Autobiography
Autobiography is most commonly defined as “the biography of a person narrated by that
person”, or “the story of a person's life as told by him or herself”. With such a definition
it is possible to trace the origin of the genre to post-Homeric Greece and works by
Hesiod, Empedocles, Plato (Epistle 7) and Isocrates, and then see it being developed in
the Roman world in Ovid's autobiographical poems, Cicero's Brutus and St Augustine's
Confessions (circa 430). An even older claimant, according to Saul K. Padover in
Confessions and Self-Portraits: 4,600 Years of Autobiography (1975) would be a certain
Uni, court official of the Pharaonic fourth dynasty. The English word “autobiography”,
however, is first coined in the late eighteenth century when the genre begins to flourish in
Europe and North America, notably in Rousseau´s Confessions (1782), Benjamin
Franklin's Autiobiography (1784), Casanova's Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de Venise
(1788) and Gibbon's Memoirs (1796). Its flourishing at this time is generally seen as
consistent with the birth of the Romantic fascination with the complex individual soul
and the interaction of nature with social experiences. In the twentieth century, the
possibilities of the genre have been greatly enlarged, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas (1933) being structured as the life story of her friend and personal
secretary Alice B. Toklas, and Sartre's Les mots, written when he was already sixty years
old, relating only the first twelve years of the author's life.
Such generic expansion calls in question whether it is valuable, or even possible, to say
what “autobiography” is, what it is for, and what its methods should be – anything
beyond saying that all “self-life-writing” qualifies. What formal features are shared by
works like St. Augustine's Confessions, John Banyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of
Sinners, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe's Dichtung and Wahrheit, William Wordsworth's
The Prelude, Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Henry Adams's The Education of Henry
Adams, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and Richard Wright's Black Boy - to name but a
few of the most widely discussed works in autobiographical studies?. Autobiographers
may leave out whatever they wish, and include anything from sensory details and
figurative device, or even into a space to wash dirty laundry. Similarly they may choose
where to begin or end, and the subject's name may not necessarily correspond to the
author's (as in Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B Toklas); for some people reveal
their lives only when consciously revealing the life of another. Many scholars of the
genre, however, feel bound to set limits to the application of the term “autobiography”.
Within these limits some would include Pepys' diaries, Montaigne's essays , long poems
such as The Prelude by Wordsworth, the “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, and
autobiographical novels such as Dickens' David Copperfield. Purists, on the other hand,
restrict the term to prose works that propose to give a clear account of the author's life.
The last three decades of the twentieth century saw the genre move from the peripheries
to the center of the literary canon, for reasons which it may be helpful to inspect. This
was a period when criticism was dominated by post-structuralist and postmodernist
theorisation of the text as a purely textual object, a self-referential weave of codes whose
significance could only be explained by itself (not by gesturing towards the presumed
immanence of a real “author” whom the text figured). Such exposure of the mimetic
fallacy and beliefs in a residual or underlying “truth” is evident in the famous essays by
Barthes, “Death of the Author” (1968), and Foucault, “What is an Author?” (1969). On
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the other hand, James Olney (1980) has noted the appeal of autobiography in enabling an
escape from the closed ground of “intertextual play” and the aesthetic dimensions of
fiction towards the historical, sociocultural and anthropological, observing that
autobiography has become the focalizing literature for various politically engaged areas
of study – Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, Queer
Studies, Disability Studies – the genre's closeness to advocacy and apology enabling it to
claim visibility of groups minoritized, oppressed or effaced from the historical record.
But one of the most important explanations for the critical turn toward autobiography as
literature was the shift of attention from 'bios' to 'autos', that is, from the life to the self
which is responsible for prominence of the genre and the generation of questions of a
philosophical, psychological and literary kind. And this is the crux of the matter, Olney
proceeds to argue, for the special appeal of autobiography in recent times: it is a
fascination with the self and its profound and endless mysteries, as much as an anxiety
about the dimness and vulnerability of that entity, about its shadowy existence or nonexistence in the text and in life (Olney 1980: 19, 23).
The leading spokesman for a formal generic definition of autobiography was Philippe
Lejeune. In Le Pacte autobiographique (1975) he presented a formula combining
chronological narration, mimesis and individualism: his famous definition of
autobiography as a “Retrospective prose narrative that a real person makes of his own
existence, when he emphasizes his individual life, especially the history of his
personality” has been learned by heart by generations of American and French students.
Lejeune characterized the pact as an autodiegetic contract between the author, narrator
and central character or protagonist, submittable to proofs of verification. But to that we
need to add the “rules” of Elizabeth Bruss (1976) with which all works considered
“autobiographies” must comply: viz., the autobiographer must be at the origin of the plot
as well as of the structure of the text, and the information and the facts must have been,
be, or have the possibility of being true. To Karl Weintraub (1978), an autobiography is
the retrospective narrative of an individual's life, written by that individual, with the aim
of telling the true story of his public or private experience. Moreover, an “ideal”
autobiography, according to Buckley (1984), is one which takes a retrospective glance at
the life and personality of a person, one in which the facts carry less importance than the
veracity and profundity of the experience. It depicts a voyage of self-discovery which
acquires a sense of perspective and integration. And, finally, for Bruce Mazlish,
autobiography is a literary genre, produced by romanticism, which offers us a portrait,
from the point of view of the present, of the formation of an individual past, achieved
through introspection and the memory, and in which the I appears as an entity in
development (Mazlish, 1970, 28)
Evidently all these theorists posit autobiography as the narration of the life of a person
written by him/herself and rely upon two features of an autobiography which have
recently received searching critique: the first being the presence of the author in the text the idea that a single pre-existing personality can be projected via literary mediation - and
that idea that an autobiography must not in any sense be fictitious. For them,
autobiography is a genre based on the notion of a pre-existing ontological self and
possesses a kind of “authority” which the other genres lack: that which is conferred
by the fact of being based on a verifiable relationship between the text and the extratextual referent. So, Georges Gusdorf, the great purist, summarized his vision of
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autobiography in this sentence which would become the target for the arrows launched by
poststructuralists: “No one can know better than I what I have thought, what I have
wished; I alone have the privilege of discovering myself from the other side of the
mirror” (Gusdorf 1980, 35)
Such a traditional vision of the integral Self and its autobiographical expression has been
the object of multiple revisions over the last years, with the result that the Self is seen as
neither integral, nor private, nor unique. Postmodern concepts take the Self for a
grammatical entity and for a symbolic construct rather than a referential one; that is to
say, the Self is not a unified psychological representation whose “essence” or “identity”
is prior to the language which expresses it; rather its essence and identity are constituted
by the language that produces it. Recent criticism has destabilized the Self the
autobiographer naively relies on , showing it to be no more than a fiction of language.
Language is then the signifier that creates the Self that signifies, and the Self is in turn so
absent that it can only be guessed at, like a ghost, among the lines that comprise the text.
As this postmodern view is opposed by those who believe autobiography to be a
sustained revelation about a life lived wholly outside and before the text which represents
it, so this debate has left us with two opposing views – the Humanist “self-before
language” or the Deconstructionist “language-before-self” schools. But between such
warring formulations, certain conciliatory positions have emerged. John Paul Eakin in
1992, and other theorists of the genre, have approached autobiography in the spirit of the
cultural anthropologist, asking what such texts can teach us about the ways in which
individuals in a particular culture experience their sense of being “I” -and in some cases
that prove the rule, their sense of not being an “I”. They recognize the concept of the self
as the focal structure of autobiography studies, and avoid the models of essentialists who
view the self as “absolute, ineffable, and timeless”; and of structuralists and their
followers who reduce the self to a “reified textual system”. Instead, they call for a
broadly cultural approach to the study of self in autobiography; that is, for a vision of
self-knowledge as always grounded in the signs of one's existence that are received from
others, as well as from the works of culture by which one is interpreted (Eakin 1992, 90).
These critics admit that there are two systems operating within autobiography: a
referential system linking the textual self to “reality” and committed to producing “the
image of the real”; and a literary system in which a self not formerly in existence is
created through language and in which the author is committed to producing “the effect
of the real” or verisimilitude (what Olney, Fleishman and Eakin have called metaphors,
figures, or fictions of the self, respectively). These critics, then, subscribe to the idea that
the autobiographical “I”, however fugitive and unreliable, is indeed the privileged textual
double of a real person, as well as a self-evident textual construct. Even though the
reduction of texts to the never-ending self-referential play of language is revealing and
fascinating, if it implies that there is nothing more to be had from texts than this kind of
play, it is also misleading. This is why these mediating postures have emerged, in an
attempt to embrace the deconstructivist argument while at the same time saving some of
the autobiographical reference. And this is, it seems, what most autobiographers go for. It
is clear that the integrity of the romantic self and the linear narrative structure that was its
most characteristic expression have been supplanted by a view of the self as fragmented,
and the autobiographical fragment as its form. The autobiographical act is now performed
not in some wholly private, fictive realm of the isolate self, but rather in strenuous
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engagement with the pressures that life in culture entails. But still, autobiographers are
sustained by the conviction that, deep down, an authentic, if divided, self resides within
us.
As for the question of truth versus fiction, it is clear today that an autobiography is an
artistic arrangement of facts, an imaginative organization of experience with an aesthetic,
intellectual and moral aim (Shapiro, 1968, 435). Roy Pascal (1960) was the first critic to
speak of “design” and “truth” in autobiography and to point out that there is no dividing
line between the two; for truth may entail imagination and imagination may contain
partial truth. Most readers think it natural that autobiographers should base their work on
the verifiable events of a life, and it is this referential dimension that has governed the
development of a poetics of autobiography for many years. But on writing an
autobiography several problems crop up. In the first place memory is forgetful and
selective, and also creative, and tends to succumb to the artistic instinct. Recognising this,
readers no longer approach an autobiography as an objective biography (as if even this
genre once managed to tell “the truth”): an autobiography is recognised as a genre
compromised between the demands of historiography and of art; it does not disclose to us
an individual as seen from the outside, but an intimate person. It is along these lines that
Paul John Eakin argues in Fictions in Autobiography (1988) that autobiographical truth is
not a fixed and stable content, but a complicated process of self-discovery and selfcreation, and that the Self of all narrative autobiography is necessarily a fictitious
construct: the “I” that the autobiographer talks about is no longer himself, but someone
with the same name, though another age, surrounded by other circumstances, immersed
in other activities and, certainly of younger physical appearance. The autobiographers of
the twentieth century tend to accept the proposition that an essential constituent of the
truth in a life is fiction; they no longer believe that an autobiographer is capable of
offering a faithful reconstruction of a verifiable historical past. On the contrary, it is
understood that the materials of the past are remodelled by memory and imagination in
order to meet the demands of the present state of consciousness. Among the many
profound reflections that grace Doris Lessing's Under My Skin: Volume One of My
Autobiography, to 1949, we find this:
Telling the truth or not telling it, and how much, is a lesser problem than the one of
shifting perspectives, for you see you life differently at different stages, like climbing a
mountain while the landscape changes with every turn in the path. Had I written this
when I was thirty, it would have been a pretty combative document. In my forties, a wail
of despair and guilt: oh myGod, how could I have done this or that? Now I look back at
that child, that girl, that young woman, with a more and more detached curiosity. [. . .]
Besides the landscape itself is a tricky thing. As you start to write at once the question
begins to insist: Why do you remember this and not that? Why do you remember in every
detail a whole week, more, of a long ago year, but then complete dark, a blank? How do
you know that what you remember is more important than what you don't? (p.12.)
It is also quite clear, however, that an autobiography is not fiction and the fact that an
autobiography employs the techniques of fiction does not make it a novel. At all times the
autobiographer means to express a personal truth, and it is this intention that produces
results different from fiction. Certainly, the novel also makes use of the techniques of
autobiography, such as first person narration, the use of the protagonist-narrator, facts
taken from history, but it is for purely fictional purposes that the novelist employs the
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techniques of autobiography. Whereas all the various motives which lead an author to
write an autobiographical text speak for the implicit or explicit intention to answer a
reader who turns to the autobiography in search of the truth, or at least as much of it as
the author may wish to impart. Finally we may add that the simple truth that the
autobiography is not fiction cannot be shaken by the fact that some autobiographies
appear under the guise of fiction, nor by the fact that authors may design their works to
be classifiable under both genres. These experimental texts which go counter to the rigid
norms of the genre (for example The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, or
Borderlands [La Frontera] by Gloria Anzaldua come to mind) show how it is possible to
write autobiography using imagination as well as experience; such autobiographical
fictions are understood to be means for transmitting essential, private truths by bringing
the ordering process of art to the lived and re-imagined experiences of the author.
Many of these questions about the truth-status of autobiography take on new importance
in recent readings of the genre from scholars who have particular concern with the effects
of gender and ethnicity. In such works revisionism of the concept of selfhood continues,
but this time with the view of the self as a cultural construct instead of a private
subjectivity. Smith and Watson (1999) suggest that women's autobiography is now a
privileged site for thinking about issues of writing at the intersection of feminist,
postcolonial, and postmodern critical theories. In a synoptic view we can say that the first
wave of feminism essentialized woman in creating an analogy between their lives and
their texts: the emphasis on the egalitarian sisterhood of all women as a collectivity
presumed a an unproblematic “we” of women that excluded differences of class and race,
and notably elided differences affecting women of color. The second wave of feminism,
then, would write autobiographically to announce these differences in an irreducible
plurality of voices. During the 1980s and the 1990s, other feminist theorists emerged
who, escaping the constrictions of generic terms, were more inclined to theorize specific
national identities, hybridity, and distinct ethnic histories (Afroamerican, AsianAmerican, Native, Latina, Canadian...). On the other hand, the intellectual turn toward
postcolonial studies in the 1980s, provoked serious theoretical engagement with women's
status as multiply-colonized in many parts of the world. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson,
for instance, in De/Colonizing the Subject (1992) gathered essays that mapped emergent
literatures and reframed women's issues and subjectivities at diasporic sites, relating
subjectivity to the material and economic conditions of women's lives, and recasting the
terms of theories rooted in Anglo-American autobiography. The result is that, today, the
idea of “Woman” becomes only one of a number of ways women autobiographers may
construct identity. Feminist theorists and autobiographers are today exploring alternative
notions of subjectivity which are not based on the humanist idea of a unique and
universal self, but in very complex collective identities which feature autobiographical
subjects as existing at particular and changing intersections of race, nationality, religion,
education, profession, class, language, gender, sexuality, a specific historical moment,
and a host of material conditions. The new geography of identity insists that we think
about women writers in relation to a fluid matrix instead of an outworn binary opposition
of male/female or masculine/feminine (Smith and Watson 1999, 40).
In thinking about autobiography, ethnic writers have challenged and relinquished what
disables them in both humanist and poststructuralist poetics, and have taken what enables
them. Thus, they have appropriated the postsmodern project of decentering the universal
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subject in order to make space for the experience of racial minorities, the working
classes, colonial and postcolonial peoples, women, homosexuals. At the same time they
have refused to relinquish the possibility of a unified self: why give up a visibility and a
position from which to act, a visibility and a position only just beginning to become
available to them?. The much trumpeted “death of the self” and “death of the author” are
already a sign of the crisis of the Western world. Euro-American authors, so the argument
goes, may be digging their own graves, but many authors who have never had the
possibility of inscribing their names or those of their race and culture, are anxious to
occupy the abandoned podium. The result is the emergence of a plethora of different
poetics of the genre which seek to describe how particular group identities function in the
discursive creation of the self in autobiographies by Afro-Americans, ethnic minorities,
aboriginals, homosexuals, and other long silenced or marginalised groups.
Contemporary autobiographers often recognize that the dichotomy of self versus society
is too simple, and, as commentators have raised the issues of multiculturalism and
identity politics, minority writers have embraced the perplexing question of identity how group identities contribute to the self an essential quality, a crucial part of selfdefinition. So, group-based identity becomes a key term in recent autobiography, in
particular, ethnic identity. For those who wish to stress ethnic identity, a shared group
history becomes a crucial topic in their autobiographies and they feel responsible for
telling group history as part of their personal histories. In general, ethnic autobiography
combines personal history with cultural criticism and thus works as a declaration of
personal liberation from the dominant culture; a celebration of the importance of group
identity in the shaping of their own identity, and at the same time, as a demand for
respect and acceptance of their difference. Testimony-autobiographies have played an
important role in public discourse, and have often become the platform from which
personal experience can be articulated in the public sphere, to support or oppose political
regimes and cultural authorities, to call attention to the need of marginalized groups; or to
define emerging social and political identities. Such narratives seem to offer a
particularly effective potential for public action, in as much as they appeal to the
authenticity of the testimony being made public.
Finally, disease is already the protagonist in this kind of literature in numerous memoirs
or testimonies about AIDS, multiple sclerosis, paralysis, cancer, etc (the so-called
Disability Studies). After two decades of dissecting the subject of autobiography from the
angle of post-stucturalist dogmas, it is no wonder that the life of the body claims its right
to have a say. The “abject” lives that would previously have been hushed up and kept
hidden; the ruined identity that reaffirms its human dignity; the stories about extreme
physical situations—those are the ones that sell in the new century, but they are also texts
that have brought new paradigms to life-writing.
It is clear from the above that autobiography has stopped being an exclusive concern of
literary studies. And for the very simple reason that the self and its story in the lives we
live and write are deeply embedded in culture. So, the autobiographical act is performed
not in some wholly private, fictive realm of the isolate self, but rather in strenuous
engagement with the pressures that life in culture entails (Eakin 1992: 71). If
autobiography, as Spengemann and Lundquist already proclaimed in the 1960s, operates
as a “focusing glass” which brings together the personality of the writer and the shared
values of his culture, it is not surprising that it has held a fatal attraction not only on
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literary critics and theorists of the self and of genre, but on sociologists, anthropologists,
psychiatrists, philosophers, and even theologians.
The Enlightenment idea of the self - an autonomous individual, testing rules imposed
from without against a personal sensibility nourished from within - is today vigorously
contested. By analysing early-modern 'life writing' in all its variety, from private diaries
and correspondences to public confessions and philosophical portraits, this volume shows
that the relation between self and community is more complex and more intimate than
supposed. Spanning the period from the end of the Renaissance to the eve of
Romanticism in Western Europe, a period in which the explosion of print culture
afforded unprecedented opportunities for the circulation of life stories from all classes,
this book examines the public assertion of self by men and women in England, France
and Germany from the Renaissance to Romanticism.
Beauvoir’s notions of selfhood in her philosophical essays, and then discusses her four
autobiographical and two biographical volumes, along with some of her unpublished
diaries, in an attempt to explore notions of selectivity, and the politics of truth-production
and reception. The study concludes that Beauvoir’s vast auto/biographical project,
situated in specific personal and historical contexts, can be read as shaped by a
testimonial obligation rooted in a productive consciousness of the Other.
The seventeenth century saw a dramatic increase in self-writing-from the private jotting
down of personal thoughts in an irregular and spontaneous way, to the carefully
considered composition of extended autobiographical narrative and deliberate selffashioning for public consumption. Recent anthologies of women's writing, drawing to
some extent on this rich but relatively little-known archive, have demonstrated the
importance of studying such material to gain insight into female lives in that era. Personal
Disclosures is innovative in that it stimulates and facilitates comparative analysis of
female and male representations of the self, and of gendered constructions of identity and
experience, by presenting a broad range of extracts from both women's and men's
autobiographical writings. The majority of the extracts have been freshly edited from
original seventeenth-century manuscripts and books. Exploiting all kinds of text-diaries,
journals, logs, testimonies, memoirs, letters, autobiographies-the anthology also
encourages consideration of topics central to current scholarly interest: religious
experience, the body, communities, the family, encounters with new lands and peoples,
and the conceptualization and writing of the self.
for Derrida autobiography is not so much subjective self-revelation as relation to the
other, not so much a general condition of thought as a general condition of writing - what
Derrida calls the ‘autobiography of the writing’ - which mocks any self-centred finitude
of living and dying. In this context, and using literary-critical, philosophical, and
psychoanalytical sources, Smith thinks through Derrida’s texts in a new, but distinctly
Derridean, way, and finds new perspectives to analyse the work of classical writers
including Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, and de Man
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