ENGLISH LITERATURE & CULTURE

‘I’ IS ANOTHER:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ACROSS GENRES

Camelia Elias
first person singular
• autobiography is only to be trusted
when it reveals something disgraceful
(Orwell)
• autobiographical topics:
 devised out of personal interest
 in line with one’s highest authority
 the result of an irresistible longing for
confidential expansion (Leslie Stephen)
autobiographer, writer, reader
• the best autobiographies draw on the art of
introspection
• art and autobiography are antithetical: the better the
artist the poorer the autobiographer
• ‘true’ artists don’t believe in autobiography
• reader response:
 the ideal reader  the pleasure in reading
autobiographical work is in catching the
autobiographer out in suspicious reticences, self-
serving misperceptions, cover-ups, clever deceptions.
 the intelligent reader  reads for the facts and for
the lies (lies are better than facts)
autobiography as self-biography
through fragment
• Epstein’s taxonomy:
 nickels
 dimes
 essays
 memoirs
 anecdotes
• paradox: the fragmentary form is
more suitable for a narrative that is
otherwise linear
autobiographical ironies (Epstein)
• reading autobiography doesn’t
increase the hope for the human
race, but
• it lends amusement in watching it all
pass in review
• it makes a generational statement:
one is never too old to express
resentment against one’s parents
traditions
• American: extrapolate from the particular
in order to make a general statement
 autobiography is read particularly for its
capability to make generalizations
 ‘size matters’, greatness now
• English: go from the general to the
particular
 use the common-sense of the individual
 ‘concentrated thought’, posterity matters
Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your
Time, 1990
• “I don’t boast about the quality of my
work, but I may be permitted to pride
myself, on the gift of steady
application … the gift of
concentrations stays with me, and it
is perhaps my only gift”
the construction of family vs. the
construction of language to represent
family

• if the focus is on family drama (love, death,

madness, sickness, suicide, jealousy,
resentment, rivalry) at a minimum, than
the language to represent these events falls
on satire, the schematic, the ideational,
and the play of language.
• the introspective wisdom of both, family
and language, is a desire to transcend the
banal.
Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?
• “The only real wisdom I have
acquired in fifty years of living is the
banal, frequently made point that
happiness requires no more than
good food, good wine, laughter, and
the presence of friends.” (1991)
familial autobiographies
Shared concern  how to go against:
• dullness
• sentimentality
• the uninteresting
• the trivial
• the insignificant
• the mediocre?
Writing strategy and premise:
• it’s better to be well qualified rather than
well-equipped to write about one’s life
Franz Lidz
• a Sports Illustrated
senior writer
• a New York Times film
essayist
• Books:
 Ghosty Men
 Unstrung Heroes: My
Improbable Life with
Four Impossible
Uncles (which was
made into a 1995
Disney feature film)
identifications / private and public
• self and other
• self and an imaginary self which
merges with the fictionalized/crazy
subject
• the recognition of a potential self in
the fictionalized situation
• the desire to maintain the difference
between self and ideal
identification/reproduction
• Identification reproduces:
 sameness
 fixity
 the confirmation of existing identities
 politics of recognition:
 you are what you give
 you are what your space gives you
fantasies of the private self as
a public self mediated through:
• devotion
• adoration
• worship
• transcendence
• aspiration and inspiration
• (frames)
normative functions
• the family / the uncles as (anti)
heroes
 role models
 someone to emulate
 the epitome of what a 13 year old should
be
 ideals of ‘cool’ appearance against the
background of ideals of (un)strung
relations
extra/off-narrative practices
• pretending
• resembling
• imitating
• copying
• desire involves wanting ‘to have’ and
identification involves wanting ‘to be’
mediations
• between instruction and tradition
• voice and body (metonymic associations)
• order and chaos
• madness and normality
• logic and illogical acts
• sentimentality and toughness
• artificiality and the genuine
• medium (narrative in the story) and medium (film in
the story)
• house and den (this planet and ‘other’ planet)
• real name (Steven  becomes artificial) and fictional
name (Franz  becomes real)
life and story
• “I sometimes feel like this story has
been written from graveside
conversations filled with fantastical
anecdotes, well-worn gossip,
profound illuminations – fragments
that may or may not produce a
rounded image, a whole person, the
history of a family.” (23-24)
emergence of the private/political
self
• storied selves (life writing)
• identity through self-narration
• a model “of the human subject that
takes acts of self-narration not only
as descriptive of the self but, more
importantly, as fundamental to the
emergence and reality of that
subject”
(Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self, 1991)