vegetables it is simply because you do not like them, and you find it difficult, if not impossible, to eat what you do not like. (WJ 14) Enforcing a distance to the present self, this confrontation also poses as a form of self-protection. Sorlin holds that the second person “works as a protecting shield for the author who tries to give a sincere rendering of his flaws” and thus “has a mitigating effect, keeping safe Auster’s self-image” (62) as well as his reputation and authorial legacy. Auster, who has been a prominent presence in the US literary scene for four decades, complicates an all-too neat self-stylisation and upholds the self-image of a flawed writer scarred by life, in line with earlier explorations of biographical material (in The Invention of Solitude, The Red Notebook, or Hand to Mouth). It seems that the necessity to provide new (narrative) perspectives responds to market-driven considerations that position Winter Journal alongside a range of autobiographical works to offer more reader-oriented and (seemingly) less egotistic forms of life-writing. Despite the distancing perspective, which, one

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could argue, favours a more self-reflective approach to the past and present self, the memoir is not entirely devoid of self-congratulatory comments such as “the women loved you as a man” (WJ 4–5) or the description of himself as being “an unaggressive, not unrepresentable young man” (WJ 52). While the second person induces a (necessary) distance and “serves as an indicator that remembering is reconstructing” (Lehnert 785), the act of self-address is linguistically pronounced and enables Auster to portray the self as Other. The second person negotiates, as I argue, some in-betweenness, avoiding the authority of the I and the detachment of the third person. The second person thus seems to become a technique to come to terms with questions of self-centredness and self-stylisation. The self is, if we consider the relationality of the autobiographical work, not only involved in a dialogue with the self but also a potential addressee (a reader), as will be outlined in the following.

Inviting the Reader as Narratee and Addressee The appellative function of the second-person narrative as well as the engagement of the implied reader in a dialogue are signs of a tendency in Auster’s autobiographical writing which points towards a more communicative and seemingly less egotistic scope of self-narration. The second person not only establishes a (necessary) distance towards the self but encourages commonality as (so Auster’s assumption) “[e]verybody recalls these experiences. It’s part of being human” (Auster, A Life in Words 55). Both Winter Journal and Report from the Interior explore how secondperson narration can serve to revalue the reader in the act of self-narration through a suggested (and potentially problematic) universalisation of shareable experience. The second person formally invites the reader to the communicative space. The engagement of the reader in the narrative and the attempt to transfer memories and experiences to the reader already implies, I argue, an ethical dimension of autobiographical writing. As Sorlin suggests, the second person may provide a “balance between overdistance and underdistance” which evolves from its “typical immersing/alienating effect” (74). To begin with, I shall briefly reconsider Philippe Lejeune and his emphasis on “the double character of the addressee: if I talk to myself while saying to myself ‘you,’ at the same time I display this unfolded enunciation to a third party, the eventual listener or reader” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 34). Although the reader is not directly addressed in Winter Journal (compared to forms of apostrophe or expressions such as “Dear reader”), they may still feel addressed in the process of you-narration. While a first-person perspective would uphold an authorial and authoritative hierarchy, the second person thus equates the narrator and the reader to make room for a shared approach to the autobiographical narrative. In an interview, Auster even proclaims that Winter Journal is first and foremost intended “to implicate the reader” and that

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Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal the book is an invitation to the reader to explore his or her own memories, to think about his or her own life. I hope it can serve as a sounding board for people to remember the kinds of things I’m remembering about myself in the book. (A Life in Words 55)14

If we reconsider the first paragraph of Winter Journal, this agenda of creating a “sounding board” becomes particularly clear when Auster highlights that the narrated events may happen to anyone: You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else. (WJ 1) Although autobiographical writing is often considered to be inherently relational, the autobiographical text, I argue, is not relational per se but unfolds its affective and engaging qualities (mainly) through narrative strategies. The simplistic language, the repetitiveness, as well as the spokenword language is an unfiltered and vivid “stream of consciousness”. This first paragraph of Winter Journal is also just one sentence, emphasising the run-on character of the memoir and the rhythmic engagement through syntactic means. This passage literally promotes a generalisation of experience which almost seems to become an underlying mantra of Auster’s autobiographical writing. As many passages provide little background information about the narratee, the addressee is constructed to be exemplary, not special – personal experiences seem to become transferable, shareable experiences. Although we know that the autobiographical pact suggests a unity of author and narratee, the you simultaneously addresses the reader; these “things” (unspecified at this point) could happen to anyone. The gradual development from “never happen” to “cannot happen” to “will ever happen” to “begin to happen” and, finally, “they happen” indicates the inevitability of these “things”, while the generality of language aims for a universalisation of experience which is applicable to others. James Peacock holds that the second person in Auster’s works “participates in the endless negotiation between productive solitude and solipsistic isolation, individualism, and collectivism, and the vexed relationship between real-world self, authorial self, and characters who resemble both” (“Self-Dispersal” 2). Although Peacock problematises the question of “communality” by introducing the expression “self-dispersal”, he also acknowledges that the “second person amplifies questions of insider and outsider, individual and collective, the simultaneous desire for a stable self and interpersonal intimacy” (“Self-Dispersal” 3). By constructing or, rather, simulating a dialogue not only with the authorial self but also the reader, the experiences in Winter Journal are

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directed towards a potential audience that may empathise with or be alienated from the narrated self. Sorlin, in her analysis of Winter Journal, holds that “compared to the first-person pronoun in monologues, the addressive nature of the second person reduces the artificiality of such narratives” (62). According to Fludernik, past scholarly research has rather neglected the combination of the referential function of the second person to the protagonist and the address function (“Second Person Fiction” 218) and hence “the inherent strategies of referential indeterminacy that proliferate in you […] narratives” (“The Category of ‘Person’” 101). Not only are Auster’s autobiographical works attempts to understand the self and come to terms with his autobiographical agency, in this case predominantly in relation to the (male) ageing body, but also to create a framework and space for identification on the part of the reader. The universalisation of potentially shareable or shared experience and the engagement of the reader in the narrative now seem to be more important than postmodern indifference, which corresponds with Huber’s proclaimed desire for communicative bonding in contemporary literature. As recurring themes Huber names “the turn towards the communicative link with the reader and the cession of the authority by the author” (42). The seemingly diminished authoritative stance of the author seems to become particularly relevant in Auster’s autobiographical texts, especially regarding attempts to universalise experience and the withdrawal of the first person. Although autobiography is traditionally concerned with the individual perspective, second-person autobiography dissolves this assumption and involves the reader in the narrative process. One possible function of the second-person perspective is therefore, corresponding with Auster’s desired effect as observed in interviews, a narrative of exemplary experience and the connection of the reader to the narrated memories. If we all experience similar things, the second-person narrative in Winter Journal may encourage a communicative outreach, concerned with seemingly relatable themes and offering various aesthetic and formal devices that may engage reader and author alike. Whether or not this communicative outreach is successful depends on the willingness of the reader (Schmitt 129). Although Winter Journal is also a relational text in that it involves others in the narrative, references to others are mostly unspecified. The three women, Auster’s mother (e.g. WJ 118–151), his wife Siri Hustvedt (e.g. WJ 197–198), and his first wife Lydia Davis remain unnamed. The effect of this lack of names proclaims an exemplarity of the life depicted in his autobiographical work. Apart from being more accessible in the present tense,15 the experiences that are presented as the most “relatable” lack, as already mentioned, a certain degree of background information and therefore suggest an increased level of generalisation: Physical pleasures and physical pains. Sexual pleasures first and foremost, but also the pleasures of food and drink, of lying naked in a hot bath, of scratching an itch, of sneezing and farting, of spending an extra

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Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal hour in bed, of turning your face toward the sun on a mild afternoon in late spring or early summer and feeling the warmth settle upon your skin. (WJ 2)

Here, memories are presented in such a general manner and are portrayed as possibly anyone’s memories. “Common” experiences such as childhood memories, for example “roughhousing” and other “pleasures of boyhood” (WJ 33; 33– 35) are supposed to promote recognition on the part of the reader. Kuczma further states that “memory is inevitably plural and mediates between the inside and the outside, the individual and the collective” (278). This mediation between the individual and the shared in Winter Journal is enacted on a narrative but also on a formal level, with the second-person perspective being a demonstrative stylistic means to embrace both self- and other-writing. The following passage illustrates shared subjectivity in relation to others and provides aspects of both identification and alienation; it starts with a general observation: You can’t see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end – at least as far as others are concerned – your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. (WJ 163) In this rather abstract passage, the author engages in a physical self-observation and negates the possibility of a coherent identity via actual bodily existence. Just to emphasise the contrast – the following passage continues with more specific background information on the narratee: Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others. (WJ 163–164) What appears noteworthy in this passage is the fact that the more general remarks about what we experience as the perceptions of ourselves are juxtaposed with more detailed information – “you, who have lived inside your

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body for sixty-four years now”. It is likely that apart from an initial identification, this additional information of age may disturb the possible identification if not congruent with the reader’s background (e.g. in case their age or lifestyle differs greatly from the one presented in the text).16 While the effectiveness and degree of identification may depend on the reader, Winter Journal affords a commonality of experiences on a formal and diegetic level. The text is not so much about a close relationality such as in family memoirs but about an acknowledgement of the relevance of others in general and the attempt to reduce author-presence and provide an ethical encounter with an audience. As said before, another effect of second-person autobiographical writing can be alienation, especially when it comes to passages which display emotional distance, disengagement, or pity. Sexual experiences (WJ 16; 42–56; 196), Auster’s experiences in brothels (WJ 45–48; 54–56) or the description of venereal diseases (WJ 185) could also raise a feeling of discomfort, or as Lehnert suggests, make the reader “feel like a voyeur intruding into something that is not addressed to him” (786). Critical is for example the assumption of a patronising stance effecting through the second person: “Yes, you drink too much and smoke too much, you have lost teeth without bothering to replace them, your diet does not conform to the precepts of contemporary nutritional wisdom” (WJ 14) or in the question “But you aren’t tough anymore, are you?” (WJ 162). Possible effects of alienation or intimacy show the scope of the narrative givens which are established in the dialogic situation. The second person may thus have effects ranging from engagement to estrangement. Despite being a work of autobiographical writing, Winter Journal, in the end, attempts to include the reader in the process of self-construction and addresses overarching humanistic concerns. When asked about the reason for choosing the second-person perspective, Auster answers that the “displacement from the I to the you, I hope, allows the reader to enter the book” and claims that “[w]e’re having the same experiences in different variations” (Auster, “Paul Auster in Conversation”).17 The possibility of identification of the reader with the narrated memories and experiences seeks to move the focus from individuality to shared experience. Invoking collective or historical memory, Auster more than once thematises his Jewishness (WJ 70–74; 227–229) and historical events or personas (e.g. Kennedy, WJ 182–183). While Maurice Halbwachs differentiates between “autobiographical memory” and “historical memory” (52), Auster’s text engages autobiographical memory to have readers recall similar or shareable experiences and collective memory. In these attempts to provide commonality and to universalise shareable experience, Auster’s second person allows him to confront his own egocentrism and engage the reader in the process of self-narration: [Y]ou have consciously decided to be everyone, to embrace everyone inside you in order to be most fully and freely yourself, since who you are is a mystery and you have no hope that it will ever be solved. (WJ 117)

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This passage is a manifestation of commonality, transferability, and a sharing of history and experience and at the same time incorporates the inaccessibility of the self in its entirety. Involving both the narrating self and the reader in the narrative in complex attempts and affordances to universalise and transfer experience, Winter Journal accounts for an ambiguous but fruitful reading of self- and other-narration.

Memory and the Body and the Embodiment of Memory Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson identify “embodiment” as one key concept of autobiographical subjectivity and stress that “the body has always been there in life writing as the source and site of autobiographical utterance” (54). Acknowledging the role of the material body for self-narration, they hold that “the body is a site of autobiographical knowledge because memory itself is embodied. And life narrative is a site of embodied knowledge (a textual surface on which a person’s experience is inscribed) because autobiographical narrators are embodied subjects” (49).18 In the few scholarly discussions of Winter Journal, critics have in fact predominantly considered the body as a central characteristic of self-narration (Abecassis; Lehnert; Longolius; Brady; Eilers). Although I do not deny the central relevance of the body in Winter Journal, I find that the narrative perspective has been notoriously undervalued in the discussion of physicality in the memoir. What seems to be missing from the conversation is how “body writing” and narrative perspective work together and how the physical body as an expression of subjectivity influences (and sometimes undermines?) the relational impetus of Winter Journal. At the same time, the material body is another means of establishing commonality and shareable experience: “We all have the memories of our bodies. We’ve all been sick, we’ve all hurt ourselves, we’ve all felt joy, we’ve all tasted food we like. Everyone recalls these experiences. It’s part of being human” (Auster, A Life in Words 55). Finally, the text addresses questions of reliability and unreliability, invoking epistemological implications of autobiographical writing. Upholding that he is not a dualist (A Life in Words 65), Auster’s separation between mind and body in Winter Journal and Report from the Interior respectively puts alternative emphasis on the young self and the mature self, on the developing mind and the ageing body. Auster’s wife Siri Hustvedt summarises the tensions of subjectivity and relationality in her comment on the body: The body is at once the “I” and an object in the world that can be seen by others; it has interiority and otherness simultaneously, and it has an implicit relational tendency toward a you, which is there from the beginning. The body is at once natural and social, and lived intersubjective human experience, mobile and sensual and dense with fluctuating feelings, must be incorporated into frames of understanding along with thirdperson investigations into the dynamic neurobiology that accompanies it. (132)

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In contrast to Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, Winter Journal is not based on a particular crisis of the autobiographer but rather takes on an exploration of the self in relation to the body, bodily experiences, and memory, while also dealing with traumatic events and the recurring theme of death. The emphasis on physicality in Winter Journal could be considered an attempt to restore memory, and as a literary journey centred around the body to recollect physical memories. Just as the many “micro-narratives” (Lehnert 783) are only loosely connected and coherent, Auster’s literary journey accumulates memory in a rather eclectic fashion. The second person, which “does not have the assured centredness of an ‘I’” (Sorlin 64) may help to approach these memories of a fragile subject. The writer begins this journey as follows: Perhaps it is just as well to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenomenology of breathing. (WJ 1) The image of a “catalogue of sensory data” foregrounds the relevance of list-making in the memoir (which will be explored at a later point in this chapter) and the deliberately loose organisation of memories and bodily experiences. It also emphasises the impact of the senses as a form of reconnecting with the past and connecting with the reader. When asked about the process of writing Winter Journal, Auster claims to have written it in a kind of trance, and it came to me in the order you see in the final version. I didn’t map it out. I made a little list of some of the things I wanted to examine, but the order never changed. It was there from the beginning. (Auster, A Life in Words 55) Using the process of transcribing music as an image, he continues: “I’ve rarely felt so integrated with what I was writing. I’ve rarely had to struggle less with my material” (55). This sensory, eclectic, hands-on materialisation of memory is repeatedly underlined and stresses the desired affective effect of the autobiographical text. The body thereby serves as an “inventory” (WJ 5), an archive for memories to recollect experiences on a sensory and affective level. In his journey of the physical, Auster moves from “[p]hysical pleasures and physical pains” (WJ 2) to an enumeration of scars and wounds he has received over time (2–11; 179–180), a car accident involving his family (18–27), the death of his father (30–31), and the death of his mother (117–151). Exploring the male body, he provides insights into the “years of phallic obsession” (43), his sexuality in general (42–56), and even a description of his venereal diseases (185–186), as well as physical collapse (31–32) and panic attacks (32; 128).

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Siegumfeldt highlights the “identification of factual with sensory data” (Auster, A Life in Words 60) as particularly engaging. Winter Journal is an attempt to gain and communicate a sensory view of the self and its spatiality, which has always held a place in Auster’s writing (e.g. Eilers 232–239) and which is an indicator of a sense of self: “Always lost, always striking out in the wrong direction, always going around in circles. You have suffered from a lifelong inability to orient yourself in space” (WJ 56–57). In Winter Journal, Auster examines “your body in the air around you” (WJ 11) thematises his surroundings when writing (106–107), while always relating the body to the respective space it inhabits at a specific time. In an extensive list, which is one of the longer passages in Winter Journal (59–112), he enumerates “the places where you have parked your body over the years – the places, for better or worse, that you have called home” (59), which can be read as an invitation to the reader to do the very same. Among the many topics Auster covers in his autobiographical work, the themes of death, mortality, and ageing assume a prominent role. Timothy C. Baker writes in an essay on the body in life-writing that the “autobiographical space allows for a discussion of much broader ideas, particularly illuminating the relation between consciousness and the body, and that between the writing self and the reader” (231). Auster approaches the past through a physical, sensory emphasis on the ageing body, “before it is too late […]. Time is running out, after all” (WJ 1), hinting at the inevitable ageing process and the evanescence of life.19 The theme of posteriority and the legacy of the writer feeds into this comment, and points to the author’s attempts to stylise and maintain his public persona and literary figure. When Auster highlights “that all life is contingent, except for the one necessary fact that sooner or later it will come to an end” (WJ 5), he stresses mortality as an inherent element of life, thereby pointing towards a shared quality in every living being, supported by the second person: We are all going there, you tell yourself, and the question is to what degree a person can remain human while hanging on in a state of helplessness and degradation. You cannot predict what will happen when the day comes for you to crawl into bed for the last time, but if you are not taken suddenly, as both of your parents were, you want to be lovable. If you can. (WJ 216) Here Auster shifts the common aspect of ageing and dying to a collective first-person plural “we”, stressing a sense of communality. As Smith and Watson suggest, narratives of conscious ageing consist of “self-made men [who] present the process of aging as teleological, climbing the rungs of the ladder to a pinnacle of success from where the rest of life may be contemplated in its afterglow” (150). In fact, Smith and Watson predict a potential increase of “memoirs of aging – about desires to revamp the body,

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revive memory, and bewail the finitude of all things mortal” (150). This fascination with ageing, decay, and mortality also becomes apparent in the following passage in Winter Journal, when Auster holds that you, who were once nature’s strongman, able to resist all assaults from within and without, impervious to the somatic and psychological travails that dog the rest of humanity, are not the least bit strong anymore and are rapidly turning into a debilitated wreck. (WJ 21) In this “autobiography of his body” (Abecassis 1035), Auster confronts his (frail) self by foregrounding the body, its declining (male) strength, and the memories connected to it. Physicality permeates the narrative, memories, and the process of writing itself, as “[w]riting down memories seems to make the events happen again. It also triggers discoveries” and as the physical act of writing “generates more language, that generates thoughts, sensations, memories, and ideas that can only occur while you’re writing” (Auster, A Life in Words 59). Death is also one of the most central themes in Auster’s oeuvre, such as in The Invention of Solitude or 4321, and “is frequently the inspiration for creativity” (Peacock, Understanding Paul Auster 12). Winter Journal is to an extent a form of death-writing or “autothanatography”, “a life-writing micro-genre which ostensibly addresses the theme of death – either one’s own or the other’s” (Kusek 150). It thematises both the death(s) of others but also the general awareness of one’s own mortality: “[D]eath freezes you and shuts you down, robbing you of all emotion, all affect, all connection to your own heart” (WJ 130; see also WJ 68).20 A long ekphrasis of the 1950s film D.O.A. (Dead On Arrival) deals with the autobiographer’s “permanent panic of death – he projects it onto a virtual movie screen, only to frame it reflexively always within his own bodily (panic) states” (Abecassis 1051).21 Death is a constant theme in the book, for example in the accounts of Auster’s own near-death experiences (WJ 7; 26–27; 31–32; 189; 216–217) such as a severe car accident, the fish bone incident which almost has Auster suffocating (WJ 217–219), the sudden death of a boy during camp holiday through lightning (WJ 129), sudden deaths (WJ 189), and “[a]n absurd death, a nonsensical death” (WJ 217), and “the ridiculous ways in which people can meet their end” (WJ 217) in the form of the death of his friend’s uncle who fell in the bathroom, “a death that could have been yours five years ago if your head had landed just a few inches to the left” (WJ 217). While Auster reserves his account of his father’s death predominantly for The Invention of Solitude, Winter Journal only briefly thematises Sam Auster’s death (WJ 30–31) and later the death of his grandmother (WJ 189) and, in a much longer passage at the heart of the book, the death of his mother (WJ 118–151). He then broadens the scope by addressing the deaths of celebrity figures Jean-Louis

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Trintignant (WJ 27–30), John Keats (WJ 164–165), James Joyce (WJ 165) or Joseph Joubert (WJ 192; 215–216), and finally hints at the “millions of others [who] have confronted far worse, have not had the luxury of leading an ordinary life, soldiers in combat, for example, civilian casualties in wars, the murdered victims of totalitarian governments” (WJ 217). To close the circle, Auster wonders towards the end of his memoir, “How many mornings are left?” (WJ 230), and thereby alludes to the omnipresence of death as an inherent part of the cycle of life in general. In a sense, these enumerations once again stress the natural process of dying as part of being alive and the relational impetus of the text. According to Smith and Watson, the autobiographer “depends on access to memory to narrate the past in such a way as to situate that experiential history within the present. Memory is thus the source, authenticator, and destabilizer of autobiographical acts” (22). Some autobiographical texts use a more self-reflexive approach to memory, as is the case in most of the selected case studies, in which the act or process of remembering is often directly thematised. Reflecting on the epistemological ambiguity of the concept of memory, James Olney already suggests that a split self is necessary to approach the past (Memory and Narrative 412). If we consider the already established theoretical background of second-person autobiographical writing, this necessity of an external perspective on the self would then be particularly beneficial for Auster’s self-narration. Olney also claims that memory is an adaptive function, with a self-adjusting and self-defining plasticity about it, turning back to the past so as to position itself and us for what is to be dealt with in the future: it adapts continuously to changing circumstances, external and internal, to constitute the self as it is at any given instant. (Memory and Narrative 343) This resonates with Alison Gibbons’s consideration of affective subjectivity, which is to be considered situational “in that it narrativises the self, seeking to locate that self in a place, time and a body” (118). In Winter Journal, instead of claiming that his memories are complete, Auster thematises the elusiveness and limitations of memory and the discrepancy between fact and fiction in his autobiographical works.22 With these metageneric commentaries, the communicative situation is presented as trustworthy and thus as comparable, the limitations are directly addressed and appear regularly in Auster’s autobiographical narratives: “Some memories are so strange to you, so unlikely, so outside the realm of the plausible, that you find it difficult to reconcile them with the fact that you are the person who experienced the events you are remembering” (WJ 184). Here, the narrator draws attention to the limits of language and the mimetic depiction of memory. The admission that memory is fluid is a means to re-establish

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sincerity, factuality, and authenticity in a genre which has long been subverted by postmodernist poetics. A means to react to and subvert the fluidity of memory is what Peacock calls a “pervasive mode of autobiographical reconstruction through listmaking” (“Self-Dispersal” 13). Lists may serve as self-constituting facts, remind of memorisation techniques, and, in Winter Journal, include places where Auster’s body has been (WJ 58), his homes (WJ 59–112), meetings (WJ 103–106), things he has done with his hands (WJ 165–167), his travels (WJ 112–115), his favourite food as a boy (WJ 212–215). In her recent work on list-making, Anne Rüggemeier defines the process as a practice that documents rhythms and routines, sums up and reduces the excess of lived experience, and, both as a practice and as a form, relies on (and sometimes misuses) the reader as a co-constructor of life stories, memories, and autobiographical selfhood. (184) While lists in Winter Journal also serve to condense lived experience, they seem to be a consolidation of his memories, which appear to be catalogued in a conscientious and meticulous manner without raising the claim of being exhaustive and which, as Rüggemeier suggests, rely on the reader’s co-construction.23 The thematic relation between the lists or micro-narratives seems eclectic and intuitive. In his interview with Siegumfeldt, Auster points out that there is “a kind of lyrical force to these lists that harmonizes with the tone I wanted to create with the prose” and comments on the link between his collected memories and the body: It’s essentially a book about the body, but not one hundred percent. This inventory of dwelling places is justified because those are the places that have sheltered my body from the elements. So there’s a reason to include it. The same goes for the sections about my mother, because it was in her body that my body began, and so, it seemed right and proper to talk about her. The passages about her are at the very center, right in the middle of the book. (Auster, A Life in Words 57) Asking “Where does a mind discover itself and know itself except in memory?” (Metaphors of Self 67), Olney emphasises the necessity of remembering to discover the self. Accordingly, Robert Folkenflik sees autobiography as a way to get “an image of our exterior self […] that enables self-contemplation” (215). Winter Journal thus serves to “renegotiate what it means to be a subject and to have an identity, or to renegotiate the kind of relationship [Auster’s] texts are able to establish with the world” (Lehnert 769–770). Auster’s Winter Journal is full of gaps and voids which cannot (or are not supposed to) be filled with memories. His micro-narratives are no

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“coherent story of an individuation” (Lehnert 786), they have no “stringency or causal necessity” (788) and thus place all events and experiences on a same level without favouring one over the other. As Peacock rightly suggests, Auster’s text can be read “as attempts to confront incoherence” (“SelfDispersal” 11) and is structured as a loose form of self-narration, with undated journal entries which are divided by single space lines and which vary greatly in length.24 Accepting the limitations of memory and addressing them accordingly,25 Auster accounts for a less authoritative autobiographical narrative in which “literal gaps, the empty lines remind the readers of all that must remain unsaid by the author and that must be filled in by the readers” (Lehnert 790). Auster vehemently denies any fictionality in his autobiographical work, “No fiction, no fiction” (Auster, “Paul Auster Talks”), and emphasises his loyalty to the autobiographical pact in that it must be truthful. First and foremost, Auster sees authenticity and a certain truthfulness as essential to autobiographical writing, and thus aims to be as accurate as possible, not to cheat. I think cheating would vitiate the whole project, make it meaningless. It’s as if you make a pact with the reader and say, “I’m telling you the truth as I remember it. I know there are probably inaccuracies in here, but they’re not intentional.” […] When people claim to remember exactly what was said, they’re merely using the conventions of popular fiction to embroider their lives. I find those works dishonest. It’s really a moral problem, isn’t it, if you lie and insist you’re telling the truth. (Auster, A Life in Words 57) In Winter Journal, Auster explicitly addresses the accessibility of memory (and, in fact, direct speech is rarely displayed, e.g. in WJ 177). This becomes apparent in the following passage which thematises his missing knowledge of his mother after her death: [E]ven though you happened to be her son, you know next to nothing yourself. Too many gaps, too many silences and evasions, too many threads lost over the years for you to stitch together a coherent story. Useless to talk about her from the outside, then. Whatever can be told must be pulled from the inside, from your insides, the accumulation of memories and perceptions you continue to carry around in your body. (WJ 132) The unreliability of self-narration and memory is also thematised when the narrator adds clarifications such as “If you remember correctly” (WJ 38) or “as you remember it now, more than half a century later” (WJ 38). In other instances, the autobiographer comments on intact memories: “You remember” and “You can recall” (WJ 138). In fact, the question of truthfulness is of minor concern, especially as autobiographical writing can always just

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provide an insight in, a glimpse of, the past and, respectively, the present. Auster’s awareness of the ethical decision to leave out details about someone’s personal life becomes obvious in the following passage: “[Y]ou remember his name but will not divulge it here, since you do not want to embarrass him – assuming he is still alive” (WJ 10). Thus, apart from a direct thematisation of the ethical responsibilities connected to memory and autobiographical writing, Auster addresses the conscious decision to leave gaps, to withhold information. The intertwinement of memory and the body as well as the generalisation of memory are of central concern in Winter Journal. The focus on the body helps Auster to recollect memories in his autobiographical endeavour, which also supports the idea of the body being a necessary means for the embodiment of memory in general. By addressing limitations and ethical concerns, Winter Journal adheres to contemporary generic considerations and reflects the complexity of autobiographical “truth” and subjectivity.

Style, Rhythm, and Materiality In one of his studies on the relation between identity and narrative, Paul J. Eakin claims: “When we write autobiography and when we read it, we repeat in our imaginations the rhythms of identity experience that autobiographical narratives describe” (Living Autobiographically 79). Taking this literally, to complement the previous reflection on memory and the body, I will now turn to the relevance of style and rhythm for an affective engagement of autobiographer and reader in the narrative process in Winter Journal. The body as the centre of existence can also be seen in the remark “that is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well” (WJ 12), and, as a result, the “physical journey” becomes “a mirror of the mental journey” (Auster, “Paul Auster in Conversation”). The intertwinement of movement and writing does not necessarily lead to coherence and order but rather entails a “liberation from the desire to create ‘narrative coherence’” (Lehnert 787). Winter Journal thus focuses on the process of self-narration, i.e. “writing as a process, subjectivity as a process, the body as a process, living as a process” (Brady 63), which goes together with the affiliations of the autobiographical text with the journey and the journal as incoherent, unfinished self-narration. Jennifer Brady, in her comparative essay on Auster and Juan José Millás, focuses on the body as “the primary point of reference for the self” (48) and “as the primary site of perception and the act of writing” (63). Brady claims that Auster prefers the physical body to language in this self-narration and that “[l]anguage is constantly relegated to make room for analysis of the physical body” (51). The problem with this conclusion is that language – especially considering Auster’s background in poetry – has always played a major role in Auster’s writing. Even though Auster proclaims to “put aside [his] stories for now” (WJ 1), he perhaps relegates fictionalisation (“stories”)

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but adheres to a – still literary – language of simplicity and repetition with a very distinct, functional rhetoric. I argue that the style and rhythm of the text leave room for an affective engagement of the reader. No doubt you are a flawed and wounded person, a man who has carried a wound in him from the very beginning (why else would you have spent the whole of your adult life bleeding words onto a page?), and the benefits you derive from alcohol and tobacco serve as crutches to keep your crippled self upright and moving through the world. Self-medication, as your wife calls it. (WJ 15) In an interview with Jonathan Lethem, Auster states that “[w]riting is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind” (150). By equating his writing with “bleeding words onto a page”, Auster again relates the body to the mind, the physical to the literary. The influential role of the body in the reconstruction of memory in Winter Journal is undeniable. However, it is not only used to approach questions of the self and personal subjectivity but the more general “mind-body-problem”. Auster’s mental as well as artistic journey, particularly with regard to the commentary on the writing process, becomes apparent in the following passage, which describes Auster’s response to a dance rehearsal ending his one-year writer’s block, during which “your work had staggered to a halt, you were stuck and confused, […] and you were slowly coming to the realization that you would never be able to write again” (WJ 221). The first thing that struck you was that there was no musical accompaniment. The possibility had never occurred to you – dancing to silence rather than to music – for music had always seemed essential to dance, inseparable from dance, not only because it sets the rhythm and speed of the performance but because it establishes an emotional tone for the spectator, giving a narrative coherence to what would otherwise be entirely abstract, but in this case the dancers’ bodies were responsible for establishing the rhythm and tone of the piece, and once you began to settle into it, you found the absence of music wholly invigorating, since the dancers were hearing the music in their heads, the rhythms in their heads, hearing what could not be heard, […] it wasn’t long before you began to hear those rhythms in your head as well. (WJ 222) This performance of “[b]odies in motion, bodies in space” (WJ 220), Auster explains, encouraged “the scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed you through a crack in the universe” (WJ 220). As Abecassis holds, Auster realises in these experiences “that writing is silent rhythm incarnated as ink

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on a page, meant to be read aloud by a dramatic human voice” (1039).26 Auster regards this experience as responsible for his “second incarnation as a writer” (WJ 224), leading, as he claims, to him regaining his voice as a writer and being able to write “White Spaces” in 1979. The transformational effect of this experience is explained as follows: “The dancers saved you. They are the ones who brought you back to life that evening in December 1978” (WJ 220). The passage demonstrates a link between body and rhythm, while the following passage addresses the transfer between body and mind: You can’t remember the details of their movements, but in your mind you see jumping and spinning, falling and sliding, arms waving and arms dropping to the floor, legs kicking out and running forward, bodies touching and then not touching, and you were impressed by the grace and athleticism of the dancers, the mere sight of their bodies in motion seemed to be carrying you to some unexplored place within yourself, and little by little you felt something lift inside you, felt joy rising through your body and up into your head, a physical joy that was of the mind, a mounting joy that spread and continued to spread through every part of you. (WJ 222–223) The emotions that the autobiographer experiences – a physical transfer of joy from the body to the mind, as he suggests – are contrasted with the choreographer of the ballet company trying to explain the movements after the performance, an endeavour which seems impossible and entirely inadequate: “[H]er words were utterly useless, inadequate to the task of describing the wordless performance you had just seen, for no words could convey the fullness and brute physicality of what the dancers had done” (WJ 223). The physicality Auster addresses here is closely linked to rhythm – not only the rhythm in movement but also the rhythm in speech, words, and in literature, which is realised in the aesthetics of the passage above. The rhythm of the passage, with its enumerations and dichotomies (e.g. “jumping and spinning, falling and sliding”) as well as its repetitions mirror the rhythmic quality of the dance in an affective and engaging attempt at equating body and mind. The sequence highlights the performative aspect of language, in which the form and the rhythm of a text are particularly valued as carrying forward the meaning of words.27 To illustrate these assumptions and claims with an example from Winter Journal, I refer to the following passage, in which Auster proclaims the propelling influence of actual physical and rhythmic movement on the writing process: In order to do what you do, you need to walk. Walking is what brings the words to you, what allows you to hear the rhythms of the words as

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Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal you write them in your head. One foot forward, and then the other foot forward, the double drumbeat of your heart. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, two feet. This, and then that. That, and then this. Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin. You sit at your desk in order to write down the words, but in your head you are still walking, and what you hear is the rhythm of your heart, the beating of your heart. (WJ 224–225)

The passage above is particularly rhythmic itself, the paratactic, elliptic style as well as the repetition of words such as “walk” or “meaning” emphasise the interrelation between the physical and the literary. Movement is an essential characteristic of Winter Journal on the diegetic level, when Auster describes “the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities” (WJ 59) as well as on the formal level in the form of a progressive rhythm, repetitions, paratactic style or run-on sentences. When Auster comments on the transfer of motion and emotion in the dance rehearsal, “the mere sight of their bodies in motion seemed to be carrying you to some unexplored place within yourself” (WJ 222), the effectivity and affectivity of motion are reflected on a formal and diegetic level. The rhythmic engagement with the autobiographer’s writing reflected in the? dance rehearsal experience is, in a sense, mirrored in the aesthetics of Winter Journal in that it provides a rhythmic, flowing narration with a? strong thematic focus on physicality and the affective experience of self-? narrative and self-expression. Auster’s early focus on poetry before writing prose fiction is constantly hovering in his writing, which is very much concerned with rhythm and poetic aesthetics. Kors writes that even Auster’s novels “have the emotional immediacy and resonance of a good poem. They are works of the moment, of present feeling and personal action” (22). Accordingly, Abecassis states that “for Auster plot is tertiary in importance to the rhythmic music of language and secondary to phenomenological problems as such” as “one must bring the reader along if literature still wants to be a social phenomenon, but plots are artistically irrelevant without the rhythmic prose poetry that propels them” (1058). While style and rhythm in Winter Journal make for a possible affective involvement, they can only do so much to avoid the somewhat self-mythologising tensions which accompany autobiographical self-inspection. In addition to the ambivalence of the second-person perspective, Winter Journal equips his autobiographical insights with a physically affective style to both emphasise the relationship between autobiographer, body, and mind but also between audience, body, and text.

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Concluding Remarks As other experimental forms of life-writing which do not account for a coherent reconstruction of the past, Winter Journal is an insightful and innovative autobiographical text. The themes of death and mortality account for a certain degree of subjectivity, which is certainly complicated by the narrative perspective. The function of the body in Winter Journal seems mainly to retrieve memories – and thus to overcome the barrier between body and self. Especially the affective style and rhythm of the text feed into this mind-body-relation and once more emphasise the text’s engaging quality. Auster does not seem to be deeply interested in metanarrative commentary, although he does address epistemological components of autobiographical writing by meticulously evaluating memories and the lack thereof, inconsistencies or uncertainties. The more eclectic approach to selfnarration in the form of selective memories, a fragmented structure, and the ambiguity of the second-person perspective provides an insightful engagement with self and other. My reading of Paul Auster’s Winter Journal has highlighted the innovative (and not unproblematic) use of the second person and its various implications for the communicative situation of the autobiographical text: including you in a literary setting which is traditionally concerned with the autobiographical “I” accounts for a tension between inclusion and exclusion, personal and relational, particular and general – and thus increases the ethical dimension of life-writing. By addressing not only the narrated self but also the reader in the narrative, Auster engages both narratees in a dynamic and ambivalent relationship which encourages a universalisation of experiences by making the second person “capable of being simultaneously generic and specific” (Sorlin 79). Auster moves beyond a postmodern “celebration” of playfulness and indeterminacy. The aesthetics of fragmentation and the questioning of the authenticity and sincerity of narratives is thus substituted by an increased desire to communicate and to include the reader in the narrative act while demonstrating a commitment to the dialogic situation. At the same time, Auster’s seems to foreground his status as literary writer by foregrounding aesthetics and to come to terms with his own mortality and male authorial agency. Despite the doubly deictic you, processes of inclusion and exclusion may limit the affective and cognitive involvement of the reader. However, the ambivalence of the second person allows for a flexibility which resonates with self-doubt, shame, and the potentially universalising gestures throughout Winter Journal (and, as will be shown, its sequel Report from the Interior).

Notes 1 All references preceded by “WJ” are to the following edition: Auster, Paul. Winter Journal. New York: Henry Holt, 2012. 2 In his works, Auster constantly “veers away from labels” (Martin 2). As recurring themes in Auster’s fictional writing, Martin names “the plight of the individual, the

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4

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6 7 8

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10 11

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Embodiment and Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal role of the author, the inadequacy of language, and the overwhelming lack of cognitive certainty associated with the contemporary, largely indifferent, and contingent world that Auster and his protagonists inhabit” (31). Auster is obviously aware of the rarity of the narrative technique (e.g. Auster, A Life in Words 54). Although Winter Journal seems to be the first autobiographical work entirely written in the second person, Auster has used the second person before in his fiction, e.g. in his novels Sunset Park and Invisible (see Peacock’s “Self-Dispersal” for a discussion of the development of the second person in Auster’s writing). Among the first extensive analyses of Auster’s works are Aliki Varvogli’s The World that Is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction (2001), Ilana Shiloh’s Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest (2002), Änne Troester’s A Momentary Stay against Confusion: Selfhood and Authorship in the Work of Paul Auster (2003), and Mark Brown’s Paul Auster (2007). Brendan Martin’s Paul Auster’s Postmodernity (2008), Abecassis, Lehnert, and various other scholars characterise Auster’s work as postmodern. For a study on Auster’s autobiographical writing see Christian Eilers’s Paul Austers autobiographische Werke (2019). In his exchange of letters with J.M. Coetzee, Auster also addresses the relevance of the body: “I took a pause, and a couple of days into the new year began writing something else: an autobiographical work, a collection of fragments and memories, a curious project that revolves around the history of my body, the physical self I have been dragging around with me for sixty-four years now” (Auster and Coetzee 234). For a more linguistic reading of Winter Journal (and Report from the Interior) see Sorlin (57–79). Material from this chapter appears in my essay “‘You’ Reconstructing the Past: Paul Auster’s Winter Journal” (2017). Surely, this endeavour can only be conflicted, and Auster questions the possibility of perceiving oneself, as “You can’t see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether friends or strangers or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you” (WJ 163). It is almost impossible not to read Winter Journal against and alongside Auster’s first autobiographical work, The Invention of Solitude (1982). Written after his father’s death, the text is predominantly crisis-driven, with the first part “Portrait of an Invisible Man” being an attempt to archive his memory: “I thought: my father is gone. If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him” (6). The second part, “The Book of Memory” (which is written in the third person), covers Auster’s personal crisis after his father’s death and the necessity to establish distance using the third person: “He speaks of himself as another in order to tell the story of himself. He must make himself absent in order to find himself there. And so he says A., even as he means to say I” (165). For an in-depth study on memory in Paul Auster’s work see Katarzyna Kuczma’s Remembering Oneself, Charting the Other: Memory as Intertextuality and SelfReflexivity in the Works of Paul Auster (2012). In The Invention of Solitude, Auster focuses on the trauma of losing his father, “the darkest time of the year”, during which he felt “as if I were living somewhere to the side of himself – not really there, but not anywhere else either” and during which “[t]here is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding” (78). The early abortion Auster and his then-girlfriend had to go through is another traumatic memory which is approached in the memoir: “A brutal memory, another one of the things that still keep you awake at night, and while you are certain the two of you made the correct decision not to have the baby […], you are tormented by the memory of that unborn child” (WJ 197).

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13 The autobiographer thematises a scene at his father Sam Auster’s funeral, during which an uncle refused to shake hands with the father’s employee: “[Y]ou were filled with disgust, appalled that he could have treated a person like that, any person, but especially this person, who was there only because he felt it was his duty to be there, and what galls you today, what still floods you with shame, is that you said nothing to your uncle” (WJ 171). 14 Similarly: “It’s important to stress that I don’t find my life to be exceptional in any way and that this is not an autobiography. It’s a book composed of autobiographical fragments shaped like a piece of music. It’s a poem rather than a narrative. One would normally write something like this from a first-person point of view. Had I done that, my own story would have been in central focus, and that’s not what I wanted to do” (Auster, A Life in Words 55). 15 The use of future tense may also have an alienating effect: “One month from today, you will be turning sixty-four” (WJ 2). 16 For example: “This morning, waking in the dimness of another January dawn, […] there is your wife’s face turned toward your face” (WJ 4). 17 Eilers dismisses the second person in Auster’s autobiographical works as an often-mentioned criticism in reviews (285–292) and points to the artificiality of the narrative situation in Winter Journal (e.g. 289), paying little attention to its theoretical, aesthetic, and ethical potential. 18 For further insights into the body in life-writing see e.g. Christopher Stuart and Stephanie Todd’s New Essays on Life Writing and the Body (2009) or Thomas G. Couser’s Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997) and Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (2009). 19 Similarly, Auster reflects on his age in the following passage: “It is an incontestable fact that you are no longer young. One month from today, you will be turning sixty-four. […] [Y]ou cannot stop yourself from thinking about all the others who never managed to get as far as you have” (WJ 2). 20 When Auster is unable to grieve, his body literally takes over: “You couldn’t cry. You couldn’t grieve in the way people normally do, and so your body broke down and did the grieving for you” (WJ 129), and similarly: “Whenever you come to a fork in the road, your body breaks down, for your body has always known what your mind doesn’t know” (WJ 68). 21 For a detailed discussion of film ekphrasis see my chapter on Report from the Interior in this book. 22 In a letter to J.M. Coetzee, Auster suggests an investigation of memory or the deception of memory as a subject: “It strikes me that memory might be something we could investigate. Or, if that is too vast a subject, the deceptions of memory” (Auster and Coetzee 108). 23 When Auster holds that “you forgot to mention your journeys between Brooklyn and Manhattan” (WJ 225), he could easily come back to his original list and alter it but instead opts for the retrospective comment to secure the apparent authenticity and realism of the autobiographical text. 24 Winter Journal features four longer passages, including meditations on a list of places Auster lived in (WJ 59–112), on the death of his mother (WJ 118–151), on the film D.O.A. (WJ 151–163) which expresses Auster’s constant fear of death and stresses his affinity for film and visuality (an aspect which will be explored in Chapter 3), and on Auster’s wife Siri Hustvedt (WJ 197–212). 25 To provide a few further examples: “Your mother is driving, and you have been on the road for some time now, going from where to where you can no longer remember” (WJ 17); “Sixty years later, you have no memories of the accident” (WJ 6–7); “More than fifty years later, you remember nothing about the game that was played that afternoon” (WJ 8); “For some reason, your memories of what happened in that apartment were dim” (WJ 64); “You have no memory of

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making: the decision” (WJ 85); “[E]verything that happened that day has been obliterated from your memory” (WJ 118); “You can’t remember the details” (WJ 222). 26 Abecassis reads Winter Journal as “privileging the bodily and rhythmic nature of the pivotal ‘dance epiphany’ in its relation to theory of language, explaining the usage of cinematic ekphrasis as representations of the panic-inducing obsession with death, and, lastly, underlining Auster’s thorough consciousness of the interaction between necessity and randomness in human affairs” (1059). 27 Auster explains: “There is a rhythm in walking, a binary rhythm, as with so many things to pertain to the human body: two eyes, two hands, two legs, two feet, and the heartbeat, which is a kind of thump-thump, thump-thump. Walking seems to create a rhythm that is conducive to the production of language, especially of course, poetry. […] I get up and pace around the room a lot, and just that, the act of moving around, the act of walking, seems to generate the next gust of words. Writing is an intensely physical activity for me; not only am I holding the pen or typing on the typewriter, which are material objects, I’m also moving around, as if building up momentum for the next round with the pen or typewriter” (Auster, A Life in Words 61–62).

Bibliography Abecassis, Jack I. “Montaigne in Brooklyn: Paul Auster’s Body Writing.” MLN 129.4 (2014): 1035–1059. Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. 1982. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Auster, Paul. “Jonathan Lethem Talks with Paul Auster.” Interview by Jonathan Lethem. Conversations with Paul Auster. Ed. James M. Hutchisson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. 149–162. Auster, Paul. A Life in Words: Conversations with I.B. Siegumfeldt. New York: Seven Stories, 2017. Auster, Paul. “Paul Auster Talks with Vicente Molina Foix at Fnac Castellana.” YouTube, uploaded by Fnac España, 27 April 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v= JXsiW4_WaIo. Accessed 10 August 2022. Auster, Paul. Report from the Interior. London: Faber and Faber, 2013. Auster, Paul. “White Spaces.” Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. 153–162. Auster, Paul. Winter Journal. New York: Henry Holt, 2012. Auster, Paul. “Why Write?” Collected Prose. New York: Henry Holt, 2010. 265–272. Auster, Paul, and J.M. Coetzee. Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011. London: Vintage, 2013. Baker, Timothy C. “The Art of Losing: The Place of Death in Writers’ Memoirs.” Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature. Ed. Richard Bradford. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 219–233. Brady, Jennifer. “Writing Life in the Twenty-First Century: The Body and the Self in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal and Juan José Millás’s El Mundo.” Comparative Literature Studies 55.1 (2018): 47–65. Brockmeier, Jens. “Time.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. 2. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 876–877. Brown, Mark. Paul Auster. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

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Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Eakin, Paul J. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Eilers, Christian. Paul Austers autobiographische Werke: Stationen einer Schriftstellerkarriere. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019. Fludernik, Monika. “The Category of ‘Person’ in Fiction: You and We NarrativeMultiplicity and Indeterminacy of Reference.” Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. 101–141. Fludernik, Monika. “Second Person Fiction: Narrative You As Addressee And/Or Protagonist.” Arbeiten aus der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 18 (1993): 217–247. Gibbons, Alison. “Contemporary Autofiction and Metamodern Affect.” Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth After Postmodernism. Eds. Robin van den Akker et al. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 117–130. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. 1950. Trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980. Herman, David. “Textual ‘You’ and Double Deixis in Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place.” Style 28.3 (1994): 378–410. Huber, Irmtraud. Literature after Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hustvedt, Siri. “Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in Crossing Disciplines.” American Lives. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013. 111–135. Kors, Stacey. “The Solitude of Invention.” Columbia Magazine. 2012. www.maga zine.columbia.edu/article/solitude-invention. Accessed 10 August 2022. Kuczma, Katarzyna. Remembering Oneself, Charting the Other: Memory as Intertextuality and Self-Reflexivity in the Works of Paul Auster. Trier: WVT, 2012. Kusek, Robert. “Challenging Generic Conventions: Levels of Life by Julian Barnes and the Genre of (Auto)thanatography.” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 26.2 (2015): 149–160. Lehnert, Robert. “Autobiography, Memoir and Beyond: Fiction and Non-Fiction in Philip Roth’s The Facts and Paul Auster’s Winter Journal.” Anglia 132.4 (2014): 757–796. Lejeune, Philippe. “Autobiography in the Third Person.” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 27–50. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Eds. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Trans. Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Longolius, Sonja. Performing Authorship: Strategies of “Becoming an Author” in the Works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Bielefeld:Transcript, 2016. Marcus, Laura. Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Martin, Brendan. Paul Auster’s Postmodernity. New York: Routledge, 2008. Olney, James. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

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Peacock, James. “Self-Dispersal and Self-Help: Paul Auster’s Second Person.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2020): 1–17. Peacock, James. Understanding Paul Auster. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Rüggemeier, Anne. “Life Writing and the Poetics of List-Making: On the Manifestations, Effects, and Possible Uses of Lists in Life Writing.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 36.1 (2021): 183–194. Schmitt, Arnaud. The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making It Real. London: Routledge, 2017. Schönberger-Stepien, Christina. “‘You’ Reconstructing the Past: Paul Auster’s Winter Journal.” Auto/biography: Its Telescopic and Temporal Dimensions. Ed. Beatrice Barbalato. Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017. 89–98. Shiloh, Ilana. Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Sorlin, Sandrine. The Stylistics of ‘You’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Stuart, Christopher, and Stephanie Todd. New Essays on Life Writing and the Body. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Troester, Änne. A Momentary Stay Against Confusion: Selfhood and Authorship in the Work of Paul Auster. 2003. University of Leipzig, PhD Dissertation. Varvogli, Aliki. The World that Is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001.

3

Visuality and Self in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior

While Paul Auster’s Winter Journal sheds light onto the author’s memories related to bodily experiences, the second instalment of Auster’s autobiographical musings, Report from the Interior, shifts the focus from the body towards “exploring your mind as you remember it from childhood” (RI 4).1 With Auster’s book on his philosophical, intellectual development up until the age of twelve,2 the writer creates an archive to reach beyond the self and to emphasise the relevance of a cultural and collective past for the individual. He covers memories which seem relatable, pictures childlike thoughts and ideas which innately come to mind when trying to re-construct the past and to constitute the various impressions on the self from multiple perspectives.3 Given the consistent use of the second-person perspective, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior could well be read together. As Report from the Interior is more informed by generic hybridity and intermediality than Winter Journal, I will interweave the second person with other forming characteristics inducing an interplay of distance and proximity, such as intermediality, visuality, and the thematisation of memory in the memoir. In Report from the Interior, “the literary and the everyday intersect in intriguing ways” (Mildorf 138) and thereby establish a complex narrative which, in the long-run, accounts for a universalising form of autobiographical writing with a stark tendency towards the everyday. Report from the Interior is, structurally, both innovative and eclectic and consists of four generically different parts. The first part, “Report from the Interior”, concentrates on the writer’s personal experiences, thoughts, and intellectual development up until the age of twelve. In the second part, “Two Blows to the Head”, Auster summarises and comments on two films which had a decisive impact on the author – The Incredible Shrinking Man (watched at the age of ten) and I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (watched at the age of fourteen). The third section, “Time Capsule”, consists of a collection of Auster’s letters to his ex-wife Lydia Davis.4 Finally, the fourth section, “Album”, combines text passages from the previous three parts with visual material Auster compiled in a long research process and consists of photographs and depictions of celebrities, stills from films, comics and cartoons, newspaper articles, advertisements, food, gadgets, paintings, or portrait DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374-3

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shots of famous people, places, and more (in combination with the captions to the images, which are in fact sentences, phrases, or passages from the main text of the other sections). The visual material provides Auster’s prose with a new setting, in which memories are supported by visual evidence for the display of cultural, sociohistorical, political events and artefacts. In an interview, Auster states about the genesis of Report from the Interior: Winter Journal and Report from the Interior are a pair, a diptych. After finishing Winter Journal, I realized there were other things I wanted to explore – but from another point of view. If Winter Journal is essentially a book about the physical self, this one is more about inner life, inner development, thought, morality, aesthetics, politics, religion. All the things that go into making a person. That was my object, I think. At the same time, I’m not a dualist, and it would be wrong to say one is the “body book” and the other is the “mind book.” The perspective shifts, that’s all. Report from the Interior is probably the strangest book I’ve ever written. (Auster, A Life in Words 65) The strangeness of the book may in fact stem from its peculiar structure, which allows for an insightful but fragmentary approach to the self in the sense that it is open-ended, non-exclusive, eclectic. The blurb of Report from the Interior reads that “this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before” (RI blurb). As the sequel to Winter Journal, it is not only the second-person perspective but the overall four-part structure of the work which makes the memoir a challenge to generic implications and expectations. My reading of Report from the Interior comments on the formal, structural, and thematic ways of universalising experience in the memoir. It will hence focus on the use of the second-person narrative perspective, with a consideration of self-narration and exemplarity, and the autobiographical text as a site of enforced (and somewhat idealised) dialogue. In addition, as the memoir provides insightful examples of archival structures, this chapter will trace the diverse media which are presented in Report from the Interior, e.g. the letter as a form of archive with a dialogic function as well as the visual, socio-historical, and cultural archive.

Encountering Yourself: You and Self-Dialogue As a sequel to Winter Journal, Report from the Interior is both a continuation and subversion of its predecessor. The autobiographical second-person text establishes a similar ambiguity regarding the relationship between author, narrator, and protagonist. The effect of the present-tense secondperson perspective is, to a great extent, comparable to its use in Winter

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Journal. However, and I will draw this out by referring to suitable selected examples, the engagement with the intellectual development of the narrated self offers a few more possible interpretations and considerations regarding the functions of the second-person perspective. Report from the Interior is an attempt “to chart the workings of your young mind, to look at yourself in isolation and explore the internal geography of your boyhood” (RI 45). In an interview, Auster states that Report from the Interior “wasn’t written as a form of therapy; it was an attempt to turn myself inside out and examine what I was made of” (Auster, “An Interview with Paul Auster” 27). By mapping the influences of culture, politics, history, and identity, Auster parallels his journey of the body in Winter Journal with a journey of the mind. This subchapter predominantly refers to part 1 and 3 of Report from the Interior, as they are concerned with the verbal (in contrast to the two visual sections). As already discussed in Winter Journal, the second person provides a distance between the narrating self and the narrated self, depicting “the vulnerability of self-knowledge and fragmentation of subjectivity” (Sorlin, “Auster’s Autobiographical” 2). This distance is very well phrased in Report from the Interior, in which Auster describes adolescence in that the “rift between one’s inner self and the self one presents to the world is never wider, when soul and body are most drastically at odds” (RI 90). To give an example: What possessed you to attack that old Philco, to eviscerate it and render it useless, to annihilate it? Were you angry at your parents? Were you striking back at them for some wrong you felt they had done to you, or were you merely in one of those fractious, rebellious moods that sometimes get the better of small children? You have no idea. (RI 54; my emphasis) The passage above features two forms of you. The last instance (in italics), in contrast to the previous uses of the second person, refers to the present self (who has no idea of what the younger self thought at the time), while the other instances refer to the past, younger self (Sorlin, “Auster’s Autobiographical” 8). As has been discussed in the theoretical part of this study, the second-person pronoun oscillates between distance and intimacy. The first level of distance is created between past and present self as addressee. An example of how the voice of the young, past self is reflected can be found here: “[Y]ou could tell a lie when the situation demanded you tell one, even if you knew that God would eventually punish you for it. But better God, you thought, than your parents” (RI 56). The critical distance that the second person establishes between a more knowing, experienced self and the younger, past self becomes evident in the following passage: “The Cold War was in full bloom then, the Red Scare had entered its most poisonous phase, but you were too young to understand that” (RI 59). Through the second

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person, the self becomes an object of analysis, resulting, to an extent, in an objectification and observation of the self. Interestingly, Auster even uses the third person in a few instances, which enables Auster to address his earlier self from a distance, feeling estranged and detached from it: Dreaded boredom, long and lonely hours of blankness and silence, entire mornings and afternoons when the world stopped spinning around you, and yet that barren ground proved to be more important than most of the gardens you played in, for that was where you taught yourself how to be alone, and only when a person is alone can his mind run free. (RI 44; my emphasis) In this passage, Auster combines the more intimate self-narration with you as a substitute for I and establishes himself as an Other in the third person, which stresses the more self-reflective commenting function of the narrative perspective. Narrative you is often seen as a distancing device but may in fact also create intimacy with the narrated and past self. An intimate, affectionate relationship (Mildorf 130) is, for example, established in the following passage: “Who were you, little man? How did you become a person who could think, and if you could think, where did your thoughts take you?” (RI 5). Here, the age difference and the intimacy of self-address are displayed very clearly. The occasional use of the past tense emphasises the separation and distance between narrating self and narrated self, not necessarily a patronising stance but, again, a caring, affectionate one, stressing the emotional and intellectual development of the present self. Of very central concern in the formal and structural discussion of Report from the Interior is the third part, “Time Capsule”, which comprises a collection of Auster’s letters to his ex-wife Lydia Davis which Auster received during the writing process of Report from the Interior, consisting of material of 500 pages written between 1966 and the late 1970s. But why the inclusion of letters? The section moves away from attempts to universalise experience. Acting “as an editor on behalf of a past version of himself” (Watson 2) and leaving the reader with “a recrafted narrative as much as a collection of old letters” (Watson 7), Auster quotes extensively from the letters and by exploring the “innate subjectivity of the epistolary genre” (Watson 3) gives the reader an insight into a more self-centred first-person perspective of a younger Paul Auster. The writer comments on his selection process and writes that the letters can be considered love letters, but the ups and downs of that love are not what concern you now, […] for many other things are discussed in the letters as well, and it is those other things that belong to the project you have been engaged in for the past several months.

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They are what you will be extracting from the time capsule that has fallen into your hands. (RI 183) As a reminder, the intended agenda of Auster’s project is to explore his younger mind and his intellectual development. The second person is only used sparingly in this section but marks a distance between the I in the letter and the narrating self of Report from the Interior. [A]s you continued to work on this book, exploring the mental landscape of your boyhood, you were also visiting yourself as a young man, reading words you had written so long ago that you felt as if you were reading the words of a stranger, so distanced was that person to you now, so alien, so unformed, with a sloppy, hasty handwriting that does not resemble how you write today, and as you slowly digested the material and put it in chronological order, you understood that this massive pile of paper was the journal you hadn’t been able to write when you were eighteen, that the letters were nothing less than a time capsule of your late adolescence and early adulthood, a sharp, highly focused picture of a period that had largely blurred in your memory – and therefore precious to you, the only door you have ever found that opens directly to your past. (RI 181) Auster himself reads these “words of a stranger” with a pronounced distance between the younger and older self. Auster learns in his letters to Lydia “what it means to be an artist, to be the man who becomes the artist by turning himself inside out” (RI 260). The distance also demonstrates that Auster himself assumes the role of the critical observer, just as the reader of the letters (and the memoir itself). Especially in his re-reading of the letters, the writer assumes an even more distanced stance towards his earlier self: Forget twenty-three and twenty-four, then, and all the years that follow. It is the stranger who intrigues you, the floundering boy-man who writes letters from his mother’s apartment in Newark […] – for you have lost contact with that person, and as you listen to him speak on the page, you scarcely recognize him anymore. (RI 182; my emphasis)5 In the beginning of the letter section Auster writes, as already mentioned, about the limitations and form of the journal, especially as “you didn’t know what person you were supposed to be addressing, whether you were talking to yourself or to someone else” (RI 179). Sara Watson claims that the section “only enhances the feeling that the correspondence is a stylistic exercise as much as a human interaction” (11). Considering the one-sided

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depiction of the exchange of letters, the most prominent form of dialogue is still between Auster’s former and present self. This is particularly the case as the letters symbolise and refer to a person different from the present self: “I read through my own letters and felt I was encountering a stranger, a boy I only vaguely knew and had completely lost sight of” (Auster, A Life in Words 72). The distance between narrating and narrated self is particularly foregrounded in the rediscovery, reception, and reproduction of the letters. It is thus not only the second-person perspective which creates a distance towards the narrated self, but the letters themselves. Both the reader and Auster are able to revisit the letters and the past through this particular twist – a twist which can be read as an attempt to establish common ground between audience and writer. An effect of the combination of first-person letters and Auster’s narrative perspective is the increased critical distance. For example, Auster points out weaknesses in his writing when commenting on “a rambling letter of six pages that begins oddly, pretentiously, with a number of chopped-up sentences” (RI 188).6 To contextualise his letters and provide background information, Auster intersperses the letters with comments (in the second person, of course, sometimes in the main text, sometimes in footnotes), for example: “You wanted to isolate yourself as thoroughly as possible because you had started writing a novel, and it was your juvenile belief (or romantic belief, or misconstrued belief) that novels should be written in isolation” (RI 193). The critical observation of his early self extends the already established distance of the second person. He continues: [O]f course you were not capable of writing a novel when you were twenty, or twenty-one, or twenty-two, you were too young and inexperienced, your ideas were still evolving and therefore continually in flux, so you failed, failed again and again, and yet when you look back on those failures now, you don’t consider them to have been a waste of time. (RI 194) Again, the passage demonstrates the possibility of critical self-reflection and of providing a commentary on the author’s earlier writings. Similar comments on his early ignorance and delusion regarding his work occur in the following: You remember thinking it was quite good, but that doesn’t mean your judgment was correct, and even if you hoped to have it produced, you never thought of it as anything more than a novice work, an experiment. What astounds you now is how deluded you were in thinking you could mount a production, how ignorant you were about the ways of filmmaking, how ridiculously naïve and foolishly optimistic you were about the whole business. You knew nothing, absolutely nothing. (RI 230)

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These comments and judgements reflect on the archival material (the letters) of collected and stored memories of the past which are revisited by Auster’s narrating self. The diverse ways of commenting and reformulating experiences and memories of the past (in the present) represent and depict the fluidity of memory and of (critical) self-understanding. Regarding the temporal distance of the “documented” memories in the letters to a more experienced and older self, the dialogue between Auster and his earlier version of self leaves room for more: “I wanted to write you a long letter in order to hold your attention for as long as possible” (RI 271). The ambiguity of the second person, which refers both to Lydia and the reader ironises its rhetorical message to both engage Lydia and an audience in his writing. Watson, finally, describes Report from the Interior as an “archaeological dig: layers of the self are exposed and made to engage in dialog with the present” (18). In addition, Auster “encourages the reader to confront their own to his, in a fulfilling and shared metatextual experience” (Watson 18). In the end, the question remains if this must result in the reader’s scepticism or alienation? These letters and responses to the very same serve a similar archival function as the “album” (as will be explored in the respective chapter). They are another quintessential form and medium of communication, of sharing information, emotions, and a history, engaging the past and present self in a productive dialogue of self-exploration. Despite the potential distancing effect of the second person, Report from the Interior demonstrates how the intellectual development is negotiated through self-address and self-dialogue, particularly in those passages which display the distance between narrating and experiencing self.

You, the Personal, and the General At the beginning of Report from the Interior, Auster outlines his underlying motivation for writing about his intellectual developments during his childhood: “Not because you find yourself a rare or exceptional object of study, but precisely because you don’t, because you think of yourself as anyone, as everyone” (RI 4).7 This posture of insignificance will become even more relevant in my chapter on Coetzee’s Summertime. Similar to Auster’s Winter Journal, his work Report from the Interior seems to enforce a universality of experience and memory to be seen, to invoke Arnaud Schmitt’s take on resonance again, “as collaborative work and shared reenactment” (Phenomenology 130). But how is this resonance transported in Report from the Interior? The observable interplay of the personal and general in the memoir not only emerges from the second-person perspective, but also from the thematically and aesthetically complex structure of the text. The work differs from Winter Journal in that it is an eclectic and heterogeneous collage of memories in four different modes. Auster’s autobiographical text is presented as “a story of the times – which makes it everyone’s story” (RI

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blurb). This “story of the times” may resonate with those who either have similar experiences or connect any kind of memories to the cultural and historical memory inscribed in Auster’s autobiographical text but certainly does not apply to everyone. It more importantly attempts to tone down the self-centred perspective of the I by encouraging a communicative act of self-narration.8 Auster is even more specific regarding the plan for his autobiographical endeavour: In thinking about where you want to go with this, you have decided not to cross the boundary of twelve, for after the age of twelve you were no longer a child, adolescence was looming, glimmers of adulthood had already begun to flicker in your brain, and you were transformed into a different kind of being from the small person whose life was a constant plunge into the new, who every day did something for the first time, even several things, or many things, and it is this slow progress from ignorance toward something less than ignorance that concerns you now. (RI 5) Regarding this very passage, Siegumfeldt observes in an interview with Auster that his focus is “not the extraordinary, not the exceptional – but rather that which is ordinary, or simply human” (Auster, A Life in Words 65). The withdrawal from an autodiegetic autobiographical narrative is, furthermore, a linguistic pronunciation of the limits of self-knowledge, which makes self-narration “something less than ignorance” (RI 5), as Auster writes. The second-person perspective is not the only way to shift the focus to the “general” in an autobiographical text. In another instance, Auster emphasises the communicative function of writing, aware that the gesture also applies to his particular choices of self-presentation: Until then, you had always considered the act of writing to be a gesture that moved from the inside to the outside, a reaching out toward an other. The words you wrote were destined to be read by someone who was not yourself, a letter to be read by a friend, for example, or a school paper to be read by the teacher who had given you the assignment, or, in the case of your poems and stories, to be read by some unknown person, an imaginary anyone. (RI 179) It is also, as Siegumfeldt observes, the ordinary and human in the narrative which may appeal to an individual other than (or in addition to) the narrated self. The appellation of the narratee is an essential means for Auster’s generalising gesture – which may be perceived as either encouraging or lecturing: Forgive others, always forgive others – but never yourself. Say please and thank you. Don’t put your elbows on the table. Don’t brag. Never say unkind things about a person behind his back. Remember to put

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your dirty clothes in the hamper. Turn out the lights before you leave a room. Look people in the eye when you talk to them. Don’t talk back to your parents. Wash your hands with soap and make sure to scrub under your nails. Never tell lies, never steal, never hit your little sister. Shake hands firmly. Be home by five o’clock. Brush your teeth before going to bed. And above all remember: don’t walk under ladders, avoid black cats, and never let your feet touch the cracks in sidewalks. (RI 16–17) In this passage, the rules that the autobiographical self has probably experienced as a boy evolve into a list of general requirements of social life and conduct. These rules obviously come from an outside source, are imprinted on him by the multiple others who must have voiced them (Sorlin, “Auster’s Autobiographical” 25; Bakhtin 277) – and thus stress the relationality of the self while at the same time addressing a reader with this imperative. Another appellation of the self can also be transferred to the reader as an encouragement to reflect on their past: “Dig up the old stories, scratch around for whatever you can find, then hold up the shards to the light and have a look at them. Do that. Try to do that” (RI 5).9 While Mildorf describes the reduced specificity – which has already been addressed in the reading of Winter Journal – as “a strategy of withdrawal”, a “strategy of deferring information [which] contributes to the sense of elusiveness that makes one wonder whether one can ever hope to learn more about the author” (137). One could also say that Auster uses a strategy of retracting the self behind the everyday and of providing a platform for, as Auster writes, “anyone, [for] everyone” (RI 4). While “autobiographers may possibly even use the effect of resonance to deflect attention from themselves” (Mildorf 126), Report from the Interior seems to serve both purposes of autobiographical writing: addressing the self and addressing the reader. Mildorf claims that the marked lack of specificity in these accounts also creates a sense of elusiveness, as if Auster were offering intimate glimpses into his life and thoughts without ever actually making good on the offer. What he relates could have happened to many people growing up in America in the 1950s, and the trivia he lists do not help one form a better sense of how these contributed to making Auster Auster. (132) Identification then depends, just as in Winter Journal, both on the level of details regarding the narrated or depicted memories as well as on the shared experience between author/narrator and reader. As Schmitt states, “the reader must acknowledge that she must find a way to turn the centripetal nature of resonance into an empathic counter-movement” (90). Particularly when the everyday is addressed, the narrative becomes “sufficiently general to draw in

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readers who may have had similar childhoods and who could therefore be set on their own trains of memories concerning that period of their lives” (Mildorf 131). What Mildorf describes in the following as the reader’s “thwarted expectations” can only be considered a problem if we assume a naïve, autobiographical pact in the first place since Auster “exteriorizes his inner life and thus turns it into a common experience that many people growing up under similar circumstances in the 1950s may recognize and identify with” (138). What may prevent the reader from identification is that they need to be familiar with similar circumstances to relate to the narrative. Although I agree that the memoir removes the “special”, the particular, in favour of a more general experience, I see Auster’s techniques of withdrawal as an attempt to establish common ground, and a universalisation of experience in the hope that we have something to share.

Visuality, Intermediality, and the Collective The relevance of documentation, photography, and visuality plays an interesting role in autobiographical writing, especially when photographs are considered not only informative but affective and collective artefacts. This aspect becomes important in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior. But even a lack of personal photography is noteworthy. With regard to cover photographs, it is striking that the first hardcover editions of both Winter Journal and Report from the Interior do not feature photographs of Paul Auster (Winter Journal has a blue “X” scraped into a white, snowy surface, while Report from the Interior a white sketched “O” on red background) just as Barnes’s Levels of Life, Coetzee’s Summertime, and Rushdie’s Joseph Anton do not provide any cover photographs of the author, at least in their first edition. The lack of photography might be indicative of another pronounced withdrawal of the (visual) authorial self. The question arises how photography complicates autobiographical narrative. Annette Kuhn’s work Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (2002) provides a valuable insight into the interrelations of memory and photography, as well as the personal and the relational. Although we might think that personal photography is rather individual, Kuhn still claims that “if the memories are one’s individual’s, their associations extend far beyond the personal. They spread into an extended network of meanings that bring together the personal with the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social, the historical” (4). The benefits of relating experiences and memories to the visual material available may be beneficial for a historical and public engagement with the past: Memory work makes it possible to explore connections between “public” historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender, and “personal” memory. In these case histories outer and inner, social and personal, historical and psychical coalesce; and the web of interconnections that binds them together is made visible. (Kuhn 4)

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Kuhn even goes so far as to say that “[a]ll memory texts […] constantly call to mind the collective nature of the activity of remembering” (5). Case studies are capable of being read in a number of ways: for the stories they tell about a particular life, stories which will perhaps speak with a peculiar urgency to readers in whom they elicit recognition of a shared history; as a contribution towards understanding how memory works culturally; for what they offer more generally to theories of culture and methods of cultural analysis; and perhaps most important of all, as a recipe, a toolkit, even an inspiration, for the reader’s own memory work. (Kuhn 8–9) The collective level indicates that certain material carries both personal memory and serves an archival function. In her impressive and seminal work On Photography, Susan Sontag both captures the essence and function of the photograph and the gist of the relevance of photography for this study: “To collect photographs is to collect the world” (3). In Report from the Interior, visuality and intermediality are central guiding principles. They appear in sections two and four, while section one and three focus on the verbal and Auster’s intellectual development. While the section “Two Blows to the Head” provides an insightful and detailed form of film ekphrasis, the section “Album” consists of a collection of rather objective cultural visual material in the form of photographs and images of celebrities (politicians, sportsmen etc.), stills from films, cartoons, newspapers, food, gadgets, paintings and drawings, or sports. Richard Phelan describes the conglomerate of oppositions in Report from the Interior as “a play between self and former self, between self and other, between the verbal and its other, the visual” (4). Hinting at the immense impact of memory work and the impact of visual culture on our self-making, Kuhn points out: Memory work presents new possibilities for enriching our understanding not only of how films work as texts, but also of how we use films and other images and representations to make our selves, how we construct our own histories through memory, even how we position ourselves within wider, more public, histories. (39) Intermediality in Report from the Interior is expressed through film, photography, art/painting/drawing, and more and will be related to the argument that these medial influences serve an archival function and as a platform of recognition on the part of the reader. Visuality and forms of cultural memory include the filmic influences on the writer. The book’s second section “Two Blows to the Head” can be subsumed

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under the aspect of “visuality”, although this section operates in a different way than the actual visual presentation of cultural and historical photographic material in the last part of Report from the Interior.10 The film section covers the effect and impact of two particular films on Auster and gives a very detailed and most attentive verbal description (“cinematic ekphrasis”, Abecassis 1059) of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). These films are of course not selected at random but are related to the other sections in the book and mirror certain themes such as growing up, selfknowledge, and invisibility. As Auster writes, The Incredible Shrinking Man causes a “philosophical shock, a metaphysical shock” (RI 106) and “leaves you in a state of gasping exaltation, feeling as if you have been given a new brain” (RI 106), and fundamentally changes and shapes the protagonist’s way of thinking: [Y]ou feel that the world has changed its shape within you, that the world you live in now is no longer the same world that existed two hours ago, that it will not and cannot ever be the same again. (RI 131) Paul Auster’s detailed description of two of his favourite films in Report from the Interior reminds strongly of Annette Kuhn’s analysis of the film Mandy. Kuhn states that “film theory, cultural theory, can surely risk a tentative embrace of ‘feeling’, or ‘naïve’ response, whilst yet avoiding abandonment to the apparently unanalysable – the immanence of pure emotion, pure experience” (38–39). Auster particularly emphasises the distance between narrating and narrated I, as the film is “so far in advance of what your child’s imagination ever could have conceived that the wind is knocked out of you” (RI 122). Furthermore, the films deal with a fear of being or becoming invisible, as referred to in The Incredible Shrinking Man (“no longer visible”, RI 130) and I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (“no longer visible”, RI 173).11 The latter has a similar effect on the young Auster and causes “the next cinematic earthquake of your life, the next film that blasted in on you and altered the composition of your inner world” (RI 135). Interestingly, both films make use of the second person and thereby create ambivalence within their narratives as well (Sorlin, Stylistics 69–71) – ensuring that the autobiographical I does not take centre-stage but leaves room for other subjectivities. The dedication of around 70 pages to the cultural and intellectual impact of two films on the author links the first part to the second part of the book in that it continues the presentation of intellectual development and thinking. While the first part of the book covers the years from six until the age of 12, “Two Blows to the Head” exemplifies the relevance and role of art, culture, and visuality in our intellectual development and upbringing. The detailed description of and the involvement with these two very films demonstrate their relevance to Auster and, at the same time, provide a link to the other instances of cultural storage space – letters, photography, and the very own childhood

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memories. Mildorf, hinting at the rather superficial and even “popular” reading of the films (136), states the following: “To draw on Schmitt’s concept of resonance, one can say that Auster’s film ekphrasis appeals precisely because of its commonness” (137).13 The “common” engagement with the film, together with an affective style drawing on sensory and cognitive perception, encourages the involvement of the reader but also displays the writer’s personal experience. As already indicated, the fourth part of Report from the Interior, the “Album” section, links photographs and text passages from the previous sections and complicates, once again, the relationship between the visual and the verbal. Siegumfeldt describes the fourth part as “an alternative world where images from films, cartoons, and historical scenes were as real to you as people of flesh and blood. This is where cartoon figures like Farmer Gray and Felix the Cat truly exist” (Auster, A Life in Words 74). The title “Album” at first glance seems to promise an intimate (visual) insight into the autobiographer’s life, as in a family album, a photo album, and in private photographs. However, the section is not intimate but “conspicuously void of the personal” (Fjellestad 184), an archive of public and cultural material, “document[ing] a historical exterior in which the writing self is embedded; they are […] a memoir of a historical period re-created from the public archives of images” (Fjellestad 185). The section breaks, as Danuta Fjellestad suggests, the “autophotographic pact” (167).14 This “storage system”, scrapbook, or archive of memories and experience is, in addition to the secondperson narrative, another way of providing a space for identification, and another sign of Auster’s universalising gesture.15 Fjellestad claims that “Auster weaves together a rich web of visual, acoustic, audiovisual, and mixed media to suggest that media configure not only perceptions of the external world but of one’s interiority” (168). This setting engages the reader in the visual presentation of the past – with images from an archive leading away from the protagonist’s personal life and stressing the historical and cultural – universal – worth and impact of the memories.16 These captions are passages from the main texts, i.e. the preceding sections (part one to three) of Report from the Interior.17 Sontag even goes so far as to state that “[p]hotographs – and quotations – seem, because they are taken to be pieces of reality, more authentic than extended literary narratives” (74). I would evoke Roland Barthes’s conception of the archival “proof” here, which may counteract Auster’s gaps and uncertainties regarding his memory: 12

The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory (how many photographs are outside of individual time), but for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty: The Photograph’s essence is to ratify what it represents. (Camera Lucida 85)

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This documentary mode is particularly relevant for Auster’s Report from the Interior as the photographs mark an archival function, a “report” of the past: “Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images” (Sontag 153).18 Annette Kuhn holds that “popular memory also speaks volumes about the culture and the society in which it is produced and circulated and to which it always alludes” (69). This also applies to Auster’s Report from the Interior: sharing memory, sharing celebrations, the moon landing, and other culturally important events lead to a collective feel of popular memory, as Kuhn states: “Being comprised of stories people tell each other about the past, their past, popular memory is a shared story” (75). Emotional involvement may also be triggered by the depiction of soldiers or the strikes against Vietnam war at Columbia. Richard Phelan suitably claims that the “visual story is a tonal atmosphere or an envelope to the verbal texts” (10). While in The Invention of Solitude Auster includes personal photographs to “fill in gaps, confirm impressions, offer proof where none had existed before” (Auster, Invention 15) in the revisiting of his father’s past, Report from the Interior operates differently. In the memoir, the personal statements and snippets of thought are visualised by more public images, thus leading the reader from the specific to the general – while, in a circular manner, also referring the cultural background back to the more personal autobiographical passages (which, vice versa, refer back to the collective). Not only since Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes has photography played an essential role in autobiographical writing and selfportrayal. In fact, Barthes’s text is written from a first- and third-person perspective and displays personal photographs which give an insight into Barthes’s personal life. In Camera Lucida, Barthes describes photographs as “emanation[s] of past reality” (Camera Lucida 88) and raises the question of what belongs to the personal and to the collective. In contrast to Barthes’s more personal photographs, Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior provides an even more explicit imagery of the historical and cultural past. While Barthes states that “[e]very photograph is a certificate of presence” (Camera Lucida 87), it is quite telling that the documentation of Auster’s life is deficient to non-existent – as are many other forms of documentation: You thought you had left no traces. All the stories and poems you wrote in your boyhood and adolescence have vanished, no more than a few photographs exist of you from your early childhood to your midthirties, nearly everything you did and said and thought when you were young has been forgotten, and even if there are many things that you remember, there are more, a thousand times more, that you do not. The letter written to you by Otto Graham when you were turning eight has disappeared. The postcard sent to you by Stan Musial has disappeared. The baseball trophy given to you when you were ten has disappeared.

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No drawings, no examples of your early handwriting, no class pictures from grade school, no report cards, no summer-camp pictures, no home movies, no team pictures, no letters from friends, parents, or relatives. (RI 177)19 As Auster notes, “nearly every trace of your early existence was wiped out” (RI 178), which is why the “Album” images “stand in as surrogates for missing or non-existent personal images” (R. Phelan 20).20 While the album section captures the verbal memories from the previous sections, we may “observe […] that the gap between the visual and the verbal points to the gap between representation and reality” (R. Phelan 21). Photography and visuality in the memoir may be considered an attempt to recover his past (which, as Auster writes, is not well documented) but also the past in general, and to create a catalogue and archive of cultural memory. The question is how the photographs complicate the rest of the autobiographical narrative in Auster’s Report from the Interior. How does the memoir benefit from the visual archive? One consideration could be that the photographs and visual material work in an informative and affective manner. While self-portraits in narrative texts tend to highlight the presence of the author’s body (Rugg 14), Auster excludes his self-portrait from his memoir (at least in the original first edition). This lack shifts the focus, once more, from the personal to the general and stresses the value of cultural archives and memory.21 Steve Edwards, in his short introduction to Photography, writes that “documentary, in all its forms, entails an objective, unmediated record of facts. Documentary is said to provide its viewers with direct access to truth” (27). Documentary, one might think, may be seen as evidence of Auster’s personal memory, but not so in Report from the Interior: As impersonal images, they may also appeal to a wider community, creating a form of cultural and historical common ground which may resonate with the viewer and the writer’s personal connection to the images and memories. Fjellestad observes that the images “are predominantly linked to the narrative moments of bitterness, disappointment, fear, and a sense of failure; no pictures are connected to the (relatively rare) moments of joy and happiness” (178). The universality of the images contrasts the writer’s particular experiences and thus furthers the potential generality of memories. Due to the spatial and structural distance between the album and the other sections of the book, it remains questionable if the reader draws the connection, goes back to re-read the respective passages or, even more unlikely, goes to the captions in the album section for reference while reading the other sections.22 The rather provisional nature of the album thereby seems to mirror the fragmentary and eclectic style of the memoir. Hence, the operationality is slightly problematic and once more complicates the rhetorical frame of the autobiographical narrative. Thus, although the “album” as a collection of pictures is combined with the author’s autobiographical background, the dominance of the black and

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white, depersonalised and historical images (there are 107 of them), emphasise the value of this album as a collection of cultural and historical memories. Timothy Dow Adams, in his work Light Writing & Life Writing (2000), has addressed the role of photography in Auster’s The Invention of Solitude from 1982,23 more specifically in the memoir’s first section “Portrait of an Invisible Man”. The use of photographs to restore the memory of the autobiographer’s father is particularly striking in comparison to the role of photography in Report from the Interior and even Winter Journal. The opaqueness of Auster’s autobiographical works with regard to personal and autobiographical photography shapes, to a certain extent, the notion of visuality and relationality in the selected texts. While the second part of The Invention of Solitude is written in the third person, it does not actually depict photographs in contrast to the first section. If we compare Auster’s Report from the Interior to his earlier autobiographical work The Invention of Solitude, we find an entirely different set of photographical material.24 Adams states that “Auster sees the images not as reminders of the past but as evidence for the present [and] uses the photographs not to reinforce memory but to reinvent memory” (39). Shareable memory and experience in Auster’s autobiographical works already come up in The Invention of Solitude: “The point of Auster’s memoir is to create ‘a shared story,’ the story of the family’s lack of story and the author’s need to share stories with his son” (Adams 29). Auster repeats this sharing in another “album”, the one included in Report from the Interior. However, he even goes one step further and instead of leaving the pages blank, he includes photographs of collective and historical importance. Overall, the privacy of the photograph25 is contrasted by the lack of personal visual material. What seems to be a withdrawal is, in fact, a shift of focus towards the more general, collective memory, presented in the form of public images and a cultural archive. By juxtaposing – or intertwining – the verbal and the visual, Report from the Interior creates an interplay of public and private, personal and collective, and past and present self.

Shared Subjectivity and the Elusiveness of Memory Auster’s Report from the Interior distinguishes itself from other memoirs through a particularly “everyday” style and “everyday” content. The simple language in the memoir is – comparable to Winter Journal, one means of making the narrative more exemplary and occurs mostly in decidedly “sententious expressions or aphoristic language” which seem to “generalize propositions about the world” (Mildorf 133). The second-person narrative in present tense thereby “adheres to this accommodation and creation of intimacy and immediacy” (Mildorf 133). This does not apply to the part “Time Capsule”, which features first-person letters to Auster’s ex-wife Lydia Davis, which disrupt the otherwise consistent second-person narrative.26 The

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compilation of Report from the Interior seems complex, especially with regard to the access to early childhood memories: It was one thing to write about your body [in Winter Journal], to catalogue the manifold knocks and pleasures experienced by your physical self, but exploring your mind as you remember it from childhood will no doubt be a more difficult task – perhaps an impossible one. (RI 4) Right at the beginning Auster hints at the difficulty of accessing childhood memories and introduces the elusiveness of memory as an epistemological conflict in his autobiographical endeavour. Mildorf observes that [t]he everyday and the “everyman’s” perspective predominate on the story level while quotidian styles and registers of communicating the fragmented stories underline the commonness of Auster’s life. Despite its proclaimed interiority, the book never really allows us to peek into more personal issues. (137) The title Report from the Interior conveys interesting allusions: A “report” as something which is more organised, matter of fact, and objective is contrasted by the word “interior”, which suggests a personal, intimate selfportrayal. However, as we learn in the book, this intimacy is contrasted by the focus on the universal, the everyday and thus takes the focus from the autobiographical self and shifts it towards a more generalised and universal form of life-narration. Auster thereby “uses an almost colloquial or casual but at the same time apophthegmatic style in his presentation of fragments and his collage of quotidian items and experiences” (Mildorf 138). This casualty feeds into the engagement of the reader and Auster’s depiction of the universal, “non-special”. As already quoted, Mildorf argues that the distance of the second person and an emphasis of the everyday promote “a sense of withdrawal” (126). This withdrawal stands in contrast to Auster’s fiction, in which the author “writes himself into his storyworld” (Mildorf 135). The aesthetics of fragmentation appears in the collection of “shards” (RI 5), as Auster writes, and recognises memory and the reconstruction of the self as something inherently incomplete, shattered, and most unlikely to create a whole. This is formally displayed by the structural organisation of Report from the Interior. Similar to Auster’s Winter Journal, Report from the Interior thus thematises the elusiveness of memory and a dissociation from the very same, both on a formal and on a thematic level (Mildorf 126). The following passage mirrors questions of identity and self-knowledge:

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Visuality and Self in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior Every now and then, for no apparent reason, you would suddenly lose track of who you were. It was as if the being who inhabited your body had turned into an impostor, or, more precisely, into no one at all, and as you felt your selfhood dribble out of you, you would walk around in a state of stunned dissociation, not sure if it was yesterday or tomorrow, not sure if the world in front of you was real or a figment of someone else’s imagination. This happened often during your childhood for you to give these mental fugues a name. Daze, you said to yourself, I’m in a daze, and even though these dream-like interludes were transitory, rarely lasting more than three or four minutes, the strangeness of feeling hollowed out like that would linger for hours afterward. (RI 44)27

The second person in this example emphasises the distance between present and past self by thematising Auster’s forming identity, supported by the past tense. Doubly deictic you, as Sandrine Sorlin holds, also “brings to the fore the vulnerability of memories” (Stylistics 63), along with a “difficulty for Auster to reconstruct the story of his life from scratch” (64). The ambiguity of the second person may then be suitable for self-narration as it “does not have the assured centredness of an ‘I’” (64). The section “Time Capsule”, which features Lydia Davis’s letters, ends with the following words: It is morning. It has taken me many hours to write you this one-paragraph letter. I am tired beyond belief, but I had to finish. The birds are going wild, an early morning song, ecstatic and abundant. I’m sure it will be a beautiful day. I’ll sleep through it like a child. I wanted to write you a long letter in order to hold your attention for as long as possible. I have written with love and fatigue. (RI 271) Similar to Auster’s overall endeavour in Report from the Interior, the writer tries to hold the addressee’s attention (Mildorf 138) and uses his younger selves’ words (“I”) to finish the narrative prose sections in his memoir, leaving a gap between the past and present self and addressing Lydia and the reader. Smith and Watson write: “As memory researchers from fields as diverse as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy have argued, remembering involves a reinterpretation of the past in the present” (22). This reinterpretation is orchestrated by the distance between the present and past self and depends on multiple factors, such as the accessibility of memory. In 1957, Auster was a boy of ten years, with some vague understanding that the Suez Crisis has ended, that Eisenhower has sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in order to stop the riots and help desegregate the schools, that Hurricane Audrey has killed more than five hundred people in Texas and Louisiana, that a

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book about the end of the world called On the Beach has been published, but you know nothing about the publication of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and even less than nothing about the death of Joseph McCarthy or the expulsion of Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamster union from the AFL-CIO. (RI 105) What the passage shows is a differentiation of which information and, as a result, which memories seem relevant to a young boy in contrast to a more experienced, present self. An epistemological take on Report from the Interior becomes apparent when discussing the various passages which hint at the elusiveness of memory and the problematics of reconstructing the past “truthfully”. Your earliest thoughts, remnants of how you lived inside yourself as a small boy. You can remember only some of it, isolated bits and pieces, brief flashes of recognition that surge up in you unexpectedly at random moments – brought on by the smell of something, or the touch of something, or the way the light falls on something in the here and now of adulthood. (RI 4) Invoking a Proustian madeleine moment, Auster addresses the fragmentariness and incoherence of memories which are often connected to certain stimuli, and which bring about a glimpse of the past. Interestingly, Auster sees his way of childlike perception as follows: “The only proof you have that your memories are not entirely deceptive is the fact that you still occasionally fall into the old ways of thinking” (RI 4). The second person may serve the author’s attempts to revive the voice of the younger self, maintaining ambivalence and flexibility in an endeavour which can only be fragmented and incomplete. Leaving out information is thus not only a side effect of the fluidity of memory, but also a means of leaving room for interpretation. Auster writes: “You can’t remember being read to, nor can you remember learning how to read” (RI 19). There is a certain immediacy with which Auster approaches his memories but even the very selection of episodes he includes in his self-narration: Why hark back to this story now, this ancient scrape with fear that turned out rather well for you in the end, so well, in fact, that you walked away from it without suffering the consequences you had anticipated with such dread? (RI 82) Auster also thematises the availability of memory in the following: “You have touched on all these events before, but the letters weren’t available to you then, and there was much that you had forgotten or misremembered

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when you sat down to write those pages in 1996” (RI 200). A thematisation of (knowledge) gaps and the inaccessibility of memory are often employed as a means to establish authenticity and address epistemological concerns. In addition, Auster acknowledges the distinction between past and present self while at the same time emphasising the sameness of the two poles, thus creating a paradox and pointing at the incapability to grasp self and identity in definite terms and concepts: “In spite of the outward evidence, you are still who you were, even if you are no longer the same person” (RI 5). Fragmentation and incoherence are essential characteristics of the autobiographical text, while “memories of specific events alternate with more general reflections” (Mildorf 134). The eclectic nature of Report from the Interior becomes evident in the following passage, in which Auster comments on the restrictions and peculiarities of memory: At least you think you can remember, you believe you remember, but perhaps you are not remembering at all, or remembering only a later remembrance of what you think you thought in that distant time which is all but lost to you now. (RI 4) He even thinks about other possibilities of storing and collecting memories in his writing, such as a diary, an “antifiction” (Lejeune, On Diary 201), which could have been helpful in his autobiographical endeavour and in encountering the elusiveness of memory: You wish now that you had kept a diary, a continuous record of your thoughts, your movements through the world, your conversations with others, your response to books, films, and paintings, your comments on people met and places seen, but you never developed the habit of writing about yourself. You tried to start a journal when you were eighteen, but you stopped after just two days, feeling uncomfortable, self-conscious, confused about the purpose of the undertaking […] You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget – and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost. (RI 178–179)28 Auster’s decision to focus entirely on his early childhood complicates the autobiographical process and restricts the time frame Auster can cover: “In thinking about where you want to go with this, you have decided not to cross the boundary of twelve, for after the age of twelve you were no longer a child” (RI 5).29 Auster addresses the challenges of recollecting memories in his interview with Siegumfeldt, in which he states that “it was more difficult to write

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Report from the Interior than Winter Journal” (Auster, A Life in Words 66). He also admits that there was a lot of material that seemed important but which I’d mostly forgotten. I needed to concentrate on the things I remembered well in order to discuss them in enough detail. So many other things have vanished. I have no access to them. (Auster, A Life in Words 66) The very first sentences of Report from the Interior – which demonstrate the literariness of Auster’s autobiographical writing – also render the miniatures of memory and experience Auster tries to recollect: In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the clouds had names. Scissors could walk, telephones and teapots were first cousins, eyes and eyeglasses were brothers. The face of the clock was a human face, each pea in your bowl had a different personality, and the grille on the front of your parents’ car was a grinning mouth with many teeth. Pens were airships. Coins were flying saucers. The branches of trees were arms. Stones could think, and God was everywhere. (RI 3) Mirroring the beginning of Genesis 1, Auster explores life, nature, objects, and childlike naivety while observing that “God was everywhere”. This depiction of the everyday and the literariness is the onset of the exploration of distance and proximity in Report from the Interior. The personifications in this passage, meaning the equipping of everyday items such as scissors with human characteristics and qualities reflect Auster’s childlike perception (see also his linguistic misunderstandings in RI 11–12). At the same time, the passage already introduces the visuality of things which is so persistent in Report from the Interior. The style in the memoir is thus dependent on the perspective taken. Auster’s observations are narrated in a childlike innocence as well, trying to capture the voice of the young boy, for example when he explores his first cartoons on TV, which undermine reality in a way that “you can’t help feeling that a nasty trick has been played on you” (RI 9).30 Auster also comments on the elusiveness of memory and transports his reservations towards reliability into the narrative: “There was a time in your life, perhaps before six or after six – the chronology has blurred – when you believed the alphabet contained two extra letters” (RI 23). Very early on in the text, Auster establishes his situation as a young boy and sets the scene for a complex engagement with the past self and the past environment and culture: Your circumstances at the time were as follows: midcentury America; mother and father; tricycles, bicycles, and wagons; radios and black-

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Visuality and Self in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior and-white televisions; standard-shift cars; two small apartments and then a house in the suburbs; fragile health early on, then normal boyhood strength; public school; a family from the striving middle class; a town of fifteen thousand populated by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, all white except for a smattering of black people, but no Buddhists, Hindus, or Muslims; a little sister and eight first cousins; comic books; Rootie Kazootie and Pinky Lee; “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”; Campbell’s soup, Wonder bread, and canned peas; souped-up cars (hot rods) and cigarettes for twenty-three cents a pack; a little world inside the big world, which was the entire world for you back then, since the big world was not yet visible. (RI 6–7)

Auster’s little world, as he writes, is interwoven with the cultural, political, and social past, which is depicted as generally as possible through the listmaking Auster employs (see Chapter 2). In another instance, Auster describes this unsystematic act of list-making as follows: “Random, unrelated events, connected only by the fact that they all occurred in the year of your birth, 1947” (RI 64). The trusting and naïve perspective of the longer passage above may also resonate with the reader, who can relate to this “little world inside the big world, which was the entire world for you back then, since the big world was not yet visible” (RI 7). In one of his letters to Lydia, Auster explores his own philosophical paradox: The world is in my head. My body is in the world. You still stand by that paradox, which was an attempt to capture the strange doubleness of being alive, the inexorable union of inner and outer that accompanies each beat of a person’s heart from birth until death. (RI 192)31 The “inexorable union of inner and outer” and multi-dimensionality is also indicative of Auster’s life-writing, in its negotiation of self and other, private and public, particular and general, and – with a nod to Winter Journal – the connectivity of self and body.

Concluding Remarks In a letter, Auster writes about the elusiveness of the self and emphasises the relevance of expression or writing: “For me the problem of the world is first of all a problem of the self, and the solution can be accomplished only by beginning within and then… moving without. Expression, not mastery, is the key” (RI 260). The complex structural form of the autobiographical expression Auster chooses, however, complicates the autobiographical endeavour as it provides multiple nuances and ambivalences of engagement,

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self-narration, and visual resonance. When Auster states in an interview that “that’s what all writing is about: how to find your own humanity and your connection to other human beings” (Auster, A Life in Words 81), he foregrounds the relationality in writing and his attempts at connecting and sharing but also illuminates the forcefulness of connection. As for the first part of Report from the Interior, Auster himself describes his stories “to be fundamental stories. Stories we all have. Memories consolidated by emotion” (Auster, A Life in Words 70). Problematic as this universalising gesture may be, the second person first and foremost “oils the wheels for the ethical encounter with an ‘other’ being” (Sorlin, Stylistics 77) as it opens a space the for autobiographical self and the reader. Although the title of the autobiographical work suggests that the readers get a “report from the interior”, they are equipped with a much more complex and less straightforward form of self-and-other narration. The tension between distance and proximity – between narrating and narrated self as well as between the narrative and the reader – is also shaped by the general and the specific, the personal and the relational. The structural and medial diversity of the book, the narrative perspective, and the fragmentary and everyday style support ambivalent readings of the text. While Winter Journal is concerned with a more physical approach to the self, Report from the Interior interweaves Auster’s intellectual development with memories of the past which move beyond the personal and provide an insight of the socio-political, historical, and cultural past. The self-withdrawal may in a sense allow for reader immersion but at the same time cannot fully circumvent the forcefulness with which Auster’s autobiographical narrative tries to convey universality.

Notes 1 All references preceded by “RI” are to the following edition: Auster, Paul. Report from the Interior. London: Faber and Faber, 2013. 2 The reviews were rather mixed and often criticised the eclectic, repetitive, narcissistic style (Thomson; Akbar). 3 What may be striking is the very restricted space Auster dedicates to his family (RI 45–48), although this might also be explained by his other autobiographical works which covered his personal family background, such as the death of his father in The Invention of Solitude and the death of his mother in Winter Journal. 4 Lydia Davis had kept Auster’s letters after their separation: “Lydia contacted me. She was planning to sell her papers to a library, and it turned out that she had saved most of the letters I had written to her. The letters themselves, the physical letters, belonged to her, but the words belonged to me. That’s the law. No one can publish anything from those letters without my permission, but she has the right to sell the physical objects. So, she wanted me to go through them and see if I wanted anything sealed off” (Auster, A Life in Words 72). See also Auster’s account on how he got hold of the letters, glad that his memories were not entirely lost (RI 179–181). 5 Similarly: “And what did Paul think? Of how much he loved Lydia. In thinking about her, was he objective? Only as far as love allows to be objective. The nature of his thoughts? Wistful. Infinite sadness. Infinite longing” (RI 187–188).

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6 Auster’s criticism is not restricted to his style or writing in general but also includes moral concerns or questions: “It puzzles you that you shared the story of sleeping with another girl with the girl you thought of as your girlfriend, for the genial tone that runs through the letter does not suggest that you and Lydia were on the outs just then. At the same time, you were both young, you had never lived together, you were not planning to get married, and because you were free to do what you wanted, perhaps you felt the story would amuse her, as if it were a story you were sharing with a friend, rather than a lover or (future) spouse” (RI 253). 7 See in contrast Rousseau’s autobiographical work Confessions, in which he emphasises the uniqueness of the self: “I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist. If I am not more deserving, at least I am different” (Rousseau 5). 8 Sorlin writes that “even when ‘you’ does not refer to the reader at all, as is the case in most of Auster’s ‘you,’ the reader does feel ‘pulled in’ by the pronoun, invited to participate somehow in the dialogue that is played out for her” (“Auster’s Autobiographical” 34). Sorlin even argues that Report from the Interior provides “some space for readers as ‘horizontal’ co-participants in the reading/writing of Auster’s life. The proximity generated by ‘you’ triggers some form of solidarity with the reader” (34). 9 Auster comments on this passage in an interview: “I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, and I felt that this debate with myself about what I was proposing to do was a natural part of the book” (Auster, A Life in Words 75). 10 In Report from the Interior, there are additional film descriptions, such as The War of the Worlds and even the cartoon Felix the Cat. Structurally, however, they assume a less prominent position in the memoir. 11 This ties in with the following: “you sometimes wondered if you would ever grow up” (RI 80). 12 Ekphrasis also occurs in Winter Journal, in which Auster retells the story of the film D.O.A. and “recreates in his reader the somatic panic that he himself experiences during his own real panic attacks” (Abecassis 1055). 13 The identification goes so far that “Scott Carey is no longer just a character in a film. Scott Carey is you” (RI 110). 14 For studies on photography and life-writing see Linda Haverty Rugg’s Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (1997) and Timothy Dow Adams’s Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (2000). Examples of memoirs featuring photographs include Annette Kuhn, who combines her scholarship with personal narrative in Family Secrets (1995). For a more general link between photography and literature see François Brunet’s Photography and Literature (2009). 15 In fact, Kuhn even wonders how “images and sounds of and from, or referring to, ‘the past’ – from a past indeed that precedes my own lifetime – can feel so familiar; and how this sense of recognition might connect with the activity of remembering, at both a personal and a collective level” (107). The resonance of cultural memory seems to move beyond the limitations to having experienced memories. 16 Nancy K. Miller’s But Enough About Me (2002) is another first-person narrative which includes personal and cultural material and is interspersed with photographs. 17 Fjellestad observes that about 67 images refer to the first section “Report from the Interior”, 26 to the second section, 14 to the third section. These texts are also written in the second person and are not strictly separated but linked through three dots at the beginning and end, thus creating a flowing sketch of the past and making the gaps visible.

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18 Sontag also holds that “[p]hotographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (4). In a more provocative sense, the event needs evidence, and thus demands its portrayal in writing or in photography: “There can be no evidence, photographic or otherwise, of an event until the event itself has been named and characterized” (19). In this respect, Sontag also claims that photographs “tell one what there is; they make an inventory” (22) and simultaneously “turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past” (71). 19 See also: “For a person born in the mid-twentieth century, the era of the inexpensive camera, the postwar boom days when every middle-class American family was gripped by shutterbug fever, your life is the least documented of anyone you have ever known” (RI 177). 20 Rugg writes that an “absence of actual photographs from their autobiographies and their emphasis on that absence […] illustrate a denial of photography’s power to unequivocally denote reality, even as the presence of photography as metaphor stresses the power of photography in the imagination” (232). Kuhn points out that, most generally, family photographs “function to record, to immortalize, something regarded as especially important by and for the family concerned: a rite of passage, a possession, a relationship, an occasion of special social significance” (61). 21 Fjellestad’s interpretation of the “Album” section (175–182) moves into an opposite direction in claiming that the images in the section are “an integral part of [Auster]” (178). However, Fjellestad provides an insightful analysis of the section with great attention to detail in connecting images and words from the previous section. 22 Fjellestad even finds that the connections seem mostly “arbitrary, random, whimsical, tenuous, and quite feeble” (174). 23 The intermediality in Auster’s autobiographical writing is already introduced in The Invention of Solitude: “For all the book’s postmodernism, The Invention of Solitude is profoundly relational and, in a sense, referential – if not reverential – gracefully performing a variety of functions of life writing, serving not just as biography, autobiography, memoir, portraiture, self-portraiture, and family album but also as confession, eulogy, and epitaph” (Adams 38). 24 The Invention of Solitude has, as suggested before, a close relationship to photography, as it features some photographs of Auster’s father which Auster uses to reconstruct the past. Two photographs are actually reproduced in The Invention of Solitude: the cover photograph and a group photograph, which had been ripped apart and pieced together by Auster’s grandmother to expel Auster’s grandfather from the picture. In The Invention of Solitude, Samuel Auster, the father, left behind “several hundred photographs – stashed away in faded manilla envelopes, affixed to the blank pages of warped albums, scattered loosely in drawers”, while “[o]ne very big album, bound in expensive leather with a goldstamped title on the cover – This is Our Life: The Austers – was totally blank inside” (Auster, Invention 13–14). As Auster writes “no one had ever bothered to fill it” (Invention 14). Adams holds that “Auster’s book attempts to subvert the congruence of protagonist, subject, and narrator by various devices, including writing in the third person and reproducing two photographs that problematize rather than supplement or document the narrative” (25). 25 “The reading of public photographs is always, at bottom, a private reading” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 97). Barthes claims that “[e]ach photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: The age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of

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Visuality and Self in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly” (Camera Lucida 98). While in Winter Journal the name of Auster’s wife Siri appears once, Report from the Interior features his ex-wife’s full name, Lydia Davis. The “uncanny sense of having fallen asleep with your eyes open, but at the same time knowing you were fully awake, conscious of where you were, and yet not there at all somehow, floating outside yourself, a phantom without weight or substance, an uninhabited shell of flesh and bone, a nonperson” (RI 45) mirrors Auster’s gradual self-knowledge: “Then there’s a leap into the next phase […] when memories start to coalesce. Until then, I think we’re largely fragmentary beings, but a moment of self-awareness comes, self-consciousness, of being able to say to yourself: ‘I’m thinking the thought that I’m thinking.’ This kind of reflection is very different from just thinking” (Auster, A Life in Words 66). He continues: “Once you have the ability to look at yourself from the outside, memories become continuous and the narrative self begins. As time goes on, you lose much of it. […] I found that some of the most vivid memories were of the foolish and ridiculous things I did” (Auster, A Life in Words 66–67). “The problem with the journal was that you didn’t know what person you were supposed to be addressing, whether you were talking to yourself or to someone else, and if it was yourself, how strange and perplexing that seemed, for why bother to tell yourself things you already knew, why take the trouble to revisit things you had just experienced, and if it was someone else, then who was that person and how could addressing someone else be construed as keeping a journal?” (RI 179). His argument is that at the age of six, “[o]ur lives enter a new dimension […], for that is the moment when we acquire the ability to tell our stories to ourselves, to begin the uninterrupted narrative that continues until the day we die” (RI 13). Also: “God was the commander of the celestial mind police, the unseen, allpowerful one who could invade your head and listen to your thoughts, who could hear you talking to yourself and translate the silence into words” (RI 12). Auster refers to this paradox in an interview as well: “That’s it. We perceive the world. The world is our idea. We can only see the world to the extent that we can perceive it. In other words, the world is somehow a construction of our imagination, but at the same time, we’re concrete beings who occupy space. We have bodies, and we’re in the world that we perceive. So it’s a paradox. I think those two sentences capture the essence of what I’ve been trying to do all my life” (Auster, A Life in Words 74).

Bibliography Abecassis, Jack I. “Montaigne in Brooklyn: Paul Auster’s Body Writing.” MLN 129.4 (2014): 1035–1059. Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Akbar, Arifa. “Book Review: Report from the Interior, by Paul Auster.” Independent. 01 November 2013. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ reviews/book-review-report-from-the-interior-by-paul-auster-8915557.html. Accessed 10 August 2022. Auster, Paul. “An Interview with Paul Auster.” By Larry McCaffery and Linda Gregory. Conversations with Paul Auster. Ed. James M. Hutchisson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. 13–39. Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. 1982. London: Faber and Faber, 2012.

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Auster, Paul. “Jonathan Lethem Talks with Paul Auster.” By Jonathan Lethem. Conversations with Paul Auster. Ed. James M. Hutchisson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. 149–162. Auster, Paul. A Life in Words: Conversations with I.B. Siegumfeldt. New York: Seven Stories, 2017. Auster, Paul. Report from the Interior. London: Faber and Faber, 2013. Auster, Paul. “White Spaces.” Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. 153–162. Auster, Paul. “Why Write?” Collected Prose. New York: Henry Holt, 2010. 265–272. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 1980. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. 1975. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Edwards, Steve. Photography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Eilers, Christian. Paul Austers autobiographische Werke: Stationen einer Schriftstellerkarriere. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019. Fjellestad, Danuta. “‘A Figment of Someone Else’s Imagination’: Intermedial Games in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior.” Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies. Eds. Nassim Winnie Balestrini and Ina Bergmann. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. 167–189. Kuczma, Katarzyna. Remembering Oneself, Charting the Other: Memory as Intertextuality and Self-Reflexivity in the Works of Paul Auster. Trier: WVT, 2012. Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Visitation. London: Verso, 1995. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Eds. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Trans. Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Longolius, Sonja. Performing Authorship: Strategies of “Becoming an Author” in the Works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016. Martin, Brendan. Paul Auster’s Postmodernity. New York: Routledge, 2008. Mildorf, Jarmila. “Autobiography, the Literary, and the Everyday in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 17.1 (2019): 125–140. Miller, Nancy K. But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Phelan, Richard. “Auster’s ‘Album’ in Report from the Interior: Analysis and Analogies.” E-rea 17.1 (2019). 15 December 2019. doi.org/10.4000/erea.9179. Accessed 10 August 2022. Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Schmitt, Arnaud. The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making It Real. London: Routledge, 2017. Shiloh, Ilana. Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. New York: Anchor, 1990. Sorlin, Sandrine. “Auster’s Autobiographical ‘You’ in Report from the Interior: Multi-Faceted (Inter)Subjectivities.” E-rea 17.1 (2019). 15 December 2019. doi.org/ 10.4000/erea.8900. Accessed 10 August 2022.

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Sorlin, Sandrine. The Stylistics of “You”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Thomson, Ian. “Review: Report from the Interior, by Paul Auster.” Financial Times. 8 November 2013. www.ft.com/content/1c009f60-4569-11e3-b98b-00144feabdc0. Accessed 10 August 2022. Troester, Änne. A Momentary Stay Against Confusion: Selfhood and Authorship in the Work of Paul Auster. 2003. University of Leipzig, PhD Dissertation. Watson, Sara. “In Search of Lost Lines: ‘Time Capsule’ and the Epistolary Genre in Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior.” E-rea 17.1 (2019). 15 December 2019. doi. org/10.4000/erea.9065. Accessed 10 August 2022.

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Personal and Exemplary Grief in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life

As one of the most acclaimed contemporary English writers, Julian Barnes is known for his diverse fictional and non-fictional oeuvre, his genre-bending writing, and a certain affinity for subversion, privacy, and disguise.1 Born in 1946 in Leicester, the Francophile writer has contributed to the (postmodern) literary landscape both in his fictional works (e.g. novels and short stories) and his non-fictional writing (e.g. essays of literary criticism and journalistic essays). Barnes has received several awards for his works, including the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending and the David Cohen Prize for Literature for his lifetime achievement in the same year. While Barnes is probably less known for his autobiographical writing than for his other works, such as Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), it still comes as a surprise that Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008), an essayistic memoir on death and mortality, and Levels of Life (2013), his most recent memoir, have not prompted more critical research. The two texts, despite dealing with the theme of death and grief, are inherently different and still tragically intertwined as Nothing to Be Frightened Of was published just months before, Levels of Life a few years after the cancer diagnosis and death of Barnes’s wife of 29 years, Pat Kavanagh.2 In his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes, who identifies as a “thanatophobe” (Nothing 25), addresses the theme of death from a historical and philosophical but also from a personal viewpoint. Nothing to Be Frightened Of, an essayistic memoir and reflection on how to deal with mortality and (fear of) death, was prompted by the death of his parents which “had an effect, a personal effect to begin with, obviously, but then a kind of literary effect” (Barnes, “The Final Interview” 163). He continues to explain: I didn’t want to write an essay addressing death in a head-on fashion – what, whither, why, whence – because I’m not that sort of writer. I sensed that the approach would have to be episodic, discursive, memoirish, flowing between essay and memoir. (Barnes, “The Final Interview” 163) DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374-4

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In a way, this rather essayistic approach also suits Barnes’s autobiographical endeavour in Levels of Life, in which the writer addresses the theme of death and grief from a necessarily personal but also from a historical, philosophical, and literary perspective.3 With Levels of Life, which was published in 2013 and which Mark Lawson describes as a “very Barnesian book about love and grief” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”), Barnes has selected both a most traditional and experimental approach to self-narration.4 In the interview above, Barnes expresses a general unwillingness to label his works, stating: “If they ask me to label it, I would just say a ‘book.’ Or, I would say, the author’s name is the label” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”).5 It is exactly this indefiniteness of generic status and labels which makes Levels of Life a complex and intriguing work on grief. Being subdivided into three generically distinctive parts, the tripartite structure includes a biographical essay entitled “The Sin of Height”, a fictional short story entitled “On the Level”, and an autobiographical essayistic piece entitled “The Loss of Depth”.6 The third part thereby assumes a rather prominent position and takes up about half the length of the book. Recurring thematic motifs in Levels of Life are all tied to ballooning and photography, height and depth, love and grief, and resonate in all three parts. The first part of Levels of Life, “The Sin of Height”, introduces the tropes of ballooning and photography, with ballooning being a sort of magic, photography being a sort of truth. Truth and magic leads you to love. The idea of putting two things together, which then change the world. Imagining two people put together and how […] the world is changed thereby. (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”) It deals with the history of ballooning, and gives a biographical and essayistic account of the aerostatic French photographer Félix Tournachon (also known as Nadar) around the end of the 19th century, “who first put two things together” (LL 27), displaying his innovations and experiments in aeronautics and photography as well as, although very briefly, Nadar’s love for and loss of his wife Ernestine after 55 years of marriage.7 “On the Level” is constructed as a fictional short story about the (historical person and) actress Sarah Bernhardt and soldier Fred Burnaby, developing from a love story into a grief story. The autobiographical part, “The Loss of Depth”, deals with Barnes’s personal grief and his way of coming to terms with the loss of his wife. This part intertwines with and echoes the biographical and fictional parts through metaphorical language and recurring structural and thematic patterns. As will be shown, this ties in with Barnes’s avoidance of a display of (all-too) personal grief. Levels of Life reveals a withdrawal of the self which resides in the formal structure and arrangement of the generically diverse texts as well as in the extensive use of second-person narration in the third part of the memoir and

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the recurring (philosophical) tropes of love and loss, height and depth, ballooning and photography, the horizontal and the vertical, magic and truth (Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 178). As my reading of Levels of Life will demonstrate, the text reaches beyond the personal towards a more general understanding of love and loss through its aesthetic: its narrative perspective, its literariness, its common and essayistic style and pattern, and a movement between the general and the particular.

Pronominal Distance and Proximity Second-person narration in Levels of Life differs from the examples of Paul Auster’s Winter Journal and Report from the Interior. Although there is a frequent use of the second-person pronoun, Levels of Life is not a narrative written consistently from a second-person perspective. Rather, there is a continuous shift of pronouns with an extensive use of the second person in the autobiographical part of the book.8 The pronominal design is additionally complicated by the generic hybridity in the form of the biographical essay in the first part and the fictional short story in the second part, which are both third-person narratives and do not include the authorial self. As with regard to the narrative perspective, I will thus focus on the third part, “The Loss of Depth”, which in contrast to the other two parts, can be considered a “straightforward” form of memoir writing and interweaves the first person (singular and plural) with a very prominent use of the second person. Also, the second person in Levels of Life is different to the occasional uses of reader address in Nothing to Be Frightened Of such as: “You see (again) why (in part) I am a novelist?” (243). The rhetorical effects of the second person as doubly deictic you may be subsumed under strategies of self-concealment, reader address, generalisation, and generally a more distanced perspective towards the self, presumably related to the theme of grief. Although a considerable part of “The Loss of Depth” is written in the first person (singular or plural), these passages often include personal conversations, anecdotes of friends and acquaintances as well as accounts of others’ behaviour towards the mourning person. These first-person passages also tend to be more detailed or specific, especially when it comes to memories and dreams. Passages which are more particular display for example Barnes’s thoughts about suicide: “Most days I pass the stretch of pavement I was looking at when the idea first came to me” (LL 80; see LL 90). The particularity and the relation of space and time to the particular thought establish a narrative closeness which is circumvented in the second-person sections. Barnes predominantly seems to switch to the second person whenever he addresses more general questions of grief or fundamental questions of mourning directed towards himself (and the reader, as will be discussed in the subsequent chapter). As in Winter Journal and Report from the Interior, the doubly deictic you in Levels of Life is most often combined with the present tense, which promotes a sense of immediacy and generalisation. In addition,

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the use of the second-person perspective may again be used as a distancing device inducing a form of self-address and even self-protection. In Timothy C. Baker’s reading of death in writers’ memoirs, “the death of others is presented as a necessary aspect of the development of the literary self: the intersection of the self, the death of the other, and the demands of writing creates the autobiographical environment” (222). Baker quotes Levinas on the impact of loss on the self: The death of the other who dies affects me in my identity as a responsible “me” [moi]; it affects me in my nonsubstantial identity, which is not the simple coherence of various acts of identification, but is made up of an ineffable responsibility. (Levinas 12)9 Stressing a more general consequence of death, Baker thus highlights that death causes “a complete rethinking of the self predicated on the other’s death. If grief is the emotional response to a particular death, mourning is the way that response is understood in relation to death as such” (223). This rethinking of the self is reflected in the mix of narrative perspectives and personal pronouns and even more so in the second person, which pronounces the gap between narrating and narrated self. Barnes writes in the first part of the book about photography (a recurring trope for “truth”, LL 37): “To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock” (LL 27). The distanced observation of the self may be, as Barnes writes, a shock but may also be helpful to approach the narrated self from a distance, especially with regard to traumatic experiences (as has been established in my reading of Paul Auster’s Winter Journal). The multiplicity of pronouns in Levels of Life may serve to mirror the fragmented identity of a self which has experienced loss and death. Trauma and the inaccessibility of selfknowledge can thus be reflected in the alternating personal pronouns. In Levels of Life, the distance between the narrating and the narrated self could be effective for the thematisation of traumatic events and pain and is revealed in the following passage, which establishes a dialogue between narrating and narrated self: You ask yourself: to what extent in this turmoil of missing am I missing her, or missing the life we had together, or missing what it was in her that made me more myself, or missing simple companionship, or (not so simple) love, or all or any overlapping bits of each? You ask yourself: what happiness is there in just the memory of happiness? And how in any case might that work, given that happiness has only ever consisted of something shared? Solitary happiness – it sounds like a contradiction in terms, an implausible contraption that will never get off the ground. (LL 79–80)

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The passage shows that the second person is not used in the form of a generalising you (in the sense of one), which the use of the personal pronouns “her” as a reference to the deceased partner suggests. The fact that Barnes asks these (rhetorical) questions demonstrates the uncertainties that come with grief and loss. In addition, Barnes includes the audience, on the one hand, in a cognitive process, and, on the other hand, in a dialogue, in which the reader is activated by the narrator’s questions. The use of the second person, in addition, stresses the address function of the questions and encourages the communicative gesture to involve the other in the process of self-narration. As the questions are never answered, they leave a gap, a communicative imbalance which resonates with the entire third part of Levels of Life. By addressing these questions to himself, “You ask yourself”, Barnes displays a self-dialogue, a sort of interrogation about the possibility of happiness after loss. The present tense as well as the repetition of the words “missing” and “happiness” account for a self-reflective, intimate and immediate engagement with the self. In addition, the formal distance of the second person is reflected in generalised observations on grief and mourning from a philosophical viewpoint. The passages in the second person do not approximate experiences in the present but rather accentuate the general nature of grief in various attempts to rationalise it: Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names? It also reconfigures space. You have entered a new geography, mapped by a new cartography. You seem to be taking your bearings from one of those seventeenth-century maps which feature the Desert of Loss, the (windless) Lake of Indifference, the (driedup) River of Desolation, the Bog of Self-Pity, and the (subterranean) Caverns of Memory. In this new-found-land there is no hierarchy, except that of feeling, of pain. Who has fallen from the greater height, who has spilt more organs on the ground? Except that it rarely seems as straightforward – straightforwardly sad – as this. There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd […]. (LL 84)10 The “geographical mapping” of feelings through grief demonstrates its reconfiguring power and Barnes’s attempt “to look down on the landscape of loss” (Brockes). The spatial configurations caused by grief emphasise its fundamental impact on the grief-struck – a term which Barnes introduces in his essay “Regulating Sorrow” (216; 220; 224). Barnes reflects on the differences between grief and mourning in the following passage: There is the question of grief versus mourning. You can try to differentiate them by saying that grief is a state while mourning is a process;

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Personal and Exemplary Grief in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life yet they inevitably overlap. Is the state diminishing? Is the process progressing? How to tell? Perhaps it’s easier to think of them metaphorically. Grief is vertical – and vertiginous – while mourning is horizontal. Grief makes your stomach turn, snatches the breath from you, cuts off the blood supply to the brain; mourning blows you in a new direction. But since you are now in enveloping cloud, it is impossible to tell if you are marooned or deceptively in motion. You do not have some useful little invention consisting of a tiny paper parachute attached to fifty yards of silk line. All you know is that you have small power to affect things. You are a first-time aeronaut, alone beneath the gasbag, equipped with a few kilos of ballast, and told that this item in your hand you’ve never seen before is the valve-line. (LL 87–88)

The generalising you in combination with the present tense accounts for an approximation of Barnes’s reflections in the moment, thus demonstrating its immediacy, and is supported by the simple language which echoes the essayistic character of the book’s other narratives, as will be shown in the respective subchapter. Initially, you continue doing what you used to do with her, out of familiarity, love, the need for a pattern. Soon, you realise the trap you are in: caught between repeating what you did with her, but without her, and so missing her; or doing new things, things you never did with her, and so missing her differently. (LL 88) This loss of orientation is displayed on a thematic level, as Baker suggests, – a complete rethinking of the self seems necessary – and is also reflected in the second-person perspective, which accentuates the distance between narrating and experiencing self (“initially”). The second-person perspective is again paired with the reference to Barnes’s wife as “she” or “her”. If we consider the distancing situation in Levels of Life both on a formal and a diegetic level, the second person ties in with the development of the grief story: Baker claims that “[m]ourning separates the self from the world, a separation that is essential if the self is to understand her own relation to the world” (224). Grief is thus a crisis of identity and self. Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera). And you have never done this kind of work before. It is unpaid, and yet not voluntary; it is rigorous, yet there is no overseer; it is

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skilled, yet there is no apprenticeship. And it is hard to tell whether you are making progress; or what would help you do so. Theme song for youth (sung by the Supremes): “You Can’t Hurry Love”. Theme song for age (arranged for any instrument): “You Can’t Hurry Grief”. (LL 104–105) The elusiveness of grief is similar to the elusiveness of memory in the other readings in this study and hints at the limits of self-knowledge and selfdepiction in an, if you will, even more challenging and necessary attempt to come to terms with the self in the world. The seemingly orienting conceptual pattern for the process, “grief-work” (a term coined by Barnes), is contrasted by Barnes’s analysis of its elusiveness. In a further passage, Barnes asks a rhetorical question, but this time gives an instantaneous answer himself: “When might you expect to be ‘over it’? The griefstruck themselves can hardly tell, since time is now so less measurable than it used to be” (LL 107). The temporal reconfiguration of life through grief is reflected in this miniature self-dialogue. Another dialogue of self-distancing and alienation is also apparent in the following passage: Nor do you know how you appear to others. How you feel and how you look may or may not be the same. So how do you feel? As if you have dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body. That is what it feels like, and why should it look any different? No wonder some want to swerve away to a safer topic of conversation. And perhaps they are not avoiding death, and her; they are avoiding you. (LL 77) By pronouncing the gap between appearance and feeling, body and soul, self-interrogation becomes relevant on a thematic and formal level, through the interplay of inner and outer and through the second person in an attempt to stage the mind-body problem. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson state that in memoirs of grief “narration acts ambivalently as memorialization of mourning and its melancholic refusal” (138). They also highlight the therapeutic quality of the memoir “as a form of grief work” in which authors “may seek repair or emotional compensation” (Smith and Watson 138–139). This does not necessarily apply to Barnes and his choice of the personal diary as a more intimate form of writing to deal with his grief after his wife’s death (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”). In Nothing to Be Frightened Of Barnes writes about the “therapeuto-autobiographical fallacy” (Nothing 97) and addresses a very prominent aspect of grief memoirs, namely their supposedly therapeutic or healing effects. Thomas Couser’s perception of memoir as self-healing (“scriptotherapy”) is that “the term emphasizes the work

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of the narrative – its goal or aim – rather than its form” (43). Barnes expresses a sceptical attitude towards the healing qualities of grief memoirs and writes further: “Something bad happens in your life – or, in the case of death, is slated to happen: you write about it; and you feel better about that bad thing. In very small, local circumstances, I can imagine this applying” (Nothing 97). His scepticism towards the healing effect of autobiographical writing ties in with the somewhat detached self-exploration in Levels of Life: The generality of Barnes’s explorations of grief seems more essayistic than personal. Kusek rightly observes in Levels of Life a “refusal to follow a trajectory of grief”11 and foregrounds the work’s “critique of the anticipated therapeutic impact of a narrative” (Through the Looking Glass 184). Although the recurring use of the second-person perspective permeates “The Loss of Depth”, the third part of Levels of Life, the interplay of distance and proximity is complicated by the pronouncement of pronominal identity changes. However, the second person has been identified as a form of self-dialogue and self-exploration which may prove beneficial in the exploration of grief, as is prominently displayed in Barnes personal “grief work” – without being authoritative and without expressing any universalisation of grief(s).

Personal vs Communal Grief In Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s seminal work Reading Autobiography, memoirs of grief are categorised as a sub form of the memoir, which “are often passed from hand to hand as how-to guidebooks, serving as contemporary books of consolation” (138). As has been established in the previous chapter, the second person may enable a (necessary) distance from the self. Barnes creates this hybrid form of self-narration, which on the one hand displays the withdrawal of the self in its very aesthetics and on the other hand displays, thematically, a more general outlook on grief and loss by providing stories beyond the personal. In an interview, Barnes states: I think my attitude towards using myself and bits of my life in my books is that I’m willing to, if I can get the right distance from it, so that using a bit of me or what I know or have experienced is in the same focus and perspective as if it came from your life […]. I don’t think I have any desire to be confessional, but I think I’m quite willing to use my own life as an example of something. (Barnes, “The Final Interview” 165; my emphasis) The right distance towards the self seems to be, regarding Nothing to Be Frightened Of (which had been written before the interview was conducted), an underlying principle of Barnes’s take towards autobiographical writing. By moving away from a self-centred and all-too personal depiction of his loss and using his own life as an example of “something”, Barnes may engage and address an audience in his writing.

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Levels of Life is a narrative of grief, loss, and love and thus can correspondingly be identified as a form of (auto)thanatography.12 This particular sub form of autobiography is, according to Kusek, “a life-writing micro-genre which ostensibly addresses the theme of death – either one’s own or the other’s” (“Challenging Generic Conventions” 150).13 The death of Barnes’s wife is the central theme and starting point for his part-fictional-part-autobiographical endeavour.14 Barnes says about his earlier work Nothing to Be Frightened Of that it is designed to “[a]pproach the general through the particular” (Barnes, “The Final Interview” 165). By providing three case studies (a historical one, a fictional one, and his own personal grief story) and thus moving from objectivity to a more personal stance, Barnes’s Levels of Life can embed the personal in the general whole. As “[w]e all want stories and details and particulars in our life-stories” (Lee 2), the focus on biographical, fictional, and personal insights into the themes of love and loss seems to be particularly suitable for a more relational form of life-writing and an affective involvement of the reader. Nancy K. Miller writes that “[e]very autobiography, we might say, is also an autothanatography” (“Representing Others” 12), which resonates with Barnes’s statement that “[e]very love story is a potential grief story” (LL 36–37). According to Robert Kusek, “(auto)thanatographies often display a tension between intimate and public forms of grief” (Through the Looking Glass 182), which also ties in with the interplay of distance and proximity evolving in Levels of Life. Arnaud Schmitt’s rather vague concept of resonance describes how I “read what being someone else actually is (more or less), how, for example, memories of my pain can help me measure to some extent the pain suffered by someone else” (129–130). He continues to state that autobiography, “as collaborative work and shared reenactment, that is to say at its very best, can be the resonance of another life” (Schmitt 130). As a form of grief memoir or (auto)thanatography, Levels of Life may thus be considered a communicative gesture to involve the “other” grief-struck in the process of self-narration. Timothy C. Baker writes that the central relationship between the self and the other becomes the catalyst for the relationship between the text and the reader: it is only in seeing this originary relationship between the self and the other, revealed in the other’s death, that we can come to know our own selves. (232) As he displays his personal grieving and mourning process, Barnes may thus contribute to the reader’s self-understanding and affective involvement in a relationship between self and other, life and death. I would argue that personal grief is made exemplary through an extensive use of the second-person pronoun and through the combination of the personal with historical and fictional examples of loss and grief. Barnes uses the historical figures of Sarah Bernhardt, Fred Burnaby, and Félix Tournachon and thus interweaves fact and fiction in his personal account. These public

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lives are contrasted with Barnes’s life, who remains the private person in his own memoir. In fact, an interviewer once said to Barnes that “[u]ntil now, you appeared to agree with Flaubert […] and never revealed much about yourself” (Barnes, “The Final Interview” 165). Barnes explains the process of writing as a process in which there is only “you, the world, the book, and the reader” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”). Even though Levels of Life is not constructed as a self-help book, this remark outlines the dialogic relationship between author, text, and reader, and its real-world relevance. I requote the following passage, which has already been employed to demonstrate the self-dialogue between narrating and narrated self: Nor do you know how you appear to others. How you feel and how you look may or may not be the same. So how do you feel? As if you have dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body. That is what it feels like, and why should it look any different? No wonder some want to swerve away to a safer topic of conversation. And perhaps they are not avoiding death, and her; they are avoiding you. (LL 77; my emphasis) The question “So how do you feel?” includes the reader, as do the instances of first-person plural narration, e.g. in “We grieve in character” (LL 70).15 Having already used this passage as an example of self-address, it thus caters to the double function of the second person as an address of the autobiographical self as well as the reader as addressee. Similar to Paul Auster’s two memoirs, Barnes’s language is simple, paratactic and thus supports the relational gesture of making the book more generally applicable than seems to be visible on a personal level. The use of rhetorical questions supports this narrative style and ties in with the proximity encouraged through the second person. By using a more general, common language and descriptive essayistic passages, Barnes constructs a certain universalising gesture in his grief narrative: You think that Year Two can’t be worse than Year One, and imagine yourself prepared for it. You think you have met all the different sorts of pain you will be asked to bear, and that after this there will only be repetition. But why should repetition mean less pain? Those first repetitions invite you to contemplate all the repetitions to come in future years. Grief is the negative image of love; and if there can be accumulation of love over the years, then why not of grief? (LL 89) The repetition of the words “You think” mirrors the perpetual self-confrontation with grief and the repetition of pain and suffering in the continuity of recurring

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experiences. In contrast to Barnes’s suggested exclusivity and complicity of experiencing grief, the use of the second person nonetheless establishes proximity and engages the reader in a more general reflection on grief. Considering the universality of language and the consistent other-address, this passage may, in addition to its function as self-dialogue, demonstrate the direct appeal to the reader, thus a form of reader address and a possible instance of identification and recognition. Although Barnes does not present “universal truths” in “The Loss of Depth”, he provides a repertoire of descriptions of and approaches to grief: Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to other drivers, to the unwidowed. (LL 70)16 The passage above thematises the nature of grief. The aspect of community or belonging to a certain group, an in-group even, is portrayed in this passage, which not only emphasises the own altered identity from plural to singular – “‘[w]e’ are now watered down to ‘I’. Binocular memory has become monocular” (LL 109) – but also the increased awareness of others being part of this community or group.17 Griefs do not explain one another, they may overlap. And so there is a complicity among the griefstruck. Only you know what you know – even if it is just that you know different things. You have stepped through a mirror […] and find yourself in a world reordered in logic and pattern. (LL 72) The question of the community of the grief-struck is portrayed in these previous passages as a re-formation of life and collective identity. In direct contrast, but as a valid complement to the collective function of grief, Barnes states that “[g]rief-workers are self-employed” (LL 109) and thereby stresses the individuality of grief and a dichotomy of isolation and the community of the grief-struck, as becomes (painfully) visible in the following: And there are still new, one-off pains for which you are quite unprepared, and unprotected against. Like sitting round a table with your seven-year-old great-niece while she amuses the company with her new game of Odd Man Out. So-and-so is the odd man / woman out because of blue eyes / brown jacket / goldfish ownership, and so on. Then, from nowhere, except from childlike logic: “Julian’s the odd one out because he’s the only person whose wife is dead”. (LL 89–90)18

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Barnes’s isolation becomes clear in this passage, in which he is literally characterised as the “odd one out”, as separated from the rest of the community due to his experience of loss. This loss and the subsequent loneliness are, however, relativised by Barnes’s consideration of two possible kinds of loneliness: There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. (LL 111) Although Levels of Life is a personal narrative, Kusek states that “Barnes recognises his position as another in a series of mourners” and holds that the second person as well as the more inclusive first-person plural (which seems, in a way, more authoritative than the second person) “emphasise the collective nature of bereavement and the shared lot of the bereaved” (Through the Looking Glass 182).19 The passage emphasises the isolation of the grief-struck and grief’s invisibility to others who do not share the experience. Barnes writes: “As a former lexicographer, I am a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist” (LL 100), which means that Barnes does not provide a “manual” of how to deal with grief and loss; he combines his selfnarrative with more generalised philosophical thoughts on grief.

Commemoration and Precarious Relationality While Levels of Life can be regarded as “a testimony of Barnes’s coming out of grief” (Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 185), it is first and foremost an attempt of coping with loss as one of those events that “weaken us for ever” (LL 84) without diminishing or reducing the irrevocable pain and helplessness incorporated in the process. In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes writes that we “die in […] character” (177) and gives prominent examples of writers who have died in character, such as Goethe (200) or Stendhal (223).20 He revives this thought in Levels of Life, writing that “[w]e grieve in character” (LL 70), stressing the individuality and diversity of grieving and mourning. If we want to continue this line of thought, Barnes also writes about grief in character, as can be seen in the work’s generic hybridity but also Barnes’s own withdrawal, a refusal to include anything personal about his deceased wife, and his non-sentimental approach to loss and grief through a peculiar examination of precarious relations in his environment. In “The Loss of Depth”, Barnes focuses on the act and process of mourning. When Barnes lost his wife Pat Kavanagh, he had already completed Nothing to Be Frightened Of, but the more recent Levels of Life is the first depiction of his mourning in writing: “I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely. […] I miss her in every action, and in every inaction” (LL 81). Throughout the book,

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Barnes does not mention the name of his deceased wife even once, which he explains in an interview as a decision he made out of respect, as his wife was a rather private person who did not like seeing her name printed or published (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”). An essential characteristic which highlights the universality of experience – just as in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal – is thus the fact that Barnes does not make use of names in the memoir part of Levels of Life. Kusek writes that Levels of Life “is a personal narrative; however, it is not intimate. […] It is a memoir of the self, rather than of the other” (Through the Looking Glass 182), thereby suggesting that Levels of Life is less about the beloved, Barnes’s wife than about Barnes’s personal journey of grief. The fact that Levels of Life withholds personal information and insights about Pat Kavanagh and is less about the deceased does not necessarily mean that it is more so about the autobiographer. I would argue that Levels of Life is, consequentially, a memoir of the many, symbolising and proclaiming a generalising take towards truths, grief, loss, and love. Kusek’s observation thus in fact only supports my claim that the memoir is not merely about the personal but rather about the general. Although Barnes claims to be aware of his role as his wife’s “principal rememberer” (LL 90), he withholds any personal information about her in Levels of Life, which is thus less about a commemoration of the spouse than about Barnes’s grief and the general process of mourning. Barnes thus follows a strategy of simultaneously sharing and withholding. This sharing-and-withholding is also reflected in Barnes’s concept of memory; the unreliability of memory or dreams is addressed in “The Loss of Depth”. When considering the memory of his wife, Barnes observes that “dreams are more reliable, more secure, than memory” (LL 96).21 This reflection hints at the loss of memory and the fear of forgetting: Barnes writes that “when I seek to go down in memory, I fail” (LL 97) as “[his] memory seems burnt away” (LL 98). The acts of non-commemoration in “The Loss of Depth” are thus always associated with the lack of memory and with withholding memory. Perhaps Jeffrey Berman’s claim that autothanatography “heightens our feeling of self-control” (Companionship in Grief 173) is more adequate to describe Barnes’s autobiographical endeavour.22 And so that memory, now in the first person-singular, changes. Less the memory of an event than the memory of a photograph of the event. And nowadays – having lost height, precision, focus – we are no longer sure we trust photography as we once did. Those old familiar snaps of happier times have come to seem less primal, less like photographs of life itself, more like photographs of photographs. (LL 110)23 While the photograph may preserve “emanation[s] of past reality” (Camera Lucida 88), with “photography being a sort of truth” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”), Barnes’s memory is removed twice from reality. After his wife’s death, Barnes “kept voluminous notes, a diary of hundreds and

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thousands of words, which [he] deliberately didn’t look at when [he] came to write the grief section of Levels of Life” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”). However, after finishing the book, he consulted his notes again and still found that there was “very little that [he] needed to add” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”). As Smith and Watson observe, “[n]arratives of mourning […] are targeted at chronicling and contemplating the loss of a loved one, sometimes to achieve consolation, sometimes to acknowledge that consolation may never come” (140). However, the memoir section of Levels of Life is not, as Kusek observes, “a testament to the life and work of the beloved person” (Through the Looking Glass 182). Barnes, true to his rather private lifestyle, does not focus an entire memoir on his grief or personal experience, but provides an exemplary narrative of (collective) grief, embedded in a conglomerate of fiction and non-fiction. The tripartite structure, and thus the move from height to level to depth, “inevitably prepares the reader for the final, third part of the volume” (Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 180). Not only does Barnes reveal the lack of dialogue and communication with his wife after her death, but he also displays this lack by not sharing their “tropes, teases, short cuts, injokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes” with the reader (LL 88). With regard to the dialogue with his wife, Barnes writes: You constantly report things, so that the loved one “knows”. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back. No texture, no resonance, no depth of field. (LL 100) Although Barnes emphasises that he speaks to his wife, he does not reveal any specifics about these reports. The communication is thus one-sided, the self-narration as a form of other-narration does not include Barnes’s wife. Barnes clarifies in the following passage that he needs others to find orientation, to log his position, and thus emphasises the relationality of being: You need to establish where you are and how lies the ground beneath; but surveying from a balloon never did prove possible. Others helpfully – and hopefully – log your position for you. “Oh,” they say, “you’re looking better.” Even, “Much better.” The language of illness, inevitably; and the diagnosis is simple – always the same. But the prognosis? You are not ill in any normal manner. At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist. “Throw off your grief”, such doubters imply, “and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away”. A journalist friend was once found weeping at her desk by her section editor. She explained what was already known – that her

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father had died six weeks previously. The editor replied, “I thought you’d be over it by now”. (LL 106–107) In a similar vein, Barnes linguistically reflects on his loneliness in that “‘[w]e’ are now watered down to ‘I’. Binocular memory has become monocular” (LL 109).24 Barnes’s experience of loss and grief informs his engagement with the theme of grief and mourning as he discusses the “attitudes that people manifest towards death, theories of mourning, family and acquaintances who (mis-)behave towards the grievers” (Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 183). This dialogue assembles the various takes towards death, other’s experiences and recommendations, but above all, emphasises a precarious relationality induced by the complexity of death and grief. Although Barnes acknowledges the necessity of others for orientation, the relationality depicted is thus a precarious one, as becomes evident in the subsequent passage: And this is where the Silent Ones cause further offence. They do not understand (how could they?) that they have a new function in your life. You need your friends not just as friends, but also as corroborators. The chief witness to what has been your life is now silenced, and retrospective doubt is inevitable. So you need them to tell you, however glancingly, however unintendingly, that what you once were – the two of you – was seen. Not just known from within but seen from without: witnessed, corroborated, and remembered with an accuracy of which you are yourself currently incapable. (LL 98) Central to the memoir is Barnes’s account of reactions to his loss which in most cases meant a test to his friendships (LL 77) due to ignorance or failures to mention his wife’s name (LL 78).25 Barnes’s “duty as a writer” to “describe the human heart and the way it operates without pumping it up and without squashing it flat” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”) feeds into the affective involvement of the reader by providing a nonsentimental, relatable, but aestheticized form of self- and other-narration. With certain scepticism, Barnes addresses the question of how grief and mourning can be successful and tries to reorganise it in temporal structures – by putting a halt to the constant examination of these precarious interactions with others: There are moments which appear to indicate some kind of progress. When the tears – the daily, unavoidable tears – stop. When concentration returns, and a book can be read as before. When foyer-terror departs. When possessions can be disposed of […]. And beyond this? What are you waiting for, looking for? The time when life turns back

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By emphasising a narrative of non-commemoration, thus a refusal to reveal the private life (apart from and beyond the grieving process) and by addressing precarious relationality, Barnes establishes a distance towards the personal. In this respect, Levels of Life is characterised by a non-sentimental and descriptive style of writing, strengthening the general in the process.

Fictionalisations of Grief: Literariness, Patterns, and Style Essential characteristics of Levels of Life are Barnes’s essayistic style (which, with regard to his professional background as a journalist, is in fact influential throughout his works), the memoir’s aesthetic function, an extensive use of literary language (metaphors and imagery), and the intertextual references between the three parts. In part one and two, Barnes approaches the theme of death and grief from a historical and fictional perspective. The third part, “The Loss of Depth”, however, is also informed by literary language, the tropes of height and depth, ballooning and photography and thus fits into the pattern of the book’s aesthetics and the interwoven tripartite structure. This subchapter will approach the various aesthetic and thematic elements to determine the interrelations between the three parts of the book and the relevance of literariness, style, and patterns in their affective affordances of Levels of Life. The relevance of style and linguistic expression is particularly noteworthy in Barnes’s attempt to depict the hardship of loss and grief, even as he indicates “that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak” (LL 71). Trying to find a language to express his grief, Barnes creates his own imagery: “We have lost the old metaphors and must find new ones” (LL 96). This “attempt to renew linguistic expressiveness” (Calafat 465), which then may resonate with the reader, is recurrently emphasised in a thematisation of changes in vocabulary, grammar, or metaphors. For instance, Barnes emphasises the lack of an English expression for “the longing for something” and finds that the German word “Sehnsucht describes the first kind of loneliness. But the second kind comes from the opposite condition: the absence of a specific someone. Not so much

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loneliness as her-lessness” (LL 112–113). This linguistic inadequacy is also reflected in the following passage, which thematises the shared vocabulary of lovers: “You feel sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, injokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes – all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider” (LL 88). Barnes holds that to grasp his wife’s position in a “past-present” it seems like “the grammar, like everything else, has begun to shift” (LL 108). Barnes coins new terms such as “grief-struck”, “grief-work”, and “griefworkers” to linguistically express his sorrow and to rationalise the concept of grief. These linguistic considerations inform Barnes’s essayistic and philosophical encounter with his personal narrative. In the interplay of the historical, fictional, and autobiographical writing, Barnes undermines generic implications and subverts the boundaries between fictional and non-fictional (Brus´ 81). Barnes’s memoir, in its emphasis on structure and patterns, consists of “calculated episodes, in a refreshed sense of bios that is episode-based” (Brus´ 81). Levels of Life thus favours the aesthetic structure and pattern to reflect the episodic character as well as the fragmentariness and fragility of life. Brus´ quotes V.S. Pritchett’s understanding of the short story, which owes much to the quickness, the objectivity and cutting of the cinema; it owes much to the poet on the one hand and the newspaper reporter on the other; something also to the dramatic compression of the theatre, and everything to the restlessness, the alert nerve, the scientific eye and the short breath of contemporary life. (qtd. in Brus´ 82) The brief insight into the short story displays, among other aspects, the symbiosis of the poet and the journalist as influential implications of the short story. By combining, in a similar vein, (fictional and historical) narrative and essayistic anti-sentimentalism, Barnes reflects the incoherence and ambiguity of life and truth in his grief memoir. Teresa Brus´ claims that “Barnes […] is attracted to such a conglomerate power of the fragment” (82). The different parts in Levels of Life inform each other, reproducing and at the same time complicating a pattern of literariness and generic hybridity. Emphasising the freedom of the writer in their self-narration, Brus´ suggests that “what makes bios come alive is the literary practice that defends change and irreverence in form and content, struggling, nevertheless, to arrive at some resolution, some intelligible tying and ending” (82). This open-endedness is both thematically and structurally reflected in Levels of Life. The form of the essay is thereby a most suitable way to approach the theme of grief and to cover this theme in the sense of the French verb essayer, “to attempt”, as a form which is not finite, and which promotes ambiguity and incoherence. I agree with Calafat that Levels of Life (just as Nothing to Be Frightened Of) oscillates between memoir and

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essay and would argue that the essayistic style is an essential and effective aesthetic feature of the text (Calafat 466–467).27 Despite the uses of metaphors and literary language, Barnes’s text is characterised by a conversational tone (tying in with one implication of the second person as dialogic). Brus´ writes that by “fusing quintessentially essayistic impulses with the exacting framework of the short story, Barnes creates in sharp viable fragments compelling glimpses of ways of life” (83). The historical figures as “knowable and tellable referential character[s]” (Brus´ 84) in the first two parts even emphasise the universal quality of love and grief as an overarching and exemplary reference to humanist concerns. With the combination of fictional writing “in which we model how we know” and autobiographical writing, “in which we save what we know” (Brus´ 88), Barnes establishes a narrative framework which explores humanity in multiple dimensions and leaves enough but controlled space for his personal experience. This personal experience gains, with and against other narrative elements in the book, a communicative force which moves beyond the particular to display the general. One essential characteristic of the text is the structural and thematic relevance of the pattern. “All couples, even the most bohemian, build up patterns in their lives together” (LL 88–89). This pattern may be disturbed by the loss of a loved one, “grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any pattern exists” (LL 85). When Barnes explains that “[w]e are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern” (LL 69), he emphasises the human urge for patterns in life and at the same time highlights the profound helplessness and chaos which is associated with death and loss. Barnes writes: Each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern. Writers believe in the patterns their words make, which they hope and trust add up to ideas, to stories, to truths. This is always their salvation, whether griefless or griefstruck. (LL 85–86) Barnes thus hints at the communicative function of narratives and the possibility to tell truths but also the writer’s task in recreating these patterns – which he obviously does in his grief memoir. The relevance of patterns and structure is constituted on two levels: first, the diegetic level as the pattern which love and relationships in general may provide. Here, the pattern seems to imply a healing function in autobiographical writing but also for love or relationships in general. Second, the formal level, including the features of fictionalisation which shape the text, and which provide for an aesthetic mirroring of a thematic pattern. The following quotation neatly summarises the metaphorical structure of Levels of Life: We live on the flat, on the level, and yet – and so – we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with

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religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crush. There are few soft landings. (LL 36) The passage summarises the riskiness of love and of being hurt, a recurring trope in Levels of Life which unites the three parts. The symbolism of ballooning – “Ballooning is freedom, is it not?” (LL 53) – is central to Levels of Life as it represents the experiences of love and grief, which are so closely connected according to Barnes’s metaphorical structure (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”): “So why do we constantly aspire to love? Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning” (LL 37). The literariness in Levels of Life is another means of establishing a distance between Barnes’s personal grief and the more universal picture he draws and constructs, celebrating “the miraculous trickery of art” (LL 93).28 Portraying this story about ballooning, Barnes introduces a historical element, in a way, “about a reality exterior to his own loss, yet, inevitably, addresses a very personal grief” (Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 179) and thus “make[s] the subjective suddenly objective” (LL 27).29 This relationality between another reality and his personal grief also mirrors the relationship between the (autobiographical) narrative and the reader and the transferability of experiences to others. I now revisit the structural pattern of Levels of Life. All three parts of the book begin with the same first sentence, while the third part “The Loss of Depth” takes a slight alteration: (1) “You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed” (LL 3); (2) “You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t” (LL 31); (3) “You put together two people who have not been put together before” (LL 67; my emphasis). Barnes hence alters the introductory phrase in the third (autobiographical) part by replacing “things” with “people” and thus transfers the idea of combining two things (e.g. ballooning and photography) to human relationships. Moving from height to level to depth, the optimism in the follow-up sentences changes. While the “world is changed” in the first part, the uncertainty whether this combination (or relationship) works arises in the second part, which continues this thought as follows: You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their own two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly. (LL 31–32) The downward movement culminates in the third parts’ emphasis on the catastrophic ending such a combination or relationship may entail:

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Even at this point, the third part could still be fictional – the reader only realises that this is a story about Barnes himself, when Barnes begins the fourth paragraph with: “We were together for thirty years. I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart” (LL 68). The consistency in language and imagery links the three parts of Levels of Life, although language is not the only aspect the three sections share. The memoir’s aesthetic function makes Levels of Life particularly noteworthy as a work of autobiographical writing in its depiction of relational, humanist concerns. The emphasis of other characters’ stories, such as the lives of Nadar, Sarah Bernhardt, and Fred Burnaby, reflects the withdrawal of personal and intimate self-narration in Barnes’s memoir. The intertextuality (also with regard to the references to French writers, painters, and actresses) as historical references embeds the global whole in Barnes’s seemingly personal self-narrative. The pattern is thereby also a recurring thematical presence in the book. Nadar’s relationship with his wife Ernestine introduces the theme of marriage, grief, and the loss of a spouse in the first narrative. Just as Barnes’s wife Pat, Ernestine, who died in 1909 after 55 years of marriage, has provided “a pattern to [Nadar’s] life” (LL 24) and with her death, “Nadar [loses] his rudder” (LL 25). In addition, Fred Burnaby, falling in love with Sarah Bernhardt, is also denied a pattern in his life: “In life, you might be a bohemian and an adventurer, but you also sought a pattern, an arrangement to help you through” (LL 60). The hurtful rejection by Sarah forces Burnaby to reflect on the question how we know “which was a true pattern and which was false?” (LL 60), while he realises that “if being on the level didn’t shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds” (LL 62). Even though Burnaby finally marries another woman, “a pattern […] was again denied him” (LL 62). I will now try to solve Barnes’s metaphorical puzzle, which culminates in the autobiographical third part of Levels of Life. The metaphors of ballooning and photography, of height and depth and horizontal movement provide an overarching theme for the three parts of Levels of Life. The metaphor of ballooning stands for love and grief but also for freedom, spiritual exaltation, and human progress. Barnes explains the relations of ballooning and love and the uncertainties of life as follows: “I thought of

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how grief in a way is like being in a balloon, maybe in the clouds, not knowing if you’re going up or down or moving in a progressive direction” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”). In Levels of Life, Barnes develops this thought and notes that “grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space. […] It is not a place of upper air; there are no views” (LL 82).30 With regard to questions of riskiness, Barnes writes: “In this silent, moral space, the aeronaut experiences health of body and health of soul” (LL 13). While “[h]eight was moral, height was spiritual” (LL 13), “aeronautics purged the sin of height, otherwise known as the sin of getting above yourself” (LL 14).31 In fact, right from the beginning, the precariousness of ballooning is captured by the mocking expression “balloonatic” (LL 5; LL 55; LL 56). The beginning of Levels of Life plays with the mistaken assumption that “a balloon brought no evil” but “represented freedom – yet a freedom subservient to the powers of wind and weather. Aeronauts often couldn’t tell if they were moving or stationary, gaining height or losing it” (LL 9). This line of thought links to the central metaphor of the risk of love, which always implies a risk of grief and loss, and which reflects Barnes’s personal grief. Another essential metaphor is the depiction of a downward movement or route. Barnes moves from height to level to depth and thereby recounts the movement from a superior, elevated position to a lower, depressed position. This structure sketches a downfall or a downward movement that mirrors the emotionality and tragedy of the text as well as a movement from fictional to personal grief. In addition, it establishes an interplay of distance and intimacy in its relation to the autobiographical self, which seems to underline the three levels and at the same time plays with the emotionality in each separate part. Height, level, and depth account for distance and proximity, structuring emotional bonds, freedom, and loss. The vertical movement is again mirrored on a micro-level in the first part of the book, beginning with the ascent of ballooning and ending with Ernestine’s death: “While Blériot went up into the air, Ernestine went down into the ground” (LL 25).32 The biographical and historical essay about Nadar expands the generic boundaries of memoir writing and introduces his “head-above-the-clouds” mentality and idealism to support Barnes’s essayistic engagement with love. With the reliance on the historical figure of Nadar, Barnes links the reality of grief to his own autobiographical background. Nadar is thus an exemplification of the trust in progress but also a figure of love and grief which becomes both personal, historical, and universal when read with the third part “The Loss of Depth”. 19th-century public figure Nadar is a “journalist, caricaturist, photographer, balloonist, entrepreneur and inventor, a keen register of patents and founder of companies, a tireless self-publicist, and in old age a prolific writer of unreliable memoirs” (LL 15). With Nadar, Barnes involves a historical person, “who took the most authoritative celebrity portraits of his time and did the first photo-interviews [and] was also the first photographer to take aerial views” (Sontag 176). Nadar plays a central

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role in the biographical and fictional parts of Barnes’s Levels of Life and thus elevates the relevance of photography for the autobiographical and fictional alike, as love, to requote the passage, is the “meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning” (LL 36–37). The second part of Levels of Life, “On the Level”, serves to introduce a failed relationship. Two characters from “The Sin of Height”, Sarah Bernhardt and Fred Burnaby, are transferred into the second part and short story “On the Level”, which portrays a fictional relationship: “Despite Burnaby’s reticence and Bernhardt’s waywardness with fact, we may establish that they met in Paris in the mid-1870s” (LL 37). The essayistic first and second parts (the biographical essay and the short story) complement Barnes’s personal grief story and thus illustrate the common experience of loss and love. The explicit focus on the biographical and fictional in the first two parts of the book illustrate the distance Barnes creates to elaborate on his grief. The mismatch of Sarah and Fred is already indicated in the following passage: “Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both” (LL 36–37). In the third part, Barnes repeats that “every love story is a potential grief story” (LL 67), this time introducing his personal loss and grief. This passage hints at the oftentimes incongruent situation two people find themselves in, as well as the possibility of both parties experiencing grief. In the case of Fred Burnaby’s and Sarah Bernhard’s affair, the differing perceptions and understandings of their relationship – “He saw them as a couple, putting things together, assembling a life. He always imagined them in motion. He was – they were – soaring” (LL 49) and “[h]er eyes and her smile had been a proposal, an offer which he had accepted” (LL 50) – provides a different insight into the failure of relationships. The act of completing a person by putting two things together is reflected in Burnaby’s comment that “we are all of us incomplete. I am just as incomplete as you. That is why we seek another person. For completion” (LL 57).33 Barnes writes in Nothing to Be Frightened Of that “[w]hatever the writer’s aesthetic – from subjective and autobiographical to objective and author-concealing – the self must be strengthened and defined in order to produce the work” and to “mak[e] it just a little harder for myself to die” (88). Aesthetics do not seem to change the fact that the self is strengthened in the autobiographical process. Levels of Life orchestrates an intriguing interplay of distance and intimacy on a diegetic and formal level. It displays personal grief in an aestheticised and literary manner, thereby providing a shared space for the reader to engage in a narrative of grief which withdraws the autobiographical self to a great extent without diminishing the resonance of their personal affection and pain. The literariness of the book is particularly reflected in the consistency of metaphors and patterns which inform all parts of the book and expand the personal by philosophical insights into grief and mourning. The essayistic style of the memoir, in addition, underlines this move from the particular to the general.

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Concluding Remarks Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life employs multiple strategies to pass as both particular and general autobiographical writing (for the grief-struck). Creating a tripartite structure of love, loss, and grief, Barnes establishes a capacity of exemplary fate in Levels of Life, focussing on the universal question of how to successfully move on in the grieving and remembering process. Barnes’s unsentimental approach, the matter-of-factness and straightforwardness of his grief, makes Levels of Life a decidedly collective book of general grief and love. It is exactly the retracted authority of the grieving self which enables a more objective yet engaging work of autobiographical writing. Barnes notes in his review “Through the Window” that “autobiographical accounts of grief are unfalsifiable, and therefore unreviewable by any normal criteria. The book is repetitive? So is grief. The book is obsessive? So is grief. The book is at times incoherent? So is grief” (“Regulating Sorrow” 222). Accordingly, Barnes does not try to provide a self-help guide of how to deal with grief. Instead, Levels of Life accounts for an engaging and affectively involving memoir precisely because it does not try to be consoling and therapeutic. The generic hybridity, the literariness and essayistic style, and the use of metaphors and recurring tropes provide an interplay of distance and proximity on an aesthetic and thematic level. Barnes’s self-withdrawal and detachment and his refusal to commemorate his wife as other grief memoirs do account for a more relational narrative in which gaps and uncertainties provide a space for the reader to involve and engage and relate Barnes’s grief to their own experiences. The use of the second person to establish (self-)dialogue and to address the reader as well as the thematisation of grief, loss, and precarious relationality account for an innovative memoir with a particularly complex communicative outreach. The essayistic style leaves much room for Barnes’s exploration and continuation of his journalistic and philosophical endeavour without being too intimate. The very structure of the book, in its combination of historical, fictional, and personal material, adheres to the distancing approach Barnes promotes. Although and because the generic hybridity of Levels of Life complicates its classification, the work’s rhetorical function makes it an outstanding piece of life-writing and reading experience. Brockes writes in her review that “as the slim volume progresses, something not quite central to your vision builds, so that by the end you are blindsided by a quiet devastation”. Levels of Life develops the affective outreach of the memoir in a gradual, philosophical way and is particularly effective in its display of personal and universal grief, which may, perhaps more than other memoirs, appeal to the reader: “The thing is – nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter” (LL 71).

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Notes 1 Barnes has published some of his work under his pseudonyms, e.g. “Dan Kavanagh” for his early detective fiction. For studies on Barnes’s oeuvre see Merritt Moseley’s Understanding Barnes (1997), Christoph Henke’s Vergangenheitsobsessionen (2001), Matthew Pateman’s Julian Barnes (2002), Vanessa Guignery’s The Fiction of Julian Barnes (2006), Frederik M. Holmes’s Julian Barnes (2009), and Peter Childs’s Julian Barnes (2011). 2 Barnes has written about widowerhood and grief before his wife’s death, e.g. in “Pulse”, published in the short story collection with the same title (2011) and in Flaubert’s Parrot, which is also quoted in Levels of Life, and in which the widower states that “[p]art of love is preparing for death” and that “you are tarred and feathered for life” (LL 114–115). 3 All references preceded by “LL” are to the following edition: Barnes, Julian. Levels of Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013. 4 The Guardian classifies Barnes’s Levels of Life as an “essay on grief” (Morrison), which to some extent diminishes its aesthetic and literary quality. 5 In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes also comments on the question of genre: “This is not, by the way, ‘my autobiography’. Nor am I ‘in search of my parents’” (Nothing 34) and further: “Perhaps I should warn you […] that some of this book will strike you as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff” (Nothing 38). The generic hybridity and the defiant indefiniteness of the self-narration is also evident in Levels of Life. 6 Kusek classifies the first part as a biographical essay, the second one as a short story, and the third part as an (auto)biographical narrative (Through the Looking Glass 176). Mark Lawson, in an interview with Julian Barnes, classifies the three parts as “biography, fiction, autobiography”, Barnes himself defines the parts as “biographical essay, short story, memoir” (Barnes, “An Interview with Julian Barnes”). Brus´ has an even shorter description at hand and summarises Levels of Life as an “essay-story-memoir” (83). The dust jacket describes Levels of Life as a biography/memoir and thus emphasises the autobiographical nature of the book. 7 Nadar was the first to “put together two things” (LL 3; LL 27), which is photography and aeronautics. “Félix Tournachon describes ‘the silent immensities of welcoming and beneficent space, where man cannot be reached by any human force or by any power of evil, and where he feels himself live as if for the first time’” (LL 13). The crash of the balloonist seems to be a punishment, a warning that it is repulsive to “visit God’s space” (LL 13) and therefore committing the “sin of getting above yourself” (LL 14). 8 Roughly 60 per cent are written in the first-person singular, 15 per cent in the first-person plural, and about 25 per cent in the second person. 9 For an in-depth insight into Levinas’s consideration of death see his work God, Death, and Time (2000). 10 In his 2011 review “Regulating Sorrow” of Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Barnes writes: “Grief dislocates both space and time. The grief-struck find themselves in a new geography, where other people’s maps are only ever approximate. Time also ceases to be reliable. […] And this unreliability of time adds to the confusion in the sorrower’s mind as to whether grief is a state or a process” (“Regulating Sorrow” 224). Barnes then suggests that “grief is the state and mourning the process” only to specify that “to the person enduring one or both, things are rarely so clear” (224). He specifies that “there can be no general rules, nor standard timescale” (224). 11 “Barnes not only openly challenges the five-stage path of mourning and its progress, arguing in favour of the ‘accumulation’ of grief, but, unlike many of his

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fellow (auto)thanatographers, questioning the very idea of ‘success’ at grief” (Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 184). Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying addresses this five-stage development of grief: (1) denial and isolation (51–62), (2) anger (63–92), (3) bargaining (93–96), (4) depression (97–122), (5) acceptance (123–146). Since the late 90s, there has been an increase in autothanatographical writing as well as attempts to define and map this micro-genre (Couser, Memoir 43). Susanna Egan’s Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (1999) studies autobiographical narratives and death. Analysing works of “death writing” (Egan 207) which feature narratives of AIDS or cancer, the study focusses on the process of dying selves and others and thus “on illness, pain, and imminent death as crucial to the processes of that life” (Egan 224). For a discussion of the epistemological problematics in autothanatography see Callus’s essay “(Auto)Thanatography or (Auto)Thanatology?” (2005). Smith and Watson use expressions such as narratives of grief, mourning, and reparation (138–141). Addressing the example of AIDS narratives, Smith and Watson suggest that in such narratives “constructing memoir becomes an act of mourning not only personal loss but collective vulnerability and communal loss” (139). In Through the Looking Glass (2017), Kusek lists several examples of memoirs which are concerned with the death of spouses, e.g. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story, Anne Roiphe’s Epilogue and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name. For a study of memoirs of loss see Berman’s Companionship in Grief (2010) and of memoirs of dying see Berman’s Dying in Character (2012). Emphasising the community of mourners, Barnes writes for example: “We imagine we have battled against it [grief], been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest” (LL 118). Barnes has used the description of grief as “this unique, banal thing” in his 2011 review “Regulating Sorrow” of Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (“Regulating Sorrow” 216). As “there are now fewer social forms to surround and support the grief-bearer” and as “[v]ery little is handed down from one generation to the next about what it is like”, people are, as Barnes writes, “expected to suffer in comparative silence” (“Regulating Sorrow” 216). Levels of Life is comparable to Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which “is essayistic and concise, seeking external points of comparison, trying to set her case in some wider context” (Barnes, “Regulating Sorrow” 218). “Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still – at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) – it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross” (LL 68). This is also the only instance in which the writer’s name is mentioned. In general, the characters in the autobiographical part of Levels of Life remain exemplary and anonymous. This also concerns the necessity of everyone being affected by death, in which Barnes observes other people at the hospital and asks: “How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?” (LL 68–69). “You may die in your personal character, or in your literary character. Some manage to do both” (Barnes, Nothing 174). When Barnes writes about his dreams (LL 96–97), a prominent passage from Nothing to Be Frightened Of comes to mind: “I have always been suspicious of dreams; or rather, of excessive interest in them” (Nothing 147).

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22 See also the following passage in Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “Fiction is made a process which combines total freedom and utter control, which balances precise observation with the free play of the imagination, which uses lies to tell the truth and truth to tell lies. It is both centripetal and centrifugal. It wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction and irresolvability; at the same time it wants to tell the one true story, the one that smelts and refines and resolves all other stories” (240–241). For an insightful reading of emotion and memory in Nothing to Be Frightened Of see Callus (“There Is Great Unrest”). 23 In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes writes: “My philosopher brother distrusts the essential truth of memories. I distrust the way we colour them in” (Nothing 29). 24 The binocular is “corroborated by the one who was there at the time. What we did, where we went, whom we met, how we felt. How we were together” (LL 109). 25 Barnes acknowledges that grief also triggers “all aspects of vanity. Look how much I suffer, how much others fail to understand” (LL 113). 26 He continues: “These may sound like clear markers, boxes awaiting a tick. But among any success there is much failure, much recidivism. Sometimes, you want to go on loving the pain. And then, beyond this, yet another question sharply outlines itself on the cloud: is ‘success’ at grief, at mourning, at sorrow, an achievement, or merely a new given condition? Because the notion of free will seems irrelevant here; the attribution of purpose and virtue – the idea of griefwork rewarded – feels misplaced. Perhaps, this time, the analogy with illness holds. Studies of cancer patients show that attitudes of mind have very little effect on clinical outcome” (LL 117). 27 Calafat’s reading of Levels of Life predominantly focusses on French heritage in the book and the various influences by prominent writers such as Michel de Montaigne, Gustave Flaubert, or Jules Renard. Montaigne, who is also a private person, is very much known for his essayistic writing and the thematisation of death, which resonates stylistically and thematically with Barnes’s essayistic memoir (Calafat 466–467). 28 Barnes also states that “what seems to have disappeared is a feel for the pattern of things” (LL 85). 29 “The vestigial human outline on a cave wall, the first mirror, the development of portraiture, the science of photography – these were advances which allowed us to look at ourselves better, with increasing truth” (LL 26). 30 The consistent reference to cork overjackets in all three parts of Levels of Life points to the meagre possibilities to avoid pain or grief after a crush or loss, respectively: “Early cross-Channel aeronauts often wore cork buoyancy jackets in case they landed on water” (LL 8) or “There are some balloonists who wear cork overjackets in case they land in the sea. But that strikes me as unsporting. I believe a man should take his chances” (LL 43). When rejected, Burnaby’s feelings are also compared to ballooning: “He had been given his answer. The water was freezing and he had not so much as a cork overjacket to protect him” (LL 59). The reference to the cork overjacket this time introduces its applicability to hurt in relationships and reaches its climax in its recurrence in “The Loss of Depth”, in which Barnes in an “initial shock” feels that “you have suddenly come down in the freezing German Ocean, equipped only with an absurd cork overjacket that is supposed to keep you alive. And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked” (LL 69). 31 The ending of Levels of Life closes the circle and connects with the common tropes of the memoir to indicate some sort of hope in the process of grieving: “We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them. All that has happened is that from somewhere – or nowhere – an

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unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again. But where are we being taken? To Essex? The German Ocean? Or, if the wind is northerly, then, perhaps, with luck, to France” (LL 118). 32 “We have lost God’s height, and gained Nadar’s; but we have also lost depth. Once, a long time ago, we could go down into the Underworld, where the dead still lived” (LL 86). This is a reference to Euridice who “is losing height” (LL 95). 33 Almost invisibly, Barnes includes another love story (about a parrot and a monkey) in “On the Level”: “In parenthesis, another love story” (LL 57).

Bibliography Baker, Timothy C. “The Art of Losing: The Place of Death in Writers’ Memoirs.” Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature. Ed. Richard Bradford. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 219–233. Barnes, Julian. “An Interview with Julian Barnes. BBC Front Row.” Interview by Mark Lawson. BBC Radio Four. 03 April 2013. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b01rlnht. Accessed 10 August 2022. Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. 1984. London: Vintage, 2012. Barnes, Julian. “Julian Barnes: The Final Interview.” Interview by Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts. 2007. Conversations with Julian Barnes. Eds. Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 161–188. Barnes, Julian. Levels of Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013. Barnes, Julian. Nothing to Be Frightened Of. 2008. London: Vintage, 2009. Barnes, Julian. Pulse. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011. Barnes, Julian. “Regulating Sorrow.” Through the Window: Seventeen Essays (and One Short Story). London: Vintage, 2012. 215–227. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 1980. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Berman, Jeffrey. Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C.S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trilling. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Berman, Jeffrey. Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. Brockes, Emma. “Julian Barnes: The Sense of Another Ending.” The Guardian. 30 March 2013. www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/30/julian-barnes-sense-of-anotherending. Accessed 10 August 2022. Brus´, Teresa. “Lives, etc.: Fragments of Lives in Short Stories by Julian Barnes.” The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction. Eds. Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Dra˛ g. Wilmington: Vernon, 2019. 81–89. Calafat, Caterina. “Je Sois Autre Moy-Mesmes: Generic Blending and French Heritage in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 43.3 (2016): 461–476. Callus, Ivan. “(Auto)Thanatography or (Auto)Thanatology? Mark C. Taylor, Simon Critchley and the Writing of the Dead.” Forum of Modern Languages 41.4 (2005): 427–438. Callus, Ivan. “‘There Is Great Unrest’: Some Reflections on Emotion and Memory in Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of and The Sense of an Ending.” Prague Journal of English Studies 1.1 (2012): 55–70. Childs, Peter. Julian Barnes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

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Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Guignery, Vanessa, and Ryan Roberts. “Julian Barnes: The Final Interview.” Conversations with Julian Barnes. Eds. Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 161–188. Henke, Christoph. Vergangenheitsobsessionen: Geschichte und Gedächtnis im Erzählwerk von Julian Barnes. Trier: WVT, 2001. Holmes, Frederick M. Julian Barnes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families. 1969. New York: Scribner, 2003. Kusek, Robert. “Challenging Generic Conventions: Levels of Life by Julian Barnes and the Genre of (Auto)thanatography.” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 26.2 (2015): 149–160. Kusek, Robert. Through the Looking Glass: Writers’ Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2017. Lee, Hermione. Body Parts: Essays in Life-Writing. London: Chatto & Windus, 2005. Levinas, Emmanuel. God, Death, and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Miller, Nancy K. “Representing Others: Gender and Subjects of Autobiography.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.1 (1994): 1–25. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Pateman, Matthew. Julian Barnes. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2002. Schmitt, Arnaud. The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making It Real. London: Routledge, 2017. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. New York: Anchor, 1990.

5

The Personal and the Ethical in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime

J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 and the first twotime winner of the Booker Prize for both Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999, is certainly one of the most appraised contemporary writers today. Two recent biographical studies, John Kannemeyer’s J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing (2012) and David Attwell’s J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (2015), portray a very private author in a symbiotic relationship with his writing. Born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa, Coetzee’s works are most often concerned with ethics and politics, but also with the renegotiation of genre conventions and questions of truth, selfknowledge, and (authorial) responsibility.1 His writing is greatly influenced by his upbringing in an Afrikaner family with English instead of Afrikaans as the main language. Although the thematisation of South African politics and ethics invites critics to concentrate on the political and historical aspects in Coetzee’s work, Coetzee’s engagement with aesthetics and form is ubiquitous in his writing. Between 1997 and 2009, Coetzee published three autobiographical texts entitled Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009),2 forming a trilogy which “presents the autobiographical and the confessional in unexpected ways” (Marcus, Autobiography 23).3 Coetzee’s trilogy of “fictionalized memoirs” (Coetzee, Scenes from Provincial Life blurb)4 was re-published in 2011 in the single volume Scenes from Provincial Life with partially revised versions of the memoirs. Critical scholarship on Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy has often focused on questions of fictionality and factuality, their generic categorisation (e.g. Kusek, Through the Looking Glass; Cichon´),5 or its metanarrative potential (e.g. Effe, “Coetzee’s Summertime”, Effe, J.M. Coetzee; Rüggemeier, “Auto/ Biographic Metafiction”; Struth, “Autobiographies in the Third Person”). Contrary to his claim in an interview that Boyhood and Youth would be his only memoirs – “Will there be a third volume? My feeling at present is, no. Enough is enough” (Coetzee and Attwell 216) – the writer added a third, experimental volume to his autobiographical trilogy, Summertime (2009).6 Although Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime share the third-person perspective as well as the present tense and could therefore be well read together, Summertime differs from its prequels in that it is a unique metacommentary on auto/biographical DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374-5

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practice and emphasises the relational scope of self-narration. This study will thus focus on Summertime’s outstanding role as a tongue-in-cheek autre-biography par excellence in Coetzee’s trilogy.7 Summertime, a title which ironically suggests the portrayal of an upbeat and flourishing life, is a compilation of interview transcriptions and notebook entries written by John Coetzee. The “very tricksy memoir” (Cartwright) emphasises its innovative generic scope and experimentality.8 The biographer Mr. Vincent, who has never met the by then deceased author but is in possession of John’s notebooks, conducts five interviews between 2007 and 2008 with some of John’s acquaintances: former lover Julia Frankl, a therapist living in Canada, John’s cousin Margot Jonker, who is based on Coetzee’s cousin Agnes (Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 197), lives in South Africa and who has the closest relationship with John, a Brazilian dance teacher named Adriana Nascimento and two colleagues from the University of Cape Town, Martin J., a white South African now living in England, and Sophie Denoël from France. The, as Vincent claims, “seriously intended biography” concentrates on the years between 1971/72 to 1977, “an important period of [Coetzee’s] life, important yet neglected, a period when he was still finding his feet as a writer” (S 225). Summertime begins with eight notebook entries which deal with the years 1972 to 1975 and concludes with five “undated fragments” which portray John’s relationship with his dying father, thus giving the notebooks a structural and thematic prominence. Summertime is Coetzee’s most explicit commentary on the practice of auto/ biographical writing and the disruption of the unity of author, narrator, and protagonist as proposed in Lejeune’s more traditional take on autobiography. This chapter will provide an insight into the impact of Coetzee’s narratological and aesthetic choices on the interplay of personal and ethical and the metacommunicative scope of the memoir. Justly, Elleke Boehmer sees in Coetzee’s writing a “tireless oscillation […] between the ‘expressive function’ of language on the one hand, and the concealment that metaphor and symbolization allow on the other” (59). Considering Coetzee’s consistent protection of literature as art and his statement against restrictive interpretations – by readers and, as an author, by providing master-interpretations of his own work – this study emphasises ambivalences and ambiguities in Summertime. The third-person perspective and present tense, the form of the interview and the combination of dialogue and narrative prose, and the metageneric commentary in Summertime reflect on the representability of the self and generic conventions, while the consideration of truth(s) and the “human” in Summertime demonstrates the memoir’s move beyond the personal towards a relational outlook. John’s notebook entries and italicised memos demand a discussion of their own as they are a central component of third-person autobiographical writing and in juxtaposition with the interview sections. The narrative perspective as well as more universal ethical and humanist questions opt for an ambivalent yet fruitful interpretation and make Summertime simultaneously personal and relational,

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intimate and distanced, reflective and ironic. I will argue that one possible reading of Coetzee’s Summertime hints at the memoir’s dialogic and communicative gesture, in which the overarching message and consideration of humanist concerns comes before the individual narrative.

Autre-Biography and Self-Withdrawal Considering J.M. Coetzee’s academic background in English language studies and linguistics, narrative form has always been relevant in his fictional writing. While we may think of first-person narrative as a “privileged” form which promotes authoritative self-centredness and a pronounced engagement with the I, the move towards the (present-tense) third person has multiple effects on the autobiographical text. In Summertime, the autobiographical self ceases to be the authority – not only regarding its distanced self-portrayal but also through a structural marginalisation (by proclaiming the writer as dead and by literally having someone else write about him). Coetzee’s claim that, after all, “when one tries to put the historical self into writing, what emerges, inevitably, is a substitute for that self […] all autobiography is, in fact, autre-biography” (Coetzee and Attwell 216) mirrors Philippe Lejeune’s clarification that the first-person perspective only “conceals the gap between the subject of enunciation and the statement” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 31). The third-person perspective (in the notebook as well as in conversations about John) and the fictional biographer Vincent, then, explicitly underscore the text’s three levels of autre-biography. Considering the contemporary refusal of the notion of a unified self, Katja Sarkowsky even states that “by pronouncing the gap, the use of ‘he’ instead of ‘I’ might even be the more ‘honest’ autobiographical utterance” (2054). I argue that the third person establishes a formal distance, while the withdrawal of the I is mirrored on multiple other occasions. Although the third person is often thought of as a distancing device, other affective and cognitive strategies and their communicative function may counteract this perception. In Summertime, the third person establishes a distance which enables both “internal distancing” and “personal confrontation” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 28).9 In Lejeune’s approach to third-person autobiography, the scholar claims that “if one seeks to make someone else’s point of view part of his autobiography, it could only be in an imaginary way, by restoring the other as a character in the novel” (On Autobiography 46). This aim has been voiced by one of Coetzee’s role models, Roland Barthes, who states in his autobiographical work Roland Barthes from 1975 (which in fact oscillates between the first and third person) that “[i]t must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel” (1). The thirdperson perspective can be a distancing device (of fictionalisation), as “[o]ne cannot write an autobiography without constructing and communicating a point of view towards oneself” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 41; my emphasis). Laura Marcus summarises this necessary act of

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self-externalisation as follows: “Autobiography imports alterity into the self by the act of objectification which engenders it” (Auto/Biographical Discourses 203). In Summertime, this objectification results in a dislocation of the (auto-)biographical self and a “persistent if subtle syntax of subjective displacement” (Clarkson, Countervoices 21). The distance and dissociation of the third person thus encourages an engagement with personal responsibilities, judgements, and political incongruities. As already stated, this distance is even more increased as the removal of the autobiographical self appears on several levels. First, the notebook sections are entirely written in the third person. Second, the deceased John is the object of discussion in the interviews, which makes him both present and absent in the narrative, and third, Coetzee engages a fictional biographer to narrate John’s story.10 Summertime thus stages a discrepancy between the physical absence, which is characterised by John’s fictional death, and the thematic presence in the interviewees’ narratives. The third person allows the writer and the reader to observe the narrated self from multiple perspectives, a perspectivity which is multiplied by several micro-narratives (interviews) and more “personal” notebook entries. In Doubling the Point, a collection of essays and interviews conducted by David Attwell, Coetzee famously coined the term autrebiography, and explained that the “discipline within which he (and he now begins to feel closer to I: autrebiography shades back into autobiography) had trained himself/myself to think brought illuminations that I can’t imagine him or me reaching by any other route” (Doubling the Point 394). In his interview with Coetzee, Attwell stresses the productive potential of this distance for self-exploration and suggests that “the third-person mode of address enables one to achieve greater leverage, possibly extending to the writing subject diagnosing the written subject or protagonist as belonging to a certain historical condition” (Coetzee and Attwell 216). The third person thereby creates “an image of our exterior self […] that enables self-contemplation” (Folkenflik 215) and may therefore promote intimacy despite its initial distancing effect. The external perspective helps to move closer to and reflect on the autobiographical self in the process.11 In Summertime, the third person seems, to invoke Lejeune here, to mark “an articulation (a tension) between identity and difference” (On Autobiography 36). It demonstrates a mode of detachment and an increased level of fictionalisation to explore the relationship between the past and present self. The advantage of the third-person perspective can therefore also be that “the stern truth criteria of autobiography are relaxed” (Martens 50) – although Coetzee states that in fact “all life writing invents its object, whether it declares its fictionality or not” (Coetzee and Attwell 214).12 While traditionally in literary autobiography, the third person has become a technique for “blurring the line between fact and fiction, memory and imagination” (Gunzenhauser 563), I would suggest that Summertime creates a cross-reference between diegetic and non-diegetic world and not an attempt to mingle them (see Effe, “Coetzee’s

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Summertime”; J.M. Coetzee). Summertime is no different in its undertaking of complicating the fact-fiction-dimensions, but necessarily does so in a way which favours a cognitive involvement of the reader in the autobiographical process by complicating the generic status of the memoir. With Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee introduces the present tense in his thirdperson autobiographical writing.13 While the third person creates a “feel of being set in the past” (Clarkson, Countervoices 24), the temporal convergence of past and present through the present tense works against this “feel” and may also create intimacy, an “unsettling sense of nearness” (Cardoen 103). This intimacy is not comparable to what Paul Auster tries in Winter Journal or Report from the Interior with an inclusive present-tense you but rather encourages “an immediacy of reflection on narrative construction of the events and thoughts related” (Sarkowsky 2054).14 If we consider examples of confessional writing, such as Augustine’s or Rousseau’s Confessions, however, Coetzee’s autobiographical accounts appear less intimate, which ties in with Coetzee’s refusal of “confessional self-revelation” (Attridge 138) in his fiction.15 The present tense is used in combination with a specific and restricted time frame (in Boyhood it is John’s childhood, in Youth his adolescence, and in Summertime 1970s South Africa) and allows for an approximation of the narrated past in the present.16 Summertime comments on the use of the thirdperson perspective when Vincent explains the narrative perspective in John Coetzee’s notebooks: “As you will hear, [Coetzee] follows the same convention as in Boyhood and Youth, where the subject is called ‘he’ rather than ‘I’” (S 205). A third-person narrative within a third-person narrative, Summertime makes use of this form in one of the fictional interviews as well. Vincent reads out the account which he has formulated based on the transcribed interview conducted with Margot. He comments on the use of the third person and that the “she I have introduced is like I but is not I” (S 89), which Margot perceives as “confusing” (S 89). The section is presented in free indirect discourse rendering the story in Margot’s voice but is written by Vincent, which complicates the question of narrative authority. The complicating nature of the third person is essential to Coetzee’s autobiographical endeavour in that “the reader is invited to an ambiguous reading” (Lejeune, On Autobiography 32). This ambiguity permeates Coetzee’s Summertime, in which the writer subverts the boundaries which usually constitute the genre, and the dominance of the narrating I. The narrative perspective allows for a “complex relationship of intimacy and detachment” (Lenta 157) and less a complete withdrawal from his own autobiographical text. The autobiographical text thus oscillates between a state of omission or detachment, self-legitimisation, and self-responsibility.

The Third-Person Notebooks: The Personal vs the Collective In most scholarly approaches to Summertime, critics have either overemphasised the interview sections or the notebook entries. I will extend the

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previous discussion of Coetzee’s third person with a closer look at the notebook sections, as they assume a prominent position in Summertime – if not lengthwise, then at least aesthetically and structurally by being placed at the beginning and the end of the memoir and giving John the “first and last word” in free indirect discourse, an “effective substitute for what in a more conventional account would be the first person” (Lenta 168). While the interviews in Summertime offer multiple perspectives on the interviewees as well as on John, the notebooks reveal autobiographical notes of the auto/ biographical subject of the book and provide a contextual and at times more intimate frame to the interview sections. The first notebook entries cover the years 1972 to 1975 and John’s enforced and reluctant return to South Africa after his years in the US, while the concluding notebook sections are undated fragments, dealing with his ageing father. The placement of the notebooks at the beginning and end of Summertime gives them an additional prominence to separate them structurally and stylistically from the interview sections. The notebook sections, written in present-tense third person, give an insight into John’s personal life. The italicised memos, which John writes below his notebook entries at a later point, stress the work-in-progress character of his notebooks and, on the content-level, sum up, comment on, or judge his preceding entries. In addition to Alexandra Effe’s assumption that the notebooks display the progress of fictionalisation, I argue that the memos are intended to provide more substantial background on John’s original thoughts in the notebook entries, which also becomes apparent in the phrasing of the memos, e.g. “To be expanded on” (S 6; S 8).17 According to biographer Vincent, “Coetzee wrote them himself. They are memos to himself, written in 1999 or 2000, when he was thinking of adapting those particular entries for a book” (S 20). The distance of self-address is mirrored by a later commenting self in the memos which “set the tone for the increasingly distanced and selfcritical portrait of the artist that will emerge in this text” (Kossew 16) and a reconsideration of self-narration as a process. In general, the notebook sections seem to serve as a means of characterisation and of providing more personal insights, using John as a focaliser. The historical context of South Africa during apartheid is undeniably present in Coetzee’s writing, although, and this will be explored in the subsequent subchapters, he does not take a strong political stance or show an active engagement with political issues.18 Considering Coetzee’s educational background in European (modernist) tradition and culture and the various cultural surroundings of living in the US, the UK, and Australia, there is a multiplicity of identities and perspectives the writer unites and upholds in his writing. The first notebook entries from 1972 to 1975, however, predominantly disclose insights into South African politics and their impact on John and his philosophical and ethical reflections. Recounting his father’s disdain for South Africa, the ongoing violence, and the enormous and consequential socio-political turbulences during one of the most conflictual

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periods of apartheid, John compares his father’s reaction to the news – Jack Coetzee “resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores” – with his own response to this “moral dilemma”, namely “fits of rage and despair” (S 5), and wonders whether his reaction is more suitable. When John decides to lay the concrete around his father’s house (S 6–7), he reflects on the sustainability of creative work (i.e. writing) in contrast to manual labour, commented on in the following memo: “To be expanded on: his readiness to throw himself into half-baked projects; the alacrity with which he retreats from creative work into mindless industry” (S 8). At the same time, John employs this account to clarify his political views, as in carrying out this manual labour “he finds himself doing […] what people like him should have been doing ever since 1652, namely, his own dirty work” (S 7), an aspect which is re-addressed in Margot’s account of John’s (unsuccessful) attempts to fix his broken car by himself, blaming his failure on the “long history of making other people do our work for us while we sit in the shade and watch” (S 111). An entry on Breyten Breytenbach introduces the idea of homeland in Summertime and of the freedom to abandon the homeland (S 9), pointing towards John’s recent return to South Africa and the conflicted relationship with South Africa. While another entry on John’s conscientious attitude towards his translation work, which the later John identifies in a memo as integrity and naiveté, highlights John’s strong linguistic interests and the reliance on principles (S 12), a brief passage on religion demonstrates John’s atheism (S 13) and the last introductory notebook entry once again comments on political tensions and the divide between criminalised neighbourhoods and “white suburbia” (S 15). The introductory notebook entries thus seem to establish several central characteristic ethical and political concerns in John’s life, which are elaborated on or reappear in the subsequent interviews and final notebooks. While the relationship between John and his father is thematised throughout the interviews (e.g. S 41–48; 95), the final undated notebook entries provide a more detailed account of a difficult and complex father-and-son-relationship which plays a decisive role in the memoir.19 While Coetzee’s mother was still alive at the time (she died of cancer in 1985; Kannemeyer), John’s mother has already died (S 37) in the memoir (which may be since Coetzee has already addressed their relationship in Boyhood).20 John’s meditation on the relationship with his father raises issues of success, failure, and expectations: A father to look after, a father not very good at looking after himself, smoking a little in secret, drinking a little in secret, with a view of their joint domestic situation no doubt at variance with his own: for instance, that it has fallen to him, the unlucky father, to look after him, the grown-up son, since he, the son, is not very good at looking after himself, as is all too evident from his recent history. (S 254–255)

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While some notebook entries cover John’s reflection on the role of his Afrikaner education in Worcester (S 252–255)21 or love and women (S 255), they concentrate predominantly on the father, taking up a central theme of Boyhood. Despite the complicated relationship, the notebooks begin with an account of their joint interest in sports, “the strongest surviving bond between them” (S 245). In contrast, the notebooks entail an insightful passage about guilt and shame on John’s part, in which he writes about his father’s favourite Tebaldi record, which John hates very much (at the age of 16), and which becomes a symbol of their struggle between affection and hatred. John considers “[t]hat he might despise it simply because his father loved it, that he would have resolved to hate and despise anything in the world that his father loved, was a possibility he would not admit” (S 249). This explanation is also given as a reason for destroying the Tebaldi record, an impulsive action John regrets (and which he tries to make up for, S 250): “For that mean and petty deed of his he has for the past twenty years felt the bitterest remorse” (S 249). A confessional mode becomes apparent in this section, as the third person establishes distance towards shameful experiences, between narrating and experiencing self. Interestingly, John imagines a conversation in which he asks his father for forgiveness for making his life miserable: Forgive me for deliberately and with malice aforethought scratching your Tebaldi record. And for more besides, so much more that the recital would take all day. For countless acts of meanness. For the meanness of heart in which those acts originated. In sum, for all I have done since the day I was born, and with such success, to make your life a misery. (S 250) The striking change from third- to first-person narration is particularly relevant as it gives a more immediate insight into John’s emotions, reducing the distance between narrating and experiencing self and marking a more direct reference to the autobiographical self (Kossew 20). Communicative difficulties between John and his father are also addressed in the following passage, stating that “he finds it hard to detect what his father cares about […]. If he could solve the mystery of what in the world his father wants, he might perhaps be a better son” (S 247; S 251). The relationship thus portrays an interplay of misunderstanding and affection, and the very hesitance of showing the latter: [I]t is not the practice in their family for one person to reach out and touch another. […] If on this one extreme occasion he were to ignore family practice and grasp his father’s hand, would what that gesture implied be true? Is his father truly loved and cherished? Is his father truly not alone? (S 263; also S 9)

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The general conflict of living with his father is further summarised in the memo: “Theme to carry further: his father and why he lives with him. The reaction of the women in his life (bafflement)” (S 252; see also S 14; 31; 149). As Patrick Hayes emphasises, the notebooks in Summertime hint at John’s guilty conscience regarding his father (“Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 83), an aspect which culminates in the final sentences of the notebooks: It used to be that he, John, had too little employment. Now that is about to change. Now he will have as much employment as he can handle, as much and more. He is going to have to abandon some of his personal projects and be a nurse. Alternatively, if he will not be a nurse, he must announce to his father: I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye. One or the other: there is no third way. (S 265–266) In addition to John’s return to his lonely father after his return from the US, already “an act of filial duty” (S 92), as Margot notes, the passage above summarises the dilemma of having to choose between abandonment and the obligation to care for his father. It points towards a consideration of ethical responsibility towards and for (familial) others. This conflicted state between abandonment and obligation resonates throughout the book. As Attwell observes, it not only hints at the literal father but “is metonymically associated with the father-land” as “John’s discomfort on returning home has not shifted” (“Trauma Refracted” 293). John’s psychological state is thematised in a few passages, for example when he describes himself as a “gloomy fellow; a wet blanket; a stick in the mud” (S 248). When he reminisces about a fictional story about a man and his diary recording his bad days (S 260–261) and his “malaise” (S 261) and suicide (S 261), the third person unconvincingly differentiates between the fictional man John invents and John himself. Overall, the third-person notebooks stage and emphasise the distance between narrating and narrated self, especially in the confrontation of uncomfortable experiences, shame, and ambiguous accounts. The prominent position of the notebooks furthermore stresses the relevance of the fatherand-son relationship in Summertime as a central relational concept and as symbolic of John’s identity issues, while introducing and picking up relevant and recurring themes of the autobiographical text.

Coetzee’s Countervoices: Relational Selves Coetzee’s Summertime not (only) depicts the limits of self-narration but – as a side-effect of the autobiographer’s self-reduction – foregrounds other lives which are written into the autobiographical text. Summertime is a conglomerate of microauto/biographies (i.e. interviews) inscribed into a biography-inthe-making within an autobiographical work and juxtaposes the relevance of

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the protagonist with other voices which in the process become as important or even more important than the autobiographical subject. The use of interviews and other characters’ narratives establishes a shift towards the Other, moving (further) away from the autobiographical I. This multi-perspectivism puts the reader “in the position of the biographer […] assembling fragments of information about [Coetzee’s] dead subject” (Kermode 9). This supports the processes of self-reduction, cognitive involvement, and the extensive possibilities of self- and other-narration. Effe writes about authorial identity that a “turn away from the self acknowledges a fundamental quality of how we come into being and how we come to understand ourselves, namely in relation to others, acknowledging also that in constructing a narrative of oneself one affects others” (“Coetzee’s Summertime” 259). Effe continues to state that the “focus on others and on the process of writing are Coetzee’s way of taking responsibility for the multiple stories that form the authorial identity and voice and for the impact they have” (259). This responsibility is reflected on two levels: the stories of others shape John’s personal story and at the same time document that lives are relational and impact other lives. Coetzee’s attention to others may also be “perceived as a commentary on the speaking and experiencing selves, as a reluctance to equate them, not as a withdrawal from the autobiographical project” (Cichon´ 63). Although multiple stories provide a multifaceted perspective on the writer John Coetzee, they also reveal the interviewees’ own self-narratives. Coetzee’s coinage of the term “autrebiography” is hence most evidently performed via form and content. Summertime features a multiplicity of voices and thus accounts for a dialogic and polyphonic relationality in the text (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism) and an inherently ethical structure. In a review in The New York Times, Coetzee writes that a “fully dialogical novel is one in which there is no dominating, central authorial consciousness, and therefore no claim to truth or authority, only competing voices and discourses” (“The Artist at High Tide”). Coetzee’s autobiographical endeavour in Summertime seems to work against a “monologic ideal” (Coetzee, Doubling the Point 65) by including a multiplicity of voices “whose temporalities are indistinct and overlapping” (Hayes, “Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 80). However, as the overall authorial voice is still Coetzee’s, the writer of the “massive unitary self-projection comprised by his oeuvre” (S 226) only supposedly presents independent voices. By introducing multiple stories about others and by juxtaposing their respective voices, Summertime accounts for a pronounced plurality, and thematises the tension between personal and relational (and even collective). The acknowledgement in life-writing studies “that one person’s autobiography is inevitably someone else’s biography” (Couser, “Genre Matters” 124) thus characterises Coetzee’s autobiographical work. In Doubling the Point, Coetzee identifies writing in general as dialogue and states that [t]here is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them.

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It is some measure of the author’s seriousness whether he does evoke/ invoke those countervoices in himself. (Doubling the Point 65) When Margot questions Vincent’s goals by asking why she is such a central figure in a book about John Coetzee, Vincent answers, “You were part of your cousin. He was part of you” (S 152), and foregrounds the relationality of selves. The different versions of John as characterised by the interviewees imply a multitude of selves, presented through a plurality of perspectives and a polyphonic autobiographical text, as “there is no one version, only versions, of a life” (Kossew 20). The result leaves the autobiographer, as Rüggemeier suggest, with “no voice” (“Auto/Biographic Metafiction” 292) – which may hold true for the five interview sections in Summertime but certainly not for the notebook sections at the beginning and end of the memoir. Just as in Coetzee’s other works, “[t]he importance of the many” (Mehigan and Moser 10) in Summertime is a guiding principle. Regarding the dominance of characters in the text there is no specific hierarchy, although the interview sections on Margot, Julia, and Adriana are the longest and Martin and Sophie reserve less space in the memoir. Despite being the biographical subject, John remains in the background, while the interviewees “concentrate […] on their own stories rather than John’s” (Kermode 10). In an interview, Coetzee states that “[h]istoricising oneself is an exercise in locating one’s significance, but is also a lesson, at the most immediate level, in insignificance” (Doubling the Point 209). The self, decentred by the third person, is additionally detached through multiple (auto)biographical subjects. Summertime thus shifts the narrative away from the autobiographical I and creates a platform “to tell the stories, and recount the lives of those who would otherwise not be seen as suitable biographical subjects” (Sheehan 87). Jan Tlustý concludes that “[b]y means of narrative, Coetzee says, this is me too. Stories of a country where apartheid destroys human dignity are my stories too” (234). The overarching questions of identity serve as a link between the characters, less so the personal history of John Coetzee. According to Lejeune, the autobiographer may access the self in two different ways: “On the one hand, he puts himself inside others in order to understand how they see him; on the other hand, he puts himself outside his self in order to see that self as if he were someone else” (On Autobiography 49; my emphasis).22 The figure of the biographer Vincent (as coordinator of narratives) allows Coetzee to be described from an outer perspective (except for some fragments of dialogue recalled by the interviewees) and serves as a filter to comment on the modes and limitations of self-narration.23 Just as the reader of the memoir, the autobiographer enters into a “pact of observers”, a position of observation in which writer and reader assume a distance towards the narrated self. Both author and reader are thus confronted with the interviewee’s and the biographer’s statements and degrading comments – apart from Margot’s, who “has a lingering soft spot for John” (S

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89) and a more sympathetic view of her cousin, the “failed emigrant, the poet of melancholy” (S 141). By the time Summertime was published, Coetzee had already been a Nobel prize winner and successful writer. However, the depiction of John in the memoir is less self-fashioning than straightforward self-deprecating as the various characters in Summertime go out of their way to demonstrate John’s flawed character and appearance and that he is a “failure” (S 21). The same applies to the various comments on John’s (in)ability to love, his manliness, his sexuality, his mediocre qualities and success as a writer, teacher, and academic, his (awkward) social nature, or John’s general insignificance.24 Tlustý holds that “Coetzee’s self-ironical or even self-abasing selfimage […] aims at one of the most sensitive points of all confessional writing, i.e. the ability to acknowledge one’s weaknesses, specify one’s own mistakes and guilt” (234).25 While autobiography has long been considered a way to represent “the life of the ‘great man’” (Smith and Watson 195), it is striking that Coetzee opts for “not a very dignified picture” (S 185). The elements of self-deprecation and self-irony “are consistent with the overall process of conscientious self-examination” (Tegla 271). In line with his fictional characters, Coetzee thus points to the moral implications of autobiographical writing but also towards wider ethical implications of involving others in the narrative and of the transgressive character of the autobiographical or narrative act itself (Butler 136). With regard to Margot’s interview, which in comparison to the other interviews is more advanced in the editing process (translations of Afrikaans vocabulary are provided by Vincent’s colleague),26 Vincent makes some changes and thus turns Margot’s version of the story into a very different one (S 91): I cut out my prompts and questions and fixed up the prose to read as an uninterrupted narrative spoken in your voice […]. Because the story you told was so long I dramatized it here and there, letting people speak in their own voices. (S 87) Margot rightly asks Vincent why, “if it is a book about John” he includes “so much about me” (S 152). At the same time, however, her voice (and as we learn from Vincent’s previous statement, the voices of other characters involved) is manipulated by the biographer, who replaces Margot’s I with a third-person narrative. This process highlights that the interview itself is a dialogic genre and space (especially if not transcribed verbatim). Summertime thus plays with the premise that the characters maintain a certain sense of control beyond the influence of the writer. In her interview, Julia appears to be very much aware of the fact that she centres the story around her “young and self-centred” self and her “erotic entanglement” (S 59) with John. The long passages in her interview show her dominance as well as her

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urge to tell her story about women in South Africa, about relationships between men and women – a “social microsystem” (S 27) – and about (her) sexuality (e.g. S 38). To underpin her agency and self-confident voice, there are only a few and short prompts and interruptions by Vincent (in twelve instances there is even silence). At times, Julia even interrupts herself with comments such as: “End of digression. I am fully aware it is John you want to hear about, not me and my schooldays” (S 41). Further: Mr Vincent, I am perfectly aware it is John you want to hear about, not me. But the only story involving John that I can tell, or the only one I am prepared to tell, is this one, namely the story of my life and his part in it, which is quite different, quite another matter, from the story of his life and my part in it. My story, the story of me, began years before John arrived on the scene and went on for years after he made his exit. (S 43; my emphasis) Although Julia is aware of the ultimate intention of Vincent’s project, she obviously has her story to tell (not only in relation to her dependence on John) and is eager to declare every detail as important, for example when she asks Vincent to “be patient, this is not irrelevant” (S 73). The distance established through a third-person perspective in John’s notebooks is thus contrasted with more authoritative and self-centring first-person insights into the interviewee’s lives (except for Margot, whose voice is explicitly altered and manipulated). Like in the rewriting of Margot’s story in the third person, Julia warns Vincent about the danger of editing and fictionalising the story to his needs: You commit a grave error if you think to yourself that the difference between the two stories, the story you wanted to hear and the story you are getting, will be nothing more than a matter of perspective – that while from my point of view the story of John may have been just one episode among many in the long narrative of my marriage, nevertheless, by a dint of a quick flip, a quick manipulation of perspective, followed by some clever editing, you can transform it into a story about John and one of the women who passed through his life. (S 44) Julia’s vehemence marks Coetzee’s principal of reserving space for his “countervoices” and undermines the notion that an isolated (non-relational) and overall picture of John is needed – which ties in with María J. López’ claim that the memoir “constitutes a zealous defence of the private dimension of the life of the writer as public figure” (245). The biographer Vincent seems to be aware of the ethical delicacy of writing about others from various perspectives but the subject’s own – an ethical responsibility which is implicitly suggested in Martin’s interview,

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although the ethical implications are of course shown throughout Summertime: “[W]hich would you rather have: a set of independent reports from a range of independent perspectives, from which you can then try to synthesize a whole; or the massive, unitary self-projection comprised by his oeuvre?” (S 226). The multiple perspectives of the interviewees are based on the selective choice of the interviewer, which has a strong impact on the depiction and construction of the self and selves. Although Vincent claims that he “let Coetzee himself do the choosing. [Vincent] simply followed up on clues he dropped in his notebooks – clues as to who was important to him at the time” (S 217), John’s colleague-friend Martin has a different opinion, fearing that Vincent’s interviewees might “have […] ambitions of their own to pronounce final judgment on Coetzee” (S 217) and dismisses the accounts of John’s acquaintances as too subjective and personal, and, as Martin rightly assumes, “emotionally involved” (S 217): Shouldn’t that give you pause? Are you not inevitably going to come out with an account that is slanted toward the personal and the intimate at the expense of the man’s actual achievements as a writer? Will it amount to anything more than – forgive me for putting it this way – anything more than women’s gossip? (S 218) In Summertime, Coetzee grants other voices centre-stage and consequently frames these narratives as “slanted toward the personal”. In contrast to Paul Auster, Coetzee states in his correspondence with Auster that he does not regard his memories as exemplary, but specifically attributed to his own self as “all of them [are] trapped in their particularity, not generalizable. My experiences seem to remain my experiences alone, not relevant to other people” (Auster and Coetzee 75). Peter Boxall sees in the Summertime an exchangeability of voices which “are only lightly attached to the characters that own them” (115). The overarching consideration in Summertime is how the focus shifts from the author to the individuals who are involved in the life-narrative(s). As in other examples of Coetzee’s writing, the “ethic Coetzee discusses […] favors the many over the few or the singular in point of principle” (Mehigan and Moser 10). In tune with the understanding of autobiographical writing as inherently relational, this assumption of the many over the few is mirrored in Coetzee’s Summertime and the act of narrating the self in relation to others.

Metageneric Commentary and Communication Summertime provides a striking example of metanarration in autobiographical writing. The withdrawal of the authorial self (John) from the centre of his self-narrative and even the withdrawal of the biographer’s authority through a multiplicity of voices not only aim for a marginalisation

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of the autobiographical self but also for an elaborate commentary on selfnarration and on questions of reliability, fictionality, factuality, and genre. As “self-reflexive works of art accentuate the fertile interaction between the sides of production, text, and reception in the generation of meaning” (Middeke, “Self-Reflexivity” 222), the deciphering of Summertime becomes a collaborative act. In her monograph on metalepsis in Coetzee’s works, Alexandra Effe writes that “[s]elf-reflexivity is a means of writing provisionally and tentatively, without authority, and in dialogue” (J.M. Coetzee xiv). Effe thereby focusses “on the combination of the author’s rhetorical control and the reader’s interpretative freedom” (14) and stresses that Coetzee’s texts “neither teach specific lessons nor value absolute uncertainty” (15). The ambiguity of reading and the rhetorical potential are of central concern in Summertime as “languages exist so that we can communicate with each other” (S 104). Metageneric commentary is, in fact, a prominent feature in Summertime (more so than in the prequels Boyhood and Youth). Anne Rüggemeier writes on metaauto/biographical writings that they “illuminate the methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of life writing as they foreground and highlight the processes of selection, the narrative process of meaning making and the cultural patterns and ideologies that shape the discourses of life narratives” (“Auto/Biographic Metafiction” 284).27 Effe’s work on metalepsis in Coetzee’s oeuvre is not merely concerned with the author’s autobiographical writing but makes a valid point in claiming that metalepsis is a way to encourage communication between author, text, and reader, thus facilitating a “truthful” form of writing and promoting a relational form of self-narrative that is not merely diegetic (see Effe, “Coetzee’s Summertime”; J.M. Coetzee). She writes: Summertime complicates the boundary between text and world but holds on to a distinction between them. Metaleptic transgressions between these levels function […] to turn the text into a site of negotiation between author and reader, who share the responsibility to continuously negotiate storyworld and world. (Effe, J.M. Coetzee 21) Effe also holds that the text “continuously transgresses the boundary between real world and storyworld. […] Summertime puts the narrative strategy of metalepsis to use in order to show the cross-influence between world and storyworld without equating the two” (J.M. Coetzee 117–118). I argue that the text is not necessarily concerned with a postmodernist, if you will, “play” with blurred boundaries, but rather with a productive framework which negotiates on an affective and reflective level a communicative relation with the reader. Like Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (Chapter 6), Summertime thus serves as a commentary on art and challenges generic

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boundaries. A central perception of the value and aims of writing becomes apparent in the following passage: I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion. That’s all. (S 242; my emphasis) With Summertime as “metaautrebiography” (Struth, “Autobiographies in the Third Person” 359), Coetzee is also deforming his medium.28 As Coetzee states in an interview with David Attwell, “genre is not […] a refined concept. Genre definitions – at least those definitions employed by ordinary readers – are quite crude. What if the writer wants to trouble the boundaries of the genre?” (Coetzee and Attwell 214). Clearly, Coetzee’s considerations are translated into his memoir Summertime and its challenges to autobiographical writing. The text can be regarded as a quintessential work of communication between author, text, and reader, as dialogic material in the form of interviews, dialogue, the diary-like notebooks, and the autobiographical act itself. Summertime lures the reader into a communicative situation in which “one feels oneself to be directly addressed by the author, who through his characters poses the philosophical questions that are driving the narrative” (Danta xvi). A central question that arises, and which has been addressed in Chris Danta’s Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority in Contemporary Fiction (2011), is the question of literary authority. When Sophie concludes that “our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world” (S 227), she raises central ethical concerns about narrating the life-stories of others (let alone deceased others) and “the question of discretion” (S 226). Vincent even claims that “[a] great writer becomes the property of all of us” and that “a well-known figure in our common cultural life, is to some extent public property” (S 226). Even though Vincent “never met [John] in the flesh” (S 34), he feels authorised to be John’s biographer – “Does one need authorization to write a book?” (S 225) – but would not “pronounce a judgment on anyone without ever meeting him face to face” (S 196). Sophie warns Vincent that a biographer “ought to be wary of putting people in neat little boxes with labels on them” (S 229). These dialogues display the ambivalent awareness of ethical concerns regarding the project, while at the same time, the fictionality of the biographer propels this ethical consideration back towards the reader. In fact, the multiple, and at times deviating portrayals of John and the interviewees themselves provide different versions of the self. These representations do not aim at a coherent image of the autobiographical subject John but renegotiate the plurality and relationality of the self as such. Its

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multidimensionality negates the boundaries of biographication and pushes the limits of autobiographical writing. In a conversation with John’s lover Julia, John regards a book as a “gesture of refusal in the face of time. A bid for immortality. […] I mean surviving beyond one’s physical demise” (S 61). By refusing the various expectations attributed to the memoir as self-promotion and self-construction – on the part of the biographer, the autobiographer(s) (the interviewees very well provide self-narratives of their own), or the reader – Summertime exemplifies a “resistance to ideological principles and collectivities” (López 247). What Coetzee does, however, is provide intertextual cues to his oeuvre, not only with respect to Coetzee’s memoirs Boyhood and Youth – “As you will hear, [John] follows the same convention as in Boyhood and Youth, where the subject is called ‘he’ rather than ‘I’” (S 205) – but also to the author’s fictional writing, e.g. Dusklands. A discussion between John and Julia about the truthvalue of a preface – “Oh, that’s all made up.” (S 55) – adds to the engagement with questions of genre in Summertime. Of course, the linguistic choices, and this includes the use of the third-person perspective and the different forms of diary-like notebooks, interviews, and memos, can be regarded as a metageneric commentary as well: Clarkson asks in Countervoices how seemingly innocent linguistic choices on the part of the writer have ethical consequences for the position of the speaking or writing self in relation to those whom one addresses, or in relation to those on whose behalf one speaks, or in relation to a world one attempts to represent or create in writing. (Countervoices 1) Clarkson discusses the concept of dialogism in Coetzee’s writing (15–17) and argues that “self-reflexive linguistic questions are at the core of [Coetzee’s] ethical enquiries, enquiries inflected by attentiveness to cultural and historical contingencies” (16). Ethical concerns regarding other-narration in biographical writing occur for example in Julia’s question addressed to John: “And how does your father feel about it, […] about having false claims made about him, about being turned into a character in a book?” (S 56). Adriana is aware of this, too: Of course you offer to me that I can change the record, I can add or cut out. But how much can I change? Can I change the label I wear around my neck that says I was one of Coetzee’s women? Will you let me take off that label? Will you let me tear it up? I think not. Because it would destroy your book, and you would not allow that. (S 199–200) In Margot’s interview, the question of truthful representation and integrity arises when she complains about Vincent’s revision of her interview: “When

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I spoke to you, I was under the impression you were simply going to transcribe our interview and leave it at that. I had no idea you were going to rewrite it completely” (S 91), to which Vincent answers: “I have not rewritten it, I have simply recast it as a narrative. Changing the form should have no effect on the content. If you feel I am taking liberties with the content itself, that is another question” (S 91). Margot, however, is not convinced – “your version doesn’t sound like what I told you” (S 91) – and addresses the ethical responsibility of “truthful” representation: “You can’t write that. You can’t. You are just making things up” (S 137) or “You are putting words of your own in my mouth” (S 119). This scepticism is in fact confirmed by the biographer: “I added a detail or two to bring the scene to life” (S 105). Margot’s response “[Y]ou can’t write down every word I say and broadcast it to the world” (S 100) prompts Vincent’s defensive reaction: “I’ll cut it out or tone it down, I promise” (S 101). The discussion about the editing process turns into a paradox as we read along with their debates and end up with a copy of seemingly unedited material plus metacommentaries.29 On a metalevel, these considerations of course collide with the moral responsibility and the level of respect for privacy on the part of the biographer of what to alter, include, and withdraw from John Coetzee’s biography. With a similar take on the reliability and the (im)possibility of reconstructing dialogue, Summertime addresses the implications in Julia’s interview, in which the construction of dialogue is in itself a sign of fictionalisation and alteration of factual truth: You must be getting worried. What have I let myself in for? you must be asking yourself. How can this woman pretend to have total recall of mundane conversations dating back three or four decades? And when is she going to get to the point? So let me be candid: as far as dialogue is concerned, I am making it up as I go along. Which I presume is permitted, since we are talking about a writer. What I am telling you may not be true to the letter, but it is true to the spirit, be assured of that. (S 32) Summertime consistently questions the reliability of sources and Vincent’s biographical practice of fictionalisation: [I]n biography one has to strike a balance between narrative and opinion. I have no shortage of opinion – people are more than ready to tell me what they think or thought of Coetzee – but one needs more than that to bring a life-story to life. (S 216) When Sophie hints at other seemingly reliable sources to look for documented facts – “What of his diaries? What of his letters? What of his

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notebooks? Why so much emphasis on interviews?” (S 225) – Vincent ironically dismisses John’s non-fictional writing as not trustworthy enough: 30

I have been through the letters and diaries. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record – not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity. (S 225–226) Instead, Vincent stresses the unreliability of factual accounts and proposes that “if you want the truth you have to go behind the fictions they elaborate and hear from people who knew him directly, in the flesh” (S 226). Sophie’s following objection points to the general processes of fictionalisation: But what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any worthier of credence than what he tells you himself? (S 226) In his interview, Martin emphasises the unreliability of John’s writings and the transferability of the written work to John’s personality: “It would be very, very naive to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life” (S 215) and asks: “Who can say what goes on in people’s inner lives?” (S 216). This ironic hint at the referentiality of autobiographical works once more undermines their reliability. Although Summertime is most often classified as a form of metaautobiographical writing, it additionally moves beyond the singular self which autobiographical texts often portray and hence emphasises questions of knowability, identity, and the representability of others. The memoirs “investigate less the ‘substance’ of a particular self-truth but the possibility and the process of writing it” (Sarkowsky 2060) and not just the process but also the formal and aesthetic implications and ambivalences of self-narration. Summertime thus adheres to a notion of truth and realism, or world-reference (Effe, J.M. Coetzee 103), and as I argue, is not all about metareferentiality but points towards more universal questions beyond.

Of Truth(s), Ethics, and Humanist Concerns Coetzee does not seem to be (predominantly) concerned with the presentation of an autobiographical self but rather with an auto/biographical narrative which addresses more ethical than personal questions. The writer’s awareness of questions of authenticity in life-writing is obvious in the text’s engagement with theoretical considerations of auto/biography, ethical responsibility, and

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humanist concerns in general. While Coetzee himself does not aim to differentiate between truthful and fictionalised autobiography, he seems to regard truth as something inherent in writing itself: “Truth is something that comes in the process of writing, or comes from the process of writing” (Doubling the Point 18), or as Derek Attridge paraphrases, “[t]he text does not refer to the truth; it produces it” (145). I suggest that the focus in Coetzee’s autobiographical writing is to open discourses of truth-telling or -producing but also more ethical and philosophical questions in a narrative which is based less on personal circumstances. As Angela Müller argues in her study on the poetics of self in Coetzee’s autobiographical works, “the question of authorial agency is intricately related to the historical and political subject position of the self” (16). Foregrounding what I see as an interplay of the personal and general in third-person autobiographical writing, the text is written in a “self-referential autobiographical mode that holds out the promise of intimacy and revelation, and occasionally approaches it, while simultaneously keeping the self at arm’s length” (Kossew 12). As Sarkowsky states, Summertime is not concerned with an “inward turn” (2050) as could be observed in literature after the end of apartheid but an engagement with others, with truths, and the referentiality of literature. While the question of (male) identity and the possibility of self-knowledge are already at the heart of Boyhood and Youth, these aspects become even more relevant in Summertime. Considering Coetzee’s biographical and educational background, a rather intellectual approach to writing and literature seems inevitable: As Mehigan and Moser point out in their edited collection on Coetzee’s intellectual landscapes, Coetzee’s work “hardly ever serves as a mere illustration of ideas or as straightforward allegory. Rather, philosophical ideas and aesthetic form interact in opposing ways” (3). The fragmentation on the aesthetic level seems to be mirrored by an underlying quest for the ambivalent truths of identity and humanity, as “Coetzee consciously links up with a long tradition of writing that puts literary techniques in the service of philosophical ideas” (4). In Coetzee’s works, as suggested in recent philosophical debates, the following three ideas are considered essential: “the question of truth versus that of justification, the question of objectivity versus that of communication, and, finally, the question of the convergence of interpretative horizons and that of the affirmative ground of moral solidarity” (Mehigan and Moser 6). Given the decidedly philosophical scope of Coetzee’s fictional works, these areas feature strongly in Summertime. A tendency to move beyond postmodernist poetics as observed in Coetzee’s later writing seems to suggest that Coetzee accepts a representation or reality of a world beyond the text, “that art in its superior manifestations is able to reach toward something of this type of knowledge, where some kind of truth reference can be defended” (Mehigan and Moser 8). Summertime promotes the possibility of opposing a necessity to create truthful accounts of the self in contrast to a much more universal consideration of truths beyond the autobiographical

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narrative. This kind of truth-reference is linked to a more universal understanding of what it means to be human. In his discussion of (romantic) irony31 in Coetzee’s texts and the influence of Roland Barthes on Coetzee’s writing such as in the “fragmented quality” of Summertime (Powers 3), Patrick Hayes introduces some excellent thoughts which support my thesis that Coetzee’s autobiographical writing reaches beyond the self towards more general ethical questions.32 Hayes highlights “the imaginative possibilities within several different kinds of fictional voices” (“Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 79) as one of Summertime’s assets, which allows the memoir to “articulate a multivalent understanding of what it means for John to belong” (Hayes, “Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 82). Hayes further distinguishes Coetzee’s writing from Roland Barthes’s “question of the intellectual’s political responsibility” but also highlights that “its exploration of the question of belonging covers not dissimilar terrain – albeit across a much bigger fictional canvas, and a richer mix of voices” (“Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 79). The notebook fragments at the very beginning of Summertime already introduce South African politics and even contrast the notes with an account of its media coverage on the news: “How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit” (S 4) and “He reads the reports and feels soiled. So this is what he has come back to” (S 4). Regarding “the topic of white South African identity” (S 209) in Vincent’s interview with Martin and the fact that John drops the topic in his notebooks, Martin replies that “it might have seemed too complex a topic to be explored in a memoir or diary – too complex or too close to the bone” (S 209). Of course, the issue is then re-addressed by the interviewees, who lend their voices to articulate the text’s underlying experiences with and political perceptions of the question of belonging and unbelonging.33 According to Martin, they had a “certain style of mind in common, a style that I attribute to our origins, colonial and South African. Hence the commonality of our outlook” (S 211). They also shared a “certain provisionality” (S 211) or indifference towards South Africa and a consequential “reluctance to invest too deeply in the country, since sooner or later [their] ties to it would have to be cut, [their] investment in it annulled” (S 211). He states: Broadly speaking, he and I shared an attitude towards South Africa and our continued presence there. Our attitude was that, to put it briefly, our presence there was legal but illegitimate. We had an abstract right to be there, a birthright, but the basis of that right was fraudulent. Our presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid. Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted, that was what we felt ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland. (S 209–210)

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Given John’s absence from South Africa just before the period covered in Summertime, the alienation from his South African identity as well as questions of guilt and shame are particularly foregrounded (as is the biographical fact that Coetzee has left his homeland behind by becoming an Australian citizen, see S 209), as for example in the already discussed passage on “the taboo on manual labour” (S 61), to subvert the principles of white South Africans.34 This is to be read as a sign of an “abject guiltiness” (Attwell, “Trauma Refracted” 289) on John’s part. Julia specifically questions the self-victimisation of white South Africans: [W]hite South Africans in those days liked to think of themselves as the Jews of Africa […]: cunning, unscrupulous, resilient, running close to the ground, hated and envied by the tribes they ruled over. All false. All nonsense. […] Those people were not tough, they were not even cunning, or cunning enough. (S 54) The passage raises issues of race and belonging as well as John’s conflicted relationship with South Africa and his view of his position as a white South African – a view seemingly devoid of an awareness of his actual privilege. This naivety or ignorance reappears when Margot’s and John’s stay in the wilderness unsettles the question of belonging and relationships, Margot poses as the figure of a mother longing to love a child and being connected to nature (S 120–121). The various voices in Summertime predominantly serve as exemplary figures to demonstrate different perspectives, overarching ideals and issues, as well as the multiplicity of selves in one person and in one community. Margot’s interview also points to feelings of unbelonging, the lack of a home or identity, which goes back to John’s English upbringing (i.e. linguistically) in an Afrikaner family in which he is perceived as “affected and supercilious” as “from the heights of his englese [English] education […] John looks down on the Coetzees” (S 90). The use of Afrikaans in Margot’s interview section displays the ambivalence of colonial belonging, as it constitutes her own sense of belonging, her linguistic engagement with identity, and John’s wish to cut himself free from South Africa: “From what does he mean to free himself? From love? From duty?” (S 142). Even when John calls himself and his father “Afrikaners” and speaks his “baby-Afrikaans, of which he is not in the slightest ashamed” (S 102), Margot seems to question his identity: “Does he really consider himself as an Afrikaner? She doesn’t know many real [egte] Afrikaners who would accept him as one of the tribe” (S 95; also 102). The linguistic distinctions and associations with identity appear several times, and are particularly relevant in John’s profession, when he is asked by a woman in Cape Town for advice regarding her husband’s will but is not regarded as competent (S 10–12) or when Adriana refuses to accept John as a “proper English teacher” (S 157). In contrast to John, Margot serves as an essential character, as she is the sole interviewee

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who still lives in South Africa and has her own experiences of shame and guilt with Black South Africans as she is caught up in existing politically charged structures and situations (e.g. S 145). Interestingly, both Margot and John seem to share a strong affection for the family farm Voëlfontein and John, although he is not ambitious, “has an idle longing to live in the Karoo” to “sit with his chin in his hands and contemplate the sunset and write poems” (S 128): They are in a minority, a tiny minority, the two of them, of souls that are stirred by these great, desolate expanses. If anything has held them together over the years, it is that. This landscape, this kontrei – it has taken over her heart. When she dies and is buried, she will dissolve into this earth so naturally it will be as if she never had a human life. (S 129)35 In Boyhood, John writes that “[t]he secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is belong” (95). The same country which provides a sense of belonging, however, “wrenches [John’s] heart” (S 97) and provokes simultaneous alienation and detachment (López 248): What are we doing here? […] What are we doing in this barren part of the world? Why are we spending our lives in dreary toil if it was never meant that people should live here, if the whole project of humanizing the place was misconceived from the start? (S 140) This symbiosis of body and land – the natural, the “nonhuman” – and the moral responsibility that go along with it ties in with John’s refusal to accept (political) ideologies: He longed for the day when everyone in South Africa would call themselves nothing, neither African nor European nor white nor black nor anything else, when family histories would have become so tangled and intermixed that people would be ethnically indistinguishable. (S 232–233) As has been suggested in many scholarly works on Coetzee, this passage exemplifies his aversion to engage in political questions. Sophie’s characterisation of John as “anti-political” (S 228) and as “too idealistic, too Utopian” (S 228) emphasises his political inactivity – “In fact he was not political at all. He looked down on politics” (S 228) – and the problematics of this very political apathy.36 Sophie also asks: “Where, after all, does character end and politics begin? At a personal level, I saw him as rather too fatalistic and therefore too passive” (S 240). The problematics of crossgenerational responsibility and John’s “quietist” political response to apartheid

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is reflected literally as, in his writing, “his aesthetic response tends toward abstraction” (Neuman 135). The historical context and political complexity of apartheid South Africa shapes Coetzee’s autobiographical engagement with “the political condition of being human” (Smuts 23). The troubled relation with his own identity is complicated by national identity, segregation politics in South Africa, and the turmoil and consequences of apartheid, be it in its heyday between the 1940s and 1970s or after its abolition in 1994.37 The conflicted relationship is thematised in Boyhood and referenced in Summertime: “He had been rebuffed by the Afrikaners too often, rebuffed and humiliated – you have only to read his book of childhood memories to see that” (S 238) or similarly in his statement that under the gaze of history he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically. (S 238) Vincent summarises John’s conflict as follows: “So we have the case of a man who spoke the language only imperfectly, who stood outside the state religion, whose outlook was cosmopolitan, whose politics was […] dissident, yet who was ready to embrace an Afrikaner identity” (S 238). While Sophie states that “they were cultural Afrikaners but not political Afrikaners” (S 239), she acknowledges that “two whites offering a course in black African literature” is problematic (S 222). According to Hayes, Coetzee (comparable to Roland Barthes) is interested in a more difficult form of knowledge, one in which the act of knowing is a specifically literary experience where insight is involved with affective intensities. This may even seem like no knowledge at all, so rigorously does it refuse the possessive narrowness of the ego. (“Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 82) Hayes suitably argues that Summertime deal[s] with what it mean[s] for John to belong, and how his belonging (to a nation, to a landscape) should be articulated in large part precisely through the expectations of others, and through a sense of his legitimate duties towards them. (“Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 83) Considering all three instalments of Scenes from Provincial Life, Hayes holds that all three texts shift our attention away from questions about inner motives onto questions about the modes of responsible being that constitute a life,

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and they place the life of the individual in relation to other lives and other expectations. (“Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 83) My initial claim that Summertime is not just a metaautobiographical text which undermines the traditional structures of autobiographical writing goes in a very similar direction in that Coetzee’s chosen form is most effective in its acknowledgement of universal questions inherent in this, undoubtedly, experimental piece of life-writing. In the end, the aesthetics of Summertime leads to a reduced focus on the individual towards more general questions of “what it means to be a writer, what it means to have a moral conscience, and perhaps above all, what it means to experience love” (“Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 84) – which might be indicative of his reluctance to fundamentally engage with his white South African identity. As Effe rightly observes, the writer’s “comments on autobiography and on the notion of truth elucidate why metalepsis amounts to an ethics of writing and suggest that this ethics is a consequence of the challenges he sees himself facing as a white South African writer” (J.M. Coetzee 118). Summertime raises the question of ethics and responsibility, both formally and on the diegetic level, particularly regarding Coetzee’s responsibilities as a white South African writer and the ethical implications of truth, identity, and culture – and truth instead of justification. Although in fictionalised form, Coetzee not only provides the reader with a metageneric commentary on autobiographical practice but also a discussion of more general questions of what it means to be human. This agenda also becomes apparent in Sophie’s claim: “The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person – not necessarily a warmer person, but someone more uncertain of himself, more confused, more human” (S 235).

Concluding Remarks J.M. Coetzee’s fictionalised memoir Summertime demonstrates that the use of the third person and the multi-perspectival approach to the relational autobiographical self may engage the reader cognitively to reflect on questions of self, identity, and relationality, and to invoke genre-theoretical questions and humanist concerns. The fact that the memoir is fictionalised (through a detached third-person narration and the various biographical alterations as well as temporal and spatial adjustments) does not make the memoir less “true”. Questions of truth and humanist concern referring to a world outside the narrative are thereby always accompanied by Coetzee’s strategy of using reality rather than reflecting reality. Summertime does not try to solve the question of truth or factuality but rather serves as a communicative gesture for the reader to explore the various narrative and aesthetic affordances of the text to gain a broader understanding of creating and constructing identity and the overarching considerations of humanist concerns.

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By subverting the traditional notions and conventions of autobiographical writing as “literature of the first person” (Eakin, “What Are We Reading” 124) and by using stylistic means such as the third person, the present tense and an innovative structure in his work Summertime, Coetzee engages the reader in the decoding process by challenging their expectations and knowledge. It seems that the processes of self-reduction and self-withdrawal work against what we may usually assume in an autobiographical work: (shameless) self-promotion. Instead, there is a pronounced air of “unimportance” of the authorial self in Summertime. My reading of the fictionalised memoir ties in with Coetzee’s refusal to provide model-interpretations to his oeuvre. Summertime only establishes affordances for the reader to interpret and engage with and evokes, after all, a strong communicative tendency through a distanced self-portrayal and a move towards the relational. The third-person perspective, the relationality, the metageneric commentary, and the “truths” of communication beyond the text establish an interplay of detachment and intimacy and thereby allow for an ambiguous reading that “operates as an affirmation of the work’s inventiveness” (Attridge 128).

Notes 1 The following more recent studies on Coetzee’s oeuvre are predominantly concerned with his fictional writing: Jane Poyner’s J.M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship (2009), Dominic Head’s The Cambridge Introduction to Coetzee (2009), Patrick Hayes’s J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (2010), Anton Leist’s and Peter Singer’s J.M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature (2010), Jarad Zimbler’s J.M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (2014) and Jared Zimbler’s recent The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Coetzee (2020). Critical studies dealing with Coetzee’s autobiographical writing include Angela Müller’s Autre-Biography: Poetics of Self in J.M. Coetzee’s Fictionalized Memoirs (2016) and, in part, Alexandra Effe’s J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (2017). 2 All references preceded by “S” are to the following edition: Coetzee, J.M. Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Harvill Secker, 2009. 3 Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007) also feature possible authorial selves. 4 Coetzee’s trilogy is sometimes categorised as autofictional (Tlustý). In his private notes, Coetzee speaks of “memoirs” (Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 187– 209; “Writing Oneself”). Attwell speaks of Coetzee’s work as “a huge existential enterprise, grounded in fictionalized autobiography. In this enterprise, the texts marked as autobiography are continuous with those marked as fiction – only the degree of fictionalization varies” (J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 2). 5 Regarding the relation between fictional and non-fictional writing, Coetzee writes that “all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it” (Doubling the Point 17). Writing thus “reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. In fact, it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say. What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. That is the sense in which one can say that writing writes us” (18).

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6 In Summertime, John’s third memoir “never saw the light of day” (S 205). 7 This focus does not mean that Boyhood and Youth do not offer enough (metanarrative) material for discussion in addition to the third-person present tense (e.g. Youth 9–10). All instalments of Scenes from Provincial Life are narrated in the third person and in present tense (especially Boyhood and Youth strictly adhere to this narrative perspective) and focus on specific times in Coetzee’s life, including recurring themes such as family, shame, and South African identity. Boyhood gives an account of the protagonist’s childhood experiences in South Africa and is predominantly concerned with family relations (especially with his mother) and identity. Youth covers the narrator’s life as a student of mathematics in Cape Town, his life in London, his job as a computer programmer, and the struggles of finding himself. Taking James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a model, Youth describes John’s adolescence and his struggles as an artist in the making. For a discussion of processes of fictionalisation in Boyhood see Collingwood-Whittick. For insightful studies of Boyhood and Youth, see e.g. Müller, Clarkson’s J.M. Coetzee: Countervoices, and Sarkowsky’s essay on the two memoirs in the Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. 8 In this study, “J.M. Coetzee” or “Coetzee” will be used to refer to the real-life author, while “John” will be used to refer to the character of the fictional writer in Summertime. 9 The third person emphasises the distinction between narrator and protagonist: “This figure of enunciation reveals the problem of expressing identity – it draws the readers’ attention to the issue of coherence and continuity of the subject in time” (Cichon´ 63). 10 Paul Sheehan calls this perspective “‘fourth-person singular’, a narrative perspective that distances the subject still further from the false intimacy of the biographical voice” (85). 11 Grant Farred asks the legitimate follow-up question: “Is the only writing of the Self that which can take place through the strategic, necessary use of the thirdperson Other?” (832). In fact, he classifies Summertime as an autopbiography, a term which describes “the critical act of taking apart – autopsying – the life of the author before that life is (physically) over” (832). Farred continues to suggest that the work “undertakes nothing less than the project of writing the living Self writing itself as a dead Self” (832–833). 12 Elleke Boehmer, highlighting the benefits of fictionalisation in autobiography, even claims that “it is where we are most fictional […] that we can most fully explore and expose the truths of the self” (71). 13 Carrol Clarkson, in her work on the countervoices in Coetzee’s writing, has addressed the linguistic choices in his works and demonstrated the difference by rewriting two passages from Boyhood and Youth in the first person (Countervoices 24–28). 14 In Boyhood and Youth, the third person and present tense allow for a “singular immediacy, one might almost say a depthlessness” (Attridge 140). 15 An insight into the confessional character of Coetzee’s work is given in Attridge’s essay “Confessing in the Third Person” in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Writing (2004). 16 For more insights into narrative perspective in Boyhood and Youth see e.g. Margaret Lenta or Anna Cichon´, who writes that Boyhood and Youth “bear semblance more to self-creation, if not self-concealment, than to self-revelation or self-disclosure” (65). Free indirect discourse with focaliser John as a boy (Boyhood) and an adolescent (Youth) respectively emphasise the distance between narrating self and narrated self. In Boyhood and Youth, the “strict adherence to the perspective of the protagonist allows the reader to simultaneously engage with and distance him-/herself from the protagonist’s self-abasement and

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The Personal and the Ethical in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime doubts” (Sarkowsky 2052). This also becomes apparent in Youth, in which the third person “ironizes the portrayal of John’s romantic image of the artist and the resulting agonies when he fails to conform to his ideal, combining his struggles over his artistic developments with a reflection on literary models and the possibility of writing” (Sarkowsky 2059). The notes include: “To be explored” (S 9), “Question” (S 9), “Features of his character that emerge from the story” (S 12), “Caution” (S 13), “Continuation” (S 16), “Theme to carry further” (S 252), or “To be developed” (S 255), “Query” (S 260). David Attwell’s J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing shows that Coetzee’s novels “are located in the nexus of history and text” (2) and demonstrates how the two methodological strands can be made fruitful for an engagement with Coetzee’s work. In the Coetzee Papers, Coetzee writes that Summertime “turns into a book about his father and why he lives with him. The old man he carries about with him everywhere, something no one will understand. Certainly not the women of his life” (qtd. in Kusek, Through the Looking Glass 206). See Paul Auster’s focus on his father in The Invention of Solitude and on his mother in Winter Journal. Having addressed his childhood in Boyhood, Coetzee writes in Summertime: “He is the product of a damaged childhood, that he long ago worked out; what surprises him is that the worst damage was done not in the seclusion of the home but out in the open, at school” (S 252). The rather restrictive and “forming” education methods John never stopped to resist and counteract (S 253) where intended “to form the child as congregant, as citizen, and as parent to be” (S 252). This resistance permeates in John’s unwillingness to respond to issues of ideology. This also correlates with what Attwell suggests in an interview with Coetzee: “Your own autobiographical practice would seem to confirm an aspect of de Man’s argument, in which he points out that when one tries to put the historical self into writing, what emerges, inevitably, is a substitute for that self” (Coetzee and Attwell 216). Coetzee states in an interview that “tracing the line from past to present is such a self-interested enterprise (self-interested in every sense), selective vision, even a degree of blindness, becomes inevitable” (Doubling the Point 391). The notion of the self is thus selectively experienced: “All the facts are too many facts. You choose the facts insofar as they fall in with your evolving purpose” (Doubling the Point 18). For more examples see some of Julia’s (S 37; 46–47; 59), Adriana’s (S 163; 183; 193), Margot’s (S 130) and Sophie’s comments (S 235) on John. The texts feature derogatory comments on John’s appearance (S 21; 24; 32; 34), his lacking potential as a partner (S 48; 80–81; 171). For comments on John’s lack of sexual presence and manliness, see e.g. Julia’s comments he has “no sexual presence whatsoever” (S 24), and Margot’s “Is he by nature as heatless as he is sexless?” (S 118; also 114). John is said to be “not cut out to be a teacher” (S 207), Sophie suggests that as a novelist John has “no special sensitivity […], no original insight into the human condition” (S 242). Julia describes John as being “socially inept” and “repressed” (S 20), and John is literally reduced to “nothing” by Adriana (S 193), as well as to “supporting cast” (S 43) and “minor character” (S 44) by Julia. Note that the self-deprecating comments already occur in Boyhood, in which he is described as an “irascible despot” (13), and in Youth, in which he appears “cold, frozen” and with a “lack of heat, [a] lack of heart” (168).

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26 The process of translation as another possibility of alteration and manipulation plays a central role in Adriana’s interview, which is transcribed by a professional translator of Brazilian Portuguese. See López for a study on linguistic (un) belonging. 27 Rüggemeier stresses that metanarratives “interrogate the traditional conventions of life writing texts, namely their truth value, the idea of authentic personhood, the notion of autonomous selfhood and the expectation to see life transformed into a coherent narrative” (“Auto/Biographic Metafiction” 293). 28 Coetzee’s motivation and understanding of creating fiction becomes apparent in one of his letters to Paul Auster: “I must say that I get impatient with fiction that doesn’t try something that hasn’t been tried before, preferably with the medium itself” (Auster and Coetzee 165). 29 Vincent gives Margot the opportunity to go through the text again: “I promise, when I have finished I will hand over the text to you, the whole text, and let you cut out whatever you wish” (S 137). 30 In the 2011 edition, Sophie says “reliance” (Coetzee, Scenes from Provincial Life 453) instead of “emphasis”, which slightly shifts the tone towards the question of reliability and trustworthiness. Martin has similar reservations regarding Vincent’s practices, he states that “it seems to me strange to be doing the biography of a writer while ignoring his writing. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am out of date” (S 218). 31 Katja Sarkowsky claims that in contrast to its distancing effect in Boyhood and Youth, irony in Summertime “functions as a metatextual device of genre-reflection” (2053). 32 Hayes points out that Roland Barthes has been a major influence in Coetzee’s theoretical thinking about autobiography. He writes that “a text should be ironic insofar as it must work to expose the limits of any particular description of reality, which is necessarily partial” (“Autobiography and Romantic Irony” 68). Hayes continues, “the ironist should be mindful that such descriptions are nonetheless our only means of access to reality, and thus should in some sense be honoured, however partial they may be” (69). Barthes, whose use of the third person in Roland Barthes is also said to be a form of self-irony (Hayes 71), writes about his choice of pronoun for his autobiographical work: “I shift from imitation (from description) and entrust myself to nomination. […] I myself am my own symbol, I am the story which happens to me: freewheeling in language, I have nothing to compare myself to; and in this movement, the pronoun of the imaginary, ‘I,’ is im-pertinent.” (Roland Barthes 56). 33 For a closer discussion of (un)belonging in Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime see López (219–249) or Jacobs. 34 In fact, Margot’s reaction complicates the sensitive political issue: “That is simply not true! It’s just anti-white prejudice!” (S 112). Her defensiveness also becomes clear when she judges Hendrik, a “retired” labourer at the family farm, who is “[s]ozzled by mid-morning: what a life” (S 122). 35 In a conversation with Margot, John says about this place: “I feel blessed, one of a lucky few. But practically speaking, what future do I have in this country, where I have never fitted in? Perhaps a clean break would have been better after all. Cut yourself free of what you love and hope that the wound heals” (S 132). 36 Sophie describe John’s “politics” similarly: “Nothing is worth fighting for because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation” (S 230). She states that according to John, “politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions” and “a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state” (S 229). Also: “He saw Africa through

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a romantic haze” as his “philosophy ascribed to Africans the role of guardians of the truer, deeper, more primitive being of humankind” (S 231). 37 Political views on apartheid are voiced by Margot (S 117) and Adriana (S 180), who calls herself a “refugee woman” (S 188). In contrast to the other characters, Adriana assumes the role of the foreigner who conflates South Africa with loss and her marginalised position as an immigrant (being from Brazil) (e.g. S 177–181).

Bibliography Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Attwell, David. “Trauma Refracted: J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime.” Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel. Eds. Ewald Mengel and Michela Borzaga. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 283–294. Auster, Paul, and J.M. Coetzee. Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011. London: Vintage, 2013. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. 1975. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Boehmer, Elleke. “Reading Between Life and Work: Reflections on ‘J.M. Coetzee’.” J.M. Coetzee: Fictions of the Real. Ed. Anthony Uhlmann. London: Routledge, 2018. 59–74. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cardoen, Sam. “The Grounds of Cynical Self-Doubt: J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime.” Journal of Literary Studies 30.1 (2014): 94–112. Cartwright, Justin. “Summertime by J.M. Coetzee: Review.” The Telegraph. 10 September 2009. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/6167636/Summ ertime-by-JM-Coetzee-review.html. Accessed 10 August 2022. Cichon´, Anna. “Boyhood. Scenes from Provincial Life and Youth – J.M. Coetzee’s Autobiographies.” A Universe of (Hi)Stories: Essays on J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Liliana Sikorska. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006. 59–66. Clarkson, Carrol. J.M. Coetzee: Countervoices. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Clarkson, Carrol. “Inner Worlds.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 58. 4 (2016): 422–434. Coetzee, J.M. “The Artist at High Tide.” New York Review of Books. 2 March 1995. www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/03/02/the-artist-at-high-tide. Accessed 10 August 2022. Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. 1997. London: Vintage, 1998. Coetzee, J.M. Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker, 2007. Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Coetzee, J.M. Dusklands. 1974. London: Secker & Warburg, 1982. Coetzee, J.M. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, Summertime. New York: Penguin Books, 2011.

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Coetzee, J.M. Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Harvill Secker, 2009. Coetzee, J.M. Youth. London: Secker & Warburg, 2002. Coetzee, J.M., and David Attwell. “‘All Autobiography Is Autre-biography.’: J.M. Coetzee Interviewed by David Attwell.” Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/Biography. Eds. Judith Lütge Coullie et al. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. 213–218. Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila. “Autobiography and Autrebiography: The Fictionalisation of the Self in J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life.” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 24.1 (2001): 13–23. Couser, G. Thomas. “Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation.” Life Writing 2.2 (2005): 123–140. Danta, Chris. “Introduction: J.M. Coetzee: The Janus Face of Authority.” Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction. Eds. Chris Danta et al. New York: Continuum, 2011. xi–xx. Eakin, Paul J. “What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?” Narrative 12.2 (2004): 121–132. Effe, Alexandra. “Coetzee’s Summertime as a Metaleptic Conversation.” Journal of Narrative Theory 47.2 (2017): 252–275. Effe, Alexandra. J.M Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression: A Reconsideration of Metalepsis. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Farred, Grant. “Autopbiography.” South Quarterly 110.4 (2011): 831–847. Folkenflik, Robert. “The Self as Other.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. 215–234. Gunzenhauser, Bonnie J. “Literary Autobiography.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. 2. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 562–564. Hayes, Patrick. “Autobiography and Romantic Irony: J.M. Coetzee and Roland Barthes.” The Intellectual Landscapes in the Works of J.M. Coetzee. Eds. Tim Mehigan and Christian Moser. Rochester: Camden House, 2018. 66–86. Hayes, Patrick. J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to J.M. Coetzee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Jacobs, J.U. “(N)either Afrikaner (n)or English: Cultural Cross-Over in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime.” English Academy Review 28.1 (2011): 39–52. Kannemeyer, J.C. J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing. Trans. Michiel Heyns. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2012. Kermode, Frank. “Fictioneering.” London Review of Books 31.19 (2009): 9–10. Kossew, Sue. “Scenes from Provincial Life (1997–2009).” A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Tim Mehigan. Rochester: Camden House, 2011. 9–22. Kusek, Robert. Through the Looking Glass: Writers’ Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2017. Kusek, Robert. “Writing Oneself, Writing the Other: J.M. Coetzee’s Fictional Autobiography in Boyhood, Youth and Summertime.” werkwinkel 7.1 (2012): 97–116. Leist, Anton, and Peter Singer. J.M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

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Lejeune, Philippe. “Autobiography in the Third Person.” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 27–50. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lenta, Margaret. “Autrebiography: J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Youth.” English in Africa 30.1 (2003): 157–169. López, María J. Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. Marcus, Laura. Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Marcus, Laura. Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Mehigan, Tim, and Christian Moser. “Introduction. Coetzee’s Intellectual Landscapes.” The Intellectual Landscapes in the Works of J.M. Coetzee. Eds. Tim Mehigan and Christian Moser. Rochester: Camden House, 2018. 1–21. Middeke, Martin. “Self-Reflexivity, Trans-/Intertextuality, and Hermeneutic DeepStructure in Contemporary British Fiction.” Self-Reflexivity in Literature. Eds. Werner Huber et al. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. 211–222. Müller, Angela. Autre-Biography: Poetics of Self in J.M. Coetzee’s Fictionalised Memoirs. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2016. Neuman, Justin. “Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime.” Criticism 53.1 (2011): 127–136. Parish, Amy Louise. Strange Intimacies: Autre-biography, Failure and the Body in J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster. 2017. University of New South Wales, PhD Dissertation. Powers, Donald. “Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J.M. Coetzee’s Afterlives.” Life Writing 13.3 (2016): 323–334. Rüggemeier, Anne. “Auto/Biographic Metafiction and Relational Lives: Antonia S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009) as Paradigms of Meta-Auto/Biographies.” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations. Eds. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2018. 283–296. Sarkowsky, Katja. “J.M. Coetzee: Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002).” Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. Vol. III. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. 2049–2063. Sheehan, Paul. “Coetzee & Co: Failure, Lies and Autobiography.” J.M. Coetzee: Fictions of the Real. Ed. Anthony Uhlmann. London: Routledge, 2018. 75–92. Smuts, Eckard. “J.M. Coetzee and the Politics of Selfhood.” English in Africa 39.1 (2012): 21–36. Struth, Christiane. “Autobiographies in the Third Person: The Self as Other in Breyten Breytenbach’s Metaautobiography The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and J.M. Coetzee’s Meta-‘Autrebiography’ Summertime.” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations. Eds. Michael Basseler et al. Trier: WVT, 2013. 347–363. Tegla, Emanuela. “J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Style in Autobiography.” A Companion to Literary Biography. Ed. Richard Bradford. Chichester: Wiley, 2019. 263–274.

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Tlustý, Jan. “On Unreliability of Memories: J.M. Coetzee’s Autofictional Trilogy.” Travelling Texts: J.M. Coetzee and Other Writers. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014. 225–237. Zimbler, Jarad, ed. The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Zimbler, Jarad. J.M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

6

The Personal and the Political in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton

In autobiographical writing, (personal) events seem to have particularly noteworthy consequences for the development and depiction of the narrated self. However, when the personal becomes political, the autobiographical text may change its focus and political relevance. On 14 February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie for the alleged blasphemy committed against Islam in Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses.1 As a result, the Indian-British writer, who was born in Bombay in 1947, was forced to live under police protection and was exposed to persistent threats on his life, to acts of violence against his publishers, translators, bookstores,2 and to fierce protests around the world. While at the time the author had been predominantly known for his Booker Prize winning novel Midnight’s Children (1981), since then he has become inseparable from the fatwa, the “Rushdie affair”, the cultural and political conflict associated with the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.3 In 2012, Rushdie published his memoir Joseph Anton, which is written from a third-person perspective and which, in ten chapters and one prologue, gives an account of his ten years or so in hiding, as well as his fight for freedom of speech, the fight for his “birthright”:4 “Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away” (JA 19).5 While Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses had received much praise (winner of the Whitbread Book Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, both in 1988), his memoir Joseph Anton, covering the years which were overshadowed by the threatening response to the novel, received rather mixed reactions (e.g. Wesley; O’Gorman). Joseph Anton can be read as lifewriting, memoir/diary, non-fictional account, re-enacting, literary novel, or detective story (Wallhead 91–92). The effect of this mingling of generic characteristics seems to suggest that in the book “Rushdie tries to at once reveal and conceal himself” (Wallhead 92). I also argue that Joseph Anton is not (merely) a fictionalisation, but rather an attempt to control and shape Rushdie’s story among readers. Raising the question of genre, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré suggests that DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374-6

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Joseph Anton is neither an autobiographical novel, where the distance between the author and the narrator is sufficiently wide for the reader to clearly distinguish between the two, nor a fictitious autobiography where the real is transfigured by the narrator. (13) The fine nuances of distance and proximity, of concealing and revealing, are a central characteristic of the rhetorical function of Rushdie’s memoir (and I am using Rushdie’s classification of his book here). This ties in with the use of the third-person perspective which establishes, as I aim to show, an ambivalence in the memoir: In my reading of Joseph Anton, I argue that Rushdie’s memoir stages his public persona as a political figure in the struggle for freedom of the arts in the face of political and religious threat. Dealing with the aftermath of an incisive (personal and traumatic) event and the memoir as archive, my reading also suggests that Joseph Anton shifts the focus from the personal towards a more political and collectivising (or even universalising) scope of self-narration.6

Rushdie’s Third-Person Alter Ego In his memoir, Rushdie wonders: “If he ever wrote a book about these years, how would he do it? He could change names, obviously[,] but how could he convey what these years had been like?” (JA 340). What he knew was that “if the time came when the story was ready to be told, he wanted to be the one to do it” (JA 250). Finally, and in contrast to Paul Eakin’s claim that autobiography is a “literature of the first person” (“What Are We Reading” 124), Rushdie decided to write Joseph Anton in the third person as it seemed less narcissistic (“Life During Fatwa”). I would argue that the use of a heterodiegetic narrator who, by definition, is not a character in the story, the retraction of the pronoun “I” enables a more objective and distanced self-portrayal and at the same time allows for insightful introspection and self-reflection. Consequently, the (idealised) unity of the self, which may only be implied by the pronoun I, is explicitly dissolved (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 32). Through the third person, as already suggested in the theoretical part of this study, the “indirectness is admitted, is boldly proclaimed. The procedure is felt to be artificial because it destroys that illusory effect of the first person which makes us take the indirect for the direct” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 32). The memoir thus demonstrates the impact of the narrative perspective on chronicling the event of the fatwa and its aftermath, making it possible for the author to restate his case7 in the first place and to approach an issue he had failed or did not have the chance to portray adequately in the news or in interviews. The memoir renders the effects of the fatwa and the debates fruitful for the community, especially regarding Rushdie’s literary engagement with the historical event.8

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Furthermore, Lejeune notes that the shift from I to he in autobiography is used for “internal distancing and for expressing personal confrontation” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 28), which may be helpful for dealing with traumatic or uncomfortable experiences.9 Benaouda Lebdai acknowledges the potential of the memoir as a means to come to terms with the trauma caused by the fatwa. In Joseph Anton, Rushdie writes that “he is suffering from a great weariness, a kind of nervous exhaustion” (JA 243), which also becomes visible: Friends who saw him in those days were shocked by his physical deterioration, his increase in weight, the way he had let his beard grow out into an ugly bulbous mass, his sunken stance. He looked like a beaten man. (JA 170) In addition, death is constantly present in the memoir – not only regarding the death threat, but also the deaths of close friends and family, colleagues, of his first wife Clarissa, and the innocent persons who died because of The Satanic Verses. Tying in with the problematics of approaching and narrating trauma, Rushdie states that he seems to “lack a memory for trouble” (JA 251), a process or even protective strategy for which Rushdie’s mother, as he writes, coined the term “forgettery” (JA 251). Especially due to the political explosiveness of the fatwa affair, the use of the third person thus an effective technique to approach Rushdie’s past and the aftermath of the fatwa.10 Joseph Anton demonstrates, as Wesley puts it, the “ongoing struggle between authorial identity both within an author’s work and in dialogue with interpretative communities comprising readers and critics” (521). This struggle is, to a certain extent, supported and mirrored in the third person, as it stresses the questioning of the author’s authority by retracting the more personal, first-person perspective and introducing a seemingly objective perspective instead. At the same time, however, the “third-person figures provide a range of solutions in which distancing is more prominent, though always used to express an articulated connection (a tension) between identity and difference” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 32). This distancing is thus in no way a dissolution of connection but marks an oscillation between proximity and distance, as the narrated self and the narrating self are never anticipated to be entirely separated. Hinting at the multiplicity of names and identity formations during the fatwa years, Rushdie comments on the consequential split between selves – and identities – in the following passage: He was aware that the splitting in him was getting worse, the divide between what “Rushdie” needed to do and how “Salman” wanted to live. He was “Joe” to his protectors, an entity to be kept alive; and in his friends’ eyes, when he was able to see them, he read their alarm, their fear that “Salman” might be crushed under the weight of what had happened. “Rushdie” was another matter entirely. […] He was an

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effigy, an absence, something less than human. He – it – needed only to expiate. (JA 251–252) In a similar vein, Rushdie writes that his name had been stolen from him, or half his name anyway, when Rushdie detached itself from Salman and went spiralling off into the headlines, into newsprint, into the video-heavy ether, becoming a slogan, a rallying cry, a term of abuse, or anything else that other people wanted it to be. (JA 164) During the time in hiding as well as in his memoir, “Joseph Anton” serves as Rushdie’s alias, combining the literary heritage of two of his favourite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov, to create a new identity. Rushdie addresses the fictionalisation in his memoir as follows: “He had spent his life naming fictional characters. Now by naming himself he had turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well” (JA 165). This resonates with Lejeune’s dictum that “when an autobiographer speaks to us about himself in the third person […] he is certainly using a figure” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 30). Ganapathy-Doré also focuses on the issue of naming, renaming, and name-taking as well as the different aliases in Joseph Anton and defines renaming as “an example of autogenesis in which the individual came into being by re-embodying himself in a new name that endowed him with a different lineage” (15). In her view, the new name amounts to a change of identity and origin – a symbolic death of the author (Ganapathy-Doré 15). Being exiled from the literary world through the event of the fatwa, the self-establishment as a character as well as the link to prominent literary figures may serve to re-establish his participation in the literary world (O’Gorman).11 Only after the end of the death threat Rushdie may in fact reclaim his name and literary persona: Mr. Joseph Anton, international publisher of American origin, passed unmourned on the day that Salman Rushdie, novelist of Indian origin, surfaced from his long underground years and took up part-time residence in Pembridge Mews, Notting Hill. Mr. Rushdie celebrated the moment, even if nobody else did. (JA 610) The novelistic12 approach to the self through a literary alias thus stresses the split and the incongruence of the narrated and the narrating self.13 By constructing a “new self” (JA 5), both the third person and the pseudonym Joseph Anton make Rushdie “an invisible man in a whiteface mask” (JA 163).

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Rachel Trousdale describes this process of retracting the first person as “the peculiar blurring of public and private that Rushdie experienced while in hiding” (155). Rushdie writes that the “gulf between the private ‘Salman’ he believed himself to be and the public ‘Rushdie’ he barely recognized was growing by the day” (JA 131) – “He did not exist. Only Joseph Anton existed; and he could not be seen” (JA 177). In fact, one could argue that by adopting the name “Joseph Anton”, Rushdie has already lived part of his life in the third person, which is why his choice of narrative technique makes sense in the process of chronicling the aftermath of the fatwa. Furthermore, by using the past tense in his autobiographical account, Rushdie restores his earlier self, Joseph Anton, in contrast to and to distinguish it from his free present-day identity as Salman Rushdie. In comparison to Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, which is written in the present tense to evoke immediacy, the past tense in Joseph Anton thus creates a distance towards the narrated events and self, contributing to the already established distance of the third-person perspective and stressing the historical, archival function of the text which shall be explored in the following.

The Archival Function of Joseph Anton According to Robert Eaglestone, the third person is used to “‘objectively’ archive” events to “encapsulate the whole history” (“Po-fa” 120). Eaglestone makes a valid point when he states that Joseph Anton is a “special form of memoir, an archive, which demonstrates the development of Rushdie’s thought and novelistic practice” (“Po-fa” 115). As an autobiographical work, Joseph Anton has the capacity to store and collect the events of the (autobiographer’s) past. The length of the memoir as well as the third person feed into the archival function of Joseph Anton. The memoir is therefore a retrospective engagement with the historical event, which makes it, once more, a political gesture, especially as “in history, the archive creates the historical event” (Eaglestone, “Po-fa” 120). At the same time, I would second Eaglestone’s claim that the “archive is also an intervention” (“Po-fa” 121) as the memoir thematises the freedom of speech and the political climate and conflicts related to religion and ideology. Apart from a mere recollection of events, the distance of the third person gives Rushdie the opportunity of “drawing attention to the spaces between the multitudinous signifiers that, when joined together, map a person’s identity at a given time” (O’Gorman 457). The archival function of Joseph Anton thus leaves room for the many identities created during the fatwa years. Rushdie describes the split self with particular regard to the iconicity of his public self and the various versions of the selves that seem to have been created over time: This business of being turned into an icon was very odd, he thought. He didn’t feel iconic. He felt… actual. But right now it might just be the

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best weapon he had. The symbolic icon-Salman his supporters had constructed, an idealised Salman of Liberty who stood flawlessly and unwaveringly for the highest values, counteracted and might just in the end defeat the demon version of himself constructed by his adversaries. (JA 365) The passage signals Rushdie’s knowledge of being perceived as an iconic and heroic public persona, a “symbolic icon-Salman”, a development which is connected to the fact that Rushdie’s (more or less vehement) engagement with the freedom of speech has been publicly displayed throughout his time in hiding and afterwards. He also points to the creation of identities and versions of the self through others, which are intertwined with his public presence and his limitations of rectifying or controlling these versions, as can be seen in the following description of the satanic persona “Satan Rushdy”: The Satanic Verses was a novel, Satanic Verses were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author, “Satan Rushdy”, the horned creature on the placards carried by demonstrators down the streets of a faraway city, the hanged man with protruding red tongue in the crude cartoons they bore. Hang Satan Rushdie. How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight. (JA 5) Lejeune states that autobiographies are always constructed in a way which “enable[s] the author to piece together and thus retrieve or modify the image he thinks others have of him” (“Autobiography in the Third Person” 41). Lejeune clarifies in his account on third-person autobiography that “if one seeks to make someone else’s point of view part of his autobiography, it could only be in an imaginary way, by restoring the other as a character in the novel” (On Autobiography 46). This also applies to the observing autobiographer himself as “[o]ne cannot write an autobiography without constructing and communicating a point of view towards oneself” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 41). The role of justification in autobiographical writing goes at least back to Rousseau’s Confessions and is often associated with feelings of paranoia and self-justification. This may explain the self-justifications Rushdie includes in the account and the air of self-defence which accompanies parts of the memoir: He was costing the country a fortune and was, of course, arrogant and ungrateful. And now the country had to pay for his girlfriend too. Elizabeth knew she wasn’t costing the country anything and her contempt for the fabricated stories was admirable. (JA 298)

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Rushdie sums up the accusations and charges he is confronted with over the years, that he is “a bad person, an apostate traitor, an unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, and opportunist whose work was without merit, an attacker of Islam for his own personal gain” (JA 74). He regularly comments on these accusations and provides his perspective on public discussions: “How could he be called an enemy of Islam […]? He was not an enemy. He was a friend. A sceptical, even a dissident friend, but a friend nevertheless” (JA 271). Here, Rushdie positions himself as friend of Muslim culture and seems to justify his right to question the Koran from a secular perspective (Lebdai 5); his rhetorical question emphasises his friendly attitude towards Islam. Similarly, Rushdie clarifies his justifications for being sorry, for apologising and for which reasons an apology has become or should become necessary: His private, self-justifying voice argued that he was apologizing for the distress—but he was not apologizing for the book itself. And yes, we should be conscious of others’ sensibilities, but that did not mean we should surrender to them. That was his combative, unstated subtext. But he knew that for the text to be effective it had to be read as a straightforward apology. That thought made him feel physically ill. (JA 145) The following passage, in addition to being rather self-defensive, addresses Rushdie’s wish to be liked and to be popular, and the conviction that he meant well in the first place when writing his novel The Satanic Verses: He had fallen into the trap of thinking that his work had been attacked because it had been misrepresented by unscrupulous persons seeking political advantage, and that his own integrity had been impugned for the same reason. If he were a person of base morals, and his work lacking in quality, then it was unnecessary to engage with it intellectually. But, he convinced himself, if he could just show that the work had been seriously undertaken, and that it could honourably be defended, then people – Muslims – would change their minds about it, and about him. In other words, he wanted to be popular. (JA 212) These sample passages are in line with the archival function of Joseph Anton and are an attempt to rationalise any false claims, impressions, and misperceptions (Eaglestone, “Po-fa” 120).14 The following passage leaves room for the various arguments and objections Rushdie saw himself confronted with and mirrors the dialogue and opposition between conflicting perceptions of the situation: He didn’t want to split academies, to injure the world of books. That was the opposite of what he wanted. He was trying to defend the book

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against the burners of books. These small battles of the bookish seemed like tragedies at a time when literary freedom itself was so violently under attack. (JA 157) Rushdie stresses that his explanations and justifications of fighting for the freedom of speech (during the fatwa years and afterwards) were not a “special pleading to attract more sympathy to his own case, or to justify his ‘outrages.’ It was just the truth” (JA 303). The third person thus allows the autobiographer to include information he had not been able to deliver at the time, though presented from a certain distance. This distance encourages increased self-reflection but may also serve to provide an elaborate image of the self, which may prove effective for a more substantiated and elaborate depiction of the aftermath of the fatwa.15 The third person as well as the address of the figure “Joseph Anton” clearly mark a shift from the traditional memoir to a form of more experimental life-writing. O’Gorman deems the third person even necessary in Joseph Anton as it “works to show that the increasingly confrontational and outspoken Rushdie of the present day still retains more in common with his postmodern, pre-fatwa self than might at first seem the case” (457). Furthermore, the third person establishes an additional layer of self-reflexivity, which highlights the literariness of the “story” as a work of art but also the restriction of the perspective to one person (O’Gorman 457).16 Although I would argue that the distinction between fact and fiction is not decisive for the categorisation of the text as autobiographical, I would like to hint at Rushdie’s comment on the communicative gesture of writing Joseph Anton: “The only reason his story was interesting was that it had actually happened. It wouldn’t be interesting if it wasn’t true” (JA 340–341). The relation between the socio-political context and the event of the fatwa seems to feed the interest in and the engagement with the autobiographical narrative. Whether or not the memoir tends to be fictionalised or novelistic thereby seems to be of minor concern. I would argue, however, that the way Joseph Anton is written – in a dense, novelistic, and literary language17 – can be related to the suspenseful writing of, for instance, crime stories, especially when they are initiated by a film-like beginning as in Joseph Anton.18 Celia Wallhead thus suggests that “the how and why becomes the focus, rather than the who” and that “such novels engage the reader in the pursuit of the details as well as the motivations” (101). After all, the memoir is marked by its literary language. Lebdai claims that “[d]etails are provided throughout the text confirming [Rushdie’s] strong desire to prove that he is after all a novelist, an intellectual and not a politician or an ideologue” (10). I assume that the two aspects do not exclude but rather complement each other. The literariness in Joseph Anton both emphasises Rushdie’s role as a writer and helps to put his political outreach into the context of his (literary) writing:19

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The Personal and the Political in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton The language of political speeches was alien to him. He believed in pushing language, making it mean as much as he could make it mean, listening to the meaning of its music as well as its words; but now he was supposed to speak plainly. Say what you really mean, he had been told; explain yourself, justify yourself, don’t hide behind your fiction. Did it matter if a writer was denuded in this way, stripped of the richness of language? Yes, it did, because beauty struck chords deep within the human heart, beauty opened doors in the spirit. Beauty mattered because beauty was joy and joy was the reason he did what he did, his joy in words and in using them to tell tales, to create worlds, to sing. And beauty, for now, was being treated as a luxury he should do without; as a luxury; as a lie. Ugliness was truth. (JA 329)

Joseph Anton thus combines elements of autobiographical and novelistic writing by aiming for and including an archival function and the selfreflection of the third person. The memoir clearly plays with the literariness of language and the historical self to make the narrative appealing and engaging and, considering its communicative function, more effective in its political outreach.

The Fatwa and Its Aftermath: The Personal and the Political Event The French philosopher Alain Badiou defines an event as “a split, a rupture, an exceptional time” (“Happiness Is a Risk”) and as “something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable” (Philosophy and the Event 9).20 An event is thus something which happens, not which is. However, Badiou proposes the idea that the event reveals a reality which had already been there in hiding or “invisible”. In Joseph Anton, this process is mirrored in the statement that through the event of the fatwa “the unimaginable became imaginable” (JA 9). Freedom was just something Rushdie had lived by, almost without knowing it. Artistic freedom had been the air he breathed, and as there had been a plentiful supply of it, it had been unnecessary to make a big deal about the importance of having air to breathe. (JA 196)21 The unexpected arrival of an event such as the fatwa and its aftermath – an exceptional time, as Badiou’s statement suggests – hence subverts a status which used to be taken for granted by the writer, i.e. Rushdie’s freedom and security. In his account on Alain Badiou’s Logic of Worlds, Andrew Robinson observes a tendency that “Events are now seen as Events in terms of their effects on their ‘world’ (or situation), not only in self-regarding terms”.22 (Personal) events are expected to have particularly noteworthy

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consequences for the development and depiction of the narrated self in autobiographical writing. In Joseph Anton, the effect and aftermath of the event is reflected in the subsequent public engagement with the right to artistic freedom and therefore with the transformative potential of the fatwa. By writing the memoir about his fight for freedom and his experiences at the time and thus creating a narrative, Rushdie is able to, as Badiou states, “make the possibility opened up by the event come alive” (Philosophy and the Event 11) and deal with his past experiences in writing by producing a memoir of public and political outreach. In Badiou’s sense of the event as a catalyst for revolution and change, the event of the fatwa as something unexpected is the trigger for further engagement with freedom of speech, the liberty of the arts. Rushdie filters the subversive and constructive potential of the fatwa and embeds it in his life as well as in his memoir. According to Joseph Brooker, memoirs23 are traditionally about “specific, exceptional bouts of experience which are worth recounting” (374). In addition, Smith and Watson state that autobiographers “place themselves at the center of the stories they assemble and are interested in the meaning of larger forces, or conditions, or events for their own stories” (14). Based on their exceptionality but also on their socio-political relevance, there is no doubt that Rushdie’s experiences are worth recounting. However, the memoir Joseph Anton is not only interested in the meaning of larger forces for Rushdie’s “own stories”. It is also interested in the global relevance of the event, a position which author Hanif Kureishi rightly assumes by calling the fatwa “one of the most significant events in postwar literary history”. Rushdie’s perception of the attack in Joseph Anton sounds as follows: The attack on The Satanic Verses was in itself a small thing, though it had garnered a lot of headlines, so it was hard to persuade people that it was extraordinary enough, that it meant enough to warrant an exceptional response. As he began his long trek around the world’s corridors of power, he was obliged, over and over again, to restate the case. (JA 344) Although people seemed to be aware of the popularity of the “attack on The Satanic Verses”, Rushdie had to justify his exceptional response to the attack. In an interview, Rushdie identifies as the main event “[n]ot the fatwa, but the battle against radical Islam” (Rushdie, “Life During Fatwa”), thus emphasising the aftermath of and the fidelity to the event24 by fighting for his ideals and, most importantly with regard to Joseph Anton, communicating these ideas by securing them in writing (Badiou, “Happiness Is a Risk”). The engagement with the past through narrativisation is thus a literary re-visitation of the fatwa years and an attempt to reconsider the events as a catalyst for change and transformation. In line with the history of relationality in life-writing, which has been explored in Chapter 1, Joseph

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Anton takes part in a development from solipsistic self-writing to the assumption that “an I was speaking for an us [and] that the memoir can record shared experience” (Zwerdling 6). In Joseph Anton, Rushdie also clarifies that the ideals he is fighting for are universally important, namely the “[f]reedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner. Also scepticism, irreverence, doubt, satire, comedy, and unholy glee” (JA 285).25 The memoir thus aims to speak not only for one specific author, but for the community (of writers) depending on the liberty of the arts. Joseph Anton gives a personal perspective on the event which had taken on “geopolitical significance” and had marked “a new tension between secular and fundamentalist societies” (Trousdale 151). Eaglestone aptly summarises Joseph Anton as a book which puts “Rushdie’s view of the power of fiction in relation to the power of events” (“Po-fa” 121). The following passage in Joseph Anton (which I will quote in full length as it captures the ethical and political issue quite well) outlines the dispute over The Satanic Verses and addresses once more the juxtaposition of the power of fiction and the power of the event: At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses, he said, behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told? For everyone lived by and inside stories, the so-called grand narratives. The nation was a story, and the family was another, and religion was a third. As a creative artist he knew that the only answer to the question was: Everyone and anyone has, or should have that power. We should all be free to take grand narratives to tasks, to argue with them, satirize them, and insist that they change to reflect the changing times. We should speak of them reverently, irreverently, passionately, caustically, or however we chose. That was our right as members of an open society. In fact, one could say that our ability to re-tell and remake the story of our culture was the best proof that our societies were indeed free. In a free society the argument over the grand narratives never ceased. It was the argument itself that mattered. The argument was freedom. But in a closed society those who possessed political or ideological power invariably tried to shut down these debates. We will tell you the story, they said, and we will tell you what it means. We will tell you how the story is to be told and we forbid you to tell it in any other way. If you do not like the way we tell the story then you are an enemy of the state or a traitor to the faith. You have no rights. Woe betide you! We will come after you and teach you the meaning of your refusal. (JA 360)

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Regarding the events and the various instances in which Rushdie is portrayed as a “beaten man”, Eaglestone holds that Joseph Anton “is the writing of an author who has seen what he takes to be the limits of fiction and has retreated from his optimistic position” (“Po-fa” 122). As can be seen in the last few lines of the passage above, the main conflict, according to Rushdie, is the extent to which a free and open society is opposed and influenced by the political and ideological power of closed societies. By contrasting the power of fiction and the power of events in his memoir, Rushdie once more emphasises the subversive and constructive potential of the fatwa and adds to the socio-political complexity of our time. The memoir is therefore an example of autobiographical writing in which the personal event may not only have an impact on or relevance for the individual but may also be transformative for politics and society in its vehemently universalising gesture.

The Public Self in/as Joseph Anton The transformative effects of the fatwa become evident in the consideration of the dialogical situation in Joseph Anton, which is predominantly concerned with an appellation of the democratic and ethical responsibility of the reader as well as the political impact of the fatwa and the necessity of dialogue, discussion, and argument in society and culture. The role of the (idealised) reader is thematised in the following passage: When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator’s have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it. (JA 90–91) This passage makes clear that literature in general and the memoir in particular are first and foremost considered forms of dialogue and communication, just as in James Phelan’s conception of literature as a “communicative event”, that is “a rhetorical action in which an author addresses an audience for some purpose(s)” (“Rhetoric, Ethics” 56). It also has an educational, idealistic air, trying to highlight the readers’ responsibility and thus to establish a sort of complicity, not only a pact of observers but also of (ideally) morally like-minded individuals. In addition, Rushdie appreciates the reader’s responsibility and the connection between author, text, and readership in the following fictitious enunciation:26

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The Personal and the Political in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton Dear Reader, Thank you for your kind words about my work. May I make the elementary point that the freedom to write is closely related to the freedom to read, and not have your reading selected, vetted and censored for you by any priesthood or Outraged Community? Since when was a work of art defined by the people who didn’t like it? The value of art lies in the love it engenders, not the hatred. It’s love that makes books last. Please keep reading. (JA 316)

By transferring the freedom to write to the freedom to read, Rushdie emphasises the responsibilities and the privileges of a community to which both writers and readers belong. The importance of this communicative relation between author and reader is also addressed by Nancy K. Miller, who I invoke here again and who identifies the reader as “the autobiographer’s most necessary other” (“The Entangled Self” 545) in the process of self-narration. In Joseph Anton, Rushdie establishes “a dialogical relation with the events and discourses of their context/environment” (Badulescu 88; see Trousdale 160). For the success of such a dialogic relation, Rushdie demands the acceptance of multiple points of view (Trousdale 159), which can be observed in the following passage: “In a free society the argument over the grand narratives never ceased. It was the argument itself that mattered” (JA 360). The introduction of the third person leaves room for a fictionalised view which accounts for a more distanced, critical and variable perspective and which offers in itself a possibility of dialogue: “For Rushdie, literature is dialogue, one that demands multiple points of view” (Trousdale 159). This emphasises the necessity of dialogue and the socio-political function of literature and corresponds with Rushdie’s observation that “[t]he political and the personal could no longer be kept apart. This was no longer the age of Jane Austen, who could write her entire oeuvre during the Napoleonic Wars without mentioning them” (JA 56; see Badulescu 88). The sensitivity and provocativeness of the fatwa and its aftermath has indeed caused a lot of criticism with regard to Rushdie’s way of dealing with the situation, a dispute which Rushdie captures in the following passage and which foregrounds fundamental issues of responsibility, humility and privilege: A serious writer had written a serious book. The violence and menace of the response was a terrorist act that had to be confronted. Ah, but his book had offended many people, had it not? Perhaps, but the attack on the book, its author, publishers, translators and booksellers, was a far greater offense. Ah, so, having made trouble, he opposed the trouble that came at him in return, and wanted the world’s leaders to defend his right to be a troublemaker. (JA 344)

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By restating his case, using his memoir as a manifestation of his experience, and by putting it into context, Rushdie proclaims the universal and ethical relevance of his case: He would use platforms that were offered to point out that his case was by no means unique, that writers and intellectuals across the Islamic world were being accused of exactly the same thought crimes as himself, blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, insult and offense. (JA 303) Hence, Rushdie is not the only person who has suffered under the fatwa:27 his Japanese translator was killed, his Norwegian publisher and his Italian translator attacked. Bookstores and public libraries had been bombed; protests escalated.28 Rushdie even transfers the attacks to literature in general: His nightmare had been long and literature had been hard to reclaim. He thought every day of William Nygaard and his bullet holes, of Ettore Capriolo kicked and stabbed, of Hitoshi Igarashi dead in a pool of blood by an elevator shaft. Not only he, the shameless author, but the world of books – literature itself – had been vilified, shot, kicked, knifed, killed, and blamed at the same time. (JA 428) In the end, Rushdie reinterprets the communicative outreach of the fatwa and writes: The day he had never expected had come. And yes, it was a victory, it had been about something important, not just his life. It had been a fight for things that mattered and they had prevailed, all of them, together. (JA 549) Again, I would agree with Eaglestone that the memoir “as a work of history, an archive” works to make a case for the event and aftermath of the fatwa, as “in history, the archive creates the historical event” (“Po-fa” 120). Joseph Anton therefore sets an exemplary case for suppressed or pursued artists, and thereby functions as a “useful ‘mirror’ reflection” (Lebdai 4). At the same time, Rushdie defies the role of a victim: He did not wish to be poor, hapless, pitiable. He did not want to be merely a victim. There were important intellectual, political and moral issues at stake here. He wanted to be a part of the argument; to be a protagonist. (JA 235)

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Apart from the historical recollection of the experiences associated with the fatwa, Rushdie also gives an insight into his loyalty towards his profession and his passion for writing and creating stories: It had never occurred to him before the attack to stop writing, to be something else, to become not a writer. To have become a writer – to discover that he was able to do the thing he had most wanted to do – had been one of his greatest joys. (JA 165) This also becomes obvious in the following passage, which highlights the potential and value of literature as a means of contribution, of making an impact on humanity: Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be […]. Literature’s view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war. (JA 628) This engaging and empathic notion of literature also accounts for a relevance of ethical relations in Joseph Anton, which is predominantly connected to the relationship between author, text, and reader. The question to ask is, according to James Phelan: “How does the use of techniques imply and convey the values underlying the relations of the storytellers (implied authors and narrators) to their materials (events and characters) and their audiences (narratees, implied readers, actual audiences)” (“Narrative Ethics” 531)? One may assume that Joseph Anton is to a great extent inclined to questions of ethics and morality, as it implies a more ethical discussion of freedom which is less and less concerned with the author and thus more with society in general. Although one may argue that the gist of the memoir may also be a therapeutic and reflective encounter with a traumatic past, it provides room for a wider scope of ethical deliberations which move beyond the personal. Particularly revealing is, however, Rushdie’s conflicting position when it comes to ideology and universals (JA 315). O’Gorman warns that this conflict has a distancing effect due to the prescriptive and authoritative gesture it implies: “By insisting on the universality of human nature, he is not, in practice, establishing common ground with others so much as imposing upon them a rather prescriptive, narrowly value-laden rationalist version of it” (460). From an ethical viewpoint – who is speaking for us? – this can be considered problematic and alienating instead of involving the reader.

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By setting an example and at the same time providing his readership with an explicit justification of his actions and decisions during his years in hiding, Rushdie values not only the individual but also the collective (as literary and cultural community) in his autobiographical writing and encourages a common ground for preserving the freedom of speech: He did not wish to be poor, hapless, pitiable. He did not want to be merely a victim. There were important intellectual, political and moral issues at stake here. He wanted to be a part of the argument; to be a protagonist. (JA 235) By establishing himself as a fictional character and by renegotiating the political and public impact of the fatwa and its aftermath, Rushdie’s wish to be a protagonist and part of the argument seems to be fulfilled.

Speaking Back to The Satanic Verses: Rushdie and Celebrity Cult(ure) Autobiographies and memoirs combining the personal and the public are often written by politicians, celebrities, or public intellectuals (Marcus, Autobiography 79–80), which ties in with Rushdie’s celebrity persona and the consistent presence of the fatwa and the “Rushdie affair” on the news. Lisa Appignanesi’s and Sara Maitland’s insightful collection The Rushdie File (1989) compiles various articles, letters, interviews, and other material and elaborately depicts the backgrounds of the fatwa affair right from the beginning. Most importantly, it assembles evidence of an international wave of support. There are profound differences in the approaches and reactions to The Satanic Verses, but most generally, “the actual content of The Satanic Verses was not really the issue: rather, Rushdie’s novel became a lightening conductor for a number of long-brewing global social, political and cultural storms” (Eaglestone, “Introduction” 4). If we consider the various historical sources and the multiple perspectives on the Rushdie affair which have been documented in The Rushdie File, the memoir Joseph Anton may count as another essential contribution to the documentation of an individual’s perspective on the story. This subchapter relates the responses to The Satanic Verses to Rushdie’s justifications and considerations in Joseph Anton and his ways of trying to console the reception and consequence of his literary work with his political endeavour that followed the fatwa. The question to be asked and explored is thus how the memoir Joseph Anton speaks back to Rushdie’s most controversial novel The Satanic Verses, both generically and formally. The frequently voiced claims of narcissism and egotism in Joseph Anton in reviews, news, and criticism, make us think about the celebrity cult(ure) around Salman Rushdie which shapes and contextualises the memoir. How, for example, may the use of the third-

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person perspective prove beneficial to write against egotism and narcissism? If we consider the various reactions to The Satanic Verses but also to the issuing of the fatwa, as well as the unfolding of events after 1989, the preservation of the event seems to culminate in the publication of Joseph Anton. As has been shown in the respective chapter, the style in Joseph Anton demonstrates Rushdie’s literary skills and is, however, inherently different from The Satanic Verses. Stressing the role of the author as the archiver, the one collecting and communicating memory, events, and experiences, the memoir thus supports and complements Rushdie’s other written and verbal contributions during the fatwa affair.29 While Hermione Lee observes that the “telling of life-stories is the dominant narrative mode of our times” (Biography 17), Sandra Mayer and Julia Novak emphasise that “celebrity must today be considered one of the most pervasive phenomena of global media culture that permeates virtually all aspects of life” (150). It seems that the connection between the two statements is reflected in Rushdie’s public position and political persona. Rushdie’s role as a writer with a story to tell is conflicted by the immense media attention and his celebrity status.30 As Julia Hoydis states, the “‘Rushdie affair’ is […] political drama, social history and personal story” (43). Considering Martin Amis’s famous dictum that Rushdie “vanish[ed] into the front page” (“Rendezvous with Rushdie”), both the presence of the public self and the distance of the hidden self are reflected in and resonate with the interplay of distance and proximity in the memoir. Many critics, particularly those researching Rushdie’s celebrity persona, claim that Joseph Anton is written from Rushdie’s socially and financially privileged position, is too concerned with name-dropping (Wesley 531) and authorial self-fashioning31 (“a modern Voltaire”; Wesley 526), and misses “the rebellious streak” (Chakrabarti 355).32 Being a public persona whose narrative has already been shaped by media discourse, Rushdie’s celebrity status certainly complicates his autobiographical endeavour. In his review, Wilson even claims that the idealistic impact of Joseph Anton “gets overshadowed by a toxic sense of a writer’s status as a celebrity”. According to Wilson, Rushdie “conveys very little sense of what any of [the other characters such as his parents and wives] was like”. This is particularly unusual as the writer usually focusses a great deal on his characters’ (human) depth. In this case, the distanced position as an observer becomes even more apparent. In contrast, Rushdie provides a whole list of additional people the writer knows or is acquainted with, so that the “second half of the memoir groans with famous names” (Wilson). Besides Rushdie’s reaction to negative criticism or newspaper articles and his ways of getting back at journalists, reviewers, and his wives, the memoir “takes stock of the size, variety, quality and reach of Rushdie’s literary production and consolidates his name and reputation by giving his version of the truth” (Ganapathy-Doré 22). Having been an object of speculation and public attention for a long time, one could also find that Rushdie enjoys the possibility of creating his version of a factual

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account, his version of an archive, to compile what one would call Rushdie’s personal fatwa history. Wesley also sees in Joseph Anton an attempt to depict Rushdie’s development: Ultimately, the intention – if perhaps not the effect – of this style of writing is for Rushdie to present his twenty-first-century authorial persona (the one writing the book, as opposed to the “he” within it) as the beneficiary of experience, having gained some insight from a decade of horror. (531) If we investigate this assumption more closely, the narrating self thus appears or aims to appear as an insightful, experienced self who emerged from the traumatic past of the Joseph Anton in hiding – an intended side effect of the third-person perspective which has been outlined in the previous subchapters. Although Wesley discredits this argument by directly referring to Rushdie’s apparently pretentious Enlightenment persona, Joseph Anton emerges as a form of speaking back to the fatwa affair which is informed by a reflective and justificatory evaluation of the past. The strongly conflicting reviews and reactions to The Satanic Verses as well as the subsequent discourse about freedom of speech, justice, and religious fundamentalism seem to have prompted Rushdie’s urge to write Joseph Anton and to speak back to his readers and critics via an autobiographical account of the events. In his essay “In Good Faith” in Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie explains his vision and understanding of multiculturalism and clarifies the value of diversity: [H]ybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-byfusion, change-by conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves. (“In Good Faith” 394) Employing the essay and, in the case of Joseph Anton, autobiographical writing, the resonance of truthfulness and authenticity, of revelation and justification seems to adhere to an attempt to work against the narrative and discourse of the public and literary celebrity. Regarding this cultural agenda, it becomes clear that with Joseph Anton, “the most significant role Rushdie sees himself playing here is defending free speech” (Eaglestone, “Introduction” 4). Also, in line with what Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton about the necessity of dialogue and the benefits of opposing views through dialogue, Eaglestone observes the following:

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The Personal and the Political in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton In his fiction and in his political activity, Rushdie seeks to defend the free interaction of views. But this is far from the only issue Rushdie sees as important. The range of his intellectual engagements as a global figure emerges from the “thinking” of his fiction. (“Introduction” 6)

Adding to the archival function of Joseph Anton, the memoir also (forcefully) shapes how Rushdie is publicly perceived. The use of the third person tends to demonstrate “an abandonment of authorial responsibility” or “a desire […] to have control over his literary work and a keen realization that material and socio-political conditions limit his ability to do so” (Chakrabarti 358). There is, hence, a crucial duality in the use of the third person. The abandonment of authorial responsibility, in combination with a retreat of the authorial I, establishes a distance but at the same time grants the author control and, if you will, “supervision”. Chakrabarti sees in Joseph Anton an “attempt to come to terms with his post-fatwa persona and an externalization of his desire to manage his public identity”, “to re-lay the parameters on which The Satanic Verses could be read”, and “to contest certain critical responses to earlier texts” (358–359). According to Chakrabarti, “Rushdie is [thus] trying to control the way Rushdie is perceived, thereby marking a turn from the political to the individual in his writings” (359). Thus, although Joseph Anton puts the defence of literary freedom on top of the agenda, Rushdie also uses his memoir to speak back to The Satanic Verses and the subsequent international uproar. Rushdie’s experience of shame which came with the fatwa is addressed in the following: To hide in this way was to be stripped of all self-respect. To be told to hide was a humiliation. Maybe, he thought, to live like this would be worse than death. In his novel Shame he had written about the workings of Muslim “honor culture,” at the poles of whose moral axis were honor and shame, very different from the Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. He came from that culture even though he was not religious, and had been raised to care deeply about questions of pride. To skulk and hide was to lead a dishonorable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. Both shamed and ashamed. (JA 147) With Joseph Anton, Rushdie tries to write his way back into society, to regain his self-respect but also to influence the public perception of his self and the time of the fatwa affair. Furthermore, Rushdie actively addresses the accusations of vanity and self-importance and thus employs his self-narrative to re-establish his reputation and contradict or even dissolve accusations of narcissism and egotism: The longer it lasted, the longer he went without being killed, the easier it was for people to believe that nobody was trying to kill him, and that

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he wanted the protection around him to satisfy his vanity, his insufferable self-importance. It was hard to convince people that from where he was standing the protection didn’t feel like movie-stardom. It felt like jail. (JA 178) In the following passage Rushdie addresses the various conflicts he faces and creates an imagery of external determination, displaying his lack of agency and autonomy: He was a man without armies, obliged to fight constantly on many fronts. There was the private front of his secret life, with its cringings and crouchings, its skulkings and duckings, its fear of plumbers and other repairmen, its fraught search for places of refuge, and its dreadful wigs. Then there was the publishing front, where he could take nothing for granted in spite of all his work. Publication itself was still an issue. It was not certain that he could continue in the life he had chosen, not certain that he would always find willing hands to print and distribute his work. And then there was the harsh and violent world of politics. If he was a soccer ball, he thought, could he be a self-conscious soccer ball and join in the game? Could the soccer ball understand the sport in which it was kicked from end to end? Could the soccer ball act in its own interest and take itself off the field and out of range of the booted, kicking feet? (JA 241) The image of the soccer ball emphasises Rushdie’s perception that he has lost his agency in this field of conflicts, being dependent on others and on political developments. Together with the passage on the jail-like experience of the fatwa, the memoir serves as a supplement to history by providing personal insights and by renegotiating the issues which were at stake for everyone. In cases when Joseph Anton has been received positively by scholars or critics, they particularly value Rushdie’s courage and respect his account in the sense of being an important archive and political gesture. Drabble, for example, states that Rushdie “has been brave enough to portray himself as a coward scuttling for cover and hiding behind a kitchen dresser. That takes courage, too”. Eaglestone, who observes a “constant sense of struggle” (“Pofa” 122) in Joseph Anton, describes the memoir as “the record, the archive, of a man persecuted for his beliefs [which] is worthy of a great deal of respect” (“Po-fa” 123). Although O’Gorman claims that Rushdie is “devaluing literary writing by reducing it to an ideological tool” (461),33 this “devaluation” of literary writing, however, is only marginally reflected in Joseph Anton. Despite its political rhetoric and theme, the literary language and the suspenseful tension of the narrative suggest otherwise. Trousdale approaches the issue of literature from a different angle: “If we take novels

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as the basis of our morals, as the secular equivalent of sacred texts, then writers are our not-prophets, the mediators between personal and historical, between individual and eternal” (160). With Joseph Anton, Rushdie employs the advantages of autobiographical writing, namely its common expectation to reveal truths – and Rushdie does reveal his truth – and the direct engagement with history, with his own trauma, and with the ideal of the liberty of the arts. Directing his version at an audience which might also be aware of Rushdie’s celebrity persona, the book thus serves as a counterargument in that it emphasises his authorial responsibility by speaking back to The Satanic Verses, his attempts at writing against claims of egotism and narcissism, and at the same time a preservation of Rushdie’s authorial persona.

Concluding Remarks In his essay “A Declaration of Independence”, Rushdie postulates that “[t]he art of literature requires, as an essential condition, that the writer be free to move between his many countries as he chooses […]. The creative spirit, of its very nature, resists frontiers and limiting points, denies the authority of censors and taboos.” (Rushdie, “A Declaration of Independence” 274). What Rushdie describes in this passage lies certainly at the core of his conception of art, his role as a writer, and, to an extent, his own entitlement. Joseph Anton, which makes the value of literature, apart from personal experience, a main concern of the memoir, does not only tell Rushdie’s story, but a political story of international interest. The distance created through the third-person perspective (and the use of the past tense) removes the author from the centre of attention, establishes a distance between protagonist and author, between narrating and narrated self, and thus creates a space for the reader to experience the narration as a more general look on the literary scene. It also allows a critical and self-reflective distance towards the narrated self, an aspect which, with regard to the traumatic implications of the fatwa affair, should definitely be a central concern in the analysis of the narrative situation in Joseph Anton. The celebrity status of the author, which has often been taken as a starting point for critical engagement with the notorious writer, does not conceal an Indian writer who has challenged his own relation with his Muslim background. I have suggested that Joseph Anton in fact manifests the values and morals of the writer to such an extent that it clearly holds on to the subversive effect of the fatwa: the consequences of the fatwa as an event of global concern, as has been suggested in this chapter, are indeed transformative, not only on a personal level but also on a political and public one. The use of the third person and the establishment of the character “Joseph Anton” may serve to depict the “Rushdie affair” as a societal and global issue. The memoir tries to maintain and to manifest Rushdie’s “rebellious” status by restating his case that “[h]e was fighting against the view that

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people could be killed for their ideas, and against the ability of any religion to place a limiting point on thought” (JA 285). In this respect, the event of the fatwa has not only revolutionised Rushdie’s life, but also the literary community. The literariness of the language as well as the communicative function of the memoir make Joseph Anton a revealing and insightful form of self-and-other-life-writing in its public and political outreach.

Notes 1 Rushdie’s magic realist novel The Satanic Verses (1988) is certainly one of the most controversial books in recent literary history – and received mostly positive reviews in the months after its publication (see Appignanesi and Maitland’s collection in The Rushdie File, e.g. 13). The Satanic Verses, which Appignanesi and Maitland describe as “a serious attempt to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person” (41), is a complex satirical and imaginary novel. Most who felt offended by The Satanic Verses found that it “contains a number of false interpretations about Islam and gives wrong portrayals of the Koran and the Prophet Mohamed” (Appignanesi and Maitland 24; similarly 25–26). For a discussion of the fatwa conflict and the opposing positions see Morton, who suggests that The Satanic Verses displays the “reductive dichotomy between the civilizations of the West and the so-called Islamic world by exploring the experience of the postcolonial migrant in the Western metropolis” (48). This form of critique suggests that the novel should in any way provide an accurate historical account, a debate which lies at the heart of autobiographical discourse. 2 The British Library, as a reaction to the “offensiveness” of the novel, placed The Satanic Verses in its “‘restricted’, locked shelves” (Appignanesi and Maitland 143). Multiple bookstores stopped selling The Satanic Verses in response to the fatwa to ensure their customers’ and employees’ safety (Appignanesi and Maitland 159). 3 The involvement of politics in the debate has caused immense turmoil, as the personal soon became a diplomatic issue. For more on this see the vast collection of political statements, letters, and newspaper articles assembled in The Rushdie File by Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland. 4 Among the people who supported Rushdie (and who feature in The Rushdie File) were many fellow writers and intellectuals, e.g. Nadine Gordimer, Ian McEwan, Ralph Ellison, Homi Bhabha, and Rushdie’s then-wife Marianne Wiggins. 5 All references preceded by “JA” are to the following edition: Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2012. 6 Material from this chapter has appeared in my essay “Rushdie’s Rebellious Joseph Anton or: Chronicling the Aftermath of The Satanic Verses” (2019). 7 His attempts to justify and explain himself culminated in a situation in which he breached his own principles and half-apologised, which he regretted later (JA 275–276). Note that Rushdie has not only addressed the fatwa in his memoir, but in several essays in two of his collections Imaginary Homelands (1991) and Step Across This Line (2002). 8 Rushdie’s work The Satanic Verses has often been called satirical. The aim of satire is to entertain and to spark critical reflection and discourse. English Pen also reacted to the banning of The Satanic Verses and the announcement of the fatwa, and explicitly re-emphasised their active role in the conflict by “pay[ing] tribute to the heroic determination of Salman Rushdie’s publisher not to be cowed by threats and above all to the steadfastness of British booksellers, who

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The Personal and the Political in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton have continued to make The Satanic Verses available. That is after all the whole point: freedom to publish, sell and read (or not read) within the law” (Appignanesi and Maitland 146). 114 French writers spoke in Rushdie’s support (Appignanesi and Maitland 180) as did writers in West Germany, Italy, or Egypt. Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s Nobel Prize laureate, had been accused of blasphemy for his novel Children of Gebelawi (Appignanesi and Maitland 190–191) and demonstrated an ambiguous support for Rushdie, for which he was himself threatened with death. The Private Secretary officially announced that the government’s “commitment to the protection of the rights and freedoms of our citizens, including freedom of expression, is unshakeable” (Appignanesi and Maitland 147). Akbar Ali holds that “[t]he real issue in the present controversy is the right to freedom of expression, an issue larger than Mr Rushdie’s book” (Appignanesi and Maitland 217) and thus emphasises both the political relevance and scope of the novel. The personal perspective on fatherhood, his despair and, in fact, a complete change in his dealings with family life becomes apparent as “he wished, bitterly, that he could be a proper father again and not miss the boy’s childhood. This was the greatest loss” (JA 229). Regarding the use of the third person, Yardley writes in his review of the memoir that “[i]t eliminates the temptations of self-pitying bathos […] and allows Rushdie to maintain a certain clinical distance from himself”. The burden of this “re-naming” becomes obvious when Rushdie writes that “Mr. Joseph Anton wanted to get back to being Salman Rushdie and that was, frankly, unmannerly of him. His was not to be a success story, and there was certainly no room in it for pleasure” (JA 415). Ganapathy-Doré describes the process as follows: “The relationship between name and life and between name and self, loss of name and self, the aliases and guises that put the sense of the self to test and the retrieval of name and self and the sense of renaissance that accompany it are other narrative strands that crisscross the text” (13). By renaming himself and leaving behind his identity, Rushdie “had lost control over his name” (JA 164). Eaglestone, in his essay on Joseph Anton as a “po-fa” memoir, elaborates on this “control of names” (“Po-fa” 116). Also: “In Joseph Anton, po-fa traces a change: not a radical change – his po-fa ideas have antecedents in his pre-fatwa work – but a significant one for both his thinking and his art. And this change is most visible in precisely the two issues of migrancy and ‘joining up’” (Eaglestone, “Po-fa” 118). The process of fictionalisation is, however, limited by the autobiographical endeavour – the following depiction of individuality is not apparent in Joseph Anton: “The articulation of two truly differing points of view concerning a single individual cannot be accomplished in autobiography. The novelist, however, can create a double perspective but only by sacrificing reality (omniscience and nonfocalization are impossible outside fiction)” (Lejeune, “Autobiography in the Third Person” 41). Note that the narrator’s elaboration on distancing devices in his novel The Satanic Verses can also be transferred to Joseph Anton and the combination of revealing and concealing the self: “These many distancing devices were, in their creator’s opinion, indicators of the fictive nature of his project. To his opponents, they were transparent attempts at concealment. ‘He is hiding,’ they said, ‘behind his fiction.’” (JA 75). In Joseph Anton, Rushdie describes his work process as follows: “History rushed into his pages, immense and intimate, creative and destructive […]. He was a historian by training and the great point of history, which was to understand how individual lives, communities, nations and social classes were shaped by great forces, yet retained, at times, the ability to change the direction of those forces, must also be the point of his fiction” (JA 55–56).

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14 Note that this also includes comments and descriptions of physical deterioration which do not depict Rushdie as a shiny martyr but as a “beaten man”: “Friends who saw him in those days were shocked by his physical deterioration, his increase in weight, the way he had let his beard grow out into an ugly bulbous mass, his sunken stance. He looked like a beaten man” (JA 170). 15 Both audience and author assume the position of the critical observer, which highlights the communicative function of the self-narration and possibility of cognitive involvement. Grzegorz Szpila describes Joseph Anton as an emotional narrative and “a record of emotive responses to these adverse circumstances” (537). Rushdie uses, as Szpila argues, the metaphor of darkness/light as a major imagery in Joseph Anton. This emotive language can also create intimacy or closeness: “the reader may be more likely to trust in Rushdie’s assessment of other people’s emotions as well as his own, and his ability to portray them as faithfully as possible (the use of the third person narration may serve this purpose too)” (Szpila 541). Also: “The narrator is by no means orientated towards exclusively presenting his own emotional states. Other people’s feelings are in evidence in the book and are presented also by means of idioms of emotion” (Szpila 545). 16 In fact, there are other post-fatwa autobiographies, e.g. from Algeria: Lebdai points to the fact that other writers have also received comparable threats in the past, e.g. Taslima Nashreen, Naguib Mahfouz, Ahmed Kasravi, Tahar Djaoutet, Youcef Sebti, or Abdelkader Alloula. Benaouda Lebdai classifies Rushdie’s memoir as a “literary hallmark within the post-fatwa autobiographical texts [which] marks a thematic genre in postcolonial literature” (10). After the announcement of the fatwa, Susan Sontag spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and declared that “the matter of Salman Rushdie has made him the world’s best-known endangered writer, but he is far from the only one. In all too many parts of the world, to take up one’s pen is to risk violence, most often from governments which treat criticism as treason” (Appignanesi and Maitland 168). 17 This is particularly contrasted in the following passage, which highlights the juxtaposition of events and the literary and vivid description of an encounter with these very events: “Yet the true life of books was profoundly other than this world of violence, and in it he rediscovered the discourse he loved. He emerged from his alien everyday reality and sank into Aurora, her glamour, her bohemian excess, her painterly contemplations of languor and desire, devoured her, like a starving man at a feast” (JA 428). 18 In comparison to Rushdie’s other novels, Wallhead claims that Joseph Anton is rather “a detective story where the object is also the subject, the victim gets to write the story” (102). 19 Yardley states that a sense of humility is also achieved “by abandoning, for the most part, the elaborate, fanciful, quasi-poetic style that characterizes most of his previous work […] and to write, instead, in a plain prose that by its severity makes his ordeal all the more palpable”. 20 Badiou stresses the logical level of the two different states of being before and after an event and clarifies that the development is not an elevation to a better world: “There is a before and an after. This break doesn’t cause a transition from an inferior world to a superior world. We’re still in the same world. Certainly, the consequences of the break have a status of exception in relation to that which doesn’t depend on the break. But it’s necessary to show that these consequences are organized in accordance with the general logic of the world itself” (Philosophy and the Event 126). 21 In other words, Rushdie claims that he was not aware his novel The Satanic Verses could cause such a cultural and political crisis or that the liberty of literature and freedom of speech might be at stake.

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22 “An Event always destroys the dominant state of the situation” (Robinson), its unexpected arrival is always a trigger for social change. 23 “Memoir” as a subgenre of life-writing can be described as “a piece of writing about oneself [and others] which evades the demands of comprehensiveness: giving itself licence, for instance, to focus on certain chosen periods while leaving others undiscussed” (Brooker 375; see Smith and Watson 274). 24 Livingston and Cutrofello hold that Badiou’s subject “is defined by its fidelity to an event” and that the “defining activity of an individual or collective subject consists in its faithful and transformative work, within a situation to transform its structure in light of the event, working on language itself to render visible what was formerly only latent or invisible within that situational structure” (78). 25 See also: “He knew at once that he wanted to write about iconoclasm, to say that in an open society no ideas or beliefs could be ring-fenced and given immunity from challenges of all sorts, philosophical, satirical, profound, superficial, gleeful, irreverent, or smart. All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent” (JA 210). Discourse, argument, and quarrel are thus seen as qualities inherent in literature and are intended to justify and, to a certain extent, establish liberty in the first place. 26 There are also instances when the writer is increasingly aware of the limitations of his endeavour and the limited capacity of understanding on the part of critics or people involved or concerned with the issue: “Nobody wanted to hear about freedom anymore, or about the writer’s inalienable right to express his vision of the world as he saw fit, or about the immorality of book burning and death threats. Those arguments were used up. To restate them now would be obdurate and unhelpful” (JA 271). 27 In his memoir, Rushdie is aware of and acknowledges the effort and support of the people involved: “It would come to be remembered as one of the great chapters in the history of publishing, one of the grand principled defences of liberty, and Mayer would be remembered as the leader of that heroic team” (JA 201). 28 “On 8 March the offices of the Riverdale Press were fire-bombed” (Appignanesi and Maitland 163), a Mondadori bookshop was set on fire (188). 29 It might be interesting to compare Rushdie’s different medial responses to the very conflicts in politics, culture, and academia which accompanied his career and how they have been received in public. The Rushdie File features an overview of Rushdie’s early responses to the fatwa. Very shortly after the announcement of the fatwa, Rushdie proclaimed: “The Satanic Verses is not, in my view, an anti-religious novel” (Appignanesi and Maitland 75). After the fatwa had been issued, Rushdie immediately defended the freedom to write and the freedom to read and addressed the problematics of being offended by a work of literature. In the following interview (recorded on 27 January 1989) broadcast on Channel 4 on 14 February 1989, Rushdie comments on the provocativeness of The Satanic Verses and the general choice of what to read and not to read and proclaims: “[T]he idea that, somehow, a book should exist which takes a different point of view from that of the imams and be such a dangerous thing, is not convincing to me” (Appignanesi and Maitland 29). The overall problem with the novel is also that “[a]lmost all the people who are being so insulted and provoked and disgusted have not really read the book. But I get letters every day from Muslims who do like the book” (Appignanesi and Maitland 30). With regard to his reaction to the fatwa and the perception of his work by people the novel is actually written for, Rushdie writes in a letter to the Observer: “This is, for me, the saddest irony of all; that after working for five years to give voice and fictional

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flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages. I tried to write against stereotypes; the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world” (Appignanesi and Maitland 75). See Jannis Eikenaar’s thesis on the Rushdie persona, in which he elaborates on the different roles Rushdie has accumulated over the years. This means that the author is “continually hinting at or insisting upon a connection between herself or himself and another historical figure or idea” (Wesley 527) through a “reliance on Enlightenment tropes – liberty, individualism, free speech, rights, secularism – that have deeply informed his political vocabulary and are intensified in his twenty-first-century self-fashioning rhetoric” (524). See Mishra, who predominantly criticises Rushdie’s open depiction of infidelity and celebrations as well as his “peevish righteousness”, while at the same time demanding sympathy from the audience for his hardship. While the media often portrays Rushdie as a “cosmopolitan playboy” (Wesley 520), Wesley considers Joseph Anton “an attempt by Rushdie to highlight his exilic Enlightenment persona as privileged above his other authorial ‘selves’ and which works to challenge his mediatized image as a playboy” (521). In Joseph Anton, Rushdie, sometimes oddly, takes count of celebrations and parties he attended, and about women he met over the years. Positive reviews describe Joseph Anton as “a splendid book” (Yardley). Wallhead suggests a reading of Joseph Anton as “a detective story with a beginning, middle and possible end: how the victim managed to evade the pursuers” (101). I would argue that, in line with the diary Rushdie kept during the fatwa years, these enumerations are, to some extent, part of the list-making (Rüggemeier) and recapitulating which so much permeates Rushdie’s memoir and which, as some critics argue, may explain the density of facts and information in this specific autobiographical endeavour. According to O’Gorman, who senses a “palpable affectedness in the way he valorizes literature throughout” (460), Rushdie’s solution “is to try to challenge what he sees as the misguided compulsion to think about identity in an overly objective, authentic or empirical way in the first place, instead striving to convey a much harder-to-pin-down sense of what he unironically describes as ‘soul’” (457). In his article on the failures of Joseph Anton, O’Gorman criticises, among other aspects, Rushdie’s “combative, binary language” (461) and argues that Rushdie “discusses literature [as] sacrosanct and untouchable, a resource to draw upon in order to lend an argument rhetorical weight and, in turn, to reinforce rather than subvert preconceived ways of seeing the world” (462). If we think of the reason behind Rushdie’s claims – namely the freedom of speech and the liberty of the arts as a form of freedom of speech – the attempt to maintain this freedom goes beyond the accusation of Rushdie’s perceptions of literature being sacrosanct. The freedom of opinion and speech is thus the main consideration of his defence.

Bibliography Amis, Martin. “Rendezvous with Rushdie.” Vanity Fair. December 1990. www. archive.vanityfair.com/article/1990/12/rendezvous-with-rushdie. Accessed 10 August 2022. Appignanesi, Lisa, and Sara Maitland, eds. The Rushdie File. London: Fourth Estate, 1989.

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Wesley, Charlie. “Salman Rushdie’s Authorial Self-Fashioning in Joseph Anton.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52.3 (2017): 519–533. Wilson, A. N. “Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie: Review.” Telegraph. 21 September 2012. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoirreviews/9558297/ Joseph-Anton-by-Salman-Rushdie-review.html. Accessed 10 August 2022. Yardley, Jonathan. “Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie.” Washington Post. 16 September 2012. www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/josephanton-a-memoir-by-salman-rushdie/2012/09/16/9b2fa4b8-f68a-11e1-8253-3f495a e70650_story.html. Accessed 10 August 2022.

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Perspectives and Conclusions

This book has explored 21st-century uses of the second- and third-person perspective in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. It has brought together a range of transnational examples of writings that stage, negotiate and problematise male self-narration between selfwithdrawal and self-promotion. Through detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, I hope to have demonstrated the multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narrative perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and autobiography theory, the book has engaged with questions and tensions of subjectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting from the narrative perspective, and its potential effects on the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. In addition, the book has traced relevant guiding principles the authors use to navigate their self-narratives in relation to others, such as questions of embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics, and politics. The addressed concepts of memory and embodiment, mediality and visuality, and metaisation and selfreflexivity have proven to be insightful factors that account for the ambivalence of the personal and the general in second- and third-person autobiographical writing. Both in terms of an affective and cognitive involvement of the reader, the narrative perspective, style, and the above-mentioned concepts shape the communicative function and rhetorical discourse of the autobiographical narratives in this book. Having analysed the narratives – and their respective writers – in their socio-political and cultural context, I hope to have shown to what extent these autobiographical narratives reflect the authors’ speaker positions and self-narration between self-withdrawal and self-promotion as well as their response to questions of male agency, self-stylisation, and celebrity status. In my reading of Paul Auster’s Winter Journal (Chapter 2), I discussed a striking example of a self-narrative written entirely from a present-tense second-person perspective. The ambivalence of you as well as its affordances, both personal and relational, have sparked an intriguing reading of subjectivity and relationality, dialogic encounters between past and present DOI: 10.4324/9781003345374-7

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self and with the reader. I complemented the double address function of the second person with a discussion of further meaning-making factors such as memory and embodiment, rhythmicity, and style, which further shape the text’s affective function. Paul Auster’s engagement with foundational questions of mortality, death, and artistic self-understanding as a prominent literary figure has further complicated the display of male agency and authority. Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior (Chapter 3) has proven to be an insightful variation of second-person autobiographical writing as it makes use of similar narrative strategies as Winter Journal but additionally unsettles the self-narrative by a focus on the elusiveness of memory and, even more prominently, an eclectic engagement with visuality and intermediality. The long section on two films and the section on photography complicate a straightforward reading of the autobiographical text. While the film ekphrasis underlines the author’s fear of invisibility – which is counteracted by his two autobiographical “self-constructions” – the visuality of the memoir at least suggests a move away from the personal towards a more collective cultural identity and past. Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (Chapter 4) as a hybrid form of autobiographical and fictional writing as well as a first- and second-person narrative has proven to be a useful addition to the discussion of Auster’s narratives. The ambivalence of the second person is further foregrounded by its alternating uses with the first person (singular and plural). Amid this ambivalent play with pronominal (non-)identity, Levels of Life negotiates memories, love, loss, and grief. The analysis has shown that the second person is predominantly used in generalising statements about grief and loss, while more personal insights into the autobiographer’s “grief-work” are narrated in the first person. The text’s tripartite structure has provided fruitful material for a discussion of the personal and the general due to its essayistic, fictional, and autobiographical components. Being the private author, Julian Barnes exercises a withdrawal which results in a more philosophical than personal engagement with intimacy and experiences of grief. In my reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (Chapter 5), I have turned to my first example of third-person autobiographical writing. The text has clearly demonstrated the possibilities of self-withdrawal (par excellence) – both on a formal and diegetic level. This withdrawal has shown that Coetzee’s use of the third person unsettles questions of self-knowledge, of (authorial) voice, and ethical responsibility while at the same time involving the reader both cognitively and affectively through metageneric commentary and a discussion of ethical questions. The fictionalised memoir mirrors the actual author’s sense of privacy and at the same time raises questions about responsibility as a South African writer and the political apathy which resonate throughout Coetzee’s oeuvre. My final reading in this study has been concerned with Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (Chapter 6). His use of the third person has proven to be

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different from Coetzee’s in that it is less a self-withdrawal than a selfdecentring which takes place in the narrative. The third person emphasises the split self of Rushdie’s fatwa self and navigates his personal self-stylisation in the light of a political spectacle. Both the discussion of the political event and the aftermath of the fatwa have proven to be immensely helpful to engage with Rushdie’s strategies of self-construction and, if you will, self-promotion as a celebrity figure. As probably the most notorious among the four writers I selected for this study, Rushdie uses the ambivalence of narrative perspective in his third-person memoir to make the personal political. Although these autobiographical texts work in different ways, as has been shown in the close readings in this study, the overall impact of reshaping the communicative situation and employing the ambivalence of the second or third person to negotiate personal and general concerns seems to feature in all the texts. The narrative techniques (a withdrawal of the I) effectively work to establish an ambivalent reading between distance and proximity on several levels. First, the distance between narrating and narrated self may create a space for self-reflection and, as a result, establish intimacy and selfknowledge. Second, it promotes an engaging relationship with the reader, either on an affective or on a cognitive level. A prime tension seems to lie in the interplay of rhetorical authority and a shift away from authorial control or responsibility. With this study, I have addressed a subsection in auto/biography studies and engaged in the discussion of narratological, rhetorical, and ethical implications of narrative perspective in autobiographical writing. By selecting case studies by celebrated male writers, I hope to have provided some insights into the multiple characteristics and functions of their uses of narrative perspective in relation to their respective speaker positions. Hence, a consideration of strategies of self-observation and distance, autobiographical intimacy as well as strategies of fictionalisation, metaisation, and intermediality has contributed to a more nuanced discussion of the writers’ uses of second- and third-person self-narration. It is the emphasis of a mutually engaged relationship between autobiographer and reader which lies at the centre of this study. With a tendency towards a revaluation of the reader and text–world relations, I have tried to extrapolate those theoretical concerns which I found helpful for an engagement with these prominent literary figures. Having revisited the overall arguments and findings of the close readings, I would like to summarise a few observations. The productive potential for affective and cognitive involvement in the autobiographical narratives of Auster, Barnes, Coetzee, and Rushdie lies, of course, in their strategic uses of narrative perspective. However, I found that the thematic and formal diversity and their interrelations with the texts’ relational rhetoric particularly fruitful and indicative of the authors’ respective priorities. This applies to Auster’s generalising and universalising gesture, Barnes’s communalisation of grief, Coetzee’s withdrawal and his decision to stage a multiplicity of

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other voices, and Rushdie’s attempt at re-instating the Rushdie persona he desires after having lived a long time in hiding. The readings have brought to light some intriguing insights into strategies of self-narration and attempts to move from the personal to the general. Most importantly, these ambivalences in form and content may afford to provide a framework for an affective and/or cognitive involvement of readers. Future developments in the production and research of life-writing will show which further forms of autobiographical writing may emerge and which pronominal strategies remain relevant. To gain a full picture of the historical and textual developments of second- and third-person autobiographical writing, future research could provide a systematic analysis of global, intersectional, and also earlier uses of the second- and third-person perspective in autobiographical writing (beyond the obvious autobiographical novel in the third person or autofictional accounts) and take a comparative approach, including life-writing texts from other nationalities to explore the different implications of second- and third-person pronouns in other languages. Another consideration could be the interplay of pronominal identity and photography and the, as I assume, lack of photography in second- and third-person autobiographical writing, a thought which has been briefly addressed in this study. In general, it may also be desirable to provide studies which consider the wider scope of life-writing and its various genres to see how the second and third person work there. As this book is centred around distinctive literary analyses, it provides a study of how a range of male Anglophone (European-American) authors engage in second- and third-person autobiographical writing. This book is thus not intended as a narratological study – there are other books which take a more linguistically-oriented viewpoint. My (modest) aim was to grant the five autobiographical and hybrid texts centre-stage and discuss their strategies for narrating the male self in contemporary autobiographical writing. I believe that the reconsideration of the profound relation between text and world is a decisive concern in contemporary literature and autobiographical writing. I also would not want to make definitive claims about general tendencies in second- and third-person autobiographical writing. My references to further texts by women writers and collective autobiographies in the introduction are intentional reminders that what I am primarily looking at is the (strategic) relational rhetoric of case studies by established male writers and their negotiations of male authorial agency. After all, their attempts at self-narration focus on universalising potentially shared experience, displaying the tensions between the personal and the ethical, and/or engaging in the universalising gesture of making the personal political. What my book does, then, is bring together a group of writers who are known and celebrated for their fictional oeuvre and who, at a later point in their careers, decided that either the second person or the third person may prove beneficial for their autobiographical endeavour. The close readings in this book have shown that the texts seem to (1) at least formally move

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beyond an authoritative self-portrayal, thus acknowledging epistemological limitations regarding the self in relation to the other and the autobiographical genre, (2) strengthen and emancipate a communicative other who, through second- and third-person narration, may be affectively or cognitively involved in the process of autobiographical meaning-making and (3) engage and live on the ambivalence inherent in the narrative perspectives and all the additional strategies used to unsettle an understanding of a stable and individual self. The meaning-making is thus rooted in the very inconsistencies, irritations, and ambiguities the narrative perspectives entail and contributes to a dialogic encounter which promotes the affective, cognitive, and self-reflective commitment of author, text, and reader. The ambivalences of the second and third person thereby seem to incorporate a destabilisation, an oscillation between distance and intimacy, between self-withdrawal and self-promotion – and thus formally express the uncertainties and tensions of self-knowledge, self-stylisation, and engagements with authorial agency.

Index

address 24, 26, 35, 55, 78, 107, 112, 134, 171, 194; reader address 24, 27, 35, 48, 105, 113; self-address 53, 78, 81, 106, 112, 136 addressee 24, 26–27, 48–49, 53–54, 77, 92, 112 affordance(s) 3, 14, 16, 21, 23, 33, 58, 118, 155–156, 193 ageing 46, 60–61; body 58, 60 agency 12–14, 143; authorial 2, 10, 47, 69, 196–197; autobiographical 32, 35–36, 51, 55; lack of 183; male 9, 69, 193–194, 196 alienation 18, 56–57, 81, 109, 152–153 ambiguity 7, 62, 76, 119, 135, 145; of the second person 29, 35, 47, 69, 81, 92; see also ambivalence apartheid 36, 136–137, 150–151, 153–154 apostrophe 53; apostrophic 24 archive 59, 76, 87, 89–90, 168–172 Auster, Paul, Report from the Interior: shared subjectivity and the elusiveness of memory 90–96; visuality, intermediality, and the collective 84–90; you, the personal, and the general 81–84; you and self-dialogue 76–81; Winter Journal: inviting the reader as narratee and addressee 53–58; memory and the body and the embodiment of memory 58–65; style, rhythm, and materiality 65–68; you and selfdialogue 47–53; The Invention of Solitude 12, 46, 51–52, 59 authorial identity 140 authority 3, 9, 23, 32, 53, 125, 133, 135, 140, 144, 146, 166, 194 autobiographical pact 18–22

autobiography 3–6, see also autobiographical writing autre-biography 32, 36, 132–133 Badiou, Alain 172–173 Bakhtin, Mikhail 13, 83, 140 Barnes, Julian, Levels of Life: commemoration and precarious relationality 114–118; fictionalisations of grief 118–124; personal vs communal grief 110–114; pronominal distance and proximity 105–110 Barthes, Roland 87–88, 133, 151, 154; Camera Lucida 87–88, 115; Roland Barthes 133 belonging 113, 151–154; unbelonging 151, 152 Brooke-Rose, Christine, Remake 29 Butler, Judith 12–13, 142 celebrity 10–11, 179–184, 194–195 Coetzee, J.M., Summertime: autrebiography and self-withdrawal 133–135; Coetzee’s countervoices 139–149; the third-person notebooks 135–139; truth(s), ethics, and humanist concerns 149–155; Boyhood 131, 135, 137–138, 145, 147, 150; Youth 131, 135, 145, 147, 150 collective 84–85, 90, 114, 125, 179; autobiography 8, 12, 196; first-person plural 60; identity 113, 194; storytelling 23 commonality 15, 53, 57–58 communicative function 18, 20, 24–25, 31, 33, 82, 120, 133, 172, 185, 193 community 36, 89, 113–114, 152, 165, 174, 176, 179, 185

Index De Man, Paul 4, 13 detachment 3, 26, 47, 53, 125, 134–135, 153, 156 dialogic 13, 47, 76, 120, 133, 140, 142, 146; dialogic encounter 13, 193, 197; dialogic situation 26–27, 57, 69, 175 diary 47–48, 94, 109, 139, 146–147 dissociation 32, 91–92, 134 distance and proximity 2–3, 18, 21, 28, 33–35, 37, 47, 97, 105, 110–111, 123, 125, 165, 193, 195 Eakin, Paul J. 8, 15 egotism 10, 179–180, 182, 184 embodiment 46, 58; male body 55, 59; of memory 65, 193–194 empathy 24 engagement 3, 16, 22, 32–33, 53–55, 65–66, 91, 96; engaging 54, 60, 67, 69, 125, 172, 178, 195 Ernaux, Annie, The Years 12, 26 ethics 149–155; ethical 174, 177–178; of life-writing 17; of storytelling 16 event 165, 168, 172–175, 180, 184–185, 195 everyday 35, 75, 83, 90–91, 95, 97 exclusion 16, 18, 23, 69, see also inclusion exemplary 54–55, 90, 111, 116 fatwa 164–168, 171–173, 175–185, 195 fictionalisation 28, 31, 35, 37, 65, 118, 120, 133–134, 136, 148–149, 167, 195 Fludernik, Monika 23–26 fragmentation 5, 6, 17, 46, 69, 76, 91, 94, 150 Friedman, Susan Stanford 9 gender 9, 11–12, 16, 26; gendered lifewriting 2 generalisation 18, 23, 54, 55, 105 generic hybridity 35, 75, 105, 114, 119, 125 Genette, Gérard 24, 26–27 grief 103–110; communal grief 110; grief-memoir 10, 109, 111, 119–120, 125; grief-work 108–109, 119 identification 18, 26, 55–57, 83–84, 87, 113 identity see self intermediality 75, 84–85, 194–195 intertextuality 46, 122

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intimacy 18, 30, 35, 48–49, 57, 77–78, 91, 123–124, 134–135, 156, 194–195, 197 introspection 22, 30, 36–37, 165 involvement 8, 16, 21, 23, 25–27, 87; affective 47, 68, 111, 117; cognitive 135, 140; affective and cognitive 3, 17, 36–37, 69, 196 Kuhn, Annette 84–86, 88 Lejeune, Philippe 18–22 letter 76, 78–81 Levinas, Emmanuel 12–13, 27, 106 lists 63; list-making 59, 63, 96 loss 18, 35, 50, 104–108, 110–111, 114–125 Machado, Carmen M., In the Dream House 10, 23, 47 memoir 4–6 memory 5; collective 57, 90; cultural 11, 85, 89; elusiveness of 62, 90–96, 109 metaautobiographical 17, 20, 28, 149, 155 metageneric commentary 20, 31, 36, 62, 132, 144–145, 147, 155–156 metaisation 2, 20, 33, 37, 193, 195 metalepsis 145, 155 micro-narratives 59, 63, 134 narcissism 179–180, 182, 184; narcissistic 97, 165 narratology 16, 21, 33, 196; rhetorical 3, 15, 33, 193 past tense 29; in Joseph Anton 168, 184; in Report from the Interior 78, 92; in Winter Journal 52 performativity 12; performative 67 persona 11; celebrity 10, 179, 180, 184; public 11, 60, 165, 180 Phelan, James 15–16, 26, 175, 178 photography 84–90, 104–106, 115, 118, 121–124 political 136–137; 175–179; apathy 153, 194 polyphonic 13, 140–141 present tense 23, 25–26, 35; in Levels of Life 105, 107, 108; in Report from the Interior 76, 90; in Summertime 131–133, 135–136, 156; in Winter Journal 47, 49, 55, 193 privilege 13, 152, 176, 180

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recognition 56, 85, 113 relationality 1–2, 6–10, 12–13 responsibility 52, 106, 140, 145, 153, 155, 176, 193; ethical 8, 139, 143, 148–149, 175, 194; moral 153 rhetoric 4, 66; political 183; social and relational 8, 16, 19 rhythm, rhythmic 47, 54, 63, 65–69; rhythmicity 35, 194 Roberge, Rob, Liar 23, 47 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 4, 135, 169 Rushdie, Salman, Joseph Anton: archival function 168–172; personal and political event 172–175; public self 175–179; Rushdie and celebrity cult(ure) 179–184; Rushdie’s third-person alter ego 165–168 second person 22–28 self: authorial 24, 36, 54, 84, 105, 144, 156; decentring the 28, 36; and other 8, 47, 56, 58, 69, 85, 96–97, 111, 117, 140, 185; private and public 1, 3, 47, 96; split 36, 62, 168, 195 self-concealment 29, 105 self-justification 32, 169 self-knowledge 36, 48, 82, 91, 109, 150, 194, 197 self-narration 14; limits of 139 self-observation 29, 32, 36, 56, 195 self-portrayal 1, 22, 88, 133, 156, 165, 197 self-reflection 16, 28, 30, 36, 48–49, 80, 165, 171, 195 self-reflexivity 18, 20, 171 self-stylisation 2, 11–12, 22, 52–53, 193, 195, 197; male 47 shame 51–52, 69, 138–139, 152–153, 182

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson 8, 9 social 36, 83, 96; formation of identity 13 Sontag, Susan 85, 87–88 South Africa 34, 131–132, 135–137, 143, 151–155, 194 Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 21, 28 strategy 13, 83, 115, 155 style 35, 89–90, 97 subjectivity and relationality 1, 6, 19, 22, 32–33, 35, 58, 193 third person 28–33 Thomä, Dieter 7–8, 18 trauma 8, 10, 30, 51–52, 59, 106, 165–166, 178, 181, 184; trauma narrative 23 truth 132, 149–151 universality 10, 26, 81, 89, 97, 113, 115; universalising 17, 49, 69, 76, 165; universalising gesture 26, 87, 97, 112, 175, 195–196 visuality 2, 16, 18, 33–35, 75, 84–86, 89–90, 95, 193–194 voice 10, 12–13, 19, 21, 26, 67, 77, 93, 96, 135, 140–144, 151–152, 170, 194, 196 withdrawal 11, 28, 36, 55, 82–84, 90–91, 114, 122, 133, 135, 140, 144; selfwithdrawal 97, 125, 133, 156, 193–195, 197 Wolf, Christa, Kindheitsmuster 21, 23, 28