Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction [3° ed.] 3110279711, 9783110279719

Citation preview

Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction Volume I: Theory and Concepts

Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction Volume I: Theory and Concepts

Edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

ISBN 978-3-11-027971-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-027981-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038148-1   Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, editor. Title: Handbook of autobiography | autofiction / edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Other titles: Autobiography | autofiction Description: First edition. | Boston ; Berlin : De Gruyter, 2018. | Series: De Gruyter handbook | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018017844 (print) | LCCN 2018021484 (ebook) | ISBN 9783110279818 (electronic Portable Document Format (pdf)) | ISBN 9783110279719 (hardback) | ISBN 9783110381481 (e-book epub)) Subjects: LCSH: Autobiography. | Autobiographical fiction. | Autobiography in literature. | Biography as a literary form. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / General. Classification: LCC CT25.H36 2018 (ebook) | LCC CT25.H36 2018 (print) | DDC 920--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017844 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.   © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: M.C. Escher’s “Hand with Reflecting Sphere” © 2017 The M.C. Escher Company – The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com. Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz, Lemförde Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen www.degruyter.com

Contents Vol. I: Theory and Concepts of Autobiography/Autofiction Preface: The Concept of this Handbook 

 XV

Introduction: Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines – Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf   1  9 Theoretical Approaches  1 1.1 Anthropology – Deborah Reed-Danahay   11 1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience – Hans J. Markowitsch and Angelica Staniloiu   18 1.3 Cultural Studies – Michaela Holdenried   30 1.4 Deconstruction – Linda Anderson   39 1.5 Discourse Analysis – Manfred Schneider   45 1.6 Gender Studies – Anne Fleig   54 1.7 Hermeneutics – Ulrich Breuer   64 1.8 History – Volker Depkat   73 1.9 History of Art – Gerd Blum   82 1.10 Media Studies – Matthias Christen   94 1.11 Narratology – Martin Löschnigg   103 1.12 Philosophy – Dieter Thomä   111 1.13 Political Science – Tracey Arklay   122 1.14 Postcolonialism – Mita Banerjee   130 1.15 Psychology – Rüdiger F. Pohl   136 1.16 Psychoanalysis – Christine Kirchhoff and Boris Traue   148 1.17 Religious Studies – Jens Schlamelcher   156 1.18 Rhetoric – Melanie Möller   165 1.19 Social History – Helga Schwalm   175 1.20 Sociology – Gabriele Rosenthal   182 1.21 Structuralism – Erik Martin   191 1.22 Theology – Thomas Kuhn   200  209 Categories  2 2.1 Apologia – Karl Enenkel   211 2.2 Authenticity – Michael Quante and Michael Kühler   216 Autobiographical Pact – Lut Missinne  2.3  222 2.4 Autobiography and the Nation – Lydia Wevers   228 2.5 Autoethnography – Christian Moser   232 2.6 Autofiction – Claudia Gronemann   241

VI 

 Contents

2.7 Automediality – Christian Moser   247 2.8 Ego-documents – Volker Depkat   262 2.9 Ethics of Autobiography – Stephen Mansfield   268 2.10 Ethos and Pathos – Roman B. Kremer   275 2.11 Facts and Fiction – Volker Depkat   280 2.12 Gender – Angelika Schaser   287 2.13 Genealogy – Angelika Malinar   293 2.14 The (Term) ‘I’ – Michael Quante and Annette Dufner   300 2.15 Identity – Michael Quante and Annette Dufner   305 2.16 Individuality – Eric Achermann   310 2.17 Intentionality – Eric Achermann   320 2.18 Life and Work – Gabriele Rippl   327 2.19 Life Writing – Mita Banerjee   336 2.20 Memory – Angelika Schaser   342 2.21 Mimesis – Florian Klaeger   350 2.22 Minorities – Angelika Schaser   358 2.23 Paratext – Frauke Bode   364 2.24 Personality – Michael Quante, Annette Dufner, and Michael Kühler   372 2.25 Prosopopoeia – Richard Block   378 2.26 Referentiality – Regine Strätling   384 2.27 The ‘Self’ – Michael Quante and Michael Kühler   390 2.28 Sincerity – Annette Dufner and Michael Kühler   398 2.29 Subjectivity – Dieter Thomä   402 2.30 Time and Space – Anne Fleig   410 2.31 Topics of Autobiography/Autofiction – Gabriele Linke   416 2.32 Trauma – Michaela Holdenried   423 2.33 Truth – Eric Achermann   429  435 Autobiographical Forms and Genres  3 3.1 Architecture – Salvatore Pisani   437 3.2 Autobiographical/Autofictional Comics – Martin Klepper   441 3.3 Autobiographical/Autofictional Film – Matthias Christen   446 3.4 Autobiographical Music – Christiane Wiesenfeldt   456 3.5 Autobiographical Novel – Lut Missinne   464 3.6 Autobiographical/Autofictional Poetry – Frauke Bode   473 3.7 Autobiographical Visual Arts, esp. Painting – Gerd Blum   485 Autobiography and Drama/Theatre – Anne Fleig  3.8  497 3.9 Autobiography – Helga Schwalm   503 3.10 Confessions – Ulrich Breuer   520 3.11 Conversations – Alexandra Georgakopoulou   532 3.12 Curriculum Vitae – Bernd Blöbaum   537

Contents 

 VII

 542 3.13 Autobiography in/as Dance – Gabriele Brandstetter  3.14 Diary – Schamma Schahadat   547 3.15 Digital Life Narratives/Digital Selves/Autobiography on the Internet – Innokentij Kreknin   557 3.16 Epistolary Autobiography – Karl Enenkel   565 3.17 Epitaph – Salvatore Pisani and Katharina Siebenmorgen   579 3.18 Essay – Karin Westerwelle   584 3.19 Fake Autobiography – Richard Block   595 3.20 Fictional Autobiography – Hans Vandevoorde   603 3.21 Interview – Gabriele Rosenthal   611 3.22 Letter, E-mail, SMS – Davide Giuriato   617 3.23 Memoirs – Christiane Lahusen   626 3.24 Metaautobiography – Christiane Struth   636 3.25 Oral Forms – Susanne Gehrmann   640 3.26 Photography – Matthias Christen   648 3.27 Self-Narration – Arnaud Schmitt   658 3.28 Self-Portrait – Salvatore Pisani and Katharina Siebenmorgen   663 3.29 Testimony/Testimonio – Ulrich Mücke   669 3.30 Travelogue – Michaela Holdenried   675

Vol. II: History of Autobiography/Autofiction Introduction: Autobiography Across the World, Or, How Not To Be Eurocentric – Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf   683  689 The European Tradition  1 1.1 Antiquity – Melanie Möller   691 1.2 Middle Ages – Sonja Glauch   710 1.3 Early Modern Times   724 1.3.1 Autobiographies in the Latin Language (1300–1700) – Karl Enenkel   724 1.3.2 Autobiographies in the Vernacular – Karin Westerwelle  1.4 Modernity – Michaela Holdenried   753 1.5 Postmodernity – Anna Thiemann   778  805 The Arab World – Susanne Enderwitz  2 2.1 Introduction   807 2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography   827 2.3 Modern Autobiography   850

 732

VIII 

 Contents

3 Africa – Susanne Gehrmann   895 3.1 Introduction   897 3.2 Pre-colonial Times   901 3.3 Colonial Times   910 3.4 Post-colonial Times   923  965 4 Asia  4.1 India – Angelika Malinar   967 4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos – Vatthana Pholsena  4.3 Indonesia – Monika Arnez   1006 4.4 China – Reinhard Emmerich   1026 4.5 Japan – Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit   1059

 985

 1085 Australia and New Zealand  5 5.1 Australia – Kylie Crane   1087 5.2 New Zealand – Lydia Wevers   1114 6 6.1 6.2

 1141 The Americas  Latin America – Ulrich Mücke   1143 North America – Alfred Hornung   1205

7

Autobiography in the Globalized World – Gabriele Rippl 

 1261

Vol. III: Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts Introduction: Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts, Or, How Not To Set Up a Canon – Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf   1281 1 Isocrates: Περὶ ἀντιδόσεως (353 BCE) [Antidosis] and Lucian: Περὶ τοῦ ἐνυπνίου (2nd Century) [Dream] – Peter von Möllendorff   1285 2 Plato: Άπολογία (3rd Century BCE) [Apology of Socrates] – Thomas A. Blackson   1301 3 Sima Qian: 報任少卿書 [“The Letter to Ren An”] (93/91 BCE) and Other Autobiographical Writings – Reinhard Emmerich   1312 4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V (8–12) [“Sorrows”] – Melanie Möller   1328 Aurelius Augustinus: Confessiones (397–401) [Confessions] – 5 Christian Moser   1342 6 Izumi Shikibu: 和泉式部日記 (11th Century) [The Izumi Shikibu Diary] – Judit Árokay   1359

Contents 

 IX

Muḥammad al-Ghazālī: ‫( المنقذ من الضالل‬5th/12th Century) [Deliverance from Error and Attachment to the Lord of Might and Majesty] – Susanne Enderwitz   1373 8 Francesco Petrarca: Secretum [My Secret; Secret Book]/De secretoconflictu curarum mearum (Mid-14th Century) [On the Secret Struggles of My Mind] – Karl Enenkel   1386 9 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn: ‫( التعريف بابن خلدون‬8th/14th Century) [The Autobiography] – Susanne Enderwitz   1397 10 Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur: ‫( بابر نامه‬First Third of 10th/16th Century until 935/1529) [Baburnama] – Kristina Rzehak   1410 11 Teresa de Ávila: El Libro de la Vida (1562) [The Life of the Holy Mother Teresa de Jesús] – Frauke Bode   1425 12 Michel de Montaigne: Les Essais (1580, 1588, 1595) [The Complete Essays] – Karin Westerwelle   1439 13 Francisco Guerrero: El Viage a Hierusalem (1590) [Voyage to Jerusalem] – Christiane Wiesenfeldt   1456 14 Avvakum Petrov: Житие протопопа Аввакума, им самим написанное (17th Century) [Life of Avvakum] – Erik Martin   1470 15 John Bunyan: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) – Martin Löschnigg   1485 16 Anne Halkett: The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett, 1677–78 (1875) – Helga Schwalm   1499 17 Glikl bas Judah Leib: Zikhroynes (1691–1719) [Memoirs] – Richard Block   1511 18 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) – Clare Brant    1525 19 Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791 sq.) – Volker Depkat   1539 20 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Les Confessions [The Confessions] (1782/1789) – Christian Moser   1554 21 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833) [From My Life: Poetry and Truth] – Jane K. Brown   1573 22 William Wordsworth: The Prelude (1850) – Helga Schwalm   1590 23 Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (1861) – Martin Klepper   1603 24 Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoy: Детство (1852) [Childhood] – Erik Martin   1618 25 Ned Kelly: The Jerilderie Letter (1879) – Michael Farrell   1633 26 August Strindberg: Tjänstekvinnans son. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (1886) [The Son of a Servant] – Linda Haverty Rugg   1646 7

X 

 Contents

Mark Twain: Autobiography of Mark Twain (1870–1910) – Mita Banerjee   1659 28 Franz Kafka: Brief an den Vater (1919) [Letter to his Father] – Michaela Holdenried   1672 29 Alban Berg: Lyric Suite (1925/1926) – Nicole Jost-Rösch   1688 30 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: શત્યના પ્રયોગો અથવા આત્મકથા; सत्य के प्रयोग अथवा आत्मकथा (1925–1928) [An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments With Truth] – Angelika Malinar   1703 31 Walter Benjamin: Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (1930s) [Berlin Childhood around 1900] – Michaela Holdenried   1719 32 Hu Shi: 四十自述 (1933) [An Autobiographical Account at Forty] and 胡適口述自傳 (1981) [The Reminiscences of Dr. Hu Shih] – Yu Hong   1737 33 Anaïs Nin: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–1974) – Gabriele Rippl   1750 34 Ajñeya: शॆखर एक जिवनी (1941/1944) [Śekhar: A Biography] – Angelika Malinar   1762 35 Czesław Miłosz: Rodzinna Europa (1958) [Native Realm] – Schamma Schahadat   1777 36 Karen Blixen: Out of Africa (1937) – Sophie Wennerscheid   1794 37 Michel Leiris: La Règle du Jeu (1948–1976) [The Rules of the Game] – Regine Strätling   1806 38 Albert Memmi: La Statue de Sel (1953) [The Pillar of Salt] – Claudia Gronemann   1822 39 Hal Porter: The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony: An Australian Autobiography (1963) – Jack Bowers   1838 40 Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited (1966) – Schamma Schahadat   1851 41 Frank Sargeson: Once is Enough (1973) – Lydia Wevers   1866 42 Roland Barthes: roland BARTHES par roland barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes] – Regine Strätling   1878 43 Imre Kertész: Sorstalanság (1975) [Fateless/Fatelessness] – Karl Katschthaler   1892 44 María Teresa León: Memoria de la Melancholia (1970) [Memory of Melancholy] – Inke Gunia   1906 45 Wole Soyinka: Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981) – Akin Adesokan   1921 Jeroen Brouwers: Bezonken Rood (1981) [Sunken Red] – 46 Lut Missinne   1932 47 Michael Ondaatje: Running in the Family (1982) – Martin Löschnigg   1948 48 Sally Morgan: My Place (1987) – Martina Horáková   1963 27

Contents 

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Serge Doubrovsky: Le Livre brisé (1989) [The Broken Book] – Claudia Gronemann   1977 Elfriede Jelinek: Ein Sportstück (1998) [Sports Play] – Anne Fleig   1989 Najīb Maḥfūẓ: ‫( أصداء السيرة الذاتية‬1994) [Echoes of an Autobiography] – Susanne Enderwitz   2002 Walter Kempowski: Das Echolot (1993–2005) [Sonar] – Angelika Schaser   2016 Gabriel García Márquez: Vivir Para Contarla (2002) [Living to Tell the Tale] – Cornelia Sieber   2030 J. M. Coetzee: Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) – Katja Sarkowsky   2049 Xavier Le Roy: Product of Circumstances (1998/1999) – Gabriele Brandstetter   2064 Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) – Martin Klepper   2074 Jane Alison: The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir (2009) – Jack Bowers   2089

 2103 List of Contributors   Subject Index    2105 Name Index   2132

 XI

Abbreviations aet. Aetatis, in a certain year aka also known as BCE Before Common Era ca. circa CE Common Era Ch. Chapter dec. deceased H for hijra, the prophet Mohammad’s emigration from Mecca to Medina, marks the start of the Islamic calender MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica n note n.d. no date nn notes no(s). number(s) n.pag. no pagination r. reigned s.l. no place of publication n.p. no publisher sq. subsequens # strophe/stanza For works by authors from antiquity cf. lists of common international abbreviations (Brill, Der Große Pauly etc.).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-201

Preface: The Concept of this Handbook This handbook on ‘Autobiography/Autofiction’ is a challenge  – and a risk. When Manuela Gerlof from de Gruyter proposed to edit a handbook on autobiography, I hesitated at first. As I had already conducted quite a bit of research in the field of autobiography in the German speaking world and on the theory of autobiography, it did not seem all that attractive to undertake another book on autobiography. However, the project started to intrigue me when Dr. Gerlof suggested we publish the handbook in English and place it on the international book market. Having previously dealt mostly with German autobiographies and being familiar mainly with the Western tradition of the genre, the idea of thinking about autobiography in a global and hence transcultural perspective became more and more fascinating. I realized that I did not know anything about autobiographical forms in non-Western cultures and I started to reflect on the question of the extent to which the notion of ‘autobiography,’ at least in the way we perceive of it in the West, can be considered as a specific Western product. Of course, autobiographies have been and are being written all over the world. Being aware that cultural exchange and hybridity are common features of a globalized world, one has to ask what this means for the genre of autobiography, its different cultural contexts and historical features. These and other enthralling questions finally got the upper hand of my initial scepticism. So I accepted the challenge, although I have always been aware that it will be impossible to represent a genre as mutable as autobiography in a transhistorical global perspective. The idea that this project will allow and necessitate intensive collaboration with autobiography researchers from all over the world allayed the fears of failure. And of course, such a handbook combining all these different approaches – theory, history, and analyses of individual texts – does not yet exist and will be an invaluable tool for students and researchers alike. The handbook presents the historical and conceptual variety of the autobiographical genre in three volumes. The outline of volume one is theoretical and systematic. Its first section looks at autobiography from the perspective of different disciplines and theoretical approaches. Although literary studies have been investigating the form and historical appearance of autobiography extensively, other disciplines such as history, psychology, religious studies, etc. use autobiographies as sources and have developed their own concepts of the genre. In order to foster the interdisciplinary discussion on autobiography it seems to be important to represent the views and concepts of different disciplines. If a reader has the impression that an article on literary studies is missing from the list of disciplines in the section on “Theoretical Approaches,” however, this is certainly due to the blind spot of the editor’s own disciplinary background. For a literary scholar, the literary studies perspective constitutes the ‘norm,’ whereas ‘other’ fields are ‘added’ to make the picture complete. This unavoidable disciplinary centrism may be excused by referring to the different methodological approaches that are explained in this first section of volume one as well. They indicate, of course, not only the heterogeneity of approaches within literary https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-202

XVI 

 Preface

studies but also forge connections to other disciplines and in this way promote interdisciplinary debate. The second section of volume one discusses categories which hitherto have been applied to the study of autobiography/autofiction. The chapters relate their focus on the autobiographical/autofictional to general literary and cultural studies approaches and elaborate transdisciplinary perspectives. It is the aim of the third section to display the multiplicity of autobiographical forms and genres in the course of history as well as in the present time. The chapters demonstrate the mutability of the genre with special emphasis on its media and intermedial aspects. Volume two intends to trace the historical development of the autobiographical genre. As one might imagine, doing so on a worldwide scale raises a fundamental yet intriguing problem. Of course it is not possible to tell the history of a genre in a global perspective by following a single timeline, as too many different cultural contexts would have to be considered simultaneously. Therefore, the presentation is structured by proceeding from continent to continent. This, of course, does not solve the problem of concomitance and heterogeneity, yet it helps us to come to grips with it. But where to start? Obviously, all the different options would be biased in some sense. How we start and the routes we take mirror the prejudiced ways we see the world. It is not possible to conceptualize any world order in a neutral way. The problem becomes even more complicated when we look critically at the subject under consideration: autobiographical/autofictional writing. The notion of autobiography that a European literary scholar might develop is formed, at best, by what she considers ‘the European tradition.’ Being academically and culturally socialized as European may cause her to think that the concept of autobiography is a European one. She might be mistaken, or she might have to alter her idea of ‘the autobiographical.’ In any case, she must be aware of this specific Western view when looking for authentic forms of the autobiographical in other cultures. Most likely to be found when looking across the globe is a complex and multi-layered meshwork of different autobiographical and autofictional forms and traditions, as cultures today as in the past are much more entangled than we might suspect. This handbook, therefore, undertakes an experiment which may lead to reconsidered notions of autobiography/autofiction. In the meantime, the researcher has to accept her Eurocentric focus and reflect critically on it, using it as a heuristic tool. In doing so, and not considering it as ontologically given, we might find different ways to present our material and develop new perspectives on the variety of autobiographical self-representation. With the more systematic approach of volume one and the historical procedure of volume two in the background, volume three intends to provide closer looks at individual autobiographical texts. This is not meant to set up an autobiographical canon but to demonstrate the richness of the genre and the complexity of its systematic and historical aspects in individual autobiographical/autofictional texts. The reader may find here famous and less well-known examples side by side. This is intentional. I made suggestions to the contributors of the handbook but was open to their alternative proposals. The authors were asked to write essays on the texts they had chosen

The Concept of this Handbook 

 XVII

and were not given strict guidelines about how to structure the chapter. The essays are supposed to give an overview of the state of the research debate but should also be an enjoyable read and spark the reader’s curiosity about the autobiographical work being presented. The different approaches of the handbook’s three volumes provide variable and multilayered access to the rich and complex autobiographical paradigm. As a matter of course, the nearly 70 contributors bring in their different individual, cultural, and disciplinary perceptions of their subject. The objective was thereby not to homogenize the chapters in favor of an overarching concept. This would certainly have been wrong, since it would create an illusion of coherence. Instead, it is the aim of this volume to conceptualize the autobiographical genre as multi-perspectival, relational, and mutable. Thus, the three volumes of this handbook, with more than 150 chapters, allow many different paths into and through this fascinating genre. Standardization would also have meant to level out the different academic traditions that have been prevalent in autobiographical research in different parts of the world. Interestingly, the term ‘life writing’ that is common in the Anglo-Saxon world does not translate for example into German. As ‘life writing’ also covers the biographical genre, it is a wider category than ‘autobiographical writing,’ which is more common on the European continent. Here, the debate on ‘autofiction’ originating from the French context has recently played a major role in academic discourse whereas it has only reluctantly found entry into the English-speaking world. This demonstrates the broad spectrum of subjects, terms, and concepts within the global academic discourse on the topic and the handbook tries to do justice to these differences in dealing with the autobiographical. And, in order to document the academic Western European origin of this project in its very specific historical and conceptual conditionality, the handbook has been given the title Autobiography/Autofiction and not Life Writing. This reflexive, systematic approach distinguishes the handbook for instance from Margaretta Jolly’s comprehensive and most impressive Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms (2001). As can easily be seen, different academic traditions from all over the world enrich the global picture of the autobiographical genre. In order not to unify more than was necessary, the contributors to the handbook were free to decide whether they would choose British or American English for their chapters. For philological reasons, quotations from primary texts are given first in the original language and then [in square brackets] in an English translation. This procedure, astonishingly, has caused irritations among contributors, especially among those writing on non-European subjects and using non-Latin characters. Whereas it has not been considered problematic for contributors who wrote about autobiographical texts in European languages, colleagues who are specialists for non-European literatures were somewhat reluctant to quote in Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic. They found that using non-Latin characters in the context of Latin script would make the text uneasy and the reading uncomfortable. This was quite an interesting experience for me, who, on the one hand, as a philologist, wanted to be as close to the origi-

XVIII 

 Preface

nal text, and, on the other hand, considers plurality and heterogeneity as something positive and thrilling. Well, compromises were made by using non-European characters in a somewhat allotted and attenuated form. This may seem a bit unmethodical, and indeed it is, yet it may be seen as a concession to both the diversity of the world and heterogeneous academic practices. Published translations in the running text are marked by double quotes and chapter authors’ own translations are presented in single quotes. Such a project as a three-volume handbook has many people to thank: First, I have to thank Dr. Manuela Gerlof, who initiated the project and always believed in its success without ever pushing the work process more than was necessary. And I am happy to say thank you to a wonderful and witty team that, over the years, never seemed to run out of enthusiasm for the project and patience for the arduous details of editorial handwork: especially Kerstin Wilhelms, Thomas Kater, Laura Reiling, and Till Lorenzen, as well as, at the very beginning, Lukas Ricken and, later on, Sarah Maaß. Claudia Altrock, Peter Klingel, Wolf Wellmann, Elena Göbel, Katharina Grabbe, Carolina Ihlenfeld, Leona Lucas, and Paula Marie Stevens assisted magnificently with the indices. Without you all the handbook would not have seen the light of day! I would like to thank Thomas Bauer and Stephan Tölke, who helped with the Arabic, as well as Regina Grundmann and Sarah Rürup for their assistance with the Yiddish. The Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Times” at the University of Münster gave financial support. The Internationales Kolleg Morphomata (Centre for Advanced Studies) at the University of Cologne granted me a research semester to work on the handbook. I am also grateful to Charlton Payne, who patiently edited the English of many articles (including this one). Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to the contributors to this handbook, who wrote wonderful texts and who had to endure the editor’s insistence. The handbook is as much yours as it is mine! Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf Münster 2018

Introduction: Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

Autobiography is more than just a literary genre – if it is a genre at all. Its manifold aspects, which have been discussed by literary scholars from the nineteenth century up to the present day, are closely connected with the core features of literature itself. For a long time, up until the 1960s, autobiographies had been considered as a sort of historiographical writing, as texts that are ‘true’ or at least ‘truthful’ reports of a person’s life. Since these life reports are written by the very person who has lived this life him or herself, autobiographies were often read as ‘authentic’ descriptions of what had really happened. This understanding of autobiography goes along with biogra­ phical readings of literary texts in general that are still being practiced, especially by nonprofessional readers, today. And can we blame them? – Certainly not, as literature is definitely not written for literary scholars, but for readers. Even if a novel does not depict the life story of its author it can hardly be denied that it has ‘something’ to do with the author. This ‘something’, indeed, is hard to grasp, and quite a number of liter­ ary theorists have pondered how to get hold of it. Yet the efforts of the 1960s to do away with ‘the author’, which resulted in the declaration of his ‘death’ (Barthes 1968 [1977]), can be regarded as a symbol of the author’s persistence – the more so his return in the 1990s. Paul de Man convincingly deconstructed the idea that one might be able to decide which texts should be read as autobiographical and which ones are to be regarded as merely fictional. He states: “But just as we seem to assert that all texts are autobiographical, we should say that, by the same token, none of them is or can be” (1979, 922). This sentence addresses a concept which does not only concern the dis­ cussion of autobiography but which is of utmost importance for literature in general: ‘referentiality’. The ways in which a literary text refers to ‘reality’ represents one of the most discussed problems in the study of literature and refers back to Aristotle’s notion of μίμησις [mimesis] and his discussion about imitation and representation. From the 1960s onwards, the theoretical debate on autobiography has acceler­ ated – and mirrored the general development of literary theory. On the one hand, of course, the evolution of literary theory affects the debate on autobiography as well. On the other hand, the theoretical debate on autobiography forms a model of general issues in literary theory, which become ostensive in the scope of autobiography. Certainly, the naïve conception that an autobiography may be ‘true’ or ‘truthful’ has already been scrutinized and critically debated in the 1960s. Critics have argued that nobody can ever thoroughly report his or her life since, on the one side, human memory is deficient, and, on the other side, human beings are narcissistic, which means they are not at all neutral and objective when it comes to looking at them­ selves – and others. As early as in the 1960s, literary scholars have highlighted the fictional dimension inherent in every autobiography. German writer Johann Wolfgang https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-001

2 

 Introduction

von Goethe (1749–1832) wisely called the first part of his autobiography, which was published between 1811 and 1833, Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth (1848)]. Goethe regarded his autobiography as the retrospective ‘results’ of his life and, as Johann Peter Eckermann records, viewed the ‘facts’ reported in Dichtung und Wahrheit merely as an affirmation of his life’s “höhere[r] Wahrheit” [“higher truth”] (Ecker­ mann 1999, 479 [1998, 406]). Recollection and imagination are the forces behind the life narrative, and it is ‘fiction’ that purports the ‘truth’ of his life, Goethe wrote in a famous letter to the Bavarian King Ludwig (Goethe 1993, 209). The use of symbols, references to the mythological and literary tradition, the freely designed narrative structure form the poetical character of Goethe’s autobiography – in the service of the ‘truth’ of his life which he wanted to convey. Accordingly, Roy Pascal named his often-cited critical work on autobiography, which was published in 1960, Design and Truth in Autobiography. It is the ‘design’ of the autobiographical text, i.  e. the neces­ sity to structure the narration that is responsible for its fictional dimension  – and for its attractive aesthetic value as well. How to tell the truth by fiction? This can be regarded as the primary concern of the art of autobiography. Self-evidently, there are as many ways in which ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ are interconnected as there are autobio­ graphical texts. They vary not only across history and different cultural contexts, but even within the autobiographical production of a single time period and nation. And it is this richness and variability that form the ongoing fascination of readers and literary scholars with autobiography. Yet not only the forms and genres of autobiographical writing have changed over the centuries, but also the ways in which critics perceive of autobiography have transformed enormously. And of course, there is a connection between autobiograph­ ical writing and critical reading. Since the 1980s, critics and writers look differently upon fiction in autobiography. Whereas previously fiction was regarded as unavoid­ able and sometimes therefore as appealing in the art of autobiography, postmodern writers started to play with and deliberately perform the fictional element, thus giving birth to the concept of ‘autofiction’ (Grell 2014). The French writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky, who coined the term when it was used on the back cover of his 1977 book Fils, assembled different aspects under the umbrella term ‘autofiction’. First of all, it is the linguistic nature of every autobiographical report that causes autofiction (Gronemann 1999). Furthermore, the insufficiency of human memory causes autofic­ tion. Yet Doubrovsky also thinks of the real-life effects of an autobiographical text as autofictional. This latter aspect is of utmost importance as it demonstrates that the autobiographical is not confined to the realm of the written text. The way in which the autobiographical project influences and even shapes the life of the autobiographer represents a very specific and important autofictional effect in the world of modern media (Kreknin 2014). Autofiction transgresses the boundaries between autobiogra­ phy and literature as well as the boundaries between literature and life. This, indeed, is not new at all. Of course, even former autobiographies, such as Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, may be considered as works of autofiction. Needless to say, Goethe and

Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines 

 3

his critics did not know the term ‘autofiction’ and therefore they could not address autobiographical works as autofictional. However, Goethe’s notion of poetry as pro­ moting the ‘truth’ of his life comes fairly close to the current understanding of ‘auto­ fiction’. In questioning genre definitions and the borders of literature, autobiography and autofiction attest to the relevance of the literary for human life. Significantly, ‘autofiction’ is not a unified notion. Critics have struggled to define ‘autofiction’ and various suggestions are under discussion. The fact that literary studies do not provide a consistent explanation of what ‘autofiction’ in fact means may be considered as a sort of epistemological weakness and an argument to abstain from the category at all. However, the very fact that ‘autofiction’ has come up at all in the discussion about the relation of autobiography and fiction demonstrates that there has been and still is an urgent need for a third term in order to grasp something that is pressingly at stake in the relation of life and literature. As it seems to be difficult, if not impossible, definitely to decide whether a text is autobiographical or not, the French critic Philippe Lejeune, as early as in the 1970s, has suggested that we think of autobiography as based on the idea of an ‘autobio­ graphical pact’ (Lejeune 1975 [1989]). This means that the text offers to the reader a ‘pact’ to read it autobiographically. This ‘pact’ is offered either if the name of the author on the book cover is identical with the narrator’s and the protagonist’s name, or if the subtitle of the book reads ‘Autobiography’, ‘My Life’, etc. If this is not the case, i.  e. if author, narrator, and protagonist have different names, or their names are unknown, or the book tags itself as a novel, then this text offers the novelistic pact, which triggers the reader to read the text as a novel. This means that ‘autobiography’ is no longer an essentialist category but a dimension, or better: a constitutive element of the literary communication process. Many chapters of the handbook refer to Lejeune’s concept, which was quite revolutionary in its time and to this day fosters the understanding of autobiography as a phenomenon of reception. Lejeune’s in its time somewhat revolutionary approach has to be considered within the critical context of the late 1960s/early 1970s, when the ‘theory of reception’ (with its famous Constance protagonists Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser) first appeared on the agenda of literary studies. Although it has frequently been an object of criti­ cism, the concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’ has been productive also for the discussion about ‘autofiction’. The comparatist Frank Zipfel (2009) for instance has proposed that we think of autofiction as an oscillation between the autobiographical and the novelistic pact. This means that, unsure of how to read the text, as an autobi­ ography or as a novel, the reader oscillates between two attitudes of reception. As can easily be imagined, literary texts are able to make the best of this ambiguous situation and playfully gain creative perspectives from it. As important and fundamental as the fact/fiction debate may be, it is also unpro­ ductive in the long run as it has become clear that there is no absolute distinction between fact and fiction. Therefore, recent critics, such as Arnaud Schmitt (2010), have argued to abandon the discussion about autofiction altogether and to concen­

4 

 Introduction

trate instead on ‘auto-’ or ‘self-narration’ as a form of autobiographical writing which focuses on the self and how it constructs its identity by relating his or her life. This, of course, is nothing entirely new, yet it remains relevant and gains novel qualities in the changing world of globalization and rapid medial transformation. It is well within the development of literary theory in general that, after the era of poststructuralist criticism of essentialism and its productive awareness of the linguistic mediality of meaning, literary studies is again interested in the ‘real-life’ motives and effects of literary production. “Life Is Back!” writes Arnaud Schmitt in his latest book on autobiography (2017, 2). This, of course, does not mean that one should forget what critics such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, or Michel Foucault have taught in the decades before, namely the semiotic, cultural, and discursive constructedness of the sayable. Instead, these critical insights foster a better under­ standing of ‘experience’ and ‘reality’ as well as their functions in the field of cultural production. Signification, to sum up, does not contradict ‘the real’, but assists in the process of making it more intelligible. As Paul John Eakin writes: “[…] I think there is a legitimate sense in which autobiographies testify to the individual’s experience of selfhood, that testimony is necessarily mediated by available cultural models of iden­ tity and the discourses in which they are expressed” (1999, 4). However, Eakin warns with Vincent Descombes against confusing the Cartesian subject, i.  e. the subject as a metaphysical category, with the human person and the autobiographical ‘I’. From this it follows that literary research has to take into account that the autobiographical I is an embodied I and to look at the specific ‘experientiality’ of this autobiographical I (Fludernik 1996, 9). This shift to the embodied ‘I’ has not only initiated the inclusion of cognitive science approaches to literature but also a reconsideration of its political and ethical aspects which, obviously, are also relevant in the writing and reading of autobiographical texts. A striking example of how bodily awareness and contempo­ rary medial form interact in life writing is Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur [‘Work and Structure’] (2013) which had been published as a blog before it came out as a book. In this diary-like work, Herrndorf tries to cope with the diagnosis of a terminal brain tumor. The decaying body becomes a mighty antagonist in Herrndorf’s intense digitally formatted self-inquiry, which demonstrates that digitalization has not at all done away with the ‘real’ and the ‘really’ experienced body. It goes without saying that the publication of the blog, and later on the book, entails far-reaching ethical considerations. The new awareness of the ‘real’ and of people’s ‘real-life experience’ (that should not forget literary studies’ critical knowledge of textuality) is not only due to the rapid developments in media and especially digital technology but also to the inexorable process of globalization which threatens to level out diversity and heterogeneity. The insistent diversity of autobiographical and autofictional production all over the world is an obvious and weighty counterpoise to these ongoing processes of homogenization which calls for thorough scholarly research. As Serge Doubrovsky already stated in the 1970s, autobiographies nowadays are not only authored by so-called ‘big names’ such

Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines 

 5

as Augustin, Rousseau, or Goethe, but can be and obviously are written by everybody (Farron 2003). Besides autobiographies by writers, politicians, academics, sports­ people, managers, pop stars, etc., there are autobiographical texts from all sorts of minority groups, illness narratives, coming-out narratives, narratives of migration and exile, trauma narratives, diaries and blogs, biographical entries on social media sites, graphic memoirs, witness narratives, and so on. In their seminal study Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson provide an impressive list of “Sixty Genres of Life Narratives” (2010, 253–286) that shows the breadth and variety of the autobiographical genre. All these documents of life writing do not only provide insight into specific historical and cultural contexts but are themselves part of diverse fields of cultural production. Therefore, autobio­ graphical texts are studied not only by literary scholars but also by historians, sociol­ ogists, philosophers, anthropologists and other academics who look at the genre from their disciplinary perspectives and who address specific questions to the texts. There have been ongoing discussions about the relation of reading autobiographies as texts and/or reading them as sources, i.  e. as documents (Depkat and Pyta 2017). Despite Aristotle’s famous phrase in Περὶ ποιητικῆς [Poetics] (335 BCE) that it is the function of the historian to relate what has happened whereas the poet relates what may happen (Aristotle 1995, 1451a), it would be false to maintain that historians, sociologists, etc. read autobiographies as sources whereas literary scholars investigate their textual form. It has become quite clear that an awareness of the medial qualities and cultural constructedness of autobiographical texts is also of utmost importance for scholars who read autobiographies for their historical, social, or political contents. Just as ‘new realism’ and (post)structural criticism should not be played off against each other but brought into a constructive dialogue, the ‘textual approach’ and the ‘documentary approach’ are equally to be handled and brought into relation with each other in a case-specific and subtle way. To look at how a text is made does not necessarily mean to deny the ‘truthfulness’ and the historical value of what is reported. Interdisciplinary work on autobiography on a larger scale has only started. It is important for its future productivity that we do not stake disciplinary claims and insist on theoretical and methodological realms. Fruitful collaboration between the disci­ plines on such a sensitive genre as ‘autobiography’ requires critical knowledge, con­ ceptual reflection, and the ability to shift and modify our perspectives. The interdis­ ciplinary and international Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction aims to prepare a basis for this kind of interdisciplinary endeavor across (academic) cultures. It enables the researcher and the student to collect information on manifold aspects of previous autobiographical research and combine it in a modular way according to her/his indi­ vidual questions and interest. Therefore, volume one of the handbook is structured in three systematic complexes and, in order to make the information more easily acces­ sible, the entries within these systematic blocks follow an alphabetical order. Thus, the first volume of the handbook can be used as a sort of dictionary. The first section (I.1: Theoretical Approaches) traces multiple theoretical approaches to autobiography,

6 

 Introduction

as for instance, hermeneutics, structuralism, deconstruction, and discourse analysis, and it informs the reader about the relevance of the autobiographical for different disciplines other than literary studies, such as history, anthropology, philosophy, religious studies and others. As it aims at promoting an inter- and transdisciplinary comprehension of autobiography and autofiction, the handbook provides informa­ tion about the prevalent methodological premises, the approaches, and theoretical references within the individual disciplines. The second section of volume one (I.2: Categories) discusses categories which have been applied in the study of autobiog­ raphy/autofiction and which, obviously, are basically connected with the genre, e.  g. ‘authenticity’, ‘identity’, ‘subjectivity’, but also ‘gender’, ‘memory’, or ‘trauma’. The entries connect their focus on the autobiographical/autofictional with general liter­ ary and cultural studies approaches. It goes without saying that the authors of the individual chapters, as researchers with a specific academic background, may stress disciplinary preferences; however, they were asked to consider interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives. The aim of section three (I.3: Autobiographical Forms and Genres) is to display the multiplicity of autobiographical forms and genres in the course of history up until the present time. The articles demonstrate the mutability of the genre and, breaking with Lejeune (1973, 138 [1989, 4]), do not only look at auto­ biographical texts written in prose. They also open up genre boundaries by asking whether an autobiographical account could also be rendered in lyrical or dramatic, in musical or pictorial form, or also as film, or even as dance. Looking back in history, but also observing contemporary developments, the entries in this section put special emphasis on the media of the autobiographical and its multiple intermedial aspects. The general question that forms the motif of this handbook project on the whole, namely the question of what we address whenever we refer to ‘autobiography’, thus unfolds into a broad spectrum of historical forms, conceptual dimensions, and cul­ tural functions.

Works Cited Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Barthes, Roland. “La mort de l’auteur.” Manteia (1968): 12–17 [“The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142–148]. Depkat, Volker, and Wolfram Pyta, eds. Autobiographie zwischen Text und Quelle. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2017. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. II.12. Ed. Christoph Michel. Frankfurt a.  M.: Klassiker Verlag, 1999 [Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann. Ed. J.K. Moorhead. Trans. John Oxenford. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998]. Farron, Ives. “Die Fallen der Vorstellungskraft. Autofiktion – Ein Begriff und seine Zweideutigkeit(en).” Trans. Barbara Villiger Heilig. Neue Zürcher Zeitung (31 May 2003). https://www.nzz. ch/article8VLW2-1.259501 (22 June 2018).

Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines 

 7

Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Die letzten Jahre. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche von 1823 bis zu Goethes Tod. Part 2: Vom Dornburger Aufenthalt 1828 bis zum Tode. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. II.11. Ed. Horst Fleig. Frankfurt a.  M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993. Grell, Isabelle. L’Autofiction. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Gronemann, Claudia. “‘Autofiction’ oder das Ich in der Signifikantenkette. Zur literarischen Konstitution des autobiographischen Subjekts bei Serge Doubrovsky.” Poetica 31.1/2 (1999): 237–262. Kreknin, Innokentij. Poetiken des Selbst. Identität, Autorschaft und Autofiktion am Beispiel von Rainald Goetz, Joachim Lottmann und Alban Nikolai Herbst. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poétique 4 (1973): 137–162 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Schmitt, Arnaud. Je réel/Je fictif. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2010. Schmitt, Arnaud. The Phenomenology of Autobiography. Making It Real. New York/London: Routledge, 2017. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion. Zwischen den Grenzen von Faktualität, Fiktionalität und Literarität?” Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen. Ed. Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 284–314.

1 Theoretical Approaches

1.1 Anthropology Deborah Reed-Danahay

The ethnographic methods of social and cultural anthropology involve direct encoun­ ters between anthropologists and their interlocutors. As anthropologists participate in daily life among the populations they study, questions about the relationship between the uniqueness of individual lives and shared aspects of experience and subjectivity emerge. Anthropologists employ autobiographical methods in their research to elicit personal narratives among research participants. They also incorporate elements of their own autobiographies into their ethnographic writing. That anthropology is not just the study of others but also a reflexive enterprise that includes the life experi­ ences of the anthropologist in relationship to ethnographic fieldwork has become increasingly accepted in the discipline. Interest in autobiography draws upon older humanistic traditions of anthropology but has also been influenced by postcolonial­ ism, feminism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism – approaches that, in spite of their differences, have made scholars more aware of the social construction of per­ sonhood and gendered ideas of social agency. Forms of writing that connect anthro­ pology and autobiography can be called ‘autoethnography’, when this is defined as “a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context” (Reed-Danahay 1997, 9), and this term can refer to the ethnography of one’s own group or to autobi­ ographical stories that include ethnographic perspectives. This chapter will discuss three genres of anthropological writing in both historical and contemporary contexts: 1. life writing by anthropologists that focuses on the autobiographical narratives of their research participants – sometimes called ‘life history’, 2. autobiographical writing by anthropologists, and 3. literary anthropology that employs methods of autofiction.

Life History Life history is a method used in anthropology to elicit the autobiographical narratives of research participants. Brandes (1982) referred to it as ‘ethnographic autobiography’ because such narratives provide ethnographic information about the social milieu in which the person lived and about their own life experiences and trajectory from childhood to adulthood. Life histories can also reveal cultural understandings of self­ hood, including those related to gender and sexuality. Early life histories in American anthropology concerned the lives of Native Americans, and were connected to debates about the relationship between cultural creativity and constraint. Examples of this early work include Radin’s life history of a Winnebago man, Crashing Thunder (1926), and Landes’ The Ojibwa Woman (1938), a collection of life stories gathered in collab­ oration with Maggie Wilson. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-002

12 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Anthropologists increasingly discuss the methods and circumstances in which life stories are produced, and the relationships between anthropologists and research participants that develop during their encounters. A classic example of this is Crapan­ zano’s book Tuhami (1980), whose central figure is a Moroccan tile maker with whom Crapanzano spent many hours in conversation about his life. Crapanzano poses ques­ tions about the nature of fieldwork understanding and intersubjectivity, the problem of creating a ‘coherent’ story out of the fragments told to him by Tuhami, and the obligations of anthropologists to their informants. Other well-known examples that intertwine the autobiographical reflections of the anthropologist in the field with the life history of a research participant, and which were influenced by feminism and concerns about giving ‘voice’ to women, include Shostak’s Nisa (1981) and Behar’s Translated Woman (1983). The life history method endures in anthropology, but new questions have been raised in more recent work among nonwestern societies that provides forms of cul­ tural critique (Marcus and Fischer 1999) for western assumptions about autobiogra­ phy. For example, in her research among the Kodi people of Indonesia, Hoskins (1998) found that because there was no tradition of telling others about one’s life, she could not elicit life narratives from her interlocutors. Instead, she found that autobiography could only be conveyed in relationship to discussions about objects used for exchange and in the domestic sphere. She concludes that “identities and biographies are formed around objects” (Hoskins 1998, 2) in that society. (See also Oakdale [2005] for an eth­ nographic analysis of ritual and autobiography in the Amazon that shows the embod­ iments of life stories.) A wide range of narrative practices used in biographical and autobiographical performances among indigenous groups in lowland South America are explored in an edited collection entitled Fluent Selves (Oakdale and Course 2014). In a critical look at biographical accounts among Salvadoran migrants to the United States, Coutin (2011) examines the political deployments of autobiography as stories of war and violence that circulate internationally and may disrupt neoliberal ideas of selfhood.

Autobiography There is a long history of autobiographical writing among anthropologists, but the degree to which the autobiographical elements of ethnographic writing are fore­ grounded, or remain in the shadows, varies. Although autobiographical writing among anthropologists emerged as a more prominent genre in beginning in the 1990s, the impulse to chronicle fieldwork experiences and other aspects of anthropological lives through memoir goes back at least to Frederica de Laguna’s 1930 text (not pub­ lished until 1977, however) that recounts her 1929 fieldwork in Greenland (de Laguna 1977). Several mid-twentieth-century accounts of fieldwork were written, including

1.1 Anthropology 

 13

Marriott (1952), Berreman (1962), Powdermaker (1966), Briggs (1970), Rabinow (1977), and Dumont (1978). Personal accounts of fieldwork have frequently been juxtaposed with the classic ethnographic monograph genre of the mid-twentieth century, in which the goal was to produce a description and an analysis of the social structure and culture of a par­ ticular group. Its critics portray the ethnographic monograph of previous genera­ tions as adopting a distanced and ‘objective’ approach that conveyed the findings of research without revealing much about the process of doing fieldwork or its emotional impact on the anthropologist. A major influence on the turn toward more reflexivity in anthropological writing was the volume Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 2010 [1986]). Soon after, Tedlock (1991) captured what she called a growing trend toward “narrative ethnography” in which the anthropologists place themselves within the frame of discourse. Interest in reflexive writing about fieldwork that blended memoir and ethnography gained momentum in anthropology during the 1990s, as awareness of the positionality of the anthropologist increased as part of the so-called ‘postmod­ ern turn’. A landmark text was Okely and Callaway’s edited collection Anthropology and Autobiography (1992). Book-length memoirs or autobiographies by anthropologists entail not only accounts from fieldwork but also stories of career trajectories, travel, and personal experiences such as illness. Two early classics of this subgenre of anthropologi­ cal autobiography include Blackberry Winter by Margaret Mead (1972), and Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (2012 [1955]). Zora Neale Hurston, who, like Mead was a student of Franz Boas and trained as anthropologist (although she is better known as a novelist), also produced a classic autobiography in Dust Tracks on a Road (1991 [1942]). More recent books apply anthropological insights to the author’s own experience and life and have become more revealing of the emotional lives of the anthropologists. These include Turner (2006), Behar (2013), and Stoller (2009). Khosravi (2010) chronicles his trajectory from refugee to professor of anthroplogy in an autoethnography about borders and migration. In a controversial account of his fieldwork in the Amazon and his professional career as an anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon (2013) deploys the autobiographical genre in order to attack anthropology for moving away from science. There have also been several themed collections of autobiographical essays, pri­ marily related to fieldwork, produced by anthropologists. Some, like the collection on the Pacific edited by DeVita (1991) focus on a particular geographic region in which the anthropologists conducted research. Edited collections have also dealt with issues of gender and sexuality (e.  g. Lewin and Leap 1996; Markowitz and Ashkenazi 1999). While the intent of the former, based on geography, is to provide students with a taste of what fieldwork is like among seemingly ‘exotic’ people, discussion of the foibles and mistakes made by anthropologists also teach about cross-cultural communica­ tion. Such “fables of fieldwork rapport” (Van Maanen 2011, 73) have a long-standing tradition in personal narratives of fieldwork. Narratives about gender and sexuality

14 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

focus on issues of reflexivity about the position of the anthropologist, and seek to bring more to the surface discussions of the role of gender and sexuality both in our profession and in fieldwork. In a recent collection on women’s experience, Cattell and Schweitzer (2006) include the life stories of women who became anthropologists in midlife. They move from concerns about the ‘voice’ of women studied by anthro­ pologists to one about the hidden voices of a marginalized group of anthropologists. Anthropologists reflect upon their practices of teaching, research, and social activism in another edited collection (De Neve and Unnithan-Kumar 2016).

Literary Anthropology and Autofiction Anthropologists have long written fiction and poetry, although this has often been viewed as a marginal enterprise in the discipline. The tensions between anthropology as a science and as a humanistic discipline are evident in the role that literary anthro­ pology has held. The first works of autofiction responded to the bias against autobio­ graphical writing in anthropology that prevailed until the late twentieth century. One of the earliest examples of autofiction in anthropology is Laura Bohannan’s portrayal of her fieldwork among the Tiv in Nigeria, Return to Laughter (Bowen 1954). She not only disguised her fieldwork account by calling it ‘fiction’ but also used a pseudonym to disguise her identity in order to protect her professional reputation. Another female anthropologist, Gladys Reichard, is noteworthy, however, because during the 1930s she wrote in several different genres (using her real name) based on her fieldwork among Navajo weavers. Among her several books are an autobiographical account of her fieldwork (1934), a novel about a Navajo family (1939), and a manual about how to weave using Navajo methods (1936). Anthropologist Paul Stoller has written autobiographical works, fiction and aut­ ofiction. His second novel, Gallery Bundu: A Story about an African Past (2005) draws upon his fieldwork in West Africa to create the fictionalized narrative of a middle-aged former Peace Corps volunteer in Niger who now owns a gallery in New York. Billie Jean Isbell, an anthropologist who has worked in Peru since the late 1960s, has written a novel about a fictional female anthropologist “whose voice grew out of my own experi­ ences and those of my women colleagues” (Isbell 2009, ix). In the preface to her book, she provides an overview of the history of autofiction in anthropology and discusses her own turn to fiction rather than memoir. She argues that it permits a better under­ standing of the ways in which anthropologists are transformed by fieldwork than can other genres such as memoir or ethnography. In a recent novel based on his field­ work on an island in the South Pacific, Don Mitchell (2013) writes in the voices of ‘the natives’ in order to convey the character of the anthropologist (based on himself) from their perspectives. One of the most well-known anthropologists who writes fiction is Amitav Ghosh. His book In an Antique Land (1992) blends ethnographic narrative

1.1 Anthropology 

 15

based on his doctoral dissertation research in Egypt with a semi-fictional historical narrative. Fiction has emerged as a growing genre in which to engage autobiography in anthropological writing.

Works Cited Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Behar, Ruth. Traveling Heavy. A Memoir in Between Journeys. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2007. Berreman, Gerald. Behind Many Masks: Ethnography and Impression Management in a Himalayan Village. Ithaca: Society for Applied Anthropology, 1962. Bowen, Elinore Smith [i.  e. Laura Bohannan]. Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel. New York: Harper, 1954. Brandes, Stanley. “Ethnographic Autobiographies in American Anthropology.” Crisis in Anthropology: View from Spring Hill, 1980. Ed. E. Adamson Hoebel, Richard Currier and Susan Kaiser. New York: Garland Press, 1982. Briggs, Jean. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Cattell, Maria G., and Marjorie M. Schweitzer, eds. Women in Anthropology: Autobiographical Narratives and Social History. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2006. Chagnon, Napoleon. Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes – The Yanonamo and the Anthropologists. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). Berkeley: University of California Press, 25th ed. 2010. Coutin, Susan Bibler. “Remembering the Nation: Gaps and Reckoning within Biographical Accounts of Salvadoran Emigrés.” Anthropological Quarterly 84.4 (2011): 809–834. Crapanzano, Vincent. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. DeVita, Philip R., ed. The Humbled Anthropologist: Tales from the Pacific. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1990. Dumont, Jean-Paul. The Headman and I: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Fieldworking Experience (1978). Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1991. Hoskins, Janet. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. New York/ London: Routledge, 1998. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942). New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Isbell, Billie Jean. Finding Cholita. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Khosravi, Shahram, ‘Ilegal’ Traveler: An Auto-ethnography of Borders. New York: Palgrave, 2010. de Laguna, Frederica. Voyage to Greenland: A Personal Invitation to Anthropology. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. Landes, Ruth. The Ojibwa Woman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques (1955). Trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Penguin, 2012. Lewin, Ellen, and William L. Leap, eds. Out in the Field: Reflections on Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. van Maanen, John. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (1988). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 2011.

16 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Marcus, George, and Michael M. J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 1999. Markowitz, Fran, and Michael Ashkenazi, eds. Sex, Sexuality and the Anthropologist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Marriott, Alice. Greener Fields: Experiences among the American Indians. Garden City: Doubleday, 1952. Mead, Margaret. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1972. Mitchell, Don. A Red Woman Was Crying. Hilo: Saddle Road Press, 2013. Oakdale, Suzanne. I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Oakdale, Suzanne, and Magnus Course, eds. Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Okely, Judith, and Helen Callaway, eds. Anthropology and Autobiography. London: Routledge, 1992. Powdermaker, Hortense. Stranger and Friend: The Ways of an Anthropologist. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. Rabinow, Paul. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Radin, Paul. Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian. New York: D. Appleton, 1926. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. “Introduction.” Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Ed. Deborah Reed-Danahay. Oxford: Berg, 1997. Reichard, Gladys A. Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters. New York: Macmillan, 1934. Reichard, Gladys A. Dezba: Woman of the Desert. New York: J.J. Augustin Publisher, 1939. Reichard, Gladys A. Weaving a Navajo Blanket. New York: Dover Publications, 1974 [Orig. Navajo Shepherd and Weaver. New York: J.J. Augustin Publisher, 1936]. Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. New York: Vantage Books, 1981. Stoller, Paul. The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Stoller, Paul. Gallery Bundu: The Story of an African Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Tedlock, Barbara. “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography.” Journal of Anthropological Research 47.1 (1991): 69–94. Turner, Edith. Heart of Lightness: The Life Story of an Anthropologist. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006.

Further Reading Coffey, Amanda. The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representations of Identity. London: Sage, 1999. Collins, Peter, and Anselma Gallinat, eds. The Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing Memory and Experience into Ethnography. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. Langness, L.L., and Geyla Frank. Lives: An Anthropological Approach. Novatol: Chandler and Sharp, 1981. McLean, Athena, and Annette Leibing, eds. The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders between Ethnography and Life. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. Narayan, Kirin. “Ethnography and Fiction: Where is the Border?” Anthropology and Humanism 24.2 (1999): 134–147. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. “Autobiography, Intimacy and Ethnography.” Handbook of Ethnography.

1.1 Anthropology 

 17

Ed. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland and Lyn H. Lofland. Los Angeles: Sage, 2007. 407–425. Reed-Danahay, Deborah, “Autobiography.” Oxford Bibliographies. Ed. John L. Jackson, jr. Oxford Oxford University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/97/80199766567-0162 . Watson, Lawrence C., and Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke. Interpreting Life Histories: An Anthropological Inquiry. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985.

1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience Hans J. Markowitsch and Angelica Staniloiu

The topic of autobiographical memory has only gained considerable attention in the neuroscientific research realm in the last three decades. Attempts to engage in a sys­ tematic experimental evaluation of memory for personal experiences can however be found earlier, such as in the works of Galton and Breukink (Markowitsch 1992, 53, 57). In 1983, Endel Tulving’s book Elements of episodic memory began to pave a novel path for empirical research in the domain of episodic (autobiographical) memory, although at the time the construct ‘episodic memory’ was still largely applied to the context of recalling verbal nouns which had been perceived previously. In order to provide a framework for empirical testing, Tulving amply discussed and listed the distinguishing features of ‘episodic’ and ‘semantic’ memories and considered the former to be traceable back with respect to time and place. The concept of episodic memory has however evolved over the years. In 2005, Tulving put forth a further dis­ tilled definition of episodic memory (Tulving 2005). The latter became the conjunction of subjective time, autonoetic consciousness (‘self-awareness’) and the experiencing self. By emphasizing the relation between episodic memory, self, and a certain type of phenomenological experience, this definition cemented a new construct: ‘the epi­ sodic-autobiographical memory’. In the experimental field, the new specifications of episodic memory initiated a major shift in testing paradigms, moving from testing the memory for laboratory stimuli (e.  g. word lists) with a specific embedding in time and place (Tulving 1972) to investigating the memory for complex events in natural­ istic settings (Risius et al. 2013). The advent of functional neuroimaging techniques has brought innovative neuroscientific dimensions to memory sciences. Basically, functional imaging methods have allowed correlating behavioral activity, including thoughts, with brain activity. Drawing upon data from both research on neural cor­ relates in healthy, non-brain damaged human individuals and results from patients with brain insults, the partitioning of memory in subsystems and processes under­ went several refinements, leading to a fresh understanding and research avenue in autobiographical memory.

Memory Subsystems ‘Memory’ has been comprehended and approached very differently in computer science as opposed to the cultural or social sciences. Only recently attempts to bridge or integrate views from different disciplines have been witnessed (Markowitsch 2010; Engelen et al. 2013, 289–303). In the neurosciences, clear distinctions between memory systems and memory processes are made nowadays. Furthermore, memory is categorized along a time and a content axis, respectively. The universally accepted dis­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-003

1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 

 19

Fig. 1: The five long-term memory systems and their assumed brain bases. Procedural memory is largely motor-based, but includes also sensory and cognitive skills (‘routines’). Priming refers to a higher likeliness of re-identifying previously perceived stimuli. Perceptual memory allows distinguishing an object, item, or person on the basis of distinct features. Semantic memory is context-free and refers to general facts; it encompasses general knowledge of the world. The episodic-autobiographical memory (EAM) system is context-specific with respect to time and place. It allows mental time travel. Examples are events such as the last vacation or the dinner of the previous night. The terms ‘remember’ and ‘know’ describe the distinction between EAM and semantic memory, as remembering requires conscious recollection embedded in time and space and with an emotional flavoring, while knowing represents a simple, though conscious, yes/no distinction without further connotations. Tulving (2005) assumes that during ontogeny (as well as during phylogeny) memory development starts with procedural memory and ends with episodic-autobiographical memory, a system that he reserves for human beings, while all other systems can be found in animal species as well.

tinction along the time axis is that between short-term and long-term memory. Shortterm memory is limited to time periods ranging between a number of seconds and a few minutes, or to the acquisition of four to seven bits of information. Everything beyond this time span or this number of bits is attributed to long-term memory and consequently includes life-long memories as well. Along content dimension, memory is cataloged in five long-term memory systems, which are sketched in Figure 1. The five long term memory systems are considered to assemble on each other both from a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic perspective. This implies that phyloge­ netically old animals draw mainly on simple, non-conscious processes of information transfer, while advanced animals use conscious information processing to a compar­ atively higher degree. The same pattern holds true for human babies as opposed to older human beings (Markowitsch 2010). From the five long-term memory systems, the first two (Fig. 1) are regarded to principally rely on unconscious or subconscious

20 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

(anoëtic) processing of information, the next two on conscious (noëtic) and the last on self-conscious or self-reflected (autonoëtic) information processing. The first of the two anoëtic memory systems, procedural memory, is based on mechanical or motor-related acts (e.  g. riding a bike, skiing, playing piano), the second, the priming system, relies on the repetitive appearance of subconsciously acquired material. An example are advertisements in radio and TV, where in the first block during a movie break several advertising spots are presented and then – shortly after – the spots are repeated in the same or a shortened manner. The idea is that during the presenta­ tion of the first spot the listener or viewer still is with his thoughts with the movie so that she or he does not consciously process the information. The information has, however, entered the brain so that it is ‘primed’, with the consequence that, when the information is basically repeated, it will be processed on a conscious level and may lead to the buying of the advertised product. Perceptual memory on the other hand is grounded on the idea that the repeated or even frequent confrontation with a class of similar stimuli leads to the formation of a ‘percept’ (e.  g. of an apple or a pear, or of a face of a particular individual) so that this is recognized and categorized irrespective of its current appearance or the angle from which it is seen, or the luminosity of the environment: An apple always is cate­ gorized as being an apple, irrespective of whether it is green, yellow, or red, or intact or half eaten. The second of the two noëtic memory systems, semantic memory, refers to general knowledge (world knowledge, school knowledge), that is to context-free facts. Autobiographical-semantic knowledge (such as the date of birth, own name) also belongs to the semantic memory. Lastly, the autonoëtic episodic-autobiograph­ ical memory system is primarily constituted of autobiographical events or episodes, which not only possess a distinct time and place anchoring (as in Tulving’s first defi­ nition), but also a special kind of phenomenological experience, being grounded by the conjunction of subjective time, autonoëtic consciousness (‘self-awareness’) and the experiencing self (Tulving 2005). There has been an ongoing discussion in the neurosciences, whether it is wise or not to combine the semantic and the episodic-au­ tobiographical memory systems under the heading of ‘declarative memory’. Tulving and Markowitsch identified and extensively described a number of distinct features, which offer support for a demarcation between the episodic(-autobiographical) and the semantic memory system (Markowitsch and Tulving 1998). This separation makes not only sense from theoretical and experimental standpoints, but also from a clinical one: Patients with memory disorders tend to solely or predominantly show memory impairments in the episodic-autobiographical memory domain (e.  g. lost access to their own past, inability to acquire new events for long-term storing). The episod­ ic-autobiographical memory system is regarded as being more susceptible to “disease, injury and age” (Tulving 2005, 11) in comparison to other memory systems (such as the knowledge or semantic memory system). This heightened vulnerability of the episodic memory system in contrast to the knowledge system is also beautifully sug­ gested by a phrase that Bram Stoker wrote in his Dracula (1897). He stated: “Remem­

1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 

 21

ber my friend that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker” (Stoker 1897, 119). This phrase furthermore brings the reader to the distinc­ tion between ‘remembering’ and ‘knowing’, which was promoted by Endel Tulving. ‘Remembering’ refers to the episodic-autobiographical memory and experiences of autonoëtic consciousness, while ‘knowing’ (knowledge) to semantic memory and noëtic consciousness. Tulving (2002, 2005), when inquiring about which of the two memory systems were used, would ask: ‘Do you remember this, or do you know this?’ (So-called ‘remember-know paradigm’.) It should be remarked, that not all autobiographical memories have an episodic quality. Recalling autobiographic facts such as the own birthday, birthplace or name obviously does not necessitate traveling mentally back in time. “Semantic representa­ tions of one’s personality traits” and “semantic knowledge of facts about one’s life” (Gangi and Klein 2010, 2) belong to the so called ‘autobiographical-semantic memory’. Based on patient data, Klein and Gangi proposed a dissociation within the knowledge (semantic) memory system between ‘autobiographical-semantic knowledge’ and ‘general knowledge’ (Gangi and Klein 2010). A similar proposal had been made by Markowitsch and colleagues already in 1996. They wrote: One therefore might speculate that knowledge about oneself could be another class of semantic knowledge. However, if such a restricted kind of ‘autobiographical knowledge module’ existed, it most likely would recruit additional information such as emotional –affective flavor from other regions (e.  g., the amygdala), making it altogether a wider network than those suggested pres­ ently for singular categories of semantic information (Fink et al. 1996, 4281).

Autobiographical Memory in Clinical Neuropsychology Patients with persistent and severe memory disorders have offered a great service to the neurosciences of memory, aiding to shed light on how episodic-autobiographical memory and other kinds of memory work. They could be categorized into those with anterograde and those with retrograde amnesia (Ribot 1882) or with a combination of both (Fig. 2). Patients with anterograde amnesia have certain forms of focal brain damage that are depicted in Panel 3 of Markowitsch and Staniloiu (2012). Basically, these are patients with basal forebrain damage, medial temporal lobe, or medial dien­ cephalic damage (Fig. 3). All three groups have major anterograde amnesia in the episodic-autobiographical domain, but also in anterograde semantic memory. Their remembrance of the past may be intact. Hypotheses about the existence of medial temporal lobe amnesia only began to emerge around the time of the Second World War (Markowitsch 1992). However, already in 1900 Bechterew described a “Demonstration eines Gehirns mit Zerstörung der vorderen und inneren Theile der Hirnrinde beider Schläfenlappen” [‘a brain with

22 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Fig. 2: Possible consequences of brain injury on old and new memories. Anterograde amnesia refers to the inability to store new information (usually new biographical events) long-term, while retrograde amnesia refers to an inability to retrieve old, already stored memories. Retrograde amnesia is usually unequally distributed in that way that the information closer to the present or closer to the significant event represented by the flash symbol, is more easily lost than information from the remote past. This distribution was first described by Ribot (1882) and is named after him (‘Ribot’s law’) or termed the ‘law of regression’. It was also Ribot, who attributed three meanings to memory: “the conservation of certain conditions, their reproduction, and their localization in the past” (Ribot 1882, 10).

Fig. 3: Medial section of the human brain. The darkly colored portions illustrate the areas whose bilateral damage leads to amnesia.

1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 

 23

destruction of the anterior and medial parts of the cerebral cortex of both temporal lobes’] (Bechterew 1900, 990). The bilateral damage of the uncinate and hippocam­ pal gyri was accompanied by an “aussergewöhnliche Gedächtnisschwäche, Erin­ nerungsfälschungen” [‘extra-ordinary anterograde amnesia, and a partial retrograde amnesia’] (Bechterew 1900, 990). The most well-known and studied patient with medial temporal lobe amnesia was patient H. M. (Milner and Scoville 1957; Corkin 2002; Squire 2009). Apparently H.  M. showed a preserved capacity to reflect on his disability when saying “Every day is alone, whatever enjoyment I’ve had, and whatever sorrow I’ve had” (Corkin et al. 1968, 217). Otherwise, he was completely amnesic since he had undergone a surgical intervention for his intractable epilepsy, during which both of his medial tem­ poral lobes – including the hippocampal formation and the amygdalae – had been removed. H. M.’s procedural and priming memory systems were still intact postopera­ tively, as was his retrograde semantic memory; his anterograde episodic and semantic memories were however profoundly impaired.  H. M. was evaluated repeatedly after surgery over several decades until his death in 2008. Over the years, his preoperatively acquired episodic memories deteriorated as well, which led Squire (2009) to consider it to be impaired as well. In contrast to medial temporal lobe amnesia, diencephalic amnesia has been acknowledged and described for a long time (Markowitsch 1992). In 1993, M ­ arkowitsch and colleagues extensively tested a patient with this condition (Markowitsch et al. 1993). This former medical professor had suffered an ischemic stroke (infarct) in the medial diencephalon (Fig. 3). As a consequence, he no longer could acquire new infor­ mation for long term storage, although he could remember his past prior to the stroke incident (retrograde episodic-autobiographical memory [Fig. 2]). His social skills remained intact, matching what one would have expected to find in an elderly direc­ tor of a clinic (procedural memory [Fig. 1]). His episodic-autobiographical amnesia as well as his preserved memory abilities in other domains remained unchanged for more than a decade (i.  e. until Markowitsch and colleagues’ investigation of him). In contrast to patient H. M., this patient with diencephalic amnesia usually showed unawareness of his memory deficit. This finding supports that the damaged region is important for self-reflection and self-consciousness (Markowitsch 2013) – an idea proposed already in 1925 by Dercum (1925). Essential for “flooding” “the darkness, behind which the function of the hip­ pocampus formation” was still “hidden” (Dercum 1925, 3) have been the cases with so-called developmental amnesia. These cases were causally linked to relatively selec­ tive damage to hippocampi (resulting in more than 30 % to 40 % bilateral volume reduction of hippocampi in comparison to healthy participants), occurring perinatally or in early childhood. Markowitsch and colleagues recently studied a young man with profound episodic-autobiographical amnesia, due to birth complications leading to hypoxia and subsequent bilateral damage of a portion of the medial temporal lobe (the hippocampus) (Borsutzki et al. 2013). As the brain damage of the hippocampi

24 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

occurred shortly after birth, long before the typical time for the emergence of the episodic-autobiographical memory system, his episodic-autobiographical memory system did not achieve proper development and functionality and, as a consequence, the patient was not able to acquire episodic-autobiographical events. He however was still able to attend school and to learn facts in a normal way (i.  e. he had normal semantic memory). The only autobiographical episode the patient remembered dated back to his childhood and had a special emotional charge. He remembered seeing his father jumping out of the window after a quarrel with his mother. (The window was situated at the first level of the building and luckily his father survived this experience unhurt.) These examples demonstrate that damage to certain bottleneck structures of the brain leads to severe amnesia, usually restricted to the episodic-autobiographical domain. However, there are also cases without obvious brain damage (as detected by conventional structural imaging methods), who still show severe amnesia in the episodic-autobiographical domain (Markowitsch 2003). These patients might suffer from dissociative amnesia or a related condition such as a fugue condition (Fink et al. 1997) – where a person loses access to his or her personal past and in addition engages in suddenly traveling away from his/her usual home or customary environment of living (Markowitsch and Staniloiu 2013). Over the years, these types of amnesia have sparked the interest of both health professionals and media and have been named ‘functional’, ‘hysterical’, ‘psychogenic’, ‘dissociative’ or ‘medically unexplained’. There is accumulating data, which support a psychological stress causation of these conditions. Not all cases of dissociative amnesia however follow an acute massive stress. Some occur after a seemingly objective minor stress, but a careful anamnesis usually elicits a history of recurrent stresses, often with onset in childhood or early adulthood years (Markowitsch 2000, Table 23.2, 325). Although conventional struc­ tural imaging typically does not yield significant results, functional imaging por­ trays a different picture: these patients have a reduced glucose metabolism in brain areas assumed to be engaged in memory retrieval (Brand et al. 2009). Their inability to retrieve their personal past has been termed ‘mnestic block syndrome’. This con­ struct embeds in it the supposed underlying mechanism, circumvents futile mindbrain debates and instills hope for recovery. It assumes that the mnemonic informa­ tion is still existent in their brain, but it is impossible to consciously access it and bind it properly with the relevant emotional ‘flavor’ (Markowitsch 2002). In compar­ ison to ‘organic’ forms of amnesia, dissociative amnesia and its variants are often accompanied by personality loss. Patients frequently present initially with ‘loss’ of autobiographical-semantic knowledge, but then they quickly re-learn it. Old general semantic knowledge is often preserved. Furthermore, the patients can still acquire new information for long term storage both on the semantic and the episodic-auto­ biographical level. The emotional tones of the newly acquired episodes are lower in comparison to those of normal healthy individuals. This dampened emotional col­ orization may reflect an emotional disengagement with the environment and own

1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 

 25

condition – a phenomenon already observed in the nineteenth century and named ‘la belle indifference’ (Janet 1894; Breuer and Freud 1895; Markowitsch and Reinhold 2009).

Functional Imaging and Autobiographical Memory The increased recognition and attractiveness of functional imaging permeated also the research on autobiographical memory, leading to a number of studies that have tried to unravel the brain correlates of episodic-autobiographical memory or differ­ ent components of it (such as mental time traveling or autonoëtic awareness) and distinguish at the neural level between true autobiographical events and false or fictitious ones. Due to space constraints, only a few relevant studies will be high­ lighted herein. Markowitsch and colleagues were among the first of the research working groups to trace the neural correlates of episodic-autobiographical memory retrieval in healthy human participants using positron emission tomography. They discovered that a network of regions in the temporo-frontal cortex is activated when accessing past episodes (Fink et al. 1996). Our results were in agreement with results from brain-damaged patients who had their principal lesions in exactly the same regional combination (Knight et al. 1997), and, later they received confirmation from other research groups. For example, LaBar and Cabeza stated in 2006: “[s]tudies of retrograde amnesia support Markowitsch’s proposal that retrieval of remote personal memories involves interactions between the inferior PFC (prefrontal cortex) and its connections with the anteromedial temporal lobe that course through the uncinate fasciculus” (Cabeza and St. Jacques 2007, 59). In another avant-garde study with pos­ itron emission tomography, which was carried out in healthy participants, Markowitsch and colleagues compared the retrieval of true autobiographical episodes with the retrieval of fictitious ‘episodes’. They determined a (right-hemispheric) activation of the amygdala only during the recall of personal – authentic – events, while the recall of fictitious (fabricated) resulted in quite different brain activations, mainly in the posterior cortex, including the precuneus. Named ‘the mind’s eye’, the precuneus has been attributed functions in mentally imagining events or ideas (Heiss et al. 2000). Another road of research that was largely opened by the advent of functional neuro­ imaging is the one of so-called ‘false memory syndrome’ (‘pseudoreminiscences’), although speculations about neural underpinnings of ‘pseudoreminiscences’ or ‘false memories’ can already be found in the works of Kraepelin and Korsakoff (Markowitsch 1992). The observation that information may be retrieved differently than how it was encoded can be traced back to the process of perception. It is know from numerous perceptual illusions (e.  g. Markowitsch 2010, Fig. 2, 35) that sensory systems inter­ pret information subjectively and not physically correct. This implies that portions of the perceived information are inadequately encoded and stored, and will conse­

26 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

quently also be inadequately retrieved. Furthermore, the encoding-specificity princi­ ple (Thompson and Tulving 1973) that implies that memory is faithfully reconstructed when the encoding conditions highly match the conditions present at retrieval, may offer also an explanatory avenue for the occurrence of blockades in retrieval and/or memory distortions. Markowitsch and colleagues carried out a study during which healthy participants watched a short unemotional movie. Thereafter they underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation during which they were pre­ sented with scenes that were present in the movie, scenes that were similar to those presented in the movie or scenes that were completely new. In a forced choice format, the participants had to decide if the respective scene had been in the movie or not. On the behavioral level, participants made many errors (more than 44 % of answers were incorrect) (Kühnel et al. 2008). At the brain level, the behavioral differences got translated in a neural dissociation. Correct answering (true identifications) resulted in activations in portions of the medial prefrontal cortex (Kühnel et al. 2008), an area that was ascribed functions in self-referential processing. False answering led to pos­ terior cortical activations (in the precuneus and visual association cortex), which were suggestive of the following operations: generation and mental inspection and match­ ing of alternative representations in the presence of uncertainty and use of conscious imagery to enable retrieval (Kühnel et al. 2008).

Summing Up Neuroscience has provided numerous plentiful insights into relations between brain alterations and changes in episodic-autobiographical memory. It has sharpened our views on defining episodic-autobiographical memory and distinguishing it from other memory systems. Both results from functional brain imaging and from brain damaged patients have revealed that the memory systems have distinct bases in the brain and that also the processes of information encoding, storage and retrieval can be sepa­ rated on the brain level. Phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic studies revealed that there is a sequence in the development of memory systems which begins on the left of Figure 1 with the two anoëtic memory systems; these are found in invertebrates and simple vertebrates as well as in human babies. Thereafter the two noëtic systems develop, which are found in mammals and many birds and in children below the age of three to four years. The episodic-autobiographical memory system lastly is – according to Tulving (2005, 2002) – reserved for healthy humans after the age of four years. While it emerges the latest, the episodic-autobiographical memory system is usually the first memory system that deteriorates, due to ageing or disease. In con­ trast to it, the semantic memory system (including the autobiographical-semantic system) shows more resilience. Therefore patients who suffer episodic-autobiograph­ ical memory impairments, but continue to have an intact autobiographical-semantic

1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 

 27

memory might still be able to maintain some aspects of personal identity (Conway et al. 2009). These findings argue against proposals made by animal researchers to step out of the Tulving’s model and speak instead for further refinements within the same framework. How are the commonalities and differences of the semantic and episodic components of autobiographical memory translated at the brain level? How do we break down at the neural level the different components of episodic-autobiographical memory: self, emotion, autonoëtic awareness, mental time traveling? How do memo­ ries of the personal past shape our memories of the future behaviorally and the brain level (Ingvar 1985)? Neuroimaging methods coupled with rigorous testing paradigms could unlock new venues for pursuing these questions in the future.

Works Cited Bechterew, Wladimir Michailowitsch von. “Demonstration eines Gehirns mit Zerstörung der vorderen und inneren Theile der Hirnrinde beider Schläfenlappen.” Neurologisches Centralblatt 19 (1900): 990–991. Borsutzky, Sabine, Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, Angelica Staniloiu, and Friedrich Woermann. “Social cognition in a case of amnesia with neurodevelopmental mechanisms.” Frontiers in Cognition 4 (2013): Art. 342, 1–28. Brand, Matthias, Carsten Eggers, Nadine Reinhold, Esther Fujiwara, Josef Kessler, Wolf-Dieter Heiss, and Hans J. Markowitsch. “Functional brain imaging in fourteen patients with dissociative amnesia reveals right inferolateral prefrontal hypometabolism.” Psychiatry Research: Neuro­ imaging Section 174 (2009): 32–39. Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studien über Hysterie. Wien: Deuticke, 1895. Cabeza, Roberto, and Peggy St Jacques. “Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory.” Trends in Neurosciences 11.5 (2007): 219–227. Conway, Martin A., Chris J. Moulin, and Clare J. Rathbone. “Autobiographical memory and amnesia: using conceptual knowledge to ground the self.” Neurocase 15.5 (2009): 405–418. Corkin, Suzanne, Brenda Milner, and Hans-Lukas Teuber. “Further analysis of the hippocampal amnesic syndrome: Fourteen year follow-up study of H. M.” Neuropsychologia 6 (1968): 215–234. Corkin, Suzanne. “What’s new with the amnesic patient H. M.?” Neuroscience 3 (2002): 153–160. Dercum, Francis X. “The thalamus in the physiology and pathology of the mind.” AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 14 (1925): 289–302. Engelen, Eva-Maria, Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, Marko Tscherepanow, and Harald Welzer. “Gedächtnis und Erinnerung.” Handbuch Kognitionswissenschaften. Ed. Achim Stephan and Stefan Walter. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013. 289–303. Fink, Gereon R., Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, Mechthild Reinkemeier, Thomas Bruckbauer, Josef Kessler, and Wolf-Dieter Heiss. “Cerebral representation of one’s own past: neural networks involved in autobiographical memory.” Journal of Neuroscience 16 (1996): 4275–4282. Gangi, Cynthia E., and Stanley B. Klein. “The multiplicity of self: neuropsychological evidence and its implications for the self as a construct in psychological research.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1191 (2010): 1–15. Grünthal, Ernst. “Über das klinische Bild nach umschriebenem beiderseitigem Ausfall der Ammons­ hornrinde. Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Funktion des Ammonshorns.” Monatsschrift für ­Psychiatrie und Neurologie 113 (1947): 1–16.

28 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Ingvar, David H. “Memory of the future: an essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness.” Human Neurobiology 4.3 (1985): 127–136. Janet, Pierre. État mental des hystériques. Paris: Rueff, 1894. Kroll, Neal, Robert Knight, Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, and Detlev Y. von Cramon. “Retrieval of old memories – the temporo-frontal hypothesis.” Brain 120 (1997): 1377–1399. Kühnel, Sina, Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, Markus Mertens, and Friedrich G. Woermann. “Involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex during correct and false recognitions of visual stimuli. Implications for eyewitness decisions on an fMRI study using a film paradigm.” Brain Imaging and Behavior 2 (2008): 163–176. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. Intellectual functions and the brain. Toronto: Hogrefe & Huber, 1992. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. “Repressed memories.” Memory, consciousness, and the brain: The Tallinn conference. Ed. Endel Tulving. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2000. 319–330. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. “Functional retrograde amnesia – mnestic block syndrome.” Cortex 38 (2002): 651–654. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. “Psychogenic amnesia.” NeuroImage 20 (2003): 132–138. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim. “Memory and self – neuroscientific landscapes”. ISRN Neuroscience (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/176027 (11 July 2018). Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, Uwe Schuri, and Detlev Y. von Cramon. “Mnestic performance profile of a bilateral diencephalic infarct patient with preserved intelligence and severe amnesic disturbances.” Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 15 (1993): 627–652. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, Gereon R. Fink, Angelika Thöne, Josef Kessler, and Wolf-Dieter Heiss. “Persistent psychogenic amnesia with a PET-proven organic basis.” Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 2 (1997): 135–158. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Endel Tulving. “Episodic and declarative memory: Role of the hippocampus.” Hippocampus 8 (1998): 198–204. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, Alexander Thiel, Mechthild Reinkemeier, Josef Kessler, Adem Koyuncu, and Wolf-Dieter Heiss. “Right amygdalar and temporofrontal activation during autobiographic, but not during fictitious memory retrieval.” Behavioural Neurology 12 (2000): 181–190. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Nadine Reinhold. “Retrograde episodic memory and emotion: a perspective from patients with dissociative amnesia.” Neuropsychologia 47 (2009): 2197–2206. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Sabine Bosutzky. “Entwicklung und Störungen des menschlichen Bewusstseins aus neurowissenschaftlicher Sicht.” Bewusstsein und Ich. Ed. Freie Akademie. Neu-Isenburg: Lenz Verlag, 2010. 19–40. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Angelica Staniloiu. “Amnesic disorders.” Lancet 380.9851 (2012): 1429–1440. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Angelica Staniloiu. “The impairment of recollection in functional amnesic states.” Cortex 49.6 (2013): 1494–1510. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Harald Welzer. The development of autobiographical memory. Hove: Psychology Press, 2010. Milner, Brenda, and William B. Scoville. “Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 20 (1957): 11–21. Ribot, Theodule. Diseases of memory. New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1882. Risius, Uda-Mareike, Angelica Staniloiu, Martina Piefke, Stefan Maderwald, Frank P. Schulte, ­Matthias Brand, and Hans-Joachim Markowitsch. “Retrieval, monitoring, and control processes: a 7 tesla FMRI approach to memory accuracy.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1–21. Squire, Larry R. “The legacy of patient H. M. for neuroscience.” Neuron 61 (2009): 6–9. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Archibald Constable & Comp, 1897.

1.2 Brain Research and Neuroscience 

 29

Thompson, Donald M., and Endel Tulving. “Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory.” Psychological Review 80.5 (1973): 352–373. Tulving, Endel. “Episodic memory and autonoesis: uniquely human?” The missing link in cognition: evolution of self-knowing consciousness. Ed. Janet Metcalfe and Herbert S. Terrace. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 3–56. Tulving, Endel. Elements of episodic memory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Tulving, Endel. “Episodic and semantic memory”. Organization of memory. Ed. Donaldson Wayne and Endel Tulving. New York: Academic Press, 1972. 381–403. Tulving, Endel. “Episodic memory: From mind to brain.” Annual Reviews of Psychology 53 (2002): 1–25.

Further Reading Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Harald Welzer. The development of autobiographical memory. Hove: Psychology Press, 2010. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Angelica Staniloiu. “Functional (dissociative) retrograde amnesia.” Handbook of clinical neurology Vol. CXXIX: Functional neurological disorders. Eds. Mark M. Hallett, Jon Stone and Alan Carson. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2016. 419–445. Markowitsch, Hans-Joachim, and Angelica Staniloiu. “History of memory.” Oxford handbook of the history of clinical neuropsychology. Eds. William Barr and Linus A. Bielauskas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Nilsson, Lars-Göran, and Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, eds. Cognitive neuroscience of memory. Göttingen: Hogrefe, 1999. Röttger-Rössler, Birgit, and Hans-Joachim Markowitsch, eds. Emotions as biocultural processes. New York: Springer, 2008. Staniloiu, Angelica, and Hans J. Markowitsch. “Dissociative amnesia.” Lancet Psychiatry 1 (2014): 226–241. Staniloiu, Angelica, and Hans J. Markowitsch. “Amnesia, psychogenic.” International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences Vol. 1. Ed. James D. Wright Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2nd ed. 2015. 651–658.

30 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

1.3 Cultural Studies Michaela Holdenried

In the last fifty years in the Anglo-American sphere, Cultural Studies have obtained validity as a framework for a variety of research approaches or have been critically challenged, whereas in Germany ‘Kulturwissenschaften’, as a platform for the cul­ tural turn in the humanities, have become anchored only since the 1990s. The cur­ rents in German academe opposing the main stream in ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ are apparent, and in comparison to the critical attacks on Cultural Studies, play them­ selves out merely as discussions about problem solving strategies in the humanities. From the beginning they were closely related to the process of re-organizing the uni­ versity, whereas Cultural Studies were seen more as answers to social transgression and less as an exclusively academic movement (Lindner 2000). Their social origins were a crisis of English society in the form of youth rebellion, the challenging of ‘high culture’ of an elite and the appreciation in value of sub- and popular cultural milieus. The imaginably wider concept of culture as a whole way of life was aimed at the coequality of cultural products from all walks of life. Concrete expressions and practices of everyday life came into analytical focus. Mass culture and media usage played a further important role. Methodically, in privileging participant observation – Gross­ berg calling it “a sense of intervention and even […] policy” (Grossberg 1999, 29) –, concepts were sourced from ethnology (or anthropology in American terminology). In addition, cultural semiotics displaced established hermeneutic practices. Since their foundation, Cultural Studies were exposed to attacks (see the Alan Sokal scandal of faking the style of writing in Cultural Studies), not only in respect of an assumed methodical vagueness, but in particular with regard to the political interventionism as a critique of power, as Grossberg observes. For ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ Aleida Assmann highlights the effective change not only in respect of theoretical requirements, but also in respect of an enormous boost in prestige for the humanities: “As we move from Geisteswissenschaften to Kultur­ wissenschaften, all the old problems seem suddenly to have disappeared. The per­ petual crisis is replaced by a new and vigorous self-image of Kulturwissenschaften” (Assmann 1999, 89). Both ‘Cultural Studies’ and ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ are central concepts and cate­ gories of orientation for a variety of developments, which have only vaguely (and often critically) been described by the term ‘culturalism’ – meaning a complete revision of culture connected to ‘high culture’ in a humanistic sense, and which nowadays claims validity in its plural form of ‘cultures’. Culture consequently contains the entirety of human practices in everyday life as well as in science and art. Cultural products are results of symbolic allocations of meaning, of values and achievements affecting society partially or in its entirety (sub-cultures, specific cultural milieus). In defining culture, attached more narrowly to a philological context, as “einen symbolischen https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-004

1.3 Cultural Studies 

 31

oder textuellen Zusammenhang […], ein Textuniversum, in welchem sich einzelne kulturelle Momente, als Texte, immer nur durch ihre Kontexte, bzw. eine Fülle von Kontexten erschließen” [‘a symbolic or textual connectedness […], a textual universe where individual cultural moments, as texts, reveal more and more context through their contexts’] (Böhme and Scherpe 1996, 15), widening this concept of culture explic­ itly invites re-contextualizations. In recent years cultural semiotics not only became a fruitful approach for the regeneration of philological disciplines, but turned out to be the decisive keyword for a forced beginning of self-reflection in respect of the political culture of the West and its traditions. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), founded in 1964 in Birming­ ham, anchored Cultural Studies institutionally and introduced in Great Britain and the USA a revision of the concept of culture, which in turn addressed concrete prac­ tices and forms of living. Cultural Studies on the other hand were from the beginning understood as answers to social transgression and less so as an exclusively academic movement (Lindner 2000). In going back to William Labov, however, they introduced aspects of difference depriving hierarchical valuations of their foundation. In distancing itself from the hermetic reading practices of close reading (in New Criticism) cultural criticism or materialism (Raymond Williams) implemented an interpretive turn. Cultural semiotics, exceeding the classical canon, became the most important instrument for cultural interpretations. The concept of culture was kept very wide and was closely connected to an investigation of those power structures, which control the everyday life of the individual (as consumer). Cultural Studies have always been addressing the possibilities of resistance and subversion, as Michel de Certeau (1984), for instance, stresses in The Practice of Everyday Life. Cultural Studies are methodically not only inter- but actually anti-disciplinarily positioned, as promi­ nent representatives such as Grossberg and others have conceded. As an interpret­ive approach  – in respect of texts as well as non-discursive reality  – constructivism is favoured and as such the idea of the constructedness of all culture. As „Differenzwis­ senschaften“ [‘sciences of difference’], to use Lindner’s (2000, 94) terminological sug­ gestion, Cultural Studies are theoretically and methodologically close to poststructur­ alism, conjuncturalism, discourse theory and postmodernism. In the guise of various theoretical models such as culture as text, culture as communication, culture as differ­ ence, culture in socio-political spaces, culture in institutions and ‘discourse and every­ day life’, Cultural Studies are attempting to respond to the challenges and problems of globalization and modernization (Grossberg 1999). Cultural Studies therefore operate globally as well as locally. Next to constructivism as a leading paradigm it is contex­ tualism, detailed by Grossberg (1999) as a further significant paradigm for cultural analysis. Contextualism can be understood as battle for meaning, which is fought with varying alliances. Representatives of Cultural Studies are convinced that we are wit­ nessing an encompassing transformation process of global capitalism, which will not only change everyday life but will effect identity politics – in which culture will play an important role as an integrative as much as a resistant element of globalization.

32 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

A closeness to anthropology was given from the beginning, but became fruitful only when ethnography itself became aware of its share in constructivism. In a sort of co-emergence cultural anthropology came into being, making further trend-setting forays since opening its methodological horizon to transfer concepts of understanding the foreign into an empathy independent decoding system. The disciplinary conver­ gence is very critically looked upon by anthropology as a discipline, characterized by Appadurai as a “war of the disciplines“ (Lindner 2000, 85). Cultural Studies largely limiting themselves to their own ‘participatingly observed’ society, is no longer reassuring for ethnology’s claim, since prominent representa­ tives of the discipline are themselves turning to researching their own culture (see, for instance, Marc Augé in France who with innovative methods combines field obser­ vation and autofiction to form an ethnographical amalgam, see his Journal d’un SDF [No Fixed Abode: Ethnofiction (2011)]). It has repeatedly been pointed out that identity politics of Cultural Studies as context of the autobiographical are already identified in their founding acts: the ‘sociological autobiography’ as a genre is believed to have been established by the ‘culturalists’ Richard Hoggart or Stuart Hall (Genin 2010, 12). In Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), one of the founding texts – an autobiographi­ cal reflexive text about the path from worker’s to academic milieu –, it can be seen how for a group of the scholarship boys it became the generation theme (Lindner 2000, 27, with reference to Mannheim’s generation theory). We are dealing here with para­ digmatic autobiographies with topics that were virulent in the society at large: lived experience, self improvement, but also the ‘in-between’ of the scientist coming from a foreign cultural context like Stuart Hall who hailed from the Caribbean. Members of the scholarboy generation experienced popular vs. high-brow culture in their own biography at the time as a gap as well as an element connecting them to like-minded people within the peer group. There is a clear homology between research topic and individual. Cultural Studies, in their autobiographical founding documents, present them­ selves as an empirical science which generically finds expression in autobiography. This license for self-thematization (Lindner 2000, 87) marks the transition to the aca­ demic legitimization of the autobiographical and at times the nobilitation of personal experience as research field. The closeness to theoretical approaches such as Postco­ lonial Studies contains in this field of empirical knowledge also an autobiographical element. ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ in the German context represent a meta level of the humanities’ self-reflection and re-organization, thereby regulating the confines of a discipline (Fauser 2003, 9) with inter- and transdisciplinary claim, multiperspectival theoretical, in particular text- and media-analytical grasp. With this novel yet based on the traditional German paradigm, the humanities and social sciences have tried to newly orientate themselves since the 1990s after a long crisis period of legitimacy challenges. The so-called Denkschrift [‘memorandum’] of Wolfgang Frühwald (1991), with contributions by Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Robert Jauß, Jürgen Mittelstraß, in

1.3 Cultural Studies 

 33

respect of positioning the humanities in the new context of globalization, intermedial interconnectedness and international migrations, made for good publicity. Frühwald and his combatants postulated an ‘orientation form’ of those things their disciplines were dealing with, and since those were at all times connected to a ‘cultural form’, per analogiam the humanities and social sciences had to be afforded an orientation form. Orientational knowledge was of central importance because views of the world and interpretive approaches had become more and more particular, the arbitrariness of a plurality of methods and the lack of a ‘meta-science’ had led to a disconcerting ‘anything goes’. Culture became the leading paradigm, the umbrella term for knowledge, research and teaching fields, fragmented into particularisms. Culture, Mittelstraß defined, was “der Inbegriff aller menschlichen Arbeit und Lebensformen” [‘essentially all human labour and forms of living’] (Frühwald et al. 1991, 40), constituting a ‘cultural entity’ – distancing it from technology, economy and politics – and the non-circumventable point of reference of all activities in the humanities. The memorandum explicitly demanded a ‘historical anthropology’ as well as “eine Hermeneutik interkultureller Kommunikation” [‘a hermeneutics of intercultural communication’] (Frühwald et al. 1991, 71). Both thereby were accorded the status of guidelines, which were meant to organize the necessary paradigm shift under the governing competence of ‘humani­ ties as cultural sciences’. It is historically interesting to note that these debates at the end of the last century refer back to analogous debates of a century before, where Wilhelm Dilthey (in the tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher) claimed for hermeneu­ tics, as instrument of the humanities, a similar guideline principle when the booming natural sciences first had decidedly made their claims for an overall scientific priority. Aleida Assmann, however, pointed out that hermeneutics “as a unified methodol­ ogy for the humanities” further widened “the gulf between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften” (Assmann 1999, 87). Yet, ‘self-knowledge’ had always, analogous to Cultural Studies, been part of the hermeneutical tradition as the foun­ ding acts of self-reflective humanities and could therefore be accessed in the 1990s (as Alois Wierlacher in his inauguration of intercultural German Studies earlier had explicitly revived it). The reorganization of the research landscape, subsequent to the memorandum, finally turned German Studies away from pure textual science as practiced after the restart of research in German studies in the 1950s by Emil Staiger and others, but then very soon through the installation of the paradigm ‘society’ became riddled with holes and dissolved. With the programmatic claim to understand ‘culture as text’ Doris Bachmann-Medick in the 1990s, brought this change, beginning decades earlier, to a point and pleaded, through the reception of the theoretical discussion around James Clifford in America, for an extension of the concept of culture. The category ‘alter­ ity’ – as the foreign, the other, an inclusion in this country (Germany) as well with a long tradition, contemplating the romantic philosophy and the ‘otherness of reason’

34 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

the ‘dark side of rationality’ – was referred to the relationship to foreign cultures and made its touchstone.

Differences and Convergences Just like Cultural Studies, ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ as well were subjected to critical challenges: the cultural turn seemed to open the door for methodological arbitrari­ ness. Their proponents, however, saw the pluralism of methods and replacing ‘spirit’ with the paradigm ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’ as an advantage in approaching not only texts in a more flexible manner. Canon revisions were some of the results of a plu­ ralistic understanding of culture/s. By way of contrapuntal reading (Edward Said), inspired by Postcolonial Studies or more generally, re-reading, texts were newly con­ textualized as, for example, the postcolonial re-readings of bourgeois realism show. Further results are the extension of research subjects into society as a whole, for which ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ claim expert status insofar as they “claim to possess a special competence in symbolic realities” (Assmann 1999, 91). In this turn towards everyday culture – which the Tübingen Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (empirical cul­ tural science) under Hermann Bausinger had already institutionally entrenched in the 1980s – a point of contact can be seen with Cultural Studies; others are: the revalu­ ation of products of pop culture as well as the overall turn to (mass) media. Next to Clifford Geertz and the Writing Culture-theoreticians (James Clifford et al.), Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism had an influence, where the privileging of high culture too was abolished in favour of everyday life documents. A more detailed analysis of both cultural scientific directions could probably show that mutual influences are stronger than commonly noted (via the exiling of the Aby Warburg-school and library and its renaissance in the German ‘Kulturwissenschaf­ ten’ since the 1980s, critical theory, Walter Benjamin and his reception for instance through Homi K. Bhaba and the references to cultural semiotics among others). Such interdependencies would have to be considered, in distinction from emphasizing the differences as Aleida Assmann does in respect of the ‘apolitical stance’ of ‘Kulturwis­ senschaften’: While American and British cultural studies redefine culture in such a way as ‘to provide ways of thinking, strategies for survival and resources for the marginalized’ German Kulturwissen­ schaften seem to do the very opposite […]. Their insistence on signs and symbols, media and memory constitute an approach to a theory of culture that cannot immediately serve as a matrix for political action (Assmann 1999, 91).

1.3 Cultural Studies 

 35

Autobiography/Autofiction Shared principles such as the concept of the constructedness of culture/s and the contextualism have in various fields, Gender Studies to name but one, generated par­ tially fundamental revisions. Gender, following the work of Judith Butler (and Thomas Lacqueur) is no longer seen as a biological denotation but a cultural construct. Auto­ biographical experience literature was here on a sub-structural level, as effective as in respect of revising the idea of a so to speak naturalized gender relationship (see the biographies of women scholars in the 18th century, like Friderika Baldinger et al.). Identity politics play also a role in the field of literary anthropology, broadened by a cultural science approach: Helmut Pfotenhauer (1987) in this regard had before the cultural turn already provided decisive impulses for a re-reading of historical autobi­ ography. The autobiography, for a long time already, is deemed to be the anthropolog­ ical project par excellence of the modern era, where subjectivity is tested as a project. The non-succeeding, irrational, mentally foreign, as part of a teleological concept of holism have, in Cultural Studies/‘Kulturwissenschaften’ through research directions such as literary anthropology, the phenomenological xenology according to Bernhard Waldenfels (‘topography of the foreign’), but also through invididual studies such as Kristeva’s on interdependence and concept of self, as a matter of course, become part of the epistemological inventory. Essentialist models of identity have, as a result of poststructuralist discourse ana­ lysis, been abandoned. The basic assumption that the subject is constituted through language is scientific consensus since Lacan and Foucault. Even more so since the neurosciences are reinforcing the constructivist hypothesis formation. Central to ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ are key concepts which are directly connected to theoretical issues of autobiography. The field of memory research, which Aleida and Jan Assmann initiated in an interdisciplinary way, is an essential part. The authorita­ tive concepts of ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ remembering are not theoretically gen­ erated products but instead, incorporation and development of in particular Maurice Halbwachs’ theory in respect of collective memory. There is surprisingly little research on function and form of literary remembering, despite the seemingly apparent relationship between remembering and autobiographical narration. The increase in memory research has only recently taken autobiography into account. For a long time it had been a special research subject, where traditions of remembering techniques, metaphorical concepts and models and their adaptation in respect of media develop­ ments and integrating recent knowledge of brain research/neurophysiology ranked higher. While autobiographical theory had maintained that stylization was one of the essential elements of generating/narrating the self, now ‘constructivity’ became the main attribute: supposing that identity is constructed mainly through remembering, itself a construction unable to procure an ‘original’, then that would support the sup­ positions of systems theory and constructivism in respect of identity as ‘autopoiesis’ and ‘self-generation’ (Niklas Luhmann). Memory research in ‘Kulturwissenschaf­

36 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

ten’ replaced the classical storage imagery with time oriented concepts of memory. ‘Storage’ as locatable container of memory is replaced by fleeting models such as for instance ‘trace’. Media influences on remembering are also leading to a replacement of storage models by technoid analogies. Even the constructivist approach, however, admits the activation of a permanent structure in complex cognitive connections (Schmidt 1993, 381) in remembering. In this perspective, remembering can be under­ stood as neuronal connectivity or as digital wiring. The hypothetical character is shared by all models (in replacing Plato’s wax tablet or the depot with the respective modern medial equivalent). Changed concepts of memory functions and ways of remembering have created new literary remembering techniques, as they are, for instance, already recognizable in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (1976) [Patterns of Childhood] or in Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt’s continuous autobiographical project (up to La traversée des fleuves [1999]). As a result, aspects of construction come to the fore in autobiographical writing and less the mnemotechnically oriented approach. What remembering uncov­ ers (or thus constructs) is never ‘authentic’ in the sense of recovering or reproducing past memories (as residues of facts of life, ‘real life’). It can only in (pathological) borderline cases be exposed as ‘false memory’ as in the case of Binjamin Wilkomir­ ski’s ‘memories’ (Wilkomirski had in his ‘autobiography’ claimed to be a holocaust survivor. His exposure sparked a comprehensive false-memory-debate). Disregarding such presumptions of someone else’s curriculum vitae (though by the way very much part of the history of autobiography) it is, however, the rule that the narrated memory sequences are selected according to their – actual or imagined – significance for the individual genesis. Insofar, in congruence with recent theoretical approaches (which resonate with the autobiographical praxis) autobiographical studies are still able to connect memorial segments to form a ‘meaningful’ structure, no matter how ‘con­ structive’ it may be. In the transition from individual remembering to autobiographical writing as a family history (see the boom in autobiographical family novels since 2005), in pro­ jects like Walter Kempowski’s Echolot [‘Echo Sounding’] (1993), the convergences of ‘social practice’ in ‘Cultural Studies’ and ‘cultural memory’ in ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ are particularly evident in collective forms of preservation like the diary archive in Emmendingen (Germany) and in the auto/biography as a publishing mass phenom­ enon. It is not too far fetched to accord autobiography in ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ ‘meth­ odological value’ per se, as Genin (2010) does and suggests in respect of Stuart Hall’s autobiographical reflections. In the field of interculturality, in particular in respect of intercultural autobiography, but also of the autobiographical basic structures of travelogues, ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ approaches can propose solutions concerning autobiographical theory desiderata. Translation: Walter Köppe

1.3 Cultural Studies 

 37

Works Cited Assmann, Aleida. “Cultural Studies and Historical Memories.” The Contemporary Study of Culture. Ed. Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Verkehr and Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften. Wien: Turia + Kant, 1999. 85–99. Augé, Marc. Journal d’un SDF. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011. Baldinger, Friderika. Lebensbeschreibung von Friderika Baldinger von ihr selbst verfaßt. Herausgegeben und mit einer Vorrede begleitet von Sophie, Wittwe von la Roche. Offenbach: Weiß und Brede, 1791. Böhme, Hartmut, and Klaus Scherpe. “Zur Einführung.” Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften. Positionen, Theorien, Modelle. Ed. Hartmut Böhme and Klaus Scherpe. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996. 7–24. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Fauser, Markus. Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch­ gesellschaft, 2003. Frühwald, Wolfgang, Hans R. Jauß, and Reinhart Koselleck. Geisteswissenschaften heute. Eine Denkschrift. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Genin, Christophe. “L’autobiographie dans les études culturelles: Parler de soi a-t-il une valeur méthodologique?” Filozofski vestnik XXXI.2 (2010): 10–25. Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur. La traversée des fleuves. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Globalization and the ‘Economization’ of Cultural Studies.” The Contemporary Study of Culture. Ed. Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Verkehr and Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften. Wien: Turia + Kant, 1999. 23– 46. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. Aspects of Working-Class Life, With Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Lindner, Rolf. Die Stunde der Cultural Studies. Wien: Universitätsverlag, 2000. Pfotenhauer, Helmut. Literarische Anthropologie: Selbstbiographien und ihre Geschichte – am Leitfaden des Leibes. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987. Schmidt, Siegfried J. “Gedächtnis – Erzählen – Identität.” Mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erinnerung. Ed. Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1993. 378–398. Wolf, Christa. Kindheitsmuster (1976). Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2007 [Patterns of Childhood. Trans. Hedwig Rappolt and Ursule Molinaro. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984].

Further Reading Bachmann-Medick, Doris, ed. Kultur als Text. Die anthropologische Wende in der Literaturwissenschaft. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1996. Böhme, Hartmut, Peter Matussek, and Lothar Müller, eds. Orientierung Kulturwissenschaft. Was sie kann, was sie will. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2000. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Hahn, Barbara, ed. Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Von Lou Andreas-Salomé bis Hannah Arendt. München: Beck, 1994. Halbwachs, Maurice. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950.

38 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Hofmann, Martin Ludwig, Tobias F. Korta, and Sibylle Niekisch, eds. Culture Club. Klassiker der Kulturtheorie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. Kittler, Friedrich. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft. München: Fink, 2000. Neumann, Gerhard, and Sigrid Weigel, eds. Lesbarkeit der Kultur. Literaturwissenschaft zwischen Kulturtechnik und Ethnographie. München: Fink, 2000.

1.4 Deconstruction Linda Anderson

The term ‘deconstruction’ originated with, and is generally associated with, the writ­ ings of the French philosopher and theorist, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Derrida uses the term ‘deconstruction’ in De la Grammatologie (1967) [Of Grammatology (1976)] first of all in a fairly elliptical way to question the idea of truth as a presence – as simply there – and as existing prior to linguistic signs; a belief Derrida termed “logo­ centrisme” [“logocentrism”] (Derrida 1967, 11 [1976, 11]). Instead Derrida proposes that what is required is “la dé-sédimentation, la dé-construction de toutes les significa­ tions qui ont leur source dans celle de logos” [“the de-sedimentation, the de-con­ struction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos”] (Derrida 1967, 21 [1976, 10]), a process he opposes to straightforward “démolition” [“demo­ lition”] (Derrida 1967, 21 [1976, 10]). The distinction Derrida makes is an important one, often lost in popular versions of his thinking. Whilst Derrida was interested in questioning what is deemed obvious or given in our systems of meaning, it was not in order to destroy in a nihilistic way but rather to reveal and understand how these systems came into being in the first place, and the contradictions already inherent in them. Derrida’s approach is not aimed at setting up deconstruction as a new theory or establishing a superior vantage point of knowledge but at uncovering the instability already at work, despite appearances, within every text, and following its conditions of existence, including inevitably, what it has had to repress or hide to become itself. He therefore always begins with a particular context or scene of reading (Royle 2003, 61), writing in response to, in or in the margins of other texts. According to Barbara Johnson, Derrida is “first and foremost, a reader, a reader who constantly reflects on and transforms the very nature of the act of reading” (Johnson 1981, x). In De la Grammatologie Derrida moves through key moments in the history of logocentrism, including the long-standing philosophic tradition of Aristotle, who laid down the belief that a sign is always the representation of some pre-existing idea or experience. In Christian theology the sign refers to a transcendental realm that guarantees meaning: “La face intelligible du signe reste tournée du côté du verbe et de la face de Dieu” [“The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God”] (Derrida 1967, 25 [1976, 13]). Derrida goes on to give Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, in particular his Les Confessions (1782–1789) [Confessions] a key role in the development of modern logocentrism, seeing his writing as simply exchanging the self-presence of the subject for the presence of God. His discussion of Rousseau in De La Grammatologie, though not addressing autobiography specifically, nevertheless offers a very important intervention into theories of autobiography, providing a major critique of ‘Romantic’ autobiography and Rousseau’s assertion in Les Confessions that he can both access an authentic self which is ‘true to nature’ and make himself transparent to the reader: “Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple et dont https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-005

40 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

l’exécution n’aura point d’imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un home dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet home ce sera moi” [“My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself”] (Rousseau 2011, 3 [1953, 17]). Derrida’s discussion of Rousseau puts under scrutiny both the essentialist concept of the self that seems to underpin Rousseau’s work and the belief in what it can lin­ guistically refer to. According to Rousseau, he turns to writing as a way of restoring a presence that he can never adequately express through speech, where he feels ‘at a disadvantage’. He thus hides himself and writes in order to re-appropriate a presence within speech that never really existed for him. Writing is added to speech – it is a supplement – a sort of “ruse […] artificieuse pour rendre la parole présente lorsqu’elle est en verité absente” [“artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent”] (Derrida 1967, 207 [1976, 144]). However, the word supplement, Derrida points out, has in effect two meanings that coalesce, and cannot really be separated: supple­ ment carries the sense of both surplus and substitute. Whilst Rousseau may consider writing as adding to nature, already thought of as plenitude or presence, it, in effect, substitutes for its absence; it fills a void. As Derrida says, writing is “suppléant et vicaire” [“compensatory and vicarious”], and, whilst it seems to provide the satis­ faction of presence, it does so “par signe et procuration” [“through sign and proxy”]: “Mais le supplément supplée. Il ne s’ajoute que rem-placer. Il intervient ou s’insinue à la place de; s’il comble, c’est comme on comble unvide” [“It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as one fills a void”] (Derrida 1967, 208 [1976, 145]). Whilst Rousseau’s text seems to gesture to what lies behind it, the real lives beyond and behind the limits of the text, ultimately, according to Derrida, “il n’y a jamais eu que de l’écriture” [“there has never been anything but writing”]; there has never been anything but “supplements, des significations substitutives” [“supplements, substi­ tutive significations”] (Derrida 1967, 228 [1976, 159]). The recognition that the subject requires language in order to constitute itself as a subject – in other words the deconstruction of the humanist subject of autobiography who can refer to a pre-existing self – may seem to pose an impossible dilemma for autobiography as a genre. As Robert Smith has written: To represent itself in order to constitute itself, the autobiographical subject needs a means of rep­ resentation, a language in short. And as soon as language becomes an issue for autobiographical theory, any last footing ‘the autobiographical subject’ may have had gives way (Smith 1995, 58).

The ‘I’ that seems to refer to an authorial signified, becomes rather an illusion of self-presence; ‘I’ becomes a position within language, a linguistic figure or trope. However, it would be wrong to assume that deconstruction is thus simply at odds with autobiography. As Derrida demonstrates throughout his complex and varied oeuvre, autobiography can come back as a phantom – or as, what Smith calls “an irritant” (Smith 1995, 5) – troubling the boundary between the life and the work, and

1.4 Deconstruction 

 41

calling into question the systematic coherence of philosophic or rational discourse. There remains a “singularity” in discourse that cannot be accounted for according to a general law: “It becomes a general fact about rationality that it can never be general enough” but has to form a contract with a sort of “‘low’ specificity”, with autobiogra­ phy and its “discreditable status” (Smith 1995, 5). Yet, paradoxically, it is also the case for Derrida that if any writing were truly unique or singular it would not be available to be read, and thus it always “entails a double-bind”. The singular is always bound up with the general and has to participate in genre, context, and the conceptually general dimension of meaning (Royle 2003, 120). Accordingly, for Derrida, though it is commonly interpreted as one’s own mark and what belongs to the subject alone, there is no absolutely singular ‘I’, there is no writing that one can make absolutely one’s own. “I am not the proprietor of my ‘I’”, Derrida has said and there is always a sense for him in which one can only write in terms of what has already been written, even as one necessarily strives for and attains a certain idiom of one’s own (Derrida 2001, 85). Derrida has often written in response to particular occasions: the death of friends, a conference or an interpretation of a philosophical text. This is not accidental but key to his understanding of how he writes ‘Jacques Derrida’ through a process of dis­ placement and transference on to someone else. For him “there is always someone else”, even in the most private autobiography, even if that other remains unnamed. Rather than think, therefore, of a self-identical subject, the subject becomes a place of division. The experience of the ‘I’ would not be possible without an Other, a doubling or repetition, which haunts it, and through which it becomes more than an instant/ instance. Writing about Nietzsche’s autobiographical text, Ecce Homo (1899), Derrida (1982, 72) takes Nietzsche’s statement  – “Und so erzähle ich mir mein Leben” [“I am now going to tell myself the story of my life”] (Nietzsche 2007, 13 [1927, 7]) – and demonstrates how ‘I’ constitutes itself through a return; the subject becomes himself through the text he has written in an endlessly repeated gesture of affirmation. More­ over within this structure of return difference intervenes, a temporality, dividing the ‘I’ who speaks from ‘myself’ to whom my life is told. The ‘I’ is always a place of self-di­ vision, an addressor and an addressee. For Derrida the ear that hears a text is the ear of the other, for the message ‘I’ send must pass through the labyrinthine passages of the ear to be heard, risking not being heard or being heard differently, even if the ear belongs to ‘myself’. A delay or detour is always involved in communication and accordingly the signature never becomes effective at the time it is apparently signed but later, when the other, with ears to hear it, has understood and deciphered it. The time of autobiography is thus strangely dislocated and is not the time of life or the time of writing that we think it is. For Derrida a text is “signé que par l’autre beaucoup plus tard” [“signed only much later by the other”] and is always belated (Derrida 1982, 72 [1988, 51]). In 1993, Derrida co-authored a text called “Circumfession” with the critic G ­ eoffrey Bennington. Whilst Bennington contributes a scholarly and critical account of ­Derrida’s work that dominates the page, Derrida’s text runs along the bottom of the

42 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

page, as if in the margins. Though this is one of the most autobiographical texts that Derrida wrote, being in part a response to his mother’s dying and death, it is also a discussion of St Augustine’s Confessiones [Confessions], and Augustine’s own relation to his mother. “Circumfession” enacts the way there is no singular text of the self but rather a multiplicity of discourses, none of which is solely one’s own. Derrida plays out a kind of duel with Bennington about who ‘owns’ the name ‘Derrida’, disrupt­ ing Bennington’s attempts at mastery with a fragmented, tormented text of his own. However, Derrida also turns to circumcision, the Jewish ritual in which the foreskin of the male child is cut off shortly after birth, as a figure or trope in this text for the ‘wound’ of singularity. The ritual of circumcision is at once a mark or sign enacted on the body, and a ceremony of naming. It unites the singular body with the social and the iterative, through a wound, a trauma. This wound is not remembered – Derrida is not trying to recall the forgotten experience of circumcision  – but is transferred onto his body as a trace. As such is it like writing, carrying the marks or traces of an origin it cannot represent but only endlessly repeat. The mother’s role within the ceremony of circumcision is important to Derrida, for whilst the mother offers up the son’s body for the sake of the name, she also weeps for him and experiences a pain not recognised within the social ritual. His own pain recalls her inexpressible pain, as he tries to approach her dying in his own writing and encounters the problem that trying to speak to her, he inevitably speaks in her place. His text then encounters its own impossibility in its relation to his mother; at once breached by what it cannot represent, neither can it close in on what is outside it. In his Mémoires d’Aveugle (1990) [Memoirs of the Blind (1993)] Derrida describes the paradox of how, when language is spoken, it speaks to itself “cela veut dire de l’aveuglement. Il nous parle toujours de l’aveuglement qui le constitue” [“which is to say, from/of blindness. It always speaks to us from/of the blindness that constitutes it”] (Derrida 1990, 11 [1993b, 4]). According to Derrida, a self-portrait depends on a doubling or fold that makes representation possible. Consciousness cannot grasp itself. If absolute presence were possible there would be no need for representation. A self-portrait can only be produced with reference to another: “Comme les Mémoirs, l’Autoportrait paraît toujours dans la reverberation de plusieur voix” [“Like Memoirs, the self-Portrait always appears in the reverberation of several voices”] (Derrida 1990, 68 [1993b, 64]). It can exist only insofar as it is also blind to what it tries to see. Accord­ ing to Derrida it is a “simulacra ruineux” [“ruinous simulacrum”], a “fiction perfor­ mative” [“performative fiction”], seen only “au travers de l’aveuglement qu’elle produit comme sa vérité” [“through the blindness that it produces as its truth”] (Derrida 1990, 69 [1993b, 65]). Many critics have dissented from the way Derrida seems to privilege theoretical preoccupations over specific texts, generalizing about the subject and writing in a way that seems ultimately simply repetitive and that prevents the multiple different voices of autobiography from emerging in his writing. This has been particularly the case for those critics who have criticized the theoretical positioning of women

1.4 Deconstruction 

 43

in deconstruction, where her theoretical status, troubling boundaries and limits, yet gives her no voice of her own: “Women have always been exchanged in the service of men’s subjectivity. Derrida may simply be offering a new twist to an old theme: he exchanges women in the service of the deconstruction of men’s subjectivity” (Feder and Zakin 1997, 41). Yet there is another view that would see Derrida as having made a major contribution to the development of a feminism that instead of being allied to a pre-given goal, such as legal and civil equality, is “committed to the full elaboration of difference and its uncontrollable and uncontainable movements of differentiation or becoming” (Grosz 2005, 92). It would certainly also be wrong to underestimate the impact of deconstruction on the critical understanding of autobiography since the 1970s, even if it is as a point of controversy and argument. Deconstruction needs to be reckoned with in critical accounts of autobiography. Derrida himself was critically engaged with autobiography throughout his work, even though he disclaimed it as a genre in any straightforward way. Asked, towards the end of his life, what the passion was that drove him, Derrida suggested with characteristic equivocation that it was autobiography or that rather “‘autobiography’ is perhaps the least inadequate name, because it remains for me the most enigmatic, the most open, even today” (Attridge 1992, 34).

Works Cited Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2011. Attridge, Derek. “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 1992. 33–75. Derrrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967 [Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976]. Derrrida, Jacques. L’oreille de l’autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions: Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida. Montréal: VLB Èditeur, 1982 [The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussion with Jacques Derrida. Ed. Christie McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avitall Ronell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988]. Derrrida, Jacques. “Circumfession.” Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 3–315 (Derrida 1993a). Derrrida, Jacques. Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990 [Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Oscale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 (Derrida 1993b)]. Derrrida, Jacques. “‘I have a Taste for a Secret.’” Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for a Secret. Trans. Giacomo Donis. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. 1–92. Feder, Ellen, and Emily Zakin. “Flirting with the Truth. Derrida’s Discourse with ‘Woman’ and Wenches.” Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman. Ed. Ellen Feder, Mary Rawlinson and Emily Zakin. London: Routledge, 1997. 21−51. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Derrida and Feminism: A Remembrance.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16.3 (2005): 88–94. Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction.” Jacques Derrida. Disseminations. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: The Athlone Press, 1981. vii–xxxiii.

44 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Royle, Nicholas. Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge, 2003. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions. Paris: Classique Garnier, 2011 [The Confessions of JeanJacques Rousseau. Trans. J.M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953]. Smith, Robert. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Further Reading Bradley, Arthur. Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Direk, Zeynep, and Leonard Lawlor, eds. A Companion to Derrida. Chichester: Wiley & Sons, 2014. Hill, Leslie. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kamuf, Peggy, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

1.5 Discourse Analysis Manfred Schneider

In what follows, ‘discourse analysis’ is treated as a method for understanding texts as it was elaborated by the French historian of science, Michel Foucault. ‘Discourse anal­ ysis’ in this sense must be distinguished from other theories and methods that bear the name ‘discourse analysis’ in Anglo-Saxon contexts. Foucault’s discourse analy­ sis guides a historical investigation of the effects of power which determine written documents and whose traces are recorded in them. The other discourse analysis, in contrast, is concerned primarily with linguistic usage at a given moment. Its field of inquiry are social practices of speaking and writing, in so far as they not only serve the purposes of communication but also simultaneously give rise to cultural or social realities. In contrast to the linguistic analysis of language systems, of syntax and semantics, or even of the history of language, discourse analysis within the meaning of Foucault’s concept focuses on the structure, referentiality and coherency of spoken languages (Brown and Yule 1983). Or if it takes a ‘political’ approach, discourse anal­ ysis observes how linguistic regulations constitute “activities, perspectives and iden­ tities” (Gee 1999, 4–5). Jørgensen and Phillips in this respect distinguish three areas: ‘discourse theory’, ‘critical discourse analysis’ and ‘discursive psychology’ (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). Whereas proponents of discourse theory, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, assume an explicitly critical political stance and treat the speak­ ing subject as a (powerless) agent within the discursive field (Laclau and Mouffe 2001), discursive psychology operates two-dimensionally, in that it conceptualizes agents as simultaneously subjects and objects of discourse, as “maîtres et esclaves” [‘masters and slaves’] of language (Barthes 1980, 20). Michel Foucault developed discourse analysis as a theory and history of the written works of scholarship and science. Foucault wrote a series of theoretical works about this method (Foucault 1969); yet he did not strictly adhere to his own methodo­ logical prescriptions. Foucault replaced the usual depictions of the history of science and ideas with an investigation of ‘discursive formations’. These are – simply put – the conditions and regulations of speech and knowledge beyond grammar. Such an inquiry is concerned with the question of what it is possible to say and know in a given period of time. The unity of discourse constitutes the ‘énoncé’ [‘statement’]. The analysis of discourse in terms of unities of statements enables the investigation of the presuppositions that have made possible what has been written and said in the past (and has made other statements impossible). With respect to autobiography, this means first of all that autobiographical state­ ments are not ascribed primarily to the authors themselves, that is, to such mental capacities as knowledge, consciousness, or education; rather, these statements are subjected to the fundamental question of how they came about. By no means are the statements which have been referred to as ‘autobiography’ since the beginning https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-006

46 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

of the nineteenth century in Germany self-evident. Discourse analysis does not accept the highly influential contention by Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch that a self-consciousness developed over the course of the eighteenth century, as a result of enlightenment and education, which then became observable in the narrative of a life story, and that its genesis can be read from the history of autobiography (Dilthey 1981; Misch 1949). Discourse analysis instead raises the question of the discursive and medial conditions of possibility of these statements. Drawing on Nietzsche, Foucault also referred to his method of inquiry as a ‘genealogy’. In order to achieve evident results, genealogy deals with a “grand nombre de matériaux entassés” [“a vast accumulation of source material”] and searches for the origin and presuppo­ sition (the historical apriori) of these mountains of texts (Foucault 1994, 136 [1980, 140]). The culture of autobiography has generated an enormous amount of printed as well as unprinted texts. In the view of discourse analysis, autobiographical culture does not consist of great individual works, but is the result of a pervasive and insti­ tutionally regulated activity, one that has been recorded in voluminous archives. Dis­ course analysis thus directs its line of inquiry not primarily at the great works or the exemplary autobiographical statements, but at the historical circumstances whose effects remain legible in those documents which have hardly received any scholarly attention. Western autobiographical culture originates in the introduction, by the highest papal authority, of the duty to confess for the entire Christian world, as well as in the institution of the procedures of Inquisition for ecclesiastic criminal trials by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The ‘confessio’ is a central element of both the ‘forum internum’ (confession) and the ‘forum externum’ (criminal trial) (Schneider 2007). Augustine’s Confessiones already emanate from the early Christian praxis of confes­ sion and penance (Watkins 1961). A discourse analysis which proceeds genealogically and is dedicated to the “analyse d’un champ multiple et mobile de rapports de force” [“analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force relations”] (Foucault 1976, 135 [1978, 102]), takes as its starting point this foundational act of the Lateran Council. There is considerable agreement about this connection (Zimmerman 1971; Foucault 1976; Schneider 1986). Foucault explains the implications of the regulations decreed in 1215: “L’homme, en Occident, est devenu une bête d’aveu” [“western man has become a confessing animal”] (Foucault 1976, 80 [1978, 59]). Yet the “confessing animal” and its discourse is not simply determined by the authorities of the ‘confessio’, cloisters, courts, and priests as agents of this cultural process, but by subtle relations of power, institutions, compulsions or binding conventions which do not operate from a single, all-determining node of power. According to Foucault’s study in the first volume of his Histoire de la sexualité (1976) [The History of Sexuality (1978)], the (autobiographical) confession is the effect of a veritable willingness on the part of subjects to comply with the requests being made upon them and to thereby confess their biographical truth as issuing from an intimate interior. The two forums of confession constitute the institutional matrix of the Western culture of autobiography.

1.5 Discourse Analysis 

 47

This willingness emerges out of a network of institutions that became increas­ ingly refined over the centuries. The autobiographical confession originally transpired orally. Yet after a phase of exclusive orality, the obligation to confess soon expanded to an imperative to write. Even before the Tridentine Council of the mid-sixteenth century made it a duty to conduct a (written) self-assessment before every confession and hence initiated the transition to the literary ‘confessio’, the writers of manuals of confession, such as Jacopo Passavanti in the middle of the fourteenth century, had already called for such written duplicates of memory: “fare una memoria per iscrit­ tura” [‘making a memory by written documents’] (Passavanti 1865, 144–145). Literate believers were to use a written memorandum to prepare for the confession and supply a list of actions and thoughts that needed to be confessed. However, such a record of sins was not only to be written for the occasion of the confession, but should contain daily observations as well. The protocol of an auto-interrogation condensed the ‘con­ fessio’ from a yearly into a daily cycle. At the same time, it constituted the origin of dia­ ristic religious self-scrutiny and self-monitoring (Beadle 1656), which in turn served many authors as the basis for autobiographical confession (Delaney 1969). That the culture of autobiography started with religious institutions and collective obligations is revealed by the individual life stories stacked in many repositories. The archives of various monasteries in France still house to this day mountains of biographies of nuns from the seventeenth century (Le Brun 1987). Local congregations and their archives sustained the autobiographical culture of Puritans and Quakers in England, which had already formed in the sixteenth century (Haller 1957). Likewise, there are thousands of hand-written biographies in the archives of the Moravian Brethren (Glitsch 1899). This praxis of collective transcription and archiving of biographies follows from the reli­ gious collections of vitae. The collections of Vitae Patrum from the early middle ages, attributed to Hieronymus (Hieronymus 1481/1482) and Tyrannius Rufinus (Rufinus 1990), contain the partly legendary, but also partly verified, narratives of the lives of prominent saints. The lives of nuns and monks were fundamentally structured by the imitation of such (auto)biographies. For centuries, ‘imitatio’ [‘imitation’] was, in accordance with the Regulae Benedicti, the goal of the ‘lectio’ [‘reading’] of exemplary lives of saints in monastic culture. Augustine’s Confessiones narrate a grandiose example of the bio­ graphical chain reaction set into motion by an ‘imitatio’ of an ‘imitatio’ of an ‘imitatio’. One eagerly depicted his own religious conversion as the effect of reading biogra­ phies and autobiographies. Petrarch considered himself as influenced and prompted to write his own confession of a life by the Confessiones. Petrarch structured his Secretum meum [Secretum (Petrarch’s Secret)] as a confessional dialogue with Augustine (Petrarch 1975). With the help of the printing press, ‘imitatio’ later developed into a mass culture. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the (German) book market indexed a growing supply of religious (auto)biography collections. Among these were Johann Henrich Reitz’s Historie der Wiedergebohrenen [‘History of the Reborn’], pub­ lished in seven parts between 1698 and 1745, Gottfried Arnold’s Leben der Altväter

48 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

[‘Lives of the Forefathers’] (1700) and the Leben der Gläubigen [‘Lives of the Faith­ ful’] (1701), Gerhard Tersteegen’s Außerlesene Lebens-Beschreibungen Heiliger Seelen [‘Selected Life Stories of Holy Souls’] (1733–1753), as well as Christian Gerber’s Historia derer Wiedergebohrnen in Sachsen [‘Histories of the Reborn in Saxony’] (1726–1729). Around the end of the seventeenth century, autobiographical culture became interac­ tive. Readers now considered themselves called upon to chronicle their own examples of a pious life worthy of imitation. Gottfried Arnold concludes the ‘historical report’ of his edition of the Lebensgeschichten christlicher Altväter [‘Life Stories of Christian Forefathers’] in 1700 with the request that readers submit recent biographies of pious persons to the publisher: „Beliebte jemanden zu diesem Vorhaben eine und andere Materien beyzutragen, und an den Ort des Verlages von diesem Buche einzusenden, sollte es mit Danck erkannt werden“ [‘If it might please someone to contribute mate­ rials for this project by sending them to the place of publication of this book, this will be recognized with a word of gratitude’] (Arnold 1700, 43). Such an updated collection could already appear in print a year later (Arnold 1701). The degree of dissemination of these anthologies in the eighteenth century can be calculated not only based on the numerous editions, reprints and imitations (Schrader, in Reitz 1982, vol. IV, 127). Even Arnold himself referred to how there was already an „ungeheures Meer“ [‘monstrous sea’] of „Vitis oder Lebens-Beschreibungen, Martyrologiis […], Actis Sanctorum […] Calendariis […]“ [‘vitae or life stories, Martyrologiis (…), Actis Sanctorum (…) Calen­ dariis’] (1700, 31). Many prominent authors of the period attest to the wide impact of the works of Arnold and Reitz. Karl Philipp Moritz and Heinrich Jung-Stilling recall in their autobiographies how as youths they read the Historie der Wiedergebohrenen and Das Leben der Altväter (Moritz 1972, 18; Jung-Stilling 1968, 52). Even earlier, members of Pietistic congregations considered themselves obligated to write their life stories along the lines of the model of conversion stories and narratives of rebirth (Niggl 1977, 6). In accordance with these directives, a great number of ‘authentic’ testimonies of personally experienced instances of grace were collected in church repositories, and then in part made their way into printed collections. The autobiographical con­ versions recorded therein consistently follow the narrative pattern of August Hermann Francke’s Anfang und Fortgang der Bekehrung von A. H.F. [‘Beginning and Progress of the Conversion of A. H.F.’] from 1690, which reiterates the phases of Augustinian confession. The genealogy of autobiographical discourse thus captures the ways that the ‘self-consciousness’ of autobiographers is based on compulsions to write, incitements, and collective practices that have filled voluminous archives. Because it can be traced back to the institution of the confession in 1215, this new confessional praxis was indeed religious at first, but clerical interest was also always disposed to medicinal and psychosomatic statements. The confessional fathers first asked for confessional loyalty, but later for political loyalty as well. In Germany, the Pietistic political scien­ tist Friedrich Carl Freiherr von Moser introduced a national politics of the biograph­ ical and autobiographical in the twelve-volume Patriotisches Archiv für Deutschland

1.5 Discourse Analysis 

 49

[‘Patriotic Archive for Germany’] (1784–1790), which he then resumed with the Neues Patriotisches Archiv [‘New Patriotic Archive’] (1792–1794). In the preface to the first volume of the Archive, Moser also appealed to ‘friends of truth and fatherland’ to con­ tribute to the periodically published volumes. It was then Johann Gottfried Herder who continued to pursue Moser’s politics of the national archive and called for an archive of the Germans, an “Athanasium, ein Mnemeion Deutschlands” [‘Athanasium, a Mnemeion of Germany’] in his review of Schlichtegroll’s Nekrologen [‘Necrologies’] from 1791 in the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität [‘Letters on the Advancement of Humanity’]. This was supposed to create an institutional memory out of the biogra­ phies and autobiographies of significant (German) men (Herder 1881, 25). In response to Herder’s proposal in the Letters, such an archive of immortality was published in six volumes between 1791 and 1806, with the title Bekenntnisse merkwürdiger Männer von sich selbst [‘Confessions of Remarkable Men Written by Themselves’] (1791–1806). Thus, after 1780 scholars and public figures were bombarded with requests for partici­ pation in a great (auto)biographical discourse in the form of confessions, biographies, obituaries and tributes. Among the authors of such appeals was the physician Johann Gottlieb Fritze, whose Aufruf zu Selbstbiographien [‘Request for Autobiographies’] was published posthumously in 1795 in the Deutsche Monatsschrift [‘German Monthly’]. Fritze also desired an extensive collection of such autobiographies. Soon everyone was being asked. The founders of the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde [‘Journal for Psychology from Experience’] directed an appeal to all readers to inquire about, gather and pass on the biographies of “Missetäter und Selb­ stmörder” [‘malefactors and suicidal persons’], of “Wahnwitzigen und Schwärmer” [‘lunatics and enthusiastic dreamers’] (Moritz 1978, vol. I, 1–2). The institution of this new archive around 1780 provides another early example of interactive media. In the nine volumes of the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde were published numerous confessions and case studies submitted by readers. And in the orbit of the new psy­ chology one finds plenty of evidence that the authors invested their testimonies with the highest expectations of a moral, religious, and political cure. Already beforehand, in his Lebensbeschreibung [‘Description of a Life’] of 1738, the clergyman Adam Bernd called upon all those suffering from mental illness to document their particular case for the sake of everyone else (Bernd 1973). In a diary of the year 1771 written in English, Lichtenberg notes: “[…] if I could publish the history of my private life, millions could be brought to virtue […]” (Lichtenberg 1971, 615). In the preface to his Tagebücher [‘Diaries’] of 1773, Johann Kaspar Lavater thanked everyone in advance who submitted a similar “wahre Geschichte seines Lebens und seines Herzens” [“a genuine history of his life, and his heart”] (Lavater 1773, XXV [1795, XX]). He preferred the study of these documents to every other “außerbiblischen Lesung” [“I should prefer the reading of such a book to the perusal of any one else, the Bible excepted”] (Lavater 1773, XXV [1795, XX]). The reading of such writings attained here a liturgical status similar to the lectio of Vitae Patrum in medieval monasteries. This is further attested by the diction of the nineteen-year-old Ludwig Börne, who declared in a letter to Henriette Herz in

50 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

1805: “Menschen wie ich sollten es sich zur heiligsten Pflicht machen, ihre Biographie bekannt zu machen, ich werde es auch thun” [‘People like me should make it their most holy duty to make their biographies known to others, and I will do so’] (Börne 1968, vol. IV, 122). The nineteenth century finally elevated self-representation to an object of gram­ mar-school discipline. Educational institutions took over the concept of monastic self-attestation of a biography and preserved it well into the second half of the twen­ tieth century. Yet they no longer expected the representation of religious awakening and instances of grace that had once counted toward the quota of dutiful self-rep­ resentation, but rather the experience named ‘education’. The early works of Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, contain five different autobiographies written by the pupil in Schulpforta between 1854 (as a ten-year-old) and 1861. Here the religious model of a life story recurs in different variations (Nietzsche 1994, I, 1., 33–34, 276). The origin of self-representation out of both forums is conspicuous not only in Nietzsche’s later autobiographical text Ecce Homo; the same can be said for many other literary autobiographies (Schneider 2013). For discourse analysis it is thus evident that autobiography is not a genre (Niggl 1977), but the transcription of a complex institutional praxis that has without a doubt generated extraordinary literary texts. If one wished to correlate these transcripts, which are stored by the thousands in school archives, with a history of self-consciousness, self-consciousness would be a monotone (literary) affair. These findings further suggest that literary genres do not arise from an entelechy of their own, but from a literary praxis of schooling. Ever since secondary schools and universities have ceased to practice poetics and rhetoric, literary genres have dissolved. The discourse analysis of autobiography can hence also demonstrate that, seen from a literary perspective, modern self-consciousness is a school-consciousness. Translation: Charlton Payne

Works Cited Arnold, Gottfried. Vitae Patrum. Oder das Leben der Altväter und anderer Gottseeligen Personen. Auffs Neue erläutert und vermehrert. 2 vols. Halle: Verlag des Waisenhauses, 1700. Arnold, Gottfried. Das Leben der Gläubigen, Oder Beschreibung solcher Gottseligen Personen, welche in denen letzten 200 Jahren sonderlich bekandt worden. Halle: Verlag des Waisenhauses, 1701. Barthes, Roland. Leçon/Lektion. Französisch und Deutsch. Antrittsvorlesung im Collège de France. Gehalten am 7. Januar 1977. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1980 [“Lecture”. October 8 (1979): 3–16]. Beadle, John. The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian. London: E. Cotes for Tho. Parkhurst, 1656. Bernd, Adam. Eigene Lebens-Beschreibung (1738). Ed. Volker Hoffmann. München: Winkler, 1973. Börne, Ludwig. Sämtliche Schriften. Ed. Inge Rippmann and Peter Rippmann. Vol. I–III: Düsseldorf: Melzer, 1964, Vol. IV–V: Darmstadt: Melzer, 1968. Brown, Gillian, and George Yule. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

1.5 Discourse Analysis 

 51

Delaney, Paul. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910). Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1981 [Selected Works. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Vol. III. Ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002]. Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969 [The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans.  A.  M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 2002]. Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976 [The History of Sexuality. The Will to Knowledge. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978]. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. 139–164. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche: la généalogie, l’histoire.” Dits et écrits 1954–1988. Vol. II. Ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 136–156. Francke, August Hermann. “Anfang und Fortgang der Bekehrung August Hermann Franckes” (1690) (extract). Pietismus und Rationalismus. Ed. Marianne Beyer-Fröhlich. Leipzig: Reclam, 1933 [“From the Autobiography 1692.” Pietist Selected Writings. Ed. Peter C. Erb. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1983]. Fritze, Johann Gottlieb. “Über Selbstbiographien.” Deutsche Monatsschrift 1 (1795): 156–168. Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. Theory and Method. London/New York: Routledge, 1999. Gerber, Christian. Historia derer Wiedergebohrnen in Sachsen, Oder Exempel solcher Personen, mit denen sich im Leben, oder im Tode viel merckwürdiges zugetragen; So wol aus gewissen Urkunden als eigener Erfahrung gesammelt. Dresden: R.C. Saueressig, 1726–1729. Glitsch, Alexander. Geschichte und gegenwärtiger Bestand der historischen Sammlungen (Archiv, Bibliothek, Gemäldesammlung) der Brüder=Unität. Herrnhut: Verlag des Unitätsarchivs, 2nd ed. 1899. Haller, William. The Rise of Puritanism or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643. New York: Harper, 1957. Hieronymus: Vitae sanctorum patrum, sive Vitas patrum. Köln: Conrad Winters de Homborch, 1481–1482, http://dfg-viewer.de/v2/?set[image]=37&set[zoom]=default&set[debug]= 0&set[double]=0&set[mets]=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek. de%2Fitems%2FESDIUXGVVBGITSBPUKO6CPHFVR33GKZF%2Fsource (14 October 2013). Jørgensen, Marianne, and Louise J. Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London/ Thousand Oaks/New Dehli: Sage, 2002. Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich. Henrich Stillings Jugend. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – Towards a radical democratic politics. London/New York: Verso, 2nd ed. 2001. Lavater, Johann Kaspar. Unveränderte Fragmente aus dem Tagebuche eins Beobachters seiner selbst. Rev. Christoph Siegrist. Bern/Stuttgart: Haupt, 1978 [Journal of a Self-Observer; or, Confessions and Familiar Letters. Vol. II. Trans. Peter Will. London: T. Cadell jun./W. Davies, 1795]. Le Brun, Jacques. “Das Geständnis der Nonnenbiographien des 17. Jahrhunderts.” Selbsthemati­sie­ rung und Selbstzeugnis: Bekenntnis und Geständnis. Ed. Alois Hahn and Volker Kapp. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 248–264. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Schriften und Briefe. Sudelbücher II, Materialhefte, Tagebücher. Vol. II. Ed. Wolfgang Promies. München: Hanser, 1971 [Selections: Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Stephen Tester. New York: State University of New York Press, 2012].

52 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Das Altertum. Vol. I, part 1. Frankfurt a.  M.: G. SchulteBumke, 1949 [A History of Autobiography. Vol. I, part 1. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950]. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungsseelenkunde.” Gnothi sautón oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte. Berlin: August Mylius, 1783–1793. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman. Ed. W. Martens. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972 [Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel. Trans. Ritchie Robertson. London: Penguin Classics, 1997]. Moser, Friedrich Carl Freiherr von. Patriotisches Archiv für Deutschland. 12 vols. Frankfurt/Leipzig: Schwanische Hofbuchhandlung zu Mannheim, 1784–1790. Moser, Friedrich Carl Freiherr von. Neues Patriotisches Archiv für Deutschland. 2 vols. Mannheim/ Leipzig: C. F. Schwan und G. C. Götz, 1792–1794. Müller, Johann Georg. Bekenntnisse merkwürdiger Männer von sich selbst. 6 vols. Winterthur: Stei­ nerische Buchhandlung, 1791–1806. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Jugendschriften 1854–1861. 5 vols. Ed. Hans Joachim Mette. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994. Passavanti, Jacopo. Lo specchio della vera penitenza. Ed. F.-L. Polidori. Florenz: Felice le Monnier, 1856. Petrarca, Francesco. “Secretum. De secreto conflictu curarum mearum.” Opere Latine di Francesca Petrarca. Vol. 1. Ed. Antonietta Buffano. Turin: Unione tipografico editrice torinese, 1975 [Secretum (Petrarch’s Secret). Trans. William H. Draper. London: Chatto & Windus, 1911]. Reitz, Johann Henrich. Historie der Wiedergebohrnen (1698–1745). Ed. Hans-Jürgen Schrader. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982. Rufinus, Aquileiensis. Historia monachorum sive de vita sanctorum patrum. Tyrannius Rufinus. Ed. Eva Schulz-Flügel. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1990. Schneider, Manfred. Die erkaltete Herzensschrift. Der autobiographische Text im 20. Jahrhundert. München/Wien: Hanser, 1986. Schneider, Manfred. “Forum internum – forum externum. Institutionstheorien des Geständnisses.” Sozialgeschichte des Geständnisses. Zum Wandel der Geständniskultur. Ed. Jo Reichertz and Manfred Schneider. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007. 23–41. Schneider, Manfred. “Autobiographie als Institution. Eine Skizze mit zwei Nachspielen.” Literatur Lesen Lernen. Festschrift für Gerhard Rupp. Ed. Daniela A. Frickel and Jan M. Boelmann. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2013. 353–376. Tersteegen, Gerhard. Außerlesene Lebens-Beschreibungen Heiliger Seelen […]. 3 vols. Frankfurt/ Leipzig: Böttiger, 1733–1753. Watkins, Oscar D. A history of penance: being a study of the authorities (1920). 2 vols. New York: Franklin, 1961. Zimmermann, T. C. Price. “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance.” Renaissance. Studies in Honour of Hans Baron. Ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi. Firenze: Sansoni, 1971. 119–140.

Further Reading Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris: Galilée, 1984 [“Otobiographies.” The Ear of the Other, Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida. Ed. Christie McDonald. Trans. Avital Ronell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988].

1.5 Discourse Analysis 

 53

Lejeune, Philipp. Je est un autre. L’autobiographie, de la littérature aux médias. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980. Mehlman, Jeffrey. A Structural Study of Autobiography. Proust, Leiris, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss. Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press, 1974. Schneider, Manfred. “Politik der Lebensgeschichte um 1800 und das autobiographische Wissen im Theoriedesign des 20. Jahrhunderts.” Poetologien des Wissens um 1800. Ed. Joseph Vogl. München: Fink, 1999. 267–288.

1.6 Gender Studies Anne Fleig

Within literary studies, the relationship of gender and genre is the focal point of Gender Studies; this is particularly true for the study of autobiographical writing. In this context, questions pertaining to the interrelations between the writing self, literary form and social context are crucial. A scholarly engagement with autobiog­ raphies written by women, along with inquiries into female circumstances of daily life and the extent to which female authors figure in (literary) history, is thus a major concern. Against this backdrop, Gender Studies provides a critical vantage point on the aesthetic criteria and genre conventions that led to an exclusion of women from the literary canon, as well as on notions of subjectivity that are inextricably tied to male biographies and concepts of male authorship. From the 1970s onwards, Gender Studies has challenged international research on autobiography time and again to question the existing concept of genre (Gilmore 1994; Smith and Watson 1998; Hof and Rohr 2008). Even the basic assumption that an autobiography constitutes the literary representation of an individual’s life story and personality rests on gender-specific preconditions; this holds true both for the pro­ duction and reception of autobiographical texts. Autobiography as a genre raises high expectations in regard to authenticity and reality content by negotiating the respec­ tive relationship between human experience and writing in each individual case. The research of the last two decades has increasingly criticized these expectations, strongly emphasizing the fictional character of autobiographical self-representation instead (Ashley et al. 1994). Autobiographical texts raise a number of questions: if and how far autobiography produces authenticity; which patterns the genre provides for this process; and who can claim the authority (and authorship) to make use of these patterns. Genres govern the expectations of readers, but they also set up boundaries for interpretation and lead to hierarchical structures, which in turn produce histori­ cal as well as theoretical exclusions. This is the point where the critique of genre and feminist criticism intersect (Hof 2008). What Leigh Gilmore terms “fantasies of the real” (1994a, 16) assumed particu­ lar importance for the autobiographies of women and their exploration by Gender Studies: although literature written by female authors was frequently thought to be inherently autobiographical, remarkably few texts by women found their way into the autobiographical canon. From early on, female writing was subjected to an ambiv­ alent evaluation; despite the fact that it carried positive connotations of enhanced authenticity, naturalness and verisimilitude, it was excluded from the canon on the grounds of an alleged lack of literariness. It is not by accident that the so-called ‘golden age of European autobiography’ around 1800 coincides with the establishment of male concepts of authorship. Autobiography understood as a representation of the life stories of ‘great’ men became prevalent in the nineteenth century, while female https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-007

1.6 Gender Studies 

 55

autobiographical texts were denigrated as unsophisticated and unliterary (Stanford Friedman 1988). As early as 1929, Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking autobiographical essay, A Room of One’s Own, reflects critically on the exclusionary processes affecting the works of female authors. The autobiographical self criticizes the lack of published literature by women which stands in marked contrast to the overrepresentation of women as a literary ‘sujet’, especially in novels written by men. Another important aspect is the fact that the economic preconditions of literary production are not avail­ able to women to the same degree as they are to men (the “room of one’s own” refers to both financial independence and personal freedom). Woolf’s theses were repeatedly picked up by feminist literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s (Showalter 1977 [1982]; Bovenschen 1979; Weigel 1983). In reference to the lacking canonicity of autobiographical works by women, Domna C. Stanton coined the term “The Female Autograph”, thereby moving the emphasis from the representation of a life story to the writing of the self (Stanton 1995 [1984]). By pointing towards the distinction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ at an early stage of feminist criticism, Stanton’s term also questioned essentialistic notions of referentiality. Current scholarship considers literary representations of the self to be permeated by implicit and explicit gender-spe­ cific assumptions from the very outset, which in turn contribute to gender-specific constructions of belonging. Since the 1970s, the debate on “The Death of the Author” (Barthes 1967) and the questioning of traditional autobiographical theory, along with new social concepts of subjectivity, has led to a conspicuous boom of autobio­ graphical writing expressed in new literary forms (Kosta 1994). Autobiography can today be termed a “privileged site for thinking about issues of writing at the intersec­ tion of feminist, postcolonial and postmodern critical theories” (Smith and Watson 1998, 5). Within recent genre theory, the concept of ‘autofiction’ addresses the con­ structedness of autobiographical texts. This concept represents a renewed challenge for Gender Studies in that it emphasizes the historic preconditions of authorship and permits an ironic play with subject positions (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2009), while the lit­ erary representations of real-life experiences of women and men are pushed into the background.

History Gender Studies has addressed questions and problems of autobiography from its very beginnings. Initially, feminist criticism of (auto)biography had the objectives of identi­ fying female life stories, making women’s daily life visible, and inscribing women into male-dominated (literary) history. As a result, various research projects located auto­ biographical texts by women and established archives of female autobiography on an international scale (Jelinek 1980; Vogt 1981; Goodman 1986; Sagarra 1986; Neuman 1991; Heuser 1996; Niethammer 2000; Boynton and Malin 2005).

56 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

A critical review of existing research quickly made it obvious that the autobio­ graphical subject was conceptualized as implicitly or explicitly male, with classifying statements on autobiography being derived exclusively from texts written by men. Furthermore, female authors were excluded due to the fact that traditional autobi­ ographical research evolved out of the humanities and its concern with the history of personality development, origins it shares with research on the ‘Bildungsroman’ [novel of formation]. Dilthey describes autobiography as “Deutung des Lebens in seiner geheimnisvollen Verbindung von Zufall, Schicksal und Charakter” [“an inter­ pretation of life in its mysterious combination of chance, destiny, and character”] (Dilthey 1989, 24 [2002, 96]). In his History of Autobiography, which went through several re-editions and revisions over the years, Georg Misch – following Johann Gott­ fried Herder – calls autobiographies “Bekenntnisse merkwürdiger Männer” [“confes­ sions of outstanding men”] (Misch 1949 [1907], 3 [1950, 1]), that feed on a “Bewußtsein der Persönlichkeit” [“consciousness and evaluation of personality”], which in turn forms the “Kern der europäischen Selbstbesinnung” [“the most direct impulse to the growth of self-scrutiny” (‘in the western world’)] (Misch 1949, 18 [1950, 15–16]). Even as late as 1956, Georges Gusdorf assumed that “[m]any great men, and even some not so great – heads of government or generals, ministers of state, explorers, business­ men –” write autobiographies in old age (Gusdorf 1980, 28). Based on an examination of exclusively male autobiographies, research claimed to retrace what is essentially an ideal-typical, step-by-step development of the human personality, while the con­ structedness of this model remained entirely unquestioned. The socio-historical turn in literary studies did little to rectify the prevailing view of men and women, with the latter surfacing only as a “Randgruppe” [‘marginal group’] (Niggl 1989, 9), if at all. Even Philippe Lejeune’s Le pacte autobiographique (1975) [The Autobiographical Pact (1979)], an essay that still remains essential as a basis for current research, discusses an exclusively male cast of authors. As in Dilthey’s day, texts by the triumvirate of Augustine, Rousseau and Goethe remain at the center of current European research on autobiography. In contrast, feminist engagement with female autobiographies aimed to expand and alter the male-biased canon by adding female voices. Simultaneously, another quintessential task was to reflect on the fundamentally male character of auto­ biography as a genre, and to question the aesthetic criteria that led to the exclusion of women from the literary tradition (Benstock 1988). The autobiographical subject’s determinedness by gender thus became tangible, while autobiography itself could now be conceptualized as a narrative or pattern of order with a male prefiguration. Nevertheless, a critical reflection of gender-specific conceptions of subject and genre within autobiographical research and theory formation is by no means to be taken for granted, and still remains a largely unfulfilled desideratum. As early as the eighteenth century, there is a mutual influence between theoretical concepts of genre and authorship such as Friedrich von Blankenburg’s Versuch über den Roman [‘Essay on the Novel’] (1774) and a literary practice that focused on the

1.6 Gender Studies 

 57

biographies of male characters, e.  g. the ‘Bildungsroman’. Around 1800, the power of creation came to be attached to concepts of male authorship (Humboldt, Fichte, Hegel); at the core of these concepts lies the dualism of production and reproduc­ tion that ultimately denies women the sine qua non of traditional autobiography: the development of an individual personality and the self-conscious shaping of one’s own life, which corresponds to the literary shaping of the autobiographical text. Theoret­ ical contributions from the nineteenth century continued to concentrate on works of male authors, and Thomas Carlyle’s famous treatise, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), established a focus on the ‘great men’ of history. Such works continue to inform conceptions of biographic writing to this day. In adherence to bourgeois gender discourse with its clear-cut division of society into a female, private sphere and a male, public one, theories on autobiography link notions of socio-historical greatness and narrative relevance to being male (Ní Dhúill 2009, 202). Autobiography thus came to be a genre dedicated to concerns from the spheres of public life and employment, which requires and demands a self-conscious autobiographical subject. The interplay of gender and genre becomes readily apparent here. As a direct consequence of genre conceptions deriving from bourgeois construc­ tions of masculinity, autobiographies by women were denied entry into the canon. This fact notwithstanding, research from Women Studies and Gender Studies (e.  g. Heuser 1996; Meise 2002; Kormann 2004) has provided ample evidence of female auto­ biographical writing from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, e.  g. in the context of courtly culture and in the area of spiritual or religious practice. In general, early feminist works on autobiography confirmed the assumption of a fundamental alterity of female writing, an assumption supported by bourgeois theories on genre and autobiography as well as by established patterns of autobiographical writing. In her survey of autobiographies written by women, Estelle Jelinek posits the frag­ mentedness of female writing and its concentration on the private sphere in a manner similar to Roy Pascal. According to Jelinek, male autobiographies differ in that they are more self-contained and coherent, aiming at a stringent development of the auto­ biographical self. In addition to this, men provide a portrait of their times along with their own life story, whereas female autobiographies dedicate themselves more to the domestic sphere (Jelinek 1986, XIII). However, this perpetuation of bourgeois gender dualism has been criticized along with the fact that the male norm, which perma­ nently casts female writing as the Other, remained unquestioned. Particularly in the USA, the engagement with female autobiography provoked a lively discussion as to which criteria are applicable to autobiographical texts penned by female authors. Autobiography was discovered as a genre that allows women to speak up, to tell their own stories. In the Anglophone world, the relevant catch­ phrases were “coming to the text” or “coming to speak” (Larsson 2007, 157). In Western Germany, Verena Stefan’s autobiographical novel Häutungen (1975) [Shedding (1978)] became one of the key texts in the debate on female subjectivity and its literary rep­

58 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

resentation. Describing a successful process of emancipation from traditional gender roles appeared to offer an opportunity for authentic female writing beyond male, het­ eronormative phantasies and projections – especially to the feminist movement of the 1970s. However, this approach was criticized early on within literary studies due to the fact that the persisting idea of natural, unrestricted speech reproduces male-dom­ inated notions of femininity (Kolkenbrock-Netz and Schuller 1982). With the emergence of Postcolonial Studies, feminist debate on divergent notions of the subject grew more heated as black women criticized the white and western implications of the concept of subjectivity. Numerous studies showed that black women and women of color had been rendered invisible by feminist research on auto­ biography, just as women in general had been disregarded by traditional modes of inquiry into autobiographical texts. In 1991, Shirley Neuman pointed out that neglect­ ing the categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’ is a problem that also affects gender-critical autobiographical research (Neuman 1991, 5). Despite this, an intersectional and trans­ cultural stance had already been adopted by studies such as Françoise Lionnet’s Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (1989). Early key works on Black (Women’s) Autobiography (Smith 1974; Smith Foster 1976; Andrews 1986; Braxton 1989) were primarily concerned with slave narratives, autobiographical testimonials that originated in the USA during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a pro­ found effect on the Black American Autobiography to come. In comparison, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) or Audre Lorde’s Zami. A New Spelling of My Name (1982) are autobiographical texts that exemplify literature’s ability to negotiate multiple conceptions of identity. Today, Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies share a mutual interest in the ways in which identity, culture and society intersect.

Conceptual Aspects The intellectual involvement with autobiographical writing within Gender Studies did not take place in isolation from inter- and intradisciplinary theoretical developments. While early research focused on the various biographies themselves in the wake of socio-historical approaches within literary studies, conceptions of identity and con­ structions of corporeality and subjectivity have moved to the center of interest follow­ ing the Linguistic Turn. As a consequence of Jacques Lacan’s and Michel Foucault’s radical critique of the subject, (auto)biographical research has shifted attention from the investigation of female biographical testimonials towards the question of how subjectivity is consti­ tuted, and which gender-specific implications derive from it. Psychoanalytical contri­ butions by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who subjected Freud’s and Lacan’s theories to feminist revision, also had a strong impact on academic discourse.

1.6 Gender Studies 

 59

Nancy Chodorow’s concept of female selfhood is of particular importance for the discussion of female identity within feminist research on autobiography. In a similar vein to deconstructive approaches (Derrida, de Man, Paul Jay), Chodorow’s theory on the relatedness of subjectivity cast doubt on the notion of a subject envisioned as an autarchic and coherent entity. Subsequent research drew further attention to the relational embeddedness of subjectivity in social and historical contexts (Stanley 1992, 4), thereby rendering any particular emphasis on the uniqueness of a person highly suspect. The approach to examine isolated, pre-eminent biographies was thus subjected to a fundamental review. The question of how subjectivity can be conceptualized beyond pre-existing clas­ sifications is central to the various theoretical constructions now in existence. The term itself is contaminated by traditional notions of male subjectivity and individ­ uality: on the one hand, this leads to the ascription of texts written by women to a female collective and to the negation of their individuality (Benstock 1988); on the other hand, there is the danger of neglecting the importance of a culturally produced group identity for women and minorities (Stanford Friedman 1988). Since the 1990s, postmodern and subject-critical considerations constitute an important prerequisite for gender-critical (auto)biographical research. From that point on, numerous surveys have recognized the notion of a coherent, autonomous subject as a (patriarchal) construction (Stanford Friedman 1988; O’Brien 1991; Dausien 1992); this criticism includes the literary form in which the respective constructions of the subject present themselves. Accordingly, the term ‘autobiography’ is used less fre­ quently and has been replaced by terms such as ‘autobiographical writing’, ‘women’s autobiographical practices’, ‘women’s personal narratives’ or ‘women’s lifewriting’ (Smith and Watson 1998). In addition to this, the question of female subjectivity is interconnected with the question of the referentiality of autobiographical texts. Approaches that see the construction of gender and genre realized in the textuality of autobiography (Stanton 1995) are confronted with conceptions tying female subjectivity to referentiality, and ultimately to human experience. Meyer (1989) and Volkening (2006) discuss in how far the feminine can be conceptualized as a function of autobiographical writing. In this context, the connection between autobiography and the performativity of gender con­ stitutes an important thematic field. Anna Babka, for example, conceives the perform­ ative construction of gender as a fiction – as autobiography, as it were (Babka 2002, 63). In the wake of the theoretical contributions of Judith Butler and Teresa de Lau­ retis, the continuing perpetuation of the heterosexual matrix within Gender Studies came to be problematized (Neuman 1991, 8). As a result, a number of works dealing with lesbian identity, feminist theory and autobiographical texts were published (see Stimpson 1992; Martin 1997), quickly followed by surveys dealing with concepts of queer identity (Bornstein 1995; Smith and Watson 1998). The criticism leveled by Postcolonial Studies against universal concepts of mas­ culinity and femininity had a particularly unsettling effect on approaches to auto­

60 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

biographical research based on feminist assumptions of equality. This is also true for Butler’s concept of gender performativity. Theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have made it clear that the female subject addressed by universalistic feminist theories is conceptualized as implicitly white. In light of this, the autobiographical self has to be problematized as a western construct predicated on certain historical and cultural assumptions of superiority. Western conceptions of subjectivity thus perpet­ uate a perspective of colonization (Smith and Watson 1992; 1998). Gender Studies continues to face the challenge of making texts by female authors visible without designating them as a marginal phenomenon, or even as the Other (Finck 1999, 115). Dealing exclusively with texts written by women gives a new lease of life to the problematic assumption of a female ‘écriture’ that is categorically dis­ tinguishable from male literary production; gender also remains unilaterally asso­ ciated with femininity. As an alternative, texts written by women and men can be scrutinized in regard to similarities and differences; theory and practice of autobio­ graphical writing can be examined for gender-specific implications; finally, gender as a relational category of analysis can also be included when engaging with texts by male authors (Kormann 2004). With these considerations in mind, Almut Finck has proposed to analyze the autobiographical subject in its “multiple[n] Positionalis­ ierung” [‘multiple situatedness’] (Finck 1999, 132). This implies an investigation into the contextual situatedness of the writer within a certain field, as opposed to the mere addition of individual ascriptions of identity frequently encountered in the debate on intersectionality. The controversy on the relationality of gender and genre unites Gender Studies and postcolonial criticism, and it can well be considered the key question for auto­ biographical research. Not only does this concept involve women as well as men – it also opens up a perspective on new literary forms and on the diversity of autobio­ graphical practices which results from transgressing the borders of gender and genre. Since the end of the 1990s, relationality has come to be subsumed under the keyword ‘belonging’: belonging in its most general sense can be understood as a circulation of intensities between the subject and its changing surroundings (Hilfrich 2011). This concept shifts the focus of inquiry towards the multiple and volatile situatedness of female and male authors, i.  e. towards a relational notion of genre. This relationality also becomes evident in the significance of spaces for autobiographical theory which owe their increasing importance to the concept of belonging. Accordingly, Bell Hooks conceptualized belonging as a “culture of place” (Hooks 2009) in her autobiographi­ cal and essayistic writings. Reservations prompted by the pitfalls and contradictions of feminist research on autobiography notwithstanding, the project of inscribing female authors into literary history is far from being completed. As long as current research on autobiography (particularly in the German-speaking world) continues to focus almost exclusively on texts written by men while aspects of gender are largely overlooked, the disregard of mainstream researchers for female autobiography will remain on the agenda of

1.6 Gender Studies 

 61

Gender Studies. At the same time, mechanisms of exclusion have to be taken into account and the dominance of white, male narratives has to be questioned. A double, or better yet, a multiple perspective on autobiography should be the guiding cogni­ tive principle of Gender Studies. This is not only true where the debate on ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ is concerned; a wider range of theoretical intersections like race, ethnicity and sexuality (Gilmore 1994b, 13) is involved here – with in their relationality, these terms have a particularly profound influence on autobiography and autofiction. The relationship between gender and genre outlined at the beginning of this chapter thus remains a challenge for future research. Translation: Martin Bleisteiner

Works Cited Andrews, William. To Tell a Free Story. The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography 1760–1865. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Ashley, Kathleen, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds. Autobiography & Postmodernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Babka, Anna. Unterbrochen. Gender und die Tropen der Autobiographie. Wien: Passagen, 2002. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Aspen Magazine 5/6 (1967). N. pag. Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self. Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. London: Routledge, 1988. Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw. On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York/London: Routledge, 1994. Bovenschen, Silvia. Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1979. Boynton, Victoria, and Jo Malin, eds. Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography. A Tradition Within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Dausien, Bettina. “Leben für andere oder eigenes Leben? Überlegungen zur Bedeutung der Geschlechterdifferenz in der biographischen Forschung.” Biographische Konstruktionen. Beiträge zur Biographieforschung. Ed. Peter Alheit, Bettina Dausien, Andreas Hanses and Antonius Scheuermann. Bremen: Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1992. 37–70. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Das Erleben und die Selbstbiographie.” Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 21–32. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Works. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Vol. III. Ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Finck, Almut. Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics. A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994 (Gilmore 1994a). Gilmore, Leigh. “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography and Genre.” Auto­ biography & Postmodernism. Ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 3–18 (Gilmore 1994b).

62 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Goodman, Katherine R. Dis-Closures. Women’s Autobiography in Germany between 1790 and 1914. New York et al.: Lang, 1986. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Trans. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Heuser, Magdalene, ed. Autobiographien von Frauen. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996. Hilfrich, Carola. “Unheim(at)liche Zugehörigkeiten: Algerien als Ort von Herkunft und Gedächtnis bei Jacques Derrida und Hélène Cixous.” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 10 (2011): 389–403. Hof, Renate. “Einleitung: Gender und Genre als Ordnungsmuster und Wahrnehmungsmodelle.” Inszenierte Erfahrung. Gender und Genre in Tagebuch, Autobiographie, Essay. Ed. Renate Hof and Susanne Rohr. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2008. 7–24. Hof, Renate, and Susanne Rohr, eds. Inszenierte Erfahrung. Gender und Genre in Tagebuch, Auto­ biographie und Essay. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2008. Hooks, Bell. Belonging. A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009. Jelinek, Estelle C., ed. Women’s Autobiography. Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Jelinek, Estelle C. The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography. From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. Kolkenbrock-Netz, Jutta, and Marianne Schuller: “Frau im Spiegel. Zum Verhältnis von auto­bio­ graphi­scher Schreibweise und feministischer Praxis.” Entwürfe von Frauen. Ed. Irmela von der Lühe. Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1982. 154–174. Kormann, Eva. Ich, Welt und Gott. Autobiographik im 17. Jahrhundert. Köln: Böhlau, 2004. Kosta, Barbara. Recasting Autobiography. Women’s Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Larsson, Lisbeth. “Truth and Consequences. Women’s Autobiographies. Theory and Practice.” Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Grenzen der Fiktionalität und der Erinnerung. Vol. II. Ed. Christoph Parry and Edgar Platen. München: iudicium, 2007. 152–167. Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Martin, Biddy. Femininity Played Straight. The Significance of Being Lesbian. New York et al.: Routledge 1997. Meise, Helga. Das archivierte Ich. Schreibkalender und höfische Repräsentation in HessenDarmstadt 1624–1790. Darmstadt: Hessische Historische Kommission, 2002. Meyer, Eva. Die Autobiographie der Schrift. Basel/Frankfurt a.  M.: Stroemfeld, 1989. Misch, Georg. Das Altertum. Geschichte der Autobiographie (1907). Vol. I, part 1. Frankfurt a.  M.: G. Schulte-Blumke, 3rd ed. 1949 [History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. I, part 1. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950]. Neuman, Shirley, ed. Autobiography and Questions of Gender. London et al.: Frank Cass, 1991. Ní Dhúill, Caitríona. “Biographie von ‚er‘ bis ‚sie‘. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen relationaler Biographik.” Die Biographie. Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie. Ed. Bernhard Fetz. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 199–226. Niethammer, Ortrun. Autobiographien von Frauen im 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Francke, 2000. Niggl, Günter, ed. Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung (1989). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed. 1998. O’Brien, Sharon. “Feminist Theory and Literary Biography.” Contesting the Subject. Essays in the

1.6 Gender Studies 

 63

Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. Ed. William H. Epstein. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991. 123–133. Sagarra, Eda. “Quellenbibliographie autobiographischer Schriften von Frauen im deutschen Kulturraum 1730–1918.” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 11 (1986): 175–231. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature Of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977 [revised edition 1982]. Smith, Sidonie. Where I’m bound. Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. De/Colonizing the Subject. The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices.” Women, Autobiography, Theory. A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison/London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 3–52. Smith Foster, Frances. Slave Narratives. Text and Social Context. San Diego: University of California Press, 1976. Stanford Friedman, Susan. “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice.” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock. London: Routledge, 1988. 34–62. Stanley, Liz. The Auto/Biographical I. The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1992. Stanton, Domna C., ed. The Female Autograph. Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Stimpson, Catharine R. “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie.” American Women’s Autobiography. Fea(s)ts of Memory. Ed. Margo Culley. Madison/London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. 152–166. Vogt, Marianne. Autobiographik bürgerlicher Frauen. Zur Geschichte weiblicher Selbstbewußt­ werdung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1981. Volkening, Heide. Am Rand der Autobiographie. Ghostwriting – Signatur – Geschlecht. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Autobiografie und Geschlecht.” Freiburger FrauenStudien 19 (2009): 49–64. Weigel, Sigrid. “Der schielende Blick. Thesen zur Geschichte weiblicher Schreibpraxis.” Die verborgene Frau. Sechs Beiträge zu einer feministischen Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1983. 83–137. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: The Hogarth Press, 1949.

Further Reading Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

1.7 Hermeneutics Ulrich Breuer

Historically, scientific autobiography research started with the hermeneutical approach to autobiography. In the context of philosophical hermeneutics, where a life is essentially thought of as history, autobiography, which until the start of the twentieth century had primarily been understood as a cultural-historical document (Glagau 1908), started to become a paradigm of humanities. The way this field of study treats autobiography is quite different from the approach taken by the natural sciences. However, the rise in autobiography’s epistemological value is also associ­ ated with a fateful constriction: because hermeneutical methodology was restricted to the humanities, autobiography research was long ago cut off from natural-sciences approaches, even though the hermeneutic circle is also compatible with theories of cognitive psychology. From a systematic perspective, hermeneutics commits autobi­ ography research to the traditional ‘understanding of others’ and thus is kept locked in processes of unending convergence on an individually created and context-related richness of meaning passed down in a given culture. To this extent, the rise in the epistemological appreciation of the genre is ambivalent. Although the premises of the hermeneutical theory of autobiography have been largely rejected since the 1970s, this theory has nevertheless remained productive to the present day. Scientific autobiography research came about in the larger context of the reor­ ganisation of the sciences that occurred in the late nineteenth century. It draws on older concepts of European cultural criticism, particularly German, yet views itself as a reflection of their continuity. These concepts include the Enlightenment’s prin­ cipal anthropological motto: “The proper study of Mankind is Man” (Pope 1950, 53), which establishes a categorical analogy between self-awareness and insight into human nature. As a basic methodological axiom, it is also based on Rousseau’s auto­ biography. Accordingly, the individual and his self-understanding were dependent on context, an assertion put forward, in particular, by Johann Gottfried Herder, who felt that the autobiography is a “lehrendes Exempel” [‘instructive example’] (Herder 1987, 676) because it reveals man’s position between liberty and determination. For this reason, Herder conceived of the genre as an educational resource. However, after studying the first part of Rousseau’s Les Confessions, he denied that confessions had any educational value and instead accorded such value solely to pragmatic autobiog­ raphies, like the one by Benjamin Franklin. Herder later also politicised autobiogra­ phy by making it a medium of national education. Central aspects of this hermeneu­ tics-based educational programme were implemented by Goethe in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth] (1808−1833). It does not follow the French type (Rousseau) but rather the American one (Franklin), which in the nineteenth century thus became the norm that also guided the hermeneutical theory of autobiography. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-008

1.7 Hermeneutics 

 65

This type of theory is a reaction to the fundamental crisis in philosophical thought, which in the late nineteenth century saw itself as being challenged by the achieve­ ments of the natural sciences. In an effort to save the historically focused sciences, the influential philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey drew a sharp distinction between the humanities and the natural sciences in his late work Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910 [2002]) [The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences]. The humanities are defined by their subject matter and their method. Humanity, which according to Dilthey forms the subject matter of the human­ ities, for him is not a physical circumstance but rather a “Zusammenhang von Leben, Ausdruck und Verstehen” [“the nexus of lived experience, expression, and under­ standing”] (Dilthey 1981, 98 [2002, 109]). As a result, life is equivalent to history. In his notes from the period 1906–1910, which were later published in 1927, the meaning of humanity as an historical interrelationship was spelled out in more detail. In addi­ tion, in the first part of the ongoing contiuity, the basic humanities concepts of expe­ rience, expression, and understanding were explained in more detail and exemplified by the autobiography. For Dilthey, the paradigmatic character of the autobiography for the humanities results from its quintessential nature: It shows how life can be understood. Accord­ ingly, Dilthey writes that “[d]ie Selbstbiographie ist die höchste und am meisten instruktive Form, in welcher uns das Verstehen des Lebens entgegentritt” [“In auto­ biography we encounter the highest and most instructive form of the understanding of life”] (Dilthey 1981, 246 [2002, 221]). Because hermeneutics establishes the discipli­ nary independence of the humanities, and because the autobiography gives expres­ sion to life understood, i.  e. the intellect, autobiography can become the model for the genuinely historically focused humanities. Moreover, since an autobiography by someone who discovers interrelationships in his life is identical to that by someone who creates interrelationships through engagement with a certain milieu, the auto­ biographical understanding differs from the historical one due to its particular prox­ imity, to its particular intimacy with the intellect (Dilthey 1981, 246 [2002, 222]). Ele­ mentary hermeneutics of human existence finds expression in the autobiography, which Dilthey calls ‘Selbstbesinnung’ [self-reflection] (Dilthey 1981, 247 [2002, 222]). It is elemental because it always has to look for meaning in life processes and their expression. ‘Ready meaning’ must never be attributed to life. Dilthey sees the axiom as being realised, above all, in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth]. However, he is less interested in the literary form of the autobiography, emphasising merely the wide historical variety of autobiographical forms (Dilthey 1981, 244–247 [2002, 221–223]). Even beyond autobiography, man’s reflection about himself always constitutes interrelationships. It therefore draws on the temporal structure of each experience, which is tied to the dimensions of the time, to the framework of past, present, and future. From each of these dimensions, life as a whole becomes visible, though dis­ torted in perspective. But for Dilthey, life becomes understandable as an interrela­

66 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

tionship only from the standpoint of the past, as a function of memory. It is memory that gives meaning to values (past) and objectives (future) and thus synthesises life ex post facto into an intellectual interrelationship. For Dilthey, the fundamental her­ meneutical concept of meaning is therefore not just the most important category of historical thinking (Dilthey 1981, 249 [2002, 223]) but also the fundamental category of his theory of autobiography. At the same time, he ties this theory to a canon of highly meaningful texts (Augustinus, Rousseau, Goethe, etc.). In the theory of autobiography, Dilthey’s historical hermeneutics is now consid­ ered to be a difficult burden. Criticism has been directed to the metaphysically charged concept of the intellect, without which it is impossible to resolve the basic herme­ neutical conflict between understood subject and understood object, let alone the equivalence of individual and genre, as well as to the idealistic remnants in Dilthey’s theory of time (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 21–23). If, on the other hand, one accepts the theory of time, then one of the strengths of the hermeneutical approach is the sceptical realisation, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s criticism of historicism, that in the search for meaning, memory must artificially fixate on onward-flowing life and thus inhibit, even destroy, the experiencing of the present. Put another way, autobiographies not only bring about and demonstrate interrelationships; they also destroy presence. In other words, a central theme of current hermeneutics criticism (Gumbrecht 2004) (albeit in itself astonishingly autobiography-like) is already embedded in the hermeneutical theory of autobiography. Moreover, this theory reveals that historical or anthropologi­ cal understanding can basically reach only partial notions of life’s interrelationships. This prompted Dilthey to position autobiography, and with it, the individual, against every form of historical and philosophical generalisation – a decision that, as early as the 1920s, was hardly a convincing one due to its proximity to relativism. Finally, Dilthey’s lack of interest in the form and structure of the autobiography, as well as in its role in cultural politics, undoubtedly contributed to the waning acceptance of his approach, particularly in literary studies. Dilthey’s student and son-in-law, Georg Misch, made Dilthey’s humanities herme­ neutics – but not his posthumous theory of autobiography – the basis of a monumen­ tal genre criticism of the autobiography. In 1900 the Prussian Academy of Sciences (to which Dilthey had belonged since 1887) announced a prize competition for researching and depicting the history of the autobiography. The three, hand-written volumes that Misch then submitted to the Academy were awarded the top prize in 1905 (Misch 1949, VII). Misch later suggested that it was his results that prompted Dilthey to elevate the autobiography to a paradigm of philosophical hermeneutics (Lembeck 1999–2000, 67). The Geschichte der Autobiographie [A History of Autobiography] was published in eight volumes between 1907 and 1969. It depicts the development of the genre in Europe (as well as, in part, in Asia and America) from antiquity to the broadly covered Middle Ages and early modern times and on to the late nineteenth century. It remains today by far the most comprehensive testimonial to hermeneutical autobi­ ography research.

1.7 Hermeneutics 

 67

In his introduction, Misch stresses the importance of Herder for the appreciation of, and research into, autobiography (Misch 1949, 4 [1950, 2]). From Goethe, he derives the leading point of view regarding self-action. The leading point of view is to treat “die autobiographischen Schriften in den verschiedenen europäischen Sprachen als Zeugnisse für die Entwicklung des Persönlichkeitsbewußtseins der abendländischen Menschheit” [“the autobiographical works in various European languages are here studied as revealing the ways in which the individual’s sense of personality has devel­ oped in the Western World”] (Misch 1949, 5 [1950, 9]). In other words, at the centre of the hermeneutical theory of autobiography are allegorical readings, which view autobiographical texts as masks of the increasingly self-aware individual. Although the autobiography should be understood both as a literary genre and as an elemen­ tal form of life experience (Misch 1949, 6 [1950, 4]), the philosophy-of-life approach clearly has priority over the genre-poetological one. Just as with Dilthey, questions of form play only a subordinate role, since the autobiography itself is an expression of life that is not tied to any specific form (Misch 1949, 6 [1950, 4]). For this reason, Misch claims that it is also incapable of definition but rather can at best be delineated by an explanation of the genre’s name: Autobiography, says Misch, is “die Beschreibung (graphia) des Lebens (bios) eines Einzelnen durch diesen selbst (auto)” [“the descrip­ tion (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (auto)”] (Misch 1949, 7 [1950, 5]). From the structure-endowing feature of the autobiography, which he interprets (while avoiding the difference between author and narrator) as identity between the depicting and the depicted individual, Misch derives the inti­ mate approach of autobiography, which Dilthey also emphasises, both to the particu­ lar facts and to the totality of the individual’s life history. And, just as with Dilthey, the relationship between the facts and the totality of the individual’s life is brought about by the category of meaning: As historian of himself, the autobiographer accords meaning ex post facto to the facts of his life. For this reason, Misch, too, believes that autobiography deserves the status of a paradigm for historically focused humanities. It owed this status because of its genuine philosophical claim to truth. Because autobiographies serve human self-awareness (Misch 1949, 13 [1950, 10]), they with­ stand all sceptical, deterministic, and biologistical attempts at reduction. The phil­ osophical ennobling of the autobiography at the same time commits genre criticism to important texts, to a canon. From a typically hermeneutical perspective, the truth in these texts lies not in the individual parts of the autobiography but rather “in dem Ganzen, das mehr ist als die Summe der Teile” [“in the whole works, each of which is more than the sum of its parts”] (Misch 1949, 13 [1950, 10]). As with Dilthey, this total­ ity is identical with the intellect, which regains consciousness through self-awareness and dedicates itself to the reader in the structure of the narrative, its style, and its inner form (Misch 1949, 13 [1950, 10–11]). It is therefore always characteristic of the canonical autobiography that there is a unity of “Individualität und Formgestalt” [‘individuality and form structure’] (Misch 1949, 14). Its truth is that of the individual who has taken form. As an individual

68 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

truth, it is rationally inaccessible and essentially inexhaustible: “In das Geheimnis der Persönlichkeit dringt gewiß kein Begriff” [‘Indeed, no concept can penetrate the mystery of personality’] (Misch 1949, 15). Accordingly, hermeneutics once again finds itself reliant on form, since this provides an “objektives, demonstrierbares Abbild von der Struktur der Individualität” [“objective, indeed, demonstrable image of the struc­ ture of individuality”] (Misch 1949, 16 [1950, 13]). Among the strengths of the hermeneutical approach is its expansion (adopted by Herder as well) of intellectual criticism to include cultural and, latently, form criti­ cism, since both autobiographers and the forms they chose consistently gain a specific profile in the context of the overall culture of various epochs and ethnicities (Misch 1949, 16 [1950, 13]). A blind spot in the theory becomes evident in its ideal type, which places the focus on neither the self nor the world but rather mediates between the two poles. Only autobiographies meeting this ideal type contribute to European self-reflec­ tion, because they work “im hellen Licht steigender Kulturarbeit” [“in the clear light of advancing civilization”] (Misch 1949, 18 [1950, 16]) at ‘liberating and deepening life’. As a result, the hermeneutical theory of autobiography elaborated by Dilthey and Misch is marked not merely by the idea of progress but also by massive eurocentrism, which follows from the instrumentalisation of the autobiography in the eighteenth century as a tool of educational and national politics. The most important contributions to a hermeneutical theory of autobiography thus turn out to be reading strategies legitimated by philosophy and, potentially, also by cultural politics. They treat the autobiographical text and its specific form as a superficial phenomenon, beneath which an allegorical reading has to discern the growing self-understanding of European personality and present it in its exemplariness. Up until the 1970s, this reading strategy was widespread in the theory of autobiography. The hermeneutical theory of autobiography was developed in philosophy. It was not adapted for literary studies until the 1940s and 1950s. In the process, it was exis­ tentially and aesthetically transformed in characteristic fashion. This can be made clear with two examples: During World War II, the German anglicist Horst Oppel attempted to split the hermeneutical theory of autobiography. On the one hand, he claimed that the genre had a historical “Ursprünglichkeit” [‘originality’] founded on the wholehearted identification of the autobiographer with “in bestimmter Zeit und in bestimmtem Raum vollbrachte[m] Schicksal” [‘his destiny as achieved at a certain time and in a certain space’] (Oppel 1942, 41). On the other hand, he argued that autobiography was also something late and posterior and is due to merely sec­ ondary reflection (Oppel 1942, 44). In line with the Stefan George Circle, Oppel wants to save the existential originality of the autobiography from its posteriority. For this reason, he concentrates the hermeneutical theory of autobiography completely on the poet autobiography. The originality of its character as work, he says, is based neither on historical developments nor on national or individual peculiarities but rather on a methodical devaluation of the concept of time (Oppel 1942, 51). He asserts that this alone can compel the reader to truly take seriously the man and his work as an internal

1.7 Hermeneutics 

 69

whole within the poet (Oppel 1942, 53). Because literary studies truncates the moment of posterity from the hermeneutical theory of autobiography the theory’s irrational implications come to the fore. The French philosopher and epistemologist Georges Gusdorf felt otherwise. In his transformation of the hermeneutical theory of autobiography in 1956, he once again united originality and posteriority and at the same time adopted the metaphysics of the intellect. In this way, he faces autobiography close to autofiction. Similar to Dilthey and Misch, Gusdorf also feels that in the autobiography, the mysterious being of the individual is up for debate (Gusdorf 1989, 124) and, like Oppel, that it depicts meanings that lie beyond time (Gusdorf 1989, 135). However, this being and the mean­ ings attributed to it are not created originally but instead after the fact. To this extent, the autobiography is, for Gusdorf, an “Apologie oder Theodizee des persönlichen Wesens” [‘apologia or theodicy of one’s own being’] (Gusdorf 1989, 136). In contrast to the historical and the literary, Gusdorf once again stresses the anthropological role of the autobiography. Its truth, which is always comprehensible only symbolically, is the product of a meaningful writer, who creates himself in the structuring of his experiences. This places the autobiography in proximity to the novel, which Gusdorf asserts is merely an autobiography assigned to an intermediary (Gusdorf 1989, 144). Just as with Oppel, Gusdorf also sees the hermeneutical theory of autobiography as disclosing an internal whole of life and work: “Leben, Werk und Autobiographie sind somit drei Aspekte derselben Aussage, die durch ein System dauernder Interferenz zusammengehalten werden” [‘Life, work, and autobiography are thus three facets of the same expression, held together by a system of permanent interference’] (Gusdorf 1989, 146–147). Because in autobiography, an important person depicts his own life as legend (Gusdorf 1989, 147), autobiography research should no longer be conducted (in the sense of Georg Misch) as genre criticism but instead – e.  g. in the sense of the Nietzsche biography by Ernst Bertram – as personal mythology. A strong echo of the hermeneutical theory of autobiography with simultaneous departure from its existential and aesthetic transformations can be found in RalphRainer Wuthenow’s literary-studies work on the European autobiography of the eight­ eenth century. Here the hermeneutical approach is transformed comparatively, as well from the standpoint of social, cultural, and literary criticism. Reminiscent of Dilthey’s and Misch’s hermeneutics is both the idea of progress – since by means of the autobi­ ography, the development of self-consciousness (Wuthenow 1974, 21) is to be traced all the way to the autonomous self (Wuthenow 1974, 10) – and the double meaning of the autobiographical undertaking, in literary studies and in the philosophy of life, as life that is narrated as well as construed in the narration, the experienced and remem­ bered self (Wuthenow 1974, 37). Even Misch’s eurocentrism is found again ‒ put crit­ ically yet cautiously ‒ when the autobiography is defined as a “wesentlich europäis­ che literarische Form” [‘an essentially European literary form’] (Wuthenow 1974, 18). With respect to the problem of memory, Wuthenow stresses, much like Gusdorf, that in the autobiography, the individual creates himself in the images that he makes of

70 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

himself (1974, 20). The comparative transformation of hermeneutics likewise begins to approximate the concept of autofiction. Since the 1970s, hermeneutical autobiography research has been a part of those déclassé cultural assets that are largely determined by the quotidian understanding of the genre. In autobiography research, the genre has been disparaged from a psycho­ logical, constructivist, and deconstructive perspective, as well as from the standpoint of social and reader-response criticism, but this has not put an end to the approach once and for all. On the contrary, particularly from an interdisciplinary standpoint, it has proved to be exceptionally productive. This can be seen in two recent works, both of which look into the underlying structures of the autobiography. One of them is rooted in educational theory, which has used the autobiography as a source since the late 1970s. In 1989 there was a notable attempt to link the herme­ neutical theory of autobiography with neurobiological findings. To this end, Thomas Hartge started with the hermeneutics of autobiographical experience (1989,  9) but went beyond the linguistic form of these experiences and took into account their pre-linguistic dimension. Borrowing from psychoanalysis, he was interested in the underlying structure and the subtext, in short, in the ‘other’ of autobiographical dis­ course. In order to be able to reveal the logic behind the transformation of pre-lin­ guistic experience (images, emotions, kinaestheses), Hartge united the philosophy of reflection with neurobiology. He was particularly interested in the various activities of the right (intuitive/creative) and left (rational/analytical) hemispheres of the brain. The individual’s inaccessibility, inexhaustibility, originality, and mysterious charac­ ter, to which Dilthey, Misch, Oppel, and Gusdorf all referred, was now explained by the intuitive/creative activities of the author’s right brain. Hartge therefore empha­ sizes the great weight that even partial linguistic ability of the non-dominant hemi­ sphere has for hermeneutical considerations (1989, 74). Hartge claims that this finds expression particularly in the rhetoric of the autobiographical text, especially in its metaphors and symbols. Underlying structures were also the focus of the German studies scholar Ralf Simon. Like Dilthey, he was interested in the basic epistemological constellation of the autobiography (Simon 1994, 116). Simon’s hypothesis reinterpreted Dilthey’s her­ meneutics of elementary thought processes from the standpoint of narratology. He claims that autobiography raises the elementary underlying structure of all narrativ­ ity to the level of the textual surface (Simon 1994, 111). In contrast to to Lejeune (but sometimes in agreement with him), as well as in contrast to de Man, autobiography again becomes a paradigm: It is to be thought of as a model of fundamental fiction­ alisation of everything called understanding (Simon 1994, 112). The interrelationship of life, which for Dilthey was due in part to elementary thought process and in part to the objective intellect, was instead understood from a constructivist standpoint as the superficial staging of elementary hermeneutics (Simon 1994, 112). Because it presents patterns of interpretation that make it feasible in the first place, the autobiography is, in an elementary sense, just as fictional as all true understanding. For this reason,

1.7 Hermeneutics 

 71

it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction in this genre: The poetry of autobio­ graphical discourse makes the question of truth or fiction indistinguishable and thus puts it in constant flux (Simon 1994, 115). By also proposing new solutions for such persistent sets of problems as the aestheticity, identity, authenticity, and originality of the autobiography, Simon maintains the hermeneutical theory of autobiography in ongoing discussion. New philosophical works on the hermeneutics of the individual (Kramer 2001) draw on autobiography as well, but they do not start from Dilthey but from the her­ meneutics of Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor, seeing the autobiography as a model for the narration of life.

Works Cited Dilthey, Wilhelm. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1981 [The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002]. Glagau, Hans. Die moderne Selbstbiographie als Quelle historischer Erkenntnis. Marburg: Elwert, 1903. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit. Ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller. Frankfurt a.  M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986 [Poetry and Truth. From my own life. Trans. Minna Steele Smith. London: George Bell & Sons, 1908]. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Diesseits der Hermeneutik: Die Produktion von Präsenz. Trans. Joachim Schulte. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. Gusdorf, Georges. “Voraussetzungen und Grenzen der Autobiographie” (1956). Die Autobiographie: Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 121–147. Hartge, Thomas. Das andere Denken: Hermeneutische Perspektiven einer erziehungswissenschaft­ lichen Autobiographieforschung. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1989. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Werke. 3 vols. Vol. II. Ed. Wolfgang Proß. München/Wien: Hanser, 1987. Holdenried, Michaela. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. Kramer, Christine. Lebensgeschichte, Authentizität und Zeit: Zur Hermeneutik der Person. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2001. Lembeck, Karl-Heinz. “Selbstbiographie und Philosophiegeschichte.” Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 12 (1999–2000): 58–72. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Das Altertum. Vol. I, part 1. Bern: Francke, 3rd ed. 1949 [A History of Autobiography. 4 vols. Vol. I, part 1. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950]. Oppel, Horst. “Vom Wesen der Autobiographie.” Helicon 4 (1942): 41–53. Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man. Ed. Maynard Mack. London: Methuen & Co., 1950. Simon, Ralf. “Zwei Studien über Autobiographie: I. Autobiographie als elementare Hermeneutik.” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 29 (1994): 111–129. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Wuthenow, Ralph-Rainer. Das erinnerte Ich: Europäische Autobiographie und Selbstdarstellung im 18. Jahrhundert. München: Beck, 1974.

72 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Further Reading Goldmann, Stefan. “Leitgedanken zur psychoanalytischen Hermeneutik autobiographischer Texte.” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 23 (1988): 242–260. Jaeger, Michael. Autobiographie und Geschichte: Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Misch, Karl Löwith, Gott­ fried Benn, Alfred Döblin. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1995. Jung, Matthias. Hermeneutik zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 4th ed. 2012. Langer, Daniela. “Autobiographie.” Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft. Vol. II. Ed. Thomas Anz. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2007. 179–287. Nübel, Birgit. Autobiographische Kommunikationsmedien um 1800: Studien zu Rousseau, Wieland, Herder und Moritz. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994.

1.8 History Volker Depkat

For historians autobiographies are sources of evidence, and as such are historical doc­ uments providing information about past realities. In reading autobiography as mate­ rial enabling the analysis of historical persons, events, situations, and movements, historians apply a concept of ‘reality’ to the reading of autobiography that continues to be largely informed by the nineteenth-century historicist tradition. This tradition demands that the historian reconstruct the past as it actually was – “wie es eigentlich gewesen” in the words of Leopold von Ranke (Ranke 1874 [1824], vii). Historians thus approach autobiography as a form of referential writing that, by way of induction, allows them to reach through the text to the factual context behind it. This treatment of autobiography is, of course, based on the premise that author, narrator, and protag­ onist of an autobiography are identical. When historians speak of autobiography, they usually mean the classic form of retrospective self life writing that covers the whole lifespan of its author, or at least large parts of it, usually in the form of a chronological narrative. Grouping self life writing into the larger class of personal writing, which also includes diaries and letters, historians largely adhere to a concept of autobiography as defined by French theorist Philippe Lejeune, who sees autobiography as a “[r]écit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, losqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personalité” [“Retrospective prose nar­ rative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality”] (Lejeune 1975, 14 [1989, 4]). This definition of autobiography as a retrospective narrative in prose about a lived life, focusing on the story of the author’s own personality, refers to an essentially Western practice of self-referential writing that, emerging in the eighteenth century, is deeply indebted to the Enlightenment concept of the autonomous individual, its unique indi­ viduality, and its quest to find a place in society. In categorizing modes of autobiographical writing, historians distinguish between ‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’, with memoirs being life narratives of public figures of prominence and ‘weight’, who chronicle their professional careers, describing their life and times with a focus on the public sphere, events of historical import, or the character and actions of other prominent and historically important contemporar­ ies. While the term ‘memoir’ refers to the personal recollections of an already social­ ized individual often bracketing one moment or period of experience rather than the whole life span, the term ‘autobiography’ is applied to life narratives that, following the pattern of a ‘Bildungsroman’, reconstruct how the narrator was socialized, how he found his place in society and how he became a social subject aware of his purpose in the world (Neumann 1970, 9–42; Henning 2012, 21–24, 32–34; Smith and Watson 2012, 3–4, 10, 274–275). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-009

74 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

While this generic distinction between ‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’ is thor­ oughly problematic and potentially fruitless in light of the current debate about ‘life writing’ as the more inclusive “general term for writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its subject” (Smith and Watson 2010, 4), it continues to be crucial in the field of historiography. This is largely so because historians, being more interested in public figures and their historical actions than in the private struggles of historical individuals trying to become social subjects, until very recently have mostly drawn on texts that qualify as memoirs (Crane 2006, 434–435). Historians are primarily focused on social time not individual time, collective phenomena not individual idiosyncra­ sies, and in the public life not in the private life of historical actors. This hierarchy of interests is behind historians’ preoccupation with the self life writings of men of power and the elites, such as statesmen and politicians, generals, business leaders, clergy­ men, famous authors and artists, etc., and it is this concentration on decision-makers and intellectual elites, which cements a distinction between the private and the public sphere that characterizes much of the work of historians to this very day. Historians, therefore, research collective time and experiences, while autobiography, as Jeremy D. Popkin reminds us, “adopts the arbitrary time frame of the individual and the per­ spective of the individual” that is describing “the past from the inside, filling in the dimension of motives and reactions that the outside observer can never fully know” (Popkin 2005, 11, 6). In recent years, the traditional focus on ‘great men’ and public figures has been challenged by feminist, poststructuralist, anthropological and postcolonial criticism as male-dominated, elitist, eurocentric and frequently ethnocentric (Leckie 2004). This criticism has produced a new interest in the self life writings of individuals from groups hitherto marginalized because of their race, gender, ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation, as these autobiographical texts were seen as crucial for expanding the scope of historical research to reach a fuller understanding of bygone times, and to question, correct, complete, and complicate the grand narratives about the past (Smith and Watson 2010, 222–225; Gilmore 1994; Hornung and Ruhe 1998; Ulbrich et al. 2012). While the critique of the conventional approaches to autobiography flowing from various sources has led to a multiplication of autobiographical forms and genres worthy of a historian’s attention, the discussion in the field continues to be dominated by a focus on written modes of autobiography. Historians still must come to grips with performative, visual, filmic, or digital forms of self-presentation and self-thematiza­ tion as autobiographical acts, and include them in their source criticism. That being said, autobiographical texts are classical sources of historiography, which are used to explore a wide variety of research questions for all historical periods. Generally speaking, historians using autobiographical texts either hope to be able to reconstruct a historical actor’s thoughts and feelings, motivations, and inten­ tions, or they read them in the search for factual information – usually relating to the human condition or atmospheric circumstances – that cannot be drawn from official records or other documents. Finally, reading autobiographical texts seems worth­

1.8 History 

 75

while for historians because they promise thick descriptions and detailed portrayals of bygone times from the perspective of somebody who experienced them. For all of these reasons, historians have not only analyzed autobiographies as sources, they have also collected, documented, and edited autobiographical material from all centuries to secure, broaden, and enrich the available source base for the study of the past. If we take a closer look at how historians have used of autobiographical material, the first thing that has to be noted is the omnipresence of autobiography in the field of historical biography, life course analysis, and psychobiography (Klein 2009; Mar­ gadant 2000; Ambrosius 2004; Runyan 1982; Smith and Watson 2010, 5–9). This inter­ est in autobiographical material was largely forged by historicism with its actor- and agency-centered view of the past, which holds the ideas, values, motives, feelings, perceptions, and reactions of historical actors to be important factors for explaining the course of history (Iggers 1968). Frequently connected to this interest in autobiogra­ phy was a quest for behind-the-scenes information not found in official records, that is those bits and pieces of information relating to the overall atmosphere in meeting rooms and at negotiating tables, or to the personal chemistry between contemporaries etc. (Depkat 2003, 450; Henning 2012, 23, 41). In some ways related to the uses of autobiography as biographical sources are projects investigating the history of individuality and subjectivity. This tradition goes back to Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and Georg Misch (1878–1965), who saw autobiog­ raphies as sources paving paths into the history of the Western consciousness of per­ sonality – “Zeugnisse für die Entwicklung des Persönlichkeitsbewußtseins der abend­ ländischen Menschheit” [“autobiographical writings […] are […] revealing the ways in which the individual’s sense of personality has developed in the Western world”] (Misch 1949, 5 [1950, 3]). In recent years, this traditional field has substantially been transformed and enriched by feminist, postcolonial, and anthropological criticism that, while still interested in notions of individuality, subjectivity, and personality, has opened our eyes to the multitude of alternative identity concepts beyond the white, male, and Western norm (Margadant 2000; Popkin 1999; Crane 1996, 2006). Under the auspices of the social history turn occurring in the 1960s/1970s, the source value of autobiographical material was thoroughly reassessed (Depkat 2003, 451). Unfolding as a fundamental critique of the historicist persuasion, social history devalued the historical importance of individual actors and challenged the very concept of individuality as such, arguing that all individuality was historically deter­ mined by larger socio-economic forces, anonymous processes, and societal structures. On the basis of this fundamental critique of historicism, one strand of social history went into the field of statistical analysis that abandoned all hermeneutic and interpre­ tive forms of investigation altogether, disqualifying them as purely subjective. Another strand of social history, however, led into the New Cultural History that anchors in the ‘double reality’ of all things social, that is the objectively given web of structures, institutions, social formations, and the subjectively “imagined communities” (Ander­ son 1983), in which the members of a society are living. This subjective dimension of

76 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

the social produced an interest in collective mentalities, identities, and the symbolic worlds from which individuals and groups construct meaning in their lives, organize perspectives on the world they live in, and negotiate their identity (Hunt 1989; Bonnell and Hunt 1999; Burke 2004; Bachmann-Medick 2009). In this context autobiography was reassessed as a source that could pave a path into the history of meaning-making, the social construction of knowledge and the formation of identity. Under the umbrella of the New Cultural History emerging in the 1980s/1990s, historians more interested “in the attitudes and assumptions that structure autobiographical authors’ writing than the factual claims they make about their lives” (Popkin 2005, 19) have come to see autobiographical material as important sources to answer these questions about the experience of historical change. In order to understand “how people assume the identity that situates and motivates them in relation to others”, writes Jo Burr Margadant, “it is necessary to grasp the symbolic world from which they construct meaning in their lives” (Margadant 2000, 4). This makes autobiographical texts a key source for processes of self-reflection, self-descrip­ tion, and identity formation. In the wake of the cultural turn, historians began to read autobiographical mate­ rial to learn something about processes of socialization, focusing on childhood, youth, and education as well as on deviant behavior and criminality. Other historians used autobiographies as sources for body history, the history of sexuality, and the negotiation of gender ideals. Furthermore, many studies investigating the history of religion and piety used autobiographical material, just as scholars reconstructing the history of science and technology did (Depkat 2010). Among the most recent trends in social and cultural history is memory studies that draws on autobiographical material to reconstruct the formation, transformation, and handing down of collective memory. This recent interest in the construction of historical memory through autobiography is both new and old at the same time because the idea of historiography and autobi­ ography being “two ways of narrating and preserving the past” (Popkin 2005, 4) was already discussed by scholars like Wilhelm Dilthey, for whom autobiography was the root of all historical thinking (Dilthey 1981, 247), or Paul Ricoeur, who in Temps et récit [Time and Narrative] reflected broadly about narrative identity and its relation to historical narrative (Popkin 2005, 43–50). Despite the long standing and widespread use of autobiography as a histori­ cal source, historians consider it to be dubious material at best. In terms of factual information about past events, autobiographies frequently contain nothing that is not already known from other sources, so that the question of the ‘added value’ of studying autobiographical material becomes virulent. Even more important is the problem of reliability. G. Kitson Clark, author of a widely used introduction to the study of history for students, sees autobiography as the “least convincing of all per­ sonal records” (Clark 1967, 67), and the German historian Winfried Baumgart, editor of the most recent standard manual on the study of sources, urges historians to confront autobiographical material with professional distrust from the start (Baumgart 1991, 2).

1.8 History 

 77

At the same time, he is willing to grant greater credibility to diaries and letters because their perspective on historical reality is supposedly less marred by later knowledge and experiences than the one of autobiographies (Baumgart 1991, 2–3). While his­ torians are willing to see unpublished autobiographical texts as more credible than those written for publication (Henning 2012, 39), they are generally uneasy with all forms of first-person narratives because their subjectivity seems to stand in the way of themselves and the past as it actually was. Interested in factual accuracy and historical objectivity, historians are skeptical about having to see past realities through the limited, arbitrary, and biased perspec­ tive of the autobiographer’s eye. How the autobiographer experienced history, and what he or she writes about it, they would claim, depends on his or her upbring­ ing, education, and profession, his or her regional background as well as his or her political and ideological orientation. Other factors determining an autobiographer’s perspective on his or her time are gender, class, ethnicity, and profession, and to this we must add the arbitrariness of an autobiographer’s lifespan plus other idiosyncra­ cies of individual lives. Apart from stressing the limitations of an autobiographer’s perspective, historians have pointed out that autobiographies are written with the wisdom of hindsight and, therefore, have to be addressed as after-the-fact rational­ izations serving purposes of self-promotion, self-legitimation, self-justification, or the denial of guilt. Many autobiographers have been identified as narcissists, who let their contributions and historical significance appear much greater than it actu­ ally was. Most importantly, however, an autobiographer’s narrative representation of the past is always selective; there are things that he or she writes about, while other things, purposely or not, are left unmentioned. Finally, there is the problem of lying in autobiography, whose narrative is formed by the dialectic of revelation and with­ holding, unveiling and veiling, truth-telling and lying (Popkin 2005, 11–24; Depkat 2003, 447–453). An autobiographical narrative, therefore, is not a disinterested representation of the past as it actually was, including the feelings, thoughts, motivations, and purposes of the autobiographer. Rather, from a historian’s perspective it is an interest-driven reconstruction of the past from the perspective of the writing present that represents past events in a way in which they could not have been presented at the moment they were experienced. In addition, the autobiographical narrative is carried by the con­ scious or unconscious tendency to introduce coherence and meaning into the author’s life that the author was not aware of at the time he or she is writing about. The unique access to the subjective dimensions of history that autobiographical material promises to offer is problematic because the autobiographer’s experience of history as it mani­ fests itself in his or her inner thoughts, motivations, perceptions, and feelings during specific moments in the past is inherently unverifiable on the basis of other sources. Historians, therefore, always have to decide whether they want to believe what an autobiographer tells them about the past or not, and when push comes to shove, his­ torians tend to distrust the autobiographer.

78 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

This professional distrust, not only in autobiography but in all first-person nar­ ratives, is the consequence of historiography becoming ‘scientific’ in the course of the nineteenth century. Maintaining that objectivity was the opposite of subjectivity, the ‘scientific turn’ in historiography rendered “historical subjectivity generally […] obscure as part of the attempt to be objective” (Crane 2006, 434). Demanding that the scholarly historian extract verifiable knowledge from historical material by way of rigorous source criticism in the search of historical ‘truth’, the formation of a new pro­ fessional identity as history scholars let all forms of self-referential narrative become suspected of being pure fiction. This distinction between objectivity and subjectivity made historians prefer administrative records and historical documents as the more reliable sources, while all forms of self-referential writing were understood as mani­ festations of a subjectivity that fell from the historian’s radar screen (Popkin 2005, 16; Crane 2006, 435). In all, therefore, historiography’s ‘scientific turn’, which was reinforced by the form of social history anchoring in statistical evidence and empirical data that emerged in the 1960s/1970s, went hand in hand with a separation of historiography from literature, including autobiography. With the “wall between history and autobi­ ography” having been constructed “largely from the historians’ side” (Popkin 2005, 15), historians lost their intellectual equipment to treat autobiographies as textual sources adequately, reading them literally, and judging them solely in terms of their factual accuracy. Under the auspices of the New Cultural History, feeding on feminist, poststruc­ turalist, anthropological, and phenomenological approaches, the formerly cemented distinction between objectivity and subjectivity has begun to crumble. A new aware­ ness that all knowledge is socially constructed, and that subjectivity and objectivity, therefore, are related and not opposed, has emerged since roughly the 1990s to the effect that historians increasingly have stressed the performativity, positionality and relationality of all historical knowledge. This also has far reaching consequences for the treatment of life writing in general as it suggests that historians dealing with auto­ biographical material should move their discussion beyond the antinomy of truth versus fiction (Popkin 2005, 33). More recent studies have tried to confront the hybridity of the genre oscillat­ ing between fact and fiction. Scholars like Jeremy D. Popkin, Jo Burr Margadant, Dagmar Günther, or Volker Depkat have integrated narratological and communicative approaches to reassess the source value of autobiography (Günther 2001; Margadant 2000; Popkin 2005; Depkat 2003). This has led some historians to deal with genre conventions, narrative patterns and strategies in autobiographical material, while others have been more interested in identifying the intertextual relationships of an individual autobiography with other texts. Again others endeavored to embed autobi­ ographical texts into the larger discursive contexts of a time, the effect of this being, of course, the de-centering of a personal document, the deconstruction of its claim to subjective authenticity, and the dissolution of the individual into the collective.

1.8 History 

 79

Next to this interest in the narrativity of autobiography, its communicative prag­ matics as acts of social communication is currently attracting a lot of attention. Auto­ biography has been discovered by historians as a social practice that serves a limited number of identifiable communicative functions in a given communicative context that both supersedes and envelopes the text itself. As such acts of social communica­ tion, autobiographies are triggered by concrete biographical and historical contexts that can be identified and reconstructed, which is why the biographical and historical moment of the autobiographical act has become crucial for historians to investigate (Depkat 2007; Preusser and Schmitz 2010; Lahusen 2014). While historians have developed a new curiosity about the narrativity and com­ municative pragmatics of autobiography, they continue to see them as historical sources paving a path into the extra-textual historical contexts. Historians, therefore, read self life writing as texts to use as evidence for a broad variety of questions relating to the past. Autobiography has been reassessed as a mode of narrative self-discov­ ery and self-creation, as a medium of social self-description, and as an act of meaning­ making in the light of experienced historical change. In short, historians have begun to analyze the what and how of autobiographical narration in its dependence on the when and why, making the textuality of autobiography the new point of departure for their source criticism. This suggests a very close reading of autobiographical texts to analyze how the narrator organizes the communication with his or her imagined audience and how the extra-textual communicative context shapes the textual profile of an autobiographical narrative. The uses, functions, and historical moments of auto­ biography build bridges from the textuality of autobiography into the biographical and historical context of an autobiographical act, and only this allows historians to treat autobiography as sources for the history of identity, subjectivity, and processes of meaning-making. This opens up new possibilities of interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and literary critics. Still, historians refrain from divorcing the literary narrative completely from reality and continue to insist that the relationship between narrative identity and the lived life is not fully arbitrary. David Carr has raised the question of whether the expe­ rience of life itself has a narrative structure built into it. Carr sees a lived life “as a constant effort, even a struggle, to maintain or restore narrative coherence in the face of an ever-threatening, impending chaos at all levels” because only this is the basis for acting meaningfully in a given present and with respect to an anticipated future (Carr 1986, 91; see also Popkin 2005, 52–53). Carr, therefore, suggests that human beings are constantly making sense of experiences by giving them a narrative form already while they are living the life they write about in autobiography. Narrative, therefore, is a basic cultural practice of “being in and dealing with time” (Carr 1986, 185), so that autobiography cannot be reduced to just its textuality and treated as another form of novel writing. It may, indeed, be the root of all historical understanding and meaningmaking. This turns autobiography in and by itself into both a historical fact and a historical (communicative) event that can be analyzed in terms of cause and effect.

80 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

It is not just about the facts behind the text; it is about the factuality of the autobio­ graphical text itself.

Works Cited Ambrosius, Lloyd E., ed. Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 3rd ed. 2009 [Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2016]. Baumgart, Winfried, ed. Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus und des Ersten Weltkrieges (1871–1918): Zweiter Teil: Persönliche Quellen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed. 1991. Bonnell, Victoria E., and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Burke, Peter. What is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Clark, G. Kitson. The Critical Historian. London: Heinemann, 1967. Crane, Susan A. “(Not) Writing History: Rethinking the Intersections of Personal History and Collective Memory with Hans von Aufsess.” History & Memory 8.1 (1996): 5–29. Crane, Susan A. “Historical Subjectivity: A Review Essay.” Journal of Modern History 78.2 (2006): 434–456. Depkat, Volker. “Autobiographie und die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29.3 (2003): 441–476. Depkat, Volker. Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden. Deutsche Politiker und die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts. München: Oldenbourg, 2007. Depkat, Volker. “Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der Geschichts­wissenschaft.” BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 23.2 (2010): 170–187. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften: Einleitung von Manfred Riedel. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1981 [The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002]. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Günther, Dagmar. “‘And now for something completely different’. Prolegomena zur Autobiographie als Quelle der Geschichtswissenschaft.” Historische Zeitschrift 272.1 (2001): 25–61. Henning, Eckart. Selbstzeugnisse: Quellenwert und Quellenkritik. Berlin: BibSpider, 2012. Hornung, Alfred, and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds. Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Iggers, Georg G. The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. Klein, Christian, ed. Handbuch Biographie: Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009.

1.8 History 

 81

Lahusen, Christiane. Zukunft am Ende. Autobiographische Sinnstiftungen von DDR-Geisteswissenschaftlern nach 1989. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Leckie, Shirley A. “Biography Matters: Why Historians Need Well-Crafted Biographies More Than Ever.” Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft. Ed. Lloyd E Ambrosius. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 1–26. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. 13–46 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Es. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Margadant, Jo Burr, ed. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Das Altertum. Vol. I, part 1. Frankfurt a.  M.: Schulte-Bulmke, 3rd ed. 1949 [History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. I], part 1. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950]. Neumann, Bernd. Identität und Rollenzwang: Zur Theorie der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Athenäum, 1970. Popkin, Jeremy D. “Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier.” American Historical Review 104.3 (June 1999): 725–748. Popkin, Jeremy D. History, Historians and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Preusser, Heinz-Peter, and Helmut Schmitz, eds. Autobiografie und historische Krisenerfahrung. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Ranke, Leopold von. Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (1824). Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. XXXIII/XXXIV. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1874. Runyan, William. Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010. Ulbrich, Claudia, Hans Medick, and Angelika Schaser, eds. Selbstzeugnis und Person: Transkultu­ relle Perspektiven. Köln: Böhlau, 2012.

Further Reading Brodzki, Bella, and Celeste Marguerite Schenck, eds. Life Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Depkat, Volker. “The Challenges of Biography. European-American Reflections.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 55 (Fall 2014): 39–48. Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991. Nora, Pierre, ed. Essais d’ego-histoire: Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raoul ­Girardet, Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, Rene Remond. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Rak, Julie. “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 37.3–4 (Fall/Winter 2004): 483–504. Redlich, Fritz. “Autobiographies as Sources for Social History. A Research Program.” Vierteljahres­ schrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 62 (1975): 380–390.

1.9 History of Art Gerd Blum

Since Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (Florence 1568; first edition 1550), ‘masterpieces’ of the visual arts, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, have frequently been interpreted autobiographically. Such interpretations are to be found in early modern and modern art historiography (‘History of Art’): initially in early modern ‘Kunstliteratur’ [literature on art and artists] by professional artists and later (until ca. 1900) in scholarly literature by professional ‘Historians of Art’. From the beginning of the early modern period onwards, autobiographical exegesis has been applied not only to explicitly autobiographical drawings, paintings, sculptures, and prints, but also to many works that do not have obvious autobiographical content, i.  e. to images that are neither self-portraits nor open allusions to the artist’s life or career. Art historical research became a university discipline shortly after 1800. Through­ out the nineteenth century scholarly art historians cited, but rejected, early modern autobiographical interpretations of artworks, which were based mainly on anecdotes and legends derived from ‘Kunstliteratur’ and collections of biographies of artists that were published frequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth century after the model of Vasari’s collection of “lives” by van Mander, Bellori, Baldinucci, and others (von Schlosser 1924; Blum 2012). At the same time these art historians implicitly trans­ mitted autobiographical interpretations by transferring to the visual arts the poetic theory of the pre-romantic ‘Sturm und Drang’ [Storm and Stress] movement, in which a work was the expression of the genius and the personality of the creator. It was not until formalist and iconographical methods of analyzing artworks within a history of ‘style’ (Wölfflin 1888 and 1915) or within a ‘history of ideas’ (Panofsky 1924 and 1955; Warburg 1893) became canonical that autobiographical interpretation was excluded as an exegetical tool. The new academic discipline of ‘History of Art’ was first institutionalized in Germany at Göttingen University in 1813 and then in Bonn in 1847 (Rosenberg 1995, 312). Paradoxically, the advocates of this discipline argued against autobiographical interpretations at the very moment that they developed the modern monograph on the artist’s ‘Life and Work’ (on the latter: Guercio 2006). The life-and-work genre was first established for the “Absolute Artist” (Soussloff 1997) of modern Europe before ca. 1870, i.  e. for Raphael of Urbino (Raffaelo Sanzio [1483–1520]). In 1815 Johann Heinrich Füssli published his lecture on the “Life and Works of Raphael” (Füssli 1815). Exten­ sive monographs on the life and work of Raphael by Quatremère de Quincy (1824), Rumohr (1831), Müntz (1881), Passavant (1839–1847), and Crowe and Cavalcaselle (1883) soon followed (see Hellwig 2005 and Heß et al. 2012). The authors of these monographs on the ‘life and work’ of the western artist-ge­ nius explicitly rejected the anecdotal approaches and the hyperbolic tropes of the early modern collections of artists’ lives. The authors of this new genre went to the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-010

1.9 History of Art 

 83

historical archives, corrected Vasari’s factual ‘errors’ with philological acumen, added a scholarly apparatus of sources and a ‘catalogue raisonné’ (Roesler-Friedenthal 2013) of the entire body of works by the master’s ‘own hand’ to their chronological narrative of the artist’s life, oeuvre, and career. In the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries autobiographical interpretation was extended to any drawing, painting, and sculpture by a single artist. These images were seen to result from his or her life. Autobiographical interpretation was not applied to acheiropoietical images of supposed supranatural origins [i. e. icons ‘made without hands’], or to depictions made by anonymous craftsmen. An artwork may either be considered – in a narrow sense of ‘autobiographical’ – a more or less explicit result and testimony of an occurrence in the life of an artist or as a ‘confession’ of the inner self, turning the artwork into an element of a “diary” (as Picasso famously put it [see Gilot and Lake 1965, 123; Krauss 1981]). From the time of Paolo Giovio and Giorgio Vasari, works of the visual arts have often been regarded as the result of personality and character (Price Zimmermann 1995; Enenkel 2013; Graul 2015) or as an individual response to a moment in the artist’s life and “Wirklich­ keit” [‘reality’] and thus in this wider sense it is ‘autobiographical’ (Eckermann 1836, “18. September 1823”).

Literature on Art and Art Criticism from Antiquity In the surviving fragments and rudiments of ancient treatises on the visual arts (Settis 1993) the work of art is neither conceptualized as a testimony of an event within the life of an artist nor of his inner ‘self’. This applies also to the only surviving, ancient ‘theoretical’ treatise on one of the modern ‘sister arts’ which survived, i.  e. in Vitruvi­ us’s handbook on architecture, written ca. 22 CE (Vitruvius 1999; on autobiograph­ ical aspects of architecture see Pisani and Oy-Marra 2014; Forster 2014). The most important and most influential testimonies on ancient artists and art are 1) the short ‘micro-biographies’ of and anecdotes on artists by Pliny the Younger (Blake McHam 2013), and 2) the ‘Ekphraseis’ (descriptions of art works) by the so-called Philostratos the Younger, by Lukian and others (Arnulf 2003). Autobiographical exegeses of art­ works are rare in both genres of the ancient literature of art, but one famous example is Lukian’s description of the lost Calumny of Apelles. Lukian ascribed the painting to Apelles himself, who was the court-artist to Alexander the Great, and offered an autobiographical interpretation of this panel. According to Lukian its painter, Apelles, depicted himself as the protagonist (Agnolotto 2005). This lost painting was recreated by Botticelli and other early modern painters and woodcutters. According to various ancient sources, the Amazonomachia on the shield of Phidias’s Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon at Athens contained a self-portrait of its author as its centerpiece (DNO, vol. II, nos. 900, 904, 910–912). Pliny the Elder and others explained the excellence of

84 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

paintings by Parrhasios and Zeuxis – along with Apelles the most famous painters of Antiquity – as a result of occurrences and decisions in the artist’s lives. In Parrhasios’s dreams, Hermes appears in a pose fit for portrayal (DNO, vol. II, no. 1648), and Zeuxis dares to ask the burghers of Croton to present him their daughters as nude models for an image of a single ‘model’ of ideal beauty (DNO, vol. II, nos. 1733–1737). This ficti­ tious episode has often been rendered by early modern artists as if it were a real event in Zeuxis’ life and these depictions often contained a self-portrait of the modern artist himself (e.  g. Giorgio Vasari’s frescoe in the Sala grande of his house in Florence, ca. 1569–1572 [see Blum 2011, 245–246]). The most important literary genre of autobiographical exegesis extant from ancient times is the ‘artist-anecdote’. Often far from being authentic and of factual documentary value, some of the famous and highly influential anecdotes on artists in Pliny the Elder’s chapters on the History of Art within his encyclopedic Naturalis historia (written around 1477; editio princeps 1469: Blake McHam 2013, 147–153) construct autobiographical moments to explain content and style of famous works of art (Kris and Kurz 1934). Mary Rosenthal Lefkowitz (1981) showed similar modes of crafting the ‘life’ of a poet according to his work – reminding one of Paul de Man’s famous questions in his article, “Autobiography as De-facement”: But are we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture on its model? We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiograph­ ical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium? (de Man 1979, 920)

The Middle Ages and Early Modernism The widely-held Romantic concept of the ‘Middle Ages’ was that of an epoch lacking the concept of individuality, which had not yet been discovered or invented (Burck­ hardt 1860, 201–209). In reality medieval artisans and patrons used inscriptions to mark and memorialise their authorship, often in astonishingly self-confident ways (Legner 2009; Dietl 2009). While in medieval treatises and texts on the visual arts no autobiographical exegesis has been documented, nevertheless protagonists in high medieval epics sometimes depict their own biography and thus create a form of fic­ titious autobiographical art. (On the so called Prose-Lancelot and other literary texts see Wandhoff 2003, 271–323.) The Tuscan proverb “Ogni artista dipinge se stesso” [‘Every artists depicts himself’], first documented 1478, is widely misunderstood as early modern praise of individualism (Zöllner 2002, 113–117). In a famous paragraph of Leonardo’s posthu­ mously edited written work, called the Trattato, Leonardo’s variation of this dictum suggests that every artist in all of his depictions of human figures and faces invol­

1.9 History of Art 

 85

untarily depicts his own likeness. His claim was that the mistake of self-depiction could be avoided by thorough studies of diverse models (Leonardo 1882, § 108). Vasari, however, sees the styles of individual artists as rooted in their personalities and char­ acters. For Vasari, the paintings of Andrea Castagno – a fifteenth century contempo­ rary of the pious and gentle painter Fra Angelico – are rude and aggressive in style, due to his rude and aggressive manners and character. The style is evident regardless of the respective subject matter, which would usually have been dictated by patrons (Vasari 1966–1988, vol. III, 351–365; Graul 2015). For Vasari, on the other hand, Fra Angelico’s (and Raphael’s) works are full of grace and beauty because of the sweet, saintly and sociable manners and characters of their creators (Vasari 1966–1988, vol. III, 269–283 and vol. IV, 155–217).

Ca. 1800 to ca. 1910 There is no history of the rise and decline of the autobiographical exegesis of works of art. But after ca. 1750, the ‘Sturm und Drang’ concept of the poet as ‘génie’ (Sommer 1998 [1942]), ‘Genie’ (Schmidt 1985), or ‘genius’ (Panofsky 1962; Murray 1989) was more and more applied to painters and sculptors. This gave the rich biographical and anecdotical material, which was collected (and invented) in the early modern col­ lections of artists’ lives a new significance. Every moment of an artist’s life could be interpreted as an expression of the outstanding nature and experiences of the ‘ingen­ ious’ artist. Popular genres, such as ‘guidebooks’, ‘artist-novellas’, and the new schol­ arly genre of the ‘artist monograph’, are testimonies to the widespread practice of autobiographical interpretations of artworks during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The sculptor Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, written around 1557–1566, was not published until 1728 and was then translated and edited by Goethe. However the first autobiography of an artist ever printed is Vasari’s autobiography (as the final piece of the second edition of his Lives: Vasari 1568, vol. III, 980–1002). Around 1800, a new genre of ‘paintings on painting and painters’ emerged: Paint­ ings and prints showed a painter or artist, for example Raphael of Urbino, creating artworks in an obviously private, ‘biographical’ moment, thus showing his master­ works to be results of an autobiographical constellation (see for example Jean-Au­ guste Dominique Ingres’s painting Raphael and the Fornarina, Cambridge, Harvard Art Museums, 1814; Riepenhausen 1820; Riepenhausen 1833; for more examples see Thimann and Hübner 2015). In texts, whose authors were reaching out to a wider public beyond the academic world, works of the Italian Renaissance, for example, were interpreted as autobio­ graphical testimonies. Today, Giorgione’s Tempest (Venice, Accademia), is con­ sidered to be a highly sophisticated allegory on the inspiration of the poet (Frings 1999) or an enigmatic depiction of Adam and Eve after the Fall (Settis 1978). In the

86 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

nineteenth century it was frequently interpreted as an autobiographical “Bekennt­ nis” [‘confession’] (Reinhart 1866, 252). It was seen as a depiction of the “Family of Giorgione” (Reinhart 1866, 252; Crowe and Cavasvaselle 1876, 175), which was a title which the painting obtained due to a misunderstanding of Byron’s Beppo (Ander­ son 1994). According to Raphael’s nineteenth century biographers (named above), an altarpiece by Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, depicted his son as a ‘Wunderkind’ [infant prodigy] at work. Raphael’s portrait of a young woman, the so-called Fornarina (Rome, Galleria Nazionale dell’Arte Moderna, ca. 1518) was seen as a portrait of his mistress (the same applied to his Donna Velata in Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, ca. 1515/1516). Works by northern artists, too, were also interpreted as if they were precise documents of autobiographical events and circumstances, for example, works by Rembrandt (Stückelberger 1996; Müller 2009) and Vermeer’s paintings, newly ‘discovered’, after 1860 (Thoré-Bürger 1866; Büttner 2014). The classical nineteenth century monographs on Raphael, Michelangelo, Rem­ brandt and other ‘divine’ artists and geniuses denounced earlier, pre-scholarly auto­ biographical exegeses of their works but, at the same time, succeeded in transmitting analyses of precisely this type.

Modern ‘Art History’: The Decline of Academic Autobiographical Exegesis and the Retrospective Analysis of its Topoi Since Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s claim to have advanced beyond a pre-modern ‘history of artists’ to a modern, theory-informed ‘history of art’ (“Geschichte der Kün­ stler” vs. “Geschichte der Kunst” [Winckelmann 1764, 9]), autobiographical exege­ sis has not been considered to be a reliable form of scholarship. Despite this, it has remained widespread and popular. While Winckelmann had opted for a history and theory of a hypostatized ‘Art’, Jacob Burckhardt saw the work of art as an expression of a particular ‘Culture’, rather than as a hidden autobiographical document (Burck­ hardt 1860). Philological research by ‘positivistic’ scholars like Passavant, Müntz, and others showed the absence of historical sources and archival documents for most pre­ vious autobiographical interpretations of masterworks of the canon. Within the first decades of the formation of scholarly ‘Art History’, artists began to write accounts of their own lives and works, often containing autobiographical interpretations of their works: For example, there were manifestos (at first the Realist Manifesto by Courbet 1855 [see Courbet 2011, 34–36]); diaries (Delacroix 1950); letters (Cézanne 2013; von Marées 1987; van Gogh 2009) and written records of conversa­ tions with artists by admirers and pupils (Doran 1978). Formalist art history, such as Heinrich Wölfflin’s “Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen” [‘Art History without Names’]

1.9 History of Art 

 87

(Wölfflin 1915, 20; see also Zimmermann 2009, 133) was greatly influenced by Édouard Manet’s friend Emile Zola and Hans von Marées’s friends and ‘pupils’ Konrad Fiedler and Adolf von Hildebrand. Zola, Fiedler, and Hildebrand denied any autobiographical content even of those paintings which were obviously autobiographical works (Blum 2001, 2005). As well as the ‘iconographic’ method (Panofsky 1924, 1955; Warburg 1893) formalist art history did not deal with art as an expression of an individual artist or as autobiographical testimony. These approaches define a work of the visual arts either as a realization of a supra-individual history of ‘form’ or as an expression of the ‘History of Ideas’. As a consequence of this marginalization of autobiographical interpretations within twentieth century academic historiography of art, contributions to an auto­ biographical understanding were provided, strikingly, from outside the discipline. Sigmund Freud offered an autobiographical exegesis of Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Paris, Louvre, ca. 1503–1519). He applied his psychoanalyti­ cal theory of dreams to this image by using a letter by Leonardo in which Leonardo describes a dream from his childhood (Freud 1910). Sociologist Georg Simmel inter­ preted Rembrandt’s late self-portraits as a condensed summation of his whole biog­ raphy (Simmel 1916). Freud’s pupil Ernst Kris and his co-author Otto Kurz showed the link between the seemingly factual biographical information provided in Early Modern Artists’ ‘lives’ and the artists’ works (Kris and Kurz 1934; for a history of these topoi and “Legends of the Artist” up to the second half of the twentieth century, see Soussloff 1997). Openly autobiographical paintings were created in large numbers and exhibited from 1850 onwards, first by Gustave Courbet (Marchal 2012) and soon followed by Edouard Manet, Hans von Marées, and Paul Cézanne. It was a full hundred years before the autobiographical character of the paintings by these ‘founders’ of Modern­ ism were subject to scholarly analysis. This was first done in Kurt Badt’s ground-break­ ing book on Paul Cézanne and his autobiographical motives (Badt 1960). Badt related Cézanne’s famous series of the Card Players and the Bathers to an early autobiograph­ ical drawing. Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (exh. 1863, Blum 2001) and other early paintings by this “painter of Modern Life” (Baudelaire 1964 [1863]) were ana­ lyzed as autobiographical allegories (Mauner 1975; Locke 2001). Contemporary painter Hans von Marées’s drawings and paintings are often explicitly autobiographical (Lenz 1987; Blum 2005). Avantgarde and early Modernist artists frequently provided auto­ biographical discourses about their artworks (during the pre- and post-World War I periods) (Thürlemann 1981).

88 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Autobiographical Comments and Interpretations of Contemporary Art after the “Death of the Author” After Roland Barthes’s article on “The Death of the Author” (1967), discourses by artists on the autobiographical contents of their own works and artistic self-representations were less and less seen as reliable testimonies regarding the artist’s ‘true’ life and intentions. Rather, they were seen as deliberate ‘self-fashioning’ (referring to Green­ blatt 1980: Woods-Marsden 1998). Despite a scholarly reaction against the ‘intentional fallacy’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954), the autobiographical exegesis of contemporary art works by artists and critics bloomed both in postwar Paris and New York. Surreal­ ists and postwar artists of the ‘Informel’ such as André Masson and Wols (i.  e. Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) considered art an immediate expression of the artist’s inner self via Surrealism-inspired “écriture automatique” [‘automatic writing’] (Breton 1924, 37; Masson 2005). An important spokesman for the ‘New York School’, painter Barnett Newman, declared in 1965: “The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject of painting” (Newman 1990, 187). Newman did not intend his non-figurative paintings to be expressions of his own personality and autobiography, but intended to evoke the beholder’s awareness of his or her “self” (Newman 1992, 187). So, the experience of his huge paintings is intended as a “sublime” experience of the viewer himself (Newman 1992, 170–174 [1948]; Rothko 1999 [1943]) Despite Barthes’s dictum, from the 1960s on, artists created and published auto­ biographical narratives to establish a public understanding of their works as being deeply autobiographical and authentic. For example, in many interviews, Louise Bourgeois spoke frankly about her childhood and youth and fostered an autobio­ graphical interpretation of her sculptures and drawings (Bourgeois 1998). A more extreme case is that of Joseph Beuys. In his so called Lebenslauf/Werklauf [Life Course/Work Course] (begun 1961) and in conversations with his semi-official biogra­ phers, Beuys created an entire autobiography that was wholly contra-factual, but not revealed to be a fiction until 1980 (Buchloh 2000 [1980]). Nevertheless these myths had exerted considerable influence on the autobiographical exegesis of his works and public art performances (Gieseke 1996; Riegel 2013; Schoene forthcoming). The influ­ ential curator Harald Szeemann devoted his seminal Exhibition documenta 5 (Kassel, Germany, 1972) to ‘individual mythologies’ (Szeemann 1985) by contemporary artists, which were highly loaded with autobiographical allusions. Carl Einstein wrote earlier about “private mythologies” (Einstein 1996 [1926], 112). Contemporary advocates of autobiographical exegesis, both in scholarly Art History and in Art Criticism, operate with the principle that openly autobiographical art does not reveal the artist’s ‘true’ self, but deliberately fashions an images of her or his public persona (De Man 1979; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 39–81; Woods-Marsden 1998). Since the 1970s artistic practice and art performances by Marina Abramovič (Abramovič 2010; on her autobiographical myths Janhsen 2015, esp. 324n55), Sophie

1.9 History of Art 

 89

Calle, Felix Gonzales-Torres (Smith 1996), Nan Goldin, Tracey Emin, Cindy Sherman, and others have been explicitly autobiographical and at the same time often accom­ panied by autobiographical paratexts and exegeses by the artists themselves (Höv­ elmeyer 2011; Stegmayer 2015). Autobiographical exegesis remains an important approach to art, though a canonical, scholarly and accepted methodology guiding its application to specific drawings, paintings, and sculptures is still lacking. Trying to understand a work of art by making assumptions about the artist’s intentions or by interpreting it as a direct expression of a biographical event, reduces the multi-layered meaning of an artwork. On the other hand, the successful transformation of private feelings and intimate thoughts into widely acclaimed ‘masterworks’ of art should be analyzed as a paradigmatic success in the mediation between the individual and pos­ terity. Translation: Brigitte Kalthoff, Celia and David Bloor

Works Cited Abramovič, Marina. The Artist is Present (Exhibition Catalogue, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 14 March – 31 May 2010). Ed. Klaus Biesenbach. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Agnolotto, Sara. “La Calunnia di Apelle: recupero e riconversione ecfrastica del trattatello di Luciano in Occidente.” Engramma 42 (2005). N. pag. http://www.engramma.it/engramma_v4/rivista/ saggio/42/42_saggiogalleria.html (15 November 2017). Anderson, Jaynie. “Byron’s Tempesta.” The Burlington Magazine 136 (1994): 316. Arnulf, Arwed. Architektur- und Kunstbeschreibungen von der Antike bis zum 16. Jahrhundert. München/Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003. Badt, Kurt. Die Kunst Cézannes. München: Prestel, 1960. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). The Painter of Modern Life and other Essays. Ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press, 1964. 1–40. Blake McHam, Sarah. Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance. The Legacy of the Natural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Blum, Gerd. “Édouard Manet: Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Die Erfindung der Moderne aus der Vergangenheit.” Schwellentexte der Weltliteratur. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik and Caroline Rosenthal. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2001. 201–232. Blum, Gerd. Hans von Marées. Autobiographische Malerei zwischen Mythos und Moderne. Berlin/ München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005. Blum, Gerd. Giorgio Vasari. Der Erfinder der Renaissance. Eine Biographie. München: Beck, 2011. Blum, Gerd. “Biographie.” Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft. Hundert Grundbegriffe. Ed. Stefan Jordan and Jürgen Müller. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012. 75–78. Bourgeois, Louise. Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father. Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997. Ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Breton, André. Manifeste du Surréalisme. Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1924. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol. Preliminary Notes for a Critique (1980).” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 41–64.

90 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch (1860). Ed. Konrad Hoffmann. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1985. Büttner, Nils. Rembrandt. Licht und Schatten: Eine Biographie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2014. Cezanne, Paul. The Letters. Ed. Alex Danchev. London: Thames and Hudson, 2013. Courbet, Gustave. Écrits, propos, lettres et témoignages. Ed. Roger Bruyeron. Paris: Hermann, 2011. Crowe, Joseph Archer, and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. Geschichte der italienischen Malerei. Vol. VI. Ed. and trans. Max Jordan. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1876. Crowe, Joseph Archer. Raphael. His Life and Works. London: Murray, 1883 [Raphael. Sein Leben und seine Werke. Trans. Carl Aldenhoven. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1883]. Delacroix, Eugène. Journal de Eugène Delacroix, publiée d’après le manuscrit original. Ed. André Joubin. Paris: Librarie Plon, 1950. Dietl, Albert. Die Sprache der Signatur. Die mittelalterlichen Künstlerinschriften Italiens. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009. DNO = Der neue Overbeck: Die antiken Schriftquellen zu den bildenden Künsten der Griechen. 5 vols. Ed. Sascha Kansteiner et al. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. Doran, Peter Michael, ed. Conversations avec Cézanne. Émile Bernard, Jules Borély, Maurice Denis, Joachim Gasquet, Gustave Geffroy, Francis Jourdain, Léo Larguier, Karl Ernst Osthaus, R. P. Rivière et J. F. Schnerb, Ambroise Vollard. Paris: Collection Macula, 1978. Eckermann, Johann Paul. Gespräche mit Goethe (1836). Ed. Christoph Michel. Frankfurt a.  M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2011. Einstein, Carl. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1926). Carl Einstein. Werke. Berliner Ausgabe. Vol. V. Ed. Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaethgens. Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996. Enenkel, Karl A. E., ed. Die “Vita” als Vermittlerin von Wissenschaft und Werk. Form- und funktions­ analytische Untersuchungen zu frühneuzeitlichen Biographien von Gelehrten, Wissenschaftlern, Schriftstellern und Künstlern. Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2013. Forster, Kurt W. “In den eigenen vier Wänden.” Ein Haus wie Ich. Die gebaute Autobiographie in der Moderne. Ed. Salvatore Pisani and Elisabeth Oy-Marra. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. 41–62. Freud, Sigmund. Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci. Leipzig: Deuticke, 1910. Frings, Gabriele. Giorgiones Ländliches Konzert. Darstellung der Musik als künstlerisches Programm in der venezianischen Malerei der Renaissance. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1999. Füssli, Johann Heinrich. Über das Leben und die Werke Raphael Sanzio’s. Eine Vorlesung. Zürich: Orell und Füssli, 1815. Gieseke, Frank, and Albert Markert. Flieger, Filz und Vaterland. Eine erweiterte Beuys-Biografie. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1996. Gilot, Françoise, and Carlton Lake. Life with Picasso. London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1965. van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters. The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition. 6 vols. Ed. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009. Graul, Jana. “Particolare Vizio de’ Professori di Queste Nostre Arti. On the Concept of Envy in Vasari’s Vite.” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 18.1 (2015): 113–146. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. Guercio, Gabriele. Art as Existence. The Artist’s Monograph and its Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Hellwig, Karin. Von der Vita zur Künstlerbiographie. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2005. Heß, Gilbert, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot, eds. Raffael als Paradigma. Rezeption, Imagination und Kult im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012.

1.9 History of Art 

 91

Hövelmeyer, Marion. “‘Selbstbildnisse’ eines Subjekts, das ‘verloren’ ging: Aporien und Strategien von Künstlerinnen im 20. Jahrhundert.” Die Wiederkehr des Künstlers. Themen und Positionen der aktuellen Künstler/innenforschung. Ed. Sabine Fastert, Alexis Joachimides and Verena Krieger. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2011. Janhsen, Angeli. “Das richtige Leben?: Marina Abramović’ The Hero (2001).” Künstlerhelden? Heroi­ sierung und mediale Inszenierung von Malern, Bildhauern und Architekten. Ed. Katha­rina Helm, Hans W. Hubert, Christina Posselt-Kuhli and Anna Schreurs-Morét. Merzhausen: ad picturam, 2015. 301–325. Krauss, Rosalind. “In the Name of Picasso.” October 16 (1981): 5–22. Kris, Ernst, and Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler. Ein kritischer Versuch. Vienna: Krystall, 1934 [Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: an Historical Experiment. Ed. Ernst H. Gombrich. Trans. Alastair Laing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979]. Legner, Anton. Der artifex. Künstler im Mittelalter und ihre Selbstdarstellung. Eine illustrierte ­Anthologie. Köln: Greven, 2009. Lenz, Christian, ed. Hans von Marées (Exhibition Catalogue, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemälde­ sammlungen, 11 November 1987 – 21 February 1988). München: Prestel, 1987. Leonardo da Vinci. Trattato della pittura. Ed. Heinrich Ludwig. 3 vols. Wien: Braumüller, 1882. Locke, Nancy. Manet and the Family Romance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Marchal, Stephanie. Gustave Courbet in seinen Selbstdarstellungen. München: Fink, 2012. Marées, Hans von. Briefe. Ed. Anne-Sibylle Domm. München: Piper, 1987. Masson, André. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Barbara Sietz. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2005. Mauner, George. Manet. Peintre-Philosophe. A Study of the Painter’s Themes. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. Müller, Jürgen. “Rembrandtmythen.” Kritische Berichte 37 (2009): 94–111. Müntz, Eugène. Raphaël. Sa Vie, son Oeuvre et son Temps. Paris: Hachette, 1881. Murray, Penelope, ed. Genius. The History of an Idea. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Newman, Barnett. Selected Writings and Interviews. Ed. John P. O’Neill. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Panofsky, Erwin. Idea. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. Leipzig: Teubner, 1924. Panofsky, Erwin. “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art.” Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. Garden City: Doubleday, 1955. 26–54. Panofsky, Erwin. “Artist, Scientist, Genius – Notes on the ‹Renaissance-Dämmerung›.” Wallace K. Ferguson et al. The Renaissance: Six Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 2nd. ed. 1962. 121–182. Passavant, Johann David. Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi. 4 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1839–1847. Pisani, Salvatore, and Elisabeth Oy-Marra, eds. Ein Haus wie Ich. Die gebaute Autobiographie in der Moderne. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Price Zimmermann, Thomas C. “Paolo Giovio and the Rhetoric of Individuality.” The Rhetoric of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe – Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV. Ed. Thomas F. Mayer and Daniel R. Woolf. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. 39–62. Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostôme. Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Raphaël. Paris: Gosselin, 1824. Reinhart, H. “Castelfranco und einige weniger bekannte Bilder Giorgione’s.” Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 1 (1866): 249–253.

92 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Riegel, Hans Peter. Beuys: die Biografie. Berlin: Aufbau, 2013. Riepenhausen, Franz and Christian von. Leben Raphael Sanzio’s von Urbino in zwölf Bildern dar­ gestellt. Frankfurt a.  M.: Wenner, 1820. Riepenhausen, Johannes. Vita di Raffaelle da Urbino. Rome: Giovanni Riepenhausen, 1833. Roesler-Friedenthal, Antoinette. “Defining the Œuvre, Shaping the Catalogue Raisonné.” The Challenge of the Object/Die Herausforderung des Objekts. 33. Internationaler Kunsthistoriker-Kongress 15 – 20 July 2012, Congress Proceedings. Vol. II. Ed. G. Ulrich Großmann and Petra Krutisch. Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2013. 723–727. Rosenberg, Raphael. “Von der Ekphrasis zur wissenschaftlichen Bildbeschreibung. Vasari, Agucchi, Félibien, Burckhardt.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 58 (1995): 297–318. Rosenthal Lefkowitz, Mary. The Lives of the Greek Poets. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Rothko, Mark. “The Individual and the Social” (1943). Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden: Blackwell 1999. 563–565. Rumohr, Carl Friedrich von. Ueber Raphael und sein Verhältnis zu den Zeitgenossen. Berlin: Nicolai, 1831. Schlosser, Julius von. Die Kunstliteratur. Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte. Wien: Schroll, 1924. Schmidt, Jochen. Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik 1750 – 1945. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985. Schoene, Janneke. Beuys’ Hut: Performance und autofiktionale Subjektivität, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2018. DOI: 10.11588/arthistoricum.201.272 Settis, Salvatore. La “Tempesta” interpretata. Giorgione, i committenti, il soggetto. Torino: Einaudi, 1978. Settis, Salvatore. “La trattatistica delle arti figurative.” L’Ellenismo. Lo spazio letterario della Grecia antica. Ed. Giuseppe Cambiano, Luciano Canfora and Diego Lanza. Vol. I, part 2. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1993. 469–498. Simmel, Georg. Rembrandt. Ein kunstphilosophischer Versuch. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1916. Smith, Roberta. “Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 38, A Sculptor of Love and Loss.” New York Times, 11 January 1996: 21. Sommer, Hubert. Génie: zur Bedeutungsgeschichte des Wortes von der Renaissance zur Aufklärung (1942). Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 1998. Soussloff, Catherine M. The Absolute Artist. The Historiography of a Concept. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Stegmayer, Benedikt. Confession: Autobiografie als fiktives Konstrukt. Jenny Holzer, Jenny Watson, Tracey Emin. Berlin: Verlag für Zeitgenössische Kunst und Theorie, 2015. Stückelberger, Johannes. Rembrandt und die Moderne: der Dialog mit Rembrandt in der deutschen Kunst um 1900. München: Fink, 1996. Szeemann, Harald, ed. Documenta 5: Befragung der Realität, Bildwelten heute [Exhibition Catalogue, Kassel, Museum Fridericianum et al., 30 June – 8 October 1972]. Kassel: Verlag Documenta, 1972. Szeemann, Harald. Individuelle Mythologien. Berlin: Merve, 1985. Thimann, Michael, and Christine Hübner, eds. Sterbliche Götter. Raffael und Dürer in der Kunst der deutschen Romantik (Exhibition Catalogue, Kunstsammlung der Universität Göttingen and Rome, Casa di Goethe, 2015–2016). Petersberg: Verlag Michael Imhof, 2015. Thoré-Bürger, Théophile. “Van der Meer (Ver Meer) de Delft.” Gazette des beaux-arts 21 (1866): 297–330, 458–470, 542–575. Thürlemann, Felix: Kandinsky über Kandinsky. Der Künstler als Interpret eigener Werke. Bern: Benteli 1986.

1.9 History of Art 

 93

Vasari, Giorgio. Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori (…) di nuovo ampliate (…) con i ritratti loro e con l’aggiunta delle vite de’ vivi e de’ morti dall’anno 1550 infino al 1567. Vol. III. Florence: Giunti, 1568. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568. Vol. III/IV. Ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi. Florence: Sansoni Edizioni/S.P.E.S. Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1966–1988. Vitruvius. Ten books on architecture (ca. 20 CE). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Wandhoff, Heiko. Ekphrasis. Kunstbeschreibungen und virtuelle Räume in der Literatur des Mittelalters. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003. Warburg, Aby Moritz. Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling”. Eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen Frührenaissance. Hamburg: Voss, 1893. Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. Dresden: Waltherischer Hof-Buchhandel, 1764. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien. München: Ackermann, 1888. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. München: Bruckmann, 1915. Woods-Marsden, Joanna. Renaissance Self-Portraiture. The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Zimmermann, Anja. Ästhetik der Objektivität: Genese und Funktion eines wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Stils im 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Zöllner, Frank. Michelangelos Fresken in der Sixtinischen Kapelle – gesehen von Giorgio Vasari und Ascanio Condivi. Freiburg i.  Br.: Rombach, 2002.

Further Reading Kemp, Martin. “The ‘Super-artist’ as Genius. The Sixteenth-century View.” Genius. The History of an Idea. Ed. Penelope Murray. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 32–53. Schwarz, Michael Viktor. “Figure of Memory and Figure of the Past. Giotto’s Double Life – With a Side-Glance at Joseph Beuys.” Studies of Art History 46: The Challenges of Biographical Research in Art History of Today. Helsinki: The Society for Art and Art History in Finland, 2013. 14–23. Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Most Exellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Ed. Philip Jacks. New York: The Modern Library, 2006. Winner, Matthias, ed. Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk (Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rom 1989). Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1992. 161–191. Zilsel, Edgar. Die Geniereligion. Ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal mit einer historischen Begründung (1918). Ed. Johann Dvořak. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. Zilsel, Edgar. Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes. Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus. Tübingen: Mohr, 1926.

1.10 Media Studies Matthias Christen

Media have been gaining salience within the critical discourse on autobiography since the 1970s, in the guise of individual visual and audiovisual media, of film and pho­ tography in particular. They did so in the form of separate technological and aesthetic artifacts, as ‘mediums’, rather than in terms of mediality in general and media as a collective singular that signifies “the infrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental condition, for experience and understanding” (as to the distinction between mediums and media see Mitchell and Hansen 2010, vii). As an issue of generic criticism, media have thus initially been largely confined to individual disciplines, to film studies (Sitney 1978), literary studies (Bruss 1980), or photo history (Mora 2004a [1983], 2004b [1999]). Not until the early 2000s did the different lineages begin to merge into a more comprehensive approach anchored in media studies proper. As it has been the case with its development into an academic discipline of its own, media studies contrib­ utes to the criticism of autobiography not by simply supplanting extant concepts. As a discipline it rather provides a common theoretical framework, acting as a facilitator and intermediary as it has done so successfully in different areas of research. The late advent of a media studies approach to autobiography can be put down to three reasons in particular: Literature has a long-standing tradition of autobiographical texts that reaches back as far as late Antiquity. Autobiographical films and photoautobiogra­ phies, in contrast, did grow into a conspicuous body of work no earlier than the 1960s and 1970s with documentary and avant-garde filmmaking and the autobiographical photobooks as its trailblazers. Compared to literary studies, media studies itself is still a fairly new phenomenon. It has started its academic career “as a quasi-autonomous enterprise” in the 1960s and 1970s “at or around that moment, when it becomes pos­ sible to speak of media in the singular – as something other and indeed more than a simple accumulation of individual mediums” (Mitchell and Hansen 2010, x). And, finally, while literary studies set the terms for the generic criticism of autobiography, media were initially perceived as a challenge, if not an outright threat to the tenets of autobiography (Bruss 1980), rather than as enabling new forms of life narratives in their own right. Historically, media-related approaches toward autobiography follow a trajectory from critical reluctance to the acknowledgement of mediality as elemental to the concept of the autobiographical self and their auto-narratives. This process has led – alongside the evolvement of new auto-narrative modes within the field under research – to a reevaluation and a reassessment of key concepts of the pertinent genre criticism, which has been a dominion of literary studies for the bigger part of the twen­ tieth century. Common parlance, too, has eventually begun to shift from ‘autobiogra­ phy’ toward critical neologisms such as ‘automediality’ and ‘autofiction’.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-011

1.10 Media Studies 

 95

Media-related Critical Concepts Media-related approaches to autobiography can be subdivided into first, those which are grounded in literary studies, second, those originating from a particular disci­ pline or area of research focused on individual visual or audiovisual mediums (e.  g. film studies), and third, an integrated media-studies approach which does no longer uphold the once crucial distinction between language and apparatic media and instead treats language and images, be they still or moving, as instances of an over­ arching mediality. Even though this listing does not imply a temporal succession – historically various critical concepts do coexist  –, integrated approaches are more recent, while those that pit literary texts as standard mode of auto-narration against audiovisual media seem increasingly dated.

Literary Studies The approaches that have emerged from within literary studies vary according to how they relate literature as a text based mode of life-narrative to different media. In her seminal essay “Eye for I” (1980), Elisabeth Bruss conceives filmic auto-narratives as a challenge to the traditional tenets of literary genre criticism: the primordial oneness of the authorial subject, the basic identity of author, narrator, and protagonist as well as the concept of language as a neutral, transparent means to substantiate the claim to bio-narrational coherence and authorial identity. According to Bruss, film – being an apparatic medium  – splits up the primordial oneness of the authorial self. The camera, be it a film or a photo camera, intervenes between the subject who is taking the picture and the object in front of the viewfinder. It disassociates the expression of the former’s subjectivity from the personal identity with the latter. The medium techni­ cally subverts the seemingly firm authorial stance resulting in a lack of control that the subject of autobiography exerts over their auto-narrative. Since camera based media require an actual corporeal presence of sort in front of the registering device, the focus and the range of the auto-narrative shifts from a diachronic coverage of a life past towards an ongoing present-tense narration rather diaristic in nature. If past events have not been covered in the first place, the lack of footage can hardly be made up for. The author will have to resort to either footage originating from different sources (images taken by parents, relatives, or friends) or to a different system of signs (text inserts, voice-over commentaries). Either way, autobiographical films and photoauto­ biographies inevitably turn out to be hybrid, multi-modal artifacts with their authors sharing with others what Michael Renov calls “textual authority” (2004  f, 233). They do so to a degree that has led Bruss to voice serious doubts whether there is an auto­ biographical film at all. As an apparatic medium, film, and photography by extension, seems unfit to come up with any “real […] equivalent to autobiography” (Bruss 1980, 296).

96 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

While Bruss obviously allocates ‘autobiography’ as a critical term to literature and opposes the latter as a historically dominant mode of auto-narration to (audiovisual) media, Kentaro Kawashima (2011) opts for a less exclusive approach, which, though equally rooted in literary studies, takes into consideration both literature and media. Kawashima does not share Bruss’ qualms over the advent of technical media putting an end to a century-old tradition of literary autobiography as a dominant mode of self-expression. Kawashima, however, takes media, tied up in a mutual relation­ ship, to reflect back on the literary genre in their capacity as “historisches Apriori” [‘historical apriori’] (Kawashima 2011, 9). Photography in particular, he argues, has brought on a sea change in the history of autobiography. From a media-theoretical perspective, he comprehends photography as a mnemonic storage device. Its techni­ cal precision and the truthfulness of its recordings relieve, according to Kawashima, literary life-narratives of the identifying function that the autobiographical genre has supposedly been consigned to through to the mid-nineteenth century. While not strictly ending the history of autobiography as a literary genre, the advent of pho­ tography affects the makeup of individual autobiographical texts nonetheless. In the wake of the media-historical and epistemological revolution that photography has set in motion, autobiographies from the early twentieth century onward increasingly stress the manifoldness of literary bio-narratives, the disparity and non-identity of the authorial subject, as well as a textual aesthetics of fragmentation and dispersion (“Zerstreuung” [Kawashima 2011, 26–34]). While less strict in its take on the subject than Bruss (literature vs. media), Kawashima’s inclusive approach, correlating literature and media, invites further questions and criticism on its part: Why, one might ask, do the reverberations of the said media-historical revolution surface in literary texts only decades later? What exactly does Kawashima mean when speaking of ‘photography’: a media-theoretical concept, an epistemological object, or rather a set of material images? The idea of photography being a truthful, quasi-scientific medium, has, too, figured as only one among many to shape its history and understanding and does not qualify as a timeless ontological feature. A third approach rooted in literary studies eschews these questions vastly by nar­ rowing down its focus to the issue of media in autobiographical literature. The focus is almost exclusively on photography, be it as an immaterial object referred to in the text to trigger the act of remembrance, or as actual pictures included into the auto-nar­ rative. It puts off media-ontological considerations in favor of historical inquiries into the textual occurrence of photographic imagery. The focal point is readjusted accord­ ingly from photography per se towards individual photographs and their material con­ dition. In this vein, Susanne Blazejewski draws up a detailed typology of functional strategies of putting to use photographic images within autobiography (2002, 109). Rugg (1997) and Adams (2000) take the occurrence of photographs within auto-narra­ tive texts as a cue to reflect back onto the notion of autobiography and its history. At first sight, photography, pegged as an indexical medium, seems to bolster the genre’s

1.10 Media Studies 

 97

claim to referentiality and truthfulness. On closer inspection, however, Adams notes that photography gains prominence within autobiography and its theory to the same extent that their central tenets – the notion of a unified authorial self to whom the genre supposedly has privileged access – disintegrate under the onset of Poststruc­ turalist criticism. Instead of photography and autobiography mutually subtending their claim to referentiality and truthfulness, as Adams contends, “[b]oth media are increasingly self-conscious, and combining them may intensify rather than reduce the complexity and ambiguity of each taken separately” (2000, 11). Interestingly enough, facing a time of intense crisis in the history of the genre, Adams no longer sets off lit­ erary autobiographies against photography, or film for that matter, but addresses both of them in a telling terminological turn as ‘media’ on equal grounds.

Approaches Referring to Individual Mediums While approaches located within literary studies take to conceive autobiography as above all a literary genre, there is a divergent line of research on auto-narratives that bypasses literature altogether and refers to individual technical mediums instead. Film studies have historically been prevalent in this respect with avant-garde and doc­ umentary filmmaking as its material bases (Sitney 1978; Lane 2002; Renov 2004a–f; Curtis 2006; Lebow 2012). Even though film studies are primarily concerned with moving images, most of its findings apply to photography as well inasmuch as it, too, is an apparatic, camera-based medium and a media-technological predecessor of film at that. What within literary studies poses a threat to the traditional notion of autobiography  – the splitting up of the authorial self by means of an apparatic medium – does qualify with respect to film and photography as a basic aesthetic trait of a camera-based auto-narrational practice. This is why Bruss’ essay “Eye for I” – even though critically turned against film – has been incremental for the attempt to draw up a theory of autobiography predicated on (technical) media. Other than language, film and photography know indeed of no proper visual equivalent to the first person singular. Films and photographs grant the subject of the auto-narrative a strong physical presence, but they sever, in turn, the expres­ sion of subjectivity from the assertion of identity. Studies in visual and audiovisual media as autobiography are thus regularly concerned with the question of how film and photography manage to attribute an auto-narrational discourse to a particular enunciator and how, in a historical perspective, specific aesthetic traits have been assigned the respective task. Critical inquiries thus invariably stress the quintessen­ tial hybridity that marks camera-based autobiographical discourses as well as their authorship. Since images can hardly be attributed to a particular authorial stance on their own, more recent studies such as the one by Montémont (2008) redirect the attention toward the overarching “dispositif d’identification” [‘the dispositive of iden­ tification’] (2008, 46) within which the imagery acquires autobiographical currency.

98 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Integrated Approaches Rooted in Media Studies In the early 2000s, attempts are made to merge the different academic lineages and critical concepts into an encompassing theory of autobiography for which media studies provide a common conceptual framework (above all Dünne and Moser 2008a as well as Renov 2004  f; Whitlock 2007; Lundby 2008; Lebow 2012; Hedberg et al. 2014). These integrated approaches no longer pit literature as an art form based on language against apparatic media, nor do they limit themselves to individual mediums. They rather aim at the mediality that is elemental to any form of autobiographical self-ex­ pression regardless of the technical means and the semiotic systems that subtend the individual auto-narrative. These integrated approaches towards autobiography are historically preceded and abetted by a convergence in the formation of theories that literary criticism and media studies have gone through in the wake of Poststructuralism and the twin lin­ guistic and medial or mediatic turn (Münker 2009) which have awarded language and media a transcendental status: Individuals cannot gain access to neither themselves nor the world at large if not by resorting to media or language. As a result, both literary criticism and media studies convene on a set of key concepts when dealing with auto­ biography: the artificiality of the authorial subject (Lejeune 1987, 9; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013, 8, 12) and the irrefutable mediality of the latter’s self-expression (“la vision du monde et l’expression du sujet sont intimement liées aux médias” [‘the worldview and the expression of the subject are both intimately tied to media’] [Lejeune 1987, 9]; see also Dünne and Moser 2008b, 12). By consequence, media are no longer considered to be neutral tools at the dis­ posal of a pre-existing authorial subject (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 7). There is no immediate expression to a primordial selfhood. The latter is mediated, that is depend­ ing on media. This applies, too, for any mode that autobiographical subjects chose to make themselves heard or seen. In this conceptual framework shared by media studies and literary criticism, language, too, no longer grants a privileged access to a subject of undisputed selfhood which it used to assert alongside with the coherence of the latter’s auto-narrative by means of the first person singular and its linguistic inflections. Accordingly, recent notions of autobiography are ever less predicated on language and language alone. Assigning language its own mediality (“Medialität der Sprache” [‘mediality of language’]), Wagner-Egelhaaf marks language as one among other media of autobiography (2005, 190). So, instead of highlighting differences in aesthetic, semiotic, or technical terms, recent approaches point out the basic com­ monalities that the various forms of autobiographical narrative hold as mediated modes of self-expression. With literary criticism and media studies engaging in a productive dialogue (as stipulated by Dünne and Moser 2008b, 12), autobiography is being reconceptualised as a genre as well as a field of research. Media and media technologies, the making of the authorial subject, as well as the different modes of auto-narration and the very

1.10 Media Studies 

 99

notion of autobiography were increasingly understood to be mutually dependent on each other. Neither part of this complex equation does hold sway over the other, as Dünne and Moser argue in the programmatic opening to their co-edited volume Automedialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien [‘Automediality. Subject Constitution in Writing, Image and New Media’] (2008). Neither do self-reli­ ant authorial subjects govern the media of a seemingly sovereign self-expression, nor does, in reverse, the mediality of auto-narratives reduce selfhood to a technological after-effect. Instead of advocating unilateral determinisms of sorts, Dünne and Moser opt for “ein konstitutives Zusammenspiel von medialem Dispositiv, subjektiver Refle­ xion und praktischer Selbstbearbeitung” [‘a constitutive interplay between media dispositives, the reflexion of subjectivity, and a practical (auto-narrational – M. Chr.) self-fashioning’] (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 13). The medial ‘technologies of the self’ are subject to change as Gillian Withlock has pointed out in her aptly subtitled book Soft Weapons. Autobiography in Transit (2007), just as are the other constituents of the generic interplay. The notion of autobiography has to be renegotiated accordingly, as it is the case with the concomitant notion of the self and the subject. With media, autobiography and the self as malleable entities, the history of the genre cannot be written according to a preconceived teleological pattern, eventually leading to the establishment a self-reliant, notably Western (and possibly male) subject as favored by traditional concepts (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 14). Considered from a media studies perspective, such as the one advocated by Dünne and Moser, the contemporary field of autobiography and auto-narratives appears altered in several aspects, and it has, too, been considerably expanded. So called ‘new’ – meaning ‘digital’ – media such as the personal computer or the mobile phone have coupled registering and distribution as historically distinct capacities. This has not only engendered new forms of auto-narrative discourse. It has facilitated lowlevel access to largely self-sustaining networks of distribution to a growing number of people. The personal web page, for instance, has “radically altered the culture of autobiography in the late twentieth century“ (Renov 2004  f, 232), as Renov contends: “the culture of autobiography, far from being extinguished, has in fact proliferated, percolating down to the level of popular commercial culture” (2004  f, 236). With new, easily accessible means of distributing auto-narratives in place, book publishers just as film distributors and cinemas lose part of the relevance and impact they used to have as cultural gatekeepers. In consequence, cultural hierarchies become unhinged. The single-authored book by a possibly renowned author has for the bigger part of its history been the standard model of autobiography. An expanding array of technical media, however, has made for a “größere Vielfalt an Selbstbezüg­ lichkeiten” [‘increasing diversity of self-referentialities’] (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 14), that is no longer covered by a traditional notion of autobiography. Instead of account­ ing for an entire life in retrospect, these recent modes of auto-narrative may simply relate a life lived on a daily basis. They do not even have to be self-authored; digital

100 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

self-tracking systems feed into the techno-utopian vision of a comprehensive record of one’s life and dispense with a self-conscious author, once one of the linchpins of the autobiographical tradition (Wolthers 2014). Whether automated or not, those ongoing auto-narratives will not necessarily materialize in a finite body of work, and if so, they might have lost in part what distinguished them in their original context (for the case of the wartime blog by Baghdad based blogger Salman Pax turned into a book see Whitlock 2007, 1–23). They may or may not aspire to be measured up against the evalu­ ative systems of art and literature, and they may not even be pegged neatly into one of them. Augmented opportunities of self-expression and authorial self-fashioning “jen­ seits der Autographie” [‘beyond autography’] (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 14; emphasis mine) call into question “das Privileg der Schrift” [‘the privilege of writing’] (Dünne and Moser 2008b, 14), relying on an assortment of images and texts instead that do not integrate into a narrative account. Nevertheless, these modes of self-referencing and self-reflexivity establish and follow aesthetic patterns. However, they often do so as artistically non-conspicuous, vernacular practices.

Summing Up In view of a profoundly “altered fabric of autobiographical expression” (Whitlock 2007, 4), its theoretical conceptualization, too, is in a state of transition. The theory of autobiography tries to adapt in terms of methodology and scope to a widening field of research. It does so in part by transcending the borders of individual disciplines towards media studies as an overarching conceptual framework. The expanding field of research and its reassessment have called for terminological amends too. As new media, such as the personal web site, allow for a dovetailing of the daily life with a con­ tinuous production of texts and images, it has been suggested to talk more appropri­ ately of ‘autofiction’ rather than of ‘autobiography’ (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013, 12). Dünne and Moser even went so far as to tentatively supplant ‘autobiography’ by the broader, less restrictive term ‘automediality’ (2008b, 11). Considering how media-technological innovations, the production of multimodal ‘texts’ and the notion of the authorial self have been interfering with each other in the past decades, the new term might help, as Dünne and Moser argue, to understand ‘self-expression as a mediated and cul­ tural practice that translates itself into a broad range of forms’ (2008b, 15). It is uncer­ tain whether ‘automediality’ will indeed displace its more traditional counterpart. However, four decades after the initial publication of Bruss’ seminal essay “Eye for I”, neither film nor media in general, pose a threat to autobiography any longer. Instead, it has been widely acknowledged that they contribute considerably to broaden and enrich the autobiographical genre which, in turn, has led literary criticism and media studies to forge closer ties.

1.10 Media Studies 

 101

Works Cited Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing & Life Writing. Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill/ London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Blazejewski, Susanne. Bild und Text – Photographie in autobiographischer Literatur. Marguerite Duras’ L’Amant und Michael Ondaatjes Running in the Family. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. Bruss, Elizabeth W. “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 268–295. Curtis, Robin. Conscientious Viscerality: The Autobiographical Stance in German Film and Video. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann/Edition Imorde, 2006. Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser, eds. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. München: Fink, 2008 (Dünne and Moser 2008a). Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. “Allgemeine Einleitung. Automedialität.” Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Fink, 2008. 7–16 (Dünne and Moser 2008b). Hedberg, Hans, Gunilla Knape, Tyrone Martinsson, and Louise Wolthers, eds. Auto: Self-representation and Digital Photography. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing, 2014. Kawashima, Kentaro. Autobiographie und Photographie nach 1900: Proust, Benjamin, Brinkmann, Barthes, Sebald. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Lane, Jim. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Lebow, Alisa, ed. The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary. London/ New York: Wallflower Press, 2012. Lejeune, Philippe. “Cinema et autobiographie. Problèmes de vocabulaire.” Revue Belge du Cinéma 19 (1987): 5–12. Lundby, Knut, ed. Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories. Self-representations in New Media. New York et al.: Lang, 2008. Mitchell, William John T., and Mark Boris N. Hansen. “Introduction.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Ed. William John T. Mitchell and Mark Boris N. Hansen. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. vii–xxii. Montémont, Véronique. “Le pacte autobiographique et la photographie.” Le français aujourd’hui 161.2 (2008): 43–50. Mora, Gilles. “Manifeste photobiographique” (1983). Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques. Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004. 103–106 (Mora 2004a). Mora, Gilles. “Photobiographies” (1999). Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques. Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de SaintÉtienne, 2004. 107–113 (Mora 2004b). Münker, Stefan. Philosophie nach dem “Medial Turn”. Beiträge zu einer Theorie der Medien­ gesellschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Renov, Michael. “The Subject in History: The New Autobiography in Film and Video.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 104–119 (Renov 2004a). Renov, Michael. “New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in post-verité Age.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 171–181 (Renov 2004b). Renov, Michael. “The Electronic Essay.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 182–190 (Renov 2004c).

102 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Renov, Michael. “Video Confessions.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 191–215 (Renov 2004d). Renov, Michael. “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 216–229 (Renov 2004e). Renov, Michael. “The End of Autobiography or New Beginnings? (or, Everything You Never Knew Would Know about Someone You Will Probably Never Meet).” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 230–243 (Renov 2004f). Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Sitney, Adams P. “Autobiography in avant-garde film.” The Avant-garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978. 199–246. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Einleitung: Was ist Auto(r)fiktion?” Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. 7–21. Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons. Autobiography in Transit. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, 2007. Wolthers, Louise. “Autographing: Digitized Self-Imagery.” Auto: Self-representation and Digital Photography. Ed. Hans Hedberg, Gunilla Knape, Tyrone Martinsson and Louise Wolthers. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing, 2014. 57–81.

Further Reading Hughes, Peter. “Blogging Identity.com.” The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary. Ed. Alisa Lebow. London/New York: Wallflower Press, 2012. 235–249. Kittner, Alma-Elisa. Visuelle Autobiographien. Sammeln als Selbstentwurf bei Hannah Höch, Sophie Calle und Annette Messager. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Weiser, Jutta, and Christine Ott, eds. Autofiktion und Medienrealität. Kulturelle Formungen des postmodernen Subjekts. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013.

1.11 Narratology Martin Löschnigg

As a narrative genre, ‘autobiography/autofiction’ is the subject of narratology, the theoretical and systematic study of narrative(s). Narratological approaches to autobi­ ography will thus focus on the narrative dimension (‘narrativity’) of autobiography/ autofiction and on the role of narrative in the autobiographical subject’s construction and representation of itself. According to Michael Sheringham, different positions on autobiography have usually depended on “prevailing views of narrative”: “Any moves towards a rehabilitation of narrative’s mimetic, heuristic or pragmatic func­ tions are likely to support comparable shifts in the way autobiography is regarded” (1993, 23). Accordingly, narratological positions on autobiography/autofiction have reflected developments in narratology from its structuralist orientation until the late 1970s, to its opening up towards a wide range of disciplines (e.  g. psychology and the neurosciences, sociology and historiography) and its branching out into feminist, cultural-historical and cognitive ‘narratologies’ since the 1980s.

Structuralist Narratology and Autobiography/ Autofiction In ‘classical’ structuralist narratology, autobiographical discourse is conceptualized as (quasi-)autobiographical first-person narration (Stanzel 2009 [1979]) or autodiegetic narration (Genette etc.), the most frequent variant of homodiegesis. ‘Homodiegesis’ means that an identity in person exists between the narrative instance and one of the characters (or ‘agents’) on the level of the story (diegesis), i.  e. the sequence of events (including internal communication) as rendered by the text. In contrast, het­ erodiegetic narrators (third-person narrators) do not belong to the diegetic or story level in the sense that they are also agents on that level. Autobiographical narration is ‘autodiegetic’ since the homodiegetic narrator is the protagonist, relating his/her own life-story or part of it. In conventional first person narratives, norms of empirical plau­ sibility apply, which means that the narrator’s perspective is limited (in contrast to the omniscience of authorial heterodiegetic narrators) and internal with regard to the representation of his/her own consciousness. Engaging with the foundational works of Lämmert (1980 [1955]), Stanzel, Genette, Booth (1983 [1961]) and Cohn (1978), schol­ ars like Rimmon-Kenan (1983), Bal (1985) and others have subsequently refined these categories especially with a view to increasingly experimental forms of post-modernist narratives, yet have basically retained them. Structuralist narratology concentrated on fictional narratives, and this also applies to its investigation of homodiegesis, which was analyzed primarily with regard https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-012

104 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

to plotlines and genres, to forms of focalization and to the problem of unreliable nar­ ration in narrative fiction. In itself, homodiegetic narration was largely considered as unproblematic, and discussions concentrated on phenomena which primarily pertain to heterodiegetic fiction, like for instance types of focalization, figural nar­ ration (Stanzel) and free indirect discourse. Accordingly, the models and categories proposed by Cohn, Genette, Stanzel and others show only minor differences, except for terminology, in the way they conceive of (quasi-)autobiographical first-person narration (Stanzel), autodiegetic narration (Genette) and (dissonant) self-narration (Cohn). If homodiegetic narration proved controversial, it was mainly in connection with the discussion on ‘voice’ and the significance of the third/first person opposition, which saw Genette, Cohn, and Stanzel united against Wayne C. Booth, who regarded this opposition as “[p]erhaps the most overworked distinction” (1983 [1961], 150). It had been Käte Hamburger, however, who had assigned the utmost significance to this distinction, since her definition of “epische Fiktion” [“epic fiction”] (Hamburger 1994, 66 [1973, 136]) was restricted to the heterodiegetic (in Genettean terms), while she regarded first-person narration as a “fingierte Wirklichkeitsaussage” [“feigned reality statement”] (Hamburger 1994, 268 [1973, 313]), i.  e. an imitation of referential discourse. Drawing on Hamburger, Cohn (1990) and Genette (1990) probed the boundaries between factual and fictional narratives by trying to define textual “signposts of fic­ tionality” (Cohn 1990, passim); with regard to homodiegesis, they agree on the impos­ sibility of an intrinsic distinction, i.  e. on the fact that there are no textual criteria which allow the reader to distinguish between ‘fictional autobiography’ of the David Copperfield (1849/1850) type and the autobiography of a really existing (historical) person. If a line can be drawn here, it is only on the basis of the onomastic (non-) identity of author and narrator as indicated in a paratext. Evidently, this coincides with Philippe Lejeune’s (1975) taxonomy and the autobiographical pact, which the personal identity of author and narrator proffers to the reader. In the case of factual autobiography, the homodiegetic rootedness of the narrative voice in the world of the narrative rests on actual embodiment, and the ensuing ‘materiality’ provides a crite­ rion which in principle distinguishes it from other (fictional) forms of writing (Smith and Watson 2005). Among the categories developed by structuralist narratology, the distinction between two ‘components’, as it were, of homodiegetic (and especially of auto­ diegetic) narrators remains of heuristic value for the study of autobiography/auto­ fiction: Variously referred to as the ‘narrated’ or ‘experiencing’ self on the one hand, and the ‘narrating self/I’ on the other, these categories render the dual aspect of the (fictional) autobiographer as experiencer and narrator and the epistemological and chronological distance between them. Narratives may emphasize either the one or the other, focalizing on the experiencer in “consonant” or the narrator in “dissonant self-narration” (Cohn 1978, 145–161).

1.11 Narratology 

 105

Historical and Cultural Narratology One of the main points of criticism levelled against structuralist narratology has been its concentration on the synchronic and text-centered analysis of narrative struc­ tures, to the virtual exclusion of diachronic and contextual considerations. Since the late 1980s, therefore, narratologists like Monika Fludernik or Ansgar Nünning have investigated the function of forms of narrative and of narrative genres in their cul­ tural contexts, especially also with a view to historical developments. According to Nünning, narrative structures are highly semanticized, which calls for a “context-sen­ sitive and diachronic approach to narratives” (Nünning 2000, 356) in contrast to the synchronic and text-centred orientation of structuralist narratology. Along the same lines, Fludernik claims that “[b]esides providing […] terminological and descriptive tools, narratology can also help to analyse the historical development of different types of narrative” (Fludernik 2000, 86). With regard to autobiography/autofiction, this means that historical investigations of these forms could be based on narrative parameters, since these are expressive of culturally determined forms of ‘self-fash­ ioning’ and of changing conceptions of the self. Also, diachronic analysis permits a more differentiated account of the interaction between factual and fictional forms of autobiographical narration than the concept of “formal mimetics” (Glowinski 1977, 106) which dominated structuralist narratology, i.  e. the view that fictional genres evolve in imitation of their non-fictional counterparts. Considering English autobi­ ographical writing, for example, it appears that the development of a mode of auto­ diegetic narration that captures the individual dimension of experience rather than emphasizing the exemplary, in other words the model for secular autobiography, was inextricably linked with the rise of the early eighteenth-century novel. In a wider sense, all these historical phenomena may be subsumed under ‘cultural narratology’. For Mark Currie, the necessity of a “cultural narratology” is first of all based on the ubiquity of narrative as a cultural phenomenon, secondly on the fact that ‘culture’ as such is constituted (and passed on) in the form of narrative(s) (Currie 1998, 96). In this respect, narratology assumes the role of an interface between textual analysis and context-oriented approaches by proposing “models that are jointly formal and functional – models attentive both to the text and to the context of stories” (Herman 1999, 8).

Cognitive Narratology and Narrative Concepts of Identity Post-structuralist narratology is informed by an awareness that narrative discourse constitutes rather than merely represents stories, including life-stories. This new awareness in narratology appears particularly relevant for the study of autobiogra­

106 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

phy/autofiction as recent theoretical approaches to autobiography (notably that of Paul John Eakin [see Eakin 1992, 1999]) have emphasized the role of narrative in the construction of a sense of identity. Because of its interdisciplinary orientation, con­ temporary narratology may bring to focus developments in various disciplines, espe­ cially in linguistics and the cognitive sciences, which bear on autobiographical narra­ tive(s), and may thus develop models and categories for a narratologically grounded discussion of autobiographical discourse. Cognitive narratology has become an interdisciplinary project in itself, drawing from and combining disciplines such as cognitive psychology, frame theory, linguistics, and the study of artificial intelli­ gence (Herman 2003; Hogan 2004). In particular, the specific conditions of memory and their importance for the constitution of identity have become one of the central fields of cognitive and especially of narrative psychology. Cognitive narratology may therefore be aligned in a fruitful manner with narrative theories of autobiography to provide valuable insights into the narrative structuring of individual experience and the narrative construction of identity. Narratological investigation will fous (1) on the discursive representation of the experiential in autobiography; (2) on narrativity and the self, i.  e. the role of narrative in the formation of identity; (3) on the role of frames and scripts in the textual representation of memory; and finally (4) on the question of the fictional in autobiography (Löschnigg 2010). ad 1) Contemporary approaches to autobiography/autofiction emphasize the role of the experiential in life writing. Rather than being viewed as an attempt by a detached subject to interpret itself as object, the autobiographical act is regarded as an experiential site in the sense that it stages a psychological re-living and cognitive re-construction of experience. Autobiographical narrative may therefore be conceived in terms of the frames of experiencing and reflection provided by models of cognitive narratology. One such model has been proposed by Monika Fludernik (1996). Her categories are derived from spontaneous oral narrative, which she regards as prototypical of the narrative rendering of specific experience. Basic to Fludernik’s understanding of narrative is the concept of ‘experientiality’, which is described as an individualized rendering of experience as reflected in human consciousness: “[Consciousness] both mediates narrativity and constitutes one of its signifiers” (1996, 374). The continuity of experience and narration which is thus central to Fludernik’s narratological model has also been emphasized in recent theories of autobiography (Eakin 1992, 1999). In particular, the emphasis on the ‘consciousness factor’ makes Fludernik’s model wellsuited to describe autobiographical narrative, since it is able to reflect the focus on the inner life of the subject typical of most autobiographies/autofictions better than are traditional, event-centered concepts of narrativity. ad 2) Since contemporary narrative theory looks on narrative as both a text/dis­ course type and a psychological activity, narratological approaches consider autobi­ ography not so much as a representation (in the mimetic sense) of an autonomous (and homogeneous) subject, but as a process through which identity is created:

1.11 Narratology 

 107

When it comes to autobiography, narrative and identity are so intimately linked that each con­ stantly and properly gravitates into the conceptual field of the other. Thus, narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self – the self of autobiographical discourse – does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative (Eakin 1999, 100).

Drawing on the phenomenological narratology of Paul Ricoeur (Ricoeur 1983–1985 [1984–1988]), who proposes a parallel between the narrative pre-structuring of expe­ riences on the level of what he calls ‘mimesis I’, and their narrative configuration on the level of ‘mimesis II’, Eakin emphasizes the epistemological function of narrative: “[N]arrative plays a central, structuring role in the formation and maintenance of our sense of identity” (Eakin 1999, 123). The discussion on the role of narrative in life writing is linked to a similar debate, in the 1960s and 1970s, on narrative and historiography in the philosophy of history. In this debate, the function of narrative as a ‘cognitive instrument’ (Mink 1978) which imposes order on contingent (historical) data and the role of the narrative ‘emplot­ ment’ (White 1978) of these data were emphasized. In the same way, Roy Pascal claimed that “autobiography […] imposes a pattern on a life, it constructs out of it a coherent story” (1960, 9), and Jerome Bruner (1990, 2003) has argued that the crea­ tion of meaning in autobiographical discourse rests on the construction of life stories according to established narrative genres. While theorists like Bruner have thus attrib­ uted to narrative an epistemological (meaning-creating) function, others (in particular Ricoeur and MacIntyre 1985) lean towards an ontological understanding, according to which narrative discourse reflects a narrative order of experience and even of empiri­ cal reality as such. According to the latter position, autobiography/autofiction would then have to be regarded as a double narrative structure – a narrative ‘emplotment’ of experiences which are already narratively (pre-)structured in themselves. Whether one emphasizes the epistemological or ontological implications of narrative, however, it follows that in both instances lives and identities will be understood in terms of stories: “We achieve our personal identities and self-concept through the use of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an expression of a single unfolding and developing story” (Polkinghorne 1988, 50). ad 3) In the case of autobiography/autofiction, narrative depends on the selec­ tive dynamics of memory. Since identity is inextricably linked to memory, narrative explanations of identity must take into account the psychological and neurologi­ cal research on memory as pioneered by Bartlett (1932), Schacter (1996) and others. According to Bartlett, memory involves the organizing of previous experience into patterns of expectation for present experience, a process which produces the dynamic ‘scripts’ and ‘schemata’ (cognitive frames) described by modern cognitive psychol­ ogy. The fact that memory is shaped by the motivations of the present self makes it relate to the present as much as to the past. As a result, autobiography/autofiction is determined by a temporal duality which extends beyond the double chronological structure which they already comprise due to the different epistemological horizons

108 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

involved in retrospective (memory-based) narration. This temporal duality may also serve to qualify the view that narratological approaches to identity focus on a past self which is re-constructed, as it were, from the point of view of the present, largely neglecting the present itself: “If subjects come into being through their relationship with narratives, then narratives are formed in time; […] but the form of narrative time […] does not flow in only one direction” (Williams 1995, 126). Through its focus on narrative as a mode of cognition, and on relevant scripts and frames, cognitive narra­ tology may function as a bridge between autobiography/autofiction studies and psy­ chology and the neurosciences, including psycho- and neurolinguistics. Due to the embedding of individual memory in collective/cultural memory, anthropological and sociological aspects of the narrativizing of memory must be con­ sidered, too. The integration of experiential reality into socio-culturally determined frames is a process in which, according to Bruner, narrative categories play an impor­ tant role: “The typical form of framing experience (and our memory of it) is in nar­ rative form […]” (Bruner 1990, 569). Narrative further helps cognition by establishing causal connections and by providing a framework which enables the specific to be integrated into the typical, and actual occurrences into expectations (Herman 2003). Similarly, for Bruner “the ‘suggestiveness’ of a story lies […] in the emblematic nature of its particulars, its relevance to a more inclusive narrative type” (1991, 7). This cor­ relates with one of the central tenets of cognitive narratology, namely the tendency towards ‘naturalization’ on the part of readers, i.  e. their integration of texts into reallife frames or familiar generic frames. In the case of autobiographical narratives, the generic frame is that of the ‘life-story’, and the reception of autobiographical writing will therefore be determined ultimately by those cultural factors which shape prevail­ ing views on narrative and the transparency (or opacity) of language with regard to the rendering of a life as lived. ad 4) Narrative explanations of identity as processual entail a new conceptual­ ization of the relationship between fictionality and autobiography. This new concep­ tualization stands in contrast to a traditional hermeneutic understanding of autobi­ ography, but also to the deconstructivist view which regards fiction as an element that will undermine any attempt at constructing identity. Now, fictionality is seen as an integrative element of the creation of a sense of identity, since identity conceived as a narrative construct involves the projection of possible selves which are open to revision. Through the narrative medium, the autobiographer explores alternative ver­ sions of ‘self’ and ‘other’, constructing and revising concepts of self and identity in the same way as characters/agents are construed in fiction. With a view to the reception of narratives, contemporary narratology conceives of coherence as a cognitive strat­ egy rather than a formal structure, which in turn would prevent readers from taking autobiography as an ‘authentic’ narrative of identity.

1.11 Narratology 

 109

Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Bartlett, Frederick. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 1983. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 1–21. Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990): 775–804. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. Houndsmills/London: Macmillan, 1998. Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London/New York: Routledge, 1996. Fludernik, Monika. “Beyond Structuralism in Narratology: Recent Developments and New Horizons in Narrative Theory.” Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Deutschen Anglistenverbandes 11.1 (2000): 83–96. Genette, Gérard. “Discours du récit.” Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. 65–267. Genette, Gérard. Nouveau Discours du récit. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983. Genette, Gérard. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990): 755–774. Glowinski, Michál. “On the First-Person Novel.” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 103–114. Hamburger, Käte. Die Logik der Dichtung (1957). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta/J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 4th ed. 1994 [The Logic of Literature. Trans. Marylin J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973]. Herman, David, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003. Herman, David. “Introduction: Narratologies.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts. A Guide for Humanists. New York/ London: Routledge, 2004. Lämmert, Eberhard. Bauformen des Erzählens (1955). Stuttgart: Metzler, 7th ed. 1980. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Löschnigg, Martin. “Postclassical Narratology and the Theory of Autobiography.” Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Ed. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. 255–274. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1985. Mink, Louis O. “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument.” The Writing of History. Ed. Robert H. Canary and Henri Kozicki. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 129–149. Nünning, Ansgar. “Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology: A Survey of Diachronic Approaches, Concepts and Research Projects.” Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings. Ed. Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2000. 345–373.

110 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Polkinghorne, Donald. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et Récit. 3 vols. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1983–1985 [Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988]. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983. Schacter, Daniel. Searching for Memory. The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Sheringham, Michael. French Autobiography: Devices and Desires. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 356–371. Stanzel, Franz Karl. Theorie des Erzählens (1979). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 8th ed. 2008. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Williams, Linda Ruth. Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject. London: Edward Arnold, 1995.

Further Reading Bertaux, Daniel. Les récits de vie. Paris: Nathan, 1997. Brockmeier, Jens, and Donal Carbaugh, eds. Narrative and Identity. Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity. Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Linde, Charlotte. Life Stories. The Creation of Coherence. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

1.12 Philosophy Dieter Thomä

Given that philosophy is concerned with conceptual analysis, its main contribution to the theory of autobiography and autofiction is the analysis of these composite terms. Philosophers scrutinize the reflective stance of αὐτός (autos, the self), βίος (bios, life), γράφειν (graphein, writing), and fiction. The following discussion will be confined to the first three of these terms, as a sound philosophical discussion of autofiction is still lacking. (A discussion of autofiction would likely build on the multiple meanings of ‘fingere’ – feigning, inventing, fashioning, shaping, creating, making, etc. – and explore the oscillations between a simulated and a ‘self-made’ life.) Autobiography is not just one philosophical topic among others, philosophy needs to engage with it on a more fundamental methodological level. Philosophers who are writers in their own right study autobiography in order to sharpen their self-description. The philo­ sophical ‘I’ and the autobiographical ‘I’ may be distant relatives, philosophers may shy away from the idea of writing about themselves, but in order to fully capture the terms of their assignment, they need to engage in a dialogue with autobiography. After turning to this general methodological issue some conceptual findings on the self, life, and writing will be summarized. It may be said that the philosopher is the autobiographer’s favourite enemy and vice versa. The former aims at universality whereas the latter muses about particular­ ities. Yet this clear-cut distinction is deceptive. In Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Stephen Toulmin reminds of the twofold origin of modernity by going back to two philosophers that he regards as its founding fathers (Toulmin 1990). He juxta­ poses René Descartes (1596–1650), the undisputed champion of modern philosophy and rationality, and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), author of the seminal Essais and founder of a much more elusive legacy of self-comprehension. Toulmin’s account is polemical in nature. He seeks to curtail Descartes’s role and reinstall Montaigne as his contender. Yet the difference between these two thinkers does not consist in the fact that Descartes skips or brackets selfhood and turns to universal claims whereas Montaigne embraces the role of an individual and assumes the task of portraying himself. Descartes reflects on the supposed “médiocrité de mon esprit & la courte durée de ma vie” [“mediocrity of my mind” and “short duration of my life”], and so does Montaigne (Descartes 1982, 3 [1998, 3]; Montaigne 1962, 79–95 [1991, 89–108], 270–276 [314–320]). Descartes intends “d’estudier […] en moymesme” [“to study within myself”], Montaigne says: “C’est moy que je peins” [“It is myself I paint”] (Descartes 1982, 10 [1998, 6]; Montaigne 1962, 9 [1991, LXIII]). Both authors address autobiogra­ phy, albeit in extremely different ways. The bearings of their accounts help delineate the intricate relationship between philosophy and autobiography. Descartes’ Discours de la méthode [Discourse on Method] and his Meditationes [Meditations] are presented in the form of a narrative, they allude to travels and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-013

112 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

dreams and describe the itinerary of a young man who seeks to “melius […] nosse quisnam sim” [“know a little better who I am”] (Descartes 1983, 29 [1998, 66]). This endeavour culminates in a short-circuiting of ‘to know’ and ‘to be’, of knowledge and being. The one thing that I end up knowing about myself for sure is the fact that I have the capacity of knowing something or, in general, of thinking. Descartes dismisses other findings like “me habere vultum, manus, brachia, […] me nutriri, incedere” etc. [“that I ha[ve] […] a face, hands, arms, […] that I [take] […] in food, that I walk […] about”] (1983, 26 [1998, 64]). All these qualifications are doubtful and secondary. True self-knowledge is a product of ultimate reduction and purification. The philosopher aims at stripping the world off his ego and reduces life to thinking. Descartes’ project is an autobiography of a peculiar kind, an autobiography that gets rid of ‘bios’, or, as one could put it, an ‘auto-graphy’. Any theory of autobiography has to account for the fact that it oscillates between self-description and self-invention, between authenticity and role-play, between “mon cœur mis à nu” [“my heart laid bare”] (Baudelaire 1975 [1950]) and a character made up. By reducing the ‘I’ to the ‘ego cogitans’, Descartes circumvents this ambiguity. Any move, any claim made by the ‘ego’ is based on the performative evidence that it is me who thinks just that. The thinker, the writer is not exposed to a life that – “how curious! how real!” (Whitman 1996, 176) – he could find troublesome or blissful. Des­ cartes aims at “reformer mes propre pensées et de bastir dans un fons qui est tout a moy” [“reform[ing] my own thoughts and building upon a foundation which is com­ pletely my own”] (1982, 15 [1998, 9]). This strategy of purification leads to a strong notion of personal autonomy. Inad­ vertently, Descartes becomes the forerunner of a notion of the autonomous author, granting him the ability to create his own new world from the scratch. Yet Descartes and his rationalist followers do not read the autonomous stance of the ‘ego’ as an invitation to various “ways of worldmaking” (Goodman 1978). As their account of autonomy is based on thinking, it is bound by the rules of reason. Their philosophical language aims at universal truths. The purification of the ‘ego’ leads to a neutralized description of the person. When one thinks or writes something, when one talks about himself/herself, the envisaged object or content remains coincidental. It gains relevance only by virtue of the fact that one refers to it. Only one property of a person matters: the fact that s/he thinks. As s/he shares this feature with anybody else, every person has the same ‘ego’. This view is corroborated by the transformation of ‘I’ as pronoun to ‘I’ as noun. Whenever a pronoun is used one cannot help but wonder for whom it stands, to whom it refers. One thinks of a person with a name, with a history, with qualities, one does not think of an “unencumbered self” (for a critique of this notion see Sandel 1984). When promoted from pronoun to noun, the ‘I’ becomes an independent entity attributed to each and every person in the same manner. The substantivized ‘I’ takes the step from particularity to universality. After getting rid of the ‘bios’, the next step taken by Descartes in his destruction of autobiography

1.12 Philosophy 

 113

is the universalization of the self. There is only one standard auto-graphy for everyone. This completes the picture of a philosopher being inimical or immune to autobi­ ography. Neither is s/he interested in depicting the whereabouts and circumstances of a particular life – be it his or another –, nor is s/he willing to raise her singular voice, to speak up as an individual. S/he is a spokesperson or a ventriloquist of the universal. This orthodox, dominant view is established by Descartes, endorsed by Leibniz, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, and taken for granted by today’s analytic philoso­ phers. If some philosophers like Heidegger and the deconstructionists take issue with the substantivized ego, they still share Descartes’s discontent with individuality. The heterodox, marginalized tradition which objects to the elimination of auto­ biography in philosophy is put forward by Montaigne and continued by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell, and others. The following remarks are confined to Montaigne. He writes: Les autres forment l’homme; je le recite et en represente un particulier bien mal ormé, et lequel, si j’avoy à façonner de nouveau, je ferois frayement bien autre qu’il n’est. […] Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage. […] Il faut accommoder mon histoire à l’heure. […] Mon ame […] est tousjours en apprentissage et en espreuve. Je propose une vie basse et sans lustre […]. On attache aussi bien toute la philosophie morale à une vie populaire et privée que à une vie de plus riche estoffe; chaque homme porte la forme entiere de l’humaine condition. […] Si le monde se plaint de quoy je parle trop de moy, je me plains de quoy il ne pense seulement pas à soy. [Others form Man; I give an account of Man and sketch a picture of a particular one of them who is very badly formed and whom I would truly make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him afresh. […] I am not portraying being but becoming. […] I must adapt this account of myself to the passing hour. […] My soul is ever in its apprenticeship and being tested. I am expounding a lowly, lacklustre existence. You can attach the whole moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff. Every man bears the whole form of the human condi­ tion. […] If all complain that I talk too much about myself I complain that they never even think about their own selves] (Montaigne 1962, 782–783 [1991, 907–908]).

Montaigne’s defence of autobiography is an anticipated response to Descartes’s cri­ tique. His argument goes beyond the mere attempt to reinstall autobiography as a legitimate literary form. He seeks to save the autobiographical mode of philosophy itself, and he does so, to put it briefly, by going back from ‘ego’ as a noun to ‘I’ as a pronoun. The consequences of this move become visible both on the level of what he talks about and on the level of who does the talking. If Montaigne had to discuss Descartes’s account of the ‘ego cogitans’, he would call it a philosophical mistake to create a gap between me and my properties and to launch an isolated ‘thinking thing’. I am intrinsically, inescapably linked to a wide range of properties for the very reason that talking about me already entails the ref­ erence to what I stand for. This is a grammatical argument turned into an ontological claim giving preference to ‘becoming’ or transition over ‘being’. What can be said

114 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

about me does not go beyond and should not go beyond my entanglement with the world. Descartes’s purification is unfeasible, he misconceives the person by denying embodiment. This does not mean that, on the level of content, Montaigne’s self-por­ trait is bound to consist of personal statements about his petty affairs. By talking about one single, exemplary individual, he does learn something about “la forme entiere de l’humaine condition” [“the whole Form of the human condition”] (Montaigne 1962, 783 [1991, 908]). According to Montaigne, there is no other way to access this ‘condi­ tion’ than by sticking to the individual, as we exist as such individuals only. The very idea of an isolated, substantivized, generalized ‘ego’ leads to a distorted view of how we, as humans, live or of “how we get along” (Velleman 2009). Montaigne bears the restriction coming with the junction of philosophy and autobiography as it serves the purpose of rendering a proper picture of the human being. The fact that I mingle with the world also affects the stance of the philosopher fan­ cying himself as the spokesperson of the universal. My statements come with validity claims, but they are my statements, and it is me who is obliged and entitled to defend them. Propositions are speech-acts, thinking is acting and, as such, implies an actor who raises his “voice” (Cavell 1994, VII, 3, 58) and enters the on-going “conversation of mankind” (Oakeshott 1959; see Rorty 1979, 389–394). It should have become clear by now that philosophy cannot just regard autobiog­ raphy as a more or less interesting topic that may deserve its scrutiny while remaining altogether alien to it. Modern philosophy emerges on a stage on which it has a joint appearance with autobiography. One could even make the case that this ‘liaison dan­ gereuse’ begins much earlier, as it is conceivable that, e.  g., Socrates, Seneca, and St. Augustine could get involved in this debate as well. This is not the place to bring the battle between orthodox and heterodox philosophers to a close. Suffice it to say that there is such a battle and that it has been widely overlooked and underrated. In the following sections selected philosophical findings on the conceptual fabric of auto-bio-graphy will be presented. (For a different account of this hyphenated noun see Gusdorf 1991.)

Self Autobiography is a specific form of biography, a text written by a person about herself. Self-reflective activity is not limited to writing; it comes in various forms which include self-consciousness, self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-determination, self-posses­ sion, self-respect, self-confidence, self-invention, self-management, self-assertion, self-deception, self-hate, and self-love. The basic self-reflective operation is: a refers to b, and a equals b. Strictly speaking, autobiography does not come with the claim that a ‘self’ (a char­ acter, a personality, etc.) is represented in a text, but with the more modest contention

1.12 Philosophy 

 115

that a person engages in self-reflective activity. Many autobiographies aim higher and appeal to the idea of giving a comprehensive account of oneself or of rendering an appealing self-image. Much of the philosophical debate on autobiography grapples with the question of personal identity: The debate is divided between constructivist and hermeneutic approaches, with the former stressing creativity, contingency, and experimentation (Glover 1988), and the latter emphasizing historicity, authenticity, and closure (Ricoeur 1990). Yet this controversy does not do justice to the proper, initial meaning of ‘auto’ in autobiography, in which ‘self’ merely serves as a relational term. One refers to oneself, yet who ‘one’ is remains undecided. It is this relational or reflective capacity that matters, not any definition of the self. Autobiography is a derivative from the distinctively human capacity to refer to oneself, to step aside, and to gain a fresh look at oneself. Helmuth Plessner had this ability in mind when he described the “exzentrische Positionalität” [‘eccentric positionality’] of humans (Plessner 1928, 288–346). This formula conveys a twofold message. Plessner does not just emphasize self-reflection as an unconditioned, self-sufficient procedure. He first hints at the fact that a human being finds him or herself in a ‘position’, which literally comes with coordinates, and then turns to the human being gaining distance from its given stance or location. If one looks at all those procedures that involve self-reflective behaviour, one comes across a puzzling fact that makes the identity of a relating to a dubious. It is a necessary condition that, in self-reflection, one relates to oneself. There is no third party involved. If the Delphic Oracle says: ‘Know Thyself’, it does not want you to look at your beloved or to compare apples and oranges. This requirement seems to be met in self-knowledge, self-awareness, or self-consciousness. Yet even in these cases one may run into trouble with the identity implied in self-reflection. If I am conscious of something and if this something happens to be myself, my being conscious still differs from my being referred to in conscious acts. And what about self-deception? In this case we seem to encounter some kind of personality split, in which a self talks itself into something. The deceiver, in this case, cannot be the same as the deceived, otherwise the deception would be unveiled immediately. This difference threatens to subvert the identity of the terms figuring in the self-reflective equation. This becomes even more evident when one transcends the epistemological realm and turns to atti­ tudes involving some kind of normative or emotional self-assessment or practical self-steering. Self-hate is unthinkable without the revulsion and disgust that brings me up against me as if I were a stranger to myself. Self-management only works if I have the power to challenge the sluggard that I happen to be – a power and determi­ nation that this sluggard obviously lacks. If I refer to myself or reflect on myself, the two personifications involved cannot be coextensive. The identity invoked by self-reflection has to be taken with a grain of salt. By spelling out the implications of self-reflection it can be concluded that we are entitled to acknowledge or deny, appreciate or depreciate, enhance or suppress certain features of our selves. I do not refer to myself as a well-defined, compact entity.

116 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

When referring to my doing x, having y, or feeling z (Tugendhat 1989), I wrestle with my self-definition. This finding is instrumental for understanding the functioning of autobiography, which represents a particularly complicated case of self-reflective behaviour. Such behaviour allows for or even requires a distinction between different personifications of oneself. In most of the cases discussed above, this differentiation is bipartite. One meets, for instance, the hater and learns about the things s/he hates about himself. In the case of autobiography, this differentiation is threefold. The autobiographical setting comprises the author who writes, the protagonist figuring in the text, and the person being written about. (In autofiction, the third personification has vanished.) All three are identical – yet only in some measure (Thomä 1998, 25–37).
 As a writer, I am different from the person who lives. The person I am writing about is different from the protagonist who serves as the author’s main character. Only if we keep these roles apart, only if we prevent the differences between them from collapsing, can we explore the potential and the pitfalls of autobiographical writing. We understand, for instance, why I, as an author, may want to envisage a protagonist who differs from me as a person, or why I, as an author, may want to overcome me as a person, or why I, as a person, may elude the protagonist’s embrace. Moreover, there are extremely different answers to the question of who of these figures is ‘in the lead’ and how activity and perceptivity are distributed. Some praise the author’s gift for self-invention, others his commitment to conscientiously documenting or recording a life. Some appreciate the protagonist’s malleability, others appeal to embeddedness and traditionalism.

Life An autobiographer does not tell anecdotes, s/he writes about his/her life. So s/he may write about his affairs and hobbies, her routines and ventures, his anguishes and hopes, her nightmares and pipedreams. But they still do not stand in for his life, or do they? It would obviously be absurd to exclude all these incidents and experiences, yet it would also be ill-founded to conclude that a life, which figures as autobiography’s ultimate subject-matter, could be broken down to a set of distinct issues. Autobiogra­ phy aims at life as such. But what does that mean and how could it work? An influential answer to this question is given by Dilthey. He says: Die Selbstbiographie ist die höchste und am meisten instruktive Form, in welcher uns das Verste­ hen entgegentritt. […] Derselbe Mensch, der den Zusammenhang in der Geschichte seines Lebens sucht, hat in all dem, was er als Werte seines Lebens gefühlt, als Zwecke desselben realisiert, als Lebensplan entworfen hat, was er rückblickend als seine Entwicklung, vorwärtsblickend als die Gestaltung seines Lebens und dessen höchstes Gut erfasst hat  – in alledem hat er schon einen Zusammenhang seines Lebens unter verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten gebildet, der nun jetzt ausgesprochen werden soll. Er hat in der Erinnerung die Momente seines Lebens, die er als

1.12 Philosophy 

 117

bedeutsam erfuhr, herausgehoben und akzentuiert und die anderen in Vergessenheit versinken lassen. […] So sind die nächsten Aufgaben für die Auffassung und Darstellung geschichtlichen Zusammenhangs hier schon durch das Leben selber halb gelöst. […] Die Selbstbiographie ist nur die zu schriftstellerischem Ausdruck gebrachte Selbstbesinnung des Menschen über seinen Lebensverlauf. [In autobiography we encounter the highest and most instructive form of the understanding of life. […] The same person who seeks the overall coherence of the story of his life has already pro­ duced a life-nexus according to various perspectives, namely in the ways he has felt the values of his life, actualized its purposes, worked out a life-plan, either retrospectively when looking back at his development or prospectively when looking forward to the formation of his life and its highest good. These various ways of producing a life-nexus must now be articulated as a life-history. The person’s memory has highlighted and accentuated those life-moments that were experienced as significant; others have been allowed to sink into forgetfulness. […] Thus the initial tasks involved in apprehending and explicating a historical nexus are already half solved by life itself. […] Autobiography is merely the literary expression of the self-reflection of human beings on their life-course] (Dilthey 1979, 200–201 [2002, 221–222, transl. altered]).

In this somewhat cumbersome passage written around 1910, Dilthey constructs a cor­ respondence between the living process itself and the formally accomplished autobi­ ography. The latter just serves as a platform for articulating or expressing a coherence achieved beforehand. The story told represents a formal resumption of a life already lived as a story. Hannah Arendt (1958, 184), Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, 135), Paul Ricoeur (1984, 158), Charles Taylor (1989, 47, 52, 289), and many others follow Dilthey in this respect, often without referring to his work. This view has also been influential in other disciplines such as anthropology (Ochs and Capps 1996), psychology (Bruner 1987, 11–15; Bruner 1991; Kotre 1996), and psychoanalysis (Bollas 1993). The correspondence between life and text allows Dilthey and his followers to cir­ cumvent a dilemma that runs as follows. An autobiography is supposed to be the account of a life, which consists of an innumerable multitude of incidents. If a writer had to account for all these incidents and live up to the task of really grasping a life, autobiography would become a Sisyphus’s chore. Maybe one would have to settle for spending the first half of a life living it and the second half writing it. Yet as life contin­ ues, the writer would be plainly unable to catch up with himself as a living person. The most famous mockery of this dilemma is Lawrence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, in which the author spends dozens of pages on describing the circumstances of his con­ ception before praising a “master-stroke of digressive skill” (1996, 46) and coming to the conclusion that life outgrows text. This does not prevent the author from writing, but his grip on reality becomes loose, casual, and playful. In his response to Sterne’s dilemma, Dilthey disputes the primal fuzziness of life and argues for a homology between the internal hermeneutic, narrative structure of life itself and the autobiographical form. Many modern writers and theorists, includ­ ing Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kra­ cauer, dismiss the fusion between life and narrative without denouncing the ambition to grasp the ‘real’. Philosophically speaking, Dilthey’s solution can be disputed on

118 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

two different levels, with more modest or more radical intentions (for the following Thomä 1998; Thomä 2007; Blattner 2000; Strawson 2004). The more modest critics adopt the view that life is lived as a story, but they dispute the claim that an autobiography is a mere articulation or re-enactment of a story already lived. The relation between the first (lived) and the second (told) story is strained. Strategies like retrofitting, i.  e. the attempt to retrospectively make things fit in a certain way, are widespread, and these strategies undermine the homology between those two stories. There is no neutral ground that would allow for an author­ itative comparison of the story lived and the story told. Thus autobiography cannot uphold the claim that it actually grasps life as is. In the vein of this modest critique one can also question the scope and value of such a ‘life-history’. Does it really provide orientation, is it the showcase for sense-mak­ ing? Firm convictions, full-hearted commitments are at odds with the twists and turns of a storyline. The coherence of a text is not prescriptive in the way that it allows for one sequel only, its organizing power is weaker than the defenders of narrative ethics (Newton 1995) want it to be. The more ambitious critics question the very idea that life is lived as a story in the first place and infer from this finding that autobiography, if committed to the ideal of a ‘life-history’, presents a defective, distorted, streamlined view of life itself. Their plea may serve the purpose of saving life from autobiography altogether, yet it could also lead to a more liberal or liberating view of autobiography and alleviate its duties with regard to the narrative reconstruction or production of a life as a whole. The more ambitious critique is again put forward in different variants. Two main arguments are to be considered. The first argument cuts the link between life-history and story, it disputes the idea of an all-encompassing life-history for the very reason that it does not do justice to the transitory, momentary, floating quality of the living process. This does not mean though that this process is ‘storyless’, a-narrative, or speechless altogether. Life side-tracks ‘life-history’. Yet living beings as well as autobiographers do tell stories: stories that are situative or occasionalistic. By telling these stories, they are entitled to embrace fragmentation, the episodic and rhapsodic. This approach bears impor­ tant consequences for our understanding of human temporality and of the tension between χρόνος (chronos) or temporal succession on the one hand, and καιρός (kairos) or momentary experience on the other hand. The second argument cuts the link between life and story in a more radical manner. Those endorsing this argument do not aim at limiting the scope of story-tell­ ing, they claim that stories inevitably have the tendency of reaching out to life as a whole, of establishing an imperialism of diachronicity. They turn to a reading of self-experience that cuts the link between life and story-telling. “We live beyond any tale that we happen to enact,” states the short story writer V. S. Pritchett (quoted and endorsed by Strawson 2004, 451). It is debatable whether this kind of self-experience is conceivable without any reference to some kind of tale or story.

1.12 Philosophy 

 119

Writing When talking about life as autobiography’s prime subject, the discussion has already expanded to mediality and language. The short-circuiting of history and story pro­ posed by Dilthey led into a discussion of life and narrativity. The status of writing itself has to be reconsidered and renegotiated and its use in autobiographical texts has to be specified. In his poem “Friedensfeier” [“Celebration of Peace”], Friedrich Hölderlin writes: “Viel hat von Morgen an,/Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander,/Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang” [“Much, from the morning onwards,/Since we have been a discourse and have heard from one another,/Has human kind learnt; but soon we shall be song”] (Hölderlin 1992, 364 [1990, 235]). These lines challenge the equation of life and story on an altogether different plane than that discussed in the previous section. Hölderlin gives an answer to the question of what human being is: we are “Gespräch” [“discourse” or conversation], or we are “Gesang” [“song”]. No sighting of a story can be registered, but this absence is not due to the fact that lan­ guage is alienated from life. It is used in a different mode. Even if falling short of Hölderlin’s high-flying “song”, the practice of autobio­ graphical writing comes in many variants. Montaigne, for instance, characterizes his approach as an attempt to portray or “paint” himself, and he does so for the very reason that he seeks to record momentary, transitory experiences and is suspicious of the narrative ambition “à […] r’appiesser […] [les actions humaines et à] assortir ces pieces” [“to knit [a man’s deeds] […] into one whole and […] to match up the pieces”]: “Nul esprit genereux ne s’arreste en soy: […] il a des eslans au delà de ses effets” [“No generous mind stops within itself […]; it springs past its limits”] (Montaigne 1962, 314, 1045 [1991, 373, 1211, transl. altered]). Montaigne’s is just one example taken out of the rich repertoire of autobiographical forms. Again another example would be the col­ lage-like, topical (and strictly antichronological) structure employed by modern-day writers like Roland Barthes (1994). Narratives still represent the dominant form of autobiographical writing. What exactly is a ‘narrative’? In 1935 Gertrude Stein stated in her typical punctuation-less prose: Narrative is what anybody has to say in any way about anything that can happen has happened will happen in any way. That is what narrative is and so of course there always is narrative […]. You are always listening to some one to something and you are always telling something to some one or to any one. That is life the way it is lived (2010, 32–34).

According to her minimal definition, narrative writing is defined by a linguistic sequence, a point of reference, an auctorial stance, and also, interestingly, by the ori­ entation at an addressee. Among these criteria sequentiality stands out. The narrative trajectory leading from a beginning to an end is said to re-enact the life-span between birth and death

120 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

(MacIntyre 1981, 191). Virginia Woolf carefully renegotiates this homology by settling for a paradox which juxtaposes the truthfulness of a life-emulating narrative and its disturbing ability to “make us believe” something: “The novel is the only form of art which seeks to make us believe that it is giving a full and truthful record of the life of a real person” (1958, 141). The narrative consolidation of life has been questioned in order to liberate either language or life – or both – from the yoke of chronology. This liberation is particu­ larly welcome in the autobiographical realm. Like the educational novel or ‘Bildungs­ roman’, the traditional biography of a third person typically follows a person’s lifespan. This homology between text and life is revoked in autobiography, as the author does not mind surviving the narrative’s ending. S/he may shrink back from closure as it anticipates mortification. Life must go on. The fact that the autobiographical equa­ tion between textual form and life-form falters comes as a relief for philosophy. She is not doomed to be lifeless or hostile to life when using an impersonal language. This relief conceals a challenge: Both philosophy and narrative writing are entitled and obliged to do justice to human life in their own ways.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994]. Baudelaire, Charles. “Mon cœur mis à nu.” Œuvres completes. Vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. 676–708 [My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings. Ed. Peter Quennell. Trans. Norman Cameron. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1950]. Blattner, William. “Life Is Not Literature.” The Many Faces of Time. Ed. John Barnett Brough and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000. 187–201. Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. London: Routledge, 1993. Bruner, Jerome. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 54 (1987): 11–32. Brunner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 1–21. Cavell, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1994. Descartes, René. Œuvres. Discours de la méthode & Essais. Vol. VI. Paris: Vrin, 1982 [Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998]. Descartes, René. Œuvres. Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. Vol. VII. Paris: Vrin, 1983 [Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998]. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. VII. Stuttgart/Göttingen: Teubner/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979 [Selected Works. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Vol. III. Ed. and trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002]. Glover, Jonathan. I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity. London: Penguin, 1988. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978.

1.12 Philosophy 

 121

Gusdorf, Georges. Auto-bio-graphie: Lignes de vie 2. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. I. München/Wien: Hanser, 1992 [Hyperion and Selected Poems. Ed. Eric L. Sandner. New York: Continuum Press, 1990]. Kotre, John. White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory. New York: Free Press, 1996. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. de Montaigne, Michel. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1962 [The Complete Essays. Ed. and trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin, 1991]. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1995. Oakeshott, Michael. The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1959. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. “Narrating the Self.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 19–43. Plessner, Helmuth. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Berlin/Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1928. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. I. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Sandel, Michael. “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” Political Theory 12.1 (1984): 81–96. Stein, Gertrude. Narration: Four Lectures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Sterne, Lawrence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1996. Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17.4 (2004): 428–452. Thomä, Dieter. Erzähle dich selbst. Lebensgeschichte als philosophisches Problem. München: Beck, 1998. Thomä, Dieter. “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Erzählung für das Leben.” Narrative Ethik: Das Gute und das Böse erzählen. Ed. Karen Joisten. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007. 75–93. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press, 1990. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Tugendhat, Ernst. Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Velleman, J. David. How We Get Along. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996. Woolf, Virginia. Granite and Rainbow. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

Further Reading Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2001. Kerby, Anthony Paul. Narrative and the Self. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Nash, Cristopher, ed. Narrative in Culture. The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature. London/New York: Routledge, 1990. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. I–IV. Leipzig/Bern/Frankfurt a.  M.: Teubner/ Francke/Schulte-Bulmke, 1907–1969 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Part 1. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1998]. Thomä, Dieter, Vincent Kaufmann, and Ulrich Schmid. Der Einfall des Lebens. Theorie als geheime Autobiographie. München: Hanser, 2015.

1.13 Political Science Tracey Arklay

Auto/biography (‘Auto/biography’ is the term used throughout this entry when referring to both autobiography and biography), is a form of ‘life-writing’ that fits the broad rubric of the “biographical method” (Roberts 2002, X). While biography’s focus is on the subject/object (with the subject usually dead) and the author able to select, sometimes controversially, what to include or ignore; autobiography uses memory as its primary material (Smith and Watson 2010, 22), with autobiographers able to self-select what aspects of their life to focus on. Despite these limitations the auto/biographical genre contributes to a body of knowledge that is informed by history, anthropology and sociology. Its key focus is based upon understanding the “other” (Vidich and Lyman 2000, 38). Life writing with a specific focus, e.  g. poli­ tics, is termed “special purpose biography” (Brewer 2001, 723). Biography is one of the oldest forms of political writing. Plutarch’s βίοι παράλληλοι [Parallel Lives] about Ancient Greek and Roman leaders, is the first in a long line of biographies document­ ing the lives of “great men” (Brewer 2001, 721). It took many more centuries before the writings of “great women” appeared (e.  g. Eleanor Roosevelt’s Autobiography [1992]; Margaret Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years [1993]). The writings of post-colonial leaders such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Ghana’s first presi­ dent Kwame Nkrumah extends the genre further to include issues of race and class (Brewer 2001, 721).

Reviewing the Genre Diaries, memoirs and oral histories of political actors all fit within the autobiograph­ ical typology. As a qualitative research method, autobiography is rich in description and, as with all first-person accounts, is subjective and partial. Unlike quantitative research, the auto/biographical method does not provide a generalisable set of laws that can be used to provide overarching and repeatable explanations. For that reason it has been dismissed by some in the academy as lacking in rigour (Rhodes 2006, 43). Rather it is ideographic research, historical and interpretive, contextualised in explaining specific, situated events. Life writing can be influenced by various streams of political inquiry including feminism, psychology, institutionalism, constructivism and post-colonialism. Together autobiographies, diaries and memoirs can provide insights into how politics works in practice, albeit from a privileged position and of a particular time. As such they give researchers an insight into the actions and views of elites, helping to construct meaning and understand political leadership. They are stories that allow “multiple interpretations” of events to unfold (Rhodes and Brown, 2005, 167) and the possibility for hidden patterns to emerge (Kearney 2002, 12). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-014

1.13 Political Science 

 123

The genre of political biography and autobiography is just one of many research methods that fall under the rubric of political science: governance, the study of elites, institutionalism, group behaviour and executive studies (see Walter 2014). Auto/bi­ ography is not historical analysis, with one author suggesting “history is perpetually suspicious of memory” (Nora 1989, 9). Life writing does contribute to our understand­ ing of history and leadership through a detailed observation of events as seen through an individual lens. Just as an historian’s reconstruction of past events is informed by their assumptions of the present (Cavalier 2005, 6), autobiography is “ideographic” research – a subjective, individual account that is, of necessity, more or less biased in the author’s favour. Such “thick”, descriptive accounts offer a unique perspective for a researcher interested in how politics works and how power is wielded (Walter 2009, 97). Like ethnography, it can “capture the meaning of everyday human activi­ ties” (Hammersley and Atkinson cited by Rhodes 2006, 47), and contribute to the store of knowledge by relating the actions, the thoughts and the patterns of one political actor’s life.

Autobiography in Political Science Political scientists who use an historical framework as a basis for their research find autobiographies useful for providing context. Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), was ground breaking in terms of it being a first person account of someone who identified with two conflicting worlds: the American son of a black African, who ultimately would move to the very centre of power (Baillie 2011, 319). Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994) informed us of what Mandela considered important attributes of successful leadership and explains much about his presidency. Mandela’s writing on reconciliation, forgiveness and citizenship in the new South Africa post-apartheid is an exemplar of the autobi­ ographical genre. While didactic in approach, Mandela’s writing has been translated into six African languages and made into a children’s book. It offered a code of citizen­ ship, and has inspired others. For example journalist Antjie Krog’s Country of my skull (1998) recalled her reaction to the witness statements of people who suffered during apartheid (Smith and Watson 2010, 134). Their testimonies to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission are an example of the role oral history can have in the political process. Talking truth to power has resulted in changes to government policy across the world. In Australia, indigenous peoples received an apology for the “stolen generation”, while the testimony of Holocaust survivors assisted in the creation of refugee policies. More than any other subset of the autobiographical genre, political diaries provide immediate, first-person insights into politics, the policy process and certain person­ alities at a particular point in time. Two exemplars are Richard Crossman’s Diaries of

124 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

a Cabinet Minister (1979) in the United Kingdom and Neal Blewett’s A Cabinet Diary (1999) in Australia. In the case of Crossman, his record provides a vivid account of the life of a minister and the inner workings of Whitehall. Written with a view to “stripping the legend” to provide a truthful account (Crossman cited in Theakston 2003, 20), his ultimately posthumous contribution was the subject of a concerted (but unsuc­ cessful) effort by the Secretary to the Cabinet and the Attorney-General to prevent its publication. Neal Blewett’s ministerial diary is a snap-shot of a brief period of time in Australian politics. Both diaries were written by former academics turned politicians, both written with the intention of communicating how politics is played out, and to draw attention to the iterative nature of policy design. Most political actors find it difficult to routinely record events as they unfold. The very act of writing a diary makes the author less a participant, more an observer (Smith and Watson, 2010, 1). Few politicians and senior bureaucrats even try. This is due to a number of factors including ethical issues around Cabinet solidarity, caution about personal revelation, time constraints, the physical exhaustion that comes at the end of a long day, loyalty to friends and colleagues, the risk of libel, and the awareness that they could be used against the writer. One need look no further than US Treasury official Joshua Steiner, whose diary was used by those seeking to find evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons in the ‘Whitewater controversy’ (concerning a failed real estate venture of the Clintons prior to his presidency) to understand why (Laboton 1994). In his testimony to Congress, Steiner stated, “I made no attempt to be inaccu­ rate, but I want to be clear I was not attempting to be precise. I made no attempt to check the accuracy of this diary” (Simon 1994). Despite issues of truth and motivation being raised over some diaries (for Australia see Latham 2005), they have a freshness and immediacy that other forms of life writing cannot replicate. Memoirs (not diaries) from staffers seem to be proliferating. These memoirs about times serving the powerful can be problematic; with blurred ethical boundaries par­ ticularly relating to confidentiality. As James Button’s Speechless (2012) notes about his time in Australia’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, those that work for government know “the companion of insider knowledge is confidentiality: the more you see, the less you say” (2013, 225). Button was not to know that deposed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would be returned to office in late June 2013. However, his assessment of Rudd’s managerial style does not so much provide new insights into the working style of one Prime Minister, as provide further evidence as to why his colleagues may have removed him from office in the first place. Whether such an assessment of a serving Prime Minister could influence the outcome of future polit­ ical contests, is uncertain. Nevertheless, as Weller (1984, 133) observes, diaries “are the place where facts, rumours, motives and intrigue all compete for space”. A diary, written at the time, without the advantage of retrospective analysis and without an eye to posterity can tell us much about the grit and grind of day to day politics. Political scientists are trained to recognise the risks of subjectivity and accept the inherent bias in personal accounts. Every document, first person account, memoir

1.13 Political Science 

 125

and diary is subjective. Circumspection is thus a crucial part of using the material. When cross-checked against other sources including the conflicting or corroborat­ ing accounts of other actors and triangulated with sources such as official records, Hansard, oral histories and secondary sources, diaries and autobiographies contrib­ ute toward a deeper understanding of political events, causality and policy decisions. Yet despite these advantages it seems that the field of mainstream political science remains dismissive of the life-writing genre (Rhodes 2006, 43). A cynical interpretation may be that this is due to its perceived popularity. Political biography, autobiography and memoir sell better than any other form of political inquiry (Arklay 2006; Yagoda 2009). They provide an accessible account, and sometimes a tantalising glimpse of events and personalities (even if at times they are difficult to believe). Alan Clark’s experience as a member of Thatcher’s government is one example. As Marr (2000) noted “Alan Clark’s Diaries reveal him as a raconteur, a roué… and a fascist. Thank heavens no one took him too seriously”. Still the view persists that if ‘ordinary’ people enjoy reading these stories from the political trenches then it cannot be serious schol­ arship. Perhaps that is why Australian historian Geoffrey Bolton (2006, 1) ironically noted that “real intellectuals do not do political biography”. Is such scepticism justi­ fied? Certainly there are weaker and stronger examples of the genre, with hagiography (where subjects are treated with undue reverence) just one of the potential pitfalls. Autobiographies or memoirs written with an eye to disparage a disliked colleague may earn lucrative rewards (huge advances are often proffered by publishers). Rarely do autobiographies include anyone else’s accounts of events. Critics of autobiography would argue the genre lacks rigour and fails to provide value-free insights into human behaviour. In its defence, auto/biographical research was never intended to support val­ ue-free generalisations. It is idiographic research, inductive, sensitive to context, able to provide “thick”, detailed description which while limited in its scope has the poten­ tial to provide readers with a “feel for another’s social reality” (Neuman 1997, 71). In this way it is similar to the use of narratives in organisational research. There is an emerging scholarship that views story-telling and narratives as valuable in providing a deeper understanding of workplaces. Diaries and memoirs can also contribute to that understanding. One only has to look at a political scientist’s book-shelf to observe that political auto/biographies are read by the profession. But do they inform their research? The results from an informal survey among political scientists in Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA indicate that the genre informs political science research in various ways by providing an insider account of historical events, articulating different views on leadership, shedding light on how individuals grapple with various problems they confront in office, and in highlighting how different leaders view their role  – how they become reflexive. Auto/biographies are used by academics interested in political psychology and/or leadership typologies as instances of the ‘life myth’ scholars may try to penetrate.

126 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Limitations of the Genre The motivations for writing an autobiography are varied. A writer may try to engage the reader through amusing anecdotes and character analysis of other well-known colleagues as is often the case in memoirs. Hence Paul Hasluck’s A Chance of Politics sketch portrait of Australian Prime Minister William MacMahon told of a man whom the author found “contemptible” (1997, 185). Autobiographies can also serve to justify actions taken during a career or to provide a salve to the author’s conscience by explaining some of the hard, controversial and unpopular decisions that are taken in the course of a political life. Yet, if the final account tries to rewrite history, is either unfair or too generous, or is otherwise lacking in its assessment, it is likely to be coun­ tered by others who will happily set the record straight. Most authors recognise this. It is one constraining factor. Of more significance perhaps is who gets published. In the main it is the leaders or those close to power; less often it is the rebels and the radicals. In that regard, autobiography reflects the old adage, ‘history is written by the victors’. The privileged position of those in power is reflected in whose auto/biographies get published. Auto/biography is a growing field. Well written, thoughtful accounts – be they autobiographies, diaries or memoirs – provide insight into how public policy is made. They demonstrate the negotiations and compromises that are integral to governing, and provide an insider’s perspective of political events and controversies. So we learn from reading the account by US president Bill Clinton’s staffer George Stephanopou­ los that the President he served was a man of “seductive powers” who was quick to anger and who affected staff like “an impersonal physical force” (Harris, 1999). The diaries of Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alistair Campbell outline the deals, bargains, and reactions as Blair dealt with war, death and resignations. His diary also reveals the international friendships that occur in politics such as when Australian Prime Minis­ ter Paul Keating advised Blair about how to handle Rupert Murdoch: “He’s a big bad bastard, and the only way you can deal with him is to make sure he thinks you can be a big bad bastard too… the only language he respects is strength” (2007, 74). From James Button (2013, 219) we learn something of the difficulties speech writers have in finding the voice of the leader, as well as something about the management style of individual leaders. In Australia and the UK it is still relatively rare for political staffers and public servants to pen their thoughts. Those that do so understand the risk they take. Paul Keating for example has never forgiven his former speech writer Don Watson for his reflection on Keating’s time in office, viewing it as an “unforgivable betrayal” (Button 2013, 219). In America such writings are more commonplace. Contemporary exam­ ples include Stephanopoulos’ account of Clinton in his All too human (1999), David Stockman’s book on his experiences during Reagan’s administration The Triumph of politics (1986) and Madeline Albright’s account Madam Secretary (2003) which recalls her time as the first US Secretary of State. Her book contains candid accounts of both

1.13 Political Science 

 127

the personal and political difficulties that she faced in getting through the selection process, doing the job, as well as frank accounts of other political personalities she encountered (Albright 2003, 221). Aide to President Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal (2003, 434), tells us that facing the daily trials that beset the Clinton Administration was tough: “I had to put on a suit of armor every morning and keep it fastened all day long”. In Western democracies the paper trail is being shortened as the realities of the digital age, the 24 hour news cycle and a more litigious working environment mean Administrations are increasingly shunning “paper or e-mail records of their daily deliberations” (Dallek 2003). In short auto/biography is read by many political scientists and used by some in order to gain a first-hand account of politics from a particular vantage point in time. The well-written ones can highlight broader issues and explore the beliefs and reasons that underpin political actions. At their best, they reveal the dynamics of political engagement: why it mattered to the author, and perhaps, why it should also matter to the rest of us. Political scientists understand the need to view autobiography with a critical eye, to interpret the writings in terms of their accessibility, authenticity, cred­ ibility and explanatory power (Roberts 2002, 6, 37–40). While they should never be used in isolation, auto/biography is one important element in the political scientists’ tool-kit.

Works Cited Albright, Madeleine. Madam Secretary: a memoir. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Arklay, Tracey. “Political Biography: Its Contribution to Political Science.” Australian Political Lives. Chronicling political careers and administrative histories. Ed. Tracy Arklay, John Nethercote and John Wanna. Canberra: ANU e-press, 2006. 13–24. Baillee, Justine. “From Margin to Centre: Postcolonial Identities and Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father.” Life Writing 8.3 (2011): 317–329. Blewett, Neal. A Cabinet Diary. South Australia: Wakefield Press, 1999. Blumenthal, Sidney. The Clinton Wars. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Brewer, Mary. “Politics and Life Writing.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. II. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. 721. Bolton, Geoffrey. “The Art of Australian Political.” Australian Political Lives. Chronicling political careers and administrative histories. Ed. Tracy Arklay, John Nethercote and John Wanna. Canberra: ANU e-press, 2006. 1–12. Button, James. Speechless, a year in my father’s business. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013. Campbell, Alastair. The Blair Years: extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries. Ed. Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott. London: Hutchinson, 2007. Cavalier, Rodney. “A Consideration of the Value of Diaries with Occasional Reference to the Efforts of Mark Latham.” Australian Quarterly 77.5 (2005): 4–14. Clark, Alan. Diaries 1983–1992. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993. Denzin, Norman, and Yvonne Lincoln, eds. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2nd ed. 2000.

128 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Dallek, Robert. “The Clinton Wars! The President’s Man.” The New York Times. 18 May 2003. http:// www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/books/review/18DALLEKT.html (11 July 2018). Harris, John. “Stephanopoulos Book Tests Loyalty.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ politics/special/clinton/stories/clinton030899.htm (11 July 2018). Hasluck, Paul. The Chance of Politics. Melbourne: Text Publishers, 1997. Kearney, Richard. On Stories. London: Routledge, 2002. Laboton, Stephen. “Treasury Official is Disavowing Whitewater details in his diary.” http://www. nytimes.com/1994/07/26/us/treasury-official-is-disavowing-whitewater-details-in-his-diary. html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (15 November 2017). Latham, Mark. The Latham Diaries. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005. Marr, Andrew. “Pooter in Parliament.” The Observer. 15 October 2000. Nora, Pierre. “Between memory and history: Les lieux de memoire. Representations (1989).” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Ed. Denzin Norman and Yvonne Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2nd ed. 2000. 7–26. Rhodes, Carl, and Andrew Brown. “Narrative, organizations and research.” International Journal of Management Reviews 7.3 (2005): 167–188. Rhodes, Rod A. W. “Expanding the Repertoire: Theory, Method and Language in Political Biography.” Australian Political Lives. Chronicling political careers and administrative histories. Ed. Tracy Arklay, John Nethercote and John Wanna. Canberra: ANU e-press, 2006. 43–50. Rhodes, Rod A. W. “Theory, Method and British Political Life History.” Political Studies Review 10 (2012): 161–176. Roberts, Brian. Biographical Research. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002. Scalmer, Scean, and Nathan Hollier. “I, Diarist: Examining Australia Politics from the ‘Inside’.” ­Australian Journal of Politics and History 55.2 (2009): 170–189. Simon, Roger. “Diary that could be denied would be called a liary.” http://articles.baltimoresun. com/1994-08-07/news/1994219036_1_dear-diary-joshua-steiner-diary-full (11 July 2018). Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010. Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human – A Political Education. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1999. Stockman, David. The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Theakston, Kevin. “Richard Crossman: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister.” Public Policy and Administration 18.20 (2003): 20–40. Vidich, Arthur J., and Stanford M. Lyman. “Qualitative Methods, Their History in Sociology and Anthropology.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Ed. Denzin Norman and Yvonne Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2nd ed. 2000. 37–84. Walter, James. “Biographical Analysis.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership. Ed. R.A.W. Rhodes and Paul ‘t Hart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Watson, Don. Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. A Portrait of Paul Keating. North Sydney: PM Vintage Books/Random House, 2002. Weller, Patrick. “The Politics of the Diarist. Book Review.” Politics 19.2 (1984): 133–34. Woolf, Virgina. The Diary of Virgina Woolf. 1915–1919. Vol. I. New York: A Harvest Book, 1977. Yagoda, Ben. Memoir – A History. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.

1.13 Political Science 

 129

Further Reading Jolly, Margaretta, ed. The Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. 2 vols. London: Dearborn, 2001. Pimlott, Ben. “The solace of doubt? Biographical methodology after the short Twentieth Century.” Mapping lives: the uses of biography. Ed. Peter France and William St Clair. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 321–335. Roberts, Brian. Biographical Research. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002.

1.14 Postcolonialism Mita Banerjee

As a field comprising both literature and cultural theory, postcolonialism has a par­ ticular affinity for the autobiographical. In a particular, postcolonial mode of autobi­ ography, the writer’s own cultural past of having grown up in or shaped by a culture dominated by British colonialism is mapped onto the body of the literary protagonist. Just as the writer discovers, through fiction, an alternative cultural signification, the protagonist discovers a way of emancipating himself or herself from the former colo­ nizer. Postcolonial literature as a genre thus comprises literatures from all parts of the former British Empire, from Africa with seminal postcolonial writers such as Chinua Achebe to India and the Caribbean.

Postcolonialism and “Writing the Nation” The key texts which can be seen to have inaugurated the field of postcolonial litera­ ture, from George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980), take the founding metaphors of colonialism as their starting points from which the literary protagonist – often a young boy or girl –, then goes on to distance himself/herself to create his or her own, postcolonial signification. The notion of adolescence as a form of personal, but also of political coming of age is by no means accidental here. The rationale of the colonial political and cultural system of domination, from its inception, was the idea that the colonizing nation as ‘mother country’ was to watch over its ward, the colony, which was hence implied to be “‘unfit’ for self-government” (Jacobson 1998, 27); in this colonialist thinking, it was the “white man’s burden”, as Rudyard Kipling once put it (1948, 55), to watch over those peoples who could not (yet) govern themselves. Political dependence and economic exploita­ tion were thus explained and ‘naturalized’ through the metaphor of the family. What this implied, of course, was the transvaluation of a system of exploitation into a form of kinship in which the mother country lovingly watched over and decided for its colo­ nial children. Postcolonial literature could thus well be termed a ‘declaration of inde­ pendence’ in which the ‘children’ severed their bonds to their parents, and in which they went to ‘unlearn’ the very ideas on which colonialism had been founded. From the very beginning, postcolonial literature is a form of cultural and political rebirth. Not incidentally, Salman Rushdie’s award-winning novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), starts both with the ‘birth’ of the Indian nation on August 15, 1947 and the birth of its protagonist: “I was born […] on August 15th, 1947 […]. On the stroke of midnight […]. [At] the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world” (Rushdie 1980, 1). Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem, is thus “mysteriously hand­ cuffed to history” (1980, 3). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-015

1.14 Postcolonialism 

 131

Postcolonialism thus encapsulates the practice of “writing the self” as “writing the nation” (Kim et al. 1994, ix), a practice also discussed in the second major volume by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (1990). As is evident from the concept of writing the self as writing the nation, postcolonial literature uses and expands the concept of Western autobiography. If Western autobiographies such as Benjamin Franklin’s are based on an individual as a model for the citizen of the nation to emulate, postcolonial writing conceives the relationship between the indi­ vidual and the community differently. For postcolonial writers from Salman Rushdie to Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta, the individual is inseparable from the commu­ nity, or in Salman Rushdie’s words, “to understand just one life you have to swallow the world” (1980, 147). Postcolonial literature thus ‘writes’ the former colony into being as a nation in its own right, and then describes – again based on the metaphor of a child’s growth into adulthood  – its coming of age as a nation. The metaphor of the colonial and familial dependence of the former colony on the former mother country is turned by postcolonial writers into a source of immense creativity, captured in Salman Rushdie’s memorable phrase of the “empire [writing] back” to the center (1982, 8). Taken from popular culture in a reference to George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy (1977), postcolonial literature assumes a deliberately playful, irreverent mode toward the former colonizer. It rehearses the process of coming of age which starts with the unthinking adoration of the mother country and ends with a systematic process of abrogation and appro­ priation, in the course of which the colonial mind-set (based on the alleged inferiority of colonial cultures as ‘primitive’) is rejected and replaced by alternative, postcolonial epistemologies. The literary practice which arises from the rejection of colonialism not only as a form of political domination but also as a way of thinking is the practice of ‘writing back’, of re-writing colonial narratives. Thus, Jean Rhys’s seminal novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) re-writes Charlotte Brontë’s canonical novel, Jane Eyre (1847), from the perspective of the black Caribbean madwoman who, in Brontë’s narrative, is con­ veniently locked away in the attic. In Rhys’s rewriting of Brontë’s fiction, the ascrip­ tion of madness is unmasked as the colonist’s incomprehension of an alternative sig­ nification and as a dismissal of a culture not his own. Postcolonialism is thus also a shifting of perspective, and a critical – and literary – practice that sets out to unearth cultural legacies which have been submerged by British colonial power. At the core of these postcolonial epistemologies, however, lies the problem that there can be no straightforward rediscovery of pre-colonial forms of thought; instead, postcolonial epistemologies are in themselves hybrid in that they incorporate parts of the former colonial system. The language in which they do so, moreover, is the lan­ guage of the former colonizer; the hybridity of the postcolonial text is thus both cul­ tural and linguistic. Given the metaphor of the postcolonial nation cutting the chord to its colonial ‘parent’, many postcolonial end with their youthful protagonists’ standing on the brink of adulthood. From this vantage point, they contemplate a future that is

132 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

yet uncertain: The challenge for the postcolonial nation, of course, is to do better than its parent.

Postcolonial Theory and the Agency of the ‘Subaltern’ It is this epistemological challenge which has been addressed by postcolonial theory, led originally by the “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said (Young 1995, 163). More than many other fields, postcoloni­ alism has been characterized by a close affinity between postcolonial literature and postcolonial theory. Theorists like Homi Bhabha spell out, on a theoretical plane, the textual and cultural manoeuvres that postcolonial literature performs in its abroga­ tion of colonial knowledge systems. The solution which Homi Bhabha provides for the dilemma of a postcolonial ‘rediscovery’ of a culture affected by colonial domination is a deliberately flawed equation. Bhabha writes, “the transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One […] nor the Other […] but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both” (1994, 28). Central for postcolonial theory has been the concept of the ‘subaltern’. Rooted, in the case of Gayatri Spivak, in Marxist historiography and the work of the subaltern studies group around the Indian historian Ranajit Guha, postcolonial theorists inves­ tigate in particular the concept of the agency of the postcolonial subject with regard to dominant structures of hearing. Thus, in Spivak’s memorable formation, “the sub­ altern […] cannot speak” (1994, 287) because the words she utters are not part of the epistemological spectrum which the hegemonic culture can hear. The category of the ‘subaltern’, moreover, holds a class dimension as much as a cultural one. Thus, Spi­ vak’s work in particular has investigated the ways in which the colonial power often collaborated with, and used for its own purposes, intra-cultural forms of domination, such as the Indian caste-system. As is evident in Spivak’s work, postcolonial theory is thus especially concerned with the power of colonial or hegemonic discourse. In this concern, postcolonial theory is indebted to postmodernist and deconstructionist thinking, especially to the work of Michel Foucault. Postcolonial theory thus has a strong affinity to postmod­ ernism. It is this close connection between postcolonialism and postmodernism which led Anthony Appiah to ask playfully in his 1991 article, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” (Appiah 1991, 336). Based on Foucault’s critique of knowl­ edge systems, Edward Said laid the groundwork for postcolonial studies through his 1978 study, Orientalism, in which he insists that writers as diverse as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Gustave Flaubert converge in their “othering” of an “Oriental” culture whose ability to represent itself they systematically deny (Said 1978, 6–7). What Said

1.14 Postcolonialism 

 133

adds to the concept of ‘postcolonial abrogation’ and ‘appropriation’, then, is a cri­ tique of colonial dominance as systemic in its discursive and epistemological denial of the colonial culture. There is to postcolonial theory an epistemological as well as a political agenda. Like postcolonial literary authors, the rhetorical verve with which postcolonial theorists deconstruct the dominant discourse is informed by their root­ edness in specific, postcolonial cultures. In Said’s work especially, there are strong autobiographical elements, as his critique emanates from his own subject position as a Palestinian with a Christian name having grown up in an Islamic culture. As he writes in his autobiography, Out of Place (1999): “It took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or, more exactly, to feel less uncomfortable with, ‘Edward,’ a foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said” (Said 2000, 3). As these considerations show, the autobiographical is central to the politics of the postcolonial. Live experience, the experience of colonialism on both a personal and a collective level, is at the core of postcolonial writing and theory. In this vein, postcolonial autobiographies have driven home with a vengeance the fact that the personal is always political; that the impact of a given system can best be gauged by the traces it leaves on individual lives. Similarly to Said’s, Salman Rushdie’s autobiographical work, Joseph Anton (2012), adds yet another layer to the intersection between life-writing and postcolonialism. In his memoir, Rushdie looks back at what it meant to live under the ‘fatwa’, writing under the name which the death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned him to use during his life in hiding: Joseph Anton. Rushdie’s own life has thus illustrated the pitfalls which may accompany both postcolonialism and postcolo­ nial life writing. Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, had drawn on the hybridity and deliberate cultural “impurity” which marked the author’s own biography. This was a hybridity which virtually all of Rushdie’s characters cherish; yet, it was these characters’ alleged lack of respect for Islamic religion which in 1989 earned the author of The Satanic Verses a death sentence. Joseph Anton can thus also be read as an affir­ mation of the legitimacy, and the necessity, of postcolonial writing in its exposing the fundamentalisms of our time. Like postcolonial literary authors, postcolonial theorists have celebrated the hybridity and irreverent syncretism of their own lives, which they proceed to turn from a curse into a benefit: In his later work, Edward Said uses his love of music and his friendship with Jewish composer Daniel Barenboim (Barenboim and Said 2004) as a reference to what his fellow theorist, Homi Bhabha, has called the space “outside the sentence” (1994, 180): a transcultural space in which discourses of purity and colonial authority will no longer hold. At the heart of Said’s work – and the basis for the criti­ cism which his oeuvre has sometimes been subjected to – lies the paradox of the post­ colonial. If indeed the postcolonial subject who has now come of age is to live a life unencumbered by the past, what may this alternative be constituted by? Thus, critics have argued that in Said’s work, from Orientalism to its sequel, Culture and Imperialism (1994), the deconstruction of hegemonic discourse is much more pronounced

134 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

than the reinscription of alternative, postcolonial forms of signification. This fixation on the former colonizer has been seen by most critics as an impasse or dead end inherent in postcolonialism itself. If the concept of ‘writing back’ gave rise to innu­ merable re-writings of colonial novels such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the practice of writing back ultimately served to reinforce the presence and influence of the former colonizer. What, many critics proceeded to ask, lay beyond the postco­ lonial (Loomba 2005, 1)? One of the fields which have recently arisen in this context is the use of postcolonial theory to describe the former Soviet Empire. Thus, critics such as David Chioni Moore have reformulated Appiah’s above-mentioned question to ask whether “the Post- in Postcolonial [is] the Post- in Post-Soviet” (2001, 118). It remains to be seen whether the narratives written after the demise of communism as a master narrative will have similar emplotments, describing in their turn the coming of age of former communist countries. After the waning of postcolonial rewritings of canoni­ cal works and canonical authors (such as Ania Loomba’s Postcolonial Shakespeares [1998]), postcolonial theory has been most productively used in the interrogation of hegemonic political systems coming to an end (most notably, South Africa after apart­ heid) as well as in exploring different forms of neo-colonialism. Despite the fact that colonialism took different forms in various parts of the globe, postcolonialism stresses that these forms of domination may nevertheless have strikingly similar discourses and cultural practices at their core. Yet, one of the most controversial ideas in this context has been, whether the label of ‘postcolonialism’ in fact dismisses continuing legacies of the former empire as well as neo-colonial forms of domination. Moreover, the applicability of postcolonial theory to the history and cultural production of indigenous communities such as Native Americans in the US has also been a point of disagreement. Arguably, for communities dispossessed of the land they were the original inhabitants of, colonialism is by no means ‘past’.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Appiah, Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 336–357. Barenboim, Daniel, and Edward Said. Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations on Music and Society. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bhabha, Homi, ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847). London: Penguin, 2006. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Kim, Elaine, and Norma Alarcon, eds. Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. San Francisco: Third Women Press, 1994. Kiping, Rudyard. “The White Man’s Burden.” Sixty Poems (1899). London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948. 55–57.

1.14 Postcolonialism 

 135

Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin (1953). Harlow: Longman, 1988. Loomba, Ania. Post-colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1998. Loomba, Ania, and Jed Esty, eds. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Moore, David Chioni. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Towards a Global Post­ colonial Critique.” PMLA 116:1 (2001): 118–128. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). New York: Penguin, 2012. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Penguin, 1980. Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes back with a Vengeance.” Times. 3 July 1982. 8. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses (1988). New York: Random House, 2008. Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2012. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Said, Edward. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage, 2000. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Muticulturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

Further Reading Hornung, Alfred, and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds. Postcolonialism and Autobiography. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation. New York: Routledge, 2009.

1.15 Psychology Rüdiger F. Pohl

Psychology is the science that studies human behavior and experience. It aims to explain how and why humans act in certain ways and how and why they experience the world in certain ways. With such knowledge, psychology seeks to accomplish diagnosis, prognosis, and improvement of human behavior and experience. Psy­ chology assumes that human behavior and experience are shaped by an interaction between genetically and experientially acquired regularities. Above that, each person has his or her own developmental trajectory depending on one’s genetic potential and according environmental influences. Psychology thus seeks to understand what is common to all humans and what is specific to individuals. Psychology is split into several sub-disciplines the most important of which are (a) the basic disciplines of biological psychology, cognitive psychology, developmen­ tal psychology, social psychology, differential and personality psychology, psycho­ logical and statistical methods, and (b) the applied disciplines of clinical psychology (including psychopathology and psychotherapy), educational psychology, work and industrial psychology, and consumer psychology. Historical roots of psychology can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosophers (most notably, Plato and his student Aristotle), but the current conception as a science was devised only recently, namely late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. Some of the major influences were the growing industrialization and urbanization (with all their challenges for indi­ viduals and the society as a whole), the emphasis on experimental research (as the main road to gain insight), the decoupling of psychology from philosophy, and the information-processing approach (causing the ‘cognitive turn’ in the 1960s). The objects of scrutiny here, autobiography and autofiction, are not genuine concepts in psychological research. They can nevertheless be viewed from several of the psychological sub-disciplines. In the following, the main viewpoints, namely cognitive, socio-developmental, and clinical psychology, will be sketched. In these three domains, researchers have collected data and developed theories that relate to autobiography and autofiction.

Cognitive Perspective Cognitive psychology encompasses the areas of perception, learning, memory, lan­ guage, thinking, motivation, and emotion (Eysenck and Keane 2010; Groome 2012). Most relevant questions with respect to autobiography and autofiction concern how personal events are perceived, stored, and later retrieved from memory, and how they are translated into a narrative format. These and other topics are covered by a relatively young domain within cognitive psychology focusing on autobiographical https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-016

1.15 Psychology 

 137

memory. Although the memory for one’s life had been a research object before, it became an established field not until the 1990s (starting with Conway 1990), pushed by a movement called ‘everyday psychology’ or ‘applied psychology’. Nowadays, autobiographical memory has become a widespread and internationally renowned research area and yielded a multitude of publications, ranging from basic cognitive processes to clinical applications. In the following, the main findings will be summa­ rized (Pohl 2007). Cognitive psychology distinguishes several long-term memory systems, espe­ cially declarative and non-declarative memory, with declarative memory being further divided into semantic and episodic memory. Declarative systems involve those that can be verbalized. Semantic memory includes all world knowledge that we acquired in our lifetime, while episodic memory refers to all personal experiences that can be localized in time and space. For example, remembering that Paris is the capital of France refers to semantic memory, while remembering one’s last trip to Paris refers to episodic memory. Several authors set autobiographical memory equal to episodic memory (Tulving 1972), while others see autobiographical memory as more specialized (Pohl 2007). The main criteria that are discussed for autobiographical memory are explicit self-ref­ erence, detailed (mostly visual) memory, accompanying thoughts and feelings, and (more or less specific) knowledge about time and place of occurrence. Autobiographi­ cal remembering is often described as a process of subjective re-experiencing the orig­ inal event (‘mental time-travel’). Some specific types of autobiographical memories consist of first-time experiences, highly emotional (up to traumatic) events, self-de­ fining episodes, and life-turning points (i.  e. events or decisions with long-term conse­ quences). All these episodes can be considered ‘landmark events’ that help to struc­ ture one’s autobiography. In addition, two further systems are probably also involved in organizing our autobiographical memories. The first system is a culture-specific ‘life-story schema’. Such a schema contains the typical (canonical) events that happen to most persons at specific ages within a given culture (e.  g. going to school, leaving one’s parents, or getting married) as well as other, non-canonical events that could happen to oneself but at rather unpredictable times (e.  g. having an accident or start­ ing a new job). The second system that helps organizing autobiographical memo­ ries lies in the hierarchical principles of memory representations. For example, the ‘self-memory system’ has been proposed by Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) and assumes three levels of organization. The top and most abstract level contains life­ time periods in our life, namely relationship themes and work themes, ordered in time. For example, the relationship themes could contain ‘living with one’s parents’, ‘living with one’s friend X’, or ‘one’s marriage to Y’. Each of these periods contains a number of general events on the medium level of the model. These general events are mostly repeated experiences that are typical for certain periods in one’s life. Finally, on the bottom and most specific level, the model assumes that we store event-specific knowledge that contains all the details and sensory experiences associated with an

138 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

event. The model further assumes that in order to search our memory, we enter the system either at the top or the bottom level and then (hopefully) progress from there to the other levels. In sum, autobiographical memory should not be considered a ‘mental diary’. It is much more complex and flexible, but at the same time also more malleable (see below). Cognitive psychology also studies the processes leading to encoding (learning) and retrieving (remembering) of personal experiences. In a nutshell, whether and how specific experiences are encoded and stored in autobiographical memory depends on a number of factors. These include the current goals of the experiencing person, the dominant mood, the amount of attention, the amount of pre-existing knowledge, the emotionality of the event, and the personal importance of the event. In addition, quality of encoding and storage depends on the maturity of the brain, and thus the developmental age of the person. Similarly manifold are the factors that determine whether and how a stored memory can later be retrieved. Most important, of course, is the quality of the original encoding and storage. Further factors include the quality of the current retrieval cues (that drive memory search), the retention interval (i.  e. the time between encoding and retrieval), the amount of interim rehearsal of that experi­ ence, and the amount and strength of potentially interfering memories. Generally, memory does not work like a video recorder storing all details of an event in an authentic (objective) fashion. Rather, encoding, storing, and retrieval are all subjectively governed processes that select, interpret, and abstract the original information. For example, schematic knowledge is used to understand (and thus store) the original event, as well as to retrieve and reconstruct it later on. As a con­ sequence, the retrieved memory most likely differs from the original event in several aspects: Some parts are missing, while others are distorted or completely added. These changes, however, usually remain unnoticed by us, because we do not have the original record for comparison. Thus, our memories mostly appear veridical to us. Only in cases with original records available (like e.  g. in written diaries), we may discover that our memories deviate from the original description. With respect to autobiographical memories, several systematic distortions and biases have been discovered. The sources of potential distortions can probably best be understood when considering the functions of autobiographical remembering, that is, by looking at the situations and goals that drive how we actually ‘use’ autobio­ graphical memories in our daily life. The functional perspective thus looks at the moti­ vational sources of remembering. Webster (1993) distinguished eight functions that autobiographical memories could serve, namely ‘boredom reduction’, ‘death prepara­ tion’, ‘identity’, ‘problem-solving’, ‘conversation’, ‘intimacy maintenance’, ‘bitterness revival’, and ‘teach/inform’. Later, Bluck (2003) argued for three functional catego­ ries, namely ‘self’, ‘social’, and ‘directive’. Webster as well as Bluck devised ques­ tionnaires to assess how strongly the proposed functions are indeed used. In a recent paper, Harris, Rasmussen, and Berntsen (2013) proposed four functional categories

1.15 Psychology 

 139

that could be considered a joint solution for the previous two approaches, containing reflective, social, ruminative, and generative functions. Whatever the correct solution may be, it is clear that the retrieval of autobiographical memories serves current goals and that these goals accordingly govern the reconstruction process of remembering. One of the main functions of autobiographical memories is the construction of one’s self-concept, which in turn influences the way personal events are remembered. (This discussion will be continued under the ‘developmental perspective’ below.) One of the memory distortions in this domain concerns the ‘positivity bias’. This bias describes the phenomenon that past experiences often appear more positive (or less negative) than they originally were. This tendency, moreover, increases with age. All these memory distortions or biases are considered to result from automatic reconstruction processes that cannot be influenced deliberately. In other words, these are not deliberate attempts, for example, to appear in a better light. The latter type of consciously ‘editing’ one’s history (up to bluntly lying) may occur only later, namely when someone talks (or writes) about his or her life. Then, for example, one may feel inclined to omit more shameful events, exaggerate more successful ones, or even invent completely new ones. Writing one’s autobiography is the last topic under the ‘cognitive perspective’. Given that memory retrieval already delivers a more or less biased version of one’s autobiography, writing allows for far more flexible editing. Writing (like speaking) is a way of communicating information to others. It consists of planning, writing, and revising. More experienced writers devote more time to revising, less experienced ones to writing. All communication processes follow certain, again culture-specific rules. For example, Grice’s ‘cooperative principle’ (between speaker and listener) could be seen as such a yardstick. Grice (1975) postulated, that communication should follow four rules or principles, in order to be most efficient and effective. These rules concern the maxim of quantity (‘Be as informative as required! Be neither too precise nor too general!’), the maxim of quality (‘Try to be true! Don’t say what you believe to be false! Don’t say something for which you lack adequate evidence!’), the maxim of relation (‘Be relevant!’), and the maxim of manner (‘Be perspicuous! Avoid obscurity and ambiguity! Be brief and orderly!’ etc.). However, the writings of people’s autobiog­ raphies mostly serve other and probably rather divergent goals. Such goals could be, for example, to veridically document one’s life, to impress others, or to make money by selling one’s autobiography. These goals, in turn, lead to further editing of one’s life story as it is written down (see the functions described above). Another source of potential influences lies in the fact that an autobiography rep­ resents a form of life narrative (Birren and Schroots 2006; Fivush and Haden 2003). Narratives, in turn, typically conform to some rules or norms, for example, being chronologically ordered, logical (or at least plausible), entertaining, or instructive. Life narratives, moreover, appear coherent and reflective, including turning points and major influences in one’s life. When people talk (or write) about their life, they usually select such narrative forms to present their story. McAdams (1993, 2003, 2013)

140 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

assumed that we all are such ‘story tellers’ who strive for telling ‘good’ stories by selecting, changing, or exaggerating the material we have about ourselves (see also Kotre 1998).

Socio-developmental Perspective In the past, psychological research of human development has mainly focused on the first 20 years of life, describing the typical changes until one becomes an adult. Nowadays, psychology rather seeks a life-span perspective on developmental changes (Feldman 2011; Santrock 2011). These changes are typically categorized into different domains, like ‘biological development’ (most importantly, changes in brain systems and functioning), ‘cognitive development’ (incl. language, learning, thinking, and memory), ‘socio-emotional development’, and ‘personality development’. Most important for autobiography and autofiction are presumably the development and functional role of one’s self-concept. Thus, the focus will be on the self and its role in developing and maintaining identity. In some of the life-span views of psychological development, humans are sup­ posed to be faced with a number of age-specific tasks (Havighurst 1948) or crises (Erikson 1994) that need to be resolved in order to advance to the next developmental stage. For example, Erikson proposed that everyone goes through eight consecutive crises in his or her lifetime: Trust vs. mistrust (0–1 year), autonomy vs. shame and doubt (1–3 y.), initiative vs. guilt (3–6 y.), industry vs. inferiority (6 y. –puberty), iden­ tity vs. role confusion (adolescence), intimacy vs. isolation (young adulthood), gen­ erativity vs. stagnation (middle adulthood), and ego integrity vs. despair (late adult­ hood). Obviously, most (if not all) of these crises concern one’s self-concept and one’s socio-emotional relations to others. The most influential step in developing one’s self-concept occurs in adolescence. Marcia (1966) described four stages a person may be currently in while struggling with his or her identity: identity foreclosure, identity diffusion, moratorium, and identity achievement. Depending on these stages, adoles­ cents are either strongly or weakly involved in exploring their personality, and make either strong or weak commitments. With respect to autobiography, the first personal life narrative (see above) is typically produced in emerging or early adulthood, after having completed the identity formation task, in other words, after becoming an adult (with rather stable personality features). Identity can be described as feeling person­ ally unique and sensing continuity across time (from the past over the present into the future). The experienced identity comprises personal, political, religious, moral, social, sexual, bodily, occupational, and other convictions and viewpoints. The self can be viewed as a multifaceted knowledge set (Markus 1977). It consists, for example, of a real, a possible, and an ought self. The real self contains a more or less realistic assessment of one’s features and capabilities. The possible self con­

1.15 Psychology 

 141

tains wishful or alternative selves. The ought self contains those features that others (parents, teachers, friends, etc.) expect from someone. Greve (2000) summarized the self-concept in a three-dimensional space. The dimensions are time (retrospec­ tive, current, prospective), modality (realistic, possible), and perspective (cognitive/ descriptive, emotional/evaluative). Assuming a successful identity formation in adolescence, other crises may turn up later in life. Levinson (1978), for example, postulated a ‘midlife-crisis’ that could occur at the transitional period between early and middle adulthood (from 40 to 45 years). (Another crisis could – according to his theory – occur later in life, that is, between 60 and 65 years.) The empirical evidence, however, is mixed and generally not sup­ portive. The reason is that crises represent non-canonical events that are mostly not tied to any specific time period in life (e.  g. becoming seriously ill, loosing one’s job, getting divorced, etc.). Thus, crises may turn up at any time. A corresponding theo­ retical approach is the ‘life-events’ model (Cui and Vaillant 1996). According to that model, the impact of potentially threatening events depends on a number of factors, like the personal life-stage as well as the specific socio-historical context. Moreover, a number of mediating variables (like physical and mental health, intelligence, income, support, etc.) determine, to what degree such an event will really pose a threat und whether and how it triggers according coping strategies. When it comes to self-concept threatening events in our adult life, we obviously possess a number of defensive mechanisms that strive for keeping our self-concept stable. These threatening events may involve current or remembered ones. The defense mechanisms contain processes like denial, avoidance, immunization, re-in­ terpretation, and others. Greenwald (1980) even postulated a ‘totalitarian ego’ that governs our information processing in a self-serving way by putting ‘protective belts’ around our self-concept. As a consequence, we feel more stable and comfortable. A second goal of such defensive mechanisms apparently consists in letting us see our development as positive and generally improving. The already mentioned positivity bias, for example, serves this end: We tend to remember positive events better than negative ones, and remember them generally more positive than they were (except extremely negative ones). The existence of these self-defending and self-serving mechanisms raises an important normative question: How realistic should we assess our current or past self? Or, in other words, how biased could our self-assessment become before we run into serious trouble? Kotre (1998) postulated that we possess two general mechanisms to solve this problem: One of them constantly strives to put us in a better light (thus biasing the processing of present and past events), while the other tries to preserve reality (the truth) as good as possible. Kotre referred to these two as ‘myth-maker’ and ‘archivist’, respectively. Both are assumed to be similarly strong and to continuously struggle against each other, but with neither one winning (except under special circumstances). As a result, most self-perceptions and autobiographical memories represent a mixture of both processes. In some cases, especially in written autobiographies, the myth-maker might even win, which lead the Swiss author Martin

142 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Suter to believe that “in einem Roman steckt mehr Wahrheit als in einer Autobiogra­ phie” [‘there is more truth to a novel than to an autobiography’] (WDR, 2002). In older age, life-review processes play an increasingly important role (Staudinger 2001). Typically, such processes are triggered by seriously considering one’s death (either in the face of potentially lethal illnesses or by getting closer to one’s life expec­ tancy). Erikson (1994) spoke of two crises in middle and late adulthood, namely ‘gen­ erativity vs. stagnation’ and ‘ego integrity vs. despair’, respectively. Both of these may add to the need of a life review. Generativity concerns the desire to leave some sort of legacy for the next generation. Most naturally, this includes one’s children (and grand-children), but one might also think of more material types of legacy, like build­ ing a house, planting a tree, or writing an autobiography. Generativity in this sense simply means that we want to ‘leave a mark’ beyond our death. In addition, ego integ­ rity (as goal of Erikson’s last crisis) involves thorough reflections and evaluations of one’s life. These reflections may elicit new insights and even new goals for the remain­ ing lifetime. The outcome of the evaluation could be positive (possibly with the help of the ‘myth-maker’) or negative. While the first outcome is (not surprisingly) related to well-being in old age, the second one can lead to serious mental problems up to committing suicide (the rate of which increases for men over 65 years old).

Clinical Perspective Clinical psychology focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of human psychopathol­ ogy (Kring et al. 2012). In this section, memory disorders that may affect autobiogra­ phy and autofiction will be in the focus. Most of these involve disorders of memory retrieval in one way or another. Finally, a short look will be taken at psychotherapy and how it handles truth. Changes in the way autobiographical memories are retrieved are related to current mental states. Generally, we remember those events better that fit our current state than those that do not. For example, when we experienced an event in a certain mood, we will remember that event better when we are in the same mood again. A highly common mood disorder, especially in old age, is depression. Depression is charac­ terized by a general feeling of dejectedness, including loss of emotionality, loss of affective responding, and loss of motivation. Recall of autobiographical events of depressed patients includes fewer positive events and more general episodes than the recall of healthy patients. Some authors even see the rather general memories as a defining symptom of depression. Amnesia refers to the loss of memory, either caused by organic traumata (due, for example, to injuries, virus infection, intoxication, or brain atrophy) or by psycho­ genic traumata (due, for example, to extreme emotional stress). The memory disor­ ders based on organic traumata are referred to as ‘amnestic disorders’, while those

1.15 Psychology 

 143

based on psychogenic traumata are referred to as ‘dissociative disorders’. A further distinction is made with respect to the affected time period of amnesia: Retrograde amnesia concerns problems of retrieving earlier encoded memories, while antero­ grade amnesia concerns problems of storing new experiences in long-term memory. In retrograde amnesia, usually only episodic memories are affected, while semantic and procedural memories are intact. The affected time period extends from the trau­ matic event into the immediate or distant past (i.  e. from minutes to years). Generally, retrograde amnesia is reversible, so that memories will eventually return after some time (i.  e. hours to months), except for the time period immediately preceding the traumatic event. Similarly, anterograde amnesia can be differently strong and revers­ ible. Interestingly, there is only a low correlation between retrograde and anterograde amnesia, suggesting that different brain mechanisms are responsible for the two types of amnesia. A typical disorder following organic traumata is the amnestic syndrome. It consists of a strong and mostly irreversible anterograde amnesia and possibly a retrograde amnesia to a varying extent. The intelligence of amnestic patients is intact. The specific symptoms depend on the exact location of the brain injury. For example, patients with frontal lobe amnesia tend to produce confabulations, that is, they tell fantastic (but unreal) stories about their life. Moreover, these stories are not remem­ bered, so that new stories are produced over and over again. Problems with one’s memory also arise from getting older, because several brain functions become less efficient in old age, leading to slower information processing, word-finding problems, lower working-memory capacity, and larger interference sus­ ceptibility. Apart from these rather normal problems, severe memory problems arise from degenerative brain diseases as found in different types of dementia (the most prominent of which is the Alzheimer’s disease). Dementia not only affects all cognitive domains (like memory, language, and thinking), but also one’s motor functions as well as one’s personality. The prevalence rate of dementia is about 1 % for 60-year olds and then continuously increases with age. The rate for 90-year olds is already about 30 %. So far, there is no cure for dementia and it is lethal after 8–10 years. Dementia is difficult to diagnose in its first years, because symptoms are often confused with rather typical changes in old age. Thus, dementia will most often be diagnosed not until several years after its onset. Dissociative disorders (based on psychogenic traumata) mostly involve only retro­ grade amnesia. These disorders are further subdivided into dissociative amnesia, dis­ sociative fugue (flight), and dissociative identity disorder. All these disorders center on problems with one’s autobiographical memory. In dissociative amnesia, which often emerges as part of a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), memory failures are often localized, that is, concern a specific period of time in one’s life (from days to years). These failures are mostly reversible. The dissociative fugue is characterized by a complete retrograde amnesia concerning one’s whole life. These patients expe­ rienced some sort of traumatic event that caused them to flee not only the current situation but also their whole life. As a consequence, they lost their identity and are

144 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

thus accordingly disoriented. Usually, autobiographical memory returns after some time (hours to years), but in some cases it does not and patients are forced to develop a new identity. A dissociative identity disorder may be seen as the strongest disorder in this domain. It involves the gradual development of multiple identities within the same person. The triggering traumatic event typically occurs in childhood, but the disorder does not appear until early adulthood, that is, the normal phase of identity formation (see above). This disorder is generally chronic, but may lessen in older age. All these dissociative disorders can be seen as protective mechanisms that keep us from remembering painful or emotionally stressful events. This section closes with a few remarks on the question of truthfulness of auto­ biographical memories in the context of psychotherapy. As a witness in court, one would, of course, wish to have a perfect and truthful memory, but as a patient in psychotherapy, the situation is different. First of all, the patient may not know the truth, so there would be no need to engage various memory-enhancing techniques (like intensive questioning, hypnosis, regression, or psychiatric drugs). Secondly, the current ‘truth’, that is, the way the patient understands his or her life right now may be more important than the historical truth for an effective psychotherapy. Accordingly, several clinical approaches not only work with the patient’s current life story, but also with dream work or even future fantasies. The main goals typically are to strengthen the patient’s self (see above) and to re-integrate conflicting episodes into his or her life story. Thus, in a way, psychotherapy is also a way of changing one’s autobiogra­ phy, adding new interpretations and evaluations. This happens not necessarily in the sense of a ‘myth-maker’ (see above), but more in the sense of providing alternative views (and potentially new ‘memories’), thereby allowing the patient to qualify his or her past experiences.

Summing Up This chapter outlined the basics of cognitive, socio-developmental, and clinical psy­ chology as they relate to personal identity and the encoding and recall of autobio­ graphical memories. Most of these basics refer to the regular processes that determine how events are perceived, stored, and later retrieved from memory; some others refer to clinical cases when influences are too strong to allow regular processing of infor­ mation. In sum, one accumulates experiences throughout one’s lifetime, thus shaping one’s identity which in turn determines what kind of experiences one will make. The current self-concept represents a sort of glasses through which one sees one’s past. As a consequence, one’s life appears in retrospect more coherent and integrated than it probably was. Autobiography, or more precisely one’s told or written life narrative, reflects a number of different processes that are related to regular memory characteristics and

1.15 Psychology 

 145

functional goals. The according influences may take diverse forms from (presuma­ bly unconscious and automatic) autofiction up to intentional lying. Autofiction could also be seen as a form of lying, namely ‘lying to oneself’, but it is suggested here to distinguish it from lying to others, because in the latter case, the goals of writing an autobiography may lead to forms of ‘editing’ that are rather conscious and intentional and therefore could be avoided if one wished to. This option is not available for the former cases of memory distortions.

Works Cited Birren, James E., and Johannes F. Schroots. “Autobiographical memory and the narrative self over the life span.” Handbook of the psychology of aging. Ed. James E. Birren and K. Warner Schaie. San Diego: Academic Press, 6th ed. 2006. 477–498. Bluck, Susan. “Autobiographical memory: Exploring its functions in everyday life.” Memory 11.2 (2003): 113–124. Conway, Martin A. Autobiographical memory: An introduction. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. Conway, Martin, and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce. “The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system.” Psychological Review 107.2 (2000): 261–288. Cui, Xing-jia, and George E. Vaillant. “Antecedents and consequences of negative life events in adulthood: A longitudinal study.” American Journal of Psychiatry 153.1 (1996): 21–26. Erikson, Erik H. Identity and Lifecycle. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Eysenck, Michael W., and Mark T. G. Keane. Cognitive psychology: A student’s handbook. Hove: Psychology Press, 6th ed. 2010. Feldman, Robert S. Development across the life span. Boston: Prentice Hall, 6th ed. 2011. Fivush, Robyn, and Catherine A. Haden, eds. Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2003. Gerrig, Richard J. Psychology and life. Boston: Pearson, 20th ed. 2012. Greenwald, Anthony G. “The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history.” American Psychologist 35.7 (1980): 603–618. Greve, Werner. “Psychologie des Selbst: Konturen eines Forschungsthemas.” Psychologie des Selbst. Ed. Werner Greve. Weinheim: Beltz-Psychologie Verlags Union, 2000. 15–36. Grice, H. Paul. “Logic and conversation.” Syntacs and semantics. Speech acts. Vol. III. Ed. P. Cole and J.L. Morgan. New York: Seminar Press, 1975. 41–58. Groome, David. An introduction to cognitive psychology: Processes and disorders. London: Psychology Press, 3rd ed. 2013. Harris, Celia B., Anne S. Rasmussen, and Dorthe Berntsen. “The functions of autobiographical memory: An integrative approach.” Memory (2013). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/ 10.1080/09658211.2013.806555#.UxmB7YVjDJ8 (11 July 2018). Havighurst, Robert J. Developmental tasks and education. New York: David McKay, 1948. Kotre, John. White gloves. How we create ourselves through memory. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Kring, Ann M., Sheri Johnson, Gerald C. Davison, and John M. Neale. Abnormal psychology. Hillsdale: John Wiley & Sons, 12th ed. 2012. Levinson, Daniel J. The seasons of a man’s life. New York: A. Knopf, 1978. Marcia, James E. “Development and validation of ego identity status.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3 (1966): 551–558.

146 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Markus, Hazel. “Self-schemata and processing information about the self.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35.2 (1977): 63–78. McAdams, Dan P. The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: Morrow, 1993. McAdams, Dan P. “Identity and the life story.” Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives. Ed. Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. Haden. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 2003. 187–207. McAdams, Dan P. “The psychological self as actor, agent, and author.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 8.3 (2013): 272–295. Myers, David G. Psychology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 10th ed. 2012. Pohl, Rüdiger. Das autobiographische Gedächtnis: Die Psychologie unserer Lebensgeschichte. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007. Santrock, John W. Life-span development. New York: McGraw-Hill, 13th ed. 2011. Tulving, Endel. “Episodic and semantic memory.” Organization of memory. Ed. Endel Tulving and Wayne Donaldson. New York: Academic Press, 1972. 381–403. Staudinger, Ursula M. “Life reflection: A social-cognitive analysis of life review.” Review of General Psychology 5.2 (2001): 148–160. „Thema M: Glücklich ist, wer vergisst! Wieviel Erinnerung braucht man zum Leben?“ Köln: WDR-Television (5 April 2002). Webster, Jeffrey D. “Construction and validation of the Reminiscence Functions Scale.” Journals of Gerontology 48.5 (1993): 256–262.

Further Reading Alea, Nicole, and Qi Wang. “Going global: The functions of autobiographical remembering in cultural context.” Memory 23.1 (2015): 1–10. Berntsen, Dorthe, ed. Understanding autobiographical memory: Theories and approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Bluck, Susan. “Going global: Functions of autobiographical remembering world tour.” Memory 23.1 (2015): 111–118. Draaisma, Douwe. Why life speeds up as you get older: How memory shapes our past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Habermas, Tilman, and Christin Köber. “Autobiographical reasoning in life narratives buffers the effect of biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity.” Memory 23.5 (2015): 664–674. Hallford, David J., David Mellor, and Robert A. Cummins. “Adaptive autobiographical memory in younger and older adults: The indirect association of integrative and instrumental reminiscence with depressive symptoms.” Memory 21.4 (2013): 444–457. Nourkova, Veronika, Daniel M. Bernstein, and Elizabeth F. Loftus. “Biography becomes autobiography: Distorting the subjective past.” American Journal of Psychology 117.1 (2004): 65–80. Rubin, David C. “The basic-systems model to episodic memory.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1.4 (2006): 277–311. Markowitsch, Hans J., and Harald Welzer. The development of autobiographical memory. Hove: Psychology Press, 2009. Tekcan, Ali I., Burcu Kaya-Kizilöz, and Handan Odaman. “Life scripts across age groups: A comparison of adolescents, young adults, and older adults.” Memory 20.8 (2012): 836–847. Urbanowitsch, Nadja, Lina Gorenc, Christina J. Herold, and Johannes Schröder. “Autobiographical memory: A clinical perspective.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7.194 (2013): 1–6.

1.15 Psychology 

 147

Watson, Lynn A., and Dorthe Berntsen, eds. Clinical perspectives on autobiographical memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Wolf, Tabea, and Daniel Zimprich. “Differences in the use of autobiographical memory across the adult lifespan.” Memory 23.8 (2015): 1238–1254.

1.16 Psychoanalysis

Christine Kirchhoff and Boris Traue Whether the past is constructed or re-constructed, merely narrated or precisely accounted for, whether it is a truth or a myth to be destroyed – such questions are discussed in literary studies, historical sciences, the social sciences as well as psy­ choanalysis. These disciplines each have something different to add to the problem of remembering the past and making it work for the present. They have autobiogra­ phy as a method of concept, and the autobiographical for each of them is an ‘epis­ temic object’. Biography is neither an object in a realistical sense, nor is it ‘only’ a construction. It is rather the specifically scientific way of engaging with the world through which the writing of the self becomes relevant for the expert and his or her audience. Psychoanalysis entertains a complex and rich relation to autobiography. It has often been noted how it obviously contributes to autobiography as a genre and as an interdiscourse of the human sciences. This complexity and richness makes it exceed­ ingly difficult to summarize the issue at hand. This article addresses three main issues concerning the significance of autobiography in psychoanalysis and the effects of this liaison: Firstly, psychoanalysis relies on autobiography, or rather: auto-narration as a medium of therapy and as a taken-for-granted object of its practice. Narration, in a broad sense which encompasses narrative fragments and other forms of speech, is what the interaction within the therapeutic setting is famously based on (‘talking cure’). In this sense, it is the medium of therapy, that is itself invisible, but renders the psychic processes intelligible and accessible. At the same time, as specific indi­ vidual narration, it becomes – as biography – the object of psychoanalysis, which is reconstructed in the therapeutic process. Secondly, it surprisingly displays a critical, if not hostile attitude to biography. This criticality turns specifically against the ‘hagiographical’ aspect of autonarration, autobiography and biography. Hagiography, the practice of lauding a person, more or less discreetly idealizes a person’s life and manners. (Technically speaking, hagi­ ography is the writing of the life histories of saints or publicly important person. In a broader sense, it is the idealization of a person’s character through a certain style of life history. We refer to this broader sense.) If applied to oneself, hagiography becomes one of the major obstacles to the knowing oneself which psychoanalysis seeks to attain, and to which it attributes a large part of its therapeutic efficacy. Thirdly, biography provides psychoanalysis an additional chance to further con­ textualize its efficacy as a therapeutic methodology. Biography is, for psychoanalysis, also a means for demonstrating its practices and successes to a broader public, by offering an alternative account of public figures’ lives. This can be coined the discur­ sive function of autobiography within psychoanalysis. As far as the life history also https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-017

1.16 Psychoanalysis 

 149

becomes data for the psychoanalyst as a scientist, this discursivation also enables the communication between therapists and researchers in the field of psychoanalysis and its neighboring disciplines, such as literature, sociology, cultural studies, and med­ icine. Psychoanalysis thus contributes to the interdiscursive field of autobiography and autofiction. The following deals with psychoanalytic thought and practice regarding these three aspects: the positivity of autobiography within psychoanalysis, its criticality towards the autobiographical, and the discursivity of biography. Firstly: Narration becomes the object of psychoanalysis, insofar as the narration of the patient is constructed in the therapeutic process in what has been called the psychoanalytic intersubjectivity. This objectification, or symbolization in psycho­ analytic terminology, is what allows the patient and the analyst to reconstruct their experiences. It is in this intersubjectivity that “die Botschaften […], die sich dem Kind einschreiben oder das es in das eigene Begehren übersetzt oder mit ihm vermittelt, die nicht bewußt werden und daher unbewußt wirksam bleiben, […] zu den unbewußten Szenen [werden], die sich in der Übertragung zwischen dem Analysanden und dem Analytiker wiederholen” [‘the messages (…) which become inscribed in the child or which it translates into its own desire or mediates with it, which do not become con­ scious and thereby stay unsconsciously effective, become the unsconscious scenes, which repeat themselves in the transference between the analysand and analyst’], which enables a process of remembering which could be called “psychoanalytische Erinnerung zweiter Ordnung” [‘second-order psychoanalytic memory’] (Küchenhoff 1996, 13, 15). In this first sense, the relation between writing the self and psychoanaly­ sis is an affirmative one: transference in the therapeutic setting allows the analysand to unearth unconscious, systematically forgotten memories. Even though analysis is seen as a method of recovering and reclaiming memory, it is entirely clear that this recollection is not the discovery of historical fact or the noemena of memory itself; it is – in being a reconstruction, nevertheless a construction. Freud himself describes ‘construction’ as the result of an intersubjective, dialogical meaning-making process (Freud 1937d) in which the analyst performs a labor which “eine weitgehende Überein­ stimmung mit der des Archäologen [zeigt], der eine zerstörte und verschüttete Wohn­ stätte oder ein Bauwerk der Vergangenheit ausgräbt” [“resembles to a great extent the archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice”] (Freud 1937d, 45 [1959, 258]). But construction is not only a metaphor borrowed from the cultural sciences, it is also a therapeutic technique which confronts the patient with a certain psychoanalytic impertinence, as when the therapist tells the patient: Bis zu Ihrem nten Jahr haben Sie sich als alleinigen und unbeschränkten Besitzer der Mutter betrachtet, dann kam ein zweites Kind und mit ihm eine schwere Enttäuschung. Die Mutter hat Sie für eine Weile verlassen, sich auch später Ihnen nicht mehr ausschließlich gewidmet. Ihre Empfindungen für die Mutter wurden ambivalent, der Vater gewann eine neue Bedeutung für Sie und so weiter

150 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

[Up to the nth year you considered yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother, then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time and even after her reappearance she was not devoted to you exclusively. Your feeling toward your mother became ambivalent, your father attained a new meaning for you’  … and so on] (Freud 1937d, 48 [1959, 261]).

This sort of proposition in the form of a generic experience at once sexual, moral and ethical had – at the time of the formulation of psychoanalytic thought – been at odds with the self-understanding of an average self-respecting adult. Speaking in literary terms, it deploys an alienation effect which is well known in twentieth-century liter­ ature, as when Kafka’s travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous “Ungeziefer”, or beetle, and when Gogol’s hero finds out his nose has a life of its own in St. Petersburg. But does psychoanalysis deploy techniques of literature? This question will be dealt with in the third para­ graph. As it will be demonstrated, there is a second relation of psychoanalysis to (auto-) biography, which is not one of reconstruction, but of deconstruction. The critical stance psychoanalysis takes toward the autobiographical can be shown through its use of two psychoanalytical concepts, ‘Nachträglichkeit’ [‘afterwardsness’ (Laplanche 2006, 32)] (Freud 1899a, 531–554) and the ‘Familienroman’ [‘family romance’] (Freud 1909c, 227–231). (The editor of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, translated ‘Nachträglichkeit’ as “deferred action”. We follow Jean Laplanche by arguing that deferred action only captures a part of the meaning of ‘Nachträglichkeit’ intended by Freud. It does not capture the constitution of the meaning of the past in the presence because it is focused only on the level of an action being delayed. So the neologism ‘afterwardsness’ is used here, invented by Laplanche [2006, 32] and the ‘family romance’.) Invented by Sigmund Freud in 1897 and recovered by Jacques Lacan in the 1950s (Lacan 1956, 71–170) the concept of ‘afterwardsness’ gained popularity in psycho­ analytical and interdisciplinary discourse concerning memory, trauma and narra­ tion during the last two decades of the last century. Being a crucial part of the early Freudian theory of memory and trauma, the concept of ‘afterwardsness’ deals with the constitution of psychological meaning and its special temporality, the future II (something will have been…). In Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse [The language of Psychoanalysis] Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis give a short version of the meaning of afterwardsness: “des expériences, des impressions, des traces mnésiques sont remaniées ultérieurement en function d’expériences nouvelles et de l’accèss à un nouveau degré de développement” [“experiences, impressions and memory-traces may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development”] (Laplanche and Pontalis 1981, 33 [1973, 107]). The subject as an author described here is forced to rewrite its history at any stage of psychological development: There is no past that could be remembered in the sense

1.16 Psychoanalysis 

 151

of being found again, the way in which the past is remembered is shaped by the sub­ ject’s present state. The process described here is considered to be normal. It becomes visible in the case of trauma, if there are experiences that could not be understood at the time they happened and therefore were not integrated into a context of meaning. Crucial here is adolescence, referred to as “die Avantgarde des Individuums” [‘the individual’s avantgarde’] by Mario Erdheim (1993, 936) and here we can see that ‘after­ wardsness’ also provides a great chance. As Erdheim puts it adolescence is not only the period where symptoms pop up but also a second chance: Because of what Freud called the “zweiseitiger Ansatz” [“diphasic onset”] (Freud 1925d, 67 [1925, 32]) of sexual growth the fact that according to psychoanalysis adult sexuality cannot be understood without referring to the childrens’ infantile sexuality, we have to deal with two stages of the constitution of meaning (Erdheim 1993, 941). An ongoing interaction of pres­ ence and past creates a great number of meanings that cannot be foreseen (Erdheim 1993, 941). Psychoanalysis itself, more precisely what happened in the psychoana­ lytical process, therefore should be seen as a ‘new restored adolescence’ (Erdheim 1993, 947). Jean Laplanche takes adolescence as a model for the conception of any other stage of human development beginning with early childhood: While coming late in the history of a subject adolescence is on a conceptional level the paradigm that helps to understand what is happening in earlier periods (Laplanche 1989, 107). Hence evolution is seen by Laplanche as an almost endless process of translation. A subject enters time by translating its history again and again. During this lifelong process earlier forms of translation are covered by newer ones. The stages of early childhood development described by psychoanalysis as orality, anality, genitality can therefore be seen as languages that succeed in a process of detranslation and retranslation. From the perspective of social sciences, Regina Becker-Schmidt uses what she calls an “erweitertes Konzept der Nachträglichkeit” [‘extended concept of after­ wardsness’] (1994, 155–156) to describe ‘non-linear structures of time in biographies’. ‘Afterwardsness’ is defined as a general psychological process, in which memories, self awareness and awareness of others are reinterpreted afterwards but only if the present state of mind allows to integrate them in a new context (Becker-Schmidt 1994, 174). Biographies and autobiographies as well should therefore always be seen as an attempt and result of linearization, due to what can be called the “narrative tendency” of the psyche (Laplanche 2002/2003a, 26–29). Interpretation of (auto-)biographies should therefore be sensible for gaps and irritations in order not to remain superficial. In his list of the most important sexual phantasies of puberty Freud lists the so called “Familienroman” [“family romance”] (Freud 1909c, 227 [1959, 235]), the adoles­ cent’s reaction to the changes in his relation to his parents. Beginning in prepuberty the child phantazises about descending from other parents, who are richer, more famous – in every sense better than the real parents. Those phantasies are accord­ ing to Freud made up to correct frustrations and mortifications from early childhood (Freud 1909c, 227–231 [1959, 235–242]). In “Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci” [“Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood”] Freud’s most ambitious

152 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

attempt to write a biography, he changes perspective and demonstrates the limits of psychoanalytic biographical writing. Trying to write a psychoanalytic biography, e.  g. dealing with symptoms and conflicts, trying to give a psychoanalytical interpretation of somebodys life, one has to deal with a degree of freedom that cannot be dissolved by psychoanalysis. This is, of course, an effect of ‘afterwardsness’: Aber selbst bei ausgiebigster Verfügung über das historische Material und bei gesichertster Hand­ habung der psychischen Mechanismen würde eine psychoanalytische Untersuchung an zwei bedeutsamen Stellen die Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit nicht ergeben können, daß das Indivi­ duum nur so und nicht anders werden konnte [But even if the historical material at our disposal were very abundant, and if the psychical mech­ anisms could be dealt with with the greatest assurance, there are two important points at which a psycho-analytic enquiry would not be able to make us understand how inevitable it was that the person concerned should have turned out in the way he did and in no other way] (Freud 1910c, 208 [1957, 135]).

According to Freud family romance can be seen as “die Quelle der ganzen Dichtung” [“the source of the whole poetic fiction”] (Freud 1939a, 108–109 [1964, 10]) as he demonstrates with what he calls a “Durchschnittssage” [“average legend”] (Freud 1939a, 107 [1964, 12]), which consists of the following elements: a highborn child is burdened with a curse, abandoned, saved and brought up by animals and ordinary people, finds its parents again as an adult, takes revenge (on the father), is recognized and gets magnitude and fame (Freud 1939a, 107 [1964, 12]). Here we can easily see the family romance as a reaction to the changes of the child’s feelings for the parents: the “großartige[] Überschätzung des Vaters” [“enormous overvaluation of his father”] (Freud 1939a, 109 [1964, 12]) of early childhood is followed by rivalry and disappoint­ ment, the separation from the parents is accompanied by phantasies about better parentage (Freud 1939a, 108 [1964, 12]). Psychoanalytic ‘afterwardsness’ constitutes a necessary fictional moment in all autobiographical narration, which is so effective that a thorough deconstruction of its rationalisations is warranted in psychoanalytic practice. The ‘family romance’ is not only a biased version of the ‘real’ life history, but a phantasmatic product, for which the objective facts of life become legitimations, not vice versa. In this sense, every psy­ choanalytic writing of the self is an anti-biography in being a dialogical and radical alternative to the idealized account of the bourgeois self-image. Certainly, psychoanal­ ysis captures the imagination with the promise of knowing oneself better than ever imaginable; a promise which Michel Foucault has described as a ‘volonté de savoir’ [‘will to truth’] (Foucault 1979 [1976]). This will to knowledge, however, needed to be installed historically, which leads us to the third aspect, the discursive function of biography within psychoanalysis and reaching beyond it. Contrary to the situation when Foucault engaged with psychoanalysis at the peak of its institutional power it had to surmount considerable resistance to its methods during the time of its foundation. The reinterpretation of publicly known biographies

1.16 Psychoanalysis 

 153

was an important method of demonstrating its merits in a wider public: The Schre­ ber case, The devil’s neurosis, Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevskij, Michelangelo, Goethe. The list of historic and contemporary individuals Freud and his contemporaries have psychoanalyzed from autobiographic or biographic material is long; and these psycho­ analytic biographies are certainly not – only – contributions to the psychology of art and literature. First and foremostly, they are contributions to the genre of memoir and biography, both of great importance in a wider literary and political public, and func­ tion as a proof-of-concept for psychoanalytic ideas and methods. In that function, they also serve as a hinge between psychoanalytic discourse and other areas of knowledge. In his analysis of an historic case of demon possession, Freud claims that [e]s […] auch gar nicht [s]eine Absicht [ist], diesen Fall als Beweismittel für die Gültigkeit der Psy­ choanalyse zu verwerten; [er] setze vielmehr die Psychoanalyse als gültig voraus und verwende sie dazu, um die dämonologische Erkrankung des Malers aufzuklären [nor is it [his] intention to make use of this case as evidence of the validity of psycho-analysis. On the contrary, [he] presuppose[s] its validity and [is] employing it to throw light on the painter’s demonological illness] (Freud 1923d, 329 [1959, 67]).

Is this really not what he intends? Freud explicitly frames the biographical contribu­ tions in this problematic of public acceptance: Gegen die Psychoanalyse erhebt sich wieder der Vorwurf, daß sie einfache Verhältnisse in spitz­ findiger Weise kompliziert, Geheimnisse und Probleme dort sieht, wo sie nicht existieren, und daß sie diese bewerkstelligt, indem sie kleine und nebensächliche Züge, wie man sie überall finden kann, übermäßig betont und zu Trägern der weitgehendsten und fremdartigsten Schlüsse erhebt [Psycho-analysis has once more to meet the reproach that it makes hair-splitting complications in the simplest things and sees mysteries and problems where none exist, and that it does this by laying undue stress on insignificant and irrelevant details, such as occur everywhere, and making them the basis of the most far-reaching and strangest conclusions] (Freud 1923d, 328 [1959, 68]).

The reinterpretation of publicly known biographies such as that of Senate President Schreber’s gives psychoanalytic scholarship the chance to demonstrate the explica­ tion of seemingly bizzarre and threatening psychic phenomena and to reintegrate them. In the demonic neurosis case, the tender but also greatly fearful relation to the father – impersonated by the devil – is at the center of Christoph Heitzmann’s affliction. It is no coincidence that Heitzmann is a painter. Freud’s hypothesis of an ambivalent attitude toward the father is greatly aided by an image which Heitzmann himself had painted to show how he saw the devil with his own eyes – and which perspicuously is included in Freud’s own text. In the painting, the devil has breasts, which illustrates the argument of male desire for an erotic position vis-a-vis the father rather handsomely. It is hardly a coincidence that it is often artists’ biographies which are recon­ structed. These artists are producers of evocative images and other works of art, which

154 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Freud enlists as pictorial evidence for his own analysis of these personalities. Their artistic work is – we dare to say – analysed as to contribute convincing arguments for the validity of psychoanalytic diagnoses and thus for psychoanalytic thought as a whole. Psychoanalytic thought thus becomes plausible through the combination of biographic data and artistic artefacts. The discursivity of autobiography in and outside of psychoanalysis gathers momentum in the triangle of public cases, clini­ cal language and aesthetics. The relevance of psychoanalytic thought for autobiog­ raphy and auto-fiction is thus not alone an effect of the success of psychoanalytic thought and its dissemination into public discourse, but also of strategic efforts to find a favourable place for psychoanalytic practice in the public imagination, thereby attempting to ‘restore adolescence’ to culture at large. As such psychoanalytic biog­ raphies found widespread attention and had found repercussions in the tropes of personal and literary biographies, we can conclude that ‘afterwardsness’ does not only have a methodological and clinical meaning, but that it applies as well to auto­ biographical discourse: after the fact, psychoanalysis finds new, meanwhile better acquainted ways to account for stories which were already told a first time.

Works Cited Becker-Schmidt, Regina. “Diskontinuität und Nachträglichkeit.” Erfahrung mit Methode. Ed. Angelika Diezinger, Hedwig Kitzer and Ingrid Anker. Freiburg i.  Br.: Kore, 1994. 155–182. Bruder, Klaus-Jürgen, ed. “Die biographische Wahrheit ist nicht zu haben”: Psychoanalyse und Biographieforschung. Frankfurt a.  M.: Psychosozial, 2003. Erdheim, Mario. “Psychoanalyse, Adoleszenz und Nachträglichkeit.” Psyche 49 (1993): 934–950. Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité. Vol. I: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976 [The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: The will to truth. Trans. R. Hurley. London: Allen Lane, 1979]. Freud, Sigmund. “Über Deckerinnerungen.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. I. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1999. 531–554 (Freud 1899a) [„Screen Memories.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. Vol. III (1893–1899). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962. 299–322]. Freud, Sigmund. „Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. V. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1999. 33–72 (Freud 1905d) [“Three Essays on Sexuality.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works. Vol. VII (1901–1905). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953. 123–246]. Freud, Sigmund. „Der Familienroman der Neurotiker.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. VII. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1999. 227–231 (Freud 1909c) [“Family Romances.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works. Vol. IX (1906–1908). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959. 235–242]. Freud, Sigmund. „Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. VIII. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1999. 128–211 (Freud 1910c) [“Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works. Vol. XI (1910). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957. 57–138].

1.16 Psychoanalysis 

 155

Freud, Sigmund. „Selbstdarstellung.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XIV. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1999. 33–96 (Freud 1925d) [“An Autobiographical Study.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of Lay Analysis and Other Work. Vol. XX (1925–1926). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959. 1–74]. Freud, Sigmund. „ Konstruktionen in der Analyse.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XVI. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1999. 41–56 (Freud 1937d) [“Constructions in Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works. Vol. XXIII (1937–1939). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959. 255–270]. Freud, Sigmund. „ Eine Teufelsneurose im Siebzehnten Jahrhundert.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XIII. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 2009. 317–353 (Freud 1923d) [“A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The Ego and the Id and Other Works. Vol. XIX (1923–1925). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959. 67–106]. Freud, Sigmund. „ Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion.” Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XVI. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1999. 103–246 (Freud 1939a) [“Moses and Monotheism.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works. Vol. XXIII (1937–1939). Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964. 1–138]. Küchenhoff, Joachim. “Zum Stellenwert der Biographie in der Psychoanalyse.” Zeitschrift für Psychosomatische Medizin 42 (1996): 1–24. Lacan, Jacques. „Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychoanalyse.” Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. 237–322 [“Funktion und Feld des Sprechens und der Sprache in der Psychoanalyse” (1956). Schriften I. Ed. and trans. Norbert Haas. Olten: Walter, 1973. 71–170]. Laplanche, Jean. Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008 [New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Trans. David Macey. Oxford/Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989]. Laplanche, Jean. “Narrativity and Hermeneutics: Some Propositions.” New Formations 48 (2002/2003): 26–29 (Laplanche 2002/2003a). Laplanche, Jean. Problématiques IV. L’après coup. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 7th ed. 1981 [The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicolson-Smith. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973].

Further Reading Kirchhoff, Christine. Das psychoanalytische Konzept der Nachträglichkeit. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2009.

1.17 Religious Studies Jens Schlamelcher

How do scholars of religious studies use and analyse autobiographies? Why is the study of autobiographies important for religious studies, and why should scholars of autobiographies take religion into account? Before addressing these questions, it seems to be important to make some comments about the nature of religious studies as a (non-?)discipline. In fact, the disciplinary status of religious studies is precarious, at best. Its program can best be outlined by its contrast to theology. Whereas theology (and theological approaches to the study of religion, such as religious phenomenol­ ogy) is not neutral with respect to truly religious questions, such as the existence of God, etc., religious studies does step back from giving an answer. While such ques­ tions as those concerning the existence of God, angels and other ‘supernatural beings’ can neither be empirically verified nor falsified, religious studies takes the pragmatic approach, to study religion as a socio-cultural artefact, or, according to Emile Durk­ heim, as a social (and psychological) fact – which can be observed empirically. This move, however, which emancipates religious studies from theology, opens the door for other disciplines. The whole range of social studies and humanities is thus invited to contribute to the enterprise of studying religion as a social and psychological fact. As such, religious studies has the special position of an interdisciplinary discipline. It draws upon area studies such as Middle Eastern or African studies, on the various disciplines focussing on religious traditions, such as Muslim Studies, Buddhology, and even theology, on literary studies, on philosophy, psychology, on history, on anthropology, and (probably most important) on sociology. As such, religious studies is held together by the focus on a distinctive social fact – i.  e. religion. But it borrows its methods, its theories and even its topics from other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. How then does religious studies contribute to the study of autobiography? Why is the analysis of autobiographies important to the study of religions? The status of religious studies as an interdisciplinary discipline makes it seemingly impossible to reflect on the discipline’s perspective on autobiography. Taking that disciplinary status seriously, one could easily end this overview article here by asking the reader to draw upon the other contributions to this section of the volume and look for any references to the term ‘religion’. Obviously, the author of this article has chosen for another approach. In a first step, the historical relationship between religion and autobiography will be outlined. The next paragraph turns to the question of why and how scholars of religion read and even generate autobiographies. Finally, issues for further research on the religion-autobiography nexus will be addressed. As has long been acknowledged, autobiography, and even biography, e.  g. the textualization of life, its narration as a meaningful (true?) story of the historical devel­ opment of the self, is by no means what could be called an ‘anthropological given’. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-018

1.17 Religious Studies 

 157

Cultures “without history” (Wolf 1982), for example, do not conceive life as biography, and in world history, we can hardly trace back autobiographical documents further than late antiquity. Thus, cultural sociologist Alois Hahn, one of the main contribu­ tors to the sociological study of biography, speaks about ‘biography generators’, e.  g. cultural developments that facilitated a process in which people began to narrate their lives as a meaningful and true story: Ob das Ich über Formen des Gedächtnisses verfügt, die symbolisch seine gesamte Vita themati­ sieren, das hängt vom Vorhandensein von sozialen Institutionen ab, die eine solche Rückbesin­ nung auf das eigene Dasein gestatten. Wir wollen solche Institutionen Biographiegeneratoren nennen [‘Whether the Ego has forms of memory at its disposal that are able to symbolically thematize its entire vita depends upon the availability of social institutions that allow for such a contemplation of one’s own existence. We will call such institutions biography generators’] (Hahn 1987, 12).

As Hahn (1983, 1987) argues, most of the biography generators have a Christian foun­ dation. In what he calls, referring to Norbert Elias, the ‘process of civilization’, Hahn traces back a first incentive for the emergence of biography towards the early medieval practice of the confession. Initiated by Irish monks, the laity had to confess their sinful deeds. From as early as the twelfth century, the investigation of one’s conscience became one of the main preoccupations. Not the deed itself, but rather its motive had to be explored. From now on, the absolution of sins implied their willful repentance. The rise of Protestantism was a further turning point in Hahn’s history of self-thema­ tization. In Protestant theology, the absolution of one’s sins was no longer possible. Thus, methods for rational self-control had to be developed in order to ensure their avoidance. This gave rise to diaries in which individuals would register even the small­ est sins, in order to observe and confess to themselves their weaknesses, and to help them to become more pious and sincere. This process of subjectivization, in which an individual conceives itself as a subject, had previously been observed by thinkers such as Max Weber and Michel Foucault. The latter stating that “l’homme occidental est devenu un animal confes­ sant” [‘Western man has become a confessing animal’] (Foucault 1976, 79), striving for ever more revelation of the self. Christianity’s role as a motor in the development of autobiography as a specific textual genre is now widely acknowledged: To say that Christianity has been a shaping force in the development of western life writing and, particularly, in the development of deep subjective autobiography is an understatement. It has been the major inspiration of autobiographical utterance in the Western culture and the domi­ nant matrix for its articulation over 2000 years (Abbs 2001, 211).

In non-Western cultures such as China, the emergence of autobiographies seems to be a more recent phenomenon (Wu 1990; Brockmeier 2008; for Buddhist autobiographies of eighteenth-century Tibet, see Gyatso 1998). But it is still an open research question whether Christianity alone can be conceived as a religion that generated autobiogra­

158 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

phy as a specific literary genre (for a discussion of Jewish pre-modern and modern autobiographies, see Moosley 2005). The religion-autobiography nexus may also be analysed by insights gained from Max Weber’s sociology of religion. Weber (1963) argues that religious evolution implies a shift from ritualized forms to ethical conduct. Early religious traditions would demand the correct performance of rituals, but not ethical perfection. On the basis of pure/impure, ritual masters only had to ensure their temporal purity when enacting the ritual. This pattern would gradually change with the emergence of the so called ‘religions of salvation’, which demanded not only confession to the true religion, but also moral perfection, or, in Weber’s terms, an ‘ethical conduct of life’. This development may well have corresponded with the rise of cities and thus with a tendency toward impersonal ties, where individual action is less bound by the obligation to sustain kinship ties and expectations, thus giving rise to the problem of morality (e.  g. why be ‘good’ when honest behavior is not necessarily rewarded). This ethical conduct of life may be one of the most important stimulators for the emergence of the literary genre of autobiography, at least among religious virtu­ osi. Thus, one of the first books considered in literary studies as ‘autobiography’ is the famous volume by Augustinus titled Confessiones (written between 397 and 401 CE), in which he literally confesses the history of his life as a story, leading from a Pagan childhood to the philosophical quarrellings in his youth, until finally iden­ tifying Christianity as the only true faith. While autobiography is generally shaped by the tension between character and characterization (Barbour 1987, 312–317), e.  g. the quest to assess and reveal one’s character, but under the condition of limited, situated knowledge, and by means of language (using metaphors and other tropes), ­Augustine seems to be fully self-conscious about the discrepancy, and self-critical about the partly impossible enterprise of getting from the one to the other. Augustine raised problems such as the unity of the self and the nexus between the self and one’s knowledge of it, and problematized the use of language in one’s self-assessment. While Augustine thus highlights the tensions between fact and fiction, thus antici­ pating core issues that were raised in postmodern literary theory, it is also important for the religion-autobiography nexus at the core of his quarrel. Augustine was neither familiar with the modern tag ‘autobiography’ nor with the medieval concept of confes­ sion. Yet, there seems to be a theological impetus. Augustine frames his path of life as conversion: the road of one’s imperfect, sinful self towards truth, struggling for moral purity in order to hopefully and possibly receive God’s mercy. Until the rise of modernity, when the term ‘autobiography’ was finally shaped or ‘invented’, Western autobiographical accounts seemed to be always interwoven with confession. In Augustine’s work, as well as those of medieval autobiographers such as Rather of Verona (890–974), Otloh of S. Emmeram (ca.1010–1070), Guibert of Nogent (ca.1055–1125), Peter Abelard (1079–1142), Markward of Fulda (1150–1165), Suger of St. Denis (ca.1080–1151) or Giraldus Cambrensis (1147–1223) (Röckelein 1997, 34), God is addressed as a recipient – even though it was quite clear that these writings

1.17 Religious Studies 

 159

would address (also, if not mainly) – a human audience. In fact, as Pierre Courcelle’s classic study has shown (Courcelle 1963), Augustinus‘ Confessiones seemed to serve as the standard model for pre-modern writing of Christian autobiographies. This holds true even for early modern autobiographies such as that of Canisius (see Pabel 2007, 462–473). Pre-modern autobiographical accounts thus had, so to speak, the double function of both ‘confessio’ (directed to God) and ‘exemplum’ (directed to the human audience). This close connection of confession (of religious virtuosi) and autobio­ graphy seems to have withered away with the onset of modernity as the genuine ‘culture of autobiography’ (Brockmeier 2008, 19) or the ‘Age of the Subject’. The clas­ sical account on the history of autobiography, Georg Misch (1955, 55), refers to this nexus as a Christian-autobiographical “Gemengelage” or “conglomerate”. WagnerEgelhaaf (2005, 124) speaks of a “functional connection” of medieval autobiographies and Christian belief. During the Baroque, first autobiographies appeared which broke with the Christian religion-autobiography nexus. The autobiography of the gold smith Benvenuto Cellini (1558–1566), for example, centers upon his secular achievements, with only set phrases about confession or God, which marks a remarkable shift from theo-centric to an ego- or anthropocentric view of the world (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 138–139). Later modern autobiographies, such as Karl Philipp Moritz’ Anton Reiser would follow this path. Modern biographies are neither ‘confessio’ nor ‘exemplum’, but rather presentations and explorations of one’s self. Religion, as it seems, has lost its function as a biography generator. Religion plays a role only in so far as the writers refer to experiences with religious institutions. However, this apparent secularization, which may better be understood as de-Christianization, was, for a long period, rather an avant-garde phenomenon. Bio­ graphical and auto-biographical accounts by non-bourgeois individuals reveal not only high degrees of religiosity, but also the religious framing of their life-narratives (Mitterauer 1988, 82–83). An apparent de-confessionalization of non-bourgeois biog­ raphies, when life ceased to be shaped by religious institutions, when remarkable public events turned away from religious rituals to secular happenings, is only observ­ able since the 1960s (Ebertz 1995). This reveals that the apparent high-culture secular­ ization and de-religiosification of autobiographies that began in the late eighteenth century has become a mass-culture phenomenon only in recent times, associated with processes of religious transformation in ‘late‘, ‘post‘ or ‘second‘ modernity (among others Gebhardt 2011 and Hellemanns 2005). However, does this mean the end of a religion-autobiography nexus, or rather its transformation? Social theory may help answer this question. There is a second argu­ ment, mainly derived from sociological theory, which argues that a new, de-Christian­ ized religion-autobiography nexus has evolved. This argument shall be outlined in the following. The rise of modern autobiography as a literary genre is often explained by theories of individualization (among others, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1994). The plu­ ralization of life opportunities in early modernity went hand in hand with a growing need for personal orientation (Engelhart 1990; Fritzen 2010, 378–380). Autobiography

160 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

thus offered a means to reflect upon why one’s individual life has followed certain paths, as a result of personal constraints and individual choices. As life became more and more contingent, people developed new forms of self-reflexivity, of which autobi­ ography was one of the most prominent. Another social theory, not at odds with the thesis of individualization but coming from a different angle, is that of functional differentiation (Luhmann 1998). Accord­ ing to this theory, modern society is no longer structured by stratification into dif­ ferent ranks, but by functional systems such as the economy, law, politics, educa­ tion, social welfare, and religion. These functional systems become more and more autonomous from each other. Due to this macro-process, religion seems to lose its pre-modern social function. In pre-modern times, religion served as a ‘sacred canopy’ (Berger 1967) which would legitimate any – inherently contingent – social order and reframe it as ‘natural’. The functionally differentiated sub-systems of modern society, however, do not rest on a religious foundation for their legitimation. Political insti­ tutions and leaders, for example, are legitimated not by reference to the will of God, but to the will of the people (which apparently holds true even for dictatorships). This emancipation has deep consequences for religious communication. As Peter L. Berger (1967, 127–155) and Niklas Luhmann (1989, 309) argue, religious communication works best if it is restricted. While drawing upon the distinction between immanence and transcendence, the door is potentially open for any kind of belief. Nothing is per se unbelievable. But any social effect of belief rests upon its social institutionalization. Finally, the emperor by the grace of God would raise his sword to defend God from any alternative beliefs. The autonomization of politics, however, removed this restriction of religious communication, or, of the say- and believable. Religious freedom thus also means the flourishing of religious communication, a condition under which religion, as a means to deal with ontological contingency, becomes contingent itself. Not only the social but also the individual status of religion becomes precarious in modern times. Whereas the degree of one’s social integration mainly depends on financial income (economy), education, and legal status, one’s individual religious status is most often socially optional or irrelevant. Functional differentiation thus implies reli­ gious processes of transformation that go along the paths of increasing indifference. Belief mainly makes a difference for oneself, but not necessarily for others. But this ‘secularization’, understood as a decline of religion, is only one part of the story. Individualization and functional differentiation also lead to an increasing pluralization of religious options. And the individual acceptance of any belief has turned into an individual achievement. Not only is not opting for any belief a religious option, but also the opting for a specific religion, and furthermore, the elaboration of one’s individual religiosity. Thus, secularization, individualization, and pluralization are processes of religious transformation that seem to happen at the same time (Pickel and Pollack 2003, 447–474). This has also consequences for the relation between reli­ gion and autobiography. Analytically, one can distinguish between autobiographies that are motivated and deeply influenced by religion, in short ‘religious autobiogra­

1.17 Religious Studies 

 161

phies’; secondly, biographies can refer to religion or to the autobiographical reflec­ tions of religious beliefs, practices and institutions. Thirdly, there are autobiographies without any religious references (Engelhardt 2004, 152–164). However, some scholars of the sociology of religion go even further and argue that functional differentiation also means an (auto-)biographization of religion. The individual is the realm in which the disparate parts of a functionally differentiated society come together (Nassehi 1995, 114). According to Armin Nassehi, an individual in modernity is a psychic unity for sure, but on the other hand, by participating in all of the social systems at once, it is also a social ‘dividuum’. This tension has to be resolved, the unity of the difference between individual unity and social divisibility has to be formed mainly by means of biographization, an increasing reflexivity of the self. But this implies a religious move, since the closing of the gap from divisibility to individuality can only be achieved by means of transcendence. As Nassehi states: “Das letzte großte Thema der Religion wird die Transzendenz des eigenen Lebens” [‘The last great topic of religion is the transcendence of individual life’] (Nassehi 1995, 115). Indeed, the self has become a transcendent entity, and thus the main locus for both, biography and religion, at the same time. Thus, religion and autobiography are drawn into an intrinsic relationship, once again. Self-biographization has received most attention from scholars of religion who are interested in highly religious individuals. This is especially the case in conver­ sion studies. Conversion, as it seems, is a biography generator par excellence. Again, Augustine’s Confessiones can serve as exemplum, because his framing of his path from a pagan child to an adult Christian draws upon narrative elements that can also be found in even (post-)modern biographical conversion narrations: the retrospective of a life in misery, the quest to find true belief (with many unfulfilling experiences), the occasional encounter with a religious group, and, most important, a special event that marks the turning point of one’s life (Leitner 2000, 61), e.  g. one’s personal reve­ lation, and finally, the happiness and qualm of having found one’s spiritual homeland (Krech 2005, 358–363). One can speak of a type of texts, because the representation almost always follows the same scheme, regardless of language or system of belief: The conversion is recounted, that is, repre­ sented as the event of a conversion, and thus integrated into a vita in a way that renders it as a crossroads in the self-biographical narrative, and thus divides that life into a before and after (Leitner 2000, 64).

The life story is thus divided into two periods, one before and one after the religious peak experience that constitutes the moment of conversion, which at the same time marks the centre of the narration. However, even autobiographies which do not place religion at the center of their narration are important for scholars of religion, because they can tell something about processes of religious transformation. Autobiographies are, in fact, a primary source for religious scholars to learn something about the religious environment of

162 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

an author’s time. Ausgustine’s Confessiones thus opens a window into the religious plurality of late Antiquity, and its dawn. This holds also true for investigations into the nature of contemporary religion. Sometimes autobiography is even used as a method of the social sciences, e.  g. autobiographies are ‘artificially’ produced by narrative interviews. The narrative interview as a specific form of qualitative data acquisition (Schütze 1983) generates autobiographies through the impact of a scholar, which can then be used to identify not only individual but also social processes of religious trans­ formation. The process of the de-confessionalization of biography, mentioned above, has been identified by precisely this method. As a general conclusion, it seems that autobiography is not one of the main topics in contemporary religious studies. It has gained some attention in the 1980s and 1990s, but systematic elaborations are still rare. On the other hand, elaborations of single autobiographies, past and present, seem to flourish. Thus, the study of auto­ biography, or -ies, from the point of view of the study of religion, still seems to be in its fledgling stages.

Works Cited Abbs, Peter. “Christianity and life writing.” Encyclopedia of life writing: Autobiographical and biographical forms. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London/Chicago: Routledge, 2001. 211–213. Barbour, John D. “Character and Characterization in Religious Autobiography.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55.2 (1987): 307–327. Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, eds. Riskante Freiheiten – Gesellschaftliche Individua­ lisierungsprozesse in der Moderne. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1994. Berger, Peter L. The sacred canopy. Elements of a sociological theory of religion. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Brockmeier, Jens. “Lifetime and Eternity.” Autobiography and the Psychological Study of Religious Lives. Ed. Jacob A. Belzen and Anton Geels. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008. 19–38. Courcelle, Pierre. Les confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire. Antécédents et postérité. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1963. Ebertz, Michael N. “Die Erosion der konfessionellen Biographie.” Biographie und Religion. Zwischen Ritual und Selbstsuche. Ed. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. Frankfurt a.  M./New York: Campus, 1995. 155–179. Engelhardt, Michael von. “Das Verhältnis von Biographie und Religion.” Formen des Religiösen. Ed. Eckart Liebau, Hildegard Macha and Christoph Wulf. Weinheim: Beltz, 2004. 146–174. Engelhardt, Michael von. “Biographie und Identität. Die Rekonstruktion und Präsentation von Identität im mündlichen autobiographischen Erzählen.” Wer schreibt meine Lebensgeschichte? Biographie, Autobiographie, Hagiographie und ihre Enstehungszusammenhänge. Ed. Walter Sparn. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1990. 197–247. Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Fritzen, Wolfgang. “Autobiographik und Religion: Grundüberlegungen und Beispiele zu einem Wahrnehmungsfeld praktischer Theologie.” Evangelium und Kultur: Begegnungen und Brüche. Ed. Mariano Delgado and Hans Waldenfels. Fribourg/Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010. 378–396.

1.17 Religious Studies 

 163

Gebhardt, Winfried. “Die Transformation des Religiösen. Religionssoziologie in der Tradition Max Webers.” Religionen verstehen. Zur Aktualität von Max Webers Religionssoziologie. Ed. Agathe Bienfait. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011. 177–196. Gyatso, Janet. Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Hahn, Alois. “Zur Soziologie der Beichte und anderer Formen institutionalisierter Bekenntnisse: Selbstthematisierung und Zivilisationsprozess.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozial­ psychologie 34 (1982): 407–434. Hahn, Alois. “Identität und Selbstthematisierung.” Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis: Bekenntnis und Geständnis. Ed. Alois Hahn and Volker Kapp. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 9–24. Hellemans, Staf. “Transformation der Religion und der Grosskirchen in der zweiten Moderne aus der Sicht des religiösen Modernisierungsparadigmas.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religionsund Kulturgeschichte 99 (2005): 11–35. Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. An introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Lakeville: International Nonaristotelian, 1933. Krech, Volkhard. “Religiöse Erfahrung und artikulatorische Identitätsbildung in Konversions­ erzählungen: Wissenschaftsgeschichtliches und Systematisches.” Anthropologie der Artikulation: Begriffliche Grundlagen und transdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Ed. Magnus Schlette and Matthias Jung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. Leitner, Hartmut. “Wie man ein neuer Mensch wird, oder: Die Logik der Bekehrung.” Biographische Sozialisation. Ed. Erika Hoernig. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 2000. 61–86. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. Misch, Georg. Das Mittelalter. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. II. Frankfurt a.  M.: SchulteBulmke, 1955. Mitterauer, Michael. “Religion in lebensgeschichtlichen Aufzeichnungen.” Biographie – sozial­ geschichtlich. Ed. Andreas Gestrich, Peter Knoch and Helga Merkel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988. 61–86. Moosley, Marcus. Being For Myself Alone: Origins Of Jewish Autobiography. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Nassehi, Armin. „Religion und Biographie: Zum Bezugsproblem religiöser Kommunikation in der Moderne.” Religion und Biographie: Zwischen Ritual und Selbstsuche. Ed. Monika WohlrabSahr. Frankfurt a.  M.: Campus. 103–126. Pabel, Hilmar M. “Augustine’s Confessions and the Autobiographies of Peter Canisius.” Church History and Religious Culture 87 (2007): 453–477. Pollack, Detlef, and Gert Pickel. “De-Institutionalisierung des Religiösen und religiöse Individualisie­ rung in Ost- und Westdeutschland.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 55 (2003): 447–474. Röckelein, Hedwig. “Reflexionen über Erziehung und Lebenslauf in Autobiographien des Hoch­ mittelalters.” Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 2 (1995): 33–58. Schütze, Fritz. “Biographieforschung und narratives Interview.” Neue Praxis 13/3 (1983): 283–293. Ulmer, Bernd. “Konversionserzählungen als rekonstruktive Gattung: Erzählerische Mittel und Strategien bei der Rekonstruktion eines Bekehrungserlebnisses.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17.1 (1988): 19–33. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1982.

164 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Wu. Pey-Yi. The Confucian’s progress: Autobiographical writings in traditional China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Further Reading Belzen, Jacob A., and Anton Geels. Autobiography and the Psychological Study of Religious Lives. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008. Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika, ed. Biographie und Religion. Zwischen Ritual und Selbstsuche. Frankfurt a.  M./New York: Campus, 1995. Hahn, Alois. “Zur Soziologie der Beichte und anderer Formen institutionalisierter Bekenntnisse: Selbstthematisierung und Zivilisationsprozess.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozial­ psychologie 34 (1982): 407–434. Knoblauch, Hubert, Volkhard Krech, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, eds. Religiöse Konversion. Syste­ma­ tische und fallorientierte Studien in sozioiogischer Perspektive. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1998.

1.18 Rhetoric Melanie Möller

Every autobiographic text is characterized by the tension between fiction and truth. Rhetoric, too, is shaped by this basic problematic: not only can it provide the genre of autobiography with linguistic methods and terminology; it can also supply a theoret­ ical framework for the discussion of the complex question of truth. So it is no wonder that the first autobiographic texts mentioned belong to the field of rhetoric. And yet just as ‘autobiography’ can scarcely be distinguished sharply from other textual forms, so too a genre of ‘rhetoric’ can be extracted from the various generic contexts: aside from overtly rhetorical texts (speeches, compendiums, and essays), rhetoric influences all different kinds of literary formats. Even if the speeches were primarily presented orally, it is very often a subsequently edited, written version, laden with fictional elements, which came to us. The successful story of rhetoric in the ancient world initially arises from the fact that individual self-awareness gradually gained strength. The early Enlightenment-move­ ment of the so-called Sophistic considers the human being as an acting subject. So with the genesis of rhetoric the speaker’s self, too, is up for consideration: the external appearance of the speaker, his ἦθος (ethos), along with the dimensions of λόγος (logos) (computation/reckoning) and πάθος (pathos, how the listener is affected) made up the trilogy of ‘artificial evidence’. This division, which goes back to Aristotle, already hints at the fictional scope available to speakers for the expression of the self and its sur­ roundings, whose development responds to the need to convince the audience. All three instruments of persuasion operate with suggestive experience from the commu­ nicative practice. At the same time, the so-called Sophists use the pragmatic dimen­ sion to test the theoretical basis of language. Gorgias of Leontinoi (fifth century BCE) already brought up the sore hermeneutical point of rhetoric with his speech theory: his hypothesis about the semiotic heterogeneity of logos states that truth and perception are fundamentally different and moreover are interpreted individually by every recipi­ ent (Gorgias 1982, 25). The groundwork has been laid for a theory of ‘pre-modern sub­ jectivity’ that is set up by the overlapping of appearance and reality, of facts and fiction. Exactly here lie the reasons for the early-evolving, mainly philosophically moti­ vated criticism of rhetoric. Where rhetoric accepts the speech restriction of the worldand self-perception and makes use of it, philosophy, in its doubt about the infallibility of language, tries to establish a truth which is supposed to bind the depicted self as well. Under these circumstances, the situation of rhetoric is apologetic from the begin­ ning, and so attempts of justification occur particularly in contexts where rhetoric is valued and used as a constructive form of expression. Among the critics Plato is mentioned very often. It becomes very evident from the dialogue Phaidros (Plat. Phaidr. 258 d1) that Plato certainly does not condemn rhetoric in general, but only the common practice of it. Rhetoric in the absence of truth does https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-019

166 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

not seem to him to be a scientifically validated art. The Platonic alternative would be a rhetoric based on the dialectical method, which springs from true knowledge and is founded on observation of the human ψυχή (psyche, soul). The speaker himself carries most responsibility: Plato demands that he is truly good in order to be able to both see and advise the best. Aristotle understands the usefulness of rhetoric for everyday communication and thus directs attention to its pragmatic dimension, which is to be seen as a close inter­ action of the three central dimensions that are involved in the communication process: the above mentioned ‘logos’, ‘ethos’, and ‘pathos’. By ‘ethos’, Aristotle understands a flexible category: it is only the speech itself that shows the speaker’s ‘ethos’ off to full advantage. The speaker is supposed to make his moral disposition transparent through the speech, the argumentation, and style (Aristotle 1991, 28–31). This ‘ethos’ oscillates between a real condition and a picture of one’s self, which is created by the speech (Möller 2004, 86–89). The auditor (or reader) must judge whether the speaker appears convincing and authentic. The reception is the integrative factor for the ethos of the speaker. Thereby, the speaker is given tremendous room for unfold­ ing his self-conception, even if it underlies the dictate of appropriateness (gr. πρέπον [prepon], lat. aptum), which was coined by social standardization and declared to be a virtue of style. After Aristotle, the social relevance of the rhetorically versed linguistic self-pres­ entation is taken more and more into account. The individual justifies his actions primarily with the common welfare in mind by staging himself as a responsible part of it (Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian). It goes without saying that here, facts and fiction interpenetrate each other in a reasonable and moderate way. The ‘authorised speaker’ is committed to his personal, socially bound conscience. The earliest representative of such a responsible ethic among speakers is the Greek Isocrates, who not only strongly influences the Roman orators and philologists, but with his speech called Antidosis (Περὶ τῆς ἀντιδόσεως, oratio 15) also composes the first autobiography in the narrower sense of the genre. In Isocrates’ educational theory, steering rests with ‘logos’ when­ ever one thinks and acts, since no reasonable action can be considered, announced or carried out without the aid of language (Isocrates 1980, vol. I, 109–111). Yet the ‘logos’, with all its culturally foundational and norm-regulating power, cannot be thought independent of the individual responsibility (‘apologia’) of the speaker (and the lis­ tener; Isocrates oratio 13, 10–14). The importance of the imitation of exemplary literary archetypes (‘mimesis’/‘imitatio auctorum et morum’) is to be estimated highly. In the Antidosis, Isocrates explains that the words spoken by a man of good reputation have more persuasive power than those of a person with a doubtful name. In the preamble of the autobiographic Antidosis, Isocrates exposes his personal intention: he wants to present his character, his lifestyle and his educational ideal to his contemporaries and later generations and thereby provide an authentic picture of his ‘ethos’ and his whole life. Thus, he intends to include the reading directions for his life into the work of art. With its literalization, the problem of the relation between ‘speech-speaker’

1.18 Rhetoric 

 167

and ‘work-editor’ takes on a new dimension, which Isocrates also illustrates in the Busiris (oratio 11): a written oeuvre mostly forms a unit with the name of the author so that an immediate identification between what has been said and the character of the author takes place. This demonstrates that for most recipients, life and art were no separate spheres. By fabricating a written speech, the speaker creates an ideal picture of himself that is designed for eternity. This didactic-moral equipment of (autobiographic) self-fiction is reflected in the Roman ideal of the ‘vir bonus dicendi peritus’ [‘the good man [is] eloquent’], which was formulated by Cato the Elder, and it is also mirrored in its importance for the orator of the future, the ‘orator perfectus’ (Cato 1860, 80). The ‘orator perfectus’ [‘perfect speaker’] thus defined is a roundly sophisticated philosophical speaker from whose knowledge society benefits. Cicero delivers the most detailed description of the ideal of this speaker. To achieve reconciliation between philosophy and rhetoric, Cicero on the one hand quite conse­ quently clings to rhetoric’s claim for truth, which is supposed to have risen from social practice: even fictional elements serve a pragmatic reality which accords with the measures of probability. With regard to the speaker, Cicero on the other hand designs a model that follows Aristotle, according to which the ‘ethos’ is a dynamic dimension that is only realised through the medium of speech and its reception (Cic. orat. 26). The ‘imitatio auctorum’ is likewise to be seen as an essential element of Cicero’s educa­ tional concept; the imitation of good speakers does not however lead automatically to the loss of one’s own style or to the levelling of individual differences, but leaves room for individual diversity especially with regards to the self-referential passages. In the background of this conception of the speaker-subject stands Cicero’s ‘persona’-theory, which he develops in De officiis [On Duties] (Cicero 1991, 42–43). By ‘person’, Cicero understands first and foremost the role a human being plays in society. This is not without consequences for his concept of individuality: selection and standardization of the ‘persona’ define how the individual is perceived by his social environment and the way in which it takes part in different discursive practices. Continuity over a longer period is also part of the ‘person’: thus, Cicero stresses especially from a social point of view the protection of identity as a perpetuated social role. Continuity and identity in this context are generally to be classified less as subjective than as social and con­ ventional factors. The fundamental question already for Cicero must be how much diversity in structured systems – and as such do we imagine Cicero’s res publica as well as Plato’s Politeia – can be controlled in practice. The exclusion of the implausible, the restriction of the fictional, and the minimization of possible deviations from the (ethical and stylistic) norm constitute the stability factor of the social system. The prin­ cipally inconsumable – art, its perception and rating, whose subjectivity Cicero by all means concedes – needs to be converted into the communication coherence of society. According to Cicero, the elder Seneca (Controversiae [‘Judicial Declamations’, ‘Contestations’]), along with Quintilian (Institutio oratoria [The Orator’s Education]) and Tacitus (Dialogus de oratoribus [‘A Dialogue on Speakers’]), remains commit­

168 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

ted to the socially and ethically determined speaker’s ideal. By proving the speech’s dependency on the speaker’s moral nature (and philosophical education), one creates a mostly merely apparent certainty, which suggests that one can ever classify the ora­ tor’s character and thus the quality of his speech. The crisis of rhetoric increases in the post-classical period as the range of topics gradually levels off and, as a consequence of the excessive practice of declamation, becomes increasingly menacing. Furthermore, the prevalent rhetoric is accused of losing touch with the truth and simultaneously neglecting the listeners’ pragmatic needs. Where rhetoric not only wants to be a school subject but also to have social influence, it has to practice subtle self-exegesis. The situation of rhetoric during the imperial period, which culminates in the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’, is particularly illuminating here. In the influential speeches of Aelius Aristides (second century CE), a capacious theory of ‘logos’ is developed according to which education, knowledge and rhetorical technique do not stand for themselves, but are to be regarded as a representative part of the speaker’s overall personality (Aristides 1976, 268–269). This concept of rhetoric is at the core elitist and it inherits a power which is useful for the identity of the speaker himself and his community. Likewise, Christian rhetoric submits the individual and the social groundwork of rhetoric to a profound critique. The works of Augustine, who also played a significant role in shaping the autobiographic tradition with his Confessiones [Confessions], attain canonical status for future times. In his semiological work De doctrina christiana [On Christian Doctrine], Augustine addresses the question of the oratorical ‘ethos’. The fourth book of the tract, which is significant for the history of hermeneutics, analyses the role of the author as subject and of rhetoric and language in general. To Augus­ tine, authenticity and harmony are the highest goals. This applies especially to the relation between word and action in regard to the speaker’s person. Since words of biblical texts are considered the property of all believers, a good Christian can utilize the beautifully formed and therefore beneficial text of someone else. The premise remains the moral integrity of the orator. In this respect, there is no contradiction here with Augustine’s emphatic insistence on the polarization of the individual, when he, following the example of the stoic ‘persona’-doctrine that Cicero spread, eulogizes the individual as ‘God’s wonder’ (Augustinus 1972, 53–55). Ruthless speakers not only steal from the common property available to all upright people, but also are alienated from themselves (Augustinus 1962, 165–166). The rhetorically versed Christian autobi­ ography, as Augustinus represents it, aims at staging the self as an authentic, charac­ terful individual, which is subject to a divinely motivated self-control and operates for itself and the community. The primary objective of the identity of character and ‘vita’ to which Augustine aspires is the vindication of one’s own language-bound action in front of the public, for whom one wants to serve as an example worthy of imitation in the sense of the ‘imitatio auctorum’. Approximately at the end of the seventh century CE, the room for communica­ tion narrows down still further, and this has radical consequences for the rhetoric of

1.18 Rhetoric 

 169

self-portrayal. That the social commitment of the self in relation to rhetoric remains binding also for Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modernity was brought out by Peter von Moos in cautious studies. He verifies the (in George Herbert Meads’ sense) ‘intersubjective interdependencies’ (von Moos 2004, 5): all endeavours of the individ­ ual to seek autonomy are to be considered – even in medieval times and the modern age  – ultimately as ‘phenomena of socialization’ (e.  g. Johannes of Salisbury; von Moos 2004, 7); the perfect nobleman mirrors the ‘vir bonus’-ideal that persisted from the ancient world. The techniques of the ars poetriae that developed from the eleventh until the thirteenth century CE and converged in poetics and rhetoric, those of the ‘ars dictaminis/dictandi’ [‘art of composing prose’], ‘ars arengandi’ [‘art of conversation’] or ‘ars praedicandi’ [‘art of preaching’], are characterized by school rhetoric and the focus on the individual’s social responsibility especially where one wants to make a difference through one’s own example. It is not without reason that the ‘imitatio auc­ toris’ comes to play a more and more important role. In the Renaissance, with Humanism, a newly awakened interest in the theoretical groundwork of communication can be witnessed. This grants rhetoric (which is also fixed in the context of the ‘septem artes liberales’ [‘seven liberal arts’]) the status of a leading science, which is, however, still at the command of the universally educated scholar. There are attempts to restore Cicero’s ideal of the unity of speech and morals (e.  g. Lorenzo Valla, Rudolf Agricola, and Philipp Melanchthon). Overall, a ‘realistic Anthropology’ is at the basis of all humanistic literature (Ueding 1995, 105): a compre­ hensive orientation towards the humanly possible, then, which does not have much tolerance for auto-fictional elements. Rhetoric more and more veers towards other lit­ erary dimensions, e.  g. the culture of letter-writing: most influential here was Erasmus von Rotterdam with his treaty de conscribendis epistolis [On the Writing of Letters], though he situates himself within the out-dated and apparently not very subversive ‘perspicuitas’-ideal of the rhetorical doctrine. In the modern ages, the art of speech is favoured in the ‘genus laudativum’ [‘offi­ cial commemorative speeches’]. The tradition that was overlaid by artificial rhetoric reaches an inglorious high point in the baroque period, as can be seen in the numerous special elocutions for all different kinds of occasions. Here, the topical elements limit the tolerance of expression of the self to the highest degree. Written rhetoric is culti­ vated further (e.  g. Gerhard Johannes Vossius), while its practical-artistic dimension is ever more marginalised. By contrast, rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment is entirely devoted to reason, which turns out to be disadvantageous for its fictitious elements as well. The rhetorical self-conceptions are overlaid by philosophically studious (auto-) biography (Rousseau’s Confessions), which was supposed to present a structured and modest existence (Vico, Rousseau). These individually constructed educational stories, predecessors of the ‘Bildungsroman’ [‘education novel’], aim to display con­ sciousness of the coherence of one’s own experiences, and in this they definitely draw on the conceptions of the self of early rhetoric (esp. Isocrates). In consequence of the last-mentioned developments, the handbooks dealing with the history of ideas

170 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

around the year 1800 mark the so-called ‘end of rhetoric’, which not surprisingly coin­ cides with the birth of aesthetics as a discipline (Dachselt 2003, 169–171). From now on, rhetoric ekes out a shadowy existence in schools and as a part of stylistics. The suppression of rhetoric was effective not least because people increasingly failed to see the point in it as interests gradually shifted from the general to the individual. The theoretical potential of the rhetorical problem of impact with its consequences in the history of thought was largely ignored over and above this practical limitation due to the result of aggressive opposition to it in the romantic period. This is proba­ bly shown most vividly in Klaus Dockhorn’s psychological studies about Wordsworth, which describe his poetry as determined by a “durch und durch auf einer irrational­ istischen Anthropologie beruhenden pathos-ethos-Formel” [‘a pathos-ethos-formula which thoroughly rests upon an irrationalistic anthropology’] (Dockhorn 1968, 96). Behind this intellectual incitement stands “das Recht der sprachlichen Gebärde, die sich ästhetisch, nicht aber nach Kriterien der Logik fassen läßt” [‘the right of a lin­ guistic gesture which can be grasped aesthetically, but not by criteria of logics’] (Grod­ deck 1995, 86) and which, in the field of rhetoric, is driven by the ‘desideratum’ of the individual ‘ingenium’ as well. The ‘ingenium’ is put as a combination of a unique talent and an experience which can be acquired by making exercises in rhetorical contexts. These correlations initially take place implicitly. The most obvious foundation for the rehabilitation of rhetoric is laid by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche associates lan­ guage with a “künstlerisch schaffende[m] Subjekt” [‘a subject creating art’], rhetoric with a reflective mode for conversing as “ästhetischem Verhalten” [‘aesthetic relation’] (Nietzsche 1979, 19). Where language allegedly insists on its own naturalness, it is said merely to have forgotten its figurative origin. For Nietzsche, rhetoric is the centre of life; since its status is that of an obvious art neither doubted nor interpreted as being proof of an ontological deficit, the illusory notion of life itself becomes a requirement of human existence that cannot be eluded. Thereby, Nietzsche directly ties in with the complex pseudo-topic, which had helped in bringing about the genesis of rhetoric as nomenclature of speech-theoretical thinking and auto-fictional reflection: in this sense, he can refer to the “griechische[n] Begriff der Cultur […] als einer Einhelligkeit zwischen Leben, Denken, Scheinen und Wollen” [“Greek conception of culture […] as a unanimity of life, thought, appearance and will”] (Nietzsche 1972, 123 [1997, 122]). Illusion remains subservient to reality; one cannot hold on to a dichotomy between the two categories from the point of view of language criticism, which unavoidably judges rhetoric to be the only possible way of thinking and living. Nietzsche also points to a distinct disruption of traditional attempts at coherency, when he labels the ego a series of (fragmented) self-conceptions (Sappho, Catullus, Ovid, Antiquity). At the same time, the obligatory topos of sincerity is questioned, and increasingly literary, social and national conditions are invoked against naïve concepts of autobi­ ography. Autobiography is exposed as a volitional act of memory that works with topoi of rhetorically codified perception patterns (Dachselt 2003, 97).

1.18 Rhetoric 

 171

These insights that were inaugurated by Nietzsche are radicalized during the twentieth century in literary theory and philosophy (esp. in the theory of deconstruc­ tion). In Roland Barthes’ paper L’ancienne Rhétorique [‘The ancient Rhetoric’], the art of rhetoric appears as the legitimate predecessor of literary structuralism: out of its proper referential system sense and meaning, in poststructuralist phrases, infinite reference systems should be made accessible without having to refer back to concepts like ‘concrete realities’ or ‘reliable signs’ (Barthes 1970). Under these circumstances, authentic self-expression becomes an ‘adynaton’. That not only the subject as external phenomenon but also one’s own identity – considered in self-reflexive processes  – is a discursive effect has become a banal insight, if not a commonplace. The hence-deducible permeability and performance of identity has its roots in the ancient ‘persona’-theory, which unveils the ego as a dis­ cursive effect, fragment synthesis and role selection. The diagnosis of the performa­ tivity of the I-figure is an anthropological constant, which reveals particularly well the intellectual history of the art of speech. Paul de Man in his Allegories of Reading (1982) went as far as to rate autobiography itself as a kind of rhetorical figure (even with regard to the local disposition of the linguistic segments). The situation of rhetoric henceforth is one of social and communicative struggles to convey ideas. Hans Blumenberg, following Arnold Gehlen, argues that the genesis of rhetoric occurs because of a ‘truth constraint’ of men, thus because of a specific shortage. Rhetoric directly determines the human being’s status as a “Mängelwesen” [‘deficient being’], because it comes to be proof of its inevitable dependence from speech (Blumenberg 1981, 407). When judging favourably, “Sprachwerdung” [‘becom­ ing speech’], which implies its transformation into speech, is declared to be “Human­ isierung” [‘humanization’], as far as, in pragmatic terms “[n]ur in der Sprache […] sich die verhängnisvolle Inkongruenz von Handeln und Bewußtsein auf[hebt]” [‘only in language the fatal incongruity of acting and consciousness is revoked’] (Blumenberg 1961, 68). Cicero’s aesthetical and at the same time pragmatic concept of the orator as one who acts through speaking is illuminated by this: at the hands of the orator, speech, illusion and truth can step into an appropriate relationship with each other. Already here, through the production of a ‘speech act’, reality is generated. On the other hand we find a type of rhetoric that, with the argumentation theory, again puts ‘logos’ in the centre (‘New Rhetoric’/Nouvelle Rhétorique). In its non-relativistic form, as represented by Chaim Perelman, it takes into account the comparatively statically composed ‘ethos’ primarily under juridical-pragmatic aspects (Olbrechts-Tyteca and Perelmann 1958). Yet, since this is the reception of rhetorical anthropology, the human remains enmeshed in his or her figurativeness. The self is a result of communication, it cor­ responds to a process of interpretation between different common instances. So poststructuralism rightly appraises hermeneutics and rhetoric as analogues. In the ‘autobiographical pact’ with the reader (Lejeune 1989) complicity is manifested, which represents a further component of the confession of one’s own inaccuracy.

172 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

The inter-subjective contact is at the centre, too, of every ‘act’ of rhetoric, so it is per se based on a communication contract. Aside from systems theory from the field of sociology, it is this last insight that has particularly influenced speech act theory and pragmatics. Both insist on the interdependency of discursive and social procedures. Autobiography in this way seems like a product of communication in its full sense. In the political relevance of rhetoric, too, which is primarily analyzed by Josef Kop­ perschmidt, this becomes important: political autobiography in this sense is a repre­ sentative proof of a life plan which is drafted from different kinds of media (Kopper­ schmidt 2000). Life as the sum of its (rhetorically modified) parts is always ‘written’ and not ‘de-scribed.’ There is also the fact that even the writing style performatively depends on the past of the writer and the present of the procedure of writing itself (Starobinski 1998, 201). The unity of the portrayal of a life, which is both orally conceptualized and fixed in a written form, can only ever be temporary, suggested, and hence rhetor­ ically evoked. It is also this insight, which stokes longings for authenticity – the plea for a truth, which admittedly might not be consistent with reality, but nevertheless avows for a certain consistency in self-presentation. This desire has, against better judgement, taken over literary theory (Michel Foucault’s lectures about parrhesia: The Government of Self and Others, Foucault 2011, 62–64; Möller 2012, 112–113). Rhetoric is possibly the only discipline that has always faced up to this unavoidable truth, and because of this attitude with no illusions – as the art of illusion per se – has been treated with hostility like no other. Translation: Emily Baragwanath, Melanie Möller, Anna Westerberg

Works Cited Aristides, Aelius. Opera quae exstant omnia. Orationes 1–16 complectens. Vol. I. Ed. Friedrich Walther Lenz and Charles Allison Behr. Leiden: Brill, 1976. Aristotle. On Rhetoric. A Theory of Civic Discourse. Ed. George A. Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Augustinus, Aurelius. De doctrina christiana libri IV, de vera religione liber unus. Ed. Josef Martin. Turnhout: Brepols, 1962. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 32. Augustinus, Aurelius. The City of God against the Pagans. Vol. VII. Ed. and trans. William M. Green. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. Barthes, Roland. “L’ancienne rhétorique. Aide-mémoire.” Communications 16 (1970): 172–237. Blumenberg, Hans. “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle.” Nachrichten der Gießener Hochschulgesellschaft 30 (1961): 62–75. Blumenberg, Hans. “Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik.” Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben. Aufsätze und eine Rede. Ed. Hans Blumenberg. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. 104–136. Cato, Marcus Porcius. Praeter librum de re rustica quae extant. Ed. Henricus Jordan. Leipzig: Teubner, 1860.

1.18 Rhetoric 

 173

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De oratore in Two Volumes. Ed. Harris Rackham. Cambridge, M. A.: Harvard University Press, 1942. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Duties. Ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Adkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Dachselt, Rainer. Pathos. Tradition und Aktualität einer vergessenen Kategorie der Poetik. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. Dockhorn, Klaus. Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik. Vier Aufsätze zur Ideengeschichte der Vor­ moderne. Ed. Joachim Dyck and Günther List. Bad Homburg/Berlin/Zürich: Gehlen, 1968. Foucault, Michel. The Government of Self and Others. The Courage of the Truth. Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. Vol. II. Ed. and trans. Frédéric Gros and Graham Burchell. London: Picador, 2011. Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. Ed. Douglas Maurice MacDowell. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1982. Groddeck, Wolfram. Reden über Rhetorik. Zu einer Stilistik des Lesens. Basel/Frankfurt a.  M.: Stroem­feld/Nexus, 1995. Isocrates. Isocrates in Three Volumes. Ed. George Norlin. Cambridge, M. A.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Kopperschmidt, Josef. Rhetorische Anthropologie. Studien zum homo rhetoricus. München: Fink, 2000. Lejeune, Philippe. “The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. ­Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Möller, Melanie. Talis oratio – Qualis vita. Zu Theorie und Praxis mimetischer Verfahren in der griechisch-römischen Literaturkritik. Heidelberg: Winter, 2004. Möller, Melanie. “Am Nullpunkt der Rhetorik? Michel Foucault und die parrhesiastische Rede.” Parrhesia. Foucault und der Mut zur Wahrheit. Ed. Petra Gehring and Andreas Gelhard. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2012. 103–120. Moos, Peter von, ed. Unverwechselbarkeit. Persönliche Identität und Identifikation in der vormodernen Gesellschaft. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2004. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen II: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben.“ Nietzsche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Dritte Abteilung, Erster Band. Ed. Giorgo Colli, Mazzino Montinari,Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Gerhardt Volker. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1972. 239–330. [“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 57–123.] Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1979. 79–91. Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, and Chaim Perelmann. Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique. Bruxelles: Éditions de l’université des Bruxelles, 1958. Plato. Opera. Parmenides. Philebus. Symposium. Phaedrus. Alcibiades I + II. Hipparchus. Amatores. Tom. II. Ed. Ioannis Burnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901. Ueding, Gert. Klassische Rhetorik. München: Beck, 1995. Starobinski, Jean. “Der Stil in der Autobiographie.” Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Duncker & Humblot, 2nd ed. 1998. 200–213.

174 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Further Reading Fohrmann, Jürgen, ed. Rhetorik. Figuration und Performanz. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004. Frank, Manfred, and Anselm Haverkamp, eds. Individualität. München: Fink, 1988. Mainberger, Gonsalv K. “Rhetorik und wildes Denken. Ein Zugang zum Mythos über Aristoteles.” Rhetorik. Vol. II. Ed. Josef Kopperschmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991. 408–441. Metzger, Stefan, and Wolfgang Rapp, eds. homo inveniens. Heuristik und Anthropologie am Modell der Rhetorik. Tübingen: Narr, 2003. Möller, Melanie. Ciceros Rhetorik als Theorie der Aufmerksamkeit. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013.

1.19 Social History Helga Schwalm

While autobiography tends to be allocated a peripheral place only in the social histo­ riography of literature (e.  g. Rath 1997, 315; Schneider 2004, 240–241; exception: Ford 1983), auto/biography and social history are entwined along several lines. Labelled ‘autobiography’, ‘life writing’, ‘self-testimony’, and also more recently ‘ego-docu­ ments’ (Dekker 2002), writings about one’s own person are located at a significant interface between subjectivity and social objectivity and as such inform social, cul­ tural and literary history. Whereas historians since Leopold Ranke had long dispar­ aged autobiography as a source, suspecting it to be unreliable and untrustworthy given its “romanhafte Bestandteile” [‘novelistic elements’] (Glagau 1903, 6), it was rediscovered by historians of ideas such as Georg Misch (1950) and Jacob Burckhardt (1989 [1860]). The turn to narrative history and the advent of micro-history in the 1980s further lifted the value of autobiography as a privileged source for social and cultural history, and autobiographies in fact continue to be exploited by social historians for empirical data (e.  g. Humphries 2010). Moreover, even though the simplistic notion of autobiography as a mimetic, realistic representation of life has long been discarded, autobiography is considered to offer the historian a ‘perspective from below’ (Ueding 1987, 368), or ‘bottom-up’. History is illuminated through personal experience, reveal­ ing above all the subjective experience of social structures, changes etc., as well as interpretative configurations such as life-course patterns and the everyday knowledge thereof. Life writing viewed in a socio-historical context thus sheds light on cultural habits and practices of social groups/classes rather than mere individuals. Of primary interest is the autobiographer as a member of a group  – such as a factory worker turned Chartist, or a former slave as in American slave narratives (e.  g. Dorsey 1993). What such approaches to autobiography share is the concern with a self-re­ flective, or explicit, subjectivity articulating itself within a particular contextual/ pragmatic framework and with specific functions such as understanding one’s own motives at a time of crisis, explaining one’s motives and actions to others, self-justi­ fication, apology etc. (Kohli 1980). None of the manifold forms and modes of literary and non-literary self-representation are exclusively individual but created within spe­ cific social and cultural frameworks and contexts including socio-historically specific cultures of memory. Autobiographical self-representations are embedded in institu­ tional structures and depend on culturally available institutional frames, schemata and textual models that generate particular discourses: “The kind of biographical identity or textual self one has depends on the historically and culturally varying forms of biography generators” (Hahn 1998, 27). Confessions in particular played a crucial role in the development of the modern self and modern autobiography with its dictates of self-revelation and self-censorship. At the other end of the historical scale, contemporary autobiographical practices variously engage with popular intermedial https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-020

176 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

genres (graphic autobiography) and internet forms of self-writing and self-articulation (online-life writing). In any case, it is only through an engagement with such models in the context of available biography generators that individuals may conceive of and construct them­ selves. It is at this point that the life history approach in the social sciences intersects with the notion of intertextuality prevalent in literary studies. While biographical pre­ texts provide structures which make narrating one’s individual life possible in the first place, they also carry cultural knowledge of socially possible and acceptable lives in the sense of life world or experiential knowledge. As such, they belong to the patterns of knowledge and meaning beneath the level of reflexive or theoretical knowledge (Willems and Willems 2001, 398), which will itself eventually be effected by individual rewritings in terms of a restructuring and modification of mental schemata. The social historiography of literature, too, addresses autobiographies as docu­ ments indicative of and reflecting trans-individual socio-historical structures, config­ urations and trends. As such, it intersects with a number of disciplines next to literary studies – history, economics, sociology, psychology, education. Unlike the life-history approach in the social sciences, which not only studies autobiographical documents of all sorts in order to explore specific biographical patterns, role identities etc., but also actively invites self-representations by way of narrative interviews (subsequently transcribed by social scientists), literary studies tend to be concerned only with texts composed as self-representations and to explicitly acknowledge and theorize the inev­ itable generic ambiguity of autobiographical writing, allowing for no distinct divid­ ing-line between fact and fiction. Whatever the degree of aesthetic construction or liter­ ary claim, autobiographical texts written as autobiographies in various forms originate from specific pragmatic purposes, they may not have been intended for publication originally or may have been altered and shaped for publication purposes by editors. A particular emphasis regarding the social history of autobiography is placed on the lower classes or those that do not pertain to the social and cultural elites, explor­ ing autobiography especially with regard to literacy, education, and reading practices (e.  g. Vincent 1982; Rose 2001; Richardson 1994; Messerli 2010). At the same time, autobiography features as a key site in the socio-cultural history of configurations of selfhood. In this sense, Mahrholz’s early contention still holds that autobiogra­ phy provides social historiography with “the clearest reflection of the most recent attitudes of the individual to his [and her, H.  S.] surroundings, to his time, to the thoughts and feelings that dominate it” (1919; Trans.: Jones 2011, 26). This implies a broader understanding of autobiography as historical testimony extending to the history of mentalities and ideas: Autobiography appears as a privileged historical source concerning ‘the selves we live by’ (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). Autobiogra­ phy, for instance, has played a key role in the emergence of the individualist self, or modern individual (Wuthenow 1980; Mascuch 1997 etc.). With regard to the historical nexus of autobiography and concepts of selfhood, much scholarly attention has been paid to the interplay of the proliferation and diver­

1.19 Social History 

 177

sity of life writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the evolution of auto­ biography as a literary genre ca. 1800 (separating it both from exemplary spiritual autobiography and from memoirs), and the emergence of the modern, self-consciously individualist self. Following Mahrholz’s tying of autobiography and the bourgeois individual, Bernd Neumann (1970) established a typology of autobiographical forms based on social psychology. Aligning different conceptions of identity with specific narrative modes, his seminal distinction is between the external orientation of res gestae and memoir, which rely on the factual and seek to confirm the individual’s place in the world, as opposed to autobiography, which focuses on memory and iden­ tity (Neumann 1970, esp. 25). While close ties between autobiography as literary genre and the modern bour­ geois individual have been established against the backdrop of a newly propagated dignity of ordinary life as well as an increased social (and geographical) mobility, this does not apply to all of European, let alone non-European cultures, and it is a class- and gender-specific phenomenon, initially pertaining to Protestants and intel­ lectuals (Wuthenow 1980), and to the middle classes. Indeed, the figure of the secular, autonomous autobiographical subject as it flourished ca. 1800 pertained to a small canon of literary texts only, leaving the wider practice of life writing in England, for instance, during this period of social and cultural transition seemingly untouched (Treadwell 2005). However, the ‘elite phenomenon’ of modern autobiography as a literary genre came to be canonized, incorporating the autobiographical subject as author of its own, secular story of personality formation. In the wider context of nine­ teenth-century culture, with the cultural hegemony of the middle class, this literary model merged into a more widely articulated subjectivity defined by “a mixture of introspective self-consciousness, middle class familialism and genderization, and liberal autonomy”, along with notions of freedom and creativity (Gagnier 1991, 28) – a notion of the self that the concomitant nineteenth-century novel was to negotiate, too, prominently by way of the ‘Bildungsroman’. The individualism in life writing since the latter part of the nineteenth-century was, however, not ubiquitous. With regard to German autobiographies of the 1920s, Sloterdijk distinguishes between the “Symptom-System-Schema” (‘symptom-system pattern’) of middle-class autobiography on the one hand and the “Fall-Typus-Schema” (‘case-type pattern’) of proletarian autobiography. Whereas the individual features as symptom and symbol of a whole (epoch or ‘Zeitgeist’) in the former, the latter con­ ceives of the autobiographical subject as a (typical) case among many (Sloterdijk 1978, 305). Autobiography thus prominently testifies to the different class-specific ‘logics of representation’ (Warneken 2010, 178). If on the one hand, socio-historically informed studies of life writing have yielded socio-historical data as well as shed light especially on the role of autobiography in discursive transformation processes pertaining to concepts of the self, the seemingly inextricable ties of life writing genres with (Western) subjectivity have been disentan­ gled on the other hand. As Mascuch (1997) has shown for early modern commonplace

178 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

books, which allowed little room for any individualized entry, such modes of writing did not necessarily generate any subjectivity in terms of articulating and reflecting upon individual personal experience. Neither did the conversion stories of spiritual autobiographies cater much for individual reflection but rather served as highly standardized, non-individualized examples. Furthermore, the manifold changes in technology concerning writing, reading, printing, and marketing as well as institutional control mechanisms are seen to have crucially contributed to the emergence of modern autobiography not (only) as a liter­ ary genre but as a cultural practice (Mascuch 1997). Likewise, the new social media have generated new modes of self-presentation and of fashioning biographical iden­ tity that require fresh theoretical approaches to the mediality of life writing as practice (e.  g. Dünne and Moser 2008). While, then, the field of life writing has suggested interdisciplinary approaches informing social, cultural and mental histories, a socio-historically orientated study of life writing is also pertinent to a social history of literature that addresses the interre­ lation of literature on the one hand and the historical life practice and everyday world on the other hand. Firstly, autobiographers position themselves as authors and pro­ prietors of their own texts, suggesting a close link between autobiography and modern authorship. The nominal claim of authorship on the title page is indeed the hallmark of modern autobiography. At the same time, many autobiographers did not write with publication in view and may explicitly reflect on or imply the absence of a notion of authorship for themselves, as was the case particularly for woman writers before the nineteenth century. The English novelist Fanny Burney’s diary, for instance, testifies to her embarrassment concerning her identity as novelist and expresses her doubts over her autobiographical writing, which she self-consciously addresses to “Miss Nobody” (Burney 1988). Burney’s autobiographical writing, like that of many other women, was never intended for a wider audience beyond her immediate family members and was published posthumously. Secondly, autobiographies construct and invite a reading as non-fiction that distinguishes them from fictional forms of auto­ biographical narratives. The reader is required and anticipated to possess a certain degree of competence with respect to generic codes in order to be able to enter into the ‘autobiographical pact’, i.  e. to read a given autobiography as a non-fictional account of the author’s life told by him- or herself as proclaimed on the title page (Lejeune 1975). It is by way of the autobiographical pact sealed by the nominal identity of author, narrator, and protagonist that autobiography claims referentiality, independ­ ent of the possibility that individual components may be altered or even made up. In the absence of explicit paratextual pronouncements of referentiality, the reader is asked to discern the intratextual clues pointing to the generic status of autobiograph­ ical narratives, to identify ‘signposts of fictionality’ (Cohn 1999) as opposed to the lack thereof in factual narratives. Again, such clues are subject to historical change and frequently afford no clear dividing-line between fact and fiction. In this context, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s hotly debated ‘literary crime’ to pass off his narrative of a

1.19 Social History 

 179

Holocaust childhood as autobiographical memoir (Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 [1995] [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1996)]) was really one of feigning the autobiographical pact while leaving no signposts of fiction, not of making up the story of his Holocaust survival, or parts of it, in the first place. Thirdly, the anticipated audience comes into play as autobiographical narrative addresses a reader (even if “Miss Nobody”) or has a particular audience in mind, an aspect of the pragmatics of autobiography that determines not only processes of reading, but the form, selection of events, tenor, rhetoric of autobiographies. Many working-class life writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, addressed their fellow workers for didactic purposes. In other cases, the middle-class interest in working-class writers, along with publishers’ and reviewers’ control over publishing opportunities and critical reception, would have almost inevitably influ­ enced the quality of their writing; the practices of selection by publishers, the antic­ ipated market-value and anticipated horizon of expectations must have significantly shaped self-representations intended for publication – to the point of self-censorship. A story of social rise as singular career would almost certainly have vindicated existing conditions (e.  g. Bertram Some Memories of Books, Authors and Events [1893]), possibly playing to the tune of publishers guided by market interests. In contrast, an emphasis on the collective nature of proletarian biography, on events and experiences shared by one’s fellow-men (e.  g. Thomson’s Autobiography of an Artisan [1847]; Petzold’s Das rauhe Leben [‘Rough Life’] [1920]), aims rather at ‘biographical solidarity’ (Sloterdijk 1978, 315), expressing a collective identity and refuting the bourgeois individualism underlying autobiography as genre. Finally, reading as represented in life writing also reveals empirical issues of the reception and canonization of literature pertaining to specific social groups. While testifying to the gendering of reading habits (Schneider 2004, 240), the narratives of working-class autobiographers, more specifically, frequently give an account – from the perspective of personal experience – of the autobiographer’s literary education, reading preferences and literary epiphanies, access to books and modes of reception. The role of literature in the historical processes of (literary) literacy thus comes to the fore, and as such, autobiography also plays a part in the historiography of education. At the same time, life writing ‘from below’ documents the social transmission and reach of literary and cultural configurations that, seen from the perspective of ‘high culture’, appear to be firmly established in a given period. English labouring-class autobiographers in the nineteenth century, for instance, testify to the almost complete absence of Romantic authors as opposed to the presence of an older canon until the advent of Charles Dickens (whose novels offered a script for the ‘poor-boy-makesgood’ plot). Thus, autobiographical writing practices are pertinent to social history in mani­ fold ways, revealing the interactions between historical everyday lives and writing and reading practices as well as articulating modes and patterns of biographical experi­ ence and identity.

180 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Works Cited de Bruyn, Günter. Das erzählte Ich: Über Wahrheit und Dichtung in der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1995. Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ed. Horst Guenther. Frankfurt a.  M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989. Burney, Fanny. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. Ed. Lars Troide. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988–2012. Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality.” Poetics Today 1 (1990): 753–774. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Dekker, Rudolf, ed. Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in its Social Context since the Middle Ages. Hilversum: Verloren, 2002. Dorsey, Peter. Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser, eds. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. München: Fink, 2008. Ford, Boris, ed. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. The Present. Vol. VIII. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Glagau, Hans. Die moderne Selbstbiographie als historische Quelle: Eine Untersuchung. Marburg: Elwert, 1903. Hahn, Alois. “Narrative Identity and Auricular Confession as Biography-Generators.” Self, Soul, and Body in Religious Experience. Ed. Albert I. Baumgarten. Leiden: Brill, 1998. 27–52. Holstein, James, and Jaber Gubrium. The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Jones, Sara. Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011. Kohli, Martin. “Zur Theorie der biographischen Selbst- und Fremdthematisierung.” Lebenswelt und soziale Probleme. Soziologentag Bremen. Ed. Joachim Matthes. Bremen: Campus, 1980. 502–520. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [“The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Mahrholz, Werner. Deutsche Selbstbekenntnisse. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Selbst­biographie von der Mystik bis zu Pietismus. Berlin: Furche, 1919. Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Messerli, Alfred. “Leser, Leserschichten und -gruppen, Lesestoffe in der Neuzeit (1450–1850): Konsum, Rezeptionsgeschichte, Materialität.” Buchwissenschaft in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch. Ed. Ursula Rautenberg. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. 443–502. Misch, Georg. A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. I. London: Routledge and Paul, 1950. Neumann, Bernd. Identität und Rollenzwang: Zur Theorie der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Athenäum, 1970 [New edition as Von Augustinus zu Facebook. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Autobiographie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013].

1.19 Social History 

 181

Rath, Wolfgang. “Romane und Erzählungen der siebziger bis neunziger Jahre (BRD).” Deutsche Literatur zwischen 1945 und 1995. Eine Sozialgeschichte. Ed. Horst Glaser. Bern: Haupt, 1997. 309–328. Richardson, Alan. Literature, Education, and Romanticism. Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Schneider, Jost. Sozialgeschichte des Lesens: Zur historischen Entwicklung und sozialen Differen­ zierung der literarischen Kommunikation in Deutschland. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. Sloterdijk, Peter. Literatur und Lebenserfahrung, Literatur und Organisation von Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der Zwanziger Jahre. München: Hanser, 1978. Treadwell, James. Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–1834. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ueding, Gert. Klassik und Romantik. Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution 1789–1815. Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. IV. Ed. Rolf Grimminger. München: Hanser, 1987. Vincent, David. Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of nineteenth-century Working Class Autobiography. London: Methuen, 1982. Warneken, Bernd. Populare Kultur. Gehen – Protestieren – Erzählen – Imaginieren. Köln: Böhlau, 2010. Willems, Marianne, and Herbert Willems. “Wissensformen und Sinngeneratoren. Zum komplementären Verhältnis des New Historicism zu Ansätzen der Kultursoziologie.” Sinngeneratoren. Fremd- und Selbstthematisierung in soziologisch-historischer Perspektive. Ed. Cornelia Bohn and Herbert Willems. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2001. 397–428. Wuthenow, Ralph-Rainer. “Autobiographien und Memoiren, Tagebücher, Reiseberichte.” Deutsche Literatur: Eine Sozialgeschichte. Zwischen Absolutismus und Aufklärung: Rationalismus, Empfindsamkeit, Sturm und Drang, 1740–1786. Vol. IV. Ed. Horst Glaser. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980. 148–169.

Further Reading Jolly, Margaretta, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. Krüger, Heinz-Hermann, and Winifried Marotzki. Handbuch erziehungswissenschaftliche Biographieforschung. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1999. Kuismin, Anna. White Field, Black Seeds: Nordic Literacy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2013.

1.20 Sociology Gabriele Rosenthal

In sociology, biographical research is an internationally established sub-discipline with a genuine theoretical basis and methodology of its own. These are embedded in the tradition of ‘verstehende’ or interpretive sociology, and follow the idea that scientific explanations of the social world must refer to the subjective meaning of the actions of human beings and explain their actions and the consequences of their actions through their interdependency with the actions of others (Schütz 1962). In German sociology this approach is mainly based on sociology of knowledge in the tradition of Alfred Schütz, symbolic interactionism in the tradtion of George Herbert Mead, and social constructivism as developed by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luck­ mann. In their book The social construction of reality (1966), Berger and Luckmann proposed the underpinning for a fundamental social theory for examining questions such as how social order is created, how it is maintained, and how it changes. In their conception, and in that of interpretive sociology generally, humans are not seen as puppets dependent on social structures, at the mercy of social norms and institu­ tions, but as actors with their own power of interpretation and their own power of agency, which always have a creative quality. As shown by Berger and Luckmann, the individual is faced with social reality as an ‘objective reality’, but on the other hand this reality is constituted by ‘subjective’ construction processes. The main purpose of biographical research is to reconstruct actors’ subjective constructions, and to show how these have emerged and changed in the course of their life history. Important for the way the sociologist, or the social scientist in general, understands others, is the principle formulated by Alfred Schütz (1962) that sociological constructions should be based on constructs of everyday life-world and that the mental objects of the social sciences must remain consistent with those which are formed by people in their every­ day lives. This requires that social researchers find out how the actors construct their own reality, in other words how they experience their world, how they interpret this world, and which methods of communication they use in the process. The constitu­ tion of social reality takes place in interactive processes which depend on how the actors interpret the situation. However, these interpretations are not arbitrary and are not based on the individual’s ‘lone’ psychic processes. Rather, they are based on stocks of knowledge internalized and shared with others in the course of socialization, what might be called collective stocks of knowledge, which contain rules for action and interaction, and which lead to different subjective interpretations and implemen­ tations in concrete contexts of activity, depending on the biographical situation. In other words, in his interpretations or constructions of meaning, the individual has recourse to collective stocks of knowledge. The way these are spelled out and applied will always vary according to the person’s life history and experiences, and they will always require creative application arising from the reflections of the individual in https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-021

1.20 Sociology 

 183

the concrete situation. In the course of his or her socialization, the individual learns in which settings biographical thematizations are expected and the rules according to which these are produced. The settings in which biographical thematizations are required or socially desired, or not desired, differ in the same way as the social rules concerning which areas and phases of life may or should be discussed, and how, and which should not, vary from culture to culture, from milieu to milieu, from nation to nation, and even from family to family. Thus, for example, migrants, who have been socialized in different cultures and political units (such as states), may have learned and internalized very different collective rules regarding biographical self-themati­ zation and thematization by others (Apitzsch and Siuoti 2015; Bogner and Rosenthal 2017). Social, institutional, organizational, group and family-specific rules, or the rules for different discourses, lay down what can or should be thematized, and what not, as well as how, when and in which contexts. As a result of biographical self-thematization and thematization by others in dif­ ferent situations and social contexts, people develop biographical constructions in the course of their lives which help them to interpret their life, i.  e. to give a meaning to their past, present and future, and thus to gain an orientation for their actions and their lives. These constructions have similar functions in processes of understanding others, or trying to understand how and why other people have become what they are and act the way they do. This work of construction, which must be constantly repeated or continued by the individual autobiographer in social interactions, is carried out with the aid of socially predefined patterns (e.  g. patterns prespecified by a collectivity, or rather by several collectivities), which are partly institutionalized and partly internalized in the course of socialization. Neither these patterns, nor the work of construction carried out with their help, can ever be a (purely) individual matter. These constructions may solidify in the course of a life, but they are also repeatedly modified, and in particular they repeatedly require a new interpretation of the past in the light of the changing present and changing imagined future(s) in the context of changing and critical life situations. The biography of an individual is thus repeatedly recreated in the changing presents of narration or writing. In sociological biographical research, the life stories narrated or presented in bio­ graphical narrative interviews are the main instrument used for reconstructing the individual’s stock of knowledge, its genesis in the course of a person’s life, biograph­ ical self-presentations, social actions (and experiences) and social milieus (Schütze 2005, 2007; Rosenthal 1995, 2003). However, biographical thematizations in everyday or organization contexts, written and published autobiographies, biographical (and family) documents (photo albums, diaries, letters, etc.), and personal records (lifecourse data in court proceedings, personal files in political parties, medical histories, etc.), and especially a combination of these materials, are also used as sources of data. Life stories are perceived as suitable sociological material for reconstructing patterns of interpretation and social actions. With a concentration on single cases and the use of qualitative-interpretive methods, the research first focused on the individual biog­

184 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

raphy with the intention of making sense of and accounting for particular life expe­ riences or phases within the context of a person’s life. With the central aim of using microscopic interpretive and qualitative studies in order to be able to take into account the perspectives of the actors and their communities, as well as their specific geo­ graphical and historical circumstances, biographical research follows Max Weber’s conception of social science as a ‘science of concrete reality’, as opposed to sciences such as theoretical physics or economic theory that set out to discover general laws for the activities of their subject matter (Rossi 1987, 7–62; Kruse 1990). Weber postu­ lated sociology as “a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects” (1994, 228). However, its aim is not only to analyze subjective meaning or individual cases, but to do justice to the mutual constitution of individuals and societies. Lifestory and collective historical processes are examined empirically in their ineluctable interrelationship. Biographical research focuses on the decoding and investigation of the linkages and interferences – in other words the inseparable unity – of individual and collective histories, of ‘individuals’ and ‘society’. That societies are constituted by individuals seems to be an obvious and easily comprehensible fact. However, the deceptive notion of an additive or summative connection, in the manner of classical mechanics, may easily creep in here. The reverse connection is harder to understand – the constitution of individuals, including their interpretations of their life and the way they live, by collective or ‘societal’ structures and forces.

History Sociological biographical research began at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, in association with the migration study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America by William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1958). This research was on cultural identity and social change in the Polish immigrant community in the United States, and to this day the biographical approach is a prominent method used in the sub-dis­ cipline of sociology of migration (Breckner, 2007; Siouti 2016). Even in this first study on migration by Thomas and Znaniecki, empirical work was already concentrated on the single case study. Alongside a documentary analysis of the migration process (based especially on collections of letters between the home country, Poland, and the USA), this voluminous work contains only one autobiography of a Polish migrant com­ missioned by the researchers. The authors even go so far as to claim that “life-records have a marked superiority over any other kinds of materials. We are safe in saying that personal life-records, as complete as possible, constitute the perfect type of sociolog­ ical material” (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958, 1832). It was not the concrete biographical analysis that made this work so influential for subsequent interpretive sociology and biographical research, as much as the two

1.20 Sociology 

 185

authors’ general methodological comments. One of the most important of these was their remark that “social science cannot remain on the surface of social becoming, where certain schools wish to have it float, but must reach the actual human expe­ riences and attitudes which constitute the full, live and active social reality beneath the formal organization of social institutions” (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958, II, 1834). Biographical research, inspired by this study, blossomed at the Sociology Depart­ ment in Chicago during the 1920s at the initiative of Ernest W. Burgess (1886–1966) and Robert E. Park (1864–1944). Researchers inspired by the idea of getting inside of the actor’s perspective now recognized the advantages of the biographical case study for recording the ‘subjective perspectives’, the constructions of meaning generated by members of various milieus. Clifford Shaw’s classical case study of a young criminal, published in 1930, was also basically inspired by Thomas and Park. Shaw observed Stanley, as he calls him, over a period of six years, and also got him to write an auto­ biographical report. In his analysis, Shaw discusses not only the genesis of a delin­ quent career, but underlines that for the diagnosis and treatment of delinquents their ‘own history’ is important. In the 1970s sociology increasingly began re-examining the work of the Chicago School, leading to a boom in interpretive biographical research. The first anthology of biographical research was published in Germany in 1978 by Martin Kohli, and an international reader by French sociologist Daniel Bertaux followed in 1981 (Bertaux and Kohli 1984). This field of research is expanding to this day in various specialist disciplines. In sociology today, biographies are increasingly considered and examined as a social construct of social reality in themselves (Kohli 1986; Fischer and Kohli 1987), whereas initially, written or narrated biographies were mainly used as a means of data collection, as a source of specific information. Over the last 20 years, in the field of sociological biographical research an intergenerational perspective and an elaborate conception of family history have become established, involving the anal­ ysis of interconnected biographies of multiple generations within a family (in the wider sense of a cross-generational kin network). Daniel Bertaux and others have postulated that we need to use family history as the appropriate level for case studies, as opposed to individual biographies (Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame 1997; Bohler and Hildenbrand 1995; Rosenthal 2010, 2012). This was an important step towards over­ coming an ahistorical perspective and embedding biographies within the diachronic context of social history. The case level of family histories and a timeframe oriented towards several generations – unlike the level of individual life stories – enables us to reconstruct the processes of development and change in social phenomena over the ‘longue durée’ and to analyze the family history in its interrelationship with the history of larger groupings or collectivities (Bertaux and Delcroix 2000). A socio-his­ torical timeframe that includes several generations of the same family – which may cover up to five generations in interviews with three-generation families – allows us to bridge the gaps between the micro, meso, and macro levels of enquiry (Bertaux and Thompson 1997, 12). Reconstructions that carefully use thick descriptions of life

186 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

and family histories in their intertwining with collective processes of transforma­ tion allow not only for a consideration of the interdependency of macro and micro levels of enquiry (or society and individual), they also allow for the construction of bridges between the various disciplines. Norbert Elias (1991) discussed the interde­ pendency between the structures of individuals and the social or collective struc­ tures, and made clear that “transformation at the level of society can only be under­ stood in the context of transformation at the level of the individual and vice versa” (Niestroj 1989, 141).

Theoretical Assumptions As we have shown, in sociological conceptions biography is understood not as some­ thing purely individual or subjective, but as a social construct. It refers to collective rules, discourses and conditions of a social, collective context, and both in its develop­ ment and in the interpretive reflections of the autobiographer, it is always at the same time both an individual and a social, collective product. In addition to the attempt to do justice to these so-called ‘interrelationships’ on the basis of the biographies and life stories of individuals, a biographical approach has two other objectives. The first is to interpret the meaning of experiences and activities not in isolation but in the overall context of the life story, and the other is to reconstruct and analyze the histor­ ical process of the genesis, maintenance and change of collective, social phenomena in the context of life courses. Practitioners of interpretative biographical research use biographical methods for questions that obviously relate to the life stories of people; but in addition, questions relating to other topics may also be formulated in biographical form. The methodolog­ ical decision to ask for the whole life story to be told, regardless of the specific research question, is based on fundamental theoretical assumptions (Rosenthal 2004). When we are dealing with questions of social science or history relating to social phenomena that are tied to people’s experiences and have biographical meaning for them, these assumptions lead us to interpret the meaning of these phenomena within the context of their biographies. These assumptions are: 1. In order to understand and explain social and psychological phenomena we have to reconstruct their genesis  – the process of their creation, reproduction, and transformation. 2. In order to understand and explain people’s actions and activities it is necessary to find out about both the subjective perspectives of the actors and their long-time courses of action. We want to find out what they experienced, what meaning they gave their actions at the time, what meaning they assign to them today, and in which biographically constituted contexts they embed their experiences.

1.20 Sociology 

 187

3. In order to be able to understand and explain the statements of an interviewee or autobiographer about particular topics and experiences in his or her past, it is necessary to interpret these statements as an integral part of the overall context of the person’s present life and the resulting present and future perspectives. In biographical studies the researcher looks at the experiences preceding and follow­ ing the phenomenon in question, and the diachronic order in which they occurred. The point is to reconstruct social phenomena in their process of becoming. This applies both to processes of creation and reproduction of established structures and to processes of transformation. When reconstructing a past (the life history) presented in the present of a life narrative (the life story) it has to be considered that the pres­ entation of past events is constituted by the present of narration. The present of the autobiographer determines the perspective from which the past is seen and produces a specific past. His or her present perspective conditions the selection of memories, the temporal and thematic linkage of memories, and the type of representation of the remembered experiences. This means that in the course of a life, with its biographical turning points that lead to reinterpretations of the past and present, and also of the future, new remembered pasts arise at each point (Fischer 1982). This construction of the past out of the present is not, however, to be understood as a construction that is separate from the experienced past. Instead, memory-based narratives of experienced events are also constituted through experiences in the past (Rosenthal 2006; 2016). Thus narratives of experienced events are shaped both by the present life and the past experience. Just as the past is constituted out of the present and the anticipated future, so the present arises out of the past and the possible or imagined futures. In this way biographical narratives provide information about the narrator’s present, as well as about his or her past and his or her images of the future.

Objectives Biographical research in sociology has several goals. On the one hand, it is concerned with the analysis of experiences within specific spheres or phases of the life of particu­ lar group(ing)s of people in particular historical periods and particular places (like the classical study by Thomas and Znaniecki on Polish immigrants in the USA, or studies of particular youth scenes). On the other hand, it is concerned with the reconstruction of social settings from the perspective of the actors in specific historical periods and socio-cultural contexts (e.  g. a milieu study of a socially deprived area in a big city). Another aim is the analysis of biographical self-thematization and thematization by others in social interactions, both in private contexts (e.  g. with family members or friends) and in formal or institutionalized contexts (e.  g. in court, in job interviews, at the doctor’s, in church-related settings, or in contexts of conflict management). An

188 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

important issue for current biographical research in sociology is to connect the anal­ ysis of biographical constructions and biographical self-presentation in the present (for instance, what are the rules for biographical self-thematization by survivors of collective violence in Bosnia or by former psychiatric patients?) with a reconstruction of the genesis and transformation of these constructions. Researchers also examine to what extent biographical thematizations in certain settings in the past (such as asylum procedures or psychiatric interviews) have a sustained influence on construc­ tions in the present and in other social contexts and situations.

Methods The goals of biographical research and the theoretical assumptions discussed above imply particular requirements for data collection and methods of data analysis. Unlike other qualitative methods, the intention is to reveal not only the patterns of interpre­ tation of the interviewees in the present of the interview, but also to obtain an insight into the genesis of these interpretations, their interconnectedness with the lived life and with the sequential ‘Gestalt’ [figure/form] of the life history. The methods enable the researcher to attain proximity to the courses of action and the experiences of the autobiographer, not only to his or her present interpretations, and to reconstruct the differences between the present perspectives and the perspectives that have been adopted in the past. The biographical narrative interview (Schütze 2005; Rosenthal 2003), in which the interviewees are asked to tell their life story, meets these requirements particu­ larly well. For the text analysis of biographical interviews proposed by Schütze (2007; Riemann 2006), the differentiation of text sorts (narration, argumentation and description), an analysis of their function, and a reconstruction of the overall bio­ graphical structuring of the life history are important. In the approach presented by the author (Rosenthal 1995, 2004), it is crucial to investigate the two levels of narrated and experienced life history in separate analytical steps. This means that the objective of reconstruction covers both the biographical meaning and potency of the past expe­ rience and the meaning of the self-presentation in the present. In this method of bio­ graphical case reconstruction, sequential analysis represents a procedure for analyz­ ing the temporal structure of both the narrated and the experienced life history. On the basis of the given text, the researcher tries to reconstruct the sequential ‘Gestalt’ of the life story presented in the interview, and in a subsequent, separate step the sequential ‘Gestalt’ of the experienced life history is also analyzed. These two steps then con­ tribute to discovering the genetic connectedness and interrelationship between both. Translation: Ruth Schubert

1.20 Sociology 

 189

Works Cited Apitzsch, Ursula, and Irini Siouti. “Biographical Analysis as an Interdisciplinary Research Perspective in the Field of Migration Studies.” Research Integration: Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, University of York. https://www.york.ac.uk/res/researchintegration/Integrative_Research_ Methods/Apitzsch%20Biographical%20Analysis%20April%202007.pdf (20 August 2018). Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Bertaux, Daniel, ed. Biography and Society. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981. Bertaux, Daniel, and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame. “Heritage and its Lineage: A Case History of Transmission and Social Mobility Over Five Generations.” Pathways to social class. Ed. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 63– 97. Bertaux, Daniel, and Catherine Delcroix. “Case Histories of Families and Social Processes: Enriching Sociology.” The Turn of Biographical Methods in Social Science. Eds. Prue Camberlayne, Joan Bornat, and Tom Wengraf. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. 71–89. Bertaux, Daniel, and Martin Kohli. “The Life Story Approach: A Continental View.” Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984): 215–237. Bertaux, Daniel, and Paul Thompson. “Introduction.” Pathways to social class. Eds. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 1–31. Bogner, Artur, and Gabriele Rosenthal, eds. Biographies in the Global South. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 2017. Bohler, Karl Friedrich, and Bruno Hildenbrand. “Conditions for Sociological Research in Biography.” International Sociology 10.3 (1995): 331–340. Breckner, Roswitha. “Case-Oriented Comparative Approaches. The Biographical Perspective as Potential and Challenge in Migration Research.” In: Concepts and Methods in Migration Research. Conference Reader. Ed. Karin Schittenhelm. 113–152. (2007). https://www.academia. edu/2528100/Case-oriented_comparative_approaches_the_biographical_perspective_as_ opportunity_and_challenge_in_migration_research (20 August 2018). Elias, Norbert. Die Gesellschaft der Individuen. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987 [The Society of Individuals. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991]. Fischer, Wolfram. Time and Chronic Illness. A Study on Social Constitution of Temporality. Habil. Thesis U Berkeley, 1982. Fischer, Wolfram, and Martin Kohli. “Biographieforschung.” Methoden der Biographie- und Lebens­ laufforschung. Ed. Wolfgang Voges. Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1987. 25–50. Kohli, Martin. “Biographical Research in the German Language Area.” A Commemorative Book in Honor of Florian Znaniecki on the Centenary of his Birth. Ed. Zygmunt Dulcewski. Poznan: ­Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1986. 91–110. Kruse, Volker. “Von der historischen Nationalökonomie zur historischen Soziologie.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 19.3 (1990): 149–165. Niestroj, Brigitte. “Norbert Elias: A Milestone in Historical Psycho-sociology: The Making of the Social Person.” Journal of Historical Sociology 2.2 (1989): 136–169. Riemann, Gerhard. “An Introduction to ‘Doing Biographical Research’.” Historical Social Research 31.3 (2006): 6–28. Rosenthal, Gabriele. Erlebte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte. Gestalt und Struktur biographischer Selbstbeschreibungen. Frankfurt a.  M.: Campus, 1995. Rosenthal, Gabriele, ed. “Special Issue: Family History – Life Story.” History of the Family: An International Quarterly 7. Stamford: Jai Press, 2002. Rosenthal, Gabriele. “Biographical Research.” Qualitative Research Practice. Ed. Clive Seale, Giampetro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman. London: Sage, 2004. 48–64.

190 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Rosenthal, Gabriele. “The Narrated Life Story: On The Interrelation Between Experience, Memory and Narration.” Narrative, Memory and Knowledge: Representations, Aesthetics and Contexts. Ed. Nancy Kelly, Christine Horrocks, Kate Milnes, Brian Roberts, and David Robinson. Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press, 2006. 1–16. Rosenthal, Gabriele, ed. The Holocaust in Three Generations. Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime. 2nd revised edition. Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2010. Rosenthal, Gabriele. “A Plea for a More Interpretive, More Empirical and More Historical Sociology”. The Shape of Sociology for the Twenty-First Century: Tradition and Renewal. Ed. Devorah Kalekin-Fishman and Ann B. Denis. London: Sage, 2012. 202–217. Rosenthal, Gabriele. “The Social Construction of Individual and Collective Memory.” In: Theorizing Social Memories. Concepts, Temporality, Functions. Ed. Gerd Sebald and Jatin Wagle. London: Routledge, (2016): 32–55. Rossi, Pietro. Vom Historismus zur historischen Sozialwissenschaft: Heidelberger Max Weber-Vorlesungen 1985. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. Schütz, Alfred. “Common-sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action.” Collected Papers. Vol. I. The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962. 3–47. Schütze, Fritz. “Cognitive Figures of Autobiographical Extempore Narration.” Biographical Research Methods. Vol. II (1984). Ed. Robert Miller. London: Sage, 2005. 289–338. Schütze, Fritz. “Biography Analysis on the Empirical Base of Autobiographical Narratives: How to Analyse Autobiographical Narrative Interviews—part II. Module B.2.2. INVITE—Biographical Counselling in Rehabilitative Vocational Training—Further Education Curriculum.” http://www.uni-magdeburg.de/zsm/projekt/biographical/1/B2.2.pdf. (14 June 2018). Shaw, Clifford R. The Jack-Roller. A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930. Siouti, Irini. “Biography as a Theoretical and Methodological Key Concept in Transnational Migration Studies.” In: The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History. Ed. Ivor Goodson Ari Antikainen, Pat Sikes, and Molly Andrews. 179–189. London: Routledge. 2016. Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 2nd ed. 1958. Weber, Max. Sociological writing. Ed. Wolf Heydebrand. London: Continuum, 1994.

Further Reading Champerlayne, Prue, Johanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf. The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science. London: Routledge, 2000. Miller, Robert Lee, ed. Biographical Research Methods. 4 vols. London: Sage, 2005. Rosenthal, Gabriele. “Biographical Research.” Qualitative Research Practice. Ed. Clive Seale, Giampetro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman. London: Sage, 2004. 48–64.

1.21 Structuralism Erik Martin

Structuralism was, inter alia, a harsh critique of the classical humanistic concept of the subject. This criticism was directed pre-eminently against the idea of an autono­ mous ‘I’, which has, by immediate self-presence or self-evidence, a privileged knowl­ edge of its own identity. In contrast, structuralism assumes that all knowledge is ineluctably bound to language defined as a decentralized system with no ‘private’ epistemic access whatsoever. Moreover, structuralism proposes that the subject is rather an effect of language, than its transcendent creator. This was a serious chal­ lenge because autobiography, at least from the hermeneutic point of view, was not only a literary genre defined by concepts like authenticity, authority, and facticity, i.  e. paradigmatic forms of truthful testimony and genuine self-expression, but a place of sovereign knowledge about oneself as well as history and society. Georg Misch, claimed that there is “nothing truer or more revealing than the inner form [of autobi­ ography]” (Misch 1998, 11) for this “inner form” also reflects the basic relation between the I and the world. Even though the subjectivist approach to autobiography brought along substantial methodological difficulties such as the problem of fictionalization of life ensuing from a deliberate selection of facts by the writer of an autobiography or the problem of scientific and objective value of “inner form”, those problems were considered as basic problems of hermeneutics in general and its proponents were not willing to sacrifice an essentialist concept of subjectivity to solve them. This radical step was to be done by the structuralists. Structuralism originated from structural linguistics which begins with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. His groundbreaking ideas on the structure of language were summarized by his pupils, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in the epochal Cours de linguistique générale (1916) [Course in General Linguistics (1959)] which was pub­ lished after de Saussure’s death. The book provided the foundation for both modern linguistics and semiotics and was proven to be highly influential not only on academic linguistics but also on philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Many concepts in the Course in General Linguistics are based on binary oppo­ sitions. First of all, Saussure differentiates within the human speech (‘langage’) between ‘langue’, as a system of abstract rules and conventions that is independ­ ent of and logically pre-exists individual users, and ‘parole’ as the individual acts of speech. Although language does not exist independently from concrete utterances, de Saussure claims that while human speech is heterogeneous and thus can be subject of various sciences, it is ‘langue’ that is which is homogeneous and therefore the prior object for linguistics (de Saussure 1959, 15). Inside the ‘langue’, the basic notion for de Saussure is the linguistic sign, which consists of a(n) (abstract) sound image (sig­ nifier/‘signifiant’) and a mental concept (signified/‘signifié’). Although the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary or unmotivated, both elements form an https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-022

192 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

inseparable psychological entity (1959, 66). Since de Saussure supposes that there are no pre-existing ideas and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language, a sign cannot be positively determined by its mental ‘content’, that is by signification (1959, 112). Rather each sign is defined through its linguistic value i.  e. through its negative relation to other signs. De Saussure uses the example of the French word ‘mouton’ and the English word ‘sheep’: Even though both words might have the same signification, they have different values because in speaking of a piece of meat on the table, English uses ‘mutton’ and not ‘sheep’ (1959, 115–116). Language thus works through systematic relations of difference which place signs in logical opposition to one another. This system of linguistic values completely determines a given state of language. But as the linguistic sign is arbitrary, language is permanently subjected to small changes and therefore can be studied as a synchronic as well as a diachronic phenom­ enon. However, de Saussure prefers the synchronic access because the synchronic laws apply generally, whereas diachronic facts can be accidental and particular (1959, 91–92). These concepts implied interesting alternatives to contemporary intellectual schools of thought. First of all, de Saussure’s ideas were clearly opposed to any kind of intuitivist or individualistic tendencies in philosophy, psychology, and other dis­ ciplines because mental phenomena were taken into account only as inextricably bound to linguistic facts, thus not being considered autonomous. Furthermore, de Saussure’s emphasis on the systemic character of the linguistic signs, as well as the plain preference of ‘langue’ over the individual speech act, explicitly precludes any notions of ‘expression’ of extralinguistic feelings or thought. But de Saussure also opposed the late nineteenth century positivism. For example he tried to overcome the so-called Neogrammarian School, which on the one hand restricted its research only to directly observable phenomena such as the sound level of language (ignor­ ing hereby it’s semiotic aspect) and on the other hand tried to deliver a complete description of the historical change of language governed by laws whose rigidity was supposed to be analogue to causal laws in natural science. De Saussure’s model of language as abstract a-temporal structure ecaped historicism as well as reductionism providing nevertheless linguistic laws sui generis accurate enough to maintain a sci­ entific standard. De Saussure’s ideas became very soon popular in Russia, a fact which might be explained by the work and influence of the Russian-Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, who might be considered as a precursor of structural linguistic (Jakob­ son 1972). However, long before the Russian translation of the Cours was completed in 1933, structuralist ideas were discussed in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the OPOJAZ (OПOЯЗ) (Russian: Общество изучения Поэтического Языка, Obščestvo izučenija POėtičeskogo JAZyka, ‘Society for the Study of Poetic Language’) in St. Petersburg. These groups united well-known linguists, philosophers, ethnographers, and artist like Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Osip Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and many others. Both groups were responsible for the development of Russian for­

1.21 Structuralism 

 193

malism (prominently linked with the names Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum and Yurij Tynianov, and sometimes used synonymously with OPOJaZ) as well as literary semiotics. Although structuralism and formalism were, of course, distinct intellectual par­ adigms, they had some substantial similarities. One of these similarities was the eminent importance of differential qualities. For example: In a short reflection on the concept of realism in 1921, Roman Jakobson repudiates the attempts to define realism through verisimilitude, for everything in art is conventional. However, there is a “revoljucionnyj realizm” [“revolutionary realism”] (Jakobson 1987, 89 [1971, 40]) which proposes new criteria of representation by deformation of the established canonical aesthetic rules, thus becoming ‘more real’ to the innovators (Jakobson 1971, 44). The notion of ‘deformation’ refers to the key-idea of formalist aesthetics and poetics – Viktor Shklovsky’s term ‘ostranenie’ which means ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘estrangement’. ‘Ostranenie’ provides a differential quality between poetic language and everyday language; because the former is more difficult to understand (for it describes familiar objects in strange terms), it forces us to pay attention to its percep­ tibility, which Shklovsky considers to be an aesthetic value per se (Shklovsky 1990). As a second common ground, one can refer to the attempt of overcoming the dualism of form and content. As in Saussurean theory of signs, where the sound image is not a form that ‘carries’ the mental concept as its content, Formalists fought the traditional opinion that the form of a literary work is a mere ‘ornatus’ [‘decoration’], an addition to what ‘the author tries to convey’. Rather the form was thought to be the content of literature, which means that a piece of art first of all draws attention to its ‘being made’, its texture (Hansen-Löve 1985). The third resemblance between formalism and structuralism is the rejection of historicism. In an essay from 1927, Tynianov tried to replace literary genesis, understood as a historical succession of ‘great’ writers and their influence on the following generation, through systemic evolution, which shall study the shifts of literary functions in different genres and epochs (Tynianov 1971). Moreover, along with Heinrich Wölfflin, the Formalists wanted to write a “history of art without names” (1917, VII) in the sense that not singular artists but literature itself (its technique and devices) has to become an agent of its own development. It is unnecessary to stress, that formalists also repudiated psychological or biographical explanations of literature. Despite this bias against the author as a (psychological, social, historical) persona, it is quite remarkable that the main figures of formalism turned to (auto)biog­ raphy in their works. In the early 1920s Shklovsky wrote three larger autobiographical texts: Sentimental’noe putešestvie (1923) [A Sentimental Journey (1970)], Zoo. Pis’ma ne o ljub’vi ili Tret’ja Ėloiza (1923) [Zoo. Letters Not About Love, or The Third Heloise (1971)], and Tret’ja fabrika (1926) [The Third Factory (1979)]. The Journey is about the years of revolution and civil war, in which Shklovsky actively participated – in fact, he was forced to flee Russia for being part of an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. Thus the title alludes to Laurence Sterne, not in respect to the ‘idyllic’ content, but rather to

194 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

the digressive style Shklovsky so much admired in his theoretical and emulated in (auto)fictional text. The same game of ironic stylization combined with an intricate mixture of events from personal life and literary ‘syuzhets’ [‘storys’] can be found in Zoo. The motivation behind the text is Shklovsky’s unrequited passion for Elsa Triolet, the future wife of Louis Aragon (hence the subtitle of the text, for Elsa is the third Heloise after Abelard’s and Rousseau’s). The letters, however, are not about love, but rather an intimate reflexion on his exiled situation in Berlin alternating with general thoughts on theory of literature thus defamiliarizing the genre of an epistolary novel. The last letter deconstructs this genre completely, for it is addressed not to Elsa Triolet but to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee with a plea for the permission to return to Russia. The Third Factory is perhaps the most autoreferential of these texts, for it explicitly lays bare the devices of constructing one’s life as a literary fact. (Auto)biography also plays a certain role for Boris Eikhenbaum. Alongside with ‘typical’ formalist writings in the 1920s he works on a biography of Tolstoy which gained a tremendous extent and was published between the years 1922 and 1940 in several volumes. In 1929 Eikhenbaum publishes Moj vremennik [My chonicle], a pecu­ liar mix of heterogenic genres such as autobiography, diary, memoires, family chroni­ cle, as well as theoretical reflection on literature and history (Levčenko 2012). The work of Jurij Tynianov is also situated in the liminal space between scientific biography and historical fiction. One of his two major novels deals with a rather off­ shoot figure of Russian literature – the romantic poet and critic Wilhelm Küchelbecker (Tynianov 1925). The other is about the last years of the famous poet and a friend of Pushkin – Alexander Griboedov (Tynianov 1929). In these texts Tynianov intricately interweaves fact and fiction thus creating an indissoluble tension of illusiveness – a technique brought to more perfection in the historical novel Voskovaja persona (1931) [Wax Figure] (Bljumbaum 2002). For a long time among scholars the formalists’ retreat into autobiographical or fictional genres was regarded as a kind of Biedermeier, a consequence of the repres­ sions under the communistic regime in the late 1920s. Nowadays, this shift is likely considered to be due to an autonomous dialectic of the formalist’s inner development (Levčenko 2012). Moreover, the fusion of the roles of a critic, ‘litterateur’, and theorist in a single persona, as well as certain displacements of postulated theoretical con­ cepts in one’s own fiction, instantly brings to mind analogue techniques used by post­ modern writers such as Susan Sontag, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cicioux, Umberto Eco, and others. According to this fact, more recent publications try to regard formalism as rather connected with deconstruction than structuralism (Steiner 1984; Kujundzic 1997; Speck 1997). Nevertheless, the intellectual climate in the USSR forced various thinkers into emigration, which, regardless of personal hardship, helped the spreading of struc­ turalist ideas. It were the two émigrés, Roman Jakobson and Nikolay Trubezkoy, who besides Vilém Mathesius, Bohuslav Havránek, and later Jan Mukařovský, were the leading members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Though in some respects quite dif­

1.21 Structuralism 

 195

ferent from de Saussure’s original concepts (Holenstein 1975; Seriot 1999), it proved to play an important role in the development of structuralism. Along with the Copen­ hagen School around Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal and the adherents of de Saussure in Geneva, it was one of the three major centres of structuralism in Europe in the 1920s to1930s. As the political situation dramatically changed for the worst in the late 1930s, the intellectual centre of structuralism moved further to the west. In 1941 Jakobson managed to escape from Europe to New York where he met Claude Lévi-Strauss at the École Libre des Hautes Études. It is common belief that Jakobson’s ideas helped LéviStrauss to design a theoretical framework for the Structural Anthropology, a method he prominently employed in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) [The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969)]. It seems also most likely that Jakobson informed Lévi-Strauss that Vladimir Propp had applied structuralist methods to ethnography already in 1929, namely in his book Morfologija skazki [Morphology of the Folktale (1958)], where he claimed that the (Russian) fairy tale could be described exhaustively as a syntagmatic sequence of 31 narrative functions (Grazzini 1999). However, it was the works of Lévi-Strauss that revived the interest in structuralism in post-war France and made it a major intellectual movement among humanities. Jacques Lacan, for example, makes in “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage” (1953) [“The Func­ tion and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (2006)] explicit reference to Lévi-Strauss’s notion of a structural relation between language and society as he establishes his own concept of an analogy between the unconscious and language. Beside his scientific texts, Lévi-Strauss was also famous as the author of Triste Tropiques (1955) [A World on the Wane (1961)]. As it mostly deals with his anthropo­ logical fieldwork in Brazil, one would tend to classify it as travel literature. However, Susan Sontag called it an “intellectual autobiography, an exemplary personal history” (1966, 72) and Clifford Geertz has even regarded it as an “arch-text” (1988, 32) of all Lévi-Strauss’s writings. He draws attention to the question of this text’s genre, for it seems to be a “superimposing of different sorts of text, bringing an overall pattern [of] mutually interfering texts existing at the same level” (Geertz 1988, 33). It is also remarkable for its high level of self-reflexivity, which is already marked in its title, as “tropiques” obviously also alludes to ‘trope’. Furthermore, it explicitly reflects on the power of knowledge as a power of writing (in the prominent chapter “La leçon d’écrit­ ure” [“A Writing Lesson”]). But whereas Sontag seems to detect in Triste Tropiques “an immense but thoroughly subdued pathos” (1966, 80) which she even tries to invoke with the trope of romantic alienation and melancholy (the former title of her review – “A Hero of our Time” – refers to the homonymous work of the Russian post-romantic Michail Lermontov), Geertz stresses its total factious and self-reflecting character and even claims that it is written in the style of an “ideal-typical Russian/Czech formalist poem” (1988, 33). It seems to be characteristic that the interest on self-reflexivity becomes more and more eminent as it might indicate a transition from structuralism to poststructural­

196 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

ism. While structuralism was focused on the systematic oppositions that gave any utterance its meaning, deconstruction takes into account the self-context of enunci­ ation. However, for various theoreticians this transition was simply a modification of aspects and was not always clearly seen as a paradigm shift. Moreover, as structural­ ism became a leading intellectual movement in the 1960s, many theorists, who found themselves labelled this way, cannot not be unequivocally assigned to structuralism for they tried to overcome some of the structuralism’s basic tenets (but still use some of its elements or assumptions). Such authors with highly controversial affiliation with structuralism were for example Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, or Roland Barthes. In his autobiography, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977)] the French semiologist abandons the traditional chronological order of life narrative and, instead, composes his text of shorter paragraphs. As they are presented in an alphabetical order, these paragraphs indicate the basic textuality of the autobiographical ego. And, in order not to establish the alphabet as an authori­ tative pattern of representation, Barthes deliberately abandons the alphabetical order twice. This sort of play with the autobiographical form may be regarded as an effect of the structuralist awareness of linguistic and cultural patterns. As structuralism approached its point of crises, Philip Lejeune published his works on autobiography, which can on the overall account still be called structural­ ist. Lejeune defines autobiography as a “[r]écit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” [“retrospective 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”] (Lejeune 1975, 14 [1989, 4]). In order to be a substantial instrument for literary analysis, this definition has to at least be able to differentiate autobiography from adjacent genres. As Lejeune subsequently shows, this distinction works out in most cases like memoire, biography, diary, essay etc. However, there occur difficulties as the definition is applied to a personal novel, for there seems to be no formal indication possible in the text which helps us to decide whether it is fictional or not, as long as one does not take refuge in extra-tex­ tual entities like the author’s “special unity and identity across time” (Gusdorf 1980, 35). Lejeune’s solution is rather on the technical than the ontological level. In certain respect following Foucault’s conception of different functions of the author’s name in “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1969) [“What is an Author?”] Lejeune states that “l’autobi­ ographie (…) suppose qu’il y ait identité de nom entre l’auteur (tel qu’il figure, par son nom, sur la couverture), le narrateur du récit et le personnage dont on parle” [“auto­ biography […] supposes that there is identity of name between the author (such as he figures, by his name, on the cover), the narrator of the story, and the character who is being talking about”] (Lejeune 1975, 23–24 [1989, 12]). Since Lejeune operates from the point of view of the reader-response criticism, the supposed identity of narrator and author, of course, can never be proven right (or wrong) – it is simply a mode of ‘agree­

1.21 Structuralism 

 197

ment’ between the text and the reader that is precisely a contract, an autobiographical (or a fictional) pact stating the identity (resp. the non-identity) of the author. Lejeune’s proposal for a generic definition of autobiography provoked fundamen­ tal criticism, for, according to Paul de Man, “any book with a readable title-page is, to some extent, autobiographical” (de Man 1979, 922). De Man argues, that what Lejeune has mistaken for the author’s name is, in fact, the rhetorical figure of ‘prosopopoeia’, “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity” (1979, 926). This, however, is the basic trope of autobiography “by which one’s name […] is made as intelligible and memorable as a face” (1979, 926; emphasis mine). Because the author’s name is just a trope among others, the distinction between fact and fiction is no longer a sensible operation. But as far as the trope of ‘prosopopoeia’ not only conceals this distinction but also “reveals the tropological structure that underlies all cognition, including knowledge of the self”, autobiography becomes a privileged place, for “it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totali­ zation of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions” (de Man 1979, 922). Notwithstanding, de Man repudiates the essentialist possibility of defining auto­ biography as a genre, opening thereby a viable option for a formal analysis with struc­ turalist methods. As Stefan Goldmann has shown, certain ‘topoi’, originating from the classical tradition of the rhetorical ‘persona’ description, such as descent and parent­ age, diseases, first reading experience, etc., may be regarded as invariant patterns of autobiographical self-representation. Furthermore, he observes that in many auto­ biographies of the European tradition the myth of Heracles provides a cultural mirror for the ‘individual’ autobiographical ego (Goldmann 1993).

Works Cited Bljumbaum, Arkadij. Konstrukcija mnimosti. St. Petersburg: Giperion, 2002. Ėjchenbaum, Boris. Moj vremennik. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelej, 1929. Geertz, Clifford. “The world in a text. How to read Tristes Tropiques.” Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Ed. Clifford Geertz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 25–48. Goldmann, Stefan. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland im Goethekreis. Eine psychoanalytische Studie zur Autobiographie und ihrer Topik. Stuttgart: M&P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1993. Grazzini, Serena. Der strukturalistische Zirkel. Theorien über Mythos und Märchen bei Propp, LéviStrauss, Meletinskij. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1999. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and limits of autobiography.” Autobiography. Essays theoretical and critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Hansen-Löve, Aage. “Faktur, Gemachtheit.” Glossarium der russischen Avantgarde. Ed. Aleksandar Flaker. Graz: Droschl, 1985. 212–219. Holenstein, Elmar. Roman Jakobsons phänomenologischer Strukturalismus. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1975. Jakobson, Roman. “O chudožestvennom realizme.” Raboty po poėtike. Ed. M. L. Gasparova. Moscow: Progress, 1987. 387–393 [“On Realism in Art.” Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. 38–46].

198 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Jakobson, Roman. “The Kazan School of Polish Linguistics and its Place in the International Devel­ opment of Phonology.” Selected Writings. Word and Language. Vol. II. Ed. Roman Jakobson. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. 394–429. Kujundžić, Dragan. The returns of history. Russian Nietzscheans after modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage.” La psychanalyse 1 (1956): 81–166 [“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English. Ed. Jaques Lacan. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 197–268]. Lejeune, Philip. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]. Levčenko, Jan. Drugaja nauka. Russkie formalisty v poiskach biografii. Moscow: Dom Vysšej Školy Ėkonomiki, 2012. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955 [A world on the wane. Trans. John Russell. New York: Criterion Books, 1961]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919–930. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Das Altertum. Vol. I. Frankfurt a.  M.: Schulte Blumke, 1949 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Part 1. Trans. Karl Mannheim. London: Routledge, 1998]. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne: Payot, 1916 [Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959]. Seriot, Patrick. Structure et totalité: les origines intellctuelles du structuralisme en Europe centrale et orientale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. [Šklovskij] Shklovsky, Viktor. Sentimental’noe putešestvie. Moscow, Berlin: Gelikon, 1923 [A Sentimental Journey. Memoirs, 1917–1922. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970]. [Šklovskij] Shklovsky, Viktor. Zoo. Pis’ma ne o ljubvi ili Tret’ja Ėloiza. Moscow, Berlin: Gelikon, 1923 [Zoo, or Letters not about love. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971]. [Šklovskij] Shklovsky, Viktor. Tret’ja fabrika. Moscow: Artel’ pisatelej, 1926 [Third Factory. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979]. [Šklovskij] Shklovsky, Viktor. “Iskusstvo kak priem.” Sborniki po teorii poetičeskogo jazyka. Vol. II. St. Petersburg: Opojaz, 1917. 3–14 [“Art as Device.” Theory of Prose. Ed. Victor Shklovsky. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. 1–15]. Sontag, Susan. “The anthropologist as hero.” Against interpretation. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. 69–82. Speck, Stefan. Von Šklovskij zu de Man: zur Aktualität formalistischer Literaturtheorie. München: Fink, 1997. Steiner, Peter. Russian formalism: a metapoetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Tynjanov, Jurij. Kjuchlja. Leningrad: Kubuč, 1925. Tynjanov, Jurij. Smert’ Vazir-Muchtara. Leningrad: Priboj, 1929. Tynjanov, Jurij. “Voskovaja persona.” Zvezda 1.2 (1931). N.pag. Tynjanov, Jurij. “O literaturnoj ėvoljucii.” Poėtika. Istorija literatury. Kino. Ed. Yuri Tynianov. Moscow: Nauka, 1977. 270–281 [“On Literary Evolution.” Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. 66–78]. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. München: Hugo Bruckmann Verlag, 1917.

1.21 Structuralism 

 199

Further Reading Blanchard, Marc Eli. “Of Cannibalism and Autobiography.” Modern Language Notes 93 (1978): 654–676. Blanchard, Marc Eli. “The Critique of Autobiography.” Comparative Literature 34 (1982): 97–115. Hansen-Löve, Aage. Der russische Formalismus: methodologische Rekonstruktion seiner ­Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978. Mehlman, Jeffrey. A structural study of autobiography: Proust, Leiris, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: essays theoretical and critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Olney, James. Metaphors of self: the meaning of autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge, 1960.

1.22 Theology Thomas K. Kuhn

Autobiography research that is international and interdisciplinary has boomed con­ siderably in recent decades and is flanked by instructive theoretical debates. If in 1988 the historian Andreas Gestrich could still describe as ‘desolate’ the situation of scholarly historical biography (Gestrich 1988, 5), to which the concern with per­ sonal biographical testimonies also belongs, a new and broad interest in research on life stories has emerged. The same cannot be said however – and in contrast to the lively Anglophone scholarship (see in particular the work by John D. Barbour) – for German-language theology. The assessment by Lothar Kuld in 1997 that theolog­ ical autobiography research is still very much in the beginning still holds for today (Kuld 1997, 11), even if it has noticeably grown since the 1980s in practical theology especially – above all in the context of research on (religious) curriculum vitae and pastoral care. Autobiographical research in the discipline of theology is divided into a methodologically under-reflective church history that hardly participates in expand­ ing theory discussions (Nowak 1994, 45) and a much more interdisciplinary-ori­ ented approach rooted in practical theology. Both research perspectives frequently procede without an awareness of one another; common to both are, alongside the interest in gender studies, questions concerning religious praxis in social and indi­ vidual life contexts, the life-informing effects of theological and religious orienta­ tions, as well as the shape and function of biographies in the context of death and dying. Within the Christian tradition, polymorphic biographical literature commands a qualitatively significant position. The study of these particular sources in theology is by no means self-evident, but entails specific theological requirements. Although biographical interest appears as a characteristic of the modern history of Christianity stemming from the Pietist heritage (Drehsen 1990, 33), the dominance of dialectical theology in the twentieth century for a long time prevented a theological concern for biographical texts. This theology derived from God did not ascribe any essential theo­ logical relevance to life stories: For if God is the entirely other, life stories do not play a role; faith does not aim for self-mirroring, but expects the call from ‘outside’. Without a doubt, the arguments made by Karl Barth and others carry theological weight, but they do not answer the question of how to think the relationship between biography and religion. Only the insight into the existentiality of belief, as advocated for instance by Rudolf Bultmann, as well as the emphasis on the contextuality of theology and reli­ gion in the lifeworld encouraged the theological confrontation with (auto)biography. Hence, this interest is an expression of a certain theory of religion that, on the one hand, emphasizes the close interaction between biography and theology and thus understands theology as an expression of an individual life story. On the other hand, this theory treats human life stories as theologically relevant texts. Autobiographies in https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-023

1.22 Theology 

 201

this case are treated as theology experienced by one’s self (Hirzel 1998, 211), and can therefore display kerygmatic intentions. More recently, Henning Luther has presented further observations. He conceives theology on the one hand as a “konkrete, fleischgewordene, die Existenz jedes ein­ zelnen lebenspraktisch betreffende, ansprechende und herausfordernde Wahrheit” [‘concrete truth rendered in the flesh, which affects, addresses, and challenges the existence of every single individual in his life-praxis’] possessing significant impor­ tance for individual life (Luther 1992, 38). He underscores on the other hand that reli­ gion is constitutively related to the question of the possibility of becoming a subject and that the irreducibility of the individuality of the individual is the ultimate point of reference of Christian religion (Luther 1992, 30). For him, the preoccupation with representations of life stories is theologically relevant for three reasons. With regard to the sociology of religion and church, he cites first the individualization of lifestyle and religious existence: life-stories narrate individualized forms of belief and reli­ gion. On the level of a pedagogy of religion, secondly, biographical narratives do not have an exemplary function when it comes to the norming of behavior and belief, but instead encourage open religious self-reflection. Finally, the concern with life stories is grounded theologically in the reference to the importance of the human being before God: Individual human life is sacred before God and is not indifferent (Luther 1992, 38–44). These premises give rise to several innovative research perspectives. First, the theological reflection raises the question concerning the relevant autobiographical texts. Yet, at the same time, it becomes clear that definitions of the genre of autobi­ ography are incomplete (Kuld 1997, 26). Second, explicitly religious autobiographies move into the focus of attention. Characteristic for them are the relations between the self, the world, and God that are defined individually and in this way combine an individual path of life with an understanding of God, world and self (Benrath 1979, 773). In them, as well as in other, ‘profane’ autobiographies – for instance, in that of the singer Nina Hagen, who published Bekenntnisse [‘Confessions’] (Hagen 2010) – we can find religiously confessional statements and stories of conversion. Under a reversed sign – critical of religion – expressly modern autobiographies offer similar reports, such as that of Tilman Moser, who in his book Gottesvergiftung [‘Poisoning by God’] (1976) describes the emancipation from a religious upbringing as a process of liberation. Even such autobiographies critical of religion contain high theological rel­ evance (Gräb 1990, 84, cites additional autobiographical examples). Third, in addition to the aforementioned explicitly religious autobiographies, theological scholarship is interested in life narratives in a wider sense because the writing of an autobiogra­ phy can be interpreted as a thoroughly religious act or the autobiographical narrative stance as structurally religious (Kuld 1997, 26; Barbour 1998, 1604). From a theological and historical point of view, autobiographies can be read as an “unerschöpflicher Kosmos religiöser Individualitäten” [‘inexhaustible cosmos of religious individualities’] (Nowak 1994, 51). They provide information about processes

202 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

of religious socialization, about formative religious influences as well as about the modes of appearance of individualized piety. Like hardly any other source, they reveal subjective moments of religiosity (Mitterauer 1988), and with respect to the history of piety they register processes of religious transformation and the changing relationship between a tradition of belief and individual experience. They enable new definitions of the relationship between religion and theology in modern lifeworlds (Sparn 1990). The new concern for lived religiosity that accompanies autobiography research expands, moreover, historiographical perspectives and supplements a history of Christianity that frequently tends to limit itself to the history of institutions or theology. Resurfacing in these contexts, on the one hand, is the question, discussed con­ troversially elsewhere, concerning the relationship between historiography and theol­ ogy. On the other hand, life stories show that it is not religion that disappears but the consensus about what constitutes its essence (Nassehi 1996, 53).

The Concept of ‘Autobiography’ The earliest evidence of a concept of ‘autobiography’ in the German-speaking context is from 1776 and occurs in a letter from Jakob M. R. Lenz to Goethe, in which Lenz describes the story of the youth of the doctor and devotional writer Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling as an ‘autobiography’ (Niggl 2012, 39). Like the genre itself, the identi­ fication of a specifying concept of ‘Christian autobiography’ is subject to historical change. Theological research on autobiography is also divided about the concept. In general, it uses a more broadly conceived concept and the semantic determination of ‘Christian autobiography’ is not uniform. The most recent scholarship suggests that we understand such autobiographies ‘as reconstructions of faith and theologies of life, which ensure and secure empirical fact in order to thereby make known the expe­ rience of individuated salvation in the history of a life’ (Kuld 1997, 11). They connect subjectivity and objectivity by combining a historical narrative with the fictive rep­ resentation of the reality of faith and life (Hirzel 1998, 19) and thus document not life as immediately lived but life interpreted at a specific point of time in a life. Personal experiences are thereby linked with accepted traditions. Christian autobiographies do not primarily produce belief; as selective representations, they reflect individual engagements and thoughts and serve the processes of both the development and for­ mation of identity. Niggl refers to ‘religious autobiography’ as a special form of the genre and con­ ceptualizes it in general as the story of a self with God who retrospectively tries to lend this story an interpretation and meaning (Niggl 1993, 1290). In this sense, it does not turn out to be simply an historical description of past religious experiences, but an interpreting and referring religious act.

1.22 Theology 

 203

Perspectives from the History of Christianity A history of specifically Christian autobiography has not yet been written. In light of the importance of autobiography for theological and historical questions (of piety and theology), as well as for questions in the study of religion, and in light of the broad mass of decidedly religious autobiographical writings, it is astonishing that recent church history has provided neither an intense analysis of the many extant autobiographical sources nor a theoretical understanding of the significance of auto­ biographies and biographies that incorporates interdisciplinary methods. The schol­ arship has primarily focused on Augustine’s Confessiones and the modern religious movement of Pietism (among others, Marholz 1919; Hartmann 1963; Bertolini 1968; Maier-Petersen 1984; Schrader 2004). Scholarly theological lexicons only rarely the­ matize ‘autobiography’ and as a result they document the long-reigning theological reservation towards life testimonies. Church history understands autobiography as a uniquely Christian life form that arose in the first centuries of the history of the church with no unambiguous paral­ lels in non-Christian antiquity (Staats 1994, 79). For the early history of this genre, Augustine’s Confessiones has received the greatest amount of attention in both church history and literary studies, whenever the Christian contribution to the rise of this genre is concerned. Yet whether Augustine’s Confessions can be considered an auto­ biography is subject to debate in the scholarship. Since Augustine, the writing of a life story is an integral part of the relationship of the human being to God. It represents an ‘admission of one’s own disquiet and non-identity, of difference’ (Luther 1992, 133). In this case, both doxological and self-reflective motivations play a decisive role. Niggl traces the development of new forms of autobiographical literature back to a ‘new underlying religious mood’ that ‘produced an internalized image of the human being which was hitherto unknown, was first prepared in the non-Christian space by the recent Stoics, and then underwent a mystical variation in the third century under the influence of neoplatonism’ (Niggl 2012, 70). In the medieval period, autobiographical texts are derived less from the tradition of Augustine as from the praxis of confession, which in conjunction with the newly added confessional secret ascends to an important “Biographiegenerator” [‘generator of biography’] (Hahn 1987, 19). In this context, moreover, monastic self-ob­ servation emerges as a noteworthy practice. As a clerical institution of social control, the confession, which was elevated to a yearly duty for all Christians at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, fostered an entrenched system of self-observation and can be described as a forerunner of the confessional form of autobiography (Zimmerman 1998, 344). In mysticism, an autobiography can be found in the first book of the col­ lected writings of Heinrich Seuse (1360). An additional, so far little studied, part of the history of the genre is provided by pilgrim literature. Ignatius of Loyola, for instance, described the story of his conversion (1521–1538) in the style of a pilgrim’s narrative. Ignatius already follows the three-step narrative of an awareness of sin, conversion,

204 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

and service to the church (Kuld 1997, 32). Over the course of the Renaissance, biog­ raphy and autobiography were disentangled from monastic and clerical conditions. The already perceptible increase in self-narratives increased even further after the sixteenth century, and the following century boasts especially among spiritualistic nonconformists’ numerous autobiographies. In the German-speaking world, the reli­ gious revivalist movement of Pietism shaped the history of autobiography. The Pietis­ tic autobiographical tradition emphasizes the open-endedness of the human course of life. The connection between confessional praxis, spiritual diary, and autobiography becomes apparent in the Moravian Church, in which the collecting of curriculum vitae took place. The burial process with its funeral orations, as Rudolf Hartmann has shown exemplarily with reference to Basel, holds an important function for the further devel­ opment of autobiography (Hartman 1963). These texts – for the period between 1560 and 1750 there exist more than 20,000 extant funeral orations (Nowak, 1994, 53) – reveal a juxtaposition of pronounced stylization and reserved individuality. August Hermann Francke’s (1690/1691) autobiography is a paragon of serial life stories. For these developments in Pietism (Schrader 2004) and later in the revivalist movements of the nineteenth century, the discovery of one’s own self as the site of a reliable expe­ rience of God was fundamental. As the expression of a specific religious practice, the Pietist life-narrative aimed – frequently following schematic guidelines – to depict the progress of faith and in the process to achieve religious optimization and authenticity. In functional terms, it displays alongside documentary intentions with respect to the recipient an exemplary character as well as edifying potential. Its striking quantitative growth indicates both the dawning anthropological interest of the eighteenth century and the flourishing literarization of bourgeois society. Both developments fostered in the context of progressive individualization of cultural and religious living conditions the differentiation of autoreferential media in Pietism (Viehöfer 2005, 885). The interest in life stories that had arisen from a specific Pietistic religious praxis ultimately migrated into society as a whole. This social ‘generalization’ can be understood as the precondition for the fact that other scholarly disciplines beyond the theory of religion and theology study autobiographies (Drehsen 1990, 35). Against the commonly argued ‘derivation thesis,’ we must remain aware of how biographical interest does not first issue from an emancipation from religious ties, but is a constitutive element of both Pietist and revivalist religious praxis. From a historical point of view, it must be noted, firstly, that such forms of biographical thematization were not accessible to everyone at all times and, secondly, opinions changed as to what counted as the proper content of an autobiography. The vast production of textual life-histories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries documents these developments. Theology and the church contributed to this “Biographisierung des kulturellen Lebens” [‘biographicalization of cultural life’] (Staats 1994, 63) by widely reproducing the educated middle-class’ conception of autobiography, for instance in numerous autobiographies by theologi­ ans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jessen lists 233 from the eighteenth century, 375 from the nineteenth century, but only 42 autobiographies by theologians

1.22 Theology 

 205

(until 1984) in the twentieth century (Jessen 1984). Generally speaking, we do not yet have a theological critique of this phenomenon. Such a critique would be advisable, however, as the most recent autobiographies by theologians present on the one hand ‘much proclamation but little probing of the self’ and hardly any shame in prolifer­ ating the private; on the other hand, a description of internal spiritual struggles and religious doubt as well as eschatological perspectives, as we find them exemplarily in Paul, Augustine or even Martin Luther, are missing. Instead, modern autobiography is far more interested in retrospection (Staats 1994, 69; 80).

Perspectives from Theology In more recent (practical) theological studies of autobiography, individual processes of self-representation and reflection occupy the center of research. Disturbing expe­ riences are cited as a catalyst of reflection on life stories (Maier-Petersen 1984, 486, following Peter Sloterdijk 1978), and life stories are interpreted as stories of resistance. Furthermore, the claim that autobiography is constitutively a-religious or a secular replacement for religion, has come under fire. The question of an autobiography’s religious content not only finds answers on the level of content but must also take into account the positing of a relationship between self, world, and God. The taking of both of these levels as a point of departure has led to an interest in the religious dimension of biographical self-reflection. The reflecting I grasps itself in this process as some­ thing that has become or is nascently becoming (Luther 1992, 114). The view toward one’s self and the interpretation of a life are synthesized in autobiography, although the representing self never merges entirely with the represented self. In the context of research on theological autobiography, the main problem is, first, the question of the identity and autonomy of the writing subject. Modern descriptions of life show that the predicates originally ascribed to God serve as guidelines for iden­ tity in modern autobiography (Kuld 1997, 43 and Jauß 1979, 709). The biblical doctrine of justification, which fundamentally changed the situation of justification vis-à-vis antiquity (Marquard 1979, 692), and the notion of an eschatological reservation indi­ cate a theological loss of meaning regarding the concept of identity in the context of a Christian life story. In this way, ‘all human identity guidelines and judgments about the life of a human being are now already traversed and [submitted] to a love and critique that surpasses all human representations’ (Kuld 1997, 63). Christian self-re­ flection, removed from the compulsions of self-justification and self-assertion, frees up the legitimated I for self-discovery and is distinguished from ancient apologetics as well as from a modern autobiography which reveals the tension between socially pre­ scribed patterns of identity and the reflecting self. In autobiography, the basic motive of justification is replaced by the possibility of a ‘sincere’ self-disclosure of the most individual individuality (Marquard 1979, 693).

206 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Secondly, recent theological research thematizes the connection between autobi­ ography and confession. Here, autobiography is primarily treated as a narrative and communicative medium that contains a specific potential for coping with ‘experiences of inconsistency and discontinuity’ (Drehsen 1990, 45). Through ordering narratives and plausibility checks, it is in a position to reduce the contingency of life stories and hence the complexity of life (Scheule 2002). On the one hand, these narrative and hermeneutically self-reflective descriptions of life can give rise to religion. On the other hand, they can also narrate the ‘story of an escape’ from religious contexts (Gräb 1990, 84). Translation: Charlton Payne

Works Cited Barbour, John D. “Biographie III. Autobiographie und Religion.” Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft. Vol. I. Ed. Hans D. Betz, Don S. Browning, Bernd Janowski and Eberhard Jüngel. Tübingen: Mohr, 4th ed. 1998. 1603–1604. Benrath, Gustav A. “Autobiographie, Christliche.” Theologische Realenzyklopädie. Vol. IV. Ed. Gerhard Müller. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1979. 772–89. Bertolini, Ingo. “Studien zur Autobiographie des deutschen Pietismus.” Diss. U Wien, 1968. Drehsen, Volker. “Lebensgeschichtliche Frömmigkeit: Eine Problemskizze zu christlich-religiösen Dimensionen des (auto-)biographischen Interesses in der Neuzeit.” Wer schreibt meine Lebensgeschichte? Biographie, Autobiographie, Hagiographie und ihre Entstehungszusammenhänge. Ed. Walter Sparn. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1990. 33–62. Gestrich, Andreas. “Einleitung: Sozialhistorische Biographieforschung.” Biographie – sozialgeschichtlich: Sieben Beiträge. Ed. Andreas Gestrich, Peter Knoch and Helga Merkel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988. 5–28. Gräb, Wilhelm. “Der hermeneutische Imperativ: Lebensgeschichte als religiöse Selbstauslegung.” Wer schreibt meine Lebensgeschichte? Biographie, Autobiographie, Hagiographie und ihre Entstehungszusammenhänge. Ed. Walter Sparn. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1990. 79–89. Hagen, Nina. Bekenntnisse. München: Pattloch, 2010. Hahn, Alois. “Identität und Selbstthematisierung.” Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis: Be­kennt­nis und Geständnis. Ed. Alois Hahn. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 9–24. Hartmann, Rolf. Das Autobiographische in der Basler Leichenrede. Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1963. Hirzel, Martin. Lebensgeschichte als Verkündigung: Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Ami Bost, Johann Arnold Kanne. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Jauß, Hans Robert. “Gottesprädikate als Indentitätsvorgaben in der Augustinischen Tradition der Autobiographie.” Identität. Ed. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle. München: Fink, 1979. 708–17. Jessen, Jens. Bibliographie der Selbstzeugnisse deutscher Theologen, Tagebücher und Briefe. Frankfurt a.  M./New York/Nancy: Lang, 1984. Kuld, Lothar. Glaube in Lebensgeschichten: Ein Beitrag zur theologischen Autobiographieforschung. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1997. Luther, Henning. Religion und Alltag: Bausteine zu einer praktischen Theologie des Subjekts; [Identität und Fragment]. Ed. Henning Luther. Stuttgart: Radius, 1992.

1.22 Theology 

 207

Mahrholz, Werner. Deutsche Selbstbekenntnisse: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Selbstbiographie von der Mystik bis zum Pietismus. Berlin: Furche, 1919. Maier-Petersen, Magdalene. Der “Fingerzeig Gottes” und die “Zeichen der Zeit”: Pietistische Religio­ sität auf dem Weg zu bürgerlicher Identitätsfindung, untersucht an den Selbstzeugnissen von Spener, Francke und Oetinger. Stuttgart: Heinz, 1984. Marquard, Odo. “Identität – Autobiographie – Verantwortung (ein Annäherungsversuch).” Identität. Ed. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle. München: Fink, 1979. 690–99. Mitterauer, Michael. “Religion in lebensgeschichtlichen Aufzeichnungen.” Biographie – sozial­ geschichtlich: Sieben Beiträge. Ed. Andreas Gestrich, Peter Knoch and Helga Merkel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988. 61–85. Nassehi, Armin. “Religion und Biographie: Zum Bezugsproblem religiöser Kommunikation in der Moderne.” Religiöse Individualisierung oder Säkularisierung: Biographie und Gruppe als Bezugs­punkte moderner Religiösität. Ed. Karl Gabriel. Gütersloh: Kaiser Gütersloher VerlagsHaus, 1996. 41–56. Niggl, Günter. “Autobiographie, religiöse.” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche. Vol. I. Ed. Walter Kasper. Freiburg i. Br. et al.: Herder, 3rd ed. 1993. 1290–1291. Niggl, Günter. Studien zur Autobiographie. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2012. Nowak, Kurt. “Biographie und Lebenslauf in der Neueren und Neuesten Kirchengeschichte.” Verkündigung und Forschung 39.1 (1994): 44–62. Scheule, Rupert M. Beichte und Selbstreflexion: Eine Sozialgeschichte katholischer Bußpraxis im 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt a.  M./New York: Campus, 2002. Schrader, Hans-Jürgen. “Die Literatur des Pietismus: Pietistische Impulse zur Literaturgeschichte. Ein Überblick.” Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten. Ed. Hartmut Lehmann. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. 386–403. Sloterdijk, Peter. Literatur und Organisation von Lebenserfahrung: Autobiographien der Zwanziger Jahre. München: Hanser, 1978. Sparn, Walter, ed. Wer schreibt meine Lebensgeschichte? Biographie, Autobiographie, Hagiographie und ihre Entstehungszusammenhänge. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1990. Staats, Reinhart. “Die zeitgenössische Theologenautobiographie als theologisches Problem.” Verkündigung und Forschung 39.1 (1994): 62–81. Viehöver, Vera. “Autobiographie.” Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit. Vol. I. Ed. Friedrich Jaeger. Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 2005. 885–887. Zimmermann, T. C. Price. “Bekenntnis und Autobiographie in der frühen Renaissance.” Die Auto­ biographie: Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed. 1998. 343–366.

Further Reading Barbour, John D. The Conscience of the Autobiographer: Ethical and Religious Dimensions of Auto­ biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Barbour, John D. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. Barbour, John D. The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Coomstock, Gary, and C. Wyne Mayhall. Religious Autobiographies. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1995. Gaustad Edwin S., ed. Memoirs of the Spirit. American Religious Autobiography from Jonathan Edwards to Maya Angelou. Grand Rapids/Cambridge.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999.

208 

 1 Theoretical Approaches

Holdenried, Michaela, ed. Geschriebenes Leben: Autobiographik von Frauen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. Klein, Stephanie. Theologie und empirische Biographieforschung: Methodische Zugänge zur Lebens- und Glaubensgeschichte und ihre Bedeutung für eine erfahrungsbezogene Theologie. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1994. Lynch, Kathleen. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century Anglophone World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Mecking, Burkhart. Christliche Biogaphie: Beobachtungen zur Trivialisierung in der Erbauungsliteratur. Frankfurt a.  M./Bern, 1983.

2 Categories

2.1 Apologia Karl Enenkel

Definition The (Latin) term goes back to the Greek word ‘ἀπολογία’ [‘apologia’], which means ‘speech in defence’ in juridical trials (complementary to ‘κατηγορία’ [‘kategoria’], i.  e., ‘speech of accusation’), and is especially relevant for the juridical system of Athens from the fifth century BCE on. Since in the Athenian system citizens usually defended themselves, an ‘apologia’ often means a juridical ‘self-defence’. Speeches in self-de­ fence also occurred in the Roman juridical system. From the first century CE, ‘apolo­ gia’ refers to a large category of speeches and texts composed in order to defend either Christian or Jewish belief, mostly directed against ‘pagan’ religion and/or philosophy. In the Middle Ages Christian apologetic literature continued, although it changed its character. It now focused on Christology; the rational, scholastic, or spiritual founda­ tion of doctrines; and polemics against Islamic or Jewish beliefs – on the other hand, there were also Islamic and Jewish apologetics directed against Christian belief. In the early modern period Protestantism entered the field of religious apologetics. From the fifteenth century on, ‘apology’ was used in a broader sense, including the rhetor­ ical or literary defence of all kinds of positions, ideas, and topics, whether political, scholarly, artistic, or personal. It is in this sense that apology has great relevance for autobiographical literature from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Explication Whereas in ancient Greece from the fifth century BCE on, juridical self-defence played a major role, it was a bit less so in the Roman Republic (third to first centuries BCE). In Rome, where juridical trials among the members of the leading classes were very fre­ quent, it was considered of the greatest importance to be defended by other persons, preferably influential and highly esteemed persons (‘patroni’), and it was not uncom­ mon to be defended by more than one patron. If one had respectable defenders, one sometimes added a speech in ‘self-defence’, like the nobleman Marcus Caelius did (first century BCE). But there were also senators who always defended themselves, such as Cato the Elder (second century BCE). Both in Athens and Rome juridical matters were frequently intertwined with politics. In Roman rhetorical culture, a speech in defence of somebody was normally not called ‘apologia’, but ‘oratio pro X’ (‘speech for person X’), or, in case of self-defence, ‘oratio in sua re’ (‘speech on one’s own behalf’). An exception is Apuleius’s Apologia, a juridical speech in which the author https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-024

212 

 2 Categories

defended himself against an accusation regarding hereditary matters (second century CE); Apuleius used the Greek term because he belonged to the more Hellenised culture of Northern Africa and because he was an admirer of Plato, the author of the famous Apologia of Socrates. The rhetorical context in which ‘apologia’ is imbedded causes the term to have aspects of both orality and literacy. Successful or well-composed speeches in ancient Greece and Rome were transmitted in literary form for memorial, social, political, educational, or various literary purposes, both for a contemporary audience and for posterity. It is sometimes difficult to get a clear picture of the rela­ tionship between oral speeches that were actually given and the transmitted literary texts. In some cases the literary texts greatly differ from the oral speeches, for example in Cicero’s Pro Milone. A number of written speeches were composed as literary texts only, such as Plato’s Apologia of Socrates.

Historical Aspects With respect to autobiography, the genus of juridical speeches in self-defence has some relevance, since it always implies a deliberate social self-presentation in front of a competent and educated audience. Although autobiographical topics focused to a large extent on matters of criminal, civil, or constitutional law, the Roman speeches in particular also offer a broader spectrum of autobiographical self-presentation, since the Roman juridical system required a passage ‘de vita’ – a short biography – as part of forensic speeches. Some speeches offer interesting autobiographical sections, as for example in Cicero’s Oratio pro domo or Apuleius’s Apologia. The juridical context determines the – entirely rhetorical – mode of presentation. In antiquity, however, one generally did not draw a difference between rhetorical and literary texts, since rhetoric was considered a refined art and in fact the heart of literature. Since the apologetic writings in the first few centuries CE and in the Middle Ages were entirely dedicated to religious, ecclesiastical, and theological matters, they have a certain, but also limited, relevance for autobiography. They are relevant in so far as they render personal religious and theological convictions, but only rarely do they address autobiographical matters in a broader sense. Among the most impor­ tant early Christian apologists were Justinus Martyr from Syria (second century CE), who defended in two Apologiae Christian belief (as a rational philosophy; Jesus as the philosophical ‘logos’) and rituals (especially baptism, the Eucharist, and transub­ stantiation); Tertullian of Carthago (ca. 160–225 CE), the author of the Apologeticus, in which he defended Christian religion against pagans’ reproaches (one being that Christianity demonstrated disloyalty against the empire) and argued for legal tolera­ tion of Christianity by the Roman Empire; and Augustine of Hippo, with his De civitate Dei, in which he refuted the reproach of Roman contemporaries that the sack of Rome by Alarich (410 CE) was caused by the Christians’ refusal to accept the Roman State

2.1 Apologia 

 213

cult. Important medieval apologists included Albert the Great, Maimonides, Peter Damiani, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas. Bernard of Clair­ vaux wrote an Apologia ad Guillelmum Sancti Theoderici Abbatem (1125 CE) in the defence of the Cistercians against the charge of slandering the Benedictine Cluniacs; Abelard wrote an Apologia contra Bernardum, in which he defended himself against Bernard’s charge of heresy. From the fourteenth century on, especially in Renaissance humanism, apology gained a new momentum which was connected with the ‘invention of the individ­ ual’ and a new culture of scholarship and learning. In their struggle for recognition, reputation, and fame, humanist writers from Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) onward put their individual personalities in the foreground and claimed a kind of authentic authorship. This attitude led to the rise of a new polemical culture and to a new boost in autobiographical literature. In a sense, one may argue that the genre of autobiogra­ phy is the invention of Renaissance humanism. The new polemical culture (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) was shaped by the literary genres of ‘invectiva’ and ‘apologia’, which were now very closely connected. Humanists profoundly tried to destroy their enemies’ reputations by invectives, and the attacked writers defended themselves in apologies in which they fiercely counterattacked their opponents. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries an apologia was mostly also an attack. The topics of this new polemical culture were no longer limited to religious matters, but included, among other things, personal lifestyle and family matters, citizenship, politics, learning – especially philological and grammatical knowledge, Latin style, aesthetic and artistic issues, social status, etc. In this way the spectrum of apologies became so broad that they can be labelled in a full sense as autobiographical writings. Important humanist authors of such self-defences include Francesco Petrarca, Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, Antonio Beccadelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Guillaume Budé, Ulrich von Hutten, Julius Caesar and Josephus Justus Scaliger, Gerolamo Cardano, and Caspar Schoppe, but their number seems almost unlimited, since almost every humanist engaged in this genre. In the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries the current language was Latin; from the sixteenth century on, apologias also occurred in the vernacular lan­ guages, especially after Luther’s Reformation. Luther himself was groundbreaking in this respect: he composed most of his apologetic writings in German. Of course, from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries some of ‘apologiae’ also were dedicated to reli­ gious matters – for example, the Apologia (1487) by the Neo-Platonic philosopher and cabbalist Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, who defended the radical syncre­ tism of his 900 theses against the charge of heresy, or by the Neo-Aristotelian philos­ opher Pietro Pomponazzi, who defended in his Apologia contra Contarenum (1518) his denial of the Christian dogma of the immortality of the soul. In the eighteenth century, the scholarly apologetic literature initiated by human­ ism continued; the range of topics, however, was much reduced and, according to the tastes of Enlightenment, matters that were too personal were generally excluded. Instead, a clear emphasis was placed on questions of scholarship, learning, and

214 

 2 Categories

science; of course, the radical rationalism of the Enlightenment played an important role, for example in the physico-theological apology by the Swiss naturalist, physi­ ologist, and anatomist Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777). A special development dealt with aesthetic and literary questions. The prefaces of literary works increasingly took the form of apologies, in which the authors defended their positions and views. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious matters were excluded by many as topics of apologies. Some Protestant theologians even denied the sense of theological apology. However, religious apologetics continued even in the nineteenth to twen­ ty-first centuries in Catholicism and Protestantism alike, e.  g. by the Catholic priest John Henry Newman in his Apologia pro vita sua (1864), Gilbert Keith Chesterton (Orthodoxy [1908]; The Autobiography [1936]), the Irish writer C. S. Lewis (1898–1964), the American analytical philosopher and Protestant Alvin Carl Plantinga (Warranted Christian Belief [2000]), and the American apologist philosopher William Lane Craig (Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics [2008]). In general, in the twentieth century apologetic purposes and modes of presentation played an important role in the autobiographies of politicians, among others of German Nazi leaders such as Albert Speer (1905–1981), Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) and Karl Dönitz (1891–1980). For example, Albert Speer fashioned himself in his Erinnerungen (1966) as an apolitical person focused on technical problems, and a kind of gentleman Nazi, an apologetic self presentation that was uncovered later as a ‘myth’ (by Matthias Schmidt).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography For autobiography, apology is relevant in various ways. Its most important aspect is about its main ‘mode’, i.  e., rhetorical self-defence in front of an audience of ‘judges’ which originates in juridical speeches in Greek and Roman antiquity. Of the highest importance is also the artful, deliberate, and literary self-presentation in front of a competent and educated audience, which characterizes early modern polemical culture with its many apologies and invectives. The ultimate goal was to keep up one’s personal reputation and to destroy the good reputation of one’s opponents. Since the spectrum of (auto)biographical topics increased enormously from 1300–1800, the same goes for the relevance of apology for autobiographical writing. In the twentieth century, the apologetic mode of self-presentation became especially relevant for polit­ ical autobiographies.

Further Reading Brakke, David, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and Jörg Ulrich, eds. Critique and Apologetics. Jews, Christians and Pagans in Antiquity. Frankfurt a.  M. et al.: Lang, 2009. Brucker, Nicolas. Apologétique 1650–1802 – la nature et la grâce. Bern et al.: Lang, 2010.

2.1 Apologia 

 215

Enenkel, Karl. Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Fiedrowicz, Michael. Apologie im frühen Christentum. Die Kontroverse um den christlichen Wahrheitsanspruch in den ersten Jahrhunderten. Paderborn: Schöningh, 3rd ed. 2006. Heudecker, Sylvia. Modelle literaturkritischen Schreibens. Dialog, Apologie, Satire vom späten 17. bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005. Hijmans, B. L. Jr. “Apuleius orator: ‘Pro se de Magia’ and ‘Florida’.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.34.2 (1994): 1708–1784. Lampe, Peter. New testament theology in a secular world. A constructivist work in Christian apologetics. London et al.: Clark, 2012. Lang, Albert. Die Entfaltung des apologetischen Problems in der Scholastik des Mittelalters. Freiburg i.  Br. et al.: Herder, 1962. Laureys, Marc, and Roswitha Simons, eds. Die Kunst des Streitens. Inszenierung, Formen und Funktionen öffentlichen Streits in historischer Perspektive. Bonn: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Schmidt, Matthias. Albert Speer. Das Ende eines Mythos. Bern/München: Scherz, 1982. Werner, Karl. Geschichte der apologetischen und polemischen Literatur der christlichen Theologie. 5 vols. Schaffhausen: Hurter, 1861–1867. Wiegrebe, Wolfgang. Albrecht von Haller als apologetischer Physikotheologe. Physikotheologie: Erkenntnis Gottes aus der Natur? Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2008.

2.2 Authenticity

Michael Quante and Michael Kühler

Definition Authenticity, when ascribed to a person or to some of her characteristics, essentially amounts to the idea that these characteristics truly stem from the person herself. Accordingly, individual decisions, actions, character traits, or even a person’s self as a whole may be regarded as being (more or less) authentic, and each of these aspects might call for different criteria of authenticity. However, a major distinction can be drawn between individual aspects and a person’s self or personality as a whole, for it is usually claimed that individual aspects are, in turn, expressions of a per­ son’s authentic self, or at least do not conflict with it. For example, the decision to eat a grilled steak may be regarded as authentic if one is a person who likes to eat meat. Conversely, the decision would raise doubts about being authentic if one were to understand oneself as a vegetarian. Hence, when trying to define the concept of ‘authenticity’, and especially when addressing the question of what makes a person authentic, a number of corresponding concepts come into play, especially ‘personal­ ity’, ‘I’, ‘self’, and ‘autonomy’, each of which belongs to the larger question of what it means to be a specific and autonomous person, and all of which are probably best explained by their mutual interrelation – with authenticity playing a crucial role espe­ cially when it comes to analyzing personal autonomy.

Explication Pre-reflective authenticity First of all, the question of whether a certain decision, action or character trait may be regarded as authentic, may be answered following two distinct interpretations of authenticity: pre-reflective and reflective authenticity (Taylor 1991; Quante 2002, 192– 195). Pre-reflective authenticity expresses the idea that one decides, acts, or exhibits a character trait, in an authentic manner only if one does not cognitively reflect or even think about it. Only if the decision, action or character trait comes about, or expresses itself, spontaneously and uninterrupted by any ‘cognitive detour’, can it be regarded as authentic. For example, one could play a musical instrument authen­ tically in this regard. Although this notion of authenticity is widespread in everyday life, it leaves open some crucial questions. For, how exactly can we then distinguish between desires and inclinations which may come about spontaneously but which https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-025

2.2 Authenticity 

 217

we nevertheless regard as alien to us, for example compulsions or addictions? Such desires seem to be prime examples of inauthenticity in that they overwhelm us rather than being authentic expressions of who we are. Hence, pre-reflective authenticity needs to be complemented by a notion of a person’s authentic self, so that such a distinction can be made intelligible. Although the notion of a person’s authentic self may itself be spelled out in pre-reflective terms, this option raises doubts on whether the person could still be autonomous on this basis.

Reflective authenticity and autonomy In order to solve this problem, among other things, the idea of reflective authenticity highlights our cognitive ability to step back from our spontaneous desires or inclina­ tions and critically reflect on them, i.  e. ask ourselves whether we really want to have them or act on them. Consequently, only if a desire can, after critical reflection, count as our own, can it also count as authentic, as well as the resulting decision, action, or character trait. Authenticity, thus, expresses a crucial condition for autonomy. However, ‘counting as one’s own’ may, in turn, be spelled out differently. It may either refer to a rather strong condition of ‘active identification with’, or to a weaker condition of ‘non-alienation’, or to an even more basic take on the matter in terms of a default and challenge structure (Quante 2018). Starting with the notion of identification, Harry G. Frankfurt has, in a seminal article (Frankfurt 1971), introduced a hierarchical account of the will, according to which persons not only have first-order desires but also second-order desires to have (or not to have) some first-order desire. For example, one may have a first-order desire to eat chocolate, but may at the same time have a second-order desire not to have that first-order desire. One would, thus, prefer not to have the desire for chocolate, or that it may at least not be action-guiding – which, in Frankfurt’s terms would mean that one had a ‘corresponding (second-order) volition’. However, it remains questionable as to why exactly second-order desires or volitions should count as more authentic than first-order desires or why ever higher order desires should not come into play, as well. Frankfurt’s claim in this regard is that it is sufficient if the person wholeheartedly identifies with a first-order desire on the second level (Frankfurt 1987). This is also what makes such a first-order desire count as a person’s own, i.  e. as authentic. However, Frankfurt’s account faces the problem that one’s higher order desires, volitions or identifications might still be the result of manipulation and, thus, could prove to be inauthentic. Most prominently, John Christman (Christman 1991, 1993, 2009) has argued that Frankfurt’s account needs to be complemented by a historical dimension of how one’s desires and identifications, regardless of their level, came about. Furthermore, the positive condition of wholehearted identification, including how one’s desires came about, seems to be too demanding. For, there are many indi­ vidual decisions and actions with which a person might not wholeheartedly identify

218 

 2 Categories

but which are not deemed to be inauthentic. Hence, a negative condition of only being non-alienated from one’s desires or inclinations may suffice. Accordingly, one’s indi­ vidual decisions, actions, or character traits may count as authentic if one does not feel alienated from them. Still, Christman’s account has, in turn, been criticized in that it does not solve the above problems completely (Quante 2018). For, the negative criterion of non-al­ ienation might run into the same problems as the positive notion of (wholehearted) identification. Being or feeling alienated from one’s desires usually comes in differ­ ent grades and flavors, so that it remains an open question as to when exactly we feel alienated enough from our desires, actions, or character traits in order for them to count as inauthentic. A default and challenge structure could, thus, be a viable alternative (Quante 2018, ch. 6.). One’s desires, decisions, actions, or character traits may count as authentic (per default) as long as there are no good reasons to challenge this assumption based on what from our experience may be regarded as dangers to acquiring or expressing them in a non-alienated way.

Authenticity and the self So far, authenticity may be more or less successfully attributed to individual traits of a person, while basically relying on the idea that they express who a person truly is, i.  e. that they can count as expressions of the person’s self. However, this leaves open the question of whether a person’s self can itself be deemed authentic. Basically, two opposing views on authenticity can be distinguished in this regard: existentialist and essentialist accounts. Jean-Paul Sartre explains authenticity in terms of existential freedom (Sartre 1943, 559−711, and 1992). Instead of having a certain predefined character or nature, we are unavoidably forced to choose our attitude toward how to live our life in every single action, which implies that we are always able to define and redefine ourselves anew through our actions; hence Sartre’s slogan “l’existence précède l’essence” [“existence precedes essence”] (Sartre 1946, 29 [2007, 20]), i.  e. existential freedom precedes a spe­ cifically characterized self. For Sartre, authenticity is thus the result of one’s radically free decisions and of taking responsibility for them when it comes to shaping one’s self. Against such an existentialist account of authenticity, it has been argued that the ideas of existential freedom and radical choice are plain incoherent (Taylor 1977, 31−33; Frankfurt 1993, 109−110). For, understood this way, we could not rely on any reasons or criteria when we make a choice because we would have to radically choose them first, as well. Hence, we would not be able to make any intelligible choice at all, but our choices would simply be the result of sheer luck. Authenticity, instead of being thought of as the result of radical free choice, has, therefore, to be understood as a presupposition of our ability to make choices that may count as truly our own.

2.2 Authenticity 

 219

Most prominently, and following the above line of thought concerning individ­ ual traits, Harry G. Frankfurt has advocated such an essentialist view on authenticity and the self (Frankfurt 1994, 1999). For Frankfurt, a person’s authentic self has to be regarded as the person’s specific essential nature, which is to be thought of as given and may only be discovered. The idea of what it means to have a specific essential nature is explained by Frankfurt in terms of what a person cannot help caring about. It is a specific and basically unalterable configuration of the person’s will, consisting in what Frankfurt dubs “volitional necessities” (Frankfurt 1993, 110). They represent the person’s authentic self, and deciding and acting in accordance to it, thus, may count as authentic, as well. However, it might not be that easy to find out what exactly we care about. Accord­ ing to Charles Taylor (Taylor 1977, 35−42), we need to articulate our mental (and voli­ tional) attitudes in order to make sense of them. This can, in turn, only be done within a social context. For, articulation presupposes an adequate language, including value concepts and a narrative structure. Hence, when we try to articulate our authentic self, especially in terms of autobiography or autofiction, we can do so only within an adequate social setting, providing us with the conceptual, evaluative, and narrative means to constitute and express who we are. Still, articulating our authentic self within a social setting may still contain a certain degree of openness and freedom. We may still ask ourselves, and others, whether we have articulated what we care about in the most appropriate way or whether there may be options for articulations which are still unheard of in our society (Taylor 1977, 41−42). This seems to imply that we are, at least to some degree, capable of revising and redefining our articulations and, thus, our authentic self, just like exis­ tentialist accounts claim. Accordingly, it is still an open and highly disputed question whether, or at least to what degree, authenticity with regard to the self is to be thought of as something we create through our decisions and actions or as something we can merely discover and have to articulate adequately.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography Assuming that readers of autobiographies would like to gain insight into who the person ‘truly’ is, the idea of authenticity is obviously of primary importance. However, given that the concept of authenticity is itself disputed, it becomes dubious how exactly such expectations may be fulfilled. Moreover, given that writing one’s auto­ biography usually follows specific narrative patterns and conventions, which are, in turn, socially and culturally shaped, the idea of a ‘truly authentic’ account of one’s life itself becomes questionable (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 2−5). Finally, assuming a nar­ rative account of the self, i.  e. the claim that one’s self is constituted by the story one tells about one’s life – a claim which is fairly self-suggesting when it comes to auto­

220 

 2 Categories

biography –, autobiographies, essentially following certain social and cultural con­ ventions, would themselves be the constituent of one’s self instead of only providing insight into it. Hence, any expectation of an ‘authentic insight’ into a person’s self or her life seems to be generally mislead in any case. However, the notion of authenticity may still play an important role with regard to assessing a person’s actions or self as autonomous, which, in turn, may be an important topic within the content of one’s autobiography.

Works Cited Christman, John. “Autonomy and Personal History.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991): 1–24. Christman, John. “Defending Historical Autonomy: A Reply to Professor Mele.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (1993): 281–289. Christman, John. The Politics of Persons. Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Frankfurt, Harry G. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (1971). The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 11–25. Frankfurt, Harry G. “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (1987). The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 159–176. Frankfurt, Harry G. “On the Necessity of Ideals” (1993). Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 108–116. Frankfurt, Harry G. “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love” (1994). Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 129–141. Frankfurt, Harry G. “On Caring” (1999). Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 155–180. Quante, Michael. Personal Identity as a Principle of Biomedical Ethics. Basel: Springer International Publishing, 2017. Quante, Michael. Pragmatistic Anthropology. Paderborn: Mentis, 2018. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (1943). Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Existentialisme est un humanism. Paris: Nagel, 1946 [Existentialism Is a Humanism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007]. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Notebooks for an Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Taylor, Charles. “What Is Human Agency?” (1977). Philosophical Papers 1. Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 15–44. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.

Further Reading Christman, John, ed. The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Christman, John, and Joel Anderson, eds. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

2.2 Authenticity 

 221

Henning, Tim. Person sein und Geschichten erzählen: Eine Studie über personale Autonomie und narrative Gründe. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Mackenzie, Catriona, and Natalie Stoljar, eds. Relational Autonomy. Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Oshana, Marina. Personal Autonomy in Society. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Taylor, James Stacey, ed. Personal Autonomy. New Essays on Personal Autonomy and Its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Tugendhat, Ernst. Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination. Trans. Paul Stern. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

2.3 Autobiographical Pact Lut Missinne

Definition The term ‘autobiographical pact’ was coined by the French academic Philippe Lejeune in his search for a distinctive definition of the genre ‘autobiography’, which he con­ trasted with the genre of the novel (Lejeune 1971, 1975). Lejeune stated that we can only speak of an autobiography when a threefold identity is established: an “identité de nom entre l’auteur (tel qu’il figure, par son nom, sur la couverture), le narrateur du récit et le personnage don’t on parle” [“identity of name between the author (such as he figures, by his name, on the cover), the narrator of the story, and the character that is being talked about”] (Lejeune 1975, 23–24 [1989, 12]). What differentiates autobiography from fiction is that an autobiographical text posits this identity between writer, narrator and protagonist, whereas in fictional work we generally have to discern between the author and the narrator. Lejeune considers the stating of this identity in an autobiographical text as a kind of agreement between author and reader, an autobiographical pact. By presenting his/her text as an autobiography the author declares his/her commitment to the reader to write in such a serious way about his or her own life that the reader trusts that the author will tell him/her a true, and thus autobiographical, story.

Explication An autobiographical pact can display itself in various ways. First of all, it can be con­ firmed as such by an explicit identity of names: the narrator of the story and the char­ acter about whom the story is told share the same proper name, which is identical with the name of the author as described on the cover. We could say that the autobi­ ographical pact is “avant tout un contrat d’identité qui est scellé par le nom propre” [“above all a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name”] (Lejeune 1975, 33 [1989, 19]). Secondly, genre indications in the title or subtitle of the book, or in other paratexts (Genette 1987) (preface, table of contents, introduction, epilogue, etc.) such as ‘History of my Life’, ‘Autobiography’ or ‘Souvenirs’ may conclude on an autobio­ graphical pact. Thirdly, the main text itself may articulate its character as an auto­ biography, as happens in the first sentences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782–1789): “Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple et dont l’exécution n’aura point d’imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi” [“I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-026

2.3 Autobiographical Pact 

 223

present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself”] (2011, 3 [1861, 1]). In case of a name identity between author, narrator, and protagonist, the name is considered as the “deep signature” of the autobiographical contract (Smith and Watson 2010, 207). An autobiographical pact inevitably coexists with a ‘referential pact’, since auto­ biographical texts claim to provide information on an extratextual reality. By the involvement of reality through referentiality a ‘truth claim’ comes into play. The reader expects that the author commits himself to statements that are true, or at least sincere. Thus, a ‘referential pact’ invites the reader to read the text in a specific way, and can be called a ‘reading contract’. The proper name mentioned in the text refers to an existing person, whom the reader credits with the responsibility for the text. What is alleged should be submittable to a test of verification (Lejeune 1975, 23 [1989, 11]). This does not mean that readers should actually be able to verify the author’s statements, but the reader of an autobiography assumes that what is told can be confirmed (Bruss 1976). In his definition of autobiography, building on that of Lejeune, Philippe Gasparini speaks of a “contrat de référentialité” [‘contract of referentiality’] (2004, 18). If we interpret the autobiographical pact in this broader sense, not as a pact confirmed by an identity of names, but as a contract of referentiality, the possibility to conclude such a pact does not remain restricted to the author. Others, like the editor of the book, can conclude an autobiographical pact, even behind the author’s back, e.  g. on the back flap by praising a story as the ‘true story of the author’s life’. A second form of reading contract, which Lejeune parallels with the autobio­ graphical pact, is the ‘romanesque (or fictional) pact’, displayed by either a clear indi­ cation of non-identity between author and protagonist (e.  g. by giving them different names) or by an overt declaration of fictionality (e.  g. by mentioning ‘novel’ on the cover or front page) (Lejeune 1975, 27 [1989, 15]). It is also possible that published texts in no way include an explicit contract (Lejeune 1986, 22 [1989, 26]). With his metaphor of the pact Lejeune has chosen a functional approach of the autobiographical genre, focussing on the pragmatics of literary communication. Auto­ biography, in this view, is seen as a communicative act between writer and reader. Through the text (and paratext) the author gives signals to the reader, in order to make clear in which way the text is to be understood. In his first publications Lejeune did not take into consideration the case that the reader should not accept the pact (Wag­ ner-Egelhaaf 2005, 68–72).

Revisions by Lejeune After his seminal text, “Le pacte autobiographique”  – the essay, now a classic in autobiographical studies, was published in 1973 and translated into English in 1989 – Lejeune has continuously revised his original definition of autobiography and has

224 

 2 Categories

commented on this in later publications (Lejeune 1986, 2005), which were set in a tone of irony and equivocation, yet they present a rather conflicting view on autobiography (Eakin 1992, 24–25). Despite his revisions and self-criticism, many of Lejeune’s peers still view(ed) Lejeune’s definition as ambiguous and unclear. Three of these points will be mentioned here: (1) The autobiographical pact can be expressed in different ways, but eventually it always serves to warrant the signature of the author. With his definition from 1975, Lejeune strongly prioritizes the legal connotations of his framework (autobiography as a contractual genre [1975, 44], as a ‘legal matter’ [1975, 26]). For example, one may be sceptical about what the author suggests as being autobiographical, or, on the other hand, one may look for similarities, although the author-character-identity is not stated. Alternatively, one may search for differences and/or mistakes when it is stated that the author and character are identical. According to Lejeune, such contrary reac­ tions of readers illustrate the proof of the importance of the contract. Ten years later Lejeune critically commented on the unintentional legal connotations of it, but at the same time held on to the notion of a contract. The autobiographical pact should not be interpreted as an agreement based on explicit, fixed, and discernible rules, nor as a mutual agreement between the reader and the author; it is more like a game between the two: “Passant un accord avec le narrataire dont il construit l’image, l’autobiographe incite le lecteur réel à entrer dans le jeu et donne l’impression d’un accord signé par les deux parties” [“Making an agreement with the ‘narratee’ whose image he constructs, the autobiographer incites the real reader to enter into the game and gives the impres­ sion that an agreement has been signed by the two parties”] (Lejeune 1986, 21–22 [1989, 126]). Thus, he leaves room for a contrary mode of reading by the reader, especially when no explicit indication of a contract is present: “j’ai imaginé sous la forme d’un contrat unique un double processus: l’engagement et le système de présentation choisi par l’auteur, et le mode de lecture choisi par le lecteur” [“I imagined a double process in the form of a singular contract: the agreement and the system of presentation chosen by the author, and the mode of reading chosen by the reader”] (Lejeune 1986, 22 [1989, 126]). These and similar statements seem to anticipate later criticism, but they could not prevent that his idea of a pact or contract has been repeatedly attacked. Achermann (2013) regretted that, due to Lejeune, later reflections on autobiogra­ phy seem to prefer the contract theory over referential theories; Missinne (2009, 2013) criticized the unilaterality of the pact and proposed the term ‘autobiographical offer’; McLennan (2013, 113) suggested to speak – as Lejeune (2005) proposed himself – about an ‘autobiographical promise’. Many theoreticians on the postmodern autobiography have followed Paul de Man (1979, 921) with his poststructuralistic claims about the impossibility of truth and have rejected an referential pragmatic approach of the genre (autobiography as a “figure of reading”). Others, like Eakin (1992) and Finck (1999), have sought to reconcile a textual with a referential approach. (2) A second adjustment that Lejeune has introduced in the Bis-version of the autobiographical pact was the decrease of the sharp distinction between autobio­

2.3 Autobiographical Pact 

 225

graphy and non-autobiography, and between identity or non-identity of author and narrator/character. In his first version, either the text was always an autobiography, or it was none. A gradual position on the scale from fiction to reference was only admitted in the case of the autobiographical novel. Later he brought attention to the many ambiguities and degrees of identity that he himself had observed in practical examples. (3) Although Lejeune claimed from the beginning to take the position of the reader as a starting point, the importance of the reader is emphasized more in his revised text on the autobiographical pact (Bis). Placing a stronger focus on the reader is tied to the closer observation of the textual features of the autobiography. Lejeune had, so he admits, overvalued the contract and underestimated three important aspects that determine how the reader perceives a text: content, narrative techniques, and style (Lejeune 1986, 25 [1989, 127]). This shift in focus on the textual features allows the reader “[un] nouvel espace de lecture et d’interpretation” [“a new space of reading and interpretation”] (Lejeune 1986, 19 [1989, 124]) to freely decide how s/he will inter­ prete the author’s intention as it is expressed in the text. Although Lejeune (2005, 14) increasingly highlights the performative aspects of the autobiographical pact, and more and more favours an approach of genre as a prag­ matic act (the pact as a ‘promise’ and an ‘engagement’ of the author), he guards the pact as a central category of his autobiographical concept (Smith and Watson 2010, 207), as well as the specific illocutionary status of it: telling the truth. Apart from the above-mentioned critique on the dominant referentiality in ­Lejeune’s autobiographic model, specific ideologies of identity and authority have been criticized as well. The self-determining, independent model of identity was prob­ lematised (e.  g. by Eakin 2008), and feminist critics (Smith 1987; Gilmore 1994) have denounced that the privilege of the proper name in Lejeune’s definition of autobiog­ raphy legitimates a patriarchal, traditional model of identity. The discussion between Lejeune and Serge Doubrovsky concerned another aspect, namely a categorical impracticability in Lejeune’s model. Whereas Lejeune considered a combination of an autobiographical pact (identity of the name) with a romanesque pact (indication of fictionality) as inconceivable, it was exactly this impossibility that Doubrovsky wanted to realize with his novel Fils [‘Thread/Son’] (1977) as a specimen of a new genre: ‘autofiction’. The coexistence of an autobiograph­ ical and a fictional pact, between which two the reader keeps oscillating is considered as specific to autofiction by Zipfel (2009b). The following considerations, resulting from fruitful debates on Lejeune’s notion of the autobiographical pact, seem widely accepted in recent autobiographical theo­ ries. Autobiography is generally understood as a performative act, as a “commitment to self-narration” (Smith and Watson 2010, 18). The orientation towards a theoretical modelling according to the speech act theory set by Bruss (1976), taken up by Lejeune (1986, 2005), and continued by others, such as Lehmann (1988) and Lecarme-Tabone

226 

 2 Categories

(1997), has shifted the attention from the autobiographical pact to the autobiograph­ ical act. This pragmatic orientation has explicitly foregrounded transactional aspects (McLennan): the fact that autobiography includes a relation of exchange between reader and writer. According to this view, the autobiographical truth no longer lies in a referential truth, but “resides in the intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader aimed at producing a shared understanding of the meaning of a life” (Smith and Watson 2010, 16). Another implication of this shift is the stronger emphasis on the role of the reader, his/her expectations and prior knowledge as constitutive of the autobiographical genre (Gasparini 2004; Smith and Watson 2010; Wagner-Egel­ haaf 2008; Missinne 2013). The success of the autobiographical act (or Lejeune’s pact) resides in the intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader, an interplay of referential and fictional text-strategies and is not guaranteed at all. The concept of the ‘pact’ may have faded away as a useful generic criterion for defining autobiography, but it has remained in definitions trying to specify the hybrid­ ity of complex autobiographical and autofictional texts (Darrieussecq 1996; Wag­ ner-Egelhaaf 2008: Zipfel 2009). As Eakin (1992, 26) stated: “If Doubrovsky manages to demonstrate the limitations of Lejeune’s concept of the pact, it is, of course, the very existence of this convention that enables him to do so.”

Works Cited Achermann, Eric. “Von Fakten und Pakten. Referieren in fiktionalen und autobiographischen Texten.” Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. 23–53. Bruss, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Acts. The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Darrieussecq, Marie. “L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.” Poétique 27.107 (1996): 369–380. Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Eakin, Paul John. Living Autobiographically. How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2008. Finck, Almut. Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999. Gasparini, Philippe. Est-il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004. Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987 [Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997]. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics. A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Lecarme, Jacques, and Eliane Lecarme-Tabone. L’Autobiographie. Paris: Armand Colin 1997. Lehmann, Jürgen. Bekennen – Erzählen – Berichten. Studien zu Theorie und Geschichte der Auto­bio­ graphie.Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988. Lejeune, Philippe. L’Autobiographie en France. Paris: Armand Colin, 1971. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975, 13–46 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 3–30].

2.3 Autobiographical Pact 

 227

Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique (bis).” Moi aussi. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986. 9–35 [“The Autobiographical Pact (bis).” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 119 –137]. Lejeune, Philippe. Signes de vie. Le pacte autobiographique 2. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. McLennan, Rachael. American Autobiography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Missinne, Lut. “De ontdekking van de ‘autofiction’.” Parmentier 18.2 (2009): 19–25. Missinne, Lut. Oprecht gelogen. Autobiografische romans en autofictie in de Nederlandse literatuur na 1985. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2013. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011 [The Confessions. London: Reeves and Turner, 1861]. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography. Marginality and the Fictions of SelfRepresentation. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Autofiktion & Gespenster.” Kultur & Gespenster. Autofiktion 7 (2008): 135–149. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion.” Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen. Ed. Dieter Lamping and Sandra Poppe. Stuttgart: Kröner 2009. 31–36. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion. Zwischen den Grenzen von Faktualität, Fiktionalität und Literarität?” Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen. Ed. Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2009. 285–314.

Further Reading Allamand, Carole: Le pacte de Philippe Lejeune ou l’autobiographie en théorie, Édition critique et commentaire. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018. Gronemann, Claudia. Postmoderne/Postkoloniale Konzepte der Autobiographie in der französischen und maghrebinischen Literatur. Hildesheim: Olms, 2002. Kraus, Esther. “Autobiographie.” Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen. Ed. Dieter Lamping and Sandra Poppe. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2009. 22–30. Niggl, Günter, ed. Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed. 1998.

2.4 Autobiography and the Nation Lydia Wevers

Definition A nation unites people by language, history and culture. Autobiography characteris­ tically links personhood to nationhood as aspects of the same cultural and historical situation. Broadly speaking, autobiography, like the nation, wrestles with the ques­ tion of what it means to live in a specific place, with its political culture, its history and very often unsettled population.

Explication The self, like the nation, is an unfinished project. No-one knew this better than the New Zealand author Janet Frame, who opens the first volume of her autobiography with this image: From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the fol­ lowing record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always towards the Third Place, where the starting point is myth (Frame 1982, 11).

Frame’s metaphorical evocation of the life of the body, her body, makes the point that autobiography is an embodied discourse, contextualised by, and expressive of, the historical circumstances in which it takes place. But Frame’s avoidance or delay of facts, such as date of birth, as she commences an account of her life, places the emphasis on autobiography as a history of subjectivity (in which the intersections between fact and self-invention are always at play). The act of constructing a narrative of the self, reliant on memory and an incomplete documentary record, is always, as she puts it, heading towards the “starting point” of myth, and in her three volumes of autobiography Frame continually forces the reader to think about the blurred bound­ aries between history and fiction, “myth” and record. The same tensions are always present in a nation’s account of itself, which is a congruent act of self-invention, com­ piled from many differing and contesting accounts of nationhood. Autobiography, as the textual self-invention of individual members of the nation, both consolidates and complicates its documentary representation. As Carolyn Steedman has noted, written biography has to end in the figure of the writer (1992, 47), whose sense of narrative projects the record of a life into coherence and meaning, and in this sense autobiography is a key component of the narration of nation, but it also forces the recognition that a ‘nation’ is composed of innumerable narratives, which may share https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-027

2.4 Autobiography and the Nation 

 229

common ground but cannot offer a unitary interpretation of historical or personal experience. Françoise Lionnet has argued that the value of autobiographical narrative is that it complicates the dominant national picture we have of ourselves. Writing about her daughter, she describes how it was not until her daughter went to live in Mauritius for a year that she was forced to reflect on the many competing narratives of what it means to be American. The contradictions of personal and social situations are medi­ ated by grand narratives of race, class and gender that the nation adopts and mod­ ulates continually. As Lionnet remarks: “Autobiographical texts do the cultural work of laying out the set of relations that each new generation inherits and transforms” (Lionnet 2001, 379). Essential to this cultural work of autobiography is the idea of the nation as, in Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, an ‘imagined community’, constantly main­ tained and reconstructed by shared practices, such as participation in print culture, and Ernest Renan’s equally famous precept that forgetting is a ‘crucial factor in the creation of a nation’: “L’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d’une nation” (1882, 891). These important ideas about the nation, that it is an imagined community produced by participation, will and forget­ ting, depend on the constructive elements of written texts  – memory, imagination and participation. In an endless reflection of each other, both autobiography and the nation exhibit the incompleteness and permeability of performed identity, whether it is individual or collective. As Renan wrote, more than a century ago: “Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que les tous aient oublié bien des choses” [‘the essence of a nation is that all individ­ uals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things’] (1882, 892). Part of Renan’s argument about what constitutes the nation is to dismiss the things a nation cannot be based on – race, religion, language and what he calls “[l]a communauté des intérêts” [‘community of interest’] (1882, 902). For Renan, nation is “une âme, un principe spirituel” [‘a soul, a spiritual principle’] composed of “la possession en commun d’un riche legs de souvenirs” [‘the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories’] and “ le consentement actuel, le désir de vivre ensemble, la volonté de continuer à faire valoir l’héritage qu’on a reçu indivis“ [‘present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received’] (1882, 903–904). How is this heritage, this rich store of memo­ ries, accumulated? According to Renan, what he refers to as the cult of the ancestors furnishes the social capital on which the national idea is based. The first chapter of Janet Frame’s autobiography picks up exactly this point: “The Ancestors – who were they, the myth, and the reality?” (Frame 1982, 12), as she sketches her family’s history of migration, and describes the unequal historical knowledge passed down about her father’s and her mother’s families. Part of the invention of self depends on previous inventions.

230 

 2 Categories

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction As Trev Lynn Broughton has suggested, “usages, definitions, traditions and even ety­ mological histories of autobiography are always tendentious” partly because of the way self-life-writing intersects with “beliefs about the nature of selfhood and iden­ tity” (2007, 3). There are many forms of subjective history which include elements of autobiography. The textual and literary history of a British colony like New Zealand in the nineteenth century for example, is dominated by travel writing, diaries, and experiential narratives of colonial life many of which deploy forms of autobiography. Autobiography and its many subsidiary modes form part of the documentary heritage of conquest, exploration and imperialism. In the twentieth century, ‘New Zealand’, the imagined nation of literary texts by the predominantly male writers of literary nationalism, took shape as a monocultural, male-dominated, emotionally repressed and puritanical society. Autobiography and autobiographical fiction became a key mode with which to complicate and contest this version of the nation, which excluded or minimalised other versions of belonging. In the second half of the twentieth century, autobiography was reshaped by fem­ inism, multiculturalism or biculturalism, and the resulting life narratives. Where the autobiographical subject of modernism reflected high cultural and masculinist values, the advent of New Wave feminism resulted in a powerful shift towards autobi­ ographies which deliberately set out to reclaim female voices, reassert and describe the presence of women in social history, and to rearticulate the arena of class. Autobi­ ography, sometimes described as ‘life narrative’, became the textual province not only of women who conformed to the idea that an individual life’s worth was measured in political or cultural achievement, which made their autobiographies exemplary, but also ordinary, working class, non-professional women. At about the same time there was a marked increase, certainly in New Zealand but also in other national textual cultures, in the production of autobiographies or life writing by non-white subjects. The evocation of the nation as reflecting the power structures of the executive class has been effectively lateralised and undermined by autobiography as part of the more general movement of ‘history from below’. In New Zealand these shifts have been her­ alded by the publication of autobiographies by Maori, women, convicted murderers, ex-nuns and lesbian activists, as well as the more usual panoply of writers, artists, politicians, teachers, actors, filmmakers and sportsmen, such as Frank Sargeson, Toss Woollaston, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Peter Wells, John Walker and Ngaio Marsh. In the same way that the nation is imagined as progressive and future focused, autobiography offers a sense of narrative completeness about individual life, since it is a performative genre. As the nation performs itself across a spectrum of practices – education, cultural production, politics – so the textual self enacts and shifts identi­ ties. As Françoise Lionnet has written:

2.4 Autobiography and the Nation 

 231

If the field of autobiographical studies has taught us anything for the past 20 years, it is that self and community, identity and nation, are such complex webs of feelings and desires that there is no simple formula for understanding the dynamics of subjectivity and identification (Lionnet 2001, 379).

A question to ask is perhaps, can the nation be written without autobiography? And can autobiography be written without the nation? If the nation expresses itself as a “horizontal comradeship” (1991,7), in Benedict Anderson’s words, then an individu­ al’s sense of comradeship has to depend on being able to imagine the shared common­ alities – reading the newspaper in Anderson’s celebrated example – or reading, and writing, autobiographical narratives which intermesh and differentiate repeatedly across shared ground. If autobiography foregrounds human individuality constructed through the narrative and conceptual models of the historical moment, the nation foregrounds collectivity in the same way, but through the medium of projected selves. Both modes of selfhood, nation and individual, depend on each other while at the same time resisting and complicating these dependencies.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. I Passed This Way. Wellington/Sydney: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1980. Broughton, Trev Lynn, ed. Autobiography: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Vol. I–IV. Abingdon/Oxford/New York: Routledge, 2006. Frame, Janet. To the Is-land. An Autobiography. New York: George Braziller, 1982. Lionnet, Françoise. “A Politics of the ‘We’?: Autobiography, Race and Nation.” American Literary History 13.2 (2001): 376–392. Marsh, Ngaio. Black beech and honeydew. An autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Renan, Ernest. “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (1882) Oeuvres Complètes. Vol. I. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947. 887–907. Sargeson, Frank. Once is enough. A memoir. London: Martin Brian & O’Keefe, 1973. Sargeson, Frank. More than enough. A memoir. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1975. Steedman, Carolyn. Past tenses: essays on writing, autobiography and history. London: Rivers Oram, 1992. Walker John. John Walker, champion. An autobiography with Ron Palenski. Auckland: Moa Publications, 1984. Wells, Peter. Long loop home: a memoir. Auckland: Vintage, 2001. Woollaston, Toss. Sage tea: an autobiography. Auckland: Collins, 1980.

Further Reading Lynch, Claire. Irish autobiography: stories of self in the narrative of a nation. Oxford et al: Lang, 2009. Watson, C. W. Of self and nation: autobiography and the representation of modern Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

2.5 Autoethnography Christian Moser

Definition The term ‘autoethnography’ refers to a hybrid, semi-literary and semi-scientific mode of writing, which combines discursive elements of ethnography and autobiography. It links the analysis of self to the description of culture. Autoethnography marks a relational form of life writing (on the concept of relational life writing see Smith and Watson 2010, 215–217, 278–279): its subject is defined in relation to a significant other, who comprises a collectivity – a culture, society or an ethnic group. Autoethnogra­ phy’s other can either be another culture (where the ethnographer, confronted with foreign customs and social practices, takes advantage of the field situation in order to examine her personal self) or one’s own culture (where the subject describes her native social or ethnic setting and negotiates the terms of her group membership) or a plurality of cultures (where, due to the conditions of migration or diaspora, the self inhabits a transcultural terrain and claims a bi- or multicultural identity). In any case the self of autoethnographical writing is considered to be socially constrained and culturally determined. It is not conceived of as a pre-cultural essence.

Explication In current usage, the concept of autoethnography has a double sense (Reed-Dana­ hay 1997, 2), signifying either a mode of anthropology (the ethnography of one’s own group) or a mode of autobiography (self-representation that focuses on the acquisition of a cultural identity). On closer inspection, however, the two modes of writing turn out to be closely related, in historical as well as systematic terms. The rise of native ethnography is the result of a development within anthropology that has challenged received notions of scientific objectivity and directed attention to the participant observer’s situatedness (Clifford 1986; Hastrup 1992). The ethnographer’s author­ ity to speak for (and about) her own group is never taken for granted; rather, she is called upon to lay open the kind of relation she sustains to the group in question and thus to bring into play her personal history. On the other hand, autobiographers who investigate their own cultural background increasingly employ techniques adapted from ethnography. Since the 1960s, ethnography has become more autobiographic in character, while autobiography has become increasingly ethnographic (ReedDanahay 1997, 9). Consequently, native ethnography and culturally informed auto­ biography should not be viewed as two totally distinct modes of writing, but as differ­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-028

2.5 Autoethnography 

 233

ent realizations of one and the same type of discourse that contains ethnographic and autobiographic constituents in varying degrees. Given the hybrid composition of autoethnography, it is not surprising that the concept has gained its strongest footing within the disciplinary frameworks of anthro­ pology and literary studies. But it has also entered other disciplines, above all soci­ ology, communication studies and pedagogy. In anthropology and sociology, the concept denotes a method of qualitative research designed to supplement traditional fieldwork (Holman Jones 2007). In literary studies, it refers to a genre of life writing and a technique of representation. The term’s initial usage dates back to the 1970s, when it was employed by ethnographers to refer to forms of native anthropology and ‘anthro­ pology at home’ (Hayano 1979). It was adopted by literary scholars in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a term that denotes a certain type of autobiography (Lionnet 1989; Deck 1990), on the one hand, and as a designation for a specific mode of anti-colonial discourse, on the other: a colonized people’s self-description that reappropriates and subverts the colonizer’s representation of the colonized (Pratt 1992, 7–9). Since then, autoethnography has gained currency as a critical term, especially in postcolonial, feminist and life writing studies. In anthropology and sociology, it has achieved the status of a contested (if not universally accepted) research tool.

Historical Aspects While the term autoethnography has been coined only recently, the synthesis of auto­ biography and ethnography to which it refers has a longer history. The French human­ ist Michel de Montaigne is an early precursor of the genre. In his Essais (1580–1595) [Essays], Montaigne sketches a literary self-portrait not by means of immediate introand retrospection, but by critically examining the collective memory of cultural tradi­ tion (Beaujour 1980, 113–126, 220–224 [1991, 107–121, 213–216]). Moreover, Montaigne welcomes the ‘discovery’ of America and its indigenous peoples for opening up to Europeans new possibilities of acquiring self-knowledge: in his opinion, the confron­ tation with extreme forms of cultural otherness allows the European to cast a defa­ miliarizing view on her own culture and effect an awareness of its contingency. This combination of cultural relativism and self-analysis via self-alienation marks a basic tenet of autoethnography (Moser 2006, 109, 114–115). It resurfaces briefly in proto-au­ toethnographic texts of the Enlightenment, for example in a preface to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782–1788), where the author advocates the knowledge of the other as a medium of self-knowledge and offers his own autobiography as such a medium: “que chacun puisse connoitre soi et un autre, et cet autre ce sera moi” [“that everybody should know himself and one other person, and that other person will be me”] (Rousseau 1959, 1149 [2000, 643 translation modified, C.M.]). However, one must wait until the advent of scientific and literary modernism in the early twentieth

234 

 2 Categories

century for this tenet to become truly constitutive of a specific mode of writing. A number of circumstances conspire to make this possible (Buzard 2003, 62–63): the demise of evolutionist anthropology, the concomitant development of a new holistic, spatially defined concept of culture, the establishment of ethnography as a modern science based on empirical (participant) observation, and the emergence of primitivist movements in avantgarde art, which attest to a cross-fertilization of modern literature and ethnography. The method of participant observation is designed to implement the innovative concept of culture. It requires the ethnographer to attain insider knowledge of a foreign ethnic group and subsequently to retreat to an outsider position in order to place this knowledge in a wider context (Clifford 1988, 30–31). The knowledge of culture is generated by successive acts of familiarization and defamiliarization. This also applies to the knowledge of one’s own culture, which is the ethnographer’s ulti­ mate goal: “through realising human nature in a shape very distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own” (Malinowski 1922, 25). Significantly, there is a structural affinity between participant observation and the practice of autobio­graphy (Deck 1990, 247–248; Moser 2006, 117–127). Like the ethnographer, the autobiographer alternates between being an insider (living through experience) and being an outsider (interpreting lived experience by placing it in the wider context of a life story, a culture, or a society); she, too, attains self-knowledge by defamiliariz­ ing the familiar. Given these affinities, it is no surprise that modern ethnographers utilize the field-situation for the sake of conducting a personal self-inquiry. Bronislaw ­Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, written during his stay in New Guinea between 1914 and 1918, and Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme [Phantom Africa], which covers the Dakar-Djibouti expedition undertaken by a group of French ethnogra­ phers from 1931 to 1933, furnish early examples of a new self-reflexive mode of writing: the ethnographic memoir (Tedlock 1991, 69–77). In this type of text, the ethnographer focuses on the personal dimension of fieldwork, which is normally expunged from the ethnographic monograph for the sake of conveying an ‘objective’ representation of the other culture. The investigation of the personal can extend to a radical ques­ tioning of the ethnographer’s identity, promoted by the exceptional, self-alienating situation of fieldwork. Among the ethnographic memoirs written between 1930 and 1960, Elenore Smith Bowen’s (i.  e. Laura Bohannan’s) Return to Laughter (1954) and Claude-Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (1955) are especially rigorous in conducting such a self-questioning. The technique of controlled self-alienation, which allows for an analysis of the self in its relation to culture, is not only applied in the ethnographic memoir. It is also put into effect ‘at home’ and gives rise to a new type of modernist autobiography. Parallel to the abandonment of the scientific paradigm of evolutionism, this mode of autobio­ graphic writing breaks with the conventions of narrative linearity and teleology. It no longer introspectively reconstructs the subject’s ‘Bildungsgeschichte’ [story of forma­ tion], the continuous unfolding and actualization of an immanent potential. Rather, it focuses on isolated episodes from the individual’s past, which are subjected to a defa­

2.5 Autoethnography 

 235

miliarizing gaze in order to expose the determinant links between self and society. The autobiographer treats his or her childhood as a strange and distant cultural setting; life writing is practiced as an ethnography of the self. Thus, Walter B ­ enjamin’s autobi­ ographic sketches Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (1932–1933) [Berlin Childhood around 1900] conduct a meticulous analysis of a specific social milieu, thereby direct­ ing attention to the impact of linguistic codes and material culture on the formation of the child’s subjectivity. Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiography Les mots (1964) [The Words] scathingly dissects the petit bourgeois environment of his childhood and points to its influence on the child’s psychic make-up. Other modernist autobiogra­ phers deliberately adopt ethnographic and sociological methods and concepts. In his seminal essay on “Le sacré dans la vie quotidienne” (1938) [“The Sacred in Everyday Life”], Michel Leiris applies the anthropological category of the sacred to his child­ hood life, which is compared to a primitive culture, beset by taboos and structured by ritual. This essay constitutes the germ of Leiris’s monumental autobiography La règle du jeu (1948–1976) [The Rules of the Game], which systematically turns the self into an experimental field, an exotic terrain on which cultural topoi and semiotic structures engage in cryptic constellations. In her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Zora Neale Hurston makes use of her ethnographic training in order to analyze the struc­ ture of the black community she was brought up in. More recently, the French autobi­ ographer Annie Ernaux has adopted the conceptual apparatus of Pierre Bourdieu to throw light on the working-class background of her parentage, thereby explicitly char­ acterizing herself as an “ethnologue de moi-même” [“ethnologist of myself”] (Ernaux 2011, 224). All these autobiographers stress the objectifying distance that separates the narrator from the protagonist and her or his cultural context. They rely on the participant observer’s ability to step out of culture and to effect a productive defamil­ iarization. Modernist autoethnography presupposes a rigid opposition between the self and the other. After 1945, however, the processes of decolonialization and globalization have contributed to destabilizing this opposition. Transcontinental flows of migra­ tion, the increasing mobility of people(s) around the globe, the installation of worldwide communication networks and mediascapes have called the holistic concept of culture into question. Consequently, a new, postmodern variety of autoethnography has emerged that handles cultural difference differently. In ethnography, this shift initially manifested itself as a critique of participant observation and as an increasing consciousness of the literary character of ethnographic writing. The ethnographer’s pretensions to scientific objectivity and detachment were rejected; on the one hand, she was shown always to be an integral part of the situation she described, on the other, it was made clear that her writing was not the transparent medium it pretended to be but a rhetorical fabrication (Clifford 1986, 6). The ethnographer was urged to own up to the rhetoricity, partiality and perspectivity of her account – a double partiality at that, since the image of the other culture was recognized to be as much the ethnog­ rapher’s construct as the native informant’s, whose contribution was no longer to be

236 

 2 Categories

concealed. Thus, experimental forms of ethnography were devised, such as Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980) or Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981) and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992). These works focus on the anthropologist’s personal experience in the field and highlight dialogical modes of negotiation with informants who make their appearance as individual characters in the text. They point to ‘culture’ as a fictional construct, jointly elaborated by the ethnographer and her informant (Hastrup 1992, 118). Above all, the (inter)personal and constructive dimension of fieldwork is no longer delegated to a separate autobiographic account, but integrated into the ethnographic mono­ graph proper. By exposing the ethnographer’s situatedness, ethnography has become autoethnographical and literary in its alignment. The divide between self and other, which once formed the conceptual basis of eth­ nography, has been further destabilized by the rise of native anthropology and anthro­ pology at home (Bruner 1993). Increasingly, citizens of former colonies have gone into anthropology and become ethnographers of their own ethnic group, while Western anthropologists, on their part, have turned ‘native’ by opening up new fields of eth­ nographic research within Western culture. This tendency towards conflating self and other reaches its apex in a branch of sociological research that has driven the insistence on the situatedness of knowledge to the extreme and, as a result, has dispensed with the other altogether. Evocative autoethnography, commended by some as a valid method of qualitative research (Ellis and Bochner 2000), reduces the field to be explored in field­ work to the researcher’s personal self. The aim of the method is to “analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2011, 1). Within this approach, culture and society do not figure as impersonal structures or codes, but only in a subjectively refracted form, as “cultural experience” that manifests itself in “‘epiphanies’ – remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life” (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2011, 2). Thus, evocative autoethnography can hardly be distinguished from autobiog­ raphy pure and simple. Moreover, even though it is advertised as a scientific method, it is clearly also a literary endeavour: a recent introduction to autoethnographic meth­ odology was published in the form of a novel (Ellis 2004).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction The trend towards reducing the gap between self and other that characterizes the ethnographic variant of postmodern and postcolonial autoethnography can also be detected in its autobiographic complement. But while the self tends to eclipse culture in postmodern ethnography, the ethnic group seems to eclipse the self in postcolonial autobiography. Since the 1970s, ethnic autobiography has emerged as the predomi­ nant mode of autoethnographic writing. In fact, ethnic autobiography has received

2.5 Autoethnography 

 237

so much public attention that some critics simply equate it with autoethnography. However, ethnic autobiography is a vague concept that refers to a variety of forms. It applies to autobiographic texts written by members of ethnic minorities (Fischer 1986; Reed-Danahay 1997, 2). These texts often strive to define cultural identity in a multicultural or diasporic setting. But the term is also used to designate life writing produced by members of indigenous cultures and by citizens of former colonies. Thus, a text that describes the experience of growing up as a Chinese American such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1977) counts as an ethnic autobiography as well as Australian aboriginal autobiography such as Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987; Collingwood-Whittick 2000), a postcolonial memoir such as V. S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage (1962) as well as Native American autoethnography such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981), African-American life writing such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) or Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) as well as the Latin American testimonio, Nobel prize winner Rigoberta Menchú’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (1984) [I, Rigoberta Menchú] being its most famous representative. What these heterogeneous texts have in common is the attempt to relate the personal history of the autobiographer to the collective history of her ethnic community, the individual’s retrospection to the collective memory of culture. The autobiographer seems to function as a spokesperson of the group, and since this group often has a history of colonial oppression and forced migration, of being silenced, marginalized or reduced to the object of Western knowledge, the act of speaking is highly overde­ termined: it is valorized as a liberating performance, a reclamation of the authority to speak in one’s own voice and for oneself, a repudiation of Western descriptions of one’s culture and a claim to the right of cultural self-interpretation. In a word, ethnic autobiography is reduced to a form of native anthropology. This variety of autoethnography has given rise to critique. There are some who reproach it for its “insider complacency” and for relapsing into naïve notions of cul­ tural authenticity (Buzard 2003, 72). Others, notably representatives of migrant litera­ ture, have rebelled against equating minority writing with autoethnography, since this reduces the minority writer to the status of a witness or informant: “the autoethnogra­ pher is what the native informant became” (Lai 2008, 56; Kamboureli 2008). However, such critique rather applies to a certain popular discourse about autoethnography than to autoethnography (and ethnic autobiography) itself. Closer inspection reveals that the ethnic autobiographer cannot be tied down to being a culture’s mouth­ piece, since writing ethnic autobiography implies an act of transculturation (on the concept of transculturation see Pratt 1992, 6). The autoethnographer frequently uses a medium, a language and literary forms which are not those of her native culture. For example, Rigoberta Menchú appropriates Western techniques of ethnography in her ‘testimonio’ in order to portray her native Mayan culture (Pratt 1996, 68–69). In Storyteller, Silko reports that the oral tradition of her native Laguna culture was transmitted to her in English translation; she points to the fact that she had to subject these stories to a further estrangement by transposing them into writing (Silko 2012, xxiv, 104). This

238 

 2 Categories

double transculturation allows her to mix native and Western forms of storytelling in her autoethnography. Thus, the practice of transculturation works in both directions: it distorts Western modes of writing by adapting them to indigenous traditions, but it also deforms native patterns of cultural representation and thereby introduces an element of self-alienation that distances the autoethnographer from her community. As a result, the technique of cultural defamiliarization characteristic of modernist autoethnography is brought to bear on its postcolonial successor. Ethnic autobiogra­ phy opens up a liminal sphere between cultures rather than indulging in an insider’s view (Hastrup 1992, 121). As cultural mediators, ethnic autobiographers engage in cross-cultural comparison and practice a “bifocality” of vision, “seeking in the other clarification for processes in the self” (Fischer 1986, 199). This is all the more true if ethnic autobiography is situated in a multicultural or diasporic field. Many ethnic autobiographers are bicultural or have multiple cultural affiliations: Chinese-Ameri­ can, Asian-Canadian, Turkish-German etc. The instability of cultural difference in a globalized world has turned cultural identity into a matter of permanent renegotia­ tion. Ethnic autobiography is a medium of such negotiation – a medium that prefers exploring the interstices between cultures to enclosing itself into a self-sufficient cul­ tural unit. To conclude, the subject of ethnic autobiography does not function as her cul­ ture’s mouthpiece or informant. Rather, she speaks from a position of displacement (Reed-Danahay 1997, 4), not as a participant, but as an observer of participation (Deck 1990, 247). In autoethnography, the ‘autos’ and the ‘ethnos’ never simply coincide. On the contrary, autoethnography plays out the productive tension between self and society. The self is represented in its relation to culture, but this relation is subjected to critical reflection and put to the test. Autoethnography realizes its epistemic potential where the self neither is engulfed by the ethnic group it represents nor engulfs the group by positing itself as the privileged field of inquiry.

Works Cited Beaujour, Michel. Miroirs d’encre. Rhétorique de l’autoportrait. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980 [Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Trans. Yara Milos. New York: New York University Press, 1991]. Bruner, Edward M. “Introduction: The Ethnographic Self and the Personal Self.” Anthropology and Literature. Ed. Paul Benson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 1–26. Buzard, James. “On Auto-Ethnographic Authority.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003): 61–91. Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of ­Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1986. 1–26. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Authority.” The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century ­Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge/London: Havard University Press, 1988. 21–54. Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila. “Re-Presenting the Australian Aborigine: Challenging Colonialist Discourse through Autoethnography.” World Literature Written in English 38.2 (2000): 110–131.

2.5 Autoethnography 

 239

Deck, Alice A. “Autoethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Noni Jabavu, and Cross-Disciplinary Discourse.” Black American Literature Forum 24.2 (1990): 237–256. Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I. A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek et al.: Altamira Press, 2004. Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2nd ed. 2000. 733–768. Ellis, Caroyln, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum ­Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12.1 (2011), Art. 10. http:// nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1101108 (15 November 2017). Ernaux, Annie. Écrire la vie. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Fischer, Michael M. J. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1986. 194–233. Hastrup, Kirsten. “Writing ethnography: state of the art.” Anthropology and autobiography. Ed. Judith Okely and Helen Callaway. London/New York: Routledge, 1992. 116–133. Hayano, David: “Auto-ethnography: Paradigms, problems and prospects.” Human Organization 38.1 (1979): 99–104. Holman Jones, Stacy. “Autoethnography. Making the Personal Political.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 3rd ed. 2007. 763–791. Kamboureli, Smaro. “The Politics of the Beyond: 43 Theses on Autoethnography and Complicity.” Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography. Ed. Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo: Wilfired Laurier University Press, 2008. 31–53. Lai, Paul. “Autoethnography Otherwise.” Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography. Ed. Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo: Wilfired Laurier University Press, 2008. 55–70. Lionnet, Françoise. “Autoethnography: An An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road.” Autobiographical Voices. Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1989. 97–129. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (1922). Repr. Long Grove: Waveland Press, 1984. Moser, Christian. “Autoethnographien. Identitätskonstruktionen im Spannungsfeld von Selbst- und Fremddarstellung.” AutoBioFiktion. Konstruierte Identitäten in Kunst, Literatur und Philosophie. Ed. Christian Moser and Jürgen Nelles. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2006. 107–143. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú: Autoethnography and the Recoding of Citizenship.” Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchú and the North American Classroom. Ed. Allen Carey-Webb and Stephen Benz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. 57–72. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London/New York: Routledge, 1992. Reed-Danahay, Deborah E. “Introduction.” Auto/Ethnography. Rewriting the Self and the Social. Ed. Deborah E. Reed-Danahay. Oxford/New York: Berg, 1997. 1–17. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Préambule de Neuchâtel.” Œuvres complètes. Vol. I. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. 1148–1155 [“Preface to the Neuchâtel Edition of Confessions.” Confessions. Ed. Patrick Coleman. Trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 643–649]. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller (1981). New York: Penguin Books, 2017. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010.

240 

 2 Categories

Tedlock, Barbara. “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography.” Journal of Anthropological Research 47.1 (1991). 69–94.

Further Reading Bönisch-Brednich, Brigitte. “Autoethnographie: neue Ansätze zur Subjektivität in kulturanthropologischer Forschung.” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 108.1 (2012): 47–63. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski.” The Predicament of Culture.Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1988. 92–113. Coffey, Amanda. The Ethnographic Self. Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London/ Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, 1999. Moser, Christian. “Memoiren aus der Übergangszone: Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes tropiques als autoethnographisches Erinnerungsbuch.” Europäische Memoiren – Mémoires européennes. Festschrift für Dolf Oehler. Ed. Frauke Bolln, Susanne Elpers and Sabine Scheid. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. 109–126. Poole, Ralph J. Kannibalische (P)Akte: autoethnographische und satirische Schreibweisen als interkulturelle Verhandlungen von Herman Melville bis Marianne Wiggins. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005. Purdy, Jann. “Ethnographic Devices in Modern French Autobiography: Michel Leiris and Annie Ernaux.” Pacific Coast Philology 42.1 (2007): 24–36. Russel, Catherine. “Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self.” Experimental Ethnography. The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1999. 275–314. Sikes, Pat, ed. Autoethnography. Vol. I–IV. Los Angeles et al.: Sage, 2013. Watson, Julia. “Unruly Bodies: Autoethnography and Authorization in Nafissatou Diallo’s De Tilene au Plateau (A Dakar Childhood).” Research in African Literatures 28.2 (1997): 34–56.

2.6 Autofiction Claudia Gronemann

Definition An autofictional text purports to be both fictional and autobiographical, and thus represents a paradox in the traditional understanding of genre. The neologism ‘Auto­ fiction’ stems from a literary text by Serge Doubrovsky (1928–2017). Deleted from the original manuscript of Fils [‘Threads/Son’] (1977), the term ultimately found its way onto the cover of the published novel, where it was defined as “Fiction, d’événements et de faits strictement reels; si l’on veut autofiction” [‘Fiction, of strictly real events and facts; autofiction if you like’], which for Doubrovsky was no contradiction. In fact, autofiction is closely linked to his poetics of an existential writing-about-the-self that developed out of psychoanalysis. The term ‘fiction’ here does not refer to inven­ tion in the classic sense, but to the eschewal of intentional subjectivity. Doubrovsky’s works, labeled as novels, convey the real biographical (writing) experiences of an author named Doubrovsky, who is painfully aware that the self is largely inaccessible and who approaches his own life through infinite “fils des mots” [‘threads of words’]. Genre theorists inferred from Doubrovsky’s model that any text could be called auto­ fiction if it bears the subtitle ‘novel’ while producing referentiality as an autobiogra­ phy does, usually by virtue of the author and protagonist sharing the same name. In the age of postmodernity and the media, it is considered one option of self-presenta­ tion, one that is mostly adopted by French authors due to its origins in this literary scene marked by specific traditions.

Explication Though decried even today as a “mauvais genre” [‘bad genre’] (Lecarme 1993), aut­ ofiction has been well-received by the reading public and meanwhile become a lit­ erary fact. It is applied to a wide range of literary texts addressing the question of where the boundary lies between novels and autobiographies, between fictionality and factuality. That the term is applied to Duras, Houellebecq, Guibert, Chevillard, but also to Dante and Goethe, reveals the problems inherent in defining it. The label has even entered everyday speech, and can now be found in a more generalized form in dictionaries such as Larousse (“Autobiographie empruntant les formes narratives de la fiction” [‘An autobiography which borrows the narrative forms from fiction’] [Larousse online. n. pag.]) and Le Robert (“Récit où se mêlent la fiction et le récit autobiographique [sans aller jusqu’à l’autobiographie, même romance]”) [‘Narrative https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-029

242 

 2 Categories

in which fiction and autobiographical narrative are mingled (without going right to autobiography, or even to a fictionalized one)’] (Le Robert online. n. pag.). Though originating in French letters, it has acquired a broad spectrum of meanings and has since been applied to authors writing in Spanish, Italian, English and German, and other languages as well (see for instance Alberca 2007, Toro 2010, Ott 2013, WagnerEgelhaaf 2013). Until today abundant literary criticism is also produced. In short, it became a discursive model that can no longer be ignored. Initially devised as a play on words  – ‘autofiction’, ‘autofriction’ (Doubrovsky 1977), one step further the deleted text from Fils: “si j’écris dans ma voiture mon auto­ biographie sera mon AUTO-FICTION” [‘when I write in my automobile, my autobiog­ raphy will be my AUTO-FICTION’] (Doubrovsky cit. Grell 2007, 46) – by the late 1970s Doubrovsky feels obliged to explain his writing concept from the perspective of a liter­ ary scholar. He develops it out of the talking cure of psychoanalysis, which he not only portrays in his book Fils in the form of a transcribed analytical session (the “Rêves” [‘Dreams’] chapter, spanning about 60 pages) but practices through his literature by transforming his first-person narrator into a self-analyst (Doubrovsky 1980). The ses­ sions of psychoanalytic therapy exemplify rather clearly the interlacement of language and subjectivity so crucial to an understanding of autofictionality ­(Doubrovsky 1980). Another reference point is the existentialism of Sartre ­(Doubrovsky 1989; 1991). Writing as a mode of existence, however, has a third component in the case of Doubrovsky: a writer returning to his mother tongue. The author spent fifty years as a professor of lit­ erature in the United States (his return to France was recently described in Un homme de passage [‘A man of passage’] [2011]), which is where he began his analysis. And yet it is not only analysis (conducted in English) that helps him approach his self, but writing in his native language, French, as well. What’s more, as a writer he engages in a literary duel about interpretive agency with his analyst, Robert Akeret, who referred to the case of Doubrovsky in two of his specialist books (Boulé 2010, 327). Doubrovsky even included a theoretical talk about this conflict (“Analyse et autofiction” [‘Analysis and autofiction’], given at the colloquium Écriture de soi et psychanalyse [‘Self-writing and psychoanalysis’] in 1995) in his later autofiction Laissé pour conte (1999) [‘Left­ over as tale’; but Doubrovsky alludes as well to the homophone “laissé-pour-compte” which means ‘the rejected’; Tepperberg 2004]. From this special context of veracity, Doubrovsky develops his own notion of fiction with reference to Freud and Lacan – in particular the recognition that subjectivity and consciousness are language-bound, something he experienced first-hand, both as a writer and in psychoanalysis. Fiction, for him, no longer revolves around a pact (Lejeune 1973) between writer and reader about the truthfulness or inventedness of a literary text, but refers more generally to the symbolic function of language, the process of putting experience into words, and results in the typical blending of strictly referential facts (Doubrovsky imagines and invents nothing) which, put into writing, become fiction (Saveau 1999; Doubrovsky 2010, 388). Thus, the exchange of letters between Doubrovsky and Lejeune, which took place before the publication of Fils and concerned the legitimation of a genre

2.6 Autofiction 

 243

somewhere between the novel and autobiography, indicate a misunderstanding later important for the debate. Autofiction is not a paradox to Doubrovsky, but rather an expression of the fragile relationship between language and subject, which rules out the position of the classic, self-assured autobiographer (Doubrovsky 1993; 2010): “[P]our l’autobiographe (s’il est passé par l’analyse) le mouvement et la forme même de la scription sont la seule inscription de soi possible, la vraie ‘trace’, indélebile et arbi­ traire, à la fois entièrement fabriquée et authentiquement fidèle” [‘for the autobiog­ rapher (if he went through analysis) the form of the scription itself is the only pos­ sible scription of the self, the true ‘trace’, indelible and arbitrary, entirely fabricated and, at the same time, authentic and faithful’] (Doubrovsky 1979, 105). It is precisely because the author is conscious of not being able to uphold the classic autobiography’s imperative of reflecting the self sincerely, a self he himself has no access to, that he declares his texts to be novels. Doubrovsky created autofiction as an autobiographical model for everyman (Autobiographie de Tartempion [‘Autobiography of Mr. Nobody’], Doubrovsky 1989, 323–358) that also included the possibility of failure. One of his most famous works (Le Livre brisé [‘The broken book’], Prix Médicis 1989) ‘fails’ on account of the autobiographical imperative of veracity being applied too consistently. Deep revelations about his marriage are proof of the referential, even existence-threatening dimension of his autofiction, which draws on Leiris’s idea of literature as a bull fight. And yet Doubrovsky’s tragedies are never fictitious. Rather, he tries, by writing, to cope with separation and death, and even in 1982 he anticipated: “ma vie ratée sera une réussite littéraire” [‘my ruined life will be turned in a literary success’] (Doubrovsky, 1982, 91). Neither the self-assuredness of classic self-presentations nor the novel can compare to this kind of existential writing, later adopted by authors such as Hervé Guibert with his écriture du Sida [‘Aids writing’] (Genon 2010), Christine Angot with her portrayal of her own painful experience of incest (Weiser 2008), or Abdellah Taïa (Gronemann 2013), who establishes an Arab discourse on homosexuality. The increasing public awareness of autofiction that began with the breaking of taboos has likewise led to its discrediting on aesthetic grounds (e.  g. Jourde 2002), unleashing a debate about its value as a genre. It was the volume Autofictions & Cie [‘Autofictions & Co.’] (1993) that drew greater attention to this problem. The many, varied points of view in this debate, mainly restricted to a French context, were assembled by Gasparini (2008). There are two fundamental (and divergent) points of reference in this widely ranging theoretical discussion: the problem of genre on the one hand, and the epistemological question of subjectivity on the other. Within the dispute about how to classify autofiction as a literary genre, there are basically two factions. The representatives of the fiction hypothesis see autofiction, independent of Doubrovsky, as a transhistorical phenomenon  – more precisely, as a narratolo­ gical process of (intentionally) fictionalizing the self (Colonna 1989, 2004). Autobiog­ raphy theorists, in contrast, interpret the hybrid genre of autofiction as a renewal of the autobiographical paradigm (Lecarme) or see it as the expression of a new genre theory (Darrieussecq 1996). Lejeune, whose popular idea of the autobiographical pact

244 

 2 Categories

D ­ oubrovsky opposes, believes that autofiction is an intermediary historical stage in the process of the autobiographical novel converging towards the autobiography (1986, 24). He is convinced that referential and fictional statements can be distin­ guished from one another, and is much criticized for this position (Burgelin et al. 2010a). Whereas critics like Lejeune are detractors of autofiction, others applaud it as “renouvellement de l’autobiographie classique” [‘renewal of classic autobiography’] (Lecarme, cit. Gasparini 2008, 174). Burgelin (2010b, 11) is similarly positive in his appraisal of autofiction’s very contradictoriness as an “effet propulseur” [‘effect of propelling’] and recalls the history of the novel, which (though meanwhile ennobled) was reviled as a bastard genre even in the classical period (Burgelin 2010b, 8). He thereby historicizes the boundaries of genre (“fausses sécurités des frontières” [‘false securities of boundaries’”], (Burgelin 2010b, 13) and puts autofiction in the concep­ tual context of decentralized subjectivity (Freud; Lacan) and the new écritures du je [‘self-writings’] that have emerged since Michel Leiris, Jean Genet and Marcel Proust, which draw on different narrative techniques and involve recounting stories of trauma (Burgelin 2010b, 11–17). This position is linked to the second main trend in current autofiction research which, starting from the perspective of poststructuralist theory and historical discourse analysis, no longer merely examines the aspect of genre but also the overlapping problem of the changing relationship between author, text and subject matter. Here autofiction is a conscious break with the conventional logic of genres, not merely a “spécialité bien trop française” [‘a too much French speciality’] (Burgelin 2010b, 7) but also a new variety of autobiographical writing, whose refer­ entiality does not result out of facts but, following de Man (1979) and Lacan (1966), is created by symbolic means (Gronemann 2002). A life cannot be reproduced in narra­ tive, but is formed according to linguistic patterns, which are reflected, in turn, in the metadiscourse of postmodern autobiographies. The history of the autobiographical as a literary genre itself becomes discernible as a cultural construction (Finck 1995). Doubrovsky’s claim to be strictly factual while producing texts he considers fictional – fictionality understood as the linguistic constitution of these factual reference points − appears here as the result of a fundamental shift in the literary representation of subjectivity (Doubrovsky 2010). The fragility of the self is evident nowadays not only in the manner of writing about it, but likewise in the expansion of the techniques and media available for self-presentation, as well as in the oscillating boundaries between the reality of the subject and that of the media. This is where newer concepts of aut­ ofiction come into being. These include the virtual practice of Régine Robin’s Cybersoi [‘Cyberself’] as well as the analysis of digital and television discourses of the self (Spear 2010). A systematization of this media dimension of autofiction as a further development of Doubrovsky’s model is offered in Ott/Weiser (2013), which includes essays on photographic and cinematic self-representation as well as on cross-media writing strategies, in which different media concepts are simulated in a literary text. The history of autofiction is linked to a specific debate about the boundaries of literary self-presentation, especially in the French literary discourse, where the auto­

2.6 Autofiction 

 245

biography and the novel both enjoy a high prestige. Lejeune’s autobiographical pact has had a particularly strong influence on authors, readers and critics alike, making autofictional writing seem nothing short of a kind of iconoclasm. On the other hand, autofiction has afforded many writers a means to deal with the self in a way that strad­ dles the genres of classic literature and goes beyond its culturally determined norms. Autofiction reveals existential motives for writing, raising them to the status of compo­ nents in the autobiographical debate. Writing becomes an integral part of existence, a never-ending process of producing subjectivity through language. The referential self conceives of itself – in the fabric of the text – as part of a fiction, because no author can claim to know the real meaning of his or her own story.

Works Cited Alberca, Manuel. El pacto ambiguo. De la novela autobiográfica a la autoficción. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2007. “autofiction.” http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/divers/autofiction/24331 (11 July 2018). Boulé, Jean-Pierre. “Conjugaisons de l’autofiction: Doubrakeret.” Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy 2008. Ed. Claude Burgelin, Isabelle Grell and Roger-Yves Roche. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2010. 319–340. Burgelin, Claude, Isabelle Grell, and Roger-Yves Roche, eds. Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy 2008. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2010 (Burgelin et al. 2010a). Burgelin, Claude. “Pour l’autofiction.” Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy 2008. Ed. Claude Burgelin, Isabelle Grell and Roger-Yves Roche. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2010. 5–21 (Burgelin 2010b). Colonna, Vincent. “Autofiction: Essai sur la fictionnalisation de soi en littérature”. Diss U Paris, 1989. Mikrofiche. Colonna, Vincent. Autofiction et autres mythomanies littéraires. Auch: Tristram, 2004. Darrieussecq, Marie. “L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.” Poétique 27 (1996): 367–380. Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Galilée, 1977. Doubrovsky, Serge. “Initiative aux maux. Ecrire sa psychanalyse.” Cahiers confrontation 1 (1979): 95–113. Doubrovsky, Serge. “Autobiographie/Vérité/Psychanalyse.” Esprit créateur 20.3 (1980): 87–97. Doubrovsky, Serge. Un amour de soi. Paris: Hachette, 1982. Doubrovsky, Serge. Le livre brisé. Paris: Édition Grasset, 1989. Doubrovsky, Serge. “Sartre: autobiographie/autofiction.” Revue des Sciences humaines 22.4 (1991): 17–26. Doubrovsky, Serge. “Textes en main.” Autofictions & Cie. Ed. Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme and Philippe Lejeune. Nanterre: Université Paris X, 1993. 207–217. Finck, Almut. “Subjektbegriff und Autorschaft: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Autobiographie.” Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Miltos Pechlivanos, Stefan Rieder and Wolfgang Struck. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. 283–293. Gasparini, Philippe. Autofiction. Une aventure du langage. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008. Genon, Arnaud. “Hervé Guibert: Fracture autobiographique et écriture du Sida.” Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy 2008. Ed. Claude Burgelin, Isabelle Grell and Roger-Yves Roche: Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2010. 187–206. Grell, Isabelle. “Pourquoi Serge Doubrovsky n’a pu éviter le terme d’autofiction.” Genèse et

246 

 2 Categories

Autofiction. Ed. Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Violet. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academie Bruylant, 2007. 39–51. Gronemann, Claudia. Postmoderne, postkoloniale Konzepte der Autobiographie in der französischen und maghrebinischen Literatur. Autofiction – Nouvelle Autobiographie – Double Autobiographie – Aventure du texte. Hildesheim/Zürich: Olms, 2002. Gronemann, Claudia. “‘lui dire que j’étais […] un home comme lui’: Autofi(c)ktionales intermediales Schreiben bei Abdellah Taïa.” Autofiktion und Medienrealität. Kulturelle Formungen des postmodernen Subjekts. Ed. Christine Ott and Jutta Weiser. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. 91–106. Jourde, Pierre. La Littérature sans estomac. Paris: L’Esprit des péninsules, 2002. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits I. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Lecarme, Jacques. “L’autofiction: un mauvais genre?” Autofictions & Cie. Ed. Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme and Philippe Lejeune. Nanterre: Université Paris X, 1993. 227–249. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poétique 14 (1973): 137–162. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique (bis).” Moi aussi. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986. 13–35. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Ott, Christine. “Literatur und die Sehnsucht nach Realität. Autofiktion und Medienreflexion bei Michel Houellebecq, Walter Siti und Giulio Minghini.” Autofiktion und Medienrealität. Kulturelle Formungen des postmodernen Subjekts. Ed. Christine Ott and Jutta Weiser. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. 209–225. Ott, Christine, and Jutta Weiser, eds. Autofiktion und Medienrealität. Kulturelle Formungen des postmodernen Subjekts. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. Robin, Régine. Le Golem de l’écriture. De l’autofiction au cybersoi. Montréal: XYZ éditeur. 1997. Saveau, Patrick. “Autofiction n’est pas invention: le cas Doubrovsky.” Dalhousie French Studies 48 (1999): 147–153. Spear, Thomas C. “Identités virtuelles.” Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy 2008. Ed. Claude Burgelin, Isabelle Grell and Roger-Yves Roche. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2010. 441–459. Tepperberg, Eva-Maria. “Laissé pour conte oder Laissé-pour-compte? Zur polysemantischen Geburtsdynamik des neuesten Titels von Serge Doubrovsky im Kontext der ‘entreprise auto­ fictive’: ein Essay.” Autobiography revisited. Theorie und Praxis neuer autobiographischer Diskurse in der französischen, spanischen und lateinamerikanischen Literatur. Ed. Alfonso de Toro and Claudia Gronemann. Hildesheim/Zürich: Olms, 2004. 129–152. Toro, Vera, Sabine Schlickers, and Ana Luengo, eds. La obsesión del yo. La auto(r)ficción en la literatura española y latinoamericana. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, ed. Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstitution. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. Weiser, Jutta. “Psychoanalyse und Autofiktion.” Literaturtheorie und sciences humaines. Frankreichs Beitrag zur Methodik der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Rainer Zaiser. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2008. 43–67.

Further Reading Schmitt, Arnaud. “De l’autonarration à la fiction du réel: les mobilités subjectives.” Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy 2008. Ed. Claude Burgelin, Isabelle Grell and Roger-Yves Roche. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2010. 417–440. Vilain, Philippe. L’autofiction en théorie. Chatou: Les éditions de la Transparence, 2009. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion“. Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen. Ed. Dieter Lamping. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2009. 31–36.

2.7 Automediality Christian Moser

Definition The term ‘automediality’ signifies an interdisciplinary approach to life writing that pays special heed to the diverse media employed for the sake of self-representation. The term was conceived as an alternative to ‘autobiography’ (Dünne and Moser 2008a, 11, 2008b, 15–16; Smith and Watson 2014, 77–78): whereas the notions ‘autobiogra­ phy’ and ‘life-writing’ implicitly accord writing (‘graphe’) a privileged function as the key-medium for expressing subjectivity, ‘automediality’ takes into account the full range of artistic and technological media applied to the task of self-representation. Examples would be oral history, manuscript, print, painting, photography, film and video, comics, electronic and digital media, the Internet, among others. Research focusing on the various forms of automediality acknowledges that certain media of self-representation have played a more dominant role than others in specific histor­ ical and cultural contexts, but it also holds that they have always evolved in close interaction with alternative media, thus giving rise to multi-medial and hybrid modes. Studies of automediality analyze the evolution and interplay of these medial self-prac­ tices, thereby assigning them a constitutive function: media are not just neutral tools for expressing a preexistent self; rather, due to the specific materiality, signifying prac­ tices and technological apparatuses that define them, they contribute to shaping and producing the very self that makes use of them. Depending on historical and cultural conditions, different modes of automediality generate different forms of subjectivity.

Explication Until recently, scholarship on life writing was, to a large extent, oblivious of the dimension of mediality (Dünne and Moser 2008a, 7, 2008b, 11; Heintze 2013, 10–18). It neglected to ask whether the specific medium used for representing the self in any way determined the mode and the object of representation. There are three reasons for this neglect: a) Within Western culture, writing was the predominant medium of self-representation for a long period of time. The academic study of autobiography growing out of this culture therefore took it for granted that self-representation was a linguistic activity and that alphabetic writing was the most ‘natural’ way of recording it. As a seemingly ‘natural’ mode of representation, it escaped observation. b) The tendency to ‘naturalize’ writing as the medium of self-representation was linked to certain notions of subjectivity based on reflexivity and interiority: the assumption that https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-030

248 

 2 Categories

the subject comes into being by immediate self-perception, without having recourse to an external medium. The medium was reduced to the task of transparently re-pre­ senting this preexisting interior self-presence (Dünne and Moser 2008a, 7–9, 2008b, 11–13). c) The temporal dimension of the subject was also conceived of as an immedi­ ate self-relation. The self was thought to have direct access to the interior resources of memory, and remembering was believed to articulate itself ‘naturally’ in the form of narrative (Moser 2013, 120–123); so that, again, the medium was confined to express­ ing the preexistent story of the self, without influencing its structural make-up. The ‘linguistic turn’, while fostering theoretical reflection on the key concepts of autobiog­ raphy and challenging the notion of a preexistent self, initially reinforced the neglect of mediality. By declaring the self to be a linguistic construct, it paved the way for recognizing the constitutive function of media, but it also confirmed the privileged status of language and writing, to the detriment of other media of self-representation. The concept of automediality was devised to redress this neglect. It is based on the premise that selves are no given essences, but the product of culturally determined self-practices, which necessarily involve the use of material media (Dünne and Moser 2008a, 12–13, 2008b, 17–18). The self is not immediately present to itself; it comes into being by establishing a self-relation (“rapport à soi-même” [Foucault 1984a, 11–12 (1990, 5)]) through mediation. Paradoxically, in order to establish a continuous self-relation, the self must interrupt the communion with itself and resort to an external medium (Tholen 2002, 9). This caesura allows it to get hold of itself, as it were, and to turn the self into an object of self-practice. Self-relations can take on a variety of forms – they can be cognitive, hermeneutic, ethical, religious, aesthetic, mnemonic, to name but a few. In any case, the self-relation and its concomitant self-practices are sustained and enabled by a medium or a combination of media. The self constituted by the practice of remembering, for example, does not simply communicate with its own heart; rather it has recourse to private and/or public archives of encoded memories, which can consist of a variety of media: mnemonic cues, oral histories, texts, images, relics and souve­ nirs, digital data etc. The specific media used for encoding memories inflect the form of the self-representation that makes use of them and therefore contributes to shaping the subject that evolves through this practice (Erll 2005, 124; Moser 2013, 122–123). Thus, there is an elementary mode of automediality to be observed on the basic level of self-constitution, where selves come into being by entering into self-rela­ tions made possible by mediation. Automediality examines the historical and cul­ tural variety of such self-relations and the divergent modes of self-representation to be derived from them. Which media are employed for the establishment of a certain mode of self-relation? Which forms of self-representation develop out of it, and what kind of subject is thereby produced? The study of automediality pays special attention to media history and analyzes how the emergence of innovative media technology gives rise to new modes of self-relation and self-representation. Furthermore, it exam­ ines the repercussions of emergent medial modes on the already established forms: how, for instance, does the invention of photography modify the practices of visual

2.7 Automediality 

 249

self-portraiture? But it also deals with the persistence of forms, analyzing the transfer of certain techniques of self-representation from one medial setting to another: what, for example, explains the durability of the diary form, allowing it to migrate from manuscript to print culture, and from there onwards into digital environments? Thus, the study of automediality does not treat the practices of self-representation as isolated medial modes; rather, it focuses on their interactivity. This can take on the form of a competition, where a specific type of automediality strives to define itself in contradistinction to another. More often, however, different forms of automedial­ ity enter into a productive dialogue, which can be more or less intense. The gamut runs from mere references to other media (where a certain mode of self-representation models itself on an alternative medial form; a written self-description, for example, imitating the painted self-portrait) to the combination of different media by way of montage (e.  g. the reproduction of photographs in a written autobiography) to the convergence or even fusion of different media, which can issue in new hybrid genres (e.  g. the close interplay between text and image giving rise to the artistic medium of the comic and its autobiographical variant, the graphic memoir). Automediality comprises a wide range of intermedial relations, which constitute a hitherto neglected driving force within the evolution of self-representation and subjectivity. Finally, if self-representations commonly refer to other media, they also often refer to their own medial status. This self-referential dimension marks another important aspect of automediality. It signifies how a self-representation relates to and stages the media it employs. Again, the range of possibilities is wide. Certain modes of self-rep­ resentation tend to conceal their mediality. Thus, canonical autobiographies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently strive to deny the fact that they are written, thereby creating the illusion of transparency (Moser 2008b, 20–21, 2015, 22–23). Other forms of self-representation expose the media they make use of, either through explicit commentary or by means of figuration. Specific tropes and figures, for example the metaphor of the mirror (Konersmann 1991; Dünne 2008, 189–190), have played a prominent role in the history of self-representation. Such tropes of mediation are a valuable source of knowledge about the function ascribed to media in various cultures of subjectivity.

Historical Aspects The historical study of automediality correlates shifts in the technology and semiot­ ics of media to formal and functional transformations of self-representation, thereby making allowance for the formative influences of specific cultural, social and epis­ temic contexts. It directs particular attention to the cultural history of memory, its media and techniques, since changes in the structure and mediality of archives are due to have great impact on the practices of self-representation.

250 

 2 Categories

Between the fourth and the nineteenth century CE, alphabetic writing was the predominant medium of self-representation in Western culture. By focusing on the specificity of this medium, the study of automediality realigns the history of subjectiv­ ity and autobiography in three respects: a) it emphasizes the importance of the pre-his­ tory of graphic self-representation by tracing the gradual emergence of written forms in the semi-oral contexts of ancient rhetoric and philosophy and pointing to their oral legacy (Foucault 1984a and b; Moser 2006, 31–386); b) it alerts to the significance of changes within the history of writing, particularly to the shift from manuscript to print culture and its effects on self-representation (e.  g. Mascuch 1996, 97–131; Moser 2008a); and c) it creates awareness of the fact that the dominant position attested to self-writing did not go wholly uncontested even in the period mentioned above: from the fourteenth century onward, the visual self-portrait established itself as a compet­ ing mode of self-representation (Calabrese 2006; Hall 2014), which exerted a strong influence on the forms of written autobiography. Early forms of self-representation emerged in the context of philosophical instruc­ tion in Greek antiquity. In accordance with the Delphic maxim (‘know thyself’), the would-be philosopher was exhorted to acquire self-knowledge as a prerequisite to leading a good life. The mediality of the philosopher’s cognitive and ethical self-rela­ tion was openly acknowledged: In the Platonic dialogue Alcibiades I, Socrates exhorts his interlocutor to find a suitable ‘mirror’ for self-cognition and proceeds to identify himself – the philosophical mentor – as the ideal mirror, thus designating the oral dialogue between teacher and pupil as the apt medium of philosophical self-practice (Plato 1927, 132d–e; Moser 2006, 110–124). In the subsequent centuries, the philosoph­ ical schools of antiquity performed a gradual transfer of the mirror-function from the living presence of the interlocutor to written texts, until in the fourth century CE the church father Augustine explicitly labeled the book – and especially the holy book of biblical scripture – as the mirror where the individual was to search for the truth about himself (Augustinus 1963, 410; see Moser 2006, 1). The conversion-scene in Augustine’s autobiographical Confessiones (confessious) exemplifies the mirror-function of the book: the protagonist is advised by an anonymous voice to take up the bible (thus allegorically signaling the shift from orality to writing), where he lights upon a passage that mirrors his spiritual plight and instructs him on how to effect conversion (Augustinus 1981, VIII.12.29 [1992, VIII.12.29, 151–152]). Thus, the book as mirror is not conceived of as a transparent medium; rather, the self it presents is marked as an object of laborious spiritual practice and meditative appropriation. This is in keeping with ancient optics, according to which the mirror is not a medium of reflection, but of transformation (Macho 2002). Augustine declares his Confessions to be such a trans­ formative mirror – a book to be studied carefully by the reader so that she can recog­ nize it as the image of her true self yet to be achieved by imitation. Thus, the book is granted a privileged status as the medium of self-knowledge and self-transformation. In religious and ethical contexts, the paradigm of the book as mirror holds sway up to the seventeenth century (Stock 1995, 718–719; 2001; Moser

2.7 Automediality 

 251

2006, 1–5, 2008b, 19–20). In the context of Renaissance humanism, however, an alternative paradigm emerges, which is linked to innovative media technology and to a new mode of reading. It no longer aims at providing a model-self to be imitated, but gives access to an individual self to be studied as a personality (Quillen 1998, 15; Moser 2006, 626–646). The book as mirror is superseded by the book as portrait; the humanist writing of the self takes its bearings on the visual art of (self-)portraiture. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the intermedial relations between (self-)writing and (self-)portraiture are manifold. Humanist writers commission painters to fabricate their portraits, which, in the form of engravings, serve to illustrate the printed edi­ tions of their works, furnishing the book with a visual face, as it were. At times, this interplay between image and print is explicitly commented upon. Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving of the humanist Erasmus, for instance, features the Greek inscrip­ tion ΤΗΝ ΚΡΕΙΤΤΩ ΤΑ ΣΥΓΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΑ ∆ΕΙΞΕΙ (ten kreitto ta syngrammata deixei, ‘his written works will give a better image of him’), thus comparing the printed text to a portrait of the soul, which is superior to the pictorial portrait of the body (Jardine 1993, 52). The comparison entails an implicit reflection on the virtues of the medium of print: just as the new technique of perspective painting makes possible the rep­ resentation of spatial depth, the new medium of print opens up a window on the depths of the soul. Thus, both the painted and the written self-portrait postulate the transparency of their respective medium, giving immediate access to a preexistent self. The tendency towards obfuscating the mediality of self-representation to be dis­ cerned in Renaissance humanism is strongly reinforced by the epistemic shifts that herald the periods of Enlightenment and Romanticism. The new philosophy – with its insistence on the foundational value of the ‘cogito’ in its rationalistic, Cartesian brand, its emphasis on the elementary function of (self-)perception in its empiricist variety, and its focus on reflexivity in its Kantian form – establishes an innovative mode of self-relation: Henceforth, truth is no longer to be found in the mirror of books, but in the mirror of the mind, by way of immediate introspection (Stock 1995, 718–719, Moser 2008b, 19–22). The autobiographical literature of the period subscribes to the primacy of introspection. The canonical texts – Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Confessions (1782– 1788) [Confessions], William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1798–1850), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833) [Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life]– set the standard, their authors declaring their life narratives to be immediate transcriptions of mnemonic activity, produced without the aid of archival material (see, e.  g., Rousseau 1959a, 277–278, 2000a, 269–270). Autobiographies that follow these canonical models strive to efface the materiality of their medium. Signif­ icantly, Rousseau modifies the portrait metaphor inherited from the Renaissance in order to emphasize the alleged immediacy of self-representation: the writing of auto­ biography is no longer compared to the act of drawing or painting, but to the quasi automatic production of an image by the technical apparatus of a camera obscura (see, e.  g., Rousseau 1959b, 1154 [2000b, 648]).

252 

 2 Categories

If Rousseau’s reference to the camera obscura serves to underline the alleged transparency of written autobiography, it also inadvertently betrays its mediality, and, what is more, forecasts the appearance of a new technical medium of self-representa­ tion: photography. Indeed, there is a strong affinity between photography and auto­ biography, which issues in a great variety of intermedial forms developing in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Among the reasons for this close interrelationship, two are of major importance: a) Just as autobiography is conventionally described as a referential literary genre, the photographic image is believed to possess strong referential ties with physical reality due to the technicality of its production and its specific semiotic status, the photograph not only iconically reproducing its object, but also indexically attesting its existence (Sontag 2002, 154; Barthes 1980, 126–127 [2000, 80–81]). As a referential mode of representation, photography is apt to supple­ ment or even supplant the identity-work of written autobiography (Adams 2000, 1–21; Kawashima 2011, 15–16). b) Photography is a democratic medium. With the invention of small and cheap cameras, it becomes a highly popular means of recording events in public and private life (Chalfen 1987). In fact, photography supplants the written text as the most important mnemonic instrument; it constitutes the new core medium of personal and family archives (Hirsch 1997, 7–12). After the establishment of ‘Kodak culture’ (Chalfen 1987, 4–16), the individual who wishes to write her life story neces­ sarily resorts to photographic mementos. Thus, written autobiography is compelled to interact with photography in one way or another and consequently incurs modifi­ cations with regard to its narrative structure. On a basic level, the interaction between autobiography and photography is real­ ized by inserting photographic material into the written text, either with or without a commentary by the narrator. In the twentieth century, it becomes a common prac­ tice among autobiographers and memoirists to accompany their published texts with photographic illustrations. The reproduction of photos can serve a supplementary function of documentation, thus reinforcing the autobiographical pact (Lejeune 1975 [1989]) and its claim to referential veracity. Alternately, however, the autobiographer can also foreground the tensions between writing and photography, playing off one mode of self-representation against the other. Since photographs bring to bear the physical body of the subject (Rugg 1997, 13), they urge the autobiographer to view herself from the outside and thus challenge the interiority traditionally associated with self-writing. Photography introduces elements of exteriority and alterity into the text, thereby calling into question the identity between author, narrator and protag­ onist that autobiography conventionally lays claim to (Rugg 1997, 17). As alien bodies within the text, photographs elicit explanatory commentary by the autobiographer, which in turn can disrupt the narrative continuity of the life story. In some cases (e.  g. Barthes 1980 [2000], Guibert 1981 [1982]), the exegesis of images eclipses the diegesis of life history. This indicates a general tendency within autobiographical dis­ course and a shift in the cultural practices of memory: in accordance with the snap­ shot-quality of photographic images, remembrance takes on a discontinuous form,

2.7 Automediality 

 253

thereby subverting the teleological linearity of traditional autobiographic narrative. Significantly, many modernist autobiographers substitute linear narration by serial or episodic modes of representation, thereby referring to photography as a metaphor of memory or to techniques of photographic representation as a model of autobiographic discourse (Kawashima 2011, 18–20). If photography modifies the narrative structure of written autobiography, the latter also influences photographic modes of self-representation. Early forms of the photographic self-portrait take their bearing on the painted portrait and strive to capture the essence of the self in a single image. In the twentieth century, however, photographic self-representations tend to be imbued with elements of temporality, which emphasize the fragmentary character of each individual image. In the context of the avantgarde movements, the techniques of photomontage and collage serve to confer a certain narrativity to photographic self-portraits, as the examples of Claude Cahun and Hannah Höch demonstrate (Elpers 2008, 111–188; Kittner 2009, 35–56). In the second half of the century, photographers develop a penchant for sequential modes of self-representation. The sequential format  – e.  g. Cindy Sherman’s series of self-portraits entitled Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) – points to the fleeting, sup­ plementary quality of the subject: each image of the series showing an aspect of the self, but none revealing its essence; each containing the germ of a possible story, but the entire sequence never adding up to an integral narrative. Finally, the tendency towards sequential narrativization issues in the hybrid genre of ‘photobiography’ (Mora and Nori 1983): it combines photographic images with short explanatory texts, the latter providing a narrative setting, though without transcending the disjunctive form of seriality (e.  g. Frank 1972, Calle 2013). With written autobiography resorting to discontinuous forms of memorization and photography developing modes of nar­ rative linkage, seriality marks the point of convergence between the written and the photographic self-portrait. Seriality confers a certain dynamism to the photographic image, thus approach­ ing it to the medium of film. Despite this affinity, it took much longer for filmmakers to develop the potential for self-representation inherent in their medium than in the realm of photography. An obvious reason for this belatedness is the complex technical apparatus required for the production of film. Widespread use of film for the sake of personal documentation only set in with the introduction of small, affordable camera equipment. More pointedly than in the context of other media, this dependence on technology signals the determining function of the medium in filmic autobiography. The difficulties of filmic self-representation were seized upon by adherents of a tra­ ditional concept of life writing and turned into an argument against the possibility of non-linguistic modes of self-representation in general. As late as 1980 the literary critic Elisabeth Bruss denied the possibility of filmic (and, by implication, of any kind of visual) self-representation for two reasons: a) the filmic autobiographer cannot say ‘I’, he cannot be in front of and behind the camera at the same time; b) filmic auto­ biography has no means of giving a truthful representation of the autobiographer’s

254 

 2 Categories

past; it must restage past events by fictional means and with the help of actors (Bruss 1980, 297, 307–308). However, Bruss fails to notice that film, in fact, does dispose over means to represent the filmmaker’s past, albeit by recruiting the help of other media: a) through the technique of voice-over; b) by including photographs and written doc­ uments (Lejeune 1987, 9). Thus, film must either resort to the means of fictionalization or to intermedial montage in order to be autobiographical, but in doing so it only exposes more clearly than other media structural constraints that hold true for all forms of self-representation. There are two modes of filmic self-representation, corresponding to the distinction between autobiography proper and autofiction in the domain of self-writing: the auto­ biographic fiction film and filmic autobiography (Gernalzick 2006, 2). Historically, filmic autofiction precedes filmic autobiography, the former emerging in the context of the European auteur cinema and the ‘Nouvelle Vague’ of the 1950s and 1960s (e.  g. François Truffaut, Federico Fellini). Filmic autobiography, which originates in the counter-cultural and artistic milieus of the 1960s and 1970s, is more experimental in its alignment. It focuses on exploring the director’s present condition and thus resembles the non-narrative form of the literary self-portrait (Bellour 1990, 287–290). Filmic autobiography can be subdivided into two genres: the essay film and the diary film (Curtis 2006, 44). The former features the filmmaker’s coming to terms with a controversial topic, thereby foregrounding his personal viewpoint. The works of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Alexander Kluge, Jean-Luc Godard and Boris Lehman are rep­ resentative of this genre. The latter (e.  g. Jonas Mekas’s Walden, 1964–1968) captures a filmmaker’s personal life by stringing together sequences made over a certain period of time – the filmmaker using the camera to record his reactions to the immediate reality, situations, events, relatives and friends. Both varieties of filmic autobiography refrain from directly engaging the internal dimension of the subject; rather, they con­ centrate on ‘externalities’ (bodies, localities, significant others, objects, controversial themes), thus creating an oblique self-portrait. Filmic autobiography marks a multimodal form of self-representation. The history of automediality reveals that self-representers have frequently applied the technique of combining different media, especially text and image. Nowhere have these two media entered into such an intense interrelationship as in the genre of graphic memoir. Graphic memoir marks one of the most popular contemporary modes of self-representation (Chaney 2011a, 5). One reason for its success is the fact that it draws on the potential of both traditional artistic and new technical media, effectively supplementing the one by the other. The graphic memoir links up with the tradition of the painted self-portrait, the art of drawing offering the possibility of self-interpretation through stylization (Chaney 2011a, 4). It also connects to the tradition of written autobiography, the textual elements (especially in the captions) providing an additional narrative frame. Finally, the way text and images interrelate in graphic memoir is indebted to the technical medium of film: Captions function as a kind of voice-over (Smith 2011, 67), while the images are imbued with a narrativ­

2.7 Automediality 

 255

ity of their own by obeying the filmic principle of sequentiality. Filmic sequentiality is counterpoised in turn by an element that is specific to the graphic memoir: the gutter. It punctuates and disrupts horizontal narrative continuity, thus directing atten­ tion to the vertical dimension of reflective commentary articulated in the captions. Therefore, text and image interact by means of disjuncture, not by means of synthesis (Chute and DeKoven 2006, 769). This also applies to the autobiographical subject: The ‘I’ finds its place in the captions, which brings to bear the narrator’s present, whereas the images depict the self and its past from the outside, in the third person (Chaney 2011b, 23–24). Graphic memoir stages a multiple, disjointed self and there­ fore seems to be an apt medium for coping with the complexities of postmodern subjectivity. Early forms of the graphic memoir developed in the underground comics scene of the 1960s and 1970s (Gardner 2008, 7–14). The genre gained recognition as a serious art form with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (1980– 1991), which depicts his father’s struggle for survival during the persecution of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. Maus paved the way for the creation of demanding autobi­ ographical comics dealing with the complexities of identity-formation in the context of political oppression and exile (as in Persepolis, 2000–2003, the childhood story of the Iranian-born French graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi) or problems of sexual ori­ entation (as in American cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, 2006). Significantly, many graphic novels reflect on the resistances the autobiographer faces when turning a burdened past into narrative, and exploit the comic’s capacity to include extraneous material in order to overcome them: The contents of personal archives are exhibited (e.  g. family photographs in Spiegelman’s Maus and Bechdel’s Fun Home), thus refer­ ring to the ‘raw material’ of memory work, while simultaneously pointing to its artifi­ ciality and mediality by transferring them into the medium of drawing. The most recent innovation in the field of media – the digitalization of information technology and the establishment of the Internet – opens up hitherto unknown oppor­ tunities for self-representation, but it also submits it to constraints, some of them new, some adopted from traditional forms. In the early years of digitalization, the Internet was celebrated as a means of freeing the self from the coercions of normalized sub­ jectivity. The anonymous and virtual character of the reality created by Multi-User Domains seemed to offer users the possibility of fashioning “an identity so fluid and multiple that it strains the limits of the notion” (Turkle 1995, 12). However, with large corporations such as Google and Facebook aggressively seeking domination over the Internet and subjecting it to the principles of Western market economy and its con­ comitant cultural values, the initial euphoria was superseded by a more sober assess­ ment of the medium’s liberating potential. The invention of mobile devices for Inter­ net-access and the introduction of the so-called ‘Web 2.0’, while enabling new modes of participation and interaction, also blurred the boundary-line between online and offline worlds, thus promoting the transfer of normalizing power structures into the sphere of the web.

256 

 2 Categories

Significantly, the online journal and its cognate, the personal weblog, have become “the genres of choice of internet writers” (McNeill 2003, 25). Its serial, openended form, inherited from its analog precursor, the manuscript diary, allows the blogger to adapt flexibly to the demands of the present situation. This focus on the immediate present is further emphasized by the fact that, in contrast to the printed diary, the temporal interval between the representation of the blogger’s experience in writing and its publication is reduced to a minimum: the blogger writes her journal in public, so to speak, enabling the recipient to observe her life as it is being lived. Thus, traditional distinctions between the private and the public sphere are confounded (McNeill 2003, 26; Serfaty 2004, 470–471), and the reader’s involvement is intensified. This involvement includes the active participation of the recipient, whose comments constitute an integral part of the blog. The personal blog is an interactive, multi-au­ thored and dialogical genre; it produces a relational subject that realigns itself in con­ stant negotiation with its interlocutors. Among the demands brought to bear by the recipients is the expectation of truthfulness and authenticity (McNeill 2003, 37–38; Michelbach 2015), another inheritance from the traditional diary form. If the flexi­ ble openness of the blog favours ludic practices of self-experimentation, the range accorded to such experimentation is restricted by the confessional imperative of sin­ cerity, requiring of the blogger the same kind of responsible and attributable behavior as in offline social interaction (Michelbach 2015). This ambivalence is even more distinctly marked in the realm of Social Network Sites (SNS) such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Instagram etc., which provide pre-fab­ ricated spaces of self-representation to Internet users. SNS advertise their sites to be non-hierarchical spaces of free self-expression; on closer inspection, however, they prove to be heavily regulated. Many sites require their members to create ‘profiles’ of their personalities, based on templates supplied by the SNS. Since the primary goal of SNS is to incite and sustain interactive communication among ‘friends’ in social networks, this communication in turn exerts a strong influence on the individual member’s practice of self-representation, albeit an influence channelled by the SNS, its software (the commentary functions, like and dislike buttons, share icons, posting possibilities etc.) providing a frame for participation. In certain SNS such as Face­ book, the software plays an even more determining role in the form of algorithms: they analyze the communication of each member and shape the ‘News Feeds’ and lists of posts she receives according to her (imputed) interests (McNeill 2012, 75–78). Thus, the software actively collaborates in constructing the networked self. Both self-representations in blogs and in SNS are multi-modal and multi-medial in their composition. They comprise text, photographs, film, video and audio files. Digitalization strongly facilitates the combination of different media, as does the serial, open-ended format of the blog. Self-representations in the net often have the form of assemblages or digital scrapbooks (Whitlock and Poletti 2008, xv). The per­ sonal archive no longer functions as a mere source of self-narrative, being relegated to a background position; rather, it is put on show in its entirety, the website figuring as

2.7 Automediality 

 257

an all-inclusive exposition space (Reichert 2008, 84). Digital selves are performative, exhaustive and expository in character. They compete for attention and recognition among users of the Internet. SNS in particular stimulate the cultivation of an entrepre­ neurial self (Smith and Watson 2014, 79), adept at managing its image and at market­ ing itself through the display of personal success and an attractive life-style (Reichert 2008). In the digital sphere, not only the boundaries between public and private, real and virtual, online and offline worlds are eroded, but also the dividing line between the life lived and the life represented.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction The study of automediality discloses the great variety of forms of self-representation that have emerged in different historical and cultural contexts. It thus contributes to relativizing the notion of autobiography derived from the temporary predominance of a specific medium and a specific type of self-writing: the linear, retrospective narration of a subject’s life story written by herself. Automediality calls into question certain key categories codified by a theory of autobiography based on this type, e.  g. the identity of the narrating and narrated self allegedly guaranteed by the linguistic ‘I’, and reveals their dependence on a particular medium. The study of non-linguistic forms of automediality leads to an awareness of the fact that the object of self-representation is always a fictional construct – an ‘other’ self, a persona – and that every self-representation therefore contains an element of autofiction. Furthermore it makes evident that even within the domain of self-writing, a great diversity of forms exist which are not covered by the received notion, and thus challenges scholarship to develop new, more flexible categories and to extend its historical and cultural outlook. The concept of automediality modifies our understanding of autobiography. It opens up the possibility of studying autobiography not as a literary genre that is linked to a specific medium, but as a cultural practice of subjectivization that, depending on historical circumstances, makes use of various media, often in the form of multimodal combinations (Dünne and Moser 2008a, 14, 2008b, 19). As a multimodal cultural prac­ tice, automediality demands an interdisciplinary approach. Literary studies, media studies, film studies, art history and other disciplines must cooperate in order to analyze the complex interplay of media, artistic forms, technological apparatuses, social structures, cognitive and mnemonic practices within particular cultures of subjectivity. Moreover, these cultures should not only be examined within a Western framework. A primary task of the future will be the comparative analysis of autome­ dialities: to study the diverse automedial practices that have emerged in non-Western cultures and to investigate how they have interacted with Western forms, in inter- and transcultural contact zones, in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

258 

 2 Categories

Works Cited Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing & Life Writing. Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill/ London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Augustinus, Aurelius. Aurelii Augustinii Opera. Confessionum libri XIII. Vol. I. Ed. Luc Verheijen. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981 [Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]. Augustinus, Aurelius. Œuvres de Saint Augustin. Traités anti-donatistes I. Vol. XXVIII. Ed. R. Anastasi, M. Petschenig and G. Bouissou. Bruges/Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1963. Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1980 [Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2000]. Beaujour, Michel. Miroirs d’encre. Rhétorique de l’autoportrait. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980 [Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Trans. Yara Milos. New York: New York University Press, 1991]. Bellour, Raymond. “Autoportraits.” L’Entre-Images. Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo. Paris: La Différence, 1990. 271–337. Bruss, Elisabeth. “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film.” Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 296–320. Calabrese, Omar. Artists’ Self-portraits. Trans. Marguerite Shore. London/New York: Abbeville Press, 2006. Calle, Sophie. True Stories. Arles: Actes Sud, 2013. Chalfen, Richard. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green: State University Popular Press, 1987. Chaney, Michael A. “Introduction.” Graphic Subjects. Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison/London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. 3–9 (Chaney 2011a). Chaney, Michael A. “The Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 21–44 (Chaney 2011b). Chute, Hilary, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 767–782. Curtis, Robyn. Conscientious Viscerality. The Autobiographical Stance in German Film and Video. Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 2006. Dünne, Jörg. “Einleitung Teil III. Automedialität in visuellen und elektronischen Medien.” Auto­ medialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Fink, 2008. 189–193. Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. “Allgemeine Einleitung. Automedialität.” Automedialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Fink, 2008. 7–16 (Dünne and Moser 2008a). Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. “Automédialité – pour un dialogue entre médiologie et critique littéraire.” Revue d’Études Culturelles 4 (2008): 11–20. http://etudesculturelles.weebly.com/ automeacutedialiteacute.html (15 November 2017) (Dünne and Moser 2008b). Elpers, Susanne. Autobiographische Spiele. Texte von Frauen der Avantgarde. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2008. Erll, Astrid. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Foucault, Michel. L’Usage des plaisirs. Histoire de la sexualité. Vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, 1984 ­(Foucault 1984a) [The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality. Vol. II. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990]. Foucault, Michel. Le Souci de soi. Histoire de la sexualité. Vol. III. Paris: Gallimard, 1984 (Foucault

2.7 Automediality 

 259

1984b) [The Care of the Self. The History of Sexuality. Vol. III. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1988]. Frank, Robert. The Lines of My Hand. New York: Lustrum Press, 1972. Gardner, Jared. “Autography’s Biography, 1972–2007.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 1–26. Gernalzick, Nadja. “To Act or to Perform: Distinguishing Filmic Autobiography.” Biography 29.1 (2006): 1–13. Guibert, Hervé. L’image fantôme. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1981 [Ghost Image. Trans. Robert Bononno. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982]. Hall, James. The Self-Portrait. A Cultural History. London: Thames and Hudson, 2014. Heintze, Carsten. “Einleitung: Die mediale und kommunikative Perspektive in der (Auto-) Biografieforschung.” Medialisierungsformen des (Auto-)Biografischen. Ed. Carsten Heintze and Alfred Hornung. München: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013. 3–32. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames. Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Jardine, Lisa. Erasmus, Man of Letters. The Construction of Charisma in Print. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Kawashima, Kentaro. Autobiographie und Photographie nach 1900. Proust, Benjamin, Brinkmann, Barthes, Sebald. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Kittner, Alma-Elisa. Visuelle Autobiographien. Sammeln als Selbstentwurf bei Hannah Höch, Sophie Calle und Annette Messager. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Konersmann, Ralf. Lebendige Spiegel. Die Metapher des Subjekts. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1991. Lejeune, Philippe. “Cinéma et autobiographie. Problèmes de vocabulaire.” Revue belge du cinéma 19 (1987): 7–13. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique”. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. 13–46 [“The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Macho, Thomas. “Narziß und der Spiegel. Selbstrepräsentation in der Geschichte der Optik.” Narcissus. Ein Mythos von der Antike bis zum Cyberspace. Ed. Almut-Barbara Renger. Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 2002. 13–25. Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self. Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. McNeill, Laurie. “Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet.” Biography 26.1 (2003): 24–47. McNeill, Laurie. “There Is No ‘I’ in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography.” Biography 35.1 (2012): 65–82. Michelbach, Elisabeth. “Der Fall Aléa Torik. Zum Spiel als Kategorie des autobiographischen Blogs.” Sich selbst aufs Spiel setzen. Spiel als Technik und Medium der Subjektivierung. Ed. Christian Moser and Regine Strätling. München: Fink, 2015. 157–177. Mora, Gilles, and Claude Nori. L’Été dernier. Manifeste photobiographique. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1983. Moser, Christian. Buchgestützte Subjektivität. Literarische Formen der Selbstsorge und der Selbst­ hermeneutik von Platon bis Montaigne. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006. Moser, Christian. “Die Schrift als Halluzinogen. John Bunyan, der Buchdruck und die Konstitution des protestantischen Selbst.” Automedialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Fink, 2008. 53–76 (Moser 2008a). Moser, Christian. “Einleitung Teil I. Automedialität und Schrift.” Automedialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Fink, 2008. 19–25 (Moser 2008b).

260 

 2 Categories

Moser, Christian. “Vom Selbst als Text zum Selbst in den Dingen und zurück: Überlegungen zur Medialität und Materialität autobiographischen Erinnerns.” Medialisierungsformen des (Auto-) Biografischen. Ed. Carsten Heintze and Alfred Hornung. München: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013. 115–134. Moser, Christian. “‘Das Licht eines Sterns, der vielleicht vor tausend Lichtjahren schon zerfallen ist.’ Zur Medialität des Erinnerns in Tuvia Rübners Autobiographie Ein langes kurzes Leben.” Tuvia Rübner lesen. Erfahrungen mit seinen Büchern. Ed. Jürgen Nelles. Aachen: Rimbaud Verlag, 2015. 20–36. Plato. Charmides, Alcibiades, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927. Quillen, Carol Everhart. Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Reichert, Ramón. Amateure im Netz. Selbstmanagement und Wissenstechnik im Web 2.0. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions. Œuvres complètes. Vol. I. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. 1–656 (Rousseau 1959a) [Confessions. Ed. Patrick Coleman. Trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 (Rousseau 2000a)]. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Préambule de Neuchâtel.” Œuvres complètes. Vol. I. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. 1148–1155 (Rousseau 1959b) [“Preface to the Neuchâtel Edition of Confessions.” Confessions. Ed. Patrick Coleman. Trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 643–649 (Rousseau 2000b)]. Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography & Autobiography. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997. Serfaty, Viviane. “Online Diaries: Towards a structural approach.” Journal of American Studies 38.3 (2004): 457–471. Smith, Sidonie. “Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks.” Graphic Subjects. Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison/London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. 61–72. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me. A Tool-Box about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies. Constructing the Self Online. Ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 70–95. Sontag, Susan. On Photography (1977). London: Penguin, 2002. Stock, Brian. “Reading, Writing, and the Self: Petrarch and His Forerunners.” NLH 26 (1995): 717–730. Tholen, Georg Christoph. Die Zäsur der Medien – Kulturphilosophische Konturen. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Whitlock, Gillian, and Anna Poletti. “Self-Regarding Art.” Biography 31.1 (2008): v–xxiii.

Further Reading Arribert-Narce, Fabien. Photobiographies. Pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. Bühler, Kathleen. Autobiografie als Performance. Carolee Schneemanns Experimentalfilme. Marburg: Schüren, 2009. Dannenberg, Anja Pascale. Das Ich des Autors. Autobiografisches in Filmen der Nouvelle Vague. Marburg: Schüren, 2011.

2.7 Automediality 

 261

Dollhäubl, Carmen. “Ich – eine Comicfigur. Analyseansätze und Lektüreanregungen zum Autobiographischen Comic.” Kjl & M. Forschung, Schule, Bibliothek 61.3 (2009): 53–61. Edwards, Natalie, Amy L. Hubbell, and Ann Miller, eds. Textual and Visual Selves. Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Haustein, Katja. Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes. Leeds: Maney, 2012. Hölzl, Ingrid. Der autoporträtistische Pakt. Zur Theorie des fotografischen Selbstporträts am Beispiel von Samuel Fosso. München: Fink, 2008. Hornung, Alfred, ed. Auto/Biography and Mediation. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Jongy, Beatrice, ed. Lʼautomédialité contemporaine. Dijon: Abell, 2009. Lane, Jim. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Lejeune, Philippe. “Cher écran …”. Journal personnel, ordinateur, Internet. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000. Méaux, Danièle, and Jean-Bernhard Vray, eds. Traces photographiques, traces autobiographiques. Saint-Etienne: Presses Universitaires de Saint-Etienne, 2004. Meehan, Sean Ross. Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, ­Douglass, and Whitman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Pfisterer, Ulrich, and Valeska von Rosen, eds. Der Künstler als Kunstwerk. Selbstporträts vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005. Pisani, Salvatore, and Elisabeth Oy-Marra, eds. Ein Haus wie ich. Die gebaute Autobiographie in der Moderne. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Precup, Mihaela. The American Graphic Memoir: An Introduction. Bukarest: Editura Universității din București, 2013. Rugg, Linda Haverty, ed. Self-Projection and Autobiography in Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʼi Press, 2006. Schneider, Manfred. Die erkaltete Herzensschrift. Der autobiographische Text im 20. Jahrhundert. München/Wien: Hanser, 1986. Schweikhart, Gunter. Autobiographie und Selbstportrait in der Renaissance. Köln: König, 1998. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Trinon, Hadelin. “Autocinébiographie.” Revue belge du cinéma 13 (1985): 6–22. Weiser, Jutta, and Christine Ott, eds. Autofiktion und Medienrealität. Kulturelle Formungen des postmodernen Subjekts. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. Zuern, John, ed. Online Lives. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʼi Press, 2003.

2.8 Ego-documents Volker Depkat

Definition The term ‘ego-documents’ means different things in different national and discipli­ nary contexts. The Dutch historian Jacques Presser was the first to speak of ego-doc­ uments in 1958, and he eventually defined the term as “those documents in which an ego intentionally or unintentionally discloses, or hides itself” (Dekker 2002, 7; see Presser 1958, 1969). Building on this tradition, a group of Dutch scholars around Rudolf Dekker embarked on a concerted effort to find, collect, edit, and study Dutch ‘ego-doc­ uments’ from 1500 to 1814, which for them were autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, and personal letters. Arguing that these sources had previously been almost com­ pletely ignored in the Netherlands (Dekker 1996, 33), the group pursued a pragmatic understanding of the term ‘ego-documents’, classifying all those texts as such that could also be labeled as autobiographical or self life writings in the way Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson define them (Smith and Watson 2010, 4). In the 1990s, the German historian Winfried Schulze, a specialist on the Early Modern period, expanded the category of ‘ego-documents’ to include all forms of voluntary, involuntary, and even forced self-thematization as in for example court records, tax evaluations, or petitions for mercy (Schulze 1996, 21). In all, therefore, the term is characterized by a lexical and conceptual imprecision that continues to trigger scholarly debates.

Explication The debate about ego-documents is relatively recent, and it seems to be largely restricted to the Dutch- and German-speaking academias. Originating in the Neth­ erlands, and from there spilling over to Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, the term ‘ego-documents’ is now widely used, which seems to facilitate international scholarly exchange and discussion in continental Europe. It has met with only little interest in the British and American academic worlds (Greyerz 2010, 273–274). Furthermore, the debate about ego-documents has been primarily one of histo­ rians, more precisely, historians of the early modern period for whom the concept of ego-documents seems to offer a chance to study emerging notions of subjectivity and personhood for a time period to which most of the concepts crucial to modern autobi­ ography, like ‘autonomous self’ and ‘unique individuality’, do not apply (Fulbrook and Rublack 2010, 263, 266, 270, 272). In contrast, historians dealing with the modern age https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-031

2.8 Ego-documents 

 263

since roughly the mid-eighteenth century have not really embraced the term ‘ego-doc­ uments’, which does not mean, however, that they do not show interest in autobio­ graphical material at all; yet their debate does not zero in on the term ‘ego-documents’. In all, therefore, the scholarly reflection about the epistemological worth and the added value of the concept of ego-documents has mostly been led among Early Modernists. The rise of the term ‘ego-documents’ in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with the cultural turn in historiography, which generally brought the subjective dimension of history back into fashion. As different as they are, cultural approaches all show an interest in the question of how social groups have made sense out of the world they lived in, how they have interpreted life as ‘meaningful’, and how these processes of meaning-making have shaped, structured, defined, and motivated their individual and collective actions (Hunt 1989; Bonnell and Hunt 1999; Burke 2004; Bachmann-Medick 2009). Against this backdrop, ego-documents, in the eyes of their advocates, promise a category to study “a key issue that might conveniently be summarized as that of ‘structures and subjectivities’” (Fulbrook and Rublack 2010, 263). Despite its growing popularity, ‘ego-documents’ continues to be a highly con­ tested term, with this debate being particularly intense in the German academic context with its love for fundamental theoretical debates and its historicist tradition of Quellenkunde, i.  e. the conscientious classification of sources and their rigorous epistemological criticism. While other academic contexts tend to be more pragmatic in their dealings with ego-documents, the conceptual and methodological debate among German-speaking historians revolves around two major problems. First, they are arguing about how to position ego-documents within the established schemas of source classification. Second, historians are debating the theoretical premises and conceptual emphases connected to the term ‘ego-documents’. The idea of ego-documents challenges the basic distinction between administra­ tive records and historical documents as supposedly objective sources, on the one hand, and all forms of first-person narratives and self-referential writing as suppos­ edly subjective sources, on the other hand, which, for their very subjectivity, seem to mar the historians’ access to the past as it actually was (Bernheim 1908; Clark 1967, 62–81; Brandt and Fuchs 2012, 48–64; Baumgart 2005; Popkin 2005, 11–24). In this context, the historicist system of source classification coined terms like ‘personal doc­ uments’, ‘self-narratives’, or ‘Selbstzeugnisse’ [‘testimonies to the self’] to categorize sources like autobiographies, diaries, or letters (Krusenstjern 1994; Henning 2012; Depkat 2011). Against this backdrop, the problem of ego-documents is two-fold. In its most expansive definition proposed by Schulze, it cuts across the established distinction between institutional records and personal documents. In its more restricted defini­ tion, the term’s added value in comparison to competing concepts like ‘autobiogra­ phy’, ‘self-narratives’, and especially ‘Selbstzeugnisse’ is altogether unclear. In this context, Benigna von Krusenstjern has suggested a way of relating ego-documents and ‘Selbstzeugnisse’. Declaring the explicit and voluntary self-thematization of a

264 

 2 Categories

historical subject making itself the topic of representation and communication as the defining criterion of ‘Selbstzeugnisse’, she proposed classifying these testimonies to the self as a subgroup of ego-documents, which can also include involuntary, outright forced, or indirect disclosures of an ego (Krusenstjern 1994, 463, 470). Apart from questions of classification, the conceptual premises on which the concept of ‘ego-documents’ rests has triggered heated debates among historians. Kaspar von Greyerz has most outspokenly criticized the “inevitable association” with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and the heavily charged concept of an ‘ego’ that can supposedly be accessed through sources classified as ego-documents (Greyerz 2010, 280). In his eyes, the category of ‘the self’ is more appropriate to define what histo­ rians can actually encounter in autobiographies, memoirs, letters, diaries and other forms of self-narratives. Many historians, Greyerz argues, “have continued to adhere to the notion of ‘Selbstzeugnisse’, knowing full well that in many of the personal doc­ uments studied one does not really encounter a fully recognizable self. Yet many such texts allow one to historicize at least individual aspects of the self, whereas they shed no light at all on the inner workings of an ego”. Compared to the category of ‘ego-doc­ uments’, the notion of ‘Selbstzeugnisse’ was “quite obviously the lesser evil” (Greyerz 2010, 280). In its narrowest definition, therefore, the term ‘ego-documents’ can be used inter­ changeably with ‘self-narrative’, ‘Selbstzeugnis’, or ‘self life writing’, and it is being used as such by scholars like Jacques Presser and Rudolf Dekker, who introduced the term, or Mary Fulbrook and Ulinka Rublack, who have just recently advocated its use and defended its epistemological worth (Fulbrook and Rublack 2010). In its broadest definition, advocated by Schulze, the term ‘ego-documents’ is a catch-all category that is so broad that it hardly means anything. As such, it is bound to rein­ force an already existing tendency among historians to group all forms of first-person narratives together under the rubric of ‘ego-documents’ without taking a closer look at the specific textuality, narrativity and communicative pragmatics of their source material. “Historians doing research on others’ lives”, writes Jeremy D. Popkin, “often lump autobiographies together with other forms of personal writing, such as letters and diaries, but in fact these genres are quite different” (1999, 726). Using the term ‘ego-documents’ to classify all sources in which a human being voluntarily or invol­ untarily tells us something about him- or herself in the first or third person, bears the danger of blinding historians even further to the formal, narratological, and commu­ nicative dynamics of the various forms of self life writing. At the same time the concept of ‘ego-documents’, even in its broadest definition, still appears to be too narrow for its focus on written forms of self-thematization. What about the non-written material that can also give testimony to the self? Think of visuals (paintings, prints, and photographs), audio-visuals (movies and videos), or the internet with its unlimited possibilities of combining written, visual, audio, and audio-visual media to define, negotiate and re-define one’s social self. To this list of non-written forms of self-thematization we would also have to add the artifacts of

2.8 Ego-documents 

 265

material culture like clothes, cars, and cell phones that can also serve the purpose of self-thematization, especially in affluent consumer societies.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction What does the discussion about ego-documents mean for the field of autobiography/ autofiction research? There are four points that can be made in conclusion of this article. First, the controversy around the term highlights, once again, the multitude of forms in which human beings have thematized themselves over the centuries; forms that go way beyond autobiography, memoir or diary. Second, the category of ‘ego-doc­ uments’ complicates the problem of defining the genre of autobiography/autofiction. While the very diversity and variety of self life writings has so far precluded a com­ monly accepted definition of autobiography, the debate about ego-documents opens up a whole new dimension that is bound to blur the boundaries even further. The category of ‘ego-documents’, therefore, forces us to discuss the adequacy of inher­ ited categories, their epistemological premises, and theoretical implications. Third, the controversy about ego-documents urges scholars in the field of autobiography/ autofiction to differentiate more closely between the different forms of self life writing and their very different functions and uses in different societies at different times. This suggests that scholars should invest a lot more intellectual effort into compar­ ative formal, narratological, communicative, and functional systematics of self life writings. Fourth, the debate about ego-documents, as it is led primarily among histo­ rians in the Dutch and German-speaking academias of continental Europe, highlights the importance of national contexts and disciplinary traditions for the international study of autobiography/autofiction. While we are all part of an international commu­ nity of scholars sharing a set of common values, intellectual premises, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches, we also have grown into very different national academic contexts with different intellectual traditions and institutional setups. While using a category like ‘ego-documents’ may, on the one hand, help facilitate international scholarly debate and cooperation, it, on the other hand, also glosses over underlying epistemological and conceptual problems related to the very term in the different national academic contexts.

Works Cited Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 3rd ed. 2009 [Cultural Turns. New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2016]. Baumgart, Winfried, ed. Quellenkunde zur deutschen Geschichte der Neuzeit von 1500 bis zur Gegenwart. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005. CD-Rom.

266 

 2 Categories

Bernheim, Ernst. Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 5th/6th ed. 1908. Bonnell, Victoria E., and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Brandt, Ahasver von, and Franz Fuchs. Werkzeug des Historikers. Eine Einführung in die Historischen Hilfswissenschaften. Mit Literaturnachträgen von Franz Fuchs. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 18th ed. 2012. Burke, Peter. What is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Clark, G. Kitson. The Critical Historian. London: Heinemann, 1967. Dekker, Rudolf. “Ego-Dokumente in den Niederlanden vom 16. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert.” Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte. Ed. Winfried Schulze. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1996. 33–57. Dekker, Rudolf, ed. Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in its Context since the Middle Ages. Hilversum: Verloren, 2002. Depkat, Volker. “Ego-Dokumente als quellenkundliches Problem.” Die Biographie in der Stadt- und Regionalgeschichte. Ed. Marcus Stumpf. Münster: LWL-Archivamt für Westfalen, 2011. 21–32. Fulbrook, Mary, and Ulinka Rublack. “In Relation: The ‘Social Self’ and Ego-documents.” German History 28.3 (2010): 263–272. Greyerz, Kaspar von. “Ego-documents: The Last Word?” German History 28.3 (2010): 273–282. Henning, Eckart. Selbstzeugnisse: Quellenwert und Quellenkritik. Berlin: BibSpider, 2012. Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Krusenstjern, Benigna von. “Was sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert.” Historische Anthropologie 2 (1994): 462–471. Popkin, Jeremy D. “Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier.” American Historical Review 104.3 (1999): 725–748. Popkin, Jeremy D. History, Historians and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Presser, Jacques. “Memoires als geschiedbron.” Winkler Prins Encyclopedie VIII. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1958. 208–210. Presser, Jacques. Uit het werk van J. Presser. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak/Van Gennep, 1969. Schulze, Winfried, ed. Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1996. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010.

Further Reading Amelang, James S. The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Bardet, Jean-Pierre, and François-Joseph Ruggiu, eds. Au plus près du secret des coeurs?: Nouvelles lectures historiques des écrits du for privé. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2005. Dekker, Rudolf. “Egodocumenten: Een literatuuroverzicht.” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 101 (1988): 161–189. Dekker, Rudolf. Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland: From the Golden Age to Romanticism. Houndmills/Basingstoke/Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000. Greyerz, Kaspar von, Hans Medick, and Patrice Veit. Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich: Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850). Köln: Böhlau, 2001.

2.8 Ego-documents 

 267

Jancke, Gabriele. Autobiographie als soziale Praxis: Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum. Köln: Böhlau, 2002. Jancke, Gabriele, and Claudia Ulbrich, eds. Vom Individuum zur Person: Neue Konzepte im Spannungsfeld von Autobiographietheorie und Selbstzeugnisforschung. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. Krusenstjern, Benigna von. Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges: Beschreibendes Verzeichnis. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1997. Tersch, Harald. Österreichische Selbstzeugnisse des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (1400–1650): Eine Darstellung in Einzelbeiträgen. Wien: Böhlau, 1998.

2.9 Ethics of Autobiography Stephen Mansfield

Definition Broadly speaking, an ethics of autobiography involves thinking through the rights and responsibilities of writers and readers of such texts by attending to what a life writer should do. Or to express it as a tongue twister: what is right or fair or justifiable for one who writes about one’s own life to write about? To discuss ethical questions in life writing is to attend to the relationships between writers and readers, writers and their human and historical subjects, and to the judgments writers (in the first instance) and readers (subsequently) make in writing and reading autobiography. As G. Thomas Couser states, life writers “assume two distinct kinds of responsibilities: first, to the biographical and historical record; second, to people they collaborate with or represent in their [texts]” (Couser 2012a, 80). We might add a third responsibility: to those readers who approach the task of reading autobiographically with care – that is, ethically. A guiding question in this instance is what does a writer (and consequently a reader) owe: to those individuals who are represented in life narratives?; to groups, nations or ideologies that are claimed and represented by life writers?; and to the self of the author who may write as a witness to trauma or for psychic therapy? An ethics of autobiography must consider such aspects as truth telling (or historical accu­ racy), authority (who has the right to speak for or represent whom?), authenticity (an author’s reliability over the time and space of a narrative), the fallibility of memory, and a subject’s right to privacy versus the public’s right to know various versions of a life or historical event.

Explication Couser has described the life writer’s dilemma as follows: “On the one hand, the mem­ oirist is obliged to tell the truth, or at least not to lie – because the genre resides in the realm of nonfiction. On the other, as its name suggests, memoir relies primarily on an inherently fallible faculty, human memory” (2012a, 80). However, such questions are too complex to be reduced to a set of rules for writers and readers of autobiography. As Derek Attridge explains, ‘ethics’ is a more suitable term than ‘morality’ in regards to literature, for writing involves “unpredictability and risk” rather than “specific oblig­ ations governing concrete situations” (2004, 126–127). Therefore, when discussing an ethics of autobiography we are not seeking a clear set of rules or laws, but perhaps a series of generally agreed upon conventions governing the writing and reading of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-032

2.9 Ethics of Autobiography 

 269

autobiography – although even such conventions are a continually contestable field of enquiry. Of course, as any diarist will claim, it is completely acceptable to write whatever one wants about oneself or others in a private record (if such things still exist in the world of social media). The problem arises when one decides to publish such a record. Whilst ethical and even legal questions about the veracity of literature have existed for some time, it is in the modern era of mass publication of books, and particularly in the post-1980s ‘memoir boom’ (with its associated ‘publicity machine’), that questions of defamation, and more broadly a subject’s right to privacy, have come to bear on how we read and assess life writing texts. Legally, there is the question of libel, but beyond that there are questions about the seemliness of revealing family secrets or contested versions of events in autobiographical narratives. John Paul Eakin was perhaps the first critic to nuance this contemporary relationship between author, subject, and reading public, in his groundbreaking study How Our Lives Become Stories (1999), in which he examined (amongst other texts) Katherine Harrison’s incest memoir The Kiss (1997). In a chapter called ‘The Unseemly Profession’, Eakin demonstrates how the telling of major trauma can become complicated by a life writer’s narrative mode: “a curious discrepancy [exists] between her younger self – weak, controlled, victimized – and the identity predicated by writing this tight, austere memoir – strong, controlling, even manipulative” (1999, 148). Such an authorial presentation, or posture, is, as Eakin demonstrates, exacerbated by a publisher’s willingness to exploit an author’s physical appearance or ‘interviewability’ in various promotional avenues, which con­ firms the contemporary necessity for a visible author to stand behind or underwrite (or at least publicize) the truth-claims of such texts. Perhaps the best place to identify an agreed upon set of ethics of autobiogra­ phy is in the way the media and reading public respond to the revelation of literary hoaxes. It is one thing for a novelist to trade on an invented authorial identity (see for example the Demidenko-Darvill hoax in Australia, where a novelist was stripped of a major award when her claims to an ethnic heritage were proven unfounded), but when a life writer is exposed as fraudulent in their claims to an identity, or major truth claims in their work, the sense of outrage is of a different order. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) is one such example of this phenomenon. A bestselling ‘substance-abuse survivor’ memoir, in 2006 several independent journalists unmasked it as a largely fabricated account of Frey’s life. Frey and his publisher Nan Talese subsequently appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show where they were lambasted by its host for deceiving their readers. The publishing house Doubleday responded by offering readers a refund on the book, and by including a disclaimer in subsequent editions and marketing the memoir as ‘semi-fictional’. A recent transnational example from Australia involved the author Norma Koori, who published a bestselling memoir Forbidden Love (2003) (or Honour Lost in America), in which she claimed to have witnessed the honour killing of her female friend in Jordan. For a short while Koori became a spokesperson for women’s liberation in the Middle East, until an Australian

270 

 2 Categories

journalist revealed Koori to be a middle-class American woman who had never trav­ elled to Jordan, much less married and fled from a potentially fatal marriage. Follow­ ing the revelation, Koori’s publishers attempted to re-brand Forbidden Love as fiction, which garnered its own backlash. Koori’s follow up memoir A Matter of Honour (2004) was subsequently pulped. Defining what an ethical reading of an autobiography is is even trickier than the question of an autobiographer’s ethics. How does one read life narrative ‘in good faith’ – open to the truth-claims and rights of the author, whilst remaining attentive to the rights of the various subjects the text also reveals and exposes to judgment? Whilst a reader’s intuition is perhaps the best asset in such situations, being attentive to what Noel Rowe calls an author’s “ethico-textual manoeuvres” (2008, 196) allows us to assess a writer’s ethics without necessarily becoming ‘judge, jury and executioner’. How do we assess an author’s ethico-textual manoeuvres? It means being attentive to any claims an author makes to textual or historical veracity; to any failure of memory or reasons for such failure; to any justification for exposing confidences or omitting or eliding certain details: in short to what may be called ‘the dance of intimacy under the spotlight’. To determine such ethico-textual manoeuvres, one should begin to ask the question posed by David Parker in The Ethics of Autobiography and quoted at the beginning of this chapter, namely “the question of what it is right for a life writer to do” (2007, 2). In posing Parker’s query to auto/biographers we read, we may seek to ask the fol­ lowing kinds of questions: How does one decide what an ethical representation of the self or others is? As Barbour finds, “[w]hen we are troubled by or take issue with the memoir writer, it is usually for ethical reasons that focus on whether their judgements are fair, that is, consistently made” (1993, 96–97). What are some of the ethical com­ plexities that must be negotiated when representing a loved one or family member in autobiography? How does the desire to judge or not to judge the other, to condemn or to celebrate, complicate the act of representation? In making a judgement of parents, for example, as Barbour finds, “the writer may reflect on the limits of moral agency in another person, integrating moral judgements of a parent and interpretation oriented toward understanding the determining influences that made the parent who he or she was” (1993, 91). If a subject is deceased (as is often the case with parents or other formative figures), how do notions of regret or debt affect the task at hand? How does the subject’s death impact upon our judgement of whether an author’s representation is ethical? As Eakin observed (and sought to rectify), “[t]he other’s right to privacy is frequently assumed to terminate at death” (1999, 182). Finally, how do autobiogra­ phers ‘perform’ their ethicality in the act of writing? As Smith and Watson (echoing Judith Butler) note, in a performative view of autobiography “identities are not fixed or essentialized attributes of autobiographical subjects; rather they are produced and reiterated through cultural norms, and thus remain provisional and unstable” (2010, 143).

2.9 Ethics of Autobiography 

 271

Historical Aspects By discussing an ethics of autobiography, we are situated within an approach to litera­ ture that has been termed ‘the ethical turn’. Gathering momentum in the 1990s (Parker 1998) as a reaction against the dominant theory paradigms of postmodernism and its so-called “constructivist antihumanism” (Freadman and Miller 1992, 194), the turn to ethics in literary studies is defined in part by “a systematic approach, grounded not in Theory as it is normally understood in literary studies, but in moral philosophy” (Parker 2007, 3). Of particular importance are moral philosophers who have in various ways applied their thinking explicitly to literature and the language of self-construc­ tion, such as Charles Taylor, Martha C. Nussbaum and Bernard Williams. However, the question of ethics in autobiography should not be separated from, and indeed owes much to critical approaches in cultural studies, such as feminism and postcolonial studies. Much of the conceptual framework for autobiographical ethics is also drawn from classical ethics and philosophy, such as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics. In life writing theory, an ethics of autobiography began to be formulated in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1980s onward. If we compare James Olney’s influential Metaphors of Self (1972) to the collection he edited in 1980, Autobiography, Essays Theoretical and Critical, we can note a shift to a focus on the referential qualities of autobiography, and with it notions of truth-telling. However, it is perhaps in Lejeune’s “Le Pacte autobiographique” (1975) [“The Autobiographical Pact” (1989)] that ethics first took centre stage in any discussion of the genre. Leje­ une’s definition of an autobiography as being a book where the author, narrator and main character are the same person led to his conception of the autobiographical, where the author’s name on the cover of the book is like a signature on a contract with the reader. The autobiographical pact makes use of the referential pact in which “[t]he formula would not be ‘I, the undersigned’ […] but ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’” (Lejeune 1989, 22). While Lejeune conceded that [t]he oath rarely takes such an abrupt and total form; it is a supplementary proof of honesty to restrict it to the possible (the truth such as it appears to me, inasmuch as I can know it, etc., making allowances for lapses of memory, errors, involuntary distortions, etc.), and to indicate explicitly the field to which this oath applies (the truth about such and such an aspect of my life, not committing myself in any way about some other aspect) (1989, 22),

his influential concept of a pact has made demands of autobiographers and their claims to referentiality that had previously never been articulated before. Though sig­ nificantly challenged on a number of levels since its first inception, Lejeune’s autobi­ ographical pact remains an important touchstone in any discussion about the rights and responsibilities of the autobiographer. However, it is essentially in the last three decades that the turn to ethics in life writing has progressed apace. The questions Wayne Booth asked of fiction in The

272 

 2 Categories

Company We Keep (1988), such as “What are the Author’s Responsibilities to Others Whose Lives Are used as ‘Material?’” (1988, 130) and “What are the Responsibilities of the Author to Truth?” (1988, 132) have since been applied, perhaps even more strin­ gently, by critics of autobiography. Though his criticism always asked questions about the referentiality of autobiography, Paul John Eakin did not begin engaging in any con­ crete way with the ethics of the autobiographical act until his third book length study How Our Lives Become Stories. Bringing interdisciplinary approaches from neurology and developmental psychology to bear on questions of truth in life writing, Eakin was also one of the first critics to focus on the consumption of autobiography in the marketplace, posing serious questions about the notions of privacy and representing others. Similarly, Couser’s Recovering Bodies (1997) and especially Vulnerable Subjects (2004) mark a shift in his approach from an earlier engagement with post-structuralist questions of subjectivity in Altered Egos (1989), to an investigation on the ethics of representing illness and disability in life writing. Other important studies that herald this new focus on ethics include John Barbour’s The Conscience of the Autobiographer (1992), Richard Freadman’s Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will (2001), and David Parker’s The Self in Moral Space (2007). Each of these critics, along with other important figures such as Nancy K. Miller, contributed to the collection of essays The Ethics of Life Writing (2004), in which editor and colloquium convener Eakin pro­ claimed that “ethics [is] the deep subject of autobiographical discourse” (2004, 6). (Elements of ‘Historical Aspects’ were previously published in Mansfield 2013.)

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Another approach to this topic is to see life writing texts as occasions for analysing the moral challenges of everyday life – as a study of the ethics in or even from autobi­ ography. Critics such as Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum have typically adopted this approach, by studying the choices made by the subjects of life narratives and the outcomes of such choices, to draw larger ethical principles that can be applied to a reader’s own life. However, critics such as James O’Rouke have argued against such a methodology, seeing life writing texts (and confessional literature more generally) as both richer and more unstable than this approach makes account for. In Sex, Lies and Autobiography (2006) O’Rouke contends that confessional autobiographies “are uniquely capable of challenging the narratives that give our lives a sense of ethical coherence when their polysemic qualities – their ironies, ambiguities, and indeter­ minacies – falsify the central premise of moral philosophy, the presumption of a dis­ cernable continuity from ethical principle to practice in everyday life” (2006, 1–2). Beginning with Rousseau’s Confessions, O’Rourke shows how autobiographies typi­ cally display both a ‘legitimising narrative’, in which the narrator claims to be a good, well-meaning person, and a ‘shadow narrative’ where the author “somehow – uncon­

2.9 Ethics of Autobiography 

 273

sciously, unintentionally, unwittingly, accidently, possibly negligently  – harmed other people” (2006, 6). According to O’Rouke, the discontinuity between these two narratives renders autobiography not less but more useful than the scenarios moral philosophers traditionally construct in “rhetorical laboratory conditions” (2006, 4), for they force the reader to reconsider our own legitimising narratives against the practical consequences of our ethical choices. At the very least, an attentive reading of a confessional autobiography such as Rousseau’s should help temper the ethical judgments we as readers make about the justifications offered by life writers for their own complexly layered lives. More recent studies into post-human autobiography have extended the autobiog­ rapher’s sense of obligation to be ethical, by raising questions regarding our obliga­ tions to non-human subjects (such as animals and robots) in life writing. The recent proliferation of ‘companion animal’ memoirs such as John Grogan’s Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog (2005), Dean Koontz’s A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie (2011) and Kate Jennings’ Stanley and Sophie (2009) demonstrate the increasingly porous border between what constitutes human and non-human lives, and how they are memorialised in life writing. Other studies have begun to trouble our notion of a human life ending at death: books such as Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), which explores the ethics surrounding the unauthorised harvesting of a dying women’s cells to create the immortal cell line known as HeLa, demonstrate how advances in medical science have complicated the notion of a life ‘narrative’ and raised questions about “the boundaries of personhood and one’s own property rights to one’s ‘own’ body” (Couser 2012b, 191). Considering the rapid rise and equally drastic evolution of autobiographical theory and practice in the past twenty years, it is difficult to conceive of where an ethics of autobiography will turn to next. Fascinatingly, a very recent publication from Robert McGill suggests that one direction autobiographical ethics may turn its spot­ light (as the title of this handbook also suggests) is back towards fiction. The Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics, and Autobiographical Fiction (2013) suggests that perhaps the greatest silence in debates about the rights and responsibilities of writers to their (‘real’ life or at least biographical) subjects is the question of disclosure in auto/biographical fiction. How much licence, McGill asks, should novelists have when they clearly base their work on their life experiences and their characters on intimates and family members, without acknowledging such sources or even communicating with such parties prior to publication (McGill 2013, 5)? However, rather than redraw­ ing the boundaries of the aforementioned discussions between the rights of the author and the rights of the subjects, or between the status of autobiography as compared to autobiographical fiction, McGill directs us back towards the regenerative and playful potential of fiction (or literature, broadly speaking), both for the writing ‘self’ and the written ‘other’, in revisiting and rediscovering a shared past and an imagined future.

274 

 2 Categories

Works Cited Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Barbour, John. The Conscience of the Autobiographer. London: Macmillan Academic, 1993. Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Couser, G. Thomas. “Memoir’s Ethics.” Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 79–107 (Couser 2012a). Couser, G. Thomas. “A Personal Post(human) Script.” Biography 35.1 (2012): 190–197 (Couser 2012b). Eakin, John Paul. How Our Lives Become Stories. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Eakin, John Paul. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Freadman, Richard, and Seumas Miller. Re-thinking Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. 3–48 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Mansfield, Stephen. Australian Patriography: How Sons Write Fathers in Contemporary Life Writing. London: Anthem Press, 2013. McGill, Robert. The Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics, and Autobiographical Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. O’Rouke, James. Sex, Lies and Autobiography: the Ethics of Confession. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Parker, David. “The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s.” Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory. Ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 1–19. Parker, David. The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Rowe, Noel. Ethical Investigations. Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2008.

Further Reading Anderson, Linda. Autobiography: A New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2001. Barbour, John. The Conscience of the Autobiographer. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992. Freadman, Richard. Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003.

2.10 Ethos and Pathos Roman B. Kremer

Definition The terms ‘ethos’ (from Ancient Greek ἦθος, êthos) and ‘pathos’ (from Ancient Greek πάθος, páthos) describe many complex and interrelated concepts connected to per­ sonal and emotional persuasion. In rhetorical theory, the terms usually refer to a concept most prominently developed by Aristotle. In his τέχνη ῥητορική (téchnē rhētorikḗ, rhetoric), ‘ethos’ and ‘pathos’ describe two of the three modes of persua­ sion. According to Aristotle, persuasion can be achieved either through personal trust­ worthiness of a speaker (ethos), through the emotions conveyed (pathos), or thirdly, through logical arguments (logos) (Aristot. rhet. 1356a). Together, these three concepts form the so-called πίστεις εντεχνοι (pisteis entechnoi, artistic proof), that is, proof created through the art of rhetoric, as opposed to pre-existing proof (from Ancient Greek πίστεις ατεχνοι, pisteis atechnoi), like an eyewitness in a crime case. Both ‘ethos’ and ‘pathos’ have been subject to historical changes and mutations. However, the concepts are still used in modern theory, now being researched from a multitude of disciplines, including rhetoric, psychology, literary studies, acting, musicology and economics/marketing.

Explication ‘Ethos’, understood as personal trustworthiness, can be established in a multitude of ways. Aristotle divides ethos into three subcategories, which together form the personal trustworthiness of a speaker. These three categories are φρόνησις (phrónesis, prudence), ἀρετή (aretḗ, virtue), and εὔνοια (eúnoia, benevolence) (Aristot. rhet. 1378a). Throughout history, the Aristotelian categories have been discussed and mod­ ified, but the core concepts have prevailed. It is not necessary for a speaker to actually possess these properties in order to be persuasive, as long as he/she displays their appearance (Aristot. rhet. 1378a), even though it is ethically desirable that he/she is truthful (Cic. de or. II, 189–190). While Aristotle views ‘ethos’ as reasonable trustwor­ thiness established during a rhetorical process and ‘pathos’ as the emotional part of persuasion, Cicero suggests the term ‘ethos’ for the calmer emotions, while ‘pathos’ only encompasses the more agitated emotions (Cic. de orat. II, 216; Cic. orat. 37, 128; Wisse 1989, 242), so that both terms together depict all emotions. Also, Cicero incor­ porates proof that is not created by a rhetorical act, such as the social position of the speaker (dignitas, Cic. de orat. II, 182) or the positive deeds a speaker has already https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-033

276 

 2 Categories

done prior to his speech (res gestae/benefacia, Cic. de orat. II, 182; Cic. off. II 8, 31–11, 38.; II 9, 32), into the concept of ethos. Furthermore, Cicero introduces the idea of ‘client’ ethos and ‘negative’ ethos. In addition to his own ethos, a speaker should also manage the ethos of both his client(s), which he should strive to strengthen, and his enemies, which he should attempt to taint (Cic. de orat. II, 182; Wisse 1989, 233). As a side effect,‘ethos’ becomes a category that is not only required for persuasion, but involves a whole set of sociological considerations and ‘topoi’ concerning character and ethical behaviour. Both ethos and pathos are often associated with a certain style of speaking. Ethos has mostly been related to a style that makes moderate use of stylis­ tic devices (‘stilus medium’), whereas pathos finds its expression in an elaborate style (‘stilus grande’) that makes heavy use of tropes and figures of speech (‘ornatus’) (Cic. or. 21, 69, 28, 97–99; Quint. inst. VI 2, 19; IX 2, 26). Pathos as appeal to the audience’s emotions is enabled not only through style, but also through displaying emotionally charged objects or persons, the most obvious case being the speaker himself/herself who transmits his/her emotions to the audience (emotional contagion) after using certain techniques of self-affection. Therefore, while ethos requires ethical knowledge about what a given society considers to be a good and trustworthy person, pathos relies on psychological knowledge of affective states and emotions. Ethos has tradi­ tionally been related to the speaker, while pathos has been considered to lie with the audience (Aristot. rhet 1356a 1–4, 14–16, 1377b 20–1378a). However, a speaker does not simply possess an ethos, but a certain ethos is conferred to a speaker at a certain point in time by an audience (McCroskey 2006, 83).

Historical Aspects The necessity to appear as a ‘good person’ in order to employ ethos convincingly was adapted into an entire theory of the both morally and technically versed speaker (‘orator perfectus’) by Cicero and, later, Quintilian (cf. Cic. de orat. III, 55; Cic. orat. 7, Quint. inst. I prooemium 9). The programmatic phrase for this theory has been attrib­ uted to Cato the Elder, who supposedly stated that a speaker should be a “vir bonus dicendi peritus”, a ‘good man speaking well’ (Quint. inst. XII 1, 1). This ideal proved to be one of the most influential concepts of education in the Western world. The most prominent adaptions of the ‘vir bonus’-ideal are probably the ‘Uomo universale’ of the Renaissance and the English ‘Gentleman’ (Herrick 2013, 116; Vickers 1988, 272–274). It is present in works spanning from Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528) to Knigge’s Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788) [Practical philosophy of social life, or the art of conversing with men. After the German Baron Knigge in two volumes (1799)] and beyond. Thus, ‘ethos’ evolved from a rhetorical category to a complex conglomerate that spans from predispositions (‘charisma’) over a code of conduct to a way of public display­ ing (‘image’, ‘brand’). Already in ancient Rome, the most prominent role of pathos

2.10 Ethos and Pathos 

 277

was in stylistic debates of the time, which focused on the conflict between the highly pathetical asiatic style, most prominently used by Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, and the attic style that favoured simplicity of expression. Relevant entries to the debate include Cicero’s position that all styles of speech should be employed according to the requirements of the audience (Cic. orat. 20–24), and Pseudo-Longinus’ treaty Περὶ ὕψους (Perì hýpsous [On the Sublime]). Similar debates on the role of emotions for stylistic considerations have resurfaced from time to time, most prominently in the periods of Baroque and Sentimentalism. Outside of stylistic debates, the often ill-re­ puted appeal to emotions has mostly been discussed in acting theory, particularly in discussions centred on self-affection and the transfer of emotions to the audience. The debate revolves around the question of whether an actor has to feel the emotions he/she wants to convey in his/her audience, as classical rhetoric demands (Cic. de or. II, 189–190), or whether he/she should be cold and controlled inside, as Diderot has it: “C’est au sang-froid à tempérer le délire de l’enthousiasme” [“Cool reflection must bring the fury of enthusiasm to its bearings”] (1830, 11 [1883, 13]). The fact however, that he/she has to, at least on the outside, appear to be filled with the emotions he/ she wishes to transmit, remains largely undisputed.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Since autobiographies and autofiction, at least in the influential hermeneutic tradi­ tion, are usually centred on the educational history and development of a main pro­ tagonist, the concept of ethos is essential, while the relevance of ‘pathos’ for autobi­ ographies and autofiction lies more on a stylistic level. In autobiographical texts, it is necessary for a narrator to establish a certain degree of trustworthiness since he/she claims to be relating ‘real’ events for which there may be no other proof than his/her words. Thus, the successful illusion of referentiality which is established through the offering and acceptance of an autobiographical pact is largely dependent on the very trustworthiness of the narrator: An unreliable narrator and the genre of autobiography are mutually exclusive. The successful usage of ethos-strategies is thus a prerequisite for the functioning of the autobiographical genre as such. In practice, most autobi­ ographies tend to make reference to Aristotelian concepts like ‘prudence’, ‘goodwill’ and ‘virtue’ when establishing their narrators and protagonists. In particular, the pledge of sincerity which is essential for the autobiographical pact can be understood as ethos-strategy. However, not only textual strategies should be considered for the ethos of a narrator. In the case of the autobiography in particular, most authors have already acquired a certain reputation prior to the publication of the autobiography. As Philippe Lejeune claims, an author might even only become an author once he/she has published more than one book (Lejeune 1975, 23). Thus, available information on the author, including prior texts, and the ethos that has already been established, are

278 

 2 Categories

usually transferred to the narrator and protagonist of an autobiographical text. In the same sense as ethos may influence the reception of an autobiography, an autobiog­ raphy can influence the public ethos of the author as well. This is the case with most political autobiographies which aim to create, adjust or solidify the author’s ethos, mostly for posterity, through the use of rhetorical strategies. Thus, ethos and autobiog­ raphy are closely intertwined, and very much depend on each other (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2001, 12–13), even to the point that the idea of writing an autobiographical account might influence decisions in life. Pathos, on the other hand, poses several difficulties when it comes to autobiog­ raphies. Other than diaries, autobiographies are usually written long after the events related, so that the original emotions are no longer present at the time of writing and can thus only be remembered. Furthermore, the large part of pathos that relies on the performance (corporal language, voice) of a speaker to transmit emotions cannot be applied in the same way in written texts. The concept of pathos in autobiographical texts is therefore mostly relevant as a stylistic implication. Passages that include a heightened amount of tropes and figures of speech are likely aimed towards arousing strong feelings in the audience. Stylistic cues may also involve ‘showing’ instead of ‘telling’, a focus on depicting the protagonists and their emotions, and the usage of direct speech. Concepts of ethos and pathos can also be applied to other protago­ nists and side characters in autobiographical texts. Ethos-wise, they can be depicted both in a positive way (the narrator taking the role of an ‘advocatus’) and a negative way. The destruction of the ethos of hostile protagonists as some sort of reckoning is a common feat of many autobiographies. Sometimes, hostile characters are used as particularly trustworthy witnesses in indirect self-praise, since they have no reason to give favourable reviews of the protagonist. Even though strictly speaking not consist­ ent with an autobiographical pact, autobiographies sometimes involve inside views of the emotions of other protagonists as well, thereby using them as possible sources of pathos.

Works Cited Aristotle. The art of rhetoric. Trans. John H. Freese. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Oratore Books I-II. Trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Oratore Book III. De Fato. Paradoxa Stoicorum. De Partitione Oratoria. Trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Brutus. Orator. Trans. H. M. Hubbel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De officiis. Trans. Walter Miller. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Diderot, Denis. Paradoxe sur le comédien. Paris: A. Sautelet, 1830 [The Paradox of Acting. Trans. Walter Herries Pollock. London: Chatto & Windus, 1883]. Herrick, James A. The history and theory of rhetoric: An introduction. Boston: Pearson, 5th ed. 2013.

2.10 Ethos and Pathos 

 279

Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [“The autobiographical pact” (1973). On Autobiography. Ed. Paul J. Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30] McCroskey, James C. An introduction to rhetorical communication. A western cultural perspective. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 9th ed. 2006. Quintilian. Institutio oratoria. 4 vols. Trans. Harold E. Butler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989–1993. Vickers, Brian. In defence of rhetoric. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1988. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Autobiographie – Rhetorik – Schrift. Zum Beispiel Marie Luise Kaschnitz.” Für eine aufmerksamere und nachdenklichere Welt: Beiträge zu Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Ed. Dirk Göttsche. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. 7–26. Wisse, Jakob. Ethos and pathos. From Aristotle to Cicero. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1989.

Further Reading Adam, Konrad. “Docere – Delectare – Movere. Zur poetischen und rhetorischen Theorie über Aufgaben und Wirkung der Literatur.” Diss. U Kiel, 1971. Amossy, Ruth. “Ethos at the Crossroads of Disciplines: Rhetoric, Pragmatics, Sociology.” Poetics Today 22.1 (2001): 1–23. Arnold, Antje. Rhetorik der Empfindsamkeit: Unterhaltungskunst im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin/ Boston: de Gruyter, 2012. Carchia, Gianni. Retorica del sublime. Rome: Laterza, 1990. Connors, Robert J. “The Differences between Speech and Writing: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.” College Composition and Communication 30.3 (1979): 285–290. Dachselt, Rainer. Pathos: Tradition und Aktualität einer vergessenen Kategorie der Poetik. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. Dockhorn, Klaus. “Die Rhetorik als Quelle des vorromantischen Irrationalismus in der Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte.” Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik: Vier Aufsätze zur Ideengeschichte der Vormoderne. Ed. Klaus Dockhorn. Bad Homburg/Berlin/Zürich: Gehlen, 1968. 46–95.

2.11 Facts and Fiction Volker Depkat

Definition The problem of fact and fiction forms the epistemological core of autobiography. A fact, according to Merriam Webster (2018), is “something that has actual exist­ ence” or “a piece of information presented as having objective reality”. As such, the notion of fact is carried by a philosophical realism that accords to things known or perceived an existence that is independent of the human mind. Facts, therefore, are tied to the concept of objective truth, i.  e. the idea that things exist independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them (Patzig 1981, 39–76; Russell 1966, 289–317). ‚Fiction‘, Merriam Webster (2018) defines as both “something invented by the imagination or feigned” and “the action of feigning or of creating with the imagina­ tion”. While the term ‚fiction‘ has complex philosophical and legal meanings to it, most pertinent to the problem under discussion here is the use literary criticism makes of it. Here, ‚fiction‘ refers to literature created from the imagination, manifesting itself in novels, short stories, and novellas. Fictional literature invents characters, events, and situations, representing its narrated worlds as if they were real, although they are not. While fiction can be based on true stories or situations, it does not pretend to be factual, leaving the relationship between the textual and the extra-textual reality undefined (Martínez Bonati 1981; Keller 1980; Henrich and Iser 1983; Cohn 1999).

Explication: Historical and Conceptual Aspects Beginning with the historicist source criticism and Wilhelm Dilthey’s epistemology of the humanities at the end of the nineteenth century, the theoretical and historical discussion of fact and fiction in autobiography has largely unfolded between the poles of mimesis – the representation of reality under the auspices of verisimilitude and veracity – and literary fiction (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 41–65; Smith and Watson 2010, 15–18). Inherently connected to this is the question of whether one wants to read auto­ biographies as historical sources – i.  e. as material from which facts about historical actors, events, situations, and developments can be drawn – or as texts, i.  e. as narra­ tive constructions that create worlds through narration and that transform lived lives into meaningful stories by way of selection, composition, chronological ordering, and emplotment. In the latter case, the fictitious potential of autobiography rests not only on the false representation of historical reality – although the problem of lies in auto­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-034

2.11 Facts and Fiction 

 281

biography is often discussed (Kuczinsky 1989). Rather, the fictitiousness of autobiog­ raphy is defined by the fact that the autobiographical narrative forms an individual’s life into a meaningful, coherent, and fully intelligible whole that has not much to do with how this particular life was actually lived, experienced and led. Georges Gusdorf, therefore, has identified the autobiographically suggested coherence and transpar­ ency of a life as fiction (Gusdorf 1956, 117–118), while Pierre Bourdieu, reflecting the same problem from a sociological perspective, has coined the phrase of “l’illusion biographique“ [“the biographical illusion”] (Bourdieu 1986, 69 [2000, 297]). Generally, the debate on fact and fiction in autobiography has moved from a reflection of autobiography’s worth as a historical source towards approaches taking the constructedness of autobiography for granted, and investigating into the how of the narration, the biographical and historical why of the autobiographical act, and its communicative functions in social processes of meaning-making and identity politics (Depkat 2010, 2015; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2010). The question of how the autobiographically narrated life and history relates to the actually lived life and historical reality is of towering importance for the epis­ temological debates about autobiography among historians. In debating this ques­ tion, historians reflect autobiographies not as texts but as historical sources, i.  e. as material handed down to them from the past from which they can generate factual information about this very past. Approaching autobiography as a historical source thus implies understanding it as a form of referential writing that allows us to reach through the text to the factual context behind it. From such a perspective, fact means factual accuracy of the autobiographical narrative and its faithfulness to historical reality as it actually was. In light of such an epistemological interest, historical source criticism from its inception has largely unfolded as the attempt to discern fact from fiction in autobiog­ raphy. In 1903, the German historian Hans Glagau, analyzing the relationship between autobiography and the novel, demonstrated that autobiographers frequently exag­ gerated their own importance in the events they wrote about, distorted the historical reality they depicted, and in many instances delivered invented episodes. Glagau con­ cluded that autobiographical texts were essentially fabricated stories sharing many features with the novel (1903, 166–168). Shortly thereafter, Ernst Bernheim’s widely received work on historiography argued that autobiographies offered only a limited and one-sided perspective because they represented the past from the subjective and biased view of one single individual involved in the situations written about. This, according to Bernheim, could easily lead to “viel stärkere[n] Trübungen” [‘much greater cloudings’] of the past than other, more reliable sources (Bernheim 1908, 494). The debate of the historians was compatible with how literary critics approached autobiography before 1945. However, in their quest for historical truth behind the autobiographical text, literary critics were much more interested in patterns and ele­ ments of fictionalization inherent to autobiography as a literary genre. From a lit­ erary scholar’s perspective, therefore, autobiography necessarily contained fictional

282 

 2 Categories

elements, which is why scholars like Wayne Shumaker, Roy Pascal, and others soon abandoned the notion of ‘objective truth’ to ask for the specific kind of truth contained in autobiography. In this context, the notion of subjective truthfulness increasingly began to replace the idea of factual truth. In 1954, Wayne Shumaker defined autobi­ ography as “the professedly ‘truthful’ record of an individual” (1954, 106). Arguing that ‘autobiography’ shared many features with ‘biography’ and ‘historiography’ in its referential claim and its insistence on truth, Shumaker at the same time acknowl­ edged that autobiographers also used narrative devices and techniques of the novel (1954, 110–111). However, Shumaker saw these strategies of fictionalization put to the service of subjective truthfulness. For Shumaker, it was the purpose of the writing that distinguished novel from autobiography. “If the author gives himself his real name and means to be understood as writing truthfully of his own character and actions,” Shumaker writes, “the work is autobiography, regardless of the inclusion of some ‘untruthful’ detail; if he gives himself an assumed name and means to be understood as writing fiction, the work is fiction, regardless of the admission of much autobio­ graphical fact” (1954, 140). Roy Pascal took the debate one step further by reflecting the literary conventions of the autobiographical genre and its systemic potential for fictionalization as the main reasons for why autobiographers distorted factual reality in their narratives. Holding on to autobiography as a referential text, and asking “on what principles is the content of a life organised in this literary form”, Pascal elaborated on the special kind of truth told in autobiography (1960, 2). This, for him, was the unique truth of the autobiographer’s inner life, the world of subjective experience, feeling, and thought, in short, the truth of the autobiographers’ “spiritual personalities” (Pascal 1960, 182). Autobiography for Pascal, therefore, was not primarily the report about an actually lived life rather than an account of the formation of an inner self (1960, 9). However, autobiography did not only reveal or represent the personality of the author as it existed a priori. Rather, autobiography as such was the narrative quest for the author’s self; “it is not simply the narrative of the voyage, but also the voyage itself” (Pascal 1960, 182). In the course of the autobiographical process, therefore, the autobiographer “half discovers, half creates a deeper design and truth” about his self “than adherence to historical and factual detail could ever make claim to” (Olney 1980, 11). Phenomena of fictionalization inherent to the autobiographical genre served the purposes of expressing this deeper truth about the autobiographer’s inner self, while, according to Pascal (1960, 77), “too scrupulous an adherence to the factual truth” could even “injure an autobiography”. Fifteen years later, Philippe Lejeune moved the discussion away from the text itself and toward the relationship between autobiographer and reader. Introducing the concept of an ‘autobiographical pact’, Lejeune suggested that autobiographical truth was essentially intersubjective (Lejeune 1975). Under the auspices of the autobi­ ographical pact, the autobiographer professes to deliver a truthful account of his life, while the reader agrees to read this text as the referential account of an actually lived

2.11 Facts and Fiction 

 283

life. This lets autobiographical truth reside “in the intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader aimed at producing a shared understanding of the meaning of a life” (Smith and Watson 2010, 16). In 1979, the idea of autobiography as a referential genre was fundamentally chal­ lenged by Paul de Man’s poststructuralist criticism. Questioning the very premise that “life produces the autobiography”, de Man provocatively suggests “that the autobio­ graphical project may itself produce and determine the life” written about. De Man held that the autobiographical narrative was not regulated by the events and experi­ ences of the autobiographer’s life but “by the resources of [the] medium” (1979, 920). Autobiography, therefore, was but “a figure of reading or of understanding” that made the distinction between fiction and autobiography “undecidable” (de Man 1979, 921). In de Man’s reading, autobiography is constituted by a specific arsenal of tropes and rhetorical figures that define both the possibility and impossibility of self-representa­ tion (1979, 922–923). In his concept, there is no ontological subject beyond the autobi­ ographically constructed one; ‘autobiography’ is no longer seen as a referential genre regulated by the idea of mimetic verisimilitude but as a tropologically structured, self-referential textual system of self-construction, self-fashioning, and self-invention. While poststructuralist criticism following de Man’s lead has sharpened the awareness of the textual, rhetorical, and narratological dynamics of autobiography, most theoreticians of autobiography have not given up on the idea of referentiality. It is generally accepted that, as a text, autobiography can only represent the reality it is referring to through language, narration, and emplotment. While this makes autobi­ ography a hybrid between fact and fiction, it remains tied to the realities of a lived life and the subjective experience of it.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction The theoretical debate suggests that in our discussion of autobiography we should abandon both a concept of objective truth and the binary oppositions of fact and fiction. Instead, we should reflect on the dimensions of factuality and the function of fiction in self life writing. Regarding the dimensions of factuality in autobiography, it seems appropriate to move beyond the content of the narrative and regard the autobiographical text as such as a fact. The gravitas of an autobiography as a material artifact is defined by the materiality of its manuscript and its specific mediality, as well as by the elements, content, and shape of its narrative, which in and of themselves are facts. As such a fact, every autobiography is an act of communication that serves diverse and changing, yet specific communicative purposes of meaning-making in specific biographical and/or historical contexts. This turns autobiographies themselves into historical events that can be analyzed in terms of cause and effect in relation to pro­

284 

 2 Categories

cesses of social communication, i.  e. those communicative processes through which social groups reach an understanding about what they hold to be right and wrong, good and bad, about who they are and who they want to be, about who belongs to them and who does not. Seen from the perspective of cultural studies, autobiogra­ phies written and read as referential text under the auspices of the autobiographical pact become (communicative) facts of the period in which they originate, or in which they are received and discussed as part of such meaning-making processes. On the textual level, autobiography cannot do without fiction. While it is always possible that an autobiographer presents past events and the role he or she had in them incorrectly, while we always have to reckon with lies and completely fabricated episodes in autobiography, the problem of fiction is actually much bigger and much more basic. As a narrative, the autobiographical text itself is necessarily fictional because it retrospectively turns a lived life into a coherent and meaningful story, writing about the past events and experiences of a life from a perspective from which they never were and could never have been experienced (Pascal 1960, 69). Further­ more, the events and experiences of that life are cast into narrative molds and cultural scripts that create coherence, linearity, and meaning from the actual incoherence of a lived life. At the same time, these autobiographical stories are carried by the social norms and expectations of a given time regarding acceptable lives and stories about them. The process of narrative emplotment forces the autobiographer to select from the unordered and ambiguous multitude of his biographical experiences and to compose a good story that is intelligible and interesting to others. In this process, the autobiogra­ pher becomes a narrator, who is not identical with the historical person of the author. As a narrator, the autobiographer plays certain communicative roles that set the tone of the autobiographical narrative (Lehmann 1988). He or she creates storylines, carves a chronological structure from the stream of experienced time, develops himself and other historical actors as characters, uses metaphors and imagery, turns single events into meaningful biographical episodes, dramatizes, applies patterns of rising and falling action, and very frequently reports dialogues that were never led the way they are described. All this makes autobiography a product of the literary imagination, and yet it is not pure fiction because these fictional elements serve referential purposes. Therefore, we should distinguish between ‘fiction’ and ‘fictitiousness’ in autobi­ ography (Holdenried 2000, 38–44). While ‘fiction’ is an aesthetic category that refers to the poetic dynamics of telling a good story, ‘fictitiousness’ means pure fiction – conscious fabrication and outright lies. Autobiographical fiction, therefore, remains tied to a notion of truth, although this truth cannot be objective truth but subjective truthfulness, to the service of which all fictionalization in autobiography is put. In the end, the debate about fact and fiction is one about which kinds of truth we can expect in autobiography.

2.11 Facts and Fiction 

 285

Works Cited Bernheim, Ernst. Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie: Mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 5th/6th ed. 1908. Bourdieu, Pierre. “L’illusion biographique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 62/63 (1986): 69–72 [“The Biographical Illusion.” Identity: A Reader. Ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman. Trans. Yves Winkin and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. Los Angeles: Sage, 2000. 297–303]. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Depkat, Volker. “Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der Geschichtswissenschaft.” BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 23.2 (2010): 170–187. Depkat, Volker. “Doing Identity: Auto/Biographien als Akte sozialer Kommunikation.” Imperial Subjects: Autobiographische Praxis in den Vielvölkerreichen der Romanovs, Habsburger und Osmanen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Martin Aust and Frithjof Benjamin Schenk. Köln: Böhlau, 2015. 39–58. Glagau, Hans. Die moderne Selbstbiographie als historische Quelle: Eine Untersuchung. Marburg: Elwert, 1903. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie.” Formen der Selbstdarstellung: ­Analekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbstportraits: Festgabe für Fritz Neubert. Ed. Günter Reichenkron and Erich Haase. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1956. 105–124 [“Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. and trans. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48]. Henrich, Dieter, and Wolfgang Iser, eds. Funktionen des Fiktiven. München: Fink, 1983. Holdenried, Michaela. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. Keller, Ulrich. Fiktionalität als literaturwissenschaftliche Kategorie. Heidelberg: Winter, 1980. Kuczynski, Jürgen. “Lügen, Verfälschungen, Auslassungen, Ehrlichkeit und Wahrheit: Fünf verschiedene und für den Historiker gleich wertvolle Elemente in Autobiographien.” Biogra­phi­ sches Wissen. Beiträge zu einer Theorie lebensgeschichtlicher Erfahrung. Ed. Peter Altheit and Erika M. Hoerning. Frankfurt a.  M.: Campus, 1989. 24–37. Lehmann, Jürgen. Bekennen, Erzählen, Berichten: Studien zu Theorie und Geschichte der Auto­ biographie. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. 13–46 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” MLN 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Martínez Bonati, Félix. Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature: A Phenomenological Approach. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Merriam Webster. “Fact.” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fact (8 July 2018) (Webster 2018a). Merriam Webster. “Fiction.” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fiction (8 July 2018) (Webster 2018b). Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Patzig, Günther. Sprache und Logik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2nd ed. 1981. Russell, Bertrand. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940). London: George Allen and Unwin, 7th ed. 1966. Shumaker, Wayne. English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

286 

 2 Categories

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der Literaturwissenschaft.” BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 23.2 (2010): 188–200.

Further Reading Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckman. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. Fleck, Ludwik. Erfahrung und Tatsache: Gesammelte Aufsätze. Ed. Lothar Schäfer and Thomas ­Schnelle. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Konersmann, Ralf. Kulturelle Tatsachen. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1963.

2.12 Gender Angelika Schaser

Definition ‘Gender’ is a category – like ‘class’, ‘race’, ‘religion’, ‘age’ and ‘health’ – that is con­ stitutive of societies. Gender organises social orders and affects life expectancy and life chances in all areas (access to medical care, legal status, citizenship, political participation, educational and employment opportunities, cash income, participa­ tion in cultural life, recreation, leisure and sport). The polarised gender system that developed in the nineteenth century, which is still used globally today to distinguish between men and women, equates each person’s biological sex with his or her gender identity, gender role and sexual orientation and posits heterosexuality as a norm. This polar gender system is, however, not ‘natural’ but constructed and mutable. Gender is perceived differently at various times in different regions and cultures, and gender roles are lived in diverse ways. Moreover, language, discourses, perceptions and representations create power hierarchies by feminising and masculinising individ­ ual groups, peoples, states, spaces, institutions and occupations. Just as Queer and Gender Studies have broken down this gender duality in favour of more sophisticated gender concepts, more recent historical research has increasingly explored gender as a relational category in interaction with other categories of difference.

Explication The word ‘gender’ derives from the Latin ‘genus’ [‘origin’, ‘(high) birth’, ‘category’]. His­ torically, up to the mid-twentieth century, the German word for gender, ‘Geschlecht’, was used especially in the sense of ‘noble family/families’. The word ‘gender’ has also been used in the sense of ‘being male or female’ since the Middle Ages, but this only became common in the second half of the twentieth century (Ulbrich 2006, 622–626). ‘Sex’ and ‘gender’ were and are in many cases used synonymously, and in German, for example, ‘Geschlecht’ carries the meaning of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, as well as ‘family or dynasty’. Persons were categorised strictly as male or female, and even today this identification often appears in the humanities, the sciences, and popular parlance as “natural and unproblematic, even biological and therefore impossible to change” (Celis et al. 2013, 1). A hierarchical gender model emerged in the nineteenth century that posited biological and psychological differences between men and women as ‘natural’. Women and men were assigned different social roles and developmental potentials. Gender-specific expectations, behaviour and different gender identities https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-035

288 

 2 Categories

were internalised and perpetuated. They manifested power relations, social domina­ tion and subordination. Whether one’s name was entered into a church or civil register under the rubric ‘male’ or ‘female’ was an all-important distinguishing characteristic. To this day, this single characteristic divides the population into two distinct groups from cradle to grave. Despite the synonymous use of the words ‘gender’ and ‘sex’, they are employed in different ways nowadays in the social and cultural sciences and the humani­ ties: ‘sex’ refers to biological, physiological, and legal differences, and ‘gender’ to socially constructed roles, behaviours, identifications and political or cultural differences. In the 1980s, feminist scholars inquired into the reasons for women’s exclusion from historiography and challenged the dominant ideologies surrounding gender norms, gender identities and gender roles. At that time, Joan Scott identified gender as a “useful category of historical analysis“ (1986, 1053) that turned our attention to perceptions of gender, to the process of gendering that assigned women and men different spaces (e.  g. private/public) and traits (e.  g. emotional/rational). Gerda Lerner presented gender as a universal phenomenon that had systematically disad­ vantaged women since the Middle Ages (Lerner 1993, 281). Since the advent of post­ colonial studies, critiques of gender generalisations based on the polar gender model have been levied by non-white, non-middle-class, non-western and non-heterosex­ ual women, who have pointed to the social differences in and the diverse cultural constructions of femininity and masculinity in history and in various cultures. In the wake of the differentiation of femininity within Gender Studies men’s history began in the 1990s to tackle a differentiation of masculinity, an important contribution to which was Raewyn/Robert W. Connell’s (Connell 1995) concept of hegemonic mascu­ linity. ‘Gender’ is one of several categories of analysis used to differentiate societies, and it is playing an increasing role in explorations of autobiography. Recent research integrates autofiction as a form of autobiographical writing. Women’s autofiction has a long tradition (Pizan 1992), and the most recent scholarship finds that women have shaped autofiction in the new French media to a remarkable extent (Jordan 2013). When it comes to gender, the boundaries between not just autobiography and auto­ fiction but also autobiography and biography (Booth 2003) are viewed as fluid now­ adays.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction This article concentrates on autobiography within gender history, and the interpreta­ tion of autobiographies by historians. Autobiography is studied as a literary genre as well as a historical and sociological source. Its multifarious character and multiple applications make it especially interesting for interdisciplinary, historical, social and

2.12 Gender 

 289

cultural studies. Literary studies focused first on the history, forms, themes, topics and tropes of autobiography by men, defining its paradigmatic patterns, conventions and poetics without considering gender. Historiography, also without taking gender into account, began to look for additional information, new perspectives, and the ‘truth’ in autobiographies by politicians and well-known men. Social History and Cul­ tural Studies began studying autobiography with a focus on the experiences of men, especially in the early modern period, of lower-class people, and middle-class men in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nation-building. Up to the mid-twentieth century, ‘autobiography’ stood for a “master narrative of western rationality, progress, and superiority“ (Smith and Watson 2010, 194). ‘True manhood’ was a constitutive element of these texts. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary scholarship undertook a canonisation of the autobiographies of ‘great men’ that continues to shape the study of autobiographies today. At first, liter­ ary scholarship ignored non-western, oral and non-written self-representations. The question of the gender of autobiographies was initially associated with the question of texts by women. In the 1970s and 1980s, those interested in texts by women were mainly women active in the feminist movement in Germany, the USA and other coun­ tries, who could find little about women’s history (or ‘herstory’) in their university libraries. In the USA and Britain, women’s colleges or institutions (e.  g. the Women’s Library in London, founded by the National Society for Women’s Suffrage) assem­ bled collections of documents from the women’s movements. In Germany, in contrast, attempts by the first women’s movement (1865–1933) to establish permanent collec­ tions, in women’s libraries, of literature rarely found in the male-dominated scholarly establishment and libraries, failed time and again for lack of funds (Jank 1989). When developing Women’s History and Gender Studies, historians concentrated first on those autobiographies written by women in the context of women’s move­ ments. In the beginning, participants in women’s history seminars at the universities searched for texts written by women, since both history and literary scholarship had largely studied texts by men, and rarely examined women’s autobiographical texts (Smith and Watson 2010, 203). Collections were assembled at colleges und univer­ sities, and the first selected bibliographies for use in teaching were compiled. In the course of this research scholars collected diaries, autobiographies, self-narratives, memoirs, journals and letters and opened up a new corpus of texts for research (Cline 1989, Conway 1992, Huff 1985, Sagarra 1986, Saurer 1989–). Because few women left behind ‘classical autobiographies’, women’s history worked from the outset on expanding the definition of autobiography, which included the most diverse forms and also extended to autofictional texts. Based on the questions and approaches of autobiography studies, these texts were examined for their language styles, inten­ tions and functions as exemplum, confession, apologia and memoir. The function of autobiography as a pact among narrator, reader and publisher was also explored and the argument offered that autobiographical writing is a form of self-invention that constitutes the self (Eakin 1999).

290 

 2 Categories

Early women’s studies at first sought to study ‘female writing’, and in the process looked for the specific characteristics of women’s autobiographical texts. Until well into the nineteenth century, publications by women were typically published anon­ ymously or under a male pseudonym, since women could rarely claim authority in public discussions under their own names (Hahn 1991). In comparison to autobio­ graphical texts by men, women’s self-depictions were more flexible, less strictly linear and preferred forms influenced by dialogue (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2006). Another func­ tion of the historical context was the fact that well into the twentieth century, women published autobiographies in book form less often than men did, choosing instead a ‘minor form’ for their self-representation. Only in the final third of the nineteenth century did women conquer public space in larger numbers with speeches and pub­ lications in the context of the evolving women’s movement, and only then did their autobiographies clearly begin to approximate the male pattern (Goodman 1986). One of the first tasks of women’s history was to collect published and unpublished autobiographical texts by women and preserve them for scholars (Saurer 1989–; Wedel 2010). Scholarship at first proceeded from a gender identity and gender soli­ darity among women, which was supposed to be reflected in autobiographical texts. Parallel to the development of social history, within which women’s history emerged, autobiographical texts by women as well as men were soon differentiated according to social criteria. The search for autobiographical texts by ‘ordinary folk’ was extended to those by women (i.  e. working-class autobiographies by women, Jacobi-Dittrich 1986). Particular significance was accorded here to the manufacture of authenticity in autobiographical texts by members of the lower classes, uneducated groups, and colonised people. It became evident that class and racial lines played just as great a role in autobio­ graphical texts by women as in those by men. In their autobiographies, middle-class women sometimes followed the autobiographical patterns developed by men in the western world. The lower social strata and non-dominant religious and indigenous groups developed their own autobiographical narratives with or against the tradition of male autobiography. When, in the context of the pluralising of historiography in the 1990s, Women’s History evolved into Gender History within the framework of interdisciplinary Gender Studies, the notion of gender was increasingly deployed as a relational category in order to explore differentiations in perception and representa­ tion in history and the present (Neuman 2007). Autobiographical writing by women was studied largely with regard to women’s (absent) history, political ­power(lessness), experience, agency, subjectivity, sexuality and gender (Smith and Watson 1998, 415– 428). Nowadays, autobiography is viewed as a social and cultural practice in which writers develop concepts of the person, represent biographies, and articulate und judge norms and values in the context of social power relations. When applied to autobiographical texts, this means not merely distinguishing between texts written by men and women, but also inquiring into the diverse forms of masculinity and fem­ ininity (e.  g. Gilmore 1994) as well as questions of age, health and social, religious,

2.12 Gender 

 291

ethnic, national, regional, local, transnational and professional affiliations as they are expressed in the texts. Furthermore, scholars are also studying the roles assigned to the category of gender when autobiographical texts are deployed in discourse, representation, and the various cultures of memory. Despite considerable changes in western societies in the direction of greater gender equality, popular culture continues to (re)construct gender relations, gender norms, and gender identities rooted in the nineteenth-century idea of essential and hierarchical gender differences (Milestone and Meyer 2012, 214). Translation: Pamela Selwyn

Works Cited Booth, Marilyn. “Quietly Author(iz)ing Community: Biography as an Autobiography of Syrian Women in Egypt.” L’homme. Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 14.2 (2003): 280–297. Celis, Karen, Johanna Kantola, Georgina Waylen, and S. Laurel Weldon. “Introduction. Gender and Politics: A Gendered World, a Gendered Discipline.” The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics. Ed. Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola and S. Laurel Weldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 1–26. Cline, Cheryl, ed. Women’s Diaries, Journals, and Letters. An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publications, 1989. Connell, Robert W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Conway, Jill K. Written by herself. Autobiographies of American Women. An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics. A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Goodman, Katherine. Dis/Closures. Women’s Autobiography in Germany Between 1790 and 1914. New York et al.: Lang, 1986. Hahn, Barbara. Unter falschem Namen. Von der schwierigen Autorenschaft der Frauen. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Huff, Cynthia A. British Women’s Diaries. A Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Women’s Manuscript Diaries. New York: AMS Press, 1985. Jacobi-Dittrich, Juliane. “The Struggle for an Identity. Working-Class Autobiographies by Women in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. A Social and Literary History. Ed. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 321–345. Jank, Dagmar. “Frauenbibliotheken der ersten Frauenbewegung in Berlin vor Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges.” Bibliotheks-Informationen der Universitätsbibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin 20 (December 1989): 1–6. Jordan, Shirley. “État Présent. Autofiction in the Feminine.” French Studies 67.1 (2013): 76–84. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Milestone, Katie, and Anneke Meyer. Gender and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Neuman, Shirley. “Autobiography. From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Differences.”

292 

 2 Categories

Autobiography. Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Vol II. Ed. Trev Lynn Broughton. London/New York: Routledge, 2007. 320–335. de Pizan, Christine. Le Livre de la Cité des Dames. Trans. Éric Hicks and Thérèse Moreau. Paris: Stock, 1992. Sagarra, Eda. “Quellenbibliographie autobiographischer Schriften von Frauen im deutschen Kulturraum 1730–1918.” Internationales Archiv für die Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 11 (1986): 175–231. Saurer, Edith. Die Sammlung Frauennachlässe (19./20. Century). http://www.univie.ac.at/ Geschichte/sfn/index.php Institut für Geschichte. Universität Wien. 1989 (11 July 2018). Scott, Joan. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–1068. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2nd ed. 2010. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory. A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Ulbrich, Claudia. “Geschlecht.” Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit. Vol. IV. Ed. Friedrich Jaeger. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006. Cols 622–631. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Autobiographie und Geschlecht.” Erinnern und Geschlecht. Ed. Meike Penkwitt. Freiburg i.  Br.: Fritz, 2006. 49–64. Wedel, Gudrun. Autobiographien von Frauen. Ein Lexikon. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2010.

Further Reading Boynton, Victoria, and Jo Malin, eds. Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography. 2 vols. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. Davies, Mererid Puw, Beth Linklater, and Gisela Shaw, eds. Autobiography by Women in German. Oxford: Lang, 2000. Holdenried, Michaela, ed. Geschriebenes Leben. Autobiographik von Frauen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. Holland, Dorothy. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical discourses. Theory, criticism, practice. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1994. Popkin, Jeremy D. History, Historians & Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.

2.13 Genealogy Angelika Malinar

Definition As a generic term, ‘genealogy’ comprises ideas about origins, descent and provenance as well as different techniques and metaphors for locating individuals in certain social contexts (kinship relations, generational sequence etc.) the interpretation of which varies according to the given historical periods and cultural framework. Recording genealogy can be seen as a literary convention followed or reflected upon in many autobiographical texts when the author/narrator chooses to begin the story of his or her own life with events, protagonists and circumstances before or at the time of birth. As a literary device it has the function of introducing important protagonists to the unfolding autobiographical narrative, and to suggest or reject possible explanations of certain traits and characteristic features of the autobiographical self.

Explication Genealogical track-recording has in many cultures the function of marking and proving individual claims for an often privileged social status. Knowing one’s pedi­ gree, having a genealogy, can be configured as a sign of power lent to an individual by the accumulated past of his or her ancestors. Disclosure of (unknown) provenance is a favourite trope in various kinds of narratives across cultures. Genealogy is imbued with ideas of the continuity of a social group (clan, dynasty, religious community etc.) that materialise in the sequence of generations and the creation of new members (through birth, initiation rituals etc.). This is particularly important when social status is based on a genealogical or hereditary transmission of property and professional specialisation, as is the case with aristocratic pedigrees, lineages of priests and teach­ ers etc. (for Europe, see essays in Heck and Jahn 2000). Furthermore, genealogical track-recording is often gendered (for instance due to patri- or matrilineal kinship patterns), and is thus selective with respect to who is included in the genealogical account. These features have been regarded as characteristic for pre-modern societies which are structured by stable hierarchical taxonomies of status-ascription. Yet, gene­ alogy has by no means vanished in wake of the criticism of the relevance of pedigree for determining the status of the individual that was launched in the Western Enlight­ enment. While ideas of the equality of man and the uniqueness of the individual have gained prominence, genealogical thinking and the quest for origins have surged as well not only in the sciences but also in lives of modern individuals (Weigel 2006). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-036

294 

 2 Categories

The emergence of modern individualism is marked by the formation of the modern family and one of the results of this process is the “privatization of genealogy” (Weigel 2006, 44). Indicative of this is not only the constant increase of genealogical reference material and the establishment of so-called ‘Genealogical Societies’ (Bockstruck 1983) and internet forums (Barnwell 2013), but also the way in which generational reflection and biographical information about parents and often also grand-parents has become an autobiographical convention. With its emphasis on ‘family’ as the place of origin, autobiography has become in the modern age a prominent medium for recording an individual’s pre-history genealogically, and also for constructions and imaginations of the ‘roots’ of the autobiographer’s (hi)story. Querying genealogy has also become particularly important for writers from groups that are marginalised or discriminated against as well as of those whose biographies are marked by migration, deportation, and other forms of displacement (Scafe 2013). As a literary convention, genealogy usually connects the origin of an individual to his or her provenance. Usually at the beginning of an autobiographical narrative the still unborn or just-born protagonist is presented as already entwined with the pedigrees and narratives assembled around ancestors and relatives which set the stage for the new life to unfold (Foucault 1972, 151–155; Weigel 2006, 21–22). Gene­ alogy records change with origin and pedigree being considered as stable reference points. The genealogical convention can be seen as addressing the problem of ‘begin­ ning’ in autobiography as self-narration since the ‘self-biographer’ usually does not remember his or her birth and is in no position to record it (the same is true of death). In contrast to biographies and fiction, the beginning (birth) and the end (death) of the autobio­graphical account are (usually) not at the disposal of the writer. In this way, the beginning of an autobiography navigates between citing the selected records of others and the more or less explicit imagining of the circumstances and events prior to one’s birth. As a narrative device, genealogy can have the function of cov­ ering actual gaps in recorded history since it serves to lend plausibility to the idea that relationships between absent and present individuals are based on some kind of natural (or biological) causality implied in the culturally accepted models of kinship. This can be seen in the metaphors and symbols used for representing genealogical relatedness which efface rather than explain the cause and extent of commonalities and differences, for instance by drawing on certain substances (blood, property etc.) indicating ‘heritage’ (nowadays genetics), or iconic representations such as a tree (Weigel 2006, 23–37, 50–54). In many autobiographies (as well as in modern societies at large), genealogy has become a mode of explaining the individuality of the indi­ vidual by drawing on similarities, continuities or ruptures recorded in and accorded to ancestral genealogy. Genealogy allows suggesting or imagining that in one’s life some generational transmission is at work which explains certain features of the self. While psychological and psychoanalytical theories following Sigmund Freud sustain this line of self-analytical inquiry, at the same time they have also contrib­

2.13 Genealogy 

 295

uted to deconstructing genealogy as transmitted in the family or as imagined by an individual. Freud famously argued that the individual is embedded in the history of family (and mankind) not only at a biological level, but also via a shared genealogical heritage with respect to memories, traumatic experiences, and desires that remained unaddressed by the earlier generation(s) and burden the present generation. There­ fore, it becomes important for an individual to disclose this genealogical baggage, and to deal with the past that is silenced and suppressed in the present. Conversely, this inquiry may also result in identifying ‘phantoms’ and ‘fictions’ the individual imagines with respect to his or her family (see Abraham 1991; Weigel 2006, 73–80). At both levels, these theories deeply influenced autobiographical writing as well as its academic study. In its deconstructive aspect, psychoanalysis can be seen as being part of a criticism of genealogical thinking which accompanied the modern surge of genealogy as a major concern in society as well as in the sciences. With Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical and autobiographical work, in particular Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) [On the Genealogy of Morals], and Freud’s psychoan­ alytical approach, ‘genealogy’ has become an analytical category in its own right. It is characterized by querying and deconstructing ‘origin narratives’, identity claims and teleological constructions of evolution and progress based on the metaphysics and mythologies implied in the notion of provenance. Nietzsche deconstructed the stabil­ ity of values postulated as eternal and original by demonstrating their being products of a history characterised by power struggles and subjections. Contrary to Hegel’s phi­ losophy of the evolution of the spirit as a gradual unfolding of self-consciousness, Nietzsche claims that there is no goal, no teleology that drives the history of a thing ‘ab origine’, but rather a sequence of processes of interpretation and overpowering (Nietzsche 1968, 330). Seen from this angle, autobiography as a genealogical recon­ struction of ‘oneself’ as a steady (teleo)logical development of original characteristics and potentials by means of an ever increasing self-consciousness is not only an illu­ sionary, but perhaps even undesirable endeavour. Ideas of ‘self-unification’ or ‘iden­ tity-building’ efface the contingency, violence and fluidity that are actually at play in a life: “Die Form ist flüssig, der ‘Sinn’ ist es aber noch mehr” [“The form is fluid, the ‘meaning’ even more so”] (Nietzsche 1968, 331 [2006, 51]). Therefore the emblematic colour of genealogy is not blue (which rejects any speculations ‘into the blue’ and evokes other associations as well, such as the ‘blue blood’ of aristocratic genealogies etc.), but grey (Nietzsche 1968, 266 [2006, 8]). In his influential, though controversial (Pizer 1990; Thomas 1993) interpretation of Nietzsche’s texts, Michel Foucault points out that a genealogy of the self projected as an historical inquiry cannot result in a confirmation of stable origins that would explain an individual’s identity. Rather, it may help to retrieve the uniqueness as well as the contingency of birth as ‘emergence’, as entering a stage peopled by various forces (Foucault 1972, 156–158). Foucault says:

296 

 2 Categories

L’histoire, généalogiquement dirigée, n’a pas pour fin de retrouver les racines de notre identité, mais de s’acharner au contraire à la dissiper; elle n’entreprend pas de repérer le foyer unique d’ou nous venons, cette prèmiere patrie ou les métaphysiciens nous promettent que nous ferons retour; elle entreprend de faire apparâitre toutes les discontinuites qui nous traversent. [The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discon­ tinuities that cross us] (Foucault 1972, 169 [1977, 162]).

This line of criticism has been influential for autobiographical writing as well as in literary studies and has been considerably widened in the context of gender and post-colonial studies. The modern scope of ideas and practices of genealogy (includ­ ing its criticism) is mirrored and expanded in autobiographical texts in different cul­ tural settings. On the one hand, many modern writers follow the autobiographical convention and cope with the beginning of their own life by deferring it to a narrative about ancestral background and family members. On the other hand, writers defy or ignore the genealogical convention for various reasons. For some authors the priv­ ileged knowledge of genealogy has no place in their life nor in the social group they belong to. Others respond to the elusiveness of genealogy and identity emphasised by modern critics of genealogy by creating new forms of autobiographical writing, for instance by evoking the fragmented character of recalling one’s provenance, or by deliberately blurring memory and fiction. In many cases, the defining or explanatory function of the genealogy is ques­ tioned or at least qualified by authors who draw on it. For instance, in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), Nirad Chaudhuri addresses genealogy in its custom­ ary function of status-ascription in the patriarchal structures of nineteenth century Bengal (India). This is, even for a male individual, not as stable as it might seem since it varies according to the locality in which he is dwelling. He contrasts the situation in the place of the family residence (Kishorganj) with that he finds when he visits the village of his father (Banagram): At Kishorganj, our genealogy, like every other boy’s, stopped at the father. The story ended with the assertion that Nirad Chaudhuri was the son of Upendra Narayan Chaudhuri. Not so at Ban­ agram. There not only did we know, but we repeated as a catechism: ‘Nirad Chadhuri is the son of Upendra Narayan Chadhuri who is the son of […]’, and so on, to the fourteenth generation. Not only was the descent in a straight line of Nirad Chadhuri known, but also that of every collateral relative. […] Knowing the exact lineage of every old man, every middle-aged man, every young man, every boy, every child and every baby around us we saw the relationships so graphically worked out that the human beings whom we saw appeared to be no longer human beings but fruits hanging from the tiered and spreading branches of a tree (Chaudhuri 2003, 56–57).

This is contrasted with the situation in the “joint family”, the Indian “norm of the times”, wherein “the family relations inevitably got mixed up”: “The fathers were called brother, the grandfathers and brothers father, mothers daughter-in-law, grand­

2.13 Genealogy 

 297

mothers mother, uncles father, nephews brother, till there was indescribable con­ fusion in the ideas of blood relationship” (Chaudhuri 2003, 148). The image of the tree symbolising the combination of taxonomy and sequence typical for genealogical recording is here contrasted with the actual confusions ingrained in the co-existence (imaginary or factual) of the “tiered and spreading branches” within a family. The “tree” as the favourite icon of genealogy helps not only in representing the complex­ ity and multidimensionality of relationships in time and space (Macho 2002, 28–30), but also in coping with the uncertainties actually implied in genealogy as a model for explaining provenance. The uncertainties entailed in attempts to genealogically ensure and retrieve individual history are made even more explicit by authors who are critical of origin narratives as well as of the quest for an autobiographical consolidation of identity, and aim at dissolving genealogy in fragmented, yet emblematic vignettes. In his Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes], Barthes employs his idea of a life recalled and traced as being crystallised in what he calls “biographèmes”. These emerge when a life is reduced “à quelques détails, à quelques goûts, à quelques inflexions […] dont la distinction et la mobilité pourraient voyager hors de tout destin” [“to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections […] whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate”] (1971, 14 [1989, 9]). Rather than erecting a textual monument, the (auto)biographical subject emerges as dispersed, as a “simple pluriel des ‘charmes’” [“a mere plural of ‘charms’”] (1971, 13 [1989, 8]). Others offer a complex, multi-facetted treatment in assembling what can be consid­ ered genealogical vignettes in order to assert uniqueness, as is the case in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (1908). Still others, in particular women, seem to have a distance to or are even excluded from both genealogical identity-consolidation as well as its critique when they do not comment on this issue or do so only in very abstract ways. For instance, Rahsundari Devi (Amar Jiban [1879]) – probably the first Indian woman to write an autobiography – does not record more than her being born in India, and even wonders what her actual name is (which varies according to the perspective of the household members). The marked structural differences that have been detected in autobiographies written by women (due to their being in many cases less privileged ‘subjects’, see Peterson, 1999, and from a postcolonial perspective the essays in Smith and Watson 1992) are also mirrored in their dealing with the issue of genealogy, for instance when ‘family lore’ is rejected or a different story is told. Modern ideas of genealogy (connected to family-histories) have been paradigmatic for narrating and interpreting autobiography, as well as influential in querying history and identity with respect to ‘stable roots’ and normative forms of self-perfection and meaningfulness. Such de-stabilising effects also have been the result of different views of the self and its history. This can be seen when alternative patterns of kinship are in place (see above, Chaudhuri about India), the persistent presence and availability of ancestors is acknowledged, or genealogy is located in the history of the social group an individ­ ual belongs to. Furthermore, self-multiplying notions may influence the perception

298 

 2 Categories

of the genealogy of one’s life, such as the doctrine of transmigration and the notion of ‘karman’. In this case, the individual is seen as connected to a “karmic genealogy” (Appleton 2011, 242) which extends beyond the family genealogy of his or her present birth. This becomes a topic in religious (auto-) biographies in South Asia and ques­ tions the stability of genealogical relationships. This idea has also influenced modern Western autobiographical writing (Malinar 2013). This demonstrates the stability of the notions and metaphors of genealogy for establishing various cultural construc­ tions of collective or individual distinction that are based on commonalities and dif­ ferences between the past and the present. Deconstructions of explanatory claims entailed in the idea of being linked to ‘origins’ did not result in turning genealogy into an anachronistic device in autobiographical narratives, but rather into new forms of dealing with the issue of beginnings in relation to text, history and self.

Works Cited Abraham, Nicolas. “Aufzeichnungen über das Phantom. Ergänzung zu Freuds Metapsychologie.” Psyche 45 (1991): 691–698. Appleton, Naomi. “Heir to one’s Karma: Multi-Life Personal Genealogies in Early Buddhist and Jaina Narratives.” Religions of South Asia 5 (2011): 227–244. Barnwell, Ashley. “The Genealogy Craze: Authoring as Authentic Identity through Familiy History Research.” Life Writing 10.3 (2013): 261–275. Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971 [Sade, Fourier, Loyala. Trans. Richard Miller. Berkeley: University of California, 1989]. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Noonday Press, 1977]. Bockstruck, L. “Centuries of Genealogy: A Historical Overview.” Reference & Users Services Quarterly 23.2 (1983): 162–170. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2001. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, la Généalogie, l’Histoire.” Hommage a Jean Hyppolite Ed. Susanne Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Francois Dagognet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971. 145–172 [Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. Trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 139–164]. Heck, Kilian, and Bernhard Jahn, eds. Genealogie als Denkform in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Macho, Thomas. “Stammbäume, Freiheitsbäume und Geniereligion. Anmerkungen zur Geschichte genealogischer Systeme.” Genealogie und Genetik. Schnittstellen zwischen Biologie und Kulturgeschichte. Ed. Sigrid Weigel. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2002. 15–43. Malinar, Angelika. “…western-born but in spirit eastern … – Annie Besant between Colonial and Spiritual Realms.” Asiatische Studien, L’études asiatiques 67.4 (2013): 1115–1155. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Zur Genealogie der Moral.” Nietzsche Werke. Vol. II. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968 [On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006]. Pizer, John. “The Use and Abuse of ‘Urspung’: On Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche.” Nietzsche-Studien 19 (1990): 462–478.

2.13 Genealogy 

 299

Scafe, Suzanne. “Lives Written in Fragments: The Self-Representational ‘I’ in Caribbean Diasporic Women’s Auto/biography.” Life Writing 10 (2013): 187–206. Thomas, Douglas. “Utilising Foucaults’s Nietzsche: Nietzsche, Genealogy, Autobiography.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 6 (1993): 103–129. Weigel, Sigrid. Genea-Logik. Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur-und Naturwissenschaften. München: Fink, 2006.

Further Reading Saar, Martin. Genealogie als Kritik: Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault. Frankfurt a.  M.: Campus, 2007. Watson, Julia. “Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree.” Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 297–323.

2.14 The (Term) ‘I’

Michael Quante and Annette Dufner

Definition The linguistic expression of psychological experiences or activities requires the use of the pronoun ‘I’. In philosophy of language the term ‘I’ is viewed as an indexical expres­ sion – an expression that changes its reference depending on the context of the expres­ sion (at least if the utterer thereby truly intends to refer to him- or herself). Whether or not the term ‘I’ can really be thought to refer to anything at all and, if so, how this object of reference is to be understood, depends on one’s conception of reference. Under the assumption that the term ‘I’ does not just refer to a semantic object, one may wonder whether it refers to a psychological or physical entity. In philosophy of mind the ‘I’ is conceived to be the subject of a human being’s consciousness. This implies that the ‘I’ is able to entertain thoughts, to make and judge experiences and to deliberate on plans as well as on the world in general. From an epistemological perspective one can say that humans are thought to possess some kind of privileged access to their own mental states. This apparently special character of self-knowledge has given rise to the view that there are some kinds of first person facts concerning which one is immune to error. The first person pronoun is related to a cluster of concepts by appeal to which we grasp and articulate particular characteristics of the personal existence of human beings. Further central concepts in this family of terms include the terms ‘personality’, ‘person’, ‘the self’, or ‘identity’, as well as the concepts of personal ‘autonomy’ and ‘authenticity’.

Explication Throughout our waking life, and sometimes even while we are asleep, we perceive things: the furniture in the room, the plants in the garden, the sky and the exact color it has today. Sometimes we also seem to be aware of ourselves in some way, for example when we are nervous or uncomfortable. In addition we are often aware of ourselves as doing certain things, such as thinking back to a wonderful vacation, asserting a decision to others or scratching our leg. These experiences and activities seem to give rise to the conviction that there are not only certain beliefs and conscious experiences, but that it is me who has these beliefs and experiences. There is a well-known anecdote by John Perry in the literature on philosophy of language which demonstrates the value of discovering information the expression of which employs the indexical ‘I’: “I once followed a trial of sugar on a supermarket floor”, he recounts, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-037

2.14 The (Term) ‘I’ 

 301

pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch (Perry 1979, 3).

Initially, Perry merely thought that the shopper with the torn bag was making a mess. Later he also thought that it was he who was making the mess. His identification of himself with the respective shopper was important and made a difference to him. He immediately changed his behavior. Linguistically speaking, the object of the new truth that Perry discovered is the fact that it was correct to refer to the shopper with the torn bag using the indexical ‘I’. According to a naïve theory of reference, that is usually attributed to John Stuart Mill, singular terms such as indexicals, which refer to a single object, denote this object as an arrow sign would, rather than to describe it. As the anecdote by Perry and other examples of misidentification demonstrate, this view is problematic. If ‘the shopper with the torn bag’ and ‘I’ are arrow signs pointing at the same object, then we cannot explain the fact that the two expressions are entirely different ­descriptions of the referent with entirely different informative content. For Perry, it was infor­ mative, rather than obvious and trivial, that the two expressions referred to the same object, namely himself. Descriptivism, as for example defended by Gottlob Frege and ­Bertrand Russell, has thus become one of the dominant theories of reference during the twentieth century. Descriptivism came under attack by proponents of direct (or causal) reference theories, such as Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam and David Kaplan, who insisted that even descriptive theories cannot account for all aspects of the reference of singular terms. For example, different ‘facts in the world’ could have made it the case that the descriptions ‘Aristotle’ and ‘teacher of Alexander’ would not have referred to the same person. As the proponents of this further twentieth century view argued, a particular expression can denote on the basis of historical facts and a subsequent causal chain. In texts that make use of the first person pronoun, the language often seems to suggest that there is a separately existing psychological subject. While one can argue that this is merely due to the requirements of grammar, one might also want to look for answers in philosophy of mind and self-consciousness. There has been a substantial amount of philosophical disagreement about the exact nature of the mental. On the extreme ends of the spectrum are the following two views: 1. There is an immaterial substance that is, at least in principle, entirely distinct from our brain. 2. There is nothing over and above the particular states of my brain. In between these extremes there is a multitude of more nuanced positions, for instance the claim that the phe­ nomenological character of consciousness is a property of the states of a brain, which cannot be entirely reduced to the states of the brain.

302 

 2 Categories

Historical Aspects One of the most famous positions in philosophy of mind is the view developed by René Descartes in his Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) [Meditations on First Philosophy (1680)]. Descartes pointed out that the existence of the mind is entirely indubita­ ble as long as thinking is occurring. This Cartesian claim is well-known, but it is easy to overstate its implications. The assumption that the mind is a separately existing immaterial substance, and at least in principle distinct from our bodies, might repre­ sent a problematic argumentative jump from a grammatical or maybe epistemological truth to an ontological one. Moreover, the indubitable truth only ever seems to apply to one single moment. There is nothing indubitable about the further assumption that today’s thinker is identical to yesterday’s thinker. A well-known opponent of the Cartesian position that there must be a subject that does the thinking, rather than there merely being some thinking, was David Hume. In an argument sometimes referred to as the ‘inner theatre model’ of the self, he denied that one can ever become aware of one’s self as a proper object of perception, the only perceptions that there are, he argued, are perceptions of heat, cold, tables or trees (Hume 1975). A more nuanced position was held by John Locke, who agreed with Descartes that self-reflection is a peculiar activity, but did not go as far as arguing that it proves the ontological existence of a self. He seemed to be of the opinion that reflection con­ stitutes the self in the process of thinking: “[A person] is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and considers itself as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places” (Locke, 1975, II.27.ix, emphasis M. Q./A.  D.). Immanuel Kant agreed with Locke and Hume on the view that self-awareness can never reveal an objective, ontological truth about the self, but also agreed with Descartes and Hume in that it is only ever apprehended during the process of thinking. In the end, he con­ cludes that the conception of a self is a precondition for thought in general. Apart from the questions of how the pronoun ‘I’ refers and of whether there is a separately existing psychological substance rather than merely a semantic referent, one may wonder how we can come to know anything about ourselves. Many texts imply that there is a form of special access to first person mental states. The idea often seems to be that we perceive these states by ‘introspection’, by ‘looking inward’, or by diving into an ‘inner world’ in contrast to the ‘outer world’. Most philosophers take these expressions to be mere metaphors, but what these expressions nonetheless hint at is the idea that there is a special mode of experiencing one’s own perceptions, feelings and thoughts. A more sophisticated way of putting the thesis about the special character of first person experience consists in pointing out some of the peculiar consequences of self-knowledge. For example, if a person claims to be in pain or to perceive a certain surface as red, there seems to be no way of proving this claim wrong. About matters such as these, persons seem to be infallible, or, put in other words, their belief that

2.14 The (Term) ‘I’ 

 303

they are in pain or seeing red seem to be the only genuine truth-making characteristic of this very fact. A further way of describing the special character of first person experience was brought forth by Sydney Shoemaker, who argues that self-knowledge is “immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun” (Shoemaker 1968, 556). If there is pain, for example, and the pain is mine, then I cannot be mistaken about the fact whose pain it is. The further question, ‘is it me, who has this feeling?’ simply makes no sense anymore. Similarly, a claim such as ‘it is raining, but I don’t believe that it rains’ appears odd. Other authors, such as Richard Moran, believe that the special character of first person experience is due to the practical fact that we are able to regulate our own mental states and that we thereby constitute ourselves. This view is based on the fact that I do not just passively experience the outer world, but can also determine my own thoughts. Moreover, in a practical context we are usually treated as the relevant authority when it comes to judgments about our own believes, desires and commit­ ments. If I say that I believe it is sunny today, the response ‘no, you don’t’ would simply fail to recognize the linguistic and social conventions according to which, such statements operate. Similarly, if you answer ‘yes, I will’ to the question ‘will you marry her?’, then any claim that you are ‘wrong’ seems to ignore your first person authority with regard to such statements. There are also mixed accounts of the special character of first person experience, which are both epistemic and practical at the same time. For example, Shoemaker has argued that the ability to self-ascribe beliefs and desires is an integral element of rationality. A claim such as ‘it is raining, but I do not experience any belief that it rains’ would be a kind of conceptual error. Moreover, individuals incapable of self-ascribing believes and desires would not be able to engage properly with others, or to be involved in genuine agency, since agency involves higher-order deliberation about lower-order beliefs and desires. In addition, such individuals would be rather estranged from themselves. For example, they might witness how they themselves are taking the umbrella without seeing any first person reason why they should do this.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Linguistic theories of reference for indexicals and other singular terms make use of the idea that multiple descriptions can refer to the same object or that particular causal-historical events can determine reference. In both instances, puzzle cases of misidentification can form the theoretical background of approaches in autobiogra­ phy and autofiction, and literary approaches to the subject can acquire a reference constituting role. Cartesian dualism concerning the mind is compatible with the idea that one’s psychological and one’s physical self can come apart – a further theme

304 

 2 Categories

for literary exploration – while the opposing view, that there is no essential self over and beyond my particular experiences, seems to lend a potentially constitutive role to literary approaches once more. Epistemological views about the first person perspec­ tive revolve around the idea that there is a special form of epistemic access, a kind of infallibility, or special authority when it comes to experiences, beliefs or desires from a first person perspective. This special character can give rise to tensions between the ‘inner world’ that a subject experiences and what others witness from ‘without’. This issue is the basis of a characteristic tension in autobiographical narratives, in which the subjective experiences of the narrator on the one hand and the described character on the other hand – the character as he or she ‘truly’ existed in the world – may in principle come apart. In postmodern autobiographical writings this tension is often exploited, while Philippe Lejeune’s concept of an ‘autobiographical pact’ (Lejeune 1975 [1989]) is based on the notion of a clear-cut identity of author, narrator and portrayed character.

Works Cited Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. 3–48 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Perry, John. “The Problem of the Essential Indexical.” Nous 13 (1979): 3–21. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Shoemaker, Sydney. “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 555–567.

Further Reading Castañeda, Hector-Neri. Thinking, Language, Experience. Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1989. Chisholm, Roderick. The First Person: An Essay on Reference and Intentionality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Frege, Gottlob. The Frege Reader. Ed. Michael Beaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Hatzimoysis, Anthony. Self-Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover, 1950. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kaplan, David. “Demonstratives.” Themes from Kaplan. Ed. Joseph Almog, John Perry and Howard Wettstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Moran, Richard. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Shoemaker, Sydney. “Self-knowledge and ‘Inner Sense’.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994): 249–314. Strawson, Peter. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen, 1952.

2.15 Identity

Michael Quante and Annette Dufner

Definition The notion of identity is essentially a logical concept. In its logical sense, the concept says that one thing can only ever be identical to itself. Even if two artifacts look exactly the same, they are not identical to each other in the logical sense, they are merely similar to each other. In other words, ‘identity’ signifies the unity of one thing (in a purely logical, not temporal sense) in contrast to a multitude of things. In ordinary dis­ course the notion of identity is also often applied to the temporal existence of things. In this sense, a transtemporal identity proposition like ‘A at t1 is identical with B at t2’ is true if and only if there is a continuous causal persistence chain and the thing remains similar from one point in time to the next. Likewise the synchronic identity proposition ‘A at t1 is one and only one entity of a certain kind’ is true if and only if the unity-conditions for entities of the kind in question are met. Ever since John Locke, the term ‘identity’ has also been used explicitly with reference to persons. Locke’s criterion for personal identity says the following: A person at one point in time and a person at another point in time are identical if there is continuity of consciousness between them. The identity of a person is also a biographical concept in the sense of an umbrella-term for practical self-relations. The term ‘identity’ is related to a cluster of concepts by appeal to which we grasp and articulate particular characteristics of the personal existence of human beings. Further central concepts in this family of terms include the terms ‘personality’, ‘person’, ‘the self’, or the ‘I’, as well as the con­ cepts of personal ‘autonomy’ and ‘authenticity’.

Explication/Historical Aspects To illustrate the logical concept of identity imagine two factory-produced objects that look exactly the same. Artifacts such as these can be similar in all relevant respects, but they are not identical to each other in the logical sense. The same is true of so-called identical twins. There are two of them, after all. A well-known example that problematizes transtemporal identity propositions concerning artifacts is the ship of Theseus. The ship of Theseus, it is said, was restored very thoroughly. Over the course of time, each and every one of its wooden parts was replaced by a new part. The ship’s shape and function remained intact the entire time, but the replacements nonethe­ less represented fairly significant external causal interferences. As a result, one may wonder whether there was strictly speaking a second, new ship in the end, which merely resembled the old one. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-038

306 

 2 Categories

The psychological criterion of transtemporal identity propositions concerning persons, as Locke introduced it, is best exemplified with a number of thoughts that Locke himself raised with regard to the issue. Locke thought that every kind of thing has its own identity condition and the condition for a person consists in continuity of consciousness. With this view, he distanced himself from some of the theological posi­ tions of his time according to which a person is a kind of immaterial substance or a soul – concepts which might not necessarily require any continuity of consciousness. The view that a person could be a soul without continuity of consciousness appeared strange to Locke. If this were the case, he argued, then it might be possible for a person in one century and a person in a different century to have possessed the same soul. At least, one should say, there would be no way to prove such a proposition’s truth. In addition, Locke’s view that the criterion for personal identity is continuity of con­ sciousness and not necessarily the existence of an immaterial substance differentiates his view from accounts according to which the persistence of a person is necessarily tied to a human body or organism. In his well-known case of a prince and cobbler who swap bodies, the identity of the person would go with the consciousness, not with the bodily organism (Locke 1979). An important historical criticism of Locke’s view, raised for example by Thomas Reid, concerns the role of memories in Locke’s account (Reid 2009). As already men­ tioned, Locke seems to have thought that psychological continuity is a continuous chain of memory capacities. However, stipulating a pure-bred memory criterion for personal identity seems problematic. For example, someone hallucinating under the influence of a drug might ‘remember’ having been Napoleon and having won the battle of Waterloo. Should one really be able to conclude from this that Napoleon and the person with these ‘recollections’ are identical? As this example shows, there has to be some additional, objective criterion – distinct from an entirely introspective, subjective criterion – which can serve as an external verification device against false recollections as identity markers. First-person authority alone is not sufficient to tackle this problem. The memory criterion can also have potentially problematic effects on the notion of moral responsibility. If personal identity and recollection capacities are essentially related, then thorough forgetting of past events would seem to be sufficient in order to erase moral responsibility for past deeds. While this might appear plausible in cases of human beings in the late stages of dementia, it would seem to allow for convenient escapes from accountability and punishment, without any possibility of verification by others, if applied to a broader set of cases. Apart from these criticisms of a pure memory criterion, it is important to add a further requirement to the Lockean criterion in order to take account of contemporary philosophical developments in personal identity theory: one has to require that no branching may occur during the continuous psychological development of a person. If branching occurs, then the identity of the person will have come to an end. This additional requirement has to be added because modern philosophers have imagined hypothetical scenarios, in which the psychology of a single person splits up, for

2.15 Identity 

 307

example because mad scientists have operated one half of a person’s brain into the head of a brain dead twin. If this second person wakes up and has exactly the same memories, beliefs, and plans as the original, first person, one would be faced with a case, in which a person would have divided like an amoeba. Since a person can only ever be identical to one person, such duplication would have to be seen as the end of the diachronic identity of the original person. According to authors such as Derek Parfit, this thought experiment illustrates that it is not really the identity that matters in the life of a person (Parfit 1984). What truly matters – the recollections, beliefs and plans of the person – would still be present after all. It would even be present twice, in fact. Only the identity relation as such would be lost. Even though this would imply the death of the original person in a metaphysical sense, this would not be as bad as an ordinary death. All that matters in the practical life of the original person would continue to exist after all. This kind of death would be mostly like a form of double survival. The observation that the identity relation and what matters practically, can come apart, at least in hypothetical cases, has given new momentum to the discussion of alternative criteria for personal identity. Many authors have argued that personal iden­ tity is not really a logical or a metaphysical concept after all, and should instead be understood as a practical concept, created on the basis of practical matters in a per­ son’s life and social context. This use of the term ‘personal identity’ can correlate with the general use of language, according to which someone might ‘identify’ as a German Jew or as a New York homosexual. In addition, some authors have argued that the truth conditions for transtemporal identity propositions in the logical sense should not depend on psychological proper­ ties, but rather on the continuity of the human organism. The impact of such a view is especially obvious with regard to humans in a persistent and irreversible vegeta­ tive coma. While proponents of the psychological criterion of personal identity would have to say that this person has already died (and only some kind of organism, which is not essential to the person, has remained), proponents of an organism criterion of personal identity can easily claim that the being in the hospital bed is in an essential way still the same as before. In order to avoid overstretching the notion of a person, proponents of an organism criterion can specify that the being persists, but is now actually not a person anymore, because being a person requires some further charac­ teristics at any given point in time – characteristics which are not present anymore in the case of a being in a persistent and irreversible vegetative coma. Some further thinkers have even proposed a physical criterion of personal iden­ tity, according to which it is not the continuous existence of an organism, that is rel­ evant for identity, but literally the continuous existence of some parts of the body (Williams 1970). On the basis of such a view one can even claim that a human corpse is still the same person as before. Even though this view has not been defended by many authors, it may well be able to account for the special requirements of piety that seem to apply to the treatment of dead human bodies.

308 

 2 Categories

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Historical and contemporary philosophers have suggested a number of different criteria of identity, especially personal identity. Early conceptions of an immaterial substance were followed by the psychological criterion and the memory criterion, by purely practical and narrative accounts, as well as by the organism criterion and the physical criterion. An assumed standard of normality consists in the view that all of these criteria tend to be fulfilled simultaneously in most ordinary cases. But as the debates have shown by now, there are imaginable and even real cases, in which some, but not other identity criteria are fulfilled. The resulting multitude of potential ten­ sions continues to present fertile ground for exploration in literature and other media. Some of the possible tensions consist in the separation between the introspec­ tively perceived inner life of a person and what is perceived from the outside by other people. The memory criterion, for example, can depart drastically from what the outer world perceives with respect to a specific person. The psychological criterion allows for such tensions as well, in the sense that it permits the possibility of body swaps and multiple personality scenarios. Especially body swap scenarios have been used extensively by all sorts of media, from Hollywood movies to short stories such as Die vertauschten Köpfe (1940) [The Transposed Heads (1941)] by Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann. The same is true of the organism and the physical criteria. While organism and body of a person can persist, there might nonetheless be drastic personal develop­ ments and changes, which can appear puzzling to the outer world. Especially interesting with regard to the memory criterion and the biographical understanding is the fact that according to these views, stories can acquire an iden­ tity-constituting role. Of course first-person memories and personal tales as well as narrative ascriptions by others can continuously be re-interpreted across time, and the threat of forgetting continues to endanger this aspect of the identity of a person even during the afterlife. This feature demonstrates a characteristic tension in the understanding of autobiography as such. While Philippe Lejeune’s understanding of autobiography as based on an ‘autobiographical pact’ (Lejeune 1975 [1989]) assumes the identity between author, narrator and character, postmodern authors have often worked on deconstructing these assumed identity relations.

Works Cited Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. 3–48 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.

2.15 Identity 

 309

Further Reading DeGrazia, David. Human Identity and Bioethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Flanagan, Owen J., and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, eds. Identity, Character, and Morality. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Gunnarsson, Logi. Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality. New York: Routledge, 2010. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lewis, David. “Survival and Identity.” The Identities of Persons. Ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 17–40. McMahan, Jeff. The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Noonan, Harold. Personal Identity. London: Routledge, 1989. Olson, Eric T. The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Perry, John. Personal Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Quante, Michael. “Precedent Autonomy and Personal Identity.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 9 (1999): 365–381. Quante, Michael. “Personal Identity as Basis for Autonomy.” The Moral Status of Persons: Perspectives on Bioethics. Ed. Gerhold K. Becker. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 57–75. Radden, Jennifer. Divided Minds and Successive Selves: Ethical Issues in Disorders of Identity and Personality. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, ed. The Identities of Persons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Schechtman, Marya. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Shoemaker, Sydney. “Personal Identity and Memory.” The Journal of Philosophy 56 (1959): 868–882. Shoemaker, Sydney. “Personal Identity: A Materialist’s Account.” Personal Identity. Ed. Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. 67–132. Wiggins, David. “The Concern to Survive.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979): 417–422. Williams, Bernard. “The Self and the Future.” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 161–180.

2.16 Individuality Eric Achermann

Definition Leaving mathematical logics and social methodology aside, there are two uses of ‘individuality’ which prove to be relevant for the theoretical understanding of autobi­ ography: firstly, it designates a particular mode of being, i.  e. of an object conceived as indivisible, distinct, unique or one; secondly, it stands for a totality of characteris­ tics that are supposed not only to single out a human being, but, by the same token, to constitute a prerequisite for the morally and socially relevant agency of a person. Obviously, the epistemic or ontological notion does not preclude the psycho-social one, but is presupposed by it, the latter highlighting features that are rooted in con­ victions about the relation of particular human beings to society. Briefly, the first use denotes what results from an operation of ‘individuation’, whereas the second use lays the foundation for ‘individualism’.

Explication Understanding ‘individuality’ in the first sense has a lot to do with singular terms, i.  e. proper names or definite descriptions able to identify an object. Two positions have been at the centre of a long-lasting debate on this issue: a proper name may be con­ sidered as the abbreviation of a bundle of properties that are sufficient to individuate an object, or it may be considered as a rigid designator that points to an individual object. The first theory is called ‘description theory’, the second ‘causal theory’. In the first case, Peter may be individuated by the enumeration of the place he lives, the colour of his hair, the date of his birth, etc. In the second case, Peter is Peter because he was baptized ‘Peter’ regardless of anyone’s knowledge about his date of birth (for an overview Haack 1978, 56–73). Individuality gets even more troublesome if seen on the background of the clas­ sical problems of identity-theory, i.  e. spatiotemporal continuity. A body may be said identical to a spatiotemporal distant body by referring to structures or organisms that are considered persistent. A person, on the other hand, is commonly thought of in terms of continuity in consciousness (Nida-Rümelin 2006, 98–170), as it is promi­ nently stated in Locke’s classical definition of ‘person’: “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places, which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking” (Locke 1959 [1694], 448). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-039

2.16 Individuality 

 311

Contrary to intentionality, consciousness is not seen as a mental state directed to an outward object but as the spontaneous or reflective apprehension of an inward condition. It is thought crucial for any kind of judgement linked to practical issues and thus considered unavoidable with regard to moral concepts such as ‘responsibility’, ‘self-constitution’ or ‘self-development’. At the very core of an individual’s agency, consciousness has, however, been the target of numerous and often radical objec­ tions: the mysterious capacity has been, among other things, viewed as a mechanism “ohne Gedächtnis” [“devoid of memory”], veiling the proper motives of the subcon­ scious (Freud 1900, 367 [1918, 488]), it has been decried as a product of categorical confusion, “a ghost in the machine” (Ryle 1949, 11–24), and it has been stripped of its supposedly close ties with personal identity (Parfit 1984, 219–244). Not only principles of identity have been questioned, but also the prioritization of individuality is considered precarious by a large variety of approaches, mainly at the threshold between psychology and sociology. Starting from the Freudian insight “that social life begins with each individual’s beginnings” (Erikson 1959, 21), the indi­ vidual itself has been differentiated in a multiplicity of identities (e.  g. national, racial, religious, sexual), denominating factors of a successful or traumatic ‘management’ of the personal and the social (Goffman 1963). The dialectics of this insight holds that an “individual’s self-definition” depends on the attachment to a social identity viewed itself as personal and social acknowledgment of one’s membership in a group and the esteem the group obtains (Tajfel 1974, 68–70).

Historical Aspects Since Antiquity, the impressive logical, ontological, and metaphysical interest aroused by the question of the individual is committed to a notion of truth that presupposes a state of necessary being, independent from the contingencies of reality and percep­ tion. Historically, its most influential concept is the Aristotelian notion of substance. The problems that will inform further controversies are inherent in its twofold defi­ nition: “πρώτη οὐσία” [‘primary substance’] means “ἣ μήτε καθ’ ὑποκειμένου τινὸς λέγεται μήτε ἐν ὑποκειμένῳ τινί ἐστιν, οἷον ὁ τὶς ἄνθρωπος ἢ ὁ τὶς ἵππος” [‘that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.  g. the individual man or the individual horse’], while “δεύτεραι οὐσίαι” [‘secondary substances’] are the species or genera of things (Aristot. cat. 2a13–18). The implied primacy of the individual has been chal­ lenged by Neoplatonism, holding that universals are the sole objects of knowledge (Kobusch 1976, 301), whereas the Christian dogmas of Trinity, hypostatic union and individual immortality have prompted a tenacious search for a principle of individu­ ation, moving successively from accident to form and matter (King 2000, 163–176). In the famous ‘quarrel of universals’, the development of a strong notion of individuality has been defended, though with varying radicalism, by the nominalists holding that

312 

 2 Categories

the predicate ‘to exist’ can only be applied to individuals (e.  g. Maurer 1994). Through Leibniz’ famous ‘Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals’ (McCullough 1994), the logical as well as metaphysical concern of the Scholastics may be traced down to ­present-day philosophy (Wiggins 2001, 61–63, 187–188). Contrasting “sharply with […] other prominent Greek and Roman philosophers” (Brown 2009, 179), the prioritization of the individual not only over species and the like, but over social collectives can be found in Epicurean atomism, which has been identified as a major source for “elements which make up modern individualism” (Lindsay 1932, 676). Others have detected the roots of an “unbegrenzte[n] und unbe­ dingte[n] Individualismus” [“unlimited, unqualified individualism”] in Christianity, namely the primacy accorded to the individual in its personal relation with God and the cultivation of “die Freiheit der Seele” [“spiritual freedom”] (Troeltsch 1923 [1912], 39, 31 [1931, 55, 47]). Be that as it may, both filiations leading individualism back to Antiquity are but specimens of a wide-spread quest for the ‘discovery’, the ‘birth’, the ‘rise’ or even the ‘invention’ of the individual. No age, no region have been spared by the bewildering range of literature dedicated to the emergence of modernity and its hallmark: the advent of person- and self-hood. There are, however, three historical periods on which the interest concentrates: the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the emergence of Modern philosophy and science in the seventeenth century and, finally, the establishment of liberalism as a paramount ideology in the nineteenth century. As is known, Burckhardt placed the cradle of individualism in the Italian Renais­ sance; here, “der Mensch wird geistiges Individuum und erkennt sich als solches” [“man became a spiritual individual, and recognised himself as such”] (Burckhardt 1860, 131 [1890, 129]). The position was backed by such a prominent historian as Huizinga, stating rather bluntly that for the “mental habits” of the Middle Ages “all that acquires a fixed place in life is considered as having a reason for existence in the divine scheme” (Huizinga 1987 [1919], 217). This far too restricted view has been one of the main targets of the so called “revolt of the medievalists” (for a critically balanced overview Schmitt 1989). Huizinga’s one-sided focus on realism was challenged by historians who reinterpret the “waning” or “autumn” of the Middle Ages as a period of “harvest” (Oberman 1963, 5), insisting on the socio-historical importance of nominalism and its notion of the individual “understood in its own context as potentially new, original, and unique before it is identifiable by classification into species” (Oberman 1974, 57). Several other attempts have been made to date the dawn of individualism, or certain of its main features, in the Middle Ages reflecting upon such topics as the link between early nominalism and “the search for the self” (Morris 1987 [1972], 37–95), the importance of “the rebirth of man as a political animal” in Thomist philosophy and its favourable reception in “the feudally inspired common law [that] had already ascribed a number of rights to the individual” (Ullmann 1966, 128, 149), the Scandi­ navian legacy of a certain lack of moral constraints (Gurevich 1995, 33–113, 293–309), and finally the heavy insistence on an individualism resulting from autobiographical

2.16 Individuality 

 313

writing as it appears paradigmatically in Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum (McLaughlin 1967; for a balanced position, see Bagge 1993). All this has not prevented others to get individualism started with Descartes’ ‘cogito’. Besides the priority given to self-knowledge that has been termed ‘individu­ alistic’ (Burge 1979), the Cartesian identification of mind with consciousness (see the article ‘intentionality’) led to an “‘innerworldly liberation’ of the soul” and a “new model of rational mastery” that presents the individual as a moral sovereign exer­ cising “instrumental control” over his or her passions (Taylor 1989, 146, 149). Even if it has to be admitted that there are good reasons for predating the specific model of mind, at least as far as it is thought a ‘theatre of representations’, to Scholastic philos­ ophy (Pasnau 1997, 293–294), the model of self-governance based on “suspension and examination” of judgment, as defended most prominently by Locke (Tully 1988, 23), has been of a tremendous influence on European and American political, economical and moral thought. Turning to the debates that emerge in the wake of the French revolution and the breakthrough of liberalism, Burckhardt’s depiction of Renaissance culture has to be considered in itself as a major element of the historical development of individual­ ism (Lukes 2006 [1973], 35–36). In fact, his interpretation of individuality rhymes with egoism, giving rise to a notion of “entwickelte[r] Individualismus” [“excessive indi­ vidualism”], identified with the “Grundmangel” [“fundamental vice”] of Renaissance upper class (Burckhardt 1860, 455 [1890, 454]). Generally speaking, we can observe that the meaning of ‘individual’ shifts from logics, ontology and epistemology to pol­ itics. Being primarily opposed to ‘collective’, the term stands now for an outspoken ideology, i.  e. individualism (Lindsay 1932; Rauscher 1976). While the individual is accorded priority over governmental interests by liberal democrats, it becomes a target of conservative as well as socialist criticism: the indi­ vidual is decried as a threat to society, risking by its cult of self-determination, privacy and entrepreneurial egoism to sever the necessary, or at least desirable, ties preserv­ ing the favoured kind of community (Lukes 2006 [1973], Part II). It is, probably, Marx who coins the most pointed slogan meant to unmask the lure of individual autonomy: “Das Individuum ist das gesellschaftliche Wesen” [“The individual is the social being”] (Marx 1968 [1844], 538 [1988, 105]). A second line of attack against the supremacy of the individual may be summa­ rized under the label of ‘the Crisis of modernity’. Its main targets are the conceptions of consciousness and rational control underpinning individualism. For Nietzsche, most philosophical beliefs, even logics, veil the unconscious drives by a manifest, nevertheless, deeply deceptive expression: das meiste bewusste Denken eines Philosophen ist durch seine Instinkte heimlich geführt […]. Auch hinter aller Logik und ihrer anscheinenden Selbstherrlichkeit der Bewegung stehen Werth­ schätzungen, deutlicher gesprochen, physiologische Forderungen zur Erhaltung einer bestimm­ ten Art von Leben

314 

 2 Categories

[“the greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts (…). And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, there are valua­ tions, or to speak more plainly, physiological demands, for the maintenance of a definite mode of life”] (Nietzsche 1988 [1886], 17 [2008, 11]).

Pretty much at the same time, we find Mach’s famous phrase “Das Ich ist unrettbar” [“The ego must be given up”] (Mach 1922 [1886], 20 [1914, 27]). It is Mach’s explicit intention to pursue hereby Hume’s criticism directed against Locke’s conception of personal identity, viz. that “the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imagi­ nary principle of union” called ‘personal identity’ (Hume 1969 [1739], 310). Up until now, this and other attacks are countered on different grounds, first and foremost by insisting on the natural or universal validity of selfhood as the very basis for human rights, implying self-governance as a precondition for democracy. The history of the development of autonomy, may it be juridical or moral, has been object to the same debates as the ones concerning the emergence of individuality (e.  g. Kobusch 1997; Schneewind 1998). In the realm of aesthetics and stemming principally from German idealism, neo-humanistic conceptions of personal self-fulfilment (‘Bildung’) were erected as a bulwark against instrumentalism by blending the traditions of Kantian autonomy with a concept of natural expressiveness (Taylor 1989, 368–390). Still in another vein, the notion of rational moral agency is defended on the ground of Kant’s moral philosophy (e.  g. Korsgaard 2009, 81–108).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction At the latest since Lejeune’s famous ‘autobiographical pact’, ‘individual’ stands in the centre of the theoretical debate concerning the genre of autobiography. Lejeune’s definition comprises the whole range of problems sketched above: “Récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” [“Retrospec­ tive 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”] (Lejeune 1975, 14 [1989, 4]). The strange precision that an autobiography is written by a “real person” finds its explanation in a causal theory of proper names, reducing the whole question of identity to the homonymy among the author’s and the narrator’s name (Lejeune 1975, 22 [1989, 11]). The real person is real because the author’s name is considered a rigid designator that refers to the main character of the narrative as well as to its narrator and guarantees by the same token the ‘own’ of its “own existence”. It is, so to say, merely a question of reference, not of the truth of the description involved. For Lejeune, descriptions of an author’s life compared to what we can know about the author’s life produce “resemblance”, not “identity”: “L’identité est un fait immédi­ atement saisi – accepté ou refusé, au niveau de l’énonciation; la ressemblance est un

2.16 Individuality 

 315

rapport, sujet à discussions et à nuances infinies, établi à partir de l’énoncé” [“Iden­ tity is a fact immediately grasped – accepted or refused, at the level of enunciation; resemblance is a relationship subject of infinite discussions and nuances, established from the utterance”] (Lejeune 1975, 35 [1989, 21]; for criticism, see Achermann 2012). On the other hand, the notion of ‘individual life’ relies on a conception of a different kind, to be more precise: the persistence of personality by consciousness qua memory based narration. This second notion raises the question about the necessary link of individuality and memory that was stated by Locke, attacked from Hume to Parfit, and still defended by many a philosopher (e.  g. Shoemaker 1970, 283–285; McDowell 1998, 359–382; Schechtman 1996, 105–122). The considerable interest related to autobiography as the privileged medium of an emancipating drive to a being’s self-consciousness (Dilthey 1958 [1910], 191–204; Misch 1949 [1907], 11–19; Mascuch 1997) runs parallel to the above mentioned search for the sources of individuality. So it may not come as a surprise to find the same divergences when we ask about the emergence of the autobiographical individual. As long as neither the sufficient nor even the necessary conditions are listed that have to be satisfied to ground the talk of ‘individuality’, there is no hope for an end to the ensuing debates. Perhaps, one would be well advised to distinguish an ‘individuated individual’ as numerical identity corresponding to ‘the same’ from an ‘individualistic individual’ as a certain interpretation of ‘the self’ (Ricoeur 1991). For the first, the con­ dition that has to be satisfied is the very distinctness on which personal identity – as persistence through change and the capacity of referring to one’s own person at differ­ ent times – relies. Contrary to an individualistic individual the advent of an individu­ al-based personal identity as a conscious ‘space-time worm’ is not to be dated some­ where between pre-Socratic philosophers and the nineteenth century, the faculty of being conscious of present and past, of deciding and planning future actions as well as reflecting this whole business is, in all probability, part of human nature. Denying self-consciousness is denying the capacity of drawing a picture of oneself, not the reliability of the picture. And this capacity relies on the implied αὐτός (self) of authen­ ticity and the reflexive identification of ‘me’ as a holder of different states in a βιός (bios, life) (Enskat 2005, 173–174). The modes may vary, and they do, but this does not matter as far as the sole possibility of autobiographical individuality is concerned, while the very concept of an individualistic individual is an outcome of ideology, i.  e. the “form of self-conception” (Weintraub 1978, xiv) placing a particular weight on the ‘I’, the ‘self’ and the ‘me’ in their relation to society (Eakin 2008, 100–103). In autobiographical theory, the constitution of individuality-based identity has been considered in terms of narrativity (Carr 1991, 73–99; for criticism Strawson 2004). But, here, circularity seems to pose a threat to the concept of an autobiographical pact: if the narrative constitutes personal identity, individuality itself may not be a constitutive condition for an autobiographical narrative qua an initial pact but the result of a constructive process constituting identity by linking states of the individ­ ual qua narrative. In this sense, the autobiographical report is the expression of the

316 

 2 Categories

proper identity that represents the cognitive and affective consciousness of the psy­ chologically, morally and even forensically relevant aspects of a human being who thereby becomes a public person (Enskat 2005, 143–144). The classical notion of autobiography as the narrated constitution of the self in the age of Rousseau has, however, been a criterion for the problematic distinction of autobiography and memoir: memoir starts where autobiography ends, viz. with an already formed personal identity (Neumann 1970, 16–25). In other words, memoirs require individuality, autobiographies personal identity. Moreover, it has led to the view that autobiography does not reproduce past experiences but creates them (Craemer-Schroeder 1993, 10–22; Scheffer 1992, 252), and that it does so to a pretty large extent. For many scholars, the whole autobiographical report is patterned by attitudes making the author’s life fit to the present attitudes of the author’s mind, thus, – consciously or unconsciously – distorting, completing, suppressing, rearrang­ ing, inventing, and producing past attitudes and feelings, in short and ultimately: creating life (de Man 1979). From a deconstructivist’s psychoanalytic point of view, personal identity and the different individual stages seem to express the unconscious drive of a self-constructing ‘I’ as ‘me’ to enter the realm of the symbolic order thereby constructing the illusion of sameness in otherness (Waltz 1989). Nevertheless, there is a difference between constructing and remembering. Every­ one knows the difference between one’s own experiential sphere and knowledge stemming from other sources. To explain this difference, there are good reasons for not overstating the identity between original experiences and the remembering of these experiences. Quite a few of the prominent arguments against the reliability and authenticity of self-knowledge are in no way specific to ‘autobiographical memory’ but affect all kinds of remembered contents and attitudes (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce 2000; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005 [2000], 87–91, 2010, 190–193). For this and other reasons, it may be advisable to drop the requirement of type-identity for memory based self-knowledge still considering remembered attitudes going along with remembered contents to be factive on the basis of mere entailment and resemblance (Bernecker 2009). Given that fictive contents and attitudes do not require entailment or resem­ blance, we may infer that it is paradoxically an idea of strong identity between expe­ rience and remembered experience that is at stake in autofiction: it draws its effect from the suggestion of a true or authentic match of certain memories and original experiences by pretending a self-knowledge that in fact neither entails, nor resembles any mental event in one’s own past.

2.16 Individuality 

 317

Works Cited Achermann, Eric. “Auto-Kreter: Aporien der Selbstdarstellung.” Vielheit und Einheit der Germanistik weltweit. Autofiktion: Neue Verfahren literarischer Selbstdarstellung. Vol. VIII. Ed. Hans-Gert Roloff, Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf and Claudia Liebrand. Frankfurt a.  M./Berlin: Lang, 2012. 133–139. Aristotle. Categoriae et liber de interpretatione. Ed. Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949. Bagge, Sverre. “The Autobiography of Abelard and Medieval Individualism.” Journal of Medieval History 19 (1993): 327–350. Bernecker, Sven. “Self-Knowledge and the Bounds of Authenticity.” Erkenntnis 71.1 (2009): 107–121. Brown, Eric. “Politics and Society.” The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism. Ed. James Warren. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 179–196. Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch. Basel: Schweighauser, 1860 [The Civilisation of the Italian Renaissance (1860). Trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. New York: Macmillan, 1890]. Burge, Tyler. “Individualism and the Mental.” Midwest Studies In Philosophy 4.1 (1979): 73–121. Carr, David. Time, Narrative and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Conway, Martin A., and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce. “The Construction of Autobiographical ­Memories in the Self-Memory System.” Psychological Review 107.2 (2000): 261–288. Craemer-Schroeder, Susanne. Deklination des Autobiographischen: Goethe, Stendhal, Kierkegaard. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1993. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissen­ schaften (1910). Vol. VII. Ed. Karlfried Gründer and Frithjof Rodi. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958. Enskat, Rainer. Authentisches Wissen: Prolegomena zur Erkenntnistheorie in praktischer Hinsicht. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Eakin, Paul John. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Erikson, Erik H. “Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers.” Psychological Issues (Part I). New York: International University Press, 1959. Freud, Sigmund. Die Traumdeutung. Leipzig/Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1900 [The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. A. Brill. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913]. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Gurevich, Aaron. The Origins of European Individualism. Trans. K. Judelson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Haack, Susan. Philosophy of Logics. Cambridge/London: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1919). Trans. F. Hopman. London/Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. Ernest C. Mossner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. King, Peter. “The Problem of Individuation in the Middle Ages.” Theoria 66 (2000): 159–184. Kobusch, Theo. “Individuum, Individualität: Antike und Frühscholastik.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. IV. Ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1976. 300–304. Kobusch, Theo. Die Entdeckung der Person: Metaphysik der Freiheit und modernes Menschenbild. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997. Korsgaard, Christine M. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

318 

 2 Categories

Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [“The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop. “Individualism.” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. VII. London: Macmillan, 1932. 674–680. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2nd ed. 1694). Ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (1894). New York: Dover, 1959. Lukes, Steven. Individualism (1973). Oxford: ECPR Press, 2006. Mach, Ernst. Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen (1886). Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922 [The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical. Trans. C. M. Williams. Chicago: Open Court, 1914]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Marx, Karl. “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844.” Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke (MEW). Vol. XL. Berlin: Dietz, 1968. 465–588 [Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988]. Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791. Cambridge, Oxford: Polity, 1997. Maurer, Armand A. “William of Ockham (b. ca. 1285; d. 1347).” Individuation in Scholasticism, the Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation (1150–1650). Ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 373–396. McCullough, Laurence. “Leibniz’s Principle of Individuation.” Individuation and Identity in Early Modern Philosophy. Ed. Kenneth F. Barber and Jorge J. E. Gracia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 201–217. McDowell, John. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1998. McLaughlin, Mary M. “Abelard as Autobiographer: The Motives and Meaning of his ‘Story Of Calamities’.” Speculum 42.3 (1967): 463–488. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. I, part I (1907). Bern: Francke, 3rd ed. 1949 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. I. London: Routledge, 1950]. Morris, Colin. The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200 (1972). Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Neumann, Bernd. Identität und Rollenzwang: Zur Theorie der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Athenäum, 1970; rev. ed. Von Augustinus zu Facebook. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Auto­ biographie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013. Nida-Rümelin, Martine. Der Blick von innen: Zur transtemporalen Identität bewusstseinsfähiger Wesen. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral. Vol. V. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. München/Berlin/New York: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag/de Gruyter, 1988. 9–243 [Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Trans. Helen Zimmern. Rockville: Serenity Publishers, 2008]. Oberman, Heiko Augustinus. “Headwaters of the Reformation: ‘Initia Lutheri – Initia Reformationis’.” Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era. Ed. Heiko Augustinus Oberman. Leiden: Brill, 1974. 40–88. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Pasnau, Robert. Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Quante, Michael. “Personale Identität als Problem der analytischen Metaphysik.” Personale Identität. Ed. Michael Quante. Paderborn/München: Schöningh, 1999. 9–29. Quine, Willard Van Orman. Quiddites: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987.

2.16 Individuality 

 319

Rauscher, Alfons. “Individualismus.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. IV. Ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe 1976. 289–291. Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Identity.” Philosophy Today 35.1 (1991): 73–81. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949. Schechtman, Marya. The Consitution of Selves. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Scheffer, Bernd. Interpretation und Lebensroman. Zu einer konstruktivistischen Literaturtheorie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1992. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. “La ‘découverte de l’individu’: Une fiction historiographique?” La Fabrique, la figure et la feinte: Fictions et statut des fictions en psychologique. Ed. Paul Mengal and Françoise Parot. Paris: Vrin, 1989. 213–236. Schneewind, Jerome B. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Shoemaker, Sydney. “Persons and Their Pasts.” American Philosophical Quarterly 7.4 (1970): 269–285. Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio (new series) 17 (2004): 428–452. Tajfel, Henri. “Social Identity and Intergroup Behaviour.” Social Science Information 13 (1974): 65–93. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Troeltsch, Ernst. Gesammelte Schriften. Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (1912). Vol. I. Tübingen: Mohr, 1923 [The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. Vol. I. Trans. Olive Wyon. London: Allen and Unwin, 1931]. Tully, James. “Governing conduct.” Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Edmund Leites. Cambridge/Paris: Cambridge University Press/Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1988. 12–71. Ullmann, Walter. The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie (2000). Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2005. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der Literaturwissenschaft.” BIOS 23.2 (2010): 188–200. Waltz, Matthias. “Zur Topologie und ‘Grammatik’ der Abbildung des Lebens in der ­Autobiographie.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 63 (1989): 201–218. Weintraub, Karl Joachim. The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Wiggins, David. Sameness and Substance Renewed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Further Reading Köhler, Wolfgang R. Personenverstehen: Zur Hermeneutik der Individualität. Frankfurt a.  M.: Ontos, 2004.

2.17 Intentionality Eric Achermann

Definition In today’s academic vocabulary, two uses of ‘intentionality’ are prominent: in a broad sense, it refers to all kinds of mental states, including belief, desire, fear etc., in so far as they are directed to an object (Brentano 1924, 124); in a narrower and more popular sense, it refers to a disposition directed to action or, in other words, to “something which acting in a specific way would accord” (McDowell 1998, 270). Both meanings conform in denoting a mental state as going along with “conditions of satisfaction” (Searle 1983, Ch. 3). Intentionality, therefore, plays a crucial role in the explanation of the behaviour of rational agents.

Explication Predictability is a basic criterion of modern science. As is generally known, it has served to distinguish “two cultures” (Snow 1959): on the one hand, nomothetic sciences whose results are, to a certain extent and precision, accountable for what will happen, on the other hand, idiographic sciences that focus not on the explanation of natural events but on the retrospective understanding of individuals (Rickert 1910, 11–18). The distinction has been thoroughly criticised by insisting on the law-like uni­ versality implied in many a statement occurring in historical sciences (Nagel 1953) as well as on the social and cultural relativity – and, therefore, a-rationality – of natural sciences (for a critical overview Hacking 1999, Ch. 3). Contemporary philosophy of mind and theory of action attempt to overcome this clash. Starting from folk psychology, intentionality has been treated on the basis of projectable intuitions that are apt to predict the behaviour of others (Gordon 1986). The motivational aspects of behaviour have been considered “unavoidable” (Dennett 1994, 323) for the understanding of human interaction (and, probably, of a large variety of animals). There is a widespread conviction that they do a pretty good job in fore­ telling another’s behaviour (Stich 2003) based mainly on the truism that behaviour is meant to satisfy desires, urges, moral views, and so forth, which derive, ultimately, from primordial needs (Dennett 1994, 317). Hence, the main “predictive strategy” for the explanation of human behaviour consists in “adopting the intentional stance” (Dennett 1994, 314). The far-reaching identification of causes with reasons qua intention (Davidson 1963) has been the target of attacks by eliminative materialism. For eliminativists, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-040

2.17 Intentionality 

 321

“introspective reports” are made up of black-box-terms that must be substituted by a thorough description of the physical events in the brain (Churchland 2013, 74–76). Of the many arguments against eliminativism some have to be considered relevant, at least as far as literary theory is concerned. Regardless of substitutability, one may say, that a) we are miles away from a neurobiological theory that would permit stating the sufficient or necessary conditions for human beliefs, desires and behaviour (Fodor 2000), that b) even if the propositional content of beliefs could be reduced to physical states, the emotions and the consciousness going along with them could not (Jackson 1982; Chalmers 2002) and, finally, c) if there was such a theory, intentions would still prove indispensable in everyday talk (Quine 2013, 202; for a broader discussion see Dennett 1987). To sum up, there is not much evidence that, in a foreseeable future, if asked how it feels to be in love, the answer delineating a typical pattern of firing neurons will satisfy the expressed interest. Intentionality, therefore, does not lose any of its relevance when we turn our attention to communicational processes; regardless if we deal with oral or written enouncements, it constitutes an ‘a priori’ assumption for the understanding not only of decisions, feelings, beliefs and so forth but for the whole business of meaning (see e.  g. Grice 1987, 96–116). While listening or reading, we infer from our supposed knowl­ edge of normal human behaviour. And we do so in narratives when confronted to the representation of anthropomorphic behaviour (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003). Of course, we may be led astray but, if we err, we err relatively to a more or less explicit intuition about what is expectable. There is, however, a point more controversial than inten­ tion in texts; it concerns the intention of a literary text. For decades, we have been witnessing an ongoing rejection of auctorial intention among literary scholars. Their eliminativism argues that the whole talk about authorial intentions leads us necessar­ ily to false conclusions about what we cannot know (the author’s mind while writing) and about what we do not have to know (all kinds of extra-textual entities as vehicles of meaning). The so called ‘intentional fallacy’ consists in the categorically erroneous assumption that the literary text does something what it actually does not: “If the poet succeeded in doing it [i.  e. what he tried to do], then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954, 4; for the debate see Danneberg and Müller 1983). Following this line of argument, literary anti-intentionalists could find a rather convincing argument in the following point: intentionality seems quite useless as long as it does not predict what will happen, but merely rationalizes (in an utterly unscien­ tific way) what already happened, viz. what the text already is. Contrary to everyday conversation, time and place of enouncement of a work of art are (indeterminately) distant from time and place of reception (Zipfel 2001, 34–38). So, one could conclude, intentionality does not serve interpretation by predictability of human behaviour because the reader is fully aware – in the case of authorial intention – to be confronted with a piece of the past. And for the same reason, a literary text cannot be considered part of a properly speaking communicational process. However, as one may notice, there is an important difference between this kind of literary eliminativism and the

322 

 2 Categories

above mentioned one, namely the fact that for the former anti-intentionalism con­ fines itself to expressions of art being much more concerned about the autonomy of the artistic work than the possibility or impossibility of intention-based semantics (for criticism, see Peckham 1976; Hermerén 1975). The apparently insurmountable gap created by the dissociation of the private sphere of the artist’s psychic reality and the work (being by its own nature addressed to a non-specifiable public) con­ firms aesthetic autonomy (Nathan 2005, 39–44). The work, therefore, has to be seen as an inseparable unity of the representing and the represented, a vehicle of reflexive, non-transitive reference. As a reaction against this hypostasized unity of artistic work, already defended by traditional aesthetics and hermeneutics, several methods try to discard the problem by giving up meaning for an analysis that focuses on the histor­ ical relativity of meaning conditions. Whether they are called ‘discourse’, ‘system’, ‘habitus’ or ‘culture’ (for an overview, see Schößler 2006, 37–75), reference-frames are primarily searched for in the rules and practices of the social sphere. In short, inten­ tional interpretation as practiced by hermeneutical intentionalism or neo-hermeneu­ tics (Köppe and Winko 2008, 133–148) has to deal with two rival traditions, namely classical hermeneutics that focuses on a non-intentional ‘Verstehen’ [understanding] and theories that deal with cultural or social contexts. To a certain extent, this oppo­ sition finds itself mirrored in two different strands of neo-hermeneutics, actual and hypothetical intentionalism, the latter conceding the methodological primacy to the recipient’s construction of a supposed intention and, on the same ground, of utter­ ance meaning over utterer’s meaning (Spoerhase 2007; for criticism Stecker 2006).

Historical Aspects A philosophical concern for intentionality can be traced back through the Middle Ages to classical Antiquity. Not surprisingly, insights into a topic of such general nature are to be found here and there, say, in Plato’s Θεαίτητος [Theaetetus] as well as in Cicero’s De Inventione, in the whole quarrel about the rivalling ideals of a disinter­ ested approach to truth and the technical, rhetorical realisation of self-interest, not to mention the theological debates about the relation of intellect and will that are of the outmost relevance in Patristic and Medieval thought. The most important source for the philosophical approach to intentionality, in the above cited broader sense, is to be found in Aristotle’s Περὶ Ψυχῆς [Peri psychēs, lat. De anima, engl. On the Soul] (Nuss­ baum and Putnam 1992; Caston 1998) and its whole tradition. What is at stake here is the directedness of mental representations, thoughts and signs to external objects, or, more generally, the capacity of spiritual entities to refer (Perler 2002). Concerning the second, narrower meaning of intention, it is treated as part of ethics, starting with Plato and Aristotle and adapted by the Church Fathers to their own purposes (Dihle 1982). This legacy is not buried away by the avenge of Cartesian mind-body-dualism

2.17 Intentionality 

 323

(Normore 1986; Ariew 1999, 58–76). Descartes not only retains the Scholastic notion of an “objective reality of an idea” that corresponds pretty well to what contemporary philosophers call ‘intentionality’ (Nadler 2006, 91), but he relocates this notion into the centre of his philosophy of mind. As we know, Descartes retraces the borderline between mind and body, thus identifying mind as the totality of what can be object to consciousness (Rozemond 2006, 51). This notion of consciousness is crucial for modern philosophy, and fundamental to the phenomenological approach to inten­ tionality which derives from Brentano’s reception of Medieval (Perler 2002, 399–407) and Cartesian concepts (Brown 2007, 138). It is further developed by Brentano’s pupil, Edmund Husserl (Nadler 2006, 92). Much the same can be maintained for the ana­ lytic tradition (Siewert 2011, Ch. 4). In contrast, the historiography of classical herme­ neutics refers to Schleiermacher’s legacy. Schleiermacher’s ‘Verstehen’ is commonly discussed with regard to its methodological centrality in Dilthey’s ‘Geisteswissen­ schaften’ [Human Sciences], to its existential interpretation in Heidegger’s philoso­ phy and its unavoidability in a dialogical approach to the world, held by Gadamer (Palmer 1969). In clear opposition to the tradition adopted by classical hermeneutics, the above mentioned neo-hermeneutics may be said to favour a pre-Schleiermacher hermeneutics rehabilitating by the same token the ‘intentio auctoris’ (Bühler 1993; Scholz 1994; Petrus 1997, 146–171).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Considering the main trends in today’s theoretical approach to autobiography neither intentionality nor intention do hold a central position. Nevertheless, they have been of great importance, and they still are if we look at some of the underlying elements that are used to define the genre. A distinction, however, has to be made about their scope: the overall intention of the autobiographical work and the particular representation of reasons, motives, desires, etc. in autobiographical texts. Where the first point is concerned, we are confronted with an explicit or implied intention that, at best, is considered an object of historical typology (e.  g. May 1984, Ch. 3): though autobiogra­ phies can be written for any reason, there are trends (e.  g. confessional introspection, defence of family honour, etc.) that have largely disappeared or have been subject to quite radical modifications (Scheffer 1992, 232), others, in return, have been unknown to former eras (think of psychoanalytical scrutiny). Still, there have been attempts to distinguish ‘autobiography proper’ by recurring to a specific autobiographical intention characteristically different from a merely memorial intention. The criterion enabling this distinction stresses “the self” as opposed to “the outside world” and the uniting of certain life stages into an intended totality (Pascal 1960, 8). This view often goes hand in hand with the no less problematic one that the proper intention of autobiography consists in the struggle for consciousness trying to overcome the

324 

 2 Categories

dark impulses of the subconscious (Gusdorf 1980, 39–40). Probably, it would be more adequate to limit the generalization of autobiographical overall intention to the mere purpose of telling one’s own life and of being true. Truthfulness, the intention of being true, may or may not lead to truth, it nevertheless is so strongly implied that this generic expectation can be subverted by ‘autofiction’. For Lejeune (1975), this inten­ tion to write truthfully is far more than implied, it is sealed by an initial pact which guides the reader’s further attitude. The second element of the overall intention of autobiography leads us to intentionality in the text, i.  e. the retrospective representa­ tion of a autobiographer’s intentional states (Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone 1997, 27–28). What is recorded, is recorded in consciousness of the results and, for the same reason, open to distorting as well as constructive reinterpretation. Here, intentional explication shows to be useful, even indispensable, for the understanding of strate­ gies, decisions or implicit assumptions leading to this distortions resulting from posthoc rationalization of remembered outcomes (Bruner 1991). To conclude: “no matter how doubtful the facts related, the text will at least present an ‘authentic’ image of the man who ‘held the pen’” (Starobinski 1980, 75).

Works Cited Ariew, Roger. Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Brentano, Franz. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874). Vol. I. Ed. Oskar Kraus. Hamburg: Meiner, 1924. Brown, Deborah. “Objective being in Descartes: That Which We Know or That By Which We Know?” Representations and objects of thought in medieval philosophy. Ed. Henrik Lagerland. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 133–151. Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 1–21. Bühler, Axel. “Der hermeneutische Intentionalismus als Konzeption von den Zielen der Interpretation.” Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 4 (1993): 511–518. Caston, Victor. “Aristotle and the problem of intentionality.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58.2 (1998): 249–298. Chalmers, David J. “Consciousness and its Place in Nature.” Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 247–272. Churchland, Paul. Mater and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 3rd ed. 2013. Davidson, Donald. “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.” The Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963): 685–700. Danneberg, Lutz, and Hans-Harald Müller. “Der ‘intentionale Fehlschluss’ – ein Dogma? (Part I and II).” Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 14 (1983): 103–137, 376–411. Dennett, Daniel C. “True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works” (1981). Mental Representation: A Reader. Ed. Stephen P. Stich and Ted A. Warfield. Cambridge/Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994. 312–331. Dennett, Daniel C. “Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast.” The Intentional Stance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. 339–350. Dihle, Albrecht. The Theory of Will in Classic Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

2.17 Intentionality 

 325

Fodor, Jerry. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Gordon, Robert M. “Folk Psychology as Simulation.” Mind and Language 1.2 (1986): 158– 170. Grice, Paul. “Logic and Conversation” (1967, 1987). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1987. 1–143. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Hermerén, Göran. “Intention and interpretation in Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 7 (1975): 57–82. Hirsch, Eric D. Jr. “Objective Interpretation.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 75.4 (1960): 463–479. Jackson, Frank. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 127–136. Köppe, Tilmann, and Simone Winko. Neuere Literaturtheorien: Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008. Lecarme, Jacques, and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone. L’autobiographie. Paris: Armand Colin, 1997. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. May, Georges. L’autobiographie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2nd ed. 1984. McDowell, John. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Nadler, Steven. “The Doctrine of Ideas.” The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations. Ed. Stephen Gaukroger. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 86–103. Nagel, Ernest. The Logic of Historical Analysis: Readings in the Philosophy of Science. Ed. Herbert Feigl and May Brodbeck. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953. 688–700. Nathan, Daniel. “A Paradox in Intentionalism.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 45.1 (2005): 32–48. Normore, Calvin. “Meaning and Objective Being: Descartes and His Sources.” Essays on Descartes’ Meditations. Ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty. Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1986. 223–241. Nussbaum, Martha C., and Hilary Putnam. “Changing Aristotle’s Mind.” Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima. Ed. M. C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 27–57. Palmer, Richard E. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1960. Peckham, Morse. “The Intentional? Fallacy?” (1969) On Literary Intention. Ed. David Newton-de Molina. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976. 139–157. Perler, Dominik. Theorien der Intentionalität im Mittelalter. Frankfurt a.  M.: Klostermann, 2004. Petrus, Klaus. Genese und Analyse: Logik, Rhetorik und Hermeneutik im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1997. Quine, Willard van Orman. Word and Object (1960). Cambridge: MIT Press 2013. Rickert, Heinrich. Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft. Tübingen: Mohr, 2nd ed. 1910. Scheffer, Bernd. Interpretation und Lebensroman. Zu einer konstruktivistischen Literaturtheorie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1992. Schößler, Franziska. Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft: Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Francke, 2006. Scholz, Oliver R. “Die allgemeine Hermeneutik bei Georg Friedrich Meier.” Unzeitgemäße Hermeneutik – Verstehen und Interpretation im Denken der Aufklärung. Ed. Axel Bühler. Frankfurt a.  M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994. 158–191. Searle, John R. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

326 

 2 Categories

Siewert, Charles. “Consciousness and Intentionality.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. (Fall 2011 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/ consciousness-intentionality/ (11 July 2018). Snow, Charles Percy. “The Two Cultures: The Rede Lecture 1959.” The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 1–21. Spoerhase, Carlos. “Hypothetischer Intentionalismus: Rekonstruktion und Kritik.” Journal of Literary Theory 1.1 (2007): 81–109. Starobinski, Jean. “The Style of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. By James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 73–84. Stecker, Robert A. “Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64.4 (2006): 429–438. Stich, Stephen, and Shaun Nichols. “Folk Psychology.” The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind. Ed. St. Stich and Ted. A. Warfield. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 235–255. Wimsatt, William, and Monroe Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946). The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. 3–18. Zipfel, Frank. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität: Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktions­ begriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001.

Further Reading Beckermann, Ansgar. Analytische Einführung in die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. Crane, Tim. Intentionalität als Merkmal des Geistigen: Sechs Essays zur Philosophie des Geistes. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 2007.

2.18 Life and Work Gabriele Rippl

Definition ‘Life and work’ is an umbrella term to describe extrinsic positivist approaches in literary studies which gained major influence in the later nineteenth century. Lifeand-work approaches focus on the content of texts rather than their form which is considered to be mere decoration. A close link between the life of the actual writer and his/her works is taken for granted and the meaning of the works hence sought in the circumstances and facts of the author’s life, psychological make-up and assumed intentions. Also known as ‘biographical criticism’, life-and-work approaches consider the empirical author as the most important factor for the interpretation of literary texts. They can, however, be differentiated by the extent to which they take biograph­ ical data into account. Traditional late nineteenth-century biographical criticism took for granted that the analysis of biographical facts is the means to fathom and unearth the meaning of a literary text, hence the nineteenth-century popularity of writers’ biographies. Later versions of biographical criticism, e.  g. hermeneutic approaches, no longer naively believed in a direct causal relationship between life and work which deduced the meaning of a text solely from empirical data of the author’s life and neglected literary traditions and issues of form (Jannidis et al. 2000, 11–12).

Explication French scholar Hippolyte Taine published a history of English literature in 1863, in the introductory chapter of which he argued for positivist literary scholarship which “studied literature almost exclusively in relation to its factual causes or genesis: the author’s life, his recorded intentions in writing, his immediate social and cultural environment, his sources” (Jefferson and Robey 1986, 9). Life-and-work approaches are based on what M. H. Abrams has called ‘expressive’ literary theory, which treats a work in relation to its author, as “an index to personality” (Abrams 1953, 23), as an expression and utterance of a personality’s perceptions, feelings and thoughts. Consequently, a writer and his/her work is often judged and valued according to the latter’s degree of sincerity and truthfulness. While in Dr. Johnson’s Lives of English Poets (1779–1781) the focus was on the works rather than the authors’ lives, a close relation between the two, between the poet’s personality and works, was devel­ oped in the early nineteenth century by the Romantics; this is also the time when the prototypical modern autonomous subject as well as literary biography emerged https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-041

328 

 2 Categories

(Epstein 1991, 3–4). The importance of the author and the category of authorship is the result of a quite radical reconceptualization of the creative process that culminated less than 200 years ago in the heroic self-presentation of Romantic poets. As they saw it, genuine author­ ship is originary in the sense that it results not in a variation, an imitation, or an adaptation […], but in an utterly new, unique – in a word, ‘original’ – work which, accordingly, may be said to be the property of its creator and to merit the law’s protection as such” (Jaszi and Woodmansee 1994, 3).

Historical Aspects After the Romantics’ stress on the poet’s person and originality, the subsequent emer­ gence of literary biography and Taine’s advocacy of positivist approaches to literature, hermeneutic criticism, which also favored a life-and-work approach to (literary) texts, developed in the late nineteenth century and flourished in the following decades. The hermeneutic approach of life-philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) under­ stood texts as expressions of the author’s experiences and promoted an emphatic understanding of these expressed human experiences: in order to understand a text/ literary work emphatically, the reader has to project him-/herself, the I, into the mind of the creator/author, a Thou. According to the hermeneutic circle, by which a whole text is understood by understanding each of its parts, but to understand the parts, one must understand the whole, the author’s cultural expression allows the recipient to emphatically apprehend and reconstruct the author’s own personal experience. In spite of its interest in cultural factors, in the course of the twentieth century the hermeneutic approach received a critical reception, it became “a form of speculative and intuitive psychology which seeks not merely what a text says but the genius of its creator. […] Dilthey’s approach was later […] accused of ‘psychologism’ because of his strong appeals to intentions, empathy and minds” (Kerby 1993, 91). Like hermeneutics, psychoanalytical readings of literature in the first half of the twentieth century also saw a direct relation between text and author and interpreted texts as expressions of the author’s psyche. Psychoanalytic approaches to literature share with life-and-work approaches an interest in detecting the author’s inten­ tions from his/her works and explain the latter through the facts of the author’s life. However, psychoanalytic approaches also focus on the author’s unconscious motives, i.  e. on the search for the hidden meaning of a text which the author has not neces­ sarily intended and may well be unaware of. A classic example is Marie Bonapar­ te’s study of the life and work of Edgar Allen Poe (1933) which interprets Poe’s short stories as products of the author’s unconscious, e.  g. his fixation on and hatred for his mother. Once the first fully-fledged, ‘scientific’ literary theories such as Formalism in the 1910s, Structuralism in the 1920s and New Criticism in the 1940s had entered the stage,

2.18 Life and Work 

 329

biographical criticism was seen as a dated approach to literary texts, based on an old-fashioned historical method with a too strong contextual focus. The Russian For­ malists and the Anglo-American New Critics, with their intrinsic approach and their preoccupation with form, “downgrade[d] the author, in order to guarantee the inde­ pendence of literary studies, and to save them from being merely a second-rate form of literary history or psychology” (Jefferson and Robey 1986, 15). T. S. Eliot’s convic­ tion that literature in general and poetry in particular is “not the expression of a per­ sonality, but an escape from personality” (Eliot 1975 [1919], 43) anticipated the axiom of the New Critics to focus on the work itself and the properties of the literary texts. The intrinsic concern with form and close reading of the text itself led to the under­ standing that “a work of art exists independently of its author and of the accidental circumstances of its production, […] its artistic qualities are entirely contained within itself and are not to be explained by anything outside of the work” (Cherniss 1944, 290). A literary text was now considered to be independent of its author as well as its historical context. The New Critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley maintained that a literary work of art should not be understood as an expression of the author’s experience and intentions; such a reading would constitute ‘intentional fallacy’, cre­ ating an obstacle to the study of texts (Wimsatt/Beardsley 1946, rpt. of revised version in Wimsatt 1954, 3–18). Throughout the second half of the twentieth century generations of literature stu­ dents were instructed neither to take the author’s biography, i.  e. facts from his/her life, nor his/her alleged intentions into account when discussing the meaning of a literary text. In the 1970s, not only did Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauß with their reception theory move the focus from the author and the text to the reader, Roland Barthes’ burial of the author and Michel Foucault’s investigation into the conventions and institutions of literature, in addition to the latter’s questioning of authorship as a timeless and universal formation, all led to new insights into authorship as a relatively recent formation. Consequently the author, along with biographical criticism, seemed to be deader than ever. Postmodernism’s demystification of subjectivity, authorship, intentionality, facticity and coherence reinforced this conviction (cf. Epstein 1991, 1). Eventually, however, it also triggered a backlash: During the last decades of the twentieth century a new interest in extrinsic biographical research resurged – an interest to which essay collections such as Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams’ The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism (1978), William H. Epstein’s Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (1991), Seán Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author (1992) testify, as does Stanley Fish’s claim that one cannot “read independently of biography” and “biography is not something from which we can swerve” (1991, 12, 15). This fresh interest in contextual factors and the life of the author in particular “may owe something to a nostalgia for features of pre-deconstructive reading such as authorial intention, coherence, and personal voice” (Hoffmann 2004, 1). The emergence of new critical schools since the

330 

 2 Categories

1980s, including New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Gender Studies and Postcolo­ nial Studies, engendered a new interest in recontextualization, biographical criticism and identity politics. In the fields of Gender Studies and Feminist Literary Theory biographical crit­ icism has been a contested, if indispensible approach. While it is now considered a problem that “criticism of women’s writings has been almost invariably biograph­ ical, whether or not the critic shares in the feminist revalorization of the personal as political” (Booth 1991, 86), it is also clear that texts by women writers cannot be discussed exhaustively without taking contextual factors such as education, class, occupation, religion and the gender prescripts of the time into account, this in order to understand formal and aesthetic features of their texts which often deviate from those of their male contemporaries. Following Cheryl Walker (1990, 1991) and Nancy K. ­Miller’s (1988) lead, Booth is critical of “[t]ext-centered approaches, whether New Critical or poststructuralist, [which] have been used to evade the political context” (Booth 1991, 89). She searches for “a new, more wary kind” of feminist biographical criticism which “would take into account poststructuralist assaults on textual refer­ entiality and authorial presence” (1991, 86), but “would advocate the inclusion of the author’s biography and of historical context(s) as contributing, unfolding texts”, however “without naïve empiricism” (1991, 89). Walker speaks of “persona criticism” as “a form of analysis that focuses on patterns of ideation, voice, and sensibility linked together by a connection to the author” (1991, 109), because “historical circumstances in many ways determine the literary product” (1991, 110).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction While biographical criticism and life-and-work approaches fluctuated in popularity in literary studies, there is a natural affinity between them and autobiography studies. For the interpretation of texts that claim an identity of empirical author and auto­ biographical protagonist, life-and-work approaches lend themselves perfectly well. Dilthey, for instance, applied his hermeneutic approach to acts of understanding also to autobiography, which he termed ‘self-biography’ (Dilthey 1981, 235). For him self-bi­ ography was the hermeneutic instance per se, i.  e. the most adequate way for the auto­ biographical subject to become aware – via writing – of the coherence of his life expe­ riences brought about by his awareness of chronological time (see Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 22). Dilthey’s pupil (and son-in-law) Georg Misch (1878–1965) was the author of an extensive publication on the history of autobiography which was likewise based on a hermeneutic approach. Like Dilthey, he understood autobiography as the con­ genial paradigm of hermeneutics, as “eine elementare, allgemein menschliche Form der Aussprache der Lebenserfahrung” [“an original interpretation of experience”] (Misch 1998, 36 [1950, 3–4]). Misch’s focus is on the individual and the hidden kernel

2.18 Life and Work 

 331

of the autobiographer’s personality behind the text; while the autobiographer is able to grasp the coherent meaning of his experiences and mysterious inner kernel in the process of writing, the reader, likewise, is able to understand the autobiographical personality by emphatically understanding his text. Georges Gusdorf’s seminal article “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” (1956), too, is an example of a hermeneuti­ cal approach to autobiography which claims that behind every autobiography stands a mysterious personality who tries to decipher the essence and hidden meaning of his life across time: “[…] the autobiographer assumes the task of bringing out the most hidden aspects of individual being” (Gusdorf 1980 [1956], 34), autobiography hence discerns “a new and more profound sense of truth as an expression of inmost being” (Gusdorf 1980 [1956], 44). Anglo-Saxon critics such as Donald Stauffer (1930) claimed that autobiogra­ phies “represent faithfully the life of an individual“ (Stauffer 1930, 175) and Wayne ­Shumaker (1954) maintained that “[t]he typical autobiography is a summing up, a review of the whole life or an important segment of it – the stepping back of a painter to have a look at the finished canvas” (Shumaker 1954, 103) and “[a]utobiography is the professedly ‘truthful’ record of an individual, written by himself, and composed as a single work” (1954, 106). Like the hermeneutical critics of autobiography, Stauffer and Shumaker also believe in autobiography as a transparent medium to express the innermost essence of a personality in a teleological manner. These critics tend to work with examples of autobiography written by ‘great men’ during the pre-Ro­ mantic and Romantic period. Since women’s autobiographies have often run counter to nineteenth- and twentieth-century definitions of autobiography based on post-ro­ mantic, bourgeois ideas of subjectivity, as represented in Dilthey’s discussion of early modern subjectivity in the Hegelian manner, until the 1980s they were neglected by male critics and literary studies in general (Rippl 1998). However, critics now agree that female autobiographers’ self-fashioning and textual strategies help to throw a critical light on this model of the philosophy of mind, which is based upon a concept of integral identity, on looking back and imbuing the past with meaning. In the 1970s and 1980s literary scholars such as Patricia M. Spacks (1976) and Paul John Eakin (1985) started to point out that writing an autobiography is by no means an expression of a mysterious kernel of a personality and can therefore not simply be equated with the life of a writer and his/her works. Any autobiographical writing is to be understood as a practice of self-invention under the conditions of the medium of writing. In the same vein, scholars like Marlene Kadar (1992), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1992, 1998, 2001) as well as Leigh Gilmore (2001) have broadened the notion of autobiography by radically challenging the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy that still underlies more narrow definitions of the term autobiography and by problem­ atizing some of the claims to objectivity and truthfulness that build on that dichotomy. In many cases, such attempts at redefinition go hand in hand with a more general preference for the new term ‘life-writing’ over autobiography that is energized by a well-founded suspicion that the latter tends to privilege certain ways of writing about

332 

 2 Categories

the self – those that conform to the Western Enlightenment narrative of the autono­ mous, self-determined (and at least implicitly male) individual, and which usually favour “narrative regularity” (Kadar 1992, 4) – over those by women, people of colour, post-colonial subjects, and other historically marginalized groups, whose stories of violence and oppression are often rendered in non-linear and fragmented narrative forms. Not only literary critics but writers, too, have challenged the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy and subsequently Eliot’s impersonality dictum and the New Critics’ intrin­ sic approach to texts. Eliot’s contemporary Hilda Doolittle has left a literary oeuvre which is replete with autobiographical details and hence can serve as a prime example of how problematical it is to maintain a clear demarcation line between autobiography and narrative fiction as well as to forego the author in any interpretation of texts. In the 1950s and 1960s Sylvia Plath was only one of many writers who favored the confes­ sional mode, i.  e. her narrative fiction (e.  g. her novel The Bell Jar and her short stories collected in the volume Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams) as well as her poetry (e.  g. “Daddy”) are to a large extent autobiographical. Thus, as with Doolittle, Plath’s works cannot be discussed in isolation from her life; today the confessional as well as the testimonial modes with their interest in biographical recontextualization of texts have become extremely popular again (cf. Gill 2006). Like Doolittle and Plath, postmodernist autobiographers and writers of so-called ‘autofiction’, such as Bret Easton Ellis (Lunar Park [2005]), Paul Theroux (My Secret History [1989] and My Other Life [1996]) and Jamaica Kincaid (Lucy [1990] and her latest novel See Now Then [2013]), have also blurred the distinction between autobiography and fiction. By turning their lives into works they demonstrate that autobiographical writing ultimately amounts to fiction, and fiction is saturated with auto/biographical details. They invite readers to establish and simultaneously question the close connec­ tion between the life of an author and his/her works. Over the last decades scholars and writers alike have consistently questioned and challenged notions of authentic self-representation, the fact/fiction dichotomy as well as concepts of truth, referenti­ ality and mimetic force that go with them. Biographical readings of texts today are not only obvious options when analyzing autobiographies and autofictions, but are also no longer completely interdicted in approaches to literary texts.

Works Cited Abrams, Meyer Howard. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Barthes, Roland. “La mort de l’auteur.” Manteia (1968): 12–17 [“The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. 142–148]. Bonaparte, Marie. Edgar Poe: Études psychoanalytique. Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1933 [The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe: A Psycho-analytic Interpretation. Trans. John Rodker. London: Imago Publishing Company, 1949].

2.18 Life and Work 

 333

Booth, Allison. “Biographical Criticism and the ‘Great’ Women of Letters: The Example of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.” Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. Ed. William H. Epstein. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991. 85–107. Burke, Seán. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Cherniss, Harold. “The Biographical Fashion in Literary Criticism.” University of California Publications in Classical Philology 12.15 (1944): 279–292. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Das Erleben und die Selbstbiographie.” Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1981. 235–251. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. 37–44. Epstein, William H., ed. Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991. Fish, Stanley. “Biography and Intention.” Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. Ed. William H. Epstein. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991. 9–16. Foucault, Michel. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Dits et écrits 1954–1988. 1954–1975. Vol. I. Ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald and Jacques Lagrange. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 817–849 [“What is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 113–138]. Gill, Jo, ed. Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. London/New York: Routledge, 2006. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” (1956). Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Hoffmann, George. “Introduction.” The New Biographical Criticism. Ed. George Hoffmann. Charlottesville: Rookwood, 2004. 1–9. Jannidis, Fotis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez, and Simone Winko. “Einleitung: Autor und Interpretation.” Texte zur Theorie der Autorschaft. Ed. Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez and Simone Winko. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. 7–29. Jaszi, Peter, and Martha Woodmansee. “Introduction.” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriations in Law and Literature. Ed. Peter Jaszi and Martha Woodmansee. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 1994. 1–13. Jefferson, Ann, and David Robey. “Introduction.” Modern Literary Theory. Ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey. London: B. T. Batsford, 2nd ed. 1986. 7–23. Kadar, Marlene. “Coming to Terms: Life Writing – From Genre to Critical Practice.” Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 3–16. Kerby, Anthony. “Hermeneutics.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory. Ed. Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. 90–94. Martz, Louis L., and Aubrey Williams, eds. The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1978. Miller, Nancy K. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

334 

 2 Categories

Misch, Georg. “Begriff und Ursprung der Autobiographie” (1949). Die Autobiographie: Zur Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. 33–54 [“Conceptions and Origin of Autobiography.” A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. 4 vols. Vol. I. Trans. E. W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950. 1–18]. Rippl, Gabriele. Lebenstexte: Literarische Selbststilisierungen englischer Frauen in der frühen Neuzeit. München: Fink, 1998. Shumaker, Wayne. English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, Form. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. De-colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction.” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 3–52. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Spacks, Patricia M. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1976. Stauffer, Donald A. English Biography before 1700. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930. Taine, Hippolyte. History of English Literature. Ed. Richard Henry Stoddard. Trans. Henri Van Laun. 4 vols. New York: Worthington, 1891. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Walker, Cheryl. “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author.” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 551–571. Walker, Cheryl. “Persona Criticism and the Death of the Author.” Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. Ed. William H. Epstein. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991. 109–121. Wimsatt, William K. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954.

Further Reading Benton, Michael. Literary Biography: An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Beardsley, M. C., and William K. Wimsatt. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 54.3 (1946): 468–488. Cherniss, H. The Biographical Fashion in Literary Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943. Freud, Sigmund. “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren.” Neue Revue 1 (1908): 716–724 [“Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” Gradiva and other Works. Vol. IX of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975. 141–154]. Freud, Sigmund. Die Traumdeutung. Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe. Vol. II. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1989 [The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Stanley Hall. Cutchogue: Buccaneer Books, 1985]. Hoffmann, George, ed. The New Biographical Criticism. Charlottesville: Rookwood, 2004. Jannidis, Fotis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez, and Simone Winko, eds. Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999. Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the Poets. 3 vols. Ed. John H. Middendorf. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Nias, Hilary S. “Hippolyte Taine, 1828–1893.” The Nineteenth Century, c. 1830–1914. Vol. IX of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 393–405.

2.18 Life and Work 

 335

Olsen, Stein Haugom. “Biography in Literary Criticism.” A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. Ed. Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 436–452. Regard, Frédéric. “The Ethics of Biographical Reading: A Pragmatic Approach.” Cambridge Quarterly 29.4 (2000): 394–408.

2.19 Life Writing Mita Banerjee

Definition As a concept, ‘life writing’ has been particularly productive for studies of autobiog­ raphy and biography since it abolishes the distinction between these two genres and goes on to situate them in a wider continuum of all ‘ego-documents’ written or com­ posed in various media about the lives of individuals and collectives, such as diaries, letters, visual narratives, or blogs. In this very vein, life writing research has been beset by a seemingly endless multiplicity of materials. From this multiplicity, some of the criticism which has been leveled against the concept of life writing has emerged, arguing that it was methodologically problematic to study these different materials under the same framework. Nevertheless, to the extent that it takes the aesthetic and medial specificity of its sources into account, life writing is immensely productive especially for the reconstruction of the subjectivity and the agency of marginalized communities and individuals.

Explication In the practice of giving voice and visibility to individuals and communities hardly appearing in hegemonic historiography, such as slaves in the nineteenth-century U. S., life writing as a critical concept is fruitful not only in its willingness to take as ‘documents’ pieces of evidence which would usually never be considered as such, but also in its taking into account non-verbal forms of signification. Life writing research ‘collects’ all documents or references pertaining to human lives; in so doing, it neces­ sarily overcomes any distinction between the oral and the written. Thus, an individu­ al’s life can be ‘reconstructed’ through various sources, from diary entries to court tes­ timonies (Cohen 1992). Such an opening up of the concept of ‘writing’ to comprise all forms of documenting individual and collective lives is particularly useful in contexts of colonial or political domination. Thus, in the system of American slavery, African Americans were prohibited from learning how to read and write and thus had to resort to alternative forms of recording or ‘writing’ their own lives. One of the seminal dis­ coveries made in life writing studies has been the acknowledgment of African Amer­ ican slave “Dave the Potter” as an author in his own right, inscribing his voice and narrating his voice through his pottery and the poetry which he engraved on it (Cheng 2013). As this example illustrates, the concept of life writing is used loosely here to encompass multiple forms and media of the inscription of the self. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-042

2.19 Life Writing 

 337

Life writing research, at its most productive, is concerned with multiple forms of authorship. In its view autobiography and biography as a continuum of narratives of the self, it is particularly attuned to contexts in which the lives of marginalized communities are ‘written out’ by the historiography of the dominant culture. It is in this sense that there is a close connection between life writing research and material culture. In a context where marginalized communities have to resort to different forms of self-representation, material entities such as Dave the Potter’s art or a garden which African-American writer Alice Walker describes in her essay, “In Search of Our Moth­ er’s Gardens”, take on particular significance (Walker 1972). It is here that the concept of access takes on particular significance. Unable to express herself in terms other than the shape she gave to her garden, Alice Walker’s mother nonetheless became the ‘author’ whom her daughter would then commit to memory on the written page. Walker’s concept of African-American literature is thus inextricably connected to the idea of writing ‘black’ lives, and the lives of black women in particular. By broadening the idea of ‘writing’ to non-verbal forms of expression, life writing draws attention to those circumstances under which self-expression has been particularly difficult, and transcends such restrictions through its own format. The dichotomy between the visibility and the invisibility of a given life with which life writing research is often concerned is particularly pronounced in the context of legal discourse. By including court testimonies as a form of writing lives, life writing research restores to individuals a form of agency which the legal discourse would deny them. At a time when in the nineteenth century, for instance, Chinese immigrants in the U. S. were not allowed to testify in court against a white person, the lives and the agency of these Chinese immigrants can nevertheless be pieced together from the ref­ erences to their testimonies contained in the court records. Crucially in this context, life writing research is so productive in its problematizing of the concept of narrative. Even if from these fractured documents, we have fragments of narratives only, taken together these fragments may go a long way in making newly visible a life which the dominant historiography strove to erase. Jean Pfaelzer’s award-winning study, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (2008), may be a case in point here. Pfaelzer reconstructs the per­ spective as well as the agency of Chinese immigrants in early twentieth-century Cali­ fornia who were ‘rounded up’ in small towns which strove for the ‘white purity’ of their communities. How, Pfaelzer asks, did these immigrants resist this attempt to erase their presence from the communities they had peacefully inhabited for years? Seen through the concept of life writing, Pfaelzer’s seminal account can be said to rewrite this period of the immigrants’ lives, collecting letters they wrote home, drawing up affidavits, finding photographs and re-reading ‘advertisements’ bragging about the ‘whiteness’ of small-town California. While the advertisements would seem to erase or ‘write out’ Chinese lives from the town records, the immigrants’ life writing testifies to the immigrants’ resistance to this ‘purgery’. Thus, life writing research can be seen to share with approaches such as New Historicism an attempt to collect traces of a

338 

 2 Categories

given historical event. Yet, through the concept of ‘ego documents’, it would stress not only the reconstruction of an historical event but the life and authorship of the individual on which this event had an impact. Moreover, though its expansive notion of the ‘textual,’ life writing studies would include sources not usually studied in auto­ biography or biography studies.

Writing The Body Since life writing research has focused on the notions of the lived reality of human lives, it has also opened up new avenues for interdisciplinary research. Because it understands the body in both a material and a metaphorical sense, life writing research has created points of departure for critical dialogues between the human­ ities and the life sciences. It is in this context that the work of Antonio Damasio and Paul John Eakin has been instrumental. Eakins’ concept of ‘living autobiographically’ expands traditional autobiography by drawing attention to the human life not just as it is recorded through autobiography but as it is being lived in the present. What is at stake here is a twofold shift in register. First, autobiography no longer ‘covers’ a life in retrospect, but informs the very practice of living; second, living is no longer only understood in a philosophical sense (encapsulated in concepts of the ‘good life’ as they inform, for instance, Amartya Sen’s “theory of justice” [Sen 2009, ix]), but it must also take into account life as it unfolds on a material level. As Karen Knorr Cetina has argued, new developments in the life sciences have altered our very notions of life to an extent in which life sciences are no longer separable from life writing (Knorr-Cet­ ina 2009, 63). What is needed, she argues, is a balancing of “bios” and “zoë” (Weiß 2009, 7) through the creation of what she terms a new “Kultur des Lebens” [‘culture of life’] (Knorr-Cetina 2009, 67). A description of human life, this reasoning holds, can never do without the biological ‘material’ that human life is based on. At the most extreme end of this logic, the human body is said to have a meaning of its own; the past is not only remembered by the mind, but it is also recorded through ‘embod­ ied memory’. Thus, the notion of embodiment adds an important facet to the field of memory studies (Assmann 2006, 32). The materiality of human life and its recording through autobiographical nar­ ratives holds particular significance for a different yet related field of research: dis­ ability studies. Building in part on the work of Paul John Eakin, Thomas Couser has been particularly astute in investigating the fruitfulness – and the limitations – of life writing in the concept of disability. What is at stake, Couser asks us, when we write ‘disabled’ lives? At whose expense and for whose benefit is such writing produced and what ethical dilemmas may it be caught up in? In works such as Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997), Signifying Bodies: Disability in contemporary Life Writing (2009), and Vulnerable Subjects: The Ethics of Life Writing (2004), Couser explores biographies written about disabled individuals by their loved ones as well

2.19 Life Writing 

 339

as collaborative autobiographies, which are often informed by conflicting notions of authorship. If autobiography always borders on autofiction, such fictionality is also at stake in contexts of collaborative life writing. The writing of the life of another person (a spouse, partner, sibling or child) is also a form of fictionalizing this life in the act of co-authoring its description. In constellations of collaborative life writing, authorship is particularly complex, since it is impossible to disentangle one author’s voice from another, or of detecting, in the act of reading, instances in which two descriptions of the same life may actually be at variance with each other. Couser argues that such forms of writing other peoples’ lives or ‘assisting’ them in their authorship always run the risk of exploiting another person’s inability to write their own lives. As guiding principles for an ethics of life writing in the context of dis­ ability, Couser suggests, we may look to the discipline of ethnography whose subject matter, traditionally, has been writing “the other” (Couser 2004, 31). Couser’s discus­ sion of the process of life writing, the aporias that it may be encumbered by, and the ethos that may underlie it has implications which go far beyond the field of disability studies as it pertains to notions of authorship, both individual and collective, to the intersections of narratives about a given life, and to the potential cultural, political or economic capital contained in such narratives. At the nexus between disability and auto/biography, Couser raises questions which are crucial for autobiography studies to consider. Finally, his work has profound implications for the interface between autobiography and autofiction. To the extent that a disabled individual cannot approve or correct the account that is written about him or her, to what extent, under what circumstances and to what ends does an author have the right to impose his own ‘fictionalized’ reading on the life he writes?

Life Writing And Human Rights The notion of collaborative autobiography and the distinction between ‘autobiogra­ phy’ and ‘autofiction’ also looms large in the use of autobiography for human rights campaigns and in human rights narratives (Schaeffer and Smith 2004). As human interest stories, autobiographies by individuals victimized by human rights violations have been the cornerstone of human rights campaigns, especially since these nar­ ratives can be located in between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. Even if the violation of human dignity and human rights that they describe are ‘fictionalized’ in that they have been turned into narrative, with the author selecting only those events in keeping with the storyline, they are nevertheless ‘factual’ in their recoding of human rights violations which took place in real life. In this sense, the author of a human rights narrative who comes to personify the potential ends of the human rights campaign, rewrites his or her own life through the trauma of the atrocities s/he was subjected to. Here, too, the traumatic memory recorded by the autobiographical narrative and the embodiment of this trauma by the person of the author become superimposed on one another; the

340 

 2 Categories

human rights campaign, in turn, derives much of its effectiveness from this super­ imposition. Yet, such autobiographical narratives about human rights violations are often written in co-authorship with an experienced writer or journalist, such as Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower (2011). Here as much as in the context of life writing and disa­ bility, the questions and the ethics which emerge from the concept of co-authorship pertain to the intrusion of the co-author into the human rights narrative of another person, as well as his or her potential self-interest in co-authoring this narrative. In what way is the autobiography and the recollection of the trauma it depicts shaped by the terms (aesthetic, cultural or political) which the co-author imposes on it? To what extent does the co-author benefit, for his own academic capital, from recording the ‘voicelessness’ of the autobiography’s subject? What ‘authentic’ self emerges from the autobiography that is ostensibly his or her own (Schaeffer and Smith 2004)? Thus, life writing research has been especially concerned with the structures and infrastructures into which life narratives are embedded; the historical, cultural, economic, political and ecological contexts in which they arise (Hornung and Zhao 2013), as well as the ways in which life narratives are themselves inseparable from such context. By linking notions of identity – the topics of traditional autobiography studies – to the material­ ity of the human body and the embodied self, life writing research has been especially concerned with the vulnerability of the human body, and has explored how trauma can be coped with and even transcended by multiple narratives of the self.

Works Cited Assmann, Aleida. Geschichte im Gedächtnis: Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung. München: Beck, 2006. Cheng, Andrea. Etched in Clay: The Life of Dave, Enslaved Potter and Poet. New York: Lee & Low Books, 2013. Cohen, Elizabeth. “Court Testimony from the Past: Self and Culture in the Making of Text.” Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 83–93. Couser, Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Couser, Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Couser, Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994. Dirie, Waris. Desert Flower. New York: William Morrow, 2011. Eakin, Paul John. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Hornung, Alfred, and Zhao Baisheng, eds. Ecology and Life Writing. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1984 [Epistemic Cultures: How Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999].

2.19 Life Writing 

 341

Knorr-Cetina, Karin. “Jenseits der Aufklärung: Die Entstehung einer Kultur des Lebens.” Bios und Zoë: Die menschliche Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Ed. Martin G. Weiß. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2009. 55–71. Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Schaeffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives. The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Sen, Amartya. Commodities and Capabilities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (1972). Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Weiß, Martin G. “Einleitung.” Bios und Zoë: Die menschliche Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Ed. Martin G. Weiß. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2009. 7–9.

Further Reading Eakin, Paul John. American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Jolly, Margaretta, and Meg Jensen, eds. We shall bear witness: life narratives and human rights. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

2.20 Memory Angelika Schaser

Definition Memory is a constitutive element of human life and of historiography. The term is associated with a number of meanings. Generally speaking, memory refers to the capacity of human beings to store, encode and retrieve or forget information, emo­ tions, feelings, atmospheres, sounds, colors, smells and flavors. Despite recent pro­ gress in interdisciplinary research on human memory, we have as yet no sufficient explanation of how it functions. Until the linguistic turn, history was clearly distin­ guished from memory, and historians laid claim to professional interpretive sover­ eignty over the past. In the meantime, history and memory have come to be viewed more as interwoven modes of remembering with evident similarities: Both are bound to place, time and context and operate selectively. Both create the past by referring to it. In ‘second-degree history’, the research on memory, which borrows from the work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the French historian Pierre Nora, claims to present a critical counter-model to a positivist notion of history. Historiogra­ phy distinguishes between individual, generational, collective and cultural memory, all of which are linked. As a rule, historians use the concepts of memory developed by Pierre Nora and Aleida and Jan Assmann to advance critical historiography.

Explication There is now a plethora of findings on memory from an interdisciplinary and highly elaborated field of scholarship (Gudehus et al. 2010; Welzer and Markowitsch 2006). Research in neuroscience (Markowitsch and Welzer 2005; Singer 2006), whose findings and theses on the function of memory have also strongly influenced cultural studies, has attracted particular attention. Thus, older notions of memory as a storehouse filled with layered contents that may fade with time, but remain largely unchanged and retrievable, have been replaced by the idea that these contents are subject to a constant process of change, and are reshaped according to situation and context. Within cultural studies, the literature on memory has been strongly influenced by the work of Maurice Halbwachs (Halbwachs 1925), Pierre Nora (Nora 1984–1992) and Aleida and Jan Assmann (A. Assmann 1999, 2002, 2006; J. Assmann 1992, 1995). In his pathbreaking 1925 study, Halbwachs coined the term ‘collective memory’ and postulated that individual memory depends on the group context and historical context and can function only within collective memory, since the individual acquires, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-043

2.20 Memory 

 343

retrieves and also embeds his or her memories within the various groups to which s/ he belongs (e.  g. family, religious community). These memories are shaped more by the present than the past. Pierre Nora’s multivolume work on French lieux de mémoire (1984–1992) marked an important point in historical research. Nora declared not just topographical sites but also political events, well-known persons, institutions, and immaterial points to be values and melodies that structured the French national collective memory. Follow-up projects were conducted in several European countries including Italy (1996–1997), Germany (2001), Austria (2004–2005), the Netherlands (2005–2007), Luxembourg (2007–2013), Poland (2008–2009), the Czech Republic (2009), Denmark (2010), and Switzerland (2010). The term’s success can be explained above all by its “constitutive ambiguity” (François 2010, 66) and the possibility of using the study of sites of memory to respond to the crisis of the historical master narrative. Studies of collective memory are also reactions to the growing public demand since 1990 for figures of identification. Parallel to efforts to develop a postnational historiography critical of colonialism, publications on European (den Boer et al. 2012), transnational (Henningsen et al. 2009) and German-colonial sites of memory (Zimmerer 2013) have appeared in recent years. In 1989, as the early volumes of Nora’s Lieux de mémoire [Places of Memory] were appearing, the first issue of History & Memory was published at the University of Tel Aviv. This journal “focuses on a wide range of questions relating to the formation of historical consciousness and collective memory […. and] is concerned more generally with the role of memory in modern and premodern cultures, and the relationship between historical research and images of the past in different societies and cultures” (History & Memory, Publication Information 2014). The founders of this journal were also dedicated to critical historiography and emphasized the inclusion not only of official and public monuments and commemorations, but also of the various forms of autobiography, oral accounts and new media as well as the renewed importance accorded to historical arguments in the study of national and social conflicts. Aleida Assmann’s work focuses on the varying forms and functions of commem­ oration. She differentiates between individual and generational memory, and distin­ guishes both from collective and cultural memory (Assmann 2002). What all of the various forms of memory have in common, according to her, is that every description of the past that creates meaning also helps to create identity. It is precisely at the intersection between historiography and politics that the public demands of different social groups reveal the fragmentary and incomplete nature of collective memory, accompanied by historical research. In the Federal Republic of Germany, this can be followed especially clearly if one looks at the history and realization of the central sites commemorating the victims of Nazism in Berlin. After controversial discussions, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was opened in 2005, the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism in 2008 and the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Murdered in Europe Under the National Socialist Regime in 2013. The history of

344 

 2 Categories

each monument, the initiators, funding bodies, opponents and proponents as well as the official names of the memorial sites, their different assignments of meaning for the national memory and different locations within the city, offer insights not just into the official recognition of victims and persecutes of Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany but also into the processes of inclusion and exclusion that shape present-day society. The discussions surrounding these monuments clearly show that the memory of Nazism is closely associated with the redefinition of national identity after 1990. This “constructionist point of view, according to which memories are the expression of the current production of meaning”, forms the basis for interdisciplinary research on memory today (Moller 2010, 3). Like Halbwachs, Jan Assmann stresses the communicative conditionality of mem­ ories and distinguishes between two modes of collective memory – communicative memory and cultural memory – which he assigns to different temporal dimensions (Assmann 1992). He uses the term ‘communicative memory’ to refer to mainly orally transmitted memories, which are passed down within three generations in an ‘every­ day manner’ and largely informally. Cultural memory is more comprehensive and reaches farther back into the past; it is organized and institutionalized orally and in writing through immaterial and material symbols by regular repetition and the tra­ ditions constructed thereby. By distinguishing between diverse interwoven forms of memory, A. and J. Assmann have provided important impetus for reflection upon the emergence, transformation, reception and forgetting of memories and sites of memory. In historiography, the focus has been and continues to be on the construction of collective, especially national, cultures of memory. We need to keep in mind that the terms ‘collective memory’, ‘social memory’, ‘memoria’, ‘memory culture’ etc. are to some extent used synonymously and are not always clearly distinguished from one another. Proceeding from the study of national monuments (Nipperdey 1967) and offi­ cial commemorative ceremonies (Düding et al. 1988), since the political upheavals of 1989/1990 and the cultural turn, scholars have been increasingly asking questions about the process in which collective memories develop (Confino 1997). While initially concentrating on forms of official national, regional and local memory (Confino 2008, 79; Oesterle 2009, 9–18), more recently historians have increasingly begun to explore the European, transnational, transcultural and global aspects of the topic. At the same time, the multiperspectivity and the memories of individual population groups and minorities that have been edited out of collective memory are also being addressed (Ulbrich, Medick and Schaser 2012, 11). Apart from the official, public memory culture, scholars are now also analyzing the influence on collective and cultural memory of published autobiographical texts by politicians, military officers and other wellknown persons (Schaser 2003; Depkat 2007). Numerous works on the national memory have demonstrated that the devel­ opment of a collective, national, regional, or local memory carries implications for gender history. The systematic study of the gender aspect is still in its early days (Paletschek and Schraut 2008). Billie Melman has pointed to the paradox that late

2.20 Memory 

 345

nineteenth-century writing on women’s history did not simply lead to the increasing integration of women’s history into ‘general history’: “The recapitulation of women’s past was double-edged and served two purposes. Memory could mean membership: in the citizen-state, in the national empire. But the recapitulation of a female experi­ ence could also precipitate the dis-remembrance of the history of the wider group and the dis-membering of its past” (Melman 1993, 41).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Memory and remembering are of fundamental importance for autobiography and aut­ ofiction. Both are based on a deliberate selection of individual memories, and are structurally characterized by the split into a remembering and a remembered ‘I’. This experience of alterity within the self or the ‘I’ often becomes a self-reflective element of narrative (Assmann 1999, 101), whereby the relationship between remembering and forgetting as well as the difficulty of remembering truthfully is often treated through the topoi of partiality and ineffability (Götz et al. 1993). While literary scholars have already elaborated on this connection in a nuanced fashion, uncovering the inter­ textual relationships in literary autobiographies mainly through genre-specific topoi, historians studying non-literary autobiographical texts, oral transmission, autobiog­ raphy and autofiction in the new media have more strongly emphasized the value as sources and the potential contributions of autobiography and autofiction to historical interpretation. Precisely by studying the less literary autobiographical texts, historians have reevaluated the categorization and canonization of literary autobiographies that have prevailed thus far in literary scholarship (Althaus 2005; Popkin 2005, 32; Saunders 2008, 330). The often covert reception in lexica, (auto)biographies, family books, anthologies and historical accounts, through which communities of memory can be written and/or modified (Schaser 2003, 11), means that the autobiographical basis of historiography is frequently forgotten. Autobiographical narratives, which historians still need to identify and analyze in more detail, thus acquire great significance not only in the study of previously little explored non-official memories (Moller 2010, 11). The individual memories integrated into autobiographical and autofictional texts correspond to cultural memories, although neither the narrator nor the reader nec­ essarily wholly understands or is aware of this connection. Autobiographical or aut­ ofictional narratives incorporate, adapt and alter portions of the temporal, spatial and experiential commemoration debates. The case of Wilkomirski (Wilkomirski 1995) powerfully demonstrates the extent to which authors can rely on the (reading) experiences and expectations of their audience. A Swiss adoptee interested in history who had been searching for memories of his childhood, apparently with the aid of ‘recovered memory therapy’, described a childhood in various concentration camps

346 

 2 Categories

so convincingly that presumably not just he but his editor and many readers believed the book to be an autobiographical account. We do not need this extreme example to know that it is often difficult to tell what the relationship is between writing and the various forms of memory in autobiograph­ ical texts. What do authors remember as their own experiences? What do they adopt based on their education, social affiliations and collective and cultural memory? How do they integrate remembered experiences into their texts and what shape do these memories take? How do they recall the past by reading and writing? Even if authors reflect upon their writing process and their reading, remembering and writing represent processes that merge with one another in the phase of production – as in reception (Foucault 1983). Writing and remembering are creative processes that occur synchronically and remain in part undocumented. What has been written and pub­ lished in turn forms the basis of further memory for authors and their readers. When studying autobiography and autofiction we remain largely dependent in this point on the authors’ references to their sources and writing techniques as well as our own capacity to classify the memories that appear in the texts or that to our knowledge are absent within the historical context familiar to us. The research on autobiography by historians now focuses on the question of how memory is used to write individual history as well as familial, urban, regional, national and transnational-global histories and further developed into an autohistoriographic history (Günther 2001, 51, 57): How can memories supported by historical representa­ tions, documents and archival materials of all kinds be expanded into an individ­ ually authenticated mode of writing history? The recourse to historical events and sources not only acquires central significance for the classification and assessment of one’s own life story. Rather, the emotionally coded history of experience assigns new meaning to the historical developments and events cited (against the backdrop of their discursive assessment) with verifying or revisionary intent. Reflecting on the entangledness of individual life stories and history is not seldom associated with the desire to raise awareness of collective traumas as well as incidents that remain in the shadows of general consciousness. In this way, autobiographical texts become a “memoria of the not-known” (Gutjahr 2002, 365), which bear witness to that which is excluded from the cultural archiving process. Integrating autobiography influences or even forms collective memories. These modes of autohistoriographic writing should be understood as active participation at the intersection of communicative (preserva­ tion over a maximum of three subsequent generations) and cultural memory (estab­ lishment in social awareness and action across epochs). Translation: Pamela Selwyn

2.20 Memory 

 347

Works Cited Althaus, Claudia. “Geschichte, Erinnerung und Person. Zum Wechselverhältnis von Erinnerungs­ residuen und Offizialkultur.” Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Wissen. Studien zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung. Ed. Günter Oesterle. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. 589–609. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck, 1999 [Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011]. Assmann, Aleida. “Vier Formen des Gedächtnisses.” Erwägen Wissen Ethik 13 (2002): 183–190. Assmann, Aleida. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: Beck, 2006. Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck, 1992 [Cultural memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011]. Assmann, Jan. “Erinnern, um dazuzugehören. Kulturelles Gedächtnis, Zugehörigkeitsstruktur und normative Vergangenheit.“ Generation und Gedächtnis. Erinnerungen und kollektive Identitäten. Ed. Kristin Platt and Mihran Dabag: Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1995. 51–75. Boer, Pim den et al., eds. Europäische Erinnerungsorte. 3 vols. München: Oldenbourg, 2012. Confino, Alon. “Memory and the History of Mentalities.” Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. 78–84. Confino, Alon. The Nation as a Local Metapher. Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Depkat, Volker. Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden. Deutsche Politiker und Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts. München: Oldenbourg, 2007. Düding, Dieter, Peter Friedemann, and Paul Münch, eds. Öffentliche Festkultur. Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988. Foucault, Michel: “L’écriture de soi.” Corps écrit. No. 5: L’Autoportrait. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983. 3–23. François, Etienne. “Erinnerungsorte.” Von der Arbeit des Historikers. Ein Wörterbuch zu Theorie und Praxis der Geschichtswissenschaft. Ed. Anne Kwaschik and Mario Wimmer. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. 65–69. Götz, Bärbel, Ortrud Gutjahr, and Irmgard Roebling, eds. Verschwiegenes Ich. Vom Un-Ausdrücklichen in autobiographischen Texten. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1993. Gudehus, Christian, Ariane Eichenberg, and Harald Welzer, eds. Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010. Günther, Dagmar. “‘And now for something completely different’. Prolegomena zur Autobiographie als Quelle der Geschichtswissenschaft.” Historische Zeitschrift 272 (2001): 25–61. Gutjahr, Ortrud. “Alterität und Interkulturalität.” Germanistik als Kulturwissenschaft. Eine Einführung in neue Theoriekonzepte. Ed. Claudia Benthien and Hans Rudolf Velten. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002. 345–369. Halbwachs, Maurice. Cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan, 1925 [On Collective Memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]. Henningsen, Bernd, Hendriette Kliemann-Geisinger, and Stefan Troebst, eds. Transnationale Erinnerungsorte. Nord- und südeuropäische Perspektiven. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009. History & Memory. Publication Information. http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/pages.php?pID=80& CDpath=4 (19 June 2018).

348 

 2 Categories

Immler, Nicole L. “‘Gedächtnisgeschichte’: Ein Vergleich von Deutschland und Österreich in Bezug auf Pierre Noras Konzept der ‘lieux de mémoire’.” Neighbours and strangers. Literary and cultural relations in Germany, Austria and Central Europe since 1989. Ed. Ian Foster and Juliet Wigmore. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004. 173–196. Markowitsch, Hans J. Dem Gedächtnis auf der Spur. Vom Erinnern und Vergessen. Darmstadt: Primus, 2002. Markowitsch, Hans J., and Harald Welzer. Das autobiographische Gedächtnis. Hirnorganische Grund­lagen und biosoziale Entwicklung. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005. Melman, Billie. “Gender, History and Memory. The Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” History and Memory 5 (1993): 5–41. Moller, Sabine. “Erinnerung und Gedächtnis.” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte (12.04.2010) https:// docupedia.de/images/d/d7/Erinnerung_und_Ged%C3%A4chtnis.pdf (19 June 2018). Nipperdey, Thomas. “Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert.” Histori­sche Zeitschrift 206 (1968): 529–585. Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de mémoire. 7 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992 [Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire. 4 vols. Trans. Marie Seidman Trouille. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001–2010]. Oesterle, Günter. “Kontroversen und Perspektiven in der Erinnerungs- und Gedächtnisforschung.” Gedächtnis und kultureller Wandel. Ed. Judith Klinger and Gerhard Wolf. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009. 9–18. Paletschek, Sylvia, and Sylvia Schraut, eds. The Gender of Memory. Cultures of Remembrance in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe. Frankfurt a.  M./New York: Campus, 2008. Popkin, Jeremy D. History, Historians, and Autobiography. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Saunders, Max. “Life-Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies.” Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter, 2008. 321–331. Schaser, Angelika, ed. Erinnerungskartelle. Zur Konstruktion von Autobiographien nach 1945. Bochum: Winkler, 2003. Schwentker, Wolfgang. “Schreiben und Erinnern. Ein vergleichender Kommentar.” Selbstzeugnis und Person. Transkulturelle Perspektiven. Ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser. Köln: Böhlau, 2012. 419–426. Singer, Wolf. “Was kann ein Mensch wann lernen?” Warum Menschen sich erinnern können. Fortschritte in der interdisziplinären Gedächtnisforschung. Ed. Harald Welzer and Hans J. Markowitsch. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2006. 276–285. Ulbrich, Claudia, Hans Medick, and Angelika Schaser. “Selbstzeugnis und Person. Transkulturelle Perspektiven.” Selbstzeugnis und Person. Transkulturelle Perspektiven. Ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser. Köln: Böhlau, 2012. 1–19. Welzer, Harald. Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erinnerung. München: Beck, 2002. Welzer, Harald, and Hans J. Markowitsch, eds. Warum Menschen sich erinnern können. Fortschritte in der interdisziplinären Gedächtnisforschung. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2006. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948. Frankfurt a.  M.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995 [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken, 1997]. Wischermann, Clemens. “Geschichte als Wissen, Gedächtnis oder Erinnerung? Bedeutsamkeit und Sinnlosigkeit in Vergangenheitskonzepten der Wissenschaft vom Menschen.” Die Legitimität der Erinnerung und die Geschichtswissenschaft. Ed. Clemens Wischermann. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996. 55–85.

2.20 Memory 

 349

Zimmerer, Jürgen, ed. Kein Platz an der Sonne. Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte. Frankfurt a.  M.: Campus, 2013.

Further Reading Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Klinger, Judith, and Gerhard Wolf. Gedächtnis und kultureller Wandel. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009. Oesterle, Günter, ed. Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Wissen. Studien zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Pethes, Nicolas. Kulturwissenschaftliche Gedächtnistheorien zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 2008.

2.21 Mimesis Florian Klaeger

Definition Etymologically, ‘mimesis’ derives from the lexical field of scenic performance and showmanship (Greek μῖμος [mimos], a person who represents or impersonates, and μῑμέομαι [mimeisthai], to imitate, represent, portray). In its complex history in Western aesthetics, the term has variously described artists’ attempts at the verisimilar imi­ tation of reality and at transforming reality through representation. Its meaning has oscillated between the ‘mirroring’ in art of the world or of a speaker existing outside of the mimetic work, and the ‘creation’ through art of alternative worlds, phenom­ ena or actions not pre-existing their representation in just that form. In narratology, ‘mimesis’ in the sense of ‘showing’, with minimal emphasis on the mediated nature of the process, is usually paired with ‘diegesis’ (‘telling’ or ‘narration’). The problem of mimesis immediately concerns autobiography’s recognized status between ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’ [‘poetry and truth’] – as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe named his auto­ biography. It is encountered across many artistic media and modes, and various con­ cepts of art and aesthetic value have historically been based on mimeticism. Beyond a narrowly aesthetic context, in which it raises epistemological, ontological, and moral questions, mimesis has been described as a fundamental anthropological practice and as a powerful instrument of identity-fashioning, both hegemonic and subversive.

Explication One of the oldest and most central, but also most problematic terms in aesthetics, ‘mimesis’ has encompassed a wide range of meanings since antiquity. Any defini­ tion of the term must take into account this historical variability, as well as the rel­ evance and applicability of the concept beyond the realm of literary and aesthetic representation. Not restricted to attempts, through artistic means, to ‘reflect’ the world and to simulate or ‘create’ a world (Halliwell 2002, 23; Goodman 1978), mimesis also describes the emulation of individual role models, both in a strictly literary or aes­ thetic context (e.  g. in various renaissances and classicisms) and in a more broadly psychological sense. As theorists from Plato and Aristotle to René Girard, Luce Irigaray and Homi K. Bhabha have held, the imitation of others can be a powerful means of self-fashioning, irrespective of whether it is used on purpose or unconsciously. In this respect, mimesis is also related to processes of mimicry in zoology, whereby animals or plants physically resemble the appearance, in part or in whole, of another species https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-044

2.21 Mimesis 

 351

or object in order to secure advantages. Most fundamentally, perhaps, mimesis has been linked to human cognition itself as “an essential component of human proce­ dural learning,” a skill that distinguishes the human species from others in that it “enabled humans to initiate a specific pattern of learned action, review it, and then repeat it, or modify it, to improve the performance” (Donald 2012, 276, 278). Viewing mimesis as hardwired into human nature, but at the same time an object of contingent cultural transformation, Michael Taussig calls the mimetic faculty “the nature that culture uses to create second nature” (1993, xiii). In systematic terms, processes that have historically been described as mimetic include (1) the exact and verisimilar representation in art, through speech or actions, of observable features of the external world (‘showing’), which occurs, for example, in dramatic performance or painting and, in a different way, in verbal narrative (where language represents without imitating); (2) the imitation of another speaker’s action of ‘telling’ (‘diegesis’), which occurs, for example, when an actor or novelist ‘imper­ sonates’ a character’s speech; (3) the imitation or representation, in art, of ideas or concepts not encountered in the material world in their ‘pure’ or universal form; (4) the representation or creation, in art, of a hypothetical reality that may or may not be marked as fictional or illusory but is presented in such a way as to make it appear congruous and coherent; (5) the imitation or representation, in art or in life, of an ‘authority’ (an artistic model, a genre, but also a role model such as a parent, teacher, sovereign, etc.); and (6) the reproduction, reconstruction, or emulation of another’s feelings, intentions, or desires, either consciously or unconsciously, with the effect of understanding or appropriating them. In literary theory, ‘mimetic criticism’ prescribes the imitation of life as art’s ulti­ mate goal and judges the value of works by their capacity to reproduce external reality as closely and as coherently as possible, ‘as if’ unmediated by words, paint, sound, etc. Disturbing this narrative illusion is deemed a fault by mimetic critics, although phenomena of ‘metaization’ might actually be seen as devices in the service of mimesis (in the sense of truthfully representing the act of communication that occurs in art), rather than marks of mimetic shortcoming. Like critical attitudes towards them, mimetic practices in the arts are culturally highly contingent, with varieties of realism perhaps foremost among their more recent literary manifestations (Auerbach 1946). From the point of view of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur (1983) has identified three kinds of mimetic activities involved in the narrative presentation of reality: mimesis1 is the prefiguration of the field of action, i.  e. the imitation or representation of human action at large, conceived mimetically in the minds of both poet and audience as their shared ‘pre-understanding’ of nature. Mimesis2 describes the poet’s configuration of the narrative field of action, by which she represents a version of reality through a narrative ‘emplotment’ that renders the world of the narrative coherent and intelligi­ ble. Mimesis3, lastly, is the refiguration of the field of action that occurs as the world that exists in the text and the world in which that text exists intersect, i.  e. as readers view their world differently for having encountered the world in the text. Two of these

352 

 2 Categories

kinds of mimesis have a bearing that goes beyond the specifically artistic and point towards the anthropological function of mimesis: our basic relation to the world at large appears to involve mimesis in that we model the world in our minds (mimesis1), and whenever we encounter symbolic representations (which may or may not be artis­ tic), we extrapolate from them and compare our experience in the real world with them (mimesis3).

Historical Aspects Before the fourth century BCE, Xenophon mentions mimesis as a skill required in making sculptures, but it is only with Plato that mimesis began to be conceptualized as intimately linked to artistic creation. Plato saw objects in the material world as flawed copies of perfect universals existing only in the realm of ideas. For artists to represent material objects thus constituted an act of imitation at two removes, with results that are ‘less real’ than reality. Also, since artists dabble at representing all kinds of things, their representations are necessarily based on an imperfect knowl­ edge of their objects. Finally, their representation of vice or lunacy could lure people away from virtue. Mimetic products of this sort seemed to Plato ontologically inferior, epistemologically misleading, and even morally dangerous. The imitation of speakers, objects, and actions “waters” [ἄρδειν] and “feeds” [αὔξειν] “sex and passion and all the painful and enjoyable emotions in the soul” [Καὶ περὶ ἀφροδισίων δὴ καὶ θυμοῦ καὶ περὶ πάντων τῶν ἐπιθυμητικῶν τε καὶ λυπηρῶν καὶ ἡδέων ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ], allowing them to rule over the audience and especially over young people (Republic 606d, Plato 2013, 434–435). The basis for Plato’s caution is thus the recognition of mimesis’s power over the human imagination and emotions. Hence, his attitude towards mimesis is wary, but also respectful. In Ion, Plato described mimesis as a subcategory of diegesis, with the poet imi­ tating the speech of another in epic, and the actor impersonating another’s speech in drama. At the beginning of the mimetic tradition in aesthetics, Plato thus foregrounds the performative aspect of mimesis. His student Aristotle exactly reverses matters and sees diegesis as a subcategory of mimesis in that “epic and tragic poetry, as well as comedy, dithyramb, and most music for aulos and lyre, are all, taken as a whole, kinds of mimesis” [ἐποποιία δὴ καὶ ἡ τῆς τραγῳδίας ποίησις ἔτι δὲ κωμῳδία καὶ ἡ διθυραμβοποιητικὴ καὶ τῆς αὐλητικῆς ἡ πλείστη καὶ κιθαριστικῆς πᾶσαι τυγχάνουσιν οὖσαι μιμήσεις τὸ σύνολον], with only diegetic differences between kinds (Poetics 1447a, Aristotle 1995, 28–29; see Weimar 2007, 362). For Aristotle, mimesis is primarily characterized by its referential nature. However, it is not limited to ‘copying’ nature, but it is free to supply the actual with the possible and the general or universal  – poetry will thus show things “as they should be” [ἴσως ὡς δεῖ] and will not necessarily occupy an ontological position inferior to material objects (Poetics 1460b, Aristotle

2.21 Mimesis 

 353

1995, 128–129). In a world that is seen as dynamic rather than static, mimetic action thus offers us glimpses of ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia, complete reality) and allows us to partake of the ‘becoming’ that surrounds us (Blumenberg 1981 [2000]). Unlike Plato, Aristotle never suggests that it is (epistemologically) misleading or (morally) wrong to imitate vice – for him, the choice of what to represent is artistic and generic, rather than moral, and it is justified by the anthropological function of mimesis to teach and to exercise the mind and the emotions. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period, artistic mimesis was mainly discussed under the rubric of ‘imitatio’. Aquinas squarely put it in his com­ mentary on Aristotle that “art imitates nature” (Physics II.4). Early modern aesthetic theory largely followed Aristotle in the belief that art might, indeed, offer a more perfect view of nature than its model itself. The term ‘imitatio’ progressively came to refer to the imitation of respected (classical) writers and literary forms. The legitimacy of early modern poetic and, increasingly, scientific practice derived from proximity and conformity to such models, an attitude that was to persist into the eighteenth-cen­ tury ‘Querelle des Anciens et Modernes’ and beyond. An analogous concept had long applied to the imitation of Christ in conducting one’s life, recommended not only in the New Testament (e.  g. Eph. 5:1–2), but also in Augustine of Hippo’s Confessiones (book VII) and instituted in various monastic orders. With the coming of the reforma­ tion, the individual’s responsibility to model their life after Christ became only more pronounced, if under a different name. This contributed to the immensely popular genres of hagiography and spiritual autobiography, which interposed human individ­ uals as ‘model copies’ between their readers and Christ as the perfect model. With the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, the focus of mimetic theory shifted from the representation of nature to that of psychological and social reali­ ties, and from drama to narrative prose. Both movements were epitomised in England by authors such as Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding (Watt 1957). It has been argued that the very genre of the novel only became conceivable owing to a shift in the conception of reality itself, away from a singular reality guaranteed by the evidence of the senses or by the benevolence of God, and towards an acceptance of the plurality of worlds created by artists competing with God in terms of world-making. This consti­ tutes a radically new claim of art – “eine[n] neuen Anspruch[], nicht mehr nur Gegenstände der Welt, nicht einmal mehr nur die Welt nachbildend darzustellen, sondern eine Welt zu realisieren” [“its claim, not merely to represent objects of the world, or even to imitate the world, but to actualize a world” (Blumenberg 2001, 61 [1979, 39]). Various forms of realism in nineteenth- and twentieth century art marked a shift back to the ideal of holding a mirror up to nature, with the added ambition – engendered by the rise of the social and natural sciences – of exploring and understanding the objects of representation in doing so (Levine 1983). The realist and naturalist novel, like realist painting, extended the scope of art to include social classes not previously deemed worthy of serious attention, as Erich Auerbach influentially argued in Mimesis (1946).

354 

 2 Categories

Since the nineteenth century, the psychological functions of mimesis outside the specific realm of artistic production began to be explored more fully. The imitation of others was perceived as a formative practice for individual psychosocial development by theorists such as Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and René Girard (Potolsky 2006, 115–128, 145–150). When mimetic practices produce ‘flawed’ copies of the model, such as when subordinate individuals involuntarily or deliberately perform the identity imposed upon themselves (e.  g. gender roles or colonial stereotypes) only imperfectly, such mimicry can be an instrument of oppression as well as a subversive weapon against hegemonic power (Irigaray 1985; Butler 1993; Fanon 1952; Bhabha 1994). Similarly, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin perceived a counter-rational potential in mimetic works of art that can reconcile humankind with the nature from which it has become alienated (Gebauer and Wulf 1995, 269–293). In postmodernity, philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard have attested to the “liquidation de tous les référentiels” [“liquidation of all referentials”] and their “résurrection artificielle dans les systèmes de signes” [“artificial resurrection in the system of signs”] effected by “une substitution au réel des signes du réel” [“substituting signs of the real for the real”], masking the absence of an original behind the ubiquitous simulations and blur­ ring the difference between the real and the imaginary (Baudrillard 1981, 11 [1994, 2]).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction In the present context, it is useful to differentiate between the author of an autobiog­ raphy as the ‘historical I’, the voice of the ‘narrating I’, and the principal character on the diegetic level (the protagonist). There is a sense, of course, in which these three instances are identical (Lejeune 1973), but in systematic terms, each instance becomes object and agent of mimesis separately. Firstly, the historical I as the instance pro­ ducing the autobiographical narrative models her narrative itself, her narrative voice and the persona of her protagonist after other instances of autobiography, autobio­ graphical diegesis, and cultural models of individuality and subjectivity. Secondly, she produces the narrative voice (a diegetic instance!), which in turn is mimetic not only of these precursors, but also of the author-protagonist’s process of remember­ ing and reconstituting (Basseler and Birke 2005), and it mimetically (re-)produces the persona of the protagonist (de Man 1979). Thirdly, by the convention of autobiography, this protagonist is seen a representation of the historical I, who becomes an object of mimesis in their turn (Varga 2012). A fourth agent in this mimetic process is the reader, whose ‘actualization’ of the text will produce a ‘new’ historical I – the autobiographer has fashioned herself into someone different by means of her narrative. Note that the ‘actualization’ (mimesis3, in Ricoeur’s sense) is not inevitably positive: it is conceivable that the historical I is judged negatively because of its failed attempt, via the narrating I, to turn itself into the protagonist (a ‘Munchhausen-effect’ similar to that deliberately

2.21 Mimesis 

 355

evoked by unreliable narration in fiction, or involuntarily in any number of transpar­ ently self-aggrandizing celebrity autobiographies). It has been suggested that autobiography can be fruitfully viewed in terms of its quasi-dramatic, mimetic performance of self, rather than as a diegetic form insuffi­ ciently distinct from the novel genre (Hinz 1992). In any case, autobiography must be seen as mimetic in that it produces a representation of the self and of their ‘life and times’. It constitutes a conscious act of self-fashioning that, while undertaking and professing to hold a mirror up to nature, will clearly not produce a ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ image, owing to the vagaries of language, time, and self-knowledge, to name but a few. In doing so, autobiographical narrative brings into productive tension the two mimetic poles of ‘passive’ imitation and ‘active’ creation. Just as Aristotle says of the hero in tragedy, the protagonist of an autobiography will, in a sense, always be both “true to life” and “truer than life,” with the autobiography aiming to offer a ‘better’ (more authentic, more truthful, perhaps more positive) representation of the autobiographer than previously existed (Hinz 1992, 205). Autobiographical diegesis can register these problems in a self-reflexive manner, stressing the impossibility of autobiographical authenticity and closure. Thus, Evelyn Waugh’s unfinished A Little Learning opens resignedly: “Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography” (2011, 3). Still, the protagonist of auto­ biography will always be a ‘version’ of the historical I’s self at the time of writing. Memory provides the matter of mimetic representation, but it is also its stumbling block and a gap that is bridged by autobiographical diegesis. In terms of the mimetic performance of identities imposed on the historical I, autobiography affords the opportunity for highlighting and interpreting disruptive practices: the narrating I can explain to what extent their behaviour conformed to and subverted cultural norms, encouraging readers to imitate their example of imperfect mimesis (Craigo-Snell 2010; Skilleås 2006).

Works Cited Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Basseler, Michael, and Dorothee Birke. “Mimesis des Erinnerns.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Astrid Erll. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. 123–148. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée, 1981 [Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994]. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (1994). London: Routledge, 2004. Blumenberg, Hans. “‘Nachahmung der Natur’: Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen” (1957). Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben: Aufsätze und eine Rede. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. 55–103 [“‘Imitation of Nature’: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being.” Trans. Anna Wertz. Qui Parle 12.1 (2000): 17–54].

356 

 2 Categories

Blumenberg, Hans. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans” (1964). Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2001. 47–73 [“The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel.” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. 29–48]. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle A. Barale and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 307–320. Craigo-Snell, Shannon. “Contesting the Primacy of the Word: Activism, Autobiography and Mimesis.” Feminist Theology 18.3 (2010): 257–276. Donald, Merlin. “Evolutionary Origins of Autobiographical Memory: A Retrieval Hypothesis.” Understanding Autobiographical Memory: Theories and Approaches. Ed. Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 269–289. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952). London: Pluto Press, 2008. Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. Mimesis: Culture – Art – Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Hinz, Evelyn J. “Mimesis: The Dramatic Lineage of Auto/Biography.” Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 195–212. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poetique. Revue de theorie et d’analyse littéraire 13 (1973): 137–162 [“The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Philippe Lejeune and Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989. 3–30]. Levine, George L. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Plato. Republic. Books 6–10. Vol. II. Ed. and trans. Christopher Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Potolsky, Matthew. Mimesis. New York/London: Routledge, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et récit. Vol. I. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983 [Time and Narrative. Vol. I. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984]. Skilleås, Ole M. “Knowledge and Imagination in Fiction and Autobiography.” Metaphilosophy 37.2 (2006): 259–276. Taussig, Michael T. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. Varga, Judit G. “‘Looking’ Autobiographically: Rethinking the Mirror Metaphor and the Enigma of Autobiography.” Life Writing 9.3 (2012): 291–301. Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957). London: Chatto and Windus, 1974. Waugh, Evelyn. A Little Learning (1964). London: Penguin, 2011. Weimar, Klaus. “Diegesis.” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft: Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Vol. I. Ed. Georg Braungart et al. Berlin: de Gruyter, 3rd ed. 2007. 360–363.

2.21 Mimesis 

 357

Further Reading Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953). London/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Benjamin, Walter. “Über das mimetische Vermögen” (1955). Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. 210–213 [“On the Mimetic Faculty.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 2007. 333–336]. Girard, René. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961). Paris: Grasset, 1977 [Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976]. Melberg, Arne. Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Schönert, Jörg, and Ulrike Zeuch, eds. Mimesis – Repräsentation – Imagination: Literaturtheoretische Positionen von Aristoteles bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008.

2.22 Minorities Angelika Schaser

Definition Minority refers to a group of people legally, culturally, ethnically or racially distinct from other members of society, whose main characteristics are power differentials, subordinacy and perception as separate and different from a more dominant group. Thus demographic minorities within state entities, e.  g. serfs in early modern Europe, blacks in the USA and South Africa into the nineteenth and twentieth century, and women worldwide to this day can also be defined as minorities if their legal, social and cultural life is subordinated to that of other groups and perceived as such (Schuerkens 2005). Minorities are fluid groups whose existence and emergence depend on his­ torical, political and societal developments. Groups can become minorities through changes to laws, borders or sovereignty, demographic developments, migration, flight, expulsion and resettlement as well as the settlement of new population groups. The Versailles Peace Conference after World War I sought to guarantee ethnic and reli­ gious minorities certain minimal rights within the nation states, under the oversight of the League of Nations. This protection was based on the idea of nation states with immutable characteristics, which were to accord not just individual political, civil and religious rights to members of minorities, but also cultural, ethnic, national or linguis­ tic rights to the groups themselves.

Explication The word ‘minority’ derives from the Latin ‘minor’ [smaller]. Historically, from antiq­ uity up to the French Revolution, the term appeared largely in discussions of con­ stitutional matters, and referred to that segment of a group that was outnumbered in a vote. It was only with the French Revolution that minority was established as a complementary term to majority and associated with the question of political and social inclusion (Brockhaus, vol. VIX, 1996, 666). In nineteenth-century editions of the Brockhaus encyclopedia, ‘Minority’ was simply a reference under the keyword ‘Majority’. It was not until 1932 that it appeared there as a keyword in its own right (Der Große Brockhaus, vol. VII, 1932, 571). Since the late 1990s, Brockhaus has ele­ vated ‘Minority’ to the status of a ‘key concept’ (Brockhaus, vol. VIX, 1996, 666–669). Another major German encyclopedia, Meyers Lexikon of 1906, also has no entry for ‘Minority’, but merely refers to “proportional representation” under “Minority Rep­ resentation” (Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, vol. VIII, 1906, 860). The use of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-045

2.22 Minorities 

 359

the term minority and the question of the protection of minorities were common in the political discussion after the First World War, when national minorities were demand­ ing their rights in (re)established national states.

Historical Aspects Minorities and minority rights are closely associated with notions of equality that were foreign to the estate-based society of early modern Europe. At the time, people lived in the various socio-economic groups into which they were born. Different laws applied to the different estates, and they were equipped with different privileges. Numerical majorities played no role in arguments for granting or refusing rights, and differences of estate were believed to be divinely ordained. Religious and ethnic groups whose toleration depended upon the authorities were repeatedly persecuted and expelled (e.  g. the expulsion of the Jews from all areas under the Spanish Crown in 1492, the persecution of Huguenots in France from 1530, and the persecution of Catholics in England under Elizabeth I.). The concept of minorities arose only in the late eighteenth century with the Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man. Hence­ forth, religiously, socially, economically and ethnically oppressed and disadvantaged population groups and their supporters demanded legal and actual equality. In so doing, they appealed to new notions of justice calling for political, civil and religious freedom for all people. Notions of a majority society evolved in Europe and the USA within the framework of nation states, which continue today to provide the founda­ tion for state orders and organizations as well as international relations: “National­ ism reinvented nations, and along with them, minorities” (Benbassa 2010, 7). While demands had been raised since the French Revolution for the emancipation of the individual as an equal citizen of the state, minorities now called for the right to the protection of ethnic, religious and cultural distinctions within the nation states. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews as the “extraterritorial minority par excellence” (Levitats 2007, 288) as well as national minorities demanded guarantees of equal political, civil, national, and religious rights, the autonomous management of educational and cultural institutions, respect for their languages and cultural rituals and toleration for their specific holidays. While multinational states such as the Ottoman Empire had tolerated minorities within certain limits (Bayır 2013, 19–32), the nation states tended not to accept minor­ ity groups as ‘states within the state’. They sought to force members of minorities to assimilate or to eliminate them altogether through ejection or suppression: “The history of minorities is therefore the history of racism, of marginalisation, of eugenics” (Le Dref 2010, 33–34). Equating religious with national affiliation, Turkey, for example, after its victory in the Turkish-Greek war of 1922, enforced what it referred to as a ‘pop­

360 

 2 Categories

ulation exchange’ in which approximately 1.25 million Greek-Orthodox inhabitants were compelled to leave Turkey and in return Greece deported some 500,000 Muslims to Turkey. These forced resettlements following expulsions were also not prevented by the minority treaties agreed upon at the Versailles Peace Conference, whose provi­ sions the League of Nations was supposed to guarantee. Within the logic of the nation state, contemporary politicians regarded such resettlements in the states of eastern and southeastern Europe, which included large national minorities, as a peaceful solution to ethnic conflicts. The national minorities’ claims to self-determination, which were supposed to be protected, ultimately contributed to the exacerbation of political strife in the interwar period. That is why, following World War II, the UN’s Human Rights Declaration of December 10, 1948 no longer mentions the protection of minorities, and instead stresses the guarantee of human rights. Since that time, numerous international agreements and domestic regulations seek through human rights guarantees to protect religious, ethnic, social and sexual minorities (Skutch 2005, XXIII–XXIV) as well as to guarantee equal opportunities for disadvantaged groups by means of anti-discrimination measures and special assistance measures (e.  g. affirmative action in the USA) (Laubeova 2005).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Minorities, especially oppressed ones, persecuted and legally disadvantaged groups also fashion their identity, history and expectations for the future through autobio­ graphical texts, which express their personal experiences, the experiences of their own family and their own group in order to preserve their culture and language and create group identity. These life writings were not at first perceived as autobiography. Only with postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the “master narrative of the ‘sov­ ereign self’” defined by literary scholarship and the canon of autobiographies derived from this (Smith and Watson 2010, 3) did people begin to read these works as auto­ biographical texts. Challenges to this master narrative led to an expansion of the lit­ erary definition of the autobiographical genre to include “relational autobiography”, which does not just focus on a life, but also emphasizes the various affiliations of a person, family or group (Tridgell 2005, 481–482). Only this shift of perspective and a broader definition of autobiography (see the “Sixty Genres of Life Narrative” in Smith and Watson 2013, 253–293) made it possible to ‘discover’ additional forms of autobi­ ography in connection with the critique of the constructed canon of autobiographies by “white, male, and highly literate” authors (Watson 1993, 59). These forms include (auto)biographical texts by African Americans (Butterfield 1974, 2–3) and women, and more generally the life narratives of members of the lower classes, among others. This did not simply lead to previously unheard autobiographical subjects all over the world finding a voice. It also reminds us that “autobiographical telling” should be under­

2.22 Minorities 

 361

stood as a performative act tied to specific times and places (Smith and Watson 2013, 61). Thus, for example, autobiographical texts by working-class men and women in the early twentieth century had a great impact on the emergence of the labor move­ ment. August Bebel brought out the first volume of his autobiography with the Social Democratic publishing company J.  H.  W. Dietz (Bebel 1910), one year after writing the preface to Adelheid Popp’s at first anonymously published Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin, von ihr selbst erzählt (1909) [Autobiography of a Working Woman (1912)]. Here, Popp describes her own difficult youth as an example of the living conditions of an entire class, showing a path out of misery through political education and work, and thereby illustrating the importance of class consciousness and class solidarity. Bebel’s autobiography, the first volume of which sold 70,000 copies in just a few months, follows the same pattern. Many women and men in the German labor move­ ment understood and used both autobiographies as primers for their own political development. The function of autobiographical texts in forging identity becomes especially clear in the case of those national and ethnic minorities that unsuccessfully aspire(d) to a nation state or whose existence was imperiled by repressive measures and genocidal experience (‘survivor narrative’). Thus, based on the memoirs of the Armenian Ruben Ter-Minasian (1882–1951) (Roupen 1949–1952), Elke Hartmann and Gabriele Jancke have shown how in the Armenian diaspora experience, identities developed through action in a network of varying affiliations, and that in this region, the auto-historio­ graphical narrative evolved in close conjunction with and/or against national narra­ tives and early twentieth-century state-building processes. Roupen’s memoirs cover the period 1902 to 1920 (with notable gaps in 1915 and 1919). They were intended as ‘exemplum’, ‘memoria’ and ‘confessio’, and demonstrate the mutability of concepts of the person in the author’s depicted evolution from an “Eastern Armenian student to a Western Armenian revolutionary fighter” (Hartmann and Jancke 2012, 68). As a sur­ vivor of the Sassoun massacre of 1915, he had already described the life of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the struggles of the Armenian independence movement in recollections published regularly between 1922 and 1930 in the Boston magazine Hayrenik Amsakir. Here, he fashioned himself for subsequent generations as the embodi­ ment of a unified Armenia that had never existed in this form (Hartmann and Jancke 2012, 62). His extensive and early portrayal of the life, songs, traditions and legends of the Ottoman Armenians before the genocide of 1915/1916 pointed the way for the historiography and the historical image of Armenians in the diaspora (Hartmann and Jancke 2012, 53). Like the reverse of a medal, this same genocide is marked as a ‘non-event’ in Turkish national historiography and the surviving memoirs of most of the Young Turks (Adak 2012, 358) in whose 1908 revolution Roupen and the Armenian revolutionary movement participated (Hartmann and Jancke 2012, 43). To this day, the Turkish gov­ ernment denies that the deportations, expropriation and murder of the Armenians

362 

 2 Categories

amounted to genocide. Hülya Adak has shown that the official representation of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as “rebels, betrayers, secessionists”, who actually provoked the deportations and persecutions as defensive measures by the Young Turks inscribed these events in the Turkish nation building process and the “Republi­ can defensive narrative” (Adak 2012, 359). In a detailed analysis of the memoirs, pub­ lished in exile, of Halide Edib (Edib Adivar 1926, 1928), “the most prominent woman leader among the Turkish Nationalists” (New York Times, 20 March 1920), Adak demonstrates how Edib’s mention of Armenian suffering in her autobiography not only contradicted the official account of the “Republican defensive narrative” (Adak 2012, 377), but also places her own experiences and the history of the Turkish Republic in a broader framework. For Edib, this ‘event’ becomes part of “mourning the loss of the Ottoman Empire […] the loss of the coexistence of a multitude of ethnicities and languages” (Adak 2012, 377). She thereby tells the story of the Turkish Republic as one not just of success, but also of loss. In this way, a study of autobiographical texts in particular can contribute to showing that “minorities have not always existed as such, but have been gradually fabricated to fit changing socio-political realities and their accompanying ideologies” (Le Dref 2010, 33). Translation: Pamela Selwyn

Works Cited Adak, Hülya. “Beyond the Catastrophic Divide. Walking with Halide Edib (the Turkish ‘Jeanne d’Arc’) Through the Ambiguous Terrains of World War I.” Selbstzeugnis und Person. Transkulturelle Perspektive. Ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser. Köln: Böhlau, 2012. 357–380. Bayır, Derya. Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Bebel, August. Aus meinem Leben. 3 vols. Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1910–1914. Benbassa, Esther. “Foreword.” Minority Narratives and National Memory. Ed. Cora Alexa Døving and Nicolas Schwaller. Oslo: Oslo Academic Press, 2010. 5–8. Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. Døving, Cora Alexa, and Nicolas Schwaller, eds. Minority Narratives and National Memory. Oslo: Oslo Academic Press, 2010. Edib Adivar, Halide. Memoirs of Halidé Edib. London/New York: The Century Co., 1926. Edib Adivar, Halide. The Turkish Ordeal. Being the Further Memoirs of Halidé Edib. London/New York: The Century Co., 1928. Hartmann, Elke, and Gabriele Jancke. “Roupens Erinnerungen eines armenischen Revolutionärs (1921/1951) im transepochalen Dialog. Konzepte und Kategorien der Selbstzeugnisforschung zwischen Universalität und Partikularität.” Selbstzeugnis und Person. Transkulturelle Perspektiven. Ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser. Köln: Böhlau, 2012. 31–71. Laubeova, Laura. “Equal Opportunities.” Encyclopedia of the World’s Minorities. Vol. I. Ed. Carl Skutch. New York/London: Routledge, 2005. 432–434.

2.22 Minorities 

 363

Le Dref, Gaëlle. “The Invention of Minorities. Scientific Narratives and Socio-political Discourses.” Minority Narratives and National Memory. Ed. Cora Alexa Døving and Nicolas Schwaller. Oslo: Oslo Academic Press, 2010. 25–34. Levitats, Isaac. “Minority Rights.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vol. VIX. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2nd ed. 2007. 288–291. Gale Virtual Reference Library (2 May 2014). „Minderheit.” Der Große Brockhaus. Vol. VII. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 15th ed. 1932. 571–576. „Minderheit, Minorität.” Brockhaus. Die Enzyklopädie. Vol. VIX. Leipzig/Mannheim: F. A. Brockhaus, 20th ed. 1996. 666–669. „Minderheitsvertretung, see Proportionalwahlrecht.” Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon. Vol. VIII. Leipzig/Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 6th ed. 1906. 860. Popp, Adelheid. Die Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin, von ihr selbst erzählt. München: Reinhardt, 1909 [Autobiography of a Working Woman. Trans. F. C. Harvey. London: Unwin, 1912]. Roupen. Hay Heghapokhagani me Hishadagnere. 7 vols. Los Angeles: Horizon Dbaran, 1949–1952. Schuerkens, Ulrike. “Gender and Minority Status.” Encyclopedia of the World’s Minorities. Vol. II. Ed. Carl Skutch. New York/London: Routledge, 2005. 490–492. Skutch, Carl.“Preface.” Encyclopedia of the World’s Minorities. Vol. I. Ed. Carl Skutch. New York/ London: Routledge, 2005. xxiii–xxiv. Tridgell, Susan. “Relational Autobiography.” Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography. Vol. II. Ed. Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. 481–482. Watson, Julia. “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography.” The Culture of Autobiography. Constructions of Self-Representation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. 57–79.

Further Reading Skutch, Carl, ed. Encyclopedia of the World’s Minorities. 3 vols. New York/London: Routledge, 2005. “Minority.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. https://www.britannica.com/topic/minority (22 June 2018). Soen, Dan, Mally Shechory, and Sarah Ben David, eds. Minority Groups: Coercion, Discrimination, Exclusion and Deviance and the Quest for Equality. Hauppauge: Nova Science, 2012.

2.23 Paratext Frauke Bode

Definition In Seuils (1987) [Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation (1997)], Gérard Genette defines the margins of literary texts. What he metaphorically calls “seuils” [“thresholds”], is any physical element or sign which is not part of the main text itself but serves as a frame for it. Considered “fondamentalement hétéronome, auxiliaire” [“fundamentally heteronomous, auxiliary”], its function is related to the functioning of the paramount text to which it is assigned (Genette 1987, 16 [1997, 12]). Being neither located properly outside nor inside the text, the paratextual discourse cannot readily be assigned to the exterior of a main text, as generally stressed in Genette’s typological approach. Moreover, its intermediate pragmatic status makes it relevant for questions about the fictionality or factuality of the main text. The present chapter will depict paratextual elements regarding their interdependent relation with the main text and its relevance for autobiographical and autofictional writing.

Explication Genette defines the ‘paratext’ as the general ‘surroundings’ of a literary text, the sum of the ‘peritext’ as those parts of a publication which are located directly “autour du texte” [“around the text”] and the ‘epitext’ as all those messages not originally pub­ lished with the main text (Genette 1987, 10–11 [1997, 4–5]). Although the paratext is extradiegetic and, therefore, not narrative, it contributes to the narration with quasidiegetic information, which means that it differs from the main text not in function, but in position and form (Bunia 2007, 284, 287–288) – for example through being vis­ ually detached from the continuous main text not only in location, but also in its different and more prominently exposed graphic presentation. This intermediate posi­ tion can lead to a twist between the two pragmatic levels: paratexts may foster meta­ leptical effects, because they refer to diegetic as well as extradiegetic contexts. The status of paratextual elements is, therefore, ambiguous: they participate in two differ­ ent levels of communication, commenting on the main text from a seemingly external point of view while still being to some extent part of the commented text. Thus, the paratext can display how autobiographical writing oscillates between extradiegetic reference and diegetic world-building. It is precisely in the paratextual space that the genre conventions can be exposed and the inherent ambiguity of autobiographical writing can be demonstrated. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-046

2.23 Paratext 

 365

Historical Aspects In his Le pacte autobiographique (1975) [The Autobiographical Pact (1989)], Philippe Lejeune already mentions the paratext (without coining the term) as what determines the autobiographical pact: paratextual elements like the author’s name, the title, the subtitle, the name of the collection, the editor’s name, and the prologue(s) form a “frange du texte imprimé” [“fringe of the printed text”] (Lejeune 1975, 45 [1989, 29]). Genette takes up Lejeune’s attempt to locate the paratext within a pragmatic situ­ ation of communication between “texte et hors-texte” [“text and off-text”] (Genette 1987, 8 [1997, 2]). However, they would disagree about the paratext’s function. Genette stresses its subordinate position within an oeuvre’s overall structure, while Lejeune considers it autonomous: for him it controls the whole reading process, whereas for Genette it only contributes its specific share to the complex framework of the main text. The paratextual elements to be discussed from Lejeune’s and Genette’s catalogues are the author’s name, the title and intertitles, the “prière d’insérer” [‘please insert’] (Genette 1987, 105) and cover texts, the dedication, prologue and notes, as well as the public and private epitext. The list reveals a modern understanding of publishing. Although individual items are present in earlier writing (notes, for example, stem from the ‘marginalia’ of medieval manuscripts), and also in oral literature (where they are, however, more difficult to trace), their accumulation is generally confined to printed book publishing from the Early Modern period onwards. The name of the author as part of the paratext is a specifically modern phenomenon: Medieval or Early Modern texts often name their author at the beginning or end of the main text or in even less conspicuous places (Genette 1987, 41–42 [1997, 37]). The gradually established print conventions increased the difference between the codes of the main text and those of the paratext (Bunia 2007, 289).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction The following overview of paratextual elements is guided by the hypothesis that the paratext of autobiographies and autofictions functions as an authorising method. It claims or refutes referential authenticity  – with stabilising or destabilising effects: authorising strategies can confirm a fictional or non-fictional reading, depending on whether the frame is congruent with the main text or not. The paratextual influence on the reception of a text will be discussed with regard to their two main functions of index and commentary. Both functions can be attributed to most paratexts, but one of the two is generally dominant.

366 

 2 Categories

The Indexical Function The core element of Lejeune’s definition of autobiography is the fact that the author, narrator and protagonist share the same name (Lejeune 1975, 15 [1989, 5]). The auto­ biographical pact is tied back to the paratext (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 69) as soon as the name of the author appears on the book cover or title page. The author’s name thus exemplifies the indexical function of the paratext, referring a diegetic element to an extradiegetic instance. This verification of identity verges on the limit of meta­ leptic ambiguity: the author appears on two different pragmatic levels as her or his name recurs both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the book. Genette attributes metaleptic effects only to a specific type of narrator – the narrator who signs a dedication and thereby becomes the “‘auteur supposé’” [“‘imagined author’”] (Genette 1987, 133 [1997, 130]). In fact, the paratext can be more often characterised as metaleptical. This is because, even if it emphasises the factuality of autobiographies, it does so by assigning the nar­ rative instance different levels of enunciation: diegetic and paratextual respectively. When in Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977)] the apparently ‘more real’ handwritten indication “Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman” [“It must all be consid­ ered as if spoken by a character in a novel”] (Barthes 1975 [2010]) incites an autofic­ tional reading and suggests even more powerfully the contradictory trespassing of diegetic levels, for the utterance stems from the same instance as the anthological main text. The paratext of autobiographies is, therefore, metaleptical, because (and inasmuch as) its intended indexicality leads to a diegetic paradox: the narrator claims to be the author by using extradiegetic material, namely the paratext. Apart from the author’s name, rhematic titles such as ‘autobiography’ or ‘novel’ indicate the fictional or factual constitution of a text and the genre to which it suppos­ edly belongs (by definition of the author and/or editor) (Genette 1987, 82 [1997, 86]). The ‘intertitles’ that appear before new parts or chapters of a longer text influence genre perception in works that allow it to evolve, or even change, during the reading process. The fact that a single part of a text, or an independent text like a story or poem, has a genre-defining title like ‘autobiography’ might convince the reader of the whole text’s authenticity. The special form of long, sentence-like intertitles, copying or parodying the medieval titling tradition, can have an ambiguous effect on the identities of author and narrator in homodiegetic narratives. As Genette exemplifies with regard to Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time], title sentences make the reader question whether their speaker is the narrator or the implied author as organizer of the text. As the narrator of the Recherche stays within an “anonymat relatif” [“relative anonymity”] (Genette 1987, 305 [1997, 303]), the novel structurally shifts towards autobiography. Genette concludes that the Recherche can be classified as autofiction particularly because of the indecisive role of its intertitles. It is through their intermediate position  – both graphically and in what they enunciate – that titles and intertitles contribute strongly to autobiographical read­

2.23 Paratext 

 367

ings, especially when the sense of deictic reference is not otherwise determined. A personal pronoun appearing in a title, subtitle or intertitle next to the author’s name is likely to establish him or her as its extradiegetic reference, because it creates an open deixis that must be specified in order to establish the autobio­ graphical pact. Titles like Giacomo Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie (written from 1790 on, published posthumously) [History of My Life]) contrast with neutral forms like Thomas Bernhard’s Ein Kind [‘A Child’] (1982). Also, titles that form a speech act will be directly related to the author, as we can see with Rousseau’s Confessions (written 1765–1770, published posthumously). However, his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1776–1778) [The Reveries of the Solitary Walker] exemplifies the fact that a missing deixis can also index the author as autobiographical narrator in the third person. Both Lejeune and Genette judge the contractual indication given by rhem­ atic titles to be obligatory in its bearing on the author’s quest to tell the truth – an “engagement” [“commitment”] in which Genette equates autobiography, history, and memoirs (Genette 1987, 16 [1997, 11]). The “extrafictional voice” (Sniader Lanser 1981, 123) apparently inserts historical authority. However, the description fulfilled by all titles can also destabilise the autobiographical pact. Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils [‘Son/ Threads’] (1977), for instance, is paratextually framed as a novel, while on the level of the dedication it seems to bring the author’s life into the text because it is dedicated “A ma mère/qui fut source” [‘To my mother/who was source’] and “pour Noémi/qui fut ressource” [‘to Noémi/who was resort’] (Doubrovsky 1977). Indexicality by means of a dedication – especially to persons belonging to the author’s surroundings – author­ ises an autobiographical reading if combined with other referentialisations. In the case of Fils, the identity of the author’s name with that of his figure, together with the dedication and the designation of the work as a novel, both affirm and question the autobiographical pact.

The Commentary Function If the author’s name, the title and the dedication are comparable in pointing to the author’s identity, the commentary function dominates in prefaces. Genette has a stunning thought about forewords written by the author-narrator-figure: what if the younger I explained his or her thoughts about the life description given by the – nec­ essarily – older I? Given that this could only be possible in the realm of fiction (Genette 1987, 175 [1997, 188]), such a preface would convert the autobiography into an autofic­ tion. Genette’s idea, however, triggers the question why a foreword is necessary at all if the enunciating instance is the same in the preface as in the main text. Obviously, the foreword fulfils specific functions: it can offer commentary or justification, but also communicate with the public or give metatextual reflections, as well as stabilising or destabilising information, on the autobiography (English 2010, 248–249). Also, it can

368 

 2 Categories

itself fulfil an autobiographical function, providing information about the author’s life or the circumstances of writing. Structurally, the foreword stands out of narrative time: above the chronology of diegetic enunciation, as well as above the chronology of the narrated life; this phenomenological difference outweighs the deictic identity between the enunciating instances. As a very French bibliographic element, the ‘prière d’insérer’ is closely linked to the preface. In the sense in which Genette compares the ‘please-insert’ with what today mainly appears as cover texts [“the blurb”] (Genette 1987, 105 [1997, 111]), it can appear as a merely descriptive summary or a short interpretation, a citation from the main text or a motto-like citation from an allograph text. What distinguishes it from the preface is, then, its position – either on the back cover or, traditionally, as an insert for critics inside the book. Its summarising qualities may be comparable to those of a preface, but its visibility is greater. Within this range of possible forms and locations, it is not surprising that Doubrovsky’s first edition of Fils uses the back cover to give an interpretative key and coin the term for the genre-to-be: ‘autofiction’. If the preface seems to provide a space in which the author can address the reader more directly than in his diegetic function, so do footnotes and endnotes, inserting an element usually attributed to academic and scientific texts, with their assumed concretion and precision. Notes belong to the paratext because they cause a rupture in the enunciation. When inserted into texts of “‘impure’” fiction they tend to con­ centrate on nonfictional parts, producing “témoignages et […] documents à l’appui” [“testimony and supporting documents”] (Genette 1987, 334 [1997, 332–333]). If we may include autobiographical and autofictional texts under this laconic rubric of ‘impure fiction’, footnotes obviously insert such stabilising information. Their function can be traced back to the modern autobiographical pretext, Rousseau’s Confessions: annota­ tions provide a space for critical comment, explication, and bibliographical sources, thus evoking autobiographical ‘honesty’ (Strätling 2012, 156). Jacques Derrida’s Circonfession, obviating its – albeit playful – debt to Rousseau, is inserted entirely into the footnotes to Geoffrey Bennington’s Jacques Derrida (1991), both Bennington and Derrida being paratextually introduced as the authors on the front cover. The whole autobiography is conceived as notes to the main text (Strätling 2012, 156), which adopt the character of a gloss while reversing the hierarchy between text and paratext. Notes in general and Derrida’s Circonfession in particular introduce a second voice, underlining that any autobiography is constructed by a dialogue of (at least two) discursive levels. Authorial notes not only demonstrate that the “narrating” and the “experiencing self” (Cohn 1978, 143) are two different entities, they even introduce a third, typographically distinct narrative instance, ‘the author’, who belongs to a more ‘real’ level and who can confirm or rectify earlier statements (Strätling 2012, 158). While these functions are comparable to those of prefaces, the metaleptical tendency of notes is even stronger, for the enunciation in the preface lies clearly outside the main text, while the notes interact with it. When Renaud Camus corrects a textual element twice in the notes to P. A. (1997), he introduces typographically distinct speak­

2.23 Paratext 

 369

ers who contradict themselves (Strätling 2012, 158). In this way notes display the auto­ biographical “Referenzbegehren” [‘desire for referentiality’] (Schabacher 2007, 348), inasmuch as they link the experiencing to the narrating self and suggest that these two are identical in the writing process. However, this identity remains paradoxical, because the notes – as corrective ‘marginalia’ – also indicate that the main text may not be factually accurate at all. Thus the metalepsis appears on second view: while the narrative enunciation is split into various voices on different levels, they yet claim to be one and the same.

Summing Up Epitexts can aptly conclude the survey of paratextual forms and functions because they unite the indexical and commentary functions fulfilled by the paratext. Public and private utterances of the author (other than in the peritext), interviews, other writ­ ings, letters, journals, private announcements, etc. add to referentialisations already established in the main text or paratext by explicitly affirming or denying them. As the epitext is located “anywhere out of the book” (Genette 1987, 346), all the men­ tioned media can, but need not, be paratextual: their effect, not their function makes them so. In this broad definition, the epitext provides references from the textual to the extratextual and offers a space for explanations and critical comments. Epitexts answer the question “Ce livre, est-il autobiographique?” [“Is this book autobiograph­ ical?”] (Genette 1987, 364 [1997, 362]). Yet they can only claim autobiographical refer­ entiality, not prove it. Of course, this is also possible in the opposite direction: inter­ viewed about the first volume of his Recherche, Proust claimed that the narrator is not the author (Proust 1965, 287; Genette 1987, 359). Roland Barthes’ review of his Roland Barthes, published under the title “Barthes puissance trois” [“Barthes to the Third Power”] (Barthes 1975 [1986]), potentiates the metaleptic qualities of autobiograph­ ical and autofictional paratexts, because Barthes not only first refutes the identity between the narrator and the author in the handwritten comment on the inner cover page of the book, but then signs an epitextual comment as a critic. In conclusion, all the analysed paratextual elements explicitly or implicitly con­ tribute to the genre definition of the main text: explicitly by naming the genre, implic­ itly by providing extradiegetic references for the narrator, the characters or the plot. These referentialisations produce an intrusion of the extradiegetic into the diegetic level. The graphically exposed location of a title or a dedication suggests an onto­ logical difference. However, the peritext is impregnated with both levels (Bode 2012, 285–286). Rather than being exclusively extradiegetic, as Genette proposes, the para­ text finds itself in an ‘in between’ that allows extradiegetic to come into contact with diegetic information – in so far as these two can reasonably be associated with one another. Understood in this sense, the title of a book, story, or poem, an epigraph, or

370 

 2 Categories

a dedication, can be read as the beginning of the speaker’s enunciation. This means that the paratext must be analysed with criteria for diegetic as well as for extradiegetic information. Both the extradiegetic and diegetic levels have to be seen as part of the textual production and part, therefore, of the constitution of a pact – be it autobio­ graphical, fictional, or autofictional. The foregoing discussion shows that the paratext’s functions are far more complex than Genette assumes in his typology. It is neither the case that the authorial role can be designed as easily as he suggests as a trustworthy instance with sublime insight into the text’s mechanisms, nor that the genres are as clearly definable (Genette antici­ pates this critique in the final chapter of his study, Genette 1987, 375 [1997, 408]). When Zipfel says that in the case of Doubrovsky’s Fils the autofiction is not a ‘narrative ruse’ (“ruse du récit”, Doubrovsky 1988, 69) but a ruse of the paratext in its communication with the reader (Zipfel 2009, 299–300), he implicitly, like Genette, separates text and paratext and does not attribute narrative qualities to the paratext. While the story of Fils itself may not at all question its autobiographical mode of telling, the paratext makes it ambiguous (Doubrovsky 1988, 75). Doubrovsky’s article on Fils can itself be considered an epitextual comment which stresses the autofictional status of his text). However, if we see the paratext as part of the narration – meaning that it shares the main text’s functions, only suggesting that it is itself ‘something different’ due to its localisation – the paratextual framing is a very specific narrative strategy of authen­ tication or fictionalisation.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010]. Barthes, Roland. “Barthes puissance trois.” Quinzaine littéraire 295 (1975): 5 [“Barthes to the Third Power.” Trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. On signs. Ed. Marshall Blonsky. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. 189–191]. Bode, Frauke. Barcelona als lyrischer Interferenzraum. Zur Poetik der Komplizität in spanischen und katalanischen Gedichten der 1950er und 1960er Jahre. Carlos Barral – Gabriel Ferrater – Ángel González – Jaime Gil de Biedma – José Agustín Goytisolo. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Bunia, Remigius. Faltungen. Fiktion, Erzählen, Medien. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2007. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Galilée, 1977. Doubrovsky, Serge. “Autobiographie/vérité/psychanalyse.” Autobiographiques: de Corneille a Sartre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988. 61–79. English, Jeri. “Réinscriptions du sujet écrivant: le paratexte aux mémoires de Simone de Beauvoir.” Neohelicon: acta comparationis litterarum universarum 37.1 (2010): 247–261. Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987 [Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989].

2.23 Paratext 

 371

Proust, Marcel, and Élie-Joseph Bois. “À la recherche du temps perdu (1913).” Marcel Proust: Choix de lettres. Ed. Philip Kolb. Paris: Plon, 1965. 283–289. Schabacher, Gabriele. Topik der Referenz. Theorie der Autobiographie, die Funktion ‘Gattung’ und Roland Barthes’ „Über mich selbst“. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Sniader Lanser, Susan. The Narrative Act. Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Strätling, Regine. “Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie.” Den Rahmen sprengen. Anmerkungspraktiken in Literatur, Kunst und Film. Ed. Bernhard Metz and Sabine Zubarik. Berlin: Kadmos, 2012. 153–172. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion. Zwischen den Grenzen von Faktualität, Fiktionalität und Literarität?” Grenzen der Literatur. Ed. Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 285–313.

Further Reading Link-Heer, Ursula. Prousts ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ und die Form der Autobiographie. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1988. Stanitzek, Georg. “Texte, Paratexte, in Medien: Einleitung.” Paratexte in Literatur, Film, Fernsehen. Ed. Klaus Kreimeier and Georg Stanitzek. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2004. 3–19.

2.24 Personality

Michael Quante, Annette Dufner, and Michael Kühler

Definition The term ‘personality’ belongs to a cluster of concepts by appeal to which we grasp and articulate particular characteristics of the personal existence of human beings. Further central concepts in this family of terms include the terms ‘person’, ‘the self’, ‘the I’, or ‘identity’, as well as the concepts of personal ‘autonomy’ and ‘authenticity’. The personality of a human person is to be understood as “the individual characteris­ tics, which a human individual x gives to his or her personhood” (Quante 2012, 139). Personality can be understood as the result of the lifestyle, decisions and actions of a human person. Personality is to be comprehended as the result of an active forma­ tion of particular natural and social preconditions in light of biographical experiences and challenges. In this sense the concept of ‘personality’ is related to the notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘autonomy’, as well as the concept of ‘the self’. The personality of a human person integrates not only naturally given or cultural components, but also both descriptive and evaluative elements. The descriptive aspects of the concept allow for its use in areas such as subjectivity analyses in philosophical metaphysics, but also in individual psychology and in the social sciences. Due to the evaluative aspects, the concept of ‘personality’ can be used in normative contexts (such as ethics and law), as well as for the purpose of articulating the value and meaning of the personal aspects of human existence.

Explication and Historical Aspects One historical root and the etymological origin of ‘person’ is the Latin ‘persona’ which referred to the masks which actors wore in theatrical performances as well as to the characters in the play that these masks were associated with. The other dominant historical root goes back to the patristic tradition, which discusses the concept of a ‘person’ from a theological perspective. Originating from antique grammar with its distinction of three speaker roles (‘prosopa-personae’), the notion of a person is taken to be central to the explanation of the trinity of god. This is the beginning of the sub­ stance theoretic tradition of the concept of a person. At the same time the relationship between human beings and persons becomes subject to philosophical and theologi­ cal inquiries. The early modern treatment of the issue starts with John Locke’s ques­ tion regarding the trans-temporal identity of persons (Locke 1979 [1694]). One of his major innovations concerns the separation of the notion of a person from substance https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-047

2.24 Personality 

 373

ontological convictions, in order to free the term from metaphysical and theological controversies. Another major development in his work relates to the descriptive-eval­ uative double-character of the concept of a person, addressing properties and skills which turn an entity into a person, as well as the evaluative dimension of persons as recipients of praise and blame. Given this complex history of the concept of a person, a full understanding of the contemporary concept of ‘personality’ requires (i) a distinction between descrip­ tive and evaluative uses of the term, (ii) a clear account of the relationship between personhood and personality, and (iii) a closer look at related concepts such as the ‘temperament’ or the ‘character’ of a person. (i) Even though the term ‘personality’ is often used in a descriptive and evaluative way at the same time, it is central to the understanding of the concept to distinguish these two uses analytically. The descriptive use of the term ‘personality’ refers to the physical and psychological aspects of a human person, which can be understood as the result of his or her individual biographical lifestyle and as an expression of his or her (authentic and/or autonomous) self-interpretation. The descriptive use of the term ‘personality’ leaves open whether this dimension of human life generally implies an evaluative status as well (for example in the form of particular basic rights) or whether certain evaluative claims can be assigned to the unique and distinctive per­ sonality of a particular human person. An example for a comparatively descriptive use of the term would be the medical diagnosis ‘Mr. Jones is suffering from a personality disorder’. Psychiatrists sometimes even explicitly stipulate that their choice of the term ‘personality’ is supposed to have a more neutral, and less judgmental tone than imaginable alternatives (Zachar and Krueger 2013). Some uses of the term ‘personality’ signify an evaluative status on the basis of which the respective individual can acquire certain claims and other agents certain corresponding duties, such as the protection and further development of the integrity of the individual. For example, the judgment that certain educational activities are ‘conducive to the personality development of children’ carries with it the normative judgment that it would be desirable for children to be able to engage in such activi­ ties and that it is the task of parents or teachers to make this possible. The judgment that Mr. Smith is an ‘exceptional personality’ can simply signal that Smith deserves positive recognition by the community. This use of the term can also signal neglected duties on behalf of the person characterized and a certain claim of others to have this condition changed. For example, if the chief executive is described as having an ‘irritable personality’ by her team members, this judgment carries with it an implicit judgment that she should try to be less irritable in order to protect the work environ­ ment, the motivation, or even the integrity of her team members. (ii) The definition of personality given at the beginning of this entry makes use of the concept of ‘personhood’. It is important for a clearer understanding of the concept of ‘personality’ to grasp the relationship between personhood and personality. The best way of accomplishing this consists in asking which question one should pose in

374 

 2 Categories

order to find out what the notions of personhood and personality consist in respec­ tively. In the philosophical literature about the concepts of a person and of personal identity, one of the decisive questions concerns the properties and capacities on the basis of which a particular individual acquires the status of a person. The properties that are usually named as answers to this question are called ‘person-making charac­ teristics’. Authors such as Daniel Dennett have suggested a number of properties and capacities that should be on this list of personhood characteristics (Dennett 1976). Examples would be the requirement of rationality or the requirements that a person can communicate and can be a subject of propositional attitudes. Further central fea­ tures normally accepted are that a person must have a sense of his/her own trans-tem­ poral identity, i.  e. by ascribing former actions to herself and by accepting evaluative attributions by others on the basis of her former actions. The exact disagreements about the entries on this list of person-making charac­ teristics are not relevant to the project of distinguishing personhood from personality. The decisive difference can be identified clearly enough by appeal to the following consideration: If two different human individuals A and B both fulfill the require­ ments on this list in a sufficient way, then one can say that the property of personhood applies equally to both A and B. This will be true irrespective of the possibility that A and B might have qualified for the status of personhood in different ways. An example to illustrate this point is the following: There are different ways of passing an exam, but whoever fulfills the necessary requirements acquires the status of ‘exam passer’, irrespective of the specific (permitted) ways in which he or she has managed to pass the required threshold. In this sense, ‘personhood’ signifies a universal status, which numerically distinct individuals can instantiate as an identical property. The concept of ‘personality’ comes into play, if we further ask ourselves, what the difference between the way in which A realizes his or her personhood and the way in which B does this consists in. ‘Personality’ signifies the fact that each human person gives a unique shape to his or her life as a person through actions, decisions and atti­ tudes of her own. This individual feature, which we usually see as an accomplishment of the respective person, as his or her individual way of leading a personal life, is what the term ‘personality’ is meant to express. To come to terms with the complexity that a human individual’s life normally exhibits, it is important not to understand a human’s personality as a static feature which cannot alter. Quite the opposite: it is part of our conception of personality that is developed in reaction to and in interaction with the challenges of life. The more this development can be understood as this individual’s own way of ‘getting along’ or ‘getting through’, the more the result is taken to be his or her own (or authentic) personality. (iii) Related concepts such as ‘temperament’, ‘trait’ or ‘character’ cannot be strictly separated terminologically from the term ‘personality’. While ‘temperament’, in its contemporary use, can be understood as a pre-given starting condition that can only be changed by the individual to a limited degree, there are vastly diverging ter­ minological positions with regard to the use of ‘character’ and ‘personality’: in some

2.24 Personality 

 375

accounts, personality is seen as an invariant precondition for the individual lifestyle of a person, while ‘character’ signifies what a human person makes out of this pre­ condition in his or her striving for autonomy, authenticity and the search for meaning in life. Other authors use the terms in exactly the opposite way (Kupperman 1991). Since both ‘personality’ and ‘character’ can be used in descriptive and evaluative ways and since both are at least to some degree technical terms in the sense that they are ‘theory-laden’, it seems impossible to arrive at an easy settlement of this issue. It is important to be aware of the difference, but whether one wants to label one aspect ‘personality’ and the other ‘character’ or vice versa cannot be determined conclusively by semantical or etymological facts. These terminological disagreements are, unsurprising, given the fact that the English term ‘character’, has both a descriptive as well as an evaluative meaning — just like the term ‘personality’. The history of the term ‘character’ can even be traced back to two different etymological roots, depending on which use one is looking for. On the one hand, its origin is the Greek χαρακτήρ (charaktêr), which referred to the mark impressed on a coin and later to the properties that distinguished one thing, or one individual, from another. In its evaluative use, on the other hand, the term probably stems from the Greek ἀρετή (aretḗ; êthikai aretai), which could be trans­ lated as ‘ethical excellence’. ‘êthikai’ is thought to be related to ‘ethos’ [‘character’], which is sometimes explicitly translated as ‘moral character’. According to Aristotle, a good, or virtuous character always displays a balanced mean between an excess and a defect of certain properties, both of which would constitute a vice (Aristotle 1984, 1106b36–1107a3). Among other examples, the mean between the vices of cowardice and recklessness would be the virtue of courage, which can be seen as a distinguish­ ing mark of moral excellence or of good character.

Special Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction If personality is an expression of human individuality, which arises out of the active shaping of natural and social preconditions (such as temperament, bodily appear­ ance or social role expectations) as well as the handling of biographically relevant events (e.  g. illness or other strokes of fate), then it obviously has to be a category rel­ evant for autobiography/autofiction. The synthesis of preconditions and self-directed choices, as it is characteristic of the active human self-formation in the shape of a biography, features central elements of theatrical performance and autobiographical story telling (Velleman 2009). This notion of personality can be found in Johann Wolf­ gang von Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833) [Poetry and Truth] that treats the genre of autobiography as providing an account of an individual’s personality development according to his concept of the ‘Bildungsroman’ (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 166–174).

376 

 2 Categories

The rich descriptive psychological content of the category ‘personality’ (in con­ trast to the comparatively formal or abstract categories of ‘person’, ‘personhood’, or the term ‘I’) makes it particularly suitable for autobiographical self re-enactment and allows for the interpretation of the actions of complex characters as creation, preser­ vation or, in the case of failure, the destruction of the personal identity of a human person. The rich normative content of the attempt to acquire personal unity is closely related to the categories of autonomy, authenticity or integrity, which have become central norms of modernity (Taylor 1989, 1992). At the same time, the category of per­ sonality opens up the possibility to address the issue of the social origins of human individuals as well as the tension between biography and autobiography, between self-interpretation and interpretation by others, as well as between authentic and oth­ er-directed forms of existence.

Works Cited Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. 2 vols. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Dennett, Daniel. “Conditions of Personhood.” The Identities of Persons. Ed. Amélie Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Kupperman, Joel. Character. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Quante, Michael. Person. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2nd ed. 2012. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Taylor, Charles. Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Velleman, J. David. How we get along. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Zachar, Peter, and Robert F. Krueger. “Personality Disorder and Validity: A History of Controversy.” Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry. Ed. K. W. M. Fulford et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 889–910.

Further Reading American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Washington: American Psychiatric Publishing, 5th ed. 2013. Aristotle. Ethica Nicomachea. Ed. Ingram Bywater. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894, Reprint 1970. Baumeister, Roy F., and Leonard S. Newman. “How Stories Make Sense of Personal Experiences: Motives that Shape Autobiographical Narratives.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20 (1994): 676–690. Caprara, Gian Vittorio, and Daniel Cervone. Personality: Determinants, Dynamics, and Potentials. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Doris, John. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

2.24 Personality 

 377

Harman, Gilbert. “The Non-Existence of Character Traits.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 223–226. Haviland-Jones, Jeanette, David Boulifard, and Carol Magai. “Old-New Answers and New-Old Questions for Personality and Emotion: A Matter of Complexity.” Identity and Emotion: Development through Self-Organization. Ed. Harke A. Bosma and E. Saskia Kunnen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 151–171. John, Oliver P., ed. Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. New York: Guilford Press, 2008. Orsolya, Friedrich, and Michael Zichy, eds. Persönlichkeit. Münster: Mentis, 2014. Turner, John C., Katherine J. Reynolds, S. Alexander Haslam, and Kristine E. Veenstra. “Reconcep­ tualizing Personality: Producing Individuality by Defining the Personal Self.” Individuality and the Group: Advances in Social Identity. Ed. Tom Postmes and Jolanda Jetten. London: Sage, 2006. 11–36. Watson, Gary. “On the Primacy of Character.” Identity, Character, and Morality. Ed. Owen Flanagan and Amélie Rorty. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

2.25 Prosopopoeia Richard Block

Definition ‘Prosopopoeia’ (προσωποποιία) originates from the Greek prosopon (πρόσωπον, face) and poiein (ποιειν, to make). It is often used synonymously with ‘personification’ to describe giving speech to an absent person or to an object that has no speech, as in the following excerpt from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “Methinks I hear/ Antony call; I see him rouse himself/To praise my noble act. I hear him mock/The luck of Caesar…Husband, I come!” (5.2.283). The example is telling insofar as it also emphasizes that bringing the dead to speak implicates the one who gives voice to the dead or feigns another person speaking. For who truly is mocking Caesar’s luck? And at what price to Cleopatra does she give voice to Antony? For Paul de Man this specular structure determines all writing and reading, leading him to insist that any text “with a readable title page is to some extent autobiography” (1984, 76). Reading or writing oneself into a text is a condition of understanding. What constitutes meaning is what the writer or reader projects of herself onto the text so that the text comes to mirror to varying degrees of exactitude the psyche of the reader or writer. Autobiography merely interiorizes this specular structure in an attempt to make one’s name “as intelligible and memorable as a face” (de Man 1984, 76).

Explication Embedded in such discussions is the difficulty of distinguishing between the visual register, the face, and the linguistic register, meaning. Perhaps, only in Genesis  1, when God’s word and thing or image perfectly correspond does prosopopoeia bridge this chasm. (As de Man reminds us, “to the extent that language is figure (or metaphor, or prosopopoeia) it is indeed not the thing itself but the representation, the picture of the thing, and as such, it is silent, mute as pictures are mute” [de Man 1984, 80]). Arguably the Adamic language of Genesis  2, in which the name given by Adam is the thing, accomplishes this. But in a post-metaphysical epoch, or in keeping with the Biblical reference, in the time after Babel there exists or is no longer an absolute signified to halt the ceaseless transfer of one voice to another to align the face and meaning of the word. As such, the self, caught in a “whirlgig of speculative thought and transfer,” can never escape itself, and autobiography, which now describes every text (or no text at all), produces only a “succession of voiceless tropes” (de Man 1984, 80) and “demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totaliza­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-048

2.25 Prosopopoeia 

 379

tion (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions” (de Man 1984, 71). An instructive example is Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther [Young Werther’s Sorrows]. Undeniably, Werther has a lot of Goethe in him. His suicide testifies of a sort to the voicelessness of the tropes (for de Man language is only tropes) that would stand in for Goethe. Unless the author or the reader animates those tropes with her own voice, they remain life­ less remnants of a meaningless or inscrutable text. Disimissing the possibilities of autobiography as a distinct genre, de Man continues, “[t]he study of autobiography is caught in this double motion, the necessity or escape from the tropology of the subject and the equally inevitable reinscription of this necessity within a specular model of cognition” (de Man 1984, 73). Yet, without prosopopoeia, Hillis Miller argues, literature would be unthinkable: prosopopoeia “is the fundamental generative lin­ guistic act making a given story possible” (Miller 1990, 13). Literature is thus always underwritten by the act of giving face and/or voice to a dead or absent subject. The face or voice, were it to succeed, is always one’s own; everything is then autobiogra­ phy. But if all tropes are voiceless, nothing speaks for the subject: nothing is autobiographical.

Historical Aspects The ancients, however, understood prosopopoeia to be one trope among others and not, as de Man insists, “the very figure of the reader and of reading” (de Man 1986, 45), even if from a modern perspective the distinction is not as stable as presumed. In one of the earliest treatments of ancient ‘progymnasta’ or preliminary exercises, Adelus Theron explains that students were read aloud a passage which they were required to transcribe from memory. Next, successive exercises required students to compose an argument using ten rhetorical devices of which prosopopoeia was one (Kennedy 1986, 26–27). The taxonomic system that would distinguish between devices certainly invites a blurring of lines, such as one between ekphrasis and prosopopoeia. Recall the masks by Greek tragedians to signifiy “the inseparable connection between taking on the voice of the other and mourning […].With each utterance the voice announces that it is neither properly dead nor alive but somewhere in between” (Lukacher 1986, 90). The image brought forth by the tragedian is a death mask, signifying the fate of any language or transmissibility itself. For Ovid, it is the wall in his tale of Pyramus and Thisbe that comes to occupy this in-between space and make a path for the lovers’ voices (Ovid, Book 4). A crack in the wall animates and sets in motion a transference of voices allowing for declarations of love, but the crack in the wall signals the state of such a language that is dependent upon a wall to enable expres­ sions of love. The wall bars the presence of the signified. That language is always already fractured, leaving the lovers to mourn the death of their love the moment

380 

 2 Categories

it is expressed. (We should remember that the lovers’ words could pass through the wall safely as long as they were kept quiet. In other words, only in silence is there safety.) What de Man describes as the “latent threat of prosopopoeia” goes directly to the living who in giving voice to the dead are “struck dumb, frozen in their own death” (de Man 1984, 78). Cleopatra’s fate signaled as much. The myth of Orpheus presents the threat more graphically. After Orpheus is ripped to pieces for having refused to honor his previous patron Dionysus, his head and lyre continue to sing. The songs that carry his head to Lesbos, at least in some versions of the myth, and inspire erecting a shrine in his honor depend upon his dismemberment. The story of Pygmalion evinces another threat inherent in prosopopoeia, namely that the sculptor will mistake his own creation for real: “Pygmalion is so skillful an artist, skilled even in concealing his art from himself, that he is taken in by his own fabrication: it seems to him that Galatea must be a real girl” (Miller 1990, 7). Dante’s choice to write in the vernacular prompts him to defend his use of prosopopoiea, notably in chapter 25 of La Vita Nuova and provides insight into how the trope will come to be so slippery for Western modernity. As in La Divina Commedia, the work attempts to personify love, to create an actual substance by saying about Beatrice that which has never been said about anyone. Dante, however, adds a crucial caveat not found among the ancients; he insists that the poet has control over his use of the figure. That is to say, the poem must mirror the poet’s intentions; behind or beyond the rhetoric is what the poet really means to say. Moreover, as in this case, the poet must offer commentary to actualize the essence of the poem. In fact, the opening paragraph insists that only in this manner can substance be given to love, i.  e. through a conflation of writer, reader, subject, God, and Beatrice: In quella parte del libro della mia memoria dinanzi alla quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubric la quale dice Incipit Vita Nuova. Sotto la quale rubric lo trovo scripte le parole le quali e’ mio intendimento dássemplare in questo libello, e se non tutte, almeno la loro sententita [‘In that part of my book of my memory before which there is little to read is a rubric that says ‘Incipit Vita Nuova.’ Under such rubric I find written the words that is my intention to copy out in this little volume, and if not all of them, their basic substance’] (Dante, 1995, paragraph one).

Dante’s turn to the vernacular exhibits the inevitable defacement that inheres in prosopopoeia insofar as both its inadequacies and excesses are evinced by the need for commentary and interpretation. Prosopopoeia thus becomes both a master trope and one among many. The possible lack of alignment of its many parts, commentary and various poetic forms, threatens to make of this master trope one that appears in the guises of many others. This explains, at least in part, the difficulty of main­ taining the distinctions found in the exercises of the ancients. Note how Roland Barthes, for example, collapses the difference between prosopopoeia and apostrophe into a scene of abandonment, embracing rather than fearing de Man’s warning of being struck dumb, which for Barthes, at the very least, produces an articulation of

2.25 Prosopopoeia 

 381

such loss: “ABSENCE. Tout épisode de langage qui met en scène l’absence de l’objet aimé – quelles qu’en soient la cause et la durée – et tend à transformer cette absence en épreuve d’abandon” [“absence/absence. Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object…whatever its cause and its duration  – and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment”] (1977, 19 [1979, 13]), whereby “je, tourjours présent, ne se constitue qu‘ en face de toi, sans cesse absent” [“an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you” (1977, 19 [1979, 13]). This leads Barthes to insist upon making no attempt to possess the other: “Il faut que le vouloir-saisir cesse […]” [“The will to possess the other must cease”] (1977, 275 [1979, 232]). Writing in the seventeenth century, Edmund Spenser seems upon first reading to be only mildly aware of such dangers. In the Fairie Queen, he expresses his intention to render for eternity the face of the subject: “And thou, o fayrest Princesse under sky,/ In this fayre mirrhour maist behold thy face” (Spenser 2001, 158). The poem is the face in which the queen will see her true virtues mirrored. While Spenser lauds the ability of the verse to flatter or bring forth the queen’s virtues, his sacrifice is incom­ plete once the dedication to Lady Strange in “The Teares of the Muses” is considered: “I devised this last slender meanes […] that by honouring you they might know me, and by knowing me they might honour you” (Spenser 1989, 268). The question that emerges is just who is the author and who is the subject of the poem. Easily recognized is how the slippery parameters of any definition or use of prosopopoeia emerge from the impossibility of the dead actualizing themselves. Its hegemonic tendency leads to its impossible realization whereby all other rhetorical embellishments are markers of prosopopoeia’s failure. Stated otherwise, either the self misrecognizes itself in the object or commits a form of suicide to animate the object and allow for mistaking the object for the thing in itself. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray points to both possibilities: Dorian misrecognizes himself in Basil’s painting and the transference of life to the portrait necessitates defacing the misrecognized self or portrait, an act that brings about Dorian’s death. The alternative to suicide is disfigurement. William Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality (1807), known as well as the “Great Ode”, demonstrates how illusory the apparent success of giving a face to one’s past is. The poet bemoans the lost vision of his youth and seeks in the course of the ode to recover that part of himself now lost. While the poems ends with an affirma­ tion – “Hence in a season of calm weather/Though inland far we be,/Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea/Which brought us hither/Can in a moment travel thither,/ And see the Children sport upon the shore/And hear the mighty waters rolling ever­ more” (Wordsworth 1983, 1.16–170), the chiasm that transports souls back to child­ hood, (“hither/thither)” is a lie; the questions that conclude the first part of the ode – “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (56–57) never truly receive an answer. Only the poet speaks; the face he would give to the poem is mute. Samuel Coleridge’s criticism of the poem, likewise, recognizes the

382 

 2 Categories

failure of the poem to move anywhere outside of itself; the poet can make no more sense of a child’s world than could the child (Coleridge 1907, 213). Barthes’ insistence on abandoning any will to possess seems empty. If, as de Man insists and Wordsworth, for one, confirms, that everything or nothing is autobiogra­ phy, how does one depersonalize or disavow the voice given to the dead, how are such words anything other than the lineaments of the author’s death mask? Michael du Plessis’s experimental novel, The Memoirs of Jon Benet by Kathy Acker, offers a possible response in its especially radical use of prosopopoiea. In this instance, three figures – two of them already dead – could be said to author the next as easily as the text could be an account of any of their lives. “I don’t know who is writing these words, Jon Benet or Kathy Acker,” the author(s) concedes early on (5). One might just as easily retort that du Plessis is writing these words, save the novel is replete with citations from other published works (e.  g. Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood). The dead, therefore, are given a voice without author or authority. What emerges is a disinherited community in which no one is struck dumb and in which everyone is related with few but distinct degrees of separation. That, in turn, makes all its readers addressees of the prosopopoeia that serves as the novel’s dedication: “For all of those who have died in Colorado.”

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction With the increasing secularization of the West, prosopopoeia has come to describe the process by which all autobiography comes to be written. The author puts a face on a self or a part of her life to bring back to life that which has already passed or perhaps been buried. But that text, if we read with de Man, is nothing but a series of voicless tropes always inadequate to the text. For that reason all autobiography is an exercise in disfigurement or de-facement.

Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. Vita Nova. Ed. Guglielmo Gorni. Torino: Einaudi, 1996 [La Vita Nova. Ed. and trans. Dion S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 1995]. Barthes, Roland. Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977 [A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979]. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London: Clarendon Press, 1907. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 67–82. de Man, Paul. “Hypogram and Inscription.” The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 27–53. du Plessis, Michael. The Memoirs of Jon Benet by Kathy Acker. Los Angeles: Trench Art, 2012.

2.25 Prosopopoeia 

 383

Kennedy, George Alexander. Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill: University Press North Carolina, 1986. Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Miller, J. Hillis. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Ovid. The Metamorphis. Ed. and trans. George Sandys. London: William Stansby, 1626. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. John Wilders. London: Oxford University Press, 1995. Spenser, Edmund. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Ed. William Oram, Einar Bjorvand and Ronald Bond. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1989. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. London/New York: Longman, 2001. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Wordsworth, William. Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Further Reading Alighieri, Dante. Il Convivio. Ed. Maria Simonelli. Bologna: Casa Editrice Prof. Riccardo Pàtron, 1996. de Man, Paul. “Shelley Disfigured.” Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Seabury Press, A Continuum Book, 1979. 59–73. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 1994. Stimili, Davide. The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism. Albany: SUNY University Press, 2005.

2.26 Referentiality Regine Strätling

Definition Referentiality designates the condition, quality or state of being referential in the sense of indicating an object by means of a sign. 1) In the philosophy of language, linguistics, semiotics, and literary criticism, the term ‘referentiality’ is used to delimit the phenomenon of meaning and to explain the relation between language and an extra-linguistic object or state of affairs. It is applied to conceptualize various forms of how words and texts generate meaning by referring to ‘the world’, to concepts, and to other texts. 2) The compound term ‘self-referentiality’ is applied when a statement, text, or artwork refers to itself.

Explication: Historical and Conceptual Aspects While the term ‘referentiality’ became established only in the course of the twenti­ eth century, the debate surrounding how language – and also more specifically, lit­ erature and the arts – relate and refer to ‘the world’ can be traced back to ancient Greek thought. A locus classicus of European philosophy of language, Plato’s dia­ logue Κρατύλος [Cratylus], debates whether the adequacy of names and words can be grounded in their intrinsic relationship to the objects that they designate or whether these are based on convention. Since Greek antiquity, referentiality is also topical in poetic and aesthetic contexts, when art’s epistemological dimension and the function and limits of aesthetic imitation are debated under the banner of the term ‘mimesis’ (see Plato’s Πολιτεία [Politeia] and Aristotle’s Περὶ ποιητική [Peri poiêtikês (Poetics)]). Discussions about how art refers to an extra-artistic reality resonate to this day; their influence can be felt in aesthetic interrogations of the ‘truth content’ of art and they recently reappeared in the claim for an artistic epistemology and in the present dis­ cussion of the documentary in art. From the standpoint of conceptual history, ‘referentiality’ is related to the concept of reference, which entered the philosophy of language with Black’s translation of Frege’s Über Sinn und Bedeutung [Sense and Reference] (Frege 1892 [1948]). Frege con­ siders linguistic reference a ‘ternary configuration’ of sign, ‘Sinn’ [‘sense’ in Black’s translation] and ‘Bedeutung’ (which Black translates as ‘reference’ for the process or ‘referent’ for the object referred to). In this triad, ‘sense’ is an intersubjectively shared concept or thought represented by a proper name (word, expression) or a sentence; it operates to an extent as a mediation between the linguistic sign, on the one hand, and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-049

2.26 Referentiality 

 385

the extra-linguistic referent, on the other. Frege ties reference to the question of truth and existence, claiming that the referent of a declarative sentence is its “Wahrheits­ werth” [“truth value”] (Frege 1892, 34 [1948, 216]). Since Frege, especially in the logic of language, this tripartite conceptualization of the sign has been taken up with diverse terminology as well as varying emphasis and presuppositions (for an overview, see Devitt 1998; Whiteside 1987). In general, however, Frege’s distinction of the term that Black translates as ‘sense’ both from the linguistic sign and from the extra-linguistic object of reference has been sustained. During the first half of the twentieth century, reference theories were dominated by the assumption that the referent of a proper name is singled out by descriptions associated with that name (description theory). This view was criticized around 1970 based on the insight that one can successfully refer with a name even without attributing correct descriptions. ‘Causal theories’ pro­ posed an alternative model of reference according to which a name designates what­ ever is linked to it in an initial act of naming, a connection then passed on from one speaker to another through communicative exchanges (Kripke 1980). A question of particular relevance to literary criticism’s hermeneutical and generic debates that resulted from the triadic conceptualization of the sign is the status of expressions and sentences, which refer to something with no extra-linguistic exist­ ence. Frege argues that a sign may have ‘sense’ without pointing to an existing referent [‘Bedeutung’] – as it is the case in a work of art (Frege 1892, 33 [1948, 216]). A further step in the solution to this problem has been the shift in the philosophy of language from a semantic perspective to a pragmatic one, which takes the context of utterance into account (Strawson 1950; Searle 1969). Fiction in this view appears as a context of utterance different from the one of nonfiction prose where the reader assumes that whatever is referred to exists. Alongside these conceptual developments, literary criticism has developed various interpretive approaches to the referentiality of literary texts. Here, Saussurean linguistics  – which consider the sign as a binary entity composed of signifier and signified, overlooking the extra-linguistic referent as irrelevant (de Saussure 1916 [1983]) – has been far more dominant than the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language. De Saussure featured notably in the theories developed within the Prague School. In particular Jakobson’s model of communication became influential, which distin­ guishes between various linguistic functions and separates the poetic function as the “set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such” from other functions such as the referential function which pertains to the message’s denotation, to its “CONTEXT” (Jakobson 1960, 356, 353). Since the late 1950s, especially in France, the ramifications of linguistics and semiotics have been taken up in diverse disciplines, from ethnology to psychoanaly­ sis, from literary criticism to history and philosophy. The common point of departure of this semiotisation of cultural and psychic phenomena labelled as ‘structuralism’ is the rejection of the ‘vertical’ concept of meaning in favour of a ‘horizontal’ concept; meaning is no longer anchored in the reference of a sign or an utterance to the ‘world’

386 

 2 Categories

but generated through the difference of a sign from other signs. Following Jakobson and de Saussure among others, structuralist literary theory attempted to investigate the literary work of art as a complex of signs whose internal processes of signification should be interpreted without reference to an extra-literary reality or recourse to the figure of an individual author. Structuralism’s formalistic and generalizing approach came under growing criticism, however. In post-structuralism, the refutation of refer­ entiality aligns itself with a critique of the traditional disdain for the signifier for the sake of the signified. Derrida’s deconstructive analyses not only expose the illusion of positive réferénce. They show that processes of signification are neither static nor closed and that the author’s attempts to impose definite meaning are incessantly sub­ verted by uncontrollable processes of semiosis (Derrida 1967). The humanities’ linguistic turn has also affected theories of fictionality. Whereas theories of fiction in connection with studies of the novel tend to characterise fictional texts as ones in which the world appears under the condition “que soit suspendue la reference du discours descriptif” [“that the reference of the descriptive discourse is suspended”] (Ricoeur 1975, 278 [1977, 221]; Iser 1991), distinguishing them by this ­criterion from non-fictional texts, poststructualist critique of referentiality has led in the humanities to an emphasis of the rhetoricality and the constructivist dimension also of nonfiction, even scholarly prose.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Referentiality is a fundamental aspect of autobiography, as is evident in the term itself, designating the writing (γράφω, grapho) on the extra-linguistic reality of the life (βίος, bios) of an authorial subject by itself (αὐτός, autos). This reference to an extra-linguistic reality is generally assumed by both writers and readers as a precon­ dition of autobiography. From the recipient’s perspective, still today, it often leads to readings of autobiographies as ‘ego-documents’: sources which can offer clues to a historical reality. The assumption that autobiographic narration refers to existing people  – besides the author also to other individuals involved in the ‘real’ events told – implicates ethical concerns and happens to entail juridical consequences, when those depicted feel that their privacy is infringed. Before the term ‘referentiality’ was absorbed into the theory of autobiography, the concept featured in the categories of ‘truth’ and of ‘truthfulness’, as in e.  g. Shumaker’s definition of autobiography as the “professedly ‘truthful’ record of an individual” (Shumaker 1954, 106, see also Winter 1985). However, already in the first theoretical engagements with autobiographies during the emergence of the modern humanities, the notion arose that the truth of autobiographical self-interpretation is different from an objective portrayal of ‘reality’. Previously to the theoretical discussion, autobiographical practice itself had long been reflecting upon the question of referentiality. Rousseau frames his Confessions

2.26 Referentiality 

 387

(1782/1788) with a programmatic claim to unconditional truth, thus setting in motion a poetics of the autobiographical text’s uninterrupted reference to the authorial ‘I’ in terms of mimetic representation: “Je me suis montré tel que je fus” [“I have dis­ played myself as I was”] (Rousseau 1973, 33 [1954, 17]). Already in Rousseau’s case, however, the question of referentiality is complicated by scepticism about language’s capacity to portray the individual’s truth. Hence, he displaces the problem of truth from factual reference onto the medium of language itself – whose idiosyncratic use is supposed to allow authentic self-expression. In contrast, Goethe’s Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833) [From my Life: Poetry and Truth] severs the imperative of autobiographical truth from the claim to mimetic fidelity. Goethe elab­ orates a symbolic concept of truth that he considers superior to mere factual accu­ racy and indissociable from poetic creation. Yet another problematisation of autobi­ ographical referentiality can be found in texts where statements correspond to their authors’ biographical material but where the status of reference becomes ambivalent by the author’s attribution of the text to the genre of the novel, such as in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785–1790). Despite such inventive handling of referentiality in the autobiographical practice, the early research in autobiography concerned with generic aspects accorded pride of place to the premise of a truthful record of the author’s life. Still, depending on the respective research interests, different models of reference were developed, tied to a greater or lesser extent to a factual accuracy. Lejeune’s pragmatic theory of the ‘autobiographical pact’ (1975) brought a new perspective to the genre debate that was largely emancipated from the question of the text’s semantic correspondence to an extra-textual reality. Following Lejeune, a ‘pact’ based on the lexical category of the proper name assures the identity of author, narrator, and protagonist, allowing the reader to read a text as an autobiography: The writing ‘I’ and the written ‘I’ converge in the author’s proper name indicated in the paratext. Hence Lejeune’s argument displaces the question of referentiality to grammatical and pragmatic categories. It is explicitly relying on linguistics, although without direct import from the intensive debate in the philosophy of language con­ cerned with the reference of proper names. Lejeune’s theoretical proposal was not without its critics. Derrida’s work on auto­ biography, for instance, can be read as a deconstruction of the proper name which bears so much weight in Lejeune’s argument  – for even, or especially, the proper name is disconnected from the singular presence of an ‘I’ (Derrida 1984). According to Derrida, then, also paratexts like the proper name on the book jacket cannot form a bridge from the text to an extra-textual reality. De Man advances another influential counterposition to Lejeune’s view by chal­ lenging the very possibility that autobiography is a discrete genre. He argues that what makes us apprehend a text as an autobiography is not a privileged form of extra-tex­ tual referentiality but a question of rhetoric. Autobiography is a figure of discourse – a fiction which “in its own turn, acquires a degree of referential productivity”. Accord­

388 

 2 Categories

ing to de Man, the reference is mere illusion and “a correlation of the structure of the figure” (de Man 1979, 920). The gradual shift in research from referential readings toward analyses of autobio­ graphical writings’ mediality and performativity gained further momentum through new forms of autobiographical practice informed in their own turn by linguistics and semiotics. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977)], for instance, combines (post-)structuralist semiotics and autobio­ graphical reflexivity – an approach condensed in the question, “Ne sais je pas que, dans le champs du sujet, il n’y a pas de référent?” [“Do I not know that, in the field of the subject, there is no referent?”] (Barthes 1975, 61 [1977, 56]; see Eakin 1992). Post­ modern ‘new autobiographies’ reveal the identity and history of an ‘I’ as a discursive effect rather than the text’s origin. They blur the traditional lines between factual writing and obvious departures from ‘reality’ – without making the ‘context of utter­ ance’ explicit. The question of reference-effects of particular media has grown in scope through the recent scholarly interest in autobiographies relying on or integrating visual material. In this context, especially photographs in autobiographies pose the question whether the photographs “come to the rescue of autobiographical referentiality through the representation of the author’s body in the world, or […] undermine the integrity of referentiality through multiple or posed presentations” (Haverty Rugg 1997, 1). The question of referentiality continues to be posed also once the constructedness of any autobiography is recognized, and recent studies tend to establish a position, which considers the interaction of referentiality and textuality/mediality. Translation: James Redfield

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977]. Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies. L’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris: Galilée, 1984 [“Otobiographies. The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name.” Transl. Avital Ronell. In: The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. 1–38]. Devitt, Michael. “Reference.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. VIII. London/New York: Routledge, 1998. 153–164. Eakin, John. Touching the World. Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Frege, Gottlob. “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik NF 100 (1892): 25–50 [“On Sense and Reference.” Trans. Max Black. Philosophical Review 57.3 (1948): 207–230]. Haverty Rugg, Linda. Picturing Ourselves. Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

2.26 Referentiality 

 389

Iser, Wolfgang. Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics: Closing Statement.” Style in Language. Ed. Thomas Sebeok. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. 350–377. Kripke, Saul Aaron. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. 3–48 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” MLN 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Ricoeur, Paul. La métaphore vive. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [The Rule of Metaphor. Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977]. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Les Confesssions.” Œuvres complètes 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1959 [The Confessions. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953]. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot, 1916 [Course in General Linguistics. Trans. R. Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983]. Searle, John. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Shumaker, Wayne. English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Strawson, Peter Frederick. “On referring.” Mind 59 (1950): 320–344. Whiteside, Anna. “Theories of Reference.” On Referring in Literature. Ed. Anna Whiteside and Michael Issacharoff. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. 175–204. Winter, Helmut. Der Aussagewert von Selbstbiographien. Zum Status autobiographischer Urteile. Heidelberg: Winter, 1985.

Further Reading Achermann, Eric. “Von Fakten und Pakten. Referieren in fiktionalen und autobiographischen Texten.” Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. 23–53. Genette, Gérard. Fiction et Diction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991 [Fiction and Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993]. Linsky, Leonard. Referring. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. Schabacher, Gabriele. Topik der Referenz. Theorie der Autobiographie, die Funktion ‘Gattung’ und Roland Barthes’ ‘Über mich selbst’. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Whiteside, Anna, and Michael Issacharoff, eds. On Referring in Literature. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.

2.27 The ‘Self’

Michael Quante and Michael Kühler

Definition The question who a person is sometimes aims at a deeper understanding of the person than merely getting to know her name. Accordingly, when it comes to questions of autobiography and autofiction, the notion of the ‘self’ may initially be understood as a kind of umbrella term under which more specific understandings of who one is can be subsumed. Moreover, trying to define the concept of the ‘self’ leads one to a number of corresponding concepts, especially ‘personality’, ‘I’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘autonomy’, each of which belongs to the larger question of what it means to be a (specific and autonomous) person and all of which are best explained by their mutual interrelation. In this regard, the self features prominently in personal autonomy, i.  e. ‘self-government’. In order to be autonomous, one has to live according to convictions, values, desires, or motives that may count as expressions of one’s (authentic) ‘self’, i.  e. of who one truly is or wants to be. Approaches to explaining the notion of the ‘self’ can then roughly be divided into 1) subjectivist accounts, which point to individual traits of the specific person in question, 2) social-relational accounts, which point to a person’s social involvement and social interdependencies, and 3) narrative accounts, which highlight the idea that a person’s self is constituted by the stories we tell about who a person is.

Explication/Historical Aspects Subjectivist Accounts of the Self Existentialist Account A first subjectivist account is the existentialist account, according to which we create our (authentic) self through our radically free decisions and actions. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, our primary mode of existence as human beings consists of existen­ tial freedom (Sartre 1943, 559−711). This means that we are inevitably and continually forced to choose the attitude we want to adopt toward our life and to take responsi­ bility for living it in a specific manner, each time we make a decision. Ultimately, this entails that we are able to define and redefine our self each time anew through our choices and actions; hence Sartre’s slogan “l’existence précède l’essence” [“existence precedes essence”] (Sartre 1946, 29 [2007, 20]), i.  e. existential freedom precedes and creates the self. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-050

2.27 The ‘Self’ 

 391

Yet, it would be a mistake to assume that existential freedom leads to the idea of ‘anything goes’ when it comes to the constitution and definition of our self. Certain boundaries, e.  g. some of our bodily properties or our individual history, cannot simply be altered at will and, thus, have to be acknowledged as matters of fact. Accordingly, Sartre develops a twofold constitution of the self in that he distinguishes between facticity and transcendence. On the one hand, the notion of facticity refers to factors of our self that can be attributed to us from a third person point of view, e.  g. bodily properties, psychological traits, or individual history, and which cannot, at least for the most part, be altered at will. On the other hand, the concept of transcendence refers to the first person point of view. It depicts our (existential) practical capacity of not only being able to adopt a third person perspective toward ourselves and the traits of facticity, but also being able to adopt an engaged first person stance toward them. It is, thus, a practical ques­ tion of whether we choose to endorse or disapprove of these traits, thereby making them our own or disavowing them. Accordingly, our authentic self is comprised only of those traits of facticity that we have made our own from the practical first person point of view of transcendence. Given that we are constantly able to pose this prac­ tical question and to take a different stance toward our traits of facticity, we are also constantly able to define and redefine our authentic self. Put simply, according to the existentialist account we are constantly able to choose and create who we want to be. It has been argued against such an existentialist account of the self that the notion of existential freedom, which lies at its heart, is incoherent so that the corresponding notion of the self has to be rethought, as well. Lately, Charles Taylor and Harry G. Frankfurt (Taylor 1977a, 31−33; Frankfurt 1993, 109−110) have pointed out that if we were to be thought of as radically free in existentialist terms, we would not be able to make choices that could reasonably be attributed to ourselves or even to make any intelligible choice at all. For, if we were not already bound by any personal desires, values, or commitments, we would lack all personal criteria or reasons on which our choices could be based. This is so because we would have to choose all of these per­ sonal criteria and reasons in a radically free way, as well. Consequently, we would be completely disoriented about what choices to make. Instead of making radically free choices, it would simply be a matter of sheer luck and arbitrariness and would have nothing to do with us in any intelligible way. Given that our authentic self is thought to be the result of radically free choice, existentialist accounts, therefore, fail with regard to explaining the self of a specific person in a meaningful way, as well. Essentialist Account Following the above line of criticism, it has been noted that the Sartrean dictum puts the cart before the horse. Instead of existence preceding essence, it is a person’s essen­ tial nature or true self that has to take precedence. Not only are there factors of a per­ son’s self attributable to her from a third person perspective, but also the first person

392 

 2 Categories

perspective has to be understood as shaped by a personal essential nature, i.  e. a per­ son’s true self. Accordingly, the self is not a matter of active creation, but something that is passively given and may only be discovered. A current prominent proponent of such an essentialist account of the self is Harry G. Frankfurt (1994, 1999, 2004, and 2006). According to Frankfurt, our essential nature can be described primarily in volitional terms by pointing out what we most deeply care about (1999). Although feelings, emotions or value judgments may play a role, as well, caring about something essentially means that it is our will that is focused on the well-being of the specific thing or person in question. Moreover, we cannot simply decide to abandon what we care about. Any option that would go against the well-being of what we care about is not volitionally open to us. They are, in a prac­ tical way, “unthinkable” (Frankfurt 1988, 181), and any attempts to go against these “volitional necessities” (Frankfurt 1993, 110) remain ineffective. However, our ‘voli­ tional necessities’ do not simply represent psychological compulsions or addictions but rather have volitional authority in that we also identify with and endorse them. Neither can we muster the will to care about something else nor do we even want to care about something else. Even in the rare cases where we, indeed, desperately try to reject and change what we care about, this only leads to ambivalence or friction in our assessment of our self. It is, thus, the specific configuration of our will that shapes our essential nature or true self, and we are merely able to discover it by finding out what we cannot help caring about.

Social-relational Accounts of the Self Both subjectivist accounts of the self mentioned above rely solely on individual traits or capacities to define a person’s self. This, however, has been criticized as implausi­ bly neglecting the importance of social conditions and relations for the initial devel­ opment as well as for the ongoing constitution of the self. Social-relational accounts of the self, on the other hand, explicitly highlight the social context. First of all, following Frankfurt’s essentialist account, we might still be unsure about what exactly it is we care about. Charles Taylor (1977a, 35−42) has argued that in order to make precise sense of our mental and volitional attitudes they need to be articulated first, i.  e. they have to be interpreted and clearly defined. Yet, articulat­ ing them this way presupposes an adequate language, including value concepts and a narrative structure. Otherwise evaluative and coherent assessments would not be possible at all (Taylor 1977b). Both language and narrative rely, in turn, on a social foundation. Hence, when we try to articulate our authentic self, especially in terms of autobiography or autofiction, we can do so only within an adequate social setting, providing us with the conceptual, evaluative, and narrative means to constitute and express who we are. Consequently, our self is unavoidably and more or less directly shaped by our society and culture (Taylor 1989).

2.27 The ‘Self’ 

 393

However, articulating our self within a social setting may still contain a certain degree of openness and freedom. We may still ask ourselves, and others, whether we have articulated what we care about in the most appropriate way or whether there may be options for articulations which are still unheard of in our society (Taylor 1977a, 41−42). This seems to imply that we are, at least to some degree, capable of revising and redefining our articulations and, thus, our authentic self, just as existentialist accounts claim. However, it has been argued that society’s influence on the constitution of the self is more severe than merely providing tools for individual articulation (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000; Oshana 2006; Helm 2010; Kühler and Jelinek 2013). Based, for example, on works of George Herbert Mead (1934), it has been claimed that the initial devel­ opment as well as the ongoing constitution of the self is crucially a matter of social practice. Accordingly, the self is a product of social interaction. Mead’s basic idea is that we acquire our self primarily by internalizing social expectations and reactions to us. We see ourselves through the eyes of others. For Mead, this already becomes clear in the realm of children playing games, especially organized games like team sports, in which each player has to take on a specific role. Not only do the children have to play a specific role, but at the same time they also have to imaginatively take on all other roles in order to make sense of their own role and the game as a whole (Mead 1934, 151−154). Later on as adults, we again take on specific social roles and internalize the corresponding expectations, i.  e. what it means to be, for example, a teacher. The expectations and reactions are bundled together in what Mead called the “generalized other” and are internalized by us as the ‘me’ part of the self (1934, 152−164, 173−178). Opposed to the ‘me’ is the ‘I,’ which represents the individualistic and spontaneous part of our self when we react to the generalized other, i.  e. to certain social expecta­ tions and role definitions (Mead 1934, 173−178, 192−200, 209−213). Following this line of thought, the self may be seen as a form of internal dialogue or even struggle between different parts of the self, i.  e. the socially constituted ‘me’ and the individualist ‘I.’ While we have to come to terms with social expectations concerning our social roles through internalizing them via the ‘me,’ we also have to acknowledge and integrate our own individual reactions to them, i.  e. the ‘I,’ either by adapting the ‘I’ or by trying to change the ‘me,’ i.  e. ultimately the social definition of a specific social role. The latter case inevitably plays out in society because redefining a certain social role or creating a new one has to be acknowledged and sanctioned by society. Hence, developing and maintaining one’s self may be seen as a contin­ uous struggle for social recognition (see Mead 1934, 214−222; Taylor 1991, 40, 49−50; Honneth 1995, 92−139).

394 

 2 Categories

Narrative Accounts of the Self So far, all accounts discussed above include the assumption that we could somehow gain direct access to the self’s features, be they subjective or social-relational. However, this assumption is rejected by narrative accounts, which are of special importance for autobiography and autofiction. Following Taylor’s emphasis on the need for articulation, narrative accounts comprise the even stronger claim that the self is foremost nothing but a linguistic construction. More precisely, we construct the self in the form of narratives. Put simply, our self is nothing but the story which is told about who we are. One of the main current proponents of a narrative account of the self is Paul Ricoeur (1995, 140−168; see also MacIntyre 1981, 214−225; Taylor 1977b, 68−76, 1989, 25−52). In trying to answer the question of who someone is, Ricoeur firstly points to our immediate and intuitive attempt to tell a story about the person in question. This even holds true for the person herself. The identity of the story, therefore, features as a first step toward a person’s self. In this regard, it has to be noted that single aspects of a story do not have meaning on their own but gain their meaning only in relation to each other and to the story as a whole. Accordingly, if we want to make sense of single aspects or situations in our life, we have to incorporate them into a story, i.  e. we have to put them in a meaningful order and relate them to each other narratively. However, narrativity may be understood in a rather weak sense or may contain a stronger claim. Galen Strawson has pointed out that putting aspects and situations of a person’s life in a meaningful order does not necessarily mean telling a canonized form of story (2004, 439−443). Weaker versions of narrative accounts, therefore, only comprise the claim that some form of meaningful order has to be established with regard to the aspects and situations in question. This may be, but does not have to be done in form of a canonized story. In contrast, stronger versions of narrative accounts, like Ricoeur’s, claim just that. We need canonized forms of storytelling in order to construe a meaningful self. Accordingly, we also need an adequate social-relational context in which this may be done and from which the canonized forms of storytelling stem. Ricoeur goes on to refer to Aristotle’s Περὶ ποιητικῆς [Peri poiêtikês (Poetics)] when it comes to how life stories have to be construed. A story’s identity is conveyed to its main character, whose identity now functions as the second step to a person’s self. Together, the story and its main character have to display concordance or coherence. All aspects of the ‘life’ of the story’s main character, including discordances or con­ tingencies, have to be incorporated plausibly into the overall story, i.  e. in its overall configuration. This configuration then constitutes a concordant, as well as dynamic, identity of the story’s main character. Ricoeur’s third and final step toward a person’s self consists in the identification of the (real) person with the main character in the story. This means that we engage in a game of imagining certain variations of the story, including the main character’s iden­

2.27 The ‘Self’ 

 395

tity, and then identify with the main character thus narratively defined. Furthermore, as we are always aware of this game of imagination and of the possibility of narrative variations, Ricoeur claims that we may even gain new knowledge or a new awareness of our self. For, the varying stories may be seen as a way of active self-interpretation. This finally leads back to the question of how much influence we may have over the definition of our self. While existentialist accounts claim that we are completely free in creating our self, most other accounts have more or less explicitly granted at least a certain amount of individual freedom when it comes to discovering and inter­ preting our self, be it in the form of individual articulation, the ‘I’, or the question of who tells which story exactly. Hence, the question whether the self is (primarily) something we can create more or less freely or (secondly) something we can merely discover and interpret is still a highly contested one.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Given that autobiographies are not only intended to tell the story of one’s life but also to include the idea of giving a portrayal of one’s self, i.  e. providing an answer to the question who one is, the different accounts of the self sketched above would imply different criteria of what would count as an adequate way of answering this question. Existentialist accounts would claim that a portrayal of who one is primarily has to include one’s radical choices in order to depict one’s authentic self. In contrast, essentialist accounts would claim that one’s autobiography should first and foremost contain an accurate description of what one cares about. Moreover, following Tay­ lor’s complementation of Frankfurt’s essentialist account, one’s value concepts and articulations have to be included, as well. However, social-relational accounts would abandon this focus on one’s person alone and claim that an accurate depiction of one’s self would have to focus on one’s social roles instead. Still, existentialist, essentialist, and social-relational accounts can be regarded as similar insofar as they all make claims, albeit different ones, as to what content should be included in one’s autobiography, highlighting either one’s radical choices, or what one cares about, or the articulations of one’s values, or one’s social roles. Narrative accounts, on the other hand, not only resemble the formal idea of autobiography as one’s life story, but also claim that it is this story that constitutes one’s self in the first place. And while one’s narratively constituted self may well include references to one’s radical choices, to what one cares about, to one’s value articulations, or to one’s social roles, neither of these references could still be regarded as being more or less truthful, i.  e. being more or less accurate to what is actually the case with regard to one’s self. Instead, autobiographies themselves would count as narrative creations and constructions of one’s self, which, in turn, would explain their problematic rela­ tionship to the ideas of truth and truthfulness (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 41−57). If one’s

396 

 2 Categories

self were ultimately nothing but a narrative construction, there would simply be no self that would exist independently and that could be depicted more or less truly or truthfully.

Works Cited Frankfurt, Harry G. “Rationality and the Unthinkable.” The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 177–190. Frankfurt, Harry G. “On the Necessity of Ideals” (1993). Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 108–116. Frankfurt, Harry G. “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love” (1994). Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 129–141. Frankfurt, Harry G. “On Caring” (1999). Necessity, Volition, and Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 155–180. Frankfurt, Harry G. The Reasons of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Frankfurt, Harry G. Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Helm, Bennet W. Love, Friendship, & the Self. Intimacy, Identification, & the Social Nature of Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Kühler, Michael, and Nadja Jelinek, eds. Autonomy and the Self. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Mackenzie, Catriona, and Natalie Stoljar, eds. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Automony, Agency, and the Social Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934. Oshana, Marina. Personal Autonomy in Society. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Etre et le Néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943 [Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992]. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Existentialisme est un humanism. Paris: Nagel, 1946 [Existentialism Is a Humanism. Trans. Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007]. Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio (New Series) 17 (2004): 428–452. Taylor, Charles. “What Is Human Agency?” (1977) Philosophical Papers 1. Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 15–44 (Taylor 1977a). Taylor, Charles. “Self-Interpreting Animals” (1977). Philosophical Papers 1. Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 45–76 (Taylor 1977b). Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.

2.27 The ‘Self’ 

 397

Further Reading Christman, John. The Politics of Persons. Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gallagher, Shaun, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gallagher, Shaun, and Jonathan Shear, eds. Models of the Self. Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 1999. Henning, Tim. Person sein und Geschichten erzählen: Eine Studie über personale Autonomie und narrative Gründe. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Quante, Michael. Personales Leben und menschlicher Tod. Personale Identität als Prinzip der biomedizinischen Ethik. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Quante, Michael. Person. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. Quante, Michael. Personal Identity as a Principle of Biomedical Ethics. Basel: Springer International Publishing, 2017. Tugendhat, Ernst. Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination. Trans. Paul Stern. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

2.28 Sincerity

Annette Dufner and Michael Kühler

Definition Assertions are sincere if the utterer or author thereby seriously intends to convey facts or events accurately and according to the truth. The concept of sincerity is based on the assumption that the objective truth can sometimes be beyond the grasp of indi­ vidual agents and replaces the imperative of objective truthfulness with the impera­ tive of a subjective intention to convey only what one personally believes to be true. Oftentimes, the term is explained in contrast to the concepts of lying, deceiving or intentionally omitting relevant information – actions which are usually geared toward raising false beliefs in the hearer about the true mindset of the utterer. As a result, it is unsurprising that some authors would describe sincerity as a moral virtue. Aristotle, for example, thinks that truthfulness or sincerity is a mean between self-deprecation and boastfulness (Aristotle 2011, 1127b 3–31). The notion of sincerity can also be used to describe a person rather than a virtue or an individual utterance or action. In this sense, it is supposed to imply that a person is living in accordance with his or her genuine convictions. The idea of autobiographical sincerity is thus related to a cluster of concepts by appeal to which we grasp and articulate particular characteristics of the personal existence of human beings. Further central concepts in this family of terms include the terms ‘personality’, ‘person’, ‘the self’, or the ‘I’, as well as the con­ cepts of personal ‘autonomy’ and ‘authenticity’.

Explication/Historical Aspects The etymological root of the terms ‘sincerity’ and ‘sincere’ most likely go back to the Latin term ‘sincerus’, meaning clean, pure or sound. ‘Sincerus’ may also have meant ‘one growth’ from ‘sin-’ (one) and ‘crescere’ (to grow). In twentieth-century philosophy of language a ‘sincerity condition’ is essential to the principle of cooperation between speaker and hearer, which has become known as the ‘principle of charity’ (Davidson 1984). The principle of charity requires that hearers or readers assume the speaker’s or author’s sincerity and even largely the truth of what has been said, unless there are weighty reasons against this. The principle is supposed to avoid arbitrary mutual assumptions about the intentions of the participants in communication processes, which would destroy the reliability of linguistic meaning and the possibility of shared understanding. Since many assertions involve the expression of psychological states, the condition of sincerity requires that a speaker be in the psychological state that the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-051

2.28 Sincerity 

 399

speech act expresses, for example if the utterer says ‘it is raining’ he or she actually has to hold the belief that it is raining. First-person assertions about someone’s personality, character or authentic self are of particular interest in the present context, since a shared belief in the truth of these assertions may be a particularly powerful indicator for their objective truth, thereby producing a social construction of reality, as it has been debated by the protag­ onists of psychoanalysis, postmodernism and deconstructivism. The notion of sincer­ ity can be further described in contrast to the notions of lying, deceiving or intentional omissions of relevant information. It is important to point out that being insincere does not necessarily imply a lie (Williams 2002). The concept of deceit allows for the possibility of raising false beliefs in someone else by putting forth nothing but true sentences. Such a strategy utilizes certain false assumptions that the recipient of the information will most likely have, without, however, actively confirming these false assumptions. Likewise, the omission of relevant information can lead to false beliefs on behalf of the recipient without this false belief having gotten actively confirmed in the form of a lie. It is often argued by philosophical ethicists that at least literal lying is morally wrong on the grounds that it instrumentalizes the other person and destroys the reliability of the instrument of language (Kant 1996). It is a matter of long-standing philosophical debate how to distinguish a sincere subjective belief from the actual truth. The difficulty of arriving at an answer has cer­ tainly lead to the development of the concept of sincerity which in some ways seems to represent a substitute to the more objective concept of truth. One leading theory in response to this question is the correspondence theory of truth, according to which the propositional belief in question has to refer in some way to particular facts in the world. It is a matter of debate, however, how further to describe the presupposed relationship of reference between linguistic meaning and facts in the world. A further account of the nature of truth is represented by the so-called coherence theory of truth, according to which the truth of particular propositions depends on whether they can get integrated into a system of further propositions in a coherent way. This requires the larger scope of an entire system of propositions in order to determine the truth of particular claims. A final truth theory that is relevant in the context of autobiographies is the so-called consensus theory, according to which the truth of particular propositions depends on whether relevant experts agree about the claims in question (Künne 2003).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Autobiographies are sometimes assumed to reveal historical realities in a purely ref­ erential way. At the same time, though, they have to be taken to convey the subjective position of the author. The facts, as they are reported, are inevitably the result of sub­

400 

 2 Categories

jective judgments and recollective arbitrariness. As a result, many autobiographies, especially from earlier centuries, begin with an initial promise to be sincere. If an author is in principle incapable of describing the objective truth, so the rationale goes, then at least, he or she should try to be sincere (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 41–43). Even the assumption of sincerity as a general element of autobiographies might not fully capture the nature of this genre, though. It seems to overlook further functions of auto­ biographies, such as providing justifications for problematic actions and decisions or simply aesthetic pleasure. The tension between referential descriptions and literary constructions of the life of the author is the fundamental characteristic of autobiog­ raphies and has given rise to playful hybrids such as autofictional novels or entirely fictional autobiographies. Moreover, the idea of being sincere when writing one’s autobiography becomes even more multifaceted when it comes to narrative accounts of the self, i.  e. the claim that one’s self is constituted by the story we tell about our life  – a claim which is fairly self-suggesting when it comes to autobiography. Given that autobiographies are not only intended to tell the story of one’s life but also to include the idea of giving a portray of one’s self, i.  e. providing an answer to the question of who one is, one’s autobiography would, thus, itself be the constituent of one’s self rather than just giving a more or less accurate or sincere portrayal of it. However, if the intention of sincerity consists in conveying only what one personally believes to be true, and if there is no independent truth about one’s self but only the story we tell about it, which itself is shaped by social and cultural conventions, it seems to be impossible to write one’s autobiography ‘sincerely’ in the above sense. Hence, not only the notion of truth but also the notion of sincerity seems to pose fundamental problems with regard to autobiography.

Works Cited Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Ed. and trans. Terence Irwin. Cambridge: Hackett, 2011. Bywater, Ingram, ed. Aristotelis Ethica Nichomachea. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894. Reprint 1970. Davidson, Donald. “Radical Interpretation.” Repr. in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. 125–139. Kant, Immanuel. “Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen.” Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. 635–643 [“On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philantrophy.” Practical Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]. Künne, Wolfgang. Conceptions of Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Williams, Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

2.28 Sincerity 

 401

Further Reading Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Austin, John. How to do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Aquinas, Thomas. “Question 110: Lying.” Summa Theologiae (II.II), 41: Virtues of Justice in the Human Community. Ed. T. C. O’Brien. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972, c. 1271. Augustine. “On Lying” and “Against Lying.” Saint Augustine: Treatises on Various Subjects. Ed. Roy Deferrari. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1952. 51–110. 121–179. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. Ed. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller. Albany: State University Press of New York, 1987. 124–142. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Sämtliche Werke. Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit. Vol. I/14. Ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller. Frankfurt a.  M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986. Grice, Paul. “Meaning.” The Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 377–388. Habermas, Jürgen. “Erläuterungen zum Begriff des kommunikativen Handelns” (1982). Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. 571–606. Kirkham, Richard. Theories of Truth. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2001. Searle, John, and Daniel Vanderveken. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Taylor, Chloe. The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’. New York: Routledge, 2008. Williams, Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

2.29 Subjectivity Dieter Thomä

Definition The term ‘subjectivity’ appears in three variants. The colloquial reference to the sub­ jectivity of judgments alludes to the particular flavour of a person’s utterances, opin­ ions, or expressions. This talk is often pejorative: People complain about a person’s idiosyncrasy, blame persons for being imprisoned or absorbed in their subjectivity, and insist on the objectivity of facts. This variant of subjectivity also comes in a more appealing form, e.  g. in the praise of aesthetic subjectivity or a poet’s whim. The limitation of this first variant becomes obvious when one thinks of the fact that any statement is inherently subjective in the sense that it is made by a subject. There is no object without a subject. Subjectivity figures as a fundamental feature of knowledge, intentionality, and sense-making in general. Kant has this second variant of subjectivity in mind when he states that “Das: Ich denke, muß alle meine Vorstel­ lungen begleiten können” [“the I think must be able to accompany all my representa­ tions”] (Kant 1981, vol. III, 136 [1998, 246]). The third variant is neither linked to the subjectivity of speech-acts nor to the fundamental notion of subjecthood, but to the content of speech or, generally speak­ ing, to the subject-matter of self-comprehension. When a person speaks about herself, she may be eager to sketch a self-portrait that amounts to an image of what her sub­ jectivity is all about. Hegel addresses this third variant as the “innere Subjektivität des ­Charakters” [“inner subjectivity of character”], unfolding as the “Fortgang und Verlauf einer großen Seele, ihre innere Entwicklung, das Gemälde ihres […] Kampfes mit den Umständen, Verhältnissen und Folgen” [“progress and history of a great soul, its inner development, the picture of its (…) struggle against circumstances, events, and their consequences”] (Hegel 1970, vol. XIII, 341, vol. XV, 564–565 [1975, 263, 1230]).

Explication Subjectivity and the Autobiographical Triad In order to transpose these findings into the autobiographical framework, one first needs to get hold of the ‘personnel’ employed in this particular setting and to iden­ tify their respective roles. Schematically speaking, it is possible to distinguish three different players: (a) the narrator of a story or, more generally, the author of a text; (b) the main character, leading actor or protagonist; (c) the person that the protagonist https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-052

2.29 Subjectivity 

 403

is meant to impersonate. This framework has been called the autobiographical triad (Thomä 1998, 25–26; for a different scheme, which combines author, narrator and pro­ tagonist and accounts for the obtrusiveness of reality by linking the author to the “real person,” see Lejeune 1989, 4–7). In the autobiographical setting, the relation between narrator and protagonist, which in narratology is called “autodiegetic” (Genette 1980, 245), is completed – and complicated! – by the additional requirements that the pro­ tagonist’s life relates to the life of the (historical, real) person concerned and that the narrator is not just an ‘I’ appearing in the text but, again, an actual writer. Autofiction circumvents some of these complications by questioning and playing with the link between protagonist and living person. Roughly speaking, the division of labour or the distribution of roles in the auto­ biographical triad reflects the three different meanings of subjectivity introduced in section one. The “self-fashioning” (Greenblatt 1980), the creative practice of the author connects to the first variant of subjectivity. That the protagonist’s profile resembles the third variant of subjectivity is confirmed by the double meaning of ‘character’, which stands both for an actor or literary figure and for a personality or the “qualitative iden­ tity” of a person. Last but not least, the protagonist refers to the “numerical identity” of exactly this one person, whose life is to be told: This person represents the second variant of subjectivity. (For the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity, see Strawson 2003, 33–34, 69–70; Ricoeur 1992, 115–122.) The alignment between the three variants of subjectivity and the autobiograph­ ical triad needs to be handled with care. Beyond applying his subjective ‘touch,’ the author may pursue other goals, he may want to reassure himself about his past. Beyond having a ‘character’ in the sense of ‘inner subjectivity’, the protagonist may get lost in a stream of experiences. Beyond being the indexical reference point of a narrative and the bearer of self-consciousness, the person may follow her own sub­ stantial agenda. These reservations do not invalidate the partition of different roles and responsibilities. They are due to the fact that the boundaries between the three figures are permeable. This does not come as a surprise as they represent different aspects of the same human being.

Patterns of Subjectivity: Sincerity, Authenticity, Creativity The following paragraphs will expand on the heuristic value of the autobiographical triad and explore three showcases of subjectivity. The relation between author and person stands under the sign of sincerity, the relation between protagonist and person under the sign of authenticity, the relation between author and protagonist under the sign of creativity. Sincerity: Ever since Trilling’s seminal book Sincerity and Authenticity, sincer­ ity has been a canonical component of the autobiographical repertoire. An author is sincere if he aims at the “unmediated exhibition of the self, presumably with the

404 

 2 Categories

intention of being true to it” (Trilling 1972, 9). Sincerity is primarily a moral virtue warranting “the absence of dissimulation or feigning or pretence” (Trilling 1972, 13). It does not comprise the author’s dedication to fathom the abyssal depths of his exist­ ence. Sincerity applies much less to the quality of a text than to the quality of its producer, the quality of speech-acts as actual acts. A person does something and then s/he goes on and tells the truth about it or about herself. The moral commitment of a sincere author leads back to his being a person. An important premise for the language-game of sincerity consists in the fact that this ‘being a person’ does not strike the author as being problematic or enigmatic. S/He knows what s/he has done, s/he is willing to confess. But what if s/he were asked the question of who s/he is? An author committed to sincerity would not really know how to live up to this challenge except for the fact that s/he could clumsily recount his ventures and adventures. A hidden prerequisite of sincerity is a person’s being uncon­ cerned about herself. The question of who s/he is just does not occur to her or him for the very reason that s/he already knows the answer to this question: An answer that is deemed to be simple. Only if a person has a firm position in the social fabric, only if s/he does not change fundamentally over time, does a sequence of sincere statements pass for a conceivable account of a life, an account that does not provoke the question of why, for heaven’s sake, s/he has done this and that. The person ideally qualified for being sincere is the saint: a saint has firm convic­ tions and consistently lives according to these convictions. It does not matter whether a story told by him or her goes ten years back or is very recent. S/He stays the same; s/ he barely is in need of an autobiography (Gumbrecht 1979). It should not go unnoticed though that the achievement of consistency often emerges from an ardent struggle with a former life: the life of a sinner. Augustine’s Confessions speak volumes about this genealogy (Freccero 1986, 16–18). It has been just stated that the sincerity of an author traces back to a primordial knowledge: the knowledge of a person who knows what s/he has done and where s/ he belongs. There is still more to be said about sincerity as a feature of autobiograph­ ical writing. It comes to the fore when the discussion turns to the difference between honesty and sincerity. So far this chapter has depicted sincerity in a way that blurs this difference. As mentioned above, a sincere person, like an honest person, is willing to disclose what s/he has done. Sincerity takes a step further when it comes to the task of not just retelling things that happened but of increasing self-awareness. As opposed to the merely honest person, a sincere person needs to be curious. S/he wants to figure out how she really feels about being abandoned or seduced, s/he does not know that beforehand. As long as this effort is based on the belief that such knowledge is accessi­ ble even if hidden or buried in a stack of memories, the framework of sincerity remains stable. Self-knowledge may not be readily available, but it can be reached in principle. The author redirects all his efforts back to the person s/he is. Michel de Montaigne’s Essais are a marvellous, ground-breaking example for this coincidence of sincerity and curiosity.

2.29 Subjectivity 

 405

One cannot leave aside a feature of sincerity that has escaped our attention so far. Sincerity is unthinkable without an addressee. A person is called upon to be sincere when he or she acts as a witness in a trial or when s/he confides to a friend. Here the argument touches upon an important feature of the autobiographical subject in general: the fact that its self-concern oscillates between self-absorption and the longing for interaction. When it comes to sincerity itself, people excel in the willingness to speak out, yet in a strangely indiscriminate manner. If being sincere is their main concern, they just tell how they are, they do not care about the content of our confessions. Persons are sincere about anything, they convey a neutralized mass of information. Thus a sincere person can appear to play a detached, lofty role. Society requires of us that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we actually are what we want our community to know we are. In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgment may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic (Trilling 1972, 10–11).

Authenticity: In this last quotation authenticity is introduced as sincerity’s true con­ tender. Trilling goes on by stating that “the word ‘authenticity’ […] suggest[s] a more strenuous moral experience than ‘sincerity’ does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in” (Trilling 1972, 11). The basic premise of authenticity is the experience of the self missing: persons do not know who they really are. According to Kierkegaard and Heidegger inauthenticity antecedes authenticity. An author may still try to faithfully record past events, yet he is haunted by the feeling that these records about contingent facts do not amount to a proper self-image. By consulting the person as his ‘alter ego’, the author cannot really figure out who he is. He is bound to the task of reconstructing a proper self-image. Fulfilling this task is an achievement in its own right: the author presents the protagonist as the true person­ ification of a person. This major shift becomes abundantly clear in an early educational novel, which is also a clandestine autobiography: Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz, published 1785–1786. It should be mentioned that Moritz also was the editor and chief author of Gnothi sauton, a journal of “experiential psychology“, whose issues were published between 1783 and 1793 (ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde). In his novel, Moritz cuts the link between the person and the author and transfers the quest for identity into the narrative realm itself: [Es] war […] nötig, dass gleichsam alle die Fäden abgeschnitten wurden, die seine Aufmerk­ samkeit immer an das Momentane, Alltägliche und Zerstückte desselben hefteten […]. Wer auf sein vergangnes Leben aufmerksam wird, der glaubt zuerst oft nichts als Zwecklosigkeit, abge­ rissne Fäden, Verwirrung, Nacht und Dunkelheit zu sehen; je mehr sich aber sein Blick darauf heftet, desto mehr verschwindet die Dunkelheit, die Zwecklosigkeit verliert sich allmählich, die abgerissnen Fäden knüpfen sich wieder an, das Untereinandergeworfene und Verwirrte ordnet

406 

 2 Categories

sich – und das Misstönende löst sich unvermerkt in Harmonie und Wohlklang auf. […] Und dies waren die glücklichsten Momente seines Lebens, wo sein eigenes Dasein erst anfing, ihn zu interessieren, weil er es in einem gewissen Zusammenhange, und nicht einzeln und zerstückt betrachtete. [It was necessary that all the threads, so to say, should be cut off which fastened his attention on what was momentary, everyday and fragmentary (…). A man surveying his past life is at first inclined to see in it mere aimlessness, broken threads, confusion, night and darkness; but as he fixes his gaze more closely, the darkness vanishes, the aimlessness gradually disappears, the broken threads rejoin, order appears in place of confusion and disorder, and discord is resolved into harmonious melody. (…) These were the happiest moments of his life, when his own exist­ ence began to interest him, because he looked at it as a connected whole and not as a series of single and detached events] (Moritz 1987, 82, 106, 393 [1996, 81, 107, 404]).

The self is reassembled by the author in order to provide the reassuring experience of a life beyond fragmentation, of a life embedded in history (Taylor 1989; 1992). Authen­ ticity is the mark of the protagonist’s life or its pretension. This pretension is obviously debatable: The coherence attributed to the protagonist may be phony, it may turn out to be an order artfully erected on the shambles of life. Autobiography may become a cover-up story. The claim that the protagonist stands in for a person and is entitled to ‘reality’ is mainly founded in a purely internal feature of the narrative: the purported integrality, the all-encompassing coherence of a self-image, the refined view of the life of a soul, of an “internal ocean” (Emerson 1983, 272; see Kateb 1992) or an “inter­ nal space” (Trilling 1972, 24). (For an “effet de réel” [“reality effect”] functioning in a totally different manner, namely as an occasional, strategic allusion to “reality,” see Barthes 1968 [1986].) Within the paradigm of authenticity, the autobiographical author plays an impor­ tant role, yet it is the role of a servant whose major skill consists in the ability to reveal himself or herself. This task is famously ambiguous, as a revelation can be an appear­ ance of something formerly unheard of as well as a remembrance of things past. This ambiguity is due to the fact that the relation between protagonist and person can be read in two directions. I can aim at drawing a self-image that makes me become who I am. Or I can claim that I will truly find myself when only digging deep enough. But how do I know, while digging, that I have reached the bottom of my heart? Does my heart have such a bottom at all? Creativity: An author who is at odds with the role of the servant reminds himself or herself of his or her creative powers and seeks to resurrect them. S/He takes issue with a presupposition central to the paradigm of authenticity: that my self is not at my disposal and not really malleable. The champions of authenticity do take different stances when it comes to their own (re-)constructive effort. But even when embracing this effort, they prefer disclosure over creation. Without any reference to something given, the whole idea of authenticity would collapse. The disempowered, disconcerted author objects to this view by raising two different arguments. S/He ends up replacing authentic self-discovery by creative self-invention.

2.29 Subjectivity 

 407

The first argument radicalizes a view already voiced in the discourse on authen­ ticity. If read as a role-model rather than a mere replica of the person concerned, the protagonist gains independence from historical facticity. When taking the step from authenticity to creativity, this independence is newly explained as an achievement of the author. If living a life comes close to ‘making up’ a life, autobiography transforms into autofiction. The second argument in this plea for creativity takes a different road. It does not turn to the protagonist but reaffirms the author’s own sovereignty as an artist unbound. S/He presents herself/himself as a figure that excels in the capacity to act freely: a capacity that he secretly borrows or rips off from the autonomous agent. Historically speaking, this link is corroborated by the fact that Friedrich Schlegel’s romanticism, an outstanding example for autobiographical creativity, is a direct off­ spring of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s idealism (Izenberg 1992, 101–138). Some literary authors may use their creative powers in order to better control their brainchildren. They may crave for the latters’ submission in order to zealously congratulate themselves on their omnipotence. This power-game does not work in autobiography, as the protagonist is the ‘alter ego’ of the author. The creativity of the latter instigates the animation of the former. Autobiography becomes a showcase for freedom. Dependency is negated, facticity is revoked. The stages of life are read as a series of steps leading from the past to the present, and further on to the future, with each step representing a nucleus of freedom or a new beginning. Under the sign of creativity, the movement of the autobiographical narrative and the development of an individual life virtually coincide (Rorty 1989). This parallelisation is deceptive for a very simple reason. An autobiographer may want to depict an on-going self-invention, but the temporal trajectory of a life being lived and of a life being narrated are inversely related. It is fathomable that auctorial creativity and practical agency merge at the threshold to the future, but autobiograph­ ical self-invention cannot help but turn backwards. It comes after the fact, thus the creativity attributed to the protagonist is impaired. If authenticity is called into ques­ tion for its reliance on historicity, creativity is called into question for its liquidation of the past. Kierkegaard notes: Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglaends. Men derover glemmer man den anden Saetning, at det maa leves forlaends. Hvilken Saetning, jo meer den gjennemtaenkes, netop ender med, at Livet i Timeligheden aldrig ret bliver forstaaeligt, netop fordi jeg intet Øieblik kan faae fuldelig Ro til at indtage Stillingen: baglaends. [Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause – that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take a stance – backward] (Kierkegaard 2001, 194 [2000, 12]).

408 

 2 Categories

Sincerity, authenticity, and creativity are patterns of autobiographical subjectivity that come with their own merits and shortcomings. The analysis of these patterns does not serve the purpose of discarding one or two. It is meant to help understand the intricacies of a literary form that, all-too readily, is taken as just another version of the ‘life-form’ of humans itself. “Am Ende ist die lebendige Geschichte gar keine Geschichte” [“The living history is ultimately no history at all”], says Robert Musil (1983, 1077 [1990, 118; transl. altered]) – and it is no story either.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. “L’Effet de réel.” Communications 11 (1969): 84–89 [“The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. 141–148]. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays & Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983. Freccero, John. “Autobiography and Narrative.” Reconstructing Individualism. Ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. 16–29. Genette, Gérard. “Discours du récit.” Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. 65–282 [Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980]. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “Die Identität des Heiligen als Produkt ihrer Infragestellung.” Identität. Poetik und Hermeneutik. Vol. VIII. Ed. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle. München: Fink, 1979. 704–708. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Werke. Vol. XIII–XV. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1970 [Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Vol. I/II. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975]. Izenberg, Gerald N. Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787–1802. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Werke. Vol. III/IV. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch­ gesellschaft, 1981 [Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]. Kateb, George. The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Kierkegaard, Søren. Skrifter. Vol. XVIII. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2001 [The Essential Kierkegaard. Ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna S. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000]. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul J. Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 2008 [Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel. Trans. John R. Russell. Columbia: Camden House, 1996]. Musil, Robert. Gesammelte Werke. Essays und Reden – Kritik. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983 [Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses. Trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1990]. Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990 [Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blarney. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, 1992]. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Strawson, Peter F. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London/New York: Routledge, 2003.

2.29 Subjectivity 

 409

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Thomä, Dieter. Erzähle dich selbst. Lebensgeschichte als philosophisches Problem. München: Beck, 1998. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Further Reading Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Heller, Thomas C., Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery, eds. Reconstructing Individualism: ­Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. Marquard, Odo, and Karlheinz Stierle, eds. Identität. Poetik und Hermeneutik. Vol. VIII. München: Fink, 1979. Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1985.

2.30 Time and Space Anne Fleig

Definition Time and space determine literary narrative in their mutual interrelatedness. Mikhail Bakhtin was the first to draw attention to this correlation, terming it ‘chronotope’. In his essay dating from 1937/1938, “Форми времени и хронотопа в романе” [“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”], Bakhtin argues that the inseparable connection between time and space is the essential property of literary narration. The term ‘chronotope’ designates the ‘thickening’ of time in space, as well as the “взаимосвязь временных и пространственных отношений, художественно освоенных в литературе” [“mutual relation of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”] (Bakhtin 1975, 234 [1996, 84]). Bakhtin’s concept aims at a dynamic understanding of literature and genre that is capable of taking historical change into account. It is thus linked to Kant, who pioneered the notion of time and space as the ordering structures behind human experience. None­ theless, there has been a long tradition of attaching far more significance to time than to space in literary studies: Lessing’s Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766) [Laocoon: an Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1853)], with its definition of literature as an art form characterized by its relationship to temporality, proved profoundly influential in that it established a permanent focus on temporal structures. Bakhtin’s case for the relevance of constructions of space for narrative texts can thus be understood as an early contribution to what came to be known as the ‘spatial turn’ from the 1980s onwards.

Explication The conception of time and space has a bearing not only on questions of literary rep­ resentation within a given text, but also on its respective context and reception. The question raised by Augustine in his Confessiones – “quid est ergo tempus?” [“What is time then?”] (Augustine 1961, 238 [1961, 239]) – cannot be answered: as opposed to space, time is not amenable to unmediated perception. Rather, the specific nexus of time and space necessarily precedes perception. As Kant argues in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/1787) [Critique of Pure Reason (1838)], time and space not only con­ stitute the object of human cognition: they are simultaneously its precondition and determine its structure. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Einstein developed the concept of spacetime as part of his theory of relativity, arguing that time is con­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-053

2.30 Time and Space 

 411

text-dependent. Within literary studies, Bakhtin’s blueprint of the chronotope draws on Einstein’s theories. The term merges the Greek χρόνος (chrónos, time) and τόπος (tópos, space) so that “в […] хронотопе имеет место слияние пространственных и временных примет в осмысленном и конкретном целом” [“In the (…) chrono­ tope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, con­ crete whole”] (Bakhtin 1975, 235 [1996, 84]). It thus becomes possible to examine the space-time-configurations in various genres of the novel, genres that can then be dif­ ferentiated and contextualized within their historico-cultural background. The specific link between time and space can affect different dimensions of lit­ erary texts; it organizes the plot and constitutes a literary setting or story space, but it also shapes feelings, memories, or dreams. On a fundamental level, the concrete meaning of a certain spatial expanse has to be distinguished from a metaphorical or symbolic concept of space. In addition, the chronotope is not restricted to the intra­ textual time-space-relations: it is just as significant for the perception of time and space where production and reception are concerned, precluding naive readings of literary texts as mirror images of their historical context (Frank and Mahlke 2008, 207). Building on Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, Susan Stanford Friedman’s concept of the spatialization of narrative texts proposes an interpretation of space-time-relations on two separate axes: the (horizontal) axis of the text and the (vertical) axis of the interchange between author and reader (Stanford Friedman 1993, 14). The advantage of this concept lies in the fact that the social, cultural and historical factors that influ­ ence the interpretation of texts are taken into consideration. The decisions which assign a text to a certain genre are also part of the context of a literary work. Lejeune in particular has pointed out that production and reception are especially important in autobiographical texts, as they raise the decisive question of the relationship between fiction and reality. The chronotopic perspective emphasizes the connections between society, culture and the writing self, which manifests itself not least in the appropriation of certain spaces. A plurality of spaces corresponds to a plurality of discourses and a plural­ ity of perspectives negotiating issues of power and dominance (Bergland 1994). This is particularly true in relation to gender and ethnicity. In this context, the question arises whether Western European concepts of autobiography are applicable to autobi­ ographical texts of non-European origin. Various examples of transcultural autobio­ graphical writing (Adetayo 2005; Ette 2005) cast doubt on the notion of a literary self that is embedded in a clearly delineated national or cultural space.

Historical Aspects Since the eighteenth century at the latest, the humanities have associated time with concepts of progress and linearity which imply a development from premodern,

412 

 2 Categories

cyclical notions of time to the sense of acceleration that is the hallmark of moder­ nity. In contrast, the current debate on deceleration makes it clear that time is a topic of central importance in contemporary societies. The significance of spaces for the processes that shape our sense of belonging and community was noted early on in the history of sociology by Georg Simmel (1992 [1908], 1995a [1903], 1995b [1903]). The conviction that space as a basic paradigm of cultural studies is indispensable in literary and historical analysis has asserted itself in the wake of the spatial turn since the 1980s. Inquiries that demonstrate the close interwovenness of time and space by examining parallels in the use of the two concepts became increasingly important (Schlögel 2003; Bachmann-Medick 2010). In the field of the genuine spatial sciences such as geography and anthropology, naturalistic conceptions of space as a mere physical reality were increasingly criticized. Relations of power and gender within society became crucial fields of inquiry, resulting in a development of critical concep­ tions of space that emphasized the way in which these relations shape concepts of social spaces and the participation therein (Ardener 1981; McDowell and Sharp 1997). In the wake of works dealing with spatial issues by Foucault and Bourdieu (Dünne and Günzel 2006), social sciences and Cultural Studies have adapted a relational concept of space. Sigrid Weigel’s suggestion to designate the spatial turn as a ‘topographical turn’ (Weigel 2002) also derives from an awareness of the social constructedness of space. In the meantime, space has become the topic of numerous publications in lit­ erary studies, dealing with spaces of remembrance and knowledge (Assmann 1999), concepts of movement and the body, or with paratexts (Hallet and Neumann 2009). In this context, admonishing voices have already posited the danger of a “Hypostasi­ erung der Raumvorstellung” [‘hypostatization of the concept of space’] (Ritzer 2012, 19). Given the strong bias toward linear personality development prevalent in auto­ biographical research in the humanities, chronotopic perspectives have remained largely unacknowledged. Time and space as categories of analysis do not figure in the genre’s foundational texts (see the collections edited by Olney [1980] and Niggl [1998]). With an eye on André Gide’s works, Lejeune discusses what he calls ‘autobio­ graphical space’ – a term conceptualized as the creation of a characteristic self-image for the reader via the “‘mise en jeu’ des textes les plus divers” [‘interplay within the wide range of texts’] (1975, 172) composed by the author in his or her lifetime (1989, 26–28). Within literary studies, the analysis of space remains an approach rarely pursued in autobiographical research to this day; Frédéric Regard’s Mapping the Self. Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography (2003) has to be mentioned here as one of the few surveys in existence. In a similar vein to Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace (1974) [The Production of Space (1974)], Regard suggests envisioning the auto­ biographical self as embedded in representations of space, spatial practice and spaces of representation (2003, 21). Dedicated to the systematic linking of autobiography and spatial theory, the anthologies edited by Pamela Moss (2001) and Andreas Bähr, Peter

2.30 Time and Space 

 413

Burschel and Gabriele Jancke (2007) from the fields of history and geoscience deserve special mention.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Representations of the self in autobiographical texts are inextricably linked to the con­ struction of time and space. As Norbert Elias emphasizes, a “specific time experience” (Elias 2007, 111) forms an integral part of human existence in all cultures and societies. The connectedness of self-representations with the construction of time and space is a constituent feature of autobiographical writing: space cannot be conceptualized without movement. In autobiographical texts, spaces always stand in relation to the moving self. For Bakhtin, space thus becomes a dynamic variable inevitably deter­ mined by temporality. Bakhtin argues that the representation of a character’s journey through life in (auto)biographical texts from classical antiquity involves a completely new concept of time – an innovation that ultimately comes to full fruition in the Euro­ pean novel with its focus on personality development. In doing so, he distinguishes between the interior chronotope, the “время-пространсво изображаемой жизни” [“time-space of their represented life”], and the “внешний реальный хронотоп, в котором совершается это изображение своей или чужой жизни как гражданскиполитический акт публичного прославления или самоотчета” [“exterior real-life chronotope in which the representation of one’s own or someone else’s life is realized either as verbal praise of a civic-political act or as an account of the self”] (Bakhtin 1975, 282 [1996, 131]). In order to be able to present it in the form of a text, authors structure their own past in temporal and spatial terms, thereby making the significance of time and space for the autobiographical text in question obvious. In this context, it should be kept in mind that while the narrating and the narrated self are identical in Lejeune’s terms, they are situated on different temporal, spatial and systematic levels. The texts in which the authors sketch, shape and stage their specific self are brought into being by the interplay between these levels. At the same time, the engagement with constella­ tions of time and space creates an increased awareness of the fact that autobiograph­ ical texts are not only concerned with things past. In fact, the autobiographical self moves on the border between the past and the present; therefore, autobiographical texts will always enable conclusions pertaining to the time of their composition. Within autobiographical research, the relevance of spatial structures for autobio­ graphical self-construction has first and foremost been noted by postcolonial, trans­ cultural and gender-critical approaches. All these fields of study share a concern with the position from which the autobiographical self is articulated, and with the ques­ tioning of existing authorities that frequently goes along with this process. Whereas traditional autobiographical research understands the self in terms of a temporal

414 

 2 Categories

development, the perspectives mentioned above establish the fundamental impor­ tance of spatial conditions as factors that shape the autobiographical self. Space is thus examined as one’s material surroundings, as an “embodiment” of the self, as a social construction or as a symbol (Watson 2007, 19). The finding that traditions of autobiographical writing exist in the most diverse of cultures serves as a starting point for Postcolonial Studies; the objective is then to unmask the universal, autonomous and self-conscious subject as a Eurocentric construction, and to draw attention to the relationality of autobiographical writing. Based on Bakhtin’s concept of the chrono­ tope, postcolonial approaches have emphasized the relationship between culture and self-conception by examining the “temporal and spatial arenas” (Bergland 1994, 80) occupied by the autobiographical self. The chronotope can successfully address the complexity of interwoven structures because it is capable of reflecting historical change, as well as changes in writing that break with established traditions. As genres, both the novel and autobiography are thus characterized by a marked openness. Translation: Martin Bleisteiner

Works Cited Adetayo, Alabi. Telling our Stories. Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies. New York et al.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ardener, Shirley, ed. Women and Space. Ground Rules and Social Maps. London: Croom Helm, 1981. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck, 1999. Augustine. Confessions. 2 vols. Trans. William Watts. London: Wilhelm Heinemann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. “Spatial Turn.” Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 4th ed. 2010. 284–328. Бахтин, Михаил. “Форми времени и хронотопа в романе. Очерки по исторической поэтике.“ Вопросы литературы и эстетики. Исследования разных лет. Москва: Художественная литература, 1975. 234–407 [“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” The Dialogic Imagination – Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 84–258]. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Chronotopos. Trans. Michael Dewey. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. Bähr, Andreas, Peter Burschel, and Gabriele Jancke, eds. Räume des Selbst. Selbstzeugnisforschung transkulturell. Köln: Böhlau, 2007. Bergland, Betty Ann. “Representing Ethnicity in Autobiography: Narratives of Opposition.” The Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 67–93. Dünne, Jörg, and Stephan Günzel, eds. Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Elias, Norbert. An Essay on Time. The Collected Works of Norbert Elias. Vol. IX. Ed. Steven Loyal and Stephen Mennell. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007. Ette, Ottmar. ZwischenWeltenSchreiben. Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz. Berlin: Kadmos, 2005.

2.30 Time and Space 

 415

Frank, Michael C., and Kirsten Mahlke. “Nachwort.” Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Chronotopos. Trans. Michael Dewey. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. 201–242. Hallet, Wolfgang, and Birgit Neumann, eds. Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literatur­ wissenschaften und der Spatial Turn. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. McDowell, Linda, and Joanne P. Sharp, eds. Space, Gender, Knowledge. Feminist Readings. London/ New York: Edward Arnold, 1997. Moss, Pamela, ed. Placing Autobiography in Geography. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Niggl, Günter, ed. Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung (1989). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed. 1998. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Regard, Frédéric. “Topologies of the Self: Space and Life-Writing.” Mapping the Self. Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography. Saint Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint Étienne, 2003. 15–30. Ritzer, Monika. “Poetiken räumlicher Anschauung.” Literarische Räume. Architekturen, Ordnungen, Medien. Ed. Martin Huber, Christine Lubkoll, Steffen Martus and Yvonne Wübben. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2012. 19–37. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Space.” The living handbook of narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn, J. Christoph Meister, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. http:// www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/space (15 November 2017). Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit – Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. München: Hanser, 2003. Stanford Friedman, Susan. “Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative.” Narrative 1.1 (1993): 12–23. Simmel, Georg. “Der Raum und die räumlichen Ordnungen der Gesellschaft.” Soziologie. Unter­ suchun­gen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1992. 687–790. Simmel, Georg. “Soziologie des Raumes.” Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. 132–183 (Simmel 1995a). Simmel, Georg. “Über räumliche Projektionen socialer Formen.” Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. 201–220 (Simmel 1995b). Watson, Julia. “The Spaces of Autobiographical Narrative.” Räume des Selbst. Selbstzeugnisforschung transkulturell. Ed. Andreas Bähr, Peter Burschel and Gabriele Jancke. Köln: Böhlau, 2007. 13–25. Weigel, Sigrid. “Zum topographical turn. Kartographie, Topographie und Raumkonzepte in den Kulturwissenschaften.” KulturPoetik 2.2 (2002): 151–165.

Further Reading Allan, Stuart. “‘When discourse is torn from reality’: Bakhtin and the Principle of Chronotopicity.” Mikhail Bakhtin. Vol. II. Ed. Michael Gardiner, London: Sage, 2003. 121–143. Dennerlein, Katrin. Narratologie des Raumes. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Hooks, Bell. Belonging. A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009. Lehnert, Gertrud, ed. Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011.

2.31 Topics of Autobiography/Autofiction Gabriele Linke

Definition In many systematic overviews on autobiography, such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s (2010), the word ‘topic’ does not appear as a key term. If it comes up at all, it is usually not employed as an analytical category with its own definition but rather in its common meaning of ‘subject of a text’ and connected with “narratives of” grief, illness, addiction and the like (Smith and Watson 2010, 128). In publica­ tions as, for example, the Encyclopedia of Life Writing, the terms ‘subject’ (Jolly 2001, 603, 617) and ‘theme’ (xxix) are used as near-synonyms, with the latter appearing to refer to slightly more general issues. In general, ‘theme’ and ‘subject’ are well-estab­ lished literary terms, while ‘topic’ is not. As a literary term, ‘theme’ denotes a “salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment of its subject-matter” and is described in abstract terms, whereas the subject of a text “is described concretely in terms of its action” (Baldick 2004, 258). In other contexts, ‘subject’ is defined as “the topic of a discourse” and ‘theme’ as a “general topic of a text or group of texts” (Oxford Reference 2013). Further complications arise from the overlapping in meaning of the term ‘topic’ with the concepts ‘genre’ and ‘topos’.

Explication Genres have been central for the classification of autobiographical texts so far. They have also been defined at different levels of specificity, and autobiography as such has been labelled a genre. While some conceptions of genre focus consistently on the formal, structural and medial aspects of texts to delineate genres such as diary and oral history, other authors also covered contents, as in ‘prison narrative’ and ‘war memoir’ (Smith and Watson 2010, 253–286), which renders genre similar to topic. Fur­ thermore, topics, like genres (Smith and Watson 2010, 253), can be understood as evolving templates of life narratives that mix and mutate all the time, never allowing the system to close. Although any systematic overview on topics will mainly rely on contents, inevitably, some categories will coincide with content-based genre concep­ tions. The second concept that is semantically related to topic is ‘topos’. ‘Topoi’ are standard forms of rhetorical argumentation that evolved in antiquity. In Greek and Roman antiquity, funeral laudations and orations of defence at court as well as auto/ biographies relied on a rhetorical inventory of ‘argumenta a persona’, arguments https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-054

2.31 Topics of Autobiography/Autofiction 

 417

taken from the life of the person to be defended, praised or mourned. Such – flexible – catalogues of topoi for orations and writing about a person’s life encompass charac­ teristics such as names, birth and genealogy, gender, nation, physical and mental characteristics, education, fortune, activities and deeds, including travel and other achievements (Goldmann 1994, 662). Furthermore, the use of such topoi links the per­ son’s life with his/her historically specific environment and marks socially relevant points (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 109–110). These topoi for the narration of a person’s life have since then provided the basis for, and found their reflection in, the topics and the genres of autobiography.

Historical Aspects Stefan Goldmann (1994, 669) argues that since antiquity, the topoi of a person’s life story have served to preserve human knowledge and help bridge gaps in memory. He goes as far as suggesting that the mythology of Heracles has provided the matrix of autobiographical childhood narratives and of any self-presentation as a hero and bringer of civilisation (1994, 670–671). Although mythological life narratives and the various lists of rhetorical topoi have provided a repertoire of biographical elements that are still recurring, autobiographical texts at different times and in different cul­ tures show significant shifts in the selection, emphasis and combination of topoi, topics and genres. With regard to topics, both continuity and innovation are evident, as Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf has illustrated for German autobiography (2005, 118– 210). The shifts in form and focus are determined by a variety of factors, from dom­ inant philosophical, political and literary ideas through the media available to the individual’s creativity.

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction At the most abstract level, topics of life narratives are the writer/speaker’s Self and his or her life, memories, experiences, and perceptions of other persons and of the world. Philippe Lejeune (1989, 4) and Harold Rosen (1998, 12), for example, define autobiog­ raphy by claiming that the accent of the story is on the author-narrator’s own life and existence, and that this life is represented through constructions of past events and experiences. Lejeune’s claims that the topic must be “principalement la vie individu­ elle” [“primarily individual life”] (1975, 138 [1989, 5]), and that it is necessary that the “genesis of the personality” shapes the main narrative are relevant for the definition of autobiography but are, nevertheless, problematic. While, for example, Muriel Spark follows the developmental model by stating that she wanted to give “a picture of [her] formation as a creative writer” (2009, 14), other autobiographers are not primarily

418 

 2 Categories

interested in giving an account of their own development; rather, they foreground personal observations of the exterior world, as happens in memoir, travel writing, ethnographical and ecological life writing. Furthermore, it is impossible to write one’s own life without inscribing in it other persons’ lives since “no person is an island complete of itself” (Stanley 1992, 10). Auto­ biographical writing is usually also biographical, but the degree to which the Self or other people take centre stage varies, and both sides are tightly interlocked, as, for example, in David Ellis’ Memoirs of a Leavisite (2013). Some autobiographers program­ matically emphasise the exemplary character of their lives – exemplary of a social class, religion, generation or any group with a particular shared experience, as Charan Gill does when he declares that his story is “no different” from that of other immi­ grants from Punjab to the UK (2006, 2). Such references to the collective for which the autobiographer claims to stand give the Self as the topic of autobiography an addi­ tional representational dimension and render the group’s experience an implicit topic of the narrative. Phases of life: As long-established topoi, childhood and other particular phases of life often function as topics in autobiographies. The most common ones are certainly childhood, adolescence and coming of age, but other, even short phases of a life may also become topics. Many autobiographical texts do not cover a whole life time. At more concrete levels, the list of possible topics of autobiography is open-ended; the boundaries and relationships between topics are fuzzy, and any autobiographical text may have a general theme or themes but also touch upon several more specific topics, with topics changing throughout the narrative. Therefore, only some major groups of topics will be discussed here. Genealogy and family: One set of topics that can be found in most autobiographies deals with familial and other social and emotional relations. Some autobiographers start with genealogy and family history, others develop their story along their quest to find their family and discover their ancestry. Adoption narratives (e.  g. Kay 2010; McGee-Sippel 2009) stand out for their explicit focus on the establishment of famil­ ial relations and ancestry. Furthermore, both intergenerational relations between, for example, mother and daughter, and relations with persons of the same generation such as siblings, friends or rivals may form main or subordinate topics of life narra­ tives. Genealogy and familial relations have been topics (and topoi) of autobiograph­ ical writing from the very beginning. Body: As a topic, the body as the material form of the Self is almost completely absent in some life narratives but the central concern of others. In traditional mas­ culinist (heroic) narratives of individual growth, for example, the body may be the seat of growing strength and endurance or of suffering in times of crisis, and have a metaphorical function. In contemporary life writing about cancer, HIV and other dis­ eases, observations about the I’s body are a central element. Body-centred life narra­ tives have also been written by persons with disabilities (Couser 2009) and addictions. Body weight is the core concern in writings about anorexia and obesity, as in the ‘fat

2.31 Topics of Autobiography/Autofiction 

 419

memoir’ (Lindner 2011). The physical and psychological experiences of rape as well as sexual, physical and emotional abuse have been a topic of so many autobiographies that it almost established a trend in the early 2000s (e.  g. Briscoe 2006). The body is also a crucial topic in narratives of the search for a sexual identity. Consequently, in many body-centred life narratives, taboos about sexual and other organs and bodily functions are violated and intimate details made public. As G. Thomas Couser (2001) argues with regard to illness narratives, writings about specific medical and bodily conditions do not only deal with crisis and marginalization, but are embedded in wider cultural discourses and invested with – often metaphorical – cultural mean­ ings. They can be concretisations of more abstract themes such as the celebration of personal resilience, agency or self-help, or of a critique of social and sexual inequal­ ities, norms and institutions, of which M. K. Gandhi’s early autobiographical writing (1982 [1927–1929]) is an example. Body-centred life writing, and writing about illness, disability, rape and abuse in particular, was rare before 1950 but has flourished since the 1980s, alongside public discourses on women’s bodies, HIV, disabilities etc. War: War is another well-established topic of life writing, reaching back to antiq­ uity. In the twentieth century, the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War were major subjects of war writing and produced a wealth of diaries, memoirs, letters etc., but earlier as well as more recent wars have also been the subject of autobio­ graphical activity. The sub-topics of military life writing vary from ordinary soldiers’ descriptions of daily military life through the experience of battle, injury and intern­ ment as prisoner of war to military commanders’ memories of strategic decision making and military politics. However, war may also be the subject of memories by deserters and conscientious objectors, nurses and any civilians, which means that war as an all-encompassing historical event allows an infinite number of sub-topics, from wartime work to stories of rape and trauma, with survival being a major concern at a more abstract level. Captivity: Closely connected with war is the topic of captivity, that is, of a life that is forcibly enclosed or imprisoned by institutions or other persons. Writing about capture and captivity has a long and varied history, with prime examples such as Mary Rowlandson’s account of her Indian captivity in colonial America (1682) or slave nar­ ratives, and it continues in modern-day life writing on the captivity of hostages, pris­ oners of war and other internees. Experiences of prison life may vary much, depend­ ing on the country, era, kind of offence (criminal or political) etc. Traumatic Jewish experiences during the Holocaust, with its hiding places, ghettoes and concentration camps, has been a relevant sub-topic. Memories of captivity are often tied in with more abstract themes such as survival, guilt, betrayal, and reconciliation. That trauma has become a topic in self life writing (Vice 2001) is crucial insofar as attempts to voice the unspeakable are a way of coming to terms with mental and physical injuries and of giving testimony to crimes against humanity. Although the Jewish experience of suffering and trauma during the Holocaust has been pivotal to the field, autobiogra­ phers from other groups have also written of trauma and genocide. Furthermore, the

420 

 2 Categories

pain of confinement may play a role in life narratives by persons who were locked into convents, educational or mental institutions against their will. Trans-culturality: Another group of topics in life narratives may be subsumed under the concept of trans-culturality, which, as a result of encounters with other, ‘foreign’, cultures, may have shaped the lives of travellers, explorers, migrants, ref­ ugees, exiles, displaced persons, ethnic minorities and cosmopolitans. Observations on ‘alien’ people, practices, languages, institutions and landscapes are one form of writing across cultures, but usually interactions with other cultures – be they confron­ tational, cooperative or erratic – and the impact of those interactions are at the centre of autobiographical narratives. A peculiar type of trans-cultural life writing is made up by narratives of passing (especially from one ethnic or ‘racial’ identity to another) and of identity experiments in which a person temporarily assumes a different identity to explore what life is like for the other group (e.  g. Griffin 2011 [1960]). Work: Work is a major topic of autobiographical writing not only by professionals such as doctors and nurses, lawyers, judges, journalists, businessmen, actors and musicians but also, especially in the twentieth century, by industrial and agricultural workers, miners, farmers, seamen etc. Narratives of working lives are often not only stories of individual achievement within a vocational group but also contributions to social history, especially when their subject is the historical transformation of mate­ rial culture, technology, and the ways of working and living. Truthfulness and authenticity as topics: Some autobiographers devote parts of their writing to their search for, and attitude to, truth and authenticity, and their method of re-constructing their life, as does, for example, Muriel Spark when she elaborates on her methods of verifying her own recollections (2009, 11–14). Such self-reflexive elements are expressions of the referentiality peculiar to autobiogra­ phy. Topoi of reference, that is, the autobiographers’ – rhetorical – assertions of their truthfulness, honesty and authenticity (Schabacher 2007, 352), are constitutive of the genre but come in a many different forms, such as the use of names, pronouns and photographs. Although the basic topoi of autobiographical narratives have been recurring since antiquity, the topics of autobiographical texts have continually diversified, particu­ larly since the nineteenth century and wide-spread literacy. Autobiography studies may describe and interpret both continuities and innovations. A further systematic inspection of the main and subordinate topics in a life narrative may offer itself as a step towards a better understanding of the structural models employed in the narra­ tive, of its genre(s) and the text’s historical and ethical implications. Although ‘topic’ is a vague and commonsensical word rather than a technical term with a clearly defined meaning, its application can support analytical as well as classificatory work on autobiography.

2.31 Topics of Autobiography/Autofiction 

 421

Works Cited Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 2004. Briscoe, Constance. Ugly. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006. Ellis, David. Memoirs of a Leavisite: The Decline and Fall of Cambridge English. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Couser, G. Thomas. “The Body and Life Writing.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. I. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 121–123. Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Gandhi, M. K. An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–1929). Trans. Mahadev Desai. London: Penguin, 1982. Gill, Charan. Tikka Look at Me Now. Charan Gill: The Autobiography. Edinburgh: Black and White Publishing, 2006. Goldmann, Stefan. “Topos und Erinnerung: Rahmenbedingungen der Autobiographie.” Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. DFG-Symposion 1992. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1994. 660–675. Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me (1960). San Antonio: Wings Press, 2011. Jolly, Margaretta, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. 2 vols. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. Kay, Jackie. Red Dust Road. London: Picador, 2010. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]. Linder, Kathryn E. “The Fat Memoir as Autopathography: Self-Representations of Embodied Fatness.” Auto/Biography Studies 26.2 (2011): 219–237. McGee-Sippel, Lorraine. Hey Mum, What’s a Half-Caste? Broome: Magabala, 2009. Oxford Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. oxfordreference.com (15 August 2014). Rosen, Harold. Speaking from Memory: A Guide to Autobiographical Acts and Practices. Stoke on Trent: Trentham, 1998. Schabacher, Gabriele. Topik der Referenz: Theorie der Autobiographie, die Funktion ‘Gattung’ und Roland Barthes’ ‚Über mich selbst‘. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010. Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography. Manchester: Carcanet, 2009. Stanley, Liz. The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Autobiography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Vice, Sue. “Holocaust Writings.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. I. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 437–439. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.

Further Reading Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. DiBattista, Maria, and Emily O. Wittman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

422 

 2 Categories

Douglas, Kate. Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Freadman, Richard, and John Gatt-Rutter. “Introduction: Life Writing and the Generations.” Auto/ Biography Studies 19.1–2 (2004): 1–9. Hipchen, Emily, and Jill Deans. “Introduction: Adoption Life Writing: Origins and Other Ghosts.” Auto/Biography Studies 18.2 (2003): 163–170. Jensen, Meg, and Jane Jordan, eds. Life Writing: The Spirit of an Age and the State of the Art. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.

2.32 Trauma

Michaela Holdenried

Definition Psychotraumatology defines ‘trauma’ as vitales Diskrepanzerlebnis zwischen bedrohlichen Situationsfaktoren und den individuellen Bewältigungsmöglichkeiten, das mit Gefühlen von Hilflosigkeit und schutzloser Preisgabe ein­ hergeht und so eine dauerhafte Erschütterung von Selbst- und Weltverständnis bewirkt [‘vital experience of discrepancy between threatening situational factors and the individual capacity to deal with them, associated with feelings of helplessness and defenceless surren­ der, effecting a permanent breakdown of the understanding of self and the world’] (Fischer and Riedesser 1999, 79).

Recent trauma research exceeds the Greek ‘trauma’ – referred to in Freud’s interpre­ tations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) – etymologically a physical lesion in the clinical sense. Cathy Caruth clarifies: “the term trauma is understood as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (1996, 3). A cognitive reaction is not possible in a traumatic situation, instead a “Furchtstruktur” [‘fear structure’] (Neuner et al. 2009, 306) is activated, setting a “Verteidigungskaskade” [‘defence cascade’] (2009, 314) in motion, which can lead to dissociation. Dissociation means an ­ lockade […]. extreme psychic reaction, “eine zunehmende funktionelle sensorische B Gleichzeitig kommt es zu einer Lähmung der Willkürmuskulatur und zu einer Unfähig­ keit, Sprache angemessen zu produzieren und zu verarbeiten” [‘an increasingly func­ tional sensory blockade (…). At the same time a paralysis of voluntary motor motion and an inability to adequately produce and process language’] (2009, 314). Caruth from this situation of abandonment extrapolates a kind of ‘echo’ as part of the trauma complex, which more recent trauma research is investigating as posttraumatic stress disorder: “In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming expe­ rience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth 1996, 314).

Explication The effects and symptoms associated with traumata, whether singular or repeated occurrences, shell shock, accidents, torture, civil war experiences, sexual abuse, the experience of 9/11 and paradigmatically surviving the holocaust, are essentially https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-055

424 

 2 Categories

always the same: in the autobiographical memory lacunae are formed, the experience is stored in fragments and is intrusively repeated through so-called triggers – swamp­ ing with unwanted memories, flashbacks, nightmares. The indirectness of the experience and the repetition compulsion constitute the traumatic complex which, according to Caruth and Freud, can be described as attempts “to grasp the paradoxical relation between survival and consciousness” (Caruth 1996, 61). These echo effects can lead to a re-traumatization. The sensory, cognitive, emotional and physiological re-experiencing of a traumatic situation rep­ resents the core of PTSD (Neuner et al. 2009, 305). In accordance with modern neurobiological insights, Caruth has recorded that traumatic re-experience holds an enormous autodestructive potential, leading to the paradoxical situation of suicide even though the traumatized person is secure. She speaks of “survivors of Vietnam or of concentration camps, who commit suicide only after they have found themselves completeley in safety“ (1996, 63). Trauma as crisis when threatened with death corresponds with a crisis of survival, which, before Caruth, William G. Niederland has described as ‘survivor syndrome’. Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, in American trauma research, embedded trauma experiences in the wider setting of Jewish history, not only in respect of Freud’s bio­ graphical experiences of displacement and exile in the context of his trauma research, but also in respect of the traumatic Jewish history. According to Caruth (1996, 71), “the theory of trauma contains within it the core of the trauma of a larger history”. Freud’s trauma theory has historical references where he, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, refers to the treatment of war neuroses. In the same way his example of a train accident in Moses and Monotheism (1937) is interpreted as trauma, situated in the technological modern era (Stewart 2003, 8). Here Stewart refers to Laura Marcus’ comments in respect of Freud’s concept of modernity and trauma. Repeti­ tion and the concept of an empathic witness play an important role in the coping process. There is, in psychotraumatological and literary discourse, consensus about the silence of traumatized people and their imperative of silence as the most prominent symptoms. Gilmore refers to “a consensus […] that takes trauma as the unrepresenta­ ble to assert that trauma is beyond language in some crucial way, that language fails in the face of trauma and that trauma mocks language and confronts it with its insuf­ ficiency” (2001, 6). Neurobiological approaches ascribe the ‘non-communicable’ not only to avoidance and defence behaviour but also to a missing narrative structure whose subsequent construction is impeded by avoidance (Neuner et al. 2009, 306). The considerable disturbance of the autobiographical memory, the non-integrability of the traumatic situation is particularly dramatic in multiple traumatizations result­ ing in a deeply disturbed self-relation and often social isolation. Therapeutical methods for the reconstruction of the autobiographical memory therefore comprise narrative processes (for instance the so-called narrative exposition therapy NET [Neuner et. al 2009]), which close the lacunae and give the so-called

2.32 Trauma 

 425

‘cold’ memory (which organizes the life story and structures it cognitively) prevalence again over the ‘hot’ memory (being swamped by extreme emotions).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography The therapeutical situation and literary modes of trauma enactment, be they autobio­ graphical, autofictional or purely fictional, aim to ‘retrieve’ the causal incident. W. G. Sebald for instance uses Niederland’s research for his novel Austerlitz (2001) whose protagonist is traumatized as a child expatriate. Austerlitz’ case can be regarded as a classic implementation of the ‘survivor syndrome’, although it is not fictionalized ‘concentration camp literature’. Crucial for both forms of ‘coping’ or ‘enactment’ of traumata is the institution of witnessing. In therapy the therapist, as ‘emphatic witness’ provides support, in the literary field it is the nexus between author and reader, which establishes witnessing as an institution. A close causal correlation is apparent between the significant increase in survivor literature (term used referencing DeKoven Ezrahi’s ‘literature of survival’ [Günter 2002, 23]) and studies on witnessing in the 1990s. Giorgio Agamben’s somewhat controversial large-scale project in respect of archiving and witnessing belongs to this nexus. In particular the re-interpretations of the shame-guilt-complex in opposition to the common interpretations, Primo Levi’s, for example, are worth considering. Agamben (1998, 99) defines shame as the funda­ mental sentiment to be a subject with the ambiguity of ‘sovereign’ and ‘sub-jected’. The argumentative gap however occurs in the transition from ‘ontological glossolalia’, the disintegration of living and speaking, to testimony. Previously, Young (1992) already in his encompassing holocaust study had highlighted witnessing as survival motive. Holocaust literature is so closely associated with the topos of ineffability which has in effect resulted in a highly problematical narrowing to a ‘poetics of failure’ (Günter 2002, 21). Lauer (2003) criticized the negative realization modes of literature and its authorship as the only adequate modes of realizing the ‘ineffable’. ‘Successful’ writing and identificatory reading were not supposed to happen in respect of autobio­ graphical works deemed to be a group sui generis. This, however, accords (German-Jew­ ish) autobiography a highly problematic exemplariness: on the one hand, in referring to only one reality substrate, shared by this group, the threat of extermination by the holocaust, it is – as type – unique. On the other hand, it is used as an exemplary fun­ damental, subject theoretical statement of deconstructivism: that autobiographical writing is profoundly affected by the metaleptic impossibility of self-realization. Two autobiographical works shall be mentioned which in distinctly different ways have reacted to this factual taboo qua the topos of ineffability, thereby contradicting an assumed group status: Ruth Klüger in weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1992) [Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001)] and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt’s com­ plete autobiographical work. Klüger also dealt with the ban on images (for instance

426 

 2 Categories

in her critique of Lanzmann’s Shoa film) and in her autobiography focussed on the ‘normality’ of horror. Goldschmidt’s continuous self-exploration project, in different form shows that ‘negativity’ and failure are anything but ‘differentia specifica’ of a ‘literature of survival’. Poignantly he, in his autobiographical summa La Traversée des Fleuves speaks of a “constatation ininterrompue” [‘uninterrupted self-assertion’] which has become possible against traumatization, a “presence de soi” [‘presence of self’], made possible through autobiographical writing, which although presenting itself as “ironie dernière” [‘quasi ultimate irony’] (Goldschmidt 1999, 158), can none­ theless be considered a place of reconstituting identity. Heuristic reasons alone justify collecting survival literature under group charac­ teristics; to generally assign them a status of the other, ‘negative’ writing, would in addition mean to associate deviation once more with Jewishness (Holdenried 2009). The knowledge gained at the end of the 1960s in respect of the effects of extreme holocaust traumatization, transferred onto more recent traumatic experiences like 9/11, in civil wars and genocides in Rwanda and elsewhere, is horribly re-actual­ ized. The continuously close association of ‘breakdown of civilization’ and trauma motivates research to focus on German-Jewish literature of the ‘second generation’, children of survivors. They, in their autobiographical works, impressively describe the so-called telescoping effect, meaning the continuing effects of experienced trau­ mata in the following generation – where, on account of the imperative of silence and through it the effectiveness of the trauma prevent its processing. In more recent times, triggered by the number of ‘parent books’ but also subse­ quent to intense debates like those around W. G. Sebald’s cycle of lectures Luftkrieg und Literatur (2001) [On the Natural History of Destruction (2003)], bring the trauma and indissoluble connections between victim and perpetrator more intensely into focus. An ‘arithmetic summation’ is not at stake here, comparing the traumata experi­ enced in the aerial raids on Hamburg or Dresden to those of holocaust victims, but the effects on a collective psychic disposition in post-war Germany, as described by Alex­ ander and Margarete Mitscherlich (1967), are now more intensely replicable through exemplary literary cases. The status quo of autobiographical ‘exposition literature’ is characterized for good reasons by separating descriptions of victim and perpetrator traumatizations, but it is conceivable that the elements of this field will analytically come closer together to give a comprehensive picture of the collective effects of traumatic injuries. Literature, through (auto)fictional modes of enactment, can widen this picture, as Gilmore has stated: “Although those who can tell their stories benefit from the therapeutic balm of words, the path to this achievement is strewn with obstacles. To navigate it, some writers move away from recognizably autobiographical forms even as they engage autobiography’s central questions” (2001, 7). Translation: Walter Köppe

2.32 Trauma 

 427

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. Larchivo e il testimone. Homo sacer III. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998 [Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2008]. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Fischer, Gottfried, and Peter Riedesser. Lehrbuch der Psychotraumatologie. München/Basel: Reinhardt, 1999. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography. Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur. La Traversée des fleuves. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Günter, Manuela. “Writing Ghosts.” Überleben Schreiben. Zur Autobiographik der Shoah. Ed. Manuela Günter. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. 21–51. Holdenried, Michaela. “De-Fragmentação e recomposição. Sobre a problemática da identidade judaico-alemã na literatura autobiográfica de sobreviventes. O caso Goldschmidt.” Em primeira pessoa. Abordagems de uma teoria da autobiografia. Ed. Helmut Galle, Ana Cecilia Olmos, Adriana Kanzepolsky and Laura Izarra. São Paulo: Anna Blume, 2009. 51–60. Klüger, Ruth. weiter leben. Eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992 [Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: The Feminist Press, 2001]. Lauer, Gerhard. Abbilder des Holocausts? Über die Schwierigkeiten der Literaturwissenschaft im Umgang mit Autobiographien des Holocausts. http://www.iaslonline.lmu.de/index. php?vorgang_id=2242 (11 July 2018). Marcus, Laura. “Oedipus Express: Trains, Trauma and Detective Fiction.” New Formations 41 (2000): 173–88. Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Margarete Mitscherlich. Die Unfähigkeitzu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. München: Piper, 1967 [The Inability to Mourn. Principles of Collective Behavior. Trans. Beverly R. Placzek. New York: Grove Press, 1975]. Neuner, Frank, Maggie Schauer, and Thomas Elbert. “Narrative Exposition und andere narrative Verfahren.” Posttraumatische Belastungsstörungen. Ed. Andreas Maercker. Heidelberg: Springer, 2009. 302–350. Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. München: Hanser, 2001 [Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2001]. Sebald, W. G. Luftkrieg und Literatur. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 2001 [On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003]. Stewart, Victoria. Women’s Autobiography. War and Trauma. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Yale: Yale University Press, 1993 [Beschreiben des Holocaust. Darstellung und Folgen der Interpretation. Trans. Christa Schuenke. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1992].

Further Reading Améry, Jean. Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

428 

 2 Categories

Langer, Phil C. Schreiben gegen die Erinnerung? Autobiographien von Überlebenden der Shoah. Hamburg: Krämer, 2002. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 1985.

2.33 Truth Eric Achermann

Definition In contemporary philosophy, we currently distinguish two opposing theories of truth, one based on correspondence, the other on coherence (for an overview Brendel 1999, 45–169). If we take some beliefs, statements and propositions to be about the world, then truth qualifies those beliefs, statements and propositions that are satisfied by observations about how things actually are. On the other hand, if we consider some beliefs, statements and propositions to be related to each other, then truth qualifies those beliefs, statements and propositions that do not contradict each other and, additionally, are linked by some kind of logically based relation (inference). To put it rather bluntly, ‘truth’ stands for any kind of representation having been justified by fact or reason.

Explication Both theories have been subject to criticism: on the one hand, the difficulties in defin­ ing what portions of the world correspond to beliefs, statements and propositions seem to be unsurpassable, on the other hand, and even worse, truth depending on other truths must give rise to the suspicion of leading straight to infinite regress and, by the same token, to the collapse of the boundary wall separating fact from fiction. Nevertheless, there are reasons for pretending the intuitions underlying the above mentioned theories helpful to locate this boundary. And they may even be more so when dealing with texts, for readers are, in general, ready to claim their commitment to truth in presumably non-fictional texts and to suspend that claim confronted with presumably fictional texts. They express their commitment to truth by recurring to standard arguments of justification, namely by invoking experience, knowledge, introspection or logics (Audi 2011, 6–7). However, considering justified beliefs, one may be puzzled by similarities, if not identity, when compared to beliefs generated by fictional texts (Rorty 1982, 135–138). Even though constructivists may defend some views that would seem, from an epistemological point of view, hard to reject, it is often held that for “those interested in literary fiction, these questions are of no significance” (Lamarque 1996, 10). Still, it cannot be denied that beliefs rest on a very strong, basically ontological intuition: in the reader’s mind, fictions are fictions because some of the represented things and events are not, and have never been, the way they are told, and this for the simple https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-056

430 

 2 Categories

reason that a story-teller pretends certain things and events to have been observed that, supposedly or obviously, cannot be and cannot have been observed. The relation between truth and fiction, is, unlike the relation between truth and falsehood, asymmetrical. Most of us accept to speak in terms of truth about things happening in a novel, e.  g. ‘it is true that the knight met the king’s daughter after he had killed the dragon’. In fact, fiction is not necessarily less coherent than non-fiction, it is often even over-coherent (Currie and Jureidini 2004), but it fails in correspond­ ing. And therefore we may use ‘true’ to designate truth in and not the truth of a story. Concerning truth in fiction, correspondence is overruled by coherence, concerning truth of fiction, it is the other way round. The reader of fiction relies on coherence and is, for the same reason, ready to make all those inferences the understanding of a story necessitates. Of course, the same could be said of erroneous or deceptive representations of what one believes or is supposed to believe. All kinds of narrative rely on coherence. But, and the point is crucial, contrary to lies and errors, the falsity of a story is, as long as it is considered fiction, no matter of sanction; contrary to lies and errors, to cope with fiction does not entail to validate the truth of the story, but it presupposes a hypothetical understanding of the truth in the story. Strong coherence and lack of sanctions may be the main reasons why fictional texts are treated as encapsulated unities, bracketed by conventions which prevent ref­ erence to the extra-textual world and, hence, correspondence. This view is held most prominently by Searle. He assumes a “set of horizontal conventions that break the connections established by the vertical rules”, thus freeing a fictional text as a whole from “the connection between words and the world” (Searle 1975, 326). Unfortunately, he specifies neither form nor content of such conventions. Some scholars have tried to remedy this deficiency. Starting from a fundamental non-identity of author and narra­ tor, they deem the dissociation of tense- and time-relations, ubiquity and omniscience of the narrator, alternation between internal and external focalisation, and so forth, to be indices of fiction (Zipfel 2001,115–181).

Historical Aspects With regard to literary theory, the most influential distinction concerning truth is to be found in Aristotle’s Poetics. Keeping his distance from Plato’s concept of mimesis as a dangerously deceptive device (Gulley 1979, 173–174), Aristotle proposes a triadic interpretation of the relation between representation and the world: a philosophical relation based on the cognition of the essence of things and the natural laws govern­ ing these things; a historical relation based on the knowledge of things as they occur in reality; and, finally, a poetic relation that presents persons acting and talking in a characteristic way (see Dupont-Roc and Lallot 1980, 221–222; Schmitt 2011, 387–392). The first kind of representation corresponds to truth and expresses things the way

2.33 Truth 

 431

they are necessarily; the second kind corresponds to reality and expresses things the way they are contingently; the third, finally, deals with possible things in accordance to necessity or, at least, probability (Aristotle, 1451b5–10). Stemming from a more rhetorical than philosophical tradition (Fuhrmann 1992, 151–155), an alternative, notwithstanding influential concept of poetical truth can be found throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The famous Horatian “aut prodesse aut delectare” [‘to profit or to delight’] (Horace, v. 333) implies for most of the later interpreters that a mainly moral truth can be made accessible to the ‘indocti’ [‘untaught’] in the guise of a pleasing piece of poetry. The huge number of commentar­ ies that follow the first Latin translations of Aristotle’s Poetics tends, from the middle of the sixteenth century on, to merge the philosophical and the rhetorical approach and their corresponding notions of truth (Herrick 1946, 39–47). As is known, the Aristotelian notion of truth – in all the impressive diversity it unfolds up to the end of the sixteenth century (Mercer 1993) – is shaken in its funda­ ments by a rival epistemology reducing the whole of the phenomenal world to matter and motion, asserting in return the constructive power of the perceiving subject in abstracting from merely secondary qualities (Perler and Wild 2008). The new epis­ temology does not ask how we get knowledge but what “justifies ordinary empiri­ cal knowledge” (Pasnau 1997, 6–7). With regard to our starting point, this means a stressing of correspondence theory and weakening of coherence theory: truth is what actually is and, therefore, epistemology’s main concern is not about the syllogistic relation of general and particular ideas, but about the grades of certainty an inner representation has. The central role mimesis plays as a key concept in the unifying process of estab­ lishing a collective singular ‘art’ (Kristeller 1952, 17–24) in the first half of the eight­ eenth century goes hand in hand with a rehabilitation of the Aristotelian modal theory of representation, trying to satisfy both requirements, coherence and correspondence (Achermann 2014). It is rivalled by contemporary tendencies to define the nature of art by recurring to emotional response, strengthening thus the irrationality or a-ra­ tionality of aesthetic experience (Baeumler 1967). As a reaction to Kantian philosophy, Romantic aesthetics, finally, can be seen as an idealistic attempt to compensate the Kantian denial of the “thing-in-itself” [‘das Ding an sich’] as an object of philosophical cognition by poetic world-creation (Schaeffer 1983, 21–48).

Specific Relevance for Autobiography/Autofiction Without entering into the debate on the exact demarcation of the autobiographical genre, most literary historians agree on one point: the years from 1760 to 1830 are not only a period of a quantitatively impressive production of autobiographical texts but also of textual models that stand paradigmatically for our understanding of autobio­

432 

 2 Categories

graphical writing. These models have often been tagged ‘classical’. To describe their underlying concept of truth, it may be useful to differentiate three aspects concerning the subject/object-relation of world-perception as well as the writer/reader-relation: truth, truthfulness and trustworthiness (for an alternative triadic distinction, see Wag­ ner-Egelhaaf 2005, 2–5). Traditionally, the ‘narratio’ of one’s own life had been treated as ‘historia’ not ‘fabula’ (Heßelmann 2012, 95–104) and, therefore, as a representation of contingent reality and not of poetic probability. Apart from all the different ends autobiographical writings may serve (apologetic, paraenetic, polemic, and so forth), they are supposed to be part of a larger corpus reporting the deeds, manners and sayings of notable people. ‘Truthfulness’, now, marks an aspectual shift, a shift from commitment in narrated-truth to commitment in narrating-truth, while ‘trustworthi­ ness’ marks the reader’s estimate of both, truth and truthfulness. The crisis resulting from the conflict of objective and subjective concepts of truth due to the mentioned arrival of epistemology gives rise to a new way of treating psychology that completes the traditional architecture of faculties by a “historical, plain method” (Locke 1959, 26) attached to the motivational account of the emergence and development of inward representation. The secret story of the heart and its relation to a visible, public life appears as the major theme of classical autobiography, abandoning, thereby, topical, meditative or event-driven representation for psychologically motivated narration. But what on earth could check the truth in the realm of interiority? The prospect of truth, held out by the subjective claim for truthfulness, has to meet with expectations that are mainly folk psychological consisting in the projection of what one believes to be probable. The rapprochement of autobiography and novel that may be observed in so prominent works like Rousseau’s Confessions (1782/1789), Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785–1790) and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit [From my Life: Poetry and Truth] (1811–1833) finds its telling expression in the new poetics of the novel that heavily insists on the motivational account of the soul’s evolution (Blankenburg 1965, 259–264). The classics of autobiography, hence, are determined in their core by a certain fictionality as a necessary result of gaining probability by eliminating contigency. And so truthfulness can be said to be counteracted by the motivational requirements of trustworthiness. This aporetic relation of classical autobiography to historical veracity can be doubtlessly observed throughout the nineteenth century and is still a major facet of autobiographical writing. It may not be confused with contemporary tenden­ cies toward ‘autofiction’ (Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone 1997, 267–283; Zipfel 2009; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013, 7–14). The impediments that are encountered in giving a con­ vincing account of the inward evolution of one’s own person differ strongly from the “panfictionalist” (Gibson 2002) conviction that every kind of representation, even the representation of the external world, cannot and should not be detached from prod­ ucts of imagination. From this point of view, truth appears as a merely conventional tool that suits a specifically literary game: the falling short of truth-expectations that are generally acknowledged constitutive for the genre of autobiography.

2.33 Truth 

 433

Works Cited Achermann, Eric. “Was Wunder? Gottscheds Modaltheorie von Fiktion.” Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1706). Philosophie, Poetik und Wissenschaft. Ed. Eric Achermann. Berlin/New York: Akademie-Verlag/de Gruyter, 2014. 147–184. Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. and trans. Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Audi, Robert. Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 3rd ed. 2011. Baeumler, Alfred. Das Irrationalitätsproblem in der Ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed. 1967. Blanckenburg, Friedrich von. Versuch über den Roman (1774). Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965. Brendel, Elke. Wahrheit und Wissen. Paderborn: Mentis, 1999. Currie, Gregroy, and Jon Jureidini. “Narrative and Coherence.” Mind and Language 19.4 (2004): 409–427. Dupont-Roc, Roslyne, and Jean Lallot. “Commentary.” Aristote. La Poétique. Ed. and trans. R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980. Fuhrmann, Manfred. Die Dichtungstheorie der Antike. Aristoteles – Horaz – ‘Longin’. Eine Einführung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed. 1992. Gibson, John. “The Threat of Panfictionalism.” Symposium 6.1 (2002): 37–44. Gulley, Norman. “Aristotle on the Purposes of Literature.” Articles on Aristotle. Psychology and Aesthetics. Vol. IV. Ed. Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield and Richard Sorabji. London: Duckworth, 1979. 166–176. Heßelmann, Peter. “Der ‘honig der angedichteten umstände’. Zur rhetorisch-poetologischen Kontroverse um ‘historia’, ‘fabula’ und ‘evidentia’ in der Romantheorie des Barock.” Spielregeln barocker Prosa. Historische Konzepte und theoriefähige Texturen ‘ungebundener Rede’ in der Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Thomas Althaus and Nicola Kaminski. Bern/Berlin: Lang, 2012. 91–117. Herrick, Marvin T. The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531–1555. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1946. Horace. “Ars Poetica.” Horace for Students of Literature: The “Ars poetica” and its Tradition. Ed. Osborne Bennett Hardison and Leon Golden. Trans. Leon Golden. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. 7–22. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Modern System of the Arts (Part II).” Journal of the History of Ideas 13.1 (1952): 17–46. Lamarque, Peter. Fictional points of view. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Lecarme, Jacques, and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone. L’autobiographie. Paris: Armand Colin, 1997. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1894). Vol. I. Ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser. New York: Dover, 1959. Mercer, Christia. “The Vitality and Importance of Early Modern Aristotelianism.” The Rise of Modern Philosophy. The Tension between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz. Ed. Tom Sorell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. 33–67. Pasnau, Robert. Theories of cognition in the later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Perler, Dominik, and Markus Wild. “Introduction.” Sehen und Begreifen. Wahrnehmungstheorien in der frühen Neuzeit. Ed. D. Perler and M. Wild. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. 1–70. Rorty, Richard. “Is there a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” Consequences of Pragmatism. Essays 1972–1980. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1982. 110–138. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. La naissance de la Littérature. La théorie esthétique du Romantisme ­allemand. Paris: Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1983.

434 

 2 Categories

Schmitt, Arbogast. “Commentary.” Aristoteles. Poetik. Ed. and trans. Arbogast Schmitt. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2nd ed. 2011. Searle, John R. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 319–332. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Einleitung: Was ist Auto(r)fiktion?” Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. 7–21. Zipfel, Frank. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität: Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion. Zwischen den Grenzen von Faktualität, Fiktionalität und Literarität?” Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen. Ed. Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 284–314.

Further Reading Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Williams, Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

3.1 Architecture Salvatore Pisani

Definition A relationship between architecture and autobiography can be claimed for city, house and interior design. It may be of a twofold nature. It can be described either as an extension of autobiographical writing systems or as a physical extension of the I into architecture. In the former case, architecture understands itself as a surface into which the autobiographical can be inscribed; in the latter case it understands itself as a coat/ cover which physically extends the autobiographical I. This is to say, architecture tells the I, however while making it sensually evident at the same time.

Explication A City Like Me As the earliest ‘autobiographical city’ of the early modern age we may refer to Pienza, whose name is derived from that of its founder, Pope Pius II. This place in Tuscany, originally called ‘Corsignano’, is that Pope’s birthplace, which in 1459 he had been renovated by building a cathedral, a municipal palace and a family palace. Crucial for the decision to renovate his home town was an autobiographical recollection. In his Commentarii [Commentaries] Pius writes: “Offendebat Pontifex ubique suae senectu­ tis inditia” [‘Like in a mirror, the Pope identified signs of old age with himself’] (qtd. in Tönnesmann 1996, 120). It was an integral part of the topic of the autobiography to gain a view of one’s own life from encountering oneself in front of a mirror, whose function is here taken over by the city’s architecture. The age of the city’s buildings is equated with one’s own physical age. Their renovation also means monumentalising one’s own name. In Pienza, the Pope-I becomes a monument. Another biographically motivated founding of a city is the place of Richelieu in Poitou, which was built in 1631 by order of Cardinal Jean-Armand du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu. The starting point of the project was the rebuilding of the residential palace, integrating parts of the existing family palace, first of all the room where the Cardinal had been born. Analogously to the hour of birth, in autobiographies the place of birth becomes the starting point of a frame narrative which here translates itself into an urbanistic project structuring both palace and neighbouring place to form one building ensemble, the town of Richelieu (Kruft 1989, 84–98).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-057

438 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Fig. 1: The villa of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte on Capri

Interior Design As little as the building of cities has mimetic qualities which might imitate the indi­ vidual physiognomy of the I, as little it is provided with the interior design developing with the bourgeois chamber of the nineteenth century. Typical of this interior design is the intimate relation man develops to his/her own home and its furnishment. In the nineteenth century, interior design becomes a synonym of spiritual life (Schulze 1998, 11). By interior design there sediment both sensitivities and self-narratives. Per­ sonal ‘mementos’ and objects materially grasp states of mind but also biographical stages of the way in which one has become oneself. Thus the autobiographical I is provided with structure and stability, or with a fixed frame narrative (Pisani 2014, 11). This finds a parallel in the ‘Bildungsroman’ of the nineteenth century and the there drafted classical subject of inwardness. In the twentieth century, when the idea of the subject as a coherent, autonomous I dissolves in favour of the idea of a multiple I, also the interior world of houses starts dissolving: The groundplan becomes flexible, the walls become transparent, the multitude of objects makes room for air and light. Not without reason, the keyword of the 1930s is ‘Befreites Wohnen’ [‘Liberated Living’]. Interior design moves along the interface of object and subject culture. This is from where the furnishment industry of the nineteenth century gained its business ideas: Interior design is said to function both as a mirror and ‘alter ego’ of its inhab­

3.1 Architecture 

 439

itant. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man without Qualities] from 1930–1932 Robert Musil expressed this idea by a well-known formula: “Sage mir, wie du wohnst, und ich sage dir, wer du bist” [“Tell me what your house is like and I’ll tell you who you are”] (Musil 1995, 20 [1988, I, 16]). In his Passagenwerk (1927–1940, published 1982) [The Arcades Project] Walter Benjamin writes that the house bears “den Abdruck seines Bewohners” [“the impression of its occupant”] (Benjamin 1982, 292 [1999, 220]). Consequently, interior design and house are never just signs. This must be understood to be a medial specific of architecture: There, the autobiographical I prolongs phys­ ically into the materiality of the world. This way there it comes to the formation of a hybrid which one may describe by the term I-architecture.

A House Like Me Like with city and interior design, also in the case of the house it is about an (irra­ tional) relation in the context of which subject and object cannot be clearly differenti­ ated from each other. The Casa come me [‘House like Me’] received its name from the villa of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte who retired to a self-chosen exile on the Island of Capri (Fig. 1) (McDonough 1999). Made after his own design, he provided his villa there with a trapeze-shaped, conical stairway to the rooftop, as a quotation of the flight of stairs in front of the Santissima Annunziata church building on Lipari, where the author had been exiled by Mussolini in 1933. Thus this stairway to the rooftop is a ‘memento’ of a biographical experience of suffering. It is telling that Malaparte describes the change of media, from literature to architecture, as being necessary for an authentic personal confession: Il giorno che io mi son messo a costruire una casa, non credevo che avrei disegnato un ritratto di me stesso. Il migliore di quanti io non abbia disegnati finora in letteratura. […] Ma non posso dire che i miei libri diano di me un ritratto essenziale, nudo, senza ornamenti, quel ritratto che ogni scrittore idealmente si prefigge di sé [‘When I started building this house, I was not aware of drafting an image of myself. And it is the best of all of them, which up to now I would not have been able of drafting by literary means. (…) I may not claim that my books depict that deep image of myself, naked, undecorated, that any author intends to draft of himself’] (Talamona 1990, 81).

Malaparte’s claim that architecture, if compared to the literary genre of the autobiog­ raphy, is a medium free of any suspected self-staging, is not at all borne out by the facts. For, just as the autobiography, architecture is a means of auto-fiction or a wellproven medium of coating and disguise. The villa is particularly connected to autobiography because, like the latter, it is a feature of identity. If with Manfred Schneider (1986, 21–26) we describe individuality and its written ways of expression as a derivation, this holds also for the villa. By the villa as an (eccentric) place of retreat from the social centres, ‘homo solitarius’ as

440 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

described by Petrarch in the mid-fourteenth century becomes reality, and that is some­ body escaping from the frame of society. Since Petrarch villa and autobiography have been two parallel lines of the history of individuation whose productive interferences have, for the time being, been hardly analysed by research. Translation: Mirko Wittwar

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1982 [The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1999]. Forster, Kurt W. “The Autobiographical House. Around a Haunted Hearth.” Philip Johnson. The Constancy of Change. Ed. Emmanuel Petit. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1998. 38–59. Kruft, Hanno-Walter. Städte in Utopia. Die Idealstadt vom 15. bis 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Staats­ utopie und Wirklichkeit. München: Beck, 1989. McDonough, Michael. Malaparte – A house like me. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999. Musil, Robert. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Erstes und Zweites Buch. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1995 [The Man Without Qualities. 3 vols. Trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Picador, 1988]. Pisani, Salvatore. “Ich-Architektur. Das Haus als gelebte Vita und Alter Ego.” Ein Haus wie Ich. Die gebaute Autobiographie in der Moderne. Ed. Salvatore Pisani and Elisabeth Oy-Marra. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. 9–39. Schneider, Manfred. Die erkaltete Herzensschrift. Der autobiographische Text im 20. Jahrhundert. München/Wien: Hanser, 1986. Schulze, Sabine. “Innenleben. Die Kunst des Interieurs.” Innenleben. Die Kunst des Interieurs. Vermeer bis Kabakov. Ed. Sabine Schulze. Stuttgart: Hatje, 1998. 9–15. Talamona, Marida. Casa Malaparte. Milano: Clup, 1990. Tönnesmann, Andreas. Pienza. Städtebau und Humanismus. München: Hirmer, 1996.

3.2 Autobiographical/Autofictional Comics Martin Klepper

Definition Autobiographical/autofictional comics are practices of factual or fictional self-thema­ tization consisting of “hybrid word-and-image form[s] in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially” (Chute 2008, 452). The spe­ cific modal form, characterized by Will Eisner as “sequential art” (2008, 127–145) and by Art Spiegelman as “comix”, “commingling […] verbal and visual modes of expression” (Chaney 2011a, 5), distinguishes this form of autobiography/autofiction from prose work, necessitating different strategies of reading and attention. Comics navigate the reader/viewer through “progressive counterpoint[s] of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space)” (Chute 2008, 452). Through the reader/viewer’s activity, closure emerges from the limbo (McCloud 1994, 66) between framed and blank spaces as well as the often disjunctive tension between text and image. The points of indeterminacy and ambivalence, resulting from this bimodal and variously textured (paneled) form, predestine autobiographical/autofic­ tional comics to address complex questions of authenticity and artifice, embodiment and symbolization, temporality and memory, ideology and subjectivity and to explore alternative agendas. The self-referentiality of the comic mode effectuates a “salutary loss of innocence” of the genre (Hatfield 2005, 127).

Explication Various terms have been introduced for autobiographical/autofictional comics. They belong to the family of graphic narratives or graphic novels  – the distinction not always being clear-cut due to the transgressive nature of the comic mode. Some schol­ ars borrow the term ‘autobiographics’ from Leigh Gilmore’s genealogy of women’s self-representation, some use ‘autography’, while Gillian Whitlock uses ‘autographics’ “to draw attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal text in this genre of autobiography” (Whitlock 2006, 966; see also Kukkonen 2013, 56). The latter term has come to include also auto assemblages in social networks and self-representations in ‘zines’. The proliferation of names pays tribute to the significance of an “explosive cultural phenomenon”, the graphic novel (Baskind and Omer-Sherman 2008, xv), and the observation that autobiography has become “a distinct, indeed crucial, genre” and “the most respected genre in comics today” (Hatfield 2005, 112; Kukkonen 2013, 70). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-058

442 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Historically autobiographical/autofictional comics “trace their origins to the underground ‘comix’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s” (Hatfield 2005, ix; see also El Refaie 2012, 37), which, in defiance of the Comics Code of 1954, explored experiment and explicitness (Chute 2010, 14), emphasized “the abject, the seedy, the anti-heroic, and the just plain nasty” (Hatfield 2005, 111), and brought to graphic autobiography a lasting dissident or rebel stance (El Refaie 2012, 36). A seminal year was 1972, when Robert Crumb created The Confessions of R. Crumb and Justin Green published Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin. 1972 also saw the publication of the magazine Tits’n’Clits, which indicates the crucial connection of underground comics to second-wave fem­ inism (Chute 2010, 20). Moreover, the same years “challenged comfortable assump­ tions not only about who could legitimately produce autobiography but also what form autobiography can and should take” (El Refaie 2012, 15). Autobiographical/auto­ fictional comics emerged from this alternative scene (both in the US and in Europe) and later masterpieces, such as Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–1991) and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), are heavily influenced by these beginnings. The phase of underground experimentation came to an end in the 1980s, when the Comics Code began to unravel and publishers such as Marvel and DC Comics began to market comics for adults. As a result, Charles Hatfield contends, contemporary graphic narratives are marked by a “collision of mainstream commercial habits and countercultural sensibility” (2005, 112). Linda Hutcheon, writing about Maus, has char­ acterized this conflation of mass cultural form and avant-gardist ethos as “postmodern provocation”. Her observations can be extended to the genre as such, which combines “strangely realist narrative[s]” and explicit awareness “of the lack of transparency of both its verbal and visual media” (Hutcheon 1997, 305–306). Hatfield, commenting on Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical American Splendor (1976–2008), makes a similar point about autobiographical/autofictional comics, in which “ideologically fraught claims to truth collide with an anxious distrust of referentiality […]. Yet, ironically, the disavowal of objective truth may serve to shore up the genre’s claims to veracity” (2005, 114). The tension between truth claims (in the sense of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact), self-referentiality (many, if not most, autobiographical comics explicitly comment on their own creation) and skepticism about the possibility of representation is inherent in the form and grammar of autobiographical comics. They “perform identity visually in the third person” (Chaney 2011b, 23): the author/artist creates a narrator and a character with an “I-con” serving as her/his avatar. As Michael A. Chaney points out, picturing oneself in a cartoon means conjuring up the imaginary, while repressing the symbolic and yet acknowledging it (2011b, 38). Charles Hatfield speaks of “ironic authentication”: Lejeune’s pact “is upheld as it is abused […]. Artifice and candor can go hand in hand” (2005, 124). Moreover, the very “non-transparency of drawing – the presence of the body, through the hand, as a mark in the text – lends a subjective register to the narrative surface […]” (Chute 2008, 457). With Philippe Marion Karin Kukkonen refers to this gesture of enunciation in the drawing as ‘graphiation’ (2013, 56): the icons are like signatures.

3.2 Autobiographical/Autofictional Comics 

 443

Narratologically these paradoxes play out as a tendency toward metaleptic trans­ gressions (Chaney 2011b, 29). Due to the bimodal form graphic narratives have a complex narratological grammar (described in detail by McCloud): the basic element is the panel (or frame), which defines (establishes) and fractures both time and space (McCloud 1994, 67). The grid of the page is textured by the arrangement of panels. One panel is separated from the next through the gutter. Panels are inhabited by icons; they are endowed with sound through word balloons and sound effects (icons indi­ cating sound); they may or may not contain words in speech balloons (by the char­ acters) or captions (by the narrator). Kukkonen posits three autographic agents: “the narrator, who creates the image; the focalizer, on whose knowledge it is based; and the observer, whose embodied spatial position is represented and which the reader is invited to share” (2013, 59). There is ample opportunity for transgression (metalep­ sis): “When elements of the form, such as panel frames, captions or gutters become salient, because characters jump out of the panel, because they interact with the cap­ tions (usually invisible to them) or because they take a short cut in the gutter from one panel to the another (sic), then comics become self-reflexive” (Kukkonen 2013, 65). Various observers have pointed out that image and text, I-con and voice, “entwine, but never synthesize” (Chute 2010, 5). Edward Said has remarked that graphic narra­ tives are therefore endowed with double vision (Chute 2008, 459) – they call attention to the fictional in every representation of fact. The potential clash between image and text decelerates the reading process; moreover the nature of the I-con as cartoon suggests at the same time intimacy and detachment. McCloud has characterized the nature of the cartoon as “amplification through simplification” (1994, 30): the abstracted image of the avatar invites identification and, yet, remains ambiguous. In other words: autobiographical/autofictional comics always retain a difference within; Hatfield writes: “Whereas first-person prose invites complicity, cartooning invites scrutiny” (2005, 117). Ole Frahm has suggested that comics deliberately laugh at the idea of truth outside/before signification, the bimodal form establishing struc­ tural parody: words and images (despite Scott McCloud) never reach complete closure (2010, 33–38; 2000, 177– 191). Another difference to prose autobiography resides in the complexities in time, which autobiographical/autofictional comics are able to enact. Writing about artists Phoebe Gloeckner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel, Hillary Chute explains that “the comic form not only presents a child protag­ onist and an adult narrator but also gives voice simultaneously to both perspectives, even within the space of a single panel, layering temporalities and narrative positions” (2010, 5). Chute quotes cartoonist Chis Ware, who contends that comics – consisting of fragmented images  – can be a “metaphor for memory and recollection” (Chute 2010, 4). In their serial arrangement, comic panels can symbolize the ongoing process of re-picturing and working through a riveting or traumatic event (such as Holocaust memory in Spiegelman’s Maus, the death of the father in Bechdel’s Fun Home or the repercussions of a religious upbringing in Craig Thompson’s Blankets [2003]). In this

444 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

sense, seriality, the repetition of a pattern, can at the same time work as a commercial, mass cultural strategy and an avant-gardist form of therapeutic remembering. Autobiographical/autofictional comics very often “follow an agenda that often puts socially marginalized issues center stage” (Kukkonen 2013, 68). As in the works of Joe Sacco (Palestine [1993], Footnotes in Gaza [2009]), the “medium of comics can perform the enabling political and aesthetic work of bearing witness powerfully because of its rich narrative texture” (Chute 2010, 4). The genre and form has proven to be extraordinarily innovative and productive in putting formerly marginal or con­ tested issues on the agenda, not least because cartooning can play “with and against visual stereotype” (Chute 2010, 12). The reactions to Satrapi’s Persepolis, Spiegelman’s Maus – but also the cartoon wars – affirm that this is a form to be reckoned with.

Works Cited Baskind, Samantha, and Ranen Omer-Sherman, eds. The Jewish Graphic Novel. Critical Approaches. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Chaney, Michael A., ed. Graphic Subjects. Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Chaney, Michael A. “Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 21–44 (Chaney 2011a). Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 452–465. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices From the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiogaphical Comics. Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Frahm, Ole. “Weird Signs. Comics as Means of Parody.” Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Ed. Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000. 177–191. Frahm, Ole. Die Sprache des Comics. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2010. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics. A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Hutcheon, Linda. “Postmodern Provocation: History and ‘Graphic’ Literature.” La torre 2.4–5 (1997): 299–308. Kukkonen, Karin. Studying Comics and Graphic Novels. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–979.

3.2 Autobiographical/Autofictional Comics 

 445

Further Reading Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Chute, Hillary and Patrick Jagoda. Comics & Media (Critical Inquiry Book). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2016. Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven, eds. Graphic Narrative. Spec. Issue of Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006). Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest. The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature. Critical Essays on the Form. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010. Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels. Stories to Change Your Life. London: Aurum Press, 2005. Jacobs, Dale. “Multimodal constructions of self: autobiographical comics and the case of Joe Matt’s Peepshow.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 59–84. Magnussen, Anne, and Hans-Christian Christiansen. Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000. McCloud, Scott. Making Comics. Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels. New York: Harper, 2006. Whitlock, Gillian, and Anna Poletti, eds. Autographics. Spec. Issue of Biography. An interdisciplinary quarterly 31.1 (2008).

3.3 Autobiographical/Autofictional Film Matthias Christen

Definition Variously termed as ‘filmic autobiography’, ‘cinéma autobiographiqueʼ, ‘autodocu­ mentary’, ‘cinema of me’, ‘first person documentary’, or ‘subjective cinema’, the auto­ biographical/autofictional film resists a conclusive generic definition. The denomina­ tor ‘autobiographical’, however, allows for a basic understanding along the lines of its constitutive elements: αὐτός (autos, self), βίος (bios, life), and γραϕή (graphe, writing). Thus, the autobiographical film is a self-reflexive practice by which a filmmaker makes herself the object of a cinematic enunciation. From a personal point of view, it relates in various degrees of comprehensiveness to her factual life. Whatever aspects of a life are covered, it is achieved by the particular means of recording that film as a techni­ cal medium provides. Autobiographical film, thus, in the broadest sense, has to be understood as a personal record of whatever a filmmaker chooses from her life and experience – based on moving images and sound instead of words alone.

Explication The mode of inscription the autobiographical film relies on marks a major difference compared to the literary autobiography that ultimately affects all generic constitu­ ents. Film is a multimodal medium. Beyond language, it encompasses sounds and images both of which belong to a different class of semiotic signs. As arbitrary, con­ ventionalized signs, words may span vast stretches of life in retrospect. Cinematic images, instead, entertain an indexical relation to their profilmic object. Apart from animated features (for example Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis [2007]), autobiographi­ cal films, thus, usually require some sort of actual corporeal presence of the subject, be it in front of the camera or as a voice on the soundtrack – hence their “inherent present tense” (Curtis 2006, 57) and their often “unterentwickelte diachrone Dimen­ sion” [‘underdeveloped diachronic dimension’] (Decker 2008, 172). Film, however, is not only multimodal, it is also a distinctly technical medium. As an apparatic intermediary, the camera splits up the autobiographical ‘me’. The filmmaker can either be the profilmic object in front of the camera or exert his/her authorial control behind it. So, even if there is footage related to the filmmaker’s life, it still stands the question whether it can be referred to her in terms of authorship. Film, in sum, challenges traditional tenets of literary genre criticism: the basic identity of author, narrator, and protagonist, the diachronic coverage of the latter’s https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-059

3.3 Autobiographical/Autofictional Film 

 447

past life, and the authorial control over the respective source material. It has done so to a degree that it has raised serious doubts whether there is an ‘autobiographical film’ at all (Bruss 1980, 296: “there is no real cinematic equivalent to autobiography”). For film to become acknowledged as an autobiographical form in its own right, two preconditions had to be met: In terms of aesthetics and style, film had to learn how to say not only ‘me’ (Lejeune 1987, 9), but also ‘then and there’. In addition, film­ makers had to contrive ways how to assert authorship in cinematic terms and to cope with life’s extended temporality. Film criticism, in turn, had to dissociate itself from generic concepts that favored language as guarantor of the autobiographical self’s primordial unity, and, accordingly, the first personal singular as autobiography’s mainstay. While cameras have been available for domestic use from as early as the 1920s, it was not until the early 1960s that the technical equipment allowed for the recording of lip-synced sound and images beyond the confines of industrial movie production. But even with light-weight handheld 16mm cameras available, the act of cinematic record­ ing required a certain degree of technical skills, which affected the overall output in several ways: Until the advent of digital consumer cameras, the range of people who had access to the recording technology and the necessary know-how remained limited. Most of the early cinematic autobiographers were either professional film­ makers or media-savvy amateurs (Decker 2008, 172; Bühler 2009, 218). And while the editing of the footage may evolve in private, the actual shooting involves a heightened sense of apparatic presence irrespective of the camera’s size and versatility; the film­ maker/autobiographer’s interaction with her surroundings inevitably implicates the tools of recording. As with the late advent of film as an autobiographical form in the 1960s, the main features of a first person cinematic discourse have been established in the fiction film of the 1930s and 1940s (Brinckmann 1997). Point-of-view shots, camera movements, blurs and changes of focus became stylistic markers that indicated a narrator’s phys­ ical presence, merging the camera eye with the character’s personal perception. As a complement to the point-of-view shot, the technique of the voice-over allows to strengthen the narrative’s focalization aurally. Disembodied, but a strong personal presence nevertheless, the narrator’s voice is able to move more freely in time and space than the cinematic image. Hence, the voice-over has evolved to a probate means to broaden the temporal reach of autobiographical films. In 1968, David Holzman’s Diary was among the first films to assign the full range of aesthetic means that the fiction film held in store for first-person narratives to a seem­ ingly autobiographic purpose. But, even though its eponymous protagonist clearly is in control of the recording apparatus, excessively addressing it with accounts of his personal sensitivities, the end titles credit another, heterodiegetic ‘filmmaker’ – Jim McBride – with the film’s authorship. So, while cinematic means may engender sub­ jectivity, they do not necessarily guarantee its attribution to an authorial stance. For a cinematic first-person narration to become an autobiographical film proper, the sty­

448 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

listics of subjectivity had to merge historically with a trusted genre of factual filmmak­ ing. The “convergence of autobiography and documentary” (Lane 2002, Ch. 1, 11–32), both of which were considered “referential activities” (Lane 2002, 5) resulted from the 1960s onwards in one of the most prolific strands of autobiographical filmmaking: the autodocumentary. As Decker (2008, 172) has argued, “[e]rst in dieser Kombina­ tion kann der Ichfilm zu dem werden, was im Medium der Schrift als autodiegetische Narration gilt” [‘only in this particular combination, the first person film can become what qualifies as autodiegetic narration in the medium of writing’]. Contending that “ein genuin autobiografischer Film nur im Rahmen eines dokumentarischen Kon­ trakts zustande kommen kann” [‘a genuinely autobiographical film can only take shape hedged by a documentary contract’] (Decker 2008, 171), Decker adapts Philippe Lejeune’s notion of autobiography as based on a pact between author and reader to (documentary) film. As to film, it is – according to Decker – the supposed factual­ ity of a preexisting genre (documentary) that asserts the basic identity between the subject of the cinematic enunciation and the filmmaker as a pre-filmic entity. In this vein, several aesthetic, stylistic as well as paratextual elements that keep reoccurring in autodocumentary films can be understood as enforcing the contractual bond: the use of the first person singular in voice-over narration, title sequences attributing the film to a filmmaker who is addressed by characters within the narrative by his or her proper name, the appearance of the filmmaker in front of the camera as well as images of her handling the recording device reflected in mirrors or windows have become a signature shot of autodocumentary films. Considered within a broader cultural context, the convergence of autobiography and documentary filmmaking is closely linked to the “larger turn of the politics of self­ hood” (Lane 2002, 8) that, from the late 1960s onwards and especially so in the United States, has made race, sexuality and ethnicity “consciously politicized” and highly “personal’ issues” – with the women’s movement leading the way (Renov 2004b, 177). In its wake, the autodocumentary grew into the most prolific form of autobiographi­ cal filmmaking and has, thus, been well researched (Renov 2004; Decker 1995, 2008; Lane 2002). There is, however, a second, no less prominent strand of autobiographical film­ making originating in the experimental and underground film avant-garde. Reach­ ing further back, the 1960s autobiographical avant-garde film is considered to be among the “generative forces” of “self-inscription in documentary” (Lane 2002, 8). While in documentary subjectivity used to be considered “anathema” (Lane 2002, 4) way into the 1960s, due to the genre’s longstanding “faktuale Kodierung” [‘factual coding’] (Decker 2008, 171), it played a key role in avant-garde films and their con­ ceptualization. With its main representatives – Stan Brakhage, Jerome Hill, Carolee Schneemann, Chantal Akerman, Jonas Mekas, Robert Frank – the self and its artistic sensibilities alongside with its means of expression form the twin objects of a mutual cinematic inquiry. In The Animals of Eden and After (1970), Brakhage “explores the fact of cinematic succession as a model of autobiography” (Sitney 1978, 224). Schneemann

3.3 Autobiographical/Autofictional Film 

 449

makes her own body the medium of self-inquiry and carnal knowledge (Bühler 2009, 11). In About Me: A Musical (1971), photographer-filmmaker Robert Frank questions the notion of a unified (autobiographical) subject. Though the title attributes author­ ship to Frank’s eponymous ‘me’ and even though the filmmaker appears several times throughout the film as a guiding force, the narrative’s main character “Robert Frank” is played by an actress. In Film Portrait (1972), Jerome Hill, too, subscribes to a per­ formative notion of the autobiographical self by playfully incorporating various ver­ sions of his future ʻmeʼ. While subjectivity provides the focus through which avant-garde film autobiogra­ phies reflect – in a self-conscious, meta-filmic turn – on the nature of cinema as well as on the filmmaker herself, they do not necessarily cover the latter’s life in its diachronic extension. This is more likely the case with home or family movies. Although this third strand of autobiographical filmmaking harks back as far as the 1920s (Schneider 2004; Odin 1995), its generic attribution seemed dubious for several reasons: home movies are produced and circulated within a close community, held together by the bonds of family or friendship. Filmmaker, narrator, onscreen characters, and their audience mostly share a familial identity. That is why they often dispense with the contractual trappings. Without being stated explicitly, authorship remains mostly anonymous. The audience either knows or does not care since it prioritizes the group’s identity over any individual authorship – if there is any at all, technically speaking. Nevertheless, home movies have supplied a “matrix of seminal practices” of autobiographical film­ making: “as model of style, as raw material for formal manipulation, [or] as referential or enabling concept” (James 1992, 151–152). The film diary, in particular, has evolved into an autobiographical sub-genre in its own right – with Lithuanian born filmmaker Jonas Mekas cultivating the film diary as a domestic practice and evolving it into an art form (for the distinction between film diary as practice and diary film as product, see James 1992). As an “affirmation of the anti-industrial and anti-aestheticist cinema”, the film diary in the 1970s “afforded a means of mobilizing a subjectivity otherwise stranded between the impersonal rationality of structural film, on the one hand, and on the other, the preoccupation of the field of subjectivity by people of color, women, and gays” (James 1992, 151). The ʻinherent present tenseʼ of film has, in turn, contrib­ uted considerably to the ongoing popularity the (video) diary has been enjoying as a form of autobiographical self-inscription well into the new millennium (Day is done, 2011), taking it even beyond the cinema as the once dominant form of distribution (http://jonasmekas.com/diary). The three different strands of autobiographical filmmaking might well be kept apart for the sake of clarification. Historically, however, the distinction holds true for only a limited period of time. The more advanced the history of the genre, the more the categories lose in focus (for the “convergence of documentary and experimental films” see Curtis and Fenner 2014, 10). In the process of delimitation, the actual auto­ biographical filmmaking and its criticism have an equal share. They both convene on the suspension of, if not outright assault on the notion of a ‘unified subject’ – no

450 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

matter the theoretical underpinnings, be it gender studies (Curtis and Fenner 2014), post-structuralist discourses (Renov 2004a), or arguments of medium specificity (Bruss 1980; Decker 2008). Representative for a large body of work, Decker concludes that in the confrontation with film’s technical apparatus, the autobiographical subject gets equally split and enlarged in a way “dass die veränderte Technik der Selbstbe­ trachtung auch einen neuen Subjektbegriff entstehen lässt” [‘that the altered tech­ nique of self-observation gives rise to a new notion of the subject’] (Decker 2008, 170). No longer firmly anchored in the linguistic identity of the first person singular, the self is considered a “multiperspektivisches Geflecht, das das autobiografische Subjekt als Effekt konkreter Begegnungen und Situationen entstehen lässt” [‘a multi-perspec­ tive network, resulting from chance encounters and situations’] (Decker 2008, 175). Instead of a pre-existing entity that reveals itself to various degrees in the autobio­ graphical act, the self is thought of as constructed by that very act – being “a site of instability – flux, drift, perceptual revision – rather than coherence” (Renov 2004a, 110). What the notion of a unified subject loses, other categories, in turn, win in critical attention  – a development that has engendered new research agendas. Consistent with its medium, Bühler (2009), among others, perceives the construction of the auto­ biographical self as a cinematic performance. Filmmaker Sarah Poley proves the point by letting actors play out her (potential) genealogy in shreds of fake domestic footage. By confronting reenactments of a probable past with the surviving real life persons, she sets off the notion of a singular, coherent account of a life lived by the eponymous multitude of “stories we tell” (Stories We Tell [2012]). In line with the argument of media specificity, Bruss stressed the autobiographer’s body as a “locus of identity” (1980, 319) as early as 1980, in her seminal essay “Eye for I” which used to be misread in disfavor of cinematic autobiographies in general. Taking up on Bruss, Curtis (2006, 33) advocates “a more corporeal notion of the self”: “the body and visceral experience – as an expression of the present moment – take precedence over the construction of a thread that connects the events of the past to the present“ (2006, 20). ʻCorporalityʼ as a critical term has gained salience with the growing body of work by queer filmmakers who suffered from HIV and AIDS. In Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993), director Tom Joslin hands over the camera to his partner Mark Massi when he is no longer able to handle it himself due to his dete­ riorating physical condition. Matching his failing eyesight, British filmmaker Derek Jarman sets up a uniformly blue screen for the viewer to enter an immersive, corporeal space which is populated by the voices of Jarman himself and the people close to him (Blue, 1993). In view of the “elusive, mercurial presences” (Egan 1993, 616) and the “contin­ gency of lived experience” (Egan 1993, 595) which the process of recording inevitably entails, Susan Egan has reconceptualized the autobiographical film as an essentially “interactive genre” (1993, 594). This has led, in more recent studies, to a revaluation of the various collectives from which the autobiographical self emerges – favoring com­

3.3 Autobiographical/Autofictional Film 

 451

munitarian identities over the individual. Just like the choice of the medium used, the self and its autobiographical practice is understood as refracted through the respec­ tive ethnic, religious, or “familial Other” (Renov 2004e, 216; Lebow 2008). This self-mediation through communitarian bonds has, in consequence, affected the concept of authorship. The dependency on others within collaborative processes – as with the handing-over of the camera in Silverlake Life and familial records (Renov 2004e)  – fosters what Renov has termed “sharing textual authority” (2004e, 223) and forms of “shared autobiography” (Lane 2002, 84). Since “the ‘I’ is always social, always already in relation”, Lebow (2012, 3) suggests to speak more aptly of a “cinema of we” instead of the first-person singular variant. Further strands of recent research lead beyond the issues of medium specificity and textual dynamics: Lebow (2012, 6) points out rightly that most previous studies have been focused on “films from North America and/or Europe”. Therefore, she calls for a broader, transcultural scope that includes autobiographical practices and forms of subjectivity (e.  g. “diasporic subjectivity”, Lebow 2012, 9, 219–232) that are not cen­ tered on the otherwise prevalent first-person singular. In her work on germanophone autobiographical filmmaking, Curtis (2006; and again Curtis and Fenner 2014) also argues for a heightened critical sensitivity toward cultural specifics. Egan (1993), and Curtis (2006) especially, broaden the range of genre criticism by including the audience and the visceral experience autobiographical footage engen­ ders: according to Curtis, “[t]he specifics of film reception enable the viewer, who is crucially envisioned as embodied, to take a particularly empathetic and corpo­ real stance to the particular kind of intersubjective experience filmic autobiography offers” (2006, 41). The advent of digital technologies has not put an end to the culture of autobiog­ raphy as Bruss has feared that film would in the early 1980s (1980, 296). To the con­ trary, audiovisual autobiographical accounts have “proliferated, percolating down to the level of popular consumer culture” (Renov 2004  f, 236). Hence, the new medium environment has re-enlivened discourses of medium specificity (Renov 2004d, 191) and brought to the fore the issues of distributing autobiographical content within a “radically altered […] culture of autobiography in the late twentieth century” (Renov 2004  f, 232; further Hughes 2012; Juhasz 2012). The field of autobiographical film, in sum, encompasses a vast array of cinematic practices and forms of expression. It ranges from narratives centered on a filmmaker’s life, in an established documentary or diaristic mode, to the display of a personal sen­ sibility in the avant-garde and experimental film and broaches on the hybrid forms of web-based life writing. The mode of authorship and subjectivity as well as the degrees of temporal coverage and personal presence of the filmmakers vary accordingly. Film­ makers may feature prominently in front of the camera as well as on the soundtrack and strive to affirm the personal identity of author, narrator, and onscreen character, while others keep a more elusive cinematic presence (Day is Done), eschew first-per­ son narrative, or reassign authorial control to a collective we (Silverlake View). And

452 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

while Jonas Mekas engages in a life-long diaristic activity, spanning decades, media, and individual works, other autobiographical films focus with equal justification on a particular, though essential episode in the filmmaker’s life (Sherman’s March; News from Home) or even her corporeal sensations (Schneemann). The approaches that film and media studies have adopted towards autobiograph­ ical filmmaking match the cinematic practices in terms of breadth and variety. Not­ withstanding their differences, they commonly disavow the notion of an ontologically pre-established unified subject and authorial stance, be it in the wake of post-struc­ turalism or based on arguments of medium specificity. Inasmuch as the autobiograph­ ical subject is regarded a (mediatic) construct, the genre’s confines open up to films that either incorporate fictional elements (role-play, reenactments) or would qualify as outright fictional by traditional standards. Hamid Naficy’s notion of an “accented cinema” is a case in point: Having left their countries of origin and living in an intersti­ tial space, migrant and diasporic filmmakers tend, as Naficy argues, “to create ambi­ guity regarding their own real, fictive, or discursive identities, thus problematizing Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’” (1989, 35). Even though they are “empiri­ cal subjects who exist outside and prior to their films”, accented authors may inhabit their films in various forms: “as real empirical persons, enunciating subjects, struc­ tured absences, fictive structures or a combination of these” (Naficy 1989, 35). Since the identity of the accented author is troubled due to experiences of loss and deterri­ torialization, it cannot be reaffirmed by means of a pact, so that autobiography has to be thought of as auto-fiction. While Naficy’s argument rests on the migrant biography of individual filmmakers, Dannenberg gives it a more fundamental turn resorting to Jacques Lacan’s psycholinguistic theory: As there is no subject prior to language, the autobiographical claim, as Dannenberg argues, is at odds with the myth of objectivity that documentary film purports (2011, 62–63). An autobiographical stance is, thus, conceivable only within fictional films. As the field of autobiographical film has grown to include ever more culturally diverse practices and has begun to subvert the distinction between fiction and non-fic­ tion film, critics have adopted an increasingly cautious stance as far as issues of defi­ nition are concerned. Bühler goes so far as to talk less of autobiographical film as a genre than of ‘the autobiographical’ as a mode. In a broad sense, “das Autobiografi­ sche” [ʻthe autobiographicalʼ] signifies “eine elementare Form der Darstellung von Lebenserfahrung” [‘an elementary form of representing a lived experience’] (Bühler 2009, 212) or “eine Form der Selbstbefragung mithilfe der Erinnerung” [‘a form of self-in­ quiry based on memories’] (2009, 215). Less focused on film in a traditional sense than on a variety of audiovisual media and their pragmatics (video, digital video, the Web), Renov in turn foregrounds “self inscription” as a basic activity shared by all audiovis­ ual autobiographical practices (2004a, 106; 2004e, 218; 2004  f, 232). Emphasizing the act of self-inscription over its result allows Renov to accommodate new, non-canon­ ical autobiographical forms that the evolving audiovisual media keep engendering (for electronic essays, video confessions, and personal Web pages see Renov 2004c;

3.3 Autobiographical/Autofictional Film 

 453

2004d; 2004  f ). What kind of autobiographical work the new media will come up with in the age of post-cinema, how they will deal with the issues of subjectivity, tempo­ rality, and authorship, how they will address their audience, and how they will be accounted for in critical terms is up for future debate.

Filmography David Holzman’s Diary. Dir. Jim McBride. Jim McBride, 1967. Scenes From Under Childhood Sections 1–4. Dir. Stan Brakhage. Stan Brakhage, 1967–1970. The Animals of Eden and After. Dir. Stan Brakhage. Stan Brakhage, 1970. Conversations in Vermont. Dir. Robert Frank. Dilexi Foundation, 1969. Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches. Dir. Jonas Mekas. Jonas Mekas, 1969. About Me: A Musical. Dir. Robert Frank. American Film Institute, 1971. (nostalgia). Dir. Hollis Frampton. Hollis Frampton, 1971. Diaries. Dir. Edward Pincus. Edward Pincus, 1971–1976. Film Portrait. Dir. Jerome Hill. Jerome Hill, 1972. Keep Busy. Dir. Robert Frank. Canada Council, 1975. Life Dances On. Dir. Robert Frank. Robert Frank, 1980. Home Improvements. Dir. Robert Frank. Robert Frank, 1985. Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibilities of Romantic Love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapon Proliferation. Dir. Ross McElwee. Ross McElwee, 1986. News from Home. Dir. Chantal Akerman. Alain Dahan, Carlotta Films, 1991. Silverlake Life: The View from Here. Dir. Tom Joslin. Doug Block, Matthew Fassberg, 1993. Blue. Dir. Derek Jarman. Takashi Asai. Basilisk Communications, Uplink Co., Arts Council of Great Britain, Channel Four Films, BBC Radio, Opal, 1993. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter. Dir. Deborah Hoffman. Deborah Hoffman, 1994. The Present. Dir. Robert Frank, and Paolo Nozzolino. Vega Film, 1996. Flamingo. Dir. Robert Frank. Robert Frank, 1996. Nobody’s Business. Dir. Alan Berliner. Alan Berliner, Cine-Matrix, 1996. I Remember. Dir. Robert Frank. Robert Frank, 1998. Paper Route. Dir. Robert Frank. Vega Film, 2002. True Story. Dir. Robert Frank. Robert Frank, 2004/2008. Persepolis. Dir. Marjane Satrapi, and Vincent Parronnaud. 2.4.7 films, France 3 Cinéma, The Kennedy/Marshall Company et al., 2007. Day is Done. Dir. Thomas Imbach. Okofilm, SRF, Arte, 2011. Stories We Tell. Dir. Sarah Polley. National Film Board of Canada, 2012.

Works Cited Brinckmann, Christine N. “Ichfilm und Ichroman.” Die anthropomorphe Kamera und andere Schriften zur filmischen Narration. Zürich: Chronos, 1997. 82–112. Bruss, Elizabeth W. “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 296–320. Bühler, Kathleen. Autobiografie als Performance: Carolee Schneemanns Experimentalfilme. Marburg: Schüren, 2009.

454 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Curtis, Robin. “Selbstverortungen: Räumlichkeit und filmische Autobiographie.” Umwidmungen: architektonische und kinematographische Räume. Ed. Gertrud Koch. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005. 70–86. Curtis, Robin. Conscientious Viscerality: The Autobiographical Stance in German Film and Video. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann/Edition Imorde, 2006. Curtis, Robin, and Angelica Fenner, eds. The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. Dannenberg, Pascale Anja. Das Ich des Autors: Autobiografisches in Filmen der Nouvelle Vague. Marburg: Schüren, 2011. Decker, Christof. “Selbstbetrachtungen. Zur Erkundung des Subjekts im autobiografischen Dokumentarfilm.” Inszenierte Erfahrung: Gender und Genre in Tagebuch, Autobiographie, Essay. Ed. Renate Hof and Susanne Rohr. Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2008. 169–184. Decker, Christof. Die ambivalente Macht des Films: Explorationen des Privaten im amerikanischen Dokumentarfilm. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1995. Egan, Susanna. “Encounters in Camera: Autobiography as Interaction.” Modern Fiction Studies 40.3 (2003): 593–618. Hughes, Peter, ed. Women, Autobiography and New Media (= Screening the Past 13 [2001]). http:// tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast (15 November 2017). Hughes, Peter. “Blogging Identity.com.” The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary. Ed. Alisa Lebow. London/New York: Wallflower Press, 2012. 235–249. James, David E. “Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden.” To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground. Ed. David E. James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. 145–179. Juhasz, Alexandra. “The ME and the WE: A First Person Meditation on Media Translation in Three Acts.” The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary. Ed. Alisa Lebow. London/New York: Wallflower Press, 2012. 250–267. Lane, Jim. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Lebow, Alisa, ed. The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary. London/ New York: Wallflower Press, 2012. Lebow, Alisa. First Person Jewish. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Mekas, Jonas. “The diary film: a lecture on Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania.” The Avantgarde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978. 190–198. Naficy, Hamid. “Autobiography, Film Spectatorship, and Cultural Negotiation.” Emergences 1 (1989): 29–54. Odin, Roger. Le film de famille: usage privé, usage public. Paris: Klincksieck, 1995. Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London/New York: Wallflower, 2009. Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Renov, Michael. “The Subject in History: The New Autobiography in Film and Video.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 104–119 (Renov 2004a). Renov, Michael. “New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in the Post-verité Age.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 171–181 (Renov 2004b). Renov, Michael. “The Electronic Essay.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 182–190 (Renov 2004c).

3.3 Autobiographical/Autofictional Film 

 455

Renov, Michael. “Video Confessions.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 191–215 (Renov 2004d). Renov, Michael. “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self.” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 216–229 (Renov 2004e). Renov, Michael. “The End of Autobiography or New Beginnings? (or, Everything You Never Knew You Would Know about Someone You Will Probably Never Meet).” The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 230–243 (Renov 2004f). Schneider, Alexandra: “Die Stars sind wir”: Heimkino als filmische Praxis. Marburg: Schüren, 2004. Sitney, Adams P. “Autobiography in avant-garde film.” The Avant-garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978. 199–246.

Further Reading Bellour, Raymond. “Autoportraits.” Lʼentre-images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2002. 271–337. Bluher, Dominique. “L’auteur et l’autofiction.” Nouvelle vague, nouveaux rivages: Permanences du récit au cinema (1950–1970). Ed. Jean Cléder and Gilles Mouëllic. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001. 259–268. Dubois, Philippe. “Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic Apparatuses.” Fugitive Image: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. 152–172. Esquenazi, Jean-Pierre, and André Gardies. Le je à l’écran: actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Grange, Marie-Françoise. L’autoportrait en cinema. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008. Katz, John Stuart. Autobiography: Film, Video, Photography. Ontario: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978. Odin, Roger. De la fiction. Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 2000. Pini, Maria. “Video diaries: questions of authenticity and fabrication.” Women, Autobiography and New Media (= Screening the Past 13 [2001]). http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/ screeningthepast (15 November 2017).

3.4 Autobiographical Music Christiane Wiesenfeldt

Definition Can a musical composition mirror its composer’s self? This question has fascinated music scholars ever since the concept of genius was established during the Age of Enlightenment. There is a clear consensus that music may be understood as an expression of the soul, as a bearer of emotions and a medium for transmitting moods. However, arriving at an unambiguous understanding of how this actually takes place is difficult, both empirically and hermeneutically. For this reason, interpreters typi­ cally make use of ‘paratexts’. Ever since the Early Modern period, quite a few composers have staged their music autobiographically. One might recall compositions written in homage to deceased teachers (for instance, Josquin des Prez’s Deploration sur la mort d’Ockeghem [1497]), tone poems depicting the composer’s longing for his homeland (Bedřich Smetana’s Ma Vlast [‘My country/homeland’] [1874]), and late works with evocative titles (Johannes Brahms’s Vier Ernste Gesänge [Four Serious Songs] op. 121 [1896]). But music that contains a program, a commentary, a dedication or even a specific accompanying text is not per se autobiographical  – this always remains stuck at a paratextual level. And the chasm between subject and object seems unbridgeable.

Explication Even in the nineteenth century, biographical interpretations made the error of equat­ ing musical and psychological movement. Without attributing too much importance to the term, such interpretations were often methodologically based on the early sev­ enteenth-century theory of rhetorical figures. Back then, interpreters were already seeking to develop a formal catalogue of musical figures that musical creators and lis­ teners could associate with specific meanings. A descending series of notes was inter­ preted as a journey to the underworld, and a rising series as a ladder to the heavens, etc. Figures of sound and melody became bearers of semantic symbols intended to form a bridge between the work of art and its beholder. This strategy may have worked in the presence of a suitable accompanying text (for example, voices crossing during a crucifixion scene, or the like). However, a theory of affect for purely instrumental music required the efforts undertaken in the eighteenth century to attribute specific characteristics to particular tonalities. Even more abstract than the theory of figures, which entered speculative terrain with its notion of ‘hypotyposis’ (not clearly defined https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-060

3.4 Autobiographical Music 

 457

musical expression of text)  – never more closely specified in musical terms  – the theory of affects was always based on the notion that a catalogue of criteria would facilitate the experience and understanding of the content of musical events. This effort did not focus primarily on the theory of composition, or the didactic idea that one could compose better or more successfully with the help of the semantic appara­ tus (where an economic motivation could not be completely ruled out). Instead, the principal motivation was the wish to carve objective peepholes into the self-reflective bastions of music. The nineteenth-century biographically focused interpretations of music carried these various attempts at semantification to their logical conclusion: a hermeneutical unification of the work and the artist’s life could make it possible to finally come close to that ultimate, hidden artistic self, all the more transfigured at this point in time by the ideas of the aesthetics of genius and the autonomy of the work. As naïve or banal as all of these attempts to translate musical facts into a semantic vocabulary may seem in retrospect, they have demonstrated extraordi­ nary persistence in public cultural life. Hardly a program note or CD booklet failed to include such speculative comparisons, in which minor keys represented a crisis in the composer’s creative life and adagio movements the melancholy of widowhood. Even if undisputed musical symbols such as the ladder to heaven cited earlier (for example, in “ascendit in coelis”) can attempt to create a semantic consensus between the music and its audience in sacred music, and to represent the anagogic element of the music, such formulas can hardly claim to embody the composer’s personal reli­ gious faith. Instead, they represent central religious symbolic ideas in music, which carried validity for their era. Once again, such symbolism fails to provide direct access to the composer’s self or his creative ‘ego’. Whereas post-hoc attempts to semanticize music by means of biographical, figu­ rative or affective theories can at best reveal the psychology of creative moments, but never illuminate the aesthetic-psychological structure of an entire work because their access points are always exterior. Perhaps concentrating on the interior structure of the music could offer a remedy. The key question is to locate those moments in the musical material that disclose its creator and can be read as personal testimony or as self-revelatory, the moments where music opens its self-reflective coherence to the outside and grants us a deeper view. To be consistent – assuming that the work of art is a coherent system – one would have to seek objective instances: those moments in which fractures, breaks, assembly-points, or projective surfaces in the aesthetic subject itself are (made) visible. If one accomplishes this aim, these moments can then be read as symbols of subjective shapes and forms. We must set aside the old objectifying model of formal conventions: it makes no sense to just inquire about devi­ ations from musical ‘norms’. This presupposes the existence of a universal norm, and although music may have always used such norms as frameworks, it has never recog­ nized them as a ‘conditio sine qua non’. Other specific aspects are far more revealing, because they can be explicitly deduced from an analysis of the manuscript and the music score. These aspects may be present at various levels:

458 

1 1.1 1.1.1 1.1.2 1.2 1.2.1 1.2.2

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Working systems (‘systems of notation’) Writing processes in the horizontal dimension (‘placing oneself in time’) in the vertical dimension (‘placing oneself in space’) Correction processes in breadth (‘recalibration/self-questioning at the level of the work as a whole’) in depth (‘self-specification/plumbing the depths in the details’)

The first level essentially refers to working systems: these are recognizable from a single manuscript, and are those elements that illustrate the subject’s creative act. The working system in turn has two layers: the manuscript layer of a musical struc­ ture and the layer – to the extent it is present – of its correction. Writing processes may be manifested in the melodic line (horizontally) and thus in ‘placing oneself in time’, and in harmonic features (vertically), and thus in ‘placing oneself in space’. The correction processes, by contrast, offer insights about self-reflective processes (‘placing oneself against oneself’), where what is present is reconsidered and possi­ bly altered. To analyze these subjective processes and decision-making requires a pro­ found engagement with the working manuscripts, sketches and corrected trial proofs or printer’s scores: ink textures, layers of deletions, variants, correction colors and paste-overs all potentially reveal the composer’s idiosyncratic habits of textgenesis and -variation. If one can draw conclusions about the conception of the music from the sum total of the discoveries from the writing, then the creative process itself will become apparent at the very moment of its realization. The work can thus serve as a mirror of subjective decision-making even prior to its final aesthetic process of desubjectification. Writing processes in the horizontal dimension (‘placing oneself in time’) primarily disclose procedural thinking. How does the composer structure his musical ideas, in what sections are they composed? Perhaps they are ‘all there’ right away or only present in a rudimentary state at first to be formulated later in greater specificity. Sometimes general sketches are prepared for orientation, moments of inspiration recorded or worked out; they tell us about the composer’s conceptual thinking process in time. The proportions of themes, transitions, free sections, reprises and repetitions, the increases and decreases in dynamics, or the textual underlay tell us about the inner structures of these writing processes. Anton Bruckner’s (1824–1896) symphonic process sketches, where entire thematic passages are missing, are a fascinating doc­ umentation of his oft-expressed faith in God to provide him with the right ideas at the right time: once the grid was set, filling it in was a simple matter with God’s help. Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770–1827) sketch notebooks tell a different story; they have not been entirely decoded to this day and are full of juxtaposed ideas of the most varied provenance: leaps from one work to another, and from theme to theme are not unusual. He was an unconventional thinker in the literal sense, who quickly noted ideas down so they would not be washed away by the next torrent of ideas.

3.4 Autobiographical Music 

 459

By contrast, writing processes in the vertical dimension (‘placing oneself in space’) primarily demonstrate spatial thinking in the score. The writing may proceed in rows – if not the middle voices are notated first – elaborated from the bass (below) or the melody (above). Different weightings of voices or instrumental groups allow us to draw conclusions about sensibilities regarding sound (mediating versus confronta­ tional, alternating, etc.). Perhaps transparent or dense concepts of sounds are detect­ able (hierarchical versus in parity). If we first record temporal and spatial writing processes empirically and subsequently read them as facets of a creative profile, we can deduce elements of individuality (and thus, subjectivity) from those points where such decisions can be recognized as paradigmatic because of their frequency or their uniqueness. We will avoid invoking the notion of ‘style’, something that – although ascribed to most composers – only refers to the work and not to its capacity for self-tes­ timony. It is in the nature and form of the writing process that we can determine atti­ tudes, constants and shifting movements of the artist toward his work of art, which might remain foreign and inaccessible on the basis of the work of art alone, considered at a distance from its foundational sources. Is it merely coincidental that in his instru­ mental music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) first wrote down the melodic framework as a part-score and only later systematically and precisely filled in this scaffolding of melody and bass foundation from within? This may demonstrate a stra­ tegic process to commit the idea that is completely present inside the composer’s mind to paper with the greatest possible efficiency. How different was the compositional method of the Finnish symphonic composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), who thought in sound surfaces and always forged ahead section-by-section, spontaneously inspired and thinking and notating in a less deliberate way. Work processes become especially legible through corrections, even though they take place in the second, always deepened layer of working out the composition. Anal­ ogous to the writing processes, there are two directions distinguishable in the correc­ tion process: corrections on a broad scale – the deletion or new composition of entire sections, and correction in depth – plumbing the details. Broad-scale correction is motivated by a process of ‘recalibration/self-questioning at the level of the work as a whole’. The details of its execution offer a deep perspective. Thus, one can recognize different temperaments in correction: rash versus prudent corrections, chaotic versus orderly, neat deletions, etc. In addition, the manner of deletion provides an indication about the aesthetics of inspiration and work (is a correction carefully elaborated or does it happen spontaneously?). Breaks, montages and fractures in the process of cre­ ation become apparent. Especially in the process of revising one’s own material – for example, when a composition is transposed into a different version or setting – may provide insight into (transformed) ideas about form, such as might exist between a composer’s early and late works. Thus, Johannes Brahms (1833–1987) could no longer use the original second half of the movements in his later version of the Opus 8 piano trio (the earlier version was composed in 1854) – and overall, this is the only time he ever radically revised an early work. His quintessentially linear concept of thematic

460 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

development no longer permitted simply re-attaching the breaks and cuts onto the old endings. The cuts virtually compelled Brahms to let a new compositional dynamic grow out of them, and this made it necessary to have different endings for the same beginning in the later version. The subjective stamp of the artist and his thinking process is visibly applied to the work. By contrast, in-depth corrections (‘self-specifi­ cation/plumbing the depths in the details’) hone down our perspective from the broad scale to the specific. Here, we can draw conclusions about a typology of how com­ posers become immersed in details, for example, in differentiating motifs or dynamics. The processes of revising one’s own decisions also are quite revealing: perhaps the composer takes a long time at revision, with multiple attempts or even approach the work with skepticism, or perhaps the new detail is deployed quickly and precisely. Multiple corrections of the same detail can be a sign of insecurity or recovery of secu­ rity if we can demonstrate an interval of time between the first and second transcrip­ tion. A particularly compelling example is provided by the sometimes-excessive cor­ rections made by the workaholic composer Max Reger (1873–1916). We can recognize the composer’s state just by the diction of his erasures. More than anywhere else in the creative process of composition, these differen­ tiated processes of writing and correction reveal the subjective creativity still openly exposed to view in the ‘uncovered’ work. In analyzing these processes, our aim cannot be to disclose an individual, but instead, to disclose a concept of a person in the sense of concepts of creation. As we differentiate between these forms of subjective reality, it becomes possible to read music autobiographically: less in its realistic mode as a mirror of the eccentric artist, but more in its creative mode, as the composer is making and avoiding decisions. Uncovering this interpretive field opens new possibilities for analyzing the idea of the work and the artist, irrespective of time or subject. The analysis of work processes requires access to evaluable sources, and this excludes the majority of music history from this method for lack of adequate source material. Can we uncover autobiographical patterns in the artwork itself, in the urtext edition at hand? In practice, this is possible if a second, deeper layer of analysis can uncover so-called reference systems – that is to say, social, subjective and material references: 2 Reference systems (social, subjective and material references) 2.1 Outside citation (‘Placing oneself in relation to something else’) 2.2 Self citation (‘Placing oneself in relation to oneself’) 2.3 Repetitions (‘Placing oneself in relation to one’s own material’) These reference systems can be specifically discerned in the music and go on pro­ viding access to the author even after completion of the work, and thus within its aesthetic system. The author becomes manifest in the material. These systems of reference relate primarily to the phenomenon of musical citation. Thus, an outside citation  – citation of another work, melody or a folk song, among others  – can be an example of ‘placing oneself in relation to something else’. The reference may be

3.4 Autobiographical Music 

 461

specific and recognizable to all or else may be veiled and hidden (only visible to the initiated). The nature and manner of citation, whether in the form of a full or partial citation, a parodied citation, an abstracted, stylistically transformed citation, etc., provide solid information about the connection to the outside object or the outside individual who is cited, and thus, about the individual making the citation as well. This may involve an act of homage as mentioned earlier, or can be a political state­ ment (such as the distortion of an enemy national anthem during times of war), doc­ ument a teacher-student relationship, a love affair (as often happened between the couple Robert and Clara Schumann), or the desire for peace, as in Heinrich Schütz’s motet Da pacem (1627), composed for the meeting of the Prince-Electors of the Holy Roman Empire [‘Kurfürstentag’] in Mühlhausen in the throes of the Thirty Years War. All of these outside citations demonstrate a relationship to something, because the person evoking the relationship reveals him- or herself in the material and takes a definite stand through the way s/he treats the material. Interpreting these moments requires no abstract hermeneutics, but only an analytic comparison between the orig­ inal and the citation along with its technique. Outside citations exist alongside self-citations, which occur at least as frequently, and are instances of ‘placing oneself in relation to oneself’. They operate according to the same mechanisms as outside citations, in that they employ material from another work (in this instance, one’s own work), but self-citations provide information about one’s connection to one’s own object, and thus, sometimes about changes, reflections or (altered) self-images. Interesting examples of such changes include such compos­ ers of the Early Modern Age as the Spaniard Thomas Luis de Victoria (1548–1611). In his late books of masses he primarily wove in material that he himself had created during an earlier period, and the potent tradition of outside parody that was still prevalent during the period progressively receded into the background. At the risk of oversimplification, for the first time during this era, there was a quantitative increase in self-generated music, in ‘music about music’ with an exclusively self-referential quality. One might also consider whether this shift also might have been connected to the qualitative increase in the development of the composer’s personal identity, and that in this instance, self-reference is directed at stabilizing that identity through self-condensation. In the context of investigating artistic identity formation processes in the Early Modern Age, attention to this phenomenon of self-citation could help develop new insights. A third and final reference system is made up of the repetitions within a work that ‘place oneself in relation to one’s own material’. Repetitions provide emphasis in the music and are not only once structuring markers, but also markers of singularity. In forward movement, they can have the effect of self-reassurance, self-encouragement or self-recollection. In backward movement, they are retrospective (‘turning oneself back in time’). In every instance they are markings in the work that refer to the subject and to his or her understanding of time. Joseph Haydn’s (1732–1809) play with repe­ titions and listener expectations is a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon. He

462 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

often erases a motif in the very place that the listener had come to expect it. Here, the composer functions almost as a foreign agent who comes along from somewhere else to throw the work out of step – simply through omitting an anticipated repetition. Rarely does the subject stand out from the artwork as sharply as it does in these inter­ ventions. Taking these thoughts to another level, we could certainly identify further reference systems that might offer primarily quantitative rather than qualitative support for the methods under discussion. Instead, by way of conclusion, let us examine several extreme processes of systemic interruption where the artist breaks out of his work, thereby making himself or herself visible: 3 Systems breaks (Breaking out of the work) 3.1 Fracture (‘Making oneself visible in the work’) 3.2 Torso (‘Withdrawing oneself from the work’) 3.3 Destruction (‘Annihilating oneself’) The first order break that is still located inside a work of art is the fracture, or ‘making oneself visible in the work’. We are referring to abrupt breaks from one’s own con­ ceptions with which the listener has become familiar. The issue here does not involve breaks with external referential conventions, which in any case are difficult to inter­ pret (see above), but rather with the composer’s own concepts, which are suddenly cast aside in the work, resulting in a break. This can consist of a harsh, unantici­ pated crooked dissonant note in triple fortissimo or a gestural shift that arrives unan­ nounced. Should they occur frequently, one would have to question the method behind such breaks (variational or exemplary) along with their frequency; this can illuminate the relationship of the artist to her/his work in its gradations of distancing. The fracture creates an open wound, revealing the artist in her/his subjective deci­ sion-making. In the second category the artwork only remains as a torso, for the artist has with­ drawn himself or herself from the work. Unfinished, interrupted works reveal the moment of breakdown and retreat, which becomes structurally visible in its naked­ ness. Thus, one can sketch a psychological diagram of the interruption as the most extreme instance of distancing from the concrete material. The ultimate result of a systematic break between the music and the composer is destruction (‘annihilating oneself’), which can be interpreted as a suicidal act, since the creative ego is directly affected, along with the destruction of the work. The act of annihilation results in the death of a part of the artist as well, of his subjectivity that became idea. Music must be regarded as a special case in the context of autobiography. Unlike the visual arts or literature, music makes use of a language with far more self-referential qualities than any other, and for this reason, it is incomparably more difficult to deci­ pher. Music cannot say ‘I’ or portray the ‘I’. Programs, paratexts and other ego doc­

3.4 Autobiographical Music 

 463

uments one draws upon for interpretation can at best only cast light on the psycho­ logical context of creation, but they never disclose the aesthetic self. To approach the aesthetic self requires an explicit philological engagement with the creative process, supplemented by the analysis of referential materials in the music itself. The subject reveals himself/herself in the work of art through these actions, gestures and refer­ ences that are present in the concrete musical score, even if it is not in the form of an ‘I’ but rather in the form of a continuously redefined concept of a self.

Further Reading Unseld, Melanie. Biographie und Musikgeschichte. Wandlungen biographischer Konzepte in Musikkultur und Musikhistoriographie. Köln: Böhlau, 2014. Bleek, Tobias. Musikalische Intertextualität als Schaffensprinzip: eine Studie zu György Kurtágs Streichquartett Officium breve op. 28. Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2010. Danuser, Hermann, and Günter Katzenberger, eds. Vom Einfall zum Kunstwerk. Der Kompositions­ prozeß in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts. Laaber: Laaber, 1993. Floros, Constantin. Alban Berg - Musik als Autobiographie. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1993. Gratzer, Wolfgang, and Otto Neumeier, eds. Arbeit am musikalischen Werk. Zur Dynamik künstlerischen Handelns. Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 2013. Schmidt, Matthias. Komponierte Kindheit. Laaber: Laaber, 2004. Wiesenfeldt, Christiane. “‘Homine hispano’ or ‘Uomo universale?’ Victoria’s Marian Masses and the Case of Artistic Identity in the Late 16th Century.” Estudios. Tomás Luis de Victoria. Studies. Ed. Javier Suárez-Pajares and Manuel del Sol. Madrid: ICCMU, 2013. S. 93–101.

3.5 Autobiographical Novel Lut Missinne

Definition If we look at the term ‘autobiographical novel’ from a linguistical point of view, the noun designates, in the first place, a novel whose specifics are characterized by the attribute of being autobiographical. Without entering into many long discussions about the nature of the novel, we state that a novel is a narrative, fictional and literary text (Genette 1991). If the novel is further typified by the adjective ‘autobiographical’, this characteristic seems to come into conflict with the fictional nature of the text. The merging of fictional and autobiographical components is the most striking and most discussed feature of the autobiographical novel. An autobiographical text is characterized by an identity between the author of the text, the narrator of the story, and the character that is being told about. Philippe Lejeune (1975 [1989]) stipulated this threefold identity (expressed by an identity of proper names between author, narrator and protagonist) as a distinctive generic cri­ terion for an autobiography. In an autobiographical novel, however, such an identity is not explicitly given (Burdorf 2007, 59), but the reader thinks it exists. We can, with Lejeune (1975, 25 [1989, 13]), define an autobiographical novel as a fictional text, in which the reader presumes a certain identity between the protagonist and the author of the text on the basis of resemblances he/she means to have seen.

Explication This definition raises many questions: Which components of the book can cause the reader to surmise a relation of identification between the story and the real life of the author? Should the protagonist be modelled after the author, or should the central plot mirror the events of his or her life? To what extent is autobiographical recognition required? Does one autobiographical fact suffice to label a novel as autobiographical, or does an autobiographical novel have to depict the entire life of the author in a fic­ tional mode? How is this recognition aroused? In comparison to the autobiography, the autobiographical dimension of a novel is less distinct and relies more strongly on the reading activity. The author has chosen to deny, to ignore, or to disguise the similarities between the protagonist and him/herself (Lejeune 1975, 25 [1989, 13]). S/he makes clear that s/he is talking about his/her own life and is simultaneously making a fictional claim. The reader assumes, or knows, that s/he is reading an autobiographical novel because of the autobiographical signs s/he detects in a text presented to him/her as a novel. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-061

3.5 Autobiographical Novel 

 465

The major question in this matter is how a novel can conjure up an autobiograph­ ical suggestion. Beyond doubt, the identity of the proper name is the main autobi­ ographical clue. However, this hardly explicitly occurs in this genre. Partial name analogy, on the other hand, is found more often. Authors dispose of a wide range of possibilities to express a gradual correspondence between their real identity and that of their alter-ego in their autobiographical novels: François René de Chateaubri­ and gave his protagonist in René (1802) his second name; several of Herman Hesse’s figures bear the author’s initials ‚H. H.‘; Charles Dickens reversed his initials for cre­ ating the name of David Copperfield (1850); Charlotte Mutsaers used an anagram of her own name, Rachel Stottermaus, for the female character of her novel Rachels rokje [‘Rachel’s skirt’] (1994); Knut Hamsun, pseudonym of Knut Pederson, used his less known civil name for the protagonist of his wanderer-trilogy (1906–1912). In addition to using name allusions, other indicators can suggest a partial autobi­ ographical identity: author and protagonist share the same age, date or place of birth, place of residence, physical characteristics, social environment, occupation, profes­ sional aspirations, previous publications, etc. (Gasparini 2004, 25). Such indications function in cooperation with other textual or paratextual signs to arise or support the reader’s suspicion of autobiography. Not all the particulars are verifiable, but within the frame of the text and the reader’s expectations they acquire a status of probability and may convince the reader to form an image of the author on the basis of what s/ he has read. In an autobiographical novel the connection between the author and the text-in­ ternal narrator is not a relation of identity, nor one of incompatibility, but could be called an ‘indicial relation’ (Barthes 1975, 247), a relation between ‘signifier’ and ‘sig­ nified’, based on a relation of contiguity. As a whole, indicial identity relations func­ tion as authentification strategies in novels (Holdenried 1991, 182). The interplay of signs within a text may suggest an autobiographical dimension; the interaction between texts within the work of one and the same author may do this as well. When a reader of a novel interprets – on account of associations s/he finds between this and another (autobiographical) text by the same author – elements of the story as belonging to the author’s life, it is due to the effect of an ‘espace auto­ biographique’ [‘autobiographical space’] (Lejeune 1975, 41–43 [1989, 26–28]). Each writer can engage him/herself in constituting his/her personality playfully through an ensemble of different texts. The network of connections between the non-autobi­ ographical works of an author and his/her autobiographical texts is called ‘autobio­ graphical space’. It contains explicit autobiographical texts, as well as texts with little autobiographical elements, ambiguous and non-autobiographical texts (Musarra 1989, 52; Gasparini 2008, 298–300).

466 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Autobiographical Novel and Autobiography Many theoreticians have attempted to define autobiography in contrast to its most related genre: the autobiographical novel (Shumaker 1954; Pascal 1960; Lejeune 1975; Müller 1976). It is, however, very difficult – if not unfeasible – to draw a sharp demar­ cation line between autobiographical and fictional genres. The non-identity of author and protagonist might seem to be a solid criterion at first sight; many texts instigate uncertainty about this identity or non-identity, as is also shown by a wide range of names that express the difficulty of categorization: ‘semi-autobiographical’ or ‘qua­ si-autobiographical novel’; ‘hypothetical autobiography’, ‘Wunschautobiographie’ [‘ideal autobiography’], ‘Roman-Autobiographie’ [‘novel-autobiography’], etc. Attempts to typify autobiographical novels by their linguistic structures or fea­ tures are even more complicated. By trying to discern autobiography from the autobio­ graphical novel, on the basis of textual devices, these attempts suffer from the problem that stilistic, structural, or metaphorical techniques are applied on a gradual scale. If these become a matter of more or less, no sharp distinctions between the genres can be made. In the past, some authors have investigated the specifics of the autobiographical novel in a greater complexity of writing. Müller (1976) investigated how and to what extent the autobiography in Goethe’s time profited from the narrative techniques of fiction, without becoming fiction itself. Pascal (1960) explored the literary character of the autobiographical novel in comparison to the autobiography. The novel disposes of a larger range of narrative devices: it can tell about events that take place outside the visual field of the protagonist, events can be hypothesized or explained; the thoughts and motives of other characters in the story can be revealed; scenes and dialogues may be vividly staged; outer physical descriptions and comments by characters other than the protagonist are possible; the chronology of events can be played with, etc. The nov­ elist profits from greater freedom because s/he is not bound by the frame of early life as anticipation of the future. Therefore, as favoured by Pascal: “The greatest of auto­ biographies tend to meet the autobiographical novel” (1959, 149). A similar freedom in fiction was recorded by Abbott (1988): a fictional narrative ends with the last event in the story, whereas an autobiographical narrative can never tell a complete life story. In addition to using more complex narrative techniques and having more freedom in writing, other aspects considered as typical of the novel are intensified reflexivity, a greater awareness of the problematic nature of identity, a higher degree of self-ref­ erence, etc. (Holdenried 1991). However, as previously stated, all autobiographical genres are able to imitate fictional narrative strategies. With the rise of (post)modern autobiography, it has become more and more difficult to distinguish autobiography from the autobiographical novel. Recent autobiographers use fictional narrative stra­ tegies, or they call the work that unmistakably tells their own lives a novel. Typological models seem doomed to fail. To have recourse to the referential and pragmatical status of the text seems to be the only way out. The autobiography and the autobiographical novel are distinguished

3.5 Autobiographical Novel 

 467

by their relationship to and claims about a referential world (Smith and Watson 2010, 10). They may share the same content, but the second one lacks the alleged identity on the level of the expression (‘énonciation’). If the resemblances between author and protagonist are not explicitly indicated in the text and are merely presumed by the reader, we are dealing with an autobiographical novel. This opens up a large range for various degrees within the genre. On the one hand, autobiographers may disguise their life stories as a novel in order to protect themselves against questions about the correctness of their account, like Theodor Fontane did in Meine Kinderjahre (1894) [‘My Childhood Days’]: Alles ist nach dem Leben gezeichnet. Wenn ich trotzdem, vorsichtigerweise, meinem Buche den Nebentitel eines ‘autobiographischen Romanes’ gegeben habe, so hat dies darin seinen Grund, daß ich nicht von einzelnen aus jener Zeit her vielleicht noch Lebenden auf die Echtheitsfrage hin interpelliert werden möchte. Für etwaige Zweifler also sei es Roman! [‘Everything is based on (my) life. However, I carefully categorize my book as an autobiographical novel because I don’t want the authenticity regarding characters referred to in the book, and who may still be alive, to be questioned. Therefore, for sceptics it’s a novel!’] (Fontane 1894, v).

On the other hand, the genre includes specimens like the novel Der Prozess (1925) [The Trial] by Franz Kafka that only covertly displays autobiographical elements. Another point of discussion in a referential approach that searches for generic distinctive features is the truth claim. While a novel lays no claim on telling the truth (Burdorf 2007, 59), the goal of the autobiography is to speak truthfully. Yet it is impor­ tant to define which kind of truth is at stake here (Aichinger 1989, 187): a referential truth, concerned with the verification of factual information – an operation that can hardly be executed by any reader – or a ‘higher truth’, as Goethe claimed for his auto­ biography Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1814) [Poetry and Truth. From my own life], by which he meant the same as the ‘deeper truth’ of life experi­ ence that Pascal wrote about. Pascal underlined the importance of the autobiograph­ ical genre as an understanding of the human self-consciousness. His interpretation of ‘autobiographical truth’ as ‘autobiographical veracity’ (Pascal 1959, 140) is quite relevant for the further study of autobiographical genres. He saw autobiographical truth not as a referential truth to the facts, but as the subjective conviction by the author (“the basic truth of existence” [Pascal 1959, 147]) that convinces the reader that s/he is reading an authentic story. This leads to an often heard assessment that a novel can depict life in a more truthful way than any autobiography ever could. A novel enables the author to show the hidden sides of life and the underlying motives for human actions. Pascal illustrates this with novels by Gottfried Keller (Der grüne Heinrich [1854/1855; 1879/1880] [Green Henry]), Charlotte Brontë (Villette [1853]) and D.  H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). In Sons and Lovers the author reveals the hidden logic of the protagonist Paul Morel, recognizable as Lawrence’s younger self, and writes about the unrealized potential in his life, which he couldn’t have written about in an autobiography (Pascal 1965, 199).

468 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

The interpretation of autobiographical truth as being subjective truth, as psycho­ logical veracity, or authenticity might lead to the contention that all literary work is ultimately autobiographical. “Every great work of fiction is simply an interior life in novel form,” the French author François Mauriac wrote (qdt. in Gusdorf 1980, 46). Even style can be considered as a never-absent implicit autobiographical dimension: la marque individuelle du style revêt une importance particulière, puisqu’à l’autoréférence expli­ cite de la narration elle-même, le style ajoute la valeur autoréférentielle implicite d’un mode singulier d’élocution [“In a narrative in which the narrator takes his own past as theme, the individual mark of style assumes particular importance, since to the explicit self-reference of the narration itself the style adds the implicit self-referential value of a particular mode of speaking”] (Starobinski 1970, 257 [1980, 74]).

Autobiographical Novel and Autofiction The relationship between the autobiographical novel and autofiction is another intricate problem. Shortly after the term ‘autofiction’ had been introduced by Serge Doubrovsky in France in the 1970s, it quickly spread throughout the French-speaking world and seemed to eradicate the older and often criticized term ‘autobiographical novel’. In recent times authors (especially French) have dismissed ‘autofiction’ for reasons of vagueness or redundancy (Darrieussecq 1996; Jeannelle 2007). It is no coin­ cidence that the term ‘autofiction’ was sharply criticized for its redundancy in France, ­ arraute) where the nouveau romanciers (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie S had written ‘nouvelles autobiographies’, a genre that was particularly based on the idea of the paradoxical coexistence of referential and fictional components. Auto­ fiction critics have pleaded for a rehabilitation of the term ‘autobiographical novel’ (Colonna 2004; Gasparini 2004, 2008). If ‘autofiction’ is used in a broad sense, designing literary texts in which both an autobiographical and a fictional pact are presented (Zipfel 2009, 31), in which the distinction between autobiographical and fictional has become irrelevant (WagnerEgelhaaf 2008, 145) or in which the interrelation between real life and fiction forms a experimental space for selfexploration (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2010, 197), it is quite difficult to discern it from the autobiographical novel that likewise transcends the boundary between the fictional and the referential. Attempts to introduce subcategories within the genre of autofiction (Colonna 2004) do not really solve this problem, neither does the emphasis on the deliberateness of this transcendence (Smith and Watson 2010) nor the accentuation of the poetical and self-reflexive dimension in autofiction (WagnerEgelhaaf 2010), since to a certain extent all these characteristics can be found in auto­ biographical novels as well (Missinne 2013). A narrowly defined genre of autofiction can be more succesfully distinguished from an autobiographical novel: autofiction is a special kind of fictional narration

3.5 Autobiographical Novel 

 469

in which the protagonist who bears the name of the author exists in an evidently fictional world (‘fictionalisation du soi’ [‘self fictionalisation’] [Colonna 2004; Zipfel 2009; Missinne 2013]). Yet, demarcation problems continue to exist since the distin­ guishing features, such as the probability of the events told and the recognizability of facts and events as belonging to the author’s life – evidently fictional characters – remain gradual and reader dependent categories (Missinne 2013, 34).

Autobiographical Novel and Fictional Autobiography An autobiographical novel could, in a certain way, be called the opposite of a fictional autobiography (Missinne 2013, 50). In the first case an author takes advantage of a fic­ tional form – the novel – by presenting a more or less autobiographical content, while in the second case the author uses an autobiographical frame for the presentation of an invented story. Fictional autobiographies often use an I-narrator as protagonist (e.  g. Thomas Mann, Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull [1954] [Confessions of Felix Krull]) in order to obtain the ‘autobiographical effect’, while autobiographical novels can be told by an I-narrator (e.  g. Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit [1932] [Journey to the End of the Night]) or by a third person-narrator (e.  g. Gottfried Keller, Der grüne Heinrich). Most literary histories situate the origins of the autobiographical novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although some date the tradition of this mixed form back to Late Antiquity (Somnium sive Vita Luciani [The Dream or Lucian’s Career]) and the Middle Ages. Dante’s Vita nuova (1293–1295) [The New Life] could be con­ sidered an early specimen of this genre (Gasparini 2004, 25; Kraus 2009, 35; Wag­ ner-Egelhaaf 2005, 133). The term ‘autobiographical novel’ appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, to name a phenomenon that had already been existing decades before (Gasparini 2004, 287). During the eighteenth century, the age of rising individualism – Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his epistolary novel, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) [Julie or the New Heloise] and Lawrence Sterne with his travel narrative, Sentimental Journey (1768) – had already produced texts with an ambiguous status that would soon gain success all over Europe. In Germany Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiographical project Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit was the start of a tradition reflecting on the constitutive role of the subject and his history and, together with Les confessions (1782) [The Confessions] by Rousseau, is considered the prototype of self-conscious autobiographical writing that ascribes an indispensable role to fictionalisation (‘Dichtung’). Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich was first conceived as a short narrative about the downfall of a young artist, yet it developed into a complex work in the second version, with profound shifts in contents and narrative situation, and is considered one of the first autobiographical novels in German. For France this position is taken by René (1802) written by De Chateaubriand, a novel in which a sophisticated ambiguous strategy

470 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

is applied with no overt autobiographical indications, but that is nevertheless recog­ nizable as such for attentive readers. In England the start of the genre can be seen in the romantic ironic tradition with Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819–1824) and later in the tradition of the realistic novel David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens. The twentieth-century novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce is exemplary for the developments of autobiographical novel in modernism: an increas­ ing fragmentarization, narrative and stylistic experiments, the dissolution of the generic categories of autobiography, novel, or essay, and an increased self-reflexive dimension. There are at least two reasons why the notion ‘autobiographical novel’ has suf­ fered from a general disgrace. The ‘impurity’ or ‘hybridity’ of the genre and its ‘patch­ work’ character of referential and fictional elements have led to complex discussions about fictionality and referentiality involving this type of genre and have irritated those with an urge for consistent and homogeneous genres. Another reason is the fact that this term has the appearance of a descriptive generic category, yet it is often used in a deprecatory way. To subsume the autobiographical novel under the category of autobiography, as with fictionalist poetics (like Paul Ricoeur’s [Ricoeur 1990]), is a form of aesthetical rejection (Gasparini 2004, 314). If the literary value of a text comes under suspicion when its fictional status is indefinite, autobiographical genres are suspect as to their literary qualities. In such cases ‘autobiographical’ and ‘novel’ are not used as generic terms, but as normative concepts. Formulated in a positive way: emphasizing the fictional character of a text can be a strategy for claiming aesthetic quality and for legitimizing autobiographical genres as literature. Calling a text a novel in such cases does not say anything about the type of the text, but about its literary quality. This strategy often prevails in the discourse on autofiction: the phenomenon of what henceforth is called ‘autofiction’ has contributed to restore the legitimacy of being literature, and a visibility in the bookmarket to what was previously called ‘autobiographical novel’ (Forest 2011, 11). If we leave behind essentialist categorizing conceptions of genre and depart from a functional and dynamic genre approach (already to be found in Bruss 1976) with a communicative perspective which takes into account the role of the reader and the his­ torical context, the above mentioned difficulties cease to be at the forefront. Generic differences between autobiographical and fictional texts “need to be respected as an effect of reading, even if they cannot be defined as intrinsic qualities of the texts in question” (Jefferson 1990, 109). This entails a shift in attention in the research of auto­ biographical genres from the generic concern to the interaction of the text qualities and the reader, a “shift from genre to discourse” (Smith and Watson 2010, 3). The interaction of signs of fictionality and of referentiality that characterize the autobio­ graphical novel are considered with attention for their effects on the reading process. Put in an extreme way, this means that the status of an autobiographical novel can only be determined after the process of reading and interpreting has taken place (Gasparini 1994, 10). ‘Telling the truth’, as the original objective of the autobiography,

3.5 Autobiographical Novel 

 471

gives way for the truth of autobiographical writing that novels can attain as well: the truth is put in the text as power of persuasion and effect of authenticity.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories.” New Literary History 19.3 (1988): 597–615. Aichinger, Ingrid. “Probleme der Autobiographie als Sprachkunstwerk.” Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 170–199. Barthes, Roland. “Introduction à l’analyse structural des récits.” Communications 8 (1966): 1–27 [“An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 237–272]. Bruss, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Acts. The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Burdorf, Dieter. “Autobiographie. Autobiographischer Roman.” Metzler-Lexikon Literatur. Begriffe und Definitionen. Ed. Dieter Burdorf, Christoph Fasbender and Burkhard Moennighoff. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007. 57– 59. Colonna, Vincent. “Défense et illustration du roman autobiographique. ” http://www.fabula.org/ revue/cr/468.php.2004 (16 August 2013). Darrieussecq, Marie. “L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.” Poétique 107 (1996): 369–380. Fontane, Theodor. Meine Kinderjahre. Berlin: F. Fontane & Co, 1894. Forest, Philippe. Je & Moi. La Nouvelle Revue Française 598. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Gasparini, Philippe. Est-il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004. Gasparini, Philippe. Autofiction. Une aventure du langage. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008. Genette, Gérard. Fiction et diction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991 [Fiction & diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993]. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Holdenried, Michaela. Im Spiegel ein anderer. Erfahrungskrise und Subjektdiskurs im modernen autobiographischen Roman. Heidelberg: Winter, 1991. Jeannelle, Jean-Louis. “Autofiction et poétique.” Le propre de l’écriture de soi. Ed. Simonet Tenant Françoise. Paris: Téraèdre, 2007. 25–30. Jefferson, Ann. “Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet.” Intertextuality: Theories and Practices. Ed. Judith Still and Michael Worton. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. 108–129. Kraus, Esther. “Autobiografie.” Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen. Ed. Dieter Lamping and Sandra Poppe. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2009. 22–30. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique” (1973). Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. 13–46 [“The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. ­Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Missinne, Lut. Oprecht gelogen. Autobiografische romans en autofictie in de Nederlandse literatuur. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2013. Müller, Klaus Detlef. Autobiographie und Roman. Studien zur literarischen Autobiographie der Goethezeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. Pascal, Roy. “The Autobiographical Novel and the Autobiography.” Essays in Criticism 9.2 (1959): 134–150. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

472 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Shumaker, Wayne. English Autobiography. Its Emergence, Materials, and Form. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Starobinski, Jean. “Le style de l’autobiographie.” Poétique 1.3 (1970): 257–265 [“The Style of Auto­biography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 73–83]. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Autofiktion & Gespenster.” Kultur & Gespenster. Autofiktion 7 (2008): 135–149. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, ed. Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion.” Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen. Ed. Dieter Lamping and Sandra Poppe. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2009. 31–36.

Further Reading Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2001. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography. Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Lejeune, Philippe. Moi aussi. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986. May, Georges. L’autobiographie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979. Paulsen, Wolfgang. Das Ich im Spiegel der Sprache. Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991. de Toro, Alfonso, and Claudia Gronemann, eds. “Autobiographie revisited”: Theorie und Praxis neuer autobiographischer Diskurse in der französischen, spanischen und lateinamerikanischen Literatur. Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Olms, 2004. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der Literaturwissenschaft.” Bios 23.2 (2010): 188–200.

3.6 Autobiographical/Autofictional Poetry Frauke Bode

Definition Poetry owes the Romantic tradition its precarious status as an inherently autobio­ graphical genre (Abbs 2001, 81; Farish 2011, 139). Although the critical assumption that authors of poetry will necessarily express their own feelings in their writing is nowadays widely outdated, the idea still underlies a popular understanding of this genre. Poetic speech seems to be the ideal means of self-expression: this idea can be found in such weighty authorities as Goethe and Hegel (Horn 1995, 299), and was developed in later criticism and poetics up to the second half of the twentieth century – see, for example, the German idea of romantic ‘Erlebnislyrik’ or the Spanish ‘poesía de la experiencia’ of the 1950s and 1960s, both of which share the term ‘expe­ rience’ – simultaneously with the emerging tendencies of structuralism and postmod­ ernism that would reject a too referential, let alone biographical reading. Even though poetry is said to show a more intense relationship between authors and their oeuvre than narrative or dramatic texts, poems have not yet been included within the core of studies on autobiography, which tend consistently to concentrate on prose texts. This may be because poetry is structured on numerous levels (Weich 1998, 43) displaying openly that it is made and that it is therefore artificial. Yet within this set of paradoxes poetic autobiography does nonetheless exist.

Explication The term ‘autofiction’ as an alternative to autobiography seems to avoid the fallacies of biographical readings by underlining the fact that any autobiographical quest is defined by the permeability of its border between fact and fiction. Poetry is neither per se autobiographical nor autofictional, but engages in continuous negotiation of its status. Consequently, we have to examine whether a text is read as an autobiog­ raphy (reception aesthetics), whether this attribution has to do with techniques of poetic production (production aesthetics), and whether the text presents itself as such (object aesthetics). Do the poems in question resort to autobiographical strategies? The following depiction is structured by three questions: 1) What role does fiction play in poetry, particularly when a textual ‘I’ is involved? 2) How does poetry arrange specifically autobiographical time sequences? 3) What strategies of authentication/ distraction identify a particular poetic text as autobiographical or autofictional?

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-062

474 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Fiction and Poetry As already noted, defining poetry as a fictional genre is controversial. In Käte Ham­ burger’s influential theory, poetic speech has no function other than the immediate enunciation of the ‘I’, whereas narrations and drama produce a “Scheinwelt” [“a world of semblance, mimesis”] (1994, 217 [1973, 271–272]). While the content of a poem may be fictitious, its enunciation, the ‘I’, refers to a real speaker. Wolfgang Müller also contends that authors stand closer to their oeuvre in poetry than in other genres: poetry is subjective and monological, expressing an ‘I’ even though this may not be grammatically overt. His argument is similar to Hamburger’s: although the ‘I’ should not be read autobiographically, it can only be separated from the author in the case of a role song (Müller 1979, 12, 31, 48). Hamburger and Müller exemplify the tendency to distinguish poems from nar­ rative texts, and hence to question their fictional status. More recent discussion, however, underlines the fictionality of poetic speech (Eagleton 2007, 31; Fischer 2007, 43). In this view, poetry (like any other literary genre) is based on a fictitious enuncia­ tion with at least two pragmatic levels that allow us to distinguish between the author and the speaker (Weich 1998, 23). Nevertheless, it is equally important not to apply this postmodern notion to poetry in general, but to bear in mind the specific historical context and reading contract between author and reader, mediated by genre conven­ tions and ‘historical and pragmatic presuppositions’ (Warning 1983, 194). In this light, the ‘I’ as it occurs in poems can be defined as a category of deixis: if and only if the speaker uses the first person singular can that voice be termed a ‘lyrical (i.  e. poetic) I’. For only then can poetry be analysed as autobiography or autofiction: only the grammatically explicit presence of a first-person speaker can create the pos­ sibility that the speaker is pointing to him or herself. However, the use of the lyrical ‘I’ does not allow any conclusions about the speaker’s relation to the author – like the narrator in narrative or the roles in drama, the lyrical ‘I’ forms part of the text. This first person can consequently best be conceptualised as a ‘figure of reading’ that provides answers to questions like ‘who is speaking’ and ‘about what’ (Horn 1995, 299–300). The term ‘lyrisches Ich’ [‘lyrical I’] itself, introduced by Margarete Susman in 1910 and discussed highly controversially in German literary theory (Martínez 2002, 376), is appropriate here because it forms the counterpart in poetry to one of the defin­ ing elements of autobiography: the ‘I’ that speaks explicitly of itself.

Fiction and Poetic Autobiography/Autofiction Philippe Lejeune’s influential definition in Le pacte autobiographique (1975) [The Autobiographical Pact] explicitly limits autobiographical writing to prose. Interest­ ingly, and in contrast to the observation made above that the ‘I’ in poetry is often con­ fused with the ‘I’ of the author, Lejeune sees the reader of poetry as perceiving an open

3.6 Autobiographical/Autofictional Poetry 

 475

deixis without reference and context (1975, 245 [1989, 234]). Nevertheless, for formal definition as autobiography, he stipulates the existence of a clear identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist, an equation consolidated by Gérard Genette (1993, 76–77). This would suggest that a poem can qualify as autobiography if it is spoken by a real person who tells his or her life story in retrospect (Lejeune 1975, 14 [1989, 4–5]). The (lyrical) ‘I’ alone, however, is not a sufficient criterion for a lyrical autobiography, it needs some other “signe de réalité” [“sign of reality”] (Lejeune 1975, 23 [1989, 12]) by which the ‘I’ can be paratextually identified and verified. One such a sign could be the correspondence of the speaker’s and the author’s name. This iden­ tity does not guarantee ‘truth’ in autobiographical writing either, but establishes the autobiographical pact. However, the ‘pact’ only works as long as the parties involved are prepared to keep to it. While Lejeune excludes “jeu[x] de devinette” [“guessing game(s)”] in the triangle of identity (1975, 26 [1989, 13]), postmodernist texts produce referential uncertainty as a means to call in question the claim of ‘truth’ underlying autobiographical writing, thereby exposing autobiographies as fictionalisations. In Lejeune’s theory, the limits of the autobiographical pact are reached when a biographical ‘story’ cannot possibly be reconstructed (de Toro and Gronemann 2004, 9–10). Serge Doubrovsky’s notion of autofiction, however, bypasses this axiom neatly and precisely by constructing the fic­ tionalised author as a “ruse du récit” [‘narrative ruse’] with a psychoanalytic function (Doubrovsky 1988, 69, 87). Autofiction produces a willingly ‘ambiguous pact’ (Alberca 2007), in which the author implicitly states: “‘C’est moi et ce n’est pas moi’” [“‘It is I and it is not I’”] (Genette 1991, 87 [1993, 76–77]). According to Marie Darrieussecq, autofiction is mainly ludic, feigned and serious at the same time (1996, 377). But far from being a postmodernist game played with tokens of reference, poetry’s “guessing game[s]” with the lyrical ‘I’ can be traced back far further than the twentieth century. Indeed, as the historical overview will demonstrate, the very idea of poetry as self-ex­ pression exposes the fragility of the autobiographical text-world reference.

Time While the semantic (identification) and the pragmatic (retrospective focalisation) aspects of Lejeune’s defining triad can be prominently found in poetry, the syntac­ tic element (narrativity) is not usually associated with it. However, poems (not only ballads) can also be structurally narrative when they bring to mind events that “repre­ sent temporally organized sequences” and are presented by mediating agents (Hühn and Sommer 2013, para. 1): poetic language can not only state thoughts and express emotions, but it can also design a dramatic situation involving characters and their speech and report on something – the speaker functioning as the narrator of a story (Weich 1998, 43). Therefore, a poem can undoubtedly evoke phases of story-telling. In these structural elements of narrative, the time sequence is crucial. Not only because

476 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

narration and time (following a linear concept) are generally both defined by a succes­ sion of events, but because autobiographies in particular refer to a specific individual life span. How, then, do poems configure time as the speaker’s position relative to a story, as a category of voice (Genette 1980, 216), and time as the narrated temporal sequence of life events, as a category of order (Genette 1980, 33–85)? Poetic speech configures the moment in time of its enunciation by using verb tenses, adverbial and explicit time references. Sometimes, the speaker’s utterance can be assigned to a specific point in time (for example when naming a date in the main text or in its title, dedication or epigraph). In many cases, the time of the enunciation is undefined and only describable as retrospective, anchored in the present or ori­ ented towards the future. In the first quartet of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 2”, the lyrical ‘I’ speaks about the addressee’s future: “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,/ And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,/Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now/Will be a tottered weed of small worth held” (Shakespeare 2006, 27, l. 1–4,). The example shows how the time of the enunciation, an unspecified present (“now”, l. 3), is to be distinguished from the time that is its topic: the addressee’s future at the age of forty. Inasmuch as Shakespeare’s Sonnets can be located within an autobiographical context, “Sonnet 2” is of particular interest because it exemplifies how the present of poetic speech is not necessarily historical. The description of the addressee’s future (here within the ‘topos’ of vanity) is more than a mere referential warning: even if it were explicitly dated, the present would have to be actualised in every reading. This unspecified deictic situation of enunciation (‘here, now and I’) is often considered typical of poetic utterance. Despite this anchorage of the poetic voice in the present, poetry speaks, there­ fore, not only about the situation current in the moment of speech, but also about the past or future. The periods dealt with are often points rather than larger phases, and this influences the narrative order: events of a longer duration tend to be arranged in separate images and sequences, subdivided into different poems, and structured by leaps in time (Frank 2003, 93). We can thus expect to find poetic life-writing in longer, eminently narrative forms like ballads; but it is also present in shorter poems which, read cyclically, form a more extended autobiographical structure. If poems published separately in a book or linked expressively as a cycle can be attributed to the same speaker, they will belong to different moments of enunciation. In this way, poetry can narrate an entire life in single “spots of time”, as Wordsworth claimed in The Prelude (1805; XI, l. 258): it does so by means of what might be called an ‘intermittent narra­ tive’ (Bode 2015, 139).

Authority The discussion of poets and oeuvres in what follows concentrates on some exemplary texts from the western canon, and would have to be completed by further research on

3.6 Autobiographical/Autofictional Poetry 

 477

the function of the ‘I’ in other literatures, which cannot be addressed here. Assuming the ‘basic structure of autobiography’ – the ‘I’ talking about itself and its life (Wag­ ner-Egelhaaf 2005, 104) – the overview chooses poetic milestones to answer the ques­ tion as to how the lyrical ‘I’ is to be read under the historically specific pragmatic contracts – in particular concerning the functions of author and speaker. Does the text belong to a period in which there was a concept of an author that reigned over the production and reception of (poetic) texts, and did the author leave any traces of staging him/herself in the text (Jannidis et al. 2000, 14)? Autobiographical and autofictional writing aims to authenticate a story as stem­ ming from the author’s life. Paratextual sources will ostensibly verify or falsify the lit­ erary statements. Within the text, it is mainly concrete places, dates, and persons that will offer an autobiographical reading based on the author’s traditionally assumed sovereignty (‘auctoritas’) over his/her text (Hammerschmidt 2010, 53–54). Carolin Fischer argues that poetry often offers a ‘poetic pact’ explicitly identifying the lyrical ‘I’ with the role of the ‘poeta’, the writer of the text (Fischer 2007, 73). This autobio­ graphical framing leads to a text authorising itself by giving the textual ‘I’ ‘auctoritas’ as authorial ‘I’. However, these textual or paratextual authentication strategies and the function of the ‘I’ have changed throughout history. A series of classical Latin poems explicitly differentiates between author and lyrical ‘I’. Although the apostrophe of the ‘I’ as “Catullus” is a leitmotif in Catullus’ carmina and the speaker presents himself within a historically traceable group of con­ temporaries, one of his songs claims that the poems are of an entirely different nature from their author: “qui me ex uersiculis meis putastis,/quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum./nam castum esse decet pium poetam/ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est” [“who dared judge me on the basis of my verses –/they mayn’t be manly: does that make me indecent?/Squeaky-clean, that’s what every proper poet’s/person should be, but not his bloody squiblets”] (Carmen 16, l. 3–6 [Catull 2005, 62–63]). However, Carmen 16 can also be seen as a form of occasional poetry, an apology written in reac­ tion to actual hostilities (Green 2005, 5–6). Similarly Publius Ovidius Naso, Ovid, in the introductory poem to the second volume of the Amores, names himself as the poems’ author: “Hoc quoque composui Paelignis natus aquosis/Ille ego nequitiae Naso poeta meae” [“This too I, stream-fed Sulmo’s son, have written –/Ovid, the poet of my naughtiness”] (Amores II, 1, l. 1–2 [Ovid 1990, 28]). But at the same time he dis­ tinguishes the poetic voice from that of its biographical author. The Amores follow the generic convention of Roman elegy: love and poetry are one (Fischer 2007, 153). This is why, on the one hand, Ovid employs strategies of authentication which name him as ‘poeta’ of the verses and ‘amator’ of Corinna (Fischer 2007, 22), while, on the other, the lyrical ‘I’ also laughs at the “credulity” of those who believe his praise to be sincere: “Et mea debuerat falso laudata videri/Femina; credulitas nunc mihi vestra nocet” [“You should have seen the praise I gave my girl-friend/Was lies: I’m crushed by your credulity”] (Amores III, 12, l. 43–44 [Ovid 1990, 79]). Yet at the same time, the ‘I’ admits that his writing had an effect on reality: Corinna became attractive to other

478 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

men after his poems had created a myth about her (Galinsky 1975, 178; Fischer 2007, 154). In a stricter sense, the long final poem of Tristia IV in which the ‘I’, recalls his entire life from the perspective of exile, is more clearly autobiographical. However, the poetic form asks for a double reading of this text, too: not only as a true or complete account of his life, but also as an artistic and aesthetic project: “It is both a poet’s auto­ biography, in that details are selected, emphasized, or omitted as they relate to Ovid’s poetic career, and a poetic autobiography, in that these details are organized into an aesthetically conceived and unified whole” (Fredericks 1976, 154). Although autobiography is a phenomenon generally attributed to the modern era, autobiographical information within vernacular poetic texts (Müller 2010, 425) answers the question whether there was a notion of autobiography in the European Middle Ages. In Middle High German, troubadours like Walther von der Vogelweide, Tannhäuser, or Oswald von Wolkenstein insert their own experiences to prove their statements (Müller 2010, 427–428). As poetry was a genre of performance, its recep­ tion was socially mediated: the troubadours’ ‘lyrics’, which were played at court with musical accompaniment until the fifteenth century, are to be considered ‘contract work’ (Bauschke 2011, 309). As occasional poetry, they were part of an extratextual communication fulfilling public functions which, as such, mediated the veracity of the ‘referential’ information about speaker and addressee. The functional differen­ tiation between author and narrator appears in the medieval courtly verse epic, e.  g. Chrétien de Troyes. While earlier troubadours were anonymous bearers of a “social ‘I’” (Gragnolati 2010, 125), speaking for society as a whole and reflecting the ritual scheme of courtly love, poets now emphasise their authorial role. The author figure thus appears at a moment when orality merges into writing (Warning 1983, 194–195). Paradoxically, it is by giving away his real name that the author displays the genesis of the concept of fiction in the split between author and narrator (Warning 1997, 51). So, from the twelfth century on, a confusing ‘literary game’ (Classen 1991, 11) involving the identities of the real authors and their fictive role, and recurring indirectly to antique techniques, was already being played between the poets and their courtly audience (Warning 1983, 196; Müller 2010, 442). On the other hand, reading the proposed iden­ tity autobiographically, the Occitanian ‘vidas’ linked the troubadours’ life and work. According to Ulrich Müller, Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s “Frauendienst” [‘Service of Ladies’] of 1255, which shows the fictional autobiography of courtly love merging into claimed facticity, can be considered the first German autobiography (Müller 2010, 442–443). In the later Middle Ages the poet  – as in the formula “ich Wolkenstein” [‘me, Wolkenstein’] (Müller 1968, 39–42) – tries to configure himself in the process of writing, but the appearance of autobiographical aspects remains occasional and it is not until the fifteenth century that poets place themselves explicitly at the centre of their work (Classen 1991, 11–12; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 130). Even then, these late medieval authors do not primarily seek to relate their ‘extra-literary’ experience, but to show their skill as authors (Bauschke 2011, 309): the autobiographical reference, in other words, is about art rather than life.

3.6 Autobiographical/Autofictional Poetry 

 479

In the European context, it is Dante and Petrarca who initially develop the tradi­ tional theme of courtly love towards a self-referential attitude (Classen 1991, 81). In Dante’s Vita nuova [The New Life], a text that literally presents a change in the author’s life, his love for Beatrice is expressed in sonnets and ‘canzoni’ glossed in prose. In this context, the lyrical ‘I’ describes itself as “an individual and historically determined subject” (Gragnolati 2010, 140), contrasting with a Beatrice who appears as an allegor­ ical figuration, the ‘godly summum bonum’ (Müller 2010, 443). In a further contrast, the ‘I’ in Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [Canzionere] has mythical tendencies, and Laura is presented as an allegory of poetry, a personification recalling Catullus’ Lesbia and Ovid’s Corinna (Stierle 2003, 477; Brockmeier 2005, 198–199), who belongs decisively, therefore, to the realm of poetry. In sonnet 5 her name appears hidden in different lines: “LAU-RE-TA” (l. 3, 5, 7) and “LAU-RE” (Petrarca 2000, 4, l. 9). But this ‘Laura’ names more than the beloved: it refers to the laurel of Apollo, a symbol of poetry itself. Nevertheless, Petrarca stresses the poems’ autobiographical authenticity paratextually in a letter to Giacomo Colonna (Stierle 2003, 658, 507). In the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, Petrarchist poetry frees itself from the public pragmatic context and takes a step towards fiction, with a stylised autobiographical ‘I’ that claims authenticity. Poetry as an ‘agency of knowledge’ follows a mimetic paradigm as ‘aemulatio’ and ‘imitatio’ of Latin and Greek antiquity (Mahler and Weich 2008, 889–890). With the Spanish ‘Siglo de Oro’, namely with Lope de Vega’s Rimas, the lyrical ‘I’ is read metaphorically and as a fictionalisa­ tion (Carreño 1992, 73). In France, chronologically organised cycles appear, themati­ cally centred on the beloved mistress, and pointing towards the author’s biography (Penzenstadler 2011, 347). Ronsard’s inclusion of his name in the dedicatory poem opening his Amours (1556) presents himself as the author of the ensuing story and resumes the double identity attributed to the ‘I’ as both ‘poeta’ and ‘amator’ (Fischer 2007, 58–59). In England, Shakespeare’s Sonnets demonstrate that autobiography in poetry is a question of reception. The autobiographical content of Shakespeare’s poetry has been widely discussed, critics investigating the ‘real’ existence of the “Dark Lady” and the ‘authenticity’ of the platonic and homoerotic impetus of the first half of the sonnets (Penzenstadler 2011, 348–349), but “no remotely satisfactory identification of the beloved youth, the rival poet or the Dark Lady has been proposed” (Orgel 2012, 16). Combining different concepts of love with an overt reference to the Petrarchan ‘topos’, the Sonnets undermine any direct biographical relation. Paradoxically, the homoerotic aspect contributed in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth cen­ turies to suspend the sonnets’ autobiographical reception. Homoeroticism seemed incompatible with the figure of Shakespeare as it was then conceived (Orgel 2012, 11). In French classicistic poetry, the referentiality of many occasional poems depict­ ing topical situations is masked by the norm of an ‘art de plaire’ [‘art of pleasing’] (Pen­ zenstadler 2011, 352). Spitzer even diagnoses Voltaire’s gallant “Epître XXXIII”, “Les Vous et les Tu”, as ‘decorative’ rather than ‘experiential art’ (Spitzer 1980, 232). With the German ‘Sturm und Drang’ [‘Storm and Stress’] this poetic convention becomes

480 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

more individually shaped as can be seen in Goethes Sesenheimer Lieder [‘Sesenheim Songs’] (1770/1771). ‘Mimesis’ as a paradigm returns with Romanticism. Now, the textual ‘I’ attempts to negate its staging, and the poetry is intended to express personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Nevertheless, this apparently direct expression of feelings is only produced, and paradoxically, the romantic ‘I’ has difficulties defining itself in the text. Wordsworth’s Prelude with its three versions (1799, 1805 and 1850) exemplifies this quest. The poem “remains indeterminate, in pursuit of an inviolable origin which inevitably gets dispersed into various different revised or substituted versions” (Anderson 2011, 50). The “intermittent narrative” defined above as a poetic form of life narration, complicates Wordsworth’s task, because the “story in terms of a single narrative trajectory” does not exist, “rather Wordsworth remembers a series of past experiences out of chronological order, ‘spots of time’ (Wordsworth 1805, xi, [l.] 258) which revivify his writing in the present: ‘Such moments worthy of all gratitude,/ Are scatter’d everywhere’ (Book xi, [l.] 274–275)” (Anderson 2011, 50–51). As memo­ ries cannot recreate the authentic experience, the individual creates and imagines the self from memory. In this sense, Wordsworth’s autobiography is an ‘auto-genesis’ (Assmann 2003, 101, 112–113). According to Hugo Friedrich’s influential study, the earlier subjectivity in litera­ ture yields during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to a “diktatorische Phan­ tasie” [“dictatorial imagination”] (Friedrich 2006, 81 [1974, 57]). With José Ortega y Gasset he argues that modern poetry becomes “dehumanized” and hermetic (Frie­ drich 2006, 69–71, 109–111 [1974, 132–135, 140–144]). As the poetic paradigm turns from mimesis to imagination language achieves an increasing autonomy (Mahler and Weich 2008, 891–892). Arthur Rimbaud’s famous dictum “JE est un autre” seems to perfectly describe the autofictional tendency in modern poetry, although it does not so much separate the empirical from the lyrical ‘I’, as refer to the condition of the poet as a modern ‘poeta vates’ who sees the unknown and draws from the subconscious (Friedrich 2006, 62–63; [1974, 42]). Although the fictional component of autobiographical poetry has been empha­ sized in this account, it is not until the twentieth century that one can speak of autofictional poetry. Strikingly, it is in the 1950s and 1960s that poets from different coun­ tries begin overtly to suggest, and at the same time undermine, the identity of an authorial and lyrical ‘I’ by means of metaleptic strategies. In Germany and Italy, for example, a ‘new Subjectivity’ is detected (Lampart 2011, 423), while Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath represent what is called ‘confessional poetry’ (which finds its conti­ nuity in gender discussions in and around postmodern women’s poetry [Sontag and Graham 2001, 5]). Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s “Otobiyografi” (1961) is an example for the recurrence of poems entitled ‘Autobiography’. And the title of Jaime Gil de Biedma’s (1929–1990) poem “Después de la muerte de Jaime Gil de Biedma” [“After the Death of Jaime Gil de Biedma”], published in the significantly named Poemas póstumos [Posthumous Poems (1968)], is already metaleptic, inasmuch as the author has become a figure within the text, addressed by the lyrical ‘I’ as ‘Jaime Gil de Biedma’,

3.6 Autobiographical/Autofictional Poetry 

 481

and therefore distinct from the speaker. When the ‘I’ talks about the figure’s death “[y]o me salvé escribiendo/después de la muerte de Jaime Gil de Biedma” [“I saved my skin writing/after the death of Jaime Gil de Biedma”] (l. 55–56 [Gil de Biedma 1993, 102–103]), the metalepsis transforms into a ‘mise en abyme’ of the enunciation. As ‘I’ and addressee become one, the ‘I’ identifies himself first with a writer (“escribiendo”), and then with the writer of this poem (“después de la muerte de Jaime Gil de Biedma”): author, lyrical ‘I’, and addressee merge into a single character. Logic already suggests that this is a fake identity, because the real author could write this piece although the character ‘Jaime Gil de Biedma’ was dead (Bode 2012, 244–248) – which demonstrates that the autofictional lyrical ‘I’ expresses more than the mere intention to recreate autobiography in poetry. Where Assmann characterises Romantic autobiography as ‘auto-genesis’ – the ‘I’ being fictionalised in the artistic process – autofictional poetry can be said to create a phantasmatic ‘I’ that becomes indistinguishable from, but para­ doxically independent of the author (Bode 2012, 301). In conclusion, poetry can on the one hand display particularly well how post­ modern life and life-telling is being torn into episodic parts (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 187). On the other, from a poststructuralist point of view, poetic autobiographies prove what is a characteristic of every autobiographical genre (in prose or in verse): that autobiography always has an autofictional tendency, stemming from the ontological difference between factual and fictional discourse (Bode 2012, 300), and this is far from being uniquely postmodern.

Works Cited Abbs, Peter. “Autobiography and Poetry.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. I. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 81–83. Alberca, Manuel. El pacto ambiguo. De la novela autobiográfica a la autoficción. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2007. Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London/New York: Routledge, 2011. Bauschke, Ricarda. “Mittelalter.” Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte. Ed. Dieter Lamping. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2011. 306–334. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck, 2003. Bode, Frauke. Barcelona als lyrischer Interferenzraum. Zur Poetik der Komplizität in spanischen und katalanischen Gedichten der 1950er und 1960er Jahre. Carlos Barral – Gabriel Ferrater – Ángel González – Jaime Gil de Biedma – José Agustín Goytisolo. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Bode, Frauke. “Zeit in der Lyrik. ‚Zäsuriertes Erzählen‘ als intermittentes Narrativ der Lyrik.” Zeiten erzählen. Ansätze – Aspekte – Analysen. Ed. Antonius Weixler and Lukas Werner. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. 129–152. Brockmeier, Peter. “Kommentare.” Francesco Petrarca. Canzionere. 50 Gedichte Italienisch/Deutsch. Ed. and trans. Peter Brockmeier. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006. 179–350. Carreño, Antonio. “Amor ‘regalado’/amor ‘ofendido’: las ficciones del yo lírico en las Rimas (1609) de Lope de Vega.” Hispanic Studies in Honour of Geoffrey Ribbans. Ed. Ann L. Mackenzie and Dorothy S. Severin. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992. 73–82.

482 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Catullus, Gaius Valerius. The Poems of Catullus. A Bilingual Edition. Ed. and trans. Peter Green. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Classen, Albrecht. Die autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelalters. Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi, 1991. Darrieussecq, Marie. “L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.” Poétique 107 (1996): 369–380. Doubrovsky, Serge. “Autobiographie/vérité/psychanalyse.” Autobiographiques: de Corneille a Sartre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988. 61–79. Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell, 2007. Farish, Helen. “‘Faking it up with the Truth’: The Complexities of the Apparently Autobiographical ‘I’.” Poetry and Autobiography. Ed. Jo Gill and Melanie Waters. New York: Routledge, 2011. 139–143. Fischer, Carolin. Der poetische Pakt. Rolle und Funktion des poetischen Ich in der Liebeslyrik bei Ovid, Petrarca, Ronsard, Shakespeare und Baudelaire. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Frank, Horst J.: Wie interpretiere ich ein Gedicht? Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 6th ed. 2003. Fredericks, B. R. “Tristia 4.10: Poet’s Autobiography and Poetic Autobiography.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 106 (1976): 139–154. Friedrich, Hugo. Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik. Von der Mitte des neunzehnten bis zur Mitte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1956). Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006 [The Structure of Modern Poetry. From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974]. Galinsky, Karl. Metamorphoses. An Introduction to the Basic Aspects. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Genette, Gérard. Fiction et diction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991 [Fiction and Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993]. Gil de Biedma, Jaime. Longing. Selected Poems. Trans. James Nolan. San Francisco: City Lights, 1993. Gragnolati, Manuele. “Autorship and performance in Dante’s Vita nova.” Aspects of the performative in medieval culture. Ed. Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010. 125–141. Green, Peter. “Introduction.” The Poems of Catullus. A Bilingual Edition. Ed. and trans. Peter Green. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 1–41. Hamburger, Käte. Die Logik der Dichtung (1957). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta/J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, 4th ed. 1994 [The Logic of Literature. Trans. Marylin J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973]. Hammerschmidt, Claudia. Autorschaft als Zäsur. Vom Agon zwischen Autor und Text bei d’Urfé, Rousseau und Proust. München: Fink, 2010. Horn, Eva. “Subjektivität in der Lyrik: ‘Erlebnis und Dichtung,’ ‘lyrisches Ich.’” Einführung in die Lite­ ra­tur­wissenschaft. Ed. Miltos Pechlivanos, Stefan Rieger, Wolfgang Struck and Michael Weitz. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. 299–310. Hühn, Peter, and Roy Sommer. “Narration in Poetry and Drama.” The living handbook of narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ article/narration-poetry-and-drama (11 July 2018). Jannidis, Fotis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez, and Simone Winko. “Autor und Interpretation.” Texte zur Theorie der Autorschaft. Ed. Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez and Simone Winko. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. 7–29. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989].

3.6 Autobiographical/Autofictional Poetry 

 483

Lampart, Fabian. “Gegenwart.” Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte. Ed. Dieter Lamping. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2011. 413–427. Mahler, Andreas, and Horst Weich. “Einzelaspekt: Lyrik und Chanson.” Handbuch Französisch. Sprache – Literatur – Kultur – Gesellschaft. Ed. Ingo Kolboom, Thomas Kotschi and Edward Reichel. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2nd ed. 2008. 889–895. Martínez, Matías. “Das lyrische Ich. Verteidigung eines umstrittenen Begriffs.” Autorschaft. ­Positionen und Revisionen. Ed. Heinrich Detering. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2002. 376–389. Müller, Ulrich. „Dichtung“ und „Wahrheit“ in den Liedern Oswalds von Wolkenstein: Die autobiographischen Lieder von den Reisen. Göppingen: Alfred Kümmerle, 1968. Müller, Ulrich. “Thesen zu einer Geschichte der Autobiographie im deutschen Mittelalter.” Lyrik II, Epik, Autobiographie des Mittelalters. Ed. Margarete Springeth, Gertraud Mitterauer and Ruth Weichselbaumer. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 2010. 423–446. Müller, Wolfgang. Das lyrische Ich. Erscheinungsformen gattungseigentümlicher Autor-Subjektivität in der englischen Lyrik. Heidelberg: Winter, 1979. Orgel, Stephen. “Introduction.” William Shakespeare. The Sonnets. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 1–22. Ovid. The Love Poems. Trans.  a.  D. Melville. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Penzenstadler, Franz. “Frühe Neuzeit.” Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte. Ed. Dieter Lamping. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2011. 335–365. Petrarca, Francesco. The Canzionere (Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta). Vol. I. Ed. and trans. Frederic J. Jones. Market Harborough: Troubadour, 2000. Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Sontag, Kate, and David Graham. “Containing Multitudes.” After Confession. Poetry as Autobiography. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2001. 3–8. Spitzer, Leo. “Einige Voltaire-Interpretationen” (1931). Voltaire. Ed. Horst Baader. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980. 209–252. Stierle, Karlheinz. Francesco Petrarca. Ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts. München/ Wien: Hanser, 2003. Susman, Margarete. Das Wesen der modernen deutschen Lyrik. Stuttgart: Strecker & Schröder, 1910. de Toro, Alfonso, and Claudia Gronemann. “Einleitung.” Autobiographie revisited. Theorie und Praxis neuer autobiographischer Diskurse in der französischen, spanischen und lateinamerikanischen Literatur. Ed. Alfonso de Toro and Claudia Gronemann. Hildesheim: Olms, 2004. 7–21. Warning, Rainer. “Der inszenierte Diskurs.” Funktionen des Fiktiven. Ed. Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser. München: Fink, 1983. 183–206. Warning, Rainer. “Lyrisches Ich und Öffentlichkeit bei den Trobadors. Wilhelm IX. von Aquitanien: Molt jauzens, mi prenc en amar.” Lektüren romanischer Lyrik. Von den Trobadors zum Surrealismus. Ed. Rainer Warning. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 45–84. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1809, 1850). Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. London: Penguin, 1995.

Further Reading Audinet, Éric, and Dominique Rabaté, eds. Poésie & Autobiographie. Rencontres de Marseille. 17, 18 Novembre 2000. Tours: Farrago/cipM, 2004. Bazzocchi, Marco A., ed. Autobiografie in versi. Sei poeti allo specchio. Bologna: Pendragon, 2002.

484 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Hühn, Peter, and Jörg Schönert. “Einleitung: Theorie und Methodologie narratologischer Lyrik-Analyse.” Lyrik und Narratologie. Text-Analysen zu deutschsprachigen Gedichten vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Jörg Schönert, Peter Hühn and Malte Stein. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2007. 1–18. Lerro, Menotti. Raccontarsi in versi. La poesia autobiografica in Inghilterra e in Spagna (1950–1980). Roma: Carocci, 2012. Luengo, Ana. “El poeta en el espejo: de la creación de un personaje poeta a la posible autoficción en la poesía.” La obsesión del yo. La auto(r)ficción en la literatura española y latinoamericana. Ed. Vera Toro, Sabine Schlickers and Ana Luengo. Madrid/Frankfurt a.  M.: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2010. 251–267. Zymner, Rüdiger. Lyrik. Umriss und Begriff. Paderborn: Mentis, 2009.

3.7 Autobiographical Visual Arts, esp. Painting Gerd Blum

Definition There is no established genre in the Visual Arts that corresponds to the literary form of ‘autobiography’, and only as late as with Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Atelier du peintre. Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique et morale [‘The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of my Artis­ tic and Moral Life’, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 1854–1855], an explicitly autobiographical painting with a canonical status comparable to Augustinus’s and Rousseau’s Confessions was created. So far, no generally accepted definition of ‘Autobiographical Art’ has been estab­ lished, nor does any, historical or systematical survey exist on this subject. Nonethe­ less it seems obvious to transfer the common definition of the literary form of auto­ biography (‘the biography of an author narrated by this very author’) to the Visual Arts as images can represent significant moments and biographical constellations of persons from an artist’s life. According to a narrow definition of ‘autobiographical art’, an image is auto­ biographical if it contains an obvious self-depiction of its author and at the same time figures who represent protagonists from the author’s ‘private life’ (and career). In a wider definition though, quite a number of paintings from the canonical and well established genre of ‘history painting’ (“historia”, as defined by Leon Batti­ sta Alberti in 1435/1436, Alberti 1972, 60–93) may be considered autobiographical, because they show self-portraits of their respective author, often in full figure, as protagonist of a depicted scene that does not show a scene from the artist’s life but from the canon of Western iconography. In a very wide definition, every image created by an artist can be considered an autobiographical document or an expression of the ‘inner self’ and ‘inner genius’ of an artist (Gedo 1994, Steiner and Young 2004).

Explication As to the narrow definition of ‘autobiographical art’: The figures represented are acting within a scene taken from the author’s private and professional life. There are very few examples in Early Modern Art of this type of autobiographical art, but many from the 1850s on, fusing the established genres of ‘self-portrait’ and ‘history paint­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-063

486 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

ing’. Such depictions often refer to the genre of ‘The Artist in his Studio’, established since the Fifteenth century. In ‘autobiographical paintings’ according to the wider definition, artists, by involving themselves in effigie into obviously not empirically ‘autobiographical’ scenes, extend, so to speak, their empirical autobiography in time and space. Since the fifteenth century artists are frequently shown within sacred and profane history paintings as detached beholders or as close witnesses of scenes which the ‘real’ artist cannot have been able to see unless by a supernatural ‘vision’. Since the sixteenth century, painters and sculptors quite often depicted themselves as acting protagonists in images with subjects from religious and mythological history. Many ‘masterworks’ of Western history painting from Renaissance and Baroque are depicting subjects deriving from the ‘grand narrations’ (Lyotard 1979, 5 and passim) of the Western tradi­ tion, i.  e. they show subjects deriving from pagan mythology, from the Hebrew and the Christian Bible, Hagiography, and from secular history. But at the same time several of these paintings depict their respective author as beholder or even agent within the represented scene. These scenes from salvation history, mythography, and secular history have mostly no ‘objective’ to its author at all. Often, the represented “historia” [‘story’, ‘narration’] (Alberti 1972, 70) happened in a distant past or is supposed to happen in the future when the author of the painting was not yet or will no longer be alive. Michelangelo represents himself as Nicodemus, who buried Christ (Balas 2004 on his late Pietà in Florence), and also as S. Bartholomew witnessing the Last Judg­ ment (Preimesberger 2006) – both events did not take place in his present time and within his ‘life’, but only in his imagination. Often, the depicted ‘historia’ occurs at a place where according to common sense, the author of the painting cannot have been. The depicted ‘distant’ event is transformed by its very artist into a (fictitious) autobio­ graphical event, by integrating self-portraits, most of them in full figure, to the scene. The very wide definition of ‘autobiographical art’ considers that, from the begin­ ning of the early modern period onwards, autobiographical exegesis has been applied not only to explicitly autobiographical drawings, paintings, sculptures, and prints, but also to many works which do not have an obviously autobiographical content, i.  e. to images which are neither self-portraits nor open allusions to the artist’s life or career. Canonical examples of autobiographical paintings and drawings date from the seventeenth century. Adam Elsheimer’s drawing showing the artist and his starving children in his studio (Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, before 1610) is preceded by Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting Family of the Artist (Basel, Kunst­ museum, ca. 1528), a representation of the austere living conditions of the painter’s wife and their children, giving this portrait autobiographical authenticity. Peter Paul Rubens frequently depicted himself, his first and his second wife and his chil­ dren within narrative group portraits (van Beneden 2015). He painted, for instance, himself, his son Nicolaas from his first marriage, and his second wife walking through the garden of his stately palace in Antwerp (Rubens and/or workshop, The Walk in

3.7 Autobiographical Visual Arts, esp. Painting  

 487

the Garden, Munich, Alte Pinakothek, ca. 1631; Rubens, Self-Portrait with Helena ­Fourment and Clara Johanna, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca. 1632). As opposed to Rubens’ representational images of the artist as an aristocrat, Rembrandt depicted himself as a sinner in his Self-Portrait in a Tavern (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, ca. 1651). Whether Vermeer’s De Schilderconst or ‘The Art of Painting’ (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, ca. 1664–1673), a studio painting, has to be con­ sidered a programmatic, self-reflexive painting about the art of painting or a depiction of an intimate moment between artist Vermeer and his model and muse, remains open to debate. As early as 1695, it was considered a self-representation of Vermeer (Montias 1989, 364). The painter Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, son-in-law and successor of Diego Velázquez as court-artist in Madrid, painted an imaginary family portrait including all his children from his two marriages and both his late first wife and his then second wife (The Family of the Painter, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, ca. 1664–1665; Swoboda 2014). Del Mazo cautiously integrates narrative moments into a representational portrait which combines the living and the dead wife and their chil­ dren within an imaginary family meeting. At the same time the compositional formula of that fictitious meeting openly cites the famous composition of Velázquez’ Meninas, now in the Prado Museum. Nor in Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque painting, nor in eighteenth century painting, autobiographical subjects do play a decisive role. In classicist painting around 1800, autobiographical issues are depicted only through mythological, his­ torical and allegorical subjects, for example in Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Woman (Paris, Louvre, 1799), planned while David was imprisoned as a supporter of Robespierre as a plea for reconciliation between the parties but also between the public and himself (Schnapper 1989). In his early biography of Antonio Canova, Carl Ludwig Fernow praises the fore­ most sculptor of classicism for avoiding any autobiographical expression and for objectivity (Fernow 1806, 49). The ‘head’ of the romantic ‘school’ in France, Eugene Delacroix, however, was soon supposed to have integrated a self-portrait into the pictorial narration of his painting, La Liberté guidant le peuple [‘Liberty Leading the People’] (Salon of 1830; Paris, Louvre [see Ubl 2009, 154n43]). Since the paintings created for Michelangelo’s official funeral in 1564 in Florence (Wittkower 1964) and the biographical paintings produced for the Casa Buonarotti in Florence, the life of artists had been becoming a new iconographical subject. This upgrading of the life of an artist to the subject of representation also promoted the creation of autobiographical drawings, prints, and paintings. The crisis of classical iconography around 1800 and especially since Francisco de Goya (Busch 1993) increased the significance of the artist as the subject of painting. In his Vorlesungen über Ästhetik [Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Arts], posthumously pub­ lished in 1837, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stated that in contemporary art, artists not only had to choose or develop an autonomous style, but also had to choose and develop subjects on their own (Hegel 1975, vol. 1, 602).

488 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Autobiographical painting emerges as an important genre in Courbet’s first monu­ mental canvasses establishing his soon Europe-wide fame since the Salon of 1849 and his one-man-show in his ‘Pavilion of Realism’ on the occasion of the 1855 World-Ex­ hibition in Paris (Clark 1973; Marchal 2012). Courbet’s painting After Dinner at Ornans (Lille, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1848) depicts the apparent portrait of the artist sitting with friends and family members around a table, referring both to an everyday scene in rural France and to famous religious images by Baroque painters Caravaggio and Louis Le Nain. In the Salon of 1850/1851, Courbet showed a monumental rendering of a contemporary burial in a newly opened graveyard in the environs of his town of birth, fusing memories of the recent burial of two family members and containing portraits of himself and family members (A Burial at Ornans, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 1849–1850). The above mentioned Atelier centers on an image of the painter, and most probably his lover, model and muse Louise Veuillot (Marchal 2012, 251n550) and their son, showing also portraits of some personal friends of Courbet and of art philosophers, critics, and collectors from his circle. Its above cited title, published in the ‘livret’ [short exhibition catalogue] of its first presentation in Courbet’s private one-man show of 1855, names an autobiographical content (‘[…] of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life’) and at the same time evokes an allegorical exegesis (‘A Real Allegory’). According to a commonly held belief, modernist painting (not only in the Baude­ lairian sense of ‘painting of modern live’ but also as self-reflexive ‘peinture pure’) had its origin in France between 1850 and 1880, in Courbet’s Realism, Manet’s Naturalism, in the art of Paul Cézanne, and of the Impressionists, especially of Claude Monet. Only more recent research since 1960 has been showing that highly important works by Manet and Cézanne which laid the foundation of modernist painting are explicitly autobiographical (or based on explicitly autobiographical drawings). Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (first exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, 1863; Paris, Musée d’Orsay) is often considered the first ‘painting of modern life’ and the first modernist painting. Only in 1973 it became clear that Manet conceived this painting as an autobiographi­ cal allegory – based on a famous engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael. Manet shows himself as a modern Paris from the city of Paris (Andersen 1973), trying to choose (but unable to make up his mind) between his muse and model, Victorine Meurent (mentioned by Manet as “Mademoiselle V.” in the ‘livret’ from 1863) and his future wife (Blum 2001). Meurent is famously depicted in the nude in the foreground, while the bather in the back is a hidden portrait of his future wife Susanne Leenhoff, alluding to the canonical iconographical theme of the ‘Bath of Susanna’ (Mauner 1975). Manet transformed an autobiographical scene into an allegorical image of a Baudelaireian ‘homo duplex’, choosing between a ‘Venus vulgaris’ and a ‘Venus cae­ lestis’ (Mauner 1975) – a painted “family romance” as Nancy Locke (2002) put it with reference to an essay by Sigmund Freud on the ‘Familienroman’ [‘family novel’] from 1909. Cézanne placed an explicit self-portrait both in his first variation of Manet’s Déjeuner (Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, 1876–1877), and in his versions of A Modern Olympia (Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 1873–1874, and other versions), a variation of Manet’s

3.7 Autobiographical Visual Arts, esp. Painting  

 489

famous Olympia (see Dombrowski 2013, 61–98). Claude Monet, too, painted a huge variation of Manet’s Déjeuner, also inserting his own self-portrait (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1865–1866, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and version in Saint Petersburg). Manet’s early work is often autobiographical, showing explicit or hidden portraits of himself, his wife and her son Leon (La pêche, New York, The Metropolitan Museum, ca. 1860; The Breakfast in the Studio, 1869, Munich, Neue Pinakothek). Paul Cézanne devel­ oped two series of paintings, his Joueurs de cartes [‘Card-Players’], and Baigneuses and Baigneurs [‘Bathers’] (Krumrine 1989), whose autobiographic content has been shown first by Kurt Badt (1960) with reference to two explicitly autobiographical drawings within his early letters. In the German speaking countries, painter Hans von Marées’s (1837–1887) influ­ ence on formalist art theory (especially on Konrad Fiedler and his pupil, sculptor Adolf Hildebrand) and on formalist art history (especially on Heinrich Wölfflin) is notable (Boehm 1991, LXXII–XCVII). Fiedler (1889) and Hildebrand (1891) identified the autobiographical subjects of his paintings and drawings, Hildebrand being a frequent protagonist of Marées’s images. But they choose to keep silence about this autobiographical aspect of his work. After a visit in Paris in 1869, Marées painted a var­ iation of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, integrating an explicit self-portrait into Manet’s compositional scheme (Schäferszene, Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum, 1869–1875). From 1868 on, Marées drew and painted a huge number of explicitly autobiographic scenes, showing full-figure-portraits of himself, Hildebrand, the latter’s future wife Irene Koppel, with whom Marées also had had a love affair, and Fiedler, who was to become a famous formalist art theorist. Like Courbet and Manet in their early oeuvres, but even more so, Marées drew and painted whole series of autobiographic images (Blum 2005). And like Cézanne in his late Card-Players and Bathers, Marées found a way, too, to transfer the ‘private iconography’ (Einstein 1996 [1926], 112; Szeemann 1985) of his many explicitly autobiographic drawings into allegorical depictions of the ‘Ages of Man’, ‘The Golden Age’ and the like (Hofmann 1960). According to his own statement, Marées intended to generalize the autobiographical content of his paint­ ings to the point that they would be publicly exhibited and appreciated as ‘generally important’ paintings of a universally valid ‘conditio humana’ (letter to Hildebrand, 20 July 1871 [Marées 1987, 73; Blum 2005, 190–202]). Unlike Courbet and Manet, their pro­ totypes and examples, Cézanne and Marées transformed highly personal and explic­ itly autobiographical drawings which included obvious portraits of themselves and closely related persons into monumental paintings of seemingly timeless essence and existence with seemingly anonymous protagonists. The development of autobiographical iconographies by late nineteenth and early twentieth century artists led to famous paintings which were considered auto­ biographically connected ensembles by their creators: notably Marées’ Hesperidenbilder [‘The Hesperides’/‘Images from Hesperia’]; Edvard Munch’s cycle of pictures ­Livsfrisen [‘Frieze of Life’]; Marcel Duchamp paintings from Munich, where the artist, in 1912, created an ensemble of autobiographically motivated paintings (Friedel et al.

490 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

2012). Pablo Picasso created over hundred variations on Manet’s Dejeuner, frequently showing himself as the depicted painter (Cooper 1963). Modernist artist Wassily Kandinsky (Thürlemann 1986) and expressionist painter Max Beckmann (Peters 2005, 169–207) gave autobiographical explanations of their work. Regarding the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ [‘New Objectivity’] Otto Dix’s paintings and etchings showing the disasters of World War I are obvious autobiographical testimo­ nies and at the same time highly sophisticated variations about non-autobiographi­ cal works from the canon of the history of art (Peters 2010, 21–22). Felix Nussbaum’s work, too, is strongly autobiographical, showing his experience as a victim of the Nazi Regime (Timms 2008). In postwar Paris, Jean Paul Sartre famously gave an autobio­ graphical interpretation of the often non-figurative paintings by Wols and of Alberto Giacometti’s portraits of his brother, Diego (Sartre 1998 [1948]). Marc Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and other artists of the New York School (also known as ‘Abstract Expressionism’) did not depict autobiographical scenes. They intended to create ‘autobiographical moments’ by evoking deep and “sublime” (Newman 1990 [1948], 170) emotions in the beholder. Despite Roland Barthes’s widely received text about the “Death of the Author” (Barthes 1967), artists of the ‘Neo-Avantgarde’ since the 1960s, namely Marina ­Abramovič, Joseph Beuys, and Louise Bourgeois created autobiographical, often mostly fictitious myths, both in their writings and interviews and by the obvious auto­ biographical allusions in their works and performances (Abramovič 2010; ­Bourgeois 1998). ‘Appropriation’-artists Sherrie Levine and Elaine Sturtevant, challenged the autobiographically focused cult of the male “Absolute Artist” (Soussloff 1997) and the traditional “Legend […] of the Artist” (Kris and Kurz 1934). The self-fashioning of artists according to longstanding topoi of the male, heroic artist (Helm et al. 2015) has been deeply criticized in the case of Beuys since Benjamin Buchloh’s seminal essay of 1980 (Riegel 2013). Works by artists such as Eva Hesse (1936–1970 [Tietenberg 2005]) and Felix Gonzales-Torres (1957–1996 [Spector 2007]), who both died young, were inter­ preted as autobiographical, a reading suggested not least by the artists themselves. Gerhard Richter’s early paintings such as Uncle Rudi (Lidice Collection, Lidice, Czech Republic, 1965) and the portrait of his aunt, Dora Margarete Marianne S ­ chönfelder, who was killed in the course of the so called ‘Euthanasie’-Program in early 1945 (Bild Tante Marianne, 1965, private collection), have been discussed in recent years as auto­ biographical testimonies (Schreiber 2005). Despite or partly because of academic art history’s neglecting of autobiographic narratives, ‘auto­biographical’ artworks and art performances by contemporary female artists such as Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman, are widely esteemed by museums, critics, and on the art market. These works are often not only explicitly autobiographical by inte­ grating self-portraits into a pictorial narrative but they are often accompanied also by autobiographical titles, paratexts and exegeses by the artists themselves as in Emin’s Assemblage Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (formerly London, Saatchi Collection, 1995, destroyed). By connecting autobiographical self-representations to

3.7 Autobiographical Visual Arts, esp. Painting  

 491

a critical reflection of gender role models and to a critical reflection of the history of autobiographical art and its clichés, Sherman continues the history of autobiographi­ cal art in a subversive but successful way (Respini 2012). Autobiographical paintings do not always depict ‘real’ scenes from the life of an artist but more often result in a ‘self fashioning’ (Greenblatt 2000 [1980]; WoodsMarsden 1998) of images of a public (or semi-public) persona by merging recollected and imagined scenes and by conflating apology and apotheosis. A good example is the luxuriously printed album of engravings after drawings by the then famous late classicist artist, Bonaventura Genelli, Aus dem Leben eines Künstlers [‘Scenes from the Life of an Artist’], financed by Marées’s early patron, Adolph von Schack, and pub­ lished 1868. As Adolph Menzel’s earlier cycle of lithographs, Künstlers Erdenwallen [The Artist’s Wanderings, published 1834], Genelli’s autobiographical, highly allego­ rized album of engravings was inspired by biographical cycles of prints about the lives of artists, especially from the first and second series of Umrisse zum Leben Raphaels [‘Contours of the Life of Raphael’] by the brothers Riepenhausen (published 1816 and 1833/1835 [see Thimann and Hübner 2015]). A small number of artists and architects since Alberti (see Enenkel 2008, 189–228) wrote autobiographical texts in the classical mode ‘from birth to old age’ (famously Benvenuto Cellini, written ca. 1557–1566 [Cellini 1728]); Giorgio Vasari [1568]). Since the Nineteenth Century and especially in the cases of Marées and Cezanne, and most famously of Vincent van Gogh, letters by artists, written in advance of future publica­ tion in print, became an important genre of autobiographical writing by artists. Conse­ quently, Picasso explicitly demanded a profound, day-by-day knowledge of his biog­ raphy by his interpreters: “I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings finished or not, are the pages from my diary” (qdt. in Gilot and Lake 1964, 123). From the 1960s on, interviews with artists have become an important method of disseminating autobiographical self-interpretations of artworks by their creators (Blunck et al. 2013). A pioneer of interviews with artists was David Sylvester (2002). Today, Hans Ulrich Obrist is an influential interviewer of artists. Since Phidias in classical antiquity (DNO, vol. II, no. 900, 904, 910–912) and since the twelfth century, artists have been enlarging their empirical biography by fictitious or factual events in which their self-portrait-like depicted ‘alter ego’ is included (often in full figure), though the artists themselves were definitely not present at the represented event, for example as witnesses of the Crucifixion of Christ. By merging the depiction of events from ‘other’ times and places with their own presence within the very moment of a represented scene, artists create ‘anachronic’ (see Nagel and Wood 2010) autobio­ graphical moments. When walking through a major gallery of Western panel painting, quite a few of the history paintings on display show witnesses and protagonists with the obviously displayed likeness of their very authors. According to common sense, these artists have never been ‘there’. So these images represent quite uncanny hybrids of past, present and – a sometimes eschatological – future, especially in Early Modern paintings and sculptures referring to ‘Modern Devotion’ and Counter-Reformation.

492 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

At the beginning of post-antique development of involving the artist’s likeness into history painting, Medieval artists from the twelfth century on showed themselves as very small and physically detached beholders of a sacred scene. One of the very first examples is a self-representation of Master Gerardus having a vision of Moses with the Burning Bush (stained glass, pane from Arnstein/Lahn, Münster, Landesmu­ seum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, ca. 1170 [Marx 2005]). In the fifteenth century, artists depict themselves as close standing witnesses of sacred events (e.g. Andrea Mantegna, Presentation at the Temple, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, ca. 1455) but also as agents within sacred scenes (Rogier van der Weyden, Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, ca. 1435–1440, and id., Entombment, Florence, Uffizi, ca. 1459). Albrecht Dürer shows himself and the by the time already deceased humanist, Conrad Celtis, as a witnessing and walking couple, reminiscent of the pair of Dante and Vergil in Dante’s Purgatorio, within his painting, Torment of the Ten Thousand Christians (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, ca. 1508). Dürer represents himself and his close friend anachronistically within an event that happened under Roman emperor Hadrian more than thousand years before Dürer’s birth. Michelangelo is supposed to have embedded a full-figure portrait of himself in scenes relying on bib­ lical and later Christian texts. Shortly after his lifetime, the monumental figure of a Nicodemus or John of Arimathia of his late marble Pietà, today in Florence (Museo del Opera dell’Duomo, ca. 1543–1547, partly destroyed and altered), was considered a self-portrait of Michelangelo (Pope-Hennessy 1966, 298; Balas 2004). Since 1925, the monumental figure of Saint Bartholomew within the central group of saintly figures surrounding Christ has been considered a self-portrait by Michelangelo (Heimeran 1925; Preimesberger 2006). Michelangelo da Caravaggio followed Michelangelo ­Buonarotti’s model by depicting himself in the guise of protagonists from the biblical narratives (Preimesberger 2011, 100–104), for example, as Goliath in his David with Goliath’s Head (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, ca. 1600–1601). The paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, first female member of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno (the first Academy of Fine Arts), are often considered autobiographical. The artist who was raped and who prosecuted the rapist with the help of her father is said to have digested this traumatic event in important paintings (e.  g. Judith Slaying Holofernes, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, ca. 1614–1620 [Garrard 1989 and 2001]). A later baroque painter, Michaelina Woutiers from Antwerp, integrated a daring self-portrait as a bac­ chante or Ariadne in her Bacchanal (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, before 1659). In the eighteenth century, the idea of a republic of artists and a posthumous assem­ bly of ‘geniuses’ arises (Zilsel 1918). A famous example is Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Homère déifié [‘Homer Deified,’ also known as ‘Apotheosis of Homer’] (Paris, Louvre, Salon of 1827), which incorporates a self-portrait of the artist, Ingres, close to a portrait of his idol, Raffael, who in turn had represented himself among the most important philosophers of antiquity in his frescoe of the so-called Scuola di Atene [‘School of Athens’] (Vatican, Papal Palace, ca. 1511). Group portraits of living and deceased artists, including the painter of the respective group portrait, also play

3.7 Autobiographical Visual Arts, esp. Painting  

 493

an important role in twentieth century art (Renato Guttuso, Caffè Greco, Cologne, Museum Ludwig, 1976; Jörg Immendorff’s series of paintings, Café Deutschland and Café de Flore, various locations [Riegel 2010]). Here, the painter and with him living and already deceased artists are depicted as joining in a fictitious symposium as a pseudo-autobiographic event. While earlier paintings had integrated the presence of an artist into the realm of salvation history, artists now integrate the stories of their own lives into the secularized salvation history of art history. Since Giorgio Vasari, Western art historiography includes art-religious tendencies. By enacting seemingly autobiographical events as parts of a teleologically proceeding history of art, autobio­ graphical works of post-medieval art quite often rely on hagiography and topoi of the heroical genius (Helm et al. 2015). A self-interpretation that is deeply grounded in religious topoi could still be observed recently in works and performances by Joseph Beuys (Schoene 2018) and Christoph Schlingensief. Since the 1970s, the meta­ morphosis of autobiographical images of artists into icons of the apotheosis of the artist-genius (Abramovič 2010; Janhsen 2015) has been increasingly ‘deconstructed’ and ironicized especially by female artists (Hövelmeyer 2011; Stegmayer 2015). An anti-autobiographical ‘anti-icon’ is Sturtevant’s print Beuys La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi ([‘Beuys We are the Revolution’] 1988, and later versions; Kittelmann 2005, 206), an ‘appropriation’ of Beuys’s well-known poster La Rivoluzione siamo Noi ([‘We are the Revolution’] 1972). Sturtevant depicts herself in full figure and in the guise of Beuys, appropriating her self-portrait to Beuys’s iconic self-portrait as hero of the Avant­ garde. By depicting herself as a ‘Wiedergängerin’ [revenant] of a ‘Wandering Beuys’, ­Sturtevant uncanningly exposes her autobiographical ‘self’ as a subversive appropri­ ation of biographical topoi of the heroical male artist. Translation: Brigitte Kalthoff

Works Cited Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting and On Sculpture. The Latin Texts of De pictura and De statua (1435/1436). Ed. Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon, 1972. Abramovič, Marina. Marina Abramovič (Exhibition Catalogue, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 14 March – 31 May 2010). Ed. Klaus Biesenbach. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Andersen, Wayne. “Manet and the Judgement of Paris.” Art News 72.2 (1973): 63–69. Badt, Kurt. Die Kunst Cézannes. München: Prestel, 1960. Balas, Edith. Michelangelo’s Double Self-Portraits. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” (1967). The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Ed. Neil Badmington and Julia Thomas. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Routledge, 2008. 121–125. Beneden, Ban van, ed. Rubens in Private. The Master Portrays his Family (Exhibition Catalogue, Rubenhuis, Antwerp, 28 March – 28 June 2015). London: Thames & Hudson, 2015. Blum, Gerd. “Édouard Manet. ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.’ Die Erfindung der Moderne aus der Vergangenheit.” Schwellentexte der Weltliteratur. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik and Caroline Rosenthal. Konstanz: UKV, 2001. 201–232.

494 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Blum, Gerd. Hans von Marées. Autobiographische Malerei zwischen Mythos und Moderne. Berlin/ München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005. Blunck, Lars, Michael Diers, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds. Formen und Foren des Künstlergesprächs, Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2013. Boehm, Gottfried. “Einleitung.” Schriften zur Kunst. Vol. I. Ed. Konrad Fiedler. München: Fink, 2nd ed. 1991. xlv–xcvii. Bourgeois, Louise. Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father. Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997. Ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol. Preliminary Notes for a Critique (1980).” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 41–64. Busch, Werner. Das sentimentalische Bild. Die Krise der Kunst im 18. Jahrhundert und die Geburt der Moderne. München: Beck, 1993. Cellini, Benvenuto. Vita di Benvenuto Cellini, orefice e scultore fiorentino. Ed. A. Cocchi. Cologne (Naples): P. Martello, 1728. Clark, Timothy J. Image of the People. Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Cooper, Douglas. Pablo Picasso, Les Déjeuners. New York: Abrams, 1963. Dombrowski, André. Cézanne, Murder and Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. DNO = Der neue Overbeck: Die antiken Schriftquellen zu den bildenden Künsten der Griechen. 5 vols. Ed. Sascha Kansteiner. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. Einstein, Carl. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1926). Werke. Vol. V. Ed. Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaethgens. Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996. Enenkel, Karl A. E. Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des neuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2008. Fernow, Carl Ludwig. Über den Bildhauer Canova und dessen Werke (1806). Bassano del Grappa: Istituto di Ricerca per gli Studi su Canova e il Neoclassicismo, 2006. Freud, Sigmund. “Der Familienroman der Neurotiker” (1909). Gesammelte Werke (Studienausgabe). Vol. VII. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1989. 225–231. Friedel, Helmut, Thomas Girst, Matthias Mühling, and Felicia Rappe, eds. Marcel Duchamp in Munich 1912/Marcel Duchamp in München 1912 (Exhibition Catalogue, Lenbachhaus, Munich 2012). München: Schirmer/Mosel, 2012. Fiedler, Konrad. Hans von Marées. Seinem Andenken gewidmet. München: Bruckmann, 1889. Garrard, Mary D. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Garrard, Mary D. Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622. The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Gedo, Mary Mathews. Looking at Art from the Inside Out. The Psychoiconographic Approach to Modern Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Gilot, Françoise, and Carlton Lake. Life with Picasso. London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1965. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (1980). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten. Vol. X, part 2. Ed. D.  H. G. Hotho. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1837 [Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T. M. Knox. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975]. Heimeran, Ernst. Michelangelo und das Porträt. München: Bruckmann, 1925. Helm, Katharina, Hans W. Hubert, Christina Posselt-Kuhli, and Anna Schreurs-Morét, eds.

3.7 Autobiographical Visual Arts, esp. Painting  

 495

Künst­ler-Helden? Heroisierung und mediale Inszenierung von Malern, Bildhauern und Architekten. Merzhausen: ad picturam, 2015. Hildebrand, Adolf von. Das Problem der Form. Strassbourg: Heitz, 1893. Hofmann, Werner. Das irdische Paradies. Kunst im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. München: Prestel, 1960. Hövelmeyer, Marion. “‘Selbstbildnisse’ eines Subjekts, das ‘verloren’ ging. Aporien und Strategien von Künstlerinnen im 20. Jahrhundert.” Die Wiederkehr des Künstlers. Themen und Positionen der aktuellen Künstler/innenforschung. Ed. Sabine Fastert, Alexis Joachimides and Verena Krieger. Köln: Böhlau, 2011. 317–328. Janhsen, Angeli. “Das richtige Leben?: Marina Abramović’ The Hero (2001).” Künstlerhelden? Heroi­ sie­rung und mediale Inszenierung von Malern, Bildhauern und Architekten. Ed. Katharina Helm, Hans W. Hubert, Christina Posselt-Kuhli and Anna Schreurs-Morét. Merzhausen: ad picturam, 2015. 301–325. Kittelmann, Udo, ed. Elaine Sturtevant – Catalogue Raisonnée 1964–2004. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2005. Kris, Ernst, and Otto Kurz. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: an Historical Experiment (1934). Ed. Ernst H. Gombrich. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Krumrine, Mary Louise. Paul Cézanne. The Bathers (Exhibition Catalogue, Basel, Kunstmuseum, 1989/1990). Zürich: Schweizer Verlagshaus, 1989. Locke, Nancy. Manet and the Family Romance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Minuit, 1979. Marchal, Stephanie. Gustave Courbet in seinen Selbstdarstellungen. Paderborn/München: Fink, 2012. Marx, Petra. “Aus der mittelalterlichen Glasmalerei-Sammlung des Freiherrn vom Stein […].” Das Kunstwerk des Monats. September 2005. Ed. Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte. Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum, 2005. N.pag. Marées, Hans von. Briefe. Ed. Anne-Sibylle Domm. München: Pieper, 1987. Mauner, George. Manet, peintre-philosophe. A study of the Painter’s Themes. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. Montias, John Michael. Vermeer and his Milieu: A Web of Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Newman, Barnett. “The Sublime is Now” (1948). Selected Writings and Interviews. Ed. John P. O’Neill. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. 170–174. Peters, Olaf. Vom schwarzen Seiltänzer. Max Beckmann zwischen Weimarer Republik und Exil. Berlin: Reimer, 2005. Peters, Olaf, ed. Otto Dix (Exhibition Catalogue, Neue Galerie New York/The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2010–2011). München: Prestel, 2010. Pope-Hennessy, John Wyndham. The Portrait in the Renaissance. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966. Preimesberger, Rudolf. “‘Und in meinem Fleisch werde ich meinen Gott schauen’: biblische Re­ge­ ne­ra­tions­gedanken in Michelangelos ‘Bartholomäus’ der Cappella Sistina.” Das Buch der Bücher – gelesen. Ed. Steffen Martus and Andrea Polaschegg. Bern/Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2006. 101–117. Preimesberger, Rudolf. Paragons and Paragone. Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2011. Respini, Eva, ed. Cindy Sherman (Exhibition Catalogue, The Museum of Modern Art, New York et al., 2012/2013). New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Riegel, Hans-Peter. Immendorff. Die Biografie. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2010. Riegel, Hans-Peter. Beuys. Die Biographie. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2013. Sartre, Jean-Paul. La pittura di Giacometti (1948). Milano: Jaca Book, 1998.

496 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Schnapper, Antoine. Jacques-Louis David, 1748–1825 (Exhibition Catalogue, Musée du Louvre, 1989). Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989. 323–338. Schoene, Janneke. Beuys’ Hut: Performance und autofiktionale Subjektivität, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2018. DOI: 10.11588/arthistoricum.201.272. Schreiber, Jürgen. Ein Maler aus Deutschland. Gerhard Richter: das Drama einer Familie. München: Pendo, 2005. Soussloff, Catherine M. The Absolute Artist. The Historiography of a Concept. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Spector, Nancy, ed. Felix Gonzales-Torres. America (Exhibition Catalogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2007/2008). New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2007. Stegmayer, Benedikt. Confession: Autobiografie als fiktives Konstrukt. Jenny Holzer, Jenny Watson, Tracey Emin. Berlin: Verlag für Zeitgenössische Kunst und Theorie, 2015. Steiner, Barbara, and Jun Yang. Autobiographie. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 2004. Swoboda, Gudrun. “Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazos ‘Familie des Künstlers’: die erste Variation auf Velázquez’ ‘Las Meninas’.” Velázquez (Exhibition Catalogue, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien/ Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid/Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 2014–2015). Ed. Sabine Haag. München: Hirmer, 2014. 89–105, 277–283. Sylvester, David. Interviews with American Artists. London: Pimlico, 2002. Szeemann, Harald. Individuelle Mythologien. Berlin: Merve, 1985. Thimann, Michael, and Christine Hübner. Sterbliche Götter. Raffael und Dürer in der Kunst der deutschen Romantik. Petersberg: Imhof, 2015. Thürlemann, Felix. Kandinsky über Kandinsky. Der Künstler als Interpret eigener Werke. Bern, 1986. Tietenberg, Annette. Konstruktionen des Weiblichen. Eva Hesse: ein Künstlerinnenmythos des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Reimer, 2005. Timms, Edward. “Autobiographical Motifs in the Paintings of Felix Nussbaum.” Word & Image 24 (2008): 3, 224–250. Ubl, Ralph. “Eugène Delacroix’ Figuration der Freiheit.” Ästhetische Regime um 1800. Ed. Friedrich Balke, Harun Maye and Leander Scholz. München: Fink, 2009. 139–164. Vasari, Giorgio. “Descrizione delle opera di Giorgio Vasari, pittore e architetto Aretino.” Le Vite dei più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani. Florence: Giunti, 1568. 980–1002. Wittkower, Margot, and Rudolf Wittkower. The Divine Michelangelo. The Florentine Academy’s Homage on his Death in 1564. London: Phaidon Press, 1964. Woods-Marsden, Joanna. Renaissance Self-Portraiture. The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Zilsel, Edgar. Die Geniereligion. Ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal mit einer historischen Begründung (1918). Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. Zilsel, Edgar. Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes. Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus. Tübingen: Mohr, 1926.

Further Reading Białostocki, Jan. “Begegnung mit dem Ich in der Kunst.” Artibus et historiae 1 (1980): 25–45. Blum, Gerd. “Art as Autobiography: Hans von Marées and his Autobiographical Interpretation of the Antiques of Naples.” Art as Autobiography: Hans von Marées. Ed. Lea Ritter Santini and ­Christiane Groeben. Napoli: Macchiaroli, 2008. 125–149. Gockel, Bettina. Die Pathologisierung des Künstlers. Künstlerlegenden der Moderne. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2010. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.

3.8 Autobiography and Drama/Theater Anne Fleig

Definition Autobiography and drama are traditionally seen as opposites: dialogue, the basic structuring principle of the play, seems incompatible with first-person narration; the relationship between the dramatic text and the stage on which it is performed is inherently dialogic; the actor is usually not identical with the author of the performed text; even a monologue is implicitly addressed to an audience, whose very presence influences and co-determines the performance. These obstacles make it difficult to enter into the autobiographical pact as theorized by Lejeune. Yet the barrier between author and actor has been explicitly thematized and frequently dismantled after the emergence of performance art in the 1960s: the actor turns into the performer of his or her own story, opening up the stage for a whole new range of performative construc­ tions of the self and for innovative modes of autobiographical narration. This process is far from being complete – autobiographical theatre in all its various forms is in high demand worldwide, testifying to the desire for ‘real life’ and for a critical involvement with authenticity and artificiality, with reality and fiction.

Explication From a historical point of view, the generic boundaries of autobiography are far more fluid than those of poetry, epic and drama. Autobiographical writing assumes a mul­ titude of literary forms, and attempts to define it are just as numerous – a fact that clearly demonstrates the historical contingency and relativity of genre conventions. Since antiquity, autobiography potentially encompasses all literary forms, includ­ ing drama, as Georg Misch points out (Misch 1949, 6 [1950, 4]). From the eighteenth century onward, however, the history of autobiography as a genre is determined by the attempt to distinguish it from the novel on the one hand and from its neighboring genres (“genres voisins” [Lejeune 1973, 138]) such as diaries, memoirs or biographies on the other hand (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 5). Narration and reflection – these are the characteristic features of autobiographical life stories, usually presented from a first-person perspective and based on the assumption of an identity of author and narrator. By contrast, coeval bourgeois drama is structured by dialogue, a funda­ mental difference to first-person narration. This also holds true for monologues, in which actors ultimately address the audience while ostensibly ‘talking to themselves’. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-064

498 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Whereas drama and theatre mainly aim to achieve their effect in the here and now, a priority further emphasized by the simultaneous presence of actors and audi­ ence, autobiography is frequently retrospective, dealing with the past instead of the present (Howarth 1980, 98). This creates a pronounced antagonism between autobi­ ography and a predominantly text-based theatre. Since the 1960s, however, new possibilities for performative constructions of the self and for autobiographical narration on stage have developed in the wake of perfor­ mance art. Situated right at the interface of writing and speaking, these “performative autobiographics” (Grace 2006, 18) open themselves up to multiple, polyphonic con­ ceptions of identity that transgress the traditional boundaries of first-person narration and drama. In German-speaking academia, this interplay between autobiography and theatre is mainly discussed in the context of “postdramatisches Theater” [“postdra­ matic theatre”] (Lehmann 1999, [2006]). The merging of autobiography and drama/theatre in performance art and postdra­ matic theatre clearly demonstrates that established genre conventions are the necessary prerequisite for deliberate transgressions against these very norms (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 7). Although the challenging of generic boundaries is a recurring feature in the history of both autobiography and drama, the links between these two genres remain largely unexplored in theoretical and historical terms; existing research has only just embarked on an examination of contemporary theatre (Grace and Wasserman 2006). For Lejeune, the identity of author and first-person narrator on the auctorial level as well as the identity of narrator and protagonist on the narrative level are the crucial defining characteristics of autobiography. Lejeune’s definition of the genre ultimately excludes drama and theatre, although he concedes that it is not necessary for a text to conform to every single one of the criteria that his definition contains – the decisive factor is that author, narrator and protagonist are one and the same (Lejeune 1973, 138 [1989, 5]). This is the basis for the autobiographical pact with the reader, which ultimately permits the equation of the narrated life story with reality itself. Paul de Man, on the other hand, not only questions autobiography’s status as a genre, relegating it to a position of secondary importance when compared to tragedy or epic and lyric poetry – he also casts doubt on the referential function of autobi­ ography (de Man 1979, 920). According to de Man, the term ‘autobiography’ denotes neither a genre nor a particular type of text, but rather a “mode of figuration” that reveals a mutual process of reflection between text and reader (1979, 920). This process of mirroring recalls the dialogic structure so typical of the theatre stage. While de Man does not refer to this correlation explicitly, it is highly symptomatic that he conceives of autobiography as a “de-facement” (1979, 919), thereby revealing its inherently dra­ matic nature, “the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, fig­ uration and disfiguration” (1979, 926). In the language of autobiography, voice and muteness, figure and picture interact (de Man 1979, 930). For de Man, autobiography’s significance lies in the fact that it simultaneously veils and unmasks the fundamental linguistic dilemma of representation.

3.8 Autobiography and Drama/Theater 

 499

Five years before de Man, William Howarth had drawn a comparison between autobiography and the self-portrait, emphasizing the process of mirroring involved in the creation of both (Howarth 1980, 85). Howarth distinguishes between several possi­ ble strategies for autobiographical writing, including a dramatic variety: analogous to the self-portrait in visual arts, the author creates an autobiographical persona with the stage as a mirror, narrating his or her life story in a theatrical performance. According to Howarth, this involves a clear emphasis on “acting instead of exhorting” (Howarth 1980, 98), i.  e. on scenes, characters and role playing as opposed to abstract concepts. For the dramatic autobiographer, the spatial constellation is decisive – the staging of the self in theatre refers to life itself, and not to its end in death. Both Howarth and (even more so) de Man hint at the distinction between charac­ ter and dialogue, between the role and the actor’s body, that characterizes postdra­ matic theatre with its strong epic influence. It is a distinction that ultimately negates the representative function of the stage: the self is constituted performatively in dia­ logue; there is no ‘I’ preceding the performance. With autobiography established as a “mode of figuration” both on the level of authorship and narration, it can be concep­ tualized as a “narrative performance” (Renza 1980, 274) in which different voices enter into dialogue with each other. This polyvocality opens up a space of dialogicity that can be analyzed by drawing on the concept of autofiction. In this context, autofiction makes it possible to playfully explore the author’s persona and to negotiate questions concerning autobiographical writing. Autofiction thus turns into a ‘de-facement’, dis­ playing the writing process and its poetological reflection in mirror-like fashion. This kind of ‘play’ is alien to classical drama. According to Peter Szondi, the play­ wright himself is absent in his drama: “Er spricht nicht, er hat Aussprache ge­stif­ tet” [“He does not speak, he institutes discussion”] (Szondi 2011, 17 [1983, 195]). For Szondi, drama is absolute – not representation, but pure dialogue with no room for either the “epic I” or for reflections on the proceedings on stage (1983, 196  f.). Yet there is a historical development away from this essence of drama as characteristics of the epic, the novel and other genres are adapted. With the ‘I’ as the “Subjekt der epischen Form” [“subject of the epic form”] (Szondi 2011, 15 [1983, 194]; here, Szondi concurs with Lukács) assuming more and more space, drama itself turns into a borderline case of generic history. Postdramatic texts and performances increasingly take on typical traits of the epic, questioning the status quo through polyvocalic refraction and reflec­ tion. At the same time, the development of postdramatic theatre is contingent upon an increasing distance to drama itself. This has led to the emergence of a theatre “jenseits des Dramas” [“beyond drama”] (Lehmann 1999, 30 [2006, 27]), in which several art forms merge and produce a rich variety of new autobiographical and autofictional genres. Parallel to this development, there is a shift in focus from the author of the dramatic text towards the body of the actor. Here, the staging of autobiography is syn­ onymous with the life story embodied by the performer. In this context, Susan Bennett has emphasized the particular tension between liveness and the body as archive, cul­ minating in the question: “what here is real?” (Bennett 2006, 35).

500 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

These new genres developed from within the visual arts, but they also drew heavily on performances of films, videos and audio tapes; conceptualized as perfor­ mance art from the early 1970s, they all share with theatre the basic constellation of a performance in front of an audience. Performance art took a critical stance towards the established art and theatre scene, advocating an artistic renewal fueled by a reli­ ance on individual biographies and everyday experiences. In this context, artists fre­ quently turned their own body into an object of remembrance and into the centerpiece of their art. The process of autobiographical remembrance thus instigated a dialogue between past and present that included the presence of the audience. At first, the happenings subsumed under the term ‘performance art’ took place in galleries, off-theatres etc. (MacDonald 1995, 188–189). Originating from the USA, these art forms have since turned into an important means of expression especially for femi­ nist artists, who frequently question the predominantly bourgeois/male/white notion of the subject that still informs Howarth’s and de Man’s conceptions of authorship and artistic practice. Along with this, performance art renders visible the multiplication of conceptions of identity that has been increasingly thematized from the late twentieth century onward: “Genres of the autobiographical have proliferated, just as gendered positionalities have” (Smith and Watson 2009, 14). Initially, the identification of the artist with the self-created ‘I’ acting on stage was one of performance art’s central tenets. In analogy to autobiographical writing, this was seen as a possibility for ‘authentic’ self-expression. Simultaneously, female artists discovered performance art as a suitable medium to express the fundamental dichotomy between their own artistic endeavors and a male-dominated art world still treating the female as an object (MacDonald 1995, 189). This perspective left no room for the idea of the stage as a representation of the world where pre-assigned roles are enacted. In the wake of works by Judith Butler and various other authors from the emerging field of Performance Studies, a growing consensus developed that the self is consti­ tuted performatively in a process of constant repetition. In performance art, too, artists no longer simply played ‘themselves’ after the 1990s. Instead, today’s performances explore the question of how subjectivity is produced via performance (MacDonald 1995, 194). As Gender Studies has emphasized time and again, the attempt to construct an autonomous, coherent autobiographical self is doomed to failure. Yet it is precisely this failure that makes it possible to playfully subvert the autobiographical coherence of the self, thereby resisting the white, bourgeois norm of individualism expressed in autobiographical narrative (Smith 2009, 31). This is why autobiographical issues are of particular importance in the context of performance art (Lee-Brown 2004, 3): over and over, they exhibit the process of remembrance while simultaneously performing it, thereby underlining the performative manner in which the self is constituted. Sherrill Grace’s works on the relationship of autobiography and theatre explore this connec­ tion, for which she has coined the term “performative auto/biographics” (Grace 2005, 67). This concept refers to performative practices that produce several versions of a life

3.8 Autobiography and Drama/Theater 

 501

story as autobiography and biography blend into each other. Dramatic performances involve several persons; hence Lejeune’s ‘pact’ must be renewed, including not only author and actors, but also director and audience (Grace 2005, 69). In German-speaking countries, the development of performance art corresponds to the emergence of postdramatic theatre. Postdramatic theatre rejects the preemi­ nence of the dramatic text; like the bodies of the actors or the space of the stage, the text is considered to be part of the play’s production – the identification of char­ acter and actor is dissolved. In the tradition of Brecht’s Epic Theatre, a number of texts emerged (e.  g. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Max Frisch, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller and Elfriede Jelinek) that could be considered as critical reflections on the history of drama and on theatre as an institution: in his comedy Biografie: Ein Spiel (1967; 1984) [Biography – a Game (1969)], Max Frisch stages a play-within-the-play that tentatively explores the question of if and how the life of the protagonist could have taken a completely different turn. The text’s repetition and variation of several versions of the character’s fictional life raises crucial questions pertaining to the performative construction of identity; Elfriede Jelinek’s later texts demonstrate how the dissolution of a character-based point of view in favor of an open, polyphonic texture of voices allows poetological self-reflections on authorship as well as the integration of auto­ biographical traces. These traces can be interpreted as autofiction, showcasing the intertextual approach to literary production in plays such as Ein Sportstück (1998) [Sports Play (2012)], er nicht als er (1998) [Her Not All Her (2004)] or Winterreise (2011) [Winter’s Journey]. Autobiographical works for the stage currently receive new impulses from so-called ‘post-migratory theatre’ and from a new, provocative way of staging the dis­ abilities or illnesses of one or several members of the cast – the issue of the unity of performed role and the actor’s body is particularly pressing in both of these contexts; the catchphrase ‘biographical theatre’ also plays an important role in pedagogical approaches to drama and theatre. All told, the turn towards postdramatic theatre has led to the emergence of a wide range of autobiographical writing, speaking and acting on stage that is in urgent need of further inquiry. Translation: Martin Bleisteiner

Works Cited Bennett, Susan. “3-D A/B.” Theatre and AutoBiography. Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006. 33–48. Gale, Maggie B. “Autobiography, Gender, and Theatre Histories: Spectrums of Reading British Actresses’ Autobiographies from the 1920s and 1930s.” Theatre and AutoBiography. Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006. 185–201. Grace, Sherrill. “Performing the Auto/biographical Pact: Towards a Theory of Identity in

502 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Performance.” Tracing the Autobiographical. Ed. Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perrault and Susanna Egan. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2005. 65–79. Grace, Sherrill. “Theatre and the AutoBiographical Pact: An Introduction.” Theatre and AutoBiography. Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006. 13–29. Howarth, William L. “Some Principles of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 84–114. Lee-Brown, Elizabeth. “Autobiography, Adaptation, and Agency: Interpreting Women’s Performance and Writing Strategies through a Feminist Lens.” Diss. U Texas, 2004. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatisches Theater. Essay. Frankfurt a. M: Verlag der Autoren, 1999 [Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London/New York: Routledge, 2006]. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poétique 13 (1973): 137–162 [“The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul J. Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30. MacDonald, Claire. “Assumed Identities: Feminism, Autobiography and Performance Art.” The Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Julia Swindells. London/New York: Routledge, 1995. 187–195. Misch, Georg. Das Altertum. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. I, part 1. Leipzig: Teubner, 1949 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Part One. Trans. E. W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Renza, Louis A. “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 268–295. Smith, Sidonie. “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance.” Auto/Biography studies 10.1 (2009): 17–33. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “New Genres, New Subjects: Women, Gender and Autobiography after 2000.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses. Special Issue on Life Writing and Gender: Construction, Frames and Prospects 58 (April 2009): 13–40. Szondi, Peter. “Theory of the Modern Drama, Parts I–II.” boundary 2 11.3 (1983): 191–230. Szondi, Peter. Theorie des modernen Dramas. Ausgewählte Werke. Vol. I. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011. 9–148. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.

Further Reading Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics. A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. McLeod, Katherine. “(Un)Covering the Mirror: Performative Reflections in Linda Griffiths’s Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen and Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose.” Theatre and AutoBiography. Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006. 89–103.

3.9 Autobiography Helga Schwalm

Definition Derived from gr. autos (self), bios (life), graphein (write), autobiography as a literary genre denotes a non-fictional, retrospective narration that seeks to reconstruct an individual’s life course in terms of a formation of one’s unique personal self within a given historical, social and cultural framework. In very concise terms, it is a narrative account of a person’s life or a substantial part of it, written by him/herself. Used in a broader sense almost synonymously with ‘life writing’ (the latter also comprising writing the life of another), autobiography signifies all modes and genres of narrating one’s own life, with no clear dividing lines between fact and fiction. While there are autobiographies in the third person (e.  g. Sean O’Casey [1939–1956]), in epistolary form (e.  g. Plato, Seventh Epistle [353 BCE], Ludvig Holberg [1727–1743]), or verse (e.  g. Ovid, “Tristia” IV [10 8–12 CE], William Wordsworth [1799; 1805; 1850]), autobiography is typically told in the first person (‘I narration’/autodiegetic narration) and is, at least in its classic shape, characterised by a retrospective perspective that operates as a governing structural and semantic principle, a principle increasingly challenged and subverted in the course of the twentieth century with respect to poetic practice, poe­ tological reflection and genre theory alike.

Explication In German, the term ‘Selbstbiographie’ [‘self-biography’] first appeared in the collec­ tive volume Selbstbiographien berühmter Männer [‘self-biographies by famous men’] (1796). Its editor David Christoph Seybold identified Johann Gottfried Herder as his source. Jean Paul called his unfinished and unpublished autobiography Selberlebensbeschreibung [‘description of one’s own life’] (1987, 16). In English, Isaac D’Israeli coined the term “self-biography” in 1796 (95–110) while his critic William Taylor sug­ gested “auto-biography” (Nussbaum 1989, 1). These neologisms reflect a poetological and critical interest in a mode of writing that was emerging as a distinct genre in the field of literature: not until the mid-eighteenth century did autobiography separate from historiography as well as from (hetero-)biography, for which the terms ‘life’, memoir’ and ‘history’ were employed. Before this time, there had not been a distinc­ tion between “tell[ing] his own story” and “recounting the life of another” (Samuel Johnson, Rambler 60 [1750] and Idler 84 [1759]) (Schwalm 2014, § 8). Whereas the origins of autobiography ultimately date back to antiquity, the history of autobiography as a literary genre and as a critical term is a much shorter https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-065

504 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

one. Accordingly, autobiography has both a narrow as well as a broad systematic and historical reach; its generic signification can be explicated only by reference to its historicity. As a literary genre and critical term, autobiography emerged contempora­ neously with what has been labelled ‘the modern individual/modern subject’ around 1800 (Foucault 1969 [1979]). In line with this coincidence, autobiography articulates a historically and culturally specific notion of narrative personal identity, which sub­ sequently came to be identified as its generic paradigm, short-circuiting historical phenomenon and poetic norm: Any autobiography that resembles modern autobiographies in structure and content is the modern kind of autobiography, regardless of when it was written. […] By autobiographies in the modern mode I mean […] works like those that modern readers instinctively expect to find when they see Autobiography, My Life, or Memoirs printed across the back of a volume (Shumaker 1954, 5).

Early hermeneutic accounts of autobiography, however, acknowledged the historicity of autobiographical writings to a certain degree. In his monumental study of 1907, Georg Misch placed the history of autobiography in the “universalgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang der Entwicklung des menschlichen Geistes” [“history of the human mind”] (1907–1969, 7 [1950, 4]), viewing the history of the genre as a reflection of the “Verlauf der europäischen Selbstbesinnung und Individualisierung” [“trajectory of forms of subjective consciousness”] (1907–1969, viii [1950, vii]). Autobiography is thus inextricably linked to the history of subjectivity. With his concept of autobiography as “eigener Literaturgattung” [“a special genre in literature”] and at the same time “elementare[r], allgemein menschliche[r] Form der Aussprache der Lebenserfahrung” [“an original interpretation of experience”] (1907–1969, 6 [1950, 3–4]), Misch tied in with Dilthey, who considered autobiography “die höchste und am meisten instruktive Form, in welcher uns das Verstehen des Lebens entgegentritt” [“the highest and most instructive form of the understanding of life”] (1990, 246 [2002, 221]). Dilthey spells out that autobiography is a principally interpretive rather than a mimetic genre, requiring “Verstehen” [“understanding”] (1990, 246 [2002, 221]). The perspective of the present ascribes meaning to the past; the “verschiedenen Teile [des] eigenen Lebensverlaufs” [“various parts of [one’s] own life-course”] are “zu einem Ganzen verbunden” [“linked into a whole”] (1990, 244 [2002, 219]), in which “das Leben zum Verständnis gelangt” [“life attains understanding”] (1990, 247–248 [2002, 222]). The basis of autobiographical hermeneutics is subjective memory. Given its cre­ ative power and at the same time fallibility, memory leaves the boundaries between fact and fiction inevitably blurred, as Goethe’s title Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833) [Truth and Poetry] self-consciously articulates. Goethe explicitly writes of himself as a unique and historical individual; at the same time, his autobiography carries the implication of a close relationship, a causal connection even of the author’s life and work. With Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions [1782–1789]) and Goethe as its canonical examples, the classic model of auto­

3.9 Autobiography 

 505

biography as a non-fictional ‘Bildungsgeschichte’ [‘story of formation’] undertakes to ask in a mode of self-reflection “‘who am I’ and ‘how did I become what I am?’” (Wein­ traub 1982, 1). It retraces the “genetic personality development founded in the aware­ ness of a complex interplay between I-and-my-world” (Weintraub 1982, 13); its char­ acteristic traits are narrative coherence, psychological introspection, and the notion of a secular, (ideally) autonomous subject in interaction with its historical context. In short, literary biography provides a literary grand narrative of modern individual identity. As such, it differs from related forms such as memoirs and ‘res gestae’, which aim not at the self but at the subject in public life and in tune with its public role. With its narrative telos of individual identity in charge of itself and of its own story, modern autobiography not only testifies to the much debated, seemingly inex­ tricable connection between narrative and identity, but also appears as its prime, generic location (Klepper 2013). Its structural core is comprised of the dual referen­ tiality of its first-person pronoun: The autobiographical ‘I’ pertains to the ‘narrating I’ as well as to the ‘narrated’, or ‘experiencing I’, the latter of which evolves to move towards, to ‘become’ the autodiegetic narrator in the course of the autobiographical plot. The ‘narrating I’ looks back to tell the story of his/her life from the beginning to the present, telling the story of its own making – tracing, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, “wie man [wurde], was man ist” [“How One Bec[ame] What One Is”] (2005; Untertitel [1992; subtitle]). While the ‘narrated I’ features as the protagonist of the life course, the ‘narrating I’, the autodiegetic narrator, ultimately personifies the overall autobiographical voice and focaliser, although it may temporarily choose to adopt an earlier point of focalization in order to emphasise the process of “re-living” of experi­ ence (Löschnigg 2010, 259). For theoretical and systematic purposes, the ‘narrating I’ is distinguished from the empirical autobiographer as a/the ‘real life’ author of his/her autobiography, also labelled ‘Real’ or ‘historical I’. Some theorists have added the abstract category of ‘ide­ ological I’, signifying according to Smith and Watson “the concept of personhood cul­ turally available to the narrator when he tells the story” (2001, 59–61). The ‘ideological I’ accounts for the social dimension of autobiography: any autobiographical self-writ­ ing is inevitably grounded in and engages with historically and culturally specific generic and institutional genres, structures and institutions of self-representation that serve as a “master narrative”, “schema”, cognitive “script” (e.  g. Neumann, Nünning, and Petterson 2008), as “patterns of emplotment”, or “Biographiegeneratoren” [‘biog­ raphy generators’] (Hahn 1987, 12). Operating prior to and shaping individual autobio­ graphical writing, these scripts provide pre-texts of meaningful biography (Schwalm 2014, § 3–5). Based on such available pretexts, any autobiographical account is hence inev­ itably scripted by others. On an intratextual level, it is also “relational” (Smith and Watson 2001, 64–69) in so far as any act of autobiographical communication addresses another. Its narratee may be part of the self, an individual person, the public, or God. Further, addressing another occurs as the autobiographical text envisages an ideal

506 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

or implied reader. Finally, there are of course also empirical readers involved. At the same time, autobiography is relational in so far as it brings into play other persons at the level of its plot. Apart from important figures in one’s life story or the presence of personal role models, autobiographies may be centred on a relationship of self and other to an extent that effectively blurs the boundaries between auto- and heterobi­ ography (e.  g. Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Story of Two Temperaments [1907]; Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman [1987]; Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders [2003] [In my Brother’s Shadow] and Der Freund und der Fremde [‘The Friend and The Stranger’] [2005]; John Burnside’s A Lie About My Father [2006]). In any case, not even in its classic, more self-centred versions is autobiography ever an autonomous undertaking; indeed, the “routing of a self known through its relational others undermines the understanding of life narrative as a bounded story of the unique, individuated narrating subject” (Smith and Watson 2001, 67). The auto­ biographical self fashions itself through interaction with others, in terms of social others and cultural scripts. Paradoxically, the modern individualist self is fashioned according to a script that stipulates a singular, unique biographical trajectory. In contrast, pre-modern forms of autobiography demonstrate that autobiographical self-writing does not necessarily engender a notion of individuality or subjectivity. Commonplace books allotted very little space to individual input, and the conver­ sion stories of spiritual autobiographies operated along rigid plot lines and structures that allowed for little individuality of experience or particularity. In contrast, modern autobiography as individual ‘Bildungsgeschichte’ [‘story of formation’] seeks to rep­ resent a particular, individual life course, secularizing and varying its moment(s) of self-recognition. It is from the final vantage point of one’s biographical trajectory that past events are shaped into a meaningful, coherent plot. A certain causal order and linearity of narrative is thus superimposed. Moreo­ ver, a stable narrative present (that the story drives towards) is implied, rendering the logic of autobiography ultimately circular. However, autobiographers frequently reflect upon the instability of their present situation and the impossibility of arriving at a final version of self as narrator, or else they may display a suspiciously deliberate effort to construct the narrative present as a (pseudo-)static moment of autobiograph­ ical ‘quasi death’ (Schwalm 2014, § 3). Thus, for instance, the enlightenment philos­ opher David Hume notoriously concluded his stoic self-presentation: “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution […] it is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present. […] I am, or rather was […] a man of mild dispositions […]” (Hume 1776, xv; emphasis mine). In contrast, William Wordsworth’s multi-version verse autobiography The Prelude (1799; 1805; published posthumously in 1850) represents the unattainability of auto­ biographical closure for the Romantic poet. Again and again, Wordsworth rewrites the same time-span of his life, and as his life continues to progress, his subject, the “growth of a poet’s mind” (1850; subtitle), perpetually appears to him in a new light, requiring continual revision, even though the “duration” (Genette 1993, 88–89) in fact

3.9 Autobiography 

 507

remains the same. Accordingly, the later versions bear the mark of the autobiogra­ pher’s practice of revision and rewriting, exhibiting, in Wordsworth’s case, his later political conservatism in contrast to his youthful revolutionary enthusiasm. Similarly, the historian Edward Gibbon composed six versions of his life (1788–1793), waver­ ing considerably in selected subject matter, focus and tone. The published version was a work of compilation carried out posthumously by his editor (Memoirs of My Life [1796]). Wordsworth’s disciple Thomas de Quincey not only continued to reinvent himself in a whole series of autobiographical texts, but also translated the instability of self, both epistemologically and opium-induced, into complex configurations of loss and displacement (Confessions of an English Opium Eater [1822 and 1856]). The present of narration, then, can only ever be a temporary vantage point, affording a ‘Zwischenbilanz’ [an ‘interim balance’] (de Bruyn 1994) at best. If it is thus possible to arrive at a final version of the self, the role of memory is also considered an ambivalent one. Autobiographers frequently remark upon its two-faced power – creative source yet liable to gaps and distortions – that renders futile any attempt of a ‘definite’ version of the self. Whatever the tenor, the subjectivity of time and narration under the auspices of memory is frequently foregrounded especially in the twentieth century, programmatically by Vladimir Nabokov in his Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited (1966). In highly untypical contrast, Elias Canetti’s three-volume auto­ biography (Die gerettete Zunge; Die Fackel im Ohr; Das Augenspiel [1977–1985] [The Tongue Set Free; The Torch in My Ear; The Play of the Eyes]) continues in the classic autobiographical mode, insisting on the power of memory. His concern with language, however, connects him to twentieth-century autobiographers such as Virginia Woolf (Moments of Being [1985]), Gertrude Stein (Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933]; Everybody’s Autobiography [1937]), Michel Leiris (L’age d’ homme [1939]; La règle du jeu [1948–1976]; Le ruban au cou de l’Olympia [1981] [Manhood; The Rules of the Game; The Ribbon on Olympia’s Neck) and Jean-Paul Sartre in his exploration of his childhood years (Les Mots [1964] [The Words]). Paradigmatically, Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (1932–1934/1938) [Berlin Childhood Around 1900] self-consciously explores the linguistic mediatedness of language, operating with textual fragmenta­ tion – “verzettelte Schreiberei” [‘frittered scribbling’] (Wizisla 2008). Benjamin oscil­ lates between individual and collective dimensions of memory, between events of the past, their promises and future impacts and outcomes. Although a relatively modern literary phenomenon, several markers of autobi­ ographical writing are discernible in Greek poetry, as in Ulysses’ apology, in Hesiod and Solon (Rösler 2005). Plato’s Apology (399 BCE) is considered to offer a schema of autobiographical self-representation; in particular, its motive of self-justification was to pervade ancient autobiographical writings (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 105–108). St Augustine’s Confessiones (ca. 397 CE) is, however, usually considered the generic origin of autobiography – both in terms of its coherent autodiegetic story telling (includ­ ing an account of his childhood), hinging on the conversion to Christianity, and in terms of its rigorous psychological self-examination and reflections on memory itself

508 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

(Book 10). After antiquity, modern autobiography was predated by a small number of medieval and Renaissance/humanist autobiographical narratives, often of debat­ able authenticity (Heinrich Seuse’s Vita [1327]; the mystic English woman’s The Boke of Margery Kempe [ca. 1433]; Dante’s Vita Nuova [1295]; Petrarca’s L’ascesa al monte Ventoso [1326]; Benvenuto Cellini’s self-conscious account of his life as an achieve­ ment of his own [1558–1566; freely translated by Goethe 1803]; Girolamo Cardano’s De propria Vita [1575/1576; published posthumously 1643]). Early modern spiritual, above all Puritan and Pietistic autobiographies (John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding on a Chief of Sinners [1666]; August Hermann Francke, Lebensnachrichten über A.  H. Francke [‘News of A. H. Francke’s Life’] [1690/1691]; Adam Bernd, Eigene Lebensbeschreibung [‘Description of His Own Life’] [1738]; Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Heinrich Stillings Jugend. Eine wahrhafte Geschichte [‘Heinrich Stilling’s Youth. A True Story’] [1778]), continued to employ the Pauline/Augustinian conversion plot demanding a self-nar­ rative in terms of biblical texts or pattern of biblical history. The religious focus of spiritual autobiography resulted in and provided a normative pattern of little flexibil­ ity that was hardly concerned with the recording of experience as such. “Undertaken as a religious exercise, such compositions were not to dwell on the narration of fact; fact was to serve purely as ground for reflection, and allowing it to become an end in itself would be a vain self-indulgence” (Starr 1965, 27). Its plot hinges upon its pivotal moment of conversion, which makes the story (usually containing few and familiarly scripted individual moments) ‘narratable’ in the first place: only after the experience of conversion and with the certainty of God’s grace can the story be told at all, and it is told as ‘exemplum’. Well into the nineteenth century, this model continued to operate in its ‘migrant’ forms aiming at collective identities: American slave narratives adopted the pattern of the conversion narrative (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [1845]; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861]), and Chartist working-class autobiog­ raphers articulated their class consciousness, faith, hope for educational improvement and social progress by resorting to the same script. The latter replaced the moment of recognizing God’s grace by a conversion to temperance and political radicalism (e.  g. Thomas Doubleday, Political Pilgrim’s Progress [1839]). While the conversion narrative lived on, the eighteenth century saw a prolifera­ tion of diverse autobiographical practices – diaries, letters, memoirs etc. –, some of which performed a secular turn of autobiography that the new genre of the novel like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) had already anticipated to some extent. Thus the rigorous self-examination of the Augustinian Confessions was adopted by the phi­ losopher Vico, who gives an account of his intellectual formation in Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (1725–1731). The key transition between pre-modern and modern autobiography is marked by secularization, shifting its subject from a spiritual self paradoxically attaining its ‘true self’ through self-renunciation and surrender only to a modern, secular self that has come to shoulder the burden of autonomy (Marquard 1976), replacing providence

3.9 Autobiography 

 509

with history/the individual’s life story. Notoriously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782–1789) radically undertook such a project of accounting for himself by auto­ biographical narration: “Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple et dont l’exécution n’aura point d’imitateur. […] Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j’ai vus; j’ose croire n’être fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent” [“I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator […] I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not like any of those who are in existence”] (Rousseau 2009, 1 [1957, 1]). With his assumption of exceptionality, Rousseau claimed solely for himself what paradoxically became the telos of modern autobiography: unique, exceptional individuality. (About the lack of imitators he proved wrong, of course.) More concerned with an account of himself as professional, the bookseller James Lackington, arguably the first modern autobiog­ rapher (Mascuch 1997, 51), narrated his life as the story of an individual’s successful career (Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington [1791]), while Benjamin Franklin rewrote the Puritan script to conceive of himself as a suc­ cessful American entrepeneur (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin [1793]). The nineteenth-century autobiographers Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater [1821 and 1856]) and Cardinal Newman (Apologia Pro Vita Sua [1864]) adopted the confessional mode, whereas the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill, for instance, focussed on his intellectual development that centred around a “crisis” in his “mental history” (1989 [1873], 111), triggered off by his reading of the Roman­ tics. The cool, utilitarianism-taught analyst thus undergoes a process of incorporating poetry and feeling into his self-conception: “The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance” (1989 [1873], 111/118). Mill’s text is typical of autobiography as a story of professional, intellectual or poetic formation. Indeed, writers like François-René Chateaubriand (1848/1850), Henry Adams (1918), Leon Trotsky (1930), H. G. Wells (1934), Arthur Koestler (1934/1954), Stephen Spender (1946/1951), Simone de Beauvoir (1958), Elias Canetti (1977–1985), Alain Robbe-Grillet (1986/1989), Arthur Miller (1987), Doris Lessing (1994) all contin­ ued to write in this vein. More specifically, Henry James, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois conceived of themselves “as subjects of American progress, if oftentimes with ambiv­ alence” (Smith and Watson 2001, 104). Whatever the specific stories of self-formation, these autobiographies tend to bring together life and work. Nietzsche’s Ecce homo. Wie man wird, was man ist (1889) [Ecce homo. How one becomes what one is], also represents an autobiography that traces the writer’s development as a philosopher and thereby comments upon his own work, despite the fact that Nietzsche generally thought little of biography. In his text written shortly before his mental breakdown, Nietzsche discards conventional chronological structures in favour of self-praising and/or self-mocking chapter headings such as “Warum ich so weise bin” [“Why I am so wise”], and “Warum ich so klug bin” [“Why I am so clever”]. In practice, classic autobiography with its narrative coherence, circular logic and self-centredness proved of limited historical duration (although it lives on in specific

510 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

subgenres such as crisis and illness narratives). Modernist and postmodernist writers in particular tried out new forms of autobiographical writing: fragmented (Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, published posthumously 1985), composed in the second or third person (Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster [1976] [Patterns of Childhood]; Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933]), splitting the subject and plurivocal (Gottfried Benn, Doppelleben [1950] [Double Life]; Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X [1965]; Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers [1991]; Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey [2010]), blending auto- and heterobiography or moving into fiction according to the tradition of the autobiographical novel, which had long interacted with autobiography (e.  g. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie; ou, La Nouvelle Heloise [1761]; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther [1774] [The Sorrows of Young Werther]; Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser [1785–1786]; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield [1850]; Charlotte Brontë, Vilette [1853]; Gottfried Keller, Der Grüne Heinrich [1854–1855; second, autodiegetic version 1879–1880] [Green Henry]; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man [1916]; Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu [1913–1927] [In Search of Lost Time]). Diaric and essayistic forms of self-writing (e.  g. Max Frisch, Tagebuch 1946–1949 [1950] [Diary 1946–1949]; Peter Handke, Das Gewicht der Welt [1977] [The Weight of the World]; Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives [2013]) came to the fore. Alternatively, (post)modern autobiographers altogether dismissed traditional self-positionings as authorial narrator of one’s own life (e.  g. Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance [1983] [Childhood]). In order to not “indulge” in the “both conventional and illusionary” genre of autobiography, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu attempted a “self-socioanalysis” (2004, 1), while Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes], frequently cited as the epitome of a postmodern dismantling of autobiography, radically rejected the notion of coher­ ence by insisting on the fragmentary nature of the subject and biographical expe­ rience. Although Barthes’ autobiography indeed testified to the pronounced “sorte d’accélération autobiographique” [“sort of autobiographical acceleration”] (Derrida 1981, 282 [2001, 52]) towards the end of his writing career, it continued his critical concern with the writer as ‘scripteur’ not in authorial charge of a text necessarily de-centred, putting into question the very possibility of the “par-lui même”, of writing about ‘oneself’ (Gabara 2006, 1–2). In various ways, these revisions of and experi­ ments with autobiographical form articulate modernist concerns with the subjective, split and fragmentary nature of consciousness, or they reflect the postmodern dis­ missal of history or (grand) narratives. Whatever their radical purposes and poetics, autobiography ‘manuals’ today instructing the general reader on how to write one’s own life (e.  g. Tieger 2010) confirm that unconventional forms and techniques, such as the versatile use of pronoun, have by now entered mainstream, popular life writing. In spite of its manifold rewritings and critical revisions, the nexus of autobiog­ raphy and subjectivity has proved a tenable one. Thomas Bernhard’s five prose texts widely held to be autobiographical (Die Ursache; Der Keller; Der Atem; Die Kälte; Ein Kind [1975–1982] [An Indication of the Cause; The Cellar; Breath; In the Cold; A Child])

3.9 Autobiography 

 511

break with chronology in so far as the first four volumes comprise his school and apprenticeship years (culminating in his admittance to a lung clinic), while the final volume leaps back into childhood (Ein Kind [1982] [A Child]). Again, however, critics have seen that these autobiographical writings trace a psychogenesis that furthers our understanding of his literary work. With their pathographic interpretations, Bernhard’s autobiographical texts at least provisionally appear to correspond to a post-political trend of German autobiography since the 1970s, labelled ‘new subjec­ tivity’ or ‘neue Innerlichkeit’ [‘new interiority’]. Bernward Vesper’s prose fragment Die Reise [‘The Journey’] (1977, published posthumously) was received as a key text of the so-called ‘Väter-Literatur’ [‘fathers literature’]. Engaging with his prominent Nazi father, Vesper employs the Romantic motif of ‘journey into the self’ along with that of a drug-induced ‘trip’, thus combining a new subjectivism with the political. Among the diverse autobiographical texts by writers pertaining to marginal social groups, from homosexuals to prisoners, Fritz Zorn’s Mars (published posthumously 1977) was especially popular. Zorn (a pseudonym) accounts for his terminal cancer in terms of a psychosomatic deformation caused by the Zürich bourgeoisie – hence the diagnosis of his posthumous editor, Adolf Muschg, of “writing as therapy” [“Schrei­ ben als Therapie”] (1981). In the wake of feminist and gay movements, autobiographers increasingly came to explicitly explore their lives by way of negotiating their sexual identities, frequently resorting to a more traditional mode of autobiographical narration/fiction. While Hubert Fichte (Versuch über die Pubertät [‘Essay on Puberty’] [1974]) gave an account of his homosexual coming out, locating himself in a marginal social position, Verena Stefan’s cult book Häutungen (1975) [Shedding and Literally Dreaming] accounted for her path to self-discovery via a rejection of heterosexuality and turn towards lesbian relationships. The Welsh travel writer Jan Morris – typical of transsexual autobiogra­ phies – structured her biography around his sex change from man to woman, famously opening with “I was perhaps three or four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember that moment well, and it is the earliest memory in my life” (Conundrum 1974, 1). If classic autobiography was hardly ever, or for a short historical period only, a clear-cut story of a unique individual narrated by himself, the theory of autobiography lagged behind. Until the advent of so-called ‘Theory with a capital T’, the hermeneutic notion of autobiography continued to dominate criticism. Georges Gusdorf accord­ ingly defined autobiography as “a kind of apologetics or theodicy of the individual being” (1980, 39), yet shifted the emphasis somewhat by prioritising its “literary, artis­ tic function” over the “historic and objective function” (1980, 43). Anglo-American scholars similarly tended to claim “a single work” (Shumaker 1954, 106) as the poet­ ical norm (Shumaker 1954; Pascal 1960; Morris 1966; Weintraub 1982 et al). Whether grounded in hermeneutics or New Criticism, the history of the autobiography as “art” (Niggl 1998, 6) is seen to culminate in Rousseau’s Confessions and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1832) (Pascal 1960; Morris 1966; Weintraub 1982 et al.), whereas its

512 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

origins are frequently seen in the Renaissance. Goethe’s literary autobiography is con­ sidered to display perfectly the “full convergence of all the factors constituting [the] modern view of the self” (Weintraub 1982, XV). The autobiographer’s individuality is articulated by way of idiosyncratic style (Starobinski 1983). Only under the auspices of the various social, cultural and linguistic turns of lit­ erary theory since the 1970s did autobiography untie its bonds with a specific notion of the literary work and the Romantic notion of selfhood. Taking up Mahrholz’s early study of autobiography as reflecting the rise of the middle class (Mahrholz 1919), Bernd Neumann established a social psychology-based typology of autobiographical forms. With reference to Freud and David Riesman, he distinguished between the external orientation of res gestae and memoir, focussing on the individual as social type, on the one hand, and autobiography focussing on memory and identity formation on the other (1970, esp. 25). Neumann thus aligned types of autobiographical writings with social and historical notions of self. While Klaus-Detlef Müller also contextualised autobiography’s historical evolution from a pragmatic textual mode (‘Zweckform’) into a literary genre within the rise of the bourgeois subject, he explored its generic interplay with the novel (Müller 1976), as did Patricia Meyer Spacks (1976). In terms of theorising autobiography as literary genre, the concept of the ‘autobi­ ographical pact’ (similarly: Bruss’s ‘autobiographical act’ [1976]) has proven seminal, claiming to unequivocally mark autobiography off from fiction. According to Lejeune, autobiography is an institutionalised, communicative act where author and reader enter into a particular contract – the ‘autobiographical pact’ – ensured by the triple reference of the same proper name: “L’autobiographie (récit racontant la vie de l’au­ teur) suppose qu’il y ait identité de nom entre l’auteur (tel qu’il figure, par son nom, sur la couverture), le narrateur du récit et le personnage dont on parle” [“Autobiography (narrative recounting the life of the author) supposes that there is identity of name between the author (such as he figures, by his name, on the cover), the narrator of the story, and the character who is being talked about”] (1973, 145 [1989, 12]). The author’s proper name refers to a single autobiographical identity, identifying author, narrator and protagonist as one, and thus calls for a reading as (non-fictional) autobiography. While Lejeune’s pragmatic approach theoretically resolves the precarious relationship between autobiography and autofiction, it acknowledges its own historical limitations set by the author’s function. As such, Lejeune’s typical autobiographical pact depends on the emergence of the modern author in the long eighteenth century as proprietor of his or her own text, guaranteed by modern copyright and marked by the title page/ the imprint just as, for instance, in James Lackington’s Memoirs: “Printed for and sold by the author […] and all other Booksellers (1796)”. Hence the history of modern autobiography as literary genre is closely connected to the history of authorship and the modern subject and vice versa. Less concerned with delineating autobiography as genre, recent scholarship has explored the nexus of autobiographical narration and identity from more interdis­ ciplinary perspectives, questioning its key components and structures (Eakin 1992;

3.9 Autobiography 

 513

Bruner 1991 and 2003; Eakin 2008; Neumann and Nünning 2008; Klepper 2013 et al). Moreover, the key role of memory in autobiographical self-constructions (Olney 1998) has been addressed on a cognitivist basis (e.  g. Erll, Gymnich and Nünning 2003), and the neurobiological foundations of autobiographical memory have been explicated (Markowitsch/Welzer 2005). In any case, given the creative or constructive quality of memory, there is no clear dividing-line between autobiography and fiction. Catching up with autobiography’s poetic challenges and rewritings since mod­ ernism, the autobiographical subject has also been reconsidered in view of psycho­ analytical, (socio)psychological or even deconstructive concepts (Bruner 1993; Olney 1980; Sprinker 1983; Eakin 1985 and 1999; Holdenried 1991; Folkenflik 1993; Smith and Watson 1998; Pietzcker 2005; Volkening 2006; deconstructive: Derrida 1982; Smith 1995). Various critics have debated the “end of autobiography” (Sprinker 1980; Groppe 1990, 27; Mundi 2008, 46–48; Finck 1999, 11 et al.), or even suggested “zoegraphy as a radically post-anthropocentric approach to life narrative” in response to aesthetic practices that “turn ‘life itself’ into a work of art” (Van den Hengel 2012, 1) and diag­ nosed autobiography’s conspicuous absence in posthumanism (Whitlock 2012, v). Perhaps most radically of all, albeit of little lasting impact, autobiography was earlier denounced by de Man as a rhetorical figure that ultimately produces “the illusion of reference”. Prosopopoia functions as a paradigmatic trope of autobiography, or vice versa autobiography is an exemplary case of prosopopoia and as such “veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause” (1984, 81). According to de Man, autobiography engenders rather than represents its referential object as a metaphys­ ical illusion. In any case, chronology, coherence, retrospective narrative, and closure as man­ datory generic markers have finally been disqualified (Niethammer 1995; Freccero 1986) or ‘downgraded’ as optional elements (Kronsbein 1984). At best, autobiographi­ cal identity appears as “transitory” (Hilmes 2002, 16). The generic scope and diversity has been extended to include the diary/journal as “serial autobiography” (Fothergill 1974, 152), the “literary self-portrait” as a “polymorphous formation, a much more het­ erogeneous and complex literary type than is autobiographical narration” (Beaujour 1980, 25), and to include the essay (e.  g. Hof and Rohr 2008). Innovative intermedial forms of life writing in the new media have come to the fore (Turkle 1997; Gabara 2006). In a number of ways, then, autobiography has increasingly resisted identifica­ tion in terms of “its own proper form, terminology, and observances” (Olney 1980, 4). Class (Sloterdijk 1978; Vincent 1982) and gender have played a key role in revealing autobiography’s individualist self as a limited and socially exclusive phenomenon of male self-fashioning. Gender focussed studies have retraced a specific female canon (Jelinek 1980; Stanton 1987; Benstock 1988), postulated a distinct female voice of/ in autobiography as more “multidimensional, fragmented” (Jelinek 1986, viii; Mason 1980), subsequently refuted such essentialism (Finck 1995, 291–293), and have ana­ lysed autobiographical selves in terms of discursive self-positionings (Nussbaum

514 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

1988; Finck 1995, esp. 291–293), following redefinitions of autobiography as a prac­ tice and institution of (self-)discipline that evolved from the changes of communi­ cation media and technologies of memory in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­ turies (Schneider 1988, 16). Seminally, Felicity Nussbaum identified autobiography in the long “New Eighteenth Century” (Nussbaum and Brown 1987) as a spectrum of multiple, intersectional discursive practices generating new subjectivities. Among these, women’s “scandalous memoirs” were on the one hand sexually explicit; but on the other hand reproduced the topical convergence of sexual licentiousness and low class status (Nussbaum 1988). The nexus of “gender, genre, and history” (Broughton 1991, 93; Kormann 2004, 11; Hof and Rohr 2008 et al.) has indeed yielded fresh per­ spectives on the history of autobiography. Leigh Gilmore, for instance, investigated women’s transgressions of boundaries and the inadequacy of confession to trauma narratives (Gilmore 1994 and 2001), and with regard to seventeenth-century women autobiographers, Eva Kormann has diagnosed a “heterologous subjectivity” at work, signifying a self-writing via writing about another, or others (2004, 5–6). Pursuing a different, non-eurocentric angle, Post-Colonial Theory has both exposed autobiography’s traditional discursive tenets and further diversified its corpus to include non-Western texts (Braxton 1989; Lionett 1989; Smith 1987; Smith and Watson 1992; Nishitani 1995; Williams 2000; Gabara 2006, xi et al). The impli­ cations for critical theory are manifold, among them the urgent question of how those who cannot or must not speak for themselves, who have no voice of their own (Spivak’s ‘subaltern’), may attain (auto)biographical representation. ‘Writing ordinary lives’ and their critical study, especially of those subjected to marginalisation, exclu­ sion and silencing, poses specific problems – sociological, ethical, aesthetic – that ultimately unsettle the foundations of autobiography (e.  g. Pandian 2008). The concept of “eco-autobiography” (e.  g. Perreten 2006), or “Autobiogeogra­ phy” (Gregory-Guider 2005) entered criticism in the wake of the spatial turn. The much-cited figure of “mapping the self” (Regard 2003) pertains to a specific mode of autobiography that constructs a “relationship between the natural setting and the self”, often aiming at “discover[ing] ‘a new self in nature’” (Perreten 2006, 1). In less Romantic and more general terms, it “charts human encounters with the regional specificity of a place” (Smith and Watson 2001, 268). Wordsworth and the American transcendentalist Henry Thoreau’s autobiography Walden (1854) count as paradigms, and modern examples range from Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1959) and V. S. Nai­ paul’s post-colonial The Enigma of Arrival (1987) to texts as generically diverse and hybrid as Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother (1995), Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind (2003), the psycho-geographical writings of Iain Sinclair, or Jon Krakauer’s autobiographical travel narrative Into the Wild (1996). In a wider sense of the term, eco- or topographical autobiographies undertake to place the autobiograph­ ical subject within spatial or topographical figurations. They bring into play space and/or topography as a pivotal moment of biographical identity, thus destabilizing its traditional narrative logic that is anchored in time (Kilian and Wolf 2016).

3.9 Autobiography 

 515

Given the proliferation of narrative structures, semantic foci, identity notions and thematic concerns at play in autobiographical practice and theory alike, the concept of autobiography has come to signify “a broad range of literary and cultural practices that draw on and incorporate a multitude of textual modes and genres ” (Schwalm 2014, § 24). Accordingly, Smith and Watson identify fifty-two “Genres of Life Narra­ tive”, taking into consideration both formal and semantic features. They include nar­ ratives of migration, immigration or exile, narratives engaging with ethnic identity and community, prison narratives, illness, trauma and coming out narratives as much as celebrity memoirs, graphic life writing, or forms of internet self-presentation. All these autobiographical texts testify to new “subject formations” (Smith and Watson 2001, 106), emerging within specific historical and cultural localities that remain to be explored further.

Works Cited Beaujour, Michel. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. New York: New York University Press, 1980. Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Bourdieu, Pierre. Esquisse pour une auto-analyse. Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2004 [Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007]. Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Broughton, T. L. “Women’s Autobiography: The Self at Stake?” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 14.2 (1991): 76−94. Bruner, Jerome. “The Autobiographical Process.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representations. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. 28–56. Bruss, Elizabeth W. Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. de Bruyn, Günter. Zwischenbilanz: Eine Jugend in Berlin (1992). Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1994. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 67–82. Derrida, Jacques. “Les morts de Roland Barthes.” Poetique 47 (1981): 269–292 [“The Deaths of Roland Barthes.” The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 31–68]. Derrida, Jacques. L’oreille de l’autre. Otobiographies, Transferts, Traductions. Ed. Claude Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald. Montréal: vlb éditeur, 1982 [The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Trans. Avital Ronell and Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985]. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1990 [“The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.” Selected Works. Vol. III, part 2. Ed. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 101–175]. D’Israeli, Isaac. “Some Observations on Diaries, Self-Biography, and Self-Characters.” Miscellanies; or, Literary Recreations. London, 1796. 95–110. Eakin, Paul J. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

516 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Eakin, Paul J. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Erll, Astrid, Marion Gymnich, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Literatur, Erinnerung, Identität. Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien. Trier: Wissenschaftsverlag Trier, 2003. Finck, Almut. “Subjektbegriff und Autorschaft. Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Autobiographie.” Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Miltos Pechlibanos. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. 283–294. Finck, Almut. Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999. Folkenflik, Robert, ed. The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Fothergill, Robert. Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. Foucault, Michel. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Bulletin de la societé française de philosophie, LXIII (1969): 73–104 [“What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. and trans. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 141–160]. Foucault, Michel. “Les techniques de soi.” Dits et écrits. Vol. IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 783–813 [“Technologies of the Self.” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton. London: Tavistock, 1988. 16–49]. Freccero, John. “Autobiography and Narrative.” Reconstructing Individualism. Ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, and David Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. 16–29. Gabara, Rachel. From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Genette, Gérard. Fiction et Diction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991 [Fiction and Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993]. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811). Vol. I. Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1975 [From my Life. Truth and Poetry First Part. Ed. and trans. Parke Godwin. London: Wiley and Putnam, 1847]. Gregory-Guider, Christopher Calvin. Autobiogeography and the Art of Peripatetic Memorialization in Works by W. G. Sebald, Patrick Midiano, Iain Sinclair, Jonathan Raban, and William Least Heat Moon. University of Sussex (microfilm), 2005. Groppe, Sabine. Das Ich am Ende des Schreibens: Autobiographisches Erzählen im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Hahn, Alois. “Identität und Selbstthematisierung.” Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis: Be­kennnis und Geständnis. Ed. Alois Hahn and Volker Kapp. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 7–24. Hengel, Louis van den. “Zoegraphy: Per/forming Posthuman Lives.” Biography 3.5 (2012): 1–20. Hilmes, Carola. Das inventarische und das inventorische Ich: Grenzfälle des Autobiographischen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. Hof, Renate, and Susanne Rohr, eds. Inszenierte Erfahrung: Gender und Genre in Tagebuch, Auto­ biographie, Essay. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2008. Holdenried, Michaela. Im Spiegel ein Anderer: Erfahrungskrise und Subjektdiskurs im modernen autobiographischen Roman. Heidelberg: Winter, 1991.

3.9 Autobiography 

 517

Hume, David. The History of England, etc. New edition corrected; with the author’s last corrections and improvements. To which is prefixed a short account of his life, written by himself. London, 1776. Johnson, Samuel. Idler and Adventurer. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vol. II. Ed. W. J. Bate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vol. III. Ed. W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Jelinek, Estelle C., ed. Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Jelinek, Estelle C. The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Kilian, Eveline, and Hope Wolf, eds. Life Writing and Space. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. Klepper, Martin. “Rethinking narrative identity.” Rethinking Narrative Identity. Persona and Perspective. Ed. Martin Klepper and Claudia Holler. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. Kormann, Eva. Ich, Welt und Gott: Autobiographik im 17. Jahrhundert. Köln: Böhlau, 2004. Kronsbein, Joachim. Autobiographisches Erzählen: Die narrativen Strukturen der Autobiographie. München: Minerva, 1984. Lejeune, Philippe. “Apprendre aux gens à écrire leur vie.” Moi aussi. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986. 203–223 [“Teaching People to Write Their Life Story.” On Autobiography. Ed. Philippe Lejeune and Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 216–231]. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poetique. Revue de theorie et d’analyse littéraire 13 (1973): 137–162 [“The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Philippe Lejeune and Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Lionett, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Löschnigg, Martin. “Postclassical Narratology and the Theory of Autobiography.” Postclassical Narratology. Approaches and Analyses. Ed. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. 255–274. Mahrholz, Werner. Deutsche Selbstbekenntnisse. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Selbstbiographie von der Mystik bis zum Pietismus. Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1919. Markowitsch, Hans, and Harald Welzer. Das autobiographische Gedächtnis. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005. Marquard, Odo. “Identität – Autobiographie – Verantwortung. Ein Annäherungsversuch.” Identität. Poetik und Hermeneutik VIII. Ed. Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle. München: Fink, 1976. 690–699. Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self. Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Mason, Mary G. “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers.” Autobiography: Essays ­Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 207–235. Meyer Spacks, Patricia. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography (1873). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Leipzig et al.: Teubner, 1907–1969 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Trans. E. W. Dickes and Georg Misch. Vol. I. London: Routledge & Paul, 1950]. Morris, John. Versions of the Self. Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart Mill. New York: Basic Books, 1966.

518 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Müller, Klaus-Detlef. Autobiographie und Roman: Studien zur literarischen Autobiographie der Goethezeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. Mundi, Thorsten. Die Pragmatik des Sinns: Eine Funktionstheorie der narrativen Kunst. Würzburg: Ergon, 2008. Muschg, Adolf. Literatur als Therapie? Ein Exkurs über das Heilsame und das Unheilbare. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1981. Neumann, Bernd. Identität und Rollenzwang. Zur Theorie der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Athenäum, 1970 (new edition: Von Augustinus zu Facebook. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Autobiographie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013). Neumann, Birgit, Ansgar Nünning, and Bo Pettersson, eds. Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008. Niethammer, Ortrun. “Identity, Linearity and Biography: Concepts of the Theory of Autobiography?” Plurality and Individuality: Autobiographical Cultures in Europe. Ed. Christa Hämmerle. Wien: Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, 1995. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Wie man wird, was man ist. München: Beck, 2005 [Ecce Homo. How One Becomes What One Is. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992]. Niggl, Günter, ed. Die Autobiographie: Zur Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed. 1998. Nishitani, Yoriko. “Entwicklung der autobiographischen Literatur von Frauen in Japan.” Geschriebenes Leben. Autobiographik von Frauen. Ed. Michaela Holdenried. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. 379–389. Nussbaum, Felicity, and Laura Brown, eds. The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature. New York: Methuen, 1987. Nussbaum, Felicity. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Pandian, M. S. S. “Writing Ordinary Lives.” Economic and Political Weekly. 43.38 (2008): 34–40. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1960. Paul, Jean. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Norbert Miller. München: Hanser, 1987. Perreten, Peter. “Eco-Autobiography: Portrait of Place/Self-Portrait.” Autobiography Studies 18 (2003): 1–22. Pietzcker, Carl. „Die Autobiographie aus psychoanalytischer Sicht.“ Antike Autobiographien. Werke – Epochen – Gattungen. Ed. Michael Reichel. Köln: Böhlau, 2005. 15–26. Regard, Frédéric, ed. Mapping the Self: Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/biography. SaintEtienne: Publications de’l Université de Saint-Etienne, 2003. Roesler, Wolfgang. “Ansätze von Autobiographie in früher griechischer Dichtung.” Antike Auto­ biographien. Werke – Epochen – Gattungen. Ed. Michael Reichel. Köln: Böhlau, 2005. 29–43. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782–1789). Ed. L. G. Crocker. New York: Pocket Books, 1957. Saint Augustine. Confessions. Ed. R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Schneider, Manfred. Die erkaltete Herzensschrift: Der autobiographische Text im 20. Jahrhundert. München: Hanser, 1988. Schwalm, Helga. “Circularity and Subjectivity in Autobiography: Conversion, Closure, Hermeneutics, and Beyond.” Symbolism. An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 9 (2009): 41–66. Schwalm, Helga. “Autobiography.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/autobiography (5 July 2018). Seybold, David Christoph. Selbstbiographien berühmter Männer. Wintherthur: Steiner, 1796.

3.9 Autobiography 

 519

Shumaker, Wayne. English Autobiography. Its Emergence, Materials and Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Sloterdijk, Peter. Literatur und Organisation von Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der Zwanziger Jahre. München: Hanser, 1978. Smith, Robert. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–314. Sprinker, Michael. “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 321–342. Stanton, Donna C. The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Starobinski, Jean. “Le style de l’autobiographie.” La Relation critique. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. 83–98 [“The Style of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 73–83]. Starr, G. A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. Tieger, Gerhild. Anleitung zur Autobiografie in 300 Fragen. Berlin: Autorenhaus Verlag, 2010. Vincent, David. Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography. London: Methuen, 1982. Volkening, Heide. Am Rand der Autobiographie: Ghostwriting, Signatur, Geschlecht. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Weintraub, Karl J. The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Whitlock, Gillian. “Post-ing Lives.” Biography 35 (2012): v–xvi. Wizisla, Erdmut. “Verzettelte Schreiberei: Walter Benjamins Archiv.” Topographien der Erinnerung. Ed. Bernd Witte. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. 152–162. Williams, Roland Leander. African American Autobiography and the Quest for Freedom. Westport: Greenwood, 2000.

Further Reading Baggerman, Arianne, Rudolf Dekker, and Michael Mascuch, eds. Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing Since the Sixteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Baumann, Uwe, and Karl Neuhausen, eds. Autobiographie: Eine interdisziplinäre Gattung zwischen klassischer Tradition und (post-)moderner Variation. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht unipress, 2013. Chanski, Ricia Anne, and Emily Hipchen, eds. The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2016. El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2012. Riggs, Thomas. The Literature of Autobiographical Narrative. Vol. I. Autobiography and Memoir. Detroit: St James Press, 2013.

3.10 Confessions Ulrich Breuer

Definition A confession means a more or less ritualised speech act by way of which an individual publicly assumes responsibility for a culturally volatile accusation. The basic form consists of answering ‘Yes’ to a decisive question: ‘Yes, I killed my mother’; ‘Yes, I didn’t say the truth’. Antonyms of confession are denial and indifference. From a per­ formative standpoint, the expression ‘to confess’ introduces a scene composed of a questioning authority, the answering confessor, the volatile accusation, and a public setting. Confessions include those of guilt and sin, as well as thanks, praise, and faith. They may appear in a variety of discourses (law, religion, rhetoric, politics, art) and media (speech, literature, music, film, internet). The autobiographical genre of confessions is a configuration of more than one confession of a similar or different nature. In this genre, individual confessions are usually bound together by a narrative and are often presented in an autodiegetic manner with the aim of exonerating the narrator. The serial character of confessions undermines the responsibility aspect of confessing and with it the confessor’s individ­ uality and the authenticity of his speech.

Explication In countless disciplines, the “anthropologische Fundamentalkategorie” [‘funda­ mental anthropological category’] of confessing (Schröer 1984, 441) has become the subject of vast, comprehensive research. We find contributions from, in particular, theology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and literary studies, as well as recently from culture and media studies, all of which deal with various aspects of confessions. They investigate and describe the ecstatic dimension of confessions from the perspective of religious philosophy (Buber 1909), the emergence of confessions in the history of reli­ gion (Zeeden 1985), the history of the religious confession of sin (Schnitzer 1930; Ohst 1995), and confessions of faith in the major religious denominations. Psychoanalysis (Reik 1925), epistemology (Foucault 1989), and literary studies (Galle 1986; Schneider 1986; Levin 1998) have dealt with confessional practices, forced confessions, and the poetry of confessions (Foster 1987), as well as specifically with the linguistic bases of the autobiographical genre of confessions (Lehmann 1988). In the late 1980s, a first sociological attempt was made to launch interdisciplinary research into confes­ sions, but it found little resonance (Hahn and Kapp 1987). The impetus was taken up https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-066

3.10 Confessions 

 521

and implemented especially in philology, taking broadly into account the findings of the named disciplines (Breuer 2000). A summary of research can also be found there (Breuer 2000, 35–40). A recent topic of study has been the exponential growth of public confessions in the media, including from the perspective of cultural sociology (Burkart 2006; Bublitz 2010). An initial approach to the autobiographical genre of confessions can be obtained by means of etymology and conceptual history. The etymology of confessions reveals a momentous connection between the term’s classical and Eastern roots in European culture (Breuer 2000, 49–61). The expression ‘confession’ can be traced back to the Latin ‘confiteor’ (I confess, I acknowledge), first documented in 450 BCE., which in turn was borrowed from the Greek expression ὁμολογέω (homologéo, to speak the same thing), likewise first documented in the fifth century B. C.E. The Greek expres­ sion originally related to a need for coordination between equals and in so doing fol­ lowed a politically accentuated ideal of consensus. It can relate first, from a rhetori­ cal, philosophical, and political perspective, to coordination between the individuals involved in the act of confession at this very instant; second, as used in law, to confess­ ing to an antecedent criminal charge; and third, in economic contexts, to the future acknowledgement of a debt. The “rituel de discours” [“ritual of discourse”] (Foucault 1976, 82 [1984, 61]) associated with confessing involves short, easily remembered, somewhat formulaic texts (confession to having done something, acknowledgment). An entirely different, hierarchical ideal that relates specifically to a religious denomination’s relationship to God follows from the Hebrew ‘hoda’ah’ (to give thanks, to admit). In the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, ‘hoda’ah’ was rendered as ‘homologéo’, and as a result, the semantic continuum based primar­ ily on coordination between equals was augmented by a vertical dimension, which stresses the difference between non-equals, and was thereby gradually destroyed. This is where the confession of sin and of praise originated, and with them progressive indi­ vidualisation of the confessor. It is the performative variant of reading ‘to make some­ thing known by action’ which belongs to the range of meanings of ‘confiteor’ meaning that the effective appearance of exposed beings (gods), by way of which they suddenly make themselves recognisable, can be called ‘confessio’. The rise of Christianity led to a split in the way the word was used, which, with characteristic differences, is now at home in both religious discourse and the secular discourse of legal transactions and of trade, including the discourses of rhetoric and literature that refer back to the latter (Propertius, Ovid). The religious variants can be broken down into confessions of guilt, faith, and praise. It was not until the late antiquity that St. Augustine merged all three variants and in so doing founded the literary genre of confessions. Using the example of the German word ‘bekennen’, it can be seen that the original meaning in the law of confessional statements was difficult to harmonise in European languages with the religious meaning that came to be added under Christian influence (Breuer 2000, 61–78). Of special significance for conceptual history was thus the tight link between religion and politics during the Reformation, which also cultivated a

522 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

separate literary genre in the form of confessional writings. It was preceded by the meaning that arose in German mysticism of ‘professing one’s faith, espousing some­ thing from deepest conviction’. In modern German, the reflexive term ‘sich bekennen’, by way of which a speaker can give expression to his or her commitment, denotes the role of confessions in individualisation, particularly as used by the media. Since in the autobiographical genre of confessions, a number of types of confes­ sion are not infrequently brought together, and with them also different discourses, the focus on etymology and conceptual history needs to be augmented by discourse criticism. It draws on ritual practices that have gained attention, in particular, in the field of religious studies. The human as “une bête d’aveu” [“a confessing animal”] (Foucault 1976, 80 [1984, 59]) appears already in archaic societies. In these societies, confessions have been employed, above all, for exoneration (Breuer 2000, 82–85). Emergencies affecting social groups were explained by occult thinking as the infiltra­ tion of harmful substances. In order to heal, the harmful substance had to be expelled. This was accomplished through ritual transference, which could either take the form of personalisation or that of verbalisation. One example of personalisation is the scapegoat, over which Aaron confessed “all the iniquities of the sons of Israel and all their transgressions in regard to all their sins” and then sent out into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:21). Verbalisation first seeks to document the harm as thoroughly as pos­ sible by speaking it out or writing it down, following which it could then be banished (e.  g. by destroying the sign vehicle). In religious studies, this variant of ritual sin confession is known as ‘word magic’ (Schnitzer 1930, 99). Transference of the harmful substance to people or words promised release of the individual from the stigma of guilt, exoneration of the group, and cosmic purification. One of the two origins of the European concept of confession can be found in legal discourse (Breuer 2000, 85–88). Among other things, a confession is considered to be where a party, whether an involved individual or an accused, avers the truth of facts alleged by the other side (Creifelds 1992, 498). Since Roman times, two legal sub-discourses have taken root in which admission of guilt plays a role: criminal law and civil law. In antiquity, confession in a criminal trial was often explained using Aeschylus’s Eumenides. In a trial Orest is asked by the Erinyes whether he has killed his mother or not. In answer to it he confesses the crime act (Aischylos 1996, 438). Con­ fession is seen as a partial victory in a contest spanning several rounds, culminating in an enforceable judgment. In criminal law, confessions are considered to constitute particularly strong evidence, as well as a virtually unbeatable basis for convincing the judge (Magaß and Robling 1994, 348). But even under Roman law, confessions were required to be examined. If a confession was coerced (by torture, etc.), it was not permissable in court. Civil law considers a confession to mean a statement by a party before a judge acknowledging an opponent’s claims (debts, contractual assurances, etc.). All facts alleged that are not expressly contested are thereby deemed admitted. In order to be legally relevant, confessions must be made of one’s own free will and in a simple, uniform manner.

3.10 Confessions 

 523

The second origin of the European concept of confessions, which is constantly in conflict with the first, lies in religious discourse, with its confessions of faith and sin and the baptismal creed (Breuer 2000, 88–110). Confessions of faith can be found in all major religions. They summarise in a formulaic manner the principal statements that each religion uses to consolidate itself internally and delineate itself externally. In most cases, the name of the deity forms to core of the confession of faith. For instance, at the heart of Judaism is the belief that Yahweh is the God of Israel, whereas at the heart of Christianity, it is the belief in Jesus. A distinction must be made between the compact, formulaic form of confession of faith (the symbol of confession) and the spe­ cific process of confessing (the act of confession). Codifying the symbol of confession increases the stability of a religious denomination. When it is relaxed, modified, or released, individualisation tends to occur, reaching as far as heresy. In terms of form, the Christian confession of faith dates back to the monomial “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9). The binomial form states, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” (Acts 8:37), while the trinomial one also refers to the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). In this regard, the plurality of confessional substance is always to be drawn back into the singularity of one, sole confession. The formulations of the Chris­ tian churches keep working on the same problem. Among the most influential con­ fessions of faith in the Catholic Church are the “Apostles’ Creed”, the “Nicene Creed”, and the “Athanasian Creed”, which was composed in the fifth or sixth century and was highly regarded in the Middle Ages. The Christian confession of faith was dynamised in the Reformation. Also contributing to this was the loss of the original meaning of confessing and its dissemination through printing. Following Luther’s philological analysis of the concept of confession in the New Testament (Vogelsang 1930, 101–107), confessing was reendowed with its eschatological dimension and thereby developed enormously explosive political power. In the Augsburg Confession (1530), Melanchthon united the confession of the Reformation with those of the Old Church. Thereafter, printed confessions spread like wildfire, until the Formula of Concord (1577) put a stop to pluralisation (Wenz 1996–1998). This initiated a process in which confessions started to become interpretations of confessions (Schumann 1937, 192). The Catholic Church countered the Reformation’s confessions at the Council of Trent (1543–1563). If one looks only at Germany with respect to further developments, then in the sixteenth century, the Lutheran doctrine of symbolism gave an updated interpretation to ecclesiastical confessions and the clergy employed confessions to defend against heresy. After the confession of faith was reduced to a mere affiliation under the General State Laws for the Prussian State (1794), the nineteenth century saw a return to the normative character of confessions. Writers began to distance themselves from the confessional church, including David Friedrich Strauß, who in his 1872 work The Old Faith and the New confessed to being an unbeliever and a proponent of the theory of evolution. This prompted Friedrich Nietzsche to claim that we are living in a “Periode der cynischen Philisterbekenntnisse” [“age of cynical philistine confessions”] (1988, 173 [1997, 13]) and with his “Bekenntnis eines Einzelnen” [“confession of an individ­

524 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

ual”] (1988, 241–242 [1997, 55]) he sought to juxtapose that period with the demand for stylistic brilliance and ethical integrity. In the twentieth century, Pope Pius X believed that the effects of natural science and technology were forcing the Catholic Church into a confessional situation and accordingly demanded that all clerics take the Oath against Modernism. The oath was not rescinded until 1967. The Protestant side saw the formation of the Confessing Church, which at its Second Synodal in 1934 repudiated the totalitarian claims of National Socialism, particularly the ‘Führer principle’ and the Aryan paragraphs. In 1969 the Order of the Evangelical Churches in the German Democratic Republic relied on the rejection of the total state. The baptismal creed arose alongside the institution of the Church in early Christi­ anity, serving to bring new believers into the denomination while waiting for the Last Judgment. The formula of the baptismal creed is identical to that of the confession of faith: The baptisan confesses his belief in Jesus, the Son of God (Hebrews 4:14). In order to constantly remind believers of their baptismal creed, it was set down in hymn (Bornkamm 1939). The Christological hymns used for this purpose drew on the tradi­ tion of confessions of praise found in the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms. They adopted the core articles of Christian faith and freely reshaped them (Robinson 1964, 202). With them, the emerging Church used worship as an intermediary between the compact, formulaic symbol of confession and the individual believer’s act of con­ fession. As was the case with the baptismal creed, the confession of sin also arose in the first centuries after Christ. At first, it was closely associated with the confession of praise. By confessing his sins, the believer accepted God’s offer of salvation. After the first confession formula was elaborated in the third century, followed by the first catalogue of confessions, the obligation to confess one’s sins at least once a year was introduced by the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215. As a result, confession of sin became an effective instrument of social control by the Church, but also an instrument of exoneration (Hahn 1982). The Late Middle Ages then saw intense production of pen­ itentials written in the vernacular, which were designed to support both priests and the laity. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther rejected all clerically mandated acts of confession of sin, while accepting individual confession of sin and private confes­ sion. The Council of Trent responded by stipulating the features of Catholic confession of sin (Borobio 1987). Because confession of sin has for centuries compelled Christians to reflect con­ stantly on their own imperfection, it has made a decisive contribution to the formation of the modern consciousness of individuality. Since private confession, in particular, links the series of a Christian’s sinful actions to their agent and in this way enables one’s entire life to become the subject of an autodiegetic narration (Feistner 1996, 12), confession of sin in the Late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance also fostered the emergence of the early modern autobiography. Petrarca’s Secretum [The Secret] reveals the connection between systematic self-analysis and autobiography (Zimmer­ mann 1989).

3.10 Confessions 

 525

In rhetoric, three areas of application can be distinguished for confessions (Breuer 2000, 110–115). First, confession is an anti-rhetoric delimiter, which reveals both rhetoric’s origin in forensic speech and the precarious relationship between rhet­ oric and truth. Once the accused has confessed his guilt in court, his speech comes to an end. Plain truth makes rhetoric superfluous. For this reason, Quintilian strongly recommended that the accused resist having a confession elicited from him (Quin­ tilian 1995, 630). On the other hand, he also recommended that the accuser seek to unsettle the accused and in this way extract a confession from him (Quintilian 1995, 496). A Christian’s confession to God likewise ends all further speech, particularly in a court setting. Insofar as this reinterpreted the emperor cult in the Roman Empire in sacred terms, it could turn Christians into martyrs (Magaß and Robling 1994, 349). Second, in rhetoric, confession is a technical artifice and a stylistic device. Con­ fession is used as an artifice when the speaker wants to capitalise as far as possi­ ble on the ensemble of undisputed facts and circumstances that are relevant to the speech situation. Where the facts are harmless, the openness that the speaker shows in admitting them is bogus. The rhetorical confession is designed primarily to elicit goodwill and trust from those to whom it is addressed. It principally serves the speak­ er’s storytelling (Magaß and Robling 1994, 349). As a stylistic device, the ‘confessio’ is a figure of thought (‘figura sententiarum’). In applying it, the speaker anticipates the objection to be expected to his speech and admits it (Ueding and Steinbrink 1986, 293). Provided the ‘confessio’ does not harm the speaker, it comes close to irony (Quintilian 1995, 290). From the perspective of speech tactics, the ‘confessio’ can also be used as a ‘remedium’ and announce the speaker’s basic decision in favour of a speech method of openness (‘confessum’) as opposed to one that is hidden (‘dissimulatio’) or ironic (‘simulatio’) (Lausberg 1990, 142). This function is also used by the autobiographical genre of confessions. Third and finally, rhetoric considers confession within a speech situation to mean that which is generally acknowledged by the public (‘confessum’). It forms the sub­ stance of identical statements by the two parties, in contrast to those that are disputed (‘controversum’), which is the actual focus of the speech. The ‘confessum’ can be used either to establish the legal issue in dispute in a given case or instead as an argument. If it is employed to establish the legal issue, inquiry into the facts beyond those not in dispute will continue until the ‘controversum’ has been identified. The ‘confessum’ can serve as an argument because it involves something conceded by both parties, as well as by the listeners. Whether the concession is real or fictional is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that all pieces of evidence have to be acknowledged (Quintilian 1995, 616). The literary genre of confessions must be distinguished from the etymology of confessing and the discourses relating thereto. Proceeding from the genre’s name, ‘confessions’, and the expectations that this triggers, the genre can be understood from a systematic perspective as a configuration of individual confessions and types

526 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

of confessions. In classifying it more precisely, the key aspect is the connection between the plurality of the symbols of confession and the unity of the act of confes­ sion. In literary confessions, particularly the elements of the act of confession (forum, confessor, facts and circumstances, audience) that are present in the confessional situation (such as in court), and to this extent are directly evident, must be linguisti­ cally structured and be plausible. This applies above all to the figure of the confessor. His/her ‘narratio’ must give the impression that s/he is completely aware of the facts and circumstances that s/he is communicating, that s/he knows how volatile they are to the forum and the audience, and that this audience is committed to certain norms (Lehmann 1988, 60). This is possible only on the level of symbols of confession, and it seems reasonable to employ stylistic artifices for this purpose, up to and including fiction (Starobinski 1970). In order to be able to appreciate with clarity the relationship between the act of confession and symbols of confession, it makes sense to view the genre as a form of communication. The “dialogue of confessing” (Foster 1987, 13) is characterised by the fact that within it, the two functions of the first-person singular pronoun – the reference function and the statement function – correlate with the double role of the person to whom it is addressed, i.  e. the one who, on the one hand, (also) stands apart from the confessional situation as guarantor of the truth of that which is being said and, on the one other, stands (also) within it as an impressionable observer. To this extent, the confessional communication aims equally at the depiction of true facts and circumstances and at the emotions of the persons to whom it is addressed, who are prepared to act. This dual objective has consequences for the genre’s status in the literary field. With its claim to truth, it is not unlike the genre of the autobiography and with its emotional dimension, the vague textual field of confessional speech. Whereas reduc­ ing confessions to the genre of the autobiography makes them a thing of history and action, their allocation to confessional speech results in their getting caught in the wake of volatile emotions, where all “masters of their texts” (Foster 1987, 19) are deposed, all textual varieties are exploded, and all readers are liberated. Characteris­ tic of confessions is the presentation of transgressive individuality from the perspec­ tive of a norm-setting and norm-guaranteeing authority (Breuer 2000, 151). By narra­ tively combining more than one confession, confessions become figurations of the individual. However, there are gender-specific differences: Whereas in confessions by men, the ‘narratio’ in which the self is represented usually appears as an apologetic identity continuum, in confessions by women, a parcelled, disparate form of identity tends to be expressed (Holdenried 1995, Bagley 2000). Confessions typically display a series of formal features. These include the topic of sincerity, the use of deictic expressions (‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’), the postulate of complete­ ness, an additive structure, the integration of various confessional forms and func­ tions, the thematisation of violations of norms (theft, lying, pride, perversions, etc.), the use of metaphors and images of negativity (‘crooked path’, ‘stain’, ‘bleakness’,

3.10 Confessions 

 527

‘gloom’, etc.), and a rhetoric of soliciting sympathy (‘ductus simplex’, ‘confessum’, ‘concessio’, ‘dubitatio’, irony). A history of literary confession includes canonical works of the highest order. The first literary confession is considered to be St Augustine’s Confessionum libri XIII [Confessions]. For a history of literary confessions, the decisive circumstance is that during the historical crisis situation of late antiquity, Augustine embedded the forms of hymnal confessions of praise, faith, and sin, which were already closely linked in the Old and New Testaments, in a rhetorically well-structured text. The confessor figures in this text as a sinful individual in need of salvation, one who in his power­ lessness must submit entirely to the authority of scripture. This scripture offers salva­ tion because God has revealed Himself in it, and it derives its authority from the fact that the Church administers it. By entrusting his sins to scripture, the confessor par­ ticipates in its divinity and thus transforms his existence in the praise of the authority to which scripture owes its sense and meaning. During the Middle Ages, St Augustine’s confessions were intensely read but rarely imitated. One of the few exceptions are the confessions of Guibert of Nogent (De vita sua sive monodiarum libri tres [ca. 1115] [A monk’s confession: The memoirs of Guibert de Nogent]). In addition, there were a variety of literary confessions in which, in more or less typical form, one’s sins and transgressions were admitted. In autobiography research, this strand has been called reflective autobiography, in contrast to the auto­ biography of actions (Müller 1989). It also includes texts from the area of mysticism, which were often written by women (Holdenried 1995, 407–409). In early modern times, printing led to the emergence of a new genre of confes­ sional writings in which the confessions from religious discourse change over to public discourse. Around 1700, against the backdrop of the thus caused religious wars, pietistic confessional literature emerged, which was due to a new desire for evi­ dence on the part of countless Christians (Schrader 1989, Mücke 2000, Breuer 2005). It made a decisive contribution to eighteenth century European culture and literature with their cult of privacy and introspection (v. Graevenitz 1975). The second high point in the genre’s history came during the Enlightenment and the period of sentimentalism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau placed the definite article in front of his confessions in order to make reference to St Augustine while at the same time clearly distinguishing them from him: Les Confessions (1782–1789) [The Confessions]. The confessor has now become an exemplary person above all institutions and traditions, as well as above language and scripture, on which he nevertheless remains dependent (Breuer 2000, 181–219). He is literarily adept at reacting to anonymous public accusations made against him and in so doing consistently professes his own innocence. With Rousseau, there was a massive proliferation of stylistic possibilities of confession-like self-dramatisation, which also spread to the author’s other texts, turning them into elements of an unified oeuvre defined by confession. This is where Johann Wolfgang Goethe picks up, who at the same time shares Herder’s reserve with respect to Rousseau’s confessions and therefore renounces the

528 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

writing of confessions out of hand (Breuer 2000, 219–294). However, in his autobiog­ raphy Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth], which itself is but one component of a major autobiographical project, Goethe declares that everything that has been confessed by him consists of fragments of a great confession, which he seeks to render complete with Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe 1986 [1908], 310). It links his life with his work. Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1821]) and Alfred de Musset (Confession d’un enfant du siècle [1836] [The Confession of a Child of the Century]) draw on the confessions of both St Augustine and Rousseau. On the other hand, Heinrich Heine, in his Geständnisse (1854) [Confessions], takes up Goethe’s con­ nection between life and work and makes it the norm, which he nevertheless ironi­ cally breaches and exceeds. By contrast, Theodor Storm, in his novella Ein Bekenntnis (1887) [A Confession], fictionalises confessional discourse and overrides the fiction through a figuration of his own authorship (Malinowski 2003). Whereas in Expressionism, the confession became a typical speech gesture for all sorts of artists (Hilmes 2000, 29–37), Thomas Mann subtly fictionalised the genre in his Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954) [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man]. Beneath the mask of his alter ego Felix Krull, the author makes an auto­ fictional style confession and reveals himself before the tribunal of his readers to be a literary confidence man with a high seductive appeal (Breuer 2000, 378–459). The public confessions made under Stalinism are particularly illustrative of the connection between confession and the public (Erren 2008). Then, during the 1970s, the publication of autobiographical confessional texts began to rise dramatically (Breuer 2002), followed in the 1990s by an exponential increase in confessions on television and in the new media. In media studies, the assumption is that the ritual and practice of confessions staged in the media serve to give shape to their subjects (Bublitz 2010, 10–11). They constitute themselves in concurrence with, or delimitation of, social normality and social eccentricity, with the boundaries between the private and public spheres being exceeded and shifted. Accordingly, new forms of private life are on the horizon.

Works Cited Aeschylus. Tragödien. Ed. Bernhard Zimmermann. Trans. Oskar Werner. Zürich: Artemis, 1996. Bagley, Petra M. “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: A Consideration of Contrition and Confession in Contemporary Austrian Woman Writers.” Representing Identities: Biography and Autobiography. Ed. Geoffrey Burkhart and Marilyn Bendera. Morgantown: West Virginia University, 2000. 46–55. Bornkamm, Günther. “Das Bekenntnis im Hebräerbrief.” Theologische Blätter 18 (1939): 56–66. Borobio, Dionisio. “Das tridentinische Modell des Sündenbekenntnisses in seinem geschichtlichen Kontext.” Concilium 23 (1987): 107–117. Breuer, Ulrich. Bekenntnisse: Diskurs – Gattung – Werk. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2000.

3.10 Confessions 

 529

Breuer, Ulrich. “Nackt wandern: Karin Strucks ‘Klassenliebe’ im Bekenntnisdiskurs (der siebziger Jahre).” Bekenntnisse. Ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2002. 103–127. Breuer, Ulrich. “Lebendige Erkenntnis: August Hermann Franckes Lebenslauf.” Aedificatio: Erbauung im interkulturellen Kontext in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Andreas Solbach. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005. 49–63. Buber, Martin. “Einleitung: Ekstase und Bekenntnis.” Ekstatische Konfessionen (1909). Ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985. xxi–xxxviii. Bublitz, Hannelore. Im Beichtstuhl der Medien: Die Produktion des Selbst im öffentlichen Bekenntnis. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Burkard, Günter, ed. Die Ausweitung der Bekenntniskultur – neue Formen der Selbstthematisierung? Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006. Creifelds, Carl. Rechtswörterbuch. Ed. Hans Kauffmann. München: Beck, 11th rev. ed. 1992. Erren, Lorenz. “Selbstkritik” und Schuldbekenntnis: Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin (1917–1953). München: Oldenbourg, 2008. Feistner, Edith. “Zur Semantik des Individuums in der Beichtliteratur des Hoch- und Spätmittel­ alters.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 115 (1996): 1–17. Foster, Dennis A. Confession and Complicity in Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976 [The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hirley. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984]. Galle, Roland. Geständnis und Subjektivität: Untersuchungen zum französischen Roman zwischen Klassik und Romantik. München: Fink, 1986. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang v. Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit. Ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller. Frankfurt a.  M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986 [Poetry and Truth. From my own life. Trans. Minna Steele Smith. London: George Bell & Sons, 1908]. Graevenitz, Gerhart. “Innerlichkeit und Öffentlichkeit: Aspekte deutscher ‘bürgerlicher’ Literatur im frühen 18. Jahrhundert.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 49 (1975): 1–82 (special release). Hahn, Alois. “Zur Soziologie der Beichte und anderer Formen institutionalisierter Bekenntnisse: Selbstthematisierung und Zivilisationsprozess.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozial­ psychologie 34 (1982): 407–434. Hahn, Alois, and Volker Kapp, eds. Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis: Bekenntnis und Geständnis. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. Hilmes, Carola. Das inventarische und das inventorische Ich: Grenzfälle des Autobiographischen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. Holdenried, Michaela. “‘Ich, die schlechteste von allen’: Zum Zusammenhang von Rechtfertigung, Schuldbekenntnis und Subversion in autobiographischen Werken von Frauen.” Geschriebenes Leben: Autobiographik von Frauen. Ed. Michaela Holdenried. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. 402–420. Lausberg, Heinrich. Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Einführung für Studierende der klassi­schen, romanischen, englischen und deutschen Philologie. Ismaning: Hueber, 10th ed. 1990. Lehmann, Jürgen. Bekennen – Erzählen – Berichten: Studien zu Theorie und Geschichte der Auto­ biographie. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988. Lehmann, Paul. “Autobiographies of the Middle Ages.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5.3 (1953): 41–52. Levin, Susan M. The Romantic Art of Confession: De Quincey, Musset, Sand, Lamb, Hogg, Frémy, Soulié, Janin. Columbia: Camden House, 1998.

530 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Magaß, Walter, and Franz-Hubert Robling. “‘Confessio’ and ‘Confessiones’.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994. 348–52. Malinowski, Bernadette. “Mimesis als Transgression: Gattungsdiskursive Untersuchungen zu Theodor Storms Bekenntnisnovelle ‘Ein Bekenntnis’.” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (2003): 77–116. Mücke, Dorothea von. “Experience, Impartiality, and Authenticity in Confessional Discourse.” New German Critique 79 (2000): 5–35. Müller, Ulrich. “Thesen zu einer Geschichte der Autobiographie im deutschen Mittelalter.” Die Autobiographie: Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 297–320. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke. 15 vols. Vol. I/II. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 1997. Ohst, Martin. Pflichtbeichte: Untersuchungen zum Bußwesen im Hohen und Späten Mittelalter. Tübingen: Mohr, 1995. Quintilian, Marcus Fabius. Ausbildung des Redners: Zwölf Bücher. Vol. I. Ed. Helmut Rahn. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 3rd ed. 1995. Reik, Theodor. Geständniszwang und Strafbedürfnis: Probleme der Psychoanalyse und der Krimino­ logie. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925. Robinson, James M. “Die Hodajot-Formel in Gebet und Hymnus des Frühchristentums.” Apophoreta. Festschrift für Ernst Haenchen. Ed. Walther Eltester and Franz Heinrich Kettler. Berlin: Töpelmann, 1964. 194–235. Schneider, Manfred. Die erkaltete Herzensschrift: Der autobiographische Text im 20. Jahrhundert. München: Hanser, 1986. Schnitzer, Joseph. “Religionsprobleme: Die Beichte im Lichte der Religionsgeschichte.” Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie 6 (1930): 94–105. Schrader, Hans-Jürgen. Literaturproduktion und Büchermarkt des radikalen Pietismus: Johann Heinrich Reitz’ “Historie Der Wiedergebohrnen” und ihr geschichtlicher Kontext. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989. Schröer, Henning. “Glaubensbekenntnis(se): X. Praktisch-theologisch.” Theologische Real­ enzyklopädie. Vol. XIII. Ed. Gerhard Müller. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1984. 441–446. Schulze, Ursula. “Beichte.” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Georg von Braungart, Harald Fricke, Klaus Grubmüller, Jan-Dirk Müller, Friedrich Vollhardt and Klaus Weimar. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1997. 208–211. Schumann, Friedrich Karl. “Die Bekenntnisse und das Bekenntnis.” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 108 (1937): 181–205. Starobinski, Jean. “Le style de l’autobiographie.” Poetique 1 (1970): 257–65. Ueding, Gert, and Bernd Steinbrink. Grundriß der Rhetorik: Geschichte, Technik, Methode. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 1986. Vogelsang, Erich. “Der confessio-Begriff des jungen Luther (1513–22).” Luther-Jahrbuch 12 (1930): 91–108. Wenz, Gunther. Theologie der Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche: Eine historische und systematische Einführung in das Konkordienbuch. 2 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996–1998. Zeeden, Ernst Walter. Konfessionsbildung: Studien zur Reformation, Gegenreformation und katho­ lischen Reform. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985. Zimmermann, T. C. Price. “Bekenntnis und Autobiographie in der frühen Renaissance.” Die Auto­ biographie: Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 343–366.

3.10 Confessions 

 531

Further Reading Brook, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law & Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Engbert-Pedersen, Anders, Michael Huffmaster, Eric Nordhausen, and Vrääth Öhner, eds. Das Geständnis und seine Instanzen: Zur Bedeutungsverschiebung des Geständnisses im Prozess der Moderne. Wien: Turia + Kant, 2011. Moog-Grünewald, Maria, ed. Autobiographisches Schreiben und philosophische Selbstsorge. Heidelberg: Winter, 2004. Moser, Christian. Buchgestützte Subjektivität: Literarische Formen der Selbstsorge und der Selbst­ hermeneutik von Platon bis Montaigne. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006. Sasse, Sylvia. Wortsünden: Beichten und Gestehen in der russischen Literatur. München: Fink, 2009.

3.11 Conversations Alexandra Georgakopoulou

Definition The study of autobiographical narratives within and as conversations originates in socio-cultural linguistic approaches, in particular sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Initially, the term ‘conversations’ employed for stories told in everyday life conversational environments, either by professional storytellers or by ordinary people, was non-literary or vernacular storytelling. The work of William Labov is often mentioned in the context of this major shift of interest from literary to vernacular stories. Labov (1972) was primarily interested in how people slip from formal to casual speech and what this reveals about their social class, when he asked his interviewees in New York if they had ever been in danger of dying. The result of this tactic, however, was a corpus of well-structured personal experience stories, which Labov documented as revealing the tellers’ communicative artistry and thus presenting many of the formal devices that had been exclusively associated with literary narrative (Tannen 1989). Much of this initial research on what is currently referred to as ‘conversational storytelling’ still viewed stories that occurred in environments where the addressees were physically present, as monologic, rather than as part of a conversation with an audience. This was in tune with the parallel move of the narrative turn in the social sciences, which sought to explore people’s social identities through a focus on the life stories that they told in research interviews specifically designed to elicit stories. In these studies, the role of the interviewer was to be an attentive, sympathetic listener.

Explication The initial sociolinguistic explorations of everyday life stories presented similar con­ cerns with the study of literary narrative, since they placed emphasis on what makes stories creative and performed, from the point of view of their textual and linguistic devices. This convergence of ideas around narrative creativity in many strands of nar­ rative studies is arguably related to specific characteristics of narrative as a communi­ cation mode that comes with the requirement to draw the addressees into somebody else’s story. Three such notable characteristics can be singled out as recurrent con­ cerns: the importance in narrative of a point of view through which the events are rep­ resented. Second, the requirement for a story to be unique, remarkable and individ­ ual, owned by the person who has experienced its events. This is in tension with the need for a story to have some kind of familiarity, for its events and happenings to be https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-067

3.11 Conversations 

 533

recognizable enough, so as to generate interest and empathy in its audience (e.  g. see Bruner 1991). The final characteristic involves the interplay of two worlds, the narrated world (tale) and the narrative world, that is, the event in which the story is recounted. Sociolinguistic work on conversational storytelling in relation to the three afore­ mentioned concerns has amply documented the culture-specificity of the devices that make an instance of storytelling a ‘performance’, through its dual emphasis on how storytellers draw on culturally shaped norms of what constitutes a good story, while at the same time designing their stories so as to make them tellable in specific occa­ sions of storytelling. In this way, there has been a shift away from defining narrative creativity purely on aesthetic and formal aspects that foreground the role of the teller as an individual performer towards locating them in context: as a jointly constructed activity between the teller and the audience(s)/readers. Put differently, there has been a shift from the study of what inherently makes a story creative and performed, be it extraordinary events or specific linguistic devices, to how stories can function and be perceived and received as good stories in different contexts. The crux of this context-specificity is to be found in Bauman’s (1986) influential ideas about every narrative performance implying an assumption of responsibility on the part of the per­ former for the display of communicative skill and competence and an acceptance that such a display is going to be evaluated by the audience in a local context. This makes it difficult to postulate a priori of a specific story’s telling if it is going to be tellable or not, evaluated positively or negatively by an audience, etc. Ultimately, tellability is linked with what Ochs and Capps (2001) called the current relevance of a story, that is, the ways in which it contributes to its local context of occurrence and the concerns of the participants. This does not mean to say that the use of devices recognizeable as ‘dramatic’ devices play no role in how a story is going to be perceived. However, the interplay between individual artistry and conventional ways of performing happens not in a vacuum, but in specific contexts, both the situations in which stories are told and their broader socio-cultural environments. From this research that has documented the context-specificity of stories in con­ versations, it is worth teasing out certain insights about the interactional dynamics of storytelling events. These have mainly been documented within conversation-analytic approaches to stories that have shown stories to be talk-in-interaction, very much shaped by what has come before in the local context in which they occur and having organized implications for what follows after they are told. The analysis of how stories are introduced into and exited from conversations has shown that the tellers routinely mobilize specific linguistic devices to ensure that they get permission from their inter­ locutors to hold the floor. During a story’s telling and upon completion, tellers also make sure to communicate a story’s point effectively to their audience (e.  g. Jefferson 1978). Another insight regarding the significance of the audience in the telling of stories in conversations pertains to the multiplicity of the audience roles. Possible audience roles that have been found to be important for how a story is told include: knowing

534 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

(of the story’s events) vs. non-knowing recipients; recipients who are also principal characters in the events being narrated; recipients who are addressed or not, aligned with the story’s plot and point or not; primary recipients vs. bystanders or over-hear­ ers, etc. (e.  g. Goodwin 1984). Overall, the internal diversification of the audience has been shown to be relevant to the organization of the story in process. Recipients can uphold and collaborate in the telling but they may also offer competing frameworks for interpretation (Goodwin 1997). They can negotiate, contest and even change all constituents of a story’s emplotment, such as events, characters, assessment, moral codas, etc. The above insights present obvious implications for how stories should be studied in the context of research interviews. It is increasingly the case that the role of the interviewer as a conversational partner is being scrutinized and the analysis of the stories takes into account how the interviewers position themselves (e.  g. as active par­ ticipants? neutral recorders? etc.) and how their questions and contributions shape the telling of a story (De Fina and Perrino 2011). This inquiry into stories in either conversations or interviews as interactional events has extended to the study of identities through stories, so that identities are too seen as malleable, negotiable and jointly constructed amongst interlocutors rather than as static self-categorizations that the storytellers possess and automati­ cally express in their stories. Viewed in this way, people’s identities often become “an outcome, a finding, a result of analysis, not a presupposition of analysis, a definition of what analysis should be” (Schegloff 1997, 170). Such an interactional view of identities through conversational stories has shown the importance of ephemeral, contingent choices that tellers make about how to present themselves most effectively in specific contexts and to specific audiences. Such choices, both linguistic and embodied, show the rhetorics involved in telling stories and the dangers of associating people’s stories with identities that are constant and hold above and beyond specific contexts. Drawing on sociologist Goffman’s view of the presentation of the self in everyday life, Schiffrin (1990), for instance, docu­ mented stories as effective rhetorical ways of putting forth views, because of the pos­ sibilities that tellers have in assigning their point of view to characters, for example, through reported speech. To sum up, the study of conversational stories has documented their context-spec­ ificity and interactional nature. Current research is striving to find a balance between the local contingencies of telling stories and more durable, broader norms of socio-cul­ tural practices which everyday stories are part of. But overall, the opening up to the contextual relativity of stories has gone hand in hand with the opening up of narrative analysis to fragmented, incomplete, (often, literally) ‘small’ stories that are not just about the self but about others too, and that depart from the conventional definitions of an aesthetically beautiful and masterfully crafted story. The longstanding reluc­ tance of narrative analysts to include such stories in their analysis has gradually given way to the recognition that small stories can be important narrative activities in certain

3.11 Conversations 

 535

contexts with major consequences for how tellers present themselves, relate with and are perceived by others, for instance, in adolescent peer-groups (Georgakopoulou 2007). Small stories research has also shown small stories to abound in social media platforms, which are significant communication forums for many people. One genre of small stories that has been documented there involves breaking news stories, about very recent (e.  g. yesterday, today, just now) and in some cases ongoing events (Geor­ gakopoulou 2012). The resonance of small stories in numerous everyday life environ­ ments is necessitating a focus on features of stories that depart from the conventional concerns and assumptions of autobiographical studies: for instance, a focus on the telling of fleeting moments, slices of life, that routinely involve mundane and ordi­ nary events; on stories that extend beyond a single event and get told, sometimes in a piecemeal fashion (e.  g. with frequent updates), across media and settings. Small stories of this kind tend to be multiply authored and the ownership of the personal story therefore becomes complicated. This is taking the existing work on stories as interactions into new and promising avenues about how the forms and functions of autobiography may be changing in the era of social media communication.

Works Cited Bauman, Richard. Story, performance and event. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bruner, Jerome. “The narrative construction of reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21. De Fina, Anna, and Perrino Sabiba. “Interviews vs. ‘natural contexts’. A false dilemma.” Language in Society 40 (2011): 1–11. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. Small stories, interaction and identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. “Storytelling on the go: Breaking news stories as a travelling narrative genre.” The Travelling concepts of narrative. Ed. Mari Hatavara, Lars-Crister Hydén and Matti Hyvärinen. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012. 201–224. Goodwin, Charles. “Notes on story structure and the organization of participation.” Structures of Social Action. Ed. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 225–246. Goodwin, Marjorie H. “By-play: Negotiating evaluation in story-telling.” Towards a Social Science of Language: Papers in Honor of William Labov. Ed. Gregory R. Guy, John Baugh, Deborah Schiffrin and Crawford Feagin. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990. 77–102. Jefferson, Gail. “Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation.” Studies in the organization of conversational interaction. Ed. Jim Schenkein. New York: Academic Press, 1978. 219–249. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. Living narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Schegloff, Emanuel. “Whose text? Whose context?” Discourse & Society 8 (1997): 165–187. Schiffrin, Deborah. “The management of a co-operative self during argument: The role of opinions and stories.” Conflict talk: Sociolinguistic investigations of arguments in conversations. Ed. Allen D. Grimshaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 241–259. Tannen, Deborah. Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue and images in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

536 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Further Reading Bamberg, Michael, ed. Oral versions of personal experience: three decades of narrative analysis. Special Issue of Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1997): 1–4. Bamberg, Michael, ed. Narrative – State of the Art. Special Issue of Narrative Inquiry 16.1 (2006). De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. Analyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, eds. The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Quasthoff, Uta M., and Tabea Becker, eds. Narrative Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005.

3.12 Curriculum Vitae Bernd Blöbaum

Definition Curriculum Vitae, also referred to as ‘CV’, is Latin for résumé. A CV summarizes a per­ son’s most important personal, educational and professional data in a structured and compact manner. Usually, a CV is formatted as a table, following a chronological order. It consists of information concerning a person’s educational development, including school and university degrees, references of vocational qualification, advanced edu­ cation and certifications, further skills that might be important for one’s professional career, and finally a list of previous postings. Usually drafted for applications, besides certificates and a letter of motivation, CVs are part of the application documents for job postings, scholarships, projects, etc. A CV is a highly standardized document, laying out the course of one’s life and a particular form of autobiography. Despite national and cultural differences regarding individual items and presentation details, its structure and content is conventional­ ized. By reducing the complexity of one’s personal, educational, and professional history in a predefined manner, CVs facilitate the comparison of individual qualifica­ tions particularly in application processes. Thus, they reduce biographies and indi­ vidual skills for the purpose of comparability and measurement.

Explication In the following, a CV is considered primarily as an element of application processes, providing the reader with information about one’s qualification and professional skills. Based on self-descriptions, CVs communicate information which is relevant for the professional realm. As a matter of fact, the author is advertising for him or herself. Hence, one can regard a CV as a means of strategic communication: In order to receive access to resources (be it a job, money, etc.), authors reveal information about their qualification. This form of self-representation is both intentional and rational. Although certain standards as to style and content restrain an author’s creativity, through selecting crucial biographical moments and skills and neglecting others one can nevertheless construct one’s past strategically. Certain documents such as certifi­ cates and grades underline the author’s credibility. Considering a CV as a specific form of autobiography, the question of how the author’s life relates to the written document arises. Does the CV make use of fiction like every autobiography does (Wagner-Egel­ haaf 2013, 8)? Does the author arrange and combine data and steps regarding his or https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-068

538 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

her life in a way that turns it into autofiction? Does the CV leave room for construction? In which respect does a CV represent strategic, i.  e. intentional communication? Strategic communication is defined as “an attempt to influence opinions and atti­ tudes with respect to particular interests and is thus strategic action” (Röttger, Gehrau and Preusse 2013, 11). At least with regard to application processes, the CVs ares ori­ ented towards the goal of presenting an author’s qualifications and thereby achieve a certain effect among readers. Its restrictions as to form and structure indicate that the CV aims at reaching an understanding and agreement. However, its primary goal is of strategic-persuasive manner, intending to convince the reader of the author’s competences. In the following, we shall focus firstly on the CV as a specific text form before addressing the relationship between author and reader. CV as text form: Certain conventions have emerged that provide the author with orientation as to structure and content. The normed structure makes comparisons feasible and facilitates both the evaluation as well as ranking with regard to a particu­ lar intention. Since CVs are an essential element for entering the professional realm, writing résumés is already taught and practiced in school. There exists a range of tips and manuals on how to write a CV for an application. The University of Oxford’s career service, for instance, differentiates between “traditional (reverse chronolog­ ical) CV”, “skills-based CV”, “academic CV” or “visual and infographic CVs” (Uni­ versity of Oxford 2017). The respective institution at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) not only lists recommendations on how to structure a CV, but also refers to numerous examples. For an academic career it advises that texts be short (one, maximum two pages) and include the following information: Name, Address, Education, Dissertation, Fellowship and Awards, Areas of Competence, Teaching and Research Experience, Publications, Languages (MIT 2018). The tips illustrate the strategic purpose by recommending: “Highlight what you’ve achieved, to make the reader want to learn more by meeting you” and “target your CV” (University of Oxford 2017). The high standardization of this text form allows for statistical analyses of career developments, mobility, and research capacities (Gaughan 2009; Canibano and Bozeman 2009; Youtie et al. 2013). The CV is “one of the few scientific artifacts nearly universal in its availability and nearly standard in its meaning”. As a “record of scientific accomplishment, brief history of professional life course, and job search resource” it provides the basis for empirical analyses of both careers and more gener­ ally the academic field” (Cañibano and Bozeman 2009, 86). Combining data extracted from 326 CVs of medical scholars with bibliometric data, Sandström identified four groups of scientists: “mobile, immobile, excellent and entrepreneurial” (2009, 135). Whereas the studies mentioned above regard the CV as a means of self-market­ ing and use its data for measuring and comparing performance, other social scien­ tific research focuses rather on the (unintentional) effects of individual elements. It analyses whether anonymous applications (without information on sex, age and nationality) result in more equal opportunities. For this purpose, online portals are launched for which experts anonymize applications (Furkel 2010): “Anonymous job

3.12 Curriculum Vitae 

 539

applications gain attention and popularity as an attractive policy intervention to reduce or even eliminate discrimination in hiring” (Krause et al. 2012, 1). Anonymous applications exclude personal characteristics such as age, sex, and ethnicity, thereby condensing résumés to a person’s educational and professional development. In a way, CVs are de-personalized by isolating an individual’s qualification and skills from features of his or her personality. Field studies in France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany demonstrate that “in most cases, anonymous job applications lead to the desired effect of increasing the interview invitation probabilities of disadvantaged groups” (Krause et al.). However, experiments on anonymous applications also show that “anonymous hiring can even prevent the employer from applying measures such as affirmative action, at least in the first stage of the hiring process” (Krause et al. 2012, 18). Anonymous CVs underline the intentional purpose of this text form. A résumé strategically communicates a person’s performance with respect to a particular goal: To be invited to a job interview. Bearing in mind increasing demands as to vocational experience and professional mobility as well as the high number of temporary con­ tracts, the CV has become an important means of self-marketing. By tuning one’s résumé, as handbooks advise, a person tailors his or her previous achievements to expectations in the future (i.  e. a job interview). The strict norm of this text form reflects the growing demand of a globalized economy for qualified manpower. The rigid structure of predefined elements makes CVs comparable as to the expectations of a job posting. It remains unclear whether this process also results in a standardization of personal and professional biographies. Similar to autobiographies, a CV transfers the past into the present by reinforc­ ing memories in order to create images of the future (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2010, 190). However, the rigid form of two pages at most, including elements such as individ­ ual features, education, employment, publications, grants, contracts, etc., leaves little room for creativity. In this respect, the CV can be compared to the topical form of the autobiography as it has been described by Stefan Goldmann. Goldmann has highlighted the close connection between autobiography and the topics of persona description in classical rhetoric (Goldmann 1994). Handbooks recommend high­ lighting specific competences, achievements, and experiences in applications with particular reference to the respective job advertisement. Unlike autobiographies that “conceal, manipulate, add and invent” memories (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2010, 192), a CV does not allow for this kind of deviance, this being the case because the relationship between author and reader follows a specific purpose. Author and reader: Whoever writes and sends out a CV is pursuing a specific goal: to be invited to a job interview and/or to be given a job, granted an award or schol­ arship. Usually, the reader remains anonymous. Rather, he or she is addressed with regard to his or her role in human resources. The author creates an image of himself to evoke a reaction from the reader. He is willing to slip into a role in order to improve his career. Due to rigid categories (from education to contracts) the range of creativity is

540 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

limited substantially compared to other forms of autobiography. As a type of “aut(h)o(r) fiction” (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013), CVs leave hardly any room for fiction. Factual rather than fictional  – this premise is underlined by the need for proof (e.  g. certificates) of information provided in applications. Selecting individual steps of one’s résumé, including and excluding specific information, are means to circumvent the rigid restraints of the predefined form. Unlike an autobiography, that is a closed entity, a CV lacks explication and cause. These contextualizing elements are rather integrated into a cover letter and letter of motivation. Anonymous CVs eliminate an author’s personal history nearly entirely. He is reduced to his competences that he acquired during his educational and professional career. By highlighting the ‘what’-question rather than the ‘how’- and ‘why’-question, the structure and purpose of CVs omit by and large an author’s personality. Handbooks recommend that CVs be short: “Employers are not going to spend more than a minute reading it” (University of Oxford 2017). Whoever reads a CV does not seek entertainment or relaxation but rather information. A reader scans a résumé against the backdrop of a specific job profile. In this respect, CVs are merely listings of biographical information that are assessed as to their applicability. In large corpora­ tions human resources departments specialize in evaluating applications in general and CVs in particular. The author of a CV has a reader in sight who is addressed as performing a specific role as decision maker. A CV is one-way communication: It flows from the author to the reader – yet, in the hope of evoking further communication (in terms of an interview). The setting is asymmetrical also in the way that only the author reveals personal information. However, the communicational relationship is open in the respect that both parts are aware of its strategic character. In summary, CVs are a specific form of autobiography. They do not offer a lot of room for creativity because of their rigid structure. The standardized form meets the reader’s expectation of being provided with information and data on the author’s personal and professional life that is largely comparable. By selecting, emphasizing, and excluding parts of one’s individual biography CVs can contain traces of autofic­ tion. However, they primarily reduce (professional) biographies to information that is useful to human resources in the hope of eliciting subsequent communication. Translation: Hannah Lorenz

Works Cited Cañibano, Carolina, and Barry Bozeman. “Curriculum vitae method in science policy and research evaluation: the state-of-the-art.” Research Evaluation 18.2 (2009): 86–94. Furkel, Daniela. “Bewerber ohne Namen und Gesicht.” Personalmagazin 11 (2010): 22–23. Gaughan, Monica. “Using the curriculum vitae for policy research: an evaluation of National Institutes of Health center and training support on career trajectories.” Research Evaluation 18.2 (2009): 117–124.

3.12 Curriculum Vitae 

 541

Goldmann, Stefan. “Topos und Erinnerung. Rahmenbedingungen der Autobiographie.” Der ganze Mensch. Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings. Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 1994. 660–675. Krause, Annabelle, Ulf Rinne, and Klaus F. Zimmermann. “Anonymous job applications in Europe.” IZA Journal of European Labor Studies 1.1 (2012): 1–20. MIT Global Education & Career Development. CVs. https://gecd.mit.edu/jobs-and-internships/ resumes-cvs-cover-letters-and-linkedin/cvs (21 June 2018). Röttger, Ulrike, Volker Gehrau, and Joachim Preusse. Strategische Kommunikation: Umrisse und Perspektiven eines Forschungsfeldes. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013. Sandström, Ulf. “Combining curriculum vitae and bibliometric analysis: mobility, gender and research performance.” Research Evaluation 18.2 (2009): 135–142. University of Oxford: The Careers Service. CVs. http://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/cvs/ (21 June 2018). Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der Literaturwissenschaft.” BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 23.2 (2010): 188–200. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. Youtie, Jan, Juan Rogers, Thomas Heinze, Philip Shapira, and Li Tang. “Career-based influences on scientific recognition in the United States and Europe: Longitudinal evidence from curriculum vitae data.” Research Policy 42.8 (2013): 1341–1355.

Further Reading Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Heinze, Carsten. “Zum Stand und den Perspektiven der Autobiographie in der Soziologie. Sozialkommunikative Konzepte zur Beschreibung einer literarischen Gattung.” BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 23.2 (2010): 201–231.

3.13 Autobiography in/as Dance Gabriele Brandstetter

Definition Unlike the long tradition of literary autobiography, autobiography in dance is a mode of presentation that only assumed its final form in the ‘Modernist’ period. The ‘auto/ bio/graphical mode’ as performance in dance – presenting oneself and one’s life-story in terms of bodily movement – is closely bound up with notions of the autonomy of body and movement. Autobiography in/as dance is a form of presentation in which body and movement (and possibly voice and speech as well) perform in such a way as to construct a ‘self’ before the eyes of the audience. In dance performance the real auto-biography characteristic of the self-awareness of a self-producing ‘I’ – which is autofictional in form – undergoes, in comparison to literary autobiography, a charac­ teristic shift: in the doubling, overlapping and simultaneity of the individual body on the one hand and the fictional or artificial body on stage on the other (each in their respective modes of movement and aesthetic codes). Autobiography in and as dance must here be distinguished from the published memoirs of female dancers of the kind that appeared in the course of the nineteenth century and grew even more popular at the beginning of the twentieth. Nevertheless these memoirs (such as those of Duncan 1927; Gert 1931, 1968) should be read in parallel to the self-performances of the dancers themselves – especially the female ones – as mythopoetic attempts at autobiography (Albright 2013).

Explication As a first person presentation in movement, the autobiographical performance follows the principle of ‘A impersonates B, while C looks on’, which the theatrical mode of per­ sonification changes into ‘A impersonates A, while C looks on’ (Carlson 1996, 599). The autobiographical contract defined by Lejeune to agree on the identity of author, nar­ rator and protagonist cannot be generalized to cover autobiographical performance in dance (Lejeune 1973 [1982]). The viewer (like the reader) has a crucial constitu­ tive function for bringing about the ‘performative contract’ (Brandstetter 1998, 99) within the frame of stage and auditorium, concerning the agreement on the fact and/ or fiction of the self-presentation and identity of ‘the author’ in the ‘hic et nunc’ of the performance. – This article refers to concepts of autobiography, identity, subjectiv­ ity and representational forms in performance and dance in European and American Modernism. How to transcend the Eurocentric perspective and examine the concept https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-069

3.13 Autobiography in/as Dance 

 543

of ‘auto-bio-graphical’ with regard to identity policy and intercultural dimensions, are questions that must await a later article. For the representational mode of literary autobiography the following applies: The (writing) author is absent, the ‘présence d’absence’ is established by the act of reading, and this act, as a component part of autobiographical contract, determines the attribution of authenticity. In autobiographical dance performance the witness born by the viewer is crucial, as is his co-presence in the counterpart of the self-dis­ play in the performance, which in turn is influenced by various secondary discourses (e.  g. theatre programs) on the authorship of the dancer/performer. The game of fictionalizing an embodied ‘I say I’ is thus open: The identity of who is presenting, moving, dancing or talking is not fixed, as it may always remain uncertain who is performing: Is the dancer the author of his/her performance? The authentication of authorship takes the form of various (sometimes contradictory) body and speech signals. The versions of the presented and self-presenting ‘I’ conjure up many differ­ ent standard cultural images and media scripts: “The ‘identity’ articulated by auto­ biographical performance was discovered to be already a role, a character, follow­ ing scripts not controlled by the performer, but by the culture as a whole” (Carlson 1996, 604). The form of self-presentation in dance performances is usually the solo. From the advent of Modernism to contemporary dance the solo has become the preferred format of autobiographical performance. It offers scope for the representation and reflection of questions of identity with regard to gender, race, cultural difference and body-po­ litical action (Preston 2006). Of great importance for autobiography in/as dance is the way in which authorship is showcased. There is a difference between the author’s own auto-authentification strategies and their interpretation. When we apply Jacques Derrida’s theory of the paradoxical relationship between repetition and singularity in the relation between signature and the absolute singularity of an event (Derrida 1985 [1982]), the question arises as to how the dancer presents ‘his’/‘her’ performance as a physical author’s signature; and what acts and discourses of such a policy of naming in/as dance per­ formance assume relevance for the viewer. A key function in this reciprocal process of authentication (or mis-reading) is performed by various forms of addressing. These may be physical gestures or spoken words, modes of self-addressing counting as forms of indicating, just as direct appeals to the viewer function as strategies of the perform­ ative contract. The growing experimentation with the role of the audience since the autobiographical dance performance of the 1990s has lent this format a self-reflexive, theoretical basis, providing an exhibition and a re-enactment of the individual and institutional structures both of the performative contract and the theatre (Brandstetter 1999). The solo as author’s auto-dance becomes the preferred format, accompanied by the body-political, aesthetic and innovative media of the Modern Age. This marks the opportunities “in which the performing body physicalizes the autobiographical voice

544 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

to produce a representation of subjectivity that is at once whole and fragmented” (Cooper Albright 2013, 95). In the dance solo of Isadora Duncan, for example, authorship (choreography), presentation (dance performance) and outline configuration (self-management) are generally combined in one person. The concept of performative self-enablement/ autonomy and individuality, in keeping with the modern philosophy of subjectivity, plays a leading role in this, especially in female author/auto dance performance. In Modernist and Postmodern times the solo becomes a platform of presentation, reflec­ tion and critique for feminist, queer- or identity-related self-presentations, especially since the Performance Art of the 1960s (Preston 2006). The dance solo presents itself on the one hand as a physical, dance variant of the monologue. Like the latter, the solo is in itself a polylogue; the ‘I say I’ as self-present­ ing body remains fictional. It contains a multitude of voices and bodies. On the other hand, the solo in dance performance also contains elements of self-portraiture as well as (via the mirror situation of an Other, a ‘you’, a viewer) self-embodiments that follow iconographic models while also repeatedly displaying cultural and aesthetic traditions of self-objectification. Feminist approaches to the female masquerade and the quotability and performativity of the gender-constitution relate to these questions of fragmented identity and their processuality in the autobiographical performance (Heddon 2008; Schneider 2005). The autobiographical dance solo also integrates elements of monodrama in its presentation by using music, light, voice and text to showcase the self. In the Modern­ ist solo quotations from attitudes, poses, gestures in self-transforming actions (Isadora Duncan adopts elements of the monodramas and attitudes of Lady Hamilton) are part of a repertoire of an I that (re-)constitutes itself from the story’s stock of images. The ‘Tanztheater’ [dance theatre] has other ways of establishing forms of autobiographical dance. Individual life stories are transferred to the stage for purposes of self-pres­ entation: as a solo in which the subject’s own way to becoming a dancer is physically presented as an author’s own autobiography – such as the personal movement story shown by Susanne Linke in her autobiographical solo Schritte verfolgen [‘Following Steps’] (1985). Another form of autobiographical dance solo was conceived by Pina Bausch, who collaborated with her dancers to produce a dramaturgy of pieces com­ posed of scenic narratives and individual stories taken from the lives of the perform­ ers. Memories of childhood, difficult or happy situations experienced in the dancers’ own lives, are improvised in rehearsals and developed individually by the dancers themselves, using a vocabulary composed of movement, gestures and speech, into a solo of self-presentation. In a collage of scenes the solo also becomes part of a general dramaturgy in which themes taken from everyday life, involving sexual encounters and social hierarchies, are presented. That defining feature of autobiography that is characterized by a retrospective narration and kept up to date by a system of (self-) repetition, is transferred in the ‘Tanztheater’ to a performative mode by this specific representational technique of using a composition made up of scenic self-presenta­

3.13 Autobiography in/as Dance 

 545

tions and their commemorative potential. In this way a mode of temporality can be updated on a narrative basis: the constitutive mode of retrospect for autobiograph­ ical narration. Remembrance, repetition as re-enactment of one’s own history, and self-presentation, enter into a specifically performative association in this technique of producing and personifying the dancer’s/author’s own story. Since the emergence of Performance Art in the 1960s and the breakdown of barri­ ers between the arts as well as between artistic and everyday movements as material for the dance, self-presentation has changed through the incorporation of speech, text, media, film and video. Questions of the linking of individual and collective history and the possibilities of recollecting and archiving have become topics and dramaturgies for autobiographical performance and its time structures. The topic of ‘I say I’ is paraphrased as a processually understood ‘Who am I’, reflected in solos that enact revisions of identity. The ‘I’ – as ‘terra incognita’ – appears as a ‘Not I’ in fragmentations and transformations which interrogate concepts of identity and their underlying social norms and cultural traditions with the power to define. The place of the ‘Self’ is taken – in the solo lecture performance of the 1990s – by a Self Unfinished (Le Roy 1998), whose constantly transforming acts of self-person­ ification touch the boundaries of the human: a self-alienation that points to media and discursive modes of (alien) control. At the same time the capacity to remember and the representation of a coherent retrospective look at life is deconstructed. I is memory (Lachambre 2006) operates with the paradoxical time structures of an auto­ biographical/memorial enactment: the conveying of ‘Once-upon-a-time’ and ‘Now’ in the relevant performance time period. It turns out that the auto-biographies cannot be condensed into the ephemeral Now of movement. The auto-performative deconstruc­ tion, which various contemporary dance performances are experimenting with, is also an attempt to test the limits of the format and the possibilities of an author to achieve autobiography in movement/as movement.

Performances Lachambre, Benoît. I is memory (Dance Solo, 2006). Le Roy, Xavier. Self Unfinished (Performance, 1998). Linke, Susanne. Schritte verfolgen (Dance Solo, 1985).

Works Cited Albright, Ann Cooper. “Auto Body Stories. Blondell Cummings and Autobiography in Dance.” Engaging Bodies. The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. 92–114. Brandstetter, Gabriele. “Selbst-Beschreibung. Performances im Bild.” Theater seit den 60er Jahren: Grenzgänge der Neo-Avantgarde. Ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Friedemann Kreuder and Isabel Pflug. Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 1998. 92–134.

546 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Brandstetter, Gabriele. “Geschichte(n) Erzählen im Performance-Theater der neunziger Jahre.” Transformationen. Ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Christel Weiler. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 1999. 27–42. Carlson, Marvin. “Performing the Self.” Modern Drama 39 (1996): 599–608. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature évènement contexte.” Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985. 365–385 [“Signature Event Context.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 291–314]. Duncan, Isadora. My Life. New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1927. Gert, Valeska. Mein Weg. Leipzig: Devrient, 1931 (2nd ed. private print ca. 1950; reprint: Valeska Gert. Ästhetik der Präsenzen. Ed. Wolfgang Müller. Berlin: Martin Schmitz Verlag, 2010. 100–105). Gert, Valeska. Ich bin eine Hexe: Kaleidoskop meines Lebens. München: Franz Schneekluth Verlag, 1968. Haddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poetique 13 (1973): 137–162 [“The Autobiographical Contract.” French Literary Theory Today. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Trans. R. Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 196–222]. Preston, Carrie J. “Women’s Solo Performances.” A new Genealogy of Modernism. Diss. Rutgers U, 2006. Schneider, Rebecca. “Solo Solo Solo.” After Criticism. New Responses to Art and Performance. Ed. Gavin Butt. London: Blackwell, 2001.

Further Reading Adler, Benjamin. Das Selbst als Erzählung? Diss. U Freiburg (Switzerland), 2010. http://ethesis.unifr. ch/theses/AdlerB.pdf?file=AdlerB.pdf (11 July 2018). Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World. Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Gale, Maggie, and Viv Gardner. Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Matzke, Annemarie M. Testen; Spielen, Tricksen, Scheitern. Formen szenischer Selbstinszenierung im zeitgenössischen Theater. Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Olms, 2005. Moser, Christian, and Nelles, Jürgen, eds. AutoBio-Fiktion – Konstruierte Identität in der Spät­ moderne. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2006.

3.14 Diary

Schamma Schahadat

Definition „Poniedzałek. Ja. Wtorek. Ja. Środa. Ja. Czwartek. Ja” [„Monday. Me. Tuesday. Me. Wednes­day. Me. Thursday. Me”] (Gombrowicz 1977, 9 [2012, 3]). The famous beginning of Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary, which he kept from 1953 until shortly before his death in 1969, encompasses crucial questions of diary writing: Who is the author? What is the subject? What is the form of a diary? Who is the addressee? Gombrowicz, of course, wrote about a lot of things in his diary: about exile, about death, about Poland, about literature, about the places where he lived (Argentina, Berlin, France). But he wrote mostly about himself, a fact that he, half mockingly, admits in the first lines of his diary. What he also acknowledges is, that since the ‘I’ is so prominent in writing the diary, in being the topic of the diary and in, probably, reading the diary, the fact that the perspective on the ‘I’ is also the perspective of the ‘I’ – which touches upon one of the most sensible characteristics of the diary (and of autobiography in general): the blurring between fact and fiction. How reliable is the writer of a diary concerning the events he or she describes? Since the diary has an “uncertain”, “ambiguous”, “elastic” form which “has frus­ trated many a literary specialist in search for canonical clarity” (Hellbeck 2004a, 621), a positive way out of this dilemma has been to describe it as a transgressive genre: the diary transgresses the borders between body and text, since the ‘real’ author and the narrator seem to fall into one in the diary. It transgresses the borders between public and private, marking the diary as a gendered genre since in the patriarchal paradigm the private counts as the realm of the female – the German philosopher Beate Rössler showed that the notion of the ‘private’ has been discussed in feminist theory which considered the private from the perspective of exclusion from the public sphere (Rössler 2005, 2–3). Furthermore, the borders between fact and fiction are transgressed because the ‘I’ of the diary is subjective and unreliable with respect to the events it relates to; and, if one looks at writers’ diaries, who often are avid diary writers, diaries often are artfully constructed. (The list of dichotomies can vary, and it can be enlarged.)

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-070

548 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Explication The Diary as a Genre: Form and Function The diary is (sometimes) considered to be a genre  – for the Russian formalist Yuri Tynyanov a genre “is marked by distinctive dominants and a particular intention […]. Unlike the individual work of art, the genre exists and is effective only as a reference system” (Striedter 1989, 61). Tynyanov thus defines the genre as something which can be recognized by its characteristics; however, it is not static – the genre system changes in the course of history. A certain genre that may be in the center of the genre system at one point can move to its periphery at another time  – Tynyanov shows this movement with regard to the letter: while in Russia in the first half of the eight­ eenth century letters were a phenomenon outside of literary life (“iskliuchitel’no iavleniem byta” [‘exclusively part of everyday life’]), the end of the eighteenth century with the advance of sentimentalist and romantic literature incorporates the letter into its genre system (Tynjanov 1969, 418). By entering literature in the form of the epistolary novel, the letter became a литературный факт (literaturny fakt, literary fact) and thus a literary genre. The diary finds itself in a very similar situation: as a form of self-expression it moves closer to the center of the genre system in periods where the individual is of special importance (in the Renaissance, in Romanticism, in Symbol­ ism). This short recourse to Formalist genre theory may help in defining the diary: the diary is considered to be a “private text”, occupying a “marginal” place in the literary canon (Bunkers and Huff 1996, 2). The fact that the diary is transgressive in form, func­ tion, publicity, authorship and fictionality/factuality is also the reason why the diary has become so central for academic research on postmodernism, when fixed notions were questioned and transgressions favored. It seems as if the diary became a genre when the notion of genre was destabilized in literary theory. Underlining the trans­ gressive character of the diary is a positive reinterpretation of the diary’s “‘uncertain’ nature between literary and historical writing, between fictional and documentary, spontaneous and reflected narrative” (Hellbeck 2004a, 621). What are the diary’s “distinctive dominants and the particular intentions” which make up a genre? At first glance it seems that one of its main characteristics is the fact that it has none – the diary “is virtually formless” (Jackson 2010, 1), there are no rules about content or length (Boerner 1969, 11). The very essence of the diary seems to be that it is unstructured, being constructed in an “unplanned and incondite manner” (Abbott 2005, 106). Virginia Woolf compares the diary to “some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through” (qtd. in Jackson 2010, 1). Susan Rubin Suleiman speaks of “the loose form” of the diary, “weaving together a large number of different themes, and stories, that emerge only gradually” (1996, 234).

3.14 Diary 

 549

Even if the diary is free in form and transgressive concerning the norms and forms of literary genres, there are nevertheless a few ‘distinctive elements’. The diary is subject to temporal restrictions, like every narrative it develops in time. The diary, similar to the letter, marks this temporal ordering by dating its entries. While many diaries are fairly precise in their dating, the chronological order also gives room for experimentation: Gombrowicz only uses the names of the day not the correct date (“Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday”) while Sylvia Plath numbered rather than dated her entries (Jackson 2010, 1). She often used places as an ordering principle (“Lookout Farm”, “Wellesley”, “Northampton” [Plath 1982, 3, 8, 17]), thus subverting the diaristic order of time into an order of place. Experimenting with dates and times exposes the various time levels that are involved in diary writing (and reading) and points to the fact that the chronology is not at all as consequent as it is supposed to be: “No sooner had I written this [the date] than Madame Gravé appeared & has left only the wreck of an evening behind her”, Virginia Woolf writes in her diary on “Saturday 6 March” in the book with the date “1920” (Woolf 1978, 22). The gap between the event that happened and writing it down on paper is exposed by the fact that the interruption of the act of writing itself is marked. The reader is aware of the fact that some time has elapsed between the writing of the date, the event that followed (Madame Gravé’s visit) and the writing scene. A second interruption is effected by the editor’s (Anne Oliver Bell’s) insertion of “the date” in brackets so that an additional chronological level is added: the time of the editing of the diary. A second distinctive feature of the diary is that it is a first-person narrative with the consequence of “the diary’s special relationship to privacy, intimacy, and secrecy” (Paperno 2004, 562). This “privacy, intimacy, and secrecy” can, however, once again be playfully subverted. When Gombrowicz writes “me” after every day of the week he quotes this distinctive feature of the diary genre, yet since he wrote his diary not (only) for himself but sent it in monthly portions to the Polish emigré journal Kultura in Paris, where it was regularly published, the notions of privacy, intimacy and secrecy are openly displayed. If the chronological order and the first-person narrative are the ‘distinctive fea­ tures’ of the diary, what is its intention or rather: its function? Since the diary can include a vast array of different materials, from being a chronicle of daily events on the one extreme to being a ‘journal intime’ on the other, the functions can be very different. However, given its special relation to time, an important function of the diary is to keep track of time. Considering the diurnal form of the diary and its genetic relationship to the account book (Sherman 1996; Lejeune 2009, 51–60; Paperno 2000), the diary appears to be a “symbolic equivalent” to account books: “used to account for one’s time, the diary stems from the fear of watching life grow shorter with each passing day” (Paperno 2004, 563; Paperno here refers to Corbin 1990, 498). Stuart Sherman marks Samuel Pepys’ Diary (1660–1669) as the founding narrative for this connection between time and the diary. Pepys wrote his Diary when in England Chris­

550 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

tian Huygens had just regulated the pendulum of the clock, thus making the measure­ ment of time more precise (Sherman 1996, 2): “Huygens’ clocks actually implemented new rules of engagement with passing time in order to measure the minutes; Pepys devised similar rules to track the days as […] no one writing English had done before” (Sherman 1996, 35).

Transgression I: Between Body and Text The diary, one can summarize thus far, accounts for the days of the writer’s life on a (more or less) daily basis and consequently protects this life against annihilation (Paperno 2004, 563). But who is the ‘I’ of the diary, talking to himself or herself on paper? In the act of writing the subject is split into three: into the real, empirical ‘I’, the writing ‘I’ and the written ‘I’. (This discursive triangle was applied by Magda­ lena Marszałek [2003] to her analysis of the Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska’s diaries. Nałkowska regularly kept diaries starting in 1899 when she was 15 until her death in 1954.) It is the relationship between the empirical ‘I’ and the written ‘I’ that has been the focus of diary theorists. Of special interest however is also the writing ‘I’ since scenes of writing (the place, the time, pen and paper) occupy an astonishingly great part in many diaries. In this respect, diary writing is similar to letter writing which also tends to incorporate the writing scene. It is at the crossing between the three ‘I’s that the body and the text enter into a dynamic relationship. Recent scholarship has focused on the writer of the diary and on the act of self-construction this writer performs in the act of writing, i.  e., on the relationship between the empirical ‘I’ and the written ‘I’. The text of the diary becomes the site for the writer’s self-fashioning where scripture transforms the body of the writing ‘I’ into a ‘persona’. Diaries like autobiographies are not only texts but “practices of shaping and contesting power by establishing agency and the individual ‘I’ in a social and historical context” (Walker 2006, 351; while Walker formulates this definition in her review article on Hellbeck [2004b] to describe the function of autobiographies, it however seems fitting to describe the function of the diary). Once again, Gombrowicz is an obvious example: when Gombrowicz stranded in Buenos Aires in 1939, he was already an established writer in Poland but completely ignored in his new homeland. With little time to write, since he had to work for a living, Gombrowicz gave up novel writing and turned to a more convenient form: the diary. In 1952 he wrote to Jerzy Giedroyc, the editor of the Paris based Kultura: “I must become my own commenta­ tor, even better, my own theatrical director. I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other nec­ essary Gombrowiczes” (qtd. in Gombrowicz 2012, viii). André Gide’s Journals inspired Gombrowicz to start his own diaries, but as Rita Gombrowicz writes: “Gide had written his diary when he was already famous, whereas Gombrowicz wrote his to become so” (2012, viii).

3.14 Diary 

 551

Self-fashioning and self-creation are, however, not restricted to writers’ diaries, they can also be typical for a certain culture where diaries carry the burden of shaping this new culture and the new cultural ‘persona’ – the self-fashioning of the culture and the self-fashioning of an individual can be parallel events in coming to terms with a new identity. Scholars on Russian culture have stressed the fact that in Russia, due to its alleged “backwardness” in relation to the West, “a historically self-con­ scious type of selfhood that produces its own textual trace” can be observed (Hellbeck 2004a, 627). Personality as a “moral and social ideal” was designed and tried out in private diaries. Private diaries of ordinary people have been analyzed in this vein, e.  g. the “the very laconic, often incomprehensible, almost account-book-style entries” (Glagoleva 2009, 709) in the diary of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchёnov, a merchant in the Russian provinces. A detailed analysis (Ransel 2009) shows how this Russian pro­ vincial merchant, at the time of modernization and westernization, tried to adapt to the new circumstances and how the diary is a major site for this adaptation. Another high time of diaries with the function to educate the self was during Stalinism, when a great number of diaries were written in which the writers tried to develop themselves into civilized Soviet ‘personas’. (A collection with diaries from Stalinism was edited in translation by Garros, Koenevskaya and Lahusen 1995. Diaries from Stalinism are analyzed by Hellbeck 2006 and Paperno 2009.) If the relationship between the empirical ‘I’ and the written ‘I’ in the diary is one of control, where a Foucault’ian ‘care of the self’ is the aim of the writing – either to invent the writer as in the case of Gombrowicz or to invent a public ‘persona’ as is the case in the private Russian diaries in various historical times –, the writing ‘I’ is posi­ tioned in a narrative scene. Virginia Woolf’s diaries contain many different writing scenes: Wednesday 14 January [1920]. On Saturday the Shoves dined here; Monday nothing; Tuesday Club & talk, almost of an intimate kind, with Gumbo […]. Wednesday is the present moment, in from a snatched walk at Kew, awaiting Leonard, & expecting a large party, Doggats, Joshua’s & c. at 7–30. So I write as if waiting for a train. I might fill this page & the succeeding ones with the Shoves’ gossip, but I have never determined how far it is permitted to go here in indiscretion. I should have to write at length to retail this specimen properly which is the conclusive reason against it (Woolf 1978, 7).

Not only does Virginia Woolf describe her scene of writing (“as if waiting for a train”), she also reflects on what to write into her diary and what to omit. Newer works on diaries stress the fact that not only the text but also the repetitions, gaps and silences have to be taken into account (e.  g. Bunkers and Huff 1996, 11). For Virginia Woolf the years when she did not write her diary are significant since they mark periods of her mental illness (Podnieks 2000, 101). Another reason for the gaps is diaris­ tic censorship. Thus, Frances McCullough, the editor of Sylvia Plath’s Journals, explains:

552 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

There are quite a few nasty bits missing – Plath had a very sharp tongue and tended to use it on nearly everybody, even people of whom she was inordinately fond […]. So, some of the more devastating comments are missing […] and there are a few other cuts – of intimacies – that have the effect of diminishing Plath’s eroticism, which was quite strong (McCullough 1982, x).

Transgression II: Between Public and Private One of the most important boundaries within the formless genre of the diary runs between ‘real’ and ‘fictional diaries’ (Suleiman 1996) or between ‘private’ to ‘public diaries’ (Bloom 1996). “Truly private diaries are those bare-bones works written pri­ marily to keep records of receipts and expenditures, the weather […]. Written with neither art nor artifice, they are so terse they seem coded” (Bloom 1996, 25). While it is debatable whether “real diaries” are really as private as they seem, a writer’s diary can hardly remain private – “the diary as truly spontaneous, secret, uninhabited text remains at best an ambiguous reality” (Podnieks 2000, 24), and: “for the professional writer there are no private writings” (Bloom 1996, 24). Who is the reader of a diary? While the ‘private’ diaries by unknown private people are usually read by scholars who work on them in the archives (Paperno 2004, 561), writers’ diaries are generally written with the ‘other’ as the reader in mind, be it in the writer’s lifetime (as was the fact for Gombrowicz, who produced his diaries for a public readership) or posthumously, an audience which every writer had to consider (as was the fact with Virginia Woolf’s or Sylvia Plath’s diaries which were meticulously edited and commented on). Although diaries pretend to be private texts, they can always cross the border and enter the literary field in a new outfit (printed rather than handwritten). Two examples show the permeability of this border between the private and the public and the dynamics of diaries: the ethnographer Bronisław Malinowski’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967) and the diaries of Sofia Tolstaya, Lev Tolstoy’s wife. Malinowski, as many ethnographers, kept two diaries: a field diary where he noted his professional observations – detached, scientifically, written for the eyes of the public –, and a private diary, full of resentments, racism and contempt, but also filled with erotic dreams about the native girls he studied in his manner of ‘participant observation’. When the private diary, which was not written for publication, was pub­ lished posthumously in 1967, the scientific community was shocked to see the private feelings of the eminent anthropologist. While right after its publication the diary was described as a “revealing, egocentric, obsessional document” (Raymond Firth), after the self-reflexive turn in anthropology twenty years later, Clifford Geertz called it the “backstage masterpiece of anthropology, our The Double Helix” (Geertz 1988, 75). With the “double helix” Geertz pins down the twofold nature of the diary that contains – and reveals – the public and the private persona at the same time. The second case study concerns the diaries written by Sofia Tolstoya who married Lev Tolstoy when she was 18 years old. Tolstaya kept a diary up to her death in 1919

3.14 Diary 

 553

and she usually turned to her diary when she was unhappy or had quarreled with her husband: 8 октябтя Опять дневник, скучно, что повторение прежних привычек, которые я все оставила с тех пор, как вышла замуж. Бывало, я писала, когда тяжело, и теперь, верно оттовго же. [October 8 (1862). My diary again. It’s sad to be going back to old habits I gave up since I got married. I used to write when I felt depressed – now I suppose it is for the same reason.] (Tolstaya 1978, 37 [1985, 3])

This is her first diary entry after her wedding. Tolstaya’s diaries were published post­ humously between 1928 and 1936 in Moscow. The editor of the first volumes “warned readers of the need for caution in view of Sofia’s morbid, suspicious and jealous dis­ position and referred to her impressionistic entries, temperamental outbursts and vehement language” (Christian 1985, xiii). Since the Tolstoys’ marriage is known to have been a difficult one, the editors of the following editions (and the readers) were taking sides for either Tolstoy or for his wife. With the publication of the diaries the private life of the famous writer turned into a public scene. And while they make Sofia Tolstaya visible, scholars use her diary as a source not about the woman who wrote them, but about her famous husband  – “despite their admitted exaggeration and unfairness it would be unthinkable to write a serious biography of Tolstoy without drawing on them extensively” (Christian 1985, xvii). The female subject of the diary is thus reduced to an “exaggerating and unfair” wife.

Transgression III: Between Fact and Fiction The information a diary provides about events, emotions and ideas is mediated by the writing subject and by the media: the language, the style, the materiality of the text. While historians are mainly interested in facts, literary scholars have started to focus on the literary side of diaries. Knowing that diaries are unreliable concerning these facts, some historians have solved this problem by focusing on the self of the diary in its historical context: “The decisive condition is not the diary as a formal literary type, but the emergence of a historically self-conscious type of selfhood that produces its own textual trace to validate its existence” (Hellbeck 2004a, 627). By “highlighting the specific historical or cultural context” (Paperno 2004, 567) histori­ ans gain access to the “intimate theater of history” (John Randolph, qtd. in Paperno 2004, 568), linking the individual to history. But what about the literary aspects of the diary? How much fiction do we find in the diary? Some (deconstructivist) approaches locate the literary aspect on the side of the reader. Paul de Man sees autobiography (which, for him, would enclose the diary) “not as a genre or a mode but as a figure of reading or understanding that occurs, in some degree, in all texts” (de Man 1979, 921), which leads him to the radical

554 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

assumption that “all texts are autobiographical or […] none of them is or can be” (1979, 922). Philippe Lejeune believes this “figure of understanding” cemented in the “autobiographical pact” (1975 [1989]) which the reader concludes with the flesh-andblood author in order to believe in the factuality of the autobiographical (or diaristic) text. Andrew Hassam puts forward the opposite position when he argues that a diary assumes the status of literature as soon as it is published (Hassam 1987, 440). Once the “secrecy clause” is violated, “the reader is likely to feel somewhat cheated, as though the text is less honest and the secrets suppressed” (1987, 438). Lately literary scholars have linked diaristic and literary styles and analyzed (female) diaries from an aesthetic point of view (Podnieks 2000; Jackson 2010). Sit­ uating Woolf’s diaries in an intertextual field that is made up of diaries (e.  g. Pepys’) and literature alike, Elizabeth Podnieks argues that her diaries are just as fragmented and at the same time unified as modernist writing in general, e.  g. by James Joyce and T. S. Eliot (Podnieks 2000, 106); gaps, divisions and multiple consciousness are char­ acteristics of the diary as well as of modernist writing (2000, 90). “It strikes me that in this book I practice writing; do my scales; yes & work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here, – & Mrs D. & shall invent my next book here” (Woolf 1978, 319) is one of the quotes she uses to argue her case. If the diary, as Felicity Nussbaum writes, “creates and tolerates crisis in perpetu­ ity” while autobiography concentrates on “crisis moments” on the “epiphany of trans­ formation from a former self to a new fixed self” (1988, 134), the diary would be closer to the modernist text while the autobiography resembles a realist ‘Bildungsroman’.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. “Diary.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. 106. Bloom, Lynn Z. “‘I Write for Myself and Strangers’. Private Diaries as Public Documents.” Inscribing the Daily. Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 23–37. Boerner, Peter. Tagebuch. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969. Bunkers, Suzanne L., and Cynthia A. Huff. “Issues in Studying Women’s Diaries: A Theoretical and Critical Introduction.” Inscribing the Daily. Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 1–20. Christian, R. F. “Introduction.” Sofia Tolstoya. The Diaries of Sofia Tolstaya. Ed. O. I. Golinenko. Trans. Cathy Porter. London: Cape, 1985. x–xviii. Corbin, Alain. “Backstage.” A History of Private Life. Vol. IV. Ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1990. 451–667. Glagoleva, Olga. “Review on David Ransel, A Russian Merchant’s Tale.” Russian Review 68.4 (2009): 709–710. Geertz, Clifford. “I-Witnessing. Malinowski’s Children.” Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity Press. 73–101. Gombrowicz, Rita. “Foreword.” Witold Gombrowicz, Diary. Trans. Lillian Vallee. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012. vii–x.

3.14 Diary 

 555

Gombrowicz, Witold. Dziennik 1953–1956. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997 [Diary. Trans. Lillian Vallee. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012]. Hassam, Andrew. “Reading Other People’s Diaries.” University of Toronto’s Quarterly 56.3 (1987): 435–442. Hellbeck, Jochen. “The Diary between Literature and History: A Historian’s Critical Response.” The Russian Review 63 (2004): 621–629 (Hellbeck 2004a). Hellbeck, Jochen, ed. Autobiographical Practices in Russia/Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2004 (Hellbeck 2004b). Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Jackson, Anna. Diary Poetics. Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962. New York/London: Routledge 2010. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1989]. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Trans. Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as Defacement.” MLN 94.5 (1979): 919–930. McCullough, Frances. “Editor’s Note.” The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Huges and Frances McCullough. New York: The Dial Press, 1982. ix–x. Nussbaum, Felicity A. “Toward Conceputalizing Diary.” Studies in Autobiography. Ed. James Olney. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 128–140. Paperno, Irina. “Tolstoy’s Diaries: The Inaccessible Self.” Self and Story in Russian History. Ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. 242–265. Paperno, Irina. “What Can Be Done with Diaries?” The Russian Review 63 (2004): 561–573. Paperno, Irina. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Huges and Frances McCullough. New York: The Dial Press, 1982. Podnieks, Elizabeth. Daily Modernism. The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Ransel, David L. A Russian Merchant’s Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchёnov, Based on His Diary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Rössler, Beate. The Value of Privacy. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2005. Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time. Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form 1660–1785. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Striedter, Jurij. Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value. Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1989. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Diary as Narrative: Theory and Practice.” The Search for a New Alphabet. Literary Studies in a Changing World. In Honor of Douwe Fokkema. Ed. Harald Hendrix, Joost Kloek, Sophie Levie and Will van Peer. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1996. 234–238. Tolstaya, S.  A. Dnevniki. V dvukh tomakh. Tom pervyi. Ed. V. E. Vatsuro and N. Gej. Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1978 [The Diaries of Sofia Tolstaya. Ed. O. I. Golinenko. Trans. Cathy Porter. London: Cape, 1985]. Tynianov, Yuri. “Literaturny fakt/Das literarische Faktum”. Texte der russischen Formalisten. Band I. Texte zur allgemeinen Literaturtheorie und zur Prosa. Ed. Jurij Striedter. München: Fink, 1969. 392–431. Walker, Barbara. “Autobiographical Practices in Russia/Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland (review)”. Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 7.2 (2006): 351–357.

556 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume Two. 1920–1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York/ London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Further Reading Garros, Véronique, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds. Intimacy and Terror. Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. Trans. Carol A. Flath. New York: The New Press, 1995. Jurgensen, Manfred. Das fiktionale Ich. Untersuchungen zum Tagebuch. Bern/München: Francke, 1979. Marszałek, Magdalena. “Das Leben und das Papier.” Das autobiographische Projekt Zofia Nałkowskas: Dzienniki 1899–1954. Berlin: Synchron Wissenschaftsverlag der Autoren, 2003.

3.15 Digital Life Narratives/Digital Selves/ Autobiography on the Internet Innokentij Kreknin

Definition Digital life narratives are a prevalent form of life narration and self-performance in media societies today. Narrowly defined, the term ‘digital life narrative’ refers to the straightforward transfer of familiar autobiographical genres such as ‘diary’ to the digital medium of the internet, with minimal alterations. However, this rarely applies to digital life narratives today. Most consist of a wide array of practices conducted via digital media, whose common factor is their ability to produce the image of an iden­ tifiable person, figure or avatar. Constant adaptations to new technological develop­ ments result in an ongoing shift of forms and genres, making it impossible to specify all variations of digital life narratives. For the most part, however, digital narratives are performed via personal websites, weblogs and social networking sites, and are located somewhere between traditional autobiographical poetics and the new pos­ sibilities offered by information technology. The dependence of digital life narratives on technological development and the constant transformation of forms and poetics make the study of digital life narrative an even more dynamic and innovative field than traditional autobiography studies.

Explication Differences between Autobiographical Writing and Digital Life Narrating Scholars agree that the emergence of the Web 2.0 and the success of social networking sites marked a major shift in the field of auto/biography-studies and life narrative-stud­ ies. The developments associated with the ubiquity of the internet and the digitalized world have changed and intensified everyday practices of self-representation (Eakin 2014, 29–30). These changes not only affect us online, but may also influence our behavior in the offline world (McNeill 2012, 69; Zhao et al. 2008, 1831–1832; Rak 2005, 173). The relatively restricted field of auto/biography- and life narrative-studies widens significantly when confronted with the challenges of the digital turn. Communica­ tions science, new media studies, cultural studies, game studies, sociology, and psy­ chology are just some of the disciplines grappling with the question of how identity https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-071

558 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

and self-narratives are formed in a digitalized world (Poletti and Rak 2014, 3). Each discipline has its own theories and methodologies that need to be considered when addressing the subject of digital selves/autobiographical forms on the internet. The emergence of life narratives in digital media makes it necessary to re-evaluate and update an old paradigm of the auto/biography-studies. This is Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as “Recit retrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence” [“Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person con­ cerning his own existence”], focusing especially “sur sa vie individuelle” [“the story of his personality”] (Lejeune 1975, 14, emphasis I. K. [1989, 4]). This definition, together with the acceptance of a situation where the protagonist equals the narrator, who in turn equals the author, are the basis of Lejeune’s “Autobiographical Pact”. The digital shift renders this basis obsolete, however. Some scholars suggest that to fully understand and appreciate the new forms of digital life narrative, one must invent a new, “posthuman pact” that updates Lejeune’s theory (McNeill 2012, 80). Usually, digital life narratives are not retrospective, are rarely in prose and are often written not by a real person but by computers and algorithms. Such ‘stories’ often become com­ modities, owned by corporations that provide the means for such life-writing, such as Facebook or Instagram. What the digital age requires are therefore new models of genuinely digital self-construction and genuinely digital auto/biography, able to keep up with technological, social and aesthetic changes. The impact of online actions on the “lifeworld” (Roessler 2015, 153–154) of users makes clear that the digital representations of a person have lost their initial aura of virtuality and become inseparable from the real life performance of the actor. Utopian calls for a newfound freedom of self-expression in the internet (Baumann 2015) have been rejected and a new, autofictional but nevertheless referential reality is being created online (Kreknin 2014, 429–431). The rise of digital media has led to three major developments: 1. Lejeune’s defini­ tion of ‘autobiography’ is largely redundant in the digital realm; the term ‘autobiog­ raphy’ becomes too narrow to describe the new phenomena of autobiographical acts. Writing a text is no longer the dominant practice of the genre; instead, photographs, videos and bulks of data become essential parts of a person’s life-story. The authori­ tarian autonomy of the traditional autobiographer is changing into a heteronomous dependence upon media-patterns and algorithms. Acknowledging these shifts, the suggestion has been made to replace the term ‘autobiography’ with ‘life narrative’ (Smith and Watson 2010, 4). This is a good way to describe the new transmedial forms beyond the written text. ‘Digital life narratives’ is thus a blanket term that includes tra­ ditional forms (‘autobiography on the internet’) and digital representations of a person (‘digital selves’). 2. Life narratives formed in the digital realm are heavily dependent on media in which they are produced. The characteristics of the instruments, channels, and platforms using digital data-transfer therefore need to be carefully examined, as do their impact on life narratives. The study of digital life narratives needs to be a transdisciplinary endeavor, or at least take into account the approaches of new-media

3.15 Digital Life Narratives/Digital Selves/Autobiography on the Internet 

 559

studies. 3. The rapid developments in information and communication technology are causing digital life narratives to change their quality, structure, and form. This makes a unitary and conclusive theory or definition of ‘digital life narratives’ impos­ sible. Instead, scholarly approaches must allow a degree of flexibility regarding their subject, theory and methodology. One promising methodological and theoretical approach to the study of digital life narratives is the concept of automediality, developed by Jörg Dünne und Christian Moser (Dünne and Moser 2008; Smith and Watson 2010, 168; Maguire 2015, 74–75). It takes into account the argument of Michel Foucault and others that identity and subjectivity are not pre-existing entities, but are produced by the individual in “a daily identity practice” (Eakin 2014, 21). Dünne and Moser point out that this kind of practice is heavily influenced by media techniques, especially in a society dependent on digital communication. Their concept of automediality draws attention to the fact that media infrastructure, subjective reflection, and the practices of self-fashioning are closely interlinked (Dünne and Moser 2008, 13). The concept of automediality also enables an approach to digital autobiographical practices without completely abandoning paradigms originating in autobiographical studies within the Gutenberg Galaxy.

Forms and Prevalence In order to provide orientation in this over-determined field, six dominant forms of digital narrative can be identified (Smith and Watson 2010, 185–187). – Personal websites and blogs: In the early stages of the internet, before the devel­ opment of Web 2.0 and 3.0, a personal website was the most likely way to create a digital image of one’s persona (Gretzel 2015, 183–185). However, this technique was difficult to use for people unfamiliar with coding. After 1999, when software for weblogging became more accessible, the situation changed (Blood 2002, 3–4). Platforms like Blogger.com offered templates suitable for even technically unskilled users. While it is impossible to quantify precisely the total number of blogging-sites, dozens of millions of active blogs exist worldwide today. The website statista.com cites a figure of 35 million blogs for the year 2006  – and nearly 300 million for 2016 on the platform Tumblr alone, many of them ‘personal’ blogs, used like online diaries and filled with personal texts and photos. Blogging introduced the possibility of commenting on particular posts, thus paving the way for a new level of interactivity in the one-to-many communication style of weblogs that is today considered the norm. – Video hosting and streaming services: Platforms such as YouTube (since 2005) provided the possibility of uploading home-made videos, the ‘YouTube-celebrity’ giving rise to a new category of public figure. Users can create profiles and collect subscribers, who are notified as soon as a new video is uploaded. The prevalence

560 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

of publicly available personal videos (vlogs) marks a new quality of observation of intimacy and (voluntary) intrusion of privacy. The possibility of embedding videos in blogs and posting them on social networking sites makes them easily accessible and highly ‘contagious’ (they can ‘go viral’). The personal image pro­ duced on these sites is often bound to the ‘real life’ performance of the users, especially those who are popular. Different subgenres of personal videos (‘tuto­ rial’, ‘unboxing’, ‘let’s-play’) developed, allowing persons to portray themselves in a particular way (e.  g. as fashion-expert, pro-gamer) and to build a reputation in particular communities. Other platforms such as Twitch and YouNow, which specialize in life-streaming (‘lifelogging’), enabled a synchronicity of video pro­ duction and video consumption previously unavailable to most users. – Social Networking Sites/Dating Sites and Apps/Quantified Self: Online dating sites have been around since the early days of the public internet, however a digi­ tally produced, networked and widely visible image of oneself only became preva­ lent after 2003, when MySpace and LinkedIn went online. These sites became popular very fast, each listing hundreds of millions of users. They shared some features of dating websites, especially the personal profile and the possibility of contacting other persons registered on the platform, however were not restricted to amorous contacts. Social networking sites in general are a prime example of how the practice of self-writing and self-governing migrated to the digital realm (Sauter 2014), becoming the most popular form of digital life narrating today. The impact of these sites can hardly be exaggerated. In March 2015, Facebook (since 2004) had approximately 1.4 billion active users per month worldwide (World Bank 2016, 150). All registered users have an online profile and most use the platform for various purposes: to upload personal, home-made texts, photos or videos, to mark their location on a map, to express their tastes and proclivities by ‘liking’ certain profiles (TV shows, restaurants, publishers, etc.), and to befriend other users or share links to internal or external content. The needs met by the services of those platforms consist largely of consuming and contributing infor­ mation and entertainment, developing a network of ‘friends’, discussing topics and – above all – creating a user identity (Porter 2015, 170) and making digital self-representations visible to a specified or unspecified audience (depending on privacy settings). Zhao et al. refer to Facebook as “a multi-audience identity pro­ duction site” (Zhao et al. 2008, 1832), an apt description of social networking sites in general. One major difference to ‘traditional’ autobiographies is that digital life narratives that are conducted via social networking sites are – with very few exceptions – not ‘written’ by a single person, but are constructed and composed by members of a digital network of friends and associates. Other users share another person’s content, or link another person’s profile to their own content, thus creating referentiality. Users might also ‘like’ or comment on another per­ son’s postings and uploads or send messages to other profiles (Donath and Boyd 2004). Alongside social networking sites with no specific focus there are count­

3.15 Digital Life Narratives/Digital Selves/Autobiography on the Internet 

 561

less ‘special-interest’-sites and platforms providing users with particular services, from self-optimization (Fitocracy, Runtastic) to gay dating (GayRomeo). Members of the self-tracker or quantified-self movement often belong to digital communi­ ties, sharing the results of their training, diet, and general biological data. The varieties and possibilities of social networking sites are unlimited and their total number of users is impossible to quantify. – Chat Rooms and Micro-Blogging Sites: Chat rooms became popular at the dawn of the internet, allowing users to communicate anonymously in real time via text messages. Many chat rooms were dedicated to a particular topic and involvement had potentially little effect on the ‘analogous’ lives of users. It was also possi­ ble to develop an ‘online-persona’ and to form a reputation, be it as a reliable partner and communicator or as a ‘troll’ who mocks others. Communication in chat rooms was built on the one-to-one or few-to-few model. The ascendancy of chat rooms began to fade when Twitter was introduced in 2006. Twitter allows its users to communicate to an unspecified number of followers (one-to-many) via short text messages, links, photos, GIFs, and videos (microblogging), creating a timeline of personal content on their profile. While most chat rooms have been replaced by other forms of communication (vlogging, life-streaming, messaging via WhatsApp, Snapchat or on social networking sites), Twitter – with its approx. 300 million active users – prevailed. It was complemented by other services such as Tumblr (2007) or Instagram (2010), which largely focus on multimedia-mi­ croblogging. One of the distinct features of microblogging-sites is that they are frequently used by public figures and celebrities, allowing others to peek into their ‘private lives’. – Auto/Curation Sites: Many microblogging platforms, particularly those relying on audio-visual content in the first place, can also be used as auto/curation sites. This form seems especially appealing to women: approximately 80 % of US users of the most distinctive social curating site Pinterest (2010) identify as women (Friz and Gehl 2016). On social curation sites, unlike on conventional social networking sites, individual profiles are often without any personal information; the individ­ ual is usually not obliged to reveal him-/herself, and textual or personal interac­ tion is not the main feature. Most users utilise these sites as a digital scrapbook, ‘pinning’ external content (mostly pictures) and sharing (‘produsing’ [see Bruns 2008, 9–36]) it on their own digital boards. Finding, assembling and sharing content can still be qualified as an “implicitly auto/biographical act” (McNeill and Zuern 2015, xvi) that produces a different kind of digital self, one that seeks distinction by demonstrating taste via aesthetic compositions – and by attracting followers as an audience for their actions, though not necessarily for themselves as persons. – Computer Games and Avatar Sites/Avatar Software: Software can create virtual environments, often in 3D, in which users can place an avatar, interact with the environment and other avatars, and experience “immersiveness” (Lauria and

562 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Morie 2015, 148). Here, cyberspace becomes a “part of the routines of everyday life” (Turkle 1995, 9). Early ‘dungeon crawlers’ developed into ‘Massively Multi­ player Online Role-Playing Games’ such as World of Warcraft (since 2004), which offer its users not only a spatial world but also the ludic experience of following a pre-determined story line, solving quests and upgrading and improving their in-game character. Most often, this class of game includes a rudimentary social networking feature, encouraging users to organize themselves in ‘guilds’ and ‘parties’, to cooperate in the game-play, to exchange virtual items or simply to chat. Another kind of virtual world is represented by ‘sandboxes’ such as Second Life (since 2003) or Minecraft (since 2011). These variants usually have no in-built storyline, however allow their users to create elaborated avatars and to alter the virtual environment, to build entire cities and landscapes and to experience this world with other avatars, with whom they can also interact. In other words, users experience an embodiment, a virtual life, and thus create the narrative of their virtual self or selves. These virtual worlds often mimic features of the offlineworld, including educational institutions or economies with their own currency, which can be acquired for real money. It is important to point out that digital life narratives seldom rely solely on one of the forms above. It is much more common for a person to use several of them. The different profiles may be linked to each other – or be completely independent, thus allowing a person to produce multiple images or variations of their digital personae. Additionally, nearly all forms share similar characteristics, such as the option for ‘nonymous’, anonymous or acquaintanceship-use. Their features can also be com­ bined: social-networking-sites-profiles can incorporate vlogs or tweets; personal web­ sites can be used like curating sites, and so on. Digital life narratives are also not bound to one single technical infrastructure. While almost all of them were originally located on the internet and accessible via an online browser alone, today’s practices rely heavily on mobile technical devices (smartphones, tablets, smart watches, wear­ ables) and their supporting software (apps, programs, games, sharing- and cloud-ser­ vices) (Gurrin et al. 2014, 10–14, 83–93). With the development of ubiquitous com­ puting and the ‘internet of things’, one can expect digital life narratives to become increasingly disconnected from the ‘traditional’ internet, and to become ubiquitous as well.

Problems, Conflicts, Conclusions Questions have been raised about autonomy and heteronomy, and about the influence of opaque agendas on platforms where digital life narratives are conducted (Sauter 2014, 8; McNeill and Zuern 2015, viii; Zhao et al. 2008). Another alarming issue is the question of ownership and authorship: Every person that is identifiable in any way

3.15 Digital Life Narratives/Digital Selves/Autobiography on the Internet 

 563

within digital data flows has produced – albeit unwillingly – a small part of a digital life narrative that is stored in databases, processed by algorithms, sold by companies and viewed by secret services. The control of the depicted person over this data must be the subject of further research, as must the question of the blur between the public and the private sphere (McNeill and Zuern 2015,viii and passim). Additionally, raising the issue of posthumanism is the fact that, in some cases, technical infrastructure such as smartphones must be considered an extension of the person, not only con­ taining his or her memories but also acting as the actual manifestation of his or her digital existence. Finally, the most prominent enemy of digital life narratives may be digital obsolescence. As soon as software is no longer compatible with newer versions, or when the server of a Multi-User Domain shuts down, or a company scraps an older service or platform, significant chunks of a person’s digital life are likely to get lost. The study of digital life narratives demands a very close look at technological and medial developments. It requires recognizing digital life narratives not (only) as works of art or fiction, but as daily practices that define the lives of individuals. The prevalence of digital media and data processing makes this endeavor unavoidable. The study of digital life narratives will provide valuable access to even more important issues – and serve as a training ground for analysis of future forms of privacy, subjec­ tivity, sociality, society, and art.

Works Cited Baumann, Max-Otto. “Web 2.0 und soziale Autonomie.” Selbstbestimmung oder Fremdbestimmung? Soziales Leben im Internet. Ed. Ulrike Ackermann. Frankfurt a.  M.: Humanities Online, 2015. 75–91. Blood, Rebecca. The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Cambridge: Perseus, 2002. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. From Production to Produsage. New York: Lang, 2008. Donath, Judith, and Danah Boyd. “Public displays of connection.” BT Technology Journal 22.4 (2004): 71–82. Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. “Allgemeine Einleitung. Automedialität.” Automedialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Ed. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Fink, 2008. 7–16. Eakin, Paul John. “Autobiography as Cosmogram.” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 6.1 (2014): 21–43. Friz, Amanda, and Robert W. Gehl. “Pinning the feminine user: gender scripts in ­Pinterest’s sign-up interface.” Media, Culture & Society 2.1 (2016). http://sms.sagepub.com/ content/2/1/2056305116633481.full (10 July 2018), doi:10.1177/0163443715620925. Gretzel, Ulrike. “Web 2.0 and 3.0.” Communication and Technology. Ed. Lorenzo Cantoni and James A. Danowski. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton, 2015. 181–190. Gurrin, Cathal, Alan F. Smeaton, and Aiden R. Doherty. “LifeLogging: Personal Big Data.” Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 8.1 (2014): 1–117, http://www.nowpublishers.com/ article/Details/INR-033 (10 July 2018), doi:10.1561/1500000033.

564 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Kreknin, Innokentij. Poetiken des Selbst. Identität, Autorschaft und Autofiktion am Beispiel von Rainald Goetz, Joachim Lottmann und Alban Nikolai Herbst. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2014. Lauria, Rita M., and Jacquelyn Ford Morie. “Virtuality: VR as metamedia and herald of our future realities.” Communication and Technology. Ed. Lorenzo Cantoni and James A. Danowski. Berlin/ Boston: de Gruyter Mouton, 2015. 141–160. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Édition du Seuil 1975 [“The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30]. Maguire, Emma. “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles.” ­Biography 38.1 (2015): 72–86. McNeill, Laurie, and John David Zuern. “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction.” Biography 38.2 (2015): v–xlvi. McNeill, Laurie, and John David Zuern. “There Is No I in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography.” Biography 35.1 (2012): 65–82. Poletti, Anna, and Julie Rak. “Introduction. Digital Dialogues.” Identity Technologies. Constructing the Self Online. Ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak Madison. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 3–22. Porter, Constance Elise. “Virtual communities and social networks.” Communication and Technology. Eds. Lorenzo Cantoni and James A. Danowski. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton, 2015. 161–179. Rak, Julie. “The Digital Queer: Weblogs and Internet Identity.” Biography 28.1 (2005): 166–182. Roessler, Beate. “Should personal data be a tradable good? On the moral limits of markets in privacy.” Social Dimensions of Privacy. Ed. Beate Roessler and Dorota Mokrosinska. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 141–161. Sauter, Theresa. “‘What’s on your mind?’ Writing on Facebook as a tool for self-formation.” new media & society 16.5 (2014): 1–17. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. World Bank. World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends. Washington: World Bank, 2016. http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1596/978-1-4648-0671-1 (10 July 2018), doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0671-1. Zhao, Shanyang, Sherri Grasmuck, and Jason Martin. “Identity Construction on Facebook: Digital Empowerment in Anchored Relationships.” Computers in Human Behavior 24.5 (2008): 1816–1836.

Further Reading Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser, eds. Automedialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. München: Fink, 2008. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. McNeill, Laurie, and John David Zuern, eds. Biography 38.2 (2015). Online Lives 2.0. Poletti, Anna, and Julie Rak Madison, eds. Identity Technologies. Constructing the Self Online. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

3.16 Epistolary Autobiography Karl Enenkel

Definition The letter is an important and – particularly in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries – frequently used genre of autobiographical self-expression, regarded as especially adequate because of its implied authenticity, (supposed) private character, formal openness, and flexibility. In a letter an autobiographer may describe any content, any period of his or her life – from long periods to a single day, event, or moment. Among other things, it enables authors to present their life in a kaleidoscopic and fragmen­ tary way, and to include various, even contradictory aspects of their personality; for autobiographers, it sometimes seemed favourable not to be bound to a long, con­ sistent narrative. Epistolary autobiography is mostly in prose, but in antiquity and the Renaissance it also was written in hexametric or elegiac verse; often it took the form of a collection of letters or a correspondence. Epistolary autobiography in verse is governed by rules different from that in prose. A special subgenre is a whole ‘Vita’ in prose, presented as a letter to a friend (e.  g. by Lipsius and J. J. Scaliger). A second subgenre is the ‘Letter to Posterity’, which was invented as a metrical text in elegiac verse by Ovid: a fictive letter directed by a writer to his or her future readership, mostly in order to legitimise the claim of authorship. A third, rarer subgenre is the autobio­ graphical ‘letter of consolation’, in which authors reflect on their misfortunes (Seneca, Abelard).

Explication Of course, not all of the letter-writing genre is relevant for autobiography, which always implies some kind of intentional self-expression or self-presentation. From antiquity on, letters were used for a great number of practical purposes that required written communication, such as legal and financial transactions, politics, diplomacy, warfare, commerce, official documentation, and private exchange of information. If used for these purposes, letters were normally not intended to function as autobiog­ raphy, or to be published at all. And from antiquity on, the majority of ‘private’ letters in a more narrow sense – i.  e., letters that include information on the writer’s personal life, thoughts, and feelings – were not meant to serve as autobiographical self-pres­ entation, let alone as literary texts intended for a big readership. The vast majority of all letters of all time are ephemeral. The ancient Roman practice of using wax tablets as a basic means of correspondence may serve as a paradigm of the letter’s ephem­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-072

566 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

erality: after the addressee had read the letter, its purpose was fulfilled – the text was deleted and the tablets were reused for other messages. For epistolary autobiography as literature, the ideas of preservation and trans­ mission, circulation among a larger readership, collection, edition, and (future) pub­ lication (either during the author’s lifetime or posthumously) are of great importance. A writer who has not had at least one of these ideas in mind will hardly author an epistolary autobiography. Except for the above-mentioned subgenres, epistolary auto­ biography does not consist of a single letter; often it is a more demanding enterprise that always implies great effort and much work, and keeps the author busy during a longer period, sometimes until the end of his life, as was the case with, among others, Pliny the Younger (ca. 61–ca. 114 CE), Sidonius Apollinaris (431–489), Franc­ esco Petrarca (1304–1374), Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini, 1406–1464), Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), Erasmus (1466–1536), Lipsius (1547–1606), Voltaire (1694–1778), Goethe (1749–1832), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Jean Paul (1763–1825), and Thomas Mann (1875–1955). Collections of letters may constitute true autobiographical monuments designed for contemporary readers and posterity as well. Of course, this does not mean that such collections do not contain letters that had somehow played a part in real correspondence; of paramount importance is the autobiographical impulse behind the collection. One must always take into account that during the composition of a collection, letters may be severely changed and rewritten, or sometimes even newly written, such as in the collections of Petrarca, Pliny the Younger, Veronica Franco (1580), and Bettina von Arnim (1835). When the original letters of the actual correspondence are also preserved, the differences between original and edited letters may become evident, such as with the Briefwechsel [‘Correspondence’] between Goethe and Schiller, which was edited and published by Goethe (1828), or with a couple of Petrarca’s and Erasmus’s letters. Publication does not always mean the same thing in different historical periods. Before the introduction of the printing press (ca. 1450), the publication of texts always took place in manu­ script form. The author’s decision to publish was equivalent to his allowing copies to be taken from his work. In the era of the printed book, the manuscript state of letters may point to a more private use. Until ca. 1540, epistolary autobiography was mostly in Latin; from the sixteenth century on, it also took shape in the vernacular languages, first in French and Italian, and then in a number of others as well. It is important to note that epistolary autobiography is not simply the equivalent of a so-called ‘ego-document’ in the form of a letter. The definition of ‘ego-document’ is much broader; it refers to a large category of historical documents that include all kinds of traces (especially written ones) left by individuals. In fact, any letter by a certain person may be regarded as an ego-document. Epistolary autobiography is regarded here exclusively in the sense of literary writing, as one of the forms and genres of autobiography. Although in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries a private and confidential char­ acter was ascribed to correspondence among friends, this feature is ambiguous; at the

3.16 Epistolary Autobiography 

 567

same time, everybody knew that such letters were often intended for a bigger audi­ ence of contemporary and future readers. This is especially true for humanist episto­ lography: in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was general practice for letters addressed to a certain friend to be read aloud by the addressee to his circle of friends and acquaintances. However, some authors – for example, Erasmus, Lipsius, and J. J. Scaliger – deliberately used the fictive private character of letters addressed to close friends as proof of the trustworthiness of their autobiographical account. This strategy was applied especially in ‘difficult’ cases: i.  e., with respect to autobiographical facts that were unfavourable to their authors or were extremely difficult to explain, such as in the case of Erasmus’s birth as an illegitimate child of a priest who maintained a sinful relationship with a concubine (Erasmus’s mother), or in the case of Scaliger’s (false) claim of nobility. Epistolary autobiography as a genre was constituted in classical Latin litera­ ture, with a number of influential inventions by Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Pliny the Younger. In Greek literature there seems to have been comparatively little interest in this genre (with perhaps the exception of Plato’s Seventh Letter, the authenticity of which is disputed). One of antiquity’s most fruitful writers of letters with autobio­ graphical content was the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), although it remains unclear how many of his letters he wanted to have published, and in what ways. Cicero left some 900 letters, which deal with his private life and times and cover the years from 68 to 43 BCE. Cicero obviously consented to the publication of a small selection of his letters (some 70). The majority of the letters are the remains of Cicero’s actual correspondence and contain an enormous number of confidential political statements which might have been embarrassing had they been revealed to a larger audience. However, as a sign of personal veneration, Cicero’s 900 letters were published posthumously by his close friend Atticus, in four collections (Ad familiares [‘Letters to his friends’]; Ad Atticum [‘Letters to Atticus’]; Ad Quintum fratrem [‘Letters to brother Quintus’]; and Ad M. Brutum [‘Letters to Brutus’]). In this way Cicero’s collections of letters appeared as an autobiographical monument. Some later Roman writers were inspired by them (Pliny the Younger, Sidonius Apollinaris), and in Renaissance humanism they turned out to be of paramount importance for the (re)invention of epistolary autobiography. As author and editor, the inventor of epistolary autobiography in the form of a collection of prose letters was probably the Roman politician and intellectual Pliny the Younger (born ca. 61 CE), who edited and published a collection of 247 well-com­ posed ‘private’ letters in nine books (after the nine Muses) covering the years 98 until ca. 114 CE. Although a number of Pliny’s letters go back to his real correspondence, the majority clearly reflect a literary and autobiographical ambition, which seems to have been present from the outset. The contents and style of the letters show that Pliny always had a large audience in mind, for example when he reflects on literature, rhetoric, and visual arts; habits and morals; trends and styles; active and contempla­ tive life; country houses and the urban jungle; spare time and obligations; history

568 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

and storytelling; rumours and truth; official events and private dinner parties; etc. Pliny’s letters also include lengthy and aesthetically brilliant descriptions, e.  g. of his villas and gardens, the miraculous behaviour of a tame dolphin, the appearance of a ghost, or the eruption of Vesuvius, which caused the death of his uncle Pliny the Elder. Many of his literary, moral, aesthetic, and philosophical statements would not work in the context of a real correspondence. Pliny’s collection of letters constitutes a well-thought-out literary self-expression and self-presentation in which he deliber­ ately tries to shed light on various aspects of his personality. The idea for his literary self-portrait probably originated from Cicero’s letters, but he shaped it in a way totally different from Cicero. Pliny’s letters are never spontaneous reactions to daily events in colloquial language, but are always well-thought-out artistic miniature paintings that demonstrate the skills of their author with respect to autobiographical style and composition. Interestingly, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Pliny’s epis­ tolary autobiography was despised because it did not meet readers’ expectations of autobiography – which was supposed to be the most authentic, spontaneous, and ‘real’ form of writing. Two important Roman poets founded different forms of epistolary autobiography in verse, Horace (65–8 BCE) and Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE). Horace is the inventor of hex­ ametrical epistolary autobiography. He published two books of letters (Epistulae), in 20 and 14 BCE, respectively. Horace’s Epistulae, addressed to his friends, are a mixture of autobiographical self-presentation, philosophical and moral self-reflection, criti­ cism of his contemporaries, and moral or aesthetic self-definition. Horace meditates on a great number of topics, varying from social and material life to philosophical questions, country life to urban life, inspired poetic authorship to writers block, aes­ thetic judgements to down-to-earth interests of ordinary people, always in a kind of inner dialogue. Horace describes many scenes from daily life, in which he partakes as an actor or viewer, and he reflects on them. Often the addressees only implicitly partake in the author’s meditations. The attractive peculiarity of this self-portrait is the constant switch of levels of thought, and approaches: serious philosophical med­ itations are mixed with urban irony, sarcasm, and no-nonsense attitudes. As a matter of course, this metrical epistolary autobiography is solely literary and has little in common with a real correspondence. The famous love poet Ovid invented the subgenre of the fictive ‘Letter to Posterity’ in metrical format (Tristia IV, 10). His ‘Letter to Posterity’ is part of a large collection of elegies (Tristia/Sorrows or Lamentations, five books) written in exile at Tomi on the Black Sea, where he was banished by Emperor Augustus in 8 CE, officially with the charge of having authored immoral poems that provoked adultery, but in fact because he was suspected of having partaken in a conspiracy against the Emperor. Ovid artfully developed the metrical autobiographical letter from the Hellenistic poetical practice of the σφραγίς (sphragis, seal); in the ‘sphragis’ poets revealed their identity through a few autobiographical lines. Ovid’s attractive idea was to extend the few lines of ‘sphragis’ to a wholesale autobiography, in which he describes his life from his birth

3.16 Epistolary Autobiography 

 569

to the time of writing. This elaborate autobiography suits the Tristia collection very well with respect to its entire autobiographical content: in the elegies Ovid describes his miserable life and state of mind in faraway exile; his sadness; his depressive mood, close to suicide; his desire to see his beloved wife, family, and friends; and his bitter remembrances of his former joyful existence in Rome as a glorious writer. It makes sense to understand all the poems of the collection as metrical letters addressed to the poet’s grieving wife, close friends, patrons in Rome, and, in some cases, to the Emperor himself; the proper autobiography (IV, 10), however, was clearly conceived as a letter, as is apparent from its first lines: “Ille ego qui fuerim, tenerorum lusor amorum,/Quem legis, ut noris, accipe posteritas” [“That you mayst know who I was, I that playful poet of tender love whom thou read, hear my words, posterity”]. In his autobiographical letter Ovid describes his youth and his life in Rome, including the circles of his fellow poets, such as Tibullus, Propertius, and Vergil; the deaths of his brother and father; his marriage; his fatal ‘error’ that caused his fall; and his miser­ able life and mental condition in Tomi. It is crucial for the interpretation of Ovid’s epistolary autobiography to understand his subtle applications of the rules of elegy to life-writing. The philosopher Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BCE–65 CE), with his Ad Helviam matrem de consolatione [‘To mother Helvia on consolation’], written in ca. 42/43 CE, probably authored the first example of an autobiographical ‘letter of consolation’. This work too is connected with exile: Seneca deals with his condemnation in 41 CE after a charge of adultery – with Julia Livilla, the sister of Emperor Caligula – and his subsequent banishment to the island of Corsica. Seneca describes his state of mind in exile in a way totally different from Ovid: Seneca maintains that he has no hard feelings; that he is not depressive, but rather mentally healthy, unbroken, and joyful; and that he does not suffer from any physical or social shortcomings – he even claims to be living under the best circumstances ever, since he is now devoid of all distracting preoccupations and has room for his proper activities, i.  e., for study of nature and philosophy. The result is, of course, a biased self-portrait. The author tries to persuade himself and his mother – mostly with Stoic arguments – that his life is not shattered, that outward circumstances do not have any influence on the philosopher’s mind, and that the only true good is spiritual; therefore, exile itself bears nothing shameful or harmful. In late antiquity (fourth to fifth centuries), a couple of letter writers, such as Sym­ machus and Sidonius Apollinaris, were inspired by Pliny the Younger and/or Cicero. The Roman statesman and champion of pagan religion Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (ca. 345–402) left an enormous corpus of some 900 letters (in 10 books) about both private and political matters. The first book was edited by Symmachus himself, the others by his son Fabius and other family members. The first book is above all dedi­ cated to the self-presentation of a Roman noble man in his social network of friends, family members, and fellow politicians. Another aristocrat, Sidonius Apollinaris of Lyon (ca. 430–489), composed and published his private letters after the example

570 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

of Pliny the Younger, in nine books. Similarly to Pliny, Sidonius carefully chose the topics in order to paint a convincing, kaleidoscopic self-portrait. Sidonius represents an interesting case, since he published his collection of letters only after he converted to the Christian religion and became a bishop in 470/472. The first book is autobio­ graphical in a special sense, since it solely treats a ‘closed’ period of Sidonius’s life, his life as a pagan (until 469). Sidonius imitates Pliny’s epistolary autobiography also in the sense that he elaborates on similar autobiographical topics, e.  g. the description of his villa (Avitacum), private affairs, friendship and family matters, travels (e.  g. to Rome), the description of places (Ravenna), etc. A considerable number of Christian authors left correspondence as well, such as Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, and Cyprian, but they are mostly focused on theological (apologetic) and ecclesiastical matters, not on autobiographical self-presentation. Accounts of conversions, however, form an exception; they are sometimes told in autobiographical letters, for example by Paulinus of Nola (ca. 354–431), a nobleman from Gaul. In the Middle Ages, because of the ubiquitous religious ideology of humility, there was generally little interest in engaging in autobiographical accounts, and this, of course, also goes for epistolary autobiography. There are, however, a few exceptions, the most noteworthy being the French scholastic philosopher Abelard (1079–1142), who left a veritable autobiography, Historia calamitatum ad Amicum suum consolatoria [‘History of his Misfortunes, a Letter of Consolation to his Friend’] (ca. 1132). In doing so, Abelard probably authored the first epistolary autobiography in the form of a single letter, by resuming Seneca’s invention of autobiographical writing as a letter of consolation, albeit in a different way. Abelard pretends to console his friend with his autobiography by comparison: if the friend – and, of course, the reader – came to know about the author’s disastrous misfortunes, he would understand that his own are comparatively small. Unlike Seneca, Abelard’s addressee is fictive, and the author’s consolatory intention seems questionable. The content of the letter, however, is spectacular. In telling the story of his life, Abelard does not refrain from breaking all kinds of social and religious taboos: he describes in detail his scandalous love affair with the girl Heloise, 20 years his junior, which resulted in the birth of the illegal child Astrolabe (i.  e., ‘fallen from the stars’); his castration by the girl’s outraged rela­ tives; his forced entry into monastic life because of his sexual escapades; the succes­ sive enmities he experienced as an involuntary monk from his abbots, fellow monks, and bishops; the censorship imposed on him as a theologian who was accused of heresy and whose books were burned, etc. Throughout his autobiographical account, Abelard emphasises the cruelty of the persecutions he had to face, to the point of comparing them with the ones of Christ. In Renaissance humanism, epistolary autobiography was as its heyday (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries), as letter writing in general was among the favourite genres of humanists. Almost every humanist composed Latin letters, and many of them col­ lected, edited, and published their correspondence. Epistolary autobiography ben­ efited from the contemporary practice, which embraced the Latin letter as the most

3.16 Epistolary Autobiography 

 571

important means of communication in the so-called ‘Republic of Letters’: to have a correspondence in Latin was to truly participate in the community of scholars and intellectuals, and this was in fact a sine qua non to be taken seriously as an author. Hence, epistolary autobiography gained enormous importance in the fifteenth–sev­ enteenth centuries. Reputation and personal fame were the basic ingredients of the humanists’ existence, and both could be obtained by epistolary self-representation in a network of humanist ‘friends’. Moreover, the majority of the humanists – in a marked difference from mediaeval intellectuals – acknowledged autobiographical writing as a legitimate form of literature and self-expression, and autobiography as a legitimate purpose of letter-writing. The amount of texts in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries is enormous, and it is completely impossible to give an adequate overview of them in a short article. An average humanist easily composed more than 100 Latin letters, and many humanists published them in their collections. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, hundreds of Latin letter collections are preserved, either in print or in manuscript. The majority of them lack modern or critical editions. In the present article, we must limit ourselves to a few examples that may serve as paradigms for a widespread literary genre. In a typical humanist collection of epistolary autobiography, the author depicts himself as interacting socially with his humanist correspondents, according to the codes of the Republic of Letters. In a sense similar to Pliny and Sidonius, he presents well-chosen aspects of his personality. He reveals details about his education, fields of interest, reading, and learning, as well as his teachers, students, enemies, and patrons; sometimes he may give a glimpse of his intellectual development or progress in scholarship. He gives accounts of his travels and describes the places he visited and the people he met; friends, scholarly leisure, and literary projects are always important topics. He gives a sketch of his lifestyle and describes his study, book col­ lection, ‘museum’, or country house (if he owns one), as, for example, Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Symmachus, and Sidonius had done. He discusses questions of literary style, rhetorical composition, and textual criticism, but he also talks about his offi­ cial positions and his obligations, e.  g. at courts, city councils, universities, grammar schools, or as a private teacher. He includes major events of his life, his successes and failures, and things he hopes for and those he is afraid of; sometimes he may go into events of a historical dimension, e.  g. warfare, the death of rulers, or the election of emperors and popes. Generally, letters that deal with childhood and youth, are often composed in hindsight, and in this sense they are fictive. Most humanists com­ posed their collection of letters only after they obtained a certain position, either in the Republic of Letters or in society at large. Humanist epistolary autobiography starts with Francesco Petrarca. In 1345 Petrarca discovered a manuscript with Cicero’s letters Ad Atticum [‘To Atticus’], which inspired him to compose a similar collection of autobiographical letters (Familiares res [‘Private matters’], 24 books), followed by another one (Seniles res [‘Matters of old age’], 18 books). In total, Petrarca wrote about 450 Latin letters. The Familiarium

572 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

rerum was a groundbreaking literary invention. Although Petrarca insists on the fact that Cicero is his literary example, his letters are of a totally different quality, as they rarely deal with ephemeral matters, rumours, or political struggles, and are never written in a colloquial style. The concept of the whole collection is autobiographical. At the age of about 45, just after the disastrous Black Death of 1349, Petrarca aims at transmitting to posterity a complete picture of his mind, partly in retrospective, and he carefully chose accordingly certain of those topics that he considered characteristic of his personality: his admiration of the ancients; his love of the city of Rome, philol­ ogy, philosophy, contemplative life, and his country estate in Vaucluse; his dislike of cities, especially Avignon (the place of the papal curia in his time); the importance he attached to friendship and travelling; his coronation as poet laureate; and his reli­ gious conversion. Petrarca’s prose letters had an enormous impact on the generations of humanists to come: from Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), Pier Paolo Vergerio (1370–1344), Leonardo Bruni (1369/1370–1444), and Poggio Bracciolini on, many of them composed autobio­ graphical collections of private letters. There are, however, remarkable differences in style, contents, narrative, and overall composition. Petrarca’s Latin style was highly literary and even contained ‘poetic’ words taken from Vergil and Horace; his autobi­ ographical constructions were extremely artful as well, always based on spiritual or intellectual concepts, and sometimes veiled in allegory or symbolism. For example, his ascension of Mont Ventoux (Familares res IV, 1) is an artful allegory of his spiritual development, with a fictive conversion on the mountaintop. Other humanists, such as Poggio, preferred a more down-to-earth or realistic approach: Poggio introduced into epistolary autobiography a simple, spontaneous, and colloquial style in which he tried to imitate Cicero’s letters. With respect to content, he tried to imitate the spon­ taneity of real life: for example, in each letter Poggio dealt with a couple of different items, in order to equalise real epistolary practice. Poggio surely wanted to give a literary self-portrait, but a more natural and dialogical one than Petrarca. Whereas Petrarca engaged in thoughtful, intellectual, and spiritual self-constructions, Poggio wanted to transmit to posterity in fact “quicquid in buccam venerat” (“whatever came to his mind”, in Epistolarum liber ad Nicolaum Nicolum [‘Book of the letters to Niccolò Nicoli’], letter 1, p. 3) – a programmatic phrase that went back to Cicero’s letters; and of course it went along with this self-portrait to think in Latin, even about daily matters. Poggio’s Latin ‘mind-mapping’ was highly appreciated by some of his contemporaries, although others heavily criticised it. In his epistolary autobiography in eight books, Leonardo Bruni was keen on the lucidity, compendiousness, and consistency of his autobiographical narrative, and he preferred a simple and clear, but elegant and clas­ sical, style. He refrained from colloquialisms and disagreed with Poggio, who in his epistolary hyperrealism had even introduced Italian words into his Latin prose letters. One of the most inventive and successful letter-writers of Italian humanism was Enea Silvio, later Pope Pius II. In a marked difference from Poggio and others, he had no strong preference for Cicero as a model of epistolary autobiography. Enea Silvio

3.16 Epistolary Autobiography 

 573

developed a highly original approach to epistolary autobiography, and a personal epistolary style that did not resemble any of the classical authors. His collections of letters were surely meant as autobiographical monuments; it is no surprise that this writer also authored a proper autobiography, Commentarii, about the years of his papacy (1458–1464), whereas his collections of letters covered his earlier life as a layman, bishop, and cardinal. Enea Silvio’s special strength was his ability to con­ struct substantial, highly vivid narratives of the various events of his fascinating life as a diplomat; papal, royal, and imperial secretary; clergyman; bishop; and cardinal. Another novelty in epistolary autobiography was his beautiful descriptions of land­ scapes, towns, and buildings, ceremonies and feasts, etc. Sometimes it seems that his autobiographical ‘I’ constitutes itself only through a profound descriptive mastery of the world. Enea Silvio’s letters cover a broad spectrum of personal experiences, from high politics to love affairs; from theological conversations to earthly and simple pleasures, such as enjoying a breeze on his skin or drinking a glass of wine; from dangerous situations in which he struggled for survival to the sweet leisure of country life. Another influential and innovative author of an autobiographical correspondence was the Florentine Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494). He published his impressive collec­ tion of 250 letters in 12 books in manuscript form in 1494, which shortly afterwards appeared in print (1498). Poliziano presented himself as an icon of humanism by including many letters of those contemporaries who loved and venerated him. Poli­ ziano emphasises the personal, kaleidoscopic, often self-contradictory, and dialogic character of epistolary autobiography. Although ‘imitatio veterum’ [‘imitation of the ancient authors’] certainly played a role, he considered it of the highest importance not to be indebted to a single literary example. His style is eclectic and mirrors learned conversation, but it is never colloquial, as in Cicero’s or Poggio’s letters; he acknowl­ edges the quality of Pliny’s literary letters but prefers a more realistic self-portrait that better reflects his daily scholarly life. Poliziano generally avoids long narratives, the trademark of Enea Silvio’s epistolary autobiography, and engages in literary brevity, which was suggested by Cicero’s and Symmachus’s letters. Some letters are only six to eight lines, and in this sense they are meant to imitate a real correspondence. Italian humanists such as Petrarca, Poggio, Enea Silvio, and Poliziano became famous all over Europe, and in this way they promoted epistolary autobiography as a genre of humanist self-presentation, which began to flourish north of the Alps in the last decennia of the fifteenth century. Among the most important and influen­ tial authors of autobiographical letter collections are the pan-European Dutchman Erasmus, the German Eobanus Hessus (1488–1540), the Frenchman Marc-Antoine Muret (1526–1586), the Scotsman George Buchanan (1506–1582), and Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Erasmus’s correspondence contains the amazing total of about 3200 letters, and a large portion of it was edited and published by Erasmus himself or under his supervision. Erasmus’s collections of letters started to appear in 1518 in various editions, and they cover in fact his whole life as a grown man. Erasmus was inspired

574 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

by Poliziano, and his epistolary autobiography is characterised by a number of Poli­ ziano’s principles. However, Erasmus’s letters are generally much longer and include substantial autobiographical narrative; the range of autobiographical self-presenta­ tion is much bigger, in content as well as style, and his Latin is even more sparkling with original brilliance. In his epistolary autobiography, Erasmus depicts himself in his leading position in the Republic of Letters, in daily interaction with his impor­ tant correspondents, whose letters he carefully included. Through in-depth accounts of his intellectual activities he constructed a new and impressive authorisation of authorship. Lipsius’s epistolary collections, which contain hundreds of Latin letters, display new qualities: above all, a certain sprezzatura with respect to content, and a unique Latin style, in which he tried to surpass all other epistolary styles to date in inventive brilliance, ingenious brevity, and the use of rare Latin words. His epistolary autobiography in fact includes all topics, far more than those of many of his predeces­ sors, including purely material things, such as his body, the symptoms of his many illnesses, even unimportant ones (flu, dysentery), gardening, his dogs, the disastrous destruction that accompanied the Dutch Revolt, and his psychological state of mind, including attacks of despair and depression. From the sixteenth century on, autobiographical collections of letters were also composed in other European languages, first in Italian and in French. As with the Latin collections, the amount of authors and texts in these languages is immense. In general, the French and Italian collections take over many features from the humanist ones. Similar to the Latin collections, the Italian ones often have the title Lettere familari [‘Letters to friends’]. There are, however, a number of new developments. Some authors made the breaking of social, literary, and other taboos the guiding principle of their epistolary autobiography, and they included more emotional aspects of their per­ sonality – for example, the Venetian writer and sexual omnivore Pietro Aretino (1492– 1556) and the North Italian poet and philosopher Jacopo Bonfadio (born 1508–?), who was condemned for sodomy, beheaded, and burned. Aretino’s authorship especially consisted of an extremely arrogant attitude, in which he talked in his letters in an embarrassingly disrespectful way to the rulers of the earth, the emperor, the pope, kings, etc. His trademark was a woodcut author’s portrait on the title page, with the inscription “il divino Pietro Aretino” [“the divine Pietro the Aretine”]. In his letters he described his many sexual escapades and depicted himself as a kind of Don Juan. The portrait of his mind also contains other embarrassing elements, such as his inclina­ tion to unbridled attacks of anger; he depicts himself as a furioso ready to attack, even kill, everybody who dares to insult him. Jacopo Bonfadio’s epistolary autobiography, a literary collection of letters, is entirely dedicated to the description of the author’s depressive and melancholic mind, full of doubts about himself and his ability to cope with the hardships of ordinary life, and with his introvert misanthropy. In a sense, Bonfadio’s epistolary autobiography is the inversion of Seneca’s consolatory letter Ad Helviam matrem [‘To Helvia on consolation’]: he demonstrates in detail that no kind of consolation works out.

3.16 Epistolary Autobiography 

 575

Another interesting novelty of vernacular epistolary autobiography is the inclu­ sion of female writers. For example, the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco com­ posed an elaborate self-portrait in her Lettere familiari, published in 1580, in which she styled herself as an honest and trustworthy person who fully partakes in the social life of the elite. Interestingly, in her letters she mostly takes the part of the philosopher Seneca, who consoled his addressee. In a marked difference from Seneca, however, she suppressed the names of her addressees, for reasons of discretion. This also differs from the autobiographical practice of the correspondence of humanists, who usually constitute their personality through a network of important friends. Throughout her literary self-portrait, Veronica Franco emphasises her honest friendship and sincere emotional attitude to her correspondents. This feature had been a pivotal element of many humanist familiar letters. In the case of a woman and a courtesan, however, it has a specific function: through the description of her ‘vero affetto’ she constitutes herself not only as a socially respectable person, but also as an author who deserves to be taken seriously. On the one hand, she instrumentalised an important code of humanist epistolary autobiography in order to establish female authorship. On the other hand, she reshaped this code by ‘female’ features: Franco’s letters of conso­ lation are devoid of harsh, ‘male’, and heroic Stoicism, and display more sensitiv­ ity, understanding, and practical realism. Bettina von Arnim (Brentano, 1785–1759), a female writer of the Romantic period, also constructed herself by the publication of a correspondence with Goethe. Her Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, pub­ lished in 1835 [Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child (1837)], immediately made her famous. Bettina von Arnim presented her correspondence as authentic. However, the majority of her letters were fictive and full of wishful fantasy. Also, her self-fash­ ioning as a child includes fictive elements: at the time of the ‘real’ correspondence, she was 22–26 years old, and when she actually wrote the large part of the letters, she was about 50 years old. Bettina von Arnim was possibly inspired by the enor­ mous success of epistolary novels in the eighteenth century, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) [Julie, or the New Heloise]. Rousseau maintained that he was only the editor, not the author, of these letters, and, as the reactions show, many of his deeply emotionally touched contemporaries believed that. For writers of the ‘Deutsche Klassik’ [‘German Classicism’], such as Goethe, Chris­ toph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), and Jean Paul, letter-writing remained an important medium of autobiographical self-expression. All of the above-mentioned writers left more than 10,000 letters. For example, Goethe’s edition of his Briefwechsel [‘Corre­ spondence’] with Schiller (1828), which contained more than 900 letters, was con­ ceived as an autobiographical monument in order to represent a certain period of his life. For Jean Paul, even the most private letters were written for a large readership; in his view, letters were in fact nothing other than small books. In the nineteenth and in the first part of the twentieth century, the collection and edition of correspond­ ence still remained enormously important. In his repertory Briefsammlungen des

576 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

19. Jahrhunderts [‘Collections of correspondences of the 19th century’], Fritz Schlawe registered no fewer than 1360 collections between 1815 and 1915. Thomas Mann wrote about 25,000 to 30,000 letters, and Hermann Hesse some 35,000. In the autobiograph­ ical letters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emotional and psychological aspects, inner life, individualistic idiosyncrasies, and aesthetic judgements play a more important role than they did, for example, in the Latin correspondence of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Following the example of Ovid’s Tristia, many humanists composed autobio­ graphical epistolary elegies, including the Italian poets Giovanni Pontano (1426– 1503) and Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530), the Hungarian Janus Pannonius (i.  e., Ivan Česmički, 1434–1472), the Dutchman Janus Secundus (i.  e., Jan Everaerts, 1511–1536), and the German Petrus Lotichius Secundus (1528–1560). These elegies are addressed to their friends, patrons, relatives, and loves. The most striking aspect is the way in which a considerable number of humanist poets ‘inscribed’ their life into Ovid’s exile. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europe seems to abound with poets in exile, whereas in real life hardly any of them were banished. The poets eagerly searched for situations that could serve as the equivalent of exile: travels, moving from one’s place of birth to another town or country, service in war, unfulfilled love, illness, or loss of poetic inspiration. For example, Pontano, the prime minister of the King of Naples, described his experiences in a military campaign in Northern Italy in autobiograph­ ical elegiac epistles to his beloved wife, Ariana Sassone. Janus Pannonius depicted himself as being in a kind of desperate inner exile caused by a severe illness, which led to his premature death at the age of 38. Petrus Lotichius Secundus found his exile in the military campaign of the Schmalkaldian war (1546–1547), in which he partici­ pated as a soldier on the side of the Protestants. In his epistolary elegies addressed to his friends he vividly depicts his experiences in war and his miserable state of mind, shattered by anxiety and fear, and tormented by loneliness, homesickness, and loss of identity. Sannazaro construed his inner exile as a – maintained – total loss of poetic inspiration, and thus of identity, in an elegiac epistolary autobiography addressed to his platonic friend Cassandra Marchese. A special subgenre in which some humanists, such as the German poets Eobanus Hessus and Joannes Fabricius (Schmid, 1565), engaged is the “Letter to Posterity” − a complete ‘Vita’ in verse. The very young poet Hessus legitimised the authorship of his Heroides Christianae [‘Letters of Christian Heroines’] through a bold poetic contest with Ovid’s letter to posterity, Tristia IV, 10. In his epistolary autobiography, young Hessus surpasses his example Ovid in every respect: he maintains that he wrote his first Latin poems at a younger age than Ovid; that in his education, career, and as a lover he was more successful than Ovid; and that his appearance was more beauti­ ful than Ovid’s. Petrarca transformed Ovid’s epistolary autobiography in verse into a prose one (Epistola posteritati, [‘Letter to Posterity’] [ca. 1370]). As a prose letter, the “Letter to Posterity” is still used in modern times, for example by Dennis Wheatley (1947), who placed his last manifesto in a bottle buried in his garden, or the American

3.16 Epistolary Autobiography 

 577

philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013). Danto constructed his “Letter to Posterity” (2012) as a close imitation of Petrarca’s: I was born on January 1, 1924, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My birthday perhaps explains my inde­ fensible optimism. Each year opens on a new page, for me as well as for the world. I have always enjoyed the age I was, excepting my adolescence, when the fact that I was born a philoso­ pher muddled my life without my knowing why. I enjoy being 88, despite not having achieved wisdom […].

Works Cited Ovid. Tristia, Ex Ponto. Trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 5th ed. 1975. Petrarca, Francesco. Le familiari. Edizione critica per cura di Vittorio Rossi. 4 vols. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1933–1948. Bracciolini, Poggio. Lettere. Vol. I: Lettere a Niccolò Nicoli. Florence: Leo. S. Olschki, 1984. Seneca. Essays. Vol. II. Trans. John W. Bashore. London/Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 4th ed. 1958.

Further Reading Brower, Jeffrey E., and Kevin Guilfoy, eds. The Cambridge companion to Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Enenkel, Karl A. E. Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Enenkel, Karl A. E. “Rhetorische Strategien und Interpretation von Ovid, Tristia IV, 10.” Ad Litteras. Latin Studies in Honour of J. H. Brouwers. Ed. Arpád P. Orbán and Marc G. M. van der Poel. Nijmwegen: Nijmwegen University Press, 2001. 113–130. Enenkel, Karl A. E. “Modelling the Humanist: Petrarch’s ‘Letter to Posterity’ and Boccaccio’s Biography of the Poet Laureate.” Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance. With a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity. Ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel, Betsy de JongCrane and Peter Liebregts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 11–50 and 243–281. Fellinger, Raimund. Der Brief. Kunstwerk und Mitteilung. Frankfurt a.  M.: Insel, 2006. Houdt, Toon van, Jan Papy, Gilbert Tournoy, and Constant Mattheeussen, eds. Self-Presentation and Social Identification. The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002. Köhn, Rolf. “Autobiographie und Selbststilisierung in Briefsammlungen des lateinischen Mittel­ alters. Peter von Blois und Francesco Petrarca.” Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter. Ed. Jan Adrianus Aertsen. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996. 683–703. Kormann, Eva. Ich, Welt und Gott. Autobiographik im 17. Jahrhundert. Köln: Böhlau, 2004. Küppers, Jochem. “Autobiographisches in den Briefen des Sidonius Apollinaris.” Antike Autobiographien. Werke – Epochen – Gattungen. Ed. Michael Reichel. Weimar/Köln/Wien: Böhlau, 2005. 251–277. Müller, Wolfgang. “Der Brief als Spiegel der Seele. Zur Geschichte eines Topos der Epistolartheorie von der Antike bis zu Samuel Richardson.” Antike und Abendland 26 (1980): 138–157. Ortner-Buchberger, Claudia. Briefe schreiben im 16. Jahrhundert. Formen und Funktionen des epistolaren Diskurses in den italienischen Libri di lettere. München: Fink 2003.

578 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Ray, Meredith K. Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Schmolinsky, Sabine. Sich schreiben in der Welt des Mittelalters. Begriffe und Konturen einer mediävistischen Selbstzeugnisforschung. Bochum: Winkler, 2012. Schöttker, Detlev. Adressat Nachwelt. Briefkultur und Ruhmbildung. München: Fink, 2008. Thamm, Angela. Romantische Inszenierungen in Briefen. Der Lebenstext der Bettine von Arnim geb. Brentano. Berlin: Saint Albin Verlag, 2000. Vaillancourt, Luc. La lettre familière au XVIe siècle: Rhétorique humaniste de l’épistolaire. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003.

3.17 Epitaph

Salvatore Pisani and Katharina Siebenmorgen

Definition Epitaphs (from Greek ἐπιτάφιοv, epitaphion, ‘writing on a tomb’) may be considered as identity-affirming accounts of an individual’s past, perpetuating, through commemo­ ration, the ego beyond death. An epitaph retrospectively sums up the life of the dead in terse and concise text either in prose or verse (often in one single distich form). It is inscribed on a tombstone or mortuary monument, but also used figuratively for any literary artefact imitating a sepulchral inscription as though it could be placed on a grave. Since at least Renaissance humanism in German the term refers as well to the sepulchral monument bearing such an inscription, which, unlike the tomb, is not necessarily located at the burial place. Elaborate monuments with sophisticated architecture, rich pictorial decoration and increasingly lengthy inscriptions, often in Latin, are created for notable people; especially during the Baroque period. Both the artistic design and the panegyric words praising the dead tell of their high social status and prestige. It is the public concern that is paramount, as these monuments allow a single individual to live on in the collective memory of the group due to their meritorious life as shaped in the form of exemplary biography or mediated through iconographic programs. In its particular form as self-epitaph the genre provides a blueprint for autobiographical self-thematization. Lastly, but not least, research on autobiography is concerned where it focuses on the notion of autobiography as an epitaph or monument to a past life, based on the “fiction of a voice-from-beyond-the grave” (de Man 1984, 77).

Explication There is already evidence of this type of monumental discourse during the Old Kingdom in Egypt. Funeral inscriptions giving voice to the dead can be found in Ancient Egyp­ tian tombs of high government officials. They are considered to be the first manifes­ tation of (auto-)biographical writing. Usually formed as first-person accounts, though written by someone other than the protagonist, these funeral texts claim a personal self that is distinguished by the fact of owning a history. The use of the tomb as a site for self-presentation shows the close link between funerary cult, history/continuation and literature (Assmann 1983 and 1987). Real or fictional, epigraphic or paper epitaph, tied to one fixed place or wandering almost autonomously on the white surface of a page, epitaphs in their entirety allow us to think that, even in death, we are not all https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-073

580 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

equal. Epitaphs are different in content and ambition not only from era to era, culture to culture, but also from person to person. They range from the simple mention of the name and dates of birth and death (a sort of minimal biography) to detailed eulo­ gies and express contemporary ideas about the relationship between life and death, individual and social identity as well as the rhetoric tradition. What they share is the ubiquitous desire to perpetuate the memory of the dead. The (auto-)biographical inscription turns an anonymous sepulcher into a speaking stone (see the expression introduced by Tristan the Hermit [1601–1655] in his sonnet “À des cimetières” [‘On cemeteries’]: Tristan 1633, 103) that acts as the sign of an individual’s identification and the place of discourse in which the deceased, as though immortalized, tells the story of their life and destiny. This results in the illusion of an encounter with the absent tomb owner and corresponds rhetorically to the figure of prosopopoeia. Early Modern Poetics refers to the conventions of the genre as established in the Greco-Roman tradition. With regard to content and form it seeks to maintain the qualities of the (sepulchral) epigram and to narrow overlapping with the elegiac epicedium, the beginnings of which reach back to dirges (lamenting funeral songs). A characteristic feature is the so-called lapidary style, which combines brevity with terse complexity. This literally reflects the demands the original writing surface places on the inscriber (lat. lapidarius, ‘belonging to the stones’, ‘carved in stones’). Hard to work and limited in writing space the (tomb)stone requires short testimony which formulates its statement aptly and irrevocably. Moreover, incisive brevity enhances the retention of the message and marks the epitaph as a medium for memory that relies on commemorative repetition. As means of mnemonics even rhyme and meter can be seen in this context. Motifs such as the conventional ‘hic iacet’ [‘here lies’] and the direct apostrophe to the passerby (‘siste, viator’, ‘stop, traveller’) solicit the reader’s attention by rhetorically producing an effect of presence, where a name only is left. The classical form is therefore that of a funerary inscription, in which the dead addresses the living, such as in the two famous lines on the Spartans fallen at Ther­ mopylae that Cicero has attributed to Simonides, the inventor of the art of memory: “Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι“ [“Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie”] (Herodot, 2011, 7, 228 [Ratcliffe, 2010, 155]). Referring to the long tradition of greetings that seem aimed by the dead toward posterity is also Poussin’s painting “Les Bergers d’Arcadie” (1638/1639, Paris, Louvre) [‘Arcadian Shepherds’]. In a bucolic setting, Virgil’s Arcadia, shepherds discover a grave whose inscription reads ambiguously ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ [‚Even in Arcadia, me’; ‚In Arcadia, me too’]. The picture illustrates once again the obvious interrelation, at least in the Western tradition, between rep­ resentation and absence. However, it stresses the focus on the reader, who is intended to give the enigmatic ‘voice’ displayed in the inscription a ‘face’, just as the orphan boy Pip in the well-known opening of Charles Dickens’ novel Great expectations (1861) seeks to visualize who his parents were simply from the shape of the letters on their tombstones.

3.17 Epitaph 

 581

Occasional poetry (‘Gelegenheitsdichtung’) in the beginning, the epitaph does not take long to diverge from the conventional. Enriched with imagery from poets and phrases chosen from rhetoricians, in Greek antiquity already it can be valued as an aes­ thetic artefact in its own right. Since the late fourth century BCE, inscribed epigrams are more frequently signed, following Ion of Samos who might be the first epigram­ mist naming himself on the inscriptional stone. In Hellenism we can also find the first occurrence of poets, who write artful self-epitaphs, such as a sepulchral epigram of the Hellenist poetess Nossis, who lived around 300 BCE, that tells her name and origin and claims for herself equality with Sappho. Since self-affirmation of poets strongly relies on this kind of writing exercise, the genre will soon be a standardized element in poets’ biographies. Yet Wisława Szymborska, in her poem “Nagrobek” [“Epitaph”] (1962), uses the tradition to call herself by name and, by the way, to ingeniously summarize the genre: “Przechodniu, wyjmij z teczki mózg elektronowy/i nad losem ­Szymborskiej podumaj przez chwilę“ [“Passerby, take out your compact Compu-Brain and try to weigh Szymborska’s fate for half a minute”] (Szymborska, 1970, 83 [1998, 52]). A well-known manifestation of an epitaph that records for all times the identity of the deceased as revealed at the end of life, is the inscription on the Piedigrotta Colum­ barium, the so called tomb of Virgil, in Naples (Italy), that for a long time was thought to have been written by himself: “Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Par­ thenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces” [‘Mantua gave me birth; I died in Calabria; and now I rest at Parthenope, I sang of pastures, farms and leaders’] (Pisani 2015). In late antiquity and the Middle Ages the ancient Greco-Roman repertoire of forms and motifs is adapted to Christian virtues and conceptions of the afterlife. Differences in the textual program reflect these changes. While Christian epitaphs still serve a commemorative function, they now reflect the fear of death and the pains expected to be endured in afterlife by explicitly engaging in prayer and requiring intercession for the benefit of the soul of the departed. The fact that commemoration and prayer for the dead is intensified on anniversaries of their death might explain why tomb inscrip­ tions in the early and high Middle Ages often tell the day of death, but rarely the year. ‘Memento mori’-phrases such as the chiastic formula recurring on grave stones until the nineteenth century: “As you are now, so once was I,/As I am now, soon you must be”, can be traced back to the epitaph that Alcuin probably wrote for himself shortly before his death in 804 (Alcuin 1881, 350; see Ratcliffe 2010, 154). Renaissance humanists have once again loosened the tight link between the genre and the funeral context. While, with the rise of antiquarianism, they fervently collect inscriptions from ancient funeral monuments as both rhetorical models to imitate and tangible ties to the venerated past, leading Italian men of letters of the time write epitaph poems on great men, friends and relatives as well as literary self-epitaphs that in the manner of the sphragis establish the identity of the poet and close a book or poem. They can refer not least to Ovid’s imagined two-distich epitaph, where conclu­ sively he dubs himself “tenerorum lusor amorum” [‘a player of tender love’] (trist. 3, 3, 73–76) (Ovid, 2011, 122), shaping the way future generations look upon his wide-rang­

582 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

ing work. It is rare to find any collection of epigrams from this time where epitaphs are missing. Giovanni Pontano’s “De Tumulis” [‘Grave Mounds’], published in 1505, is the first such anthology of sepulchral poems of the period. While the genre is appealing for self-affirmation in general, because of its lauda­ tory purpose, it is a means for autobiographical individuation in particular because of the specific narcissistic constellation that comes with the writing of one’s own epitaph. The author stands at his own grave, the inscription of which is mediating between both sides – the living and the dead I. Life and death, the two fundamental references of autobiographical discourse, are thus strikingly brought together under putative control. It is hardly surprising, then, that so many people have made, at least an attempt, to compose their personal lines of exit, as many poets did in fact, from Propertius to Donne, from Swift to Yeats, from La Fontaine and Piron to Stendhal (“Arrigo Beyle, Milanese”), not to forget Rilke, Brecht or Faulkner. It is a move intended to prevent Judas from writing the actual epitaph (Guthke 2003, 120). That there is actu­ ally little control has to do with the fact that we all depend upon the performativity of language (and memory) that disfigures just as it figures. Translation: Katharina Siebenmorgen

Works Cited Alcuin. Carmina. Ed. Ernst Dümmler. Berlin: Weidmann, 1881 (= Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Poetae Latini Medii Aevi. Vol. I. 160–351). Assmann, Jan. “Schrift, Tod und Identität. Das Grab als Vorschule der Literatur im alten Ägypten.” Schrift und Gedächtnis. Ed. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann and Christof Hardmeier. München: Fink, 1983. 64–93. Assmann, Jan. “Sepulkrale Selbstthematisierung im Alten Ägypten.” Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis: Bekenntnis und Geständnis. Ed. Alois Hahn and Volker Kapp. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 208–232. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 67–82. Guthke, Karl Siegfried. Epitaph Culture in the West. Variations on a Theme in Cultural History. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. Herodot. Historíai/Historien. 2 vols. Ed. Josef Feix. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2011. Ovid. Tristia. Epistulae ex Ponto/Briefe aus der Verbannung: Lateinisch-Deutsch. Ed. Niklas Holzberg. Mannheim: Artemis & Winkler, 2011. Pisani, Salvatore. “Qui cineres? Vergils Grab am Posillip zwischen literarischer Erinnerung und politischer Mnemo-Topographie.” Et in Arcadia ego. Grab und Memoria im frühen Landschaftsgarten. Ed. Annette Dorgerloh. Paderborn: Fink, 2015. 39–59. Ratcliffe, Susan, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Szymborska, Wisława. Poezje. Warschau: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy‬, 1970‬‬ [Poems New and Collected 1957–1997. Trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998].‬‬

3.17 Epitaph 

 583

Tristan (François Tristan L’Hermite). Les Plaintes d’Acante et Autres Œuvres. Antwerpen: Henry Aertssens, 1633.

Further Reading Braungart, Georg. “Barocke Grabschriften: Zu Begriff und Typologie.” Studien zur Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts. Gedenkschrift für Gerhard Spellerberg (1937–1996). Ed. Hans Feger. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997. 425–487. Hagenbichler, Elfriede. “Epitaph.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Ed. Gerd Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994. 1306–1312. Hermann Wiegand. “Epitaph.” Realexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Vol I. Ed. Klaus Weimar. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1997. 475–476. Marin, Louis. „Toward a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds.” The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman and Inge Crosman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 293–324. Männlein-Robert, Irmgard. “Hellenistische Selbstepitaphien.” Die griechische Biographie in hellenistischer Zeit. Ed. Michael Erler and Stefan Schorn. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2007. 363–383. Panofsky, Erwin. “‘Et in Arcadia Ego’: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition.” Meaning in the Visual Arts. New York: Anchor Books, 1955. 295–320. Petrucci, Armando. Le scritture ultime: Ideologia della morte e strategie dello scrivere nella tradizione occidentale. Turin: Einaudi, 1995 [Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the Western Tradition. Trans. Michael Sullivan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998]. Scodel, Joshua. The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth. Ithaka: Cornell University Press, 1991. Suerbaum, Werner. “Die fiktiven Grabepigramme der republikanischen Dichter (mit Ausblick auf solche der Augusteischen Zeit): Literarhistorische Überlegungen.” Die metrischen Inschriften der römischen Republik. Ed. Peter Kruschwitz. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2007. 63–96. Taylor, Debra. “Epitaphs.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. Chicago/London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. 303–304. Volkmann, Benedikt K. “Inscriptiones.” De litteris, manuscriptis, inscriptionibus … Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Walter Koch. Ed. Theo Kölzer. Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau, 2007. 153–168. Weckwerth, Alfred. “Der Ursprung des Bildepitaphs.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 20 (1957): 147–185.

3.18 Essay

Karin Westerwelle

Definition The essay as generic concept – the term is derived from the French verb ‘essayer’ (to try out, to taste) – is a form of prose writing in which an author undogmatically reflects on subjective experiences of the world that are conveyed in an appealing form. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), author of the Essais (1580, 1588), is credited with the inven­ tion of the literary genre of the essay. The Essais grapple with the subject matter and knowledge of the ancient heritage; they also observe the events and mores of the con­ temporary world. The rediscovery of ancient skepticism leads Montaigne to a radical critique of knowledge, to the renunciation of judgment (‘epoché’), to the creation of multiple perspectives on the self and the world and they endorse the discovery of the possible instead of affirming the factual. At the same time, Montaigne’s Essais are, from the beginning, a representation of the self beyond religious ‘conversio’ and ‘confessio’ in a newly created space of the private which is becoming public: “car c’est moy que je peins” [“for it is my selfe I pourtray”] (Montaigne 2007, 27 [1933, xvii]). The subject and its faculty of skeptical judgment found and show themselves in a rhetor­ ically constituted style rich in images and metaphors that seems to meander about unsystematically. The open form is characteristic of the essay. Roughly contemporary with the first English translation of Montaigne, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) does not emphasize subjectivity in his own essays, but introduces, contrary to Montaigne, a didactic, normative imperative to knowledge. This inaugurates the flourishing of the essay in England. Since the Enlightenment and the growing importance of the press in literary and cultural criticism as well as in journalism, the essay has come to desig­ nate a versatile genre characterized by an independent mode of free thinking, which spread throughout Europe as well as the Anglo-American and Latin American world, always referring back to Montaigne.

Explication In the early modern period, the term ‘essay’ (fr. ‘essai’) designates the tasting of a plate, or its tasting before it is offered to the ruler, as well as an author’s first literary work; see lat. ‘conatus’, ‘specimen’, ‘tentamenta’ (Nicot 1606, Blinkenberg 1950). Ety­ mologically, the word is also related to the post-classical word ‘exagium’ (‘weighing’) (Friedrich 1967, 312–317). Montaigne’s contemporary La Croix du Maine (1584, 328– 329) understands the term as designating a form of learning or apprenticeship (“d’Es­ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-074

3.18 Essay 

 585

saiz, pour coup d’Essay, ou apprentissage”) or an imitation of the speech of another person (“Essaiz ou experiences, c’est à dire discours pour se façonner sur autruy”). According to him, the word ‘essay’ is an expression of humility. La Croix du Maine also recognizes the autobiographical dimension of the Essais which he illustrates with an anecdote. Upon Henri III’s favourable judgment concerning the Essais, Mon­ taigne allegedly responded that he himself must also please his majesty. In a humble gesture, Montaigne uses the word alone as the title of his Essais, without adding the sort of further explanations that are found in the titles of later publications like John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). In the Essais, the term essayer refers both to aesthetic judgment and sensual bodily experiences, chewing and digesting (Starobinski 1933, 266–403). ‘Essayer’ implies the application of individ­ ual judgments to all sorts of worldly things, as Montaigne explains at the beginning of the essay “De Democritus et Heraclitus” [“Of Democritus and Heraclitus”] in the first book (Montaigne 2007, 321–322 [1933, 260–263]). This can also be taken as a comment on his own method and on the essay as a genre. Montaigne’s invention of the essay is characterized by four aspects constitutive for the worldwide development and for the functions of the genre: a vast range of subjects, an open style, a new subjectivity and skepticism. Firstly, the Essais are not restricted to mere introspection. They constantly reflect on the world: They abound in subject matter and knowledge which is integrated – for example by way of citations, mostly Latin – via ancient authors, themes and traditions (MacKinley 1981). At the same time, they have to be read in Montaigne’s own historical context: they observe contemporary events and mores (Nakam 1993, 2001) and thus, combined with their aphoristic style, found the moralist tradition. To speak with one of the most impor­ tant Spanish exponents of the genre, Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Montaigne’s Essais can be considered a “forma para la creación y valoración de la realidad” [‘form for the creation and valorization of reality’] (1936, 9). They are concerned with the open horizons of cultural artifacts and of mental states of the self. Without any claim to authority, they address an interested lay public which was to grow considerably in the aftermath of Montaigne. Secondly, the Essais inaugurated a new, open way of writing, an idiosyncratic form of stylistic representation. They do not give definitions, nor do they organize their subjects in any systematic manner. Montaigne does not offer classifications, his approach is an oblique one; his essays are characterized by leaps of thought. Contrary to the reader’s first impression, the Essais are not chaotic creations, nor are they hap­ hazardly composed. They proceed by a well-ordered gait which Montaigne demands of the mind; they adhere to a metaphoric order. They are poetic essays aimed at beauty (Westerwelle 2002, 257). Thus, the Essais must also be considered aesthetic reflec­ tions. As Blaise Pascal (1623–1666) emphasizes, they can be easily remembered and cited due to a register of style close to everyday speech (Macé 2008). “As important as the familiar, conversational aspect of Montaigne’s style is its poetic quality, which will also leave its mark on future essayists, from Sir Thomas Browne to Emerson, Virginia

586 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Woolf and beyond” (Chadbourne 1997, 570). The disorder of the Essais is a systemati­ cally created one; they are intended to convey a new image of man and of his precar­ ious state of mind. Their form is open, informal, intimate and private, autobiographi­ cal; it moves “toward candor and self-disclosure” (Lopate 1995, xxiv). Thirdly, the Essais inaugurate a secular tradition of self-representation of the subject, an aspect later criticized from a theological point of view by the Jansenist mathematician and writer Blaise Pascal and by the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). In the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) refers to Mon­ taigne as a model to be emulated. Rousseau’s autobiographical reference to Montaigne made the latter’s Socratic project (‘know thyself’) known to a wider readership. The Essais present themselves as subjective, contingent judgments of the world, they do not offer a continuous, linear narrative of a life and they do not form a chronological autobiography. Montaigne’s “book of the self […] accretes around a set of topics, not a series of dates or events” (Good 1988, 27). Or, to put it differently, “[w]hat emerges, however, is less an autobiography than the peculiar dynamics of an indeterminate and questioning reader” (Gray 1999, 273). The religious or theological model of ‘con­ versio’, understood as a moment of inspiration which brings about a sudden change of life-style, plays no role. The perspective shed on the self is not intended as the laying bare of the heart to God. Montaigne does not make a ‘confessio’, he reflects on the relation of private and public space; the latter prescribes rules and boundaries of self-exposure. As the comparison with painting, with a portrait of king René of Anjou (Montaigne 2007, 692–693), with grotesque paintings (Westerwelle 2002, 327–352), and the frontispiece to the edition of 1588 make clear, the statements about the author’s self are supposed to create an image of the speaker. Contrary to the heroic invention and representation of famous personalities or of an illustrious author, Montaigne presses the case for a weak self, which is, however, entitled to representing itself and which appears in its naked, sexual corporeality. The transgression of norms in favour of truth and freedom enables forms of the private, the intimate and of individual char­ acteristics to enter the public space of representation: “J’ose non seulement parler de moy: mais parler seulement de moy. Je fourvoye quand j’escry d’autre chose et me desrobe à mon subject” [“I dare not onely speake of my selfe: but speake alone of my selfe. I stragle when I write of any other matter, and digresse from my subject”] (Mon­ taigne 2007, 988 [1933, 851]). The description of the self is one of the explicitly declared aims of the literary form (Regosin 1977), as is also emphasized by later essayists like Virginia Woolf (Gualtieri 2000, 49–68). Transitory views on things are supposed to convey the subjective point of view as well as the knowledge and interests of the self. Fourthly, the Essais undertake a radical critique of knowledge, inspired by the period’s retrieval of ancient skepticism, which is accompanied by a high awareness of language (Popkin 2003; Demonet and Legros 2004). Before René Descartes, before the Cartesian ‘cogito’, the Essais found a critique of rationalism (Toulmin 2004). Mon­ taigne’s doubts, his skepticism, are productive and progressive. He figures among the small number of thinkers who engaged with the conquest of the new world by

3.18 Essay 

 587

Spanish ‘conquistadores’ in the sixteenth century. His skepticism allowed him to balance things against each other and to pass relative judgments, as for example in “Des Cannibales” [“Of the Caniballes”]. These two aspects are completely alien to his contemporaries, but they are topical and exemplary with regard to contemporary challenges of cultural relativism. The development of the genre of the essay is linked to the reception of Montaigne. The word ‘essais’, taken from the title of Montaigne’s work, seeps into other European languages by way of translation, but it is usually elucidated by paraphrastic additions. A complete translation undertaken by the humanist John Florio (1553–1625) was pub­ lished under the title The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses as soon as 1603 and gained some popularity in England as further editions of the text (1613, 1632) suggest. At the same time, two contemporary English authors, Bacon and Sir William Cornwallis (1579–1614) adapted Montaigne. Early on in the course of Montaigne’s English reception, two distinct essayistic forms emerged, the ‘personal’ essay on the one hand and the moral, political and empirical, scientific essay on the other hand. Cornwallis published two volumes of Essayes, including moral and autobiographic reflections, in 1600 and 1601 respectively. Besides Cornwallis, Bacon is one of the first English authors to follow Montaigne, but he also deviates from his French predecessor in several respects. His Essayes or Counsels Civill and Moral (1597, 1612, 1625), which were written with a knowledge of the original French version of the Essais, were first published six years before Florio’s translation of the latter. The subtitle “counsels” points to a public, moralizing intention directed at the readers. Montaigne does not formulate such a frank claim to utility for the reader, but neither does he state that his mad dreams, his ‘resveries’ were written without any public instruction. Contrary to the meaning of the word as used by Rousseau, ‘resveries’ are not to be understood as a productive form of thinking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The word is usually used in a pejorative sense and denotes figments of the imagination or thoughts conceived in a delusional state of mind. Similarly to Bacon, the subtitle of Florio’s translation emphasizes a certain relevance for the political public sphere and the use­ fulness of essayistic considerations. Montaigne’s private and intimate autobiographi­ cal perspective is not evoked by the title, but it is subsumed under the word ‘essayes’. Subjective perception and self-reflexive consideration are replaced by a ‘participation in the common sense of prudent men’ (­ Stanitzek 2011, 48) in Bacon’s rationalistic per­ spective. His Essayes address ‘courtiers and gentlemen, favourites and ambassadors’ (Schirmer-Imhoff 1953, 124). After Bacon and Cornwallis, the title Essay was relatively common in English advice books up to the mid-seventeenth century (Boase 1968). Bacon’s Essayes were translated into French as Essais moraux and Essais politiques et moraux (1619) as well as into Italian as Saggi morali (1618). Similarly, the Italian trans­ lations of Montaigne’s Essais, G ­ irolamo Naselli’s Discorsi (1590), Girolamo Canini’s Saggi (1633) and Marco Ginammi’s Saggi di Michel Sig. di Montagna, overo Discorsi naturalil, politici e morali (1633–1634), emphasize the discursive and dialogic character of the work with the word ‘discorsi’ and thus state more precisely the social and political

588 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

relevance of the topics (Paul van Heck 2011). The Romance words ‘discours’/’discor­ so’/’discurso’, derived from the Latin verb ‘discurrere’, denotes the to-and-fro move­ ment of conversation (Stierle 1984, Westerwelle 2018, 197). As a conversation-inspiring form conducive to the development of an aristocratic and bourgeois public sphere, the essay is also of signal importance in the historical context of eighteenth century England: “Henry Fielding wrote a similar [i.  e. similar to Swift] Essay on Conversation in 1736 (published in 1743) and Lord Chesterfield wrote on the subject, as did Johnson, Addison, and Steele” (Garber 2004, 276). The genre of the essay corresponds with “a home-grown English sense of English national character” (Garber 2004, 268) and possesses excellent exponents like Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Richard Steele (1672–1729) and Charles Lamb (1775–1834). In the context of the Spanish reception of Epicurus which was in conflict with catholic orthodoxy, Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) extols ‘the authority of Mon­ taigne in his book which he wrote in French and which is entitled Essais or Discursos’ (Quevedo 1961, 938) and thus posits essay and discourse as equivalent notions. In a similar vein, the first Spanish translator of the first volume of the Essais, Diego de Cisnero, emphasizes the equivalence of experience and discourse. He renders the word ‘essais’ with ‘propósitos’ (Marichal 1984, 70) and entitles his translation, probably under the influence of Quevedo, Experiencias y varios discursos de Miguel, Señor de Montaña. The translation remained unpublished because the Essais were censored in Spain in 1640 (Marichal 1984, 63, 70); just as they were censored in France in 1676 (Legros 2009). In his preface, Cisnero criticizes the autobiographical aspects of the text, which constitute a breach of Christian commandments: ‘And the more he described in details his experiences, noting even the indecent parts, the more did he lack Christian simplicity and decency’ (Marichal 1984, 79). There is a marked contrast between the liberal views of Montaigne and those of the catholic Spanish authors of the sixteenth century. Azorín (1873–1967), who admired Montaigne, emphasizes the latter’s exceptional ideas concerning miracles and human conscience, which set the French author apart from his Spanish contemporaries. A complete Spanish trans­ lation of the Essais was published in 1898; the word ‘ensayo’ only gained currency with Leopoldo Alas Clarín’s Ensayos y revistas published in 1892, in the time of a bril­ liant generation of Spanish essayists (like Angel Genivet, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Azorín, Maeztu, Eugenio d’Ors and others). Spanish authors were among the foremost to recognize the essay as a modern genre which leads to the “descatolicización de la vida” [‘decatholization of life’] (Paquette 1972, 76). In Germany, Montaigne was first read in the French original, translations were produced only in the late eighteenth century. Johann Daniel Titus (Tietz) translated the Essais succinctly, without any additions to the title, as Michaels Herrn von Montagne Versuche. The three volumes of Versuche were published in Leipzig in 1753/1754. At the end of the century, Johann Joachim Christoph Bode gave a paraphrastic trans­ lation of the title: Michel de Montaignes Gedanken und Meinungen über allerley Gegenstände [‘Michel de Montaigne’s thoughts and opinions on sundry subjects’] were pub­

3.18 Essay 

 589

lished in Berlin between 1793 and 1797 (Westerwelle 2011). J. D. Tietz integrated the critical apparatus first produced by Pierre Coste into his edition and he also referred to the French editor in his defense of Montaigne’s self-representation. In the preface to his edition, which was read by Rousseau, Coste, who translated Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding into French, defends the author Montaigne against critics: “On a fort blâmé Montaigne de ce qu’il s’est fait lui-même le sujet de son Livre. Cette objection a été rebattue mille fois” [‘Montaigne was severely blamed for making himself the subject of his book. This objection has been refuted a thousand times’] (Montaigne, 1727, ii). Like Coste, Tietz emphasizes the honesty and the interest of Mon­ taigne’s self-representation (Montaigne, ed. Tietz 1996, xii). As in the case of German literature and its late usage of the term ‘essay’ to denote a genre – Herman Grimm (1828–1901) dedicates his collection of Essays (1859) to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and his Essays (1841, 1844) – there are also predecessors of the essay form in European literature (Villey 1908). As Bacon (1985, xlvii) puts it in a dedicatory letter: “The word is late, but the thing is auncient”; he considers Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius a prototype, i.  e. “Essaies, – That is dispersed Meditations, though conveyed in the forme of Epistles.” Montaigne admires Seneca and regards Plutarch – the author of the Moralia and Parallel Lives – as a great example for his own philo­ sophical writing and his ‘ordo neglectus’ [‘open form’] (Smith, 2007, 171). Beside the genre of the letter, the Silvae, written in Antiquity as well as in the Renaissance, combine occasional verses and motley prose texts. In the Institutiones oratoriae (X, 3, 17), Quintilian sounds a critical note in his description of those who write ‘ex tempore’. The word ‘silva’ as it is used by Quintilian is derived from the Greek word ‘hyle’ [‘raw material’, ‘prime matter’]. The Silvae or Wälder are compared to the essay in their refusal of systems, their esteem of spontaneous expression and their temporariness of representation. Authors like Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), Francis Bacon, whose Sylva sylvarum is published posthumously in 1627, and Johann G. Herder, Erste Kritische Wäldchen [‘First Critical Woods’] (1769) tested the genre (Galand and Laigneau-Fontaine 2013). Herder admired Montaigne and referred to the “Altvater von Versuchen” [‘patri­ arch of essaying’] (Adam 1988, 313); the notion of essay appears in the notes of Frie­ drich Schlegel, who is aware of the importance of the genre (Schärf 1999, 107–129); Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s use of the word ‘Versuch’ can be re-translated into ‘essay’. Hans Christoph Bode’s book combines old and new terms: Kritische Wälder. Essays, Kritiken, Glossen (Hamburg 1972, Adam 2013). Pedro Mexía, scholar and royal histori­ ographer to Charles V, published his compilation Silva de varia lección (1570), which was also translated into French, and which is often considered a predecessor of Mon­ taigne’s Essais. Thus, there is a range of possible predecessors of Montaigne: “But in the end Montaigne’s originality is unassailable” (Chadbourne 1997, 295). Under no circumstances, however, should the Essais be considered a vulgarization of ideas or subjects otherwise inaccessible to the reader. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) has emphasized Montaigne’s singular achievement, i.  e. the invention of an independent way of thinking which goes beyond established

590 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

authorities. He puts the essayist’s importance for modern society in a ‘bon mot’: “For the nature of modern society is such that, if Montaigne had not existed, it would have been necessary, as in the case of Voltaire’s God, to invent him” (Huxley 2010/2011, 119). While an exact generic definition of the essay may be difficult in changing historical and political contexts (Chevalier 1997; Ostermann 1994; Perron 2004; Stanitzek 2011), the essay in the spirit of Montaigne is a form of free thinking. In his well-known essay “Der Essay als Form” [“The Essay as Form”], Theodor W. Adorno defined the genre as a critical form ‘par excellence’, directed at any form of orthodox thinking which insists on the categories instead of experience, on the object instead of the searching word, on totality and identity instead of the fragmentary. The essay, on the other hand, is defined by Adorno as a freely combining thinking process. In a similar vein, Karl Heinz Bohrer (2007) considers it an independent, free mode of thinking which requires the establishment of an individual, subjective point of view. Thus, the art of the essay is an art of criticism (Gray 1999), as is exemplified by Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) Essay on Criticism (1711). The productive aspect of this kind of criticism is emphasized by Roland Barthes (1915–1980), whose Essais critiques (1966), among other texts, exem­ plify the production of a new text out of fragments which cannot be totalized (Bens­ maïa 1986, 14). Barthes is similar to Montaigne in this respect. The autobiographical elements in Montaigne’s Essais, the decisive project of representing the self via language, have, from the very beginning, been both admired (Gournay 1595; Millet 1996) and critcized for the frankness of the depiction of the body as well as for Montaigne’s rupture with the metaphysical horizon. Thus, Bacon’s “Of Discourse” can be seen as a reaction against Montaigne’s “De l’Art de conférer” [“Of the Art of Conferring”] (Montaigne 2007, 965–988 [1933, 832–852]). Bacon criticizes the self-reflexive project of the Essais: “Speach of a Mans Selfe ought to be seldome, and well chosen” (Bacon 1985, 105). Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), a sensitive reader of the Essais, criticizes Montaigne’s self-representation for its affirmation of the order­ ing capabilities of the self, independent of divine grace. The “sot projet qu’il [i.  e. ­Montaigne] a de se peindre” [‘his foolish plan to paint himself’] (Pascal 1977, II, 159) lies in the unsystematic self-representation which proceeds by leaps and bounds, thus implicitly suggesting that no divine order exists in the world (Westerwelle 2002, 272–274). In the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau refers to Montaigne on mul­ tiple occasions both in his Confessions and in his Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire [Reveries of the Solitary Walker] (Starobinski 1997). The sudden collision with a mastiff in the heights of Menilmontant (Rousseau 1959, 1004–1007) narrated in the second promenade is a reply to Montaigne’s collision with a horse which is narrated in “De l’Exercitation” [“Of Exercise or Practice”] (Montaigne 2007, 391–392 [1933, 326–335]). Both narrations include the reflexion of a near-death experience and the modern experience of the limits of consciousness. More authors who stand in the tradition of autobiographic essayistic writing could be named, especially if one takes into account literary forms like the moralistic aphorism, the diary and journalistic writing (Good 1988). In England, Thomas de Quincey’s (1785–1859) Confessions of an English Opi-

3.18 Essay 

 591

um-Eater (1822) are essayistic. Virginia Woolf, whose career as an essayist started with her contributions to the Times Literary Supplement, engages with de Quincey in The Common Reader (1925, 1932). She reflects on the connection of essay and autobiogra­ phy from a gender perspective. Friedrich Nietzsche, an ardent reader of M ­ ontaigne, employs the form of the essay as a remedy against systematic thinking. In the modern novel, e.  g. in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities] (1930–1952), the essay is a hypothetical form employed to approach life. Outside of Europe, where Ortega y Gasset, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Thomas and Heinrich Mann count among the great essayists of the twentieth century, Latin America has a rich tradition of essayistic writing with exponents like Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Octavio Paz (1914–1998) and Ernesto Sábato (1914–2011). Thus, “the essay continues to be the best of a tool for a self-examination and self-criticism for a continent that is constantly redefining itself” (Verónica Saunero-Ward 1997, 804). Translation: Martin Lange

Works Cited Adam, Wolfgang. Poetische und Kritische Wälder. Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Formen des Schreibens ‚bei Gelegenheit‘. Heidelberg: Winter, 1988. Adam, Wolfgang. “Les Silves en prose et l’essayistique allemande.” La Silve. Histoire d’une écriture libérée en Europe, de l’Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle. Ed. Perrine Galand and Sylvie Laigneau-Fontaine. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 689–716. Adorno, Theodor W. “Der Essay als Form.” Noten zur Literatur. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1981. 9–33 [“The Essay as Form”. Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will. New German Critique 32 (1984): 151–171. http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/film%20223/Adorno-The%20 Essay%20As%20Form.pdf (10 July 2018)]. Bacon, Francis. Essayes or Counsels, Civil and Morall. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Bensmaia, Réda. Barthes à l’essai. Introduction au texte réfléchissant. Tübingen: Narr, 1986. Blinkenberg, Andreas. “Quel sense Montaigne a-t-il voulu donner au mot ‚Essais‘ dans le titre de son œuvre?” Mélanges de linguistique et de littérature romanes offerts à Mario Roques. Vol. I. Ed. Jacques Salverda de Grave. Paris: Didier, 1950. 3–14. Boase, A. M. “The Early History of the Essai Title in France and Britain.” Studies in French Literature presented to H. W. Lawton by Colleagues, Pupils and Friends. Ed. J. C. Ireson, I. D. McFarlane and G. Rees. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968. 67–73. Bohrer, Karl Heinz. “Was heißt unabhängig denken? Ein freier Geist muß nicht immer subversiv sein.” Merkur 61.2 (2007): 563–574. Chadbourne, Richard M. “Montaigne, Michel de.” Encyclopedia of the Essay. Ed. Tracy Chevalier. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. 568–570. Chadbourne, Richard M. “French Essay.” Encyclopedia of the Essay. Ed. Tracy Chevalier. London/ Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. 294–307. Chevalier, Tracy, ed. Encyclopedia of the Essay. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.

592 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Demonet, Marie-Luce, and Alain Legros, eds. L’Ecriture du scepticisme chez Montaigne. Geneva: Droz, 2004. Friedrich, Hugo. Montaigne. Bern: Francke, 2nd ed. 1967. Galand, Perrine, and Sylvie Laigneau-Fontaine, eds. La Silve. Histoire d’une écriture libérée en Europe, de l’Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Garber, Frederick. “The Romantic Familiar Essay.” Nonfictional Romantic Prose. Expanding Borders. Ed. Steven P. Sontrup and Virgil Nemoianu. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. 267–284. Good, Graham. The Observing Self. Rediscovering the Essay. London: Routledge, 1988. Gournay, Marie de. “Préface sur les Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne, par sa fille d’Alliance.” Michel de Montaigne. Les Essais. Ed. Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien and Catherine MagnienSimonin. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 3–25. Gray, Floyd. “The Essay as Criticism.” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. The Renaissance. Vol. III. Ed. Glyn P. Norton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2006. 271–277. Gualtieri, Elena. Virginia Woolf’s Essays. Sketching the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Huxley, Aldous. “An Anthology of Essays and Criticism. Preface.” Aldous Huxley Annual. A Journal of Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond. Uncollected Writings by Aldous Huxley 1916–1913 10/11 (2010/2011): 117–146. La Croix du Maine. Premier volume de la bibliothèque, qui est vn catalogue general de toutes sortes d’Autheurs, qui ont escrit en François depuis cinq cents ans & plus, iusques à ce iourd’huy […]. Paris: Abel l’Angelier, 1584. Legros, Alain. “Montaigne face à ses censeurs romains de 1581 (mise à jour).” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 72 (2009): 7–33. Lopate, Philip. The Art of the Personal Essay. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. MacKinley, Mary B. Words in a Corner. Studies in Montaigne’s Latin Quotations. Lexington: French Forum, 1981. Marichal, Juan. Teoría e historia del ensayismo hispánico. Madrid: Alianza, 1984. Millet, Olivier. La première réception des Essais de Montaigne (1580–1640). Paris/Geneva: Champion, 1995. Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais. Ed. Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien and Catherine MagnienSimonin. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais. Édition conforme au texte de l’exemplaire de Bordeaux […]. 3 vols. Ed. Pierre Villey. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2nd ed. 1992. Montaigne, Michel de. Michael Montaigne’s Gedanken und Meinungen allerley Gegenstände ins Teutsche übersetzt von J. J.E. Bode. 7 vols. Wien/Prag: Haas, 1797–1801. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais [Versuche] nebst des Verfassers Leben nach der Ausgabe von Pierre Coste ins Deutsche übersetzt von Johann Daniel Tietz. Erster Theil. 3 vols. Zürich: Diogenes, 1996. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Auswahl und Übersetzung von Herbert Lüthy. Zürich: Diogenes, 1953. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essayes of Montaigne (1603). Ed. J. I. M. Stewart. Trans. John Florio. New York: Modern Library, 1933. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Transl. M. A. Screech. London: Allan Lane, The Penguin Press, 1991. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Transl. Donald M. Frame. London: Everyman’s Library: 2003. Nakam, Géralde. Les Essais de Montaigne, miroir et procès de leur temps. Témoignage historique et création littéraire. Paris: Champion, 2nd ed. 2001. Nakam, Géralde. Montaigne et son temps. Les événements et les ‘Essais’. L’histoire, la vie, le livre. Paris: Gallimard, 2nd ed. 1993.

3.18 Essay 

 593

Nicot, Jean. “Essay.” Le Thresor de la langue françoise, tant ancienne que moderne. 1606. http:// artflsrv01.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=essay (9 November 2013). Ortega y Gasset, José. Obras completas. Vol. I. Madrid: Revista de occidente, 1936. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. 2 vols. Ed. Michel Le Guern. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Ostermann, Eberhard. “Essay.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Vol. II. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994. 1460–1468. Paquette, Jean-Marcel. “Forme et fonction de l’essai dans la littérature espagnole.” Etudes Littéraires 5.1 (1972): 75–88. Perron, Annie. “Essai.” Le dictionnaire du littéraire. Ed. Paul Aron, Denis Saint-Jacques and Alain Viala. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. 203–204. Popkin, Richard Henry. The History of Scepticism. From Savonarola to Bayle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. ed. 2003 [Histoire du Scepticisme d’Érasme à Spinoza. Trans. Christine Hivet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995]. Quevedo, Francisco de. Defensa de Epicuro. Nombre, origen, intento, recomendación y descendencía de la doctrina estoica. Obras Completas 1. Obras en Prosa. Ed. Felicidad Buendía. Madrid: Aguilar, 1961. Quintilian. The Orator’s Education. 5 vols. Ed. and trans. Donald A. Russel. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Regosin, Richard L. The Matter of My Book: Montaigne’s Essais as the Book of the Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Saunero-Ward, Verónica. “Spanish American Essay.” Encyclopedia of the Essay. Ed. Tracy Chevalier. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. 797–804. Schärf, Christian. Geschichte des Essays von Montaigne bis Adorno. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999. Sayce, Richard A., and David Maskell. A Descriptive Bibliography of Montaigne’s Essais 1580–1700. London: Bibliographical Society, 1983. Schirmer-Imhoff, Ruth. “Montaigne und die Frühzeit des englischen Essays.” Germanisch-Romani­ sche Monatsschrift 3 (1953): 121–35. Schlaffer, Heinz. “Essay.” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Vol. I. Ed. Klaus Weimar. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1997. 522–25. Smith, Paul J., Dispositio. Problematic ordering in French Renaissance Literature, Leiden: Brill, 2007. Smith, Paul J., ed. Montaigne Studies. An Interdisciplinary Forum. Translating Montaigne 21.1–2 (2011). Schon, Peter M. Vorformen des Essays in Antike und Humanismus. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Essais von Montaigne. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1954. Stanitzek, Georg. Essay – BRD. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2011. Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne en mouvement. Paris: Gallimard, 2nd ed. 1993. Starobinski, Jean. “Rousseau: Notes en marge de Montaigne.” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 41 (1997): 11–56 [“Rousseau als ‘Marginalist’ Montaignes. Fünf unveröffentlichte Randnotizen.” Merkur 51 (1997): 391–405]. Stierle, Karlheinz. “Gespräch und Diskurs. Ein Versuch im Blick auf Montaigne, Descartes und Pascal.” Das Gespräch. Ed. K. Stierle and Rainer Warning. München: Fink, 1984. 297–334. Stierle, Karlheinz. “Vom Gehen, Reiten und Fahren. Der Reflexionszusammenhang von Montaignes ‘Des coches’.” Poetica 14 (1982): 195–212. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: The Free Press, 1989 [Kosmopolis: Die unerkannten Aufgaben der Moderne. Trans. Hermann Vetter. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1991].

594 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Van Heck, Paul. “The Essais in Italian: the Translation of Girolamo Canini.” Montaigne Studies 23. 1–2 (2011): 39–53. Westerwelle, Karin. Montaigne. Die Imagination und die Kunst des Essays. München: Fink, 2002. Westerwelle, Karin. “‘Er denkt zu sehr französisch!’. Les Essais en traduction allemande.” Montaigne Studies 21.1–2 (2011): 67–80. Westerwelle, Karin, “Michel de Montaignes Vorwort der Essais. Zur Erfindung der Selbstdarstellung.” Der Autor und sein Publikum. Zur kleinen Gattung des Vorworts. Ed. Pia Claudia Doering, Bettina Full and Karin Westerwelle. Würzburg 2018. 163-216.

Further Reading Beaujour, Michel. Miroirs d’encre. Rhétorique de l’autoportrait. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980. Cave, Terence. How to Read Montaigne. London: Granta Books, 2007. Fernández, Teodosio. Los Géneros ensayísticos hispanoamericanos. Madrid: Taurus, 1990. Langer, Ullrich, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Stierle, Karlheinz. “Montaigne und die Erfahrung der Vielheit.” Die Pluralität der Welten. Aspekte der Renaissance in der Romania. Ed. Wolf-Dieter Stempel and K. Stierle. München: Fink, 1987. 417–48. Westerwelle, Karin. “Die Schwierigkeit, Montaigne zu verstehen. Hans Stiletts Übersetzung der Essais.” Merkur 6.53 (1999): 508–520.

3.19 Fake Autobiography Richard Block

Definition While it is difficult to maintain the integrity of the term, fake autobiography is still best understood as that text whose signature as guarantor of the veracity of the text is invalidated. The author and the claims attributed to the author in the text are false. Either the author is not the signatory or the material that verifies the signatory is a fiction. The messy combinations that emerge from both possibilities form the range of what may be called ‘fake autobiography’.

Explication In Pedro Almodovar’s early film ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? [What Have I Done to Deserve this?] two alcoholic writers devise a plan to sell Hitler’s diaries, although they know them to be forged. Their plot depends upon the protagonist’s husband Antonio. A cab driver and former chauffeur in Germany, Antonio has copied in Hitler’s handwriting what his former German employer and mistress had insisted were actually letters from Hitler. As such, he is convinced that his work is really not forgery, since the source material – or so he was lead to believe – is true. As madcap a storyline as this might seem, it illustrates a problem that has always plagued autobi­ ography and its claims to veracity: only the signature of the autobiographical subject attests to the truth of what follows. Certainly documents and records can serve as some measure of authenticity, but the events, experiences and self-understanding of the autobiographical subject can only be confirmed by the subject herself; the signa­ ture serves as a guarantor. As Almodovar’s forger reveals, the signature has limited probative value; it may simply be a lie. In an age when major publishing houses rely on a battery of ghost writers, the signature often indicates that the apparent autobio­ graphical subject has merely signed off on what appears under her name but cannot claim authorship strictly speaking. Distinguishing her experience from the ghost writ­ er’s interpretation of that experience is well nigh impossible. Even if those instances are recorded accurately, the riddle of the signature still contests any claims to authorship. As Jacques Derrida explains in “Signature, Événe­ ment, Contexte” (1971) [“Signature Event Context” (1977)] written texts are not teth­ ered to their origin in the way spoken ones are. The signature indicates the absence or “non-présence actuelle” [“empirical non-presence”] of the author (Derrida 1971, 391 [1977, 107]). “Mais, dira-t-on, elle marque aussi et retient son avoir-été présent dans https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-075

596 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

un maintenant passé, qui restera un maintemant futur, donc dans un maintenant général, dans la forme transcendantel de la maintenance” [“But, it will be said, it also marks and retains his having-been present in a past now, which will remain a future now, and therefore in a now in general, in the transcendental form of newness”] (1971, 391 [1977, 107]). The autobiographical subject’s signature attests to a specific moment in time in which she attests to the veracity of the text to follow. But the context or event that sponsored such a signature is singular; the author is not the same person tomorrow or the same person each time the signature is invoked or produced to affirm or re-confirm the textual authority. The now of the signature must be iterable, which means the singular nature of the text, so essential to the perceived worth of any auto­ biography, is always already plural. Every iteration recalls the first now of the auto­ biographical subject, but such repetition only succeeds, or apparently succeeds, by appeal to a transcendental subject unchanged by the context or event of the itera­ tion. The author is thus forever constantly under construction, and all autobiogra­ phy depends upon the forgery of an always present and available autobiographical subject. Derrida, of course, extends such remarks to writing and that part of speech that is ‘writerly’: Un signe écrit, au sens courant de ce mot, c’est donc une marque qui reste, qui ne s’épuise pas dans le present de son inscription et qui peut donner lieu à une iteration en l’absence et au-delá de la presence de sujet empiriquement determine qui l’a, dans un context, donné, émise ou pro­ duite [A written sign, in the usual sense of the word, is therefore a mark which remains, which is not exhausted in the present of its inscription, and which can give rise to an iteration both in the absence of and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it] (1971, 377 [1977, 92]).

He continues: “Du même coup, un signe écrit comporte une force de rupture avec son context, c’est-à-dire l’ ensemble de présences qui organisent le moment de son inscription. Cette force de rupture n’est pas un prédicat accidentel, mais la structure même de l’écrit” [“By the same token, a written sign carries with it a force of breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which organize the moment of its inscrip­ tion. The force of breaking is not an accidental predicate, but the very structure of the written”] (1971, 377–378 [1977, 92–93]). Given the difficulty of the autobiographical subject maintaining a stable position, or cordoning off that part of their life she would write, it is not surprising that the genre has been plagued by countless, often celebrated frauds. In 1955, Jesús Sánchez Garza self-published a book called La Rebelión de Texas—Manuscrito Inédito de 1836 por un Ofical de Santa Anna [“The Rebellion of Texas—an unedited manuscript of 1836 by an official of Santa Ana”] which claimed that the American folk hero did not die at the Alamo. The book’s claims were based on what were considered to be the eye-wit­ ness testimony of José Enrique de la Peña, a Mexican officer present at the Battle of the Alamo. Adding interest to these highly suspect documents was the timing of its release – 1955 to coincide with a popular Disney mini-series Davy Crockett. This was

3.19 Fake Autobiography 

 597

not the first time the legend of Davy Crockett had inspired an apparent forgery. In 1836 T. K. and P. G. Collins, who had previously edited and published some of Crockett’s writing, produced what they claimed was Crockett’s journal: Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas: wherein is contained a full account of his journey from Tennessee to the Red River and Natchitoches, and thence across Texas to San Antonio; including many hair-breadth escapes; together with a topographical, historical, and political view of Texas … Written by Himself. Unlike Garza, who offered no explanation for how he came to possess such documents, the publishers insisted that the documents had been recovered from the Alamo by Mexican General Manuel Fernàndez Castrillo at the Battle of San Jacinto, where the General was eventually killed. By the time the book’s true authors, Robert Penn Smith and Charles Beale, had been revealed, the myth was sufficiently engrained in the American social imagery to influence historical accounts of the Alamo (Flores 2002, 135–142). Not to be forgotten, as well is the 9.5 DM Der Stern paid an intermediary for the Hitler diaries forged by Konrad Kujau, who received 2.5 mil­lion DM. Great fanfare also greeted Clifford Irving’s 1972 forgery, The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. The book capitalized on the mystique of the reclusive billionaire, aviator and movie maker to hoodwink not only the publishers but also an eager and curious public. In fact, equally storied forgeries by leading publishing houses more recently indicate that the problem is not simply one of authorial intention, but some­ thing about the nature of the genre that invites and fosters such thimble rigging. Other recent examples include Angel at the Fence (recalled just before publication in 2010) and Odd Man Out (Matt McCarthy) by Penguin Group USA 2010). Two memoirs, A Million Little Pieces (James Frey, 2005) and The Greatest: My Own Story (Muham­ mad Ali and Richard Durham, 1975) were published by Random House. And Oprah Winfrey, American’s queen of talk-show hosts, proudly hosted Frey and Rosenblatt, to talk about their work. At Smashworks.com one can still find Andrea Troy’s Daddy – An Absolutely Fake Memoir, originally published in November 2008 by iUniverse Press, to highlight, question and critique the media culture that panders to taste and demand at the expense of vetting the material. No forgery has caused more uproar and confusion than Binjamin’s Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939–1948], published by the Jüdischer Verlag (part of Suhrkamp) in 1995 and one year later in translation by Schocken Books. The book garnered the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir in Britain, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize, and France’s Prix Memoire de la Shoah. In addition, its author was featured on America’s prime-time documentary weekly Sixty Minutes as well as on the BBC. Soon thereafter it was discovered that the text was a fraud, but it generated a conversation about recovered memories and the context in which they are to be read. In other words, does an autobiography comprised of faulty memories or even manufactured memories disqualify the text in other contexts, e.  g. as a psychological profile?

598 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

To begin, the author was not born in Latvia as he claimed. Rather, he was adopted by a Swiss couple, where he spent the war years as Bruno Dösseker, thus controverting the author’s claim that he spent the war years in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe. He further claimed that his circumcision proved that he was Jewish, although an ex-girl­ friend disputed the claim. Wilkomirski reports the events in a series of disjointed frag­ ments from the perspective of a frightened, wholly confused youth who was forced to witness his father’s execution. After being separated from his remaining family, he claims to have spent four years in Majdanek. His memories of the camp include seeing hungry infants gnaw their fingers to the bone before dying. He also recalls standing in mountains of feces to protect himself from the deadly cold. The fragmented style of the narrative moves seamlessly between his years in the camps and those in Switzerland, calling attention, if nothing else, to the difficulty of retrieving and sorting memories from what appears to be a traumatic past. To explain his adoptive parents’ denial of his claims, the author insists that they and other ‘do-gooders’ tried to convince him that his memory of the camps was all a dream, a version of the events that acquires credibility for no other reason than Wilkomirski has no explanation of how he escaped the camps. Significant gaps in memory, of course, is nothing unusual. Primo Levi addresses that issue in I Sommersi e I Salvati (1986) [The Drowned and the Saved (1988)]. More to the point, he underlines how memories come to be filled in by accounts from other survivors, the historical record, documentary footage, and one’s own system of psy­ chological defenses to distort, intentionally forge or simply confuse events to cope with the threat such memories pose to the mental health of the subject: Si conoscono alcuni meccanismi che falsificano la memoria in condizioni particolari: i traumi, non solo quelli cerebrali; l’interferenza da parte di altri ricordi “concorrenziali”; stati abnormi della coscienza; repressioni; rimozioni. Tuttavia, anche in condizioni normali e’ all’ opera una lenta degradazione, un offuscamento dei contorni, un oblio per cosi’dire fisiologico, a cui pochi ricordi resistono. […][U]n ricordo troppo spesso evocato, ed espresso in forma da racconto, tende a fissarsi in uno stereotipo, in una forma collaudata dall’esperienza cristillizata, perfezionata, adorna, che si installa al posto del ricordo greggio e crescea sue spese [Some mechanisms are known which falsify memory under particular conditions: traumas, not only cerebral ones; interference from other “competitive”memories; abnormal conditions of con­ sciousness; repressions, blockages. Nevertheless, even under normal conditions a slow degrada­ tion is at work, an obfuscation of outlines, a so to speak physiological oblivion, which few memo­ ries resist. […] [A] memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at it expense] (Levi 1986, 13–14 [1988, 23–24]).

If such an understanding of the unreliability of memory threatens the veracity of their accounts, Levi goes on to make a clear distinction between what can be fabricated and what cannot be. Clearly, he leaves no room for those who would deny the Holocaust based on the unreliability of witness testimony: “É generalmente difficile negare di aver commesso una data azione, o che questa azione sia stata commessa; é invece

3.19 Fake Autobiography 

 599

facilissimo alterare le motivazioni che ci hanno condotto ad un azione, e le passione che in noi hanno accompagnato l’azione stessa”) [“It is generally difficult to deny having committed a given act, or that such an act was committed; it is, on the contrary, very easy to alter the motivations which led us to an act and the passions within us which accompanied the act itself”] (Levi 1986, 18 [1988, 30]). Facts are not in question; the historical record is clear on this account. What Levi also explains is how the vic­ timizers shield themselves from the horrors they have committed: É piú facile vietare l’ingresso a un ricordo che liberarsene dopo che é stato registrato. A questo, in sostanza, servivano molti degli artifizi escogitati dai commandi nazisti per proteggere le coscienze degli addetti ai lavori sporchi, e per assicurarsi I loro servizi, sgradevoli anche per gli scherani piú induriti [It is easier to deny entry to a memory than to free oneself from it after it has been recorded. This, in substance, was the purpose of many of the artifices thought up by the Nazi commanders in order to protect the consciences of those assigned to do the dirty work and to ensure their ser­ vices, disagreeable even for the most hardened cutthroats] (Levi 1986, 20 [1988, 31]).

While the Holocaust presents a particularly dramatic, singular challenge for victims and victimizers alike, no memory or trauma is immune to such obfuscations. What makes Bruchstücke so difficult to dismiss, not as a Holocaust memoir but as a psychological portrait, is how the memories came to be. While revelation of the fraud led most critics to dismiss the book completely, others, like Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson, consider the forgery for its value as a case study in self-inflicted false memories. Still others hold to their initial assessment of the work, lauding its “fero­ cious vision, a powerful narrative, an accumulation of images, and the unforgettable way in which a small child’s voice is deployed in an unfeeling adult world” (Zeitlin 2003, 177). But the consequences for Holocaust memoirs do not end here. Just as dis­ turbing is how the Wilkomirksi fraud makes use of the Holocaust to fill in memo­ ry’s void. His apparent exploitation during childhood as a ‘Verdingskind’ [a form of adoptive slavery] in Switzerland finds in the Holocaust a suitable enough analogue to derive perhaps some therapeutic advantage from the translation of one traumatic event into another. The inevitable question that follows is whether the actual Holo­ caust can be displaced by its use as a trope for those who can find no other language to communicate personal trauma? For Derrida, consideration of the difficulty in locating the autobiographical subject, or in charting a stable subject position, leads him to Blanchot’s short prose piece, “L’instant da ma mort” [‘The Instant of My Death’] (1994). Here, a third-person narrative describes the near death of a young man before a firing squad, freed at the last moment by the Russians out of respect for the nobility. The events correspond closely to what Blanchot had written about his own life. So, why then re-tell the story in the third person? The final lines of Blanchot’s piece offer a clue: “Je suis vivant. Non, tu et mort” [‘I am alive. No. you are dead’] (Blanchot 1994, 8). The speaker survived the death he should have died; the quote thus emanates from a vague space between

600 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

the dual position of the speaker. As death seemed imminent, the narrator describes a feeling of lightness that, according to the narrator, will never quite leave the young: “Demeurait cependent, au moment où la fusillade n’était plus qu’en attente, le sen­ timent de légèreté que je ne saurais traduire: libéré de la vie? Línfini qui sóuvre? […] Comme si la mort hors de lui ne pouvait désormais que se heurter à la mort en lui” [‘There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? The infinite opening up? […] As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him’] (Blanchot 1994, 7, 9). Lightness uplifts the one who did not die at the appropriate hour but was in every way prepared to. If biography is always a form of testimony (insofar as Derrida insists that testimony is always a form of autobiography [Derrida 1998, 51 (43)]), then the following observation must be considered: One testifies only when one has lived longer than what has come to pass. Detachment from what one will testify provides the distance necessary for autobiog­ raphy to easily translate, as it does in this example, into the third person. As a result, irony threatens the tone and just as likely the reading of the testimony that grounds all autobiography. After all, the survivor attests to the (non) death of the subject of the text to follow. To illustrate the disjunction at the heart of autobiography, Derrida interrogates Blanchot’s text, specifically the aporia opened up by the word ‘instant’ of the title as evidenced by the English ‘instant’ and ‘instance.’ According to Derrida both meanings cross and reside uncomfortably together in French. On the one hand, ‘instant’ denotes singularity, not only in the sense of temporality but also with respect to the author of the testimony or the witness. “Je suis seul à avoir entendu, ou à avoir vu cette chose unique, avoir entendu, ou à avoir été mis en présence de ceçi ou de cela, à un instant déterminé, indivisible; […] et il faut me croire parce qu’il faut irremplacable” [“I am the only one to have seen this unique thing. The only one to have heard to have been present in the presence of this or that, at a determinate, indivisible instant, [… ] and you must believe me because I am irreplaceable”] (Derrida 1998, 47 [1998, 41]). But the irreplaceable must also be translatable to others, capable of becoming a shared expe­ rience. In a word, it must be exemplary; the instant becomes an index or something universalizable. “[N]’importe qui à ma place, etc., confermerait mon témoignage, qui est donc à la fois infiniment secret et infiniment public…” [“[A]nyone […] in my place, etc., would confirm […] my testimony, which is thus both infinitely secret and infinitely public”] (Derrida 1998, 48 [1998, 41]). The remark threatens the authenticity of any autobiography – not simply because the first sentence could be recast, ‘I am the only one to have lived this life,’ and not simply because any life is but an instant measured against the vastness of the universe, but also because of the contractual implications and complications of the signature discussed above. Autobiography, of course, has taken note of these problems, especially in the post-war era in which the integrity of the subject has been under assault. Of course, Goethe recognized the difficulty of constructing one’s own life as a biographical

3.19 Fake Autobiography 

 601

subject without recourse to some form of poetry and fiction as indicated by the title of his own autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth]. The conjunction emphasizes the indissoluble relationship between poetry and truth. Of course, that relationship can also produce some rather comical disjunctions. In 1850 John Oxen­ ford published a translation of Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann (Gespräche mit Goethe) under the title Conversations with Eckermann by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The volume was reprinted in 1984 by North Point Press. While the content of the conversations is the same in both the German and English, Goethe’s towering presence renders him the possible and often presumed author of almost anything that concerns him. A more radical attempt to reconsider and challenge the limits of autobiogra­ phy and witness testimony is Charlotte Delbo’s holocaust trilogy, Auschwitz et après [Auschwitz and After], comprised of Aucun de nous ne reviendra [None of Us Will Return (1965)], Une connaissance inutile [Useless Knowledge (1970)], and Mesure de nos jours [The Measure of Our Days (1971)]. (Delbo and her husband were arrested in 1942 for producing anti-Nazi literature. Her husband was later executed; Delbo was eventu­ ally sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Raisko, and Ravensbrück. In June of 1945 she was repatriated by the Red Cross.) The ‘we’ of the first volume is particularly instructive. If Blanchot looked to write from a purchase beyond the grave, Delbo’s use of the first person plural rather than the ‘he’ of Blanchot’s text emphasizes that the experience of a presumed death so fundamental to autobiography does not merely displace the subject but pluralizes her. Using numerous genres, her fragmented subjected and dis­ embodiment precludes any possibility of the linear narrative, preferred, for example, by Elie Wiesel. Here, the autobiographical subject is broken, never to be reconstituted except as a ‘we’ that is always under construction, always under destruction. The ‘we’ may suggest a community, but the borders of that community are always shifting; some are Jews Roma and Sinti; others political prisoners whose chances of survival are better than the first. And while most never returned, their voices haunt the text and constitute an unstable community that underwrites the autobiographical subject that is now plural. Delbo’s oft repeated dictum defines a new or strangely sober approach to autobiography: “Essayez de regarder. Essayez pour voir” [‘Try to look, just try and see’]. There is no single author of the text(s) that comprises the autobiography, only a medium or a subject constantly filtering out what she sees and filtering out (or attempting to filter out) anything other than descriptions of what is presented to the retina. The subject (matter) has changed even beyond recognition. It also requires bearing witness to swear to a different kind of truth which Delbo encapsulates as the epigraph to the first volume of the trilogy: “Aujourd’hui, je ne suis pas sûre que ce que j ái écrit soit vrai. Je suis sûre que c’est véridique” [‘Today, I am not sure what I wrote is true (real), but I am sure it is truthful’] (Delbo 1970, 7).

602 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Works Cited Blanchot, Maurice. L’instant de ma mort. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994. Collins, T. K., and Davy P. G. Crockett. Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas: wherein is contained a full account of his journey from Tennessee to the Red River and Natchitoches, and thence across Texas to San Antonio; including many hair-breadth escapes; together with a topographical, historical, and political view of Texas … Written by Himself. Texas: Nafix and Cornish, 1845. Delbo, Charlotte. Aucun de nous ne reviendra. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1970. Delbo, Charlotte. None of Us Will Return. Trans. John Githens. New York: Grove, 1968. Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Galilée, 1998 [Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998]. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature, Événement, Contexte.” Marges de la Philosophie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972. 82–111 [“Signature Event Context.” The Derrida Reader. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. Trans. Alan Bass. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991]. Flores, Richard: Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity and the Master Symbol. Austin: University Press Texas, 2002. Garza¸ Jesús Sánchez. La Rebelión de Texas – Manuscrito Inédito de 1836 por un Ofical de Santa Anna. (self-published, 1836). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Conversations with Eckermann. Trans. John Oxenford. San Francisco: North Point, 1984. Levi, Primo. I Salvati and I sommersi. Torino: Einaudi, 1986 [The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage, 1988]. Wilkomirksi, Binjamin. Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995. Zeitlin, Froma. “New Surroundings in Holocaust Memory.” The Holocaust in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Moishe Postone and Eric Santner. Chicago: University Press Chicago, 2003. 177–208.

Further Reading Agamben, Giorgio. Quel che resta di Auschwitz: Il archivio e il testimone. Torino: Bollati Boringheiri, 1998 [Remnants of Auschwitz: the witness and the archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone, 2000]. Tobias, Rochelle. “The Double Fiction in Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten.” The German Quarterly 79.3 (2006): 293–307. Travis, Carol, and Elliot Aranson. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. New York: Harcourt, 2007. Trezise, Thomas. “The Question of Community in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After.” Modern Language Notes 117.4 (2002): 858–886.

3.20 Fictional Autobiography Hans Vandevoorde

Definition The term ‘fictional autobiography’ is used with different and confusing meanings, which often overlap with ‘autobiographical novel’ or ‘autofiction’. In a restricted sense, a fictional autobiography is a narrative which simulates an autobiographical discourse without any suggestion of identity between the narrator/protagonist and the author of the book. It imitates the conventions of an autobiography. Therefore, it pretends to be an authentic life story narrative, hence the use of alternative terms like ‘pseudo-autobiography’, ‘quasi-autobiography’, ‘quasi-autobiographischer Ich-Ro­ man’ [‘quasi-autobiographical I-novel’] (Stanzel, qtd. in Löschnigg 2006, 13), the attributive adjective conveying the mimetic act of an autobiographical narrative. An alternative designation like ‘Roman in autobiographischer Form’ [‘novel in autobio­ graphical form’] (Poier-Bernard, qtd. in Löschnigg 2006, 13) emphasizes the fictional­ ity of the genre, which is a “combination of an autobiographical mould with a fictional filling” (Hampel 2001, 17). One could say that a fictional autobiography and an autobi­ ographical novel are both novels, yet in the first case the autobiographical character of the text refers to the representational frame of it; the story recounts somebody’s life and tells about the psychological, social and moral development of the protagonist. In the second case, the autobiographical aspect concerns the content of the story, which is to a larger or lesser degree referentially bound to the life of the author.

Explication When dealing with classical texts one can distinguish between a ‘real’ and a ‘fictional’ autobiography by answering the question: Do the author and the protagonist share the same (first) name, or not? (Gasparini 2004, 22; Lejeune 1975, 30–31). In a real auto­ biography – according to Philippe Lejeune – there is an identity of names between the narrator/protagonist and the author, whereas in a fictional autobiography this is not the case. Also, the paratext – in combination with textual features – informs the reader about the referential status of the narrated story. Problems with this definition of fictional autobiography however arise in a post­ structuralist paradigm. When the representational capacity of language is refuted, and autobiography is generally seen as a fictional genre, the combination of ‘fictional’ and ‘autobiographical’ might become problematic (Löschnigg 2006, 14). Moreover, a poststructuralist view that radically rejects autobiographical referentiality cannot https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-076

604 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

hold on to a distinction between a ‘real’ and a ‘fictional’ autobiography. As a conse­ quence, a vision that denies this distinction can hardly handle hoaxes like Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (1995) [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1996)], a book in which the author pretended to evoke his memories as a Holocaust survivor. This, and comparable other cases, such as the feigned memoir by James Frey about his treatment as a drug addict in A Million Little Pieces (2003), illustrate how the postmodern effacement of the difference between fic­ tional and factual narratives is incongruous with public reception. Once these authors had presented their books with a referentially-based truth-claim, they could not later return to arguments of fictionalisation for legitimating their literary aspirations. Nevertheless, a paradigmatic shift both in autobiographical theory and practice has taken place in the last decades and has radically affected the boundaries of auto­ biographical genres. The deliberately invoked generic confusion, together with the increased self-reflexivity and metafictional reflection (‘Metaisierung’) in postmodern (fictional) autobiographical writing, caused Ansgar Nünning to introduce the term ‘fictional meta-autobiography’ (Nünning 2007; Nadj 2006). This genre can be consid­ ered as holding one extreme pole of the large spectrum of fictional autobiographies. In contrast to conventional fictional autobiographies, ‘fictional meta-autobiographies’ shift the emphasis from the depiction of the past life of the autobiographer to meta­ fictional comments about epistemological, methodological, or representational prob­ lems with the reconstruction and narrative representation of someone’s course of life, and with the possibilities of conveying experiences through language. Not the life of the autobiographer – the ‘real’ object of autobiographical representation – but the reflection on problems of reconstruction of a past life and the linguistic representation of this becomes the center of interest (Nünning 2007). On the other side of the spec­ trum, Nünning refers to ‘classical’ fictional autobiography, that is ‘heteroreferential’, and in which historically-documented events from the life of the author constitute the dominant extratextual referential domain (Nünning 2007, 278). Nünning’s definition of the ‘classical’ type opens up the generic variety to include factual autobiographies, which also contain fictional elements. This is a broad definition, which contrasts with the one aforementioned, namely of a fictional autobiography as a fictional text that mimics autobiographical form. In the broad definition (like Nünning’s), autofiction and autobiographical novel are also included in a general concept of fictionalising autobiographical writing. There are two genres that can be considered to be the ancestors of the fictional autobiography: the picaresque novel and the ‘Bildungsroman’. The anonymously published La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) [The Pleasant History of Lazarillo de Tormes (1586)] is the prototype of the picaresque novel, the genre that originated in Spain in the sixteenth century and flourished throughout Europe during the following centuries. Picaresque novels are stories told by an I-narrator, who mostly is a pro­ tagonist of ‘low birth’ and tells in a loose way about his or her adventurous life. The story of Lazarillo de Tormes is preceded by a prologue by the same I-narrator, who

3.20 Fictional Autobiography 

 605

excuses himself for his crude style and hopes that his story will convince the reader of the real existence of a man with so many misfortunes and troubles. Based on what is written in the prologue the reader is supposed to believe that he will read a true story. Nothing in the Lazarillo absolutely proves its fictional character (Genette 1987, 193), since the name identity (of author and narrator/protagonist) is not denied because of the anonymity of the book. A famous later example of a picaresque novel and fictional autobiography, Moll Flanders (1722) by Daniel Defoe, shows the same typical charac­ teristics: an I-narrated story preceded by a preface. Here, too, the preface purports the book to be a true account on life. The author of the preface, however, is not Moll Flan­ ders, but an anonymous (fictional) editor of a manuscript that he happened upon and claims to have put the story “into new words” (Defoe 1980, 28). Thus, this life story is not presented as an autobiographical story of the author, but as the real story about “The Fortunes and Misfortunes Of the Famous Moll Flanders, &C. Who was Born in Newgate” (Defoe 1980, 27). The autobiographical illusion concerns the story of Moll Flanders, the (anonymous) editor makes an authenticity claim from his own. Prefaces are often used to invoke the suggestion that the story deals with a true-life experience. Fictional autobiographies were often modelled after the picaresque novel, espe­ cially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Souiller 1980; Löschnigg 2006), whereas in the nineteenth century the ‘Bildungsroman’ [‘education novel’ or ‘novel of development’] became a dominant example for fictional autobiographies. Both center on experiences which transform and mold a character and share a profound trust in the capacity of narrative for the constitution of identity. Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1873)], Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) [Corinne, or Italy (1833)], Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) are all narratives of apprenticeship, of education in life, renunciation, and civic integration into bourgeois society (Smith and Watson 2010, 119). The nineteenth century was the Golden Age of the fictional autobiography and English novels, such as those mentioned above, attracted a great deal of attention in literary research (bibliography in Löschnigg 2006). The impact of the picaresque novel reached far into the twentieth century. Famous examples are Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954) [Confessions of Felix Krull (1955)] by Thomas Mann and Die Blechtrommel (1959) [The Tin Drum (1959)] by Günter Grass. Also, the ‘Bildungsroman’ has stood model for many twentieth-century politically engaged and gendered specimens of life writing (Smith and Watson 2010). As the ideals expressed in the ‘Bildungsroman’ collapsed in the twentieth century, the genre of the fictional autobiography altered and displayed a greater complexity and ambiguity. Selfhood and self-examination were seen in a more fragmentary way; the consciousness of the constructedness of social beings grew (Smith and Watson 2010) – modern views were expressed in novels like Rainer Maria Rilke’s Aufzeichungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; first English trans­ lation under the title of The Journal of My Other Self in 1949], James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), or Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927)

606 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

[­ Steppenwolf (1929)]. The idea of a coherent autonomous subject vanished; the pre­ sentation of a fragmented and constituted identity and of estranging self-experiences took over. The traditional narrative pattern of successive linear events was exchanged for the coexistence of different time dimensions (Löschnigg 2006, 54). The evolution of experimental representations of a dynamic identity constituted by language persists in postwar fictional autobiographies like The Painted Bird (1965) by Jerzy Kosiński or in postmodern work like W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), novels that can no longer be subsumed under one generic category.

Autobiographical and Fictional Suggestion If fictional autobiography is defined as a genre that simulates an autobiographical dis­ course, it is important to ask which features of this text can be recognized as generic specifics and which lead the reader to think of an autobiography. Secondly, one has to ask how the reader discerns it to not be a ‘real’ autobiography. We first look at how the illusion of autobiographical authenticity is attained. In the case of fictional autobiography one could say that the reader is offered a “tele­ scoped double pact, an autobiographical pact impacted within a fictional pact” (Cohn 1999, 33), a description by Cohn that, in fact, inverses the interpretative steps by the reader: first the reader is faced with a text that s/he recognizes as an autobiography, and secondly s/he discovers the fictional character of the narrative. A first feature of generic recognition for an autobiographical text is the narrative situation. A first-person-narrative or an I-novel easily invokes an autobiographical suggestion, if we restrict the I-narration to homo- or autodiegetic narration (Genette 1972) and exclude heterodiegetic I-narrators, as in William M. Thackery’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848) (see Stanzel’s auctorial I-narrator). Whereas an I-narrator is not sufficient to evoke an autobiographical suggestion, it is, on the other hand, hardly conceivable without an I-narrator. If a fictional (autobiographical) I-narrative would be rewritten as a third-person narrative, it would simply be read like a novel, possibly like a ‘Bil­ dungsroman’. A second characteristic is closely related to this occurrence of an I-narrator and concerns the relationship between the narrator and the protagonist: Die Dualität von erzählendem und erlebendem Ich ist ein wesentliches Strukturmerkmal der quasi-autobiographischen Ich-Erzählung, die nach Stanzel somit als ‘Sequenz von Stellen mit dem Darstellungsfokus abwechselnd im erzählenden und im erlebenden Ich’ erscheint [‘The duality between I-narrator and I-character is an essential structural feature of the quasi-au­ tobiographical I-narrative, which according to Stanzel becomes apparent in the alternation of passages that are focalized by the telling I or the experiencing I’] (Löschnigg 2006, 22).

3.20 Fictional Autobiography 

 607

The focus may lie more on the experiencing I or on the telling and writing I (as in poststructuralistic autobiographies), thus resulting in different types of fictional auto­ biographies. The suggestion that the I-narrator is telling a (part of a) life story is further enhanced by modelling the narrator and his discourse to autobiographical models (Löschnigg 2006, 105–122). This includes 1) ‘biographische Modellierung’ [‘biograph­ ical modelling’], 2) ‘erfahrungsmimetische Modellierung’ [‘experience-based mimeti­ cal modelling’] and 3) ‘Medialisierung’ [‘mediatisation’]. 1) If the narrating character is individualised by specific biographical information (such as birth, location, social environment, professional aspirations or achievements, idiosyncratic expressions, etc.), this has an authentification effect. 2) Just as important as the biographical mod­ elling is the fact that the I-narrator is submitted to the same epistemological restric­ tions as a factual autobiographer. This means that his experiences must look authen­ tic, the story must (seem to) originate from the memory of the imagined subject and not from the imagination of the author. The I-narrator cannot dispose of information that a ‘normal individual’ couldn’t possibly know. An I-narrator with an extraordinary memory, displaying an abundance of complex and detailed information or knowledge of intimate thoughts and feelings of other characters would make him or her unreliable as an autobiographer. Therefore, David Copperfield and Moll Flanders tell about their adventures in retrospective, from the moment that they can dispose of all informa­ tion and have finished their roles as heroes (Löschnigg 2006, 88–89). Insertions that express this restricted epistemological faculty, like ‘I am not sure if,’ or ‘It might be so,’ on the other hand, increase the reliability of the narrator as an autobiographer. 3) The ‘Medialisierung’ [‘mediatisation’] of the autobiographical discourse must be con­ vincing; it must look as if somebody is orally conveying a story (by the use of defective language, repetitions and hesitations), or as if he is writing autobiographically. The retrospectivity of the storytelling contributes to this effect. Fictional autobiographical narratives try to mimic features that provoke authenticity in authentic autobiographies. On the other hand, what are the signs that inform the reader about the ‘fictional pact’ that includes the autobiographical one (Cohn 1999, 33)? Apart from many authentically working components, fictional autobiographies simultaneously point out their fictional character to the reader. A strict distinction between fictional and factual autobiographies, like the onomastic criterion that Lejeune has used for defin­ ing autobiography, is of little value here. Anonymous publication, like in the Lazarillo de Tormes, manipulation with feigned or anonymous editorship in the paratext, like in Moll Flanders, or the play with names and heteronyms as Fernando Pessoa does, make the use of the criterion of the name identity or non-identity rather problematic. One of the many heteronyms that Pessoa created was that of the writer Ricardo Reis, whose works were edited by the author Pessoa. In such cases the borderline between fictional autobiography and autofiction again becomes very thin. An ironic, caricatural or detached self-presentation can indirectly expose the I-narrator as an invented character and creates a reading pleasure that is comparable

608 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

to the effect evoked by an unreliable narrator, as if the author winks at the reader behind the back of his narrator. When Felix Krull presents himself in the first pages in a bombastic style and exposes himself as an arrogant, conceited, and distrustful person, the reader soon knows he is dealing with a parody. Ironic distancing, but also emotional or cognitive detachment of the narrator from his protagonist, prevent the reader from making an identificatory gesture. Prefaces play an important role in directing and manipulating the reader’s expec­ tations. From the eighteenth century on an illusion of authenticity was created by a fictive editorial staging (‘manuscrit trouvé’, the ‘found manuscript’-device); the author invented a fictive editor or pretended to be merely the editor of a so-called authentic manuscript. Such an authenticity suggestion does not necessarily imply an autobiographical suggestion; it can also serve a moral legitimation as in Moll Flanders (Löschnigg 2006), the telling of which story Defoe justified as: “To give the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be made as wicked as the real history of it will bear” (1980, 29). When Benjamin Constant gave Adolphe a subtitle: “anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un inconnu et publiée par m. Benjamin de Constant” [“an anecdote found among the papers of an unknown person, and published by Benjamin de Constant”], he used the pattern of the fictional autobiography for disguising his own confidences and moved in the direction of a ‘fic­ tionalised’ autobiography (Gasparini 2004, 80). Also, Der grüne Heinrich (1854/1855; 1879/1880) [Green Henry (1960)] by Gottfried Keller illustrates the inconstancy of the genre. This autobiographical novel stages a protagonist named Heinrich, who brings with him a manuscript telling a fictional autobiography, which seems to contain ele­ ments from the life of Keller himself (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 178). Similar devices (‘fictioneering’ as Frank Kermode 2009 called it) can be found in recent novels like J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009) in which a biographer assembles material for the life story of the deceased writer Coetzee. In the novel the author appears as the object of biographical representation (Smith and Watson 2010). This last example and further similar ones illustrate that the role of fictionality in literary practice has changed. In postmodern times fictionality fulfills a different role than in nineteenth-century literature; new practices play with the conventions of autobiographical writing and display a self-referential dimension in their complex structures, metafictional comments or intertextual references. They question the genre from within. “Viele meta-autobiographische Romane entziehen sich daher einer eindeutigen Gattungsklassifikation bzw. stellen die Tragfähigkeit und den Erkenntnis­ gewinn von traditionellen Gattungsbeschreibungen auf die Probe” [‘Many meta-auto­ biographical novels elude from an unequivocal genre classification or question the purport and cognitive power of traditional genre descriptions’] (Nünning 2007, 277). Changing historical contexts also include changing reader’s attitudes and expec­ tations that influence the functioning of traditional fictionalising and authentifying devices. Experienced twenty-first-century readers expect an autobiography to be (par­ tially) fictional. Whereas feigned editorship (‘manuscript trouvé’) was commonplace

3.20 Fictional Autobiography 

 609

in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in order to make readers believe the story was true, we see that postmodern authors use this topos ironically and play with nar­ rative conventions. The Dutch author Atte Jongstra aspires to a contrary effect as that of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century author when he presents his novel De avonturen van Henry II Fix [‘The adventures of Henry II Fix’] (2007) as a manuscript dearly acquired at an auction. Readers who know the tradition of this literary convention demystify the topos of the ‘found manuscript’. For them, it will paradoxically work as a fictionalising strategy.

Works Cited Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore/London: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Constant, Benjamin. Adolphe. London/Paris: Colburn/Tröttel & Wurtz, 1816 [Adolphe. Trans. Margaret Mauldon. Philadelphia: M. Carey and Son, 1817]. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. Gasparini, Philippe. Est-il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004. Genette, Gérard. Figures iii. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987. Hampel, Regine. “I Write Therefore I Am?” Fictional Autobiography and the Idea of Selfhood in the Postmodern Age. Bern: Lang, 2001. Kermode, Frank. “Fictioneering.” London Review of Books 31.19 (8 October 2009): 9–10. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Löschnigg, Martin. Die englische fiktionale Autobiographie. Erzähltheoretische Grundlagen und historische Prägnanzformen von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006. Nadj, Julijana. Die fiktionale Metabiographie: Gattungsgedächtnis und Gattungskritik in einem neuen Genre der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006. Nünning, Ansgar. “Metaautobiographien: Gattungsgedächtnis, Gattungskritik und Funktionen selbstreflexiver fiktionaler Autofiktionen.” Grenzen der Fiktionalität und der Erinnerung. Vol. II of Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Ed. Christoph Parry and Edgar Platen. München: iudicium, 2007. 269–292. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Souiller, Didier. Le roman picaresque. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980. Stanzel, Franz Karl. Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.

Further Reading Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Jürgen, Jurt. “Autobiographische Fiktion – Fiktionale Autobiographie.” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 34 (1993): 347–359.

610 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Löschnigg, Martin. “Narratological Perspectives on ‘Fiction and Autobiography’.” Fiction and Autobiography: Modes and Models of interaction. Ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Wolfgang Görtschacher. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2006. 1–11. Parry, Christoph. “Autobiographisches bei Peter Handke. Die Wiederholung zwischen fiktionalisier­ ter Autobiographie und autobiographischer Fiktion.” Grenzen der Identität und der Fiktionalität. Vol. I of Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur. Ed. Ulrich Breuer and Beatrice Sandberg. München: iudicium, 2006. 276–290. Paulsen, Wolfgang. Das Ich im Spiegel der Sprache. Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991. Welsh, Alexander. From Copyright to Copperfield. The Identity of Dickens. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

3.21 Interview Gabriele Rosenthal

Definition An interview is a tool used to gain information from the interviewee(s) in diverse spheres of society (for example in medical or legal contexts, journalism, personnel management), as well as for empirical research in the socio-cultural sciences. David Silverman (1993, 19) is probably right to speak of an “‘interview society’ in which inter­ views seem central to making sense of our lives”. In many different spheres of society and the media, interviews are used to obtain information, as a form of entertainment in talkshows, or to present the views of well-known personalities. Job interviews are sometimes conducted as biographical interviews, and witnesses of historical events are requested by the media to give autobiographical accounts of their experiences or are interviewed about certain parts of their lives. Thus, in modern societies most people have relatively clear ideas concerning how interviews can be conducted, what makes people feel comfortable or uncomfortable when giving interviews, and in which contexts autobiographical accounts are expected. In various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, interviews are used to question people for research purposes. In biographical or life story interviews, the interviewer requests to hear the life history, or a narration of certain biographical phases, or certain aspects of the life of people (who may be associated with various societies, groupings, classes, milieus or organizations). Unlike other non-standardized and semi-structured forms of interview, the aim is to discover not only the patterns of interpretation of the interviewees in the present, but also the nature of their experiences in the past.

Explication In the early days of biographical research in social science, autobiographies written at the prompting of the researcher served as a source of data (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958; Shaw 1930). It was not until the 1970s that biographical or life story interviews were commonly used to obtain life histories. A considerable advantage of interviews over the controlled process of writing, which may be more liable to be influenced by criteria of social desirability, is that the interview may give rise to off-the-cuff narra­ tives, in which the interviewees enter into a flow of narration and thus into a stream of memories (Rosenthal 2006). Just as with the writing of autobiographical texts, interviewers can stimulate processes of remembering and biograpical work or, put https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-077

612 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

in another way, identity work, by inviting interviewees to talk about their lives and encouraging them in this process by asking questions, and above all by listening. Thus, the autobiography of the German dramatist Heiner Müller (1992), for instance, is based on biographical interviews which he agreed to give for the publishing house Kiepenheuer and Witsch. This book can also be read as an example of the helpful and structuring effect of questions. Moreover, as Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (2005, 206) has put it, through such interviews the autobiographical narrator takes on a ‘media gestalt’ ‘which in the interaction of question and answer renders the mediality of the autobiographical self visible’. As a tool of empirical research, the biographical interview as a method has become well established in sociology (Riemann 2003; Rosenthal 2003, 2004, in press; Schütze 1992, 2007), in oral history (Bornat 2004; Perks and Thomson 1998) and in educational science (Alheit 1994; Krüger and Marotzki 1999). Psychology has also rediscovered the biographical approach and biographical interviews (Hollway and Jefferson 2008; McAdams 1993; Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992). The concept of ‘narra­ tive identity’ has gained more attention, and fairly elaborated versions of this concept have been proposed (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). In many fields of social work, biographical interviews provide a basis for shaping professional services, both for individuals and families, for instance in youth work (Köttig and Rätz-Heinisch 2005; Rosenthal and Köttig 2010). In all these disciplines of the socio-cultural sciences, biographical or life story interviews are part of the arsenal of methods used for qualitative empirical research, and they are conducted either as semi-structured interviews with the aid of a thematic guide (Atkinson 1998, 2002) or as in-depth, unstructured interviews. In the case of semi-structured interviews, the conversation remains more or less within the struc­ ture of a question-and-answer interview, with the interviewer determining the topics and the sequential order in which they are treated (Hollway and Jefferson 2008, 302). Atkinson, for example, proposed a list of over 200 questions for the interviewer to choose from, depending on the way the interview goes and on the particular research context. The questions are asked in the chronological order of the life history, begin­ ning with childhood, and proceeding to schooldays, marriage, career and retirement. This standard pattern, based on the idea of a normal biography, comes close to what Stefan Goldmann, in a Cultural Studies perspective, has described as autobiograph­ ical ‘topoi’ (Goldmann 1994), it structures the interview to quite a high degree and does not allow the interviewee to choose which life phases he or she would like to talk about, nor to choose the order in which the topics are treated. This method insists on keeping to the chronological order of the experienced life history, thereby missing the chance to be able to analyze the structure, and that includes the diachronic structure, of the narrated life story in the present, which differs in principle in its thematic and temporal linkages from the chronology of the lived experiences. McAdams (2008) also gives firm instructions for autobiographical presentations. He tells interviewees, for instance, to think “about your life as if it were a book or novel” (2008,1), to divide

3.21 Interview 

 613

it into chapters, to give every chapter a title, “and just tell me a little bit what each chapter is about”. In the 1970s there was a painstaking debate among sociologists in German-speak­ ing countries concerning the use of thematic guides, which do not allow the inter­ viewer to go with the flow of the conversation or to take the language of the inter­ viewee into account (Hopf 1978). The unstructured narrative interview, developed in the 1970s by the German sociologist Fritz Schütze, is better able to do justice to the relevance system of the interviewed person. This is an interview form with very few predetermined questions, which, except for an initial question inviting the person to talk about her or his life at the beginning of the interview, are only used in the last phase of the interview. This type of interview has by now become an established technique far beyond the German-speaking research landscape in social-science bio­ graphical research and in the sphere of oral history. The aim is to give the interviewee the greatest possible freedom in shaping his narration. Since experiences are best described in the form of a narrative, a text form for communicating events one has experienced oneself, Schütze (1976, 1977) borrowed ideas from narrative research and linguistics, especially ideas by Labov and Waletzky (1967). In the context of a research project on community power structures in small towns or communities which had been merged, he first developed a thematically focused type of narrative interview. Schütze’s suggestion at that time was to ask people to narrate the course of events that led to a specific local (political) situation. More or less unexpectedly, the inter­ views contained a number of autobiographical narrations. As a result, Schütze devel­ oped this technique and devised the method of the biographical narrative interview, in which people were asked to tell their life history without any restriction to specific themes or certain status passages (Riemann 2003, 10). In biographical narrative interviews in a great variety of research projects and also in diverse geographical and social contexts, it can frequently be observed that the interviewees begin telling detailed autobiographical stories, that the narration’s proximity to the past increases in the course of the narration, and perspectives entirely different from the interviewee’s present perspective show themselves, which becomes clear in the argumentation parts or in the narrated anecdotes. As Schütze (1977) pointed out, this is connected with certain imperatives or “constraints of extempore story-telling”. These constraints are to condense to go into details and to complete the form or close the gestalt of the story (Hermanns 1987). Independently of their specific research questions, most scholars who use this method of data collection first consider the entire life story, both in terms of its genesis and how it is constructed in the present. That is why when one conducts interviews and reconstructs life stories, one does not restrict oneself to any parts or phases of the biography, in the interview as well as during (at least the first phase of) the data anal­ ysis. Examining specific phases, or areas, of life is supposed to only take place after the ‘gestalt’ (or structure) of the whole biographical narrative and, as far as possible, of the entire life history have been considered. At the beginning of each individual interview,

614 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

the interviewee is generally just invited to tell his or her life story. In some contexts, researchers may use a more structured form (Rosenthal 2004, 51) and invite the inter­ viewee to talk about a specific phase or area in his or her life (for instance, the story of his or her migration, or of a chronic illness); or they may combine the life history with a thematic focus (e.  g. ‘We are interested in the life stories of people with a chronic disease, people who migrated to the US, who have experienced armed conflicts, etc.’). The request to hear the interviewee’s life story, or the story of specific life phases, often results in a long biographical narration (or biographical self-presentation), pos­ sibly lasting for hours. This so-called main narration is at no time interrupted by ques­ tions from the interviewer, but is supported by paralinguistic expressions of interest and attentiveness. In this way, the researcher is able to start by observing the relevance system of the interviewee and the way his or her everyday world is constructed. The relevance system of the researcher does not dominate the conversation until the third phase of the interview. When the interviewee has clearly brought the main narration to an end, the next step for the researcher is to ask so-called internal narrative ques­ tions, i.  e. questions about things the person has said. For this purpose the researcher may refer to notes taken during the main narration. In this first questioning part of the interview, no topics are mentioned which have not already been introduced by the interviewee her- or himself. Only in the third part of the interview external narrative questions are asked, concerning topics that have not yet been mentioned and in which the researcher is interested. A narrative question does not mean asking questions about opinions or reasons (‘Why did you…?’, ‘Why did you do that?’, ‘Why did you want to…?’); instead it means encouraging people to tell more about certain phases in their life, or a particular sit­ uation. This succession of internal narrative questions and external narrative questions, and the temporal separation of the corresponding interview phases, make it possible to know which topics were introduced at which point by the interviewee, which topics were avoided, and what significance may be attached to the fact that certain topics were thematized and others not. One of the reasons why it is extremely important to include a phase with external narrative questions is that this helps to reveal the exist­ ence and significance of omissions or gaps. Translation: Ruth Schubert

Works Cited Alheit, Peter. “Everyday Time and Life Time. On the problems of healing contradictory experience of time.” Time & Society 3.3 (1994): 305–319. Atkinson, Robert. The Life Story Interview. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998. Atkinson, Robert. “The Life Story Interview.” Handbook of Interview Research. Ed. Jaber F. Gubrium and James Holstein. London: Sage, 2002. 121–140.

3.21 Interview 

 615

Bornat, Joanna. “Oral History.” Qualitative Research Practice. Ed. Clive Seal, Giampetro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium and David Silverman. London: Sage, 2004. 34–47. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of meaning. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1990. Goldmann, Stefan. “Topos und Erinnerung. Rahmenbedingungen der Autobiographie.” Der ganze Mensch. Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Jürgen Schings. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 660–675. Hermanns, Harry. “Narrative Interview – a New Tool for Sociological Field Research.” Approaches to the Study of Face to Face Interaction. Folia Sociologica 13. Ed. Zbigniew Bokszanski and Marek Czyzewski. Lodz: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego, 1987. 43–56. Hollway, Wendy, and Tony Jefferson. “The free association narrative interview method.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. Ed. Lisa M. Given. Sevenoaks: Sage, 2008. 296–315. Hopf, Christel. “Die Pseudo-Exploration – Überlegungen zur Technik qualitativer Interviews in der Sozialforschung.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 7.2 (1978): 97–115. Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. The self we live by. Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kallmeyer, Werner, and Fritz Schütze. “Zur Konstitution von Kommunikationsschemata.” Gesprächs­ analyse. Ed. Dirk Wegner. Hamburg: Buske, 1977. 159–274. Köttig, Michaela, and Regina Rätz-Heinisch. “Potenziale unterstützen, Selbstverstehen fördern. Dialogische Biografiearbeit in der Kinder- und Jugendhilfe.” Sozial Extra 29.11 (2005): 16–20. Krüger, Heinz-Hermann, and Winfried Marotzki, eds. Handbuch erziehungswissenschaftliche Biographieforschung. Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1999. Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. “Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experiences.” Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Ed. June Helms. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967. McAdams, Dan. The Stories We Live by: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. London: The Gulford Press, 1993. McAdams, Dan. “The life story interview”. http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/foley/instruments/ interview/ (10 July 2018). Müller, Heiner. Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992. Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson. The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge, 2015. Riemann, Gerhard. “A Joint Project Against the Backdrop of a Research Tradition: An Introduction to ‘Doing Biographical Research’.” FQS, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 4.3 (2003): 1–15. Rosenthal, Gabriele. “The Healing Effects of Storytelling. On the Conditions of Curative Storytelling in the Context of Research and Counseling.” Qualitative Inquiry 9.6 (2003): 915–933. Rosenthal, Gabriele. “Biographical Research.” Qualitative Research Practice. Ed. Clive Seale, Giampetro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium and David Silverman. London: Sage, 2004. 48–64. Rosenthal, Gabriele. “The Narrated Life Story: On the Interrelation Between Experience, Memory and Narration.” Narrative, Memory, Knowledge: Representations, Aesthetics, Contexts. Ed. Nancy Kelly, Christine Horrocks, Kate Milnes, Brian Roberts and David Robinson. Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield, 2006. 1–16. Rosenthal, Gabriele. Interpretative Social Research. Göttingen: University Press (in press). Rosenthal, Gabriele, and Michaela Köttig. “Biographische Fallrekonstruktionen.” Qualitative Methoden in der Sozialen Arbeit. Ed. Karin Bock and Ingried Miethe. Opladen: Budrich, 2010. 232–239. Rosenwald, George C., and Richard L. Ochberg, eds. Storied Lives. The Cultural Politics of SelfUnderstanding. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

616 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Schütze, Fritz. “Zur Hervorlockung und Analyse von Erzählungen thematisch relevanter Geschichten im Rahmen soziologischer Feldforschung.” Kommunikative Sozialforschung. Ed. Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder Soziologen. München: Fink, 1976. 159–260. Schütze, Fritz. Die Technik des narrativen Interviews in Interaktionsfeldstudien. Dargestellt an einem Projekt zur Erforschung kommunaler Machtstrukturen. Bielefeld U. 1977. N.pag. Schütze, Fritz. “Pressure and Guilt: War Experiences of a Young German Soldier and their Biographical Implications.” International Sociology 7.2 (1992): 187–208. Schütze, Fritz. “Biography analysis on the empirical base of autobiographical narratives: How to analyse autobiographical narrative interviews—part II. Module B.2.2. INVITE—Biographical counselling in rehabilitative vocational training—further education curriculum.” http://www. biographicalcounselling.com/download/B2.2.pdf (5 September 2013). Shaw, Clifford R. The Jack-Roller. A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930. Silverman, David. Interpreting Qualitative Data. Methods for anaylsing Talk, Text and Interaction. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, 1993. Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 2nd ed. 1928. Thompson, Paul. The voice of the past: oral history. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005.

Further Reading Hollway, Wendy, and Tony Jefferson. Doing Qualitative Research Differently. A Free association, narrative and the interview method. London: Sage, 2000. Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein, eds. Handbook of Interview Research. Context and Method. London: Sage, 2002.

3.22 Letter, E-mail, SMS Davide Giuriato

Definition A letter is a message in writing that is highlighted on a surface with a writing instru­ ment and corresponding liquid, prepared for dispatch, and forwarded to someone not present over a spatial distance before being received by the addressee after a time delay. Regardless whether a reply and thus a dialogical exchange of letters ensues, the letter represents an event geared towards communication that in terms of both its production as well as reception is tied to specific institutional, material, and media arrangements and is singular in character. An E-mail (abbreviation of ‘electronic mail’) is a text message in letter form that is typed on a keyboard and sent electronically via a mail server across a computer network. Regardless of the geographical distance, normally an E-mail can be received by the addressee within a few seconds of its forwarding. A SMS (abbreviation of ‘short message service’) is a short text message limited to 160 characters and immediately transmitted mostly by cell phone (but also the internet) via a short message service center (SMSC) to the device of the receiver. For longer messages (‘Long SMS’) the text is divided into several parts which are sent separately.

Explication Up until the discovery of the electrical telegraph in the nineteenth century the letter was the predominant means for communicating and maintaining relationships over distances. Since Antiquity the practical rules of epistolary communication are based on an ‘autobiographical pact’ guaranteeing the identity of the author, the authenticity of the writing and its subject matter, thus furnishing referential reliability (Lejeune 1975). Considering that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the pinnacle of letter culture, the classical autobiography, the diary and the letter are the central means in the formation of culture of inwardness that genuinely constitutes itself through the medium of writing (Schulze 1996; Koschorke 1999). The letter is thus an object of cultural value that since the twentieth, and more so since the twenty-first century, seems to be vanishing as a result of competition with other communica­ tion technologies, specifically E-mail and SMS. In comparison with the accelerated possibilities afforded by new media, this traditional means of forwarding messages is indeed being devalued as ‘snail mail’. According to Reinhard Nickisch’s analysis https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-078

618 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

however, communication via E-mail and SMS is nothing but the continuation of cor­ respondence through the letter by other means (Nickisch 2003, 72). Hence, the history of the letter needs to be surveyed not with a view to the supposed end of the culture of correspondence based on exchanging letters but rather in accordance with the histor­ ically changing communication technologies, and this means: in light of the specific media conditions and possibilities.

Systematic Aspects of the Letter Since Antiquity letters have been understood on the one hand as historical-bio­ graphical documents (private letter, official letter, business letter, open letter, etc.), and as an example of a philosophical or literary genre on the other (philosophical letters, travel letters, epistolary novel, etc.). In both cases epistolary communica­ tion gains its characteristic tension through how the real written message address­ ing someone absent is to replace or simulate the verbal conversation between two present persons, and that the dialogical structure of the utterance made in a letter is conceived from a constitutive monological situation, from an act of solitary writing or reading. This liminal position, determining definitions of the letter since ancient times, has led to a variety of views in research. Firstly, the affinity to verbal commu­ nication is anchored structurally in such a way that the written aspect of epistolary production is devalued methodologically as an incidental formality and pressed into the background in favor of perspectives exploring social and cultural history (e.  g. Steinhausen 1889/1891; Nickisch 1991). In contrast, starting from the concrete prag­ matic context, meaning that any composing of a letter is coupled to the respective historically variable conventions and specific technological conditions, theoretical approaches to the letter assign a fundamental role to precisely these supposed acci­ dental aspects of writtenness and the inherent logic of a particular media (e.  g. Joost 1993; Siegert 1993). Far from functioning solely according to the laws of verbal con­ versation, communicating a message by letter is more than merely producing and reading linguistic signs and the information conveyed – instead, the function played by the medium is also determined by an array of material criteria: simply the choice of paper (e.  g. format, color, quality), the writing instrument (stylus, quill, pencil, type­ writer, etc.), or the liquid used (wax, ink, etc.), the arrangement of the writing surface (e.  g. the layout of the salutation, the text body, and the ending), the different ways of rendering the written content (e.  g. handwritten, typewritten), the manner of its sending (folded, sealed, placement in an envelope, the addressing, franking, etc.), and the means of transportation (messengers, couriers, mail coach, rail, ship, air­ plane, etc.) – in short: the unique character of a letter and its attendant circumstances possess semiotic and aesthetic qualities and thus represent a more or less codified message (Bohnenkamp and Wiethölter 2008, IX–X). In the light of these preliminary considerations, it is worth keeping in mind that existing definitions of the letter fail to

3.22 Letter, E-mail, SMS 

 619

take into account the material and phenomenal dimension of the written document (e.  g. Müller 1994).

On the History of the Letter For centuries the epistolary form of communication is framed by guidelines as to its composition. From Antiquity until well into the Early Modern period both the theory and practice of letter writing are programmatically influenced by rhetoric. Mistakenly attributed to Demetrius of Phalerum from the fourth century before the Common Era, the work on style known as Περὶ ἑρμηνείας (Peri hermeneias, On Style) sets out the postulates of correspondence established as topoi for the first time: related to oral expression, the letter is to be written in a plain and clear style, revealing the soul of its writer. Although it is recognized that the epistolary exchange is one of the two sides of a dialogue, Pseudo-Demetrius underlines that, unlike the dialogue, the written form demands greater care and is sent as it were as a δῶρον (doron, gift) (Demetrius 1969, 173–177). Accordingly, for a long time writing a letter remained oriented on the stand­ ards of oratory formulated in Antiquity and its arrangement (‘dispositio’) [into five parts: formulaic greeting (‘salutatio’), securing the goodwill of the addressee (‘capta­ tio benevolentiae’), exposition of the occasion for writing the letter (‘narratio’), justi­ fying a request or the cause (‘petitio’), and the ending (‘conclusio’). Based on these conventions, medieval epistolography removed the letter from its embedment in the rhetorical context and elevated it to the status of an independent subject to be taught (Camargo 1992). Against the backdrop of social changes (primarily in the fields of trade, law, and administration), the ‘ars dictaminis’ (designating the discipline) or the ‘ars dictandi’ (the handbooks) extended the scope of letter writing to include specific criteria for written forms of presentation. Greater attention is paid to the social position of the correspondents in the model of a chancery letter for example, leading to the formulation of formulaic phrases and forms of address befitting social status. To write a letter in this context means to produce texts according to prescribed models (Ludwig 2005, 209). That epistolary production modeled on the criteria of rhetoric continued well into the Early Modern period however is witnessed by the treatise De conscribendis epistolis [‘On the Writing of Letters’] (1522) by the humanist Erasmus from Rotterdam. Although this manual presents examples for different kinds of letters, drawing on the classical stylistic precepts for their writing, a burgeoning awareness of freedom in the composition is evident in the area of the familial private letter (Müller 1994, 71). The fact that subsequent letter writing remains bound to the stylistic precepts of simplicity and clarity makes the detachment from the standard set of rules of rhetoric and the concomitant turn towards the ideal of naturalness, increasingly prominent and discernible throughout the seventeenth (England and France) and eighteenth centuries (Germany), seem like a license for ‘free’ expression. Preeminently through

620 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Gedanken von einem guten deutschen Briefe [‘Thoughts on a Good German Letter’] (1742) and Briefe, nebst einer Praktischen Abhandlung von dem guten Geschmacke in Briefen [‘Letters, together with a practical treatise on good taste in letters’] (1751) a letter culture anchored in civilian society is codified in which writing for the purpose of carrying out a spontaneous and confessional soulful dia­ logue between two confidants is firmly defined as a substitute for direct speech and becomes the focus of a literature and culture of inwardness. That at the same time this practice never loses sight of the parameters of the written form is indicated by the Allgemeine deutsche Briefsteller [‘Guide to German Letter-writing’] from 1793: “Auch auf das Äußere des Briefes verwende man die nöthige Sorgfalt, denn selbst bei Briefen machen Kleider Leute” [‘Necessary care also needs to be given to the exterior of the letter, for even with letters clothes make the man’] (Moritz 1832, 94). The history of the letter shows that the material aspects of correspondence prac­ tice assume a fundamental role and that letter writers make every effort to find the suitable ‘clothing’. It is known for instance that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg repeat­ edly drew attention to the non-language requirements of writing a letter – a studiously calculated handling of the entire undertaking is discernible, extending from the paper and quill, the ink, the blotting sand, and the folding through to the sealing, address­ ing, and forwarding (Joost 1993, 63–79). In a letter from 16 November 1776 to Christi­ ane Dietrich he gives the reason for choosing a pink-colored large quarto sheet with gild edging: “Eine nicht ganz ungewöhnliche Bitte thue ich an Sie auf einem ganzt ungewöhnlichen Papier. […] Nehmen Sie diesen kleinen muthwilligen Gedancken als eine kleine Vergoldung der Bitte an. Das Papier ist schon vergoldet” [‘I put forward to you a not quite uncommon request on quite uncommon paper. […] Take this small mischievous thought as a small gilding of the request. The paper is already gilded’] (Joost 1993, 126). This sensual quality of the letter can come to the fore in fictive letters as well. In the revised edition of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774/1787) [The Sorrows of Young Werther (1779)] for example the protagonist writes to Lotte on July 26: “Keinen Sand mehr auf die Zettelchen die Sie mir schreiben. Heute führte ich es schnell nach der Lippe und die Zähne knisterten mir” [“please don’t sprinkle sand on the little notes you write. I pressed today’s quickly to my lips and my teeth grated”] (Goethe 1994, 83 [2012, 35]). The invention of blotting paper some decades later would solve this and similar problems for ardent letter readers and replace the sand-blotting pot used by Goethe himself. Since the mechanization of written production at the end of the nineteenth and the general acceptance of the typewriter in the first third of the twentieth century, the choice of the instrument employed when writing becomes contentious, particu­ larly in relation to the question of the intimacy of conducting a dialogue by letter and accordingly one’s own handwriting as an essential characteristic of the private letter. Hermann Hesse for example greatly appreciated – although handwriting supposedly lends the message greater individuality – the ‘anonymous’ face of typewriting and exploited it as an opportunity to experiment with letters typed in a variety of colors

3.22 Letter, E-mail, SMS 

 621

(Bohnenkamp and Wiethölter 2008, 36). In contrast, Walter Benjamin, Robert Walser, and Rainer Maria Rilke, each of whom left behind an important corpus of letters, are amongst those letter writers who at the beginning of the twentieth century deliberately refrained from using a typewriter, preferring the freedom of arrangement afforded by handwriting. On the other hand, Else Lasker-Schüler feels the need to justify using a typewriter so as to ensure that the addressee does not doubt the intimacy of what she writes: “Ich schreibe mit der Maschine meiner Hand wegen, die mir weh tut. Verzei­ hen Sie bitte” [‘I’m typing because my hand is aching. Please excuse’] (Bohnenkamp and Wiethölter 2008, 15). Of course, the materiality of writing is of vital importance not only for the aesthetic and semiotic quality of the letter. As an example from the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke shows, precisely the writtenness of epistolary communication provides the scope nec­ essary for transgressing the traditional borders between genres, enabling the letter to become an autobiographical text. Lasting just a month, the intensive correspondence with the Viennese pianist Magda von Hattingberg is characterized by how Rilke does not write his letters on letter paper: “Mein Papier, Briefpapier, ist nun da, gute Freun­ din, aber ich will großsprechen und sagen: es war immer meine Gewohnheit, Ihnen auf diesem hier zu schreiben, auf dem ich gewöhnlich arbeite, mag es dabei bleiben” [‘My paper, the stationery, is here now, good friend, but I want to boast and say: it has always been my custom to write to you on this paper I normally use for working, let it remain that way’] (Rilke 2000, 27). For Rilke, the paper normally used for work is tied to the liberating consequence that what he writes need not heed any criterion, so what he expresses soon indeed becomes an intimate diary. In the letter from 16/20 Feb­ ruary 1914, wherein Rilke calls his letters to her “Brief-Titanen” [‘letter-titans’] (Rilke 2000, 119), he can thus claim: “Ich schreibe weiter, Du theures Mädchen, dieses unbe­ greifliche Journal meines Leben-Wollens an Dein Herz” [‘I continue writing, address­ ing to your heart this incomprehensible journal of my desire to live’] (Rilke 2000, 111). Amounting to no less than thirty-one manuscript pages, with this letter Rilke emphasizes a functional equivalence between epistolary communication and autobi­ ographical confession that is rooted in the media conditions of writing (see Giuriato 2010).

Letter – E-mail – SMS If the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are generally regarded as the pinnacle of letter culture, the history of telecommunications media since the emergence of the tel­ egram (1874), the postcard (1847), and the telephone (in Germany from 1877) has con­ comitantly witnessed – thanks to the competition unleashed – a gradual and repeat­ edly lamented demise of the letter. Although epistolary exchange in the traditional form seems to have all but disappeared since the end of the twentieth century with the sweeping success of digital transmission of data, it is nonetheless advisable to desist

622 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

from joining the emphatic chorus of cultural criticism. The present transformation ushered in by new media technology has led rather to a pluralization of communica­ tion cultures (letter culture, telephone culture, cell phone culture, E-mail culture). The variety of media makes several switching technologies readily available today, and the ‘diversity demands decisions, several times a day: one has to consider how one wishes to communicate with someone, what kind of influence the chosen medium has on the message, and which channels the recipient uses in which way’ (Stock 2001, 47). Against the background of this entangled situation, which at times triggers ‘uncertain behavior’ when dealing with existing and new media, it is not only the question as to the rules of communication which needs to be continually reconsidered (Höflich and Gebhardt 2003, 8). The diversity and heterogeneity of the available com­ munication media also indicates the need to differentiate functionally between their various usages and to take into consideration the metacommunicative significance of the individual medium. Empirical studies suggest that the private letter has lost none of its importance and credibility as a means of emotional exchange, although it has long been surpassed quantitatively by E-mail and SMS in terms of user preference (Leppänen 2001; Höflich and Gebhardt 2003). In contrast, the time interval required by the communication process in the case of E-mail and SMS, a consequence of the respective technology, apparently brings with it ‘more immediate contact’, which can however be connoted with a lower degree of commitment (Meier 2002, 69). Finally, the elliptical style of SMS communication (leaving out the subject pronoun, absence of sequences for greetings or saying goodbye, abbreviating words and sentences) as distinct from the letter and the E-mail is connected with a functional orality, highlight­ ing the recurrence of situation-deictic elements (Dürscheid 2002). For letters generally it is thus necessary to consider that for all the freedom they afford in terms of their compositional arrangement, they are always written within the framework of rhetorical and material conventions as well as specific media and historical conditions. With regard to both private as well as official letters it can – depending on the circumstances – make a significant difference whether in the digital age one writes an E-mail, an SMS, or a handwritten or typewritten letter, whether one decides to use in vogue retro design products such as handmade paper, ordinary writing paper, or preprinted paper with letterhead, whether one scents the letter or not, whether one folds the letter and has it sealed or simply places it in an envelope, whether one writes in blue, black, red ink or uses a pencil, etc. All the traces visible on the sheet of paper or on the screen, whether specifically stemming from the act of writing or otherwise, can be read by the recipient and, if need be, interpreted. Thus, whenever the letter is drawn on as a historical or (auto-)biographical information source, its staged character, or more generally, the specific contours of its appearance need to be considered closely. Upon adopting such an approach it becomes quickly clear that, ultimately, the letter defies reproduction. A facsimile can be made of a letter, or it can be photographed, scanned, filed, or exhibited in a museum – only the original document can convey a sense of its singularity. The letter is in itself an event,

3.22 Letter, E-mail, SMS 

 623

an event that can tell entire stories through its material properties and the peculiar features of its respective medium. This not only pertains to all that the writer does in arranging and then sending the document. Once out of their hands and forwarded the letter embarks on a – at times – long journey fraught with danger. Along with the sender and recipient, various agents are involved in the conveyance capable of influ­ encing the fate of the letter, likewise that of an E-mail or SMS – no matter whether the intentions are sympathetic or malicious. Whereas postal staff in democratic societies are obliged to observe the secrecy of letters as a fundamental legal principle, under totalitarian conditions the channels of conveyance represent a gray area in which unknown readers can make trouble as they choose – this secrecy is no less threatened in the case of the E-mail and the SMS given the relatively simply surveillance of the digital medium possible today (Meier 2002, 68). In the one case as in the other, Franz Kafka’s remark in a letter to Milena Jesen­ ská from 1922, claiming that corresponding through letters has something inherently ghostlike about it, seems eerily apt: Alles Unglück meines Lebens […] kommt, wenn man will, von Briefen oder von der Möglichkeit des Briefeschreibens her. […] Die leichte Möglichkeit des Briefeschreibens muss – bloss theore­ tisch gesehen – eine schreckliche Zerrüttung der Seelen in die Welt gebracht haben. […] Wie kam man nur auf den Gedanken, dass Menschen durch Briefe miteinander verkehren können! […] Postalische Küsse kommen nicht an ihren Ort, sondern werden von den Gespenstern auf dem Weg ausgetrunken [All the misfortune of my life […] derives, one could say, from letters or from the possibility of writing letters. […] The easy possibility of letter-writing – seen merely theoretically – must have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. […] How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! […] Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts] (Kafka 1986, 301, 302 [1999, 182,183]).

Translation: Paul Bowman

Works Cited Bohnenkamp, Anne, and Waltraud Wiethölter, eds. Der Brief. Ereignis & Objekt. Basel/Frankfurt a.  M.: Stroemfeld, 2008. Camargo, Martin. “Ars dictandi, dictaminis.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. 1040–1046. Demetrios. On Style. The Greek Text of Demetrius De Elocutione. Ed. W. Rhys Roberts. Hildesheim: Olms, 1969. Dürscheid, Christa. “E-mail und SMS – ein Vergleich.” Kommunikationsform E-mail. Ed. Arne Ziegler and Christa Dürscheid. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2002. 93–114. Erasmus von Rotterdam. De conscribendis epistolis/Anleitung zum Briefschreiben (1522). Ed. Kurt Smolak. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott. Die epistolographischen Schriften (1742/1751). Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971.

624 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Giuriato, Davide. “Die unwirthlichen Blätter. Rilke, das Papier, die Post und die Briefe an Benvenuta”. Der Brief. Ereignis & Objekt. Frankfurter Tagung. Eds. Waltraud Wiethölter and Anne Bohnenkamp. Frankfurt a.  M.: Stroemfeld, 2010. 134–146. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers/Die Wahlverwandtschaften/Kleine Prosa/Epen. Ed. Waltraud Wiethölter. Frankfurt a.  M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994 [The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. David Constantine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]. Höflich, Joachim R., and Julian Gebhardt, eds. Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel. Brief, E-mail, SMS. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2003. Joost, Ulrich. Lichtenberg – der Briefschreiber. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1993. Kafka, Franz. Briefe an Milena. Ed. Jürgen Born and Michael Müller. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1986 [Letters to Milena. Trans. James Stern and Tania Stern. London: Vintage Books, 1999]. Koschorke, Albrecht. Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts. München: Fink, 1999. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]. Leppänen, Sanne. “The Relationship between Electronic Mail and Paper Mail”. Case Study: Changes in Postal Services – Paper or Bytes? The Consumer Research Project. Ed. Digital Media Institute. Tampere, 2001. 51–80. Ludwig, Otto. Von der Antike bis zum Buchdruck. Geschichte des Schreibens. Vol. I. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995. Meier, Jörg. “Vom Brief zur E-mail”. Kommunikationsform E-mail. Ed. Arne Ziegler and Christa ­Dürscheid. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2002. 57–75. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Allgemeiner deutscher Briefsteller (1793). Berlin: Rückert, 10th ed. 1832. Müller, Wolfgang G. “Brief.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994. 60–76. Nickisch, Reinhard M. G. Brief. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. Nickisch, Reinhard M. G. “Der Brief – historische Betrachtungen.” Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel. Brief, E-mail, SMS. Ed. Joachim R. Höflich and Julian Gebhardt. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2003. 63–73. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Briefwechsel mit Magda von Hattingberg. Ed. Ingeborg Schnack and Renate Scherffenberg. Frankfurt a.  M.: Insel, 2000. Schulze, Winfried, ed. Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1996. Siegert, Bernhard. Relais. Geschicke der Literatur als Epoche der Post. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1993. Steinhausen, Georg. Geschichte des deutschen Briefes (1889/1891). Dublin/Zürich: Weidmann, 1968. Stock, Ulrich. “Bitte melde dich!” Die Zeit (19 July 2001): 47–49.

Further Reading Baasner, Rainer, ed. Briefkultur im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999. Barton, David, ed. Letter writing as a social practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000. Behr, Monique, and Jesko Bender, eds. Emil Behr. Briefzeugenschaft vor, aus, nach Auschwitz. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Bernard, Andreas. “Im SMS-Stil. Gibt es eine Poetologie der 160 Zeichen? Über den Zusammenhang von Literatur und Medientechnologie.” “System ohne General”. Schreibszenen im digitalen

3.22 Letter, E-mail, SMS 

 625

Zeitalter. Ed. Davide Giuriato, Martin Stingelin and Sandro Zanetti. München: Fink, 2008. 189–197. Dossena, Marina, ed. Letter writing in late modern Europe. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. Ebrecht, Angelika, ed. Brieftheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990. Poster, Carol, and Linda C. Mitchel, eds. Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Stockmar, René. Private Briefe – freie Wissenschaft. Briefe edieren am Beispiel von Friedrich Nietzsches Briefwechsel 1872–1874. Basel/Frankfurt a.  M.: Stroemfeld, 2005. Ziegler, Arne, and Christa Dürscheid, eds. Kommunikationsform E-mail. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2002.

3.23 Memoirs Christiane Lahusen

Definition Memoirs (memorable events, lat. ‘memoria’ [memory, remembrance]). One starting point for the definition of memoir is Bernd Neumann’s 1971 theory of autobiography, Identität und Rollenzwang [Identity and Social Roles]. In contrast to autobiography, which centers on the psychic and personal development of the individual, memoirs devote more attention to ‘exterior states’ (Neumann 1970, 10). While childhood and youth are often depicted individualistically (Pascal 1965, 8), using autobiograph­ ical material such as family photographs, this changes as soon as the protagonist enters the professional arena. These ‘exterior states’ often refer to ‘political life’, as statesmen and politicians have traditionally used the memoir genre to put their rec­ ollections on paper. However, this also includes ‘public life’ in a broader sense, as the written accounts of the lives of sports personalities, actors, or even politicians’ family members are frequently said to belong to this genre. They are part of a tradi­ tion of modern memoir that is strongly individualistic and psychological. This tra­ dition, which has existed since the eighteenth century, problematizes ‘social roles’ (Neumann 1970, 11) as well as the societal context within which they are assumed. What all forms of memoir have in common is that they focus on a role that is often of central importance, but which can nonetheless be seen as an interplay between dif­ ferent forces (a distinction drawn not only by Neumann, but one that is also present in Georg Misch’s monumental Geschichte der Autobiographie [A History of Autobiography]). At the heart of all of this stands the bigger picture, a higher-ranked subsystem in society, be it football or politics. Memoirs are therefore a depiction of an individual’s life, or a ‘memorable’ part of it, within which the era in question and the effect an individual has had on a historically important political or public event is brought to the fore. Although the boundaries between the two forms are fluid, memoir is distinct from autobiography in that it characteristically involves inserting an individual life story into a larger context of public or historic consequence; it focuses on participa­ tion by an individual, most commonly a public personality, in public life, in public events, not on the reconstruction of an individual’s developmental history. Although the subjective past does play a role, memoirs principally deal with “an event, an era, an institution, a class identity” (Hart 1979, 195).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-079

3.23 Memoirs 

 627

Explication The word ‘memoir’ has been in use for much longer than autobiography (Misch 1950, 97). The Oxford English Dictionary notes its use as early as the sixteenth century to denote any personal “record of events, not purporting to be a complete history, but treating of such matters as come within the personal knowledge of the writer” (Buss 2001, 595). Memoirs had their heyday in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in France. This is when the genre acquired the diversity of form that characterizes it to this very day (Kleber 1999, 240–242). Memoirs in this era were composed with the express purpose of providing the reader with knowledge about the world, setting an example, relating marginal events in history, or providing information about signif­ icant individuals (Schwalm 2007, 489). They were often apologetic in character. The memoirs of the French Revolution and the post-Napoleonic era followed in this tra­ dition (e.  g. Camille Desmoulins, Jacques Necker, Madame de Staël, Emanuel de Las Cases, Henri-Benjamin de Constant; in England David Hume and Edward Gibbon). Genuine memoir literature did not emerge in Germany until the nineteenth century (e.  g. Karl August Varnhagen v. Ense, Otto von Bismarck). The eighteenth century is often seen as the birthplace of the modern autobiogra­ phy. Rousseau’s Confessions represent a revolution in this regard: Going against the classical tradition, but also against most thinkers of the century of Enlightenment, Rousseau does not define man with reference to his social nature; by rejecting the primacy of society, he also rejects the social hierarchy, which had previously informed the project of life writing (Jurt 2009, 281). This period – the middle of the eighteenth century – also serves as the birthplace of the modern memoir, which is understood as depictions that problematize both ‘social roles’ and the societal context in which they are exercised. At that time, the ‘scandalous memoir’ (Nussbaum 1989, 178–200) genre was established. These memoirs were accounts of a range of ‘fallen’ women – pros­ titutes, actresses, independent women. Their writings secularized the confessional form of the memoir that had dominated up to this point. The religious wars were often documented in the form of memoirs – thus combining historiography and professions of religious faith (Kleber 1999, 220). The scandalous memoirists of the eighteenth century sought to understand their life stories in the context of a suppressive culture (Buss 2001, 595) and defended their unconventional biographies in their memoirs (e.  g. Constantia Philipps, Laetitia Pilk­ ington, Charlotte Clarke). In their drive to give narrative form to political events or sexual escapades, time and again they approached the territory occupied by the novel or made use of its conventions; conversely, many novels of the era used memoir as a narrative template (e.  g. John Cleland: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [1749]; Alexan­ dre Dumas père: Mémoires d’un Médecin [1846–1853]. This form has continued to exist throughout the centuries – Felicitas Hoppe’s Hoppe [2012] serves as a contemporary example of fiction masquerading as nonfiction).

628 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

In this period, memoir was frequently considered to belong to the genre of biog­ raphy. Since the nineteenth century, autobiography has been in the ascendant, and memoir above all has declined in value in the eyes of the critics. It has frequently been seen as a supplement, as autobiography’s less talented sibling. At the same time, one can speak of a radical instability in the use of the term by writers and publishers, critics and scholars. The term has been used to describe and encapsulate very different kinds of life writing over the last couple of centuries. However, it has generally been used by critics to characterize a kind of life writing considered inferior to what is called ‘autobiography’. This is already evident in the work of Georg Misch, who sees memoir as a kind of precursor to the truer forms of life writing that biography, autobiography, or historiography represented: An und für sich bringt das Wort also nur die Anspruchslosigkeit einer Schrift in Bezug auf die literarische Form zum Ausdruck: daß der Autor keinen schriftstellerischen Ehrgeiz hat – oder wenigstens keinen zu haben vorgibt. Er will nur Material liefern für ein literarisches Werk, Z.  B. das eines zukünftigen Historikers oder für sonstige weitere Forschung [In itself the word simply expresses the unpretentiousness of the writing in question in the matter of literary form, implying that the author has or affects to have no intention at all of coming forward as a literary person. He proposes only to supply material for a literary work that may be compiled by a future historian, or serve for research in other ways] (Misch 1949, 9 [1950, 7]).

Misch, however, goes one step further, in that he draws conclusions about the charac­ ter of the writer from the genre selected: Der Bezug des Menschen zur Umwelt kann aktiv oder passiv gefaßt werden. Hieraus läßt sich der Unterschied zwischen Selbstbiographien und Memoiren ableiten. In Memoiren ist dieses Verhältnis passiv, da die Memoirenschreiber […] sich meist nur als Zuschauer der Vorgänge und Aktionen einführen, von denen sie erzählen. Wenn sie unter den handelnden Personen auftreten, so nur in Nebenrollen [Man’s relation to the world may be conceived actively or passively. From this consideration comes the distinction between autobiographies and “memoirs” (…). In memoirs that relation is passive in so far as the writers of memoirs (…) introduce themselves in the main as merely observers of the events and activities of which they write, and if they join the active participants it is only in minor parts] (Misch 1949, 17 [1950, 15]).

It is precisely these last few sentences that are equally questionable and ever present. Neumann’s work is more differentiated, however those individuals who were particu­ larly ‘active’ in their lives are still subsumed under the category of ‘memoir’: war­ riors, politicians, conquerors, explorers. According to Neumann (1970, 12), memoir is a suitable form for recording the lives of active individuals. However, Misch’s rea­ soning underlines two points that are still considered crucial in the differentiation between autobiography and memoir. For one, the author of a memoir always speaks as the bearer of a social role. In addition, Misch views memoir as minor, shallow, and subliterary and autobiography as major, deep, and literary; memoir is marginal and autobiography is canonical (Couser 2012, 18). This differentiation still persists to the

3.23 Memoirs 

 629

present day, although a stark distinction between the recipient perspective and the critical perspective must be drawn. The confines within which social roles must be exercised have considerably expanded in the last few decades. Despite the fact that for hundreds of years memoirs have been written by the most powerful men and the least well-known, most margin­ alized women, the latter category of life has not been considered scandalous in the sense of being ‘unworthy of memoir’ for some time now, at least by readers. At the end of the twentieth century, memoirs were considerably boosted in importance by the recipient side. Books whose titles or subtitles contained the term ‘memoir’ enjoyed great popularity. The “memoir boom” (Gilmore 2001, 2) had come, and the public was gripped by “an insatiable appetite for the written life […], a kind of literary cannibal­ ism” (Raulff, qtd. in Ullrich 2007, 51). Within this, the field of politics has continued to play an important role, although a conspicuous number of politicians do not look back on their careers retrospectively, but instead publish memoirs during their time in office, which they then use as part of an election campaign (e.  g. Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and also Silvio Berlusconi, who sent his 2001 memoir to 12 million Italian households free of charge). However, the classic time for writing, following the (involuntary) end of an active life in politics, still frequently prompted the decision to take to the page (e.  g. Tony Blair, Erich Honecker). But the social roles that are perceived as being ‘worthy of memoir’ are increasingly defined more broadly, both by readers and writers of memoirs – often it is the desire to problematize these very roles that gives rise to the writing of memoirs. For this reason, books from family members of so-called ‘great men’ increasingly came to prominence. These books always also promised to allow the reader to glance behind the curtain, and thus brought a private element to the genre (e.  g. Bettina Wulff, Walter Kohl, Pál Sarkozy). These texts belong to a tradition of modern memoir that does not stop at the private sphere, but instead problematizes the disappearance of the individual behind a role (which Neumann in 1971 still considered the purpose of memoir, 12–14) and uses memoir as an attempt to reinstate individuality, that is, to abandon their role in some sense. They certainly place importance on their development and experiences, but also on their actions as social role bearers, how their actions were greeted by others, and the effect these evaluations had on them personally. In this way, these texts parallel the ‘classical’ memoirs, in that they also typically proceed from the point at which identity has been attained. The memories of childhood contained therein are usually colorless, being mostly restricted to short descriptions of the external circumstances of childhood and youth. It is not an individual’s process of maturing that is depicted, but rather his/her actions following successful socialization. Public events, mostly of historical significance, structure these memoirs; however, the memoirs describe the problems these events represented for the individual. This category also includes the memoirs of sportspeople (e.  g. Philipp Lahm, Mesut Özil, Lothar Matthäus, David Beckham) and musicians (e.  g. Keith Richards, Ricky Martin, Rod Stewart), whose memoirs frequently focus on the problematization

630 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

of their social roles – that is, the problematization of publicity and fame – and the person behind the role. The fact that in many cases it is only after a career has ended that the occasion for writing a memoir arises, brings marginalization as an occasion for writing into sharp focus as something that applies to all memoir writers. On the one hand, it applies to formerly ‘great men’ who were active in a societally important role that they no longer occupy; on the other hand, it applies to the ‘ordinary people’, who have increasingly gained in importance in the book market in the last few decades. The genre “appears to be open to anybody, i.  e., ‘nobody’” (Couser 2012, 5). This is an important develop­ ment, both in historical and cultural terms. Contemporary memoir has become a genre in which a previously silent group has found its voice – in a manner comparable to eighteenth century women’s memoirs. However, while these earlier memoirs reported on ‘scandalous’ lives, now those with ‘very ordinary’ lives have begun to engage in life writing: a development that time and again has been met with harsh criticism from the literary profession. In this vein, Neil Genzlinger of the New York Times referred to “the lost art of shutting up”, while simultaneously invoking the good old days in which the “memoir-worthiness” of a life was strictly bounded: There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing some­ thing noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended (Genzlinger 2011).

William Gass anticipated this in a highly regarded article on “Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism”, written in the 1990s, in which he underlines the hard work that life writing implies for its authors, and thus argued “one would expect the subject to be of some significance to history as a whole” (1994, 44). He consequently has little sympathy for the others who put their, in his eyes thoroughly inconsequential, lives onto the page and into print: “Why is it so exciting to say, now that everyone knows it anyway: ‘I was born… I was born… I was born?’ I pooped in my pants, I was betrayed, I made straight A’s” (Gass 1994, 46). Both Genzlinger and Gass thereby invoke a time long gone, in which memoirs were, at their core, an elite project. The memoirs of ‘ordi­ nary people’ have sold in vast numbers in the last few decades, possibly because of the high potential for identification. The reasons for publishing these texts have been summarized by Andrea Köhler in three words, primarily in relation to the US market, but easily applicable to other contexts: ‘sadness, triumph, and therapy’ (Köhler 2012). ‘Sadness’ refers to the memoirs of individuals who write about their lives with a particular illness to great acclaim – whether it concerns their mother’s cancer, a father’s dementia, the loss of a child or dealing with their own illness (e.  g. Megan O’Rourke, Lowell Handler, Laura Rothenberg). This form of memoir has not only found a ready market in the USA; it has even also been the subject of scholarly inves­ tigation in that country (Couser 1997).

3.23 Memoirs 

 631

‘Triumph’ and ‘therapy’ often go hand in hand and are modeled after the pro­ totype for this genre, Augustine’s Confessions. These memoirs here become a form that involves putting oneself on trial, thereby becoming a ritual that is observed even by those at the highest levels of society (Bill Clinton, George Bush): “The penitent sinner, whose Christian confession was taken into the Age of Enlightenment by that pioneer of the worldly confession, Jean Jacques Rousseau, has become the most popular public figure in America” (Köhler 2012). But here too, the typical elements of memoir can be found: The writers quote documents about the past whenever this is possible. They seek to prove something – in this case their redemption – by means of repeating the judgments of others about them. Here too, we see the idea of the role bearer at work: He is what he represents to others, and can also use this as the means of self-depiction. One further genre category referred to here is the ‘graphic memoir’. These have grown strongly in the last ten years, but have, however, been in existence for much longer. Justin Green’s graphic memoir Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) appeared as far back as the start of the 1970s. The genre achieved greater popularity as a result of Art Spiegelmann’s Maus (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize, but Persepolis (2000) by Marjane Satrapi is also significant here. The exact nature of the genre has, however, been problematic, which is almost certainly due to their unfortunate charac­ terization as part of the “graphic novel” category (Couser 2012, 161). Thus, solely due to the fact that it is a comic, Spiegelmann’s Maus was classified by the New York Times Book Review as fiction – this was only changed when Spiegelmann himself publically and vehemently challenged this categorization. Memoirs are used as sources by a range of disciplines, and the questions that are asked of them and the insights drawn from them are of course also different. I refer, for example, to the differences between literary studies and the social sciences, the principal difference between which is that the former distinguishes more strongly between ‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’ than the latter, since the literary form/medium itself is what literary studies addresses, whereas history and the social sciences are more interested in the contents. Historians tend to emphasize the commonalities that arise due to shared struc­ tural factors, such as chronological order presentation, the retrospective gaze, the systematization of life experience, and the analysis of life from a unified authorial perspective; they frequently also subsume memoir under ‘autobiography’ (Depkat 2007, 24). The questions that historians ask of these sources have markedly changed in the last decade, and they have thus come closer to the perspectives common in literary studies. German-language research into autobiography began with Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey elevated first the biography, and then the self-biography to the status of ideal source material. At the root of this was an attempt to mark out the terrain of the humanities from the terrain of the natural sciences, and to provide history with a scientific theoretical foundation. In these sources he not only saw a healing antidote

632 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

“to the dead abstractions that are mainly drawn from the archives”, but also the incar­ nation of the hermeneutic paradigm: Each life has its own meaning. Insights cannot be generated by constructing causal relationships, but solely by collecting individual experience. He thereby developed a theoretical basis for “self-biography”, and also firmly established it in psychology, history, philosophy, and literary studies (Dilthey 1922, 34). Dilthey’s pupil Georg Misch developed the classic definition of autobiogra­ phy, which emerged within his monumental Geschichte der Autobiographie [A History of Autobiography] from the year 1907. To this day, it serves as a point of reference and distinction for other approaches to historical autobiographical research; it also subsumes memoir within it. According to Misch, the term ‘autobiography’ applies to works that do “was der Ausdruck besagt: die Beschreibung (graphia) des Lebens (bios) eines einzelnen durch diesen selbst (auto)” [“what the term ‘autobiography’ implies: the description (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (auto)”] (Misch 1949, 7 [1950, 5]). Within the history of biography, and especially within theoretical works that address this genre and also its use as a source within the context of the humanities, there is a differential weighting of these three elements, namely the shift from ‘bios’ to ‘autos’ and finally to ‘graphia’. For the period up to the 1970s, it can be argued that autobiographical sources were used as mines of facts, as evidence of the historic uniqueness of ‘great men’, or as a barometer of the cultural refinement of the citizenry. The 1980s saw a move to the ‘inner world’ and shifted the focus onto the ‘self’ that writes. In the third phase, along with the ‘death of the author’ the ‘biographical illusion’ was also destroyed, to which, according to Bourdieu, both autobiographers and theorists were always enslaved (Bourdieu 1990, 75–81). The ves­ tiges of textuality remain, preventing autobiographical texts from being read as the product of a self-aware subject, but instead revealing them as inscribed processes of identity production (Depkat 2007, 452). The congruence between the act, the subject, and the object of the writing are thus viewed critically. However, in Misch’s history of autobiography it is the omission of the reader of these texts that can truly be described as undue neglect. This can also be explained historically: Reception theory and research first emerged in the 1960s. After all, this constitutes the neglect of an actor who plays an essential collabo­ rative role in what Philippe Lejeune terms “le pacte autobiographique” [“the autobio­ graphical pact”] (Lejeune 1975, 13 [1989, 3]). The concept of the autobiographical pact emphasizes the relationship between the writer and reader, making it the linchpin of any understanding of the genre. Lejeune speaks of a referential contract the text is offering towards the reader, and according to whose terms the reader recognizes what is related as factual information that can be traced back to what the author has lived and experienced. This means that the author is no longer the sole creator of the memoir, which could be more accurately be described as being jointly produced by the reader in the act of reading. This pact grants insights into the reader’s concept of truth, which is expressed not least in the hurt reaction these readers exhibit in the event of a “abus de confiance” [“breach of trust”] (Lejeune 1975, 23 [1989, 11]).

3.23 Memoirs 

 633

Lejeune thus points to the fact that evaluations of autobiographical writing cannot solely rest on the criteria of truthfulness, authenticity, and directness. It is precisely the lifting of these previously fixed barriers between fact and fiction in autobiograph­ ical theory – which always encompassed memoir – that led at the end of the 1970s to memoirs being viewed as suspect ‘source material’, and to them being accused of being ‘lies’ from the outset. Paul de Man’s 1978 essay Autobiography as De-facement is widely seen as a break in this regard. He provokes hermeneutically focused historians and literary scholars with two theses. First, he claims that it is not possible to differ­ entiate between autobiography/memoir and fiction. Second, he argues that they are not genres or textual modes but instead a figure of reading or understanding that may arise in any text (de Man 1994, 920–921). At the same time in many research works, despite the reservations expressed at the outset, the described facts were still equated with the real, that is, the text is taken literally as a mirror of an extratextual reality. In the last few decades, historians have increasingly come to the point where they do not merely deconstruct memoirs in terms of their truth and falsity, but instead analyze their narrative and imaginative worlds. This implies a recognition of the tension between texts and societal discourses and of the notion that the moment of reference should never be entirely left to one side. The writers of memoirs are not merely a part of the life world; they co-create it in important ways as part of its social construction. Referentiality and textuality do not contradict each other – pointing to the ways in which the world is bounded by language does not make reality disappear, but instead merely dispenses with the illusion that it is possible to gain direct access to reality outside of language: Textuality does not repudiate connection to the world, it creates it (Finck 1999, 39). This connects to the third component of Misch’s definition, ‘graphia’. The author writes his self and life, and in the process of recording he chooses, constructs, models, and proposes a narratively shaped identity. The notion that the production of conti­ nuity and coherence is the identity-bolstering contribution of memoirs has already been emphasized. The other aspect is once again associated with the recipient: Identities are always a narrative construction that is performatively generated. The author accords her-self particular qualities that change over time, and thus makes this self visible as an entity shaped by experience. In this way, she not only con­ structs her own self, but also adjusts this in response to an imagined or actual reader reaction. According to this understanding, memoirs are an act of ordering, through which the author directs herself towards a goal and presents her proposed identity. In this way, she positions herself in relation to the existing range of identities on offer, appro­ priates preexisting narratives, perpetuates them, or dispenses with them. In this form of writing, the authors reiterate their sense of connection, distinguish themselves from their origins, or join a new group. The concepts of narrative identity developed by Ricoeur and Somers are central here (Ricoeur 1990; Somers 1994).

634 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

The processes of joining are particularly evident in times of failure, in the moments when an imagined coherent identity is unsettled. The incursion of the life world that occurs when the author’s tale begins to unravel is particularly evident where earlier forms of writing no longer suffice, new elements are introduced, and others are left aside. Over the course of a life, familiar self-images may go astray, which is reflected in the written form: The possibilities and the limits of the sayable also coauthor memoirs (Landwehr 2004). These limits are determined both by societal discourses and small­ er-scale relationship networks. This form of self-reflection is not a monologue delivered into an empty space, but is instead the social self-exploration process of a particular time – memoirs can there­ fore be understood as a social communication event. They thus inhabit the space on the border between the individual and social groups: They are at the same time acts of individual and collective self-historicization. Translation: Roisin Cronin

Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre. “Die biographische Illusion.” BIOS 1 (1990): 75–81. Buss, Helen M. “Memoirs.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. 595–597. Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir. An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Depkat, Volker. Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden. Deutsche Politiker und die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts. München: Oldenbourg, 2007. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Vol. I. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1922 [Introduction to the Human Sciences. Ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Trans. Michael Neville et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989]. Finck Almut. Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999. Gass, William. “The Art of Self. Autobiography in the Age of Narcissism.” Harper’s Magazine (May 1994): 43–52. Genzlinger, Neil. “The problem with memoirs.” New York Times (30 January 2011)/Sunday Book Review: 14. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Hart, Francis Russell. “History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir.” New Literary History 11.1 (1979): 193–210. Jurt, Joseph. “Französische Biographik.” Handbuch Biographie. Ed. Christian Klein. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009. 278–288. Kleber, Hermann. Die französischen Memoires: Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung von den Anfängen bis zum Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999. Köhler, Andrea. “Ich und der Rest der Welt. Memoiren-Boom in den USA.” http://www.nzz.ch/

3.23 Memoirs 

 635

aktuell/feuilleton/literatur-und-kunst/ich-und-der-rest-der-welt-1.17905092# (6 July 2018). Landwehr, Achim. Geschichte des Sagbaren. Einführung in die Historische Diskursanalyse. Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 2004. Lejeune, Paul. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. I, part 1. Frankfurt a.  M.: Schulte-Bulmke, 1949 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vol. I. Trans. E. W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950]. Neumann, Bernd. Identität und Rollenzwang. Zur Theorie der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a. M.: Ätheneum, 1970. Rev. ed. Von Augustinus zu Facebook. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Autobiographie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013. Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Autobiographical Subject. Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Pascal, Roy. Die Autobiographie. Gehalt und Gestalt. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965. Ricoeur, Paul. “L’identité personelle et l’identité narrative” Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. 137–166. Somers, Margaret R. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity. A Relational and Network Approach.” Theory and Society 23.5 (1994): 605–649. Schwalm, Helga. “Memoiren.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur. Ed. Dieter Burdorf, Christoph Fasbender and Burkhard Moennighof. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 3rd ed. 2007. 489. Ullrich, Volker. “Die schwierige Königsdisziplin.” Die Zeit (4 April 2007): 51–52.

Further Reading Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. Portland: Eighth Mountain Press, 1997. Billson, Marcus. “The Memoir: New Perspectives on a Forgotten Genre.” Genre 10 (1977): 259–282. Klein, Christian. Handbuch Biographie. Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009. McDonnell, Jane Taylor. Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir. New York: Penguin, 1998. Rak, Julie. “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity.” Genre 36 (2004): 305–326. Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. New York: Riverhead, 2010.

3.24 Metaautobiography Christiane Struth

Definition ‘Metaautobiography’ designates a relatively new development within autobiographi­ cal writing that reflects on its own conditions and conventions, the history of autobi­ ography and contemporary autobiographical practices. Although many autobiogra­ phers have self-reflexively engaged with the conventions of autobiography since the emergence of the genre, metaautobiographies have proliferated only since the begin­ ning of literary postmodernism that marked a shift towards a heightened self-reflex­ ivity within literary practice. Like other meta-genres, metaautobiography functions as a catalyst of generic development (Hauthal 2013), for it does not only expose and comment on autobiographical practices and their cultural, ideological and/or histor­ ical foundations but also devises new ways of writing and representing lives. Crucial to the reconception of autobiography in and through metaautobiographical texts is the notion that each autobiography is only one version of a given life. Therefore, metaautobiography relinquishes traditional autobiography’s claim of absolute truth. The narrativization of a life as presented in traditional autobiographies is exposed as a constructive and creative act – or even an act of fabrication – on the part of the autobi­ ographer. Metaautobiography exposes the notion that it is the past which determines how life’s material is represented as a fiction. Instead, the autobiographer’s present circumstances and the problems pertaining to the act of writing become an integral part in the autobiographer’s reflections on and representation of his or her life.

Explication The recent surge in the production of metaautobiographies is arguably due to the fact that the conventions of traditional autobiography cannot account for the revolution in modern, postmodern and poststructural concepts of identity central to the conception of autobiography. While traditional autobiography is based on the assumption that the autonomous individual is the hero of his or her life, other forms of life writing have emerged that contest this notion on various grounds (e.  g. in particular the relational conception of self as discussed in Eakin 1998 and in general the poststructuralist critique of the representational model of language). For this reason, the ‘death,’ or rather the ‘end’ of traditional autobiography has been proclaimed from a variety of disciplinary points of view (Finck 1999; Sprinker 1980). The cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner captures the prevailing view within academia in stating https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-080

3.24 Metaautobiography 

 637

that “[a]utobiography is altogether too familiar a form to be taken at face value. Its very familiarity risks obscuring its secretive metaphysics and its tacit presupposi­ tions, both of which would be the better for some airing” (Bruner 1993, 38). Meta­ autobiography can be seen as a reaction against the highly conventionalized genre of traditional autobiography as well as the schematic representation of lives it entails. For this reason, it actively engages with traditional autobiography’s “usually tacit conventions“ (Eakin 2008, 17) and also highlights and references theoretical debates surrounding the status of autobiography. Being situated at the interface of autobio­ graphical practices and critique, it can be read as a genuine attempt on the author’s part to adequately represent his or her life in narrative form. But beyond the nar­ rative representation of a life, it tends to foreground the by now seemingly univer­ sally established conventions, specific cultural influences and hidden ideological agenda of traditional autobiography through a variety of literary techniques. Prom­ inent examples for metaautobiography that develop innovative narrative strategies in order to expose the conventions of traditional autobiography are John Barth’s Once Upon a Time. A Floating Opera (1994), Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake (1996), Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Philip Roth’s The Facts. A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), and Lauren Slater’s Spasm. A Memoir With Lies (2000). The implicit foregrounding of central tenets of traditional autobiographies is often aided by explicit metanarrative comments on aspects of the text that relate to traditional autobiography and theories of autobiography. With regard to the latter, the theory of autobiography as put forward by the literary critic Philippe Lejeune is often referred to or even parodied in metaautobiographical texts (Nünning 2013). In his highly influential theory on the autobi­ographical contract, Lejeune proposed that autobiography can be differentiated from biography and fictional I-narratives because the author, narrator and protagonist of an autobiography bear the same name, i.  e. the one printed on the book cover, which induces the reader to believe that the author is telling the story of his or her own life. Hence, the reader is supposed to accept an autobiographical instead of a biographical or fictional reading contract: “Pour qu’il y ait autobiographie […], il faut qu’il y ait identité de l’auteur, du narrateur et du personnage” [“Autobiography (…) supposes that there is identity of name between the author (…), the narrator of the story and the character who is being talked about”] (Lejeune 1975, 15 [1988 (1987), 12]). In contradiction to this model, metaautobiogra­ phy tends to highlight the indeterminacy of its generic status in offering multiple reading contracts to the reader. Thus, an important feature of metaautobiography is that it can often be simultaneously read as an autobiographical, a biographical and/ or a fictional work. In this regard, metaautobiography ressembles autofictional texts that deliberately blur the distinction between autobiography and fiction by offering the reader the autobiographical as well as the fictional reading contract (Gronemann 2002; Schaefer 2008). Instead of devaluing the concept of genre (Cohen 1995 [1988]), the conscious blurring of generic borders in metaautobiographical texts has the effect that the concept of genre as such and the specifics of a given genre become the main

638 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

objects of contemplation. Given the fact that ‘metaization’ is defined as a cognitive process for which the active reflection on the part of the reader is requisite (Wolf 2007), generic indeterminacy and hybridity as constitutive aspects of metaautobiographical texts are often employed as tools for stimulating the reader’s reflections on genre con­ ventions and the manifold overlaps between neighbouring genres, such as autobiog­ raphy, biography and diary writing. Another important feature of metaautobiography that is related to the theory of the autobiographical contract as proposed by Lejeune is the metaautobiographical dissociation or non-identity between author, narrator and protagonist which is often effected by highlighting the problematic referential status of the pronoun ‘I’ designating the autobiographical subject in traditional autobiogra­ phy. The unity of the subject as symbolized by the use of ‘I’ in traditional autobiog­ raphy is exposed as a cultural and literary convention in metaautobiographies that alternate between the use of ‘I’ and the third person pronoun ‘he’ or ‘she’ to designate the autobiographical subject (Lejeune 1977). Chiming in with the general ambiguity of metaautobiographical texts, this means of foregrounding the identity and non-iden­ tity between author, narrator and protagonist is prone to stimulate further thoughts on the relationship between the autobiographer, the narrator and the protagonist (or textual self) of traditional autobiography. Taking into account the propensity of the metaautobiographer to emphasise the constructedness of his or her textual self, metaautobiography tends to deconstruct the seemingly unproblematic referentiality of traditional autobiography. Instead it highlights the creative aspect of self-narratives that can be said to bring forth what they were hitherto thought to merely portray (de Man 1979). In this sense, metaautobiographies prioritize the ‘world-building’ function of language over its representational function (Nünning 2010). Consequently, these texts mark a shift in how autobiography is conceptualized, which corresponds with a shift from the conceptualization of autobiography as a referential and factual genre towards conceptualizing autobiography as a genre that is necessarily built on ‘fictions’ (Eakin 1985).

Works Cited Bruner, Jerome. “The Autobiographical Process.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik and Barrett Lindon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. 38–56. Cohen, Ralph. “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?” Postmodern Genres. Ed. Marjorie Perloff. Norman/ London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995 [1988]. 11–27. Eakin, Paul John. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2008. Eakin, Paul John. “Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story of the Story.” True Relations. Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Ed. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998. 63–81. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

3.24 Metaautobiography 

 639

Finck, Almut. Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999. Gronemann, Claudia. Postmoderne, postkoloniale Konzepte der Autobiographie in der französischen und maghrebinischen Literatur: autofiction – nouvelle autobiographie – double autobiographie – aventure du texte. Hildesheim: Olms, 2002. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte Autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 (1987)]. Lejeune, Philippe. “Autobiography in the Third Person.” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 27–50. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Nünning, Ansgar. “Making Events – Making Stories – Making Worlds: Ways of Worldmaking from a Narratological Point of View.” Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Ed. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning and Birgit Neumann. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. 191–214. Nünning, Ansgar. „Meta-Autobiographien: Gattungstypologische, narratologische und funktionsgeschichtliche Überlegungen zur Poetik und zum Wissen innovativer Autobiographien.” Autobiographie: Eine interdisziplinäre Gattung zwischen klassischer Tradition und (post)moderner Variation. Ed. Uwe Baumann and Karl August Neuhausen. Bonn: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, 2013. 27–81. Hauthal, Janine. “Metaization and Self-Reflexivity as Catalysts for Genre Development: Genre Memory and Genre Critique in Novelistic Meta-Genres.” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change: Contemporary Fiction, Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations. Ed. Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning and Christine Schwanecke. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013. 81–114. Schaefer, Christine. “Autofiktion zwischen Fakt und Fiktion.” Im Zeichen der Fiktion: Aspekte fiktionaler Rede aus historischer und systematischer Sicht. Festschrift für Klaus W. Hempfer zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Irina O. Rajewsky and Ulrike Schneider. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008. 299–326. Sprinker, Michael. “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 321–342. Wolf, Werner. “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen: Ein Systemati­ sie­rungs­versuch metareferentieller Formen und Begriffe in Literatur und anderen Medien.” Metaisierung in der Literatur und anderen Medien: Theoretische Grundlagen, historische Perspektiven, Metagattungen. Funktionen. Ed. Janine Hauthal, Julijana Nadj, Ansgar Nünning and Henning Peters. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. 25–64.

Further Reading Hauthal, Janine, Julijana Nadj, Ansgar Nünning, and Henning Peters, eds. Metaisierung in der Lite­ ratur und anderen Medien: Theoretische Grundlagen, historische Perspektiven, Metagattungen. Funktionen. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. Nünning, Ansgar. “Fictional Metabiographies and Metaautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology, and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Meta-Genres.” Self-Reflexivity in Literature. Ed. Werner Huber, Martin Middeke and Hubert Zapf. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. 195–209. Nünning, Ansgar. “Metaautobiographien: Gattungsgedächtnis, Gattungskritik und Funktionen selbst­reflexiver fiktionaler Autofiktionen.” Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Grenzen der Fiktionalität und der Erinnerung. Vol. II. Ed. Christoph Parry and Edgar Platen. München: iudicium, 2007. 269–292.

3.25 Oral Forms Susanne Gehrmann

Definition Oral forms of speaking the self are multifold and thus cannot be adequately grasped through a comprehensive unique definition. While occasional everyday forms of oral talking about oneself are certainly a widespread transcultural practice, clearly defined and established oral autobiographical genres are nonetheless rather scarce and have rarely been in the focus of research into oral literature. Diverse oral literary forms such as praise poetry, epics and folktales can comprise auto-narrative sections. A minimal definition must take the direct performance situation, which ensues between the oral speaker and the audience, into consideration. The performer makes references to his/ her own life and/or understanding of his/her self, while the audience which might encompass either an individual or a group of people could engage in a form of active exchange. Interaction in this case is realised through a verbal or otherwise physical (clapping of hands, body moves etc.) response to and/or dialogue with the performer. Eventual interaction between the oral performer and the audience differs immensely according to the contexts which range from oral performance at festivities inside a given social group to an interview situation between an anthropologist, historian or journalist and the narrating subject. Frequent characteristics of oral self narrative or lyrical forms of self-representation are fragmentation, repetition, metaphorical density and a focus on social relations between the speaking individual and the col­ lectives he/she refers to.

Explication The urge to speak about oneself and to narrate one’s own life – in whatever form – can count as an anthropological constant in human life and is not necessarily dependant on the written word (Miller 1994; Lüsebrink 2003, 1). Precisely because of their oral nature, the existence of specific forms of speaking the self cannot be traced back with historical accuracy. In many African, Asian, Australian/Oceanic and Native Ameri­ can societies, oral autobiographical forms have existed long before colonial times, and probably for many centuries. Orally transmitted life narrative transcribed into autobiography has also often been an important genre in the process of the shift from orality to literacy. Notwithstanding, modes of oral self-narration in the practices of catholic confession and modern psychoanalysis used to be and are still well embed­ ded into societies of the global North, while – due to the weight of the long written https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-081

3.25 Oral Forms 

 641

autobiographical tradition – they may not receive critical attention as oral forms of the autobiographical continuum. In the era of secondary orality (Ong 1982) and globalisa­ tion, oral autobiographical performance has furthermore become part of TV-formats, such as talk shows, and of worldwide hip hop culture, such as in rap and slam poetry performances. In his groundbreaking study entitled Oral Tradition as History (1985) Belgian anthropologist and historian Jan Vansina points out how important oral life story telling – being an integral part of orality at large – functions as a repository for cul­ tural memory on the one hand and for modern history writing on the other. In soci­ eties where alphabetically based writing and the printing press were largely absent prior to the advent of modern European imperialism, memorization and eventual oral narration of historical events used to be the major form employed to convey happen­ ings of the past. This practice would often be embedded into or framed by personal life accounts. However, it must be stressed that orality is never static, but rather dynamic, for the process of transmitting society’s as well as individual stories of the past from one generation to another depends on the raconteur’s interpretation of historical events which are modified according to the speaker’s present situation of enuncia­ tion. Furthermore, the acceptance and practice of oral life narratives varies largely across cultures. In West African cultures embodied within the dialectical continuum of Mande languages, for instance, the noble classes (according to the symbolically still power­ ful stratification of the society which has existed since the empire of Old Mali) would not speak out about themselves in public. It is up to the ‘griot’, also known as the the professional master of the word (Hale 1998) to narrate the genealogy of the nobles and recount their deeds through words of praise. However, as member of a ‘lower cast’ in the society, the ‘griot’ has himself/herself the right to integrate his/her own oral auto-referential account into an oral performance, which is thus made up of a mixture of biographical and autobiographical elements (Okpewho 1992, 21–26). Nevertheless Lisa McNee’s study (2000) of female autobiographical forms in Senegal indicates that these formal boundaries become more permeable today. In Wolof society, for instance, the popular short praise genre ‘taasu’ opens up spaces beyond social differences to speak about the self in relation to others in a lyrical form. With regard to Native American cultures, Wong (1987, 18) stresses that oral “auto­ biographical expressions tend to tell a portion of a person’s life – a dramatic or transi­ tional experience”. Apart from epics as heroic biographies, oral narratives in general are likely to be restricted in time and are performed in front of a specific public. There­ fore, oral autobiographical narrative appears to be “often fragmentary, but always dialogical and interactive” (Lüsebrink 2003, 2). Depending on one’s worldview with regard to time, self narrative does not necessarily need to be retrospective, because: “early Native Americans tended to speak their lives as they were living them. Rather than shaping a past life in the present, they shaped a present (and sometimes a future) life in the present moment” (Wong 1987, 20).

642 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Lyrical Forms: Self Praise In Bantu speaking cultures of Africa (which cover approximately two thirds of the con­ tinent’s territory South of the Sahara) as well as in some West African cultures lyrical autobiographical genres, which basically allow the performer to praise himself/herself in public, have been a wide spread practice, still alive today albeit with a tendency of decline (Yali-Manisi and Opland 2006, 119). These forms are lyrical by means of met­ aphorical density and the rhythmic speaking or chanting mode engaged during the performance. The existence of precise names for the genre in many African languages (Kabuta 2003, 29–30) proves their long tradition as well as their survival beyond the period of colonial domination. While in some languages, self praise appears just as a sub-genre of general panegyrics (for example the Xhosa and Zulu word for praise poetry ‘izibongo’ embraces both praise for others and self-praise, see Mvika et al. 2006, 132 and Opland 1996, 97) in others it has a specific generic name. In some cul­ tures there are even clear generic distinctions between different types of self-praise (as in Kynarwanda which distinguishes between the general performative act ‘ukwivuga’ [‘to speak of oneself in public’] and at least three distinct genres: ‘iningwa’ [‘short self-praise’], ‘ibyivugo’ [‘chanted self-referential poems by warriors’] and ‘ibitekerezo’ [‘lyrical narrations of achievements’], see Nsengimana 1996, 39–40). Furthermore, in his seminal study Éloge des soi, éloge de l’autre [‘Praise of the Self, Praise of the Other’] which is based on extensive fieldwork, Kabuta confirms auto-pan­ egyrics as a specifically African tradition due to quantity and quality of forms. Yet, he also stresses the structural kinship between the African oral forms of self-praise and related forms across time and cultures from the European Middle Ages to today’s practices in worldwide Hip Hop cultures (Kabuta 2003, 23). Self-praise can be impressively long as well as astonishingly short. Joubert ana­ lyzes Northern Sotho self-praise performances by elderly women which do not even exceed two minutes (Joubert 2004, 391–403). In any case, the semiotics of these per­ formances rely heavily on allusion, metaphorical density and body language, which can only be fully comprehended by a culturally initiated public. Thematically, selfpraise concentrates on the physical and moral qualities of the speaker, his/her merits in society, in particular through either work or warfare, and always from an individ­ ual perspective (Kabuta 2003, 235). Oral forms of self-praise can best be understood as lyrical condensations of lifelines embedded in communal exchange; as such they are not comparable to full-fledged life narratives. However, self-praising, similar to written autobiography in this respect, also “seek[s] to define a self, and to achieve a measure of permanence and immutability in the interpretation of identity” (Coullie 1999, 62). Names, in particular, can embody a full-fledged biographical and poetical agenda of their own therefore making them worthy of the self-praise categorisation. Beyond names inscribed on official passports and religious names, in many communities chil­ dren are given metaphorical praise names, which link them either to particular events

3.25 Oral Forms 

 643

or to family bonds. During the course of life, more surnames are added on top of these primal praise names by others or by the subject him/herself. The additional praise names are often inspired by one’s marriage, professional affiliation, achievements, bravery, offspring etc. They are frequently constructed through metaphors, similes and hyperboles and amplified through relative clauses and addition. While poetic in nature, the accumulated names can also be considered as a self-narrative in the short. In the extreme, a self-praise poem can exclusively consist in the declamation of hon­ orific names, which display a great value for the person and a dense poetical program for the audience (Kabuta 2003, 135–136). Self-praise poems based on naming as oral self genre appear to be “highly intertextual, since they often comprise elements that are self-composed, others that are drawn from praises of friends, relatives, or ances­ tors, praises that are given by others, or that are simply part of the cultural currency of the society” (Mvika et al. 2006, 132). Beyond the individual performer’s praise names, the recitation of names of one’s extended family and ancestors as well as of toponyms are equally an important part of self-praise, as the individual performer inscribes his/her own name into a collective network of interconnections and correlations (Kabuta 2003, 137). While the declama­ tion of one’s own singular names functions as the main signature of the self-praise poem, genealogy and topography link the performer to his/her social group in the sense that “the individual realizes his personality not as an alienated ego but as an integral member of the community” (Afejuku 1990, 689). The recitation of names gen­ erally stirs high emotions in African audiences (Kabuta 2003, 135). Naming and the recitation of names as part of self performance are equally an important part in Native American oral practices. As “naming provides contin­ ual updates on an individual’s life” (Wong 1987, 22) this poetic device functions as an expression of a fluid identity concept, open to ongoing transformations, as “the process of recurring naming suggests a sense of an ever-changing self. As the indi­ vidual travels through life, he/she will receive new names, reflecting the important deeds and events of his/her life – a life and an identity which are both in process” (Wong 1987, 22). Today, shifts from traditional forms of self praise to new musical genres can be observed, as in the case of Yorùbá culture for instance. While the Yorùbá panegyric genre ‘oriki’, devoted to the gods and outstanding rulers in particular, has included the possibility for self praise since pre-colonial times (Barber 1991, 38), Raji-Oyelade (2012, 96–97) confirms that today self-naming and the celebration of self are an out­ standing component of the urban ‘fúji’ music style.

Collaborative Oral Forms Well documented, that is transcribed, contextualized and analysed, oral self-narra­ tives in prose have more often than not been the product of collaboration between

644 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

anthropologists or historians and the speaking subjects, be the latter members of either dominantly oral societies or of those social classes ‘which do not write’ (see Lejeune’s “L’autobiographie de ceux qui n’écrivent pas” [1980] [“The Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write” (1989)]) although they are part of predominantly liter­ ate societies. The numerous successful projects documented that capture life stories through oral self narration point to the fact that few people are basically hostile toward self narration, while this alone does not prove the existence of formalised oral forms. An oral self-narrative which is structured through precise questions that spring from the particular interests of an interviewer lacks spontaneity and may shift away from earlier conventions to speak about oneself. However, it can also be argued that the facility with which oral self-narrative is adopted vis-à-vis the anthropologist hints to the ontological embeddedness of the act of speaking the self in a given culture. Two of the most famous oral autobiographical tales have been transcribed, pub­ lished and interpreted by two American anthropologists: Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa (1954) by Mary F. Smith and Nisa. The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981) by Marjorie Shostack. The protagonists and autobiographical narrators in both publications are portrayed by Smith and Shostack as exceptional women and gifted storytellers in their communities. The authorial names inscribed on both book covers differ from the signature name on their title pages. This distinction indicates that one of the basic common assumption of the autobiographical, namely the iden­ tity between author, narrator and protagonist, is significantly altered in the process of shift from the oral narrative to its written and published edition. Furthermore, what might have been narrated over a long period of time in an a-chronological or frag­ mented way has been translated and ordered into a comprehensive narrative form that follows a line from childhood to adulthood and gives impressive space to auto-ethno­ graphic details of everyday life, which would be completely superfluous for the local audience. If the text is originally an oral conversation with an outsider to one’s culture whose curious questions influence immensely on the content of the self-narrative, the eventual neatly ordered and written text in the form of a book would seemingly belong as much to the anthropologist as to the narrator, as both are closely entangled into the same project (Frank 1995). Ultimately, in an appreciative perspective, transcribed oral life narrative can thus be understood as “a collaborative product in which the dialogical relationship between teller and listener, and their probably mixed motives, shape the outcome” (Waterson 1994, 3). In how far the author’s ordering and altering of the oral text takes away the agency from the oral speaker in the context of unequal relationships between interviewer and interviewee (e.  g. colonizer/colonized, liter­ ate/illiterate, academic middle class/disprivileged social class) remains nevertheless doubtful. Shostack’s approach to weave her own voice and self-reflection on her posi­ tion as an outsider into the transcribed oral autobiography of Nisa in Nisa. The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, has however set standards for modern anthropology. Meanwhile, a collaborative act of turning an oral form of self-narration into a scripted publication can also take place between activists who share a common

3.25 Oral Forms 

 645

vision, as in the case of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) subtitled as told by Alex Haley in some editions. Haley’s and X’ collaboration, based on a series of interviews between 1963 and 1965, is motivated by their shared struggle for Black liberation in the United States. Yet, the well documented process of turning the oral material into a coherent book was not void of controversy between the two activists, as has frankly been documented in Alex Haley’s epilogue to the book. Only in rare cases is a thorough comparative analysis of the recorded oral narra­ tive and the final written version possible, as in the case of Australian Ella Simon’s Through my Eyes (1978) which was not officially co-authored, but nevertheless heavily transformed by the publishing house which wiped out oral tale narrative techniques such as repetition (Jones 2013, 43–48). Indeed, in present times, the collaborative anthropological practice of self narratives lives on in co-authored testimonial texts of ‘minority groups’ from the global South, be they by HIV/AIDS affected individu­ als (Morgan 2003), child soldiers, first nations (Jones 2013) or simply women, whose oral accounts offer the raw material which Western journalists and human rights’ activists will transform into marketable books. While these  – ambiguously activist and at the same time commercially oriented – forms of collaboration raise difficult questions about authorship, authority and agency, the idea that all autobiographical forms, whether oral or written are to some extent collaborative, has been developed in audience oriented research. For “[t]he idea of an audience implies shaping one’s experiences to suit or, perhaps, confound, the expectations of one’s readers/listeners who, of course, are also shaped by a cultural framework” (Wong 1987, 20). However, in a live performance situation between oral narrator and his/her present audience there is more than that: direct reactions and interaction between speaker and public are registered in a live process. In Native American cultures, oral forms mainly performed by men have been described as rather brief, beginning with the naming and the locating of oneself, followed by the listing of one’s achievements in life as the main part and concluding in a formulaic pattern, whilst at the same time this structure is open to the intervention of the audience (Wong 1987, 23–24) and thus reveals the collaborative nature of such a performance act. The same is true for the practice of Australian aboriginal ‘yarning’, which is a communal oral activity of several people giving their life accounts and reinforcing each other in their memories (Barker 2008, 9.7.). This form deeply relies on a collective and collaborative concept from its very beginning.

Works Cited Afejuku, Tony E. “Cultural Assertion in the African Autobiography.” Meta XXXV.4 (1990): 689–700. Barber, Karin. I could speak until tomorrow: Oriki, women and the past in a Yoruba town. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. Barker, Lorina. “‘Hangin’ Out’ and ‘Yarnin’: Reflecting on the Experience of Collecting Oral Histories.” History Australia 5.1 (2008): 9.1.–9.9.

646 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Coullie, Judith Lütge. “Dislocating Selves. Izibongo and Narrative Autobiography.” Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa. Ed. Duncan Brown. Oxford: James Currey, 1999. 61–89. Frank, Gelya. “Anthropology and Individual Lives: The Story of the Life History and the History of the Life Story.” American Anthroplogist 97 (1995): 145–148. Hale, Thomas A. Griots and Griottes. Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Jones, Jennifer. “Australian Aboriginal Life Writers and Their Editors: Cross-Cultural Collaboration, Authorial Intention, and the Impact of Editorial Choices.” The Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature. Ed. Belinda Wheeler. Rochester: Camden House, 2013. 29–52. Joubert, Annekie. The Power of Performance. Linking Past and Present in Hananwa and Lobedu Oral Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. Kabuta, Ngo Semzara. Éloge de soi, éloge de l’autre. Brussels et al.: Lang, 2003. Miller, Peggy. “Narrative Practices. Their Role in Socialization and Self-Construction.” The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative. Ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 158–179. Lejeune, Philippe. “L’autobiographie de ceux qui n’écrivent pas. Qui est l’auteur?” Je est un autre. L’autobiographie, de la littérature aux médias. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980. 232–250 [“The Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write.” On Autobiography. Ed. John P. Eakin. Trans. ­Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 185–215]. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen. “Dynamiques de l’autobiographie: De l’ancrage anthropologique aux horizons interculturels.” Enjeux des genres dans les écritures contemporaines. Ed. Robert Dion, Frances Fortier and Élisabeth Haghebaert. Québec: Editions Nota bene, 2001. 103–119 [“The dynamics of autobiography: from anthropological anchorage to the intercultural horizons.” Mots pluriels 23 (2003). http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP2303hjl.html (10 July 2018)]. McNee, Lisa. Selfish Gifts. Senegalese Women’s Autobiographical Discourses. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Morgan, Jonathan, and the Bambanani Women’s Group. Long Life: Positive HIV Stories. Cape Town: Double Storey Press, 2003. Mvika, Zolani, Duncan Brown, and Susan Kigulu. “People feel no Event is Complete Without a Poet.” Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Autobiography. Ed. Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya and Thomas Olver. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. 132–147. Nsengimana, Joseph. “Ukwivuga (parler de soi-même), genre autobiographique rwandais.” Autobiographical Genres in Africa/Genres autobiographiques en Afrique. Ed. János Riesz and Ulla Schild. Berlin: Reimer, 1996. 39–51. Okpewoh, Isidore. African Oral Literature: background, character and continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Opland, Jeff. “Structural Patterns in the Peformance of a Xhosa Izibongo.” Comparative Literature 48.2 (1996): 94–127. Raji-Oylade, Aderemi. Playful Blasphemies. Postproverbials as Archetypes of Modernity in Yorùbá Culture. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012. Simon, Ella. Through my Eyes. Adelaide: Rigby, 1978. Shostack, Marjorie. Nisa. The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Smith, Mary F. Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

3.25 Oral Forms 

 647

Waterson, Roxana. “Analysing Personal Narratives.” Southeast Asian Lives. Personal Narratives and Historical Experience. Ed. Roxana Waterson. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. 1–37. Wong, Hertha D. “Pre-Literate Native American Autobiography: Forms of Personal Narrative.” MELUS 14.1 (1987): 17–32. X, Malcolm and Alex Haley: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Yali-Manisi, David Livingstone Phakamile, and Jeff Opland. “Versions of Life in Poetry.” Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Autobiography. Ed. Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya and Thomas Olver. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. 117–131.

Further Reading Alabi, Adetayo. Telling Our Stories. Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Freedman, Jim. “Je suis Nyakagarura na Mahuku, le fils de mon père.” Âge, pouvoir et société en Afrique noire. Ed. Marc Abélès and Chantal Collard. Paris/Montréal: Karthala, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1985. 271– 285. Moreno, Almeida Cristina. “Unravelling distinct voices in Moroccan rap: evading control, weaving solidarity, and building new spaces for self-expression.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 25.3 (2013): 319–332. Read, Peter, Frances Peters-Littles, and Anna Haebich, eds. Indigenous Biography and Autobiography. Canberra: Australian National University E press and Aboriginal History Incorporated, 2008. Wheeler, Belinda. A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature. Woodbridge/Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2013.

3.26 Photography Matthias Christen

Definition The terms in use  – ‘photographic autobiography’, ‘light/life writing’, ‘autobiogra­ phischer Phototext’ [‘autobiographical phototext’], ‘Photoautobiographie’ [‘photo­ autobiography’], ‘photobiographie’ [‘photobiography’] – allow neither for a conclu­ sive generic definition, nor do they delineate a clear-cut body of work. They broadly cover any use of photographic imagery that is considered elemental to the self-con­ ception and the life narrative of either the photographer or the depicted subject. As photographs are hardly able to assert an autobiographical stance on their own, it has been argued to consider less photography per se than a “dispositive autobio­ graphique” [‘autobiographical dispositive’] (Montémont 2008, 48) or the “dispositive de l’identification” [‘dispositive of identification’] (Montémont 2008, 45) to which pho­ tographs relate. Within this frame of reference, the uses of photography vary greatly in terms of temporal comprehensiveness, the amount of images involved, their degree of materialization, authorial markedness, aesthetic organization and formal accom­ plishment. Depending on the emphasis given to the various gradients, the photo­ graphic discourse of the self can be traced as far back as to the early auto-portraits and the (anonymous) nineteenth century family albums. Generically more strictly confined, the ‘photobiography’ is thought of as originating in the 1980s, with the establishment of a new multimodal aesthetic form by artists and in the advent of modern printing techniques that facilitate a cheaper production of photobooks (Mora 2004c).

Explication Following up its inception in the 1830s, photography has grown into a part of what Alan Sekula has termed “a bureaucratic-clerical-statistical system of intelligence” (1992, 351) that allowed political authorities to identify, control and apprehend their subjects in case they would engage in deviant behavior (Tagg 1988, 2009). This iden­ tificatory regime has led to the mandatory inclusion of photographs into passports and personal documents from the early twentieth century on (Groebner 2004, 167). In the aesthetic domain, however, the “identity-value” of photographs (Bruss 1980, 300) is less disambiguous. Judged by the literary standard of a comprehensive life narrative with its founding unity of author, narrator and main character, it seems doubtful whether photography lends itself to an autobiographical “discours de soi” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-082

3.26 Photography 

 649

[‘discourse of the self’] at all (Montémont 2008, 46). Conjoining two different classes of signs, the icon and the index, photographic pictures accord their objects a strong sense of corporeal presence. Other than images based on iconic resemblance alone – such as drawings or paintings – photographs imply an undeniable personal reference to the individual who inevitably must have been in front of the camera at some point in the past since there would be no picture otherwise, according to Roland Barthes’ famous reasoning (1980 [2010]). As an assembly of purely visual signs, however, pho­ tographs present the beholder with a “chaîne flottante des signifiés” [‘floating chain of ­signifieds’], instigating what Barthes aptly calls “la terreur des signes incertains” [‘the terror of uncertain signs’] (1964, 44 [1980, 274]). While there is “no textual evidence to distinguish autobiography from the auto­ biographical novel” (Adams 2000, 229), photographs offer even less distinctive traits. Devoid of additional information, they would not even disclose their subject’s name (Montémont 2008, 47). Were it not for circumstantial evidence, the portrait of the pho­ tographer’s parents in Daido Moriyamas Memories of a Dog (2004, 16) might show whoever’s ancestors. Photographic pictures, thus, state a strong, yet ultimately void identity, since it remains anonymous if not specified by further declaration. This holds true for the person behind the camera too. In strictly visual terms, nothing hints at either their name or identity. As with moving images, there is no visual equivalent to the first person singular in still photography. It lacks the “outil d’énonciation particulier” [‘that particular means of enunciation’] (Mora 2004b, 109), making it difficult to trace “l’énunciateur de la photographie”, the person or entity to which a picture can be attributed as the origin of a (self-reflexive) utterance (Montémont 2008, 47). As photography evolved into a polyvalent mode of expression, some stylistic fea­ tures have come in due course to visually code subjectivity and a personal stance. With the introduction of smaller, hand-held cameras in the late nineteenth century, for instance, motion blurs came to infer a corporeal presence of the photographer at the scene. Equally, close ups might physically implicate the photographer in the event depicted, as does the choice of a particular point of view in general (e.  g. Antoine ­d’Agata’s photographic diary with its telling title Index [2015]). The sense of subjectiv­ ity that these stylistic traits may invoke, however, will remain generic, as long as there is nothing to claim it for any one person in particular, regardless of how intensely it makes itself felt. Language affords the enunciator a basic personal unity by means of the first person pronoun and its inflections. The photo camera, on the contrary, intervenes between the subject who is taking the picture and its object, splitting up the two of them. As an apparatic medium, photography disassociates the expression of the for­ mer’s subjectivity from the assertion of the personal identity with the latter. Aesthetically, there is only a limited range of means to suggest an identitary rela­ tionship between photographer and photographed and to establish unequivocally a picture’s authorship. Posing in front of a mirror, the inclusion of the registering device

650 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

or a release cable into the frame, an arm stretched out to insinuate a sense of physi­ cal contiguity between the photographer, the imaging tool and the final picture, the shadow cast by the photographer on a bright surface – all these visual tropes grant what Lejeune (1975) conceives of as ‘autobiographical pact’ and have thus become signature images figuring prominently in photobiographic narratives (e.  g. Moriyama 2004, front cover, 6 as well as Friedlander 2005, passim). Even with those identitary marks present, photographs cover only certain aspects of the individual depicted. Being visual representations, they focus on what meets the (apparatic) eye: a person’s appearance, her facial and bodily expressions. And while photographs are, semiotically speaking, less conventionalized than words, they miss out on the depth and the nuance of psychological insights the latter might yield. As a spatial rather than a time based art form, photography is restricted in yet another respect. Other than moving images, photographs represent only fractions of a successional chain of events. This is what makes temporality the key issue of photo­ biographic narratives (Mora 2004b, 112) and the “passage du fragment à l’ensemble” [‘passage from the fragment to the ensemble’] the prime obstacle to overcome (Mora 2004b, 111). And as if the pictures’ fragmentary condition wasn’t enough in terms of formal limitations, once crucial biographic events have passed, there is no way to retrieve them photographically if they have not been taken by persons other than the subject of the photoautobiographical narrative. As Montémont has argued for French photographer Sophie Calle as a case in point, childhood photographs were most often taken by parents or relatives rather than by the child itself (2008, 46). Hence, it doesn’t make sense to categorically exclude photographs from the autobiographical source material based on their provenience alone (2008, 46). Photographic pictures, in sum, depend on the completion by further images and even more so by language in order to adopt an autobiographical stance (Montémont 2008, 47; Gehrmann 2009, 17, 22). Based on a different kind of signs, language helps to attribute photographs to an enunciator and to comment on whom or what they show. Words might, too, add context to the event depicted and confer a sense of bio-tem­ poral cohesion to pictures that otherwise represent only liminal fractions of a life’s story. “Sans texte”, as Mora points out, “pas de photobiographie, mais un simple suite chronologique visuelle” [‘without text, there is no photobiography, but just a simple chronological succession of visual impressions’] (2004b, 113). It is thus neither the pictures’ content nor their provenience that constitutes a “discours de soi” [‘discourse of the self’], but “la manière dont le texte annexe ces images issues de différentes sources, pour les intégrer à un dispositif d’identifica­ tion” [‘the way texts appropriate those pictures originating from different sources in order to incorporate them into a dispositive of identification’] (Montémont 2008, 46). Within this particular frame of reference, images do not have to be taken by the subject herself in order to become an integral part of their autonarrative. Conversely, not every picture that technically qualifies as a self-portrait amounts to a photoautobiograph­ ical enunciation. In her series Untitled Film Stills, the American artist-photographer

3.26 Photography 

 651

Cindy Sherman (1990) makes herself and her body the object of a playful subversion of the gender roles that the movie industries designates for women. The series is about women and femininity in general, not about Sherman in particular and there is no textual accompaniment to suggest otherwise. With the text-image relation as the dispositive’s center piece (Montémont 2008, 48), photoautobiographical narratives are inherently hybrid, even though the share of the two components (‘the textual’ and ‘the photographic’) might vary. Montémont contends accordingly that photoautobiographical narrative concludes a double con­ tract with the reader/beholder. In addition to the pact outlined by Philippe Lejeune that assures the reader of an autobiographical text of the personal identity of author, narrator and main character, photoautobiographical narratives enter “un pacte de coherence” [‘a pact of coherence’] between the autobiographical character of the text and the autobiographical nature of photographies (Montémont 2008, 49). Robert Frank’s seminal photobook The Lines of My Hand (1989) makes for a perfect example of this contractual double bind. The title of the book attributes its content by linguistic means – the use of the first person possessive pronoun ‘my’ – to a ‘Me’ that the byline identifies as Robert Frank. The visual metaphor of a ‘life line’ that the title’s chres­ tomathic subtext implies, announces an encompassing bio-narrative – though possi­ bly speculative in nature – that it ties to a corporeal presence (“my hand”). In a further transferral, Frank adds handwritten comments to several photographs throughout the book. Written by hand, the concomitant texts contribute to the sense of a mutual cor­ poral bond between the author/photographer, the text and the picture (for the hand­ writing as an additional physical trace that invigorates the pictures indexicality see Adams 2000, 239 and as a further example Ginsberg 1990). As the dispositive of identification is able to accommodate a vast array of pictures within hybrid photoautobiographical narratives, the corpus appears large and some­ what fuzzy towards its fringes. The gamut runs from actual self-portraits that with virtually no temporal extension condense a life’s span into the co-presence of gestures and physiognomical traits (for the ‘selfie’ as its up to date vernacular form see Bieber 2015) to the traditional literary autobiography at the other end that contains no pic­ tures at all but verbally evokes photographs to trigger a process of remembrance (for childhood photographs as mnemonic cues see Schaffner 2004). Family albums often make do with almost no additional text, except for a few dates and names that serve as aide memoire. Since they tell the story of a group rather than an individual, it is the communal act of leafing through its pages, of commenting on the images and collectively remembering a past shared that provides the autobi­ ographical dispositive of identification. The latter recedes into obscurity as soon as familial ties come loose and the collaborative practice of an informed commenting peters out – leaving behind a heap of anonymous images ready to be discarded at flea markets (e.  g. Stultiens 2008). As “demotic artifacts” (Coleman 1996, 132) albums display a comparatively high degree of formal organization; other vernacular prac­ tices, however, might never grow into finite artifacts and will instead lend themselves

652 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

to occasional autobiographical acts (see the collecting of photographs in shoeboxes, on hard drives or mobile phones [e.  g. van Dijck 2007]). The traditional photoalbums are usually commonly owned unique material objects that address a close circle of friends and relatives. In contrast, the photobooks by known artists and photographers that take up the vernacular formats (the album, the visual diary) from the 1970s onward, reach out to an audience way beyond the societal context from which their material originates. As elaborate aesthetic objects, circulating in various print runs (yet seldom as unique objects), these photobooks claim a paradigmatic relevance for the individual’s life story they tell (see e.  g. JacquesHenri Lartigue’s Diary of a Century [1970], edited by Richard Avedon and designed by Bea Feitler; for further examples see Samaras 1971; Sultan 1992; Goldin and Armstrong 1994; Goldin et al. 1996). Faced with a broad variety of formats and practices, academic research has from the 1990s onwards focused predominantly on the issues of ‘photography in autobiog­ raphy’ or ‘photography and autobiography’ – taking its lead from the literary genre and its criticism. It has been less concerned with photography as a medium of auto­ biography in its own right and with image dominated forms and practices. While the functions that photographs might adopt in literary contexts have been discussed extensively, less consideration has been given to what is meant by the term ‘photogra­ phy’ respectively. One of the crucial insights that the growing body of photo related research conducted across various disciplines has led to is the semantic polyvalence of the supposedly simple and unambiguous concept. ‘Photography’ variously signi­ fies: an apparatic medium that allows to record mechanically graded light values, a semiotic entity, a group of material visual artifacts, an epistemological object, a social object put to different kinds of use, a metaphor, a theoretical paradigm, as well as a discourse that helps coding issues as diverse as intimacy, scientific knowledge and political control. Against all attempts to ascribe an unalterable ontological core to photography, the medium is steeped in history in all of its various semantic aspects. The body of research that has been conducted on photography and autobiogra­ phy can be assorted based on which of the aspects mentioned it is focused on. In the wake of Foucauldian discourse analysis, Kawashima (2011) takes a media-theo­ retical approach. He conceives photography as mnemonic storage device. Due to the technical precision and the truthfulness of its recordings, photography was able to relieve literary texts of the identificatory functions that the autobiographical genre used to hold up until the middle of the nineteenth century (Kawashima 2011, 283). The media-historical revolution, brought on by photography strongly affects the formal organization of autobiographical texts, as Kawashima argues, leading up to profound changes in the genre’s overall design. Instead of offering a narrative con­ tinuum, subtended by an equally uninterrupted consciousness (2011, 26), those new autobiographies emerging at the turn of the previous century stress the manifolded­ ness and disparity of the narrating subject (2011, 20). Kawashima’s approach draws criticism in several respects: Even if a major change can be observed in the history of

3.26 Photography 

 653

literary forms, it can hardly be credited to the advent of any one medium exclusively. If photography brings about a media-historical revolution, why then, one might ask, do its reverberations make themselves felt only decades later? Precision, richness of detail, truthfulness, which Kawashima takes up upon, were – even in the nineteenth century – some among several features that have been ascribed to photography, just as the task of scientific data-collecting has not been the sole function of the medium. And finally: while photography supposedly causes a sea change in autobiography’s history, it seems strangely unaffected by history itself. Kawashima takes it to be an ontologically fixed, theoretical entity, at the expense of material images and the varying practices they are bound to. Another major approach revolves around the semiotic status of photographic images. Adams (2000) and Rugg (1997) both take their clue from the vernacular assumption that photography and autobiography share an ontologically privileged relation to their respective objects (e.  g. Adams 2000, 17). Adams and Rugg, there­ fore, hold photography uniquely valuable when it comes to theoretically reconsid­ ering autobiography and its representational issues (Adams 2000, xvi; Blazejewski 2002, 106). However, they both understand the indexicality of photographs and their supposedly privileged mode of reference not to be timeless ontological givens, but distinctive features that the medium has been accorded under particular historical circumstances. In Roland Barthes’ La chambre claire (1980) [Camera Lucida (2010)], a seminal photo-theoretical text, it has obviously been a heightened sense of temporality, instilled by the death of the author’s mother, that has prompted him to make referen­ tiality the defining feature of photography. Allegedly “das indexikalisch-referentielle Medium per se” [‘the indexical-referential medium per se’] (Gehrmann 2009, 9), ‘pho­ tography’ has gained prominence within ‘autobiography’ and its theory, too, to the same extent that the central tenets of the genre – the notion of a unified subject and the genre’s inherent truthfulness – came under attack by poststructuralist criticism. As it became ever more difficult in its wake to uphold a firm distinction between fact and fiction, photography seemed able to bolster the referential claim of autobiograph­ ical narratives. Adams, however, contends “that the role of photography in autobiography is far from simple or one-dimensional. Both media are increasingly self-conscious, and combining them may intensify rather than reduce the complexity and ambi­ guity of each taken separately” (2000, xxi). Rugg, too, voices doubts as to the idea of an uncompromised referentiality of photographic images. As a material artifact, the portrait of an author might well strengthen the autobiographical pact they enter with their audience. As an apparatic medium, however, that usually requires a third party to take the picture, photography engenders a sense of alienation similar to the one the author encounters when she makes herself the object of an autobiographical narrative: “the loss of control over the body’s image inherent in photographic por­ traits strikes a respondent chord in the autobiographer’s consciousness of the loss

654 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

of control inherent in writing and (more importantly) publishing an autobiography” (Rugg 1997, 4). So, while Adams and Rugg adhere to the notion of referentiality, the status of pho­ tography proves nevertheless highly ambiguous to both of them (Blazejwski 2002, 17). Even when Adams ultimately maintains “that no amount of sophisticated poststruc­ turalist theorizing will ever replace a persistent belief in the referentiality of autobiog­ raphy” (2000, 242), he does not simply bypass poststructuralist concepts in order to reinstate the trust in the ontological power of photography. The referentiality is in the eye and mind of the reader/beholder who is willing to believe in it; it is not upheld by any ontological prerogative of either autobiography or photography. Favoring pragmatics over ontological concerns has paved the way for an approach that foregrounds the use of material pictures in divergent historical texts instead of photography ‘as such’. Based on an elaborate assessment of both the thematic conver­ gences and the structural equivalence that photography and literary texts entertain as basically fragmentary modes of self-expression, Blazejewski (2002, 109) draws up a detailed typology of functional strategies of putting to use photographic images within autobiography. Instead of simply invigorating the autobiographical pact, the combi­ nation of texts and photographs require, as Blazejewski puts it, a highly “co-creative act” (2002, 131) on the part of the reader/beholder. In accordance with the aesthetic hybridity of photo-texts, the multi-modal reception adds up to the multi-functionality and multi-perspectivity that make up the defining features of photoautobiographic narratives. In a time of ontological uncertainty, they can no longer be expected to provide an unequivocal and unified likeness (Blazejewski 2002, 131). Gehrmann (2009) expands on the functional approach from a postcolonial per­ spective. Based on a close reading of Les corps glorieux des mots et des êtres (1994) by the Congolese writer-philosopher Valentin Yves Mudimbe, Gehrmann criticizes Philippe Lejeune’s concept of an autobiographical pact in that it is modeled on Western notions of a unified, preferably white male subject. For Gehrmann, the semio-onto­ logical concept of indexical referentiality attributed to photography, too, no longer serves as a cornerstone of the autobiographical writing by postcolonial authors. As Gehrmann argues, their texts and images engage in a less affirmative functional rela­ tionship within which they mutually affect and condition each other (Gehrmann 2009, 13–14).

Outlook Way into the early 2000s, most of the research on photoautobiographical narratives has methodologically been firmly anchored in literary studies. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, however, new approaches have emerged from different fields of expertise. Studies in photo history and aesthetics have put greater emphasis on photography as

3.26 Photography 

 655

an autobiographical medium in its own right and have thus drawn attention to a body of work that has only partially been covered by the focus on autobiographical texts in a more traditional sense of the word (Mora 2004a, 2004b, 2004c; Méaux and Vray 2004; Montémont 2008; Coutagne 2010). For this development, the burgeoning inter­ est in the photobook, its poetics and history are incremental (for the latter see e.  g. Parr and Badger 2004, 2006, 2014). As to autobiographical narratives, the sequencing of photobooks, their materiality as well as the role of the book designer as a co-authorial agent are topics that will require further research. The evolution of digital technologies, in turn, has brought on new means of record­ ing alongside with technoutopian imaginations of self-generating visual bio-narra­ tives. The manufacturers of wearable cameras such as the ‘Autographer’ and the ‘Nar­ rative Clip’ promise its users an automatically generated, image based record of his or her life. Digital technology and the world wide web in particular provide new means of presenting, distributing and sharing auto-related photographic imagery (see the hugely popular YouTube-video Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 12.5 years which arranges hundreds of self-portraits into an ongoing bio-narrative visual flow [Kalina 2012], on the issue of self-representation and digital photography Wolthers 2014a, 2014b; Hedberg et al. 2014; Bieber 2015; Eckel et al. 2017). The metadata that modern digital cameras record embedded into the image files, oddly enough, rein­ state a sense of indexical referentiality thought lost to poststructuralist criticism. They allow to locate the photographer and her objects precisely in time and space (e.  g. by means of geotagging). The metadata thus provide a new kind of material ready to be mined for autobiographical purposes. These recent technological developments, however, bear rather on photo based autobiographical practices and imaging devices that lend themselves to an autobiographical use. Whether they will help produce a new body of autobiographical work or whether they will favor vernacular practices over accomplished aesthetic artifacts in a more traditional sense, either way, there is no conclusive evidence so far.

Photographical Works Chandès, Hervé, ed. Francesca Woodman. Zürich/Berlin/New York: Scalo, 1998. D’Agata, Antoine. Index. Paris: André Frère Éditions, 2015. Engström, Jan Henrik. Trying to Dance. Stockholm: Journal, 2003. Epstein, Mitch. Family Business. Göttingen: Steidl, 2003. Frank, Robert. The Lines of My Hand. Zürich/Frankfurt/New York: Parkett/Alltag, 1989. Friedlander, Lee. Self portrait. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005. Ginsberg, Allen. Photographs. Altadena: Twin Palms, 1990. Goldin, Nan. Ein doppeltes Leben. Ed. with Walter Keller and Hans Werner Holzwarth. Zürich/Berlin/ New York: Scalo, 1994. Goldin, Nan, and David Armstrong, David Armstrong, and Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed. Nan Goldin. I’ll be your mirror. Curated by Elisabeth Sussman and David Armstrong. Zürich/Berlin/New York: Scalo/Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996.

656 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Kalina, Noah. Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 12.5 years. 2012. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=iPPzXlMdi7o (15 November 2017). Lartigue, Jacques-Henri. Phototagebuch unseres Jahrhunderts. Luzern: Bucher, 1970. Lartigue, Jacques-Henri. L’album d’une vie, 1894 – 1986. Ed. Clément Chéroux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003. Lyon, Danny. Memories of Myself. London/Berlin: Phaidon, 2009. Moriyama, Daido. Memories of a Dog. Tucson: Nazraeli, 2004. Samaras, Lucas. Samaras Album: Autointerview, Autobiography, Autopolaroid. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art & Pace Editions, 1971. Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Stills. München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1990. Stultiens, Andrea. Komm, mein Mädchen, in die Berge. Berlin: Verlag für Bildschöne Bücher, 2008. Sultan, Larry. Pictures from Home. New York: Abrams, 1992. Templeton, Ed. The Golden Age of Neglect. Rom: Drago, 2004.

Works Cited Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing & Life Writing. Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill/ London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Barthes, Roland. “Rhétorique de l’image.” Communications 4.1 (1964): 40–51 [“Rhetoric of the Image.” Classic Essays on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. Trans. Stephen Heath. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. 269–285]. Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard, Éditions du Seuil, 1980 [Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010]. Bieber, Alain, ed. Ego Update. A History of the Selfie. Köln: König, 2015. Blazejewski, Susanne. Bild und Text – Photographie in autobiographischer Literatur. Marguerite Duras’ L’Amant und Michael Ondaatjes Running in the Family. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. Bruss, Elizabeth W. “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 296–320. Coleman, Allan Douglas “The Autobiographical Mode in Photography.” Tarnished Silver: After the Photo Boom, Essays and Lectures 1979–1989. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1996. 129–140. Coutagne, Gabriel. L’authenticité de l’autobiographie photographique, entre vrai et faux. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière, 2010. http://www.ens-louis-lumiere.fr/formation/ recherche/memoires-de-fin-detudes/photographie/2010/lauthenticite-de-lautobiographiephotographique-entre-vrai-et-faux.html (15 November 2017). Dijck, José van. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Gehrmann, Susanne. “Autobiographie und Photographie bei V. Y. Mudimbe.” Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 9.17 (2009): 9–34. Groebner, Valentin. Der Schein der Person: Steckbrief, Ausweis und Kontrolle im Europa des Mittel­ alters. München: Beck, 2004. Hedberg, Hans, Gunilla Knape, Tyrone Martinsson, and Louise Wolthers, eds. Auto: Self-representation and Digital Photography. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing, 2014. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Kawashima, Kentaro. Autobiographie und Photographie nach 1900: Proust, Benjamin, Brinkmann, Barthes, Sebald. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Méaux, Danièle, and Jean-Bernard Vray, eds. Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004.

3.26 Photography 

 657

Merzeau, Louise. “Au jour le jour: autour d’une experience de journal photographique sur le web.” Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques. Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004. 131–135. Montémont, Véronique. “Le pacte autobiographique et la photographie.” Le français aujourd’hui 161.2 (2008): 43–50. Mora, Gilles. “Manifeste photobiographique” (1983). Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques. Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004. 103–106 (Mora 2004a). Mora, Gilles. “Photobiographies” (1999). Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques. Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de SaintÉtienne, 2004. 107–113 (Mora 2004b). Mora, Gilles. “Pour en finir avec la photobiographie.” Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques. Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004. 115–117 (Mora 2004c). Parr, Martin, and Gerry Badger. The Photobook. A History I–III. 3 vols. London/New York: Phaidon, 2004, 2006, 2014. Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Schaffner, Alain. “L’image de soi dans le récit d’enfance.” Traces photographiques/Traces autobiographiques. Ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004. 191–205. Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” The Contest of Meaning. Critical Histories of Photography. Ed. Richard Bolton. Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 1992. 342–389. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Houndsmills/ London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988. Tagg, John. The Disciplinary Frame. Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Wolthers, Louise. “Autographing: Digitized Self-Imagery.” Auto: Self-representation and Digital Photography. Ed. Hans Hedberg, Gunilla Knape, Tyrone Martinsson and Louise Wolthers. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing, 2014. 57–81 (Wolthers 2014a). Wolthers, Louise. “Virtual Selves: Art and Digital Autobiography.” Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography. Ed. Jonas Larsen and Mette Sandbye. London: Tauris, 2014. 205–226 (Wolthers 2014b).

Further Reading Dubois, Philippe. “Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic Apparatuses.” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 152–172. Eckel, Julia, Jens Ruchatz, and Sabine Wirth, eds. #SELFIE – Imaging the Self in Digital Media. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017. Hölzl, Ingrid. Der autoporträtistische Pakt: Zur Theorie des fotografischen Selbstporträts am Beispiel von Samuel Fosso. München: Fink, 2008. Price, Barbara Wells. “Picturing the Self. Autobiography and Photography.” Diss. U Iowa, 1994.

3.27 Self-Narration Arnaud Schmitt

Self-narration is a form of autobiographical writing that focuses on the self  – as opposed to the more classical life narratives –, and more precisely on the construc­ tion of identity, mostly through a reflection on the inner workings of memory and how the latter is deeply entangled with the sense of who we are. Thus, self-narration is the narration of the self as an ongoing process underpinned by selected memories. In a way, this was also one of autofiction’s main projects, but self-narration is not inter­ ested in calling into question the fact-fiction border; it remains first and foremost an unequivocal autobiographical endeavor.

Explication I first coined the term ‘auto-narration’ in an article published in Poétique in 2007 and later developed it in an article published in the American journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies in 2011. ‘Auto-narration’ became ‘self-narration’ in English, a much more evoc­ ative expression since the French prefix ‘auto’ (from the Greek ‘autos’) does not carry as directly as the prefix ‘self’ the idea of a persona and of introspection. Obviously, ‘self-narration’ had been used before but I systemized it and used it to define, or rede­ fine to be more precise, a literary domain.

Historical Aspects In 2007, ‘autofiction’ referred both to an art form (arguably a subcategory of ‘autobi­ ography’) and to a theoretical field, the latter particularly dynamic but also slightly chaotic with various definitions of the ‘genre’ being spawned, each one trying to have the final word on the matter. Many important literary theorists gave their own defi­ nition or at least approach of Doubrovsky’s original concept (one he himself tam­ pered with afterwards): Vincent Colonna, Philippe Gasparini, Régine Robin, Made­ leine Ouellette-Michalska, Philippe Vilain, Marie Darrieussecq (the last two being also writers, even ‘autofictionnists’), to name just a few. My own interest in ‘autofiction’ stemmed from a different perspective. Working on contemporary American texts, it turned out to be particularly difficult to differentiate between various and fundamen­ tally different autobiographical ventures such as Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994–98), Henry Roth’s oeuvre, and Philip Roth’s ironical or deeply ambiguous attempts at life writing (for instance, The Counterlife [1987], The Facts [1988] or Deception [1990]). Though ‘autofiction’ did not exist as a category in the US at the time (and still does not https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-083

3.27 Self-Narration 

 659

today), these texts were often referred to as such in French reviews; across the Atlan­ tic, they were simply dubbed as ‘ambiguous autobiographical novels’. This label was unsatisfactory for an appropriate description of these texts, but ‘autofiction’ did not work as well in Henry Roth’s case. It also did not work on texts I studied later such as Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min Kamp (2009–2011) [My Struggle (2012–2016)]. The concept was inadequate on two counts: whether tilting towards fiction (Colonna [2004]; Vilain [2005, 2009]) or autobiography (to a certain extent, Gasparini [2008]), ‘autofiction’ failed to accurately describe the horizon of expectations of the aforementioned texts. Doubrovsky’s original intention was to name – I disagree with people who argue that the French writer and academic founded a genre, ‘autofiction’ existed before Dou­ brovsky coined the term, and the fact that it is a genre is highly debatable – a literary space no one had particularly, or at least extensively paid attention to before him, a middle ground between ‘fiction’ and ‘autobiography’ that had always been a sensitive area no one had previously been very good at circumscribing (Gasparini 2008). But the original definition was also intended as a manifesto: to breathe new life into a mode of expression – life writing – that, at the time, was struggling to gain literary respect­ ability. And on a more personal level, he simply aimed at drawing the contours of a form of expression adapted to the (postmodern) times and offering the same flexibility as the most ambitious novels published in the 1970s. Doubrovsky’s bold program was initially meant to revolutionize autobiography, not the novel. It was conceived as a sort of memoir with a hint of fiction, in other terms a novelistic autobiography, not as an autobiographical novel. In a way, the first version of his definition fits the criteria of what I later defined as the perimeter of self-narration: a creative form of self-refer­ ential texts, memoirs nourished by the most innovative narrative energy. Unfortunately, Doubrovsky changed the recipe and added more fiction (Gaspar­ ini, 2008). In a way, this eventually led to Colonna’s definition of ‘autofiction’, prob­ ably the most extreme one: ‘autofiction’ is fiction, and only the name of the author is real (Colonna 2004, 75). Colonna’s text is often brilliant, but what purpose does it serve? He dissolves ‘autofiction’ in fiction, save for one tiny element. Consequently, only for a brief moment in time was ‘autofiction’ on the side of autobiography, and then it became mostly fictional; when it did so, it turned into a micro-phenomenon in the long history of autobiographical novels. ‘Autofiction’ in 2007 was then theoretically ‘tainted’ by fiction: the fictional part in the so-called hybridity underpinning the genre had expanded beyond recognition. “La perspective de l’autonarration” [‘the perspective of self-narration’] (Schmitt 2007) was meant to recapture what Doubrovsky originally intended to do: to create some­ thing new with something extremely old, or, put differently, to evoke the possibility of writing about one’s life without having to forgo aesthetic ambition, or simply the immense creative energy linked to fiction in the last decades of the twentieth century. ‘Autofiction’ could have carried out that project, but it eventually did not, maybe because, right from the start, the term chosen by Doubrovsky was ‘faulty’. Taking a theoretical step back, ‘autofiction’ means ‘fiction about oneself’. But a host of novels

660 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

fit this description. With the exception of historical novels for instance, most novels are fictions about the author’s life or the author’s imagination. Simply inserting the author’s name or some identifiable biographical elements in a novel might be confus­ ing, challenging or playful for the reader, but in terms of autobiographical experience, it remains limited. Furthermore, it has been done for centuries. This is the reason why I distinguished between two major approaches when it comes to ambiguous autobiographies: on the one hand, one can find ‘panfictionalism’ (David Shields’ recent diptych is a perfect illustration of this trend) or ‘indeterminacy’; briefly, the former claims that, whether a narrative is fictional or referential, it should be regarded as fictional because it remains essentially a narrative, while the former puts forward the idea that trying to decide if a self-narrative is genuine (with regard to facts) or not is a waste of time, since ‘true’ or ‘false’ memories are fundamentally entangled, and as a result, mostly false (because of the fallibility of our memory) (Schmitt 2016). The concept of self-narration stemmed from the opposite approach, that I came to refer to as the ‘rationalist’ one. A telling example of this approach is Philippe Lejeune’s no-nonsense remark: “Je ne crois pas qu’on puisse vraiment lire assis entre deux chaises” [‘I don’t think one can read sitting on the fence’] (2007, 3). Indeed, the rationalist approach – and to a certain extent it includes self-narration – is based on the idea that you either read a text as fiction or as a memoir, but not as both. It is a well-known fact that our brain is a machine designed to avoid cognitive overload and indeterminacy: it is hard-wired to help us make decisions, as smoothly as possible. As readers, but also as human beings, we often opt for the ‘path of least resistance’ (see for instance, Fludernik 1986, 20). ‘Autofiction’ goes against this prin­ ciple, but some readers might be tempted by more resistance. However, throughout literary history, genres have been established to help us categorize, understand and simply naturalize the narratives that we read. Thus, the notion of self-narration was not meant to be rationalist for the sake of being rationalist. My original intent was to consider texts often referred to as ‘autofic­ tions’ from the perspective of the reader. The various theorists associated with ‘inde­ terminacy’ (Colonna, Vilain, Darrieussecq, Robin, etc.) mostly tackle the issue from a writer’s perspective: what the writer wants to achieve or how s/he wants the reader to read the text (as a genre instead of another one, or as a genre without genre). But being strongly influenced by reader-response theories (for instance, Iser or Rabinowitz), I chose a more pragmatic approach, and wondered if a genre without genre is cogni­ tively possible, or whether Gasparini’s so-called ‘hybridity’ can generate a satisfactory reading experience. I came to the conclusion that, in the final analysis, indeterminacy is not indeterminate: it eventually fictionalizes the narrative − in other words, not to decide is to read a text as fiction.

3.27 Self-Narration 

 661

Specific Relevance for Autobiography Self-narration is clearly an autobiographical concept, or more precisely one that can only be applied to an autobiographical context and a not too equivocal reading con­ tract. It urges the reader to decide to read a text as ‘sincere’, a term handled in this specific case with the customary caution, and yet understood as what it is: a commit­ ment to tell the truth. Lejeune himself did not balk at reminding his readers of these, for some old-fashioned, essential premises, which represent the very foundation of his autobiographical pact: an autobiographical pact is a “pacte de vérité” [‘pact of truth’] and depends on the author’s “engagement de vérité” [‘commitment to telling the truth’] (Lejeune 2005, 9) and to write about herself/himself “dans un esprit de vérité” [‘in a spirit of truth’] (Lejeune 2005, 31). Self-narration is only possible if such a commitment exists. One should not however ironically brush aside these prem­ ises by discarding the idea of truth as deeply naïve. My understanding of truth takes into account all the hurdles a “pact of truth” has to overcome, and most prominent among these hurdles are ‘fallibility’ (essentially of our memory, but we are also fallible because we are psychologically primed to see things as we see them) and ‘contextu­ alization’ (the fact that there is no objective perspective from which to narrate). Truth might no longer be seen as neutral data but still exists as a form of personal commit­ ment. In his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel (2016), John Le Carré perfectly sums up both the relevance and limits of this pact: Was there such a thing as pure memory? I doubt it. Even when we convince ourselves that we’re being dispassionate, sticking to the bald facts with no self-serving decorations or omissions, pure memory remains as elusive as a bar of wet soap. […] But please be assured: nowhere have I consciously falsified an event or a story. Disguised where necessary, yes. Falsified, emphatically not (2016, 6–7).

One would be hard-pressed to find a more eloquent definition of the pact at the core of self-narration: to tell the truth while constantly keeping in mind the limits inherent in such a task, and the constant challenges it lays out. This leads to a final point: if self-narration implies the same reading contract as the one theorized by Lejeune for autobiography, what differentiates both terms? The difference is two-fold: historical and linguistic. I developed this idea of self-narration as a reaction, and to a certain extent an alternative to the theory of ‘autofiction’ and what I perceived as a form of theoretical hysteria: by and large, ‘autofiction’ was pre­ sented as being everything while being nothing at all. Furthermore, it was no longer what it was supposed to be originally, i.  e. a new mode of life writing adapted to the narrative trends of the moment. Self-narration was, and still is intended as a way of reconciling autobiography and narrative boldness. Then, linguistically, more than restrictively defining a genre (something autobiography undoubtedly does), self-nar­ ration defines an intention that is not linked to a label (a memoir can fall under this category, for instance), and yet also confines this intention to narrating the self, and

662 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

not life in general. Thus, many autobiographies or memoirs do not qualify as self-nar­ ration. It definitely is a form of introspection that cannot accommodate non-committal personal accounts, texts that do not grapple with the very nature of one’s identity. Focusing on the self, on one self, is also a way of constantly reminding the reader of the deeply subjective contours of the narrative: it remains an attempt, and only an attempt, at recovering a form of personal truth.

Works Cited Colonna, Vincent. Autofiction et autres Mythomanies Littéraires. Paris: Tristram, 2004. Darrieussecq, Marie. “L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.” Poétique 107 (1996): 369–380. Fludernik, Monika. “Narrative and its development in Ulysses.” Journal of Narrative Technique 16 (1986): 15–40. Gasparini, Philippe. Autofiction. Une Aventure du Langage, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. Min Kamp. 6 vols. Oslo: Oktober Forlag. 2009–2011 [My Struggle. Trans. Donald Bartlett. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2012–2016]. Le Carré, John. The Pigeon Tunnel. London: Viking, 2016. Lejeune, Philippe. Signes de vie. Le Pacte autobiographique 2. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le journal comme ‘antifiction’.” Poétique 149 (2007): 3–14. Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine. Autofiction et dévoilement de soi. Montréal: Les Éditions XYZ, 2007. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988. Robin, Régine. Le Golem de l’Écriture, De l’Autofiction au Cybersoi. Montréal: Les Éditions XYZ, 1997. Roth, Henry. Mercy of a Rude Stream. Vol. I: A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994. Roth, Henry. Mercy of a Rude Stream. Vol. II: A Diving Rock on the Hudson. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995. Roth, Henry. Mercy of a Rude Stream. Vol. III: From Bondage. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Roth, Henry. Mercy of a Rude Stream. Vol. IV: Requiem for Harlem. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Roth, Philip. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Roth, Philip. Deception. London: Vintage, 1990. Schmitt, Arnaud. “La perspective de l’autonarration.” Poétique 149 (2007): 15–29. Schmitt, Arnaud. Je réel/Je fictif. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2010. Schmitt, Arnaud. “Making the Case for Self-Narration Against Autofiction.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 25.2 (2011): 122–137. Schmitt, Arnaud. “David Shields’s lyrical essay: the dream of a genre-free memoir, or beyond the paradox.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31.1 (2016): 133–146. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. Shields, David. How Literature Saved my Life. London: Notting Hill Editions, 2013. Vilain, Philippe. Défense de Narcisse. Paris: Grasset, 2005. Vilain, Philippe. L’Autofiction en Théorie. Chatou: Les Éditions de la Transparence, 2009.

3.28 Self-Portrait

Salvatore Pisani and Katharina Siebenmorgen

Definition A self-portrait is an artistic depiction in any visual medium done by artists using them­ selves as the subject and traditionally exploring the face. While a portrait’s interest mainly lies in its reference to the represented person regardless of the maker, the self-portrait always refers to the person portrayed and portraying as well. Containing the person twice, as artifact and artificer, as the double and the self, self-portraits, whether in painting, photography, sculpture, or more recently in video clips and per­ formance art, might be seen as a sort of first-person visual declarations of existence. Inherently linked to the concepts of self-consciousness, documentation and identity, self-portraiture follows an intellectual course similar to self-writing practices being at once a claim to and an expression of artistic self-projection. In the common form of the portrait ‘en face’, it refers to Narcissus admiring his own image reflected in water.

Explication Self-portraits, from a technical point of view, are done with the help of a mirror. Dis­ playing before the mirror, the artist makes of him-/herself an object to be observed and transferred on canvas or another support of imitation thus rendering the ephem­ eral mirror image permanent. The dissociation at work in the artist’s self-encounter opens up the possibility of self-questioning that aims to uncover the inner life without reserve. In the early modern era however, when the art of self-portraiture first evolved, self-portraits had little to do with our complex concepts of the inner self, self-reflec­ tion as introspection rather being concerns of later modern days. Still today considered a means for artists to demonstrate their hand and craft, self-portraiture emerged when the sovereignty of the individual was being affirmed. Not a simple artisan reproducing a repertory of forms anymore, the artist came to be considered a real and true creator and emulator of God. In Renaissance and Baroque self-portraiture the artist’s gaze in the mirror does not imply self-scrutiny. It is, on the contrary, subjected to the modeling of the self according to Pico della Mirandola’s aesthetic credo in De hominis dignitate (1496), that through art only man becomes man or, in other words, that man has indeed the power to be his own “molder and maker”, to freely and honorably invent and shape himself: “[…] ut, tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque plastes et fictor, in quam malueris tute formam effingas“ [“(…) so that https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-084

664 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

you may, as the free and extraordinary shaper of yourself, fashion yourself in what­ ever form you prefer“] (Pico della Mirandola 2012, 116–117). Accordingly, early modern self-portraits have been deployed as a means of self-fashioning. They confront us not with unique, authentic individuals, but with fabricated masks. This accords with the dualistic anthropology predominating Christian tradition that draws a sharp distinction between the (immaterial, inner) soul and the (material, outer) body. The body, considered to be the vesture for the soul, is recognized as an eloquent means of expression, which by men, other than animals, is formed into a differentiated semiotic system. Since man is ζῷον λόγου ἔχον (zoon logon echon, the animal possessing language) (Rese 2003, 33–45), we are able to distinguish between signifier (expression, body, surface) and signified (intention, soul, inside) and to manipulate their agreed relation. While, on the one hand, philosophers, echoing Aris­ totle, invent a science of physiognomy that turns the natural link between the inner and outer into a norm of rules (Giacomo della Porta, De humana physiognomia [1586], and Charles Le Brun, Conférence de M. Le Brun sur l’expression générale et particulière [1678]), nascent self-portraiture, on the other hand, provides an art not of disclosure but of concealment for the purpose of self-refinement.

The Naked Truth The rising individualism and self-awareness of Renaissance humanism promoted both self-portraiture and self-writing experiences, such as those by the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, the Italian humanist Girolamo Cardano or by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who started the self-motivated project of writing his daily life and inner self. In early modern culture, self-portraits reflecting the desire for unsparing self-ex­ posure are strictly private. A first and rare example is Albrecht Dürer’s Nude Self-portrait (ca. 1505), a drawing that depicts the artist naked and in realistic vein, free from idealization (Demele 2012). The bent and emaciated body shows folds and bulges, in which the characteristics of time – transience, transformation, mortality – emerge. The aesthetic rule of unblemished skin, on which relies the classical doctrine of beauty, gives way to Dürer’s depiction of the biological truth of aging and decay. By posing naked, the artist takes off cultural patterns and imperatives of decorum. Against the norm established with Christian classical rhetoric of the body, Dürer puts the request of the non-dissimulated, naked evidence, a claim that only later, in modern western art, becomes general.

3.28 Self-Portrait 

 665

Normativity and Role Models Very different, on the other hand, are Dürer’s official self-portraits, which not only firmly respect the codes of decency, but even further enhance their acceptance. In his Munich self-portrait from 1500, depicting the artist in fully frontal pose, with mag­ nificent hear and beard, Dürer evokes the so-called ‘vera icon’, the most important miraculous image of Christ, as a model for his own likeness. Seen in the context of the new humanist understanding of the subject (emerging with Renaissance thought and practice), the christomorph Dürer hereby declares himself to be his own creator. Public self-portraits reveal less about individuality than they do about social status and family relations for the expression of which art has its own visual alpha­ bet, containing clothing, facial expressions, body postures and other attributes. The portrait in its classical form was established in seventeenth century France, where each detail, from robe and posture to curtains and accessories, counts for the demon­ stration of the artist’s artistic career, their aesthetic credo and social status (see the self-portrait of the court painter Pierre Mignard, Louvre, 1690). For art historians self-portraits have therefore been pivotal not so much as statements and representa­ tions of an artist’s individuality, but a source for social history writing, that follows the transition from the medieval artisan to the Renaissance ‘gentiluomo’ or ‘honnête homme’ (Boschloo 1998, 59–65). It is through historicizing reenactments of myth or history – with artists playing with masks, staging in historical costumes or mythological contexts, identifying with figures of the past – that a new picture type, namely the allegorical or historicizing portrait evolves. It originates from Italian monumental history painting which used to be the place for an artist’s immortalization within the larger composition imperson­ ated in the figure of a spectator of the represented event (such as Taddeo di Bartolo did in the face of the painter’s patron saint Judas Thaddeus in his Assumption altarpiece of 1401 at Montepulciano). Two models of subjectivity appear with the large number of historicizing portrai­ ture. On the one hand, artists act as (transgressive) heroes. Giorgione, for example, casts himself as David, Frans Floris becomes Saint Luke painting the Madonna, Arte­ misia Gentileschi shows herself as the allegorical figure of painting. On the other hand, we find (subgressive) anti-heroes replacing more and more since at least in Baroque art the hero-pattern, such as the self-portrait of Michelangelo on the flayed skin of Saint Bartholomew, of Caravaggio in the decapitated head of Goliath, of Gianlorenzo Bernini as ‘anima damnata’ [‘damned soul’] or of Luca Giordano as cynic philosopher. Artists even today still refer to this image of the anti-bourgeois and social outcast, like Otto Dix who depicts himself as sex murderer, soldier, target, war cripple (Schmidt 1978).

666 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

“I myself“ Compared with written autobiography, which makes use of the first person speech, self-portraiture as a visual art is limited. In order to confirm likeness or to simply verify self-reference, it therefore introduces ‘signatures’. On Dürer’s Munich self-portrait, where the artist directs attention on himself with a pointing gesture of a hand raised to his chest, a Latin inscription at eye level reads “Ich, Albrecht Dürer aus Nürnberg, habe mich selbst mit angemessenen Farben im Alter von 28  Jahren so dargestellt” [‘I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg portrayed myself in everlasting colours aged twen­ ty-eight years’] (Preimesberger 2005, 42). Such interactions between word and image refer to the incapacity of painting to speak according to Simonides’ dictum (500 BCE) that ‘painting is mute poetry’ (Patz 1998, 62). Just as body and face cannot communicate biographical events, self-portraiture doesn’t provide an adequate means to represent the narrative continuum otherwise given with biography. Even the age of the sitter is not always immediately obvious, since it is not unusual that the artist detaches himself in a timeless, idealized sphere. Although the picture preserves a person’s immanence, it nonetheless deprives the person of their biological life consisting of flourishing, ageing and decay. In his London Self Portrait with Turban, van Eyck affirms to be 33 years old, exactly Jesus’ age when crucified and said to be the ideal Christian age, that souls would bodily rise from the dead regardless of their age at the point of death (Gludovatz 2005, 34).

The End of Physiognomic Portrayal From the middle of the nineteenth century painters like Gustave Courbet and namely Vincent van Gogh have introduced a new portrait option. Instead of physiogno­ mic likeness, personal effects appear which in the sense of individual traces of life stand in for human figure portrayals (Pfisterer and Rosen 2005, 20). At the beginning there is Van Gogh’s Chair (National Gallery, London), the portrait of an old stool on which lies a pipe telling of the artist’s absent presence, thus no longer focusing on the face or emphasizing recognisability. As a result of this, in the nineteenth century, housing interiors could portray the absent resident. The abandonment of individual physiognomic likeness went together with a new notion of the ego, which in favour of multiplicity loses coherence and unity. Not at least the more recent photography brought to light previously unseen facets of the ego. Equally to chronophotography, a photographic technique beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century with Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey revealing the details of motion sequences otherwise invisible to the human eye, portraiture was supposed to uncover hidden sides of the ego. Consequently, in 1917, Marcel Duchamp questions identity in a multiple self-portrait (Autour d’une table [‘Around a table’] [1917]). The photo brings together five images of him around a table as if the artist meet with his different selves.

3.28 Self-Portrait 

 667

In favour of exploring the traits of one’s invisible interiority avant-gardists are less and less interested in making faithful self-portraits. Besides the unbroken success of self-portraiture among a wide public, during the twentieth century, important intellectual trends put in question the very funda­ mentals of the genre, while promoting to adapt it to new demands. Not only picking up prevailing concepts of subjectivity and identity, self-portraits create a resonating space for them to be demonstrated, challenged, and brought into effect. In the light of the various paradigm shifts and differentiations, whether ideologically, politically or culturally, which, accordingly, also effect the artist’s self-reflection, it is not sur­ prising that contemporary self-portraiture can hardly be brought down to a common denominator. Some general features that work until today can still be distinguished.

The Disappearing Subject: Self-Expression and Self-Effacement Such an important trend was psychoanalysis. Postponing attention to the role of the unconscious, concepts of the sovereign self became more and more obsolete. At the same time it contributed enormously to the renewal of the genre. Following the psy­ chopathological approach, established with Cesare Lombroso’s work Genio e follia (1864) [The Man of Genius (1891)], the life and work of outstanding artists was inter­ preted in the context of psychic impulses, if not mental illness. Artists like namely Egon Schiele readily submitted to society’s expectations by depicting themselves as psychologically disturbed to indicate their claim to ingenuity. Particular importance attaches also to new theoretic approaches emerged since the late 1960s with post­ structuralist distrust in a fixed, stable identity of the subject as represented in Renais­ sance self-portraiture, allowing for a decentered, disjunctive concept of the subject. Accordingly, self-portraiture draws largely on the artist’s own image as a vehicle for both self-negation through hiding or fading and social critique. Regardless of the radical idea of the ‘death of the subject’, individual identity has remained a major concern in self-portraiture though becoming more nuanced and complex with artists seeking the subjective gesture in exploring how it is made by biography as well as by gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. In performance art self-portraiture hides in plain sight, their proximity going through the artist’s body. Self-portraits in con­ temporary photography are often a documentation of a performance taking the form of film stills, such as in Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, that are photographic self-portraits for which the artist transformed her appearance to resemble a range of feminine stereotypes in order to explore the long history of portraiture as playing an active part in the (de-)construction of identity. Translation: Katharina Siebenmorgen

668 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Works Cited Boschloo, Anton W. A. “Perception of the Status of Painting. The Self-Portrait in the Art of the Italian Renaissance.” Modelling the Individual. Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance. Ed. Karl Enenkel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 51–73. Demele, Christine. Dürers Nacktheit. Das Weimarer Selbstbildnis. Münster: Rhema, 2012. Gludovatz, Karin. “Jan van Eyck. Der Mann mit dem roten Turban, 1433.” Der Künstler als Kunstwerk. Selbstporträts vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Ulrich Pfisterer and Valeska von Rosen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005. 34–35. Lombroso, Cesare. Genio e follia. Rome: Fratelli Bocca, 1864 [The Man of Genius. Trans. H. Havelock Ellis. London: W. Scott, 1891]. Patz, Kristine. “Sub rosa. Verschwiegene Beredsamkeit im Londoner Selbstporträt von Salvator Rosa.” Diletto e maraviglia. Ausdruck und Wirkung in der Kunst von der Renaissance bis zum Barock. Ed. Christine Göttler. Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 1998. 61–73. Pfisterer, Ulrich, and Valeska von Rosen. “Vorwort.” Der Künstler als Kunstwerk. Selbstporträts vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Ulrich Pfisterer and Valeska von Rosen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005. 11–23. Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Oration on the Dignity of Man. A New Translation and Commentary. Ed. Francesco Borghesi, Michael Papio and Massimo Riva. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pietrass, Katrin. Michelangelos “Gesichter”. Identitätskonzepte in den Selbstdarstellungen Michelangelo Buonarrotis. Leipzig: Literaturverlag, 2012. Preimesberger, Rudolf. “Albrecht Dürer. Selbstbildnis, 1500.” Der Künstler als Kunstwerk. Selbst­ porträts vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Ulrich Pfisterer and Valeska von Rosen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005. 42–43. Rese, Friederike, Praxis und Logos bei Aristoteles. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Schmidt, Diether. Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978.

Further Reading Boehm, Gottfried, Orlando Budelacci, Maria Giuseppina Di Monte, and Michael Renner, eds. Gesicht und Identität. Paderborn: Fink, 2014. Bonafoux, Pascal, ed. Moi je, par soi-même. L’autoportrait au XXe siècle. Paris: de Selliers, 2004. Hall, James. Self-Portrait. A Cultural History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

3.29 Testimony/Testimonio Ulrich Mücke

Definition Testimonio is a Latin American literary genre that came into being in the second half of the 1960s and was beset by crisis in the 1990s. Testimonio can be defined as a booklength story narrated by a person coming from the margins of society, for example a poor woman, a peasant, an outlaw or a guerrilla. Testimony is told in the first person and informs the reader about injustice and resistance as part of the life of the narrator. As testimony gives a voice to the subalterns and denounces injustice, it belongs both to the realm of politics and that of literature. However, since the narrator usually is illiterate or, if literate, cannot him- or herself write a text the length of a book, the actual writing is done by a professional, for example, a journalist who transforms the oral account into a written one (Beverley 1996, 24–27).

Explication Most scholars believe Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón [Biography of a runaway slave] was the first testimonio in the full sense of the term. Published in 1966, the book is the life story of a Cuban slave said to have been born in 1860. He first ran away from his master and – after the abolition of slavery – became a soldier in the wars of independence at the end of the century. According to Barnet, he interviewed Estebán Montejo in the 1960s and wrote the book, piecing together what Montejo had told him in numerous long meetings. In 1970, the Casa de las Américas (Havana) included tes­ timonio in its annual awarding of literary prizes. In this way, testimonio has become a literary genre officially accepted, at least in Cuba. Except for Barnet’s Cimarrón, the most famous testimonios were published in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1971, Elena Poniatowska published La noche de Tlatelolco. Testimonios de historia oral [Massacre in Mexico] as a kind of collage of eyewitness accounts of the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City. In Mexico and abroad, Poniatowska’s book was crucial, since it gave a voice to the victims of the so-called revolutionary government of Mexico. In a very different way, “Si me permiten hablar …” Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia [Let me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines] denounced the exploitation of the miners in revolu­ tionary and post-revolutionary Bolivia. Published in 1977, the book tells the story of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, who after having been a modest housewife became an important leader of the left. When she died in 2012, the government declared a period https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-085

670 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

of national mourning. In 1982, the Nicaraguan guerrilla leader Omar Cabezas told his story of the 1979 revolution in La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde [Fire from the Mountain. The Making of a Sandinista]. Unlike Poniatowska and Barrios de Chungara, Cabezas’ narrative did not focus on oppression and exploitation. Rather, it presented a kind of coming-of-age story that showed how the young student Cabezas became a man through his involvement in the guerrilla movement, which at the same time brought his fatherland to a new age of freedom and justice never known before. Probably the most famous testimonio is Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983) [I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala]. It denounces the poverty of Guatemalan peasants and the genocidal counterinsurgency of the mil­ itary governments during the country’s civil war. In 1992, Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle for human rights in her fatherland. Authorship does not define testimonio. The author may or may not be the nar­ rator. In many testimonios, the author, narrator and hero of the text are the same person, and the paratext clearly informs the reader about this identity. As these tes­ timonios respect Philippe Lejeune’s criteria for an autobiographical text, they are a kind of Latin American left-wing autobiography (Lejeune 1975). In other testimonios, the author is not clearly defined. Generally, the paratext informs the reader that the narrator is an exploited and oppressed person not able to write down his own life story. Therefore, a professional writer (a journalist or a university scholar) writes the text after having heard the story directly from the narrator. The published text may reproduce the information of the interviewee faithfully. However, in some testimonios, the author writes a completely new text, a kind of “novela-testimonio” in the words of Miguel Barnet (Barnet 1979). Finally, other testimonios reproduce exactly what has been recorded in interviews. In this case, there is no individual author. Therefore, in terms of authorship, testimonio is situated between autobiography, oral history, journalism and the new novel of the 1960s and 1970s. The relationship between inter­ viewer and interviewee was the cause for much controversy about power relationships inherent in the production of testimonio. All testimonios tell the story of exploitation, oppression and resistance from the point of view of those exploited who resist and fight against oppression and exploita­ tion. Many tell the story of revolution. Testimonios criticize existing societies as unjust and brutal and express a clear idea of the reasons for poverty and political violence: Capitalism, the oligarchy (or bourgeoisie, i.  e. the privileged classes) or simply the rich maintain the existing system through violence against the poor. Testimonio does not see God’s will or human nature as the reason for these realities. It has a liberal (or leftist) idea of human nature, that is to say, human beings do not harm anybody if they are not forced to do so. The narrator of testimonial texts does not only speak for him- or herself but rather for a group. More often than not, this group is a large col­ lective or a social class: the slaves, the miners, poor peasants, the indigenous people, working class women, etc. Testimonio claims to give an insider view of the hardship these classes suffer. As a first-person narrative, testimonio includes heart-breaking

3.29 Testimony/Testimonio 

 671

moments, such as the unjustified deaths of children or near relatives who are killed by police or military forces or who die due to poverty. Most testimonios tell how the hero achieves a clearer idea of the true causes of his suffering and how he or she begins to take steps against injustice and oppression. However, testimonios do not allow for a critical stance towards the hero. If the hero is mistaken at any specific moment, it is only for his or her lack of understanding and never because of egoism or any other vice. Testimonios do not permit divergent readings. It is clear from the beginning who are the good guys and who are the bad. The stories told are so brutal and terrifying that everyone will feel a sense of solidarity with the narrator. There has been much scholarly debate about the ‘truth’ of testimonio. Testimo­ nios form part of literary realism and according to George Yúdice, testimonio is “an authentic narrative” (Yúdice 1996, 17). But does this mean that the stories told in testi­ monios are true? It was Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio that ten years after publication led to a heated debate on that question. On the one hand, David Stoll could show that Menchú had lived a life quite different from that told in her book. She was not as poor as she suggested and she did not personally witness military forces burning her brother alive, to give just two examples (Stoll 1999). On the other hand, nobody doubts that there were millions of poor peasants suffering genocidal warfare at the hands of the Guatemalan state agents. The truth of Menchú’s book was not something individ­ ual. It did not tell her life story. Rather, it is a historical or political truth transformed into a personal life story. The truth of testimonio is not the truth most readers might expect, because they read testimonio as a kind of Western autobiography and believe the details of the story to be proven facts. Testimonio should be seen as a political and literary project of the left. It had two main goals. First, it sought to give a literary voice to the people without voice and history. The poor of Latin America could only have a place in the public sphere if they produced written records. Most of the poor were not able to do that. That is why leftwing journalists, anthropologists, sociologists and others provided a helping hand to produce such documents. It was crucial that the poor would articulate their own vision, i.  e. that they spoke for themselves. Testimonio is not some sort of academic oral history. It does not conduct research to arrive at a refined understanding of reality. Testimonio is not in search of truth – rather, it expresses a truth already known. Testi­ monio does not construct a memoir or an interpretation of oppression and resistance. It is a weapon to fight against oppression and exploitation. The narrators all form part of the left. They tell their stories in a heart-breaking way so as to win over the public to their cause, and they use traditional forms of autobiographical writing. However, testimonio is not an autobiography, because its essence is not the individual life but the political realm. Testimonio has many roots. The eighteenth and nineteenth century slave narra­ tive fostered abolition in a similar way, testimonio promoted revolutionary projects of the Latin American left. It is possible that the Cuban Miguel Barnet knew the Slave Narrative Collection of the U. S. Works Progress Administration (1936–1938). However,

672 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

similarity does not prove concrete influence. It is most likely that the most important stimulus for testimonio was the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban guerrilla diary of Che Guevara published in 1963 was an immediate success (Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria [Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War]). It is a first-person account that in a way very similar to testimonio understands the narrator as a voice and a personification of a group (in Guevara’s case, the revolutionary movement). Equally important might have been new pathways in journalism and scholarly research inter­ ested in the daily life of the poor. In 1960, Carolina Maria de Jesus published Quarto de despejo. Diário de uma favelada [Child of the Dark. The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus], a description of her life in a Brazilian shantytown. It was an immediate success and some scholars see it as the beginning of testimonio in Latin America. However, Carolina Maria de Jesus did not criticize capitalism or the political order; rather, she saw alcoholism and lack of discipline among the poor as the main reason for their sufferings. Quarto de despejo had in common with later testimonios that a journalist helped to publish the text under Carolina Maria de Jesus’ name. In a more academic way, in 1961 the U. S. anthropologist Oscar Lewis published The Children of Sanchez. Autobiography of a Mexican Family. It describes the poor in Mexico City based on interviews with a small number of persons. Finally, testimonio forms part of the New Novel. Barnet, as mentioned, repeatedly spoke about the “novela-testimo­ nio,” describing testimonio as “socio-literatura” (Barnet 1979). Testimonio might be seen as another ‘boom’ in Latin American literature parallel to the the great upturn in interest in the Latin American novel within the European and U. S. market in the 1960s and 70s. It invented new forms of literature and was much more committed to political engagement than the novel. The end of testimonio came in the 1990s, by the time the revolutionary project of the left had then lost much of its impetus. When the military retired to the bar­ racks and political elections were held, it became much more difficult to distinguish between the good guys and the bad. At the same time, old ideas of heroes came under attack. The hero of the testimonio became a strange person because he was unbeliev­ ably pure and without sin. Scholars asked whether the subaltern can speak at all in a world that has no language for them. (Spivak 1988). Today old-style testimonio does not have much importance. However, new styles of first-person narratives interested in debating oppression and resistance have emerged. Some of them discuss problems and perspectives of testimonial literature, especially the relation between the intellec­ tual writer and the narrator who represents the poor (Reuque Paillalef 2002). Others follow the form of testimonio in a stricter sense but do not espouse the same politi­ cal position. They adopt a much more moderate stance, criticizing the radicalism of the past (Gavilán Sánchez 2012). Testimonio in a broader sense will always survive. However, testimonio as a clearly distinguishable literary genre in the strict sense only existed in Latin America from the second half of the 1960s up until the 1990s.

3.29 Testimony/Testimonio 

 673

Works Cited Barnet, Miguel. Biografía de un cimarrón. Habana: Instituto de Etnología y Folklore, 1966 [The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. Trans. Jocasta Innes. London/Sydney: Bodley Head, 1966]. Barnet, Miguel. “La novela testimonio: socio-literatura.” La canción de Rachel. Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 2nd ed. 1979. Barrios Chungara, Domitila. Si me permiten hablar. Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia. Mexico-City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1978 [Let me speak! Testimony of Domitila, a woman of the Bolivian mines. New York: Monthly Review Press 1978]. Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio.” The Real Thing. Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Ed. Georg M. Gugelberger. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996. 23–41. Cabezas, Omar. La monaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde. Mexico-City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982 [Fire from the Mountain. The Making of a Sandinista. Trans. Kathleen Weaver. New York: Crown, 1985]. Gavilán Sánchez, Lurgio. Memorias de un soldado desconocido. Autobiografía y antropología de la violencia. Lima/Mexico-City: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Universidad Iberoamericana, 2012 [When Rains Became Floods. A Child Soldier’s Story. Trans. Margaret Randall. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 2015]. Guevara, Ernesto Che. Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria. La Habana: Ed. Unión, 1963 [Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. London: Allen and Unwin, 1969]. Jesus, Carolina Maria de. Quarto de despejo. Diário de uma favelada. São Paulo: Livraria F. Alves, 1960 [Child of the Dark. The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Trans. David St. Clair. New York: Dutton, 1962]. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Lewis, Oscar. The Children of Sánchez. Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Random House, 1961. Menchú, Rigoberta. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. Ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Barcelona: Argos-Vergara, 1983 [I, Rogoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1984]. Poniatowska, Elena. La noche de Tlatelolco. Testimonios de historia oral. Mexico-City: Ediciones Era, 1971 [Massacre in Mexico. New York: Viking Press, 1975]. Reuque Paillalef and Rosa Isolde. When a Flower is Reborn. The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist. Ed. Florencia E. Mallon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Spivak, Gayatari Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988. 271–313. Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans. Boulder/Oxford: Westview Press, 1999. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” The Real Thing. Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Ed. Georg M. Gugelberger. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996. 42–57.

Further Reading Arias, Arturo, ed. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Bartow, Joanna R. “Testimonial Literature.” Latin American Women Writers. An Encyclopedia. Ed. María Claudia André and Eva Paulino Bueno. New York/London: Routledge, 2008. 504–509. Beverley, John. “Introduction.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 18.36 (1992): 7–19.

674 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

Beverley, John. Testimonio. On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Gugelberger, Georg M., ed. The Real Thing. Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 1996. Hart, Stephen M. A Companion to Latin American Literature. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2nd ed. 2007. Jara, René, and Hernán Vidal, eds. Testimonio y literatura. Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986. Nance, Kimberley A. Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006. Oviedo, José Miguel. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Vol. IX: De Borges al presente. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2005. Randall, Margaret. “¿Que es, y como se hace un testimonio?” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latino­ americana 18.36 (1992): 23–47. Sklodowska, Elzbieta. “In the Web of Reality. Latin American Testimonio.” Literary Cultures of Latin America. A Comparative History. Vol. II. Ed. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 197–208. Sklodowska, Elzbieta. “Testimonio.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures. Ed. Daniel Balderston, Mike Gonzalez and Ana M. López. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. 1462–1463.

3.30 Travelogue Michaela Holdenried

Definition Travel literature is a collective term for representations of actual or fictional travels. On a more factual level ‘travelogue’ refers to guidebooks with useful information for travellers, pilgrimage guides, travel descriptions and scholarly accounts (expeditions) in the form of diaries, log book entries, sketches or proper scientific proceedings. Lit­ erary travel accounts, travel stories and novels are also part of travel literature. Both actual and ficticious travel accounts are literary renderings. Although there is no pure travel account ‘per se’ – even the factual travel accounts of antiquity, περίπλοι (periploi) and περιήγησης (periegeses), fantastically embroider their scientific informa­ tion –, hybrid extensions into the literary realm are common. Epic forms like adven­ ture novels, ‘Bildungsromane’ [‘novels of education’], autobiographies are related genres. For a long time, travel literature was seen as a functional form rather than a liter­ ary genre. Often observed, literary criticism regarded the fictional aspect as violating the form, mirroring the traditional reproach of invention which has always accom­ panied travel accounts. Analogous to autobiography, functionality is no longer stip­ ulated and it is therefore reasonable to let go of Peter Brenner’s (1989) limitation of ‘travel accounts’ to their documentary function in favour of the wider frame of ‘travel literature’.

Explication The earliest travel accounts are geographical descriptions of the antique world. They are undertaken in the form of ‘periploi’ or ‘periegeses’, with specific emphasis on cul­ tural sites, to describe places and countries of the known world as comprehensively as possible. Most of these works have survived as fragments only. The oldest surviv­ ing complete work in Latin that has survived is Pomponius Mela’s chorography from the year 44 CE. Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 800 BCE), seeding among others the origin of the adventurous travel novel, is one of Mela’s sources. The fantastical element is an important part of representing reality in respect of geography, fauna and flora in these descriptions of the world. Explorers and seafarers used the known descriptions of the world in their orientation and adopted these traditional elements of a fauna of the fan­ tastical. Christopher Columbus, for instance, believed to have seen mermaids in the sea. Such memorabilia had always been part of perceiving the world. The travel stories https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-086

676 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

of Marco Polo were thought to be memorable rather on account of their exaggera­ tions and downright lies. Highly fictionalized make-believe novels of the eighteenth century, such as the fantasy adventures of Baron Münchhausen – the cannonball on which he travels propelling the narrative –, continue this tradition of the memorable in its fantastical exaggeration. Pilgrimages are the oldest form of group tours. Pilgrimage guides helped with ori­ entating the pilgrim, informing about routes, overnight accommodation, pilgrimage sites and particular indulgence. They have been widely distributed since the twelfth century. Pilgrimages aside, to travel meant to educate oneself. The sixteenth century saw the emergence of travel advice literature serving the scholarly study tour. Late medieval travel oriented texts, from pilgrim guides and itineraries to literary travel accounts are still following the prescripts of being unaffected by emotions, as it was mandatory for historiographical genres since antiquity. Not the self (and her/his enjoyment while travelling) was to be central but the religious or educational aim. Violation of the genre conventions, which have to do with the competing paradigms of emotional neutrality on the one hand and documenting one’s own accomplishment on the other, can be observed. Auch die meist in den Reiseberichten gewählte Ich-Form darf nicht dazu verleiten, in ihnen eine humanistische Ich-Orientiertheit des Autors zu suchen. Über ihn und sein persönliches Erleben erfahren wir aus diesen Texten sehr wenig, da er im Grunde nur dort auftritt, wo es darum geht, als Augenzeuge das […] Schöpfungswunder Gottes zu bestätigen. Insgesamt gesehen ist der spät­ mittelalterliche Reisebericht damit so zu bestimmen, dass nicht […] die Authentizität des Erleb­ ten und die individuelle Note in der Darstellung wichtig sind, sondern die Übereinstimmungen mit den in der jeweiligen Tradition vermittelten Sinngehalten [‘The first person accounts of most travelogues are by no means an indication for an author’s humanistic self-orientation. These texts tell little about a personal experience, because basically the author is only there as an eye-witness (…) to confirm the marvels of God’s creation. Authen­ ticity of the experience and the individual touch in the description are, by and large, not impor­ tant in the late medieval travelogue but the congruency with traditional expectations’] (Wiegand 1989, 107).

This only changes in the sixteenth century, not in pilgrim accounts but in humanistic travelogues. The eye-witness element is an indispensable part of the travelogue (eventually morphing into personal experience): to have seen with one’s own eyes what one writes about was stipulated for it. This attribute was important for the reception of the genre. The Travels of Jean de Mandeville (mid-fourteenth century) were received as authentic and represent one of the best known examples for the evasion of these pre­ scripts of objectivity. Marco Polo’s and Mandeville’s travelogues influenced the ideas about the Far East for a long time. Their exaggerations seemed to mirror the fairy­ tale-like character of the mysterious Middle Kingdom and were – even though their hypertrophy was recognized as such – for a long time read as ethnographically correct documents.

3.30 Travelogue 

 677

The beginning of the modern era and the discovery of the New World with its con­ comitant travelogues and letters of seafarers, explorers, missionaries and adventur­ ers produces ego-documents whose function is to authenticate fabulous eye-witness accounts. Amazement and horror expressed by Columbus and later by Hans Staden or Jean de Léry are less expressions of personal experience: Amazing facts are perceived within the horizon of existing cultural experiences, the religious dimension always being particularly important. Columbus’s logbook, for instance, compares the song of birds with the European nightingale, filtering and re-integrating perceptions of the foreign into the horizon of the known. In later years explorers like Alexander von Humboldt broke down this protective barrier and were able to describe the marvels of the South American fauna and flora in their immediate effect on the travelling subject (see his letter to his brother Wilhelm where he talks about the perception of the new affecting the senses [Humboldt 1993, 42] [English translation of Humboldt’s letter in Kutzinski et al. 2012, 239–241]). Not an ‘objective’ but a culturally comparative view can also be observed in the accounts of Staden and Léry, making them precursors of ethnographic travelogues. In the baroque era journeys are thematically and structurally part of the Spanish picaresque novel since the hero has to pass through various spatial stations. A sub-cul­ ture of mobile groups – beggars, jugglers, vagrants, camp followers – is introduced into literature. The type of the picaresque adventurer, already pre-figured in sixteenth century chapbooks (Fortunatus [1509], Till Eulenspiegel [1515]) finds its full expression in the baroque novel of Grimmelshausen (Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus [1668] [The Adventurous Simplicissismus]). The action in this kind of popular literature is of an exemplary nature and the inner experience of the protagonist is of no concern. In the wake of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) the baroque picaresque novel is succeeded by robinsonades. A new type of travelogue emerges in the eighteenth century, reflecting the indi­ vidual viewpoint and acknowledging it as an aspect of the narrative. The accounts of explorers are on the one hand becoming scientifically more exact and on the other hand reflecting, as Georg Forster does in Reise um die Welt (1777) [A Voyage round the World], that what he sees is coloured by the glass through which he looks. In this methodological reflection, the observer’s position, his cultural baggage, his personal horizon and his intentions factor. Forster’s and in particular Humboldt’s accounts can, as Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow maintains, be called philosophical travelogues: Schließlich aber ist es die philosophisch-enzyklopädische Reise, die zugleich den Gegenständen der Welt, den Objekten wie dem Subjekt dient […]. Dem Ich, das Objekt und Subjekt wie auch Medium des Erinnerns ist, gesellt sich die Welt als Objekt und Medium der Erfahrung zu. Sie ist der Gegenstand des Reiseberichtes. Dem erinnerten Ich der Autobiographie korrespondiert die erfahrene Welt der Reiseliteratur. Das Ich und die Welt erscheinen als komplementär [‘The philosophical-encyclopaedic journey addresses the objects of the world and the subject (…). The self which is object, subject and medium of remembrance and the world as object and medium of experience are now affiliated with each other’] (Wuthenow 1984, 24).

678 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

This convergence is based on various factors: the scientification of travelling (through, for instance, the provision of questionnaires [Moravia 1989]) enables a more exact representation of the world out there while new sciences focus on the inner world and how experiences are processed mentally (‘Erfahrungsseelenkunde’, i.  e. psychology). Facts and feelings are subject to observation and verification. Both are to serve an increase in our knowledge about humankind: “The proper study of Mankind is Man” (Pope 1950, 53). Travel literature of the romantic period further accentuates the subjec­ tive feeling. The experience itself in respect of mood and premonition becomes central in line with the experiences of nature by Rousseau and writers of ‘Empfindsamkeit’. The journey itself in all its factuality is increasingly marginalized and becomes an occasion for literary reflection instead of its object. In the nineteenth century travel and autobiography become more and more amalgamated. Pilgrimages were one of the few forms of travel open to women. For all others they had to legitimize the necessity and purpose of any travel. One such legit­ imization was to enter areas closed to men, such as harems (Lady Montagu’s [1793] travel letters from Turkey). Ida Pfeiffer, a best-selling author of travel literature, in pro­ logues to her works advances among others her stage of life as a legitimate argument for her ‘wanderlust’. After having performed her womanly duties, she now assumed the right to enjoy this lust. Annegret Pelz characterized women’s travel literature as a “Raumerfahrung eines weiblichen Ich, das reist und zugleich selbst fremd und anders ist” [‘experience of space described by the female self being itself other and differ­ ent’] (Pelz 1993, 11). She uses the term ‘autogeographical writings’ for those autobio­ graphical forms of writing, which are grounded in a specifically ‘female’ experience of space. The great works of travel literature, like Goethe’s Italienische Reise (1816/1817) [Italian Journey] served many women authors as orientation, failing them, however, on account of the different modalities and limitations of travelling as women, just as the women autobiographers failed the classical examples of autobiographical outline of self. Maria Sibylla Merian represents a particular telling example within explora­ tion literature for the achievement of women who can do without an involved auto­ biographical commentary. It remains to be studied though how far an autobiograph­ ical subtext is present in the apparently neutral commentaries and descriptions. At the end of the nineteenth century, researchers like Cäcilie Seler-Sachs enter the male domains as assistants of their husbands (partially) reflecting this autobiographically. Seler-Sachs’ travelogue contains two tendencies, the first of which was important for the women’s movement: the demand for educational equality. Until the end of the nineteenth, beginning of twentieth century, women were not admitted to universities to study for a degree. With a few exceptions, scientific expeditions also were closed to women. Both these elements are reflected in Seler-Sachs’ travelogues and cultur­ al-theoretical writings. After the turn of the century, impressionistic and neo-romantic types of travel literature emerge. The Indienfahrt (1916) [An Indian Journey] of Waldemar Bonsels

3.30 Travelogue 

 679

belongs to both types. Impressionistic atmosphere and colourfulness, vitalistic and proto-religious aspects characterize this work, according to Wolfgang Reif, as the most successful travelogue in German literature (Reif 1989, 443). Self-discovery is an essen­ tial motivating force for the journey along the coast of Malabar and for the encoun­ ter with the Indian human; erotic and aesthetic experiences being in the foreground. In this type of autobiographical impulse for the journey – the search for originality and closeness to nature – go hand in hand with a highly fictionalized and poeticised account, including dreams. The escapist search for a paradise beyond Western civili­ zation is prefigured in works like Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa (1897). This is early ‘dropout’ literature with an autobiographical motive. Forced journeys, especially to North and South America, from the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of mass poverty, generated autobiographical texts which have not been researched extensively. Research focuses to a greater extent on twenti­ eth century forced journeys into exile. Stefan Zweig and B. Traven are describing their new environments with an autobiographical slant. Zweig’s Brasilien. Ein Land der Zukunft (1941) [Brazil. Land of the Future] is a remarkable example how wishfulness and reality are amalgamated. Zweig focuses on the beauty and the future viability of his host country and the fact of exile is almost completely omitted. New media, especially new means of transportation, fundamentally change trav­ elling at the beginning of the twentieth century: railway, car and ocean liner shorten travel times. Travelling speeds increase and quickly cabled travelling reports are the result of modern technologies, such as used by Egon Erwin Kisch, the ‘raging reporter’ (Paradies Amerika [‘Paradise America’] [1930]). The slow type on the other hand is the flâneur. Both forms, the (politically accentuated) choice of topics (abattoirs, prisons), strolling around cities and the specific perception of the city, point towards the autobiographic positioning of the writing self. Journeys to experience the inner self increased in the twentieth century instead describing the outward facts of foreign countries and landscapes or even the inability to experience anything at all. After 1945 travel literature includes essayistic-reflexive travel accounts, experimen­ tal-autobiographical forms (e.  g. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Rom, Blicke [‘Rome, Glances’] [1979]) and hybrid forms. These extend the borders to ethnology, for instance, in the ethno-poetical novel (Hubert Fichte, Michael Roes) describing the travelling subject both as researcher and introspective explorer. There are also philosophical extensions probing the limits and possibilities of modern travel (Alain de Botton). Some classi­ cal forms such as pilgrimage accounts experience a renaissance within the context of contemplating the possibilities of at least temporarily dropping out from society or of a fundamental change of life style. The development of travel literature was to some degree always connected with autobiographical writing. Historiographical writing required emotional neutrality, but the subjective element could never be elim­ inated completely, even if only commenting on foreign customs. The modern trend is to move away from the functional character toward hybrid literary forms receptive to new things.

680 

 3 Autobiographical Forms and Genres

The convergence of travel literature with autobiography, as hinted at in the his­ torical section, can be seen as genre specific. Actual witnessing and the validation of a report through the principle of personal inspection, and eye-witnessing, are important elements of the genre from the beginning. Vouching for the authenticity of the experience and the autobiographical claim of truthfulness are analogous to both genres. Transforming information into poeticity is characteristic for both genres. From the eighteenth century onward, the non-fictional genres autobiography and travelogue are influenced by a new autonomous aesthetic of subjectively oriented composition. The aesthetic of genius replaces the prescripts of an aesthetic of genres. All other originally non-literary or functional forms, predominantly autobiogra­ phy, have always had their share of historical fiction as a more or less evident aspect of the genre. Only recently, however, research in travel literature has begun to re-evalu­ ate the genre specific reproach of invention and to neutralize Marco Polo’s and Jean de Mandeville’s fantastical exaggerations and to make them accessible to an objectified investigation. It would be sensible to replace the term ‘travelogue’, still connected to the func­ tional definition of travel account, with the wider concept of ‘travel literature’, provid­ ing room for real and fictional travels. A more flexible umbrella term would allow for ‘softer’ categorizations, should the delineation of genres in general still be desirable. Real historical developments of genres, clearly following the fictionalizing trend, need then no longer be negated. Sharp divisions between authentic and fictional can be replaced by gradations between literary travel descriptions and travel novels/stories. For a more refined definition beyond the relevant genre categories, other equivalent aspects could be added. Recent studies add contemplation of aspects of the other, the foreign, modes of representation of alterity, references to cultural dominances and hierarchies of contact zones (Mary Louise Pratt) and the basic question of representa­ tion of foreign ways of life and cultural modes in general. Travel literature and autobiography share similar problems of representation which are getting more difficult, congruent to the increase in anthropological, eth­ nological and psychological knowledge. Episteme, as defined by Foucault, governing as strategic apparatus the possibility of knowledge generally, is at the same time that which makes a distinction of true or false increasingly difficult. Modern travel writers parry the loss of original experience of the foreign – by now a traditional motive in travel literature (from Claude Lévi-Strauss to the modern ethnographical novels of Thomas Stangl or Michael Roes) –, with strategies of intertextuality (tracing the jour­ neys of others), metatextuality (contemplating the crisis of representation) and the playful deconstruction of the ‘law of genre’: “Fast alle Autoren ziehen die inhaltli­ chen und formalen Konsequenzen aus dem […] Paradigmenwechsel und der Krise der Repräsentation” [‘Almost all authors are drawing the consequences from the (…) paradigm shift and the crisis of representation’] (Biernat 2004, 144). Both genres are using postmodern narrative strategies, detached from prescripts of genre, to be able

3.30 Travelogue 

 681

to hold on to a concept of experience which stays connected to the movement in space and the innerness of the exploration of self. Translation: Walter Köppe

Works Cited Biernat, Ulla. “Ich bin nicht der erste Fremde hier”. Zur deutschsprachigen Reiseliteratur nach 1945. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. Brenner, Peter J., ed. Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1989. Humboldt, Alexander von. Briefe aus Amerika 1799–1804. Ed. Ulrike Moheit. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1995. Kutzinski, Vera M., Ottmar Ette, and Laura Dassow Walls, eds. Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas. Berlin: Walter Frey, 2012. Montagu, Mary Wortley. Letters Of the Right Honourable Lady M-y W-y M-e: Written during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, etc. in different Parts of Europe: Which Contain, Among other Curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks; Drawn from Sources that have been inaccessible to other Travellers. Berlin: Mylius, 1799. Moravia, Sergio. Beobachtende Vernunft. Philosophie und Anthropologie in der Aufklärung. Frankfurt a.  M.: Ullstein, 1989. Pelz, Annegret. Reisen durch die eigene Fremde. Reiseliteratur von Frauen als autogeographische Schriften. Köln: Böhlau, 1993. Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man. Ed. Maynard Mack. London: Methuen & Co., 1950. Reif, Wolfgang. “Exotismus im Reisebericht des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts.” Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur. Ed. Peter J. Brenner. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1989. 434–462. Wiegand, Hermann. “Hodoeporica. Zur neulateinischen Reisedichtung des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts.” Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur. Ed. Peter J. Brenner. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1989. 117–139. Wuthenow, Ralph-Rainer. “Vom Geiste der Entdeckungen. Reisebericht und -tagebuch in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Das Bild und der Spiegel. Europäische Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. München: Hanser, 1984. 9–25.

Further Reading de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2012. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard 1966 [The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Ed. Robert D. Laing. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970]. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. A World on the Wane. Trans. John Russell. New York: Criterion Books, 1961. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

Introduction: Autobiography Across the World, Or, How Not To Be Eurocentric Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

Whereas the first volume of this handbook follows an alphabetical order and can be used as a sort of dictionary, the second volume intends to present the history of autobiography/autofiction. ‘The’ history? What history? It goes without saying that literary history has become problematic. Since the poststructural critic François Lyotard proclaimed the end of grand narratives or meta-narratives (Lyotard 1979, 63 [1984, 34, 37]), there have been numerous efforts to deconstruct historiography as a metaphysical, totalitarian and power-driven enterprise which colludes with colonialism and Eurocentrism (e.  g. Spivak 1987; Buschmeier et al. 2014). Especially the chronological structure of historiography as it was developed and practiced up until the nineteenth century, with its idea that history follows a progressive timeline, has come under suspicion. Furthermore, the legitimacy of the historiographical genre is under debate ever since critical scholars have raised the questions of who are the agents of history and historiography and who are the victims or the subjects whose voices are not being heard, in history as well as in historiography. Naturally, these critical considerations have affected literary history as well. The compliant idea that literature can be thought of as a process of continuous historical development has been unmasked as a discursive construction. And especially the notions of the epochs being used in literary history to structure the historical process of literary development have been recognized as constructions that reflect historically invested points of view or merely disciplinary conventions. Various alternative models have been suggested: writing the literary histories of particular groups, for instance women, migrants, working class authors (e.  g. Goodridge and Keegan 2017), differentiated histories so to speak, or foregrounding individual authors and texts, or specific dates as exemplary (Marcus 2009). However, all these efforts to modify the notion of chronology implicitly retain the chronological model in one way or another. The same, of course, holds true for histories of autobiography (e.  g. Smyth 2016). Georg Misch, the famous first historian of the genre, from whose work autobiography research still profits today, in the end failed to finish his project (Misch 1949–1969), as he was overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of the historical material and his ambition to represent it in its completeness. Fully aware of these epistemological problems and the acknowledged impossibility of presenting ‘the history of autobiography’, this handbook nevertheless undertakes such an effort once again. Users of a handbook on autobiography/autofiction clearly do not only look for approaches, concepts and genre definitions, but also refer to the handbook for historical information. And, yes, they certainly look for historical information in a contextualized manner – i.  e. in the form of historical narrative. Yet, this handbook does not have to present only the autobiographical production of a single country, language group (as e.  g. Simonet-Tenant 2017), or continent, but https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-087

684 

 Introduction

its general outline suggests that we consider autobiography/autofiction on a worldwide, global scale. Definitely, this is as impossible as it is megalomaniacal. In any case, the handbook has accepted the challenge to do the impossible. But in what way should the phenomena be sorted? Should the chapters be arranged historically or geographically? For pragmatic reasons, and with critical reservations, the decision has been taken to use the historical narrative as, indeed, a specific culturally dependent narrative. Yet, having accepted chronological temporality, it seemed unfeasible to narrate one single holistic story of the world’s autobiographical production. Not only pragmatic reasons hold sway against this option – who would be able to write about a certain time in history with expertise across languages and cultures? – but so too do mainly epistemological motifs. The heterogeneity of cultures, writing traditions, and concepts of time and history speak vehemently against the idea of a single and monolithic grand narrative. Therefore, the somewhat unoriginal option has been taken to arrange the material according to continents, which is itself, admittedly, a fairly crude form of classification. But where to start? In Africa or in Asia? For a literary scholar trained in Germany this would be very unfamiliar and somehow odd. This unfamiliar idea, however, hints at a fundamental epistemological problem that deeply affects our scholarly worldviews. It should be kept in mind that although scientific research promotes the ideals of objectivity and neutrality, its notions, categories, and terminology are deeply culturally rooted and biased. Autobiography research as it developed in Western academia has dealt again and again with the same master texts: St. Augustine’s Confessiones (ca. 399) [Confessions], Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782/1789), or Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth] have been interpreted as prototypes of the autobiographical genre by many scholars. In turn, the notion of autobiography has been conceptualized with reference to these and other prominent examples. Even if nowadays a variety of non-exemplary autobiographical texts have found scholarly attention, the notion of autobiography has been shaped predominantly with respect to texts of the established Western tradition. Here, certainly the notion of ‘life writing’ is much more permissive and innocuous than the genre specific term ‘autobiography’. The question arises whether ‘autobiography’ is at all a Western category. Certainly, the concept has been exported to other cultural regions of the world where it has been adapted to non-Western texts. Is autobiography even a colonial concept? And one might ask whether it would not be better to abstain from scholarly or scientific categories that carry with them their own cultural premises and ideologies and instead look at the texts as texts and not as genre paradigms. And furthermore: Is it politically correct to read and interpret texts from, for example, South-East Asia or Africa as ‘autobiographies’ – with a Western notion of ‘autobiography’ in mind? On the other hand, scientific research needs categories and concepts to perceive, to differentiate, and to communicate knowledge. And besides, writers from all over the world produce life narratives and very often in critical exchange with traditional Western models. In the globalized and medially interconnected world, cultural forms

Autobiography Across the World, Or, How Not To Be Eurocentric 

 685

and patterns migrate around the globe and are continually being adapted and transformed. Obviously, they should not be considered as the exclusive heritage of a specific cultural area. This, however, does not mean that we should disregard the geographical and historical contexts of cultural traditions. We have to take into account that cultural exchange is not an achievement of modernity, but has always taken place in various and context-specific forms. Just as Wolfgang Welsch has defined ‘transculturality’ as a network of differentiation and identification (Welsch 1999), the autobiographical genre should as well be conceived of as a multifaceted and flexible paradigm that can be adapted in more than one way. Yet, it must be clear that a text a Western reader or scholar may automatically address as ‘autobiography’ is not necessarily conceived as ‘autobiography’ in other cultural contexts. The relation between ‘terms’ and ‘things’ has always been a major epistemological problem which is not only pertinent in the field of autobiography studies. Even if people use the same word they may have different objects in mind – which not only hinders but also stimulates communication. However complex the situation in this context is, it should be mentioned that the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) was founded in 1999 in Beijing on the initiative of a Chinese scholar, Zhao Baisheng, who, strikingly enough, is Professor of Comparative World Literature. The handbook embarks on its historiographical journey of autobiographical writing in Europe, for it is that part of the world that has brought forth both autobiographical master narratives which are globally referred to and prominent theoretical reflection on the autobiographical genre by the likes of Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Misch, Roy Pascal, Georges Gusdorf, or Philippe Lejeune. For pragmatic reasons, but also because it reflects the academic discourse on autobiography as well as literary history in general, it retains the conventional epochal structure, as unsatisfying as this may be. However, the epoch-based disposition enables the user of the handbook feasible orientation. Due to the specialized expertise of the chapters’ individual authors, unfortunately not all European languages could be considered. Whoever looks for country-specific information may be advised to consult Margaretta Jolly’s comprehensive Encyclopedia of Life Writing (2001) that provides entries to almost every country in Europe and beyond – though they are often short and do not yield more results than a list of names for the most part. The approach of this handbook is not nation-oriented, but takes into account wider geographical and cultural regions. However, immediately another problem occurs: the problem of defining the limits of historical epochs. As is generally known, notions of historical epochs vary not only between disciplines but also within disciplines due to the distinct conceptions of individual scholars. Therefore, the designations of epochs used in this handbook merely supply rough terms for the user’s orientation. This explains why users of the handbook will meet overlaps between chapters, for instance between ‘Modernity’ and ‘Postmodernity’. This, however, is not to be deplored, as notions of epochs are constructions – constructions that may be built differently. And it is possible that one and the same autobiographical text can be read as a modern or as a postmodern text – with good reasons for both options.

686 

 Introduction

Perhaps the reader would have expected that the handbook, after striding across Europe, would continue its journey through the world of autobiographical writing by heading for the Americas as historical descendants of Europe’s colonial and imperialist search for expansion. Such a conceptual itinerary, however, would not have been appropriate for two reasons: Firstly, by exporting its Eurocentric perspective there would have been the risk of overlooking the American native cultures by perceiving them in the line of European genre history. And, secondly, there have been much older historical influences – influences on Europe’s intellectual world from the Arab world. These influences reach back to antiquity and, as Europeans have termed it, ‘the Middle Ages’. Because of the long-standing cultural and intellectual relations between what was to become Europe and the Arab world, the second chapter of this geo-historical overview turns south-eastwards in order to discover the richness of autobiographical production in the Arabic language. And from there, the handbook travels on further into the African continent. As Northern Africa is included in the section on autobiography in the Arab world, the ‘Africa’ section of this handbook deals with Africa south of the Sahara only. For a long time, Africa has not been considered as an area of significant autobiographical production by Western scholars. Only with the advent of structural and poststructural, especially postcolonial, approaches that have led to an awareness of autobiography as culturally constructed and the hybridity of genre boundaries, has the African continent found critical attention by life writing research. James Olney, in the 1970s, regarded personal contact as the best means of learning about other cultures; however, he viewed autobiography as a sort of substitute as it “offers a way of getting inside a world that is inevitably very different from [the non-African reader’s] own in its assumptions and values, in its attitudes and beliefs, in its practices and observances” (Olney 1974, 7). This statement, indeed, demonstrates clearly the ways in which insight and the construction of difference are closely intertwined. As the division of the chapter into sections dealing with Precolonial Times, Colonial Times, Postcolonial Times reflects pragmatically, autobiographical writing in Africa is seen as deeply affected by the overall historical political development of and on the continent. Thus, autobiography in Africa, especially in Postcolonial Times, mirrors its critical entanglement with the so-called ‘Western tradition’ and an increased awareness of African political self-identity. The next stops on the handbook’s travel route are made in India, South East Asia, Indonesia, China and Japan as diversified scenes of autobiographical writing in Asia. As regards the South East Asian sub-continent, the handbook has to confine itself to one exemplary country: to Laos, where autobiography is deeply intertwined with the trajectory of nation-state building and political tensions marked by ideologies, revolutions, and wars. Again, it is important to note that it is by no means the intention of the handbook to narrate unified stories of the autobiographical traditions in individual countries. Multiplicity of languages, manifold intercultural relations and traditions, differing self-conceptions and interconnections between the individual and the com-

Autobiography Across the World, Or, How Not To Be Eurocentric 

 687

munity have provided challenges for the historiographers who, on the one hand, are academic experts for the region they write about and, on the other hand, significantly enough, have been trained by Western academia. Travelling further South-East, the historian of the autobiographical genre arrives in Australia and then in New Zealand. Here, the overlapping of indigenous cultures, European colonialism, nation-building, and postcolonial reflection again form political and cultural areas of conflict up to this day. And once more, one has to keep in mind that the Western notion of autobiography as a written form of self-expression foregrounding the individual cannot automatically be applied to South Pacific native cultures. Moreover, as an effect of the colonial situation, the autobiographical genre frequently mingles with other forms of writing – which makes it all the more pertinent for this handbook. Finally, the handbook on its eastward journey reaches the Americas where it also meets critical Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial constellations. Whereas Latin America, indeed, has a long and rich tradition of autobiographical writing which has not been extensively studied by scholars, the situation in North America is different. Especially in the United States, life writing is a lively and highly refined field of research (e.  g. Olney 1972, 1980, 1999; Smith and Watson 1996, 1998, 2001, 2017). American research on autobiography was the first to look at life writing by minorities and it has highlighted many momentous aspects of the genre as life writing. Thus, numerous critical impulses as well as autobiographical texts have come across the Atlantic and enriched the European scene of life writing and its scholarship. And, in the last chapter of this volume, the handbook looks at autobiographies in the globalized world, that is to say, autobiographical manifestations of lives which were lived and written – transversally – in different parts of the world. It should have become clear that it is profoundly worthwhile and productive to travel in different directions around the globe, studying influences and differences, comparing and finding new routes in the rich and still widely undiscovered field of autobiographical writing. As the academic world moves closer together, worldwide collaboration in the field of Autobiography Studies promises to find novel and intriguing topics, aspects, and approaches for further fruitful study.

Works Cited Buschmeier, Matthias, Walter Erhart, and Kai Kauffmann, eds. Literaturgeschichte. Theorien – Modelle – Praktiken. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. Goodridge, John, and Bridget Keegan, eds. A History of British Working Class Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Jolly, Margaretta, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn/Routledge, 2001. Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le Savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979 [The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984].

688 

 Introduction

Marcus, Greil, ed. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. 4 vols. Bern/Frankfurt a.  M.: Francke/SchulteBulmke, 1949–1969 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Part 1. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1998]. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self. The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Olney, James. Tell me Africa. An Approach to African Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Olney, James. Memory and Narrative. The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Simonet-Tenant, Françoise, ed. Dictionnaire de l’Autobiographie. Écritures de soi de langue française. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2017. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Getting a Life. Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory. A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run. A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2001. https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/m/maize/mpub9739969 (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9739969) (3 July 2018). Smyth, Adam, ed. A History of English Autobiography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies. Deconstructing Historiography.” In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics. New York/London: Methuen, 1987. 197–221. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture. City, Nation, World. Ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London/New Delhi: Sage, 1999. 194–213.

1 The European Tradition

1.1 Antiquity Melanie Möller

There is no unitary generic term for autobiographical texts in the ancient world. Thus, we look at a variety of different kinds of poetic and prosaic texts which are used for self-portrayal (lyric, elegy, satire; philosophical treatises, letters, speeches, solace, denomination and conversion literature). Memoirs in the sense of Ὑπομνήματα (notes), ‘vitae’, ‘commentarii’ and ‘res gestae’ (account of actions) are conceptually close to the term ‘autobiography’. In the case of ancient texts, it makes good sense to hold on to the term ‘autobiography’ instead of switching to seemingly less suspicious phrases such as ‘ego-texts’, ‘documents of the ego’ or the like. ‘Autobiography’ is where someone writes about his or her life, while considering the relationship between an ‘I’ and the world and revealing a knowledge of the distance between text and author created in the act of writing. Hence, in the following literary-historical account, all antique texts shall be mentioned to which these conditions apply. In addition, central works of Greek and Latin literature will be examined with regard to whether they show the ability for a critical analysis of one’s own life (or someone else’s), independent of whether this takes place from the author’s perspective or on the diegetic level. Usually – for heuristic reasons – traditional genre classifications are applied here and the chronology provides a loose orientation. The division into poetry and prose constitutes the basic structure, since this dichotomy mirrors, as it were, the natural development of ancient literary language from poetry to prose.

Poetic Ego-reflections and Self-representations Epic and Tragedy For a long time, the opinion prevailed that the Homeric heroes represented a quasi-archaic type of human being who was not yet capable of self-awareness and reflection (e.  g. Dodds 1951). In line with an established historical-philosophical tradition, Bruno Snell, too, in Die Entdeckung des Geistes (1946) [The Discovery of the mind (1983)], attributes to the Greek an essential inability for holistic self-conception that he at the same time considers an inalienable prerequisite for self-reflexive thinking and self-determined behavior. The examination of modern psychological and sociological theories has gradually established the insight, even in the field of classics, that there has just as little been a visible changeover from a disparate and ‘un-free’ ancient (and medieval) human being to an enlightened modern subject capable of perceiving one’s own identity as there has been a spontaneously awakening conception of individualhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-088

692 

 1 The European Tradition

ity (Burckhardt 2013 [1936]). In the wake of the postmodern critique of the unity of the self, moreover, Homer’s mythical characters also became interesting for their autobiographical dimension precisely because of their fragmented character. The complexity of the self-images developed in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were primarily pointed out by Arbogast Schmitt (Schmitt 1990). Schmitt investigated the possibilities inherent in the depicted characters to distinguish and choose between rational and irrational options and to reflect upon the resulting consequences for one’s own βίος (bíos, life). Schmitt’s study shows that the ideal of a (lasting) unity of the person is not a prerequisite for such personal reflection. Odysseus is probably the epic character with the most complex self-conception. His wanderings (Hom. Od. 9–12), which can be interpreted as travels within the self (which initially fail to achieve their goal), have served as a rich source of inspiration for later autobiographers. Homer equips his hero with surprisingly many traits of autobiographical awareness: When Odysseus tells his hosts, the Phaiakians, about his adventures of the past years since his departure from Troy, he is providing an autobiography in nuce. In a retrospective mode he weighs an important part of his life in the balance and elaborates on it (esp. Hom. Od. 9, 218–230; 10, 496–498; 11, 207–208; Rösler 2005). As a result of this emotionally conducted and rationally established ‘self-catharsis’, Odysseus restores his old identity, which he was in danger of losing during his wanderings. In the context of Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1981) and Levinas’ (1967) subject-critical analyses, the Odyssey is an allegory of the search for one’s identity. The Odysseus depicted in Attic tragedy is even more multifaceted than the Odysseus of epic: In Sophocles’ Αἴας [Aias] and Φιλοκτήτης [Philoktetes] and in Euripides’ Ἑκάβη [Hekabe] and Κύκλωψ [Kyklops], Odysseus appears as a fragmented self which repeatedly loses sight of its center and also fools its surroundings with its changeability. Therefore, neither he himself nor anyone else can succeed in grasping an ‘authentic’ Odysseus (see even his “choice of soul” in Hom. Od. 20, 17–18; Cic. Tusc. 2, 43–50, Sen. epist. 31, 2sq.). Similarly subtle are the tragic and epic configurations of Medea. Medea induces a radical disruption of her established way of life by fleeing with Jason. Medea’s social identity is intimately connected with her linguistic identity: In the namesake tragedies of Euripides and Seneca, Medea consists, as it were, in her power of speech. After Jason’s broken promise, she survives even the moment of the radical loss of all her worldly goods, which had made up her identity, through her speech (Sen. Med. 166). It is especially this magniloquent Medea who has been adapted in postmodern pieces: Christa Wolf (Medea. Stimmen [1996]) made her words develop into mere sounds and voices with an effect confined to the immediate moment, and in Heiner Müller’s Medeamaterial (1982) the eponymous heroine gains regulatory power over her own history by recounting it in the form of a furious discourse. Ovid’s Medea tragedy has admittedly not been preserved, but the subtle psychology of the protagonist in her tension between furor and self-reflection also becomes evident in the Metamorphoses. In met. 7, 10–71, Ovid shows Medea as a lover who gives an elaborate account of her

1.1 Antiquity 

 693

condition to herself and diagnoses her inner tensions meticulously. In the 12th letter of the Heroides, Medea once more completely dissolves into speech and writing: Here again she presents herself as a creature of her own history. Thereby, she conveys the impression that she wants to grant the reader exclusive insights into her mind. The myth of Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is highly relevant to the subject of ancient self-conceptions, too. Narcissus’ connection with the famous Delphic oracle is distinctive: Ovid offers an ironic version of the Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself!), for Narcissus shall only be able to become happy precisely when he does not recognize himself (Ov. met. 3, 348: “si se non noverit”). Here important points of contact with the mythical character of Oedipus emerge in his potential to understand his own life as a failed one. Narcissus surely shall not come to realize this. Besides the epistemic problem of the unreliability of (self-)awareness, a hermeneutic problem appears: N ­ arcissus seems to live in a speechless world, where he can realize himself no more than he can overstep its borders. So in the Fasti, too, Ovid lets him deplore, in a speech to himself, that he cannot at the same time be the one who observes and the one who is being observed (Ov. fast. 5, 226: “infelix, quod non alter et alter eras”). The coveted object of his lust edges itself into the recognitional situation just like a foreign object (Renger 2002). With his desire for himself, whose hopelessness lies within the insuperable distance from the self as subject to the self as object, Narcissus renders, almost en passant, proof for the obviousness of autofictional consciousness in the ancient world. For this reason alone the reception of the myth of Narcissus had a concrete influence on subsequent autobiography theory (see J. J. Rousseau’s ­Narcisse ou l’amant de lui-même [‘Narcissus or The Lover of Himself’] (1753) as well as the concept of ‘amour-propre’/‘amour de soi-même’ in the works of La ­Rochefoucauld and Marivaux). Self-interest advances here to the central problem of an integral ego-identity. It should only be pointed out that Narcissus has been broadly received in postmodern theory, especially in the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis. The phenomenon of ‘narcissism’ is virtually based on the understanding that the subject, in relation to the object, does not present an entirely unitary construction. The fragmented nature of the ego here becomes its circumventable requirement. While Sigmund Freud interprets the ‘ego’ as a prerequisite for the possibility of ‘narcissism’, Jacques Lacan declares the ego the result of narcissistic self-reflection (Most 2002, 129). Thus, from the very beginning, the ego which is constitutive of one’s own identity expresses mere fiction (Lacan 1973, 64).

Lyrical, Satirical, and Elegiac Self-images The early Greek lyricist Sappho (born around 630 BCE) reveals concise autobiographical awareness. Two sorts of ‘ego’-utterances can be discerned in her poems: Unspecific universal ones in the so-called ἐπιθαλάμιος (Epithalamiums, wedding songs: e.  g. Sappho 1954: frg. 107; 114–115; 121) and pointedly individual ones (Sappho 1954: frg. 3;

694 

 1 The European Tradition

5; 15b; 58; 98ab; 132; 150 and West’s edition of the new fragment: West 2005). Within this second category, Sappho gives some explicit autobiographical references to her brother and her daughter, which she connects to reflections about her emotional world and her actions, even with regard to her life as a whole. She repeatedly discusses the preservation of her reputation, which might be in danger due to different incidents, such as her banishment to Sicily or the ambivalent behavior of her brother. Sappho therefore plays with her perception by the public sphere and thereby proves that the outside perspective in early Greek lyrics constitutes a central performative criterion. The Roman lyricists explicitly situate themselves in Sappho’s tradition. In Catullus’ (first  century BCE) carmina we find a particularly complex self-conception. He subjects his poetry to the hermeneutic rules of auto-fiction: In poem no. 16 we learn that art and life are two conflicting variables. Accordingly, it is impossible to express oneself ‘authentically’ in arts. His whole opus is based on that programmatic condition, which is very often cited and varied in Roman literature, an opus where there is, however, often talk about his ‘ego’ or ‘Catullus’, his love life, his transformations, and self-fragmentations. Catullus wrote texts about inner conflicts and divisions (esp. poems 8, 76 or 85), in which he shows the reader a reflexive process of a distinctive turn to oneself that becomes more specific in different life designs. He confronts us with an ‘ego’ that moves between the poles of self-consciousness and dependence. Again and again, he adopts the outsider’s view of himself so as to re-identify his own conditions of being. The reflexive movement of self-consciousness takes place in a language which, already inside the poem, comes between the self and the world as a tool for creating a distance and which functions as an instrument of (self-)distancing. The concept of ‘persona’ (mask) has become an established framework for the interpretation of Roman lyric poetry in its different appearances. It derives from the world of drama and clarifies the vicariousness of literary communication: Authors use these kinds of ‘masks’ to distinguish themselves from the protagonists of their texts, to transform distinctive facets of their ego artistically and to keep the reader at a distance. The ‘persona’ is especially popular among the satirists, whose texts quite often also adopt autobiographical traits. Among the satires of M. Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) we can find titles relevant to the autobiography theme such as Bimarcus [‘Doubled Marcus’] and Sesculixes [‘One and a half Odysseus’]. As far as we can understand it, the author caricatures himself in both pieces by splitting his personality in various and at most loosely connected pieces – “a burlesque type of monologue”, which is sometimes interpreted as a model for later first-person-novels (Misch 1969, 222). The Augustan poet Horace (65–8 BCE) uses his satires as well as his poetic epistles to present occasional poetry as the result of different configurations of the self. By subtly using ‘personae’, Horace succeeds in reminding the reader that a self-relation cannot be depicted in a direct or an obtrusive way, since it has always been subject to different communicative discourses. The texts that are arranged as self-biographies describe, at an essential distance, the emergence of the self from the arts (e.  g. Hor.

1.1 Antiquity 

 695

epist. 1, 20, a short biography addressed to his book, which exhibits typical ‘vita’-elements). In a self-ironic manner, Horace stylizes his writing compulsion as the only possibility to express his identity at least indirectly and in segments. The change of genres and topical variations serve as metamorphoses of an ‘ego’ that can only exist in a penmanship from which there is no escape. To use a particular phrase of Paul de Man, Horace practices a ‘De-Facement’ in the best sense of the word, since he makes his self disappear quite effectively in writing poetry (de Man 1979). Already at its roots, the Elegy seems to be especially suited for the portrayal of autobiographic negotiations with the ego. One of its (indeed manifold) main themes is the threnody: In this connection with the death theme, it overlaps with the funerary epigram and the funeral oration (see below). The early Greek elegiac poets debate the relation between life and death in an alternatingly pessimistic (Mimnermos of Kolophon, about 600 BCE) and optimistic (Solon of Athens, seventh/sixth century BCE) manner. Here, it involves less concrete, but more general life designs, which can be typologized. Let Solon’s so-called “age-of-life-elegy” (frg. 27; West 1972, 135–137) serve as an example, where he divides life in a ‘hebdomadal’ mode (ten units of seven years). Every single one only gains its special meaning through participation in the whole. The guiding principle of this elegy is to illustrate human life as a reasonably structured, performative unit in a logical sequence, which is not subject to blind chance. This poetic piece of biographical theory is flanked by other, more personal elegies of Solon in which he accentuates his individual biographical achievement (e.  g. frg. 36; West 1972, 141sq.). Although the Roman elegy now is particularly known for its erotic topics and its traditional Hellenistic erudition, it also contains autobiographically relevant literary techniques. In the works of Propertius (ca. 48–15 BCE), the strong accentuation of his Osco-Umbrian heritage is his personal trademark. In accordance with his artistic mission, he does not, like other Augustan poets, stylize himself as a ‘vates’ (seer), but rather as the regional counterpart of the ‘verus haruspex’ (“true extispicist”) (carmen 3, 13). He rejects the panegyric ‘code’ of Augustus and thereby even carries out a specific coining of his artistic ‘vita’. Carmen 4, 1 offers a coherent description of the climaxes of the Propertius-‘vita’, albeit from the perspective of the astrologist Horus. Wherever Propertius proceeds autobiographically the closeness of death stands out: At times it is the vision of his own death, at times the memory of the death of friends and relatives, which is the main structural feature of the poem. Propertius designs his (former, present and future) life invariably as a ‘thanatographical’ project. Life only takes shape through the imagination of death. Here, the so-called ‘Sphragis’ (carmen 1, 22), Propertius’ ‘seal poem’, is programmatic. Ovid (43 BCE–15 CE) holds a special position among the elegiac poets: He is the only one who, living in exile on the Black Sea, has written a more elaborate autobiography. In 132 verses Tristia 4, 10 gives an account of his life which largely meets the traditional criteria of the genre (intended for publication, retrospective, chronological order, first-person perspective, justification). The poet’s life and opus here have coa-

696 

 1 The European Tradition

lesced in an inseparable way. Ovid unfolds his ambivalent relationship to the aesthetics of writing between the poles of ego and world. He shows us his isolated, exiled and elegiac ‘ego’, which seems to be driven by the fear of isolation typical of exile. His writing displays discernible self-therapeutic purposes: Ovid designs his entire exile poetry in the modus of autobiographical self care. As an autobiographer, the poet captures his experience of life as well as his imagined death, temporal boundaries are suspended. Under these circumstances, Ovid succeeds in creating the impression of his unbroken identity even under the radically changed new living conditions. Not only does Ovid reflect on his role as resourceful steward of his own ‘vita’, but he also critically and productively takes the discursive function of his authorship into account. Thus, he can be regarded as a far-sighted moderator of communication via his poetic existence.

Autobiographical Theories and Documents in Prose Philosophy/Rhetoric In the earliest philosophical evidence, autobiographical theory and practice often coincide. Religious philosophy in particular is in the service of self-portrayal (see for instance the so-called ‘expiation song’ of Empedocles, fifth century BCE). Among the Presocratics, one may point to Heraclitus (sixth/fifth century BCE), as his reflections about human individuality present an appealing contrast to the common projections of personality that are aimed at continuity and identity. Heraclitus attests to man as having a personality that is constantly changing and quasi multiple; the only steady trait is the outer form. A theoretically based biography, likewise constructed as an intra-diegetic autobiography, is provided by Plato (ca. 428–348 BCE) with the Apology of Socrates. He allows 70-year-old Socrates to reveal his life coherently in front of his denouncers in a way that lets him craft it as an artistic whole. Here we find two central, yet differently weighted aspects of ancient autobiography: The aspiration for uniqueness (esp. Plat. apol. 18e–24b), and the insistence on identity (Apology 17c). Socrates seeks to compensate for his lack of personal heroic deeds with his extraordinary personality. He firmly points to his deliberately chosen and constantly maintained life style. For this he appeals to his δαιμόνιον (daimonion), his inner voice, which supposedly has co-determined his conduct and has brought about coherence (see esp. Plat. apol. 33a). The Platonic Φαίδων (Plat. Phaid. 96a–100a) likewise offers a continuous autobiographical passage. Here Socrates describes his intellectual development before he allows the narrative to flow onto the discussion about the immortality of the soul. This, too, serves primarily as a justification of the chosen lifestyle, which is supposed to lead to true insight.

1.1 Antiquity 

 697

The passage from the philosophical to the rhetorical evolution of autobiography is fluid, since not only Plato concedes a substantial position to rhetoric in terms of (self-) portrayal. For the logographer and theorist of rhetoric Isocrates (ca. 436–338 BCE), philosophy and rhetoric even constitute a disciplinary entity. To be sure, Isocrates draws on the autobiographical model of the platonic Socrates; however, instead of stressing his individual singularity, he stages himself as one of many, as a ‘typos’ compatible with society. This is best demonstrated by the speech no. 15, that was published under the title Antidosis [‘Exchange’], which includes the 82-year-old’s autobiography. In the preamble, Isocrates explains that he wants to present to his contemporaries and future generations the truth about himself and a picture of his views and of his whole life. The written speech shall function as an instruction for readers about his life and contribute to the revision of his public image. Isocrates fudges the official reason by narrating an event from his earlier life time – namely, the legal dispute about fortune exchange. Obviously, it was considered inappropriate to talk about oneself at such length without a clear reason. Like Socrates, Isocrates strongly emphasizes his identity. For this, he has developed a specific method: he weaves miscellaneous citations from his different speeches into his autobiography. This is supposed to help illustrate the coherence of his moral positions. The fallibility of one’s own memory, which is a basic problem of every theory of autobiography, he takes into account from the beginning: τοσοῦτον οὖν μῆκος λόγου συνιδεῖν, καὶ τοσαύτας ἰδέας, καὶ τοσοῦτον ἀλλήλων ἀφεστώσας συναρμόσαι καὶ συναγαγεῖν, καὶ τὰς ἐπιφερομένας οἰκειῶσαι ταῖς προειρημέναις, καὶ πάσας ποιῆσαι σφίσιν αὐταῖς ὁμολογουμένας, οὐ πάνυ μικρὸν ἦν ἔργον [to view as a whole so great an extent of subject matter, to harmonize and bring together so many diverse varieties of discourse, to connect smoothly what follows with what goes before, and to make all parts consonant one with another has been by no means an easy undertaking] (Isocrates 1982, 191).

Because he wants to counteract exegetical misuse, Isocrates relies on the power of the anticipating effect of the construction of self qua speech: the speaker creates an image of himself which is ideal and meant for eternity through the formulation of the speech. Cicero (106–43 BCE) affiliates himself with his role model Isocrates in many ‘autobiographical’ dimensions – especially regarding the rhetorical basis of one’s own philosophical work. For Cicero’s ideas of self it is especially revealing to look at his theory of the four ‘personae’, presented in his book De officiis (44 BCE) [On Obligations] (Cic. off. 114sq.), which he had developed following the Stoic Panaitios of Rhodes (180–110 BCE). While the first ‘persona’ divides man, as a rational being, from animal, the second one describes the temperamentally individual character by which people can be distinguished from one another. The third ‘persona’ suggests the role model shaped through time, environment and society, whereas the fourth ‘persona’ leaves room for the individual choice of the ‘genus vitae’ (‘way of life’: here Cicero primarily bears in mind external factors such as career choice etc.). All four ‘personae’ are

698 

 1 The European Tradition

imposed on man by nature. The individual is, to be sure – at least in the case of the fourth ‘persona’ –, the agent of choice, but not a ‘personality’ as a mode of being a singular individual. Cicero also draws his ‘constantia’ ideal from Stoic ethics: Continuity over a longer period of time also belongs to a ‘person’. Cicero stresses the protection of identity especially from a social perspective. In being a ζῷον πολιτικόν (zôon politikón, political being), man’s assignment is to conduct himself publicly as well as possible. Therefore, he has to orientate himself according to what is socially acceptable (the ‘decorum’/’aptum’ passed on through the ‘mos maiorum’ [ancestral custom]). Likewise important for personality-building is the so-called Oἰκείωσις (Oikeiosis) doctrine, a programmatic principle of ‘self-realization’ or ‘self-acquisition’: every individual is encouraged to realize his/her intellectual aptitudes and to develop his/her own strengths in order to update them in everyday life. One shall live according to one’s natural aptitude and, in the sense of the Stoic harmony-doctrine, in conformity with the universal nature: ‘secundum naturam vivere’. Whoever lets himself be directed by others too much and thereby loses sight of his own ego, risks coming under the control of the dangerous ‘perturbationes animi’ [‘mental confusions’], which can cause a form of mental disease (Cic. Tusc. 5, 37–39). To avoid such risks, the principle of self-care emerges in later Stoic theory and practice as a technique for forming an individual life (Foucault, L’histoire de la sexualité. Le souci de soi [1984]). Seneca (ca. 4 BCE–65 CE), in his 124 didactic Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, develops a form of self-therapy (‘cura sui’) composed of self-observation and training of the will. This is a matter of soul-searching, which is supposed to lead to inner independence (esp. Sen. epist. 28, 10, and 123, 5 as well as the treatise De tranquillitate animi). The written documentation of the therapeutic procedure promotes its circulation and is supposed to encourage imitation. In his works, Seneca depicts his life; this sketch is already regarded as his true will by the historian Tacitus (56–117 CE) (Tac. ann. 15, 62–63). Even in Epictetus’ (ca. 50–138 CE) four books Διατριβαί [Dissertationes (‘Discourses’)] we find a powerful form of Stoic self-care-practice. Epictetus draws on the felicity-theory of the rigorous ethics of the older Stoics (Zeno, Chrysippus, Cleanthes) to develop his theses about inner freedom through reasonable insight and regular asceticism. In this respect, Marcus Aurelius’ (121–180 CE) work τὰ εἰς ἑαυτὸν βιβλία [Ad se ipsum (‘To myself’)], written between 170 and 178 CE, is even more revealing. It consists of twelve books, which in part contain pithy soliloquies: an autobiographical-philosophical collection of aphorisms. The central topic is the fear of life and death; philosophy offers a method of ‘ars moriendi’ [learning to die]. Marcus Aurelius sets clear physical boundaries to the mental sovereignty of man. Altogether, it is the awareness of boundaries that fascinates him and encourages him in his individual search for meaning. The Stoic practice of asceticism has grown for him into a form of automatism.

1.1 Antiquity 

 699

Letters Letters per se exhibit an autobiographical character. When turning to an addressee, one reveals a more or less pronounced awareness of oneself. Letters have been suspected of being autofictional from an early stage: this impression at least is suggested by the omnipresence of the epistolographic topos of the ἐπιστολή = εἰκὼν ψυχῆς (epistula = imago/speculum animi/vitae, letter as mirror of the soul), which was already phrased by Demetrios of Phaleron (fourth/third century BCE) in his essay περὶ ἑρμηνείας (De elocutione [On style]) 227): its popularity vividly shows how urgent the attempt to maintain appearances was. We already find autobiographical elements in the seventh Platonic epistle. If the letter really stems from Plato, the author would have been approximately 74 years old by the time he wrote it. The central point is Plato’s stage of life in which he has put himself into Dionysus I of Syracuse’s service as the educator of his employer’s son, Dionysus II. It is well known that this experiment failed, and Plato, in this letter, tries to explain himself and his behavior publicly. He extensively analyzes his own development until the departure to Sicily while repeatedly inserting protreptic philosophical passages. Cicero is one of the most important autobiographers in the field of epistolary literature as well. We find four anthologies of Cicero’s letters in a total of 36 books, which contain about half (864 letters) of the actual correspondence. Admittedly we cannot subsume Cicero’s letters under the category of autobiography entirely: Cicero had not intended for them to be published, and naturally, they do not mirror synopsis in retrospect, but rather contain excerpts from his life relevant to particular moments. We are also dealing with ‘authentic’ letters, which is to say letters actually sent. However, the fact that they only had one concrete addressee does not change much about their autobiographical significance. Cicero especially commands the skill of adapting his persona well to the interests of his different addressees. Thus, he addresses his particular recipient (and thereby the reader) as a friend, politician, teacher, companion, etc. Cicero strikingly succeeds in creating the impression of presence: he suggests closeness between writer and addressee bordering on identity, and thus, too, encourages the impression of authenticity (e.  g. Cic. Att. 12, 39: “adlevor cum loquor tecum absens” [‘However it cheers me to talk with you when you are absent’], or Cic. Att. 8, 14: “ego tecum tamquam mecum” [‘I talk with you as I talk with myself’]). The situation is different with the epistolary collection of Pliny the Younger (62–114 CE), which was designed for collective publication. It consists of 247 private letters (in nine books) and 121 official letters to the emperor Trajan. The letters were edited and stylized afterwards. Every one of the letters, which have different addressees, deals with a certain topic. In this way, Pliny succeeds in drawing a sketch of Roman society under Trajan’s reign. The close interconnectedness with current events and the constant reference to the public interest qualify these letters as autobiographical texts, too. Pliny first of all portrays himself as an educated citizen, thus adhering to the

700 

 1 The European Tradition

‘humanitas’ (humanity)-ideal established by Cicero. To give the impression of objectivity, Pliny regularly puts his extensive self-praise into the mouths of other persons mentioned in the letters; these are often presented as ‘exempla’ [models] whose opinions claim general reliability. Indeed, Pliny shows us different sides of his private life as it evolved publicly; however, they only diverge in a certain degree from one another. They do not cross the line of the ideal of continuity and identity. After all, it is a noticeable concern of Pliny’s letters to leave a picture of their author to posterity and thus reserve a lasting position in the collective cultural ‘memoria’ (memory) for him. The aspiration for self-portrayal also increases in other functional branches of epistolary literature. Two autobiographical letters from the famous doctor Galenos (129–216 CE) reveal an impressive example of a writing culture among physicians; they allegedly originated at the end of his life. Already the titles (περὶ τῆς τάξεως τῶν ἰδίων βιβλίων; περὶ τῶν ἰδίων βιβλίων [“About the order of my own books”; “About my own books”]) point, in their strong referentiality, to self-portrayals: Galen uses the desolate status of contemporary academic teaching as an opportunity for his auto­biographical writing which would make it possible for his works and lectures to circulate frequently under a different name or in a distorted form. So it is a genuine need for authorization that motivates his letters “ὅπως ἴδωσιν οἱ μέλλοντες ἀναγνώσεσθαί τι τῶν ἐμῶν, κατὰ τίνα τὴν ἡλικίαν ἕκαστον ἔγραψα καὶ κατὰ τίνα τὴν αἰτίαν” [‘the readers should know at what age and on which occasion I wrote the particular books‘] (Galenos 1893, 102). Galen therefore single-handedly sets up lists of his books and classifies their origin according to the development of his life (they are designed as educational history).

Political Biographies, Accounts of Actions, Historiography Political biographies are rooted in ancient mortuary cults. One could even say that these biographies are, from the beginning, characterized by death: death, be it real or virtual, gave rise to evaluation, from death one took a close look at life (this is also true for life-descriptions in a different textual style, e.  g. above: ‘elegy’). Even the ancient Egyptians compiled biographical information in epitaphs which summed up the life and deeds of the deceased in a concise manner. As is attested by epigraphic testimonies, this practice gained currency also in Greece and Rome. It found a specific form in the Roman ancestor cult. After a Roman citizen died, a ceremony was held in which important personalities from the circle of ancestors symbolically accompanied the funeral procession (in the form of waxen imprints or masks, which were paraded by relatives or actors). Personal achievements were summarily put on display in a ‘laudatio funebris’ (public eulogy of the deceased). At times, they were even collected and edited in books, in the form of a family chronicle. It was inherent to the eulogy to mention ancestry, fortune, family, and social links, physical and psychic advantages (this catalog would

1.1 Antiquity 

 701

later be adopted in the ‘vitae’-tradition). Cicero explicitly hints at its creative scope in de oratore [‘On Oratory and the Orators’] 2, 46: the eulogist was allowed to feign these features or exaggerate them – a ‘carte blanche’ for bios-fiction, especially concerning fundamental characteristics. With respect to this tradition, we can also see the deep rootedness of Roman self-understanding in the social sphere: the deceased individual is always measured according to his public commitment. The so-called ‘Laudatio Turiae’ (Praise of Turia), the longest known epitaph of a Roman from Augustan times (about 180 lines), gives us a good sense of this. It is about the commissioner’s late wife, who had obviously put herself out for her husband with unselfish commitment.

Political Self-portrayals The increasing public interest in biographical matters is also revealed in political documents such as Hypomnemata, memoirs, first-hand accounts, diaries or courtly journals, written very often in the third person, which in some cases even came into existence during the lifetime of the person concerned. Already the Persian Great Kings were interested in the unitary publication of the motives for their actions (e.  g. the famous rock inscription [Behistun-inscription] of Darius I, sixth/fifth century BCE). Political (auto-)biography early on has a clearly marked apologetic context. The need for moral justification is gradually accompanied by the wish for aesthetic flourish. First-hand accounts are stylistically edited, and enriched with digressions and recognizably fictional elements that serve self-styling. With Alexander the Great (fourth century BCE), the politically motivated life account reaches a first climax; Alexander already served as a model for Cicero for how to optimize the authorial glorification of one’s own famous deeds (Cic. Arch. 24). The Romans tried to align themselves as closely as possible to this tradition, but at the same time gave it their own accents. The mention of authors of now lost works suggests that there was a substantial amount of such self-portrayals aiming to generate good publicity for Roman politicians. The apologetic tendency of Roman autobiographical literature is already evident in the case of Scipio Africanus the Elder (ca. 235–183 BCE). After his fame, won through the victories against Carthago, had waned, he was suspected of corruption in his Roman homeland. In order to re-establish his reputation, he wrote a letter, following the Hellenistic tradition of politic epistles, to King Philipp V of Macedonia (Epistula ad Philippum regem [‘Letter to King Philipp’]). His contemporary and friend, the historian Polybius (second century BCE), reports about its content that Scipio stressed his personal commitment and has rejected the charge of being a mere minion of the Gods (Pol. 10, 9, 3). With his autobiographical commitment, Scipio seems to have fathered a family tradition, since his descendant Scipio Nasica, according to Plutarch (45–120 CE), depicted his own merits in the Battle of Pydna (168 BCE) in an Epistula ad Massinissam regem (‘Letter to King Massinissa’, Plut. Aemilius Paulus, 15 [Plutarch 1918, Vol. VI, 392]).

702 

 1 The European Tradition

Similar motives obviously facilitated the emergence of the autobiographical de consulatu et de rebus gestis suis liber [‘book about his Consulship and his further deeds’] of the consul Q. Lutatius Catulus (~ 150–87 BCE) (see Cic. Brut. 132, and Plut. Marius 27 [Plutarch 1920, Vol. IX, 536]). With M. Aemilius Scaurus (163–89 BCE), a new culture of labeling autobiographical publications seems to begin: the title De vita sua [‘About his life’] not only strengthens the tendency towards claims of objectivity (third person), but also lays claim to comprehensiveness. It is likely that Scaurus, in this work containing three books, not only limited himself to single passages of his life. Similarly, a political intrigue and the loss of his reputation with subsequent exile may have induced P. Rutilius Rufus (*ca. 158 BCE) to depict his life in five books (he seems to have preempted Stoic selfcare practices there [Sen. epist. 79, 14]). A first climax of Roman political autobiography is marked by the memoirs of L. Cornelius Sulla (138–78 BCE), which were written between 78 and 76 BCE and contained at least 22 books: this quantitative magnitude is not only due to the wild life of the commander, but also to the increasing need for extensive self-styling of political leaders. In Sulla’s case, the apologetic motive is enormous, as he had directed brutal proscriptions during the civil war against Marius and furthermore taken over the position of dictator without time limit – a striking breach of political norm, which further underlines his exceptional position. His withdrawal from public to private life appears all the more spectacular, and supplies a stylish frame for his intended autobiographical project. His excessive self-portrayal corresponds to the individual personality cult of Sulla (he is considered the founder of the tradition of self-chosen nicknames, in this case: ‘Felix’). This is also expressed through the increase in divine signs that relate to individuals. Cicero, too, elaborated his political work autobiographically – not only in letters to his friends and in political statements (see above), but also in two minor epics, which were not very popular (De consulatu suo [‘About his Consulship’], De temporibus suis [‘On his Life and Times’]). Just how great Cicero’s embarrassment was, is apparent in the fact that he first tried to win over a biographer (e.  g. the poet Archias) for the public eulogy of his political successes. His epos about the time of his banishment in 3 books, De temporibus suis, is lost. Larger fragments of the second epic self-biography, De consulatu suo, written in the year 60 BCE, have survived (about 100 verses), which reveal that Cicero has followed the chronological ‘vitae’-guidelines from the Hypomnemata-tradition. Thus, he depicts his background and education in order to dwell upon his election as consul and the exposure of the Catilinarian conspiracy, the highlights of his life. He lets Jove hold a protecting hand over him and thereby elevates himself into a sacral sphere. Apologetic and psychagogic arguments dominate, which serve the quest for objectivity. Aiming at the milestone of Roman political self-portrayal, the res gestae of Augustus, the seven books penned by C. Julius Caesar, the Commentarii rerum gestarum de bello Gallico [‘Commentaries on the Gallic War’], need to be at least touched upon. The rather plain notes, which were probably designed as accounts to the senate, can hardly be called an autobiography, but they are nevertheless characteristic of a certain

1.1 Antiquity 

 703

type of literary political self-presentation: The transition of the Commentarii, which are predominantly written in the third person, and in which the identity of narrator and protagonist is largely maintained, to historiography is seamless. The author stylizes himself between the poles of ‘res publica’ and individuality as an ‘exemplum’: at a second glance, his prosaically staged exemplary status turns out to be a charismatic literary conception of an exceptional existence. The amalgamation of public and private occurs, in an even more complex way, at the hands of Augustus. This is true for two of his texts: the famous “account of deeds”, the res gestae divi Augusti (also quoted as Monumentum Ancyranum = Augustus 1985; The Deeds of the Divine Augustus [1911]) and his actual autobiography titled De vita sua [‘About his Life’], which tellingly – apart from a few fragments that influenced Suetonius’ (70–130 CE) Vita of Augustus [‘Life of Augustus’] in the Vitae parallelae [’Parallel Lives’] – is lost. Self-consciousness, and the need to bolster the charisma of the author of the res gestae (about which our considerable knowledge stems from three reconstructions), is already apparent in the style of publication: not only was the text already distributed over the whole country during his life-time for propagandistic reasons, but it was also displayed on the Roman ‘Campus Martius’ [Field of Mars] as an epitaph in front of the Mausoleum of Augustus, a monument of at least 40 meters in height and 90 meters in diameter. The austere account was probably published around 2 BCE and edited once again shortly before the death of the ‘Princeps’. It comprises the events between 44 BCE and 14 CE, spanning nearly 60 years. The paper is divided into different topics and thereby reveals an impressive technique of selection: relevant domestic events are withheld tenaciously. When they are described, domestically relevant events (honors, expenditures for public welfare, etc.) are followed by the successes of the author in foreign policy (victorious campaigns and conquests). Augustus stylizes himself as the committed, selfless ‘pater patriae’, whose highest aim was the restoration of the republic, and whose every action had been in accordance with the elites of the ‘res publica’. The responsibilities offered to him supposedly draped him in an untouchable, sacred aura. His endeavor to legitimate his exceptional position by personally adhering to republican ideals is consistent. His own interests and those of the ‘res publica’ are psychologically interwoven with one another in such a skilled way that it sometimes appears as if Augustus and the nation were the same. Information about private life seems to have entered into the actual biography: in the 13 books De vita sua (25/24 BCE) [‘About his Life’], the ‘Princeps’ tells us about his origin, his physique (as well as his manifold diseases), his marriages, and other personal entanglements  – which certainly for their part always refer to his public function and are itemized apologetically. Analogously to the res gestae, here, too, is a strong tendency towards sacralization: multiple references to divine signs aim to give the impression that the Gods, also, motivated Augustus’ political actions. Augustus’ successor, Tiberius (14 BCE–37 CE), wrote a short life description entitled Commentarii. Claudius’ (51–54 CE) self-biography is said to have comprised eight books, but its content was suppressed by Suetonius because of the author’s exag-

704 

 1 The European Tradition

gerated self-admiration. From the fragments of emperor Hadrian’s (117–138 CE) auto­ biography, about which we are slightly better informed, we can reconstruct the fact that the aspect of apology bordering on self-praise still continued to be relevant. Hadrian singles out his ‘pietas’ – a central Roman value not only since Virgil’s Aeneid – and thereby proves that there was still a great commitment to common moral values, particularly for a leader. Tellingly, Hadrian published his autobiography under the name of one of his educated freedmen: this once again illustrates the need for an impression of objectification and authentication in self-praise. Something similar should apply to a less-known autobiographical work of Septimius Severus (146–211 CE). The related genre of (political) biography also experiences a rapid ascent. The Greek Vita of Augustus written by Nikolaos of Damascus (born 64 BCE) is strongly panegyric and is informed mainly by the res gestae of the ‘princeps’ himself. Nikolaos wrote not only a world history in 144 books, which extends into his own time (about 4 BCE), but also an autobiography, whose surviving remains indicate a strong proclivity for self-aggrandizement. A kind of private biography of Augustus which possibly was commissioned by the ‘princeps’ himself and seemingly contained even personal information (Suet. Aug. 79 and 94) originated with Iulius Marathus (first century BCE).

Historiography As many of the works discussed above transcend the border of historiography, it is appropriate to take a complementary look at this genre. Among the Romans, it is first and foremost C. Sallustius Crispus (86–35/34 CE) who succeeds in slipping autobiographical elements into the depiction of Roman history – in this case, the recent events around the Catilinarian conspiracy and the war against the Numidian king Jugurtha (Bellum Iugurthinum). In both texts, the author appears as a moral example that explains the abysmal behavior of individual citizens with the general decline in moral values and the increasing trend toward individualization in Roman politics. Sallust explicitly includes himself in this critique, in order to subsequently exculpate his own behavior and partisanship (esp. Sal. Catil. 3, 3–4, 2). In the Greek-speaking area, historiography and self-portrayal increasingly belong together as well, as the example of Flavius Iosephus (37–ca. 100 CE) shows. To his historical work, the Bellum Iudaicum [Jewish War], he attached, almost as an annotation, an autobiography (Ἰωσήφου βίος [‘Life of Josephus’]). Only the narrative perspectives change (in his Bellum, the author writes in the third person, in the autobiography he talks about himself in the first person). In this autobiography, he proceeds quite conventionally (chapter 1–3: family, education, etc.); the author endeavors to position the self developed in the text between his private ‘bios’ and the claims of a public ‘ethos’. Here, too, the apologetic orientation stands out, which is discharged in invectives against his opponent, the historian Iustus of Tiberias (first century CE) – autobiography now also gains agonistic elements within the genre.

1.1 Antiquity 

 705

Biography The work of the bustling author, antiquary and archivist M. Terentius Varro (see above) documents that biographical interest in Graeco-Roman antiquity, even beyond genuine historiography, increased steadily. Hieronymus even puts him at the beginning of Roman biography. An interesting innovation is provided by his Ἑβδομάδες [Imagines], a sort of personal dictionary in 15 books, in which he presented about 700 personalities in the form of illustrated portraits. The pictures were accompanied by short epigrams describing character traits. Varro furthermore wrote a more extensive biography of Pompey (three books) – and likewise a three-book autobiography, which is lost; the mere fact, however, that he wrote them proves how strongly self-portrayal and ‘external’ biography were correlated. The situation is different with Cornelius Nepos (ca. 100–24 BCE), who limited himself to biography – maybe also because he possessed no political ‘vita’ and thus could not incorporate enough material that would serve to publicize himself. Of special interest is his collected edition De viris illustribus [On Illustrious Men], which comprised at least 16 books. The mostly lost work introduces famous men who are classified according to their profession and activity (kings, commanders, orators, historians, grammarians, poets). The broad space granted to private matters is striking – a development whose novelty is already shown by the fact that Nepos elaborately explains this procedure. Nepos here clearly stands in Hellenistic-peripatetic tradition (see esp. the typological studies of Theophrastus, 371–287 BCE). Especially Plutarch, the most important biographer of ancient times, will take this up about one century later; of all things, he opens the Vita of Alexander the Great (as one of the founders of the ancient art of self-portrayal) with the remark that “ἀλλὰ πρᾶγμα βραχὺ πολλάκις καὶ ῥῆμα καὶ παιδία τις ἔμφασιν ἤθους ἐποίησε μᾶλλον ἢ μάχαι μυριόμενοι καὶ παρατάξεις αἱ μέγισται καὶ πολιορκίαι πόλεων“ [“a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities”] (Plut. Alexander 1 [Plutarch 1919, Vol. VII, 224sq.]).

Conversion Literature In postclassical times, especially in late antiquity, a hitherto little pronounced form of texts, which can be roughly subsumed under the keyword ‘conversion literature’, arises. This includes novelesque conversion stories as well as confessional statements. They all criticize the concept of identity that had been binding for self-portrayals – even if at times ex negativo. Now, it is a more or less radical volte-face that constitutes the core of biographical and autobiographical depiction and in this regard anticipates the modern ‘Bildungsroman’. Aurelius Augustine (354–430 CE) had an extraordinary impact on the further development of autobiography both within this genre and outside of it. Not only do

706 

 1 The European Tradition

the especially relevant Confessiones (ca. 397/398 CE) [Confessions] deal with the question of the constitution of self; before that, Augustine had put into writing Soliloquies (386/387 CE), fictitious talks between his sensual and his rational features. A self-analytical intention already underlies this dialogue. The Retractationes [‘Improvements’] (427 CE), written near the end of his life, on the other hand, are to be understood as a kind of a reading key to the Confessiones: in Retractationes 2, 32, Augustine phrases important information from a retrospective about his intention and the intended audience of his autobiographical opus magnum. For a long time, the Confessiones were believed to be the first ‘real’ autobiography (Augustine 1969). In 13 books, the author practices a psychological self-analysis to explain his own conversion, which at the same time presents itself as an honorable pronouncement of the Maker: this semantic ambivalence is already laid out in the title (confiteri [confess/praise]). The opus can be divided into three parts: books 1–9 deal with the past. They describe his life up to the point of his mother’s death. The actual ‘conversio’-scene appears in book 9 and is continued in the baptism of the ninth book. Book 10 takes a current perspective, whereas books 11–13 concern the future actions of the convert, discussing theological problems and offering especially a speculative interpretation of the biblical doctrine of creation. The human word of the past and the present is substituted by the divine word of the future. The educational history (from Manichaeism through Neo-Platonism up to Christianity) now and then indeed takes on the traditional apologetic color (here especially concerning the explanation of the previous closeness to the Manicheans); in its conception, it establishes a structural scheme which becomes mandatory for Christian autobiography: the second landmark is reached and the transition in one’s life takes place, completing the ‘autobiographical phase’ as well. In this regard, the autobiographical paper acts as “Medium einer Differenz, die das Leben erst darstellbar macht, indem sie es von einem idealen Ziel- und Betrachtungsstandpunkt aus in eine kritische Distanz rückt” [‘medium of difference, which only makes life portrayable by moving it from an ideal aiming and consideration point to a critical distance’] (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 114). To Augustine, the dialogue seems to be the ideal device for depicting one’s inner divisions and changes in their dramatic details. Augustine also counts himself among the addressees of his book: he wants to and can (re)read his life in order to recognize himself. As a consequence, the dialogue is also in the service of a modus of self-distancing. Augustine presents to us a multilayered ego which constitutes and reveals itself between the poles of self-loss and self-possession. The narrating ego distances itself from the narrated one; both, in turn, are subject to the reading ego of the present – and future. At the same time, Augustine can consequently stick to the first-person perspective, since there are no witnesses for what is told apart from God. The devotion to God and the apostrophization of the divine truth function as part of the authentication strategy. God is a kind of “absoluter Bezugspunkt” [‘absolute reference point’] of the autobiographical pact (Zimmermann 2005, 243). As the connecting link between past, present, and future, memory becomes the central medium of

1.1 Antiquity 

 707

autobiographical self-awareness. The notorious ‘artificiality’ of the language assumes an ambivalent role: as rhetoric, it is associated with the seductive power of the flesh and set against the truth of the divine word. And yet, language is a most important means for working on the mind of the faithful and also for the readers who are willing to imitate Augustine. Life mirrored linguistically remains subject to contingency and thus is contestable. Its complex writing especially made the text so appealing to postmodern reception (Derrida 1991). But even in ancient times, Augustine was received frequently and imitated, whether in the form of explicit confessional documents, in letters, diaries, confessions, prayers, or the like. Here, we shall only point to the collected letters of Paulinus of Nola (ca. 354–431 CE), which document his conversion to Christianity contingent on austere practice and radical orientation toward the beyond. Paulinus of Pella (fifth century CE) with his Eucharisticum has written a concise autobiography in 616 dactylic hexameters, where he appraises his life from different perspectives: by also including the negative phases in his conversion story and acknowledging their meaningfulness for the whole, he aims to expand his autobiography supplying proof of God. The Eucharisticum (or Confessiones), too, of Magnus Felix Ennodius (473–521 CE) includes an autobiographical conversion account; in the form of a prayer, the author depicts his conversion caused by illness as a radical alienation from poetry and rhetoric. Lastly, the famous Consolatio Philosophiae [The Consolation of Philosophy] of Boethius (480–524 CE) is also informed by Augustine’s Confessiones: shortly before his death, the incarcerated Boethius composed his consolatory writing, which functions as a ‘Vademecum’. Just like Augustine’s Confessiones, Boethius’ text is pervaded by autobiographical confessions illustrating his inner dichotomy. Here, personified philosophy shows the protagonist that his life up to now has been a delusion in order to motivate his conversion and to teach him to distinguish the qualities of true and false life in the face of death. Translation: Emily Baragwanath, Charlton Payne, Anna Westerberg

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944). Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1981 [Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings. New York: Continuum, 1976]. Augustinus, Aurelius. Sancti Aureli Augustini Retractationes libri duo. Rec. Pius Knöll. Wien: Gerold, 1902. Augustinus, Aurelius. Confessiones. Ed. Martin Skutella. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1969. Augustus. Res gestae divi Augusti = The Achievements of the Divine Augustus. Ed. Peter A. Brunt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Augustus. Meine Taten. Res gestae divi Augusti. Ed. Ekkehard Weber. München: Artemis und Winkler, 1985.

708 

 1 The European Tradition

Augustus. Res gestae divi Augusti: Text, Translation and commentary. Ed. Alison Cooley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch. München: Beck/Basel: Schwabe, 2013 [The Civilization of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S.G.C. Middlemore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014]. Catullus, Gaius Valerius. C. Valerii Catulli Carmina. Ed. R.A.B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon, 1958. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. M. T. Ciceronis Tusculanae Disputationes. Rec. Max Pohlenz. Leipzig: Teubner, 1918. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. M. Tulli Ciceronis scripta quae manserunt omnia. Fasc. 3: De oratore. Ed. Kazimierz Feliks Kumaniecki. Leipzig: Teubner, 1969. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Brutus. Ed. Bernhard Kytzler. München: Artemis und Winkler, 3rd ed. 1986 [Brutus. Ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1939]. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. M. Tullius Ciceronis Epistulae ad Atticum. Ed. David Roy Shackelton Bailey. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1987. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. M. Tulli Ciceronis scripta quae manserunt omnia. Fasc. 19: Oratio Pro Sulla. Oratio Pro Archia Poeta. Ed. Helmut Kasten. Stuttgart/Leipzig: Teubner, 1993. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De officiis. Ed. Michael Winterbottom. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Demetrius. On Style. Ed. W. Rhys Roberts. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1973. Derrida, Jacques. Circonfessions. Paris: Seuil, 1991 [Circumfessions. Ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993]. Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951. Galenos. Galeni scripta minora. Vol. II. Rec. Georg Helmreich and Johannes Marquardt. Leipzig: Teubner, 1893. Homer. ἡ Ὀδύσσεια. Homeri Opera. Vol. III and IV. Rec. Thomas W. Allen. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908 and 1917. Horatius Flaccus, Quintus. Q. Horati Flacci opera. Ed. David Roy Shackleton Bailey. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1985. Isocrates. Isocrates in Three Volumes. Ed. George Norlin. Vol. II. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits 1, Nouvelle édition. Texte integral, Paris: Seuil, 1966/1999 [Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006]. Lacan, Jacques. Schriften. Vol. I. Ed. Norbert Haas. Olten/Freiburg: Walter, 1973. Levinas, Emmanuel. “La trace de l’autre.” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Ed. Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Vrin, 1967. 187–202 [“The Trace of the Other” (1963). Deconstruction in Context. Ed. Mark Taylor. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 345–359]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Von der Renaissance bis zu den autobiogra­phischen Hauptwerken des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Vol. IV, part 2. Ed. Bernd Neumann. Leipzig: Teubner, 1969. Most, Glenn W. “Freuds Narziß: Reflexionen über einen Selbstbezug.” Narcissus. Ein Mythos von der Antike bis zum Cyberspace. Ed. Almut-Barbara Renger. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2002. 117–131. Ovidius Naso, Publius. Metamorphoses. Ed. William S. Anderson. Leipzig: Teubner, 1982. Ovidius Naso, Publius. P. Ovidi Nasonis Tristia. Ed. John Barrie Hall. Stuttgart/Leipzig: Teubner, 1995. Ovidius Naso, Publius. Fastorum libri sex. Rec. E.H. Alton. München/Leipzig: Teubner, 2005. Plato. Platonis Opera. Vol. IV. Ed. Ioannis Burnet. Oxford: Clarendon, 1900.

1.1 Antiquity 

 709

Plutarch. The Lives of Plutarch. Ed. Jeffrey Henderson. Vol. VI. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1918. Plutarch. The Lives of Plutarch. Ed. Jeffrey Henderson. Vol. VII. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1919. Plutarch. The Lives of Plutarch. Ed. Jeffrey Henderson. Vol. IX. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1920. Propertius. Sexti Properti elegos. Ed. Stephen J. Heyworth. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007. Renger, Almut-Barbara, ed. Narcissus. Ein Mythos von der Antike bis zum Cyberspace. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002. Rösler, Wolfgang. “Ansätze von Autobiographie in früher griechischer Dichtung.” Antike Autobiographien. Werke – Epochen – Gattungen. Ed. Michael Reichel. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2005. 29–43. Sallustius Crispus, Gaius. C. Sallusti Crispi Catilina. Iugurtha. Historiarum Fragmenta selecta. Appendix Sallustiana. Rec. Leighton Durham Reynolds. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Sappho. Lieder. Ed. Max Treu. München: Ernst Heimeran, 1954 [The Songs of Sappho. Various Translators. Mount Vernon: Peter Pauper Press, 1966]. Schmitt, Arbogast. Selbständigkeit und Abhängigkeit menschlichen Handelns bei Homer. Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Psychologie Homers. Mainz/Stuttgart: Steiner, 1990. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. L. Annaei Senecae ad Lucilium Epistulae morales. Rec. Leighton Durham Reynolds. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. L. Annaei Senecae Tragoedia. Rec. Otto Zwierlein. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Snell, Bruno. “Die Auffassung vom Menschen bei Homer.” Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen (1946). Ed. Bruno Snell. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 6th ed. 1986. Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius. Opera. Vol. I. Rec. Maximilian Ihm. München/Leipzig: Teubner, 2003. Tacitus, Cornelius. Cornelii Taciti Annalium ab excessu divi Augusti libri. Rec. Charles Dennis Fisher. Oxford: Clarendon, 1906. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. West, Martin L., ed. Iambi et Elegi ante Alexandrum cantati II. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. West, Martin L., ed. “Sappho frg. 58 LP.” Times Literary Supplement 5334 (24 June 2005). Zimmermann, Bernhard. “Augustinus, Confessiones – eine Autobiographie? Überlegungen zu einem Scheinproblem.” Antike Autobiographien. Werke – Epochen – Gattungen. Ed. Michael Reichel. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2005. 237–249.

Further Reading Arweiler, Alexander, and Melanie Möller, eds. Vom Selbst-Verständnis in Antike und Neuzeit. Notions of the Self in Antiquity and Beyond. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Baumann, Uwe, ed. Autobiographie, Eine interdisziplinäre Gattung zwischen klassischer Tradition und (post)moderner Variation. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Kleinschmidt, Anika Lisa. Ich-Entwürfe in spätantiker Dichtung. Ausonius, Paulinus von Nola, Paulinus von Pella. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. Marquard, Odo, and Karlheinz Stierle, eds. Identität. München: Fink, 1976. Sonnabend, Holger. Geschichte der antiken Biographie. Von Isokrates bis zur Historia Augusta. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002. Reichel, Michael, ed. Antike Autobiographien. Werke – Epochen – Gattungen. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2005.

1.2 Middle Ages Sonja Glauch

‘Medieval Autobiography’? As a narrative genre, ‘autobiography’ is paradoxical. It implies the existence of a ‘life’ to be told. But there is no story of a life before the composition of this story (in the narratological sense of ‘story’). The life lived, the subject of the narration, comes to form a coherent whole through acts of narrative constitution, and it is exactly this transformation of a set of happenings into a story (the ‘mise en intrigue’ [emplotment] of Ricoeur [1984–1988]) which fabricates the course of the life to be told. Medieval autobiography may be a perfect paradigm for this paradoxical entanglement of telling and told, insofar as there are rarely other sources relating ‘objective’ facts about the authors of presumed autobiographical statements. Nothing entitles modern readers to set life and experience (‘truth’) against story (‘poetry’). The situation of the available sources clearly depicts the paradoxes of the genre: how medieval authors may have understood themselves is accessible only through the narrative expression that they gave to their self-understanding and that shaped their self-understanding. But there are not many texts – and even fewer texts of a certain prominence – produced in the European Middle Ages that could readily be called ‘autobiographies’. Or even more emphatically put: “It is [...] clear that there do not exist for the Middle Ages any autobiographies in the modern sense of the term” (Schmitt 2010, 49). The selection of exemplary autobiographies in volume three of this handbook, virtually skipping the Christian European centuries between 500 and 1500, is striking evidence for that. There are biographical narrations in the first person like the Frauendienst (ca. 1255) [The Service of Ladies (2004)] of Ulrich of Liechtenstein or the Vita nuova [‘The New Life’] (ca. 1292/1295) of Dante, which, albeit showing a clear autobiographical form and intention (the author is professedly telling his life’s story), are seldom recognised as ‘truly’ autobiographical because of the high degree of stylisation they show. Statements that are thought to be ‘authentic’ self-expressions, on the other hand, are often found as insertions into texts of a different nature, subordinated to their respective functions, which is why one has to deny them an autobiographic form and intention. When, for instance, Gregory of Tours (538–594/595) and Bede (672/673–735) include (auto-)bibliographical surveys in the final chapters of their historiographical works, Historia Francorum [‘History of the Francs’] and Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [‘Ecclesiastical history of the English nation’] respectively, this might be referenced as ‘ego-document’ but surely not as ‘autobiographical’. The Middle Ages lack not only a notion of texts retrospectively portraying the life of their authors, but also the cultural context which would have allowed for the existence of such texts as a literary genre sui generis. It is only in the field of late medieval https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-089

1.2 Middle Ages 

 711

mystic literature that one might acknowledge the formation of a literary paradigm that is recognisable, with some reservations, as ‘autobiography’ (see below). Elsewhere, autobiographical testimonies have to be reckoned as variant or borderline forms of other literary traditions, or as unique experiments. The occasions, the purposes, and the patterns of autobiographical representation had to be found and devised anew time and time again. Accordingly, it is not easy to decide in a particular case which texts should be considered as autobiographical, if it is fundamentally impossible to attribute to the authors an intention to write an autobiography, as opposed to an intention to tell of their life. In short: “The genre [...] existed in a form that is not fully comprehended by modern definitions” (Frost 1990, 22). The defining factor of the autobiographical lies in the constellation of the author writing about himself or herself (see the definition by Misch: “die Beschreibung (graphia) des Lebens (bios) eines Einzelnen durch diesen selbst (auto)” [‘the description of the life of one single person by him- or herself’] [1989, 38]). This may seem a platitude, but even apart from any post-modern problematisations and paradoxisations of ‘saying I’, it is not. For one thing, in the Middle Ages texts of presumedly autobiographical nature are not seldom presented in the third person (Seuse by Heinrich Seuse [1295/1297–1366]; the Book of Margery Kempe [ca. 1375 to ca. 1440]). By this feature the identity (sameness) of author and protagonist is flagged as irrelevant. In certain constellations there are sound reasons why authors do not claim authorship based on an ‘I’ – as, for instance, Mechthild von Magdeburg (ca. 1207–1282), who presents her book of revelations as written ‘out of God’s heart and mouth’. It would have been precarious for an unlearned woman to postulate authority of her own, and where women are respected as authors (like Hildegard of Bingen [1098–1179]), they need to develop an authorial concept before they begin to write (Meier 2004, 214). In a sense, “the writing of autobiography is a presumptuous act. [...] The writer claims, at least by implication, that the life being recounted is worthy of the literary effort of composition and, perhaps more important yet, of making some claim on its readers” (Fleming 2014, 35). This can result in avoiding the first-person pronoun. Secondly, even where the narrator identifies himself with the protagonist, the text – even with paratext, if there is one – indicates the autodiegetic structure or the offer of an ‘autobiographical pact’ – as theorised by Lejeune (1988) –, but not the identity of the author. Medieval textual tradition hardly ever allows an identification of the ‘real’ author with certainty. Moreover, the author is usually accompanied by scribes, translators, and redactors: the works of secular rulers and of spiritual women will normally have been dictated. In such cases the responsibility for the exact wording, if not the whole literary form, lay with third parties, and this will have been the usual case with spiritual women and noble lay people. For instance, in the Books of Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Margery Kempe (ca. 1375 to ca. 1440) the involvement of a male amanuensis is attested. The union of author and subject of enunciation in one person is loosened here. Furthermore, in the Middle Ages this personal union is feasible in the small circle of highly educated men of letters (clerics, chancery clerks, university members) only. And even

712 

 1 The European Tradition

where one is wholly justified in taking the name of the protagonist for the name of the ‘real’ author, it is not possible to determine unambiguously to what extent and in what sense an I is narrating of himself. If one differentiates between ‘empirical I’ and ‘poetic I’, as Leo Spitzer proposed (1946 [1959]), or if one takes into account the concept of ‘persona’ (Bond 1987), the reference of the word ‘I’ becomes unstable. Authors legitimise their depiction of an individual life exactly by suggesting a programmatic, prototypical, allegorical understanding of a vita. Tellability of personal experience lies in its being representative of the human condition. The seemingly simple criterion of triple identity between author, narrator and protagonist is thus blurred in many ways where medieval self-narration is concerned. Instead, we need to “come to terms with a form of autobiography where the life being examined becomes an artifact itself, a ‘made’ thing and hence fictive” (Frost 1990, 22). There are uncharted areas, in particular, bordering that autodiegetic form of narration appearing as precursor of the fictional first person narrative because it does not meet the requirements for authenticity that the present time demands of the autobiographical. This refers to narratives like the Old French Roman de la rose (ca. 1230) [The Romance of the Rose (1999)] of Guillaume de Lorris, the Voir dit (ca. 1365) [The Book of the True Poem (1998)] of Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377), or the Spanish Libro de buen amor [‘The book of good love’] (1330/1343) of Juan Ruiz. A broad spectrum of designations has been offered for these texts: should one name them ‘autography’ with A[nthony] C. Spearing (2012), ‘erotic autobiography’ with G[erald] B. Gybbon-Monypenny (1973), ‘pseudo-autobiography’ with Laurence de Looze (1997) or ‘autobiographical novel’ with Evelyn Birge Vitz (1989)? The tendency towards the exemplary exhibited by all medieval autobiographies is particularly pronounced in these texts, but there is no fundamental formal difference between autobiographies and them. What modern readers and critics are inclined to differentiate as ‘autobiographies’ and ‘pseudo-autobiographies’ is part of a continuum of forms and stances. In addition, this means that, when addressing the autobiographical, one should consider all literary forms addressing human life and self-conception: from the hagiographic vita to the romance. The analysis of autobiographic writing is surrounded by concepts and notions like ‘self’, ‘identity’, ‘individuality’, ‘personality’, ‘subjectivity’, and so forth. All of these notions, revealing much about the self-understanding of the modern era, may only with some modifications be employed for the time period before about 1800. With a characteristic change of perspective, the historical sciences first tended to deny that phenomena like the above-mentioned were present in the Middle Ages, only to renounce this later, but at the price of having to characterise these phenomena as different, that is to say specifically medieval. The classic example of this is ‘individuality’. Jacob Burckhardt deemed its ‘discovery’ to be the crucial epochal criterion for the demarcation between the Middle Ages and modernity. It is probable that few scholars would agree with this today. But even the most considered assertion of the existence of pre-rinascimental ‘individuality’ will conclude that “mittelalter­

1.2 Middle Ages 

 713

liche Individualität [...] gerade nicht analog zu neuzeitlicher Programmatik mit dem Triumph des Identitätsgewinns verbunden ist, sondern umgekehrt mit der Gefahr des Identitätsverlusts konfrontiert” [‘medieval individuality (...) is not – as if it were in accordance with the modern notion (of individuality) – associated with the triumph of gaining identity, but conversely with the risk of losing identity’] (Gerok-Reiter 2006, 36). One might ask if the ‘individuality’ that is so feared may not actually be something other than the desired ‘individuality’ of the modern era that became hypostatised and elevated to the core of personal existence. The autobiographical genre is clearly one of the scenes of individualisation and awareness of ‘individuality’, and of confrontation with other concepts named above. One can hardly dispute that there is an “innere[r] Zusammenhang[] zwischen der Entstehung eines gesteigerten Persönlichkeitsbewußtseins und der Ausbildung der Autobiographie” [‘inner connection between the emergence of a heightened consciousness of personality and the formation of (the genre of) autobiography’] (Rein 1919, 194), whatever that connection may be like. Therefore the beginnings of the autobiographical in the Middle Ages as a subject of scholarship do not remain untouched by the dilemma of concurrent awarding and denial of categories of ‘modern’ self-concepts. Medieval self-expressions are less individual and less immediate than modern ones, because they are more strongly oriented towards models of a rhetorical, literary, or social nature. Instead of naming features of personal, individual, particular nature, for instance, they measure grades of ideal qualities (Vitz 1989). With respect to this alterity scolars have sought to decide between two alternatives: are these the articulations of selves that are comparable to the modern ‘self’, but in an unfamiliar (medieval) manner, or are they the articulations of selves of unfamiliar (medieval) constitution? But this is a choice to which one can commit only if one assumes the existence of a ‘self’ prior to and independent of its articulation. The problem is reflected in the ever increasing number of surrogate terms found in studies of medieval history and medieval literature: ‘ego-document’, ‘self-narrative’, ‘autonarration’, ‘self-writing’, ‘Selbstzeugnis’ [‘self-testimonial’] etc. These concepts are more broadly defined and vaguer than ‘autobiography’. They also cover expressions that are not formal autobiographies, but occur as autobiographic ‘particles’ in texts that primarily have other illocutionary stances. As personal identity is not only communicated, but first of all constituted by the narrative transformation of events into the story of a life, and as this model did pertain to medieval people, too, all forms of such dependent self-expressions are meaningful to the historical humanities. Sabine Schmolinsky has pondered the concept of ‘Selbstzeugnis’ very thoroughly from the standpoint of the historical sciences (Schmolinsky 2012). Her focus is on authentic self-expression, with a minimum of literarisation or fictionalisation, as a result of which she keeps ‘poetical I-statements’ out of view (Schmolinsky 2012, 75). But how to draw that line between authenticity and fictionalisation? Schmolinsky does not address this tantalising question. In its status and functioning, fiction in medieval literature and epistemology differs from the modern era (Glauch 2014). If

714 

 1 The European Tradition

we exclude literarised and stylised self-expressions, we exclude exactly that which accounts for the specific nature of the autobiographical in the Middle Ages.

Functions and Contexts of the Autobiographical in the Middle Ages The following outline is not primarily arranged in chronological order and is not sorted by languages. (For that see Schulze, Brunhölzl and Sellheim 1980, which displays a wealth of facts. Misch [1949–1969] remains a fundamental chronological representation.) Instead, it aims at a classification according to some key functions and contexts. Even if such functions and contexts of autobiographical writing are always situated in specific historical periods, the resulting sections should not be conceived as chapters of a history of development. Rather the different groups seem quite independent of each other. They may be held together only by our concern for the modern notion of autobiography – this suspicion was voiced already by Misch (1955, 13–14). A development of sorts could be seen in the gradual expansion of literacy: when unlearned laymen, women, and ordinary townspeople got to be authors of texts in the later Middle Ages, this was bound to the prerequisite of advancing access to writing. Then again, functions and contexts determine the choice of forms: it is readily evident, as Ulrich Müller pointed out, that writers reached for different forms and means of presentation, if they created autobiographical self-justifications, like Helene Kottanerin (ca. 1400 to ca. 1475) and Jörg Kazmair (d. 1417) apparently, or, like Heinrich Seuse, mystic explorations of God and self for pastoral purposes, or, like emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519), autobiographical allegories with representational intentions. In each case another audience is targeted (Müller 1989, 310). Regrettably however, it is scarcely possible to pinpoint the motives, programs, and cultural contexts of most texts.

Latin Clerical Autobiographies from the Early and High Middle Ages: Confessions, Conversions, Initiations Some Latin texts from the tenth to the twelfth centuries seem to fit the modern notion of autobiography, even if no models for autobiographical writing existed then. “Autobiographie als Gattung ist [...] zu dieser Zeit noch eine anachronistische Kategorie, angesiedelt in einer Schnittmenge von confessio und exemplum” [‘At this time, autobiography as a literary genre is an anachronistic category, located at an intersection of confessio and exemplum’] (Asper 2002, 111). It seems as if ‘autobiographies’ emerge as a side effect of impulses of confession and self-legitimation as author. What takes effect here is the example of the Confessiones of Augustine, the most formidable work

1.2 Middle Ages 

 715

of autobiographic character from Christian late antiquity of which the Middle Ages had knowledge. However, the Confessiones inspired the expression of confessions of sin, but not the composing of autobiographies. The first text to be classed among this group is the Dialogus confessionalis [‘Confessional dialogue’] of bishop Rather of Verona (d. 974), with its radical self-accusation (for the text see Kölmel 1996, 668–671). The impact of the Confessiones was widespread, but Franz Brunhölzl reckoned their influence on the development of the autobiography as probably more modest than might be expected (Brunhölzl 1980, 1262). Following the model of Augustine’s Confessiones such confessions assume “eine narrative Struktur, die den Weg des Sünders aus der Gottesferne zur Gottesnähe, zum Heiligen schildert” [‘a narrative structure delineating the path of the sinner out of the separation from God to the nearness to God, to sanctity’] (Asper 2002, 112), they adapt ein vorgefundenes Modell der Erneuerung und Initiation, einen zunächst traditionell erscheinenden ‘rite de passage’: die Conversio. [...] In das allgemeine Modell der Conversio, das sich auch in mehrere Phasen differenzieren läßt, werden Züge individueller Disposition und spezifischer Berufung eingeschrieben. Sie garantieren die Authentizität und qualifizieren für eine spezifische Autorschaft [‘a pre-existing model of renewal and initiation, an at first seemingly traditional ‘rite de passage’: the conversio. (...) Into the generic model of conversio, which can be broken up into several phases, features of individual disposition and specific calling are being inscribed. They guarantee the authenticity and qualify for specific authorship’] (Meier 2004, 210).

Meier surveys a number of writers from 1070 to 1170 whose conversion narratives have mostly been read as autobiographies: Otloh of Saint-Emmeram, Guibert of Nogent, Peter Abelard, Rupert of Deutz, Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schönau, Hermann of Cologne and Aelred of Rievaulx. Meier sheds new light on their narratives by reading them as ways of devising conceptions of authorship and of manifesting personal aptitude for and calling to being an author. So confessions of this kind tell about the initiation of an author as well and gain an autobiographic expression from their narrative structure. Among those conversion narratives with their typical succession of error and reversal are Otloh of Saint-Emmeram’s (d. ca. 1070) De temptatione cuiusdam monachi [‘Of the temptation of a certain monk’] and Herman of Cologne’s (d. after 1181) De sua conversione [‘Of his conversion’]. Herman’s conversion narrative (from Jew to Premonstratensian priest) has elicited debates as to whether it is authentic or fabricated by Christian clerics. A major study by Jean-Claude Schmitt has shown the fruitlessness of such an alternative: the enigmatic “face beneath the mask”, that of Judas the Jew before his conversion, is at once that of a real Jew and “an edifying scenario made up by a canon of Cappenberg”, it is fiction and truth (Schmitt 2010, 43). His conversion can be read as a metaphor for the Christian’s search for the conversion of the carnal into the spiritual. “The story of Judas/Herman is the story of each new member of the new order of Prémontré, but in an ideal form where the use of the first person lends even more reality and effectiveness” (Schmitt 2010, 197).

716 

 1 The European Tradition

Likewise, Peter Abelard’s Historia calamitatum [The History of My Calamities] recounts the departure from a sinful life, in this case after the traumatic experience of castration. Abelard (1079–1142) wrote it at the age of about 54 in the form of a letter of consolation to a friend (ad amicum suum consolatoria). In addition to the purpose of offering consolation to the friend by demonstrating its author’s tribulations, the text had many more purposes and intentions, which do not exclude each other and which should not be seen as being in opposition to one another. The Historia was part of the ‘founding book’ of Paraclete, the nuns’ convent overseen by Heloise, and supplied an etiological and parenetic foundation myth; it was instrumental in the fabrication of spiritual authority, it surely provided self-consolation and finally, as “Sorge ums eigene Selbst” [‘self care’] (Bezner 2002, 169), it might be read as an (arrogant) self-fashioning and an attestation of subjectivity and individuality by the most distinguished thinker of the twelfth century. It is most intriguing that the “autobiographische Welle um 1115” [‘autobiographical wave from around 1115’] (Berschin 2001, 341–352) ebbs away in the thirteenth century, from which there are no comparable texts extant. Ian Wei has attempted to explain this with changes in the self-conception of the scholars, whose interests were now better served by the language of collectivity rather than individuality: “Biographical writing was displaced by representations of the scholar as a social type with distinctive qualities, needs, and pastoral roles” (Wei 2011, 78).

Biography and Allegory Sub Specie Amoris [‘In the Light of Love’] The first vernacular, non-clerical ‘formal’ autobiographies – texts that claim to tell the story of their author’s life – emerge from the thirteenth century onwards. Most present readers do not understand them as autobiographies, though. This is mainly due to their clearly noticeable stylisation and allegorical shaping which cast doubt on the protagonists of these narrations: they enter a twilight between exemplary universality and personal individuality. But it is just this universal applicability and abstraction from the individual which may be at the center of medieval autobiography: one’s own life is worth telling insofar as it can be conceived as exemplary. If Leo Spitzer regards Dante’s Vita nuova as “a seemingly autobiographical (but actually ontological) account of the development and course of the feeling of love” (1959 [1946], 103), this could be said about all of these accounts. Indeed, the ages of man – youth and old age in particular – lend themselves as symbols for qualities and destinies of everyman’s life. It is significant that it was of all things the non-narrative genre of love lyric that gave an impulse for biographic narration. Both Ulrich of Liechtenstein’s Frauen­ dienst and Dante’s Vita nuova emerge from their authors’ retrospective reflection on the poetry that they had composed earlier in the cultural context of courtly love. We also find an inverse interconnection of biography and lyric, where songs relate biographical moments, as is the case with the Tyrolean nobleman Oswald of Wolkenstein

1.2 Middle Ages 

 717

(1377–1445). The dependency of the (auto-)biographical on the first person discourse of the ‘grand chant courtois’ [high courtly song] has been noted quite often: “Thus, one could view this [i.  e. pseudo-narrative montages of lyric songs], in the vernacular tradition, as one of the beginning points of autobiography in its strict sense, with the difference that the oppositions true/false, real/fictitious are neutralised by the very nature of the discourse” (Zumthor 1973, 36). The Styrian nobleman Ulrich von Liechtenstein has been lauded as author of the first autobiographical novel in first person perspective in the German language. His Frauendienst, written at the age of 55, is an account of his life in the courtly ‘service of ladies’. This life comprises chivalrous deeds (jousting at tournaments and arranging two great series of jousts in the guise of Venus and of King Arthur), composing songs of ‘Hohe Minne’ [courtly love] (of which 58 are incorporated in the narrative) and wooing two women, first an unapproachable lady, then an amiable one. Amidst all the playfulness and comicality which has been observed, the ‘conversio’-like structure of the story seems to convey a serious idea: how the protagonist renounced his ill-advised and impatient suit and attained his aim of joyful, steady, courtly ‘Minne’ [love] and ‘Minnesang’ [lovesong]. It would not be too far-fetched to see the traditional story of the process whereby a subject gains insight as the underlying narrative model. Dante’s prose account contains 31 love songs, situates them biographically and comments on them. The youthful life that Dante drafts herein is admirably determined and consistent. It is orientated towards the figure of his beloved Beatrice, the ‘gloriosa donna de la mia mente’ [‘the glorious lady of my mind’]. Her life story is contained in the vita in an almost hagiographic way. The Vita nuova is the document of a ‘conversio’ in the sense of overcoming the concept of courtly love for the sake of Christian ‘caritas’, and it serves as poetic vindication and the announcement of an even more spiritualised work. It is a mysticisation of the life-long love for Beatrice, a treatise of theories of poetry and love, and a consolidation of personal authorship, all in one. More than one work of Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), usually seen as a figure of transition to modernity, could be added here: apart from the Secretum, the Canzoniere [Rime sparse] in particular. This collection of 366 sonnets and canzones, “which relate, celebrate, and bemoan his love for Laura, living and dead” (Fleming 2014, 44), obviously does not constitute a formal (narrative) autobiography, but it implicitly models a biography of the lyrical subject. Just as the number of poems stands as a calendaric symbol for the whole of time and life, and as the last canzone puts God’s mother in place of Laura and thereby casts the loss of self in love in the light of the soul’s salvation, so the Canzoniere “[wird] insgesamt lesbar als eine lyrische Auto­ biographie, die der heilsgeschichtlichen Symbolik von Fall und Erlösung unterstellt ist” [‘as a whole can be read as a lyrical autobiography subordinated to the symbolism of fall and redemption’] (Regn 2003, 188). In ‘autobiographies’ like these the narration of an individual life is at once an allegory of man’s need of salvation and itself modelled on and ennobled by narrative schemes like repentance or ascent.

718 

 1 The European Tradition

Spiritual and Mystical Autobiographic of the Late Middle Ages The search for God and the experience of grace in the encounter with him are the subject of a set of late medieval self-reflections and life stories in the vernacular. Research has often categorised (or at least treated) them as ‘autobiographic’ (Misch 1967, 91–112; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 124–128; Bürkle 2003 for a discussion of the problematic relationship between mystic revelations and autobiography). Indirectly the model of Augustine’s Confessiones as the prototypical story of the journey of the soul, the journey toward conversion, had a formative influence on these accounts of one’s own religious life. With the mystics, though, conversion was not the finishing line but rather a point of departure for their spiritual experiences, and normally a person would not feel authorised to write down their own experience by just devoting themselves fully to God, but by being endowed with revelations (visions, auditions) that were experienced as grace. In this light, autobiography tends to result in autohagiography (for this notion see Greenspan 1996). The kind of relationship with God into which the mystics entered surpassed the tenets and practices of liturgy and sacrament; it manifested itself in an intimate connection to and ‘personal’ experience of God. This informed the nature of their self-reflection and stimulated a psychologically refined observation of the ‘inner’ man. However, the ‘self’ is not the subject of these texts. It is stylised as passive towards the revelation received and in the role of a mouthpiece, even if it cannot remain totally inarticulate, insofar as it has to guarantee the sincerity of the experience. The disclosure of mystic experiences often resorts to a strategy of not only claiming the ineffability of the divine but of also reflecting it in the language, the form, and the convoluted circumstances of their own formation that the texts contrive. In most cases the composition is attributed to a request from the monastic community or even to a command of God. Accounts of mystical experience were aimed at spiritual uplift and encouraged the ‘imitatio’ of contemplation. With the exception of Margery Kempe, who relates her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Rome and hardships such as trials for heresy and imprisonment, the ‘external’ life usually remains unconsidered. Women played a major role in this literature, perhaps because “das Kundtun einer Offenbarung [...] der einzige auf Öffentlichkeit zielende Beitrag zur Theologie [war], der einer Frau erlaubt war” [‘the proclaiming of a revelation was the only contribution to theology aimed at the public that was permitted to a woman’] (Störmer-Caysa 1998, 41). (For the ‘spiritual autobiographies’ of Angela of Foligno (d. 1309), Julian of Norwich (d. 1415), and Margery Kempe (d. 1440) see Fleming 2014, 45–47.) An important exponent of this female piety is Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207– about/after 1282), who was the first to write a mystical self-inspection in the German vernacular. The Fließende Licht der Gottheit [Flowing Light of the Godhead (1998)], composed between ca. 1250 and ca. 1280, tells the story of the loving soul and of its union with the divine beloved; it is a book of confessions, meditations, and revelations. The sparse biographic allusions it contains (Mechthild being ‘greeted’ by the

1.2 Middle Ages 

 719

Holy Ghost at the age of twelve, leaving the safety of the family home, living a precarious life as a beguine) could well be concretisations of a programmatic concept of the ‘vita religiosa’ [female religious life]. The theme of love is articulated in a hymnic style and in images from the Song of Songs. The Flowing Light excels in the distinct intensity of a dialogic conversation between the soul/the I and the lover. In the fourteenth century, mostly in Dominican convents in south Germany, there are some examples of so-called ‘Nonnenbücher’ [nuns’ books] or ‘Schwesternbücher’ [sister books]: compilations of foundational legends and biographical accounts of nuns noteworthy and exemplary for their pious lives graced by ecstatic experiences and devoted to ascetic practices, addressed to the other sisters (Lewis 1996). Often their female piety is accentuated by vivid emotional and erotic affects. Alongside these memorial collections of ‘vitae’ there are texts that focus on the life and introspection of one individual nun. Albeit not organised by narrative coherence or chronological order and in themselves strongly non-homogenous in writing style and narrative/discursive schemes, the personal identity of the imitable subject is construed by presenting her – or herself – as the author of the text: writing is a part of the pious life, even if the name of the protagonist is mostly omitted, and even if the collaboration of male spiritual counselors is apparent. Evoking a life written by herself, texts like the Offenbarungen [‘Revelations’] of Margarete Ebner (1291–1351) from the Dominican convent Medingen, of Adelheid Langmann (d. 1375) from Engelthal, or Christine Ebner’s Gnadenvita [‘Life of Grace’] tend to an autobiographic format. Exceptional, but not without contact with this female literary culture, is the vita of the Dominican mystic Heinrich Seuse (1295/97–1366), pupil of Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1328). His book called “der Súse” [the Seuse] is not written in the first person and claims to be the late redaction and amplification of records and letters collected by Elsbeth Stagl, a nun from the convent Töß near Winterthur, also attested as author of the sister book of this convent. The ‘Seuse’ is meant as spiritual guidance, and its second part consists of lessons and instructions for the spiritual daughter. Its first part presents the exemplary life of the protagonist, named ‘servant of Eternal Wisdom’, as a journey to perfection arranged in the traditional three steps from the ‘beginning’ through the ‘progressing’ to the ‘perfected’ state. Strongly modelled by narrative biographic schemes of the legend and of courtly culture (e.  g. the promotion from squire to knight), all episodic accounts seem to be objectivisations or concretisations of an inner progression. Role models of knighthood illustrate the concept of ‘militia’ as enduring pain and distress in the sense of the book of Job, and an indicated age of the protagonist could often be symbolic. The book is “nur im uneigentlichen Sinn eine Autobiographie” [‘an autobiography only in the figurative sense’] (Ruh 1996, 445). The ‘Seuse’ is none the less rightly famed for its realistic and lively imagery.

720 

 1 The European Tradition

Autobiographies of Sovereigns and Autobiographies in the Sphere of Princely Courts The self-conception of nobles and rulers is articulated in ‘vitae’ of kings and princes of the late Middle Ages. As the first self-portrayal of a German ruler, the Latin Vita Caroli Quarti [Autobiography of Emperor Charles IV (2001)] of emperor Karl IV (1316–1378) deserves to be mentioned. It comprises the time from his birth to his election as king in 1346, and was composed arguably between 1347 and 1355 (Schmid 2006, 119–123). It addresses the successors to the throne and encourages them to pious conduct, considering the transience of human aspirations. According to Schmid the main intention of the Vita, besides instructing the king’s descendants, lies in legitimating the German and Bohemian king by displaying the divine favours he had been granted in the course of this life. This text is one example of the fact that early autobiographies were understood by contemporaries as reflection of aristocratic efforts to preserve the ‘memoria’ of one’s house. Another important autobiography of a ruler is the Catalan Llibre dels fets [‘Book of deeds’], a first person (plural) chronicle-style narration of the life and military deeds of the king of Aragon, Jaume I, lo Conqueridor (1208–1276). It is ‘auto’biographical only insofar as one takes into account that kings are the ‘auctores’ [authors], guarantors, in the medieval sense of the term, even if the collaboration of scribes and redactors “strengthens their authorship: the collaborators assisted in the technical production of the text, but the kings remain the true centers of the narratives, as authors, narrators, and protagonists” (Aurell 2012, 135). Monnet and Schmitt locate such rulers’ autobiographies between the poles of imperial sovereignty, sovereignty of governing oneself, and the engagement of memory. “Locuteur individuel, subjectivité narrative et dignité de la personne impériale” [‘Individual speaker, narrative subjectivity, and the dignity of the imperial person’] (Monnet and Schmitt 2012, 15) coalesce in the king’s speaking of himself. Texts like this seem to be modelled upon the genre of historiography. Their forms and functions differ from those originating from the urban middle classes and are much more clearly directed toward the public. But it is the (new) autobiographical forms from an urban environment of the early modern era proper  – including the humanistic autobiography – that tend to be seen as the beginnings of modern auto­ biography. As Velten (1995, 34) puts it: Heute ist als sicher anzunehmen, daß die sich in Deutschland wie in Italien im 15. Jahrhundert herausbildenden autobiographischen Texte keinerlei Vorläufer hatten und sich selbständig zunächst aus genealogischen Aufzeichnungen wie Familienchroniken und Hausbüchern, aus lokalen Chroniken und aus kaufmännischen Handels- und Merkbüchern vor allem im städtischbürgerlichen Raum entwickelten [‘Today it can be safely assumed that the autobiographical texts emerging in Germany and in Italy in the 15th century had no predecessors and initially developed autonomously from genealogical records like family chronicles and ‘Hausbücher’, from local chronicles and from mercantile trading and notebooks primarily in the urban, bourgeois space’].

1.2 Middle Ages 

 721

Works Cited Asper, Markus. “Leidenschaften und ihre Leser. Abaelard, Heloise und die Rezeptionsforschung.” Abaelards Historia calamitatum. Text – Übersetzung – literaturwissenschaftliche Modell­ analysen. Ed. Dag Nikolaus Hasse. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2002. 105–139. Aurell, Jaume. Authoring the Past. History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Bezner, Frank. “‘Ich’ als Kalkül. Abaelards ‘Historia calamitatum’ diesseits des Autobiogra­phi­ schen.” Abaelards Historia calamitatum. Text – Übersetzung – literaturwissenschaftliche Modellanalysen. Ed. Dag Nikolaus Hasse. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2002. 140–177. Berschin, Walter. Ottonische Biographie. Das hohe Mittelalter. 1070–1220 n. Chr. Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter. Vol. IV.2. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann Verlag, 2001. Bond, Gerald A. “Composing yourself: Ovid’s Heroides, Baudri of Bourgueil and the problem of persona.” Mediaevalia 13 (1987): 83–117. Brunhölzl, Franz, Ursula Schulze, and Rudolf Sellheim. “Autobiographie.” Lexikon des Mittelalters 1 (1980): 1262–1269. Bürkle, Susanne. “Die Offenbarungen der Margareta Ebner. Rhetorik der Weiblichkeit und der autobiographische Pakt.” Weibliche Rede – Rhetorik der Weiblichkeit. Studien zum Verhältnis von Rhetorik und Geschlechterdifferenz. Ed. Doerte Bischoff and Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 2003. 79–102. Fleming, John V. “Medieval European Autobiography.” The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography. Ed. Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 35–48. Frost, Kate Gartner. Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Gerok-Reiter, Annette. Individualität: Studien zu einem umstrittenen Phänomen mittelhochdeutscher Epik. Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 2006. Gybbon-Monypenny, G[erald] B[urney]. “Guillaume de Machaut’s Erotic ‘Autobiography’: Precedents for the Form of the Voir-Dit.” Studies in Medieval Literature and Languages: In Memory of ­Frederick Whitehead. Ed. William Rothwell, William R.J. Barron, David Blamires and Lewis Thorpe. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1973. 133–152. Glauch, Sonja. “Fiktionalität im Mittelalter; revisited.” Poetica 46 (2014): 85–139. Greenspan, Kate. “Autohagiography and Medieval Women’s Spiritual Autobiography.” Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages. Ed. Jane Chance. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996. 216–236. Kölmel, Wilhelm. “Autobiographien der Frühzeit.” Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter. Ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1996. 667–682. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Lewis, Gertrud Jaron. By Women, For Women, About Women. The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1996. de Looze, Laurence. Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Meier, Christel. “Autorschaft im 12. Jahrhundert. Persönliche Identität und Rollenkonstrukt.” Unverwechselbarkeit. Persönliche Identität und Identifikation in der vormodernen Gesellschaft. Ed. Peter von Moos. Köln/Weimar: Böhlau, 2004. 207–266. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. 4 vols. Bern/München: Francke, 1949, Frankfurt a.  M.: Schulte-Bulmke, 1950–1969. Vol. II: Das Mittelalter: Die Frühzeit. Frankfurt a.  M.: SchulteBulmke, 1955. Vol. IV.1: Das Hochmittelalter in der Vollendung. Aus dem Nachlaß. Ed. Leo Delfoss. Frankfurt a.  M.: Schulte-Bulmke, 1967.

722 

 1 The European Tradition

Misch, Georg. “Begriff und Ursprung der Autobiographie” (1907/1949). Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 33–54. Monnet, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Schmitt. “Introduction.” Autobiographies souveraines. Ed. Pierre Monnet and Jean-Claude Schmitt. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012. 7–32. Müller, Ulrich. “Thesen zu einer Geschichte der Autobiographie im deutschen Mittelalter.” Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 297–320. Regn, Gerhard. “Poetik des Aufschubs: Giovanni Colonna und die Architektur des Canzoniere (zu RVF CCLXVI und CCLXIX).” Petrarca-Lektüren: Gedenkschrift für Alfred Noyer-Weidner. Ed. Klaus W. Hempfer. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003. 185–211. Rein, Adolf. “Über die Entwicklung der Selbstbiographie im ausgehenden deutschen Mittelalter.” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 14 (1919): 193–213. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988. Ruh, Kurt. Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik. Vol. III: Die Mystik des deutschen Predigerordens und ihre Grundlegung durch die Hochscholastik. München: Beck, 1990–1996. Schmid, Barbara. Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft. Deutsche Autobiographik in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Zürich: Chronos, 2006. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Schmolinsky, Sabine. Sich schreiben in der Welt des Mittelalters. Begriffe und Konturen einer mediävistischen Selbstzeugnisforschung. Bochum: Verlag Dr. Dieter Winkler, 2012. Schulze, Ursula, Franz Brunhölzl, and Rudolf Sellheim. “Autobiographie.” Lexikon des Mittelalters 1 (1980): 1262–1269. Spearing, A[nthony] C. Medieval Autographies. The ‘I’ of the Text. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Spence, Sarah. Texts and Self in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Spitzer, Leo. “Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors” (1946). Romanische Literaturstudien 1936–1956. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1959. 100–112. Störmer-Caysa, Uta. Entrückte Welten: Einführung in die mittelalterlicher Mystik. Leipzig: Reclam, 1998. Velten, Hans Rudolf. Das selbst geschriebene Leben. Eine Studie zur deutschen Autobiographie im 16. Jahrhundert. Heidelberg: Winter, 1995. Vitz, Evelyn Birge. “Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum and Medieval Autobiography.” Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire. New York/London: New York University Press, 1989. 11–37. Vitz, Evelyn Birge. “The ‘I’ of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume Lorris.” Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire. New York/London: New York University Press, 1989. 38–63. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Wei, Ian P. “From Twelfth-Century Schools to Thirteenth-Century Universities: The Disappearance of Biographical and Autobiographical Representations of Scholars.” Speculum 86 (2011): 42–78. Zumthor, Paul. “Autobiography in the Middle Ages?” Genre 6 (1973): 29–48.

1.2 Middle Ages 

 723

Further Reading Barthélemy, Dominique, and Rolf Große, eds. Moines et démons. Autobiographie et individualité au Moyen Âge (VIIe–XIIIe siècle). Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2014. Brownlee, Kevin. “Discourses of the Self: Christine de Pizan and the Romance of the Rose.” Rethinking the Romance of the Rose. Text, Image, Reception. Ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. 234–261. Kimmelman, Burt. The Poetics of Authorship in Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona. New York: Lang, 1999. Rubenstein, Jay. “Biography and Autobiography in the Middle Ages.” Writing Medieval History. Ed. Nancy Partner. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. 22–41. Spengeman, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Zink, Michel. The Invention of Literary Subjectivity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

1.3 Early Modern Times 1.3.1 Autobiographies in the Latin Language (1300–1700) Karl Enenkel

General Features In the late Middle Ages and in the early modern era, the interest in and production of autobiographical writings increased to a spectacular degree. With respect to Latin autobiographies, the phenomenon is indissolubly intertwined with humanism, which began in the fourteenth century. It is a noteworthy coincidence that the ‘inventor’ of humanism, Francis Petrarch (1304–1374), had a strong inclination toward autobiography: more than half of his literary production (most of it in Latin) was dedicated to autobiographical topics (Secretum [My Secret Book (2016)], De vita solitaria [The Life of Solitude (1924)], Epistole metrice [‘Verse epistles’], Familiarium rerum libri [Letters on Familiar Matters (1975–1985)], Senilium rerum libri [Letters of Old Age (1992)], Sine nomine [Book Without Name (1973)], Bucolicum carmen [‘Eclogues’], and Canzoniere [‘Book of songs’]) (Enenkel 2008, 1–145). The fact that the majority of the authors of the Latin autobiographies written between 1300 and 1700 were humanists influenced their content, literary form and outlook, manner of presentation, and choice of literary models. Humanism was something like a new religion: its adherents believed that an intensive study of the literature of antiquity was a sine qua non of new literary production, and of knowledge, language, philosophical understanding, and the education of mankind in general. The humanists saw themselves as heroic representatives of a new era of history, arriving after a long period of cultural decay (generally referred to as the ‘Middle Ages’); their mission was to revive the culture, language, and literature of antiquity. Their proud, zealous, and sometimes arrogant and biased attitude easily brought them into conflict with other types of intellectuals, e.  g. scholastic university professors, Aristotelians, traditional monks and clerics, representatives of the mendicant orders, new spirituals, and adherents of the ‘Reformed Church’, such as Lutherans and Calvinists. This context of conflict, competition, and religious struggles played an important role as the background and incentive for many autobiographies. With respect to the literary form, it is important to note that until the eighteenth century no discernible and clear-cut literary genre of autobiography existed; ‘autobiography’ refers to the content and the figuration of writing, but not to a certain genre. Autobiographical writing took place in a number of traditional genres and forms; in many cases, these genres stemmed from Roman antiquity, such as the elegy (Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius), verse epistle (Horace), Heroides (i.  e., love letters of Heroines https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-090

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 725

and Heroes; Ovid), prose letter (Cicero, Seneca, Pliny the Younger), eclogues (Vergil), lyric poems (Catullus, Horace), epos (Vergil), Commentarii (Caesar), Confessiones (Augustine), biographies of Roman Emperors (Suetonius), invectives (Cicero), philosophical reflections (Emperor Marcus Aurelius), and so on. It was the humanists who discovered (or rediscovered) and creatively used (or reused) these genres as relevant forms for autobiographies. It is exactly this dynamic process of adaptation that makes Latin autobiography from 1300 to 1700 so interesting. Sometimes the discursive elements of various genres are combined. In general, the biographies of the humanists are artful and sophisticated, not only with respect to composition, but also with regard to style, especially their ornamentation with rhetorical figures and the display of intertextuality with writings from antiquity. After close analysis, it turns out that the form of the literary models is of the highest importance: it not only reflects a formality, but it affects profoundly the image of the individual, and has repercussions even in the smallest details. Thus, in the construction of the self, the literature of antiquity played a pivotal role. The majority of the humanist autobiographies from 1300 to 1700 were meant to be read by a larger audience, even if a number of them remained unpublished. Only occasionally does an author explicitly state that an autobiographical work was not intended to be published, such as Petrarch in his Secretum. In Petrarch’s case, however, this seems primarily to be a literary device to enhance the credibility and authenticity of the work. Latin autobiographical writings from 1300 to 1700 may be regarded as ego-documents; nevertheless, the majority of them were much more than just documents kept in a family archive. They are generally oriented toward a bigger audience, and they are written in a persuasive mode. Often their large and international audience consists of the so-called ‘Republic of Letters’, i.  e., the newly founded community of scholars and writers, a kind of society within society, with peculiar values and a peculiar hierarchy. Many autobiographies, especially those by young writers or the ones written after the example of Ovid (poet’s autobiography, elegy, sphragis, letter to Posterity, Heroides), functioned as a kind of passport which would legitimise their authors as members of the Republic of Letters.

Confessions Among the autobiographical writings from 1300 to 1700, confessions represent a comparatively small but intriguing group because they were shaped at the crossroads of religion, literature, and humanist scholarship. Their ancestor is, of course, the Confessiones [Confessions (2014)] by the Church Father Augustine (354–430 CE; composed 397–401 CE), which describes the author’s intellectual and religious development until his conversion to Christianity in 401 CE. The trademark and climax of this work is its ­ ugustine’s Confessiones detailed depiction of Augustine’s conversion in book eight. A

726 

 1 The European Tradition

is an important model or source of inspiration for, among other works, Petrarch’s Secretum (Enenkel 2008, 127–145) and Familiares (IV, 1), Giovanni Conversino da Ravenna’s Rationarium vite [‘Report of his life’] (after 1393/1401), and Franciscus Iunius the Elder’s Vita (1575–1578). Petrarch’s Secretum is probably the most enigmatic of those writings. It is a fictional dialogue with an open end, in which Petrarch does not give a chronological account of his life, but discusses certain problems that troubled his mind sometime between 1341 and 1353; the work does not depict a conversion, but suggests that a conversion may take place in the future. The Secretum does not directly mirror Augustine’s Confessiones, but it clearly was inspired by it. Nevertheless, Petrarch’s organisation of the text is very different. For example, he uses the traditional catalogue of mortal sins as a means to analyse the troubles of his mind. As a dialogue character, Augustine functions as Petrarch’s father confessor. In the end, it turns out that the Secretum is meant to prepare Petrarch’s audience for a new kind of authorship, which implies a change from poetry (especially the epos Africa) to Latin prose, and from history to moral philosophy (Enenkel 2008, 127–145). With respect to the composition and discursive construction of the autobiography of the Italian proto-humanist and teacher of grammar Giovanni Conversino, the Rationarium vite (a detailed analysis and bibliography in Enenkel 2008, 146–188), Augustine’s Confessiones play an even more important role. Nevertheless, the Rationarium vite is anything but a simple imitation of Augustine’s work. Although the author emphasises time and again his sincere will to confess, the narrative mostly resembles a rhetorical self-defence in which the author argues that he is not guilty of the awkward things that happened over the course of his life: for example, as a young boy, Conversino tried to kill his teacher twice; he had sex with a prostitute before marrying a young woman he did not support, simply abandoning her until she died of poverty and grief; he became entangled in a bitter war against the young woman’s family, and he succeeded in suing one of the family members and getting him executed; he earned his living as a spy and a gambler, was condemned to death by the city of Venice, and hence fled to the pirate’s nest of Ragusa (in modern-day Croatia), where he stayed a couple of years and earned a living as a ‘notary’; and so on. Conversino uses A ­ ugustine’s Confessiones in order to authorise and legitimise his self-defence, and to render his embarrassing statements and explanations more plausible and trustworthy. For Conversino, conversion means two ideals, which are intertwined: first is Petrarch’s ideal lifestyle as a humanist scholar and writer, such as it is described in De vita solitaria, and second is Seneca’s ideal as a Stoic philosopher, described in his Epistulae morales ad Lucilium [Epistles (1917–1925)]. In a sense, in Conversino’s ‘confessions’ Petrarch’s humanism and Seneca’s Stoicism replace Christian religion. Furthermore, in the Rationarium vitae conversion is not perceived as a single event that takes place at a certain moment, but more as a long-lasting, if not lifelong, process. This process is influenced by, among other things, the necessities and outward circumstances of life which cannot be determined by the individual. Most remarkably, Conversino proves step by step that other people are guilty of the fact that

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 727

he never really succeeded in achieving Petrarch’s humanist and Seneca’s philosophical lifestyles: he reproaches his cruel teacher Filippino, the bad friends who tried to seduce him, his first wife for keeping him from his humanistic studies, his wife’s nasty family members for prosecuting him, his enemies for their jealousy, the wealthy and powerful for failing to discover and honour his talents as a writer and scholar, etc. Interestingly, Conversino wrote his autobiography when he was appointed chancellor (a kind of first secretary) by Francesco Carrara the Younger, Lord of Padua (1392/1393); this means that Conversino had by then earned an honourable position which would normally be regarded as belonging to politically active life. Conversino, however, identified it with the ideal humanist contemplative life. He most probably composed the Rationarium vite as a means to defend himself against his enemies at the court of Padua, who despised him both for his low social origins and the dark sides of his former life. The autobiography (1575–1578) of the French Huguenot preacher and theologian Franciscus Iunius (du Jon) (1545–1602) matches Augustine’s conversion with the Calvinist theology of predestination and the political events of the Dutch Revolt (1565– 1567) (a detailed analysis and bibliography in Enenkel 2008, 670–727). In a marked difference from some other humanist imitators of Augustine, such as Petrarch or Giovanni Conversino, Iunius claims to have experienced a single, Augustinian-style conversion, which took place in the house of his father shortly after a period when he had been a pupil of the humanist Barthemlemy Aneau in Lyons. Just a few days before, Aneau had been murdered at the Corpus Domini feast by rioting Catholics. Iunius legitimised his spiritual superiority, his status as one of the chosen, and the fact that he survived as a ‘hagepreker’ [secret preacher] in the Dutch Revolt by a combination of God’s grace and his conversion. In Iunius’s autobiography, the chronological account of his participation in the Dutch Revolt serves as proof of God’s grace and of the fact that the author’s conversion had been successful.

Epistolary Autobiography Probably the largest and most diverse group of Latin autobiographies from 1300 to 1700 consists of epistolary autobiography, which comprises both prose and verse autobiographies.

Elegy Elegy figures among the most important genres of Latin autobiography from 1300 to 1700 (Enenkel 2008). The reception of Roman (love) elegy starts about 1425 in central Italy (Siena, Florence) with works by Giovanni Marrasio, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, and

728 

 1 The European Tradition

Antonio Beccadelli. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, elegy became one of the most popular genres in Italy, the German Empire, France, and the Low Countries. Roman elegy of the Late Republic and Augustan eras (Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid) was conceived as a highly individual genre in which emotions and inner life in general played an important part; it is, however, not clear to what degree Roman elegies were meant to be autobiographical documents. The authors created a certain persona of the poet which surely contained some fictional elements. For example, the way in which love was perceived and defined in the elegies has unrealistic traits. It usually brings to the fore an exaggerated veneration by young noblemen of women who in fact were nothing more than courtesans or prostitutes. To early modern readers, the social particulars and unrealistic features of Roman elegies were not always clear. They were inclined to perceive elegy basically as an autobiographical genre. For the Roman poets, the main topic was love; for the early modern Latin poets, it was any autobiographical topic, or their whole life as such. In taking this approach, they were stimulated by the elegies of Ovid, although he represents a special case. This is due to the fact that he had been exiled by Emperor Augustus, allegedly as a punishment for his erotic elegies (Ars amatoria [The Art of Love (1929)]). From his exile in Constanza (in modern-day Romania), Ovid continued to write elegies, but they were henceforth ones of mourning and complaint. This, however, is the reason why so many early modern poets’ verse autobiographies seem to have been written in exile, although their authors were not banished: poets’ autobiographies from 1450 to 1700 usually tell the story of exiled persons. For example, Michael Marules (ca. 1448–1500), the Latin-speaking son of Greek immigrants, describes his life as the story of his exile; in his elegy De exilio suo [‘On his exile’] (1489/1490), he interprets his deplorable present state as a servant under an anonymous tyrant by the Black Sea as punishment for his failure to defend his fatherland of Constantinople against the Turks in 1453. Marules’s impressive self-portrait, however, is questionable, since in 1453 he had not even been born, and further, he had never been in Constantinople (a detailed analysis and bibliography in Enenkel 2008, 368–425). Another famous exile is Petrus Lotichius Secundus, who was not exiled either but described his participation in a military campaign by the Protestant prince Maurice of Hessen against Emperor Charles V in 1546 to 1547. In other autobiographies, Ovid’s exile is simply replaced by a journey or by a displacement from spot A to spot B. Sometimes exile is nothing but a mental, spiritual, or metaphorical category – man’s existence on earth, far from his heavenly fatherland; a change of lifestyle, or intellectual or religious environment; participation in a (civil or religious) war; or illness, poverty, or misery of any kind. The autobiographical ‘exile’ topic in the elegies of the Croatian/Hungarian humanist Janus Pannonius [Csezmiczei János] (1434–1472) is an amalgam of participation in a military campaign and a severe illness (tuberculosis), which led to his death at young age. The exile in the verse autobiography (1565) of the German Calvinist poet, preacher, and theologian Joannes Fabricius Montanus [Hans Schmid] (1527–1566) is in fact his second home-

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 729

town in Switzerland, Zurich, where he was educated and where he studied, married, and found employment (a detailed analysis and bibliography in Enenkel 2008, 575– 618). ­Fabricius’s case is especially illuminating, since he also composed a prose autobiography in the same year. If one compares these writings it seems as if they depicted two different people. For example, in the prose autobiography Fabricius is anything but a miserable exile – he is a successful and self-confident person.

Commentarii Not many Latin autobiographies of early modern times use Caesar’s Commentarii (58–51/50 BCE; 48/47 BCE) [The Gallic War (1917); Civil War (2016)] as their literary example: probably the most famous, impressive, and extended one does: Pope Pius II’s [Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s] Commentarii, written during his papacy (1458–1464) (a detailed analysis and bibliography in Enenkel 2008, 300–329). In a marked difference from Caesar, Pius dedicates the first book of his work to the story of his life from his childhood on (until his election as pope [1406–1458]). In his Commentarii, Caesar considered this as entirely irrelevant. This alone proves Pius’s new understanding of the genre of ‘commentarii’ as essentially autobiographical. The narrative of the other books of his Commentarii treats the political and military events the author partook in as pope, and his travels, ambitions (especially the preparations for a crusade against the Turks), speeches, and personal impressions. The narrative also comprises, among other things, extended descriptions of Italian towns and regions. Furthermore, the work is an interesting fusion of various genres: among other things, it contains a large number of quotations and epic scenes from Vergil’s Aeneid. Pius identified with Aeneas, the hero of the Aeneid and founder of Rome, and he presents his campaigns in Italy, especially his preparations for a crusade, as epic deeds, and himself as the founder of the modern papacy, in which the pope reigns like a king in a territorial state.

Autobiography in Suetonian Style With his De vita Caesarum [Lives of the Caesars (1914)], the Roman scholar and imperial secretary Suetonius (ca. 70–122 CE) invented a special type of biography which avoids long narrative but consists of short chapters on certain topics and aspects of the person being described: for example, eating habits, bodily peculiarities, conversation and the use of certain phrases, cruelty, sexual life, etc. It is partly the fact that it could include the smallest details, partly its ‘imperial’ pretentions that made this type of writing interesting for autobiography. In fact, Renaissance Latin Suetonian autobiography already started with Petrarch’s Epistola posteritati [‘Letter to posterity’]

730 

 1 The European Tradition

(ca. 1370). Petrarch links, for example, his date of birth with that of Emperor Augustus, and compares his humble origin with Augustus’s. Petrarch’s imperial attitude may have originated in his coronation as poet laureate in 1341. Of course, such pretentions may turn out to be tricky to execute. The scholar, medical doctor, and natural philosopher Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) goes less for imperial pretentions and more for an extremely detailed manner of describing his personality. His autobiography, De vita sua [The Book of my Life (1930)], is an intriguing fusion of genres and discourses: he mixes Suetonian biography with precise medical diagnoses, philosophical reflections (as in the Meditationes composed by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century CE), (medieval) astrology, and supernatural experiences (a detailed analysis and bibliography in Enenkel 2008, 641–669). Cardano divides his autobiography into fifty-two mostly ‘Suetonian’ chapters. Especially interesting is Cardano’s emphasis on bodily aspects: in a sense, he considers his autobiography the history of his illnesses; illnesses and peculiarities of the body, of course, may shape a person. Similar to Suetonius, Cardano devotes one chapter to a chronological narrative: in Suetonius’s work, this is limited to the subject’s life until the first day of his emperorship; in Cardano’s Vita it comprises his whole life until the date of composition. Cardano’s autobiography is not least meant as a rhetorical self-defence against accusations of the Roman inquisition. The detailed analytical approach of Suetonian autobiography enabled him to display a maximum of evidence and credibility.

Works Cited Augustine. Confessions. Books 1–8. Trans. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Caesar. The Gallic War. Trans. H.J. Edwards. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917. Caesar. Civil War. Ed. and trans. Cynthia Damon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. Cardano, Girolamo. Vita. Milano: Gio. Battista Sonzogno, 1821 [The Book of my Life. Trans. Jean Stoner. New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1930]. Cardano, Girolamo. De propria vita liber, ex bibliotheca Gabrielis Naudaci. Adjecto hac secunda editione de praeceptis ad filios libello. Amsterdam: Johannes Ravestein, 1654. Conversino da Ravenna, Giovanni. Rationarium vite. Ed. V. Nason. Florenz: Olschki, 1986. Enenkel, Karl A.E. “A Critical Edition of Petrarch’s Epistola Posteritati with an English Translation.” Modelling the Individual. Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance. Ed. Karl A.E. Enenkel, Betsy de Jong-Crane and Peter Liebregts. Leiden: Brill, 1998. 243–281. Enenkel, Karl A.E. Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. Fabricius Montanus, Ioannes. “Ioannes Fabricius Montanus. Die beiden lateinischen Autobiographien.” Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur [Mainz], Geistesund Sozialwissenschaftliche Klasse. Ed. Siegmar Döpp. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998. 34–38 (Prosaautobiographie), 39–45 (Dichterautobiographie). Iunius, Franciscus. Vita Nobilis et eruditi viri Francisci Iunii, S. Theologiae Doctoris et in Academia Lugdunensi Professoris dignissimi, ab ipso nuper conscripta, in lucem vero edita ab Paullo G.F.P.N. Merula, Iurisconsulti, Historiarum ibidem enarratore. Praeter alia commemorantur hic

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 731

infinita notatu digna, quae Belgicorum tumultuum inciderunt in anno LXVI et sequentes. Ed. Paullus Merula. Leiden: Franciscus Raphelengius, 1595. Marullus, Michael. Carmina. Ed. Alessandro Perosa. Zürich: Artemis, 1951. Ovid. Art of Love. Cosmetics. Remedies for Love. Ibis. Walnut-tree. Sea Fishing. Consolation. Trans. J.H. Mozley. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929. Petrarca, Francesco. The Life of Solitude. Trans. Jacob Zeitlin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1924. Petrarca, Francesco. Bucolicum carmen. Ed. and trans. Tonino T. Mattucci. Pisa: Giardini, 1971. Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch’s Book Without a Name. Trans. Norman P. Zacour. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973. Petrarca, Francesco. Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarum libri). Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo. 3 vols. Albany: Italica Press, 1975–1985. Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch. Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri). Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo. Baltimore: Italica Press, 1992. Petrarca, Francesco. My Secret Book. Ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann. London: Harvard University Press, 2016. Piccolomini, Enea Silvio. Pii Secundi pontificis maximi Commentarii. Ed. Ibolya Bellus and Iván Boronkai. 2 vols. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 1993–1994. Seneca. Epistles. 3 vols. Trans. Richard M. Gummere. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917–1925. Suetonius. Lives of the Caesars. 2 vols. Trans. J.C. Rolfe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914.

Further Reading Arnold, Klaus, Sabine Schmolinsky, and Urs Martin Zahnd, eds. Das dargestellte Ich. Selbst­zeug­ nisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit. Bochum: Winkler, 1999. Bernheiden, Inge. Individualität im 17. Jahrhundert. Studien zum autobiographischen Schrifttum. Frankfurt a.  M. et al.: Lang, 1988. Enenkel, Karl, and Claus Zittel, eds. Die Vita als Vermittlerin von Wissenschaft und Werk. Form- und Funktionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu frühneuzeitlichen Biographien von Gelehrten, Wissenschaftlern, Schriftstellern und Künstlern. Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2013. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Guglielminetti, Marziano. Memoria e scrittura. L’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini. Turin: Enaudi, 1977. Lumme, Christoph. Höllenfleisch und Heiligtum. Der menschliche Körper im Spiegel autobiogra­phi­ scher Texte des 16. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 1996. Price Zimmermann, Thomas C. “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance.” Renaissance. Studies in Honour of Hans Baron. Ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi. Florence: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971. 119–140. Velten, Hans R. Das selbst geschriebene Leben. Eine Studie zur deutschen Autobiographie im 16. Jahrhundert. Heidelberg: Winter, 1995.

1.3.2 Autobiographies in the Vernacular Karin Westerwelle

The Generic Notion Testimonies “of the growth in Western civilisation of man’s awareness of personality” (Misch 1998 [1907], vii; see Gusdorf 1956, 105–106) discuss the I, the self or the subject, one’s own life or personality, in an overarching retrospective. Consequently, they narrate retrospectively, i.  e. in an introspective form qua ‘memoria’. The narrating I seeks knowledge of self (expressed in the catch phrases ‘nosce te ipsum’ [know yourself] and ‘intus, et in cute’ [inward, and under the skin]) or takes account of itself as self and presents that self to others. Autobiographies connect a historical relation to reality with a process of linguistic ‘Gestaltung’ [expression]. It merges the selection and organisation of experiences and events with interpretation and evaluation in a narrative literary form. The presence of the self as a speaker on behalf of him or herself and narrative sequences are thus the defining characteristics of autobiography. The corresponding kinds of documents, a field of research for several subjects in the humanities, were variously labelled from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance period and up to the eighteenth century. ‘Autobiography’ was a neglected genre in the Middle Ages (Briesemeister et al. 2002, 1262; Zumthor 1975, 165–180; Zink 1985, 127–170). As regards the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, a difference, however blurry, must be made between casual autobiographical testimonies, which can also be included in other works, and actual autobiographical writings, which unfold a continuous narration. Early modern autobiographical writing comprises a plethora of different genres as recent research has established for the case of English auto­biography (Seelig 2006; Smyth 2010): ‘memoirs’, ‘commentarii’ [memoirs], ‘letters’, ‘vitae’ [life descriptions], ‘journals’, ‘logbooks’, ‘travelogues’, ‘portraits’ and other writings with various titles, including Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1592) Essais (1580, 1588, 1595) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–1778) Confessions (since 1782), both of which became generic models.

Historical Discursive Contexts The definition of autobiography as a genre through which writers reflect on their life or their historico-biographical self as a subject of writing and which attempts to fathom the self through narrative structures (i.  e. through “cohérence logique” [‘logical coherence’] and “rationalisation” [‘rationalisation’] [Gusdorf 1956, 117]) must explicate the notions of subject, self, individual, person, self-consciousness and self-assertion https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-091

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 733

(Taylor 1989), all of which are social constructs. Without a doubt, the grammatical pronoun ‘I’ in medieval texts does not have the same semantic and epistemological content that it acquired in different ways between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries (Zumthor 1975, 165–180; Cave 1999, 111–127). There are two basic interpretative perspectives: the self writing about itself relates to the spiritual and religious spheres and considers itself and earthly life as grounded in divine transcendence or it prefers to affirm and describe his or her historical existence in a wordly, profane sphere and thus as an actor in the political and social world. Whereas in the first case memory and introspection are directed towards God and the time of the hereafter, in the latter case the self remembers the space of experience of lived history and establishes a new kind of continuity in the act of recording, namely the transcendence of life and the creation of posthumous fame via the writing of the self. It is obvious that the cultural availability of the literary text is valorized in a new manner through the act of the recording of the self and the intentional orientation to posterity. From the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, the importance of religiously motivated introspection fades despite its revival in the sixteenth-century Reformation, the pervasive influence of the Jesuits and French Jansenism and English Puritanism in the seventeenth century as well as the German Pietism of the eighteenth century. At the same time, the retrospective consideration of the individual’s historical life and the concomitant justification and affirmation of the self or the invention of subjectivity within the framework of contingent worldly existence gains importance. There do not seem to have been purely autobiographical texts in England up to the middle of the seventeenth century. Calvinistic and Puritan culture in England demanded permanent self-control and was conducive to the genesis of autobiographical writing (John Bunyan in 1666), which relates even the most trivial, mundane details of the individual’s life to the working of divine grace. Bedford, Davis and Kelly define ‘selfhood’ as “a fascinating composite, shifting between the spiritual and the mundane” (2006, 2). Taylor states that [f]rom Bunyan to Pepys to Boswell, and arguably even to Rousseau, the Protestant culture of introspection becomes secularized as a form of confessional autobiography, while at the same time helping to constitute the new form taken by the English novel in the eighteenth century at the hands of Defoe, Richardson, and others (Taylor 1989, 184).

The differentiation of public and political life which emerged during the Renaissance at the courts and in the cities with their institutions, a process fuelled by the humanist ideal of human self-affirmation, was essential for the emergence of autobiographical genres in the Romance (Western Mediterranean) world. Even those authors who record their individual journeys and achievements more often than not in exile or even in a state of bodily deficiency do not look back on a solitary life, but rather on a life ripe with experiences in courtly, religious, political and artistic centres of power and influence. The rise and increasing public distribution of autobiographical texts coincide with a stronger emphasis on the individual, which can be seen in the practice of sig-

734 

 1 The European Tradition

natures and portrait painting. The specific human achievement, man’s exceptional status, based on his faculty of ‘inventio’ in the ‘artes’ and in literature, has been explicated as an ordering model under the paradigm of the ‘imitation of nature’ by Hans Blumenberg (1957), who, however, drew more on philosophical than literary texts as sources. The valorisation of feasibility, transformation and invention of the new grants the self access to the malleable space of history. The description of exterior features, of the body and face as characteristics of unique individuality, gains importance and breaks away from the theory of the bodily humors, the type, the character and the topical. Moreover, the analytical representation of interiority with its rational, intellectual and with its imaginative, creative powers together with the new category of the genius understood as a mark of the individual and as a creative potential of man, the critical elucidation of affects and emotionality, including pathological aspects, gains ground. Going beyond the mentioning of honourable parents, the transformation of the self into writing is now more often concerned with its walk of life since childhood and youth. Likewise, the (literary, artistic, religious or philosophical) formation of the mind in its social and historical context, as the setting which decides over success or failure, emerges as a formative influence on the self. The notion of fortuna and the influence of the stars as opposed to God and divine providence as the governors of worldly affairs, gain importance as explanatory models for unexpected events, surprising turns and the vicissitudes of human life. Teleology is opposed to new strategies of coping with chance and sheer contingency. Autobiographical texts seem to gain ground during the second half of the eighteenth century. Their emergence seems to be linked with bourgeois society and with increasing temporalization, the “Historicizing of the self, 1770–1830” (Burke 2011). If one accepts the (heuristic) thesis prominent in the history of ideas according to which early Italian Humanism and the Renaissance led to the discovery of man, then human self-assertion faces new crises and challenges in the sixteenth century. Clashes of the old and the new take place in the context of confessional strife and religious wars, which lead to the rise of the concept of ‘liberté de conscience’, i.  e. the freedom of conscience and consciousness, which slowly asserts itself against exterior forces and violence as a category of interiority (Westerwelle 2013) and which is transformed from a “pure opération psychique” [‘purely psychic operation’] into a “règle éthique” [‘ethical rule’] (Le Goff 2001, 21); furthermore, the reception of ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism, even before Descartes, opens rationalistic and scientific truths to doubt; in addition, with the discovery of the New World and the concomitant relativization of the world picture and knowledge of Antiquity, the figure of the savage or cannibal – who, as the barbarian in ancient literature, serves to differentiate between the self and the other – appears on the horizon; finally, the invention of printing with moveable type allows the fast and wide circulation of writing and written documents, in which the linguistic and symbolic representation of the individual as ‘homme illustre’ (Bonnet 1998) gains pace, thus superseding the ‘grand homme’ characterized by physical prowess. In the sixteenth century, natural science revolutionizes the geocen-

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 735

tric world picture. The Copernican revolution deprives man of his exceptional place in the cosmic order. In the seventeenth century, Absolutism and the reign of local princes solidify political structures of administration. The wars of religion destabilise European countries. The primacy of the religious and theological explanation of the world and man’s comfortable metaphysical place are called into question in the journalistic and political public sphere of the Enlightenment, which ultimately leads to the abolition of the Estates in the French Revolution. As a result, the individual’s role in society is set in motion. Symbolic representation via signs, symbols and rituals is destroyed and replaced by money and capital as unified markers of social distinction. If early modern history is understood as an intensified calling into question of metaphysical and religious pictures of the world and the self, then man’s narration about himself brings about a secularization of the religious structure of ‘confessio’, which allows the self to situate itself with respect to its creator God in the consciousness of sin and imperfection and to define itself as either elected or more or less dramatically condemned. New forms of self-care and self-control (Foucault) replace the old structures; the self-empowerment of man freed from religious structures makes self-justification, the establishment of order and sense, more difficult. New justifications and fortifications of the self are innovatively manifested in the milieu of Italian merchant and family books, especially in Florence, starting in the thirteenth century. However, the main concern in the autobiographies is to present and assert artistic, literary or scientific talents and achievements. Along with a sizeable range of memoirs by female authors (e.  g. Marguerite de Navarre), the mystic and spiritual life narratives of women (e.  g. Teresa of Avila) play an important role. Montaigne occupies an exceptional position. He does not emphasize the exemplary, the general or the edificatory as models of life, but he depicts the changing self, which explores its own idiosyncrasy and which must come to terms with this knowledge of a self irreducible to any general order of thought. Montaigne innovatively grounds the self’s assurance in the linguistic and aesthetic process of assuring himself of himself via representing himself through writing. In classical idealistic philosophy, determinations of the self are corroborated by self-justifications in the discourse of courtly love or by inventions of the self couched in assuring family constellations, but also by relations to transcendence and to the philosophy of history. Autobiographical narratives contain structures of secular justification. The repudiation of guilt and the defense against public failure favour the representation of private and personal interiority, artistic self-assertion or philosophical and scientific discoveries in the pursuit of posthumous fame. Fair judgement about the legitimacy of a life is thus left to posterity (see Girolamo Cardano, Benvenuto Cellini and especially Rousseau). Typical forms of self-description, which borrow from religious, hagiographical or legendary stylizations of the individual, dissolve to an increasing extent in the period spanning the late Middle Ages to the end of the Ancien Régime. Restrictions as to what can be said, the demand to depict an exemplary life and to fight self-love, the ‘amor proprius’, recede and make room for the representation of an individual, flawed, even immoral,

736 

 1 The European Tradition

non-exemplary self. In other words, the intimate private sphere gains ground in a public context, even though restrictions, precepts and inhibitions remain valid and are reflected upon well into modern times.

Self-love (amor proprius) and Self-belittlement The representation of the self was subjected to strict rules in Antiquity, in the Middle Ages and in Early Modern times. Man is obliged to God and society in different ways according to the times and must efface his own self lest he fall into improper self-love or hubris. Traditionally, the self must only be emphasized in so far as it serves the common good, and as long as rhetorical decorum is respected. According to Aristotle (rhet. 1418b, 16), it is necessary to resort to ‘prosopopoiia’, i.  e. “to introduce a different speaker” to avoid disgust, tedious digressiveness and resentment. In his Convivio [The Banquet], written between 1303 and 1306, Dante (1265–1321) invokes the rhetorical rule to censure the self and adds to it the concept of ‘self-love’: “E ancora la propria loda e lo proprio biasimo è da fuggire […]; però che non è uomo che sia di sè vero e giusto misuratore, tanto la propria caritate ne ’nganna” [‘Furthermore, praise and reproach of oneself are to be shunned for the same reason (…); because there is no man who is a truthful and just judge of himself, self-love deceives him’] (Dante 1996, I, ii). The self’s poor judgment of itself is caused by the ‘amor proprius’, which blinds and leads to hubris and vanity. Love thwarts the right measure if it is not directed towards God and one’s fellow creatures. As Dante points out, speech about the self is only to be permitted if it provides a cautionary model and an edifying example, as in the case of Augustine, or if it averts unjustified shame or calumny (Guglielminetti 1977). It is one of the topoi of autobiographical texts to address the accusation of an unbecoming speech motivated by self-love as well as the self’s lack of judgment concerning itself (see Girolamo Cardano, De vita propria [written at the end of his life, 1501–1576, published posthumously by Gabriel Naudé in 1643] [Buck 1967, 13] as cited by Grafton: “cum difficillimum sit de seipso recte loqui posse” [‘because it is very difficult to talk appropriately about oneself’] [1999, 351]). The use of the third person singular in the memoirs of the seventeenth century (Garapon 2003, 121) creates distance, in keeping with the principle of ‘honnêteté’ (‘aptum’). Giambattista Vico and Vittorio Alfieri also resort to this grammatical form in their lives. Rousseau splits speech about himself up into different roles (Rousseau juge de Jean Jaques [sic], Dialogues [Rousseau 1959]). Michel Foucault (see Teuber 2004) begins his Histoire de la sexualité with a presentation of the hazards of self-representation. The reproach of uselessness and idleness connected with self-representation emphasizes a fundamental element of culture: as is pointed out in ancient rhetoric, writing has to be considered a social act (Beaujour 1980, 13–14). It is supposed to convince, deter, rebuke and praise. Autobiographical subjectivity threatens to elude these functions. For this reason, Michel de Montaigne

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 737

turns against his readers and their interests with a brash and surprising ‘volta’ in the preface to his Essais, precisely because he judges his self-reflexivity (“je suis moymesme la matiere de mon livre” [Montaigne 2007, 27] [‘I am myself the matter of the book’] [Montaigne 1965, 2]) as a threat to his own writing, anticipating it as ‘devoid of interest’, as vain. As stipulated at the fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the demands for self-scrutiny and control of conscience oblige all Catholics to go to confession. It is of great importance for European history and the prevailing types of self-consciousness that the exploration of the self was institutionalised as an obligatory task in connection with the confession of guilt (Hahn 1987, 18–19). About the same time in the thirteenth century, trials by ordeal were discouraged by Canon Law in favour of the principle of inquisition and procedures of confession, testimony and documentary evidence (Doering 2017). Knowledge, conscience and consciousness are formed in the conjunction of law and theology, of external social control and punishment, which exercise an influence on body and soul. The pious practice of confession, jurisdiction and the Inquisition attempt to discipline not only men’s deeds but also their inner life (Pirillo 2003). Radically new religious movements such as the Franciscans with Francis of Assisi or the reformed religions, Jesuitism, Jansenism, Puritanism and Pietism bring about stricter or newly founded modes for the examination of one’s conscience and interiority, which plunge autobiographical writing into an existential, spiritual drama of guilt, sin and transgression or, in other words, which open up a dialectic of free will and obligation or, rather, coercion. The transgressions of the mortal sins, ‘superbia’ [pride], ‘ira’ [wrath], ‘invidia’ [envy], ‘avaritia’ [avarice], ‘luxuria’ [fornication], ‘gula’ [gluttony] and ‘accidia’ [sloth], provide the structure and the narrative scheme for self-scrutiny and increased political self-control. Petrarch’s autobiographical letter, Posteritati [Letter of Posterity], the so-called ‘libri di famiglia’ [‘family record books’] (Weiand 1993), the mystical writings of Santa Teresa of Avila (1979, 180; Teuber 2004) and, in a somewhat different way, Rousseau’s exploration of his behaviour and sexuality (Starobinski 1971) are all examples of how confession generates a discourse conducive to the development of self-reflexion. Only few autobiographical texts (Montaigne, Casanova) are completely free from self-accusation, from the self-reproach of moral and ethical guilt, confessions of misbehaviour towards relatives and friends or society or are not subjected to the question and structure of justification and self-legitimation. Memoirs, which reconstruct historical and political contexts, also seem to be at a great remove from religious and theological language and from its notions such as ‘error’, ‘guilt’ etc. They testify to the emergence of a consciousness of life which differs from the rest of society (see Philippe de Commynes, the Cardinal of Retz). However, the literary confession of guilt, of ‘contritio’, as well as of the experience of pain, offers the possibility of self-enjoyment, such as in the cases of Petrarch and, later, Rousseau, and thus of a narcissistic hubris. In the first novella of the Decameron, dealing with the notary and liar Cepperello who turns into a (pseudo-) saint by making a (mendacious) ‘confessio’, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) throws

738 

 1 The European Tradition

light on the potential of dissimulation, which turns the ‘confessio’ into a lie disguised by deceptive speech, thus leading to the creation of a masking ‘persona’. Actual or dissimulating obsequiousness to the norm, the critique of prevailing practice and the escape from the norm are the field of experimentation for the self representing itself through writing. Most notably, the moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries investigate the courtly practice of representation in their autobiographical texts and attempt to invent an adequate language located beyond lie and dissimulation. The freedom to consider the self situated in transitory time from a non-theological perspective is already assumed by Montaigne in his Essais, which provoked criticism by Pascal and censure in Spain. Anyone who distinguishes himself by standing out as an individual violates religious rules because his self-love leads him to elevate himself unseemingly before God and society. Blaise Pascal’s (1623–1662) sharp proverbial saying about the despicable self (“Le moi est haïssable” [‘The self is hateful’] [Pascal 1977, 351]) is aimed at Montaigne and criticises the autonomy of the representation of a self situated outside of religious ties, whereas the authority of religion and God allow the integration of the self into society or offer the possibility of creating a space of conversation, a public sphere which excludes the weak self and its mental states. Pascal eschews the courtly behavioural codes of the ‘honnête homme’ and chooses Christian piety which obliterates the self and sublates it in God, while the sophisticated court culture at least succeeds in concealing and suppressing it. Anyone who says ‘I’ is suspicious of violating social norms regarding rhetoric, religious piety and the public sphere. It is true that Rousseau adopts theological and liturgical patterns in the title of his Confessions as well as in the rhetorical gesture of offering his book to God’s judgment. However, he does not subject himself to the Christian model of confession, but creates his own imperative of self-representation and self-analysis, as is already evident in the motto “Intus, et in cute” [‘Inward, and under the skin’.] (Rousseau 1959, 5). As Marcel Raymond [1959, xii] sums it up, the self is worthy to be loved for Rousseau (“Pour Rousseau, le moi est aimable”). The paradigmatic change lies in Rousseau’s explicit intention to generate the author’s deserved and sure posthumous fame through the reading public of posterity.

Kinds of Autobiographical Texts Memoirs, which developed in the Northern Italian merchant milieu, many of which are preserved from thirteenth to fifteenth century Florence, called ‘ricordi’, ‘ricordanze’ or ‘libri di famiglia’ (Weiand 1993; Burke 2004), give accounts of family, trade, city and chronicles and also, in more or less detail, about the author himself. A famous example of these family and memoir books, which can be traced back to account books, the ‘libri contabili’, was produced by the rich Florentine merchant and patron of art Giovanni Rucellai (1403–1481). It is written in different hands and was com-

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 739

pleted with notes and additions by Rucellai himself. Begun in the summer of 1457 in San Giminiano, to which the author had retired with his family during a plague epidemic, it is intended to pass on worthwhile things to his two sons. Giovanni Rucellai (2013, 5) calls the work a “Zibaldone quaresimale” [‘motley pasticcio’], “una insalata di più erbe” (‘a mixed salad’). It contains quotations from ancient and contemporary authors, but also letters (e.  g. by Marsilio Ficino). The individual faculties of ‘prudenza’ [prudence], ‘saggezza’ [wisdom], ‘virtù’ [virtue], which have to deal with fickle fortune in merchants’ affairs, have, as Alessandro Perosa (2000, 147) underscores, no clear humanistic and ethical value, but are oriented towards material profit. Rucellai relates godly fortuna to Princes’ claims to power and thus risks comparing divine and profane things. Key notions which constitute the grandeur of Renaissance man according to Burckhardt, do not exclusively abide by a humanist ethos, but are valued pragmatically. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a sizeable range of ‘mémoires’ is written in Ancien Régime France (Kuperty-Tsur 2001; Kleber 1999). These texts, e.  g. by the Cardinal of Retz (1613–1679), the Grande Mademoiselle (1627–1693) or Saint-Simon (1675–1755), were not intended for publication in their authors’ lifetime and allowed them to pass comment on the king in a free and confidential manner, in competition with official historiography. These texts offer the opportunity of confidential official historiography. The emergence of memoir literature replaces medieval historiography and bears witness to a new social class, lettered aristocrats who are unable or unwilling to distinguish themselves by feats of arms. Influenced by the humanist ideal, aristocrats take it on themselves to give accounts of themselves and their deeds and to convey them to posterity. Unlike medieval chronicles and annals, ‘mémoires’ are distinguished by the fact “d’avoir été écrit par leur protagoniste en personne et de se consacrer à leur récit de vie” [‘that they have been written by the protagonist in question and that they are dedicated to their account of life’] (Kuperty-Tsur 2001, 66). With these ‘mémoires’, the aristocracy corroborates its claim to social rank, e.  g. the aristocratic ethos of genealogy. The records are employed as justification in court, they illustrate the heroism of the individual and of his family. The memoirs open up a space of free, uncensored speech. Many are addressed to a small readership, children and family. Thus, the Protestant poet Agrippa d’Aubigné enjoins his children to produce no more than two manuscript copies of his Sa vie à ses enfants [‘His Life for His Children’]. Many of the manuscripts of memoirs were first published in the nineteenth century. Philippe de Commynes’s (1447–1511) Mémoires, begun in 1489 in the prison of Loches during a period of temporary banishment from court, are apologetic in nature, an attempt to justify his betrayal of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and his entering into the service of Louis XI of France. However, the reader is also fascinated by Commynes’s compelling clarity, his acute consciousness of the duration of states and of the king’s well-being. Like the less well known sixteenth and seventeenth century instances of the genre, Commynes’s memoirs combine historical narrative with the depiction of a ‘career of life’ (Gusdorf 1990). In the German-speaking area, the Lebens-

740 

 1 The European Tradition

beschreibung Herrn Götzens von Berlichingen [‘Description of the life of the knight Götz von Berlichingen’], written in 1557 and first printed in Nürnberg in 1731, is an example of a narration of feats of arms and an apologetic self-narrative, which defends the knight’s autonomy against the dawning reordering to be brought about by Roman Law. Just as the narration of general history is to be differentiated from the (auto) biographical narrative of the self, the exposition of objective, general time (‘histoire’ in narratological terminology) is to be differentiated from the specific temporality of memoirs (‘récit’). The autobiographical emerges from the narrative modelling of time structures, as they are the confluence of interpretation, analysis, causality and judgement, thus bringing about a new division and ordering of temporal events, which are the result of later understanding and thus forming the experiencing self and the narrating self as two separate entities. The retreat from the political and historical field to the study and the act of writing create a virtual space, in which the memoir writer analyzes the field of politics and power from which he was excluded. A great deal of memoirs end with the concurrence of the time of the narrated events and the current moment of writing; other memoirs simply break off. The concept of ‘mémoires’ has a long history. Rousseau, who does not use the term ‘autobiography’, is asked by his publisher and other correspondents to write his “mémoires particuliers” [‘individual memoirs’] (Raymond 1959, xxiii), while he himself refers to his Confessions as memoirs (Rousseau 1959, 569). Artists from the period of Italian Humanism write about their works, their craft and their persons in commentarii, a genre related to memoirs. Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378– 1455) created the first autobiographical portraits in his Commentarii (written between 1447 and 1455). His bronze portrait on the Gates of Paradise of the Florence Baptistery (Bergdolt 1998, 35), underscores the importance of the artistic individual. Just as Dante situates the ancient poets in the paradise-like limbo, the sculptor distinguishes himself through his art. Ghiberti’s head, which protrudes from a round opening, appears in the urban, architectural space, which was partly created by himself. The portrait as a signature appears in the sacred, symbolic space of Paradise. In this medial figuration, which connects urban architecture, spaces of piety and the artistic field, it creates a specific effect, which emphasizes the value of his artistic achievement. Letters, including those with fictional addressees, deal with the experiences of the self. Like almost all of his works, Petrarch’s Latin letters, especially the letter adressed to posterity, the Posteritati, and the letter relating the ascension of the Mount Ventoux, give much room to “the reflection of the self and to the expression of subjectivity” (Kessler 1983, 21). Along with the autobiographical letters of the Humanists Erasmus – who wished to be portrayed by Dürer (Schweikert 1999) – and Guillaume Budé (1459– 1540), who was portrayed by the royal painter Jean Clouet – those written by Mme de Sévigné (1626–1696), which Proust refers to in his novels because of their autobiographical nature, must be mentioned in this context. Anticipating his Confessions, Rousseau paints an “admirable portrait lyrique” (Raymond 1959, xxii) of himself in his four Lettres à Malesherbes [Letters to Malesherbes] from January 1762 (Rousseau 1959,

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 741

569). He had originally planned a letter collection with himself as the main subject (“de parler principalement de moi” [Raymond 1959, xxi]). Portraits (as ‘ritratto’, as ‘autoritratto’), which have always been current on coins and as portraits of the emperors, precede a work, a book or a manuscript as a small genre of self-characterization, e.  g. in the form of a prologue or miniature (Peters 2008). They connect authorial self-representation as a function of the prologue with the autobiographical self. Contemporaneous with the rise of the portrait as a genre of the visual arts in the fourteenth century (Gaucher-Rémond and Garapon 2013, Pommier 1998) as well as with the sixteenth-century semantic shift of the word, which no longer designates the representation of all objects, including inanimate things, e.  g. the ‘ritratto’ or ‘portrait’ of a town, autobiographical writing adapts and enhances the portrait-like, descriptive evocation of the outer and inner man and applies the metaphor of painting and drawing to this way of writing (see “car c’est moy que je peins” [“for it is myself that I portray”] [Montaigne 2007, 27 (1965, 2)]). Portrait engravings of Montaigne were first included in the Essais as late as 1608. Their authenticity is a matter of debate. The difference between pictorial and textual representation is a theme in Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1528) pictures. It points to the level of reflection of semiotic procedures, the differing potential of text and image to represent interior and exterior views of the sitter (Schmid 1999). Descartes employs the painting metaphor in his Discours de la méthode [Discourse on the Method], published anonymously in 1637, to describe his plan to represent his life (“comme en un tableau” [“as a picture”] [Descartes 1967, 4 (1975, 83)]). Rousseau emphasizes the uniqueness of his self-portrait in the preface to his Confessions: “Voici le seul portrait d’homme, peint exactement d’après nature et dans toute sa vérité, qui existe et qui probablement existera jamais” [‘This is the only portrait of a man painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth, that exists and probably the only one that will ever exist’] (Rousseau 1959, 3). Contrasting the self-portrait with the chronological, narrative unfolding of autobiography, Beaujour calls it a “déploiement logique, assemblage ou bricolage d’éléments […] thématiques” [‘logic deployment, assemblage or composition of elements’] (1980, 8–9) exemplified by such texts as Montaigne’s Essais, Cardano’s De vita propria or Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire [The Rêveries of the Solitary Walker]. Thus, the self-portrait is not characterized by syntagmatic narrative, but by discontinuous arrangement. The title ‘The Life of’/‘Das Leben von’/’La Vita di’/’La Vida de’ is very common. It labels a hybrid genre, which comprises biographical and autobiographical records as well as the fictional events in novels. In the Christian tradition of hagiography, lives of the saints are models for religious and spiritual life writing. Many of these legends and patterns can be found in the Legenda aurea compiled by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine (1228/1229–1298), which was widely read across Europe. Religious lives evoke the experience of vocation by an epiphany or by divine signs and provide a narrative of conversion. Despite their historical frame, the elements of divine, providential guidance (stigmatization) and of the miraculous are included in the life of Saint Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226). Elements of hagiography are, however, also

742 

 1 The European Tradition

included in Dante’s Vita nuova, which is situated in an urban laic setting, or in the life of Benvenuto Cellini. In the Humanist reception of Antiquity, Plutarch’s (ca. 45–120 CE) Parallel Lives remain an important model for the depiction of great or outstanding personalities up to 1800. Collections of literary portraits of so-called ‘de viris illustribus’ are produced by the early Humanists (Petrarch, Boccaccio), but the ‘great men’ are also represented in urban fresco cycles. The pervasive influence of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, fostered by translations into the vernacular (Sühnel 1993), extends to autobiographical works from Montaigne to Cellini and up to Rousseau. Montaigne appreciates Plutarch and other historians who write biographies (“escrivent les vies”) and who are more interested in inner motivations than in external events (Montaigne 2007, 437). Contrary to Plutarch, Caesar was too reticent in talking about himself (“trop espargnant à parler de soy” [Montaigne 2007, 437]) and the simple historians are unable to reveal themselves in their reports (“dequoy y mesler quelque chose du leur” [Montaigne 2007, 437]). With this remark Montaigne captures the interpretative and analytical scope of the subjective, autobiographical mode which differs from the simple historical recording of facts. The autobiographer’s increasing attention on his inner life is reflected in semantic change: the meaning of the notion of ‘history’ shifts from the exterior to the interior world, the importance of the chronological unfolding of action has been transfered to the invisible ‘history of the human mind’. At the beginning of his Discours de la méthode Descartes prudently announces his project: “Mais, ne proposant cet escrit que comme une histoire, ou, si vous l’aimez mieux, que comme une fable” [“But regarding this Treatise simply as a history, or, if you prefer it, a fable”] (Descartes 1967, 4 [1975, 83]); the English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) writes “the history of my own mind” (1961, 83) in his autobiography; William Wordsworth’s Prelude (1799, 1805 [1850]), usually considered an autobiographical document, is “the history of the Author’s mind” (Wordsworth 1969, 244). Rousseau writes the “histoire de son âme” (Rousseau 1959, 903, also xxiii), down to the last detail, as he constantly reminds his reader (1959, 902). The increasing dissemination of biographies has an impact on autobiographical writing, sometimes it also provokes rivalry between the genres. As can be seen in Petrarch’s Posteritati, biographical life and autobiographical life are related in their intended effect. Petrarch wishes to convey an author’s portrait to his future readers written not by a biographer’s alien hand but by himself. As later in Rousseau’s prefaces, the writer’s authentification via the prologue and the autobiographical text coincide in the case of Petrarch. The more detailed representation of the author and his work in prologues and autobiographical writing can be understood as a steady ‘amplificatio’ of the author’s mention in the spraghis (i.  e. in the more or less open mentioning of the author’s name in the concluding poem), in the lyrical envoi (‘envoi’, ‘congedo’) cultivated by the troubadours and medieval poets, in bio-bibliographical notes or in the prologue to a text. The artists’ lives published by Giorgio Vasari (1511– 1574), beginning in 1550, incited and accelerated the self-writing of artists and writers such as Baccio Bandinelli and Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571). This interpenetration of

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 743

self and alien-authored vita continues into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Fetz 2009). Lives as histories of self and life narrate in a chronological and introspective mode, but also in mystic or meditative contemplation and analyse events, biographical ruptures, social exclusion, conversion experiences and the process of character formation. The confession, understood as a laudatory profession of faith in God and at the same time as a confession of guilt, frames a narrative structure of time. The life preceding and the life following the ‘conversio’ provide the subject with important interpretative patterns. This type of narrative can be found in religious as well as in profane autobiographies (sometimes entitled ‘vita’), such as those written by Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Cellini, Bunyan, Rousseau. Augustine’s Confessiones enjoy a long history of reception (Courcelle 1963), spanning from Abélard’s (1079–1142) Historia calamitatum (first printed in 1616), from early Humanism with Petrarch (see the Secretum and the letter narrating the ascension of the Mont Ventoux), the Spanish mystical tradition with Teresa of Avila (Teuber 2004, 62) and the Jansenism of Port-Royal (Courcelle 1963) to Rousseau’s Confessions. The religious interpretation of the self and the world, the ‘conversio’, is mediated by confession. A life crisis is followed by a conversion to true faith, however riddled with turning points and relapses. ‘Conversio’ is the transformation of the former life into a new life, of a prior state of existence into a new human being. In lay interpretations of the self and of the world sudden (non-religious) illuminations and crises mark a moment of conversion which leads to new knowledge or to a new way of life: Rousseau depicts the ‘illumination’ which occurred to him in October 1749, when he was on his way to visit the incarcerated Diderot in Vincennes as the scene of origin of his literary vocation (Starobinski 1971). The break with an old (philosophical) tradition and the invention of the new in autobiographical depictions of careers of learned men such as those written by Descartes, Giambattista Vico and Rousseau follows a lay model of ‘conversio’. These authors accuse public institutions or persons, justify and legitimize their own and the creative subject’s way, which diverges from tradition in scientific invention and tradition, thus founding something new. Margaret Cavendish’s A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life (1656) and John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding (1666) are important examples of seventeenth-century autobiographical self-depictions couched in closed narratives. Whereas in religious and spiritual lives introspection and self-analysis take place in relation to God, profane lives not bound to religion integrate an increasing amount of contemporary historical material (Burke 2011). The Spanish picaro novel with its satirical depiction of the social outcast resembles failed courses of life in society recorded by autobiographies such as Cellini’s Vita. The prologue to the Vita di Lazarillo de Tormes (1544) discusses this novel as a case history, not as a religious confession. A “caso” [‘case’] (Anonymus 1996, 10), as it is called in juridical terminology and alluding to the genre of the novella, is reported in detail and at the same time, an “entera noticia de mi persona” [‘complete account of my person’] (1996, 11) is given. As in France and Germany, the novel in eighteenth-cen-

744 

 1 The European Tradition

tury England takes up models of representation provided by autobiography. In Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), the experiencing self recedes as stuff of the narrative, while the first person narrator Tristram and his incoherent, erratic narration come to the fore. Sterne critically reflects and subverts (autobiographical) narration, which, according to Paul Ricoeur (1983, 105–162), forms a constellation, that is: a ‘story’ and the self, through the chronological ordering of events. The “failure of obsolete conventions of narration” in Tristram Shandy conveys the subject’s contingency (“the experience of being right in the middle of things” [Iser 1987, 74]). According to his own account, Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita was written between 1558 and 1566. The text was first circulated in manuscript form and edited in Naples only in 1728. An English translation published by Thomas Nugent in 1771 caught the attention of Goethe, who translated and published it in twelve parts in Schiller’s Horen. Goethe’s interest in Cellini’s autobiography anticipates Jacob Burckhardt’s interest in the Renaissance, which stemmed largely from Goethe’s translation of Cellini’s life (Hausmann 1997, 505). Cellini counts himself among the great men who possess ‘virtù’ and whose extraordinary skill and talent alone oblige them to give an account of their lives. At a later point in his career, his own grandeur falls into a crisis when Cellini no longer obtains commissions by Cosimo I de’ Medici. He now recognizes the reason for his writing his life to be his desperate personal situation and, as he interprets it, the pernicious influence of the stars. The crisis of the sculptor, who resides in Florence without commissions after the completion of his Perseus sculpture, is the reason for autobiographical account (Guglielminetti 1977, 293–386). One of the most famous episodes in the Vita is the casting of the group of Perseus with the Head of Medusa, a 3.2 meter-high bronze sculpture exhibited in the Loggia dei Lanzi. Cellini’s order book, the Ricordi, contains more than a dozen commissions (‘ricordi’) between 1549 and 1566 concerning the paying for the Perseus sculpture. The narration of the casting of the Perseus group (Cellini 1982, 420–431) is fascinating on several counts: 1) the subject of Perseus holding the Medusa’s head takes up the dialectic of the self and the (killed) other; 2) the difficult manual production process, the casting of the sculpture, coincides with the artist’s illness, which exposes the relation of creative act and bodily frailness, and it leads 3) to the work’s completion, which represents the sculptor’s victory over the elementary forces of matter, the artist’s recovery. The work’s realization defeats those who doubted Cellini’s mastery and thus justifies the sculptor’s writing about himself. Journals, travel diaries and logbooks (it. ‘diario’, from lat. ‘diarium’, also ‘giornale’ and ‘taccuìno’), i.  e. registers of life-historical recordings set down on a day-by-day basis, lacking narrative continuity, sometimes witnessing the encounter with strange cultures, customs and regions, are part of the vast field of self-documents, which also comprises recordings of urban and public events and medical reports about the king’s health (Chartier 2000). The fragmentary, discontinuous recordings are not organized retrospectively; their outlook is tied to the present moment. Travel diaries and auto­

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 745

biographical writings increasingly influence each other in the sixteenth century. This is the case for Montaigne’s Journal, Marguerite de Valois’s (1553–1615) Memoirs, where the action of surveying land is compared to the exploration of the infant self, as well as for confessionally biased writings such as those by Thomas and Felix Platter in Basel (Le Roy Ladurie 1995). Some works without reference to the life or the self in the title can also be considered autobiographies. Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580, 1588, 1595) influenced autobiographical forms across epochs and countries, such as in the case of William Cornwallis (Lange 2018). The Essais refer to the provisional and non-exemplary as well as to knowledge derived from experience in their title and foreground the analysis of a self which is neither heroic nor exemplary. They are skeptical of experience and do not adhere to a life-historical narrative. For Rousseau the autobiographical representation in the Essais is still a controversial point which provokes oblique contestation. Rousseau (1959, 1001) differentiates himself from Montaigne in his relation to the reading public. He claims to write for himself, while, according to him, Montaigne wrote for others. He points out that Montaigne presented a profile view of himself, while he will present himself in his entirety. The narration in the Rêveries of the experience of death and consciousness following the collision with a Great Dane near Menilmontant is a reference to Montaigne’s riding accident. Both authors describe the gradual recovery of consciousness and sensibility. It is the rebirth of the self from the self and, thus, a reversal of the model of salvation in God.

Publication Strategies In the history of reception and in literary criticism the genre of autobiography comprises various written documents which originally bore different titles. Differing modes of divulgation to posterity were intended for them. Some were to be withheld from the general public. In the course of reception history, titles change and are cleared from ambiguity when works are assigned to the genre of autobiography. Just as the life recordings written by the monk Guibert de Nogent (mid twelfth century) are still entitled “histoire de sa vie” [‘story of his life’] in 1907 and then “autobiography” in 2012 (see Guibert 2012), the Vita di Giambattista Vico, scritta da se medesimo [‘Life of Giambattista Vico, written by himself’] (1725), which Vico (1668–1744) wrote in the third person singular, is referred to as ‘autobiography’ in the modern English and Italian editions. Vico’s text was first printed in the journal Raccolta d’Opusculi scientifici e filologici [‘Selection of scientific and philological works’] in Venice and presented as a model for other scientists and learned men, who wished to write their own intellectual autobiographies. Memoirs published posthumously or a long time after the actual events – Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s (1405–1464) Commentarii (1584), for example, were published 120 years after their completion – were either intended

746 

 1 The European Tradition

for familiar or genealogical use or they had to await a later publication due to sensitive information. Thomas Whythorne’s autobiographical recordings, written around 1576, were rediscovered and edited as late as the twentieth century. The testimonies by Raimundus Lullus and Hildegard of Bingen were edited by the humanist and reformer Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples in order to foster the mystical renewal. The pratice of publication – the question of whether a piece of writing is intended for publication or not, as is reflected by Petrarch in the title to his self-questioning Secretum (1342) – is decisive for the mode of recording and public acceptance or scandal. Cardano makes a conscious distinction between information intended for the public and information not intended for the public in De Vita propria, which was only published in the middle of the seventeenth century (1643): “I want it to be known that I am [quod sim], but I do not wish everybody to know how I am [non qualis sim]” (Grafton 1999, 340). Étienne Pasquier and Scaliger wanted to eliminate one third of the Essais because they considered it insignificant whether Montaigne prefered red wine or white wine (Westerwelle 2018, 184.). Montaigne’s travel journal (written by a secretary from 1581 to 1583 and later by himself) was not intended for the public. It was published (1774) and translated (German translation 1776) as late as the eighteenth century and met with some incomprehension, partly because of the physiological descriptions of the author who was plagued by kidney stones. The description of body and pain convey, as V ­ igarello points out, an intuition and a “sentiment de soi” [‘feeling of oneself’] (2014, 40). The word “soi” [‘self’] as a point of reference for the individual is a neologism which dates from around 1760 (Vigarello 2014, 80). Saint-Simon’s memoirs about the courtly society of Louis XIV, which feature short autobiographical passages, were, as most of the memoir literature of the Ancien Régime, not intended for publication (Kuperty-Tsur 2001). Rousseau ordered the book to be published posthumously (Raymond 1959, xx, cxvi). Samuel Pepys’s (1633–1703) diary was discovered in 1825, more than a hundred years after his death. It was gradually published as Pepys’s shorthand was decrypted. Autobiographical texts written by female authors were published with an especially great delay, when the female self-documents did not accompany other works. Christine de Pizan integrated self-portraits into the Cent Ballades [‘Hundred Ballads’] (1402) and the Livre de Paix [‘Book of Peace’] (1413) and had typified miniatures of herself made in her own workshop according to her instructions (Dulac and Reno 2013, 49). Examples of late posthumous publication are the Mémoires de la Grande Mademoiselle [‘Memories of the Grand Lady’] (2013), written by the granddaughter of Henri IV who lived in the court of Louis XIV, Mme de Guyon (1648–1717), who was in conflict with the court and official theology and whose La Vie de Mme Guyon écrite par ellemême (1720) [‘Life of Madam Guyon written by herself’; The Autobiography of Madame Guyon (1897)] was published as late as 1720, and Mme d’Espinay (1726–1783), a friend and, until their split, promoter of Rousseau’s whose recordings only met with interest posthumously. Autobiographies are written down in various ways. On his voyage to Italy, Montaigne first dictated his journal entries to an amanuensis and then continued the work

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 747

himself when the scribe dropped out. Cellini dictated his life to a young lad in his studio and later continued himself. Female authors, especially the mystics, narrated their experiences and visions to a father confessor. They were assisted by a spiritual guide in recording their texts. The oldest Castilian autobiographical document is of the Andalusian noblewoman Doña Leonor López de Córdoba, which was dictated to a scribe in 1400 (Briesemeister 1983, 45). Female authors of life narratives not written by themselves were for a long time not considered original authors in their own right. Rousseau’s autobiographical writings have been preserved in drafts and manuscripts from different editorial stages. They were not produced spontaneously. Rousseau carefully planned them and reconstructed dates and events based on his correspondence. The manuscripts were carefully copied by himself, as he thoroughly disliked mistakes and cancellations (Raymond 1959, xxv). He repeatedly read and copied his own confessions, never completing the Confessions (de Saussure 1958, 259), and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire continue the self’s reflections on his exile from society and his oneiric and imaginary faculties. Comparable in their pervasive influence to Saint Augustine’s Confessiones, Montaigne’s Essais were read across Europe in all epochs and provoked controversies about the essayist’s religious orthodoxy and about his decency. They have inspired reflections about the self and its transformation into writing in a European context including England up to Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

Rhetoric of the Self As a form of memorial writing, autobiography depends on the concept of ‘memoria’ as well as on the awareness of historical epochs and on narrative forms. Due to its retrospective nature or, to put it more precisely, due to the the speech act which establishes a disjunction between the act of saying and that which is said, the speaking subject and the subject spoken about must be distinguished. Experience is rearranged by ‘memoria’ and receives a new ordering structure and a new meaning (Gusdorf 1956, 119). Not every autobiography makes literary pretensions, but self-documents are determined by the language system, especially by rhetoric. Some habits of thought and style subject the discovery of the self and personal expression to general models of courtliness such as ‘honnêteté’ or ‘conversation’. In other cases subjective expressive capacities like ‘ingenium’ and ‘judicium’ as opposed to ‘memoria’ gain importance. As Fumaroli shows for Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, the “the epiphany of the first person” (1988, 35) can be veiled as well as revealed by ingenious literary procedures. A great deal of autobiographies (Montaigne, Marguerite de Valois, the Grande Demoiselle, Rousseau) eschew stylized rhetorical form, thus situating themselves outside the norms of ‘decorum’, i.  e. stylistic conventions and rhetorical patterns, in order to present themselves in marked ‘natural’ simplicity, truth and authenticity (Fumaroli

748 

 1 The European Tradition

1979). Even when the authors’ retrospective and introspective act of transforming their lives into writing does not follow ancient genres, models of style and content are formed as rhetorical forms and references, to which autobiographical writing refers intertextually. Menn points out that “so much, including the very description of one’s own independence, turns out to be borrowed” (2003, 181) in the autobiographies of scientists and independent thinkers such as the physicist Galen and the philosopher René Descartes. Language, rhetoric and style produce a deviation from the real or from the norm, whose relevance varies and which is accompanied to a greater or lesser degree by a reflective consciousness of the author. The imaginary and the fictitious created by language are important elements of autobiography. As early as the sixteenth century, thanks to his extraordinary astuteness, Montaigne, a keen self-observer, was conscious of the linguistic productivity of the self which emerges in the book only through language and scripturality. Without the book as a mirror of the self and without the awareness and reflection of language, the self as it is represented by Montaigne would not be present. 

Translation: Martin Lange

Works Cited Anonymus. Lazarillo de Tormes. Ed. Francisco Rico. Madrid: Catedra, 1996. Aristotle. On Rhetoric. A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 2006. Beaujour, Michel. Miroirs d’encre. Rhétorique de l’autoportrait. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980 [Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Trans. Yara Milos. New York: New York University Press, 1991]. Bedford, Ronald, Davis Lloyd, and Helen Kelly, eds. Early Modern Autobiography. Theories, Genres, Practices. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Bergdolt, Klaus. “Ghibertis Lebenserinnerungen.” Autobiographie und Selbstporträt in der Renaissance. Ed. Gunter Schweikhart. Köln: König, 1998. 29–36. Blumenberg, Hans. “Nachahmung der Natur. Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen.”Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben. Aufsätze und eine Rede. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012. 55–103. Bonnet, Jean. Naissance du Panthéon. Essai sur le culte des grands hommes. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Briesemeister, Dietrich. “Die Autobiographien in Spanien im 15. Jahrhundert.” Biographie und Autobiographie in der Renaissance. Arbeitsgespräch in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel vom 1. bis 3. November 1982. Ed. August Buck. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983. 45–46. Briesemeister, Dietrich. Franz Brunhölzl, Rudolf Sellheim, and Ursula Schulze. “Autobiographie.” Lexikon des Mittelalters. Vol. I. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002. 1262–1269. Buck, August. “Introduction.” Girolamo Cardano. Opera omnia, the 1662 Lugduni ed. Vol. I. Ed. August Buck. New York/London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967. 5–15. Burke, Peter. “Worldviews: Some Dominant Traits.” The Italian Renaissance. Ed. Harald Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2004. 177–202.

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 749

Burke, Peter. “Historicizing the self, 1770–1830.” Controlling Time and Shaping the Self. Developments in Autobiographical Writings since the Sixteenth Century. Ed. Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker, and Michael Mascuch. Leiden: Brill, 2011. 13–32. Cardano, Girolamo. Hieronymi Cardani de propria vita, liber. Opera omnia, the 1662 Lugduni ed. Vol. I. Ed. August Buck. New York/London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967. 1–54. Cave, Terence. Pré-Histoires. Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité. Genève: Droz, 1999. Cellini, Benvenuto. La Vita. Ed. Guido Davico Bonino. Torino: Einaudi, 1982. Chartier, Roger. Le Jeu de la règle: lectures. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires des Bordeaux, 2000. Courcelle, Pierre. Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire. Antécédents et Postérité. Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1963. Dante Alighieri. Das Gastmahl. Erstes Buch. Ed. Francis Chevenal. Trans. Thomas Ricklin. Vol. I, part 1 of Philosophische Werke. Ed. Ruedi Imbach. Hamburg: Meiner, 1996. Descartes, René. Discours de la méthode. Ed. Étienne Gilson. Paris: Vrin, 4th ed. 1964 [Discourse on the Method. The Philosophical Works. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Vol.I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975 (1911). 79–130]. Dihle, Albrecht. “Antike Grundlagen.” Biographie zwischen Renaissance und Barock. Ed. Walter Berschin. Heidelberg: Mattes, 1993. 1–22. Doering, Pia Claudia. “Dummheit wird bestraft: Zum Verhältnis von beffa und Recht (Decameron Novelle VIII, 6).” Rechtsnovellen. Rhetorik, narrative Strukturen und kulturelle Semantiken des Rechts in Kurzerzählungen des späten Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. P.C. Doering and Caroline Emmelius. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2017. 215–234. Dulac, Liliane, and Christine Reno. “Les Autoportaits de Christine de Pizan.” L’Autoportrait dans la littérature française du moyen âge au XVIIe siècle. Ed. Élisabeth Gaucher-Rémond and Jean Garapon. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013. 49–69. Fetz, Bernhard. “Die vielen Leben der Biographie. Interdisziplinäre Aspekte einer Theorie der Biographie.” Die Biographie. Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie. Ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 5–66. Fumaroli, Marc. “Mémoires et histoire. Le dilemme de l’historiographie humaniste au XVIe siècle.” Les Valeurs chez les mémorialistes français du XVIIe siècle avant la Fronde. Ed. Noémi Hepp and Jacques Hennequin, Paris: Klincksieck, 1979. 21–45. Fumaroli, Marc. “Ego scriptor: rhétorique et philosophie dans le Discours de la méthode.” Problématique et réception du ‘Discours de la méthode’ et des ‘Essais’. Ed. Henry Méchoulan. Paris: Vrin, 1988. 31–46. Garapon, Jean. “Amateurisme littéraire et vérité sur soi, de Marguerite de Valois au Cardinal de Retz.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 103 (2003): 275–285. Gaucher-Rémond, Élisabeth, and Jean Garapon, eds. L’Autoportrait dans la littérature française du moyen âge au XVIIe siècle. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013. Gibbon, Edward. The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon. Ed. Dero A. Saunders. New York: Meridian Books, 1961. Giovanni di Pagolo Rucellai. Zibaldone. Ed. Gabriella Battista. Firenze: del Galluzzo, 2013. Grafton, Anthony. Cardano’s Cosmos. The World and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Guglielminetti, Marziano. Memoria e scrittura. L’autobiographia da Dante a Cellini. Torino: Einaudi, 1977. Guibert von Nogent. Guibert von Nogent. Die Autobiographie. Ed. Walter Berschin. Trans. Elmar Wilhelm. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2012. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie.” Formen der Selbstdarstellung. Analekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbstportraits. Festgabe für Fritz Neubert. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1956. 105–124.

750 

 1 The European Tradition

Gusdorf, Georges. Les Lignes de vie. 2 vols. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990. Hahn, Alois. “Identität und Selbstthematisierung.” Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis. Be­kennt­ nis und Geständnis. Ed. Alois Hahn and Volker Kapp. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 9–24. Hausmann, Frank-Rutger. “Benvenuto Cellini.” Goethe Handbuch. Vol. III. Ed. Bernd Witte, Theo Buck, Hans-Dietrich Dahnke, Regine Otto, and Peter Schmidt. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1997. 500–506. Iser, Wolfgang. Laurence Sternes ‚Tristam Shandy’. Inszenierte Subjektivität. München: Fink, 1987. Kessler, Eckhard. “Antike Tradition, historische Erfahrung und philosophische Reflexion in Petrarcas ‚Brief an die Nachwelt‘.” Biographie und Autobiographie in der Renaissance. Arbeitsgespräch in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel vom 1. bis 3. November 1982. Ed. August Buck. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983. 21–34. Kleber, Hermann. Die französischen Mémoires. Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung von den Anfängen bis zum Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999. Kuperty-Tsur, Nadine. “Réalité et rhétorique des interlocuteurs dans les Mémoires du XVIe siècle.” L’Écriture de soi comme dialogue. Actes du colloque de Caen (24–25 janvier 1997). Ed. Alain Goulet. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 1998. 41–61. Kuperty-Tsur, Nadine. “Le Moi, sujet de l’histoire.” La Nouvelle Revue du XVIe siècle 19.1 (2001): 63–81. Lange, Martin. “Essayistische Formen zwischen Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit bei Michel de Montaigne und seinen englischen Lesern des 17. Jahrhunderts.” Diss. U Münster, 2016. München: Fink, 2018 [forthcoming]. Le Goff, Jacques. “La Tentation de la biographie pour l’historien des Annales. Interview.” Biographie und Interkulturalität. Diskurs und Lebenspraxis. Ed. Rita Franceschini. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001. 13–22. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Le Siècle des Platter. Paris: Fayard, 1995. Marguerite de Valois. Mémoires et autres écrits. 1574–1614. Ed. Éliane Viennot. Paris: Champion, 1999. Menn, Stephen. “The Discourse on the Method and the Tradition of Intellectual Autobiography.” Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy. Ed. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 141–191. Misch, Georg. Das Altertum. Geschichte der Autobiographie (1907). Vol. I.1. Bern/München: Francke, 1949 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Part one. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1998 (1950)]. Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais. Ed. Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine MagnienSimonin. Édition des ‘notes de lecture’ et des ‘sentences peintes’ établie par Alain Legros. Paris: Gallimard, 2007 [The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965]. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. 2 vols. Ed. Michel Le Guern. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Peters, Ursula. Das Ich im Bild. Die Figur des Autors in volksprachigen Bilderhandschriften des 13. bis 16. Jahrhunderts. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2008. Perosa, Alessandro. Studi di filologia umanistica. II Quatrocento fiorentino. Ed. Paolo Vitti. Roma: Ed. di storia et letteratura, 2000. Pirillo, Nestore, ed. Autobiografia e filosofia. L’esperienza di Giordano Bruno. Atti del convegno. Trento 18–20 maggio 2000. Roma: Ed. di storia e letteratura, 2003. Pommier, Édouard. Théories du portrait. De la Renaissance aux Lumières. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. Raymond, Marcel. “Introductions.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Œuvres complètes I. Les Confessions. Autres textes autobiographiques. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. xi–xcv.

1.3 Early Modern Times 

 751

Ricoeur, Paul. L’Intrigue et le récit historique. Temps et récit. Vol. I. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Œuvres complètes I. Les Confessions. Autres textes autobiographiques. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Santa Teresa de Jesús. Libro de la vida. Ed. Dámaso Chicharro. Madrid: Catedra, 1979. de Saussure, Hermine. Rousseau et les manuscrits des ‘Confessions’. Paris: Boccard, 1958. Schmid, Wolfgang. “Denkmäler auf Papier. Zu Dürers Kupferstichporträts der Jahre 1519–1526.” Das dargestellte Ich. Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des späteren Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky, and Urs Martin Zahnd. Bochum: Winkler, 1999. 223–260. Schweikhart, Gunter, ed. Autobiographie und Selbstportrait in der Renaissance. Köln: König, 1998. Schweikhart, Gunter. “Vom Signaturbild zum autonomen Selbstporträt.” Das dargestellte Ich. Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des späteren Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky and Urs Martin Zahnd. Bochum: Winkler, 1999. 165–188. Seelig, Sharon Cadman. Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature. Reading Women’s Lives. 1600–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Smyth, Adam. Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La Transparence et l’obstacle. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Sühnel, Rudolf. “Plutarch, Klassiker der Biographie und seine Übersetzer Jacques Amyot (1559) und Sir Thomas North (1579).” Biographie zwischen Renaissance und Barock. Ed. Walter Berschin. Heidelberg: Mattes, 1993. 129–156. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Teuber, Bernhard. “Von der Lebensbeichte zur kontemplativen Selbstsorge. Autobiographisches Schreiben als Ästhetik mystischer Existenz bei Teresa von Avila.” Autobiographisches Schreiben und philosophische Selbstsorge. Ed. Maria Moog-Grünewald. Heidelberg: Winter, 2004. 57–72. Vigarello, Georges. Le Sentiment de soi. Histoire de la perception du corps XVIe–XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2014. Voisine, Jacques. “Naissance et évolution du terme littéraire ‘autobiographie’.” La Littérature comparée en Europe orientale. Conférence de Budapest. Ed. István Sötér. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1963. 278–286. Weiand, Christof. ‘Libri di famigli̕ a’ und Autobiographie in Italien zwischen Tre- und Cinquecento. Studien zur Entwicklung des Schreibens über sich selbst. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Westerwelle, Karin. “Dissimulatio und Gewissen in Montaignes Essais.” Konfessionelle Ambiguität. Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Andreas Pietsch and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013. 118–141. Westerwelle, Karin. “Michel de Montaignes Vorwort der Essais. Zur Erfindung der Selbstdar­ stellung.” Der Autor und sein Publikum. Zur kleinen Form des Vorworts. Ed. Pia Claudia Doering, Bettina Full, and Karin Westerwelle. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018. 163–216. Wordsworth, William. “Preface” to the “Excursion” (1814). The Prelude or Growth of a poet’s mind (test of 1805). Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Zühlke, Bärbel. Christine de Pizan in Text und Bild. Zur Selbstdarstellung einer frühhumanistischen Intellektuellen. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1994. Zink, Michel. La Subjectivité littéraire. Autour du siècle de saint Louis. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. Zumthor, Paul. Langue, texte, énigme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.

752 

 1 The European Tradition

Further Reading Enenkel, Karl. Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, Jean-Michel Spieser, and Jean Wirth, eds. Le Portrait. La représentation de l’individu. Florenz: Micrologus Library, 2007. Popkin, Jeremy D. History, Historians and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Smyth, Adam. Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

1.4 Modernity Michaela Holdenried

From the Time of Pietism to the Secularization of Autobiography The decline of the middle-class culture in the seventeenth century was caused by a number of factors, the Thirty Years War being one of the more extreme ones. Its impact during the age of absolutism resulted in the bourgeoisie losing a lot of its power base and subsequently there is less documentation of bourgeois advancement. Nevertheless, autobiographical accounts were still produced in different forms, for instance, in combination with such picaresque models as Grimmelshausen’s novels, or in the literature of French memoirists of the time (Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Sevigné). So, too, in diaristic works such as The Diary of Samuel Pepys (kept from 1660–1669 and discovered only in 1818), who created a bipolar form of self-observation, ranging from his personal diet to political chronicling, to which the apparent formlessness of the diary genre lends itself particularly well (Holdenried 2000, 118–126). Pietism, an important movement in the history of thought and religion in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gave autobiography valuable impulses. As a religious movement it criticised the dogmatic forms of the institutional protestant church; in contrast, the Pietists practiced a form of religiosity inspired by life in the pietistic community, based on small congregations. In these circles one gathered, shared one’s experience of God and subjected oneself to mutual social control. Self-examination and disclosure of one’s own state of faith and possible spiritual crises were the most important parts of this movement. Numerous diaries and surveys of life have survived. Two forms are particularly noteworthy: the Pietistic book of hours with only occasional retrospective digressions, and the Pietistic autobiography. August Hermann Francke’s conversion story Lebenslauff [‘Curriculum Vitae’] (1690/1691) forms the structure for the latter. As in Augustine’s writing and mysticism, the basic structure follows a tripartite division into sinful life before, ‘breakthrough’ and ‘rebirth’ to a godly life. The Pietists bundled their writings in ‘evidentiary’ text corpora, and being purely documentary in recording the attainment of grace, they are extremely schematic and uniform (they also served as eulogies). How could this form of the Augustinian tradition, negating everything individual, provide an important impulse for the autobiography? Günter Niggl (1989) has given a convincing and obvious answer: the sinful life had always been the onset of more extensive religious confessional documents. The same holds true in this case: a typological secularization developed, and the religious confession was overlaid by the professional and particularly the scholarly autobiograhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-092

754 

 1 The European Tradition

phy (such as August Gottlieb Spangenberg’s, the Herrnhuter Bishop). With the necessity to record one’s own life before the experience of grace, the opportunity arises to include elements foreign to the genre, which eventually assumes an independent existence. Next to this typological ‘secularization’, a further phenomenon needs to be highlighted, namely that the Pietistic scheme was also used by non-Pietists, for instance, by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (whose autobiography was written in the Hohenasperg dungeon between 1778 and 1791) with its self-observational imperative and level of linguistic refinement providing access to the inner self in worldly-psychological terms. In this way, the Pietistic tradition of self-observation and self-exploration contributes to the development of psychology. Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling’s Lebensgeschichte [‘Life Story’] (1777–1817) is noteworthy because in its literary presentation of the developmental stages from a lower middle-class situation it stands out from the bulk of Pietistic autobiographical writings. The continuous threat of failure can only be counterbalanced by the idea of an invisibly acting God. The life story is objectified by being subjected to a more encompassing totality. Descriptions of childhood, scenically colourful and extensively presented as formative early years, are an innovative trend for the history of the genre. This is significant because Jung-Stilling and later Karl Philipp Moritz for the first time not only posit childhood as an important phase but also provide a literary rendering of it. The typological secularization is accompanied by the psychological with particular emphasis on the diary. The spiritual diary, practicing the religiously motivated inner observation (of sinfulness), paved the way. Convergences can be found in the literary movements of sensibility with their introspective tenor, the sentimental tone of the dialogue between correspondents and the respective novelistic literature. The public discourse of sentimentalism and the Pietistic (introspective) expression came together in the imperative discourse of public self-observation. Whereas the Zurich preacher Johann Caspar Lavater’s Geheimes Tagebuch [‘Secret Diary’] (1771) reaches a first stage of smug psychological self-exploration, Karl Philipp Moritz marks a high point in the culture of self-observation at the end of the eighteenth century. Two phenomena have to be added here: the first is the autobiographical pathography, Eigene Lebensbeschreibung [‘Autobiography’] (1738), the records of the Leipzig preacher Adam Bernd’s ailments. This is an uncompromising text about all kinds of “seltsame Trübsal, Krankheit oder Anfechtung” [‘strange gloom, illness or tribulation’] (Bernd 1973, 147), from hypochondriacal melancholy to contemplating suicide. Just as with exaltations and illnesses of female mystics before him, he too had no scientific explanations for his frightening conditions. The second is the role of woman Pietists like Anna Vetter, Johanna Eleonora Petersen, Beata Sturm and others whose texts, relegated to Pietistic collections and patronized by parallel male texts, are gradually being retrieved by newer dedicated studies. It is their dilemma to have in the religious context, on the one hand, one of the few opportunities to make themselves heard, yet, on the other, to be subjected to the dictates of humility, to suffer often enough not only

1.4 Modernity 

 755

what is nowadays called a ‘psychosomatic reaction’, but also passing on extremely negative self-imaging far into the nineteenth century (Kormann 1996, 92). Ulrich Bräker’s Lebensgeschichte und natürliche Ebentheuer des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg [‘Life Story and Natural Adventures of the Poor Man in the Toggenburg’] (1788/1789) represents a further variety, only partly fitting into the Pietist context. In the eighteenth century the number of lower-class self-portrayals increases as a result of enlightenment. Bräker’s accounts can be categorized under various labels, such as a predecessor of workers’ autobiographies because of his hard labour in saltpetre works or perhaps as picaresque autobiography. Childhood and youth are essential parts of his rendering, and subjugation into military service in Berlin, desertion, marriage to an unloved wife, deaths in the family and professional failure as a cotton merchant are the essential cornerstones of his unsuccessful life. Two elements in his autobiography are important: the first is that the Pietistic scheme no longer suffices to counterbalance failure or give it a higher meaning. The second is that Bräker’s escape into reading and his own writings is not only in competition with the religious context, but in fact undermines it. That Bräker imbues his writing with literary aspirations by orientating himself with Jung-Stilling and Rousseau, is per se a surprising fact and that he did not use the literary form to embellish his life, is another (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 161–163). Pietism was also a major formative power of the autobiographical in the Netherlands, where during the eighteenth century many Pietist diaries were composed (Vanacker 2001, 647–648). At the end of the Pietist century, however, biography had grown into a literary form with psychological interest in the genesis of the self. After its secularization, traditions of religious autobiographical writings are retained: the veracity and truth topos, namely, now relocated, however, in the context of the inner world.

Multiple Projects of Literary Autobiographic Writings Between 1780 and 1830 The eighteenth century can be seen as an experimental laboratory and as an encompassing foundation of today’s knowledge of man. Sabine Groppe (1990, 36) has addressed this fact as “Konkurrenzentwürfe eines Gleich- oder Nachzeitigkeitsraumes” [‘competing drafts of a contemporary or post-contemporary space’]. A comprehensive process of secularization enables a view independent of religion and thereby the development of new branches of science beyond the disciplines of theology, jurisprudence and medicine. Karl Philipp Moritz’s psychological novel Anton Reiser (1785–1790, in four parts) is certainly the most impressive example for this experimental space. While this autobiographical work was considered secondary to Goethe’s for a long time, because it

756 

 1 The European Tradition

was primarily seen as post-Pietistic and pedagogical in form, new approaches have highlighted the originality of his contribution (Holdenried 1991). It can quite rightly be considered a work that sets a tradition and benchmark. Direct references to Anton Reiser by Peter Weiss (around 1960) and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt (since 1990) testify to this. It would be possible, therefore, to consider a different line of tradition of ‘deviant’ – or better perhaps: ‘multiple’ – autobiographical writings, with Bernd, Bräker and Moritz having contributed as much as did before them (wittingly or unwittingly) the psycho-pathographical writings of nun mystics. In his psychological novel, Moritz documents himself as a case study, in a way that is similar to what he had done before with regard to himself and others in his journal Gnothi sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde [‘Know thyself or magazine of experiential psychology’], the first psychological journal in Germany. Focussing on the ‘inner history’, he at the same time founded an autonomous scientific discipline of empirical psychology as well as a new literary genre. In his life story he pursues the influence of early childhood on the further psychic development of the individual. The beginning of his record of individual psychology sum up precisely these influences: “Unter diesen Umständen wurde Anton geboren, und von ihm kann man mit Wahrheit sagen, daß er von der Wiege an unterdrückt ward” [“It was under these circumstances that Anton was born, and of him it can truly be said that he was oppressed from his cradle onwards”] (Moritz 1996, 15 [1997, 8]). The novel cannot artificially round a failed life, even though that is the task the author had assigned himself: by means of reminiscences he wants to achieve an entity of coherent life wherein “das Mißtönende” [“discord”] “unvermerkt” [“imperceptibly”] is resolved in “Harmonie und Wohlklang” [“harmony and concord”] (Moritz 1996, 107 [1997, 87]; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 160). The lost childhood can, however, not be made up for, the psychically impoverished life cannot be artificially enriched. The transgression of the limitations of the empirical in literature (and vice versa) and the creation of an anti-classical project of advanced self-understanding are what makes Moritz’s work modern. At the epochal turn around 1800 new parameters of innovation, originality and representativity begin to replace teleological, doctrinal literature. This also pertains to autobiography. At the same time autobiographical writing expands: lower class people and women are writing. Women before had few opportunities for self-expression and strangely enough, this seems to have been the case again at the end of the century when the enlightenment was thought to have encouraged women to become erudite. Text editions of the last decades have again made autobiographical works accessible, but despite the texts of Charlotte von Einem, Friderika Baldinger and Angelika Rosa, the negative finding is confirmed that “die Frauenautobiographie dieser Zeit” [‘the female autobiography of this time’] (Ramm 1998, 41) does not exist. Baldinger’s autobiography is a prime example how women use the ‘masculine’ form of the scholarly autobiography only to fatally fail at the form because they basically detail the hindrances on their way to erudition. Madame Roland, who Goethe referred to admiringly, paid for her erudition during the time of the French Revolu-

1.4 Modernity 

 757

tion with her life: having disregarded the virtues of her gender, she was sent to the guillotine. There are few examples where women participate in scholarly activities without being sanctioned – mostly they act clandestinely, Ernestine Christine Reiske being one of them (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Guzzoni 1992). Women appear to choose rather the ‘Briefwerk’ because an autobiography written by a woman around 1800 would have been a provocation (Ramm 1998, 17). For a long time women were not able or empowered to authorize themselves – they still needed ‘permission to speak’.

The Paradigm of Modern Autobiography: Rousseau’s Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his Confessions (1782) as follows: Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple dont l’exécution n’aura point d’imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme ce sera moi. […] Je sens mon cœur et je connais les hommes [I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself (…) I know my own heart and understand my fellow man] (Rousseau 1964, 3 [1953, 17]).

The Confessions, reminiscent in its title of Augustine, appeared four years after Rousseau’s death. He set with it a caesura in the history of the genre: writing about oneself needs no other legitimization but one’s own unmistakable individuality. The multi-branched filigreed material of self-portrayal is held together by sentiment alone. On exactly this question, the sentimental tone, seen as exhibitionistic, opinions differed. Though reluctantly, the Confessions had to be afforded a place among the classical works because even critics who regarded the person and the work as offensive had to acknowledge the radicality of Rousseau’s self-experiment. Rousseau, however, did not use self-exposure as an end in itself; it was to serve scientific knowledge. He did not regard himself as a psychopathological case and was convinced that all explicitly unveiled contradictions in his personality would be resolved in some higher entity: “C’est pourtant ainsi que je suis; s’il y a là de la contradiction, elle est du fait de la nature et non pas du mien: mais il y a en a si peu, que c’est par là précisément que je suis toujours moi” [“However, that is how I am; if there is any contradiction it is of Nature’s making, not mine. But it is such a trifling one that it is the very mark of my consistency”] (Rousseau 1964, 761 [1953, 591]). Jean Starobinski (1988) carefully dissected the text’s two antagonistic tendencies: on the one hand Rousseau wants to say everything so that his readers can (against his enemies) form their own opinions; on the other hand the ‘genetic method’ (the imprint

758 

 1 The European Tradition

of early childhood experiences) is apologetically invoked for his defence. Augustinian confession and apologia melt together to form a contradictory amalgam. From this no justiciable truth can be derived, and Starobinski rightly emphasizes that authenticity takes it place; the emphatic, self-exposing discourse is connected with a corresponding language: the specific truth is accessible to him solely in the style of ‘ardent emotional writing’, apt to render the most subtle psychological stirrings and because of that highly inconsistent. The Rousseauian model with its criterion of absolute veracity and literary exactness remains, wittingly or unwittingly, influential beyond the turn of the century. It is the specific Rousseauian tone of professing truthfulness which is found in many autobiographies, even if only echoing the radical self-experiment.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit Aus meinem Leben [From My Life] is the overall title of the autobiographical ‘division’ of Goethe’s works which includes Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833) [Poetry and Truth], Italiänische Reise (1816/1817) [Italian Journey], Campagne in Frankreich 1792 (1822) [Campaign in France 1792], Belagerung von Maynz (1822) [Siege of Mainz], The Annals or Tag- und Jahreshefte (1830) [‘Day and Year Papers’] and Biographische Einzelheiten (1832) [‘Biographical Details’]. Goethe was not only concerned with his own life but also with the life of others. He thought and wrote about Cellini, Diderot and Winckelmann and worked on their biographies. He kept a diary for almost six decades; it has been edited by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Weimar Classic Foundation) since the 1990s. In the history of autobiographical writing Dichtung und Wahrheit was regarded as a “Höhe- und Kulminationspunkt der Gattung” [‘high and culminating point of the genre’] (Aichinger 1977b, 813) for a long time. Aichinger’s dictum reflects the dominant scholarly opinion in respect to Goethe’s autobiography as a model and ideal type of the genre, but more and more scholars find such a teleological orientation problematic at least (Vollers-Sauer 1993). Reason for and range of the autobiography make the definition as ideal type doubtful. The project of self-commentating takes on a life of its own and is abandoned at the age of 26, at the time of his move to Weimar. About Goethe’s time in Weimar, including Charlotte von Stein, Schiller and his works and their anticipated connectedness, nothing or very little is recorded. In fact, in the preface to the autobiography Goethe himself is sceptical vis-à-vis his own undertaking. He describes the main biographical task as:

1.4 Modernity 

 759

den Menschen in seinen Zeitverhältnissen darzustellen, und zu zeigen, inwiefern ihm das Ganze widerstrebt, inwiefern es ihn begünstigt, wie er sich eine Welt, und Menschensicht daraus gebildet, und wie er sie, wenn er Künstler, Dichter, Schriftsteller ist, wieder nach außen abgespiegelt [to present the subject in his temporal circumstances, to show how these both hinder and help him, how he uses them to construct his view of man and the world, and how he, providing he is an artist, poet, or author, mirrors them again for others] (Goethe 1978, 9 [1987, 17]).

He names the psychological factors of a genesis of self, composed of supporting and hindering elements and also the functions of this ‘self-education’, referring to the genre of professional biography, namely to function as a reflector of influencing forces. On the one hand, the idea of educational development is highlighted, yet, the knowledge of the self and the emphasis on the continuity of self and also the knowledge of the century on the other hand, do not appear to be attainable cornerstones of Goethe’s own undertaking. Such skeptical tones were mostly suppressed in the reception of Goethe’s autobiography. All of its problematic aspects were sacrificed in favour of a coerced homogeneity. Ultimately, the successful self-conceptualization had to be the strong anti-position to Moritz’s or Rousseau’s problematic (and problematizing) definition of ‘self’. Ever since Eissler’s (1963) psychoanalytic biography, scholars have backed away from this idealized assessment. One needs only to follow Goethe’s own references, expressly mentioning the compensatory and self-therapeutic functions of his writing, for instance, where he talks about his poetic disposition: Und so begann diejenige Richtung, von der ich mein ganzes Leben nicht abweichen konnte, nämlich dasjenige, was mich erfreute oder quälte […] in ein Bild, ein Gedicht zu verwandeln und darüber mit mir selbst abzuschließen, um sowohl meine Begriffe von den äußeren Dingen zu berichtigen, als mich im Innern deshalb zu beruhigen. Die Gabe hierzu war wohl niemand nötiger als mir, den seine Natur immerfort aus einem Extrem in das andere warf. Alles, was von mir bekannt geworden, sind nur Bruchstücke einer großen Konfession, welche vollständig zu machen dieses Büchlein [!] ein gewagter Versuch ist [And so began that tendency which throughout my life I have never overcome, namely to transform whatever gladdened or tormented me (…) into an image, a poem, and to come to terms with myself by doing this, so that I could both refine my conceptions of external things and calm myself inwardly in regard to them. It is likely that no one needed this talent more than I, since my nature kept propelling me from one extreme to the other. Therefore, all my published works are but fragments of one great confession, which this little book (!) is a bold attempt to complete] (Goethe 1978, 283 [1987, 214]).

What Goethe was not able to recognise in other biographies, is doubtful in his own: a continuous, unbroken development. If Goethe had followed the entelechy model of self-education, it soon dawned on him that it hardly could ever be applied in its pure form: “Es sind wenig Biographien, welche einen reinen, ruhigen, steten Fortschritt des Individuums darstellen können” [“There are few biographies that can depict an individual’s progress as being pure, calm, and steady”] (Goethe 1978, 478 [1987, 355]).

760 

 1 The European Tradition

The fragmentary ending, an almost forcible abortion, despite its strong symbolic super elevation, can be interpreted in many ways. One could, like Wagner-Egelhaaf (2005, 174), suppose the transition to a higher truth. Others like Jeßing (1998, 364) interpret the incursion of the daemonic as devaluating a harmonizing rounding off: with the first greater crisis the daemonic is called up to indicate the dys-functionality of meaningful models. The autobiographical self-portrayal does not present at the end a self-confident self, but the operation of daemonic-irrational forces. Finally, some remarks are necessary about the aspect of fictionality which keeps on troubling scholars. What exactly is Dichtung und Wahrheit? If it is not an autobiography in the strict sense, is it then a ‘semi-autobiography’, an autobiographical novel? Much is fictionalized, the Sesenheim episode being the most popular example. The work in its entirety, however, integrating completely disparate elements, shows Goethe’s intention: the fundamentally true (das “Grundwahre” [Goethe 1998, 1321]), that is his conviction, is what has been recognized as meaningful for one’s own life. In not choosing introspection and associated psychological analysis (like Rousseau and Moritz) but fiction instead, he indicates, be that negative or positive, the preponderance of the aesthetic in his existence. As much as Goethe’s autobiographical work appears singular, it would be advisable to locate it in a net of coordinates. It then appears as one possibility of auto­ biographical writing among multiple projects in his time, but certainly not as its ideal form.

Post-Classical Forms. The Problem of Epigonality in Nineteenth-Century Autobiographical Writing Post-classical forms, synonymous with a decline of the genre, wrongly taken for its epigonal swansong, were deviations rather from the ideal type – the assumed ideal form reflecting the genesis of a supposed successful personal development. Traces of personal disintegration and the collective disintegration of the bourgeois individual in times of crisis are to be found long before Goethe, as the examples of Bernd and Bräker show. These meandering, dissociating and fragmenting movements of ‘problematic’ identity – which can also be understood as ‘searching movements’ of the self in the medium of writing – have always belonged to the variations of the form. In the nineteenth century, however, they were always tied to the postulate of ‘succession’. If since the beginning of the twentieth century the ‘deviation coefficients’ are on the increase, this is nothing but the emancipation from this postulate. Against the dismissal of an entire century as a mediocre phase of epigonal ‘imitatio Goethe’ in the history of the genre, a closer look at some works is needed. Jean Paul, for instance, does not glorify his youth, as would seem to be the case at first sight. His ‘historical lectures’ are the highly ironic commentaries of a young boy’s

1.4 Modernity 

 761

life in the countryside, its naturalness, small events and so on. Reacting allergically to the irony of the Selberlebensbeschreibung [‘Autobiography’] (1826), Goethe already correctly read the text as relating to him. Jean Paul dared to persiflage the famous birth scene (which Goethe himself had borrowed from Gerolamo Cardano) in his ‘Joditzer Idyllen’. The reader should have quite rightly understood the relocation of the scene of a botanical-rural setting instead in an inter-stellar space as parody. More of the contradictory is hidden underneath the idyllic than a mere contra facture to Goethe’s design, and a close reading shows that where Goethe emphasizes the brokenness and Jean Paul regards the idyllic less seriously, both meet in the daemonic. Heinrich Heine later, in his Memoiren [Memoirs] fragment (published in 1884), with its misleading title, also ironically bows before the “seligen Collegen Wolfgang Goethe” [“late lamented colleague Wolfgang Goethe”] (Heine 1982, 60 [1910, 30]) whose maxim of the interchange between self and world he was willing to follow faithfully. Instead, he would subvert all good announcements in counterfactually narrating a ‘fairy tale of his life’, flights in imaginary loft worlds, readings and magical experiences. Self-irony and persiflage characterize these memoirs, reversing the Goethe model. The topically stipulated return to the idyll after the historical warping of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 in France and Germany should not be accepted over hastily. What is valid for Johann Heinrich Voß’s explicitly ‘rural poem in three idylls’, his Erinnerungen aus dem Jugendleben [‘Memories of My Youth’] (1829) before the turbulences of the failed uprisings, also applies to the subsequent idylls, perhaps even to the paradigm of a ‘biographical idyll’, Bogumil Goltz’ Buch der Kindheit [‘Book of Childhood’] (1847) or the occultist Justinus Kerner’s Bilderbuch aus meiner Knabenzeit. Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1786 bis 1804 [‘Picture Book of My Boyhood. Memories from the Years 1786 to 1804’] (1849). Individual studies have shown that critical readings reveal under the idyll, or negative foil to be read along, the chasms of the time. The many today forgotten idylls idolizing childhood can surely be ascribed to an emulation calculated to bring financial gain. In the 1830s already more and more problematic autobiographies appear (often as fragments), focussing on father-son constellations, which are not merely accidental but pointing like the expressionistic variation or later in the 1970s to manifest social conflicts, the father-son conflict only being an indicator. Franz Grillparzer’s unfinished Selbstbiographie [‘Autobiography’] (1872 posthumously) can be regarded as an attempt to deal with his self-doubts related to autobiographical circumstances. The failure permeating Grillparzer’s accounts can be interpreted as an individual-psychological moment, an expression of a manifest depression, also as a transferrable moment of collectively-psychological melancholy (in terms of Lepenies’ [1969] theory of melancholy as a ‘Handlungshemmung’ [‘inhibition to act’]). In the changeover to the diary as an adequate form of self-expression, which the autobiography would only relate in a veiled form, doubts about life come up, suffering from within, about one’s own name, on account of one’s own twistedness (the ‘misfortune’). We see in ­Adalbert

762 

 1 The European Tradition

Stifter, the rival, a similar phenomenon: the autobiographical draft gets stuck in its beginning, the gloomy inner life remaining locked away. Around the middle of the century the Goethe model is used to introduce new impulses for new experimental forms. One example of an early attempt, in the romantic sense of structuring one’s own life as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, is Karl August Varnhagen von Ense’s archiving of his (and his wife’s) life, in this passion as a collector embodying an ideal type of nineteenth-century positivism. His portraits, however, stand in the traditional form of antiquity. The acceptance of heterogeneous material is already present in Goethe and here connected with other empirical impulses. Tragic in its personal fissures is the life of Friedrich Hebbel: only the switch from the harmonizing Aufzeichnungen aus meinem Leben [‘Notes from My Life’] (between 1846 and probably 1854) to the diary – according to Aichinger (1977a, 75) – made a more adequate examination of his disparate life stories possible. Hebbel is one of the sources for Aichinger’s influential thesis that the diary had up to the twentieth century become the most important modern autobiographical form. Contrary to Aichinger, I would say that Hebbel is a good example for how one suppressive element governs both genres: Whoever dares to look at his own life without illusion, cannot bear this insight. Aphoristically, only Hebbel could face up to it: “Der Mensch ist der Basilisk, der stirbt, wenn er sich selbst sieht” [‘Man is a basilisk who dies when he sees himself’] (1966, 223). Greater changes of form in the nineteenth century are recognizable not only in the changeover to the diary. In integrating biographical elements and essayistic contemplations and ironically reflecting the Goethe model, a self-understanding takes the place of autobiographical writing, differentiation and heterogeneity increase. The literary now encompasses forms like sketch, humoresque, pastiche – small-scale forms, yet demanding representativity. At the same time, influenced by historicism, the chronicle type is distinctly dominant or, as in Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich [Green Henry], a renewed convergence with the novel (two versions existing; 1854/1855 and 1879/1880). One should therefore like Lehmann (1988, 230) not assume a decline of the genre but its diversification and renewal. Two works, strange monoliths on the way to modernity, show how this can also lead to the destruction of the form: the one is Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s 17,000 page Journal intime (1839–1881) [Amiel’s Journal], a life mutated into a filing cabinet. A homogeneous outline of the self is as absent here as in Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s travel novel Auch Einer [‘Also Somebody’] (1879), which Winkler (1988, 51) calls the ‘perhaps most peculiar work’ of modern literature. A.E. is the misanthropic-melancholic ‘alter ego’ of its author, in real life a Tübingen aesthetics professor, plagued by a permanent cold. It is a composite of notes, scenes, travesties, without any recognizable composition. August Strindberg, in Sweden, too, experimented with the autobiographical form (Hoberman 2001, 857). Theodor Fontane’s autobiography is a completely different attempt, in not so much responding to the overwhelming Goethe model with ironical subversion but

1.4 Modernity 

 763

with a renewal of the form. In his ‘autobiographical novel’ Meine Kinderjahre [‘My Childhood Years’] (1893) and Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig [‘From Twenty to Thirty’] (1889), apart from the confident handling of the ‘question of originality’, the anecdotal is immediately apparent. It uses a narrative element to keep up the claim of a representative autobiographical construction, foregoing a comprehensive teleological interpretation. Fontane instead succeeds in capturing formative events or facets of his childhood in characteristic scenes, marking a ‘biographical time’ in contrast to the historical. Instructional conversations with the father, for instance, problems of the parents’ house, revolutionary scenes and others are anecdotally rendered. Together with scenically depicted spaces of childhood like the loft, the chronical life structure is opened up in the direction of a multi-perspective narrative. Part of it is also the emphasized bi-polarity of a remembering and remembered self. The easing of the biographical structure, while on the one hand indicating a shortcoming, a loss of one-directional linearity of the life interpreted, is on the other hand the condition for a new form of multi-focality. Splinters of character studies, dialogues, and atmosphere together reflect a biographical truth, however parabolically. Fontane’s “Stückwerk” [‘piecemeal’] dictum – “aber alles blieb zufällig und ungeordnet, und das berühmte Wort vom ‘Stückwerk’ traf, auf Lebenszeit, buchstäblich und in besonderer Hoch­gra­ dig­keit bei mir zu” [‘but everything remained incidental and disorganized, and the famous “piecemeal” dictum applied to life in general and in a particular degree to me’] (Fontane 1982, 188; see Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005, 186) – can at the same time be read as commentary on his life and poetological statement. While autobiographical writing was, as pointed out, difficult for women before the nineteenth century, as they could not meet the criteria of the genre, now, turning to letter and correspondence, a re-entry is made through the autobiographic backdoor, so to speak. The female romantics in particular, in letter-related writings, have used innovative forms. Only in recent years has this connection been appraised or identified at all. Extensive letter editions have brought to light the enormous extent of the correspondence, for instance, of Rahel Varnhagen, Anna Louisa Karsch, the so-called nature poetess, and others. (One example of the numbers involved: at the end of the 1970s the Varnhagen archive in Cracow was rediscovered, an enormous correspondence of 10,000 letters to 300 different addressees). Gottsched already thought women be the better letter writers on account of their ‘naturalness’. But the letter remained a ‘pre-aesthetic space’ as Silvia Bovenschen (1976, 72) phrased it, and a space without authorship status. “Briefeschreiben und Autorschaft schließen sich aus“ [‘Letter writing and authorship exclude each other’], Barbara Hahn concludes (1988, 10). Letter and correspondence, on account of theoretical reviewing and excellent letter editions, are gaining in significance. The letter as ‘literary fact’ freed from its natural postulate and issues of aesthetics, tradition and self-creation through correspondence are now receiving greater attention. Katherine Goodman (1985, 294) has suggested the term “letter autobiography”. The correspondences of Rahel Varnhagen and Bettine von Arnim, whose extensive work was already edited during her lifetime –

764 

 1 The European Tradition

Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835) [Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child], Die Günderode [‘The Günderode’] (1840), Clemens Brentano’s Frühlingskranz (1844) [Brentano’s Wreath of Spring] – show how letters can serve as life history in that they reflect the development of the individual, an expressed attribute of autobiographic writing. In the mid-nineteenth century women also produced ‘real’ or actual autobiographies, which were at the same time accounts of emancipation: George Sand described in her Histoire de ma vie (1854/1855) [Story of My Life] the central points of conflict in her life, namely the attempts to domesticate her into a marriage of convenience. The occupation of spheres deemed to be a male preserve often scandalized contemporaries. Fanny Lewald (Meine Lebensgeschichte [‘My Life Story’] [1861/1862]) and Malwida von Meysenbug (Memoiren einer Idealistin [1869] [Memoirs of an Idealist]) escaped such a fate. Both found in their time rare paths of liberation from the woman’s life prepared for them, yet not without paying the corresponding price. It was the time of the first women’s movement. Lewald became the first successful professional woman writer, von Meysenbug in 1850 founded a college for women. The last of these emancipation accounts by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (Meine Kinderjahre [‘My Childhood Years’] [1905]) is less a ‘Tendenzschrift’ [‘tendentious writ’] than the painful account of a dressage, which in the course of her life she could escape from, although scenes from this autobiography suggest at what cost. Ebner-Eschenbach, like Fontane, created an innovative type of autobiographical writing, inconspicuous at first, in suspending chronology by way of scenic narration, striking changes of perspective and repetition of motives. The dismissal of a uniformly organized text body and an emphasis on the fictional in place of chronological factuality would decidedly influence the autobiographical practice of the twentieth century.

Variations of Autobiographical Writing in the Twentieth Century We do not find noticeable epochal changes around 1900, but rather the creation of innovative forms through variation and modification. However, autobiographies now deal aesthetically and theoretically with themselves as subject matter while Georg Misch’s autobiographical theory (1907–1969) paves the way for them into the canon of acceptable literary genres. Three divergent tendencies – fictionalization, long begun already, trivialization by emulating historically jaded forms and skeptical distancing – continue in the twentieth century. Particularization and distancing have to do with the disturbing experiences of the first two decades after 1900 which peaked in the attrition warfare of the First World War. That experience made a subject confidently mastering its own history seem anachronistic.

1.4 Modernity 

 765

Variations of the form developed against the background of the experiences mentioned, the resultant language crisis and under the influence of psychoanalysis. The renewed autobiographical novel as a potentially innovative major form finally prepared the genre to become fiction. Correspondingly, one of the determining tendencies of the century was the concentration on childhood and adolescence, the most important developmental psychological phases, as a search through the medium of fiction and supported by psychoanalytical advancements for an in-depth analysis of biographical material. We find intended fragmentations of the major form, for instance, in respect to the travel diary, the autobiographical sketch. But also where “autobiographische Großtexte” [‘major autobiographical texts’] (Hoffmann 1989, 502) come up (Karl May, Max Dauthendey, Else Lasker-Schüler), the autobiographical becomes part of the poetic work. Alongside these innovative diversifications, one form of the traditional link to the Goethe model still has an affecting influence: the work of Hans Carossa is an example of the consistent trivialization through reduction. The third tendency, a distancing from autobiographical writing, extends from the constructive variant of ironising the form to rejecting the form as ‘jaded’. A summary of these skeptical objections were presented in the short (auto)biographies of the contributors to the poetry collection Menschheitsdämmerung [‘Twilight of Mankind’], edited by Kurt Pinthus in 1919.

The Autobiographical Novel as an Example of Fictionalization The German-language novel-like autobiography after 1900, such as Franziska von Reventlow’s Ellen Olestjerne (1903), does not have the same sophistication as the autobiographical novels characterizing the century: in the first place Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) [In Search of Lost Time], James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and also Italo Svevo’s Zeno Cosini (1923). Zeno Cosini represents basically the rejection of any organized life plan and the ironic destruction of teleological belief. Cosini’s failed self-analysis culminates in the statement that any life plan is justified – as long as it is fed by desire. Trying to respond to the experience of a crisis of the modern subject goes beyond the scope of mere metaphor. As major projects, these works plumb the possible dimensions of modern experience against the background of the aesthetic knowledge of their time in the most precise way possible. Equivalents in the German-speaking world are fictional works like Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924) [The Magic Mountain] or Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–1943) [The Man Without Qualities].

766 

 1 The European Tradition

Sceptical Distancing from the Autobiographical and Movement towards Other Forms Comprehensive diary works appear after 1900 (Hermann Bahr, Franz Kafka, Gerhart Hauptmann, Harry Graf Kessler, Paul Kornfeld, Oskar Loerke, Robert Musil, Franziska von Reventlow), but in contrast to ‘actual’ autobiography, which is simultaneous with life and contemporary, they are not capable of apotheosis or at least affirmation of a fragmented life-nexus. Kafka’s work exemplifies in all probability this movement towards other forms, which are subjected to changes in their own right. The diaristic form is extended, the autobiographical form on the other hand often reduced to fragmentary or minimal forms like sketches or pastiche. Kafka’s diaries (1910–1923) clarify precisely the requirements and possibilities of the diary, changing its character from the wailing wall to a place of self-conceptualizing, however, fragmented. Instead of being a mere replacement for the impossible autobiography, the diary becomes a catalyst of self-analysis with particular attention to dreams and neurasthenic details (next to the many novelistic drafts found in his diaries; see also, for instance, Heimito von Doderer’s ‘quarry’-diaries, Tangenten [‘Tangents’] [1940–1950] and Commentarii [‘Records’] [1951–1966]). While many contributions in the anthology Menschheitsdämmerung laconically reject autobiographical writings, Alfred Döblin’s autobiographical sketches represent a third way between rejection and emulation, with the impulse to know the self leading to ever new and never final accounts of a self that is itself psychoanalytically trained and mistrustful of itself.

Anachronism of the Form and Trivialization Carossa’s autobiographical works between 1922 and 1955 can be characterized as epigonally following a model which is reduced to trivial succession: An ‘imitatio Goethe’ without depth, poetic scenic realism, impressionistically stringing together images and genre scenes. This aesthetic anachronism is far from the subject skepticism of Döblin who referred to his novels for more precise disclosures about himself, or from Kafka’s self-agony. An anachronistic awareness of the genre such as this characterized the so-called ‘blood and soil literature’ of the 1930s and 1940s.

Marginal Autobiography: A Dominant Special Form In the first two decades of the twentieth century, next to literary autobiography, works by marginal groups in society are strongly on the rise. The best known is Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [‘Memoirs of a Mentally Ill’] (1903). Lena Christ’s Erinnerungen einer Überflüssigen [‘Memories of a Dispensable Person’]

1.4 Modernity 

 767

(1912) have recently been re-discovered. ‘Ethnological interest’ in sub-cultures within one’s own society, the self-expression of psychotics, criminals, proletarians, and in particular their female variants, motivated the reception. The authors place themselves by all means in a tradition of self-understanding through deviation (and as such are forerunners of what in the 1970s was called ‘Verständigungsliteratur’ [‘confessional literature’]). While retaining the traditional form, this literature at the fringe of society is in contrast characterized by its content, deviating from society’s norm and even delinquent. Christ’s autobiographical debut is characterized by its authentic manner of speaking, the chronology of continued abuse follows a strict realism where the dialogue (in dialect), similar to Ödön von Horvárth later, serves to describe and reveal states of consciousness. Oskar Maria Graf’s autobiographical works (Frühzeit [‘Early Times’] [1922], Wir sind Gefangene [‘We are Prisoners’] [1927]), with their comparable rural Bavarian background, are deemed to belong to a line of great confessions.

Paradigmatic Modernity: Proust, Woolf, Stein, and Benjamin Developments in fascist Germany separated literary life from the works embodying modernity, such as Proust’s monumental Recherche work, Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (from 1932) [Berlin Childhood Around 1900] and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Only after 1945 did it reconnect with the new forms of autobiographical narration. As an autobiographical novel, Proust’s Recherche is a paradoxical undertaking in that the narrator’s life story only very loosely embraces the universe of events and personae. Renouncing linear autobiographical narration made this novel a paradigmatic type of modern autobiography. Proust expressed the impossibility of grasping the self and captured it aesthetically. A complete surrender of the individual is averted in a literary theory of remembrance where the seemingly forgotten rises into consciousness, constituting layers of one’s own personality. Early on Walter Benjamin, recognizing Proust’s tendency to negate conventional concepts of self, withdrew himself from biographical determinism. Wanting to remain unrecognized, however, is not synonymous with a complete eradication of subjective signs as the poststructuralist would have it. In Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert Benjamin develops a poetics of spaces of remembrance modelled on a child’s magical thinking. A distinct theory of transformations characterizes the texts, imitating a child’s perception in an attempt to approach a capacity for mimesis now lost. In many ways the images, in adjusting to the threatening, take up the process of becoming similar. Fixating a person as identical with itself (as portrait photography attempts to do, according to Benjamin’s theory of photography) is but creating the complete adaptation to the expected. This creates the perfect deception: “Ich aber bin entstellt vor Ähnlichkeit mit allem, was hier um mich ist” [‘I am disfigured by the similarity with everything around me’] (Benjamin 1983, 71). Traces and signs of individual exist-

768 

 1 The European Tradition

ence and withdrawal from all determinations are held in Benjamin’s fragment in a precarious balance. Linda Anderson (2011, 90) has convincingly shown, using the example of Virginia Woolf, that she, herself set in a familiar tradition of biographically conservative writing, undertook “to imagine a different kind of biography which could bring together fiction’s attention to the ‘intangible personality’ and the ‘inner life’ with the veracity and substance of historical fact.” In her significantly for a time unpublished Sketch of the Past (1940) she found “new techniques of proximity”, leading into the sphere of the pre-Oedipal, the “archaic memories”: Virginia Woolf has been a key figure for critics of autobiography who, drawing on the psychoanalytic writings of both Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, have seen her writing as opening up the question of the feminine as a challenge to the phallic or masculine position of the subject (Anderson 2011, 95).

Anderson’s resume about Woolf’s autobiographical writing is also true for Gertrude Stein’s variant, as if seen in a distorting mirror: the questioning of a phallic or masculine position of the subject (Holdenried 2017 [in prep.]). At first glance, Gertrude Stein does not appear as distant from the traditional autobiographical discourse as Proust or Benjamin. Reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as readers of the first edition did, without the author’s name on the title page, Toklas would figure as author according to the pact-theory of Philippe Lejeune (1975). The true authorship is only revealed in the last paragraph. Amusing as it is, reminiscent of light memoir like natterings, it is a game of deception with regard to genres. The reconstruction of an identity, which according to Stein does not exist in the first place, is replaced by the sheer presence of originality. The famous ‘bon mot’ according to which ‘I am, because my little dog knows me’ is the ironically shortened version of the dispute about memory and identity. Stein presents a solution that would prevent the metaphysical charging of the autobiographical and approaches in parlando style the memoir type without, however, coinciding with it (Gölter 1995).

Pacts with Power and Suffering from It There is no development of autobiographic writing under National Socialism in Germany. Autobiographical research has hardly explored this period because the genre appears to have been reduced to mere functionality. Nevertheless, autobiography established itself with a bang as an ideological instrument for supporting the fascist regime, rather than by way of stealth as Wolfgang Paulsen (1991) noted with reference to the former naturalist Gerhart Hauptmann. His beautified remembrances (Im Wirbel der Berufung [‘In the Swirl of the Calling’] [1936], Das Abenteuer meiner Jugend [‘The Adventure of My Youth’] [1937]; see Holdenried [2013]) are in their questionable design alarmingly close to the blood and soil literature of a Gustav Frenssen (Lebens-

1.4 Modernity 

 769

bericht [‘Life Report’] [1940]). The naturalists in particular in their life reports appear to have shown an affinity to the new ideology: Max Halbe’s Scholle und Schicksal [‘Field and Fate’] (1933) and Johannes Schlaf’s Aus meinem Leben [‘From My Life’] (1941) need to be mentioned in this regard. Hans Fallada’s autobiographical books (Damals bei uns daheim [‘Back Then in Our Home’] [1941], Heute bei uns zu Haus [‘Today in Our Home’] [1943]) are relatively harmless variants of an idyllic glorification with escapist traits. The greater part of autobiographic writing after 1945 had an apologetic character. The autobiographic works describing persecution and internment and the majority of autobiographic writing in exile were published with a symptomatic delay, some of it after decades. Apart from the destruction of records and the disinterest in publishing autobiographies of exiles, often denounced as ‘traitors’ (see Döblin’s Schicksalsreise [1949] [Destiny’s Journey], reporting such sentiments in post-war Germany), many survivors of the holocaust were not able or willing to re-enact their experiences in the act of writing. Jean Améry, in his essays about torture, and Primo Levi (Se questo è un uomo [1947] [If This Is a Man]) describe the horror ending in the apology of suicide. Several autobiographies of surviving women, Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben (1992) [Still Alive] or Charlotte Delbo’s Trilogie. Auschwitz und danach (1990) [Auschwitz and After], were first published in the 1990s. The Tagebuch der Anne Frank [The Diary of Anne Frank] had already been published in German in 1950, translated into 40 languages, a bestseller with many million editions. The diary, already a dominant type in the 1940s, guaranteed continuity in the course of autobiographical writing after 1945. During the Second World War it was assigned for propaganda purposes, heroic records of soldiers had to strengthen the system and the population was asked to keep diaries to find ideological orientation and personal relief. After 1945 this relief function came to the fore: in mostly ‘retroactive’ diaries (a ‘contradictio in adiecto’, really), like Ruth Andrea Friedrich’s, the immediacy of the medium was converted into justification. ‘Retroactive’ diaries were started when the authors considered the war lost, hence revealing the justification aspect. Luise Rinser’s Gefängnistagebuch [‘Prison Diary’] (1946) was often read as an attempt to present herself as a Nazi opponent. It is possible though that the two months in prison caused her ‘conversion’ (Peitsch 1990). Literary criticism favoured Ernst Jünger’s Strahlungen [‘Radiations’] (1949) over the ‘educational’ diaries, as adhering to the experience of war ensured a transformation of the past, a ‘conversion’ not necessarily synonymous with a total rejection of the nationalistic past. Jünger fascinated readers in elevating the war existentially to where an individual could retain his or her sovereignty. Exiles, however, were excluded from such ‘community of shared experience’. Peitsch (1990, 373) characterized Gottfried Benn’s Doppelleben (1950) [Double Life] as a “Muster einer deutschen Apologie” [‘model of German apology’]. His polemic is directed against the German emigrants (Klaus Mann by name), enjoying themselves “in französischen Badeorten” [‘on the French Riviera’] (Benn 1980, 115). He on the

770 

 1 The European Tradition

other hand had been endangered, as someone disagreeing  – as a Prussian  – with Hitler. The NS-regime is described as a bunch of “Krakeeler[]” [‘brawlers’], as “reiner Ausfall an Wurf und Form” [‘a diatribe in toss and form’] (Benn 1980, 115) – a diagnosis showing his elitist consciousness foremost and less a political criticism of an inhumane totalitarian system. Only art, and in this Benn’s apology, converging with the hopes of the 1950s, is exempt from the resigned view of mankind: true art in his opinion is anti-ideological and hermetic.

The 1950s: Moving on to New Pastures Alfred Andersch’s report of a desertion, Die Kirschen der Freiheit (1952) [The Cherries of Freedom], stands content-wise in sharp contrast to the apologists of those days. Andersch interprets his escape in 1944 in Italy as an existential act, symbolized by the wild cherries he enjoys in freedom. In the style of a report, the ‘factual writing’ corresponds with a philosophical withdrawal from ideological dogma, as the realism of the Gruppe 47 [‘Group 47’] demanded. Max Frisch’s Tagebuch 1946–1949 [‘Diary 1946–1949’], designed as a public diary, was published in 1950. Frisch writes on current affairs, observations (travelling through destroyed Germany in 1946, the destroyed Warsaw Ghetto), encounters and moralistic reflections about life under the conditions of terror. There is a short autobiographical text labelled ‘autobiography’, in the laconic tone of a chronology, with few comments on inner states. In the diary, like in his novels, Frisch writes about himself indirectly, by way of a substitute. Georg K. Glaser’s report Geheimnis und Gewalt [‘Mystery and Violence’] (1951) stands out among the autobiographical works of this time like a monolith. In this report about brutal deformation through education, Glaser in all clarity answers questions few before him had dared to ask: Hitler was possible, because, being the victim of a violent father, Glaser bears his father as well as Hitler inside himself.

The 1960s: Trouble Spot Peter Weiss’ two autobiographical volumes Abschied von den Eltern. Erzählung (1961) [Leavetaking] and Fluchtpunkt. Roman (1962) [Vanishing Point. A Novel] mark a significant turning point in autobiographic writing after 1945. Weiss and others in his wake (like Goldschmidt) draw on the tradition of the psychological novel. “Verlorenheit und Haltlosigkeit unserer Existenz” [“lostness and instability of our existence”] (Weiss 1985, 116 [2014, 99]) describes the emigrants, and Weiss expressly uses the term ‘psycho-dramas’. The feeling of abandonment includes the closest family circle and was long before the flight from Germany the adolescent’s dominant sense of life. The family is described as a nucleus of extreme alienation, escape into music, books

1.4 Modernity 

 771

and painting are opposing stations of self-discovery which can only be attained in a spirit of negation. In Fluchtpunkt, the “Werdegang eines Widersachers” [‘career of an antagonist’] (Weiss 1983, 28), Weiss succeeds in merging autobiographical impulse and psychoanalytic cognitive process in literary form. While such a fictional surrogate still remains questionable, the invention, not re-discovery, of lost time is the target of autobiographical writing. Weiss called his history of anti-fascist resistance Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975–1981) [The Aesthetics of Resistance], a ‘wish-biography’, this too being a rejection of any conventional project of biographical writing. At the height of literary-political debates of the 1960s, Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared the ‘death of literature’ and political action was to take its place. A few years later a new trend is at issue, and the ‘return to narration’ acclaimed. Demands for authenticity and ‘realism’ were retained, yet under different auspices – not seen as abstract parameters but connected to the ‘subjective factor’. In the context of ‘new subjectivity’ the autobiographical becomes the dominant literary model.

The 1970s: Everybody’s Autobiography Peter Schneider’s novella Lenz (1973) and Karin Struck’s novel Klassenliebe [‘Class Love’] (1973) mark the beginning of ‘new subjectivity’ in the German-speaking context. They are symptomatic for the new trends, turning from big politics to politics of the private. Both texts stand out from the crowd of ‘confessional texts’. Their common characteristic is a heightened cult of personal ‘concern’. The interest in existential topics, personal crises, illness and death experience is characteristic for this confessional literature, which appears in retrospect, despite some important literary works (Fritz Zorn’s Mars [1977], Maria Erlenberger’s Hunger nach Wahnsinn [‘Hunger for Madness’] [1977]), rather amorphous, exchangeable in its fusion of socio-political claim and daily life (Verena Stefan’s Häutungen [‘Skinnings’] [1975], Brigitte Schwaiger’s Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer [‘Why Is the Ocean Salty’] [1977], Elisabeth Plessen’s Mitteilungen an den Adel [‘Messages to Nobility’] [1976]). The works of known authors like Max Frisch (Montauk [1975]), Günter Grass or Peter Handke (Wunschloses Unglück [‘Wantless Disaster’] [1972]) distinguish themselves from these confessional texts, which were often written as debuts and as their only works, by extending mere descriptions of mental states in a literary way. For that very reason, though, they also do not contain the same destructively powerful language which these ‘hate books’ use in dealing with societal conflicts. Bernhard Vesper’s Die Reise [‘The Journey’] (1977 posthumously) embodies the radical proto-type of such reckonings with society and the parents’ generation, the generation of perpetrators. Vesper foundered on this amalgam of drug trip and travel account in a wider existential sense. Like Glaser, Vesper had to come to the dreadful conclusion that not only was he violated by his Nazi father (and mother), but that he, too, bore Hitler within himself.

772 

 1 The European Tradition

The democratization of writing created literature workshops and writing groups in the belief that everybody could write, and instead of professional specialization, spontaneity had to be the challenge for writers. Older authors like Ricarda Huch (Erinnerungen an das eigene Leben [‘Memories of My Own Life’] [1980 posthumously]), Elias Canetti and Manès Sperber, unimpressed by this new democratic inwardness, wrote their life stories. Canetti’s highly praised memoirs are works of a great old-fashioned writer, apparently in command of remembrance without productive doubt and a fundamentally traditional subject conception.

Anti-Idylls and Border Crossings in the Autobiographical Novel The extension of autobiographical writings in the 1970s brought about a proliferation of forms. Autobiographies, digressing into details of particular incidents and moods, were no longer describing only childhood and adolescent life, least of all entire life cycles. Microscopy prevailed instead of introspection. The autobiographical essay, fragments and protocols of consciousness extended the repertoire. From the middle of the 1970s, initially with Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (1976) [Patterns of Childhood], there was a return to the literary, connected to the dominant form of the autobiographical novel. Fictionalizing in novel-like form allows for the experimental treatment of autobiographical material. Wolf’s many-layered novel became the structural model to examine the past in a way which had not been done before in this complex form (Holdenried 2003). The journey to the place of childhood in present day Poland is artfully combined with the leitmotif question of ideological corruptibility: “Wann hat das angefangen?” [“When did it start?”] (Wolf 1979, 153 [1980, 162]). The act of writing is to break open the lifelong “Panzerung” [‘armour’] (Wolf 1979, 376). A row of painful childhood memoirs appear during this time, most of them less complex than Wolf’s or Versper’s explorations, but as intensively interested in the reconstruction of biographical archaeology. Among them are Helga Novak’s volumes (Die Eisheiligen [‘The Ice Saints’] [1979], Vogel federlos [‘Bird Without Feathers’] [1982]), Manfred Bieler’s story of an abuse (Still wie die Nacht. Memoiren eines Kindes [‘Still as the Night. Memoirs of a Child’] [1989]), Cordelia Edvardson’s Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer [‘A Burnt Child Seeks the Fire’] (1989) or Beate Morgenstern’s Nest im Kopf [‘Nest in the Head’] (1989). Ingeborg Drewitz, in a one-hundred-year family chronicle, presents a life and contemporary history on a large scale (Gestern war heute. Hundert Jahre Gegenwart [‘Yesterday was Today. One Hundred Years of the Present’] [1978]). Child and adolescent biographies have in the history of the genre, and on account of their ‘theoretical-subject’ background, often been judged as deficient. A great number of childhood memoirs since the 1960s seem to confirm this rating. They are characterized by anxiety, violence – directly physical and atmospheric – oppression

1.4 Modernity 

 773

and existential loneliness. One could see it as a documentation of the origin of ‘negative identity’ as described by Erik Erikson. Franz Innerhofer’s continuous autobiography, against the somewhat exotic rural background of Austria in the 1950s and early 1960s, illustrates that stories about deviation and frustrated identities are not (exclusively) individual pathographies but at the same time portraits of their society. Innerhofer’s autobiography in three novels and one novella (Schöne Tage [‘Beautiful Days’] [1974], Schattseite [‘Shady Side’] [1975], Die großen Wörter [‘The Great Words’] [1977], Der Emporkömmling [‘The Parvenu’] [1982]) are interesting because education is given an essential role in the emancipation of the protagonist Holl from unbearable conditions. Its ambivalence becomes apparent, however, in the course of the emancipation project. The leap from the peasant-autodidact to writer is so enormous that he himself cannot grasp it. Holl experiences language as an instrument of oppression to an extent that he cannot found his existence on it. In this skeptical distance to language, Innerhofer’s work distinguishes itself from other writer autobiographies. Writing for him – like Thomas Bernhard – remains under the banner of unappeasable and interminable permanence of self-conceptualization. Wolfgang Koeppen’s long anticipated great novel, when it finally appeared, was a small autobiographical work titled Jugend (1976) [Youth] – a masterwork of autobiographical narrative art. Pubescent awakening, the motif of transformation, escape into literature and the anarchic lone wolf are themes which stand equitably next to literary reflections about poverty, power and war. Paratactically structured, the text is not a testimony of an either ascending or descending life, but the dreamlike panorama of a remembering consciousness insisting on the dream doublet of a life lived in actuality up to the present. The paradox of potential and always imaginable alternatives drives this prose – the introductory motto places Koeppen in the vicinity of Goethe’s concept of ‘fundamental truth’ – and not the verifiable factuality of life. The same is valid for Thomas Bernhard’s autobiography in five volumes (Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung [1975] [Gathering Evidence], Der Keller. Eine Entziehung [1976] [The Cellar. An Escape], Der Atem. Eine Entscheidung [‘The Breath. A Decision’] [1978], Die Kälte. Eine Isolation [‘The Coldness. An Isolation’] [1981], Ein Kind [‘A Child’] [1982]). Bernhard’s life and work are written from the perspective of death, as thanatography. Life determining moments, especially in Der Atem, always lead to existential turns into the ‘opposite direction’. Montaigne-trained, Bernhard did not give away the history of his life: “Aber auch das kann, wie alles hier Notierte, nur Andeutung sein” [‘But this, like everything I record here, can only be indicated’] (Bernhard 1994, 88 [2003, 129]). The increase in Holocaust literature in the 1980s and 1990s can directly be traced to the age of its authors – the ‘Krankheit Auschwitz’ [‘Auschwitz illness’] (Weil 1983, 8), which dealt with the perspective of approaching death, is again traumatically invoked. Grete Weil’s books (Meine Schwester Antigone [1980] [My Sister, My Antigone], Generationen [‘Generations’] [1983]) are to be named here along with the aforementioned books of Klüger, Delbo and others.

774 

 1 The European Tradition

Far from its prophesised end since the beginning of the century, the innovative potential of autobiographical writing is by far not exhausted at the turn of the millennium. At the end of this historical overview the one keyword under which all further imaginable developments could be subsumed is ‘crossing borders’. The novelistic work of Hermann Lenz with Eugen Rapp as protagonist, created over decades, follows a pace which at first appears quite anachronistic, but is in fact a very modern pace of remembering. From the grandparents’ world in Württemberg around 1900 until the author’s last life phase this work encompasses the twentieth century. The counterpart to this major autobiographical project is the micro-autobiography of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, who in five autobiographical novels and one ‘genuine’ autobiography deals with the trauma of persecution as a Jewish child and his survival. The ‘fantastical exactness’ Wolf invokes in her remembering is achieved by Goldschmidt by deeply penetrating the order of language of the self in a way that is unrivalled to this day. For his work, comparable only with the self-experiment of a Fernando Pessoa or Michel Leiris, Goldschmidt took Karl Philipp Moritz as an example. Crossing borders and the dissolution of fixed cultural identities will be the signum of the early twenty-first century. The emergence of hybrid identities is a topic of the literature which owes its existence to the crossing of real borders. The result: more and more intercultural autobiographically grounded texts (Yoko Tawada’s Wo Europa anfängt [1991] [Where Europe Begins], Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn [1998] [The Bridge of the Golden Horn]) deal with life between cultures. 

Translation: Walter Köppe

Works Cited Aichinger, Ingrid. “Selbstbiographie.” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Ed. Werner Kohlschmidt and Wolfgang Mohr. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977. 801–819 (Aichinger 1977a). Aichinger, Ingrid. Künstlerische Selbstdarstellung. Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit und die Auto­ biographie der Folgezeit. Bern: Lang, 1977 (Aichinger 1977b). Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2011. Benjamin, Walter. Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. Benn, Gottfried. “Doppelleben.” Das Hauptwerk. Vol. IV. Ed. Marguerite Schlüter. Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1980. 67–171. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Anke, and Alfredo Guzzoni. Gelehrsamkeit und Leidenschaft. Das Leben der Ernestine Christine Reiske 1735–1798. München: Beck, 1992. Bernd, Adam. Eigene Lebens-Beschreibung. Ed. Volker Hoffmann. München: Winkler, 1973. Bernhard, Thomas. Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994 [Gathering Evidence. A Memoir. Trans. David McLintock. London: Vintage, 2003]. Bovenschen, Silvia. “Über die Frage: gibt es eine weibliche Ästhetik?” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 25 (1976): 60–75. Eissler, Kurt R. Goethe: 1775–1786. A Psychoanalytic Study. 2 vols. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963.

1.4 Modernity 

 775

Fontane, Theodor. “Meine Kinderjahre.” Autobiographische Schriften. Vol. I. Ed. Gotthard Erler. Berlin: Aufbau, 1982. Gölter, Waltraud. “Thanatographie – Biographie.” Geschriebenes Leben. Autobiographik von Frauen. Ed. Michaela Holdenried. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. 366–378. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit.” Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Vol. IX. Ed. Erich Trunz. München: Beck, 1978 [From My Life. Poetry and Truth. 2 vols. Ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons. Trans. Robert R. Heitner. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987]. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter in den Jahren 1828 bis 1832.” Sämtliche Werke. Münchner Ausgabe. Vol. XX.2. Ed. Edith Zehm and Sabine Schäfer. München: Hanser, 1998. Goodman, Kay. “Weibliche Autobiographien.” Frauen, Literatur, Geschichte. Ed. Hiltrud Gnüg and Renate Möhrmann. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985. 289–299. Groppe, Sabine. Das Ich am Ende des Schreibens. Autobiographisches Erzählen im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990. Hahn, Barbara. “‘Weiber verstehen alles à la lettre’. Briefkultur im beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert.” Deutsche Literatur von Frauen. Vol. II. Ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler. München: Beck, 1988. 13–27. Hebbel, Friedrich. “Tagebücher 1.” Werke. Vol. IV. Ed. Gerhard Fricke, Werner Keller and Karl Pörnbacher. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966. Heine, Heinrich. “Memoiren.” Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke (Düsseldorfer Ausgabe). Vol. XV. Ed. Gerd Heinemann. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1982. 59–100 [Heinrich Heine’s Memoirs. From his works, letters and conversations. 2 vols. Ed. Gustav Karpeles. Trans. Gilbert Cannan. London: Heinemann, 1910]. Hoberman, Ruth. “Sweden.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001. 856–858. Hoffmann, Volker. “Tendenzen in der deutschen autobiographischen Literatur. 1890–1923.” Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 482–520. Holdenried, Michaela. Im Spiegel ein anderer. Erfahrungskrise und Subjektdiskurs im modernen autobiographischen Roman. Heidelberg: Winter, 1991. Holdenried, Michaela. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. Holdenried, Michaela. “Christa Wolf: Kindheitsmuster.” Interpretationen. Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts. Vol. III. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. 87–107. Holdenried, Michaela. “Der Roman des Lebens. Gerhart Hauptmanns autobiographische Selbst­ erkundungen in Das Abenteuer meiner Jugend und Buch der Leidenschaft.” Acta Germanica 41 (2013): 181–194. Holdenried, Michaela. “Selbstmaskerade und Autobiographie. Lebensgeschichtliches Schreiben von Frauen 1900–1950.” Autobiographische Diskurse von Frauen (1900–1950): Theoretische Ansätze und Praxis. Ed. Montserrat Bascoy and Lorena Silos Ribas. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017. 25–43. Jeßing, Benedikt. “Art. Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit.” Reclams Romanlexikon. Vol. I. Ed. Frank Rainer Max and Christine Ruhrberg. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998. 360–364. Kormann, Eva. “‘Es möchte jemand fragen, wie ich so hoch von Gott geliebt worden bin, und was mein junger Lebens=lauff gewesen’: Anna Vetter oder die Religion als Argumentations- und Legitimationsmuster.” Autobiographien von Frauen. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte. Ed. Magdalena Heuser. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996. 71–93. Lehmann, Jürgen. Bekennen, erzählen, berichten. Studien zu Theorie und Geschichte der Autobiographie. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.

776 

 1 The European Tradition

Lepenies, Wolf. Melancholie und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1969. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. 4 vols. Leipzig et al.: Various Publishers, 1907–1969. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman in vier Teilen.” Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman in vier Teilen. Andreas Hartknopf. Eine Allegorie. Andreas Hartknopfs Predigerjahre. Zürich: Artemis & Winkler, 1996. 5–431 [Anton Reiser. A Psychological Novel. Trans. Ritchie Robertson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997]. Niggl, Günter. “Zur Säkularisation der pietistischen Autobiographie im 18. Jahrhundert.” Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Ed. Günter Niggl. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 367–392. Peitsch, Helmut. “Deutschlands Gedächtnis an seine dunkelste Zeit”. Zur Funktion der Autobiographik in den Westzonen Deutschlands und den Westsektoren von Berlin 1945 bis 1949. Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1990. Ramm, Elke. “Warum existieren keine ‘klassischen’ Autobiographien von Frauen?” Geschriebenes Leben. Autobiographik von Frauen. Ed. Michaela Holdenried. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995. 130–142. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions. Ed. Jacques Voisine. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1964 [The Confessions. Trans. John M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1953]. Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Vanacker, Sabine. “Netherlands and Belgium (Flanders)”. Encyclopedia of Lifewriting. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001. 647–649. Vollers-Sauer, Elisabeth. Prosa des Lebensweges. Literarische Konfigurationen selbstbiogra­phi­ schen Erzählens am Ende des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: M & P, 1993. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2005. Weiss, Peter. Fluchtpunkt. Roman. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. Weiss, Peter. Abschied von den Eltern. Erzählung. Frankfurt a.  M.: Suhrkamp, 1985 [Leavetaking. Trans. Christopher Levenson. London: Melville House, 2014]. Winkler, Willi. „Biedermeiers trauriges Ende. Zur Neuausgabe von Friedrich Theodor Vischers „Auch einer“.“ Die Zeit (5 February 1988). 51. Wolf, Christa. Kindheitsmuster. Roman. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1979 [A Model Childhood. Trans. Ursule Molinario and Hedwig Rappolt. London: Virago, 1980].

Further Reading Baggerman, Arianne, ed. Controlling Time and Shaping the Self. Developments in Autobiographical Writing Since the Sixteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Braun, Rebecca. “‘Mich in Variationen erzählen’. Günter Grass and the ethics of autobiography.” German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Birgit Dahlke, Dennis Tat and Roger Woods. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. 121–136. Golec, Janusz. “Sprache aus dem Verlust und der Bedrohung. Konstruktionen in Elias Canettis Autobiographie.” Jüdische Identitätssuche. Studien zur Literatur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Lubin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, 2009. 121–133. Huddart, David. Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2008. Mittermayer, Manfred. “‘Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Lüge’. Thomas Bernhards autobiographische Inszenierungen.” Spiegel und Maske. Konstruktionen biographischer Wahrheit. Ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger. Wien: Zsolnay, 2006. 79–94.

1.4 Modernity 

 777

Nelva, Daniela. “Erinnerung und Identität. Die deutsche Autobiographie nach der ‘Wende’.” Gedächtnis und Identität. Die deutsche Literatur nach der Vereinigung. Ed. Fabrizio Cambi. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. 31–43. Parry, Christoph: “Autobiographisches bei Peter Handke. ‘Die Wiederholung’ zwischen fiktiona­ lisierter Autobiographie und autobiographischer Fiktion.” Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Vol. I. Ed. Ulrich Breuer and Beatrice Sandberg. München: iudicium, 2006. 275–290. Steinig, Valeska. Abschied von der DDR. Autobiografisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der politischen Alternative. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2007. Tarvas, Mari, ed. Autobiografisches Schreiben von der Frühen Neuzeit bis in die Gegenwart. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2009. Weil, Grete. Generationen. Roman. Zürich: Benziger, 1983.

1.5 Postmodernity Anna Thiemann

The era of postmodernity, which is usually said to have begun in the second half of the twentieth century, coincides with a surge of scholarly attention to the genre of autobiography and its reconceptualization in both literary and critical discourse. The relationship between postmodernity and life writing can be approached from historical and conceptual perspectives. Many scholars have focused on the co-evolution of postmodern culture and increasingly experimental and subversive autobiographical forms. Under the impact of poststructuralism, the canon debate, and various social movements, autobiographical writing adopted, constituted, and challenged new epistemologies and political agendas that were based on a radical deconstruction of its central categories. Traditional notions of truth, authenticity and the universal self stood on increasingly shaky ground, and the end of modernist elitism, which had maintained a dividing line between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, led to an unprecedented proliferation and interest in formerly marginalized lives and autobiographical forms. At the same time, some critics perceive ‘autobiography’ to be ahead of the postmodern curve as it has always been “a site of identity production”, which has taken various shapes (Gilmore 1994, 4). Due to its emphasis on the modes and practices of self-representation, autobiography touches upon many issues that have become highly relevant in the postmodern era. According to Leigh Gilmore, autobiography and postmodernism are characterized by a “shared interest in theorizing the subject” (1994, 3) and the former gives the latter “a text and a discourse through which to theorize human agency” (1994, 8). Making similar observations about autobiography as a signifying practice, Joseph Fichtelberg even suggests that it is a “paradigmatic postmodern genre” (1998, 3–4). These arguments prepare the way for an anachronistic reading of autobiography as a site of ‘postmodern’ fictionalizations of the self. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that the genre was originally informed by Enlightenment traditions, which are at odds with the postmodern denial of rational objectivity and the autonomous self. Following a historical approach, this chapter will concentrate on autobiographical, philosophical, and literary-theoretical texts of the postmodern era that present radically new concepts of (self-)knowledge, human agency, and identity. In addition, it will shed light on postmodern “auto/biodiversity” (Saunders 2004, 286), which comprises a broad spectrum of experimental and (neo-)realist forms. Since it is obviously impossible to provide a comprehensive overview of postmodern life writing in Europe, this chapter will single out dominant and influential trends and phenomena illustrating these with selected examples that are embedded in historical and theoretical contexts. The following four sections, which are loosely chronological, will outline the continuities and changes between modern and postmodern culture and autobiography, the relationship between life writing and poststructuralist deconstruction during https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-093

1.5 Postmodernity 

 779

the era of high postmodernism, the impact of the women’s movement on the practice and theorization of autobiography, and the late twentieth-century memoir boom, which involved an increasing diversification and commodification of life writing.

The Threshold of Postmodernity The gradual transition from modern to postmodern culture is often associated with the atrocities of the Nazi regime and the Second World War, which seem to have put a definite end to the Western faith in rationality, morality, modernization, and human progress. This development is powerfully reflected in autobiographical texts of the immediate post-war era. In World within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (1951), the English poet, novelist, and former communist opens the first chapter with a nostalgic reminiscence of pre-war optimism: “I grew up in an atmosphere of belief in progress curiously mingled with apprehension. […] [I]t seemed that I had been born on to a fortunate promontory of time towards which all other times led” (Spender 1951, 1). The book is a chronological account of the narrator’s loss of innocence, which is made to represent the fate of an entire generation. Disillusioned by the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the rise of fascism in pre-war Britain, Spender reconceptualizes the modern self as a helpless subject that struggles in vain against the arbitrary forces of history. Recent historical events have revealed a new world in which human agency is extremely limited: “The 1930’s saw the last of the idea that the individual, accepting his responsibilities, could alter the history of the time. From now on, the individual could only conform to or protest against events that were outside his control” (Spender 1951, 290). Spender’s autobiography exemplifies the decline of the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity, the belief in human progress and emancipation (Lyotard 1979, 7). Yet, the writer’s position is considerably less radical than the postmodernist stance taken by the likes of Jean François Lyotard and Michel Foucault in the 1960s and 1970s. Spender is unwilling to give up the last vestige of coherence and volition, the inner self, which may be saved from fragmentation because it is in touch with “timeless qualities”, the human craving for love, “faith and joy” (Spender 1951, 286). The inner life of the self is presented as a sanctuary, where the world can be reimagined even if public chaos prevails and the course of history is beyond human control. Spender repeatedly insists that “the inner life of man must create his outward circumstances […], it is only within the inner life that man can will himself to be a coherent whole and not a part set against another part” (Spender 1951, 286–287). According to World within World, the tension and interrelation between inside and outside are constitutive not only of ‘reality’ but also of the autobiographical subject. In his introduction, Spender explains that he faces the challenge of reconciling an interior/subjective and an exterior/objective perspective on the self as he “is really writing the story of two lives: his life as it appears to himself […] and his life as it appears

780 

 1 The European Tradition

from outside” (1951, viii). On the author’s account, the inclusion of “subjective experiences” is a key characteristic of autobiography even though they constitute “holes” in the “framework of objective events” (1951, vii). Examples include flashbacks, the “portrayal of types” instead of “real personalities” (1951, ix), or passages where “the narrative diverges into satire” to convey “certain impressions” (1951, ix). For Spender, ‘evidence’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ are still valid categories. At the end of World within World, he insists that his work is more complex, intimate and honest than autobiographical novels such as Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–1927) [Remembrance of Things Past (1922–1930)], which allegedly escape from harsh realities and suspend the reader’s critical judgment (1951, 310). An interesting phenomenon of the immediate post-war era is the publication of sequels to autobiographies that were written before 1945. In 1954, the Scottish poet and novelist Edwin Muir published a revised and expanded version of The Story and the Fable (1940), which was reissued under its former subtitle, An Autobiography. Looking back at the time when he wrote the first part of his life narrative, Muir explains that the world has since been turned upside down by “a great war and a succession of revolutions” (1964, 194). Similar to Spender, he alludes to the grand narratives of progress and human emancipation, which have lost their credibility: This world was set going when we began to make nature serve us, hoping that we should eventually reach a stage where we would not have to adapt ourselves at all: machinery would save the trouble. We did not foresee that the machinery would grow into a great impersonal power, that we should have to serve it instead of co-operating with nature as our fathers did, and that as it grew more perfect, we should become more powerless and be forced at last into a position not chosen by us, or chosen in blindness before we knew where our desires were leading (Muir 1964, 194).

Muir’s image of “the machinery” and his concept of “great impersonal power” evoke Foucault’s poststructuralist notion of discursive power and disciplinary regimes, which are, however, conceived as a product of modernity and considered to be all-encompassing, leaving no room for primordial “desires” or choices. In Discipline and Punish (1976), Foucault insists that power produces and constitutes reality, truth, and the individual, rather than repressing or masking them (Foucault 1975, 227). As will become more evident below, Muir’s autobiography is still far from embracing this radical poststructuralist notion of knowledge and identity even if his life narrative was written at a time when postmodern culture was taking shape. In Muir’s argument, the Second World War not only put an end to the grand narrative of modernization but also shattered the identity of the modern self. He compares pre-war life to a sentence broken off before it could be completed; the future in which it would have written its last word was snatched away and a raw new present abruptly substituted; and that present is reluctant now to formulate its own sentence, from the fear that what it has to say will in turn be cut short by yet another raw present (Muir 1964, 194).

1.5 Postmodernity 

 781

Continuity and progress have been replaced by incoherence and contingency, leaving the subject in a state of stupor and paralysis. The simile of the “sentence” implies that the coherence and continuity of life and identity are discursively produced rather than given. A similar notion is expressed in the first part of Muir’s autobiography, which focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a passage about his transition from teenager to adult, the narrator suggests that masculinity is not innate but a performance that is dictated by social norms and conventions: It is in these years between eleven and eighteen that we construct little by little, with the approval of all the world, the mask which we shall wear with such ease when we reach manhood, feeling then that we were born with it, though it is merely a face which was made to look like a face […]: a crude imitation of our romantic conception of some grown-up figure such as never existed except in our imagination (Muir 1964, 67).

Again, this passage stops short of affirming Foucault’s postmodern concept of discursive identity, the basis of Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity (Butler 1990). The mask implies that there is an ‘original’ and ‘true’ identity behind it, which is concealed and repressed by society. When Muir explains in another context that “every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man”, he stresses the universality of human experience rather than its inherent discursivity and constructedness. The same passage reveals the narrator’s strong belief in a hidden essence of the self that is above ordinary history and beyond human understanding. The eponymous distinction between “story” and “fable” refers to a perceived difference between “historical events”, which are “external and deceptive” (Muir 1964, 49), and a higher order that influences human existence in mysterious ways. Roger J. Porter describes Muir’s fable as “a mythic state […]. It is a history beyond history, an idea that joins him with other human beings however their specific, concrete experience may differ” (2002, 83). Even though the fable cannot be known or written, the autobiographer is still able to recognize its stages by going beyond the listing of historical facts, which alone would not bring him closer to knowing man’s eternal self (Muir 1964, 49). In addition to being interested in the transcendental essence of human existence, Muir shows awareness of the modernist crisis of representation, which would become the basis of poststructuralism in the postmodern era. He compares the autobiographer’s use of dates and language to children’s games of make-believe: an agreement by which years and days are given certain numbers to distinguish them, and peoples and countries and other things certain names: all this is necessary, of course, for the business of living. But it is deception as well. If I knew all these figures and names I would still not know myself, far less all the other people in the world, or the small number of people I call my friends (Muir 1964, 49).

This passage is reminiscent of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who argues that language is structural rather than referential, that individual words gain meaning, not because they point to objects in the real world, but because they differ

782 

 1 The European Tradition

from other signifiers. Consequently, language is arbitrary and offers no access to reality. Along similar lines, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that truth is merely “ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern” [“a mobile army of metaphors”] (Nietzsche 1999b, 880 [2001, 878]). However, this is not the notion of truth and (self-) knowledge that Muir presents in his autobiography. The narrator mentions that he studied Nietzsche “with a great sense of liberation” but eventually found his philosophy of epistemic and moral relativism to be unbearable (Muir 1964, 52). Gaining full self-knowledge by means of self-writing may ultimately prove to be a futile endeavor, but each glimpse of the eternal fable strengthens the subject’s belief in immortality and moral truth. Like Spender, Muir grapples with the question whether the autobiographical novel would be a more suitable means to achieve his aim of extrapolating the fable from the particulars of his life, but autobiography, with its unique combination of objective fact and true myth, seems to be the most promising genre when it comes to revealing the eternal mysteries of the self (Muir 1964, 48). The shortcomings of the novel are not explicitly discussed in Muir’s Autobiography but in another piece of life writing: a letter from 1938 that addresses his attempt to write “something like a description of [himself]” (Muir 1974, 100). Therein, the author explains that he “would like to avoid all make-believe; [that] the arranged patterns of modern novels give [him] a stale, second-hand, false and tired feeling” (Muir 1974, 101). This is not to say that autobiography lacks form and design, but its “facts” provide a necessary basis that restricts the writer’s freedom of expression (Muir 1964, 48). Spender’s and Muir’s approach to autobiography resonates with critical perspectives that developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), one of the first studies to treat life writing as a literary genre, Roy Pascal concludes that “[b]eyond factual truth, beyond the ‘likeness’, the autobiography has to give that unique truth of life as it is seen from inside, and in this respect it has no substitute or rival” (2015, 195). About a decade later, James Olney similarly argued that autobiography focuses on “the isolate uniqueness that nearly everyone agrees to be the primary quality and condition of the individual and his experience” (1972, 21). Not coincidentally, “everyone” is not gender-neutral in this case, for Olney, Pascal, and others initially established a conservative canon of works by ‘great men’, ranging from Augustine and Rousseau to Goethe and Muir, whose experiences were considered representative of the human condition. According to Linda Anderson, this important group of modern scholars “deduced abstract critical principles for autobiography based on ideals of autonomy, self-realization, authenticity and transcendence which reflected their own cultural values” (2011, 3). Despite their awareness of the ‘literariness’ and fabrication of autobiographical narratives, they were unwilling to give up on the sovereign Cartesian subject, who uses language as a medium of (self-)expression permitting access to the world, or truth, beyond the text. As this analysis of Spender’s World within World and Muir’s Autobiography has shown, autobiographical subjects of the immediate post-war period had to regain and

1.5 Postmodernity 

 783

defend their autonomy against the decentering effects of burgeoning postmodernity. Both works are on the threshold of a new era. They reflect on the decline of grand narratives and human agency while still clinging to the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity and the Romantic notion of a unified and transcendent autobiographical self. In Porter’s reading, the life narratives of Muir’s generation were dedicated to “recovering a self that time and history had effaced” (Porter 2002, 85). While literary critics were defending this notion of autobiography and the self throughout the 1960s and 1970s, poststructuralist theory and postmodern life narratives set out to deconstruct its central premises.

Postmodern Deconstruction Many autobiographical texts of the second half of the twentieth century were complicit with and deeply affected by a widely recognized crisis of representation and the ultimate arrival of the post-sovereign subject. As indicated above, these issues were not brought about by the historical caesura of the Second World War alone but were foreshadowed and influenced by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments in philosophy and other fields of knowledge production that are sometimes referred to as postmodern avant la lettre. Dismissing transcendental reality as a met­ aphysical illusion, Nietzsche claimed that the world, truth, and, last but not least, the ego are but a contingent “Fabel [oder] Fiktion” [“fable [or] fiction”] (Nietzsche 1999a, 91 [2003, 60]). The disempowerment of the modern subject was further propelled by Freud’s exploration of the unconscious. His division of the mind into the ‘id’, ‘ego’ and ‘superego’ challenged the traditional notion of a unified, sovereign self. Torn between instinctual urges and cultural norms, he famously claimed, the ego is not even “Herr […] im eigenen Hause” [“master in its own house”] (Freud 2001, 285 [2000, 284]). In the 1960s and 1970s, these early insights into the textuality of (self-)knowledge and the disintegration of the subject were taken up and further developed by poststructuralist thinkers, who “grant[ed] no access to any reality outside signification” (Chandler 2002, 75). Drawing on Freud and Saussure, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan stressed the constitutive role of linguistic structures in the process of identity formation. According to his reformulation of Freud’s Ödipuskomplex [‘Oedipal complex’], awareness of the self develops in two stages: the subject’s entry into the imaginary and the symbolic order. In his argument, children experience a symbiotic union with the maternal body until they are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Their image or Doppelgänger gives rise to an illusionary idea of autonomy, wholeness, and unity that conceals the fragmented nature of human existence. After this imaginary or mirror stage, children enter the symbolic order, which is dominated by the Law of the Father, the world- and identity-shaping structures of language (Lacan 2001, 1285–1290). Even more radically than Lacan, whose theory includes a preverbal

784 

 1 The European Tradition

developmental stage, the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida maintained that “il n’y a pas hors texte” [“there is nothing outside the text”] (1967, 227 [1997, 163]). Along similar lines, Roland Barthes announced “the death of the author” (Barthes 1977) and relocated the individual in a web of texts, discourses and conventions. He deconstructed the link between textual meaning and authorial intention, pointing out that “it is language that speaks, not the author” (1977, 143). What most postmodern theorists have in common is their firm belief that language produces reality and the subject rather than mirroring or representing them, a perspective that has also passed under the name ‘linguistic turn’. These insights into the interdependence between language and identity coincided with a radical reconceptualization of autobiography, which became evident in both theoretical discourse and life writing itself. The postmodern denial of referentiality challenged the traditional notion of autobiography as a ‘truthful’ representation of the author’s life and even questioned its status as a distinct genre that differs, above all, from fiction. According to the linguistic turn, the extra-textual subject of autobiography is an ‘artifact’ produced by the text rather than a preverbal reality. In that sense, life writing is quite similar to the novel, which likewise creates its referent rather than representing it. From a postmodern perspective, writing an ‘objective’ or ‘authentic’ account of one’s life is pointless. Nevertheless, there are quite a few postmodern writers who have taken up and played with the genre, including Roland Barthes, who is perhaps the most unlikely figure to ‘resurrect’ the life of the author. According to Hayden White’s back cover blurb for an English edition of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes] (1975 [1994]), the text can be regarded as a “genuinely postmodern autobiography” (White qtd. in Barthes 1994, n. pag.). Beginning with the title, which includes the author’s name, Barthes’s work dismantles the illusion of referentiality and the stable self. The book opens with an epigraph, a handwritten note in French, which reveals the paradox of writing an autobiography in the postmodern age: “Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personage de roman” [“It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel”] (Barthes 1974, n. pag. [1994, n. pag.]). Representing the visible trace of a hand movement that precedes the text, the epigraph can be seen as a marker of authenticity, the author’s extra-textual existence, and a direct articulation and representation of thought. Yet, these defining characteristics of handwriting (and autobiography) are challenged by the content of the note and its mechanical reproduction in print, which highlight the fictionality and non-referentiality of Barthes’s life writing. This reinterpretation of ‘écriture’ is reminiscent of Barthes’s argument in “The Death of the Author” (1967), the notion that “the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins” (Barthes 1977, 146). The epigraph is followed by a brief introduction and photos from Barthes’s family album, which are described as external ‘others’ that reveal “la fissure du sujet” [“the

1.5 Postmodernity 

 785

fissure of the self”] (Barthes 1974, 6 [1994, n. pag.]). The author’s indebtedness to Lacan’s theory of the subject and his emphasis on the non-identity between the signifier and the signified is made even more explicit in the caption beneath a full-page oval baby portrait, which contains a direct reference to the mirror stage (Barthes 1974, 25). The rift between the ‘I’ and its ‘other(s)’ is additionally underlined by the use of different pronouns throughout the book. Barthes’s subversion of generic conventions and his assertion of the primacy of (linguistic) structure over human agency and intention are equally prominent in the main part of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, which is made up of personal and philosophical reflections. Rather than creating a chronological (life) narrative, Barthes chose to include more than two hundred titled fragments, which are arranged alphabetically. In the consecutive entries “L’alphabet” [“The alphabet”] and “L’ordre dont je ne me souviens plus” [“The order I no longer remember”], Barthes describes his glossary as “un ordre immotivé (hors de tout imitation)” [“an unmotivated order (an order outside of any imitation)”] (Barthes 1974, 150 [1994, 147]) that has no origin(al). Deconstructing the difference between autobiography and fiction became a common strategy in postmodern life writing. In contrast to Muir and Spender, many authors of the 1970s embraced the terms ‘novel’ and ‘invention’ when describing their autobiographical works. Similar to Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Kindheitsmuster (1976) [A Model of Childhood (1980)] by the East German writer Christa Wolf opens with a disclaimer: “Alle Figuren in diesem Buch sind Erfindungen der Erzählerin. Keine ist identisch mit einer lebenden oder toten Person. Ebensowenig decken sich beschriebene Episoden mit tatsächlichen Vorgängen” [“All characters in this book are the invention of the narrator. None is identical with any person living or dead. Neither do any of the described episodes coincide with actual events”] (Wolf 2002, n. pag. [1984, n. pag.]). This explanation comes as a surprise in view of the fact that the book deals with the author’s childhood in Nazi and post-war Germany. This apparent contradiction supports the conclusion that Wolf’s introductory paragraph is meant to reveal the non-identity between her narrative and the past. She insists that historical events are not directly accessible, that our knowledge of them is always already mediated: “Die Beschreibung der Vergangenheit – was immer das sein mag, dieser noch anwachsende Haufen von Erinnerungen – in objektivem Stil wird nicht gelingen” [“The past – whatever the continuously accumulating stack of memories may be  – cannot be described objectively”] (Wolf 2002, 164 [1984, 240– 241]). Wolf’s distinction between her account and the past resonates with the (post-) structuralist paradigm in history, the notion that “historical narratives […] are verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found” (White 2001, 1713). Yet, the fact that the past cannot be recovered does not exempt Wolf from the moral obligation to confront her involvement in the most disturbing chapter in German history. In her attempt to deal with these epistemological and ethical challenges, Wolf develops a concept called ‘inner’ or ‘subjective authenticity’. In Barbara Mabee’s reading,

786 

 1 The European Tradition

[t]he term implies an unconditional demand for truth in dealing with one’s own experiences and, therefore, calls for a new relationship to reality. Instead of attempting an objective reproduction of facts, in which subjective elements are hidden or suppressed, Wolf suggests to bring the subjective element out into the open. This subjective element involves the experience of the individual in the writing process as well as personal evaluations and thoughts (1997, 501–502).

Following this logic, Kindheitsmuster keeps returning to the problem of memory, which is described not only as a highly subjective, unreliable, and contingent process, but also as a moral act (Wolf 2002, 211). Other issues that are repeatedly addressed are the limits and dictates of language, “die […], indem sie Benennung erzwingt, auch aussondert, filtert: im Sinne des Erwünschten. Im Sinne des Sagbaren” [“(which) acts as a filter in the process of minting expressions. It filters: in the sense of what is desirable. In the sense of what is mentionable”] (Wolf 2002, 337 [1984, 228]). The author’s highly self-referential mode of representation is also reflected in the narrative structure of her work, which shifts between three temporal levels: Wolf’s early life in her native town G., a journey to G. in the early 1970s – the place is now called L. and belongs to Poland, and the time when Wolf writes the book. The protagonists in these narrative threads are presented as separate selves, thus underlining the disintegration of the autobiographical subject. The child becomes an alter ego called Nelly, who is referred to in the third person, while the travelling and the narrating selves are addressed as ‘you’. Even though the pronoun ‘I’ surfaces at the end of the novel, it remains doubtful whether the distance between the self and its (fictional) others can ever be bridged. Even more experimental and overtly fictional is George Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) [W, or the Memory of Childhood (1988)] about the author’s memories of World War II, which he experienced as the only child of Polish Jews living in Paris at the time. The most significant and traumatic events in Perec’s life are his father’s death in the French army and the separation from his mother, who sent her six-yearold son to the ‘zone libre’ [‘free zone’] before she was deported and murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. Perec faces the challenge of writing about the unspeakable, the unimaginable horrors of the Nazi regime and the holocaust, which robbed him of his family and identity. His memoir directly addresses this dilemma, which lies at the heart of every trauma narrative. No matter how accurate, emotional or fanciful Perec allows his family memoir to be, he manages nothing more than “un ressassement sans issue” [“the reiteration of the same story, leading nowhere”] (Perec 1975, 58 [1988, 41]). The attempt to write about his parents only yields a blank, “[le] reflet d’une parole absente à l’écriture, le scandal de leur silence et de mon silence” [“(the) refraction of a voice that is absent from writing, the scandal of their and my silence”] (Perec 1975, 59 [1988, 42]). Yet, the impossibility of giving a voice to the dead and filling the inevitable void in the survivor’s memory does not stop Perec from writing a memoir about his childhood. Even though the traumatic past is unspeakable, it is still a part of his fragmented identity that needs to find expression (Perec 1975, 59). As the title indicates – the letter ‘W’ is a pun on ‘double-vé/vie’ [‘double-life’] – Perec’s memoir consists of two alternating narrative threads, which are “inextrica-

1.5 Postmodernity 

 787

blement enchevêtrés” [“inextricably bound up with each other”] (Perec 1975, n. pag. [1988, n. pag.]). According to the author, [l]’un de ces textes appartient tout entier à l’imaginaire […], la reconstitution, arbitraire mais minutieuse, d’un fantasme enfantin […] [et l]’autre texte est une autobiographie: [un] recit fragmentaire […] pauvre d’exploits et de souvenirs, fait de bribes ésprases, d’absence, d’oublis, de doutes, d’hypothèses, d’anecdotes maigres [(o)ne of these texts is entirely imaginary (…), an arbitrary but careful reconstruction of a childhood fantasy (…) (and the) other text is an autobiography: a fragmentary tale (…) lacking in exploits and memories, made up of scattered oddments, gaps, lapses, doubts, guesses and meager anecdotes] (Perec 1975, n. pag. [1988, n. pag.]).

The book is subdivided into two parts and thirty-seven chapters; the W episodes are written in italics and the autobiographical account is printed in roman characters except for the passages about his parents, which appear in bold type. W, opens with the first-person account of a French deserter who lives under a false name in Germany. Gaspard Winckler is sought out by a mysterious man who reveals that the narrator was given the identity of a deaf-mute boy gone missing before or after a shipwreck that claimed the latter’s mother’s life. Gaspar agrees to embark on a search for his namesake, which takes him to the island nation W near Tierra del Fuego, whose history and social organization are detailed in the second part of the book. The reader learns that northern European settlers turned W into a Spartan society that revolves around athletic competitions within and among the villages on the island. What looks like an Olympic utopia at first is gradually revealed to be a cruel and arbitrary social system that endorses manipulation, food deprivation, violence and rape. The second first-person narrative focuses on the author’s childhood memories, including the revelation that the Olympic dystopia is based on a story written by the young Perec himself. Even though the autobiographical part begins with the disclaimer that the narrator has no childhood memories, he struggles to reconstruct the past with the help of photos and other documents. Some recollections are later revealed to be imaginary, which casts doubt on the author’s initial distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The reader’s suspicion is additionally reinforced by increasing evidence that the ‘imaginary’ story is in fact no less ‘autobiographical’ than the reconstruction of Perec’s childhood. As both narratives unfold, it becomes clear that the child’s invention of the totalitarian and inhumane regime on the island of W must have something to do with his parents’ death. Both the deserter Gaspar, who lost his family and original identity, and the boy, whose mother drowned while he most likely survived, function as Perec’s alter egos, who highlight the author’s identity crisis and survivor guilt. The dystopian vision of W, the athletes’ futile struggle to win and survive, on the other hand, is an equally distorted representation of Perec’s life under Nazi occupation and the unimaginable circumstances of his mother’s death. The final chapters provide an obvious hint at these hidden interdependencies: The ‘autobiographical’ narrative ends with Perec mentioning that he visited an exhibition on the

788 

 1 The European Tradition

concentration camps, while the ‘imaginary’ tale closes with an extensive quote from L’univers concentrationnaire [‘concentration world’], David Rousset’s 1946 description of the Nazi death camps and the structures and mechanisms of the Hitler regime. As indicated above, the postmodern deconstruction of the boundaries between life writing and fiction poses a challenge to literary scholars who seek to define autobiography as a distinct genre. In the mid-1970s, the French structuralist Philippe Lejeune turned his attention to the ways readers respond to certain kinds of texts, including different forms of life writing that share a number of generic properties. If the names of the protagonist, narrator, and author of a retrospective narrative prose text about the life of a ‘real’ person are identical, he argues, it is reasonable for the audience to assume that they are dealing with a non-fictional autobiography: “Ce qui définit l’autobiographie pour lui qui la lit, c’est avant tout un contrat d’identité qui est scellé par le nom propre. Et cela est vrai aussi pour celui qui écrit le texte” [“What defines autobiography for the one who is reading it is above all a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name. And this is true also for the one who is writing the text”] (Lejeune 1975, 33 [1989, 19–20]). The result of such a constellation is an ‘autobiographical pact’ between the writer and the reader of a book, a tacit agreement that it offers a truthful account of the author’s life. For Lejeune, autobiographies are “des textes référentiels: exactement comme le discours scientifique ou historique, ils prétendent apporter une information sur une ‘réalité’ extérieure au texte, et donc se soumettre à une épreuve de verification” [“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”] (1975, 36 [1989, 22]). Lejeune’s influential essay “Le pacte autobiographique” (1975) [“The Autobiographical Pact” (1989)] was published in the same year as Barthes’s novel/autobiography, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, which effectively challenges the critic’s structuralist model. Meeting all criteria for an autobiographical pact but claiming to be a novel, Barthes’s text makes a mockery of Lejeune’s basic distinction between fiction and nonfiction. In a deliberate attempt to test the boundaries of Lejeune’s theory, the French writer (Julien) Serge Doubrovsky wrote a fictional first-person account of a character who bears the author’s name. Fils [‘Son’/‘Threads’] (1977) opens with the declaration that the book is not an autobiography but “[f]iction d’événements et de faits strictement reels; si l’on veut, autofiction” [‘(f)iction, made from strictly real events and facts. Autofiction if you like’] (Doubrovsky 2001, 11). Similarly, Doubrovsky’s Un amour de soi [‘Self-Love’] (1982) revolves around a character who seems to give an account of his life even though he claims to be writing a novel rather than an autobiography. In the narrator-protagonist’s view, only famous people such as movie stars, politicians, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau have what it takes to write an autobiography. Julien or S.D., as the narrator is variously called, is not up to the task because he “éxiste a peine, [il est] un être fictive. [Il écrit son] autofiction” [‘barely exists. (He is) a fictional being. (He writes his) autofiction’] (Doubrovsky 1982, 91). Yet, the creative process turns out to change the narrator’s self-image and identity. While writing (about) his

1.5 Postmodernity 

 789

life, he finds it increasingly compelling and significant: “À mesure que je deviens le personnage de mon roman, je me passionne pour moi” [‘The more I become the character of my novel, the more fascinated I am with myself’] (Doubrovsky 1982, 91). At first sight, Fils and Un amour de soi seem to suggest that autobiography and autofiction are alternative forms of life writing, but Doubrovsky refutes this notion in a 1992 essay titled “Textes en main” [‘Texts in Hand’]. Here, he points out that autobiography, the attempt to write an authentic account of one’s life, is doomed to fail in the postNietzschean and post-Freudian age. The observation that we are fictional beings, he insists, is not a literary formula but an existential fact. Doubrovsky is not the only contemporary writer/theorist to take issue with Lejeune’s approach. Perhaps the most influential critique of the ‘autobiographical pact’ was offered by the Belgian-born literary scholar Paul de Man. As a poststructuralist, he prefers to regard referentiality as an illusion or effect that is produced by the medium of (self-)representation. In his landmark essay “Autobiography as De-Facement” (1979), he deconstructs Lejeune’s binary opposition between ‘autobiography’ and ‘fiction’: We assume the life produces autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of its medium? (de Man 1979, 920)

Distancing himself from the traditional notion of autobiography as a distinct genre that “reveals reliable self-knowledge” (de Man 1979, 922), de Man redefines it as “a figure of reading and understanding that occurs, to some extent, in all texts” (1979, 921). What makes autobiography such an interesting case is “that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and totalization […] in all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions” (de Man 1979, 922). According to de Man, the dominant trope of autobiography is ‘prosopopeia’, which is characterized by the unending dynamics of figuration and disfiguration, or face-giving and de-facement. He describes ‘prosopopeia’ as “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech” (1979, 926). Yet, as a “fiction” or “mask”, it not only restores the self but also marks its constitutive absence (1979, 926). Even though the concept of autofiction became ubiquitous in literary criticism, the postmodern deconstruction of autobiography and the absolute denial of referentiality have come under attack from various quarters. In his follow-up to “Le pacte autobiographique”, “Le pacte autobiographique (bis)” (1982), Lejeune defends life writing as an everyday practice that continues despite the recent vogue of poststructuralist critique and its persuasive view of the referential illusion (Lejeune 1986, 30–31). Thinking along similar lines, the American literary critic Paul John Eakin endeavors to resurrect autobiography as a genre without falling back on a ‘naïve’ referential approach. In

790 

 1 The European Tradition

Fictions in Autobiography (1985), he echoes Lejeune’s notion that the poststructuralist insight into the fictionality and contingency of autobiography does not cause writers and readers to give up their desire for autobiographical truth and referentiality: “Let us grant the very concept of the self as a fiction, let us speak in the French way of textuality of the self. After such knowledge, why do authors still indulge in, and readers still consent to, a fiction of this kind?” (Eakin 1988, 27) On the one hand, Eakin admits that “the autobiographer constructs a self that would not otherwise exist” (Eakin 1988, 26); yet, on the other hand, he is reluctant to sever the link between lived and narrated experience. To find a compromise between poststructuralist and referential theories of autobiography, Eakin sets out to redefine ‘original’ or lived experience as a cultural construction. He suggests that experience is always already the result of fictional manipulation since it depends on narrative scripts and cultural codes that precede and constitute the self. Autobiography is thus only a specific form of self-invention in “a ceaseless process of identity formation in which new versions of the past evolve to meet the constantly changing requirements of the self in each successive present” (Eakin 1988, 36). Eakin’s critique of poststructuralism becomes even more emphatic and pronounced in Touching the World (1992), which stresses the importance of referentiality in the production, reception and study of autobiography.

Feminist Interventions While these epistemological debates were in full swing, feminist critics turned their attention to the long yet largely invisible tradition of women’s life writing. In her introduction to the groundbreaking essay collection Women’s Autobiography (1980), the editor Estelle C. Jelinek suggests that established criteria concerning the content and form of autobiography, especially its focus on professional success and its adherence to progressive linearity, have served to exclude women’s autobiographies from the canon of Western literature. According to Jelinek, women’s life writing is characterized by its emphasis on the (inter)personal and its non-linear structure, which is “analogous to the fragmented, interrupted, and formless nature of their lives” (1980, 19). She assumes that late twentieth-century developments, the increasing interest in experimental forms, will eventually cause a change in the perception of women’s autobiographical works. Jelinek’s argument resonates with second-wave feminist writing that aims to record female experiences and to foreground female modes of representation, for which Hélène Cixous proposed the term ‘écriture féminine’ (Cixous 1976, 883). The 1970s saw the rise of feminist confessions, “a type of autobiographical writing which signals its intention to foreground the most personal and intimate details of the author’s life” (Felski 1989, 87). A showcase example is Häutungen (1975) [Shedding (1978)] by the Swiss-born writer Verena Stefan, which focuses on the narrator’s emerg-

1.5 Postmodernity 

 791

ing lesbian identity. In her foreword to the first edition, the author recalls that writing the book heightened her awareness of the misogynist and heteronormative nature of conventional language: “Als ich über empfindungen, erlebnisse, erotik unter frauen schreiben wollte, wurde ich vollends sprachlos, deshalb entfernte ich mich zuerst so weit wie möglich von der alltagssprache und versuchte, über die lyrik neue wege zu finden” [“When I wanted to write about sensitivity, experiences, eroticism among women, I could not find the words. This is why I distanced myself from everyday language as much as possible, and why I tried to find new paths via poetry”] (Stefan 1994, 34 [1984, 53–54]). Yet, this concept of female life writing has not found unanimous approval among feminist critics. While the focus on ‘écriture féminine’ is a powerful strategy to create and express a group identity, it also involves the risk of essentialist generalizations and a rather naïve notion of autobiographical representation. Jelinek has accordingly been criticized for her approach: “Not only was [her] model of women’s autobiography mimetic in form and expressive in content of women’s life”, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out, “it also assumed that ‘experience’ is unproblematically ‘real’ and ‘readable’, and can be captured transparently in language expressing the truth of experience” (1998, 9). Notwithstanding the postmodern aversion against the concept of experience, it has continued to play a crucial role in feminist theory and women’s life writing. The postmodern deconstruction of identity and the subject provided the theoretical basis for feminist politics of difference, which was spearheaded by the black feminist movement and put an end to universalist notions of female experience. Yet, at the same time, feminist activists feared that radical deconstruction would mean the end of political agency, leading to a dysfunctional “feminism without women” (Modleski 1991). One of the most outspoken responses to this dilemma, the essay “Postmodern Blackness” (1990) by the African American author and activist bell hooks, discusses the downsides of deconstructionist theory, a conglomerate of radical ideas that was initiated by the white male establishment. Hooks states somewhat sarcastically that “it’s easy to give up identity, when you got one” and encourages the reader to “be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the ‘subject’ when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time” (hooks 2001, 2482). As an “adequate response to this concern”, she proposes “to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of ‘the authority of experience’” (2001, 2483). This insistence on claiming a voice and the right to self-representation is likewise evident in black feminist activism in Europe, which has been strongly influenced by the black power movement and black feminism in the United States. Audre Lorde’s 1984 visiting professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin, for example, was crucial to the emergence of a visible and politically active Afro-German community. In addition to introducing German students to poetry by African American women, the radical feminist and civil rights activist inspired the publication of Farbe bekennen: Afrodeutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986) [Showing Our Colors: Afro-Ger-

792 

 1 The European Tradition

man Women Speak Out (1992)], a collection of essays and testimonials that shed light on the contributors’ life stories and their struggle against racism, sexism, and other institutional barriers in German society. The first book-length autobiography by a Black German woman, Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben (1998) [Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany] (2001) highlights the importance of language and self-representation for the formation of individual and collective identities: Solange ich mich nicht selbst definiere, nicht selbst weiß, wer ich bin, werde mich andere definieren. […] Wir Afrodeutschen beginnen, in der BRD unsere eigene Geschichte zu schaffen, sie sichtbar zu machen und weiterzuentwickeln. […] Wir definieren uns selbst als Afrodeutsche oder Schwarze Deutsche und geben uns damit einen Namen, mit dem wir uns identifizieren. ‘Mischling’ und ‘Mulatte’ waren für viele von uns die gängigsten Bezeichnungen, noch häufiger hießen wir ‘Besatzungskind’, obwohl die Existenz vieler Schwarzer Deutsche nichts mit den beiden Weltkriegen zu tun hat [As long as I don’t define myself, others will. As long as I don’t know who I am, others will try to tell me who I ought to be. (…) All across the country at this time, we Afro-Germans are beginning to make our histories visible, to take control of our lives. (…) We call ourselves Afro-Germans or Black Germans, thus coining a new name for ourselves with which we can identify. Most of us have been labeled mixed-race or Mulatto all our lives. For others it was occupation baby, though the presence of a considerable Black population in Germany predates and has nothing to do with World War II (Hügel-Marshall 1998, 93 [2008, 92–93]).

The child of a German woman and an African American corporal who returned to the US before she was born, Ika spends the first years of her life in a small Bavarian town, where her mother meets and marries a former member of Hitler’s army. Raised in ignorance of her racial background, Ika has a positive outlook on life until she learns that she is ‘different’, until she looks into the (metaphorical) mirror and discovers that she is a black girl living in a society where whiteness is the norm (Hügel-Marshall 1998, 17). As a recurring motif in Hügel-Marshall’s memoir, the mirror highlights the (mis-)representation of black ‘others’ in post-war German society, which is reflected in language and perpetuated by the media, institutions, and authorities. In March 1952, a few days after Ika’s fifth birthday, the Federal Agency for Civic Education publishes an article about the increasing number of “Besatzungskinder” [“occupation babies”] that is rife with racial stereotypes  – ranging from the notion that “Mischling[e]” [“children of mixed race”] are not adapted to the German weather to the conviction that cultural assimilation will never erode their ‘corrupt character’ (Hügel-Marshall 1998, 18–19 [2008, 5–6]). The same year, Ika’s mother is approached by a local youth welfare officer who persuades her that her beloved daughter would be better off in an orphanage, where she would be ‘protected’ from the “feindliche Welt” [“hostile world”] (Hügel-Marshall, 1998, 21 [1998, 8]) and the inevitable fate of becoming an alcoholic and ‘fair game’ for white men. At the orphanage, where Ika lives for the rest of her childhood, she falls victim to racially motivated abuse by other children, teachers and nuns who run the institution.

1.5 Postmodernity 

 793

The narrator remembers being treated unfairly because of her skin color, discouraged to pursue her dreams, beaten, tied, and locked up in the attic, and even brought to an exorcist. These traumatic experiences instill in her the notion that her blackness is a stain. She consequently starts to develop a double consciousness, a “sense of always looking at [herself] through the eyes of others” (Du Bois 2007, 3), which involves an inferiority complex and the self-destructive desire to be white (Fanon 2008). Looking into the bathroom mirror, Ika desperately wishes to be white (Hügel-Marshall 2008, 29). Barred from higher education, Ika trains to become a social worker but finds it difficult to find a job at first. She eventually starts working at a children’s home in Frankfurt, where she earns her colleagues’ respect and decides to go back to school and get an academic degree in social pedagogics. After turning her workplace into a humane institution, she quits her job, becomes an active feminist, and co-founds the first women’s shelter in Frankfurt. But even among her new friends and fellow activists she feels isolated and misunderstood since the women’s movement refuses to deal with the issue of racism. Ika eventually decides to get in touch with other Afro-Germans and joins the “Initiative Schwarze Deutsche (ISD)” [“nationwide Black German Initiative”] (Hügel-Marshall 1998, 93 [2008, 93]) as well as the “afrodeutsche Frauengruppe ADEFRA” [“Afro-German women’s organization […] ADEFRA”] (Hügel-Marshall 1998, 94 [2008, 93]). After moving to Berlin, she becomes a close friend of Audre Lorde and travels to the United States, where she eventually meets her biological father. The Afro-German community and Ika’s African American family give her a sense of belonging that she has never experienced before. Even though the problem of antiblack racism persists, the memoir ends on a positive note that underlines the narrator’s growing self-esteem and self-determination: “Ich schaue in den Spiegel und freue mich, denn ich möchte um nichts in der Welt anders sein, als ich bin” [“I look in the mirror and am happy, for there’s nothing in the world I want to be but myself”] (Hügel-Marshall 1998, 140 [2008, 136]). Germany was not the only European country to be affected by civil and social rights activism in the United States. A similar trend can be observed in Britain, where black feminism came on the heels of the women’s movement and black community politics. In the reader Black British Feminism (1997), which contains numerous references to bell hooks and Audre Lorde, the editor Heidi Safia Mirza summarizes the late twentieth-century agenda of the black feminist project as follows: Oriented around issues of difference, essentialism, representation, and cultural hybridity the collective project of black feminism is now, in the late 1990s, concerned with mapping our experience. But this is not a simple mapping of experience to uncover the ‘truth’, but rather an engagement with experience; a placing of the self in theory so as to understand the constructions and manifestations of power in relation to the self (1997, 13).

In a later passage, Mirza elaborates on these issues and sheds critical light on the relationship between postmodern theory, oppression and resistance:

794 

 1 The European Tradition

To valorize our ‘different’ experience means we have to locate that experience in materiality. Holding on to the struggle against inequality and for social justice anchors the black feminist project. For it seems whatever the project of postmodern theorizing, black women remain subject to discrimination and exclusion. Black women remain preoccupied with their struggles against low pay, ill health and incarceration, and for access to care, welfare and education. Inspite of postmodernism, little has changed for the majority of black women, globally and nationally. For them power is not diffuse, localized and particular. Power is centralized and secure as it has always been, excluding, defining and self-legitimating (1997, 20).

Mirza’s comment reflects a general concern in the (black) feminist movement that the postmodern focus on language, discourse, and the deconstruction of gender roles comes at the cost of ignoring women’s material existences and experiences. A further concern the editor raises in her introduction is the black women’s struggle for self-representation, which is closely linked to the ethics of representation or the “the problem of speaking for others” (Alcoff 1991, 5). Unlike bell hooks, who warns that postmodern theory could render black women invisible, Mirza suggests that minority voices are at risk of being appropriated by “masculinist postmodern” scholars who seek to “enter and share […] [their] place on the margin, which has now become ‘trendy’ to occupy” (1997, 20). In comparison to the Afro-German community, the black British diaspora and black British life writing have been considerably more visible at least since the mid-twentieth-century increase in migration between the (former) colonies and the metropolis. One of the few female voices in this important phase of black British literature is the Nigerian-born writer Buchi Emecheta, who published her first postcolonial and diasporic novel, In the Ditch, in 1972. Fourteen years and almost a dozen novels later, she finally decided to write a ‘proper’ autobiography. In the introduction to Head above Water (1986), Emecheta acknowledges that this is not her first autobiographical work, pointing out that many of her previous novels deal with her experience in Nigeria and Britain, where she and her young children struggled to survive in the face of racist discrimination and an irresponsible and abusive husband. Head above Water focuses on her life as a single mother who gathers all her strength to provide a safe home for her and her children, to earn her first money as a writer, and to pursue a degree in sociology. In chapter twelve, which is titled “That First Novel”, Emecheta explains why, as a first-time author, she decided to write a “documentary novel” (1986, 58) rather than an autobiography: I noticed a difference with this type of writing. I found it almost therapeutic. I put down all my woes. I must say that many a time I convinced myself that nobody was going to read them anyway, so I put down the whole truth, my own truths as I saw them. Because the truths were too horrible and because I suspected that some cynics might not believe me, I decided to use the fictitious African name of Adah, meaning ‘daughter.’ Well, time proved that to be a vain hope. People could tell straight away that Adah’s life was over fifty per cent mine (1986, 58).

1.5 Postmodernity 

 795

Emecheta is not the only feminist author to become interested in the genre of autobiography at a fairly late point in her literary career after writing several novels that are loosely based on her experience. Another prominent example is the British writer Jeanette Winterson, who published her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, in 2011. Similar to her autobiographical debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), it reconstructs Winterson’s experience as an adopted child of an evangelist family that does not tolerate her lesbian identity and her love of literature. Looking back on her first steps as a writer, the former English student at Oxford tends to take a relatively critical perspective on the concept of experience, pointing out that her early work not only helped her to come to terms with a traumatic past but also offered an opportunity to intervene in dominant gender discourses. Winterson recalls that 1985 wasn’t the day of the memoir – and in any case, [she] wasn’t writing one. [She] was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about ‘experience’ – the compass of what they know – while men write bold – the big canvas, the experiment with form. […] [W]hy could there not be the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody? (Winterson 2012, 3–4)

At the same time, she suggests that all autobiographical writing is fictional and, quite literally, a means to save one’s life when she explains that the first published version of her coming-of-age story was “faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time”, and, above all, “a story I could live with” (Winterson 2012, 6).

The Memoir Boom Winterson’s decision to rewrite her past is indicative of the so-called memoir boom, an increasing diversification and commercialization of life writing, which is usually said to have set in in the early 1990s. As the narrator of Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) aptly observes, “[i]t used to be said that everyone had a novel in them. And I used to believe it, and still do in a way. […] Just now, though, in 1999, you would probably be obliged to doubt the basic proposition: what everyone has in them these days, is not a novel but a memoir” (Amis 2001, 6). The label ‘memoir’ was formerly used to designate a form of life writing that focuses on socio-historical developments rather than the narrator, who merely acts as an observer, but it has since superseded ‘autobiography’ as the most commonly used term to designate various genres and practices of life writing. In the postmodern period, ‘memoir’ acts as a handy replacement for ‘autobiography’, which is often associated with outdated notions of autonomy and universalism (Smith and Watson 2010, 3). For Nancy K. Miller, “memoir is fashionably postmodern, since it hesitates to define the boundaries between private and public, subject and object” (2000, 2). In its current manifestations, the memoir also questions

796 

 1 The European Tradition

the elitist notion that only accomplished and famous people should write about their lives. Typically focusing on a significant chapter in the authors’ past, the memoir has become a highly popular vehicle for chronicling bizarre, pitiful or scandalous episodes in the lives of ordinary people. Winterson’s and Amis’s works are examples of what Thomas Couser calls “somebody memoirs” (2009, 1) which are written by celebrities or other well-known people such as world-leading athletes, acclaimed authors, or politicians. “Nobody memoirs” (Couser 2009, 1), on the other hand, are life narratives by ‘nameless’ individuals who only enter the spotlight when their work gets published (Couser 2009, 1). Though often a one-hit wonder, nobody memoirs can also become the stepping stone for a successful literary career. Nick Hornby’s first book, for instance, was an autobiographical work called Fever Pitch (1992), which deals with the author’s obsession with soccer. The book was an instant success and became the basis of two films and a Penguin Modern Classic in 2012. The current popularity of nobody memoirs is an unprecedented phenomenon, as is the broad spectrum of issues and experiences that are addressed in contemporary life writing. Based on current US bestseller lists, Couser comes to the conclusion that “[t]he memoir craze seems to offer something for everyone”, from “memoirs of pets” to “personal narratives of world-historical events” (2012, 4). Amis’s Experience implies that this development is not limited to the United States, where autobiography has always been an extremely popular genre. Supporting Amis’s observation about the current popularity of life writing, the Guardian ran an article on “the rise and rise of the memoir” (Armitstead 2001, n. pag.) in 2001, and European nonfiction bestselling records are routinely broken by memoirs like the pilgrimage story Ich bin dann mal weg (2006) [I’m off Then (2009)] by the German comedian Hape Kerkeling, which has sold over five million copies to date. A common explanation for the rise of the memoir points to the contemporary obsession with “personality and self-exposure”, which manifests itself in various new media forms, from reality TV such as Big Brother and Supernanny to social networks such as Facebook and Instagram (Anderson 2011, 114). Another line of argument suggests that the birth of certain subgenres was, at least to some extent, politically motivated, resulting from ‘spin-offs’ of the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which put great emphasis on self-representation. Patients’ rights activism and the disability movement, for instance, have given rise to illness and disability narratives. Another prominent subgenre is the so-called ‘misery memoir’, a chronicle of the writer’s suffering and recovery from childhood abuse or other difficult circumstances and traumatic experiences such as poverty, drug addiction, or the tragic loss of a close relative (Yagoda 2009, 9; Couser 2012, 5–6). Much of the appeal of such memoirs seems to derive from the protagonist’s inspirational triumph over adversity, which evokes the quest or progress narrative of conventional autobiography. Yet, this success formula is not universally applicable, especially in the case of illness narratives, also known as ‘autopathographies’. As Couser points out, writers who suffer

1.5 Postmodernity 

 797

from a chronic or terminal illness “may have difficulty reconciling their experience […] with the comic plot expected of autobiography” (1997, 5). One such example is Jean-Dominique Bauby’s autopathographie Le scaphandre et le papillon (1997) [The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (1997)]. Facing an uncertain prognosis, the author finds himself drawn towards episodic rather than linear narrative forms. The account of Bauby’s life with locked-in-syndrome consists of twenty-nine largely independent chapters that focus on everyday experiences, memories, and dreams without following a strict chronological order. After a massive stroke and twenty days of deep coma, the former journalist finds himself speechless and unable to move except for one eyelid, which he uses to ‘dictate’ his memoir. The book focuses on Bauby’s tragic recognition that his condition might be irreversible. However, rather than sinking into permanent nostalgia and cynicism, the tone is often light-hearted and humorous, thus reflecting the contrast between the narrator’s confined body and free mind, which are metaphorically represented by the eponymous diving-bell and butterfly. Bauby not only departs from the conventional structure of mainstream autobio­ graphy; he also evokes the main topoi of postmodern identity theory and life writing. In a disturbing and painful repetition of the Lacanian mirror stage, the narrator (mis-) recognizes himself in a windowpane, realizing that he is not only “exilé, paralysé, muet, à moitie sourd, privé de tous les plaisirs et réduit à une existence de méduse, mais en plus […] affreux à voir” [“exiled, paralysed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures and reduced to a jelly-fish existence, but (…) also horrible to behold”] (Bauby 1997a, 31 [1997b, 33]). Language, or the ‘symbolic order’, to use Lacan’s term, plays a central role in Bauby’s memoir. The narrator’s inability to speak even makes him doubt his material existence (Bauby 1997a, 47). Accordingly, he grows very fond of his new means of communication, a frequency-ordered alphabet that is recited until he stops the reader with a blink of his eye. This “hit-parade” (Bauby 1997a, 25) of vowels and consonants allows him to record episodes from his pre- and post-stroke existence between the covers of a book, thus defying the notion that he is disappearing (Bauby 1997a, 83) and that the accident divided his life into ‘before’ and ‘after’ (Bauby 1997a, 92). Bauby’s memoir is ultimately also a book about the power of memory, language, and the imagination, which, free like a butterfly, is able to resurrect the past and seemingly irretrievable pleasures and sensations like chewing a beef steak at a fancy restaurant or preparing a homemade meal with the finest ingredients of the season. The final chapter, titled “The Season of Renewal”, even ends on a hopeful note. At first, the narrator acknowledges that his life has changed drastically since he is confined to the wheelchair and the hospital. But he nevertheless chooses to conclude the book with faint optimism concerning the possibility of recovery, survival, or, at least, another daydream: “Y a-t-il dans ce cosmos des clefs pour déverrouiller mon scaphandre? Une ligne de métro sans terminus? Une monnaie assez forte pour racheter ma liberté? Il faut chercher autre part. J’y vais” [“Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my cocoon? A metro line with no terminus? A currency strong enough

798 

 1 The European Tradition

to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking. I’ll be off now”] (Bauby 1997a, 137 [1997b, 139]). Since the beginning of the disability rights movement, an increasing number of disability narratives, or “some body memoirs” (Couser 2009, 1), departs from dominant cultural scripts because their authors prefer to present their physical and/or mental ‘otherness’ as an integral part of their identity rather than a ‘disorder’ to be ‘cured’. Many of these texts reveal the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ to be cultural constructions, without, however, neutralizing the experience of disability or concealing the fact that “different bodies and minds require and create new modes of representation” (Siebers 2001, 737). Similar to the feminist discourse discussed above, the disability movement is attracted to both the “liberation epistemology” of constructivism and the power of disability as a subjective experience (Jeffreys 2002, 32). The memoir Born on a Blue Day (2006) by the UK-born autistic savant Daniel Tammet, for instance, focuses not only on the writer’s “impairments affecting social interaction, communication and imagination” (Tammet 2006, 6), but also and foremost on his visual mind – the memoir is made up of texts and images – and his extraordinary talent with numbers and foreign languages, which enables him to found a successful e-learning company. Tammet’s disability narrative is thus a success story that challenges dominant concepts of normality by refusing to move towards a prescribed cure and recovery. What misery, illness, and disability memoirs have in common is that their value seems to be “bound up with their authenticity” (Couser 2012, 91), the congruence between the text and the author’s life. Fidelity is often considered to be more important than aesthetic quality in such cases, and overly imaginative writers even run the risk of being suspected of forgery. According to Couser, a fabricated memoir about the suffering “of the oppressed […] constitutes an egregious ethical breach” (2012, 91–92) due to its violation of the ‘autobiographical pact’. He insists that [t]his is not just some arbitrary implication of conventions of the genre; it makes ethical sense. Imposture in memoir has two effects […]. The first is that false testimony can undermine the credibility of actual testimony; by creating doubt in the public’s mind, it empowers those hostile to the cause in question. Testimony is a classic instance of speaking truth to power, and its force lies not just in its factual truth but also in its authenticity (2012, 92).

Similar to experience and ‘écriture féminine’, the concept of authenticity has sparked a controversy among contemporary critics, many of whom have found it necessary to redefine it – as in Wolf’s notion of ‘subjective authenticity’ – or to reject it altogether. From a poststructuralist perspective, authenticity is not a guarantor of truth and unmediated access to an extra-textual reality but a rhetorical effect or “sign relation” (Culler 1988, 161). Following Jonathan Culler’s argument about the paradox of authenticity, a memoir “must be marked as authentic [to be experienced as authentic], but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes” (1988, 164). Yet, this postmodern debate about the non-existence of authenticity has

1.5 Postmodernity 

 799

not diminished its significance as a political act and mode of reception since writers have continued to capitalize on authenticity and the power and authority to be gained from it. As Virginia Richter succinctly observes, authenticity “is a deeply flawed […] term; but our collective investment in it is so high that even after decades of deconstruction and anti-essentialism it is impossible to get rid of it” (2009, 73). There is no better illustration of the continuing relevance of authenticity than recent scandals surrounding fake memoirs that have infuriated readers and critics alike, who accused the authors of fraud and, depending on the subject matter and circumstances, of appropriating the voice of the marginalized. The most explosive cases are the ones in which texts deceive the reader into believing that the writer belongs to and speaks for a victimized minority. One such example is the fake Holocaust memoir Bruchstücke (1995) [Fragments (1996)], which was published under the author’s adopted name Binjamin Wilkomirski. The revelation that this prize-winning book about the World War II experience of a Jewish child was actually a pseudo-memoir by a seemingly deluded writer triggered a heated debate not only about poetic license and the ethics of representation, but also about the genre of autobiography and the role of memory, subjectivity, and authenticity in its creation (Chambers 2002; Gabriel 2004, 172–175; Langer 2006, 48–63; Suleiman 2006, 164–172; Richter 2009, 61–63). The subject-matter and political function of life writing are not the only factors that determine the need for authenticity. The cultural context in which autobiographical texts are produced and interpreted also plays an important role. Attitudes towards the relationship between truth, fiction and life writing vary immensely across Europe. A cursory glance at Poland, for example, reveals the cultural contingency of these attitudes and some of the historical trajectories sketched in this chapter. Even though life writing has a long-standing place in Polish literary history, Polish writers, readers, and critics have been slow in embracing the Western European concept of autofiction. As Robert Kusek recently argued, the dominant Polish term for life writing, ‘literatura dokumentu osobistego’ (‘literature of personal document’), and the scarcity of ‘literary memoirs’ in Poland reveal the prevalence of traditional notions of the genre. Many critics and scholars in the Eastern European country share the conviction that autobiographies are, or should be, narratives that are based on documented facts rather than experimental literary works that are overtly fictional and self-reflexive (Kusek 2015, 94–97). The Wilkomirski affair and the controversies outlined in other sections of this chapter demonstrate that the postmodern celebration of autofiction is only the far end of a continuum of positions in contemporary life writing studies and practices that range from radical constructivism to pragmatic realism. Writers, publishers, readers and critics in the twenty-first century take various, often strategic, approaches to life writing as it continues to reveal its aesthetic, political, and economic potential.

800 

 1 The European Tradition

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20 (1991): 5–32. Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2011. Amis, Martin. Experience. London: Vintage, 2001. Armitstead, Claire. “My Life as a Story.” The Guardian (27 January 2001). http://www.theguardian. com/books/2001/jan/27/biography (11 July 2018). Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974 [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994]. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142–148. Bauby, Jean-Dominique. Le scaphandre et le papillon. Paris: Laffont, 1997 (Bauby 1997a) [The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly. Trans. Jeremy Leggatt. London: Fourth Estate, 1997 (Bauby 1997b)]. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Chambers, Ross. “Orphaned Memories, Foster-Writing, Phantom Pain: The Fragments Affair.” Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community. Ed. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 92–111. Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2002. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohan. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875–893. Couser, Thomas G. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Couser, Thomas G. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Couser, Thomas G. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Culler, Jonathan. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967 [Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997]. Doubrovsky, Serge. Un amour de soi. Paris: Hachette, 1982. Doubrovsky, Serge. “Textes en main.” Autofictions & Cie. Ed. Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme and Philippe Lejeune. Nanterre: Université de Paris X, 1993. 207–217. Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Emecheta, Buchi. Head above Water. London: Pearson Education, 1986. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Fichtelberg, Joseph. “Introduction.” True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Ed. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998. 1–9. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Freud, Sigmund. “Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse.” Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse und Neue Folge. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachey. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1947. 34–445 [Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Part III). Vol. XVI. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001]. Gabriel, Yiannis. “The Voice of Experience and the Voice of the Expert: Can They Speak To Each Other?” Narrative Research in Health and Illness. Ed. Brian Hurwitz, Trisha Greenhalgh and Vieda Skultans. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 168–186.

1.5 Postmodernity 

 801

Gilmore, Leigh. “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre.” Auto­ biography and Postmodernism. Ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 3–18. hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 2478–2484. Hornby, Nick. Fever Pitch. New York: Penguin, 1994. Hügel-Marshall, Ika. Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1998 [Invisible Woman: Growing up Black in Germany. Trans. Elizabeth Gaffney. New York: Lang, 2008]. Jeffreys, Mark. “Visible Cripple (Scars and Other Disfiguring Included).” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. S.L. Snyder, B.J. Brueggemann and R. Garland-Thomson. New York: MLA Press, 2002. 31–39. Jelinek, Estelle, ed. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Kerkeling, Hape. Ich bin dann mal weg: Meine Reise auf dem Jakobsweg. München: Pieper, 2006 [I’m off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago. Trans. Shelley Frisch. New York: Free Press, 2009]. Kusek, Robert. “Writing (non)fiction. On Polish Problems with Life-Writing.” Contested ­Identities: ­Literary Negotiations in Time and Place. Ed. Roger Nicholson, Claudia Marquis and Gertrud Szamosi. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 87–99. Lacan, Jacques. “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du je: telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique.” Revue française de psychanalyse 13.4 (1949): 449–455 [“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 1285–1290]. Langer, Lawrence L. Using and Abusing the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. 13–46 [“The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989. 3–30]. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique (bis).” Moi aussi. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986 [“The Auto­biographical Pact (bis).” On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. ­Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989. 119–137]. Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. Mabee, Barbara. “Subjective Authenticity.” The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature. Ed. Friederike Eigler and Susanne Kord. Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 1997. 501–502. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 319–330. Miller, Nancy K. Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Mirza, Heidi Sarfia. Black British Feminism. A Reader. London: Routledge, 1997. Modleski, Tania. Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in the “Postfeminist” Age. New York: Routlegde, 1991. Muir, Edwin. An Autobiography. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. Muir, Edwin. Selected Letters of Edwin Muir. Ed. P.H. Butter. London: Hogarth Press, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Der Fall Wagner, Götzen-Dämmerung, Der Antichrist, Ecce Homo, DionysosDithyramben, Nietzsche contra Wagner. Ed. Giorgio Collio and Mazzino Montinari. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999. 55–161 (Nietzsche 1999a) [“Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.” Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Ed. Michael Tanner. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 2003. 29–122].

802  ‘

 1 The European Tradition

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne (1872).” Die Geburt der Tragödie, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873. Ed. Giorgio Collio and Mazzino Montinari. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999. 873–890 (Nietzsche 1999b) [“On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. Trans. Ronald Speirs. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 874–884]. Olney, James. Metaphors of the Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Opitz, May, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, eds. Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986 [Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak out. Trans. Anne V. Adams. Ann Arbor: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992]. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2015. Perec, Georges. W ou le souvenir d’enfance: Récit. Paris: Denoël, 1975 [W, or the Memory of Childhood. Trans. David Bellos. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1988]. Porter, Roger J. Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Richter, Virginia. “Authenticity.” Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities. Ed. Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 59–74. Saunders, Max. “Biography and Autobiography.” The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. Ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 286–303. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737–754. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices.” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 3–52. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010. Spender, Stephen. World within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951. Stefan, Verena. Häutungen. Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 1994 [“Foreword to Shedding.” German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature. Trans. Johanna Moore and Beth Weckmueller. New York: SUNY Press, 1984. 53–54]. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Tammet, Daniel. Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, a Memoir. New York: Free Press, 2006. White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artefact.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 1712–1729. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Bruchstücke: Aus seiner Kindheit, 1939–1948. Frankfurt a.  M.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1996 [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken Books, 1996]. Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Vintage, 2012. Wolf, Christa. Kindheitsmuster. München: Luchterhand, 2002 [Patterns of Childhood. Trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984]. Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.

1.5 Postmodernity 

 803

Further Reading Doubrovsky, Serge, Jacques Lecarme, and Philippe Lejeune, eds. Autofictions & Cie. Nanterre: Université de Paris X, 1993. Gudmundsdóttir, Gunnthórunn. Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Hornung, Alfred. “Autobiography.” International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997. 221–233. Madden, Patrick. “The ‘New Memoir.’” The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography. Ed. Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 222–236. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation. London: Routledge, 2009.

2 The Arab World

2.1 Introduction Susanne Enderwitz

It is unquestionably legitimate to ask whether any ‘curriculum vitae’ with a chronological order, any life-story with facts, data and memorabilia or any self-account embellished with anecdotes falls automatically within the definition of autobiography. It is likewise legitimate, however, to ask whether our Western definitions of autobiography are as universally valid as they usually claim to be, and whether they can be applied without modification to the whole field of non-Western autobiography. This last question, in particular, is the subject of the following pages. They focus on the Arabic-speaking world and autobiographies written in Arabic (and sometimes in English or French), albeit not necessarily by Arabs (as Berbers, Kurds, Kopts and others, too, belong to the Arabic speaking world). The introduction restricts itself to those trends and authors, who posed the question whether or not there is a non-European autobiography in general and an Arabic autobiography in particular. They include Western historians of literature, who saw Western self-concepts as a precondition to the genre of autobiography, specialists in Arabic and Islamic Studies, who followed Western theories (at least up to a certain extent), and Arab historians of literature and culture, who adopted the Orientalists’ works as a guide for their own research. More recently and in contrast to the above mentioned groups, they also comprise Western and Arab critics from the postcolonial (or, more specifically, post-Orientalist) camp, who reject Western theories altogether or try to escape from the dilemma of a divide between a Western and a non-Western literary tradition. Although among all these scholars only a handful of researchers (compared to the bulk of research dealing with the history of Western autobiography) have thoroughly studied the Arabic autobiographical tradition, one has to remember that the history of Arabic autobiography itself covers over a millennium. In the beginnings, Arabic autobiography shared its Hellenistic/ Greek roots with the European tradition, but separated itself from it with the ‘classical’ Arabic autobiography in the ninth century. (In the following, the term ‘classical’ will often be used to denote the pre-modern Arabic autobiography, particularly between the ninth century and Ottoman rule. Like many other terms borrowed from Western tradition, ‘classical’ is but an auxiliary term with no real epochal value. It has been preferred to the term ‘medieval’, as it extends in both directions to what Westerners usually understand by this term and is still regarded by some in the Arab world as exemplary.) Only in the nineteenth and, increasingly, in the twentieth century, the two traditions were brought closer together again by the fact that Western models of literature took a leading role. Yet, the question remains of whether Arabic autobiography still focuses, in general, more on the collective aspects of a life-story (including the family, the generation, the city etc.) than Western autobiography.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-094

808 

 2 The Arab World

The Western View For many years, the theoretical discussion on autobiography remained a Western prerogative. Until the 1990s, Arabic works on Arabic autobiography aimed at exploring the subject in rather historical and/or systematical and less in theoretical terms (for example ‘Abbās 1956; Ḍayf 1956; ‘Abd al-Dāyim 1975). If they had a theoretical orientation in mind, they usually followed Western theories (Barāda 1996). Only in most recent years and in convergence with post-colonial theory, Western models are increasingly criticized. However, the globalization has had its impacts, and the positions are no longer defined according to geographical lines. The best example for this process is, perhaps, no. 22 (2002) of the American-Egyptian journal Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics/Alif: Majallat al-balāgha al-muqārana (The Language of the Self: Autobiographies and Testimonies/Lughat al-dhāt: al-siyar al-dhātiyya wa-l-shahādāt) which unites Arab and Western scholars with a mixed academic background writing in Arabic and English. In 1956, Georges Gusdorf published the article “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie” [“Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” (1980)] which was to have a lasting impact on the theory of autobiography for decades. In his article, Gusdorf holds the view that an autobiography worth its name is to fulfill “the virtue of individuality” (1980, 34) as an indispensable prerequisite of seriousness. Only by this virtue, he maintains, man has felt the impetus to explore the external world as well as his inner self. Seen from today’s post-orientalist perspective, Gusdorf displays a conspicuous bias in emphatically praising colonialism and autobiography as the two sides of the same ‒ shining ‒ coin: “Renascent man puts forth on the oceans in search of new continents and men of nature. Montaigne discovers in himself a new world, a man of nature, naked and artless, whose confessions he gives us in his Essays, but without penitence” (1980, 34). Starting from this premise, Gusdorf challenges the universality of autobiography in the literatures of the world. “First of all”, he writes, “it is necessary to point out that the genre of autobiography seems limited in time and in space: it has not always existed nor does it exist everywhere.” Further: “The concern, which seems so natural to us, to turn back on one’s own past, to recollect one’s life in order to narrate it, is not at all universal. It asserts itself only in recent centuries and only on a small part of the map of the world.” And: “This conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life is the late product of a specific civilization” (Gusdorf 1980, 28–29). In temporal terms, according to Gusdorf, autobiography is restricted to the Renaissance and the following centuries. In spatial terms, too, autobiography is restricted to Western cultures. If non-Western cultures have developed some kind or other of autobiography since then, it did not emerge out of an indigenous tradition but out of Western impacts. Bluntly put: “When Gandhi tells his own story, he is using Western means to defend the East” (Gusdorf 1980, 29).

2.1 Introduction 

 809

The inclusion of a text or its exclusion from a literary genre depends heavily on the definition of the genre. Accordingly, if the concept of autobiography derives from the self-concept of the emerging bourgeois class in the West, the model autobiography will be found only there. But in spite of being conspicuously biased towards the modern European autobiography, Gusdorf’s article proved to be extremely successful and was not only circulated, copied and transformed, but also vulgarized. During this process, the focus shifted even stronger from the inclusion to the exclusion of non-Western autobiographies from the definition of genre. Some examples of this biased simplification may suffice: Autobiography is a purely Western construct, starting with Augustine (d. 430 CE) in the fifth century, leading to autobiography proper in the Renaissance and coming to fruition in the following centuries (Neumann 1970, 109). Autobiography has no roots in the Near or Far East, but is connected with a certain quest for spiritual identity which is in turn restricted to European culture (Pascal 1960, 2). Autobiography as an exploration of the self goes with the Western exploration of nature and of reason, whereas autobiographies from other parts of the world find solace in a nostalgic mood of looking back (Kavolis 1984, 67). The example given for this diagnosis, most often, is the Kitāb al-i‘tibār (1930) [An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades (1987)] of the Syrian nobleman Usāma b. Munqidh (b. 488 H/1095 CE, d. 584 H/1188 CE) from the time of the Crusades, who – incidentally – had good personal reasons for looking back nostalgically, as he lost nearly all of his family when the castle of his ancestors was hit by an earthquake in 551 H/1156 CE. (In other contexts, Usāma b. Munqidh is mentioned as an outstanding example of classical Arabic autobiography.) From these examples, the ‘deficiencies’ in Arabic autobiography which, in the eyes of its critics, range from the very beginnings of Arab autobiography until the present, are clearly identifiable. It lacks the aforementioned “virtue of individuality”, in Gusdorf’s terms (1980, 34), and this lack is usually traced back to either the religious, historical or cultural conditions of Arab autobiography. Individuality, and particularly its public announcement, is held to contradict a religion which rejects introspection and self-exposure, a community which eschews a desacralisation of its history, and a society which gives the exemplary precedence over the empirical one. In short: As long as the public space does not welcome the uninhibited exposure of private thoughts and affairs, a distanced and nuanced observation of the self as an object of introspection, and a claim to individuality which is taken for granted, there will be no autobiography proper. This Western approach to non-Western autobiography in general and to Arab autobiography in particular was for a long period always to the negative. This is due to the fact that Western (Christian, humanistic/secular, bourgeois, male and literary) autobiography was seen as a matrix whose features had to be met by any autobiography. Consequently, Arabic autobiography from the ninth to the nineteenth century and even Arabic autobiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has usually been degraded as being not much more than an auto-biography, auto-bibliography or auto-hagiography (Lewis 1991, 25, 29). The basic question, when

810 

 2 The Arab World

dealing with Arab autobiography, is therefore not how but if Western definitions of autobiography are applicable to non-Western autobiography. Like in other fields of Orientalist research ‒ religious history, political history, social history ‒, it is not easy to escape the models which have been formulated in the West and for the West. The low esteem in which non-Western autobiography (Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Indian, Japanese or Chinese) was held since a long time, was further aggravated by the canonization of Western autobiography. Orientalists in general, Arabists in particular and even Arab scholars have adapted the view of the leading scholars in European literary history and theory. Despite many efforts to establish adequate parameters for measuring the values of non-Western autobiography, this Eurocentrism or Orientalism continues to have an effect on the study of Arabic autobiography. Even the authors of the two most comprehensive works in the field of classical and modern Arabic autobiography, which will be extensively used on the following pages, struggle over the right way of de-Orientalization. In his substantially positive review of Tetz Rooke’s study of modern Arabic autobiography (In My Childhood [1997]), Dwight F. Reynolds included the following criticism: “Although I must disagree with the author’s dependence on Western categories and definitions, and with his constant comparison of Arabic texts with Western literary and psychological models, I can recommend this work highly” (1999, 288).

The Arabic Terminology At a first glance, the Arabic terminology for autobiography seems to support the Western claim to exclusivity. ‘Sīra dhātiyya’ [self-biography] and ‘tarjama shakhṣiyya’ [personal biography], as well as the two other combinations from these composita, are neologisms. Even further, they are undoubtedly derived from the Western term ‘autobiography’ in order to denote the modern, individual, personal and subjective aspects of a life-account. Accordingly, Arab publications on the history of Arabic autobiography reflect the problems of terminology. Shawqī Ḍayf chose the title al-Tarjama al-shakhṣiyya [‘personal biography’] for his book on the history of Arabic autobiography (1956). Iḥsān ‘Abbās preferred the title Fann al-sīra [‘the art of biography’] for his history of Arabic biography and autobiography (1956). Yaḥyā ‘Abd al-Dāyim published his book on modern Arabic autobiography under the title al-Tarjama al-dhātiyya [‘self biography’] (1975). The nouns in these combinations, ‘sīra’ and ‘tarjama’, however, have deep roots in the literary history of the Arabs and go back to the beginnings of Islam. Unlike modern European autobiography with its interdependency with the emergence of the novel, the classical Arabic autobiography goes back to the emergence of historiography. The earlier of the two terms (‘sīra’ [way of life, conduct, example]) was already in use in pre-Islamic times and pointed to the tradition (the established conduct) in the tribal

2.1 Introduction 

 811

society. Outstanding examples of conduct were preserved in the oral tradition of the Arabs, usually as an additional information to genealogy and poetry in the form of a short narrative or anecdote (‘khabar’). This fragmentary form of ‘khabar’ (pl. ‘akhbār’) as the basic unit of any narrative proved, in the long run of Islamic times, to be the most stable element of all historiographical writing, including biographical collections, comprehensive biographies and autobiographical accounts. Under Islam, ‘sīra’ came to denote specifically the biography (the praiseworthy example) of the prophet, when Ibn Hishām’s (d. 213/219 H/829/834 CE) recension of Ibn Isḥāq‘s (d. 150 H/767 CE) biography of the prophet, Sīrat Muḥammad rasūl Allāh (1858) [The Life of Muhammad (1990)], became the model text for the life of Muḥammad. Later, the form served as a vehicle for the retelling of other famous lives, like Ibn Shaddād‘s (d. 631 H/1234 CE) biography of Saladin, Sīrat Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn [‘The biography of Saladin’]. Already in medieval times, ‘sīra’ could also denote an autobiography, like al-Mu’ayyad al-Shīrāzī’s (b. 330s H/990s CE, d. 470 H/1078 CE) account of his life, Sīrat al-Mu’ayyad [‘The biography of al-Mu’ayyad’]. In any case, the biographical and the autobiographical ‘sīra’ were not sharply distinguished from each other, and the same holds true for narratives in the first and the third person (Reynolds 2001, 38–39). In the course of the centuries, the term ‘sīra’ became less and less common for biography/autobiography, perhaps because it came into use for the great (anonymous) Arab folk epics, like Sīrat ‘Antar b. Shaddād [‘The history/biography of ‘Antar b. Shaddād’]. Not later than the thirteenth century, a second term for biography or the biographical notice, ‘tarjama’, found its way from the Aramaic into the Arab language (Ghamdi 1989, 23–24; Eickelman 1991, 36) and was used, from then on, as a near synonym for ‘sīra’. ‘Sīra’ and ‘tarjama’ are not exactly the same, as the ‘tarjama’ (in modern Arabic ‘translation’) functions indeed as a ‘translation’, an ‘interpretation’ or a ‘commentary’ for an ‘original’ which is less to be seen in the person itself, but in the person’s deeds and accomplishments. Here lies the sharpest contrast with European (auto)biography, as the opening life story of a ‘tarjama’ played a subordinate role to the following selection of the subject’s best poetry, letters and bon mots (Reynolds 1991, 42–43). Still other terms were in use for either a single biography or biographical collections, like ‘majmū‘’ [collection], ‘kitāb’ [book], ‘fihrist’ [bibliography], ‘tārīkh’ [history], ‘ta‘līq’ [commentary], ‘ta’līf’ [composition] or ‘kurrāsa’ [notebook] (Ghamdi 1989, 23–26; Young 1990, 168–169). Before the term ‘sīra dhātiyya’ was coined to denote an autobiography in the second half of the twentieth century, the term ‘mudhakkirāt’ [memoirs] made its way into the Arab language. This, too, was a neologism, presumably derived from the French word ‘mémoirs’, as there circulated a lot of French memoirs in nineteenth century Egypt (Häusler 1990, 3; Cheikh-Moussa 1985–1986, 24–25). Today, the term ‘mudhakkirāt’ is in use for memoirs in particular, but it can also be applied to an autobiography [‘sīra dhātiyya’]. Furthermore, both terms are applicable to fictional writing, but the opposite is also true (Rooke 1997, 68–72). The modern terms for ‘novel’

812 

 2 The Arab World

[‘riwāya’] and ‘(short) story’ [‘qiṣṣa or qiṣṣa qaṣīra’] are sometimes used for autobiographies, namely in the expression ‘qiṣṣat ḥayātī’ [the story of my life]. In order to distinguish his autobiography Tarbiyat Salāma Mūsā (1947) [The Education of Salama Musa (1961)] from a memoir, the Egyptian author Salāma Mūsā (1889–1958) was, in 1947, the first to explicitly and deliberately use the term ‘sīra dhātiyya’. However, it seems that he used it in a reflexive way rather than as a technical term, as he obviously wished to stress the ‘subjectivity’ of his text in contrast to the ‘objectivity’ of a memoir. ‘Sīra dhātiyya’, then, served Salāma Mūsā as a kind of self-defense for turning his attention to his inner self, and not as a reference to an established literary genre (Rooke 1997, 66–67). In fact, until recently the term ‘sīra dhātiyya’ was in use for any kind of autobiographical pronouncement, irrespective of its literary form. As a result, a whole range of personal genre writing could be headed under the name of autobiography: ‘yawmiyyāt’ [diaries], ‘i‘tirāfāt’ [confessions], ‘rasā’il’ [letters], ‘waṣāyā’ [advice], ‘aḥādīth ṣuḥufiyya’ [interviews] and ‘riḥlāt’ [travelogues] (Rooke 1997, 69–70). Conversely, Arab autobiographies often bear titles which point to casual everyday speech: ‘tadhakkurāt/dhikrayāt’ [memories], ‘ṣuwar/safaḥāt’ [pictures, leaves], ‘fuṣūl’ [chapters], ‘shahāda’ [testimony], ‘jawla fī dhikrayāt’ [a walk round the memories] or ‘anghām al-ḥayāt’ [melodies of life] (Rooke 1997, 71).

In Search for Origins If it is legitimate to search for such a thing as European autobiography avant la lettre (i.  e. before the term ‘autobiography’ or ‘self-biography’ was coined in the eighteenth century), then it is also legitimate to do the same for the Arabic autobiography. Nineteenth century scholarship, still under the spell of the late Romantic movement, was openly enthusiastic about the individualism of and in Arabic literature. No other than Jacob Burckhardt, in his masterpiece Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy] from 1860 [1944], contrasted medieval European culture with Greek and Arab culture, to the advantage of the latter: In the Middle Ages [...] Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category. It is in Italy that this veil dissolved first [...] [M]an became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race (Burckhardt 1944, II/1).

Scholars of Oriental Studies, when dealing with Arabic poetry, historiography, or ‘belles lettres’ [‘adab’], shared this enthusiasm far into the twentieth century. They pointed to the fact that “the pre- and early Islamic Arabs were great individualists” (Goitein 1977, 3) and that this individualism extended into Islamic times: “Everywhere

2.1 Introduction 

 813

on the vast field of Arab literature”, Franz Rosenthal maintained, “the self-awareness of the writing person seeks to express itself” (1937, 3). This diagnosis was deemed applicable to all kinds of literature (Lewis 1991, 14), but particularly to historiography, biographical collections and biographies proper (Kilpatrick 1991, 3–16). Biographical literature was rendered as “first among all classical and medieval cultures” (Gibb 1962, 54), including the European cultures, and was understood as “almost a synonym for historiography” (Rosenthal 1968, 101; Goitein 1977, 17). In an article dealing with individualism in the literature of the Arab-Islamic Middle Ages, S.D. Goitein firmly states: First and foremost, I was impressed by the endless number of individuals whose personality is clearly brought out, in one way or another, by those ancient Arabic narratives. In the case of prominent actors on the scene, this is being done in monographs, composed of consecutive accounts, complemented by longer or shorter disconnected anecdotes, and concluded, usually subsequent to the story of his death, by a formal description of his character, illustrated again by the narration of relevant deeds, dicta, or incidents (1977, 5).

How does this undisputed individualism in Arabic culture and literature, then, relate to the emergence of autobiography? Four cultures had a deep impact on the development of autobiography in classical Islam, the Greek, the Persian, the (pre-Islamic) Arab and the Islamic culture (Ghamdi 1989, 42–58). However, the Islamic impact perhaps ranges first, as it was the role of Islam to integrate the other three and channel them in a specific direction. Under Islam, religion, law, ethics, politics and culture, including poetry, history and literature (anecdotes, sayings, maxims, proverbs, and literary prose), were understood as predominantly social phenomena being represented, authenticated and communicated by individual persons (Gibb 1962, 54). In this context, the eminence of Muhammad’s life-story for the establishment of Islam as a social, juridical and moral system in nearly every aspect of life cannot be overrated. The collection of the vast material of Hadith [‘ḥadīth’] or traditions from the prophet, prompting a critical apparatus which started already in the seventh century and leading to the (still valid) canonical collections in the tenth century, fostered the emergence of the ‘science of the men’ [‘‘ilm al-rijāl’]. As the chain of transmitters [‘isnād’] was held to be more decisive for the authentification of a particular prophetic tradition than its text proper [‘matn’], hundreds and thousands of the prophet’s companions and later transmitters were examined according to their biographical data, character traits and mutual relations. The veneration of the prophet which fuelled the interest in his social environment, his family, friends and companions, additionally promoted the collecting activities. In the course of time, biographical lexica were extended from the prophet’s companions to other groups of persons who played a role in the elaboration and spreading of Islam, like jurists, theologians or (Koran) reciters, to non-religious profession groups, like poets, philosophers and physicians, and to unusual/marginal professions, like dream interpreters, beggars or thieves, not to forget some additional collections on women.

814 

 2 The Arab World

Perceived as an independent literary genre with up to ten thousand entries, the biographical collections were called ‘ṭabaqāt’ (sg. ‘ṭabaqa’), literally ‘layer’, denoting a ‘generation’, ‘class’ or ‘category’. In the beginning, they were classified along the generations, but when this system became too confusing, they were alphabetically arranged or according to a mixture of generation and name. The entries varied in length; they ranged between a few lines and more than hundred pages. The date of death was deemed important and, if known, the date of birth, genealogical data and sometimes philological remarks concerning the name. The standard biographies further covered information about education, teaching, journeys, appointments and publications. Sometimes anecdotes were added which shed light on the intellectual and moral capacities of the person in question, and sometimes a physical description was added (Rosenthal 1968, 95–105; Young 1990, 168–172). Some biographies grew to a considerable volume and became an independent book, and the same holds true for autobiographies, but there was no generic difference felt to mark the difference between a book and an entry. The development of classical Arab autobiography is closely connected with the emergence of the biographical collections. Compilators and authors of such collections and lexica asked famous contemporaries to provide them with their ‘curriculum vitae’, and inserted these texts in their own books (Eickelman 1991, 42). Often, authors of biographical and historical works included their own ‘curriculum vitae’, if they held themselves in the esteem of being noteworthy contemporaries. These autobiographies are usually short, but there are exceptions, like Ibn Khaldūn’s (b. 732 H/1332 CE, d. 808 H/1406 CE) autobiography al-Ta‘rīf bi-Ibn Khaldūn wa-riḥlatih gharban wa-sharqan [The biography of Ibn Khaldūn and his journey West and East (1951)] which comprises more than 380 pages in the printed version. In any case, these autobiographies resembled the biographies, as they, too, focused on education, publication and career. They include the name of their author, the books he read, the posts he held, the rewards he received and, above all, the books he wrote. Their purpose was a documentary one which is further underlined by the fact that they sometimes quote from his correspondences, speeches or poems (Rooke 1997, 77–78). As the dispute on the respective merits of biography and autobiography reveal, the classical authors were fully aware of a difference between the two. Some held the view that is was better to write one’s own biography, as nobody knew one’s life better than oneself. Others warned of the danger of conceitment, as autobiographers were tempted to embellish their character and achievements (Ghamdi 1989, 27). However, the dispute also shows that no generic difference was seen between autobiography and biography. Both, autobiographer and biographer, shared the same purpose: to write a biography. Rooke, in his book on autobiography, maintains: It appears to have been irrelevant to the audience of the day whether the recording of the biographical facts was done by the person concerned or not. The sīra/tarjama of a person might be written (or dictated) by that person himself or by somebody else. It did not matter which. It was only a question of circumstances or convenience. The content, purpose and function of the text

2.1 Introduction 

 815

was the same, whoever held the pen. A majority of the classical text referred to as ‘autobiographies’ are entries in biographical lexica dictated or written by the person treated in that particular entry himself. But the only significant difference between these entries and the rest is that the autobiographical ones do not include the death date of the subject (1997, 76–77).

Orientalist Criticism Franz Rosenthal, who published in 1937 his seminal article “Die arabische Auto­ biographie” [‘The Arabic autobiography’], was the first Orientalist to systematically explore the realm of classical Arabic autobiography. It is this article which marks the beginning of a line extending to Georg Misch’s monumental Geschichte der Auto­ biographie [‘A History of Autobiography’] (1949–1969), to Gusdorf and to other historians of autobiography. Rosenthal, an expert on Arabic historiographical writing and the one who had pointed to the importance of biographical writing for Arab-Islamic historiography, was not very enthusiastic about the subject of his study. Arab-Islamic autobiography, he lamented, did not exceed the limits of Arab-Islamic biography, as it was “less bound to personality than to the subject matter”, it was “not much more than a curriculum vitae”, and it did not come “into being out of a consciousness of the individual value of the uniquely personal” (Rosenthal 1937, 11, 19, 40). In fact, he concluded, Arab-Islamic autobiography was nothing more than ‘Tatsachenautobiographie’ [‘an autobiography of subject matter’] (Rosenthal 1937, 11). Even al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (1961) [Deliverance from Error (1953)] of al-Ghazālī (b. 450 H/1058 CE, d. 505 H/1111 CE), a spiritual autobiography of one of the greatest Muslim theologians which was sometimes compared with Augustine’s Confessions (fourth/fifth century CE), did not escape his criticism: If one is looking back from al-Ghazālī to Augustine, he writes, “the most personal autobiography of Islam appears in a rather pale light, if it is compared with the wealth of personal moments and the joy with which they are perceived and utilized by Augustine” (Rosenthal 1937, 15). Rosenthal’s view was later echoed and sharpened in the writings of other Orientalist scholars, for example Bernard Lewis, who gives Arab-Islamic autobiography the cold shoulder. In his opinion, this literary genre with its leading question of “who am I” exhausts itself in the Arab-Islamic context in the three items: “what I did”, “what I saw” and “what I thought” (Lewis 1991, 26, 28). With the following rhetorical-polemical counter-question ‘What kind of autobiography?’ to Rosenthal’s study on Arab autobiography, André Miquel, too, made clear that for him there was no Arab autobiography worth its name (1983, 12). Over and over again, we come across notions which either foreshadow or reflect Gusdorf’s suggestions, tarring all Arab autobiographies from medieval times to the present with the same brush. The Arabs, being praised for their individuality in most literary genres, are under attack for lack of individuality when it comes to autobiography. Reynolds’ suggestion of a kind of ‘paradigm shift’ is reasonable enough to be quoted in full length:

816 

 2 The Arab World

Autobiography’s shift from a general category of literature as conceived by Goethe, Herder and Dilthey to the culturally specific genre advocated by Gusdorf, May, and Pascal represents a highly significant, and politically suspect, turning point in western Intellectual history. It marks a reorientation that seeks to distinguish fully formed, authentic, modern western selves from the incomplete individual consciousnesses of earlier periods and inauthentic, facsimile selves produced by modern nonwestern cultures in imitation of their superiors. Seen in this light, autobiography is positioned at the very crux of literary scholarship’s relationship to earlier historical periods and to other cultures and is currently privileged as a defining discursive marker for what it is to be ‘modern’ and what it is to be ‘western’ (2001, 18–19).

Sometimes, the interpretations even adapt an ontological colouring, particularly with regard to cultural differences in concepts of the self. Aiming at an interpretation of self-accounts of traditional Islamic scholars in contemporary North-Africa and Oman, and pointing to the continuous importance of ‘family’, ‘clan’ or, generally, ‘group identity’ in current Arab societies, the American anthropologist Dale F. Eickelman finds it useful to distinguish between the notions of ‘individual’ and ‘person’: ‘Individual’ refers to a mortal human being, the object of observation and self-reflection. Thus individuals can wield considerable power and still not be recognized as playing a significant or legitimate social role. ‘Person’ refers to the cultural concepts that lend social significance to the individual. Personhood can be regarded as a status that “varies according to social criteria which contain the capacities of the individual within defined roles and categories” [S.J. La Fontaine – S.E.]. The notion of ‘person’ [...] is society’s confirmation that an individual’s identity has social significance (1991, 37).

Eickelman seems to argue that Arab-Islamic societies have granted, throughout history, freedom of act and speech to the person in his or her social role, but not to the individual with his or her particularist (‘private’) interests. Therefore, Arabic and Arab-Islamic biographies and autobiographies have always responded ‒ and continue to do so ‒ to an urge to conformity. In one way or other, this interpretation is held by many Western scholars, and some even try to explain it by the religion of Islam. We read that the Koran rejects introspection (Déjeux 1973, 62–63), that Islam only knows shame (von Grunebaum 1967, 11) instead of guilt, and that it has no tradition of confessions, neither in religious nor in secular terms (Milani 1990, 2–3). Most important in the eyes of one scholar, “for a pious Muslim, an exaggerated insistence on personal originality and creative power was always precarious” (Haarmann 1991, 73). The reason for this is seen by another scholar in the fact that creativeness is God’s alone. [...] Where man’s choice is unimportant it cannot become a literary theme. Human conflict is strangely absent from Muslim and especially Arab-Muslim literature [...]. Thus ‘standard’ Islam has not known the drama nor the narrative depicting the conflicting claims on man of opposing moral laws (von Grunebaum 1967, 10–11).

2.1 Introduction 

 817

The mentality of the Arabs is another argument brought forward in order to explain the preponderance of ‘Tatsachenautobiographie’ and the lack of concise literary self-portraits, which grant the reader access to the inner self of the person. The argument is in accordance with the realistic observation that poetry and classical literature have a predeliction for anecdotes and ‘concetti’, but it gives this interpretation an essentalist or even racist turn. Misch, for example, speaks of an Arab enchantment by ‘amazing traits’ which has prevented the transformation of scattered anecdotes about a person into a coherent personality description (Misch 1962, 922). The religious and the cultural arguments, used to explain the lack of a full autobiography in the Western sense, are complemented by a third, social notion. According to this, Arab-Islamic society used to disencourage any rebellious or candid spirit in writing from its beginnings and, therefore, turned out to be an impediment for the further development of biography and autobiography. This impediment has its roots largely in the way how the individual (fard) sees himself in accordance with his society and how he looks upon himself and upon others. [This accordance] is much deeper embedded than individual boasting with one’s own achievements and the meanness of others. To this day, our [Arab] society welcomes this superficiality, as the philosophical foundation of the person [or personality – shakhṣiyya – S.E.] is weak or has failed (‘Abbās 1992, 114).

Independently of whether the scholars of autobiography blame the religion of Islam, the mentality of the Arabs or the Arab-Islamic society for the ‘failures’ of Arabic autobiography, they agree in attesting three handicaps for the emergence of a fully fledged genre of autobiography: a lack of historical (historicist) awareness, a preponderance of corporative thinking and an urge to exemplarity (Kramer 1991, 1–3). Marvin Zonis, in a widely read anthology on Arab biography and self-narrative, contends that the Arabs to this day have failed to adapt a historicist thinking, as they have never abandoned the sacralization of history, the modern form of it being the personality cult of Arab leaders: Historicism is the commitment to an understanding of a phenomenon as rooted in particular contexts that change over time with the result that the phenomenon itself may change. That commitment is not yet thoroughly subsumed within the culture of the Middle East. It is no wonder, then, that autobiography and biography are not yet part of the genres of literature in the Middle East (Zonis 1991, 61).

As we have seen, biography is part and parcel of traditional Arab-Islamic historiography, but the author goes on to self-confidentally develop his thought further, this time about individuality, and to derive an equally apodictic argument from it: It has been widely noted that concepts of the individual and individualism assume different dimensions in Middle-Eastern and in Western cultures. [...] The well-being of the community, even at the expense of the well-being of the individual [...] is more highly valued in the Middle East than in the West. It could, in fact, be argued that if the three paramount values of Western society are liberty, equality, and fraternity, only fraternity is central to the value structure of the

818 

 2 The Arab World

Middle East. The centrality of the value of community over individuality and individualism works against the production of both autobiography and biography for that value lessens the need for the critical scrutiny of the individual life and the attempt to organize a life history into a coherent point of view and life pattern (Zonis 1991, 62–63).

Formulations and formulas like these give reason to suspect that there is still the old Eurocentric thinking or Orientalism at work, and not only in the obviously incorrect statements. Today’s Arab societies have ceased to be the frozen relics of a historical period predating an awareness of a man-made history apart from salvation history and the emergence of the bourgeois class with the growing of individualism. Quite the contrary: The adaptation of the autobiographical genre even before World War II is ample evidence for the fact that the understanding of history and society had dramatically changed in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, one argument remains and cannot be as easily dismissed as the other two. Until very recently and perhaps to our days, the author of an autobiography still had to take the constraint to exemplarity into account or, in other words, to respond in one way or other to the priority of the social role over individual self-fulfillment (von Grunebaum 1967, 11; Shuiskii 1982, 122; de Moor 1998, 132; Aghacy 1998, 219).

Exemplarity and Individuality The claim to exemplarity, too, cannot be held without modifications. A glance at the great old men of modern Arabic autobiography suffices to show that not all of them were corresponding to a fixed or pre-ordained social role. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1889–1973), the blind son of a farmer, did not follow the path laid out for him: He did not become a Koran reciter, but professor for Arabic Literature, the Dean of his faculty at Cairo University and Egypt’s minister for education. The same is true for his contemporaries Aḥmad Amīn (1886–1954) and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987), with only slightly less spectacular careers: The former became one of Egypt’s leading intellectuals instead of an Azhar shaykh, and the latter preferred the position of Egypt’s leading dramatist to a career as a lawyer. Each of the three refused to follow a pre-ordained path and, instead, adopted the role of a political, scientific and artistic innovator in the national interest. But in all three cases it was an elevated and accepted, even admired social role, and in this sense it can be fairly said that they did not step out of the boundaries of exemplarity. Only decades later and even then in very rare cases do we find autobiographers deliberately fulfilling socially hardly accepted roles like that of a (male) prostitute, a rebel or a Hippie. This corresponds to the view of Stephan Guth, who maintains that until the 1970s all Arab autobiographies met with the compulsion to prove the individual’s ‘success’ in a socially accepted form. Until then, an autobiographer only documented his life-story, if he was “fully convinced that the experiences he has lived through are something to be proud of and not to be looked upon by society or

2.1 Introduction 

 819

as the case may be, by himself as a failure” (Guth 1998, 140). This is all the more true, if one adopts Rooke’s perspective on Arabic autobiography as a genre of the marginalized, i.  e. the blind, the alien, the poor and, last not least, the women who, in their autobiographies, triumphantly present what they have achieved against all odds and difficulties (Rooke 1997, 201–202). The notion of exemplarity, however, is not restricted to an elevated social position, but includes a typical life-story which represents a generation, a class, a profession or another group. Hishām Sharābī (1927–2005), like Aḥmad Amīn or Salāma Mūsa before him, points to this fact by borrowing the motto for his book from Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924) [The Magic Mountain (1952)]: ً ‫ال يعيش الفرد حياته الشخصية فحسب بل أيضا‬ ‫“[ حياة عصره وحياة جيل‬A man lives not only his personal life (...), but also (...) the life of his epoch and his contemporaries”] (Sharābī 1978, preliminary note [Mann 1952, 32]). Exemplarity, in this sense, has a double meaning. It shows, on the one hand, a keen awareness of a historical situation or social position, and it aims, on the other hand, at a rather withdrawn and classificatory observation of the self. ‘I’ is but an example, a humble gesture which is often used in the introduction to a modern autobiography. It goes back to the ‘captatio benevolentiae’ of the Arabic autobiographical tradition (Wild 1998, 83), where the author most often traces the motives for his autobiography back to the request of somebody else. There are friends who put pressure on the author to write down his life, or Europeans who ask for insights into Arab family and social life, or another public which is particularly interested in the historical situation of the author’s life-time. There is even a third meaning of exemplarity which complements the individual and group-specific aspects of the term, and this is its moral connotation. Exemplarity can also be understood as exemplarity in social conduct, the avoidance of indecency with regard to others and discretion in private affairs. In the early period of modern Arab autobiography and even later decency and discretion were understood as a self-evident tribute to the social mores, for example in Aḥmad Amīn: ‫على ذلك وضعت‬

‫ فمن الحق ما يرذل قوله وتنبو األذن عن‬،‫ ولكنني لم أذكر فيه أيضا ً إال الحق‬،‫ ولم أذكر فيه كل الحق‬،‫هذا الكتاب‬ ‫ وإذا كنا ال نستسيغ عري كل الجسم فكيف نستسيغ عري كل النفس؟‬،‫“[ سماعه‬On this (understanding) I wrote this book. I have not told all the truth in it but I have also not told anything but the truth. For there is some truth which is vile to tell and repugnant to hear. If we do not deem proper the nudity of the whole body, how can we deem proper the nudity of the whole self?”] (Amīn 1989, 4 [1978, 3–4]). One has to keep in mind, though, that Aḥmad Amīn considered himself a public person or a contemporary witness. He did not intend to write an intimate confession, but a historical document: ‫فلماذا ـ إذا ـ ال أؤرخ‬ ً‫ وتعين غدا‬،ً‫ ولعلها تفيد اليوم قارئا‬،‫«حياتي» لعلها تصور جانبا ً من جوانب جيلنا وتصف نمطا ً من أنماط حياتنا‬ .ً‫“[ مؤرخا‬Why then shouldn’t I write the history of ‘My Life’ perhaps (sic!) it may portray one aspect of our generation and describe one type of our life, perhaps it may benefit a reader today and help a historian tomorrow”] (Amīn 1989, 9 [1978, 5]). Today, the threefold kind of exemplarity is no longer the sine qua non of Arabic autobiography; failures are admitted, subjectivity is allowed, and even intimate details

820 

 2 The Arab World

are sometimes addressed. But only rarely do the three appear together in one book. The Palestinian autobiographer Fadwā Ṭūqān (1917–2003) is a good example for an amazing openness which is nevertheless coupled with decency. She presents herself as exemplary, a fighter for women’s rights, and in this respect she spares neither the male nor the female members of her conservative Palestinian family. She speaks of her lonesome fight against many obstacles, mirrored by the fragmentary style of her narration, thereby doubly – socially and literary – counteracting the dominant male discourse (Malti-Douglas 1991, 164). The text reveals many instances of male dominance, infringement and indifference, but also the dominant female compliance with this system of oppression. At the same time, Ṭūqān is reluctant to reveal too many intimate details of her adult emotional life and love affairs, as long as they are not part of her fight against male domination. Therefore, she defends her subjectivity in depicting her relation to her family, as far as she acts as a vanguard against the oppression of the Oriental woman: ‫ ان أتخطى ما كان يستحيل‬،‫ في حدود ظروفي وقدراتي‬،‫ كيف استطعت‬.‫“ما كشفت عنه هو الجانب الكفاحي الذي ذكرت قبل قليل‬ ‫ ثم اصراري على أن أعطي حياتي معنى وقيمة أفضل‬،‫تخطيه لو ال االرادة والرغبة الحقيقية في السعي وراء األفضل و األحسن‬ ”.‫مما كان مخططا ً لها‬ [(The part) I have laid bare is mainly the struggle I have just mentioned: how I succeeded, despite the limitations of my ability and my circumstances, in surmounting what would have been insurmountable without the will and the determination to pursue the noblest and best goals, and to give my life a higher meaning and value than seems to have been planned for it] (Ṭūqān 1985, 10 [Tuqan 1990, 12]).

But at the same time, she defends her more intimate feelings, when she alludes to the role of love in her life outside the family and her struggle: ‫ نؤثر أن نبقيها كامنة في‬،‫ هناك أشياء عزيزة ونفيسة‬.‫ فليس من الضروري ان ننبش كل الخصوصيات‬،‫لم افتح خزانة حياتي كلها‬ .‫ فال بد من ابقاء الغاللة مستدلة على بعض جوانب هذه الروح صونا ً لها من االبتذال‬،‫زاوية من أرواحنا بعيدة عن العيون المتطفلة‬ [I have not completely removed the lid from my life’s treasure chest. We are not obliged to dig out all our private affairs. We feel it is best to keep certain matters, precious to us alone, concealed in some corner of our inner being away from probing eyes. We must keep the veil down over some aspects of the soul to safeguard it from debasement] (Ṭūqān 1985, 10 [Tuqan 1990, 12]).

Like Aḥmad Amīn’s discretion, Fadwā Ṭūqān’s decency can, from a Western point of view, easily be understood as an anachronism, but one should not forget that in Europe, up to the 1950s, autobiographical writing, too, was deemed improper for a woman. However, a cultural gap between European and Arab culture remains, insofar as autobiographers ‒ male even more than female ‒ actually find it necessary to discuss the concept of discretion in their autobiographies. Said K. Aburish (1935–2012), in his book Children of Bethany (1988) which is a family history rather than an autobiography proper, ignores the taboos of his parents’ generation and playfully displays them: “My mother insisted that the book ‘may be good for the Middle East but it’s bad for the family’” (Aburish 1992, “Acknowledgements”). Iḥsān ‘Abbās

2.1 Introduction 

 821

(1920–2003), on the other hand, acquiesces in the taboos of his envisioned readership, but looks nostalgically back to the ‘Sturm und Drang’ period of his youth: ‫وكنت في شبابي‬

‫ وجدت أن حماسة الشباب‬،‫متحمسا ً للصراحة الكلية في كتابة السيرة الذاتية ولكني حين وقفت أمام التجربة بنفسي‬ ‫ وأن مجتمعي ال يزال يص ّد عن‬،‫ وأني ال أستطيع أن أتحمل مسؤولية تلك الصراحة‬،‫ال تستمر بعد عهد الشباب‬ .‫‘[ تقبلها‬In my youth, I used to fight enthusiastically for complete openness (‘ṣarāḥa’) in autobiography. But when I, myself, was concerned, I realized that the ardour of youth flees with the young age. I could not bear the responsibility for this openness, as long as my society refuses to accept it’] (‘Abbās 1996, 6). Fouad Ajami, to quote a third and last example, brings the same argument forward in order to explain his total abstention from writing an autobiography: Two narratives were available to me. I could have written of my private, family inheritance, but Arabs are reared to tread carefully on private family matters. We are taught not to air family matters that we glimpse. [...] Ya rabb ya suttar, an appeal to God has it, Oh God Thou who veilest. In this world, “honor”, privacy, and public decorum are rarely breached. Family secrets are taken to the grave, and the lives of mothers, sisters, and stepmothers are sacred, forbidden matters. Even lesser concerns  – the hard times endured by families on their way out of poverty  – are handled with care. Fiction enabled modern Arabs to enter emotional territory that biography had not traversed, but the biographies remained stilted, polite, and opaque. In the autobiographies, fathers were invariably strict but well intentioned, mothers devout and patient, and the sisters stayed out of trouble (Ajami 1998, 25, 30).

Ajami’s words are a highly polemical exaggeration of matters, but they bring the constraint to exemplarity in Arabic autobiography back to mind. In doing so, they simultaneously evoke the constraint concerning (personal, private, intimate) confessions, which have so profoundly contributed to the specific shape of Western autobiography. It has repeatedly been said that Arabic autobiography ‘lacks’ this confessional mode, but the very notion of lack is in itself an anachronism. This can perhaps be seen more clearly, if we turn our attention again to the ‘lack’ of “the virtue of individuality”, or individualism. Referring to classical standard autobiographies, Reynolds rightly points to the fact that “ṭabaqāt do not fail to take account of individuality; rather, they succeed in excluding it” (2001, 41). The development of European autobiography from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century can no longer be the sole and only benchmark for autobiography in general, as it was in fact a worldwide unique case. Meanwhile, literary critics are ready to accept that the concept of the self in autobiography depends on the surrounding culture and has to be regarded accordingly. Together with this acceptance, definitions of autobiography take the peculiarities of non-Western autobiography into account in order to broaden the concept of the genre.

822 

 2 The Arab World

New Approaches The first serious attack on Western definitions of autobiography came from the new trend of Cultural Studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Still, Gusdorf’s influence was discernible, but it was mentioned only in order to become criticized. Susan Stanford Friedman challenged Gusdorf’s view that autobiography is only possible in highly individualized societies, where social bonds are diminishing, group identity is weak and competition is the rule. Instead, she pointed to the fact that this concept marginalizes, illegitimately and anachronistically, conceptions of selfhood among women, minorities and many non-Europeans. An aspiration for identification, interdependency and community, she argued, had always been a key element in identity building among women all over the world, among blacks in a dominantly white society, among Jews in a dominantly Christian society, and among homosexuals in a dominantly heterosexual society. In all these groups, a relatively recent development toward a self-assuring ‘cultural’ autobiography has taken place, which includes ‘collective’ aspects of identity (Friedman 1988, 54–55). Similar arguments were raised in Postcolonial Theory in order to assess the autobiographies of migrant groups, exiled persons or (formerly) colonialized people as documents of a ‘cultural’ versus an ‘autonomous’ identity. These groups, like the above mentioned, differed from one another, as the problems of gender, class, race, ethnicity and sexuality have never been interchangeable. Yet, there were overlappings in the perception of self and other as well as in the representation of the self among those, who could not or were not willing to succumb to the hegemonial claims of the dominant Western/male/white/Christian/heterosexual culture. Being the ‘other’ in the perception of others as well as in one’s self-perception was from its beginnings imbued with a collective meaning which referred to the kind of a particular otherness. In order to find a common denomination for all those sharing the experience of living outside, on the thresholds or at the margins of the dominant Western societies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined the term of the ‘subaltern’. Although a focus on problems of gender is again discernible, Spivak’s argumentation also extends to the legacy of colonialism, to new forms of immigration, to the situation of the working classes and to other positions of marginalization. Spivak’s essay Can the subaltern speak? (1988) is considered as a crucial text of Postcolonialism. So are texts of Edward Said (particularly his book Orientalism from 1978) and Homi K. Bhaba. It is no coincidence that each of the three started her or his career as a specialist in Literary History and Theory, Spivak as a co-founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Said as professor for English and Comparative Literature, and Bhaba as professor for English and American Literature and Language. Postcolonialism, which originally referred to the political, economical and sociological conditions of former colonies in the Third World, rapidly gained dominance in the field of Literary Studies. “The crucial questions entailed in this shift”, write Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, were “on the one hand, the polit-

2.1 Introduction 

 823

ical vantage point of Western ideology vis-à-vis the formerly colonized now decolonized Third World, and, on the other hand, the elitist stance and airs of Western, mostly English and American academics” (1998, 1–2). Issues raised in this spectrum of Postcolonial Studies particularly related to the changed evaluation and form of autobiography in postmodern times, as questions of agency, subjecthood, cultural memory and others seemed to be of central concern to the colonized and decolonized condition. These short historical reminiscences are a reminder of the fact that the stimuli for a reappraisal of classical and modern Arabic autobiography did not come from inside the fields of Arabic or Islamic Studies, but were an import from Literary Studies and Postcolonial Theory. However, the discussion on ‘Orientalism’ as a special kind of Eurocentrism had already started around 1980, and the departments of Arabic and Islamic Studies were prepared to apply the results of their introspection to specific fields of research. In 1998, in a programmatic article “Autobiography in the modern period”, which was part of the research program “Individual and Society in the Mediterranean Muslim World” of the European Science Foundation (ESF), Robin Ostle emphatically declared Philippe Lejeune’s far-reaching term of ‘the autobiographic pact’ to be dead: “For our purposes, the single most important message [...] is that it is simply no longer necessary to sign up to Le pacte autobiographique according to the classical model of Lejeune although this is still the one which is likely to command wide acceptance” (1998, 95). For decades, Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as “récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur la vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personalité” [“retrospective prose story that a real person relates about his/her own existence, in which he/she gives emphasis to his/her individual life and to the history of his/her personality in particular”] (Lejeune 1973, 138 [1989, 4]) had proved to be an almost unsurmountable impediment for students of Arabic autobiography. The reasons were manifold, the most important perhaps being “the history of his/her personality”. One of the most conspicuous markers of classical Arabic autobiography is the fact that it is usually not organized along a linear progression through time, but around ‘circumstances’, ‘conditions’ or ‘states’ [‘aḥwāl’, ‘aṭwār’], which are dictated not merely by one’s progression from childhood through youth to adulthood and old age: When al-Suyūṭī [Arab autobiographer in the fifteenth century – S.E.] begins to recount his life, he presents it not in a chronological narrative but rather in categorized accounts describing different aspects of his identity and intellectual activity. Consecutive sections discuss his genealogy, his geographic origin, his emulation of pious figures who had written about their own geographic origins, legal opinions of his father with which he disagreed (to demonstrate his independence of thought), his birth, the works he studied as a youth, the transmitters (more than six hundred, nearly a quarter of whom were women) from whom he collected ḥadīth [traditions of the prophet – S.E.], the “rare” ḥadīth he collected as an adult scholar, his pilgrimage to Mecca, his other travels, his teaching positions, the full text of one of his lectures, a list of his published

824 

 2 The Arab World

works (283 of them), praise of his publications by contemporaries, the spread of his writings outside of Egypt, the description of a lengthy, bitter rivalry with an unnamed contemporary, his claim to have reached the level of “independent legal theorist” (mujtahid) in Islamic law, and finally his claim to the title Renewer of the Faith (mujaddid) for the tenth Islamic century (Reynolds 2001, 4).

What is to follow from the incompabilities between Lejeune’s definition and the phenomenon of Arabic autobiographies? Should we restrict our dealing with Arabic autobiography to the time when Western autobiography had made an impact on Arabic autobiography? And what about modern Arabic autobiographies? Can one speak of Arabic autobiography at all, if modern Arabic autobiographies, too, do not lend enough emphasis to “the history of his/her personality”? And what, if this ‘lack’ or ‘deficiency’ extends to the “emphasis to his/her individual life”? Dwight F. Reynolds, in his enquiry of classical Arabic autobiography Interpreting the Self. Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), chooses to deduce a working definiton of classical Arabic autobiographies from his material instead of adopting European model definitions. However, he still has European standard autobiographies in mind, when explaining the parameters for his either inclusion or exclusion of texts: From the wide range of Arabic writings that might be termed first-person literature or self-narratives, the texts selected are those that appear to be closest kin to the western idea of autobiography, mostly from the Arabic genres of sīra and tarjama. The guiding criterion in this study for deeming a text an autobiography has been that the text present itself as a description or summation of the author’s life, or a major portion thereof, as viewed restrospectively from a particular point of time (Reynolds 2001, 9).

In the continuation of his argument, Reynolds tries to clarify the aspects in which he does not follow Western definitions of autobiography. Whereas Western scholars of Arabic autobiography always have defined their subject rather negatively by using the characteristics of Western autobiography as their reference point, Reynolds adopts this scheme for liberating his subject as much as possible from the shackles of Western definitions of autobiography. In doing so, he tries to broaden the scope for autobiographical research without breaking ties with the genre as a transcultural phenomenon: For texts that met this basic description, no attempt has been made to pass judgment involving issues of which texts are “real” or “true” autobiographies based on subjective criteria such as the degree to which the author reveals his or her “inner self”, or the degree to which the author stands back from and critically evaluates his or her earlier self, or which aspects of human life are portrayed in detail (all issues that are commonly raised in modern western literary criticism of autobiography). Nor has a sharp distinction been made between autobiography and memoir (the focus of the latter being the external events that took place during the author’s life rather than the development of the author’s life per se). Although the two categories appear to be separate and clear in the abstract, when addressing actual texts this clarity often proves ephemeral. The exclusion or inclusion of texts on the basis of length or other formal criteria has also been avoided (Reynolds 2001, 9).

2.1 Introduction 

 825

Whereas Rosenthal treated only twenty-three autobiographical texts, Reynolds counts roughly hundred forty and adds: “There are clearly far more premodern Arabic autobiographies in existence than have previously been assumed; however, the works included in this study represent only a portion of the tradition as a whole. What portion they represent cannot be known with any certainty at this time” (2001, 241). For modern Arabic autobiography, some of the definition problems remain the same. This is what Tetz Rooke in his thesis on modern Arabic autobiography, In My Childhood. A Study of Arabic Autobiography (1997), has in mind, when he avoids a clear cut definition, but at the same time tries to approach his subject by probing its generic markers, its historical development, or its thematic concepts. Under the heading “Continuity and Change”, he gives an account of his reluctancy to comply with strict rules for what constitutes a modern Arabic autobiography: The Arab reader of today finds the market overflowing with personal literature of all sorts. Diaries, travel-books, letters and autobiographical essays are published in a steady stream. Heads of state, officials, professionals and “stars” of all categories fancy writing their memoirs. The autobiographical novel flourishes. Arabic autobiography is by no means a fixed or closed corpus; exchanges between it and these adjacent genres have all along marked its existence and continue to do so. In addition, historical and foreign models also affect the genre. The purpose of the present chapter is to try to estimate the influence of the classical forms on modern production in this field of literature on the one hand, then to compare this influence with that of “Western” works on the other, to look for signs of continuity and change (Rooke 1997, 92).

The last fifteen or twenty years have not contributed really much to a clarification of the generic characteristics of modern Arabic autobiography. On the contrary, technical innovations have created an additional, hitherto unknown autobiographical ‘cyberspace’ in the World Wide Web, thus rendering infinite possibilities for individual self-representation to interplay with other individual or collective voices. Conversely, and in comparison with the vast body of critical research on Western autobiography, Arabic autobiography remains an academically largely unexplored field of self-representation in the Arab world. At the same time, the restrictions on self-exposure have largely stayed in place, even if the moral obligations to exemplarity were mitigated. Valerie Anishchenkova, in her recent book Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture (2014), resolutely favours autobiographical fiction or fictionalized autobiographies as the material basis of her research: In Arab cultural contexts, a salient factor behind the author’s choice to narrate personal selfhood through a novel is the question of censorship [...] in that it is far less acceptable to reveal intimate details of one’s life and to talk openly about taboo aspects of autobiographical subjectivity, such as family relationships, sexuality, political activity, unconventional religious beliefs. [...] Therefore, I am most interested in literary texts that are implicitely autobiographical, that is, texts that are not bound by Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, namely, autobiographical novels. In such narratives authors can exercise more freedom of self-expression while avoiding scrutiny from their readers for being untruthful. [...] I define a novel as autobiographical when the principal function of the text is the making of autobiographical identity (Anishchenkova 2014, 9–10).

826 

 2 The Arab World

In fact, Anishchenkova not only extends her research on Arabic autobiography to literary and fictional texts, but also to films, blogs and subsequently printed cyber-writing, thus transgressing the most common genre definitions. This seems a reasonable approach, although the reasons may be found elsewhere than (only) in cultural restraints. Many circumstances have contributed to the fact that today’s Arabic autobiographical writing is deeply embedded in all kinds of political, social, religious, artistic and literary discourses. When the novel had been introduced, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Egyptian avant-garde of writers took advantage of the opportunity to fictionalize their autobiographical material ready at hand. After the novel had become an established genre, the process of de-colonization led ‒ mainly in the North-African countries ‒ to the genre of ‘auto-fiction’ as a means to deal with the painful memories of a ‘fragmented’ self. Over the whole period of the twentieth century and in nearly all Arab countries, literature and autobiography had to bear the burden of being politically relevant, as censorship widely prevented overt political writing and action. Palestinians, starting in the 1970s to write down their autobiographies, did so in order to compensate for the non-existence or inaccessibility of historical Palestinian archives. Last not least, the hundreds and perhaps thousands of blogs, selfies, graffiti and other forms of self-representation of Arab youths having spread in recent years do participate in the ongoing process of national, social and religious identity making. Candace Lang’s famous dictum from 1982, that “autobiography is indeed everywhere one cares to find it” (1982, 6), is particularly applicable to the Arab world today.

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography Susanne Enderwitz

The first Arabic autobiographies, or “proto-autobiographies” (Reynolds 2001, 52), were written in the ninth century CE. They had no precedents in the Arabic tradition and appear to have been composed independently from each other. But although they did not stem from an Arabic tradition, they referred to an ancient tradition and had Greek and Persian precedents. This holds particularly true for the type of philosophical/medical autobiography which is found among the earliest autobiographies in Arabic. As to the ninth century CE, there are references to five autobiographies, of which only three are still extant and/or identifiable as belonging to the genre. Abū ‘Abd Allāh Ḥārith b. Asad al-‘Anazī al-Muḥāsibī (b. ca. 165 H/781 CE, d. ca. 243 H/857 CE), an early ascetic and mystic, prefaced his ‘Bequests’ (al-Waṣāyā) with a brief account of his conversion to the mystical path (Smith 1974). Abū Zayd Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq al-‘Ibādī (Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, b. 194 H/809 CE, d. 260 H/873 CE or 264 H/877 CE), a Christian physician and translator from the Greek, is credited with an autobiographically inspired self-defense against his enemies (Cooperson 1997). And al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (b. before 215 H/830 CE, d. between 292 and 297 H/905 and 910 CE), a religious figure with great influence on later philosophers and mystics, composed one of the earliest spiritual autobiographies in the Arabic tradition (Reynolds 2001, 119–120). The following sub-chapter gives an overview of autobiographies between the tenth and the nineteenth centuries CE, which stand out by the fame of the author, the size of his autobiography, or its conception.

An Overview In the twelfth century CE, autobiography as a genre was firmly established in Arabic literature. The flowering of autobiographical writing rendered it even possible for composers of biographical dictionaries in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries CE to make extensive use of the existing texts (Reynolds 2001, 53). Autobiographies of scholars as famous as the physician and philosopher Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyā’ al-Rāzī (known in the West as Rhazes, b. 250 H/854 CE, d. 313 H/925 CE or 323 H/935 CE) (Kraus 1935), the physician, mathematician and physicist Abū ‘Ali Muḥammad al-Ḥasan b. al-Haytham (Ibn al-Haytham, known in the West as Alhazen, b. 354 H/965 CE, d. ca. 430 H/1039 CE), the physician and philosopher Abū al-Ḥasan b. ‘Abd Allāh b. Sīnā (Ibn Sīnā, known in the West as Avicenna, b. 370 H/980 CE, d. 428 H/1036 CE) (Gohlman 1974), the physician Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Riḍwān (Ibn Riḍwān, b. 388 H/998 CE, d. 453 H/1061 CE), and the religious scholar and belletrist ‘Alī b. Aḥmad b. Ḥazm (Ibn Ḥazm, b. 384 H/994 CE, d. 456 H/1064 CE) (Arberry 1953) became more widely known, most often through biographical collections, but sometimes also as https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-095

828 

 2 The Arab World

independent works. Two lengthy, independent autobiographies, those of ‘Abd Allāh b. Buluggīn (Ibn Buluggīn, 447 H/1056 CE, d. after 487 H/1094 CE) (Tibi 1986) and Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (b. 450 H/1058 CE, d. 505 H/1111 CE) (Watt 1953), were composed in the short period between 1095 and 1107 CE, but the motives behind them differ considerably, as the first is a political family history of the Zirid Berber rule in Granada until its end and the second an account of a spiritual crisis by one of the leading theologians in Islam. The autobiographical account of the Jewish convert to Islam, Samaw’al b. Yaḥyā al-Maghribī (b. 520 H/1126 CE, d. 569 H/1174 CE), also dates from this period. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries CE, for the first time, a ‘cluster’ of autobiographical texts were written by a group of educated, politically, culturally or religiously prominent persons, living in Damascus and Aleppo during or shortly after the time of Saladin (Reynolds 2001, 53–55). The poet, historian and politician ‘Umāra b. abī al-Ḥasan al-Ḥakamī al-Yamanī (b. 515 H/1121 CE, d. 569 H/1175 CE) belongs to this cluster, the nobleman, poet and warrior Usāma b. Munqidh (b. 488 H/1095 CE, d. 573 H/1188 CE) (Hitti 1929), Saladin’s secretary and biographer ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī (b. 519 H/1125 CE, d. 597 H/1201 CE), the literary historian and biographer Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (b. 575/1179 CE, d. 622 H/1229 CE), the grammarian, physician and ‘protegé’ of Saladin, Muwaffaq al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Laṭīf b. Yūsuf al-Baghdādī (b. 557 H/1126, d. 629 H/1231 CE), the historian Ibn al-‘Adīm (b. 588 H/1192 CE, d. 660 H/1262 CE) and the governor, historian and Sufi Sa‘d al-Dīn b. Ḥamawiyya al-Juwaynī (b. 592 H/1196 CE, d. 674 H/1276 CE). As Reynolds maintains, this group of ‘literati’ was well aware of each other’s careers and writings, some of them evidently met face-to-face or were colleagues or friends, and a few explicitely quote from the works of others. All of their writings are well known in historical research, as the period of the Crusades is one of the main topics in Medieval History. But it seems that the autobiographies or autobiographical accounts of these men were also famous among Arab autobiographers of later centuries, being referred to a number of times. The reasons for our knowledge of multiple autobiographical texts from such a close-knit literary and scholarly group may have been prompted by the very existence of this group, by the political circumstances of the period, or they may simply reflect the fact that the period has been extensively studied. Whatever the case, there were obviously a number of other clusters of autobiographies written by Sunni scholars in Spain (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE) and the Mashriq (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries CE), among Sufis in the Maghrib (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries CE) and Shiites in Lebanon (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE), and among enslaved Western Africans in the United States and the Caribbean (nineteenth century CE) (Reynolds 2001, 55–58). Although autobiographical writing seems to have been increasing between the thirteenth/fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries CE, mentioning of a handful of autobiographers may suffice here, as their works clearly stand out from the mass of shorter or longer autobiographical works. They are marked either by their literary

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 829

quality or by sheer length, and all of them show a heightened awareness of the auto­ biographical act, either in literary or in moral terms. Whereas the first autobiographies from the ninth to the twelfth centuries CE went without a particular justification apart from their immediate purpose (to defend oneself against critics, to provide a spiritual guide for one’s followers, to serve as an example for the next generations), a certain ambiguity accompanies the maturation of the genre. It seems that a certain “auto­biographical anxiety” (Reynolds 2001, 52) set a discussion of the legitimacy of auto­biographical writing from the twelfth century CE on in motion. Particularly interesting, in this respect, is the reference to Kor. 93/11 which shows up, for the first time, ْ ‫ك فَ َح ّد‬ in Ibn Ḥazm’s text: .‫ث‬ َ ّ‫“[ َوأَ َّما َ ِبنِ ْع َم ِة َرب‬And as for the bounty of your Lord, speak!”] (Ibn Ḥazm n.  d., 78 [1953, 158]), From then on, the verse became a standard disclaimer of pride or arrogance when speaking about oneself (Reynolds 2001, 62). Other motives for writing an autobiography are discernable, too: asserting control over one’s life story, responding to a request from someone else or presenting one’s achievements to posterity are also concerns which appear in carefully composed framings of the autobiographical text itself. The autobiography of the Damascene jurist and historian ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. Ismā‘īl al-Maqdisī Abū Shāma (b. 599 H/1202 CE, d. 665 H/1268 CE) (Lowry 1997) falls still into the thirteenth century CE and can be regarded as a latecomer of the above-mentioned cluster, as Abū Shāma was obviously aware of some of the cluster’s autobiographies. With the scholar and politician Muḥammad b. ‘Abd Allāh b. Sa‘īd b. ‘Alī b. Aḥmad al-Salmānī (Lisān al-Dīn b. al-Khaṭīb, b. 713 H/1313 CE, d. 775 H/1374 CE) we enter the fourteenth century CE. Major autobiographical figures from the fifteenth century CE, in addition to the famous ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad b. Khaldūn (Ibn Khaldūn, b. 792 H/1332 CE, d. 808 H/1406 CE), include the scholar and historian Abū al-Ṭayyib Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. ‘Alī al-Fāsī (b. 775 H/1373 CE, d. 832 H/1429 CE) and the Hadith scholar Aḥmad b. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad (Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī, b. 773 H/1372 CE, d. 852 H/1449 CE). In the sixteenth century CE, particularly two names stand out, the judge and legal scholar ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. abī Bakr b. Muḥammad al-Khudayrī (Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, b. 849 H/1445 CE, d. 909 H/1505 CE) (Sartain 1975) and the Sufi Shaykh ‘Abd al-Wahhāb b. Aḥmad al-Sha‘rānī (b. 897 H/1492 CE, d. 973 H/1565 CE) (Reynolds 1997/1998). As to the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries CE, a considerable number of autobiographers are mentioned in the sources, but the material is relatively scarce, due to the fact that copies are either lost, unidentifiable or unpublished (Reynolds 2001, 274–279). This is amazing, as, in recent scholarship, these centuries are singled out for their growing individualism, foreshadowing the beginnings of modernity in the nineteenth century CE (Reichmuth 2008). But at least at the end of this period, some illustrous autobiographers appear, like the jurist and scholar Yūsuf b. Aḥmad al-Baḥrānī (b. 1107 H/1696 CE, d. 1186 H/1772 CE), the historian and biographer Muḥammad Khalīl b. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Murādī al-Dimashqī (b. 1173 H/1759 CE, d. 1206 H/1791 CE) and the scholar and Sufi Aḥmad b. ‘Ajība (Ibn ‘Ajība, b. 1160 H/1747 or 1161 H/1748 CE, d. 1224 H/1809 CE) (Michon 1969).

830 

 2 The Arab World

Apart from the existing autobiographical clusters, it is difficult to turn the material into a history of classical Arabic autobiography. Until recently, Middle Eastern Studies treated these texts as “orphan texts” (Reynolds 2001, 26). To start with, the motivations for composing a written self-representation are complex and multifarious. Some autobiographical accounts are small contributions for biographical collections, others are part of family histories. Some autobiographers present themselves in the entourage of the powerful or as witnesses to great historical events, others write in order to preempt or redress criticism of their lives or works. Some present their spiritual autobiographies as guides to later seekers of the true path, others make use of their lives as a means of producing edifying entertainment. Some describe the process of their conversion from one religion to the other, others address their writings to their children. In religious and ethnic terms, the autobiographers are as diverse as in their writings. There are Jewish authors, Christians of various denominations, and Muslims of Sunni as well as Ismaili and Twelver Shiite orientations. There are Arabophone writers and others, who use Arabic only for intellectual exchange. There are writers from the heartlands of Islam, but also from far away such as India or Central Asia. However, from a bird’s eye view, the autobiographers present themselves as socially homogeneous. They are male, speak Arabic and belong to the educated or social elites of their day, even if their origins are humble. There are no autobiographies of women (with the possible exception of a Sufi Shaykha in the fifteenth/sixteenth century CE) and no lower-class autobiographers either (Reynolds 2001, 8–9). As long as there is no coherent history of classical Arabic autobiography, the following sub-chapters are rather provisionally. However, they follow not only the classical Arab predeliction for grouping biographies (including autobiographies) according to professions, but also a certain chronological order. It is not by coincidence that in the long history of classical Arabic autobiography the physicians and philosophers, the specialists for the human body and soul, were the first to come up with individual life-accounts. Then, and together with Islam increasingly gaining hold as an integrative force of society, followed the mystics with their knowledge of the human spiritual needs. Only after that all the others made their appearance, the scholars, administrators and politicians, who also contributed to the strength of the Muslim community, albeit with more mundane means.

Physicians/Philosophers Two autobiographers from outside the Islamic and the Arabic-speaking world seem to have stimulated the development of Arabic autobiography, the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (b. ca. 129, d. 201/215 CE) and the Persian physician Burzœ (sixth century CE). Translations of both of their works circulated widely in the classical Arab-Islamic

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 831

world, and references to them can be found in several classical Arabic autobiographies between the ninth and the twelfth centuries CE (Meyerhof 1929). Galen inserted autobiographical details into several of his texts, namely in De libris propriis [‘On my own books’] and De ordine librorum propriorum [‘On the order of my own books’]. In the former, he gave a comprehensive list of his books, as he had noted that some of them were circulating under names other than his and others were falsely attributed to him. In the latter, he classified his books according to their complexity, proceeding from the basic to the difficult, and to the motives as well as the time and the place of their composition (Brock 1929, 174–181; Moraux 1985). As Reynolds notes, autobiographies similar to Galen’s De libris propriis did indeed become one of the common features of Arabic autobiography. However, unlike Galen’s work, these bibliographies were usually only part of larger autobiographical works which documented other personal details of the author’s life such as his birth, geneaology, teachers, and travels (2001, 46–47). Burzœ is first and foremost known as the translator of the famous Indian collection of animal fables, the Pañcatantra [‘Panchatantra’], from Sanskrit into Middle Persian. Later, this text was translated by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (b. ca. 102 H/720 CE, d. 139 H/756 CE) into Arabic. Under the title Kalīla wa-Dimna [Kalīla and Dimna] it was a major contribution to medieval Arabic literature which made its way also East and West, reaching even late medieval Europe (“Kalila and Dimna” 2009). Burzœ’s autobiography can be extracted from the prefaces of the various redactions and translations of the book, where he informs his readers about his professional crisis and religious doubts which befell him when realizing that even the best medical skills have only limited effect. The doubts took him to India, where, on behalf of Khusraw Anūshirwān, he obtained a copy of the fabulous collection in question (Blois 1990). On the one hand, it is clear that the autobiographical writings of both Galen and Burzœ set the stage for the emergence of the Arabic autobiographical tradition, particularly as the first autobiographies in Arabic are autobiographies written by physicians and philosophers. But on the other hand, apart from the autobibliographical subgenre, neither text seems to have influenced in any direct manner the form, structure, style, or content of Arabic biographical or autobiographical writing. The series of Arabic autobiographical accounts from physicians and philosophers starts with the Nestorian Christian Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (d. ca. 264 H/877 CE), who lived in Baghdad in the heyday of the Abbasid Empire. Referred to as ‘the Shaykh of the translators’, he mastered four languages (Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Persian) and was the most prolific translator of his time. Coming from the Iraqi town of al-Ḥīra, Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq originally sought a medical career in Baghdad. After a quarrel with his teacher, he left Iraq and studied Greek in Alexandria or Constantinople. After his return to Baghdad, he rendered works by Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen into Arabic. In addition to his translations, he composed more than seventy scientific treatises of his own. As a translator, he broke with the tradition of word-by-word translation and

832 

 2 The Arab World

initiated a process by which the Islamic world was able to appropriate a huge amount of Greek thought (Reynolds 2001, 107–108, 109–118). Ḥunayn’s autobiographical account Risāla fīmā aṣābah min al-miḥan wa-lshadā’id [Epistle on the Trials and Tribulations Which Befell Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (Reynolds 2001, 109–118)] appears in a biographical collection, which was composed in the thirteenth century CE by a historian of medicine (Ibn abī Uṣaybi‘a 1995, Vol. I, 184–200). It is not a comprehensive life account, but the account of a trial at the court of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (ninth century CE). After lamenting the treachery of his fellow Christians and their envy of his superior abilities, Ḥunayn tells the story of how his coreligionist and fellow physician Jibrīl b. Bukhtīshū‘ outwitted him in front of the caliph. Bukhtīshū‘ ordered a precious icon of the virgin Mary holding Jesus in her lap and presented it to the caliph as a gift. Before doing this, however, he fervently kissed the icon and informed the caliph that all Christians were obliged to do this. Then he provoked Ḥunayn to spit on the same icon, whereupon the caliph summoned Theodosius, the head of the Nestorian church, in order to investigate the legitimacy of such a behaviour. In accordance with Theodosius, the caliph ordered Ḥunayn to be thrown in prison, beaten and tortured. While waiting for his execution, Ḥunayn was miraculously rescued, when the caliph fell ill and saw Jesus Christ in a dream who ordered him to pardon his prisoner. The caliph had Ḥunayn released, endowed him with riches and made him his chief physician. This account, apart from being autobiographical, can be read as a commentary on living in a court society, on Muslim-Christian relations, and perhaps also on Byzantine iconoclasm. Although some modern scholars have doubted the authenticity of the text (Cooperson 1997, 239–243), it represents an extraordinary documental evidence for the career of a Christian physician with a Greek education in Muslim service. At the same time, it resembles the Greek genre of apologetic autobiography. However, it is also highly reminiscent of the biblical/Qur’anic story of Joseph. Thus it evokes both the Greek and the Abrahamic heritage of Christianity and Islam: “Both Ḥunayn and Joseph are betrayed by their ‘brothers’ (coreligionists in the case of Ḥunayn), falsely accused and imprisoned, and finally released, absolved, and rewarded as a result of a ruler’s dream. The epistle thus presents a fascinating amalgam of Greek and biblical elements in an Arabic literary form” (Reynolds 2001, 108). An apologia, too, is the autobiography of al-Rāzī (Rhazes, d. 323 H/935 CE) from Rayy, who was for a time the director of a hospital in Baghdad, but also the court physician and a courtier himself. He presents his life-account al-Sīra al-falsafiyya [‘Philosophical way of life/Philosophical biography’] (Rāzī 1939, 97–111 [Kraus 1935]) as an ethical treatise which serves, at the same time, as a defense of having spent his time as a courtier as well as a scholar. As al-Rāzī is considered “the most free-thinking of the major philosophers of Islam” (Goodman 1995, 474a), it is no wonder that he refers more to the Greek than to the Islamic ethical tradition. In accordance with the principles of his master Socrates, so he claims apologetically, he has led a life of moderation, excessive only in his devotion to learning. He associated with princes never as a man

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 833

at arms or an officer of the state but always, and only, as a physician and a friend. He was constantly writing – in one year, he urges, he wrote over twenty thousand pages, “in a hand like an amulet maker’s” (Goodman 1995, 474b). With Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 428 H/1036 CE), the physicians and philosophers enter the field of scholarly autobiography, which had already begun to spread among other medieval Arab intellectuals. Ibn Sīnā’s account covers only his earlier years and deals mainly with his parents, birth, teachers, education, and travels (Ghamdi 1989, 135). He was born in 370/980 near Bukhara, his native language being Persian. His father, an official of the Sāmānid administration, had him carefully educated at Bukhara. His intellectual independence was served by an extraordinary intelligence and memory, which allowed him to overtake his teachers at the age of fourteen. Ibn Sīnā’s untitled autobiography (Ibn abī Uṣaybi‘a 1995, Vol. II, 2–20; Ibn al-Qifṭī 1903, 413–417 [Gohlman 1974; Arberry 1951, 9–24; Gutas 1988, 22–30]) is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it is more detailed than other contemporary examples of this type (Reynolds 2001, 60). Secondly, it is the first Arabic autobiography which focuses on the author’s childhood and youth (Reynolds 2001, 60; 1997, 381). And thirdly, the text has come down through the ages as both an autobiography and a biography. Ibn Sīnā dictated the text to his disciple, secretary and friend al-Jūzjānī, who later continued the text as a biography, providing an account of the remainder of Ibn Sīnā’s life. Due to this textual history, the text was transmitted both as a separate work and as an entry in several biographical collections. Particularly, the autobiography appears in biographical collections on physicians and other scientists, namely in the thirteenth century CE collections of the above-mentioned Ibn abī Uṣaybi’a and a similar collection of al-Qifṭī. In summary: “The entry on Ibn Sīnā includes a short introduction by the compiler, the text of the autobiography itself, the biography of al-Jūzjānī, a short bibliography of Ibn Sīnā’s works, a selection of his poetry, and a bibliographical addendum” (Reynolds 2001, 60). Reynolds highlights the fact that Ibn Sīnā, according to Ibn abī Uṣaybi‘a, composed his own account of his life so that others would not do so. This, he maintains, was a concern echoed by a number of later writers. The issue was not so much to write an autobiographical text but a text which guaranteed control over the content and presentation of the material and prevented the spread of factual errors (Reynolds 2001, 60–61). After an Iraqi living in Cairo, Ibn al-Haytham (d. 430 H/1039 CE) (Ibn abī Uṣaybi‘a 1995, Vol. II, 90–98), and a Cairine by birth, Ibn Riḍwān (b. 388 H/998 CE, d. 453 H/1061 CE) (Ibn abī Uṣaybi‘a 1995, Vol. II, 99–105; Ibn al-Qifṭī 1903, 294, 298–300, 443–445 [Dols 1984, 54–66]), had composed their autobiographies, the list of physicians’ autobiographies dried out, because the same was true for the specialized collections which had formerly been a repository for the transmission of such texts. In post-Abbasid times, biographies of physicians continued to be included in biographical collections of a more general type, but the main interest of these collections were men of the religious and political establishment. The references to physicians are scarce and mostly brief, unless these belonged to the political elite. Physicians are no longer referred

834 

 2 The Arab World

to as ḥakīm [scientist, philosopher], a term denoting the comprehensive erudition of the profession, but as ṭabīb [physician] or according to their narrow specialization. Particularly in Mamluk times, medicine came under the umbrella of religious (Sunni or Sufi) learning, and non-Muslims were excluded from the biographical collections. They did not belong to the elite any longer, and Dāwūd al-Anṭākī (d. 1008 H/1599 CE) was the last great Arab physician. In general, the reputation of the medical profession deteriorated, and saints and Sufis appeared as men whose karāmāt [miracles] also included healing powers (Behrens-Abouseif 1989).

Sufis/Ascetics Sufi autobiographies were written nearly as early as autobiographies of physicians/ philosophers in Arabic literature, as the ascetic and Sufi renunciation of the material world favoured a corresponding focus on the life of the ‘inner self’. Franz Rosenthal traces the Sufi autobiography back to al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857) (1937, 11–12), whose spiritual manual al-Waṣāyā [‘The bequests’] or Kitāb al-naṣā’iḥ [‘The book of advice’] (1986, 59–64 [Smith 1974; Massignon 1922, 216–218]) starts with a short sketch of his own conversion to the right path. In general, Sufi autobiographies are more personal in character than other Arabic autobiographies, as they usually display a basic transformation of the self and, thus, come closest to the predominantly European genre of ‘confessions’. Next to the autobiographies of physicians and philosophers with their ancient Greek and Persian roots, “the Sufi spiritual autobiographies [...] emerged as a recognizable subtradition of its own, which in turn influenced even some nonspiritual autobiographical texts” (Reynolds 2001, 48). Among the clusters of autobiographies which Reynolds was able to isolate throughout the centuries, there is at least one cluster of Sufi autobiographies which points to a particular Sufi tradition. It is located in North Africa, where Sufi brotherhoods were particularly strong and well organized. This cluster is headed by the famous Moroccan Sufi Ibn ‘Ajība (b. ca. 1160 H/1747 CE, d. 1224 H/1809 CE), who was obviously familiar with several of his contemporaries’ and predecessors’ autobiographies, namely al-Darqāwī (b. 1174 H/1760 CE, d. 1239H/1823 CE), Zarrūq (b. 846 H/1442 CE, d. 899 H/1493 CE), al-Sha‘rānī (d. 973 H/1565 CE), and al-Yūsī (b. 1040 H/1631 CE, d. 1102 H/1691 CE) (Reynolds 2001, 56). The account of ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad b. ‘Alī, known as al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (‘the sage of Tirmidh’, d. between 292 and 297 H/905 and 910 CE) is neither an independent account nor an entry in a biographical collection, but marks the beginning of his book Khatm al-awliyā’ [‘The seal of the saints’]. Under the title Buduww sha’n abī ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī [The beginning of the affair of Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī] (Tirmidhī 1965, 14–32 (Radtke and O’Kane 1996, 15–36; Reynolds 2001, 119–120)], this preface is nevertheless one of the earliest spiritual autobiographies in the Arabic tradition. al-Tirmidhī studied religious sciences in his home

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 835

town Tirmidh (today southern Uzbekistan) and became aware of his mystical calling only when he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca. As an ascetic, al-Tirmidhī held the view that the real seeker had to attain an exemplary degree of self-control and resist all engagement with the transient world. In his autobiography, al-Tirmidhī shortly recounts his childhood, youth and training, but then quickly passes to a series of dreams and visions which indicate his spiritual status. Most of them are not his own, but the dream-visions of others, and therefore the autobiographical ‘I’ intermingles constantly with the ‘I’ of others, particularly his wife’s ‘I’. It is she who, among other things, reports to him that a mysterious figure has identified him as the leading walī [‘friend of God, saint’] of his time. Her reports are a mixture of Arabic and Persian, the latter most probably being the only language al-Tirmidhī’s wife could speak. As the wife plays a crucial role in the autobiography, the use of Persian is perhaps a hint to al-Tirmidhī’s contention that formal education is not a prerequisite for mystical inspiration (Reynolds 2001, 119–120, 121–131). After al-Tirmidhī, nearly hundred years passed by, before the great Muslim theologian and Sufi mystic Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (d. 505 H/1111 CE) wrote his spiritual autobiography al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl [‘The saviour from error’] (1961 [1953, 2006]. In it, al-Ghazālī describes his lifelong pursuit of truth and the dramatic spiritual crisis that eventually led him to explore and reject several schools of thought before finally choosing the mystical path. However, in the centuries to come, several Sufis composed their autobiographies, starting with Rūzbihān al-Baqlī al-Shīrāzī (b. 522 H/1128 CE, d. 606 H/1209 CE) [1997, 9–26]. The autobiography is written in the first person, dealing with al-Baqlī’s visionary encounters with God, angels, prophets, and Sufi figures. In the first fifth of the text he describes a vision at the age of fifteen, which prompted him to abandon his vegetable shop and to wander in the desert. The proliferation of Sufi thought and practice may be inferred from the fact that, whereas al-Baqlī lived and wrote in Persia, the next major Sufi figure, Muḥyī al-Dīn b. al-‘Arabī (b. 560 H/1165 CE, d. 638 H/1240 CE), came from Andalusia. Being one of the most important postclassical writers of Sufism, Ibn al-‘Arabī is often mentioned for the strongly autobiographical structure of his books, but no single text presents itself as an autobiography proper. Like Ibn al-‘Arabī, the Sufi Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Simnānī (b. 659 H/1261 CE, d. 736 H/1336 CE) included autobiographical details in some of his works (1983, 396–400 [Reynolds 2001, 190–193]). In contrast to Ibn al-‘Arabī, he also left a longer autobiographical account of when and how his conversion to Sufism took place, how he supported places for Sufi teaching and how he overcame the temptations of Satan, who tried to seduce him to give up his ascetic life and return to the amenities of wealth and power. al-Simnānī lived under the Mongol Ilkhānid dynasty in Iran, came from a family of high standing and was raised for a life at the court. Already at a young age, he turned to Sufism, perhaps under the influence of Christianity or Buddhism. In his childhood he served as a companion to the Ilkhānid prince Arghūn, who displayed great tolerance toward Christianity, but is himself said to have been a follower

836 

 2 The Arab World

of Buddhism. Like many other Sufis, al-Simnānī’s autobiographical pieces were intended to serve the didactic function of illustrating his teachings through examples from his personal experience and demonstrating the way to Sufism (Reynolds 2001, 188–189). Leaving some minor Sufi figures aside, we pass into the sixteenth century CE which gave rise to one of the most important classical Arab autobiographers in general, not only with regard to Sufi autobiography, ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī (d. 973 H/1565 CE) (Reynolds 1997, 98). al-Sha‘rānī was an Egyptian Sufi, scholar and historian of Sufism with North-African ancestors. His autobiography Laṭā’if al-minan wa-l-akhlāq fī wujūb al-taḥadduth bi-ni‘mat Allāh ‘alā al-iṭlāq [‘The Book of Gracious Merits and Virtues Bestowed on Me by God and the Absolute Obligation of Renouncing His Blessings’] (Cairo 1938–39 [Vacca 1972]), which he finished in 960 H/1552 CE, is not only exceptionally voluminous (about 700 pages in print), but also truly professional. First of all, al-Sha‘rānī positions himself at the end of a long list of predecessors which is a revised version of an earlier list, written by Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī. Then, he goes on to discuss the reasons for writing an autobiography, both in scholarly and in mystical terms (Reynolds 2001, 65). Finally, he organizes his text in sixteen chapters devoted to God’s bounties and the virtues bestowed on him. Both in line with and apart from headings pointing to his eminent lineage, his vast knowledge in Islamic scholarship and his undisputable eminence among the religious scholars from all doctrines, which point to a certain self-centredness, al-Sha‘rānī’s autobiography contains all kinds of information about his spiritual life, such as biographical facts, supernatural incidents, qualities he possessed, visions he saw, and anecdotes about many individuals with whom he had contact or whose works he had read (Ghamdi 1989, 79–80). Like al-Tirmidhī, al-Sha‘rānī had a genuine empathy for the weak and underprivileged elements of society, such as peasants, labourers, and women. Although he attended the gatherings of Cairo’s best-known Ulema, he displays a special admiration of and indebtedness to his Sufi master ‘Alī al-Khawwāṣ, an illiterate palm-leaf plaiter (Ghamdi 1989, 79; Winter 1997, 316b). In later centuries, too, the geographical dissemination of Sufi autobiographies is impressive. ‘Abd al-Qādir b. ‘Abd Allāh al-‘Aydarūs (b. 978 H/1570 CE, d. 1037 H/1628 CE) (Reynolds 2001, 208–209) is particularly interesting for his South-Arabian descent and his upbringing in Gujarat (India). He came from a family of merchants, who were renowned for their piety and scholarship. al-‘Aydarūs himself obviously belonged to the upper class, as courtiers and court ladies were part of his life and princes and merchants studied Sufism under his supervision. His autobiography appeared as an entry under the year of his birth in his biographical dictionary al-Nūr al-sāfir ‘an akhbār al-qarn al-‘āshir [‘The light unveiling the reports of the tenth century H’] [1934, 334–343 (Reynolds 2001, 210–215)], obviously meant to serve as a biography like all the other biographies. al-‘Aydarūs mentions his parents, his education, his rise to fame, his numerous students and his books. The autobiography is neither succinctly Sufi nor unconventional, as its glimpses into the parent-child relation and emotions of

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 837

love, pain and passion (expressed in verse rather than in prose) are not uncommon in classical Arabic autobiographies. More interesting, from a literary point of view, are the North-African autobiographies from the seventeenth and the following centuries CE, namely the texts of al-Yūsī and Ibn ‘Ajība. Whereas the Indian Arab autobiographer might have felt a need to display his familiarity with the conventions of Arabic biographical and autobiographical writing, a North African autobiographer was more independent composing his lifestory. al-Yūsī (d. 1102 H/1691 CE), an innovative and influential Moroccan Sufi, wrote a lengthy autobiography under the title al-Fahrasa [‘index’] (2004) which has only partly survived. However, his Muḥāḍarāt fī al-adab wa al-lugha [‘Lectures on literature and language’] (2006), which includes anecdotes, poetic quotations, travel narratives, and reflections upon such varied topics as sainthood, food customs in the Sufi convents and the story-tellers of the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech, also contains many autobiographical passages, in which the author unusually frankly discusses his childhood misdeeds, the pleasures of his conjugal sex life, and other intimate details of his personal life (Reynolds 2001, 276; Killito 2002, 352a; Berque 1958). Another Moroccan Sufi, Aḥmad b. ‘Ajība (d. 1224/1809), also composed such a Fahrasa [L’autobiographie (fahrasa) du soufi marocain Ahmad ibn ‘Agiba (1747–1809)] (1990 [Michon 1969]). It starts more conventional than its predecessor’s, as it first covers Ibn ‘Ajība’s childhood, education, teachers, wives and children. But then Ibn ‘Ajība turns to his dramatic conversion to Sufism, periods of imprisonment, and religious beliefs (Reynolds 2001, 279). These and other examples show the vivacity of the classical Sufi autobiography from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries CE, which extended through to the twentieth century. Its end, according to Reynolds’ collection, is marked by the autobiographer Ibn ‘Alīwa (b. 1289 H/1869, d. 1352–1353 H/1934 CE) (Reynolds 2001, 286). After his death, his spiritual autobiography that he had dictated to one of his disciples sometime after 1923 was discovered among his papers. It recounts his rise from a cobbler’s life to the Shaykh of a Sufi order and includes many intimate details, such as his mother’s great love for him, periods of intense loneliness, his difficulties with his wives, and his inner struggles. The autobiography closes in 1910 (Ibn Tūnis 1936, 20–41 [Lings 1971]). In Sufi autobiographies, the central focus of the text lies on the author’s path of spiritual development. They are by definition texts that portray the inner life of their authors and are constructed on a model of transformation. They do not only follow a more linear exposition than other kinds of Arabic autobiography, but also a more exemplary one. The authors present themselves as models of emulation in the sense that the text is a call or an invitation to the reader to travel the same spiritual path (Reynolds 2001, 47). Dreams and visions do play a considerable role, like in the autobiography of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, but they are not peculiar to Sufi autobiographies. They can be found in all other kinds of autobiographies, as medieval Arab-Islamic society, as a whole, strongly believed in the usefulness of dreams and dream interpretation which was, after all, sanctioned by the Prophet.

838 

 2 The Arab World

Scholars/‘Literati’ Sufi and scholarly autobiographies are not always clearly distinguishable, as people renowned for their Sufism sometimes present themselves predominantly as scholars and vice versa, though the latter is rarer. There was no clear distinction between Sufis and scholars, because many scholars had stronger or weaker inclinations towards Sufism. Whether or not a man became known for his Sufism depended, among other things, on his personal life-style and not only on his learning and teaching. Among the scholars, who left an autobiography, are traditionists (transmitters and scholars of traditions of the prophet), judges, preachers, historians, chroniclers, biographers, grammarians, lexicographers, encyclopaedists, astronomers, mathematicians, geographers, administrative officials, prose writers and poets. The autobiographers collected in this sub-chapter were predominantly known for their knowledge, erudition and learning. There are mainly two different groups, distinguished by focussing either on religious or literary erudition, and representing two competing social groups, the Ulema (‘ulamā’, religious scholars in general) on the one hand and the Kuttab (kuttāb, administrative officials) on the other. However, as religious learning comprised not only Koran and Hadith studies, but jurisprudence, history, biography, grammar and lexicography, we often find some of these sciences united in one person. As time went by and Ulema and Kuttab were both subsumed under the social group of ‘the men of the pen’ (as against the military, ‘the men of the sword’), the distinction between the two camps became more and more blurred. Therefore, it is not uncommon for a religious person to excel in poetry or prose of which particularly the latter had originally been the domain of the ‘literati’. It seems that writing an autobiography became popular among scholars and others among the educated elite only from the tenth century CE onward or even later, after the main characteristics of Muslim society had already emerged. This coincides with the fact that, from this time, (biographical) dictionaries, (systematic) encyclopaedias and (literary) anthologies were abundantly produced in response to the needs and wishes of a highly complex urban society. In this climate, the emergence of independent autobiographies was not particularly favoured. Instead, many scholars and ‘literati’ found an opportunity to include their autobiography in their own historiographical (biographical) work, or they were asked by other historians to act as biographers of the self. The autobiographies which are included in the biographical dictionaries between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries CE, are far too numerous to be presented in detail. Most of them follow a highly conventional arrangement, already discernible in the autobiography of the historian and religious scholar Ẓāhir al-Dīn ‘Alī b. Zayd al-Bayhaqī (b. 493 H/1100 CE, d. 565 H/1169 CE) from Persia, parts of which are preserved through excerpts in the Mu‘jam al-udabā’ [‘Dictionary of learned men’] of Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī from the thirtheenth century CE (Yāqūt 1993, 4/1759–1768). According to Yāqūt, al-Bayhaqī included his autobiography in his book Mashārib al-Tajārib [‘Drink-

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 839

ing troughs of experience’], which has since been lost. Thus, we deal with an autobiography which was written by a scholar to be included in one of his historical books, then preserved by another historian in his biographical collection. Incidentally, Yāqūt is said to have added his own autobiography to his biographical compendium, but it is also lost. In the printed version, al-Bayhaqī’s first person account covers nearly ten pages and is summarized by al-Ghamdi in the following terms: He begins his autobiography by tracing his lineage from Adam. He was born on Sha‘bān 27, 499 H/1105 CE in al-Sābzawār district of Persia. His father sent him first to school (kuttāb) and then took him with him to Shashmand where his father had some landed estates. In his youth he memorized certain works on Arabic poetry, grammar and logic. Later he attended the school of Abī Ja‘far, the Qur‘ānic reader and Imām of the grand mosque in Nisābūr. He studied several works under him, mainly books on the Arabic language. In 515 H/1122 CE he attended the lectures of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Midānī [sic!] and frequented the presence of the Imam Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarrāz, the theologian, and that of the Imām Muḥammad al-Farāzī, from whom he heard rare ḥadīths. After the death of his father in 517H /1123 CE he moved to Marw where he met Tāj al-Quḍāh Abū Sa‘īd Yaḥyā ibn Sa‘īd whom he describes as ‘an angel in human appearance’ and under whom he studied jurisprudence and theology and mastered the art of argumentation (jadal). By then he was holding wa‘ẓ (sermon) sessions at the school and the mosque. In 521 H/1127 CE al-Bayhaqī married. He was so preoccupied with his wife that he was completely distracted from his studies. In this same year he began a series of travels. He went first to Sābūr, then to Bayhaq to visit his mother, then to Nisābūr, and finally back to Bayhaq to where he married again, this time the daughter of Muḥammad ibn Mas‘ūd al-Mukhtār, the governor of al-Rayy. Burdened now with family responsibilities, he was obliged to take the position of the judge of Bayhaq in 526 H/1131 CE. Unable to endure the anger of the people over his judgments, he soon gave up this position. He says: “I decided I would not spend my time and life dwelling on matters whose highest rewards would not extend beyond what Shurayḥ, the judge, once said: I awoke the next morning with half of the people angry at me.” He went to al-Rayy where he was warmly received: while there he studied mathematics. He moved on to Khurāsān in 527 H/1132 CE where he completed his study of mathematics under the direction of ‘Uthmān ibn Jādhūkār. There he later became a distinguished mathematician. In 529 H/1134 CE he studied wisdom (ḥikmah) in Nisābūr, a branch of knowledge which he did not yet grasp. Having failed to make any progress in this subject, he returned, disappointed, to Bayhaq. In time he was supernaturally directed to a new teacher under whose care he achieved success. He says: “I returned to Bayhaq annoyed at my inability to grasp (ḥikmah). Then in 530 H [1135 CE] I saw a vision in which I was told by a voice that I should seek out Quṭb al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Marwazī, known as al-Tibsī. So I went to Sarkhas and stayed there to be near to him.” al-Bayhaqī spent almost six years in Sarkhas and Nisābūr studying wisdom under the direction of al-Marwazī. After his master’s death in 536 H/1141 CE, he went to Bayhaq, only to leave it furtively one month later because of the envy of his relatives. He found a home in Nisābūr where he was reverently received by the notables. During his nearly thirteen years residence in that city he held three lectures (majālis) a week. On a visit to Bayhaq in 549/1154 he found that both his mother and son had died. al-Bayhaqī concludes his autobiography with a list of the works which he had written to 549/1154 CE. These works number eighty-one, come in different sizes, and cover a wide range of disciplines (Ghamdi 1989, 140–142).

840 

 2 The Arab World

Like many other autobiographical texts of a similar background, size, and purpose, al-Bayhaqī’s autobiography focuses on his birthdate, education, travels, career, and publications. However, some details are noteworthy, like his tracing his lineage back to Adam, the account of the early days of his marriage, and the divinely inspired choice of a teacher. This characteristic, too, is not exceptional in itself. None of the many standard autobiographies is completely devoid of a certain individualism in style, composition or outlook, the descent of the author or the narrated events. This is also true for later centuries, as a few examples may show. The grammarian, lexicograper, philosopher, and physician ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (d. 629 H/1231 CE), for example, included his autobiography in a larger work with the title Ta’rīkh [‘History’, ‘Diary’], which he composed for his son. The complete work has not survived, but excerpts are preserved in a biographical dictionary of a later time (Ibn abī Uṣaybi‘a 1995, Vol. II, 301–313 [Reynolds 2001, 157–167]). al-Baghdādī starts in the usual manner with his family, his education in the religious sciences, his teachers, his journeys in search of learning, his encounters with powerful rulers of his time or their representatives and his later career in the service of the Ghaznavid ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Dāwūd b. Bahrām. And yet, as Shawkat M. Toorawa points out in an overview of al-Baghdādī’s autobiography, “it is clear from these fragments and those preserved in other works that ‘Abd al-Laṭīf’s sīra was replete with insights and judgments about the places he lived and visited, the people he encountered, and the intellectual currents of his day” (Reynolds 2001, 156). This insight is particularly strong in his views about medicine and the natural sciences, as he notes, for example, that many of the best scholars of his era, including himself, were unduly preoccupied with alchemy. Toorawa concludes his brief introduction into the autobiography of ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī with the words: “His autobiography, besides providing glimpses into the ingredients that make a scholar, is a record of the triumph of knowledge and learning even in times of turmoil, upheaval, and shifting alliances” (Reynolds 2001, 157). Once the tradition of scholarly autobiography was established, it did not change much over the centuries, but this is also true for the individual imprints of the texts in question. Individuality can be found both in style and composition and in the cognitive value of these works. The much later autobiography of the Bahrayni Shiite jurist and Hadith scholar Yūsuf al-Baḥrānī (b. 1107 H/1696, d. 1186 H/1772 CE) constitutes the final section of his biographical dictionary of Shiite scholars, Lu’lu’at al-Baḥrayn [‘The pearl of Bahrayn’] (1966, 442–449 [Reynolds 2001, 218–223]). al-Baḥrānī lived at a time when Bahrayn underwent a turbulent period after having been ruled by the Safavids. The autobiographer, originally coming from a family of wealthy merchants (pearl trade), fled and eventually settled in Kerbala after several years, where his financial situation improved and he became a respected scholar and teacher. One striking feature in al-Baḥrānī’s autobiography is his repeated mention of his financial state, debts, losses, and taxes and the abundant use of metaphors of commerce and acquisition. This extends even to verses of love-poetry quoted by the author, where nearness

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 841

is equated with wealth and distance with poverty.” “The central metaphor for his life”, we read in Devin J. Stewart’s interpretation, “is accumulation, and through this metaphor he describes his life as a double quest: on the one hand, to acquire material and worldly property, including money, land, date palms, wives, and dependents, and, on the other, to accumulate religious knowledge as embodied in certificates of study, books, and treatises” (Reynolds 2001, 217). It would be easy to multiply these examples of conventional autobiographies, which at second sight reveal an amazing variety. Particularly interesting, however, are three autobiographies, which are likely to give some clue to the relation between biography and autobiography, the interplay between autobiographer and biographer and the interdependency of history and autobiography. They all come from Syria and belong to the twelfth/thirteenth centuries CE, where and when the classical Arabic autobiography was at its height, together with the other historiographical genres. ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī (b. 519 H/1125 CE, d. 597 H/1201 CE), to start with, was a historiographer and the author of a biography-cum-autobiography. ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib [‘the secretary’], his name already suggesting his function, was a state official under the reign of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin), the Ayyūbid ruler and opponent to the Crusaders. He composed a biography of Saladin in seven volumes, entitled al-Barq al-Shāmī [‘The Syrian thunderbolt’] (1986–1987), on the ruler’s life, politics and actions, including not only narrative accounts but also official letters, poems, and memorandums. Of the seven volumes only two have survived, but a condensed version from 622 H/1225 CE (Sanā al-barq al-shāmī [1971]) gives a summary of the whole. As ‘Imād al-Dīn composed his book with a distinctly autobiographical voice emphasizing his own role in the events, later autobiographers like al-Suyūṭī (fifteenth century CE) and al-Sha‘rānī (sixteenth century CE) refer to it as an autobiography of himself (Reynolds 2001, 264). It has been suggested that the text could easily be entitled “My life with Saladin”, as we view Saladin’s life and deeds through the eyes and opinions of his personal assistant ‘Imād al-Dīn (Reynolds 2001, 145). One of the recurrent motifs is the contrast between “the men of the pen and the men of the sword”, the latter being represented by Saladin and the former by his biographer. However, this autobiography is less remarkable for its personal details, but for its account of the daily duties of a high-ranking government official: drafting reports, writing proclamations, composing verses, buying books, attending public events and organizing public disputations (Reynolds 2001, 145–155). It is, therefore, more fruitful as a source for our knowledge about the functions of a high ranking state official than about the history of Arabic autobiography proper. The interplay between an autobiographer and his biographer, on the other hand, is highlighted in the autobiography of the Aleppan historian Ibn al-‘Adīm (b. 588 H/ 1192 CE, d. 660 H/1262 CE). The complete autobiography has not survived, but passages are cited in Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī’s Mu‘jam al-udabā’ [‘Dictionary of learned men’] (1993, 5/2068–2091 [Reynolds 2001, 169–178]). Yāqūt had asked Ibn al-‘Adīm to write a history of his family and of himself for his planned dictionary. The procedure itself was not

842 

 2 The Arab World

unusal, but in this exemplary case – which sometimes reads like an interview – we can discern the process of writing such an entry in a dictionary. On Yāqūt’s request, Ibn al-‘Adīm wrote a book of ten fascicles, the final section of this family history being an account of his own life. Yāqūt read the book, questioned Ibn al-‘Adīm further, gathered supplementary material and had Ibn al-‘Adīm review the text. Nuha N.N. Khoury, in the introduction to her excerpts from the book, summerizes her findings: The text as it has come down to us is thus an autobiography by Ibn al-‘Adīm as told to Yāqūt, with a mixture of many different voices, the result of an active collaboration between autobiographer and biographer. It is a complex text but one that is fascinating not only for the life that is portrayed therein but also for the light it sheds on the processes of biography and autobiography at the eve of the Mongol invasions. Both Yāqūt the biographer and Ibn al-‘Adīm the autobiographer demonstrate clear concern with establishing the historical facts and documenting the authority by which those facts have been transmitted (Reynolds 2001, 165).

Additionally, Yāqūt quotes external sources for critical points of Ibn al-‘Adīm’s account, checks the latter’s claims for particular informations and includes material outside his reach. The last example for the links between autobiography, biography and history is related to the Damascene jurist and historiographer Abū Shāma (d. 665 H/1268 CE). He included his autobiography under the year of his birth in the chronologically arranged Dhayl [‘Appendix’] to his Kitāb al-rawḍatayn [‘Book of the two gardens’] (2002, 57–68 [Reynolds 2001, 182–187]), a history of the reigns of Nūr al-Dīn Zangī and Saladin. This is not unusual, but Abū Shāma refers to himself throughout the larger historical text, too. He provides information of a rather personal nature (concerning his wife and children) and intermingles it with the major historical occurrences, thus placing the events of his own life on par with those of the kingdoms and reigns he chronicles. ‫ توفيت والدتي‬:‫ وفيها‬.‫ ومن ال ّشام شرف الدين يعقوب صاحب شركس‬،‫] ح ّج بالنّاس من العراق ابن ابي فراس‬:‫وفيها [في هذه السنة‬ ‫ وكانت وفاتها يوم السبت سادس‬،‫رحمها الله ودفنتها بالجبل في طريق قريب األماج والمغر الى جانب الوادي وأرجو أن أدفن عندها‬ .‫ توفي األمير مبارز الدين سنقر الحلبي الصالحي‬:‫ وفيها‬.‫رجب وكانت دينة صالحة رضي الله عنها‬ [In this year Ibn Abī Firās led the people from Iraq on the pilgrimage, and Sharaf al-Dīn, the ruler of Sarkas, those from Syria. Also in this year, my mother passed away – may God have mercy on her. I buried her in the foothills on the road near al-Imāj and al-Maghar, next to the wadi. I hope to be buried next to her. Her death occurred on Saturday, the sixth of the month of Rajab. She was pious and virtuous – may God be pleased with her! Also in this year, the Amīr Mubāriz al-Dīn Sunqur of Aleppo died, one of Saladin’s contingent] (Abū Shāma 2002, 202–203 [Reynolds 2001, 180]).

In the autobiography itself, however, Abū Shāma shifts to the third person and portrays only little of his personal life, while tales such as dreams and visions occupy a prominent place alongside details of his education and career. He chose to present information on his life in the standard third-person format of scholarly biography or, as Lowry maintains: “He probably composed it specifically as a ‘camera-ready’ text to

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 843

be quoted by later historians and biographers” (Reynolds 2001, 180–181). Curiously enough, none of Abū Shāma’s biographers quotes this text, and there are some hints at the fact that it might have been controversial. al-Sakhāwī (d. 902 H/1497 CE) notes Abū Shāma’s sharp tongue and makes reference to his high opinion of himself, while al-Sakhāwī’s chief rival, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911 H/1505 CE), cites the text as a respectable precedent for writing an autobiography (Reynolds 2001, 181, 182–187). The same Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, “the most controversial figure of his time” in the words of the editor of his autobiography (Sartain 1975, I 72), wrote several versions of his autobiography the longest of which extends to about 250 pages in print. al-Taḥadduth bi-ni‘mat Allāh [‘Speaking of God’s bounty’] (1975) is thematically organized in order to present the author as the renewer of the faith for the tenth century H. Thus, it focusses on his teachers, his own teaching posts and the books he wrote, but also on his disputes with other scholars. The longest chapter (17) is entitled ‫ى فى‬ ّ ‫ذكر نعمة الله عل‬ .‫“[ أن أقام لى عد ّواً يؤذينى وابتالئى بأب جهل يغمصنى كما كان للسلف مثل ذلك‬On how God blessed me by setting enemies against me to harm me and tested me with the false accusations of an ignoramus, as has also happened to our forefathers”] (Suyūṭī 1975, 160 [Reynolds 2001, 203; Ghamdi 1989, 171–172]). In it, al-Suyūṭī takes great pain, quoting from the Koran, Hadith and even the Torah, to point out to his readers that only great scholars, wise men, and productive people suffer at the hands of their contemporaries. Apart from his claims to be recognized as an outstanding scholar, however, al-Suyūṭī meant to situate his text “within what was for him a recognized tradition of Arabic autobiographical writing” (Reynolds 2001, 1, 203–207). And so it was, apart from the fact that − for unknown reasons − the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE stand out by “elaborate defenses of autobiographical writing” (Reynolds 2001, 241–242).

Politicians/Officers As is the case with the distinction between Sufis and scholars, the divide between scholars and politicians is blurred for a number of reasons, first and foremost because of the fact that autobiographers from both camps formed part of an elevated culture where religious and secular texts, poetry and prose as well as historical and political aims were often closely interconnected. Thus, the above-mentioned Kātib al-Iṣfahānī, who served as Saladin’s secretary and biographer, came from the secreterial class and could have figured among the politicians. Conversely, the belletrist Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064) was a jurist and belonged to the class of religious scholars, but his famous Ṭauq al-ḥamāma fī al-ulfa wa-l-ullāf [The Ring of the Dove. A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love (1950 [1953])] is based on his memories of his life among his family, thus being a nostalgic account of his childhood and youth. Yet, it is disputable whether or not this book is to be regarded as an autobiography, as it includes only a handful of autobiographical notes (Reynolds 2001, 260).

844 

 2 The Arab World

The men who are grouped together under the title of politicians, distinguished themselves by a particularly refined education, style and outlook. They belonged to the upper class, but not necessarily to the entourage of the ruler. Some, like Ibn Buluggīn, were rulers and noblemen themselves, others, like Ibn Khaldūn, served in high religious and political offices. Their autobiographical accounts betray the social independence of these men, as they do not confine themselves to the medieval standards of an autobiography, but differ with regard to their themes and structures. They include either lenghty accounts of political events and processes or detailed remarks on aristocratic sports like hunting, and come therefore nearer to the modern notion of memoirs than to that of autobiographies. al-Mu’ayyad fī al-Dīn Hibat Allāh al-Shīrāzī (b. 330s H/990s CE, d. 470 H/1078 CE) left a book-length autobiography, entitled Sīrat al-Mu’ayyad fī al-Dīn dā‘ī al-du‘āt [‘Biography of the chief-missionary al-Mu’ayyad fī al-Dīn’], with a lively account of his adventures in Iran, Egypt, and Iraq. Born in the Iranian city Shiraz, al-Mu’ayyad was a missionary or agent provocateur for the Shiite (Ismaili) Fatimid dynasty of Egypt. In his life, he held many different posts: He acted as a religious teacher, a political agitator, a missionary, a senior court official, and a military commander. In his life-account, al-Mu’ayyad proceeds chronologically, with several flashbacks and occasional foreshadowings, presenting “a gripping story of high-stakes political intrigue, military adventure, and espionage” (Reynolds 2001, 132). In this text, al-Mu’ayyad focuses on three main periods of his career. First of all, he details his activities in Shiraz, when he tried to win the sultan Abū Kālījār over to Ismailism, and the opposition he met from the local clergy, who once forced him to flee in disguise in order to save his life. Later, he gives an account of his position at the Fatimid court in Cairo which is a historically valuable depiction of the Fatimid court life in the eleventh century CE. The third stage which plays a considerable role in the autobiography is a detailed account of his military expedition against the Seljuq Turks and a short-lived capture of Baghdad, made possible by a coalition he had forged among several Arab tribes and Turkish mercenaries. al-Mu’ayyad presents himself as a highly educated person, an accomplished and bilingual rhetorician and prose writer and poet of distinction. When he allows himself lengthy and flowery argumentation while speaking publicly, his opponents are left either anonymous and silent or give only terse and simple responses. However, despite the broad citation of his speeches, al-Mu’ayyad also confides his fears during his adventures to the reader, particularly in moments when he is alone, at night or when in hiding (Reynolds 2001, 132–133, 134–144; Muscati and Moulvi 1950). From the Iberian Peninsula stems the autobiography al-Tibyān or Mudhakkirāt al-amīr ‘Abd Allāh ākhir mulūk Banī Zīrī bi-Gharnāṭa al-musammā bi-Kitāb al-tibyān [The Tibyan: Memoirs of ‘Abd Allāh b. Buluggīn, Last Zīrid Amīr of Granada (1955 [1986])] of ‘Abd Allāh b. Buluggīn (b. 447 H/1056 CE, d. 487 H/1094 CE). He was the last member of the Berber Zīrīd dynasty in the kingdom of Granada and was deposed by the invading Almoravids. In 483 H/1090 CE, he was sent into exile in Aghmāt

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 845

(Morocco), where he lived for the rest of his life as a captive and wrote his memoirs in about 487 H/1094 CE. The only extant copy starts with the family history which led his Berber forefathers, the Banū Zīrī, to come to Andalusia and establish their kingdom in Granada. It was during the reign of his grandfather Bādis that Ibn Buluggīn began his political career, which eventually led to his designation as his grandfather’s successor and his rise to power at the age of seventeen. The next chapters relate to his reign from 465 H/1073 CE – 483 H/1090 CE and the many obstacles to his political survival for nearly twenty years, before he surrendered to the Almoravid emperor Ibn Tāshūfīn and offered to exchange his kingdom and all his wealth for his personal safety. In spite of having written a memoir, Ibn Buluggīn comes amazingly close to the criteria described by modern western historians of autobiography, such as direct portrayal of the author’s thoughts, emotional reactions, and an awareness of psychological development and maturation from childhood through adulthood to old age (Reynolds 2001, 74). First of all, his autobiography provides explicit, self-conscious justifications for the autobiographical act. His motive for writing is to be thankful for God’s blessings and to defend the reign and reputation of his dynasty. More intriguing, however, is the directness with which he addresses this aim: ‫ أو معن ًى يؤدِّى إلى تأَدب‬،‫ أو حكاية مستغربة‬،‫وليست الفائدة فيما قصدنا إليه ِذ ْك َر خبر يوصف ويأتى عليه نادرة مستطرفة‬ ‫ ولهذا نُري ُد إيرادَه كالحديث‬.‫ق الحديث فى التأْليف بَعْضه لبَعض أحسنُ خرطا ً وأفض ُل نظما ً من تقطيعه‬ َ ‫] وأرى أنَّ مسا‬...[ ‫وانتفاع‬ .‫ ونصُّ ه على أ ْك َمل ما يمكن‬،ً‫ فيتَّفق ايرادُه دفعةً واحدة‬:‫ نضرب ال َمثَل لبَعضه ببَعض‬،»‫«[فالحديث] ذو الشجون‬ [My intention in this enterprise of mine is not to narrate some entertaining tale or some strange anecdote or an edifying or profitable notion. (...) I believe it is better for a composition to give a continuous, rather than a disconnected, narrative. I would like, therefore, to give my book the form of a narrative account – for ‘a narrative has digressions’ (lit. several ways) – and to draw comparisons from various parts of the book. In this way, the book will come out as one whole and will have as complete a text as possible] (Ibn Buluggīn 1955, 2–3 [1986, 33–34]).

Here, and in particular contrast to the above-mentioned al-Suyūṭī, an author aims at presenting his work as a coherent narrative, not as a sequence of carefully substantiated historical anecdotes along with their sources. When dealing with his family, Ibn Buluggīn not only portrays them with their dynastic claims and deeds, but points to the love and affection his grandfather felt for his father, which he then, after the death of his father, transferred to himself, the grandson. The same love comes to the fore when Ibn Buluggīn speaks about his own children, particularly his firstborn daughter. In the final chapter, he finishes his report by evaluating his experiences, discussing several topics like medicine, health, eating habits, sexual mores and appetites etc., then by giving his own opinion. All in all, this chapter offers a critical evaluation of the author’s own personality, a retrospective examination of the course of his life, and even a sense of imparting some of the hardlearned lessons of that life to posterity (Reynolds 2001, 80). Ibn Ḥazm and Ibn Buluggīn were not the only members of important families who had to struggle with the vicissitudes of the political life of their times. The best

846 

 2 The Arab World

known autobiography of a medieval Arab, in Europe, is the self-account of ‘Usāma b. Munqidh (d. 573 H/1188 CE), the Syrian nobleman, poet, and warrior during the Crusades. The Kitāb al-i‘tibar [An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades (1930 [1987])] was written when Usāma was ninety years old and contains anecdotes from his adventures in the Crusades. The first part of the book is arranged according to chronological and biographical principles and covers Usāma’s life up to the year 550 H/1155 CE. As the first twenty-one pages, two-thirds of this part of the book, are missing in the only extant manuscript, the text starts only with the year 532 H/1138 CE, when Usāma had already reached his forties. Usāma was born and raised in the castle of Shayzar in Western Syria, where he received a highly refined education in the chivalrous, linguistic and literary arts. After the death of his father, he saw himself confronted with two enemies, his uncle as the legitimate heir of the castle and the combined forces of the Byzantine Caesar and the Franks. Usāma went to Damascus and later to Cairo, where he spent most of his ten years at the court of the Fatimids in one of their most turbulent epochs, characterized by conspiracies, murder, and intrigue. Back in Damascus, for a second time in the service of the Zengid ruler Nūr al-Dīn, he closes his account with the descriptions of the ordeal of his family who were captured by the Franks in Akka, and of the loss of his library with thousands of books (Müller 2009, 31–32; Ghamdi 1989, 100–103). Usāma introduces the second half of his text with the words: ‫وقد كان بين هذه الوقعات‬

‫ وساورد من عجائب ما شاهدته ومارسته في‬.‫فترات شهدت فيها من الحروب مع الكفَّار والمسلمين ما ال احصيها‬ .‫“[ الحروب ما يحضرني ذكره‬Between these happenings (mentioned above) were intervals in which I took part in innumerable battles against unbelievers as well as Moslems. And now I shall proceed to recount what my memory has retained of the marvels I witnessed and experienced in warfare (...)”] (Usāma 1930, 36 [Ghamdi 1989, 104]). In this part, Usāma completely abandons the chronological narrative. His anecdotes follow an associative order and illustrate concepts like chivalry, thus providing his readers with the title-giving didactic program. Particularly interesting are his anecdotes about the Franks, with whom he had many social contacts. He starts by describing the battles in which he fought against them, and then proceeds to enumerate their customs, virtues and vices, including their mean medical practice, excellent chivalry and lack of jealousy. In all these anecdotes, Usāma doesn’t present himself as the historical man with his shortcomings and weaknesses, but as the human ideal he strived to live up to: brave in warfare and hunting, calm and prepared for God’s decisions, loyal to the honour of the family and the memory of his father. Usāma closes his book with reflections on fate and death, the misfortunes of old age and a panegyric on Saladin. Around the year 580 H/1184 CE, he added two appendices to his book, one of it a collection of curious anecdotes about holy men, medicine and dreams and the other a collection of hunting episodes from his life with his father. This very last section also mentions several other people who had an impact on his formation, like the Shaykh Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Ṭulayṭulī, a grammarian, who used to join him and his father on their hunting expeditions.

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 847

Last but not least, mention has to be made of Abū Zayd ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad b. Khaldūn (Ibn Khaldūn, b. 732 H/1332 CE, d. 808/1406 CE), a famous political figure, historical writer and social theorist. He originally included his auto­biography as an appendix to his work on North African history, the Kitāb al-‘ibar (book of learning by example), and later expanded and published it as an independent book. al-Ta‘rīf bi-Ibn Khaldūn wa-riḥlatih gharban wa-sharqan [‘The biography of Ibn Khaldūn and his journey West and East’] (1951 [1952]) covers an account of his family and education, as well as a detailed memoir of his political career in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Cairo, including his encounter in Damascus with the Mongol Tamerlane.

Converts/Schismatics The group of autobiographers, who converted from another monotheistic religion to Islam, moved from one Islamic sect to the other or in some other way changed their religious beliefs, forms only a small but significant group. (There are no accounts of a conversion from Islam to Judaism or Christianity.) To this group belong people, who intensified their commitment to Islam (al-Tirmidhī), found their way to Sufism (al-Ghazālī), were shaken by visionary experience (al-Simnānī), moved from one Shiite sub-sect to another (Ibn Ḥawshab), or converted from Judaism and Christianity (Samaw‘al al-Maghribī, ‘Abd Allāh al-Turjumān). As there are again overlappings with the previous sub-chapters, only the last group of converts from Judaism and Christianity to Islam will here be dealt with. Samaw’al al-Maghribī (d. 569 H/1174 CE) was a Jewish scholar who converted to Islam and became an anti-Jewish polemicist. His autobiography, entitled Qiṣṣat Islām al-Samaw’al [‘The story of al-Samaw’al’s Islam’], is an appendix to a revised version of his anti-Jewish book Ifḥām al-Yahūd [Silencing the Jews] (1964, 94–120 [1964, 74–88]). At the outset of his autobiography, al-Samaw’al states: ،‫وانا اذكر ما وفَّقني الله له من الهداية‬ .‫ ليكون عبرة وموعظة لمن يقع اليه‬،‫ منذ نشأت الي انتقالي عن مذهب اليهود‬،‫“[ وكيف انساقت بي الحال‬I shall relate God’s guidance granted to me, and how I was led since my birth from the faith of the Jews toward my conversion, that it may become an example and an exhortation to whomsoever this may reach”] (Samaw’al 1964, 94–95 ([1964, 75]). al-Samaw’al starts by describing his Moroccan-Iraqi family and birth in Baghdad, where he learned Hebrew and studied the Torah. At twelve or thirteen, he discovered a predilection for historical works on the ancients, tales, stories, and books of entertainment. In the course of his reading, al-Samaw’al came across the biography of the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran. At the age of fourteen, his father ordered to teach him Indian arithmetic, medicine, algebra, geometry, and the mathematical sciences. When he was eighteen, he began to write on the sciences, to practice medicine and to question the religious affiliations, stimulated by the autobiography of the Persian physician Burzoe. Convinced of the high standing of reason, he began examining his

848 

 2 The Arab World

own religion, Judaism, and comparing it with Christianity and Islam. As all three religions were dependent on transmission, and as the evidence of transmission existed for all three prophets (Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad), there were only two rational choices: either to believe all of them or to reject all of them. In the end, al-Samaw’al came to believe in the prophethood of Muhammad, but only after he had experienced two visions. In one the Prophet Samuel confirmed an allusion in the Torah about the prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad for him, and in the other al-Samaw’al recited the Shahada to the Prophet Muhammad. However, at the end of his autobiography he informs his readers that it was not the visions which induced him to abandon his first faith, but the proofs of demonstrations and arguments for the prophethood of Muhammad (Ghamdi 1989, 75–79). There is also a Christian convert to Islam who wrote an autobiography. ‘Abd Allāh al-Turjumān (‘Abd Allāh the Interpreter, Fray Anselmo Turmeda, b. 753 H/1352 CE, d. ca. 835 H/1432 CE). This time, the autobiography opens a work with the title Tuḥfat al-arīb fī al-radd ‘alā ahl al-ṣalīb [A Unique Find for the Intelligent Mind (1983 [Reynolds 2001, 196–201])] that is aimed at refuting Christianity’s claim to be the true faith. A native of Mallorca, ‘Abd Allāh presents a straightforward narrative of his early life, religious studies and his fellow students’ confusion over the ‘Paraclete’ in the New Testament. This is a figure (‘the Comforter’) whom Jesus promises God will send after him (John 16.7) to teach the world all things (14.26), who will be another counsellor and testify about Jesus (15.26), but whom the world will not accept (14.16–17). Strangely enough, when the young priest Anselmo Turmeda turns to his teacher and mentor, the older priest confesses that the Paraclete is no other than the Prophet Muhammad and advises to flee to Muslim lands. ‘Abd Allāh follows this advice, and at the age of thirty-five he gives public witness in Tunis before the Sultan that Islam is the true faith and that Muhammad is God’s messenger. His later life remains obscure, but at the end of his autobiography, ‘Abd Allāh is happily married, the father of a young son, and enjoying the personal favour and blessing of the sultan (Reynolds 2001, 194–195). Opportunism was certainly one of the motifs behind a conversion from one faith to the other, but in the above-mentioned cases a sense of mission is clearly discernible. Samaw’al and ‘Abd Allāh had received a religious education according to their respective faith, yet both concluded that Islam was the better religion. Given the political situation in which their conversion took place, they might have felt that Islam was the religion of the future. In fact, there was no need to regret their decision to convert. Both men became famous by their spectacular change of faith, and both were supported by their ruler. In the Conclusion to his book on classical Arabic autobiography, Reynolds points to a number of features which mark this particular genre. Arabic autobiographers were certainly aware of the act of writing an autobiography and of earlier texts which had to be emulated. At the same time, it becomes clear from a comparison of the texts that no fixed form for autobiographical representation existed. Given the literal meaning

2.2 Classical Arabic Autobiography 

 849

of ‘tarjama’ as ‘translation’, the literary act of writing an autobiography seems to have aimed at ‘interpreting’, ‘representing’ or ‘portraying’ oneself in written form. While these texts look less personal than modern autobiographies, they are no less individuating. Individual colourings are particularly discernible in childhood memories, descriptions of action, dream narratives and the inclusion of (sometimes self composed) poetry. In accordance with other classical Arab-Islamic writing, individuality is conceived of as part inherited and yet also changing. A great attention is given to describing the author’s parents, grandparents, and even uncles, but on the other side the author’s own character undergoes clear transformation in many of the texts. However, it does not seem that these texts emerged from a tension between the private and the public, as our modern notion would have it. Therefore, Reynolds concludes: It was the purpose of many of these authors to demonstrate their part in the passage of history – and a major element in the concept of history was the transmission of authority, legitimacy, and descent. This can be seen in realms as diverse as genealogy, religious authority, political legitimacy, scholarly knowledge, and mystical enlightenment; by contrast, artistic genius in poetry and music was far likely to be understood in this paradigm. Thus a great deal of the material in these autobiographical texts serves to locate the authors in their appropriate channels of transmission. Yet, to be part of this larger flow of transmission did not hinder the understanding of oneself as an individual. One rather common motif in medieval Arabic scholarly literature, for example, is the author’s claim to have provided in a given work ideas and insights that are unique and unprecedented in his field. Equally common is the writer who complains that he cannot find other minds of his caliber or other figures at his moral or spiritual level (2001, 244).

2.3 Modern Autobiography Susanne Enderwitz

Whether or not a certain inquietness, a perturbance or even a quest for a new kind of expression of the self is already discernible in the Arabic literature of the eighteenth century, is an open question. It is an open question, too, whether or not the ‘Napoleonic expedition’ to Egypt in the year 1798 was a decisive turning point in the history of the near East. However, it can be safely stated that after the expedition Egypt − and with it the whole region − underwent a rapid change and would never return to its former kind of existence. In 1798, Napoleon set out to Egypt with an army of about forty thousand soldiers and a “Commission des sciences et des arts”, a group of about one hundred fifty experts on ancient history, biology and zoology, together with painters, copperplate engravers and engineers, to put an end to British supremacy in the Mediterranean, to open new markets for France and to document Pharaonic history. After having landed at Abukir near Alexandria, the French army quickly moved forward through the delta of the Nile, put the ruling Mamluks to flight and occupied Cairo. On a military and political level, the expedition turned out to be a failure, as it was cut short by a coalition of British and Ottoman forces only three years later. On a scientific and cultural level, it was a success, as it led to the foundation of the Institut de l’Égypte, the voluminous Description de l’Égypte [‘Description of Egypt’] (1809; 1821–1830), the deciphering of the ‘Rosetta Stone’ and to the European ‘Egyptomania’ in general. On the local and regional level, too, it left traces which acquired their own dynamics. In the long run, the expedition led to an expansion of infrastructure, an integration into the world-market, an increase in population, a modernization of administration and the emergence of a middle-class. It was this middle-class of literate, educated, secular, well-paid and open-minded civil-servants, doctors, lawyers, engineers and traders whose views profoundly changed the ideas of the relations between individual, family, and state.

The Beginnings Reynolds has included the nineteenth century in his book on classical Arabic autobiography, as he maintains that most of the writers in this period continued to write in the traditional way of composing an autobiographical account. However, at least three autobiographers have to be singled out, as, in histories of modern Arabic literature and culture, they usually stand for the beginning of a new – and modern – era. All of them had been motivated to write their autobiography by the fact that they had contact with Europe, Europeans and European culture. Thus, the rejuvenation of Arabic autobiography started as a renewed interest in a subgenre of autobiographihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-096

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 851

cal writing, the riḥla [travel account]. 1) The Egyptian religious scholar and reformist Rifā‘a Rāfi‘ b. Badawī b. ‘Alī al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873) composed his semi-autobiographical travel account Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz ilā talkhīṣ Bārīz [An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–1831)] in 1835 (2012 [2011]) after his return from a five years’ residence in Paris, where he had functioned as a spiritual guide (Imam) in the first Egyptian student mission. The author is at pains to give a sober and factual description of the French people, their culture and politics which was hitherto unknown to a majority of the Egyptians. His travel account became a model and was emulated by dozens of Arab authors, who composed and published accounts of their journeys to different European countries, most notably to the World Exhibitions at the end of the nineteenth century. 2) In 1855 (1966 [2014]), the Syrian (Maronite, later Protestant and then Muslim) journalist and translator Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804–1887) published al-Sāq ‘alā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Faryāq [Leg over Leg] as a fictional and satirical autobiography, but at the same time as a traveller’s tale and a lexicographical study of Arabic. Also focusing on his life among the Europeans, Shidyāq’s book is intuitive and even “Rabelaisian” (Reynolds 2001, 281), opening discussions on philosophical, social, and linguistic/literary matters. In contrast to al-Ṭahṭāwī’s book, Shidyāq is always provocative and was never granted proper recognition in the Arab speaking world. 3) The autobiography of the Egyptian engineer and statesman ‘Alī Mubārak (1823–1893) was originally included in his description of Egypt’s major towns and villages, al-Khiṭaṭ al-tawfīqiyya al-jadīda li-Miṣr al-Qāhira wa-mudunihā wa-bilādihā al-qadīma wa-l-mashhūra [‘The new description in honour of Tawfīq of Cairo, Egypt, and its old and famous cities and towns’] (1889), being part of ‘Alī Mubārak’s entry on his native village Birnbāl (Fliedner 1990). However, a year after his death the autobiography was published separately as Ta’rīkh ḥayāt al-maghfūr lahu ‘Alī Mubārak Bāshā [‘History of the life of the late ‘Alī Mubārak Pasha’]. In his autobiographical account, ‘Alī Mubārak includes misadventures of his childhood, his education, his travels in France, and his political career. None of the above mentioned authors had a revision of the Arabic autobiography in mind, perhaps with the partial exception of the highly experimental Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq. In general, it was their truly exceptional life which prompted their autobiographical writing, not an autobiographical interest in a life narrative as such. The same could be said for other autobiographical accounts which were written by persons who were aware of the fact that they lived at the threshold of a new era and had the opportunity to act on behalf of their country’s future, be it in governmental, political, educational, religious or cultural positions. From the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of national movements, a national or nationalist overtone in autobiography became the rule, be it Pan-Islamic, Ottoman, Egyptian (Syrian, Lebanese) or Arab. The first half of the twentieth century was an extremely politicized era in the Near and Middle East, as it was an era of colonization, decolonization and the emergence of new nation states in the area. As a result, the public sphere reached a completely new dimension which had its impacts on the writing of autobiographies.

852 

 2 The Arab World

Many autobiographies from that time overlap with memoirs and vice versa. The use of terms adds to this confusion, as the terms ‘sīra’ for (auto)biography and ‘mudhakkirāt’ for memoirs are not clearly distinguishable from each other (Rooke 1997, 65–73). At the same time, new national literatures were under way, but here, too, the genres intermingled. In this case, however, the blurring of genres was due to the closeness of autobiography and novel. The novel, as a new and fictional genre, promised an escape from too rigid social norms, and the autobiography, as a subject matter, offered writing material ready at hand. A particularly good example for playing a sort of game with the expectations of readers is, among others, Ibrāhīm al-Māzinī (1890–1949). In his ‘novel’ Ibrāhīm al-kātib [Ibrāhīm the Writer] from 1931 (2009 [1976]) he explains that he is not identical with the hero of his story and quite the opposite of him. At the same time, the autobiographical nature of the novel is apparent, since the name and profession of the author and the protagonist of the text are the same, which suggests complete identity. In the introduction to his ‘autobiography’ Qiṣṣat ḥayāt [‘The story of a life’] (1943), al-Māzinī likewise denies the autobiographical character of his story. But again, the denial that the text represents an autobiography is contradicted by the narrative itself, which is cast in first-person form and displays all the common traits of an autobiography (Rooke 1997, 60–61). For this reason, the standard subtitle ‘riwāya’ for a novel [literally ‘prose-narrative’ or ‘story’] does not necessarily function as a generic marker, but is often used for autobiographies, too. In this chapter, the autobiographers are not grouped according to their professions, as all of them belong more or less to the cultural public sphere in Egypt or other Arab countries. Yet, social markers do play a role, thus providing again a certain chronology of the development of modern Arabic autobiography. Unquestionably, and in contradiction to Reynold’s view (2001, 5), the writers of belletristic prose were the first to compose novelized autobiographies and autobiographical novels. Not only in the Western, but also in the Arab world the emergence of modern autobiography went hand in hand with the emergence of the novel, albeit more than a century later.

Writers As early as 1908, the first Arab writer and intellectual to push the Arabic autobiography into an almost radical direction, was the Lebanese Jurjī Zaydān (1861–1914). He was one of the fathers of the Arab nahḍa [renaissance], famous for his historical novels about the splendid past of the Arabs, for his publishing house Dār al-hilāl [‘House of the crescent’] and also for his encyclopaedic magazine al-Hilāl [‘Crescent’]. In his life account, Zaydān recounts the story of his childhood and early youth in Beirut. Born into an Orthodox Christian family of the lower middle class, he was originally not destined for a higher education. His father owned a small restaurant and, being illiterate and uneducated himself, urged young Jurjī to help him out in his business. However,

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 853

in 1881 Jurjī Zaydān was admitted to the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed The American University of Beirut) as a medical student and additionally developed an interest in modern economics, social Darwinism and in enlightened Freemasonry. Through his fellow student Ya‘qūb Sarrūf, also an important representative of the Arab nahḍa, Zaydān came into contact with a highly influential book in the Anglophone world, Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles, which gave his life a decisive turn. The book which promoted the idea of being responsible for one’s own luck, had a deep impact on him in personal and social terms. Deeply impressed by the idea of individual freedom, Zaydān left Syria and moved to Egypt, where already a number of Syrian intellectuals had emigrated in order to escape Ottoman suppression. For a while, he continued his studies at the Medical School in Cairo, then joined a British military expedition to the Sudan as a dragoman. After his return and being offered a post in one of Egypt’s leading newspapers, he gradually began to focus on a career as a writer. In 1889, Zaydān’s first book on the Freemasons appeared, followed by a world-history and the first of his twenty-three historical novels. Zaydān thought of himself primarily as a historian who, in an entertaining manner, would awaken a historical consciousness for the great days of Arab-Islamic history in the Arab public. Perhaps Zaydān was still under the spell of his own biographical history of great Eastern men in the nineteenth century which he had finished a year before writing his autobiography (Rooke 1997, 90–91). In this case, he could have been influenced by the classical tradition of adding one’s own biography to a biographical collection. Nevertheless, Zaydān’s autobiography differs in many aspects from traditional autobiographies, as it is not only exceptional, but self-reflective and analytical. He begins his text with his family background, tracing its origin as far back as the Ghassanids at the time of Muhammad. Then, he relates his father’s migration to Beirut, describes the gradual growth of the city, the daily life of his family, the popular culture of shadow plays, sword games and story tellers, and the life of the social classes with their gatherings and drinking habits (Rooke 1997, 196–197). In the second half of his autobiography, Zaydān relates the events that took place at the Syrian Protestant College when he was a student there, most certainly with a particular reader in mind, who was about to start his studies at this institution at the time when the text was written. This intended reader was no other than Zaydān’s son Emile, on whose request the autobiography was composed. Nobody knows whether or not Zaydān planned to publish the book, as it bears no title and breaks off in the middle. Afterwards, the manuscript remained in the hands of the family and was published only in 1968 [1979] under the titel Mudhakkirāt Jurjī Zaydān [Ğurğī Zaydān, His Life and Thought] (Rooke 1997, 90). Therefore, this text which was qualified by its editor as the absolutely first autobiography to have been written in modern Arabic literature, had no impact at all on the further development of modern Arabic autobiography. The book which was to have a deep impact on Arabic literature in general, not only on Arabic autobiography, was written by an Egyptian. It was Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s (1889–1973) al-Ayyām (1929) [An Egyptian Childhood (1932)] which is perhaps − apart

854 

 2 The Arab World

from the Koran − the most widely read literary work in the Arab world till today. After having been published first in serialized form in 1926–1927, the book came out in 1929, followed by a couple of sequels in 1939 and 1967. But it was the first part which proved extremely successful, both for the Arabic autobiography and the Arabic novel, as it is still open to discussion whether the book is a novelized autobiography or an autobiographical novel. With the publication of al-Ayyām, Ḥusayn has been a trend-setter in almost every aspect. First of all, the book is an implicit autobiography, as neither the title nor the name of the protagonist gives any clue to his identity with the narrator or the author. However, the identity of the protagonist with the author-narrator is established in the last chapter of the volume, where the narrator personally addresses the protagonist’s daughter under the author’s name. Secondly, by focusing his interest on his childhood memories and thus on the particularly formative period in his life, Ḥusayn proved to be thoroughly modern. Childhood had been a subject in classical Arabic autobiography, too, but Ḥusayn looks at it from an entirely new perspective. In using a third-person-narrative, thus distancing the adult narrator from the boy he once was, he succeeds in recreating the cosmos of a peasant boy at the turn of the century. And thirdly, for hundreds of years, peasant life had passed nearly unnoticed in Arabic literature. Now this book appeared, which looks through the eyes of a young boy at the social customs, the religious (Sufi and superstitious) practices and the family life in the rural parts of Egypt. al-Ayyām narrates the childhood and adolescence of a boy, who grows up in the country-side and can be easily identified with the author, something which was new and original in respect to Arab standards at that time. One of the first to adopt this concept was Sayyid Quṭb (1906–1966), not yet the political ideologist and martyr of the Muslim Brothers at that time, but a literary historian and creative writer. In 1945 (1973 [2004]), he published his autobiography under the title Ṭifl min al-qarya [A Child from the Village] and dedicated it explicitely to Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: ‫ وفي‬،‫ في بعضها من أيامك مشابه‬،‫ عاشها طفل من القرية‬،‫ إنها يا سيدي أيام كأيامك‬.‫ الدكتور طه حسين بك‬.. ‫إلى صاحب األيام‬ ‫ وحياة وحياة بل بمقدار ما يكون بين طبيعة وطبيعة‬،‫ وقرية وقرية‬،‫ اختالف بمقدار ما يكون بين جيل وجيل‬.‫سائرها عنها اختالف‬ .‫– أيام من األيام‬ ‫– بعد ذلك كله‬ ‫ ولكنها‬.. ‫واتجاه واتجاه‬ [To the author of al-Ayyām (literally ‘the days’ – S.E.) Doctor Taha Hussayn Bey: These, dear sir, are ‘days’ like your ‘days’, lived by a village child, some are similar to your days and some are different. The difference reflects the difference between one generation and another, one village and another, one life and another, indeed the difference between one nature and another, between one attitude and another. But they are, when all is said and done, also ‘days’] (Quṭb 1973 [2004], dedication).

Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s influence can be directly and indirectly found in other autobiographies as well. In Lebanon, the linguist and historian Anīs Frayḥa (1902–1992) published his childhood account under the title Isma‘ yā Riḍā! [‘Listen, Riḍā!’] (1956). In the introduction, the author compares his own writing about his childhood experience with that done by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Frayḥa 1981, 12; Rooke 1997, 86). In Egypt, the journalist

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 855

and political activist Ibrāhīm ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm (1920–1986) gave his autobiography the title Ayyām al-ṭufūla [‘The days of childhood’] (1955). This title is a clear indication of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s influence, and ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm’s frequent use of the phrase ‫ما زلت أذكر‬ [‘I still remember’] (‘Abd al-Ḥalīm, 13–21) in the first chapter adds to this impression (Rooke 1997, 146). It is clearly a reference to the famous opening sentence of al-Ayyām which renders ‫“[ ال يذكر‬He cannot remember”] (Ḥusayn 1992, 15 [1932, 1]). Again in Egypt and as late as 1981, the literary critic and historian Shawqī Ḍayf (1910–2005) published his autobiography under the title Ma‘ī [‘With me’], a rather conventional ‘curriculum vitae’ which is combined with a summarizing chronicle of Egyptian history. Nevertheless, Ḍayf seems to aim at presenting his life in the manner of his mentor Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, as he adopts several literary conventions from al-Ayyām like the characteristic third-person narration (Rooke 1997, 32). Apart from these direct influences, al-Ayyām also had an indirect impact on other autobiographers. Being a childhood autobiography, written at a relatively early age, it motivated others to write about their childhood memories. Already in 1943, the Egyptian writer Ibrāhīm al-Māzinī (1889/1890–1949) helped to establish the genre through his Qiṣṣat ḥayāt [‘The story of a life’] which depicts the author’s early years in Cairo at the turn of the century. In Morocco, the novelist, journalist and ambassador ‘Abd al-Majīd b. Jallūn [Benjelloun] (1919–1981), who was brought up in England and returned to Morocco at the age of ten, had a great success in 1957/1958 with the first and in 1968/1969 with the second part of his autobiographical novel Fī al-ṭufūla [‘In the childhood’]. The author had studied and lived in Egypt for many years, and so it is likely that his choice of autobiography as a genre had been stimulated by its Egyptian precendents (Rooke 1997, 86). The last one to be mentioned here is the famous writer and playwright Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987). With his Sijn al-‘umr (1990) [The prison of life (1992)], first published in 1964, he put a seal on the genre of autobiography, its canonical status and its undeniable popularity (Rooke 1997, 87). Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s influence reached far, but it also had its limits, as had the nature of the autobiographical project itself. Ḥusayn had not yet been thirty when he published his childhood account, but not many of his generation followed him in this respect. Between the publication of the first part of al-Ayyām in 1929 and the publication of the next substantial autobiography of a member of his generation thirty years elapsed. In 1959/1960 Mikhā’īl Nu‘ayma (1889–1988) presented the three volumes of his autobiography Sab‘ūn [‘Seventy’]. Although Cornelis Nijland has praised the book for its introduction of new forms of autobiography into Arabic literature (Nijland 1975, 81), its status as a major work in the genre is due to its monumental scope rather than to its textual originality (Rooke 1997). Sab‘ūn has a documentary outlook, as can be seen from the insertion of diary entries from Nu‘ayma’s notebooks and its meticulous chronological order. The first volume of Sab‘ūn, subtitled as al-marḥala al-ūlā [‘the first stage’] extends from the author’s birth to the year 1911 and recounts his childhood and youth in the village Biskintā in the mountains of central Lebanon until his emigration to America. The second volume deals with his twenty years life-span in the

856 

 2 The Arab World

American diaspora, whereas the third volume covers the homecoming of the author to Lebanon in 1932 and the period up to the time of narration in 1959. Mikhā’īl Nu‘ayma is one of the major mahjar [emigration] writers, most of whom were Lebanese Christian emigrants to America. In his native village, Nu‘ayma attended the Russian missionary school, then went to the Russian teacher’s college in Nazareth and from there to the theological seminary in Poltava (Ukraine). At this time, he studied the great works of Russian literature and felt particularly impressed by the work of Leo Tolstoy. In 1911, he joined his brothers who had already emigrated to America in order to make a better living, like many other Lebanese at that time. Besides being a writer, Nu‘ayma worked as a travelling salesman, until he returned to Lebanon and devoted his time to composing poetry, narrative prose, drama, biography, autobiography, literary criticism and essays. Because Nu‘ayma had lived the life of a foreigner already from his youth and for many decades, the place of origin is of great significance for him. Perhaps further enhanced by his theosophic inclinations, he gives a truly romantic image of his childhood in his autobiography. Lyrically he recalls the primitive natural beauty of his place of origin at the foot of Mount Ṣannīn in central Lebanon. At the same time, he praises the virtues of the sturdy and industrious village people who turned this originally rough and wild spot of the earth into a blessed garden. The picture he paints is both vivid and pleasing, but also conveys the bitter poverty of his family and that of the whole village (Rooke 1997, 178). Nu‘ayma’s idyllic picture of village life and the peasants is a departure from Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s and Sayyid Quṭb’s social criticism of the rural living conditions. In the third volume of Sab‘ūn, the author likens his return to Lebanon to a ‘rebirth’. He also quotes a speech, in which he denounces the Western world and its civilization as being dependent on the work of machines and as being constantly in a state of crisis. He in contrast praises traditional life in the local community, which is associated with peace, harmony, creativity, imagination and beauty. However, Nu‘ayma seems far away from the praise of the fallāḥ [peasant], as it was common in the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt among nationalist writers. In the same speech, given well before Lebanese independence from French colonial rule, Nu‘ayma criticizes all kinds of nationalism. According to him, the individual’s sense of identity should not be bound to the nation state but to the smaller units of the family and the village (Rooke 1997, 180–181). The romantic shift in childhood memories from the countryside widened the gap to childhood memories from cities. Like al-Māzinī already in the early 1940s, many autobiographers had an urban background. It is interesting to see that, in contrast to the romanticist attitude of stressing the bond between the individual person (including his or her family) and the (local) village community, the urban setting brought with it a strong predilection for individualism. Whereas autobiographers with a rural background tend to depict the whole village, autobiographers with an urban background focus much more on the house of the family. This trend can be seen particularly clear in Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s (1898–1987) Sijn al-‘umr (1964 [1990]) [The Prison of Life (1992)] from 1964 which spans the first thirty years of al-Ḥakīm’s life and ends in 1928 with

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 857

his return from Paris. Yet, for his student years in Paris (1925–1928), al-Ḥakīm refers only to a collection of letters to a French friend which he had published in 1943 under the title Zahrat al-‘umr [‘The flower of life’]: ‫وقضيت في باريس تلك األعوام الموصوفة بالتقريب في‬ ..‫ وعدت إلى بالدي‬..»‫“[ كتابي «زهرة العمر‬I spent in Paris the years of which an approximately accurate description will be found in Zahrat al-‘umr. Then I returned to my country”] (al-Ḥakīm 1990, 227 [1992, 207–208]). Next comes a short summary of the homecoming to Egypt in another sixteen lines, and there the book ends, followed only by a brief epilogue. Tawfiq al-Ḥakīm was the son of an Egyptian father and a Turkish mother from Alexandria, an educated, music loving and financially independent woman. After having been to a number of schools of diverse standards, al-Ḥakīm was sent to his paternal uncles to Cairo in 1914 in order to complete his education and to study jurisprudence. The period in Cairo turned out to be a liberation from the strictness of his parental home, as his father had always urged him to read the classical Arabic heritage instead of modern Arabic and European literature. In Cairo, al-Ḥakīm intensively consummated French novels and went to the theatre of Georges Abyaḍ (1880–1959), the actor and director who had introduced serious drama in Egypt. While still at the Law School, al-Ḥakīm started to write novels, and when he obtained his License in 1925, he passed as the one of the weakest candidates in his group. Nevertheless, his father decided to send him to France to obtain a doctoral degree. According to al-Ḥakīm himself, his writing career started in Paris (Brugman 1984, 279). In 1927, al-Ḥakīm returned to Egypt without a doctorate, but started to work as a lawyer in the civil service. After 1933, when his first play brought him unexpected success, he was offered a number of posts which were probably meant to be a ‘sinecure’. He held a number of high ranking posts and even spent several years as the Egyptian representative at the UNESCO at Paris. Meanwhile he pursued his career as a leading playwright, one of the most acclaimed novel writers and a highly esteemed columnist in Egypt (Brugman 1984, 277–280). Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s autobiography is not chronological, as its focus on the story of the family villa violates the linearity of the narrative. In a humorous or ironic way, al-Ḥakīm uses the fate of the villa for an exemplification of his own struggle with his father, his quest for freedom and his escape from ‘the prison of life’. In Tetz Rooke’s summary of the crucial passages, the shift from an alomost ethnographic description of traditional village life to a modern conflict about patriarchal authority becomes clearly discernible: This villa is the symbol of the father’s foolishness in particular. He was a fool to buy the house in the first place. [...] He was an even greater fool to get the idea to renovate it: ‘I do not know which of them, my father or my mother, gave birth to this luminous idea, but I do know that the first hole made by pick-axes in the walls of this house was destined not to be refilled by all the money on earth.’ [...] The problem was that the father did not consult an architect. He directed the work himself and as usual he failed: ‘With him knowledge was one thing, execution was another.’ [...] Mockingly the author describes his father as al-muhandis al-‘abqarī, ‘the genial architect’. [...]

858 

 2 The Arab World

Then he was also a fool to mortgage the house. [...] Only after the death of the father, was the family able to get rid of ‘the drain that went under the name of a house’. [...] But before that, at last, it had been of some benefit as the starting point for the funeral procession of its distinguished lord, al-Ḥakīm acidly remarks. [...] Here the story of the villa ends with the scenes of the death and burial of the father. The house has become a symbol for the patriarchal father’s autority and for his failure to impose his will on his son. The burial of the father is a burial of his influence and power over the mind of the protagonist. Getting rid of the house means getting rid of the paternal yoke within, or is at least an attempt to do so (Rooke 1997, 242).

Apart from these two examples from the 1960s, three other major autobiographies have to be mentioned, which were published in the 1970s and 1980s. The first of the three is Baqāyā ṣuwar (1975) [Fragments of memory (1993)] of the best-known Syrian writer Ḥannā Mīna (b. 1924), which was followed by the sequels al-Mustanqa‘ [‘The swamp’] (1977) and al-Qiṭāf [‘The picking’] (1986). In many interviews, the author has always rejected the idea of having written or intending to write an autobiography. On the other hand, he has repeatedly pointed to the autobiographical nature of his writing. Therefore, particularly Baqāyā ṣuwar and al-Mustanqa‘ are almost generally regarded as the author’s autobiography. Certainly, compared with the Arabic autobiographies which had appeared earlier, Ḥannā Mīna has pushed fictionalization further than his predecessors. In an interview from 1992, he classified the first part of his life-account as both an autobiography and as fiction. “By this”, Rooke reasonably argues, “he means that the book is a combination of personal and social history, but also a mixture of facts and imagination” (1997, 47). The two books and the books in combination with interviews are imbued with political symbolism, novelized sequences (i.  e. particularly long scenes and descriptions) and contradictory statements which all in all cancel the ‘autobiographical pact’. But in the already mentioned interview, Ḥannā Mīna also states that he is identical with the protagonist and reasserts his readers of the strong autobiographical elements in his books (Rooke 1997, 48). The Greek Orthodox Ḥannā Mīna is an admirer of the great Russian realist Maxim Gorky, who also wrote an autobiographical trilogy. Sharing with Gorky the fate of a deprived childhood in a wretched proletarian milieu and due to this experience and just like his mentor having become a socialist, Ḥannā Mīna was presumably inspired to communicate his life-story in the same literary form as Gorky’s. There are also similarities in the plot, as both the Russian and the Arabic autobiography begin with the same sad event, the death or illness of the father which symbolizes the beginning of the displacement of the family and of its misery (Rooke 1997, 113). Ḥannā Mīna’s unusual long childhood narrative is set in the French Mandate over Syria, especially in the region of Iskenderun (Alexandretta). At this time, the French Mandate was hit by a severe economic depression, aggravated by the decline of world economy in the 1930. On top of this, the French misgoverned Syria, thus strengthening the landlord class. The majority of the Syrian peasantry was landless, incapable of supporting themselves and an easy prey to feudal lords, merchants and money-lenders.

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 859

In this kind of milieu the autobiography starts. The family of the hero has got lost in the countryside, has been displaced and cut off from the city where it belongs. In this text, the rural village is not a metaphor for a lost homeland, it is not romanticized and not a symbol for cultural roots. Rather, it is the city which is the place of origin, associated with a certain nostalgia. But when the city replaces the village in the course of the sequel of the autobiography, nothing is gained. The misery of the peasant under a feudal lord corresponds to the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist system, and both are patronized by the colonial system. The doctrinal slant of the narrative, its politically charged vocabulary and its moralizing echoes of the Gospels by which the autobiography represents the Arabic concept of al-adab al-multazim wa-l-hādif [committed and purposeful literature], has often been criticized for its ‘ideological’ style, but nevertheless has powerful passages. Such a passage is the description of the industry of raising silkworm in the Levant and how this industry vanished almost completely with the introduction of cheap synthetic silk on the world market. Such impressive passages are, additionally, also found on a more individual level. Vividly painted portraits of the major characters, profoundly moving descriptions of cruelty and persecution and scenes of heroism and courage have also been applauded by critics, who attest the author an ability to “tell a story and create suspense” (Rooke 1997, 218). The novelizing trend in Arabic autobiography was furthermore promoted by the work of Idwār al-Kharrāṭ (b. 1926), particularly by his proclamation of a al-ḥassāsiyya al-jadīda [new sensibility] in contrast to the older models of ‘realistic’ and ‘engaged’ literature. Consequently, when his Turābuhā za‘farān (1986) [City of Saffron (1989)] appeared in 1985, it was preceded by a denial of the autobiographical character of the text. ْ ‫ ففيها من ش‬.‫ وال شيئا ً قريبا ً منها‬،‫ليست هذه النصوص سيرة ذاتية‬ ‫ فيها‬.‫ ومن صنعة الفن ما يشطّ بها كثيراً عن ذلك‬،‫َطح الخيال‬ ‫ وسحبات من الذكريات التي كان ينبغي أن تقع ولكنها لم تحدث‬،‫ ون َويّات من الوقائع هي أحالم‬،‫ ورؤى ـ شخوص‬،‫أوهام ـ أحداث‬ .‫ ذاتية‬،‫ فقط‬،‫ وليست‬،‫ ال سيرة‬،‫ لعلها أن تكون صيرورة‬.ً‫أبدا‬ [These writings are not an autobiography, nor anything like; the flights of fancy, the artifice therein, bear them far beyond such bounds. They are illusions – incidents and visions – figures; the kernels of events which are but dreams; the clouds of memories which should have taken place, but never did. More, perhaps a ‘becoming’ than a ‘life’; not my life] (Kharrāṭ 1986 [1989], prefatory note).

al-Kharrāṭ was born into a Coptic family in Alexandria, where he was raised and educated. He received a degree in Law from the University of Alexandria in 1946, but became predominantly known for his novels and, additionally, for his contributions to the Egyptian literary and cultural sphere as a critic, editor, and translator. In Turābuhā za‘farān and Yā banāt Iskandariyya (1990) [Girls of Alexandria (1998)], al-Kharrāṭ traces the Alexandrian memories of Mikhā’īl [Mikhael], the novels’ Coptic protagonist, and the author’s ‘alter ego’. These memories skip easily from childhood reminiscences to realistic descriptions to dream-like episodes. The dense, poetic texts both individually and together resist a clear chronological mapping, as “Mikhael the

860 

 2 The Arab World

child” and main protagonist of the novel “imaginatively perceives or experiences his world, Mikhael the adult narrator remembers it, and al-Kharrāṭ the author uses the creative imagination of the artist to shape these remembrances” (al-Nowaihi 1994, 37). However, al-Kharrāṭ’s denial of being an autobiographer differs from that of Ḥannā Mīna. Where Mīna finds identity through taking sides with ‘the people’ on a socialist basis, al-Kharrāṭ’s practises ‘writing back’ through identifying with his city in post-colonial terms. His point of reference is the famous Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960) of Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990), who had spent some years in Alexandria during the Second World War, before he wrote his novel. In the first volume Justine, he refers to Alexandria as “the capital of memory” (1968, 188) and at the same time denies the autobiographical character of his text. A prefatory note to the novel explicitly states: “The characters of this novel [...] are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to living persons. Only the city is real” (1968, 9). In his own prefatory note to Turābuhā za‘farān, al-Kharrāṭ doubly denies Durrell’s claim to have captured the reality of Alexandria, first because of Durrell’s colonial perspective of the city and secondly because this colonial perspective belongs to the past. For his part, al-Kharrāṭ conceives of Alexandria as a living organism with a past, present and future which is remembered, shaped and reshaped by an author who is himself part of the city, interwoven with its innate being and symbiotically bound to its history. In other words, protagonist, narrator and author together authenticate the very presence of Alexandria. For al-Kharrāṭ, who considers himself to be the one and only writer − including other Egyptians − who has passionately loved Alexandria and is capable to communicate this love through his writings, the city is the main protagonist of all his novels: Alexandria in his texts, according to himself, is neither the material nor the stage of fiction, but the autobiographical fictional act in itself (Starr 2009, 49). Shortly after al-Kharrāṭ’s novel, autobiographical novel or novelistic autobiography, in 1987 [1995], another text appeared which evaded a clear-cut affiliation to a definite genre. In this year, Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā (1919–1994) published al-Bi’r al-ūla [The First Well], followed in 1994 [2005] by the sequel Shāri‘ al-amīrāt [Princesses’ Street]. Again, like in Mīna’s and al-Kharrāṭ’s writing, the reader is confronted with an author in whose works autobiographical and fictional writing intermingle. In his preface, Jabrā openly announces that the autobiography we are about to read represents a version of his childhood complementary to the one found in his works of fiction. Moreover, in two places of the text the author has placed footnotes informing us that he abstains from elaborating on a certain event from his childhood because he has already explored it in his fiction. The opposite is also true: In his famous novel from 1987 (1990 [2000]), al-Baḥth ‘an Walīd Mas‘ūd [In Search of Walid Masoud], one of the main characters is pictured composing his autobiography entitled “al-Bi’r” [‘the well’]. Born and raised in Bethlehem at the time of the British Mandate over Palestine, the Syrian Orthodox Jabrā finished his school education in Jerusalem and studied

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 861

English Literature in Cambridge (England). In between his studies, he spent some time in Jerusalem teaching and participating in the vivid cultural life at that time. However, when the Arab-Jewish war broke out in 1948 and the state of Israel was founded, he emigrated to Baghdad, where he married, pursued his university career and was involved in Baghdad’s thriving cultural life. Apart from many journeys and sojourns abroad, Jabrā remained in Baghdad for the rest of his life. Compared with al-Kharrāṭ’s imaginary Alexandria of the past, then, Jabrā’s Bethlehem has not only been lost in time, but also in space, as the West-Bank of the river Jordan was first occupied by the Jordanians and after the war of 1967 by the Israelis. Therefore, Jabrā’s Bethlehem can be conceived of as a Bethlehem of the heart, a part of his inner self which he carries with him wherever he goes. Or, as he states in the preface: ‫ بعض الشموس واألمطار والوجوه‬،‫ إنها بعض تلك البيوت واألشجار والوديان والتالل‬:‫وهي [الكينونة] طبعا ً جزء من محيطها‬ ‫ عن قصد أو غير‬،‫ ولعلني‬.ً‫ والفرح والبؤس جميعا‬،‫ وتكتشف الجمال والقبح‬،‫ وبها تكتشف القيم واألخالق‬،‫ التي بها تحيا‬،‫واألصوات‬ .ً‫ بل وتجسيد رمزي له أحيانا‬،‫ في الواحد انعكاس لآلخر‬،‫ جعلت من الذات والمحيط أحيانا ً موضوعين متبادلتين‬،‫قصد‬ [This developing being was, of course, part of his environment: he was part of the houses, trees, valleys, and hills; and he was part of the sun, the rain, the faces, and the voices which he lived surrounded by and in which he discovered values and morals, beauty and ugliness, joy and misery – one and all. Perhaps I have made of the self and the environment, intentionally or unintentionally, two reciprocating subjects in each of which there was a reflection of the other, even a symbolic embodiment sometimes] (Jabrā 1990, 10 [1987, 13]).

It is a far cry from ‘Alī Mubārak’s autobiography in his Khiṭaṭ, where the individual life is embedded in the history of his village, via Jurjī Zaydān’s autobiography, which includeds many details of historical Beirut, and via al-Kharrāṭ’s narrative, which replaces the colonial perspective on Alexandria through the perspective of a native son to the completely personal perspective of Jabrā. Jabrā’s text, although imbued with nostalgia for Palestine, is wholly subjective. To quote Rooke again: Thus al-Bi’r al-Ūlā contains many images of Palestine that in their condensed brilliance remind one of miniature paintings. The text is studded with landscapes and ‘skyscapes’ and descriptions of buildings. It is also rich in human local colour. These sceneries are aimed at a faithful recapturing of the child’s impressions, but also express the vision of the mature artist, whose ‘imaginary homelands’ in many respects resembles Paradise. Daily activities come to life through the senses of the boy Jabrā, who frequently stops in mid-action to watch some activity like the watering of the camels in the square, or the selling of licorice-drink in the street, or some natural scene like the swallows shooting across the evening sky in spring (1997, 197).

Of course, Jabrā was neither the last Arab nor the last Arabophone writer to leave an autobiography. Special mention should be made to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Munīf (1933– 2004), the great Saudi/Iraqi/Syrian writer, perhaps the only ‘transnational’ Arab author in the twentieth century, who published his childhood memories in 1994 [1999], entitled Sīrat madīna. ‘Ammān fī al-arba‘īnāt [Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman]. However, it was Jabrā who gave Arabic autobiography the last twist towards artistic prose, freeing it from any national, political or religious consideration.

862 

 2 The Arab World

Intellectuals Although, in this chapter, no mention will be made of memoirs in the strictest, political sense, like that of the Druze leader from Lebanon, Shakīb Arslān (1869–1946), the Pan-Arab nationalist from Syria, Sāti‘ al-Ḥuṣrī (1880–1968), or the former president of Egypt, Anwar al-Sādāt (1918–1981), is not always easy to distinguish between the ‘writers’ of the former chapter and ‘intellectuals’. In the beginnings of modern Arabic literature, cultural production was an extremely dynamic field where politics and journalism, report and essay, poetry and prose often went hand in hand, and the same is true for the processes of publication and reception. However, generally speaking it is safe to say that intellectuals, more than writers, have preferred to compose a ‘standard’ autobiography which focuses less on their formative periods and more on their later achievements, their professional career and their political/religious convictions. For intellectuals, too, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn could serve as a point of reference, but there were also other, and mainly Western, models. When the Egyptian journalist and writer Salāma Mūsā (1889–1958) published his autobiography Tarbiyat Salāma Mūsā [The Education of Salāma Mūsā] in 1947 [1961], the title was a verbatim reference to the autobiography of the American historian, politician and journalist Henry Adams (1838–1918), The Education of Henry Adams (1907). The referring passage reads: ‫وسيرتي‬ .‫ى قد ينتفع به القارئ‬ ً ‫ ووجدت في معناه مغز‬،‫ وقد اقتبست العنوان من هنري آدمز‬.‫“[ هي أوالً وآخراً تربيتي‬From beginning to end, the story of my life is the story of my education, and therefore I borrow its title from Henry Adams, finding in it a deep significance from which the reader may well benefit”] (Mūsā 2014, 12 [1961, 9]). In the text, the author also mentions having read the autobiography My Life (1939) of Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), the British physician, writer and social reformer, who studied human sexuality. Likewise, he points to having read the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), whose autobiography Les Confessions (1782) [The Confessions (1783/1790] has been a milestone in European literary history. Les Confessions, with its title going back to the Confessiones of St. Augustine, has also been a source of inspiration for other Arab authors. Here, no distinction can be made between authors of poetry and prose, essays and novels, or literary and journalist works. Already in 1916, the poet, teacher and critic ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Shukrī (1886– 1958) had published a work with the title Kitāb al-i‘tirāfāt [‘The book of confessions’] which he presented as the record of thoughts and feelings of a young man, confronting the problem of his existence. Other writers and intellectuels referred to Rousseaus Confessions, too, a relatively recent example being Muḥammad Shukrī (1935–2003). When, in 1985, he was asked in an interview about his sources of inspiration, he mentioned Rousseau, but also Somerset Maugham, Simone de Bouvoir and JeanPaul Sartre (Rooke 1997, 111). Not only the Americans, British and French, but also the Russians had a deep impact on Arab writers and intellectuals, and likewise not only through their literary, but also through their autobiographical works. To a certain extent, the impact of a particular European literature on an Arab writer or intellectual

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 863

at the turn of the century or after depended on how and where he received his education and spent his student years. Different mission schools (Russian, American, British, French or German) competed for students, and Paris, London and Moscow were highly attractive destinations for completing their education. Salāma Mūsā spent many years in Western Europe and never made a secret out of his hope to see Egypt Europeanized and cleaned from its old ways, particularly with regard to social, gender and religious traditions. Mūsā was born into a family of Coptic land owners near Zagazig in the Nile delta. His father died, when he was still a young child, leaving the family an inheritance that allowed them to live comfortably. In 1903, Mūsā went to Cairo in order to finish secondary school there. But he disliked the Khedivial college with its proto-military training as much as he approved of being able to meet writers like Faraḥ Anṭūn (1874–1922), Jurjī Zaydān or Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid (1872–1963) and others, who discussed modern and radical ideas such as Social Darwinism, women’s rights and nationalism. For his interest in European literature and science, Mūsā first went to France in 1907 and then moved to England in 1909. In London, he came into contact with the Fabian Society and embraced the ideas of getting rid of the landed class and of empowering the peasants. After his return to Egypt in 1914, Mūsā worked as editor and journalist for several newspapers and journals, formed a socialist party and was committed to the improvement of education in Egypt. Salāma Mūsā, in his autobiography, was the first Arab author to use the term sīra dhātiyya [autobiography] for a characterization of his own text, but it is very doubtful whether he meant to coin it as a technical term. On the contrary, he writes: ‫وواضح أن كل‬ .‫“[ سيرة يرويها صاحبها يعيبها نقص هو الذاتية‬It is evident that every biography (sīra) which is narrated by the person it concerns suffers from a defect, namely subjectivity (al-dhātiyya)”]. That ‘al-dhātiyya’ is a noun and not an adjective in this sentence, is clear by its syntactical position. Moreover, Mūsā contrasts it in the same passage with the objectivity (al-mawḍū‘iyya) of traditional autobiography. When the compound then occurs in the sentence: .‫“[ قد يعيب السيرة الذاتية آيضا ً أن مؤلفها لن يبوح بكل ما يعرف‬The subjective biography (al-dhātiyya) is also defective in as far as its author will not disclose all the facts he knows”], it is obviously not meant in a technical sense. This corresponds with the fact that Mūsā was certainly less preoccupied with ‘subjective’ literature than with ‘objective’ science, whose task was mainly to prepare the grounds on which freedom could grow, prosper and prevail. This is reflected by his autobiography which is mainly a report of his intellectual development, much less a recapturing of the past and certainly without any nostalgic feelings (Mūsā 2014, 10 [Rooke 1997, 67, in contrast to Mūsā 1961, 4]). Parallel to Jurjī Zaydān’s self-image as a ‘self-made man’, Salāma Mūsā was explicitly proud of his ‘self-education’ to which he constantly refers. This links him with the whole generation of his and certainly with one of the most widely read intellectual autobiographies, Ḥayātī (1950–1952) [My Life (1978)] of Aḥmad Amīn (1886–1954). And yet a big gap between the two remains. Amīn, too, was proud of his personal, intel-

864 

 2 The Arab World

lectual and professional achievements. But he attributes them less to himself than to a somewhat strange mixture of Social Darwinism and God’s intervention. In a certain way, his views resemble medieval Islamic propositions on man’s nature as they were held among the rational school of the Mu‘tazila: ُ ‫ لقد عمل في تكويني إلى حد كبير ما‬.ً‫ وعاش في بيئة كالتي عشت لكان إياي أو ما يقوب مني جدا‬،‫ورثت‬ ‫ولو ورث أي إنسان ما‬ ‫ وأدبنا الشعبي الذي كان‬،‫ واللغة التي نتكلم بها‬،‫ الدين الذي يسيطرعلينا‬،‫ والحياة االقتصادية التي كانت تسود بيتنا‬،‫ورثت من آبائي‬ ‫يروى لنا ونوع التربية الذي كان مرسوما ً في ذهن أبوي ولو لم يستطيعا التعبير عنه ورسم حدوده ونحو ذلك؛ فأنا لم أصنع نفسي‬ .‫ولكن صنعها الله عن طريق ما سنّه من قوانين الوراثة والبيئة‬ [If any man inherited what I did and lived in an environment like mine, he would have been me or very nearly so. My formation has been influenced to a great extent by what I inherited from my forefathers, the economic life that prevailed at our home, the religion that dominated us, the language that we spoke, the folk literature that was related to us, and the kind of upbringing that was in my parents’ mind though they could not express it or draw its outlines, and so on. I did not make myself: God made me by way of the laws He prescribed for heredity and environment] (Amīn 2011, 14 [1978, 10]).

Aḥmad Amīn was one of the leading Egyptian intellectuals in the second quarter of the twentieth century, who wrote more than twenty books on Islamic culture and thought, and edited several works of classical Arabic literature and Islamic philosophy. His traditional schooling had prepared him to be a Sharia judge, but he abandoned his career as a law teacher (1911–1921) and judge (1921–1926) when he became a professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Cairo (1926–1946). He stood with one foot in the classical Islamic tradition and with the other in the modern literary community, which can be inferred from nearly every page of his book. His approach is particularly clearly discernible in his thoughts about religion and science. Since God is active in this world by means of natural laws, these laws can and have to be understood by reason. His autobiographical models he found in the Islamic tradition, but also in European modernity. On the one hand he found consolation in the spiritual quest which was laid down by al-Ghazālī in the eleventh century, but on the other he also referred to Leo Tolstoy’s autobiography. An open ambivalence can be discerned when Amīn, at the end of his autobiography, nostalgically looks back to the times of traditional patriarchalism, traditional education and traditional ‘curricula’. On the preceding pages, however, he expounds in all detail his complicated relation to his father, the brutality of teachers and Shaykhs and even the shallowness of the educational subjects in his own schooldays. Amīn’s autobiography has gained canonical status and was ranked only second to the autobiography of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, although it is much more conservative, both in terms of literary style and religious outlook. With its religious conservatism, it has marked the beginning of a new trend in Arabic autobiographical writing. At the time of Amīn’s writing, the mainstream of modern Arabic autobiography was secular, as opposed to the traditional sīra/tarjama-literature which had most often been religious or semi-religious. But there are exemptions from that secular rule, and there are traditional features in standard autobiography, too. The exemptions are represented by

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 865

Shaykhs and preachers who have played a role in the public life of their country, most notably Egypt. In the following, they are grouped together, regardless of their date of publication. All of them, though, have published at a relatively late date between the 1970s and the 1980s. In 1976, the Egyptian ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd (1910–1978), a Sufi master and Shaykh of the religious Azhar University, wrote al-Ḥamdu lillāh, hādhihi ḥayātī [‘Praise God, this is my life’]. In 1987, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Kishk (1933–1996), also a graduate of the Azhar University, popular not for his scholarship, but for his humorous, strictly conservative and politically and socially critical sermons, published Qiṣṣat ayyāmī [‘The story of my days’]. And in 1992, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Mitwallī al-Sha‘rāwī (1911–1998), an Islamic scholar, minister for religious endowments in the 70s and also an extremely popular preacher, published Ḥayātī min Daqādūs ilā al-wizāra [‘My life from Daqādūs to the ministry’]. One example, ‘Abd al-Ḥalim Maḥmūd‘s autobiography, will suffice. The book tells the story of the author’s youth and early adulthood. The main sections represent the author’s recollections from the Azhar and the Sorbonne, respectively. Maḥmūd copies the thematic schedule of the classics: ancestry, birth, formal education and travels. Just like his medieval forerunners in the sīra/tarjama genre he attaches prime attention to the books he has studied and the teachers he has known or met during the course of his career (Rooke 1997, 92–93). However, even if the themes and the language of the text may appear classical, their function is a different one. The implied reader is not the fellow scholar, but the average Muslim. The book was not written for the archives, but for the commercial book-market. Maḥmud was a bestseller author, whose works sold in tens of thousands of copies. Borrowing elements from the classical heritage, he presents himself as a traditional, conservative and orthodox man. But he presents himself to a modern audience, who knows to read this autobiography as a political book. Maḥmūd admonishes his readers to resist the ideological invasion of the West against the Arab world. Rooke rightly points to the fact that this is not an autobiography in the classical sense, but ostentatiously runs contrary to contemporary autobiography: Read as autobiography, the allusions to the classical heritage, the emulation of its conventions and the use of religious language are just the metaphors of the ‘self’. In other words, the traditional form of the narrative may be interpreted as an expression of the author’s personality as he wants it to appear. Maḥmūd’s imitation of classical tarjama serves to underline his conservative and orthodox views on life. The religious nature of the “self” is underlined by an Islamic form of autobiographical discourse that mixes with other conventions typical of the modern genre (Rooke 1997, 94).

The autobiography of Maḥmūd can be linked to two other ‘standard autobiographies’ from Jordan and Egypt which, although being wholly secular, display a similar recourse to the traditional Arabic way of presenting oneself. The autobiographies of Yūsuf Haykal (1907–1989), Ayyām al-ṣibā [‘Days of youth’] (1988) and Rabī‘ al-ḥayāt [‘The spring of life’] (1988), and of Shawqī Ḍayf, Ma‘ī [‘With me’] (1981) and Ma‘ī, al-juz’

866 

 2 The Arab World

al-thānī [‘With Me, second part’] (1988), are cases in point. Both are, like the autobiography of Maḥmūd, apologetical, glorificating the socially successful well-connected an well-integrated individual, whereas the polemical tendency in Maḥmūd is replaced by a nationalist undertone. Typically, these authors were all members of the elite. Whereas Maḥmūd was the rector of the Azhar University, Haykal was an ex-mayor of Jaffa and Jordanian ambassador and Ḍayf was a university professor. Again, one example will suffice. Shawqī Ḍayf (1910–2005) was an Egyptian literary critic and historian, editor and scholar who, among many other works, wrote a history of Arabic autobiography. In the 1930s, he worked under Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and Aḥmad Amīn in the Faculty of Arabic at Cairo University, becoming one of its most eminent professors. His many textbooks and reference works, and his supervisions of students of many Arab countries have made him one of the most influential figures in twentieth century Arabic scholarship. Only the first third of Ḍayf’s autobiography, typically narrating the early years of the author, is in a sense novelized. The author begins with a description of his native village in the Nile Delta, using metaphors and similes in an attempt to achieve aesthetic effect. Natural scenery from the river shore and the daily life of the peasants are combined in order to paint a romantic fresco of Egyptian country-life in the early part of the century: ‫ وكأن سماء من البلول الناصع تمتد على‬.‫وفي الجانب المقابل للقرية تقع بحيرة المنزلة بصياديها وشباكهم وبمياهها الفضية البراقة‬ ‫ متمايلة مع الريح ـ تمايل األغصان ـ بأشرعتها‬،‫ والمراكب الشراعية تتهادى فيها مقبلة مدبرة‬،‫سطحها المشرق الهادئ الساطع‬ ‫ وتبتعد فتخالها حسنات منثورة على خدود البحيرة الالمعة‬،‫ وكأنها هي طيور سابحة بجناح واحد فريد‬،‫ المتفاوتة األحجام‬،‫البيضاء‬ .‫ وتجنح إلى المغيب فتخالها أهلة تغرب في األفق السحيق‬.‫البراقة‬ [In the opposite direction from the village lies Lake Manzala with its fishermen and their nets and its glittering silvery water. It is as if a sky of pure crystal covered its shinging, calm and brilliant surface. The sailboats flock on it and move to and fro leaning with the wind, bending as branches on a tree with their white sails of different sizes. It is as if they were swimming-birds with one lonely wing. When they move away to a distance, you imagine them as beauty spots spread on the sparkling, glittering cheeks of the lake. When they sail into the sunset, you imagine them as crescent moons setting on the remote horizon] (Ḍayf 1985, 7–8 [Rooke 1997, 151]).

However, from early on the nascent imaginative attitude gives way to a dominant factual one. The central purpose of Ma‘ī is the recording of Ḍayf’s educational career. The story of his personal development is presented as the story of his formal advancement from the poor village school via the Quran school and various religious seminars to the university and a final doctoral degree. His private life remains veiled throughout the narrative. At the same time, the autobiography serves as a chronicle of political events in Egypt during the 1920s and 1930s (Rooke 1997, 97). In the sequel, Ḍayf continues this trend, restricting personal history to a question of professional feats, and adding descriptions of trips abroad under the heading Dhikrayāt wa-mushāhadāt [‘Memories and sights’]. Apart from being religiously polemic accounts or accounts of a public professional career, modern Arabic standard autobiographies of intellectuals often bear

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 867

either an openly nationalist and/or socialist mark. There are a number of autobiographies which have been very popular among an Arab audience at their time, but not particularly ambitious as to literary criteria. To the list belong, among others, the Moroccan ‘Abd al-Majīd b. Jallūn [Benjelloun] (1919–1981) and his autobiography Fī al-ṭufūla [‘In the childhood’] (1957), the Lebanese Muḥammad Qaraḥ ‘Alī (1913–1987) and his autobiography Suṭūr min ḥayātī [‘Lines from my life’] (1988), and the Egyptian Ibrāhīm ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm (1920–1986) and his autobiography Ayyām al-ṭufūla [‘Days of childhood’] (1955). Other Egyptians are Khalīl Ḥasan Khalīl (b. 1921?) with al-Wisiyya [‘The Wisiyya’] (1983), ‘Abdallāh al-Tūkhī (1926–2001) with ‘Aynān ‘alā al-ṭarīq [‘Eyes on the road’] (1981) and Najīb al-Kīlānī (1931–1995) with Lamaḥāt min ḥayātī [‘Glimpses of my life’] (1984). Most of them, with the exception of the last mentioned Muslimbrother, were secular journalists, political activists, or professionals. Among the recurring subjects we find the antagonism between the urban areas and the countryside, the diglossia of Standard Arabic and Egyptian (Moroccan, Lebanese), and the miserable living conditions of the poor. However, there is a feature which seems to have been inherent in modern Arabic literature right from its beginnings, as it can already be discerned in the so-called ‘first’ modern Arabic novel, Zaynab (1913) [Zaynab (1989)] of Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (1888–1956). Once called “the double-edged message of Rousseau” (Ostle 1991, 106), the strongest social criticism of the poverty of the peasants or the exploitation of the working-class and a romantic nationalism of the highest order exist alongside each other. In ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm’s Ayyām al-ṭufūla, a panorama of inequality, exploitation and injustice opens up. At the same time, the young protagonist bursts into a hymnic praise of the landscape of the Nile, the beauty of rural Egypt and the spirit that unites rich and poor, young and old and men and women (Rooke 1997, 182). (Romantic) nationalism is one of the most constant features in Arabic autobiographies in the second half of the twentieth century, both in the form of an Arab and an Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese or Moroccan nationalism. To these two kinds of nationalism must be added a third, Palestinian nationalism which is connected with the other two, but at the same time distinct from them (Enderwitz 2002). Palestinian autobiographers living in the West-Bank most often share the Arab nationalism of other Arabs, but this is different with Palestinians living outside Palestine. In this case, autobiographers seem to have two options. Some nourish a nostalgic remembrance of the past, comparable to that of Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā in the last sub-chapter. Others have reached a kind of postnationalism which was, at the time of their writing, almost unheard of in the Arab world. The two variants are found, for example, in Hishām Sharābī’s (1927–2005) sequel to his autobiography al-Jamr wa-l-ramād (1978) [Embers and ashes (2007)], Ṣuwar al-māḍī [‘Images from the past’] (1993), and in Fawwaz Turki’s (b. 1940) sequel to his personal account The Disinherited. Journal of a Palestinian exile (1972), Exile’s Return. The making of a Palestinian American (1994).

868 

 2 The Arab World

Nostalgia: ‫ في صباح كل يوم في الصيف‬.‫الى هذا اليوم ما زلت غريبا ً في هذا البلد الذي قضيت فيه الجزء األكبر من حياتي‬ ‫ وعندما‬.‫] أغمض عين ّي يخيل ال ّي اني اتنشق عبير الورد في عكا‬..[ ‫والخريف اجلس في الشرفة المطلة على حديقتنا الصغيرة‬ ‫] الواقع‬..[ ‫ وافركه بين اصابعي واش ّم رائحته ارى نفسي في جبال لبنان‬،‫ الذي زرعته من اجلي‬،‫التقط ورق الصعتر االخضر‬ ‫ اني كمسافر يمأل الحنين قلبه منذ اللحظه التي يغيب فيها ساحل‬.‫الذي عشته هنا ألكثر من اربعين سنة ما زال عاجزاً عن امتالكي‬ .‫ ينتظر ساعة العودة‬،‫ حقائبه دائما ً معدّة‬،‫ ويعيش محكوما ً باآلني والعابر‬،‫بالده عن ناظريه‬ [‘Until today I am but a stranger in this land (the United States – S.E.) where I have spent most of my life. Every morning in summer and autumn I sit down on our veranda facing our little garden. (...) I close my eyes and imagine that I inhale the scent of the flowers in Acre. And whenever I pick up a green thyme-leaf which I have grown for myself, pulverize it between my fingers and smell its scent, I see myself in the mountains of Lebanon. (...) My real life here for more than forty years is still beyond my reach. I am like a traveller, whose heart is filled with longing from the moment, in which he leaves his native home, and who lives under the impact of the present and the contingent with his suit-case always ready, waiting for the hour of return’] (Sharābi 1993, 21–22). Postnationalism: There is an animate logic in calling this land the Holy Land, and nothing else. To call it a nation, a state, a country, is like debasing a rose by using its botanical name. When this land is freed from the petty effusions of politics and the venomous fabric of nationalism and when we allow it, this little piece of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, to make accessible the magic of its metaphoric affinities with our being, then we have to call it simply what it calls itself: the Holy Land. No person who encounters this land, in this manner, could give to another so much of his love (Turki 1994, 34).

Turki’s personal account was originally published in English, an anomaly for Arab autobiographies in general, but rather typical for Palestinian autobiographies. Palestinian autobiographies are often written in English or in another foreign language (Swedish, German, Dutch), as it is one of their aims to reach a Western public. In some cases, authors feel more at home in the English language, particularly when they have lived and worked for a long period in foreign countries. Hishām Sharābī has repeatedly pointed to his struggle with Standard Arabic, as he had spent most of his life in America. Nevertheless he has published his autobiography in Arabic, contrary to Edward Said (1935–2003) who, despite his deep attachment to the Arabic language, published his autobiography Out of Place. A memoir (1999) in English. Edward Said was an American Protestant with Palestinien roots, who received a British education in Cairo. Though he was a life-long advocate of a Palestinian state, in his autobiography he adheres to postnational thoughts similar to that of Fawwaz Turki.

Women Comparable to the situation in Europe, Arab women were not active in publishing before the twentieth century. This is particularly true for women’s autobiographies, which are practically absent from classical Arabic literature. To this day, female Arab autobiographers (and writers in general) find their audience mainly among other women. Presumably the first autobiography written by an Arab woman appeared in

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 869

1875, having been composed under most extraordinary circumstances. Emily (Salme) Ruete (1844–1924) was a princess from Oman, having been raised in the Sultan’s palace at Zanzibar. As a young woman, she fell in love with a German tradesman. They married, set up a household in Hamburg and had three children. Only few years later, the husband died and left a widow and three orphans nearly penniless. They could neither return to Oman, as Emily Ruete had abandoned her Muslim faith, nor could she go to work, as ordinary women did. As she was widely known in Germany at that time, she tried to make a modest living out of selling her striking life-story to a curious audience (Ruete 1993). At the end of the nineteenth century, the situation in Egypt and other Arab countries slowly but significantly changed, as with the emergence of a public sphere, the creation of private salons, the beginnings of literacy among women, their participation in national aspirations and the public debate on the status of women’s voices became increasingly audible. The Egyptian ‘Ā’isha al-Ṭaymūriyya (1840–1902) was the first woman writer to preface one of her books, an allegorical narrative with the title Natā’ij al-aḥwāl fī aqwāl wa l-af‘āl [‘The results of a life in words and deeds’] (1988), with an autobiographical introduction. In it, she describes her childood aversion to the domestic education offered by her mother and her love of the world of books and learning openend up to her by her father (Reynolds 2001, 283; Badran and Cooke 1990, 126–128). Although the publication of women’s biographies became a major subject of women’s magazines around the turn of the century, the writing of an autobiography continued to be a male prerogative, and this was to last for most of the twentieth century. Rooke, in examining his material from − roughly − two thirds of the twentieth century, regards only two autobiographies of female writers as fully belonging to the genre. These are the autobiographies of Bint al-Shāṭi’ (‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān) from Egypt and Fadwā Ṭūqān from Palestine, both written and published in the second half of the century. Men dominate the main corpus. [...] This imbalance, I believe, reflects the literary production during the period of study. [...] Since the late 1930s, mainly in Egypt, women have written (or dictated) their memoirs, but not with any literary intent. [...] As a contrast, during the last decade Arabic literature has witnessed almost an explosion of women’s life-stories (Rooke 1997, 14).

One of the above-mentioned ‘memoirs’ is Mudhakkirāt Hudā Sha‘rāwī (1981) [Harem Years (1986)] which the Egyptian upper class woman, the feminist and political activist Hudā Sha‘rāwī (1879–1947) dictated to her personal secretary (‘A.F. Mursī) shortly before her death. However, the book shared the fate of Jurjī Zaydān’s autobiography, as the secretary – for unknown reasons – published it only 35 years later. Until today, the book is certainly better known in the Western than in the Arab world, as Margot Badran translated, shortened and rearranged the book for Western readers in English. Recently, she has been followed by Hudā Sha‘rāwī’s granddaughter, who also published a biography of her grandmother in English (Sharawi Lafranchi 2012).

870 

 2 The Arab World

In the late 50s and early 60s of the twentieth century, female Arab authors entered the Arab book-markets. In the beginning, authors were − in one way or another − inspired by the rebellious novels of Françoise Sagan, like the Lebanese Laylā Ba‘labakkī (b. 1936) with Anā aḥyā [‘I live’] (1958) and the Syrian Kūlīt Khūrī (Colette Khoury, b. 1931) with Ayyām ma‘ahu [‘Days with him’] (1959). Belonging to a rebellious generation themselves, they wrote their novels with an autobiographical background. Colette Khoury’s book, for example, aroused a scandal because it spoke openly about love in general and about her affair with a legendary Syrian poet in particular. During the next years, the novels became more complex addressing social and political subjects in addition to love problems. But they continued to be autobiographically grounded, like Īmīlī (Emily) Naṣrallāh’s (b. 1931) Ṭuyūr Aylūl [‘Birds of September’] (1962), Saḥar Khalīfa’s (b. 1942) Mudhakkirāt imra’a ghayr wāqi‘iyya [‘Memoirs of an unrealistic woman’] (1986) or Ḥanān Al-Shaykh’s (b. 1945) Misk al-ghazāl (1986) [Women of Sand and Myrrh (1989)] show. In this context, the Egyptian Nawāl al-Sa‘dāwī (b. 1931) deserves special mention with three of her works, Mudhakkirāt ṭabība [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor] from 1958 (1980 [1988]), her much later Mudhakkirātī fī sijn al-nisā’ (1984) [My Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1986)], and Riḥlātī fī al-‘ālam (1987) [My Travels around the World (1991)]. The first is a fictional autobiography of Sa‘dāwī, who for years had worked as a doctor and psychiatrist. The second is a prison memoir, based on a diary which she kept during a prison sentence under the Sadat regime. And the third is an adaptation of the classical autobiographical genre riḥla [travel], now written from a woman’s perspective. However, in spite of obvious correspondances between fiction and biography and in spite of how the audience received the books, most of these writers strongly denied particular autobiographical references of their novels. In fact, most of them refrained from composing an autobiography proper or wrote it at a much later date. In conspicuous contrast to the autobiographies of Arab men, the appearance of Arab women at the autobiographical field in the twentieth century start with a clear religious confession. It is as if religion (and later nationalism) has had a double function of empowering women to publicly present their life-stories. First, religious principles are brought forward for the implementation of feminist aspirations, and second, religious activism serves to legitimize an autobiographical publication. The most extravagant publication in this respect is certainly Zaynab al-Ghazālī’s (1917–2005) book Ayyām min ḥayātī [The Return of the Pharao] from 1977 (1989 [2006]). The text itself need not concern us here, as it is a prison memoir and not an autobiography. But the life of its author may serve as a reminder to the fact that Islam lends itself well to social claims. With reference to her religio-political activism, the Egyptian Zaynab al-Ghazālī insisted on a marriage contract which was much more favourable to her position as a wife than Islamic marriage contracts usually are (Cooke 1994). According to Rooke, the first self-referential text of a women writer which fully deserves the name of an autobiography, is ‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥman’s (1913–1998) ‘Alā al-jisr [‘On the bridge’] (1986), which she published in 1967 under her pen name Bint

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 871

al-Shāṭi’ [daughter of the riverbank]. ‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān was an Egyptian university professor, Islamic scholar and creative writer. Like so many before and after her, she first wrote autobiographically inspired fiction, before she came out with an autobiography proper. Organized around the account of her education, the text is, in fact, the account of a liberation. Born as the second child into a middle class family in Damietta, ‘Ā’isha was not the son her father had hoped for. Nevertheless, he disregarded gender and encouraged her to the service of Islamic science, where she absorbed a great measure of knowledge in the Quranic sciences, Arabic language and Islamic law. This stock of traditional learning helped her greatly in her career, even if it took another direction than that which her father had hoped for. She found her place not in the mosque but in the modern university, an institution which her father considered to be an abominable innovation of “the Party of Satan” (Rooke 1997, 262). The climax of the story comes when she meets Amīn al-Khūlī (Khawlī), professor for Arabic language and literature at King Fu’ād University, who is dedicated to the literary study of the Quran. He becomes her professor, mentor and husband, and after his death she − and some of his other students − carry the project further, until it is taken over by the next generation. In ‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s life account, childhood and youth are nothing but a long journey towards this seminal event, which is described as a ‘rebirth’ when it happens. The author very consciously aims at the creation of a myth, a personal myth that by analogy is meant to show the relevance of religion to us all. Correspondingly, the original subtitle of ‘Alā al-jisr is said to have been Usṭūrat al-zamān [‘The myth of times’] (Rooke 1997, 265–266). ‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān is particularly interesting for her ambivalence with which she is always both at one and the same time, the dutiful daughter and the rebellious girl, the devote wife and the career woman, the pious Muslim and the self-made woman. This ambivalence is particularly discernible in a conclusive interpretation of her life as a qadar [fate] which is a reminder of the humble thanks to God in classical autobiography and yet at the same time a statement of her self-induced achievements: ‫ على الطريق‬،‫ الستطيع أن أجتاز وحدى تلك المفاوز الضيقة والسدود الصعبة والمنحنيات الخطرة‬،‫ لوال مشيئته تعالى‬،‫وما كنت‬ ‫ بال زاد للرحلة مع‬،‫ وال كان فى طاقتى أن أقتحم التيه الموحش في خضم الدنيا‬،‫ كال‬..‫تائه المعالم ملتوى المسالك خابى المنارات‬ ..‫ وهذا اليقين بأن الله سبحانه معى فى مسعاى‬،‫ غير اخالص البذل فى طلب العلم‬.‫المخاوف والهواجس والظنون‬ [If it had not been His will, I would not myself have been able to cross such oppressive deserts, difficult barriers and dangerous slopes as I did, on such a road where all the landmarks had been wiped out, full of misleading tracks and empty of guiding lights. Indeed no! Nor would it have been in my power to challenge the desolate wilderness of this vast world without any other provisions for my journey with its worries, anxieties and doubts than my firm determination to spend the utmost in the quest for knowledge (ṭalab al-‘ilm) and my certainty that God was on my side in my efforts] (Bint al-Shāṭi’ 1986, 85 [Rooke 1997, 134]).

Fadwā Ṭūqān (1913–1998) can be seen as ‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s Palestinian and secular counterpart, as she rose to national fame as a political poet after the premature and much lamented death of her beloved elder brother Ibrāhīm Ṭūqān in 1941.

872 

 2 The Arab World

Ibrāhīm, who during his lifetime and afterwards has been celebrated as the Arab voice against the British Mandate in Palestine, was one of the very few persons on whom young Fadwā relied. Although the Ṭūqān family was highly respected in pre-War Palestine, it was only Ibrāhīm − and not the rest of the family − who took care of Fadwās literary education, discovered her poetic talent and supported her against the current social norms. ‫خرجت من ظلمات المجهول الى عالم غير مستعد لتقبلي‬. [“I emerged from the darkness of the womb”], she writes in her autobiography, [“into a world unprepared to accept me”] (Ṭūqān 1985, 12 [Tuqan 1990, 12]). Then she goes on to tell how her mother, who was exhausted after too many pregnancies, had tried to abort her, and how much her father was disappointed when she proved to be a girl. This is the beginning of the first part of Fadwā Ṭūqān’s autobiography Riḥla ṣa‘ba riḥla jabaliyya (1985) [Difficult Journey, Mountaineous Journey (1990)], in which she describes her long struggle for getting a profound education, for the right to independently travel abroad and to lead a life of her own. Several years later it was followed by a second part, al-Riḥla al-aṣ‘ab [‘The more difficult journey’] (1993), referring to her later years as a student of English literature in Oxford and a powerful voice against the Israeli occupation of the Westbank. The first part of this autobiography has been translated into many languages, as it is a very intense depiction of a wealthy Palestinian family in the interwar period, including impressions of the unquestioned male dominance in family and society, the idleness and emptiness of the life of the Harem women, the lack of mutual love between the family members of the extended household, the scarcity of education and manners among the Palestinian land-owning classes, and her ever increasing wish to escape from the closed world of Arab society in general as well as the Palestinian extended family and the Ṭūqān family in particular. One of the strongest passages is her criticism of the men of the Ṭūqān family, which extends to Palestinian and Arab men in general: ّ ‫لقد كانوا يرتدون الز‬ ‫ ثم‬،‫ ويقعون في الحب‬،‫ ويأكلون بالشوكة والسكين‬،‫ ويتكلمون التركية والفرنسية واالنكليزية‬،‫ي االوروبي‬ ‫ كان يمثلون‬.‫يقفون بالمرصاد كلما حاولت احدانا تحقيق انسانيتها عن طريق التطور الطبيعي او التطلع الى األفضل واالحسن‬ ‫ ظلوا يمثلون انقسام شخصية‬،‫ـ خير تمثيل ـ جمود االنسان العربي وعجزه الكلي عن االحتفاظ بشخصية واحدة غير مشطورة‬ ‫ ونصف مشلول األقدام‬،‫ نصف مع التطور والتجاوب مع روح العصر ومسايرة ايقاعات الحياة المعاصرة‬:‫االنسان العربي شطرين‬ ‫ تلك العنجهية التي ظل يعامل الرجل بوحيها‬،‫مسكون باالنانية المترسبة في نفس الرجل العربي بكل ما فيها من عنجهية شرقية‬ .‫االناث من ذوي قرباهم‬ [The men dressed in European style; they spoke Turkish, French and English; they ate with knives and forks; they fell in love. Then they lay jealously in wait whenever one of us girls aspired to better things or tried to assert herself in quite natural ways. They represented, in the most flagrant manner possible, the rigidity of the Arab male and his absolute inability to maintain a personality that was healthy and whole. They represented, now as ever, the dual personality of the Arab: one half going along with development, conforming to the spirit of the times and adjusting to the rhythm of contemporary life; the other half paralysed, informed by an age-old egoism rooted in the Arab man’s soul, with all the eastern haughtiness that has dictated how the male should trat his female relatives] (Ṭūqān 1985, 96–97 [Tuqan 1990, 78–79]).

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 873

Fadwā Ṭūqān’s almost self-obsessed insistence on her independence stands in stark contrast to the autobiography of the much younger Moroccan Laylā Abū Zayd (Leila Abouzeid, b. 1950) which appeared eight years after her own. Like Ṭūqān, Abū Zayd comes from a respected family. Her father worked as an interpreter for the French, but he was a nationalist at the same time and became very active in the struggle for independence. In contrast to Ṭūqān, Laylā Abū Zayd received an excellent education in Rabat and London, and easily found a position in Moroccan journalism, in the literary scene and in the service of the government. Her novel ‘Ām al-fīl [The Year of the Elephant] came out in 1983 [1989] and was the first novel by a Moroccan woman to be translated from Arabic to English (Anishchenkova 2014, 59). In 1993, Abū Zayd’s autobiography Rujū‘ ilā al-ṭufūla [Return to Childhood (1998)] appeared, which is particularly interesting for its anti-colonial, nationalist and religious orientation. Bluntly like barely another modern author, Abū Zayd expresses a certain anxiety with regard to the effects of autobiography. Autobiography, for her, is an imported genre in modern Arabic literature which runs against the fact that a Muslim’s life is considered an ‘awra [an intimate part of the body] and needs to be concealed. Particularly for women autobiographical writing becomes difficult, because Arab and Muslim women do not speak in public, let alone about their private lives. Like classical Arab autobiographers, she links autobiography to the negative attitude of self-praise, denoting all sorts of defects in a person or a writer: selfishness versus altruism, individualism versus the spirit of the group, arrogance versus modesty. Therefore, and in accordance with other Arab autobiographers – both classical and modern –, she emphasises the fact that her autobiography has come about only at the request of another person. In this particular case, it is the American academic Elizabeth Fernea, who has widely published herself on women in the Middle East and North Africa (Abouzeid 1998, author’s preface). With her childhood narrative which uses narrative strategies of oral Arabic tradition in order to characterize a family, to depict the interrelations between the generations and between husbands and wives and to analyze the role of all of them in the struggle for independence from colonial rule, Abū Zayd is not alone. Yet, her text is a special one, as Pauline Homsi Vinson maintains, when she highlights Abū Zayd’s ‘emical’ discourse: In recent years, several women from the Arab world have written autobiographical works that are specifically directed toward Western audiences. […] Leila Abouzeid’s Return to Childhood […] is such a book. [...] Abouzeid [...] frames her memoirs as not so much a revelation of her inner self as a revision of an ‘Other’s’ presumed perception of her self. [...] This stance is [...] the ‘Authentic Insider Position’ (2007, 90–92).

First of all, Abū Zayd has written her text in Arabic, although French was and still is the main language of intellectual public discourse in Morocco. However, French is for Abū Zayd the language of the colonizer, the Christians and the secularists, all of which her national pride rejects (Vinson 2007, 105). Secondly, Abū Zayd deliberately under-

874 

 2 The Arab World

mines Western conceptions of autobiography, as she portrays a life which is dominated by collective elements. This is particularly true for the private lives of women, which are shown to be intimately linked both to the lives of other women around them and to the public events that shape national politics (Vinson 2007, 95). And thirdly, Islam is for Abū Zayd the sole religion whose ‘eternal principles’ can reasonably shape a Moroccan’s identity. Despite all efforts to correspond to the ‘exemplary life mode’ of classical Arabic autobiography, she criticizes her father (!) for having adopted secularist political ideas. “It seems”, Vinson concludes, “that for Abouzeid, to be Moroccan is to speak Arabic and practice Islam” (2007, 104). This interpretation is underlined by the fact that Abū Zayd takes no notice of Berber culture, Jewish traditions or Islamist tendencies in Morocco. In terms of rejecting or adopting the social, cultural and religious tradition, most female Arab autobiographers stand between Fadwā Ṭūqān and Laylā Abū Zayd. Like Abū Zayd, they aim at presenting the above mentioned ‘authentic insider position’, and like Ṭūqān, they do so from a transfeminist perspective. Well-known examples, for a Western audience, are Fatima Mernissi (Fāṭima Marnīsī) and her Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1995); Nawāl al-Sa‘dāwī (Nawal El Saadawi) with Awrāqī ḥayātī (1995–2001) [Daughter of Isis (1995); Walking Through Fire (2002)]; Leila Ahmed (Lailā Aḥmad) with A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999); Jean Said Makdisi (Jīn Sa‘īd al-Maqdisī) with Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir (2005) and, last not least, Assia Djebar (Āsyā Jabbār) with Nulle part dans la maison de mon père [‘Nowhere in the house of my father’] (2009). However, of all these books only al-Sa‘dāwī’s account of her life as a feminist, political and leftist activist has originally been written in Arabic and can thus be considered fully as an ‘Arabic’ autobiography.

Bordercrossers Colonialism has brought with it many disruptions for the identity of the colonized, as they either became part of the colonial system or were systematically marginalized. The colonizers not only politically, economically and socially superseded the indigenous populations, but also devaluated their religions, cultures and traditions. This prompted frictions within communities, families and even the ‘self’, as educational opportunities tended to alienate one generation from the other, led to intra-generational conflicts and individual disorientations. On the other hand, in the ensuing struggle over cultures, ‘autochthonous’ (‘authentic’, ‘nativist’) positions were developed which also need to be scrutinized. This is particularly clearly discernible in the disputes over the status of Middle Eastern women, where discourses on ‘feminism’ and ‘authenticity’ clash. In order to overcome such binaries, postcolonial writers argue for a revision of both ‘Western’ and (in Edward Said’s term) ‘nativist’ positions.

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 875

In this sense, the authors grouped together under the heading of bordercrossers, are postcolonial authors. For our purpose, Anne Donadey’s distinction between anti-colonial and postcolonial literature is particularly useful, as in her understanding postcolonial literature points to the dynamics in the process of decolonization which extends not only to what is told, but also by whom and how it is told. The main difference, as she maintains, lies in the move not from a dualist to a pluralist perspective, but from a dualist view to a multiplicity of expression: The main difference, to my mind, lies in the move from Manichean dualism to multiple technique. The [postcolonial – S.E.] literature underscores the fractures in the grand narratives of decolonization; it begins to effect a slippage away from the (former) colonizer as its main target and instead turns to a multiplicity of struggles. [...] The mark of the postcolonial, then, is the blurring of neat, dichotomous boundaries – which does not mean the end of power differentials or the end of oppositionality. Postcolonial literature underscores the impossibility of Manichean resistance as well as the necessity for continued opposition to old and new oppressive structures (Donadey 2001, xxv).

Postcolonial literature, according to such a definition, lends itself badly to a rigid genre definition, and for this reason one should rather speak of ‘autobiographical discourses’ and not of ‘autobiographies’ proper. (De-)construction, polyphony and literary invention are literary techniques which are constantly employed in these texts in order to bring about the effect of a fragmented self. This fragemented self, however, is nowhere more with him- or herself than in language. Therefore, this chapter breaks away from the rule to considering only autobiographical texts which were originally written in Arabic, its main focus being North Africa. For a number of reasons, North African (Arab, Berber, Jewish) cultures were more deeply penetrated by the French language than the Egyptian, Palestinian or Syrian cultures by either French or English. Till today, French is often more than a second and Arabic less than the first language, particularly in Morocco and Tunisia. The Algerian Assia Djebar (Āsiyā Jabbār, the Arabicized pen-name of Fāṭima-Zahrā’ Īmālāyān), for example, came from a Arabo-Berber family, her father having been a teacher for French. Accordingly, she speaks of Arabic and Berber as her maternal (‘langue maternel’) and of French as her paternal (‘langue paternel’) language. Interestingly, she has always produced her documentary films in Arabic and wrote her (autobiographical) novels in French. It is certainly inadequate in a way to register an ‘autobiographical discourse’ written by a Berber women in French under ‘Arabic autobiography’. But not all North African authors writing in French are Berbers, and many Berbers are Muslims. They live in a dominantly and increasingly dominant Arab culture. At the same time, North African literature written in French is increasingly Arabicized, as Assia Djebar’s and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s (‘Abd al-Kabīr Khaṭībī) experiments with the French language demonstrate. In order to avoid absurd ethnic distinctions and to allow for an outline of the history of North African literature of the self, the aim of which is to establish

876 

 2 The Arab World

a postcolonial culture, the authors of this chapter have been grouped irrespective of their ethnic background. However, it should be pointed out that of these five authors three are (for the most part) Berbers, one is a Sephardic Jew and one is an Arab. The Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun (Mawlūd Fir‘awn, 1913–1962) was born in a small village in Upper Kabylia. In 1936 he qualified as a teacher and made a modest career, first as a head teacher on several posts and then as an inspector for the Centres sociaux, which had been set up by the UNESCO in order to provide education for the poorest in society. In 1962, he was assassinated with five of his collegues by the French colonial right-wing terrorist group OAS (l’Organisation Armée Secrète), the year that Algerian independence was achieved (Kelly 2005, 56). The publication of Mouloud Feraoun’s autobiographical novel Le Fils du pauvre [‘The poor man’s son’] (1950) is generally recognised as a founding moment in the literary, cultural and political context of North African writing in French. A claim can be made for this text as the first real expression of the voice and experiences of an indigenous Algerian writer as opposed to the writings concerning North Africa produced by the French themselves during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is also different in its aims from the writings of Algerian writers usually described as ‘assimilated’ during the same period. In France and elsewhere, Le Fils du pauvre was received favourably. The Encyclopaedia Britannica still refers to it as the work of “a gentle man of integrity”, portraying “the simple life in the mountains” which is “filled with nobility, human compassion, and a love of family and native soil” (Kelly 2005, 54–55). This approach, as Debra Kelly maintains, is common in the consideration given to early North African writing in French, qualifying this type of literature as “ethnographic”. Jean Déjeux, one of the French experts of North African literature from the 1970s to the 1990s, has illustrated this point clearly by writing: “Mouloud Feraoun’s novels fall within a cateogry which we call ‘ethnographic’. In general, it is written for a European public. In it, Feraoun reveals himself as a witness of his society and his time” (1980, 118). By others – most notably North African intellectuals – Feraoun has been criticized as being ‘assimiliationist’: Trop de pitié et de bonté écrasent ce livre, c’est l’autobiographie d’un homme de bonne volonté […] Voilà une différence avec des écrivains comme Kateb, Memmi, Chraïbi qui, quand ils se racontent, ne voient qu’une suite de mutilation, et des enfances blessés et ratées. [Too much pity, too much kindness spoil this book. It is the autobiography of a man of good will (...) Here lies the difference to writers like Kateb, Memmi, Chraïbi. When narrating, they see only a succession of mutilations, of childhoods that were wounded and destroyed.] (Khatibi 1968, 49–50 [Kelly 2005, 56])

However, the actual life story of the ‘son of a poor man’ was more complex than this apparently straightforward itinerary of a peasant farmer’s son who became a primary school teacher through his own diligence and the opportunities provided by the French school, thereby achieving a certain status in his own community. On one level

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 877

his work goes beyond individual experience to describe in detail the everyday life of a community under colonial rule and then in war, and his writing is also concerned with the politics, in the widest sense of the word, of a specific period in French colonial history and in the history of Algeria. On another level, it raises complex questions concerning the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ in such a situation, whether that other is the colonizer or the community to which the individual belongs, and the place the individual may occupy between the two: “In the Feraounian text the inner and the outer gaze correspond, enforce each other and differ, (creating) an image for oneself and for the other, and also the image of the self by the other” (Khadda 1991, 80). Only seven years younger than Mouloud Feraoun, the Tunisian sociologist and writer Albert Memmi (Albirt Mīmī, b. 1920) was born and raised under completely different circumstances. The poverty of the family is a common feature of the two families, but Memmi came from an urban background, his father being a bourrelier [leather-worker]. Memmi spent his early childhood on the edges of the ḥāra [the Jewish quarter] of Tunis, a place that remained a fundamental point in the typology of his work. In Tunis, he first went to Jewish schools and then to the French ‘lycée’. After school, he studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. In 1943, he spent some time in the forced labour camps in Tunisia during the Second World War. After the war, he continued his studies at the Sorbonne. In Paris, Memmi married a Catholic Frenchwoman from Lorraine and stood in a relationship with the Parisian intellectuals of the period, two challenges to which he has repeatedly referred in his later writings. La statue du sel [The Pillar of Salt] appeared in 1953 [1992], but had been written already in 1950, when the couple lived in Tunis. Some details in the book, like in Memmi’s second autobiographical novel, Agar (1955) [Strangers (1958)], differ conspicuously from Memmi’s real life. In La statue du sel the hero leaves for Argentinia, whereas in reality Memmi went to Paris. In Agar, the marriage of the hero with a Frenchwoman breaks up, whereas in reality the couple settled in Paris. These are literary devices within an interplay of realistic constellations, which fit into the context of Memmi’s ideas about the difficulties of East-Western contacts, his wish for a reconciliation of both parts of his identity and his belief in achieving this aim through writing (Kelly 2005, 136–138). ‘Autobiographical’ writing according to established rules is no option for Memmi, who has once and again stated: “L’écrivain dit la vérité avec des mensonges successifs. La formule me paraît heureuse. A force d’ajouter fiction sur fiction, l’écrivain finit par dire presque la vérité” [“The writer tells the truth through a succession of lies. I think this is an appropriate expression. By adding fiction to fiction, the writer ends up by telling something like the truth”] (Guérin 1990, 164 [Kelly 2005, 131]). And yet, La statue du sel is an invaluable historical document, as it recreates the life of the Jewish community of Tunis whose almost total disappearance coincided with Memmi’s childhood, adolescence and coming to adulthood (Kelly 2005, 142). It is the story of a young man named ‘Benillouche’, who wishes to break away from the community (Memmi sometimes speaks of the ‘tribe’) in which he has grown up.

878 

 2 The Arab World

It is, at the same time, a rediscovery of the origins of the individual. On a third level, the text gives a voice to the hitherto silent and anonymous Jewish community against which the protagonist rebels but which he is also clinging to. It ends with the protagonist’s leaving of the community to which he must not look back, otherwise risking his subjection to the biblical punishment of Lot’s wife to which the title alludes. The titles of the novel’s three parts follow the same movement: ‘L’Impasse’ [dead end] is the (allegorical) name of the alleyway in which the family of the protagonist lives and where he spends his childhood. Alexandre Mordechaï Benillouche refers to the adolescent who receives a French education and enters a conflictual relationship with his family. ‘Le monde’ denotes his escape from the universes of the family and the school into the wider world. The Moroccan writer Muḥammad Shukrī (Mohamed Choukri, 1935–2005) is a monolith among the North African autobiographers, but at the same time a bordercrosser of the first order. Of Berber origin, his extremely poor family migrated from the Rif mountains first to Tétouan and then to Tangier where Shukrī learnt Arabic and Spanish on the street. Still being illiterate at the age of eleven, he earned his living as a petty burglar, an occasional smuggler and as a male prostitute. While in prison at the age of twenty, he discovered his love for classical Arabic. After his release, he attended school and became a teacher himself. In the 1960s, he came into contact with the American writer Paul Bowles (1910–1999), who had settled in Tangier as early as 1947. Bowles and Shukrī worked together on the English version of the Arabic manuscript of Shukrī’s autobiographical novel For Bread Alone [al-Khubz al-ḥāfī], and Bowles arranged for the book to be published in England in 1973 [1982]. Later, Shukrī added a sequel under two titles, Zaman al-akhtā’ [‘Time of errors’] for the Moroccan edition and al-Shuṭṭār (1992) [Streetwise (1996)] for the English one. al-Khubz al-ḥāfī starts with the death of Shukrī’s younger brother, murdered by his violent father, and ends with a visit at the grave of the brother. Between the beginning and the end of the novel, the narration extends over fifteen years full of brutality, hope, misery, love and criminal actions. Comparable to Memmi’s La statue du sel, the book and its sequel are documents of contemporary Moroccan history, as Shukrī was a witness to the last phase of the Tangier International Zone, the exodus of Jews to Israel and the European-American bohème living in the city. In Tangier, Shukrī met not only Paul Bowels, but also made friends with Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) and Jean Genet (1910–1986). Shukrī’s autobiographical text has been named a ‘picaresque novel’, as it offers glimpses into the hitherto unknown worlds at the margins of Moroccan society. After the English translation For Bread Alone had become an international success, a French version appeared in 1980, followed by a private edition of the Arabic original in 1982. However, Shukrī’s sometimes brutal and obscene language, the depiction of sexual encounters and the inclusion of homosexual scenes provoked Moroccan censorship, following the advice of the religious authorities. The censorship ended in 2000, and the book was finally published in Morocco. In 2005, it was put again on the index, this

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 879

time in Egypt, as it had been on the reading list of an Arabic Literature course at the American University of Cairo. Compared with Mouloud Feraoun and Albert Memmi, the Moroccan sociologist and writer Abdelkébir Khatibi (‘Abd al-Kabīr Khaṭībī, 1938–2009) already belongs to the next − and ‘verbatim’ postcolonial − generation of North-African authors writing in French. Born at the Atlantic coast, he attended both Koranic and French schools and lived as an undergraduate and postgraduate student in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While still in Paris, he worked on his doctorate about the North African novel under the supervision of Albert Memmi. Later, he became one of the most prominent and productive figures in the political, intellectual and literary life of Morocco. Khatibi’s first literary work was published in 1971 with the title La Mémoire tatouée [‘Tattooed memory’] and the subtitle Autobiographie d’un décolonise [‘Autobiography of a Decolonised Man’], a text which he openly acknowledged as autobiographical. About it, he wrote: “En 1968 je décidai d’écrire ce récit autobiographique qui sera La Mémoire tatouée, tout en redoutant l’enjeu redoutable qui s’y engage et s’y agite” [“In 1968 I decided to write this autobiographical account which was to end up in La mémoire tatouée, although I was afraid of the frightening prospects that would arise from it”] (Khatibi 1971, 10 [Kelly 2005, 207]). The question of selfhood is decisive in Khatibi’s work and linked to his very being as a writer and the act of writing, which is not so different from the cases of Feraoun and Memmi. However, in contrast to the two previous writers, Khatibi by often depersonalizing his life experience uses the French language as a powerful tool of decolonization. His concept of a ‘langue sauvage’ [savage language] theorizes a literature written in French as the ‘language of the adversary’, that will nevertheless serve as a perfect tool for expressing the aspirations and cultural specifities of the North African writer. It offers a reflection on the potential of a ‘third route’ between Western notions of reason and ‘unreason’, in order to achieve a ‘decolonising ourselves and each other’. Khatibi therefore not only attempts to undermine the domination of one language or culture by another, but to accomplish the even more revolutionary task of founding ‘une pensée-autre’ (an other thought) (Kelly 2005, 207). Accordingly, La Mémoire tatouée is not a conventional autobiography and has, in fact, given rise to several neologisms like ‘alterbiography’. Although written in the first person, the author does not provide his readers with either realistic scenes of the past, a logical sequence of events, or a coherent psychological portrait. Instead, Khatibi’s protagonist is a construct, not only in the sense of a personal invention of its author, but also in the sense of a cultural invention. In order to go beyond the binaries of anti-colonialism, Khatibi investigates new notions of alterity and of identity of the person and to celebrate the multiple and the constantly changing ‘non-I’. Four areas of a life story make up the two parts of the book: first, the childhood of the narrator in El Jadida and Essaouira under colonial rule, secondly, his adolescence in Marrakech and the coming of independence, thirdly, the narrator’s ‘exile’ in Paris, and finally a long journey taken in order to return to the country of his birth. Instead of a straight-

880 

 2 The Arab World

forward narrative with a fixed chronology, Khatibi presents a series of highly charged ‘scenes’. They serve to evoke an atmosphere which is characterized by binary oppositions (traditional and colonial), multiple voices (Arabic and French) and different traditions (oral and scriptural) (Kelly 2005, 219–228). In an introduction to the second edition of La Mémoire tatouée, Khatibi added a commentary to his method of writing: Comment ai-je délimité le champ autobiographique? En démobilisant l’anecdote et le fait divers en soi, tout en dirigeant mon regard vers les thèmes (philosophiques) de ma prédilection. [How did I define the field of autobiography? I left aside anecdotes and unimportant events. Instead, I turned my attention to the (philosophical) subjects which were of greater interest to me]. (Khatibi 1979, 11 [Kelly 2005, 221])

The progressing deconstruction of the writing subject and the search for an authentic voice of the decolonized subject, already discernible in Memmi and pursued further in Khatibi, is in a certain way extended by the Algerian writer, film-maker and translator Assia Djebar (Āsyā Jabbār, 1936–2015). By adding a gender aspect to her postcolonial version of writing, she enhances the polyphonic effect of the autobiography of an individual which is at the same time a re-writing of colonialism and a collective biography. Assia Djebar was born in Cherchell and educated in Algiers and Paris. She was the first Algerian woman to be accepted at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Sèvres in 1955, but interrupted her studies in order to take part in the Algerian independence movement. Later, she lectured in history at the universities of Rabat and Algiers, where she was also involved in journalism and broadcasting. Particularly her many novels have contributed to her the role of one of the most influential North-African writers and have been translated into a multitude of languages. Like other women writers of her generation, Djebar started with stories in the style of Françoise Sagan – La Soif [‘The Mischief’] (1957) and Les Impatiens [‘The Impatients’] (1958) – which attracted praise from the French press and contempt from Algerian revolutionaries. After some other publications of prose and poetry, followed by a ten year period of almost total silence, she returnd to public life in 1979 with her first film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua [‘The Nouba of the women from Mount Chenoua’], which received first prize at the Venice film festival. Since then, Djebar has published three semi-autobiographical works, L’amour, la fantasia (1985) [Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade (1988)], Ombre sultane (1987) [A Sister to Scheherazade (1988)] and Vaste est la prison (1995) [So Vast the Prison (1999)] as part of an ‘Algerian quartet’. For her contribution to world literature, she won numerous prizes, and in 2005, she was elected to the Académie française, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition (Ringrose 2006, 9–12). Although, like so often in North-African literature, the affiliation of the text to the genre autobiography is blurred by a number of factors, Assia Djebar has called L’Amour, la fantasia her first openly autobiographical book (Djebar 1993, 15). ‘Fantasia’, the title alluding to the playful mode of Beethoven’s Mondschein-Sonate [‘Moonlight Sonata’] and at the same time to an Algerian cavalcade on horseback, moves fluidly

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 881

between the French conquest of Algeria, Djebar’s own youth under French colonial rule and the Algerian War of Liberation (Ringrose 2006, 36). In parts one and two of the book, the chapters alternate between historical and autobiographical sections, moving back and forth from French colonial rule over Algeria to incidents from Djebar’s childhood, youth and early adulthood. In part three, which is predominantly based on oral testimonies of former Algerian revolutionaries, the chronological linearity is completely abandoned, as Djebar takes on the voice of her compatriots and tells not only her story but their stories. The multiple subjects of this part, whose experiences, voices and stories merge, can be mainly attributed to four alternating representations: Djebar acting one moment as a child and the next as a woman, Algeria personified as a woman and the women of Algeria representing themselves (Ringrose 2006, 43–44). In accordance with Khatibi’s concept of ‘langue sauvage’, Djebar understands writing as a resistance against the French ‘enemy’ in the language of the ‘enemy’, a problem that both attempt to address by ‘Arabicizing’ their French. However, in Djebar’s case the problem is made more complex by the fact that she, additionally, distinguishes between her ‘maternal’ languages Arabic and Berber and her ‘paternal’ language French. French is the ambiguous gift bestowed on her by her father, as it has opened her eyes to a wider world, has introduced the male universe to her and has helped in freeing her body. But its use also leads to to an emotional detachment, compared with the slow, comforting, rhythmic pace of Arabic (Ringrose 2006, 88). French: Comme si soudain la langue française avait des yeux, et qu’elle mes les ait donnés pour voire dans la liberté, comme si la langue française aveuglait les mâles voyeurs de mon clan et qu’à ce prix, je puisse circuler, dégringoler toutes les rues, annexer le dehors pour mes compagnes cloitrées pour mes aïeules mortes bien avant le tombeau [As if the French language suddenly had eyes, and lent them to me to see into liberty; as if the French language blinded the peeping Toms of my clan, and at this price, I could move freely, run headlong down every street, annex the outdoors for my cloistered companions, for the matriarchs of my family who endured a living death] (Djebar 1985, 208 [1988, 181]). Arabic: Je ne pouvais dire le moindre mot de tendresse ou d’amour dans cette langue [French – S.E.], à tel point que c’était un vrai questionnement de femme. Ainsi avec certain hommes avec qui se dérouler un jeu de séduction, comme il n’y avait pas de passage à la langue maternelle, subsistait en moi une sorte de barrière invisible [I could not speak any words of love or tenderness in that language (French; S.E.), to the extent that it made me question my identity as a woman. And when it came to relationships with men, where games of seduction were played out, since I could not draw on my maternal language, a kind of invisible barrier still remained inside me] (Djebar 1996, 79 [Ringrose 2006, 68–69]).

But the contrast between paternal and maternal language(s) is less clear in Djebar’s writings than these quotations suggest. Certainly, as opposed to French, spoken Arabic is the language which lends itself easily to a language of emotional attachment, and writing in Arabic Djebar once even describes as if it were an act of physical love (Ringrose 2006, 88–89). But at the same time Arabic stands for a patriarchal tradition, as opposed to the Berber (Touareg) oral tradition, which stands for a matriarchal community is the privileged property of women (Ringrose 2006, 26, 134).

882 

 2 The Arab World

As cultural bordercrossing is closely intertwined with linguistic problems, North African authors have been privileged in this section. However, they are by no means the sole bordercrossers in the more recent history of Arab autobiography, on the contrary. As notions such as ‘autobiographical discourse’, ‘semi-autobiography’, ‘autobiographie double’ [double autobiography], ‘collective autobiography’ or ‘autobiographie plurielle’ [plural autobiography] have widened the field of autobiography even further, and as an increase of world-wide migration fosters autobiographies written by Arabs in English, German, Swedish and other European and non-European languages, dozens of other names could be mentioned. Generally speaking, it seems safe to conclude that postcolonial autobiographies, as outlined above, have come to prevail in all Arab autobiographies written in other languages. This is particularly true for the two ‘marginal’ groups, the Palestinian autobiographers and the women, like the already mentioned Edward Said and Leila Ahmed. The latter, in A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999), highlights a “connectedness” (Hassan 2002, 20) which represents not just a relation to the family, but extends to to the long Arab-Islamic cultural history on the one hand and the formation of the Egyptian nation on the other. Telling the story of a sheltered childhood in a comfortable higher middle-class setting in Cairo, she embeddens her narrative into the Sufism of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī as well as into a crash course in Egyptian history. However, in the end she does not subscribe to an undisputed Muslim-Arab or Egyptian, let alone American identity. Instead, she reflects the enormously complex history of the Middle East in the twentieth century with Islamic tradition, European colonialism and Egyptian nationalism: “Aḥmed’s autobiography […] seeks to dissolve discursive and ideological barriers between past and present, Egypt and America, ‘East’ and ‘West’” (Hassan 2002, 20).

An Outlook The Arab autobiographers, who have been the subject of the preceding chapters, have acquired a status almost comparable to ‘modern classics’. In the last ten to fifteen years, however, the situation in the Middle East has considerably changed. First of all, a new generation of migrants has emerged, who see nothing truly exceptional in living between two or more cultures. Secondly, technical innovations have enabled new modes of communication, particularly among young people outside the literary establishment. And thirdly, due to the dramatic events of the ‘Arab Spring’ and the numerous directions it has taken in the last few years, representational discourse has expanded exponentially. In a recent publication, Valerie Anishchenkova sets out to explore Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture (2014), and she does so by including modes of autobiographical discourses which have hitherto been neglected in studies on autobiography. Among a wide range of visual and per-

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 883

formative genres, cinema is perhaps the most influential though not the only one. As Anishchenkova emphasizes, “contemporary autobiographers increasingly choose a moving image over a pen to articulate their selfhood.” And she continues: “You Tube, home videos, shorts, autobiographical documentaries, and autobiographical motion pictures these videographic and cinematic self-referential genres are as diverse and complex as their literary counterparts” (2014, 142). However, Anishchenkova favours full-length motion pictures over the shorter, more fugitive and more recent autobiographical genres. For that reason, her example fully falls into the the last third of the twentieth century. The paragon of Arab/Egyptian cinema was (and still is) Youssef Chahine (Yūsuf Shāhīn, 1926–2008) with his trilogy, composed of Iskandariyya... leh? [‘Alexandria... why?’] (1979) which won the Silver Bear  – Special Jury Prize at the 29th Berlin International Film Festival, and the sequels Hadduta misriyya [Ḥaddūtha miṣriyya, ‘An Egyptian tale’] (1982) and Iskandariyya kamān wa-kamān [‘Alexandria again and forever’] (1990). In Anishchenkova’s words, Chahine’s stature in Egyptian and Middle Eastern cinema is comparable to the American Francis Coppola and the Italian Federico Fellini in their respective countries. His cinematographic oeuvre had an impact on the Arab film similar to Najib Mahfuz’ (Najīb Maḥfūẓ) influence on Arabic literature: the two have given the world the trilogies of their respective cities, Cairo and Alexandria. But most importantly, Chahine was the pioneer of the autobiographical genre in Arab cinema. The first part of the trilogy takes place during the Second World War in Alexandria and offers a mosaic of subplots, one of which centers on the teenage version of Youssef Chahine’s ‘alter ego’, Yahya Mourad, and his coming-of-age story. The narrative framework resembles a rather typical structure of the Egyptian novel of the twentieth century with its close connection between the autobiographical protagonist’s life and national history, including the familiar image of a middle-class Egyptian family struggling for a better life. Even the last scenes of the film bring to mind the typical departure of the protagonist from home, although the real protagonist of the film is the city itself and the many stories of love and loss it contains. The second part of the trilogy is radically different from the first, as it presents a middle-aged film director who, like Chahine himself, has to undergo a bypass surgery and takes place mostly inside Yahya’s body during the surgery. It is a cinematic fantasy, a kind of cinematic legacy which Chahine commented as follows: As for Hadduta misriyya, the idea of this film came to me after I discovered that I had to undergo an open-heart surgery. I learned that I was very close to dying, and all those questions came to me: What is it that I’ve done in my life before today? [...] I do not have a son, nor was I able to build pyramids. So what do I leave behind? A few films (Anishchenkova 2014, 153).

Conspicuously, none of three separate versions of Yahya in the film (the child, the teenager and the man), with the partial exception of the teenager, is particularly attractive: The child is an angry and cunning kid who attempts to kill the adult Yahya by blocking

884 

 2 The Arab World

his heart arteries, and the adult is an ambitious and rude film-maker who demoralizes his surrounding with his bad habits. All in all, the second part of the trilogy is a much more blunt, mocking, and self-deprecating autobiographical portrait than the first part. The final instalment of the trilogy features Youssef Chahine himself, who steps into his own frame to play his ‘alter ego’, Yahya Mourad. But due to the roles of the actors an uncertainty in the film’s representational discourse remains as to the question who is playing whom. This uncertainty is an excellent visual-performative demonstration of the inherent complexity of human selfhood. The intricate and nonlinear relationships between different characters in the film and different actors who play them replicate the intricate relationships between different pieces − selves − of a fragmented subjectivity (Anishchenkova 2014, 161). Youssef Chahine is certainly not the only Arab filmmaker who has crafted his work autobiographically. The Syrian Muhammad Malas (Muḥammad Malaṣ, b. 1945) with Aḥlam al-madīna [‘Dreams of the city’] (1983) and al-Layl [‘The night’] (1992), the Lebanese Ziad Doueiri (Ziyād Duwayrī, b. 1963) with Bayrut al-gharbiyya [‘West-Beirut’] (1998), the Egyptian Khalid al-Hagar (Khālid al-Ḥajar, b. 1963) with Ahlām saghīra [‘Little dreams’] (1993), the Tunesian Farid Boughedir (Farīd Būghadīr, b. 1944) with Halfaouine [‘Ḥalfāwīn’] (1990) and other films from different parts of the Arab world offer interesting and diverse accounts of cinematic autobiographical storytelling. However, none of them has been so explicitly labeled and perceived in the framework of filmic autobiography as Chahine’s trilogy (Anishchenkova 2014, 144). Whereas cinematic autobiographical accounts started relatively early, thanks to Youssef Chahine’s outstanding work, mudawwanāt [blogs] are a much more recent phenomenon in the Arab world. Within a short time, blogging has become a particularly important element in cultural life and a great platform for ideological movements, expecially in the hands of the younger generations. In many countries where censorship prevails, blogs offer not only artistic but also political outlets for expressing one’s selfhood with much innovative freedom. Anishchenkova speaks of “autoblography”: “a series of autobiographical blogs by the same author, often united by a common thematic thread” (2014, 172). Autoblography can take various shapes which range from individual private experiences to larger political and social issues or eye-witness reports to a major event, but all of them essentially offer a chain of autobiographical experiences in the form of separate blog entries. Autoblographies are a very special mode of self-expression, as they render highly inividual, private narrative accounts in the highly public space of the World Wide Web. Bloggers are increasingly perceived as public figures and public intellectuals due to the expansion of the public sphere to incorporate many private concerns discussed in blogs. One of these bloggers, who has made her private concerns public and has received such an acclamation that one of the leading Egyptian publishing houses produced a printed version of her blogs, is Ghada Abd al-Al (Ghāda ‘Abd al-‘Āl, b. 1978). Her blog started in 2006 under the English title Wanna-B-A-Bride and became so successful that it was printed in 2008 under the title ‘Āyiza atgawwiz [I Want to Get Married (2010)]

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 885

with over a dozen reprints. At the same time, it was translated into English, Italian, German and Dutch. In addition to that, a TV series of the same title was released in 2010 during the Ramadan season. With her autoblography, Abd al-Al, a pharmacist by training, has offered a glimpse into the lives and aspirations of her generation, particularly of its female part. It presents a series of stories about failed engagements, interrupted by short chapters on − specifically − the pitfalls of being a young urban Egyptian woman in the beginnings of the twenty-first century. Like Chahine in his films, Abd al-Al uses colloquial Egyptian, sparkled with youth lingo, transliterations of English words and, occasionally, Modern Standard Arabic. While sharing some very personal stories with her readers, including her encounters with potential grooms, private conversations with her female friends, insights into private matters of her family etc., Abd al-Al is aware of the collective aspect of Egyptian womanhood and claims to speak for a large number of Egyptian ّ ‫ الى‬٥٢ ‫سن‬ ّ ‫ مليون بنت من‬٥١ ‫أمثل‬ women: ‫ واللي بيضغط عليهم المجتمع كل يوم عشان يتجوزوا‬٥٣ ‫سن‬ .‫“[ مع إنه مش بايديهم إنهم لسه قاعدين‬I represent 15 million of women between the ages of 25 and 35 who are on a daily basis pressured by society to get married, while it is not at all their fault that they have not been able to do so yet”] (Anishchenkova 2014, 195; original webblog no longer accessible [2014, 179]). To compose her blog as a dialogue with the reader, Abd al-Al incorporates many elements of communication, such as short and direct entries, giving accounts of her feelings, or questions to the readers throughout the narrative. On the content level, Abd al-Al’s autoblography is highly subversive, all the more as she focuses on the social and material framework of marriage and leaves undisputed the subject of marriage in general or the respect for one’s parents as well as religious sentiments. Without being a revolutionary, she bluntly and highly effectively accuses Egyptian society to continue and to reinforce the patriarchal system. In the very beginning, Abd al-Al’s blog appeared under the pseudonym ‘Bride’ (in Arabic letters), but when the book version appeared with her name on it, the text had not been modified and the sharp social criticism had not been censured. In the same year, two other widely circulated blogs appeared as books, Ghāda Muḥammad Maḥmūd’s Ammā hādhihi... fa raqṣatī anā [‘As for this, it is my own dance’] (2008) and Rihāb Bassām’s Urz bi-l-laban li-shakhṣayn [‘Rice pudding for two’] (2008). Arab autoblographies are also published in English, and the most popular include Salaam Pax’s The Baghdad Blog (2003), based on his widely read blog Where is Raed?, and Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (2005). As the Arabic blogosphere started with people living under the pressures of war, rebellion and persecution, it is no wonder that blogographies have tremendously increased since the beginnings of the ‘Arab spring’. For Egypt, the same is true for an array of first-hand-accounts of the ‘revolution’ in 2011 and its aftermath. At the time being, it is hard to tell whether and which of these historical snapshots will remain and become part of the Arabic autobiographical tradition in general. An important new aspect of the above mentioned testimonies, cyber and printed alike, is that access is not restricted regionally or even

886 

 2 The Arab World

linguistically, as a large number of bloggers and writers use English and other European languages (Anishchenkova 2014, 170–192). Compared with the autoblographies presented in Anishchenkova’s book, the ‘traditionally’ produced autobiographies which she offers as examples for “autobiographical identities in contemporary Arab culture” do not fully meet the expectations of the reader. They either date from the twentieth century and have already been referred to in one of the previous chapters, or they fall conspicuously behind the standards of the above-mentioned authors. Anishchenkova points particularly to two books, Somaya Ramadan’s (Sumayya Ramaḍān, b. 1951) Awrāq al-Narjis (2001) [Leaves of Narcissus (2002)], and Batul al-Khudayri’s (Baṭūl al-Khudayrī, b. 1965) Kam badat al-samā‘ qarība (1999) [A Sky so Close (2001)]. In this case, as in the case of Youssef Chahine, neither the authors are particularly young nor the books particularly recent. More important is the fact that they finally seem to push Arabic autobiography towards a wholly personal or individual position, as the autobiographical subject is completely absorbed from bringing together her multiple selves. This raises again the initial question whether or not George Gusdorf’s call for “the virtue of individuality” is really what is needed most. Paradoxically, in this particular historical moment a ‘connected’ or collective position seems of much more relevance to expressing the ‘self’ in Arabic literature. At least three distinguished Arab authors have come up recently with accounts of their participation in the ‘Arab revolution’ in and after 2011: the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif (Ahdāf Suwayf, b. 1950) published Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012) in English, the Syrian Samar Yazbek (Samar Yazbak, b. 1970) wrote A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (2012), also in English, and Nawāl Sa‘dāwī (b. 1931) published al-Thawrāt al-‘arabiyya [‘The Arab revolutions’] in Arabic (2013).

Works Cited ‘Abbās, Iḥsān. Fann al-sīra (1956). Amman: Dār al-shurūq, 1992. ‘Abbās, Iḥsān. Ghurbat al-rā‘ī’. Sīra dhātiyya. Amman: Dār al-shurūq, 1996. ‘Abd al-‘Āl, Ghāda. ‘Āyiza atgawwiz. Cairo: Dār al-shurūq, 2008 [Abdel Aal, Ghada. I Want to Get Married! Trans. Nora Eltahawy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010]. ‘Abd al-Dāyim, Yaḥyā Ibrāhīm. al-Tarjama al-dhātiyya fī al-adab al-‘arabī al-ḥadīth. Cairo: Maktabat al-nahḍa al-miṣriyya, 1975. ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm, Ibrāhīm. Ayyām al-ṭufūla (1955). Cairo: Dār al-thaqāfa al-jadīda, 1973. ‘Abd Allāh al-Turjumān al-Andalusī (Fray Anselmo Turmeda). Tuḥfat al-arīb fī al-radd ‘alā ahl al-ṣalīb. Ed. Maḥmūd ‘Alī Ḥamāya. Cairo: Dār al-Thaqāfa li-l-ṭibā‘ wa-l-nashr, 1983. Abū Shāma, Shihāb al-Dīn. Tarājim rijāl al-qarnayn al-sādis wa-l-sābi‘ al-ma‘rūf bi-l-dhayl ‘alā al-rawḍatayn. Ed. Ibrāhīm Shams al-Dīn. Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-‘ilmiyya, 2002. Abū Zayd, Laylā. ‘Ām al-fīl. Rabat: Dār al-ma‘ārif al-jadīda, 1983 [Abouzeid, Leila. Year of the ­Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Towards Independence and Other Stories. Trans. Barbara Parmenter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989]. Abū Zayd, Laylā. Rujū‘ ilā al-ṭufūla. Casablanca: Maṭba‘at al-najāḥ al-jadīd, 1993 [Abouzeid, Leila. Return to Childhood. The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman. Trans. Leila Abouzeid and Heather Logan Taylor. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998].

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 887

Aburish, Said K. Children of Bethany. The story of a Palestinian family (1988). London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Aghacy, Samira. “The Use of Autobiography in Rashīd al-Ḍa‘īf’s Dear Mr. Kawabata.” Writing the Self. Autobiographical writing in modern Arabic literature. Ed. Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor and Stefan Wild. London: Saqi Books, 1998. 217–228. Ahmed, Leila. A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Ajami, Fouad. The Dream Palace of the Arabs. A generation’s Odyssee. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. Amīn, Aḥmad. Ḥayātī (1950–1952). Cairo: Ṣafaḥāt, 2011 [My Life. The autobiography of an Egyptian scholar, writer and cultural leader. Trans. Issa J. Boullata. Leiden: Brill, 1978]. Anishchenkova, Valerie. Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Arberry, A. J. Avicenna on Theology. London: John Murray, 1951. ‘Aydarūs, ‘Abd al-Qādir b. ‘Abd Allāh al-. al-Nūr al-sāfir ‘an akhbār al-qarn al-‘āshir. Ed. Muḥammad Rashīd Afandī al-Ṣaffār. Baghdad: al-Maktaba al-‘arabiyya, 1934. Badran, Margot, and Miriam Cooke. Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. London: Virago Press, 1990. Baḥrānī, Yūsuf b. Aḥmad al-. Lu’lu’at al-Baḥrayn. Ed. Muḥammad Ṣādiq Baḥr al-‘Ulūm. Najaf: ­Maṭba‘at al-Nu‘mān, 1966. Ba‘labakkī, Laylā. Anā aḥyā. Beirut: Dār majallat shi‘r, 1958. Baqlī, Rūzbihān al-. The Unveiling of Secrets: Diary of a Sufi Master. Trans. Carl Ernst. Chapel Hill: Parvardigar Press, 1997. Barāda, Muḥammad. “al-Adab al-shakhṣī: adab i‘tirāf?” al-Wasaṭ 214 (1996): 55. Bassām, Riḥāb. Urz bi-l-laban li-shakhṣayn. Cairo: Dār al-shurūq, 2008. Behrens-Abouseif, Doris. “The Image of the Physician in Arab Biographies of the post-classical age.” Der Islam 66 (1989): 331–343. Benjelloun (Ibn Jallūn), ‘Abd al-Majīd. Fī al-ṭufūla (1957). Rabat: Maktab al-ma‘ārif, 1975. Berque, Jacques. Al-Yousi: Problèmes de la culture marocaine au XVIIème siècle. Paris: Mouton, 1958. Bint al-Shāṭi’ (‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān) ‘Alā al-jisr. Bayna al-ḥayāt wa-l-mawt (1967). Cairo: al-Hay’a al-miṣriyya al-‘āmma li-l-kitāb, 1986. de Blois, François. Burzōy’s Voyage to India and the Origin of the Book of Kalīlah wa Dimnah. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1990. Brock, Arthur J. Greek Medicine, being extracts illustrative of medical writers from Hippocrates to Galen. London: Dent and Sons, 1929. Brugman, Jan. An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1984. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. London: Phaidon Press, 1944. Cheikh-Moussa, Abdallah. “L’écriture de soi dans les mudhakkirāt de Ğurğī Zaydān.” Bulletin d’études orientales 37/38 (1985/1986): 23–50. Cooke, Miriam. “Zaynab al-Ghazālī: Saint or subversive?” Die Welt des Islams 34.1 (1994): 1–20. Cooperson, Michael. “The Purported Autobiography of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq.” Edebiyât – Special Issue – Arabic Autobiography 7.2 (1997): 235–249. Ḍayf, Shawqī. al-Tarjama al-shakhṣiyya (1956). Cairo: Dār al-ma‘ārif, 1987. Ḍayf, Shawqī. Ma‘ī (1981). Cairo: Dār al-ma‘ārif, 1985. Ḍayf, Shawqī. Ma‘ī, al-juz’ al-thānī. Dhikrayāt wa-mushāhadāt. Cairo: Dār al-ma‘ārif, 1988. Déjeux, Jean. Littérature maghrebine de langue française. Introduction générale et auteurs (1973). Sherbrooke, Quebec: Edition Naaman, 1980. Djebar, Assia. L’amour, la fantasia. Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1985 [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. London/New York: Quartet Books, 1988].

888 

 2 The Arab World

Djebar, Assia. Ombre sultane. Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1987 [A Sister to Scheherezade. Trans. D.S. Blair. London: Quartet Books, 1988]. Djebar, Assia. “La langue dans l’espace ou l’espace dans la langue.” Mise en Scène d’Ecrivains: Assia Djebar, Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon et France Théoret. Ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber. Grénoble/Quebec: Presses universitaires de Grenoble/Le Griffon d’argile, 1993. 15–17. Djebar, Assia. Vaste est la prison. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995 [So Vast the Prison. Trans. Betsy Wing. New York/Toronto/London: Seven Stories Press, 1999]. Djebar, Assia. “Territoires des langues: entretien avec Lise Gauvain.” Littérature 101 (1996): 73–87. Djebar, Assia. Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007). Paris: Fayard, 2009. Dols, Michael. Medieval Islamic Medicine: Ibn Riḍwān’s Treatise “On the Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Donadey, Anne. Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing between Worlds. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001. Durrell, Lawrence. Justine (1957). London: Faber & Faber, 1968. Eickelman, Dale F. “Traditional Islamic Learning and Ideas of the Person in the Twentieth Century.” Middle-Eastern Lives. The Practice of Biography and Self-Narrative. Ed. Martin Kramer. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. 35–88. Enderwitz, Susanne. Unsere Situation schuf unsere Erinnerungen. Palästinensische Autobiographien zwischen 1967 und 2000. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2002. Feraoun, Mouloud. Le fils du pauvre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1950. Fliedner, Stephan. ‘Alī Mubārak und seine Ḫiṭaṭ: Kommentierte Übersetzung der Autobiographie und Werkbesprechung. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1990. Frayḥa, Anīs. Isma‘ yā Riḍā! (1956) Beirut: Dār al-maṭbū‘āt al-muṣawwara, 5th ed. 1981. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and practice.” The Private Self. Theory and practice of women’s autobiographical writing. Ed. Shari Benstock. London: Routledge, 1988. 34–62. Ghamdi, Saleh al-. Autobiography in Classical Arabic Literature: an ignored genre. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989. Ghazālī, Muḥammad al-. al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl. Cairo: al-Maktab al-fannī, 1961 [“Deliverance from Error.” The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazālī. Trans. W. Montgomery Watt. London: Allen and Unwin, 1953. 17–92; Al-Ghazali’s Path to Sufism, his Deliverance from Error. Trans. Richard J. McCarthy. Fons Vitae: Louisville, 2006]. Ghazālī, Zaynab al-. Ayyām min ḥayātī (1977). Cairo: Dār al-shurūq, 1989 [Return of the Pharao. Trans. Mokrane Goezzou. Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2006]. Ghazoul, Ferial, ed. The Language of the Self: Autobiographies and Testimonies. Special issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 22 (2002). Gibb, Hamilton A.R. “Islamic Biographical Literature.” Historians of the Middle East. Ed. Bernard Lewis and P.M. Holt. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. 54–58. Gohlman, William. The Life of Ibn Sina: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. Albany: SUNY Press, 1974. Goitein, Shlomo D. “Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam.” Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam. Ed. Amin Banani and Speros Vryonis. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977. 3–17. Goodman, L.E. “al-Rāzī.” The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Leiden: Brill, 2nd ed. 1995. 474a–477b. Grunebaum, Gustav E. von. “Literature in the Context of Islamic Civilization.” Oriens 20 (1967): 1–14. Guérin, Jeanyves. Albert Memmi: Ecrivain et sociologue. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Gutas, Dimitri. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works. Leiden: Brill, 1988.

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 889

Guth, Stephan. “Why Novels – Not Autobiographies? An essay in the analysis of a historical debate.” Writing the Self. Autobiographical writing in modern Arabic literature. Ed. Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor and Stefan Wild. London: Saqi Books, 1998. 139–147. Haarmann, Ulrich. “The Plight of the Self-Appointed Genius – Muṣṭafā ‘Alī.” Arabica 38 (1991): 73–86. Ḥakīm, Tawfīq al-. Sijn al-‘umr (1964). Cairo: Maktabat al-ādāb, 1990 [The Prison of Life: An auto­ biographical essay. Trans. Pierre Cachia. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1992]. Hassan, Waïl S. “Arab-American Autobiography and the Reinvention of Identity: Two Egyptian ­Negotiations.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 22 (2002): 7–35. Häusler, Martina. Fiktive ägyptische Autobiographien der zwanziger und dreißiger Jahre. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 1990. Haykal, Muḥammad Ḥusayn. Zaynab (1913). Cairo: Dār al-ma‘ārif, 1974 [Zaynab. Trans. J.M. Grinsted. London: Darf, 1989]. Haykal, Yūsuf. Ayyām al-ṣibā. Ṣuwar min al-ḥayāt wa-ṣafaḥāt min al-tārīkh. Amman: Dār al-Jalīl li-lnashr, 1988. Haykal, Yūsuf. Rabī‘ al-ḥayāt. Amman: Dār al-Jalīl li-l-nashr, 1988. Hornung, Alfred, and Ernstpeter Ruhe. Postcolonialism & Autobiography. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā. al-Ayyām (1929, 1939, 1967). 3 vols. Cairo: Markaz al-Ahrām li-l-tawzī‘ wa-l-nashr, 1992 [Hussein, Taha. An Egyptian Childhood. Trans. E.H. Paxton. London: Routledge, 1932; The Stream of Days. A student at the Azhar. Trans. Hilary Wayment. London/New York/Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948; A Passage to France. Trans. Kenneth Cragg. Leiden: Brill, 1976]. Ibn abī Uṣaybi‘a. ‘Uyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’. 2 vols. Ed. Nizār Riḍā. Beirut: Dār maktabat al-ḥayāt, 1965. Ibn ‘Ajība, Aḥmad. al-Fahrasa. Ed. ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Ḥamdān. Beirut: Dār al-ghad al-‘arabī, 1990. Ibn Buluggīn, ‘Abd Allāh. Mudhakkirāt al-amīr ‘Abd Allāh ākhir mulūk Banī Zīrī bi-Gharnāṭa al-musammā bi-kitāb al-tibyān. Ed. E. Lévi-Provençal. Cairo: Dār al-ma‘ārif, 1955 [The Tibyan: Memoirs of ‘Abd Allāh b. Buluggīn, Last Zīrid Amīr of Granada. Trans. Amin T. Tibi. Leiden: Brill, 1986]. Ibn Ḥazm, ‘Alī b. Aḥmad. Ṭawq al-ḥamāma fī al-ulfa wa-l-ullāf. Ed. Ḥasan Kāmil al-Ṣayrafī. Cairo: al-Maktab al-tijāriyya al-kubrā, 1950 [The Ring of the Dove, by Ibn Hazm. Trans. A.J. Arberry. London: Luzac, 1953]. Ibn Isḥāq, Muḥammad: Das Leben Muhammed’s. Vol. I. Ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld Göttingen: Dieterichsche Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1858 [The Life of Muhammad (1955). Trans. Alfred Guillaume. Oxford University Press: Karachi, 1990]. Ibn Khaldūn, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān. al-Ta’rīf bi-Ibn Khaldūn wa-riḥlatih gharban wa-sharqan. Ed. M. al-Ṭanjī. Cairo: Lajnat al-ta’līf wa-l-tarjama wa-l-nashr, 1951 [Ibn Khaldūn and Tamerlane. Partial trans. Walter Fischel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952]. Ibn al-Qifṭī. Ta’rīkh al-ḥukamā’. Ed. J. Lippert. Leipzig: Dieterich, 1903. Ibn Tūnis, ‘Adda. al-Rauḍa al-saniyya. Mostaghanem: al-Maṭba‘a al-‘alawiyya, 1936. Iṣfahānī, ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-. Sanā al-barq al-shāmī, by al-Fatḥ b. ‘Alī al-Bundarī. Ed. Fatḥiyya al-Nabarāwī. Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1979. Iṣfahānī, ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-. al-Barq al-shāmī. Vol. III. Ed. Muṣṭafā al-Hayarī; Vol. V. Ed. Fāliḥ Ḥusayn. Amman: ‘A.H. Shuman, 1986–1987. Jabrā, Jabrā Ibrāhīm. al-Baḥth ‘an Walīd Mas‘ūd (1987). Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1990 [In Search of Walid Masoud. Trans. Adnan Haydar and Roger Allen. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000]. Jabrā, Jabrā Ibrāhīm. al-Bi’r al-ūlā. Fuṣūl min sīra dhātiyya (1987). Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 2009 [The First Well. A Bethlehem Boyhood. Trans. Issa J. Boullata. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1995].

890 

 2 The Arab World

Jabrā, Jabrā Ibrāhīm. Shāri‘ al-amīrāt. Fuṣūl min sīra dhātiyya. Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘arabiyya li-l-dirāsāt wa-l-nashr, 1994 [Princesses’ Street. Baghdad Memoirs. Trans. Issa J. Boullata. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2005]. Kavolis, Vytautas. “Histories of Selfhood, Maps of Sociability.” Designs of Selfhood. Ed. Vytautas Kavolis. Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. 15–103. Kelly, Debra. Autobiography and Independence. Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Khadda, Naget. “Autobiographie et structuration du sujet acculturé dans Le Fils du Pauvre de Mouloud Feraoun.” Itinéraires et Contacts de Cultures – Special issue: Autobiographies et récits de vie en Afrique 13 (1991): 79–85. Khalīfa, Saḥar. Mudhakkirāt imra’a ghayr wāqi‘iyya. Beirut: Dār al-ādāb, 1986. Khalīl, Khalīl Ḥasan. al-Wisiyya. Cairo: al-Hay’a al-miṣriyya al-‘āmma li-l-kitāb, 1983. Kharrāṭ, Idwār al-. Turābuhā za‘farān. Cairo: Dār al-mustaqbal al-‘arabī, 1986 [City of Saffron. Trans. Frances Liardet. London/New York: Quartet Books, 1989]. Kharrāṭ, Idwār al-. Yā banāt Iskandariyya. Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1990 [Girls of Alexandria. Trans. Frances Liardet. Northampton: Interlink Pub Group Inc., 1998]. Khatibi, Abdelkébir. Le roman maghrébin. Paris: Maspéro, 1968. Khatibi, Abdelkébir. La mémoire tatouée (1971). Paris: Denoël, 1979. Khoury, Nuha N.N. “The Autobiography of Ibn al-‘Adīm as told to Yāqūt al-Rūmī.” Edebiyât – Special Issue – Arabic Autobiography 7.2 (1997): 289–311. Khuḍayrī, Batūl. Kam badat al-samā’ qarība. Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘arabiyya li-l-dirāsāt wa-lnashr, 1999 [A Sky so Close. Trans. Muhayman Jamil. New York: Anchor Books, 2001]. Khūrī, Kūlīt: Ayyām ma‘ahu. Beirut: Dār al-kutub, 1959. Kīlānī, Najīb al-. Lamaḥāt min ḥayātī. 3 vols. Beirut: Dār al-shurūq, 1984. Killito, Abdelfattah. “al-Yūsī.” The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Leiden: Brill, 2nd ed. 2002. 351b–352a. Kilpatrick, Hilary. “Autobiography and Classical Arabic Literature.” Journal of Arabic Literature 22 (1991): 1–20. Kishk, ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd. Qiṣṣat ayyāmī. Mudhakkirāt al-Shaykh Kishk. Cairo: al-Mukhtār al-islāmī, n.  d. Kramer, Martin. “Introduction.” Middle Eastern Lives. The Practice of Biography and Self-Narration. Ed. Martin Kramer. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. 1–19. Kraus, Paul. “Raziana I: La conduite du philosophe.” Orientalia 4 (1935): 300–334. Lang, Candace. “Autobiography in the Aftermath of Romanticism.” Diacritics 12 (1982): – 16. Lewis, Bernard. “First-Person Narrative in the Middle East.” Middle-Eastern Lives. The Practice of Biography and Self-Narrative. Ed. Martin Kramer. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. 20–34. Lings, Martin. A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, Shaikh Ahmad al-‘Alawī: His spiritual heritage and legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Lowry, Joseph. “Time, Form, and Self: The Autobiography of Abū Shāma.” Edebiyât – Special Issue – Arabic Autobiography 7.2 (1997): 313–325. Maḥmūd, ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm. al-Ḥamdu lillāh, hādhihi ḥayātī (1976). Cairo: Dār al-ma‘ārif, 1985. Maḥmūd, Ghāda Muḥammad. Ammā hādhihi... fa-raqṣatī anā. Cairo: Dār al-shurūq, 2008. Makdisi, Jean Said. Teta, Mother, and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir. London: Saqi Books, 2005. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Blindness & Autobiography. Al-Ayyām of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word. Gender and discourse in Arabo-Islamic writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Medicines of the Soul. Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Trans­ national Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 891

Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg (1924). Frankfurt a.  M.: Fischer, 2002 [The Magic Mountain. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: The Modern Library, 1952]. Marzolph, Ulrich. “Kalila und Dimna.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 3rd ed. 2009. 587–594. Massignon, Louis: Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulman. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1922. Māzinī, Ibrāhim al-. Ibrāhim al-kātib (1931). Cairo: Dār al-shurūq, 2009 [Ibrahim the Writer. Trans. Magdi Wahba. Cairo: al-Hay’a al-miṣriyya al-‘āmma li-l-kitāb, 1976]. Māzinī, Ibrāhim al-. Qiṣṣat ḥayāt (1943). Cairo: al-Dār al-qawmiyya, n.  d. Memmi, Albert. La statue du sel. Paris: Gallimard, 1953 [The Pillar of Salt. Trans. Edouard Roditi. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992]. Memmi, Albert. Agar. Paris: Éditions Corréa/Buchet Chastel, 1955 [Strangers. Trans. Brian Rhys. London: Elek Books, 1955]. Mernissi, Fatima. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. New York: Perseusbooks, 1995 (also published under the title The Harem Within: Tales of a Moroccan Girlhood. London: transworld 1995). Meyerhof, Max. “Autobiographische Bruchstücke Galens aus arabischen Quellen.” Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 22 (1929): 72–86. Michon, J.-L. L’autobiographie (fahrasa) du soufi marocain Aḥmad ibn ‘Ajība (1747–1809). Trans. J.-L. Michon. Leiden: Brill, 1969. Milani, Farzaneh. “Veiled Voices: Women’s Autobiographies in Iran.” Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran. Ed. Afsaneh Najmabadi. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. 2–12. Mīna, Ḥannā. Baqāyā ṣuwar (1975). Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1984 [Fragments of Memory. A story of a Syrian family. Trans. Olive Kenny and Lorne Kenny. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993]. Mīna, Ḥannā. al-Mustanqa‘ (1977). Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1986. Miquel, André. “Introduction.” Usāma Ibn Munqidh. Des enseignements de la vie. Souvenirs d’un gentilhomme syrien du temps des croisades. Ed. André Miquel. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1983. Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. III.2. Frankfurt a.  M.: Schulte-Bumke, 1962. de Moor, Ed. “Autobiography, Theory and Practice: The case of al-Ayyām.” Writing the Self. Autobiographical writing in modern Arabic literature. Ed. Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor, Stefan Wild. London: Saqi Books, 1998. 139–147. Moraux, Paul. Galien de Pergame: souvenirs d’un médecin. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985. Muḥāsibī, Abū ‘Abd Allāh Ḥārith. al-Waṣāyā. Ed. ‘Abd al-Qādir Aḥmad ‘Aṭā. Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-‘ilmiyya, 1986. Müller, Christian. “Ibn Munqiḏ.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 3rd ed. 2009. 31–32. Munīf, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān. Sīrat madīna. ‘Ammān fī al-arba‘īnāt. Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘arabiyya li-ldirāsāt wa-l-nashr, 1994 [Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman. Trans. Samira Kawar. London: Quartet Books, 1998]. Mūsā, Salāma. Tarbiyat Salāma Mūsā (1947). Cairo: Mu’assasat Hindāwī li-l-ta‘līm wa-l-thaqāfa, 2014 [The Education of Salāma Mūsā. Trans. L.O. Schuman. Leiden: Brill, 1961]. Naṣrallāh, Īmīlī. Ṭuyur Aylūl. Beirut: Dār al-ahliyya, 1962. Neumann, Bernd. Identität und Rollenzwang. Zur Theorie der Autobiographie. Frankfurt a.  M.: Athenäum, 1970. Nijland, Cornelis. Mikhā’īl Nu‘ayma. Promoter of the Arabic Literary Revival. Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1975. Nowaihi, Magda al-. “Memory and Imagination in Edwar al-Kharrat’s Turābuhā za‘farān.” Journal of Arabic Literature 25 (1995): 34–57.

892 

 2 The Arab World

Nu‘ayma, Mikhā’īl. Sab‘ūn. 3 vols. Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1959–1960. Ostle, Robin. “The Arab World.” Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East – 1850–1970. London/New York: Routledge, 1991. 104–115. Ostle, Robin. “Autobiography in the modern period.” Individual and Society in the Mediterranean Muslim World. Issues and Sources. Ed. Robert Ilbert and Randi Deguilhem. Aix-en-Provence: European Science Foundation, 1998. 89–97. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Qaraḥ ‘Alī, Muḥammad. Suṭur min ḥayātī. Beirut: Mu’assasat Nawfal, 1988. Quṭb, Sayyid. Ṭifl min al-qarya (1945). Beirut: Dār al-shurūq, 1973 [A Child from the Village. Trans. John Calvert and William Shepard. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004]. Radtke, Bernd, and John O’Kane. The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism. Two works by al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996. Ramaḍān, Sumayya. Awrāq al-narjis. Cairo: Dār al-sharqiyyāt, 2001 [Leaves of Narcissus. Trans. Marilyn Booth. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002]. Rāzī, Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyā’ al-. Rasā’il falsafiyya li-Abī Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyā al-Rāzī. Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Murtaḍiyya, 1939. Reynolds, Dwight F. “Childhood in One Thousand Years of Arabic Autobiography.” Edebiyât – Special Issue – Arabic Autobiography 7.2 (1997): 379–392. Reynolds, Dwight F. “‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī’s sixteenth-century defense of autobiography.” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 4.1–2 (1997–1998): 122–137. Reynolds, Dwight F. “Review of ‘In My Childhood’”. International Journal of Middle East Studies 31.2 (1999): 288–289. Reynolds, Dwight F. Interpreting the Self. Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition. Berkeley/ Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2001. Ringrose, Priscilla. Assia Djebar. In Dialogue with Feminism. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006. Rooke, Tetz. ‘In My Childhood.’A Study of Arabic Autobiography. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1997. Rosenthal, Franz. “Die arabische Autobiographie.” Studia Arabica 1 (1937): 1–40. Rosenthal, Franz. A History of Muslim Historiography (1952). Leiden: Brill, 1968. Ruete, Emily. An Arabian Princess between Two Worlds. Ed. E. van Donzel. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Sa‘dāwī, Nawāl al-. Mudhakkirāt ṭabība (1958). Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1980 [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. Trans. Catherine Cobham. London: Saqi Books, 1988]. Sa‘dāwī, Nawāl al-. Mudhakkirātī fī sijn al-nisā’. Cairo: Dār al-mustaqbal al-‘arabī, 1984 [Memoirs from the Women’s Prison. Trans. Marilyn Booth. London: Women’s Press, 1986]. Sa‘dāwī, Nawāl al-. Riḥlātī fī al-‘ālam. Cairo: Dār nashr taḍāmun al-mar’a al-‘arabiyya, 1987 [My Travels around the World. Trans. Shirley Eber. London: Methuen, 1991]. Sa‘dāwī, Nawāl al-. Awrāqī ḥayātī. 3 vols. Cairo: Dār al-hilāl, 1995–2001 [A Daughter of Isis. The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi. Trans. Sharif Hetata. London: Zed Books, 1999; Walking Through Fire. A Life of Nawal El Saadawi. Trans. Sharif Hetata. London: Zed Books, 2002]. Sa‘dāwī, Nawāl al-. al-Thawrāt al-‘arabiyya. Beirut: Shirkat al-maṭbū‘āt li-l-tawzī‘ wa-l-nashr, 2013. Said, Edward. Out of Place. New York: A. Knopf, 1999. Samaw‘al b. Yaḥyā al-Maghribī. Samau‘al al-Maghribī: Ifḥām al-Yahūd “Silencing the Jews”. Ed. and trans. Moshe Perlman. New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1964. Sartain, Elizabeth. Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī. Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Sharābī, Hishām. al-Jamr wa-l-ramād. Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalī‘a li-l-ṭabā‘a wa-l-nashr, 1978 [Ambers and Ashes. Trans. Issa Boullata. Northampton: Interlink Pub Group Inc., 2007]. Sharābī, Hishām. Ṣuwar al-māḍī. Sīra dhātiyya. Beirut. Dār Nilsūn al-Suwayd, 1993. Sha‘rānī, ‘Abd al-Wahhāb b. Aḥmad al-. Laṭā’if al-minan wa-l-akhlāq fī wujūb al-taḥadduth bi-ni‘mat

2.3 Modern Autobiography 

 893

Allāh ‘alā al-iṭlāq. Cairo: ‘Ālam al-fikr, 1938–1939 [Il Libro dei Doni. Ed and trans. Virginia Vacca. Naples: Istituto Orientale, 1972]. Sharawi Lafranchi, Samia. Casting off the Veil. The life of Hudā Sha‘rāwī. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. Sha‘rāwī, Huda. Mudhakkirāt rā’idat al-mar’a al-‘arabiyya al-ḥadītha Hudā Sha‘rāwī. Ed. ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Fahmī al-Mursī. Cairo: Dār al-hilāl, 1981 [Harem Years. The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist. Ed. and trans. Margot Badran. London: Virago Press, 1986]. Sha‘rāwī, Muḥammad Mitwallī. Ḥayātī min Daqādūs ilā al-wizāra. Bi-qalam Muḥammad Ṣafwat al-Amīn. Alexandria: Qāyitbāy, 1992. Shaykh, Ḥanān al-. Misk al-ghazāl. Beirut: Dār al-ādāb, 1986 [Women of Sand and Myrrh. Trans. Catherine Cobham. London: Quartet Books, 1989]. Shidyāq, Aḥmad Fāris al-. al-Sāq ‘alā al-sāq fīmā huwa al-Faryāq. Ed. N.W. Khāzin. Beirut: Dār maktabat al-ḥayāt, 1966 [Leg over Leg or The Turtle in the Tree Concerning The Fāriyāq What Manner of Creature Might He Be. 4 vols. Trans. Humphrey Davis. New York: New York University Press, 2014]. Shīrāzī, al-Mu’ayyad al-. Sīrat al-Mu’ayyad fī al-dīn dā‘ī al-du‘āt. Ed. M.K. Ḥusayn. Cairo: Dār al-kutub, 1949 [Excerpts in Jawad Muscati and Khan Bahadur Moulvi. Life and Lectures of the Grand Missionary Al-Muayyad-Fid-Din al-Shirazi. Karachi: Ismailia Association of West Pakistan, 1950]. Shuiskii, Sergej A. “Some Observations on Modern Arabic Autobiography.” Journal of Arabic Literature 13 (1982): 111–123. Shukrī, Muḥammad. al-Khubz al-ḥāfī (1973). London: Saqi Books, 1982 [Choukri, Mohamed. For Bread Alone. Trans. Paul Bowles. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1987]. Shukrī, Muḥammad. al-Shuṭṭār. London: Saqi Books, 1992 [Choukri, Mohamed. Streetwise. Trans. Ed Emory. London: Saqi Books, 1996]. Smith, Margaret. An Early Mystic of Baghdad: A Study of the Life and Teaching of Ḥārith b. Asad al-Muhāsibī (1935). Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1974. Soueif, Ahdaf. Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the subaltern speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313. Starr, Deborah. Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt. London/New York: Routledge, 2009. Suyūṭī, Jalāl al-Dīn al-. Kitāb al-taḥadduth bi-ni‘mat Allāh. Ed. E.M. Sartain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Ṭahṭāwī, Rifā‘a Rāfi‘ al-. Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz (1835). Cairo: Mu’assasat Hindāwī li-l-ta‘līm wa-l-thaqāfa, 2012 [An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–31). Trans. Daniel Newman. London: Saqi Books, 2011]. Ṭaymūriyya, ‘Ā’isha al-. Natā’ij al-aḥwāl fī aqwāl wa l-af‘āl. Cairo: Maṭba‘at Muḥammad Afandī Muṣṭafā, 1888. Tirmidhī, Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Ḥakīm al-. Khatm al-awliyā’. Ed ‘Uthmān Yaḥyā. Beirut: Imprimérie Catholique, 1965. Tūkhī, ‘Abdallāh al-. ‘Aynān ‘alā al-ṭarīq. Riwāyat ḥayāt. Cairo: Rūz al-Yūsuf, 1981. Ṭūqān, Fadwā. Riḥla ṣa‘ba riḥla jabaliyya. Acre: Dār al-aswār, 1985 [A Mountainous Journey. An Autobiography. Trans. Olive Kenny. London: The Women’s Press, 1990]. Ṭūqān, Fadwā. al-Riḥla al-aṣ‘ab. Amman: Dār al-shurūq, 1993. Turki, Fawwaz. The Disinherited. Journal of a Palestinian Exile. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Turki, Fawwaz. Exile’s Return. The making of a Palestinian American. New York/Toronto: The Free Press, 1994. Usāma b. Munqidh. Kitāb al-i‘tibār. Ed. Philip K. Hitti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930

894 

 2 The Arab World

[An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usāmah Ibn-Mundqidh. Trans. Philip K. Hitti (1929). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987]. Vinson, Pauline Homsi. “A Muslim Woman writes Back. Leila Abouzeid’s Return to Childhood. The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman.” Arab Women’s Lives Retold. Ed. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. 90–107. Watt, W. Montgomery. Muslim Intellectual: A Study of Al-Ghazālī. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963. Wild, Stefan. “Searching for Beginnings in Modern Arabic Autobiography.” Writing the Self. Autobiographical writing in modern Arabic literature. Ed. Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor and Stefan Wild. London: Saqi Books, 1998. 82–99. Winter, Michael. “al-Sha‘rānī.” The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Leiden: Brill, 2nd ed. 1997. 316a–316b. Yāqūt (b. ‘Abd Allāh al-Rūmī al-Ḥamawī). Mu‘jam al-udabā’: irshād al-arīb ilā ma‘rifat al-adīb. 7 vols. Ed. Iḥsān ‘Abbās. Beirut: Dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1993. Yazbek, Samar. A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution. Trans. Max Weiss. London: Haus Publishing Ltd., 2011. Young, M.J.L. “Medieval Arabic Autobiography.” Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning, and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period. Ed. M.J.L. Young, J.D. Latham and R.B. Serjeant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 183–187. Yūsī, Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan al-. al-Muḥāḍarāt fī al-adab wa-l-lugha (1982). Ed. Muḥammad Ḥājjī and Aḥmad al-Sharqāwī Iqbāl. 2 vols. Beirut: Dār al-gharb al islāmī, 2006. Yūsī, Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan al-. al-Fahrasa. Ed. Zakariyyā al-Khuthayrī (Khathīrī). Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-‘ilmiyya, 2009. Zaydān, Jurjī. Mudhakkirāt Jurjī Zaydān. Ed. Ṣalāh al-Dīn al-Munajjid. Beirut: Kitāb al-jadīd, 1968 [Ğurğī Zaydān, His Life and Thought. Trans. Thomas Philipp. Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 1979]. Zonis, Marvin. “Autobiography and Biography in the Middle East: A Plea for Psychopolitical Studies.” Middle Eastern Lives. The Practice of Biography and Self-Narration. Ed. Martin Kramer. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. 60–88.

Further Reading Allen, Roger. The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982. Bauer, Thomas. Die Kultur der Ambiguität. Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen (Insel), 2001. Giffen, Lois. Ibn Ḥazm and the Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Ed. S.K. Jayyusi. Leiden: Brill, 1992. 420–442. Golley, Nawar Al-Hassan: Shahrazad Tells Her Story. Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Grunebaum, G.E. von. Medieval Islam. A study in cultural orientation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946. Nash, Geoffry P. “From Harem to Harvard: Cross-Cultural Memoir in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage.” Arab Voices in the Diaspora. Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature. Ed. Layla Al Maleh. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009. 351–370. Reichmuth, Stefan, ed. Zwischen Alltag und Schriftkultur: Horizonte des Individuellen in der ara­bi­ schen Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Ergon, 2008. Toorawa, Shawkat M. Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture. A ninth century bookman in Baghdad. London/New York: Routledge, 2005.

3 Africa

3.1 Introduction Susanne Gehrmann

In an influential essay, the French philosopher Georges Gusdorf writes in 1956: “il ne semble pas que l’autobiographie se soit jamais manifestée en dehors de notre aire culturelle; on dirait qu’elle traduit un souci particulier à l’homme d’Occident” [“autobiography is not to be found outside our cultural area; one would say that it expresses a concern peculiar to Western man”] (1956, 105 [1980, 29]). A few years later, Gusdorf’s Eurocentric stance is confirmed by the English literary critic Roy Pascal’s assertion that “there is no doubt that autobiography is essentially European” (1960, 22). On the verge of African independence, such claims exclude the then largely still colonized and discursively primitivized Africa from autobiography studies. In the 1970s, structuralist and rhetorical concepts as well as poststructuralist deconstructions of the autobiographical genre open up new possibilities for the recognition of African autobiographical forms, as they put the normativity of the genre and the authority of the Western canon into question. Philippe Lejeune’s influential reception-oriented Pacte autobiographique (1975) and his minimalistic structuralist definition of the genre as “Récit retrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” [“Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his existence, where the focus is on the individual life, in particular the story of his personality”] (1975, 14 [1989, 4]) made it possible to consider a growing number of African texts as autobiographies (Jaccomard and Volet 1992), even if Lejeune’s definition excludes oral and lyrical forms of self-referentiality. James Olney’s figurative approach to autobiographies as Metaphors of the Self (1972) rejects normative genre boundaries in favor of an anthropological understanding of the human desire to order, but also to transcend the self and his/her lifestory through figurative, metaphorical “pattern-making creativity” (1972, 38–39) that can be expressed in a variety of forms. Moreover, the poststructuralist dismissal of the very possibility of autobio­graphy as a referential genre ironically contradicts the growing importance of postcolonial autobiography in the decades after independence, “at the very moment when Africans and others finally had sufficient access to literacy and, even more important, publication, autobiography should be declared nonexistent” (Berger 2010, 34). Paradoxically, Paul de Man’s and Jacques Derrida’s dismantling rejection of the genre and hence of the authority of the Western autobiographical canon did nevertheless help African and other non-Western forms of self-referential narrativesto be taken into account in the now fluid continuum of a “non-genre” (Benesch 1994, 133). Olney’s Tell me Africa: An Approach to African Literature (1973), one of first monographs ever devoted to European language literature in Africa, explicitly looks at African writing through the prism of self-writing. Olney asserts that a confessional-autobiographical pattern is constitutive for African literatures. More recently, Edgard https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-097

898 

 3 Africa

Sankara stresses the strength of “the autobiographical ‘cachet’ in African literature” (2011, 19) and Roger Berger confirms that “[d]espite Western autobiographical theory’s ongoing efforts to render it impossible, African autobiography thrives” (2010, 32). The controversy around the non-existence of African autobiography has often been posed as a problem of either the supposed lacking or incomplete sense of individuality in African societies. In the very monograph in which he foregrounds the self-narrating gesture in African literatures, Olney doubts that African autobiographers express the deep sense of individuality which is constitutive for the Western genre. He stresses the importance of community and a collective consciousness for African subjects and concludes that the expression of individual identity always merges “with group identity so that the part represents the whole, the whole is embodied and personified in the part” (Olney 1973, 76). As the African writer, according to Olney, does not stress his/her uniqueness, but always narrates the life of a group, the American critic comes up with the term ‘autophylography’ to replace ‘autobiography’ in an African context. However, the importance of collective identities in African cultures – be they based on familial, ethnic, gender, age, religious, nationalist or political grounds – does not necessarily mean that a strong sense of individual self is lacking in African concepts of selfhood. Indeed, the Nigerian literary critic, Tony Afejuku, strikes back at such disabling views on African individual subjectivities when he posits that African autobiographical writers do not portraythemselves as alienated individuals within their societies as Western autobio­ graphers mostly do. They write as inseparable and indistinguishable parts of the group and we perceive that the works are more of group, rather than personal or private autobiographies. [...] [T]he individual realizes his personality not as an alienated ego but as an integral member of the community (Afejuku 1990, 689).

Afejuku thus valorizes the importance of collective identities without diminishing the existence of individual personalities. Because of the controversy surrounding the ‘proper practice’ of autobiographical writing in non-Western cultures, some critics prefer to use the concept of life-writing “to describe work which is autobiographical without necessarily observing the classical rules of the genre” (Moore-Gilbert 2009, 131). However, life-writing includes biography and excludes oral self-referential genres, the latter being crucial for what could preferably be called the ‘African autobiographical continuum’. In fact, the Greek word ‘graphein’ that is contained in the three partite word ‘auto/bio/graphy’, originally implies more than alphabetical writing, as it also embraces drawing and tracing in general. Metonymically, the broader visual and tactile activity of ‘graphein’ can thus be expanded to oral performance in which the voice and body of the performer do also trace a lyrical or narrative text. The following overview will as much as possible make use of the generic designations which African authors choose and thus claim for their texts. Meanwhile the umbrella terms ‘autobiographical forms’ and ‘life narratives’ will also frequently be employed. Finally, Leigh Gilmore’s 1994 proposal from a

3.1 Introduction 

 899

feminist theoretical position to use the plural form ‘autobiographics’, in order to mark the variability and instability of a generic continuum that originates from a normative male European canon on the one hand and from other cultural, such as female, forms of expression on the other hand, is also useful with regards to Africa in particular, and non-Western cultures in general. The concept of classical autobiography has indeed been contradicted and subverted since its very invention in the nineteenth century. The structural and ideological kinship between feminism and postcolonialism suffices to substantiate the purpose of using the plural autobiographics, and not simply autobiographies, as a concept that marks difference, and indeed differance in Derrida’s sense. Postcolonialism as an epistemological paradigm clearly deals with the intellectual and artistic responses of (formerly) colonized subjects to the situation of colonialism and its aftermaths. In this respect, every African text that deals critically with colonialism and the socio-political structures in Africa that it has generated can be considered as postcolonial – whether it was written during colonialism or after formal independence. In this chapter the attribute ‘postcolonial’ without hyphen will therefore be used for an attitude of reflection and resistance to colonial ideologies. In the interest of historical periodization, ‘post-colonial’ with hyphen will be used to mark the timeline after independence. Hence, the section “Post-colonial times” deals with African autobiographical texts published after formal independence only, while the section “Colonial times” refers to texts written during formal colonization, that is from the second half of the nineteenth century onward to at least 1960, when the majority of African countries located South of the Sahara were granted independence. However, in the case of South Africa the indelible historical marker of Apartheid will be considered as the watershed between colonial and post-colonial times. Although formally independent from the colonizing European powers as early as 1931, South Africa’s White minority rule and the Apartheid system are understood as a prolonged form of colonialism. Therefore, 1994 is considered as the year of South Africa’s official entry into the post-colonial period. The ‘Africa’ chapter of this handbook deals with Africa South of the Sahara only, given that Northern Africa is included in the section on autobiography in the Arab world. The decision to continue with this classical, yet epistemologically questionable division of the African continent was agreed upon for pragmatic reasons and does not imply that the Sahara should be considered as a fixed cultural boundary. Linda Warley underlines that “spatial location is crucial to post-colonial autobiographical self-representation, and that the forgetting of the locatedness of the subject speaks of an imperialist assumption of centrality that has never been possible for the post-colonial writer” (1993, 23). Indeed, since the era of the slave trade and of colonial projects of settlement and displacement, followed by the departure of the first generations of Oxbridge and Paris trained African elites, African autobiographical narratives have often been inspired by intra- and transcontinental experiences of dislocation and migration. The mobility across spaces and cultural environments challenges new

900 

 3 Africa

forms of construction of the self that put established genres, narrative forms, canons and languages into question. In the following sections, autobiographical writing by first generation African migrants will therefore be taken into account, while long term established African Diasporas such as the African American and Caribbean Diasporas will be dealt with in the respective chapters on the Americas. Given the limited access to pre-colonial and colonial sources on the one hand, and the proliferation of African autobiographical writing in post-colonial times on the other, part three of the Africa chapter will be substantially more exhaustive than parts one and two.

3.2 Pre-colonial Times Susanne Gehrmann

Any research into pre-colonial African history and literatures faces the problem of sources. Given that book print was unknown prior to colonization, the majority of pre-colonial societies relied on oral performance and transmission of both lyrical and narrative texts. In this context of orality, it is impossible to trace back genres to their exact dates of emergence. Moreover, there is a lack of knowledge about oral-literary forms that may have existed, but which are now extint. However, it is a fallacy to claim that script was utterly unknown in Africa South of the Sahara prior to European colonization, rather, pre-colonial African scripts constitute a neglected field of research, a fact which Meikal Mumin aptly calls “understudied literacy” (2014, 41). Original alphabets of some African languages existed before colonization and islamization. In addition graphic sign scripts on media such as textiles and pottery constitute a widespread practice of ‘graphein’ that dates back to pre-colonial times (Faïk-Nzuji 1992; Battestini 1997; Kootz and Paasch 2008). In Islamized zones of Africa, writing in Arabic which has, sporadically, been in use as early as the twelfth century (Hunwick 1995b, 1), flourished between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Arabic script was used either for religious, scholarly and literary writing in Arabic or adapted for writing in as many as at least eighty African languages (Mumin 2014, 44), among them important ‘linguae francae’ such as Hausa, Wolof, Fulfulde, Swahili, Yoruba and Amharic. ‘Ajami’, derived from the Arabic root for ‘foreign’, is the umbrella term for those scripts. However, writing was not widespread among the population, but rather the privilege of a learned class. Therefore, scholars speak of “restricted literacy” (Humery 2014, 173). In spite of the colonial rupture that largely imposed the Latin alphabet, writing in Arabic script has not disappeared in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries (Mumin and Versteegh 2014).

Oral Autobiographical Forms The Nigerian researchers Ademola Dasylva and Remy Oriaku assert that “most, if not all forms of oral literature are either steeped in auto/biography or characterized primarily by self-narration” (2010, 303). For the African context, they propose to distinguish between on the one hand the oral or primary auto/biography and, on the other hand, the written or secondary auto/biography. […] Although, the primary auto/biography neither shares the same medium nor concept with its secondary counterpart in the absolute sense, the text and objectives are largely the same, and pervade the entire genres of oral literature (Dasylva and Oriaku 2010, 304).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-098

902 

 3 Africa

Oral performance practices of autobiographical narrative or lyrical forms that still exist in Africa today are often considered as ageless, as belonging to traditions which reach back to several centuries. However, given that orality is never static, it is difficult to say, how much those forms have changed over time. As Alabi (2005, 9) points out, oral self-narrating in Africa is not moulded into one standardized form. Rather, diverse oral literary forms such as praise poetry, epics and folktales can comprise auto-narrative sections. Apart from epics as heroic long format biographies, oral narratives in general are likely to be rather restricted in time. They are performed in front of and addressed to a specific public. Hence, oral autobiographical narrative appears to be “often fragmentary, but always dialogical and interactive” (Lüsebrink 2003, 2). In Bantu speaking African cultures (which cover almost two thirds of the continent’s territory South of the Sahara) as well as in some West African cultures, lyrical autobiographical genres, which basically allow the performer to praise himself/herself in public, were widespread and are still in practice today, albeit with a tendency of decline (Yali-Manisi and Opland 2006, 119). In his seminal study Éloge de soi, éloge de l’autre [‘Praise of the Self, praise of the Other’] (2003), based on extensive fieldwork, the Congolese researcher Ngo Kabuta regards auto-panegyrics as a specific African tradition. These forms are characterized by a lyrical and metaphorical density and by a rhythmic speaking or chanting mode during their performances. The existence of precise names for the genre in many African languages (Kabuta 2003, 29–30) and specific language codes that reflect pre-colonial social orders proves that their long tradition can be traced back to pre-colonial times. In some cultures, self praise features as sub-genre of general panegyrics. For example, the Xhosa and Zulu word for praise poetry, ‘izibongo’, embodies both praise for others and self-praise (Mvika, Brown and Kigulu 2006, 132; Opland 1996, 97). In other cultures it has a specific generic name, and in some there are even clear generic distinctions between different types of selfpraise (as in Kinyarwanda [see Nsengimana 1996]). Self-praise can be impressively long as well as astonishingly short. The semiotics of these performances relies heavily on allusion, metaphorical density and body language, which can only be fully comprehended by a culturally initiated public. Thematically, self-praise concentrates on the physical and moral qualities of the speaker, his/her merits in society achieved through work, warfare, artistic merits or parenthood. Self-praise is always from an individual perspective (Kabuta 2003, 235). As a social act, performance is however community oriented and the boundaries between ‘biography’ and ‘autobiography’ are often blurred, as varieties of the same praise lines can be performed by either the celebrated subject or other people who praise him/her. As Coullie explains for ‘izibongo’, they are [e]ssentially community affiliated rites, with auditors participating in the performance and interrupting at appropriate moments with expression of encouragement. […] That the poems are essentially social acts of self-portrayal is manifest, also, in the fact that they are performed not only by the individual who is the subject of the poem, but also by her or his family and contemporaries. Thus where Western forms focus on the author as a source of and authority

3.2 Pre-colonial Times 

 903

for meaning, indigenous South African oral narrative forms emphasise the self-in-community (Coullie 1999, 66).

Oral forms of self-praise can best be understood as lyrical condensations of lifelines embedded in communal exchange; as such they are not comparable to full-fledged prose life narratives. However, similar to written autobiography, self-praise also “seek[s] to define a self, and to achieve a measure of permanence and immutability in the interpretation of identity” (Coullie 1999, 62). Referring to self-praise, names in particular can embody a full-fledged auto/biographical and poetical program of their own. Beyond official passport or religious names, in many communities children are given metaphorical praise names, which link them to either particular events or family bonds. During the course of life, more surnames and praise names are added on by members of the community or by oneself depending on one’s achievements, bravery, professional and marital affiliation, number of offsprings etc. These poetic names can be considered as short lyrical narratives. They are frequently constructed through metaphors, similes and hyperboles and amplified through relative clauses and appositions. In the extreme, a self-praise poem can exclusively consist of the declamation of honorific names, which display a great sense of value for the individual and offer a dense poetical program for the audience (Kabuta 2003, 135–136). Self-praise poems based on naming as an oral self-genre appear to be “highly intertextual, since they often comprise elements that are self-composed, others that are drawn from praises of friends, relatives, or ancestors, praises that are given by others, or that are simply part of the cultural currency of the society” (Mvika, Brown and Kigulu 2006, 132). Beyond the individual performer’s praise names, the recitation of names of one’s extended family and ancestors as well as of toponyms are equally an important part of self-praise, as the individual performer inscribes his/her own name into a collective network of interconnections and correlations (Kabuta 2003, 137). While the declamation of one’s own singular names functions as the main signature of the self-praise poem, at the same time genealogy and topography link the performer to his/her social group. The recitation of names generally stirs high emotions in African audiences (Kabuta 2003, 135). In other African cultures, the performance of praise and self-praise used to be and is still largely restricted to professional experts of orality. Within the dialectical continuum of Mande languages (stretching from Senegal to Ghana, with Mali and Guinea as heartlands), the noble classes of the stratified society that has existed since the empire of Old Mali were not allowed to speak out about themselves in public. It is up to the ‘griot’, the professional master of the word and of music (Hale 1998) to narrate and chant the genealogy of the nobles and to praise their deeds. However, as a member of a (traditionally endogamic) differentiated cast in the society, the ‘griot’ has himself/ herself the right to integrate his/her own oral auto-referential account into an oral performance, which is thus made up of a mixture of biographical and autobiographical elements (Okpewho 1992, 21–26).

904 

 3 Africa

The combination of auto-referential performance with epic poetry as a biographical praise of outstanding personalities is equally to be found in Yoruba culture, as explicated by Ademola Dasylva and Remy Oriaku: Usually, the characteristic self-inscription by the oral performer serves as a way of affirming his/ her expertise in the art and a way of introducing the subject and the theme before embarking on the epic journey the purpose of which is celebration of uniqueness and greatness of the subject (Dasylva and Oriaku 2010, 304).

Hunter chants are quoted as another oral autobiographical genre in West Africa (Dasylva and Oriaku 2010, 305).

Autobiographical Writing in African Languages and Arabic Thanks to the (yet uncompleted) series on the Arabic Literature of Africa (Vol. I–V, 1994–2016) as part of the larger Brill Handbook of Oriental Studies, a comprehensive overview on the published and unpublished Arabic and Ajami scripts of South of the Sahara is now available for the regions of Western, Central and Northeastern Africa (Hunwick 1995, 2003a; O’Fahey 1994, 2003; Stewart 2015). The editors admit, however, that the state of research on Ajami writing in important African languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde is still at its beginnings (Hunwick 1995a, xi). The listed authors belong to a learned elite of Muslim scholars and are predominantly male, although women are not excluded from writing. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the scripts listed in Arabic Literature of Africa, are religious: theological texts, hagiographies of prophets and saints, biographies of religious leaders written by their disciples, devotional and spiritual writings. While only a small part of the corpus consists of literary works like poetry and scarcely prose, texts on jurisprudence and historiography are also important. In this spectrum, ‘biography’ as a historiographical and religious-devotional genre is much more important than ‘autobiography’. However, autobiographical elements are often an integral part of religious and scholarly writings, in so far as they explicate personal stories of conversion, pursuit of knowledge, and spiritual experience: Autobiography in this context is mostly limited to an account of origin, education, travel in pursuit of knowledge, and educational or judicial appointments. The attachment to mystical groups and brotherhoods sometimes brings in a more personal element, and some scholars as well as mystics used the autobiographical form to justify their own claims to intellectual leadership or higher spiritual authority (Reichmuth 1996, 180).

Poetry in Arabic and Ajami also frequently displays autobiographical features and functions. According to Ahmad’s comment on his republished version (1983, qtd. in

3.2 Pre-colonial Times 

 905

Reichmuth 1996, 180) of the 1655 long didactic poem, Mazgarat al-fityân, by Muhamad as-Sabbag, the poem counts as the oldest written autobiographical text in Northern Nigeria. It focuses on the academic career of the author and aims to set an example for the youth. The text could thus be qualified as a lyrical memoir. The above mentioned Arabic Literature of Africa sourcebook series quotes some early pre-colonial autobiographical texts or fragments. In Abd al-Sadi’s important historiography Ta’hrik al-Sudan that was handwritten in the first half of the seventeenth century, preserved in Timbuktu and only published by the end of the nineteenth century, the chapter 35 is said to be “frankly autobiographical” (Hunwick 2003b, 40). The undated brief autobiography of Abu Bakr (1657–1697), a Tuareg who studied in Agadez, covers forty years of his life and is at the same time a historiographical piece on the sultanate of Aïr (Hunwick 1995c, 34). There is a noticeable lack of preserved texts for the eighteenth century, but several important autobiographical writings that have also been used as sources by historians are recorded for the nineteenth century. Around 1812, the important Islamic jurisprudent and philosopher Abdullahi dan Fodio, brother of Usman dan Fodio who was the founder of the Sokoto caliphate in what is today Northern Nigeria, wrote a short piece entitled Idâ’ al-nusûkh man akhadhtu ‘anhu min al-shuyûkh (trans. in Hiskett 1957, 560 as “The repository of texts – those of the shaiks from whom I took knowledge”), which reads as an honouring of his spiritual masters through the autobiographical account of his scholarly training. This was followed by a compilation of poems Tazyîn al-waraqât (manuscript of 1813 [‘The Embellishment of the Papers’ (Reichmuth 1996, 184)], first published and translated by Hiskett in 1963) which contains war poetry from the perspective of the participating witness, praise poems as well as self-praise in the context of the Fulani jihad led by his brother (Reichmuth 1996, 184–186). While many handwritten scripts must have been lost over time, the scripts of outstanding historical personalities who came into contact with Western colonial researchers have had more chances to be preserved. This is the case, for instance, of the autobiography of Al-Zubayr Pasha, a powerful merchant, slave trader and conqueror of the Darfur sultanate. The script that Pasha completed in 1876 has been translated into several languages (O’Fahey 1994a, 72). During colonial and post-colonial times, the writing of autobiographical texts in Arabic or Ajami South of the Sahara as a tradition that originates in pre-colonial times, would diminish, but not disappear. Some autobiographical scripts of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries have been preserved, but have neither been dated nor edited. A specific example is the autobiographical script by Muhammad Salma from Darfur (O’Fahey 1994b, 301). The posthumously published autobiography of the Grand Mufti of Eritrea, Ibrahim Al-Mukhtar, composed in the 1930s to 1940s (Miran and O’Fahey 2003, 2–3) critiques the Italian colonial administration. The research institute IFAN in Dakar preserves the handwritten autobiography of the religious leader Muhammad Shams al-Dinthat that was written in 1967 and the undated

906 

 3 Africa

memoirs by Somali Ibrahim Hashi Mahamud (1973) which have appeared shortly before independence (Kassim, O’Fahey and Reese 2003, 69). Swahili, East-Africa’s main ‘lingua franca’ that emerged through the encounter of Arabic with Bantu languages along the Indian Ocean’s coast, has had a written literature since the seventeenth century and an important repertoire of oral literatures for even longer. The generic term ‘tawasifu’, which derives from the verb ‘kusifu’: ‘to praise’, covers both oral and written as well as lyrical and prose forms of self-narration, but it is not clear when the oral concept has been shifted to the written. Prior to German colonialism, Swahili was written in Arabic letters; traces of this Ajami script date back to the eleventh century (Zhukov 2004, 1). The main genres were poetic and autobiographical elements constituting part of longer poems can be traced back to classical Swahili poetry in the eighteenth century (King’ei 2001). This integrative form of short self-referential stances is still to be found in the well-known Utendi wa Mwana Kupona [‘The Epic of Mwanakupona’] (1940 [first written around 1858]). The title is centered on the writer, Mwana Kupona Binti Msham, a Swahili female poet from Pate Island. But it would be misleading to read the entire text, which contains mainly didactic advice to young girls in lyrical form, as autobiographical. Autobiographical Swahili prose narratives will only arise at the verge of colonialism. Religious autobiographical writings in an Islamic tradition can indeed be traced back to the early Islamization of parts of West and Eastern Africa. Today, autobiographies by religious leaders are still important sources for historians of religion. For instance, Rüdiger Seesemann’s study (1993) of the Senegalese brotherhood of the Muridiya that was founded in 1883, relies heavily on the numerous Arabic writings of the founding religious leader, Cheikh Amadou Bamba, which are partly autobiographic. At least one of the ‘slave narratives’ which will be introduced in the following sub-chapter has also been written, originally, in Arabic.

In-Between the Continents: Autobiographical Slave Narratives Autobiographical texts written by the first generation of people born in Africa and who were forcibly displaced to the Americas and/or Europe through the transatlantic slave trade can be considered as integral part of pre-colonial African autobiographical productions. Therefore, in this sub-section the particular autobiographical genre of so called ‘slave narratives’ from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be taken into account. Many critics have considered such works as the foundational genre of African American literature (Sekora 1988). ‘Slave narratives’ as a genre comprises writings and sometimes oral narrations (put to script by others), mainly produced by emancipated formerly enslaved people who were either born in Africa, the Americas or Europe. Only the first group will be considered here.

3.2 Pre-colonial Times 

 907

Slave narratives can be considered as transgeneric texts, as this particular brand of life accounts frequently integrates forms and functions of travelogues, political pamphlets and autoethnography as integral parts of the life narration. Adetayo Alabi describes the general structure and purpose of slave narratives as follows: They are organized, like most autobiographies, chronologically. They trace the development of the slave from birth to the time of their enslavement, if they were not born slaves, and record their experiences in slavery as well as those of other slaves. They intermingle their accounts of their experiences with their resistance to those experiences, ending with their escape from slavery. This emphasis in the narratives shows how devastating, brutalizing and violent slavery is, so that it can be rejected. The experiences also show the odds stacked against the slaves and why their attempts at resistance are laudable (Alabi 2005, 53).

Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself was first published in 1789 and was, at its time, an international literary success comparable to Rousseau’s canonized Confessions (MooreGilbert 2009, xi). According to his account, Equiano was born in Southeast Nigeria in 1745, captured and sold into slavery at the age of eleven. The first chapter of his book is devoted to the detailed autoethnographic description of “his country, and their manners and customs” (Equiano 2003, 31). Through this gesture, the author values Igbo culture and refutes the negative construction of Africa and Africans before he even speaks about his own birth and childhood. However, Equiano’s vision of Africa is not romantic: he mentions and condemns internal domestic slavery, although it is clearly described as a milder form of enslavement compared to the overseas’ dehumanization of enslaved Africans. Indeed, slave narratives provide an early counter-discourse to European discourses on Africa and Black people. It is also within slave narratives that the tradition of autoethnography, an integral part of African autobiographical writing during colonial times and beyond, is initiated. During the eighteenth century, philosophical anthropology started to shift towards the new scientific discipline of ethnology that would be consolidated at the height of nineteenth century colonialism. Nascent biological race theories combined with ethnographical description of non-Europeans cemented the racist Othering of Africans and their construction as inferior that served as the ideological foundation for the transatlantic slave trade. In her classical postcolonial study Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt explains that “ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations” (1992, 7). Therefore, autoethnography is such an important element in slave narratives as well as in later African postcolonial autobiographics. Beyond his autoethnographic reconstruction of the African society and culture he originates from, Equiano reverses the discourse of Othering when he repeatetdly calls the slavetraders and masters ‘savages’. During the description of his deportation

908 

 3 Africa

to the Americas, he vividly recalls the hardships of the middle passage. Not only is Equiano a victim of flogging himself, but he also becomes witness to the perverse torture of other African men and to the brutal sexual abuse of enslaved African women and children. His depreciation is first uttered, when he declares “the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among my people such instances of brutal cruelty” (Equiano 2003, 56–57). In what follows, Equiano’s life is dominated by continually imposed mobility. Initially he arrives in the West Indies, then on a plantation in Virginia, and is resold to a British captain of a merchant ship who takes him to England. There he will be baptized into Christianity and eventually becomes part of the merchant’s crew, which entails shuttling between the continents for many years as a sailor. In the course of his travels, he is resold to Americans who force him to work between the Caribbean and North America, yet allow him to engage in independent trade. When Equiano is able to buy his freedom, he chooses England as his adopted home, where he becomes an activist with the abolitionist movement. As it was the custom during the times of the transatlantic slave trade, several names and by implication identities were imposed on the narrator during his life journey. Olaudah Equiano became ‘Michael’, ‘Jakob’ and finally ‘Gustavus Vassa’, the latter which remained his civil name in England. Equiano chooses to inscribe both his original African/Igbo and his European name into the autobiographical signature of the book. This act confirms the complex transcultural identity construction at play on the textual level, and can else be appreciated as “an obvious case of cultural syncretism, a survival strategy that is diasporic” (Chinosole 2001, 3). Additionally, Equiano’s gesture alludes to the multiple audiences he seeks to address, and can furthermore be read as a reminiscence of the African tradition of naming as a continous auto/biographical practice. The Interesting Narrative occupies an outstanding place within the slave narrative genre, not least because of its literary qualities. As Chinosole aptly summarizes: Equiano is no ideologue, but he is an excellent autobiographer. What makes him effective artistically is the mimetic principle, the duality and multiplicity around which his narrative moves. Irony, especially conscious ironic humour, is Equiano’s most effective means of dual and multiple communication. Conscious and unconscious irony shape moving axes of contradictions on the levels of audience, narrative posture, and ideological insight (Chinosole 2001, 11–12).

Equiano’s famous book was however not the first English language slave narrative. Other examples of either written or orally narrated and transcribed accounts by Africans who were born on the continent, enslaved, displaced and eventually freed activists of the eighteenth century comprise: A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, Written by Himself (1774), Venture Smith’s A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: but Resident Above SixtyYears in the United States of America, Related by Himself (1798), and Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery of 1787. As far as Ottobah Cugoano’s narrative is concerned, the political pam-

3.2 Pre-colonial Times 

 909

phlet is however more important than the life account of this West African writer who was born in today’s Ghana, sold to the West Indies in 1770 and freed from slavery in England. All these narratives are witness to the cruelties of the transatlantic slave trade. The flourishing of this autobiographical genre must be understood in the context of the then nascent abolitionist movement in Europe. For the nineteenth century, it is recorded that Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, a native of Timbuktu who was kept in slavery in Jamaica for over 30 years, then liberated by Englishmen whom he accompanied on a colonial expedition. He wrote two volumes of his lifestory in Arabic in 1834 and 1835, which were also translated into English (Paul 2006, 186). Further examples quoted in Paul (2006, 187) indicate that at the time of a shift from the era of the slave trade to the formal colonization of Africa, slave narratives tended to become more and more integrated into the scientific interest of European linguists or ethnographers who recorded and transcribed witness accounts of former slaves.

3.3 Colonial Times Susanne Gehrmann

With formal colonization and the successive implementation of the European school system in Africa, European languages and written literatures including the Western autobiographical tradition were not only introduced to, but were also ideologically imposed on Africans as superior cultural forms. Moreover, autobiographical genres such as travel writing and memoirs play a major role for the colonial discursive archive. The vast body of European conquerors’ autobiographical writing produced in and on Africa cannot be taken into consideration here, but it has to be kept in mind that the ideological construction of Africa in such texts and the spread of these forms have largely influenced and challenged upcoming postcolonial voices. The production of indigenous autobiographical narratives has played an important role for colonial regimes as well as for the emerging discipline of anthropology, which strongly relied on the willingness of Africans to narrate their ways of life to the researchers. In the light of colonial didactic pressure on African subjects to ‘produce’ autobiographical narration, Gusdorf’s argument that the West’s “conquête systématique de l’univers” [“systematic conquest of the universe”] (1956, 105 [1980, 29]) has led, among other things, to the adoption of autobiography “par une sorte de colonisation intellectuelle” [“by a sort of intellectual colonizing”] (1956, 105 [1980, 29]) cannot be entirely dismissed. However, the existence of pre-colonial oral and written self-referential texts contradicts Gusdorf’s belief that the capacity to speak/write in a self-referential mode can only be achieved through the total surrender to a European mentality.

Autobiographics as Colonial Project While the existence of oral and written pre-colonial autobiographical forms cannot be denied, the influence of colonialism on the emergence of modern autobiographical writing in Africa is without doubt crucial. With respect to the general import of European languages, the Latin alphabet, schools and literary canons, autobiography occupied a particular position. In spite of the ontological distance created between Europeans and Africans by binary colonialist thinking, colonizers were interested in learning more about the psyche of those whom they colonized. To incite introspective life narrations from the colonized for the benefit of the colonizers can therefore be considered a colonial tool of dismantling knowledge that would eventually serve the colonial project. Transcribed oral or translated written self-narratives by Africans often came to print during colonial times as a product of ‘collaboration’ between Africans and Western missionaries, administrators, or anthropologists. It is worthy to note that https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-099

3.3 Colonial Times 

 911

many actors in the colonial project actually served more than one of these functions. The emergence of ethnography and anthropology as scientific disciplines is closely linked to colonialism and favoured the construction of Africa South of the Sahara as an imagined culturally homogenous entity (Mudimbe 1988). The numerous successful projects to document life stories point to the fact that Africans were basically not hostile to self-narration. However, an oral life narrative which is structured through precise questions that spring from the particular interests of an interviewer lacks spontaneity and may shift from earlier conventions of speaking about oneself. In the Christian missionary context of colonial Africa, models of Catholic oral confession and Protestant self writing as practices of pious introspection were handed on to newly converted Africans (Paul 1996, 188). Missionaries, who were also often the first to teach reading and writing to communities that had previously largely relied on oral cultures, also encouraged life writing from early on. Around 1920, for instance, Donald Fraser, a missionary of the United Free Church of Scotland in Nyassaland, now Malawi, incited Daniel Mtusu, a convert who also became one of the first Christian pastors in his community, to write down his lifestory. Mtusu did so in Chingoni, his mother tongue. However, the English version that was finally published in 1925 as The Autobiography of an African told in biographical form & in the wild African setting of the life of Daniel Mtusu, illustrates a complex collaborative process. In fact, Mtusu died before he finished his life narrative, which was then completed by Andrew Mkochi, another Ngoni pastor, before being translated and rewritten by Fraser, who explains: I have rewritten in English what they have told me in their own language, and have added a certain amount of background to their pictures, so as to make them more intelligible to readers at home. I have followed throughout their account of events, and especially Daniel’s own story of his youth and mental awakening (Fraser 1925, 7).

Large passages of the book, also illustrated with ten photographs, are made up of ethnographic descriptions. The use of raw racist language with regards to African cultures clearly follows in the footsteps of colonial discourse, whereas Mtusu’s story is deliberately constructed around the triumph of Christianity in his life. In the end, the text appears more as a prolongation of Fraser’s own autobiographical account on his mission work entitled Winning a Primitive People. Sixteen Years’ Work Among the Warlike Tribe of the Ngoni and the Senga and Tumbuka Peoples of Central Africa (1914) than as an account by an African autobiographical narrator. In the early years of the twentieth century, Hamed bin Mohammed el Murjeb, better known as ‘Tippu Tip’, a notorious slave trader from Zanzibar, wrote the first full length autobiographical narrative in the Swahili Ajami script, but it was published in its original version in Swahili Latin script as late as 1974. Heinrich Brode, the German Africanist, who contends that he had encouraged Tippu Tip to write his autobiography (1903, 55), published a first German translation fairly faithful to the original narrative of 1902 and 1903. Two years later he came up with an expanded version

912 

 3 Africa

in book form that he had visibly reworked into a biography from a colonialist point of view. The ambiguous title Tippu Tip: Lebensbild eines zentralafrikanischen Despoten: nach seinen eigenen Angaben hergestellt [literally ‘Tippu Tip: the image of the life of a Central African despot: crafted after his own statements’, English translation as Tippoo Tib: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar & Central Africa (1907)] alludes to the practice of blurring the line between ‘autobiography’ and ‘biography’, but belittles the actual act of appropriation by the German author who diminishes Tippu Tip’s agency as an autobiographer. In German East-Africa, Elise Kootz-Kretschmer, a Herrenhuther missionary wife encouraged a couple of converted female Christians who were former slaves and now under her wing on the mission station of Utengele, to narrate and document their life-stories. Some of these life accounts were published in German in the 1920s and reissued by Marcia Wright, an American historian, in English translation in her book Strategies of Slaves and Women. Life-Stories from East/Central Africa (1993). In her overview article on biographical research in Africa, Sigrid Paul further quotes a number of examples of autobiographical writings that came into being through the interaction between Africans and either colonial administrators or Africanist researchers (1996, 191–194). In the French colonial system based on the doctrine of cultural assimilation of its colonized subjects – hence the importance of French and the neglect of African languages – a particular focus was put on autobiographical as well as on autoethnographical writing. These were implemented as an important obligatory part of learning in the secular French school system: In the early 1900s during the colonial period, French colonial authorities inculcated and demanded the need for Francophone autobiography. Their colonized subjects, educated through their colonial schools, were required to become cultural translators of themselves and their community in order to increase the French colonial administrator’s knowledge. Thus, prior to the formal literary practice of the genre, there was a tradition of written self-narratives in Francophone Africa in the form of journals, travelogues, and other self-writing during the colonial era (Sankara 2011, 7).

The archives of L’École Normale William Ponty, the institution in Senegal which formed the first generation of African elementary teachers for the whole French colonial territory, hold numerous school essays on subjects such as ‘My childhood’ or ‘The customs of my village’, often with specific ethnic references. Ironically, some post-colonial autobiographies such as Kesso Barry’s Kesso, princesse peuhle [‘Kesso, the Fulani princess’] (1988) and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s Amkoullel, l’enfant peul ­[‘Amkoullel, the Fulani child’] (1991) cite this type of title in use at colonial schools. The colonially initiated tradition of autobiographical writing as a school exercise was of course dominated by short texts that dealt with fragments rather than with fullfledged life stories. However, as integral part of training in the French colonial school, they can be considered as efficient exercises which might have inspired future writers

3.3 Colonial Times 

 913

to further develop the genre. In fact, a short piece of this brand entitled “Ma petite patrie” [‘My little homeland’] by the future Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ, whose famous novel Une si longue lettre (1979) [So Long a Letter (1981)] has also often been read as autobiographical, was published in 1949. By then, Bâ was a student at the École Normale de Rufisque where the first generation of female West-African schoolteachers in French Africa was trained. Due to its excellence, Bâ’s autobiographical piece on her childhood was selected for publication in the French colonial geographer Jacques ­Richard-Molard’s book Afrique Ocidentale Française (qtd. entirely in Riesz 2009, 260–265). The short piece Ngonda [‘girl’ in the Bassa language] (1958 [43 pages]) by the Cameroonian Marie-Claire Matip that counts as the first book ever published by a francophone female African author springs from this educational tradition, too. Ngonda was written by the 17 years old author in the context of a “competition sponsored by Air France and the magazine Elle which sought to promote education for young African women in the French colonies” (Toman 2004, 82). The text narrates Matip’s village childhood and valorizes oral and female culture in particular. Such literary competitions were widespread in colonial Africa and more often than not served to promote writing in European languages and genres; however, in the East African Literature Competition, Swahili was also admitted. The famous Swahili poet and novelist Shabaan Robert, who also served as a customs’ official in the British colonial administration in Tanganyka, wrote two parts of his autobiographical trilogy in the context of competitions. Xavier Garnier summarizes Robert’s autobiographical oeuvre as follows: In fact, Shaaban Robert wrote three autobiographical texts at different times in his life. The first, which is lost, covered his childhood and had been written when he was 27. The second, which corresponds to the first part of this work, is called Maisha Yangu [My Life] and was written at the age of 37, covering the period 1936–1946. The last, with the title Baada ya Miaka Hamsini [After Fifty Years] was completed in 1960, in other words when the author was only just 50, but covers the period 1946–1959 (Garnier 2012, 106).

According to Robert, the childhood autobiography won the first prize of the competition, but was lost in the process (2010, 92). He received the Margaret Wrong Prize for African literature, donated by a Canadian Christian activist, for Maisha yangu [‘My Life’] that was consequently published in London in 1949 and reissued posthumously in 1966 together with the third part of his life narrative. While the format of colonial competitions might have inspired Robert to come forward with such self-centred narratives, it is obvious that his writing largely follows the aesthetic patterns of pre-colonial Swahili writing. It combines prose narrative with poems in classical Swahili metre and much of the poetry is addressed to other people, praising them or giving them advice, similar to the above-mentioned epic Utendi wa Mwana Kupona. In Maisha yangu Robert focuses on his career in the colonial administration, in Baada ya Miaka Hamsini his political activism as member of the struggle for independence becomes prominent. Beyond the external facts and events, the text contains an impor-

914 

 3 Africa

tant number of ontological reflections. Both levels of narrations are interconnected, as Garnier explains: The first follows the career of a civil servant and is therefore chronological and has no surprises, and the second bears witness to the obscure battles that he had to fight at the same time. These two perspectives are always interconnected and when he talks explicitly about his career, the reader must understand that the crucial issues are being played out on the other level, namely life. […] Shaaban Robert’s autobiography is not a retrospective text whose function is to assess his life, but is entirely interconnected with that life and prolongs the battles which were fought over its course (Garnier 2012, 110, 113).

‘In Their Own Voice’? – Autobiographical Anthologies Margery Perham, a British historian and director of the Oxford Institute of Colonial Studies in the 1940s, published the anthology Ten Africans. A Collection of Life Stories in 1936. The book contains six transcribed oral and four written self-narratives by one female and nine male Africans from Kenya, Nigeria, Rhodesia and South Africa. In the 1920s and 1930s Perham had travelled extensively across the British colonies and South Africa and developed the idea to collect life stories. The anthology was realized in collaboration with a number of other British researchers who approached Africans in order to collect their life narratives. Shortly after Perham’s anthology, Dietrich Westermann, who was a missionary in Germany’s colony Togo in the early twentieth century, then a linguist and professor of African languages in Berlin (1910–1950) published Afrikaner erzählen ihr Leben [‘Africans Narrate their Life’] (1938). Westermann’s collection features eleven autobiographical accounts from different parts of Africa: four from Togo, including the only woman of the volume, two from Nigeria, two from South Africa and one from Sierra Leone, Kenya and Namibia respectively. The narratives vary from only eleven to more than a hundred pages in length and are accompanied by photographic portraits of seven of the author-narrators. The versatility of both anthologies indicates that the editors strive to represent a complete picture of Africa as much as possible. Westermann covers three transcribed oral and seven originally written narratives which, with the exception of the text by Martin Aku, a Togolese who writes directly in German, have been translated from not less than eight African languages by Westermann and his numerous European as well as African auxiliaries. In the introduction to Afrikaner erzählen ihr Leben, Westermann describes the intent of his project metaphorically as a bridge that he wants to build for the better understanding of African people. While he implicitly critiques anthropology, he underlines about his book: “Es berichtet nicht über den Afrikaner, sondern lässt ihn selbst reden” [‘It does not talk about the African, but allows him to speak for himself’]

3.3 Colonial Times 

 915

(Westermann 1938, 8). Furthermore, Westermann pleads for the recognition of the African’s perspective not only on his own life, but also on the African world. This sounds like a progressive stance in colonial times, however Westermann, not less than Perham, does not question colonialism as such. Rather, both anthologies are of highly didactic value for Europeans as colonizers. As much as Westermann stresses that the narratives were told or written without any interference or instruction from his side, it is contradictory that at the same time he admits his cutting of passages and giving advice on how to structure the text: Die Geschichten sind ohne jede Beeinflussung oder Anleitung erzählt, oder niedergeschrieben und, abgesehen von einigen Kürzungen, unverändert übersetzt und abgedruckt worden. Die Verfasser erhielten lediglich einige Hinweise, Vorschläge zu einer Einteilung des Stoffes, die übrigens keineswegs von allen befolgt worden sind. [‘The stories have been narrated or written without any influence or tutelage, and, apart from some abbreviations, have been translated and printed unaltered. The authors received solely some advice, suggestions on how to structure the material, which have not been ensued by all of them’] (Westermann 1938, 11).

In the same vein, Perham presents the life stories in her anthology as ‘authentic’ and ‘spontaneous’, but at the same time ‘modestly’ asserts: “I did no more than offer a few tentative suggestions as to the lines upon which the narrator should be guided if guidance should prove possible without injury to the spontaneity of his subject” (Perham 1963, 16), and then proceeds with a precise program: The African should be encouraged to sketch the main events of his life; should be coaxed to explain any customs which he might otherwise regard as requiring no explanation; should refer to the coming of the Europeans if that event seemed to interest him, and should be invited to philosophize a little at the end, if philosophy seemed to come naturally to him (Perham 1963, 16).

Perham openly criticizes anthropology (1963, 12) and stresses that her book shall not be read as a scientific study, but that it addresses a large readership interested in the better understanding of Africa. In the end, the autobiographical narratives presented to the German and British readership in both anthologies are as much the result of a complex collaborative process as any anthropologist’s presentation of a life-narrative. Moreover, Perham’s active role in British colonial affairs makes it difficult to see her project as an enterprise that was solely detached from colonialism. While Westermann’s standing as a German academic in the 1930s positions him outside direct colonial implication, it remains valid that at the time the encounter between a White European who asks Africans to narrate their lives remains inevitably trapped in colonial power relations (Riesz 2000, 284). However, interestingly, neither Westermann nor Perham censured the Africans’ critique of colonialism that is palpable in each of the narratives. Ranking from the intimate description of traumatic violence to the explicit dismissal of racist theories of the day, the Africans in Afrikaner erzählen ihr Leben and Ten Africans use the auto-

916 

 3 Africa

biographical genre to elaborate an often illuminating counter-discourse to colonialist and racist constructions of African cultures and societies. The frankness they employ, at a time that was still far away from open struggles for independence, supposes a certain relationship of confidence between the narrating subjects and the collectors of their stories. This does also prove the possibility of intervention through narration/ writing and contradicts the simplified supposition that colonial subjects were completely stripped of agency. Westermann’s book was reissued in 1943 and translated into French in the same year, while Perham’s anthology was republished in England and the United States during the 1960s, with several editions. The reception reaches far beyond the colonial era. Olney, for instance, considers Westermann’s book as an “excellent and fascinating anthology” (1973, 9) while János Riesz reads the stylistic variety and originality of the contributions as a sign for their authenticity (2000, 282). When one looks for instance at the narrative by Mqhasi who introduces himself as a Xhosa poet, the importance of genealogy and proverbs as well as the full length quotation of a poem composed at his birth clearly link his prose narrative back to pre-colonial auto/biographical practices. Furthermore, the importance of naming and re-naming at birth and throughout life are features that come back in almost all of the narratives. As much as reference to oral autobiographical forms is made inside both volumes, the anthologies Ten Africans and Afrikaner erzählen ihr Leben did also influence the emergence of further African autobiographical writing in European as well as in African languages. The Togolese researcher Simon Amegbleame (1991) underlines the continuity between Westermann’s project and the development of auto/biographical writing in Ewe, one of the major languages in Togo and Ghana.

African Autobiographics and the Encounter with Europe It is striking that in, almost, all the first African full-length autobiographical narratives which were written and published in European languages during colonial times, the contact with Europe (and by extension North America) plays an outstanding role. Such contacts were initiated through colonial schools and travels. The first auto­biography published in French by an African writer, Bakary Diallo’s, Force-Bonté [‘The Strength of Generosity’] (1926) chronicles the author’s participation in World War I as a colonial soldier fighting for France. Diallo’s role in this war is the main event around which the entire narrative unfolds. Force-Bonté has often been read as literature of tutelage and its authenticity has even been disputed. Indeed, the author was not part of the early academically trained French colonial elite, but was instead an illiterate herdsman before joining the military to fight with the colonial troops, first in Morocco, then in France. Certainly, much of the content of this narrative with its long passages of

3.3 Colonial Times 

 917

appraisal of France as the ‘grande nation’ and French civilization that, supposedly, uplifted the I-narrator from his modest origins, reads as a total surrender of the colonized subject to the colonizer’s assimilationist ideology. However, Diallo also mentions his deception once he arrives in France because the expectations he was drilled to have of the superior material and intellectual lifestyle in France were not entirely fulfilled. The question whether the autobiographical book was either written entirely by Diallo, produced through a collaborative process with his editors or simply fabricated by the latter, has never been properly elucidated (Watts 2005, 38–40). In the 1940s, first autobiographical writings by a West African Anglophone writer were released by Mbonu Ojike in the United States, where he studied. Portrait of a Boy in West Africa (1945), My Africa (1946) and I have two countries (1947) form an autobiographical trilogy. While the first title is a childhood autobiography, the second blends the same childhood reminiscences with quasi didactic cultural information on Africa for the American public, and the third narrates Ojike’s experiences as an African student in the States. The autobiographical narrator sketches himself as representative of a more general portrayal of “the human story of Africa” (Ojike 1946, xiii). In his writing, Ojike, who became a leading Nigerian journalist and politician in the 1960s, advocates a clear stance for Nigeria’s independence and the valorization of African cultures (Manschke 1999, 139–140). Incidentally, the first autobiographical piece by a Congolese writer, entitled Memorias de un Congolés [‘Memories of a Congolese’], was published in Spanish in 1949. Francisco José Mopila followed his Spanish employer to Madrid where he studied fine arts (Dunzo 1986, 323). The piece that was translated into French in 1973 as L’Enfance [‘Childhood’] is largely autoethnographical and praises Azande culture through a dense description of customs. A continuous comparison with European lifestyle points to the desire of the autobiographical subject to prove his transcultural competences (Muswaswa 1996, 146–147). In the decade of the 1950s, during which resistance to the colonial system and claims of independence grew stronger, Guinean Camara Laye’s now canonical text L’Enfant noir (1953) [The Dark Child (1954)] exemplifies the shift from an African philosophical worldview to a hybrid postcolonial positioning. A clear-cut classification of this text as either autobiographical novel or open autobiography is difficult, as the setting is referential, but the I-narrator remains nameless. This strategy elevates the protagonist to a representative function as an African child of his generation. Characteristic for childhood autobiographics, the narrator’s perspective oscillates between a retrospective stance from an adult point of view and focalization of the youths’ worldview. The vivid description of daily life in a West African compound and the initiation rites surrounding male circumcision largely relies on the recreated child’s perception and offers valuable autoethnographic information to readers outside of the Malinké culture depicted in the text. Indeed, this autoethnographic gesture of a revalorization of African cultures initiated by referential and fictive genres alike, and the autobiographical ‘Bildungsroman’in particular (Amoko 2009), has become a major feature of

918 

 3 Africa

African autobiographical texts that proceeds from the colonial into the post-colonial period. The underlying conflict of Laye’s text is the protagonist-narrator’s growing fascination with the colonial school that gradually draws him away from African ways of learning. The protagonist leaves his village in order to go to college in Conakry, a colonial city that is a culturally hybrid space, which both fascinates and estranges the narrator. At the end of the narrative, the African child travels to France, to the deep grief of his mother, in order to pursue further studies instead of following in the footsteps of his father who is a goldsmith with magical skills, as the hereditary tradition would have had it. This major rupture within his family and cultural environment is taken up by the nostalgic stance of the now adult narrator who admits that “j’ai quitté mon père trop tôt” [“I had left my father’s house too soon”] (Laye 1953, 11 [1954, 12]). Laye portrays “the colonized African subject [as] hopelessly divided against himself” (Berger 2010, 36). The unconditional re-valorization of Malinké culture in Laye’s autobiography, a “romantic and tragic narrative that yearns for an idealized African culture that is in the process of being (or has been) destroyed by colonialism” (Berger 2010, 36) is not void of essentialism. However, in the spirit of the Négritude movement, this must be understood as a deliberate subversion of the negative colonial image of Africa, and can thus be read as a postcolonial gesture of resistance. In the very last scene of L’Enfant noir, the young man who has just arrived in France studies the Parisian underground map. This symbolic reading of the Other’s space and structure that the protagonist is going to appropriate stands as a symbol for the complexity and swift change in his generation’s life. In 1966, Laye published an autobiographical follow-up text, Dramouss, that clearly indicates the shift to post-colonial times as the main subject of critique is Sékou Touré’s regime. In comparison to Laye’s novel, the childhood autobiography Kossoh Town Boy (1960) by Robert Wellesey Cole is written in a more lighthearted mode. Cole is a Sierra Leonian author who became the first West African member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and a government’s medical adviser by independence. Pondering upon the collective dimension of this narrative, Afejuku underlines that the vivid description of birth ritual conveys a “‘universalizing’, so to speak, of his own individual experience. His birth is a ritualized experience that is both private, typical and prototypical” (Afejuku 1990, 691). Similar to Laye’s book in francophone Africa, Cole’s is still a school lecture in anglophone West Africa today. Bernard Dadié, a prolific writer from Ivory Coast and former student of L’École Normale William Ponty, published his autobiographical novel Climbié in 1956. This text presents colonial school as a place of suffering, where African cultures and languages were ridiculed and eventually suppressed. As a counterpoint, an uncle teaches the protagonist about the Black liberation movement in the United States, thus awakening his political consciousness (Riesz 2013, 265). In 1949/1950, Dadié was imprisoned because of his political activism. He was a member of the ‘Rassemblement africain pour la démocratie’ [‘African Democratic Assembly’], which had started the

3.3 Colonial Times 

 919

Ivorian struggle for independence. Dadié would be able to publish his Carnet de prison [‘Prison Journal’] in 1981 only, but very close to the liberation of French West Africa, the author would create a further sub-genre in the African autobiographical continuum: the referential yet satirically fictionalized travelogue that features at the same time a reversed ethnography: Un Nègre à Paris [‘A Black man in Paris’] (1959), written in the form of a travel journal addressed to an anonymous friend in Africa, was composed after Dadié’s first visit to Paris in 1956. He further published two volumes in the same pattern on New York and Rome after 1960. The text has often been tentatively classified as a chronicle, but can also be read as part and parcel of Dadié’s larger autobiographical endeavour (Riesz 2009, 234). Intertextually close to Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) [Persian Letters (1722)], the textual construction relies above all on the subversion of the colonial anthropological gaze. Here, it is the African’s gaze which conquers the colonial metropolis and, by means of parody of an ethnographic mode of writing, reports the strange customs of the French back home. “The irony of this situation resides in the inversion of the gaze: the West, formerly the sovereign gaze and the master word, is now being identified as the Other” (Mudimbe-Boyi 1992, 26). At the same time, Un Nègre à Paris is also counterdiscursive to the autoethnographical mode that was prominent in so many African autobiographical texts of that time. For Dadié, writing back to the centre is less a matter of justifying one’s own culture, even if he does so implicitly, than a claim for discursive ownership of the centre.

South African Autobiographics under Apartheid Given the peculiar situation of apartheid as a prolonged form of colonialism and its extreme oppression of the Black majority by a White minority, autobiographical texts by prominent South African writers and political activists as well as ‘ordinary’ citizens flourished between 1950 and 1990. In spite of the rich South African tradition of oral self-praise and the South African educational policy that favored writing in African languages, almost all of these texts were written and published in English (Coullie 1999, 66). This trend can be explained by the testimonial dimension of the majority of such texts that were meant to appeal to an interethnic South African as well as to international audiences. However, it should be mentioned that the spread of writing cultures in South Africa also led to the transcription of ‘izibongo’ in newspapers as early as the 1920s (Coullie 2004, 65 with reference to Opland 1998). Also, oral selfpraise was and still is a current practice throughout the twentieth and twentyfirst century (Gunner and Gwala 1994). In this sub-chapter White life-writing that fails to address the institutionalized racism in South Africa will not be adressed, instead the focus lies on autobiographical practice as a form of resistance. Peter Abrahams’s Return to Goli (1953) and Tell Freedom (1954), written during his exile in London, are considered as the first published autobiographical texts by a

920 

 3 Africa

South African of colour. Both texts set the tone for the combination of a personal storyline with the careful analysis of apartheid structures and their social impact that will characterize most of the anti-apartheid autobiographics. Black South African women started to join the stream of life-writing in the 1960s, with Noni Jabavu’s Drawn in Colour (1960) and The Ochre People (1963) as the first published texts. In The Ochre People, Jabavu makes ample use of the autoethnographical writing mode in order to value the Xhosa culture she originates from. Thengani Ngwenya aptly states: “Dating back to the emergence of black autobiographical writing in the 1950s, counter-hegemonic self-definition involving historical reappraisal has become a definitive feature of the autobiographical writings of black South Africans” (Ngwenya 1999, 111). Taking Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963), E’skia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) and Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy (1986) as representative examples, Apollo Amoko summarizes that the texts effectually exposed the desperation and violence black people experienced under apartheid. They denounced the systematic disenfranchisement of the black majority by a white minority. […] All three writers bear graphic witness to the horrors of racist oppression even as they each narrate the story of spectacular individual triumph (Amoko 2009, 198).

The writers speak out on behalf of a collective situation of oppression and have a clear activist stance, while at the same time their individual identity formation within the framework of apartheid is stressed. The thematic exploration of the racial divide “that is the lack of ordinary social contact between members of different race groups” (Coullie 2004, 1) runs through the South African autobiographical continuum. Under apartheid, autobiography is an act of agency for Black writers which allows them to write themselves out of a passive victim position and an act of solidarity for Whites who took activist sides in the resistance struggle. British born Helen Joseph in Side by Side: The Autobiography of Helen Joseph (1986) or Breyten Breytenbach’s ironically titled The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984), are specific examples. Allegedly accused of terrorism and tried, Breytenbach spent seven years in prison and Joseph lived under house arrest for many years. Winnie Mandela’s Part of my Soul (1986) is an oral narrative adapted to script by Mary Benson and Anne Benjamin. The text reads as both autobiography of the narrator and partly biography of her famous husband Nelson Mandela whose political struggle was unconditionally embraced by his wife. An oral style of narration is even more pronounced in Frances Baard’s My Spirit is Not Banned (1986), an autobiographical piece that focuses on her experience of imprisonment as a prominent figure of the ANC’s women’s league in the 1960s. The trauma of detention and torture is also impressively addressed by Emma Mashinini in Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life – A South African Autobiography (1989) whose traumatic memory lapses question the very possibility of the mimetic writing of violence.

3.3 Colonial Times 

 921

Indeed, collaborative projects with either anthropologists’ or journalists’ who collected and ordered life narratives allowed autobiographical voices of people who would rather have shied away from writing to come to the limelight. For instance, Carole Hermer edited The Diary of Maria Tholo (1980) that she adapted from tape recordings with the activist in the 1976 students’ uprising (Coullie 2004, 247). Apparently far removed from politics were projects that collected narratives about daily life from specific social groups such as workers. The collection Working Women: A Portrait of South African Black Women Workers (1985) edited by Lesley Lawson and Helene Perold, both White researchers, is a known example. As with other colonial collaborative projects, the power relations in such endeavors remain clearcut and the extent of the “ordering imperative” (Davies 1992, 3) is to the discretion of the editors. Nevertheless, such collections could help to raise awareness about social injustice. It has to be kept in mind, that most of the above mentioned texts were censored and banned in South Africa, but widely circulated abroad. An immediate function of many of the testimonial autobiographies, by prominent figures such as Albert Luthuli (1982), Winnie Mandela or Helen Joseph in particular, was to inspire and strengthen the worldwide anti-apartheid movement that led to considerable economical and political pressure on the South African government during the 1980s. Because of its quality as testimony, life writing during apartheid was more important than fiction, which is why it was commonly banned by apartheid censors. Even stories by ordinary South Africans that may seem to be apolitical in nature […] are in fact not apolitical, because merely to testify to the brutalities of racism before and during apartheid is, in itself, a politically significant act (Coullie 2004, 7).

Summing Up For authors who emerge “from a colonial experience and its sequels of psychological trauma, political subordination, and transformation” (Sankara 2011, 19), the weigh of the opportunity to create meaning out of one’s life story and the possibility to re-inscribe the African subject into history through autobiographical writing cannot be underestimated. Following Mohanty’s stance that “colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression – often violent – of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question” (1984, 336), autobiographical writing in European languages emerged during colonial times both as a result of colonial structures and projects and as a possible site of resistance for Africans. By the end of formal colonization, autobiographical writing had become a major genre of expression in Africa. The gesture to validate and to foreground African individual identities in a context of Eurocentric colonial denial of African subjectivity, individuality and weight in World History is a postcolonial act of self-affirmation. Olney’s statement that African “writers have found autobiography to be the form best adapted to expressing,

922 

 3 Africa

recreating, or reacting to their experience” (1973, 248) is partly true, although the parallel emergence of the African novel besides the ongoing artistic production of poetry and plays prove that African literatures are prolific in many genres. Yet, “autobiographical writing has often served as a tactic of intervention in colonial repression” (Smith and Watson 2001, 45), affirming its status as an important form of agency and as a practice of decolonization. The trend of autobiographical writing to emerge in a multitude of different subgenres that is already palpable in late colonial times will be affirmed and even more diversified during the post-colonial period.

3.4 Post-colonial Times Susanne Gehrmann

The prolixity of autobiographical writing in post-colonial Africa, mainly in European languages, but to a lesser extent also in African languages and in Arabic, and the plurality of the forms and sub-genres in use, point to the importance of the autobiographical continuum as self-confirming practice. Not only are African subjectivities erected against the grain of the normative Western canon, even more importantly they are written against the erasure of African individual as well as collective identities through colonial discourse. Post-colonial African authors write both quite conventional autobiographical texts such as political memoirs, and challenging reinventions of the generic continuum such as autobiographical essays. In post-colonial contexts, autobiographics remain a privileged practice to represent and to negotiate the subjectivity of a remembering self who reconstructs his/her lifestory through a self-centered narration which may also feature collective identities and may set the individual as a representative for the communities from which the subject emerges. Postcoloniality is informed by cultural hybridity that can lead to conflict, psychological crisis and fragmentation of the subject, but also to fruitful textual negotiations of a self that inscribes open and multiple belongings into his/her life story.

Subjectivity, Historicity, and Hybridity in Postcolonial African Autobiographics For a lot, postcolonial autobiography in Africa deals with writing the African subject into history. As with the adoption of other written literary genres and of European languages as a medium for writing, the practice of post-colonial self-narration is caught up in the tension of dismantling the colonial master’s hegemonic tools while it is at the same time in need of using such tools aptly. It would however be wrong to consider post-colonial autobiography as a simple imitation or a mere subversion of the Western model. The hybrid cultural identities of postcolonial authors are sustained by both African and Western systems of thinking. Therefore, an important feature of the practice is the re-composition of different cultural features on the level of identity formation expressed in the text and on the formal level of narrative techniques. Postcolonial autobiographical writing has not produced a fixed genre, rather it is the mixing of genres such as childhood autobiography, novel, memoirs, faction, essay, historiography, autoethnography and self-praise condensed through a prism of cultural hybridity that makes up its peculiarity. Writing strategies include ironic reference to the Western canon or colonially imposed forms of self-writing as well as the use of patterns from oral genres. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-100

924 

 3 Africa

If postcolonial African autobiographical forms often strive to subvert the White/ Western/male tradition of the teleological, canonical autobiography, the claim for historical referentiality to a lived experience remains nevertheless largely valid. With regards to matters of identity construction, the aspiration for a stable, unified and self-content position in line with a simple progressive story of achieved self-fulfillment is rarely to be found in postcolonial autobiographics. Moore-Gilbert underlines that “decentred subjectivity is often represented as one effect of the material histories and relations of colonialism, in which new and occasionally radically conflicting identities are inscribed in palimpsestic fashion on the subaltern, sometimes by force” (2009, xxi). Shortly after independence, the trend of the nostalgic childhood autobiography combined with the theme of the culture conflict and autoethnographical details is still dominating. Mugo Gatheru’s Child of Two Worlds, published in 1964, only a year after Kenya had been granted freedom, is a case in point. In 1961, Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s autobiographical novel L’Aventure ambiguë (1961) [Ambigous Adventure (1972)] delves into the theme of identity crisis and painful hybridity in the light of Camara’s Dark Child. Kane’s setting for the upbringing of his protagonist Samba Diallo is the fictive country of the Diallobé that represents the atmosphere of a deeply religious Fulani culture in Northern Senegal. Surpassing former examples of the genre that has sometimes been termed ‘identity novel’ (see Small’s critical discussion 2013), the protagonist’s conflict between Islamic values, his communal heritage of a noble family which has lost its power to colonialism, as opposed to secular French philosophy as well as to the temptations of modern life in Paris drives him into madness. Pushed by his aunt, “la Grande Royale” [“the Most Royal Lady”] (Kane 1961, 30–31 [1972, 20–21]) to learn the daunting “L’art de vaincre sans avoir raison” [“the art of conquering without being in the right”] (1961, 47 [1972, 18 (1963, 37)]) of the French, Samba’s study trip to Paris drives him into a deep depression, as the spatial and cultural dislocation fragments the self and confuses him beyond any possible reconciliation: Je ne suis pas un pays des Diallobé distinct, face à un Occident distinct, et appréciant d’une tête froide ce que je puis lui prendre et ce qu’il faut que je lui laisse en contrepartie. Je suis devenu les deux. Il n’y a pas une tête lucide entre deux termes d’un choix. Il y a une nature étrange, en détresse de n’être pas deux [I am not a distinct country of the Diallobé facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it and what I must leave with it by way of counterbalance. I have become the two. There is not a clear mind deciding between the two factors of a choice. There is a strange nature, in distress over not being two] (Kane 1961, 164 [1972, 150–151]).

Caught in this predicament of unhappy hybridity, Samba Diallo who became “a paradigm for a perceived identity crisis in decolonizing/postcolonial African society” (Small 2013, 6) also compares himself to a ‘balafon’, one of West Africa’s major musical instruments, that does not resonate anymore (Kane 1961, 164 [1972, 163]). On his return to Africa, the Islamic Master, who figures as the embodiment of the pure Islamic order that is not meant to survive into the post-colonial times, is already dead and cannot

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 925

help Samba to reconcile with his culture. In the end, the unhappily hybrid hero is tragically killed by the village madman. This highly symbolic act can be read as either punishment or redemption. Berger observes a major shift of paradigm from colonial to post-colonial autobiography in Africa which he describes as a move from the romantic and the tragic to the ironic and the comic – that is from a hopelessly divided self that envisions it’s sure obliteration to one that struggles both to understand itself as well as the sociological and political realities that shape and threaten its understanding of identity (Berger 2010, 36).

This shift can be understood as an integral part of a “discursive decolonization” (Berger 2010, 36). If Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure that was published shortly after independence and Laye’s Dark Child, discussed above can count as prototypes of the ‘tragic mood’, Wole Soyinka’s Aké: The Childhood Years (1981) and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s two volumes of memoirs (1991, 1992) deploy a more optimistic perspective. The works of both authors will serve as an illustration of the shift towards the self-recognition of the African subject as a culturally hybrid portrayed in a more productive and politically conscious way, as compared to those postcolonial subjects who are estranged and torn between cultures portrayed by Kane and Laye. Both Soyinka and Bâ deal with childhood/youth during colonial times and write from the perspective of a mature and successful intellectual looking back at the earlier times of his identity formation. The reminiscing subject is thus fundamentally in a relationship of difference to the remembered subject. From the position of maturity, the authors construct what is remembered of the child, the youth, or the younger adult as in the case of Bâ’s second volume. While this tension between two different worldviews is constitutive for autobiography as a genre per se, it is striking how much Bâ and Soyinka strive to harmonize the vision of their past with their achievements of today, as well as their strong individualism with their simultaneous identification with communities. Referring to the follow up to his childhood autobiography Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years that deals with his years as a student, Wole Soyinka uses the term “faction” (Soyinka 1994, ix) in order to indicate that a clear-cut distinction between facts and fiction is not the issue in an autobiographical text because both will inevitably flow into one another. In Aké, Soyinka presents the culturally hybrid, yet mainly harmonious universe of his homestead. In the parish of Aké in Abeokuta in South-Western Nigeria, where his father was headmaster of the English school, thus an important personality in the order of colonial days. The narrated time frame covers the late 1930s and early 1940s that is precisely Soyinka’s childhood from his second to his eleventh year. As the text mainly focuses on family ties and the politically still unnurtured perspective of the child, it scarcely provides information on the colonial administrative situation as such. However, it is important to mention that the conflicts between generations and genders inside the text are often generated out of the colonial situation.

926 

 3 Africa

The last part of the book devotes a lengthy chapter to the historical Agba women’s strike in protest against taxation and thus privileges historical referentiality, while it also honors women’s resistance against colonial structures. Although the historical accuracy of this depiction has warrantly been put under critical scrutiny by Jane Bryce (2008), the episode is after all an important part of Soyinka’s self-construction as autobiographer. As an early literate, the young Wole becomes an important intermediary between the women and those male Nigerian collaboratorsof the colonial order who are, in accordance with the British indirect rule system, in charge of the unjust taxation of market traders. For the autobiographical narrator, Wole, the experience of the then eleven years old boy to back the well justified protest and resistance movement of the women, serves as an awakening of his political consciousness, and thus as a pre-figuration of the adult activist whose fight against post-colonial Nigerian dictatorship is widely known. Meanwhile, the prefiguration of the writer and intellectual Soyinka traverses the whole text and is early on constructed in a quasi mythical way, when the not yet three year old Wole asserts himself until he is accepted in school. Different from other postcolonial African autobiographies in which colonial school features as a traumatizing place of discursive as well as physical violence and alienation, the young Soyinka integrates into the British educational system of which his father is the representative, without any umbrage. On the contrary, he becomes an avid reader of his father’s English library and integrates both his African environment as well as his premature reading experiences into his growing personality. Wole is brought up in a homestead in which the parents embody two different value systems: the father stands for the British educational system with its world of books and debates, while the mother stands in for Christian faith and morality. The surnames ‘Essay’ and ‘Wild Christian’ symbolically validate these two spheres of power in Wole’s life. Aké as a place holds both a mission church and a school; this topography, that clearly follows a colonial order, reconfirms English literacy and Christian religion as framework for Wole’s upbringing. However, the Yoruba religious universe with its polytheism and masquerade rituals is also an integral part of the child’s world. Indeed, there is a major conflict between the child’s grandfather, also named ‘Father’ with a big ‘F’, and his father ‘Essay’. As a practitioner of traditional religion and rites, the grandfather wants to initiate Wole into Yoruba customs, which Essay disapproves of. In the autobiographical topography, Isarà, the village of the grandparents, features as a counter-place to Aké, where Yoruba life still seems to be untouched by European influences. In this space, the nine years old Wole will be introduced to a male Yoruba identity, which relies on hard physical work, courage and the capacity to bear pain stoically. In this logic, for instance, the first hunting experience of the child that comes with some injuries, stands out as a proof of bravery: “I bore my wounds proudly home and displayed them – not to Teacher and Wife – but to that other parent who had become a fellow conspirator, who truly embodied the male Isarà for me in its rugged, mysterious strength” (Soyinka 1981, 139).

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 927

In brief, Soyinka reconstructs the perspective of a child who feels embraced by and attracted to both cultures and does not see profound contradictions between African and Europeans ways of thinking and being. This capacity to move smoothly between different reference systems will remain a quality throughout the academic and artistic career of the future Nobel Prize laureate. The titles and generic subtitles of Malian Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s two volumes of ‘memoirs’: Amkoullel, l’enfant peul [‘Amkoullel, the Fula child’] (1992) and the follow up Oui, mon commandant! [‘Yes, my commander!’] (1994) are highly ironic. While the first quotes a typical title of the colonial school practice of the autobiographical essay assignment, the second reiterates the formulaic standard replica which a subordinate colonial subject had to enunciate in front of his superior. Hence, with both titles, Bâ cites from the very colonial discourse that he is going to subvert inside his autobiography. Furthermore, the style of Bâ’s texts is not to be confounded with the genre of political-professional memoirs and stands as a counter-disourse to colonial memoirs on West Africa. Memoirs has to be understood in the sense of memories here – the French word ‘mémoires’ carries indeed this double meaning – when the author confirms in his preface that his interest is focused on a highly valued African form of unconditional memory that springs from an oral culture – and certainly not any European generic model: C’est que la mémoire des gens de ma génération, et plus généralement des peuples de tradition orale qui ne pouvaient s’appuyer sur l’écrit est d’une fidelité et d’une précision presque prodigieuses. Dès l’enfance nous étions entraînés à observer, à regarder, à écouter, si bien que toute événement s’inscrivait dans notre mémoire comme dans une cire vierge [‘The memory of people of my generation, and more generally of peoples with an oral tradition who couldn’t rely on script, is of a quasi prodigious fidelity and exactitude. From childhood on, we were trained to observe, to look, to listen, so intensly that every event inscribed itself in our memory as if into a piece of untouched wax’] (Bâ 1992, 13).

With respect to the dialectics of the individual and the collective in African autobio­ graphics, the beginning of Amkoullel is quasi didactic. In a few introductory sentences (1992, 19), Bâ succeeds to explain his double anchorage in his own story as both an individual and an integral part of communities: He insists on his pan-African and ethnic identity as Fulani as well as on his familial linage and explains why it is convenient to start his autobiography with his father’s and mother’s lifestories and family genealogies (these will cover over 100 pages). At the same time he stresses that the focus of the book will be on the narration of his own personal life (1992, 19). In the second volume, the flexible identities of the I-narrator are explicated through the Bambara proverb “Les personnes de la personne sont multiples dans la personne” [‘The persons of the person are multiple inside the person’] (Bâ 1994, 225) which alludes to the necessity of the flexibility of different social roles during life. Some of the roles Amadou will have to play in his life are however assigned by the colonial power relations of the day, and to write the African subject out of the subaltern position that

928 

 3 Africa

he plays as a clerk in the French administration in Oui, mon commandant! is one of the major aims of Bâ’s autobiographical oeuvre. He observes colonial alienation and mimicry, but always distances his self-construction from the surrender to these structures. Rather, he models his autobiographical subject as one that is solidly anchored in its culture of origins and furthermore opts to use the new knowledge acquired from the colonial educational and professional context for his personal growth in diverse skills and general wisdom. The above-mentioned orally trained mnemonics and inscription of genealogy and the use of proverbs are some of those elements that link Bâ’s writing back to conventions of orality. On the content level, Bâ describes his fascination for oral performances that have shaped his experience from earliest childhood on (Riesz 2013, 323–327). Indeed, as an academic writer, Bâ, who was one of the first African collaborators of the French research institute IFAN [Institut français d’Afrique noire] in Dakar, is widely known as a collector and expert on oral African literatures. The eminent use of oral structures and stylistic devices as well as references to orature in his own writing does no come as a surprise and is part of what Moradewun Adejunmobi calls “the politics of the representation of orality in African texts” (2000, 27). Western readers may misread parts of Bâ’s memoirs as a mere collocation of anecdotes, closer to a picaresque novel than to an orderly autobiography. But from a West African point of view, it is perfectly legitimate to recognize the structure as a sequence of initiation tales (Nidaye 1998; Köhler 1999, 34–41). Every voyage in this highly mobile vita under colonial circumstances becomes a challenge that the boy/ young adult needs to cope with in order to construct his moral integrity. As far as mobility is concerned, Bâ’s family is displaced several times, which compels the boy to travel between different colonial and ‘traditional’ places of learning, and during his later career he experiences punitive dislocations in the colonial administration. The author-narrator uses a lot of humor for this initiation tales, specifically in those episodes in which he reconstructs a childish perspective that turns alterity into a question of magic and envisions enemies as dangerous monsters. Moreover, each time that the young Amadou proves his courage and cleverness, the autobiographical figure of Amkoullel (meaning the small Koullel, a surname given to the young Amadou in honor of his ‘griot’ Koullel with whom he has a close relationship) is inscribed into the model of the hero reminiscent of the grand West African epics, such as the Sunjata or the Samba Gelajo epics. In spite of the mythical aspect of the construction of a somewhat idealized subject through epic-heroic features, but which are not romanticized, Bâ’s oeuvre clings to historiographic accurate referentiality. Throughout the texts, time and geography are carefully detailed. Moore-Gilbert underlines that “postcolonial life-writing engages to a very significant degree with both travel and its effect on the constitution of subjectivity, not least because of the substantial psychic and affective implications of (dis)location” (2009, 83). Indeed, as a travelogue, Bâ’s narration in which he traverses large parts of West Africa due to colonial circumstances symbolically culminates

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 929

in the creation of a new, personalized map, and which is materially integrated into the original edition of Amkoullel as a paratext. Amadou Hampâté Bâ challenges the colonial science of cartography and the discourse on Africa in European travelogues and memoirs, as he appropriates established literary genres and at the same time transforms them through the mixing with African oral conventions. Eventually, this hybrid autobiographical text foregrounds a multiple subject and subverts a devaluating perspective on Africa and Africans, not least through historiographical and anthropological accuracy (Adejunmobi 2000, 31–35) skillfully combined with frequent use of humor and irony. Strikingly, postcolonial life writing from Africa does not often come forward as a definitively closed one volume autobiography, a fact that points to the complexity of the postcolonial subject’s self-construction. Soyinka alone has published four autobiographical writings and a fictionalized biography of his father. Bâ was working on a third volume of his memoirs, when he died in 1991. Senegalese Birago Diop, who like Bâ was a promoter of oral literatures, published not less than five volumes of ‘mémoires’ between 1978 and 1989. Diop’s texts are precise historical-referential testimonies, while they stylistically make ample use of oral narrative strategies (Azarian 2006; Riesz 2013, 327–332). Buchi Emecheta and Ken Bugul, to whom the next sub-section will turn, also attached themselves to the same technique of producing multiple volumes as an ongoing attempt to write the self.

African Women’s Post-colonial Autobiographics While a sub-section on women’s writing risks reiterating the classical gender dichotomy, the specific use of autobiographical forms by prominent African women writers justifies this approach. In her seminal study Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (1989), Françoise Lionnet underlines that postcolonial women’s autobiographics tend to “the creation of a plural self, one that thrives on ambiguity and multiplicity, on affirmation of differences, not on polarized and polarizing notions of identity” (1989, 16). While these features can equally be found in male postcolonial authors, the particular situation of double oppression experienced by women in colonial as well as local patriarchal orders must be taken into account, given that much postcolonial women’s life-writing is animated not so much by a wish to escape the oppression of (neo)colonialism as those of an indigenous patriarchy which seeks to (re)position gender identities within coercive discourses of tradition and authenticity, whether or not as part of the struggle against foreign domination (Moore-Gilbert 2009, xvi–xvii).

Focusing on Senegal as a case study, Lisa McKnee in her monograph titled Selfish Gifts (2000), shows how autobiographical practices by African women cover a wide range of genres evident in the continuation of oral self-performance, written memoirs,

930 

 3 Africa

childhood autobiographies, and autobiographical fiction. This approach proves that women’s self narratives cannot be understood as one uniform exercise in form and intent. The beginning of post-colonial African women’s autobiographical writing in English dates back to the 1960s. Mabel Segun’s childhood narrative My Father’s Daughter (1965), foregrounds “a conscious rejection of the feminine role in favor of identification with her male parent” (Bryce 1992, 55), a clergyman who was fond of giving formal English education to his daughter. As the autobiographical element in the title suggests, the narrative, composed in simple language and actually published in a collection for children’s literature, reads as an intertwined text of the biography of the much admired father and the autobiography of the daughter. In Daughter of Mumbi (1969) Charity Waciuma, a Kenyan, continues the autoethnographical Gikuyu tradition initiated as early as 1938 by Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya and extended into post-colonial times in Gatheru’s Child of Two Worlds (1964), from a female point of view. Waciuma reminds us of the importance of namegiving as a means to inscribe the individual into a biographical continuum of the larger community: In our country, names are not chosen haphazardly. Any name includes many people who are now dead, others who are living, and those who are still not born. It binds its owner deep into Kikuyu history, beyond the oldest man with the longest memory. All our relatives to the furtherest extent of the family, their actions, their lives and their children are an intrinsic part of our being alive, of being human, of being African, of being Kikuyu (Waciuma 1969, 163–164).

In Waciuma’s text, the auto/biographical practice of oral (self-)praise with its particular attention to naming is implicitly shifted to the autobiographical prose narrative which contains reminders of such earlier self-referential conventions. In Francophone Africa, 1975 is the year of the simultaneous publication of Aoua Kéita’s Femme d’Afrique [‘Woman of Africa’], Nafissatou Diallo’s De Tilène au plateau: une enfance dakaroise [‘From Tilène to the Plateau: a Dakar childhood’] and Simone Kaya’s Les danseuses d’Impe-Eya [‘The Dancers of Impe-Eya’]. The three texts from Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast, respectively, offer good examples of the variety of African women’s autobiographics. Aoua Kéita, who was one of the first medically trained midwives and the first female Member of Parliament in Mali, constructs her narration mainly as a strictly official memoir, focused on her career and public life during the struggle for independence and early nation-building, while her personal relationships remain discreetly in the background. Kéita clearly focuses on her own outstanding personality for the most part within the destiny of Mali as a post-colonial nation. In contrast, Simone Kaya prefers a collective and autoethnographic perspective in so far as she mostly constructs her autobiographical subject as part of her larger family as well as female age-group. In doing so, she uses the first person plural narrator. Both Kaya and Diallo adapt the classical motif of narrating about their characters’ departure to France for further studies, presented as a rupture that brings their

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 931

autobiography to the end. Nafissatou Diallo’s text features, according to Julia Watson, “a multidiscursivity” that negotiates the boundaries between “the competing genres of autobiography and ethnographic memoir” (1997, 35–36). The text can also be read as a comical tongue-in-cheek story of a rebellious young girl who playfully opposes family laws and her attributed gender role. Indeed, a concern shared by all three texts, despite their remarkable differences in form and style, is the promotion of access to modern education for girls as a feminist stance to overcome the limits of traditional gender hierarchies. In 1986, the Nigerian success writer Buchi Emecheta came up with Head above Water as her official autobiography. She narrates her story along the lines of her education in colonial Nigeria, her struggles as a Black mother and student in the UK of the 1960s, her career as a social worker and finally her resistance against the oppressive behavior of her husband. Emecheta posits her vocation as a writer early on and how it was suppressed in the missionary school she went to. Parts of the story in Head above Water are familiar to the readership of Emecheta’s earlier novels, namely In the Ditch (1972) and Second-class citizen (1974). These are autobiographical novels written at a time when the author did not yet dare to speak out about gender oppression in an openly referential manner. This explains why Emecheta invents the novelistic character of ‘Adah’ as her ‘alter ego’. While feminist research into autobiography has often underlined the “politics of fragmentation” (Smith 1993, 155) as to female subjectivity and embodied representation, the fragmentation is less to be found in the subject formation as in the progressive use of different genres and disrupted storylines in the case of Emecheta. From her position as an accomplished writer, in Head above Water, Emecheta introduces a metatextual level, when she explains that Second-Class Citizen as an “autobiographical work […] give[s] a rich background to In the Ditch” (1986, 109). But critics point out that “Head above Water reveals the extent of the autobiographical content of her other writings” (Oriaku 2007, 15) and that the two autobiographical novels “are so slight and interconnected thematically and chronologically that they could have appeared as one novel” (Ogunyemi 1983, 66). The parallel reading of the earlier novels and the later autobiography finally allows one to connect the fragments of a life-story. In other words, just as it is revealing to reread the novels in the light of the autobiography, the reception of the autobiography can be completed through the reading of the novels. Although Emecheta’s identity construction as a woman and mother affected by patriarchy and as a Black African woman confronted with everyday racism in London points to collective identifications, she also poses as an exceptional strong individual and does not shy away from portraying tensions within different Black communities in the UK. While the tone in Head above Water is frankly self-celebratory, the focus in Second-class Citizen and In the Ditch is on social struggle for emancipation and recognition. The character Adah is narrated through a third person voice that keeps a detached distance and as Emecheta admits, “[s]ome scholars say that I was probably too harsh on myself” (1994, 63). Speaking psychologically, the creation of distance was maybe necessary for Emecheta at the time when the memory

932 

 3 Africa

of traumatizing events such as the burning of her first manuscript by her husband were still fresh. Ken Bugul’s autobiographical writing, stretching from 1981 to 2014, offers an even more complex case of fragmented and serial writing. Bugul’s subversion of the law of genre can be linked to that of gender – thereby playing on the double meaning of the word ‘genre’ in French. Bugul’s I-narrators in a series of not less then five texts feature as transgressive subjects that do not fit into given orders of gender, race, age and post/colonial hierarchies. Her much debated literary debut Le Baobab fou (1981) [The Abandoned Baobab (2008)] appeared in a collection entitled ‘African Memoirs’ in Dakar, and was followed by a series of texts signed as novels (Bugul 1994, 1999, 2003, 2008, 2014), but which all oscillate between fiction and autobiographical references. By choosing a writing strategy that is different from the classical autobiographical novel format, Bugul does not fictionalise names or places, but rather employs referential motifs of the writer’s life-story and combines them with fiction through forms as diverse as myth, enchased symbolic sub-narrations, poetic passages and flashbacks/ flashforwards into times and places beyond any realistic grasp. Parts of her pen name, Ken Bugul, or her civic name, Mariétou Mbaye, appear in the narrations. So far, Bugul is among the few African writers for whom the concept of autofiction is applicable. Bugul’s point of departure is a story of double alienation: through colonial school, on the one hand, and through the rupture with her mother who abandoned her in early childhood, on the other. The wound from the rejection by her mother, a figure who allegorizes traditional femininity and to some extent also symbolizes Africa, is a theme that runs through all of Bugul’s texts. In the opening scene of Le Baobab fou such a traumatizing rupture is condensed into the narration of the founding myth of her mother’s village and a close up on the feeling of maternal neglect through the image of a girlchild abandoned under a baobab tree. Switching to a realistic mood, Bugul mocks the Senegalese school girl that she was and who aspired to be French and even White through her body performance: gait, taste for European clothes, make-up, and straightening of her hair. When she becomes an estranged student in Belgium, paradoxically, it is the role of a stereotyped sexualized Black woman, with provocative African clothes, ‘ethnic’ attire, lascivious dancing style that she must perform in order to gain recognition by the White European society. This is the sort of pressure that eventually draws her into drugs, sex-work and a resulting psychological breakdown. While Le Baobab fou focuses on the impossibility of the gendered and racialised migrant to develop an identity in the European space, in the follow up texts, the transcultural subject returns to Africa and questions her possibilities to re-integrate into a community – her family, Senegalese womanhood or the Islamic ‘umma’ [the religious community]. In Riwan et le chemin de sable [‘Riwan or the sandy track’] (1999) the I-narrator marries into the harem of a polygamous religious leader, who offers her spiritual and sexual healing. In the narrative, she blends her own story with a fictional twist while telling the imagined stories of her co-wives’ biographies. Making metaphorical use of rituals borrowed from her adopted home country Benin, in De

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 933

l’autre côté du regard [‘On the other side of the gaze’] (2003), the narrator speaks to her deceased mother and seeks reconciliation with her. Mes Hommes à moi [‘My Men’] (2008) is dedicated to the nostalgic memory of her father and brother, but features a frame narrative in a Parisian bar, where the now mature narrator observes the lonely drinkers and imagines their weird stories. In spite of the strong feeling of loneliness and the ambiguous desire to become recognized as both a unique human being and an integral part of a religious group or community, the female collective and the larger family are often challenged and contradicted. These aspects feature the radical individuality of the autofictional subject who does not fit into her social role as woman and contests any merging with the law of community. The reconstruction of collectives remains as tentative and undisclosed as the construction of the narrated self. In her latest novel, Cacophonie [‘Cacophony’] (2014), Bugul switches to a third person narrator and to a protagonist with a fictional name, who happens to be an ageing writer, but confronts the reader with recurring motifs from her earlier works. Actually, the poetic documentary Ken Bugul. Niemand will sie [‘Ken Bugul. Nobody wants her’] (2014) that was shot in Bugul’s house in Porto Novo and in different places in Senegal by Swiss filmmaker Silvia Voser, seems to illustrate the setting of this novel. In the light of the film, the novel is yet again readable as another piece of autofiction. Indeed, Bugul’s autofictional practice is a case in point for the poststructuralist argument that autobiography shall be less considered as a function of representation of a given identity, but rather as a writing strategy for the production of identity through writing (Benesch 1994, 129). As a Senegalese woman writer from the next generation, Fatou Diome, who has been living in France for more than twenty years by now, is to some extent indebted to the autoreferential writing strategies of her elder predecessor Bugul. In several of her novels and short stories, Diome uses references to her own now well-known CV and cultural as well as family background as strategic elements to construct her fiction. She admits, albeit concluding Lejeune’s famous pact: “La petite Salie dans Le ventre de l’Atlantique, l’étudiante de La préférence nationale. Oui, c’est absolument moi” [‘The little Salie of The Belly of the Atlantic, the student from Nationals preferred. Yes, that’s absolutely me’] (Diouf 2009, 139). Diome readaopts her alter ego character Salie from her success novel The Belly of the Atlantic (2006) again in her last novel entitled Impossible de grandir [‘The Impossibility to grow up’] (2013). Still haunted by the exclusion she experienced as an illegitimate child born and bred on the island of Niodior on Senegal’s Atlantic coast, the first person narrator is an independent single woman writer living in Strasbourg who observes both the French and the Senegalese society with a sharp eye and lucid critic – just as the author who is often invited to media events and whose personal topography and family background mirror those of Salie. However, Fatou Diome refuses the genre of autobiography for her writing. With regards to her use of personal memories in her texts, she explains:

934 

 3 Africa

Alors moi je n’aime pas fondamentalement l’autobiographie. Je pense qu’aucune vie n’est si intéressante pour faire un roman en entier. Je dis toujours que je ne fais pas d’autobiographie. Je prends juste quelques petits morceaux de vécu, d’expériences que j’insère dans le livre pour le côté exemple, pour renforcer une intrigue, et après, l’histoire se tisse autour pour s’ouvrir aux autres [‘So, myself, I don’t really like autobiography. I believe that no life is interesting enough to become a novel on its own. I always say that I do not practice autobiography. I just take some small bits of lived experiences which I will insert into the book as examples, in order to reinforce the plot, and after that, the story is woven around it in order to open up to others’] (Diouf 2009, 138).

While she obviously uses auto-referential material in her novels, Diome’s implicit modesty about her own life as not being interesting enough echoes Bechi Emecheta’s strategic fictionalisation in her autobiographical novels of the 1970s. The cases of Ken Bugul, Bechi Emecheta and Fatou Diome, who all criticize sexism, racism and classism in their writing, prove a fact that was already visible during colonial times: contexts of migration continue to stimulate African autobiographical writing in diverse forms. This is equally true for the following section that deals with an innovative genre that often springs up among intellectual writers of the African Diaspora.

Autobiographical Essays Since the 1990s, a sub-genre which might aptly be termed autobiographical essay (Gehrmann 2011), precisely because it combines theoretical reflection with autobiographical narration, has become prominent in African writing, from the intellectual Diaspora in particular. The genre is close to the concept of intellectual autobiography in the Western tradition, but in its specific postcolonial writing strategies it also goes beyond. The postcolonial philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe, who is also a cultural theorist and novelist, set up a masterpiece of this brand with Les corps glorieux des mots et des êtres: Ésquisse d’un jardin africain à la bénédictine [‘The Glorious Bodies of Words and Beings. Sketch of an African Garden in the Benedictine Style’] (1994). As to the autobiographical continuum in Mudimbe’s work, it is remarkable that this major autoreferential text is framed by two travel diaries: Carnets d’Amérique [‘American Diaries’] (1976) that relates the impressions of an early travel to the United States, and Cheminements. Carnets de Berlin [‘Paths. The Berlin Diaries’] (2006), which is about Mudimbe’s stay in Germany as a guest professor in 1999. Cheminements focuses above all on his readings, intellectual reflection and inner restlessness. While the diaries’ structure and content in both texts focus on new experiences gathered through travel, the testimonial mode is broken up, enriched and complicated at the same time through transitions into other fictional and non-fictional genres. Such generic hybridations, as Olga Hél-Bongo (2012) argues, enable the African and dias-

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 935

poric writer to develop new critical takes on colonial and postcolonial domination and alienation. Mudimbe’s ‘official autobiography’, Les corps glorieux, is a hybrid text that cannot be described with any established genre definition. On the level of content, the text is “about the life of a former monk who became an atheist intellectual” (Sankara 2011, 54). The loosely chronologically narrated lifelines run from the chraracter’s childhood as an outstanding pupil in Congo’s colonial, mission based school system through his disavowal of the chosen clerical career as a young man, who then becomes a brilliant student in Paris and Leuven during the stimulating 1960s. He further becomes a professor in Zaïre, and finally a celebrated academic thinker, in exile, in the United States. In his foreword, Mudimbe claims that he was inspired to take stock of his life on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. The author concludes an autobiographical pact with his readers and emphasizes on the straightforward and authentic nature of his work’s character as “témoignage” [‘testimony’] (Mudimbe 1994, 2). In doing so, he seems to follow the tradition of classical representatives of the Western autobiographical canon. But he immediately dismisses this commitment when he concedes that “il [ce livre] relève de l’autobiographie sans en être réellement, et de l’essai” [‘it (this book) participates in autobiography without really being such, and in essay-writing’] (Mudimbe 1994, i). Indeed, if one weighs the different sections of the book against each other, it is obvious that the theoretical-essayistic digressions cover large parts of the book. Admittedly, there is a first-person narrator at the centre of the text – a character who, however, splits into an abundance of facets and voices (Bisanswa 2000, 46–47). The fragments of his personal memories, told quite unsystematically, are repeatedly interrupted by essayistic passages devoted to a large variety of themes – from the colonial and post-colonial history of Africa to reflections on the effectiveness of psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminism. Not least, postcolonial cultures and scholarly discourses are evaluated and analyzed in the context of the personal self-narrative. This makes the corps glorieux “a site where history, philosophy, and self-narrative meet” (Sankara 2011, 53). Furthermore, a metatext runs through Les corps glorieux. The autobiographical subject reflects repeatedly on the act of writing and consciously transgresses the boundaries of genre. Mudimbe analyses his own text and its hybrid status between autobiography and essay and concludes that this particular genre crossing actually serves his autobiographical project, since it functions as an expression of Mudimbe’s personality: Ce mélange de genres témoigne, à la fois, d’une expérience et d’une méditation. Il synthétise, en effet, en sa propre logique et en ses contradictions, une intention de déchiffrement des inquiétudes spirituelles et, paradoxalement, d’un confort intellectuel [‘This mixture of genres simultaneously testifies to an experience and a meditation. In fact, it synthesizes, in its own logic and with its contradictions, an intention to decipher spiritual uncertainties and, paradoxically, an intellectual well-being’] (Mudimbe 1994, ii).

936 

 3 Africa

The metatextuality in Les corps glorieux is part and parcel of Mudimbe’s greater intellectual project of analysing and critically questioning the discourses and knowledge constructions in African history and cultures (Mudimbe 1988, 1994), while taking into account his own subjective experience. Looking at Mudimbe’s earlier work as a novelist, one can observe that he has had a preference for the self-reflective diaristic novel form (Entre les Eaux [‘Between Tides’] [1973], Shaba II [1989]) and has created protagonists whose personal problems (the critical but intimate relationship to Catholicism, the role of African intellectuals between cultures) are very similar to his own. In a way, Mudimbe’s double writing-practice as an essayist and novelist flow together in his autobiographical essay. Further complicating the generic heterogeneity of Les corps glorieux, Mudimbe places a section of twenty-four photographs at the end of his book. No claims are made for any aesthetic merits of these photos for they appear as conventional single or group portraits that could be found in any family photo album. Read in light of the text, the chronologically ordered photographs present Mudimbe in his childhood during colonial times, as a husband, a professor and a father. The photographs display multiple semantic functions and can be analyzed at a further meta-textual level which not only structures the text, but also questions it (Gehrmann 2012). In short, Mudimbe ironises the classical Western model of autobiography by mixing life writing and essayistic writing, and foregrounds the unreliability of memory even if it is sustained by photographic traces of one’s life. He simultaneously analyzes colonization as a collective/ global and individual/personal process. At the same time his political criticism is also directed against post-colonial dictatorship and mismanagement. The question of the diasporic writer’s unbelonging to stable spaces and communities is at the heart of Nuruddin Farah’s Yesterday and Tomorrow: Voices of the Somali Diaspora (2000). While thoroughly questioning his own stance to Somali politics as an outsider, the novelist who has been living in exile since 1974, uses an interview technique in order to allow numerous Somali diasporic voices to resonate in his text. He creates a mosaic of many individual stories of exile, including his own. Through his travels to different places where he meets representatives of the Somali Diaspora and allows them to speak in his autobiographical essay, he creates an imaginary, textual community. In 2008, Farah also published the short autobiographical piece “The Family House” that intersperses memories from a return visit to Somalia with childhood reminiscences and political reflections. Completely different in tone and style from his above analyzed childhood autobiography Aké, in You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006) Wole Soyinka combines the narration of his exile years in the United States with a thorough analysis of the political crisis in post-colonial Nigeria. The focus on political events and Soyinka’s networks with prominent players in the academic, artistic and political scenes in Nigeria and other parts of the world resemble a memoir – hence the generic subtitle of the work. But Soyinka’s elevated level of reflection links this autobiographical text back to his famous theoretical and political essays, such as Myth, Literature, and the African World

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 937

(1978) or The Open Sore of a Continent (1997) among many others. The title alludes to flight and disruptive departures that have been constitutive of his life in exile. In contrast to Mudimbe, Farah, and Soyinka, Manthia Diawara, a professor of comparative literature and film studies at New York University, is not a fiction writer. After a number of scholarly works, he published In Search of Africa (1998) and We Won’t budge (2003), two essays which are characteristic of an autobiographical/essayistic flow. In both books, a travel story frames the narrative in which the first case chronicles a research trip to Guinea-Conakry, where Diawara grew up and where in 1996 he wanted to shoot a documentary film on Sekou Touré. The second case entails a sabbatical granted by his American university which allows him a trip back to Paris, where Diawara’s exile from Africa as a student had once started. In Search of Africa is structured into four ‘situations’ – a concept borrowed from Sartre – and eight chapters that alternate between a theoretical-analytical mode of writing, travel account and autobiographical reconstruction of Diawara’s youth in the West Africa of the 1970s. As the author explains in his preface: “The Situations deal with blackness and modernity, and my own place and role in shaping them. The Situations are designed to provide distance for reflecting on the issues in Africa with which I am concerned” (Diawara 1998, vii). Thus, from the beginning the entanglement of theoretical and autobiographical reflection is announced. Diawara narrates his travel to Guinea-Conakry as an intellectual quest during which he wishes to comprehend how Sékou Touré, Africa’s hope at independence, turned into a dictator. At a personal level, he longs to reunite with his intimate childhood friend, Sidimé Laye. To his dismay, the downtrodden country as well as the once promising friend who has become a sculptor for the tourist market, deceive him. However, the journey which inspires the writing frame gives way to multiple reflections on Africa’s destiny in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined with flashbacks into the author’s childhood. The interconnectedness of the personal, the autobiograpical and the essayistic analytical mode are to be found in each chapter of Diawara’s work. For instance, a re-reading of the implications and reception of Sartre’s famous “Black Orpheus” preface to Senghor’s Anthologie de la poésie nègre et malgache [‘Anthology of Black and Malagasy Poetry’] from 1948 leads him to a personal re-evaluation of the liberating aspects of Négritude for his generation: My generation had been drawn to Negritude because it promised to make us equal to white people, to lift us above the tribe and the clan, and to provide us with our own nations. Many children of my generation, overlooked by the colonial system, had gone to school and learned to read and to write only because of Negritude and independence. It is in this sense that we say that Negritude invented us, taught us how to think in a particularly modern way, and put us inside history (Diawara 1998, 8).

Diawara also succeeds to take the reunion with his friend as a starting point to narrate in two intertwined moods: nostalgic reminiscences of his youth, on the one hand and

938 

 3 Africa

a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Sidimé Laye’s artistic practice on the other hand. In the chapter entitled “Africa’s Art of Resistance”, he learns to read Sidimé’s practice as a sculptor as a double sign of resistance against the repressive post-colonial state and against Islam, the two dominant paradigms in Guinea which both suppress original African forms of ritual and art. At the same time, it is a means of survival following the specific dynamics of African marketplaces that are in turn the analytical subject in the chapter entitled “The Shape of the Future”. Diawara outlines a clairvoyant analysis of Africa’s economic and symbolic losses at the end of the post-socialist decade of globalization in the 1990s. In his second autobiographical essay, subtitled An African Exile in the World, Diawara ponders upon his strategic mixing of academic and literary auto/biographical writing: By making the past speak to the present in this manner and using literary techniques to write the history of African immigrants, I hope to go beyond anthropology and sociology, while continuing the discussion with these academic disciplines. I call my approach reverse anthropology, or neo-anthropology, or simply cultural studies. That is, I study African immigrants in Europe and America by using, whenever appropriate, the tools of anthropology, sociology, literature, memoirs, the epistolary form, and travel narratives (Diawara 2003, xi–xii).

As a guest professor in Paris, Diawara experiences a number of racist incidents that make him regret France’s systematic abandonment of its ideals of ‘equality, fraternity, liberty’. He thus decides to write a book on African immigrants in France. The process of writing is metaphorically framed by a malaria fever that also links the Parisian present back to an earlier visit to Mali and to an inevitable, physical condition. In what follows, Diawara’s reminiscences oscillate between spaces namely Bamako, Paris and its infamous banlieues, and Washington. The going back and forth between the present and unchronologically rendered glimpses of the past, constructs the effect of an actual spontaneous flow of memory. Meanwhile, Diawara’s own life-story and his observations of today’s Malian immigrants get more and more entangled. Beyond the rendering of the feverish and fragmentary memories on display in Diawara’s text, he also uses more reliable, original letters that he wrote to his acquaintances back home during the difficult years of his erstwhile migration to America, and which had a therapeutic function for the empoverished student of that time. Excerpts of the ‘authentic’ letters are embodied in the text of We won’t budge (2003). The recycling of the letters gives way to a metatextual reflection on self-writing as a constitutive form of individuation: Through writing, I could define my reality in my own terms and make myself the agent of my own destiny. In other words, as I described my activities to my friends in my letters, they became reality for me in Washington. Writing also provided me with a sense of individualism and autonomy: a belief that I had a unique point of view and that, one day, the world would discover me as an intellectual – that my name would go beyond the circle of my friends and family (Diawara 2003, 22).

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 939

In spite of the instability of the text, voluntarily orchestrated through the metaphor of the fever, some common elements determine the writing of We won’t budge. One is the growth of the author-narrator’s consciousness about racism through his progressive identification with the struggle of African Americans, his reflection on the differences between American structural discrimination based on capitalism and the French form of racist paternalism. With regards to his reflection on an African migrant’s life that oscillates between cultures and his culturalist theoretical approach, Diawara poses as a postcolonial subject. However, he is well aware of the fact that the sheer celebration of hybridity and the role of a cultural broker between worlds risks to become a new stereotype of the African intellectual. As the texts analyzed in the above sub-sections portray, ‘identity’ in the sense of a fixed and stable positioning of the subject in just one fixed cultural framework, is a doubtful category for postcolonial autobiographical texts. Indeed, the teleological narration of classical Western autobiography is denied, while postcolonial authors construct their subjectivity as culturally open, pluralistic and not rounded. They combine historical referentiality with either oral narrative conventions or fictional elements and position the self in relationship to different communities. Thus, the linear narrative concerned with the processes of a unified, referential self’s search for identity is frequently subordinated to a subjective, oppositional historiography, a conscious fictionalization of the self, or a focus on the collective dimension of the self. In the remaining sections of this overview, African autobiographical sub-genres that have a different, and more deliberate political function, will now be dealt with.

Political Memoirs The founding father of African independence, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and second president, published his book Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah in the year of the Gold Coast’s independence in 1957, and thus Nkrumah can also be considered as the founding father of an autobiographical genre that would flourish in the 1960s and 1970s in particular. Although the distinction between autobiography and memoirs is fluid when one considers that the supposed dichotomy between the focus on the development of a personality in autobiography as opposed to the focus on external events in memoirs collapses more often than not inside one text, the life narrations by the generation of political leaders that will be dealt with in this sub-section shall be summarized through the generic term ‘political memoirs’, despite the fact that the editorial choice for many of these publications was ‘autobiography’. In doing so, the difference of this sub-genre to the postcolonial autobiographics dealt with so far shall be underlined.

940 

 3 Africa

Above all, the political activism, struggle and triumph described in these texts do not only leave little space for private matters, but they also rarely tend to critical self-introspection. The public political subject constructed in these texts per se tends to be coherent; the genre celebrates a heroic, straightforward self that has no need for psychological complexity, instability or doubt on his (rarely her) mission. An epic, heroic mode of self-presentation is generally favored. That notwithstanding, the autobiographical pact in the sense of a solemn declaration of veracity is more important than ever in political memoirs, as the readers’ expectation in the face of this genre tends to be a personalized history lesson. Also, as a reference to oral conventions of constructing the self as part of a community, the genre often includes the presentation of the larger family genealogy of the subject. For instance, in My Life (1962), the Northern Nigerian leader Ahmadu Bello traces his political destination back to Usman dan Fodio, the founder of the Sokoto caliphate in the early nineteenth century. As he chronicles: “I could not avoid the obligation of my birth and destiny. My great-great-grandfather built an empire in the Western Sudan. It has fallen to my lot to play a not inconsiderable part in building a new nation” (Bello 1962, viii). Indeed, ‘nation-building’ is the keyword for the relevance and the function of the genre as it fosters “ideological value in creating a national consciousness which is personalized in the figure of the national leader”, and also because “autobiographies are far easier for the common man to understand than abstract political programmes and treaties” (Grohs 1996, 196). With reference to Obafemi Awolowo’s Awo (1960) among other texts, Dasylva and Oriaku clearly oppose the political autobiographical genre to a literary refined one and define it stylistically as considerably steeped into politics as the author employs the special narrative as a means to a political end. This form of auto/biography is the most common, and largely characterized by a simple pro: often organic and has a synchronic linear plot in which the subject defines and determines the unfolding syntax of action (Dasylva and Oriaku 2010, 306).

Notably, the pioneers of African independence rarely wait to reach old age before looking back at their life. On the contrary, several prominent figures came up with their memoirs during the struggle or shortly after they had achieved freedom and the foundation of a new nation. Following in Nkrumah’s footsteps, for instance Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s first president published Zambia shall be free. An Autobiography (1962) two years before the process of independence was completed. Tom Mboya, a prominent syndicalist and minister in the 1960s, released Freedom and now? (1963) in the very year of Kenya’s independence, and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994) was published in the year of South Africa’s first democratic elections. The political memoir typically blends the life narrative with a narration of the nation that must be built, healed, and preserved. Not only does the narrator identify with the nation, through the political engagement in his lifestory he becomes the symbolic embodiment of the nation. The paratextual apparatus of Nkrumah’s and Kaunde’s memoirs illustrates this fundamental idea for the very titles on the cover

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 941

confound the new nation’s name, Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) and Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia), with the name and the picture of the president-auto­ biographer. As Philip Holden shows for Nkrumah’s paradigmatic text (which is in fact a collaborative memoir largely written by his secretary Erica Powell [Holden 2003, 12]): The narrative of Ghana’s emergence as a nation-state is tied to Nkrumah’s own personal growth and a series of parallels are again drawn between technologies of the self which are coded as masculine, and applied to the male body, and the action of the party and then the state upon the nation (Holden 2003, 9).

As a genre, the political memoir has clearly been dominated by the founding fathers of independence and politicians who occupy high positions, yet sometimes it is also used from an oppositional perspective. This is the case, for instance, with the Congolese Tshiakatumba Matala Mukadi’s 2001 memoir entitled Dans la tourmente de la dictature [‘In the troubles of dictatorship’]. Although subtitled as “autobiographie d’un poète” [‘autobiography of a poet’], Mukadi who is well known for his poetry, does not seek for literary refinement in this text. Oginga Odinga’s Not yet Uhuru (1967) offers an earlier example. The Kenyan author was vice-president to Jomo Kenyatta with whom he fought during the independence struggle, but founded his own party in 1966, when Kenyatta’s reign turned into a repressive regime. Odinga explains the interweaving of lifestory and political activism in his preface when he states that “I have frankly told the story of my life and political activity, admitting my mistakes and miscalculations […]. I have tried to show that there have been consistent threads running through our struggle form the early days until the present” (1974, xii). Besides the clear focus on political events in Kenya’s history, Odinga’s book leaves space for personal anecdotes. But those are stories that take place in the public space and do not unmask the personal and private sphere. It can be asserted, for all examples of the sub-genre, that the private is only revealed in so far as it completes the public image of the political subject, and remains otherwise discreetly in the background. Political memoirs are clearly content, not style centered. In general, the genre leaves little space for sophisticated narrative techniques or rhetorical devices. However, Michael Chapman recognizes an “oral story-teller’s gift of parable, proverb and maxim” (1999, 132) in Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. Recently, this male dominated genre has been revived from a female point of view with the publication of memoirs by the first three female African Nobel Peace Prize Winners. Liberia’s president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s This Child will be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President (2009), despite its stylistic sobriety, stands for the allegorical representation of the ‘mother president’ as the renascent Liberian nation after the long civil war. Liberian human rights’ activist Roberta Leymah Gbowee’s Mighty be Our Powers: How Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation (2011) and Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed. A Memoir (2006) can also be added to the list of political memoirs, albeit from an oppositional perspective

942 

 3 Africa

which subverts established political and social regimes and further explicates lives devoted to new ways of seeking peace and justice in African societies.

Prison Writing Post-colonial African autobiographical memoirs and diaries in relation to imprisonment are numerous. They are almost exclusively written in connection with political detainment and often by authors who were already recognized writers or prominent political activists. Sometimes the narrated time of this important sub-genre dates back to colonial times. For instance Bernard Dadié’s Carnet de Prison [‘Prison Journal’] that was published in 1981, but deals with the author’s imprisonment under colonial rule in 1949/50 in Ivory Coast or Joseph Muthee’s 2006 Swahili prison memoir Kizuizini [‘In Prison’], that goes back to the British detention camps during the 1950s Mau-Mau struggle for independence. Given the repressive nature of many post-colonial regimes on the continent and the role of politically activist writers, autobiographical prison writing – already prominent under apartheid and in other colonial situations – contin­ ues to flourish as a sub-genre in post-colonial Africa and with reference to post-colonial oppressive regimes. The introspection of imprisonment and the extreme conditions of torture or solitary confinement to which political prisoners are often subjected, sharpen the self-observation of the activist subject as well as his (rarely her) political consciousness that reflects on the society outside the prison space. In Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981), Ngugi wa Thiong’o underlines the collective social aftermaths and historical continuities of political imprisonment in Africa – a form of punishment unknown to pre-colonial African societies – when he writes in the foreword to his own prison diary that he tried to discuss detention not as a personal affair between me and a few individuals, but as a social, political, and historical phenomenon. I have tried to see it in the context of the historical attempts, from colonial times to the present, by a foreign imperialist bourgeoisie, in alliance with its local Kenyan representatives, to turn Kenyans into slaves (Ngugi 1981, xi).

It is impressive to see how Ngugi actually succeeds to maintain this analytical level in the diary itself, parts of which he wrote not knowing if he would survive his prison experience. In his text, Ngugi makes reference to Nkrumah’s political memoirs and to Dennis Brutus’s Letters to Martha (1968), the latter being a poetry collection published by the famous apartheid detainee. Ngugi therefore inscribes both Nkrumah and Brutus’s texts in his work as a continuum of African prison writing and struggles for freedom. The diary, a hybrid text with newspaper clips, song lyrics, poems etc. (Waliaula 2009a, 249), is followed by a compilation of letters that Ngugi wrote to his wife and to politicians responsible for Kenyan detainees. This combination of

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 943

the inner, solitary thoughts in the diary part with the enchased extroverted media of communication allows the reader to grasp both the prisoner’s despair and determination. Waliaula (2009a) suggests that Ngugi’s text should be read beyond the notion of testimony as a political manifesto. The will to claim and disseminate one’s political conviction is certainly a function that most of African prison writing performs. Wole Soyinka, accused and charged of being a spy for Biafra, was imprisoned for 22 months during the Nigerian civil war. His The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) is composed of actual notes taken during the detention and later rewritings of his experience. While the text maintains the form of chronological diary entries, it also contains memories as well as reflections that he eventually added to those. In the first chapter, Soyinka makes transparent the process of recomposing actual prison notes, a technique that is certainly imperative for most published prison writing. He remarks that [t]his book has taken many forms and shapes. The question of what to include, what suspend, what totally erase, all influenced by problems of expediency, of my continuing capacity to affect events in my country, of effecting the revolutionary changes to which I have become more then ever dedicated, considerations of my own safety, […] all these have changed the format, title, conception of this book at least a dozen times (Soyinka 1985, 12).

Given the extreme prison conditions  – 15 months in complete isolation, extensive fasting and uncountable physical and psychological calamities as described by Soyinka – the author concludes by calling his book “not a textbook of survival but the private record of one survival” (Soyinka 1985, 26). Curious survival strategies developed by Soyinka include the indulging into mathematical exercise, obsessively observing plants and animals and the brewing of a strange liquid playfully named ‘Soy’ink’ for writing purposes. Writing, though strictly forbidden, becomes itself an obsession and a means of psychological survival. In contrast to Soyinka’s accurate self-observation as a deep psychological portrait of the humiliated prisoner that he was, Ken Saro-Wiwa, the well known novelist and eco-activist from the oil rich Niger Delta, used his A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary, published posthumously after his execution in 1995, to foreground the suffering and the struggle of the Ogoni people. In this light, his own detainment appears as just one sacrifice that was imposed as part of much larger structures of oppression. Indeed, during the military dictatorship of Soni Abacha from 1993–1998, political imprisonment in Nigeria was extremly frequent, a fact that let to a proliferation of prison writing during the late 1990s, early 2000s. For instance, the journalists Kunle Ajibade in Jailed for Life: a Reporter’s Prison Notes (2003) and Chris Ngozi Anyanwu (one of the rare women writers of this genre) in The Days of Terror: a Journalist Eye-witness Account of Nigeria in the Hands of Its Worst Tyrant (2002), are witness to the harsh oppression of media and public opinion through imprisonment; they were both only released after Abacha’s death. While authors such as Soyinka, Ngugi, and Saro-Wiwa were already accomplished writers when they went to prison, autobiographical prison writing has also been the

944 

 3 Africa

literary starting point for some authors. This is the case with the Kenyan political activist and academic Abdilatif Abdalla whose self-referential prison poems Sauti ya Dhiki [‘Voice of Agony’] (1973) which imbibe a polyphone aesthetic (Waliaula 2009b), became the starting point for his recognition as an outstanding Swahili poet (Beck and Kresse 2015). Autobiographical poetry is indeed also a widely established part of prison writing from Africa, as the many examples from West-, East- and Southern Africa in Jack Mapanje’s 2002 anthology, Gathering Seaweed, indicate. Another example are the poems in Chris Abani’s collection Kalakuta Republic (2001), based on the author’s experience of imprisonment under the Babangida regime in Nigeria in the 1980s. Abani, a prolific prose fiction writer, opted for dense metaphorical, but also blunt language of poetry to express unspeakable experiences of torture. Prison writing by women is rare in Africa, besides the particular situation of apartheid. South Africa has generated an important number of both male and female testimonies on imprisonment such as Ruth First’s 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African Ninety-Day Detention Law (1965) and Caesarina Kona Makhoere’s No Child’s Play: In Prison under Apartheid (1988). In 2003, the association of Zimbabwe Women writers published an anthology of narratives based on interviews with 30 female prisoners. As a collaborative project among Zimbabweans, albeit from a different class background, A Tragedy of Lives: Women in Prison in Zimbabwe exceptionally allows imprisoned female ‘ordinary criminals’, to speak out about crime, prison, and above all social conditions. Prison writing implies a testimonial mode of writing that seeks for its target audience in Africa, as it aims to intervene in local politics, but also outside the continent in order to raise international awareness, and hopefully intervention with regards to human rights violations. Given the sheer number of publications and importance of the sub-genre, prison diaries and memoirs have been treated as a category apart from other testimonial arenas with which will be dealt now.

Testimonial Narratives While the gesture of witnessing as a means to reconquer History can be said to be an inherent part of postcolonial autobiographics in general, a particular genre of testimonial autobiographical writing has, internationally, been visible since the 1990s. Personal testimonial narratives on human rights’ violations, be it during the Rwanda genocide in 1994, other civil wars in Africa, or about the particular conditions of women and children, all add to this category of testimonial autobiographics. Such testimonial texts by Africans who are originally not writers now make an important contribution to the genre and occupy an established place on global markets for books. Texts such as Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower (1998) or Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) have been carefully marketed bestsellers.

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 945

Emerging from the realm of human rights debates, the genre features the autobiographical testimony of a vulnerable person who has survived exploitation and misuse, persecution or menace of death. More often than not, such texts are co-authored with journalists and/or human rights activists who either write down an oral testimony or are otherwise involved in the manuscript’s revision. Comparable to the anthropologist’s activity, the involvement in authorship by a third party raises questions about the ‘authenticity’ as opposed to marketable ‘artificiality’ of such texts. Although, in general, language and structure are kept simple, the story might have been concluded in order for it to fit into a certain pattern of reception. Testimonial narratives draw attention to political pitfalls, gender and class inequalities as well as violence in Africa. They often follow a dramatic storyline that evokes pity, but also relief of the reader, as a provisional happy ending will be provided. Most often, with the help of human rights’ organizations, the witness-writers are successfully (re)established, often in the global North. Indeed, today the anthropological practice to generate self narratives, lives on in co-authored testimonial texts of ‘minority groups’ from the global South be they HIV/ AIDS-victims (Morgan 2003), child soldiers, or women, whose oral or roughly written accounts serve as raw material for journalists and human rights’ activists to be transformed into a readable written book aimed at “a Western based publishing industry, media, and readership” (Schaffer and Smith 2004, 24). These texts can be understood as a form of human rights’s activism that has a laudable political agenda. But at the same time, the commodification of testimony through collaborative production raises difficult questions about authorship, authority and agency. For as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith argue: instead of an analysis of social and political circumstances that give way to structures of human rights’ violations, the individual story of just one person is focused. This implies that the belief in the individual’s uniqueness and unique story, and his or her individual rights, has gained an international currency (Schaffer and Smith 2004, 24).

The majority of the (co-authored) writers of such testimonial texts are women. Gender related oppression is often at the centre of the narrative. Since the above-mentioned testimonial by Dirie, a Somali born supermodel, was published, female genital cutting has been a major subject (Khady 2006; Katoucha 2007); modern-day slavery (Akofa 2000; Nazer 2004) and, most recently, captivity in the context of Islamic extremism (Assiatou 2016) are further issues in connection with women’s and human rights. Some years after the boom of African women’s testimonial narratives, the genre of the child soldier testimony came up, following a similar pattern of tragedy and redemption. Ugandan China Keitetsi was the first ex-child soldier to come out with her story, first published in Danish in 2001 (English translation 2005). While in her specific case gender oppression of girls in wars as well as exploitation of recruited children in general were documented, this sub-genre is however largely male centered (Badjoko 2005; Beah 2007; Jal 2009, Amisi 2011; Nsuami 2012 among others). Sanders

946 

 3 Africa

(2013) points to the formulaic nature of the child soldier testimony that features recurrent patterns of disruption from school and family life, training, initiation to drugs and killing, atrocities, demobilization and redemption, often through the adoption by Western or upper class African tutors. However, there is a striking difference between the internationally marketed books of the brand and locally published testimonial narratives by African ex-child soldiers who are still based in Africa. For instance, Josué Mufula’s Enfant de guerre: Souvenirs d’un ex-Kadogo [‘War Child: Memories of an ex-child soldier’] (2005), published and marketed in Kinshasa displays a laconic, self-distanced style of non-embellished witnessing in simple language, while the international bestsellers heavily draw on emotions, (self-)critical comment, regret and the redress of evil. The latter genre is styled according to the expectations of an international readership because “what the reader wants is a story of recovery” (Sanders 2013, 207). The ambivalence between the consumerist oriented marketing and the underlying political agenda of writing, together with televised testimonies on human rights violations is carefully addressed in Schaffer and Smith’s study on Human Rights and Narrated Lives: the Ethics of Recognition (2004). The value of the testimonies as possible tools to raise awareness has after all to be recognized: Acts of listening and reading, however diverse in location and purpose, seed new awareness, recognition, respect, and willingness to understand, acknowledge and seek redress for rights violations. While such narrative acts and readings are not a sufficient ground for social change, they are a necessary ground (Schaffer and Smith 2004, 226).

Autobiographical writing as urgent testimony that is less concerned with literary sophistication can also be dominant within contexts of migration. As Ibrahima Diagne (2012) points out, the emerging field of literature of migration by Africans in Germany often privileges a testimonial mode of representation. Experiences of alienation, racial prejudice and discrimination trigger the urge to testify in a bid to speak back to the German public and to alert fellow Africans both in the Diaspora and ‘at home’. However, Diagne’s overview shows that there is not one unified mode of autobiographical writing in this field. Apart from considerable differences in content and style, the variations in the use of fiction, poetry, philosophical essays and documentary confirm the flexibility of self-referential testimonial narratives. The crucial questions of how to write trauma, war and genocide in the twentyfirst century has been addressed by a number of witnesses and writers, in the context of the Rwanda genocide of 1994 in particular. Yolande Mukagasana (1997, 1999) and Esther Mujawayo (2004) among others published witness accounts. Yet, as texts produced by diasporic Rwandans prove, the urge to express pain, loss and mourning are no longer limited to the figure of the eye-witness; rather what Azarian calls “une littérature d’implication” [‘a literature of implication’] (2012, 115) gives voice to secondary witnesses i.e those who did not experience the killings, but are nevertheless affected

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 947

by the survivors’ trauma that inscribes itself into a transspatial and transgenerational continuity. Furthermore, the commemorative Fest’Africa project “Écrire par devoir de mémoire” [‘Writing out of the duty to remember’] of 1998, delves into the epistemological necessity to renegotiate the porous boundaries between the testimonial and the fictional (Kopf 2012; Bishop 2012). Texts such as Véronique Tadjo’s L’ombre d’Imana: Voyages jusqu’au Coeur du Rwanda (2000) [The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda (2002)] and Abdourahman Waberi’s Moisson de Crânes: Textes pour le Rwanda (2000) [Harvest of Skulls (2017)] offer important new perspectives on the issue of im/possible representations of violence in a transgeneric framework. The mixing of testimonial account, fiction, travelogue, essay and collection of rewritten oral testimonies of perpetrators and survivors questions all existing models of writing. Collective trauma is equally at the heart of many of the South African post-apartheid autobiographical narratives that will be dealt with in the next sub-chapter.

Post-Apartheid Autobiographics The 1990 watershed in South Africa marked the period, when apartheid laws were abolished and the transition to democracy was initiated, followed by the first democratic elections in 1994. The decolonizing process led to a new flourishing of the literary scene and book industry in this country in general, and of autobiographical writing in particular. The need to reassess personal life experiences under apartheid and to share them with a now available South African public, (as censorship had widely prevented the distribution of critical writing previously) made literary voices to emerge which may not have had the courage to come out with their story as long as the apartheid system was operative. Therefore, a large part of the South African autobiographical corpus of post-apartheid South Africa is still made up of anti-apartheid activists’ testimonies which again often privilege the political in favor of the private. To name but a few: Meggie Resha’s My Life in the Struggle (1991), Mamphela ­Ramphele’s A Life (1995), Linda Fortune’s The House in Tyne Street: Childhood Memories of District Six (1996) are examples. However, statistically speaking, it is interesting to note that after 1994, autobiographical texts by White South Africans out-number those published by non-Whites. Yet during the decades of the anti-apartheid struggle, it used to be the other way round (Coullie, Ngwenya and Olver 2006, 30). Beyond the body of testimonial writings, that will soon include the New South Africa’s grappling with HIV/AIDS (Morgan 2003; Cameron 2005) and high crime rate, in particular rape (Smith 2001), a number of renowned South African fiction writers have further developed autobiographical writing aesthetically. Sindiwe Magona, who was to become one of South Africa’s most acclaimed post-apartheid fiction writers, started her career with two autobiographical volumes: To My Children’s Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992). Not only does Magona move back and forth between

948 

 3 Africa

her short stories and autobiographics as well as between oral and written conventions of narration (Daymond 2002), she also goes on to write fictional biography based on historical material as in Mother to Mother (1998). Further, she has explored interviews that she carried out with her own parents in order to write the larger family auto/ biography (Magona and Meyer 2006). Antjie Krog, an Afrikaans writer mainly known for her poetry, came up with a number of texts which all challenge genre boundaries within the autobiographical continuum. Yet, she is strictly aware of the literary-autofictional character of her writing, as she underlines that “everything which has been transformed into language has already become a fiction” (2003, 369) and that “stories around us can lie the truth” (2003, 369). These assertions resonate within her autoreferential work. Country of My Skull (1998) is a testimony of Krog’s witnessing of the Truth and Reconcilitaion Commission’s hearings. The book constitutes a journalistic reportage which she blends with many other disruptive genres such as childhood reminiscences, letters, poetry, essayistic reflection and lengthy quotations from witnesses of the TRC, but also from world literature. In the realm of this hybrid transgenericity of the text, which also proposes “multiple subject positions” (Schaffer and Smith 2006, 1579), the modes of writing oscillate between factual, lyrical, realist, dialogical and metatextual styles. By forwarding voices of apartheid victims as well as apartheid beneficiaries, Krog’s self-narration is not straightforward, but imbedded in the larger history of South Africa and its transit into the future. Indeed, [i]n the text she enacts at different times both an effacement of self and an advancement of self as a representative agent of reconciliation. […] Krog, presenting herself as a white Afrikaner beneficiary of apartheid imagines the landscape of her narrative, the country of her skull, as an in-between, transitional space in which her place is uncertain (Schaffer and Smith 2006, 1579).

In A Change of Tongue (2003), Krog’s personal referential narration is predominant, yet the narration switches between first, third and second person narrators as different voices of the autobiographical subjects approach to the self. Deliberately privileging a fragmented instead of a teleological form, Krog composes the book in six parts which can also be read as separate entities. The highly literary construction of J. M. Coetzee’s autoreferential writing in Boyhood (1998) and Youth (2003), is presented in the self-distanced form of a third person narrator whose point of view emanates however from the focalized subject. Coetzee’s texts reveal the complexities of White identity formation under apartheid. In a world of structural privilege, the protagonist’s coming of age in the South Africa of the 1940s and 1950s is fostered at the cost of psychological estrangement from his environment. The boy does not identify with neither the African majority nor with his White family and environment, while “being unable to articulate a coherent or consistent anti-racism, the young Coetzee distanced himself, almost instinctively from the supremacy and prejudices of the adults around him” (Amoko 2009, 204). Yet, the inevitable complicity with the system seems to make the classical autobiographical

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 949

first person position unbearable. As a writer, who is also a literary theorist, Coetzee opts for a poststructuralist approach, when he claims, following Paul de Man, that “all writing is autobiography” and autobiography is always “autre-biography” (Coetzee and Atwell 2006, 214, 216). In his writing practice, he takes this a step further in Summertime (2009), which chronologically speaking, is a follow-up to Boyhood and Youth, but relies on a different autofictional narrative construction: different narrative personae tell parts of the life of one John Coetzee in the Cape Town of the 1970s, while fragments of the notebooks of this autofictional character are also an integral part of the text. Both Krog’s and Coetzee’s autobiographical/autofictional practice, as different as they are in scope and style, exemplify what Tony Simoes da Silva has decribed as “intrinsic to the narratorial posture” of White South African post-apartheid writers whose “stories of self are now constrained by a heightened awareness of the privilege – now in effect coded as a burden – of whiteness” (da Silva 2005, 476). Not surprinsingly, Zakes Mda’s approach in his monumental Sometimes There is a Void. Memoirs of an Outsider (2011) is completely different. He chooses a frame narrative that opens every chapter and is set in the present: it is a travelogue that takes the readers to the places in South Africa and Lesotho where the author-narrator once lived as a child and young man. The landscapes and physical sensations, as people whom he meets and not least photographs which he contemplates trigger memories of the past. While the autobiographical narration follows a chronological line from childhood to maturity, the consciousness of the recognized author and US-based university professor Zakes Mda remains palpable throughout all parts of the autobiographical story. The narrator does not strive to reconstruct a childlike perspective, rather he uses his political consciousness of today to reflect upon his personal development as imbedded into the larger history of Black Southern African struggles. Mda’s autobiographical subject oscillates between a strong identification with the collective ‘we’ of Africans suffering under apartheid, and more generally postcolonial structures, and the strong individualism as a personality who early on feels the vocation to become an artist, which makes him an outsider, even in his own family history. In this respect, the detailed account of his different namings at the beginning of the memoir is significant: My father named me Zanemvula, which has the double meaning of ‘the rain bringer’ and ‘the one who has been brought by rain’. […] Father Sahr would not baptize me into the Roman Catholic Church without what he called a Christian name, which had to be a saint’s name. But my father, an ardent Pan Africanist, insisted that he would not give me a ‘white name’, so he opted for Kizito, after the youngest of the Ugandan Martyrs. […] My third name, Gatyeni, was my father’s way of giving a nod to his ancestors by naming me after one of them (Mda 2011, 15).

Via the process of naming, the strong paternal authority inscribes the boy into a given familial, religious and political collective. However, in his own logic of a painter and a writer to become, as early as in primary school Mda adopts the pen name ‘Zakes’, when he signs a drawing with “‘by Zakes, the artist’” (2011, 6). This name comes from

950 

 3 Africa

a different community: the one of outcasts and artists with whom he will strongly identify throughout his life narrative. I was given the name by a friend, Percy Bafana Mahlukwana, an artist in his own right, who later died in one of the gang wars. At this time there was a famous saxophonist by the name of Zakes Nkosi in Alexandra Township. With my initials ZK, it seemed the logical thing to name me after this great man (Mda 2011, 6).

Still, his father, the exiled lawyer who kept his children at emotional distance, remains a haunting figure throughout the memoir. It must also be mentioned that a number of autobiographically inspired stage plays were published and performed in South Africa after 1994 (Coullie et al. 2006, 31). The founder of anti-apartheid theater, Athol Fugard, published The Captain’s Tiger: A Memoir for the Stage in 1998, a play in which he links parts of his own lifestory as a writer with the fictionalized story of his mother. Several plays evolved around the complex identity issues of minority groups that were racially classified outside the Black and White divide, such as Malika Ndlovu’s A Coloured Place (1998 [first performed 1996]) and Phillipa Yaa de Villiers Original Skin (2010).

Towards Post-postcolonial Autobiographics Recent life narratives from Eastern Africa include elaborate autobiographical texts by prominent fiction writers such as Mbali na Nyumbani [‘Far away from home’] (2013) by the Zanzibari Swahili novelist Adam Shafi Adam and the two volumes by Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter: a Memoir (2012) which all refer back to colonial times and post-colonial passages into the present. Both classics of African literature set on to write about their life when they were well over 70 years old, thus looking back from a position of achieved fame and wisdom. This does however not exclude the wit that comes with the reconstruction of a genuine childhood, adolescent and inexperienced young man’s perspective. At the same time, with the two Kenyans Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011) and Ken Walibora’s Nasikia Sauti ya Mama [‘Listen to Mother’s Voice’] (2014) as representative examples, a new generation of younger writers, who have not witnessed colonialism themselves, is taking up the autobiographical challenge in their early forties. In this generation, both continuities and ruptures with postcolonial autobiographics become palpable, as will be exemplified with a short reading of Wainaina’s text. One Day I Will Write About This Place covers a time frame from the 1970s to the present, developing the perspective from a shy boy at the age of seven to the one of today’s successful writer and professor of creative writing, including the process of personal and political maturation. Wainaina combines the introspective self-obser-

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 951

vation of a child, then young man, who is a voracious reader and often feels like an outsider to majority rules, with sharp observations of the political and social situation in South Africa, where he studied, and in Kenya, his homeland that never ceases to preoccupy him. Mimicking the remembered child, the comments on politics seem to be naïve, if not ironic, at the beginning: “Kenyatta is the father of the nation. I wonder whether Kenya was named after Kenyatta or Kenyatta after Kenya” (Wainaina 2011, 14). The memoir, as the text is subtitled, unfolds a subtle intertextual dialogue with Ngugi’s earlier writings and postcolonial engagement. Notably, both Ngugi and ­Wainaina dropped their English first names, James and Kenneth respectively, when they opted for their definite pen name. While the first started to write as James Ngugi, dropping his Christian name after his shift to radical anti-colonialism in 1972, the latter followed the gesture right from the beginning of his career as a writer. Wainaina reminds the readers of the importance of naming in Africa as a social and self-affirmative act, but also of how colonialism altered the customs and gave way to a hybrid culture, when he writes: We are mixed-up people. We have mixed-up ways of naming too: the Anglo-colonial way, the old Gikuyu way, then the distant names from my mother’s land, a place we do not know. When my father’s brothers and sisters went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a Western name. They adopted my grandfather’s name as a surname: Wainaina. Baba says in the old days, everybody had many names, for many reasons, a name only for your age-mates, a name as the son of your mother, a name after you became a man. These days, most times, your name is what is on your birth certificate (Wainaina 2011, 21–22).

Although the quote alludes to colonial violence, as an observation by the narrator it is void of regret or revolt: the mixing up of traditions has become casual to him. Furthermore, the quote points to a shift from oral to written rites of naming and not least to Wainaina’s multiethnic and transnational family background: his mother is of rwandophone Ugandan origin and his father a Kenyan Gikuyu. The narrator witnesses the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the systematic exclusion of Gikuyu people from public offices under the Moi regime and the 2007/2008 post-election violence in Kenya from this particular family background. Metatextual remarks such as “I am certain that the world of my family is as solid as fiction” (Wainaina 2011, 127) underline the interconnectedness of referentiality and fiction as well as of personal narrative and collective history. Wainaina’s narrative can also be read as an allegory for the porosity of national boundaries and ethnic identities in (East)Africa in general. Inspite the strong love for Kenya as a home, the stance is deliberately post-national. When, aged 19, the autobiographical narrator reads Ngugi’s essay Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) for the first time, it triggers his political consciousness as a postcolonial subject. However, his revolutionary determination to follow into Ngugi’s footsteps as a decolonized Gikuyu writer is mingled with his ordinary dreams of a young middle-class man in a hilarious way:

952 

 3 Africa

I read Decolonising the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong’o a few week [sic!] ago. It is illegal and it was thrilling, and I had vowed to go back to my own language. English is the language of the colonizer. I will take Gikuyu classes, when I am done with diversiddy [sic!]and advertising, when I am driving a good car. I will go to the village and make plays in Gikuyu, in my good new car. I will make a very good decolonized advertisement for Coca-Cola. I will be cool and decolonized. Like, like Youssou N’Dour. Even Ngugi is in America (Wainaina 2011, 92).

The oxymoron of a decolonized Coca-Cola advert captures the naivety of the young man, just as his desire to be both cool in the American way and decolonized in Ngugi’s way is a marker for the globalized urban culture in the Africa of the upcoming twenty-first century. His personality is thus stretched between the intellectually assumed necessity of postcolonial revolution à la Ngugi and the comfort he is used to as a member of the Kenyan middle class. Clearly, Wainaina does not have a traumatic relationship with English as a colonial language: in his generation, it has just become an every day tool of global communication. Obviously, the practice of language(s) in a multilingual country is also a matter of class. Addressing his middle-class peer group, the narrator in his persona of the eleven year old boy states: If I visit you in your home and your mother speaks to you in your language while I am there, you will roll your eyes at me, and reply to her in English and Kiswahili, because we have agreed that parents are ridiculous that way. More than anything, we laugh at and dislike those kids who seem unable to escape their tribe (Wainaina 2011, 34).

In contrast, those privileged kids perceive the children from the disadvantaged classes as “kids who speak strange languages, who laugh if you speak English to them – they understand, but find it pretentious; kids who wear no shoes, kids who miss school a lot” (Wainaina 2011, 35). The fissures of today’s Kenyan society are to be found in the internal clash of classes rather than in the confrontation with the ex-colonizer, as the autobiographical subject has to learn from his privileged position. A few chapters later, when he comes back to Nairobi after a long stay as a student in South Africa, Wainaina shifts from the personal to the collective level of his narration as he gets once more back to the question of language, in the urban setting of Nairobi: Urban Kenya is a split personality: authority, trajectory, international citizen in English; national brother in Kiswahili: and content villager or nostalgic urbanite in our mother tongues. […] Kiswahili is where we meet each other with brotherhood (Wainaina 2011, 125).

Wainaina’s praise of Swahili as an internethnic lingua franca in East Africa is very different from Ngugi’s postcolonial claim of an unconditional rejection of all foreign languages. As much as his autobiographical narrator loves Swahili, he never questions English as his language of writing. The postcolonial struggles of the generation of Ngugi and today’s struggles of Wainaina’s post-postcolonial generation are not the same anmyore.

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 953

Meanwhile, a motive that remains strong in African literary autobiographics across the generations is the mythical construction of one’s early and inevitable vocation as a writer. Wainaina’s narrator decides at twelve that “one day I will write books” (2011, 54).

Summing Up Post-colonial African autobiographics unfold in a multitude of diverse forms, voices, and attitudes towards the relationship between the textual self, the historical subject and his/her affiliations with national, diasporic, gendered, ethnic or familial communities. The eminent political function of most postcolonial autobiographical texts has been aptly described by Aurélia Mouzet: The question of identity at the core of autobiographical writing has never been as political as in postcolonial literature. Avocating one’s singularity is indeed not only a way of healing the stigma left by colonization but also stands as an attempt to start a dialogue between the fringe and the center. It thus becomes an inherently committed act. The affirmation of the postcolonial self is indeed more urgent for it stands as an answer to oppression (Mouzet 2015, 161).

Yet, the recognition of postcolonial autobiographics as a political act shall not mislead the reception in the sense of a simplyfied reading that would ignore the aesthetic dimension, literary devices, narrative techniques and fictional creativity, which all are at work inside the vast autobiographical continuum that spreads out from post-colonial Africa and its Diasporas.

Filmography Ken Bugul – Niemand will sie. Dir. Silvia Voser. Waka Films/EZEF, 2014.

Works Cited Abani, Chris. Kalakuta Republic. London: Saqi Books, 2001. Abdalla, Abdilatif. Sauti ya Dhiki. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1973. Abrahams, Peter. Return to Goli. London: Faber & Faber, 1953. Abrahams, Peter. Tell Freedom. London: Faber & Faber, 1954. Adejunmobi, Moradewun. “Disruptions of Orality in the Writings of Hampaté Bâ.” Research in African Literatures 37.4 (2000): 27–36. Afejuku, Tony E. “Cultural Assertion in the African Autobiography.” Meta XXXV.4 (1990): 689–700. Ajibade, Kunle. Jailed for Life: a Reporter’s Prison Notes. Ibadan: Heinemann, 2003. Akofa, Henriette. Une esclave moderne. Paris: Michel Lafon, 2000. Alabi, Adetayo. Telling our Stories. Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

954 

 3 Africa

Amegbleame, Simon Agbeko. “La posterité de Westermann: la biographie dans la littérature ewe.” Autobiographies et récits de vie en Afrique et aux Antilles. Ed. Jacqueline Arnaud and Bernard Mouralis. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991. 33–37. Amisi, Serge. Souvenez-vous de moi, l’enfant de demain. Carnets d’un enfant de la guerre. La Roque d’Anthéron: Vents d’ailleurs, 2011. Amoko, Apollo. “Autobiography and Bildungsroman in African Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel. Ed. F. Abiola Irele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 195–208. Anyanwu, Chris Ngozi. The Days of Terror: a Journalist Eye-witness Account of Nigeria in the Hands of Its Worst Tyrant. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 2002. Assiatou. Enlevé par Boko Haram. Paris: Michel Lafon, 2016. Awolowo, Obafemi. Awo: The Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Azarian, Viviane. “Double démarche individuelle et collective dans l’écriture de Birago Diop: mise en parallèle des Contes d’Amadou Koumba et des Mémoires.” Francofonía 15 (2006): 53–70. Azarian, Viviane. “Renouveau du genre testimonial en Afrique subsaharienne: de la littérature engagée à une littérature d’implication?” Conventions & Conversions. Generic Innovations in African Literatures/Innovations génériques dans les littératures africaines. Ed. Susanne Gehrmann and Flora Veit-Wild. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012. 115–124. Bâ, Amadou Hampâté. Amkoullel, l’enfant peul. Mémoires I. Brussels: Babel, 1992. Bâ, Amadou Hampâté. Oui, mon commandant! Mémoires II. Arles: Actes Sud, 1994. Bâ, Mariama. Une si longe lettre. Dakar: NEA, 1979 [So Long a Letter. Trans. Modupé Bodé-Thomas. London: Heinemann, 1981]. Bâ, Mariama. “Ma petite patrie” (1949). Astres et Désastres. Histoire et récits de vie africains de la Colonie à la Postcolonie. Ed. János Riesz. Hildesheim: Olms, 2009. 262–263. Badjoko, Lucien. J’étais enfant soldat. Paris: Plon, 2005. Battestini, Simon. Écriture et texte: contribution africaine. Québec/Paris: Presses de l’Université de Laval/Présence africaine, 1997. Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2007. Beck, Rose-Marie, and Kai Kresse, eds. Abdilatif Abdalla – Poet in Politics. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2015. Bello, Ahmadu. My Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Benesch, Klaus. “Fictions of the Self: Geschichte, Identität und autobiographische Form.” Compar(a)ison 1 (1994): 129–141. Berger, Roger. “Decolonizing African Autobiography.” Research in African Literatures 41.2 (2010): 32–54. Bin Haji Ghassaniy, Muyaka. Diwani ya Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy. Johannesburg: University of the Witswatersrand Press, 1940. Bisanswa, Justin Kalulu. Conflit de memoires: V.Y. Mudimbe et la traversee des signes. Frankfurt a.  M.: IKO, 2000. Bishop, Cécile. “Thinking through Literature: Abdourahman Waberi’s Moisson de Crânes and the Rwandan Genocide.” Conventions & Conversions. Generic Innovations in African Literatures/ Innovations génériques dans les littératures africaines. Ed. Susanne Gehrmann and Flora VeitWild. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012. 125–140. Brode, Heinrich. “Autobiographie des Arabers Schech Hamed bin Mohammed el Murjebi, genannt Tippu Tip. Tanskribiert und übersetzt von Dr. H. Brode.” Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orien­ta­ lische Sprachen. III. Abtl.: Afrikanische Studien 5 (1902): 175–277; 6 (1903): 1–55. Brode, Heinrich. Tippu Tip: Lebensbild eines zentralafrikanischen Despoten: nach seinen eigenen Angaben hergestellt. Berlin: Baensch, 1905 [Tippoo Tib: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar & Central Africa. Trans. H. Havelock. London: Arnold, 1907].

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 955

Breytenbach, Breyten. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. London: Faber & Faber, 1984. Bryce, Jane. “Inventing Autobiography: Some Examples from Fiction and Journalism by Nigerian Women Writers.” Aspects of Commonwealth Literature 2 (1992): 53–60. Bryce, Jane. “‘Self-Writing’ As History: Reconsidering Soyinka’s Representation of the Past.” Philosophia Africana 11.1 (2008): 37–60. Bugul, Ken. Le Baobab fou. Dakar: NEA, 1982 [The Abandoned Baobab: the Autobiography of a Senegalese Woman.Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008]. Bugul, Ken. Cendres et braises. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994. Bugul, Ken. Riwan ou le chemin de sable. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1999. Bugul, Ken. De l’autre côté du regard. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2003. Bugul, Ken. Mes hommes à moi. Paris: Présence Africaine, 2008. Bugul, Ken. Cacophonie. Paris: Présence Africaine, 2014. Cameron, Edwin. Witness to AIDS. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2005. Chapman, Michael. “Mandela, Africanism & Modernity. A Consideration of Long Walk to Freedom.” Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa. Ed. Duncan Brown. Oxford/Cape Town/ Athens: James Currey/David Philip/Ohio University Press, 1999. 132–137. Chinosole. The African Diaspora and Autobiographics. Skeins of Self and Skin. New York: Lang, 2001. Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. New York: Penguin, 1998. Coetzee, J.M. Youth. Scenes from Provincial Life II. London: Penguin, 2003. Coetzee, J.M. Summertime. London: Harvill Secker. 2009. Coetzee, J.M., and David Atwell. “All Autobiography is Autre-biography.” Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography. Ed. Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya and Thomas Olver. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. 2013–2018. Cole, Robert Wellesey. Kossoh Town Boy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Coullie, Judith Lütge. “Dislocating Selves. Izibongo and Narrative Autobiography.” Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa. Ed. Duncan Brown. Oxford: James Currey, 1999. 61–89. Coullie, Judith Lütge. The Closest of Strangers: South African Women’s Life-Writing. Johannesburg: Witswatersrand University Press, 2004. Coullie, Judith Lütge, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya, and Thomas Olver, eds. Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Cugoano, Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery: and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain. London, 1787. N. pag. Dadié, Bernard B. Un Nègre à Paris. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956. Dadié, Bernard B. Carnet de Prison. Abidjan: CEDA, 1984. Dan Fodio, Abdullahi. Tazyîn al-waraqât. Ed. Mervyn Hiskett. Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press, 1963. Dasylva, Ademola O., and Remy Oriaku. “Trends in the Nigerian Autobiography.” History Compass 8.4 (2010): 303–319. Davies, Carole Boyce. “Collaboration and the Ordering Imperative in Life Story Production.” De/ Colonizing the Subject. The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 3–19. Diagne, Ibrahima. “Différenciation, hybridation et transposition du Je. Pratiques autobiographiques et écriture interculturelle dans la littérature de l’immigration africaine en Allemagne.” Conventions & Conversions. Generic Innovations in African Literatures/Innovations génériques dans les littératures africaines. Ed. Susanne Gehrmann and Flora Veit-Wild. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012. 141–159.

956 

 3 Africa

Diallo, Bakary. Force-Bonté. Paris/Dakar/Abidjan: CCT/NEA, 1985. Diallo, Nafissatou. De Tilène au Plateau. Une enfance dakaroise. Dakar: NEA, 1975. Diawara, Manthia. In Search of Africa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Diawara, Manthia. We Won’t Budge. An African Exile in the World. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003. Diome, Fatou. La Préférence nationale. Paris: Présence Africaine, 2001. Diome, Fatou. Le Ventre de l’Atlantique. Paris: Anne Carrière, 2006 [The Belly of the Atlantic. Trans. Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006]. Diome, Fatou. Impossible de grandir. Paris: Flammarion, 2013. Diop, Birago. La Plume raboutée. Paris/Dakar: Présence Africaine/Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1978. Diop, Birago. À Rebrousse-temps. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982. Diop, Birago. À Rebrousse-gens. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1985. Diop, Birago. Du Temps de.... Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987. Diop, Birago. Et les yeux pour me dire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989. Diouf, Mbaye. “‘J’écris pour apprendre à vivre’. Entretien avec Fatou Diome. Québec, 18 avril 2008.” Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 17 (2009): 137–151. Dunzo, Annette I. “Hispanic Africa.” European Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ed. Albert S. Gérard. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1986. 321–330. Emecheta, Buchi. Second-class citizen. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972. Emecheta, Buchi. In the Ditch. London: Allison & Busby, 1974. Emecheta, Buchi. Head above Water. London/Ibadan: Heinemann, 1994. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. New York/London: Penguin, 2003. Faïk-Nzuji, Clémentine. Symboles graphiques en Afrique noire. Paris: Karthala, 1992. Farah, Nuruddin. Yesterday, Tomorrow. Voices of the Somali Diaspora. London/New York: Cassell, 2000. Farah, Nuruddin. “The Family House.” Transition 99 (2008): 6–15. First, Ruth. 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African NinetyDay Detention Law. London: Bloomsbury, 1965. Fortune, Linda: The House in Tyne Street: Childhood Memories of District Six. Cape Town: Kwela, 1996. Fraser, Donald. Winning a Primitive People Sixteen Years’ Work Among the Warlike Tribe of the Ngoni and the Senga and Tumbuka Peoples of Central Africa. London: Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd., 1914. Fraser, Donald, and Daniel Mtusu. The Autobiography of an African. Retold in Biographical Form & in the Wild African Setting of the Life of Daniel Mtusu. London: Seeley, Service & Co., Ltd., 1925. Fugard, Athol. The Captain’s Tiger: A Memoir for the Stage. New York: Theatre Communication Groups, 1998. Garnier, Xavier. “Talking about Oneself to Act in the World: a Swahili Autobiography (Shabaan Robert, Maisha yangu na baada ya maika hamsini).” Swahili Forum 19 (2012): 106–116. Gatheru, Mugo. Child of Two Worlds. London: Heinemann, 1964. Gbowee, Roberts Leymah. Mighty Be Our Powers. How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation. New York: Beast Books, 2011. Gehrmann, Susanne. “De la quête d’Afrique au détour par la France. Les essais autobiographiques de Manthia Diawara.” Textes et Terrains / Textwork – Fieldwork. In honor of Alain Ricard. Ed. Virginia Coulon and Xavier Garnier. Paris: Karthala, 2011. 262–275. Gehrmann, Susanne. “Functions of Photography in V.Y. Mudimbe’s Autobiographical Essay Les Corps glorieux des mots et des êtres – The Glorious Bodies of Words and Beings.” Conventions & Conversions. Generic Innovations in African Literatures/Innovations génériques dans les

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 957

littératures africaines. Ed. Susanne Gehrmann and Flora Veit-Wild. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012. 3–24. Grohs, Gerhard. “Changing Social Functions of African Autobiographies with Special Reference to Political Autobiographies.” Genres autobiographiques en Afrique/Autobiographical Genres in Africa. Ed. János Riesz and Ulla Schild. Berlin: Reimer, 1996. 191–203. Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw. A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, Written by Himself. Newport: S. Southwick, 1774. Gunner, Liz, and Mafika Gwala, eds. Musho: Zulu Popular Praises. Johannesburg: Witswatersrand University Press, 1994. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie.” Formen der Selbstdarstellung. ­Analekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbtsportraits. Ed. Günther Reichenkron and Erich Haase. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1956. 105–123 [“Conditions and Limits of Auto­ biography.” Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. and trans. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48]. Hale, Thomas A. Griots and Griottes. Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Hél-Bongo, Olga. “Réflexions sur la notion de genre dans Écrire en pays dominé de Patrick ­Chamoiseau et Cheminements. Carnets de Berlin de V.Y. Mudimbe.” Conventions & Conversions. Generic Innovations in African Literatures/Innovations génériques dans les littératures africaines. Ed. Susanne Gehrmann and Flora Veit-Wild. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012. 105–114. Hiskett, Mervyn. “Materials relating to the state of learning among the Fulani before their jihad.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19.3 (1957): 550–578. Holden, Philip. Imagined Individuals: National Autobiography and Postcolonial Self-Fashioning. Working Papers Series of the Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, October 2003. http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/wps/wps03_013.pdf (11 July 2018). Humery, Marie-Ève. “Fula and the Ajami Writing System in the Haalpulaar Society of Fuuta Tooro (Senegal and Mauritania): A Specific ‘Restricted Literacy’.” The Arabic Script in Africa. Studies in the Use of a Writing System. Ed. Maikal Mumin and Kees Versteegh. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 173–198. Hunwick, John O., ed. Arabic Literature of Africa. Writings of Central Sudanic Africa. Vol. II. Leiden/ New York/Köln: Brill, 1995. Hunwick, John O. “Preface.” Arabic Literature of Africa. Writings of Central Sudanic Africa. Vol. II. Ed. John O. Hunwick. Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill, 1995. xi–xvii (Hunwick 1995a). Hunwick, John O. “The Arabic Writings of Central Sudanic Africa: an Overview.” Arabic Literature of Africa. Writings of Central Sudanic Africa. Vol. II. Ed. John O. Hunwick. Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill, 1995. 1–15 (Hunwick 1995b). Hunwick, John O. “Chapter One: The Central Sudan before 1800.” Arabic Literature of Africa. Vol. II: Writings of Central Sudanic Africa. Ed. John O. Hunwick. Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill, 1995. 16–51 (Hunwick 1995c). Hunwick, John O., ed. Arabic Literature of Africa. Vol. IV: Writings of Western Sudanic Africa. Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2003. Hunwick, John O. “Chapter One: The Middle Niger to 1800.” Arabic Literature of Africa. Vol. IV. Writings of Western Sudanic Africa. Ed. John O. Hunwick. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003. 8–42 (Hunwick 2003a). Jaccomard, Hélène, and Jean-Marie Volet. “Le ‘Pacte autobiographique’ et la réception des ouvrages des écrivaines francophones d’Afrique noire.” Présence Francophone 41 (1992): 9–26. Jal, Emmanuel. War Child. A Child Soldier’s Story. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009.

958 

 3 Africa

Joseph, Helen. Side by Side: The Autobiography of Helen Joseph. London: Zed Books, 1986. Kabuta, Ngo Semzara. Éloge de soi, éloge de l’autre. Bruxelles et al.: Peter Lang, 2003. Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. L’Aventure ambiguë. Paris: Julliard, 1961 [Ambiguous Adventure. Trans. Katherine Woods. London: Heinemann, 1972]. Kassim, Mohamed M., Rex S. O’Fahey, and Scott S. Reese. “The Arabic and Chiambalazi Writings of Somalia.” Arabic Literature of Africa. The Writings of the Muslim Peoples of Northeastern Africa. Vol. III. Ed. R.S. O’Fahey. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003. 69–110. Katoucha. Dans ma chair. Paris: Michel Lafon, 2007. Kaya, Simone. Les danseuses d’Impe-Eya. Jeunes filles à Abidjan. Abidjan: CEDA, 1975. Kéita, Aoua. Femme d’Afrique. La vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-même. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1975. Keitetsi, China. Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life. Johannesburg: Jacanda Media, 2005. Kenyatta: Facing Mount Kenya: the Tribal Life of the Gikuyu. London: Secker and Warburg, 1938. Khady. Mutilée. Paris: Collection Récit Poche, Pocket, 2006. King’ei, Kitula. “Aspects of Autobiography in the Classical Swahili Poetry.” Folklore 16 (2001): 87–96. Kopf, Martina. “The Ethics of Fiction. African Writers on the Genocide in Rwanda.” Journal of Literary Theory 6.1 (2012): 65–82. Köhler, Sigrid G. “Einer Kalebassenscherbe gleich…” Autobiographisches Schreiben zwischen kolonialer Gewalt und kultureller Situierung. Amadou Hampâté Bâ. Bremen: Palabres Éditions, 1999. Kootz, Anja Berendine, and Helma Pasch, eds. 5000 Jahre Schrift in Afrika. Entstehung – Funktion – Wechsel. Köln: Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek, 2008. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. Johannesburg: Random House, 1998. Krog, Antjie. A Change of Tongue. Johannesburg: Random House, 2003. Krog, Antjie. Begging to Be Black. Cape Town: Random House, 2009. Laye, Camara. L’Enfant noir. Paris: Plon, 1953 [The Dark Child. Trans. James Kirkup. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1954]. Laye, Camara. Dramouss. Paris: Plon, 1966. Lawson, Lesley, and Helene Perold, eds. Working Women: A Portrait of South Africa’s Black Women Workers. Johannesburg: Sached Trust/Ravan Press, 1985. Lebdai, Benaouda, ed. Autobiography as a Writing Strategy in Postcolonial Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]. Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Luthuli, Albert. Let My People Go: An Autobiography. London: Collins, 1962. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen. “Du journal de voyage au témoignage. Autobiographies fragmentaires ­d’auteurs africains dans la presse ouest-africiane à l’époque coloniale (1916–50).” Auto­ biographical Genres in Africa/Genres autobiographiques en Afrique. Ed. János Riesz and Ulla Schild. Berlin: Reimer, 1996. 83–100. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen. “Dynamiques de l’autobiographie: De l’ancrage anthropologique aux horizons interculturels.” Enjeux des genres dans les écritures contemporaines. Ed. Robert Dion, Frances Fortier and Elisabeth Haghebaert.Québec: Editions Nota Bene, 2001. 103–119 [“The dynamics of autobiography: from anthropological anchorage to the intercultural horizons.” Mots pluriels 23 (2003). http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP2303hjl.html (11 July 2018)].

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 959

Maathai, Wangari. Unbowed. A Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Magona, Sindiwe. To My Children’s Children. Cape Town: David Philip, 1990. Magona, Sindiwe. Forced to Grow. Cape Town: David Philip, 1992. Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother. Cape Town: David Philip, 1998. Magona, Sindiwe, and Stephan Meyer. “We would write very dull books if we just write about ourselves.” Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography. Ed. Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya and Thomas Olver. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. 219–230. Makhoere, Caesarina Kona. No Child’s Play: In Prison under Apartheid. London: The Women’s Press, 1988. Mandela, Winnie, and Mary Benson. Part of my Soul Went With Him. London/New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Johannesburg: Macdonald Purnell, 1994. Manschke, Doris. Genese und Funktion von Autobiographie in der westafrikanischen englisch­ sprachigen Literatur. Eine Gattungsgeschichte. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 1999. Mapanje, Jack, ed. Gathering Seaweed. African Prison Writing. Oxford: Heinemann, 2002. Mashinini, Emma. Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life – a South African Autobiography. London: Women’s Press, 1989. Mda, Zakes. Sometimes There is a Void. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012. Miran, Jonathan, and Rex S. O’Fahey. “Chapter One: The Islamic and Related Writings of Eritrea.” Arabic Literature of Africa. The Writings of the Muslim Peoples of Northeastern Africa. Vol. III. Ed. Rex S. O’Fahey. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003. 1–17. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” Boundary 12.2 (1984): 333–358. Montesquieu, Charles de. Lettres persanes. Amsterdam: Pierre Brubelm 1721 [Persian Letters. Trans. John Ozell. London: Jacob Tonson, 1722]. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Life-Writing. Culture, Politics and Self-Representation. London/ New York: Routledge, 2009. Morgan, Jonathan, and the Bambanani Women’s Group. Long Life: Positive HIV Stories. Cape Town: Double Storey Press, 2003. Mouzet, Aurélia. “The Postcolonial Autobiography: Force Majeure?”Autobiography as a Writing Stratgey in Postcolonial Literature. Ed. Benaouda Lebdai. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing, 2015. 161–176. Mudimbe-Boyi, Elisabeth. “Travel, Representation, and Difference, or how can one be a Parisian?” Research in African Literatures 23.3 (1992): 25–39. Mudimbe, V.Y. Entre les Eaux. Dieu, un prêtre, la révolution. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973. Mudimbe, V.Y. Carnets d’Amérique. Paris: Saint Germain-des-Prés, 1976. Mudimbe, V.Y. Shaba II. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1988. Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. London: Currey, 1988. Mudimbe, V.Y. Les corps glorieux des mots et des êtres. Ésquisse d’un jardin africain à la bénédictine. Paris/Montréal: Présence Africaine/Humanités, 1994. Mudimbe, V.Y. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Mudimbe, V.Y. Cheminements. Carnets de Berlin. Québec: Éditions Humanitas, 2006. Mufula Jive, Josué. Enfant de guerre. Souvenirs d’un ex-Kadogo. Kinshasa: Médiaspaul, 2005. Mujawayo, Esther, and Souâd Belhaddad. SurVivantes. Rwanda dix ans âpres le génocide. La Tour d’Aigues: Aube, 2005. Mukagasana, Yolande. La mort ne veut pas de moi. Paris: Fixot, 1997.

960 

 3 Africa

Mukagasana, Yolande. N’aie pas peur de savoir. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999. Mumin, Meikal. “The Arabic Script in Africa: Understudied Literacy.” The Arabic Script in Africa. Studies in the Use of a Writing System. Ed. Maikal Mumin and Kees Versteegh. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 41–76. Mumin, Meikal, and Kees Versteegh. The Arabic Script in Africa: Studies in the Use of a Writing System. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Musengezi, Chiedza, and Irene Staunton, eds. A Tragedy of Lives: Women in Prison in Zimbabwe. Harare: Weaver Press, 2003. Muswaswa, Bertin Makolo. “Histoire d’âmes et autobiographie au Zaïre.” Littératures autobiographiques de la francophonie. Ed. Martine Matthieu. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. 137–156. Muthee, Joseph. Kizuizini. Nairobi: Kwani Trust, 2006. Mvika, Zolani, Duncan Brown, and Susan Kigulu. “People feel no Event is Complete Without a Poet.” Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Autobiography. Ed. Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya and Thomas Olver. Honolulu: University Of Hawai’i Press, 2006. 132–147. Nazer, Mende, and Damien Lewis. Slave. The True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and her Fight for Survival. London: Virago Press, 2004. Ndlovu, Malika (formerly Lueen Conning). “A Coloured Place.” Black South African Women: An Anthology of Plays. Ed. Kathy A. Perkins. New York: Routledge, 1998. 13–42. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary. London: Heinemann, 1981. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir. New York: Pantheon, 2010. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In the House of the Interpreter: a Memoir. New York: Pantheon, 2012. Ngwenya, Thengani H. “Orality and Modernity in Autobiographical Representation. The Case of Naboth Mokgatle’s Life-story.” Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa. Ed. Duncan Brown. Oxford: James Currey, 1999. 111–131. Nkrumah, Kwame. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. Edinburgh: Nelson, 1957. Nsengimana, Joseph. “Ukwivuga (parler de soi-même), genre autobiographique rwandais.” Autobiographical Genres in Africa/Genres autobiographiques en Afrique. Ed. János Riesz and Ulla Schild. Berlin: Reimer, 1996. 39–51. Nsuami, Junior Nzita. “Kadogo.” Si ma vie d’enfant soldat pouvait être racontée. Aix-en-Provence: Percée, 2012. Odinga, Oginga. Not Yet Uhuru: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1967. O’Fahey, Rex S., ed. Arabic Writing of Africa. The Writings of Eastern Sudanic Africa to C. 1900. Vol. I. Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill, 1994. O’Fahey, Rex S. “Chapter Three: The Writings of the Turkiyya.” Arabic Writing of Africa. The Writings of Eastern Sudanic Africa to C. 1900. Vol. I. Ed. Rex S. O’Fahey. Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill, 1994. 53–72 (O’Fahey 1994a). O’Fahey, Rex S. “Chapter Eleven: The Hindiyya, Qādiriyya, Sacdiyya and Tijāniyya.” Arabic Writing of Africa. The Writings of Eastern Sudanic Africa to C. 1900. Vol. I. Ed. Rex S. O’Fahey. Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill, 1994. 277–303 (O’Fahey 1994b). O’Fahey, Rex S., ed. Arabic Writing of Africa. The Writings of the Muslim Peoples of Northeastern Africa. Vol. III. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. “Buchi Emecheta: The Shaping of a Self.” Komparatistische Hefte 8 (1983): 65–77. Ojike, Mbonu. Portrait of a Boy in West Africa. New York: John Day, 1945. Ojike, Mbonu. My Africa. New York: John Day, 1946. Ojike, Mbonu. I Have Two Countries. New York: John Day, 1947.

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 961

Okpewoh, Isidore. African Oral Literature: Background, Character and Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Olney, James. Metaphors of the Self: the Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Olney, James. Tell me Africa: An Approach to African Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Opland, Jeff. “Structural Patterns in the Peformance of a Xhosa Izibongo.” Comparative Literature 48.2 (1996): 94–127. Opland, Jeff, ed. Xhosa Poets and Poetry. Cape Town: David Philip, 1998. Oriaku, Remy. “Self-presentation and Coping with Disadvantage in Anglo-Nigerian Self-narratives.” Context: Journal of Social and Cultural Studies 10.2 (2007): 12–23. Paul, Sigrid. “Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Biographie-Forschung in Afrika.” Paideuma 42 (1996): 183–213. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Perham, Margary. Ten Africans. A Collection of Life Stories. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Ramphele, Mamphela. Mamphela Ramphele: A Life. Cape Town: David Philip, 1995. Reichmuth, Stefan. “Autobiographical Writing and Islamic Consciousness in the Arabic Literature of Nigeria.” Autobiographical Genres in Africa. Ed. János Riesz and Ulla Schild. Berlin: Reimer, 1996. 179–189. Resha, Maggie. My Life in the Struggle: Mangoana O Tsoara Thipa Ka Bohaleng. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1991. Riesz, János. Koloniale Mythen – Afrikanische Antworten. Europäisch-afrikanische Literaturbeziehungen I (1993). Frankfurt a.  M.: IKO, 2000. Riesz, János. “Astres et Désastres”. Histoire et récits de vie africains de la Colonie à la Postcolonie. Hildesheim: Olms, 2009. Riesz, János. Südlich der Sahara. Afrikanische Literatur in französischer Sprache. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2013. Riesz, János, and Ulla Schild, eds. Autobiographical Genres in Africa/Genres autobiographiques en Afrique. Berlin: Reimer, 1996. Robert, Shabaan. Maisha yangu. London: Nelson, 1949. Robert, Shabaan. Maisha Yangu na Baada ya Miaka Hamsini. London: Nelson, 1966. Robert, Shabaan. Autobiographie d’un écrivain Swahili (Tanzanie). Paris: Karthala, 2010. Sanders, Mark. “Culpability and Guilt: Child Soldiers in Fiction and Memoir.” Law & Literature 23.2 (2013): 195–223. Sankara, Edgard. Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies. From Africa to the Antilles. Charlottesville/London: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Orphée noir.” Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française. Ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1948. ix–xliv. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. “Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the Beneficiary: Antjie Krog’s ‘Country of My Skull’.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 121.5 (2006): 1577–1584. Seesemann, Rüdiger. Amadou Bamba und die Entstehung der Muridiya. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1993. Segun, Mabel. My Father’s Daughter. Ibadan: African Universities Press, 1965.

962 

 3 Africa

Sekora, John. “Is the Slave Narrative a Species of Autobiography?” Studies in Autobiography. Ed. James Olney. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 99–111. Shafi, Adam Shafi. Mbali ya nyumbani. Nairobi: Longhorn Publishers, 2013. Simoes da Silva, Tony. “Narrating a White Africa: Autobiography, Race and History.” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 471–478. Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson. This Child Will Be Great. Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009. Small, Audrey. “The roman de l’identité and the Impossibility of Identity.” Research in African Literatures 44.3 (2013): 1–12. Smith, Charlene. Proud of Me: Speaking Out About Sexual Violence and HIV. Sandton: Penguin, 2001. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Smith, Venture. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: but Resident above sixty years in the United States of America. New-London: Holt, 1798. Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Soyinka, Wole. Aké. The Childhood Years. London: Rex Collins, 1981. Soyinka, Wole. The Man Died. Prison Notes. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1985. Soyinka, Wole. Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years. A Memoir: 1946–65. London: Methuen, 1994. Soyinka, Wole. The Open Sore of a Continent. A Personal Narrrative of the Nigerian Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Soyinka, Wole. You Must Set Forth at Dawn. A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2006. Stewart, Charles C., ed. Arabic Literature of Africa. The Writings of Mauritania and the Western Sahara. Vol. V. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015. Toman, Cheryl. “Writing Childhood: Reflection of a Nation in a Village Voice in Marie-Claire Matip’s Ngonda.” French Literature Studies. The Child in French and Francophone Literature XXXI (2004): 81– 89. Waberi, Abdourahman A.. Moisson de crânes: textes pour le Rwanda. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2000 [Harvest of Skulls. Trans. Dominic Thomas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017]. Waciuma, Charity. Daughter of Mumbi. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969. Wainaina, Binyavanga. One Day I Will Write About This Place. London: Granta, 2012. Waliaula, Ken Walibora. “Reading Ngugi’s Detained as a Manifesto.” Du Nègre Bambara au négropolitain: Les littératures africaines en contextes transculturels. Ed. Désiré K. Wa Kabwe-Segatti and Pierre Halen. Metz: Université Paul Verlain, Centre de Recherches Écritures, 2009. 247–262 (Waliaula 2009a). Waliaula, Ken Walibora. “Prison, Poetry, and Polyphony in Abdilatif Abdalla’s Sauti ya Dhiki.” Research in African Literatures 40.3 (2009): 129–149 (Waliaula 2009b). Walibora, Ken. Nasikia Sauti ya Mama. Nairobi: Longhorn, 2014. Warley, Linda. “Locating the Subject of Post-Colonial Autobiography.” Kunapipi XV.1 (1993): 23–31. Watson, Julia. “Unruly Bodies: Autoethnography and Authorization in Nafissatou Dialllo’s De Tilène au Plateau (A Dakar Childhood).” Research in African Literatures 28.2 (1997): 34–53. Watts, Richard. Packaging Post/Coloniality. The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005. Westermann, Dietrich, ed. Afrikaner erzählen ihr Leben. Elf Selbstdarstellungen afrikanischer Ein­geborener aller Bildungsgrade und Berufe und aus allen Teilen Afrikas. Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1938.

3.4 Post-colonial Times 

 963

Wright, Marcia. Strategies of Slaves and Women. Life-Stories form East/Central Africa. New York/ London: Lilian Barber Press/James Currey, 1993. Yaa de Villiers, Philippa. Original Skin. Troyeville: Home Truths Production, 2010. Yali-Manisi, D.L.P., and Jeff Opland. “Versions of Life in Poetry.” Selves in Question. Interviews on Southern African Autobiography. Ed. Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya and Thomas Olver. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. 117–131. Zhukov, Andrey. “Old Swahili-Arabic Script and the Development of Swahili Literary Language.” Sudanic Africa 15 (2004): 1–5.

Further Reading Curtin, Philip D., ed. Africa Remembered. Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Gehrmann, Susanne, and Claudia Gronemann, eds. Les enJEux de l’autobiographique dans les littératures de langue française. Du genre à l’espace – l’autobiographie postcoloniale – ­l’hybridité. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Holden, Philip. Autobiography and Decolonization. Modernity, Masculinity and the Nation-State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Jolly, Margaretta, ed. The Encyclopedia of Life-Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London: Routledge, 2001. Ndong Ndong, Yannick Martial. Les Écriturs africaines de soi (1950–1910). Du postcolonial au postracial. Saint Denis: Edilivre, 2016. Omuteche, Jairus, and Tunai Kesere, eds. Critical Readings On Eastern African Autobiography. Glienicke: Galda Verlag, 2016. Oriaku, Remy O. Autobiography as Literature. London: Sam Bookman Publishers, 1998. Waliaula, Ken Walibora. Narrating Prison Experience: Human Rights, Self, Society, and Political Incarceration in Africa. Champaign: Common Ground Publishing, 2014. Wisner, Geoff, ed. African Lives. An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies. Boulder: Lynne Rienners Publishers, 2013. Whitlock, Gillian. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

4 Asia

4.1 India

Angelika Malinar Any discussion of the development and shape of autobiographical writing in India is faced not only with the issue of the compatibility and translatability of what has often been deemed a ‘Western’ literary genre, but also with the huge spectrum of languages, literary works and traditions which is far from being sufficiently explored. The availability of in-depth studies of representative works and authors depend on the language expertise of scholars with respect to the twenty-two languages officially recognized in the Indian Constitution and an even larger number of local dialects. The twenty-two recognized languages comprise not only classical languages like Sanskrit and Tamil and the languages of the Indian regional states (Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu etc.), but also the languages of what are now neighbouring national states (Urdu and Nepali). The Sahitya Academy, the Indian National Academy of Letters, gives prestigious literary awards to selected works in any of these languages. Furthermore, there is the corpus of what is referred to as ‘Indian English Literature’ which includes works of Indian authors who publish in English as well as in one of the Indian languages, or who have migrated to other parts of the world. The historical and structural complexity of the literary field in India and the fact that autobiography has only recently started to receive scholarly attention set certain limits to what can be covered in a general overview. From a historical point of view, the shape of autobiographical writing in India from the nineteenth century onward can be viewed as being a response to the encounter with modern Western autobiography. It is thus intrinsically connected to the repercussions of British colonialism and the implementation as well as adoption of Western literary canons in India (Viswanathan 1990). Autobiography, like realistic novels, detective fiction etc., belongs to those modern literary forms which are propelling as well as mirroring what typically has been seen as the advent of modernity, and in particular ‘the (modern) individual’ in Europe and India alike. While ‘classical’ modernization theories and historiographical perspectives based on them tend to construe processes of modernization rather unilaterally as being incited or imposed by ‘Europe’, recent studies emphasize the multi-sited character of these developments which are now increasingly studied as ‘entangled history’ or ‘histoire croisée’ (Werner and Zimmermann 2002). In these discussions, the issue of the ‘individual’ and ‘individualism’ seems particularly contested, and this touches upon a central concern of autobiographical writing as a form centred on the self as author, narrator and central character. The latter issue has been contested in literary studies as well, and more than once the connection between autobiography and modernity has been criticized not only with respect to its generic profile but also by pointing to Western antiquity as well as classical and early modern non-European literary practices (for instance, de Man 1979). Paradigmatic statements by acclaimed scholars such as Gusdorf (1980) that autobiography is not to be found outside of Europe have been criticized not only https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-101

968 

 4 Asia

by scholars studying non-European literature, but also in post-colonial and feminist scholarship. Major points of critique are the ideological implications of the peculiar genealogy of the genre as bound to Enlightenment ideas of humanity and selfhood that entail a history of (white male) privilege and violence. As a consequence, other forms of understanding the self, person and ‘I’ – for instance as being constituted by social collectives or involved in a history of multiple existences due to transmigration – have been marginalized. Recent scholarship has drawn attention not only to the presence of ‘non-western’ autobiographical writings, but also to texts not following the rules of genre and thus constitute examples of ‘counter-law’ or ‘outlaw’ genres (Kaplan 1992, 119). They can be seen as belonging to resistance literature as is the case with ‘testimonio’ writing in Indian Dalit literature. While such alternative ways of autobiographical writing have been detected in modern works and can thus be viewed as belonging to the spectrum of ‘counter-narratives’ which typically emerge in modern fields of literary productions, the classical forms have been studied less. Such studies are necessary not only in order to explore still different ways of self-narrating, but also for establishing a referential framework for the development of modern autobiography in India. While both critics as well as prominent Indian authors have commented upon ‘autobiography’ as something ‘new’ and ‘Western’, neither the idea nor the practice of individual(’s) life-histories is something new or uncommon. The same is true of autodiegetic writing and of practices of reflection or meditation of a self (ātman) about itself or as a variously defined self. Such practices were the basis on which the colonial-modern concern with the individual, the related styles of thinking and writing about the self and their social institutionalization, were interpreted, adopted, or rejected in India. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, well-established modes of literary practice converge with new literary styles and genres in texts of Indian authors. Conversely, some Indian views on the ‘self’, in particular those connected with ideas of karman [law of retribution with respect to one’s deeds] and reincarnation influenced narratives of/about the self’s history in texts of Western authors. Virginia Woolf’s fictional biography Orlando (1928), and Man: Whence, How and, Whither (1913) the autobiographical account of the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, in which they trace their autobiography through their different reincarnations from the beginning of history (see Malinar 2013), may serve as examples here. Along with these entanglements, autobiographical writing as search for the self and topic of historical and social self-imagination proliferated in the literatures of India. Before turning to these developments, older forms of life-history and autodiegetic narration shall be dealt with.

4.1 India 

 969

Life-history and ‘Self’ in Classical and Early Modern Indian Literature The narration of individual life-histories became a well-established literary practice around the beginning of the Common Era and came to be referred to in Sanskrit by the generic term ‘carita’ [literally: course of a life, acts of a person]. This term is also used when rendering the term ‘autobiography’ in modern Indian languages (ātmacarit; see also below). In the two oldest Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa [‘The great story of the Bharata clan’ and ‘The advent of Rāma’], the lives of the main protagonists are related by explicitly following a chronological sequence (krama), from birth to death. In both texts, the word ‘carita’ (along with kathā [story, tale]) is used for this kind of narrative. The epics include several autodiegetic episodes of protagonists recalling and disclosing autobiographical details which affect the further course of events. Self-reflection and autodiegetic narration are usually connected with instances of recollection (smara[ṇa], smṛti), which serves as narrative device for tracing and disclosing threads in the story that are enclosed in the ‘private’ agency of the protagonists. ‘Private’ here means either a deed performed in secret or inner thoughts and emotions which are retrospectively identified as having motivated socially visible deeds. Such moments of self-perception and autobiographical disclosure are usually embedded in intimate dialogues between family members. A good example of this is the account which the epic heroine Kuntī gives her husband and later her sons about her pre-marital life (Mahābhārata 1.113.31–38, 5.142.10–143). The Sanskrit epics and other texts of the period testify to an increasing interest in matters of the ‘self’ and the ‘person’ which are part of the larger cultural and socio-economic changes which occurred in India from about the fifth century BCE (establishment of larger empires, formation of new forms of knowledge, social stratification etc.). A part of these larger processes was the emergence of religious alternatives to older religious practices. Criticism of established religious goals and practices voiced by individuals was accompanied by an increasing interest in the structures of individual existence. This resulted in a religious pluralism which remained a characteristic feature of the social and political landscape of the Indian subcontinent. The conceptualization of the individual in the philosophical and religious literature of the period was an important aspect in the establishment of different religious pathways the central concerns of which included ideas of self, agency and personal relatedness (Malinar 2015). This is reflected by concepts such as karman and ātman [self, Self]. The latter is in many traditions interpreted as an immortal entity that is only temporarily connected to a mortal body, and the recognition of this is said to result in liberation (mokṣa) from the limitations of corporeal existence. The presence of different religious pathways and the possibility for an individual to choose among these also resulted in the emergence of a new literary trope, namely, individuals seeking the true religious goal by visiting different teachers and experimenting with various practices.

970 

 4 Asia

This trope becomes an important aspect of the also new literary genre of biography or life-story (carita), which at first centred on exceptional individuals, such as religious teachers, kings, and heroes. While their lives are characterized by an extraordinariness “which made them deserving of the distinction of a narrative” (Kaviraj 2004, 87), they also serve as examples for certain ideals and values of society at large, or for the ‘fundamental truths’ about human existence taught in religious and philosophical schools to which teachers and followers adhered. The focus on what constitutes the self and the interest in the life of exceptional as well as exemplary individuals converge in a new way with respect to a historically attested figure, namely in the literature about the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha (ca. fifth to fourth century BCE). He became the main protagonist of a carita in the form of an elaborate Sanskrit poem (kāvya), the Buddhacarita by Aśvaghoṣa (ca. first century CE). For the first time a carita focussed on one individual whose life provided both the form and the content of the poem. At around the same time the Pali Buddhist Canon (tripiṭaka) had taken shape, which includes as one of its parts a collection of discourses of the Buddha. In some instances in the canon the Buddha is depicted as sharing ‘autobiographical’ details in the form of an autodiegetic report about his earlier life. All these texts reflect the importance of the Buddha as teacher, example and authority for the community of his followers and they gave rise to a whole literature on the life of Buddha. This literature soon also included accounts of his previous existences when he was still bound by the laws of karman and transmigration. The collection of Jātakas [tales of former births] does not follow any chronological sequence. Rather, each tale is complete in itself and contains a (Buddhist) didactic kernel. At the end of each story, the protagonist is identified as being the Buddha, usually accompanied by disciples or relatives. Accounts of multiple lives became an important feature of Buddhist literature (Appleton 2011). The recollection of former existences is an important achievement of ascetic and meditative practices which are recommended in several Indian religious traditions as means for obtaining liberating knowledge. Buddhism, Jainism and Yoga traditions acknowledge the ability of jātismara [recollection of births] as a sign of the highest form of knowledge. The remembrance of former existences is seen as an antidote against further entanglements and bondages that prevent obtaining liberation – the common goal of all these traditions. As the studies on medieval Jaina literature by Phyllis Granoff (1994a, 1994b) have demonstrated, the narration of such recollections enjoyed a considerable popularity among Jainas. According to Jaina teachings, jātismara cannot only motivate renunciation, but also cause liberation. Knowledge of former existences provides an “autobiographical encounter” (Granoff 1994a, 25) for the persons concerned. As a consequence they “either adopt the religious path for the first time or are made firm in an earlier religious resolve” (Granoff 1994a, 25). Granoff notes that such autobiographical encounters are depicted as happening through either direct remembrance in the course of meditative practices, an external stimulus causing a sudden memory, or when a Jain sage tells a person his or her

4.1 India 

 971

own biography. A common feature of these narratives is that they “deconstruct our notion of the world with its fixed, stable and denotable relationships” (Granoff 1994b, 17). The stories present the world as “a jumble of births and rebirths and a chaos of interchanging relationships in which everyone is potentially the same to and the same as everyone else” (Granoff 1994b, 17). Collections of such narratives, such the Kuvalayamālā written in Prakrit by Uddyotanasūri (eighth century) and its Sanskrit summary, the Kuvalayamālākathā of Ratnaprabhasūri (thirteenth century), form an important corpus of Jaina literature. The narratives are structured according to the tenets of Jainism; they are didactical literature in an autobiographical form. A special position can be accorded to the Upamitiprabhavaprapañcakathā, a text straightforwardly composed as a spiritual autobiography by the Jaina monk Siddharṣi. This long text was completed in 906 CE. Siddharṣi recounts his numerous births with the intention of serving as an example to the audience, and of providing instruction for advancing their own spiritual aspirations. In his reflections about the purpose of such an account, Siddharṣi points out that while it is inappropriate for a noble man to talk about himself, ātmanindā, blaming oneself, the confession of failures and shortcomings, is a central, highly recommended practice for Jaina ascetics and lay followers alike. The religious framework propels self-reflection, recollecting and recording the details of one’s lives as part of a recommended religious practice. Siddharṣi has written a spiritual autobiography that does describe a linear progress towards the religious goal. Since transmigration is a central doctrine, “the narrative reveals a series of steps forward and backward, and in so doing stresses the complexity of the spiritual quest which at any time may reverse its direction as the soul slides backward to an unpleasant rebirth” (Granoff 1994a, 38). In his composing an exceptional account of his lives, Siddharṣi is part of a long-standing tradition of self-writing in Jaina communities, which is continued in the following centuries. An important, outstanding example for the persistence as well as transformation of this literary practice is the Ardhakathānaka (Half a tale [trans. Lath 1981]; 1641, Braj Bhāṣā) by the Jaina merchant Banārasīdās, who does not deal with previous lives, but tells “his own story” (nij kathā; v. 3) as a “half-tale”. The titled is explained as follows: “बरतमान नर-आउ बखान । बरस एक सौ दस परवांन ॥ ६७३ ॥ तातैं अर्ध कथान यह,बानारसी चरित्र । दषु ्ट जीव सुनि हं सहिंगे,कहहिं सुनहिंगे मित्र ॥६७४॥” [‘The fifty-five years cover half the number of the life-time allotted to man. Therefore, the story of Banārasī is called ‘halftale’. Wicked men will laugh when they hear it, friends will surely listen’] (v. 673–674). This focus on the present life as well as on what he himself has actually experienced is also emphasized at the beginning: जैनधर्म श्रीमाल सब ं । बानारसी नाम नरहं स ॥तिन मनमांहि बिचारी बात । कहौं आपनी कथा विख्यात ॥४॥ जैसी ु स सन ू ी बिलोकी नैन । तैसी कछू कहौं मुख-बैन ॥ कहौं अतीत दोष-गुणवाद । बरतमानतांई मरजाद॥५॥ [That paragon called Banārasī, of the Jain faith and the Śrīmāl clan, thought to himself, ‘I should make my tale known in the world.’ ‘Let me say in words what I have heard, what I have seen with my eyes; let me tell of past faults and virtues, observing the customary proprieties’] (v. 4–5 [Snell 2005, 80]).

972 

 4 Asia

This is one of the very few passages in which the author uses the first-person, while in the rest of the text he refers to himself in the third person, being the protagonist of his own story. Although Mukund Lath (1981) has to be credited for editing and translating this important text for the first time, Rupert Snell (2005) rightfully criticizes the fact that Lath has changed in his translation the third-person autobiographical poem into a first-person prose narrative. The consequence of this is that the text is made to rouse expectations of revealing personal or intimate details deemed typical for modern autobiographical writing, while its specific literary and poetic features are effaced. As the text apparently does not contain much personal details, Lath suggests that the text should rather be read as an apologetic account which serves to justify his position as the leader of a newly formed Jaina community (called ‘Adhyātma’). Interestingly, this group propagated the idea that it is possible to pursue the highest goal of Jainism, the liberation of the self (jīva, ātman) without becoming a monk or nun, only by practising asceticism as a householder. This interpretation implies a re-evaluation of inner-worldly life which matches the focus of the text on recounting the twists and turns of Banārasī’s attempts to establish himself as a merchant and to set up his own household while being drawn to poetry and religion. Failures and bad judgement result time and again in financial mishaps and debts. In addition, he has to cope with the death of his nine children and other family members. The autobiography is neither a success story nor the account of a personal development, but rather a record of as well as a reflection upon the changes and upheavals he had to cope with and on his own behaviour. In doing so, well-established conventions of ‘self-blaming’ and of listing positive and negative qualities of a person are made to serve the author’s specific literary and spiritual purposes. The sometimes ironic “juxtaposition of dark and light themes within a single moment of time” is a recurrent literary technique and “the constant game of hide-and-seek between well-being and suffering is one of his most favoured themes” (Snell 2005, 90). Eventually, Banārasī manages to establish a firm economic basis, but by now he and his wife are on their own: “नौ बालक हूए मुए, रहे नारि नर दोइ । ज्यौं तरवर पतझार ह्वै,रहैं टूंठसे होइ॥६४३॥” [“All full nine children lived and died: bereft, the parents twain – as trees, at leaf-fall, stumps remain”] (v. 643 [Snell 2005, 91]). There is no further comment on his state of mind or a further inner development, the metaphor strikingly makes the point. In summarizing his tale, Banārasī offers a self-portrayal by listing his faults and virtues (v. 647–656), and in this way he explicitly distinguishes himself from those who only know self-praise or would talk about the faults of others. The autobiographical dimension brought into play by religiously motivated practices of self-reflection is not only present in Jainism, but also in Buddhist, Yoga and other ascetic traditions which accord the recollection of one’s life and previous lives an important role in obtaining liberation (further studies are needed, see Granoff 1994a, 46–49 for some general observations). Furthermore, not only biographical writings, but also self-narratives proliferated in the contexts of the so-called medieval bhakti traditions of Hinduism which proliferated from about the thirteenth century

4.1 India 

 973

in the different regions of the Subcontinent and played an important role in the emergence of the regional languages. These communities (sampradāya) are centred on love and devotion (bhakti) to the one and only god or goddess proclaimed as the ‘highest’ that is, as the creator of the world as well as the one who guarantees final liberation (mokṣa). The bhakti communities follow different philosophical-theological formulations monotheistic doctrine based on an ideally uninterrupted teacher-disciple tradition (guruparamparā). The teacher becomes the model of the ideal of bhakti to be realized by the members of the community. Autodiegetic and autobiographical dimensions are implied in the highly individualized relationship a devotee should develop with his or her beloved god or goddess. Similar to the Jaina autobiographical narratives, the reflexive and narrative encounter with one’s own history follows certain patterns and models representing the religious tenets of the community to which the author belongs. Early examples of such spiritual autobiographies and autobiographical religious poetry are the narration of the events of the life of Cakradhara, the founder of the Mahānubhāva-Sampradāya, included in Līḷācaritra [‘Story of divine plays’] by Mhāibhaṭa (ca. 1278, Marathi), and the Gāthās [songs] and the travelogue in the Tirthāvaḷī [‘Account of Holy Sites’] ascribed to Nāmdev (fourteenth century), one of the founders of the Vārkarī-Sampradāya (Tulpule 1976). The corpus of bhakti literature includes also texts by women, as for instance, Ātmanivedana [‘Self-Offering’] the autobiographical verses by Bahiņā Bāī (1628–1700), in which she relates not only events of her childhood and marriage, but also the spiritual visions which sustained her devotional life. She also gives an account of her previous lives. While these and many other texts of or ascribed to bhakti poets in the various regions of India contain many details about family members, spiritual teachers and also certain personal experiences, introspective reflections or ascriptions of a particular ‘meaning’ to one’s life are rare. The religious quest plays the dominant role. Yet, while this entails that individual experiences are turned into examples for more general messages, it also gives room for the expression of the most intimate thoughts and emotions. While the didactic impetus provides the organizing principle for what is included and excluded in these accounts, the rhetoric and tenets of bhakti allow highly individualized forms of voicing oneself/ the self. Both aspects are intertwined in literary conventions, such as detailed descriptions of “longing caused by absence of the beloved” (viraha) or “self-mocking irony and self-deprecating humour” (Parekh 1989, 253). In modern times, the religious quest continues to be a prominent context for the emergence of autobiographical writing as a medium of self-reflection and self-assertion of the individual vis-à-vis their socially accorded roles. The landscape of literary forms and of self-memorization includes also literary practices which were brought to India with the establishment of Islamic empires and sultanates (in particular from the eleventh century onward) and the dissemination of Islamic forms of religion. In the field of religious writing, Sufism blended with ideas and practices of bhakti in many parts of India and resulted in the emergence of new religious communities as well as new literary and artistic creations. Persian,

974 

 4 Asia

Arabic and Turkish forms of (auto)biographical writing and historical recording were continued in India. This is particularly true of the Mogul rulers, starting with Bābur (1483–1530) who composed his Bāburnāma (in Chagatai), the memoirs of his life and successful career as a Timurid prince who became the founder of the dynasty. In his text, Bābur combines verse poetry with precise accounts of important events and the details of geographical and social settings in the well-known style of official court reports (Dale 1996, 639). His grand-son (1569–1627) continued this tradition with his memoirs (Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī). While these works may have stimulated the development of memoir writing and other forms of recording personal experiences in other strata of Indian society, a comprehensive study of this literary material is needed.

Autobiographical Writing in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Recent studies of the literary and intellectual landscape of seventeenth and eighteenth century India have demonstrated that the emergence and the shape of colonial rule in India needs to be understood as a complex interplay between established and new forms of cultural, social and political practices. Literary texts of this period, such as the Ardhakathānaka, have been connected to changing perceptions and interpretations of the role and place of the individual in public life. What has often been depicted as the ‘advent’ of colonialism is no longer seen as a watershed event resulting in a linear progress towards modernity, but as a gradual, multi-faceted process full of twists and turns. This can also be seen with respect to the development of autobiographical writing. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the challenges and “masks of conquest” (thus the title of the study by Viswanathan 1990) posed by the advent of British colonial rule, brought new values into the limelight which had resulted in Europe in the dissemination of ideas of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on individual freedom. At the end of the eighteenth century, ‘autobiography’ as a term and a new literary genre of life-history writing emerged as a literary practice no longer confined to religious contexts or to exceptional individuals of noted reputation. The new emphasis on the individual as both being unique and the creator of its own history as well as the product of the socio-cultural milieus in which its life is embedded, also influenced Indian authors. However, this does not mean that well-established forms of life-history writing were given up. Rather, they were continued in modified form, and they also influenced the ways in which the new referential frameworks of meaning and the claims of epistemic hegemony ingrained in British colonial rule were interpreted and adopted in India. While in some factions of Indian society these new ideas were criticized as imposing alien ideas and practices on what came to be

4.1 India 

 975

construed as ‘traditional’ culture, they were in others taken as incentives for ‘reform’. Furthermore, these ideas were adopted also by marginalised and underprivileged groups who in their struggle for recognition navigated between the two factions. The latter is particularly true of authors who saw in autobiographical writing an opportunity for crossing established social boundaries or for fighting discrimination. This is mirrored in the considerable number of autobiographies written by Indian women from the late nineteenth century onwards and, since the late twentieth century, in the surge of autobiographical writing by Dalits, members of the so-called ‘untouchable’ communities. Since the late twentieth century, we see also an increasing production of autobiographical/autofictional texts in English by Indian migrants, for instance, The Shock of Arrival (1996) by Meena Alexander or Joseph Anton, a Memoir (2012) by Salman Rushdie. The consolidation of British colonial rule in India from the beginning of the nineteenth century not only resulted in increased activities by Christian missionaries, but also in the implementation of an educational agenda with an emphasis on history, science and Western literary and philosophical canons. New ideas of the development of the individual, a ‘unified self’ and a unique personality connected to equally new literary forms like the ‘Bildungsroman’ and ‘autobiography’ were also propagated in India. While the latter were only gradually turned by Indians into a medium of self-writing, the earlier well-established patterns of searching for the religiously defined ‘self’ and of autodiegetic writing were made into points of reference for narratives about one’s life which emphasized historical accuracy and aimed at a ‘lively’ depiction of social contexts and relationships. In this way, new forms were added to extant forms rather than replacing them completely. This can be seen in the vocabulary adopted for these new types of writing which draws on already established terms that were readily used for rendering ‘autobiography’ into Indian languages, namely ātmakathā and ātmacarit(ra) highlighting the self (ātma) and jīvancaritra, jīvanvṛttānta, jīvansmṛti emphasizing the experiences of a life (jīvan). In rendering the English word ‘autobio­ graphy’, the terms ‘ātmakathā’ and ‘ātmacarit’ echo the long-established, philosophically highly loaded interpretations of the term ‘self’ (ātma) and, at the same time, open them up to new interpretations and explorations. The word ‘ātmakathā’ carries therefore an ambiguity when it is not primarily understood as the translation of the English word, but is re-translated as an Indian word as ‘story about oneself/the Self’. Accordingly, ‘ātmacarit(ra)’ is ‘biography of oneself/the Self’. The question of what is actually understood by authors as the ‘self’ being at stake in these texts has received different answers. In his discussion of modern Marathi literature Shankar Gopal Tulpule, for instance, states: “Ātmacaritra is actually a misnomer. For ­Ātmacaritra literally means ‘Life of the Ātman’ and the modern Marathi autobiography is far from it” (1976, 58). This refers to the preponderance of autobiographical texts in which the quest for a ‘true’ or ‘inner’ self does not play any role, but which are dominated by the subject’s political and social activities, that is, a public self. Yet, the quest for the ‘inner self’ remains a topic in some modern ‘spiritual autobiographies’ which Tulpule

976 

 4 Asia

(1976, 59) interprets as continuations of older literary traditions. The other terms, ‘jīvancaritra’ etc., render ‘life-story’ or ‘memoirs’ implying an autodiegetic structure, and do not evoke the same ambiguity although they also encompass a large spectrum of texts. Indian authors critically engaged with the new genre not only with respect to the terminology, but they also discussed the question as to whether autobiography means introducing a Western practice that fosters ego-oriented attitudes (self-glorification etc.) which were considered undesirable in the Indian context (Parekh 1989, 257; Kaviraj 2004, 83–86). For instance, in the preface to his autobiography Mohandas K. (‘Mahatma’) Gandhi explains why he calls his text ‘ātmakathā’ although it is actually an account of his experiments with ‘truth’. Since the story about these experiments converge with his life it takes a form that resembles ‘jīvanvṛttānt’, lifehistory. Academic studies of autobiographical writing in India across languages and historical periods as well as academic disciplines have increased in recent decades (for instance, Walsh 1982; Harish 1993; and essays in Granoff and Shinohara 1994; Arnold and Blackburn 2004). Textual, literary and psychological studies as well as research on life-histories in the context of history, anthropology and postcolonial studies opened up a large spectrum of themes, literary styles and interpretations of what the self is in its own narration, of what are the possible distinctions between author, narrator and protagonist in autobiographical writing, and to what extent autobiography as a phenomenon of (Western) modernity mirrors colonial power-relations which continue in the post-colonial world at large (see essays in Smith and Watson 1992). With respect to India, these issues are connected to the larger debate as to whether Indian culture at all acknowledges the individual as a focus of social concern (Malinar 2015). Scholars have also noted a persistent reticence and even reluctance on the part of modern Indian authors with respect to personal introspection or the disclosure of intimate details: “our autobiographies are remarkably ‘public’ (with constructions of public life not necessarily modern)” and “seldom yield pictures of an endlessly interiorized subject” (Chakrabarthy 1992, 88; see also Kaviraj 2004, 86). Yet, there are also important examples to the contrary, as for instance, the autobiographies of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Kamala Das. The connection between the dissemination of autobiographical writing and the colonial-modern frameworks of power becomes apparent at various levels. The new genre gained some popularity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, mostly in circles of Indian society that were advocating a reform of Indian society and were directly communicating with the British rulers. At this time also Indian women, from various backgrounds, began to write autobiographies. The practice proliferated in the twentieth century with the ever-increasing stream of autobiographies and memoirs by intellectuals, politicians, activists, religious teachers, etc. (Harish 1982; Lotz 2004). Many of the authors of these were active in nationalist movements and the struggle for independence. The struggle itself and the experiences accompanying it, in particular imprisonment and the partition of India, formed the background of many of

4.1 India 

 977

these works (Arnold 2004). The texts by Mohandas K. Gandhi (Satyanā prayogo athavā ātmakathā [1929], An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth [1927– 1929]) and J. Nehru (An Autobiography [1936]) are particularly widely acclaimed, not only because of their literary qualities, but also because they represent two conflicting visions of India’s future and of dealing with the ‘self’. From a still different perspective, Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999) addresses these issues in his much debated The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). This autobiography offers not only a detailed account of social and political settings, but is also a unique reflection about the colonial encounter which invites for various readings (Almond 2011). It includes also reflections on the genre in the form of ‘prefatory notes’ which precede different parts of the book. In the note preceding the section on his childhood, Chaudhuri distances himself from other forms of autobiographical writing when he points out that he is not interested in memories “as things interesting in themselves or as a foil to my later life” (2001, 137). Rather his book is more of an exercise in descriptive ethnology than autobiography, for presenting childhood against the background of the age, for presenting it as a submerged City of Ys […]. If there is any Atlantis to speak of in this book, it should and would be all our life lived till yesterday (Chaudhuri 2001, 137).

Furthermore, in the post-colonial period autobiographical writing also became an important medium of resistance and for claiming a public space for groups and individuals who viewed themselves as being exposed to different forms of ‘traditional’ social discrimination and exclusion, in particular women, so-called ‘untouchables’ (Dalits) and ‘tribals’ (adivāsi). They viewed certain aspects of the development of colonial modernity as opportunities for improving their status and gaining more personal freedom. It seems that perhaps the earliest text which carries the label ‘autobiography’ was produced, although somehow reluctantly, at the request of British friends of the author. One of the most prominent and influential Indian intellectuals of the early nineteenth century, Ram Mohan Roy (1777–1833), produced  – in response to the already mentioned request – a very short Autobiographical Sketch (1833), whose brevity he explains with his lack of leisure for reporting further details. Roy entertained an in-depth encounter with Hindu, Islamic and Christian texts and traditions whose mediation he sought within the framework of his interpretation of classical Indian monistic philosophy. In 1826 he founded in Calcutta the Brāhmo Samāj, a new Hindu religious group dedicated to the worship of Brahma (God) without icons and rituals. Subsequently, several members of the Samāj and its offshoots composed autobiographies which are important documents of the period. They are accounts of an individual life as well as of new forms of self-reflection. Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), active in the Brāhmo Samāj and father of noble-laureate Rabindranath Tagore, published in 1889 his ‘Account of the life of Debendranath Thakur written by himself’ (svarachita jībana-charitra; also referred

978 

 4 Asia

to as Ātmajībanī). The Bengali text was translated into English in 1914. The text is organized around the religious development of the author and his involvement in his religious community. In 1918 Sivnath Sastri, also associated with the Brāhmo Samāj, published his autobiography (Ātmacaritra). While his autobiography focuses on his spiritual quest and his activities for the Samāj, it also deals with aspects which point to what Sudipto Kaviraj (2004) has called in the title of his study “the invention of private life”. As a consequence, Sastri’s religious commitment is depicted as both the reason for his open violation of family norms and customs as well as the instrument which gives him the strength and resolution to endure social ostracism. In this way, the autobiography demonstrates how one may cope with new forms of social life organized around individual choices. In contrast to earlier autobiographical and autodiegetic narratives which follow conventions of self-blaming and self-effacement, Sastri’s text “follows a modern moral path, which considered such self-abasement unworthy of human dignity” (Kaviraj 2004, 86). His autobiography presents his life as a series of redefinitions and substitutions of what is customarily viewed as a desirable, ‘ordinary’ Hindu life with new, modern ideas and forms of the ordinary. This results in many conflicts, most intensely with his father, for instance, when Sastri rejects the performance of temple rituals because of his adherence to the Brāhmo Samāj (which rejects image worship), or when he refuses to give up his first wife. In these instances he was encouraged by the religious tenets propagated in the Brāhmo Samāj, with their emphasis on introspection and the awareness of God residing inside the heart. At several instances, prayer is described as providing the strength for pursuing the chosen path. Still, this does not result in any personal account of religious experiences or mental states of the autobiographical narrator, who “never adopts the tone of introspective intimacy” (Kaviraj 2004, 95). This reticence with respect to personal or intimate matters is typical of many autobiographical texts of the period (Orsini 2004). In this regard, Shastri’s text mirrors both “the embarrassment of the autobiography in the Indian context” (Kaviraj 2004, 95) and the conventions of Victorian autobiography mirroring puritanical values. Religion, in this case well-established Hindu Vaiṣṇava bhakti (devotion to god Viṣṇu), was also an important incentive and medium in the life of the author of the first autobiography in Bengali (and probably in any of the modern Indian languages). This was written not by one of the urban literati, but by a woman living in rural Bengal within the confines of the Indian patriarchal system, fulfilling her traditional roles as mother and householder. Rāssundarī Dāsī (1809–?) finished her Āmār Jīban [‘My life’] in 1866 (published in 1875; Sarkar 1999, 2fn1) at the age of sixty. Encouraged by its successful publication, she added a second part and a new edition was published in 1897 with a preface by Jyotirindranath Tagore (brother of Rabindranath Tagore). Patterns of sacred biographies, well-established in the devotional literature of Bengal, were reconfigured by Rāssundarī Dāsī when relating her life as an encounter and dialogue with the will and power of God. Driven by an irrepressible desire to read the sacred biographies of Bengali bhakti-saints, Rāssundarī Dāsī describes

4.1 India 

 979

her overcoming the barriers the Indian tradition has erected against the education of women. Her account focuses on her childhood, the traumatic experience of marriage (a topic in many autobiographies of women; Harish 1992, 10; Karlekar 1993), and her veiled, homebound life centred on cooking for and catering to not only her twelve children, but all members of the household. This is contrasted with her persistent, but secret desire to learn to read. Each chapter is preceded by a metric invocation of God. In this way, life becomes intertwined with what she views as God’s interventions and with her following a divine purpose. In contrast to the authors discussed before, Rāssundarī Dāsī had no institutional infrastructure when writing about her life as being characterized by both submission to as well as transgressions of the customary roles and duties imposed on her (Sarkar 1993, 36, 50–51). Tanika Sarkar credits her with having made “a major innovation in religious as well as in literary conventions by articulating a devotional statement in an autobiographical mode” (1993, 37). This allowed her to disclose that her innermost, personal desire gravitated towards reading and writing, practices denied to her as a woman. Therefore her efforts to obtain these skills had to be kept secret during much of her life. With her narrative she discloses this secret, private life she had while being dominated by the chores imposed on her as an ‘ordinary’ upper-caste woman in the household of her in-laws. The act of writing allowed her to create for herself a different life and in many respects “her autobiography […] resisted her lived life more than [it] reflected it” (Sarkar 1993, 44). Only occasionally the text refers to social and political issues, such as the debate on the education of women waging at that time between Hindu reformers and the conservative factions of the Hindu community. Rather, Rāssundarī focuses on herself and God by abstracting herself from her concrete circumstances. In so doing, Rāssundarī devised “a novel mix of rhetorical modes that would mask a public unveiling of her life […]. What emerged out of such constraints was a sustained, skillful and delicate double-speak” (Sarkar 1993, 45). In this way, criticism of the life imposed on her and her awareness of the ‘woman question’ can be traced in double-entendres, invocations and metaphors. Occasionally there are some explicit statements, in particular when she welcomes the present time with its new opportunities for women: আমাদের সেকালেতে মেয়েছেলেদের লেখাপড়া শিক্ষা করা নিয়ম ছিল না। […] এখন জগদীশ্বর সব বিষয়েই নূতন নিয়ম সৃষ্ঠি করিয়াছেন, এখনকার নিয়ম দেখিয়া আমি বড় সন্তোষ হইয়াছি । […] এখন যাহার একটি কন্যাসন্তান জন্মিয়াছে, তাহার পিতামাতা সেই মেয়েটিকে পরম যত্নে শিক্ষা দিয়া থাকেন । আমি দেখিয়া বড় সন্তোষ হই, বেশ হইয়াছে । [In the old days, women were not allowed to read. (…) Now the Great Lord has decreed new rules, I find them most satisfying. (…) Now, even if one has only one daughter, she is educated with great care. I find it wonderful] (Rāssundarī Dāsī 1995, 106 [Sarkar 1999, 207]).

Furthermore, Rāssundarī reflects on the fragmentary character of her memory, her identity and the chances to actually recognize, interpret and relate the changes of a life-time. While this points, on the one hand, to the ‘ordinariness’ of much of her life spent in the recurrent schedules of household duties, it reflects, on the other hand, her

980 

 4 Asia

autobiographical appropriation of religious metaphors and idioms. In recalling her obtaining senior status in the family she refers to the oppression of women: সেকালে মেয়েছেলেদিগের স্বাধীনতা ম�োটেই ছিল না; নিজের ক্ষমতায় ক�োন কর্মই করিতে পারা যাইত না, সম্পূররূ ্ণ পে পরাধীনা হইয়া কালযাপন করিতে হইত । সে যেন এককালে পিঞ্জরাবদ্ধ বিহঙ্গীর মত থাকা হইত । তন্মধ্যে আমার মনে আবার কি প্রকার ভাব উদয় হইল, তাহাও কিঞ্চিত্ বলিতে হইল । […] আমার মন যেন তখন ষড়ভু জ হইল । দুই হাতে ঐ সংসারের সমুদায় কাজ করিতে চাহে; যেন বাল বৃদ্ধ কেহ ক�োনমতে অসন্তুষ্ট না হন । আর দুই হাতে ঐ কয়েকটি ছেলে সাপটিয়ে বুকের মধ্যে রাখিতে চাহে । অন্য দুই হস্তে আমার মন যেন চাঁদ ধরিতে চাহে । [Those days, women were not at all free. They could take no initiative themselves, they lived in subjection, like caged birds. What were my feelings at that time? (…) It was if my mind had sprouted six arms. Two of them served the whole household, so that none should be unhappy. Two others were clutching my sons close to my heart. But the other two thrust themselves up to reach out to the moon] (Rāssundarī Dāsī 1995, 55–56 [Sarkar 1999, 180–181]).

The text does not follow a clear-cut chronology, but moves back and forth between themes and incidents. For instance, she recollects her earliest memory twice in the text, each time pointing to the difficulty and perhaps even pointlessness of establishing a ‘master perspective’: আপনার শরীর ও মনের বিষয়ে ভাবিয়া দেখিলে মন এককালে অধৈর্য ও অবশ হইয়া পড়ে ।আমার এই শরীর এই মন এই কাঠাম�োই কয়েক প্রকার হইল । আমার শরীরের অবস্থা এবং মনের ভাব পূর্বে কি প্রকার ছিল, এবং এখনি বা ক্রমে ক্রমে কি প্রকার অবস্থাপ্রাপ্ত হইতেছে, তাহা নির্ণয করিয়া বলা বড় সহজ কর্ম নহে; একটু কঠিন ব্যাপার বলিতে হইবে । বিশেষতঃ আমার শক্তিতে তাহার যে সম্পূর্ণ ঘটনা সমস্ত নির্ণীত হইয়া উঠিবে, এমন ভরসাও করি না । [When I reflect upon my own body and mind, I am overwhelmed and bewildered. In this one life of mine, my body and mind have gone through several phases. It is not easy to spell out how they were before, what they are like now, and what they are moving towards at this moment. It is all the more difficult because I cannot regulate these changes] (Rāssundarī Dāsī 1995, 67–68 [Sarkar 1999, 189]).

Like Rāssundarī Dāsī many Indian women would turn to autobiographical writing in the next decades and thereby resist the roles imposed on them. Some of these women were Christian converts, as for instance Lakshmibai Tilak (1868–1936) who wrote Smṛticitreṃ [“Pictures of Memory” (1934); I follow after (1950)] and Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1956), the first female barrister in India (India Calling [1934], India recalled [1936]). What is now seen by critics as the first autobiographical novel was also written by an Indian Christian, namely Krupabai Satthianadhan (1862–1896), who recounts her own life in narrating the life of her protagonist Saguna (1882). The text provides a complex negotiation of Indian reformist notions of the ‘new woman’ as being the partner of her husband and mother of the nation in a complex environment comprising different social and religious milieus. Furthermore, Saguna depicts “a privileged Indian native life in constant negotiation with English models of selfhood that were expressed in Victorian British novels” (Hasan 2009, 116). The multi-facetted intertextuality is an important aspect of the autobiographical discourse which draws on novelistic as well as historiographic modes of writing. One of the common themes in the autobiographies of women, irrespective of their different social backgrounds, is the

4.1 India 

 981

critique of the traditional role models. These form the background as well as motive for telling one’s own tale and for creating a public space otherwise often denied to them (Harish 1993; Chakravarti 1995). This is also true of the ‘spiritual autobiography’ of Banāsā Lāṭh (1880–1947) a modern female saint who relates how she pursued her religious aspirations by overcoming the resistance of her in-laws (Merā anubhav [ca. 1946] [My Experiences]; see Horstmann 2003, 1). Post-Independence autobiographies emphasize the struggle of women for obtaining forms of individual existence which allows them choices similar to those of men. This is often connected with attempts to establish oneself as a writer, to move “from the needle to the pen” (Harish 2002; see also Chakravarti 1995). As a consequence, there are some autobiographies by female literati which were controversially received, such as My Story (1971) by Kamala Das (1934–2009) which owed its controversial reputation to its frank depiction of her marriage and other intimate relationships. Another is Amrita Pritam’s Rasīdi Ṭikaṭ (1976) [The Revenue Stamp: An Autobiography (1977)] a text revolving around the trauma of partition and her struggle to establish herself as a writer. She continued her autobio­graphy with Akṣroṃ ke sāye: ātmakathā (1994) [Shadows of Words (2001)]. Autobiographical writing attracted also male literati with Rabindranath Tagore’s Jivansmṛti (1912) being an early example. From the 1930s onward, autobiographical writing became a field for exploring new literary forms as well. For instance, ­Sachchidanand Harinand Vatsyayan (aka: Agyeya) blurs the boundaries between autobiography and fiction in his Śekhar: ek jivanī (two volumes: 1941, 1944). In this text, the question of the relationship between the inner ‘driving force’ of an individual and the historical context he finds himself entwined with – in particular the struggle for Indian independence – plays a central role. The fight against colonial rule is also a major topic in Yaśpāl’s memoirs (Siṃhāvalokan [1994] [‘Beholding the lion’]). A quite different perspective on the period is unfolded in Pandey Bechan Sharma’s (aka: Ugra) Apni Khabar (1960) [About me (2007)]. His text is remarkable for its frank account of a childhood and youth marked by many painful events, such as violence and abuse in the family, and difficult circumstances, in particular the poverty of his Brahman family. The narrative is intertwined with citations of proverbs and incidents from the Rāmāyaṇa which serve as important devotional-philosophical inter-texts for commenting on and interpreting his experiences. In many instances, autobiography in India became an important way of crossing social boundaries and of voicing painful or discriminatory circumstances of living. This is particularly true in the case of the so-called ‘Dalit literature’, which emerged in the 1970s in the Indian state of Maharashtra and gained shape as a movement with the establishment of the ‘Dalit Panthers’ in 1972, who – following the model of the ‘Black Panthers of America’ – fought for the liberation of the so-called ‘untouchables’. The first Dalit authors were associated with this group and their political cause. Dalit authors published the stories of their lives in which the individual account was often taken as representing the community at large, which has remained in post-colonial

982 

 4 Asia

India a group much discriminated against, and often living hidden from public view (Beth 2007). Representative examples are Upara (1981) [Upara: an outsider (1997)] by Lakshman Mane, who was awarded with a prize from the Sahitya Academy, Jina Amucha (1986) [The Prisons we broke (2009)] by Baby Kamble, one of the first autobiographies by a Dalit woman, and Jūṭhan (1997) [Joothan, An Untouchable’s Life (2003)] by Omprakash Valmiki. It has been argued with respect to Bama’s Karukku (2000) that Dalit autobiographies can be read as ‘testimonio’: “Autobiography presupposes an autonomous individual subject. Testimonio, on the other hand, is a genre where the narrator stands in for the whole social group” (Nayar 2006, 85). It is “a narrative of witnessing. The narrator is the witness recounting the trauma. The genre enlists the reader as a witness to this trauma” (Nayar 2006, 91). In this way, autobiography is a form which allows the development of the literary and rhetorical strategies necessary to establish a space of intersubjectivity that turns the reader into a witness as well. It has become a point of controversy whether this metonymic relation between the individual and the Dalit community does not result in a new kind of normative collective identity which may restrict individual voices and the tensions within the Dalit community at large (see discussion in Beth 2007). In this connection, autobiography has also been seen as an oppressive genre, which allows only a certain form of expression to marginalized groups as well as to the individual. Autobiographical writing in India has a considerable classical and medieval as well as colonial-modern past, and the trajectories linking it with the literature in the post-colonial period still need to be explored in greater detail. It is a field of literary production which displays not only the multilinguality of India, but also the many different potential forms and functions it has offered and continues to offer in a socio-cultural context in which issues of selfhood, individuality and relatedness are as contested as in other parts of the world. Autobiography assumes a particular importance in the post-colonial situation in which colonial genealogies are entangled with the dynamics of globalization, and in which individuals – either on their own or in giving voice to the concerns of the collectives they belong to – struggle to find a place for living and narrating their lives.

Works Cited Almond, Ian. “Four Ways of Reading the Work of Nirad C. Chaudhuri. A Case Study of a Postcolonial Conservative.” Orbis Litterarum 66.6 (2011): 487–504. Appleton, Naomi. “Heir to oneʼs Karma: Multi-Life Personal Genealogies in Early Buddhist and Jaina Narratives.” Religions of South Asia 5 (2011): 227–244. Arnold, David, and Stuart Blackburn, eds. Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and the Life History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Arnold, David. “The Self and the Cell. Indian Prison Narratives as Life Histories.” Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and the Life History. Ed. David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 29–53

4.1 India 

 983

Beth, Sarah. “Hindi Dalit Autobiography: An Exploration of Identity.” Modern South Asian Studies 41 (2007): 545–574. Chakrabarthy, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ʻIndianʼ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1–26. Chakravarti, Moutushi. “Isolation, Involvement and Identity: Indian Women as Autobiographers.” Indian Literature 38.3 (1995): 139–151. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001. Dale, Stephen F. “The Poetry and Autobiography of the Bābur-nāma.” The Journal of Asian Studies 55.3 (1996): 635–664. Granoff, Phyllis. “This was my life: Autobiographical Narrative and Renunciation in Medieval Jainism.” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 75 (1994): 25–50 (Granoff 1994a). Granoff, Phyllis. “Life as Ritual Process: Remembrance of Past Births in Jain Religious Narratives.” Other Selves. Autobiography and Biography in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ed. Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara. New York: Mosaic Press, 1994. 16–34 (Granoff 1994b). Granoff, Phyllis, and Koichi Shinohara. Other Selves. Autobiography and Biography in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Mosaic Press, 1994. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays theoretical and critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Harish, Ranjana. Indian Womenʼs Autobiographies. New Delhi: Arnold Publishers, 1993. Harish, Ranjana. “Pen and Needle: The Changing Metaphors of Self in Autobiographies by Women in Post-Independence India.” Indian Literature 46.4 (2002): 161–171. Hasan, Narin. “Jane Eyreʼs Doubles? Colonial Progress and the Tradition of New Woman Writing in India.” Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years Ed. Annette R. ­Federico. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. 111–127. Horstmann, Monika. Banasa: A Spiritual Autobiography. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003. Kaplan, Caren. “Resisting Autobiography. Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects.” De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 115–138. Karlekar, Malavika. Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kaviraj, Sudipto. “The Invention of Private Life, a Reading of Sibnath Sastriʼs Autobiography.” Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and the Life History. Ed. David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 83–115. Lath, Mukund. Half a tale: A study of the interrelationship between autobiography and history. The Ardhakathanaka, translated, introduced and annotated. Jaipur: Rajasthan Prakrit Bharati Sansthan, 1981. Lotz, Barbara. “Autobiographies of Oriya Leaders: Contributions to a Cause.” Text and Context in the History, Literature and Religion of Orissa. Ed. Angelika Malinar, Johannes Beltz and Heiko Frese. New Delhi: Manohar, 2004. 383–425. Malinar, Angelika. “ʻ…western-born but in spirit eastern …ʼ – Annie Besant between Colonial and Spiritual Realms.” Asiatische Studien, Lʼétudes asiatiques 67.4 (2013): 1115–1155. Malinar, Angelika. “Religious Pluralism and Processes of Individualization in Hinduism.” Religion 45.1 (2015): 386–408. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919–930. Nayar, Pramod K. “Bamaʼs Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41.2 (2006): 83–100. Orsini, Francesca. “The Reticent Autobiographer: Mahadevi Varma’s Writings.” Telling Lives in India:

984 

 4 Asia

Biography, Autobiography, and Life History. Ed. David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 54–82. Parekh, Bhikhu. “Indianisation of Autobiography.” Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, An Analysis of Gandhiʼs political discourse. New Delhi: Sage, 1989. 247–266. Rāssundarī Dāsī. Āmār Jīban. Kalikātā: Samīraṇ Caudhurī, 1995. Sarkar, Tanika. “A Book of her Own. A Life of Her Own: Autobiography of a Nineteenth-Century Woman.” History Workshop Journal 36 (1993): 35–65. Sarkar, Tanika. Words to Win. The Making of Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Snell, Rupert. “Confessions of a 17th–century Jain Merchant: The Ardhakathanak of Banarsidas.” South Asia Research 25 (2005): 79–104. Tulpule, Shankar Gopal. “Spiritual Autobiography in Marathi.” Biography and Autobiography in Modern South Asian Regional Literature. Ed. Mujahid Husain Zaidi. Heidelberg: South Asia Institute, 1976. 57–68. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. Walsh, Judith. Growing Up in British India: Indian Autobiographers on Childhood and Education under the Raj. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung. Der Ansatz der Histoire Croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 607–636.

Further Reading Hansen, Kathryn. Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies. New York: Anthem Press, 2011. Kumar, Udaya. Writing the First Person: Literature, History, and Autobiography in Modern Kerala. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos Vatthana Pholsena

The two autobiographies discussed in the first part of this chapter convey in equal measure intimate and political dimensions, retracing lives of two individuals (Prince Phetsarath and Chao Sai Kam) that are deeply intertwined with the trajectory of the nascent Lao nation-state and a twentieth century marked by ideologies, revolutions and wars in Southeast Asia. In 1893 ‘Le Laos français’ [French Laos] was incorporated into the French Indochinese Union, which had been created in 1887 (besides Laos, French possessions in Mainland Southeast Asia consisted of Cambodia, Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina, the last three entities forming today’s Vietnam). French rule collapsed on 9 March 1945 following the Japanese armed takeover. The Japanese interned what remained of the colonial administration in Indochina and incited the rulers of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to proclaim their countries’ independence under Japanese patronage. The end of French Indochina was delayed by a costly, prolonged counter-revolutionary conflict, the First Indochina War (1946–1954). Laos, as a buffer-state in the Cold War in Asia, became after 1959 a political and military battle­ ground between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. Prince Phetsarath and Chao Sai Kam’s narratives of their lives reveal how dramatic change and historical development are perceived from within by members of the would-be or newly formed nation. In particular, the autobiography by Prince Phetsarath forms a textual site where the autobiographical self and the Lao national imagination intersect and mutually shape each other, rhetorically and politically. The second part of the chapter shifts to the informal mode of autobiographical self (as opposed to the formal mode, i.  e. published, written autobiographies): personal oral narratives that uncover what individuals tell us about their own understanding of events, that is, what they believed they were doing and what they now think they did. In other words, their subjectivity plays an integral role in the construction of the past. This section of the chapter is particularly concerned with how people were shaped by their wartime experiences, from combatants and revolutionaries to villagers and civilians, amid the civil war that shattered Laos from the early 1960s until 1975 when the Communists took power. The use of personal narratives as a research tool is about giving voices to the non-famous, uncovering their attitudes, responses and (sometimes) adaptations to the ‘acceleration of history’ that marked the twentieth century, technological leaps enabling unprecedented manifestations of violence. Laos’ tragedy lay then in the internationalization of its internal politics. The degree of external pressure on the civil war in the country was such that any resolution of the conflict progressively eluded its political leaders, in spite of their attempts to form coalition governments (1957–1958, 1962–1963). On the one hand, the Lao communist movement was supported by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the communist bloc, with China at its head in Asia; on the other hand right-wing partisans suphttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-102

986 

 4 Asia

ported by the United States and Thailand threw their weight behind the Royal Lao government and anti-communist Lao. In the aftermath of the Communists’ victory in 1975, tens of thousands of Royal Lao Government civil servants and Royal Lao Army officers were sent to labor camps that were set up in remote areas across the country. Memoirs of survivors of these camps have appeared in recent decades outside Laos. This chapter will conclude with a brief study of these autobiographies, traces and voices of a past that lingers on.

Autobiography and the Birth of Modern Laos The Lao have a centuries-old tradition of Buddhist literature and a modern secular literature that emerged during the French colonial period. Traditional Lao literature is closely linked to the Buddhist religion; from the sixteenth century the majority of Lao literary works were influenced by a collection of stories known as the Tales of Bodhisattva, accounts of the various lives of the Bodhisattva (or the one who will become the Buddha), recorded in the Tripitaka Buddhist scriptures. Traditional Lao literature served the Buddhist temples by educating followers to accept their place within Lao society and the larger Buddhist world. The first autobiographies written by Lao authors were published after independence. The majority of the writers were members of the Lao elite, many of whom studied in France. During the colonial period, Lao students educated at government schools were exposed to French literature instead of the Lao literary works. Secular prose fiction, previously unheard of in Lao society, became fashionable among the upper class, while traditional literature ceased to be taught (Koret 1999, 9). The first modern novel in Lao, ພຣະພຸ ດທະຮູບສັ ກສິດ [Phra Phoutthahoup Saksit (‘The Sacred Buddha Image’)] by Pierre Somchine Nginn, was published in 1944 (Koret 1999, 13). Nginn studied in Vientiane and Saigon, then continued his education in France. He was also very knowledgeable in the fields of Lao culture and language, and the director of the Lao Literary Committee. He published his autobiography in 1971: Nostalgie du Passé: Les mémoires du Professeur Somchine P. Nginn. The original title of this text, which was written in Laos, is ອະດີຕານຸສອນ (ຄິດຮອດເບື້ອງຫຼັງ) [Aditanuson (kithordbeuanglang)]. Beside Nginn, several Lao intellectuals contributed to the renewal of Lao literature during and after World War II; to name a few: Maha Sila Viravong, Prince Phetsarath, and his half-brothers Princes Souphanouvong and Souvannaphouma, Nhouy Abhay, Ouroth Souvannouvong, Bong Souvannouvong, Katay Don Sasorith, and Phoumi Vongvichit (Phinith 1975). Between 1941 and 1945, the Lao elite participated in a cultural revival movement as part of the broader Campaign for a National Renovation under the auspices of the French authorities. Faced with expansionist threats by the Japanese and the Thai, the aim of the campaign was to enroll the support of the local elites by convincing them that Laos had a place within the Indochinese Fed-

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 987

eration under French colonial rule. Many educated Lao, especially in the civil service, enthusiastically joined the campaign to defend and buttress their idea of a distinctive Lao national culture and identity, regardless of the colonial agenda (Evans 2002, 89–92). Several became leading political figures in the anticolonial struggle, and a few went on to publish their memoirs after independence (“3349” [Prince Phetsarath] 1957; Katay 1958; Phoumi 1987; Sila 2004). These members of the Lao elite straddled the colonial and post-colonial eras. Most of them were trained under the French education system and pursued their career in the newly independent Laos. A biographical approach helps to bring these actors of history out of the shadows of the past, to understand reality as they perceived it, and to gain a deeper understanding of their life situation and world views in times of great political and social change. Iron Man of Laos. Prince Phetsarath Ratanavongsa was published (in Thai) in 1956 in Bangkok by an author identified only as “3349”. This is a curious work, an assemblage of various writings, including narratives of Phetsarath’s life (written in the first person), praises of the prince and criticisms of King Sisavang Vong of Laos, and assessments of other Lao leaders (these two latter sections are presented in the third person). It is therefore not impossible that some parts of the book were written by another person, although some scholars believe that Phetsarath himself is the author of the entire text (he was fluent in Thai and had been living in Thailand for several years when the book was published) (Phinith 1971; Evans 1998). The hagiographical content of the book furthermore leaves little doubt that the prince was at the very least involved in its preparation. In view of these elements, part autobiography, part ­biography, is not an entirely reliable source of information. Nevertheless, this personal document has some clear historical value; to use Anthony Reid’s words speaking of Indonesian autobiographical accounts, “they provide the indispensable starting point for evaluating some of the great events in Indonesian history from the perspective of the participants involved” (Reid 1972, 3). Phetsarath was a central figure in the modernization of Lao administration under French rule (1893–1950) and played a key role in the emergence of Lao nationalism. His career and political life paralleled the making of modern Laos in the first half of the twentieth century. As such, his account “offers us a unique revealing glimpse into the life and thought of one person whose ideas and actions are indelibly imprinted into the modern history of Laos” (“3349” 1978, xxi). The publication of Iron Man of Laos coincided with a time of hope in Lao politics. Between 1954 and 1957, reconciliation talks between the communist and non-communist sides constituted the key element that could ensure Laos’ unity as well as its position of neutrality amid foes and allies. The prince could declare confidently a few months prior to his return (he was living in Bangkok in self-imposed exile) that “the fact that Laos is united and is an independent country equal to other countries is the reason I am pleased and willing to return to help you and all of the Lao people build our country in prosperity and progress” (“3349” 1978, 101). While the prince dreamt of a unified, independent and national Laos, in the end the country remained divided due to internal and external factors which far surpassed his impressive efforts to create

988 

 4 Asia

an autonomous postcolonial state. In 1959 Phetsarath passed away in Luang Phrabang as the escalation of the American-Vietnam War (1961–1975) made any attempt to isolate Laos from the battlefield of the Cold War futile. Phetsarath was born in 1890 into a ‘cadet’ branch of the royal family of Luang Phrabang. While the Luang Phrabang Kingdom was administered as a protectorate, the rest of Laos was ruled directly by the French either as a colony or as military territories. Phetsarath began his formal education aged almost eight. At the age of 14, Phetsarath left the royal palace to study in Cochinchina, attending classes at the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon before moving on to study at the École Coloniale in Paris. In many ways, he followed the standard trajectory of colonial elites – secondary education in elite schools in the colonies and then, for those who made the cut, higher studies in the ‘métropole’. Phetsarath in his narrative of his early years paints a portrait of a young man with a mind of his own, who on a few occasions defies his French school masters and is punished for his boldness. For instance, frustrated by his absence of progress in English language and the lack of help from his teachers while studying in France, he sets off to England on his own, returning to this country several times during school vacations. The end of this narrative, curiously shifting to the third person, presents the prince having forged his character, defined by a “resolute” heart “from a young age” and “his [increased; V.Ph.] dislike for the French” after “having studied the customs and traditions of foreign countries such as England and France in the mother countries themselves, not from the colonial riffraff” (“3349” 1978, 18–19). The aristocrat’s expression of superiority over low-class Frenchmen, who “were an embarrassment as they contradicted the assumed superiority of their race” (Evans 2012, 70) should not be viewed as an early reflection of a desire for independence, though. The prince after all offered to raise a contingent of Lao troops to fight alongside French soldiers during World War I. The affection for ‘la Patrie’ [the Fatherland] among many French-educated Lao in the early twentieth century was genuine before such sentiments turned sour a few decades later (Evans 2012, 72). Not long after returning home in 1913, Phetsarath was recruited to serve the French colonial bureaucracy working in the Office of the ‘Résident Supérieur’ (the representative of the colonial government) in Vientiane. The autobiographical sections of the book give no details on his career as a colonial civil servant, a complete gap of more than thirty years between his return from France and the Japanese occupation of Indochina during World War II. This silence is to some extent unsurprising given the prince’s anti-colonial nationalism that became increasingly apparent from the outbreak of World War II. In a later section of the book, a letter that Phetsarath wrote in 1956 takes a look back at his actions in colonial times and presents them as pioneering accomplishments that paved the way for Laos’ independence. The process of constantly reworking one’s own experienced past, which Paul Cohen has termed “autobiographical mythologization”, certainly does violence to an accurate remembering of the original experience (Cohen 1992, 83). But, at the same time, autobio-

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 989

graphical mythmaking has a clear value, in that it helps the author to preserve a sense of psychological coherence and personal integrity over time. In 1919, Phetsarath was named to the Cabinet of the ‘Résident Supérieur’ and put in charge of the “examination of questions related to indigenous administration” (Ivarsson and Goscha 2007, 58). The prince used this position to reorganize the civil service administration. At the turn of the twentieth century, local administrators in a district were still recruited from among people born and living in that same district. Phetsarath argues that this system created a situation whereby “the people of each district understood that their motherland had an area limited to their own district, and they believed that other districts were like other provinces. […] Consequently, each district considered itself independent and alone” (“3349” 1978, 98). He subsequently revamped the system of ranks, titles, examinations and promotion for officials and set up a school of law and administration for Lao students. From then on, “[c]ivil servants of all ranks and divisions changed their duties in all provinces, regardless of whether they were northern Lao, central Lao, or southern Lao. This allowed the Lao people to come to know officials of all regions and encouraged greater cooperation”, Phetsarath wrote in 1956 (“3349” 1978, 98). Local civil servants travelled within what is today Laos to perform their duties. Their mental and spatial horizons were broadened; they were able to imagine a common space beyond their ‘home’ district through encounter and exchange of similar experiences with fellow officials coming from all over the country. As a result, “[t]hese colonial meeting points […] gave rise to a wider consciousness of Laos in territorial and human terms” (Ivarsson and Goscha 2007, 60). World War II created new opportunities for the prince. The loss of the Lao westbank territories of Champassak and Sayaboury Provinces by the French to the Thai in May 1941 came as a blow to French legitimacy, already weakened by the Japanese presence (Stuart-Fox 1997, 54). In compensation for the territorial loss, the French granted the kingdom of Luang Phrabang administrative control of Vientiane, Xieng Khouang, and Haut (Upper) Mekong Provinces. During the reorganisation of the kingdom, the royal council was abolished and replaced with a ministerial system. Phetsarath was appointed Prime Minister and was also elevated to the rank of Viceroy. This double status conferred on the prince administrative powers and royal legitimacy, thereby strengthening his leading position in Lao politics. In private, he was reported to have declared that “le roi règne, mais celui qui fait marcher la boîte, c’est moi” [“the King reigns, but the one who runs the place is me”] (Ivarsson and Goscha 2007, 64). Phetsarath understood that his administrative experience, prestige and nomination as Prime Minister and Viceroy could allow him to increase his power and influence in all of Laos and he began to pursue the wider goal of achieving the unification of the country: I appointed Lao administrative governors, paired with French Indochina Commissioners, in Khammuan, Savannakhet, Saravane, and Champassak Provinces. I sought to join the kingdom and to unite Laos as it had been in ancient times. Twice I requested the French to do this, but they refused to allow it. From that time on, fighting for the independence and unification of Laos has been strongly on my mind (“3349” 1978, 99).

990 

 4 Asia

The memoirs contain extracts of Prince Phetsarath’s journal narrating the events that he experiences during the Japanese armed takeover of Indochina in early March 1945. The passages cover a tense 9-day period and highlight several interesting elements. On 10 March, returning from a inspection tour in the countryside and upon hearing the news of the Japanese troops’ overthrow of the French administration in Saigon and advance towards Vientiane, the prince’s immediate reaction is to prepare his travel to Luang Prabang to be with King Sisavang Vong. His foremost priority is to protect the integrity of the Lao kingdom and its administrative apparatus across the country. Before departing, he gives the following instructions to his Lao collaborators in Vientiane: “The present crisis is the concern of the Japanese and the French. Fate will determine the winner. We must all carry out our duties as usual, and demonstrate our abilities. We cannot show any weakness” (“3349” 1978, 32). There is no allusion relating to issues of sovereignty or independence in his entry on that day, however. Hopes are running high among Lao nationalists when French rule collapses following the Japanese coup d’État, but there aren’t any plans yet to seize independence amid the ensuing chaos. The contrast could not be greater between the account of his dinner with the French High Commissioner where he displays great ease in a French bourgeois setting (“‘If they [the Japanese; V.Ph.] actually came right now, we would lose this good wine we’re drinking […]’, [the High Commissioner; V.Ph.] said. ‘It’s better to drink it up quickly than to give it to people without good taste’ I answered” [“3349” 1978, 31]), and that of the journey he embarks upon soon afterwards on foot through the rugged mountainous terrain of northern Laos in order to evade capture by Japanese troops. [Monday, March 12] I climbed the mountains before dawn. The air was cool and invigorating, but I couldn’t ride the horse because the mountain was so steep that the horse would have tired quickly. I climbed for a long time and reached the Nam Feuang River in four hours and thirty minutes. Then I crossed the water, climbed a little more, descended sharply, and reached the Yao village Ban Pha Khom in one hour and thirty minutes. There I ate, changed the porters for a pack horse, and continued on to the Meo village of Ban Pham Kalah, which I reached in two hours and thirty minutes. From there, I climbed a steep mountain, which took one hour, and then reached the Meo village Ban Pa Hok in another hour, and slept there at the village chief’s house. Altogether it took ten hours and thirty minutes to travel around forty-two kilometers (“3349” 1978, 34).

Phetsarath gives a matter-of-fact account of a grueling journey that is exclusively centered on his actions and cool determination – there is no process of self-analysis, neither is there any utterance of physical pain or mental anguish. The emotionless narration, in a way, matches the earlier portrait of the ‘resolute’ young prince who will be known later on as the ‘Iron Man of Laos’. It portrays the fulfilment of individual autonomy through the heroic masculinity of its main protagonist. Laos was proclaimed independent on 8 April by King Sisavang Vong. A few months later, the first return of French troops after the capitulation of the Japanese forces on 27 August led to an open conflict between the king and the prince. The king, replying to the latter’s demand to reaffirm the unity of Laos, informed him instead of

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 991

the abrogation of the country’s declaration of independence and its return to French protectorate status. In contrast, when upon his release from prison, the former ‘Résident Supérieur’ calls upon Phetsarath to inform him that he will resume the leadership of the colony from 1 September, the prince admonishes him: “The French had run away rather than protect Laos, and Laos had unilaterally declared its independence. Was it right for them to come back?” (“3349” 1978, 26). Two weeks later, Phetsarath without the king’s permission proclaimed the independence of Laos again, along with the integration of all the country’s provinces (and thus the fusion of the separate regional authorities of Luang Prabang, Vientiane and Champassak), thereby unifying the French-created Lao state for the first time. However, on 21 March 1946, at Thakhek in central Laos, the ‘Lao Issara’ [Free Lao] forces were decisively defeated by the French, and the leaders of the Vientiane regime fled to Thailand. On 23 April Sisavang Vong was crowned King of Laos once more, having earlier been deposed by the ‘Issara’ government; the following day, French forces entered Vientiane. A constitution was promulgated on 11 May, and Laos became a constitutional monarchy within the French Union. Most ‘Issara’ leaders returned to Vientiane when the government-in-exile officially declared itself dissolved on 25 October 1949. Phetsarath adopted a wait-and-see policy that led him to a ten-year exile in Thailand. He eventually returned home in 1957 to become Viceroy again. As a colonial official the prince revised the civil service administration so as to allow local officials to circulate among different provinces beyond their ‘native’ locality according to the needs of the Franco-Lao administration. As a Prime Minister and Viceroy, he sought to unite the different regions of Laos into a wider, national Lao entity. His memoir, however strange on content and disjointed its structure may be, contributes to a better understanding of an emerging national Lao space and state in times of dramatic political change from the perspective of one of its modernizing leaders. The next autobiography to be discussed here, published in the late 1960s, in contrast reminds the reader of the persistence of local identities against which the notion of national Lao space was constantly to be appraised.

A Regionalist Identity: Chao Sai Kam Chao Sai Kam was 47 years old when he accepted to narrate part of his life to the French anthropologist and philologist, Charles Archaimbault, in 1965. Though the two men were close friends, the governor of Xieng Khouang and descendant of the ‘Phuan’ (a northern Tai speaking group) nobility had been until then deeply averse to the idea of an autobiographical account of his life so much was he “dismayed by everything that touche[d] upon the ‘I’ and the expression of sentiments” (Archaimbault 1967, 649). The story of one’s self is not a given. One cannot expect interviewees to be natural story-tellers  – unfamiliar as they might be with the kind of autobio-

992 

 4 Asia

graphical narrative that unfolds a linear and intimate account of one’s life (Fabre et al. 2010, 8–9). The governor eventually agreed to confide to Archaimbault when the latter explained how his earlier biography of Prince Boun Oun of the southern Champassak Principality greatly improved his understanding of religious rituals in southern Laos. The autobiography of Chao Sai Kam (in French), entitled Biographie de Čau Sai K’àm. chef de province de S’ieng Khwang (Archaimbault 1967), reveals a powerful, even overwhelming, sense of a wounded, yet extremely proud, Phuan identity. Muang Phuan, or Phuan Principality (in modern-day Xieng Khouang province), was devastated in the nineteenth century by war and regional rivalry between Vientiane Principality, (especially) the kingdom of Siam (present-day Thailand) and the Ðại-Việt (present-day Vietnam). Following Chao Anu’s (the last king of Vientiane) uprising against Bangkok in 1827, Siam launched devastating raids into Lao territories on the left-bank of the Mekong, as well as into the province of Xieng Khuang (also the name of Phuan state’s former capital). Many thousands of Phuan people were deported in the late nineteenth century and resettled in central Laos (what is now Borikhamxai province) and in northeastern and central Thailand. At the end of the nineteenth century only two small kingdoms remained in the Lao territories, both vassals of the Siamese kingdom – in the north in Luang Phrabang and in the south in Champassak. Chao Sai Kam is a descendant of Chao Noi (or Prince Noi) who, with his two sons and a grandson, were the last rulers of Muang Phuan. Little is known about the reign of Chao Noi, except for his tragic end. He was exiled and executed in Annam (central Vietnam) amid the conflict between the Siamese and the Vietnamese (Smuckarn and Breazale 1988, 7–8). The undignified and (perceived) unjust death of their ancestor profoundly shaped the historical consciousness of the Phuan ruling elite, as reflected in Chao Sai Kam’s narration of this event and its consequences: L’arrestation de Cau Noi, les sévices qu’il subit au cours de sa déportation, son désespoir quand il apprit qu’une partie de sa famille avait disparu dans un rapide de la Nam Mo [...][;] sa fin ignominieuse en place publique, tous ces tristes évènements de notre histoire ressurgissaient, séquence par séquence, intimement liés au martyre qu’avaient subi de son côté Cau Anu et sa famille. “Quand mon père Cau K’Am et ses frères revinrent d’Annam après vingt ans d’absence, ils parlaient p’uon avec l’accent annamite. Jamais ils ne purent se débarrasser de cette marque de l’oppression, mais jamais ils n’oublièrent le crime commis par l’empereur d’Annam qui, pour se disculper, avait fait mettre à mort Cau Noi après l’avoir discrédité. Méfiez-vous donc des Annamites et n’ajoutez point foi aux racontars des gens de Wieng Can [Vientiane; V.Ph.] qui stupidement colportent les mensonges forgés par les Annamites.” C’est ainsi que mon père régulièrement concluait son récit. Fidèle auditeur de mon père, comment n’aurais-je point nourri dès mon plus jeune âge la plus grande méfiance à l’égard de tous ceux qui essayaient de noircir mon héros: Cau Noi [...] [The arrest of Chao Noi, the maltreatment that he underwent during his deportation (to Annam; V.Ph.), his despair when he learned that part of his family had disappeared in rapids at Nam Mo (...) his ignominious death in public, all these sad events of our history reappeared, episode by episode, intimately linked to the martyrdom not unlike that undergone by Chao Anou and his family. “When my father, Chao Kam, and his brothers returned from Annam after twenty years’ absence, they spoke Phuan with an Annamite accent. They never rid themselves of this mark of

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 993

oppression, but they never forgot the crime committed by the emperor of Annam who, in order to clear himself, had put to death Chao Noi after discrediting him. So be wary of Annamites and do not give credence to the lies of Vientiane people who stupidly hawk the lies forged by the Annamites.” Thus my father would conclude his account. Faithful listener to my father, how could I not have nourished in my youth a great mistrust with regard to all those who tried to blacken my hero: Chao Noi (...)] (Archaimbault 1967, 654–655 [Evans 2009, 260, amended V.Ph.]).

Chao Sai Kam’s life story underlines a very strong geographical element of his Phuan identity, rooted in the locality of Xieng Khouang. The provincial governor, despite following the standard trajectory of colonial elites that takes him to study in Vientiane and Vietnam on several occasions, always yearns to return to his highland province, to live and work there. His deep attachment to his homeland is compounded by the unyielding sentiment that the outside world is hostile to him and to the Phuan in general, not least in Vientiane and amongst the lowland Lao. The latter are said to hold historical grievances against the Phuan, in particular accusing their rulers of betraying Chao Anu and causing his capture and execution by the Siamese (Archaimbault 1967, 655). It is possible that a sense of distinctiveness from, if not oppression by, the lowland Lao brings Chao Sai Kam closer to members of another local population that inhabit the provinces of Xieng Khwang and neighboring Hua Phan: the Hmong. The most prominent Hmong leader under the Royal Lao Government and member of the King’s council, Touby Lyfoung, was a life-long friend of Chao Sai Kham. Both were civil servants in the colonial provincial administration and even worked together in Nong Het district in Hua Phan province in the early 1940s. Chao Sai Kam remembers: Faire nommer un P’uon en territoire mêu était donc assez singulier. Il est vraisemblable que le résident avait senti que j’étais la personne qui convenait. Pour les fonctionnaires lau, les Mêu étaient des êtres inférieurs et des espèces de bandits. Or, à l’école, j’avais eu des amis mêu, en particulier Tu Bi et son frère Pau Zé. Nous nous entendions remarquablement. Chaque jour, il y avait bien vingt-cinq Mêu qui venaient à la maison voir mon père et souvent ma mère les retenait à déjeuner. Je n’avais donc nulle appréhension, j’étais même fort joyeux car j’allais retrouver Tu Bi qui exerçait la fonction de tasêng à Nông Het [To name a Phuan to Meo territory was thus rather peculiar. It is probable that the (French) résident felt that I was the right person. For Lao civil servants the Meo were lower beings and kinds of bandits. However, at school I had had Meo friends, in particular Touby and his brother Tougeu. We got along remarkably. Each day, they were twenty-five Meo who came to the house to see my father, and often my mother invited them to lunch. I thus had no apprehensions and was extremely merry because I was going to work with Touby who was the tasseng (a sub-provincial administrative position; V.Ph.) of Muang Het] (Archaimbault 1967, 559–660 [Evans 2009, 262, amended V.Ph.]).

In contrast, his encounter in 1942 with Prince Phetsarath leaves him unimpressed and confirms his belief that the Luang Phrabang nobility (of lowland Lao stock) is untrustworthy (“Dès que je fus en sa présence, je compris que c’était une personne qui aimait voir les autres ramper à ses pieds. Telle est d’ailleurs, quelques exceptions

994 

 4 Asia

mises à part, la caractéristique des princes de Luang P’rabang” [‘As soon as I was in his presence I realized that he was a person who liked to see others crawl in front of him. With some exceptions, this is a characteristic of the princes of Luong Prabang’] [Archaimbault 1967, 661], he said to Archaimbault). The rift between the royal houses further deepened following the Japanese armed takeover in March 1945 and the dramatic sequence of events that ensued (as detailed above). The provincial governor sided with the French to ward off the threat of a Vietnamese communist (Chao Sai Kam was staunchly anti-communist), then ‘Lao Issara’, occupation of Xieng Khouang. His chief concern was to preserve his province’s integrity, and, according to Grant Evans, “the French were more likely to recognize [the Phuan’s; V.Ph.] claims to status than the politically ambitious Luang Phrabang nobility” (Evans 2009, 255). Sadly, however, not unlike Prince Phetsarath’s shattered dream of a unified and neutral Laos, Xieng Khouang became a major battleground between pro- and anti-communist forces during the Vietnam War. Both descendants of an aristocratic lineage, Chao Sai Kam and Prince Phetsarath articulate different visions of their homeland in their autobiographies. While the latter is advocating for a Lao national space, the former defends a regionalist identity rooted in a locality that was once a kingdom. The two autobiographies clearly fulfil Philippe Lejeune’s criteria of a “récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa proper existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” [“a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality”] (Lejeune 1973, 138 [1982, 193]). In terms of the Western genre of autobiographical narrative, they nonetheless seem anomalous. There is none of the “intimate, confessional, and self-revealing style of expression” (Röttger-Rössler 1993, 366). Reflecting on her failure to collect life histories among the Makassar in Sulawesi, Indonesia, Birgit Röttger-Rössler realizes that “Makassar narratives do not focus on the “inner life” of the narrator himself, but instead are more event- or action-centered” (1993, 366). Furthermore, these accounts of events or self-conduct are deeply enmeshed in the Makassar’s complex social stratification governed by the phenomenon of ‘siri’ [self-respect, shame, honour], which is of “paramount importance for social life in general, and for the evaluation of personal qualities in particular” (Röttger-Rössler 1993, 365). In essence, the true Self of a Makassar individual is revealed in their relating of their social position dependent on the esteem of the others within the society. Not dissimilarly, the Selves of Chao Sai Kam and Prince Phetsarath are their public Selves realized through their narrations of their social actions tied to a sense of pride and honour in protecting their land and leading their peoples – or, to use Clifford Geertz’s words from his essay on the concept of the Self among the Balinese: “their role is of the essence of their true selves” (1966, 38).

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 995

Memoirs and Narratives of the War and its Aftermath On 2 December 1975, the founding of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic was proclaimed in Vientiane. In Laos, the period of socialism (1975–1986) was a short historical episode before the official endorsement of the so-called New Economic Mechanism (or System) in 1986. The new economic policy, or ຈິນຕະນາການໃໝ່ (chintanakan mai, new thinking), could be described as ‘perestroika’ without ‘glasnost’, i.  e. economic restructuring through privatization of government enterprises and capitalist investment without any reduction in the monopoly of power hold by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP). The LPRP is the country’s sole political actor and continues to emphasize the goal of creating a socialist society in its official texts. In the field of economy, the communist regime aims to follow the growth model of Vietnam’s and China’s booming ‘market socialism’ (that is, the co-existence of socialist policies and market capitalism).

Memoirs of Revolutionary Cadres Memoirs and biographies of former revolutionaries began appearing in bookshops and markets in Vientiane and provincial capitals in the early 1990s. War veterans were reaching retirement age and those who could afford it or find some private sponsorship published their autobiographies for a small readership (print circulation usually amounts to 1,000 to 2,000 copies, many of which are given to relatives and friends). Prior to publication, authors have to apply for official authorization from the Ministry of Information and Culture and have their manuscript checked by a reading committee. Indeed, history must be ‘correct’, that is, it must legitimize the leadership’s rule, and in the case of communist states, it must also follow the single party-state’s vision. History as written by authoritarian states definitely constitutes a good example of a highly selective, if not distorted, representation of the past. This genre of historiography is still commonly available in Laos. The state printing press continues to churn out memoirs of Party leaders and histories of Laos as well as of ‘heroic’ provinces (those that fought the toughest battles against the ‘enemy’ and subsequently suffered the most, for example, Huaphan and Xieng Khouang in the north, or Sekong in the south), all of which follow the same underlying pattern: the celebration of the party-state’s righteous guidance that led to the liberation of the Lao people from ‘colonial tyranny’ (the French) and the ‘imperialist forces’ (the Americans) 40 years ago (though amid the political rhetoric valuable historical information can also be found). Nevertheless, it is possible to learn through a few of these memoirs how war and revolution were experienced by individuals that lived through it, joined the ‘struggle’, and even grew up with it. Though the patriotic tone and revolutionary rhetoric are unmistakable in these autobiographies, they do not merely repeat the chronology of

996 

 4 Asia

key political events or celebrate deeds of revolutionary leaders. They tell us also about childhood and friendship, fear and joy, pride and pain during decades of conflict that directly impacted their lives. To a certain extent they contribute to the fleshing out of a sort of history of war from below, such as the memoirs by Thedlakhorn Douangsonthi, entitled ຮອຍຊີວິດ [Hoysivit (‘Traces of Life’)] and published in 2009. Thedlakhorn, the former Lao consul in Saigon, was born in a village in the east of Savannakhet Province in central-southern Laos around 1950. He joined the Revolution in 1962 following in the steps of his older brother, who was a soldier in the ‘liberation’ army. Thedlakhorn wanted to study rather than to fight, however. The education system was poorly developed at that time in Laos, and even more so in rural areas. Joining the communist ranks opened the door to a world of possibilities beyond that of his village and rural life. After several months spent in Muang Phine, the revolutionary base in eastern Savannakhet, Thedlakhorn is sent to the province of Sam Neua in north-eastern Laos (known as the ສູ ນກາງ [sounkang, centre]) in revolutionary parlance, where the Pathet Lao has its headquarters) along with other children and communist cadres who serve as guides. The children take with them few belongings. They have been told that they will have to walk, the journey will be long and that they should not be burdened with non-essential items: Thedlakhorn feels anxious, travelling for the first time outside his home region: “ແຕ່ ໃນຂະນະດຽວກັ ນກໍ່ຮູ້ສຶກມີຄວາມລັ່ງເລໃຈເມ່ື ອ ຄິດວ່ າ: ເມ່ື ອໄປຮອດແລ້ ວໃຜຈະມາຕ້ ອນຮັ ບ? ແລະ ຈະຖາມຫາໃຜ? ໃນເມ່ື ອຂ້ ອຍບ່ໍ ຮູ ້ ຈັກໃຜ ແລະ ກໍ່ແມ່ ນການໄປເປັນຄັ້ ງທໍ າອິດ ພວກຂ້ ອຍຈະໄປທາງໃດ?” [‘But at the same time we were full of uncertainty and kept thinking: who would welcome us at our destination? Who should we turn to? I didn’t know anyone and it was my first trip (...) Where were we going?’] (Thedlakhorn 2009, 40). Children, such as himself, who came from Laos’ southeastern provinces travelled on the Ho Chi Minh Trail (in reality, a maze of dirt roads through forests and mountains, to which were later added paved routes) and stopped in military camps established at (more or less) regular intervals to eat, rest, and sleep. The group swelled as it recruited more children on the way. At the end of the trip, the column could include up to several dozen students. But the group also suffered losses, as some children ran away and returned to their villages after experiencing just a night or two separated from their families (Pholsena 2012, 54). Mobilization of children during the war was one constituent of the social process of identity formation in support of the Party’s goals and vision of a new social order both during and after the war. The close relationship between education and the desired revolutionary transformation of Lao society was repeatedly stressed by the Lao communist leadership (Langer 1971, 8–9); Kaysone Phomvihane, the Pathet Lao’s leader, pointed out that, in contrast to the Royal Lao Government’s “neutral education”, “education [was under the communist system; V.Ph.] always intended to serve the Party’s political duties’ by providing indoctrination, training cadres, and serving as an instrument of class struggle” (Lockhart 2001, 21). Memoirs and biographies of former revolutionary cadres in Laos overwhelmingly portray the lives of male Lao leaders. Only one biographical memoir of a (lowland)

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 997

Lao woman revolutionary (Khampeng Boupha) has been published in the last fifteen years, entitled Remembrances of a Lao Woman Devoted to Constructing a Nation: Khampheng Boupha (Mayoury 1993). Khampeng Boupha, the first woman to be elected as a member of parliament and to the Central Committee of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, was a communist cadre who mostly held intellectual and political positions. In her memoir, she mentions several other Lao women revolutionaries who were awarded the highly prestigious Medal of National Heroes for their military actions and courage. Unfortunately, their stories are unknown. To our knowledge, these women never published their memoirs, and none of them had their revolutionary lives narrated. Some of them no doubt died during the war: it is not uncommon for the title of National Hero to be granted posthumously as it is often associated with the sacrifice of one’s life for the country. Nonetheless, a history of the Vietnam War as lived by female war veterans is conceivable through the use of personal (and oral) narratives as opposed to published accounts. Personal experiences of historical events and social changes revealed through such a medium are significant in their own specific ways. As the anthropologist Roxana Waterson has stressed, “it is the combination of the deeply personal, and the social and political, embedded as it is in the manner of telling, which can make the life history such a special kind of document” (Waterson 2007, 12). It is this unique positioning of the subject-narrator − linking the private and the public worlds of experience − that gives the narrative its authenticity, not some assessment of the individual’s story as being “representative” or “typical” (Watson 2006, 3).

Narratives of Two Women Fighters Manivanh and Khamla are the two women fighters in the Lao revolutionary movement whose oral testimonies are in part reproduced in the following sections (Pholsena 2013, 205–208). These two militants belonged to the second generation of indigenous revolutionaries – the first one was formed by resistance fighters who participated in the struggle against the French (see above) – who were recruited between the mid1950s and the late 1960s in PL-controlled areas in south-eastern Laos. Although their testimonies have historical value (i.  e. they contain information on historical facts such as guerrilla-controlled areas, battle dates, and guerilla activities), their subjectivity plays an integral role in the constitution of their past; that is, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did. In other words, their narrated past also matters because of its relation to the present (Ochs and Capps 1996, 25). These two female war veterans’ remembrances of their past are, of course, selective and subjective, evoking only certain memories. Yet, by analyzing what such inconsistencies reveal in terms of deeper psychological and emotional significance, their narratives in the end unveil characteristics of the ‘good revolutionaries’ that are not related in wartime propaganda literature and the carefully vetted memoirs of official leaders.

998 

 4 Asia

Manivanh is a very well-known revolutionary figure in Savannakhet Province. She is indeed the only female revolutionary cadre who has been awarded the regime’s highest military title of ‘National Hero’ in the whole province. Manivanh was born in a Katang (Mon-Khmer speaking group) village a few kilometers from the district centre of Muang Phine around the mid-1940s. After some formal introductions, she begins to unfold the story of her revolutionary life: ກ່ ອນທ່ີ ປ້ າຈະເຂ້ົ າຮ່ ວມການປະຕິວັ ດ, ແຮງຈູງໃຈຂອງປ້ າມີດ່ັ ງຕ່ໍໄປນີ້ທໍ າອິດປ້ າເປັນລູ ກກ່ໍາພ້ າ ທັ ງພ່ໍທັງ ແມ່ຂອງປ້ າແມ່ນໄດ້ ເສຍຊີວິດໝົ ດ. ປ້ າຈ່ຶ ງໄດ້ ມາອາໄສຢູ່ ກັ ບລຸ ງແລະປ້ າ. ປ້ າກ່ໍບ່ໍໄດ້ ຄິດຄຽດຫຍັ ງແລະ ກ່ໍບ່ໍໄດ້ ມີຄວາມຮູ ້ ສຶກກຽດຊັ ງໃດໆບ່ໍປ້ າບ່ໍມີຄວາມຮູ ້ ສຶກແບບ […] ເມຶ່ອອາຍຸ ຮອດ14ປີປີ 1957, ໃນຂະນ ະທີ່ປ້ າກໍ າລັ ງເດີນທາງກັ ບມາຈາກໄຮ່ ກ່ໍໄດ້ ພົ ບກັ ບລຸ ງຂອງປ້ າເຊິ່ງໃນຕອນນັ້ ນເພິ່ນໄດ້ ເຮັດວຽກໃຫ້ ແກ່ ການປະຕິວັ ດແລ້ ວແລະເພ່ິ ນກ່ໍກໍາລັ ງລົ ບລ້ີ ຢູ່ . ເພ່ິ ນຖາມປ້ າວ່ າ: “ຢາກເຂ້ົ າຮ່ ວມເຮັດການປະຕິວັ ດບ່ໍ? ຢາກຮຽນໜັ ງສືບ່ໍ ?” ແລ້ ວປ້ າກ່ໍເລີຍຕອບໄປວ່ າ: “ຢາກ, ຂ້ ອຍຢາກຮຽນໜັ ງສື!” ແລ້ ວລຸ ງເພິ່ນກໍ່ ພາປ້ າໄປຫາຄົ ນອື່ນແລະບອກກັ ບເພິ່ນຜູ້ ນັ້ນວ່ າ: “ຈົ ດຊື່ຂອງລາວລົ ງໄປ ແລະ ເອົາລາວໄປຮຽນການເມືອງ, ຮຽນເລື່ອງຄວາມສາມັ ກຄີ ແລະ ອື່ນໆທັ ງໝົ ດ!” […] ແລະ ນັ້ ນກ່ໍເປັນທ່ີ ມາວ່ າມັ ນໄດ້ ເລີ້ມຕົ້ ນຂຶ້ນແນວ ໃດແທ້ ໆ! [‘Before getting involved, my motivations were as follows: first, I was an orphan, both my parents had died. I was living with my uncles and aunts. I wasn’t angry; I didn’t hold any sentiments of hatred. No, I didn’t. […] At the age of fourteen, in 1957, on my way back from the hay (upland rice field) I met my uncle. He was already working for the Revolution. He was in hiding. He asked me: “Do you want to get involved? Do you want to study?” I then replied: “Yes, I want to study!” He took me to another agent and told him: “Write her down and take her to study politics, solidarity and all that!” […] And that was how it really began!’] (Interview by the author on 26 February 2004 in Kaysone Phomvihane City, capital of Savannakhet Province).

The kind of motivation that pushes Manivanh onto the revolutionary path is not the stuff for stories of heroism. What seems to persuade her to join the struggle is the disarmingly straightforward prospect (yet exceptional in those circumstances) of going to school, studying, and escaping a destitute life as an orphan. ‘Anti-imperialist’ feelings of anger and hatred will come later: ຕ່ໍມາປ້ າກ່ໍໄດ້ ເຂົ້ າໃຈ, ໄດ້ ຄິ ດຄືນປ້ າກ່ໍ ໄດ້ ເຫັນຢ່ າງຈະແຈ້ ງວ່ າປ້ າຕ້ ອງການຢາກເຂົ້ າຮ່ ວມການປະຕິ ວັ ດ ແລະເໜືອສິ່ງອື່ນໃດໝົ ດແມ່ ນຂ້ າປ້ າຢາກຮຽນໜັ ງສື. ປະການທີສອງປ້ າຮູ ້ ວ່ າຢູ່ ໃນໝູ່ ປ້ ານພວ ກສັ ດຕູ ກໍ າລັ ງບຸ ກຕີເຮົາແລະຂົ່ ມຂູ່ ພວກເຮົາ […] ແລະ ນ້ີ ກ່ໍແມ່ ນເຫດຜົ ນທ່ີ ປ້ າຕັ ດສິນໃຈເຂ້ົ າຮ່ ວມ ການ ປະຕິວັ ດ…ໃນປີ 1958, 1959ລຸ ງແລະອ້ າຍຂອງປ້ າໄດ້ ຖືກຈັ ບ. ປ້ າກ່ໍ ຢາກໄປຮ່ວມກັ ບພວກທະຫານ, ໃນໃຈຂອງປ້ າມີຄວາມກຽດຊັ ງພວກສັ ດຕູ ! ໃນຕອນນັ້ ນປ້ າບ່ໍແມ່  ໃຈວ່ າພວກມັ ນແມ່ ນພວກຝຣັ່ ງຫື ຼ ອາ ເມລິກາແຕ່ ປ້ າແມ່ ນເຕັມໄປດ້ ວຍຄວາມກຽດຊັ ງ. ນ້ີ ທີ່ປ້ າໄດ້ ເຂ້ົ າຮ່ ວມການປະຕິວັ ດແມ່ ນປະມານເດືອນ ກໍລະກົ ດວັ ນທີ20ປີ1957. [‘Later I understood, I reflected, I clearly saw that I wanted to join the Revolution, that I wanted above all to study. Secondly, I understood that in the villages the enemy was beating us, was threatening us (…) and this is why I joined the Revolution….My uncle, my brother were arrested in 1958, 1959. I wanted to go with the soldiers. In my heart, I hated the enemy! At that time, I wasn’t sure if they were French or Americans. But I was full of hatred. The date of my entry into the Revolution was around July 20, 1957’] (Interview by the author on 26 February 2004 in Kaysone Phomvihane City, capital of Savannakhet Province).

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 999

Khamla was born in Muang Phine in Savannakhet Province in the mid-to-late 1950s. She also comes from a ຄອບຄົ ວປະຊາຊົ ນ (khorp khoua pasason, ordinary family), did not go to school in her childhood because “there wasn’t any in the village”, nor (as a member of the Bru Katang ethnic group) could she speak Lao. Her first acquaintance with the communist-nationalist movement at the young age of eight occurs when the area where her village is situated is ‘liberated’ around 1963–1964. She enjoys helping collecting fruits and vegetables in the forest to feed guerrilla soldiers who enter the village to hold meetings and conduct their activities. As time goes by, she gradually learns how to write and read in the company of revolutionary soldiers and cadres in makeshift evening classes. In fact, she partly explains her proper ເຂ້ົ າຮ່ ວມການປະຕິວັ ດ (khaw hoam kan pativat, entry into the Revolution) in 1968 (that is, approximately one generation of revolutionary cadres later than Manivanh’s generation) as the result of a desire to get a better education (“ຂ້ ອຍເປັນຜູ້ ຍິງ ທີ່ບໍ່ຮູ້ ຈັ ກຫຍັ ງ ຂະໜາດພາສາລາວກໍ່ຍັ ງເລົ້າບໍ່ໄດ້  ” [‘I was an ignorant girl, could even not speak Lao’]), since she hopes that leaving her village and joining the revolutionary movement ‘out there’ will help her in achieving this goal. Nonetheless, Khamla also links her personal reason with a more collective motive, i.  e. “ຄວາມຄຽດແຄ້ ນແລະຄວາມກຽດ ຊັ ງຕໍ່ພວກຕ່ າງຊາດທີ່ເຂົ້າມາຮຸ ກຮານ” [‘resentment and hatred against foreign invaders’] as she puts it, employing commonly used anti-colonialist idioms. Khamla and Manivanh’s narratives reveal the complex nature of their motivations. The reasons for their involvement in the Revolution are first personal (they come from underprivileged backgrounds and they want to study) and subsequently collective (Manivanh fights to take revenge against an enemy who arrested and probably tortured her fellow fighters two years after she joined the guerrilla forces). Their motives are not initially ideological. The politically inspired reasons would mature progressively.

Voices of the Elderly The use of private memory as a research tool can give voice to the obscure and the ordinary. It can offer a more democratic and diverse representation of the past because it is the voices of ordinary people that are sought. Increasingly, it also concerns the documentation of the vast field of human experiences. Personal narratives uncover what individuals tell us about their own understanding of events. As the Italian historian Alessandro Portelli observes, oral history is about focusing on the ‘no man’s land’ that lies between what happened and what is inside the witnesses’ minds (Portelli 2009). This is well illustrated here by a narrative of the Vietnam War by several voices of the elderly – four men and two women – from the village of Sopnam in Sepon district to the east of Savannakhet Province, a narrative that was fragmented, lacking in structure and coherence, yet lively and relatively unrestrained (Pholsena 2010, 267–269). The initial exchanges between the interviewer and the interviewed were hardly spontane-

1000 

 4 Asia

ous, though. The narration of events was first taken care of by the village’s ເລຂາພັກ (lekha phak, Party Secretary), an amiable and studious man in his early fifties (therefore, relatively young compared to the group of elders). To the first question that was purposely vague and general – “could you tell us what happened in the village after the French left [Laos] in 1954?” – his answer was mindful, if not conventional, slightly hesitant, relying on the official history’s key dates. Then, progressively, while the Party Secretary continued his monologue, consciously spelling out the officially-sanctioned important dates and events, the elderly people intervened more and more frequently in the conversation, adding information, disputing the dates, interrupting the communist cadre in his narration to the extent of eventually imposing their own voices. When asked for further details of events during a particular year (1965) that appeared significant (that is, when the villagers were forced to leave their houses and rice-fields and to take refuge in the mountains because of the U.S bombing campaigns over the region), the six old men and women took charge and monopolized the exchanges from then on. An extract from the transcription of their narration follows: ຂະໜາດໃນຕອນກາງຄືນ [ຍົ ນ] ກ່ໍຍັ ງບິນ ແລະ ສືບຕ່ໍ ຄ້ັ ນຫາ ດຊ່ ອງຈ້ ອງ…ບ່ໍ ວ່ າຈະເປັນຕອນ ກາງ ຄືນຫຼືກາງເວັນມັ ນຄືກັ ບວ່ າໝົ ດມ້ື ໝົ ດຄືນ…ພວກເຮົາບໍ່ມີຫຍັ ງຫົ ຼ ງເຫື ຼ ອເລີຍ…ບໍ່ວ່ າຈະເປັນງົ ວ, ຄວາຍ ພວກເຮົາປະຖ້ິ ມ##ໝົ ດ… [A second old man interrupted the first narrator and said to the interviewer ້ໍ ກະທະໜ່ ວຍດຽວສໍາລັ ບເຮັດແກງແລະມີໝ directly] ລູ ກຟັ ງພ່ໍ ພວກເຮົາມີແຕ່ ໝ ຶ່ ງສໍາລັ ໍ້ ອີກໜ່ ວຍໜ ບໄວ້ ຕົ້ ມເຂົ້າກິນ, ມີຜ້ າຫົ່ ມ, ມີເສື່ອ, ມີບ່ ວງແລະມີກ້ ານໄມ້ ເພື່ອເອົາໄວ້ ຂຸດຄູ ນກັ້ນເທົ່ານັ້ ນລະ!... [Another old man added] ເຄື່ອງນຸ່ ງແລະຜ້ າຫົ່ ມແມ່ ນຖືກສັ ດແມງມາກັ ດຕອດໄປໝົ ດ… ເລ່ົ າໃຫ້ ຟັ ງຕາມຄວາມຊື່ເລີຍ! [A woman added] ແລະຕົ ນໂຕພວກເຮົາເຕັມໄປດ້ ວຍຂີ້ຕົມໝົ ດ [another old man carried on] ເມື່ອພວກເຮົາມີໂອກາດພ ວກເຮົາກໍ່ຟ້ າວອາບນໍ້າຢ່ າງໄວວາ, ພວກເຮົາຢ້ ານຍົ ນຫຼາຍ! [A woman behind him said] ເພິ່ນຫ້ າມເດັດຂາດບ່ໍ ໃຫ້ ໃສ່ ເສ້ື ອສີຂາວ. [then, lastly, the first narrator spoke again] ີ ພວກເຮົາຕ້ອງຍ້ າຍໄປຕະຫຼອດ, ພວກເຮົາຢູ່ ບ່ ອນນີ້4ຄືນແລະຫັ ຼ ງຈາກນັ້ ນມ້ື ທີ5ກໍ່ເຖິງເວລາທີ່ຈະຕ້ ອງໜ ອີກຢ່ າງຟ້ າວຟັ່ ງ. ພວກເຮົາຢ້ ານ ສັ ດຕູ ສິເຫັນ, ຕູ ບກາຍັ ງເຮັດບໍ່ແລ້ ວຊໍ້າພວກເຮົາກ່ໍ ຈໍາເປັນຕ້ ອງໄດ້ ປະຖິ້ ີ ອອກຈາກບ່ ອນພັ ກຂອງພ ມໄປ. ພວກຫວຽດນາມຈະເປັນຜູ້ ມາບອກພວກເຮົາວ່ າ: “ພວກເຈົ້າຕ້ ອງໜ ວກເຈ້ົ າ ເພາະຍົ ນມັ ນກໍລັ ງສິມາໂມງ ນັ້ ນໂມງນ້ີ .” ພວກຫວຽດນາມຮູ້ ດີແທ້ ໆໄດ໋. ຖ້ າບ່ໍ ມີພວກເຂົາເຈ້ົ າມ າເຕືອນໃຫ້ ພວກເຮົາຮູ້ ພວກເຮົາທຸ ກຄົ ນ ກໍ່ຄົ ງຈະຕາຍໄປໝົ ດແລ້ ວ! [‘Even at night (the planes) were flying, kept on searching, scrutinizing… night or day, it was alike… all night, all day, all night, all day… we had nothing left… cows, buffalos, we abandoned them all…’ (A second old man interrupted the first narrator and said to the interviewer directly) ‘my child, listen to me, we had one saucepan for the soup, another one to boil the rice, a blanket (his neighbor added)… and a mat, a spoon, and a stick (a trowel?) to dig the trenches, that’s all!’ ... (Another old man added) ‘the clothes, the blankets were swarming with vermin… to tell it bluntly!’ (A woman added) ‘and completely covered with mud’ (another old man carried on) ‘we cleaned ourselves very quickly, when we could, we feared so much the planes!’ (A woman behind him said) ‘it was absolutely forbidden to wear white clothes’ (then, lastly, the first narrator spoke again) ‘We had to move all the time, we stayed four days here, then, on the fifth day, it was time already to flee very quickly. We were scared to be discovered. Shacks were not even finished, we already had to leave. The Vietnamese would tell us: “You must leave your shelters. The planes are coming at such and such hour”. They were really well informed. Had they not been there to warn us, we all would be dead by now!’]

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 1001

From 1964 onwards, the U.S. army used planes based in north-eastern Thailand and other more distant locations to carry out extensive bombing in south-eastern Laos in an attempt to stop supplies flowing into South Vietnam from the North. Laos borders some 1,300 miles of Vietnamese territory and hence provided the best terrestrial route for reaching South Vietnam from the North. By late 1964, Vietnamese communist manpower and supply infiltration through southern Laos showed no sign of losing ground. The United States, as they deepened their military commitment in South Vietnam, subsequently secured the Lao government’s green light to expand their anti-infiltration effort. The U.S Air Force launched in December of that year airstrikes against fixed targets and infiltration routes throughout Laos, which soon expanded in April 1965 to a day-and-night offensive air campaign in southern Laos. Until the meeting, the elderly of Ban [village] Sopnam, like most villagers encountered during this field research, had never been interviewed, nor had officials ever enquired about their wartime memories and experiences as civilians. The state-sponsored historiography of anti-colonial wars against the French and the Americans in effect focuses much less on people’s experiences than on a teleological narration of the ‘revolutionary struggle’ and the ‘final victory’ whose main purpose is to endow the current regime with moral and political legitimacy. The oral exchanges with the elderly of Ban Sopnam on that day, in a way, defied the ‘amnesic’ official discourse of the past, with the old men and women fragmenting the language and the structure of the state-sanctioned historiography (as presented by the Party Secretary) to the point of displacing it with their own narrative of the war. This revealed the gap between the past as envisioned by the regime and the past as experienced, remembered, and told by those who lived through it.

The ‘Forgotten’ History of Labor Camps A past that has been blanked out by the regime still haunts those it tried to silence and to eliminate four decades ago. In the aftermath of the Communists’ victory in 1975, tens of thousands of Royal Lao Government civil servants and Royal Lao Army officers were sent to labor camps that were set up in remote areas across the country. Estimates of the numbers interned for long periods vary from 10,000 to 40,000, some of whom experienced up to fifteen years of imprisonment (Evans 2012, 200–201). Other were summarily executed or died from illness, accident, or maltreatment in the camps. A full history of labor camps in post-1975 Laos has yet to be written. What we know about them mainly comes from (a few) oral and written testimonies (published and unpublished) by former detainees who either managed to escape or were freed after years of detention (Mithouna 2001; Nakhonkham 2003; Khamphanh 2004; Bounsang 2006). Those who have written or spoken about their experiences in labor camps did so in their country of exile, in France, Australia or the United States. Grant Evans, the

1002 

 4 Asia

noted anthropologist on Laos, made one of the rare comments on Lao reeducation camps in recent years in his review of the memoirs by Nakhonkham Bouphanouvong (2003). He wrote in vivid terms: The camps were designed to terrorise both those outside and those inside into submitting to the will of the new regime. Arbitrary justice was of its essence. Those who survived the experience were deeply scarred by it. Some committed suicide in the prisons, some returned home broken and withdrawn (Evans 2003, n. pag.).

These prisoners were sentenced to forced labor, though in fact they were condemned to “nothing”, as Todorov wrote in regard to detainees in communist camps in Eastern Europe, since in both cases there had been no judgment or legal punishment (1995, 121). These testimonies are undoubtedly partial, though it does not mean that these personal accounts of historical events ought to be completely dismissed. Below is an extract from the memoirs of Bounsang Khamkeo (in English), a French-educated Lao civil servant, who was imprisoned in labor camps for seven years in the uplands of northern Laos and fled into exile in the United States shortly after his liberation in 1989. His memoirs are a remarkable testimony, narrated in a dispassionate tone, recollecting his senseless existence as a ຂະນ້ ອຍ (kha noy, little slave) in two labor camps with detail and candor. Life was cheap, and men died like animals and were thrown into holes and forgotten. It was as if they had never existed, although some prisoners swore that they could hear them at night, crying from the forest or wailing in lament as they haunted the camp. [...] I began writing a new confession, but it turned out to be exactly what I had written before. I handed it over to Master Bouaphat. Three days passed without a reaction from the camp authorities. Finally, at the end of the fourth day, Master Xienmi appeared in front of my prison house and called out my name. I ran to the door, glanced at Master Xienmi, and squatted before him. [...] He studied me for a long moment and then began berating me violently. “Why did you write such a foggy tale? What’s all this stupidity about you refusing to make your confession? Do it over! This time, tell me about your connections with Bangkok, Beijing, and the Lao resistance movement.” “Confession?” I pronounced carefully. “Yes, a full confession”, he said. That night, before I fell asleep, I thought about Master Xienmi’s order. I knew I had to write my confession for the third time, but this time I felt more confident. I would write the truth. The next day, I wrote the same thing I had written before and handed it over to Master Bouaphat. I waited anxiously for the camp authorities to respond, but nothing happened. Weeks passed, and still nothing happened. My anxiety began to abate, and I returned to my normal handcuffed existence, pacing the narrow aisle – twenty-five steps forward and twenty-five steps back. I imagined I was pacing the circumference of the world (Bounsang 2006, 214–215).

Confessions constituted the political and judicial instrument ‘par excellence’ deployed by communist regimes to identify ‘the enemies of the people’. The ‘tool’ of confession was ruthlessly used by the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng prison, code-named ‘S-21’, in Phnom Penh during their brutal rule (1975–1979). The S-21 archives held more than 4,000 such confessions that were extracted under torture from prisoners who accused

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 1003

themselves of counter-revolutionary crimes they were told they had committed. Of some 14,000 men, women, and children who were incarcerated only seven survived (Chandler 1999). ‘Suspicious’ passages were branded as evidence of the individual’s political deviancy. Bounsang was told to admit counter-revolutionary crimes; had his confession contained these ‘facts’, he certainly would have been severely punished, or even executed. In the end, his writing of the “truth”, stubbornly reciting the same ‘unsatisfactory’ story, seems to have worn out his guards. It could even be seen as an act of resistance against Master Xienmi’s absurd and brutal demands. The testimonies of labor camp survivors help to overcome gaps in our knowledge and to rescue a fading past, throwing a light on this forgotten terrain. But the lack of democratization and the absence of a public space for Lao citizens to freely debate about their country’s violent past contribute to maintaining social amnesia in Laos (i.  e. a conscious action to overlook an unsettling past), and impeding for now any hopes for an open dialogue between the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’ of Laos’ civil war.

Works Cited The English translation of “3349”. Iron Man of Laos, Prince Phetsarath Ratanavongsa (1956) was used in this article due to the difficulty of accessing to the original publication in Thai. “3349”. Iron Man of Laos, Prince Phetsarath Ratanavongsa (1956). Ed. David K. Wyatt. Trans. John B. Murdoch. Ithaca: Cornell University: Data Paper 110, Department of Asian Studies, 1978. Archaimbault, Charles. “Biographie de Čau Sai K’àm. chef de province de S’ieng Khwang.” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 53.2 (1967): 649–673. Archaimbault, Charles. “Les Annales de l’ancien Royaume de S’ieng Khwang.” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 53.2 (1967): 557–674. Bounsang Khamkeo. I little slave. A prison memoir from communist Laos. Spokane/Cheney: Eastern Washington University Press, 2006. Chandler, David. Voices from S-21. Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Cohen, Paul A. “The Contested Past. The Boxers as History and Myth.” The Journal of Asian Studies 51.1 (1992): 82–113. Evans, Grant. The politics of ritual and remembrance: Laos since 1975. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998. Evans, Grant. “Book Review: Lao Gulags.” Bangkok Post (13 September 2003). N.pag. Evans, Grant. The Last Century of Lao Royalty. A Documentary History. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2009. Evans, Grant. A Short History of Laos. The Land in Between (2002). Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012. Fabre, Daniel, Jean Jamin, and Marcello Massenzio. “Jeu et enjeu ethnographiques de la biographie.” L’Homme 3 (2010): 7–20. Geertz, Clifford. Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1966. Ivarsson, Søren, and Christopher E. Goscha. “Prince Phetsarath (1890–1959): Nationalism and Royalty in the Making of Modern Laos.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38.1 (2007): 55–81. Katay Don Sasorith. Souvenirs d’un ancien écolier de Paksé. Laos: Editions Lao Sédone, 1958.

1004 

 4 Asia

Khamphanh Thammakhanty. Get to the Trunk, Destroy the Roots: The Fall from Monarchy to Socialism. Portland: [self-published], 2004. Koret, Peter. “Contemporary Lao Literature”. Mother’s Beloved. Stories from Laos. Ed. Bounheng Inversin and Daniel Duffy. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999. 3–35. Langer, Paul. Education in the communist zone in Laos. Santa Monica: Rand corporation paper series, 1971. Lejeune, Philippe. “Le pacte autobiographique.” Poétique 14 (1973): 137–162 [“The Autobiographical Contract.” French Literary Theory Today: A Reader. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Trans. R. Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 192–222]. Lockhart, Bruce M. Education in Laos in historical perspective [unpublished manuscript], 2001. Maha Sila Viravong. ຊີວິດຜູ ່ ຂ້າ. My Life. Buddhist Predictions and Poems from the ‘40s. Vientiane: Doked Press, 2004. Mayoury Ngaosyvathn. Remembrances of a Lao Woman Devoted to Constructing a Nation: Khampheng Boupha. Vientiane: Lao Women’s Union, 1993. Mithouna. La Route N° 9. Témoignage sur le goulag laotien. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Nakhonkham Bouphanouvong. Sixteen Years in the Land of Death: Revolution and Re-education in Laos. Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2003. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. “Narrating the Self.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 19–43. Phinith, Saveng. “Cav Bejráj burus hlek hen râjaânâckrlâv toy 3349.” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 58 (1971): 321–330. Phinith, Saveng. “Contemporary Lao Literature.” Journal of Siam Society 63.2 (1975): 239–250. Pholsena, Vatthana. “Life under bombing in Southeastern Laos (1964–1973). Through the Accounts of Survivors in Sepon.” European Journal of East Asian Studies 9.2 (2010): 267–290. Pholsena, Vatthana. “La production d’hommes et de femmes socialistes nouveaux: Expériences de l’éducation communiste au Laos révolutionnaire.” Laos. Sociétés et pouvoirs. Ed. Vanina Bouté and Vatthana Pholsena. Paris: Les Indes Savantes-IRASEC, 2012. 45–67. Pholsena, Vatthana. “‘Minority’ Women and the Revolution in the Highlands of Laos: Two Narratives.” Women in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements. Ed. Susan Blackburn and Helen Ting. Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. 198–225. Phoumi Vongvichit. ຄວາມຊົ ງຈໍ າຂອງຊີວິດເຮົາ ໃນຂະບວນວິວັ ດແຫ່ ງປະຫວັດສາດຂອງປະເທດລາວ [‘Memoirs of My Life in the history of Laos’]. Vientiane: Lao State Printing, 1987. Portelli, Alessandro. “The Working-Class and the Sublime: Steel Workers, Globalisation and Identity.” Third Series of Public Lectures. Life After 30: Reflecting on 30 Years of the History Workshop. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 3–5 April 2009. Reid, Anthony. “On the Importance of Autobiography.” Indonesia 13 (1972): 1–3. Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt. “Autobiography in Question. On Self Presentation and Life Description in an Indonesian Society.” Anthropos 88 (1993): 365–373. Smuckarn, Snit, and Kennon Breazale. A Culture in Search of Survival: The Phuan of Thailand and Laos. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1988. Somchine P. Nginn. ອະດີຕານຸ ດສອນ (ຄິດຮອດເບື້ອງຫຼັງ) [‘Nostalgia of the Past: Memoirs of Professor Somchine P. Nginn’]. Vientiane: Fondation Somchine Nginn, 1971. Stuart-Fox, Martin. A History of Laos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Thedlakhorn Douangsonthi. ຮອຍຊີວິດ [‘Traces of life’]. Ho Chi Minh City: Consulate of the Lao PDR, 2009. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Communist Camps and their Aftermath.” Representations 49 (1995): 120–132. Waterson, Roxana, ed. Southeast Asian Lives. Personal Narratives and Historical Experience. Singapore/Athens: Singapore University Press, Ohio University Press, 2007. Watson, Conrad William. Of Self and Injustice: Autobiography and Repression in Modern Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press, 2006.

4.2 South East Asia: The Case of Laos 

 1005

Watson, Lauren C., and Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke. Interpreting life histories: an anthropological inquiry. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985.

Further Reading Goscha, Christopher E., and Søren Ivarsson, eds. Contesting visions of the Lao past: Lao historiography at the crossroads. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2003. Ivarsson, Søren. Creating Laos: the making of a Lao space between Indochina and Siam, 1860–1945. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2007. Khoo, Agnes. Life as the River Flows: Women in the Malayan Anti-Colonial Struggle. Kuala Lumpur: SIRD, 2004. Lim, Patricia Pui Huen, James H. Morrison, and Kwa Chong Guan, eds. Oral History in Southeast Asia: Theory and Method. Singapore: National Archives of Singapore and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998. Loh, Kah Seng, Ernest Koh, and Stephen Dobbs, eds. Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pelley, Patricia M. Postcolonial Vietnam. New Histories of the National Past. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Turner, Karen Gottschang, and Phan Thanh Hao. Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam. New York: John Wiley, 1998. Rodgers, Susan. Telling Lives, Telling History: Autobiography and Historical Imagination in Modern Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Waterson, Roxana, and Kwok Kian-Woon, eds. Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012.

4.3 Indonesia Monika Arnez

Blurred Boundaries: (Auto)-Biographies and Cultural Conventions A discussion of autobiographical texts in the Indonesian context has to take the variety of local cultures and literary traditions in the vast Indonesian archipelago into account. Klinken rightfully argues that these texts are “close to the stories of heroes or the lives of the saints” (2007, 199). Three decades before him, Reid had already noticed that Indonesians tend to read autobiographies and biographically laudatory texts of their national heroes (1972, 2). However, it is remarkable that this interest in autobiographical texts displaying ‘heroic features’ has continued into the twenty-first century, although the market is more diversified nowadays (Hill 2007, 216). A considerable number of autobiographical texts written since the time of independence carry self-aggrandizing characteristics. Religious (auto)-biographies and self-opinionated texts by civil politicians were written that demonstrate how the respective authors have contributed to the country’s progress (Klinken 2007, 201). They meet the demand of texts focusing on national heroes, who played an important role in history. Such autobiographies are also popular among teenagers, for instance, ‘madrasa’ [pupils of Islamic schools] and ‘pesantren’ [Islamic boarding schools] at the level of senior high school. Author’s fieldwork results in madrasa and pesantren in the area of Yogyakarta, Central Java, in February 2014 revealed that their favorite writings were autobiographical texts of religious figures, in particular ‘ulama’ [Islamic scholars]. Specifically, they were interested in reading about the way they served the country and acted as religious role models. It is noticeable that the boundaries between autobiography and biography are becoming blurred in several Indonesian texts. Ghostwriters have produced some declared autobiographies, and at the same time ‘collaborative autobiographies’ appeared. Naveau, arguing that numerous people gave biographies as presents to people, whose life they narrated, also emphasizes that there is no clear-cut boundary between biography and autobiography in the Indonesian context (2004, 131). Roosa points to this unclear divide, too, when he terms President Suharto’s text an “autobiography”, co-written by Brigadier General G. Dwipayana, the man, who was “most responsible for crafting Suharto’s image” (2008, 137). Conditioned by the blurred boundaries between such texts, some scholars such as Hill (2007) and Klinken (2007) have termed these texts ‘(auto)-biographies’. Another characteristic of Indonesian autobiographical texts several scholars emphasize is the hesitancy of the autobiographical self to talk about her or his feelhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-103

4.3 Indonesia 

 1007

ings. Most of the texts mainly deal with representing the public self, and the internal world is mostly absent from the debate. Ajip Rosidi’s autobiography Hidup tanpa ijazah. Yang terekam dalam kenangan. Otobiografi Ajip Rosidi [‘Living without a diploma. What is recorded in memory. The autobiography of Ajip Rosidi’] (2008) is one example of this phenomenon. As Chambert-Loir points out in his preface of this text, Ajip deliberately avoids feelings or emotions because his intention is to highlight facts and events instead (Rosidi 2008, xi). Even within the relatively small corpus of texts dealing with childhood experiences of the adult self, emotions are not a dominant feature. These narratives have a tendency of using childhood as a means to comment on social history, for instance, colonial rule (Rodgers 1995). Aku dan Toba: Tjatatan dari masa kanak-kanak [‘Me and Toba: Notes from Childhood Times’] (1950) by P. Pospos and Semasa ketjil dikampung, 1913–1928: autobiografi seorang anak Minangkabau [‘Childhood in a village, 1913–1928: the autobiography of a Minangkabau’] (1950) by Muhamad Radjab, both translated by Rodgers, contain childhood memories of North Tapanuli, Toba Batak, and the Minangkabau highlands near Padang Panjang in West Sumatra. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s both texts cover Batak and Minangkabau everyday life, culture and beliefs, and they also deal with the journey toward Indonesia’s independence. Although they recount ‘minor Sumatran boyhoods’, they also reveal revolutionary consciousness and the ‘invention of Indonesia’ (Rodgers 1995, 4, 73). There are only a few autobiographies that deliberately put personal emotions in the center and refrain from commenting on historical circumstances, for example NH Dini’s reminiscences. NH Dini, a well-known Indonesian author, born on 29 February 1936 in Semarang, wrote texts that were influenced by her experiences in Europe. After being employed as a stewardess with the Indonesian airline Garuda in the late 1950s, she married a French diplomat in 1960. It is remarkable that Dini, in contrast to other autobiographers, tends to avoid comments on history. One reason for this, as Watson implies, is her intention to focus on the development of her personality. If she had placed emphasis on historical development, the reader might have been misled to think that her book was some kind of historical memoir, thus his argument (Watson 2011, 185). Dini herself argues in Argentuil; hidup memisahkan diri [‘Argentuil; Life Separates Itself’] in 2008 that after she had been reading texts by the French writer Marcel Pagnol, she adapted his ‘souvenirs’ [reminiscences] for her own narratives. She explains that as her stories do not only revolve around herself but also do relate to events and people in her environment, her books are not novels, curriculum vitae or autobiographies but reminiscences (Dini 2008, 83). The latter relate to the characters’ everyday life and not to national history. In Argentuil the troubled emotions of the first-person narrator play a decisive role. The intimate ‘aku’ [I] narrates how her life changes due to her divorce from her husband, spatial separation from one of her children, and her new work as a ‘madame de compagnie’ [lady’s companion] of an elderly Dutch man. When the author reports on her activity as a writer, she also explains her own way of becoming an author and points to the relationship between

1008 

 4 Asia

her personal experiences and fictional texts such as La Barka [‘The Boat’] (1975) and Pada sebuah kapal [‘On a Ship’] (1973). These characteristics, I argue, make her reminiscences auto-fictional texts that seek to explain the relationship between real and fictional characters, thus seeking to fill the void between author and text. This chapter acknowledges different forms and conventions of Indonesian autobiographical texts. Based on selected works, the first section discusses early autobiographical texts, whereas the second part starts out to examine how autobiographies are connected with the term ‘nation’. In addition, it analyzes prison narratives that were written in the context of the bloody killings of communists in and after 1965. The final paragraph discusses autobiographies composed by two well-known religious figures of the religious mass organization Muhammadiyah, Hamka and Maarif, who were both born in the local matrilineal Minangkabau culture.

Early Autobiographical Writings Early autobiographical references appeared in texts written in Malay, Arabic or vernacular languages that had been circulating in the area long before there was any concept of Indonesia as a nation state. Such references occur in diaries, in court-chronicles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as in Islamic hagiographic literature published by Islamic centers of learning (Watson 2001, 468). Rich pre-modern collections of manuscripts also revealed autobiographical characteristics, for example, the pre-modern Bugis tradition of manuscripts. It was the introduction of printing introduced by missionaries that gradually gave birth to other forms of life writing. The British missionary Medhurst, whose lithographic press was built up in Batavia in 1828, probably brought the method of lithographic printing to the area (van der Putten 1997, 717). Reverend Keasberry, who had learnt this process from Medhurst, founded a mission with a school and print shop in Singapore, in 1839, and relied on Abdullah bin Abdulkadir Munsyi (1796–1854) to write, copy, and edit lithographs of Malay texts. It does not come to much of a surprise that Abdullah’s autobiography Hikayat Abdullah [‘Abdullah’s Life Story’], which he finished in May 1843, was one of the first works to be lithographed (van der Putten 1997, 717; Tol 2001, 126). Some characteristics noticed by scholars are its impressive and ambitious nature (Gallop 1990, 98) and the apparent contradiction between its truthfulness and its fictional character (Sweeney 2006, 224–225, 235). Further factors that impacted on texts written in this period were the literary forms and conceptions of authorship and audience. These were shaped by different elements, for example, British ideas and local oral traditions (Rodgers 1995, 38). ‘Foreign’ influence also played a role at the turn of the twentieth century, when travel accounts and documentary writing by Europeans in translation were readily available. As a result, an increasing number of texts appeared that incorporated autobiographic experience, for instance, accounts of journeys to foreign countries (Watson

4.3 Indonesia 

 1009

2001, 468). The composition of travel diaries was one of the results. According to Skinner, these narratives marked a transitional stage between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ literature (Skinner 1978, 467). In the further development of Indonesian autobiographies, a common theme certainly is related to Indonesia’s past and the complex ways of how the personal experiences of ‘tokoh’ [particular personalities] have shaped the development of Indonesia. This aspect has also played an important role in scholarly works; C.W. Watson (2011) examined the interplay of self and nation in one of his two books on autobiography in Indonesia. Watson emphasizes that, in contrast to contemporary European autobiographies, external events play a more important role in structuring Indonesian autobiographical texts (Watson 2006, 138). According to him, a person’s contribution to nationalism is foregrounded, whereas the author’s and protagonist’s own intellectual development is not necessarily put forward. For Watson, Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879–1904), a well-known symbol of women’s emancipation in Indonesia, differs from other Indonesian autobiographers as her resistance against political oppression is also indicative of the new self-reflexivity at the turn of the twentieth century.

Self-reflection and Emotion in Letter Writing In the letters Kartini composed between 1899 and her early death in 1904 in Dutch, she emphasizes the relevance of education for women and urges them to free themselves from the shackles of patriarchal society. Kartini belonged to the ‘priyayi’ [traditional Javanese aristocracy], her father being the regent of Jepara. Although he had enabled her and her sisters to learn Dutch, and Kartini soon expressed herself well in written Dutch, she was not allowed to continue formal education, when she reached puberty. Nevertheless, she wrote letters in Dutch to women, for instance, Mrs. Abendanon, the second wife of Jacques Henri Abendanon, former director of colonial education. Influenced by the Dutch feminist Stella Zeehandelaar, among others, with whom Kartini exchanged letters from 1899 until 1903, she advocated better educational opportunities for girls. Furthermore, she demanded an end to polygynic marriages. Ironically, though, she was married to Raden Adipati Joyodiningrat, the regent of Rembang, in 1903 and became his fourth wife. Jacques Henri Abendanon, who was Kartini’s patron and publisher, collected and edited some of her letters. They appeared in a book entitled Door duisternis tot lίcht: Gedachten over en voor het Javaansche volk van Raden Adjeng Kartini [From darkness to light: Thoughts on and on Behalf of the Javanese People by Raden Adjeng Kartini] in 1912. Due to the popularity of the letters, they were translated into English (1920), Arabic (1926), Japanese (1955) and French. Watson refers to Lejeune (1982), when he constructs the letters of Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879–1904) as an autobiography. He notes that Lejeune’s ‘general procedures’ of the autobiographical contract serve as a good starting point for an initial assessment of the text (Watson 2006, 20). In general, the autobiographical contract is established

1010 

 4 Asia

in letters because author, first-person narrator and the letter’s protagonist are one person. Watson uses the theoretical framework of Lejeune’s autobiographical contract to legitimize and explain why he considered Kartini’s letters useful to construct her autobiography. He argues that these letters were written over the whole duration of the friendship between her and Mrs. Abendanon (Watson 2006, 34). He suggests that this ‘completeness’ prevents giving a superficial impression of the friendship between the two women. He rightfully argues that Kartini’s letters are a good example of revealing the autobiographical contract, in the sense that she creates the autobiographical self, and the readers’ expectations exercise a control over the text (Watson 2006, 27). He does not mention, however, that the effort at reconstructing Kartini’s self through her letters is only based on fragments of her life story, and, in contrast to autobiographies, does not allow for a retrospective overall view of a person’s life. Nevertheless, he concedes that letters do not provide scholars with the opportunity of carrying out a systematical study according to the principles of the autobiographical contract since they are more open, tentative and undetermined than autobiographies. Another problem he addresses is that the construction of the self evolves more slowly than in autobiographies. The greatest difference he identifies between letters and autobiographies is their readership: conventional autobiographies address a general readership, whereas a letter is directed to an individual reader. Despite this difference he notes one similarity, the construction of the self, as a response to the judgment by the reader. He concludes: “And this critical perspective is especially privileged in the study of a correspondence because, as in this case, we are able to be much more particular about the dynamics of the relationship between reader and writer” (Watson 2006, 35). Watson provides the model of the regular exchange with Mrs. Abendanon to emphasize that in a slowly evolving correspondence self-reflection does play a more important role than it does in autobiographies. As he convincingly shows, different Kartinis are produced in this way, and ongoing self-reflection is stimulated. He points out that Kartini, through self-disclosure in her letters to Mrs. Abendanon, reaches a new understanding of her own life situation.

The Nation and Memory Serving the Country Nationalism and criticism of the colonial regime were factors that autobiographies in later periods frequently discussed. One example is Kesadaran Nasional: otobiografi Ahmed Subardjo Djoyoadisuryo [‘National Awareness: the autobiography of Ahmed Subardjo Djoyoadisuryo’] published in 1978. Subardjo, together with Sukarno and Hatta, had prepared Indonesian independence, and his autobiography covers the

4.3 Indonesia 

 1011

period 1896 until 1974, with a focus on the years between 1934 and 1949. Whereas the first part discusses Subardjo’s youth and cultural background, and early Indonesian nationalism, part two concentrates on his university education in Europe, and contacts with foreign nationalists. The third part shows how Subardjo returned to Indonesia in April 1934, when he again actively participated in the nationalist struggle, the Second World War. It stresses the events that took place during the last days of the Japanese occupation. The fourth part outlines the Indonesian Revolution, the occupation by the allied forces, the imprisonment of the author by the Dutch, and his activities as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Finally, his contacts with Middle Eastern countries are described in part five. Common themes of many texts related to the period of independence are the new national identity, the enthusiastic support and the readiness to defend the new-born state. Some writers voiced critical thoughts on the violent break with the colonial power, but many more “regarded the zaman revolusi [revolutionary period; M.A.] as the critical period of their lives” (Watson 2011, 137). Watson refers to several authors of political autobiographies, for instance by Hamka, Sukarno, Hatta, and Saifuddin Zuhri, and points out that their texts describe how the authors relate to the ‘triumph of nationalism’ between 1920 and 1949 and in which ways they contribute to this triumph (Watson 2011, 138). Of course, Indonesian authors experienced sovereignty as liberation, but they had different ways of interpreting the events of the independence war. The purpose of serving the country is like a red thread running through numerous autobiographies; many of them carry the subtitle mengabdi pada negara [‘serving the country’] (Wieringa 2012, 144). Writers organized their autobiographies around crucial periods in the development of the nation, the Dutch colonial period (1602–1942), the Japanese occupation (1942–1945), and the struggle for independence (1945–1949). The autobiographic texts of the well-known entrepreneur Sukamdani Sahid ­Gitosarjono, founder of the Sahid Hotel chain, are an example of self-assertive, nationalist writing. Sukamdani, born in 1928 in Solo, moved to Jakarta in 1952, and from the profits of his first business, the printing company CV Masyarakat Baru, he fulfilled his dream to build a hotel in Solo in 1961. The first part of his autobiography entitled Wirausaha mengabdi pembangunan: otobiografi [‘An entrepreneur serving development: an autobiography’] was published in 1993, the second, Memoar Sukamdani S.G. – otobiografi II (1993–2001): kisah kegiatan bisnis, pendidikan, sosial-budaya, dan harapan saya [‘The memoir of Sukamdi S.G.: autobiography II (1993–2001): a story of economic, educational, socio-cultural activities, and my hopes’] was released in 2001. Whereas the former gives the reader a general overview over his life, the latter concentrates on a relatively short period between 1993 and 2001. This text, co-written by Exacty S. Sryantoro and Sugiarta Sriwibawa, was published just one year before Sukamadani delegated responsibility for the operational management of the Sahid group to his children. These texts clearly reveal that Sukamdani saw himself as a true independence fighter and pioneer of the Indonesian hotel industry. As he recounts, after his stay in an old hotel in Medan in 1960 he had the idea to develop the hotel

1012 

 4 Asia

industry in Indonesia. In addition to setting up hotels, Sukamdani has also been active in international relations, in particular with China. He played an important role in resuming direct trade between Indonesia and China in 1989 (Sukma 1999, 126). The nationalist character of his autobiography, however, is neither exceptional nor is it restricted to authors with Indonesian descent, as the following two cases illustrate. Yap Tjwan Bing’s autobiography Meretas jalan kemerdekaan: Otobiografi seorang pejuang kemerdekaan [‘Pioneering Independence: The Autobiography of an Independence Fighter’], published in 1988, provides an example of a fervently nationalistic Indonesian with Chinese descent. Yap Tjwan Bing was born on 31 October 1910 in Solo, Central Java. Being aware of his special status as the only Chinese in the Indonesian Independence Preparation Committee set up in August 1945, he emphasized at the beginning of his autobiography how necessary it was that ethnic groups cooperate with each other to ensure peaceful interaction. In his view, it was only possible to reach sovereignty because all ethnicities had collaborated. After independence, his nationalist attitude prompted him to become active in the nationalist party PNI. Due to this commitment for PNI, he frequently travelled abroad; to prove his activism, he includes a photo of his stay in Cairo as a member of the PNI fraction in the autobiography. The years he spent in the Netherlands and the USA had a strong impact on his life. He mainly used his stay in the Netherlands for educational and political purposes: Di Negeri Belanda, saya berusaha untuk membaca buku-buku politik sebanyak mungkin. Di samping itu, saya juga ikut dalam persidangan para mahasiswa Indonesia yang tengah berusaha untuk memperjuangkan kemerdekaan bagi bangsanya. [‘In the Netherlands, I tried to read as many books about politics as possible. In addition, I also joined the sessions of the Indonesian students, who tried to fight for the freedom of their country.’] (Bing 1988, 15)

Furthermore, his education as a pharmacist in the Netherlands was important for him. He repeats several times in his autobiography that he finished his studies half a year faster than average. Impatient to get back to his wife in Indonesia, he points out his eagerness to learn, and back in Indonesia he established his own pharmacy in Bandung. In 1946, he became the chairman of Chung Hua Chung Hui (CHCH), a Chinese organization promoting trade, which, according to its statutes, also had the aim of joining in the struggle for Indonesian independence. His direct appeal to members of the Chinese ethnic group to help Indonesians to expand the trade sector after independence is reiterated at the end of his autobiography, when he advises young Chinese people to help Indonesian non-Chinese in this area. He also suggests that they should prevent further conflict between these groups. This advice can also be linked to a bitter personal experience on 10 May 1963, when Indonesian students destroyed Yap Tjwan Bing’s car and his bungalow. When recounting this event, he asserts that the students would not have demolished his property had they known that it was his. He argues that they would not have attacked a true patriot. However,

4.3 Indonesia 

 1013

the ‘I’ narrates that the attack shocked his wife in such a way that she persuaded her husband to settle in the USA. Another reason for moving to the USA is of a different nature: as their son has been suffering from poliomyelitis since he took a bath in a swimming pool in Singapore, Yap Tjwan Bing’s wife has been pushing him to seek medical advice in the USA. Finally, he gives in, suggesting that it is his responsibility to take care of his son. Although he spends the rest of his life in the USA and the Netherlands, the autobiographical self is constructed as a patriot having fought for the interests of Indonesia. The important message of the text is that being of Chinese descent does not interfere with patriotism. This loyalty to the Indonesian state might be one reason why the Solo provincial government called a street in Solo after him in 2008. Another example of an Indonesian nationalist of Chinese descent is The Liang Gie, who was born on 25 August 1932 in Yogyakarta. The Liang Gie, whose ancestors had come from the province Fujian, stresses in his autobiography that one of his obsessions was to become a diligent servant of the Indonesian state. Thus, when he managed to get a position in Jakarta, despite the fact that only a few Chinese-born Indonesians are occupied in the civil service, he considered himself fortunate. He even considered this one of the turning points of his life. Later, when he became more active in lecturing, he also aimed at serving the state and achieving top performance (Wieringa 2012, 148, 149). However, the lesson he learnt from the attacks against Chinese people in urban centers of Indonesia in 1998, where thousands of Chinese people were killed, were different from Yap Tjwan Bing’s in 1963. After this event, he looked for the roots of his origin, and he idealized everything associated with Chineseness. Finally, he finished his autobiography in Chinese language in 2001; one year later the Indonesian version entitled Riwayat hidup sendiri dari seorang ayah yang selalu beruntung [‘Curriculum Vitae of an ever-lucky father’] was published. According to him, writing his autobiography had been his “most satisfying personal achievement” (Wieringa 2012, 168, 120). Wieringa shows here that The Liang Gie always strove hard to be accepted as an Indonesian. The anti-Chinese riots in 1998 finally made him realize that this would never be the case. As a consequence, he abandoned his former patriotism for Indonesia and began idealizing an imagined Chinese home country. Finally, assuming a new identity is the way of challenging the former home country, now perceived as the foreign other. Such a reorientation is not unique; however, there is a tendency of ethnic Chinese people looking for their Chinese roots in Indonesia and beyond (Wieringa 2012, 168). Other autobiographical texts, for example, several prison narratives, also highlight the differentiation from the ‘foreign other’, represented by colonizers and later the Indonesian state.

1014 

 4 Asia

Prison Narratives During the revolutionary period, many authors approved of the violence exerted against the colonizers and perceived it as a heroic act. Writers, who opposed the regime and spent time in prison without trial, often experienced the state as cruel, repressive and inhumane. Several of them later wrote down their experiences as prison narratives. These started to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s when the Dutch colonial government began to take stronger action against anti-colonial resistance and imprisoned political opponents in remote areas in the archipelago (Watson 2006, 19). As part of their effort to subdue any nationalist activities, the Dutch colonial forces imprisoned influential public figures such as Muhammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, who later became leading figures of independent Indonesia. Both of them were prisoners in Boven-Digoel in Papua and later Banda Neira, Moluccas, and they were accused of having founded the new Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI). Sjahrir’s text, for example, was based on the letters he wrote to his Dutch wife when he was in prison. They were first published in a book entitled Indonezische Overpeinzingen [‘Indonesian Musings’], published by De Bezige Bij in 1945 in Amsterdam. The narrative contains a description of the above-mentioned prisons and Sjahrir’r thoughts on national and international politics. One example of a prison narrative dealing with the Japanese occupation (1942– 1945) is written by Mia Bustam, herself a painter, who was also married to an artist, Sudjojono. The first of the two volumes, published in 2006, is entitled Sudjojono dan aku [‘Sudjojono and me’] (2006) and deals with the time up to 1958. It concentrates on the last days of the Japanese occupation and gives an insight into how her life was like as the wife of a well-known artist in the post-war period. The second volume of her memoir, Dari Kamp ke Kamp [‘From Camp to Camp’] (2008), describes her experiences as a political prisoner during the New Order. The reason for her incarceration was her involvement with the Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (People’s Cultural Institute, Lekra), a cultural group associated with the Indonesian Communist Party. The most well-known prison narrative written by an Indonesian writer is Nyanyi sunyi seorang bisu (1995–1997) [The Mute’s Soliloquy (1999)]. In this text, analyzed in detail in Volume III of this handbook, Pramoedya Ananta Toer discusses his experiences of the notorious prison island Buru. Other texts focusing on the experiences of people in prison in 1965 published in the last decade were those of the political activist Raid (2001), author Setiawan (2003), physician Saroso (2002), government advisor Moestahal (2002), journalist Suparman (2006) and teacher Prayitno (2007) (Hearman 2009, 25). Sulami Djoyoprawiro wrote one of the few women’s prison narratives, entitled Perempuan, kebenaran dan penjara; Kisah nyata wanita dipenjara 20 tahun karena tuduhan makar dan subversi. [‘Women, truth and prison; A true story of a woman imprisoned for 20 years for alleged treason and subversion’] (1999). She was a Gerwani activist, the women’s organization associated with the Indonesian Communist Party. They were blamed for having danced naked and committed sexual acts with the generals and of cutting off the generals’ genitals. Such representation of Gerwani

4.3 Indonesia 

 1015

women was part of Suharto’s plan to create disorder by exploiting the deep anxieties of the people (Wieringa 1995, 2011). Sulami was a political prisoner under the New Order from 1966 to 1984, and she, similar to her friend Sudjinah, discussed experiences of torture and imprisonment in her autobiographical stories (Watson 2006, 82). Prison narratives are different from traditional memorializing texts because they do not narrate a life story but tell a particular experience out of the necessity to uncover its cruelty (Sobanet 2008, 18). Hearman, who has interviewed some political prisoners, asserts that writing prison narratives was a way for them to “to restore their voices and identities” (2009, 23). In this sense, it can be argued that they are “alternative narratives”, as Suryomenggolo terms those autobiographies that serve to set the record straight. According to him, they stand in contrast with texts that have primarily been written to defend the New Order (Suryomenggolo 2011, 222). That does not imply that such texts can be read as true portrayals of reality. Individual memory is an act of imagination and as such it contains fictional enrichments that are associated with autofiction. The term ‘autofiction’ is based on the presumption that each autobiography uses fictional elements (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013, 8). Some of the authors of prison narratives in Indonesia are testimony writers who have written their books to give an insight to their experiences in prison. By reworking these experiences into autofiction, they have found a way of explaining the cruelty they and fellow inmates have endured. Martin Aleida, who is also known for having included his experiences in prison in his fictional texts, is a suitable example here. This author was born under the name Nurlan on 31 December 1943 in Tanjung Balai, North Sumatra. From 1964−1966, he worked on ships in the Riau Archipelago, after 1966 he operated for a conveyance in Deli, North Sumatra. During the harassment of communists and communist sympathizers that followed the years after the 1965 coup, Martin Aleida was imprisoned. When he was released from prison, he started to work as a journalist; from 1971 to 1984 he worked for the magazine Tempo, he was a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Zaman Baru [‘New Era’], a literary magazine published by Lekra that was associated with communism in the early 1960s. Aleida published some short stories during the New Order (1966–1998) but he could not use his own name. He is said to have invented the pen name Martin Aleida to express his and his father’s admiration for Martin Luther King, and to include a local Tanjung Balai expression, ‘aleida’, an exclamation used to express astonishment (Hua 2005). In February 1970 he wrote a short story in the literary magazine Horison, entitled “Gray Night”. In this story, the protagonist is confronted with the fact that his fiancé and her whole family have been killed in the course of anti-communist violence, and his life design is in ruins because her father was an important PKI authority (Arnez 2002). On the other hand, the protagonist’s collocutor, a civil servant, regarded this man as his enemy, who should be murdered as quickly as possible. This story was one of the few that appeared in the immediate years after the events of 1965. Watson briefly comments on this short story, mentioning that, in the introduction to Leontin Dewangga [‘Dewang-

1016 

 4 Asia

ga’s Pendant’] (2011), originally published in 2003, Aleida expressed his fear that the New Order authorities might imprison him again. At that time, Harry Aveling translated one of his stories and discussed it in a forum in the Taman Ismail Marzuki cultural center in Jakarta in the mid-1970s (Watson 2006, 23). Much later, Aleida published Layang-layang tak lagi mengepak tinggi-tinggi […] [‘The swallows not longer fly high’] (1999). Hua (2005) categorizes this text as an autobiographical novelette, but I argue that it is an autofictional testimony. This relatively short text, narrated by a third-person narrator, does not make an autobiographical contract with the reader. The protagonist and autobiographical self, Saifullah, is not identical with the author. Instead, Aleida makes a testimonial contract with the reader when he promises him to do justice to the collective memory of all those who were tortured in prisons due to the 1965 events. Even so, Saifullah carries many common characteristics with the author. These show clearly in passages, where the third-person narrator reveals the consequences of stigmatization for Saifullah such as harassment and lack of prospects in private and public life. In the second chapter, Saifullah quits his job as a journalist with the PKI-newspaper Harian Rakyat because he fears that he will be imprisoned as a sympathizer of the communists. These concerns turn out to be justified because Saifullah soldiers soon arrest him and his friends. They take them to a formerly Catholic school in the road Budi Kemuliaan that has been remodeled into a concentration camp. The third-person narrator describes how Saifullah’s friend Putu Astagina – the author Putu Oka Sukanta in real life  –, is tortured in this concentration camp for having written poetry associated with communist thought. Saifullah does not experience violence but feels sorry for his friend who suffered from torture. Despite adverse conditions, Saifullah came through this time in prison relatively unscathed. In the penultimate chapter, when he is interrogated, the interview is carried out by a friendly sergeant. Only now Saifullah learns the reason he was imprisoned: in the pocket of his trousers soldiers had found a letter from his parents, their last will. Saifullah’s parents wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and, facing this dangerous journey, they took precautions, asking Saifullah’s sister to give the letter to her brother. This letter now becomes Saifullah’s entrance card to freedom because the sergeant allows him to answer the letter and comes to the conclusion that a devout Muslim cannot be a communist. After having been released from prison, though, Saifullah still feels as if he was incarcerated. People suspect him to be a spy, he becomes painfully aware of the fact that he cannot work for the daily paper Kompas because the government does not allow PKI-sympathizers to work in the mass media. He also fears that as a consequence of his internment he neither can reintegrate into his family nor into society anymore. Therefore, at first appearance, Saifullah’s loneliness at the end of the book can be explained with the fear of being rejected by the people, who are prejudiced against him. At second glance, though, this fear is used to illustrate the strategy of the Suharto regime to further discriminate the released prisoners and exercise effective control over them. Saifullah thinks that the strong hierarchical order and atmosphere

4.3 Indonesia 

 1017

of prevailing mistrust does not leave any space for him. Accordingly, he interprets the freely whirling swallows in the air as mockery. In contrast to him, they can move everywhere, without being abused, punished or hunted down. Saifullah cannot stand the presence of the swallows because they remind him of his own miserable situation: Aku senang saja bercanda dengan kalian. Tetapi tidak sekarang. Aku inginan kalian pergi jauhjauh. Kepak sayap kalian menyakitkan hatiku kini. Nikmatilah kebebasan kalian itu sedalamdalamnya. Hirup dari dasarnya yang paling dalam. Tetapi jangan dekatku. Pergilah jauh-jauh. [‘I really enjoy playing with you. But not now. I want you to fly far away. Your wing flaps are hurting me now. Enjoy your freedom as much as possible. Inhale it as deeply as possible. But not next to me. Fly far away’.] (Aleida 1999, 115)

Staying true to the testimonial contract with the reader, it can be assumed that the author lets his own thoughts and opinions speak through Saifullah. Bandel (2014) views Aleida’s works as part of the struggle against ongoing intentional misrepresentations of history. The latter argument is convincing because it is quite obvious that the author intends to take action against deliberate historical distortions. Among others, this can also be seen from the fact that Saifullah mentions scholars from Cornell in the text, according to who the officially disseminated version of the events, holding PKI responsible, is not true. So, Aleida’s narrative serves to give a voice to the individual on the micro level and to correct historical distortions on the macro level. The text’s function is more than that, namely, to present an alternative version of the events to middle-class readers, whose knowledge about 1965 was manipulated by the state, and to share common experiences with victims of 1965. Thus, the third-person narrator acts as a spokesman for many victims of the events of 1965 and intends to give voice to a collective ‘we’. In addition to such autofictional testimonies, there are a remarkably large number of autobiographical texts that have been written by religious figures. Considering the religiosity of many Indonesians the last part of the chapter raises the question how the self is framed in the context of the nation, religion and memory in autobiographies.

Constructions of Minangkabau Memories Religion plays a major role in the lives of most Indonesians, and, from 1990 onwards, the most popular self-writing is the religious biography (Klinken 2007, 201). So, it could be assumed that religious experience does feature prominently in autobiographies. Surprisingly, though, descriptions of religious experience are largely absent (Watson 2011, 112). Authors prefer to portray their lives as people of public interest and thus they emphasize their contribution to the country’s development. Other personal experiences, in particular emotions, are not a popular subject of discussion. There are some prominent Muslims, who have written their autobiographies, among others, authorities of the Muslim mass organizations Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muham-

1018 

 4 Asia

madiyah, who respectively claim a membership of thirty and twenty million people. A recent autobiography written from an NU background is Karir politik anak desa: otobiografi Tosari Widjaja [‘The career of a village child: the autobiography of Tosari Widjaja’] (2004). The author, born on 20 August 1940 in Probolinggo, East Java, is a central figure of the Islamic party PPP, he held high political offices, for example in the People’s Representative Council in East Java und the House of Representatives. Currently, he serves as the ambassador for the Indonesian government in Marocco. Some elites of Muhammadiyah, a reformist organization founded in 1912, have also written autobiographies. The most well-known is Kenang-kenangan hidup [‘Life Memories’] (1951), published by Hamka, one of the “most prolific authors on Islamic religious subjects” (Teeuw 1994, 69). Hamka was an ‘ulama’ [religious scholar] who founded Muhammadiyah in West Sumatra, and he was the only ‘ulama’ who has ever written down his experiences of the pilgrimage to Mecca (Chambert-Loir 2014, 134). In Indonesia his religious text Tasawuf Moderen [‘Modern Mysticism’] (1939) has received considerable attention. He also wrote a commentary of the Qur’an and some pieces of fictional narratives. Hamka’s ambivalent attitude towards the independence struggle and his father shapes his autobiography. Although he would have preferred to be more strongly associated with the struggle of freedom, it was the honor Hamka received under the Japanese that “built a wall blocking him from revolutionary glory” (Hadler 1998, 147). The autobiography testifies to his conflictive relationship with his father and his changing attitude towards local Minangkabau culture. This region that is strongly influenced by Islam has a matrilineal society, where the practice of ‘merantau’ [out-migration], away from the Minangkabau homeland during or after adolescence, is significant for young men. Over the last years the pattern of ‘merantau’ has been changing as not only young men travel to seek their fortune elsewhere, but also young women. Furthermore, as Blackwood’s fieldwork on Minangkabau women has revealed, especially their daughters try to get “the right to control their own households, rights that position husbands, not wives, as subordinate within the matrilineal relation” (Blackwood 1999, 52). At the time when Hamka published his text, however, neither this assertion in claiming women’s rights nor the practice of out-migration was common among Minangkabau women. Hamka’s autobiography raises the topic of gender roles especially about his father, commonly called ‘Haji Rasul’, who played a decisive but ambivalent role in his life. An Islamic preacher, who intended to purify Islam, he was both his role model and his competitor. Hamka condemned his father for marrying several women and getting divorced from Hamka’s mother. He regarded Minangkabau customs as another cause of his painful memories as marriage custom made it easy for his father to marry many women. In those passages in which the narrator asks the imagined reader, where to go, the autobiography reveals that he was unsure about his future (Hadler 1998, 142). There are different narrative agents of the texts, the first-person narrator, the neutral ‘he’, ‘our young man’ and ‘our brother’ or ‘our brother Hadji.’ These different narrators are used to express different stages of his life. The intimate ‘aku’ [I] is used for

4.3 Indonesia 

 1019

the part until his parents’ divorce and the abrupt change to the third-person ‘dia’ [he] constitutes a break in his life. Then, as he advances in his career, the imagined reader seems to determine and construct the choice of narrative agent, related to his role as a public figure. Hence, Chambert-Loir observes that the text is autobiographical in the beginning but soon turns into a biography, recounting a national figure’s life career (Chambert-Loir 2014, 667–673). By creating an ironical distance to his earlier autobiographical self he can share the readers’ amusement about young Hamka’s naivety: “Dan lagi sebelum mengembara, Bung Hadji kita agak sempit pahamnja. Tidak ada jang seindah adat Minangkabau! Pernah dia pidato di Kongres Muhammadijah Bukittinggi, memudji-mudji adat; jang tidak lekang dipanas, tidak lapuk dihudjan!” [“And furthermore before propagandizing, our Bung Hadji had a rather narrow understanding of things. There is nothing as beautiful as Minangkabau adat! Once he spoke before the Bukittinggi Muhammadijah Congress, praising adat; that which doesn’t crack in the heat, or rot in the rain!”] (Hamka 1951, 46–47 [1998, 133–134]). The autofictional narrative produces several Hamkas. They reflect the attitude of the older autobiographical self towards different phases in his life. Here the ambivalent nature of autofiction becomes clear that Genette nicely framed in the sentence “c’est moi et ce n’est pas moi” [“It is I and it is not I”] (1991, 84 [1993, 77]). The quotation portrays young Hamka as a naive man with romantic ideas about Minangkabau customs. In an imagined discourse with the reader and by means of the different elements of the self, presented by the narrative agents, Hamka is constructed. The narrative agents serve to focus critically on the disruptions in Hamka’s life. Finally, taking the decision to out-migrate to Jakarta he reconciles with the past in two ways. First, this decision means that he abandons his political aspirations and decides to live a life as a religious scholar. Second, after his father’s death prior to the end of the Japanese occupation, he follows in the footsteps of his father (Watson 2011, 119). Another compelling autobiographical text is Ahmad Syafii Maarif’s Titik-titik kisar di perjalananku: autobiografi Ahmad Syafii Maarif [‘Turning points of my journey: the autobiography of Ahmad Syafii Maarif’] (2006) that belongs to the recent Indonesian autobiographies. Similar to Hamka, Maarif is a religious scholar of Minangkabau origin, who has been considered a ‘guru bangsa’ [nation’s great teacher] by some. He served as the chairman of Muhammadiyah between 2000 and 2005. Maarif was born in Sumpur Kudus, a remote area in West Sumatra, on 31 May 1935. The seclusion of this place becomes clear, when the reader learns that electricity was only introduced there in 2003 (Maarif 2006, 80). At a later point of the autobiography, the first-person narrator, the intimate ‘aku’, recounts that this success can partly be attributed to his commitment as chairman of Muhammadiyah to further improve his remote home village. One possible way of reading this autobiography is a demonstration of God’s power that has been working through Maarif’s life. The account provides an example of how a poor orphan, who lost his mother, when he was only one and a half years old, progressed as an individual and served the country. The first-person narrator

1020 

 4 Asia

recounts that he was lucky to have grown up in the house of his aunt, the house of who was close to his father’s. Another blessing for him was that, later on, he was able to practice out-migration to different areas, not only within Indonesia but also in the USA, where he lived in Ohio and Chicago. He held true to the Minang belief that the experience of ‘merantau’ is important for a Minang to develop his spiritual, intellectual and economic potential (Maarif 2006, 54). At an early stage of his auto­ biography, the reader learns that the author’s Minangkabau origin and Islamic faith are two important factors for why he loves Indonesia (Maarif 2006, 14). Commenting on Minang customs, the first-person narrator points out that his father married several women, a parallel not only to Hamka’s father but many Minangkabau men. Maarif, though, decided to marry only one woman, Nurkhalifah, and the marriage took place on 5 February 1965. The first-person narrator ironically comments that, in contrast to his father, he had been at his wits’ end with but one wife (Maarif 2006, 160). He thought his relationship with his father to be better than Hamka’s, but his own behavior and religious convictions reveal that he did not agree with his father’s marriage practices. In his comments on the Qur’an, he comes to the conclusion that monogamy is and must be the dominant way of marriage in Islam. According to him, the door to polygamy has to be firmly closed, with the exception of utter emergencies (Maarif 2006, 209). It should be pointed out here, though, that he only adopted this view after returning from his year-long stay in Chicago, where he studied Islam under the well-known Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman. Maarif was deeply influenced by Fazlur Rahman as his teaching caused him to adopt a positive attitude towards interfaith relations and abandoned his former idea of transforming Indonesia into an Islamic state (Burhani 2012, 34). As the title of the book indicates, this autobiography is organized around turning points of Maarif’s life. Points of gyration are an important structuring element in many autobiographies that serve the construction of the self. They serve to give a sense to the protagonist’s life and to present himself to the reader in a self-fashioning way. Bruner aptly describes the constructive character of turning points: They [turning points] are prototype narrative episodes whose construction results in increasing the realism and drama of the Self. In that sense, the narrative construction, whenever it actually happened, is as important as what is reported to have actually happened in the turning point episode. Turning points, in a word, construct emblems of narrative clarity in the teller’s history of Self (Bruner 1994, 50).

The protagonist provides a sense to his life by means of self-construction with hindsight. As scholarly studies (Nünning 2012; Nünning and Sicks 2012) have shown, turning points function to explain critical events in the protagonist’s life. The narration of these incidences is often combined with a narrative of legitimation why the self has chosen a particular path. In addition to their constructive nature, points of gyration can serve as a narratological device to arouse readers’ expectations and increase tension (Nünning 2012, 47). Maarif refers to three turning points in his autobiography

4.3 Indonesia 

 1021

that are related to his self-esteem, his course of education, and his spiritual development. Somewhat surprisingly, a direct reference to the first and second point of gyration of Maarif’s life comes rather late, in the final part of the autobiography. With hindsight, the autobiographical self describes that the first incident that changed his life was the opportunity provided by the Islamic school Mu’allimin to give a public speech in front of the people of his ‘kampung’ [hamlet] and to debate with local authorities in the mosque (Maarif 2006, 356). This first step into the public sphere is the first indication of Maarif’s later success. The turning point is deliberately used to point out Maarif’s accomplishments, despite his restricted Islamic knowledge and his rather unfortunate starting point in life. The second turning point of his life occurs when he continues his studies at the Islamic school Mu’allimin Jogjakarta in Central Java. The reader does not receive much information on this point of gyration except that the protagonist’s horizon has broadened. Rather, the first-person narrator points to those aspects that have not changed, in particular his ‘fundamentalist instinct’. He indicates that the period he has spent at the University of Ohio also has not brought about a change of his mindset. Although he was more than forty years old at that stage, his goal to turn Indonesia into an Islamic state remained unchanged (Maarif 2006, 357). The ‘I’ describes the third turning point as follows: Di lingkungan kampus Universitas Chicago-lah aku mengalami kebangkitan spiritual dan intelektual yang baru dan sekaligus merupakan titik kisar yang ketiga. Ini adalah titik kisar dalam pemikiran keislaman dan keindonesiaanku. Peran Fazlur Rahman, dengan segala kritikku kepadanya, sungguh sangat besar. Strategi dan pendekatan yang digunakannya agar aku menimbang seluruh kekayaan khazanah Islam klasik dan modern dengan al-Qur’an barangkali telah membuatku mengalami titik kisar terakhir di perjalanan intelektualku. [‘In the environment of the University Chicago campus I experienced a new spiritual and intellectual awakening and, all of a sudden, the third turning point emerged. This was a point of gyration of my Islamic thought and my Indonesianness. The role of Fazlur Rahman, despite all my criticism of him, was indeed very significant. The strategy and approach he took for the purpose of making me deliberate over the rich wealth of classical and modern Islam with the Qur’an perhaps made me experience the last turning point of my intellectual journey.’] (Maarif 2006, 357–358)

At another point, he shows that this ‘point of gyration’ in fact was not a particular incident, but an ongoing process since 1979, in which Maarif’s change of thinking with respect to Islam was crucial. At this point, according to the construction of the self in this autobiography, Maarif had abandoned extremist views when he became chairman of Muhammadiyah. He explicitly leaves it for the ‘pengamat’ [observer] to answer the question if this turning point is in accord with the right path in the sense of Islam. The protagonist repeated his argument that his concept of Indonesianness had merged with Islam a long time ago and puts forward his hope that the reader will accept his life account as an example of an authentic Islamic way of life. He has closed his chapter as an extremist as indicated on the last pages of the autobiography. Here he appeals to extremists, who are potential readers of his book, not to use radicalism to reach their aims. Interestingly, though, he does not focus on differences of ideas

1022 

 4 Asia

within Islamic discourse here but advances the practical argument that Islamists run a high risk of failing (Maarif 2006, 359). It becomes clear that extremists are among his intended readership, and his life account serves as a didactic means to get them back on the straight and narrow. The aspiration of authors to educate their readers is a well-known phenomenon in Indonesian literature, and it is, therefore, not surprising that many autobiographies carry didactic features. Despite the great variety of autobiographies, these texts have been driven by an interest in partly interrelated themes and relationships. Some of these are the role between self and nation, authorship and work, the relationships of the self between privacy and the public sphere, and the position of the narrator as individual, part of a local community and wider society. There is a tendency to construct the self in relation to national history, in an attempt to reveal how the autobiographical self has defined Indonesianness and contributed to the nation. Autobiographies by political as well as religious authorities are popular among readers in Indonesia, but there is also a demand in texts that can be read as a guide how to become a successful entrepreneur. Another common feature of autobiographies in Indonesia is a general reluctance to discuss emotions; Maier (1991) has pointed out that most Indonesian autobiographical texts do lack introspection. A general reluctance to portray the inner life, related to local customs and ideas, was obvious in the majority of the texts presented in this chapter; however, Maarif’s autobiography can be seen as an exception. This narrative highlights the first-person narrator’s concerns, in particular, when Maarif decides to study in Chicago at a rather late stage in his life. The ‘I’ clearly expresses his fear that his family will not be able to follow him if he does not obtain best grades. There also seems to be a tendency that the more intimate ‘aku’ is preferred in narratives that openly address emotions. Autobiographies in Indonesia cannot be understood without paying attention to the literary conventions of particular texts and sub-genres. Another significant element to look at is the dynamics and constraints of production of the texts. The development of printing, which has been influenced by censorship for decades, is an important element in this regard. Many Indonesian autobiographies that reflected on the events of 1965, for instance, were published after the fall of President Suharto, when censorship had been abolished. Looking back on the past, some authors such as Aleida have written autofictional testimonies that give an insight into life in prison and provide the possibility of ‘speaking about the unspeakable’. These narratives do make a testimonial contract with the reader; the narrator attempts to faithfully reflect personal views of historic events, and the reader gets a personal, yet ‘true’ account of these incidents. In several cases, these personal constructions of memory can also be read as instruments of resistance against official accounts of history.

4.3 Indonesia 

 1023

Works Cited Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir. Hikayat Abdullah [‘Abdullah’ Life Story’]. S.I.: Koloniale Regering Strait Settlement, 1887. Aleida, Martin. “Malam Kelabu” [‘Dark Night’]. Horison (1970): 36–40. Aleida, Martin. Layang-layang itu tak lagi mengepak tinggi-tinggi [‘The swallows no longer fly high’]. Jakarta: Emansipasi, 1999. Aleida, Martin. Leontin Dewangga [‘Dewangga’s Pendant’]. Jakarta: Kompas, 2003. Arnez, Monika. Politische Gewalt und Macht in indonesischer Literatur von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart. Diss. U Köln, 2002. http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/759/ (11 July 2018). Bandel, Katrin. “Martin Aleida dan sejarah” [‘Martin Aleida and history‘]. http://boemipoetra. wordpress.com/2014/01/08/martin-aleida-dan-sejarah/ (7 April 2014). Bing, Yap Tjwan. Meretas jalan kemerdekaan: Otobiografi seorang pejuang kemerdekaan ­[‘Pioneering Independence: The Autobiography of an Independence Fighter’]. Gramedia: Jakarta, 1988. Blackwood, Evelyn. “Big houses and small houses: Doing matriliny in West Sumatra.” Ethnos 61.1 (1999): 32–56. Bruner, Jerome. “The ‘remembered Self’.” The remembering Self. Construction and accuracy in the Self-narrative. Ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 41–54. Burhani, Ahmad Najib. “Transmission of Islamic Reform from the United States to Indonesia.” Indonesia and the Malay World 41.119 (2012): 29–47. Bustam, Mia. Sudjojono dan aku [‘Sudjojono and me’]. Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2006. Bustam, Mia. Dari kamp ke kamp: cerita seorang perempuan [‘From camp to camp: the story of a woman’]. Jakarta: Buku Kita, 2008. Chambert-Loir, Henri. “Pengantar.” Hidup tanpa ijazah; yang terekam dalam kenangan Otobiografi Ajip Rosidi [‘Foreword.’ ‘Living without a diploma. What is recorded in memory. The autobiography of Ajip Rosidi’]. Jakarta: Dunia Pustaka Jaya, 2008. x–xi. Chambert-Loir, Henri. Naik Haji di Masa Silam. Kisah-kisah orang Indonesia naik haji 1482–1964 [‘Going on the pilgrimage to Mecca in the past. Stories of Indonesians going on the pilgrimage to Mecca 1482–1964’]. Vol. I. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, 2013. Chambert-Loir, Henri. Naik Haji di Masa Silam. Kisah-kisah orang Indonesia naik haji 1482–1964 [‘Stories of Indonesians going on the pilgrimage to Mecca 1482–1964’]. Vol. II. Jakarta: ­Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, 2013. Dini, NH. Argentuil. Hidup Memisahkan Diri [‘Argentuil. Life in Separation’]. Jakarta: Akapi, 2008. Djoyoadisuryo, Ahmed Subardjo. Kesadaran Nasional: otobiografi Ahmed Subardjo Djoyoadisuryo [‘National Awareness: the autobiography of Ahmed Subardjo Djoyoadisuryo’]. Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1978. Djoyoprawiro, Sulami. Perempuan, kebenaran dan penjara [‘Women, the truth, and prison; A true story of a woman imprisoned for 20 years for alleged treason and subversion’]. Jakarta: Penerbit Cipta Lestari, 1999. Gallop, Annabel Teh. “Early Malay Printing; an Introduction to the British Library Collections.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 63.1 (1990): 85–124. Genette, Gérard. Fiction et diction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991 [Fiction and Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993]. Gitosarjono, Sukamdani Sahid. Wirausaha mengabdi pembangunan: otobiografi [‘An entrepreneur serving development: an autobiography’]. Jakarta: Haji Masagung, 1993. Gitosarjono, Sukamdani Sahid. Memoar Sukamdani S.G. – otobiografi II (1993–2001): kisah kegiatan bisnis, pendidikan, sosial-budaya, dan harapan saya [‘The memoir of Sukamdi S.G.:

1024 

 4 Asia

autobiography II (1993–2001): a story of economic, educational, socio-cultural activities, and my hopes’]. Jakarta: Grasindo, 2001. Hadler, Jeffrey. “Home, Fatherhood, Succession: Three Generations of Amrullahs in Twentieth-Century Indonesia.” Indonesia 65 (1998): 122–154. Hamka. Kenang-kenangan hidup [‘Life Memories’]. Jakarta: Gapura, 1951. Hamka. Tasauf Moderen [‘Modern Mysticism’] (1939). Singapore: Pustaka Nasional Pte. Ltd, 1st ed. 1997. Hearman, Vanessa. “The uses of memoirs and oral history work in researching the 1965–1966 political violence in Indonesia.” International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 5.2 (2009): 21–42. Hill, David T. “Ethics and Institutions in Biographical Writing on Indonesian Subjects.” Life Writing 4.2 (2007): 215–229. Hua, Lie. “Martin Aledia: Writing as testimony on joys and grief.” http://www.thejakartapost.com/ news/2005/12/04/martin-aledia-writing-testimony-joys-and-grief.html (4 March 2014). Kartini, Raden A. Door Duisternis tot Licht: Gedachten over en voor het Javaansche volk van Raden Adjeng Kartini. Ed. J.H. Abendanon. The Hague: Luctor et Imago, 2nd ed. 1912. Klinken, Gerry van. “The Combative ‘I’: State Domination and Indonesian Self-writing.” Life Writing 4.2 (2007): 197–214. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte Autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975 [“The autobiographical Contract.” French Literary Theory Today: A Reader. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Trans. R. Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 192–222]. Maarif, Ahmad Syafii. Titik-titik kisar di perjalananku: autobiografi Ahmad Syafii Maarif [‘Turning points of my journey: the autobiography of Ahmad Syafii Maarif’]. Bandung: Mizan, 2006. Naveau, Etienne. “Les otobiografi indonésiennes à travers leurs illustrations.” Archipel 67 (2004): 1129–1172. Nünning, Ansgar. “‘With the Benefit of Hindsight’. Features and Functions of Turning Points as a Narratological Concept and as a Way of Self-Making.” Turning Points. Concepts and Narratives of Change in Literature and other Media. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Kai Marcel Sicks. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2012. 31–58. Nünning, Ansgar, and Kai Marcel Sicks. Turning Points. Concepts and Narratives of Change in Literature and Other Media. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2012. Pospos, P. Aku dan Toba: Tjatatan dari Masa Kanak-Kanak [‘Me and Toba: Notes from Childhood Times’]. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1950. Putten, Jan van der. “Printing in Riau. Two Steps towards Modernity.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 154.4 (1997): 717–736. Radjab, Muhamad. Semasa ketjil dikampung, 1913–1928: autobiografi seorang anak Minangkabau [‘Childhood in a village, 1913–1928: the autobiography of a Minangkabau’]. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1950. Reid, Anthony. “On the Importance of Autobiography.” Indonesia 13 (1972): 1–3. Rodgers, Susan. Telling Lives, Telling History: Autobiography and Historical Imagination in Modern Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Roosa, John. “Suharto (June 8, 1921–January 27, 2008).” Indonesia 38 (2008): 137–143. Rosidi, Ajip. Hidup tanpa ijazah. Yang terekam dalam kenangan. Otobiografi Ajip Rosidi [‘Living without a diploma. What is recorded in memory. The autobiography of Ajip Rosidi’]. Jakarta: Pustaka Jaya, 2008. Skinner, Cyrill. “Transitional Malay literature: Part 1. Ahmad Rijaluddin and Munshi Abdullah.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 134.4 (1978): 466–487. Sobanet, Andrew. Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-century French Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

4.3 Indonesia 

 1025

Suryomenggolo, Jafar. “Defining Indonesia from the margins: working class autobiography as part of the nation’s collective memory.” Indonesia and the Malay world 39.114 (2011): 221–243. Sweeney, Amin. “Abdullah Bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi: a Man of Bananas and Thorns.” Indonesia and the Malay World 34.100 (2006): 223–245. Tol, Roger. “Master scribes: Husin bin Ismail, Abdullah bin Abdulkadir Munsyi, their handwriting and the Hikayat Abdullah.” Archipel 61 (2001): 115–138. Toer, Pramoedya Ananta. Nyanyi sunyi seorang bisu: catatan-catatan dari Pulau Buru [‘Silent song of a mute: Notes from Buru Island’]. Jakarta: Lentera, 1995. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Einleitung: Was ist Auto(r)fiktion?” Auto(r)fiktion. Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. 7–22. Watson, C.W. “Indonesia and the Malay World.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Routledge, 2001. 468–469. Watson, C.W. Of Self and Injustice. Autobiography and Repression in Modern Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2006. Watson, C.W. Of Self and Nation. Autobiography and the Representation of Modern Indonesia (2000). Jakarta/Kuala Lumpur: Equinox, 2nd ed. 2011. Widjaja, Tosari. Karir politik anak desa: otobiografi Tosari Widjaja [‘The career of a village child: the autobiography of Tosari Widjaja’]. Jakarta: Forum Indonesia Satu, 2004. Wieringa, Edwin. “Wie chinesisch ist es? Zur Identitätskonstruktion in der Selbstdarstellung ‘Autobiographie eines immer vom Glück begünstigten Vaters’ des sino-indonesischen Autors The Liang Gie.” Reisen im Zwischenraum. Zur Interkulturalität von Kulturwissenschaft. Festschrift für Helmolt Vittinghoff zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Franziska Ehmcke and Martin Müller. Würzburg: Ergon, 2012. 135–169. Wieringa, Saskia, ed. Subversive Women: Historical Experiences of Gender and Resistance. London/New Jersey: Zed Books, 1995. Wieringa, Saskia. “Sexual slander and the 1965/66 Mass Killings in Indonesia: Political and Methodological Considerations.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 41.4 (2011): 544–565. doi: 10.1080/00472336.2011.610613

Further Reading Ali-Fauzi, Ihsan. “On being a Marxist Muslim: reading Hasan Raid’s autobiography.” Studia Islamika 91 (2002): 107–138. Hadley, Jeffrey. “Home, fatherhood, succession: three generations of amrullahs in twentieth-century Indonesia.” Indonesia 65 (1998): 122–154. Maier, Henk. “Politieke autobiografieen in het Indonesisch.” Ik is anders: Autobiografie in verschillende culturen. Ed. M. Schipper and P. Schmitz. Baarn: Ambo, 1991. 244–256. Munsyi, Abdullah. The Hikayat Abdullah. Trans. A. H. Hill. Kuala Lumpur/New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Rodgers, Susan. Telling Lives, Telling History: Autobiography and Historical Imagination in Modern Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Smith, Margaret K. From prison camp to caviar: an autobiography from Java to Iran. Greenwich: Peacock Press, 1988. Sukma, Rizal. Indonesia and China: the politics of a troubled relationship. London: Routledge, 1999. Sweeney, Amin. “Some Observations on the Nature of Malay Autobiography.” Indonesia Circle 51.2 (1990): 1–36. Toer, Pramoedya Ananta. The mute’s soliloquy: a memoir. New York: Penguin, 1999. Watson, C.W. “The study of Indonesian and Malay autobiography.” Indonesia Circle 49 (1989): 3–18.

4.4 China

Reinhard Emmerich

Sources, and the State of the Field Research on Chinese autobiography in the West began with Georg Misch (1878–1965) at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1909, he published translations and brief interpretations of the wills of the Guangxu 光緒 Emperor and that of his regent, Cixi 慈禧 (1835–1908), who had the young ruler poisoned out of fear of losing her power. Yet this early work, while an outstanding example of Misch’s wide-ranging interests, did not have any influence on the research that came later. The first important collection of Chinese autobiography, and one that remains important today, was published in 1936 under the general title Lidai zixuzhuan wenchao 歷代自敍傳文鈔 [‘Anthology of Autobiography Throughout the Ages’]. In this work, Guo Dengfeng 郭登峯 compiles 141 texts by 114 authors from Han times until the Republican period. The short forword categorizes the component works according to the imprecise criterium of 性質 [‘character’]. Guo divides first between zixuzhuan 自敍傳 [‘proper autobiography’] and zhunzi xuzhuan 準自敍傳 [‘quasi-auto­ biography’], and then between those texts that summarize an entire life and those that limit themselves to specific episodes in or aspects of the writer’s life (Guo 1936, 2). The anthology itself classifies the works into different autobiographical xingshi 形式 [‘forms’], which have been described by Frühauf (1987, 52–53) and Larson (1991, 171n31). These include, for instance, such categories as danpian duli de zixu 單篇獨立 的自序 [“Independent, separate, self-written prefaces”], zizuo muzhiming 自作墓誌銘 [“Self-composed epitaphs”], and zizhuang zisong yu zizan 自狀自訟與自贊 [“Self-narrated appeals, disputes, and eulogies”] (Guo 1936, 1, 6, 11 [Larson 1991, 171n31]). Guo Dengfeng’s anthology avoids any engagement with the content of the auto­ biographical works it contains, and the comparative study of Chinese autobiography he announces in the ‘Foreword’ (Guo 1936, 6) has never been realized. It is possible that the short Zhuanji xue 傳記學 [‘Study of Biographical Literature’] that Wang Yuan 王元 (or Wang Mingyuan 王名元) published in 1948 drew from Guo’s unpublished work (Frühauf 1987, 56n272). Like Guo Dengfeng before him, Wang Yuan divided true autobiography from quasi-autobiography on the basis of literary form (Frühauf 1987, 61 and 61n306), further dividing both into sub-categories (Frühauf 1987, 61–64). Wang moreover named eighteen “forms of literary self-portrayal”, including “zixu 自敍 Selbstschilderung” [‘self-description’], “zizan 自讚 Selbstpreisung” [‘self-praise’], and “zisong 自訟 Selbst­verteidigung” [‘self-vindication’] (listed in Frühauf 1987, 65–66). There is no specific term for ‘autobiography’ there. Wang Yuan names a few deeply ingrained cultural values as hindrances to the development of Chinese autobiography. He says specifihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-104

4.4 China 

 1027

cally that some writers presented their own autobiographies as biographies because they were unwilling to display any individuality in front of others, particularly in front of their family members (Frühauf 1987, 74). Wang Yuan finally names what he believes to be the characteristics of a successful autobiography: it should be true to the facts, dedicated to rectitude, and well-written, and it should shed light not only upon its subject but also upon his times (Frühauf 1987, 75–76). Whereas Wang Yuan was satisfied with eighteen types of autobiography, Du Lianzhe 杜聯喆 (born in 1904) accentuated the great variety of forms. In Mingren zizhuan wenchao 明人自傳文鈔 [‘Anthology of Ming Autobiography’] (1977), Du names nearly ninety categories (Frühauf 1987, 79–83). These include “zichao 自嘲 Selbstverspottung” [‘self-mockery’], “zidiaowen 自弔文 Eigene Trauerrede” [‘self-eulogy’], “zishouwen 自壽文 Eigener Geburtstagstext” [‘a birthday greeting to oneself’], and “zishu xiaoxiangzan 自書小像贊 Selbst geschriebene kleine Bildwidmung” [‘a self-composed dedication on an image’]. Du Lianzhe recalls Wang Yuan when he demands autobiographical correctness and assigns each text to one of six categories on the basis of its tone: zhencheng 真誠 [‘sincere’] or xuwei 虛僞 [‘vain’], kuazhang 誇 張 [‘exaggerated’] or qianxu 謙虛 [‘modest’] and xianyang 顯揚 [‘adulatory’] or zhegai 遮蓋 [‘concealing’] (Frühauf 1987, 83). Wolfgang Bauer (1930–1997) published his magnum opus, Das Antlitz Chinas [‘The Face of China’] in 1990, after nearly thirty years of work. Its nine hundred dense pages examine “[d]ie Autobiographische Selbstdarstellung in der chinesischen Literatur von ihren Anfängen bis heute” [‘the autobiographic self-portrayal in Chinese literature from the earliest times to the present’] – as suggested by the book’s subtitle. The book was praised as “the most inclusive and comprehensive” study of its topic, and Bauer himself won praise for his “broad generalizations and stimulating theses” (Schirokauer 1993, 194, 195). Bauer’s generalizations and suppositions are in fact quite widereaching: 1) The idea that the soul is trapped in the human body, common in the West, is known in China only after the arrival of Buddhism, and even then remained somewhat foreign (Bauer 1990, 15). In the West this idea supposedly led to the question “Was bin ich?” [‘What am I?’] Instead of this, however, Bauer says that in China there was a fundamentally historical perspective, which asked instead, “Was soll ich?” [‘What should I do?’] (Bauer 1990, 15). 2) He furthermore suggests that feelings of “Melancholie und Resignation” [‘melancholy and resignation’] are common, if not universal, characteristics of Chinese self-portrayal (Bauer 1990, 16). Bauer argues that this arises from social and family pressure on Chinese people to conform, which Chinese people have suffered for all time (Bauer 1990, 16–17). Bauer deems this a result of what he sees as an equally timeless population pressure in China (Bauer 1964, 25–26). 3) Bauer argues for a differentiation between ‘autobiography’ and ‘self-portrayal’ or ‘self-description’. Autobiography places its weight on development and has as its medium prose, and presents innumerable individual images. Self-portrayal or self-de-

1028 

 4 Asia

scription, in contrast, presents its subject in an ahistorical fashion, as an organic whole, and in the medium of lyric poetry (Bauer 1990, 18–19, 22). 4) In general, he argues, the reader must expect the problem of authorial silence in any example of Chinese autobiographical writing, a silence that may take the form of assuming a third-person voice as disguise (Bauer 1990, 19). Such a disguise may take on an idealized form, or it might simply be concealing the autobiographical character of the writing. 5) Bauer acknowledges that a great deal is missing due to the limitations of the Chinese writing system. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, he asserts, autobiography developed only out of the relative few persons who knew how to write. While Bauer acknowledges that no few autobiographical texts were written by authors from impoverished backgrounds, he proposes that such authors provided only a partial view into their social groups of their origins, because they had already begun learning the Chinese writing system. In the end, though, Bauer’s argument remains a bit abstruse. As for him, the Chinese script can hardly be used for anything other than writing down Confucian ideas. He believes that the writing system was connected intrinsically to a particular, Confucian mode of thinking; hence learning to write usually entailed adopting that mode (Bauer 1990, 21). 6) Bauer’s diachronic analysis can be summarized into three main periods: The basic form of autobiography in China developed in the time between the fifth and second centuries BCE. Despite some changes over the following two and a half thousand years, a certain continuity obtains, and for Bauer the most interesting characteristic of autobiographical writing in China comes in “ihrer eigentümlichen Geschlossenheit hinweg über Zeit und Raum” [‘its singular closedness over time and space’] (Bauer 1990, 23). “Vor allem im 16. Jh. nahm die Zahl der Autobiographien und Selbstdarstellungen geradezu explosionsartig zu […]” [‘The number of autobiographies and self-portrayals exploded above all in the 16th century’] (Bauer 1990, 22). A still larger wave came in the 1920s, after the May Fourth Movement and associated cultural reforms brought numerous Western autobiographies to China (Bauer 1990, 24). At another place, Bauer claims that in contemporary China, beginning in 1949, a ‘reevalutation of all values’ especially affected autobiography (Bauer 1990, 24). This is a widely shared view, and one that was itself repudiated following the Cultural Revolution (Hsu 1979). In the same year that Das Antlitz Chinas [‘The Face of China’] appeared, Wu Pei-yi (1927–2009) published his own pioneering study of Chinese autobiography (Wu 1990). These two unconnected works could hardly be more dissimilar. The difference is immediately apparent: Wu Pei-yi’s elegantly written exploration weighs in under three hundred pages long – in other words, less than half the size of Bauer’s weighty tome. Wu Pei-yi’s study moreover treats a much shorter period of Chinese history than Bauer’s does. Looking back on his twenty years of scholarly work, Wu Pei-yi names two difficulties that had persistently afflicted him. Despite Guo Dengfeng’s (1936) already

4.4 China 

 1029

mentioned anthology, he says it was very difficult “to assemble a collection of useful material,” and harder still “to make sense of the unwieldy mass of diverse and obscure writings (Wu 1990, ix). He names as the primary reason for this “the lack of a Chinese critical tradition with regard to autobiography,” for, he writes, “autobiography itself may not be, but autobiography as an academic discipline decidedly is, a unique product of the modern West” (Wu 1990, ix). Bauer proposed a somewhat inconsistent distinction between ‘autobiography’ and ‘self-portrayal’. Wang Yuan and Du Lianzhe sought to separate ‘quasi-autobiography’ from ‘autobiography’ proper. Despite their extensive research among the numerous subgenres of autobiography, these scholars were unable to establish a workable, overarching definition of autobiography. Wu Pei-yi treated the problem of defining ‘autobiography’ in a pragmatic fashion: “By accepting any biography written by the subject himself as autobiography the reader can bypass the problem of definition” (Wu 1990, x). Wu Pei-yi’s views on the origins and history of autobiography in China contrast sharply with Bauer’s. a) For Wu, autobiography in China arose out of biography and remained essentially a part of it until the thirteenth century. It was only at the end of that century, when the “sober and mannerly” Confucians were infused with a “spiritual fervor” and the desire to communicate their individual experiences, that their autobiographies began to seek new forms (Wu 1990, xi). b) The end of the seventeenth century – specifically the year 1680 – marked for Wu another break in the history of autobiography. The earlier autobiographies generally needed to maintain a degree of believability and, as Wu (1990, xi) writes, “they seldom stray from plausibility even when they report their spiritual ecstasies.” But a few biographies appear in the seventeenth century that show a fascination for the fantastic and the occult – i.  e. less strictly plausible elements. c) Nearly all the autobiographies that Wu Pei-yi discusses in the main part of his book were written between 1565 and 1680. For Wu Pei-yi, this was the golden age of autobiography in China. For him, it was also the period in which both East and West, despite their differences, would be closer than never before and ever since. In both places, he argues, it was then that ideas concerning moral scrupulousness about sin and forgiveness emerged. d) It is a remarkable fact that most Western autobiography comes from a time when autobiography in China had already passed its zenith. Wu Pei-yi sees in this a dilemma: “The problem is, then, how one should apply the findings of the discipline, which mainly concerns Western autobiographies written after 1700, to a collection of Chinese works written before that date” (Wu 1990, ix–x). Wu’s (1990, x) response to this problem of whether and to what degree the definitions and arguments of Western researchers should delineate his research is down-to-earth: “My approach, then, is eclectic.” It draws the reader’s attention when Wu Pei-yi opens his discussion with the assertion that, “[t]he single most important fact about Chinese autobiography is its close and long association with Chinese biography. […] Chinese autobiography […] imitated Chinese biography almost slavishly” (Wu 1990, 3). And yet, biography in

1030 

 4 Asia

China, which thus gave form to autobiography, itself served historiography. Indeed, the word ‘biography’ [zhuan] had the basic meaning of ‘to pass along’ or ‘something transmitted’ to the afterlife. “Consequently”, continues Wu Pei-yi, “biography in China was not primarily a ‘representation of a life,’ as it was in ancient Greece, but mainly a way of transmitting to posterity certain aspects of a life” (Wu 1990, 4). This had wide-reaching consequences for the content and tone of Chinese autobiography. In particular, Chinese autobiography shared biography’s aversion to the usage of personal pronouns and thereby developed an “impersonality of tone” and a “suppression of individual voice” (Wu 1990, 6). In terms of content, both biographer and autobiographer were equally required to adhere to the standards of objectivity that obtained in historiography. Personal expression remained the province of poetry (Wu 1990, 6). Finally, a word about quantity: It is difficult to ascertain with any certainty the relationship between the quantity of texts transmitted to us and those that existed in the past. Wu Pei-yi believes, on the basis of some good evidence (such as the titles of no-longer-extant works), that many works belonging to the genre of authorial self account were lost or silently converted into biographies. Yet he does not attempt a precise quantification (Wu 1990, 56–58). Without considering the number of autobiographical genres noted in earlier studies and, unfortunately, on the basis of limited evidence, Wendy Larson (1991) makes three assertions from a semiotic perspective. First, she argues “premodern autobiographies” in China can be divided into two ideal types according to the type of references used to define the self of the author. [...] At the one end of the continuum were the circumstantial texts, in which the context of referentiality was the socio-material world of kinship, ancestry, ‘real’ time and place, proper names, and official position. At the other end were the impressionistic autobiographies, which suppressed reference to kinship, ‘real’ time and place, proper name, and official position and substituted reference to aspects of the life of a detached literatus (Larson 1991, 3).

As prototype of the circumstantial autobiography, Larson offers that of Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–ca. 86 BCE), and Tao Qian’s 陶潛 (365–427 CE) Wuliu xiansheng zhuan 五 柳先生傳 [‘Biography of the Master Five Willows’] as the exemplary impressionistic autobiography (Larson 1991, 13–17). Larson secondly sees the circumstantial autobiography as socially engaged, while the impressionistic autobiography is, for her, a product of reclusion (Larson 1991, 12). She also connects impressionistic autobiography to an essentially conservative point of view: “[W]ithin the small number of texts I studied impressionistic texts were a better indicator of conservativism than circumstantial texts, which could signify either conservativism or progressivism” (Larson 1991, 5). Finally, though without giving precise evidence, Larson dates the end of the “premodern” autobiography to the nineteenth century. She also sees the contrast between impressionistic and circumstantial approaches in more recent texts: “When I investigated late Qing autobi-

4.4 China 

 1031

ographies, I found the same continuum and poles of referentiality that existed in the premodern texts” (Larson 1991, 5).

“Self-Written Biographies” versus “Authorial Self-Accounts” In order to get a handle on the majority of Chinese autobiographies, as various as they are, Wu Pei-yi draws an important essential distinction between “self-written biographies” and “authorial self-accounts” (Wu 1990, 15, 42).

Self-written Biographies Accepting Wu’s (Wu 1990, 15) basic definition of this kind of autobiography as “a biography written by the subject himself”, his assertion, that the poet Tao Qian’s Wuliu xiansheng zhuan [“Biography of Master Five Willows”] was the first composition of this type, can also be followed. In it, Tao Qian stays close to his own identity in portraying himself as Master Five Willows. Speaking of himself in the third person allows him to get beyond the limitations of the autobiographical form. At the same time, however, Wu Pei-yi argues that Tao Qian prevented himself from achieving his goal of portraying the development of an exemplary creativity because he slavishly followed the form of historiographical biography: “In summary we might say that T’ao Ch’ien as well as his followers paid a heavy price for disguising autobiography as biography, for adopting for the self a guise too narrowly designed. What they achieved is not a portrayal but a pose; they conceal more of themselves than they reveal” (Wu 1990, 19). There is a subsection of “self-written biographies” that Wu Pei-yi terms “self-written necrologies” (Wu 1990, 24). The written word has long been a means by which to commemorate the dead in China. Ever since antiquity those commemorations have taken the form of short biographies, often accompanied by verse eulogies. These were inscribed on tablets of wood or stone and placed in front of their subjects’ graves or buried nearby. Other memorial texts were placed in or on top of the coffin. The necrology in China takes various forms, all of which share a tendency toward embellishment and adulation. This, perhaps combined with a fear of criticism or just insufficient appreciation, caused no few authors, beginning in the eleventh century, to write their own necrologies and to forbid the composition of obituaries by others. These self-written obituaries can be very dry: Cheng Xiang 程珦 (1006–1090) in his obituary limited himself to listing the official positions he and his forefathers held; naming the descendents he was aware of, to three generations; and to forbidding any further necrology on the grounds that he had not achieved anything important (Wu 1990, 25).

1032 

 4 Asia

The first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (1328–1398, r. 1368–1398), wrote a eulogy of himself, in which he relates his rise from the humblest of origins to the founding of a dynasty. He was averse to elevated and mighty men, and opened his eulogy by explicitly stating that he desired no posthumous flattery. Zhu Yuanzhang wrote this obituary at age fifty, well before his death, when he looked in the mirror and perceived his own infirmity (Wu 1990, 25–26). In other self-necrologies one similarly perceives the fear of improper immortalization. Still others express the fear of being forgotten. For instance, the collector Yang Xunji 楊循吉 (1458–1546) wrote, “[a]fraid that once I disappear like the morning dew there may be none to record my life, I have written this notice to be inscribed on the tombstone” (qtd. in Wu 1990, 28). The third sub-type of “self-written biographies” is what Wu Pei-yi called the “annalistic autobiography” [zixu nianpu 自序年譜] (Wu 1990, 32), a kind of tabular curriculum vitae that arranges the literary creations of its subject into chronological order. Luise Stoll (2012, 20) names Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846) as the originator of this approach. Wu Pei-yi credits it to the much later Wen Tianxiang 文天祥 (1236–1283), who was executed by the Mongols and in his autobiography preserved his memory as a martyr for his dynasty. The high point of annalistic autobiography came only in the first half of the seventeenth century (Wu 1990, 32–34).

Authorial Self-accounts “Authorial self-accounts” [zixu 自敘, zixu 自序, ziji 自紀] are Wu Pei-yi’s second main group. In this instance also Wu proposes two sub-types, dividing the texts according to the contexts from which they arose: Some are “authorial self-accounts” in the basic sense, which were “organic parts of books”, while others are “authorial self-accounts independent of books” (Wu 1990, 49). In the former type, authors explain and may also present “a brief account of their lives” within larger works (Wu 1990, 42). The originator of this type is Sima Qian. Guo Dengfeng (1936) names him as the first person in China to write an autobiography. Some other early writers were nearly as important in the history of autobiography. The first of these is Wang Chong 王充 (27–97?), who radiated a sublime “Gefühl der Einzigartigkeit” [‘feeling of individuality’] (Bauer 1990, 112, 112–117). Wu Pei-yi sees Wang as someone able to lay aside the fetters of historiography, and who indulged in “a perverse pleasure in denigrating his ancestors”; Wu also sees Wang as laying aside the fetters of historiography (Wu 1990, 44, 45; Wells 2003, 80–82). A third important authorial self-account comes in an afterword by Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226), the emperor of a short-lived dynasty during the early medieval period. In writing of his public and private lives, Cao Pi displayed a delight in detail and embellishment that was unexampled in the Chinese tradition and which none would match for centuries. He was praised also for having combined his text – “almost as an after-

4.4 China 

 1033

thought” – into the work before him (Wells 2003, 84; Bauer 1990, 134–140, and Frühauf 1987, 219–236, 16–20). Perhaps the most important creator of an authorial self-account is Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343 or 363), who included autobiographical information at the end of both the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ sections of his monumental work of syncretic philosophy Bao pu zi 抱朴子 [The Master Who Embraces Simplicity (Sailey 1978)]. Ge emphasized different things in each. The ‘inner’ section of the text is devoted to Daoist religious ideas, and its two-page afterword has been described as “a fairly abstract self-portrait” (Wells 2003, 72). Yet Ge Hong in fact is able to present himself in just a few sentences as an outsider whom few understood: 世儒徒知服膺周孔，桎梏皆死，莫信神仙之事，謂為妖妄之說，見余此書，不特大笑之。又將 謗毀真正 […]。其不可與言者，不令見也。貴使來世好長生者，有以釋其惑，豈求信於不信者 乎！ [The Confucianists of our day know only how to maintain faithfully the memory of the Duke of Chou and Confucius, both of whom died in the stocks. None of them believe in gods and the genii; they consider such talk ill-omened or mad. When they see this book of mine, they will not only break into guffaws of laughter; they will also malign the truth and the correct statements it contains. […] Let it not be seen by those with whom these matters may not be discussed! My purpose is that those of the future interested in the Fullness of Life may find a place where their doubts can be resolved. The confidence of nonbelievers is not sought.] (Bao pu zi neipian jiaoshi, 附錄 1, 368 [Ko Hung 1966, 26–27]).

The much longer postface to the Confucian section of The Master Who Embraces Simplicity deserves more attention. Not only has it been praised as a “narrative of an individual life written by that person”, it has also been named “the first substantial contribution to a theory of autobiography in Chinese literature” (Wells 2003, 72). In it Ge Hong leaves no doubt that his goal in writing, both there and in his other works, is to preserve himself for posterity and to compensate for what he saw as his failures: 上不能鷹揚匡國，下無以顯親垂名，美不寄於良史，聲不附乎鍾鼎。故因著述之餘，而為自敘 之篇，雖無補於窮達，亦賴將來之有述焉。 [As far as high affairs [of state] are concerned, I cannot set the country right, and in lesser ones I cannot leave a good reputation for the honor of my parents. My goodness has not been entrusted to a good historian. Tales [of my achievements] do not adorn bells and tripods. Thus, in addition to my writings, I am composing this autobiography. Although it cannot supplant my failure or success in life, still, it may be set down for future generations] (Bao pu zi waipian jiaojian 50.721 [Sailey 1978, 272]).

Despite the tone of humility in these lines, which seems to suggest old age, Ge Hong was only in his late thirties when he wrote them. It is thus no surprise to see him criticized by his contemporaries: he should have devoted himself to a life of active service to the state, but instead had given himself over to maudlin nostalgia (Sailey 1978, 272). He did that later, too, but one cannot avoid getting the impression that Ge Hong’s scorn for the world and his habitus of the precocious child was something by

1034 

 4 Asia

which he intended to advertise for himself, as many did after him. We see something of his pose in the following passage, in which Ge Hong writes of himself in the third person: 洪體鈍性駑，寡所玩好。[…] 又擲瓦、手搏，不及兒童之羣。未曾鬬雞鶩，走狗馬。見人博 戲，了不目眄。 [Hung was clumsy, physically, and he was by nature lacking in talent. Few things amused him. […] [W]henever other children were scaling tiles and making models from clay, he would not join the group of boys. He had no interest in fighting cocks and ducks or in dogracing and horseracing. When he saw people gambling, he would not even glance at them (Bao pu zi waipian jiaojian 50.721 [Sailey 1978, 265]).

The second sub-set of “authorial self-accounts” are the independent texts. This type is more recent than the first sub-set and developed out of it. The earliest of the “authorial self-accounts independent of books” dates, according to Wu Pei-yi (1990, 49), to the first century CE. In later centuries, famous writers like Jiang Yan 江淹 (444–505) also composed this style, including the eminent historiographical critic Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 (661–721). Indeed Liu’s importance for the study of Chinese autobiography is twofold. In his magnum opus Shitong 史通 (Wu 1990, 50, translates the title as “Universals in history”), the value of which can hardly be overstated, Liu Zhiji considers with unprecedented thoroughness the tasks of autobiography. And he includes his own zixu 自敘 [“self account”] in Shitong (Liu 1985, 375–388 [Koh 1957, 126–133]; Frühauf 1987, 366–376; Bauer 1990, 242–244; Wu 1990, 50–51). Unlike most of his predecessors, Liu Zhiji forgoes consideration of his genealogy and begins by speaking of himself. His account presents the rapid intellectual development of a strong-willed child. It is worth noting that Liu Zhiji spends nearly the entire last third of his text justifying the composition of the self-account. This he does, more Sinico, with reference to earlier examples. A certain fifth century author, for instance, supposedly wrote his zixu because he wanted to put himself next to an earlier scholar, and this is exactly what Liu Zhiji sought. He claims also to model his composition upon the “authorial self-account” of Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE), whom he identifies as a kindred spirit. Despite this gesture of modesty, Liu Zhiji’s text was innovating, since for the first time friends were honored in a self-account. Yet more important are the critical remarks about autobiography that Liu Zhiji includes under the title “Xuzhuan” 序傳 in chapter nine of Shitong (Liu 1985, 335–343 [Frühauf 1987, 410–413]; Bauer 1990, 239–244, and Wu 1990, 52–60). Bauer describes these remarks as a “theory of autobiography”, which is a bit of a stretch. What the Xuzhuan actually contains is a discussion of common errors in self-portrayals. Liu essentially postulates three requirements, each of which he bases on Confucian thinking. First, an autobiographer should refrain from embellishing his genealogy by exaggerating his own antecedents or claiming important members of other clans for his own. In case of doubt, any lacunae or ambiguities must be presented frankly. To do

4.4 China 

 1035

otherwise would violate the dictum of Confucius: 非其鬼而祭之，諂也。[“To offer sacrifice to the spirit of an ancestor not one’s own is obsequious”] (Lunyu 2.24 [Con­ fucius 2000, 17]). Secondly, Liu Zhiji condemns the inclusion of indiscretions in autobiography. He mentions the example of Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (179–117 BC), who, with some pleasure, reported to have eloped with his host’s daughter. Liu Zhiji deems such records not to conform to the standard set by the Confucian text Chunqiu 春秋 [‘Spring and Autumn Annals’], which maintained a discrete silence about such conduct. Liu’s third demand was that autobiographers must not praise themselves. He saw this as having been common since the time of Wang Chong, who denigrated his own forefathers in order to make himself look better. This final demand is somewhat more difficult to justify on Confucian grounds, for as Liu Zhiji knew well – indeed, he mentions it  – Confucius did not shy away from praising himself. The Sage, for instance, referred to his own inimitable thirst for learning (Lunyu 5.28), and deemed himself to have been selected by Heaven and placed under its protection as the bearer of culture (Lunyu 9.5). That did not hinder Liu Zhiji. Liu Zhiji’s pronouncements had an enormous influence on the character and development of Chinese autobiography: “[N]o other Chinese historiographer or literary critic ever broached this subject again until the present century, as if Liu’s judgment were final, allowing not even a slight modification”, states Wu Pei-yi (1990, 52). Wu believes that Liu Zhiji’s critique was responsible for the increasing numbers of pseudo-biographies, self-chronicles, and annalistic autobiographies in the following centuries, while those in the form of forewords and afterwords decreased (Wu 1990, 60). One of the great exceptions to this trend is the autobiography of China’s foremost female poet, Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084–1151?). Her “Jinshilu houxu” 金石錄後 序 [“Postface to a Record of Stone and Metal Inscriptions”, as Wu 1990, 65, translates it], dated to 1132, originally accompanied a collection of bronze and stone inscription texts and studies, which is itself no longer extant. Li Qingzhao’s husband Zhao Mingcheng 趙明誠 (1081–1129) had gathered its contents over the course of three decades, and Li uses her “Postface” to describe the assembly of the couple’s collection of books, paintings, calligraphy, and ritual vessels, and the collection’s eventual loss. Bauer sees the “Postface to a Record of Stone and Metal Inscriptions” as a mirror for his own feelings − the “love of old writing and objects” and the “passion for ‘collecting’” (1990, 308). He furthermore takes the tragedy of Li Qingzhao and her husband’s collection, uprooted and destroyed in the tumult of war, to stand for the loss of China to the foreign invasion that drove the Song Dynasty out of north China in 1127 (Bauer 1990, 308–309). Stephen Owen understands the text quite differently. He sees in it “a testament of love mixed with great bitterness” (Owen 1986, 83; Owen, 80–98 translates the entire text). He reads its first part as describing the “pure idyll” (Owen 1986, 83) the newlyweds enjoyed while assembling their collection through purchases in temple markets. He sees them getting caught up in the collation of texts and competing to

1036 

 4 Asia

locate citations among their sea of books. Yet Owen sees Li Qingzhao quickly becoming burdened with worry about the collection. That worry proved justified, and after a quarter century their collection was destroyed: part burned, part plundered, part stolen by neighbors. Li Qingzhao would lose her husband and be forced to deal with these blows alone. She ends her autobiographical “Postface” with a mix of religious questions, philosophical consolation, and exhortation for future scholars and collectors: Could it have been Heaven itself that took the enjoyment of the collection from her? Or might it have been the dead – in particular her deceased husband – conscious and possessed of desires like the living, who had destroyed the collection, so that they – that he – might possess it? She comforts herself, writing, 然有有必有無，有聚 必有散，乃理之常。人亡弓，人得之，又胡足道。 [“When there is possession, there must be lack of possession; when there is gathering together, there must be a dissolution – that is the constant principle of things. Someone loses a bow; someone else happens to find a bow – what’s worth noticing in that?”] (Li 1979, 182 [Owen 1986, 97–98]) But her final word is for those who would come later: Everything is transitory. 所以區區記其終始者，亦欲為後世好古博雅者之戒云。 “The reason why I have so minutely recorded this story from beginning to end is to serve as a warning for scholars and collectors in later generations” (Li 1979, 182 [Owen 1986, 98]).

A Flowering of Autobiography between 1565 and 1680? The hundred and some years between 1565 and 1680 were the heyday of Chinese autobiography. Wu (1990, 207) attributes this to a “new mood in the moral climate”, a growing consciousness of the human propensity for evil and the accompanying idea that men could load themselves down with guilt. The central writings of early Confucianism exhort their readers to pursue self-cultivation and self-improvement. Yet Confucianism had no ritual form for acknowledging sin and receiving absolution. Nor did any early author write at length about the problem of personal guilt. The earliest indigenous form of confession in China traces back to the Heavenly Masters. This Daoist sect of the second to third century CE interpreted illness as a sign and a result of personal guilt and sin. They saw the open acknowledgement of sin and guilt as a requirement necessary before recovery could take place. Buddhism also played an important role in this development. The earliest rules for monks prescribed twice monthly a rite of “confession” [“uposatha”], which was connected with “fasting and sacrifices” (Wu 1990, 211). This was required no later than the fourth century CE in the cloisters and later even among lay Buddhists (Wu 1990, 211–212). Wu Pei-yi describes Buddhist confession as typically “ornately rhetorical in style but silent on personal misdeeds” (Wu 1990, 212). “Nor did subsequent Buddhist

4.4 China 

 1037

penitential services require each individual participant to reveal his own wrongdoings either orally or in writing” (Wu 1990, 213). Thus, early Confucianism never required any sort of public confession, and indeed could hardly have squared such a practice with its insistence on “propriety and discretion” (Wu 1990, 216). Early autobiography in China placed value on self-effacement, and Liu Zhiji condemned a lack of discretion in autobiographical writing. The sixteenth century brought with it far-reaching changes in autobiographical practice. Wu Pei-yi attributes this to the influence of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529), who held that every person had an “inner knowledge” [liangzhi 良知] that was an “unerring guide” in moral questions. “It was he who postulated the self-sufficiency of every moral being, the promise of radical transformation for any mortal who would faithfully follow his own inner light” (Wu 1990, 216). This new spirit can be perceived in the charge Wang Yangming gave to the teachers in the “community schools” he founded: 每日清晨，諸生參揖畢，教讀以次。遍詢諸生：在家所以愛親敬長之心，得無懈忽，未能真切 否？[…] 諸童子務要各以實對, […]。 [Every day, early in the morning, after the pupils have assembled and bowed, the teachers should ask all of them one by one whether at home they have been negligent and lacked sincerity and earnestness in their desire to love their parents and to respect their elders (…). All boys must answer honestly] (Wang Yangming 2006, 88 [1963, 184)].

Wang Ji 王畿 (1498–1583), one of Wang Yangming’s students, went still further in this regard. After a fire destroyed his house and possessions, Wang Ji wrote an essay he called a “Self-Indictment” [Zisong 自訟], a “penitential text” that, for Wu Pei-yi, marked “a turning point in Chinese moral culture” (1990, 217). In composing this text, Wang Ji subjected himself to a difficult test of his character, indeed of his conscience as the regulator of his relationships: 愛人若周或涉於泛。憂世若亟或病於迂。或恣情徇欲認以為同好惡。[…] 甚至包藏禍心,斯天妄 人之念。潛萌而間作。但畏惜名譽,偶未之發耳。凡此皆行業所招。鬼神之由鑒也。 [I seem to love all people, but I may be too indiscriminate. I seem to be much concerned with the affairs of the world, but I may be too pedantic in my approach. Sometimes I give full reign to my passions in dealing with people, yet I take it as being consistent in my likes and dislikes (…). What is worst of all is that my evil thoughts and desires to deceive Heaven and humanity grow in secrecy and emerge from time to time. Only my concern for reputation has held them in check. All these, witnessed by gods and spirits, bring about retribution] (Wang 1970, 15.17a–b [Wu 1990, 218]).

This interest in self-reflection, which Wu Pei-yi sees as an important part of the background of the flowering of autobiography during the Ming dynasty, is also noticeable in the writings of other authors. Wang Ji’s younger contemporary, the Buddhist master Zhuhong 袾宏 (1535–1615), and Zhang Lüxiang 張履祥 (1611–1674) both wrote “penitential texts” with the title Zize 自責 (“Self Reproach”, Wu 1990, 220–221). And it also

1038 

 4 Asia

left marks in shanshu 善書 [“morality books”] and gongguo ge 功過格 [“ledgers of merits and demerits”, (Wu 1990, 223)], which have frequently drawn criticism due to their nature as mechanistic accountings: In such books good and bad deeds are each assigned a number of positive or negative points. The reader is instructed to enter into the ledger at the end of each day his good and bad deeds with their numerical values. Offsetting positive points against negative points he would arrive at his moral balance for the day, just as a storekeeper does with his account book (Wu 1990, 223; see also Sakai 1970 and Brokaw 1991).

The Spiritual Autobiographies of Monks and Neo-Confucians Wu Pei-yi (1990, 71) rightly notes that Chinese clerics, especially Chan Buddhist masters, would seem to have been in good positions to record the tales of their lives and/or their conversions. Many left their families while still young, and they often experienced defining religious insights. Some scorned social conventions. And yet, China’s monks remained reticent, at least about details. It is, for instance, disappointing when Huineng 惠能 (638–713), one of the most important monks of his time, described to students his background and enlightenment in the following terse fashion: 父又早亡，[…] 艱辛貧乏，於市賣柴。忽有一客買柴，遂領惠能，至於官店。客將柴去，惠能 得錢，却向門前，忽見一客讀《金剛經》, 惠能一聞，心便明悟。 [While I was still a child, my father died (…). We suffered extreme poverty and (…) I sold firewood in the market place. By chance a certain man bought some firewood and then took me with him to the lodging house for officials. He took the firewood and left. Having received my money and turning towards the front gate, I happened to see another man who was reciting the Diamond Sutra. Upon hearing it my mind became clear and I was awakened] (Huineng 1967, 126–127).

Uninspired and uninspiring as Huineng’s account may sound, yet it hints at what evolved into religious autobiography embedded in doctrinal conversations called ‘sermons’ in the thirteenth century. Wu (1990, 76–81) names the Chan Master Zuqin 祖欽 (1216–1287) as founder of the tradition of religious autobiography, while Miriam Levering (2002), in contrast, points to the older Chan Master Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 (1089–1163). Zuqin entered a Buddhist monastery at age five, received the tonsure at sixteen, and began a life of wandering from cloister to cloister at eighteen. His autobiographical reminiscences are, like those assembled on behalf of Huineng, expressed in sermon form, in Zuqin’s case one concerned with the topic of death. He concentrates on his years of wandering, above all on his spiritual experiences and enlightenment, and in doing so provides a peerless insight into his inner life. Wu Pei-yi calls Zuqin’s long and detailed portrayal of the three days that his protracted enlightenment lasted “a

4.4 China 

 1039

landmark in the history of Chinese narrative” (1990, 83). Wu suggests that the wealth of detail may have been inspired by contemporary dramatists and storytellers (1990, 84). Dahui Zonggao also included autobiographical information in his sermons: “[He] gave his listeners, as well as the readers of his widely-circulated sermon collections, something of the moment-to-moment quality of his body and mind, his ‘interior subjectivity,’ over a considerable period of time” (Levering 2002, 99). But not all Buddhist autobiographical accounts were in sermons. One of the most extensive examples took the stiff form of an annalistic record. It comes in the account of Hanshan Deqing 憨山德清 (1546–1623), and is especially interesting because its nearly eighty-year-old author wrote it shortly before his death. Like none other before him, this gifted man looked back to his early and earliest years. He writes on the one hand of commonplace topoi – of his precocity and childhood piety. On the other hand, he also gives his mother an unusually definitional role. Deqing speaks of his father first in writing of his betrothal, in his twelfth year, which he escaped by entering a monastery, in which action he had his mother’s support. Elsewhere, Deqing recalls literary models. He claims to have become acquainted with death at age seven, and to have become absorbed in its contemplation. This calls to mind Siddhartha, the historical Buddha, who was raised a prince and sheltered from harsh realities until he encountered old age, sickness, and death during trips outside the palace. Other models came from religious texts, such as the Avataṃsaka-Sūtra [chin. Huayanjing 華嚴經], which Struve (2012) demonstrates was known to Deqing. Deqing’s account of the time after his enlightenment becomes somewhat thin, and even the enlightenment itself, which came when he was twenty-nine years old, is treated in a matter of fact fashion: One day after a meal of rice porridge I began circumambulating. All of a sudden I stopped and could not perceive my body or mind; there was only something huge and bright, something perfect, full, and silent like a gigantic round mirror, with mountains, rivers, and the great earth reflected in it. When I awoke I felt very clear. I sought for my body and mind, but they were nowhere to be found. […] From that time on I was clear both internally and externally, and sounds and sights no longer posed obstacles. All the former doubts and confusions were now gone (qtd. in Wu 1990, 153).

This development of spiritual autobiography among Buddhists between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries has somewhat later parallels among Neo-Confucian scholars. They invite comparison with monks in other respects, too, and some in fact lived at times as (ordained) monks. The great Confucians before the fifteenth century generally say nothing of their personal and intellectual development. They perhaps did not do this deliberately, even though constant evaluation of oneself was a basic principle of Confucianism. The diaries of scholars, common between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, indicate this. An example of the fifteenth century mode comes in the diary of the important Neo-Confucian Wu Yubi 吳與弼 (1392–1469), which a critic already in the sixteenth

1040 

 4 Asia

century recognized as an exceptional “history of an individual […] presented in his own words” (qtd. in Wu 1990, 94). Wu Pei-yi argues that travel narratives [ youji 遊記] exerted a great deal of influence on the development of Chinese autobiography. These increased in number during the sixteenth century, when an unrecognized ‘Wanderlust’ struck many writers. The first spiritual autobiography in the form of a travelogue came from Deng Huoqu 鄧豁渠 (1498?–1570?), a famous Neo-Confucian. Deng temporarily entered a Buddhist monastery, at the same time many of his contemporaries saw Buddhism in a positive light. Already with its title Nanxun lu 南詢錄 (“The record of a quest in the south”, Wu 1990, 101), Deng connects his work to the account, well known in Chinese Buddhist literature, of the Indian boy Sudhana [chin. Shancai 善財], who visited fifty-three different teachers in search of enlightenment (Wu 1990, 101). What is unusual about Deng’s work, which he wrote near the end of his life, is that while it has the form of a travel narrative, its focus is not on describing landscapes and human activities, as is usual for such texts. Instead, Deng occupies himself “with the creation of a unique persona who is as free of restraint and as rambling as any traveler” (Wu 1990, 101). Hu Zhi 胡直 (1517–1585), who may well have known Deng Huoqu’s work, gives us a somewhat later example of a Neo-Confucian’s spiritual autobiography. Hu Zhi’s notes bear a title that alludes to a saying of Confucius: “Kunxue ji 困學記” (“A record of learning through difficulties”, Wu 1990, 243). Hu wrote his work in 1573 or later, and in doing so concentrates his account on the years of his education, which brought him success only in his late thirties (fully transl. in Wu 1990, 243–251). Hu Zhi was justified in speaking of “learning through difficulties”. He describes how, as a young man, he rebelled against the Neo-Confucian education his father and others sought to impart to him. Only after years of intellectual and spiritual effort did he find his way back there. This fact leads Wu Pei-yi also to place the Kunxue ji 困學記 near to the genre, well known in the West, of the “conversion narrative” (Wu 1990, 118) or, as the case may be, the “reconversion narrative” (Wu 1990, 125). According to Hu Zhi, he managed through a combination of intellectual effort and meditation to reach the recognition that the external world was “only an extension of one’s mind” (Wu 1990, 122). This is an idea as Buddhist as it is Confucian (Mencian), which Hu Zhi traced to Confucian thought: 一日，同諸君游 […]，坐地方欠身起，忽復悟天地萬物果非在外。印諸子思「上下察」，[…] ， 靡不合旨。視前所見，灑然徹矣。 [One day I went sight-seeing (…) with several members of the literati. Just as I stood up and stretched myself after having sat down for some time, the insight suddenly came back to me that heaven, earth, and the myriad things are truly not external to me. I verified this insight against what various Confucian masters had gone through […] and they were in perfect accord. I examined my previous understanding and everything became clear and coherent once more] (Hu Zhi 1985, 522 [Wu 1990, 122, 247]).

4.4 China 

 1041

Autobiography after 1680. Autobiographical References in Great Novels Wu Pei-yi’s most pointed thesis is that the golden age of autobiography came to a sudden end after the seventeenth century. He attributes this to an abrupt conservative turn, which led to previous unknown levels of state control, especially for scholars (Wu 1990, 235). Martin Huang agrees with Wu’s interpretation, and refers to the standard explanation that the Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) made this shift in order “to claim legitimacy for their foreign rule by embracing the dominant native orthodox ideology” (Huang 1995, 2). Huang, however, makes a significant revision to Wu Pei-yi’s argument. Huang agrees that there was a “decline of formal autobiographical writings” (Huang 1995, 6) at the time, which resulted from the repression of “direct self-presentation” (Huang 1995, 8). Yet the autobiographical impulse did not disappear. Rather it sought a new medium, which it found in fiction, especially the novel, a genre that traditionally had been given little weight and so was spared strict censorship. In other words, beginning in the late seventeenth century scholars turned to “fictional ‘masquerading’” (Huang 1995, 9). Huang may be unable to prove definitively that the literati desire for “direct self-presentation” (Huang 1995, 8) was turned into “masquerading” due to the pressure of the Manchu rulers. Yet with reference to recent research, he shows his suggestion to be plausible. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the novel in China began a process of “literati-ization” [wenrenhua 文人化], which entailed growing involvement of the literati in “the production and consumption of the novel” (Huang 1995, 15). This involvement had several important aspects. First, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the novel became an “individual project of a single literary author” (Huang 1995, 19) rather than the production of multiple inviduals. Second, at the same time, there was a parallel shift, in which the content of novels came to represent private experience. This was also related to another, third change, which was that novels increasingly depicted contemporary life. Many novels’ depictions were of the educated class, to which the authors themselves belonged, and the resulting texts demonstrated an “inward turning” toward themes of “individual responsibility, personal guilt, and human fallibility” (Huang 1995, 21). Fourth, the autobiographical tendencies of novels in the late imperial period was furthermore encouraged, according to Huang, because the texts themselves often circulated only in handwritten form among relatives and friends before being published for sale. Thus, says Huang (1995, 24), “at least during the initial state of circulation, reading a novel was a much more private act than it is for the modern reader” (Huang 1995, 24). If all that were not enough, the economic and social changes that China experienced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries caused an identity crisis for the educated classes as each individual’s chance of obtaining a government position dwindled:

1042 

 4 Asia

Since there were always more literati than official positions, many literati found themselves excluded from officialdom. Being unable to find employment in the government thus became the major source of disappointment and frustration for a large proportion of the literati (Huang 1995, 27).

These things were the general background against which the novel emerged as a way for authors to “to reconstruct or reinvent their ‘selves’ through various strategies of fictional narrative in order to come to terms with their increasingly problematic self-identity as literati” (Huang 1995, 13–14). Huang applies his analysis to two famous novels: Rulin waishi 儒林外史, literally ‘The Unofficial History of the Forest (i.  e. World) of the Literati’ and better known as The Scholars; and Hongloumeng 紅樓夢, The Dream of the Red Chamber. He also treats the little-known text Yesou puyan 野叟曝言, ‘Humble Words of an Old Rustic.’ ‘The Unofficial History of the Forest of the Literati’, written around 1750 and published forty years later, was the first satirical novel in China. It depicts, with some adjustments to hide identities, upper class scholars and officials, of which its author, Wu Jingzi 吳敬梓 (1701–1754), himself was one. Some three dozen main characters and two hundred minor characters populate its six hundred pages (in English). Its episodic character and narrative discontinuities are not unlike what one encounters in Western satires. Because it is, at least in part, a ‘roman à clef’, and because its protagonist Du Shaoqing 杜少卿, one of the few positive characters in a sea of corrupt officials and degenerate scholars, has commonalities with the author, ‘The Unofficial History of the Forest of the Literati’ has long been interpreted as autobiographical in nature. Huang does this, and in his analysis even ranges far beyond the content of the novel to delve into the psychology of Wu Jingzi, understanding the text as Wu’s attempt to deal with his self-perceived failure (Huang 1995, 56). Huang links the four sections of the novel to the four stages in the life of a man who began as one “obsessed with success in the civil-service examinations” (Huang 1995, 51), and ended in a “profound despair” shared by “a generation of literati” (Huang 1995, 51). Huang claims that the author of ‘The Unofficial History of the Forest of the Literati’ identifies with different characters at different points in the novel, “so that he can look back at his past self in the form of many others without having to bear the full consequences of a direct confrontation” (Huang 1995, 53). Huang also sees in the theme of travel in the text a connection to the life of its author: “The restlessness that permeates the world of the novel was an experience shared by the author, who was so frustrated in his lifelong search for fulfillment as a literatus” (Huang 1995, 53). The Dream of the Red Chamber, Huang’s second example, is more than twice as long as ‘The Unofficial History of the Forest of the Literati’. Written in the middle of the eighteenth century, it circulated among its author’s family and friends in hand-copied form until reaching publication in 1792. The Dream of the Red Chamber has been praised as “the greatest of all Chinese novels” (Hsia 1968, 245), and its more than

4.4 China 

 1043

one hundred million copies sold makes it one of the bestselling books of all time. Despite his novel’s fame, little is known about the author Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 (1715 or 1724–1763 or 1764) (Hsia 1968, 247), and the tangled history of the text and its reception makes the situation still more difficult. Cao Xueqin himself most likely wrote only the first eighty chapters, with the remaining forty chapters coming from another’s hand, or at least having been substantially edited by someone other than him. That has, however, not hampered autobiographical readings of The Dream of the Red Chamber. The novel on its face is a complicated recounting of the life of its protagonist, Jia Baoyu 賈寶玉, his two cousins, and some five hundred other characters, accompanied with the account of an aristocratic family rise and fall. Autobiographical readings see Jia Baoyu as a self-portrait of Cao Xueqin, little known as he is, and make reference to the author’s statement at the beginning of the novel that his goal is to write a ‘collective biography’ of the many girls he had encountered: 今风尘碌碌，一事无成，忽念及当日所有之女子，一一细考较去，觉其行止見识， 皆出于我之上，[…] 虽我未学，下笔无文，又何妨用假语村言，敷演出一段故事来，亦可使闺 阁昭传，[…] , 不亦宜乎？ [In this busy, dusty world, having accomplished nothing, I suddenly recalled all the girls I had known, considering each in turn, and it dawned on me that all of them surpassed me in behaviour and understanding (…) Though I have little learning or literary talent, what does it matter if I tell a tale in rustic language to leave a record of all those lovely girls] (Cao 1988, 1 [1978, I, 1–2]).

Huang’s interpretation of the novel makes some significant departures. Acting under the assumption – questionable as it is – that the portrayal of a male person by means of a female character has a long history in Chinese literature, Huang sees aspects of Cao Xueqin in the different women who appear in the novel and thus describes Cao Xueqin applying a strategy which is comparable to that employed by the author of ‘The Unofficial History of the Forest of the Literati’: Jia Baoyu is an autobiographical reconstruction of certain aspects of the author [...] Cao Xueqin displaces his autobiographical self (selves) in more than one character in the novel (unlike the usual case in autobiographical fiction). This, to a degree, resembles what Wu Jingzi did in The Scholars. What makes The Dream unique, however, is Cao Xueqin’s masterful manipulation of gender strategies (Huang 1995, 77).

Huang deploys the same sort of creative interpretation in reading his third text, ­Huangsou puyan [“Humble Words of an Old Rustic”, Huang 1995, 7], with its 154 chapters perhaps the longest novel in Chinese literature, by Xia Jingqu 夏敬渠 (1705–1787), a rather shadowy figure. Its plot is very simple. It follows the protagonist’s meteoric rise to the top of the bureaucracy, thereby fulfilling a dream of thousands. Xia himself suggests by means of a play on words that there may be connections between himself and several of the characters in the novel. But Huang goes much further, following his psychological form of analysis. He sees the novel’s protagonist as the literary counterpart of its author, whose long life was “dogged by poverty and illness” (Huang 1995,

1044 

 4 Asia

112). In the creation of the novel Huang suspects an attempt by Xia to elevate and indeed to heal himself: “Here the autobiographical act is largely a self-healing process through willful forgetting and misremembering” (Huang 1995, 113).

Shen Fu (1763–ca. 1808): Privacy in Autobiography If one were to select a single autobiographical work in China as unique, it would likely be Fusheng liuji 浮生六記 [Six Records of a Floating Life]. It is the most widely-known Chinese autobiography, and also the most frequently translated and the most frequently filmed and enacted on stage autobiography in China. It was written in 1810 but began to achieve renown only seventy years later, after a handwritten copy of its six chapters was discovered and published. Its author, Shen Fu 沈復 (1763–ca. 1808), was the scion of an official clan. He had luck neither in business nor as a painter, but found through good fortune a job as the private secretary of a powerful man, which provided him a means to live. What is singular about Six Records of a Floating Life is that its author does not concentrate on himself, and instead spends most of its length  – some 150 pages in translation  – depicting his wife, who died young. The book is also remarkable for portraying the couple’s intimacy, despite the prudery of its times. Shen Fu justifies his decision with reference to the classic Book of Songs, which begins with a love song (Shen Fu 1983, 25). The following passage suffices to demonstrate Shen Fu’s tender picture of the couple’s relationship: 伴嫗在旁促臥，令其閉門先去。遂與比肩調笑，恍同密友重逢，戲探其懷，亦怦怦作跳，因俯 其耳曰：「姊何心舂乃爾耶？」芸回眸微笑，便覺一縷情絲搖人魂魄。擁之入帳，不知東方之 既白。 [Yün’s servant then urged us to go to sleep, but we told her she should go to sleep first, and to shut the door to our room. We sat up making jokes, like two close friends meeting after a long separation. I playfully felt her breast and found her heart was beating as fast as mine. I pulled her to me and whispered in her ear, ‘Why is your heart beating so fast?’ She answered with a bewitching smile that made me feel a love so endless it shook my soul. I held her close as I parted the curtains and led her into bed. We never noticed what time the sun rose in the morning] (Shen Fu 2003, 6 [1983, 28–29]).

The classification of Six Records of a Floating Life and its position in literary history have been subjects of differing views. Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980) sees in Shen Fu “subjectivism, individualism, the disregard for traditional bars and considerations, the awareness of the tragedy of life”  – the very characteristics that marked literature between the First and Second World Wars  – and deems Shen Fu the “creator of Chinese autobiography” (Doleželová-Velingerová and Doležel 1972, 138, 139). But Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Lubomír Doležel (1972) argue that the focus on Shen Fu’s wife means that Six Records of a Floating Life is not an autobiography. They furthermore insist that the “dominance of the love story” in a text that is organized

4.4 China 

 1045

in “motif-clusters” rather than chronologically, and furthermore written in a very elevated style, all things that mark the result as something other than an autobiography (Doleželová-Velingerová and Doležel 1972, 142). Doleželová-Velingerová and Doležel differ also from Průšek in their understanding of Six Records of a Floating Life’s position in literary history. For while Průšek sees in it premonitions of themes and motifs that would become important in the twentieth century, they look backwards. Doleželová-Velingerová and Doležel (1972, 155–156) put Six Records of a Floating Life in a tradition that stretches back to the Lisao 離騷 [“On Encountering Trouble”] of Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 340–278 BCE), which is characterized by “poetic confession” (Doleželová-Velingerová and Doležel 1972, 155) and is also marked by the “peace, composure and endurance” (Doleželová-Velingerová and Doležel 1972, 156) of Song-period poetry.

The 1920s and 1930s: Autobiography in the Service of Political and Social Renewal The most important cultural break in recent Chinese history, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, not randomly coincides with the year in which the Treaty of Versailles granted the former German colony of Qingdao to Japan, despite China’s cooperation with the victorious Allied side in the First World War. Incensed at this obvious injustice, furious university students in Peking filled the streets on the fourth of May, 1919. Their protests were directed not only against current politics, but expressed a much wider dissatisfaction with the state of culture in China – a dissatisfaction that in part resulted from Western influences. The magnitude of what the demonstrations sought to achieve, and the fact that their causes were larger than the Treaty of Versailles, can be seen from an important essay that appeared in the magazine New Youth in 1917. Its author, Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), then in his mid-twenties, would become one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. In his essay, “Wenxue gailiang chuyi 文學改良芻議” [“Preliminary Proposal for the Reform of Literature”], Hu Shi lays out a number of proposals for literature. They can be summarized in his insistence that vernacular language [baihua 白話] replace the literary Chinese that had for two thousand years been the dominant cultural medium, which would help break the hold of traditional culture on China’s society. Janet Ng (2003, 2) speaks for many when she calls 1917 “the beginning of a new era in literature” because of this essay. As she translates Hu Shi’s text, “the root of China’s weakness is the ignorance of the masses, and that literature has a moral function, to educate them and lift them out of their ignorance” (Ng 2003, viii). Hu Shi argued always in favor of diaries, biographies, and autobiographies as tools of Enlightenment and as sources for contemporary history. Already at age seventeen, he began to collect the biographies of great men, who were to be models, and would go on to write a number of autobiographical works over

1046 

 4 Asia

the course of his life. In response to Hu Shi’s exhortation to write in the vernacular, writers treated familiar topics in ordinary language and autobiographies increased so rapidly in number during the 1920s and 1930s that in 1933 Hu Shi stated: “The era of autobiography seems to have begun” (qtd. after Findeisen 2001, 113). Not everyone was convinced of their value. Lao She 老舍 (1899–1966), for example, satirized the autobiographical craze in his 1934 essay Zizhuan nanxie 自傳難寫 [“It is difficult to write an autobiography”] (Findeisen 2001, 118). Looking back on the autobiographies of the 1920s and 1930s, a number of commonalities emerge. First, many writers of autobiographies put themselves into the background, treating themselves as representatives of their times and justifying their accounts with reference to larger considerations: “No matter how personal the individual stories were, many wrote from a didactic impulse to fulfill their sense of social duty through literature” (Ng 2003, x). Second, Hu Shi’s pleas and arguments, combined with an improved access to education, particularly encouraged women, many of whom in turn created autobiographical works. Third, the increase in Chinese autobiography at this time had a close interrelationship with autobiography in other countries. On the one hand, according to Bauer (1990, 651–652) at least two dozen Western autobiographies had been translated into Chinese by the end of the 1920s, particularly those of prominent persons. Findeisen (2001, 119) furthermore tells us that Rousseau’s (1712–1778) Confessions was translated into Chinese no fewer than eight times between 1928 and 1945. Chinese autobiographies, on the other hand, found an interested readership in the West, especially in the United States, among those who sought information about China as described by Chinese people. Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976), who spent decades in the US and wrote gracefully in English, appealed to this audience. He was celebrated for My Country and My People (1935) and numerous other works (Wang Jing 2000, 161–163), leading to the popularity of many Chinese autobiographies written in the US or in China, whether originally in English or Chinese. Finally, while most of the May Fourth Movement authors wrote their autobiographies during the 1920s and 1930s, some did so only much later. The memoirs of Su Xuelin 蘇雪林 (1897–1999), written in 1967 and 1991 are one such example. Among the many writers who were active participants in the May Fourth Movement, a few serve to demonstrate the spectrum of autobiographical writing at the time. For that purpose two men and two women are discussed below. First and foremost of these is Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978), who combines the roles of scholar, politician, writer, and translator (of Goethe, among others) like no one else of the twentieth century. The youngest of eight children of a wealthy landlord, Guo Moruo enjoyed an education in China that combined traditional knowledge with Western-inspired content. He subsequently traveled to Japan to study medicine, completing his degree in 1923, at age thirty. His literary tendencies already at that time took stronger hold of him, and upon the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 he became President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Despite joining the

4.4 China 

 1047

Communist Party late, he was one of the best-known intellectual supporters of Mao Zedong and Mao’s reputation as a scholar-statesman. Guo Moruo treats autobiographical topics in a few of his literary works and also wrote explicit autobiographies. According to Doleželová-Velingerová (1964), Guo himself designated eight early works in different literary forms as autobiographies, and later added more, the last one being Hongbo qu 洪波曲 [“The song of the waves”], Guo Moruo’s “memoirs for the period of the war against Japan”, composed in 1958 and published one year later (Doleželová-Velingerová 1964, 47n1). As Doleželová-Velingerová (1964) explains, some of the early works were later re-titled, while the content of others was changed. Guo Moruo expressed repeatedly the purpose of his autobiographies, thereby making some lofty comparisons: 我的童年是封建社會向資本制度轉換的時代，我現在把它從黑暗的石炭的阬底挖出來。我不是 想學Augustin和Rousseau要表述甚麼懺悔，我也不是想學Goethe和Tolstoi要描寫甚麼天才。我 寫的只是這樣的社會生出了這樣的一個人，或者也可以說有過這樣的人生在這樣的時代。 [My youth was a period of transformation from a feudal society to a capitalist society. I dug it out from the bottom of a black coal pit. I did not want to take St. Augustine or Rousseau as models and write a confession. I did not even want to follow Goethe’s or Tolstoy’s example and write about a genius. I only wrote about how a specific society gave birth to a specific person, or you could say how a specific person lived in a specific period] (Guo 1957, 2 [Doleželová-Velingerová 1964, 74]).

One ought not take all that at face value, and some doubt about the author’s candor is in order. For is it not a “confession” when Guo writes about his awakening sexuality, about reading erotic literature, about his first homosexual encounters – and about the accusation that he gained merits by homoerotic encounters with teachers? Does he not portray himself as precocious, indeed a genius, when he attests to the excellence of his intellect in childhood? He says he could read the most difficult classics and independently interpret the most important Tang poets before age ten (Guo Moruo 1981, 52). When he describes how at age fourteen he was the best in his class until his teachers downgraded him in order to please his envious classmates (Guo Moruo 1981, 103–105). Or when he claimed to have been the first person to correctly understand a literary passage after two thousand years, while still an adolescent (Guo Moruo 1981, 118–121). These examples reflect the general style of Guo Moruo’s Childhood, and one should not accept the text as an objective record of its time, as Doleželová-Velingerová (1964, 75) does when she writes, “he supplies the historian with valuable material on many topics, such as everyday life at the beginning of the present century”. As is the case in his Childhood, in Youth Guo Moruo likewise claims that he wishes less to write of himself than he does to describe the spirit of his time and make it intelligible. And indeed there are more – pretending – gestures toward modesty. If one believes a foreword dating from 1929, Guo Moruo recorded the years of his youth only because an anonymous letter from a reader urged him to make yet another contribution to political, social struggle, and Enlightenment, despite his own

1048 

 4 Asia

doubts about its utility (Guo Moruo 1985, 10–11). – That seems like clever propaganda, the deliberate creation of a persona. And no less a reader than Mao Zedong himself praised Youth for its realistic portrayal of Guo’s background (Guo Moruo 1985, 284, translator’s afterword). Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980), the next autobiographer to discuss, was far less political than Guo Moruo. He came to represent a group of scholars known, fittingly, as the Yigupai 疑古派  – the ‘Doubting Antiquity School’. Their primary perspective was a thoroughgoing skepticism about the authenticity of early Chinese textual records. They employed rigorous philological methods to consider the sources for and conclusions about early Chinese history, challenging anything they found dubious. In the decade and a half between 1926 and 1941, members of the ‘Doubting Antiquity School’ published some 350 essays, collected and published in seven volumes. An autobiography of Gu Jiegang, focused primarily on his education, begins the collection. Bauer (1990, 660) somewhat imprecisely describes the text as “die letzte große Autobiographie traditionellen Stils” [‘the last great autobiography in the traditional style’]. When Gu Jiegang cites his diaries and notes and even an account of himself he wrote as a twelve year old, the effect goes beyond the portrayal of an individual to reflect the spirit of that time of upheavel. The fact that Gu’s autobiography was translated into English five years later (Hummel 1931) reflects the real interest in China among Westerners of the time. Yet the text is not free of cliched elements. Gu’s description of his own precocity recalls accounts of Ge Hong and Wang Chong and is rather embarrassing: 我家是一個很老的讀書人家，他們酷望我從讀書上求上進。在提抱中的我，我的祖父就教令識 字。聽說我坐在「連抬交椅」(未能步行的小孩所坐)里已經識得許多字了；[…] 六七歲時已能 讀些唱本小說和簡明的古書。但也因為如此，弄得我遊戲的事情太少，手足很不靈敏，[…]。 [My family had for generations been interested in literary pursuits, and I was expected to advance in life by the same path. While I was yet a child in arms my grandfather taught me to differentiate the ideographs of our language, and I am told that when I was still confined by a baby-carriage and therefore unable to walk, I could recognize many of them. (…) At the age of six or seven I was reading some dramas, novels and the easier works of antiquity. Doubtless in consequence of this I did not play enough, and therefore am not as free in the use of my limbs as I should be (…).]” (Gu 1926, 5 [Hummel 1931, 5]).

The first of the two women to be considered is Chen Hengzhe 陳衡哲 (1890 or 1893–1976), known also as Sophia H. Chen and Chen Nanhua. She traveled to the United States in 1914 on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, making her one of the first Chinese women to study in the United States. Four years later she received an MA in History from the University of Chicago and immediately upon her return became the first woman to serve as professor at Peking University (Cheng 2011, 256). Years after Chen’s return home she wrote Autobiography of a Chinese Young Girl (Peiping 1935) in English. The Chinese version appeared only in 2006, decades after her death, and its relationship to the original has not been researched very well (Gimpel 2015, 146, 150).

4.4 China 

 1049

In Gimpel’s view, Chen Hengzhe sought both to provide her English-language readership with information about China and also to show the “symbolic value for her life as a representation of China’s recent history” (Gimpel 2015, 146). In the end, however, Gimpel’s evaluation of Chen Hengzhe’s autobiography is not positive: Thus her autobiography serves as a form of self-propaganda toward her foreign readers, self-confirmation at the age of forty-five, reassuring herself that she had indeed chosen the correct path and, in the selection of passages published in Chinese, as encouragement to a female readership, now being asked to return to domestic concerns, to continue to choose their own paths in life (Gimpel 2015, 150).

The final example here is Xie Bingying 謝冰瑩 (1906–2000), who, up till her death in San Fransisco after a long life, had the reputation as a young soldier. She earned this reputation with her wartime diary, which she began in 1927 upon joining the Kuomintang in its fight against ‘warlords’ in north China. Parts of the book were published already in 1940 as Girl Rebel, a further reflection of the interest in China among Americans. Even the New York Times praised it (Wang Jing 2000, 166). A more recent scholar describes it as follows: Girl Rebel is unique among the autobiographies of Xie’s contemporaries in its portrayal of Chinese women’s struggle to gain independence and freedom through the path of revolution and transgendered identity. […]. Intended for Chinese readers, Xie’s text in English translation was read as a representation of China during World War II (Wang Jing 2000, 179–180).

This unfortunately does not delve into the details of Xie Bingying’s autobiography, which present some significant difficulties. One need only examine the “Introduction” to the most recent English translation, A Woman Soldier’s Own Story (2001) to confirm this. There, Xie’s daughter and son-in-law discuss only biographical trivia and empty praise for Xie Bingyun, and say little about the history of the text. Their lack of concern about this is troubling. The first volume of A Woman Soldier’s Own Story is supposed to have been published in Shanghai in 1936, while the second was published in 1946 in Hankou. The introduction describes the process of publication in this way: Subsequently, the two volumes were combined and published in Taiwan, but the Taiwan edition omitted a number of passages that appeared in the original editions. Evidently, some passages were dropped because of aesthetic imperfections, others because they did not suit the political or moral climate in Taiwan. In our translation we have retained nearly all the original material, excluding only passages that seemed to us (and to the author) to be cumbersome. Ours is the first English translation of the entire autobiography and the last version in any language to be authorized by Xie Bingying (Brissman and Brissman 2001, xiii–xiv).

This is clearly insufficient – especially for a book published by a scholarly press. A careful reader of the book will at least need critical annotations indicating the scope and nature of the changes alluded to, as regards the Taiwan edition, the translation, and the changes made by the author herself.

1050 

 4 Asia

With weaknesses of this sort in mind, Frühauf (2001) goes through and demonstrates the considerable variations among the different editions and translations of Xie Bingying’s autobiography. These inconsistencies may be explained with reference, however vague, to “politische Überlegungen” [‘political considerations’] and personal privacy (Frühauf 2001, 153). Yet these things are not limited to Xie Bingying’s case, leading Frühauf (2001, 155) to a thought-provoking conclusion about Chinese autobio­ graphy in the first half of the twentieth century: He sees in them indications of the social changes of the time, but little evidence of the author’s intellectual or emotional involvement with those changes. For while they express support for the shifts, they never give any reasons for their support and, in particular, never depict any process of learning or rethinking, which indubitably took place. And, as if that were not enough, these autobiographies were also casual about factual accuracy, even concerning such concrete matters as dates of birth (Gálik 2001, 111).

Interviews, Self-criticism, and Coerced Accounts Little is known about the early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, which was formed in 1921. Nonetheless, it was a form of autobiography that made some of the fathers of the People’s Republic famous in the West. In particular, interviews by American journalists beginning in the late 1930s came to serve as autobiographies. They were preceded, however, by a few pioneering works, and a number of important early autobiographical accounts resulted from oral interviews, which were compiled into accounts that resembled autobiographies. The Russian dramatist Sergej Tretjakow (1892–1937) spent a number of years in Peking as a Russian teacher in the 1920s, during which time he assembled a portrayal of a particular Chinese youth. It appeared in 1930 in Russian, with a German translation following in 1932 entitled Den Schi-Chua. Tretjakow (1932) admitted freely that the interviews were in large part the result of his intervention. He was just as frank about the purpose of the book, which was to contribute to the development of a particular identity: “Chinese people who have heard sections of this book have said, ‘That is our childhood, our school, our life’ – so typical is Schi-Chua’s biography for the young intelligentsia of today” (Tretjakow 1932, 10). Ida Pruitt (1888–1985) was born in China, the daughter of American missionaries. Over two years she recorded the life story of a Chinese woman from a humble background. Yale University Press published the resulting book, The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman (Pruitt 1945). It is hard to imagine today the depth of Pruitt’s and Tretjakow’s influence on Western perceptions of China. And yet they were later far overshadowed by the American journalists Edgar Snow (1905–1972) and Helen Foster-Snow, who wrote under the pseudonym Nym Wales (1907–1997). In Red Star Over China (1937), Edgar Snow created a deeply sympathetic picture of the Chinese Communists. This was especially the case

4.4 China 

 1051

for Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who dictated his memoirs to Snow at the Communist base in Yan’an (Shaanxi). This account is an important document also because it does not spare most embarrassing stilizations and platitudes. It describes Mao Zedong’s teachers as hard, his father ill-tempered, his mother kindly. Mao was critical and selfaware and at 14 or 15 was interested only in talking about serious topics: “My friends and I preferred to talk only of large matters – the nature of men, of human society, of China, the world, and the universe!“ (Snow 1937, 145). Similar stereotyped accounts come among the records of twenty-four high-ranking Communists assembled by Helen Foster-Snow with the help of a translator over the course of five months in Yan’an during 1937. More important than the cliches are Foster-Snow’s observations about the reticence of her interlocutors: Though traditional courtesy was a convenience without which these narratives could not have been secured, I encountered another side of it which presented an obstacle difficult to surmount. The idea of autobiography seemed entirely new to these persons, and it seemed to them a violation of etiquette to individualize their personal histories and exploits (Foster-Snow 1952, ix).

Thus, Chinese Communist leaders early in their history were stingy with details, as they are today. Yet, since the beginning of the Communist movement, autobiographies and other self-critical accounts written under duress served political purposes, especially during the political campaigns that marked the early period of the People’s Republic. In this respect, deeply rooted Chinese ideas entered into an unholy alliance with the thought of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). Lenin saw self-criticism as a necessary instrument for the development of the Party and the masses. Liu Shaoqi 劉少奇 (1898–1969), who would later become president of China, developed these ideas into a new, Chinese form. His 1937 lecture “How to Be a Good Communist” eventually became required – often literally – reading and millions of copies were printed. He postulated that the Confucian requirement for daily self-examination was related to the Marxist-Leninist demand for all-round self-cultivation (Bauer 1990, 692–701). Among the famous persons who wrote such self-criticisms under the pressure of the early years of the People’s Republic, two stand out. The first of these is Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895–1990), best known for his History of Chinese Philosophy, a standard work in its field. Like Hu Shi, Chen Hengzhe and others, Feng Youlan studied in the United States under the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, receiving in 1923 his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey. After completing his studies, he returned to China. There he was repeatedly attacked, beginning in the 1950s, for his intellectual background and positions and compelled to compose self-criticisms – to the degree that in 1958 he sighed upon writing his one hundred and thirty seventh such piece (Bauer 1990, 702). Feng Youlan, at least, did not number among those intellectual self-critics forced to pay with their lives in the early People’s Republic. In the person of Aisin Gioro Puyi 愛新覺羅•溥儀 (1906–1967), the Communists found the ideal political figure through which to legitimate their policies. From 1908

1052 

 4 Asia

until 1912 and during a twelve-day restauration period in 1917, while he was still a child, Puyi was the last emperor of China. He later collaborated with the Japanese colonial authorities, and served first as president and then as emperor of the puppet state Manchukuo (1932–1945). In 1945, he was imprisoned in the Soviet Union after the defeat of the Manchus, and in 1950 he was handed over to the Chinese authorities. They detained him for years. Only when they decided that they had achieved their goal of turning the former emperor into a loyal citizen of the People’s Republic did they release him. At the end of 1959, Mao Zedong himself personally prepared the pardon, which said in part, “As a result of remoulding through labour and ideological education during his captivity he has shown that he has genuinely reformed” (Pu Yi 1987, 472). Just a few years later, in 1964, the Last Emperor of China began to publish his autobiography. It spread rapidly around the world and was translated into English and other languages, and was even turned into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1987. The autobiography’s German translator, Richard von Schirach, asks whether Puyi has become “ein Opfer brutaler Gehirnwäsche [‘the victim of brutal brainwashing’] ­(Schirach 1973, 429), being well aware of the “agitatorische Absicht des Buches” [‘fomenting intention of the book’]. Still, von Schirach refuses to declare it an “ungebrochene Propagandaschrift” [‘unabated propagandistic writing’] (Schirach 1973, 434). Indeed, Puyi’s autobiography reads most like a work of praise for the preferential treatment that Puyi – a convicted war criminal – received from the Communists. His reaction upon hearing his pardon is one of the central passages of the book: “Before I had heard this to the end I burst into tears. My motherland had made me into a man” (Pu Yi 1987, 472). The propaganda value of Puyi’s re-education was not limited to this autobiography. So thorough was his remolding that in his final years, when he was working as a gardener, Puyi was even permitted to meet with certain foreign journalists, at least with such compliant ones like Edgar Snow, whom he met at a Peking cocktail party in 1960, upon which occasion he praised the Communist government: My crime helped to cause the deaths of millions of people. I should have died for it. Instead of that I have been given a chance to repent and to work for socialist constructions. […] I cost the lives of millions. Any other country would have killed me. Instead, they have let me work at what was always my hobby – gardening (Snow 1961, 43).

Recent Developments: Fuzzy Concepts and Psychological Interpretations The 1920s and 1930s were an exceptional time for autobiography in China. Subsequent decades have seen nothing comparable and autobiographies – especially those of women – have been very few. As Wang Lingzhen (2003, 23) writes, “Modern Chinese women’s autobiographical writing […] virtually disappeared after 1949.”

4.4 China 

 1053

Recent literary criticism and literary history in China makes little distinction between autobiography and fiction, a development perhaps related to the decline of the former. When literary scholarship differentiates – or claims to, at least – it demonstrates a marked preference for some fuzzy notions. In her study of fictional autobiography, Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China, Wang Lingzhen (2004, 12) differentiates between zizhuanxing wenxue 自傳性文學 and “autobiography per se”: “All the texts I study in this book can be characterized as zizhuanxing wenxue, a useful and conventional Chinese term denoting autobiographical literature but not necessarily autobiography per se. They are diverse in genre […] and imaginative in nature, but they center on a self in the text.” A striking example of unclear terms comes in Martin and Hase-Bergen’s anthology, Bittere Träume. Selbstdarstellungen chinesischer Schriftsteller (1993) [Modern Chinese Writers’s: Self-Portrayals, Martin and Kinkley 1992], in which the notion chuangzuotan 創作談 is central. What does the term mean? In a foreword – absent from the English edition – it is variously translated as “autobiographische Essays” [‘autobiographical essays’] and “Bemerkungen über den kreativen Prozess” [‘remarks about the cre­ ative process’] (Martin 1993, vi). Chuangzuotan is supposed to denote “mannigfaltige Inhalte” [‘various contents’ (Martin 1993, vi), and a style more common in the People’s Republic than among Taiwanese authors. They include autobiographical reports about things such as the origins and courses of literary careers, about the conditions under which certain works were created, and notes about how those works were received. Martin hastens to add that critical readers in China give these little credence, saying, “[n]irgendwo wurde mehr geflunkert und geschönt als in derartigen Texten” [‘[n]owhere else is there more fibbing and sugarcoating than in this type of text’] (Martin 1993, vi). There is little enough to go on here. Unsatisfactory is also secondary literature in English and German, which often uses psychology to interpret twentieth century Chinese autobiographies. Frühauf, for instance, suggests three motives for the composition of Xie Bingying’s autobiography mentioned above: economic considerations and political motives, in that she wanted to show herself not to be in the leftist camp. Third, Frühauf suggests that Xie Bingying sought to at least partly overcome her feelings of disappointment by writing the story of her life (Frühauf 2001, 148–150). These things are a bit vague, and Wang Jing is similarly equivocal in the following evaluation of autobiography in the People’s Republic: [I]n the early post-Mao era, memoirs of the Cultural Revolution were written and read – if only as a cathartic relief of the collective memory of a past trauma. Two well-known texts […] were published when China engaged in a heated political discussion called “The yardstick of truth is practice” (實踐是檢驗真理的標準 shijian shi jianyan zhenli de biaozhun) […]. Under such circumstances, both reading and writing of autobiographies became acts of political correctness in their cathartic telling of truth (Wang Jing 2000, 2).

More sophisticated is Jeffrey C. Kinkley’s “Autobiography as Therapy” (2001), a study of Xiao Qian’s writings. At the same time, however, it demonstrates the difficulties

1054 

 4 Asia

inherent in transcultural psychological interpretation. Xiao Qian 萧乾 (1910–1999) was a journalist, essayist, and translator. He spent years in England before returning to China after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, at which time he broke off all contact with the wider world – even forcing his wife to break with her sister, who was living in the US. During the Cultural Revolution, Xiao Qian was criticized as a rightist. In the 1980s he began to create autobiographical texts in the form of essays and forewords appended to new editions of his works. While Xiao Qian himself deemed these “self analysis” (Kinkley 2001, 161), Kinkley sees in Xiao’s texts both political commitment and belated self-criticism: Xiao Qian delivers subtle and unsubtle reproofs to the dictatorship of China, he is also criticising himself for having put up with it. His biggest problem of self-accounting is to explain why he returned to China that so mistreated and misused him (Kinkley 2001, 165).

Kinkley’s reference to “subtle and unsubtle reproofs” alludes to the difficulty of understanding criticism within a particular culture, with its demands for specific forms. With regard to that and to the the difficulty of psychological interpretation a final example shall be considered. Yang Jiang 楊絳 (1911–2016) and her husband Qian Zhongshu liuji 錢鍾書 (1910–1998) were already well-known scholars and authors when they were removed from their positions at Academia Sinica in Peking at the height of the Cultural Revolution (1969–1970). They were sent to a rural school for cadres operated under military oversight and in this they shared the fate of millions of their contemporaries. Yet they were exceptional in that their record of their experiences was published as a memoir by Yang Jiang, with an accompanying foreword by Qian Zhongshu. Ganxiao liuji 幹校六記 [Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder” 1984] was published in 1981, and the English translation appeared soon thereafter. The result was worldwide recognition for Yang and Qian. Yang Jiang’s retrospective does neither bemoan the suffering that she and those like her underwent, the years of their lives that were lost, nor does she offer a scholarly analysis. Howard Goldblatt, who translated her Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder”, in fact attests just the opposite: “The author has chosen to describe life in a cadre school by recounting relatively insignificant and commonplace events” (Yang Jiang 1984, 99–100). Yet he tells us that it would be inaccurate to see Yang’s work as avoiding the greater matters: Several features emerge from her quiet, matter-of-fact narrative. One is the mutual distrust and general incompatibility between China’s urban intellectuals […] and the peasants who were their ‘masters’ […]. Another recurrent theme is waste – particularly the waste of human talent” (Yang Jiang 1984, 101).

Goldblatt is a sensitive reader and an expert on modern Chinese literature. He interprets Yang Jiang’s account as “a love story, which, while describing a society in one of its darkest historical moments, reaffirms the endurance of humanity” (Yang Jiang 1984, 101). If one is to follow that line of interpretation, one must grant that Chinese culture masters criticism in a soft tone.

4.4 China 

 1055

But just how loudly criticism can ring, however, is clear from Qian Zhongshu’s foreword to the book. Building on the striking resemblance of the title Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder” to that of the Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu, which was introduced above, Qian offers titles for the accounts that other participants – willing or not – might have written. In doing so, he delivers a harsh judgement about the effects of the Cultural Revolution and other mass campaigns in China: 在这次运动里，如同在历次运动里，少不了有三类人。假如要写回忆的话，当时在运动里受冤 枉 […] 的同志们也许会来一篇《记屈》或《记愤》。至于一般群众呢，回忆时大约都得写《记 愧》[…]。也有一种人，他们[…]充当旗手[…]。按道理说，这类人最应当“记愧”。不过，他们很 可能既不记忆在心，也无愧怍于心。 [In this political campaign, as in all that preceded it, at least three types of people emerged. If the comrades who suffered under unjust accusations (…) were to write an account of this campaign, they might title it “A Record of Grievances” or “A Record of Resentments.” As to the masses in general, in reminiscing, they might feel constrained to call theirs “A Record of Shame”. The third type of person persisted in serving as flag-wavers (…). These people should logically have the greatest need to write “A Record of Shame,” but quite likely they have no recollection of what they did and feel no remorse over it. They may have forgotten the past precisely because of a sense of shame, or because they are impervious to shame] (Qian 1981, 1–2 [Yang Jiang 1984, 2]).

Such criticism rings loud indeed. Last, but not least: It is worth to mention that, in 1999, the International Auto/ Biography Association (IABA) was founded in China (https://sites.google.com/ ualberta.ca/iaba/home). 

Translation: Charles Sanft

Works Cited Bao pu zi neipian jiaoshi 抱朴子內篇校釋. Coll. and comm. Wang Ming 王明. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996. Bao pu zi waipian jiaojian 抱朴子外篇校箋. Coll. and comm. Yang Mingzhao 楊明照. 2 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997, 2004. Bauer, Wolfgang. “Icherleben und Autobiographie im Älteren China.” Heidelberger Jahrbücher 8 (1964): 12–40. Bauer, Wolfgang. Das Antlitz Chinas. Die autobiographische Selbstdarstellung in der chinesischen Literatur von ihren Anfängen bis heute. München/Wien: Hanser, 1990. Bodde, Derk. Peking Diary. A Year of Revolution. New York: Henry Schuman, 1950. Brissman, Barry, and Lily Chia Brissman. “Introduction.” A Woman Soldier’s Own Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ix–xiv. Brokaw, Cynthia Joanne. The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Cao Xueqin. A Dream of Red Mansions. 3 vols. Trans. Hsien-Yi Yang and Gladys Yang. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1978, 1980. Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹, Gao E 高鹗. Hongloumeng 红楼梦. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1988.

1056 

 4 Asia

Cheng Tieniu. “Writing Women’s Experiences in the Early Twentieth Century China: A Study of Chen Hengzhe’s Autobiography.” International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology 1.3 (2011): 255–265. Confucius. The Analects. Trans. D.C. Lau. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2000. Doleželová-Velingerová, Milena. “Kuo Mo-jo’s Autobiographical Works.” Studies in Modern Chinese Literature. Ed. Jaroslav Průšek. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1964. 45–75. Doleželová-Velingerová, Milena, and Lubomír Doležel. “An Early Chinese Confessional Prose: Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life.” T’oung Pao 58 (1972): 137–160. Dooling, Amy D. Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Du Lianzhe 杜聯喆. Mingren zizhuan wenchao 明人自傳文鈔 [‘Anthology of Ming Autobiographies’]. Taibei: yinshuguan, 1977. Findeisen, Raoul David. “Autobiographie als Collage – ‚Tragischer Lebenslauf‘ von Bai Wei.” China in seinen biographischen Dimensionen. Gedenkschrift für Helmut Martin. Ed. Christina Neder, Heiner Roetz and Ines-Susanne Schilling. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001. 113–127. Foster Snow, Helen, alias Nym Wales. Red Dust. Autobiographies of Chinese Communists as Told to Nym Wales, with an Introduction by Robert Carver North. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952. Frühauf, Manfred W. Frühformen der chinesischen Autobiographie. Frankfurt/Bern/New York/Paris: Lang, 1987. Frühauf, Manfred W. “Betrachtungen zu Xie Bingying und ihrer ‚Autobiographie einer Soldatin‘.” China in seinen biographischen Dimensionen. Gedenkschrift für Helmut Martin. Ed. Christina Neder, Heiner Roetz and Ines-Susanne Schilling. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001. 141–156. Gálik, Marián. “Autobiography in Flux: On Two Problematic Spots in Mao Dun’s Self-Portraits.” China in seinen biographischen Dimensionen. Gedenkschrift für Helmut Martin. Ed. Christina Neder, Heiner Roetz and Ines-Susanne Schilling. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001. 105–112. Gimpel, Denise. Chen Hengzhe: A Life between Orthodoxies. Lanham/Boulder/New York/London: Lexington Books, 2015. Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛. Gushi bian 古史辨. Vol. I. Beiping: Jingshan shushe, 1926. Guo Dengfeng 郭登峯, ed. Lidai zixuzhuan wenchao 歷代自敍傳文鈔 [‘Anthology of Autobiographies Throughout the Ages’]. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936. Guo Moruo. Kindheit. Autobiographie. Trans. Ingo Schäfer. Frankfurt: Insel, 1981. Guo Moruo. Jugend. Autobiographie. Vol. II. Trans. Ingo Schäfer. Frankfurt: Insel, 1985. Guo Moruo 郭沫若. Shaonian shidai 少年時代. Shanghai: Xin wenyi chubanshe, 1957. Hawkes, David. “Introduction.” The Golden Days. The Story of the Stone, A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin. Vol. I. Trans. David Hawkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. 15–46. Hsia, C. T. [Chih-tsing]. The Classical Chinese Novel. A Critical Introduction. New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1968. Hsieh Pingying [Xie Bingying]. Girl Rebel, the Autobiography of Hsieh Pingying, with Extracts from her New War Diaries; Translated by Adet and Anor Lin, with an Introduction by Lin Yutang. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 (First Edition: New York: John Day, 1940). Hsu, Francis L.K. “Traditional Culture in Contemporary China: Continuity and Change in Values.” Moving a Mountain: Cultural Change in China. Ed. Godwin C. Chu and Francis L. K. Hsu. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1979. 259–279. Hu Zhi 胡直. “Kunxue ji” 困學記. Mingru xue’an 明儒學案. 2 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985. Vol. 2, 519–526. Huang, Martin W. Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the EighteenthCentury Chinese Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Huineng. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. The Text of the Tun-huang Manuscript with

4.4 China 

 1057

Translation, Introduction, and Notes by Philip B. Yampolsky. New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1967. Hummel, Arthur W. The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian. Being the Preface to a Symposium on Ancient Chinese History. Leiden: Brill, 1931. Kinkley, Jeffrey C. “Xiao Qian: Autobiography as Therapy.” China in seinen biographischen Dimensionen. Gedenkschrift für Helmut Martin. Ed. Christina Neder, Heiner Roetz and Ines-Susanne Schilling. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001. 157–166. Ko Hung. Alchemy, Medicine, Religion in the China of A.  D. 320: The Nei P’ien of Ko Hung (Pao-p’u tzu). Trans. James R. Ware. Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 1966. Koh, Byongik. “Zur Werttheorie in der chinesischen Historiographie auf Grund des Shih-T’ung des Liu Chih-Chi (661–721), II. Teil: Übersetzungen aus dem Shih-t’ung.” Oriens Extremus V.2 (1957): 125–181. Larson, Wendy. Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1991. Lee, Leo Ou-fan. The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973. Levering, Miriam. “Was There Religious Autobiography in China before the Thirteenth Century? The Ch’an Master Ta-hui Tsung-kao (1089–1163) as Autobiographer.” Journal of Chinese Religions 30 (2002): 97–122. Li Qingzhao 李清照, Wang Xuechu 王學初 (Coll. and Comm.). Li Qingzhao jiaozhu 李清照集校注. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979. Martin, Helmut. “Dreidimensionalität als Oberfläche. Chinas Schriftsteller, Chinas Intellektuelle.” Bittere Träume. Selbstdarstellungen chinesischer Schriftsteller. Bonn: Bouvier, 1993. Martin, Helmut, and Stefan Hase-Bergen, eds. Bittere Träume. Selbstdarstellungen chinesischer Schriftsteller. Bonn: Bouvier, 1993 [Martin, Helmut, and Jeffrey Kinkley, eds. Modern Chinese Writers. Self-Portrayals. Armonk/London: M.E. Sharpe, 1992]. Misch, Georg. “Die autobiographische letzte Kundgebung der chinesischen Herrscher.” Inter­natio­ nale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 3.35 (1909): 1133–1142. Ng, Janet. The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Owen, Stephen. Remembrances. The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1986. Pruitt, Ida. A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman from the Story Told Her by Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai (1945). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967. Pu Yi. Ich war Kaiser von China: Vom Himmelssohn zum neuen Menschen. Ed. and trans. Richard von Schirach and Mulan Lehner. München: Hanser, 1973. Pu Yi. From Emperor to Citizen. The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi. Trans. W.J.F. Jenner. Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Qian Zhongshu 钱钟书. “Xiaoyin” 小引. Ganxiao liuji 干校六记. Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1981. i-iii. Roddy, Stephen J. Literati Identity and its Fictional Representations in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Sailey, Jay. The Master Who Embraces Simplicity. A Study of the Philosopher Ko Hung, A.  D. 283–343. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1978. Sakai, Tadao. “Confucianism and Popular Educational Works.” Self and Society in Ming Thought. New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1970. 331–366. Schirach, Richard von. “Nachwort.” Ich war Kaiser von China: Vom Himmelssohn zum neuen Menschen. München: Hanser, 1973. 427–434.

1058 

 4 Asia

Schirokauer, Conrad. “Das Antlitz Chinas: Die Autobiographische Selbstdarstellung in der chine­ sischen Literatur von ihren Anfängen bis Heute, by Wolfgang Bauer. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1990. P.p. 918. Notes, Appendix, Bibliography, Index, List of Chinese Characters.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 15 (1993): 193–197. Shen Fu. Six Records of a Floating Life. Trans. Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Shen Sanbai 沈三白 (i.  e. Fu 復). Fusheng liuji 浮生六記. Comm. and coll. by Tao Xunruo 套恂若 and Wang Guanshi 王關仕. Taibei: Sanmin shuju, 2003. Snow, Edgar. Red Star Over China. London: Victor Gollancz, 1937. Snow, Edgar. The Other Side of the River. Red China Today. New York: Random House, 1961. Stoll, Luise. Das Niän Pu. Eine Untersuchung zu den literarischen Formen chinesischer Biographien. Darmstadt: Wittich’sche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1935. Struve, Lynn A. “Deqing’s Dreams: Signs in a Reinterpretation of His Autobiography.” Journal of Chinese Religions 40 (2012): 1–44. Tretjakow, Sergej. Den Schi-Chua. Ein junger Chinese erzählt sein Leben. Berlin: Malik, 1932. // Alternatively: S. Tretjakow. Den Schi-Chua. Die Geschichte eines chinesischen Revolutionärs. Berlin: Universum-Bücherei für alle, 1932. Wang Ji 王畿. Wang Longxi quanji 王龙溪全集. Vol. 3. Taibei: Huawen shuju, 1970. Wang Jing. “Strategies of Modern Chinese Women Writer’s Autobiography.” Diss. Ohio State U, 2000. Wang Lingzhen. Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Wang Yangming. Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yangming. Translated, with Notes by Wing-tsit Chan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Wang Yangming 王陽明. Wang Yangming quanji 王陽明全集. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006. Wang Yuan 王元. Zhuanji xue 傳記學. Guangzhou: Guoli Zhongshan daxue, 1948. Wells, Matthew: “Self as Historical Artifact: Ge Hong and Early Chinese Autobiographical Writing.” Early Medieval China 9 (2003): 71–103. Wu Pei-yi. The Confucian’s Progress. Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Xie Bingying [Hsieh Pingying]. A Woman Soldier’s Own Story: The Autobiography of Xie Bingying. Trans. Lily Chia Brissman and Barry Brissman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Yang Jiang 杨绛. Ganxiao liuji 干校六记. Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1981. Yang Jiang. Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder”. Trans. Howard Goldblatt. Seattle/London: University of Washington Press; Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984.

4.5 Japan

Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit Throughout Japan’s long and continuous literary history, which can be traced back to the earliest extant written texts from the early eighth century, there existed various forms of autobiographical writing, including some of the most canonical texts through the centuries. In practically all periods, there are numerous genres which can be categorized as forms of autobiography. There is, however, no single traditional term under which to subsume these different literary forms. The terms 自伝 (jiden) meaning ‘self-biography’, or 自叙伝 (jijoden, literally: self-told biography), as an alternative coinage are taken to be modern translations of the Western term ‘autobiography’, as it was introduced into Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century (Saeki 1977), even though the word jiden itself, based on the Chinese term zizhuan, had existed in Japan since the tenth century, and jijoden can be found since the fifteenth century (Schamoni 2016, 4). ‘Autobiography’, therefore, is not a category which is traditionally applied to Japanese pre-modern texts, and in spite of the large corpus of pre-modern and modern works which can be grouped under this rubric, practically no systematic research has been conducted on autobiography, even though many of these works and genres have been studied extensively.

Terminological Issues and Contexts Instead of ‘autobiography’, which is often based, albeit unconsciously, on a European notion of the term, it would be wiser to speak of ‘autobiographical writing’, or even use some of the more recent general notions like ‘life writing’, ‘life narratives’, or ‘self narratives’ in the case of Japan with its large number of different genres potentially falling into this category. A notion like ‘first person writing’, as it has been suggested recently (Ruggiu 2013) would not be applicable to the Japanese case with its wide range of linguistic possibilities to express agency and subject. For strategical and practical reasons, the term ‘autobiography’ is retained here and is used in the wider sense of autobiographical writing to indicate its function as an umbrella term for a larger scale of styles and forms of writing the self in Japan. Strictly speaking, autobiography as a genre proper was established in the late Meiji period, from the 1910s, even though various other autobiographical genres like 年譜 (nenpu, annals) or ‘memoir’ (回想, kaisō or 回想録, kaisōroku) continue to exist alongside jiden. ‘Memoir’ also functions as another alternative modern term for autobiography, without a systematic distinction from jiden or jijoden. The task of this overview will be a tentative synchronic and diachronic mapping of genres of self-writing through Japan’s literary history. We understand autobiography in a Japanese context as an autonomous text, in which a person records his or her experiences over a larger span of his or her life https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-105

1060 

 4 Asia

in retrospect with the intention of drawing a coherent picture of this life, composed in Chinese or in Japanese, in prose or in lyrical forms (Schamoni 2016). Other genres like日記 (nikki, diaries or personal memoir), 紀行文 (kikō or kikōbun, travel literature) or 随筆 (zuihitsu, miscellanies) also count among self-writing in the sense that they are records by individuals thematizing single events or a relatively brief span in the author’s life in relative temporal proximity to its subject matter. Research in Japanese and in Western languages has tended to focus on these latter genres, as they are more accessible and better documented because of their long history and canonical status in Japan, although traditionally they have not been the object of research under the rubric of autobiography. In general, categorizations in pre-modern or ‘classical’ Japanese literature are difficult if they rely on genre designations in the title of works, as these may differ according to the various versions handed down. Thus, nikki (diaries) are usually distinguished from 物語 (monogatari, narrative, epic tale), but the famous Ise monogatari [Tales of Ise], a tenth century prose narrative centering on poems (uta-monogatari, with uta standing for lyric, poem), has nikki in the title of another version (Zaigo Chūjō nikki [The Narihira Diary]). There is a clear distinction, however, in linguistic form between 漢文 (kanbun, literature composed in Chinese) and和文 (wabun, in Japanese). The adaptation of Chinese writing and literature in scriptless Japan around the fifth century formed the basis of a written literature in Japan, which developed since the Eighth Century. Kanbun was used since ancient times for administrative, diplomatic, legislative and historiographical purposes and was the notational style of (male) aristocrats, bureaucrats and Buddhist clergy, and in the Early Modern period of scholars. Whereas kanbun was predominantly the mode for factual purposes, wabun, which was developed out of Chinese script as a complex mixture of syllabaries and (Chinese) characters through several stages, served as the mode for ‘belles lettres’, to use this notion for want of an appropriate term in the sense of the most esteemed ‘classical’ genres in the order of lyric, (prose) narrative, and drama. There is a gender bias inherent in many pre-modern genres, most visible in the choice of language, which correlates, however, with certain genres, as explained above. This is the reason for the widespread notion that pre-modern Japanese literature is basically feminine, as many of the most highly appreciated, canonical works dating from the Heian period (794–1185) were of female authorship.

Classical Genres – ‘Diaries’ and ‘Memoirs’ (nikki), Travel Diaries (kikōbun), and Miscellanies (zuihitsu) In dealing with pre-modern nikki (also, in early times, read niki), it is essential to stress discrepancies with a Western understanding of ‘diary’. While nikki refers to day-to-day records of individuals or institutions (Tsuchida 1984), Heian nikki may not be defined

4.5 Japan 

 1061

by auto-biographical or confessional qualities but by the fact that they all depict the personal life of a historical personage (Shirane 1987). Private journals by aristocrats, centering on life at the court, or reports of travels and expeditions, such as the journey of monk Ennin to China in 838 CE, were typical of the formal and official character of nikki written in Chinese (kanbun). Interestingly, the first example of literary prose set exclusively in Japanese is the Tosa no niki [Tosa Diary (1976)] written in 935 CE by Ki no Tsurayuki (d. 946 CE), a prominent male poet and official. He provocatively opens with the statement: 男もすなる日記といふものを、女もしてみむとて、する なり。 [“I intend to see whether a woman can produce one of those diaries men are said to write”] ([Miyake 1996, 41 after McCullough, 263]). The author had been governor of the province of Tosa in Southern Japan between 930 CE and 934 CE, and the text relates the voyage back to the capital of Heiankyō, later named ‘Kyōto’, in the form of chronological diary entries, suggesting authenticity and immediacy of experience, even though it has to be assumed that he put down the text only after his arrival. What is more, he writes from the perspective of a fictive female co-traveler, giving him narrative license and thereby inventing a new narrative voice, recorded in the hiragana syllabary, which was used by women and was therefore also termed onnade [‘woman’s hand’]. The Tosa Diary is regarded as the origin of several genres such as the kikōbun [literary travel diary] and nikki [memoirs in the form of chronological notes], which unfolded during the aristocratic and art-minded Heian period and form an unbroken tradition into the present. The Tosa Diary oscillates between factuality as a historic travel account and clear fictionalization in its literary composition, interweaving prose and lyrics which structure the text, forming narrative and emotional peaks, and alternating between the sublime and the banal. Posing as a woman allowed the author-narrator a higher degree of intimacy, individuality, and originality. The contemporary readership certainly understood the gender play, but it creates a certain tension in the process of reading. Linguistically as well as concerning voice, gender positions overlap (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 2001). Marilyn Jeanne Miller, who devoted a systematic study to Japanese autobiographical literature from a comparative-literature perspective (Miller 1985, 1987), speaks of nikki bungaku [“literary diaries”] when discussing a number of texts from the golden age of Japanese classical literature, starting with the Tosa Diary and Kagerō nikki [The Gossamer Years] until the early fourteenth century. This terminology is criticized by other scholars who maintain that ‘nikki bungaku’ is not a historical term, but a modern coinage, which lumps together works belonging to different genres or categories (Shirane 1987). On the other hand, we have seen that a work may be assigned to different categories depending on the textual variant or tradition, and genre boundaries easily tend to be breached. This even applies to the boundaries between poetry and narrative, as Japanese epics are typically interspersed with poetry, and genres like 俳文 (haibun), prose compositions by 俳諧 (haikai) poets, usually come with haikai stanzas. The criterion of historical personage recording, in a chronological manner, events in his or her life, applies to the most highly esteemed works of the nikki group,

1062 

 4 Asia

including the ‘diaries’ of middle- and lower-ranked noblewomen such as Murasaki Shikibu (d. ?1014 CE), the author of the famous Genji monogatari [Tale of Genji], as well as Fujiwara Michitsuna no haha, wife of a major court figure and author of the Kagerō nikki, which she purportedly began to write in 974 CE. This latter work in three parts covers the period 954 to 974, and is regarded as the oldest extant female ‘diary’ in Japanese literature. In her preface, the author explicitly contrasts her work as a real-life story to the ‘invented’ narrations of the preceding monogatari literature, describing it as ‘a diary concerning myself only’. The Gossamer Years centers on her frustrating relationship with her easygoing husband, for whose affections she strives in vain. Stylistically, it deviates from the diary form with regular chronological entries in that it is a first-person narrative in an elegant and verbose diction with inserted poems and with a remarkable psychological acuteness. At the same time, it is the factuality and detailed accuracy that sets her notes apart from other classics of its kind. According to Konishi, The Gossamer Years shares features with much later realistic novels, and it exerted considerable influence on later Japanese narrative (Konishi 1986, 267). The Murasaki Shikibu nikki [‘Diary of Murasaki Shikibu’] likewise does not use daily entries and covers only a brief period, from autumn 1008 to the beginning of 1010. The text did not survive in its entirety and seems to have been revised more than once to form an integral unit. It deals with life at the court in a long section describing the birth and surrounding events of Empress Shōshi’s children, and chronicles interactions between ladies-in-waiting and female court writers in the form of vignettes which reveal the author’s own emotions and feelings. Linguistically, it is a fine example of the new style developed by court women from the spoken language to express the self in a more flexible written style (Bowring 2005). Murasaki’s literary ‘rivals’, Izumi Shikibu (?974–?) and Sei Shōnagon (b.? 966), the author of the famous Makura no sōshi [Pillow Book], likewise contributed to the extraordinary reputation of the literature of female ‘diarists’ from the Heian period. The date and authorship of the Izumi Shikibu nikki [‘Diary of Izumi Shikibu’] is uncertain, but the work is usually thought to be by Izumi Shikibu, the greatest poet of her time and famous for her large number of lovers. The story centers on the narrator’s romance with Prince Atsumichi (d. 1007 CE), from her first exchange of poems with him through the secret love affair until, after several twists, the lady moves into the Prince’s palace. The prose is stylistically uneven and does not match the brilliance of the poetry sections. Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, completed in 1002, is fundamentally impossible to categorize (Miner, Odagiri and Morrell 1985, 227). It is usually regarded the prime exemplar of zuihitsu [literally: following the writing brush, miscellany], a sequence of miscellaneous jottings − observations, reflections, or feelings in an apparently casual way. The text, consisting of 300 or more paragraphs, according to the respective textual line, contains three sorts of contributions, namely lists of matters, for example ‘distasteful things’, reflections, and diary-like memoirs. The author’s wit, perceptiveness, and her subjective presence in these notes, sketches, anecdotes, and biographical information of all areas of human life make this highly individual work a rich

4.5 Japan 

 1063

historical source as well as a superb literary creation, which ranks among the highest throughout Japanese literary history. While it is certainly inspired by the nikki mode, it has to be left to a more systematic approach to decide in which way the genre of zuihitsu, with other canonical samples such as Kamo no Chōmei’s (1155–1216) Hōjōki (ca. 1212) [An Account of My Hut] or Yoshida Kenkō’s (ca. 1283 – ca. 1352) Tsurezuregusa (1330–1331) [Essays in Idleness], can be categorized as autobiographical writing. As mentioned earlier, in the context of Japanese literature, this and the other genres discussed here are not studied according to their character as autobiographical literature. The Sarashina nikki [‘Sarashina Diary’] (ca. 1060 CE) was written by the Daughter of Sugawara Takasue, Sugawara Takasue no musume (b. 1008), whose aunt was the author of the Gossamer Years. The Sarashina Diary is one of the few Japanese literary diaries or memoirs that cover substantially a whole life, beginning in the autumn when the author was twelve, and going on for a year or so after her husband’s death, when she was in her late fifties. The text, written down assumedly without recourse to a diary, records in chronological order, but hardly ever giving dates, stages of her life based on memory. Factual events are interwoven with digressions on love of literature, religious views, dream experiences, and observations on character. Like other contemporary works by women, it contains numerous poems. Because of its several travel accounts, the work is sometimes also categorized as a kikōbun [travel diary]. Among the later noted monuments of female nikki from the Kamakura period (1185–1333) are the nun Abutsu’s (d. 1283) Izayoi nikki [The Diary of the Waning Moon], an account of the author’s journey to the bakufu in Kamakura in 1280 on behalf of her sons’ disputes, including many poems, and her memoir Utatane [Fitful Slumbers], written around 1240 and dealing with her first love affair before marrying. Lady-inwaiting Gofukakusa In Nijō (b. 1258) covers several decades of her life in a work she termed Towazugatari [‘A Tale Nobody Asked For’], translated as The Confessions of Lady Nijō. The -gatari of the title cuts across conventional categories, as katari or monogatari, the traditional word for ‘narrative’, should be about someone other than oneself, and be told in the past tense (perfect aspect) (Miner, Odagiri and Morrell 1985, 346). Yet in a number of cases such as this, the opposition to nikki and kikō is thus blurred and alerts us to the fact that these categories are not exclusive and are based on conventional distinctions, not on scholarly definitions. Nevertheless, this work in five parts is treated as a nikki in literary histories, beginning in 1271, when Nijō, aged 14, is given to Emperor Go-Fukakusa as a concubine, narrating frankly life at the court with its endless amorous intrigues, and continuing after her expulsion from the court in 1283 as a nun in books four and five until 1306. It resembles in style that of the diaries kept by women of the Heian court three hundred years before. The immediate impulse for writing these confessions may have been the need Nijō felt to record her pilgrimages, although the first three books do not suggest that she repented for her sins (Keene 1993, 844). The author-narrator’s outspokenness, however, allows readers to see her gradual personal development, from the innocent young woman who has

1064 

 4 Asia

been raped by Gofukakusa to the detached, worldly-wise observer of her later years. Clearly, this memoir is written to a larger part in retrospect, thus not conforming to a diary pattern, but like the Kagerō nikki and the Sarashina nikki and other works, it is a first- or third-person account of the author’s life over a lengthy period of time and thus resembles the pattern of typical Western autobiographies (Walker 2010, 209). The great range in subject matter, manner of narration, stated intentions, form and style within the group of texts termed nikki once again alerts us to the difficulty of identifying clear-cut genre categories. Janet Walker distinguishes three types of nikki, translating the term as “fictionalized memoir” or “poetic memoir”, the first one being the aforementioned type similar to a conventional Western understanding of autobiography, ranging from about one hundred to about three hundred pages in length, often in a mixed first- and third-person point of view. A second type of nikki covers a briefer period of the author’s life, such as the Izumi Shikibu nikki. A third variety of nikki is one that “reveals strong links with the traditions of history and biography and gives as well a sense of the author’s personality” (Walker 2010, 210), with the Murasaki Shikibu nikki as a major example. Walker sorts out the Tosa nikki, which, as we have seen, deviates from the pattern of identity of author with narrator, and the Izumi Shikibu nikki, with its unclear authorship and a “somewhat omniscient point of view” as borderline cases and concludes that, while most nikki are autobiographical in the Western sense, some are not (Walker 2010, 211). The kikō, or travel account, is “a nikki that focuses on the life of a particular historical person in the context of a journey that he or she has taken” (Walker 2010, 212). Travel records were also written in Chinese (kanbun), but have traditionally been regarded too prosaic and matter-of-fact to be considered of interest in a literary context. The earliest sample of nikki, the Tosa Diary, is also regarded as the origin of the kikō, which flourished in the centuries following the high tide of court ladies literature. Overlaps are inevitable, as can be seen by the example of some of the works introduced before such as the Sarashina Diary or the Confessions of Lady Nijō. There are, according to Herbert Plutschow, about seventy travel records written between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries that have been edited, but Konishi hints at a much larger number of woodblock prints or manuscripts. The travel accounts can be divided into two kinds, those written on command by poets for the emperor or some other high-ranking person linked to the imperial court, as a kind of official record of a journey, and those written voluntarily by hermits and lay-priests recording a journey undertaken for personal, often spiritual reasons (Walker 2010, 212, after Plutschow 2006, 7).

Among the latter is a series of five kikō by Matsuo Bashō (1640–1694), the noted haikai poet, written between 1685 and 1692. The most famous of the texts is the last in the series titled Oku no hosomichi [The Narrow Road to the Deep North], recording his walking-tour with one of his disciples, Kawai Sora (1649–1710), through the Northeastern provinces in 1689. Bashō records experiences, encounters, reflections and

4.5 Japan 

 1065

impressions of all kinds in varying density, sometimes aphoristically, each episode culminating in a haikai, which captures the travel sketches in images of epigrammatic conciseness (Lewin 1965, 271). The interweaving of prose and poetry is typical of earlier travel and nikki literature, but is intensified here, forming a model of haibun, or haikai writing, a prose composition with haikai stanzas, which turned into a model for generations to come, as did the travel route with its meisho, or ‘famous places’. Poet Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), a farmer’s son from the province of Shinano near the Japan Sea, who led a poor vagrant life, contributed to the genre a number of diaries, which combine nikki and kikō, most notably his Ora ga haru (1819–1820), translated as The Year of My Life. This haikai diary delineates in chronological order the author’s experiences and reflections during the course of the year 1819, including his travel to the North, his daughter’s death, his mother’s love, and stories of plants and animals. Motifs of aging, love of children and compassion with nature abound, and the text is marked by spontaneity and closeness to everyday life. From a literary-aesthetic point of view, these kikō that reveal an evolving spiritual self are outstanding examples of a genre, which was very popular among the contemporary readership knowledgeable about the Buddhist practices underlying the religious pilgrimages, the poetic traditions, and the famous places mentioned in the works. They read kikō also for practical reasons such as information about routes and localities. In the Edo period (1603–1867), travelogues served many purposes. Herbert Plutschow, who claims that there was something of a “Japanese enlightenment movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (2006, 44), due to what he sees as “conditions similar to Europe”, shows in his anthology of travelogues by figures as diverse as scholars, artists, merchants, or physicians a new intellectual stance of curiosity coupled with a critical and realistic mind and a new ‘seeing’ liberated from previous restrictions.

Other Genres in Pre-Modern Literature – Beyond Canonized Forms Some researchers, most notably Wolfgang Schamoni, prefer a tighter definition of pre-modern Japanese autobiography, hinting at the problem that the inclusion of genres as diverse as nikki, kikō, and zuihitsu and sub-groups such as haibun not only poses serious definitional problems, given the fluidity of conventional genre names in pre-modern times, but also because the genres mentioned cover a large portion of extant texts, adding to the difficulty of assessing and systematizing such a huge literary landscape, which grew exponentially during the Edo period. Schamoni therefore suggests a different grid of genres beyond the canonized literary forms. He distinguishes altogether six established forms of writing about one’s self in the Early Modern period (Schamoni 2001, 2016; see also Árokay 2012). The 覚書 (oboegaki, notes to remember,

1066 

 4 Asia

memorandum) is a relatively open group of texts written in Japanese, preferably in a more formal style, the so-called sōrōbun [correspondence style]. Addressees are the author’s children or heirs; the texts follow the chronology of life and may contain genealogical notes. They may also be addressed at feudal lords and take the form of a petition. Scholar and strategist Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685) wrote Haisho zanpitsu [‘Legacy from Exile’] (1675) for fear of dying after nine years of exile, appealing to his descendants, begging for recognition of his deeds and his career and declaring his notes as a guideline for his successor. The text was not meant for publication but was given, together with his testament, to a subordinate. Scholar-bureaucrat Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725) equally produced his well-known Oritaku shiba no ki (1716) [Told Round a Brushwood Fire (1980)] in a politically tenuous situation as a self-justification and as a warning to the young shogun not to trust dishonest friends (Árokay 2012, 126). Likewise, the author’s own personal development does not form the skeleton of the story but biographical information is woven into the text. In the first and most personal of altogether three chapters, the author’s father forms the rhetorical center, as the motivation for writing down the text is drawn from his father’s refusal to hand down his family history, and yet the parents are presented as models. This text, like ‘Legacy from Exile’, apologizes for lacking formal rigor and stresses that, as it is not addressed to outsiders, confidential information was included in an attempt to hand down to posteriority insider knowledge accessible only to himself as a confidant of the former shogun. The group of家訓 (kakun, family book/house or lineage book) is intended as instruction to heirs, offsprings and successors. Kakun may or may not contain auto­ biographical portions, stressing the importance of lineage and veneration of the ancestors. As these texts were addressed to family members, they generally circulated in the form of manuscripts. In their function as family chronicle and household instructions for descendants, Kakun proliferated towards the end of the Edo period. Well-known examples can be found among the groups of urban merchants and of rich farmers and landowners, who had gradually moved from agricultural activities into commerce and who constituted a self-consciously defined elite in their local society. Suzuki Bokushi (1770–1842) can serve as an example for the latter type. He was author to a number of works, including an encyclopedic cultural geography of a snowy region in north-central Honshu on the Sea of Japan. His pride as a successful merchant, who sees his family history on par with samurai chronicles and distances himself from the local peasants, is reflected in his Eisei kirokuchō [‘Chronicle for Eternity/for Coming Generations’] (two parts, 1821), which centers on his ancestral records and family’s activities and overlaps somewhat with his more autobiographical Yonabegusa [­ ‘Jottings during Night Hours’] (1824), recording the major events in his own life and the life of his family, and emphasizing self-reflection and subjective memory, while maintaining a didactic and sermonizing tone (Tomonari 2008, 3). 芸談 (Geidan, literally: art talks), are notes or chronicles by what would in the modern period be termed ‘artists’, such as dramatists, actors, performers, or poets,

4.5 Japan 

 1067

who share the secrets of their art with their followers by looking back on their personal development. Kabuki actor Nakamura Nakazō I (1736–1790) paints his childhood and early education in vivid descriptions and traces his career until he is an acknowledged master in his Tsuki yuki hana nemonogatari [‘Told like in sleep: Of moon, snow, and flowers’] (year of composition unknown). 年譜 (Nenpu) are chronological personal histories, usually written in Chinese (kanbun), addressed at successors and disciples. Nenpu may occasionally be completed by disciples after a person’s death, or even be written down as a whole in a posthumous situation. The life chronicle of Zen priest Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481), titled Ikkyū oshō nenpu, is a famous example, which served as a model for many monks’ (auto)biographies. Biography and autobiography are also difficult to distinguish in the group of texts called序文 (jobun), designating prefaces or postscripts to texts of a religious, historical or didactic nature. The preface 序 (jo) had been an established genre of Chinese literary prose (Schamoni 2013, 83). The model for this group of texts was the ‘postscript autobiography’ of Sima Qian (ca. 145–90), author of the first historiographical work, a comprehensive history of ancient China, the Shiji [‘Historical Records’] (ca. 91 BCE). His “Autobiographical Afterword of the Grand Historian” formed the final volume 130 of his record of ca. 2000 years of Chinese history, explaining his motivation and the circumstances of writing the work. While these prefaces or postscripts were addressed to a general public and were determined by the mostly larger works which they accompanied, leaving no space for personal expression, the genre of 伝 (den) or 伝記 (denki), a collective name for biography and autobiography, comes closer to a modern notion of autobiography in that it stands for autonomous texts which present largely consistent biographies, even if they may be fairly brief and orient themselves on the preface model. This genre attains a wider visibility in the late nineteenth century through works of prominent intellectuals, businessmen, or politicians carrying den, or jiden in their title. They will be introduced in the next section, dedicated to modern and contemporary genres. As mentioned before, the late nineteenth century is regarded as the period when, under the impact of Western literature, autobiographies were written and circulated as tools of (self-)education and self-assertion, of participation in a developing political discourse, and of nation-building. The existing terms of den, denki or ji(jo)den were utilized to designate that genre which emerged in the nineteenth century as a counterpart to modern Western autobiography as a translation term of ‘autobiography’, i.  e. jiden or jijoden [literally: self-narration]. The genres introduced in this section are characterized by their pragmatic, non-aesthetic nature and are therefore widely neglected in reference works of literary studies and anthologies.

1068 

 4 Asia

Modern and Contemporary Genres – jiden, shishōsetsu, and jibunshi Modernization in Japan has long been regarded as synonymous with Westernization, in Japan as well as outside the country, but historians meanwhile agree that decisive factors such as urban growth, a high degree of literacy in contemporary international standards, proto-industrialization and proto-capitalism had paved the way before the crisis that led, under growing pressure from imperial powers, to the so-called kaikoku [opening of the country] and the Meiji ishin [Meiji restoration, alternatively termed Meiji revolution] in 1868, which in conventional histories of Japan is regarded as the origin of modernization. In the intensive process of restructuring all areas of public and private life that took place in the Meiji period (1868–1912), political and social movements as well as institutions such as the press, and new functions and notions of literature emerged. It is this period when bungaku is born as an umbrella term for ‘literature’, comprising poetry, epics, drama, and criticism (hyōron) (Suzuki 2006). In the so-called Enlightenment phase in the early and middle decades of Meiji, treatises, biographies and autobiographies by Westerners, e.  g. Benjamin Franklin, or Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833) [Poetry and Truth] were read or introduced in adaptations and translations as sources of information about life, society and values in Europe and the United States. Leading journalists and intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), who produced million-sellers with his textbooks, his propagation of the principle equality of opportunity and education as a means to success and human greatness, Gakumon no susume (1872–1876) [An Encouragement of Learning], or his Bunmeiron no gairyaku (1875) [An Outline of Civilization], also began to write autobiographies towards the end of the nineteenth century. His Fukuō jiden [‘The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi’] (1899), a rhetorically convincing plea for personal independence of the individual presented in a style inspired by oral recitation, but based on his training in Chinese classics, was highly innovative. To literary historian Shūichi Katō, Fukuzawa was not only the first Japanese writer to develop a form of civilization critique which combined elements of idealism and realism, but in his autobiography created a new prose style in Japanese. Fukuō jiden, according to Katō, has to be regarded as the founding text of “autobiography as a Japanese literary form” (1983, 86). Noboru Tomonari, who observes that two other notable texts of this new genre were written around the turn of the century, argues that the rise of a specific, new social class with new interests in the late nineteenth century worked as an incentive to record memories (Tomonari 2008, 38). Tomonari categorizes their authors as “management intellectuals”, a self-selected group of spokespeople, opinion leaders, philosophers, or apologists of the managerial class, emphasizing self-dependence, character, and constancy (Tomonari 2008, 41). Fukuzawa’s auto­ biography constructs his selfhood and subjectivity through formative memories of his early childhood, promoting difference from, but also creating bonds and relationships

4.5 Japan 

 1069

between his family and the community. He clearly distances himself from the ruling bureaucracy. Entrepreneur Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931), the ‘father of Japanese capitalism’, published his biographical record in 1900. Together with Fukuzawa Yukichi and journalist and writer Fukuchi Gen’ichirō (1841–1906), he counted among the by far bestknown personalities of his time in contemporary popularity polls (Gluck 1985, 63; Bierwirth 2013, 140). Shibusawa’s first autobiography, Amayo gatari [‘Told on a rainy night’] was published as part of his large autobiographical and biographical record in 1900 (Shibusawa Eiichi jijoden [The Autobiography of Shibusawa Eiichi (1994)]). Amayo gatari begins with his childhood and ends with his resignation from the Ministry of Finance, which, as the author explains, was prompted by his need to empower and transform the private sector. Like Fukuzawa, he depicts himself as both independent and dependent, the self being a construct that is socially and economically generated, whereas in the latter part of his autobiography the self is identified largely with his business enterprises. His life trajectory was seen not only as that of his individual self but also as that of major industries, his memory constituting in this sense “a collective memory and an ethos” (Tomonari 2008, 63), from humble beginnings into the center of the burgeoning Japanese industrialization. Both Fukuzawa and Shibusawa, who had moved from the margins of their society, reconstructed in their autobiographies their emergence and assimilation to the mainstream as principal economic subjects (Tomonari 2008, 56–73). Within the growing stream of autobiographies and autobiographical writing in the twentieth century, entrepreneurs are a distinct and very productive group. Against the backdrop of Japan’s political and economic development during its years of colonialism and militarism, as well as during the reconstruction of society under the signature of democracy after World War II, their voices were part of the public discourse, and their autobiographies were widely read. Famous entrepreneurs whose names stand for Japan’s rise as industrial superpower in the 1970s and 1980s such as Matsushita Kōnosuke (1894–1989), the founder of Panasonic Corporation, dubbed the ‘god of Japanese management’, Morita Akio (1921–1999), co-founder of Sony, Honda Sōichirō (1906– 1991), founder of Honda Corporation, or Toyoda Eiji (1913–2013), president and later chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation, all authored well-known autobiographies, many of which were also translated into foreign languages. These entrepreneurial authors describe their professional activities in the context of reconstructing their lives as the teleological narration of a chain of events which have led to the present state from which they retrospectively unfold their development, obstacles and coincidences notwithstanding. Recapitulating their lives supplies them with a basic structure to bring order into the dazzling array of events and suggests patterns of rationale. Among Meiji intellectuals, Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930) was famous for his political resistance and interventions based on his Protestant faith. He had spent four years, from 1884 to 1888, in the United States, where he wrote his autobiography in English, How I became a Christian (1895). This work, which was translated into many lan-

1070 

 4 Asia

guages, including Japanese, is an attempt to explain himself to Americans, beginning with a brief account of his childhood years and giving a detailed description of his mental development during his education at Sapporo Agricultural College through his years in the States. He also addresses general issues such as Japan’s relationship with Christianity. Uchimura, who later propagated a Japanese, ‘churchless’ (mukyōkai) version of Christianity and an absolute pacifism, attracted a number of writers and political activists. From the beginning of the twentieth century and against a background of a developing mass society with a high growth in readership, a flourishing market for periodicals and publishing houses, and a diversifying public discourse, autobiographies and memoirs (kaisō) from persons of all segments of society gained popularity. Political activists such as the anarchists and socialists of the 1920s and 1930s articulated and promoted their values and views in their self-writing. Early examples of these works are Ōsugi Sakae’s (1885–1923) Jijoden [‘The autobiography of Ōsugi Sakae’] (1922), and Katayama Sen’s (1859–1933) Jiden [‘The autobiography of Katayama Sen’] (1922) alongside with autobiographies by other activists and union workers such as Sakai Toshihiko’s (1870–1933) Sakai Toshihiko den [‘The autobiography of Sakai Toshihiko’] (1926) and Suzuki Bunji’s (1885–1946) Rōdō undō nijūnen [‘Twenty years of labor activism’] (1931). Ōsugi, who was thirty-six when he wrote his autobiography, is representative for this kind of self-narration which is prompted by a sense of immediate mission rather than a retrospective state of mind in old age. He styles himself as a rebellious youth and depicts his turning as he transforms his rebellion into one with a political objective. In this, his narrative resembles Uchimura’s Christian conversion narrative (Tomonari 2008, 87). Sakai refers to Ōsugi’s autobiography in his own Sakai Toshihiko den, explaining that it helped him to feel close to Ōsugi’s personality in spite of personal discord. Sakai published his autobiography almost immediately after Ōsugi was murdered by the military police in 1923 in the so-called ‘Amakasu incident’ and he himself was let out of prison. Both texts were serialized in a journal before being published in book form, which is a most widespread pattern in the Japanese publishing world until the present, for fiction as well as essayistic writing. Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960), a Christian pacifist, reformer and labour activist, became famous with his autobiographical novel Shisen o koete [Across/Beyond the Death Line] in 1922, which was not only a bestseller in Japan but was also translated into many languages, leading to his nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 and 1948, and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954 and 1955. As these few examples demonstrate, autobiographical writing in the context of political and philosophically inspired agendas was increasingly widespread in the twentieth century, whether as “autobiographies of counterhegemony” (Tomonari 2008, 119) or as “sites” or “historical markers” where numerous conflicts and issues intersect, which is the perspective under which women’s self-writing has been positioned by Ronald P. Loftus as “active participants in a wide variety of discourses”, constituting a “substantive oppositional ideology” (2004, 17, 16). In the context of the

4.5 Japan 

 1071

so-called ‘Proletarian Literature Movement’ in the 1920s and 1930s, women writers such as Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951), Sata Ineko (1904–1998), and Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–1972) were among the most widely-read with their autobiographical novels, combining narratives of individual hardships and personal development with a consciousness of wider issues such as women’s liberation and social problems. As political activists, they faced repression like their male comrades under the tightening militarist system and during the war, but they continued to write autobiographical works and memoirs in the postwar period. Other feminist activists such as Oku Mumeo (1895–1997), Takai Toshio (1902–1983), Nishi Kiyoko (b. 1907–1995), or ­Fukunaga Misao (1907–1991) only published their reminiscences of the Interwar Years in the 1980s. Their texts, which deal with women who worked in factories, waitressed in cafés, who engaged in radical politics, and who worked for modern journals, are self-identified as jiden, kaisō, jijoden, or jibunshi [personal history] and are first-person narratives with authorial names on the title page (Loftus 2004, 29). In contrast to these explicitly non-literary texts, the autobiographies of the aforementioned authoresses were partly read as literature, as they are definitely closer stylistically to full-fledged novels, although the fact of their being categorized as belonging to the ‘leftist’ movement constrained their appraisal as literary works. What distances some autobiographical novels from jiden is the formal feature of third-person narrative and a different name for the author’s ‘alter ego’. Miyamoto Yuriko’s autobiograpical trilogy begins with Nobuko (1928), carrying the name of her protagonist in its title, yet the authoress is prominent enough for her readership to identify her literary persona with the real Miyamoto, who continues to delineate the emancipatory process of Nobuko in her follow-up works Futatsu no niwa (1947) [Two Gardens] and Dōhyō (1947–1950) [Sign Post]. Writer, journalist and political activist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), founder of Seitō [‘Bluestocking’], Japan’s first literary journal run by women, and the most influential figure in the early women’s movement in Japan, commenced her autobiography with that powerful and iconic sentence, which also formed its title Genshi, josei wa taiyō de atta: Hiratsuka Raichō jiden (3 vols., 1971–1973) [In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist (2006)]: 元始、女性は実に太陽であった。真正の人であった。  今、女性は月である。他に依って生き、他の光によって輝く、病人のやうな青白 い顔の月である. [“In the beginning, woman was truly the sun. An authentic person. Now she is the moon, a wan and sickly moon, dependent on another, reflecting another’s brilliance”] (Hiratsuka 1983, 14 [2006, vii]). As a matter of fact, this work was first serialized between 1911 and 1916 in Seitō. The examples of jiden, jijoden and kaisō mentioned here have hardly been subjected to systematic research as autobiographies due to their perceived non-literary nature. On the other hand, there exists one genre in Twentieth-Century Japanese literature which, in spite of its explicitly autobiographical features, is categorized as canonical, or jun-bungaku [‘pure literature’]: 私小説 (Shishōsetsu), with the alternative reading watakushi shōsetsu [literally: I-narration, I-novel], is a widespread genre in modern and contemporary Japanese

1072 

 4 Asia

literature, which has been described as a quintessentially Japanese form. Although often termed ‘I-novel’ in Western literature, it is important to note that it is not identical with and should therefore not be confounded with the European ‘Ich-Roman’, which refers to a fictional first-person narrative, and in which the narrator is not identical with the author’s biographical self. Shishōsetsu may be written in the first or the third person. Its crucial generical conditions are the supposed identity between protagonist, narrator, and author, established in a kind of autobiographical pact, encapsulated in the two interrelated structural elements of focus figure and factuality. Factuality designates the relation between the work of literature and pragmatic reality as supposed by Japanese readers, an agreement in literary communication implying that the work is a direct reproduction of the reality experienced by the author. The focus figure is a specific organization of the text which can be traced on all its levels, most conspicuously, in the unity of narrator, protagonist, and author, but also in point of view, a temporal position of narration which moves along with the chronological progression of the plot, the protagonist’s domination of the work’s implicit value system, and a non-cognitive, affective mode of experience (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1981, 1996). The genre’s origins lie in the自然主義 (shizenshugi, naturalist movement) inspired by European literature in the beginning of the twentieth century. The imperative of depicting life sono mama [as it is], in a rokotsu-naru byōsha [naked description], coupled with the conviction that a truthful account can best be procured by taking one’s own life as literary material, led to the formation of a confessional wave in literary circles since around 1906. To most literary historians, Tayama Katai’s (1872–1930) story Futon (1907) [The Quilt] about the secret love of a writer for his female disciple marks the beginning of the genre, as it triggered numerous imitations and parodies as well as a lively critical discourse. It took more than a decade, however, until the term watakushi shōsetsu was coined in 1920, which was shortly afterwards, and in a slight semantic differentiation, partially substituted by the reading shishōsetsu in the context of a growing meta-critical discourse about this new mode of openly confessional and even scandalous writing. Due to the difference between the literary phenomenon and the relevant meta-discourse, which is, however, only to be expected, some scholars deny shishōsetsu the status of a genre and speak of “a word used not as a descriptive or normative term, but as an evocative, ambiguous, and unique signifier” (Suzuki 1996, 2), regarding it instead as a “mode of reading”, not a literary form but a literary and ideological paradigm (Suzuki 1996, 6). Others have stressed narratological characteristics of shishōsetsu based on linguistic structures of Japanese, to the effect that shishōsetsu tends to converge with shōsetsu, the standard form of narrative or novel in modern Japan (Fowler 1988). Whether we regard shishōsetsu as a prevalent mode of narration in modern Japanese literature, as a mode of reading, as an ideological paradigm, or as a literary form or genre, it remains a fact that the term itself as well as literary texts produced under this rubric continue to shape the literary scene as well as critical discourse into the twenty-first century (Giannoulis 2010). The obvious attractiveness of the genre for authors and readers, its psycho-hygienic func-

4.5 Japan 

 1073

tions, its publicly sanctioned voyeurism, and the comfort and tranquil and harmonious state of mind found after passing through a phase of compassion towards the hero explain shishōsetsu’s remarkable resilience and productivity throughout the twentieth century. Because of the principle of makoto [absolute sincerity] as a writing attitude, and the slender temporal distance between recorded details from the author’s life and the act of writing them down, necessary to conform to the myth of immediacy and spontaneity surrounding the genre, shishōsetsu typically thematizes a relatively short stretch of time in the author’s life. This is one of the factors distinguishing it from literary autobiographies like Satō Haruo’s (1892–1964) Shibun hanseiki (1963) [Half-Century of My Literary Career] or literary memoirs like Tayama Katai’s Tōkyō no sanjūnen (1917) [Literary life in Tōkyō, 1885–1915]. Shishōsetsu are valued for the riaritī [ring of authenticity] in depicting an uneventful and trite everyday life with occasional epiphanies triggered by natural phenomena or crises such as conflicts with friends and relatives, illness, a partner’s infidelity, or financial difficulties. They have been classified according to their subject matter and mood into two groups: chōwa-gata [harmony type] and hametsu-gata [nemesis type]. Among the first are some of Shiga Naoya’s (1883–1971) most famous stories, including Wakai (1917) [Reconciliation] about the author’s unexplained conflict with his father or Kinosaki ni te (1917) [At Kinosaki], a meditative account of a recovery stay at a spa town. The latter type is represented by many of Dazai Osamu’s (1909–1948) stories, including one of Japan’s all-time bestsellers, his novel Ningen shikkaku [No longer human], published posthumously after the author’s suicide in 1948. This novel transforms the genre pattern in the sense that it consists of three diary-like notebooks depicting distinctive periods in the life of a desperate hero whom readers immediately identify with the author, framed by the brief story in which the notebooks are presented and evaluated by an unnamed narrator after the hero’s death. Shishōsetsu has sustained its position as a highly valued genre throughout the decades into the twenty-first century by producing masterworks like Miura Tetsuo’s (1931–2010) prize-winning story Shinobugawa (1960) [The River Shinobu]. This story, which was to form the title story of a series of stories about a student living in Tokyo, tells about the student’s first encounter with a girl working in a restaurant called ‘Shinobugawa’ until their wedding night and the start of their honeymoon. The perceived lyricism and stark beauty of this love story of two innocent young people in utter poverty points to some of the genre’s intrinsic contradictions, namely a tendency to aestheticize and to ‘fictionalize’, which runs counter to the postulate of absolute sincerity in the conventional understanding of the genre. The work’s reception, however, leaves no doubt that it was understood as an outstanding sample of shishōsetsu. This was also the case with Shimao Toshio’s (1917–1986) novel Shi no toge (1977) [The Sting of Death], consisting of a series of short stories published in different literary magazines over a period of seventeen years. They focus on the strained relationship between Toshio and his wife Miho − the work uses the real names of the author and his wife − after she has learned about his infidelity and falls into a state of mental distur-

1074 

 4 Asia

bance. While this and other works by the author, including the nikkitai shōsetsu [novel in diary form] Hi no utsuroi (1976) [The passing of the days], which equally covers events in the author’s life, have stimulated the theoretical discourse on the genre, this is intensified by the growing number of parodies and in the wake of the changing publication and media landscape. Among recent shishōsetsu, we also observe a growing share of female authors, who had rarely figured prominently in prewar times, with Hayashi Fumiko’s (1903–1951) Hōrōki (1928–1930) [Diary of a vagabond] as the most notable exception. Mizumura Minae’s (b. 1951) novel Shishōsetsu from left to right, published in 1995, is a bilingual experiment, while Kanehara Hitomi (b. 1983), with titles such as Ōtofikushon (2006) [Autofiction] and its particular stylistic strategies of authentification, along with other contemporary authors simultaneously transgress and reinstate the genre. The genre had been under criticism since the 1920s with the influence of Marxist-oriented literati, and there was a second high point of shishōsetsu criticism in the immediate postwar period, when it was attacked as a “literature of parasites” (Sugiura Minpei), accused of privatism, passive conformity, retreating from public responsibility (Maruyama Masao) and “hermit-like isolation” (Kuwabara Takeo) (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996, 323–324). On the other hand, these aspects were also linked to wider issues, stating that the problem of shishōsetsu was by no means only a literary problem but much more the “problem of the nature of Japanese ‘modernity’” (Takeuchi Yoshimi) (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996, 324, 326). This fundamentally negative assessment of the genre did not impede literary production in the field, but it may well be held responsible for the fact that there was no systematic research on the genre until the early 1980s. Since then, the situation has changed radically, as shishōsetsu became the object of research in and outside of Japan. The reasons for this may be seen in the context of growing cultural self-assertion in the wake of Japan’s rise as an international superpower, as well as in the fact that the genre with its purported rootedness in particularly Japanese traditions and cultural codes challenged a new generation of scholars. Writing and remembering are central aspects of the modern genre of 自分史 (jibunshi, self-histories), a non-literary form that grew out of the emancipatory movement of pedagogues in the early twentieth century which encouraged free essay-writing as a liberation and development of children’s expressive capacities and culminated in the seikatsu tsuzurikata undō, the ‘movement for one’s own story’, supported by leftist intellectuals after the world economic crisis of 1929 with the aim of giving a voice to the impoverished rural population (Buchholz 2003). Jibunshi emerged as a mass practice in the 1970s, propagated by historian Irokawa Daikichi (b. 1925), who published his own ‘self-history’ titled Aru Shōwa-shi: Jibunshi no kokoromi [‘A Certain History of the Shōwa Era – An Attempt at Self-History’] in 1975 and encouraged his compatriots to write their jibunshi from a vantage point of re-enacting their past (tsuitaiken) in a fair and honest way and with a view to embedding it in a more general framework of socio-cultural developments (Buchholz 2003, 128). His ambitious outline of jibunshi, which displays commonalities with the methods of oral history, clearly acknowledges

4.5 Japan 

 1075

jibunshi’s purpose and value as historiography and contrasts with conventional definitions of the genre that regard it as a rather undemanding form of self-writing on a grassroots level. As a piece of writing about one’s own ordinary life, it covers sub-genres such as travelogues, stories of illness and shinpen zakki [miscellaneous records of the everyday life], a sub-genre, by the way, which is also known in shishōsetsu. Nozawa describes jibunshi and their typical non profit, low-budget forms of circulation in self-publishing or in dōjin zasshi [coterie journals] as minikomi (‘mini communication’ vs. ‘the media’ or ‘mass communication’) as precursors to the contemporary computer-mediated social media. In his ethnographical approach to jibunshi, Nozawa hints at the “low-profilism” as an ethic of modern life whose virtue lies in an aesthetic of counterspectacularity and even a certain form of piety in jibunshi (2012, 70, 77). Whereas he stresses the digressive form of jibunshi as a spatiotemporally disjointed collage of everyday snapshots, rather than as a continuous line of narrative emplotment, there are also other, more thematically focused jibunshi such as those described in another study. In the late 1980s, the media had orchestrated a sense of transition or dawn of an era way before the demise of Emperor Hirohito in 1989, which brought Japan’s long Shōwa era (1926–1989) to an end. In this context, publishers and newspapers initiated a veritable retrospection frenzy with their calls for submitting “My Shōwa history”, “My personal August 15th”, the date of Japan’s war capitulation, or “My personal postwar history” (Buchholz 2003, 148–155). These texts, written by men and women of the wider middle class with no elated functions either during or after the war, were not only published in the large national newspapers, but were also collected in widely circulated anthologies. In her paradigmatic analysis of these Shōwa history jibunshi, Buchholz identifies the following tendencies in the construction of these reminiscences: a preference for single exemplary episode (or a few episodes) over an overview of one’s complete life-career; a perspective ‘from within’, seeing oneself as part of a whole, in contrast to a perspective ‘from without’, as a subject that confronts history and that judges it from an external vantage point; and an approach from a personal experience constructed as an interface with historical events, as opposed to an approach emanating from official major events. Their preferred time window of personal reminiscences is childhood and youth, and the stories are centered on the protagonist-narrator, with other persons remaining shadowy, or only functioning as representing the outside world. Thematically, the reminiscences focus on wartime experiences, motivated by an obligation as witness of history and a necessity to clarify ‘lies’ and ‘truth’ behind official and one’s own former positions (Buchholz 2003, 200– 363). The performativity of jibunshi as testimony and counter-memory has been scrutinized in a trans-cultural perspective by Buchholz, who looked into the self-published perpetrators’ histories of a group of Japanese military and administrative personnel who were subjected to re-education in Chinese captivity, and after their release in 1956 formed an association of China returnees. According to the point of time, the situation, the motif, and the addressee of the recording, three different categories can be

1076 

 4 Asia

identified: the self-narratives written during captivity as official confessions of guilt, perpetrators’ stories in a more narrativized form, written in the context of cultural activities in the camp and addressed at co-captives and camp educators in a kind of writing workshop, and texts written after having been released and returned to Japan, directed at the Japanese public (Buchholz 2012). Buchholz points out that the ongoing battle about memory in myriad personal versions of all extremes is particularly vivid in Japan because of a legislation which prosecutes neither war crimes by Japanese nor hate speech. Thus, a self-confessed war criminal does not have to fear prosecution but may be confronted with ‘the limits of the unspeakable’ (‘Unsagbarkeitsgrenzen’) in contact with other cultures (Buchholz 2012, 414–516).

Source Materials, Characteristics, and Research Questions The marginal status of autobiography as a genre in the conventional Japanese literary system, its unclear status between narration and historical document, is deemed responsible for the lack of substantial research to the present day. There exist no bibliographies of relevant Japanese research. As for the sources, there are no collections of materials from the pre-modern period and no catalogues of existing materials in archives and private collections. As an important step towards a systematic study, a complete inventory of extant genres, if not texts for each period is desirable, such as Schamoni (2016) provides with paradigmatic samples of each genre for the early modern period. In spite of a highly developed editing practice and philological standards in Japanese literary studies, much needs to be done in respect to those many autobiographical texts in archives and private collections which still await editing and compilation. The situation is different for those canonized sections of ancient, mediaeval, and early modern literary history such nikki, kikōbun, haibun, or zuihitsu, many of which have been edited and studied meticulously, albeit not with reference to the different genres of autobiography. Many of these texts are also available in translation and commentary. As for a synoptical approach, Keene has provided two overviews of Japanese diary writing for the pre-modern and the modern periods in the form of 69 and 30 chapters respectively, each of them dedicated to one work or a group of works, discussing canonized as well as lesser known texts with brief excerpts in translation (Keene 1989, 1995). For the modern era, and due to the pioneering work of Saeki Shōichi, the documentation of source materials is much better. It also reflects a considerable interest of the general readership in autobiographical materials. Saeki compiled a 23-volume anthology under the title Nihonjin no jiden (1980–1982) [‘Autobiographies of the Japanese’], containing altogether 68 autobiographies from the modern and contemporary periods and two supplementary volumes. Other documentations include Denki sōsho

4.5 Japan 

 1077

[‘The (auto)biographical library’] (1985–2000) with 350 volumes of biographical and autobiographical texts, which were published since the Meiji era. Another publisher launched a 110 volume-series Sakka no jiden [‘Writers’ Autobiographies’] (1994–2000) as well as the series Ningen no kiroku [‘Human Records’] (1997–2005), comprising 170 volumes of autobiographies by politicians, entrepreneurs, artists, social activists, athletes, and scholars since the Meiji period. Watashi no rirekisho [‘My vita’] is an autobiographical column in the feuilleton of the national newspaper Nihon keizai shinbun, which has continued since March 1956. It features autobiographies in the form of a series of installments over approximately one month by personalities of note, from the business and political world as well as artists, actors, or writers, including some non-Japanese, among them George W. Bush and Tony Blair. These autobiographies are also published in book form in altogether six series between 1957 and 2008 of up to 49 volumes and in numerous single volumes featuring several autobiographies arranged by their authors’ professions such as painter, physician, or scientist. In 2014, the newspaper featured autobiographies by conductor Seiji Ozawa, a Kabuki actor, a business counselor, and a former chairman of another Japanese global corporation, as well as a pro-golfer. Beyond their function as reading matter for an audience seeking encouragement, consolation, models to emulate or simply satisfaction of their curiosity and voyeuristic interest in the supposedly authentic recording of a prominent individual’s personal life, these texts may be consulted for historical, sociological, ethnographical or other information, but are rarely subjected to textual analyses, due to their open referentiality, which sets them off from works of fiction or junbungaku [pure literature]. Obviously, these forms take up earlier genres such as geidan, kaisōroku, or nenpu, mixing them freely. The richness of autobiographical sources in all eras of Japanese literary history has yet to be opened up to systematic research in Japan and abroad. Western research has tended to confine itself to singular texts in isolation, without contextualizing them within their cultural tradition and socio-political framework (Schamoni 2016). Japanese scholarship has been, apart from the lack of interest in autobiography as a genre, restricted by its complacency to see things Japanese in an exclusively native framework (Saeki 1985, 358). Recent developments in international research with a view to a comparative re-framing of the issue beyond Eurocentric paradigms, which have also shaped, albeit on a widely unconscious level, modern Japanese literary study, have, however, inspired new approaches to the field. Under a comparative perspective, there have emerged several topical clusters in the research on Japanese autobiographical writing, which call for clarification. The Japanese autobiographical system has only emerged in vague contours so far and necessitates synchronic and diachronic research. As the majority of prose works in the Heian period were not titled by the author, and also in other epochs were not given a generic classification, so that the words nikki, monogatari [tale], and shū [collection] were applied indiscriminately to the same work (Konishi 1986, 252; Walker 2010, 225), genre categorizations need to be re-discussed under partially new criteria, which

1078 

 4 Asia

enable us to identify structural analogies with non-Japanese forms, but avoid new ethnocentrisms of nomenclature. Briefer, and non-canonized, pragmatic autobiographical forms such as jobun [preface, postscript] or oboegaki [memorandum] as well as letters, are part of the system. One approach is to analyze patterns of self-description through an author’s use of a variety of these forms, as Árokay has demonstrated in the case of Ueda Akinari, with the result of differing concepts of self according to the choice of format (Árokay 2012). Genre conventions and restrictions are to be taken into account here, as they are instrumental in creating the specific self. In respect to genre, the question of hierarchies within the autobiographical system also necessitates clarification. Whether it makes sense to regard haibun as a subgenre of kikōbun, or of zuihitsu, or whether jibunshi should be regarded as a main genre with subgenres as diverse as travelogues, stories of illness, and genealogies remain open issues. The different functions, culturally and historically, of the notions of ‘public’ and ‘non-public’ are determinants for categorizing autobiographical texts. Schamoni differentiates between ‘non-public’ texts, which were written for a single person or for a defined group of addressees and were circulated in hand-written form, as opposed to ‘public’ texts, which were written or prepared by the author for publication, usually in printed form, even posthumously, to a non-limited audience, even if this distinction cannot be made for all groups of texts with certitude (Schamoni 2003b, 2014). ‘Public’ (ōyake) and ‘private’ (watakushi, shi), and their connotations also form distinct cultural-historical discourses, which do not necessarily conform to a European grid (Bierwirth 2013, 53–63). ‘Public’ and ‘non-public’ appear to be relevant categories, which could also be applied to other autobiographical traditions, and which would avoid the problematic connotations of a term such as ‘écrits du for privé’ [writings of the private forum] coined by Madeleine Foisil in 1986, which Ruggiu criticizes as limiting the texts too strictly to the expression of privacy and intimacy (2013, 11). Gender aspects are central to Japanese autobiographical writing from its very beginning and are closely linked with choice of genre, idiom, and construction of self. For women, the choice of genre was confined throughout centuries to nikki and other genres, which focus on a private, internal discourse. Even today, and in the case of a genre as accessible as jibunshi, some researchers see a clear gendering in the narratives’ thematic thrust: whereas men tell success stories, women dwell on failure, but also in format, namely in the contrast of “book-like text and paper-like record” (Nozawa 2012, 72). On the other hand, women’s writing experience was “a powerful enabling force” (Loftus 2004, 21). One marked difference from Western traditions of autobiographical writing is the high status of works by female authors in the Heian period, as opposed to personal factual records by men, which were considered as being of historical, but not of literary, relevance (Schamoni 2003a). In later epochs, women may have gradually disappeared from the literary arena, but recent research is directed at uncovering neglected contributions by female authors in the Early Modern period (Gramlich-Oka 2007). Agency and performativity have been thematized in scholarship on modern female Japanese autobiographies, which typically deal with

4.5 Japan 

 1079

role conflicts, in the context of ‘writing as a means of liberation’ (Gössmann 1996, 300). To the extent that such texts with strong referentiality and a socio-critical stance are categorized as ideological and as aesthetically inferior, there is a clear gender bias in literary criticism. This also applies to narratives by groups other than Japanese, e.  g. Koreans in Japan, producing a racist bias. Japanese autobiographical writing is strongly associated with lyrical forms. This distinguishes it from a conventional Western understanding of autobiography as prose narrative. Nikki of the Heian period as well as zuihitsu of later ages derived their prestige from their affinity with poetry as the most prestigious form in the pre-modern literary canon. Nikki, kikō, or haibun may be composed as strings of waka, poems in Japanese, connected by brief narrative sections, and the self at times is “subsumed under the poetic tradition” (Walker 2010, 221), while the poems give authenticity to the author’s voice (Konishi 1986, 291). The peculiar nature of authenticity as aesthetic value, as well as the tension between the jitsu [principle of truth] or makoto [genuineness] with its strong ethical-moral components, and its connotations with sincerity, which has been observed in the case of (modern) shishōsetsu (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996), point to issues concerning the rootedness of the genres in the respective historical socio-cultural value systems and poetics. The oxymoronic structure of ‘artful artlessness’ and ‘mediated immediacy’ of early modern poetry discourses in the context of haibun against the background of a traditional understanding of jitsu [truth] and kyo [fabrication, fiction, invention] and its hybrid nature as a cultural product, rooted in both, aristocratic and chōnin [townspeople] culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is later, in the early twentieth century, deprived of its complexity through its identification with ‘sincerity’, has been explored by Bierwirth (2009). The poetry-prose binary and its transgressions in Japanese autobiographical writing as well as the specificities of the Japanese discourse on factuality vs. invention refer us to the necessity of discussing the epistemological status of autobiographical writing. As for the category of authenticity, recent research has re-situated it in the context of media theory as a phenomenon of transgression of frames (Giannoulis 2010, 75–83). While the tension between narrativity, or aesthetic character, and documentary nature informs all discussions of autobiographical texts, regardless of their cultural origin, a sense of the constructedness, as opposed to an understanding of autobiography as transparent self-disclosure, is prevalent in much of Japanese self-writing. Generally speaking, the self in Japanese autobiographical writing is constructed ‘relationally’, e.  g. in negotiation with other persons, or with the Japanese poetic tradition, supporting a notion of autobiography as a process of self-discovery and self-creation involving imagination as well as memory (Walker 2010, 218, 222). Recent developments in Japan’s strong jibunshi tradition and self-publishing point to a convergence with global trends in the use of internet publication. To the extent that publishers specialized in printing jibunshi have lost visibility since the early 2000s, jibunshi writers seem to have taken to online presence. The implications of this media change will certainly affect existing Japanese patterns of self-writing

1080 

 4 Asia

beyond the mere change of format, but have not yet been studied on a systematic basis. Other main genres such as shishōsetsu have developed hybrid forms (Giannoulis 2010), including ‘crossovers’ with genres such as ‘essay manga’ (Watakushishōsetsu kenkyūkai 2014, 228–229). Japan’s vigorous tradition of autobiographical narrative offers countless clues for comparative research, challenging genre assumptions and relativizing existing models based on Western norms. Meaningful comparative work, however, necessitates much more detailed textual and contextual research on Japanese autobiographies, which remain a sadly understudied field with high potential for future scholarship.

Works Cited Preference is given to materials in English. In many cases, there exist several translations. The translator’s name and date of publication refer to the first complete translation or the first scholarly authoritative rendering, but readers are advised to consult bibliographical data for alternatives or translation history. Anon. Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan. Trans. Helen Craig McCullough. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968. Arai, Hakuseki. 新井白石 Oritaku shiba no ki 折たく柴の記. 日本古典文学大系、第９５巻 Nihon koten bungaku taikei. Vol. XCV. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1964 [Told round a brushwood fire: The autobiography of Arai Hakuseki. Trans. Joyce Ackroyd. Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1979]. Árokay, Judit. “Muster der Selbstbeschreibung: Japanische Autobiographien zwischen Tradition und Moderne.” Selbstzeugnis und Person: Transkulturelle Perspektiven. Ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2012. 123–137. Bauer, Wolfgang. Das Antlitz Chinas: Die autobiographische Selbstdarstellung in der chinesischen Literatur von ihren Anfängen bis heute. München/Wien: Hanser, 1990. Bierwirth, Gerhard. Makoto und Aufrichtigkeit: Eine Begriffs- und Diskursgeschichte. München: iudicium, 2009. Bierwirth, Gerhard. Shōnindō – Der Weg des Kaufmanns: von der Diskriminierung eines Standes zur Ökonomisierung einer Kultur. München: iudicium, 2013. Bowring, Richard J. Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs. A Translation and Study. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Bowring, Richard J. “Introduction.” The Diary of Lady Murasaki. Ed. Richard John Bowring. London: Penguin, 2005. Buchholz, Petra. Schreiben und Erinnern. Über Selbstzeugnisse japanischer Kriegsteilnehmer. München: iudicium, 2003. Buchholz, Petra. Vom Teufel zum Menschen: Die Geschichte der Chinaheimkehrer in Selbstzeugnissen. München: iudicium, 2010. Dazai, Osamu. 太宰治. Ningen shikkaku. 人間失格. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1948 [No Longer Human. Trans. Donald Keene. New York: New Directions, 1958]. Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Fujiwara no Michitsuna no haha. The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. North Clarendon: Tuttle, 1964.

4.5 Japan 

 1081

Giannoulis, Elena. Blut als Tinte: Wirkungs- und Funktionsmechanismen zeitgenössischer shishōsetsu. München: iudicium, 2010. Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Gössmann, Hilaria. Schreiben als Befreiung. Autobiographische Romane und Erzählungen von Autorinnen der Proletarischen Literaturbewegung Japans. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996. Gramlich-Oka, Bettina. “Early Modern Japanese Women and Spacing the Self.” Räume des Selbst: Selbstzeugnisforschung transkulturell. Ed. Andreas Bähr, Peter Burschel and Gabriele Jancke. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2007. 111–130. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela. Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-cultural Phenomenon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela. “Nachwort.” Ki no Tsurayuki. Elegische Heimreise – Ein japanisches Tagebuch aus dem Jahre 935. Trans. Peter Olbricht. Frankfurt a.  M./Leipzig: Insel, 2001. 53–61. Hiratsuka, Raichō. 平塚らいてう. Seitō 青鞜. Hiratsuka Raichō chosakushū, 1.平塚らいてう著作集 , 1 [‘Bluestocking: Collected Works of Hiratsuka Raichō. Vol. I’]. Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1983 [In the Beginning, Woman was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist. Trans. Teruko Craig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006]. Izumi Shikibu. Izumi Shikibu nikki 和泉式部日記. Nihon koten bungaku taikei dai nijūkan　日本古典 文学大系　第二十巻 [‘Collection of Pre-modern Japanese Literature.’ Vol. XX]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1957. 381‒459 [The Izumi Shikibu Diary: A Romance of the Heian Court. Trans. Edwin A. Cranston. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969]. Iwabuchi, Reiji. “Characteristics of Egodocuments in Edo Period Japan (1603–1867).” The Uses of First Person Writings. Africa, America, Asia, Europe. Les usage des écrits du for privé. Afrique, Amérique, Asie, Europe. Ed. François-Joseph Ruggiu. Brussels/Bern/Berlin: Lang, 2013. 107–122. Kamo no Chōmei. Hōjōki 方丈記. Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei dai sanjūkyūkan 新日本文学大 系　第三十九巻 [‘Collection of Japanese Pre-modern Japanese Literature.’ New Series. Vol. XXXIX]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1998 [“An Account of My Hut.” Trans. Donald Keene. Anthology of Japanese Literature. New York: Grove Press, 1955. 197–212]. Kato, Shuichi. A History of Japanese Literature: The Modern Years. Trans. Don Sanderson. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha International, 1983. Keene, Donald. World within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600–1867. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. Keene, Donald. Travelers of a Hundred Ages. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1989. Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late-Sixteenth Century. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. Keene, Donald. Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed Through Their Diaries. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995. Keene, Donald. So Lovely A Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Ki no Tsurayuki. Tosa Nikki: A Tosa Journal”. Trans. Helen McCullough. In idem, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry with “Tosa Nikki” and “Shinsen Waka”. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985, 263–91. Ki no Tsurayuki. 紀貫之　土佐日記　新日本古典文学大系 第24巻 [‘Collection of Pre-modern Japanese Literature.’ New Series. Vol. XXIV]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996. Kimura, Masanori. “Nikki bungaku.” Nihon koten bungaku daijiten [‘Comprehensive Dictionary of Classical Japanese Literature’]. Vol. IV. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984. 608–609. Konishi, Jin’ichi. The Early Middle Ages. Ed. Earl Miner. Trans. Aileen Gatten. Vol. II of A History of Japanese Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

1082 

 4 Asia

Konishi, Jin’ichi. The High Middle Ages. Ed. Earl Miner. Trans. Aileen Gatten and Mark Harbison. Vol. III of A History of Japanese Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Lewin, Bruno. Japanische Chrestomathie von der Nara-Zeit bis zur Edo-Zeit. I. Kommentar. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965. Loftus, Ronald P. Telling Lives: Women’s Self-Writing in Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Lozerand, Emmanuel. “Sur quelques transformations des écrits du for privé dans le Japon de l’ère Meiji (1868–1912).” The Uses of First Person Writings. Africa, America, Asia, Europe. Les usage des écrits du for privé. Afrique, Amérique, Asie, Europe. Ed. François-Joseph Ruggiu. Brussels/ Berne/Berlin: Lang, 2013. 155–168. Michitsuna no Haha. Kagerofu no nikki. Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei, 24. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996 [The Kagero Diary: a woman’s autobiographical text from tenth-century Japan. Trans. Sonja Arntzen. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997]. Miller, Marilyn Jeanne. The Poetics of “Nikki Bungaku”: A Comparison of the Traditions, Conventions, and Structure of Heian Japan’s Literary Diaries with Western Autobiographical Writings. New York/London: Garland, 1985. Miller, Marilyn Jeanne. “Nikki bungaku – Literary Diaries: Their Tradition and Their Influence on Modern Japanese Fiction.” World Literature Today 61.2 (1987): 207–210. Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Miner, Earl, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert E. Morrell. The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Miyake, Lynne E. “The Tosa Diary: In the Interstices of Gender and Criticism.” The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing. Ed. Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. 41–73. Monnet, Livia: “‘In the beginning woman was the sun’: Autobiographies of Modern Japanese Women Writers.” 1/2, Japan Forum 1:1/1:2 (April/October 1989): 55–81/196–233. Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari). 2 vols. Trans. Royall Tyler. New York: Viking, 2001. Murasaki Shikibu. The Diary of Lady Murasaki. Trans. Richard Bowring. London/New York: Penguin, 1996. Nihon koten bungaku daijiten [‘Comprehensive Dictionary of Classical Japanese Literature’]. 6 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1977–1978. Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten [‘Comprehensive Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature’]. 6 vols. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1983–1986. Nozawa, Shunsuke. “Discourses of the Coming: Ignorance, Forgetting and Prolepsis in Japanese Life-Historiography.” The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. Ed. Casey High, Ann H. Kelly and Jonathan Mair. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 55–86. Plutschow, Herbert. “Introduction.” Four Japanese Travel Diaries of the Middle Ages. Ed. Herbert Plutschow and Fukuda Hideichi. Ithaca: China-Japan Program, Cornell University Press, 1981. Plutschow, Herbert. A Reader in Edo Period Travel. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2006. Ruggiu, François-Joseph, ed. The Uses of First Person Writings. Africa, America, Asia, Europe. Les usages des écrits du for privé. Afrique, Amérique, Asie, Europe. Brussels/Bern/Berlin: Lang, 2013. Saeki Shōichi. Nihonjin no jiden [‘Autobiographies by Japanese’]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1974. Saeki Shōichi. “Jiden.” Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten [‘Comprehensive Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature’]. Vol. IV. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1977. 174–176.

4.5 Japan 

 1083

Saeki Shōichi. Kindai Nihon no jiden [‘Modern Japanese autobiography’]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1981. Saeki Shōichi. Jiden bungaku no sekai [‘The world of autobiographical literature’]. Tokyo: Asahi shuppansha, 1983. Saeki Shōichi. “The Autobiography in Japan.” Trans. Teruko Craig. Journal of Japanese Studies 11 (1985): 357–368. Schamoni, Wolfgang. “Die Zwei Leben des Uejima Onitsura.” Wasser – Spuren. Festschrift für Wolfram Naumann zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Stanca Scholz. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997. 228–253. Schamoni, Wolfgang. “Kaisō kara jiden e: Nihon jūnana seiki no baai” [‘From Reminiscence to Autobiography: The Case of 17th Century Japan’]. Ochanomizu joshi daigaku daigakuin ningen bunka kenkyūka kokusai Nihon gakka shinpojiumu hōkokusho [‘Papers of the international symposium, Japanese Studies section of Ochanomizu Women’s University’s Faculty of Cultural Studies’]. Tokyo: Ochanomizu joshidaigaku, 2001. 114–124. Schamoni, Wolfgang. “Weibliche Autobiographie vs. männliche Biographie? Die japanischen ‘Hofdamentagebücher’ des X. / XI. Jahrhunderts.” Biographie – „so der Westen wie der Osten“? Ed. Walter Berschin and Wolfgang Schamoni. Heidelberg: Mattes, 2003. 59–80 (Schamoni 2003a). Schamoni, Wolfgang. “Kōkai to hikōkai no aida” [‘Between public and not public’]. Misuzu 503 (2003): 36–53 (Schamoni 2003b). Schamoni, Wolfgang. “Gelübde und Autobiographie. Der Ôbaku-Mönch Ryôô (1630–1707) und seine Bibliotheksprojekte.” Hōrin 13 (2007): 27–51. Schamoni, Wolfgang. “Die ‘Vorwort-Autobiographie’ (Jijoden) des Mori Genjuku.” En – Nexus. Japanische Episoden übersetzt für die Ökumene. Klaus Kracht zu Ehren aus Anlaß seiner Eme­ ritierung. Ed. Michael Kinski, Matthew Königsberg, Gerhard Leinss, Markus Rüttermann and Harald Salomon. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013. 81–98. Schamoni, Wolfgang. Erinnerung und Selbstdarstellung: Autobiographisches Schreiben im Japan des 17. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016. Shibusawa, Eiichi: Amayo gatari: Shibusawa Eiichi jijoden. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984 [The Auto­biography of Shibusawa Eiichi. Trans. Teruko Craig. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1994]. Shirane, Haruo. “The Poetics of Nikki Bungaku: A Comparison of the Traditions, Conventions, and Structure of Heian Japan’s Literary Diaries with Western Autobiographical Writings by Marilyn Jeanne Miller” (Review). The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 21.1 (1987): 98–102. Sugawara no Takasue no musume菅原孝標女 Sarashina nikki.更科日記Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei dai sanjūkyūkan 新日本古典文学大系　第24巻 [‘Collection of Pre-modern Japanese ­Literature.’ New Series. Vol. XXIV]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996. Suzuki, Sadami. The Concept of “Literature” in Japan. Trans. Royall Tyler. Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2006. Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Tomonari, Noboru. Constructing Subjectivities: Autobiographies in Modern Japan. Lanham et al.: Lexington Books, 2008. Tsuchida, Naoshige. “Nikki.” Nihon koten bungaku daijiten [‘Comprehensive Dictionary of Classical Japanese Literature’]. Vol. IV. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984. 606–608. Walker, Janet. “Reading Genres across Cultures: The Example of Autobiography.” Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice. Ed. Sarah Lawall. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 203–235.

1084 

 4 Asia

Watakushishōsetsu kenkyūkai, ed. Watakushishōsetsu handobukku [‘A Handbook of Watakushishōsetsu/Shishōsetsu’]. Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2014. Yoshida, Kenkō 吉田兼好. Tsurezuregusa徒然草Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei dai sanjūkyūkan 新 日本古典文学大系　第三十九巻 [‘Collection of Pre-modern Japanese Literature.’ New Series. Vol. XXXIX]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1998 [Essays in Idleness. The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko. Trans. Donald Keene. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998].

Further Reading Andro, Chantal, Annie Curien, and Cécile Sakai, eds. Tours et détours: écritures autobiographiques dans les littératures chinoise et japonaise au XXe siècle. Paris: Publications universitaires Denis-Diderot, 1998. Dazai, Osamu. Gezeichnet [‘Ningen shikkaku’]. Trans. Jürgen Stalph. Löhne: Cass Verlag, 2015. Katsumata, Hiroshi, ed. Watakushi shōsetsu sennenshi: Nikki bungaku kara kindai bungaku made [‘A Millenium of shishōsetsu: From nikki literature to modern literature’]. Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2015. Loftus, Ronald P. Changing Lives: The ‘Post-war’ in Japanese Women’s Autobiographies and Memoirs. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2013. Sei Shōnagon. Kopfkissenbuch. Makura no Sōshi. Ed. Michael Stein. Zürich: Manesse, 2015. Suzuki, Sadami. „Nikki“ to „Zuihitsu“: Janru gainen no Nihonshi [‘Nikki and zuihitsu: A Japanese History of generic terms’]. Kyoto: Rinsen shoten, 2016. Wittig, Matthias. “Erzählen vom Erfolg: Japans Nachkriegsunternehmer und ihre Autobiographien. Eine Bestandsaufnahme.” Bulletin of the Faculty of Foreign Studies, Sophia University 48 (2013): 27–53. Wittig, Matthias. Identität und Selbstkonzept: Autobiographien japanischer Unternehmer der Nachkriegszeit. München: iudicium, 2016.

5 Australia and New Zealand

5.1 Australia Kylie Crane

It seems necessary to state at the outset, even if it is a point that echoes throughout the volumes that comprise this project, that to apply the category of ‘autobiography’ to the textual production of a country such as Australia is to privilege a certain mode of telling (one’s own) story. Which is to say that the printed text is privileged over the other versions of partaking in this kind of tale, including, for instance, the oral. (Other modes that might engage in the ‘telling of one’s story’ include visual arts, dance, audio-visual media such as documentaries, video installations, and television.) Further, and to continue problematising this contribution before it has begun, the bounds of a country such as Australia are also the product of colonial – both historical and ongoing – political processes. To write of Australia in such a context is to not write of alternative modes of understanding a geological (biological, mineralogical, social, etc.) place, but of a nation-state that emerged as a consequence of European colonialism. And a third rejoinder: To consider ‘autobiography’ is also to consider a specific mode of story-telling that foregrounds the individual, a foregrounding which emerges out of a mode of Western thought and does not necessarily transpose to all (non-Western) cultures. This contribution endeavours to introduce the reader to key issues of autobiographical writing within the Australian context, keeping the rejoinders above in mind. This requires consideration of some historical dates and events, although these will be limited to those considered germane to the study of Australian autobiographical writing, but might also aid the reader unfamiliar with the particular (colonial and postcolonial) issues of Australian (cultural and literary) history. Gillian Whitlock, in “From Biography to Autobiography”, asks “[w]hat are the complicities between the genre of self-portrait autobiographies and processes of assimilation?” (2000, 254). Generic boundaries, Whitlock suggests, drawing also on Brian Castro’s Writing Asia and Auto/biography, “have also been used as racial boundaries” (2000, 255). The way in which these observations map onto autobiographical writing from Australia thus requires contextualisation that traces the “unsettled past” (2000, 255) of the continent/archipelago of Australia beyond a broad postcolonial setting, emphasising some of the specific socio-historic events and entanglements that have given rise to the various forms of cultural production in, on, and about this site. The problematisation of the genre of Australian autobiography is to be considered a rider for this contribution, as some sections will, as a consequence of the generic specificity of this entire project, undoubtedly privilege certain ethnicities over others – in particular white Australians (‘Anglo-Celtic’, as they are sometimes called, or ‘postsettlers’). In the description of three tropes for autobiographical writing from Australia – the battler, the battler in the outback, and the outsider – such a privileging is more than evident. Accordingly, this description is supplemented with the addihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-106

1088 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

tion of two further types of autobiographical writing: testimony and ficto-criticism. The former seeks to address the various life writings (with various autobiographical tendencies) of the indigenous peoples of Australia. To consider as autobiography only those texts that meet critical and market expectations of what constitutes an autobiography would be to exclude this vibrant and crucial body of texts, a problematic power play, as shown in some detail below. The latter type, ficto-criticism, foregrounds attempts by white (academic) Australians to probe the structural inequities of (academic) writing with respect to issues of ethnicity in particular. (Note, however, that the body of ficto-critical writings from the Australian context is by no means restricted to this identificatory category; gender, in particular, has also given rise to a large body of ficto-critical texts.) This body of writing, in the version presented in this contribution, engages in Whitlock’s problematisation of biography and autobiography in the Australian context: The question of ‘what is autobiography’ is replaced by a series of questions about when and how it is possible to read autobiographically. Equally, it suggests that the reader needs to question how writers and critics approach these issues too, to understand the artfulness and the historicity of both literary and critical discourses (2000, 247).

Histories Prior to British settlement on the eastern coast of what is now the Australian continent, people had lived throughout the archipelago of Australia for some 40,000 years or more. (The expression ‘archipelago’ is deliberate, in order to suggest that the nation state of Australia encompasses not only the large island with which most are familiar, but also the various islands off this island: The largest, Tasmania, to the south, is wellknown; other islands which fall under Australian state sovereignty include Christmas Islands, the Torres Strait Islands, etc.) These indigenous peoples are now generally referred to as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. The term encompasses various clans, and linguistic and cultural communities. After mostly maritime explorations by a number of European nations in the seventeenth century (Dutch, French, British), the English seafarer James Cook mapped the east coast in 1770 and claimed around half the continent as a British possession. In 1788, a contingent of more than one thousand British convicts and soldiers arrived near what is today Sydney to establish the first European settlement. 26 January 1788 is marked as the day of Sydney’s founding, and this day is still celebrated each year as Australia Day. Some Indigenous Australians, in contrast, refer to 26 January as Invasion Day. Australia as a nation-state came into being in 1901 with the federation of various British colonies to form one nation. Laws enacted soon after federation, which remained valid until the mid- to late-twentieth century, collectively known as the ‘White Australia Policy’, privileged migration to Australia for certain ethnic groups,

5.1 Australia 

 1089

particularly people from the British Isles. People of Chinese heritage, who had migrated to the Australian colonies during various nineteenth century Gold Rushes, as well as Pacific Islanders who had worked as indentured labourers on plantations, were discriminated against and many were deported from Australia soon after federation. Aborigines were not granted full citizenship and voting rights until later in the twentieth century. More recently, indigenous Australians have demanded land rights and won various legal and political battles, and thereby challenged settler-Australians to reconsider a history of colonialism, as well as notions of identity and belonging. The High Court’s Mabo ruling of 1992 was important in this regard. It rejected the myth of ‘terra nullius’, i.  e. that the lands of Australia were uninhabited at the time of British settlement, and recognised the prior and ongoing ‘native title’ property rights of indigenous Australians. The Wik decision of 1996 acknowledged that pastoral leases did not extinguish native title rights. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report, based on an inquiry into twentieth century policies of forced removal of indigenous children from their homes and communities, finally led to a formal apology to the so-called Stolen Generations by the Australian government in 2008. This report will be discussed in more detail below, as it comprises a specific form of life-writing: testimony. Finally, in this cursory historical sketch, it is worth mentioning that Australians voted in 1999 not to become a republic, thereby retaining the British monarch as their official head of state. These events have undoubtedly had an effect on Australian identities, and also the production of autobiographical writing from and about Australia. However, this is not to suggest a rigid causality, or of a mirroring effect, where cultural forms (such as the autobiography) reflect developments in a society ‘at large’, understood as somehow separate. Instead, legal decisions, political changes and historical events are here, as elsewhere, manifestations of shifts that reverberate with cultural productions.

Autobiography and the Postcolonial A contribution on Australian autobiography, such as this, is an engagement in a genre of writing. This foregrounding of the written entails a foregrounding of particular versions of stories: Of historical accounts of the written form. If ‘Australia’ can be said to have existed prior to its exploration and mapping by European seafarers as a continent or archipelago, for example in the mythic renditions of ‘terra australis’ on maps and in other written accounts, then this formation is still attested through written documents. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson accordingly argue that the notion of autobiography, as word and as practice, is entangled with Enlightenment notions of a self of coherence. Western autobiographical practice emerges as “an exclusionary genre against which the utterances of other subjects are measured and misread” (Smith and

1090 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

Watson 1992, xviii). The privilege of the autobiographical ‘I’ blends to a ‘Western eye’ that “sees Man as a unique individual rather than a member of a collectivity, of race or nation, of sex or sexual preference” and “the colonized as an amorphous, opaque collectivity of undifferentiated bodies” (Smith and Watson 1992, xvii). The evocation of the colonised has a further layer of meaning in Australia. Postcolonial has been mobilised not only to reference the Indigenous peoples of the continent/archipelago (or other non-majority ethnicities such as Chinese Australians or Greek Australians), but also white Australians, settlers and postsettlers. Reference is made here in particular to the hyphenated post-colonial of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s influential The Empire Writes Back (first published 1989). Two of the authors are Australian (Griffiths is Welsh), and all three have spent large periods as academics in English departments based in Australia: They write from an Australian perspective. They use the term ‘post-colonial’ to “cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin 2002, 2). This has the effect of subsuming different cultural productions, particularly the literary (which is the predominant focus of the volume), into what they call “stages of production” (2002, 4–6), regardless of ethnic or cultural background. The first stage, they suggest, is marked by productions from “‘representatives’ of the imperial power” (2002, 5), for instance gentrified settlers as well as settlers. In this stage, ‘home’ is still imagined as England (or, occasionally, somewhat broader as the British Isles). The second stage, the last that the authors enumerate, is that which is produced, as they argue, “‘under imperial licence’ by ‘natives’ or ‘outcasts’” (2002, 5), whereby both descendants of the colonisers and colonised are understood under this rubric. To make the point, Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin cite a text written by James Tucker, a convict sent to Australia. The capacity of Tucker to publish a book at all suggests a certain kind of privilege – even if it does not last his whole life (he was later imprisoned [Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin 2002, 6]) – which the authors are careful to point out. Their example is particularly auspicious here, for the work, Ralph Rashleigh, was originally taken to be a convict memoir rather than a novel (Webby 1988, 122), and thus can be considered as an early contribution to autobiographical writings from Australia. The use of ‘postcolonial’ or, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin write it, ‘post-colonial’, has been (and continues to be) used in a particular way in Australia. The postcolonial in the Australian context does not exclusively refer to the writings of, or writings about, indigenous peoples. Further, the point can (and has been) made that the conditions under which the indigenous peoples of Australia live are in fact not postcolonial at all, but colonial. (The Mabo decision, whilst acknowledging indigenous peoples’ property rights, did not recognise their sovereignty over the land.) The ‘post-colonial’ in this use is significantly broader, encompassing settlers, migrants, and the indigenous: The colonial centre (the British Isles, England, London) is understood as exerting power over all inhabitants of Australia in this model. Western modes of representation, including of course autobiographies and autobiographical writings,

5.1 Australia 

 1091

dominate the cultural landscape, rendering alterations or changes to such modes as alterations or changes, that is, as reinforcing the dominance of such modes of representation as recourse is repeatedly made to them. Further, this double-consciousness of what, and in particular whom, the critique of postcolonial theory applies to – specifically, the modes of considering power structures in the wake of colonial and imperial expansion – affects the reception of Australian texts in specific ways that may differ (dramatically) from other postcolonial contexts. Readers who approach the literary or critical reception of Australian autobiography might thus be cautioned to reckon with the varying uses of ‘postcolonial’ in the Australian context: The transposition from, for instance, the non-settler colonies of non-white majorities in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, does not occur without interferences. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, in observing the particular patternings of postcolonial thought with respect to Australia, notes that whilst Scottish, Irish and English migrants have differing relations to British imperialism due to their ethnicity, they do, in Australia, occupy a different position than, for example, “Italian, Greek and Vietnamese migrants”. This leads to the production of “different conceptions of home, place and belonging” (Moreton-Robinson 2003, 29). The notions of home, place, and belonging are central themes of autobiographies and autobiographical writings across the globe. With respect to Australia, this means keeping the various colonial and postcolonial power constructs in mind. “White Australians are ambiguously positioned” suggests Deborah Bird Rose, stressing the roles of colonisers and colonials: In the first position they share a Home-based subjectivity which distances them from the continent and the Indigenous people. In the second position, they find themselves excluded from the subjectivity of Home, and objectified as a disjunctive fragment transported to an unfavourable part of the globe (Rose 2004, 43).

The disjunct of ‘Home’, inscribed here with a capital letter, refers to England, or alternatively the British Isles; as the trope of the outsider (discussed below) explores in some detail, this double position with respect to postcoloniality is not only a matter of theoretical consideration, but has specific effects on the production of autobiography and identity positions beyond writing.

Unsettling Autobiography As Gillian Whitlock stresses, the history of Australia is not settled, indeed, as she also notes, it is unsettling (2000, 255). This doubling of positions is integral to contextualising Australian autobiography: in ‘white’ writings in the more traditional forms of autobiographical production (through the themes of the ‘Battler’ and the ‘Outsider’);

1092 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

through ficto-critical explorations of these themes; and through the power frameworks established and challenged by testimony. One way of tracing such double positions is to trace the publication of texts in early colonial Australia. Initially, publication outputs were controlled by the ‘centre’ (London) gate-keeping the texts that entered into circulation. In this early period, costs of local publication were prohibitive due partly to the fact that materials required for printing had to be imported (Webby 1988, 114). As Elizabeth Webby points out: “The British government was sufficiently conscious of the spirit of the age to send a printing press to Australia with the First Fleet. Initially, however, no-one could operate it” (1988, 114). Publication within Australia in the early period focussed primarily on reports, auction catalogues, and similar materials. To the extent that ‘literary’ works were published with Australian themes, Webby notes that “most of the non-fiction, the accounts of first settlement, later works of travel and exploration, histories, biographies and autobiographies, were published outside Australia, usually in London” (1988, 115). Such documents often served as reports from the far reaches of Empire to the reading public of the English market, resulting in significant editorial work undertaken by English editors conscious of this particular audience. This issue remained “a problem for Australian writers throughout the nineteenth century” (Webby 1988, 115). During this period works were often produced at their author’s expense; this entails a magnified site of privileging to those who could write, had the time and inclination to write, and, further, who had the necessary funds to facilitate publication (Webby 1988). Accordingly, issues of autobiographical writing in Australia are compounded by expectations of the marketplace. These intertwine with the notion of authenticity, in particular for ‘minorities’, whether along lines of ethnicity, gender or sexuality: The extent to which autobiographies must comply with the “taste and expectations of a white readership and publishing industry” (Whitlock 2000, 252) places constraints on the form and modes of telling within the genre. (This problematic applies to other genres too, as the publication history of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria [2006] reveals: this novel, which went on to win the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s esteemed prize for novels, was initially rejected by numerous publishing houses.) Authenticity comes to bear down on autobiographies when it encodes temporalities of cultures in terms of traditions or as traditional. To note the centrality of the oral tradition for Indigenous Australians is, for instance, to note a disjunct between the performance of the oral tale, where stories were told to those who knew the story teller (Kurtzer 1998, 21) and the written tale, constrained by any number of factors as outlined above. Oral stories, further, have proximate listeners, listeners who are present and close to the telling. Penny van Toorn’s reading of Bennelong’s letter as a first instance of Aboriginal life writing within the Australian context draws attention to the multiple addressees of the letter (van Toorn 2001). In it, Bennelong adheres to conventions of letter-writing (asking after Mr. Phillips, the immediate addressee’s health, for instance) and yet also mentions Mrs. Phillips and Lord Sydney, proximate addressees. Van Toorn suggests

5.1 Australia 

 1093

that these structural characteristics are paradigmatic for oral traditions: “Bennelong dictates his letter as though he, and everyone he speaks about, are in each other’s physical proximity, and can thus be spoken to, as was usually the case (subject to traditional avoidance patterns) in precolonial Aboriginal societies” (van Toorn 2001, 5). By drawing a parallel to other written documents, particularly those which are published, van Toorn makes a case for this specific letter as a precursor of later documents of life writing, which indeed address more than one individual. The expectations of the reader and market generate reading publics, reviews, responses and all manner of paratextual codes. The marks of such matters extend well beyond the autobiographical subject, rendering them the autobiographical object of such expectations. This is not to suggest that the humans who occupy the lives told in such works are reduced to a passive object-position: The works may foreground episodes or modes that indeed object to the expectations which they respond to (or imagine responding to). Graham Huggan, writing of ethnic autobiographies, suggests that this body of texts “signal[s] the possibility of indirect access to ‘exotic’ cultures whose differences are acknowledged and celebrated even as they are rendered amenable to a mainstream reading public” (2001, 155). The allegorical function of the autobiography is that it not only speaks for itself, it also speaks of its writer (hence autobiography), and, importantly, of a number of subject-positions that the writer inhabits as well as those attributed by a (heterogeneous) reading public. White Australian autobiographies thus inhabit a conceptual space where they can be read as allegories of nationhood. So called ‘ethnic’ or indigenous Australian autobiographies are read, oftentimes, not so much as allegories of nationhood, but instead, as Huggan (2001, 155) argues, as insights into other cultures.

Watershed Dates and Publications The year of 1988, the bicentenary of Australian settlement, is a date around which many publications and events congeal. Numerous publications reflecting on the nation-state of Australia entered the market around this date, including, for instance, autobiographical/polyphonic texts like Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) (which is given an entire chapter in Volume 3 of this handbook, and will be addressed briefly later in this introduction) and Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988). The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (edited by Laurie Hergenhan) was published in 1988, as were the December 1988 issue of Southerly: A Review of Australian Literature with a focus on Aboriginal Literature and the inaugural volume of the British Australian Studies Association’s journal Australian Studies, in June 1988. The bicentennial issue of Outrider was also published as Australian Writing Now in 1988. The list is extensive, and these texts comprise only a small sample. Importantly in this context, John Colmer’s Australian Autobiography: The Personal Quest was published

1094 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

in 1989. An intensified interest in matters Australian, including the narrative of the nation and those of its citizens, is attested to by such a proliferation. Some book-length studies have been published on Australian autobiography and autobiographical writings. Colmer’s self-appraised “first book-length study of Australian autobiography” (1989, 2), published the year after the bicentenary as mentioned above, claims to “illustrate the diversity of autobiographical writing in Australia” (1989, 2). However, the author almost apologises for the “extent to which – until comparatively recently – male writers dominated the scene” (1989, 2), and suggests the “rise of women’s autobiography, its central place in Women’s Studies, is the subject for a separate book” (1989, 2). McCooey’s volume, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography published with Cambridge University Press (1996), has a more careful gender balance with respect to the authors whose works he includes, although other books, for example Anne Brewster’s brief introductory book Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1996), are more explicit in fulfilling this desiderata. In Artful Histories, McCooey draws on themes from the autobiographies to organise his book, with a particular emphasis on childhood and parents, place (in particular the home), objects, and the garden. This organisational principle gives insight into these topoi across a broad selection of Australian autobiographies. However, the specific Australian-ness of these themes is mostly elusive, perhaps a consequence of his hesitance towards theories of identity (pertaining to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or postcoloniality in general). These publications are supplemented by some shorter, introductory pieces included in edited volumes, as well as various isolated publications in journal formats. In one such contribution, “Autobiography” to the Penguin New Literary History, Chris Wallace-Crabbe suggests that the year 1963 “marks a climax and watershed in this matter of writing the self into a book” (1988, 561). He notes not only the publication of Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony – “surely the most brilliant of all Australian autobiographies” (1988, 561) – but also Miles Franklin’s Childhood at Brindabella, Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Child of the Hurricane and Xavier Herbert’s Disturbing Element. Following this, 1964 saw the publication of Jack Lindsay’s Franfolico and After and George Johnston’s autobiographical novel My Brother Jack. In 1965, Graham McInnes’ The Road to Gundagai and Martin Boyd’s Day of My Delight (with the sub-title An Anglo-Australian Memoir) were published. Wallace-Crabbe looks overseas to developments in other English-speaking countries and to entanglements in the Vietnam War to explain this particular surge in autobiographical writings. Whilst such an explanation might suggest a dependency of Australian culture on external affairs and international impulses, it might also be interpreted as indicative of a coming-ofage on the international ‘stage’. Gillian Whitlock’s essay “From Biography to Autobiography” in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature deserves special note for its inclusiveness towards the various forms which life-writing can take in the Australian context, providing a succinct and nuanced survey. She suggests, for instance, that writings by explorers

5.1 Australia 

 1095

might provide “insight into the historical, cultural and social contexts which shape the autobiographical subject” (Whitlock 2000, 232), particularly following the publication of Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay in 1987. Autobiographical writings certainly come in many forms. Some are clearly marked and marketed as autobiographies, as is the case for texts of the first of the following three sections, which addresses the tropes of ‘white’ Australian writing encompassing (exemplarily) the egalitarian myth of the battler, the battler of the iconic Australian Outback, and the Outsider.

Tropes: The Battler, The Battler in the Outback, The Outsider The Battler In Australia, Elizabeth Furniss argues, “the master narratives are of a kind of victimisation that necessitates not a passive endurance but an ongoing, aggressive battle for survival” (2005, 35). The trope of the Battler thus points at the colonial beginnings of writing in Australia, and foregrounds the double-consciousness of Australian relations to colonialism outlined above. This, all the more so, as the subjects and writers of this trope are typically white (Anglo-Celtic) male figures, positions, therefore, that are usually associated with privilege. The battler, in Australian myth, is closely associated with egalitarian (and utopian) principles of equality. Like in similar myths, for instance the U.S. imaginary of dishwasher-to-millionaire stories, such privilege is backgrounded against adverse circumstances of other identity categories, especially those of class. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2003, 23) argues that the battler serves as a self-legitimising legend, as “people who struggled to overcome adversity, worked hard and achieved a better life in […] society” (2003, 26). The trope of the Battler therefore necessitates difficult or tough circumstances from which the individual can arise. These circumstances can, but do not always, point back to the individual’s childhood. The centrality of childhood to autobiography and autobiographical writing is a commonplace, rising during the twentieth century (and perhaps linked to the influence of psychoanalysis at the turn of the twentieth century). Read metonymically, the gesture of the Battler then takes recourse to the circumstances of the nation’s birth. In such a reading, the nation, too, emerges from difficult or tough circumstances, often encoding landscape, indigenous peoples, and societal constraints in similar terms. The antagonism of landscape, in particular, gains prominence in the Australian context, as the sub-trope of Battler in the Outback will reveal. Anna Johnston argues the following:

1096 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

Individual autobiographies inscribe individual life-narratives, which accumulate to inscribe a national discourse. This ‘imagined community’ [a reference to Benedict Anderson, K.C.] reverberates in the national consciousness, providing a set of texts and subjectivities which identify a nation. In Australia, this is particularly evident in the range of ‘Aussie battler’ autobiographies (1996, 132).

Such ‘battler’ autobiographies comprise A.B. (Albert Barnett, or Bert) Facey’s A Fortunate Life (1981) and works by Alan Marshall but also, as Johnston notes, a series of autobiographies written by Labor politicians who position themselves as battlers. The circumstances into which one is born is often recounted at the outset of an autobiography, as for instance A.B. Facey’s starting with the declaration of his birth and a sketch of the social circumstances into which he was born. His stories of hardship overcome, particularly in the periods of settling and clearing land, are kept in a jovial, friendly tone. The overall trajectory and tone are celebratory, reaffirming the development of a life and a nation without much overt criticism: Colmer ascribes the success of A Fortunate Life to its celebration of popular Australian myths in a period he suggests was “notable for critical reassessments of the Australian tradition, in works such as The Australian Legend Revisited and Richard White’s Inventing Australia, both of which seriously question the nationalist myths built up over the last hundred years” (Colmer 1989, 90). Facey’s involvement in some of these myths directly – specifically the landing at Gallipoli – helps to forward such an interpretation, even if his judgement of the First World War is rather damning (Colmer 1989, 92). Certainly, the trope of the Battler as a person who encounters and overcomes hardship draws heavily on war metaphors (note that the ‘battler’ comes from ‘battle’). It is no surprise, then, that this notion overlaps readily with another of Australia’s national(istic) myths: Gallipoli. The involvement of Australian troops in fighting at Gallipoli, Turkey, in 1915, gave rise to the ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) myth. The landing at Gallipoli is commemorated on 25 April each year, with numerous Australians attending dawn services at Gallipoli and at war memorials throughout Australia (Hillman 2011). The capacity to rally national(istic) sentiment around soldiers is a commonplace (and crucial, for instance, to the function of the Unknown Soldier [Anderson 2006, 10]). If, in Australian nationalist myth-making, Gallipoli is the site of Australia ‘coming into its own’, it provides a framework for the making of (particular kinds) of personhood, specifically male whites. Whitlock suggests, of Facey’s A Fortunate Life, that the popularity of this text can be traced to its evocation of “an Australian oral narrative tradition in its usage of tropes and motifs, and a simple moral vocabulary” (2000, 252). Group myths near the centre of Australian nationalist thinking, such as the bush and the ANZAC myths, are incorporated into the text producing an effect that “stresses the narrator’s reliability and the text’s authenticity” (Whitlock 2000, 252). The authentic, in such an account, works by virtue of its being recognised, and being recognised as authentic.

5.1 Australia 

 1097

Alan Marshall – author of a compilation of sketches entitled, rather tellingly, Battlers – wrote a three-part autobiography comprising I Can Jump Puddles (1955), This is the Grass (1962) and In Mine Own Heart (1963). These could also be included in the trope of the Battler; the episodes recollected in the volumes, work to distillate several themes of overcoming adversity. John Colmer summarises these characteristics as follows: cheerful fortitude in the face of suffering […]; triumph over physical disability [polio, K.C.]; the Australian bush as a source of beauty and as a training ground in rugged virtue; Australian nationalism, the universal bond of humanity; and, as a continuous undercurrent in the whole trilogy, the determination to be a writer (1989, 19).

The trilogy was later made into a television mini-series in 1981, attesting to its popularity and reception. Facey’s A Fortunate Life was, similarly, adapted for the television screen in a mini-series initially broadcasted in 1986 (and now available on DVD).

Battler in the Outback The Battler might also negotiate difficult or tough circumstances that arise from the specific environment in which the life story is set. Here, recourse is taken to an iconic Australian (continental) landscape, the Outback. The Outback, sometimes figured as ‘the Bush’, is a widely disseminated image associated with Australia. Its minimal role in the quotidian lives of most Australians has not yet stymied its influence. The Outback is constructed as an antagonistic space, the ‘empty heart’ of a continental island, an unfamiliar desert (aside from the iconic Uluru gracing posters, advertisements and films), but it is also seen as mostly lacking (agricultural prospects, human populations, sites of historical or cultural importance, sustenance, water). It is a construction of a particular time and understanding of colonial history that nevertheless continues to inform the cultural imaginary of Australia to this day. The Battler of the Outback thus enacts a double gesture. To the extent that it stresses the antagonistic environment of the Outback, it reiterates the discursive exclusion of those peoples, the Aboriginal inhabitants, who have long established livelihoods and homes in the Outback (amongst other environments within the Australian archipelago). This is a prominent motive in the mythical renderings of the ‘lost’ or dead explorers (Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt, and Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, respectively). The environment of Australia, particularly the outback, is encoded in such accounts as antagonistic, giving rise to figures that must overcome hardship. The tribulations mark not only founding myths of the battler in the outback, but are marked on maps of the landscapes they travail through such names as ‘Lake Disappointment’, ‘Mount Hopeless’, ‘Anxious Bay’, and so on. (Naming as a postcolonial gesture of ownership is by now established; in the Australian context, Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay [1987] deserves special mention for its development of this theme.)

1098 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

On the other hand, to the extent that this trope renders the Outback as ‘Home’, as un-antagonistic, this space is domesticised. Further, the extent to which the white ‘bushman’ is celebrated as ‘true blue Aussie’ is predicated on the extent to which the Aboriginal ‘bushman’ is absent. The Outback, as out-back, only functions as a referent in particular contexts. When it is understood as ‘home’, the forcefulness of the image and its associations begins to dissipate. Negotiating these tensions gives rise to a particular form of history telling, and life-story telling, as Nicholas Gill argues: They draw on a highly selective recollection of the past that is not simply an outcome of colonialism but is constructed from the very mythical foundations that have informed, driven and justified non-indigenous settlement of Australia and the dispossession of indigenous people. These histories portray their protagonists one-dimensionally as deserving ‘battlers’ (2005, 80).

These life-stories are, nonetheless, quite popular in Australia, particularly those written by white women. Jeannie Gunn’s We of the Never-Never, first published as a novel under the name of Mrs Aeneas Gunn in 1908, has sold over one million copies; Sara Henderson’s From Strength to Strength (1993) is also considered a best-seller. Where Gunn’s autobiography stresses the pioneering roles she and her husband adopted for themselves, overcoming isolation and establishing domesticity in an adverse (social, natural) environment, Henderson’s adversity is financial as much as natural (she overcomes the debt her husband left her after his passing, and goes on to be named ‘Bulletin/Qantas Businesswoman’ of the Year in 1991). Both stories take the vast expanses of pastoral leases in the Northern Territory as their setting. This setting is prominent in another two autobiographical books, one, Craft for a Dry Lake written by Kim Mahood and published in 2000 as a memoir, and another, marketed as a “life story of a family in the outback” (back cover), by her mother, Marie Mahood (Icing on the Damper [1993]). Icing on the Damper employs the ‘I’ of autobiographical writing but the story is as much hers as her family’s: The eponymous phrase is taken from an episode recollected upon receiving an offer for the station: This wasn’t the first time we had been approached to sell [the station, K.C.] over the years and the offer might have been tempting if it had come when our spirits were lowest during the drought. But now the icing was back on the damper and the world was turning green again (Mahood 1993, 179).

The juxtaposition of damper – a doughy, bread-like food associated with hardship (and camping) – with icing brings forth the thematic concerns of the book as a whole and the tension between outback and the domestic sphere. The structure of the book is reminiscent of another genre of life-writing: The ‘Christmas letter’. Each chapter roughly corresponds to a calendar year, summarising trials and triumphs of family and station life, giving rise to a domestic form of writing, written with a familiar audience in mind. Kim Mahood’s book, also a memoir, and, like her mother’s, concerned with Joe Mahood (father/husband), covers much of the same ground, yet is more complex in

5.1 Australia 

 1099

tone and style. She asserts that “[i]f you can’t locate yourself in some sort of narrative or myth, you can’t survive for too long in this country. It needs to be a strong story to take its place out here, and it needs to be something that comes from the country itself” (Mahood 2000, 203). Her memoir is heavily invested in the politics of gender and race in conjunction with place, but with an aesthetics that draws on her visual art practices and shifts in poetic voice: This was my father’s country, or so I thought returning on some half-cocked pilgrimage to lay old ghosts, eschew old myths, or some such middle-life conceit. And found country, dry, a dry place that resisted memory, […] Found country that could not hold the past, that was another place. The black women gave me my old skin back and made it new, but I could not wear it. The dreaming tracks are not mine (Mahood 2000, front matter).

Kim Mahood returns to this poetic voice throughout the book to elicit a site of enunciation that remains troubled by the past. The myth of the Outback, then, would be seen to emerge from the Outback itself, and this book draws heavily on exploration journals of white, male dominance over landscape as well as contemporary sketches of Aboriginal women’s custodianship to reveal the Outback as a site of tension.
 The ‘Great Australian Emptiness’ (the term is Patrick White’s from “The ­Prodigal Son” [1989], see also McCooey 1996, 153) and the limitlessness of the horizon (McCooey 1996, 156, see also Ashcroft’s “Horizontal Sublime” [2005]) establish a dialectic between the (sub)urban habitats of most of Australia’s population and the Outback. These writers of the Outback, then, might also be considered Outsiders, even as they re-inscribe colonial modes of ownership of the land.

The Outsider The issue of what texts to reference in any introduction to Australian autobiography raises the questions about which autobiographies might ‘count’ as Australian. To suggest that Australian citizenship might be a useful category requires a definition of citizenship that extends beyond those offered by Australian law, or to otherwise forgo any accounts prior to 1949 (or 1958, depending on interpretations of citizenship law in Australia). (Note also, in this conjunction, the mobilisation of the term ‘un-Australian’ to denote specific behaviours and events as a mechanism of discursively inscribing

1100 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

the limits of Australian-ness within recent Australian history [Schwarz 2004 and Elder 2007, e.  g. 2–3]). Outsiders in this discussion are thus those who align their own positioning with respect to Australia as tenuous – this position often goes hand in hand with other ‘outsider’ roles. The autobiographical Outsider can be defined as a figure who reports on society. The autobiographical subject must be both exceptional (and thus ‘worthy’ of writing about, to say nothing of being published) as well as somehow normal (and thus representative of some kind of norm). Accordingly, the metonymical function of the autobiographer occupies a site of tension with respect to the society upon which it is reporting. This role is intrinsic to a celebrated Australian autobiography: Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, which McCooey suggests is of “primary importance” as autobiography (McCooey 1996, 1; see also the article on The Watcher by Jack Browers in Vol. III of this handbook) and Colmer also affords it centrality. Porter establishes the trope of the Outsider with the title of his autobiography as a watcher, someone who looks out, even down (as the position of the balcony would suggest), at the world. The gaze of the watcher is bifurcated. It looks to the outside and the inside, as manifest in references to his (younger) self in the third person as “the watcher” (i.  e. Porter 1986, 9), and as a crucial characteristic for the role of the writer (Porter 1986, 104). Beginning with a meditation on death – Porter’s first sentence reads “[i]n a half-century of living, I have only seen two corpses, two only” (1986, 9) – and closing with the death of his mother (one of these two corpses), the image of the person set apart and looking on, the watcher, is present throughout this autobiography. The Australian-ness of the text is established as a function of class (Porter 1986, 68–69) and, in a manner that recollects T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, through numerous objects and references to places far away (Empire, Victorian/Edwardian England, the U.S.  A., and Japan figure strongly). Patrick White, Australia’s sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, writes his autobiography as an Australian, but mostly outside Australia. As McCooey observes, “[t]he absence of Australia in Flaws in the Glass is conspicuous. White describes his times in England, Germany and the USA; his war-service in North Africa; and his love of Greece. Relatively speaking, Australia is a gap in the narrative” (1996, 144). White writes, for instance: “Till well into my life, houses, places, landscape meant more to me than people. […] It was landscape which made me long to return to Australia while at school in England. It was landscape more than anything which drew me back when Hitler’s War was over” (1985, 16). White was born outside of Australia (in London), a fact he notes by calling himself an “outsider” (1985, 19), thus explicitly adopting this role. White’s portrayal of himself as an outsider is also present in his flitting between the first and third person: The use of the third person has the effect, in moments of external focalisation (i.  e. visitors [White 1985, 3]), of having a voice outside of the person. A similar strategy to that of Porter’s autobiography, markers of outsided-ness thus appear to abound at the syntactical level of writers’ autobiographies.

5.1 Australia 

 1101

An example that constitutes an autobiography written of Australia, but not as an Australian is Graham McInnes’ The Road to Gundagai (1965). McCooey suggests that whilst McInnes was socially well-placed, the displacement from England to Australia is a key tension within the text, with a sensation that “European culture may not be at home in the Australian landscape” (1996, 110) culminating in an “ambivalent sense of homeland [and] the doubleness of Australia” (1996, 111). This, then, is an example of the double consciousness of the Australian postsettler. It is evinced in passages such as the following description of boy scouts singing around a fire – not unaware of the threat of bushfires at the time of Christmas (Australian summer) – relying heavily on the dualistic construction of Australia as ‘other’: “The strains of such rollicking Edwardian numbers, wafted out into the silent antediluvian bush and the deep antipodean sky, struck me even then as having a faintly sinister incongruity” (McInnes 1965, 172). The repetition of the prefix ‘ante-’/‘anti-’ in this sentence, combined with the “faintly sinister incongruity”, enacts an interesting shift: “[o]ne is the other side of the world; one the other side of time” (McCooey 1996, 110). Here, the Australian landscape is outside of Europe and outside of time. McInnes writes this autobiography not as Australian, but of Australia, offering an outsider view of Australia. The role of the writer, reporting ‘back’ to society, is also often described in terms of an Outsider, as is the role of those who are for some reason ‘exceptional’ – sportspeople, politicians, dishwasher-to-millionaires. Drawing the borders in such a way means that all autobiographies, regardless of context, might be considered as written by outsiders. Further, the trope of the Outsider also encompasses any number of subjectivities that find themselves outside of a (however tenuously defined) normativity or majority: heteronormativity, majority ethnicity, (cis-)gendered majority, normative bodies, etc. Porter’s cleft palate, White’s homosexuality, Marshall’s polio, for instance. In considering ‘the Outsider’ as a perspective intrinsic to (postsettler) Australian autobiography, a double-gesture reminiscent of the postcolonial doubling becomes evident. If the dominant position of Australian autobiography is afforded to particular white, male writers, then double-binary excludes well over half the population. And yet, some of the most widely read autobiographies of recent years have been written by Aboriginal women, including Sally Morgan’s My Place (see the essay on this text by Martina Horáková in Volume 3 of this handbook). Rather than including this body of writing within the politically weighted category of ‘Outsider’, a different type, Life Histories/Testimonies, is evoked to stress the political and legal incursions these texts constitute for the genre of Australian autobiography and into the grounds of the Australian nation-state as a whole.

1102 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

Type: Life Histories/Testimonies It is necessary to highlight a particular body of autobiographical writing within the Australian context that shifts the lens away from the tropes of the ‘Battler’ and ‘Outsider’ of white Australian autobiographical production to a body of texts enunciated by various members of indigenous groups living in Australia. These writings elude those labels and forms developed to address individual stories, suggesting that the challenges felt at the individual level of the tropes outlined above require extension in order to grapple with systematic oppression. As Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan state in the introduction to their volume Telling Stories: Given that a good deal of indigenous history, at least in Australia, has taken the form of life stories, it has drawn into question the subject or subjectivity that modern European textual forms – particularly that of (auto)biography – has taken for granted. The notion of a singular, bounded individual, who has a unique self marked by particular motives, aspirations, attitudes, conscience and so forth, and who recounts a life in terms of a mythic journey by which s/he purposefully moves in a more or less linear and irreversible fashion towards knowledge, fulfilment and mastery of the world, has rarely squared with Aboriginal conceptions of self (Attwood and Magowan 2001, xiv).

The collaborative projects that comprise many life histories enacts a shift away from a conception of authorial autonomy within the generic conventions of autobiography. Critics and academics writing about the body of Aboriginal self-stories (produced and marketed under a number of banners) often note the influence of non-Aboriginal editors and interventions (Brewster 1996, 8; Attwood 2001). Some stories are orally transmitted to a collaborative “white scribe” (Brewster 1996, 8), where the influence of non-self is arguably more palpable than in those texts that have (simply?) entailed work by editors and publishers from a different cultural background. The oral nature of such texts problematises the genre of autobiography and the term’s privileging of writing, giving rise to a number of different denominations including “autobiographical narrative” (Brewster 1996, 2) or “life narrative” (Whitlock 2015), amongst others. To refuse to acknowledge the role such texts play in the field of Australian autobiography and auto-fiction on the basis of authorial autonomy is to reiterate the structures of power (implicit also in the conventions of genre) that work to exclude the postcolonial subject from a subject position. Recollect David Malouf’s fictional character Gemmy announcing that he is a “B-b-british object” (Malouf 1994, 3) on arrival in a mid-nineteenth century settlement in Queensland at the outset of Remembering Babylon: Subject (and object) positions are crucial relations, eliciting such power structures. These stories comprise a shift in autobiographical production within the Australian context for a number of reasons. Notably, the stories switch focus from the story of an individual to a story that embraces familial connections. These texts, then, might be considered polyphonic as much as autobiographic, enacting a shift away from the individualistic (and exceptionalistic) tendencies of the Western genre. Sally Morgan’s

5.1 Australia 

 1103

influential My Place can be taken as paradigmatic in this instance for its inclusion not only of her own story (autobiography) but also of (versions of) the stories of her mother, grandmother and great-uncle. The prose renders these stories highly accessible; a function not only of its gentle tone – a quality for which Morgan has received ample critique  –, of its slow and careful tracing of Morgan finding and coming to terms with her identity as an Aborigine, but also of the rendering of voice through the idiosyncracies of speech and dialect. Ruby Langford (Ginibi)’s second and third books (Real Deadly [1992] and My Bundjalung People [1994]) similarly draw on the stories of extended family, as does Doris Pilkington / Nugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence has been characterised by Anne Brewster as a “partly-fictionalised dramatisation of pre-contact Nyoongah life” in “a narrative of interwoven oral history and fiction” (Brewster 2002, n.pag.). For instance, at the outset, we read a fictionalised account of ‘first contact’ and of Pilkington Garimara’s ancestors ‘coming in’ from the desert to settlements. Pilkington does not apologise for the blurring of genre, indeed, she signposts it. In the introduction, she writes: “By combining my imagination and the information from records of geographical and botanical explorations undertaken in the area […], I was able to build a clearer picture of the vegetation and landscape through which the girls trekked” (Pilkington 2002, xii). She also makes use of archival materials such as letters, newspaper reports and government documents, Brewster points out, to “re-encounter the space of terror in order to perform a re-membering and rememoration or, in the terms of narrative therapy, to bear witness to the survival of a traumatised Aboriginality” through “Indigenous counter-histories and counter-archival construction, often constituted in the form of life stories and autoethnography” (Brewster 2002, n.pag.). The ‘artistic license’ taken at the borders of the various genres breathes a life into such life writing: Insights into characters are rendered palpable through focalisation (“How peaceful it was, with the sounds of birds twittering high above […]. Dawn was his [Kundilla’s, K.C.] favourite time of the day” [Pilkington 2002, 1]) and juxtaposed with historical record (“Jigalong was established as a government depot in 1907” [Pilkington 2002, 34], for instance). These characteristics – the shifting of genre boundaries, use of oral histories as archive and the fictionalised rendering of history – suggest that texts such as this must be considered in a contribution on Australian autobiography, not despite, but because of these differences. Aboriginal life stories, testimonies and autobiographies must negotiate a plethora of culturally charged expectations. In particular when employed in contexts with judicial frameworks, such expectations are charged with legal consequences. The reports included in the Bringing Them Home testimonies that recollect these practices and their far-reaching repercussions comprise an important body of life-writing within the Australian context. More than 500 testimonies were offered to the Bringing Them Home report, which is freely available online. The report itself quotes from testimonies gathered, placing them within the context of a larger phenomenon of forced removal

1104 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

of indigenous children. Different typesets have been employed in the report. Importantly, the testimonies offered in the first-person – the most autobiographical of the various citations within it – have been highlighted by the use of bold print. Recommendations, too, have been emphasised in this way, creating an effect of binding the testimony to future action. The full (emotional) brunt of the report emerges through its polyphonic nature, its use of first-person testimony in conjunction with historical documentation and legal frameworking. The consequences of testimony are patterned in complex ways, and are not restricted to a binary construction of victim/perpetrator or testifier/court of law. Gillian Whitlock (2015) draws attention to the metaphor of bearing witness: the dialogic and rhetoric of testimony pulls the addressee into the account, transferring a weight of responsibility and affect (Whitlock 2015, 8). She argues [t]estimony takes us to worlds where the boundaries of the civilized and the strange are perpetually a work in progress, returning repeatedly to that ‘global heritage’ of postcolonialism: the struggle to imagine new humanisms and the possibilities for activism and social change that follow (Whitlock 2015, 10).

The themes of the book-length testimonies and autobiographies thus seek to redress the absences of (personalised) history. As Sonja Kurtzer argues: When Aboriginal people contribute to the discourse on Aboriginality they do not do so from a ‘free’ space. Previous discourse constrains and defines the indigenous response. It becomes a matter of having to speak in terms that ‘white’ audiences recognise as valid, on matters seen as authentic, and in terms that do not threaten (Kurtzer 1998, 28).

As marketed books, these texts must negotiate the expectations of a predominantly white readership as well as readers who also identify as Aboriginal. Anne Brewster suggests that [n]ot only do Aboriginal people tell their history and thus act to intervene in the white discourse of history, but the refusal of their stories to tell all makes the point that ‘there is always something unavailable’ […]; the stories are as much about ‘secrecy and strategic non-disclosure’ […] as they are about the giving of information (Brewster 1996, 24).

Issues of authenticity with respect to Aboriginal writing are further complicated by differing comprehensions of the role of tradition. If tradition is used in a manner that entails an enduring practice of certain standards and functions, it complicates the notion of Aboriginal writing from the outset: Aboriginal writing emerges as a consequence of colonial conquest from numerous oral cultures. (The role of other enduring art forms, such as what might be called ‘rock art’, is left outside of such logic.) Gate-keeping the authentic here, as elsewhere, is a gate-keeping of privilege, even the privilege of criticism. When recourse is taken to pre-contact cultures to bolster a par-

5.1 Australia 

 1105

ticular interpretation of the traditional as authentic, this also excludes the possibility of writing. To evoke tradition in the conjunction of Aboriginal autobiography is thus, from the very outset, oxymoronic. The same structures that necessitate the life-writings produced in conjunction with reports such as Bringing Them Home – that is the colonial and ongoing practices of exclusion, and the fact of the contentious nature of ideas of genocide within the Australian context – preclude such specific notions of culturally specific tradition. Tradition, in the particular sense used to bolster the authentic, is perhaps then better understood as a set of practices, open to change. (At the same time, this argumentation taken to a particular extreme lends itself to an interpretation whereby there are ultimately no grounds upon which Aboriginal writing can exist. This is not the point. The point is that to elicit the traditional, the authentic, the ‘true’ or ‘pure’ in a genre that has emerged from the contact zone is to deny cultural adaptation, transformation, and, ultimately, agency.) Bain Attwood suggests that the syncretic label ‘Aboriginal’ might be functional with respect to the historical function of stories about government practices of child removal from their families within Australia. The removal of children from their communities had the effect of undermining communal memory, fundamental to any community, combined with the trauma of the experience and the impact of “the assimilationist code of racism upon the children who were removed” (Attwood 2001, 187). The emergence of stories of similar patterns in response to such practices facilitates and necessitates both a generic framework for production and reception. The emergence of the ‘Aboriginal’ in this respect glosses over the myriad of indigenous cultures in response to the practices of the Australian government forged under the name of ‘the Aboriginal’. That is to say, a category of identities, a genre of life-writings, forms not always as a response to a pre-existing tradition (or sense of authenticity), but as a response to an interpellation. To suggest that the writings that emerge in response to the removal of children from their families, communities, languages and cultures must conform to a certain mode of Aboriginality is, in a sense, to discursively reiterate the violence of the practices themselves. Another part of this issue is the fallacy of the Aboriginal, in the singular sense evoked by the definite participle ‘the’. As Anne Brewster points out “there was no Aboriginality in today’s sense because Aboriginal people did not have a sense of national solidarity; their mental map was one of regional geographic and ‘tribal’ boundaries rather than of national borders” (1996, 4). Even today, with a national state in place, Aboriginal identity is in a state of flux as the relations between different subsets of a multi-ethnic Australia shift in response to events, including the events of publication of autobiography and life-writing. Pre-colonial cultures of Australia were multiple, postcolonial cultures of Australia are multiple: Labelling a text as ‘Aboriginal’ is perhaps more than anything a mark of marketing. Protocols of Aboriginal writing, then, are multiple, and to be approximated with caution. Sally Morgan’s My Place attracted attention for its breaching of protocol, as does Colin Johnson/Mudrooroo Narrogin’s (2008) commentary on her text and the debate regarding his own ethnicity

1106 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

(Crane 2007). This does not tell us so much about the text itself as it does about the contentious nature of the field within which it was placed. Reading Aboriginal texts – autobiographical, memoir, life-writing, or fictional – for Aboriginality is complicated, charged, perhaps even contentious. Reading for Aboriginality is analogous at best (and mis-guided at worst). In such frameworks, specific individual stories (be they of individuals or of individuals’ families) are attributed a status of representativeness; this status is affordable only on a tenuous basis of authenticity. Certainly, this is an issue that does not only haunt autobiographical forms but literary and cultural production at large (Huggan 2001). In autobiographical forms, however, it appears to be condensed; the truth-value of authorial position extends not only outwards, into the market, but also inwards, into the text. The writing of an ‘own-story’ (autobiography) suggests a truth-value of the events within the text, even as they are interpreted (McCooey 1996, 3). If anything, the nature of critique directed at those who engage in practices of life-writing, autobiography or testimony tells as much about the wavering and contentious nature of the biographies of the writers of such critique as about the writings that are subject to such critique. And it is at this juncture, in particular but not exclusively, that a body of Australian life-writing has emerged: ficto-criticism.

Type: Ficto-criticism In Joe in the Andamans and Other Fictocritical Stories (2008), Stephen Muecke provides the following characterisation of the ficto-critical impulse of his stories: “They are self-portraits, using that tag to get away from the genres of autobiography and memoir, with which we are already very familiar. Autobiographies might be more interesting if they had something more ‘auto’ about them” (Muecke 2008, 13). The tension which Muecke asserts ficto-critical writings and autobiography possess is a productive one for this discussion of autobiography in Australia, and it deserves closer consideration. Where ‘autofiction’ suggests a form that combines the fictional with the autobiographical (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013, 9–12), ‘ficto-criticism’, at the face of it, suggests a form that combines the fictional with the critical. The ‘ficto’ of the ficto-criticism is perhaps better understood as ‘narrato’ – a narration, rather than a fictional construct. Such a re-naming would lend itself, then, to inclusion in a broader comprehension of life writing, particularly given that the auto-reflexive gesture is common to most ficto-critical writings. Asserting a body of ficto-critical texts is tenuous. Some have placed the genre alongside the autobiography, memoir, essay and academic piece; others look to more fictional works (Helen Flavell 2004). For the purposes of this contribution, ficto-critical texts are examined to the extent at which the ‘I’ of the text can be considered identical, or an approximation, of the author of said text (and on these grounds, Kim

5.1 Australia 

 1107

Scott’s Benang [1999] and other texts with a clearly demarcated fictional ‘I’ will not be considered). Obviously, such a delineation brings with it its own problems of privileging certain kinds of texts over others. But for a contribution concerned with autobiography (and auto-fiction), such a drawing of boundaries seems warranted. Certainly, there are some important differences between autobiography and ficto-criticism. The former is usually published in book-form (sometimes in multiple volumes); the latter often as an essay, although some book-length writings exist. The autobiography is usually written for, and marketed towards, a broader reading public; ficto-criticism, however, is usually published within academic circles. (Helen Flavell’s doctoral thesis on ficto-criticism, which stretches the boundaries of what might be considered ficto-criticism, blurs this distinction by examining texts such as Helen Garner’s The First Stone [1995] and Kim Scott’s Benang.) The most pressing distinction is perhaps that the ficto-critical essay, even in its most autobiographic moments, does not make the self the object of study, but rather foregrounds the self in studying something else. This distinction is an important one, and yet it is through this gesture that the impact of ficto-critical texts as autobiographical writing becomes most evident. By foregrounding those issues, particularly issues of identificatory weight (such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, or even nationality), it is precisely those issues which readers of autobiographies read for their metonymic functions that become the centre of attention. Which is to say: If a reader of an autobiography engages on this (enjoyable, or at least not necessarily onerous) task, they often do it in order to learn something about the way in which the writer of the autobiography can be considered exemplary with respect to certain traits. These traits might be a function of their particular life journey and achievements, as for example the plethora of sporting and political figures of immensely popular ‘auto’-biographies. They might (also) be a function of their representativeness, the way in which they speak as or even for a certain group within society (along the lines of racial, ethnic, gendered or class-based associations). And, for a reader of autobiographies of a specific nation-state, for instance Australia, they may also be read as Australian autobiographies, that is, as encapsulating something particularly Australian. Ficto-criticism, by foregrounding such identificatory categories as the object of study, provides a forum for an explicit exploration and critique of such ideas. These writings thus employ the autobiographical ‘I’ at the same time as critiquing the very notions for which autobiographies can be read. The writings of ficto-criticism forgo the objective voice so common to academic and critical writing (often in pair with its close cousin, the passive voice) in order to insert the subjective voice and an active positioning into the discourse. This impulse to ‘own’ the critical voice, and to narrate specific (personal or auto-narrative) circumstances that are integral to the theoretical, ethical or aesthetic elaborations which are also intrinsic to the genre (the ‘criticism’ of the term), is what gives rise to the inclusion of this particular form of writing within the constraints of this contribution. When the ficto-critical experiment draws attention to its own playfulness as well as its own

1108 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

performance of an ‘I’, it simultaneously stresses the roles these gestures play in other texts. Ficto-criticism thus points back to the genres it flaunts; its hybridities contaminate the ‘purer’ forms, prominently narratives and criticism, from which it draws. Ficto-critical writings might not overtly ‘belong’ in the context of an introduction to autobiographical writing in Australia, but they certainly do have a lot to ‘do’ with this context, and also ‘do’ a lot to the writings which might more traditionally be encompassed in such a contribution. When David McCooey, writer of Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography, asserts that autobiography is a “social form of writing […] and open to all the checks and limitations of testimony” he stresses that it “is a public act” (1996, 164). A substantial portion of the writings done in the ficto-critical mode address issues of ethnic and racial identity (as well as gendered positionings). Ficto-critical writing provides for a performativity of the academic or critical voice that can acknowledge the troubling and problematic history of the development of such voices. Which is to say: By foregrounding the authorial position, the writer is able to render the privileges and privileging that has given rise to the writer themselves much more discernible. To be sure, ficto-criticism is not exclusive to Australia. The Australian archipelago joins that of Canada as the two main sites from which this form of writing emerges (and the motive of the archipelago is all the more important given that some key proponents of the form no longer reside within Australia nor work at its universities, for example, Michael Taussig). It is arguably no coincidence this form of writing proliferates in these two sites, as there are many similarities in the historical, social, and economical states of these states. Further, it is arguably no surprise that two (post)settler, self-declared multicultural states such as Canada and Australia have given rise to so much of the writing of this mode. To turn, then, to some practitioners of this mode. Stephen Muecke writes in a piece that references Kim Mahood’s memoir Craft for a Dry Lake (see above) that ficto-criticism can collapse “the ‘detached’ and all-knowing subject into the text, so that his [reference is to Jacques Derrida, K.C.] (or your) performance as a writer includes dealing with a problem all contemporary writers must face: how the hell did I get here?” (Muecke 2002, 108). The writing subject, here of the ‘all-knowing’ kind, becomes the subject of, and subject to, the writing taking place. The verb face alludes to the noun face, the interface of knowing. And it pulls with it the weight of ethics. Muecke’s colloquial question – how the hell did I get here? – enacts a shift characteristic of the genre, bringing the personal, colloquial, quotidian into the prose of criticism, which, as an academic discipline, disciplines its language into the impersonal, formal, exceptional. Heather Kerr suggests that it looks “as if the fictocritical performance, writing as performativity, is being understood as a particular ritualistic practice of a ‘self’ and that the text is being regarded as a device or armature within particular conducts of life and practices of that self” (1996, 94). Further, she suggests that “‘[e]thical’ would […] be understood as a doubling effect; as both practice or habitus and as a principled stance […] alongside, between, within, cultural studies and postcolonial

5.1 Australia 

 1109

theory” (1996, 94). Here, as in other writings, the ethics of positioning the self are stressed, in both the sense of emphasis and pressure or tension exerted. Michael Taussig’s writings, for instance, arose out of a scepticism towards the ethnographic voice. In an interview with David Levi Strauss, he offers the following reasoning for his style of writing: I use the Sydney expression ‘fictocriticism’ to convey the hybrid sense and I clearly designate the fictional quality through a variety of devices, mainly humor and tone, camp and arch-camp. An aim of such writing is to turn the attention of the reader to the very act of writing as an ‘anthropological’ or cultural act which engages with the desire to succumb to authority in general, and to colonial or postcolonial tropes in particular (Taussig 2005, n.pag.).

The effect, in total, not only reflects on the life of the self (the ‘auto’ and ‘bio’ of autobiography) but also on the conditions and workings of writing (the ‘graphy’ of autobiography). His telling paraphrase “Sydney expression” grounds the practice in Australia, even if Taussig’s works more often take him through a southern continent on the other side of the Pacific, South America. Further: If you assume, as I do, that reality is really made up, then you are automatically launched into this wild project conflating fiction and non-fiction. The only choice you’ve got is whether to acknowledge this or not, whether you will exploit the joints and seams, or not, and whether you will allow the sheer act of writing itself to seem a self-conscious activity, drawing attention to the continuous work of make-believe in art no less than in politics and everyday life (Taussig 2005, n.pag.).

Taussig’s explanations also stress the ethical ramifications of writing academically as well as the genre-bending gestures of writing at the conflatory juncture of fiction and non-fiction. (In My Cocaine Museum [2004], for example, he comments on the process of remembering, research and writing by noting “How strange to read these terrible things, so long ago it seems, in old- fashioned books with cheap paper yellowing with age and brittle to the touch, yet present in every breath taken today in Colombia as I write these notes in 1999” [Taussig 2004, 278]). Writing style becomes ingrained in writing politics. Anne Brewster has written broadly on indigenous writing in Australia (as indicated above). Further foci of her research profile, specifically critical whiteness studies and affect, attest to a reflection on the role of the (white) reader of indigenous texts. “Fictocriticism: Pedagogy and Practice”, a piece Brewster published in 1995, stresses the role of the body, politicised as a site of memory, and as a “vehicle of memory” (1996, 92). In practice, characterised in this piece by a writing practice which “translate[s] poststructuralist rhetoric and issues into the arena of radical subjectivity” (1996, 92), this entails a critique of her own whiteness, her own situatedness with respect to the political issues about which she writes. Amanda Nettelbeck’s academic interests in frontiers and settlements (in Australia as well as in Canada) maps her ficto-critical contributions into this nexus, also. Another practitioner working at the interface of gender and postcoloniality, Katrina Schlunke, uses the term ‘autobiography’ rather

1110 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

loosely, as a political move to embody the past, in her book on massacres, Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre (2005). This work explores versions of history and/as versions of truth, and in doing so stresses the placedness of the academic voice, the ‘I’. Much of Stephen Muecke’s ficto-critical oeuvre emerges from his work with Aboriginal individuals and communities, for instance “Visiting Aboriginal Australia” (1999), which traces his emergence as an academic working with communities in northern Western Australia autobiographically. He writes of his new appointment at a university as well as of the theoretical background producing a shift in the work that was done in anthropology at the specific moment in time (the mid-1970s): “indigenous knowledges were starting to assume overt agency in the determinations of research agendas; the subjectivity or identity of the academic researcher was challenged and leading to self-reflexivity, narrativisation and negotiation of one’s speaking position” (Muecke 1999, 49–50). Muecke’s politics of story-telling and ownership of stories are positioned here in conjunction with the politics and economics of the material world of book markets: Muecke’s work with Paddy Roe was, he asserts, “the first time to [his] knowledge that an Aboriginal research assistant had been attributed joint authorship in an academic work, and given an equal share of the royalties” (Muecke 1999, 51, reference here, in particular, is to Krim Benterrak, Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke’s Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology [1984]). Ficto-critical writing thus provides a site for the exploration for voicing marginal positions, foregrounding the processes and bounds of the authorial voice.

Summing Up Of the many moves that ficto-critical writing takes, one in particular warrants deliberation when reading Australian autobiography: the particular critical (or uncritical) stances adopted vis-a-vis the autobiography reflect back on the readers and their own ‘investments’. Where the ficto-critical essay might take pains to elicit or recollect this response, a process the ‘general’ reader of Australia may not undertake, such writing stresses the ethical dimension of the responses towards the (autobiographical) texts read. If, then, the reader of this chapter forays into one or many of the autobiographical texts mentioned here, or those discussed at length in volume three of this work, caution must be exercised as pertains to the extent to which reading for class, ethnicity, gender, or indeed nation, is by no means removed from his or her own investments. If the various literary scandals of Australian heritage demonstrate anything, it is that reading for can all too readily transform into a masquerade, masking the faces of ethical response. The various voices that emerge through the burgeoning literatures of Australia, thus, might be understood not in terms of a static, fixed, referent, but instead of an archipelagic relation of difference and, importantly, tenuously formed continuities.

5.1 Australia 

 1111

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York: Verso, 2nd ed. 2006. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (1989). London/New York: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2002. Ashcroft, Bill. “The Horizonal Sublime.” Antipodes 19 (2005): 141–151. Attwood, Bain. “‘Learning about the Truth’: The stolen generations narrative.” Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001. 183–212. Attwood, Bain, and Fiona Magowan. “Introduction.” Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001. xi–xvii. Brewster, Anne. “Fictocriticism: Pedagogy and Practice.” Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture. Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference, 1995. Ed. Caroline Guerin, Philip Butterss and Amanda Nettelbeck. Adelaide: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1996. 89–92. http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index. php/JASAL/article/view/9958/9845 (27 June 2018). Brewster, Anne. Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1996. Brewster, Anne. “Aboriginal Life Writing and Globalisation: Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.” Australian Humanities Review (2002). http://australianhumanitiesreview. org/2002/03/01/1929/ (27 June 2018). Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: Human Richts and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997. http://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/social_justice/ bringing_them_home_report.pdf (11 July 2018). Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay (1987). London: Faber & Faber, 1988. Colmer, John. Australian Autobiography: The Personal Quest. Melbourne/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Crane, Kylie. “Der Fall Mudrooroo: Authentizität, Autorität, der Buchmarkt und der Leser.” Kultur­ hermeneutik: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zum Umgang mit kultureller Differenz. Ed. Walter Sparn, Christoph Ernst and Hedwig Wagner. München: Fink, 2008. 223–241. Elder, Catriona. Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Facey, Albert Barnett. A Fortunate Life. Ringwood: Penguin, 1988. Flavell, Helen. Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-Criticism. Diss. U Murdoch, 2004. http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/53/2/02Whole.pdf (27 June 2018). Furniss, Elizabeth. “Imagining the frontier: comparative perspectives from Canada and Australia.” Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback. Ed. Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis. Canberra: Australian National University E-Press, 2005. 23–46. Gill, Nicholas. “Transcending nostalgia: pastoralist memory and staking a claim in the land.” ­Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback. Ed. Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis. Canberra: Australian National University E-Press, 2005. 67–83. Gunn, Jeannie [Mrs. Aeneas Gunn]. We of the Never-Never & The Little Black Princess. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994. Henderson, Sara. From Strength to Strength. Sydney: Sun, 1995. Hillman, Roger. “A Transnational Gallipoli?” Australian Humanities Review 51 (2011). http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2011/11/01/a-transnational-gallipoli/ (27 June 2018).

1112 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonal Exotic: marketing the margins. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. Johnston, Anna. “Australian Autobiography: the politics of making postcolonial space.” Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture. Proceedings of the Association for the Study of ­Australian Literature Conference, 1995. Ed. Caroline Guerin, Philip Butterss and Amanda ­Nettelbeck. Adelaide: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1996. 130–135. http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9965/9852 (27 June 2018). Kerr, Heather. “Fictocriticism, the ‘Doubtful Category’ and ‘The Space Between’.” Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture. Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference, 1995. Ed. Caroline Guerin, Philip Butterss, and Amanda Nettelbeck. Adelaide: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1996. 93–96. http://openjournals. library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9959/9846 (27 June 2018). Kurtzer, Sonja. “Wandering Girl: Who defines ‘authenticity’ in Aboriginal literature?” Southerly 58.2 (1998): 20–29. Langford Ginibi, Ruby. Don’t Take Your Love to Town. Ringwood: Penguin, 1988. Mahood, Kim. Craft for a Dry Lake. Sydney: Anchor, 2000. Mahood, Marie. Icing on the Damper. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1995. Malouf, David. Remembering Babylon. London: Vintage, 1994. Marshall, Alan. I Can Jump Puddles. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992. McCooey, David. Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McInnes, Graman. The Road to Gundagai. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society.” Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Ed. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller. Oxford/New York: Berg, 2003. 23–40. Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1991. Muecke, Stephen. “Visiting Aboriginal Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 2.1 (1999): 49–54. Muecke, Stephen. “The Fall: Fictocritical Writing.” Parallax 4.8 (2002): 108–112. Muecke, Stephen. Joe in the Andamans and Other Fictocritical Stories. Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 2008. Pilkington, Doris [Nugi Garimara]. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). New York: Miramax Books, 2002. Porter, Hal. The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony: An Australian Autobiography. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: ethics for decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004. Schwarz, Anja. “Modes of ‘Un-Australianness’ and ‘Un-Germanness’: Contemporary Debates on Cultural Diversity in Germany and Australia.” Journal of Australian Studies 80 (2004): 211–220. Schlunke, Katrina. Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a massacre. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction: De/colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women’s Autobiographical Practices.” De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Waston. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. xiii–xxxi. Taussig, Michael. My Cocaine Museum. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

5.1 Australia 

 1113

Taussig, Michael. “The Magic of the State: An Interview with Michael Taussig.” Interview by David Levi Strauss. Cabinet 18 (2005). http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/18/strauss.php (27 June 2018). van Toorn, Penny. “Indigenous Life Writing: Tactics and transformations.” Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001. 1–20. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Einleitung: Was ist Auto(r)fiktion?” Auto(r)fiktion: Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. 7–21. Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. “Autobiography.” The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ed. Laurie Hergenhan. Ringwood: Penguin, 1988. 561–571. Webby, Elizabeth. “Writers, Printers, Readers: The production of Australian literature before 1855.” The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ed. Laurie Hergenhan. Ringwood: Penguin, 1988. 113–125. White, Patrick. Flaws in the Glass. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. White, Patrick . “The Prodigal Son.” Patrick White Speaks. Ed. Christine Flynn and Paul Brennan. Leichhard: Primavera Press, 1989. 13–17. Whitlock, Gillian. “From Biography to Autobiography.” The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Webby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 232–257. Whitlock, Gillian. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria. Artarmon: Giramondo, 2006.

Further Reading Cooper, Judi. To Tell My Story: A Study of Practising Professional Indigenous Writers of Australia. Research Report. Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2000. Dalziell, Rosamund. Selves Crossing Cultures: Autobiography and Globalisation. Melbourne: ­Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002. McCooey, David. “Going Public. A Decade of Australian Autobiography”. Australian Book Review 281.5 (2006): 25–31. Meyer, Therese Marie. Where Fiction Ends: Four Scandals of Literary Identity Construction. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. Read, Peter, Frances Peters-Little, and Anna Haebich, eds. Indigenous Biography and Auto­ biography. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2008. see also the journal Life Writing (established in Australia, launched in 2004 by Sally Morgan)

5.2 New Zealand Lydia Wevers

There has been little critical work on ‘autobiography’ as a discrete genre in New Zealand literature. The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature includes ‘autobiography’ as one category of ‘Non-Fiction’ (Gibbons 1998, 94) and a very recent book by Valérie Baisnée, Through the long corridor of distance (2014) considers ‘space’ and ‘self’ in autobiographies by women published in the last 40 years. Consequently there is little formal analysis of autobiography, rather it is moulded into broader literary discussion, or forms part of the historical analysis introducing particular textual editions, such as E.H. McCormick’s edition of Edward Markham’s journal New Zealand, or Recollections of it (1963) or Alex Calder’s 2001 edition of Old New Zealand by a Pakeha Maori (F.E. Maning). As in most colonial societies, New Zealand autobiography is a blurred generic field in the period of colonization. A quintessential component of the mixed textual production of travel writing, journal and diary writing and volumes of letters, it is not until the later nineteenth century that ‘autobiography’ as a more distinctive and separated genre form emerged, and not until the twentieth century that it becomes a major literary genre. It is difficult to separate ‘autobiography’ from ‘exploration literature’, ‘travel writing’ and ‘ethnographic writing’ as these literary modes are always hinged on some representation and projection of the self, often reflecting what Mary Louise Pratt, referring to eighteenth century exploration literature, has called the narrative of the ‘sentimental hero’, a rhetoric of anti-conquest which naturalizes the presence and actions of a stranger in a foreign land (1992, 75). The most common textual mode of the nineteenth century is the experiential narrative which tends to be categorised as ‘history’. Much early autobiographical writing is about the shock, grief and exhilaration of displacement, followed by a gradual process of emplacement which carries within it contradictions and disappointment. As colonial texts gave way to the literary nationalism of the 1930s New Zealand literature generally focussed on the problematic of shifting and often colliding representations of ‘home’. In the twentieth century autobiography by non-indigenous New Zealand people, like other textual modes, is preoccupied with the dialogic nature of colonization and ontological and geographical dilemmas of belonging.

Colonial Autobiography The first autobiographic/ethnographic work of note in the textual history of New Zealand is Frederick E. Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863), initially published under the pseudonym ‘A Pakeha Maori’. It follows the anti-conquest mode and describes Maning’s early life in New Zealand, before it became a British colony – the “good old https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-107

5.2 New Zealand 

 1115

times – before Governors were invented, and law, and justice and all that” (Maning 1863, 1). Old New Zealand is the best known and most widely read of all works on early New Zealand (Gibbons 1998, 45). Maning’s highly digressive style has entertained many readers, though his agenda – to point out the violence of Maori society – had the more sinister objective of preparing his readers for imminent war. The pattern of Maning’s ‘autobiography’ however, reminiscence and historical description, proved the dominant autobiographic model for nineteenth century works. A handful of other nineteenth century texts are worth a mention. Samuel Butler’s A First Year in the Canterbury Settlement (1863) and Lady Barker’s Station Life in New Zealand (1870) are based on letters to family. Both describe their experience of life in the remote high country landscapes of the South Island and Lady Barker’s cheerful and resilient account of the characters and episodes of her sheep station life has remained a perennially popular text. Samuel Butler’s famous 1872 utopian novel Erewhon (a rough anagram of ‘nowhere’) is an early form of autofiction in that the opening part of the novel is recognisably set in the Canterbury high country where Butler had his sheep station. When the narrative ‘crosses the ranges’ to the West Coast it transfers its setting to the Italian Alps, a lightly disguised Domodossola, and becomes a satirical portrait of English society. The imaginative melding of two parts of Butler’s life and experience is mediated by its transference into a hypothetical narrative, so that the autobiographical element is set to work towards a polemical objective. The utopian ambitions of Butler’s novel are echoed in some other texts of nineteenth century New Zealand writing but it is by far the most successful. Experiential or ‘pioneer’ narratives remained the most prominent form of autobiographical text in the nineteenth century, generated by displacement, cultural collision and what has been called ‘settlement as forgetting’ (Turner 1999). Many nineteenth century autobiographies mix an air of heroic adventure and exploration rhetoric with the anxieties of colonization, which are sometimes represented humorously. John Logan Campbell’s Poenamo (1881) describes his early days in Auckland, mixing lyrical accounts of the Waitemata harbour with comic anecdotes about Maori, who were the dominant population in the area. Laurence James Kennaway’s Crusts: A Settler’s Fare Due South (1874) also brings humour to his chronicle of hardship and difficulty, describing the book as “notes […] first roughly put together in wind-worried huts, or under the drifty shelter of dray-wheels” (1874, 5) about the experience of teenage brothers in the South Island in the 1840s. The Maori population of the South Island in the nineteenth century was less numerous than in the North Island, and more spread out, so encounters with Maori were less frequent. Early autobiographical narratives set there focussed more on arduous engagement with the land and ‘taming’ the landscape than on negotiating relationships with indigenous people, representing the self as tough, practical, hardworking and unsentimental. But gender and personality shape the disclosure of the self that is autobiography. As Estelle Jelinek (1980, 10, qtd. in Smith and Watson 1998, 9) has said, at the level of content men distance themselves in autobiographies that are success stories

1116 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

or histories of their era, while the life writing of women emphasizes personal and domestic detail, connections to other people and, like Lady Barker’s Station Life in New Zealand draws on personal records. Broadly speaking this distinction is borne out in the New Zealand autobiographic field. Sarah Amelia Courage wrote Lights and Shadows of Colonial Life (1896), based on her diary about life on a sheep station, an experience which filled her with loneliness and horror. Few copies of the book were published, and some of those were destroyed by acquaintances who did not like Courage’s account of them. The book did not resurface until 1976.

‘Literature of Occupation’ Peter Gibbons has characterised the textual production of New Zealand in the early twentieth century as the ‘literature of occupation’ (1998, 67). He notes that autobiography was rare in this period, mostly written by men and reflected the continuation of pioneering narratives or successful professional careers. One of the most distinctive early autobiographical narratives in New Zealand which is also a narrative of occupation, is a book which has had a long subsequent life for shifting generations of critics and readers. Strictly speaking Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (1921) is the biography of a piece of land. Tutira is not an autobiography but perhaps an ‘ecobiography’ in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s phrase (2001). The entanglement of the author with his sheep station, his loving and meticulous observation of changes in the landscape caused by the impact of introduced flora and fauna, his description of the geology, Maori habitation, original bush and arrival of Europeans, is personally refracted and becomes an autobiographical narrative of the self as conservationist and naturalist as much as the landscape he is tending. Oscar Thorwald Johan Alpers 1928 Cheerful Yesterdays focuses on his eventful career as a lawyer, and describes his life working round district courts and the nascent judicial system of New Zealand in the nineteenth century. An engaging and often humorous text, Alpers’s account of his experience as a lawyer becomes a window on colonial social history, but in an anecdotal ‘success story’ rather than reflective mode. A more reflective and reflexive autobiographical text is Alan Mulgan’s popular Home: A New Zealander’s Adventure (1927). Mulgan was a newspaperman and his autobiography recounts his first visit to England in 1926. An Anglophile, he was also committed to an anglicised version of colonial New Zealand nationalism, reflected in his later autobiography The Making of a New Zealander (1958) which expresses simultaneous identifications of selfhood with New Zealand, the Empire and Great Britain.

5.2 New Zealand 

 1117

Early Maori Autobiography Autobiography/genealogy or ‘whakapapa’ is integral to Maori culture, though some earlier Maori scholars operated in two cultures. Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck)’s two major works, Vikings of the Sunrise (1937) and The Coming of the Maori (1949) are ethnological accounts of Polynesian people and Maori, inflected and coloured by his autobiographical reflections. Te Rangi Hiroa had a distinguished Western career – he was the Director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and a visiting Professor at Yale – but his professional effort and scholarly work was driven by his Polynesian ancestry, whose epistemology and ontological practises keep the self at the centre of his intellectual enquiry. In 1951 Reweti Kohere published his Autobiography of a Maori, written in English because it was easier to publish in English than in Maori. It recounts his long and active life as a journalist, Anglican pastor and community leader, recording the actions and beliefs of a man dedicated to Christianity and to helping the broader Maori community to which he belonged. Highly articulate and literate, The Autobiography of a Maori illustrates the bicultural adeptness of a well-educated professional Maori man. Like Te Rangi Hiroa, Kohere was able to move fluently between worlds. He said “the Christian cannot divide his life into two sections, religious and secular, for every act of a Christian must be Christian” (Kohere 1951, 104) but within this framework he describes a life dedicated to helping Maori. Kohere’s autobiography is not self-reflexive but the narrative of experience he recounts exemplifies social, moral and religious values at a personal and active level.

War In the early twentieth century autobiography is sometimes generated by external forces such as fierce emotional passion about war. Archibald Baxter’s We Will Not Cease was published in 1939 and recounts his experiences as a conscientious objector in the First World War. Baxter’s disturbing account of the punishments and privations he and other pacifists endured at the hands of the New Zealand armed forces and the government was acclaimed in England on publication but did not become well known in New Zealand until it was republished in 1968 and 1980. Still a controversial text in some quarters, it illustrates the extremities of experience an individual may be subjected to, and the stress enacted on other identifiers of self – such as nationality and community. John Mulgan, the more famous son of Alan Mulgan, also wrote a memoir about war, in his case the Second World War. Report on Experience (1947) was published posthumously and is both an account of his war years and an examination of the effect war has on local people, drawing on his years fighting in Greece. Gunner Inglorious (1945) by Jim Henderson described undergoing amputation as a prisoner

1118 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

of war and Howard Kippenberger who was crippled by a mine, described his military experience in Infantry Brigadier (1949). A number of autobiographical texts by New Zealand soldiers were written and published later in life, perhaps when the autobiographic self could reflect and contextualise war experience. A singular exception to the general run of texts by men are the two autobiographic volumes The Poet’s Progress (1930) and Present Without Leave (1939) by Walter D’Arcy Cresswell. Both volumes are written as numbered paragraphs and form a loose and vivid autobiographical narrative. The first describes Cresswell’s journey to London in 1921 and is a disquisition on the life and vocation of a poet, a colonial who encounters the metropolis lacking knowledge and experience of self. He believed that poetry alone offered truth and saw himself as the leader of a reinvigorated new age. Present Without Leave continues Cresswell’s progress after he returned to New Zealand following the publication and minor success of The Poet’s Progress. It has been described both as a ‘tour de force’ for the way it breaks conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, and a denunciation of New Zealand. Cresswell’s primary self-declared aim is to consider the role of the poet in the world but as he notes in Present Without Leave his lofty reflections are continually disrupted by bodily life in the daily world: “[…] while at one time my mind reached after remote and mighty decisions at another my feelings and appetites hankered after the seaport and its bars and pubs, its saloons and low crowds” (1939, CC1V, 213). One effect of Cresswell’s paragraph structure is to suggest how a disaggregated subjectivity might be represented.

Poverty One of the most harrowing autofictions in New Zealand literature is John A. Lee’s Children of the Poor (1934). Lee said it was inspired by the march of unemployed men in Auckland during the Depression. Described as a foundation work in New Zealand literature, Children of the Poor is a lightly fictionalised account of Lee’s own life in the character of Albany Porcello. The novel was endorsed by prominent leftwing figures such as Bernard Shaw, who said it had a “‘peculiar poignancy as a record of a life of poverty in the world of the poor, where normal poverty is not disgraceful”’ (Lee 1949, cover). Lee’s description of Albany’s slide into thieving so he could contribute to his family’s needs and his sister’s prostitution from a young age earned the novel a scandalous reputation and it was widely banned. A prominent view of the novel at the time was that it misrepresented social circumstances and particularly the situation of Lee’s mother and sister, but when Lee’s mother Mary Isabella Lee’s autobiography The Not So Poor was posthumously published in 1992, opinions about the fidelity of Lee’s representation were revised. Mary Lee’s account of her family’s poverty and her daughter’s prostitution confirmed the circumstantial authenticity of Lee’s novel. A

5.2 New Zealand 

 1119

powerful narrative of social protest, Children of the Poor demolishes the idea of New Zealand in the 1930s as a fair and equitable society, and aligns its cultural and social mores with the widespread depiction of a puritanical and judgemental society which became very prominent in the literature and social commentary of the post war era. It is notable that poverty, hardship and endurance are the biographical triggers for many autobiographical texts. Before the 1970s autobiography is closely linked to empirical modes of history, concerned to recover the past in what is assumed to be a transparent way, with little overt projection of the self as an organising and transforming principle. Many self published naïve life-accounts written by musterers, hunters, farmer’s wives, trampers, sportspeople or adventurers are driven by the sense that they have had experiences beyond the ordinary and often these are linked to remote or tough landscapes and hard physical work. The focus tends to be on physical exceptionalism – of landscapes, events or people. It is not until later in the twentieth century that literary autobiography, generated by the life of the writer or artist, is artistically and intellectually reflexive about both the self and the imagined community of ‘New Zealand’ and develops into a substantial textual mode. A number of autobiographic narratives published in the 1970s and 1980s prefigure the more literary autobiography by concentrating on an evocation of social and intellectual history projected through the engagement of the self with historical and political forces. Important examples of these ‘transparent’ autobiographies are Mary Findlay’s Tooth and Nail: The Story of a Daughter of the Depression (1974), Elsie Locke’s Student at the Gates (1981) and Sonja Davies’s Bread and Roses (1984). Findlay’s Depression memoir is a retrospective adjunct to John A. Lee’s novel, recounting in detail her humiliating experience of poverty and privation. Both Elsie Locke and Sonja Davies were politically active and their memoirs are focussed on the detail of political causes and intellectual and activist engagement with left wing issues. Pauline O’Regan, an activist nun, published Aunts and Windmills in 1991, about her childhood on the West Coast of the South Island, narrating her spiritual and political development in a proto-feminist mode. Accidental Life by Phoebe Meikle published in 1994 focuses on her dedication to teaching and publishing, and recounts the constraints and gradual acceptance she experienced as a woman in those professions. As Peter Gibbons has noted, in most of these texts the emphasis is upon the archetypal rather than truly personal experience, in stark contrast to a writer like Janet Frame, whose subjectivity produces the world she inhabits, both textually and personally. Social realism was the dominant mode of New Zealand fiction in the post war decades and affected the heroic or adventurous autobiographic mode of the late nineteenth century. While a stream of autobiographic texts is inevitably driven by narratives of exceptionalism, especially masculine prowess, literary autobiography is more commonly inflected by social or political awareness. James Bertram’s Capes of China Slide Away. A Memoir of Peace and War 1910–1980 was published in 1993, but draws on a number of his earlier books about China which describe his experiences as correspondent and active participant in China’s war against Japanese invasion. He was the

1120 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

first official ‘British’ person to interview Mao Zhedong and Zhou Enlai in 1937, fought against the Japanese in Hongkong and was a prisoner of war in Tokyo. From 1937 to 1993 he published four autobiographical and reflective accounts of these seminal experiences at the same time as he was actively engaged as an academic teacher and writer in New Zealand. Many of the writers and artists who were instrumental in the cultural nationalism of the 1930s, a movement which was linked to growing engagement with internationalism and left wing politics, have produced autobiographical texts which reflect on this time.

Literary Nationalism One of the key figures of literary nationalism, perhaps the key figure, is the writer Frank Sargeson, whose autobiography is reflected on separately in the third part of this handbook. The writers who followed Sargeson tended to be male and to adopt his primary tropes – New Zealand as a homosocial but also homophobic and puritanical society, characterised by repression, racism and sexism. New Zealand in the mid-twentieth century is depicted by many male writers as a society whose culture of rugby clubs, racing, drinking, and gender division perpetuated restrictive social preconceptions and deforming social and moral values and discouraged the investigation of selfhood except as socially constructed. This society is reflected and represented in many autobiographic narratives arising from the postwar decades, and is actively critiqued in the tidal wave of texts resulting from feminism. Before the advent of lifewriting as a by-product of feminist historical awareness, autobiographic texts by women that had some literary dimensions were still relatively thin on the ground and tended to conform to the gender divide described by Jelinek (1980). Helen Wilson’s self-ironising My First Eighty Years (1951) is, as the title might suggest and Peter Gibbons has noted, more concerned with people and their relationships than with national identity or ‘big’ questions (1998, 79). Wilson describes the social life of small rural towns, their pretensions, scandals and tragedies, describing Timaru as a town famous for its “fraudulent bankruptcies” (1951, 76) in the 1880s. Many women of Wilson’s generation wrote female versions of ‘pioneering’ autobiographies – life stories dedicated to memorialising the tough social lives and working conditions of rural women while keeping quiet about the social and emotional costs of such lives. Many of these are also retrospective, such as Jean Boswell’s Dim Horizons (1955) described as a biography of her mother in the late nineteenth century, which is interwoven with her autobiography. Amelia Howe’s Stamper Battery (1964) similarly details the lives of goldminers and their wives in Thames in the 1880s and 1890s, with a focus on the hardship endured by the women, who, Howe declares, never had a day of rest. Autobiographies by arts practitioners like Toss Woollaston, a painter, Mervyn Thompson a playwright and director, or Ngaio Marsh, a crime novelist and theatre

5.2 New Zealand 

 1121

director, trace the development of their artistic consciousness through their life story, which tends to be a version of a success narrative. Woollaston’s Sage Tea (1980) opens in an account of his ‘pioneering’ childhood on a King Country farm which flows into an evocative description of the ways in which he did not fit the pioneer archetype, distracted by the shapes and colours of the hills and by his emerging bisexuality. Woollaston’s singleminded commitment to becoming an artist generates an exceptionalist life-story but his autobiographic focus is on his developing artistic perception and not on the circumstances that mark him out as socially unusual. Sage Tea is a sophisticated autobiographic narrative of self discovery. Mervyn Thompson’s All My Lives (1980) is a straightforward linear account of his childhood (“the kind of childhood story from which clichés are made” [1980, 28]), its central emotional upheaval, the suicide of his mother, and his career as a successful playwright and director. Thompson’s autobiography ironically stops before the dramatic and polarising event by which he is probably most remembered – his kidnap and ritual humiliation by a group of feminists in 1984, who accused him of sexually harassing a young student. Ngaio Marsh, famous for her many crime novels mostly set in Britain, had a second life as a theatre director in New Zealand. Black Beech and Honeydew (1966) is described by Marsh in its closing chapter as a book in which she has “withdrawn from writing about experiences which have most closely concerned and disturbed me. What I have written turns out to be a straying recollection of places and people: I have been deflected by my own reticence” (1966, 284). Marsh’s most intimate representations of her life are confined to the narrative of her parents and her childhood but her eventful and successful life is very like her crime novels – dramatized by a novelist’s ear for speech but psychological or emotional complications (as she clearly knew) are scarcely hinted at, which may be linked to class and gender as well as her generation. New Zealand literature after the war was dominated by a masculinist disdain for emotions, and in general terms social identity and narrative modes were less candid than they became. Denis Glover, a wellknown poet and publisher who was actively involved in the literary nationalism of the 1930s, was persuaded to record his autobiography by M.H. Holcroft, a literary editor, critic and commentator, in the early 1960s. A breezy account of his rambunctious life, Hot Water Sailor (1962) has the tone and register of a comic novel and was published with humorous illustrations, giving rise to its subtitle (Hot Water Sailor by Denis Glover) “moaning fatly that he has been done over in libellous prepostures by Russell Clark whom he now wishes no longer not to know” (Glover, Hot Water Sailor, title page). Glover’s homosocial sense of humour (suggested by his use of the double negative in the subtitle) dominates the text, which excludes any evocation of interiority and focuses instead on linked anecdotes and incidents. A rather different model of male autobiography is offered by The World Regained (1957) by Denis McEldowney, a chronicle of the life of the body. McEldowney was a contemporary of Glover’s and also involved in the publishing and writing culture of New Zealand. The World Regained describes his childhood and early adolescence as an invalid with a heart condition and describes the sensory exhilaration of becoming well after

1122 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

surgery and discovering a “bright new vision of the world” (McEldowney 1957, 152). Though the main drive of McEldowney’s autobiographic narrative is his physical condition and the treatment he received, it is also a narrative about his development as a writer and intellectual, though as he himself notes, of limited introspection: “it never occurred to me to question why it should happen to me, the question which fiction writers suppose to preoccupy such as I was” (1957, 153). His acute observations of the narrow world surrounding his bed evoke a Proustian attention to detail, though in a minor key. Charles Brasch, one of the founders and enablers of New Zealand literary nationalism, wrote an unfinished autobiography which was published posthumously in 1980. Indirections: A Memoir 1909–47 describes Brasch’s life from childhood until he founded New Zealand’s premier and longest-running literary journal, Landfall, in 1947. Brasch, like his contemporaries Frank Sargeson and Bill Pearson, was an undisclosed homosexual and his account of his life is, like theirs, reticent about his emotional and sexual life – the autobiography is a narrative of ‘passing’. Brasch was the first person to take Janet Frame seriously as an author and facilitated the careers of many midcentury writers such as Ruth Dallas, who describes his stewardship of her writing in her autobiography Curved Horizon (1991). He edited Landfall for almost two decades and during that time shaped the culture with a decisive hand.

Women’s Autobiographies As Peter Gibbons has noted, it was women writers who “transformed autobiographical writings by incorporating into their texts the intricacies of individual experiences” (1998, 81). Part of this ‘transformation’ was driven by cultural or mainstream feminism, which arrived in New Zealand as elsewhere, in the 1970s, and effected a sea change in the way women thought about their own lives. If the ‘personal is political’ as the feminist mantra has it, the most immediate textual way in which to register the politics of the person is autobiography. First wave feminism brought a raft of new women’s presses and writing by women. Among the first autobiographical texts which accompanied the political shift of feminism was Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s I Passed This Way (1979). A monumental text of 500 pages, I Passed This Way describes an exceptional life. Brought up in remote country areas where her mother taught school to support her invalid husband and their family, her childhood was materially deprived but rich in imagination and joy of the natural world. Ashton Warner also became a teacher to support herself and worked in remote Maori schools with her husband, while also writing and painting. Her autobiography delineates a very detailed portrait of this life including innovative experiments teaching Maori children to read, which led to a number of books about teaching such as Teacher (1963) and an international reputation. Like Janet Frame, whose three volume autobiography has some similar-

5.2 New Zealand 

 1123

ities to Ashton-Warner’s, she believed that everyone, but especially children, has an inner and an outer vision, or what she called the “traffic between reality and dream” (Ashton-Warner 1963, 93) and that these views of the world are often in conflict, a conflict she describes both in her non-fiction and her novels. Her intensely personal and solipsistic autobiography constructs a self that is often anguished by the despair, conflict and antagonisms that dogged her life, shaped her growth as an artist and caused her to feel unrecognised by her own country for most of her career. I Passed This Way brought Ashton-Warner acclaim and prizes and was made into a film, and she remains a key figure in the history of education and the cultural life of New Zealand. Another woman writer of the first half of the twentieth century whose life was dogged by poverty and discrimination was reclaimed by feminism, and has now been recognised as a major figure of her time. Iris Wilkinson, who wrote under the pseudonym Robin Hyde, published an autofiction The Godwits Fly in 1938, just before her suicide in Britain. At the same time as she was writing The Godwits Fly, an account of her childhood and early adulthood in Wellington, she also wrote an autobiography, which was published from the manuscript in 1984, partly in response to increased interest in her innovative and original work. A Home in This World reflects the many kinds of displacement Hyde (and others of her generation) experienced, focussing on the problem of ‘home’ which Hyde recognised had surfaced in her writing. Hyde’s early work was heavily influenced by Georgian and Romantic poetic modes – ornate and referenced to a European aesthetic. Later, working as a journalist and commissioned writer she realised that it was the “legends of the mountains, rivers and seas of New Zealand” (Hyde, letter to Gloria Rawlinson [1936], qtd. in Bunkle et al. 1986) that should provide inspiration for her work, and she became much more outspoken about New Zealand’s colonialism and how it had affected the indigenous Maori population. A Home in this World reflects these ontological ambiguities, as well as gender discrimination, experienced by Hyde in a variety of ways – her working life where she was paid half a man’s salary, social discrimination as an unmarried solo parent and critical disdain as a female writer. Unpublished in her lifetime, A Home in this World is a moving testament to the professional and personal predicaments faced by a woman in the first half of the twentieth century and the ways in which they threatened her subjectivity. Hyde’s intensely personal and lyrical style and her radical opinions have ensured her work has remained of contemporary and not only historical interest. From the 1980s a number of women’s presses emerged, such as the New Women’s Press, which published autobiographies and life writing by women as part of the feminist project to reclaim women in history. Judith Ellmers’s Born Beneath a Rainbow (1983) is one such example. Subtitled Memoirs of a Country Childhood Ellmers’ book represents a stream of autobiographical writing that is not produced by someone whose achievement, talent or recognition gives their life story a literary or historical weight, but is rather the recovery of the daily lives of ‘ordinary’ people. Drawing on diaries and family history, Ellmers’ book describes and extols the remote landscape

1124 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

she grew up in, and the ‘carefree’ childhood she experienced, despite the financial troubles of her parents. Ellmers’ autobiography does not, as perhaps you would expect of a book published by a feminist press, engage with gender issues or politics but is focussed on the life of the family and recollections of their farm, and in that sense is similar to the broad stream of ‘pioneer’ autobiographies from the first half of the twentieth century, describing hard work, unusual events and local people, though it is differentiated by being focalised through a child. In most respects though Ellmers’s is a text of a different genre altogether than an autobiography published the year before, in 1982.

Janet Frame Janet Frame’s To the Is-land (1982), the first volume of her autobiographical trilogy, is also focalised through a child, but a child constructed and refracted by the extraordinary sensibility and linguistic brilliance of one of New Zealand’s greatest writers. Frame’s autobiography continually plays with point of view and temporal layering so the reader is simultaneously aware of the writer’s act of memory recovery and the narration of childhood as sensory, immediate and chronological. Frame opens To the Is-Land by reinforcing the reader’s apprehension, already induced by the strategically placed hyphen in the title, of the phenomenological soup that generates autobiography: “From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction is always towards the Third Place, where the starting point is myth” (Frame 1982, 11). Frame’s gestational and birthing metaphor ‘places’ her narrative in the body and in time, but also carries the deep suggestion that many aspects of autobiographical narrative are submerged or beyond recall. Such an acknowledgement is seldom made in autobiographical texts, which mostly present an evidential or ‘transparent’ narrative. But Frame’s autobiography is as interested in examining the role and failure of memory, the limits of language and imaging and vocalising the mnemonic layers of the self, as in the family and autohistory it recounts. To the Is-land offers a family history “from the starting point of myth” (Frame 1982, 12) as she recalls what she has been told about the “Ancestors”. Everywhere her representation of childhood reflects on the medium in which it occurs, the words which travel “like the wind along invisible wires” (Frame 1982, 23), words which open the colours and spaces and natural features of her childhood. It is Frame’s constant awareness of the fluidity and motility of language that distinguishes her fiction and her autobiography – her mode of representation is always infused with instability. Frame’s first novel Owls Do Cry (1957) is an autofiction. The fictional Withers family closely resembles Frame’s own family and repeats the tragic deaths of her sisters that marked her childhood. The riddling and poetic voice of Daphne, who sings from the ‘dead room’ in the novel,

5.2 New Zealand 

 1125

is a representation of Frame’s own experience with mental health, and her second novel Faces in the Water (1961) is also an autofiction in that it embodies the mind and sensibility of a mentally ill person, reflecting Frame’s eight years in institutions. But for a writer as sophisticated and multiple in her fluid use of personae and complex questioning of the power of language to represent ‘truth’, ‘autofiction’ is the wrong word for Frame’s novels, despite their links and echoes of her biographic self. As her autobiography continually emphasizes, ‘real life’ is a vanishing concept. An Angel at my Table, volume two of the autobiography, appeared in 1984 and The Envoy from Mirror City in 1985. The trilogy was subsequently made into a very successful film Angel at my Table but of course filmic techniques cannot reproduce the existential and psychological complexity Frame’s text brings to the conception of selfhood, and the work of a writer. An Angel at my Table begins when Frame leaves home to attend Dunedin Teachers Training College and describes both her excitement at the world of new learning which opens for her and her despairing and grief stricken response to the death by drowning of her younger sister, the second of two sisters to die young, particularly difficult for Frame because in a world where she felt she never really fitted in, her sister Isabel had seemed to be the one who was effortlessly accepted and ‘in the swing’. An Angel at my Table focuses on Frame’s gradual slide in breakdown which resulted in a suicide attempt and the beginning of her long residence in mental institutions, but does not go into detail about her life in hospital, perhaps because she felt that Faces in the Water was the ‘truest’ version of that experience. The Envoy from Mirror City picks up after Frame leaves hospital and, having written and published Owls Do Cry, left New Zealand to live in London for a number of years. During this time she was treated at the Maudsley Institute which authoritatively dismissed an earlier diagnosis of schizophrenia. However Envoy is primarily about her development as a writer, constantly present as a shaping force in the text as she reflects on the events of the past, including an affair and an engagement while she was living in Spain. ‘The Envoy’ is her figure for her creative self, a self who shapes experiences into the “Mirror City” of words, where the “only graveyard” is the “graveyard of memories” (Frame, 1985, 153). She observes that a “truthful autobiography tries to record the essence” (Frame, 1985, 153) but would also agree with Roland Barthes (1971), who said that biographical writing is a novel that dares not speak its name. For Frame the intersection between the novel and autobiographical is always fluid and porous and fully conscious of itself. There is no other autobiography in New Zealand literature which tackles the philosophical and epistemological problematic of autobiography in such a head-on way yet still delivers a compelling and unfolding narrative of a life. Many critics and theorists have written on Frame’s novels and autobiography and the complicated construction and deconstruction of selfhood they exhibit. Some of Frame’s male contemporaries published autobiographies in the decade after her trilogy appeared. Maurice Shadbolt’s One of Ben’s. A New Zealand Medley (1993) begins with his family’s history. The ‘Ben’ of the title was a transported convict

1126 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

to one of Australia’s most notorious penal colonies, Port Arthur, and sailed for New Zealand four months after finishing his sentence in 1859. Shadbolt, whose best known works are a historical trilogy about the New Zealand Wars, embeds his autobiographic narrative in a historical account of these early years in the British colonies and traces many links back to them, as his title suggests, insisting on subjectivity as historically, genealogically, environmentally and even genetically constructed. From the Edge of the Sky: a Memoir (1999) follows on from One of Ben’s. Keith Sinclair, historian and ‘enfant terrible’, opens his autobiography Half Way Round the Harbour (1993) with an epigram from the famous British historian A.J.P. Taylor: “Every historian should, I think, write an autobiography” (1983, ix). Sinclair was the author of the prizewinning, bestselling and very longlived A History of New Zealand (1957). One of the shaping founders of professional history in New Zealand, Sinclair was also a poet and a passionate nationalist. Both his poetic bent and his passion for the landscape and society of his youth are evoked and described in his autobiography, which was published posthumously. He was oldest child of an impoverished but intellectually and physically lively family of 10 who lived at Point Chevalier on the Auckland coast. Halfway Round the Harbour is as much a history of daily life including such details as how his mother made suet pudding as it is a narrative of a subject. Sinclair describes his growth as an intellectual and the circles in which he moved but these reminiscences are less to do with ideas than with anecdote and opinion – for example he asserts that though Charles Brasch was very well read he was not very clever, and made absurd remarks, such as the rarity of finding wellread and educated New Zealanders (Sinclair 1993, 142). Halfway Round the Harbour is a narrative of achievement, and development of an individual, his culture and society in a specific era. Sinclair’s generation were the makers of a nationalist culture in New Zealand that derived from modernism, and his autobiographic writing reflects this project, and the idealisation of some aspects of childhood, notably physical freedom in a beautiful landscape, rather than any self-examination of probing subjectivity. Like others of his time, Sinclair was more interested in delineating his life as nurtured by and illustrative of a broader culture unique to New Zealand. Another version of such a life, though with a particular slant to it, is the autobiography of Mihi Edwards. Mihipeka: Early Years (1990) is, in a broad sense, also part of the feminist recovery of women’s lives as well as the so-called ‘Maori renaissance’, a term that reflects a rush of new publication by Maori writers in the 1970s and 1980s. Mihi Edwards wanted to write about “how we the Maori people lost the language” (1990, 11) and was encouraged to do so by her friend the feminist artist Robyn Kahukiwa. Edward’s account of her life is both a conventional autobiographical narrative, chronologically linear beginning when she is three weeks old, and reflects Maori oral tradition (as do the writers of the Maori Renaissance) in which history, belief and knowledge are passed on by word of mouth. She uses a storytelling narrative mode suggesting a listener, and a first person pronoun which shifts in and out of the present, conditional and imperfect tense, suggesting the way in which Maori construct

5.2 New Zealand 

 1127

time, as a spiral not a line, and a spiral which travels seamlessly between past and present. Edwards makes this point in another way when she describes her interactions with the natural world, which she represents as linked to and prescient about knowledge of human events. This reflects the Maori idea of ‘whakapapa’, in which Maori are spiritually and physically connected to their ancestral land or ‘whenua’, a word which means both ‘land’ and ‘placenta’. These powerful biological and organicist epistemologies inform Maori thinking at every level – for a Maori person everything is ‘whakapapa’, which does not translate perfectly into textual autobiography. Maori writers therefore do not represent the self as somehow autonomous or reflecting what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have called ‘the master narrative of the sovereign self’ (Smith and Watson 2001, 3), but rather the self as engaged in, talking to and part of the world they inhabit, which includes their ‘mokopuna’ [grandchildren] and ‘tipuna’ [ancestors] in a temporal spiral. Edwards for example talks about fantails, a small bush bird, coming to tell me, or those near me, to beware of disaster, to turn to karakia [prayer; L.W.]. And of course there are times when he also brought good tidings […]. It does not matter how you try to remove him, he will not leave until he has delivered his message. It is a good idea to do what he wants and observe closely. He is a messenger, a karere, a wairua (Edwards 1990, 57).

It could be said that autobiographical oratory is the keynote rhetorical form of Maori culture and as such it articulates the cultural difference that inflects the construction of the nation – on the one hand the primacy of orality and its direct embodied dialogue, and on the other the primacy of text, whose formal linguistic structures require the subject both to avow and disavow dialogic materialism.

The Sovereign Self One such master narrative of the sovereign self is exemplified in another trilogic autobiography by a woman writer. Lauris Edmond’s three volumes of autobiography began with Hot October in 1989, followed by Bonfires in the Rain (1991) and The Quick World (1992). A developmental and linear narrative, it traces Edmond’s life through various stages – child, trainee teacher/student, wife, mother, poet. The first volume opens with her childhood experience of the devastating earthquake that destroyed much of Napier in 1931, when three children at her school were killed by collapsing walls. Although the focus is on her extended family life and childish experience, Edmond consistently links her own life to the larger historical context, and in some respects always positions herself as exemplary of her age. Hot October reproduces many of her letters written to her mother from Teachers College which produces a somewhat dissonant dialogue between the present, writerly, eloquent self and its gauche past voice. Bonfires in the Rain recounts their marriage and family life with five children as Edmond, and her husband Trevor, a school teacher, make their life in small country

1128 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

towns. But during this period of her life Edmond was also starting to write poems, which remained unpublished in a cupboard for many years, and one of the drivers of her narrative is the progression or journey she makes from the conventional life of a mother and wife, looking after others, to her ‘real’ life as a poet. Her increasing delight in and discovery of literature, and her first tentative attempts to participate as an actor in the literary culture of New Zealand, enacted privately and in what she describes as ‘small islands of time’ become the second and eventually dominating narrative of her life, a discovery of self that enables role change. Edmond wrote in the preface to the single volume edition of her autobiography (An Autobiography [1994]) that it had been a “stirring experience to publish this story of a woman’s life towards the end of a century which has so fundamentally changed women’s circumstances and outlook” (Edmond 1994, vii). Edmond’s life story represented itself as an exemplary text of second wave feminism and received a corresponding response from readers. It went into several editions and she mentions in her preface the ‘generous’ correspondence she had from both male and female readers. But in the same preface she also acknowledges the “particularity of my own view of events” (Edmond 1994, vii) which seems to be a reference to the inevitably subjective and constructed narrative of self that is autobiography but is perhaps more directed towards the controversy that accrued around her text. Some of her children publicly disavowed their mother’s version of events, and particularly Edmond’s portrait of her husband and account of the breakdown of their marriage. Their son, Martin Edmond, published an alternative ‘autobiography’, Autobiography of my father in 1992, a dialogic portrait told through the voices of father and son, described as both a eulogy and an elegy and widely perceived as a rejoinder to his mother. Martin Edmond’s own work is characterised by a disaggregated autobiographical component connected often to the place of his childhood, such as in his collection of essays on place Waimarino County and Other Excursions (2007) or Chronicle of the Unsung (2004). Edmond’s discursive engagement with the idea of self results in a very different autobiographical mode from his mother’s – more a dialogic than a sovereign self – continually remaking himself in the flow of his intellectual and creative life. Edmond’s autobiographical challenge to his mother’s version of a shared life is not the only instance of dialogic autobiography in New Zealand literature. Of course autobiography, like literature is a dialogic imaginary – it enacts a listener – but some autobiographies are overtly responsive. Barry Crump, the author of a more than twenty bestselling vernacular comedies of the Kiwi man, most famously A Good Keen Man (1960) published his autobiography The Life and Times of a Good Keen Man in 1992. Only one short chapter is about his childhood, and he notes: “I see that I’ve skipped through this account of my childhood as rapidly as I’d have liked to at the time” (Crump 1992, 17). In 2002 his younger brother Colin published In Endless Fear. A True Story which is about the abusive childhoods suffered by Colin and his brothers at the hands of their violent and cruel father. Colin Crump’s narrative is explicitly aimed at assisting the next generation – he dedicates his autobiography to his mother and

5.2 New Zealand 

 1129

to “the sons of Barry”, who “might now truly understand what helped to make their father the man he was” (2002, 11).

Cultural Collisions The wish to ‘set the record straight’, say the unsaid or fill in historical gaps is often an overt objective of autobiography, especially when there is felt social or personal injustice, sometimes related to the subject’s own experience or sometimes in response to accounts of the same period or situation by others. Many autobiographies by gay or lesbian people display such a motive, as well as stories of cultural collision or rupture and people who have had unusual life paths. Miriam Saphira’s self-published A Man’s Man (1994) recounts the story of her father’s bisexuality alongside the history of her own sexuality and belated coming out. Beryl Fletcher, author of feminist novels such as The Iron Mouth (1993) published her autobiography The House at Karamu in 2003 describing her controlling marriage as “years of imprisonment” (2003, 425) during which she looked back to her childhood home as a place of safety. Alan Duff’s semi-autobiographical novel Once Were Warriors (1990) which became an internationally famous film, lifted the lid on poverty, dysfunctional families and gang-related violence among Maori in poor suburbs of New Zealand. Duff published his memoir Out of the Mist and Steam in 1999. His father, Gowan Duff, was an intellectual and educated ‘Pakeha’ [European] New Zealander, whose own father had been a famous literary editor. After his war service Gowan Duff went to live in Rotorua, where he met and married Duff’s uneducated and later violent and drunk Maori mother. Out of the Mist and Steam is Duff’s account of his childhood, growing up with cultural and class contradictions and getting into various sorts of serious trouble, some of which forms the context for his fiction. Both his autobiography and his novels illustrate the tensions and predicaments faced by Maori in contemporary New Zealand, who are overrepresented in prison, unemployment and family violence statistics. Duff describes his time as a state ward, noting that he “felt neither Maori nor Pakeha, just a wretched loner” (1999, 157). Out of The Mist and Steam is a redemptive and exceptionalist narrative, illustrating how permeable the boundary is between social safety and despair, especially for those who are already at risk. Duff sees himself as providing “a voice, a conduit, an articulated means for others who have lived lives that have been negative” (1999, 213). An earlier autobiography which deals with similar cross cultural terrain to Duff is Alistair Campbell’s Island to Island (1984). Campbell spent the first seven years of his life on Penrhyn, in the Cook Islands. His father Jock, a trader, was from Dunedin and his mother Teu, from a chiefly Cook Island family. Teu died of tuberculosis when Alistair was six years old, and his father descended into grief and alcoholism, dying a year later. The children, Alistair and his little brother Bill, were sent to an orphanage

1130 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

in Dunedin. Much of Campbell’s later work refers to or meditates on the rupture of his childhood. The cold austerity of Dunedin contrasted poignantly with his warm and loved childhood in the Pacific. Arriving in New Zealand the Campbell children had to learn English and remake their cultural foundations. Campbell describes his later academic and literary success which saw him becoming a prominent figure in New Zealand cultural life, but his autobiography is also a lament for the life and the culture that was lost, a loss that surfaces in his poetry as lyrical evocation of his Pacific ancestry. As a young man Alistair Campbell married the poet Fleur Adcock, the older sister of the novelist Marilyn Duckworth, who also experienced family dislocation. Just as war was declared in 1939, the Adcock children travelled with their mother, Irene, to join their father John who had just begun studying for a doctorate in England. They spent the war years in England and did not return to New Zealand until 1947 when both sisters found it hard to adjust. Marilyn Duckworth’s autobiography Camping on the Faultline (2000) describes the relationship of the two sisters, who both went on to make their literary mark, their competitiveness and closeness. Where Lauris Edmond’s autobiographical narrative traces the development of a singular subjectivity, Duckworth’s reveals a relational and confessional self, shaped by her sexuality and by her life as an artist. In that sense Camping on the Faultline, whose title evokes impermanence and the precariousness of Duckworth’s sense of her life mirrors her fictional protagonists, who are generally disenchanted with marriage and men, strive for independence and try to manage change and disappointment. Duckworth’s autobiography illuminates the close connections between New Zealand’s writers and artists and their interlinking life accounts. Duckworth’s description of her long affair with Maurice Shadbolt is frankly explored, unlike his much more ‘objective’ and historically contextualised self-portrait. Duckworth records her sister Fleur Adcock writing to her from England: “You see why the thought of living in NZ makes my hair stand on end-there’s no end to the crosscurrents and coincidences” (Duckworth 2000, 255). Kevin Ireland’s two volumes of ‘life-and-times’ autobiography perhaps illustrate what Fleur Adcock was objecting to. Over the Bridge and Under the Moon (1998) is Ireland’s memoir of his difficult childhood and later young adulthood in Auckland, where as an aspiring poet, he met many of the literary figures of his day – Maurice Duggan, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Shadbolt, C.K. Stead, Barry Crump, Janet Frame. His second volume Backwards to Forwards (2002) is about his adult life in Europe, mostly in London, where he worked on newspapers and as a writer, knew the painter Francis Bacon and spent a great deal of time hosting visiting New Zealand friends. Together with Maurice Shadbolt and C.K Stead these intersecting autobiographies depict the milieu, both national and international, of postwar masculine New Zealand writers and construct a homosocial subjectivity. An exceptionalist autobiography which illustrates the individual’s survival in the face of adversity in quite a different way is Helga Tiscenko’s Strawberries with

5.2 New Zealand 

 1131

the Führer (2000). Tiscenko’s father was a high ranking General in the ‘Waffen-SS’. The family was close to the centre of power and Helga and her sister met Hitler. Their war lives were protected but after the fall of the Third Reich they experienced the deprivations and retribution of occupied post war Germany. Tiscenko’s father was executed in Bratislava in 1947. Tiscenko married a Russian she met in Munich and emigrated to New Zealand in 1951. Her autobiography reconstructs her pre-war and Nazi childhood and in detail and is less detailed about her subsequent life in New Zealand – the diptych of Germany and the promised land full of poor refugees and grateful charity makes the point. Strawberries with the Führer is retrospectively politically correct: “that nonsense about being of the Aryan race and keeping your blood pure” (Tiscenko 2000, 54), and corresponds to the autobiographic model described by Estelle C. Jelinek of self-authentication by sifting through the events of a dramatic life for explanation and understanding (Smith and Watson 1998, 9). Peter Wells’s memoir Long Loop Home (2001), like Marilyn Duckworth’s Camping on the Faultline is structured by sibling and friendship relations. Wells is a novelist and filmmaker and prefaces his autobiography with the proviso that it is a story, “written, moreover, by a writer of fiction-and a writer of fiction is only a born liar who has found some use for his talents” (Wells 2001, 7). Like Janet Frame, Wells acknowledges that versions of childhood can only be “strained through how you adolesced” (Wells 2001, 9) – throughout his memoir the reflexive writerly self is visible in the text – in his vocabulary use and figurative language, in complex syntax and in overt first person reflection on the events, people and emotions of his childhood. Both Wells and his older brother Russell were homosexual, and the memoir is overtly addressing the problematic of being homosexual children in a conservative, suburban and homophobic society. Childhood is lyrically evoked in memory, so the memoir is less a polemical account of a taboo sexuality than a sensual depiction of the remembered experience of being a child, coloured by subsequent knowledge. It is not a transparent or ‘innocent’ account. As Wells writes: We were playing a game, one that ironically lasted longer than the changes that would overtake all of us. John would be badly injured in a car accident one night, not even aged sixteen. Frankie herself would suffer torment when the aunt who gave her the bat died in mysterious, violent circumstances. My brother would die. I myself would turn into someone who hated team sports. Yet on that evening – the first evening of spring, when the darkness took longer to come – this is where I seem to have left all these children, including myself […] (2001, 45).

Russell Wells was one of the early victims of AIDS in New Zealand. Several years before Russell died Peter made a celebrated documentary, A Death in the Family, about the AIDS death of a friend. The memoir, and its loving description of their shared childhood and exploration of their sexuality in a heteronormative society, reconstructed through adult emotion and experience, is also a memorial. Much later than Long Loop Home Aorewa McLeod’s autofiction Who Was That Woman Anyway? Snapshots of a Lesbian Life (2013) is less artful about the representa-

1132 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

tion of memory, but also reconstructs the emergence of the homosexual self from childhood. As one reviewer has remarked: Her book rings with truth, but it lacks the clout of fact. This softens some of what she has to say about lesbianism in the 20th century while enabling an emotional honesty that is the real strength of the book (Zander 2013, n.pag.).

Aorewa McLeod spent her working life as a professional academic in the English department of Auckland University. One notable characteristic of autofictions and autobiographical writing in New Zealand is how they typically occur within the parameters of the literary establishment, by and about well-known writers (and often their coteries) a number of whom work in universities. The distinguished poet, novelist and critic C.K. Stead wrote an autofiction All Visitors Ashore (1984) while he was also a member of the Auckland English Department. It is a fictitious version of Stead’s experience as a student in the 1950s when he was befriended by Frank Sargeson (just as Kevin Ireland had been). During this time Janet Frame was living in an army hut in Sargeson’s garden, and Stead’s novel, with its central protagonist Curl Skidmore whose name points satirically to Stead, evokes the events of 1951 and the waterfront strike. The novel is unreliably narrated by Professor Curl Skidmore and is stylishly intertextual including around the presence of one of the characters, the former psychiatric patient Cecelia Skyways who lives, as Frame did, in the garden of a revered older writer (Melior Farbro). Sixteen years later Patrick Evans’s novel Gifted (2010) focuses on the same historical material  – the relationship between Sargeson and Frame during this period of her life. Stead did not publish his autobiography until 2008. South-West of Eden A Memoir 1932–1956 is a lyrical evocation of his childhood and early literary adulthood in Auckland. It is also a consciously reflective text on memory and narrative. Stead stakes out his field as an autobiographer by writing that as a writer of fiction: […] it is easy for me […] to forget that fiction and autobiography spring from quite different intentions and play by quite different rules. Fiction draws a great deal on real life; but what is taken, and how it is altered, and what, essential in reality, is nonetheless cast aside in favour of invention […] Autobiography, on the other hand, does not permit of invention. Fiction may choose to make use of facts; autobiography requires them […] the truth of autobiography comes of the effort to make a record that will stand against the facts (Stead 2010, 50).

Using photographs, songs, newspapers, books and personal records as aides-memoir, Stead reconstructs a highly textured literary autobiography which tracks both his development as an intellectual and poet and as a sexual and social being. The entanglement of poetry and sexuality is reflected in his text, as he remembers both poems and girlfriends, and the poetry of his contemporaries – Alistair Campbell and his ‘young and beautiful poet wife’ Fleur Adcock. Stead’s relationships with prominent New Zealand writers, his academic student work, his sexual encounters in the repressively puritanical society of 1950s New Zealand build a narrative of social and

5.2 New Zealand 

 1133

personal history from the perspective of an older and knowing narrative self. Describing an encounter with a naked woman which became the basis for an episode in All Visitors Ashore, Stead recounts receiving a phone call from the woman involved in the 1990s after she had read the novel. Now elderly and infirm, Hazel asks him “But Karl […] did we really do all that?” (Stead 2010, 308). The present-day narrator notes that he “can’t now remember […] how I framed a reply” (Stead 2010, 308). Stead’s layered narrative draws attention to the difficulties of memory and reliability in autobiography and provokes a beautifully intertextual portrait of literary and sexual subjectivity. His narrative structure is more straightforward than Frame’s but provoked by the same desire to represent ‘reality’ as complex and uncertain. While an autobiography may require facts, there are a lot of interpretive complications around the facts that arouse the reader to a more general awareness of the instability of any text proposing to deliver truth, while keeping in place a narrative of selfhood that is concrete, detailed and persuasive. Biography, in Roland Barthes’ much quoted phrase in translation, is a novel that dares not speak its name (1971). The intersections of literature and autobiography evident in so many of the works produced since All Visitors Ashore suggest that the textual impulses driving writers find a natural expression for many in literary autobiography. This impulse is not restricted to novelists or poets. Margaret Scott’s autobiography Recollecting Mansfield (2001) builds the narrative of her life, starting with the shocking accidental death of her husband Harry Scott while she was carrying their third child, around her life’s work, transcribing and editing Katherine Mansfield’s letters. For Scott, Mansfield structured the narrative of her own life, both as a narrative of work and literary scholarship and in a more personal way, as parallel and instructive experience. Transcribing her letters while on the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, Scott reflects on the fact that she is reading a letter that Mansfield wrote “less than a mile away from where I was then sitting” (2001, 66) in which Mansfield wrote: “If we set out upon a journey the more wonderful the treasure the greater the temptations and perils to be overcome. And if someone rebels and says Life isn’t good enough on those terms one can only say: ‘It is’” (Letter to J[ohn]. M[iddleton]. M[urry]. 18 October, 1920, qtd. in Scott 2001, 66). Scott remarks: “That seemed mysteriously meant for me.” Recollecting Mansfield projects selfhood as social, sexual (Scott’s memoir is frank about her sexual relationships) and intellectual, much as Mansfield does in her journals and letters, and illustrates the entanglement of a scholar’s life with her subject, as Scott meets Mansfield’s lover Ida Baker (known as ‘L.M.’) and mixes the people who were present in Mansfield’s life with the people and events of her own. Scott’s contemporaries Barbara Anderson and Fiona Kidman are also candid about the role sexuality played in their developing subjectivity and how the life of the emotions links to writing. Anderson, who spent her working life as a scientist, began writing for publication after she retired, but as Getting there (2009) makes clear, reading and writing were primal loves from childhood. Getting there obeys the conventions of a novel. Lively dialogue, a straightforwardly chronological narrative, peopled

1134 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

with the characters of Anderson’s life it has the charm and pace of fiction. Anderson does not, as C.K. Stead does, deploy narratological techniques to heighten the reader’s awareness of a double point of view – historical and present – but it is not an innocent narrative. The past may be constructed as known and re-enacted, but the narrative voice deploys rhetorical questions and asides to the reader (“I told you Admiral Oki was an interesting man” [Anderson 2009, 282]) which suggest that a conversation is taking place between a highly individualised authorial voice and her intimate reader. In an interview in 2009 Fiona Kidman said of her two volumes of autobiography At the end of Darwin Road (2008) and Beside the Dark Pool (2009): “[…] these books are written where I feel like I’m the central character in a novel really. It just so happens that the stories are true. And I think because I’ve been writing novels and fiction for so many years, I gave them a sort of novel shape, the shape of a novel,” she says over the phone from her cliff-top Wellington home, a note of weariness to her full voice. “I must admit that after nearly four years of being deeply inside the process of memoir I’m a little puffed” (Reed 2009, n.pag.).

Historically famous as the author of the first overtly feminist novel in New Zealand, a ‘Bildungsroman’ called A Breed of Women (1979), Kidman’s autobiography narrates her life as a literary only child growing up in the Far North of New Zealand, a landscape she has returned to in a number of her novels, and a prominent representative of second wave feminism. More a writer than an activist, Kidman’s autobiography nevertheless describes the protests and events in which she participated and illustrates the ways in which her life was exemplary of its times. Her autobiography is a straightforward narrative, as is suggested by her remark above that it just so happens that the stories are true, focussed on understanding the trajectory of her life and maintaining a documentary record, but nuanced and inflected by authorial comment and reflection – like Anderson she is not producing an innocent narrative but one which deploys the techniques of realism while acknowledging the reflective later self. At the end of Darwin Road finishes with the writer, like Margaret Scott, C.K. Stead and others before her, living in Menton as the Katherine Mansfield Fellow. Collecting up her papers and closing the door, she recollects the emotions of her departure from France, and finishes the narrative in the present tense ‘back in Hataitai’. A whole year has passed since she and her husband Ian left for France, and Kidman concludes the list of ‘home’ details – a grandson, the bare hills, the autumn sky, a mass of wild orange nasturtiums, with a sentence that retrospectively signals her text (and the second volume of autobiography): It can take a long time to find your way home (Kidman 2008, 265). Beside the Dark Pool continues the narrative of Kidman’s life from the 1981 Springbok tour, which divided New Zealand society into those who were for and against the tour. The ways in which public and personal life intersect is Kidman’s focus, including textually, as she includes a chapter written by her husband about his own career, literally layering the voices of the text.

5.2 New Zealand 

 1135

Another woman writer and contemporary of Kidman’s, Shonagh Koea, uses cooking and recipes to focus the narrative on particular people and specific moments of time in what she refers to as her kitchen memoirs, The Kindness of Strangers (2007). The reader is encouraged to participate in the recovery of the past by cooking from the recipes, in an extratextual dialogue. This narrative lateralisation anchors Koea’s autobiography in a chronology and a geography as well as discourses of class and gender, and the recipes she shares almost all come from women in her life. The recipes are interspersed with the autobiographical narrative of Koea’s childhood, subjected to the violent and terrorising behaviour of her father to his wife and child, and the ways in which this affected how she lived and the choices she made. The matter of fact narrative tone of Koea’s memoir heightens the horror of father’s pathological behaviour, and operates in a dialogic and dramatic contrast with the domestic and familial implications of the recipes, offering comfort and sustenance in the future of a past where none was to be had. Subjectivity is inseparable from the body, and from the human community it inhabits, and Koea’s richly nuanced text offers a sophisticated reflection on the many elements that compose a human life. Two writers published very recent autobiographies which are reflexive about their literary texts. Ian Wedde’s The Grass Catcher A Digression About Home (2014) traces the “default narrative of metaphorised unhappiness and imagination” (2014, 223) which he represents as a baseline of his self-projection in creative work, beginning with in-utero rivalries with his twin brother David. Wedde’s autobiographical narrative explores the landscapes, books and people that make up his selfhood, and winds in and out of the thread that unspools through his life-obsessively writing poems. Like many writers it is the nexus of writing and living that compels his textual attention. Witi Ihimaera’s Māori Boy. A memoir of childhood (2014) on the other hand points to one of the deep divides between the postcolonised and the postcolonial, which is that selfhood for a Māori writer is never only singular, either socially or creatively. Ihimaera’s autobiographical narrative focuses on his early years growing up in a remote, and primarily Māori, rural region of New Zealand. It is a political narrative, both in its reconstruction of Māori life and in its doubled temporal focus on what has been lost or changed in Māori culture and society. Ihimaera’s autobiography is focalised through the events of his own life, but these mean something both broad and deep about what it means to be Māori in a postcolonial world, a subject that preoccupies all his novels.

Relevance ‘Autobiography’ and ‘autofiction’ have played an essential role in New Zealand literature, as agents of nationalism and history, and as deconstructive texts, arguing against an essentialist or sentimental construction of subjectivity. Many genres partly inhabit the realm of autobiography. The history of New Zealand literature would be dimin-

1136 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

ished and misrepresented if the role of the autobiographic in history, travel writing and ecological writing was ignored. Autobiography is one of the foundational textual modes of colonialism and postcolonialism. When the self is subjected to destabilising pressure, either because it has been colonised or because it is colonising, autobiography is often the textual mode of first resort. And when master narratives and sovereign selves are deconstructed, the textual modes that replace them still operate on the ground of selfhood, and engage with the pressing human need to establish a sense of self and a home in this world.

Works Cited Alpers, Oscar Thorwald Johan. Cheerful Yesterdays. London: John Murray, 1928. Anderson, Barbara. Getting there: an autobiography. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2008. Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. I Passed This Way. New York: A. Knopf, 1979. Baisnée, Valérie. “Through the long corridor of distance”. Space and Self in Contemporary New Zealand Women’s Autobiographies. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2014. Barker, Lady Mary Anne. Staion Life in New Zealand. London: Macmillan, 1871. Barthes, Roland. “Résponses.” Tel Quel 47 (1971): 89–107. Baxter, Archibald. We Will Not Cease. London: Victor Gollancz, 1939. Bertram, James. Capes of China Slide Away. A Memoir of Peace and War 1910–1980. Auckland: ­Auckland University Press, 1993. Boswell, Jean. Dim Horizons. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1955. Brasch, Charles. Indirections: A Memoir 1909–47. Wellington/New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Bunkle, Phillidia, Linda Hardy, and Jacquie Matthews. “Introduction.” Robin Hyde. Nor the Years Condemn. Ed. Phillida Bunkle, Linda Hardy and Jacquie Matthews. Auckland: New Woman’s Press, 1986. 9–24. Butler, Samuel. A First Year in the Canterbury Settlement. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1863. Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. London: Trübner & Co., 1872. Calder, Alex, ed. Old New Zealand by a Pakeha Maori [F.E. Maning]. London/New York: Leicester University Press, 2001. Campbell, Alistair. Island to Island. Christchurch: Whitcoulls, 1984. Campbell, John Logan. Poenamo. London: Williams and Norgate, 1881. Courage, Sarah Amelia. Lights and Shadows of Colonial Life. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1896 Cresswell, Walter D’Arcy. The Poet’s Progress. London: Faber & Faber, 1930. Cresswell, Walter D’Arcy. Present Without Leave. London: Cassell, 1939. Crump, Barry. A Good Keen Man. Wellington: Reed, 1960. Crump, Barry. The Life and Times of a Good Keen Man. Opotiki: Barry Crump Associates; Auckland: Distributed by Beckett Sterling, 1992. Crump, Colin. In Endless Fear A True Story. Auckland: Penguin, 2002. Dallas, Ruth. Curved Horizon. Dunedin: University of Otago Press: Distributed by John McIndoe Ltd., 1991. Davies, Sonja. Bread and Roses. Auckland: Australia and New Zealand Book Co.; Masterton: Fraser Books, 1984. Duckworth, Marilyn. Camping on the Faultline. Auckland: Vintage, 2000.

5.2 New Zealand 

 1137

Duff, Alan. Once Were Warriors. Auckland: Tandem Press, 1990. Duff, Alan. Out of the Mist and Steam. Auckland: Tandem Press, 1999. Edmond, Lauris. Hot October. Wellington: Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1989. Edmond, Lauris. Bonfires in the Rain. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1991. Edmond, Lauris. The Quick World. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1992. Edmond, Lauris. An Autobiography. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1994. Edmond, Martin. Autobiography of my father. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992. Edmond, Lauris. Chronicle of the Unsung. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004. Edmond, Lauris. Waimarino County and other excursions. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007. Edwards, Mihi. Mihipeka: Early Years. Auckland: Penguin, 1990. Ellmers, Judith. Born Beneath a Rainbow: memories of a country childhood. Auckland: New Women’s Press, 1983. Findlay, Mary. Tooth and Nail: The Story of a Daughter of the Depression. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1974. Fletcher, Beryl. The Iron Mouth. Wellington: Daphne Brasell Associates Press, 1993. Fletcher, Beryl. The House at Karamu. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2003. Frame, Janet. Owls Do Cry. Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1957. Frame, Janet. Faces in the Water. Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1961. Frame, Janet. To the Is-land. New York: G. Braziller, 1982. Frame, Janet. An Angel at my Table. Auckland: Hutchinson, 1984. Frame, Janet. The Envoy from Mirror City. Auckland: Hutchinson, 1985. Gibbons, Peter. “Non-Fiction.” The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. Ed. Terry Sturm. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998. Glover, Dennis. Hot Water Sailor. Wellington: A.H & A.W. Reed, 1962. Guthrie-Smith, Herbert. Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1921. Henderson, Jim. Gunner Inglorious. Wellington: H.H. Tombs, 1945. Howe, Amelia. Stamper Battery: Reminiscences of a Goldfields Childhood. Hamilton: Blackwood & Janet Paul, 1964. Hyde, Robin. The Godwits Fly. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1938. Hyde, Robin. A Home in This World. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984. Ihimaera, Witi. Māori Boy. A memoir of childhood. Auckland: Vintage, 2014. Ireland, Kevin. Over the Bridge and Under the Moon. Auckland: Vintage, 1998. Ireland, Kevin. Backwards to Forwards: a memoir. Auckland: Vintage, 2002. Jelinek, Estelle C. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Kennaway, Laurence James. Crusts: A Settler’s Fare Due South. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1874. Kidman, Fiona. A Breed of Women. Sydney: Harper & Row, 1979. Kidman, Fiona. At the end of Darwin Road. Auckland: Random House, 2008. Kidman, Fiona. Beside the Dark Pool. Auckland: Vintage, 2009. Kippenberger, Sir Howard. Infantry Brigadier. London: Oxford University Press, 1949. Koea, Shonagh. The Kindness of Strangers: kitchen memoirs. Auckland: Random House, 2007. Kohere, Reweti. The Autobiography of a Maori. Wellington: Reed, 1951 Lee, John A. Children of the Poor (1934). London: Barnard Henry; Auckland: N.V. Douglas, 1949. Lee, Mary Isabella. The Not So Poor: An Autobiography. Ed. Annabel Cooper. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992. Locke, Elsie. Student at the Gates. Christchurch: Whitcoulls, 1981.

1138 

 5 Australia and New Zealand

Markham, Edward. New Zealand or Recollections Of It. Ed. E.H. McCormick. Wellington: Government Printer, 1963. Marsh, Ngaio. Black Beech and Honeydew. London: Collins, 1966. McEldowney, Dennis The World Regained. London: Chapman & Hall, 1957. McLeod, Aorewa. Who Was That Woman Anyway? Snapshots of a Lesbian Life. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2013. Meikle, Phoebe. Accidental Life. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994. Mulgan, Alan. Home: A New Zealander’s Adventure. London: Longmans, Green, 1927. Mulgan, Alan. The Making of a New Zealander. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1958. Mulgan, John. Report on Experience. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. O’Regan, Pauline. Aunts and Windmills. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1991. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reed, Megan Nicol. “Dame Fiona Kidman. A life full of possibility.” Sunday Star Times, 19 July 2009. http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/2607246/Dame-Fiona-Kidman-A-life-full-ofpossibility (11 July 2018). Saphira, Miriam. A Man’s Man: a daughter’s story. Auckland, Papers Inc., 1997. Scott, Margaret. Recollecting Mansfield. Auckland: Godwit, 2001. Shadbolt, Maurice. One of Ben’s. A New Zealand Medley. Auckland: David Ling Pub., 1993. Shadbolt, Maurice. From the Edge of the Sky: A Memoir. Auckland: David Ling Pub., 1999. Sinclair, Keith. A History of New Zealand. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969. Sinclair, Keith. Half Way Round the Harbour. Auckland: Penguin, 1993. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory. A Reader. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Stead, Christian K. All Visitors Ashore (1984). Auckland: Godwit, 1994. Stead, Christian K. South-West of Eden A Memoir 1932–1956. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010. Taylor, A.J.P. A Personal History. London: Hamilton, 1983. Te Rangi Hiroa [Sir Peter Buck]. Vikings of the Sunrise. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1938. Te Rangi Hiroa [Sir Peter Buck]. The Coming of the Maori. Wellington: Māori Purposes Fund Board: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1949. Thompson, Mervyn. All My Lives. Christchurch: Whitcoulls, 1980. Tiscenko, Helga. Strawberries with the Führer: A Journey from the Third Reich to New Zealand. Christchurch: Shoal Bay Press, 2000. Turner, Stephen. “Settlement as Forgetting.” Quicksands Foundational Histories in Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand. Ed. Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas and Hilary Ericksen. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999. Wedde, Ian. The Grass Catcher. A Digression About Home. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2014. Wells, Peter. Long Loop Home: A Memoir. Auckland: Vintage, 2001. Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire. London/New York: Cassell, 2000. Wilson, Helen. My First Eighty Years. Hamilton: Paul’s Book Arcade, 1951. Woollaston, Toss. Sage Tea: An Autobiography. Auckland: Collins, 1980. Zander, Bianca. “Who Was That Woman, Anyway? by Aorewa McLeod – review.” New Zealand ­Listener (7 March 2013). http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/who-was-that-womananyway-by-aorewa-mcleod-review/m (25 October 2015).

5.2 New Zealand 

 1139

Further Reading Stafford, Jane, and Mark Williams, eds. The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012. Wevers, Lydia. Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand 1809–1900. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002.

6 The Americas

6.1 Latin America Ulrich Mücke

Latin America has a long, rich, and mostly unknown history of autobiographical writing. However, little attention has been paid to the Latin American autobiographical narrative. Sylvia Molloy explains this contradiction by stating that “autobiography is as much a way of reading as it is a way of writing” (1996, 458). In fact, most of Latin American first person narratives are neither read nor studied as autobiographical texts. However, recently scholars have started to pay more attention to self-narratives in Latin America. Thus, this chapter seeks to give an overview of the great variety of Latin American autobiographical narratives and the main research perspectives on Latin American autobiographical writing. In La Ciudad Letrada (1984) [The Lettered City (1996)], Angel Rama explains that royal and religious administrations were fundamental in the genesis of the literary tradition in colonial Latin America. Power in colonial Latin America was exercised through written documents produced by a lettered elite (so called ‘letrados’), which lived in the city and was connected to Spain and Portugal through written correspondence. The Latin writing came to the Americas as part of Iberian colonial rule. In colonial Latin America, much of the writing was connected in one way or another to ecclesiastical or civil administration. Church and Crown played a more important role for the history of writing in Latin America than they did in most parts of Europe. According to Rama, this tradition has a strong impact on Latin American writing until today, because writing is more connected to the city and public affairs in Latin America than in the US or in many European countries. However, in the last years several authors, like Joanne Rappaport, Frank Salomon, and Mercedes Niño-Murcia have shown that more people were part of the literary world than Rama might have thought, including subaltern people, for example, poor women, slaves or Amerindians (Salomon and Niño-Murcia 2011; Rappaport 2012; see also Rama 2012). Furthermore, they have demonstrated that Amerindians had different mnemonic techniques as oral histories, dances, and songs, which fulfilled similar functions like the Latin character writing in Rama’s Lettered City (Valdés and Kadir 2004). The history of the Latin character in Latin America started with the Spanish and Portuguese conquest. Amerindians appropriated the Latin character from the very beginning and used the script as a weapon to defend their rights. Therefore, it would be misleading to understand Latin writing as an exclusively European way of communication. With the passing of time it became more and more Amerindian, African American, and, finally, also Asian American. Latin American autobiographical narratives were part of the Latin Americanization of European writing brought to the Americas (Brenot 2009). In the first centuries, autobiographical texts were strongly related to civil as well as religious administration and power. At the same time, they were used as expressions that challenged the power https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-108

1144 

 6 The Americas

of religious and colonial administration. Although the colonial heritage did not disappear completely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, autobiographical writing changed due to transformations in society. In the nineteenth century, the nation state and the public sphere broke ecclesiastical and monarchic power. Another revolutionary turn happened in the twentieth century with mass society, compulsory schooling, and the new media. Thus, Latin America’s history of writing is the transformation from the lettered city to the lettered society. Studying Latin American literary traditions requires, as the debate about the Lettered City shows, first of all an explanation of the texts that will be discussed. In this chapter, autobiographical narrative refers to written texts (graphical) which are about the life or a part of the life (bios) of an ‘I’ or a ‘self’ in singular form (auto), narrating this life or a part of it, in prose or verse. Thus, many forms of self-description, like self-portraits in paintings, photos, sculptures or movies and in all performative arts like dance or pantomime, are excluded. It does not mean that Amerindian, African American or Asian American autobiographical narratives are excluded. These narratives can be found in countless autobiographical texts in Spanish, Portuguese, and in Amerindian languages. It is much more difficult to find autobiographical narratives in pre-Spanish American cultures. Biographical writing existed in Mesoamerica, however, it is rather unlikely that in pre-Columbian times texts were composed in the definition given above. Some authors consider collective self-descriptions as autobiographical texts (Pratt 1991). However, to grasp the specific character of self-narration in Latin America it is necessary to limit the analysis to texts about the self of a single person. Within this narrower definition of Latin American autobiographical narrative, countless Amerindian, African American, and Asian American texts can be found. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the existence of an own tradition of autobiographical narratives in Latin America which includes subaltern people right from the beginning of the colonial era. Three additional points about the meaning of autobiographical narrative must be mentioned: Firstly, autobiographical narratives do not have to be written by the person referred to as ‘I’ in the text. Nobody doubts that a president’s memoir is a text which expresses his viewpoint. However, many of these memoirs were not written by the hand of former presidents. In the same way, testaments and last wills are generally considered as the expression of the person represented by the word ‘I’. Nevertheless, in many cases they are written by another person. Secondly, autobiographical narratives must be written by the hand of the text’s protagonist in the case the protagonist is not referred to as ‘I’ but as ‘he’ or ‘she’. This means that a text dictated to a second person is considered an autobiographical narrative only when it refers to the protagonist with the word ‘I’. This definition is different from the famous one of Philippe Lejeune, because it does not exclude illiterate people. Lejeune explicitly tried to define literary European autobiography (Lejeune 1996, 13–14 [1989, 4]). Different from Lejeune, this chapter discusses autobiographical narratives of both literate and illiterate people. Thirdly, autobiographical narratives need not to be written voluntar-

6.1 Latin America 

 1145

ily. Only if one wants to find out whether the statements of the text correspond with a non-textual reality, it can be helpful to distinguish between texts written voluntarily and texts written under pressure. However, this is not the main goal of this chapter. Therefore, autobiographical statements from court trials, inquisition interrogatories, and other judicial and administrative proceedings are included. This chapter describes different forms of the autobiographical narrative in Latin America. It does not defend the idea of a common Latin American tradition of autobiographical writing. Different languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Amerindian languages), different cultural traditions (American, European, African, Asian), different geographical environments, and societal structures led to different autobiographical narratives. Therefore, one must be cautious when establishing connections between different autobiographical narratives in different moments and regions of Latin America. Latin America is not an island but connected to other cultural currents in the Atlantic basin and worldwide (cf. García 2003). However, early modern Iberian colonialism, Catholicism, independence in the nineteenth century, and new media in the twentieth century form some of the many patterns common in many parts of Latin America. Nevertheless, the variety of local and regional realities in Latin America led to very different forms of these unifying forces and developments. It is true that the autobiographical narrative in Latin America has much in common with the Iberian and European narrative. However, as the origin of autobiographical writing in Latin letters can be found in the conquest, the colonial condition represents a clear distinction between Europe and Latin America. Therefore, this chapter is limited to Latin America and will analyze Latin American autobiographical narratives, focusing on different cultures, regions, and nations. The boundaries of Latin America will be marked by the frontiers of the now existing nation states of the Americas in which Spanish or Portuguese are the languages spoken by the vast majority of the people. Most of the autobiographical narratives taken into account were written within these regions by persons who were residents of these regions. Therefore, travel journals of Europeans who stayed in Latin America only for a short time and autobiographical narratives from Latin American migrants who lived in Europe, the US or Japan are generally not included. However, autobiographical narratives written by European, Asian or other migrants in Latin America are included in the analysis (cf. Woods 2005). The chapter is divided in three parts: The Colonial Era, The Nineteenth Century, and The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. As mentioned above, in the colonial era religious institutions and colonial administration played important roles for the history of autobiographical writing. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, independence marked a radical change because the religious institution lost much of its power and colonial administration simply disappeared (except in Cuba and Puerto Rico). Notwithstanding, colonial tradition did not disappear from one day to the other. In autobiographical writing, there was a long transition from colonial times to the independence era. The difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth century might be as great as or even greater than the difference between the nineteenth and

1146 

 6 The Americas

the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, economic, demographic, cultural, and political transformations were radical and led to equally fundamental changes in autobiographical writing. Thus, the third part of the chapter deals with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including a short view over recent developments in electronic media. The subheadings refer to genres (e.  g. ‘diaries’ or ‘letters’), institutions that provoked the production of autobiographical texts (e.  g. courts or the Inquisition), groups that wrote a specific kind of autobiographical narrative (e.  g. intellectuals), and societal conflicts that led to specific autobiographical narratives (e.  g. guerrilla warfare). Although these categories might overlap in one case or another, they express important constraints explaining why autobiographical narratives were written in a similar way. These constraints are literary (e.  g. norms of letter writing), institutional (e.  g. norms of a protocol in a law suit), and societal (e.  g. norms of auto-presentation of a member of a certain group).

Accounts of Exploration and Conquest The European tradition of autobiographical writing came to the Americas with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. He wrote a well-known account which later was changed and published by Bartolomé de las Casas, the famous defender of indigenous rights (Columbus 2005; Las Casas 1989; Ife 2006). Columbus’ journal of the first voyage is a first-person narrative, going beyond a simple logbook with entries about position of the ship, the fleet, or weather conditions. At length, Columbus describes the landscape he saw and people he met, using topoi and narrative style well known to Christian Europe, including a faithful hero, great dangers, and marvellous encounters. As hundreds of later accounts of explorers and conquistadors, Columbus narrates his story in an entertaining way – it is not a boring list of facts. Obviously, the journal is not a Latin American text. However, it is useful to start with Columbus as his logbook is the first text of a long tradition of Latin American accounts of conquest and exploration. There are two reasons why Columbus had to tell his story in the first person: the ‘I’ was fundamental to prove that the story and all its details were true. As there could be no other proofs of the truth, eye-witness was crucial in all accounts of exploration and conquest (Pagden 1993, 51–88). Even Bartolomé de las Casas in his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies constantly uses the first person although the text is meant to be an objective, non-personal report of the cruelties of the conquest (Las Casas 2013). The first person is needed to testify the truth and this is the reason why Las Casas repeatedly writes “yo vide” and “yo soy testigo” [‘I have seen’, ‘I am witness’]. Furthermore, Columbus’ text justifies his proceedings. Columbus had signed a contract with the Crown and he could expect honours and rewards as long as the Crown agreed to his description of reality. This included his own behaviour during the voyage and the

6.1 Latin America 

 1147

encounters with foreign people. Could the Crown trust him? Was he the right man to act for the Crown on the other side of the sea? Like Columbus’ journal, most of the accounts of exploration and conquest of the following decades were written inter alia to justify the actions of the author and to explain his rights to favours and rewards, including outstanding positions in the New World. Spaniards and Portuguese in the New World were not only fighting against Amerindians but were also competing with other Spaniards and Portuguese on both sides of the Atlantic for their position in the new societies, which they started to build with the Amerindians. Their accounts were written in search of allies as well as in search of protection from Crown and Church. Their accounts, therefore, were both reports about the New World and about their own behavior. That explains why some accounts included biographical passages similar to those found in reports on merits and services. The stories narrated in these accounts were new insofar as they took place on islands and in countries Europeans did not know before. However, many aspects of the deeds and events narrated were not completely unknown to the European readership, because the authors resorted to current European narrative patterns, symbols, and tales. This is important not only for the description of the societies found in the Americas but also for the auto-description of the authors. In their narratives, they tried to show that they were good Christians who always acted according to Christian morals. In the entry of 1 November 1492, for example, Columbus writes about the Amerindians wearing pieces of gold and silver. In his description, Columbus did not rob them but asked politely whether they could bring him gold and silver. In the journal, the Indians did not only agree but were even delighted to do so. A similar story can be found in one of Hernán Cortés’ letters to Carl V, King of Spain. Just like Columbus, Cortés did not rob silver and gold but asked the Amerindians to help him look for precious metals he wanted to send to the King (Columbus 2005; Cortés 2013 [2001]). With their stories, Columbus and Cortés show the richness of the reigns they found and conquered, their Christian modesty, and their loyalty to the King (for letters of exploration and conquest, see Porras Barrenechea 1959). According to Porras Barrenechea, in Peru accounts of conquest and exploration are the “primera historia” [‘first history’] of Peru (1986, 7), because they are the first texts written to tell future generations about the time of the authors. Porras admits that the accounts are biased (1986, 12). Nevertheless, he argues, they tell the story of the conquest. To read these accounts as autobiographical narratives means to shift the focus from the description of American realities to the description of the ‘I’ and to read these accounts as a part of inner conflicts of Spaniards and Portuguese both in the New World and Europe; they should prove that one had acted in accordance with the King’s law and God’s will. The accounts were written for both the contemporaries and God. The idea that future generations would judge the actions of the conquerors was only formed when secularization was already well under way. However, this was not the case in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

1148 

 6 The Americas

The accounts of exploration and conquest formed a new literary genre, the ‘crónicas’. These ‘crónicas’ became the first Latin American autobiographic narratives. It goes without saying that they were heirs of a Spanish and Portuguese, thus European, literary tradition and looked at the Americas with eyes of people born in Europe (Pratt 1992). Nevertheless, the Europeans who settled in the New World had a political project that differed from that of Spanish or Portuguese rulers in Europe. Therefore, at a very early moment, these accounts began to express the views of people that lived and would stay in the Americas. With the passing of time, this view became more and more American (Brading 1991). There are some Amerindian accounts of conquest. Most of them are not written in the first person (León Portilla 1971). One of the few exceptions is Titu Cusi Yupanqui’s History of How the Spaniards arrived in Peru (2006). After relating Spanish conquest and Amerindian resistance headed by his father, he explains how and why he surrendered to the Spaniards.

From Conquest to Colony Accounts of exploration and conquest were written, inter alia, to justify the claims for outstanding positions the conquerors wanted to hold in the Americas. They described the encountered realities in a way that gave them the right to rule in the conquered reigns. When colonial rule was well established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, descriptions of Latin American realities did not need to explain the deeds of the authors anymore, because at this time the Crown had introduced administrative procedures to ask for favours, honours, and employment. Thus, most descriptions of Latin American societies stopped to be written as a first-person account while, at the same time, the archives were filled with autobiographical texts which formed part of administrative acts. Many texts can be labelled as accounts in between conquest and the later impersonal descriptions of Latin America, because they focus on a description of Latin American realities but still aim to explain the author’s role in the colony in order to justify his personal claim for a better position. As these authors had not taken part in the explorations or conquests they described, they could not claim eyewitness and, therefore, needed to prove the truth of their statements in a different way. Famous texts of this kind are, for example, Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva crónica y buen gobierno (1987) [The first new chronicle and good government (2009)] and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios Reales (2006) [Royal commentaries (2006)]. Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala was an Amerindian native from the Andean highlands who, at an early age, had begun to work in colonial administration. He wrote the New Chronicle to inform the Spanish King about colonial Peru, including complaints about bad administrators and praise for good priests and monks. In his report, Huaman Poma de Ayala does not ascribe himself a major role in the conquest. He was born too late to

6.1 Latin America 

 1149

take part in the wars of conquest and he was not important enough to have changed the course of Peruvian history later on. Nevertheless, his report becomes an autobiographical text, at the moment he claims to be better informed than other people. Huaman Poma de Ayala describes himself as a native from the Highlands that knows and defends Christian values and is familiar with Andean history and costumes at the same time. Thus, he is more qualified to give a description of the viceroyalty of Peru than anyone else. The autobiographical parts, therefore, describe Huaman Poma de Ayala as a man of both Spanish and Amerindian cultural background (language knowledge, clothing, contacts, etc.). Despite the importance for his argument, there are only a small number of autobiographical insertions in the New Chronicle. However, by including two drawings of himself, Huaman Poma de Ayala transformed his autobiographical notes into a unique self-portrait. In contrast to Huaman Poma de Ayala, in Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries the author’s ‘I’ is omnipresent. Garcilaso de la Vega saw himself as an heir of the Inca rulers and wanted to prove that he and all the nobles from Cuzco, the former Inca capital, had a right to be part of the government of colonial Peru. The Royal Commentaries are not only a description of the past, they also explain why the author is the most distinguished expert in all questions regarding Peru. Thus, the statements about himself were supposed to demonstrate his expertise of all matters the text is about (Mücke 2013). In the Royal Commentaries, one can distinguish between three different ways the ‘I’ appears. First, Garcilaso de la Vega describes himself as an eyewitness of the Inca times although he was born after the conquest. He manages to do this by asserting that he had known the old ways of living because these had survived until the first decades of the colony. Second, he describes himself as the person who historians and wise men from the Inca nobility had chosen to keep the knowledge of Inca times and rule. Therefore, they told him many secrets none of his contemporaries could know. Finally, Garcilaso de la Vega describes himself as an erudite person in the Western sense by affirming to have read all important studies about Peru and the Americas. While in the narratives of conquest and exploration the deeds of the ‘I’ were crucial to claim a privilege, with Huaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, knowledge became the most important attribute of the author. The position of the author had changed. He was no longer someone who had come to the Americas but someone who was an American. Huaman Poma de Ayala describes himself as a person deeply rooted in Andean society and Amerindian tradition. Garcilaso de la Vega is the first who says that he is proud to be a ‘mestizo’, that is, a person of mixed origin (2006, 536). This challenged Spanish understanding of the social order as in Spain ‘purity of the blood’, that is Catholic ancestry, was a sine qua non to be seen as an honourable man.

1150 

 6 The Americas

Royal Administration From the very beginning of the conquest, the kings in Portugal and Spain tried to impose their rule over both the conquered people and the Portuguese and Spanish subjects in the New World. Establishing colonial government meant, among other things, building colonial administration that ruled through writing. A great part of colonial autobiographical writing was done due to administrative requirements. The most important autobiographic genre within colonial civil administration was the so called “relación de méritos y servicios” [‘report on merits and services’]; although recently scholars have remarked that these reports are ego-documents of “high value”, the autobiographical aspects of this genre have been little researched (Brendecke 2016, 40; Folger 2011). Reports on merits and services were written in order to request favours or rewards of the Crown. In early modern Iberian societies, positions were not only inherited or bought, they were also gained through personal achievements and qualifications. This was important for the Americas where the Amerindian class of nobles had lost much of its power and the Iberian high nobility was conspicuous by its absence. Although important persons used to print their reports, most of them were preserved in manuscript form. Reports can be found from early colonial times until the end of colonial domination. However, there are no quantitative studies about the history of reports on merits and services covering the entire colonial period. The aim of the reports was similar to most of the accounts of exploration and conquest: the justification of a claim for some favour or position. However, the reports were different to accounts of exploration and conquest because most of them were written in the way administrative procedures demanded. For many positions the Crowns had established ways of application that included reports on merits. Therefore, they had to consider administrative requirements answering several questions. At the beginning, reports on merits mention the parents and, in many cases, other family members like grandparents or uncles. The ‘I’ of the report is not made exclusively of its deeds but of its family as well. This rhetoric positioning of the ‘I’ within a larger social unit is one of the characteristics of the reports on merits because they describe how the person has served society his whole life by being a member of different corporations, for example, of the military, civil, ecclesiastic, or academic realm. However, in the reports it is important to mention that the supplicant was always a humble and loyal subject of the King and of the corporations he had served. Thus, the autobiographic narrative of the relations of merits and services tried to stress that the supplicant was in no way interested in his individual advantage asking for benefits from the Crown or another authority at the same time. In other words, the structure of the report on merits and services consisted of gaining individual benefits by denying individual interests. Another important colonial genre of autobiographical writing is the so called ‘memoria’ or ‘relación’, which an office holder had to present after leaving his position. This was a kind of ex-post report on what had been done. In the Spanish world,

6.1 Latin America 

 1151

this kind of account was part of the so called ‘juicio de residencia’, an investigation high office holders were submitted to after leaving their positions. The best-known reports are from the Spanish viceroys who wrote them from the middle of the sixteenth century until the independence of continental Latin America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many of these reports contain hundreds of pages; some of them were published in the twentieth century. Research has given much more attention to viceregal reports than to the above-mentioned reports on merits and services, because the viceroys generally included more information about their administration with details about society, economy, and politics. However, until today the viceregal reports have not been included into the history of autobiographical writing although most of them are written in the first person singular and offer a good impression about the presentation of the ‘I’ at the top of colonial administration. The first viceregal ‘relación’ in Latin America was written by the first viceroy of New Spain (Mexico) Antonio de Mendoza (Hanke 1976–1978, Vol. I, 38–57). As all viceregal reports Mendoza repeats time and again having put into practice the laws and wishes of the King. As this was the raison d’être of his position, Mendoza clarifies to be a loyal subject to his King. In contrast to the reports on merits and services, Mendoza’s report includes many examples of his own initiatives. Many of the orders of the King were quite general and it was up to the viceroy to decide which concrete measures to take. Other problems were not foreseen by the King so that Mendoza acted without any instruction. Therefore, Mendoza’s account describes an ‘I’ responsible for most of the steps it took fulfilling its duty in its own way. This kind of ‘I’ can also be found in other viceregal reports. This shows the way a viceroy had to be and how he had to be described. In comparison to the above-mentioned reports on merits and services it demonstrates that different positions and procedures had an impact on the way a person could write about him- or herself.

The ‘I’ Before the Judge Both in Brazil and in Spanish America the judicial system was an important element of the civil and ecclesiastic administration. Throughout Latin America, courts of justice were established to impose the colonial order. Historical research has always been interested in law and the legal system in Latin America using ecclesiastic and civil documents of the judicial system for research on a variety of topics. However, only in the last decades a “social history of law” began to use judicial documents to understand social conflicts and the vision of subaltern people (Aguirre and Salvatore 2001, 3). Judicial documents proved to be of great value because in countless investigations and lawsuits people commented on nearly every aspect of human life. Testimonies have been useful to understand concepts of, for example, marriage, honour, property, or obedience (Restall et al. 2005, 160–176; Mannarelli 1994 [2007]). Research has stressed the important role Amerindians and African Americans played

1152 

 6 The Americas

as litigants (Owensby 2008, 307). A good number of documents of civil and ecclesiastical lawsuits have been published in the last years (Millones 2002; Enciso Contreras 2004; McKnight and Garofalo 2009; Traslosheros and Zaballa Beascoechea 2010; Márquez Algara 2011). They show the way Amerindians and African Americans fought for their rights in many cases including detailed descriptions of their way of living and thinking. However, systematic research on autobiographical traits of testimonies in colonial lawsuits has just started. There are no collections of testimonies in lawsuits that aim at studying a specific question (e.  g. concepts of adultery) and very little research on the ‘I’ before the judge in colonial Latin America. Given the number of documents in the archives and the importance of explaining one’s point of view in court, research about the autobiographical narrative in Latin American judicial testimonies would be an important contribution to the history of the autobiographical narrative in Latin America.

The Inquisition Within the colonial judicial system, the Inquisition or Holy Office had a special place (Pérez Villanueva 1984–2000). The Holy Office was an institution controlled by the Crown, not by the Pope. It was a royal instrument to control behaviour and beliefs. The early modern Inquisition in Spain and in Portugal was established in the fifteenth and sixteenth century in order to persecute Christian converts who secretly practiced their former Jewish or Muslim faith. Most of the accusation were, therefore, against new Christians or people whose parents had converted to Catholicism. In Latin America, there had been neither Jews nor Muslims and the Spanish Kings excluded Amerindians from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, arguing that they were neophytes (Ayllón 1999). In Brazil, no Tribunal of the Holy Office was installed at any moment. The whole colony was part of the jurisdiction of the Tribunal of Lisbon which only a few times sent official delegations to visit the colony. However, this does not mean that the Holy Office did not condemn individuals in Brazil. Portuguese and Spanish Inquisition existed until the beginning of the nineteenth century. As they were highly bureaucratic institutions documenting nearly all of its proceedings through extensive written records, they left countless documents, many of them including autobiographical narratives. In Spanish America, Tribunals of the Holy Office existed in Mexico City, Lima, and Cartagena de Indias. All three dedicated themselves to the persecution of secrete Judaism (e.  g. converted Portuguese or Spaniards who lived in the Americas), Protestantism (e.  g. captured pirates from England or the Netherlands), the print and importation of prohibited books (Guibovich Pérez 2003; Ramos Soriano 2011), and any belief or practice that challenged Catholic orthodoxy. Persecuted crimes ranged from deviant sexual practices (Méndez 2001) to sorcery, magic, witchcraft, or explicit alliances with

6.1 Latin America 

 1153

the devil. The accusation and the testimonies of witnesses and the accused reveal much about popular beliefs and, therefore, have been studied as part of a history of Latin American “mentalidades” [‘mentalities’] (Hampe Martínez 1998, 50). Enrique Flores and Mariana Masera have recently classified testimonies of inquisitorial processes from a literary approach: “constituyen narraciones con marcas de oralidad, cercanas a las leyendas, que se mueven en los terrenos de lo sobrenatural, lo fantástico y lo maravilloso” [‘they constitute narratives with signs of orality; they are close to fables and they move in the terrain of the supernatural, the fantastic, and the miraculous’] (2010, 37). Although testimonies were given orally in the first person, most of them are transcribed in the third person. However, they clearly maintain elements of oral expressions regarding syntax, vocabulary, and content. Many of the testimonies were given out of great fear or even before or after brutal torture. Other testimonies were given as part of a denunciation and presumably denouncers were not as afraid as the accused. In any case, testimonies from the Inquisition do not necessarily tell the truth but rather stories people believed to be convincing. Autobiographical narratives in inquisitorial documents can be found in testimonies of witnesses, denouncers, and accused. For witnesses and denouncers, it was of paramount importance to explain not to be involved in the reported acts. They would either justify their knowledge by not having heard, seen or understood what was happening or argue that an authority had seduced them (Flores and Masera 2010, 152). Either way, they would swear to not repeat such sins and ask the Holy Church for absolution. Despite the cruel punishments people could expect for magic or sorcery, according to the written records of the Holy Office, many people confessed of having been seduced by the accused person to such kind of acts. A good number of processes started with self-accusations. In 1655, for example, Ana María Vázquez denounced four women who had promised to find the people who had robbed her. According to Vázquez, the four women performed magical acts showing her the thieves. However, when Ana María finally found the supposed thieves in another town, they could prove their innocence and Ana María began to believe the four women had robbed her. That is why she denounced them at the Holy Office (Flores and Masera 2010, 123–125). In other words, Ana María Vázquez denounced herself of magical acts because she wanted to denounce the people who she believed had broken into her house. In other cases, people accused themselves when a love spell had not worked and the money paid to the sorcerer was now lost. Denunciation at the Holy Office, therefore, were often a kind of customer claim. The denouncer wanted his money back without being suspected of crime or sin. Autobiographical narratives within protocols of Inquisition processes show that many people of colonial Latin America had highly imaginative and fantastic ideas about the world they lived in. Many of them did not hesitate to connect themselves with supernatural powers if this would help them to achieve their goals. The persons who related their individual experiences in the inquisitorial processes were totally convinced that supernatural forces constantly interfered in human action and their

1154 

 6 The Americas

own lives. The autobiographical self of the Inquisition is, therefore, a special one because there is no other group of autobiographical documents where the self is so clearly part of a magic world permanently transcending the limits of Christianity. Regarding Brazil, two reports of the three visits from the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil have been published (Gonsalves de Mello 1970; Siqueira 2011). Although there were no inquisitorial tribunals in Brazil, the Inquisition was permanently present delegating its power to the secular clergy, the Jesuits, and other officials. In Salvador, the inquisitorial authorities tried in vain to install a tribunal. However, in Bahia more than 1,000 persons were entrusted by the Holy Office to control the Catholic faith (Mott 2010, 24) and 235 victims of the Portuguese Inquisition were localized until today. The accused were African Baianos, buggers, and libertine priests (Mott 2010). Historical research has not focused on the self-narratives of the victims so far. Historians primarily use the sources for a better understanding of the Inquisition in Brazil, without analyzing the mentality of Brazilians at the time. However, the inquisitorial documents from Brazil are as rich as the inquisitorial documents in Spanish America. They inform about individuals, their worldview, and their fate in the Holy Office (Novinsky 1992, 2002; Furtado 2013). Within these documents we can find topics like gender, sex, work conditions or religion. Nevertheless, until today there do not exist editions of a greater number of inquisition documents related to Brazil.

Spiritual Autobiography Another important colonial autobiographic tradition can be found in the autobiographical texts of nuns and ‘beatas’, i.  e. women devoted to Catholicism (Ibsen 1999; Myers 2003; Howe 2015). Since Augustine’s Confessions, autobiographical writing was a way to announce the greatness of God and to explain the way a Christian life was supposed to be lived. Christian autobiography and hagiography were strongly related. Both shaped the idea of a good Christian life and many autobiographical texts were written with the intention to become the basis of later hagiographies; indeed, many hagiographies relied on autobiographical texts. Obviously, hagiographies and autobiographies did not challenge explicitly the orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism. Generally, they were written within the limits of contemporary beliefs and dogmas. Through counterreformation and the Council of Trent autobiographical writing gained importance within Catholicism. To fight Protestantism and avoid any further split within Catholicism the counterreformation aimed at intensifying the control over lay and clergy. The control did not refer only to daily behaviour but also to beliefs and thoughts. Nuns and devoted women had always been supervised by their male confessors. Within the Augustine tradition of autobiographical writing, written reports could help to reinforce control or produce exemplary life-stories. A boom of this religious autobiographical genre started with the counterreformation at the end of the sixteenth century and lost momentum in the eighteenth century due to a new understanding of

6.1 Latin America 

 1155

religious writing and enlightened reforms changing many traditional forms of Catholic life. The centres of Spanish American colonial rule were at the same time centres of Catholic female autobiography as autobiographical writing flourished where both a literate culture and Catholic institutions were well rooted. However, female spiritual autobiography was also written at the periphery of Spanish America while in Brazil the number of nuns and devoted women was small (Myscofski 2013) and much research on spiritual autobiography is still to be done. Most of the female writers came from the ‘criollo’ class of Spanish colonial society. They were born in America into families that claimed to descend from Spanish migrants. This means they considered themselves members of Christian families with no Native American or African ancestors. Economically, many of these families were from the upper or the middle classes owning some urban or rural properties. Especially some female writers from the upper class had a good private education before taking the habit and could manage to get important positions within monastic administration. Life in colonial cloisters differed from cloister to cloister. Many women favoured conventual life over marriage preferring the restraints of the order over those of husband and family. Most of the texts known today were written within a mystical tradition, following the Spanish nun Teresa de Ávila (1515–1582). Within this tradition the writing women have been chosen by God to lead a life devoted to Him. The author knows this through a sign from God and by further direct communication with the Almighty. Despite the direct relationship with God, the writer subjects herself totally to the orders and wishes of the Catholic Church and authorities. The life story stresses obedience and humility of the female writer including hard work and terrible sufferings. Therefore, the texts show the presence and action of God on earth and, at the same time, the ideal Christian behaviour. Generally, mystical autobiographical texts neither criticize the Catholic Church nor the social order. However, in the description of sufferings and communication with God questions about or even criticism on different aspects of ecclesiastical life and social order can be found. One of the most intriguing autobiographical texts is the spiritual diary of Ursula de Jesús (1604–1666) who was a ‘donada’, an African American enslaved given to a cloister for work (Deusen 2004). Although freed, she stayed in the cloister and began to write a diary in the 1650s, describing the hard work she was doing. She asks herself whether she is mistreated by the nuns because of being an African American. However, she does not define her opinion regarding the position African American should hold according to God’s will, but offers two contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, she explains that “en cuanto al alma” [“respect to the soul”] work defines the value of a person (Úrsula de Jesús 2012, 235 [Deusen 2004, 121]), on the other hand, she states that in purgatory “cada uno tenia su lugar conforme a su estado [...] los seglares, saserdotes, yndios, negros, todas las jenerasiones y estados de cada uno [en otros lugares], y [que según] las obligasiones que tenian se les daban las penas” [“all had their place (...) and lay persons, priests, Indians, blacks, and all other generations were punished

1156 

 6 The Americas

according to their conditions and distinct responsibilities”] (Úrsula de Jesús 2012, 212 [Deusen 2004, 108]). Although Ursula de Jesús had to obey her confessors and superiors, she ventured into speculations about the role, position, and treatment of African American people. Other spiritual diaries criticizing contemporary Spanish colonial society are from Ursula Suárez (1666–1749) and from Catalina de Erauso (about 1582–1650). Ursula Suárez wrote a Relación autobiográfica [Autobiographical Report] being a nun in Santiago de Chile. In this report, she reveals that God told her to be his “saint comedian” (qtd. in Myers 2004, 299) and in fact she describes herself as a woman who through tricks and persuasive power has financially supported her family and later her order. In her report, she confesses her only sin is “to deceive men” (qtd. in Myers 2004, 299) to convince them to help her cloister. Catalina de Erauso tells an even more surprising story in her Historia de la Monja Alférez [History of the Lieutenant Nun]. According to this text, Catalina de Erauso, before taking the nun’s veil, left the cloister and lived in South America as a soldier for many years until she was discovered and accused. Eventually, she was absolved and spent the rest of her life in Europe and New Spain. Neither the original manuscript of Ursula Suárez nor that of Catalina de Erauso have survived. Therefore, their stories should be read with caution (Pérez-Villanueva 2014, 5). From the mid-seventeenth century on, female spiritual autobiography and the picaresque novel, including comedy and adventures, were well known to the Spanish world. Perhaps, the life stories of Ursula Suárez and Catalina de Erauso were written and partially invented by others. If this is the case, however, it would underline the notoriety of female spiritual autobiography at the time. The best known female writer from colonial Latin America is the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695). During her life, she published a great number of poems and dramatic plays. Her most important autobiographical text is the Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz [The Poet’s Answer to the Most Illustrious Sister Filotea de la Cruz] in which she repudiates critical reflections about female writing by the Bishop of Puebla in New Spain, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, published under the pseudonym ‘Sor Filotea de la Cruz’ (Cruz 1995 [2009]). When Sor Juana wrote her Respuesta she was already a well-known author protected by the most important civil and ecclesiastic authorities of New Spain. Salceda calls her text the “Carta Magna de la libertad intelectual de las mujeres de América” [‘Carta Magna of intellectual freedom of the women of America’] (1995, xliii) because it advocates the women’s right to read, write, and express their opinion in civil and religious matters. Sor Juana emphasizes that women are better teachers for girls and it is “utilísimo y necesario” [“most useful and necessary”] for women to study the bible (Cruz 1995, 469 [2009, 93]). Obviously, this was against the conviction of most men in colonial Mexico. To convince her readers Sor Juana uses an autobiographical line of reasoning. She starts by describing her inclination for reading and writing as a “impulso Dios puso en mí” [“impulse that God Himself bestowed on me”] (Cruz 1995, 444 [2009, 47]) and stresses to have learned to read at the age of three and to write

6.1 Latin America 

 1157

fluently at the age of six or seven. The early age of alphabetization symbolized that Sor Juana’s abilities were a gift from God. It was not pride or arrogance inducing her to learn reading and writing but God’s own will. This is the reason, why Sor Juana even asked her mother at the age of six or seven for permission to go to university. Since attending university as a woman was impossible, the future nun started to study in the private library of an uncle. Soon, she entered a religious order because of “total negación que tenía al matrimonio” [“my absolute unwillingness to enter into marriage”] (Cruz 1995, 446 [2009, 51]) or, in other words, she entered an order because cloister life was the only way for a woman in colonial Mexico to dedicate herself to an intellectual life. However, she relates in detail the difficulties of finding the time to read and write as the obligations of a nun were very time-consuming. This led to the point, where her superior even prohibited her to continue with her studies. Nevertheless, Sor Juana explains her necessity to study because every observation in her daily routine turns out to be a starting point of reflections and intellectual deliberations. This could be seen as another autobiographical proof of God’s will: she could not prevent the transformation of any daily observation into an object of investigation. Another argument for the usefulness of female reading and writing is public utility. Sor Juana stresses never having written an “indicente” [“indecent”] text (Cruz 1995, 470 [2009, 97]) nor “cosa alguna por mi voluntad, sino por ruegos y preceptos ajenos” [“a single thing of my own volition, but rather only in response to the pleadings and commands of others”] (Cruz 1995, 470–471 [2009, 97]). Therefore, to write is not her own will or her vanity but the wish of civil and ecclesiastic superiors. The talent God gave her must be employed in a useful way. That is why she composes texts and assumes that many more women have talents which should be put in use. Sor Juana died a few years after writing her autobiographical manifest and it would take a very long time for her ideas to become accepted throughout Latin America. In contrast to scholarly interest in Sor Juana and the spiritual autobiographies of Latin American women, “confessional letters” have been little researched (Kordic 2008, 19). Although Catholics must confess orally until today, many nuns wrote confessional letters to superiors, they regarded more qualified to guide them in their spiritual search (Kordic 2008, 46). In a similar way to the spiritual autobiography, confessional letters could explain in detail the spiritual problems, doubts, and fears of devote women.

Testaments One of the most popular written accounts in first-person singular during colonial times was the testament. Since the sixteenth century, Latin American people made their wills in written documents. Testators came from all social classes. Many of them were illiterate and did not speak Spanish or Portuguese but an Amerindian language.

1158 

 6 The Americas

Women were well represented, although they did not make up half of all testators. Testaments were made all over Latin America, in the centres and peripheries of colonial rule. The number of testaments, the diversity of the testators, and the wide regional spread of testaments are one reason why testaments are an important source for historical, cultural, and linguistic studies of the colonial past. The rise of social history, ethno-history, and the history of mentalities led to an increasing scholarly interest in testaments in the 1970s (Góngora 1970, 128). Historians of Mexico began to publish wills from Amerindians written in Nahuatl, Maya, and Spanish. Today, thousands of these wills in public archives are known and hundreds are published (Kellog and Restall 1998; Rojas Rabiela et al. 1999–2004; Pizzigoni 2007). All over Latin America, research about testaments focusses on Amerindians (Rodríguez Jiménez 2002), African Americans, and on poor people from the cities and the country (Reis 2003; Paiva 2009). From the very beginning, testaments were written following rules established by Church and Crown. The first model of testaments printed in Latin America was from Alonso de Molina, published in 1565 in Mexico (Rojas Rabiela 1999, 30–32). Presumably, many of the rules for testament writing given in this short text were already circulating in manuscript form at that time. In any case, churchmen, notaries, and administrative officials had brought the knowledge of how to write a testament long before 1565 to the New World. The interference of these experts in making a will explains why, despite local and temporal varieties, colonial Latin American testaments have some features in common. Generally, testators dictated their will in first person singular. The will included the mentioning of the full name of the testator, including the distinguishing ‘don’ or ‘doña’ or even a title of nobility. However, in some testaments only the first name is given. The auto-description of the testators could include more details. Many testaments refer to the parents of the testators and record whether the testator was a legitimate or illegitimate child (Kordić and Goić 2005). Furthermore, spouses, place of birth, and residence are mentioned to identify the testator. Year or date of birth generally did not form part of the personal identity of colonial Latin American testators. In Native American testaments of Mexico, the local community played an important role, almost more important than the family in describing the ‘I’. The naming of a community did not simply express the place of residence but the social unit the testator belonged to. The position testators believed to have in society is expressed in their will. On the one side, giving their properties to different people and institutions identified their relationship to them. In most cases, all children, legitimate and illegitimate, as well as other relatives are mentioned in a testament. Usually, the testators give something to friends, servants or slaves rewarding their good behaviour and loyalty. On the other side, testators explain the treatment they expect after death. Generally, they want some church rituals (bell ringing, mass, candles), stipulating a certain amount for these rituals, and in many cases, they ask for a specific place to be buried (i.  e. a spe-

6.1 Latin America 

 1159

cific church or even a special place within a church). Poor people explain how their descendants are supposed to pay the funeral (e.  g. a lay brotherhood). Although many testators declare to be sick, the ‘I’ of the testaments is not a suffering one, but an actor vigorously organising his or her future. Testators state to make their last will without coercion and with sanity. Many testaments express the wishes of the dying person with the word ‘mando’ [‘I command’] (Kordic and Goic 2005, 187). The power of the ‘I’ in testaments is related to the Christian belief of the free will (to sin, confess, and repent) and to early modern concepts of private property. The testators had to affirm to honestly wish church bells tolled, candles lighted, and mass celebrated for them because, according to Catholic belief, these acts do not have any sense if the deceased had not truly wished to save his or her soul. Furthermore, the Crown advocated in favour of testators’ free will and passed a bill in 1580 demanding “entera libertad” [‘entire liberty’] of Amerindians making their testament (Rojas Rabiela 1999, 45). The Crown did not want churchmen and Spaniards to take over properties of dead Amerindians because the Crown’s power would be threatened by a feudal concept of Spanish American society in which private Amerindian property, especially land tenure, would not exist. Private property put a limit to the power of local potentates who challenged the rule of the Crown. The alliance of Crown and Amerindians against a common enemy was well expressed in the will of Felipe Pérez, cacique (village chief) de Mimiahuapan, who, in 1568, defended his landed property saying that “en ningún tiempo quieran ser dueños los españoles de lo que nos hizo merced nuestro católico rey” [‘the Spaniards never should wish to be owner of that (land; U.M.) which gave us our Catholic King’] (Rojas Rabiela et al. 1999–2004, Vol. II, 148). In different and peculiar ways, colonial testaments created an ‘I’ that combines self-interest, individual responsibility, and private property with belonging to social units like family, local community, and Christianity.

Letters Letters – as a signed text written by a sender to an addressee – existed throughout the colonial period and probably even before in Latin America. To announce the findings of Columbus’ first voyage, a text was published in form of a letter from Columbus (1982 [2010]). Later, Hernán Cortés reported his proceedings in the New World in form of letters to the King (2013 [2001]). Communication by letters was fundamental not only in the first decades of conquest but throughout the colonial period. Administration, commerce, and long distance communication of any kind required written documents. Letters constituted a large portion of these. Until today, literature studies have not done much research on colonial letters. However, historical sciences explore Latin American letters in countless studies. Letters are important for political, ecclesiastic, legal, economic, and commercial history because much of the information they contain cannot be found in other doc-

1160 

 6 The Americas

uments. Long distance colonial administration and private business were organized by letters. Therefore, letters show the way transatlantic administration and business worked. Nevertheless, research on political, legal, ecclesiastic, and economic history does not study “letters as an ‘autobiographical’ genre” (Bray 2001, 552). Until today, scholars have not studied the ‘I’ of these letters nor their narrative patterns on a large scale. Since letters were a part of written communication, they have been mentioned above when discussing spiritual autobiography and accounts of conquest and exploration. The self of the author has also been researched in studies about so called ‘private letters’ (Vergara Quiroz 1987; Usunáriz 1992; Martínez Martínez 2007; Sánchez Rubio and Testón Núñez 2014). This designation refers to letters not meant primarily to form part of an administrative, judicial, ecclesiastic or commercial act. However, in the colonial period there was no clearly defined private sphere. Therefore, many of the so called private letters did include business matters or were in some moment presented in administrative, ecclesiastic or judicial acts. Not surprisingly, many of these letters have survived in court archives as they formed part of lawsuits. Most private letters were letters written to family members. These could be brothers and sisters, parents or children but also aunts, uncles or distant relatives. Private letters tell much about the author’s idea of his or her family and his or her position in it. Women’s correspondence, for example, has been analyzed to understand women’s view of their role as spouses (Vergara Quiroz 1987). Many letters include information about the state of health of the author, his or her failures, achievements, and economic situation. Evidently, writing convention of the time should be considered when analysing the content of private letters (Günther 2001). However, the huge number of private letters from colonial times and the considerable number of letters published by historians provide a unique opportunity to research the way people constructed their ‘I’ describing family, sentiments, and many other aspects of their lives. The most important topic of scholarly research on Latin American colonial letters are the so-called ‘cartas de llamada’, a designation Enrique Otte gave to more than 650 letters published in 1988 (Otte 1988). These letters were written by Spanish people in America to friends or, more often, relatives in Spain inviting the addressees to join the sender in the New World. This call (‘llamada’) to emigrate is the reason for the name Otte gave the letters. From Otte’s book onward these letters have been studied as an epistolary sub-genre, and several historians have published more ‘cartas de llamada’ (Macías and Morales Padrón 1991; Márquez Macías 1994; Stangl 2012b). According to Werner Stangl, in 2012 there were about 2,200 published ‘cartas de llamada’ (2012a, 94–95, 276). Stangl estimates that these are two thirds of all published colonial letters, except the letters from explorers, conquerors, and missionaries. Although the ‘cartas de llamada’ look like private letters at first sight, generally they were written for administrative reasons. The Spanish Crown regulated migration to America and very early introduced requirements for migration to the New World. The migrant had to be financially independent. This meant to have either a job or a

6.1 Latin America 

 1161

person that guaranteed to pay the immigrant’s cost of living. ‘Cartas de llamada’ were written to friends and relatives in Spain to be presented when asking for permission to migrate to Spanish America. The letters, therefore, describe the situation of the sender, express his or her wish for the addressee to join him or her, and the declaration of the addressee’s ability to sustain him- or herself. Many of the ‘cartas de llamada’ are situated between the private and the administrative sphere, written to convince both the addressee and the officer in charge of deciding the application. Most letters were written in the sixteenth century and at the end of colonial rule (1780–1820), being the years when control over transatlantic migration was strictest. The bulk of writers were male since women generally could not promise to sustain a migrant. However, many of the recipients were women. During the eighteenth century ‘cartas de llamada’ began to change in style. They stopped to mix different topics and concentrated on points important to administrative purposes. Despite their hybrid character, ‘cartas de llamada’ have been used for research on colonial mentalities and emotions. According to Rebecca Earle, for example, they prove that “eighteenth-century marriage was more intimate than its sixteenth-century counterpart” (2005, 40) as husbands of the eighteenth century used more intimate terms for addressing their spouses.

The Nineteenth Century The breakdown of the Spanish and Portuguese Monarchies during the Napoleonic Wars led to the independence of all Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, except of Cuba and Puerto Rico. In Spanish America, independence and nation building were accompanied by long lasting civil wars. Brazil, on the contrary, achieved independence peacefully. It was the only Latin American country that did not embrace republicanism but became a constitutional monarchy until 1889. One of the most important effects of independence was the emergence of a public sphere. While Crown and Church throughout colonial times had censored the printed word, the new nation states were more liberal and much weaker than the former colonial administration. Thus, from the second decade of the nineteenth century onwards, newspaper, pamphlets, and books were printed in a quantity never known before. In Brazil, the first printing press only arrived in 1809, the nineteenth century being the first century with a Brazilian press at all. Evidently, these radical changes transformed Latin American writing cultures. To understand the peculiarity of the Latin American cultures in the nineteenth century, one must bear in mind that industrialization and major demographical change came to Latin America only at the very end of the nineteenth century. “By 1850, Latin America’s population still had not recovered from the depopulation initiated by the European contact more than 300 years earlier” (Brea 2003, 5). In other words, Latin America had about 30 million inhabitants while

1162 

 6 The Americas

population numbers in Europe (half the landmass of Latin America) were nine times higher. In Latin America, no big cities like London or Paris (or later Berlin) existed. Mexico City, the most important city of colonial times, grew from less than 200,000 to half million inhabitants in the nineteenth century. Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, with approximately 800,000 inhabitants the largest Latin American cities in 1900, had been towns of circa 200,000 inhabitants until the 1850s. Therefore, in Latin America urban bourgeois culture developed in a material setting different from the setting in industrializing nations like, for example, France or the United Kingdom. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, Latin American writers could not live from their writing. Periodicals and books printed in Latin America, generally did not sell many copies because there simply did not exist enough readers (and buyers). The worst enemy of reading and writing in nineteenth-century Latin America was not authoritarianism and the state, but the lack of people. This explains why the number of novels written and published in the nineteenth-century was rather small. Only in the twentieth century, the novel found a mass readership in Latin America. The small number of novels published in nineteenth-century Latin America is probably the main reason why, with a very few exceptions, Latin American autobiographic novels only started in the twentieth century. However, in nineteenth-century Latin American ways of autobiographical narratives emerged which differed both from those of colonial times and those of the industrializing countries in the north.

Autobiography and the Public Sphere In his bibliography of autobiographical writings on Mexico, Richard Woods lists more than 1,700 printed autobiographical texts including “autobiography proper; memoirs; oral autobiography; interviews; autobiographical novels; autobiographical essays; collections of letters; diaries or journals” (2005, ix–x). Only 88 of these texts were published between 1801 and 1900, more than half of them written in English by foreigners who lived or had lived in Mexico. Woods’ extensive bibliography is a good indicator to the fact that autobiographical writing and publishing did not become mass phenomena until the twentieth century. However, regarding form and content, autobiographical narratives experienced drastic changes after independence. Most authors agree that autobiographical writing became part of the public sphere, more precisely, first person narratives were composed to be published during or after the lifetime of their authors. This contrasts with the “pilgrimage to the interior”, “self-scrutiny”, and “introspection” that has been – according to Peter Gay (1995, 5) – the distinctive features of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. Obviously, Latin American bourgeois culture was different, producing relatively more autobiographical narratives hardly interested in self-inspection. Many Latin American autobiographers saw themselves as actors and witnesses of important historical events. Writing autobiography, therefore, meant to tell present

6.1 Latin America 

 1163

and future generations histories the author had seen and lived. Particularly, independence, nation building, and the civil wars were important topics of autobiographies and memoirs (Molloy 1991; Prieto 1966; Ferreira de Cassone 2008; Díaz Cid 2009; Aristizábal 2012). Obviously, these kinds of texts did not discuss limits of personal remembering or problems of subjectivity. Their authors were interested in imposing their personal views of the present and the past and, therefore, did not enter in speculations about the truth of their stories. This type of autobiography or memoir was not special to Latin America or the nineteenth century. It was strongly related to modern historiographical research emerging at the time. Historians focussed on written documents from the past to tell “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” [‘how it actually was’] (Ranke 1885, 7). According to most of nineteenth-century historiography, great men were the moving force in history and, therefore, historical research should give special attention to these men. That is why memoirs and autobiographies were so important for a scientific description of the past. They were both documents from the past and documents from important men of the past. Considering the small output of the press in many Latin American nation states during the nineteenth century, all educated men of the public sphere knew that their autobiographical writing could have a strong impact on the view future generations would have of their time. Therefore, it is not surprising that many of them wrote autobiographies and memoirs focussing on public affairs. Most nineteenth-century autobiographies and memoirs have a second objective. Authors describe themselves as useful and honourable citizens of the newly founded nation-states. Autobiographical writing itself was a service to the nation as it produced the documents necessary for future historians. However, most of the authors understand their text as a vindication or defence of their political and intellectual trajectories. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, one of the most prolific autobiographical writers of his time, called his first autobiographical book, published in 1843, Mi defensa [My defence] (Sarmiento 1885). Others explain in large prefaces or introductions that their only aim is to refute the calumnies of their enemies that question the honour of the writer and his family. Consequently, nineteenth-century autobiographies offer a self-description of public men expressing the way they had to behave and act (Mücke 2015). The autobiographical ‘I’ is generally an educated (or self-educated) man sacrificing himself for his native country. Although he suffered under colonial rule, during the wars of independence, or in later political conflicts, he writes without hate trying to foster the reconciliation of the national family. The truthfulness and honesty of the author is expressed in different ways. Many memoirs or autobiographies start with a solemn declaration of the author to tell nothing but the truth. Gervasio Antonio de Posadas calls his memoirs a “confesión ingenua y verídica” [‘ingenuous and truthful confession’] (1920, 9). José María Espinosa points out “todo lo que en ellas [mis memorias; U.M.] se encuentra es la verdad lisa, llana y pura” [‘that all what can be found in them (my memories; U.M.) is the simple, straight and pure truth’] (1936, 21). Paraphrasing Philippe Lejeune, Cathe-

1164 

 6 The Americas

rine Aristizábal classified nineteenth-century Latin American autobiographies and memoirs as a “pacto de la verdad” [‘truth pact’] (2012, 31). From the very beginning, authors ask the readers not only to believe in the identity of author, storyteller, and protagonist of the story but also of the identity of text and non-textual reality. The ‘pacts’ between authors and readers show that nineteenth century autobiographies and memoirs were not written for Crown and Church but for the public. It was the public that finally decided whether the author’s life had been a useful and honourable one. Nineteenth century writers do not address a king or a president but a nation, a readership or another anonymous group. Although some authors use God as a reference to underline the truth of their story, autobiographies and memoirs describe their authors first of all as useful citizens and devoted patriots. They do not describe their way of finding God. That is why the atmosphere of many nineteenth-century autobiographies is rather gloomy. While the Augustine autobiography describes a life with happy end (the finding of the true faith), nineteenth-century autobiography describes a life of sufferings that may have been in vain. According to Sylvia Molloy, “one of the most expressive silences in Spanish American autobiographies of the nineteenth century concerns childhood” (1991, 6). Generally, childhood does not play an important role in the autobiographical writings because the texts are supposed to represent the author’s role in history. The texts are not so much interested in the formation of the author but in that of the nation state. When autobiographical texts refer to the childhood, they often want to connect the author’s individual life with that of the nation. One of the rare autobiographical narrative concentrating on childhood and youth is Miguel Cané’s Juvenilia (1884). However, Sylvia Molloy sees Cané’s text as “class bonding” (1991, 105). Describing his education in elite institutions, Cané does not tell the story of his personal formation but one of belonging to a selected group in Argentina. In a similar way, Halperín Donghi sees nineteenth century autobiographical texts as an instrument to place the author in a social and cultural elite of his country. While early autobiographers, for example Servando Teresa de Mier or Guridi de Alcocer, lamented their position as ‘lettered men’ in the old regime, authors after independence had to cope with the fact that the old elites were challenged by successful military leaders, foreign businessman, and many other people of humble origin (Halperín Donghi 1987, 43–63). Autobiographical writing aimed at justifying the authors’ position. Although childhood was not an important aspect, many authors included a description of their parents or other ancestors demonstrating their distinguished origin and their right to be part of the elite. Considering the close liaison between public sphere and nineteenth-century autobiographical writing, the lack of autobiographies written by women does not surprise as women were generally excluded from the public sphere. One of the few exceptions is Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Boreales, Miniaturas y Porcelanas (1902) where she relates, inter alia, the occupation of Lima by the troops of Nicolás de Piérola in 1895. At that time, Matto was already a famous liberal novelist opposing the conservative party of Piérola. Thus, Piérola’s troops plundered her house and detained the whole family

6.1 Latin America 

 1165

(Hintze 2008). Concepción Lombardo de Miramón is another example of a woman writing a political memoir about nineteenth-century politics. However, this memoir, written in the second decade of the twentieth century, aims at defending the action of her husband Miguel Miramón, shot in 1867 as a traitor since he supported the reign of emperor Maximiliano (Lombardo de Miramón 1980). A very different type of autobiography is the one of Cuban Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Between 1839 and 1854, she wrote an autobiography in letters describing herself as a young woman who meditates about her feelings and emotions. This is one of the very few autobiographies centred in the reflection of the self (Gómez de Avellaneda 1996).

Travel Narrative Nineteenth-century Latin American travel narratives resemble in many aspects autobiographies and memories of the time as they were written for the public and dealt with topics of public interests. Travel narratives, usually, were not introspective. However, most narratives include an explicit or implicit self-description of the author. Like most memoirs, travel narratives relate only a small part of the author’s life. Many Latin American travel narratives were composed in form of travel diaries conveying a more spontaneous atmosphere, although they were probably written years later. Although there exist some travel narratives about Asian countries, Africa, or Latin American regions, most deal with travels in Europe and the United States (Onís 1952; Thompson 1975), because traveling to Europe or the US was (and still is) a symbolic expression of Latin American elite’s way of life. From the 1870s onwards, steamship navigation made it more comfortable and cheaper to cross the Atlantic, thus more and more people visited Europe or the US transforming cities like London or Paris to meeting points of the Latin American elite (for Paris see Streckert 2013). Most travel narratives compare foreign countries with the author’s home country, thus showing the author’s opinion about both countries. Travellers in the US or in European industrializing countries describe ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’. This includes material richness, like railway travelling or elegant hotels, as well as education, habits, and public order. Generally, authors imagine a kind of national character and nonetheless, implicitly or explicitly, recommend their home country to emulate the visited country. Naturally, there are exceptions. Some authors criticize the situation of African Americans in the US (Prescott 2007). Juan Bustamante from the Peruvian Andes compares the treatment of the peasants in Russia with that of the Indians in Peru (Bustamante 2015, 539–540). Travel narratives are not only about the visited and the home countries, they are also about the author. By writing about his or her travels abroad, the author underlines to be part of the elite of his or her home country. At the same time, many travellers describe themselves as objective observers of foreign realities. Traveling itself was a kind of education, as Pedro Paz Soldán y Unanue noticed in his travel narrative

1166 

 6 The Americas

(Paz Soldán y Unanue 1971; Mücke 2012). Most travel narratives include descriptions of the activities of the author, stressing the education and erudition of the author by mentioning language lessons in Latin or visits of ancient ruins. While very few Latin American women wrote autobiographies or memoirs in the nineteenth century, they published a good number of travel narratives. The narratives are not completely different from those men composed. However, women included gender questions and observations about women’s movements. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Council of Education of Buenos Aires sent Clorinda Matto de Turner to Europe to study female education. She wrote a travel book, published posthumously, describing not only female education but also the importance of female workforce and her meetings with feminist leaders. In this way, autobiographical texts helped constructing the idea of an international women’s movement (Matto de Turner 2010).

Letters Within literate circles of nineteenth-century Latin America, letters were a ubiquitous form of communication. Letters were considered as a personal expression of the sender. Letters of love, therefore, expressed personal feelings, letters to the editor, personal opinions, and business letters, a personal commitment to keep one’s promise. In Peru’s 1870/1871 electoral campaign, candidate Manuel Pardo signed thousands of letters, hand written by his secretaries, and sent them to people he desired to win over. Many of the addressees were illiterate and could not read the letter. However, having received a personal letter meant to be linked with the candidate in a special way (Mücke 2004). There is a huge number of published and unpublished letter collections in Latin America. Most of the published letter collections are from important public men, i.  e. presidents, military leaders, or intellectuals. Some collections specialize in private correspondence, e.  g. with spouses or relatives, others concentrate in letters of public interest. Many public archives hold important collections of letters. Presumably, there are even more collections in private hands. Cultural and literary history always have been interested in studying letters since letters “associe le lien social et la subjectivité” [‘combine the social tie and the subjectivity’] (Chartier 1991, 9). In Latin America, most studies are about letters of public men. Recently, however, letters of women and their role in public affairs have been published and studied (Mizraje 2003). At the same time, much research has been done about private and intimate letters (Ruiz de Gordejuela Urquijo 2011; French 2015). One of the most important topics of private letters is health. The writer informs the addressee about his or her own health condition and that of family members and friends. He or she includes information about illnesses of people the writer and the addressee know and expresses the wish for recovery (Galán 2004). Therefore, letters

6.1 Latin America 

 1167

are important to understand perceptions of physical and mental illnesses and how people imagined and described their body. Additionally, letters are a “testimonio de la vida diaria” [‘testimony of daily life’] (Galán 2004, 85) as they describe the places the writer visits, meetings with people and activities of all kinds. Another important topic is social ties. Letters did not only strengthen the connection between sender and addressee but also informed about third persons. Often, besides the addressee, other people read the letter or the letter was read to others. Finally, many letters included expressions of feelings, be it in love or condolence letters. Writers expressed their feelings within the convention of their time and culture. There are no systematic comparisons between letter writing in Latin America (or one Latin American country) and letter writing in the US or in any European country. Considering the Latin American elite, apparently, letters were quite similar to letters of educated people in the US, France, Great Britain or Germany. Further research on letter writing of non-elite people would help to gain a better understanding of particular Latin American letter writing.

Diaries Latin Americans wrote different types of diaries during the nineteenth century. From the very beginning of the independence wars, military leaders wrote war diaries with details about military campaigns, battles, and life in the army. Later, international wars like that between the US and Mexico, civil wars, and the independence wars of Cuba gave birth to a huge number of diaries, most of them concentrating on military issues. However, some of them include private information and personal feelings. A very special diary about a violent social conflict is that of a Cuban who describes how he persecuted and captured slave refugees between 1837 and 1842 (Estévez 1982). Diaries did not only document violence, wars, and military campaigns but also political history. During more than 25 years, Carlos María Bustamante recorded Mexican political life day by day, bequeathing a diary of 50 volumes to posterity (Bustamante 2001–2003). However, Bustamante’s diary and most war diaries are not interested in the ‘I’ of the writer. They show that diary writing was well known in Latin America but most of them cannot be labelled as autobiographical texts. In a similar way, travel diaries moved between the private and the public sphere. As mentioned above, travel narratives could be part of a public debate about the writer’s society. Some travel diaries had exactly this objective. They described foreign countries comparing them with their home countries or dealt with a part of their own country little known to the educated readers of such travel diaries. These distant regions of the home country were generally considered as a promise for the future when ‘civilization’ would have eradicated the current way of living. Other travel diaries were of a more private nature. While there is a reasonable number of diaries about political matters, wars, military campaigns, and travelling in nineteenth century Latin America, only a few

1168 

 6 The Americas

private diaries are known. According to Rebecca Steinitz “diaries were ubiquitous in nineteenth century Britain” (2011, 2–3) where the word ‘diary’ began to refer not only to the written text but also to a small book with white pages produced for the writing of a diary. In nineteenth-century Latin America nobody produced such kind of diary-books. It is misleading to call the diary a “Beichte” [‘confession’] that has been “säkularisiert” [‘secularized’] (Wuthenow 1990, 12–13). The small number of private diaries in secularizing nineteenth century Latin America shows that Catholic confession and private diary have no link at all. It may be helpful not to forget that Catholic Christians confess with a priest while in Protestantism the role of the Church as a mediator between believers and God is not as important as in Catholicism. Apparently, the public sphere replaced some functions of the Confession, and not the diary. However, today only a few private diaries written in nineteenth-century Latin America are known. Not all of them are private diaries with daily entries focussing on the personal affairs of the writer. Some mix private and public affairs, others mix different forms of writing, for example diary and memoirs. One of the best-known private diaries is from Soledad Acosta de Samper, written between 1853 and 1855, the year she married José María de Samper, a Colombian writer and politician. Carolina Alzate speaks of a “diario de amor” [‘love diary’] (2004, xx) because the diary starts with Acosta falling in love and ends with the wedding. As Acosta did not destroy the diary, she might have written it for her later husband. Feelings and sentiments are one of the most important topics of the diary. Between 1846 and 1850, young Acosta had lived in Paris and through the education she received there, she could write a romantic diary. Catherine Aristizábal notes that “Acosta se representa como una mujer ilustrada, que maneja varios idiomas y que está al tanto de la realidad política” [‘Acosta represents herself as an illustrated woman who speaks different languages and is well informed about politics’] (2012, 166). In fact, the diary is full of citations of European writers and observations about Colombian political life. Acosta wrote in the years of a civil war when her future husband was banned from the capital. She expresses her commitment for the party of José María de Samper so that, in total, readers of the diary will be impressed of a young mid-nineteenth century Colombian woman being able to produce a text very well informed about politics, written in such a modern romantic style, repeatedly referring to modern and classical European literature. The most extensive private diary written in Latin America known today is from Heinrich Witt, a German migrant who lived in Peru from 1824 to 1892 (Witt 2015– 2016). Originally, the diary had 13 volumes totalling more than 11,000 pages. Today 10 volumes are extant. Witt started dictating this diary in 1859, revising older diaries he had written by his own hand. The diary describes in the form of a memoir his childhood in Altona (nowadays a part of Hamburg) and in the form of diary his voyage to Peru and his life in Peru from 1824 to 1892, including voyages in Peru and Europe. Witt wrote the diary in English, assuming his descendants to read it. As Witt was part of an

6.1 Latin America 

 1169

international business community, he did not know where his children and grandchildren would live. The diary is full of details about Witt’s and his family’s private life. This includes daily activities, illnesses, parties, and conflicts. The diary also abounds in details about the upper-class life of nineteenth century Lima. Furthermore, Witt describes extensively his business activities, focussing on finance and corruption in Lima and international trade between Europe and Peru. Finally, Witt comments on politics, knowing personally most of the powerful Peruvian men.

Slaves and Subalterns Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, approximately five million enslaved Africans came to Latin America, most of them to Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean. This was more than 40 percent of all African captives brought to the Americas, including the French and British Caribbean (Eltis 2001). Africans brought their ways of living and their cultures to the Americas and mixed them with those of Europeans and indigenous people. During the nineteenth century in the US, African Americans wrote dozens of autobiographical books, so called ‘slave narratives’. Today these autobiographies are considered the beginning of an African American literary tradition in the US (Davis 1985; Gates 1987; Andrews 1988; Taylor 1999; Levine 2007). The best-known Latin American slave narrative is Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía del esclavo poeta [Autobiography of a Slave (1996)]. Manzano was born in 1797 as the son of Cuban slaves. During childhood and youth, he worked in the house of his owner, the very rich Beatriz de Justiz, Marquesa de Santa Ana, where he learned reading and writing. He began to compose poems still being a slave. His writing skills were one reason why Cuban abolitionist del Monte organized a collection and freed him in 1835. Shortly after Manzano finished his autobiography which was first published in English in 1840, changed in many aspects by its editor, the Irish abolitionist Richard Madden. The Spanish original text was published only in 1937. At that moment, however, part of Manzano’s manuscript was lost. Manzano describes different aspects and moments of his life as a slave highlighting the fact that the slave’s fate depends on the master’s will. According to Manzano, the slave is a “dead soul” (qtd. in Schulman 1996, 5). However, Manzano’s text is very critical towards other slaves who are not as educated as he is. He describes himself as a man who should not be a slave because of his education, his skills, and his culture. Some authors see Manzano’s biography as the starting point of Latin American testimonial writing (Schulmann 1996). However, Manzano’s text is more individualistic than twentieth century testimony. In contrast to later testimonies, Manzano himself composed the text and he does not see himself as a representative of all slaves. On the contrary, he underlines his individual sufferings and the differences to other slaves. Therefore, his text is much closer to nineteenth century romantic autobiography than to twentieth century testimonial writing (cf. Jiménez 1995).

1170 

 6 The Americas

The “única autobiografia de um africano escravizado em terras brasileiras” [‘only autobiography of an enslaved African in Brazilian territory’] (Vieira 2014, n. pag.) is that from Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua. Baquaqua, enslaved in Africa and brought to Brazil, was freed in New York in 1847. His life story was published in 1854 in Detroit (Law and Lovejoy 2001). It describes African society, the life as a slave, and his conversion to Christianity. The narrative ends with the freedom of the protagonist. All these elements are characteristic for US-American slave narratives. Therefore, Baquaqua’s text can be labelled a slave narrative, but it is not a Brazilian slave narrative as Baquaqua lived only a few years in Brazil and was much more African and US-American than Brazilian. Furthermore, his text was written in English for a US-American and British audience and, therefore, most of the text is about Africa and the US. Other slave narratives were published in the twentieth century. The Biografía de un cimarrón (1966) [Autobiography of a runaway slave] by Miguel Barnet, for example, is widely known and there are other texts based on interviews with ex-slaves or their relatives in the twentieth century (for interviews see Filho 1988). However, these texts were composed in a completely different literary and historical context. They were not part of nineteenth-century slave narratives but of the twentieth century struggle with the legacy of slavery and racism. Although Manzano’s autobiography is the only Latin American ‘slave narrative’ fitting into the US-American genre, thousands of Latin American slaves and ex-slaves left testimonies about their life, slavery and the society they lived in. These testimonies can be found in different documents like last wills, “court depositions, spiritual conversion narratives, letters, interviews, brief narrative and ethnographic portraits, representations of conversations, etc.” (Aljoe 2014, 362). These testimonies are important as today most historians agree on that the history of slavery in Latin America should be written including the views and opinions of the slaves. However, only few historians work with nineteenth century slave testimonies. In Caetana says No (2002) Sandra Lauderdale Graham describes the fight and legal actions of a Brazilian slave woman against an unwanted marriage. Today, the documents of the lengthy process serve as a tool to better understand her perspective on her own person and slavery. Graham concludes that Caetana did not fight against the institution of slavery but “against male authority” (2002, 4). In Conceiving Freedom (2013) Camila Cowling tells the story of two women who tried to free their children from slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil and Cuba. Cowling shows how these women used the rhetoric of abolitionism to fight for their rights and those of their children. These women were able to create an autobiographical narrative using concepts of womanhood of the time. Similar to British or US-American abolitionism, they presented the separation of mothers from their children as a crime against nature. Although testimonies of enslaved women and men are fundamental to understand slavery in Latin America, research about their autobiographical narrative is still in its beginnings (e.  g. Chalhoub 1990; Krueger 1990; García Rodríguez 2011). Today, more research exists about European travellers’ views of Latin America in the nine-

6.1 Latin America 

 1171

teenth century than of the views of enslaved Africans and African Americans in Latin American. There is not a single collection of slave testimonies of any Latin American country. The same applies to autobiographical narratives of subaltern people, especially Amerindians. In the last decades, research has stressed the importance of indigenous and subaltern people for nineteenth century Latin American history. Many scholars have studied court processes or other documents to research the role Amerindians played in the history of their countries (Salvatore et al. 2001). However, very few studies deal with Amerindian autobiographical narrative. The best-known text is from Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru, a relative of the leader of the great Andean rebellion, José Gabriel Condorcanqui (Velázquez Castro 2015). This text was written in the 1820s and describes Juan Bautista’s long captivity after the repression of the rebellion. It is both a critique of Spanish rule and an Augustinian story of finding the way to true faith. Research on this document is the exception confirming the rule. Until today, there is no systematic research about indigenous and subaltern testimonies and collections of subaltern autobiographical narratives are still lacking.

The Twentieth and the Twenty-First Centuries In 1900, Latin America had recovered from the early modern demographic catastrophe counting about 60 million inhabitants. Population rose to 167 million in 1950 and 520 million in 2000. In the twentieth century, no other region in the world grew as fast as Latin America. Population growth led to urbanization. Thus, by 2000 more than half of all Latin Americans lived in cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants (Brea 2003, 7, 27). Demographic growth and urbanization reflected processes of industrialization that from a slow start at the end of the nineteenth century gained in strength in the first decades of the twentieth century and led to radical changes from the mid twentieth century onwards. This was the time when an important urban middle class emerged. This middle class introduced new housing and consumption patterns and led to an unknown expansion of public and private education. In the second half of the century, expansion of school education led to rising literacy rates and, finally, at the end of the twentieth century, literacy rates for people over fifteen years were between 90 and 98 percent in most Latin American countries (World Bank n. d.). Thus, during the twentieth century reading and writing became a common practice to millions of Latin Americans. This refers both to private writing and publishing. Although research on private writing in twentieth century Latin America is still at an early stage, obviously, millions of Latin Americans included writing in their daily life. At the same time, publishing changed dramatically. With the rise of a print industry, an increasing number of people earned their living by composing texts. Most of them were journalists whereas hardly any novelist or poet could live from the books he or she published. This changed with the so called ‘boom’, the international success of a

1172 

 6 The Americas

small number of Latin American novelists in Europe, the US, and Latin America. In the 1960s, Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru, Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia, Carlos Fuentes from Mexico, and Julio Cortázar from Argentina were the first Latin American writers to sell large numbers of copies in dozens of countries. Until the 1950s, Latin American literature had been a national business without a European or US-American audience. Generally, even the best-known authors did not sell many copies outside their country. The boom made Latin America part of the world literature (Williams 2003). From the 1980s onwards, authors like Paulo Coelho had even more success by publishing novels in a less sophisticated style (Coelho 1988 [1994]). The radical changes in Latin American societies and cultures led to an unprecedented rise of autobiographical writing. More than 95 percent of the entries in the above-mentioned bibliography of autobiographical texts from Mexico were published during the twentieth century (Woods 2005). However, it is not only a question of numbers. In the twentieth century, autobiographical narratives became more important in many different genres. All kinds of texts either included autobiographical elements or mingled with autobiography, creating new literary forms. Therefore, the radical expansion of autobiography in twentieth-century Latin America expresses both radical expansion of literary production and a new role of autobiographical narratives. Consequently, in twentieth century Latin America tens of thousands of published texts are autobiographical in one way or another, sometimes including only a few autobiographical pages. Until today, research concentrates on book long autobiographies from renowned public men and women, on autobiographical novels (and autofiction) and on ‘testimonio’. Nearly no research exists about unpublished autobiographical writing in twentieth century Latin America, for example, letter writing of common people, last wills, court testimonies, curriculum vitae writing, or autobiographical writing in the new media. In contrast, there are some studies about printed autobiographical texts of people unknown to an international audience. These studies give first insights into autobiographical writing beyond famous texts. The following pages give an overview of published autobiographical narratives. They do not include unpublished texts or texts not written to be published (for example letters). They focus both on texts of famous people, like novelists, intellectuals, politicians, and on texts for a small readership. As interpretations of texts vary from reader to reader, in the following, texts are examined which allow the readership to enter an autobiographical pact according to Lejeune. Obviously, many books are ambiguous regarding the pact between writer and reader. Additionally, crucial elements of the pact (name of the author, title, and blurb) can change in the course of time. This concept of autobiographical narrative differs from that of Sylvia Molloy who is interested in autobiography when it is not “a medium to achieve an objective but the objective itself” (1991, 461). According to Molloy, writers of autobiography must be aware “of the bind of translating self into rhetorical construct” (1996, 10; see also Alegría 1991; Franco 2017). However, the main focus of this chapter is on the diversity

6.1 Latin America 

 1173

of autobiographical narratives rather than on the different ways refined writers composed autobiographical texts. In the following, three criteria will be used to order autobiographical narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first criteria are literary genres (‘autobiographic novel’, ‘autofiction’, ‘autobiographies’, ‘diaries’, ‘theatre’, ‘poetry’). Second, autobiographical narratives will be categorized according to the authors’ position in society (‘novelists’, ‘artists’, ‘athletes’, ‘professionals’, ‘experts’, ‘intellectuals’, ‘presidents’, ‘politicians’). The reason for this division is that people write within a specific societal sphere and a specific setting of references. A novelist writes from another sphere addressing a different readership than a politician or an unknown lawyer. Third, different societal conflicts will be defined as specific spheres of autobiographical writing (‘cultural anthropology’, ‘testimonio’, ‘oral history’, ‘guerrilla warfare’, ‘revolution’, ‘dictatorship’, ‘exile’, ‘migration’). These conflicts produced specific booms of autobiographical writing with specific narrative ways. Additionally, the position of women in Latin American autobiographical writing will be discussed and it will be asked whether there is a distinguishable homosexual autobiographical narrative. At the end, there will be a reflection on autobiographical writing in today’s Latin America, taking the new media as an example.

Autobiographical Novel and Autofiction Regarding readership, ‘autobiographical novel’ and ‘autofiction’ are the most important autobiographical genres in twentieth century Latin America. There have been many attempts to distinguish autobiographical novels from autofiction, autobiography, the novel, and fictitious autobiographies. To draw a line between autobiographical novel on the one hand and the novel and fictional text in the first person on the other, Lejeune’s idea of autobiography as a pact between author and reader, where author, hero, and narrator are identical (Lejeune 1996) is useful. It is more complicated to distinguish autobiographical novels and autofiction. In both pacts constituting that hero and/or narrator are totally or partially identical with the author can be found. However, the starting point of autofiction seems to be the idea that non-textual reality does not exist for human intellect (Alberca 2007; Toro et al. 2010; Casas 2014). Therefore, also the author is a textual construct. According to this criterion, many autobiographical novels are autofictions or contain autofictious elements. Consequently, autofiction and autobiographical novel will be discussed simultaneously. Texts with no autobiographical pact whatsoever, that is the novel and fictional texts in the first person, will not be considered. Throughout the twentieth century, Latin Americans wrote very different autobiographical novels and autofictitious texts. At the beginning of the century, Rubén Darío composed El oro de Mallorca, an autobiographical novel published between December 1913 and March 1914 in the Argentine daily La Nación. The novel is very short counting

1174 

 6 The Americas

less than 100 pages. It is about a musician called Benjamín Itaspes who describes his feelings during a stay in Mallorca. Apparently, for Darío, the novel was a way to present his thoughts and inner conflicts at the end of his life. It is not clear whether the novel is unfinished as it ends with the words “Fin de la primera parte” [‘End of the first part’]. Darío died two years after having published the text. However, Arellano says “no fue una novela inconclusa” [‘the novel is not incomplete’] (2013, 145). When Darío published the novel, the revolution in Mexico had already started. The Mexican revolution as “the defining moment in Mexican history” (Joseph and Buchenau 2013, 1) can be seen as a watershed between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Latin America. ‘Modernismo’ came to an end. Even its most prolific writer, Rubén Darío, had published a non-modernist autobiographical novel and the revolution was the starting point of hundreds of novels, autobiographies, and memoirs, classified today as “The Novel of the Mexican Revolution” (Rutherford 1996). Rutherford distinguishes two phases in the Mexican Revolution novel. The most important novel of the first phase is Los de abajo (1916) [The Underdogs (1963)] from Mariano Azuela. This is a “fictitious reworking” (Rutherford 1996, 218) of his time as surgeon in the army of Pancho Villa. The second phase started with the end of the revolution in the late 1920s. Several texts narrate the author’s recollections of the revolution with different degrees of fictionalization. Famous books are, inter alia, El águila y la serpiente (1928) [The Eagle and the Serpent (1930)] from Martín Luis Guzmán, Mi caballo, mi perro y mi rifle (1936) from José Rubén Romero and one of the very few texts written by a woman, Cartucho (1931) [Cartucho (1988)] from Nellie Campobello. The Mexican Revolution novel had always been near to ‘costumbrismo’, a kind of idealistic description of local customs and life. At the end, the novel mingled with the new ‘indigenismo’, that is the description of Native Americans’ life in Mexico. According to Efraín Kristal, at least in Peru, ‘indigenismo’ was a way urban dwellers described the countryside (Kristal 1987). Therefore, it is difficult to imagine an autobiographical indigenous novel. However, there is one exception: Los Ríos Profundos (1958) [Deep Rivers (1978)] from José María Arguedas. Arguedas grew up in the Peruvian Andes learning Spanish and Native American’s Quechua from early childhood on. Los Ríos Profundos is the first-person narrative of a fourteen-year-old boy in an Andean provincial town, Abancay. He lives in a boarding school run by priests and describes the conflicts between adolescents and adults, between local subaltern people and authorities as well as between Spanish and Quechua culture. Arguedas introduces a number of Quechua words. Additionally, the reader is frequently informed that direct speech was pronounced in Quechua although it is written in Spanish. The novel relates in a fictitious way parts of Arguedas’ childhood. It shows both Arguedas’ view of Peru as a culturally and socially divided country and his self-perception as somebody having grown up in between these two cultures (Hart 2007, 167–168). With the boom of Latin American literature in the 1960s, Latin American autobiographical narratives won a worldwide readership. From the boom novels, the book closest to the author’s biography is La ciudad y los perros (1963) [The Time of the

6.1 Latin America 

 1175

Hero (1966)], written by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. It is about the life in the Leoncio Prado military academy in Lima where young Vargas Llosa spent two years. In his autobiography, Vargas Llosa explains to have written La ciudad y los perros based on his memories of his time in the academy. However, according to Vargas Llosa, most of the characters have little in common with real persons (Vargas Llosa 2010, 122). In a similar way, the autobiography Vivir para contarla (2002) [Living to Tell the Tale (2003)] from boom author and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez gives many hints to autobiographic places in his famous novel Cien años de soledad (1967) [One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)]. However, Cien años de soledad is not autobiographical although persons, places, and daily life García Márquez knew reappear in the novel. Likewise, Julio Cortázar’s famous novel Rayuela (1963) [Hopscotch (1966)] brings together many aspects of Cortázar’s life without being autobiographical in a stricter sense. Less known but more autobiographical are the novels that formed a literary movement called ‘la onda’. This name refers to several short novels depicting life of young middle class writers from Mexico at the end of the 1960s. This movement was part of an urban counter-culture related to pop and literary protest against authoritarian government in Mexico (Gunia 1994). According to Manuel Alberca, “estrategias autoficcionales” [‘autofictional strategies’] exist in Latin American literature since Rúben Darío and Jorge Luis Borges (2007, 143). He believes Mario Vargas Llosa’s La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977) [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982)] to be “un ejemplo perfecto de la autobioficción” [‘a perfect example of autobiofiction’] (2007, 195). In a similar way, Julia Erika Negrete Sandoval speaks of the “ficcionalización del autor” [‘fictionalization of the author’] that rejects the autobiographical links present in Vargas Llosa’s text (2015, 239). While both Alberca and Negrete see La tía Julia y el escribidor as an example of autofiction, they do not agree on Arguedas novel El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971) [The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below (2000)] Alberca believes this book to be “un caso de singular autoficción” [‘a case of singular autofiction’] because Arguedas is “ficcionalizando y anticipando su propia muerte” [‘fictionalizing and anticipating his own death’] in the diary extracts that appear between the chapters of the novel (Alberca 2005–2006, 121). Negrete argues that “la verdadera intromisión del autor se da al margen de la historia principal” [‘the true intromission of the author is at the margin of the main history’] (Negrete Sandoval 2015, 239). She sees the book as two texts put together: a novel and a diary. In her reading, the diary is not autofictional but expresses the idea of a distinguishable “realidad exterior” [‘exterior reality’] (2015, 239).

Autobiographies of Novelists To distinguish autobiographies and autobiographical novels is as difficult as to distinguish autobiographical novels and autofiction. The novelists’ job is to break with literary genres and traditions. However, some books are closer to Lejeune’s autobio-

1176 

 6 The Americas

graphical pact than others. Two years before his autobiographic novel, Rúben Darío wrote his autobiography entitled La vida de Rúben Darío. Escrita por él mismo (1915). In difference to the autobiographic novel, the autobiography relates Daríos life from his childhood until the writing time when Darío, 44 years old, lived traveling between Europe and Latin America. Although the title alludes to an idea of life as constructed by writing, most of the autobiography narrates episodes of Daríos life in a conventional way. With the expansion of literary production, novelists wrote more autobiographies during the twentieth century. After the 1960s boom, autobiographies of novelists became an important sub-genre. In his analysis of Ciro Alegría’s memorias, Alonso Rabí do Carmo argues that at the end of the century for some people autobiography was an essential element in the opus of any novelist. To die without leaving an autobiography meant a gap in the novelist’s works (Alegría 1976; Rabí do Carmo 2015; see also Cornejo 1963). Confieso que he vivido (1974) [Memoirs (1978)] from Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda was one of the first autobiographies written by a Latin American author sold in great numbers in the Americas and Europe. The book was published a year after Neruda’s death, just a few days after the military coup against socialist president Salvador Allende. Neruda was a staunch supporter of socialism, thus his autobiography includes political events until the last days of his life. Therefore, the diary was both the life of a famous poet and the life of a prominent Chilean supporter of Allende until the coup d’état of Augusto Pinochet. Mario Vargas Llosa, another Nobel laureate, structured his autobiography quite differently. In 1993, he published El pez en el agua [A Fish in the Water (1994)] covering his childhood, youth, and young adult life and his political engagement fifty years later when he ran for president in Peru in 1990. The subtitle Memorias of the first edition was later dropped. The book starts with recollections between 1946 and 1947, quoting the undated conversations between him and his mother. Hence, from the beginning on, the reader knows that Vargas Llosa’s narrative is the author’s creation of the past (Franco 2012). Gabriel García Márquez expressed the same concept in the title of the first and only volume of his autobiography: Vivir para contarla. Like Vargas Llosa’s autobiography, García Márquez starts with a story of him and his mother. Direct speech is much more common in his autobiography than in that of the Peruvian Nobel laureate. In many aspects, the style of García Márquez’ autobiography is similar to some of his novels. Therefore, the novelistic character of García Márquez’ autobiography stands out right from the beginning. Additionally, García Márquez describes different ways of remembrance throughout the book, transforming the act of remembering into an important topic of his autobiography (Casado Jensen n. d.). Alfredo Bryce Echenique entitled his two-volume autobiography Antimemorias (1993 and 2005), emphasizing that the past is not remembered but constructed. Although the second volume starts with the phrase “Increíble.” [‘Unbelievable.’] (Bryce Echenique 2005, 15) it is very likely that many people read these autobiographies as true accounts of life.

6.1 Latin America 

 1177

At the end of the twentieth century, bestseller authors Paulo Coelho and Isabel Allende published autobiographical texts between the novel and proper autobiography. In As Valkírias (1992) [The Valkyries (1992)], Coelho describes a forty days’ journey through a desert and his inner feelings and conflicts at the time. In a similar way, the 2010 published O Aleph [Aleph (2011)] describes another journey of Coelho (this time in Russia) wanting to resolve inner conflicts. In 1994, Isabel Allende published Paula named after her daughter. In this book, Allende narrates episodes of her life to her daughter who is dying in a hospital. All three books have in common that they show an author going through difficult times. Here, autobiographical writing becomes a therapeutic tool and readers may suppose they understand the most intimate feelings of the novelists.

Diaries of Novelists and Poets “El estudio del diario siempre ha ocupado un lugar menor en el campo crítico de la literatura de habla hispana” [‘Research on diaries always had a minor place in literary studies of texts written in Spanish’] (Gallego Cuiñas et al. 2016, 9). Only recently scholars began to research on diaries of Latin American novelists and poets from the twentieth century on a wider scale (Giordano 2011). According to Lejeune’s and Bogaert’s narrow definition, a diary should be a text written day by day without later revisions (2006, 23–24). Presumably, however, none of the known diaries from Latin American poets and novelists fulfill this criterion. All of them form an elaborated part of the author’s oeuvre in different ways. Martín Adán’s Diario de poeta (1975) is a collection of poems about the author without date and references to the daily routine. On the other side, all entries of Federico Gamboa’s seven-volume diary are dated and offer prosaic information aiming to leave, as he explains in the first volume, an account of his life to his son (Gamboa 1995–1996; Viveros Anaya 2015). Several Latin American writers kept a diary during a couple of years but only a few kept a diary for decades. From 1992 to 1995, Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s diary was published covering the period from 1950 to 1978. Ribeyro worked on these diaries from 1950 until his death in 1994. In his diaries, he describes his daily life, his writing, and his reflections on literature and writing. During his life, he read hundreds of diaries of novelists and even wrote a small text on diary writing in the 1950s (Ribeyro 2003). One of his novels and some of his short stories are autobiographical (Ribeyro 1960 and 2003, 603). Therefore, his diary is only a part of his lifelong autobiographical writing and should be read, in his words, “como literatura” [‘as literature’] (2003, 210). At the end of his life, Ribeyro left a diary with all characteristics a literary diary, according to his own definition, must have (Esparza 2006; Gallego Cuiñas et al. 2016). Like Ribeyro, Adolfo Bioy Casares kept a diary during his adult life, published partially in two volumes after his death by Daniel Martino. Borges assembles Bioy Casares’ entries on Borges concentrating on the years between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, when contact between both authors

1178 

 6 The Americas

was most intensive (Bioy Casares 2006). The second volume, Descanso de caminantes, is about the years between 1975 and 1989. Assembling ideas of stories and plots, commenting texts, noting new and old aphorism, the text combines the diary form with that of a notebook (Bioy Casares 2001).

Theatre In Latin America, autobiographical theatre gains in importance since the 1980s. Beatriz Trastoy distinguishes three ways of autobiographical theatre in Argentina (Trastoy n. d.). First, there are one-person plays based on an autobiographical account of somebody. These plays fictionalize the narrative in different degrees. Trastoy observes that often they are about marginalized people. This may be the reason why – in comparison to other autobiographical accounts – most stories are about women. Second, Trastoy mentions “autoperfomances” (English in the Spanish original, Trastoy n. d., n. pag.) where actors talk about themselves and perform a play at the same time. A third way of autobiographical theatre is exclusively about the life of the actor on stage. Trastoy mentions a play of Marzenka Nowak from 1999 which includes a childhood photo of the actor on both the scenery and the playbill, emphasizing the autobiographical truth of the play. Rodrigo Benza Guerra describes a similar boom of autobiographical theatre in today’s Peru (Benza Guerra 2013). He wrote an autobiographical play about female household workers based on interviews. In a play of Mariana de Althaus three actresses speak about their way of being mothers. In a play directed by Sebastián Rubio and Claudia Tangoa four Peruvians narrate their experiences during Peru’s civil war (1980–1992). All plays discuss current social or political problems and contribute to an ongoing public debate about the role of household workers, motherhood, and the legacy of the civil war. Autobiographical theatre is still an exception, and thus lacks extensive research (Fuente Ballesteros and Amezúa 2002; Ceballos 2013).

Poetry Throughout the twentieth century, Latin Americans composed autobiographical poetry. At the beginning of the century, Rubén Darío composed a number of poems María A. Salgado called “autorretratos” [‘self-potraits’] (Salgado 1989, 346). They narrate episodes of the life of Darío, deal with the author’s feelings, and his ideas about himself (Autorretrato a su hermana Lola [1904], Yo soy aquel que ayer no más decía [1904], Epístola [1906] [Self-portrait for his sister Lola, I am the one who only yesterday said, Epistle]). The famous Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade noted that his “poesia é autobiográfica” [‘poetry is autobiographical’] (qtd. in Avelar Cardoso Pires et al. n. d., 2). This refers to a great number of poems throughout Andrade’s life. They are about his experiences, places he lived, or events he observed (Avelar Cardoso

6.1 Latin America 

 1179

Pires et al. n. d.). At the end of the century, Argentine poet Juan Gelman composed various poems that seem to be “el apunte de un diario personal” [‘notes for a personal diary’] (Monteleone 2009, 235). During military dictatorship, armed forces kidnapped and killed Gelman’s two children and his daughter-in-law. Twenty years later, he found his granddaughter born in a concentration camp and adopted anonymously. Autobiographical elements of his poems intend to express his feelings describing the never-ending horror and grief.

Women’s Autobiographical Narratives In the twentieth century, Latin American women published more texts than ever before. This refers to absolute numbers and to their percentage relative to texts published by male writers. The twentieth century was “el siglo de las mujeres” [‘women’s century’] (Portugal and Torres 1999) which does not mean gendered discrimination and exploitation stopped. However, women began to fight for their rights in unknown ways. One of these ways was to take the opportunity to write and publish, thus also composing autobiographical texts. Some women became famous thanks to their autobiographical narratives. Rigoberta Menchú, for example, was awarded the Nobel peace prize, having published an autobiographical account of her life and her sufferings during the Guatemalan civil war in the 1970s and 1980s (Menchú 1983). Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo is best known for her ten volume Testimonios (1935–1977) [Testimonies] and her six volume Autobiografía (1979–1984) [Autobiography] describing Argentine and worldwide intellectual life during the twentieth century. Reading autobiographical texts of women raises the question whether female autobiography is a genre separate from autobiographical narratives of men. Sylvia Molloy is “dissatisfied with the usual mode of classifying women’s text in Spanish America – grouping them into ahistorical categories” such as female literature or female poetry (1991, 10–11; cf. Strejilevich 2016). She prefers to analyze texts of women and men together as will be the case in the following. However, it is important not to forget fundamental differences between female and male autobiographical writing in the twentieth century. Due to autocratic structures of, for example, universities and publishing houses, only few women could publish autobiographic narratives until the second half of the twentieth century. Even today, more men publish books or articles than women. A published autobiographical text of a woman always has been more than an autobiographical text, a manifesto or a manifestation of the women’s right to be part of the public sphere. As long as gender discrimination exists, women’s writing can be a tool of emancipation because it is one way they stop “de ser invisibles” [‘to be invisible’] (Gutiérrez Alvarez 2007, 457). One of the most important projects promoting women’s autobiographical writing as a means of liberation is Mexican DEMAC (Documentation and Studies of the Woman, Civil Association). DEMAC publishes regularly autobiographical narratives of women, most

1180 

 6 The Americas

of them from Mexico. It organizes workshops on autobiographical writing and awards a prize of female autobiography every year: until today, DEMAC has published more than 160 books and more than 180 autobiographical accounts are online on DEMAC’s webpage, probably being the largest collection of autobiographical narratives of Latin American women. Nevertheless, it is only a very small part of autobiographical narratives written by Latin American women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Homosexuals’ Autobiographical Narratives Until today, discrimination of not heterosexually oriented persons is common in Latin America. Thus, gays’ and lesbians’ autobiographical writing protests implicitly or explicitly against discrimination by describing a way of life disdained by many or most Latin Americans: “For lesbians and gay men, telling their own stories is often a means of survival” (Ellis 2002, 2). Until the second half of the twentieth century, homosexual women and men were confronted with various obstacles to publish autobiographical texts explicitly referring to their homosexuality. In the 1940s, Mexican poet Salvador Novo was one of the first to write his autobiography. However, the complete book was published only in 1998 (Novo 1998). The last decades of the twentieth-century gay and lesbian literature intensified including autobiographical writing (Ingenschay 2006). A prominent example is Antes que anochezca (1992) [Before Night Falls (1994)], the autobiography of Cuban novelist and dissident Reinaldo Arenas, published posthumously. In Mexico, Elena Poniatowska, one of the most influential intellectuals of the country wrote an interview based autobiography of Juan Soriano, an international renowned Mexican artist (Poniatowska 1998). Autobiographical texts of lesbians include the “novela muy autobiográfica” [‘very autobiographical novel’] Amora from Rosamaría Roffiel (Roffiel 1989, 7) and No busco novio (2009) [I don’t search a boy-friend] from Esther Vargas. Homosexual autobiographical literature differs from heterosexual writing in so far as it describes a way of life widely rejected in Latin American societies. However, gay and lesbian autobiographical writing developed within broader literary currents in Latin America, especially after the so called ‘boom’ in the last decades of the twentieth century. Although recently scholars have begun to research history and culture of Latin American people with bisexual, transand crossgender orientation, there is little research on their autobiographical writing (Sifuentes-Jáuregui 2002; Lewis 2010; Corrales and Pecheny 2010).

Artists and Athletes Many stars and starlets have published autobiographical texts since the mid-twentieth century. However, there is hardly any research about autobiographical writing of celebrities. In Latin America, a public celebrity culture started to appear in the second

6.1 Latin America 

 1181

quarter of the twentieth century when cinema became popular. Television, popular music (both Latin and North American), sports, and  – since a few decades  – the internet also has been crucial for making and unmaking stars and starlets. While for novelists or professional writers, autobiographical texts were an expression of their expertise in writing, autobiographies of celebrities do not aim at showing proficiency in writing but public prominence. An exception is Mexican painter Frida Kahlo who left a personal diary full of paintings and short texts (English and Spanish editions: Kahlo 1995). Latin American movie stars, musicians, and athletes use to describe themselves in accordance to their public image. They tell a life “fuera de lo común” [‘out of the ordinary’] and their stories emphasize this distinction repeatedly (Félix 1993, 17). Generally, their books include some pages and photos of their childhood and youth to underline the difference between their public life and their private past. However, most of celebrities’ books focus on their movies, music, and championships. They are a written repetition of a story already known to the public. Nevertheless, celebrities underline the truth of their autobiographical texts or, in the words of Salsa-singer Celia Cruz, “my own opinions, memories, points of view, feelings” (2004, 11). In this way, they claim to offer a personal or intimate account of their life; this includes heartbreaking stories one might expect in gossip magazines. Most autobiographies of celebrities are part of their public relations work. They offer a product their fans are likely to buy and believe. Generally, this includes photos or even  – in the case of the autobiography of Paquito D’Rivera  – a compact disc ­(D’Rivera 1999). Most of the books resemble anecdote collections, making it possible to start reading at any point without getting lost. Usually, there is no book-long story or any storyline. While some autobiographers affirm their authorship, in many books co-writers’ or ghost-writers’ names appear at the cover or in the preface. It is unclear how many copies Latin American celebrities’ autobiographies sell. Autobiographical texts seem to be more important for promotion than for earning money by selling. An extreme case is the Peruvian rock singer Pedro Suárez-Vértiz. Due to an illness, he had stopped singing and relaunched his career with an autobiographical book two years after he had disappeared from the public scene (Suárez-Vértiz 2013).

Professionals and Experts A great number of autobiographical books published since the mid-twentieth century concentrate on the professional lives of their authors. Already in the titles the specific profession is mentioned, be that a lawyer, physician, school teacher, diplomat, pilot, engineer, banker, or policemen. Analyzing the “apuntes autobiográficos” [‘autobiographical notes’] of Peruvian engineer Alberto Jochamowitz, Kathya Araujo concluded that they express “las fronteras puestas a un modelo de individuo autosostenido” [‘the limits of a model of a self-sustained individual’]. The subject of Jochamowitz’

1182 

 6 The Americas

autobiographical book justifies himself by his “sometimiento” [‘submission’] under the “comunidad” [‘community’] (Jochamowitz 1931; Araujo 2015, 183; see also Araujo 2009). Similar to Jochamowitz, many professional autobiographies underline the utility of the author’s professional life. Mexican physician Enrique Brizuela describes not only the way he cured people, he also emphasizes that the main objective of his job was not to gain money but to help human beings. He concludes his book with saying “No cultivé vicios, pero gocé de la vida” [‘I had no vices. However, I enjoyed my life’] (2010, 240). According to his memoir, helping other people is the greatest joy one can have in life. While physicians naturally describe how they help the sick and injured, lawyers underline their defense of innocent people and the principle of justice, bankers point out their accomplishments for the country’s economy, and policemen highlight their commitment for maintaining public order. However, most of these autobiographical narratives are not only about service for the community but also about public recognition. Authors mention honors and awards they received and relate in detail the way people thanked them privately and in public. When books include photos, most of them are about family life and award ceremonies. Some professional memoirs differ from this model. Autobiographical books of former ambassadors, for example, give much attention to the countries they lived in and to the political conflicts and developments they followed as eyewitnesses. Their books do not stress the utility of their life but the knowledge they have about foreign countries and political history. Therefore, the raison d’être of their autobiographical writing is to inform their national audience about something new. Obviously, a self-description of such a kind implicitly emphasizes the services the writer has rendered for his home country. Not all memoirs focusing on professional life and expertise are about the writer’s public utility. There are some memoirs of amateur pilots that focus on fun and adventures of the authors. Other books try to explain the pecularities of the author’s profession. Famous Brazilian conductor Isaac Karabtchevsky describes what it meant to become a musician and to conduct renowned symphony orchestras. He highlights daily work and routine instead of utility (Karabtchevsky 2003). In the same book series, movie director Cacá Diegues highlights his own work and his life together with movie stars and starlets. His books mixes elements of a professional guide and a celebrity’s memoirs (Diegues 2004). The autobiographical books that focus on professional life and expertise offer different understandings of the writer’s position in society. While some memoirs describe the author as a subject submitted to the common good in Araujo’s sense, in others the writer’s agency expresses a self-sufficient will, commitment, and character.

6.1 Latin America 

 1183

Intellectuals Autobiographical writing of celebrities, lawyers, physicians, and other professionals works with a prior understanding of the position the author has in society. The autobiographical texts inform in some way or another about this position. Latin American intellectuals’ autobiographical writing operates in a different way because, in the famous expression of Jean-Paul Sartre, the intellectual is imagined as “quelqu’un qui se mêle de ce qui ne le regarde pas” [“someone who meddles in what is not his business”] (1972, 12 [1976, 230]). Although most Latin American intellectuals have practiced in some moment of their life a profession and received a salary from their employer, to be a Latin American intellectual means not to have a fixed position in society because this is the sine qua non for being able to criticize as an outsider (Gonzales Alvarado 2002; Altamirano 2008–2010). Therefore, on the one hand, in Latin American intellectual autobiographical writing a self-sustained subject is more common than in professional memoirs because the independence of the writer secures the impartiality of his observations. On the other hand, the intellectual autobiographical writing inscribes the author in the home country in a similar way many nineteenth-century memoirs and autobiographies did (Kolar 2016), because in independent Latin America, to be part of the nation is crucial for having the right to make statements about politics, society, and culture (cf. Hunsaker 1999). Therefore, intellectual autobiographical writing in Latin America has described the author as a part of the nation without assigning her or him a fixed position. Except for Federico Gamboa’s seven volume diary, the most extensive autobiographical texts known from twentieth-century Latin America are memoirs from intellectuals that comment cultural and political life of their countries by narrating their biographies. In the 1930s, José Vasconcelos published a four-volume memoir focusing on the political turmoil in Mexico in the first decades of the twentieth century. He completed his work in 1957 with a fifth volume about his life and Mexican history from the 1940s onwards (Vasconcelos 1935–1939, 1957; Ramos 1967; Camargo 2008a, 2008b). Peruvian Luis Alberto Sánchez published a six-volume memoir between 1969 and 1988 describing both his decade-long research about Peruvian literature and his militancy in APRA, a political party that came to power in 1985 (Sánchez 1969–1988). Similar in length is Alfonso Reyes’ diary published posthumously (Reyes 2010–2015). Although this diary was written to be published, Reyes could launch only a single volume during his lifetime (Reyes 1969). Besides these multi-volume autobiographical texts, there are many less extensive memoirs of outstanding Latin American intellectuals. These texts are not only a description of a personal life and a comment of the history of his or her home country. They have also been crucial for forming the idea of intellectuals and their role in contemporary Latin America (see also Victoria Ocampo, mentioned above).

1184 

 6 The Americas

Presidents and Politicians In the second half of the twentieth century, an increasing number of Latin American ex-presidents published memoirs, especially in Mexico. Since José López Portillo (1976–1982), most Mexican former presidents have given a book-long account of their time as state-leaders. Usually, the authors aim at justifying their policies during their presidential term. At the end of his monumental two-volume memoir, José López Portillo concludes “[...] he explicado y justificado las decisiones fundamentales de mi régimen” [‘(…) I have explained and justified the fundamental decisions taken during my presidency ‘] (1988, Vol. II, 1278). Similar expressions can be found in most memoirs of former presidents. Thus, these memoirs concentrate on the presidential policies of the author. According to Roderic A. Camp, “Mexican autobiographies [of ex-presidents; U.M.] do not reveal as much as most of those written by European and US-American politicians” (1989, 15). Although they include chapters about childhood, school, and university education, they relate little about private adult life. Mexican former presidents’ memoirs mostly end with the presidential term. Even those written decades later avoid discussing the subjects of life and politics after their presidency. Most presidential memoirs were written by ghostwriters or with professional support. Few presidents had required writing skills and the time to compose their own text. One exception was Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas. During his lifetime, he kept a political diary published posthumously in four volumes (Cárdenas 1972–1974). There exists a great number of memoirs of Latin American members of parliament, party leaders, ministers, and office holders. Many of these memoirs are similar to those of presidents. They try to justify the political life of the author and defend a specific view of the past. Therefore, they usually do not include much information about the private life. In some cases, they present the view of the past that a specific political movement or a party tries to impose. However, unlike presidential memoirs some politicians’ memoirs denounce state policies or corruption of their former political allies. The authors of these memoirs dissociate themselves from an official view of the state, taking an outsider perspective similar to that of subaltern autobiographical writing.

Cultural Anthropology, Testimonio, and Oral History Following Franz Boas’ ideas about cultural relativism, autobiographical narratives became important to cultural anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century as people explained the way they understood their life and culture. At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, US-American anthropologist Oscar Lewis published five books on Mexico’s poor people putting autobiographical narratives in the centre of his analysis (Lewis 1951, 1959, 1961, 1964, 1969). These autobiographical narratives were crucial to Lewis’ concept of “culture of poverty” (1961, xxiv) as most Mex-

6.1 Latin America 

 1185

icans he interviewed, in his point of view, were “badly damaged human beings” (1961, xxx). “Alcoholism”, “violence”, “resignation”, and “fatalism” were defining aspects of their life (1961, xxvi). Therefore, industrialization of poor countries had to go hand in hand with “basic changes in the attitudes and value systems of the poor” (1961, xxx). In a similar way, Brazilian slum dweller Carolina Maria de Jesus describes her life in Quarto de despejo [Child of the Dark], published in 1960. Violence and alcoholism are crucial for understanding people’s behaviour in her neighbourhood. Although this text was published as a diary, apparently, journalist Audálio Dantas had played a crucial role by selecting, arranging, and publishing it (Levine 1994; Levine and Sebe Bom Meihy 1995). With publishing these stories, Lewis and Jesus called attention to the urban poor in Latin America. Their very critical view of the poor was challenged by ‘testimonio’-literature that started with Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón in 1966 [Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1968)]. Based on interviews with Estebán Montejo, Barnet tells the story of a Cuban runaway slave at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In contrast to Lewis and Jesus, ‘testimonio’-literature depicts poor people in a positive way. Although exploitation and sufferings are described at length, they do not damage people’s personality. On the contrary, in ‘testimonio’-literature the heroes from the lower classes are exemplary men and women fighting for a better world. Latin American ‘testimonio’ is similar to Lewis’s texts in so far as it is written by a professional writer based on interviews with poor people. However, ‘testimonio’ does not try to reproduce interviews following academic standards. It aims at propagating political views of the left by publishing a good-to-read autobiographical story (Beverley 1996). Miguel Barnet labelled the term “testimonio-novel” defining ‘testimonio’ as a genre between the novel and academic research literature (Barnet 1979). Following Oscar Lewis’ lead, more cultural anthropologists began to publish autobiographical narratives. In the 1970s and 1980s most of them described the poor different from Lewis. Usually, the poor did not appear to be ‘badly damaged human beings’ but ordinary people unfortunately living in precarious conditions. Academic autobiography did not silence oppression and exploitation. On the contrary, many researchers were primarily interested in these topics (e.  g. Sindicato de Trabajadores del Hogar 1982; Gutiérrez 1983; Ballón 2014). Peruvian anthropologists José Matos Mar, for example, published an autobiographical narrative of farm worker Erasmo Muñoz in 1974 and an autobiographical description of two generations of rural immigrants from a small island in the Titicaca lake living in poor neighbourhoods of Lima in 1986 (Matos Mar and Carbajal 1974; Matos Mar 1986). These people were as poor and marginalized as the ones interviewed by Lewis twenty years before. However, Matos Mar concluded that the urban poor of Lima were to build a new Peru where different cultural heritages would be respected (Matos Mar 1984). While Lewis had seen the poor as an obstacle to his idea of progress, Matos Mar described them as agents of a better future. Many anthropologists never entered in such kind of speculations. Today,

1186 

 6 The Americas

most anthropologists who publish autobiographical narratives try to describe poor people without judging them, avoiding, for example, descriptions of violence in a way that could be interpreted as a proof of mental deformation (Zevallos Aguilar 2004). Besides cultural anthropology, oral history is the most important academic field which publishes autobiographical narratives or research based on such narratives. From the 1970s onwards, oral history archives were established in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and other Latin American countries, many of them including autobiographical interviews (Pozzi 2012). In many Latin American countries researchers founded associations of oral history and held congresses on oral history. Since 2010, the Latin American Red of Oral History (Red Latinoamericana de Historia Oral) offers information about Latin American oral history online. In Mexico, Latin American oral history started with interviews about the Mexican revolution. Autobiographical narratives about uprisings, riots, and rebellions are still an important topic of oral history. Usually, oral history is more interested in political autobiography than cultural anthropology. Therefore, Latin American oral history collected testimonies of political leaders of working class organizations and political victims of dictatorship. Similar to cultural anthropology of the 1970s and 1980s, most Latin American oral historians identify with left-wing political projects, understanding academic research as part of the political conflict (Pasquali 2008; Necoechea Gracia and Torres Montenegro 2011; Benmayor et al. 2016).

Guerrilla Warfare and Revolution During the twentieth century, in almost all Latin American countries political conflict eventually turned into guerrilla warfare. For many people, the Cuban revolution of 1959 proved that guerrilla warfare was the way to build socialist societies. Thus, in the 1960s and 1970s guerrilla warfare was a widespread phenomenon in Latin America. After the Cuban revolution, however, only in Nicaragua the guerrilla took power. From the very beginning, the Cuban socialist government supported armed uprisings in other Latin American countries and propagated guerrilla warfare as a form to overthrow existing political orders. Che Guevara’s autobiographical writings were crucial for the myth of guerrilla warfare in Latin America because they seemed to show his guerrilla theory to be true. There exist four autobiographical books of Che Guevara. Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria (1963) [Episodes of the Revolutionary War (1968)] is the most important one for the revolutionary myth describing Cuban guerrilla warfare in the second half of the 1950s. It was published three years after Che Guevara had introduced a new theory about socialist revolutions challenging all left-wing authorities from Marx to Mao (Guevara 1960). The so called ‘focus theory’ concentrated on a nucleus of convinced and selfless guerrilla fighters. According to Guevara, such a group would be able to start a revolution in any poor Latin American, African, and Asian countries. The auto-

6.1 Latin America 

 1187

biographical Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria aimed at demonstrating the empirical truth of Guevara’s theory. Therefore, all the stories told are closely linked to his theory. The few ‘guerrilleros’ are the driving force of the fight against Batista’s dictatorship. They are model-like heroes who learn to survive and to wage war through fighting the corrupt and brutal Cuban army. However, the Cuban armed forces are not the most dangerous enemy of revolution but demoralization and betrayal within the guerrilla. Time and again, Guevara narrates the way traitors put into danger the revolution and the way they are punished with death by the revolutionary forces. In essence, Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria is a moralizing story where the good guys start to win the war (the book does not describe the end of the war) because they behave according to ethic principles. Soon after Guevara’s death in 1967, his Bolivian diary was published (Guevara 1968). Although it informed the reader about the failures of Guevara’s adventure in the Andes, it increased Guevara’s fame as a selfless Jesus-like hero describing in detail the daily life of the ‘guerrilleros’ by highlighting their sufferings and endeavours. In the 1990s, two more autobiographical narratives of Che Guevara were published. Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo (1999) [Congo Diary. Episodes of the Revolutionary War (2012)] complements his autobiographical book on the Cuban revolutions. Guevara describes the way African ‘guerrilleros’ led to a “desmoralización general” [‘general demoralization’] (1999, 33) of guerrilla warfare in the Congo that ended with Guevara and the Cuban ‘guerrilleros’ leaving the Congo after having fought for seven months in 1965. Notas de viaje (1992) [The Motorcycle Diaries (1995)] narrates the journey of twenty-three-year-old Guevara with a friend through South America in 1952. Published shortly after the end of the Soviet Union, it offered a less sanguinary image of the famous revolutionary. Guevara describes himself as a young man who wants to get to know Latin American realities and is shocked by poverty and exploitation he observed during his voyage. The book as well as the movie based on it, helped to maintain the myth of Che Guevara after the end of the communist utopia (Drinot 2010). Many Latin American ex-‘guerrilleros’ published guerrilla warfare memoirs (for women, see Byron 2007). Similar to Che Guevara, Nicaraguan Omar Cabezas described a war that concluded with the victory of the revolution in 1979 (Cabezas 1982 [1985]). Cabezas’ book is a coming of age story where guerrilla warfare transforms an adolescent into a responsible and patriotic adult. As no other guerrilla led to a successful revolution, most autobiographic books of former ‘guerrilleros’ deal with failures and disasters. Brazilian Fernando Gabeira wrote a bestselling book explaining autobiographically why young leftist were fascinated by political violence (Gabeira 1979). After 1989, more memoirs of guerrilla warfare concentrated on exploring the fascination of violence within certain sectors of the Latin American left.

1188 

 6 The Americas

Dictatorship and Human Rights Violation Although most Latin American countries had introduced constitutional governments in the first half of the nineteenth century, dictatorship and authoritarian regimes prevailed until the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1960s and the 1970s, the armed forces took power in many countries in order to prevent and abolish social reforms and liberal democracies. In most Latin American countries, the transition to democracy included a public debate about violation of human rights during military and authoritarian rule. Personal testimonies were crucial for delegitimizing military and authoritarian rule and defending democracy and human rights. Thus, from the 1970s onwards an array of testimonies was published showing in detail violations of human rights perpetrated by Latin American state officials (Jelin 2002; Crenzel 2010; Denegri and Hibbett 2016). In many testimonies, human rights violations start with illegal detention or in some cases with kidnapping. Nearly all describe brutal treatment including torture and inhuman prison conditions. In some cases, conditions changed after a while and prisoners came free. This happened more often at the end of military rule than at the beginning. Many testimonies include descriptions of torturers’ behaviour and of individual emotions, including pain, fear, and desperation. Most testimonies are memoirs composed after liberation. However, there exist a few collections of letters written in prison. Uruguayan Raúl Sendic, for example, was allowed to write to his family after more than ten years in prison. As he could not mention political issues or comment on his own situation, the seemingly non-political contents of his letters written to his children constitute one of the most impressing testimonies of Latin American political prisoners (Sendic 1984). Latin American prison memoirs have much in common with twentieth-century prison memoirs from Europe and other parts of the world. Primo Levi, Ellie Wiesel, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were well known in Latin America and their most important books had been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. However, only few Latin American prison memoirs refer explicitly to European or Asian testimonies. Argentine Jew Jacobo Timerman describes his years in prison as something similar to what happened to Jews under Soviet and National-Socialist rule in twentieth century Europe (Timerman 1982). His parents fled from Ukraine to Argentina in 1928 due to anti-Semitic pogroms. In the 1940s, Timerman lost many relatives in the Shoah. In his prison memoirs, he underlines that the treatment of Jews had the same basis in Argentine as in totalitarian Europe: “A los judíos, [los policías y militares; U.M.] querían borrarlos” [‘(Policemen and members of the armed forces; U.M.) wanted to erase the Jews’] (Timerman, 1982, 66). Starting in the 1980s, democratic governments of many Latin American countries installed commissions to investigate human rights violation during military rule. These commissions interviewed thousands of victims and state officials. Commissions’ reports cite at length victims, thus constituting a unique source of personal

6.1 Latin America 

 1189

memoirs (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas 1984 [National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons], Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación 1991 [National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation], Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura 2005 [National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture]). Testimonies collected by commissions differ from those published in books or other media because commissions could interview people from all social strata. This was especially important to commissions’ work in Guatemala and Peru as in both countries poor peasants had suffered most during years of civil wars when both insurgents and the state violated human rights in order to control the countryside (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico 1999 [Commission for Historical Clarification], Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación 2003 [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]). While there exist a variety of testimonies of victims, torturers and other human rights violators are cautious in publishing their memoirs. In 2003, Miguel Ángel ­Campodónico published the Memoirs of Juan María Bordaberry, former dictator of Uruguay (Campodónico 2003). However, Bordaberry did not authorize the text which is based on Campodónico’s research and his conversations with Bordaberry. Some members of the Peruvian armed forces testified before the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation and recounted their violation and killing of innocent people. Although Peruvian laws did not allow the acts they described at any time, most of them did not show any signs of regret (Denegri 2016).

Exile and Migration Dictatorship and authoritarian regimes led to forced exile of many Latin Americans during the twentieth century. Some of them published memoirs of their life abroad underlying their desire to return home and their democratic convictions. Some exile memoirs describe how exile became permanent migration. Therefore, they resemble migration memoirs written by many Latin Americans who went to the United States, Canada or Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. World War II is a division in Latin American migration history. Until the mid-twentieth century people from Europe migrated to Latin America. One of the last migration groups were Jewish refugees from National Socialist Europe. Various immigrants wrote memoirs of their voyage and their new life in Latin America. They describe the way they maintained their language and their life style as well as changes they went through and their adaption to the life in a Latin American country.

1190 

 6 The Americas

The New Media The digital revolution is changing autobiographical writing in Latin America and the world. The different outcomes of this transformation remain to be seen. It seems that currently a new epoch of autobiographical narratives is beginning. When Europeans introduced the Latin letter to Latin America at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, ‘autobiographical writing’ in today’s meaning came into being in the so called ‘New World’. Despite many important changes during the colonial era, an epochal break only came with independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The liberal nation-state, freedom of the press, and new ways of imagining personhood caused radical changes in autobiographical writing. A third revolution took place in the first half of the twentieth century, when Latin American countries became urban mass societies with a book and press market for millions of consumers. Although only a minority of the literate adult could publish some kind of autobiographical text, many of them read autobiographical texts and most of them composed some kind of autobiographical text at some point in their life, be that in form of a letter, a curriculum vitae, or a diary. The new media are changing people’s ways of reading and writing. Although this might be the case all over the world, the impact in Latin America differs from other parts of the world (Miniwatts Marketing Group 2017): most Latin Americans can read and write, however, most of them do not read books and cannot afford to buy press products regularly. Average Latin American people are not as poor as average people in many Asian and African countries and not as rich as average people in Europe, the US, Australia or Canada. Therefore, the new media offer a special opportunity to Latin Americans as they reduce the price of communication and access to literature (Jörgensen 2011; Schwartz 2016). It is cheaper to consume information online than to buy print (Rojas et al. 2016). Although nobody knows whether text on paper will lose importance due to the digital media, up to the moment the new media increased non-face-to-face communication. This opens new opportunities of self-descriptions. The future will show how these will differ from the autobiographical writing practiced until today.

Works Cited Acosta de Samper, Soledad. Diario íntimo y otros escritos de Soledad Acosta de Samper. Ed. Carolina Alzate. Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá and Instituto Distrital de Cultura y Turismo, 2004. Adán, Martín. Diario de poeta. Lima: Inti-Sol Editores, 1975. Aguirre, Carlos, and Ricardo D. Salvatore. “Introduction. Writing the History of Law, Crime, and Punishment in Latin America.” Crime and Punishment in Latin America. Law and Society Since Late Colonial Times. Ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre and Gilbert M. Joseph. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 2001. 1–32. Alberca, Manuel. “¿Existe la autoficción hispanoamericana?” Cuadernos del CILHA 7–8 (2005– 2006): 115–127.

6.1 Latin America 

 1191

Alberca, Manuel. El pacto ambiguo. De la novela autobiográfica a la autoficción. Madrid: Ed. Biblioteca Nueva, 2007. Alegría, Ciro. Mucha suerte con harto palo. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1976. Alegría, Fernando. “Memoria creadora y autobiografía en Latinoamérica.” La autobiografía en lengua española en el siglo veinte. Lausanne: Sociedad Suiza de Estudios Hispánicos, 1991. 11–25. Aljoe, Nicole N. “Caribbean Slave Narratives.” The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. Ed. John Ernest. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 362–370. Allende, Isabel. Paula. Barcelona: Plaza & Janéz, 1994 [Paula. Trans. Margaret Sayers. New York: HarperCollins, 1994]. Altamirano, Carlos, ed. Historia de los intelectuales en América Latina. 2 vols. Buenos Aires/Madrid: Katz, 2008–2010. Alzate, Carolina. “Introducción.” Diario íntimo y otros escritos de Soledad Acosta de Samper. Ed. Carolina Alzate. Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá and Instituto Distrital de Cultura y Turismo, 2004. xiii–xxxviii. Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story. The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760– 1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Araujo, Kathya. Dignos de su arte. Sujeto y lazo social en el Perú de las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Madrid/Frankfurt a.  M./Santiago de Chile: Iberoamericana/Vervuert/Universidad de Santiago de Chile, 2009. Araujo, Kathya. “Jochamowitz y el sujeto de la modernización.” Autobiografía del Perú republicano. Ensayos sobre historia y la narrativa del yo. Ed. Ulrich Mücke and Marcel Velázquez Castro. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, 2015. 159–188. Arellano, Jorge Eduardo. “Darío: el novelista que intentó ser.” Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 42 (2013): 135–149. Arenas, Reinaldo. Antes que anochezca. Autobiografía. Barcelona: Tusquets Ed., 1992 [Before Night Falls. Trans. Dolores M. Koch. New York: Penguin, 1994]. Arguedas, José María. El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1971 [The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below. Ed. Julio Ortega. Trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000]. Arguedas, José María. Los ríos profundos. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1958 [Deep Rivers. Trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978]. Aristizábal, Catherine. Autodocumentos hispanoamericanos del siglo XIX. Fuentes personales y análisis histórico. Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2012. Avelar Cardoso Pires, Hugo, Anita Helena Vieira de Souza, and Fernanda Samla Souza Costa. “Memória e biografía. Uma análise da vida de Drummond através de sua obra.” http://rabci. org/rabci/sites/default/files/Mem%C3 %B3ria%20e%20Biografia_id.pdf (15 November 2017). Ayllón, Fernando. El tribunal de la inquisición. De la leyenda a la historia. Lima: Congreso del Perú, 1999. Azuela, Mariano. Los de abajo. El Paso: Imprenta de El Paso del Norte, 1916 [The Underdogs. Trans. E. Munguía. New York: New American Library, 1963]. Ballón, Alejandra. Memorias del caso peruano de esterilización forzada. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, 2014. Barnet, Miguel. Biografía de un cimarrón. Havana: Instituto de Etnología y Folklore, 1966 [The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. Trans. Jocasta Innes. London: Bodley Head, 1968]. Barnet, Miguel. “La novela testimonio: socio-literatura.” La canción de Rachel. Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 2nd ed. 1979. Benmayor, Rina, María Eugenia Cardenal de la Nuez, and Pilar Domínguez Prats, eds. Memory, subjectivities, and representation. Approaches to oral history in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

1192 

 6 The Americas

Benza Guerra, Rodrigo. “Una mirada al Perú. Teatro documental contemporáneo.” Anais do Simpósio da International Brecht Society 1 (2013): n. pag. Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center. On Testimonio.” The Real Thing. Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Ed. Georg M. Gugelberger. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996. 23–41. Bioy Casares, Adolfo. Descanso de caminantes. Diarios íntimos. Ed. Daniel Martino. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2001. Bioy Casares, Adolfo. Borges. Ed. Daniel Martino. Barcelona: Ed. Destino, 2006. Brading, David Anthony. The First America. The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bray, Bernard. “Letters.” Enyclopedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. I. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 551–553. Brea, Jorge A. “Population Dynamics in Latin America.” Population Bulletin 58.1 (2003): 1–36. http:// www.prb.org/Source/58.1PopulDynamicsLatinAmer.pdf (15 November 2017). Brendecke, Arndt. The Empirical Empire. Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2016. Brenot, Anne-Marie. “Introduction.” Mémoires d’Amérique latine. Correspondances, journaux intimes et récits de vie (XVII–XXèmes siècles). Ed. Anne-Marie Brenot. Madrid/Frankfurt a.  M.: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009. 11–20. Brizuela Virgen, Enrique. Memorias de un médico. Colima: Universidad de Colima, Sociedad Colimense de Estudios Históricos, 2010. Bryce Echenique, Alfredo. Permiso para vivir. Antimemorias. Barcelona: Anagrama 1993. Bryce Echenique, Alfredo. Permiso para sentir. Antimemorias 2. Lima: Peisa, 2005. Bustamante, Carlos María. Diario histórico de México, 1822–1848. Ed. Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Eugenio Reyes García. Mexico City: CIESAS, El Colegio de México, 2001–2003 (2 CDs). Bustamante, Juan. Apuntes y observaciones civiles, políticas y religiosas con las noticias adquiridas en este segundo viaje a la Europa (1849). Puno: Universidad Nacional del Altiplano, 2015. Byron, Kristine A. Women, Revolution, and Autobiographical Writing in the Twentieth Century. Writing History, Writing the Self. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Cabezas, Omar. La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982 [Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista. Trans. Kathleen Weaver. New York: New American Library, 1985]. Camargo, Walter. “Jose Vasconcelos. El camino para la auto-salvación.” Memoria y autobiografía en Iberoamérica. Ed. Florencia Ferreira de Cassone. Buenos Aires: Dunken, 2008. 299–316 (Camargo 2008a). Camargo, Walter. “Jose Vasconcelos. El significado de sus memorias.” Memoria y autobiografía en Iberoamérica. Ed. Florencia Ferreira de Cassone. Buenos Aires: Dunken, 2008. 317–332 (Camargo 2008b). Camp, Roderic A. Memorias de un político mexicano. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989 [Memoirs of a Mexican Politician. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988]. Campobello, Nellie. Cartucho. Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México. Mexico City: Ediciones integrales, 1931 [Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands. Trans. Doris Meyer and Irene Matthews. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997]. Campodónico, Miguel Ángel. Antes del silencio. Bordaberry. Memorias de un presidente uruguayo. Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2003. Cané, Miguel. Juvenilia. Buenos Aires: Centro Ed. de América Latina, 1980. Cárdenas, Lázaro. Obras. 4 vols. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1972–1974.

6.1 Latin America 

 1193

Casado Jensen, Julio Hans. “Vivir para contarla como trabajo mnemónico individual y colectivo.” Aurora Boreal. http://www.auroraboreal.net/literatura/ensayo/155-hans-julio (11 July 2018). Casas, Ana, ed. El yo fabulado. Nuevas aproximaciones críticas a la autoficción. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2014. Ceballos, Edgar. Diccionario mexicano de teatro. Siglo XX. Mexico City: Escenología Ediciones, 2013. Chalhoub, Sidney. Visões da liberdade. Uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na corte. Sâo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990. Chartier, Roger. “Avant-propos.” La correspondance. Les usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 1991. 7–20. Coelho, Paulo. As valkírias. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1992 [The valkyries. Trans. Alan R. Clarke. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992]. Coelho, Paulo. O Aleph. Rio de Janeiro: Sextante, 2010 [Aleph. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London: HarperCollins, 2011]. Coelho, Paulo. O Alquimista. Lisbon: Bertrand Editora, 1988 [The Alchemist. Trans. Alan R. Clarke. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994]. Columbus, Christopher. Textos y documentos completos. Relaciones de viajes, cartas y memoriales. Ed. Consuelo Varela. Madrid: Alianza, 1982 [Select Letters of Christopher Columbus. With other Original Documents Relating to this Four Voyages to the New World. Ed. and trans. R.H. Major. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010]. Columbus, Christopher. Diario de Colón. Libro de la primera navegación y descubrimiento de Las Indias. Facs. y transcripción del manuscrito original de Bartolomé de Las Casas. Ed. Manuel Lucena Giraldo Madrid: Blázquez, 2005 [Journal of the first voyage. Ed. and trans. B.W. Ife. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990]. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación. Informe final. 10 vols. Lima: Navarrette, 2003. http://cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php (11 July 2018). Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación. Informe Rettig. Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación. 2 vols. Santiago de Chile: La Nación, 1991. http://www.gob.cl/informerettig/ (15 November 2017). Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas. Nunca más. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas. Buenos Aires: Ed. Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1984. http://www.derechoshumanos.net/lesahumanidad/informes/argentina/informe-de-laCONADEP-Nunca-mas-Indice.htm#C1 (15 November 2017). Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. Santiago de Chile: Ministerio del Interior, Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2005. https://www.indh.cl/bb/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/informe.pdf (11 July 2018). Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Guatemala. Memoria del Silencio. Informe de la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. 12 vols. Guatemala: Oficina de Servicios para Proyectos de las Nationes Unidas, 1999. http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/ descargas/guatemala-memoria-silencio/guatemala-memoria-del-silencio.pdf (11 July 2018). Cornejo, Raúl Estuardo. “Simbad el Terrestre o don Enrique López Albújar y sus Memorias.” Enrique López Albújar. Memorias. Lima: P.L. Villanueva, 1963. 215–241. Corrales, Javier, and Mario Pecheny, eds. The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America. A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1963 [Hopscotch. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon, 1966].

1194 

 6 The Americas

Cortés, Hernán. Cartas de relación. Informes al Emperador Carlos V sobre la conquista de México. Ed. Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba. Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2013 [Letters from Mexico. Ed. and trans. Anthony Pagden. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2001]. Cowling, Camillia. Conceiving Freedom. Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Crenzel, Emilio, ed. Los desaparecidos en la Argentina. Memorias, representaciones e ideas (1983–2008). Buenos Aires: Ed. Biblios, 2010. Cruz, Celia. Celia. My Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Cruz, Juana Inés de la. Obras completas. Vol. IV: Comedias, sainetes y prosa. Ed. Alberto G. Salceda. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 3rd ed. 1995. 440–474. Cruz, Juana Inés de la. The Answer. La respuesta. Ed. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: The Feminist Press at the City Universiy of New York, 2nd ed. 2009. Darío, Rubén. La vida de Rubén Darío. Escrita por él mismo. Barcelona: Casa Editorial Mauci, 1915. Darío, Rubén. El oro de Mallorca. Ed. Luis Maristany. Barcelona: J.R.S, 1978. Davis, Charles T. The Slave’s Narrative. A Collection of Essays and Reviews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Denegri, Francesca. “Cariño en tiempos de paz y guerra. Lenguaje amoroso y violencia sexual en el Perú.” Dando cuenta. Estudios sobre el testimonio de la violencia política en el Perú (1980– 2000). Ed. Francesca Denegri and Alexandra Hibbett. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2016. Denegri, Francesca, and Alexandra Hibbett, eds. Dando cuenta. Estudios sobre el testimonio de la violencia política en el Perú (1980–2000). Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2016. Deusen, Nancy E. van, ed. The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Díaz Cid, César. Elogio a la memoria, Dos siglos de literatura autobiográfica en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez, 2009. Diegues, Cacá. O que é ser diretor de cinema. Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo: Editora Record, 2004. Drinot, Paulo, ed. Che’s Travels. The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. D’Rivera, Paquito. Mi vida saxual. San Juan: Editorial Plaza Mayor, 1999. Earle, Rebecca. “Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America.” The Americas 62.1 (2005): 17–46. Ellis, Robert Richmond. They Dream Not of Angels But of Men. Homoerotism, Gender, and Race in Latin American Autobiography. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002. Eltis, David. “The volume and structure of the transatlantic slave trade. A reassessment.” The William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 17–46. Enciso Contreras, José. Procesos criminales ejemplares del Zacatecas colonial. Zacatecas: Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Esado de Zacatecas, 2004. Esparza, Cecilia. El Perú en la memoria. Sujeto y nación en la escritura autobiográfica. Lima: Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú/Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú/ Universidad del Pacífico/Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2006 Espinosa, José María. Memorias de una abanderado. Bogotá: Biblioteca Aldeana de Colombia, 1936. Esteban, Ángel, ed. Historia de la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma. Madrid: Cátedra, 2002. Estévez, Francisco. Diario del rancheador. Ed. Cirilo Villaverde. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982. Félix, María. Todas mis guerras. Mexico City: Editorial Clío, 1993. Ferreira de Cassone, Florencia. “Introducción.” Memoria y autobiografía en Iberoamérica. Ed. Florencia Ferreira de Cassone. Buenos Aires: Dunken, 2008. 9–16.

6.1 Latin America 

 1195

Filho, Mário José Maestri. Depoimentos de Escravos Brasileiros. São Paulo: Icone, 1988. Flores, Enrique, and Mariana Masera, eds. Relatos populares de la inquisición novohispana. Rito, magia y otras “supersticiones“, siglos XVII–XVIII. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones científicas, 2010. Folger, Robert. Writing as Poaching. Interpellation and Self-Fashioning in Colonial relaciones de méritos y servicios. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011. Franco, Sergio R. In(ter)venciones del yo. Escritura y sujeto autobiográfico en la literatura hispanoamericana (1974–2002). Madrid/Frankfurt a.  M.: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012. Franco, Sergio R. Autobiographical Writing in Latin America. Folds of the Self. Amherst: Cambria Press, 2017. French, William E. The Heart in the Glass Jar. Love Letters, Bodies, and the Law in Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Fuente Ballesteros, Ricardo de la, and Julia Amezúa, eds. Diccionario del teatro iberoamericano. Salamanca: Almar, 2002. Furtado, Júnia Ferreira. Travessias inquisitoriais das Minas Gerais aos cárceres do Santo Ofício. Diálogos e trânsitos religiosos no império luso-brasileiro (sécs. XVI–XVIII). Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço, 2013. Gabeira, Fernando. O que é isso, companheiro. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Codecri, 1979. Galán, Ana Silvia. La correspondencia epistolar entre familiares y amigos en la Argentina del siglo XIX. Las paradojas de la privacidad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Victoria Ocampo, 2004. Gallego Cuiñas, Ana, Christian Estrade, and Fatiha Idmhand, eds. Diarios latinoamericanos del siglo XX. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2016. Gamboa, Federico. Mi diario. 7 vols. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995–1996. García, Gustavo V. La literatura testimonial latinoamericana. (Re)presentación y (auto)construcción del sujeto subalterno. Madrid: Ed. Pliegos, 2003. García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1967 [One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row, 1970]. García Márquez, Gabriel. Vivir para contarla. Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 2002 [Living to Tell the Tale. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: A. Knopf, 2003]. García Rodríguez, Gloria. Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca. Comentarios Reales. Mexico City: Porrúa, 5th ed. 2006 [Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Ed. Karen Spalding. Trans. Harold V. Livermore. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006]. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Signet Classic, 1987. Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience. Victoria to Freud. Vol. IV: The Naked Heart. New York/London: Norton, 1995. Giordano, Alberto. La contraseña de los solitarios. Diarios de escritores. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2011. Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis. Autobiografía y Cartas. Ed. Lorenzo Cruz-Fuentes. Huelva: Diputación Provincial de Huelva, 1996. Góngora, Mario. Encomenderos y estancieros. Estudios acerca de la constitución social aristocrática de Chile después de la Conquista. 1580–1660. Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Chile, 1970. Gonsalves de Mello, José Antônio, ed. Confissões de Pernambuco, 1594–1595. Primeira visitação do Santo Ofício às partes do Brasil. Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 1970. Gonzales Alvarado, Osmar. Pensar América Latina. Hacia una sociología de los intelectuales latinoamericanos, siglo XX. Lima: Ediciones Mundo Nuevo, 2002.

1196 

 6 The Americas

Graham, Sandra L. Caetana Says No. Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. Nueva crónica y buen gobierno. 3 vols. Ed. John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno and Jorg L. Urioste. Mexico City/Madrid: Siglo XXI /Historia 16, 1987 [The First New Chronicle and Good Government. On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615. Ed. and trans. Roland Hamilton. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2009]. Guevara, Ernesto Che. La guerra de guerrillas. La Habana: Impr. del I.N.R.A., 1960 [Guerrilla Warfare. Trans. J.P. Morray. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961]. Guevara, Ernesto Che. Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria. La Habana: Ed. Unión, 1963 [Episodes of the Revolutionary War. Ed. Mary-Alice Waters. La Habana: Guairas, 1967/Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. Trans. Victoria Ortiz. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968]. Guevara, Ernesto Che. El diario del Che en Bolivia. La Habana: Instituto del Libro, 1968 [Bolivian Diary. Trans. Carlos P. Hansen and Andrew Sinclair. London: Cape-Lorrimer, 1968]. Guevara, Ernesto Che. Notas de viaje. La Habana: Casa Editora Abril, 1992 [The Motorcycle Diaries. Notes on a Latin American Journey. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1995]. Guevara, Ernesto Che. Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria. Congo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1999 [Congo Diary. Episodes of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. Trans. Patrick Camiller. New York: Ocean Press, 2012]. Guibovich Pérez, Pedro M. Censura, libros e inquisición en el Perú colonial, 1570–1754. Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2003. Gunia, Inke. ¿”Cuál es la onda”? La literatura de la contracultura juvenil en el México de los años sesenta y setenta. Frankfurt a.  M.: Vervuert, 1994. Günther, Dagmar. “‘And now for something completely different.’ Prolegomena zur Autobiographie als Quelle der Geschichtswissenschaft.” Historische Zeitschrift 272 (2001): 25–61. Gutiérrez, Ana. Se necesita muchacha. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983. Gutiérrez Álvarez, Martha. “A la mitad de la vida...” 22 Estampas de mujeres mexicanas. Vol. I. Ed. Documentación y Estudios de Mujeres, A.C. Mexico City: Documentación y Estudios de Mujeres, A.C., 2007. 455–531. Guzmán, Martín Luis. El águila y la serpiente. Madrid: Compañía Ibero-Americana de Publicaciones, 1928 [The Eagle and the Serpent. Trans. Harriet de Onis. New York: Knopf, 1930]. Halperín Donghi, Tulio. El espejo de la historia. Problemas argentinos y perspectivas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1987. Hampe Martínez, Teodoro. Santo Oficio e historia colonial. Aproximaciones al Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima (1570–1820). Lima: Congreso del Perú, 1998. Hanke, Lewis, ed. Los virreyes españoles en America durante el gobierno de la Casa de Austria. México. 5 vols. Madrid: Atlas, 1976–1978. Hart, Stephen M. A Companion to Latin American Literature. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007. Hintze, Gloria. “Memoria y testimonio en dos textos de Clorinda Matto de Turner.” Memoria y autobiografía en Iberoamérica. Ed. Florencia Ferreira de Cassone. Buenos Aires: Dunken, 2008. 189–211. Howe, Elizabeth Teresa. Autobiographical Writing by Early Modern Hispanic Women. Farnham/ Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. Hunsaker, Steven V. Autobiography and National Identity in the Americas. Charlottesville/London: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Ibsen, Kristine. Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Ife, B.W. “‘Si no está mentirosa la letra’. Revisiting the Text of the 1492 Voyage.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 12.2/3 (2006): 107–122.

6.1 Latin America 

 1197

Ingenschay, Dieter, ed. Desde aceras opuestas. Literatura/cultura gay y lesbiana en Latinoamérica. Madrid/Frankfurt a.  M.: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2006. Jelin, Elizabeth. Los trabajos de la memoria, Madrid: Siglo XXI de España, 2002 [State Repression and the Struggles for Memory. Trans. Marcial Godoy-Anativia and Judy Rein. London: Latin America Bureau, 2003]. Jesus, Carolina Maria de. Quarto de despejo. Diário de uma favelada. São Paulo: Livraria F. Alves, 1960 [Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Trans. David St. Clair. New York: New American Library, 2003]. Jiménez, Luis A. El arte autobiográfico en Cuba en el siglo XIX. New Brunswick: Ometeca Institute, 1995. Jochamowitz, Alberto. Mi vida profesional. Apuntes autobiográficos. 1900–1930. Lima: Torres Aguirre, 1931. Jörgensen, Beth E. Documents in Crisis. Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico. New York: SUNY Press, 2011. Joseph, Gilbert M., and Jürgen Buchenau. Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution. Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule Since the Late Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Kahlo, Frida. El diario de Frida Kahlo. Un íntimo autorretrato. Madrid: Debate, 1995 [The Diary of Frida Kahlo. An Intimate Self-Portrait. Trans. Barbara Crow De Toledo and Ricardo Pohlenz. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995]. Karabtchevsky, Isaac. O que é ser maestro. Memórias profissionais. En depoimento a Fátima Valença. Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo: Editora Record, 2003. Kellogg, Susan, and Matthew Restall, eds. Dead Giveaway. Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Meso­ america and the Andes. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1998. Kolar, Fabio. “Memorias en acción. ‚Un niño en la Revolución Mexicana’ de Andrés Iduarte Foucher.” Historia Mexicana 66.1 (2016): 299–357. Kordić Riquelme, Raïssa. “Introducción.” Epistolario de Sor Dolores Peña y Lillo (Chile, 1763–1769). Ed. Raïssa Kordić Riquelme. Pamplona/Madrid/Frankfurt a.  M.: Universidad de Navarra/Ibero­ americana/Vervuert, 2008. 13–112. Kordić Riquelme, Raïssa, and Cedomil Goić, eds. Testamentos coloniales chilenos. Madrid: Ibero­ americana, 2005. Kristal, Efraín. The Andes Viewed from the City. Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru, 1848–1930. New York/Bern/Frankfurt a.  M./Paris: Lang, 1987. Krueger, Robert. “Milhões de vozes, umas páginas preciosas. As narrativas dos escravos brasileiros.” Imágenes de la resistencia indígena y esclava. Ed. Roger Zapata. Lima: Editorial Wari, 1990. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. Obras completas. Vol. XIV: Diario del primer y tercer viaje de Cristóbal Colón. Madrid: Alianza Ed., 1989 [Journal of the first voyage. Ed. and trans. B.W. Ife. War­ minster: Aris & Phillips, 1990]. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. Ed. José Miguel Martínez Torrejón. Madrid/Barcelona: Real Academia Española/Galaxia Gutenberg, 2013 [A short account of the destruction of the Indies. Ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin, 1992]. Law, Robin, and Paul E. Lovejoy. The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua. His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2001. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996 [On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]. Lejeune, Philippe, and Catherine Bogaert. Le journal intime. Histoire et anthologie. Paris: Textuel, 2006.

1198 

 6 The Americas

León Portilla, Miguel, ed. Visión de los vencidos. Relaciones indígenas de la Conquista. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1971. Levine, Robert M. “The Cautionary Tale of Carolina Maria de Jesus.” Latin American Research Review 29.1 (1994): 55–83. Levine, Robert M., and José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy. The Life and Death of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Levine, Robert S. “The Slave Narrative and the Revolutionary Tradition of American Autobiography.” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative. Ed. Audrey A. Fisch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lewis, Oscar. Life in a Mexican Village. Tepoztlán Restudied. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951. Lewis, Oscar. Five Families. Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books, 1959. Lewis, Oscar. The Children of Sánchez. Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Random House, 1961. Lewis, Oscar. Pedro Martinez. A Mexican Peasant and His Family. New York: Random House, 1964. Lewis, Oscar. A Death in the Sanchez Family. New York: Random House, 1969. Lewis, Vek. Crossing Sex and Gender in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Lombardo de Miramon, Concepción. Memorias de Concepción Lombardo de Miramón. Mexico City: Ed. Porrúa, 1980. López Portillo y Pacheco, José. Mis tiempos. Biografía y testimonio político. 2 vols. Mexico City: Fernández, 1988. Macías, Isabelo, and Francisco Morales Padrón. Cartas desde América, 1700 – 1800. Seville: Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura y Medio Ambiente, 1991. Mannarelli, María Emma. Pecados públicos. La ilegitimidad en Lima, siglo XVII. Lima: Flora Tristán, 2nd ed. 1994 [Private Passions and Public Sins: Men and Women in Seventeenth-century. Trans. Sidney Evans and Meredith D. Dodge. Lima. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007]. Manzano, Juan Francisco. Autobiografía, cartas y versos. Havana: Municipio de La Habana, 1937. Manzano, Juan Francisco. Autobiografía del esclavo poeta y otros escritos. Ed. William Luis. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2007 [The Autobiography of a Slave. Ed. Ivan A. Schulman. Trans. Evelyn Picon Garfield. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996]. Márquez Algara, María G. Administración de justicia colonial en Aguascalientes. Aguascalientes: Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, 2011. Márquez Macías, Rosario. Historias de América. La emigración española en tinta y papel. Huelva: Ertoil Lubricantes, 1994. Martínez Martínez, María del Carmen. Desde la otra orilla. Cartas de Indias en el Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid (siglos XVI–XVIII). León: Universidad de León, 2007. Matos Mar, José, and Jorge A. Carbajal H. Erasmo Muñoz, yanacón del valle de Chancay. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1974. Matos Mar, José. Desborde popular y crisis del Estado. El nuevo rostro del Perú en la década de 1980. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1984. Matos Mar, José. Taquile en Lima. 7 familias cuentan. Lima: Fondo Internacional para la Promoción de la Cultura. UNESCO, Banco Internacional del Perú, 1986. Matto de Turner, Clorinda. Boreales, miniatures y porcelanas. Buenos Aires: Alsina, 1902. Matto de Turner, Clorinda. Viaje de recreo. España, Francia, Inglaterra, Italia, Suiza, Alemania. Ed. Mary G. Berg. Doral: Stockcero, 2010. McKnight, Kathryn Joy, and Leo Garofalo. Afro-Latino Voices. Narratives from the Early Modern IberoAtlantic World, 1550–1812. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009.

6.1 Latin America 

 1199

Menchú, Rigoberta. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. Ed. Elisabeth BurgosDebray. Barcelona: Argos-Vergara, 1983 [I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1984]. Méndez, María Águeda. Secretos del Oficio. Avatares de la inquisición novohispana. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2001. Millones, Luis. Las confesiones de don Juan Vásquez. Con el apéndice documental. Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2002. Miniwatts Marketing Group. Internet World Stats. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm (11 July 2018). Mizraje, María Gabriela. “Corriente alucinada. Historia, hogar y sueño en María Sánchez.” ­Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson. Intimidad y política. Diario, cartas y recuerdos. Ed. María Gabriela Mizraje. Buenos Aires: Hidalgo, 2003. 13–48. Molloy, Sylvia. At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Molloy, Sylvia. “The Autobiographical Narrative.” The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. II: The Twentieth Century. Ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pulpo-Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Monteleone, Jorge. “Gelman: Trazos en lo oscuro. Lírica, negatividad y memoria.” Contratiempos de la memoria en la literatura argentina. Ed. Miguel Dalmaroni, Geraldine Rogers and Gloria Beatriz Chicote. La Plata: Universidad de La Plata, 2009. 213–238. Mott, Luiz. Bahia. Inquisição e sociedade. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2010. Mücke, Ulrich. Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru. The Rise of the Partido Civil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Mücke, Ulrich. “Autobiographisches Schreiben und Kolonialismus in Peru.” Selbstzeugnis und Person. Transkulturelle Perspektiven. Ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser. Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 2012. 201–225. Mücke, Ulrich. “One text. Many narratives. The Comentarios Reales of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.” Image. Object. Performance. Mediality and Communication in Cultural Contact Zones of Colonial Latin America and the Philippines. Ed. Astrid Windus and Eberhard Crailsheim. Münster: Waxmann, 2013. 45–63. Mücke, Ulrich. “Ser patriota en el Perú decimonónico. Las memorias de José Rufino Echenique.” Autobiografía del Perú republicano. Ensayos sobre historia y la narrativa del yo. Ed. Ulrich Mücke and Marcel Velázquez. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, 2015. 67–98. Myers, Kathleen Ann. “Saints or Sinners? Life Wrtings and Colonial Latin American Women.” Literary Cultures of Latin America. A Comparative History. Vol. I. Ed. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 289–302. Myers, Kathleen Ann. Neither Saints nor Sinners. Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Myscofski, Carole A. Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches. Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500–1822. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Necoechea Gracia, Gerardo, and Antonio Torres Montenegro, eds. Caminos de historia y memoria en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi and Red Latinoamericana de Historia Oral, 2011. Negrete Sandoval, Julia Erika. “Tradición autobiográfica y autoficción en la literatura hispanoamericana contemporánea.” De Raíz Diversa 2.3 (2015): 221–242. Neruda, Pablo. Confieso que he vivido. Mexico City: Seix Barral, 1974 [Memoirs. Trans. Hardie St. Martin. New York: Penguin, 1978]. Novinsky, Anita. Cristãos novos na Bahia. A inquisição no Brasil. Saõ Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2nd ed. 1992.

1200 

 6 The Americas

Novinsky, Anita. Inquisição. Prisioneiros do Brasil, séculos XVI–XIX. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Expressão e Cultura, 2002. Novo, Salvador. La estatua de sal. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1998. Ocampo, Victoria. Testimonios. 10 vols. Buenos Aires: Revista de Occidente, Sur, Sudamericana, 1935–1977. Ocampo, Victoria. Autobiografía. 6 vols. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1979–1984. Onís, José de. The United States as Seen by Spanish American Writers (1776–1890). New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States, 1952. Otte, Enrique, ed. Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias, 1540–1616. Seville: Andalucía Consejería de Cultura, 1988. Owensby, Brian P. Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Pagden, Anthony. European Encounters with the New World. From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993. Paiva, Eduardo França. “Frágeis fronteiras. Relatos testamentais de mulheres das Minas Gerais setecentistas.” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 66 (2009): 193–219. Pasquali, Laura. Historia social e historia oral. Experiencias en la historia reciente de Argentina y América Latina. Rosario: Homo Sapiens, 2008. Paz Soldán y Unanue, Pedro. Memorias de un viajero peruano. Apuntes y recuerdos de Europa y Oriente (1859–1863). Ed. Estuardo Núñez. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, 1971. Pérez Villanueva, Joaquín, ed. Historia de la Inquisición en España y América. 3 vols. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1984–2000. Pérez-Villanueva, Sonia. The Life of Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun. An Early Modern Autobiography. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Pizzigoni, Caterina, ed. Testaments of Toluca. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Poniatowska, Elena, and Juan Soriano. Niño de mil años. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1998. Porras Barrenechea, Raúl. Cartas del Peru (1524–1543). Lima: Sociedad de Bibliofilos peruanos, 1959. Porras Barrenechea, Raúl. Los cronistas del Perú (1528–1650) y otros ensayos. Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 1986. Portugal, Ana María, and Carmen Torres, eds. El siglo de las mujeres. Santiago de Chile: Isis Internacional, 1999. Posadas, Gervasio Antonio. Memorias de Gervasio Antonio Posadas. Madrid: Ed. América, 1920. Pozzi, Pablo. “Oral History in Latin America.” Oral History Forum d’Histoire Orale 32 (2012). http://www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/view/442/505 (11 July 2018). Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Prescott, Laurence E. “Journeying through Jim Crow. Spanish American Travelers in the United States during the Age of Segregation.” Latin American Research Review 42.1 (2007): 3–28. Prieto, Adolfo. La literatura autobiográfica argentina. Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Alvarez, 1966. Rabí do Carmo, Alonso. “Anomalías y disidencias genéricas. Sobre algunos rasgos centrales de Mucha suerte con harto palo (1976), las memorias de Ciro Alegría.” Autobiografía del Perú republicano. Ensayos sobre historia y la narrativa del yo. Ed. Ulrich Mücke and Marcel Velázquez Castro. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, 2015. 245–280. Rama, Angel. La ciudad letrada. Hanover: Ed. del Norte, 1984 [The Lettered City. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996]. Rama, Angel. Writing across Cultures. Narrative Transculturation in Latin America. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2012.

6.1 Latin America 

 1201

Ramos, Raymundo. Memorias y autobiografías de escritores mexicanos. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1967. Ramos Soriano, José Abel. Los delincuentes de papel. Inquisición y libros en la Nueva España, 1571–1820. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011. Ranke, Leopold von. Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. XXXIII/XXXIV: Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494–1514. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1885 [History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514. Trans. Philip A. Ashworth. London: George Bell and Sons, 1887]. Rappaport, Joanne. Beyond the Lettered City. Indigenous Literacies in the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Reis, João José. Death is a Festival. Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Restall, Matthew, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano, eds. Mesoamerican Voices. Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Reyes, Alfonso. Diario 1911–1930. Guanajuato: Ed. de la Universidad, 1969. Reyes, Alfonso. Diario. 7 vols. Ed. Alfonso Rangel Guerra, Adolfo Castañón, Lourdes Borbolla and Jorge A.Ruedas de la Serna. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010–2015. Ribeyro, Julio Ramón. Crónica de San Gabriel. Lima: Ed. Tawantinsuyu, 1960 [Chronicle of San Gabriel. Trans. John Penuel. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 2004]. Ribeyro, Julio Ramón. La tentación del fracaso. Diario personal (1950–1978). Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2003. Rodríguez Jiménez, Pablo. Testamentos indígenas de Santafé de Bogotá, siglos XVI–XVII. Bogota: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2002. Roffiel, Rosamaría. Amora. Mexico City: Ed. Planeta Mexicana, 1989. Rojas, Edwin Fernando, Laura Poveda, and Nicolás Grimblatt. Estado de la banda ancha en América Latina y el Caribe 2016. Santiago de Chile: Naciones Unidas, 2016. Rojas Rabiela, Teresa. “Estudio introductorio.” Vidas y bienes olvidados. Testamentos indígenas novohispanos. Vol. I. Ed. Teresa Rojas Rabiela, Elsa L. Rea López and Constantino Medina Lima. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1999. 17–102. Rojas Rabiela, Teresa, Elsa L. Rea López, and Constantino Medina Lima. Vidas y bienes olvidados. Testamentos indígenas novohispanos. 5 vols. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1999–2004. Romero, José Rubén. Mi caballo, mi perro, mi rifle. Barcelona: Nuñez, 1936. Ruiz de Gordejuela Urquijo, Jesús. Vivir y morir en México. Vida cotidiana en el epistolario de los españoles vasconnavarros, 1750–1900. San Sebastián: Editorial Nuevos Aires, 2011. Rutherford, John. “The Novel of the Mexican Revolution.” The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. II: The Twentieth Century. Ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique PupoWalker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 213–225. Salceda, Alberto G. “Introducción.” Juana Inés de la Cruz. Obras completas. Vol. IV: Comedias, sainetes y prosa. Ed. Alberto G. Salceda. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica, 1995. vii–xlviii. Salgado, María A. “Felix Rubén García Sarmiento, Rubén Darío y otros entes de ficción.” Revista Iberoamericana 55.146/147 (1989): 340–362. Salomon, Frank, and Mercedes Niño-Murcia. The Lettered Mountain. A Peruvian Village’s Way With Writing. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2011. Salvatore, Ricardo D., Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds. Crime and Punishment in Latin America. Law and Society Since Late Colonial Times. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2001.

1202 

 6 The Americas

Sánchez, Luis Alberto. Testimonio personal. Memorias de un peruano del siglo XX. 6 vols. Lima: Ediciones Villasán and Mosca Azul Editores, 1969–1988. Sánchez de Thompson, Mariquita. Intimidad y política. Diario, cartas y recuerdos. Ed. María Gabriela Mizraje. Córdoba: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2003. Sánchez Rubio, Rocío, and Isabel Testón Núñez. Lazos de tinta, lazos de sangre. Cartas privadas entre el Nuevo y el Viejo Mundo (siglos XVI–XVIII). Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 2014. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Defensa, recuerdos de provincia, necrolojias i biografias. Buenos Aires: Lajounane, 1885. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels. Paris: Gallimard, 1972 [“A plea for Intellectuals.” Between Existentialism and Marxism. Trans. John Matthews. New York: William Morrow, 1976. 228–285]. Schulman, Ivan A. “Introduction.” Juan Francisco Manzano. The Autobiography of a Slave. Ed. Ivan A. Schulman. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. 5–37. Schwartz, Marcy. “Beyond the Book. New Forms of Women’s Writing.” The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature. Ed. Ileana Rodríguez and Mónica Szurmuk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 527–542. Sendic Antonaccio, Raúl. Cartas desde la prisión. Montevideo: M. Zanocchi, 1984. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Ben. Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American Literature: Genders Share Flesh. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Sindicato de Trabajadores del Hogar, Basta. Testimonios. Cusco: Sindicato de Trabajadores del Hogar, 1982. Siqueira, Sonia, ed. Confissões da Bahia (1618–1620). Segunda visitação do Santo Ofício às partes do Brasil, pelo inquisidor e visitador o licenciado Marcos Teixeira. Livro das confissões e ratificações da Bahia, 1618–1620. João Pessoa: Ideia, 2nd ed. 2011. Stangl, Werner. Zwischen Authentizität und Fiktion. Die private Korrespondenz spanischer ­Emigranten aus Amerika, 1492–1824. Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2012 (Stangl 2012a). Stangl, Werner. Zwischen Authentizität und Fiktion. Die private Korrespondenz spanischer ­Emigranten aus Amerika, 1492–1824. Suplemento electrónico. Edición de las cartas de llamada. Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2012. http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/ download/163079/978-3-412-20887-5_Bonus.pdf (11 July 2018) (Stangl 2012b). Steinitz, Rebecca. Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Streckert, Jens. Die Hauptstadt Lateinamerikas. Eine Geschichte der Lateinamerikaner im Paris der Dritten Republik (1870–1940). Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 2013. Strejilevich, Nora. “Genres of the Real: Testimonio, Autobiography, and the Subjective Turn.” The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature. Ed. Ileana Rodríguez and Mónica Szurmuk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 433–447. Suárez, Ursula. Relación Autobiográfica. Ed. Mario Ferrecio Podestá. Santiago de Chile: Biblioteca Nacional, 1984. Suárez-Vértiz, Pedro. Yo, Pedro. Lima: Planeta, 2013. Taylor, Yuval. I was Born a Slave. An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives. 2 vols. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999. Thompson, Lawrence S. “Hispanic Travellers in the South since the Civil War.” Inter-American Review of Bibliography 25.3 (1975): 256–270. Timerman, Jacobo. Preso sin nombre. Celda sin número. Barcelona/Caracas/Buenos Aires: El Cid Editor, 2nd ed. 1982 [Prisoner without a Name. Cell without a Number. Trans. Toby Talbot. New York: A. Knopf, 1981].

6.1 Latin America 

 1203

Toro, Vera, Sabine Schlickers, and Ana Luengo, eds. La obsesión del yo. La auto®ficción en la ­literatura española y latinoamericana. Madrid/Frankfurt a.  M.: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2010. Traslosheros, Jorge E., and Ana de Zabella Beascoechea, eds. Los indios ante los foros de justicia religiosa en la hispanoamérica virreinal. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2010. Trastoy, Beatriz. “La dramaturgia autobiográfica en el teatro argentino contemporáneo.” Artea. Investigación y creación escénica. http://artesescenicas.uclm.es/archivos_subidos/ textos/144/La_dramaturgia%20autobiografica_en_el_teatro_argentino_contemporaneo.pdf (11 July 2018). Úrsula de Jesús. “Diario Espiritual de la Venerable Úrsula de Jesús, escrita por ella misma, Convento de Santa Clara de Lima, Perú.” Las almas del purgatorio: El diario espiritual y vida anónima de Úrsula de Jesús, una mística negra del siglo XVII. Ed. Nancy E. van Deusen. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2012. 163–302. Usunáriz Garayoa, Jesús M., ed. Una visión de la América del XVIII: Correspondencia de emigrantes guipuzcoanos y navarros. Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992. Valdés, Mario J., and Djelal Kadir, eds. Literary Cultures of Latin America. A Comparative History. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vargas Llosa, Mario. La ciudad y los perros. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1963 [The Time of the Hero. Trans. Lysander Kemp. London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1966]. Vargas Llosa, Mario. La tía Julia y el escribidor. España: Seix Barral, 1977 [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982]. Vargas Llosa, Mario. El pez en el agua. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2010 [A Fish in the Water. A Memoir. Trans. Helen R. Lane. London: Faber & Faber, 1994]. Vargas, Esther. No busco novio. El libro del blog Sex o no sex. El lado les. Lima: Calato Editores, 2009. Vasconcelos, José. Ulisses Criollo. 4 vols. Mexico City: Editorial Jus and Editorial Botas, 1935–1939. Vasconcelos, José. En el ocaso de mi vida. Mexico City: Populibros La Prensa, 1957. Velázquez Castro, Marcel. “El cautiverio de la memoria. Voces y subtextos en un autodocumento (1825) de Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru.” Autobiografía del Perú republicano. Ensayos sobre historia y la narrativa del yo. Ed. Ulrich Mücke and Marcel Velázquez Castro. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, 2015. 45–66. Vergara Quiroz, Sergio. Cartas de mujeres en Chile, 1630–1885. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1987. Vieira, Leonardo. “Historiadores traduzem única autobiografia escrita por ex-escravo que viveu no Brasil.” O Globo (27 January 2014). https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/historia/historiadores-traduzem-unica-autobiografia-escritapor-ex-escravo-que-viveu-no-brasil-14671795 (11 July 2018). Viveros Anaya, Luz América. El surgimiento del espacio autobiográfico en México. Impresiones y recuerdos (1893) de Federico Gamboa. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2015. Williams, Raymond Leslie. The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Witt, Heinrich. The Diary of Heinrich Witt. 10 vols. (print), 12 vols (E-book). Ed. Ulrich Mücke. Boston/ Leiden: Brill, 2015–2016. Woods, Richard D. Autobiographical Writings on Mexico. An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources. Jefferson/London: McFarland, 2005. World Bank. “Literacy rate, adult total (% of people ages 15 and above).” http://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?name_desc=false (11 July 2018).

1204 

 6 The Americas

Wuthenow, Ralph-Rainer. Europäische Tagebücher. Eigenart. Formen. Entwicklung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990. Yupanqui, Titu Cusi. History of How the Spaniards Arrived in Peru. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2006. Zevallos Aguilar, Juan. “From Representation to Self-Representation. Life Stories, Testimonies, and Autoethnographies in Spanish America.” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 20.1 (2004): 18–27.

6.2 North America Alfred Hornung

The history of North American autobiography begins before the emergence of the genre itself. Before Benjamin Franklin’s classic autobiography of the eighteenth century, which constitutes the genre conventions, precursors of autobiographical forms long existed on the American continent. The recognition of these precursors is based on a dual modification in the perception of self-expression in this part of the world. On the one hand, it requires the acceptance of cultural manifestations prior to the European arrival in the ‘New World’, on the other hand, an awareness of new research in autobiography studies. The 500-year anniversary of the discovery and/or conquest of the American continent in 1992 shifted the perspective from a Eurocentric view of culture to the position of Indigenous peoples who had lived on the land for thousands of years. Material artifacts and oral literature provide abundant proof of Native Americans’ and First Nations’ long pre-contact history and cultural legacies. Thus, the Native American writer Gerald Vizenor (born 1934) has famously argued that tribal mythologies predate and antedate postmodern expressions (Narrative Chance [1989]). The contemporary redefinition of the genre of autobiography is connected to Vizenor’s revisionary idea. For a long time, the classical forms of autobiography and biography as full-blown and complete accounts of human lives were considered the only versions of the genre worthy of discussion. The gradual expansion and inclusion of other forms began with James Olney’s landmark collection Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical in 1980. It reflected the increasing turn to expressions of the self by women, ethnic minorities, and postcolonial migrants from the 1980s and 1990s onward, such as the Filipino Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (1946) or the Canadian Metis writer Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973), and the introduction of the umbrella term of ‘life writing’. As such, it covers autobiography, biography, journals, diaries, e-lives, Internet blogs, performances of self, film and video clips, photography, comic visualizations, musical orchestrations, to name only some examples. Especially the use of the new media for the representation of the self has made life writing and the presentation of life stories one of the most popular genres of contemporary cultures in the United States of America. Susan Sontag’s suggestion that a correlation exists between photography and American democracy, also seems to apply to an affinity between autobiography and American democracy (Sontag 1977; Hornung 1990). The same holds true for the situation in Canada. As the classic countries of immigration on the American continent, the United States of America and Canada have seen countless accounts of transcultural lives in the process of migration from all parts of the world to new lives in North America. The following presentation of ‘autobiography’ in North America will begin in the pre-contact period and reflect the new ‘life writing’ concept in the discussion of exemplary autobiographical works.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-109

1206 

 6 The Americas

Pre-Columbian America Some of the earliest forms of cultural expression by Indigenous people in the New World are the pictographs and petroglyphs found in the Barrier Canyon of Utah. The representation of anthropomorphic figures in this rock art dates back to the years between 4000 and 7000 BCE. The rather schematic rendition of life-size figures gives an impression of a community of people bound together by an apparent spiritual life. Prayers, myths, and songs substantiate the idea of early forms of communal self-expression that emerge in contemporary autobiographical manifestations, be they written renditions of oral documents, memories, mythologies (Vizenor 1974), or theatrical performance and re-enactments of tribal stories (Däwes 2007). Very striking examples of tribal lineage carried on into our own time are the so-called ‘totem’ or ‘family poles’. The word ‘totem’ derives most likely from the Ojibwe word for ‘kinship group’, and the construction and preservation of these family representations is still practiced today among the Haida Nation on the isles off the coast of British Columbia and Tlingit in Alaska and the northwest of the United States. The hierarchical arrangement of human and animal figures in conjunction with spiritual figures expresses the idea of an interrelation of all organic life in a cosmic order and thus precedes contemporary correlations of ecology and life writing (Hornung and Zhao 2013).

Colonial North America While oral versions and performances of self-expression continue to be practiced among Indigenous peoples after the arrival of the Europeans, written forms of autobiographical statements accompany the passage of explorers and discoverers. Their Eurocentric self-reflections and accounts of their exploits ignore the Indigenous tribal documents due to the European system of knowledge production based on writing. Next to journals and logbooks kept on board the ship by Christopher Columbus and his consorts, one of the earliest forms of autobiographical expression is the so-called ‘relation’ written by Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English explorers for their monarchies. In these narratives, they describe the arrival on the coastlines of the New World, depict first contacts with Indigenous peoples and give an account of the exotic fauna and flora. The purpose of these relations is the literal appropriation of these new territories and the conquest of the Other in Tvetzan Todorov’s assessment (1982). At the same time, it is meant to give Europeans an idea about the prospects of this newly discovered world and invite them to settle there eventually. One of the most interesting and remarkable examples of this type of autobiographical account is La Relacíon of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542) [The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (2003)]). The Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1490–ca. 1558) participated in an expedition led by Pánfilo de Narvaez commissioned by the Spanish king to

6.2 North America 

 1207

explore the region of Florida. After a first stop in Santo Domingo on the Island of Hispaniola, the fleet circumnavigated the Island of Cuba and arrived in Florida in April 1528. Discouraged by fierce battles with the Natives and inclement weather, the crew members tried to reach the Spanish colony in Mexico. On the way along the North American coastline, they were hit by hurricanes and most of them were lost at sea except for four survivors, including Cabeza de Vaca and the Moroccan Berber Esteban, who were stranded on Galveston Island in November 1528. It is here that Cabeza de Vaca’s eight-year long journey through the Southwest territory and Northern Mexico begins. It ends in Mexico City in July 1536 where he and his companions reunite with their compatriots in New Spain. After his return to Spain, he started writing the narrative of his experiences published in 1542. The ‘relation’ is addressed to Charles V, the “Sacred Caesarian Catholic Majesty” in order to transmit what I saw and heard in the nine years I wandered lost and miserable over many remote lands. I hope in some measure to convey to Your Majesty not merely a report of positions and distances, flora and fauna, but of the customs of the numerous, barbarous people I talked with and dwelt among, as well as any other matters I could hear of or observe (Cabeza de Vaca 2003, 60).

In this narrative, Cabeza de Vaca relates the many hardships and fatal encounters with different Native tribes, including both a form of enslavement as well as mutually enhancing interactions. To a certain extent, this autobiographical narrative represents an ethnographic account of the customs and life of Indigenous peoples, which started out in the period of enlightenment and became popular forms of anthropological research in the twentieth century, such as Claude Levi-Strauss’ encounter with Indigenous peoples in the Brazilian rain forest in Tristes Tropiques (1955). In this sense de Vaca’s relation provides useful information not only about his own life in an existential crisis situation but offers at the same time valuable insights into the lives of different Indigenous peoples across the Southwest of America and Northern Mexico. As such his ‘relation’ constitutes a first example of a relational autobiography that is based on a dialogical principle between a European self and the Indigenous Other. This relational approach also explains Cabeza de Vaca’s critical attitude toward Eurocentric views and European colonialism. His own life as a slave among the so-called ‘savages’ allows him to take the perspective of the Natives when he encounters the brutal practices of his Spanish compatriots in enslaving native people. He openly criticizes the party of Spanish slave hunters under Diego de Alcatraz and calls them “Christian slavers” (Cabeza de Vaca 2003, 69). This critical attitude, which he partially includes in his ‘relation’, eventually leads to his arrest when on a second mission in the Río de la Plata region, where he wanted to apply a modified approach in dealing with Indigenous peoples. He was sent back in chains in 1545 and exiled to modern-day Algeria. Cabeza de Vaca’s insightful relational autobiography did not serve as a model for the ‘relations’ of other European explorers simply because they lacked the experience

1208 

 6 The Americas

of going native. Instead, English and French explorations of the North American continent focus on descriptions of geographical sites and landscapes and provide observations of Native cultures from an outside perspective. Samuel de Champlain’s narratives are based on the journals he kept during his many voyages between 1600 and 1633 in which he relates his experiences as a geographer and objective ethnographer (Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France [1632] [The Voyages of Sieur de Champlain (2003)]). Captain John Smith (1580–1631) could rely in his accounts on earlier English attempts to establish a colonial outpost in Virginia. The self-advertisement of his adventures in the war against Turkey on the Austrian side established his expertise in dealing with foreign affairs and led to his mission to secure the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia, founded in 1603. In his autobiographical narrative, A True Relation of Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia (1608), which derived from a letter sent back to England, Smith represents himself as a heroic figure in various encounters with Powhatan’s tribe in the Chesapeake Bay Area. It culminates in the heart-rending episode in which Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas saves the imprisoned captain from his imminent death by placing herself between the victim and his tribal aggressors. The truth-value of this rendition has been contested, and Smith’s narrative prefigures later forms of ‘autobiographical impostures’ popular in our own time (Egan 2011). Captain John Smith’s further travels to the northern part of the American continent resulted in his A Description of New England (1616), which turned out to be a travel advisor for the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans on their journeys to the New World in 1620 and 1630. For these religiously motivated settlers in search of spiritual freedom, the autobiographical situation poses itself completely differently. On the one hand, they embrace a religious belief system, which determines their lives, on the other hand, they oscillate between the memory of their lives in Old England and the aspirations to and first impressions of life in New England. The transition from the Old World to the New World is accompanied by a crisis situation, which is decisive for a spiritual life and its transformation into an autobiographical text. The experience of conversion is the focal point of both the spiritual and the textual life. In both the Puritan settlers in New England were guided by the example of the Catholic Church Father Saint Augustine of Hippo and his classic model of autobiography. Saint Augustine’s life prefigures the manifest destiny of the Puritans. As a resident of the Barbary shores, Augustine is considered an outsider and ‘barbarian’ of the Roman Empire. He converts to the new Christian religion while teaching in Milan from 386 to 387. The reading of the Bible redirected his life from his sinful past to a Christian existence. In his autobiography Confessiones (397–401), he retraces the stages of his sinful life, locates the moment of conversion, and spends the final chapters on the discussion of time and eternity and an exegesis of the biblical Genesis. The Puritans repeatedly evoke Saint Augustine as an exemplum for both their lives and their autobiographical representations in which conversion becomes the pivotal point. The Puritan minister Thomas Shepard (1605–1649) may serve as an example for this type of spiritual autobiography (The Autobiography of Thomas Shepard [1646]. He grows

6.2 North America 

 1209

up in England and is raised by his relatives after his parents’ deaths. As a student at Cambridge University, he enjoys life and undergoes several phases of conversion following moments of drunken stupor: And I drank so much one day that I was dead drunk, and that upon a Saturday night, and I was carried from the place I had drink at and did feast at unto a scholar’s chamber […] and knew not where I was until I awakened late on that Sabbath and sick with my beastly carriage. And when I awakened I went from him in shame and confusion, and went out into the fields and there spent that Sabbath lying hid in the cornfields where the Lord, who might justly have cut me off in the midst of my sin, did meet me with much sadness of heart and troubled my soul for this and other my sins which then I had cause and leisure to think of (Shepard 1646 qtd. in McGiffert 1972, 41).

Although there are some relapses, he eventually joins the community of Puritan ministers, preaches his first sermons and suffers the persecution of Bishop Laud and the Anglican Church. After the birth of his first son, the first attempt at emigration terminated due to a severe storm in which his son dies. In 1636 the family finally makes the passage with his second son suffering however another loss with his wife’s death upon arrival in Massachusetts Bay colony. The passage from Old England to New England constitutes the actual conversion to a new life in Christ against all personal sufferings. The writing of the autobiography, which is dated to 1 May 1646 after ten years of acculturation to the new land, is motivated by the loss of his second wife in childbed. It is addressed to his second oldest son, Thomas, in an effort to create a continuity of life beyond death: TO MY DEAR SON Thomas Shepard with whom I leave these records of God’s kindness to him, not knowing that I shall live to tell them myself with my own mouth, that so he may learn to know and love the great and most high God, the God of his father (Shepard 1646 qtd. in McGiffert 1972, 33).

At the time Shepard takes up writing his autobiography in 1646, the Puritan project of setting up a community of believers has proved to be successful. The colony has braced itself against all internal and external foes and enjoys a situation of peace. The personal loss of his wife juxtaposes this peaceful environment and reminds him of his own mortality. In the same way in which his wife dies in the firm belief of being united with Christ, he entrusts himself to the same message. The autobiography becomes his textual document, reconciling his private loss with the peace of the new Puritan community and the belief in Christ. Prerequisite for this narrative resolution of personal crises is the conversion successfully accomplished by the passage from the sinful life in the Old World to the spiritual realm in the New World. Hence, he stresses the importance of conversion for his community as minister of the church in Newtowne, today’s Cambridge. All people who want to join the Puritan community have to give an account of their conversion, generating a new type of autobiography, the conversion narrative. It consists of the public confession of one’s sinful life in front of the congregation in church and the public acceptance of faith. Shepard collected these oral presentations

1210 

 6 The Americas

of conversion narratives, which reveal the great variety of different lives of ordinary people, including women’s lives in the patriarchal Puritan community. They also reveal the differences between the community’s official agenda and ordinary people’s deviations from these goals. Critics like Patricia Caldwell have also noted a difference between the conversion narratives as told in Old England and New England. The emphasis on conversion seems to be predominant among the English Puritans, whereas the Americans stress the transplantation into a new world as the actual conversion (Caldwell 1983). It is not surprising that the autobiographical impulse is a strong motive for the first settlers in New England who use their oral and written statements as a means of mediating between the European past and the new beginning in America. Acknowledged and unacknowledged feelings of doubt and insecurity, as evident in journals and private documents, are resolved in the textual rendition of a seemingly stable life. Thus the autobiographical mode provides a structural net for the poetry of Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672) in which she addresses her situation as a woman, mother, and wife transplanted to a new environment. Often the motive for writing emerges from moments of personal discomforts and reconciles her dismal situation with the prospects of life after death and the continuation of life by her offspring. The poem opening the autobiographical essay “To my dear children” (1656) exemplifies this idea. This book by any yet unread, I leave for you when I am dead, That being gone, here you may find What was your living mother’s mind. Make use of what I leave in love And God shall bless you from above. A.B. (Bradstreet 2003, 272).

At the end of this brief text, Bradstreet refers to her physical condition and motive: “This was written in much sickness and weakness” (2003, 275) and reconfirms the Puritan belief that the human self is subsumed in God. The autobiographical texts of Thomas Shepard and Anne Bradstreet exemplify the overcoming of personal predicaments often related to disease and death in writing. At the same time, they project a solution to the Puritan paradox of personal loss and the prospect of salvation. To ward off the specter of death turns out to be the secret motive for autobiographical engagements. This is also evident in the genealogy of the important Puritan ministers and the succession of autobiography and biography. This is best represented in the three generations of the Mather family: Richard (1596– 1669), Increase (1639–1723) and Cotton Mather (1663–1728). Richard Mather’s Journal (1635), which documents the early years of Puritan religious practices in the New World, becomes the basis of son Increase’s biography of the father: The Life and Death of That Reverend Man of God, Mr. Richard Mather (1670) and eventually leads onto Increase Mather’s Autobiography (1715), written from mid-life until the end of his life.

6.2 North America 

 1211

This again is followed by his son’s biography: Cotton Mather’s Parentator: Memoirs of Remarkables in the Life and Death of the Ever-Memorable Dr. Increase Mather (1724). These auto/biographical affinities in Puritan times find their summation in Cotton Mather’s magisterial Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), the biographical history of the Puritan congregation in New England in seven volumes. For this biographical project couched in the style of a Christian epos, the ecclesiastical biographer relied on the extensive entries in the Diary of Cotton Mather (1681–1724). In his effort to situate the New England Church in line with the Biblical tradition he depicts in exemplary biographies the governors, magistrates and saints as types of Old Testament patriarchs to establish a New Jerusalem for the Chosen people of the Puritans. Thus Cotton Mather likens John Winthrop (1588–1649), who led the first party of Puritans in 1630 on their passage to New England and became the first and long-time governor of Massachusetts Bay, to the Biblical Nehemiah, who rebuilt Jerusalem. As “Nehemias Americanus” he realizes for Cotton Mather the idea of erecting a “City upon a Hill”, the New Jerusalem. Accordingly, when the noble design of carrying a colony of chosen people into an American wilderness was by some eminent persons undertaken, this eminent person was, by the consent of all, chosen for the Moses, who must be the leader of so great an undertaking: […] But whilst he thus did, as our New English Nehemiah, the part of a ruler in managing the public affairs of our American Jerusalem […] he made himself still an exacter parallel unto that governor of Israel, by doing the part of a neighbor among the distressed people of the new plantation (Mather 2003, 404, 406).

Next to these hagiographical representations of Puritan saints by Cotton Mather, more mundane and ordinary issues emerge in the diaries of less exposed members of the community. The Puritan clergy man Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705), whose epic poem about the Last Judgment “The Day of Doom” (1662) illustrated the grim side of Puritanism and threatened the eternal damnation of sinners, uses his diary to record his private feelings for the students he taught at Harvard and to admit his anxieties about his salvation. The secret code which he used for the description of his temptations and meditations on faith were only deciphered in Edmund Morgan’s edition of 1965. In general, the entries reveal a person of little self-esteem who refused to accept the presidency of Harvard University. A different kind of attitude toward the official Puritan belief system also appears in The Diary of Samuel Sewall (1674–1729), which he kept from the age of twenty-one until his death in 1730. Most important is his critical attitude toward the Salem Witchcraft Trials in which he served as a judge. Thus he recorded the pain suffered by the victims in torture and during the executions questioning the relevance of this form of capital punishment.

1212 

 6 The Americas

Monday, Sept. 19, 1692. About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press’d to death for standing Mute; much pains was used with him two days, one after another, by the Court and Capt. Gardner of Nantucket who had been of his acquaintance: but all in vain (Sewall 1973, Vol. I, 295).

This libertarian stance also shows in Sewall’s opposition to slavery making him one of the first abolitionists in colonial America. In general, his diaries portray the daily living of a pious Puritan who had many children in three successive marriages. The woman’s perspective of early colonial life in New England emerges in the Journal of Madame Knight. Sarah Kemble Knight (1666–1727), married to a businessman in Boston and trained in legal matters, undertakes a five-month journey from Boston through the state of Connecticut to New York City in 1704–1705 (October to January). In addition to recording place names, dangerous river passages and the hardship of being on horseback she also observes the people’s behavior from a woman’s point of view. This position as a woman also makes her sensitive to forms of discrimination, which she recognizes in the treatment of slaves and Native Americans. The perspective of a woman is also instrumental in the formation of another form of autobiographical texts, the captivity tale. Although narratives about the imprisonment of white people by ethnic tribes have existed in other parts of the world, the captivity of European settlers by Native American tribes on the East Coast has become a special version of American autobiography. The captivity narrative of Mary ­Rowlandson constitutes an innovative combination of gender and genre. Mary ­Rowlandson belongs to the first generation of Puritans. She was born in England between 1635 and 1637 and brought to New England as a child in 1638 where she married Joseph Rowlandson, the settlement’s first minister, and had four children. In the course of the King Philip’s War (1675–1676), the most devastating of the early colonial confrontations with native tribes, the Wampanoags captured her during her husband’s absence on 10 February 1676 with her children. Rowlandson spent a total of eleven weeks in captivity and was ransomed on 2 May 1676. Her daughter Sarah had died of injuries received during the attack, her other children were ransomed soon after her own release. It was the Puritan Minister Increase Mather who encouraged Mary Rowlandson to write down her experiences, hoping that she would consort with the Puritan perception of the Indians as savage heathens and Red Devils. In the “Preface to the Reader” of the first publication of the captivity narrative in 1682, Increase Mather stated the official Puritan version and interpreted the war as God’s punishment for the colony’s declension from religion. Rowlandson’s narrative modifies this binary position in an important way. The full title given to the autobiographical narrative supports the religious interpretation: The sovereignty and goodness of GOD, together with the faithfulness of his promises displayed; being a narrative of the captivity and restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, commended by her, to all that desires to know the Lord’s doings to, and dealings with her. Especially to her dear children and relations. The second Addition Corrected and amended. Written by her own hand for

6.2 North America 

 1213

her private use, and now made public at the earnest desire of some friends, and for the benefit of the afflicted. Deut. 32, 39. “See now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me; I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand” (Rowlandson 1997, 62).

Mary Rowlandson’s text documents in great details her family’s capture by the Indians, the death of her sister and nephew, the death of her youngest daughter and her separation from her other children. Critics see her tale as one of adventure, heroism and piety. In this tale a double perspective unfolds: both a portrayal of Rowlandson’s inner life, her mood and emotion, and a portrayal of the protagonist’s outer experiences. The narrative consists of a series of twenty so-called ‘removes’, named for the Indians’ varying periods of encampment, which can also be likened to the stages of the soul’s spiritual removals. This double perspective is the most striking feature of Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. It shows in her description of the physical deprivation while living among the Wampanoags and caring for her children. It also expresses her inner life, the fear and anxiety about her survival in times of war. Likewise, she modifies the Puritan idea of the wilderness and the savages who inhabit it. In her experience, this space outside of the Puritan colony proves to be a livable world, maybe not as comfortable as the settlers’ homes, but, without the hostilities, a harmonious life in nature would be possible. This also implies a redefinition of the people who live in this natural habitat. While she reconfirms the official Puritan ideology, which sees the Indians as God’s agents to test the Puritans’ strength of belief and to punish them for their sins, she also gets to know them as fellow human beings who feed her and care for her. Thus, she emphasizes throughout the narrative that she was treated fairly and defuses the stereotypical assumptions of Puritan men about her sex: “yet not one offered the least imaginable miscarriage to me” (Rowlandson 1997, 84), “not one offered me the least abuse of unchastity” (1997, 107). They also allow her to keep and read her Bible, in which she finds sustenance and comfort. In more than eighty references to the Bible, she stresses the importance of her religious life, which is guided by God’s plan according to the general belief in the function of providential history. The personal self, who relates the experiences in captivity, is subsumed in God’s will. The double perspective of this example of autobiography is also reflected in a mix of different forms. Thus, this captivity narrative combines elements of the spiritual autobiography with those of the sermon, the jeremiad, and secular adventure story. It is the first full-length work published in America and written by a woman. More than forty editions have appeared making it one of America’s earliest and most consistent best sellers. It is significant that eleven editions appeared in the eighteenth century turning the captivity tale into a very popular genre used for commercial reasons by imitators who meant to contribute to the eventual relocation of Native Americans from the East Coast to the reservations in the West in the passage of President Andrew ­Jackson’s ‘Indian Removal Act’ of 1830. Thus An Affecting Narrative of the Captivity and Suffering of Mrs Mary Smith (1815) relates her captivity together with her husband and three daughters in August 1814, who endured

1214 

 6 The Americas

the most cruel hardships and torture of mind for sixty days (in which she witnessed the tragical death of her husband and helpless children) [and] was fortunately rescued from the merciless hands of the Savages by a detached party from the army of the brave General Jackson (Cover).

Similarly, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824) describes the experience of a woman “who was taken by the Indians, in the year 1755, when only about twelve years of age, and has continued to reside amongst them to the present time” (Cover). And Sarah Ann Horn provides An Authentic and Thrilling Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn and Her Two children with Mrs. Harris, by the Camanche Indians: and the murder of their husbands and traveling companions (1853). Captivity narratives by men, such as A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830), who records his thirty-year residence among the Indians pale when compared with the women’s reports. Contrary to Mary Rowlandson, these autobiographical renditions serve mainly ideological and commercial purposes and indicate the heroic quality of the surviving selves. They lack the religious dimension still dominant in Mary ­Rowlandson’s life writing which today appears as a first voice of dissent from the Puritan theologians and as an early example of a multiply voiced portrayal of life in a small-scale multi-ethnic society. Mary Rowlandson’s involuntary errand into wilderness partially turns out to be a stage of life in ‘wilderness’ experienced as nature that intensifies her belief in God. The importance of nature for the recognition of God surfaces in several Puritan texts. Anne Bradstreet’s long poem “Contemplations” (1678), which accompanies her short spiritual autobiography for her children, includes her sensory perception of nature as a reflection of God but proceeds to the poet’s conversion experience from physical to spiritual knowledge of God in her changing vision of nature. I once that loved the shady woods so well, Now thought the rivers did the trees excel, And if the sun would ever shine, there would I dwell (Bradstreet 2003, 257 [ll. 146–148]).

At the end of the Puritan period in mid-eighteenth century, nature takes on a different connotation. Inspired by John Locke’s empirical philosophy, the Puritan saint Jonathan Edwards celebrates the experience of nature for self-exploration. His “Personal Narrative”, written about 1740, was published posthumously by his friend Samuel Hopkins in The Life and Character of the Late Rev. Jonathan Edwards (1765) as “An account of his conversion experiences, and religious exercises, given by himself” (Edwards 2003, 466). For him, conversion takes place in nature. At the beginning of his narrative he relates his “delight to abound in his religious duties” as a young boy in the solitary experience of nature: “[…] I had particular secret places of my own in the woods, where I used to retire by myself; and used to be from time to time much affected” (Edwards 2003, 466). During his college years at Yale he neglected his prayers and “returned like a dog to his vomit, and went on in ways of sin” (2003, 466). The near-

6.2 North America 

 1215

death experience in the course of a pleurisy brings him back to religion in his walks in nature: […] I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father’s pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looked up on the sky and clouds; there came into my mind, a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express (Edwards 2003, 468).

The youthful impressions of physical nature as a pantheistic manifestation changes into a spiritual conception of grace. Religion and religious ideas are transplanted into nature: Holiness, as I then wrote down some of my contemplations on it, appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature. It seemed to me, it brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravishment to the soul: and that it made the soul like a field or garden of God [...] (Edwards 2003, 470).

This transformation of the solitary walker into aspects of nature is nothing less than the spiritual reunion of a human being with the manifestation of God in nature. Although these wanderings in nature prefigure similar experiences in the Romantic period, they differ decisively from the Romantic conception of the self as a reflection of “the infinite I Am” (Coleridge 1962, Vol. I, 202). For Edwards, the self on earth becomes a part of the divine presence in nature. My heart has been much on the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world. […] And his blood and atonement has appeared sweet, and his righteousness sweet; which is always accompanied with an ardency of spirit, and inward strugglings and breathings and groanings, that cannot be uttered, to be emptied of myself, and swallowed up in Christ (Edwards 2003, 474).

Jonathan Edwards’ fervent attempts to stay the progress of time from a God-centered universe of Puritanism to a man-centered universe of eighteenth-century enlightenment spirit had to fail. To a certain extent, he himself participated in the transition from the book of the Bible as the only source of knowledge to the book of Nature as the new form of discovery. On the one hand this is obvious in the emergence of nature writers, who started describing the new environment of their habitat, on the other hand the rise of natural science rivals religious ideas and eventually supplants them.

Early Republic The nature writers of the eighteenth century continue the work of the appropriation of the land by different means than the earlier European explorers. Their personal motivation is not directed toward a monarchy in Europe but to the land of America through which they define themselves. William Bartram, who followed in his father’s steps of walking the land and described fauna and flora as well as Indigenous people,

1216 

 6 The Americas

traveled for five years (1773–1778) through the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi and recorded his experiences in a journal. This journal became the basis of The Travels of William Bartram published in 1791. Since he started out as a painter in Philadelphia, his descriptions of animals and plants often oscillate between accurate scientific renditions and his artistic vision. Throughout there are many passages in which Bartram’s narrative perspective and his own person are foregrounded, especially in relation to adventures with wild life. Overall, his personal narrative has a transfiguring aspect, which allows him to ignore the plight of the Natives and the African slaves and to create a pastoral landscape of America. Like William Bartram, William Byrd (1674–1744) takes possession of the land by walking it. As a surveyor, he establishes the geographical borders between states by walking the state line. Like Bartram, he keeps a journal of his activities, which he later turns into The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (ed. 1841). In the relation of his encounters with newcomers from England or France and with Native Americans, he clearly marks his own ground and reveals his possessive spirit. For him, Bartram’s pastoral landscape has a religious connotation as ‘The Land of Eden’. Next to these official documents of diary records turned into history, William Byrd also kept several secret diaries, which were edited only in the twentieth century. In these private documents, Byrd includes records of his frequent trips to England and reveals areas of his private life by turning his mission and their participants into a fictional context which also allows for the inclusion of humorous scenes about the foibles of people. The autobiographical projects of the nature writers are directed toward taking account of the land and possessing it. To a certain extent it represents a mundane version of Jonathan Edwards’ transposition of his self into nature as the garden of God, insofar as the individual self transposes himself into a pastoral or Edenic American landscape to possess it. Walking the land and recording it in diaries for later narrative documents could be seen as an early example of the performance of life writing. It is actually taken up by the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet Susan Howe (born 1937) who uses a composite title referring to Byrd’s secret diary and public history for her own autobiographical poem, “Secret History of the Dividing Line” (1978), to relate her own family history to the intercultural history of America. Together, these autobiographical ventures prepare for the more extended autobiographical projects of the Early Republic and a national identification. Without doubt, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1771–1790) constitutes a major autobiographical voice representative of the new nation. In the same way in which Saint Augustine’s Confessions served as the foundational autobiographical script for the Puritans, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography can be regarded as the foundational text of American self-expression, one of the reading requirements in the American school system. As the son of an immigrant from England, who is born in Boston in 1706 and who makes his way to Philadelphia as an adolescent, Franklin evolves into an internationally renowned businessman, natural scientist, statesman,

6.2 North America 

 1217

philosopher, and prolific writer in the course of the eighteenth century. At the time of his death in 1790, he has lived and established a viable model of self-perfection for himself and the new nation of the United States of America. The writing of the four parts of his autobiography is connected to his role as a political negotiator between England and the colonies. Two missions in England from 1757 to 1762 and 1764 to 1775 and one mission to France (1783–1785) provide the basis for an intercultural relation between Europe and North America and motivate Franklin to turn to the recollection of his life in moments of personal and political crisis. For him the writing of his autobiography becomes a form of political conversion leaving behind the colonial dependence on England and identifying as an independent self of the newly founded and victorious nation. Franklin writes the first part of his autobiography between 30 July and 13 August 1771 during a visit to the country home of Bishop Jonathan Shipley at Twyford, a village about fifty miles from London. The chronological narrative covers the time from his birth in Boston to setting up a printing business in Philadelphia and ends with his marriage to Deborah Reed in 1730. In the course of his second mission to England, he had encountered severe difficulties in negotiating between the interests of the colonies and the political demands of the monarchy. The decision between the continuation of the British rule over the colonies and the independence of the American colonies was pending. Recollecting the very successful events of the first 24 years of his life from the perspective of a sixty-five-year-old man with an accomplished career allows him to arrive at a resolution of his crisis in the stability of his narrative. A first point in achieving such a reconfirmation of life is Franklin’s adaptation of the classical convention of autobiography, which he learned from the Puritans, the establishment of an intergenerational line of succession. Thus, he addresses his recollections to his son: Dear Son, I have ever had a Pleasure in obtaining any little Anecdotes of my Ancestors. You may remember the Enquiries I made among the Remains of my Relations when you were with me in England; and the journey I took for that purpose. Now imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the Circumstances of my Life, many of which you are yet unacquainted with; and expecting a Weeks uninterrupted Leisure in my present Country Retirement, I sit down to write them for you (Franklin 1964, 43).

A second point of continuity is connected to the convention of the autobiographical narrative as a form of reliving one’s life. Franklin relates this idea to his role as an author and the practice as a printer of books. That Felicity, when I reflected on it, has induc’d me sometimes to say, that were it offer’d to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first. […] However, since such a Repetition is not to be expected, the next Thing most like living one’s Life over again, seems to be a Recollection of that Life, and to make that Recollection as durable as possible, the putting it down in Writing (Franklin 1964, 43–44).

1218 

 6 The Americas

Imitating Thomas Shepard’s autobiographical example, he also gives right at the outset of his autobiographical venture a brief summary of his life, however not in a narrative sequence but in the form of an epitaph of his tombstone: The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms, But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author. He was born Jan. 6, 1706. Died   17 (Franklin 1964, 44).

This visual representation of Benjamin Franklin’s life with reference to the medium of print and the achievement of perfection sets the tone for the autobiography. The status of this eminent life is clearly established. Thus, he draws a line of affiliation to the religious background of his English relatives and to the piety of his father and the Puritan context of Boston and the Massachusetts Bay colony. Proudly he situates his family in the circle of the Puritan saints since his mother’s father is “one of the first Settlers of New England, of whom honourable mention is made by Cotton Mather, in his Church History of that Country, (entitled Magnalia Christi Americana) as a godly learned Englishman, if I remember the words rightly” (Franklin 1964, 51). The marriage to Deborah Reed at the end of the first part rounds off the picture of a complete personal and public life and contrasts the instability of his political negotiations. When he returns to Pennsylvania in 1775 he is converted to the cause of the new republic and the independence of the self in an independent nation. The second part of the autobiography is a product of Franklin’s mission in France to negotiate the peace treaty with Britain after the War of Independence. Written in 1784 in Passy, a suburb of Paris, it begins with a couple of letters asking Franklin to continue his autobiographical recollections. Rather than relating more narrative accounts of episodes in his life, he draws up the principles for a model of life in which an independent self can achieve moral perfection. Following the epistemological manner of the enlightenment age he enumerates thirteen virtues, the final one being “Humility” with the modest advice to “imitate Jesus and Socrates” (Franklin 1964, 150). The realization of these virtues is part of his “Plan for Self Examination” and is followed day by day on a variation of an x/y chart template where he can check the daily progress. Similarly, he provides a chart of his daily routine beginning at five in

6.2 North America 

 1219

the morning with “The Morning Question, What Good shall I do this Day?” and ending at ten with the “Evening Question, What Good have I done to day?” (Franklin 1964, 154). The personal schedule of values and living one’s life become the principles of all Americans. To a certain extent, these graphic representations in the second part of the autobiography also reflect the principles of co-existence as laid out in the articles of the peace treaty, signed in Paris between England and her former colonies. His assessment provides a firm basis of stability from which to recollect other achievements of his life after his return to the newly founded United States of America. Hence the third part written in Philadelphia in 1788 contains his rational observations about God and his belief in Deism, lists his most important achievements as a private businessman in Philadelphia from 1731 to 1757 up until his first mission to England. This part also includes his stereotypical description of the war with Indians in Pennsylvania and the survival of the settlers: They were all drunk Men and Women, quarrelling and fighting. Their dark-colour’d Bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy Light of the Bonfire, running after and beating one another with Firebrands, accompanied by their horrid Yellings, form’d a Scene the most resembling our Ideas of Hell that could well be imagin’d (Franklin 1964, 198).

The short last part of the autobiography amounts to a deathbed narrative and ends with his death in 1790. Over and above the national influence, Benjamin Franklin’s exemplary life also had an immediate international reception. The first publications of the first part of the autobiography appeared in England, France, and Germany, before his grandson William Temple Franklin published an edition of The Autobiography in the US in 1818. The standard scholarly edition is part of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield, and Helene H. Fineman (1959–2011). Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography represents a manual for the mediation between the realization of the self and the collective efforts of a democratic state. His example is paradigmatic for the affinity of the form of autobiography with America as a democratic nation (Hornung 1990). The imitation of Franklin’s example in other autobiographies by the Founding Fathers in the Early Republic confirms this thesis. The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States of America (1743–1826), recollects the political achievements of his public life to which his personal life is subsumed or ignored. Written in 1821, it covers the years from his birth in 1743 through 1790, excluding his presidency and later life. Crucial is Jefferson’s inclusion of ‘The Declaration of Independence’ which refers both to the liberation of the colonies from the supremacy of Britain and likewise to the liberation of the self from ideological frames and its incorporation into a new political union based on freedom. Like Franklin, he composed his own epitaph (1826):

1220 

 6 The Americas

‘Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independance of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia’ (Jefferson 1984, 709).

The exclusion of women and minority people from the foundational documents of the United States of America and their stereotypical representation in the classical autobiographies of statesmen is counteracted by the gradual emergence of female and ethnic voices in the Early Republic. The steady correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, the first vice president and second president of the USA and his wife, have only recently received full attention. In the exchange of more than 1,000 letters between 1762 and 1801, Abigail’s personal writings reveal important aspects of a woman who runs the household and cares for the farm in the Boston area during the absence of her husband as a representative in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, on diplomatic missions in Europe, and in his role as Vice President (1789– 1796) and President (1796–1801). The voice of a Native American emerges in A Short Narrative of My Life (1768) from the pen of the Mohegan Samson Occom (1723–1792), which was published only in 1982 from the Dartmouth Archives. In the first sentence, Occom reveals his identity as a ‘Praying Indian’ and classifies his short autobiographical sketch as a form of the conversion narrative. “I was Born a Heathen and Brought up in Heathenism, till I was between 16 & 17 years of age, at a Place Called Mohegan, in New London, Connecticut, in New England” (Occom 1982, 12). Although this life story is concerned with the nomadic life that his parents and the tribe led, this first sentence announces its ulterior purpose, namely Occom’s conversion from a heathen to the Christian faith. At the age of 16, Samson was aroused to religious fervor by the missionaries to the Indians, and he began to study English in order to read the Scriptures. After his successful studies, he moved to a teaching position on Long Island where he married a Montauk woman with whom he had ten children. In 1759, he was ordained and spent the next year as an itinerant minister in southern New England, until he became a missionary to the Oneida Indians who belong to the Iroquois people formerly inhabiting the region east of Oneida Lake in upstate New York. In his efforts to establish an Indian Charity School, he cooperated with the English Methodist evangelist George Whitefield in New England and became part of a fund-raising group of people travelling to England. After his return, he tried to keep the Christian Indians out of the turmoil of the Revolutionary War and rediscovered his ethnic origin taking pride in being a Native American. In this sense, his autobiographical narrative presents a religious conversion, but also reveals his later dissent with his Christian teachers and colleagues when he realizes their implicit discriminatory attitude toward him as a Native American. This ethnic sentiment concludes his autobiography:

6.2 North America 

 1221

So I am ready to Say, they have used me thus, because I Can’t Influence the Indians so well as other missionaries; but I can assure them I have endeavoured to teach them as well as I know how; – but I must Say, “I believe it is because I am a poor Indian.” I Can’t help that God has made me So; I did not make my self so. – (Occom 1982, 18).

Next to the official proclamation of the American self, as visible in Franklin’s autobiography, Samson Occom professes his ethnic version of a ‘self’ endowed to him not by a mundane republic but by God. A similar position of the self, which develops as a companion to the manifestation of the public self, is the subject of The Journal of John Woolman (1774). His belief as a Quaker eventually leads him to give up his business attitude in dealing with slaves and to become a spokesperson for abolitionism on his travels through Southern states and England, since he came to believe “slavekeeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion” (Woolman 1950, 13). Woolman’s engagement for the cause of African slaves in North America corresponds with an intensification of the slave trade in the eighteenth century. First written documents of their lives in bondage and the route to freedom emerge at the time of the foundation of the United States and claim a subject position. The first and best-known example is The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Critics have labelled this text an apologia, a captivity narrative, a travel book, an adventure book, an economic treatise, a spiritual autobiography, and a slave narrative. To a certain extent, aspects of all of these genre attributions fit the eventful transcultural episodes of Equiano’s life (ca. 1745–1797). In the Narrative, Equiano describes his birth in Essaka, the kingdom of Benin ‒ the present Eastern part of Nigeria, and his descent from an eminent family. He then relates being kidnapped at the age of eleven with his sister by neighboring tribes who turn them over to European slave traders. His descriptions of the horrors of slavery begin with the cruelty of the ‘Middle Passage’ from Africa to America, the arrival in the slave market on the Caribbean island of Barbados, and his transportation to a plantation in Virginia. One of his tasks is to fan his master Campbell while he is asleep. Soon he is relieved from the slave existence on this plantation by Captain Pascal, a lieutenant of the Royal Navy, who buys him to work on his transatlantic merchant ship. Against his protests, Pascal forces the name of Gustavus Vassa, a Swedish freedom fighter, on him. In this new environment as well as in England he finds a more positive reception as a black person, learns how to read and write for a Christian education, and is baptized in 1759. The new knowledge allows him to react to the injustice of slavery when he is sold to yet another master, Robert King ‒ a Quaker from Philadelphia, while on business in the West Indies. King promises him further education and eventually his freedom, but also makes him a part of the slave trade traffic: “I used frequently to have different cargoes of new negroes in my care for sale” (Equiano 2001, 77). While Equiano relates the horrors of mistreating African slaves, such as rape and child molestations, he does not reflect his own position in this deal. However, he notes the double moral standards of the whites, who accept the rape of

1222 

 6 The Americas

black women, but punish and kill black men for similar transgressions. The Narrative ends with Equiano buying his freedom and receiving the official document of his manumission: “Accordingly he signed the manumission that day; so that, before night, I, who had been a slave in the morning, trembling at the will of another, was become my own master, and completely free” (Equiano 2001, 105). While the Narrative relates these different stages in a chronological order, the autobiographer’s mind constantly triangulates between the three continents of his experience: Africa, America, Europe. His recollection of these transatlantic events determines the transcultural construction of his tale and his identity as a subject of the British Monarchy. Apart from his travels in the service of slavery, he becomes an envoy on official missions of England in Central America or Africa. On these missions, he recognizes his ethnic difference framed by the British subjecthood. During the sixmonth field trip to the Miskito Indians in Central America, he starts to distinguish between the European label of ‘savages’ for the natives and recognizes them as kind nature people. Likewise, the Miskito Indians notice his culture difference within the group of Englishmen and remind him of his African origin. Hence, the writing of his autobiographical narrative takes on the features of an ethnography, becomes a critique of the assumed superiority of European Civilization, and a search for a transcultural position, also achieved in his written text. During his travel on slave ships, he is still unfamiliar with European forms of knowledge or literary conventions. It shows best in the trope of the ‘talking book’, which had first appeared in A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself (1770), who had undergone similar experiences as Equiano, however without any involvement in the slavery market. Equiano writes: I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how all things had a beginning: for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent (Equiano 2001, 48).

This scene reflects Equiano’s recognition of the difference between a written book culture and a culture of orality. In the same way in which he adopts a transcultural concept for his identity of being a British subject but calling himself in the title of the Narrative “the African”, he also posits his transcultural form of autobiography by adding “Written by Himself”, indicating the threshold between orality and writing. Thus, Equiano displays his wide reading knowledge with abundant quotations from major sources of English literature: Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Bunyan, including the Bible and the foundational autobiography Confessions of St. Augustine to establish his credentials as an educated writer. It is not surprising that critics had difficulties in classifying Equiano’s Narrative, also in light of recent findings about a potential birth in Virginia (Carretta 2005). In this sense, Charles T. Davis argued that it is “neither an Afro-American work nor a slave narrative” (Equiano 2001, 339), instead we should

6.2 North America 

 1223

read it as part of an enlightenment project of self-representation by a dark brother on a par with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin. Nevertheless, Equiano’s autobiographical narrative contains most of the features, which became essential for the emergence of life writings by black slaves in the United States and powerful voices for writing freedom. Between the mid-eighteenth century and the end of the Civil War the genre of the slave narrative represented the major form of African American self-expression. It begins with The Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon (1760), in which the author describes the turmoil of the Middle Passage and his eventual arrival in Florida. This early form of the slave narrative, which for Hammon, Gronniosaw and Equiano begins with the birth in Africa, the experience of the transatlantic passage, and slavery, eventually ending in freedom, changes to the passage within America from slavery in the Southern states to freedom in the Northern states and Canada. Of the many oral and written documents that the United States Federal Writers Project collected between 1936 and 1938, the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) and Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) exemplify best this specifically American genre. Common features of this thematically focused autobiography are the author’s ignorance of the exact date of birth, the missing link in the line of descent, and the profession of personal authorship. Hence, all slave narrators include in their titles the phrase ‘written by him/herself’. Since all slave narratives were written from the position of freedom in the North they follow similar thematic patterns. The description of the cruelty of slavery including hard work and the enforcement of absolute obedience through severe whippings of slave breakers is followed by the resolution to escape and it ends in the joyful embracement of freedom in Northern states. This new existence is usually connected with the acquisition of literacy and the support by abolitionists who encourage and facilitate the publication of slave narratives. Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) also contains these structural patterns, but displays insightful variations. Thus, his experience of the cruelty of slavery includes the friendly behavior of Mrs. Auld who teaches him how to read and write, until forbidden by her husband. And he also recognizes the hypocritical attitude of the Southern slave holders who attend Christian services but continue their inhuman behavior, actually using religion as a justification for slavery. From the retrospective position, he incorporates his critical perception in the meta-narrative comments and direct opposition. The interaction between the lived and written experience is rendered repeatedly: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes” (Douglass 1973, 29). The constitution of a self in the writing process parallels his new status as an American when he receives his official documents in his wedding ceremony in Boston. His newly gained self is also evident in his direct attack on the slaveholding religion in the South.

1224 

 6 The Americas

I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity (Douglass 1973, 117).

This kind of shrewd criticism also allowed him to reject the patronizing attitude of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) who used former slaves for their purposes in public performances, depriving them of their independent subjecthood. Resultant disputes also occasioned trips to England to escape repressive actions by the authorities. It is not surprising that Douglass went on describing his life in two further autobiographies. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), he advanced his criticism of racist discrimination from the slave states in the South to the free states of the North. His critical perception caught the attention of politics so that he became an adviser to President Lincoln and the diplomatic representative of the United States to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Toward the end of his life he rewrote and expanded his earlier versions for the comprehensive Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; expanded and rev. ed. 1892). The importance of gender for the choice of a genre is evident in Harriet Jacobs’ slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). Women in slavery had to suffer double trouble on account of racism and sexism. In her narrative Jacobs describes the conditions of slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, in the 1820s and 1830s. To avoid further sexual pursuit of her white master, she eventually hides for seven years in the tiny garret of her free Grandmother. From here, she observes the lives of her children and the practice of slavery on the plantation. After her escape, she lives in the North, constantly fearing re-capture and seeking the freedom of her children. Like Frederick Douglass, she registers forms of discrimination among the Northerners and has to live with prejudice extended to her writing. Other than Douglass, Jacobs has to face questions about her authorship and about the veracity of her narrative. The narrative opens with the preface by the abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child, whose Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans had appeared in 1833. Child describes her role of minor revisions and refutes the common mainstream assumption that “a woman reared in Slavery should be able to write so well” (Jacobs 2009, 4). The fact that Jacobs used the pseudonym of Linda Brent for the autobiographical self simply for security reasons, places the manuscript for readers in the genre of sentimental fiction and the pursuit of mulatta characters by white masters. The more observant readers could however not overlook the many signs in the slave narrative where Harriet Jacobs addresses white women readers in particular, seeking their assistance in ending the sexual exploitation of black women by white men. The author’s use of an autobiographical persona can also be read as an additional empowerment of an independent self. An interesting combination of male and female ingenuity underlies the slave narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860). The escape becomes possible

6.2 North America 

 1225

because of cross-gender dressing and passing. The mulatta Ellen passes for a white gentleman travelling North with her husband impersonating her black slave. Similar narratives about slavery also emerged in the North whose authors engaged in the fight for freedom and political rights. Thus, the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828 (Boston 1850) tells the story of Isabella Buchfree, born in Ulster County in the State of New York, whose parents were slaves of a Dutch owner until the abolition of slavery in the State in 1828. Changing her name to Sojourner Truth becomes a sort of program for her engagement for the cause of abolition and the women’s movement. Counteracting Frederick Douglass’ criticism of Christianity she also went on missions as an itinerant preacher for human rights. In 1850, she dictated her experiences to her friend Olive Gilbert who wrote down the narrative and published it. A slave narrative in reverse is the Narrative of Solomon Northup, published as Twelve Years a Slave in 1853. Solomon Northup was born as a free man in the state of New York, was lured into accepting a job, and then made a slave in Washington, D.C., in 1841. In his narrative, he recollects his miserable lot of being sold to many different owners and finally ends up on a plantation near the Red River in Louisiana. He describes in vivid details the conditions of the slave market and the hard work on cotton plantations. His skill as a cabinetmaker saves him from a number of difficult situations, and he eventually manages with the help of the Canadian cabinetmaker Samuel Bass to be freed and returned to his family. The story was very popular and sold 30,000 copies. In 2013, it was made into a very successful movie, coinciding with the term of office of the first black American President, Barack Obama. Although the legal ground for slave narratives disappeared with the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War in the thirteenth and fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, variations of the genre continued and were revived in the twentieth century. Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945) is a modern version of an impoverished African American leaving the South to find work in the Northern city of Chicago. Similar journeys of young African Americans underlie modern novels, such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), or Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976). Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) also uses elements of the slave narrative while at the same time rewriting Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

National Constitution The importance of life writing for the combined causes of abolitionism and the women’s movement throughout the nineteenth century is accompanied by auto/ biographical narratives concerned with the progress of the American nation and the criticism of the increasing material and commercial interests. The establishment of

1226 

 6 The Americas

the cultural independence of the United States, often associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar” (1837), relies on the work of biography. Thus the activities surrounding the second war of independence often resort to biographies of American heroes in the battle against the British enemies published in periodicals (Lanzendörfer 2013). More in line with the idealization of Romanticism is the evocation of original American heroes like Columbus. Washington Irving’s three-volume magisterial History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) evokes the deed of the discoverer of America and aligns it implicitly with the achievements of the founding fathers. Emerson’s biographical mode was always in the service of the American self. Guided by Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), he started a series of lectures in 1845 in which he exemplified Carlyle’s adage: “the history of the world is but the biography of great men” (Carlyle 1993, 145). Emerson’s list of great men includes Plato, the Philosopher, Swedenborg, the Mystic, Montaigne, the Skeptic, Shakespeare, the Poet, Napoleon, the Man of the World, and Goethe, the Writer. The absence of Americans in this list is part of Emerson’s biographical project to classify these subjects of his biographies as “Representative Men”, the title of the volume published in 1850. In the words of Andrew Delbanco, Emerson was always looking for ways to reconcile the spirit of independence with the claims of tradition. In Representative Men he takes a step toward solving this problem by making all his exemplary figures, despite their geographical and historical remoteness, heroes of a distinctly American type (Delbanco 1996, ix).

Hence, Emerson’s evocation of ‘representation’ stresses both the principle of democracy and the independence from England. At the same time, he mediates between his own manifestation of an American self and the general demands of a democratic nation. More radical in these political persuasions is Emerson’s companion Henry David Thoreau, who practices what his master preaches. This might also account for the change of genre, Thoreau’s turn to autobiography rather than biography. Following Emerson’s advice in the philosopher’s programmatic essay “Nature” (1836), Thoreau went to live a solitary experience in nature. From March 1845 to 6 September 1847, he practiced Emerson’s transcendentalist ideas to experience the interrelation of all organic life as a link to divine infinity. Several years later, he recollected his life in nature in a series of essays, which amount to his autobiography: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). Two ideas guided his experiment of living: economy and simplification. In describing the construction of his cabin, he itemizes all the materials and tools he uses to make a simple place of habitation, quoting the exact amount of money spent in this project of cheap living. His message to his readers, whom he wants to turn from their materialistic pursuits to embrace idealistic goals, reads “simplify, simplify” (Thoreau 1966, 75) as the basis of his philosophy of living wisely. In his autobiographical description, he condenses his two-year experience at Walden Pond into a one-year cycle in accordance with the seasons of nature. In line with romantic and transcendentalist ideas, the autobiography begins in April and ends in

6.2 North America 

 1227

the spring of the following year. Hence, he models his life writing after the cycles of nature, which he defines as “the poem of creation” (Thoreau 1966, 69). In this poetic universe, all elements are interconnected and form a biosphere of all organic lives, which Thoreau in a transcendental effort extends to infinity. Life away from society in nature also links up with the lives of Native Americans whom he meets and consorts with. Observing the animals, he relates their behavior to that of human beings and transliterates their sounds, like those of the owls, to human language: “They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!” (Thoreau 1966, 102). Thoreau’s life in nature and his life writing are also a patriotic act. The naturalist’s conscious effort to move into his newly built cabin on the Fourth of July amounts to the self’s renewed declaration of independence and the re-instatement of the original spirit of the political document. Thoreau’s affirmation of individualism is aligned to principles of American democracy that he wants to defend against his country’s anti-democratic actions in the war against Mexico (1845–1847) and the discrimination of African Americans in the Fugitive Slave Act (1850). To overcome the abuses of democracy, he advises his reader at the end of the autobiography to apply transcen­ dentalist efforts to “be Expert in home-cosmography”, which allows him and his readers to widen the geographical horizon and become “a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you” (Thoreau 1966, 267–268). The all-American horizon eventually incorporates other parts of the world. Thoreau’s Asian readings, especially the Daoist philosophy of ‘non-action’, is reflected in his writing: I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune (Thoreau 1966, 91–92).

In this passage, Thoreau has fully embraced the contemplative attitude and adopted a cyclical concept of time in analogy with the cyclical concept of nature. Thoreau appears to be in the “lucky state of trans-temporal existence […] like an enlightened Buddha” (Capelle 2013, 107). Today Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has become the major transcultural document to combine ecology and life writing (Buell 1995), matching the transformation of the site of his cabin at Walden Pond into an environmental shrine. On the one hand, his autobiography was seen in connection with eighteenth-century nature writing and the formation of American culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the other

1228 

 6 The Americas

hand, he was made the model of an ecoglobalist concern (Buell 2007; Hornung 2013, x), and his autobiography now figures worldwide as the prime example of environmental activism animating autobiography studies and ecological attitudes respectively. Thoreau’s idea of nature as “the poem of creation” (Thoreau 1966, 69) also informs the poetry of Walt Whitman. His autobiographical poem “Song of Myself” (1855) constitutes a multi-media approach to the representation of a democratic self, extended transcendentally into the universe. Using the new technology of representation, a daguerreotype portrait, for the cover of the work, the “song” of the title refers to the musical variation in the writing of his self: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, / Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding” (Whitman 1955, # 24). While the poet shares Thoreau’s transcendentalist interpretation of nature as the space of all organic life and a pantheistic universe, he is always intent on incorporating every member of this environment as composites of physical and mental aspects: I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men (Whitman 1955, # 21).

Over and above Thoreau’s appeal to his readers to imitate his example, Whitman uses his famous cataloguing technique to include all members of society regardless of race, class, and gender in the same way in which he lists a variety of animals and plants. The poet’s answer to a child’s question “What is the grass?” spells out Whitman’s universalist and all-inclusive belief: I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord […] Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive the same (Whitman 1955, # 6).

Last but not least, Whitman’s poetic autobiography becomes a way of overcoming death. In the same way in which Thoreau had transformed his two-year experience in nature into the cyclical return of the seasons ending with the renewal of life in spring,

6.2 North America 

 1229

Whitman concludes his poem with the romantic notion of life over death: “And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is / idle to try to alarm me […] And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many / deaths” (Whitman 1955, # 49). Similar to Thoreau’s transcultural extension of his self, Whitman includes the entire world transnationally in his autobiographical song: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” (Whitman 1955, # 52). Like Whitman, who couches his autobiography in a poetic form, Nathaniel Hawthorne incorporates his life writing in fiction. The “Introduction” to his romance The Scarlet Letter (1850) is motivated by “an autobiographical impulse” (Hawthorne 2006, 22) to recollect his pedestrian work as an official functionary in “The Custom-House” of Salem. It turns out to be a reflection on the role of his ancestors who were involved in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 and in the persecution of Quakers and Native Americans. While Hawthorne castigates the evil deeds of his forefathers, he nevertheless feels the burden of their sins on him and takes another course of action. Rejecting the business-oriented spirit and intolerant attitude of his Puritan legacy, he accounts for the sins of his fathers, which he has inherited, first in an autobiographical then in a fictional narrative. For this task of resolution, he embraces the craft of the writer despised by his Puritan ancestors as an “idler” (Hawthorne 2006, 27): “What is he?” … “A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!” (Hawthorne 2006, 27).

Hawthorne uses the romantic convention of the precious discovery of a manuscript in the garret of the Custom-House, which he edits for the readers, to substantiate his authorial self in a materialistic age in America. The analogy between his inherited sin and the sin of a fallen woman in seventeenth-century Salem drive the autobiographical impulse to liberate both the writer and the Puritan woman of their ‘sins’ and to create a platform for their new roles in life and society. Herman Melville’s autobiographical impulse is connected with his escape from the misery of his juvenile life in New York to his life as a sailor and in the South Seas. His experiences on board of commercial ships and whalers between 1839 and 1844 become the basis of his five autobiographical novels, which appeared after his return to New York. The recollection of his first stay on the Marquesas Islands among the Typees relates the exotic customs of the Indigenous people, but also the existence of cannibalism of a neighboring tribe. The fear is mediated by the exotic gaze of the autobiographical self and his companion, who eventually leave the unfamiliar territory. In retrospect, Melville turns his experiences into a critique of the denigrating effects of Western civilization on the Indigenous people and he singles out the role of Christian missionaries as particularly devastating. In order to authenticate his relation, Melville has to add a preface and the affidavit of his companion to the autobiographical narrative and delete the criticism of American missionaries in the American edition

1230 

 6 The Americas

of Typee (1846) that appears only in the British publication. The efforts of American writers to consolidate the American nation by way of the autobiographical mode have turned to a transcultural space and taken on a transnational dimension, which will determine modern forms of life writing, not only in America. This global reach is most prominent in the three-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain. In the course of his long life, Mark Twain travelled the world and recounted his many experiences in the United States and abroad in a series of daily dictations between 1906 and 1909. This voluminous project, in which the author wrote at random without an obvious order, came at the end of several autobiographical attempts, which Twain started first in 1870 but never finished as a complete manuscript. He left it to his editors, who came up with the definite, chronological ordered version in 2010 to 2015. A very composite and most impressive autobiography covering the course of the nineteenth century is Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898). In this autobiography, feminist Cady Stanton subsumes her life to the story of the women’s rights movement. The personal recollections of her experiences are always in the service of advancing the cause of the emancipation of women in the home and in the public. At the same time, she includes her feminist companion Susan B. Anthony in her life writing, creating an early example of a relational representation of selves, which becomes typical of women’s and ethnic autobiographies. Together with Anthony, her “steadfast friend for half a century” (Stanton 1971) to whom she dedicates the book, she organizes the Seneca Falls Convention in the summer of 1848, which becomes the first national rally for women with the proclamation of the “Declaration of Sentiments” modeled after the “Declaration of Independence” and drafted by Stanton. She also records the delivery of the “Woman’s Declaration of Rights” at the national centennial celebration of 1876 in Philadelphia by Susan B. Anthony (Stanton 1971, 313). Another important issue in the women’s movement is the fight for the vote of women and the alliance with the abolitionist movement. Stanton reviews her own publications about the History of Woman Suffrage and her feminist reading of The Woman’s Bible. Not mincing her words about the “destructive male” (Stanton 1868), she speaks out for the equality of men and women both politically and economically and establishes the critique of the devastating power of a patriarchal society. The private and withdrawn life of women, which Emily Dickinson filled with her poetic creativity, often included forms of confinement and alleged psychic diseases. This is the case of Alice James, the youngest child of the eminent intellectual and artistic family of the Jameses, whose brothers Henry and William achieved celebrity status as internationally renowned writer and philosopher-psychologist respectively. Alice James (1848 – 1892) revealed her own literary and intellectual qualities only during the final years of her short life, which was plagued by spells of hysteria and breast cancer, in The Diary of Alice James begun during her stay in England with the first entries dated in 1889 and published posthumously. In the entries, Alice describes English life and manners and records the spells of her disease without blaming anybody but her own weak body for it. With reference to her philosophy brother William she explains:

6.2 North America 

 1231

William uses an excellent expression when he says in his paper on the “Hidden Self” that the nervous victim “abandons” certain portions of his consciousness. […] I have passed thro’ an infinite succession of conscious abandonments and in looking back now I see how it began in my childhood, altho’ I was not conscious of the necessity until ’67 or ’68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end (James 1982, 149).

The example of Alice James’ Diary shows the powerful form of self-expression of Americans on the margin of society, which, however, remains concealed, often unpublished, and only recognized much later. Yet, at the same time, forms of life writing clearly empower women and ethnic writers. What remained private and hidden from the public enters the mainstream in the twentieth century. Autobiographies written in Canada prior to the Confederation in 1867 were more concerned with pioneering activities and reports to British readers about the appropriation of the land. Catherine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, or, Life in Canada (1852 [2 vols.]) have become classics of Canadian life writing. At the same time, Native teachers and missionaries started recording the lives of Native Canadians based on oral narratives, myths and legends, such as The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway) (1847) or Life and Journals of Kah-Ke-Wa-Que-Na-By (Rev. Peter Jones) Wesleyan Minister (1860).

Modern North America Major American autobiographies at the beginning of the twentieth century come from the pen of immigrants, ethnic minorities, and marginal voices. Due to this marginal position, these autobiographers use their autobiographies to speak not only for themselves but also for their group in an effort to gain access to an all-American status and to citizenship. As such, they expand the horizon of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) definition of the one-hundred percent Americans and add to the internationalization of American subjects and American letters. Jacob Riis and Mary Antin represent exemplarily the genre of the immigrant autobiography, Booker T. Washington offers a new model of the African American self, Henry Adams and Henry James stand for the diminished role of the white aristocracy, and Jane Addams and Gertrude Stein project the role of the new woman in social work and modern art. Together their life writings provide the features of a modern type of autobiography and new constructions of the self. Both the Danish carpenter Jacob Riis (1849–1914) and the Russian Jew Mary Antin (1881–1949) use their autobiographies to link their early lives in the Old World with their mature lives in the New World and to trace the process of their Americanization. In The Making of an American (1901), Riis maintains a strong tie to his native country

1232 

 6 The Americas

from the secure position of an immigrant who has successfully mastered his American status as a journalist and social worker. His extensive description of his childhood and youth in Denmark, learning the craft of a carpenter, tells of his departure for the United States in 1870 at the age of twenty-one, leaving his sweetheart behind. His account of the miserable days as an itinerant worker with little money eventually ends up in his profession as a social journalist who investigates the poverty of lives in the tenement houses of New York City and for the first time documents it with his own photography. He proudly refers to the great success of his photo-documentary account of the tenement housing situation for immigrants in New York City, How the Other Half Lives (1890, Ch. 12), and the public recognition, also by the later President Theodore Roosevelt (Ch. 13). The record of his achievements is interrupted by his personal feats, such as his return to Denmark to marry his sweetheart, Elizabeth. He underscores the importance of this delayed marriage by giving his wife a whole chapter of his autobiography in which “Elizabeth Tells Her Story” (Ch. 7). He concludes The Making of an American with yet another visit to Denmark where he receives a medal of honor from the Danish king and eventually identifies as an American. When he starts writing his autobiography he is still hesitant about his American citizenship (“I am afraid that thirty years in the land of my children’s birth have left me as much of a Dane as ever” [Riis 1943, 7]). He then suddenly embraces it in a sort of epiphany when, as a patient in bed with a fever, he sees a ship pass by displaying the American flag: […] a ship flying at the top the flag of freedom, blown out on the breeze till every star in it shone bright and clear. That moment I knew. […] I sat up in bed and shouted, laughed and cried by turns, waving my handkerchief to the flag out there. They [the doctor and nurse] thought I had lost my head, but I told them no, thank God! I had found it, and my heart, too, at last. I knew then that it was my flag; that my children’s home was mine, indeed; that I also had become an American in truth. And I thanked God, and, like unto the man sick of palsy, arose from my bed and went home, healed (Riis 1943, 443).

The healing from sickness also applies to the healing from crisis and the uncertainty about his vocation in life by writing the autobiography. For Mary Antin, the writing of The Promised Land (1912) is based on her Jewish religion and represents a form of healing in terms of a salvation. In the “Introduction” to her autobiography she is concerned about her young age of hardly thirty years as an autobiographer in view of the conventional features of the genre as “a death-bed confession” (Antin 1985, xx). ­Nevertheless, she feels justified in her autobiographical project because of her unusual experiences in the Old World and her transplantation to the New World: “I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life’s story?” (1985, xix). The radical change between the two worlds transforms her Russian life into a past self from which she distinguishes her new American life still to be lived.

6.2 North America 

 1233

[…] I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell. […] I could speak in the third person and not feel that I was masquerading. I can analyze my subject. I can reveal everything; for she, and not I, is my real heroine. My life I have still to live; her life ended when mine began (Antin 1985, xix).

Contrary to Riis’ transcultural interaction between his old home in Denmark and his new home in New York, the old life for Mary Antin in Polotzk, where she had been excluded from Gentiles activities as a Jew and barred from education as a young Jewish woman, ends at the time of her emigration in 1894 at the age of thirteen. Her life in Russia appears to her like the “Middle Ages” as opposed to the “contemporary in the twentieth century” (Antin 1985, xxi). In analogy to the Biblical story of the Israelites, she sees her escape from Russia like a deliverance from bondage and the passage over the ocean as the pathway to the Promised Land. Even though they live in the poor sections of Boston, she couches her narrative in Biblical terms and feels like she is living in a “child’s paradise” (Ch. 13) where she is allowed to go to school and has access to libraries and education; hence the slums in which they live are “a kingdom” (Ch. 19). At the end of the autobiography, Mary Antin once again reflects on generic questions and sees as “one of the inherent disadvantages of premature biography […] that it cannot go to the natural end of the story” (1985, 359). She briefly mentions her education at Barnard College in New York City as a further achievement in her career. But what is really essential to her and expresses her new life without any further description is the enjoyment of “American freedom”, which “a certain class of aliens make use of” (1985, 359). The enthusiastic embracement of and identification with America as “the youngest of the nations” in which she can be “the youngest of America’s children” completes her arrival in the “Promised Land” (1985, 364). It prepares her close cooperation with President Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive Movement. In the final analysis, the spiritual design of her autobiography appears to be an imitation of the life narratives of the Puritans in New England who had followed the Biblical analogy two centuries ago. Eventually, African Americans will also employ this Jewish Biblical pattern of escape from bondage to freedom as evident in the close cooperation of Jewish Americans with African Americans in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and his autobiography Up From Slavery (1901) principally stand for the racial uplift of African Americans after the Civil War. The first two chapters of the autobiography resemble the conventions of the slave narrative as Washington describes a childhood and youth in slavery in Virginia not knowing his birthdate or father. Thanks to the Civil War General Samuel C. Armstrong, Washington is able to attend Hampton University, one of the first institutions for African Americans, and begins his life-long struggle for education. He particularly stresses the importance of vocational training to create useful positions for black people in white American society according to his motto: “the hand, head, and heart” (Washington 1965, 73–74). Hence, the major part of his recollections focus on his foundation and

1234 

 6 The Americas

consolidation of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama as the first institution of higher education for African Americans in the United States. He relates the many difficulties in maintaining the school and his successful role in raising money by becoming a powerful public speaker. Like Thomas Jefferson’s inclusion of “The Declaration of Independence” in his autobiography, Booker T. Washington also reprints his most important speech, “The Atlanta Exposition Speech” of 1895, in which he presented the groundwork for a cooperation of white and black people in the South, stressing the special education and training of Southern African Americans over the situation in the North. He obliquely refers to his growing reputation at home and abroad by evoking a reception of Queen Victoria during his trip to Europe and President William McKinley’s visit to his Tuskegee Institute as well as the recognition of his achievements by Harvard University, which awarded him an honorary degree. After the publication of Up From Slavery President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington and his family to have dinner in the White House. Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory compromise between the races, which also included Native Americans (Up From Slavery, Ch. 6), and education for all contrasted with W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1868–1963) elitist attitude, who opted for the black leadership of the “Talented Tenth” and a separate evolution of the black race. In his collection of the mostly autobiographical essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois argues that the African American self had to possess a “double consciousness” (1969, 45) to survive in white America. In his long life, he reduplicated these ideas, which he ‒ like Booker T. Washington ‒ extended to the definition of the whole race. Du Bois spends a total of three autobiographies to present the many experiences of his eventful life from its origin in Massachusetts, education at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, the University of Berlin, and finally Harvard University, where he was the first African American to receive a PhD degree. He continues with his leadership in the NAACP, his membership of the Communist Party with stays in East Berlin, and the conclusion of his life in Africa as a citizen of Ghana. In Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940) he uses an essayistic style including poems; and finally in The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (1968) he uses a conventional chronological narrative. This form of serial autobiography, which Frederick Douglass had used earlier, becomes a common feature of autobiographical narratives by women authors and ethnic minorities, who start their life writings much earlier in life to counteract critical situations, a resort to a narrative procedure that potentially leads to solace and resolution. The situation of the poor and unskilled workers becomes the topic of critical writers and journalists connected with the Muckraking Movement (1902–1912) at a time of the radical growth and transformation of the American society due to massive numbers of immigrants. The popular and commercially most successful writer in the first decade of the twentieth century, Jack London, employed his own experiences in Alaska and the South Seas for his popular animal and adventure stories. At the climax of his success, he starts recollecting the poverty of his childhood and youth, his

6.2 North America 

 1235

association with the cause of the working class and his entry into the Socialist Worker Party. In The Road (1907), he records his participation in the 1894 Hunger March of the Poor and Unemployed from California to Washington, DC, and his eight-month trip through the United States riding illegally on top of trains and leading the life of a hobo. Jack London describes the misery of this existence and the battle against the railroad guards and police, who arrests him to serve thirty days in the Erie County Penitentiary in upstate New York for vagrancy. In the narrative of all of these adventures and experiences, he includes his Darwinian message of the survival of the fittest, which also applies to the telling of the tales that he collects on the road. A later mission takes him to the living quarters of the poor in East London where he stays for seven weeks and mixes with the miserable lot, dressed as an American sailor. He collects his impressions in a series of journalistic essays People of the Abyss, published in 1903, in which he compares the political situation in the British Empire with poverty in the United States. Both differ markedly from the sensible form of life he found among the Indigenous peoples on his travels. The autobiographical nature of most of his writing is most explicit in a fictional and a factual autobiography. In the figure of his alter ego Martin Eden (1909) he traces his rise from the poverty of the working class and the status of a disregarded writer to the eventual acclaim and success of his literature and his suicide due to the long lack of public recognition. In John Barleycorn (1913) he recounts his alcoholic journeys in life, which contributed to his premature death at the age of forty in 1916 (Hornung 2016). Like Jack London, the social worker Jane Addams also visits East London on the customary European tour of Americans. However, as an upper-middle class woman, she views the misery of the poor “from the top of the omnibus” (Addams 1961, 63) rather than consorting with them. Nevertheless, the sight of this immense poverty causes a professional and personal change of action, which Addams explains in her two autobiographies. First she abandons the plan to become a medical doctor for setting up a home for the socially disadvantaged, Hull-House in Chicago, in 1889. In addition, she eventually admits her personal relationship to Mary Rozet Smith, a donor to the Hull-House project, rather than entering into a heteronormative marriage. Twenty Years at Hull-House is based on notes taken in a diary kept during her European tour. As autobiographer, she consciously disregards “the chronological order in favor of the topical” (Addams 1961, xviii) and emphasizes that her own self is subsumed to the community of people in her social project. Rejecting her age’s culture of education and learning, she redefines the task of women by expanding the household into the realm of society and by providing a home for people in need: […] I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn from life itself; where they might try out some of the things they had been taught and put truth to “the ultimate test of the conduct it dictates or inspires” (Addams 1961, 72).

1236 

 6 The Americas

In this project of communal life, she also included stranded immigrants and gradually realized a form of culture, which functioned as a bond for all people. To create an interaction and interrelation of all members at Hull-House she advocated education through the arts in an effort to overcome the isolation of a modern society, particularly visible in the alienation between parents and Americanized children of immigrant families. In the same way in which Addams was able to unite the different members of a modern society in her social home, her communal life narrative presents her concept of a socialized education which should promote a culture which will not set its possessor aside in a class with others like himself, but which will, on the contrary connect him with all sorts of people by his ability to understand them as well as by his power to supplement their present surroundings with the historic background (Addams 1961, 300).

In the follow-up serial autobiography, Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930), Jane Addams advocates more prominently the role of the new woman, “faced with an alternative of marriage or a career”, to actively participate in public life and work for the acceptance of combining “the two functions of profession and homemaking” in a modern technological society, which provides the new means for such a life (1930, 196). Jane Addams’ many efforts on behalf of women and a change of all life were recognized in 1931 when she received the Nobel Peace Prize for having founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919. Gertrude Stein’s life started from a background similar to that of Jane Addams, but took a different trajectory. After her first European trip, Stein abandoned medical school to immerse herself into the world of modern art and experimental writing, living in Paris. The transnational and transcultural interrelations between Europe and the United States became dominant features of her relational and serial autobiographies. Repeatedly she proclaims, that “writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they really live” (Stein 1940, 2). Her discovery of the autobiographical mode is connected – as in Addams’ case – to her first trip to Europe in the company of two college women with one of whom, May Bookstave, she had a lesbian relationship before May separated from Gertrude for a relationship with another woman. When travelling with her brother Leo in 1901, Stein finds solace for that loss by reading Dante’s autobiography, Vita Nuova, and accounts for the triangular love relationship in her short story “Q.E.D”, written in 1903 but not published. Later her lesbian companion Alice B. Toklas finds the manuscript and is shocked about this unknown earlier relationship. In apparent compensation for this disappointment and as a form of the public profession of their marriage, Gertrude Stein composes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). It is only at the end of this experimental life narrative that Stein reveals her authorship:

6.2 North America 

 1237

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it (Stein 1933, 252).

This seemingly vicarious autobiography allows Gertrude Stein to continue her earlier autobiographical topics ‒ as in the voluminous history of immigration and acculturation of a German Jewish family in the United States in The Making of Americans (1925) ‒ and it allows her to have Alice B. Toklas recognize her as one of the three geniuses she met: “Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead” (Stein 1933, 5). The dialogical or relational constitution of a self between the two women is also reflected in the experimental interrelation of the narrative of two lives. Instead of a chronological account, Stein begins the autobiography, in line with the chosen title, with stages of Alice B. Toklas’ American life before they met in 1907 in Paris (Ch.s 1–2). There are obvious cross references to her own previous life, which Stein relates in the following chapters (Ch.s 3–4), going backwards from 1907 to her birth in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The last two chapters present, in a sort of conversational style, the common life of the lesbian couple from 1907 to 1932 in Paris. According to Stein’s concept of “portrait writing” (Stein 1933, 133), a combination of discursive writing in the spatial mode of a painter’s canvas, she creates a mosaic of life narrative containing Pablo Picasso, who portrayed her in 1907, Ernest Hemingway, who made advances to her, and encounters with other members of the Parisian modern art scene who frequent her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus (1933, 48). The financial success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas motivated Gertrude Stein after 31 years of absence to visit her home country, where she spent seven months lecturing and touring the land in 1934 to 1935. Apart from Lectures in America (1935) and The Geographical History of America (1936), Stein published an account of her visit as Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), which represents a transcultural dialogue between Europe and the United States mediated by Stein. For her, the self does not have a national identity any more, but takes on a transnational and transindividual dimension, as stated in one of her lectures, “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans”: “It must be remembered that whether they are Chinamen or Americans there are the same kinds in men and women and one can describe them. This I might have done” (Stein 1985, 158). Henry James, who, like Gertrude Stein, lived in Europe, also visited his home country after a long absence in 1904 to 1905 and published his autobiographical report as The American Scene (1907). Contrary to Stein, James is dismayed by the changes encountered in the country of his birth and he feels a “sense of rupture” (James 1968, 230): “It was as if the bottom had fallen out of one’s own biography, and one plunged backward into space without meeting anything” (1968, 229). The apparent presence of so many immigrants who speak inadequate English turn American cafés for James into “torture rooms of the living idiom” (1968, 139) and he is happy to return to civili-

1238 

 6 The Americas

zation in Europe. The next step in James’ approach to his actual autobiography is the conception of Prefaces for the 24-volume New York edition of his works (1907–1909) in which he reviews his literary production along with his life as a writer. From the discussion of his first novel through to the last he repeatedly relates his fictional characters to his own life, beginning with Roderick Hudson: This is why, reading over, for revision, correction and republication, the volumes here in hand, I find myself, all attentively, in presence of some such recording scroll or engraved commemorative table – from which the “private” character, moreover, quite insists on dropping out. These notes represent, over a considerable course, the continuity of an artist’s endeavor, the growth of his whole operative consciousness and, best of all, perhaps, their own tendency to multiply, with the implication, thereby, of a memory much enriched (James 1962, 3–4).

Here Henry James seems to implement Benjamin Franklin’s idea of a repetition of life in a second edition. While the Prefaces amount to a personal discourse on narrative theory, the actual autobiography composed at the end of his life consists of two completed parts, A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and a fragmentary part published posthumously, The Middle Years (1917). They cover his life from the age of two to the publication of his first novels, i.  e. from 1845 to around 1880. Henry James started to write his autobiography soon after the death of his admired brother William, whose widow had asked him to write a biography of the internationally esteemed pragmatic philosopher. Hence, the autobiography has its genesis “in an experience of loss and sorrow” (James 1983, vii), which connected for James with decisive events of his life and his feeling of being a failure. Two events are singled out: his physical debility and his failure in law school at Harvard University. The first was “a horrid even if an obscure hurt” (1983, 415), a constant pain resulting from a back injury received in 1861, which prevented him from actions like those of his younger brother Wilky, who participated in the Civil War and became a hero. The second event relates to his deplorable performance in a moot-court exercise in front of his class: […] I figured my shame for years much in the image of my having stood forth before an audience with a fiddle and bow and trusted myself to rub them together desperately enough (after the fashion of Rousseau in a passage of the Confessions,) to make some appearance of music (James 1983, 438).

The evocation of the ingenious example of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his provocative autobiography as a counter-model to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, relativizes the impression of being a failure. More importantly, failure seems to become a prerequisite of a modern existence, also visible in James’ compatriot Henry Adams. This shows in Henry James’ conversion of a felt failure into “an interesting failure” that generates creative energy:

6.2 North America 

 1239

We were to convert and convert, success – in the sense that was in the general air – or no success; and simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble stuff […] (James 1983, 123).

Clearly, Henry James, like his brother William, keeps a distance to the materialistic notions of the modern age and emphasizes the importance of the mind and spiritual life. Toward the end of Notes from a Son and Brother James explains his concept and configuration of a modern autobiography: I am fully aware while I go, I should mention, of all that flows from the principle governing, by my measure, those recoveries and reflections – even to the effect, hoped for at least, of stringing their apparently dispersed and disordered parts upon a fine silver thread; none other than the principle of response to a long-sought occasion, now gratefully recognized, for making trial of the recording and figuring act on behalf of some case of the imaginative faculty under cultivation. The personal history, as it were, of an imagination, a lively one of course, in a given and favorable case, had always struck me as a task that a teller of tales might rejoice in, his advance through it conceivably causing at every step some rich precipitation – unless it be rather that the play of strong imaginative passion, passion strong enough to be, for its subject or victim, the very interest of life, constitutes in itself an endless crisis (James 1983, 454).

A remedy for failures and crises in life for James as “a man of imagination at the active pitch” (James 1983, 455) is the narrative “upon a fine silver threat” (1983, 454) which provides the unifying function of illusion for the autobiographical retrospective. The repetition of life as a reunion with his country in The American Scene, as a revision of his narrative work in the Prefaces, and as an imaginative reliving of early childhood and youth, up to the discovery of writing as a vocation juxtaposes the configuration of the text as a unity to the contingency of life (Hornung 1989, 218). James’s lifelong belief that “it is art that makes life” (James 1915 qtd. in Miller 1972, 91) also governs his autobiographical narratives and generates oneness: “To feel a unity, a character and a tone in one’s impression, to feel them related and all harmoniously coloured, that was positively to face the aesthetic, the creative, even quite wondrously, the critical life and almost on the spot to commence author” (James 1983, 253). The virtual self of the author of fictional worlds and characters substitutes the small boy, son, and brother of the first part of his life. Hence, the autobiographical narratives are complemented by an aesthetic theory and practice for the pursuit of oneness. The gradual transition in the narration from the first-person ‘I’ to the indefinite pronoun ‘one’ seems to indicate grammatically the yearning for unity in the textual creation. The pursuit of oneness is also the ultimate goal of the cultural historian Henry Adams. He was the descendant of an eminent New England family and his great-grandfather and grandfather had served respectively as the second and sixth presidents of the United States. As the son of Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador in London, Adams felt his inadequacy to continue in this line of political offices and became – like Henry James – a man of letters rather than a man of action. His magisterial autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, completed in 1905 and privately published in 1906,

1240 

 6 The Americas

eventually appeared posthumously edited by Henry Cabot Lodge in 1918. It is guided by his belief that the formal education he received in American institutions in the nineteenth century did not prepare him for the exigencies of the twentieth century. Thus, he situates his life in the relational coordinates of the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, as spelled out at the end of chapter 29, “The Abyss of Ignorance”, and cited in the “Editor’s Preface”, which is signed by Cabot Lodge but was written by Adams himself in 1915. In it, he declares that it was his great ambition to complete St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity. The scheme became unmanageable as he approached his end (Adams 1918, xxi).

In the “Preface” dated in 1907 and signed by himself, Adams refers to Benjamin ­Franklin’s model of self-teaching and quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions as a first modern autobiography in which the French author erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure (Adams 1918, xxiv).

Adams seems to counteract this loss of substance and the reduction of the human subject to a selfless form by seeing his evolution from the perspective of a historian. Rather than speaking of himself in the first-person singular, he refers to himself as the historical figure of Henry Adams in the third person. Thereby, he endows his object of study with superior qualities, which set the tone from the very beginning: “Under the shadow of Boston State House […] in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle […] as Henry Brooks Adams” (Adams 1918, 3). Placing himself from the outset into the impressive line of eminent autobiographers – Augustine, Franklin, Rousseau –, and sketching the illustrious line of his descent from the New England nobility, he sets up the parameters of his twofold and ambivalent approach to his self-representation, which profits and suffers from this allegiance at the same time. Thus, the wide range of important experiences as a student and professor of history at Harvard University, his travels in Europe, and encounters with vestiges of medieval religiosity in the cathedrals of Chartres and Mont Saint Michel, as well as his impressive publications are inevitably seen as failures at the end of each chapter because of the wrong education. At the same time, they demonstrate his eminent status as an ingenious historian and a great American mind. This quality of ambidexterity at work throughout Adams’ autobiography is best exemplified in his account of the Chicago Exposition of 1893, ended in 1900, where he sees a relation between the energy of medieval religiosity and that of modern electric-

6.2 North America 

 1241

ity. In the best-known chapter of The Education, “The Dynamo and the Virgin” (Adams 1918, Ch. 25), Henry Adams registers an inexplicable connection between the supersensual forces emanating from an occult machine and from medieval cathedrals: “No more relation could he discover between the steam and electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith” (1918, 381). Part of the inadequacy of his formal education in America was the ignorance of the power of sexual forces, such as he recognizes from his European trips in the Greek goddess Venus or the Virgin of Christianity: “Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done […]” (1918, 388–389). Adams’ nostalgia for the unifying religious force of the Middle Ages erotically focused on the Virgin contrasts with his experience of the disintegrating signs of multiplicity. In his “dynamic theory of history” (Ch. 33), he predicts an entropic universe subject to “a law of acceleration” (Ch. 34) and doomed to destruction. Sadly he recognizes and sums up his dilemma: “In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man” (1918, 451). The autobiographical account offers the illusion of narrative order and promises a form of oneness over the chaotic fragmentation of life. The increasing use of the indefinite pronoun ‘one’ for the personal pronoun ‘he’ – as in Henry James’s autobiography – indicates Henry Adams’ dream realized in his autobiography. The resort to autobiographical approaches in modernism seems to be a response to the effacement of the subject, which Henry Adams deduced from Rousseau’s Confessions. It is a narrative means to counteract the frailty of the self with reference to the author. Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novels, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935), are based on the writer’s Southern origin in Ashville, North Carolina, his displacement to the North as a student at Harvard, his travels to Europe, and the seemingly impossible return to his home. In this sense, the autobiographical mode correlates with the existentialist stance during the interwar period. In the 1950s and the turbulent 1960s autobiographical texts become important instruments in the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, and student protest movements and are used for the emancipation of minorities and marginal figures who claim a new identity, different from the American mainstream. At the same time, postmodern writers play and experiment with forms based on the assumption that the subject as well as the author are dead.

1242 

 6 The Americas

Protest Movements and Postmodernism The most impressive example of a Civil Rights autobiography is that of Malcolm X. Born as Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, he records in his autobiography the transformation and conversion from a repressed boy, who loses his father in battle with the Ku Klux Klan and grows up in a foster home when his mother becomes mentally ill, to a self-confident Black Muslim and a powerful leader of the African American cause until his assassination in 1965. Although The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) is a collaboration with Alex Haley, who provided the chronological narrative from dictation and conversations with the Black leader, it aligns generically with Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative, Booker T. Washington’s life writing, and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. After the dramatic opening detailing his father’s death, the autobiography covers his gradual emancipation from a miserable childhood and repressed education to the celebration of a free life style in Boston that ends in prison. The seven-year prison experience is the crucial turning point in his life when he discovers the Nation of Islam and converts from the Christian slave religion of his minister father to the Islamic religion and drops his slave name for an X, referring to his unknown African name. Instructed by letters from and literature by the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, he becomes aware of a different course of human history and learns about “Yacub’s History” (Malcolm X 1966, 164): Original Man was black, in the continent called Africa where the human race had emerged on the planet Earth. The black man, original man, built great empires and civilizations and cultures while the white man was still living on all fours in caves (Malcolm X 1966, 162).

His sister Hilda informs him about “Yacub’s History” in which the existence of the white race is based on a dispute between Allah and one of his followers and scientists, Yacub, who could breed races. Embittered toward Allah, Yacub “decided, as a revenge, to create upon the earth a devil race – a bleached-out, white race of people” (Malcolm X 1966, 165). Hence the appellation of “‘[t]he devil white man,’ who down through history, out of his devilish nature, had pillaged, murdered, raped, and exploited every race of man not white” (1966, 164). While Malcolm is called ‘Satan’ by the white prison guards, he reacts by using the name of “the devil white man” (1966, 162). After his release from prison, he becomes one of the most outspoken ministers of the Nation of Islam and a strong supporter of Elijah Muhammad. A final turning point in his life occurs after his pilgrimage to Mecca where he realizes that the religion of Islam is a universal belief of all people regardless of color and that the question of African Americans is one of class, not of race. To indicate this new position he adopts the Muslim name of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. In a conversation with a white American ambassador in Africa, he formulates his new insight:

6.2 North America 

 1243

“[…] it isn’t the American white man who is a racist, but it’s the American political, economic, and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.” […] the white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly (Malcolm X 1966, 371).

This insight coincides with his growing estrangement from Elijah Muhammad’s illicit behavior and he leaves the Nation of Islam to found his own Organization of Afro-American Unity. In a long “Epilogue”, Alex Haley describes the making of the autobiography and the ramifications of Malcolm’s assassination by members of the Nation of Islam. African Americans in the South took different routes to the participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King’s pacifist and Christian approach contrasts with that of Malcolm X, also in autobiographical letters and speeches. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” of 16 April 1963, or his “I have a Dream” speech on the occasion of the March on Washington in August 1963, King bases his plea for equality and civil status regardless of color on his own life and that of his family. Even more difficult is the situation of African American women growing up in the South. Anne Moody’s (1940–2015) autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), recapitulates the painful stages of the double trouble of being Black and female in her young life. In four parts, Moody traces her evolution from childhood through education in high school and college to a member of the Civil Rights Movement. The experience of the break-up in her family, the discrimination suffered while working in white households and while attending school is compounded by two violent events, which propel her to revolutionary actions. The first event occurs during her first year in high school and concerns the brutal murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year old Black boy on a visit in Mississippi from Chicago, for allegedly whistling at a white woman in an offensive manner. The second is the death of four Black girls from a bomb that exploded in a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, during Sunday morning service to oppose desegregation. While at Toogaloo College near Jackson, Mississippi, she participates in the successful boycott of the campus cafeteria and becomes a member of the NAACP. Her rejection of Martin Luther King’s conciliatory tactics shows in her participation in a sit-in at a Woolworth counter in Jackson. In spite of the retaliation of white supremacy and short-term stays in prison, she continues her fight for equality. Her autobiography ends on the bus to Washington, D.C., to participate in the March almost against her own will since all the setbacks have made her wonder about the success of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the tenets of the women’s movement in the 1960s, ‘the personal is the political’, generated and informed many autobiographical ventures by women and ethnic minorities. Experiencing precarious situations early in life, necessitates the writing of one’s life at a young age and leads to a succession of autobiographical renditions throughout life, as seen in autobiographies by Black authors and women. Maya Angelou (1928–2014) is a case in point for this thematic and generic principle.

1244 

 6 The Americas

In a series of seven autobiographical installments, she covers her long and diversified life from her birth through the turbulent 1960s up to the twenty-first century, with the last installment Mom & Me & Mom (2013), remembering the relationship with her mother. The first in the series, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), covers her first seventeen years, in which she experienced racism and sexism in the South. The break-up of the family in St. Louis, Missouri, the name change from Marguerite to Maya, intermittent stays with her beloved grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, and the intraracial violence of rape inflicted upon her as an eight-year old girl by her mother’s boyfriend Freeman, form the platform from which she tries to emancipate herself as an independent Black woman. The progress from wanting to be white to the realization of blackness and the identification with “the wonderful beautiful Negro race” (Angelou 1980, 156) culminates in a process of recognition at the end of her years in George Washington High School and the awareness of obstacles to her goal in life: Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn’t know what I was aware of. […] The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power (Angelou 1980, 230–231).

Based on this new self-confidence, Angelou becomes the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco and gives birth to her son at the age of seventeen. At the end of this first autobiography, the stage is set for her wide-ranging career as a poet, singer, dancer, actress, and activist, including a three-year stay in Ghana where she meets Malcolm X, whom she helps to build the Organization of Afro-American Unity after her return to the US in 1965. In 2011, Barack Obama, for whom she had campaigned, presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her outstanding achievements. Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) and Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) write similar feminist success stories based on their careers as writers. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), McCarthy recollects the peculiar circumstances of her early life when she loses her parents and is exposed to different religious influences. In eight episodes she recalls her happy childhood in Seattle in a loving family with three brothers until the death of her parents caused by a flu epidemic, her upbringing between the age of six and eleven in the Catholic household of an unloving great aunt, the attendance of a Catholic convent school thereafter, and vacations with her maternal grandparents of Jewish and Presbyterian denomination. Exposed to these different belief systems, she is seriously concerned about salvation and eventually becomes an atheist. At the same time, the oscillation between different religious authorities prompts her early exercises in role-plays, including falling in and out of religions: “[…] [T]he only thing left for me to do was to enact a simulated conversion. […] I was going to pretend to be converted in the night, by a dream” (McCarthy 1957, 123). This alternation between different positions of reality and make-believe also becomes a trademark of her writing

6.2 North America 

 1245

and is reflected in her autobiography, in which she modulates between actual memories and fictions: Many a time, in the course of doing these memoirs, I have wished that I were writing fiction. The temptation to invent has been very strong, particularly where recollection is hazy and I remember the substance of an event but not the details […]. Then there are cases where I am not sure myself whether I am making something up. I think I remember but I am not positive. […] If there is more fiction in it than I know, I should like to be set right; in some instances, which I shall call attention to later, my memory has already been corrected (McCarthy 1957, 3–4).

This interrelation between autobiographical narrative and fictional design becomes a hallmark of Mary McCarthy’s follow-up autobiography How I Grew (1987), as well as of novels and short stories based on her own experiences in Vassar College and among the prominent figures of the literary scene in New York City. The fluctuations between memory and fiction as well as the awareness of the fallibility of memory and its substitution with illusory imaginations increasingly determine autobiographical narratives in the modernist and postmodern phases of the twentieth century. A frequent means to compensate for this dilemma is the resort to innovative techniques often taken from painting. Similar to Gertrude Stein’s correlation of writing with a canvas and Stein’s concept of ‘portrait writing’, the leftist liberal playwright Lillian Hellman refers to the phenomenon of ‘pentimento’ to characterize her reproduction of the past: Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter “repented,” changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now (Hellman 1979, 309).

In this second of a series of four autobiographies, which started with An Unfinished Woman (1969) and her formation of a feminist stance also maintained in her relationship with Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman used her ‘pentimento’ approach to create portraits of important people in her life. In her portrait of Julia, a childhood friend in New York, whom she helped in her underground work against the Nazis while travelling in Germany in 1936, for example, she recounts agreeing to smuggle funds to be used in the resistance against fascism. The veracity of this presentation, also made into a movie, was contested among others by Mary McCarthy, and the fight between the two writers resulted in a lawsuit. When Hellman proceeded to give an autobiographical account, in Scoundrel Time (1976), of her involvement with the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s and her troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the Joseph R. McCarthy era, she received further criticism for her association with Stalinist politics and for misrepresenting her part in her

1246 

 6 The Americas

relationships with people. It is not surprising that she added a fourth autobiographical piece in the series, Maybe (1980), in which she addressed the issue of actual facts discolored by the use of fiction. The sliding scale between memory and fiction leads to the eventual dissolution of the boundary between fact and fiction in postmodern experiments with the autobiographical mode. Writers like Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) or Philip Roth (1933–2018) play with the genre of autobiographical narratives as a literary therapy. Repeatedly, Philip Roth uses the structure of autobiography to review his Jewish upbringing and rebellion against Orthodox Judaism in mainstream American society. My Life as a Man (1974) retells, in the form of an autobiographical persona, his Jewish adolescence, unhappy marriage, and career as a writer after the death of his wife in a car accident. Vladimir Nabokov gives his novel Lolita (1955) an autobiographical frame in which Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of the fictional narrative, confesses his sexual fixation on young girls and the murder of his imaginary competitor for Lolita. This parody of a confessional and therapeutic autobiography playfully interacts with the fiction of erotic adventures in the body of the text. In his autobiography proper Conclusive Evidence (1951), revised in 1966 as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Nabokov traces important stages of his Russian life from the perspective of his exile. For the recuperation of these scenes of his youth, he employs two technical devices, the ‘laterna magica’ and the microscope. While the ‘laterna magica’ projects miniature historical scenes onto a wall, the microscope magnifies minute details, such as the parts of insects needed for his favorite occupation of collecting butterflies. The combination of both devices explains the interaction of fact and fiction, knowledge and imagination: “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic” (Nabokov 1979, 166–167). The abolition of the boundary between fact and fiction, the creation of fictions upon fictions, gives way to metafictional games with autobiographical features. A prime example is John Barth’s (born 1930) autobiographical collection of tales, Lost in the Funhouse (1968). The stories trace Ambrose Bierce’s life from his conception and childhood via a visit to a fair on the beach in Maryland on his birthday to the discovery and evolution as a writer. The biographical data of Ambrose’s life correspond with those of the postmodern author John Barth. In addition to the application of a twofold autobiographical narrative, Barth reflects on the nature of such self-representations in “Life-Story”, which chronologically records the writer’s day on Monday, 20 June 1966, at 9:00 a.  m. when he sets out to compose “another story about a writer writing a story” (1978, 114). This process of writing is occasionally interrupted by his wife, who reminds him at midnight of his birthday:

6.2 North America 

 1247

“Happy Birthday,” said his wife et cetera, kissing him et cetera to obstruct his view of the end of the sentence he was nearing the end of, playfully refusing to be nay-said so that in fact he did at last as did his fictional character end his ending story endless by interruption, cap his pen … (Barth 1978, 126).

The record of a single day on the author’s birthday as part of a collection of stories of the author’s fictional ‘alter ego’ reduplicates the process of self-representation. In other stories, the genre of autobiography is the subject of metafictional reflections, such as “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction”. It takes up the subtitle of Lost in the Funhouse – “Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice”. In this story, the incessant advance of the tape recorder generates a form of life writing, which consists of an obsessive outpouring of memory and imagination. The listening to the recording succeeds the recording of a life story on tape. Both speaker and listener, writer and reader, participate in the production of a spoken life. I perceive that I have no body. […] I’m not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don’t think . . . I know what I am talking about. […] You who listen give me life in a manner of speaking (Barth 1978, 33, 35).

The participatory role of readers in the construction of writing extends equally to the autobiographical texts. It also prepares the way for readers to become life writers themselves. After the turbulent sixties, with the accentuation of public life and open-air performances of self-presentation, the 1970s bring an inward turn of the so-called ‘me decade’. A massive turn to autobiography as a manifestation of the other self in mainstream society occurs in the 1980s. The new political programs of the two Reagan administrations, which focus on the economic evolution of the business elite at the expense of the poorer sections of society, provoke the formation of new areas of research and protest activities. New autobiographical concerns address the needs of race, class, and gender and are written in the service of identity politics. The impressive output of autobiographies by women and ethnic writers is accompanied by the emergence of critical autobiography scholarship, such as James Olney’s volume Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980), which set the standard for innovation and opened up an array of different approaches for autobiography research and also enticed scholars and intellectuals to engage in life writing.

Postcolonial, Postnational, Ecological Life Writing Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940), Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004), Angela Davis (born 1944), and Gerald Vizenor (born 1934) stand paradigmatically for Chinese American, Chicana, African American and Native American autobiographers. They focus on

1248 

 6 The Americas

their ethnic identities as writers, scholars and intellectuals and importantly promote the possibilities of autobiographical representation. The second-generation Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston grapples with her position as the female descendant of a Chinese family growing up in the 1960s in California. Both gender and ethnicity frame The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976). In five chapters, the autobiographical persona recounts episodes of her life in America along with myths and stories of the Chinese past her mother recounts to her. In this process of education and maturation at home and in school, Maxine evolves from the inferior position of a young girl to that of an independent woman. Stages in this process are indicated by the story about her aunt, the “No-Name Woman” (Ch. 1), who was shamed into killing herself and her son born out of wedlock in a remote Chinese village; the embracing of the mythic story of Fa Mu Lan, who fights for her father as a warrior woman; the emotional identification with her mother’s sister, whose Chinese husband had left her for an American wife; and the imitation of the historical example of an exiled Chinese poetess, T’sai Yen, who survives among the barbarians, and gains a transcultural competence in exile. The autobiography ends with Maxine’s career as a writer who has advanced from listening to her mother’s talk-stories to telling them herself. In a follow-up autobiography, China Men (1980), Kingston moves from the issue of sexism suffered by Chinese women in China and the United States to the issue of racism. Thus, she complements the picture of her family with the male side and gives an autobiographical record of four generations of her ancestors, starting with the life of her great-grandfather on a sugar plantation in Hawai’i, and her grandfather’s work for the railroads, her father’s laundry business in California, and her brother’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Both autobiographical projects are crucial stepping-stones on her way to becoming an emancipated woman and writer in America and document a transcultural political identity. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) originates in the physical borderland of Texas ‒ U.S. Southwest and Mexico and addresses the psychological, sexual, and spiritual borderlands of its Chicano/a inhabitants. It is both a communal autobiography of all Mexicans and the transcultural creation of a Chicana identity as the new mestiza. In the preface, the author states her autobiographical project: This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial images; with the unique positionings consciousness takes at these confluent streams […] (Anzaldúa 1987, n. pag.).

Throughout, the autobiographical narrative mediates between two different ideas to arrive at an innovative confluence. It concerns the history of the Mexican war (1846–1848), after which the northern part of Mexico became the Southwest of the United States, transforming Mexican citizens into American Chicanos and Chicanas. This binational existence also implied a bilingual form of communication between

6.2 North America 

 1249

English and Spanish, announced in the bilingual title and emphasized in the alternation between the two languages in the autobiographical text. The combination of a prose narrative in the first part with a poetry section in the second reflects Anazaldúa’s intention to pave the way for new forms of self-representations, also visible in the autobiographical nature of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, simultaneously practiced by Susan Howe (born 1937) and Ron Silliman (born 1946), which employs language as a creative process of personal experience. The most important feature for Anzaldúa’s self is the construction of an independent woman with a lesbian identity who emancipates herself from the male domination in a patriarchal Latino society. The African American Angela Davis (born 1944) likewise uses An Autobiography (1974) for political purposes and to counteract racist and sexist attitudes in society. In many ways, her autobiography takes up the tradition of the slave narrative and African American life writing. Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in a mixed neighborhood, Davis consciously realizes the racist discrimination only by way of comparison when she attends high school in New York City. Her political activism for the cause of black people is triggered by the Birmingham killing of four black girls in church in 1963, when she joins the NAACP and participates in the Civil Rights Movement. The autobiography, however, does not relate her life in chronological terms but presents it from the perspective of her experience in prison, which resulted from her engagement in the black power movement and membership in the Communist Party. Her arrest in New York and imprisonment in Palo Alto, California, frame the narrative and characterize her efforts to prove her innocence in the trial and to communicate her political struggle for freedom. The resort to autobiography at the young age of 29 re-emphasizes the crisis felt by women and ethnic minorities early in life. Her life and her life writing become paradigmatic for other people suffering from the global system of capitalism and fighting for survival. The more the movement for my freedom increased in numbers, strength and confidence, the more imperative it became for everyone to see it not as something exceptional but as a small part of a great fight against injustice, one bough in a solidly rooted tree of resistance. It was not only political repression, but racism, poverty, police brutality, drugs, and all the myriad ways Black, Brown, Yellow and white working people are kept chained to misery and despair (Davis 1988, 382). Angela Davis’ fight also has a transnational dimension, as for example when she does research for her dissertation at the University of Frankfurt ‒ where she experiences the political resistance in the student demonstrations ‒ or when she eventually gets her PhD in philosophy from Humboldt University in East Berlin in 1972. Autobiographies by Native Americans in the twentieth century start out with oral forms of communal narratives as told to white men. The most famous example is Black Elk Speaks (1932), in which Black Elk, an Oglala medicine man, gives an account of his experiences of confrontations with American forces, such as the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, and relates aspects of tribal life to John G. Neihardt, a poet and writer. After the Native American renaissance in the 1960s, Native authors write their own

1250 

 6 The Americas

autobiographies in which they invariably adopt a communal voice. Thus, the Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday (born 1934) retells in The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) the story of the historic Indian Removal of the 1830s and his tribe’s journey on the ‘Trail of Tears’ from the East Coast to the reservations in the West. He follows up this historical tale with The Names: A Memoir (1976), in which he combines personal memories with Kiowa myths and historical events. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor (born 1934), an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation, in Minnesota, uses the second edition of his autobiography, Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (2009 [1990]), to relate the Indigenous knowledge of his tribe to contemporary ecological concerns. Arguing from his Native perspective, he refutes the ideology of a ‘human exceptionalism’ rooted in the mentality of a European settler colonialism that posits categorical differences between human and non-human nature and opts for a commonality of all organic life in the biosphere. Rather than foregrounding the autobiographical self, he begins Interior Landscapes with the genealogy of his descent from the tribal crane totem: When the earth was new six tricksters posed as humans on a wild landscape; one revealed the power of a trickster stare, a mortal wound to humans, and then returned to the sea. The others abided on the earth as totems and endured as the crane, loon, bear, marten, and catfish clans. There are other totems in tribal narratives, but these five were the first woodland families. The crane is one of the original five totems of the Anishinaabe (Vizenor 2009, 3).

In order to grammatically mark the natural union between the human and animal world he uses the personal pronoun “me” (Vizenor 1998, 142). His belief in the trans-species interdependence of all organic life ties in with the ‘Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth’ formulated during the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in April 2010. The same kind of spirit also informs the autobiographies of the Japanese Canadian scientist turned activist, David Suzuki (born 1936). In two consecutive autobiographies, Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life (1987) and David Suzuki: The Autobiography (2006), Suzuki relates his evolution from a scientist interested in genetics to a transnational ecological activist. While in Metamorphosis he recollects at the age of fifty and in mid-career his family’s experience of racist discrimination in British Columbia after Pearl Harbor and reflects on the progress of his professional life, in The Autobiography he shifts the focus to a transnational and transcultural analysis of his encounter with Indigenous people. In Metamorphosis, he recognizes the importance of his father’s “Japanese cultural roots” and his claim “to be a Shintoist” and “a worshipper of nature” (Suzuki 1987, 42). In The Autobiography, he analyzes his first encounter with Natives in the company of his father and eventually realizes the common tradition of cultural origins and nature worship.

6.2 North America 

 1251

I realize now that he [Suzuki’s father; A.H.] automatically exhibited the quality that First Nations people tell us is so critical in order to communicate: respect. It would be a long time before I realized how much our shared genetic heritage – that is, our physical features – made First Nations people immediately more receptive to me (Suzuki 2006, 11).

This recognition is part of his decision to extend his classroom teaching to a television audience in 1979 by joining the very popular CBC show The Nature of Things as a host, covering a wide range of scientific and philosophical matters. Thirteen out of eighteen chapters of Suzuki’s Autobiography are descriptions of ecological projects, which range from environmental work by First Nations people in Canada to Indigenous life in the rain forests of Brazil, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. This transIndigenous bond of personal relations allows Suzuki to set up a transnational organization of environmentalists and to influence political decisions at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the Kyoto Convention on Climate Change (Suzuki 2006, 267–286, 305–323). The goal is a planetary alliance of all ‘nature people’ and their common goal of the preservation of planet Earth, summarized in his “Declaration of Interdependence” (Suzuki 2006, 275–277). An ecofeminist position is the purpose of Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). In this life narrative, the scholar for Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and activist establishes a genealogical relationship between her family, the settlement of the land by Mormons and the biosphere of the state of Utah characterized by its Great Salt Lake and desert areas in the Southwest of the United States. On the one hand, she recognizes an analogy between natural disasters, such as the flooding of the Lake, which causes the retreat of migratory birds, and the well-being of human beings. Over time, nature restores the equilibrium of all organic life. On the other hand, Williams exposes the destructive exploitation of nature in the course of the “above ground atomic testing in Nevada […] from January 27, 1951 through July 11, 1962” (2001, 283), which has led to a rising rate of cancer diseases in the region. In the Prologue and Epilogue, “The Clan of OneBreasted Women”, she connects the losses and grieves the deaths of seven members of her family who died of cancer, including her mother, grandmothers, and her brother. In protest, she participates in an illegal walk-in on the testing ground joined in spirit by Native American “sisters across the mesa” (2001, 289). The collaborative efforts of all forces in the common environment find their expression in Tempest Williams’ life writing as part of the general healing process of nature: Volunteers are beginning to reconstruct the marshes just as I am trying to reconstruct my life. I sit on the floor of my study with journals all around me. I open them and feathers fall from their pages, sand cracks their spines, and sprigs of sage pressed between passages of plain heighten my sense of smell – and I remember the country I come from and how it informs my life. […] I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself […] (Williams 2001, 3–4).

1252 

 6 The Americas

Life writing as a form of healing has become a frequent practice in past and present and has opened up new areas of research. Over and above the conventional assumption of the therapeutic function of autobiographical texts, the open discussion of medical issues and the authentic representation of diseases have entered the field of life writing. The African American poet Audre Lorde openly communicates her history of breast cancer in The Cancer Journals (1980) as “a Black Lesbian Feminist Experience” (1997, 23) to break the public silence about the disease and to seek alliance among women equally effected. Science writer Rebecca Skloot takes up the unrecorded fate of the African American woman Henrietta Lacks, whose premature death of cervical cancer provided the basis in the postwar years for an unacknowledged medical exploitation. Skloot’s biography The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) traces the history of the tremendous success of the “HeLa” cells gained from Lacks’ body and seeks to restore the rights of her family over their mother’s legacy. In the process of writing, the biographer also becomes the subject of her simultaneous autobiography. Temple Grandin relates her life with autism in Thinking in Pictures (1995). Rather than deploring the pitfalls of an autistic experience she records and demonstrates the alternative capabilities available to her, which result in her special relation to animals, especially cows, and her linkage of autism and genius. The successful American novelist and critic Siri Hustvedt (born 1955) uses life writing to explore the sudden eruption of shaking incidents in The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves (2010). She connects the decisive trigger of shaking to her father’s death and a memorial two years later at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she gave a speech and “began to shudder violently from the neck down. My arms flapped. My knees knocked. I shook as if I were having a seizure. […] When the speech ended, the shaking stopped” (2011a, 3). This incident sets the author on a narrative journey through different psychotherapy clinics, self-help groups and the engagement with neuroscience. All excursions into the history of literature and psychiatric treatments lead to no solution. In the end, Siri Hustvedt reconciles herself with reference to Saint Augustine’s Confessions and his correlation of memory, feelings, and the body to acknowledge her shaking self in her double role of doctor and patient (2011b, 187). In several public appearances on television programs, she performs her life writing in conversations with psychiatrists and neuroscientists (Hornung 2016). The interrelation of life writing and life sciences as performed by Hustvedt and Antonío Damásio (2010) has become part of research in the medical humanities. These increasing signs of the interaction of personal and scholarly experiences led to the cooperation of colleagues in medicine and the humanities, such as the Research Training Group “Life Sciences, Life Writing: Experiences at the Boundaries of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience”, at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. These kinds of transdisciplinary collaborations set up new research agendas beyond the conventional philological approaches to life writing. The inclusion of the media, especially the many possibilities of the social media and the internet, have multiplied life writing approaches exponentially. Thus, sociologists have

6.2 North America 

 1253

joined humanities scholars to focus on photographs, pictures and films as life writing (Heinze and Hornung 2013). The Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London and its European Research Council-Funded “Ego-Media” spearhead the efforts to account for online and offline autobiographical expressions (see Poletti and Rak 2014). All of these approaches combine in the composition and evaluation of popular examples of life writing with political incentives. Elections have frequently provoked the writing of campaign biographies and autobiographies. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), a classmate of the author at Bowdoin College, or John Locke Scripps’ Vote Lincoln! The Presidential Campaign Biography of Abraham Lincoln (1860) are early historical examples. A variation of this genre of campaign biography is the writing of a presidential autobiography after leaving the White House, like the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1885), which Mark Twain successfully marketed after the president’s death. In the contemporary period Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995/2004), Hillary Clinton’s Living History (2003) and Hard Choices (2014), Mitt Romney’s No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (2010), and Donald Trump’s Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America (2015) are instructive examples of winners and losers in the race. They are accompanied by the genre of the biopic, filmed campaign biographies, such as A Mother’s Promise: Barack Obama Bio Film (2008) (dir. David Guggenheim, prod. Lesley Chilcott). Increasingly, the popular genre of the graphic novel is used for autobiographical representations. The resort to the possibilities of the comic strip mode in conjunction with life writing touches on serious historical topics difficult to express in discursive writing. The affirmation of the rights of ethnic groups in past and present, the manifestation of alternative life styles and catastrophic events are frequently treated. Thus, the Canadian comic-strip artist Charles Brown composes a comic-strip biography of Louis Riel (2003), in which he celebrates the historic deeds of the Franco-Canadian freedom fighter in his battle with English colonizers in the nineteenth century. The breakthrough for this type of autobiographical genre was the publication of Art Spiegelman’s two-volume Maus, in which he recovers his Jewish family’s survival of the Holocaust in Auschwitz, his birth in Sweden in 1948 and the immigration to the United States in 1951. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, also known as Maus I: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began (1991) are serious engagements with the repercussions of the holocaust on his family and the difficulties in their acculturation in the New World, which include his mother’s unexplained suicide. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York are a second topic, which Spiegelman takes up for his genre of “commix” autobiography (Spiegelman qtd. in Chaney 2011, 5). In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) covers major aspects of 9/11, his personal involvement on the day of the attack when he takes his daughter to school and the political confrontation between the United States and transnational terrorism. He also relates the disaster to the holocaust by way of his father’s memory of the extermination of Jewish lives.

1254 

 6 The Americas

The engagement of the different media is also obvious in autobiographies in the service of human rights. Thus, Waris Dirie uses her success as a model in London and an ambassador for the United Nations to fight the continued exploitation of women in Africa and Female Genital Mutilation in her memoir, Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad (1998). Her escape from the miserable condition of a helpless girl in Somalia via Ethiopia to the glamorous career in the West is later made into a film and contributes to the awareness of women subject to male regimes in Africa. Ishmael Beah uses his memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) to relate his involvement in the civil war in Sierra Leone as a child soldier, who eventually makes his way to a rehabilitation camp and becomes a U.S.-based activist and goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and other international organizations against the use of child soldiers in armed conflict. The public display of his story and life in Starbuck’s cafés contributes to the popular acclaim of his life story and to the political awareness. Migrants and refugees who recapitulate their journeys of life once they arrive in the host lands of North America have used similar narrative strategies. The Canadian writers Michael Ondaatje (born 1943) and Dionne Brand (born 1953) are cases in point. Multiple migrations eventually lead the two postcolonial writers to Toronto. Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka in 1978 and 1980 after having left the island in 1954 at the age of eleven. The intention is to write about his family’s participation in the colonial history, his temporary stay with his mother in England and his eventual residence in Toronto. Running in the Family (1982) consists of anecdotes, personal documents, private conversations, diaries, visitors’ books, family books and affairs rather than a straightforward autobiographical master narrative. In the reconstruction of the Dutch and English colonization of Ceylon from 1600 onward, his father figures as a counteragent in the twentieth century. This idea is supported by the inclusion of family photographs, such as his parents’ wedding, which form a counterpoint to the narrative. Instead of a historical storyline, Ondaatje’s goal is the mapping of a transcultural and transnational self. Dionne Brand’s efforts to find the origin of her family in A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001) are forever hampered by the history of slavery. Born as an African-Caribbean in Guayguayare, Trinidad, she does not receive an answer from her grandfather about their origin in Africa. In spite of all the geographical maps, she cannot reconstruct her family’s identity: There are maps to the Door of No Return. The physical door. They are well worn, gone over by cartographer after cartographer, refined from Ptolemy’s Geographia to orbital photographs and magnetic field imaging satellites. But to the Door of No Return which is illuminated in the consciousness of Blacks in the Diaspora there are no maps. This door is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location. It is also perhaps a psychic destination. Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return (Brand 2002, Epitaph).

6.2 North America 

 1255

After her migration to Toronto, she does not identify as a Canadian citizen, but rather locates her life geographically between the tenth and forty-fifth parallel denying the idea of a nation-state. “I am without destination; that is one of the inherited traits of the Diaspora. I am simply where I am; the next thought leads me to the next place” (Brand 2002, 250, 150–151). Like Ondaatje’s, Brand’s life writing appears to be a substitute for the (postcolonial) myth of the narrative recuperation of a home. Instead, the subject of life writing has become a transcultural and transnational one. It is no surprise that autobiographies have become a major form of expression in North America. As the classic countries of immigration Canada and the United States of America have attracted many people from different parts of the world who in the process of acculturation needed to adapt to the conditions in the new land, often with resort to forms of life writing. In the contemporary period the practice and performance of life writing (Grace and Wasserman 2006) have become a fashion and popular media of self-expression (Rak 2013). The abundance of autobiographical manifestations also finds its equivalent in the impact of autobiography scholarship originating in North America. The journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, first published in 1985, represents the flagship of life writing research. Its editors, Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen, have published The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader (2016) as a reflection of the state of the art. North American autobiography scholarship also extends to South America hemispherically (Chansky 2017) and to the Anglophone world. Likewise, it influences decisively life writing research in other parts of the world and has begun to interact with it.

Works Cited Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918. Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). New York: Signet Classic, 1961. Addams, Jane. Second Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1930. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Antin, Mary. The Promised Land: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant (1912). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: aunte lute books, 1987. Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine (397–400). Trans. Rex Warner. New York: New American Library, 1963. Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse (1968). New York: Bantom, 1978. Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. A: Literature to 1820 (1979). New York: Norton & Company, 6th ed. 2003. Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Bradstreet, Anne. “To my dear children.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. A: Literature to 1820 (1979). Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton & Company, 6th ed. 2003. 272–275. Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001). Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2011.

1256 

 6 The Americas

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. Buell, Lawrence. “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale.” Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 227–248. Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez. “The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. A: Literature to 1820 (1979). Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton & Company, 6th ed. 2003. 71–80Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginning of American Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Capelle, Birgit. “Asian Aspects of Temporal Experience in Transcendentalist Life Writing.” Ecology and Life Writing. Ed. Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. 99–108. Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Ed. Michael K. Goldberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-made Man. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Champlain, Samuel de. “The Voyages of Sieur de Champlain.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. A: Literature to 1820 (1979). Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton & Company, 6th ed. 2003. 88–97. Chaney, Michael A. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Chansky, Ricia Anne, ed. Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing. New York: Routledge, 2017. Chansky, Ricia Anne, and Emily Hipchen, eds. The Routledge Autobiography Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2016. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Davis, Angela. An Autobiography (1974). New York: International Publishers, 1988. Däwes, Birgit. Native North American Theater in a Global Age: Sites of Identity Construction and Transdifference. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Delbanco, Andrew. “Introduction.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Representative Men: Seven Lectures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. vii–xiv. Dietrich, Maria. Ausbruch aus der Knechtschaft: Das amerikanische Slave Narrative zwischen Unabhängigkeits­erklärung und Bürgerkrieg. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1986. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845). New York: Anchor Books, 1973. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk (1903). New York: Signet Classic, 1969. Du Bois, W.E.B. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. Du Bois, W.E.B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940). New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: International Publishers Co Inc., 1968. Edwards, Jonathan. “Personal Narrative.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. A: Literature to 1820 (1979). Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton & Company, 6th ed. 2003. 466–476. Egan, Susanna. Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Norton & Company, 2001.

6.2 North America 

 1257

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield and Helene H. Fineman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Grace, Sherrill, and Jerry Wasserman, eds. Theatre and Autobiography. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter (1850). Ed. Ross C. Murfin. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. Heinze, Carsten, and Alfred Hornung, eds. Medialisierungsformen des (Auto-)Biographischen. ­Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2013. Hellman, Lillian. Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979. Hornung, Alfred. “Art Over Life: Henry James’s Autobiography.” Making Sense: The Role of the Reader in Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Gerhard Hoffmann. München: Fink, 1989. 198–219. Hornung, Alfred, ed. Autobiography and Democracy in America. Thematic Issue of Amerikastudien/ American Studies 35.3 (1990). Hornung, Alfred, ed. Autobiography and Mediation. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. Hornung, Alfred, ed. American Lives. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. Hornung, Alfred. “Life Sciences and Life Writing.” Anglia 133.1 (2015): 37–52. Hornung, Alfred. Jack London: Abenteuer des Lebens. Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 2016. Hornung, Alfred. “The Shaking Woman in the Media: Life Writing and Neuroscience.” Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works. Ed. Johanna Hartmann, Christine Marks and Hubert Zapf. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016. 67–80. Hornung, Alfred, and Zhao Baisheng, eds. Ecology and Life Writing. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013 [Chinese Translation: 生态学与生命写作 (Shengtaixue Yu Shengming Xiezuo). Trans. Lin Jiang. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press (中国社会科学出版社, Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe), 2016]. Hustvedt, Siri. The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010). London: Sceptre, 2011 ­(Hustvedt 2011a). Hustvedt, Siri. “Three Emotional Stories: Reflections on Memory, the Imagination, Narrative, and the Self.” Neuropsychoanalysis 13.2 (2011): 187–196 (Hustvedt 2011b). Hustvedt, Siri, and António Damásio. “A Conversation with Antóni Damásio and Siri Hustvedt.” Big think (2 July 2010). http://bigthink.com/videos/a-conversation-withantonio-damasio-andsiri-hustvedt (15 July 2016). Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (1861). Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. James, Alice. The Diary of Alice James (1894). Ed. Leon Edel. New York: The Penguin American Library, 1982. James, Henry. The American Scene. Ed. W.H. Auden. New York: Charles Scribener’s Sons, 1946. James, Henry. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (1934). Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1962. James, Henry. Autobiography (1956). Ed. Frederick W. Dupee. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Jefferson, Thomas. Writings. Ed. Merrill E. Peterson. Library of America. New York: Viking Press, 1984. Jensen, Meg, and Margaretta Jolly, eds. We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Jolly, Margaretta, ed. The Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. 2 vols. London: Dearborn, 2001.

1258 

 6 The Americas

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts (1976). New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Knight, Sarah Kemble. “The Journal of Madam Knight.” The Puritans. Ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson. New York: American Book Company, 1938. Lanzendörfer, Tim. The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques (1955). London: Cape, 1973. Mather, Cotton. “Magnalia Christi Americana” (1702). The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. A: Literature to 1820 (1979). Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton & Company, 6th ed. 2003. 397–417. McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. New York: Harcourt Crace & World, 1957. McGiffert, Michael, ed. God’s Great Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety. Being the Autobiography & Journal of Thomas Shepard. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1972. Miller, James E., Jr. Theory of Fiction: Henry James. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966). New York: A Paragon Book, 1979. Occom, Samson. “A Short Narrative of My Life” (1768). The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by North American Indians 1768–1931. Ed. Bernd Peyer. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1982. 12–18. Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1982. Poletti, Anna, and Julie Rak. Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Riis, Jacob. The Making of an American (1901). New York: MacMillan, 1943. Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Ed. Neal Salisbury. Boston/New York: The Bedford Series in History and Culture, 1997. Sewall, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Sewall 1674–1729. Ed. M. Halsey Thomas. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Sewall, Samuel. The Diary and Life of Samuel Sewall. Ed. Mel Yazawa. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2010. Smith, Captain John. A True Relation of Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in ­Virginia (1608); A Description of New England (1616). The Complete Works of Captain John Smith. Ed. Philip L. Barbour. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “The Destructive Male.” Speech at the Women’s Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C, 1868. http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/stanton.htm (11 July 2018). Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898). New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Random House, 1933. Stein, Gertrude. Paris, France (1940). New York: Liveright, 1996. Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America (1935). Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Suzuki, David. Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life (1987). Toronto: General, 1988. Suzuki, David. The Autobiography (2006). Vancouver: Greystone, 2007. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). New York: Holt, 1966. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982. Twain, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. 3 vols. Ed. Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith. Oakland: University of California Press, 2010–2015.

6.2 North America 

 1259

Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Anishinabe Nagomon: Songs of the Oijibwa. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1970. Vizenor, Gerald. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Vizenor, Gerald. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Vizenor, Gerald. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (1990). Albany: SUNY University Press, 2nd ed. 2009. Washington, Booker T. “Up From Slavery.” Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1965. 23–206. Wigglesworth, Michael. The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653–1657. The Conscience of a Puritan. Ed. Morgan, Edmond. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman’s Poetry. Ed. Gay Wilson Allen and Charles T. Davis. New York: New York University Press, 1955. Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Woolman, John. The Journal of John Woolman. Ed. Janet Whitney. Chicago: Henry Regenery Company, 1950.

Further Reading Chansky, Ricia Anne, and Emily Hipchen, eds. The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader. London/New York: Routledge, 2016. Couser, G. Thomas. Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Eakin, Paul John, ed. American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lejeune, Philippe. Ecrire sa vie: Du pacte au patrimoine autobiographique. Paris: Éditions ­Mauconduit, 2015. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life ­Narratives (2001). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2010. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women / Autobiography / Image / Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002.

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World Gabriele Rippl

The central terms of this chapter – ‘autobiography’ and ‘globalized world’ – have been much debated over the last 25 years; they are semantically shifting, contested terms and hence benefit from in-depth discussion. In this section the focus will be on the latter, while ‘autobiography’ is discussed later in section 3. The plethora of definitions of ‘globalization’, ‘globalization processes’ and ‘globality’ partly contradict each other and partly also overlap. According to historians, sociologists and theorists of culture, the post/modern world of the 1990s experienced a fundamental transformation which is only partially explained by the dramatic increase in migration. In 1996 Martin Albrow discussed this “new reality” and “overall change in the basis of action and social organization for individuals and groups” and labeled this period of epochal change the “Global Age” (1996, 1–2, 4). It is characterized by at least five major characteristics: “the global environmental consequences of aggregate human activities”; “the loss of security where weaponry has global destructedness”; “the globality of communication systems”; the “rise of global economy”; and “the reflexivity of globalism, where people and groups of all kinds refer to the globe as the frame for their beliefs” (Albrow 1996, 4). The concept of globalization and the claim of the global interconnectedness of human relations have triggered a vivid controversy over the last two decades, one that continues today (for the etymology and an overview of the different meanings and definitions of the term ‘globalization’, see Robertson and White [2003] as well as Osterhammel and Petersson [2003]). Leading proponents of globalization like Anthony Giddens (1991) and Roland Robertson (1992) have argued that old identities of nation states, communities and individuals are destabilized; others like Stuart Hall (1992) and Albrow have stressed “the creation of new hybrid identities, [and] transnational phenomena like diasporic communities” (Albrow 1996, 94). Manfred Steger suggests four features of globalization which critics of different convictions largely agree upon: first, “globalization involves the creation of new and the multiplication of existing social networks and activities that increasingly overcome traditional political, economic, cultural, and geographical boundaries”. Second, globalization is reflected “in the expansion and the stretching of social relations, activities, and interdependencies”. Third, globalization involves “the intensification and acceleration of social exchanges and activities”, and fourth, “the creation, expansion, and intensification of social interconnections and interdependencies [, which] do not occur merely on an objective, material level. [They] also involve the subjective plane of human consciousness” (Steger 2003, 9–12). Within the broad spectrum of globalization studies, two controversies are central: while some scholars define globalization as “a contemporary phenomenon linked to the development of electronic media, the rise of transnational corporations, global financial institutions, and proliferating forms of entertainment that easily leap https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-110

1264 

 7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

national boundaries”, others describe it as “a historical phenomenon running back to at least the sixteenth century and incorporating the histories of colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism” (Jay 2010, 2). While it is true that social, economic, political and cultural relations have changed dramatically since the development and distribution of electronic media, transcending borders of nation states to an extent previously unknown, the long histories of exploration, conquest, trade, colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism actually advocate a concept of globalization that recognizes its historical roots in the early modern period (examples are the colonization of the Americas, the East India Company and the British Raj [Bayly 2004]), if not earlier (Abu-Lughod [1989] explains how Europe was linked economically to the Middle East and China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). There are scholars who consider globalization as an economic and political phenomenon which should be studied from a materialist point of view, while others maintain that globalization “is a more broadly cultural phenomenon” (Jay 2010, 2) and hence most appropriately investigated from the point of view of cultural theory. In addition to these two controversies, there are other contentious topics that loom large in debates on globalization, which regard individual agency in the face of the economic consequences of globalization, i.  e. the complex back-and-forth of global flows of people, cash, cultural commodities; the impact of the media; the relations between global developments and local/regional circumstances, needs and practices; and the homogenizing force of economic and cultural globalization that spreads US-American/Western commodities, cultural modes and values across the globe. Other topics that have propelled debates include the repressing/liberating effects of globalization; the apolitical attitude of globalization studies; the advantage of globalization studies’ methods and approaches which  – unlike those of postcolonial studies  – are no longer related to the nation state; and last but not least, the entanglement of global and local forces, especially in politics, where forms of nationalism, patriotism and fundamentalism are resurging everywhere today. The case of the Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie may serve as an example here: his novel The Satanic Verses (1988) led to a fatwa against him, a death sentence issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. In his memoir Joseph Anton (2012), Rushdie describes what it means to live one’s life underground in a global age, when fundamentalism easily transcends national borders and, aided by international aviation travel and instant electronic communication, is able to act effortlessly on a world-wide scale (de Vries and Weber 2001).

Globalizing Literary and Cultural Studies Globalization complicates the nationalist paradigm which has also been central to the analysis of literature for centuries. The special issue of PMLA on Globalizing Literary Studies, published in 2001, issued a call for literary studies “to move beyond the national model that has dominated the institutional structure of the discipline

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World 

 1265

by creating modes of analysis suited to the interconnections of the planet, both in regard to past eras and with respect to the present intensified phase of globalization” (Friedman 2012, 499). Clearly, processes of globalization have created hybrid cultural forms which have now moved into the focus of researchers of literature and culture, inviting them to question the “older, unitary, aestheticized, ahistorical, and universalizing paradigm for literary studies that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Jay 2010, 21). Like other disciplines, literary studies have responded to what is called ‘the transnational turn’ or ‘the global turn’ in culture and asked what these turns imply for the study of literature. The increasing globalization of literary markets (today books are written in one place, published in another, and marketed to a global reader [Jay 2010, 16]), the transnational role of the English language and a global English book market (“the remarkable explosion of English literature produced outside Britain and the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century” [Jay 2010, 25]), readers’ interest in the ‘exotic’, the internationalization of writers’ identities, and regional, national, diasporic, exilic and cosmopolitan interests stand in opposition to primarily nationally oriented literary studies still undertaken within universities. The challenge to the nationalist paradigm puts a new emphasis on investigations into transnational geographies, cultural pluralities, hybrid identities, traveling literary genres, aesthetics and cultural forms in general. While postcolonial studies have queried “the primacy of discrete national literatures […] providing a framework for studying literature and culture in a transnational context” which “explicitly questioned older Eurocentric models of ‘comparative’ analysis”, the transnational turn in literary studies “began in earnest when the study of minority, multicultural, and postcolonial literatures began to intersect with work done under the auspices of the emerging study of globalization” (Jay 2010, 1–2). So the recent ‘global turn’ within literary studies is characterized by an apparent shift from a postcolonial to a global perspective, instigating new critical approaches and research paradigms, which dismiss national models of literary study and help to investigate the transnational and planetary interconnections both past and present. Hence, globalization has impacted the study of literature by “foregrounding issues of cosmopolitan and diasporic literatures, national and comparative models for literary studies, colonialism and postcolonialism, and theories of contact zones, borders, interculturalism, hybridity, cultural traffic, and transculturation” (Friedman 2012, 500–501). The field which is often referred to as ‘new world literatures’ is taking a lead since it engages, by definition, with new comparative methodologies which no longer focus on Western literature and leave the center/periphery and sameness/difference dichotomies behind while privileging a “dynamic, interstitial space between, a space in which comparison is centrally defined by the dialogic push/pull between [spatial and temporal, i.  e. geohistorical] commensurability and incommensurability: sameness and difference need to be maintained in tension” (Friedman 2012, 507). Questions regarding social practices, agents, institutions, historical constellations such as imperialism, post-colonialism, cross-currents of influence between nations and what used to be

1266 

 7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

colonial centers/cultural capitals of the West and their ‘peripheries’, migration, flow of goods, consumerism as well as new colonialism are addressed, and a critical reassessment of migratory cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, multilingualism, diaspora and cultural hybridity has set in, which allows for reading literature in a new and truly comparative manner and “on a planetary scale” (Friedman 2013, 500). This novel, relational and decentered comparative perspective takes into account transnational aspects and cosmopolitan entanglements between cultures and economies and while highlighting the dense global/hemispheric network between British, European, North American, Caribbean, Australian, African, Asian and other literatures. Their experimental, hybrid literary aesthetics and poetics as well as their intertextual relations and intercultural forms of exchange are now discussed against the respective multi/ cultural contexts and with the help of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches.

Autobiography Studies Until the 1980s, the term ‘autobiography’ referred to a particular Western way of writing one’s life developed during the pre-Romantic and Romantic period and based upon bourgeois ideas of (male) subjectivity, integral identity and a unique, autonomous and unitary individual agent (a ‘great man’). The autobiographer, on reappraising the past, imbued it with meaning and expressed the innermost kernel of his personality in a teleological manner. As Linda Anderson maintains, “[i]nsofar as autobiography has been seen as promoting a view of the subject as universal, it has also underpinned the centrality of masculine – and, we may add, Western and middle-class – modes of subjectivity” (Anderson 2001, 3). Since the 1980s traditional autobiography research has been criticized for its inherent Eurocentric and bourgeois bias. Postmodern critics working in the field of gender or postcolonial studies have convincingly argued that traditional definitions of autobiographical modes promote a view of the subject as universal and a subject which is male, Western and middle-class over those by women, people of color, post-colonial subjects, and other historically marginalized groups, whose stories of violence and oppression are often rendered in non-linear and fragmented narrative forms. Smith and Watson’s 1992 essay collection De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography has been particularly instrumental in opening up the discussion to life stories told by subjects other than Western males: What has been designated as Western autobiography is only one form of ‘life-writing.’ There are other modes of life-story telling, both oral and written, to be recognized, other genealogies of lifestory telling to be chronicled, other explorations of traditions, current and past, to be factored into the making and unmaking of autobiographical subjects in a global environment […] (Smith and Watson 1992, xviii).

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World 

 1267

Since the 1980s, scholars such as Paul John Eakin (1985), Marlene Kadar (1992), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1992, 1996, 1998, 2001), as well as Leigh Gilmore (2001) have further broadened the notion of autobiographical writing by more radical challenges to the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy that still underlies more narrow definitions of the term and by problematizing some of the claims to objectivity and truthfulness that build on that dichotomy. When postmodern writers began to experiment playfully with the concept of autobiography, the boundaries between autobiography, biography, and fiction became more porous, and this blurring of generic distinctions created new types of texts – autofiction – which showcase “both that auto/biography can be read as fiction, and that fiction can be read as autobiographical” (Saunders 2010, 7). By the 1990s autobiography research had shifted its interest from questions regarding authentic self-representation, truth, referentiality, mimetic force and non-fiction to issues of textuality, fictionality and narratological conventions, mediality and intermediality, performativity and seriality, all of which acknowledge autobiography to be a construction that cannot be referential to a life and must necessarily question and challenge notions of a unified self, truth and the fact/fiction dichotomy that goes with them. Today, due to the availability of electronic mass media such as TV, video, and web-based means of expression, there are entirely new and prolific possibilities of writing one’s life and ‘getting a life’ (Smith and Watson 1996). The ‘I’ is ubiquitous in the virtual world; it is well-documented and documentable thanks to Facebook, online diaries, blogs, and other communication platforms. Autobiographical modes in a global frame include a wide variety of oral and written autobiographical and biographical texts such as memoirs, (online) diaries, journals, testimonies, letters, autobiographies, personal essays, Facebook entries, etc.

Life-writing and Globalization Looking at recent developments in book markets around the globe, one is bound to recognize that autobiographical modes have become an especially powerful aesthetic and economic force. This has also had major repercussions on literary studies since it has moved the study of autobiography from the periphery to the academic center. The force of globalization has fostered new questions in autobiographical research which have added to the fundamental challenge and criticism of the genre of ‘autobiography’ that has been underway since the 1980s. One of the significant results of the development in autobiographical research is that European autobiographical traditions are no longer considered as ‘authentic’ autobiographical modes. In fact, the term ‘autobiography’ itself only in “its widest definition seems to provide a convenient genre to embrace the crossroad culture from East and West” (Hornung and Ruhe 1998, 3). Since the construction of the post-Enlightenment unified and autonomous modern subject “has tended to exclude any other way of imagining life-writing” (Huddart 2008, 2), autobiographical research in the ‘global age’ has had to rid

1268 

 7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

itself of narrowly ethnocentric and paternalist models of how to write a life for the very reason that these models are not able to describe adequately the great variety of genres and practices of life narratives in the West and around the globe (Smith and Watson 2001, 4). Specific cultural and historical contexts and conceptions of the self vary widely (Greedharry 2008; Moore-Gilbert 2009, xviii–xix) and with them various autobiographical and autofictional forms and traditions, which is why the more neutral term ‘life-writing’ (Rippl et al. 2013) has come to replace the term ‘autobiography’ with its “narrative regularity” (Kadar 1992, 4) and association with the Western male tradition. In Anglophone research on autobiographical and biographical modes, ‘life-writing’ has become the preferred term, both in discussions of colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial sites and in more general reflections on the multiple aesthetic forms that life-writing encompasses and the social functions it performs. Smith and Watson define the term as “writing of diverse kinds that takes a life as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or an explicit self-reference to the writer” (Smith and Watson 2001, 3). As an umbrella term, life-writing allows us to read autobiographies (in the narrow sense of the term) side by side with auto-/ biographically inspired fictions as well as non-Western community-focused modes of telling one’s/a life. Many of the issues considered central at a time when the global turn has reached literary studies – for instance migration, transnational geographies and hybrid identities – are currently being addressed by scholars working on what they call ‘postcolonial life-writing’. It is one of the achievements of postcolonial studies and postcolonial theory to have displaced universalized subjectivities associated with totalizing Western thought and emphasized, firstly, “how one universalization of subjectivity has always excluded other modes of subjectivity” and, secondly, the “situatedness” of subjectivity, knowledge and cultural forms (Huddart 2008, 4, 11). Bart Moore-Gilbert, a proponent of the study of ‘postcolonial life-writing’, claims that postcolonial and auto/biography studies have hitherto insufficiently engaged with each other (Moore-Gilbert 2009, xi). Considering the success of recent examples of postcolonial life-writing such as Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) which sold 700,000 copies within a few months of publication (Bart-Gilbert 2009, xi), this is a pressing undertaking. But this is only one contemporary example of a market for such texts which reaches back to more than two centuries: “One precursor form of postcolonial life-writing, the slave narratives of figures like Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Kohn Marrant and Olaudah Equiano (whose Interesting Narrative (1789) […] went through nine editions in its author’s lifetime alone), began to circulate from as early as 1770”, which was roughly the time when Rousseau’s Confessions (1782 the first part, 1789 the second) marked “the inaugural instance of western autobiography in a recognizably modern form” (Moore-Gilbert 2009, xi). For a long time thereafter autobiography was considered a mark of sophistication of consciousness belonging to ‘advanced’ peoples like the Europeans; and, according to Moore-Gilbert, even today a “continuing relative critical invisibility of postcolonial life-writing” can be noted

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World 

 1269

(Moore-Gilbert 2009, xii, xvi). Moore-Gilbert is well aware of the fact that colonialism “imposed new, at least partly westernized, identities on so many of its subjects”; thus the influence of western culture, languages, concepts of selfhood and autobiographical modes of writing cannot be denied (Moore-Gilbert 2009, xxv). Nevertheless, against the backdrop of western women’s auto/biographies (which have always tended to deviate from those of their male counterparts, Rippl 1998), Moore-Gilbert traces similar features in non-western auto/biographical modes. Of constitutive importance are, firstly, decentered models of personhood (which he traces back to the precursor forms of male postcolonial life-writing including Equiano’s Interesting Narrative), secondly, relationality and collectiveness of subjectivity (the notion of a life being linked to other subjects as well as to real and imagined communities, both small such as the family, or large as in the diasporic community or nation), thirdly, embodiment (the importance of bodies and ethnicity), fourthly, geo-cultural location to the formation of identity (self and place/displacement) and, finally, fifthly, questions of style (the emphasis of relationality and social dimensions of selfhood, for instance, erodes the boundaries between autobiography and biography, inter-generic traffic and experimentation, the drawing on local forms, metaphors, tropes and discursive traditions as well as hybridizing the languages of the former colonizer by integrating indigenous tongues into the standard forms) (Moore-Gilbert 2009, xx–xxiii). Another common feature of postcolonial life-writing, written in exile from dictatorship or repressive regimes, is that it serves political goals and has the intention to bring about change (Moore-Gilbert 2009, xxiii–xxiv). But does it make sense to speak of modes of autobiographical writing engendered by globalization? Do labels such as ‘postcolonial life-writing’ (Moore-Gilbert 2009; Hornung and Ruhe 1998) and ‘transcultural life-writing’ (Hornung 2009) not imply yet another repressively homogenous way of conceptualizing practices of life-writing? While these critical questions need to be asked, scholars working in the field of life-writing today have insisted on the helpfulness of such labels. Bogusia Temple, for instance, underlines the fact that migration, dispersal, and diaspora in particular “have been integral to accounts of life ever since ancient times” (Temple 2001, 601), but she also insists that a broad understanding of diasporic life-writing is needed which includes non-fictional as well as fictional forms centering on “a search for a sense of belonging or identity, a journey to find home” and often tackling questions of “cultural identity pre- and post-migration, across place as well as down the generations” (Temple 2001, 601). Alfred Hornung uses the term “transcultural life-writing” to differentiate various types of life-writing in connection with classic immigration countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States where [w]aves of immigration since the end of the nineteenth century have challenged uniform national credos and transformed mainstream societies. The end to colonial rule in Third World countries and the appeal to free economic markets in the First World have created new patterns of global migration in the second half of the twentieth century (Hornung 2009, 536).

1270 

 7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

Demands for acculturation and assimilation changed and transformed into a recognition of cultural differences in the postmodern age.

Some Anglophone Examples The topic of this chapter, ‘Autobiography in the Globalized World’, is a vast and daunting one, since it includes autobiographies from all parts of the world and spans at least five centuries. It is impossible to present a comprehensive picture in the restricted space of a handbook entry, for the twentieth century alone witnessed extensive migration, with migrants’ lives characterized by transnational mobility and cultural clashes, as well as linguistic collisions. Discussion within the limited range of this chapter is therefore restricted to a few examples taken from Anglophone transcultural literatures, arranged loosely in a geographical order. What these examples from Anglophone transcultural literatures demonstrate, however, are the diverse backgrounds of autobiographers today: members of former colonized people, immigrants or displaced refugees with their complicated histories (e.  g. Temple 2001; Kirss, Kõresaar and Lauristin 2004; Hornung 2009; Hassan 2011) who, like so many others, belong to one of the many communities who experience a diasporic in-betweenness, translocal and hybrid identities, the diasporic anxiety of identity loss, the deterritorialization of identities, and also those who are simply travelers and tourists to other countries. The examples assembled here were not only chosen for geographical reasons, but because they testify to the broad range of aesthetic and formal modes of life-writing as well as its different functions in the global age. Reading life-writing under the aspect of globalization confronts two sets of questions: Firstly, those which relate to the content of the texts and the contextual factors such as the geo-political location of the autobiographer, his/her economic and socio-political circumstances and the (political and social) functions of his/her writing (pressure of poverty, a repressive regime, dictatorship, expulsion, ethnic cleansing etc.), his/her dis/place/ment, gender, the notion of selfhood (autonomous and centered vs. relational and decentered), intended readership and marketing strategies, local or global orientation etc., which are referred to in the texts. It is also of importance, whether the texts are written in transnationalized spaces such as the Carib­ bean, the increasingly hybridized London and Toronto or other cities with growing diasporic communities. Do autobiographers explore in their life-writing the effects of globalization and global capital on local economies and environment, and how are individual agency and issues of gender addressed in connection with globalization’s repressive forces? Is the setting urban or rural? What is the identity constructed as? Is it one of an immigrant struggling with an in-between identity or one of a sophisticated cosmopolitan traveler at ease around the globe? The second set of questions in any study of life-writing in a global age is more closely tied to textual and aesthetic features: Whether texts refer to western or

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World 

 1271

non-western autobiographical genres, or if they subvert traditional generic rules and present hybrid generic forms, whether specific imagery, language and style are used which refer to other autobiographical texts and traditions, whether photographs are included or other intermedial strategies employed, whether the life is presented chronologically or in a cyclical way, the existence of a political message that turns life-writing into protest literature, the narrative strategies used and how they relate to notions of selfhood, etc. While cultural difference is at the center of many studies of postcolonial or transcultural life-writing, and alternative autobiographical practices and hybrid, counter-hegemonic autobiographical narratives have been applauded, Smith and Watson warn against underestimating “the power of cultural forms to recolonize peoples” (1992, xxi). Cultural forms easily disseminated via electronic media may not only engender new prolific possibilities of life-writing but also perpetuate Western modes. In what way do the new electronic and social media and the convergence of new technologies of communication impact life-writing today? Is (the loss of) cultural autonomy an issue, set against alien cultural formats testifying to a homogenous/homogenized culture? Is the role of language or specifically the English language addressed? With these questions in mind, let us turn to our earliest example: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. Written by Himself which was first published in London in 1789 (1791 in New York) and ran through nine editions during Olaudah Equiano’s lifetime, the last appearing in 1794. Equiano’s slave narrative is considered as a precursor form of postcolonial and global life-writing, and presents the decentered African self of the author, shaped by the Igbo concept of ‘chi’, and his hybrid identity – his “extremely chequered” life (Equiano 1997 [1789], 236)  – in the early stages of globalization and a fledgling world-wide trade. Life-writing is used “as an instrument to both protest against such abuses [as slavery] and to advance the reclamation of personhood deformed by colonialism” (Moore-Gilbert 2009, 8). Equiano’s autobiographical persona both affirms his native roots and assimilates to the dominant culture, i.  e. a singularly British identity which has internalized his captor’s values and customs (Moore-Gilbert 2009, 9). This tragic tale covers a royal child’s abduction from the Benin Province (now in Nigeria) by slave traders, the subsequent travels across the globe (from Africa to the Caribbean, from Georgia to Gibraltar, from the Antilles to England), the description of the horrors of the Middle Passage, the hideous atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade and, finally, the hardwon freedom. Not only his life but also the form of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative is “extremely chequered” as it ranges across sub-genres of life-writing such as the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, spiritual autobiography, the conversion narrative, a travelogue, an adventure tale, an economic treatise, an apologia and historical fiction. The topic of abduction links Equiano’s life-writing to another much more recent African story: Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, set in Sierra Leone’s civil war. The protagonist falls into the hands of rebels at the age of twelve and

1272 

 7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

is forced to join an army unit as a boy soldier before he is rescued by UNICEF. When new political upheavals occur, he escapes from Sierra Leone and eventually makes his way to the USA and a new life. Beah’s topic, the experiences of a young boy soldier, is certainly not a common one, but formally his life-writing follows a traditional chronological pattern. In contrast, the life story of Valentino Achak Deng, told by Dave Eggers in his novel What Is the What? (2006), uses flashbacks to narrate Deng’s life story, switching between Deng’s past – the extinction of Deng’s Dinka village and family by Arab militia, his escape to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, then years later via Kenya to the USA – and the present – his difficult in-between diasporic identity and problems of adjustment to the new Western country. Beah and Deng are examples of “globally nomadic children” who live “unrooted childhoods” due to the harsh political situation at home (Eidse and Sichel 2004, 1; Eidse and Sichel’s book, however, is dedicated to an entirely different type of nomadic children, those millions of children around the world born to highly mobile diplomats and CEOs). Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write about this Place. A Memoir (2011) is another unusual childhood/adolescent memoir from Africa with a focus on the role of Western media. Like Deng and Beah, this young Kenyan writer now lives in the USA and ruminates on the Kenyan homeland which he left years ago. The place Wainaina refers to in his memoir’s title is more than one place: it includes Kenya, the country where he was born and raised, but also Uganda, from where his mother came, and finally South Africa, where Wainaina went to university and decided to become a writer, before moving to the USA. Wainaina’s memoir is striking in many ways: it tells the bloody war-ridden history of African states such as Uganda, depicts Kenya’s postcolonial struggles and uses intermedial strategies by constantly referring to US-American popular culture, hip-hop, pop music and TV in particular, hence discussing – by highlighting the global influence of the media – what growing up and becoming a writer in a global age actually means. More recently Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole has republished a very personal and at the same time political travelogue/novella, Every Day Is for the Thief (2014; first edition published in Nigeria in 2007), which describes the author’s trip to Nigeria and depicts contemporary life in Lagos. Every Day Is for the Thief deviates from other immigrant life-writing due to the fact that identity questions of in-betweenness are not center-stage. The author describes the work as ‘fiction’, but the text clearly carries autobiographical traits. The impression that this is a piece of life-writing is conveyed by the photographs the author took during his trip and which he then added to the book, and by the intertextual references to another memoir (Cole 2014 [2007], 23, 41): the fictional memoir of the Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (1982). Ondaatje’s formally innovative postmodernist and postcolonial example of intermedial life-writing challenges traditions of autobiographical writing and traditional ideas of the autonomous self by presenting many voices (and hence projecting a relational self), intertextual traces and different genres (such as biography, memoir, travel journal, family saga etc.). While the text plays with fact and fiction, questions the reliability of memories and showcases the difficulties in

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World 

 1273

reconnecting with the past (in 1978 and 1980 Ondaatje spent time in his native Sri Lanka which he left at the age of eleven), the inclusion of family photographs produces effects of authenticity and immediacy. A classic of Chinese-American autofiction is Maxime Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girldhood among Ghosts (1975). More recently, Anchee Min in her memoirs Red Azalea (1994), her story of growing up in the last years of Mao’s China, and The Cooked Seed (2013) which describes the author’s difficulties in-between cultures after moving to America aged 27, focus on language acquisition as one of the daunting problems of immigration. The acquisition of a new language is an issue for many immigrants, but in Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989), the autobiography of Polish-American journalist and writer Eva Hoffman, language takes centre-stage and its role in identity formation is dissected. Hoffman’s account of her immigration as a young Jewish girl from Cracow to Vancouver and, later, to the USA marks two transitions: from childhood to adult life, and from the old language to the new – a transition which is characterized by linguistic uprooting, self-consciousness, feelings of diasporic nostalgia and other problems of the in-betweenness of cultures brought about by exile. Eventually, the process of self-translation is successful, so here migration autobiography ends with the typical trope of autobiographical writing, that of arrival: “The language of this is sufficient. I am here now” (Hoffman 1990 [1989], 280). A classic of transcultural life-writing from the Middle East/USA respectively, dealing with issues of recognition, diaspora and exile, is Out of Place (1999) by the Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said, who writes about the struggle for self-identification as a member of a marginalized group, the Palestinians and the refugee Palestinians (Sarkowsky 2012, 630). Said’s life-writing  – like that of so many other migrant autobiographers of the postmodern age – is intermedial in that it not only includes photographs providing visual evidence of family history, but also ekphrases of pictures shot by a film camera in order to discuss issues of Middle East geopolitics, of place and out-of placeness. There is a tension between the verbal and the visual documentary pictures, the controlling power of which the “surface self” of the narrative is eager to escape by fictionalization and through constructing “a second self” (Döring 2006, 74). Other life-writing from the USA testifies to the changing social conditions in a globalized world: One is Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) which tells the story of a life under the totalitarian regime of the Iranian theocracy after the Islamic Revolution. Nafisi is a literary scholar who lost her teaching job at the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil, but was able to leave Iran for America in 1997, where she writes her memoir from hindsight. Reading western novels such as Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), along with works by Jane Austen and Henry James in a private literature class attended by seven female students meeting at her Tehran house, helps Nafisi and the group of students to keep their sanity through engaging with imagination and fiction at a time of religious fundamentalism, oppressive gender rules and political madness,

1274 

 7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

thus transcending reality and female voicelessness by reflecting on an alternative reality. Also concerned with the Iranian Revolution and its tragic effects on the lives of women is Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003; French original 2000) and its sequel Persepolis: The Story of a Return (2004; French original 2001). The ‘graphic’ life-writing of Satrapi, an Iranian-French writer and graphic novel artist who left her native Iran to study in Austria and France and now lives in Paris, is also a prime example of what it means to live cross-culturally and, in addition, testifies to the enormous increase in the use of the graphic novel as a medium for life-writing. In the case of the Caribbean, it is rewarding to note Thomas Michael Stein’s claim that “from the early stages of their literary production”, the writers from the Caribbean such as Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, David Dabydeen, George Lamming and Wilson Harris “have preferred to fictionalize personal experience and have launched a genre of its own […]”, which he calls “fictional autobiography” (Stein 1998, 247). The Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid writes “serial autobiographies” (Gilmore 1998) or autobiographical novels which include Annie John (1983), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1995) and See Now Then (2013). Intertextual and intermedial experiments in postmodernist self-presentation, these texts create a subject-in-process and a serial postcolonial identity which escapes the fetters of colonial identity by a subtle aesthetic subversion of traditional autobiographical form, Western aesthetics and regimes of vision. Lucy, for instance, speaks of the results of cultural domination and the legacy of colonial education experienced by colonized subjects. In Lucy, Kincaid turned to the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, defined by James A. W. Heffernan as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (1993, 2), but counter-discursively revised by herself and other writers of Caribbean background like Jean Rhys and Michelle Cliff (Emery 1997, 262). Kincaid’s/Lucy’s ekphrases of several photographs turn the text into an intermedial one, which crosses not only generic but also semiotic boundaries and thus mirrors the crossing of geographic and identity-related boundaries of the protagonist. By exploring the various meanings of post-colonial possession and dispossession, these ekphrases renegotiate the regime of imperial visual culture and the representational strategies of photographic portraits, allowing the protagonist to “invent herself as a creator of images rather than a prisoner of them” (Emery 1997, 267–271, here 270). Wilson Harris in his The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) deviates from strategies employed by other Caribbean writers in that his life-writing has no regional, Caribbean focus on one individual, but a cross-cultural, global and universal one, addressing the postcolonial position and the human species as such, including the survival of humanity, the dilemma of the nuclear age and crisis-ridden civilizations around the globe (Stein 1998, 249). Thus, Harris is a proponent of an approach to life-writing in the globalized world which links to new, so-called ecological perspectives that “reconsider the anthropocentric premise of traditional life writing and open up the text and the self to a broader meaning of human life in its vital interrelatedness with nature and nonhuman life” (Zapf 2013, 4).

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World 

 1275

Among Caribbean-British life-writing Caryl Phillips’s The European Tribe (1987) is another innovative case of life-writing as a collection of critical political essays – the author calls it “a narrative in the form of a notebook” (1993 [1987], xi) – based on trips the Kittian-British novelist, playwright and essayist undertook within Europe in 1984. While the essays discuss what Phillips as a first-generation migrant in Great Britain calls Europe’s “rampant tribalism” and “deeply ingrained institutionalized racism” (1993 [1987], ix), they have a global perspective on (‘black’) identity formation (“I grew up riddled with the cultural confusions of being black and British” [1993 (1987), 2]) and the politics of immigration and mobility, a reflection of Phillips, peripatetic existence at that time in Great Britain, the Caribbean and the USA. The Lazarus Project (2008) by the Sarajevo-born, award-winning writer Aleksandar Hemon, who has lived in Chicago since 1992, may serve as a last example of transcultural American life-writing in the form of intermedial autofiction. This illustrated novel focuses on the US-immigration system and xenophobic anxieties around 1900. It tells the story of the young Russian Jewish pogrom survivor and refugee immigrant Lazarus Averbuch who shares his name with the biblical Lazarus, restored to life by Jesus after his death; hence the text’s epigraph reads: “And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with rags, and his face was covered with a cloth. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him and let him go” (The Bible, John 11:43). In addition, The Lazarus Project also refers in a very ironic way to a well-known sonnet “The New Colossus” (1883) written by the American poet Emma Lazarus which in 1903 was engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the lower level of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, ‘the Mother of Exiles’, to welcome all new immigrants to America: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (Lazarus in Lauter 2006, 27)

Hemon’s The Lazarus Project blurs the fact/fiction boundary by juxtaposing Averbush’s story with that of Brik – the text’s narrator and protagonist and Hemon’s ‘alter ego’ – who is an immigrant like Averbuch living in Chicago a hundred years later and likewise struggles with constructing his cross-cultural identity. The text starts with an event which actually happened on 2 March 1908, when Lazarus Averbuch tried to deliver a letter to the city’s Chief of Police. He was shot dead at a time when America was obsessed with anarchism and harboured many anti-Semitic sentiments. After the shooting, it was claimed he was an anarchist assassin and an agent of foreign operatives who wanted to bring the United States to its knees. From the start, The Lazarus Project vets America’s value systems, past and present, as well as its attitude towards immigrants. Hemon blends the historical events in Chicago at the beginning

1276 

 7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

of the twentieth century with contemporary immigration politics, value systems, patriotism and anxieties in the USA today, underlined when the protagonist Brik says: “The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror – funny how old habits never die” (Hemon 2008, 42). On the book’s title page, directly below the title and author’s name, it states: “With photographs by Velibor Bozovic and from the Chicago Historical Society” – but it is deliberately unclear in the autofictional novel which photos are historical and which were taken by Bozovic, the author’s friend who traveled with him to Ukraine to find out more about Lazarus Averbuch (only the picture credits at the end of the text provide clarification). Many of the historical photographs have an illustrative and documentary function and hence evoke authenticity. However, the documentary function is subverted by the fact that even the photos taken during the author’s journey through Ukraine are black and white with black frames, reminiscent for the reader of old photos and photo albums (an impression supported by additional black pages in the book which make it indeed resemble an old photo album). The novelist-autobiographer aligns his story – his own experiences of living in a foreign country – with that of the Jewish Russian immigrant Lazarus Averbuch who, unlike the Biblical Lazarus, will not return from the dead, but who lives on in the minds of The Lazarus Project’s readers. What links Hemon’s The Lazarus Project with many of the life-writing discussed above  – Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Maxime Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Edward Said’s Out of Place and Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief – is that they all employ an intermedial aesthetics, often focusing on photographs which are either added to the text or presented to the reader via ekphrases (Hemon’s text, for instance, is replete with actual photographs as well as their ekphrases [2008, 34, 227, 230]). The ways text and photographs connect vary considerably (for a discussion of Ondaatje and Kingston see Adams 2000, 40–56, 117–130); in Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, for instance, the function of illustration is sometimes impaired since the connection between text and photo is not always clear, and often the reader cannot see in the picture what the text describes. What our set of examples showcases is the broad thematic, formal and aesthetic range of life-writing in the age of globalization: it takes place in every possible medium as well as format and genre, sometimes focusing on identity politics, sometimes ignoring questions of cultural in-betweenness altogether. Some of the texts discussed have an explicit political agenda aiming at social change, others are more interested in aesthetic, intertextual and intermedial questions which help to problematize representation per se, traditional western autobiographical writing as well as established postcolonial autobiographical modes with their focus on (ethnic, hybrid) identity and “corrective rewriting” (Sedlmeier 2014, 31). The conspicuously self-reflective intermedial quality of the majority of transcultural life-writing discussed in this chapter – the combination of words and pictures as well as the many references to music (e.  g. in Wainaina’s text) – may well be read as the medial counterpart to the crossing of other boundaries such as national ones testified to by the life-writing in our global age.

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World 

 1277

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.  D. 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill/ London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Albrow, Martin. The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. Bayly, C.A. The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Cole, Teju. Every Day Is for the Thief (2007). London: Faber & Faber, 2014. De Vries, Hent, and Samuel Weber, eds. Religion and Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Döring, Tobias. “Edward Said and the Fiction of Autobiography.” Wasafiri: The Transnational Journal of International Writing 21.2 (2006): 71–78. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions of Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Eidse, Faith, and Nina Sichel. “Introduction.” Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global. Ed. Faith Eidse and Nina Sichel. Yarmouth/London: Intercultural Press and Nicholas Breadley Publishing, 2004. 1–6. Emery, Mary Lou. “Refiguring the Postcolonial Imagination: Tropes of Visuality in Writing by Rhys, Kincaid, and Cliff.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16.2 (1997): 259–280. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789). Ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin, 1995. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “World Modernism, World Literature, and Comparaticity.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 499–525. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self, Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Gilmore, Leigh. “Endless Autobiography? Jamaica Kincaid and Serial Autobiography.” Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa. Ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 211–231. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Greenharry, Mrinalini. Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity and Its Futures. Ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew. Cambridge: Polity Press/Open University Press, 1992. 273–316. Hassan, Waïl S. Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Heffernan, James A.W. The Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project. London: Picador, 2008. Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989). New York: Penguin, 1990. Hornung, Alfred. “Transcultural Life-Writing.” The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 536–555. Hornung, Alfred, and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds. Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. Huddart, David. Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2008. Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2010.

1278 

 7 Autobiography in the Globalized World

Kadar, Marlene. “Coming to Terms: Life Writing – From Genre to Critical Practice.” Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 3–16. Kirss, Tiina, Ene Kõresaar, and Marju Lauristin, eds. She Who Remembers Survives: Interpreting Estonian Women’s Post-Soviet Life Stories. Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2004. Lazarus, Emma. “The New Colossus.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. C. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation. New York: Routledge, 2009. Osterhammel, Jürgen, and Niels P. Petersson. Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Pro­ zesse, Epochen. München: Beck, 2003. Phillips, Caryl. The European Tribe (1987). London: Picador, 1993. Rippl, Gabriele. Lebenstexte: Literarische Selbststilisierungen englischer Frauen in der frühen Neuzeit. München: Fink, 1998. Rippl, Gabriele, Philipp Schweighauser, Tiina Kirss, Margit Sutrop, and Therese Steffen, eds. Haunted Narratives: Life-Writing in an Age of Trauma. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013. Robertson, Roland. Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Robertson, Roland, and Kathleen E. White, eds. Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology. 6 vols. London: Routledge, 2003. Sarkowsky, Katja. “Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recognition: Edward Said’s Out of Place and Gerald Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and ­Metaphors.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 57.4 (2012): 627–642. Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Sedlmeier, Florian. The Postethnic Literary: Reading Paratexts and Transpositions around 2000. Berlin/Munich/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction.” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 3–52. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Steger, Manfred B. Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Stein, Thomas Michael. “Fictional Autobiography in the Caribbean: George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and Wilson Harris’s The Infinite Rehearsal.” Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa. Ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 247–257. Temple, Bogusia. “Migration, Diaspora, and Life Writing.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Auto­ biographical and Biographical Forms. Vol. II. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. 601–602. The Bible. King James Version. https://www.biblestudytools.com/kjv/john/11.html (11 July 2018). Wainaina, Binyavanga. One Day I Will Write about this Place: A Memoir. Croydon: Granta, 2011. Zapf, Hubert. “Cultural Ecology, Literature, and Life Writing.” Ecology and Life Writing. Ed. Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. 3–25.

7 Autobiography in the Globalized World 

 1279

Further Reading Amireh, Amal, ed. Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. New York: Garland, 2000. Ascari, Maurizio. Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives. Jefferson: 2011. Baena, Rosalia, ed. Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing. London/New York: Routledge, 2007. Dalziell, Rosamund, ed. Selves Crossing Cultures: Autobiography and Globalisation. Kew: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002. Friedman, May, and Silvia Schultermandl, eds. Growing up Transnational: Identity and Kinship in a Global Era. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Heredia, Juanita. Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-First Century: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Migrations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Holden, Philip. “Other Modernities: National Autobiography and Globalization.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 28.1 (2005): 89–103. Jolly, Margaretta, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. 2 vols. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. MacDermott, Doireann, ed. Autobiographical and Biographical Writing in the Commonwealth. Sabadell: AUSA, 1984. Perkins, Maureen, and Mary Besemeres. “Mixed Race, Hybrid, Transnational: Writing Lives in National and Global Frames.” Life Writing 4.1 (2007): 1–151. Rippl, Gabriele. “Ekphrastic Encounters in Contemporary Transcultural American Life Writing.” Intermediality and Life Writing. Ed. Nassim Winnie Balestrini and Ina Bergmann. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2017.

Introduction: Exemplary Autobiographical/ Autofictional Texts, Or, How Not To Set Up A Canon Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

Whereas the first volume of this handbook offers theoretical approaches to autobiography and autofiction, discusses categories and key terms, while presenting a variety of autobiographical subgenres, and the second volume deals with the history of autobiographical writing across world cultures, one might ask now: What about the texts? Where are the individual autobiographies of individual authors presenting their individual lives? Is it not particularly the uniqueness of the text, its literary artfulness and intriguing quality of relating personal truths as well as writers’ commitments that fascinate both readers and scholars alike? And is it not the rich tradition of multiform and highly versatile autobiographical works that triggers and promotes research in autobiography in the first place? It goes without saying that numerous autobiographical and autofictional texts are mentioned in the course of the theoretical chapters of volume one and the historical overview of volume two. Yet, in the first and second volumes of this handbook, individual autobiographical examples are placed in service of an overarching systematic or historical perspective. However, this handbook wants to provide appropriate room for individual examples of autobiographical and autofictional writing, so as to permit deeper insights into their artistic complexity, the historically lived contexts of their origin, the reception, and the appeal they still have for readers today. Therefore, this volume of the handbook gathers essays on individual autobiographies that are considered to be of special importance in order to show this immense variety of autobiographical and autofictional writing all around the world. However, the main difficulty was to decide which examples to include in the collection. The initial plan was to present about 30 essays on a sample of diverse autobiographical/autofictional documents. However, it soon became evident that the number of 30 essays would amount to a very limited selection in a handbook that claims to provide information about the autobiographical genre on a worldwide scale! And of course, a selection of 30 essays would unwillingly appear somewhat as a ‘holy canon’. Canons, as we all know, may have far-reaching implicit and explicit effects. Even if they deny their own canonical status, the mere fact of their written form, their appearance in script, produces authority on its own (see e.  g. Morrissey 2005; Gorak 2013). To set up a canon, truly, was not intended. However, the appealing idea of presenting essays on individual autobiographical/autofictional texts rapidly developed its own dynamics: In discussing the project with different people, authors who already contributed to volumes one and two of this handbook, but also with other experts in the field of life writing, a plethora of suggestions came up – with the result https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-111

1282 

 Introduction

that this volume now contains 57 chapters! And, yes, it deliberately contains chapters on ‘canonical’ autobiographical works by authors such as St. Augustine, Rousseau, Goethe, Wordsworth and many more that the student of the autobiographical tradition would not want to miss. Obviously, this European canon needed an expansion and an upgrade with regard to non-Western autobiographical/autofictional texts. Therefore, contributors were also asked to suggest unknown and unexpected examples of autobiographical and autofictional texts which they personally felt like writing about. As a result, the reader now finds chapters, for instance, on the Baburnama of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), the conqueror of Hindustan and founder of the Mogul dynasty; or on Śekhar: A Biography of Ajñeya (1911–1986), the Indian political activist, journalist, writer and scholar; or on the French choreographer Xavier Le Roy’s (born 1963) autobiographical/autofictional performance Product of Circumstances. It is the mixture of canonical representatives of the autobiographical/autofictional genre on the one hand and non-canonical examples on the other hand that forms the specific character of this volume which is dedicated to the particular and not so much to the typical. Certainly, every demanding text is much more particular than typical… I also tried to gather essays from all continents and from as many countries as possible, although it was clear that not every single country could be represented. To do so, that is, to consider all countries for the sake of principle, would have counteracted the idea of the somewhat free-style presentation of ‘musts’, ‘favorites’ and ‘oddities’, apart from the fact that it would have been technically difficult, for instance, to find competent authors. And furthermore, this sort of ‘completeness’ and ‘justice’ would have been a chimera and would undoubtedly have produced more problems on different scales, such as the question of representativeness. Fortunately, only a few of the essays agreed upon never came in. Yet the fact that against all efforts only about one third of the essays on individual autobiographical/autofictional texts are of non-European origin demonstrates how hard it is to uphold a consistent non-Eurocentric perspective. This refers back to the still unanswered question raised in the introduction to Volume Two: Is autobiography a European, or a Western concept? A tentative answer here would be: Autobiography’s institutional and by no means ontological or essential ‘Europeanness’ or ‘Westerness’ is a product of cultural interplay between production, distribution, and reception, of reading and writing, artistic and scholarly framing. Today, one should say, its tradition-bound generic ‘Europeanness’ is a global one, which means that it does not at all belong to Europeans and Westerners but is open to adaptation, appropriation, and transformation on a worldwide scale. Yes, the genre even requires inter- and transcultural resignification in order to remain creative, fresh and relevant. By the way, one should keep in mind that St. Augustine, for instance, was not a born European, but as he adopted traditions and knowledge that in his time were not at all designated as ‘European’, he was appropriated as a person and an author by what developed as ‘European tradition’.

Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts, Or How Not To Set Up A Canon 

 1283

The same restrictions hold true concerning the historical spectrum of autobiographical examples presented by this volume’s essays. Historical ‘representativeness’ – whatever this may mean – was pursued, yet not attained. The reasons are the same, yet slightly reformulated, as those mentioned above. Much more problematic, and a cause of severe sorrow, is the fact that only about one sixth of the essays present texts written by women although more than half of the contributors to volume three are female authors. Here, I could and perhaps should have been more determined to enforce a political agenda and strive for gender parity; yet the price would possibly have been to lose authors and to accept a much longer processing time – and, finally, to draw a picture of the world’s gender relations that might be wishful, but not at all (yet) the reality. Enough of limitations: Against the backdrop of the great variety of autobiographical/autofictional writing and the way texts deal with and exceed their limitations, I wanted to present essays which are as free of strict regulations as necessary for appropriately dealing with their various subjects. Therefore, I did not impose strict guidelines for the individual chapters. The idea was to allow the authors of the following essays to be fairly free from formal restrictions and to encourage personal approaches and individual readings of ‘their’ texts. Nevertheless, the format of a handbook requires a basic agreement on what kind of information the reader may expect. Therefore, the authors of the essays were asked to provide short information about the author and the historical origins of the text as well as, of course, a summary of the content. The ensuing analysis should refer to theoretical approaches, categories and genre aspects dealt with in Volume One as well as to historical and cultural contexts provided in Volume Two. It was illuminating to see how differently authors dealt with the freedom of form on the one hand and the few basic instructions given to them on the other: Some retained the key notions of the instructions (author, origin, content, analysis) as subheadings of their chapters (which I had not intended), while others did not use subheadings at all or came up with their own. Editor and publisher finally decided not to homogenize the form of the essays and thereby document a spectrum of critical writing in autobiography/autofiction research. Diversity being a favored principle in the concept of this handbook with regard to, for instance, the diversity of theoretical approaches, genre concepts, but also the use of the English language within the individual chapters (see Preface), the presentation of various critical approaches in dealing with highly diversified autobiographical/autofictional texts seemed to make sense. I only intervened when I had the impression that the reader might need more information in order to grasp the general idea of the autobiographical/autofictional work in question. Autobiography/autofiction remains a vibrant field on the literary market as well as in scholarly research. No other genre is driven so much by the relation of textuality and literary form on the one hand and ‘the reality of life’ on the other hand as auto­ biography. It is the ever evasive line between text and life that remains effective in the performance of people’s everyday life as well as in written autobiographical/autofic-

1284 

 Introduction

tional texts (see e.  g. Shands et al. 2015; Göppel and Zander 2017). In the context of autobiography and autofiction, the term ‘text’ does not only refer to the written text, but includes other art forms as well, as it is the aim of this handbook to demonstrate. Paintings, photographs, films and even dance may be conceptualized as texts in so far as they are based on symbolic languages that communicate meaning by combining individual symbols or signs according to specific scripts or grammars. And even life may be conceived as a ‘text’, all the more so when it is narrated. Both life and text are, consciously or unconsciously, moved and activated by the sense of their limits. Autobiographical texts in this wider sense of ‘text’ display and draw on the productive forces induced by the gap between sign and referent, signifier and signified, wish and reality, past and future, self and the other, and so on, and thus provide an invaluable lens to view and reflect on what we consider our ‘real’ lives.

Works Cited Göppel, Rolf, and Margharita Zander, eds. Resilienz aus der Sicht der betroffenen Subjekte. Die autobiographische Perspektive. Weinheim/Basel: Beltz, 2017. Gorak, Jan. The Making of the Modern Canon. Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Morrissey, Lee, ed. Debating the Canon. A Reader from Addison to Nafisi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Shands, Kerstin W., Giulia Grillo Mikut, Dipti R. Pattaniak, and Karen Ferreira-Meyers, eds. Writing the Self. Essays on Autobiography and Autofiction. Waiblingen: Elanders, 2015.

1 Isocrates: Περὶ ἀντιδόσεως (353 BCE) [Antidosis] and Lucian: Περὶ τοῦ ἐνυπνίου (2nd Century) [Dream] Peter von Möllendorff

Characteristically, the self-perception of current research on autobiography and autofiction emphasizes the resurrection of the author who had been declared dead in postmodernism, and to deduce part of its ‘raison d‘être’ from here, without the want to relinquish that which has been achieved in postmodern debate on theory. The author – set against such a background – can no longer be the compact and steadfast constant, an authority being responsible for the text but standing outside of it, in an unclear relationship to intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrators, and transgressing the border between world and text in abrupt, metaleptic moments. Literary texts, having the status of ego-documents, are therefore of special interest, because they involve the author as an actual person, but at the same time, as products of postmodern speaking, cannot simply depict him. Rather, it seems to turn out that the author as an object of depiction cannot be of any use. The language’s semiotic instability shows through in speaking and thereby in the speaker, who is uncertain of his identity in the multiplying of life references in the age of social freedom and globalization, and rather perceives himself as a bunch of conflicting partial identities and identitarian claims. Neither is he able to find any stability in language; the possible forms of an autobiographical statement have multiplied ad infinitum as well. The  – imprecisely so-called  – ‘premodernity’, in contrast to that, seems to be characterized by some calming stability of the circumstances in the view of current research, and it has been laconically phrased that premodern man took on the roles that his society made available for him (Wucherpfennig 2009). It is easily seen that this view cannot do any justice to the complexity of the actual circumstances. On the one hand a large part also of the contemporary’s behavioral role is predefined, the demands of which he cannot simply defy completely, although the number and differentiation of possible roles has multiplied. On the other hand, each role demanded its role player in that seemingly more stable time as well: It was always possible to not do justice to one’s role, to fail, if one were supposed to win, one could despair of it and its limitations. Especially the question on the quality of the role play came to the fore like that on the specific character of the obligation. The fact alone that antiquity already knows autobiographical texts shows that answers to these questions were not a matter of course. From classical studies’ view the focusing of autobiographical ‘literature’ is conspicuous, although quite understandable. It is simply not the act of utterance, but the act of writing down that is examined carefully (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2006, 84−88). It results in the picture of a figure that is uncertain in identitarian regard, that tries to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-112

1286 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

gain core and conture in writing, makes and destroys drafts, arrives at ever more precision or eventually considers, is forced to consider the self-formation to be a neverending, never concluded process. It immediately suggests itself that most times the recipient of such texts is also taken into view; it is of course known that autobiographical texts are supposed to meet with approval, admiration, that they often perpetuate and spread ideological positions, but it seems that this is not often taken into view, and even more rarely set off against that identity negotiation. Of course, this is based on the problem that the moment the author gives away his text and into print, his or her person leaves the image field, but that conversely the reader does not enter, because s/he cannot be grasped empirically in the necessary individual sharpness, and therefore again only emerges as a virtual entity of the text. But it has to be taken into account that ancient literature keeps an orally auditive dimension into and through Late Antiquity, and that it is this dimension that decidedly dominates in archaic and classical times (for an overview see v. Möllendorff 2013). An autobiographical text is first of all recited by the autobiographical subject itself, this means: The subject stands with his body and voice in front of his listeners, that is why it is more difficult to convey identitarian instability and fragility, which possibly cannot be perceived that easily. In the case of Isocrates’ Antidosis and Lucian’s Dream, however, the passing on in written form, the receiving through reading is at least as important, probably even more important than their orally auditive situating, which is still strongly evoked and generically underlies both texts.

Isocrates’ Antidosis The orator and philosopher appeared before the Athenian court in 353 BCE in order to defend himself, aged 82, against the accusation of some Lysimachus. Lysimachus had charged Isocrates that διαφθείρω τοὺς νεωτέρους λέγειν διδάσκων καὶ παρὰ τὸ δίκαιον ἐν τοῖς ἀγῶσι πλεονεκτεῖν, ἐκ δὲ τῶν ἄλλων λόγων ποιεῖ με τηλικοῦτον ὅσος οὐδεὶς πώποτε γέγονεν οὔτε τῶν περὶ τὰ δικαστήρια καλινδουμένων οὔτε τῶν περὶ τὴν φιλοσοφίαν διατριψάντων· οὐ γὰρ μόνον ἰδιώτας φησί μου γεγενῆσθαι μαθητὰς, ἀλλὰ καὶ ῥήτορας καὶ στρατηγοὺς καὶ βασιλέας καὶ τυράννους, καὶ χρήματα παρ’ αὐτῶν παμπληθῆ τὰ μὲν εἰληφέναι, τὰ δ’ ἔτι καὶ νῦν λαμβάνειν [I corrupt young men by teaching them to speak and gain their own advantage in the courts contrary to justice, while in his speech he makes me out to be a man whose equal has never been known either among those who hang about the law-courts or among the devotees of philosophy; for he declares that I have had as my pupils not only private persons but orators, generals, kings, and despots; and that I have received from them and am now receiving enormous sums of money] (Isocr. ant. 30).

The speech Isocrates sets against this has an enormous scope with its 323 paragraphs. It claims to show to the citizens of the polis Athens and to posterity

1 Isocrates: Antidosis and Lucian: Dream 

 1287

τὸν τρόπον ὃν ἔχω, καὶ τὸν βίον ὃν ζῶ, καὶ τὴν παιδείαν περὶ ἣν διατρίβω, καὶ μὴ περιίδοιμι περὶ τῶν τοιούτων ἄκριτον ἐμαυτὸν ὄντα, μηδ’ ἐπὶ τοῖς βλασφημεῖν εἰθισμένοις ὥσπερ νῦν γενόμενον· [the truth about my character, my life, and the education to which I am devoted, and not suffer myself to be condemned on these issues without a trial nor to remain, as I had just been, at the mercy of my habitual calumniators] (Isocr. ant. 6).

It is due to the length and the general claim for an encompassing life report from high age’s retrospective that the signet was given by scholars to the Antidosis to be the first proper autobiographical text of Greek literature which deserves this name from a modern perspective (Trédé-Boulmer 1993, 17). Of course we find autobiographisms in earlier forensic speeches and other texts as well (Misch 1949, 158–180), but not in the sense of any presentation aiming at completeness or anyway far-reaching representativity as primary work intent. It is, to speak here with Lejeune (1975, 14), composed in prose; author, speaker and protagonist are identical persons; the report’s object lies in the past. In addition, the text again and again focusses on its scripturality, that is, it wants to be read, and thus presents a paradigm of autobiographical writing (in contrast to other medially indeterminated self-reports or, as Breuer and Sandberg [2006, 10–11] put it, ego-documents). Especially the fact that the Antidosis belongs to the genre of Attic forensic speech should remind the reader of this genre’s being at least four generations older, and that it was always in the nature of the forensic speech to include statements on oneself and autobiographical reports. The beginning of Mantitheus’ speech for defending his eligibility to hold public office, delivered at the turn of the fifth and the fourth century BCE, shall be cited here for comparison: Εἰ μὴ συνῄδειν, ὦ βουλή, τοῖς κατηγόροις βουλομένοις ἐκ παντὸς τρόπου κακῶς ἐμὲ ποιεῖν, πολλὴν ἂν αὐτοῖς χάριν εἶχον ταύτης τῆς κατηγορίας· ἡγοῦμαι γὰρ τοῖς ἀδίκως διαβεβλημένοις τούτους εἶναι μεγίστων ἀγαθῶν αἰτίους, οἵτινες ἂν αὐτοὺς ἀναγκάζωσιν εἰς ἔλεγχον τῶν αὐτοῖς βεβιωμένων καταστῆναι. […] ἀξιῶ δέ, ὦ βουλή, ἐὰν μὲν τοῦτο μόνον ὑμῖν ἐπιδείξω, ὡς εὔνους εἰμὶ τοῖς καθεστηκόσι πράγμασι καὶ ὡς ἠνάγκασμαι τῶν αὐτῶν κινδύνων μετέχειν ὑμῖν, μηδέν πώ μοι πλέον εἶναι. ἐὰν δὲ φαίνωμαι καὶ τὰ ἄλλα μετρίως βεβιωκὼς καὶ πολὺ παρὰ τὴν δόξαν καὶ παρὰ τοὺς λόγους τοὺς τῶν ἐχθρῶν, δέομαι ὑμῶν ἐμὲ μὲν δοκιμάζειν […] [If I were not conscious, gentlemen of the Council, that my accusers are seeking every possible means of injuring me, I should feel most grateful to them for this accusation; since I consider that the victims of unjust slander have the greatest service rendered to them by anyone who will compel them to undergo an examination of the record of their lives. (…) Now, gentlemen, I make no claim to special merit, if I merely make plain to you that I am a supporter of the existing constitution and have been compelled to take my own share in your dangers: but if I am found to have lived, in all other respects, a regular life, quite contrary to the opinion and statements of my enemies, I request you to pass me through (…)] (Lys. or. 16 [Mantitheus], 1–3).

The speech was delivered by Mantitheus himself but composed by Lysias, a professional ‘logograph’. In the Attic lawsuit plaintiff and accused emerged in person and their case could not, as was the case in Rome, be pleaded through attorneys. Since not everybody was able to compose an effective, concise and also rhetorically elaborate testimony, there was a sector for speechwriters who tailored a speech for the litigant

1288 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

and his specific case. The party to the case still had to deliver this speech himself. Since the information on his life therefore comes from Mantitheus himself, one is entitled to speak of an ego-document here. Lysias composed also a speech for self-defense – this, too, is an autobiographical text –, which also concentrated on certain episodes of his life (or. 12). The focus of this speech as well as of its equivalents though is usually significantly narrow, insofar as the life story is reported only scarcely and with a constant view to the concrete object of the lawsuit and, of course, to the auto­ biographical ‘topics’ (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2006, 87), therefore it is clearly functionalized. This functional relationship between ‘speech’ and ‘autobiography’ however seems to be inverted in Isocrates. For the Antidosis is explicitly a fictitious speech, conceived for the purpose of autobiographical presentation: σκοπούμενος οὖν εὕρισκον οὐδαμῶς ἂν ἄλλως τοῦτο διαπραξάμενος, πλὴν εἰ γραφείη λόγος ὥσπερ εἰκὼν τῆς ἐμῆς διανοίας καὶ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν [ἐμοὶ] βεβιωμένων· διὰ τούτου γὰρ ἤλπιζον καὶ τὰ περὶ ἐμὲ μάλιστα γνωσθήσεσθαι καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν τοῦτον μνημεῖόν μου καταλειφθήσεσθαι πολὺ κάλλιον τῶν χαλκῶν ἀναθημάτων. […] εἰ δ’ ὑποθείμην ἀγῶνα μὲν καὶ κίνδυνόν τινα περὶ ἐμὲ γιγνόμενον, συκοφάντην δ’ ὄντα τὸν γεγραμμένον καὶ τὸν πράγματά μοι παρέχοντα, κἀκεῖνον μὲν ταῖς διαβολαῖς χρώμενον ταῖς ἐπὶ τῆς ἀντιδόσεως ῥηθείσαις, ἐμαυτὸν δ’ ἐν ἀπολογίας σχήματι τοὺς λόγους ποιούμενον, οὕτως ἂν ἐκγενέσθαι μοι μάλιστα διαλεχθῆναι περὶ ἁπάντων ὧν τυγχάνω βουλόμενος. […] ἤδη δ’ ἀναγιγνώσκετε τὴν ἀπολογίαν τὴν προσποιουμένην μὲν περὶ κρίσεως γεγράφθαι, βουλομένην δὲ περὶ ἐμοῦ δηλῶσαι τὴν ἀλήθειαν, καὶ τοὺς μὲν ἀγνοοῦντας εἰδέναι ποιῆσαι, τοὺς δὲ φθονοῦντας ἔτι μᾶλλον ὑπὸ τῆς νόσου ταύτης λυπεῖσθαι […] [And as I kept thinking upon it, I came ever to the same conclusion, namely, that the only way in which I could accomplish this was to compose a discourse which would be, as it were, a true image of my thought and of my whole life; for I hoped that this would serve both as the best means of making known the truth about me and, at the same time, as a monument, after my death, more noble than statues of bronze. (…) But it occurred to me that if I were to adopt the fiction of a trial and of a suit brought against me – if I were to suppose that a sycophant had brought an indictment and was threatening me with trouble and that he was using the calumnies which had been urged against me in the suit about the exchange of property, while I, for my part, cast my speech in the form of a defence in court – in this way it would be possible to discuss to the best advantage all the points which I wanted to make. (…) I beg you now to listen to my defence, which purports to have been written for a trial, but whose real purpose is to show the truth about myself, to make those who are ignorant about me know the sort of man I am and those who are afflicted with envy suffer a still more painful attack of this malady (…)] (Isocr. ant. 7–8. 13).

The speech is based on an actual lawsuit Isocrates carried on at an earlier point of his life, and in which he had to defend himself against the proposal to exchange his fortune (on the procedure Too 2008, 4–6). This actual forensic speech has not been preserved, and this is not forcibly due to the disfavor of tradition, but may go back to Isocrates himself who created a surrogate with his Antidosis, which, as cited, was supposed to serve as a lasting monument. Since Isocrates emphasizes in the course of his speech that as a rhetor he did not at all take part in any lawsuits (Isocr. ant. 2–3, 27, 36–42, 238–239) it might be suggested that he could not well have been interested in integrating such a concrete apology for himself into an edition of his rhetoric work. Nevertheless our time still possesses six lawsuit speeches written by Isocrates, but not

1 Isocrates: Antidosis and Lucian: Dream 

 1289

on his own behalf. Whereas that speech in the concrete lawsuit certainly contained much information on financial details, Isocrates does not speak about the exchange of his fortune in the Antidosis and on the de facto occasion of the judicial dispute as such, but concentrates indeed on a general report, combined with a presentation of what he understands by the term ‘philosophy’. The speech, with its emphasis on the old age of the author, gains the character of a ‘final word’, the mere scope of which shall create medial presence and visibility. Furthermore, in the course of his speech Isocrates time and again quotes parts of his former speeches (§59: Panegyricus 51–99; §66: On the Peace 25–56, 132–145; §73: To Nicocles 14–39; §194: Against the Sophists 14–18) – if these parts that are only shown as references in the editions were completely recited as well, then the total length of his speech is increased by almost 40% –, whereby he demonstrates the historical continuity of his thinking and acting. Again one should keep in mind that the Antidosis was not only supposed to be read, but also to be spoken and listened to, in short: to be performed, and so it was; literary texts were read aloud into and through Late Antiquity, even if reading only for oneself. It takes about three hours for the recitation of the Antidosis, proper citations included. From other speeches and letters of Isocrates it is known that there were complex procedures in the circles of his students to handle the works of their master: They implied multiple acts of reception in recitations as well as lectures, respectively interrupted by discussions of single passages (Usener 1994), and even here Isocrates gives detailed instructions about how to adequately declaim this speech (ant. 12). It becomes evident from all this that the publication of the Antidosis did barely aim at making the biographical person Isocrates accessible. Interestingly enough, Isocrates does not accentuate concrete facts of his life which dismisses the reader of checking the factual truth of his narration. Facts of life of a socially visible individual might have been well known in a nearly face-to-face-society. A still dominant preoccupation of research on autobiographical and autofictional texts (see the overview in Zipfel 2009) is, then, not so important for understanding at least this autobiographical text. The private person Isocrates, even something like a deeper identity, is not being at issue here, and obviously not because it were concealed, but because it was not essential to his public, his citizen-like political task. In this sense, Isocrates stands in place of his ideology, his concept of ‘paideia’, the rhetoric as a means of language and intellectual education, of his circle of students and like-minded persons, and his as well as their political influence. If the modern reader wants to understand this as a role play, then s/he has to be conscious of the fact that such a role was first obviously not to be related to any model that was accepted in a socially general way, and second, that there was, in Isocrates’ view anyway, no option for him to not play this role. He fulfilled his role that substantially, and he was that completely permeated by his educational mission that other roles formed no imaginable alternative. This is perhaps underrated by Misch (1949) who rightly describes the self-encomiastic drive as a main stimulus of the speech but too quickly dismisses it as pretentious and deceitful (an opinion shared by most of Misch’s contemporaneous researchers as well

1290 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

as forerunners). Isocrates is therefore less of an actor than a representative of some specific discourse on education that he shapes by his intellectual and verbal exemplarity within the Athenian society, while he produces a mental present for himself and the education that is embodied by him – he also calls it ‘philosophy’ – through his students in the Greek realm that will continue beyond his death. This philosophy is Isocrates’ qualification for rhetoric, which is again considered the nucleus of all political; the good rhetor is in that – differing from what was advocated by the ­Sophists at the end of the fifth century  – per definitionem somebody who has the best for his polis in mind, and is able to achieve it. Talent, which is the most important (ant. 189), must be supplemented by exercise and practical experience, while the education must neither be neglected, but still keeps the third rank (ant. 184–188, 192). For Isocrates it is a natural result that only those coming from a good and at the same time well-off family can become good and responsible rhetors; accordingly, his adepts are recruited from the rich and powerful of the Greek world. Only they can afford the leisure to complete a multi-year rhetorical training course. But they also bear special responsibility for the political system then. The function of the educated rhetor and politician is obviously something that causally has to be inherent in the essence and the natural talent of a person. Whereas a versatile actor must be able to play any role eventually, which the director entrusts to him, here it is about a qualification of the most basic nature: Task and ability, social demand and perception that one can do justice to this demand, have to coincide. Otherwise put: What Isocrates here delivers to be – even if only fictively – valued by the judges of Athens is a stable self-conviction: He has taken the path that his provenance and his aptitude had predelienated for him, he completed it through diligence and experience, and has received appreciation in the shape of wealth and reputation. Self and foreign perception largely coincide. It is eventually only a verification of all this, that they now begrudge him this identitary success. Insofar, Isocrates has chosen the subject of his autofictional report in a highly symbolic way: His fortune, that allegedly is to be exchanged here against that of his opponent (and the real existence of which certainly can be taken for granted with regard to Isocrates‘ claim that he and his family had financed multiple liturgies), is not a mere financial quantity for disposal, but a constitutive part of his identity. He inherited part of it from his family, a large part he ‘generated’ by taking charges and fees for education in rhetoric which should earn him admiration and acknowledgement by all Athenians (Isocr. ant. 150–152, 161–166, 246, 258 and passim). These are therefore earnings that were able to enlarge his δόξα [estimation] and τιμή [honour], the highest values the polis Athens could assign to its members at his time. Greek society knows the exchange of gifts in Durkheim’s and Mauss’ sense. The individual commits himself to the collective through in-kind benefits that are appropriate to his assets – so-called liturgies –, the collective gives thanks to him through the award of honours that are publicly documented (inscriptions, monuments) and manifest themselves in the gain of power. To be forced to exchange this fortune, which in a certain way constitutes identity, against some foreign fortune, would have equalled the loss of

1 Isocrates: Antidosis and Lucian: Dream 

 1291

honour, irrespective of its actual amount, and the coincidence of self- and foreign perception would have been severely disturbed by that. Isocrates sets himself into a discursive frame with his speech, he wants to gain acceptance, further τιμή [reputation]. He cannot imagine himself as standing outside of the polis society; to this may be compared Nielsen (2009, 268–269), where the possible step that is taken by Isocrates towards the rhetorical function described above is still missing conceptually, when Nielsen says that the autobiographical text “sich als Beitrag zur kulturellen Öffent­ lich­keit profiliert und sich im Dialog mit deren institutionalisierten Erzählformen und Gattungskonventionen gestaltet” [‘distinguishes itself as a contribution to the cultural public, and shapes itself by dialoguing with its institutionalised forms of narration and generic conventions’]: Isocrates’ speech would be underrated when characterized as a mere ‘contribution’, insofar as it makes the social acceptance, nay, admiration the object of its convincing strategy. It is all the more important at the same time to refute the claim of his rival Lysimachus that he had dedicated his teaching to persons who had done damage to the polis Athens seen as a whole. Isocrates devotes much space to this refutation, and since a judgment cannot be reached in the frame of the fictitious process, one has to content oneself with its vehemence, even if it does not convince in all points. Thus a continuous chain of identity leads from Isocrates’ family via his own person with its individual talents, abilities and successes to his students who have all gained highest (even if not always flawless) public reputation, and eventually towards the polis Athens and its citizens, the total welfare of which Isocrates is convinced to have always had in mind and to have followed. Isocrates can claim this all the more easily, because his teaching activity is exactly directed at rhetoric and thereby at public speech. The verbally fought struggle of opinions at the (fictitious) time of the Antidosis is still standing at the constitutive center of the political existence of Athens and thereby, from a Greek perspective, the οἰκουμένη [inhabited world], even if this constellation was supposed to more and more lose its validity a few years later under Macedonian hegemony. Isocrates’ ability and achievements therefore do not relate to some marginal realm of Attic society, but are immediately settled at its core (ant. 253–257). There are therefore no basic perceptional differences between Isocrates and his ‘social group’ from this perspective, the rhetor – who additionally insists on having always abstained from the rhetorical allday business, the forensic speech, and thereby from the existent dispute between the parties – can feel himself, concerning his identity, to be at home in his social group. The purely affirmative gesture of not questioning himself, not showing any uncertainties, not trying to cover up any breaks, shows that the text’s fictionality does not so much serve self-construction than self-confirmation and self-monumentalizing (for that see Ant. 7).

1292 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

Lucian’s Dream It is appealing to contrast Isocrates’ Antidosis with a much shorter, still in many respects comparable text from a later age and a quite different political concept: Lucian’s short preface The Dream from the second century CE. Lucian, who is almost not to be grasped as a historical personality, came from Samosata, a Syrian town at the Euphrat’s shore, at the margin of the Imperium Romanum. His life data are uncertain, he must well have died before 180 CE. It is possible that he was publicly active as a rhetor: Some of the ‘personae’ in his writings claim this, but this may be a topical autobiographical construction that is typical for the age. The public emergence of important rhetors was indeed an outstanding feature of socio-cultural life in the Roman high empire. These so-called sophists were travelling rhetors, coming from the best families and rich circumstances who publicly demonstrated their perfect mastery of language, performance and especially classical education – this means: Attic Greek of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE as well as the whole literature, art, history and politics of that epoch as a canon of reference for one’s own time – and made a great public stir by that. One can consider them as exponents of a general culture of education, the so-called ‘paideia’, the principal mastery of which was a task assigned to every member of the upper class, if he wanted to participate in discursive power (research on these aspects of imperial culture is large; see e.  g. Schmitz 1997). Greek language and Greek culture belonged to the guiding values of the age; to be called educated, ‘πεπαιδευμένος’, was an ambition of the time that was embattled and polemically controversial. Lucian belongs in this sphere. Possibly he had more influence through his writings than through his emergence; but only in a few texts he figures under his proper name. Indeed it is only rarely that this proper name Loukianós can be found in the text as one of the many seemingly auctorial ‘personae’ who appear in the work and reproduce facets of the historical person Lucian. All of these are indeterminate, to an extent that none of them is doubtlessly to be ascertained. That Dream is all the more irritating therefore, because it seems almost intrusively autobiographical with a (possibly not authentic) subtitle Lucian’s Life, and was possibly recited by its speaker as a short preface to a larger declamation. The speaker reports in first person that his father had, when his son came of age, talked with his friends about his son’s professional future, and they had determined – in order that he might as soon as possible contribute to the family subsistence – to apprentice him at his uncle’s, a renowned stonemason, because already when he was a child he made small pottery figurines in an imaginative way. In his overeagerness the new apprentice shatters a stone plate on his first day already and takes blows for that from his uncle; sobbingly he rushes home, is soothed by his mother and falls asleep. He dreams that he met two women who each tried to win him for that respective way of life she is the representative of. The one woman is the personified Τέχνη [craftmanship]. She prophecies to him hard and honest work, for which he will gain a solid and appropriate reputation. The other woman is Παιδεία [education]: She tempts him with

1 Isocrates: Antidosis and Lucian: Dream 

 1293

the promise of world surrounding fame he could win fast and without much effort. Immediately the dreamer turns to her. She then rides in a celestial car over the earth with him, where he can see men acclaiming him from underneath. Indeed, that young man is now mature and possesses all the reputation he had been prophecied, when returning into his home. He suspects that his listeners might not have appreciated this extensive narration of his dream as a whole, but he insists on having recited it for quite a serious purpose. He pursues that Καὶ τοίνυν κἀγὼ τοῦτον τὸν ὄνειρον ὑμῖν διηγησάμην ἐκείνου ἕνεκα, ὅπως οἱ νέοι πρὸς τὰ βελτίω τρέπωνται καὶ παιδείας ἔχωνται, καὶ μάλιστα εἴ τις αὐτῶν ὑπὸ πενίας ἐθελοκακεῖ καὶ πρὸς τὴν ἥττω ἀποκλίνει, φύσιν οὐκ ἀγεννῆ διαφθείρων. ἐπιρρωσθήσεται εὖ οἶδ’ ὅτι κἀκεῖνος ἀκούσας τοῦ μύθου, ἱκανὸν ἑαυτῷ παράδειγμα ἐμὲ προστησάμενος, ἐννοῶν οἷος μὲν ὢν πρὸς τὰ κάλλιστα ὥρμησα καὶ παιδείας ἐπεθύμησα, μηδὲν ἀποδειλιάσας πρὸς τὴν πενίαν τὴν τότε, οἷος δὲ πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐπανελήλυθα […] [I told you this dream in order that those who are young may take the better direction and cleave to education, above all if poverty is making any of them faint-hearted and inclining him toward the worse, to the detriment of a noble nature. He will be strengthened, I am very sure, by hearing the tale, if he takes me as an adequate example, reflecting what I was when I aspired to all that is finest and set my heart on education, showing no weakness in the face of my poverty at that time, and what I am now, on my return to you (…)] (Lukian. somn. 18).

This autobiographical report tells – this alone is peculiar in an ancient text and sufficiently conspicuous – the history of a juvenile’s development and the story of his social rise, at least to some extent. It also tells it – more on this below – on the foundation of a whole series of important intertexts. And eventually the story is abandoned there, where it starts to become interesting, and from where on it could have gained at least a certain degree of verifiability and thereby facticity, that is, when the speaker after waking from his dream must have started his training to become an educated orator. The author, appropriate to his general revival in literature and cultural science, stands at the center of today’s research. The role of the recipient seems to be little reflected, although the types of readers, that were for example distinguished in detail by Heinz Schlaffer (1999), might well to a big part be reckoned for autobiographical texts as well. Such recipients have certain needs. They do not, as research mostly seems to assume, only relate to the question on the facticity of that which has been read – in the sense of the autobiographical contract, the way Lejeune has assumed it –, but also to tension, probability, potential for identification and much more. It is therefore especially interesting in Lucian’s small speech that its final part is dedicated to the involvement with his listeners, who have their say quite extensively and critically. Lucian himself already doubts the truthfulness of his dream explicitly. It might have been a spawn from “ἐκταραχθεὶς πρὸς τὸν τῶν πληγῶν φόβον” [“my agitation on account of the fear inspired by the thrashing” (Lukian. somn. 16)], and the decision the dreamer had taken in it is in the first place due to the memory of the moment “ἐπεί μοι καὶ εἰς νοῦν ἦλθεν ἡ σκυτάλη καὶ ὅτι πληγὰς εὐθὺς οὐκ ὀλίγας ἀρχομένῳ μοι

1294 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

χθὲς ἐνετρίψατο” [“when the stick entered my mind and the fact that it had laid many a blow upon me at the very outset the day before” (somn. 14)]. The listeners insert foot into these estimations, and call the narration “μακρόν καὶ δικανικόν” [“long and tiresome”], an “ληρῆσαι ταῦτα” [“idle tale”] and “ἕωλος ψυχρολογία” [“flat to spin pointless yarns”] (somn. 17). The speaker knows how to retaliate such reproaches with his already cited good intention of encouraging needy juveniles, but the rebukes for the narrative quality are as little eliminated by that as the estimation that the dream lacks actual significance; especially the latter much counteracts the author’s good intention. For basically, Lucian does not uncover the mystery of his success at all: When the paradigmatically suitable, the ‘instruction’, is supposed to start, his report stops – the orator is standing in completion and with all his renown in front of his listeners, but it remains hidden in uncertain dream images how he had gotten there. Since, as has been hinted at already, there is no known external source on Lucian’s (or the speaker’s) life and because he does not re-narrate the story in any of his other writings, one has to content oneself to admire the speaker in his particularity, as an exceptional personality. However, one should not exclude that this could also be an essential part of the production-aesthetical background for some modern autobiography as well, and all the more for those in which the author seems to struggle with his identity – and also for a dialogue “zwischen eigenen Erfahrungen und fremden, aber ästhetisch verallgemeinerten Erfahrungen auf der Basis der im Werk enthaltenen Einladung zum Austausch, darunter der Authentizitätserwartungen, die mit der autobiographischen Gattung verknüpft sind” [‘between one‘s own experiences and foreign, but aesthetically universalised experiences, based on the invitation for communication that is implied within the work, including the expectations of authenticity that are related to the autobiographical genre’] (Nielsen 2009, 268–269) this small text does not actually offer itself, simply due to the many indeterminacies. Indeed, the apparently autobiographical original moment – the apprenticeship as a stonemason that is begun on the father’s decision – as a seemingly authentic small narrative collapses, because one of the favourite auctorial ‘personae’ Lucian makes appear in his oeuvre is a certain Lycinus who makes his dialogue partners be tested and refuted on their veracity: a second Socrates therefore, and indeed the name ‘Lycinus’ – which for its part obviously sounds the auctorial name ‘Loukianós’, without being completely transparent towards it – may be referred to Socrates and his parents through some quite probable allusion to a passage in Aristophanian comedy (Dubel 1994). Socrates came from a stonemason family: With a view to this one cannot be sure at all how Lucian’s childhood narration is to be understood, and it is far from certain that it is authentical. His original listeners might have known what was the truth – but already his contemporary other readers may have seen themselves confronted with the same uncertainty with regard to the actualness of the reported happening as the modern reader. That s/he does not get to know any names, any places, any data does not reduce his or her suspicion. Whitmarsh (2001, 122–124) seems to accept all too quickly the value of the story told here as factual narrative and concludes from this

1 Isocrates: Antidosis and Lucian: Dream 

 1295

a conflict between a Syrian and a Greek identity. But this means also to neglect the Socratian allusion in the motif of being born into a stonemason family which certainly should be regarded as an appropriation of a facet of identity belonging to the cultural centre of the ancient world. Furthermore, the dream report itself is related to a story narrated by Xenophon, which again he gets from the sophist Hippias, namely the famous narration of ‘Heracles at the crossroads’, in which the hero meets ‘Virtue’ and ‘Wickedness’, who both want to win him for ‘their’ respective way of life (Xen. mem. 2,1,21–34; see Hopkinson 2008, 94–96). Of course Heracles chooses the path of Virtue, but in Lucian’s dream it is, surprisingly enough, Education whose clothes all too much remind of the luxurious clothing of Xenophon’s ‘Wickedness’ (Whitmarsh 2001, 123; Hopkinson 2008, 96), and when Lucian in his introduction to his dream report cites Homer’s Iliad (2,1–335), in which Agamemnon sees a dream image that makes him test his army and propose the premature leave from unconquered Troy, then one may be certain that Lucian’s listeners were reminded of this dream being an elusive one that almost prevented the Greek victory. The reader is therefore confronted here with what we might almost call a kaleidoscopic identity that is combined from literary set pieces of different provenience, and which leaves all in the condition of being half-finished. It is specifically this construction here that is brilliant from the point of view of the postulate for education. The way the speaker here plays with texts and traditions (for details Hopkinson 2008, 96–97) and combines them with relicts of his proper life until they cannot be distinguished any more, proves him to be an excellent carrier of ‘paideia’, exceptional in his being unpalpable, whose mimetic access to the classics cannot be called otherwise but masterful and inventive. Insofar it may well be said that this narration exactly by its not causing any coherence extracts most voluminous ‘life material’ and downwardly fragmentizes Lucian’s life, lets this his life culminate in the oral performance in his current emergence, his appearance hic et nunc, but creates no individuality for the reader with which he may compete, which he could discuss, but creates a document of his life, being completely merged in its educational ostentative gesture. In Lucian’s case therefore one may say that it is a role play he performs. He presents himself, at a first glance, as a successful social ascender, a selfmade man who looks back to his childishly-youthful beginnings with slight self-irony and affection, and who leaves aside the troublesome years of the apprenticeship, yes, leaves the responsibility, whether they want to choose such a way, to his listeners (v. Möllendorff 2010, 189–202). The dream figure of Paideia was similar, as has been explained above, to the allegorical shape of ‘Wickedness’ in Xenophon-Hippias, and to top it all she even claimed that the way to education was easier to tread upon: “Καὶ ὁ νῦν πένης ὁ τοῦ δεῖνος, ὁ βουλευσάμενός τι περὶ ἀγεννοῦς οὕτω τέχνης, μετ’ ὀλίγον ἅπασι ζηλωτὸς καὶ ἐπίφθονος ἔσῃ, τιμώμενος καὶ ἐπαινούμενος […]” [“You who are now the beggarly son of a nobody, who have entertained some thought of so illiberal a trade, will after a little inspire envy and jealousy in all men, for you will be honoured and lauded (…)”] (Lukian. somn. 11). This is an obvious lie, only an immature small boy, like the speaker

1296 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

was back then, could fall for. Everyone hearing this has to decide for himself/herself therefore, whether s/he is of the opinion that the dream’s promises have been fulfilled in the dreamer, and whether s/he wants to dare to set for the journey himself or herself. The story’s fragility therefore does not make the reader deduce the fragility of the identity manifesting itself in it, but clearly is a rhetorical strategy to convince. The Dream is an autofiction the aim of which is not self-construction, but the positioning within a social structure. It is interesting in this, which means of presentation the speaker uses and in what a skilful way. Specifically, in alluding to different former biographies – Socrates, Heracles – and even autobiographies – Isocrates himself who also alluded to Plato and Socrates and whose Antidosis 10 (the possible usefulness of his autobiography for young people wanting to turn to higher education) might constitute the background for the final argument of the Dream) – he may be thought to reflect on how to write autobiography. The Dream could also be called an implicit metaautobiographical text (Nünning 2007, 275, 278, 280–282) or even a refusal of the autobiographical genre (Bompaire 1993, 204). The dense intertextual structure, the contact with his audience through inserting dialogical elements, his dignified language that respectively characterizes the different speakers well, the effortless integration of different speakers whereby we get a mixture of genres that is quite typical for Lucian’s writing: all this is not a means to an end, is not a form of semantic speaking, but is a semiotic act. This is also true for the implicit figural interconnections with Socrates and Heracles with the help of which the speaker still brings himself into play as a successful philosopher: For Heracles had been accepted by Stoic philosophy as incarnation of the wise par excellence, and that this dimension of the mythical hero is meant here, is shown by the allusion to exactly the episode of choosing virtue. Finally, the presentation mode is the essential element of the role: The speaker becomes the one he claims to have become only through and by the way of his presentation. This might be considered a postmodern trait: a gaining of the subject in and by the moment of writing – and telling, as should be added (de Toro and Gronemann 2004, 9). This kind of role play is indeed connected to a concept of identity and identity formation in Lucian. In his Μένιππος ἢ Νεκυομαντεία [Menippus or The descent into Hades] he makes the cynic Menippus – in a parody on Ulysses’ Homeric vision of the underworld and the Vergilian view of the heroes in the Aeneid – see a procession, in which man’s life takes on an allegorical shape. Under the leading of Tyche (Fate), men walk their lives’ ways, and Tyche gives them masks for these ways, in which they have to play their lives’ roles. But she often takes the masks away from them again, and gives them another one; only at the end of the way and of life do all masks have to be given back, complaining and wailing are of no use. Menippus continues: Οἶμαι δέ καὶ τῶν ἐπὶ τῆς σκηνῆς πολλάκις ἑωρακέναι σε τοὺς τραγικοὺς ὑποκριτὰς πρὸς τὰς χρείας τῶν δραμάτων ἄρτι μὲν Κρέοντας, ἐνίοτε δὲ Πριάμους γιγνομένους ἢ Ἀγαμέμνονας, καὶ ὁ αὐτός, εἰ τύχοι, μικρὸν ἔμπροσθεν μάλα σεμνῶς τὸ τοῦ Κέκροπος ἢ Ἐρεχθέως σχῆμα μιμησάμενος μετ’ ὀλίγον οἰκέτης προῆλθεν ὑπὸ τοῦ ποιητοῦ κεκελευσμένος. ἤδη δὲ πέρας ἔχοντος τοῦ δράματος ἀποδυσάμενος ἕκαστος αὐτῶν τὴν χρυσόπαστον ἐκείνην ἐσθῆτα καὶ τὸ προσωπεῖον ἀποθέμενος

1 Isocrates: Antidosis and Lucian: Dream 

 1297

καὶ καταβὰς ἀπὸ τῶν ἐμβατῶν πένης καὶ ταπεινὸς περίεισιν, οὐκέτ’ Ἀγαμέμνων ὁ Ἀτρέως οὐδὲ Κρέων ὁ Μενοικέως, ἀλλὰ Πῶλος Χαρικλέους Σουνιεὺς ὀνομαζόμενος ἢ Σάτυρος Θεογείτονος Μαραθώνιος. τοιαῦτα καὶ τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων πράγματά ἐστιν, ὡς τότε μοι ὁρῶντι ἔδοξεν [I suppose you have often seen the stage-folk who act in tragedies, and according to the demands of the plays become at one moment Creons, and again Priams or Agamemnons; the very one, it may be, who a short time ago assumed with great dignity the part of Cecrops or of Erectheus soon appears as a servant at the bidding of the poet. And when at length the play comes to an end, each of them strips off his gold-bespangled robe, lays aside his mask, steps out of his buskins, and goes about in poverty and humility, no longer styled Agamemnon, son of Atreus, or Creon, son of Menoeceus, but Polus, son of Charicles, of Sunium, or Satyrus, son of Theogiton, of Marathon. That is what human affairs are like, it seemed to me as I looked] (Lukian. nec. 16).

Human life as a play on stage – this reminds of Paul de Man’s famous essay (de Man 1979) – would be a simple metaphor taken by itself, but the consequence that Menippus derives from it is important insofar as it denies all relevance to certain and not unessential aspects of human identity: the proper name (‘Polus’, ‘Satyrus’) as well as the mentioning of family (son of …) and local descend (from Sunium, from Marathon). Man is not to be differentiated from his fellow men in this attitude before and after becoming a man, while in the course of life itself only his masks are to be seen from outside, and that, which is behind it, is not inexistent but it does not interest. Men want to see a good representational performance by the actor, they are not interested in the personality behind the mask. Still, neither Lucian would have denied that the personality behind the mask is essential for the quality of the representational play. But it is simply only in this regard essential, simply insofar as it does or does not enable a good play. This certainly supports the conclusion that it is exactly education (encompassing and penetrating the whole personality), which guarantees the demanded quality. Education does not help man to somehow better endure the role that has been forced upon him by fate, but to play it well and in a sophisticated way, simply in such a way that he gives an aesthetically as well as – as one may then say with a view to life performance – ethically well-made play; and as this role has to be played anew every day, there never can nor will be an autobiographical final account of one’s life. Lucian does justice to this demand – to have created the role of his life on his own, in an original, good and sophisticated way – in his autofictional self-description. The role of the educated rhetor does not fit like an oblique armor on his shoulders (see on this picture Adversus Indoctum [The Ignorant Book-collector] (Lukian. Adv. ind. 7) but fits like a glove, cannot be separated from him, is embodied by him. He is not more, but neither less than his means of presentation, and the fact that there is almost no authentic information about him as a biographical person, that he indeed emerges in front of the modern reader only in a kaleidoscopic way in the figures of his texts, optimally corresponds to this apprehension and construction of identity. Let us eventually take a final comparing look at the constructions of identity the way we find them in Isocrates and Lucian. In the view of today’s literature and cultural sciences antiquity often appears to be a homogeneous space; it is all the more impor-

1298 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

tant to remind of the fact that Lucian and Isocrates lived with a temporal distance of half a millennium. Therefore the similarities are not self-evident, but remarkable. Both are rhetors, both texts are composed for oral performance as well as for reading reception, both give an account of their lives in the form of a speech. Both represent a strong concept of education that they regard as constitutive for identity, and both socially claim general acceptance as well for the demand of education as for their imagination of what exactly education is. There the similarities end. Isocrates creates his explanations for a clearly defined audience, the civic judges of the polis Athens that were drawn by lot, and he refers to a precisely to be named biographical event, which, at least in his time, was also officially documented, the antidosis. He unfolds his teaching activity for namely mentioned personalities that are historically concrete, he claims an immediate use of his action for his fellow citizens. He embodies his concept of education, but certain further individual factors of identity are not to be separated from this concept: family background, wealth, personal talent, willingness to exercise with effort. His students must have these qualities as well, and it is obvious that neither the political position of a member of the upper class is unimportant for understanding this identity. If all these factors act together, then the educated person is perfect, but it is also clear that this perfection, that even just education is not accessible to anyone. Isocrates is such a perfect representative of this concept, and his Antidosis shall prove exactly this. Lucian’s audience is only on first regard closer determined as a local one. In fact, it is nowhere said that the speech is provided for example in Samósata, no names are mentioned, and the moment the first scene reveals itself to the recipient as a fictitious Socratic one, we may not exclude that the vocal speech – if it was delivered at all – was delivered in front of a familiar audience, but this historicity and thereby a properly autobiographical character is not to be gained for a reading audience. Eventually the public is therefore as undetermined as the person of the speaker is. Therefore it remains completely open, how Lucian is related to his listeners, whether he indeed is of use for them, whether he indeed may serve as an example for a solid life choice. Lucian so to say is completely taken up in his ‘paideia’ as well. In contrast to Isocrates there may indeed be further individual features that create identity, but they are definitely and unambiguously named and treated as irrelevant. Other than in the case of Isocrates not the way to education is seen as important, but the emergence as a ready-made educated person. The fact that not everyone is successful on this way, that many a person cherishes elusive hopes and exaggerated opinions of themselves, even that one may not unconditionally trust dreams stands back behind the general appreciation of human life that people always have to play the role dedicated to them, without being able to be certain that they may keep this role which might change every day; the ‘semper idem’ of Isocrates (Trédé-Boulmer 1993, 19; Isocr. ant. 195) cannot be true for Lucian. The degree of options of some self-creation that aims at singularity, an existential autofiction, is thereby larger than in Isocrates, the access to education, and with this the chance to become an educated person and to

1 Isocrates: Antidosis and Lucian: Dream 

 1299

participate in his social standing, is based on the act of willing and of fundamental willingness to make the best of that which is given by fate. Eventually, education has a larger importance that is constitutive for personality and identity in Lucian than in Isocrates. While in Isocrates education is added to a full range of other, especially also material identity factors, it recreates the personality through and through in Lucian by inscribing it into the voluminous tradition of classical Greek culture and explicitly relativizes material preconditions. The individual is only interesting as a successful exponent of this tradition, he can only unfold and develop individuality in it. It is the equipment that enables him to well and beautifully play the roles of his life that fate supplies him with. Isocrates uses education as an essential although not sole part of his social personality; Lucian is only able to perceive himself in the mirror of rich tradition of ‘paideia’, his numerous figures and literary roles are her hypostases. We might wonder, whether this means, psychologically speaking, to give up self-possession, to constitute subjectivity only within the intertextual discourse of the Other, and finally means the subject to become excentric (Weiser 2006; for a concept of ancient postmodernism see ní Mheallaigh 2014). Translation: Katrin Dolle

Works Cited Bompaire, Jacques. “Quatre styles d’autobiographie au IIe siècle après J.-C.: Aelius Aristide, Lucien, Marc-Aurèle, Galien.” L‘invention de l‘autobiographe. D‘Hésiode à Saint Augustin. Ed. MarieFrançoise Baslez, Philippe Hoffmann and Laurent Pernot. Paris: Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1993. 199–209. Breuer, Ulrich, and Beatrice Sandberg. “Einleitung.” Grenzen der Identität und der Fiktionalität. Ed. Ulrich Breuer and Beatrice Sandberg. München: iudicium, 2006. 9–16. Dubel, Sandrine. “Dialogue et autoportrait: les masques de Lucien.” Lucien de Samosate. Actes du colloque international de Lyon organisé au Centre d’Études Romaines et Gallo-Romaines les 30 septembre – 1 octobre 1993. Ed. Alain Billault. Lyon: De Boccard, 1994. 19–26. Hopkinson, Neil. Lucian. A Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Isocrates. Isocrates. Ed. and trans. George Norlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982 [greek-english edition]. Lamb, W.R.M., ed. Lysias. London: Heinemann, 1967 [greek-english edition]. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Lucian. Works. Vol. IV. Ed. A.M. Harmon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961 [greek-english edition]. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 919–930. ní Mheallaigh, Karen. Reading Fiction with Lucian. Fakes, Freaks and Hyperreality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 1–38. Misch, Georg. “Isokrates’ Autobiographie.” Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. I. Frankfurt a.  M.: Schulte-Blumke, 3rd ed. 1949. 158–180. Möllendorff, Peter von. “Das A und O des Zitierens. Zur ethischen Dimension beschnittener Zitate.” Im Namen des anderen. Die Ethik des Zitierens. Ed. Joachim Jacob and Mathias Mayer. München: Fink, 2010. 189–202.

1300 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

Möllendorff, Peter v. “Vortrag/Lesung (Antike).” Handbuch Medien der Literatur. Ed. Natalie Binczek, Till Dembeck and Jörgen Schäfer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2013. 333–337. Nielsen, Henrik K. “Identitätsarbeit und Erzählung.” Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur. Ed. Michael Grote and Beatrice Sandberg. München: iudicium, 2009. 257–271. Nünning, Ansgar. “Metaautobiographien: Gattungsgedächtnis, Gattungskritik und Funktionen selbst­reflexiver fiktionaler Autofiktionen.” Grenzen der Fiktionalität und der Erinnerung. Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Vol. II. Ed. Christoph Parry and Edgar Platen. München: iudicium, 2007. 269–292. Schlaffer, Heinz. “Der Umgang mit Literatur. Diesseits und Jenseits der Lektüre.” Poetica 31 (1999): 1–25. de Toro, Alfonso, and Claudia Gronemann. “Introduction.” Autobiographie revisited. Theorie und Praxis neuer autobiographischer Diskurse in der französischen, spanischen und lateinamerikanischen Literatur. Ed. Alfonso de Toro and Claudia Gronemann. Hildesheim: Olms, 2004. 7–21. Too, Yun Lee. A Commentary on Isocrates’ Antidosis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Trédé-Boulmer, Monique. “La Grèce a-t-elle connu l’autobiographie?” L’invention de l’autobiographie. D’Hésiode à Saint Augustin. Ed. Marie-Françoise Baslez, Philippe Hoffmann and Laurent Pernot. Paris: Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1993. 13–20. Schmitz, Thomas. Bildung und Macht. Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. München: Beck, 1997. Usener, Sylvia. Isokrates, Platon und ihr Publikum. Hörer und Leser von Literatur im 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. “Autofiktion. Theorie und Praxis des autobiographischen Schreibens.” Schreiben im Kontext von Schule, Universität, Beruf und Lebensalltag. Ed. Johannes Berning, Nicola Keßler and Helmut Koch. Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2006. 80–101. Weiser, Jutta. “Psychoanalyse und Autofiktion.” Grenzen der Identität und der Fiktionalität. Ed. Ulrich Breuer and Beatrice Sandberg. München: iudicium, 2006. 43–67. Whitmarsh, Tim. Greek Literature and Roman Empire. The Politics of Imitation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wucherpfennig, Wolf. “Autobiographisches Schreiben und Identitätsarbeit. 10 Thesen.” Autobiographisches Schreiben in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur. Ed. Michael Grote and Beatrice Sandberg. München: iudicium, 2009. 272–279. Xenophon. Memorabilia. Ed. O.J. Todd. London: Harvard University Press, 1968 [greek-english edition]. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiktion. Zwischen den Grenzen von Faktualität, Fiktionalität und Literarität.” Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen. Ed. Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 285–314.

Further Reading Humble, Noreen, and Keith Sidwell. „Dreams of glory: Lucian as autobiographer.” The Limits of Ancient Biography. Ed. Brian McGing and Judith Mossman. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2006. 213–225. Goldhill, Simon, ed. Being Greek under Rome. Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Poulakos, Takis, and David Depew. Isocrates and Civic Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

2 Plato: ἀπολογία (3rd Century BCE) [Apology of Socrates] Thomas A. Blackson

The title of Plato’s (ca. 427–ca. 347 BCE) Apology of Socrates (classic commentary Burnet 1924) indicates that it is a ‘defense speech’ (an ἀπολογία), but it does not fit comfortably in the genre. This has been known for some time. In antiquity, the author of Περὶ ἐσχηματισμέμων [On figured speeches] had already made the point. (Neither the author nor the date are known. The work was ascribed, wrongly, to Dionysius of Halicarnassus. For translation and discussion Hunter 2012, 113–117.) The author notes that the Apology is overtly a defense speech in which several other subjects are artfully concealed, including an accusation of the Athenians, an encomium of Socrates, and an exhortation on what a philosopher should be like. Given this, one might wonder whether it would be more illuminating to place the Apology in a different genre. Certainty is not possible, but the Apology has the marks of autofiction. Here, again, the author of On figured speeches points the way. The Apology is more than a defense speech. (There is a tradition according to which Socrates made no speech in his defense. This tradition may have its origins in Plato’s Gorgias, where Socrates is made to say that he would not know what to say at court [Plat. Gorg. 521d–522e]. For discussion, see Oldfather 1938.) It also teaches certain lessons about Socrates. The lessons that the author of On figured speeches mentions are not the ones I will discuss, but either way the suggestion is the same: Plato’s Apology of Socrates is an instance of autofiction. The Apology can appear to be biographical. Certainly, it has a historical component. It is an account of a courtroom speech that Plato tells from the point of view of a character named ‘Socrates’. Further, given that Plato twice refers to himself by name, it is clear that he wanted his readers to know that he was present. (The Apology, in this way, is unusual among the Platonic dialogues. The only other dialogue in which Plato refers to himself is the Phaedo.) At 34a, to the jury, Socrates is made to say that he sees several of the men he allegedly corrupted when they were young. He invites their older relatives to accuse him if they believe that their younger family members were harmed. He says that he sees Adeimantus, “brother of Plato here”. Subsequently, at 38b, in the penalty phase of the trial, Socrates says to the jury that “Plato here”, and Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, bid him to increase his offer of penalty to thirty minae of silver and that they guarantee payment. (In suits of the kind brought against Socrates, no penalty was fixed by law. The accuser proposed a penalty if the accused was found to be guilty. The accused was permitted to counter with an alternative penalty.) But none of this shows that Plato intended the Apology to be a purely historical document. Socrates was a perplexing figure, as the comic portrait in Aristophanes’ Νεφέλαι [Clouds] clearly demonstrates, and so it is more natural to think that Plato wanted his readers to understand Socrates as he himself understood him. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-113

1302 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

If Plato did want his readers to understand Socrates and the trial as he understood them, then the Apology belongs to the literary genre in which the author tries to bring out something important about a person or a series of events that the author witnessed, but that the reader would miss in a straightforward historical account. This genre is autofiction. To show that the Apology fits in this genre, it is necessary to identify what Plato thought was important about Socrates and to explain why this would be obscured by a straightforward historical account. In the Apology, Socrates does not follow the custom of the day. He does not implore the jury (Plat. apol. 34b–35c). Instead, he speaks to them as men he has the right to rebuke. He says that his defense is on their behalf. He says that he seeks to prevent them from wrongdoing, that he is a gift to the city of Athens, and that he makes his defense to prevent them from mistreating him, this gift, someone who has spent his life caring for the city and its citizens (30d–33c). The jury, however, saw the situation very differently: the majority voted to execute him. In this way, the Apology portrays a difference of opinion about Socrates. Many in the jury viewed him unfavorably, as someone who was harmful and who was at least partly to blame for Athens’ downfall. Socrates’ associates, Plato among them, did not see him this way. When, at 33d–34b, Socrates invites the fathers and brothers of the young he has allegedly corrupted to bear witness against him, none do. When Socrates considers the counter-assessment he should make, Plato and Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus urge him to assess the penalty at thirty times the sum Socrates thought that he himself could pay, which itself was not inconsiderable. This difference of opinion might be taken as nothing more than a record of the historical facts, but when the Apology is read within the context of Plato’s dialogues, a straightforward historical interpretation becomes improbable. Socrates takes the lead in almost all of Plato’s dialogues. These dialogues belong to the genre of ‘Socratic conversations’. (Aristotle refers to Σωκρατικοὶ λόγοι [Socratikoi logoi] as an established literary genre [Aristot. poet. 1147b1]. Only Plato’s dialogues and Xenophon’s Socratic writings have survived intact [Kahn 1996].) The Apology is not a dialogue. It is a representation of Socrates’ courtroom speech. In this way, it is similar in form to Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ Funeral Oration (History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.34–2.46), but nothing much follows from this formal similarity. It is possible to understand Plato, even in the Apology, as trying to help himself and his readers understand the significance of the historical Socrates (Long 1998, 119–120; Matthews 2009). If this is Plato’s intention, then although there are differences in form between the Apology and Plato’s dialogues, what many of the dialogues have in common with the Apology is more important than their differences (for argument to the contrary Kahn 1996, 88–89). Plato is trying to defend and to make sense of Socrates, of his interactions with Socrates and of the interactions involving Socrates that he has heard about. The sense Plato makes is not something a historical account of what Socrates said and did, at his trial or elsewhere, would have captured. Presumably no historian has ever seriously thought that the Apology records all and only Socrates’ actual words. (“The

2 Plato: Apology of Socrates 

 1303

first question we have to ask about the Apology is how far we may regard it as a historical document. That it is not a word-for-word reproduction of the actual speech delivered by Socrates may be granted at once. Plato was not a newspaper reporter” [Burnet 1924, 143]). At the same time, it is equally clear that if the Apology is autofiction, then Plato is doing more than simply using different words to report what Socrates said. It may seem to some that this is an improbable interpretation of the Apology, and there is an argument in support of this perspective. In the other Platonic dialogues in which Socrates is the main character, it is extremely natural to think that Plato was not present at the conversation. The dramatic dates are too early, occurring when Plato was a boy or before he was born. (Historians stress the point [Kahn 1996, 2]). In other dialogues, such as in the Εὐθύφρων (Euthyphro), which shows Socrates before the trial, Plato portrays a conversation between Socrates and a single interlocutor in which no witnesses are shown to be present. In the Apology, however, in striking contrast to his practice in his works generally, Plato clearly indicates that he was present. For this reason (as the trial itself was something of a spectacle and would have had a large audience), it can seem tempting to think that the best explanation for Plato’s unusual practice in the Apology is that he wants his readers to know that he was a witness to the trial because he wants his readers to conclude that the Apology is a purely historical document. By now, however, it should be apparent that the available evidence is too weak to support such a strong conclusion. The Apology is an account of a historical event. Plato is not simply writing fiction, but it does not follow that historical accuracy is his goal. It could be that instead of faithfully reporting Socrates’ speech, Plato is trying to get at what he understands as the significance of what Socrates did and said at his trial and in his life more generally. Certainty on the point is not possible. (Myles Burnyeat summarizes the current state of the academic literature: “Plato could have preserved the gist of what Socrates said and re-presented it in his own inimitable prose. That indeed is what many scholars think the Apology does. But it is equally possible that Plato, like Xenophon and perhaps others as well, devised his own independent defense of Socrates, that had little or nothing in common with what Socrates said on that day. The scholarly literature on this topic is a paradise of inclusive guesswork” [1997, 1].) But if the Apology is autofiction, then Plato has the character Socrates express fundamental points more clearly than the historical Socrates himself ever did. Are there such passages? One likely possibility is Apology 29c6–30b4. In this wellknown passage, Socrates explains what he in fact does do and will not stop doing. It is here, if anywhere, that Plato could be expected to help himself and his readers understand something important about Socrates that would be missed in a historical account. Socrates, at this point in his defense, explains why he persists in the activity that has gotten him into so much trouble and is about to cost him his life. He explains that he would not desist from this activity even if the jury were to acquit him on that condition. In no uncertain words he says that he would continue his examining and testing, because care for the soul is all important, and because there is no greater good

1304 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

in the city of Athens than the one he brings by testing and examining the people he happens to meet, in the marketplace and elsewhere. The passage reads as follows: ‘‘‘ὦ Σώκρατες, νῦν μὲν Ἀνύτῳ οὐ πεισόμεθα ἀλλ᾽ ἀφίεμέν σε, ἐπὶ τούτῳ μέντοι, ἐφ᾽ ᾧτε μηκέτι ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ ζητήσει διατρίβειν μηδὲ φιλοσοφεῖν: ἐὰν δὲ ’ ‘ἁλῷς ἔτι τοῦτο πράττων, ἀποθανῇ’” —εἰ οὖν με, ὅπερ εἶπον, ἐπὶ τούτοις ἀφίοιτε, εἴποιμ᾽ ἂν ὑμῖν ὅτι ‘‘‘ἐγὼ ὑμᾶς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, ἀσπάζομαι μὲν καὶ φιλῶ, πείσομαι δὲ μᾶλλον τῷ θεῷ ἢ ὑμῖν, καὶ ἕωσπερ ἂν ἐμπνέω καὶ οἷός τε ὦ, οὐ μὴ παύσωμαι φιλοσοφῶν καὶ ὑμῖν παρακελευόμενός τε καὶ ἐνδεικνύμενος ὅτῳ ἂν ἀεὶ ἐντυγχάνω ὑμῶν, λέγων οἷάπερ εἴωθα, ὅτι ‘ὦ ἄριστε ἀνδρῶν, Ἀθηναῖος ὤν, πόλεως τῆς μεγίστης καὶ εὐδοκιμωτάτης εἰς σοφίαν καὶ ἰσχύν, χρημάτων μὲν οὐκ αἰσχύνῃ ἐπιμελούμενος ὅπως σοι ἔσται ὡς πλεῖστα, καὶ δόξης καὶ τιμῆς, φρονήσεως δὲ καὶ ἀληθείας καὶ τῆς ψυχῆς ὅπως ὡς βελτίστη ἔσται οὐκ ἐπιμελῇ οὐδὲ φροντίζεις;’ καὶ ἐάν τις ὑμῶν ἀμφισβητήσῃ καὶ φῇ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι, οὐκ εὐθὺς ἀφήσω αὐτὸν οὐδ᾽ ἄπειμι, ἀλλ᾽ ἐρήσομαι αὐτὸν καὶ ἐξετάσω καὶ ἐλέγξω, καὶ ἐάν μοι μὴ δοκῇ κεκτῆσθαι ἀρετήν, φάναι δέ, ὀνειδιῶ ὅτι τὰ πλείστου ἄξια περὶ ἐλαχίστου ποιεῖται, τὰ δὲ φαυλότερα περὶ πλείονος. ταῦτα καὶ νεωτέρῳ καὶ πρεσβυτέρῳ ὅτῳ ἂν ἐντυγχάνω ποιήσω, καὶ ξένῳ καὶ ἀστῷ, μᾶλλον δὲ τοῖς ἀστοῖς, ὅσῳ μου ἐγγυτέρω ἐστὲ γένει. ταῦτα γὰρ κελεύει ὁ θεός, εὖ ἴστε, καὶ ἐγὼ οἴομαι οὐδέν πω ὑμῖν μεῖζον ἀγαθὸν γενέσθαι ἐν τῇ πόλει ἢ τὴν ἐμὴν τῷ θεῷ ὑπηρεσίαν. οὐδὲν γὰρ ἄλλο πράττων ἐγὼ περιέρχομαι ἢ πείθων ὑμῶν καὶ νεωτέρους καὶ πρεσβυτέρους μήτε σωμάτων ἐπιμελεῖσθαι μήτε χρημάτων πρότερον μηδὲ οὕτω σφόδρα ὡς τῆς ψυχῆς ὅπως ὡς ἀρίστη ἔσται, λέγων ὅτι ‘οὐκ ἐκ χρημάτων ἀρετὴ γίγνεται, ἀλλ᾽ ἐξ ἀρετῆς χρήματα καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ἀγαθὰ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἅπαντα καὶ ἰδίᾳ καὶ δημοσίᾳ’ [‘Socrates, we do not believe Anytus now; we acquit you, but only on condition that you spend no more time on this investigation, and do not practice philosophy, and if you are caught doing so you will die;’ if, as I say, you were to acquit me on those terms, I would say to you: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, I am grateful to and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?’ Then, if one of you disputes this and says he does care, I shall not let him go at once or leave him, but I shall question him, examine him and test him, and if I do not think he has attained the goodness that he says he has, I shall reproach him because he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things. I shall treat in this way anyone I happen to meet, young and old, citizen and stranger, and more so the citizens because you are more kindred to me. Be sure that this is what the god orders me to do, and I think there is no greater blessing for the city than my service to the god. For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: ‘Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively’] (Plat. apol. 29c6–30b4).

These are perhaps the most famous words in all of philosophy, but Plato’s intention in making Socrates utter these words is not obvious. It can appear as if Plato is having Socrates voice well-known points that the historical figure made and said repeatedly, but this need not be what is happening. Instead, it may be that Plato is trying to explain behavior that was baffling to many of the Athenians that had heard about or had themselves interacted with Socrates.

2 Plato: Apology of Socrates 

 1305

Consider the verb ‘φιλοσοφέω’, which can be translated as ‘philosophize’ but literally means ‘love wisdom’. Prior to Plato, two attested uses are in Herodotus and Thucydides (for discussion see Frede 2000 and 2004). Herodotus has Croesus say to Solon, “ξεῖνε Ἀθηναῖε, παρ᾽ ἡμέας γὰρ περὶ σέο λόγος ἀπῖκται πολλὸς καὶ σοφίης εἵνεκεν τῆς σῆς καὶ πλάνης, ὡς φιλοσοφέων γῆν πολλὴν θεωρίης εἵνεκεν ἐπελήλυθας: νῦν ὦν ἐπειρέσθαι με ἵμερος ἐπῆλθέ σε εἴ τινα ἤδη πάντων εἶδες ὀλβιώτατον” [“my Athenian guest, we have heard a lot about you because of your wisdom and of your wanderings, how as one who loves wisdom you have traveled much of the world for the sake of seeing it, so now I desire to ask you who is the most fortunate man you have seen”] (I.30.2). Croesus attributes to Solon a certain sort of interest in a certain sort of knowledge. The knowledge in which Solon is interested is not easy to acquire, as Solon must travel the world. Further, to Croesus, Solon’s interest in this knowledge is unusual. It is not tied to any obvious practical purpose. Solon travels the world “for the sake of seeing it”, not as a merchant or ambassador, which would have been the more usual reasons. Thucydides, in the “Pericles’ Funeral Oration”, uses the verb similarly. On behalf of the Athenians he addresses, Pericles says that “φιλοσοφοῦμεν ἄνευ μαλακίας” [“we love wisdom without softness”] (II.40.1). His point is directed against the kind of anti-intellectualism represented, for example, in Plato’s Γοργίας [Gorgias], where Callicles tells Socrates that philosophy is fine for the young but is unseemly for a man because it renders him helpless in the practical affairs that properly define the life of a man (Plat. Gorg. 484c–486d) (see Θεαίτητος [Theaetetus] Plat. Tht. 174a). Pericles’ point is that the Athenians are interested in intellectual matters. They pursue knowledge on various subjects, and their pursuit of this knowledge is not always clearly tied to some practical pursuit. But this pursuit does not in any way make them soft or ineffectual. The Athenian’s love of wisdom does not prevent them from acting decisively in practical matters. In Apology 29c6–30b4, Plato is concerned to show that Socrates was doing something whose nature should not be misunderstood. The verb ‘φιλοσοφέω’ [philosophize/love wisdom] and its cognates had been used infrequently. Further, in their known uses in Herodotus and Thucydides, they were used to characterize the activity of pursuing uncommon knowledge primarily for the sake of having the knowledge, not for some clearly identified practical purpose. Plato is concerned to show that this is not what Socrates was doing. Socrates first and foremost was practicing a discipline. It is questionable whether this discipline is philosophy, given the current meaning of the word, but it is easy to see why English translators are tempted to have Socrates describe himself as a ‘philosopher’. Although the Greek noun ‘φιλοσοφία’ transliterates as ‘philosophy’, it would be a mistake to translate Herodotus so that Croesus addresses Solon as a philosopher. Equally, in the Funeral Oration, it would be a mistake to translate Thucydides so that Pericles says that the Athenians are philosophers but that this practice does not make them soft (Burnet 1930b, 195–196). Socrates, as Plato portrays him, did something much more systematic than love wisdom in the

1306 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

way Solon did when he travelled the world, or the way Pericles says that the Athenians do (Burnet 1924, 201). This is why it is reasonable to translate the Apology so that Socrates says that he will “not cease to practice philosophy”. With respect to whether the Apology is a work of autofiction, the crucial question is ‘who did what’. Did Socrates make it clear in his words and actions that he was introducing and practicing a new discipline and that he was stretching the meaning of an infrequently used word to describe his practice? Or was it Plato who made these points clear in his portrayal as part of an attempt to make sense of the significance of what Socrates did and said? On the hypothesis that the Apology is autofiction, Socrates himself never clearly explained and perhaps did not even completely grasp what he was doing. It is Plato who highlights the details of the practice, the way in which it is a discipline, and the way it goes beyond the traditional practice of loving wisdom. Given the existing evidence, it is hard to see what could show definitively that this is the right way to understand Apology 29c6–30b4, but given Plato’s philosophical originality and ability as a writer, it should hardly be surprising if this interpretation were true. A similar question arises about the new discipline in which Socrates engaged and its connection to the human ψυχή (psuchē) or ‘soul’. In the Apology at 36c, Socrates says that he tries to persuade those he goes to privately “μὴ πρότερον μήτε τῶν ἑαυτοῦ μηδενὸς ἐπιμελεῖσθαι πρὶν ἑαυτοῦ ἐπιμεληθείη ὅπως ὡς βέλτιστος καὶ φρονιμώτατος ἔσοιτο” [“not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible”] (Plat. apol. 39d). Previously, in Apology 29c6–30b4, in connection with what Socrates will not stop doing, Plato is careful to have his character link the good for a human being to the condition of his soul and to link the condition of the soul to the presence of ‘wisdom’ and ‘truth’. Socrates, as Plato portrays him, engages in this new discipline for a clear practical purpose. Unlike in the case of the new discipline, there is independent evidence for the way Socrates talked about the soul and its connection to wisdom. The Clouds of Aristophanes (423 BCE; see Dover 1968) shows that Socrates talked about the soul as early as 423 BCE, when Socrates was in his mid-forties and Plato was a boy. (Socrates refers to and mentions Aristophanes at Apology 18d and 19c; for discussion of the way Socrates appears in Athenian comedy Guthrie 1971, 39–57.) In the play, Aristophanes has Strepsiades derisively refer to the denizens of the think-tank that Socrates heads as “ψυχῶν σοφῶν” [“wise souls”] (Guthrie 1971, 94). This satirical put-down is supposed to be funny, but the joke is no longer obvious. A modern reader may be tempted to think that Socrates and his followers in the thinktank are absurd because the control they exercise over their actions through the care of their souls has turned them into fools, not wise men, contrary to what they believe and advertise. This understanding of the joke presupposes that the audience conceived of human beings as psychological beings, beings whose actions are caused by the states and processes in their soul. As such, a human being exerts control over the direction his life takes by exerting control over the beliefs and other states in his soul. Socrates

2 Plato: Apology of Socrates 

 1307

and his followers, however, go about this in a comical way. Aristophanes represents them as devotees of the new scientific/sophistical education, and he shows how this has turned them into fools, pale-faced bare-footed characters who are removed from and unfit for the practical matters and affairs of the real world. But there is another possibility. The joke may turn on the fact that members of the audience did not think that wisdom was a function of the soul at all. On this interpretation, as John Burnet puts the point, Socrates “was known as a man who spoke strangely of the soul” (1930a, 161; Burnet’s interpretation of Socrates has come under criticism [Claus 1981, although he comes to essentially the same conclusion: that Aristophanes parodies a “rational notion of ψυχή [psuchē]”, Burnet 1930a, 159; for a review of Claus see Sullivan 1982, and for more recent criticism, as well as helpful general discussion of the soul in Greek thought, Lorenz 2009]). The conception of human beings as psychological beings was not always the commonplace it is today. In Homer, the soul marks the difference between a living human body and a corpse. In the opening lines of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles is said to send many souls of heroes to Hades but to leave them, the heroes themselves, on the battlefield as food for dogs and birds. The soul in these lines is something a human being loses at the moment of death, and is something that endures in the underworld, but thinking and feeling in the living is not a function of the soul (Claus 1981, 61; Hunter 2012, 41). So, on this interpretation, Aristophanes pokes fun at the idea of an intelligent soul. The way the Greeks thought about the soul changed dramatically in the sixth and fifth centuries. The matter is exceedingly complicated (for discussion of the soul in early Greek thought Burnet 1930a, 141–160; Furley 1956; Claus 1981; Bremmer 1983; Lorenz 2009), but it appears that the soul became increasingly associated with emotions and desires and was increasingly understood as underlying the behaviors that reveal a person’s character: In Homeric Greek the psyche is not mentioned except in accounts of death or fainting, but first the lyric poets and then the other writers increasingly refer to it all kinds of emotion − love and hate, joy and grief, desire, anger, and so on − and the enduring characteristics that are manifested in these emotions (Furley 1956, 7).

In Herodotus, for example, Cambyses takes the Egyptian king Psammenitus prisoner and “διεπειρᾶτο αὐτοῦ τῆς ψυχῆς ποιέων” [“makes a trial of his soul”] (Hdt. III.14.1) by forcing him to watch as Cambyses has his daughter enslaved and son led away to be executed in a public spectacle. Similarly, in Thucydides, in the Funeral Oration, Pericles says that those who do not shrink from danger, even though they know very well both the pains and the pleasures in life, are “κράτιστοι δ᾽ ἂν “τὴν ψυχὴν δικαίως κριθεῖεν” [“rightly judged strongest in soul”] (Thuk. II.40.3). Further, the explanation of character in terms of the soul was not limited to human beings. At III.108.2, Herodotus comments that because of divine forethought, animals that are good to eat and “ψυχήν τε δειλὰ” [“timid in soul”] are prolific (helpful discussion of the use of ψυχή [psuchē] in Herodotus Huffman 2009).

1308 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

In Philolaus, a contemporary of Socrates, there is additional evidence for the conception of the soul as what underlies the emotions and desires that constitute character. Philolaus, as a Pythagorean, believed in the transmigration of souls. The Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus (ca. 245– ca. 325 CE) reports that Philolaus says that ‘‘κεφαλὰ μὲν νόου, καρδία δὲ ψυχᾶς καὶ αἰσθήσιος” [“the head is the seat of intellect, the heart of soul and sensation”] and that ‘‘ἐγκέθαλος δὲ τὰν ἀνθπώπω ἀρχάν, καρδία γεννήσιος” [“the brain contains the origin of man, heart that of animal”] (DK 44 B 13). In this fragment, the soul is not associated with the intellect. It is less clear what the function of the soul is, but there is reason to think that Philolaus understood the soul to be the underlying cause of emotions and desires and to be paired in the heart with the faculty of perception (Huffmann 2009, 23; detailed discussion of the fragment Huffmann 1993, 307–323). On this account, the animal perceives and responds to its perceptions in terms of its particular emotions and desires. This account of the soul fits with the theory of transmigration, since it is implausible to think that the intellect transmigrates from human beings to nonhuman animals. The emotional character passes, and it is somehow connected to the intellect when the transmigration is from nonhuman animal to human being. (Xenophanes, a contemporary of Pythagoras, reports that Pythagoras once intervened when a puppy was being whipped because he recognized the soul of a friend in the puppy when it yelped [DK B 21 7]. The soul here is not associated with anything specifically intellectual.) If this is how members of Aristophanes’ audience thought of the soul, as a basis in human beings and animals for emotions and desires that constitute character, then Socrates would be someone who spoke strangely about the soul if he thought the soul was somehow associated with wisdom. It is not that the care for the soul that Socrates urges has turned him and his followers into fools, not wise men. Many in the audience would have thought that this was true, but this was not the real point of the joke. Rather, Socrates and his followers are comical figures because it was laughable to think that the soul underlies any specifically intellectual cognition in human beings. It is true of course that the emotions typically have an intellectual component, but it seems to have been a stretch to talk about intelligence and the knowledge that constitutes wisdom in terms of the soul. And Socrates and the denizens of the think-tank are all the more laughable and absurd because their devotion to this novel idea has made them pale and wholly unfit for practical matters, and so has made them like the souls the audience knew from Homer, the witless and feeble shades that survive after a man’s death (Havelock 1972, 15–16; more general discussion of psychological terms in Aristophanes in Handley 1956). In the Apology, as Plato portrays him, Socrates associates the soul with ‘wisdom’ and ‘truth’. He asks the Athenians he happens to meet, “χρημάτων μὲν οὐκ αἰσχύνῃ ἐπιμελούμενος ὅπως σοι ἔσται ὡς πλεῖστα, καὶ δόξης καὶ τιμῆς, φρονήσεως δὲ καὶ ἀληθείας καὶ τῆς ψυχῆς ὅπως ὡς βελτίστη ἔσται οὐκ ἐπιμελῇ οὐδὲ φροντίζεις” [“are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best

2 Plato: Apology of Socrates 

 1309

possible state of your soul?”] (Plat. apol. 29d–e). Plato in this way makes it very clear that the soul, as Socrates understands it, can be made better or worse and that this better or worse state of the soul is a function of the presence of ‘wisdom’ and ‘truth’. The evidence from Aristophanes shows that Socrates talked about wisdom in connection with the soul, but it was left for Plato to clarify the significance of this novel way of talking. Socrates, as Plato understands him, reinterprets an existing notion of soul in terms of the intellect as opposed to the emotions. The soul is the underlying cause of character, but Socrates understands the mechanism in terms of specifically intellectual states. This is the Socratic intellectualism that Plato explores in other dialogues, most famously the Protagoras (Plat. Prot. 352–358; for some discussion see Frede 1992; also Blackson 2015). Somehow the behavior that constitutes character is supposed to stem completely from what one knows or believes. Moreover, it is not only character that the soul explains. As Plato portrays Socrates in the Apology, the soul accounts for whatever a human being does. In the range of human behavior, there are actions. It is behavior that human beings themselves do. It is not something that happens to them. They are not forced by anybody or anything to do what they do. Human beings can control their behavior and consequently can control the direction their life takes. This thought in itself would not have been surprising. Presumably, it is how human beings have always conceived of themselves. The innovative step, and the step that would have seemed extraordinarily unintuitive and perplexing at the time, was in the explanation of just how a human being controls his actions and the direction his life takes. According to Socrates, as Plato portrays him, human beings are psychological beings. A human being controls his actions, and thereby controls his life, by controlling his soul. His soul is intellect or reason, and it is in a better or worse state to the extent that it has ‘wisdom’ and ‘truth’. (Michael Frede is the classic representative of this general interpretation, but he seems to understand the Pythagorean conception of the soul to include specifically intellectual cognition [Frede 1996, 19]). In the Apology at 29d–30b, where Socrates explains what he does and will not stop doing, Plato makes it clear that the discipline Socrates practiced has an important practical component. Socrates makes it clear that ‘philosophy’ is the practice of caring for the soul so that it is in the best state possible. He makes it clear that in the best possible state the soul possesses ‘wisdom’ and ‘truth’. Moreover, he makes it clear that caring for the soul is caring for one’s self. Socrates says that “οὐκ ἐκ χρημάτων ἀρετὴ γίγνεται, ἀλλ᾽ ἐξ ἀρετῆς χρήματα καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ἀγαθὰ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἅπαντα” [“wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men”] (Plat. apol. 30b). Contrary to what is so often thought, the possession of wealth is not what makes a human being and his or her life good. Instead, a human being makes his life good to the extent that he makes the appropriate choices in the various situations he faces as he lives his life. To make these choices, the possession of ‘wisdom’ and ‘truth’ is necessary. It is also sufficient. Human beings are psychological beings. In human beings, action is a function of the states and processes in the soul.

1310 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

Further, the controlling state in the soul is knowledge. When a human being has the knowledge that constitutes wisdom, he makes his life good because he acts appropriately with respect to money and other things in the circumstances. Once again the question remains whether Socrates made this point or whether it is Plato who makes it for him. Whether Plato’s Apology of Socrates is a work of autofiction is twofold. It is a question about what the historical Socrates said, and it is a question about Plato’s intentions as the author of the Apology. Unfortunately the extant evidence holds out little prospect of providing definitive answers to these questions. The possibilities themselves, however, are relatively clear. With respect to Apology 29c6–30b4, Plato might be doing one of two things. He might be repeating the content of a point that Socrates made in his speech at his trial. The point, in this case, would be one that Socrates himself had made. It would be a point that he expressed to his close associates, and perhaps to others as well, on countless occasions in his life. Alternatively, Plato might be attributing to Socrates a position that the historical figure himself never so clearly and succinctly expressed. In this case, in Apology 29c6– 30b4, Plato is engaging in autofiction. Plato is trying to make sense of Socrates. He is trying to understand Socrates’ unusual talk about the soul and his interest in unusual intellectual questions. Accurate historical reporting would not accomplish what Plato wants to accomplish. He is trying to crystalize the position that makes the best sense of what Socrates was saying and doing, something that no factual description of what Socrates said and did could reveal. In this way, Plato uses the genre of autofiction to rewrite the history of what Socrates said and did. Plato’s intention is not to hide mistakes. This is not the point of autofiction. Instead, Plato wants to help the world to see the brilliance that he glimpsed in the words and deeds of the historical Socrates.

Works Cited Aristophanes. Comoediae. Vol. II. Ed. F.W. Hall and W.M. Geldart. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. Aristophanes. Clouds. Ed. Kenneth James Dover. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Aristotle. Ars Poetica. Ed. Rudolf Kassel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Blackson, Thomas. “Two Interpretations of Socratic Intellectualism.” Ancient Philosophy 35.1 (2015): 23–29. Bremmer, Jan. The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Burnet, John. “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” (1916). Essays and Addresses. Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1930. 126–162 (Burnet 1930a). Burnet, John. “Greek Philosophy” (1921). Essays and Addresses. Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1930. 194–235 (Burnet 1930b). Burnet, John. Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. Burnyeat, Myles. “The Impiety of Socrates.” Ancient Philosophy 17 (1997): 1–12. Claus, David B. Toward the Soul. An Inquiry into the Meaning of ψυχή before Plato. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Diels, Hermann, and Walther Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Berlin: Weidmann, 5th ed. 1952.

2 Plato: Apology of Socrates 

 1311

Frede, Michael. “Introduction.” Plato. Protagoras. Trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992. vii–xxxii. Frede, Michael. “Introduction.” Rationality in Greek Thought. Ed. Michael Frede and Gisela Striker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 1–28. Frede, Michael. “The Philosopher.” The Greek Pursuit of Knowledge. Ed. Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. 1–17. Frede, Michael. “Aristotle’s Account of the Origins of Philosophy.” Rhizai: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 1 (2004): 9–44. Furely, David. “The Early History of the Concept of the Soul.” Institute of Classical Studies 3 (1956): 1–18. Guthrie, William Keith Chambers. Socrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Handley, E.W. “Words for ‘Soul,’ ‘Heart’ and ‘Mind’ in Aristophanes.” Rheinisches Museum 19 (1956): 205–255. Havelock, Eric A. “The Socratic Self as It Is Parodied in Aristophanes’ Clouds.” Yale Classical Studies 22 (1972): 1–18. Herodotus. Herodotus. 4 vols. Ed. and trans. Alfred Dennis Godley. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920–1925. Huffman, Carl. Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic. A Commentary on the Fragments and Testimonia with Interpretive Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Huffmann, Carl. “The Pythagorean conception of the soul from Pythagoras to Philolaus.” Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy. Ed. Dorothea Frede and Reis Burkhard. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. Hunter, Richard. Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature. The Silent Stream. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kahn, Charles H. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue. The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Long, A.A. “Plato’s Apologies and Socrates in the Theaetetus.” Method in Ancient Philosophy. Ed. Jyl Gentzler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 113–136. Lorenz, Hendrik. “Ancient Theories of the Soul.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward Zalta. 2009. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/ (11 July 2018). Matthews, Gareth. “Whatever Became of the Socratic Elenchus? Philosophical Analysis in Plato.” Philosophy Compass 4.3 (2009): 439–450. Oldfather, W.A. “Socrates in court.” Classical Weekly 31 (1938): 203–211. Plato. Platonis Opera. Ed. John Burnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903. Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997. Sullivan, Shirley Darcus. “David B. Claus, Toward the Soul. An Inquiry into the Meaning of ψυχή before Plato.” Phoenix 36 (1982): 272–275. Thucydides. Historiae. 2 vols. Ed. Henry Stuart Jones and Johannes Enoch Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942.

Further Reading Brickhouse, Thomas C., and Nicholas D. Smith. The trial and execution of Socrates: sources and controversies. Ed. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

3 Sima Qian: 報任少卿書 [Letter to Ren An] (93/91 BCE) and Other Autobiographical Writings Reinhard Emmerich

Even China’s greatest writers are little known in the West. The consideration of Sima Qian 司馬遷 − one of those greatest writers – will thus begin with some basic information about him, before his autobiographical writings are introduced. Few other writers have written themselves into human consciousness in the way that Sima Qian did with his greatest work, one which he took over from his father, Sima Tan 司馬談 (ca. 190–110 BCE). What resulted is giant: in translation and with only the most basic commentary it fills no fewer than 4,000 pages. Called in English The Records of the Historian (Watson 1958; Durrant 1995), The Grand Scribe’s Records (Nienhauser 1994), or something similar, this text was in Chinese first the Taishigongshu 太史公書, then Shiji 史記. The ascription to Sima Qian alone as ‘scribe’ and ‘historian’ is a remarkable contrast to the many references to his father Sima Tan’s contributions. When the Shiji is numbered among the great works of world literature, it is usually only Sima Qian who is honored. As Watson puts it, “what Herodotus was to the historical tradition of the Graeco-Roman world, Ssu-ma Ch’ien has been to that of China, Korea, and Japan” (1958, vii). The Shiji divides its object − a history of China from its putative beginnings under the mythical Five Emperors until the lifetime of Sima Qian under Emperor Wu 武帝 (r. 140–87 BCE) of the Han 漢 dynasty − into different sections. In doing so it established the form of the standard ‘dynastic histories’, the most popular historiographical form in China. The liezhuan 列傳 [memoirs] are the largest part of the work, representing 69 of the 130 juan 卷 [chapters] that comprise the Shiji. They present the personal histories of exceptional persons, both good and bad. The nianbiao 年表 [chronological tables] and the shu 書 [treatises] (translations following Nienhauser 1994) are much less extensive, yet both represent Sima Qian’s and Sima Tan’s extraordinary authorial insight that some aspects of life and of government, such as ritual, music, calendars, and economics, deserve non-chronological but systematic treatment, while other matters are better presented in geographical and chronological tables. After the time of Sima Qian, every Chinese dynasty was the subject of a ‘dynastic history’, which followed the example of the Shiji. Sima Qian and his father thus founded a tradition that lasted over 2,000 years, one of the greatest achievements in the history of human culture. This work, which has been the subject of important explanatory commentary since the fifth century, was not confined to historiography and its Chinese idiosyncrasies. It had an enormous influence on narrative traditions and writing style in China, and its prose was held up as a model for millennia. And if the Shiji is still a reliable best seller at the end of the twentieth century, so that https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-114

3 Sima Qian: Letter to Ren An 

 1313

an important publisher like Zhonghua shuju 中華書局 is able to weather financial difficulties with the help of a new printing, as is rumored, that speaks for the uninterrupted popularity of this work. It also demonstrates the scholarly interest of a text that was the subject of hundreds of publications during the first four decades of the People’s Republic, as has been shown for the Shiji (Nienhauser 1994, vi). The modern flood of publications concerning the Shiji reflects the many questions that have come along with the Shiji’s popularity. The first of these has already appeared: For which part of this extensive opus is Sima Qian himself responsible, and for which part his father, Sima Tan? Sima Tan, (allegedly) continuing an old family tradition, was the official taishiling 太史令 at court beginning in 136 BCE. The established translations of the official title taishiling  – “Grand Historian” (Watson 1958), “Prefect Grand Astrologer” (Durrant 1995, 3), and “Prefect of (the) Grand Scribes” (Nienhauser 1994, vii, ix) – attest to the broad duties of the officeholder. Yet this official post, which his son in turn would take over after him in 108 BCE, was neither powerful nor well-remunerated. Partly in the fulfillment of his official duties, and also for his own reasons, at some uncertain time Sima Tan began to gather materials of historical relevance. But he was forced to leave his intended work uncompleted. In a dramatic final exhortation, he obliged his son and heir Sima Qian to carry on what he had begun. Sima Qian attests to this himself in an autobiographical text. Well worth close consideration, it gives insight into the values of the father and the son. In it, Sima Tan asserts that he had dedicated his life to the traditions of his predecessors, and orders his son to do the same, to continue doing what the ancestors – whom the father was shortly to join – had begun. Unfortunately his words, recorded by his son, do not indicate exactly how much Sima Tan had accomplished before the end of his life, for his son to carry forth. Had the father already begun to write, or was he still collecting material? Had he drawn up the plan of the work, and was that plan to be binding for his son? Did the elder Sima wish only to write the history of his own dynasty, or did he plan for the Shiji to range much more widely in time, as it came to do? How seriously, how literally, should Sima Tan’s wish be understood that “a record of all the enlightened rulers and wise lords, the faithful ministers and gentlemen who were ready to die for duty” (Watson 1958, 49) must not remain unwritten? Did he perhaps want historiography to serve as a political eulogy? To remain with the question of what parts of the Shiji belong to Sima Qian and which to his shadowy father, however, it is generally doubted whether individual sections can reliably be ascribed to one or the other (Schaab-Hanke 2010d, 211–213). It is conceivable that they both had never wanted anyone to seek this out, never thought that the work would be taken as a unity (Schaab-Hanke 2010b, 11). Schaab-Hanke previously attempted to explain apparent contradictions in interpretation and presentation in the expansive Shiji as differences between father and son. Additional matters relevant for Sima Qian’s autobiographical writings further

1314 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

complicate things. According to Sima Qian himself, when he had completed the Shiji, he put one copy in the palace library in the capital and a second in an unidentified mingshan 名山, a “famous mountain” (which may have been a metaphor for his own house [see Knechtges and Chang 2014, 897]). The transmitted text, however, contains contributions by others. Already the great historiographer Ban Gu 班固 (32–92) reported, without providing any details, that ten of the Shiji’s 130 chapters were missing and only their titles remained (Ban Gu, henceforth Hanshu 漢書 62.2724). Since the received version has the expected 130 chapters, there has been speculation about whether these ten chapters, which had been lost or perhaps only planned and never completed, could have been restored or added. It has even been argued that they were taken more or less in toto and without acknowledgement from Ban Gu’s later Hanshu. There are in fact a few passages in the ‘textus receptus’ which were evidently written by Ban Gu, while some older and sometimes marked additions trace to Chu Shaosun 褚少孫 (ca. 104–ca. 30 BCE). The oldest additions to the text were added by Sima Qian’s grandson Yang Yun 楊惲 (d. 56 or 54 BCE), who saved the work from oblivion. The Shiji is thus a multi-layered whole, which cannot rightly be assigned to just one author. To make things still stickier, it must be kept in mind that it is not at all clear how much time Sima Qian devoted to the Shiji, or when he set the work aside. If one believes the later Xijing zaji 西京雜記 [Diverse Notes on the Western Capital (ca. 500–529)], which is filled with anecdotes of questionable reliability, Sima Qian traveled the country when just thirteen years old in search of historical records (Heeren-Diekhoff 1981, 236). According to his biography in the Hanshu (62.2720), after being named ‘tai shi ling’ and his father’s successor, Sima Qian devoted ten years to the work he had inherited from his father. The sources do not provide anything more definitive, and the secondary literature on the topic reflects those sometimes contradictory accounts (Nienhauser 1994, x, xii; Knechtges and Chang 2014, 897, 962).

Autobiographical Writings There are in fact − beyond some passing notes in the Shiji that do not feature here − three texts by Sima Qian of direct autobiographical relevance: the Letter to Ren An introduced below; the last chapter (juan 130) of the Shiji; and the poem Bei shi bu yu fu 悲士不遇賦 [Lament for Unemployed Gentlemen (Hightower 1954)/Fu lamenting the neglected scholar (Knechtges 2014)]. This last work, however, exists only in fragments, has the fewest autobiographical characteristics, and has never been attributed to Sima Qian with certainty. As its title indicates, it is a poem of complaint written in a voice that is depersonalized and general. It describes the suffering of a talented man who was overlooked by his time.

3 Sima Qian: Letter to Ren An 

 1315

The Taishigong zixu 太史公自序 [“Self Narration of the Gentleman Grand Astrologer”] (Durrant 1995, 1) is the source for most of the preceding information and deserves more attention than Bei shi bu yu fu. The ‘Biography’ of Sima Qian, included in Hanshu 62, also relies greatly on it, but incorporates important additional information. Moreover, as Schaab-Hanke (2010c) shows, Ban Gu made use of the opportunity that the biography in the Hanshu presented to put his predecessor and rival Sima Qian in a bad light. The Taishigong zixu occupies some thirty-five pages (with commentary) in the widespread Zhonghua shuju edition, not all of which is of autobiographical relevance. It includes nineteen pages detailing − in rhyme − Sima Qian’s considerations for the composition of individual Shiji chapters. Beyond this, the Taishigong zixu can be divided into three sections of unequal length: 1) Nine and a half lines (without commentary) on the distant ancestors of the Sima clan: Sima Qian (henceforth Shiji) 130.3285–3286; Watson 1958, 42–43. 2) Thirty-three and a half lines on Sima Tan: Shiji 130.3288–3292; Watson 1958, 43–48. This section relies primarily on citation of Liujia zhi yaozhi 六家之要指 [“The Discussion of the Essentials of the Six Schools”], a critical evaluation of Chinese philosophical schools up to his time. The actual biographical information is crammed into less than two lines. In other words, the life of Sima Tan is represented through his work (perhaps what his son thought was the most important thing). 3) Forty eight and a half lines on Sima Qian: Shiji 130.3293–3300; Watson 1958, 48–54. This block is the largest and divides again into half a dozen sub-sections. It contains further biographical information about the father, inter alia in connection with the deathbed scene already mentioned, which commands a full eight lines. The most extensive section presents an undated conversation with a (former) official colleague about the Shiji and the Confucian chronicle Chunqiu 春秋 [“Spring and Autumn”]. Its reflections on the relationship between writing and life, which also feature in the letter to Ren An, are its most remarkable aspect. The simplest formal consideration of Sima Qian’s “Self Narration” reveals something important: Sima Qian is not much concerned with listing his and his father’s stations in life. He concentrates more on their central written works and summaries of them, quoting some of them at length. In doing so, however, he does not deviate from the core ideas of his biographical objectivity. Sima Qian’s letter to the imprisoned Ren An presents difficulties already in bare factual aspects. These begin with its uncertain dating, for which late 93 and late 91 BCE are both possible (Watson 1958, 194–198). The later of these would suppose that Ren An had been part of an attempt in 91 BCE to remove the crown prince by means of black magic (Watson 1958, 195). The dating to 93 BCE on the other hand connects to notes about Sima Qian’s travel for the emperor around the time of the letter’s composition. It supposes that Ren An was in prison in both 93 and 91 BCE on different

1316 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

charges. This seems plausible given what is known from the fragmentary accounts of Ren An’s life and is strengthened by the casual way in which officials were sent to jail at the time. A further difficulty stems from Sima Qian’s own writing, as the letter was transmitted in two early sources, one from the first century CE, the Hanshu (62.2725–2736; Sima Qian zhuan 司馬遷傳 [“Biography of Sima Qian”]), the other from the sixth century, the Wenxuan 文選 (Xiao Tong 蕭統 [henceforth Wenxuan] 41.1854–1866; Bao Ren Shaoqing shu 報任少卿書 [“Letter to Ren An”]). Although the two versions are not much different from each other, most scholars prefer the Hanshu version, though it is not clear which is truly the more authentic (Fuehrer 1997, 175–176). Two closely related questions follow from that. Why, first, did Sima Qian not include this letter, which is of great autobiographical relevance, in his autobiography? Second, might there not be doubt about the reliability of the letter itself? Might it not have been fabricated after the fact and attributed to Sima Qian? (Perhaps Ban Gu himself, whose Hanshu is the first place, where the letter is cited, wanted to present Sima Qian in a politically disadvantageous light?) These questions can only be evaluated on the basis of plausibility. Knechtges says the important thing about the first question when he supposes that Sima Qian must have held the letter back due to political concerns, that he had actually never sent the letter. Knechtges proposes instead that the letter became known only after its author’s death (2008, 76, 83). The possibility that the letter is a false attribution cannot be lightly dismissed. Schaab-Hanke (2010a), however, provides an important analysis that argues against this proposition on the basis of the letter’s formal characteristics and content. A few words remain to say about the letter’s intent, its recipient, and the situation of its author at the time of composition. After Sima Qian was accused of lèse-majesté in 99 BCE, he was nevertheless allowed to resume his employment and continue his father’s work. Indeed, two years after his humiliating punishment, the rehabilitated fifty-year-old Sima Qian received an official post that was higher ranking and better paying than his previous one, and he accompanied the emperor on his travels, as before. Ren An 任安 (ca. 140–91 BCE), recipient of Sima Qian’s famous letter, had a colorful official career, after which he was convicted for participating in a plot against the crown prince. Nothing more is known about his relationship with Sima Qian, his guren 故人, “old friend” (Watson 1958, 57; Hanshu 62.2725), except what is in the letter. He evidently had at some uncertain time − probably while in prison − written to Sima Qian. The content of his letter can be known only from indications in Sima Qian’s response. It appears that he urged Sima Qian to pay attention to his social contacts, and that he requested recommendations for men fit for state service. His request and his advice so little accord with the presumed cares of a prisoner that it has been alleged that Ren An’s letter seems in part to reflect ulterior motives, and in part to reflect an almost simpleminded innocence. Édouard Chavannes (1865– 1918), author of the first meaningful work on Sima Qian and his writings in the west,

3 Sima Qian: Letter to Ren An 

 1317

presumed that Ren An contacted Sima Qian “pour le prier d’intercéder en sa faveur” [‘to request intercession on his behalf’] (1967, xliii). Frank Kierman suggests, “[i] t would appear that Jen An was singularly naive in asking help of Ssu-ma Ch’ien, who had already suffered by defending a soldier against the emperor’s wrath” (1962, 52n13). More recent research casts doubt upon these understandings, pointing out that in his letter Sima Qian bemoans his lack of influence (Knechtges 2008, 78), and that there is “not nearly enough concrete evidence for Ren An’s plea for assistance in his own plight […]” (Fuehrer 1997, 174). These things, however, do not really disprove Chavannes’ reading. Perhaps Ren An’s letter is most easily explained with reference to the idea − one that Sima Qian himself once expressed − that it is duty both to bring good people into service, thus to recommend them, and to praise good rulers. Sima Qian’s letter, which Knechtges (2008, 77) rightly characterizes as “somewhat rambling”, is striking in its length. Its seventy-seven lines make it nearly as long as the autobiographical summary of Sima Qian summarized above, including its information about his father and ancestors. If the letter was originally written on bamboo slips, in accord with contemporary practice, it must have formed a considerable bundle of some thirty to seventy slips (Wells 2015, 4n51). One can divide the letter in general following the layout of the Zhonghua shuju edition (Hanshu 62.2725–2736) into six sections of different lengths. (It is noteworthy that neither Chinese epistolary culture nor scholarly endeavor has established specific terms for the individual elements and sections of a letter.) The letter begins (part 1 = Hanshu 62.2725–2726, eight and a half lines) with reference to a previous letter, which is not extant, in which Ren An had advised Sima Qian to pay attention to his associations and requested his recommendations for men fit for government service. These requests seem to have been accompanied by the suspicion that the one so challenged, namely Sima Qian, would not respond to them. Sima Qian defends himself against the accusation that he would “be swayed by what ordinary people said” (Owen 1996, 136), then moves quickly to the theme that dominates the rest of his letter: his castration, which left him useless and alone, mocked, and with all his good intentions twisted. He asks for Ren An’s understanding about his long silence, alluding to his official duties and unspecified private matters. He then states, with what is for the modern reader a striking openness, that the letter could wait no longer because Ren An’s days were numbered. In the closing of this introductory section, Sima Qian assures the reader that he will lay open in his letter everything that affected him, because in Ren An he recognized one zhi ji 知己, “who understands me” (Owen 1996, 136). Having said this, Sima Qian explains (in part 2 = Hanshu 62.2727–2728; 12 lines), with two complementary sets of reasons, why he would not comply with Ren An’s request to recommend men for official service. Castration condemned him, like all who suffered it, to social ostracism for all time. That stigma, he writes, would carry

1318 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

over onto anyone who he recommended. Indeed, he asserts it would debase the political elite if an emasculated man like himself were to make any such recommendations. The third section (Hanshu 62.2729–2730), with its twenty-one lines, is exactly as long as the first two sections together. It offers some important autobiographical information, above all in its explanation, some nineteen lines in, of the circumstances of Sima Qian’s mutilating punishment. In 99 BCE (the events so recent that Sima Qian did not need to date them himself) Sima Qian had recommended his colleague Li Ling 李陵 (134–74 BCE), to lead a military expedition. But then Li’s troops met with an enemy force nearly twenty times larger than their own. The Han infantry was wiped out, Li Ling was captured, and at court all support and acclaim for Li Ling and his campaign evaporated. Only Sima Qian stood by Li Ling. In a personal discussion with the emperor, Sima Qian argued that Li Ling had by example taught his troops loyalty and a martial spirit. And Sima Qian suggested that Li Ling’s successes far outweighed his final defeat. (Without saying so explicitly, Sima Qian thus pleaded for permission for Li Ling to return home, perhaps paying a ransom to end his imprisonment among the Xiongnu and prevent him from changing sides.) Far from accepting this reasoning, the emperor transferred Sima to prison, where he was found guilty of an offense punishable by death. For a man in his position, however, there were other legal alternatives. For Sima Qian, it was a choice between suicide and castration, as he expressed with lapidary clarity: “In the end I was convicted of having tried to deceive the Emperor. My family was poor, and I didn’t have the means to buy my way out. None of my friends came to my rescue” (Owen 1996, 139). The fourth block of the letter, like the previous, fills twenty-one lines (Hanshu 62.2732–2733). Together with block five, it forms a core in which Sima Qian justifies on the basis of principle and on personal grounds his decision to accept castration rather than commit suicide. The explanation, extremely dense and in places marked by psychological insight, is not unambiguous in all details. But in essence Sima Qian says: 1) I am the scion of a family that is not highly privileged. My ancestors were nothing more than, “writers of history and astronomical calculations”, “close in status to diviners and soothsayers”, who served only to amuse the emperor and lacked status in the eyes of liusu 流俗 [common opinion]. “Suppose that I had bowed to the law and accepted execution […] the world would never have granted that I might be compared to those who could die for principle” (Hanshu 62.2732; Owen 1996, 139). 2) The traditional maxim that held, “Physical punishments are not applied to grandees” obliged a gentleman “to be severe in guarding his honor” (Owen 1996, 139). In other words, government officials, who were actually gentlemen only in legal terms, had recourse to self-inflicted punishment in the form of suicide as a substitute for the dishonor of a trial and imprisonment. Thus, according to Sima Qian, any man who permitted himself to be dishonored through harassment by jailers and legal officials gave up the ideal of the ‘gentleman’, according to which one ought never defend himself before a judge or set foot in a jail.

3 Sima Qian: Letter to Ren An 

 1319

Great men of history give evidence of how hard it is to adhere to the principle ‘Physical punishments are not applied to grandees’ and Sima Qian continues by citing historical examples, of whom he says in summary, “when they were accused and brought before the law, they could not summon the resolution to kill themselves” (Hanshu 62.2733; Owen 1996, 140). 3) After these reflections the letter expresses again its author’s fatalism, which explains his refusal to commit suicide: “Yet a man of courage does not necessarily die for honor; and when a fearful man aspires to the right, he will strive in any way he can” (Hanshu 62.2733; Owen 1996, 140). Sima Qian rejects the notion of suicide as an easy solution, or as something that he avoided out of cowardice. These unambiguous words follow: “The reason I bore through it in silence and chose to live at any cost, the reason I did not refuse to be covered in muck was because I could not stand to leave something of personal importance to me unfinished, because I despised perishing without letting the glory of my writings be shown to posterity” (Hanshu 62.2733; Owen 1996, 140–141). In the fifth section of the letter (Hanshu 62.2735, eight and a half lines) Sima Qian continues his reflections on his castration. He begins by thinking back on men of history whose examples demonstrate that riches and fame during one’s life do not necessarily bring lasting posthumous renown: “the only ones who are known are the exceptional, those outside the norm” (Hanshu 62.2735; Owen 1996, 141). But what constitutes ‘exceptional’ and ‘outside the norm’? What will bring fame after death? For Sima Qian, the only answer is writing, even in case of personal affliction. For Sima Qian, personal difficulties cannot block one’s work. These hardships should rather work to guarantee the quality of one’s intellectual efforts. Having asserted this, Sima Qian comes back to speaking of himself. The following words about the Shiji, which was still incomplete at the time of his castration, are easily recognized as the very heart of the letter: 僕竊不遜，近自託於無能之辭，網羅天下放失舊聞，考之行事，稽其成敗興壞之理，凡百三十 篇，亦欲以究天人之際，通古今之變，成一家之言。草創未就，適會此禍，惜其不成，是以就 極刑而無慍色。僕誠已著此書，藏之名山，傳之其人通邑大都，則僕償前辱之責，雖萬被戮， 豈有悔哉！然此可為智者道，難為俗人言也。 Being, perhaps, too bold, I have recently given myself over to writing that lacks ability. I have compiled neglected knowledge of former times from all over the world; I have examined these for veracity and have given an account of the principles behind success and defeat, rise and fall. In all there are one hundred and thirty chapters. In it I also wanted to fully explore the interaction between Heaven and Man, and to show the continuity of transformations of past and present. It will become an independent discourse that is entirely my own. The draft version was not yet completed when the misfortune happened to me; I could not bear that it not be completed, so I submitted to the most extreme punishment without showing my ire. When I have actually completed this book, I will have it stored away on some famous mountain, left for someone who will carry it through all the cities. Then I will have made up for the blame that I earlier incurred by submitting to dishonor. I could die thousands of deaths without feeling regret. This, however, may be said only to a wise man; you can’t explain it to an ordinary person (Hanshu 62.2735]; [Owen 1996, 141]).

1320 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

The letter ends (part 6 = Hanshu 62.2736, six lines) in the previously avoided personal tone of the letter’s author himself. Sima Qian describes how every day, every hour, of his life was overshadowed by the ignominy he had suffered. The “inferior sort of people” (Owen 1996, 141) looked down upon him, the inhabitants of his hometown laughed at him, and he dared not visit the grave of his parents. The end of the letter closes by returning again to Ren An’s request that he recommend talented men, a request that Sima Qian once more rejects: 今少卿乃教以推賢進士，無乃與僕之私指謬乎。今雖欲自彫瑑，曼辭以自解，無益，於俗不 信，祗取辱耳。要之死日，然後是非乃定。書不能盡意，故略陳固陋。 [Now you, Ren An, instructed me to recommend worthy men − would not that be the wrong thing to do, considering my private aims? Even if I wanted to give myself refinement and explain myself with gracious words, it would do no good, because ordinary people would not credit me and I would only earn more humiliation. Only when I am dead will the final judgment be made. Writing cannot say all that is in a person’s mind, thus I give you only the rough account of my thoughts]. (Hanshu 62.2736 [Owen 1996, 142])

To whom is the letter directed? Sima Qian’s most important autobiographical document has been termed “the preeminent example of an author who utilized a personal crisis as the catalyst for an autobiographical account” (Wells 2015, 631). And yet, it is not at all certain whether Sima Qian intended to explain himself to Ren An alone. Doubts about this are fitting, above all because of the public circulation of the letter, which Sima Qian’s later rival Ban Gu brought about, to the discredit of Sima Qian (Schaab-Hanke 2010c). There are only two plausible explanations for the letter’s circulation. One could (like Wells 2015, 635) assume that Sima Qian sent the letter, which was bulky, to the prison knowing well that it would attract the attention of the prison staff. They would sure forward it to the palace, where its contents would be archived. Then, after the death of its author, the letter would reach hands that could find it a platform from which to show its author’s mind to posterity. That line of reasoning, however, is quite doubtful and rather clashes with Knecht­ ges’ opinion that “[i]t would have been highly imprudent, and even dangerous for Sima Qian to make the letter to Ren An known during his lifetime” (2008, 77). It is much more plausible to think that Sima Qian would have made the letter known only to Ren An ‒ perhaps due to the inability of the prison guards to read, and trusting Ren An to maintain caution about high-ranking prison officials getting wind of the letter. It is perhaps even more likely that Sima Qian wrote the letter but never sent it, instead preserving it in his private archive, where a copy of the Shiji might also have been found. When Ban Gu quotes this letter, he says at the end that Sima Qian’s ‘writings’ became generally known only after his death, and that his grandson Yang Yun had contributed to their dissemination (Hanshu 62.2737), which supports this last version of the events. Yet the Chinese word used for ‘writings’ is shu 書, which has multi-

3 Sima Qian: Letter to Ren An 

 1321

ple meanings. It might in this case be plural, ‘writings’, or it might be understood as ‘letter’, denoting just the preceding letter to Ren An. However one prefers to explain the letter’s late release, it gives the impression of being meant for an elite circle of educated men with sensibilities close to those of Sima Qian, and not necessarily for Ren An alone. There are some unmistakable indications of this. Thus, for example, at the end of the fifth section Sima Qian can write of personal hardship as a motivation to great work and why he rejected suicide, 然此可為 智者道，難為俗人言也。[“(t)his, however, may be said only to a wise man; you can’t explain it to an ordinary person”] (Hanshu 62.2735 [Owen 1996, 141]). This observation might, however, also be reversed, and one might ask whether an educated man and fellow spirit like Ren An would have felt Sima Qian’s long and wordy explanations were really necessary. One wonders if Sima Qian, if for no other reason than the cost of the writing materials, would not have done better to have expressed himself with greater brevity. Sima Qian certainly did not need, for instance, to bolster his argument that those who suffer castration are always stigmatized with a list of examples from history (section 2), because those examples would have been known to every informed reader of his letter. Likewise could he have supported his central observation that personal difficulty had often been the basis for great works in the past without listing as many precedents as he did (section 5), if he wanted to reach only his peers and other experts. Sima Qian’s circuitous discussion, with its asides for the ordinary and the ignorant, leaves the impression that he wanted to explain himself not only to persons like himself. Rather, he sought to communicate to those whose mockery he bore among his contemporaries, and to readers of the future. Was the letter a pretense? A catalyst? It is, as noted above, not at all sure that Sima Qian’s letter reached its addressee, or that it was even intended to do so. The significance of the further observation that the letter speaks mostly about Sima Qian himself is also uncertain. Can Well’s description of Sima Qian as “the preeminent example of an author who utilized a personal crisis as the catalyst for an autobiographical account” (2015, 631) be accepted? Was Sima Qian’s personal crisis ‒ his mutilation ‒ the “catalyst” that stimulated his autobiographical meditations? That might be too hasty a judgment. If castration were actually the catalyst for the letter’s personal reflections, then the long delay between the punishment in 98 BCE and the composition of the letter in 93 or 91 BCE requires explanation. It is at any rate implausible to assume that Sima Qian’s spirit silently suffered for years while waiting for the chance to write of his frustration and abasement. Sima Qian himself acknowledges that his letter to Ren An was long overdue, which does not support Wells’ hypothesis. Should the communicative Sima Qian have suffered and yet waited to express himself? Sima Qian’s letter thus seems unlikely to have been a spontaneous reaction to his humiliating punishment. It was, after all, composed at a great temporal distance from the catastrophe that had changed his life so radically. Sima Qian was able to devote

1322 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

the years between his castration and his letter to Ren An to work on the Shiji. Those were years in which, according to his biography (Hanshu 62.2725), Sima Qian won honor as an official, years in which he was better paid than previously. This letter, which Durrant (1995, 16) sees as filled with frustration, pathos, and self-pity to the point of being unbearable and unreadable, seems to be rather a rational and calculating document created at a chronological distance of years. Rational, at any rate, is the consideration that lays at the center of the letter about his response to the substantiated accusations of lèse-majesté, which were punishable with death: 假令僕伏法受誅，[…]而世又不與能死節者比 […]。 [“Suppose that I had bowed to the law and accepted execution […] the world would never have granted that I might be compared to those who could die for principle”] (Hanshu 62.2732 [Owen 1996, 139]). Those are clear words: The world would not have accepted that Sima Qian was prepared to die for honor. When he used the phrase si jie 死節 [die for principle], Sima Qian was borrowing from a poem from the Chu ci 楚辭 [Songs of Chu], which Hawkes (1985, 175) describes as the verse autobiography of Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 340–278 BCE). It is the archetypical portrayal of a minister originally favored by the ruler but who falls into disfavor due to unwelcome political advice and slander, is banished, and is finally driven to suicide by dishonor. An educated reader would recognize that with the phrase si jie, Sima Qian was referring to the following lines: 或忠信而死節兮，或訑謾而不疑。 [“Some men are honest and die martyrs; / Some men are cheats and are never doubted”] (Hong Xingzu 洪興祖 [Chu ci] 4.152 [Hawkes 1985, 177]). And every one of those educated men would understand that just as Qu Yuan killed himself for ‘honor’, so did Sima Qian cite honor as reason for his own course of action. A further literary reference, which has a central place in the letter, deserves attention. It comes in Sima Qian’s explanation about why he submitted to the mutilating punishment that left him alive but in a debased condition: 草創未就，適會此禍，惜 其不成，是以就極刑而無慍色。 [“The draft version (of the Shiji) was not yet completed when the misfortune happened to me; I could not bear that it not be completed, so I submitted to the most extreme punishment without showing my ire”] (Hanshu 62.2735 [Owen 1996, 141]). Owen’s translation “without showing my ire” is a somewhat free rendering of the Chinese text wu yun se 無慍色, ʻwithout expression of resentment’. Translators have varied between two extremes, understanding this as ʻhaving no emotions’ or as ʻshowing no emotions’. Watson prefers the former and has, “I submitted to the extreme penalty without rancor” (1958, 66). Schwarz (1973, 188) goes far in the other direction to understand it as, “[…] und darum unterzog ich mich scheinbar (sic!) ohne Haß unhd Zorn dieser furchtbaren Strafe” [‘I therefore underwent this terrible punishment without apparent [sic!] hate and anger.’] Sima Qian certainly employed the expression ‘wu yun se’ [‘without expression of resentment’] as a reference to the Lunyu 論語 [Analects] of Confucius, and in so doing alluded to a judgement from the Master: Confucius was asked what one should think of a man who accepted the office of prime minister three times wu xise 無喜色

3 Sima Qian: Letter to Ren An 

 1323

‘without expression of joy’, and was removed from that office three times 無慍色 [wu yun se], ‘without expression of resentment’. Confucius deemed this zhong 忠 [loyal], but declined to describe that man as ren 仁 [benevolent] (Lunyu 5.18). Should Sima Qian not have applied the same judgement to himself? Should he not have deemed himself to be a loyal underling, loyal and nothing more? Confucius continued to play an eminent role in Sima Qian’s autobiographical writings after the letter to Ren An. Even the deathbed scene with his father mentioned above could be understood as a Confucian staging of his farewell to Sima Tan: When the dying father gives his hand to his son and complains about his fate, it is a reference to a place in the Analects where it explains a gesture and a word of the Master himself (Lunyu 6.10). Sima Qian’s autobiography reflects that both Sima Qian and his father strove to carry forth and imitate the example of Confucius: 太史公曰：「先人有言：『自周公卒五百歲而有孔子。孔子卒後至於今五百歲，[…]？』意在 斯乎！意在斯乎！小子何敢讓焉。」 [My father used to say to me: ‘Five hundred years after the Duke of Chou died Confucius appeared. It has now been five hundred years since the death of Confucius. There must be someone who can succeed to the enlightened ages of the past (…).’ Was this not his ambition? Was this not his ambition? How can I, his son, dare to neglect his will?] (Shiji 130.3296 [Watson 1958, 87])

That is a clear indication that Sima Tan wanted to become a second Confucius. Watson is right when he sees this as applying to Sima Qian, too: “This passage reveals the extent to which Ssu-ma T’an and his son regarded themselves as peculiarly the heirs of Confucius and his model of historical writing” (1958, 87). Even more than that is Confucius a topic in Sima Qian’s conversation with his former colleague Hu Sui 壺遂, which receives a great deal of space in the “Self Narration”. That discussion of the relationship between the Shiji and the Chunqiu is undated but must have taken place after at least the outline of the Shiji had taken form (and was known to Sima Qian’s interlocutor). In formal terms it is quite simple: Sima Qian responds to one question from Hu Sui, then to another: “For what reason was it that Confucius in ancient times made (zuo 作) the Spring and Autumn Annals?” (Watson 1958, 50), asks Hu Sui, and Sima Qian gives three reasons: He deems the highest function of the text to be the critical evaluation of concrete historical events in order to advance good rulership. Secondly, the text was written only after Confucius had the depressing experience of being blocked in his attempts to concretely affect the deteriorated political situation of his time. Finally, he asserts that the goal of the Chunqiu was met when it became the indispensable companion of the ruler: “[O]ne who rules a state cannot afford not to know the Spring and Autumn. […] A man who is a minister must know the Spring and Autumn […]” (Watson 1958, 52). Hu Sui’s subsequent question betrays clearly that he is less interested in Confucius and the Chunqiu than he is in Sima Qian and the Shiji. For he asks with provocative directness whether Sima Qian actually wants to equate the flowering of culture and political stability of his own times with Confucius’ epoch of decline and disorder,

1324 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

and whether he wanted to make the Shiji a (mere) critique, like the Chunqiu. Sima Qian’s answer is convoluted. He assures Hu Sui that Confucius did not seek only to blame, and had also documented what was praiseworthy. Beyond that, Sima Qian says that Confucius was and remains an unattainable exemplar, that he in no way wanted the Shiji to equal the Chunqiu, etc. Sima Qian’s nicely turned answer to the clear question of Hu Sui, 夫子所論，欲以 何明？ [“(n)ow in your writings, what is it you are trying to show?”] (Hanshu 62.2719 [Watson 1958, 53]) is a clear indication that he saw himself as Confucius’ heir. In this, Sima Qian adopted two basic attitudes. One was that the Shiji sought to do what the Chunqiu did, namely, to blame what should be blamed and to praise what should be praised. The latter was the more important, he said, because their time, during the reign of Emperor Wu, was indeed one of flowering. This assertion has been criticized by both modern scholars and older voices as insincere (Heeren-Diekhoff 1981, 137–138; Durrant 1995, 159n35). Sima Qian’s second attitude, which he posits through a comparison of the Shiji with the Chunqiu, goes further than the simple claim that the two shared the same goal of apportioning praise and blame. He implies also that both the Shiji and the Chunqiu – like many great works – arose from the same sentiment, from the similar situations of their authors. This point is so important to him that Sima Qian repeats it in the same words in his letter to Ren An (Hanshu 62.2735; Owen 1996, 141) as well as in his “Self Narration” (Shiji 130.3300; Watson 1958, 54–55). (Unfortunately he does not stop to indicate whether the letter was quoting the “Self Narration” or vice versa.) Sima Qian argues, in essence, that great works arise from their authors’ experiences of personal difficulties and political setbacks. These works thus, he says, serve as standins for the political influence their authors sought and failed to gain. They wrote, “intending to reveal themselves purely through writing that would last into the future” (Hanshu 62.2735; Owen 1996, 141). In this context Sima Qian employs the ambiguous, or at least multivalent, expression fa fen 發憤 (sometimes shu fen 舒憤), which is in general translated as “expressing frustration” (Durrant 1995, 15) or “expression [of] outrage” (Owen 1996, 141). Due to this phrase, Sima Qian has been credited with the conviction that great works like the Chunqiu and the Shiji are expressions of frustration. Without rejecting this interpretation completely, it must be noted that for Confucius the phrase ‘fa fen’ had a very positive implication: the Master expected ‘fen’, in the sense of ‘enthusiasm’ or ‘zeal’, from his students. He characterized himself as someone who, ‘in his enthusiasm forgot food, and in his joy forgot care’ (Lunyu 7.19). And he decided, ‘[i]f someone is not enthusiastic, I do not show him the Way!’ (Lunyu 7.8) Taking these things together, it becomes clear that Sima Qian considered enthusiasm and zeal as bases for intellectual aspiration and achievement. Great works like the Shiji and the Chunqiu were the product of their authors’ ambition hardened by suffering and frustration. Ignored in their lifetimes, the authors had to communicate their thoughts to the future.

3 Sima Qian: Letter to Ren An 

 1325

Ambition hardened by suffering, frustration, withdrawal, and mistrust: these four things run through Sima Qian’s letter. Witness his description of his selfless service for the emperor, and his rage over the harsh punishment he received for his first ‘mistake’: 主上幸以先人之故，使得奉薄技，出入周衞之中。[…] 故絕賓客之知，忘室家之業，日夜思竭 其不肖之材力，務壹心營職，以求親媚於主上。而事乃有大謬不然者。 [I was fortunate that, on account of my father, His Majesty allowed me to offer him my meager skills and to frequent the royal apartments. (…) I cut off contact with my friends and gave up all thought of the family property; day and night I tried to exercise my miserable talents to their utmost, striving single-mindedly to carry out my office and thus to please His Majesty and win his affection. Yet one thing happened that was a great mistake (miu) and had a very different effect] (Hanshu 62.2729 [Owen 1996, 137]).

It is not a coincidence that a central word of the final sentence in this passage, miu 謬 [mistake], is taken up again at the end of the letter. In the face of his personal experiences, Sima Qian says in closing, it would be a miu for him to make any recommendations. A man could hardly complain more clearly about the emperor’s baseless impugnment of his loyalty than Sima Qian does: He asserts that he will never again commit an error, while his first and only such mistake had already brought him the shameful punishment of castration. It is also not a coincidence that a letter ascribed to ‒ if doubtfully so ‒ the same Li Ling that Sima Qian once defended bitterly mocks the ingratitude of the imperial court after he was captured by the Xiongnu. That letter rejects the possibility of Li ever returning to his homeland: 且漢厚誅陵以不死，[…]，欲使遠聽之臣，望風馳命，此實難矣。所以每顧而不悔者也。陵雖 孤恩，漢亦負德。昔人有言：「雖忠不烈，視死如歸。」陵誠能安，而主豈復能眷眷乎？男兒 生以不成名，死則葬蠻夷中，誰復能屈身稽顙，還向北闕，使刀筆之吏，弄其文墨邪？ [I have been heavily repaid (i.  e. punished, R.E.) for that I did not die. (…) This is barely that which should attract the absent servant (= me; R.E.) back to his fatherland. And so it is that I do not now regret the past. Wanting though I may have been in my duty to the State, the State was wanting also in gratitude towards me. It was said of old. ‘A loyal subject, though not a hero, will rejoice to die for his country.’ I would die joyfully even now; but the stain of my prince’s ingratitude can never be wiped away. Indeed, if the brave man is not to be allowed to achieve a name, but to die like a dog in a barbarian land, who will be found to crook the back and bow the knee before an Imperial throne, where the bitter pens of courtiers tell their lying tales?] (李少卿答蘇武書 [Li Shaoqing da Su Wu shu, ‘Li Shaoqing’s Reply to Su Wu’]; Wenxuan 41.1853; Giles n.  d., 86)

This citation from Li Ling’s putative letter brings us to the final aspect of Sima Qian’s letter: The function of the letter as a source, usually an unmarked source. As already noted, it is possible Sima Qian himself cited his letter without acknowledgement in his “Self Narration”. Eva Yuen-wah Chung has argued that parts of the description of Li Ling’s battle in Sima Qian’s letter have such close parallels in the letter attributed to Li Ling that Sima Qian’s response to Ren An is best seen as one

1326 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

of the sources for a composition usually attributed to Li Ling (Chung 1982, 331–332, 529–547). The following is even more far-reaching: Section 3 of the letter describes extensively in some nineteen lines the matter with Li Ling that led to Sima Qian’s castration. He says he had a personal conversation with the emperor about Li Ling, after which Sima Qian’s calamity took its course. Important pieces of Sima Qian’s discussion of Li Ling have parallels in Li’s biography, including a verbatim speech by Sima Qian in defense of Li Ling (Hanshu 54.2455, lines 5–6 and 2456, lines 1–4). In keeping with early Chinese practice, the source of this speech is not made clear. It could have been some sort of record of the speech. Yet a comparison of the texts leaves no doubt that in fact it was assembled out of the letter to Ren An. The unknown person who assembled it did not even take the trouble to find new formulations. The sequence is somewhat altered from that of the letter, but the most important method consists of using the letter’s text, omitting certain phrasings, and making small changes to the original wording.

Works Cited Chavannes, Édouard. „Introduction.” Se-ma Ts’ien. Les mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien. Vol. I. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1967. vii–ccxlix. Chuci buzhu 楚辭補注 [‘Songs of Chu, with annotations’]. Compiled by Hong Xingzu 洪興祖 (1090–1155). Beijing: ­Zhonghua shuju, 1983. Chung, Eva Yuen-wah. “A Study of the Shu (Letters) of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220).” Diss. University of Washington, 1982. Durrant, Stephen. The Cloudy Mirror. Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Fuehrer, Bernhard. “The Court Scribe’s Eikon Psyches: A Note on Sima Qian and His Letter to Ren An.” Asian and African Studies 6 (1997): 170–183. Giles, Herbert A. Gems of Chinese Literature: Prose. Taipei: Literature House, 2nd ed. n.  d. (1st ed.: Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1922). Hanshu 漢書 [‘History of the Former Han’]. Compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962 [Reprint 2002]. Hawkes, David. The Songs of The South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Heeren-Diekhoff, Elfie. Das Hsi-ching tsa-chi: Vermischte Aufzeichnungen über die westliche Hauptstadt. Weilheim: Druckerei Fischer, 1981. Hightower, James Robert. “The Fu of T’ao Ch’ien.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17 (1954): 169–230. Kierman, Frank Algerton Jr. Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s Historiographical Attitude As Reflected In Four Late Warring States Biographies. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1962. Knechtges, David R. “‘Key Words’, Authorial Intent, and Interpretation: Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 30 (2008): 75–84. Knechtges, David R., and Taiping Chang, eds. Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature: A Reference Guide. Vol. II. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014. Nienhauser, William H., ed. The Basic Annals of Pre-Han China by Ssu-ma Ch’ien. The Grand Scribe’s Records. Vol. I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

3 Sima Qian: Letter to Ren An 

 1327

Owen, Stephen, ed. An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York/London: W.W. Norton, 1996 [136–142: Translation of Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An]. Schaab-Hanke, Dorothee. “Anfechtungen eines Ehrenmannes: Argumente für die Authentizität des Briefes an Ren An”. Der Geschichtsschreiber als Exeget: Facetten der frühen chi­ne­si­schen Historiographie. Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2010. 369–386 (Schaab-Hanke 2010a). Schaab-Hanke, Dorothee. “Einführung.” Der Geschichtsschreiber als Exeget: Facetten der frühen ­chinesischen Historiographie. Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2010. 9–20 (Schaab-Hanke 2010b). Schaab-Hanke, Dorothee. “In eigener Sache: Die Autobiographie Sima Qians und deren (Aus-) Nutzung durch Ban Gu” (2006). Der Geschichtsschreiber als Exeget: Facetten der frühen chinesischen Historiographie. Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2010. 347–367 (Schaab-Hanke 2010c). Schaab-Hanke, Dorothee. “Sima Tans Anteil an Kapitel 27 des Shiji.” Der Geschichtsschreiber als Exeget: Facetten der frühen chinesischen Historiographie. Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2010. 211–222 (Schaab-Hanke 2010d). Schaab-Hanke, Dorothee. “Subjectivity As A Form Of Authority: The ‘I’ Voice In The Taishigong yue Sections Of The Shiji.” Der Geschichtsschreiber als Exeget: Facetten der frühen chinesischen Historiographie. Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2010. 405–428 (Schaab-Hanke 2010e). Se-ma Ts’ien. Les mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien. Trans. Édouard Chavannes. Vol. I. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1967 [ccxxvi–ccxxxviii: Translation of Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An]. Shiji 史記 [‘The Records of the Historian’]. Compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 86). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959 [Reprint 1975]. Schwarz, Ernst, ed. Der Ruf der Phönixflöte: Klassische chinesische Prosa. 2 vols. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1973 [175–191: Translation of Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An]. Watson, Burton. Ssu-ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian Of China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958 [57–67 and 214–220 (notes): Translation of Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An; 42–57 and 202–214 (notes): Translation of Sima Qian’s “Self Narration”]. Wells, Matthew. “Captured In Words: Functions And Limits Of Autobiographical Expression In Early Chinese Epistolary Literature.” A History Of Chinese Letters And Epistolary Culture. Ed. Antje Richter. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 621–642. Wenxuan 文選 [‘Selections of Refined Literature’]. Compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–531), ann. by Li Shan 李善 (630–689). Zhongguo gudian wenxue congshu 中國古典文學叢書. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1986.

Further Reading Bauer, Wolfgang. Das Antlitz Chinas: Die autobiographische Selbstdarstellung in der chinesischen Literatur von ihren Anfängen bis heute. München: Hanser, 1990 [84–87: Partial Translation of Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An]. Hightower, James Robert, trans. “Letter to Jen An (Shao-ch’ing).” Anthology Of Chinese Literature: From Early Times To The Fourteenth Century. Ed. Cyril Birch. New York: Grove, 1965. 95–102. Durrant, Stephen. “Self As The Intersection Of Traditions: The Autobiographical Writings Of Sima Qian.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106.1 (1986): 33–40.

4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V (8–12) [“Sorrows”] Melanie Möller

Publius Ovidius Naso can be called a ‘Proteus’ among the Latin poets of the classical period. He knew how to withdraw himself from a biographical access to his extra-literal self like no one else. He employs diverse ‘personae’ or masks in his texts, which he adopts to play various roles. Dressed in these ‘personae’, the poet presents to us many distinct facets contained in his literary character. On the one hand, these facets find their utterance in formal-aesthetic means through Ovid’s use of a wide range of genres. On the other hand, the facets are displayed through the poetic content, as the reader encounters the masked poet dealing with diverse situations. Due to Ovid’s various masquerades, relevant literary histories presume to know much about the poet’s historical character. Supposing this, however, some circumstances of his life are regularly neglected. Ovid himself presents to us a large amount of biographical information which is corrupted by his masks; the facts he provides are also only inherent in the text. Ovid is thus to be seen as a master of autofiction. The following roughly sketched historical biography of the poet Ovid focuses on dates relevant to his poetological development. Ovid was born on 20 March 43 BCE in the Italian town of Sulmona (Abruzzo) as a son of a wealthy equestrian family. This background enabled him, when he moved to Rome, to have not only a quick start with his political career – he began a career as a senator after being educated in law by prominent rhetoricians (Arellius Fuscus, Porcius Latro) – but also financial independence. Supported by this, he retired from politics at the age of 20 in order to live as a privateer, able to concentrate on his life as a poet within the cultural life of the capital city. This way Ovid comes to represent perfectly the Augustan ideal of ‘otium’ [creative and liberal idleness]. After getting in contact with the most important poets in Roman society (e.  g. Propertius, Horace), he was very soon counted among the favorites of the patron M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus (64 BCE–8 CE). His knowledge of rhetorics and law from his early education was fruitful for his development as an artist and his career as a poet. This leads to Seneca praising even Ovid’s speeches as “poems in prose” (Seneca 1974, 258–263). Real-life experience is thus transcended by Ovid in a poetic manner in every possible way. The rising poet won his first honors by publishing his edition of Amores [‘Love Poems’], consisting of three books. Already in this work the singular trait of Ovid emerges: the connection of tradition and innovation in an unpredictable way. This technique is a constant within Ovid’s poetry. It was still his principal preoccupation when exile to the Black Sea was forced upon him (see below). Ovid’s compelling intratextuality can be found among his first elegiac poems, the Amores, and the Tristia as representative of his last elegiac works. Writing from exile, the former ‘amator exclusus’, the lover who was locked out by his mistress, is transformed into the ‘poeta exclusus’, a poet who was excluded from the possibilhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-115

4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V 

 1329

ity of returning to Rome as if a door had slammed behind him (Bretzigheimer 1991; Williams 1994, 50–99; Holzberg 2005, 181–202). With this analogy, we see how Ovid by content and by structure creates referentiality within his poetic life. He permits neither thematic nor generic variation to open up significant gaps in his persona of exclusion. This artifice compensates for and elides the possible break between his poetic ‘personae’ and his historical biography. The literature created during exile (see below) fits properly into the poetic work and does not contrast with it, just as the poet himself performs the twin stunts balancing continuity and discontinuity, reality and fiction. Composing the Heroides [‘Letters of Heroines’], Ovid nevertheless becomes the creator of a new literary form. The fictional letters, consistently written by an abandoned mistress addressing her unfaithful or absent lover – most of them are mythical heroes – offer the complement to the genuine male perspective of the Amores. A peculiar configuration of love elegy is represented by the Ars Amatoria [‘Art of love’]: here Ovid unfolds the topic of erotica in a didactic manner. Following the first two books, which contain erotic advice for men, the third book is meant to be a reference for female readers. In addition to these, he composed the Remedia amoris [‘Remedy of love’], a metacritical occupation with the public, who reacted skeptically to the ‘Art of Love’. Another art-piece concerning this theme, a didactic poem called the Medicamina faciei femineae which deals with beauty-products for women, is lost except for its beginning. Between 2 and 8 CE Ovid crosses genre borders once again, creating his famous epic, the Metamorphoseon libri [Metamorphoses], which consists of fifteen books illustrating a varied mythological selection of more or less popular transformation legends, though Ovid organized an edition of the epic only in his exile. The tragedy Medea, highly esteemed by Quintilian, is lost, which is especially regrettable facing the topic discussed here. The presentation of the sorceress Medea in book seven of the Metamorphoses indicates Ovid’s interest in exploring the protagonist’s complex inner understanding of the self and of language, which she may have meditated upon when fighting for her own identity. This focus would have left room for the poet to draw important conclusions concerning comparisons between ancient and modern ideas about drafts of the self and autofictional principles. Parallel to his Metamorphoses, Ovid provides a poetic adaptation of the Roman festival calendar in creating the Fasti, which were only half-finished when exile was forced upon the poet. The Epistulae ex Ponto, a collection of 30 elegiac letters distributed across four books, was also executed after Ovid was exiled. These letters are an important counterpart to the autofictional outline presented in the Tristia, which he conceptualized immediately after his departure for the Black Sea (see below). Obviously, the Epistulae were created subsequent to the Tristia. They differ less in content than in form from the preceding collection, insofar as they mention the addressees by name. This in particular makes the Epistulae a more historical document than the Tristia. Finally, the exiled Ovid composed the poetic diatribe Ibis as well as a poem about fishing, named Halieutica, which follows the Hellenistic tradition of didactic poetry.

1330 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

In creating the tenth poem in Book Four of the Tristia, Ovid becomes one of the first authors of literary autobiography, according to the generic term in a narrower sense, which was incorporated into the overarching literary history. Whereas the life of Virgil, e.  g., was woven into multiple legends, Ovid’s private story is mentioned nearly nowhere else, although he achieved fame during his lifetime in a similar sphere. His intratextual manner of stylizing himself might have been too distinctive. Furthermore, a contradiction emerges in his performance of the self. While Ovid seems to offer a wide range of autobiographically based content in his elegies of exile, he explicitly puts himself in the tradition of the neoteric poet Catullus and also of the so called lex Catulli [‘law of Catullus’]. This law, formulated by Catullus in the 16th poem of his collection, is predicated upon the radical incompatibility of art and life. According to this, the self cannot be expressed within a text in an ‘authentic’ way. Ovid discusses this dicho­to­my in trist. 3, 2 and even more detailed in trist. 2, 353–356: “crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro / (vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea est): / magnaque pars mendax operum est ficta meorum: / plus sibi permisit compositore suo” [“I assure you, my character differs from my verse / (my life is moral, my muse is gay), / and most of my work, unreal and fictitious, / has allowed itself more licence than its author has had”]. Like Catullus, Ovid is also well aware of the delicate issue of making statements about life via the medium of art, which is not meant to display it. Ovid “plays”, in the truest sense of the word, with life – with his own life, to be exact (Holzberg 2005, 31sq.), which constitutes in aesthetic regards an existential kind of play. This may be seen as a result of the most pervasive burden of Ovid’s poetic life, especially as he is chronologically the last representative of the so-called ‘Augustan Age’, an era whose climax was reached as well as its endpoint with Ovid’s poetic life work. With this in mind he locates himself in his ‘autobiography’ (Ov. trist. 4, 10, 41–52): temporis illius colui fovique poetas, / quotque aderant vates, rebar adesse deos […] saepe suos solitus recitare Propertius ignes, / iure sodalicii, quo mihi iunctus erat. […] et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures, / dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra. / Vergilium vidi tantum: nec avara Tibullo / tempus amicitiae fata dedere meae [The poets of that time I fondly reverenced: / all bards I thought so many present gods / (…). Oftentimes Propertius would declaim his flaming verse / by right of the comradeship that joint him to me. (…) And Horace of the many rhythms held in thrall our ears / while he attuned his fine-wrought songs to the Ausonian lyre. / Virgil I only saw, and to Tibullus greedy fate / gave no time for friendship with me].

Ovid seems not only to associate the leading minds of his poetic generation with the genres of elegy, lyric poetry and epic, but also to dissociate himself from them ­(‘Vergilium vidi tantum; nec … Tibullo amicitiae meae’) – and thus, despite holding them in high esteem, trumps them all.

4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V 

 1331

Historical Origins of the Text According to Ovid’s own words, the first book of his Tristia was composed during his voyage to his place of exile at the Black Sea, which he describes as extraordinarily troublesome. This putative exile can be examined as a radical situation that reveals the ‘autobiographical’ aspect of his work. In the year 8 CE, Ovid was banned, by a command of Augustus, to Tomis (the present-day Constanța in Romania), where he is supposed to have stayed until his death in the year 17 CE. The exile, apparently, was never reversed, neither by Augustus nor by his successor Tiberius. This banishment, however, must have been the milder form, the so called ‘relegatio’ [‘dismissal’], enabling the author to keep his fortune as well as his Roman citizenship. Under these conditions, he was still licensed to disseminate his works in the capital city. Further details of the exile have been abundantly speculated upon. We know practically nothing about it, except for the information given by Ovid, although this information is more than dubious insofar as its documentary quality is concerned. Ovid mentions a ‘carmen’ [‘poem’] and an ‘error’ [‘mistake’] as reasons for his banishment. The ‘carmen’ could refer to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria: Augustus is supposed to have rated the erotodidactic poetry as morally reprehensible. However, this assumption is curious for the reason that the work in question had been circulating for more than eight years at the time of the banishment. Augustus must have changed his mind spontaneously and without a convincing cause. The ‘error’ evoked by Ovid, which he conjectures to be the alternative reason for his exile, creates a further riddle for the reader. Several studies on Ovid reconstruct from his allusions (“cur aliquid vidi?” [“Why did I see anything?”] [Ov. trist. 2, 103, see below]) that he might have caught a member of the imperial family in a compromising situation and, so that he would remain silent, was thus exiled. These possibilities remain speculation and cannot be clarified in a satisfying way. Moreover, several contradictions exist between historically established facts and Ovid’s fictions. The descriptions of his place of banishment differ from the facts given by reliable sources. At the very least, Ovid’s place of exile may not have been as uncivilized as he depicts it. He paints poetic drafts of himself in which he fears for his artistic and national identity. One indication of the threat of this loss can be found in the partial aphasia in trist. 5, 7, 57: “vix subeunt ipsi verba Latina mihi” [“Latin words with difficulty occur even to me”]. In fact, Ovid losing his Latin identity is hardly probable, but rather he may have even learned the local languages, such as Getian and the Sarmatian or Scythian idiom, and may have adopted them in his poetics as well. However, one has the impression that Ovid did not experience firsthand every cultural and topographical detail described in the texts written during his exile; he could have obtained facts from other ancient literary sources (e.  g. from the third book of Virgil’s Georgics). Numerous honors are mentioned, which are supposed to have been awarded to the cultural export from Rome in his new residence. This implies that the honored poet was largely acclimatized and that he did participate in cultural life, rather than the presumption that he

1332 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

withdrew and isolated himself totally. It is probable that Ovid’s withdrawal-mode is only presented on an inner fictional level as the ideal artistic-autobiographical way of life. In his Tristia and Epistulae it is obviously important to him to visualize the possible living conditions of an exiled person. Place, time, and sensual perception play a crucial role in connecting the singular parts of his work with each other. For this reason, Ovid’s banishment provided suitable material for ‘biographical’ novels, as is impressively shown by Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt (1988) [The Last World]. Ransmayr mirrors Ovid’s artifice of drawing on the details of his biography within his work. Ovid’s poetry consistently highlights the unbridgeable gap between art and life without giving the reader a proper chance to span it.

Content At the beginning of the Tristia, whose five books contain 50 elegies altogether, the author explicitly addresses his book with a poem that is sent to Rome as a herald to convey the metapoetic instructions of its composer. The work functions as a represen­ ta­tive of the author with the concrete order to speak on behalf of his interests. However, the hermeneutic effect of this strategy is ambivalent. It implicates the possibility of substituting the author for his work on the one hand, and, on the other, suggests the exact opposite in declaring the book to be merely an ineffective specter without its author. The counterpart to this programmatic opening elegy is found in the concluding chapter of the first book (trist. 1, 11), which is conceived as an epilogue for the reader (similar in trist. 5, 4). Thus, Ovid consequently involves the reader as a third party in the complementary relationship between author and text in poetological discourse. Elegy no. six, in the middle of the first book, is directed at Ovid’s wife, who is addressed in other contexts as well. This elegy is a ‘homage’ to her, since she is administering his affairs in Rome and shows a fidelity which is comparable to Penelope’s. The sixth elegy is framed by letters to Ovid’s best friend (no. 5) and to the editor of the Metamorphoses (no. 7). Two elegies which are very concretely related to his voyage into exile, but also representative of his poetical transformations (nos. 2 and 4), frame the affective and affecting description of his departure from Rome. In addition to this, there are supplicatory and accusatory elegies addressed to friends as well as to his advocates (nos. 8, 9 and 10), and abuses directed at his adversaries (e.  g. nos. 1, 8; 3, 11; 4, 9). The second book of the Tristia is a unified entity and depicts a proper forensic request to the emperor Augustus in which the poet begs for a reprieve. Whereas the first part of the poem (up to v. 206) deals with the obscure matter of his delinquency, the second part (until the end, v. 578) offers a vindication of the Ars Amatoria. This is where Ovid follows the apologetic tradition of autobiography, which is particularly common in the historically established branch of the genre. Following this, he constantly emphasizes that his current elegiac poetry composed in exile would offer no

4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V 

 1333

more erotodidactic exhortations. Conforming with this tradition, Ovid attempts to recover his publicly damaged reputation by ostensibly accepting and agreeing to criticism. At the same time, he references the Amores and therefore upholds a defense of the erotic theme, which suggests that he subverts his own apology. In this context, Ovid drafts the ambiguous rhetorical question “cur aliquid vidi?” [‘Why did I see anything?’] (v. 103), which is not only related to his unfortunate situation (see above), but could also constitute a kind of aesthetic motive: Ovid is also a visually-minded artist who unfolds his poetics primarily in a visual way. Within his complete works, the myth of Actaeon from the Metamorphoses (met. 3, 138–252) may be a suitable analogy for this. Here Ovid exemplifies the fundamental innocence of every author in a metaphoric way: although he is the observing subject, he is likewise someone who is allured by art objects – and so by objects of desire. ‘Seeing’ is always a ‘videri’, a ‘seeming’ or ‘appearing’ which occupies the imaginary world of the visual or graphic artist, and which charms him against his own will. Ovid seems to prove proleptically that Ernst H. Gombrich, who denied the validity of the formula of the “innocence of the eye” of an artist, was wrong (1960, 298). The third book of the Tristia starts with an oration of the book and concludes with a letter to the editor (no. 14). Whilst the first part of the book in particular consists of supplicatory poems to friends, which are frequently outlined in a dramatic or suicidal way, the poet employs the second half to describe his personal surroundings, consistently ending up pleading for the emperor’s mercy. In addition to this, programmatic elegies illustrate the author’s desire to couch his own fate in mythical terms (no. 9; see below). Most of these pieces hyperbolically accentuate the ‘asperitas loci’, the inhospitality of the place of his exile, which merely becomes a topos in the work. Elegy no. 7 which is a poetologically important piece addressed to the unidentified poetess Perilla through whom the author reflects upon his own poetry forms the center of the book. Ovid interweaves the text with autobiographic elements presented coherently in trist. 4, 10. Even if Ovid does not discuss any details of his exile in trist. 3, 7, he still manages to highlight the relevant facts of his complex situation, and illustrates its effects on his writing self. In this way, we learn about lasting grief (v. 8), villainous muses (v. 9), about the terrifying impact of his own destiny (v. 20sq, v. 28), about his life in exile, full of deprivations (v. 45), and about his ability to resist the ‘princeps’ (v. 48). Though this situation may existentially harm the poet, it does not cause the collapse of his literal existence. The fourth book also adopts the sender-recipient technique as the first and the last part (no. 10) are conceptualized as addresses to the reader and to posterity. The first half underlines positive traits of powerful Romans, contradicted by the versification of the poet’s negative experiences. Hereby, friends are compared to enemies and differences between fact and fiction are poetically expressed. Poetry as consolation becomes a pre-eminent topic, too (e.  g. in the frame-elegies nos. 1 and 10). The final elegy 4, 10, already noteworthy for its position, will be discussed hereafter (see below).

1334 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

The fifth book is composed of 14 further elegies with the opening section directly addressing the reader once more. As a whole, the book is, however, dedicated to Ovid’s wife, with the elegies 2, 5, 11 and 14 explicitly intended for her eyes. Furthermore, the book consists of supplicatory and condemnatory letters to friends, as well as reflections on literary theory (nos. 3 and 12) – topics which are augmented by excessive complaints about his current circumstances (nos. 6 and 10). This well-known combination of requests and complaints attests the continuity of his situation, and the fact that the artist’s identity remains unbroken even in exile.

Analysis In Tristia 4, 10, Ovid describes his life as orientated towards common generic conventions (works that are meant to be published, are directed to an addressee, give the retrospective autobiography in basically chronological order, are written from a first-person narrator’s perspective, tend to be an apology). This section stands, as his true autobiography, in the tradition of the ‘sphragis’ [‘seal-attached’], a kind of ‘copyright’: the author marks his work by using an individual signature to document his claim for ownership. Occasionally such ‘seals’ consist only of short epigrammatic dates detailing the place or year of birth or the familial financial background; sometimes a ‘sphragis’ gives also codified information, which is understandable only privately (Kranz 1961, 3–46; Spahlinger 1996, 27–50). In many cases the poet explicitly gives his name (e.  g. Hesiod, Virgil) or a sufficiently known epithet (in the Homeric hymn of Apollo “the blind poet from Chios” introduces himself as the author in v. 165–176). Moreover, Greek lyricists and elegiasts like Pindar or Theognis have authorized their works with the help of a ‘sphragis’. The technique of sealing included various genres. During the Hellenistic-Roman epoch it is adopted even by erudite poets like Callimachus in his Aitia, by bucolics like Theocritus, and by epic poets like Apollonios of Rhodes. The request for eternal glory offered here influenced Ovid’s use of the ‘sphragis’ in his Metamorphoses. Among the Romans there are, beside Virgil, Ennius, Propertius (1, 22), and Horace (carm. 3, 30 and epist. 1, 20), whose poetical modes of authorizing a text are followed by Ovid. In his literary debut, Ovid proposes his cognomen ‘Naso’ (Amores 1, 1). The poet makes recurring appearances throughout his work as ‘poeta’ [‘poet’] or ‘vates’ [‘seer’], as ‘auctor’ [‘author’] or as ‘magister’ [‘teacher’] corresponding with his ‘opus’ [‘work’], ‘liber’ [‘book’] or ‘carmen’ [‘poem’] in order to turn towards his readership. In doing so, he now addresses himself first as a self-confident, then as broken, staged poetic self (e.  g. am. 1, 1; 2, 1; rem. 1, 71sq.; Ib. 4; epist. 1, 1). The technique of the ‘sphragis’ finds its master in Ovid, who uses it across all genres in which he writes. Remarkably characteristic, however, is the prominent introductory distich of Tristia 4, 10: “ille ego qui fuerim tenerorum lusor amorum / quem legis, ut noris,

4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V 

 1335

accipe posteritas” [“That thou mayst know who I was, I that playful poet of tender love whom thou readest, hear my words, thou of the aftertime”]. This is a variation on the funeral epigram on his own death directed to his wife in trist. 3, 3. In his own words, he was motivated to create this epitaph by a malady: “hic ego qui iaceo, tenerorum lusor amorum / ingenio perii Naso poeta meo/ at tibi qui transis ne sit grave quisquis amasti / dicere Nasonis molliter ossa cubent” [“I, who lie here, with tender loves once played, Naso, the bard, whose life his wit betrayed. Grudge not, o lover, as thou passest by, a prayer: ‘soft may the bones of Naso lie!’”]. Once more Ovid confidently interacts with the reader, characterized as a passerby who is prompted by the epigram to recognize the ‘vitae acta’ [‘biographical data’] of the interred body. We can take it as a characteristic of Ovid’s eminence that he is directly reminding us of his former love poetry in this prominent place. Moreover, he does not allow any doubt about his self-conception as a love poet, which may contradict his frequently accentuated distance from the Ars Amatoria. This distance, however, takes place on a merely superficial level. In opposition to most of the brief and pointed sphragides, trist. 4, 10 occupies a special position for the fact that it illustrates a life history from birth on over at least 132 verses. Initially, Ovid describes his original homeland in the traditional way, as well as his status, his family background, and his date of birth (v. 3–14). He outlines his education and explains the reasons for interrupting his political career, then turns his attention to his ‘ingenium’ [‘god-given talent’] and his profession to become a poet (v. 15–40). He lists his poetic companions and refers back to the content of his earlier works (v. 41–64). By declaring himself to take the last position in a catalogue of elegiac poets who appear to be established as well as innovative, Ovid ascribes to himself his desired rank within literary history (v. 54: “quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fuit” [“after them came I, fourth in order of time”]). After having expressed this poetological aim, Ovid provides some details of his private life, accentuating his moral integrity and therefore establishing his impeccable behavior as a Roman ‘pater familias’, who complies with the moral values favored by Augustus (v. 65–80). In some ways, this is a constructive counter-image to the loverideal which he introduced in his erotic poetry and which he had lastingly brought to mind only a few verses before. Ovid changes his ‘persona’ at his pleasure even on the intrapoetic level. He asserts his own innocence after praising his deceased parents (v. 81–90); to affirm his blamelessness, he presents his family members as witnesses for his defense in a fictional trial. Then, he inserts himself into the tradition of the Platonic Apology of Socrates. Through the use of stable family ties, he also paints himself as a reliable and incorruptible follower of the emperor and the imperial family. Without ever growing tired of it, he emphasizes how his relationship with the emperor began due to several people in his circle of family and friends. The author then shifts his focus from the fictional dock to his current situation of suffering in the outpost (v. 91–110) where the only thing which could ever give him the necessary power to live is his poetry. It is stylized as the ultimate form of existence

1336 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

which is basically independent from external influences, and, likewise, as a consolatory activity. This way, through the merging of past and present with future, he in the end lingers on his own glory, through which he would become immortal (v. 111–132). Indeed, this is a strategy he had made use of in trist. 3, 7 and at the end of the Metamorphoses. In the following, the autofictional structure of the exile-poetry will be visualized through the three lenses which are also evoked in trist. 4, 10 (Myth, Anxiety, Social Networking). The exiled poet’s practice of self-fictionalization can be found in his use of myths. Ovid appropriates myths to provide a background for his unfortunate situation. He consistently compares himself to mythical characters, often with tragic overtones, to emphasize the drama of his fate after being exiled. Concurrently, he documents his self-confidence: as an author who is discussed in public, he is firmly and irrevocably unified with the literary cosmos in the same way as a mythical hero with regards to his narrative status. Thus, Ovid composes his own exile-myth as a “cluster […] of mythical figures” (Claassen 2008, 24). He is fond of describing the mostly non-self-inflicted miseries of both well-known and less famous mythological characters, such as Amphiaraus, Bittis, Philoctetes or Capaneus, who was, similarly to Ovid’s punishment by the emperor, struck by Jupiter’s lightning (e.  g. trist. 5, 3, 29, or Pont. 3, 1, 51). Again and again, Ovid underlines the unexpectedness and abruptness of his exile’s punitive isolation. In trist. 4, 3, he employs the tale of Callisto, whose life of suffering mirrors Ovid’s. Callisto, through her metamorphosis into a bear, is first doomed to sylvan solitude and finally condemned to a solitary existence among the stars. Likewise, Ovid suffers at the remote edge of the world. In this context, his insistence on his innocence becomes clear, as Callisto is also a victim of (divine) injustice. Elsewhere, Ovid aligns his fate with Jason’s (epist. 1, 4). The mythological character he identifies best with, however, is Odysseus. The Tristia in their entirety (and in parts also the Epistulae ex Ponto) have been read as a specific adaption of the Odyssey, not without just cause (Holzberg 2005; Claassen 2008). The evident parallels are most certainly based on the voyages memorialized by Ovid in his elegies (e.  g. addressing his friend Macer in epist. 2, 10 and peculiarly the voyage to the place of exile itself, which is outlined by Ovid mainly in volume one of the Tristia). These journeys take on a fictional quality as a result of this mythological exaltation. Moreover, the journeys of Odysseus have previously been interpreted in ancient literary reception as a process of self-discovery. This comparison is an issue of special interest for Ovid as his identity, like that of Odysseus, has not been fundamentally altered by a change of environment. A constitutive element of the exiled Ovid’s poetic self-reflection is anxiety with its concomitant effects. The anxiety of solitude is localized at the center of many poems. Herewith, Ovid does not only invoke an effect which is a phenomenon typical of banishment, but also a central aesthetic category. Anxiety seems to be central to the situation of the writing subject (not only to an imaginary exiled self). Twisting the famous philosophical dictum of René Descartes, Roland Barthes formulates: “J’ai

4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V 

 1337

peur, donc je vis” [“I’m afraid, therefore I’m alive”] (Barthes 1984, 389 [1986, 350]). According to Martin Heidegger “[liegt] in der Angst […] die Möglichkeit eines ausgezeichneten Erschließens, weil sie vereinzelt. Diese Vereinzelung holt das Dasein aus seinem Verfallen zurück […]” [“(…) in Angst there lies the possibility of a distinctive disclosure, since Angst individualizes. This individualizing fetches the ‘Dasein’ back from its delay (…)”] (1949, 190–191: § 40 [1996, 178]). Ovid’s exile as he depicts it causes such a radical solitude that the author develops a veritable desire for death, which he expresses in suicidal metaphors. Nevertheless, he manages to defuse his anxiety of isolation, although he uses it selectively for effect. It is necessary to avoid constant, lasting anxiety, and the poet retrospectively denies to himself the feeling of personal harm, which can only damage an existence that resides in the mortal world of a sharply outlined reality. The “shocking” moment of the “synopsis of now and then”, which can be found in other works of Ovid, for example in the Fasti (Schwindt 2005, 11), consistently vanishes from an unemotional, objectifying point of view. The temporal and spatial perspective is flanked by the sociological argumentation uttered in the poems. Ovid “braucht zum Überleben den Kontakt mit Freunden und Publikum” [‘needs contact with his friends and with his audience to survive’] (Müller 2009, 50). The poet’s position within this communicative framework is highlighted throughout his exile-poetry, in which there is a tension between the fact of his solitude and his desire for social bonds. A writing subject is always already condemned to break away from the real world, which must be remembered when one approaches this work of Ovid’s, which draws heavily from his autobiography. Ovid describes his isolation as the result of a dubious coercive measure, and so the constructive meaning of his solitude, too, is indicated ex negativo, i.  e. in the description of one who lacks a community. As far as Ovid defines himself in his self-conception as one who participates in a social network, his exile is to be evaluated not only as a separation from society, but also as a separation from his own self. Rome as the apostrophized capital figures as an ideal cosmos of social community. The author considers himself, even after his banishment, to be a substantive member of it. In his poetic reality, his absence due to exile has replaced his presence in the society. Nevertheless, his poetic self seeks to reintegrate itself as the absent poet through the use of a poetic life-concept. In this way, he substitutes vivid communication for himself by providing a material surrogate based on an inversion of familiar social categories (Stevens 2009, 162). In Ovid’s poetic vision, his isolation becomes a re-integration. In part, memory assists in the success of this aesthetic method. In memory, the poet’s particular ‘personae’ are incarnated as a part of the social collective. In the whole of Ovid’s works of exile, books and addressees fulfill the function of ‘reminders’ and evoke the names of his friends and enemies, as well as his own name, which reinforces this impression (Oliensis 1997). From a memorial perspective, temporal borders are surmounted. The time before and after his exile seem to coincide. The memory of the self which is evolved in Ovid’s exile elegies does not only move on a temporal, but also on a spatial axis. The ‘topos’ of spatial inclusion corresponds with

1338 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

that of exclusion, which is symptomatic of the situation of the exiled ‘poeta’. On the threshold of both imaginary worlds, the poet and his past can coexist and guarantee a coherent identity. In this condition, the poetological necessity of a socio-aesthetic network appears. Memory needs another human being to unfold its subsistent power. The one who remembers needs a counterpart, a referee who is able to testify to the participation of the excluded self in society. The ‘exclusus poeta’ [‘excluded poet’] searches constantly for addressees who can vouch for his meaningfulness and who can, under these conditions, be incorporated in an ‘autobiographical pact’ (Lejeune 1975). There is a mutual dependence between the poetic subject and the addressed object that exceeds personal attributions. By twisting the relations in the social network, the self of the poem soars up to become the sovereign creator of his own existence in the common mind of society. Furthermore, the self is related to the addressee through a process of self-interpretation. This way, following Wilhelm Dilthey, “[macht] das eigene Selbst und dessen Beziehungen zur Welt sich verständlich” [“makes the own self and its relation to the world understandable”] (1958, 204 [2002, 225]). In both of his elegiac works composed in exile, Ovid develops his ambiguous relationship to the aesthetics of writing between the poles of self and world. Themes and subjects are repeated and thereby seem to cultivate a certain kind of identity. The author’s identity remains inviolate; only external conditions have changed. Instead of the plentitude of life in Rome, Ovid is surrounded by the temporal and spatial emptiness of exile at the Black Sea. The existential conflict of deficiency, deprivation, and isolation on the one hand, and variety, satisfaction, and community on the other underlines the autobiographical point of Ovid’s exile work. He introduces to us his isolated, exiled elegiac ‘ego’, which seems to be impelled by the typical anxiety of being isolated (in a negative as well as a positive, that is, constructive, meaning). Thus, his writing is undertaken in large part for self-therapeutic purposes. What Ovid performs in his exile-poetry could be called a ‘specific form of autobiographical self-care’. As an autobiographer, Ovid overwrites his ‘real’ life as well as his physical death. Through this process, temporal-dynamic borders are overridden. Under these circumstances, Ovid succeeds in remaining himself. When Ovid apologizes for his behavior towards Augustus and his former society in Rome, he employs the apologetic background of autobiography as a generic frame. In the crucial moment, his apologies are sharpened to become intense aesthetic confessions. As a special point, we must consider that Ovid not only reflects upon his own role as a clever steward of his ‘vita’, but also negotiates the discursive function of his authorship. In this way, he enables himself to remain in mind as a far-sighted moderator of his poetic existence. Translation: Johanna Kaiser, Melanie Möller, Kate Timmers

4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V 

 1339

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Essais critiques IV. Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984 [The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Basil Blackwell, 1986]. Bretzigheimer, Gerlinde. “Exul ludens. Zur Rolle von relegans und relegatus in Ovids Tristien.” ­Gymnasium 98 (1991): 39–76. Claassen, Jo-Marie. Ovid Revisited. The Poet in Exile. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Ergänzung zu: Zusammenhang des Lebens.” Wilhelm Dilthey. Gesammelte Schriften. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1927). Vol. VII. Ed. Karlfried Gründer. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2nd ed. 1958. 202–204 [“Supplement to 3: The Life-Nexus.” Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Works. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Vol. III. Ed. Rudolf A. Makreel and Frithjof Rodi. Trans. Rudolf A. Makreel and William H. Oman. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. 223–225]. Döpp, Siegmar. Werke Ovids. Eine Einführung. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992. Gombrich, Ernst H. Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1960. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit 1. Tübingen: Neomarius, 6th ed. 1949 [Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York/Albany: New York State University Press, 1996]. Holzberg, Niklas. Ovid. Dichter und Werk. München: Beck, 3rd ed. 2005. Kranz, Walther. “Sphragis. Ichform und Namenssiegel als Eingangs- und Schlußmotiv antiker ­Dichtung.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 104 (1961): 3–46, 97–124. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Misch, Georg. Das Altertum. Geschichte der Autobiographie. Vol. I.1: Hälfte. Frankfurt a.  M.: Schulte-Bulmke, 3rd ed. 1949/1950 [A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Part One. Trans. E.W. Dickes. London: Routledge, 1950]. Müller, Ricarda. “Ovids Briefe aus der Verbannung.” Der altsprachliche Unterricht 52 (2009): 46–52. Oliensis, Ellen. “Return to Sender. The Rhetoric of Nomina in Ovid’s Tristia.” Ramus 26 (1997): 172–193. Ovidius Naso, Publius. Publi Ovidi Nasonis Tristium libri quinque. Ibis. Ex Ponto libri quattuor. Halieutica Fragmenta. Ed. Sidney George Owen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915. Ovidius Naso, Publius. Tristia. Ex Ponto. Ovid in Six Volumes. Vol. VI. Ed. and trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1975. Ovidius Naso, Publius. Kommentar. Tristia. Vol. II. Ed. Georg Luck. Heidelberg: Winter, 1977. Schwindt, Jürgen Paul. “Zeiten und Räume in augusteischer Dichtung.” La représentation du temps dans la poésie augustéenne. Zur Poetik der Zeit in augusteischer Dichtung. Ed. Jürgen Paul Schwindt. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 1–18. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Controversiae 1–6. The Elder Seneca. Declamationes in Two Volumes. Vol. I. Ed. Michael Winterbottom. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1974. Spahlinger, Lothar. Ars latet arte sua. Die Poetologie der Metamorphosen Ovids. Stuttgart/Leipzig: Teubner, 1996. Stevens, Benjamin. “per gestum res est significanda mihi: Ovid and Language in Exile.” Classical Philology 104 (2009): 162–183. Williams, Gareth D. Banished Voices. Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

1340 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

Further Reading Boyd, Barbara Weiden, ed. Brill’s Companion to Ovid. Leiden/Boston/Köln: Brill, 2002. Claassen, Jo-Marie. “Ovid’s Poems from Exile. The Creation of a Myth and the Triumph of Poetry.” Antike und Abendland 34 (1988): 158–169. Doblhofer, Ernst. Exil und Emigration. Zum Erlebnis der Heimatferne in der römischen Literatur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987. Ehlers, Widu-Wolfgang. “Poet und Exil. Zum Verständnis der Exildichtung Ovids.” Antike und Abendland 34 (1988): 144–157. Gaertner, Jan Felix, ed. Writing Exile. The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007. Gaertner, Jan Felix. “How Exilic is Ovid’s Exile Poetry?” Writing Exile. The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond. Ed. Jan Felix Gaertner. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007. 155–172. Hardie, Philip. Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hinds, Stephen. “Booking the Return Trip: Ovid and Tristia 1.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 31 (1985): 13–32. Hinds, Stephen. “Dislocations of Ovidian Time.” La représentation du temps dans la poésie augustéenne. Zur Poetik der Zeit in augusteischer Dichtung. Ed. Jürgen Paul Schwindt. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 203–230. Hofmann, Heinz. “Ovid im Exil? … sumque argumenti conditor ipse mei. Ovids Exildichtung zwischen Biographie und Fiction.” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Altphilologenverbandes Baden-Württemberg 2 (2001): 8–19. Ingleheart, Jennifer. A commentary on Ovid, “Tristia”, book 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Janka, Markus. “Vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit (Ov. Am. 1, 15, 42). Wege der Ovidforschung in der aetas Nasonis seit 1968.” Ovid. Werk – Kultur – Wirkung. Ed. Markus Janka, Ulrich Schmitzer and Helmut Seng. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007. 1–25. Klodt, Claudia. “ad uxorem in eigener Sache. Das Abschlußgedicht der ersten drei Silvenbücher des Statius auf dem Hintergrund von Ovids ‘Autobiographie’ (trist. 4.10) und seinen Briefen an die Gattin.” Antike Autobiographie. Werke – Epochen – Gattungen. Ed. Michael Reichel. Köln/ Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2005. 185–222. Labate, Mario. “Tempo delle origini e tempo della storia in Ovidio.” La représentation du temps dans la poésie augustéenne. Zur Poetik der Zeit in augusteischer Dichtung. Ed. Jürgen Paul Schwindt. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 177–201. Lütkemeyer, Sabine. Ovids Exildichtung im Spannungsfeld von Ekloge und Elegie. Eine poetologi­ sche Deutung der Tristia und Epistulae ex Ponto. Frankfurt a.  M.: Lang, 2005. McGowan, Matthew M. Ovid in Exile. Power and Poetic Redress in the “Tristia” and “Epistulae ex Ponto”. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009. Martin, Anna Julia: Was ist Exil? Ovids Tristia und Epistulae ex Ponto. Hildesheim/Zürich: Olms, 2004. Nagle, Betty Rose. The Poetics of Exile: Program and Polemic in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto of Ovid. Brüssel: Latomus, 1980. Rosati, Gianpiero. “L’esistenza letteraria. Ovidio e l’autocoscienza della poesia.” Materiali e Discussioni 2 (1979): 101–136. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Sonnabend, Holger. “Ovid in Tomis. Grenzwahrnehmungen aus dem Exil.” Migration und Grenze. Ed. Andreas Gestrich and Marita Kraus. Stuttgart. Steiner, 1998. 40–48.

4 Publius Ovidius Naso: Tristium Libri V 

 1341

Stroh, Wilfried. “Tröstende Musen. Zur literarhistorischen Stellung und Bedeutung von Ovids Exil­ gedichten.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Vol. II 31.4. Ed. Wolfgang Haase. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1981. 2638–2684. Vollstedt, Barbara. Ovids “Metamorphoses”, “Tristia” und “Epistulae ex Ponto” in Christoph Ransmayrs Roman “Die letzte Welt”. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998.

5 Aurelius Augustinus: Confessiones (397–401) [Confessions]

Christian Moser

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430 CE), bishop of the North African city of Hippo and Doctor of the Church, was one of the most prominent theologians of Latin Christianity, whose doctrines influenced the development of Christian thought throughout the Middle Ages and into the era of early modern Humanism and Reformation. Born in the Roman African town of Thagaste as the son of a pagan father (Patricius) and a Catholic mother (Monica), he received a classical education in Carthage, before setting out on a successful career as rhetorician, which led him to the power centres of the Western empire, Rome and Milan. His secular career was cut short when he converted to the Catholic faith in 386 CE. After his baptism in Milan in 387 CE, he returned to Africa, where he lived as member of a cenobitic community in his hometown, before being ordained (391 CE), then consecrated bishop (395 CE) in the city of Hippo Regius. As a bishop, Augustine was engaged in a number of major controversies with competing sects and groups within Latin Christianity (Manichaeans, Donatists, Pelagians), which caused him to define his position with regard to key issues of Christian doctrine: original sin, divine grace, and the trinity. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 CE, signalling the decline of the Roman empire, induced him to write his theological magnum opus De civitate Dei [The City of God (412–426 CE)], a cornerstone of Christian political philosophy. Augustine died during the siege of Hippo by the conquering Vandals in 430 CE, his death thus coinciding with the final throes of classical Mediterranean culture and the onset of European medievalism (on Augustine’s biography, see Brown 2000; O’Donnell 2005; for introductions to Augustine’s theology and philosophy, see Gilson 1943; Flasch 1994; Horn 2012). Augustine was a prolific writer. He published well over 100 treatises; in addition, more than 300 of his letters and 500 of his sermons have been preserved (Geerlings 2002). In his Retractationes [Revisions (426/427 CE)], an autobiographical text which takes the form of a critical commentary of all his writings, Augustine remarks that the Confessiones [Confessions], a work of self-analysis written shortly after his consecration, has proven especially popular among his contemporaries (Aurelius Augustinus 1984, II.6). This has remained so until today: the Confessions is the most widely-read of Augustine’s works. Its popularity has contributed to forming the image of Augustine as ‘the first modern man’ (Harnack 1910, 106). However, by abstracting the Confessions from the discursive contexts of its origin and by reading it as ‘plain’ autobiographical narrative, its complexities have been obscured. Therefore it is requisite to (re-)place the text into its original setting within the history of subjectivity – a period of transition between the pagan ‘cultura animi’ and Christian self-hermeneutics.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110279818-116

5 Aurelius Augustinus: Confessions 

 1343

Historical Origins of the Text Based on the evidence of the Revisions, of references to the Confessions made in Augustine’s letters and other works, and of information to be gleaned from Possidius, his first biographer, scholarship has come to the conclusion that Augustine composed the Confessions between 397 and 401 CE in Hippo, during the first period of his episcopacy (Feldmann 1986–1994, 1184). As a novice to the office, he might have felt the necessity to appease certain doubts among African Christians concerning his past – his residence in Italy and his association with the Roman social elite, but especially his intermittent involvement with Manichaeism. The Confessions was a means to demonstrate to the African community his break with this dubious past and the certitude of his Christian faith. This would account for the strong strain of anti-Manichaean polemics displayed in the Confessions. More important is another constituent factor: while composing the Confessions, Augustine was working out his radical theory of original sin and divine grace, as manifested in a number of treatises, most prominently in the epistle Ad Simplicianum de diversis quaestionibus [To Simplician on Diverse Questions (396–398 CE)]. Contrary to Christian Platonism, which interpreted the fall as the descent of pure mind into the contaminating sphere of corporality, Augustine supposed that prelapsarian man had already possessed a body (Brown 1988, 387–427; Moser 2006a, 506). The fall, therefore, directly affected the mind and impaired its faculty of reasoning. Through the fall, the human mind became opaque to itself. In order to reverse this catastrophe, it no longer sufficed to subdue the body by means of ascetism; reason itself had to be repaired, which could only be effected by the intervention of divine grace. The Confessions was written to illustrate this new conception of sin and grace: they feature a sinner’s mind anxiously screening itself in a protracted effort at self-hermeneutics, and the providential workings of divine grace that finally guide it to salutary self-cognition. A third factor went into the making of the Confessions: a former rhetorician and Christian philosopher, Augustine had always shown great interest in the problematics of human language (on Augustine’s philosophy of language, see Markus 1957; Duchrow 1965; Colish 1968; Borsche 1986). His new theory of sin and grace obliged him to revise his views on language. The fall was reconceived as mankind’s fall into language – a fall from the immediacy of intellectual vision into the mediacy of linguistic signs which demand interpretation. Divine grace had to accommodate fallen man; in its workings it had to employ the imperfect means of human communication in order to make itself understood, most notably in Holy Scripture. While writing the Confessions, Augustine was developing new methods of exegesis that tried to do justice to the role ascribed to biblical scripture as a privileged channel of grace and to the impaired judgment of the sinful human reader. In treatises such as De doc­ trina christiana [On Christian Doctrine (parts 1–3: 396/397 CE; part 4: 426/427 CE)] or De catechizandis rudibus [On the Catechising of the Uninstructed (399–400 CE)] he

1344 

 Exemplary Autobiographical/Autofictional Texts

attacked the presumptive claim upheld by the school of charismatic exegesis to be able to gain full illuminative understanding of scripture by means of solitary meditation, recommending love (‘caritas’) as an alternative principle of biblical hermeneutics: true readings of scripture are only to be found by sharing one’s interpretation lovingly with others; a full understanding of scripture can only be attained by making one’s own understanding of the text understandable to one’s brethren (Brunner 1955; Moser 2006a, 387–419). Again, Augustine put this new concept of exegesis to the test in his Confessions: in the many instances of scriptural reading which contribute to the conversion of the protagonist on the one hand, in the exegetical commentary on the first book of Genesis which takes up the majority of the last part of Confessions on the other. Though the Confessions deals with highly complex theological and philosophical issues, the hermeneutic principle of ‘caritas’ prompted Augustine to produce a readable text – to understand himself by making his self-understanding understandable to others. This is one of the reasons for its popularity among his contemporaries and subsequent generations of recipients. The unusually large number of manuscripts of the text which have survived – the oldest one, the Sessorianus, dating from the late fifth or early sixth century – attest to its popularity (Feldmann 1986–1994, 1139–1140). However, while the Confessions was widely read throughout the Middle Ages, it was rarely imitated (Moser 2006b). Saint Patrick’s Confessio (late fifth century) and Guibert de Nogent’s Vita (ca. 1115 CE) mark sporadic exceptions. Significantly, the incentive to respond to Augustine’s practice of literary self-analysis productively and to adapt it as a mode of autobiography became effective only belatedly, not in the context of common Christian piety, but of the intellectual elites: in humanist and modern texts such as Petrarch’s Secretum (1342/1343; on Petrarch’s reception of the Confessions, see Moser 2006a, 589–726), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782/1789; Hartle 1983) or Jacques Derrida’s Circonfession (1991; Schumm 2013).

Content Summary The Confessions can be divided into three parts. In Books I–IX, Augustine tells the story of his life. He begins by discussing the stage of his infancy and ends by narrating the circumstances of his conversion and baptism. While the first part submits Augustine’s self to a retrospective analysis, in the second part, which comprises no more than a single, albeit very long book (Book X), the autobiographer analyzes the present state of his soul at the time of writing the Confessions. The third part (Books XI–XIII) is devoted to the exegesis of the biblical story of creation as related in Genesis 1 and 2. 1–3. In the narrative part of the Confessions, Augustine is very selective regarding the events of his life that he deems worthy of representation. He restricts his narration to

5 Aurelius Augustinus: Confessions 

 1345

reporting incidents and circumstances which have influenced his spiritual development and his relation to God (Clark 1993, 34). The narrator focuses on the story of his inner being. Moreover, the criteria of selection are derived from the autobiographer’s present preoccupation with the doctrines of original sin and grace in the year 397 CE, not from the state of mind attained by conversion in the year 386 CE (Feldmann 1986–1994, 1153–1156; Fredriksen 2012, 91–94). As scholarship has shown with regard to his early writings, the freshly converted Augustine adhered to a variant of Christian Platonism (Brown 2000, 93–124), a position radically contested by the new theology of grace. The Augustine of 397 CE reinvented and rewrote his early life-story in the light of this theology. Accordingly, the autobiographer’s representation of the stages of infancy, childhood and adolescence (Books I and II) emphasizes the corruption of young Augustine and interprets it as a consequence of original sin. From this perspective, even the newborn infant is far from innocent, he is already driven by greed and envy. The propensity for sinning is intensified by the education Augustine receives at school on the one hand, especially by the books he is directed to read as part of the classical curriculum (Vergil and Terence), which inflame his sensual desires; by his father’s worldliness on the other hand, who, when detecting his son’s first erection, rejoices about his budding virility. Adolescent sinfulness literally comes to fruition when young Augustine commits his first outright crime by robbing pears out of a neighbour’s garden: the pear-tree clearly evokes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in paradise; and the autobiographer fittingly interprets the theft of the pears as a paradigm of sin. However, the proclivity to sin, so strongly in evidence in Books I and II, is balanced by providential and salvific counterforces, embodied in the figure of Augustine’s mother Monica. She sees to it that her son is introduced to the basic tenets of Christianity, she also strives to restrain his sensual desires. Nevertheless, she cannot prevent these desires from receiving a further boost when Augustine, at the age of 17, is sent to Carthage in order to study rhetoric. In Carthage, Augustine succumbs to the lure of sexuality (he acquires a concubine and fathers a son), the attraction of spectacle (he develops a passion for the theater), and the ambition of a worldly career (he is so successful in his studies that he attains the position of a teacher of rhetoric). In a sense, Carthage (punningly related to a cauldron  – ‘sartago’  – by the narrator; Augustinus 1981 [1991], III.1.1) signifies the nadir of Augustine’s sinful corruption. But the nadir also marks a turning-point, for in Carthage the student of rhetoric encounters the Hortensius, a protreptic writing by the famous Roman author Marcus Tullius Cicero, in which the pursuit of ‘sapientia,’ philosophical wisdom, is advocated as the goal of life. This book, the narrator avers, sets Augustine on the track of a spiritual quest. It even induces him to read the scriptures, though due to his ill-conceived partiality for high-flown rhetoric he is deterred by the plainness of biblical diction and soon abandons the task. Ber