THE ROUTLEDGE

AUTO IBIOGRAPHY
STUDIES READER

Edited by Rida Anne Chansky

and Emily Hipchen

R Routledge
Taylor &. Francis Croup

L O N D O N A N D NEW YORK
 First published 2016
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The Roudedge auto | biography studies reader / edited by
Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen.
pages cm. — (Roudedge literature readers)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Biography as a literary form. 2. Autobiography. 3. Biography.
I. Chansky, Ricia Anne, editor. II. Hipchen, Emily, 1964- editor.
CT21.R68 2015
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 For
Eric D . Lamore
and
Charles Caldwell B ow ie, III
CONTENTS

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xiii
xvi
xvii
XX

vii
 Contents

6 D esign and lie in m o d em American autobiography 49

Timothy Dow Adams

7 Is there a canon o f autobiography? 59

Eugene Stelzig

8 R eflections o f a reluctant anthologist 66

Arnold Krupat

9 F orgotten voices o f Afro-American autobiography,

1865-1930 72
William L. Andrews

10 B etw een lines: constructing the political self 77

Magdalena M aiz Pena and Luis H . Pena

T h e im pact o f critical theory on the study o f autobiography:

marginality, gender, and autobiographical practice 82
Sidonie Smith

12 W hose life is it anyway? O u t o f the bathtub and into the

narrative 89
Marlene Kadar

13 A utopathography: w om en, illness, and life-writing 95

G. Thomas Couser

14 B iography and autobiography: interm ixing the genres 101

Lois W . Banner

15 O rderin g the family: genealogy as autobiographical pedigree 108

Julia Watson

PARTII
Transformations

Introduction 117
Ricia A nne Chansky

16 K athie Lee Gifford and the comm odification o f autobiography 123

Martin Danahay

viii
 Contents

17 Transforming the tale: the auto/body/ographies o f N ancy Mairs 130

Susannah B. M intz

18 M em orializing m em ory: M arlon Riggs, and life w riting in

Tongues Untied and Black Is Black A in ’t 139
Harvey Young

19 Telling tales: B randon Teena, Billy T ipton, and transgender

biography 145
Jack/Judith Halberstam

20 Limit-cases: trauma, self-representation, and the

jurisdictions o f identity 154
Leigh Gilmore

21 A uthoring ethnicized subjects: R igoberta M enchu and

the perform ative production o f the subaltern self 159
Arturo Arias

22 R ecasting indigenous lives along the lines o f w estern desire:

editing, autobiography, and the colonizing project 168
Alison Ravenscroft

23 Constructing female subjects in the archive: a reading o f

three versions o f one w om an’s subjectivity 175
Helen M. Buss

24 O u t o f place: extraterritorial existence and autobiography 183

Alfred Homung

25 The incom plete return 188

Isabelle de Courtivron

26 Letters as/not a genre 193

Margaretta Jolly and L iz Stanley

27 Are memoirs autobiography? A consideration o f genre

and public identity 202
Julie Rak
 contents

28 Autographies: the seeing “ I” o f the comics 209

Gillian Whitlock

29 W hat are we reading w h en w e read autobiography? 214

Paul John Eakin

30 A utobiography and the limits o f moral criticism 222

Charles Altieri

PART III
Futures

Introductio n 229
Rida Anne Chansky

31 Family matters 234

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

32 Living autoethnography: connecting life and research

Faith Wambura Ngunjiri, Kathy-Ann C. Hernandez, and Heewon Chang 240

33 Cultural ecology, literature, and life w riting 247

Hubert Z a p f

34 His m aster’s voice: animalographies, life w riting, and

the posthum an 255
Cynthia H u ff and Joel Harfner

35 Engendering an alternative approach to otherness in

African w om en’s autobiography 263
Folasade Hunsu

36 Subjects in the margins 271

Leonor Arfuch

37 M em oirs o f return: Saidiya H artm an, Eva Hoffman, and

D aniel M endelsohn in conversation 280
Nancy K. Miller

38 T he generation o f postm em ory 286

Marianne Hirsch

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 Contents

39 Comics form and narrating lives 295

Hillary Chute

40 Digital biography: capturing lives online 300

Paul Longley Arthur

41 Celebrity bio blogs: hagiography, pathography, and

Perez H ilton 308
Elizabeth Podnieks

42 Cyberrace 316
Lisa Nakamura

43 Faith, doubt, and textual identity 323

Susanna Egan

44 M aking the case for self-narration against autofiction 330

Amaud Schmitt

45 Genetic studies o f life w riting 336

Philippe Lejeune

Index 340

xi
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Rida Anne Chansky

W hile it is always difficult to pinpoint exactly the beginning o f a field o f study, we view James
O lney’s 1985 “International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies” as
the m om ent when contemporary auto/biography studies emerged as a forma] discipline within
the academy. W hile there were certainly other scholars in other places in the world working
w ith and producing exceptional scholarship on auto/biographies prior to this undertaking, this
conference brought together several devoted scholars whose efforts led to the formation o f an
international research community dedicated to the examination of life narratives. O ne immedi­
ate outcom e o f this symposium was the inception o f a newsletter that was circulated to keep
attendees and other interested parties informed o f projects in the field. This modest publication
m atured into the scholarly journal we now edit, a/b: A uto /Biography Studies. W e have created
this reader to mark the thirtieth anniversary o f the symposium and our journal. This volume
is designed to provide a concise theoretical overview o f major themes that have shaped critical
discourse on life narratives over the last three decades.
T he collection grows from the archive o f a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and is enhanced by
selected essays from other publications, including Biography: A n Interdisciplinary Quarterly and Life
Writing. T he book features three sections that reflect the main waves o f theoretical scholarship
w ithin the field: Foundations, Transformations, and Futures. W ithin this contextual framework,
w e have selected essays that exemplify the progression o f theoretical approaches to the study o f
narrated lives. W e have also made a concerted effort to include essays that demonstrate diverse
methodologies and those that have the potential to prom ote interdisciplinary inquiry.
T he field o f auto/biography studies developed within the space that wom en’s studies, and then
area studies (such as African American studies, Latino/a studies, and Asian studies), carved out in the
academy for analyzing identity construction.1During this period, scholars drew from a humanities-
based tradition o f narrative analysis to explore the wealth o f published auto/biographies. At first,
this investigation strove both to establish a canon o f auto/biographical narratives and to explore
issues of canonicity and genre within this burgeoning area o f study. The Foundations section o f
this collection focuses on these central topics while considering the implications o f canonicity for
marginalized communities.This segment, furthermore, reflects a movement by scholars to reclaim
and include these neglected narratives in anthologies and other scholarly works.
As the study o f narrated lives gained stability and m om entum w ithin the academy,
scholars began to expand their definitions o f life narrative to include both new genres and
 General introduction

underrepresented voices. Reflecting the field’s transformation from the accustomed literary
model o f analyzing only traditional print genres, scholars began to engage w ith visual, oral,
digital, musical, and perform ed narratives, among others. T hey also deliberately w idened the
definition o f “text” to reflect a greater understanding o f multimodality. Intertwined w ith
this recognition o f the diverse ways in which we construct, share, and disseminate a u to /
biographical narratives is an effort to acknowledge a greater diversity of lived experiences.
T he Transformations section o f this reader captures the growing awareness o f identity c o n ­
structions read through the critical lenses o f sexuality, gender, race, and class as well as the
application o f theoretical elements drawn from postcolonial, trauma, and disability studies.
The Futures segment o f this text emerges from our current fascination w ith life stories. It
introduces recent themes prevalent in auto/biography studies that hold the potential to drive
disciplinary inquiry for years to come. In our so-called “Age o f M em oir,” it is easy to sp o t
some o f the ways in w hich individuals—including those w ho are not necessarily connected
to academia— readily engage w ith auto/biographical narratives. In the digital realm, Facebook
users continually update their pages as we watch the live newsfeed unroll across our screens;
individuals post the details o f their lives and we follow them w ith our Tw itter and Instagram
accounts; we blog and subscribe to blogs, just as we upload Y ouTube videos and download o t h ­
ers, thereby continually positioning ourselves as witnesses to narrated lives. In more traditional
formats, the reading public obsessively engages with memoirs, biographies, graphic narratives,
autofictions, and books that are “based on a true story,” while they also watch reality television
programs, biopics, and documentaries. And there is still new ground to cover. Posthumanism,
DNA testing, postmemory, secondary witnessing, digital lives, human geography, relationality,
and intersubjectrvity, to name a few, will make enduring impressions on the ways in w hich w e
continue to read and understand narrated lives.
W hile this anthology includes several essays historically important to the field, it does n o t
attempt to offer a historical chronology o f scholarship; rather, its purpose is both to serve as a
resource for students, scholars, and practitioners and to point towards some o f the main ideas
that have driven (and continue to drive) scholarly discourse in the field. The book’s organiza­
tion is intended to situate movements o f thought and ideas within appropriate contexts a n d
conversations.
It is important to note that T im othy D ow Adams originally created the term auto/biography,
with the slash, for the name o f our journal as well as a way to refer to scholarship that encom ­
passes both autobiographies and biographies. He, and other founding members o f a/b: A u to /
Biography Studies, wished to connote interest in how lives are narrated and identities constructed
without privileging self-life writing over life writing. W hile we maintain the use o f the term
auto/biography in our references to texts that explore narrated lives, scholars in the field incorpo­
rate additional terminology that appears in this book. For instance, the term life writing has come
into use to designate the many genres o f life stories that emerge from diverse communities, such
as memoirs, letters, cookbooks, diaries, blogs, Facebook posts, song lyrics, documentaries, and
reality television. W hile life writing serves as a very useful umbrella term to conceptualize this
vast and vibrant field, we also utilize the less firequendy employed term life narrative as reflective
of the multiple modes through which individuals commit auto/biographical acts. Throughout
this collection, however, readers will find terms that refer to life stories as autobiographies, auto/
biographies, life umting, and life narratives along with the more specific genres such as memoir and
biography.
As the year 2015 marks the thirtieth anniversary o f a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and the con­
ference that launched the journal, it is timely to gather together these important essays into a
single volume that will act as a guide to this vigorous field. The publication o f The Routledge

xxi
 u c r tc iu i i m r u a u c n o n

A uto /Biography Studies Reader stands as our contribution to the continuing study o f auto/bio­
graphical narratives.

Note
1 As James O lney explains, “A utobiography has becom e the focalizing literature for various ‘studies” ,
(p. 8). H is list includes A m erican Studies, African A m erican Studies, W om en’s Studies, and African Studies
as examples.

Work cited
Olney, James. “A utobiography and the C ultural M om ent: A Them atic, Historical, and Bibliographical
Intro d u ctio n .” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
U niversity Press, 1980. 3 -2 7 . Print.
 PARTI

FOUNDATIONS
Introduction

Rida Anne Chansky

The foundations o f auto/biography studies as a field are rooted in attempts to situate self-life
writing as an independent literary form deemed worthy o f inclusion in the academy, a task
that included explorations o f genre boundaries and canonicity. Positioning autobiographies
within literary studies was a task fraught with impediments since narrated lives do not h ave
set criteria of genre markers. Georg Misch explains that the boundaries o f autobiography “a re
more fluid and less definable in relation to form than those o f lyric or epic poetry or o f drama,
which, in spite o f variations [. . .] have preserved unity of form throughout their developm ent”
(p. 16). These early efforts to locate autobiographies within literary studies worked to legitim ize
engagement with narrated lives and the act o f narrating one’s life story. In some part, these
labors have to be read as a reaction to criticisms o f essentialism in w om en’s studies. W hen th e
experiential “I” was used in early feminist rhetorics, there was not an established contextual
framework through which to read, engage with, and understand this written “I.” Dismissals
from some academics who did not have a foundation that w ould allow them to read the self i n
the text led to the development o f strategies to study the narrated “I.”
This section begins with James O lney’s essay, “Autobiography and the cultural m om ent:
a thematic, historical, and bibliographical introduction.” Here the author articulates why th e
1980s were the right time for the inception o f the field o f auto/biography studies. H e proposes
that the “shift o f attention from bios to autos— from the life to the self—was [. . .] largely respon­
sible for opening things up and turning them in a philosophical, psychological, and literary
direction” (p. 11). H e adds:

It was this turning to the autos— the “I” that coming awake to its ow n being shapes and
determines the nature o f the autobiography and in so doing half discovers, half creates
itself—that opened up the subject o f autobiography specifically for literary discussion,
for behind every w ork o f literature there is an “I” informing the w hole and making its
presence felt at every critical point, and w ithout this “I,” stated or implied, the work
would collapse into mere insignificance.
(p. 1 2 )

Furthermore, this essay describes the historic development of scholarship on life narratives, thereby
placing readers within the conversations and publications that led to the inception of this field.

1
 \^uun$r~.y

The Foundations section continues with two historic essays that contributed to Olney’s
thoughts on the field: Georg Misch’s “Conception and origin o f autobiography” and Georges
Gusdorfs “Conditions and limits o f autobiography.” M isch discusses the genre classification dif­
ficulties o f autobiographical narratives, claiming “that autobiography acquires its own peculiar
power, through w hich it can attain the truthfulness o f poetry w ithout losing its hold on material
facts” (p. 20). Suggesting that it is the construction o f self that contains the repeating structure
markers rather than the genre itself, Misch states “the characteristic self-revelations [of autobi­
ographies] provide us w ith [. . .] a demonstrable image o f the structure o f individuality ” (p. 20).
Gusdorf s w ork contributes another argument for the legitimacy of autobiography as a literary
genre, but he surpasses this initial debate by offering the point that the instability o f memory
and vulnerability o f truth-telling shape life narratives. H e clarifies: “T he anecdote is symbolic:
in autobiography the truth o f facts is subordinate to the truth o f man, for it is first of all the man
who is in question” (p. 27).
Paul de M an extends this discussion on forms o f autobiographical undertakings in his essay,
“Autobiography as de-facement,” in which he touches upon fictionalization in life narratives as
another generic discrepancy that leads to confusion in classification. H e states that “the distinc­
tion betw een fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but that it is undecidable”
(p. 32). Questions o f the unstable line between fact and fiction, truth and He, permeate the essays
in this reader. T he next essay in this section, “The autobiographical pact” by Philippe Lejeune,
also considers truth and trust and is perhaps one o f the most indispensable theories in the study
o f autobiographical narratives. In his essay, Lejeune explains: “ In order for there to be auto­
biography [. . .] the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical” (p. 35). Lejeune
advocates that in an autobiographical narrative there is underlying trust between the writer and
the reader indicating that “author = narrator, and author = character” (p. 35).
In his essay, “Design and He in m odem American autobiography,” T im othy D ow Adams
offers another approach to genre debates in auto/biography studies, in which he maintains that
“ creating an airtight definition o f autobiography is virtually impossible” (p. 49) and that ques­
tions o f “design, truth, and autobiography collectively nam e” the “autobiographical paradox”
(p. 50). Insisting that “paradoxes are essential to autobiography and that any attempt to resolve
them completely w ould destroy the compelling charm o f the form ” (p. 50), Adams compH-
cates this enigma by introducing the concept o f lying as “synonymous” w ith autobiographical
constructions. Despite “ [a] promise to tell the truth [being] one o f autobiography’s earhest
premises” (p. 53), this essay proposes that time has the power to undermine truth and that
“autobiography m ight be best thought o f as a thing made out o f a thing done” (p. 54).
As scholars m oved to incorporate autobiography studies into departments o f Hterature,
inquiry into what texts would be included in a canon o f autobiographies grew alongside these
interrogations o f genre. Eugene Stelzig, in his contribution, “Is there a canon o f autobiogra­
phy?,” submits that issues o f genre and canonicity have developed simultaneously in response
to critics w ho have argued that with “no genre o f autobiography” there can be “no canon”
(p. 62). W hile he concedes that any canon of autobiography is “fluid, ill defined, unstable, and
lacking m uch consensus” (p. 62), Stelzig concludes that being w ithout a canon is like being in
“the w orld’s largest city w ithout a map” (p. 59). Anticipating the “M em oir Boom ,” he com­
ments upon the popularity o f autobiographies among the “general reading public” (p. 62),
reflecting upon w hat role mass-market texts will play in the evolution o f such a canon.
In a particularly self-reflexive essay that borders on autoethnography, Arnold Krupat
scrutinizes the role that anthologists play in canon building and canon breaking. In his essay
“Reflections o f a reluctant anthologist,” his articulation of structuring the book Native American
Autobiography: A n Anthology offers insight into both edited lives and how life stories become

2
 Foundations: introduction

canonized. W ith his admitted interest in undermining tropes, exploding binaries, and stretch ­
ing genres to construct an interdisciplinary text, this essay focuses on the ethics of p ro d u c ­
tion. Krupat acknowledges that he, as the reluctant anthologist, advises not just on “w h a t to
read but w hat to read for” (p. 67). Likewise, William L. Andrews considers the c an o n o f
African American autobiography and the subtexts o f inclusion in his “Forgotten voices o f A fro -
American autobiography, 1865-1930.” Just as Krupat struggles to situate himself and his specific
subject position as the editor of an anthology o f Native American life narratives, Andrews begins
to question how readers can envision other selves in an ethical manner. By example, he c o n ­
tends that readers rely upon “an almost monolithic metaphor we have for black self-writing, th a t
o f liberation from physical, psychological, and intellectual bondage” (p. 72), at the expense of
certain post-bellum narratives that “can teach us [. . .] just as m uch about the traditions o f black
autobiography and the relationship to black culture as we have already learned from reading
pre-Civil W ar slave narratives” (p. 75).
Andrews mentions a push to recover African American literatures in the 1960s and 1970s;
this canon building mirrors the work that Magdelena Maíz Peña and Luis H. Peña are doin g
in their essay “Between lines: constructing the political self,” which begins by noting that, at
the time o f publication, there was not a bibliographic reference o f Spanish-language na rra ­
tives penned by wom en. Maíz Peña and Peña propose that Mexican w om en’s autobiographical
narratives are singular for their “highly complex working out o f the relationship between th e
personal and the political selves” (p. 77). The authors intimate that the reclaimed texts discussed
in this essay address issues o f visibility and silencing, have heightened aspects o f relationality a n d
intersubjectivity, and use language “in the interpolation o f themselves as subjects and objects
in close relation to an inner and outer reality” (p. 78). As w ith the other essays included in this
segment, Maíz Peña and Peña strive to build theoretical frameworks through which to read
certain narrated lives.
Perhaps the essay in this section that works most diligendy for this theorizing o f the self is
Sidonie Sm ith’s contribution, “The impact o f critical theory on the study o f autobiography:
marginality, gender, and autobiographical practice.” N o t only can readers chart a movement t o
surpass the legitimacy debate in this work, but the essay also advocates several ideas regarding
wom en’s and feminized narratives that have clearly shaped life writing scholarship for the past
three decades. Like Maíz Peña and Peña, she criticizes the marginalization o f w om en’s texts,
arguing that this ostracism is “condemning them at best to a secondary status in the canon a n d
at worst to erasure from literary history” (p. 83). U nder conventional readership, which is trained
to read through a masculinist lens, Smith argues that “woman has no ‘autobiographical’ self o r
narrative o f interest to her public [. . .] if woman inscribes the conventional story o f female
development she writes a story her public will not read as culturally significant” (p. 83).T h e
author contends that “for both the woman w riter and the autobiography critic [. . .] traditional
autobiography, that ‘master narrative,’ remains the site o f patriarchal textual politics” (p. 87).
Therefore, according to Smith, “both woman autobiographer and critic must write and read
wom en’s autobiography as a locus o f the interrogation o f the politics o f master narratives” (p. 87).
Marlene Kadar extends this thinking in her essay, “W hose life is it anyway? O ut o f the bath­
tub and into the narrative,” in which she advocates the naming o f a new genre, life writing,
that moves “beyond and yet includes the old w ord [autobiography], the old gender, and the old
style” (p. 90). Kadar’s list at the close o f her essay allows us to consider the ways that this explo­
ration o f terminology and genre permit us to read beyond a master narrative and w ork towards
engaging w ith the narrative of an O ther on her or his own terms. She concludes: “Although
life writing is not exclusively the property o f wom en writers, it is always accessible to them, and
then, to all readers, and their jouissance" (p. 93).

3
 lítela Anne unansky

In his essay “Autopathography: wom en, illness, and life-writing,” G. Thomas Couser
explores another avenue opened to theoretical exploration through w om en’s studies and femi­
nist theory: the study o f the body, illness, and disability. Such “autobiographical narratives of
illness or disability” (p. 95), Couser holds, may be read as “a sign o f our cultural health— an
acknowledgement and an exploration o f our condition as embodied selves” (p. 95). Situating
disability in opposition to a masculinist construction of the able or well body, Couser suggests
that “w om en may be well-equipped [. . .] to write the life of the body as well as the life of the
m ind” (p. 99).
Another self-reflexive w ork that also functions as an autoethnography, one that intertwines
personal and political ideologies w ith scholarship, is historian Lois W. Banner’s “Biography and
autobiography: interm ixing the genres.” This project builds upon the work o f Smith and other
scholars by exploring the cyclical acceptance and rejection of feminist texts. W riting during
the backlash against second-wave feminism, Banner carefully delineates her methodological
approach to studying her life narrative as a means o f exploring the complex relationship between
wom en and feminism, endeavoring to research her own life as both an autobiographer and a
biographer. In her project she discloses that “critics are coming to agree that no biographer can
keep his or her own autobiography distinct from the biography being w ritten” (p. 103).W orking
from this premise, Banner questions what can happen when one intentionally “minglefs] the
genres o f autobiography and biography,” positing that the outcome m ight be “enriched” as she
“research[es] the social and historical contexts that surrounded Pier]” (p. 104).
This section o f The Reader closes w ith Julia W atson’s essay “Ordering the family: geneal­
ogy as autobiographical pedigree.” This w ork anticipates our contemporary interest in artifacts,
documents, archives, and the urge to use genealogy to locate the self in family histories. Watson
holds that genealogy as “family history claims the disinterested objectivity o f science. It mistrusts
‘family secrets’ as a subjective record that contaminates the preservation and transmission o f
accurate family history” (p. 109). She interrogates further whether “autobiography and geneal-
ogy [. . .] [a]re mutually informing, sustainable activities, or unrelated, incompatible impulses”
(pp. 000), considering the benefits o f “incorporate[ing] several modes o f rendering lived expe­
riences” in constructing life stories (p. 114). As she explains, “autobiography and genealogy
address personal history from different locations and for different ends” (p. 114), yet she pro­
poses that “ [g]enealogy as a liberatory m ethod o f relationality w ithout pedigree may become
[. . .] a means o f getting a new kind o f life” (p. 115). This essay also begins to open the door for
interdisciplinary inquiries that incorporate differing methodologies, rhetorical approaches, and
disciplinary practices in the w ork o f analyzing multiple modes o f identity construction. As seen
in essays comprising the later sections o f this Reader, scholarship in auto/biography studies has
continued to stretch beyond disciplinary boundaries in discussions o f narrated lives.
 1
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND
THE CULTURAL MOMENT
A thematic, historical, and
bibliographical introduction

James Olney

[. ..}
The first autobiography was w ritten by a gentleman named W . P. Scargill; it was published
iq 1834 and was called The Autobiography o f a Dissenting Minister. O r perhaps the first a u to b i­
ography was written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1760s (but he called it his Confessions);
or by Michel de Montaigne in the latter half o f the sixteenth century (but he called it Essays); o r
by St. Augustine at the turn o f the fourth-fifth century A .D . (but he called it his Confessions); or b y
Plato in the fourth century B.C. (but he wrote it as a letter, w hich we know as the seventh
episde); o r . . . and so on. Priority depends on w hether w e insist upon the word: if we refuse
to call a book an autobiography unless its author called it that, Scargffl’s latter-day entry bears
away the honor, for the word was fabricated toward the end of the eighteenth century at w h ic h
time three Greek elements meaning “self-life-writing” were combined to describe a literature
llready existing under other names (“memoirs” and “ confessions,” for example). O r if w e are
not hypemominalists [. . .] then priority depends on the rigor and twist o f definition we give
to “autobiography” and to all three parts o f the word: “auto-” “bio-” "graphy. ” W hat do w e
mean by the self, or himself (autos)? W hat do we mean by life (bios)? W hat significance do w e
impute to the act o f writing (graphe)—what is the significance and the effect o f transforming
life, or a life, into a text? Those are very large, very difficult questions, and prudence m ight w ell
urge that we give the R ev. Mr. Scargill the palm and call it a day, for if we go back beyond h im
and beyond the authority o f the w ord on the tide page— saying this is an autobiography— w e
ihall find matters not only to be m uch more complicated than we had expected but agitated
and, controversial as well. The presence o f controversy is evident in the fact that every one o f
the writers m entioned (as well as others) has had his champion(s) as the first— or at least the
bist true— autobiographer. This is one o f the paradoxes o f the subject: everyone knows w hat
autobiography is, but no two observers, no matter how assured they may be, are in agreement.
In any case, wherever and on whatever grounds w e may wish to assign priority and to whatever
books we may be willing to grant the tide the practice o f autobiography has been with us for a
long time, and it is w ith us in generous supply today.
The same is not true, however, of a theoretical and critical literature about autobiography.
That literature began, in effect, in 1956, which is not even yesterday but only about an hour ago
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
PACT
Philippe Lejeune

Is it possible to define autobiography?

[ .. .]
I had devised my definition not by placing myself sub specie aetemitatis, and examining die “things-
in-themselves” that would be the texts, but by putting myself in the place o f the reader o f today who
attempts to distinguish some sort o f order within a mass o f published texts, whose common subject is
that they recount someone’s life. [. . .] [T]his definition does not daim to cover more than a period
of two centuries (since 1770) and deals only with European literature; this does not mean that the
existence o f a personal literature before 1770 or outside Europe must be denied, but simply that our
way of thinking about autobiography today becomes anachronistic or not very pertinent outside this
area. Textually, I begin from the position o f the reader [...]. It is thus by the series of oppositions
between the different texts, which are available for reading, that I have tried to define autobiography.
In its modified form, the definition o f autobiography w ould be:

Definition: Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence,
where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story o f his personality.

The definition brings into play elements belonging to four different categories:

1. Form o f language
a. narrative
b. in prose
2. Subject treated: individual life, story o f a personality
3. Situation o f the author, the author (whose name refers to a real person) and the narrator are
identical
4. Position o f the narrator
a. the narrator and the principal character are identical
b. retrospective point o f view of the narrative

Any w ork that fulfills all the conditions indicated in each o f the categories is an autobiography.
Genres closely related to autobiography do not m eet all these requirements. Those requirements
that are not m et are listed here according to genres:

34
 The autobiographical pact

- memoirs: (2)
- biography: (4a)
- personal novel: (3)
- autobiographical poem: (lb)
-journal/diary: (4b)
- self-portrait or essay: (la and 4b).

It is obvious that the different categories are not all equally restrictive: certain conditions c a n
be m et for the most part w ithout being satisfied completely. The text must be mainly a n a r ­
rative, b u t we know ho w important discourse is in autobiographical narration. T he perspec­
tive is mainly retrospective; this does not exclude some sections from taking the form o f th e
self-portrait, a journal o f the work or o f the contem porary present o f the composition, a n d
some very complex tem poral structures The subject must be primarily individual life, the g e n ­
esis o f the personality, but the chronicle and social or political history can also be part o f th e
narrative. [. . .]
O n the other hand, two of the conditions are a question o f all or nothing, and they are o f
course the conditions that oppose autobiography (but at the same time the other types of p e r ­
sonal literature) to biography and the personal novel: these are conditions (3) and (4a). H e re,
there is neither transition nor latitude. An identity is, or is not. [. . .]
In order for there to be autobiography (and personal literature in general), the author, th.e
narrator, and the protagonist must be identical. B ut this “identity” raises a num ber of problem s,
which I will try, if not to resolve, then at least to formulate clearly in the sections that follow. [.. .]

I, you, he
The identity o f the narrator and the principal character that is assumed in autobiography is m arked
most often by the use o f the first person. [. . .] [T]here can be narrative “in the first person”
w ithout the narrator being the same person as the principal character. [. . .]
Indeed, by bringing up the problem o f the author, autobiography brings to light phenom ena
that fiction leaves in doubt: in particular the fact that there can be identity of the narrator and
the principal character in the case of narration “in the third person.” This identity, no longer
being established within the text by the use o f “I,” is established indirectly, but w ithout any
ambiguity, by the double equation: author = narrator, and author = character, from w hich it is
deduced that narrator = character even if the narrator remains implicit. [. . .]
Even if we remain w ithin the personal register (first and second persons), it is obvious that
it is possible to write w ithout using the first person. W hat w ould prevent m e from writing m y
life’s story and calling myself “you”? [. . .] This type o f narrative would show clearly, at the level
of enunciation, the difference between the subject o f the enunciation and the subject of the
utterance treated as addressee o f the narrative.
These uses o f the third and second persons are rare in autobiography, but they keep us from
confusing the grammatical problems o f person w ith the problems of identity. W e could also
imagine a diagram with dual access conceived in this way [figure 5.1].

Remarks on the diagram

1. By “grammatical person,” we must understand here the person in a privileged manner
throughout the narrative. It is obvious that the “I” is not understood w ithout a “you” (the
reader), but the latter remains generally implicit [ ...] .

35
 \g ra m m a tic a l
\ person

1 YOU HE

identity \
1 \
classical autobiography autobiography
narrator autobiography in the 2nd person in the 3rd person
= principal
character
(autodiegetic)

biography
biography classical
narrator in the 1st person
biography
* principal (witness narrative) addressed to the
character model
(heterodiegetic)
(homodiegetic)

Figure 5.1 D iagram 1

2. T he examples given here are all borrowed from the gamut o f referential narratives that are
biography and autobiography
3. [. . .] [T]he person whose life is told is addressed, before an audience w ho is the true
addressee, just as in an autobiography told in the second person, if such existed, the
addressee (formerly oneself) would be there to receive a discourse that w ould be presented
to the reader.

It is necessary, starting w ith exceptional cases, to dissociate the problem o f the person from
that o f identity. This dissociation allows us to understand the complexity o f existing or possible
models o f autobiography. [. . .]

I, the undersigned
Let’s suppose, then, that all autobiographies are written in the first person, as the great refrain of
the autobiographers— I— leads us to believe. [. . .] For an autobiographer, it is natural to w on­
der quite simply: “W ho am I?” B ut since I am the reader, it is no less natural for m e to ask the
question differendy: w ho is “I?”— i.e., who is it who says “W ho am I?”
[• • -]
T he “first person” is defined

1.Reference: the personal pronouns (I/you) have real reference only w ithin discourse, in the
very act o f enunciation. [. . .] T he “ I” refers, each time, to the person w ho is speaking and
w hom w e identify by the very fact that he is speaking.
2. Utterance-, the first-person personal pronouns mark the identity o f the subject o f the enuncia­
tion and o f the subject o f the utterance.

36
 The autobiographical pact

Thus, if someone says: “I was born the . . . ” the use of the pronoun “I” results, through the articula­
tion of these two levels, in our identifying the person who is speaking with the one who is bein g
born. At least this is the total effect obtained. We are not necessarily led to believe here that the types
of “equations” established on these two levels are the same. [...] Moreover, the example that I have
used gives us some idea o f the problems raised: is it really the same person, the baby who is b o rn
in such and such a clinic, in an era o f which I have no memory whatsoever— and me? [...] Setting
aside for the moment the problems o f utterance, I will limit myself to thinking about enunciation.
[. . .] [T]here exist tw o series o f oral situations in which this identification can pose a problem .

1. Quotation, which is discourse within discourse. [. . .] W hen Berma plays Phèdre, w h o is

saying “I”? The theatrical situation can certainly perform the function of quotation m arks,
pointing out the fictitious character of the person who says “I.” [. . .] [I]t is not the in d i­
vidual who defines the “I,” but perhaps the “I,” the individual, that is to say, the individual
exists only in discourse. [. . .] But also, in terms o f autobiography itself, we find evidence
that the first person is a role.
2. Oral from a distance, which takes place in the moment, as in a telephone conversation, a n y
conversation through a door or at night. There is no other way to identify the individual
except through aspects o f voice: w ho’s there?— me— w ho, me? [. . .] T hat the “I” refen t o
the enunciation, no one is trying to deny. But the enunciation is not the last term o f th e
reference: it poses in its turn a problem o f identity, which, in direct oral com m unication,
we resolve instinctively from some extralinguistic facts. [. . .] But, in written com m unica­
tion, unless s/he wants to remain anonymous [. . .] the person w ho formulates the discourse
must allow his/her identification within this speech by using something besides physical
signs [. . .].

[. . .] [T]here is no such concept as “I”— quite an accurate remark if we add that there is n o
such concept as “he” either, and that, in general terms, no personal, possessive, demonstrative,
pronoun, etc., has ever referred to a concept, but simply exercises a function, which consists i n
referring to a noun or to an entity that can be designated by a noun. [. . .]

1. The personal pronoun “ I” refers to the speaker at the m oment o f discourse when the “I ”
appears; but this speaker is himself capable o f being designated by a noun (whether we are
talking about a com m on noun, determined in different ways, or about a proper noun).
2. The opposition concept/no concept takes its meaning from the opposition o f comm on noun
and proper noun (not from comm on noun and personal pronoun).

[ ...]
It is in the proper name that person and discourse are linked even before being joined in the
first person, as the order o f language acquisition by children shows. [. . .] All the identifications
(easy, difficult, or undetermined) suggested [. . .] from oral situations inevitably result in trans­
forming the first person into a proper name.1
Each time that oral discourse is necessary, the return to the proper name is accomplished.
This is the presentation, made by the person involved or by a third party [ ...] . Similarly in w rit­
ten discourse, the signature designates the enunciator [. . .].
It is thus in relation to the proper name that we are able to situate the problems o f autobiogra­
phy. [. . .] T he entire existence o f the person we call the author is summed up by this name [ ...] .
But the place assigned to this name is essential: it is linked, by a social convention, to the pledge
of responsibility of a real person. I understand by these words, which figure in my definition o f

37
autobiography, a person whose existence is certified by vital statistics and is verifiable. [. . .]
[H]is existence is beyond question: exceptions and breaches o f trust serve only to emphasize the
general credence accorded this type o f social contract.2
An author is not a person. H e is a person w ho writes and publishes. Straddling the world-
beyond-the-text and the text, he is the connection betw een the two. T he author is defined
as simultaneously a socially responsible real person and the producer o f a discourse. For the
reader, who does not know the real person, all the while believing in his existence, the author
is defined as the person capable o f producing this discourse, and so he imagines w hat he is like
from what he produces. Perhaps one is an author only w ith his second book, w hen the proper
name inscribed on the cover becomes the “ com m on factor” of at least two different texts and
thus gives the idea o f a person w ho cannot be reduced to any of his texts in particular, and who,
capable of producing others, surpasses them all. This, we will see, is very im portant for the read­
ing o f autobiographies: if the autobiography is a first book, its author is thus unknown, even if
he relates his own story in the book. H e lacks, in the eyes o f the reader, that sign o f reality which
is the previous production o f other texts (nonautobiographical), indispensable to that which we
will call “the autobiographical space.”
T he author is, then, the name o f a person, identical, taking upon himself a series o f differ­
ent published texts. H e draws his reality from the list o f his other works which figure often in
the front of the book: “By the same author.” Autobiography (narrative recounting the life o f
the author) supposes that there is identity o f name betw een the author (such as he figures, by his
name, on the cover), the narrator o f the story, and the character who is being talked about.
W hat we have here is a very simple criterion, w hich defines at the same time as autobiography
all the other genres o f personal literature (journal, self-portrait, essay).
An objection comes to m ind at once: what about pseudonyms? An easy objection to avoid, as
soon as we have defined pseudonym and distinguished it from the name o f a fictional character.
A pseudonym is a name that is different from the one found in vital statistics, which a real
person uses in order to publish all or part o f his writings. The pseudonym is the name o f an
author. It is not exacdy a false name, but a pen name, a second name [. . .]. Literary pseudonyms
are in general neither mysteries nor hoaxes. T he second name is as authentic as the first.[. . .].
We must not confuse pseudonym, defined in this way as the name o f an author (noted on the cover
o f the book), w ith the name attributed to a fictional person within the book (even if this person has
the status of narrator and assumes the whole of the text production), because this person is himself
designated as fictitious by the simple fact that he is incapable o f being the author o f the book. [...]
In the case o f the fictitious name (i.e., different from that o f the author) given to a charac­
ter w ho tells his life story, the reader has reason to think that the story lived by the character
is precisely that o f the author: by cross-checking with other texts, or by delving into external
news items, or even by reading the narrative whose fictional appearance rings false [. . .]. W e
w ould have all the reasons in the w orld to think that the story is exactly the same; nonetheless,
the text produced in this way is not an autobiography. The latter supposes first of all an identity
claimed at the level o f enunciation, and absolutely secondarily, a resemblance produced at the level
o f the utterance.
These texts would therefore fall into the category o f “autobiographical novel. ” This is how
I will refer to all fictional texts in which the reader has reason to suspect, from the resemblances
that he thinks he sees, that there is identity o f author and protagonist, whereas the author has
chosen to deny this identity, or at least not to affirm it. So defined, the autobiographical novel
includes personal narratives (identity of narrator and protagonist) as well as “impersonal” nar­
ratives (protagonists designated in the third person); it is defined at the level o f its contents. ;
Unlike autobiography, it involves degrees. The “resemblance” assumed by the reader can be
 The autobiographical pact

anything from a fuzzy “family likeness” between the protagonist and the author, to the quasi-
transparency that makes us say that he is “the spitting image.” Thus, concerning L ’Année iu era be
(1972) by Olivier Todd, one critic has written that “the entire book admits to being obsessively
autobiographical behind transparent pseudonyms.”3Autobiography does n ot include degrees: it
is all or nothing.
[ .. .]
Autobiography is not a guessing game: it is in fact exactly the opposite. W hat is missing h.ere
is the essential, what I call the autobiographical pact.
Turning back from the first person to the proper name, I am therefore prompted to rectify
what I wrote in Autobiography in France: “How to distinguish autobiography from the a u to b io ­
graphical novel? We must admit that, if we remain on the level o f analysis within the text, th ere
is no difference. All the methods that autobiography uses to convince us o f the authenticity o f its
narrative can be imitated by the novel, and often have been imitated.” This is accurate as lo n g as
we limit ourselves to the text minus the title page; as soon as we include the latter in the te x t,
with the name of the author, we make use of a general textual criterion, the identity (“identical­
ness”) o f the name (author-narrator-protagonist). The autobiographical pact is the affirmation in
the text o f this identity, referring back in the final analysis to the name o f the author on the cover.
The autobiographical pact comes in very diverse forms; but all o f them demonstrate th e ir
intention to honor his/her signature. The reader might be able to quibble over resemblance, b u t
never over identity (“identicalness”). W e know all too well how m uch each o f us values h is /
her name.
An. autobiographical w ork o f fiction can be “exact,” the protagonist resembling the author;
an autobiography can be “inexact,” the protagonist presented differing from the author. T hese
are questions o f tact—let’s still put aside the question o f know ing who will be the judge o f th e
resemblance, and how — which have no bearing on questions o f right, that is to say, on the type
o f contract entered into between the author and the reader. W e see, moreover, the importance
p f the contract, in that it actually determines the attitude o f the reader: if the identity is n o t
stated positively (as in fiction), the reader will attempt to establish resemblances, in spite o f th e
author; if it is positively stated (as in autobiography), the reader will want to look for differences
(errors, deformations, etc.). Confronted with what looks like an autobiographical narrative,
the reader often tends to think o f himself as a detective, that is to say, to look for breaches o f
contract (whatever the contract). It is here that the myth o f the novel being “truer” than the
autobiography originates: w hen we think we have discovered something through the text, in
spite of the author, we always accord it more truth and m ore profundity. If Olivier Todd had
presented L ’Année du crabe as his autobiography, perhaps our critic would have been sensitive
to the faults, to the gaps, to the manipulations of his narrative— namely to the fact that all ques­
tions of fidelity (problem o f “resemblance”) depend ultimately upon the question o f authenticity
^problem o f identity), which is itself expressed with regard to the proper name.
The identity o f name between author, narrator, and protagonist can be established in two ways:

1. Implicitly, at the level o f the author-narrator connection, in the case of the autobiographical pact;
the latter can take two forms: (a) the use of titles leaving no doubt about the fact that the first
person refers to the name o f the author (Story of M y Life, Autobiography, etc.); (b) initial section
of the text where the narrator enters into a contract vis-à-vis the reader by acting as if he were
the author, in such a way that the reader has no doubt that the “I” refers to the name shown
on the cover, even though the name is not repeated in the text.
2* In an obvious way, at the level o f the name that the narrator-protagonist is given in the nar­
rative itself, and which is the same as that of the author on the cover.
 L ,v jc u n t

Identity has to be established in at least one o f these two ways; this is often accomplished by
both o f them at the same time.
[ .. .]
T he accompanying chart [see figure 5.2] gives the pattern o f possible combinations; the
num bers indicated are those o f the description that follows; in each box, at the bottom , is the
effect that the combination produces on the reader. It goes w ithout saying that this chart is
applied only to “autodiegetic” narratives.

1. Name o f the protagonist * name o f the author. This fact alone excludes the possibility o f auto­
biography. It matters little, from then on, w hether or not there is, in addition, affirmation
that the w ork is fiction (la or lb). W hether the story is presented as true (autobiographical
manuscript that the author-publisher would have found in an attic, etc.) or w hether it is
presented as fiction (and believed to be true, attributed to the author, by the reader)— in
any case, there is no identity o f author, narrator, and hero.
2. N am e o f the protagonist = 0. This is the most complex case, because it is indeterm inate.
E verything depends, then, on the pact concluded by the author. T hree cases are possible:
a. Fictional pact (the “fictional” nature o f the book is indicated on the cover page)

[ .. .]

b. Pact = 0. N o t only does the protagonist not have a name, but the author does n ot con­
clude any pact— neither autobiographical nor fictional. T he indetermination is total.
Example: Mother and Child , by Charles-Louis Philippe. Even though the secondary
characters in this narrative have names, the m other and child have no family name, and
the child has no first name. W e can certainly suppose that it is about M me. Philippe
and her son, but this is not written anywhere. Moreover, the narration is ambiguous
(does it concern a general hymn to childhood or the story o f one particular child?), the
place and time are quite vague, and we do not know who the adult is w ho is talking

Figure 5.2 Diagram 2

40
 The autobiographical pact

about this childhood. The reader, according to his m ood, will be able to read it i n the
register that he wants.
c. Autobiographical pact. The protagonist does not have a name in the narrative, b u t the
author has declared explicitly in an initial pact that he is identical to the narrator (and
thus to the protagonist, since the narrative is autodiegetic). Example: Histoire de mes
idées (Story o f M y Ideas), by Edgar Quinet; the pact, included in the title, is clarified in
a long preface, signed Edgar Quinet. The name does not appear one single time in the
narrative, but, because o f the pact, “I” always refers to Quinet.
3. Name o f the protagonist = name o f the author. This fact alone excludes the possibility o f fiction.
Even if the story is, historically, completely false, it will be on the order of the lie (which is an
“autobiographical” category) and not o f fiction. We can distinguish two cases:
a. Pact = 0 (let’s understand by pact the pact o f the title or the prefatory pact). The reader
establishes the author-narrator-protagonist identity, although it is not the object o f a n y
solemn declaration. [. . .]
b. Autobiographical pact. This is the most frequent case (because very often, so as not to
appear in a formal way at the beginning o f the book, the pact nevertheless appears
scattered and repeated throughout the text). Example: Les Confessions de Jean-Jacqu.es
Rousseau ( The Confessions o f Jean-Jacques Rousseau); the pact already appears in th e
tide, is developed in the preamble, and confirmed throughout the text by the use o f
“Rousseau” and o f “Jean-Jacques.”

Here, then, I will call “autobiographies” the texts that enter into cases 2c, 3a, 3b; as for the rest,
we read the texts falling into cases la, lb, 2a as novels; and, according to our m ood, category 2 b
(but w ithout our overlooking the fact that it is we who are choosing).
In this type o f classification, consideration o f borderline cases is always instructive and says
more than the description o f what is a m atter of course. Are the solutions that I declare impos­
sible really so? Tw o fields are to be explored here: first, the problem o f the two blackened
squares in the chart [figure 5.2]; next, the problem o f the anonymous author.
- The blackened squares, (a) Can the hero of a novel declared as such have the same name as the
author? Nothing would prevent such a thing from existing, and it is perhaps an internal contradic­
tion from which some interesting effects could be drawn. But, in practice, no example o f such a
study comes to mind. And if the case does present itself, the reader is under the impression that
a mistake has been made. Thus the autobiography o f Maurice Sachs, Le Sabbat ( The Sabbath), had
been published in 1946 by Correa, with the subtide Souvenirs d’une jeunesse orageuse (Memories o f
a Stormy Childhood); it was republished in 1960 by Gallimard (and again in 1971 in the collection
Livre the Poche) with the subtide Novel: because the story is told by Sachs using his own name (he
even gives his name— Ettinghausen—in. addition to his pseudonym), and since the responsibility for
the subtide is clearly the publisher’s, the reader picks up on the error, (b) In the stated autobiography,
can the protagonist have a name different from that o f the author (the question o f the pseudonym
aside)? TTiis is hardly ever seen;4 and if, by some artistic effect, an autobiographer chose this formula,
the reader would always have doubts: isn’t he reading a novel, quite simply? We see in these two
cases that if the internal contradiction was voluntarily chosen by the author, it would never result
in a text that we would read as an autobiography; not really as a novel either; but in a Pirandellian
game of ambiguity. To my knowledge, it is a game that we practically never play seriously.
In the [. . .] chart [figure 5.2], the ascending diagonal, w hich includes the tw o blackened
squares and the central square, marks out a zone o f indetermination (from “neither one nor the
other” in the central square to “the two together” in the blackened squares).

41
 - The anonymous author. This chart assumes that the author has a name; a tenth case should
therefore be considered: the case o f the anonymous author. But this case (with the subdivisions
that it w ould engender depending on w hether the protagonist has a name or not, and that a pub­
lisher concludes in the place o f the absent author such and such a pact with the reader)— this case
is also excluded by definition, as the author o f an autobiography cannot be anonymous. If the
disappearance o f the author’s name is due to an accidental phenom enon (the manuscript found
in an attic, unpublished and not signed), there are two possibilities: either the narrator states his
name someplace in the text, and an elementary historical study lets us know if this has to do with
a real person, given that by definition an autobiography recounts a dated and situated story; or
else the narrator-protagonist does not give his name, and w e are dealing either w ith a text that
is part o f category 2b or else w ith a simple fiction. If the anonymity is intentional (a published
text), the reader is in a state o f legitimate mistrust. T he text can appear to be authentic, to give
all sorts o f verifiable and likely particulars, to ring true— it remains that all this can be counter­
feited. At best, this w ould be a sort o f extreme case, analogous to category 2b. Everything rests,
then, on the decision o f the reader. W e will have an idea about the complexity o f the problem
in reading, for example, the Mémoires d ’un vicaire de campagne, écrits par lui-même (Memoirs o f a
Country Priest, Written by H im self) (1841), attributed to Father Epineau, whose ecclesiastical
office w ould have forced him to remain provisionally anonymous.5
Surely by asserting that it is impossible to write an anonymous autobiography, I am only
stating a corollary to my definition, and not “proving” it. Everyone is free to assert that it is pos­
sible, but then it will be necessary to start w ith another definition. W e see that here, everything
depends, on the one hand, on the link that I establish, through the notion o f author, between the
person and the name: on the other hand, on the fact that I have chosen the perspective o f the
reader in defining autobiography. For any reader, a text in the autobiographical style, which is
claimed by no one, and a w ork o f fiction are as m uch alike as two drops o f water.
B ut I think that this definition, far from being arbitrary, brings out the essential point. W hat
defines autobiography for the one who is reading is above all a contract o f identity that is sealed
by the proper name. And this is true also for the one w ho is writing the text. If I write the
story o f m y life w ithout m entioning m y name in it, how will my reader know that it was I? It
is impossible for the autobiographical vocation and the passion for anonymity to coexist in the
same person.
The distinctions proposed here, the attention paid to the proper name, have, then, a great
importance on the practical level as criteria for classification; on the theoretical level, they
impose several series o f reflections whose features I will only mention.

1. A uthor and person. Autobiography is a literary genre which, by its very content, best marks
the confusion o f author and person, confusion on which is founded the whole practice and
problematic of W estern literature since the end o f the eighteenth century. W hence the
kind o f passion fo r the proper name, which exceeds simple “author’s vanity,” since through
such passion it is the person him /herself w ho claims existence. The deep subject o f autobio­
graphy is the proper name. [. . .]
2. Person and language. We saw earlier that we could legitimately wonder, with regard to the
“first person,” if it was the psychological person (conceived naively as being outside lan­
guage) who was expressing himself by making use o f the grammatical person as an instru­
ment, or if the psychological person was not an effect o f the enunciation itself. The word
“person” contributes to the ambiguity. If there is no one outside o f language, since language
is other people, we would have to arrive at the idea that autobiographical discourse, far from
referring, as each person imagines it, to the “I” minted in a series o f proper names, would

42
 The autobiographical pact

be, on the contrary, an alienated discourse, a mythological voice by which we would all be
controlled. [...] The autobiographical voice is undoubtedly part of [it]. Thus would o p e n
up— all psychology and mystique of the individual demystified— an analysis o f the discourse
o f subjectivity and individuality as the myth o f our civilization. Moreover, each o f us in d eed
feels the danger o f this indetermination of the first person, and it is no accident if we try to
neutralize it by grounding it in the proper name.
3. Proper name and proper body. The acquisition o f the proper name is no doubt as im portant
a stage in the story o f the individual as the m irror stage. This acquisition escapes m em o ry
and autobiography, which can recount only these second and inverse baptisms that are f o r a
child the accusations that freeze him in a role through a qualifier: “thief” for Genet, “yid” fo r
Albert Cohen (O vous, frères humains [You, Human Brothers], 1972). The name received a n d
assumed first— the fathers name— and especially the Christian name that distinguishes y o u
from it, are no doubt essential basic principles in the story o f me. Witness the fact that th e
name is never indifferent, whether we adore it or we detest it, w hether we accept that w e
owe it to others or we prefer to receive it only from the self.

[ ...]
W hen we try, then, to distinguish fiction from autobiography, to determine what it is th a t
the “I” refen to in personal accounts, there is no need to go back to an impossible w o rld -
beyond-the-text; the text itself offers this last w ord at the very end, the proper name o f th.e
author, which is both textual and unquestionably referential. If this reference is beyond doubt, i t
is because it is based on tw o social institutions: vital statistics (agreement internalized by each o f
us from early childhood) and the publishing contract; there is, then, no reason to doubt identity.

Exact copy
Identity is not resemblance.
Identity is afact immediately grasped— accepted or refused, at the level o f enunciation; resem­
blance is a relationship subject to infinite discussions and nuances, established from the utterance.
Identity is defined starting with three terms: author, narrator, and protagonist. Narrator and
protagonist are the figures to w hom the subject o f the enunciation and the subject o f the utter­
ance refer within the text: the author, represented at the edge o f the text by his name, is the refer­
ent to whom the subject o f enunciation refers by reason of the autobiographical pact.
As soon as it becomes a m atter o f resemblance, we are obliged to introduce a fourth symmetri­
cal term on the side o f utterance, an extratextual referent that we could call the prototype, o r
better yet, the model.
[. . .] Is not autobiography, as its name indicates, the biography o f a person w ritten by him /
herself? W e thus have a tendency to consider it a particular case o f biography, and to apply to
it the “historicizing” problematic o f this genre. Many autobiographers, amateur or established
writers, fall naïvely into this trap— probably because this illusion is necessary to the functioning
o f the genre.
As opposed to all forms o f fiction, biography and autobiography are referential texts: exactly
like scientific or historical discourse, they claim to provide information about a “reality” exterior
to the text, and so to submit to a test o f verification. Their aim is not simple verisimilitude, but
resemblance to the truth. N ot “ the effect of the real,” but the image o f the real. AH referential
texts thus entail what I will call a “referential pact,” implicit or explicit, in which are included
a definition o f the field o f the real that is involved and a statement o f the modes and the degree
of resemblance to w hich the text lays claim.

43
 T he referential pact, in the case o f autobiography, is in general coextensive w ith the auto­
biographical pact, difficult to dissociate, exacdy, like the subject o f enunciation and that o f
utterance in the first person. T he formula for it w ould not be “I, the undersigned” either, but “I
swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” T he oath rarely takes such
an abrupt and total form; it is a supplementary proof o f honesty to restrict it to the possible [ ...] .
T he referential pact can be, according to the criteria o f the reader, badly kept, w ithout the
referential value o f the text disappearing (on the contrary)— this is not the case for historical and
journalistic texts.
This apparent paradox is due naturally to the confusion that I have maintained up to this
point, following the example of most authors and critics, betw een biography and autobiogra- h
St
phy. T o clear it up, it is necessary to restore this fourth term that is the model.
By “m odel,” I understand the real that the utterance claims to resemble. H ow can a text
“resemble” a life— that is a question the biographers rarely ask themselves and that they always
assume is resolved implicidy. The “resemblance” can be found on tw o levels: in the negative
mode— and at the level o f the elements o f the narrative— the criterion o f accuracy intervenes;
in the positive mode— and at the level o f the whole o f the narrative— what w e will call fidelity
intervenes. Accuracy involves information, fidelity meaning. [. . .] ■;
In order to represent the biographical undertaking, we can construct the accompanying
diagram, in w hich the division into columns differentiates the text and the w orld-beyond-the-
text, and the division into rows the subject o f enunciation and the subject o f utterance. Included
inside the line separating the text from the w orld-beyond-the-text is the author, in the marginal
position represented by his name on the cover o f the book.
[. . . ]
W e notice already here what is going to fundamentally oppose biography and autobiography; it is the
hierarchical organization o f the relationships o f resemblance and identity. In biography, it is resemblance
that must ground identity; in autobiography, it is identity that grounds resemblance. Identity is the real
starting point o f autobiography; resemblance, the impossible horizon o f biography. The different function o f
resemblance in the two systems thereby is explained.

text world beyond the text

/ \
=
narrator S.E.
* * 4i
S.U. protagonist < - -► model *
\ /

A b b re v ia tio n s : A = Author

S .E . = Subject of the enunciation

S ,U . = S ub ject of the utterance

R ela tionsh ip : = identical to

* not identical to

<-> resem blance

Figure 5.3 Diagram 3

44
 The autobiographical pact

This becomes obvious as soon as we outline the diagram that corresponds to autobiography.
See Figure 5.4.
T he personal narrative (autodiegetic) seems here to be absolutely irreducible to the im p e r­
sonal narrative (heterodiegetic).
Indeed, in personal narrative, what does the “ equal” (=) sign that is found between the s u b ­
ject o f enunciation and that of utterance signify? It really implies identity , and that identity, in
turn, involves a certain form o f resemblance. Resemblance w ith whom? If we are talking a b o u t
a narrative w ritten exclusively in the past, like biography, resemblance o f the protagonist to t h e
model could be looked at exclusively as a verifiable relationship betw een protagonist and m odel,
but all narrative in the first person implies that the protagonist, even if some distant adventures
about him are being told, is also at the same time the real person who produces the narration:
the subject o f the utterance is double because it is inseparable from the subject o f enunciation;
in a way, it becomes single again only w hen the narrator talks about his own present narration,
never in the other direction, to designate a protagonist untainted by any real narrator.
(...]

W e w ould thus have the two following formulas:

Biography: A is or is not N; P resembles M .
Autobiography: N is to P as A is to M .
{A = author; N = narrator; P = protagonist; M = model)

[. . .]
In the case o f identity, the borderline and exceptional case, which confirms the rule, w as
that of fraud. In the case o f resemblance, this will be mythomania— that is to say, not the errors,
the distortions, the interpretations consubstantial with the elaboration of personal myth in all
autobiography, but the substitution of an obviously made-up story, and one totally unrelated to
life [. . .].

Autobiographical space
W e must n o w show on what naïve illusion rests the widespread theory according to which the
novel is truer (more profound, more authentic) than the autobiography. [. . .]
Rest assured, I have no intention o f defending the autobiographical genre, and establishing
the truth o f the contrary proposition, namely that autobiography would be the most truth­
ful, the m ost profound, and so on. T o invert Thibaudet’s preposition would be o f no interest,
except to show that right side up or upside down, it is always the same proposition.
[. . . ]

A U T O B IO G R A P H Y

world beyond the text text world beyond the text

person of the author j^ A ^ j = narrator

S.E.

S.U. protagonists »-model

Figure 5.4 Diagram 4

45
 The reader is thus invited to read novels not only as jktions referring to a truth o f “hum an
nature,” but also as revealing phantasms o f the individual. I will call this indirect form o f the
autobiographical pact the phantasmatic pact.
If hypocrisy is a homage that vice pays to virtue, these judgments are in reality a homage
that the novel pays to autobiography. If the novel is truer than autobiography, why are Gide,
Mauriac, and many others not happy w ith writing novels? In posing the question in this way,
everything becomes clear: if they had not also written and published autobiographical texts, even
“inadequate” ones, no one w ould ever have seen the nature of the truth that it was necessary
to look for in their novels. Thus these declarations are perhaps involuntary but very effective
tricks: we escape accusations of vanity and egocentrism w hen we seem so aware o f the limita­
tions and insufficiencies o f our autobiography; and no one notices that, by the same movement,
we extend on the contrary the autobiographical pact, in an indirect form, to the whole o f what
we have written. Double blow.
Double blow, or rather double vision— double writing, the effect, i f I can risk this neolo­
gism, o f stereography.
Posed in this way, the nature o f the problem changes completely. It is no longer necessary
to know which o f the two, autobiography or novel, w ould be truer. It is neither one nor the
other: autobiography will lack complexity, ambiguity, etc.; the novel, accuracy. So it would be
one, then the other? Rather, one in relation to the other. W hat becomes revealing is the space
in w hich the tw o categories o f texts are inscribed, and which is reducible to neither o f the two.
This effect o f contrast obtained by this procedure is the creation, for the reader, o f an “auto­
biographical space.”
From this point o f view, the works o f Gide and Mauriac arc typical. B oth have organized,
for different reasons, a spectacular failure of their autobiography, thus forcing their audience into
reading all the rest o f their narrative production in the autobiographical register. W hen I talk
about failure, it is not a question o f making a value judgm ent on admirable (Gide) or estimable
(Mauriac) texts, but simply o f echoing their ow n statements, and o f establishing that they have
chosen to leave their autobiography incomplete, fragmented, full o f holes and open.6
This form o f indirect pact is becoming increasingly widespread. Formerly it was the reader
who, despite the denials of the author, took the initiative and the responsibility for this type
o f reading; today, on the contrary, authors and publishers start off from the beginning in this
direction.
[. . . ]
All these games, which show clearly the predominance o f the autobiographical project, are
found again, to varying degrees, in many m odem writers. [. . .]

Reading contract
At the end o f this reflection, a brief balance sheet allows us to take note o f a displacement o f
the problem:

- Negative side: certain points remain blurred and unsatisfying. For example, we m ight ask
ourselves how the identity o f the author and the narrator can be established in the autobiograph­
ical pact w hen the name is not repeated [.. . ] ; w e might remain skeptical in view of the distinc­
tions I suggested earlier in Exact Copy. T hat section and the one enáded I, the Undersigned, look
only at the case o f autobiography in autodiegetic narration, whereas I have stressed that other
formulas of narration were possible: will the established distinctions hold, in the case o f autobi­
ography in the third person?

46
 The autobiographical pact

- Positive side: on the other hand, my analyses have seemed fruitful to me each time that,
going beyond the apparent structures of the text, they prom pted m e to question the positions
of the author and the reader. “Social contract” o f the proper name and the publication, a u to b io ­
graphical “pact,” fictional “pact,” referential “pact,” phantasmatic “pact”— all the expressions
used refer back to the idea that the autobiographical genre is a contractual genre. [. . .]
The problematic o f autobiography proposed here is thus not grounded on a relationship,
established from the outside, between the extratextual and the text—because such a re la tio n ­
ship could only be one o f resemblance, and w ould prove nothing. N either is it g rounded
on an internal analysis o f the functioning o f the text, o f the structure, or o f aspects o f the
published text; but upon analysis, on the global level o f publication, o f the implicit or explicit
contract proposed by the author to the reader, a contract w hich determines the mode o f re a d ­
ing o f the text and engenders the effects which, attributed to the text, seem to us to d efin e it
as autobiography.
T he level o f analysis utilized is therefore that o f the publication/published relationship, w h ic h
would be parallel, on the level o f the printed text, to the enunciation /utterance relationship, on
the level o f oral communication. [. . .]
It is at this global level that autobiography is defined: it is a mode of reading as m uch as it is a
type of writing; it is a historically variable contractual effect. The present study is based on the types
o f contract currendy in use. W hence come its relativity and the absurdity that there would be
in wanting it to be universal; whence come also the difficulties encountered in this undertaking
o f definition. [. . .]
W hen all is said and done, this study would seem to m e, then, to be itself more a d o c u ­
m ent to study (the attempt o f a twentieth-century reader to rationalize and clarify his criteria o f
reading) rather than a “scientific” text: a document to assign to the file o f a scientific history o f
literary communication.
The history of autobiography would be therefore, above all, a history o f its mode o f re a d -
ing [. . .]. If autobiography is defined by something outside the text, it is not on this side, b y
an unverifiable resemblance to a real person, but on the other side, by the type o f reading it
engenders, the credence it exudes, and the qualities that are manifested in the critical response
to autobiographies.

Notes
1 O n the linguistic aspects o f the problem o f the proper name and way it contributes, in enunciadon, to th e
reference, see Oswald D ucrot andTzvetanTodorov, Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences de langage (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1972),pp. 321—22.
2 Cases o f fraud o r the problems o f the identity o f the author (anonymity, pseudonymity) can be stud­
ied, starting w ith some classic works by J.-M . Quérard, Les Supercheries littéraires dévoliêes (1847), or b y
A. Barbier, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes, 3rd edition (1872). See an amusing inventory o f recent
frauds in GwHiver 1 (N ovem ber 1972).
3 Bertrand Poirot-D elpech, in Le Monde o f O ctober 13,1972.
4 Despite appearances, this is n o t the case w ith th e Vie de Henry Brulard by Stendhal. This text poses
some very delicate problems ow ing to the fact that it is unfinished, and n o t prepared for im m ediate
publication. Consequently, it is difficult to decide i f H en ry B rulard is a pseudonym for the author o r
just the name o f a character, since the text never to o k th e fo rm o f a m anuscript m eant for publica­
tion: the hum orous titles w ere conceived, n o t fo r publication, b u t for “M M . de la Police”— in case o f
surprise; the subtide Roman imité du Vicaire de Wakefield has the same function o f burlesque fraud. T h e
fact that it concerns a veritable autobiography, provisionally “cam ouflaged,” appears obviously in the
reading o f the text itself.The nam e B rulard appears only three times in the tex t ( Ouevres in-timest Paris:
B ibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1955, pp. 6,42, and 250): two o f these three occasions show the camouflage:

47
 p. 6, B rulard is im posed over the nam e Beyle- p. 250, the “ seven letters” o f B rulard w ere at first five; and
in this w hole enjoyable passage, B ernard is to B rulard as B rulard is to Beyle. T h e rest o f d ie time, the
family name is represented by “B.” (w hich can be applied im partially to Beyle o r to Brulard) but also
quite simply by Beyle, w hoever signs the autobiography (pp. 60, 76, 376) or by “S.” (Stendhal) (p. 247),
w h ich am ounts to the same thing.
5 These anonymous Mémoires are, in their second edition (1843), prefaced by A. A um étayer.This preface
carries the am biguity to its peak.
6 See “Gide et l’espace autobiographique,” Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975),
pp. 165-96.

48
 6
DESIGN AND LIE IN
MODERN AMERICAN
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Timothy Dow Adams

The m odem era in autobiographical theory began in 1960 w ith the publication o f R oy Pascal’s
now classic Design and Truth in Autobiography. Since then, virtually all autobiographical th e o ­
rists have arranged their arguments w ithin a complex, interconnected spectrum based on the
terms in Pascal’s title. Design has been treated under such headings as genre, form, mode, a n d
style; truth has been handled in a bewildering variety o f ways, including its relation to fiction,
nonfiction, fact, fraud, figure, memory, identity, error, and myth. The word autobiography has
frequendy been analyzed in terms o f its three separate components: autos or self, bios or life, a n d
graphe or writing.
[...]
W hat this critical outpouring o f over a quarter century has produced is a paradox— an aston­
ishing ability to generate lively and valuable commentary on and ingenious and helpful readings
o f an enormous variety of autobiographical texts, despite a general agreement that autobiog­
raphy cannot really be defined. As early as 1965, William Spengemann and L. R . Lundquist
defined autobiography by its indefinable quality: “The m odem autobiographer needs an espe­
cially flexible form, one that can always outran attempts to define it.”1
[...]
N o matter how complicated or complete our attempt, creating an airtight definition of auto­
biography is virtually impossible. The word under which all of this critical work has been done,
however defined, has produced a variety o f positions, ranging from those critics, such as M utlu
Konuk Biasing, who would collapse the boundaries and expand the canon to include anything
w ith an autobiographical feel to those, such as Barrett John Mandel, w ho argue that autobiog­
raphy and fiction are completely separate genres and that a line of demarcation between them
should be drawn.2 For Paul de Man, the solution is to think o f autobiography, not as a genre, but
as “a figure o f reading or o f understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts.”3According to
Avrom Fleishman, we should begin, not by asking “what is autobiography?,” but by questioning
“how the age-old activity o f writing life stories has organized itself at various periods of literary
history.”4 Despite his exhaustive scholarship and sophisticated arrangement, Fleishman’s emphasis
on the life-writing process rather than on the outcome, the autobiographical act over the autobio­
graphical corpus, results in his analyzing David Coppetfield, The M ill on the Floss, and Sons and Lavers
as though no distinctions exist between “The Autobiographical Novel and the Autobiography,”
which is the tide of R oy Pascal’s initial foray into autobiographical theory in 1959.

49
 11
THE IMPACT OF CRITICAL
THEORY ON THE STUDY
OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Marginality, gender, and
autobiographical practice

Sidonie Smith

Autobiography criticism over the last hundred yean has moved generationally, as both James
Olney and W illiam Spengemann suggest, from preoccupation with the life (bios), to the self
(autos), to the text (graphe) o f the autobiographer. In the nineteenth century critics read autobi­
ography as a “representative” and supposedly “truthful” account o f an individual life, the signifi­
cance o f w hich derived from the public stature o f the autobiographer and the “m oral” quality of
the life lived. W ith the turn o f the century and the turn to modernism, autobiography became
interesting as one expression o f a person’s psychological posture toward the past. Consequently,
critics began to read autobiography as a creative, interpretive act and to subject it to the variety
o f critical practices characteristic o f criticism o f other genres. Certain critics charted its history;
others proposed its paradigmatic structures; others focused on thematic issues such as the tension
between self and society enacted in the text; still others proposed a poetics of autobiography.
Most recendy, as post-modernism challenged the referentiality o f language and the authenticity
o f the self, rejecting notions o f intentionality, truth, meaning, and authority, the text o f autobio­
graphy as the locus of the play of signification and as artifice o f identity became the reigning
critical preoccupation.1 Inevitably, fascination with autobiography has moved from the margins
to the center o f critical and theoretical activity.2
And yet, feminist critics m ust take a critical posture of discontent toward autobiography
and its criticism. In the proliferating discussions o f autobiography— o f teleology and episte-
mology, poetics and historiography, self-expressiveness and self-reflexivity, self-representation
and self-presentation, or typologies and definitions— wom an, her subjectivity, cultural expe­
rience and text, has been erased. For one thing, the tradition o f autobiography and o f auto­
biography criticism has been a decidedly androcentric one. Autobiography (more precisely,
those texts w ritten by m en w hich have been associated in the aggregate w ith formal “autobio­
graphy”) functions as one m ore o f those cultural discourses that inscribes male subjectivity
and androcentric fictions o f self and story in its psychosexual and socio-cultural paradigms of
self-representation. It is a story o f male selfhood rendered representative and representable. It
is, therefore, another one o f those “master narratives” in the W est that, defining the speaking

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 Marginality, gender, and autobiographical practice

subject as always male, is founded upon the repression o f woman, the silence o f the m o th e r,
the denial o f “femininity.”3
Critics bring this same androcentrism to their reading o f autobiography. A s a result, the h is ­
tory o f autobiography criticism is marked by the same androcentric ideology traced elsew here
in feminist critiques of the canon and of critical practice: “normative” generic definitions th a t
effectively marginalize w om en’s texts, condemning them at best to a secondary status in th e
canon and at worst to erasure from literary history; uncritical assumptions about “gendered”
content, structure, style, and narrative perspective; indifference to the relationship o f ideologies
o f gender to ideologies o f self; and hegemonic paradigms o f psychosexual development th a t
either condemn wom en to a text o f the same psychosexuality as man or relegate her to th e
silence o f her “other” psychosexuality.
The stranglehold o f androcentric criticism and its privileged canon must be broken by those
of us interested in w om en’s autobiography. W e need to challenge patriarchal hegemony o v e r
literary history, poetics, and aesthetics, and project alternative histories, poetics, and theories
through the lens of difference. As we do so we need to consider the relationship o f the w om an
autobiographer to generic intelligibility: to cultural fictions of psychobiography, to the structur­
ing o f story, to “self’-hood, to narrative posturing, and to representation itself. De-stabilizing
the “great tradition” w ith its “seminal texts” and literary “paternities,” we must insist that t o
speak o f wom en writing is to contest the “center” and privilege the multiplicity o f positions o n
the margins.
W oman’s life script is the other’s story o f psychosexual development, sociocultural contexts,
and linguistic practice. Denied access to learning and to the realm o f public activity and discourse
privileged by her culture, woman and her story have remained until recendy domesticated a n d
thereby marginalized. And so the woman who dared to write autobiography transgressed th e
culture’s boundaries o f legitimate female self-representation, straying from the margins in to
another’s country, there to engage competing narrative figures o f selfhood. Driven by com peting
purposes, she embraced one “fiction” o f self-representation and then the other’s in response t o
the doubled figures o f male and female selfhood constitutive o f patriarchal gender ideologies.
From one posture she speaks through the fiction o f “man,” reproducing the culturally valued
story o f male selfhood w ith its powers o f self-fabrication and its preoccupation w ith quest. B u t
the fit of her experience to the story o f man is not exact. As woman she always remains th e
outsider, marginal to the centering story of man. Moreover, she must protect herself before
the reader who, she recognizes, will inevitably read her text as the text of woman. And so, she
shifts postures, embracing the story of “woman,” that cultural fiction that defines the essence o f
woman as self-denying, self-effacing and erasing, and defines her cultural purpose through h e r
roles as wife and mother. Yet this “conventional” story o f woman, the “romance” script tracing a
pattern o f courtship, marriage, and motherhood, is a cultural non-story, a narrative marginal to
the contractual expectations o f androcentric autobiography. In this sense, woman has no “auto­
biographical” self or narrative o f interest to her public.Thus, if woman inscribes the conventional
story of female development she writes a story her public will not read as culturally significant.
H er text and her life will remain marginal to the center o f “autobiography.” If she inscribes a
“masculine” story of cultural significance she approaches the center o f “autobiography” from
her position o f cultural marginality; but she simultaneously becomes implicated in a complex
posture o f transvestism, becoming a “man” and thereby promoting the ideology o f the “same.”
In telling her life as a “man,” she collaborates in the marginalization o f woman and her story.
Such situating of the autobiographer within the complexities o f patriarchal ideologies o f
gender accounts for the oscillations in her autobiographical posture and grounds the poetics
o f her autobiographical practice. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (1856) offers a particularly

83
 itdonie Smith

interesting example o f these complexities o f wom an’s autobiographical practice prior to the
twentieth century. Desirous o f living life “like a m an,” Martineau inscribes an androcentric
narrative. She carefully, sometimes tediously, structures the evolutionary quest story, tracing
the progressive stages in the development o f her “m ind” through the three C om ptian stages
o f theological, metaphysical, and positivist vision. Embracing the evolutionary and Comptian
tropes o f self-development, she identifies her own experience as representative o f the highest
hum an achievement possible and effectively reifies both herself and the prevailing ideology o f
individualism that served as the cornerstone o f the notion o f selfhood in the century. This ide­
ology o f individualism grounded itself in the notion o f the metaphysical self, coherent, unified,
chartable, its development teleologically driven. “Self’ so understood could be “represented”
precisely because the pattern imposed by the autobiographer names and controls the meaning of
the life and the configuration o f self.
T hrough this representation, Martineau, to use Julia Kristeva’s words, “raises herself to the
symbolic stature o f her father” (28). She offers her reader an organization o f narrative events
that specify the hero’s psychological, moral and social development within a hum an rather than
a sexual fate, to alter critically a phrase from Nancy Miller’s analysis o f the “female” plot (125).
Embracing the representation o f the same, this nineteenth-century autobiographer claims her
privileges in the w orld o f words, men, and public spaces. In Martineau’s text, essentialist notions
o f gender, identity, and narrative realism combine.
But the price o f pursuing the male scenario o f selfhood is the price o f her ow n passional
existence. Like the long line o f wom en autobiographers that precede her, starting w ith Margery
Kem pe and Dame Julian in the fifteenth century, Martineau legitimates her “male” identified
life through protestations o f her chastity and modesty, that is, through denial o f her sexual­
ity. She m ust assure her reader that she has not succumbed to the passion that in wom an is
evil. T hat assurance is implicit in her criticism o f w om en such as Mary Wollstonecraft and in
her characterization o f herself as a “victim” o f “Necessity.” She attests that she w ould have
married had her fiance not died; that she did not choose to becom e a writer, that she did not
pursue public notoriety. And yet, the text cannot mask, rather it unmasks, a locus o f passion.
The presence o f her mother, that figure o f dis-ease, haunts the daughter’s life as the essentialist
notion o f w om an haunts her text. In her “passionate,” ambivalent representation o f her mother,
the reader recognizes that Martineau’s escape into Com ptian positivism signals her desire to
escape the w orld o f the mother, a world o f chaos, dependency, loss, and sexual deprivation.
The nineteenth-century autobiographer, as others before her, remains in thrall to an essential­
ist ideology o f gender that implicates her in a posture o f self-repression. The daughter cannot
escape the m other w ithout disempowering the m other and herself as woman. Ultimately, the
suppressed story o f the m other/daughter dyad disrupts the confidence and conventions o f the
father-identified narrative.
Oscillation between competing figures o f self-representation especially characterizes wom ­
en’s autobiography through the nineteenth-century. T he wom an who chooses to write a pub­
lic autobiography and thereby transgress cultural expectations o f female propriety and public
silence, redeems herself before her reader to the degree that she simultaneously inscribes a life
story representative o f male stories and thereby enhances the image o f man and maintains her
posture as the chaste, modest, proper woman. After the turn o f the tw entieth century, however,
w om an’s relationship to the genre becomes more flexible, more self-conscious, m ore experi­
mental. T here is, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis claims of narrative fiction, a changing o f story that
“ signals a dissent from social norms as well as narrative form ” (20).
This “ dissent” is made possible because o f radical challenges to descendency by the ideology
o f the essential self. Com ing out o f the nineteenth century, the ideology o f self began to fracture

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 Marginality, gender, and autobiographical practice

as the notions o f authority, meaning, and truth came under scrutiny through the agencies of
Nietszchian cultural critique and Freudian theories o f the unconscious. Since m id-century,
structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Derridean deconstruction have furthered the already
energetic dismantling o f hegemonic conceptions o f selfhood, authority, truth, meaning, and
most recently gender. All these phenomena challenge the simplicity w ith which hum an b eings
previously constructed or naturalized for themselves a “self that could inscribe a “ self-narratrve.”
And as the hegem ony o f the metaphysical self breaks down, the privileging o f “autobiography"
as androcentric contract fractures. Twentieth-century destabilizations o f the notions o f self,
author, representation, narrative, and gender have thus opened up fault-lines in the ideology of
a unitary self through w hich alternative ideologies o f self and narrative have seeped.
N o w onder autobiography, as Spengemarm and Stanton insist, “lies at the very c en ter of
modernist concerns” (Stanton 11). But it is autobiography through another ideology of self a n d
narrative since, for both m en and women, the metaphysical notion o f selfhood, tied inextricably
to male pow er and meaning, has given way before experimental explorations o f experience,
memory, language, sexuality, and psychobiography. Generic boundaries have blurred; narrative
structures proliferated. T he male story, canonized as traditional autobiography, moves fro m
the center to the margins. And the stories o f the marginalized begin to assume greater cultural
prominence. For at a time w hen literary authority itself has become suspect, a problem atic
relationship to self, identity, voice, and story becomes more the norm than the exception (o f
the exceptional woman). Through breaks in the glass o f fashion and the mirrors o f engendered
fictions, w om en’s alternative stories o f selfhood, alternative speaking postures, alternative m odes
of story-telling, alternative psychobiographies emerge.
Briefly, then, I would like to suggest some o f the alternative strategies twentieth century
wom en writers employ in their creative interventions in the privileges o f that authoritative,
“essentialist” autobiographical “I”— the “I” that Virginia W oolf describes as “honest and lo g i­
cal: as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding” (Room 104).
For, as W oolf notes in her diary, the power o f “strangulated individuality” that “presides” in
too many autobiographies must give way to “real life” that “must lack centre” (243, 335). “T h e
dominance o f the letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts w ithin its
shadow” must be displaced from the center o f the text by another “I” of fluidity, multiplicity,
and “nomadic” positionality (Room 104). It is this fracturing o f perspective, this movem ent o f
perspective from place to place, this creative dis-placement o f the centering “I” that character­
izes the two texts I w ant to consider.
W riting “Sketch o f the Past” while struggling with “Pointz Hall” (the novel that w ould
become Between the Acts), W oolf confronted a profoundly problematic scene o f writing. For a
writer whose fictional experiments moved her away from the notions o f a centering narrator,
centered protagonist, and totalized vision toward a multiplicity o f narrative voices and a com ­
munal protagonist (the six figures o f The Waves, the three generations o f The Years, the English
society o f Between the Acts), how could she use the personal signifier, that “I,” w ithout becom ing
“authoritarian” in relationship to her past and her “self? H ow could she escape the centrifugal
force o f the unitary and totalized self, that metaphysical ghost in the machine o f patriarchal nar­
rative and conventional autobiography, which she associated with the power o f the patriarchs,
hierarchy, authoritarian politics, didacticism and ideological totalization, that is with “masculine”’
narrative? She does so by variously intervening in “traditional” notions o f autobiographical nar­
rative— its emphases on progressive narrative, self-centered activity, action, and chronology—
and thereby breaking the dominance, aridity, and privilege o f this “I.” Privileging the time o f
the pre-individualized being, she opens her “sketch” w ith prelinguistic experiences o f infancy,
and traces her roots backward through the race itself, to the “instinct” o f the species. She makes

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o f m emory a force outside o f hum an will. She breaks chronology, making time a fluid con­
tinuum, a co-minghng o f past and present. She emphasizes that her story is the story o f those
people w ho were significant in her past, that to tell her story is to tell theii story so that self and
other jo in in a seamless horizon o f identity and difference. She calls into question the truth o f
those memories she relies upon to ground her story, playing with the fluidities o f time, memory,
others, as a “central oyster o f perceptiveness, an enormous eye,” allowing her nomadic subjec­
tivity to roam through the text, refusing to name the truth, resisting the position o f authority
and knowledge (“Street Haunting” 156). Consequendy, the text oscillates between past and
present, narrative and descriptive reverie, time and timelessness, moments o f being and nonbe­
ing, silences and statements, self and other, ecstasy and logos.
Like Woolf, Gertrude Stein struggled w ith the conventions of traditional autobiography.
As James E. Breslin notes, “w hat makes The Autobiography o f Alice B. Toklas so interesting is
that it admits the conventions o f memory, identity, chronological time in order to fight against
and ultimately to transcend their deadening effects” (151). Radically, Stein fractures the auto­
biographical “I” by playfully conjoining autobiography and biography. The dominance o f the
unitary self is disrupted in Stein’s text as the autobiographer becomes biographer, self becomes
other, Stein becomes Toklas, so that the relationship betw een narrator, self-narrator, and nar­
rated self, and the relationship o f history and fiction, are profoundly disturbed. These little
disturbances o f autobiographical narrative are exemplified in the position o f “Alice” as “host­
ess.” At the literal level, “Alice” presents herself in the text as the quintessential “hostess” : “The
geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with m e” (87). At the figurative
level she “hosts” in the text a succession of meetings w ith geniuses and the multitude o f people
w ho visit Gertrude Stein. M oving from one anecdote to another, she makes a “hom e” for the
artists and intellectuals o f the early twentieth century. B ut “Alice” is a hostess o f an even more
fundamental sort. She is “hostess” to Gertrude Stein herself. That is, Gertrude Stein takes up
lodging in the person o f “Alice” for the purposes o f writing the autobiography. In a sense,
Gertrude Stein is a lodger in the body o f “Alice,” and “Alice” is the body through which the
voice o f Gertrude Stein speaks. Thus “Alice” “hosts” Gertrude Stein in a variety o f ways. She
gives her lodging; she is the material through w hich Gertrude Stein speaks, as a host is to a para­
site; and she is a king o f transubstantiated host. Ultimately, Stein, in co-mingling her story with
“Alice’s” story, hosts her lover in return.
The multiple layering o f narrative “positionality”— Stein as “ center,” Toklas as “border,”
Stein as “boarder,” Toklas as “boarder”— enable a multiplicity o f stories, conventional and
unconventional, to be told. “Alice” writes a conventional “wom an’s” autobiography. As the
perfect hostess, she tells o f a life lived in relation to a genius, Gertrude Stein. Self-effacingly she
makes Stein the center and the centering space o f the text. For Stein, speaking as “Alice” pro­
vides a mask for the female autobiographical self. T hrough this mask or veil, the woman protects
herself from the reader’s expectation that as a wom an she should not talk direcdy about herself,
should not make a powerful “m yth” o f herself. Speaking as “Alice,” Stein can simultaneously
present herself as a powerful figure and protect herself from being read as unfeminine. B ut the
mask also enables Stein to intervene in the autobiographical contract by breaking the monopoly
o f the “I,” by conjoining internal and external perspective. Co-mingling herself and “Alice,”
she effectively co-mingles self and other, internal and external, voice and body, oracular voice
and practical, domesticated voice, past and present. Ultimately the narrative strategy becomes a
joke first played on the reader and then on the genre.
Zora Neale Hurston and Maxine H ong Kingston struggle w ith exacerbated experiences of
marginality in their texts because o f their positions in cultural groups “marginal” to the center o f
Anglo-American society. As wom en and minorities they must engage multiple layers o f fictive
 Marginality, gender, and autobiographical practice

paradigms o f selfhood w ith the result that a multiplicity o f speaking positions weaves th ro u g h
their texts. It is the silenced voice of the m other and the m other tongue that underw rites
Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road. Describing her m other’s deathbed scene,
the older wom an writes: “H er m outh was slightly open, but her breathing took up so m u c h
o f her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for h er. She
depended on me for a voice” (86-7). In her ow n autobiographical text, Hurston, guilty u n d e r
that silenced tongue, finds the m other’s voice in the “m other tongue.” The text is exuberant in
its celebration o f the “m other tongue” of black folk culture. In the dazzling metaphors, verbal
facility, imagistic pow er the text is testimony to the m other and her tongue, to the com m unal
voice at the margins o f white culture. But for Hurston the tension between margin and c e n te r
is acute. For she writes with another voice than the voice o f the folk community: she w rites
as a trained anthropologist in the tongue of white culture, the tongue of a centered, distanced,
objective narrator; and she writes for that white audience. The voice o f analysis and the voice
o f metaphor sometimes compete w ith one another, complicating postures o f self. As a result,
autobiography takes Hurston to the margins o f both white and black culture.
Engagement w ith the m other tongue also provides the thread linking the five apparently
distinct narratives conjoined in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Kingston speaks
from the position of various women, investing her voice in the voice o f others, releasing her
ow n subjectivity to roam through the ficdve subjectivity o f the w om en w ho populate the
world o f her text. By turns, she speaks as older woman, as young Maxine, as Brave O rchid, as
her aunts, as Fa M u Lan, that mythical figure o f female power, and as the voice o f Chinese*
American culture in the sayings that specify woman as non-entity. W inding her memories of
childhood around and through the stories o f her m other and her m other culture, stories th a t
prescribe, confine, and erase female desire and language, she struggles to find her own voice
through myth, history, her m other’s biography, and her own autobiography. Understanding
autobiography to be about the self as story-teller and the self within story-telling, Kingston
blurs distinctions betw een fiction and history, oscillating betw een personal history and cultural
myth, filial rebellion and filial imitation, voicelessness and naming. From the opening injunction
to silence given by her m other— “You must not tell”— to her closing identification with th e
m other in/as exile, Kingston gives voice to herself, her mother, and her m other culture, break ­
ing the injunction to silence, honoring her m other’s voice even as she breaks its injunction.
Re-creating her m other culture out o f her own fictions, she breaks the silences imposed u p o n
her by those cultural fictions that encircle her in childhood and yet appropriates to her o w n
hermeneutical purposes the fabricating power o f the m other and her tongue.4
These four autobiographers, as others in this century, have confronted cultural fictions c o n ­
stituting woman and her difference. Inevitably recognizing that traditional autobiography allows
no space for female desire and subjectivity, recognizing that to enter into that generic contract
she must, in a gesture of sexual and cultural ventriloquism, speak as a man, the autobiographer
resists the pattern o f the “same,” resists the father’s sentence. In telling her ow n w om en’s story,
she wrenches autobiographical form, vision, and language to her own ends. In doing so, she
liberates autobiography from the ideology of essentialist notions o f selfhood and o f sexual dif­
ference. She cracks the “hard nut” o f m an’s autobiographical “I.” Thus, for both the w om an
writer and the autobiography critic o f the twentieth century, traditional autobiography, that
“master narrative,” remains the site o f patriarchal textual politics. It is one locus o f the silencing
o f woman and the repression o f the feminine. From their position o f marginality, from their
sideline o f silence, both woman autobiographer and critic must write and read w om en’s auto­
biography as a locus o f the interrogation o f the politics o f master narratives. For both, the post­
m odern project must be the pleasure o f loosening the center’s hold on narrative, o f unloosing

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the multiplicity of voices from the margins, and o f losing, as Alice Jardine suggests, the father’s
narrative altogether.

Notes
1 I have explored this evolution o f autobiography criticism in Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women's
Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions o f Self-Representation (Bloom ington: Indiana UP, 1987) chapt. 1.
2 See Spengemann, xiii; and D om na C. Stanton, “A utogynography: Is the Subject D ifferent?” in Stanton,
ed. The Female Autograph (N ew York: N ew York Literary F orum , 1984),p. 11.
3 For explorations o f the relationship betw een post-m odernism and the ideology o f the “master narra­
tives,” see Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations o f Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: C ornell UP, 1985), esp.
pp. 13-102.
4 For an extended exploration o f Kingston’s text, see Smith, chapt. 8.

Works cited
Breslin, James E. “G ertrude Stein and the Problems o f A utobiography.” In Women’s Autobiography: Essays
in Criticism, edited by Estelle C. Jelinek, pp. 149-62. B loom ington: Indiana U niversity Press, 1980.
DuPlessis, R achel. Writing Beyond the Ending. B loom ington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
H urston, Z ora N eale. Dust Tracks on the Road. Urbana: U niversity o f Illinois Press, 1984.
Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: C ornell U niversity Press, 1985.
Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women. Trans. Anita Barrows. London: Boyars, 1977.
M iller, N ancy K. “W riting (from) the Feminine: G eorge Sand and the N ovel o f Female Pastoral.” In
The Representations o f Women in Fiction, edited by C arolyn G. H eilbrun and M argaret R . H igonnet.
Baltim ore: Johns H opkins University Press, 1983.
Olney, James. “A utobiography and the Cultural M o m en t.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical,
edited b y O lney, pp. 3-27. Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1980.
Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions o f Self-Representation.
B loom ington: Indiana U niversity Press, 1987.
Spengem ann, W illiam C . The Forms cfAutobiography: Episodes in the History o f a Literary Genre. N ew Haven:
Yale U niversity Press, 1980.
Stanton, D o m n a C . “A utogynography: Is the Subject D ifferent?” In The Female Autograph, edited by
Stanton. N e w York: N ew Y o rk Literary Forum , 1984.
Stein, G ertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, N e w Y ork: R a n d o m H ouse, 1960.
W oolf, Virginia. A Room o f One’s Own. N ew Y ork: H arcourt, 1957.
-------. “Street H aunting: A L ondon A dventure.” In Collected Essays, Volume Four. London: H ogarth Press,
1967.
-------. The Diary o f Virginia Woolf, Volume Five 1936-1941. N e w Y ork: H arcourt, 1984.
 WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?
Out o f the bathtub and into the narrative

Marlene Kadar

Life writing is the broad term used by Evelyn Hinz and Donald W inslow to refer to a genre o f
documents or fragments o f documents written out o f a life, or unabashedly out o f a personal
experience of the writer. In m y view, life writing includes many kinds o f texts, both fictional
and non-fictional, though we tend to focus on the latter because they appear more ‘true to
life.’ The texts that comprise life writing, and that are obviously life stories, are better nam ed
life-narratives, and as such fulfil Aristode’s minim um criteria for a whole story w ith a certain
unity— a beginning, a middle, and an end (634-5). Put another way, a narrative is som ething
that survives paraphrase or translation (Rimm on-Kenan 8), and in spite o f Cleanth B rooks’s
1947 notion that it is ‘heresy’ to paraphrase, life-narratives are paraphraseable.
But life writing includes more than just life stories, and it has the potential to cross genre
boundaries and disciplines. The narratives within life writing are linked by their common th e ­
matic concern with a life, or the self, but in recent years they have come to share a m o re
complex feature: a philosophical and linguistic imperative that comes first (and about w hich w e
will say m ore as we go), and then a sincere, probing disregard for genre and its rules, which has
the effect o f blending genres, creating new genres, and derailing the once-respected ‘objective’
speaker or narrator. The result has been that life w riting is the playground for new relationships
both w ithin and w ithout the text, and most important, it is the site o f new language and n e w
grammars, sometimes blended non-white languages, including Native-Canadian and African-
American styles and dialects. It is the site o f the other, and this other is ‘autobiographical’ in o n e
sense, and not at all in another. Autobiography proper requires too m uch unity o f the narra­
tive, and too m uch ‘objective’ or reasoned thinking, too m uch authority o f the author to be as
irreverent as life writing can be.
Although, we do not have a poetics o f life writing, Jacques Derrida, Jane Gallop, andShoshana
Felman make their contribution to a theorizing of life writing when they celebrate the simi­
larities betw een all types o f narrative— official and unofficial, literary, historical, philosophical,
and psychoanalytic. Virginia W oolf had a sense that autobiographical truth was in flux w h en
she w rote in A Room o f One’s Own in 1929 that ‘the impulse towards autobiography may be
spent’ (76). B ut a few pages later, as she walks through the streets o f London, she becomes
overwhelmed by what must be ‘the accumulation o f unrecorded life, whether from the w om en
at the street comers w ith their arms akimbo . . . talking w ith a gesticulation like the swing o f
Shakespeare’s w ords’ or from ‘drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the
 Marlene Kadar

Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation.
B loom ington: Indiana U niversity Press 1987
Spacks, Patricia M eyer. Gossip. Chicago: University o f C hicago Press 1985
Stanton, D om na, ed. The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice o f Autobiographyfrom the Tenth to the Twentieth
Century. Chicago: U niversity o f C hicago Press 1987
W alker, Alice. The Color Purple. N e w Y ork: H arcourt Brace Jovanovich 1976; London: W o m en ’s Press
1982
W heelw right, Philip. The Presocratics. N e w Y ork: Odyssey 1966
W inslow, D onald J. Life-Writing: A Glossary o f Terms in Biography, Autobiography, and Related Forms. A
B iography M onograph. H onolulu: University o f H awaii Press 1980
W ood, Em est. Zen Dictionary. 1957. H arm ondsworth: P enguin 1977
W oolf, Virginia- A Room o f O ne’s Own. 1929. London: G rafton 1977
-------. Three Guineas. 1938. H arm ondsw orth: Penguin 1977
 13
AUTOPATHOGRAPHY
Women, illness, and life-writing

G. Thomas Couser

The word “pathography” first caught m y attention not in its clinical context, in which it sim ply
refers to writing about illness, such as case histories, but in a review by Joyce Carol Oates o f
David R oberts’s recent biography o f Jean Stafford. There Oates adapted the clinical term to
denote— and to denigrate— what she described as “hagiography’s diminished and often p ru ri­
ent twin, [whose] motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages a n d
failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct” (3). According to Oates—
not entirely a disinterested party, since, as a famous writer, she is sure to be a biographer’s subject
eventually— we are in the midst of an outbreak of diseased biography that dwells obsessively o n
its subjects’ (psycho)pathology.
This may be true, and it may be regrettable. B ut we are also— and the two phenom ena
may be connected—in the midst o f a flowering of w hat I call “ autopathography,” a u to b io ­
graphical narratives o f illness or disability. The texts I have in m ind range from journals t o
essays to full-life narratives, but most lie in a middle range o f “single-experience” autobiogra­
phies. Disease may remain in the background, as w hen serious illness stimulates reassessment
o f a whole life; but usually it is squarely in the foreground, as w hen the narrative is coexten­
sive w ith the illness.
[. . .]
If “pathography” is for Oates a symptom o f cultural pathology, the development o f auto­
pathography is for m e a sign o f cultural health— an acknowledgement and an exploration o f
our condition as embodied selves. One o f the notable and salutary features of this recent trend is
the prominence o f wom en writers in it. Yet despite the fact that we are in the midst of intense
theorizing about w om en’s bodies, and despite signs o f a new interest in literature and the body,1
not m uch critical attention has been paid, as far as I am aware, to the emerging autobiographical
literature o f illness and disease, much o f which has been written by women. I wish to speculate
about life-writing, illness, and gender in somewhat general terms, then discuss two books by
wom en afflicted with multiple sclerosis, Barbara W ebster’s A ll o f a Piece: A Life with Multiple
Sclerosis and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext.
It is obvious, upon reflection (though most o f us rarely reflect upon it), that we have our
being in the world, and act upon it, through our bodies and only through them. As Jonathan
Miller has pointed out,

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O f all the objects in the world, the hum an body has a peculiar status: it is not only
possessed by the person who has it, it also possesses and constitutes him [sic]. [As a
result], . . . it is hard to give an intelligible sense to the idea o f a disembodied person. . . .
O ur body is not, [then] something we have, it is a large part o f what we actually are.
(14)

T hough our selves and our lives are fundamentally bodily, the body has not, until recendy,
figured very prominently in life-writing. This may not be surprising, because, to quote Miller
again, “T he immediate experience o f the hum an body is something w hich w e take for granted.
W e perceive and act with it and become fully aware o f its presence only w hen it is injured, or
when it goes w rong” (10). Exactly: injury and illness (and aging) remind us, in various unwel­
come ways, that we have bodies, that we are bodies.
W hen the subjects o f life-writing are afflicted by sufficiently serious illness or disability, those
conditions do find their way into the texts. B ut except w hen illness threatens life or ends it,
traditional biographers usually treat it as an interruption o f the life that is their proper subject.
Autobiographers are better situated than biographers to report on the bodily lives o f their sub­
jects, but until recently they have seemed disinclined to do so.2 Illness has been as studiously
ignored, or repressed, in life-writing as has the body, and for the same reasons.
[ ...]
Though bodily ills usually entail a degree o f marginalization, this form o f marginalization has
been largely ignored by literary theorists—in favor o f the marginalization o f race, class, gender,
and sexual preference. B ut w hen illness strikes wom en, it may echo and expose the marginaliza­
tion o f gender. Something like this happened to Audre Lorde, w ho was already marginalized
by gender, race, and sexual preference w hen she was afflicted w ith breast cancer. Lorde did
not require disease to raise her consciousness, o f course; rather, her feminism enabled her to
respond to breast cancer in an unorthodox way. For example, she treats the prosthetic device
she is expected to “put o n ” after surgery as a further m utilation o f her w om anhood rather than
the reconstruction o f her identity it is supposed to be. And in The Cancer Journals she constructs
her ow n racial and gender mythology with w hich to counter her disease.
The marginalization produced by disease is sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent;
sometimes, o f course, disease threatens not merely to marginalize but to obliterate the self.
Multiple sclerosis lies betw een extremes: while it is rarely life-threatening, it is always disabling.
According to Nancy Mairs, the disablement can take a variety o f forms:

D uring its course, w hich is unpredictable and uncontrollable, one may lose vision,
hearing, speech, the ability to walk, control o f bladder a nd/or bowels, strength in any
or all extremities, sensitivity to touch, vibration, a nd/or pain, potency, coordination
o f movements— the list o f possibilities is lengthy and, yes, horrifying.
(Plaintext 11)}

[. . .]
At first reading, it may seem that Barbara W ebster and Nancy Mairs adopt antithetical
responses to their disease, with W ebster choosing to withdraw from her ow n body into cerebral
analysis o f her condition, while Mairs struggles to retain her foothold in the world by rooting
her texts in the concrete details o f sensuous experience. Certainly, the writers’ styles are worlds
apart. W hile Mairs’s writing is informal, candid, concrete, and playful, W ebster’s is formal,
reserved, abstract, and impersonal. W ebster’s manner is intellectual, deliberate, and distanced;
her organization topical and recursive rather than narrative and chronological; her focus often
on society rather than on her self. For these reasons, her book may seem to acquiesce in the
alienation o f m ind from body that MS threatens to precipitate.

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 Autopathography: women, illness, and life-writing

However,Webster is emphatically not, to quote Woolf’s sardonic description o f the usual retreat
from the body, “tapering into mysticism, or ris[ing].. .into the raptures o f transcendentalism" (10).
Rather, she works to indicate what her bodily experience implies for all o f us. Doing this involves
challenging certain generic conventions of content and o f form. For example, contrary to the reas­
suring testimony o f most of the MS narratives Webster has read, she finds the disease affecting not
just her body, but also her identity and self-image, not just her self, but her relations with others and
the culture that formed her: “dealing with MS on a purely physical level was a way o f avoiding the
necessary conclusion that one’s very self is at issue and at stake in any real adjustment” (28).
T he persistent abstraction of her style may enact not a retreat from her bodily impediments,
but rather her denial that MS is solely, or even primarily, a matter o f physical symptoms. At the
very least, her all-too-obvious symptoms cause others to react to her as diseased or disabled; lik e
any stigmatic or stereotypical characteristic, they tend to obliterate the subject’s individuality. A n d
she readily admits that her self-perception is at times in danger o f being infected by cultural s te ­
reotypes. Similarly, though the recursiveness o f her book is at times frustrating, it serves to in d ic t
the comforting linearity and cozy closure found in narratives that culminate in cure or c o m ­
plete adjustment. Such linearity tends to deny the reality o f MS, which is incurable and w hose
relapsmg-remitting pattern tends to keep the afflicted figuratively as well as literally off balance.
T o W oolf the overlooked value o f illness for the writer lies in its alteration of vision and th e
consequent disclosure o f hitherto “undiscovered countries.” Webster’s diagnosis confirmed that she
had, as she suspected, been living in an “ undiscovered country,” and it located that country on th e
map. By giving her condition a name, diagnosis gave it reality. As there is no definitive test for M.S,
diagnosis involves making connections among symptoms dissimilar in nature and widely separated
in time. Because o f its difficulty, diagnosis often comes years, even decades, after the first symptoms
are experienced. For all these reasons, diagnosis may be epiphanic; it makes sudden sense of m ys­
terious, intermittent, and apparendy unrelated symptoms.4 In this case, it also vindicated W ebster’s
previous account o f her symptoms (hitherto dismissed or doubted by her family and her doctors);
thus, it retroactively endowed her own incipient life-narrative with authority and credibility.
But Webster’s book is ultimately less concerned with her discovery o f the country o f the dis­
eased than with her disclosures about the country o f the “healthy,” in which most o f us reside m ost
o f the time. The tide o f her first chapter, “Wrestling W ith a Phantom,” might have served as th e
tide o f the whole for two reasons. First, although it is a “watershed” in her life, diagnosis did n o t
make her phantom-like disease easy to grasp, let alone to “pin down.” Second, once she is officially
pronounced ill, she finds herself at odds with a phantom as formidable as her hard-to-diagnose dis­
ease— cultural attitudes towards those in her situation: “disease does not fit in the American worid
view and, in fact, conflicts so sharply as to create a situation in which comfort requires that it not be
seen. Disease is, in fact, an affront” (64).
W ebster neither denies nor claims to transcend the physical facts o f her condition; rather, she
sets out to interrogate cultural (mis)constructions o f disease. T he opening scene of her book, in
w hich she is jostled by impatient elderly American tourists at Luxor airport, stands as a paradigm
o f differing cultural attitudes toward disability:

T hey wanted to know exacdy w hen the flight was leaving and the answer, o f course
was always the same— Insh’atlah (“God willing” or “w hen G od wills”), which infuri­
ated them. . . . Faced w ith a total inability to control w hat was going on, they were
going to extreme lengths to foster their sense of being in control. They seemed to
think that continually fighting for a place in this largely illusory line would get them
to Cairo faster. M y friend and I, on the other hand, having accepted that we had no
control in this situation, were beginning to revel in that feeling.
(2 )

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 G. Thomas Couser

T hough it occurred outside her country, this incident crystallized her sense o f her alienation
within her native culture. (Perhaps it afforded her special insight into her ow n culture because it
happened on foreign soil.) In any case, even as it painfully reinforced her sense o f disability and
marginalization, this episode also enabled her to diagnose her culture’s illness.
As I have suggested, Mairs’s stance is very different from Webster’s. Whereas W ebster guards
her privacy, blocking any voyeuristic impulse in her readers, Mairs is inclined to flaunt herself,
exploiting voyeurism for her own purposes. Typically, rather than cloaking her condition behind a
more general term (“disabled”) or a euphemism (“differendy abled”), she insists upon calling her­
self a “cripple.” Closer to the “more primitive, more sensual, more obscene” language that W oolf
called for (11), Mairs’s style is concise, witty, ironic: “As a cripple, I swagger” (Plaintext 9). Perhaps
because her form o f multiple sclerosis is more serious than Webster’s, she is more forthright about
its debilitating and demoralizing effects. In any case, her graphic description o f her lurching gait
emphasizes the physically disabling and cosmetically disfiguring effects o f the disease:

M y shoulders droop and m y pelvis thrusts forward as I try to balance myself upright,
throwing m y frame into a bony S. As a result of contractures, one shoulder is higher
than the other and I carry one arm bent in front o f me, the fingers curled into a claw.
M y left arm and leg have wasted into pipe-stems, and I try always to keep them cov­
ered. W hen I think about how my body must look to others, especially to men, to
w hom I have been trained to display myself, I feel ludicrous, even loathsome.
(17)

T he body figures far m ore prominently in Mairs’s writing than in W ebster’s. B ut Mairs is
similarly, perhaps even m ore acutely, aware of the cultural construction o f her condition— as
is evident in the last sentence quoted. Like Webster, though in different ways, Mairs tends to
read her condition as culturally as well as physically determined. This is especially true o f the
many afflictions she suffers in addition to MS. In the final and climactic essay in Plaintext, “ O n
Living Behind Bars,” she catalogues ailments dating from her adolescence (well before the onset
o f MS): migraines, disabling menstrual cramps, colds, hay fever, rotting teeth, dizziness, nausea,
and abdominal pain (129). As an adult, she also suffered from agoraphobia and from depression
severe enough to result in a six-m onth confinement in an asylum (and several suicide attempts).5
In “ O n Keeping W om en In /O u t” and especially in “ O n Living Behind Bars,” she reads
her “madness”— her depression and her agoraphobia— in early adulthood as a symptom o f her
predicam ent as a woman— especially as a woman writer:

W e have had to hide while menstruating, cover our heads and swaddle our bodies,
lower our eyes, hold our tongues. N ot by accident has the process o f giving birth, per­
haps the most active o f hum an endeavors, been euphemized by a verb used always in
the passive, “to be confined.” Ours has been a history o f confinement, in the childbed,
in the crinoline, in the kitchen, even (if all other safe harbors fail) in the asylum. . . .
W e’ve know n where w e belong. And if we've tried to trespass over the threshold, our
hearts have knocked, our mouths have gone dry and our skins damp, our lungs have
shriveled, our bowels have let go. There’s nothing like the symptoms o f agoraphobia
for keeping a wom an in her place. Let me tell you. Nothing.
(103)

Nothing, one is tempted to reply, but the symptoms ofMS, which confines her more consistendy than
her agoraphobia. But Mairs is not so much concerned with the literal confinement that is increasingly

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 Autopathography: women, illness, and life-writing

her lot as with her literary confinement, the circumscription of her talent by her conditioned sense o f a
woman’s place. Thus she hastens to add that the confinement of agoraphobia is not conducive to -writ­
ing. O n the contrary, the agora is symbolic, “any area perceived as part o f the patriarchal domain. For
that reason, writing causes me as much anxiety as any other incursion into masculine activity” (103).
She is not safe from agoraphobia even in “a room of her own”; rather, in the space reserved for and
dedicated to writing, agoraphobia may assume its most subtle and insidious form.
Although Mairs never characterizes MS as a psychosomatic or culturally caused disease, she
does see a parallel between the loss o f power attendant upon MS and the passivity of her position
in intercourse. She wonders, “to what extent is multiple sclerosis merely the physical inscription of
my way o f being in the world? In sex, as in the rest of my life, I am acted upon. I am the object,
not the agent. I live in the passive voice” (85). Paradoxically, however, disease may have helped to
make Mairs a writer. Insofar as she discovered some o f her major themes, the larger patterns o f h e r
life, in coming to terms with disease, especially with MS, her confidence, mobility, and authority
as a writer have been inversely related to her physical mobility. Although writing is obviously no
cure for MS, Mairs suggests that it may help to alleviate some other, more transient ills:

I have had time to translate m y madness into the rituals that keep me alive as well as
dying. B ut at least I know now that depression and agoraphobia are metaphors, codes
in the cultural text in w hich I am embedded. N ot entities. N ot the inevitable fate of
the wom an w ho trespasses onto the page. I’m a writer. If I can make the change, I’m
sure as hell going to revise them out o f this script.
(105)

Her characterization o f life here in terms of a script, o f disease in terms o f cultural codes, does n o t
trivialize them; rather, it serves to render her life-text more amendable, more amenable to revision.
It is a strategy based in a conception of her writing as a vital art in the etymological sense.
According to Ortner, w om en have been ill situated w ith regard to m en because they are
thought to be particularly, or peculiarly, embodied. According to Woolf, illness has not been a
prime literary subject in part because o f a masculinist valorization o f the m ind over the body. I f
women and ill people are both marginalized in different ways, then sick wom en are doubly m ar­
ginalized. W ith recent developments in autopathography, then, we have a return of the doubly, o r
perhaps triply, repressed— an overt, unembarrassed, unapologetic representation o f the ill, female
body. If illness is a literary no m an’s land, it may be, by default, a terrain available for women to
map, a zone in which to rehabilitate the body as a literary subject, and a site on w hich to chal­
lenge the conventional dom ination o f mind over body. By acknowledging their illnesses and
exposing the cultural components o f their disability— subjecting their cultures to lay diagnosis—
Mairs and Webster demonstrate that “ill” women may be well-equipped to reconceptualize the
relation between psyche and soma, to write the life o f the body as well as the life o f the mind.

Notes
1 According to Elaine Scarry, “the hum an body is at the present m om ent a special site o f attention and
concern. As a historical phenom enon, there is nothing surprising about this: the very extremity o f the
skepticism about the referential capacities o f language in the past decade made it almost inevitable that
at the m om ent w hen language was finally reconnected to the world, the prim ary site o f reconnection
w ould be n o t ju st this o r that piece o f material ground but th e m ost extreme locus o f materialization,
the live body.The body is b o th continuous w ith a w ider material realm that includes history and nature,
and also discontinuous w ith it because it is the rem inder o f the extremity o f risks entailed in the issue o f
reference” (xx-xxi).

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 {j. 1nomas Couser

2 A n exception m ight be the subgenre o f athletes’ autobiographies, w hich is o f course dom inated by males.
B ut here the focus is n o t so m uch o n the body as o n the sport, o r even the career o f the athlete. In any
case, this genre tends to characterize the body as submissive to the will, an efficient tool, rather than to
reflect o n it as a m edium o f selfhood.
3 Typically, she adds, “O n e may also lose o n e ’s sense o f hum or.”
4 Because it depends o n the establishment o f relationships am ong disparate and discrete events, diagno­
sis, itself a m ajor life-event, may encourage die habit o f seeing large-scale patterns. In any case, Mairs
describes h e r ow n w riting in terms equally apt for the process o f diagnosing M S: “ O n ly recendy have I
begun to concatenate my experiences into patterns distinct from the narrative ground in w hich they are
em bedded:This process 1 call essay-writing” (Plaintext 127).
5 The relation betw een MS and depression, i f any, is unclear. M a in puts it this way: “I am immobilized by
acute attacks o f depression, w hich m ay o r n o t be physiologically related to M S b u t are certainly its logical
concom itant” (Plaintext 13). It is w o rth n o tin g that before M S is diagnosed, its victims are often diag­
nosed as clinically depressed. W ebster was referred to a psychiatrist, and caught in a diagnostic double­
bind, she reluctandy agreed to see him : “T he fact that I w ould n o t adm it that I was clinically depressed
(and I think in retrospect it is clear that I was not) co nfirm ed th em in th e ir belief that I was___I found
the w hole situation very depressing indeed, and it was difficult to m aintain a sense o f integrity in the face
o f all this disapproval and certainty” (8).

Works cited
Lorde, A udre. The CancerJournals. N .p.: Spinsters, 1980.
Mairs, N ancy. Plaintext. Tucson: U niversity o f A rizona Press, 1986.
M iller, Jonathan. The Body in Question. N e w Y ork: R an d o m , 1978.
O ates, Joyce Carol. “Adventures in A bandonm ent.” R ev . o f Jean Stafford: A Biography, by David R oberts.
N ew York Times Book Review 28 Aug. 1988: 3, 33.
O rtner, Sherry B. “Is Female to M ale as N ature Is to C u lture?” Woman, Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle
Zimbalist R osaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford U niversity Press, 1974. 67-87.
Scarry, Elaine. Introduction. Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. Ed. Elaine Scarry.
Baltimore: Johns H opkins University Press, 1988. via—xxvii.
W ebster, Barbara. A ll of a Piece: A Life with Multiple Sclerosis. B altim ore: Jo h n s H opkins University Press,
1989.
W oolf, Virginia. “ O n Being Gl.” The Moment and Other Essays. N e w Y ork: H arcourt, 1948. 9-23.

100
 14
BIOGRAPHY AND
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Intermixing the genres

Lois W. Banner

Tw o years ago, I decided to write my autobiography. I was in m y mid-fifties, drawn tow ard
taking stock o f m y life, its accomplishments and meaning. I was probably entering what g e r­
ontologists term the time o f “life review.” ' In addition, I was increasingly concerned by m y
students’ lack o f awareness of second wave feminism, o f how that movem ent had reshaped
American gender possibilities. They had little comprehension o f m y generation’s life trajecto­
ries, of the sexism against which we had struggled. They seemed to confuse my present w ith
my past and to envision my career as without difficulties, as somehow constructed out o f w hole
cloth from the beginning. W hen I told them my life story, detailed the gender difficulties I h a d
encountered, they were both shocked and intrigued.
Moreover, younger scholars o f w om en’s history, studying the 1950s, an historical p e rio d
through which I had lived, were beginning to interpret it in ways antithetical to m y m em ory.
My recollection o f that decade was o f a time o f oppression, o f the closing off of opportunities
to women. Yet m ore and more I read articles in scholarly journals and heard papers at conven­
tions presenting the 1950s as a period o f possibilities, as one w hich germinated 1960s feminism
rather than standing as the nadir o f the gender conservatism engendered by the post-Depression
and post-W orld W ar II mentality. Increasingly, Betty Friedan’s characterization o f the decade
as dominated by a “feminine mystique” (a devotion to domesticity) and “ the problem that has
no name” (the absence of any definition o f what was wrong) was coming under attack.2 W ere
these younger scholars right in their positive estimations o f the 1950s and was my negative
memory inaccurate? W ere my experiences o f oppression unusual, and was Betty Friedan’s nar­
rative too much colored by the survey o f her Smith College classmates w hich had inspired her
to write The Feminine Mystique ?3 Middle class and educated, these Smith college graduates were
hardly representative o f all women: did their experiences represent only a small part o f wom en’s
historical reality?
Or, had w e crossed a generational divide? My previous work in w om en’s history had con­
vinced me that, in the 1920s, a generation o f young wom en had largely rejected the concerns o f
the activist wom en o f the Progressive decades who had preceded them (Women 148-76). Was
history repeating itself, again producing a generation o f post-feminist wom en, like those in m y
classes, concerned primarily with combining home and careers, critical o f a previous generation
o f rights-oriented women, and even ready to abandon the designation o f “feminism” for some
new term? (Ironically, the word “feminism” first appeared in the U nited States in the 1910s to

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 Harvey Young

black gay m en w ith in society by dem anding acknowledgment. M uch like a dish breaking, the sound
generated by the snap commands attention.
4 I use the te rm cinem atographic poetry to refer n o t only to the presence o f actual poetry w ithin the
film b u t also to the “p o etic” visual style o f R iggs’s films. B oth Tongues Untied and Black Is Black A in ’t are
m arked by their lyrical and rhythm ic editing. They are visual poems. T hey are the vocal made visible.
5 T h e film m aker proves this by re-presenting a m em ory belonging to Joseph B eam , editor o f In the Life, as
his ow n. In this scene, R iggs, wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket, depicts him self w alking along
a city sidewalk. In voice-over, he declares: “I am walking dow n Spruce/C astro/C hristopher Street on m y
way to work. A h alf block away, walking towards me, is another B h c k gay m an. We have seen each other
in the clubs. Side by side, and at the precise m om ent that o u r eyes should m eet, he studies the intricate
detail o f a building. I check my w hite sneakers for scuff marks” (Beam 2 3 2 -3 3 ).T h e film recreates this
scenario. As B iggs walks, he sees another m an approaching. A t the m om ent that the tw o are about to pass
one another, the camera— now filming R iggs’s p o in t o f view— looks away. B y appropriating the words o f
another, the film maker is able to better see himself. B eam ’s experience can becom e R iggs’s experience,
because his experience is the black gay m ale experience. T he particular is the universal.

Works cited
Beam, Joseph. In the Life. Boston: Alyson, 1986.
Couser, G. Thom as. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. M adison: U niversity o f W isconsin
Press, 1997.
Davis, Angela. Y. “Black W om en and Music: A Historical Legacy o f Struggle.” Wild Women in the Whirlwind.
Ed. Joanne M . B raxton and A ndree N . McLaughlin. N e w Brunswick, N J: R utgers University Press,
1990. 4 -2 1 .
H em phill, Essex. Brother to Brother: Wordsfrom the Heart. Boston: Alyson, 1991.
-------. Ceremonies. N e w Y ork: Plum e, 1992.
O lney, James. Metaphors o f Self: The Meaning o f Autobiography. Princeton: P rinceton U niversity Press, 1972.
Petty, Sheila. “Silence and Its O pposite: Expressions o f R ace in Tongues U ntied” Documenting the
Documentary. Ed. Barry K. G rant and Jeannette Sloniowski. D etroit: W ayne State U niversity Press,
1998. 416-28.
R iggs, M arlon T .f p ro d ./d ir. Black Is Black A in ’t. California N ewsreel, 1995.
-------, p ro d ./d ir. Tongues Untied. Frameline, 1989.
-------. “Tongues U ntied: A n Interview w ith M arlon R iggs.” By R o n Sim mons. Black Film Review 5.3
(1989): 2 0-22.
T ougaw , Jason. “ Testim ony and the Subjects o f AIDS M em oirs.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10.1 (Spring
1995): 235-56.
 19
TELLING TALES
Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and transgender
biography

Jack/Judith Halberstam

T he names “Brandon Teena” and “Billy T ipton” have become synonymous with a cluster
of questions and concerns about passing, gender identities, memory, history and transgender
biography. Brandon Teena was a young wom an w ho passed successfully as a man in a small
town in Nebraska and w ho was brutally murdered w hen some local m en decided to take their
bloody revenge for w hat they considered to be a grand deception. Billy Tipton was a jazz musi­
cian w ho was only discovered to have a female body after his death. Since T ipton had married
several times and was survived by a wife and adopted children, the revelation of his biologi­
cal sex created a m inor sensation. In the case o f each of these transgender subjects, their lives
were dismanded and reassembled through a series o f biographical inquiries. This paper situates
transgender biography as a sometimes violent, often imprecise project w hich seeks to brutally
erase the carefully managed details o f the life o f a passing person and w hich recasts the act of
passing as deception, dishonesty and fraud.
I will be asking here what kind o f truths about gender we demand from the lives o f people
who pass or cross-dress or simply refuse normative gender categories. N one o f the transgender
subjects w hom I examine here can be definitively identified as transsexual, none can be read as
lesbian; all must be read and remembered according to the narratives they meticulously circu­
lated about themselves w hen they were alive. “Telling Tales” addresses thom y questions about
the ethics o f biography, about who has the right to tell tales about whose life; and it explores
and fleshes out the postm odern category “transgender.”

Transgender history
[ ...]
O ne way in w hich queers and transgenders have put themselves in the way o f gender realness
is to inhabit categories o f their own making. W hile some people suggest that categories (gay,
lesbian, transsexual) are themselves the site o f regulation, trouble, and repression, I would argue
that, to use one o fB u d e r’s terms, categories represent sites o f “necessary trouble” (14).1 Queer
theory has long been preoccupied with the relationship between identity and regulation; post-
Foucault, we recognize that to embrace identities can simply form part of a “reverse discourse”
within which medically constructed categories are lent the weight of realness by people’s will­
ingness to occupy those categories.2 However, it may be that w e have allowed this Foucauldian

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 jacK/judith Halberstam

insight to redirect discussions o f identification away from the subject o f categories themselves.
T he term “reverse discourse” in The History o f Sexuality, Vol. 1 identifies and rejects the tradi­
tional formulations o f gay and lesbian political struggle as essentially oppositional. Since certain
sexual liberation discourses recapitulate the very terms o f the hom o/hetero binary that oppress
minority sexual subjects in the first place, these discourses become part o f the installation o f the
very sexual hierarchy that they seek to oppose. However, Foucault also understands emancipa­
tion struggles as strategically and historically necessary; furthermore, a “reverse discourse” is
in no way the “same” as the discourse it reverses; indeed, its desire for reversal is a desire for
transformation.
W e may not want to reject all reverse discourses per se but may want to limit the ways in
which we invest in them (“coming out,” for example) as end points; Foucault, and Buder for
that matter, clearly believe that resistance has to go beyond the taking o f a name (“I am a les­
bian”) and must produce creative new forms o f being by assuming and empowering a marginal
positionality. Furthermore, the production o f categories is different in different spaces— expert-
produced categories (“the homosexual,” “the invert," “the transsexual”) are ultimately far less
interesting or useful than sexual vernaculars or the categories produced and sustained within
sexual subcultures. T he naming o f sexual vernaculars and the production o f community histo­
ries can be traced back to the w ork o f Gayle R ubin in particular, and she has spoken eloquently
about the limits o f expert discourses on sexuality (like psychoanalysis) and the importance o f
questions o f “sexual ethnogenesis” (the formation o f sexual communities).3 Scientific discourses
have tended to narrow our ability to imagine sexuality and gender otherwise and in general the
discussions that take place in medical communities about embodiment and desire may be way
behind the discussions taking place on email lists, in support groups, and in sex clubs. Doctors
use categories in very different ways than people cruising for a sexual partner use categories.
Accordingly, we should take over the prerogative o f naming our experience and identifications.
N ow here has the effect o f naming our identifications been clearer in recent years than in
relation to the experience w e call “transgendered.” Transgender is for the most part a vernacular
term developed within gender communities to account for the cross-identification experiences
o f people who may not accept all o f the protocols and strictures o f transsexuality. Such people
understand cross-identification as a crucial part of their gendered self but they may pick and
choose among the options o f body modification, social presentation, and legal recognition avail­
able to them. So, you may find that a transgender male is a female bom subject w ho has had
no sex-reassignment surgery, takes testosterone (with or w ithout medical supervision) and lives
as a man mosdy but is recognized by his community as a transgendered man in particular. The
term “transgender” in this context refuses the stability that the term “transsexual” may offer to
some folks and embraces m ore hybrid possibilities for embodiment and identification. At the
same time, the term “ transsexual” is itself undergoing reconstruction by publicly identifiable
transsexuals; Kate Bom stein for one has made a career from the reshaping o f the public discourse
around gender and transsexuality.4 In other words, transsexual is not simply the conservative
medical term to transgender’s transgressive vernacular; rather, both transsexuality and trans-
genderism shift and change in meaning and application in relation to each other rather than in
relation to a hegemonic medical discourse.
[ ...]
W hile m y efforts to examine the flurry o f representation surrounding Brandon Teena and
Billy T ipton and other transgender figures actually adds to this effect, the production o f counter­
narratives seems all important in a media age when suppression o f information is virtually impos­
sible (nor would I necessarily argue for the suppression o f information under any circumstances).
In the cases of Billy T ipton and Brandon Teena, however, it serves some purpose to examine

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 Telling tales: transgender biography

the motives behind various representations o f transgender lives. In general w e can identify th re e
different and often competing sets o f motivations for the representation o f a transgender life by
nontransgender people: 1) The project of stabilization— in this m ode of production, the d esta­
bilizing effects o f the transgender narrative are defused by establishing the transgender narrative
as strange and uncharacteristic and even pathological. 2) The project of rationalization— h e re
the biographer or film maker or writer finds reasonable explanations for behavior that seem s
dangerous and outrageous: an economic motive, a need to be in hiding, and the lack o f c o m ­
munity are some rationalizing narratives. 3) T he project of trivialization— the transgender life
might be dismissed w ithin such a narrative as non-representative and interesting but w ithout any
real effects upon gender normativity.
The term transgender can be used as a marker for all kinds o f people w ho challenge, deliber­
ately or accidentally, gender normativity. Jazz singer Litde Jimmy Scott, for example, is a m ale
vocalist whose high counter tenor voice causes him to be heard as female. His voice has b e e n
described as “angelic, ” and he has influenced many famous female jazr vocalists like N an cy
Wilson. The term cransgender can be applied here not to remove Jimmy Scott from the c a t­
egory “male” but to prevent him from being heard as “female.” In interviews he strenuously
objects to criticisms o f his voice that liken it to a wom an’s and he insists, in a way, that his
voice, his transgender voice, extends the category of maleness rather than capitulate to the strict
dictates o f gender normativity. In this context, the term “transgender” appears as an adjective to
describe a voice rather than as an identification category which describes Scott’s gender identity
or sexual orientation. In what follows, I will use transgender as a descriptive term for several
different forms o f non-normative gender presentation. W hile Jim m y Scott has recendy given
interviews about the medical condition (Kallmann syndrome— a horm onal dysfunction) w h ic h
gave him his high voice and his androgynous appearance, other people w ho present their gender
ambiguously may not be given the opportunity to explain what motivates their gender vari­
ance.5 Transgender history should be a discourse w hich allows the gender ambiguous to speak;
too often the histories o f women w ho pass as m en or the narratives o f transgender m en attem pt
to rationalize rather than represent transgender lives in the glory o f all their contradictions.

Ghost writing: the case of Billy Tipton

Early on in Trumpet, a haunting novel by British author Jackie Kay, Mifficent M oody, th e
widow o f the celebrated jazz musician Joss M oody, comments: “The only thing that feels
authentic to m e is my past” (37). Shortly after her husband dies, the secret that she and Joss have
kept meticulously over the years o f their marriage leaks out to the press: Joss M oody was b om a
woman. As MiUicent M oody mourns the death o f her beloved husband, she also has to fend o f f
journalists, try to repair the damaged relationship with her son, and protect the memories o f h e r
life with joss from the vicious re-writings to which they are now subject. “I am the only one,”
she says, “who can remember him the way he wanted to be remembered” (40).
In Trumpet, as even a short summary o f the novel makes clear, Joss M oody is modeled on
the life and death o f the American jazz musician, Billy Tipton. W hen Tipton died in 1992,
paramedics called by his son were shocked to find breasts beneath the man’s clothing. T ipton’s
son and wife claimed to have no knowledge of T ipton’s secret. Unlike T ipton’s wife, Mifficent
M oody in Kay’s novel Trumpet is depicted as having full knowledge o f the “facts” o f her hus­
band’s embodiment. For Millicent, her husband’s breasts and female genitalia were “ our secret,”
a secret not all that different from the many secrets kept between spouses: “Lots o f people have
secrets, don’t they? The world runs on secrets. W hat kind o f place w ould the world be w ithout
them?” (10). The revelation o f the secret of the passing man or woman, however, seems to

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occasion a very particular kind o f curiosity and has produced sometimes cruel and disrespectful
revisions o f life narratives. The revelation of Billy T ipton’s “secret,” for example, prom pted
speculation and investigation o f the so called “true” identity ofBilly Tipton.
In her highly publicized biography o f Tipton, Suits Me: The Double Life o f Billy Tipton,
Diane M iddlebrook comes dangerously close to claiming that T ipton’s life as a man was sim­
ply the result o f his overwhelming ambition to perform as a musician. This rubric then forces
M iddlebrook to view his relationships w ith w om en as elaborate deceptions; she depicts Tipton
accordingly and variously as a “magician” (147) weaving a “tangled web o f deceit” (176), as
lacking “self-esteem” (222), as someone w ho preyed upon innocent and naive women. O f
one wife, Betty, who was young w hen she married Tipton, M iddlebrook writes: “Billy made
a shrewd choice in choosing Betty as a partner, and it is the shrewdness that diminishes Billy’s
m oral stature” (177). Suddenly, the objective and scholarly biographer has turned into judge and
juror; the life hanging in the balance is measured by impossibly high standards.
[ .. .]
R eturning again to Jackie Kay’s novel, w e find a character closely m irroring Middlebrook.
In Trumpet, a biographer is hot on the trail o f Joss’s secrets and tries to bribe both his son and
his wife to give her information about Joss. In the last half o f the novel, Kay details the struggle
betw een journalist Sophie Stones and Joss’s son Colman over the docum enting ofjoss’s life; it is
in this section o f the novel that Jackie Kay forcefully brings to a crisis questions about naming,
identity and narrative. In the characterization o f Sophie Stones, moreover, it is impossible not
to read parallels between Sophie and Middlebrook. W hile M iddlebrook’s biography o f Tipton
was commissioned by his last wife, Kitty— almost to exonerate her from the supposed crime
o f impersonation so successfully enacted by her late husband, in Trumpet Joss’s wife steadfastly
refuses to have anything to do w ith a biography o f Joss, and Millicent comments in outrage:
“the idea that I could cooperate with a book about my life, that I could graft myself into this
life that they think I had . . . M y life is up for grabs. N o doubt they will call m e a lesbian. They
w ill find words to fit onto me. W ords that don’t fit me. W ords that don’t fit Joss” (153-54).
Kay depicts the biographer as a stranger w ho seeks intimacy w ith the dead for the purposes of
telling a good story: “T he public might hate perverts,” she tells herself, “but they love reading
about them ” (264). In order to tell the story o f the cross-dresser or the transgender subject, the
biographer must convince herself that her own life is normal, beyond reproach, honest. But
Kay shows that biography as a project is inevitably bound to deception and manipulation in its
ow n way— how else does the biographer get loved ones to inform upon their former father/
husband/son? H ow else to create a position from w hich to judge? At one point, however,
Sophie Stones questions her ow n motivations, and asks herself: “I w onder w hat I would have
felt if I had been Mill M oody. W ould I have fallen for Joss M oody too?” (126). This question is
an uncanny echo o f M iddlebrook’s own questions about her m otivation for rewriting T ipton’s
carefully constructed life. In both cases, the biographer is shown as one w ith no identification
w ith the subject of their biographical project; in both cases, the biographer can only wonder
about the desire directed at the transgender subject.
In a flurry o f investigative zeal, Kay’s novel shows us that a life carefiilly w ritten by its author,
ow ned and shielded by loved ones, may suddenly stand exposed as a lie. T h e beauty of Kay’s
narrative is that she does not try to undo the life narrative o f a passing man; rather she sets out
to honor it by weaving together a patchwork o f memories from Joss’s survivors, but mainly his
wife, and making that patchwork into the authentic narrative. W hen M illicent asserts, “I am
the only one w ho can rem em ber him the way he wanted to be rem em bered,” she rejects the
attempts made by the press to revise, reform and rescript her husband. Although the blurb on
the back cover of Trumpet refers to the love between Millicent and Joss as som ething built “out

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o f a complex, dazzling lie,” the novel itself quietly side-steps the equation between passing a n d
lying and instead investigates the particularity o f desire: “ I didn’t feel like I was living a lie,”
Millicent thinks. “I felt like I was living a life” (95).
[. . .]
By taking aim at the project of narrating a life built around passing, Kay’s novel also pro­
duces im portant questions about the project o f transgender history and biography. The danger
o f biography, Kay’s novel suggests, lies in the way “ [m]any ghost writers believe they are th e
real authority on their subject and not the ghost themselves” (262). Kay warns us here to listen,
to the ghost. In her beautiful sociological study o f haunting, Avery Gordon also advises us to
listen to the ghost, to hear the unspoken and to see the invisible; she remarks: “The ghost is not
simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense
site w here history and subjectivity make social life” (8). Obviously, the ghost for Gordon is not
quite the same as the ghost for Kay, yet both texts share a sense o f the mechanism of haunt­
ing as an articulate discourse. B oth texts also suggest that haunting is a mode within which the
ghost demands something like accountability: to tell a ghost story means being willing to be
haunted. “Following the ghosts,” Gordon says, “is about making a contact that changes you and
refashions the social relations in which you are located” (22). The error o f the willful biographer
lies in her refusal to be changed by her encounter w ith the ghost she chases; the m ethod of the
transgender historian must be encounter, confrontation, transformation.
Kay’s novel raises thorny questions about biography, about precisely the kind o f biography
that M iddlebrook has written: should identification be a prerequisite for writing up someone’s
life? Is a biography that tells tales and reveals secrets an act o f violence? Should there be an ethics
o f biography? Kay herself points to the danger o f biography and warns us to listen to the ghost.
And unlike the ghost w riter w ho cares nothing about the ghost, Kay grants her ghost the last
word. In the novel’s final section, Joss returns from the dead in a letter he leaves for his son
to finally tell his ow n story. This simple but effective gesture of giving Joss the last w ord sum­
marizes Kay’s particular interest in the Tipton legend and its retelling. She comes to praise, to
memorialize, to elegize Tipton/M oody and coundess transgender men, and not to bury them.

Falls City, Nebraska: a good place to die?

W hile T ipton died a so-called natural death in 1992 only to have his life rearranged by the dis­
covery o f his “secret,” Brandon Teena, one year later, was exposed and then killed precisely for his
secret. T he tragic facts o f the case are as follows: on Decem ber 31,1993 three young people were
shot to death, execution style, in a town named Falls City in rural Nebraska. Ordinarily this story
w ould have evoked only mild interest from mainstream America and a few questions about the
specific brutalities o f rural America; however, one o f the three victims was a young w hite person
w ho had been born a wom an but w ho was living as a man and had been dating local girls. The
other two victims, Brandon’s friend, Lisa Lambert, and her friend, Philip DeVine— a disabled
African-American man— appeared to have been killed because they were in the wrong place at
the w rong time although this too is debatable. I will allude here to a few o f the multiple narra­
tives that collect around the name Brandon Teena and lay out some o f the battles about gender
identity, regionality, class, sexuality and violence that have been produced by this incident. A close
investigation o f the life and death o f Brandon reveals that more than transgender politics are at
stake in the narratives that emerge from this case; also at issue are questions about urban versus
rural queer identities, and a more genera] discussion o f white masculinities and geographies of
gender. As a supporting text for the discussion o f this case, I will use the independent video by
Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir called The Brandon Teena Story. However, it is w orth noting

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 *■*.»/» x i u i u c i s i U T Y l

that this video is just one o f a slew o f media representations o f the case in recent years: the story
has been fictionalized in a novel by Dinitia Smith called The Illusionist; it has been w ritten up as
a true crime mystery called A ll S /H e Wanted by Aphrodite Jones; Diane Keaton has been trying
unsuccessfully to produce a feature film about the case, starring Drew Barrymore, but fortunately
she was beaten to the punch by independent film maker Kim Peirce whose feature Boys D on't
Cry was released in 1999 to m uch acclaim. At the same time, queer media artist Shu Lea Cheang
has created a web site for the Guggenheim simply called “Brandon” which she describes as a
“multiartist, m ulti-author, multi-institutional collaboration.”
In The Brandon Teena Story, Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir attempt to place the narrative
o f Brandon’s life and death firmly in the countryside o f Nebraska, so m uch so that Nebraska
takes on the role and presence o f a character in this drama. W e see prolonged shots o f the rolling
Nebraska countryside, road signs welcom ing the traveler to Nebraska’s “good life," and scenes
of everyday life and culture in small tow n America. T he film makers make it clear that their
relationship to Falls City and its communities is ironic and distanced; the camera peers voyeuris-
tically at the demolition derby, the local line-dancing and karaoke bar, and at the lives of the
people touched by the Brandon story. In a significant scene providing “local color,” the camera
pans the backs o f local m en watching a demolition derby; as the gaze sweeps over them, the
m en are rendered in slow m otion as they turn and gaze back w ith hostile stares o f nonrecogni­
tion. Interactions betw een the camera and its subjects register the film makers as outsiders to the
material realities o f the rural Midwest, mark the objects o f the gaze as literally haunted by an
invisible camera, and finally these interactions place the viewer at a considerable difference from
the actors on the screen. This distance not only allows for the emergence o f multiple versions
o f the Brandon Teena story but also pins the narrative o f homophobic and transphobic violence
firmly to the landscape o f white trash America and forces modes of strenuous disidentification
between viewer and landscape.
The landscape o f Nebraska then serves as a contested site upon which multiple narratives
unfold, narratives indeed which refuse to collapse into simply one story, The Brandon Teena
Story. Some o f these narratives are narratives o f hate, some o f desire; others tell o f ignorance
and brutality; still others o f isolation and fear; some allow violence and ignorant prejudices to
become the essence o f white poor rural identity; still others provoke questions about the deploy­
m ent o f whiteness and the regulation o f violence. W hile the video itself encourages the viewer
to distance herself from the horror o f the heartlands and to even congratulate herself for living
in an urban rather than a rural environment, ultimately we can use Brandon’s story to begin the
articulation of the stories o f working class white rural queers and to map the immensely complex
relations that make rural America a site o f horror and degradation in the urban imagination.
For queers w ho flee the confines o f the rural Midwest and take comfort in urban anonymity,
this video may serve as a justification o f their worst fears about the violent effects o f failing to flee;
closer readings o f Brandon’s story, however, reveals the desire shared by many Midwestern queers
for a way o f staying rather than leaving. While some journalists in the wake o f Brandon’s murder
queried his decision to stay in Falls City, despite having been hounded by the police and raped
by the m en who went on to murder him, we must consider the condition o f “staying put” as part
o f the production of complex queer subjectivities. Some queers need to leave home in order to
become queer, others need to stay close to home in order to preserve their difference. [...] This
beautiful but scary image o f rural life as a space all too easily violated depends absolutely upon an
opposite image, the image o f rural life as wide-open and free-ranging, as “big sky” and open plains.
[. . .]
One way in which the The Brandon Teena Story is able to grapple with the lives beneath the
stereotypes (of white trash, o f gender impersonation) is by allowing some of the women w hom

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Brandon dated to explain themselves and articulate their own extraordinary desires. In the m edia
rush to uncover the motivations behind Brandon’s depiction o f himself as a man, most accounts
o f the case have overlooked the fact that Brandon was actively chosen over more conventionally
male men by the women he dated despite the fact that there were few social rewards for d o in g so.
O ne girlfriend after another [...] characterizes Brandon as a fantasy guy, a dream guy, a man "who
“knew how a woman wanted to be treated.” Gina describes him as romantic, special, and attentive,
while Lana Tisdale describes him as “ every woman’s dream.” Brandon, we might conclude, lived
up to and even played into the romantic ideals that his girlfriends cultivated about masculinity.
Brandon’s self-presentation must be read as a damaging critique o f the white working-class m ascu­
linities around him; at th e same time, however, his performance o f courtly masculinity is a shrewd
deployment of the middle-class and so-called respectable masculinities that represent an Am erican
romantic ideal o f manhood. In the accounts that the women give o f their relations with B randon
we understand that he not only deliberately offered them a treatment they could not expect from
local boys, he also acknowledged the complexity of their self-understandings and desires.
In order to understand the kinds o f masculinities w ith w hich Brandon may have been c o m ­
peting, we can turn to the representations o f the murderers themselves. While some accounts of
the Brandon Teena case have attempted to empathize with the m en w ho murdered B randon—
John Lotter and T om Nissen— by revealing their traumatic family histories and detailing th e ir
encounters w ith abuse, the video tries to encourage the m en to give their own reasons for th e ir
brutality. The conversations w ith Nissen and Lotter are fascinating for the way they allow th e
m en to coolly describe rape and m urder scenes, and also because Lotter in particular articulates
an astute awareness o f the violence o f the culture into w hich he was raised. Nissen, how ever,
shows little pow er o f self-reflection; the tape represents him as ultimately far more reprehensible
than his partner in crime.
[ ...]
In “Get Thee to a Big City; Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration,” anthropologist
Kath W eston begins a m uch needed inquiry into the difference between urban and rural “sexual
imaginaries.” She comments upon the rather stereotyped division o f rural/urban relations w hich
“locates gay subjects in the city while putting their presence in the countryside under erasure”
(262). W eston also traces the inevitable disappointments that await rural queers w ho escape
the country only to arrive in alienating queer urban spaces. Ultimately W eston proposes: " T h e
gay imaginary is not just a dream o f a freedom to be gay that requires an urban location, but a
symbolic space that configures gayness itself by elaborating an opposition between urban a n d
rural life” (274). W eston wants us to recognize that the distinction between the urban and the
rural that props up the gay imaginary is a symbolic one and as such it constitutes a dream o f an
elsewhere w hich promises a freedom it can never provide. However, we also want to be specific
about which queer subjects face what kinds o f threats from w hom and in what locations. W hile
in the city, for example, we may find that the gay or transsexual person o f color is most at risk
for violence from racist cops, in rural locations we may find that even the white queers w ho
were b om and raised there are outlawed w hen they disrupt the carefully protected hom ogeneity
o f white, family-oriented communities. W e may also find that while the brutalization of a trans­
gender sex worker o f color raises little outcry in the city from local queer activists, the m urder
o f a white boy in rural N orth America can stir up an enormous activist response which is itself
symbolic o f these ocher imaginary divisions.
I believe that an extensive analysis of the Brandon Teena murders can serve to frame the
many questions about identification, responsibility, class, regionality and race that trouble queer
communities today. N o t only does Brandon represent a martyr lost in the struggle for transgen­
der rights to the brutal perpetrators o f rural hetero-masculine violences, Brandon also serves as
 nuwersiam

a marker for a particular set o f late-twentieth century cultural anxieties about place, whiteness
and rural existence. Fittingly, Brandon has becom e the name for gender variance, for fear o f
transphobic and homophobic punishment; Brandon also embodies the desire directed at non-
normative masculinities. Brandon represents other rural lives undone by fear and loathing and
his story also symbolizes an urban fantasy o f hom ophobic violence as essentially Midwestern.
B ut violence, -wherever we may find it, marks different conflictual relations in different sites; and
homicide, on some level, always depicts the micro-realities o f other batdes displaced from the
abstract to the tragically material. W hile at least one use o f any Brandon Teena project must be
to connect B randon’s gender presentation to other counter narratives o f gender realness, I also
hope that Brandon’s story can be a vehicle for discussions about class, violence, geography and
queer migration. O n some level Brandon’s story, while cleaving to its own specificity, needs to
remain an open narrative— not a stable narrative o f FT M transsexual identity nor a singular tale
o f queer bashing, not a cautionary fable about the violence o f rural America nor an advertise­
m ent for urban organizations o f queer community; like the narrative o f Billy Tipton, Brandon’s
story permits a dream o f transformation.
T he stories o f Brandon Teena and Billy Tipton, their ow n stories, the stories that are told
about them, and the stories that the people around them produce or help to produce conclude
several outm oded narratives about gender and em bodim ent in the U nited States at the end of
the tw entieth century. N either Brandon nor Billy comfortably fit into the sexological categories
o f inversion from the early twentieth century, but neither do they represent new transsexual dis­
courses involving bodily transformations. Brandon and Billy have litde to do w ith m odem gay
and lesbian identities nor are they indicative o f future renderings o f gender, class and embodi­
m ent. Perhaps they are the unresolved tales of gender variance that will follow us from the
twentieth century to the twenty-first century, not resolved, not neat, not understood. Perhaps
the only way to honor the memories o f T ipton and Teena is to remember them as they wish to
be remembered: not as heroes or demons but as examples o f w hat Avery Gordon calls “com­
plex personhood.” At the very least, Gordon tells us, “complex personhood is about conferring
the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously
straightforward and full o f enormously subde m eaning” (5). W hen we read transgender lives,
complex and contradictory as they may seem, it is necessary to read for the life and not for the
lie. Dishonesty, after all, is just another w ord for narrative.

Acknowledgments
A short section o f this article appeared in an interview I did w ith Annamarie Jagose in Genders
29 [ . . . ] 1 w ould like to thank Jacob Hale for his assistance in thinking through the transgen­
der politics o f the Brandon Teena case. I am also indebted to his article on Brandon in “The
Transgender Issue,” edited by Susan Stryker G L Q 4.2 (1998): 311-348. Thanks also to Thomas
Spear for his careful editorial assistance.

Notes
1 B utler writes: “ I ’m perm anendy troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable stum­
bling blocks, and understand them , even prom ote them , as sites o f necessary trouble” (14).
2 O n the “reverse discourse” see Foucault.
3 R u b in says: “W h e n I started this project I was interested in the w hole question o f sexual ethnogenesis. I
w anted to understand better how sexual communities fo rm . . . ” (94).
4 See, fo r example, Bornstein.
5 See W illiamson.

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Works cited
B om stein, Kate. M y Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something
Else Entirely. N ew Y ork: R outledge, 1998.
_____ . “Im itation and G ender Insubordination.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. D ian.a
Fuss. N e w York: R o u tled g e, 1991.
Foucault, M ichel. The History o f Sexuality, Vol. 1: A n Introduction. Trans. R o b e rt Hurley. N ew Y orlc:
Vintage, 1980.
G ordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. M inneapolis: U o f M innesota
P, 1997.
Hale, Jacob. “ C onsum ing the Living, (D is)Rem em bering the D ead in B u tc h /F T M B orderland.” G L Q
4.2 (1998): 3 1 M 8 . -
Jones, A phrodite. A ll S /h e Wanted. N ew York: Pocket, 1996.
Kay, Jackie. Trumpet. N e w Y ork: Pantheon, 1998.
M iddlebrook, D iane W ood. SuitsM e: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. N e w Y o rk : H oughton Mifflin, 1998.
Muska, Susan, and Greta Olafsdottir, dir. The Brandon Teena Story. Zeitgeist Films, 1998.
R u b in , Gayle. "Interview : Sexual Traffic.” By Judith Butler, differences 6.2—3 (1994): 62—100.
Stryker, Susan. “M y W ords to V ictor Frankenstein Above th e Village o f Cham onix: Perform ing
Transgender R ag e.” G L Q 1.3 (1994): 237—54.
W eston, Kath. “ Get T h ee T o A Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay M igration.” G L Q 2.3
(1995): 253-78.
W illiamson, D o n . “ Interview w ith Little Jim m y Scott.” O nline. < h ttp ://visionx.ian/ja 2z/iview s/JScott.
h tm >. Jan 2000.
 20
LIMIT-CASES
Trauma, self-representation, and
the jurisdictions of identity

Leigh Gilmore

[ ...]
I am interested in the coincidence o f trauma and self-representation and w hat it reveals about
the cultural and psychic w ork o f autobiography, its internally fractured histories, and especially,
its limits. M y account o f trauma’s centrality to contemporary self-representation, however, redi­
rects attention from the most prom inent contemporary memoirs to texts about trauma that test
the limits o f autobiography.
Telling the story o f one’s life suggests a conversion o f trauma’s morbid contents into speech,
and thereby, the prospect o f working through trauma’s hold on the subject. Yet, autobiogra­
phy’s impediments to such working through consist o f its almost legalistic definition o f truth-
telling, its anxiety about invention, and its preference for the literal and verifiable, even in the
presence o f some ambivalence about those criteria. [. . .] W hen the contest is waged over w ho
can tell the truth, the risk o f being accused o f lying (or malingering, or inflating, or whining)
threatens the w riter into continued silence. In this scenario, the autobiographical project may
swerve from the form o f autobiography even as it embraces the project o f self-representation.
These departures offer an opportunity to calibrate our attention to the range o f demands made
by autobiography and the silencing or shaming effects they impose.
T he recent example o f Rigoberta Menchú, author, activist for the rights o f the Quiche peo­
ple in Guatemala, and 1992 N obel Peace Prize winner, is instructive here. [. . .] B ut the expose
was, o f course, scandalous. M enchú and her defenders say that accusations about her truthful­
ness are political in that they mean to discredit her and thereby her efforts to raise international
concern for the indigenous Guatemalan Indians o f w hom she is one and w hom she represents.
Criticism o f autobiography is often political in just this way. It offers writers the opportunity
to present themselves as representative subjects; that is, as subjects who stand for others. It also
threatens writers w ith unsympathetic scrutiny, as M enchú knows well. [. . .] By expanding her
sense o f what happened in her life to include things that did not happen to her as i f they had,
and by n o t acknowledging this imagined transformation, she leaves her autobiography vulner­
able to charges o f lying because autobiography is a form about w hich one can pass such a judg­
ment. Yet, at the same time, she elevates her testimonio into an expansive sympathetic endeavor
in which know ing about violence done to others allows her to imagine herself as the one to
w hom violence is done, and in w hich hearing about violence makes her into a witness w ho then
represents herself as having seen the violence.

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 Limit-cases; trauma and identity

[ .. .]
[Gayatri] Spivak points to the overlapping if distinct valences in testimony: if it is not exactly
resistance, it certainly can be resistant, and can lead to further consolidation o f other resistant
practices. So, too, testimony refers not only to bearing witness, but to the protocols in w h ic h it
must be offered. [. . .]
Clearly, then, w hen the issue is narrowed to the legalistic question, “Did she lie?”, alm ost
none o f the complexity o f representing the self in the diverse cultural contexts o f representing
trauma can be retained w ithout seeming to sink into ethical relativism and equivocation. [. . .]
A different question, however, would focus on the way her testimony tests a crucial lim it in
autobiographical writing, and not just the one understood as the boundary between truth and
lies, but rather, the limit o f representativeness [ ...] . Consider the following. First, in collec­
tions o f essays published between 1988 and 1995, Dorothy Allison refers to her experience of
childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather. In 1992 she publishes Bastard Out of Carolina, a n ovel
in which the child narrator is sexually assaulted by her stepfather. [. . .] Second, in Shot in the
Heart, Mikal Gilmore weaves his ow n autobiography w ithin the vivid biography of his brother,
executed murderer Gary Gilmore, and includes his parents’ stories, M orm on history, and reflec­
tions on the American West. Third, in a series o f fictional texts published between 1983 a n d
1997 Jamaica Kincaid returns to the enigmatic and disturbing relationship between what seem
to be different versions o f the same m other and daughter. In interviews, Kincaid describes th e
relationship as autobiographical. Finally, in Written on the Body , [. . .] Jeanette W interson creates
a first-person, unnamed narrator whose gender and sexuality are never given. W ith the excep­
tion of Shot in the Heart, none o f these books is likely to appear on anyone’s list o f the m em oir
boom ’s highlights; yet, these cases describe a significant contour within the contemporary b o o m
in first-person writing about trauma. By focusing on them, we are able to discern the lim it-
testing about form and subjectivity that the self-representation o f trauma entails.
Limit-cases offer a means to think about the ways in which autobiography is partially struc­
tured through the proscriptions it places on self-representation.Trauma, from the Greek m eaning
“wound,” refers to the self-altering, even self-shattering, experience o f violence, injury, and harm .
Crucial to the experience o f trauma are the difficulties that arise in trying to articulate it.1These
difficulties are often formulated as crises in speaking and listening: If I don’t speak, how can I
transform the pain? If I do speak, what are the risks? [...] Thus language bears a heavy burden
in the theorization o f trauma. It marks a site where expectations amass: Can language be found
for this experience that will not obscure or deform it? Will a listener emerge who can hear it?
Attempts to m eet these expectations generate incompatible assertions that both literalize
and metaphorize trauma’s meanings. T o take an example of the first view, Holocaust scholar
Lawrence Langer (1994) argues that trauma ought to be written or spoken about in only the
most literal ways because to do otherwise risks negating it. [. . .] For what account can ever exist
within language that is outside language’s constitutive properties? And w ho could use or hear
it? In a seemingly opposite view, psychoanalyst Dori Laub claims that trauma cannot truly be
said to have happened until it can be articulated and heard by a sympathetic listener (Felman
and Laub 1992). [. . .] Yet, Laub’s discussion of “language” suggests that he is more interested
in a public forum or a rhetorical setting than with language per se: with w ho will listen, where,
and how. [. . .] So, too, their preferred settings and relationships in which one testifies to trauma
tilt toward the public and legalistic: toward interviews, documentation, and clinical encounters.
Utterances about trauma that arise within more fragile, private, partial, anonymous, or unsus­
tainable relations disappear. [. . .]
Survivors of trauma are urged to testify in sanctioned settings to their trauma in an effort not
only to create the language that will manifest and contain trauma, but also the witnesses who

155
 will recognize it. Thus the unconscious language o f repetition through which trauma initially
speaks (flashbacks, nightmares, emotional flooding) is replaced by a conscious language that can
be repeated in structured settings. Language is asserted as that which can make trauma real even
as it is theorized as that w hich fails in the face o f trauma. This apparent contradiction in trauma
studies represents a constitutive ambivalence. For the survivor o f trauma, such an ambivalence
can am ount to an impossible injunction to tell what cannot, in this view, be spoken. Because
trauma’s dangerous and conflictual representations will not be theorized or neglected out o f
existence, I w ould argue for the importance o f attention to specific representations o f trauma,
and to the range o f settings in w hich they emerge. Claims that language or representation are in
an inimical or proscribed relation to trauma, or that there can and ought to be proper modes for
the representation o f trauma, have a tenuous hold on the real even as they assert their privileged
relation to it. [. . .]
Some w ould describe these struggles about w hat to say, and how to say it, in terms of
ethics. [. . .] Limit-cases are almost always about [. . .] transformational activity and its ethical
complexity. T hey expose the insufficiency o f viewing ethics and law primarily as a code o f
conduct, and raise profound questions about the meanings o f truth and justice in the context o f
trauma. Limit-cases examine the relations among people that exist in the presence o f trauma,
and attempt to historicize the relations from w hich trauma has emerged in order to represent a
self who can differ from the identity trauma imposes. Limit-cases pose the questions “H ow have
I lived? H ow will I live?” in relation to the social and psychic forms within w hich trauma has
been present. T hey offer histories o f harm, the individual, and others that differ from legal ones
and w hich are, stricdy speaking, inadmissible as testimony.
For m any writers, autobiography’s domain o f first-person particularities and peculiarities
offers an opportunity to describe their lives and their thoughts about it [ ...] . Some writers,
however, are m ore interested in the constitutive vagaries o f autobiography [ ...] . I would argue
that D orothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette W interson employ auto­
biography’s defining questions as what w e m ight provisionally call autobiographical means to
other ends.
[. . .] Limit-cases are testimonial projects, but they do not bring forward cases within the
protocols o f legal testimony. They offer an alternative,- they cannot do otherwise.
W ithout recourse to locations outside the law, these stories could not be told, and in these
cases m em oir is not suited to the representations o f self and trauma being forged in language.
W hen writers establish an alternative jurisdiction for narratives in w hich self-representation
and the representation o f trauma coincide, they produce w hat w e can think o f as an alternative
jurisprudence by a knowing subject. I use “knowing” to suggest a process, even an ethic, that is
not directed toward a judgm ent in w hich the subject is “know n,” but through which it models
an engagement w ith what is difficult, compelling, intractable, and surprising. The knowing
subject works w ith dissonant materials, marked by trauma, and organizes them into a form of
knowledge. I w ould call this an alternative jurisprudence to the knowledge o f trauma and the
self that is produced in legal contexts because it contributes a critical knowledge o f the law and
speaks to the relations that underpin how we live. [. . .]
Peter Goodrich defines “m inor jurisprudences” as forms o f legal knowledge that coexist
alongside law but which lack law’s dominant authority in the present. Some o f these juris­
prudences arose w ithin jurisdictions [. . .] whose existence has been lost or destroyed. [. . .]
Limit-cases carve out a jurisdiction in which illegitimate subjects tell stories in forms marked
by elements of fiction. In their exposure of the link betw een illegitimacy and fiction in self-
representational projects, limit-cases expose the conditions in w hich alternative forms o f knowl­
edge about justice are compelled to appear, and how subjects who produce this knowledge are

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marked. I call attention to limit-cases because they offer an alternative that is in the process of
being forgotten even as it emerges. I memorialize the production o f this knowledge here against
the competing histories o f the present m om ent that may well erase its difference from c o n te m ­
porary memoirs or the study o f trauma, and notice both the w ork it does and the potential i t has
to reorganize the meanings o f justice, knowledge, and trauma.
Autobiographical performances draw on and produce an assembly o f theories of the self and
self-representation,- o f personal identity and one’s relation to a family, a region, a nation; a n d of
citizenship and a politics o f representativeness (and exclusion). H ow to situate the self w ith in
these theories is the task o f autobiography, and entails the larger organizational question o f the
ways selves and milieus ought to be understood in relation to each other. [. . .] The interface o f
singular and shareable goes to the issue of political representation, for the autobiographical self
w ho is cut off from others, even as it stands for them, is a m etaphor for the citizen. Once sepa­
rated conceptually from a nation, a family, a place, and a branching set o f contingencies, h o w
does an individual recognize this disestablished self?
In this context, we could say that the cultural w ork performed in the name o f autobiography
profoundly concerns representations o f citizenship and the nation. Autobiography’s investm ent
in the representative person allies it to the project o f lending substance to the national fantasy
o f belonging. [. . .] In autobiography, a person, solid and incontestable, testifies to having lived.
An autobiography is a m onum ent to the idea o f personhood, to the notion that one could leave
behind a memorial to oneself [. . .] and that the memorial would perform the work of p e rm a ­
nence that the person never could. [. . .] But the fantasy o f autobiography, like the fantasy o f
nationalism, never quite fulfills its promise in local terms. [. . .] Although autobiography’s asso­
ciation with and participation in dominant constructions o f the individual and the nation seem
to taint it ideologically, some postcolonial scholars, activists, and writers, for example, value it
as a mode in w hich to represent oneself as a speaking subject. W hile any control over these
dynamics by the nondom inant is, o f course, tricky, many nonetheless apprehend its fungibility.
Contemporary limit-cases articulate the relationship between representativeness and a range
o f more local notions and experiences o f the personal, in terms o f what it means both to aspire
to and achieve personhood, and to explore the interpenetration o f the private and the public.
Such texts explore representations o f personhood that are skeptical o f dominant constructions
o f the individual and the nation. [. . .]
Limit-cases are less concerned with enumerating the boundaries to which one can p o in t
between autobiography and fiction, say, or autobiography and history, or legal testimony, o r
psychoanalysis, or theory. Rather, these cases illuminate how the limits o f autobiography [. . .]
m ight conspire to prevent some self-representational stories from being told at all if they w ere
subjected to a literal truth test or evaluated by certain objective measures. [. . .] In the imagined
encounter w ith such judgments, many writers seek grounds other than the explicitly testimonial
for self-representation. For them an answer to the interrogator’s demand, “O n the night in
question, did you or did you not do X?” might begin with the need to reestablish the grounds
o f inquiry. In so doing, they convert constraint into opportunity.
Perhaps more surprising than the discovery of a negative limit in autobiography, then, is the
productivity of the limit. As writers refuse autobiography’s constraints, they grind away at them,
sometimes relendessly, and force difficult questions to the fore. W here does autobiography end
and fiction begin? H ow do the Active and the autobiographical traverse each other, and what
prompts— or bars— their crossing? W here does collective history abandon an individual to a
space o f historical amnesia? W here does speculation end and evidence begin when the ques­
tion is “W hat did you do to me?” [. . .] In their complex self-representational engagements,
limit-cases point to persistent and constitutive issues in autobiography itself. [. . .] Further, and

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crucially for the texts I have specified, can writing transform the limits o f trauma, the person,
and her or his engagement with the world?
Limit-cases reveal the possibility that not writing an autobiography can be an achievement.
[■•-]

Note
A u th o rs note: A different and earlier version o f this essay appears as the introduction to The Limits of
Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony.

1 See especially C aruth, Felman and Laub, Hacking, H erm an, Langer, Terr, and van der Kolk et al.

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