A Life by Any Other Name
If autobiography mixes memory and invention is it less than true?
Greetings Readers,
Last time around I wrote about the nexus between history and biography, fiction and poetry, and the putative ‘two cultures’ battle. Well, today, I have another, related, battleground for you! This one concerns autobiography, or should that be autofiction, memoir or life-writing? Whichever name you choose, it refers to what you write about yourself, by yourself, for yourself, and maybe others.
In recent years a couple of older friends have asked me where they could get help writing their recollections, chiefly for the younger members of their families who want to know about their forebears. With the growth of, and interest in, genealogy websites has come a desire to record family history. There are any number of courses in memoir writing and online services which work by prompting the writer with questions intended to awaken memories.
This was the method used by Marie-Françoise Allain in her book The Other Man, Conversations with Graham Greene (1982) and more recently by Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones, Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008). At one point when describing his childhood, Heaney remarks that he can’t believe he’s sharing so much detail, which reveals the pertinence of the questions. Allain later helped Greene’s lover, Yvonne Cloetta, write her memoir, In Search of a Beginning (2005).
These books are what might be called mediated autobiography but what exactly constitutes the conventional autobiography, or is there such a thing? If so, does it include the varied Confessions of St. Augustine, Rousseau and De Quincey, and Wordsworth’s Prelude? Each of these works describes the author’s spiritual path, within the context of his life. Needless to say, much is excluded (Rousseau’s abandonment of his children; Wordsworth’s liaison with Annette Vallon and their child, Caroline, coded in the story of Vaudracour and Julia, which was later published separately; De Quincey’s continuing addiction to opium) but the central motif is intimate and personal.
Interestingly, Wordsworth began The Prelude in answer to a series of questions he put to himself, opening with this one:
Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, And from his alder shaded and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? (from The Prelude, First Part, 1799)
He spent forty years working on the poem so, in effect, its progress mirrors his life. Read together, the three versions, (1799, 1805, 1850) dramatise better than any retrospect could his passage from radical youth to conservative elder.
While Byron mocks Wordsworth in Don Juan, he draws on The Prelude for his own autobiographical poem, Childe Harold. (You may recall the quote about the Maid of Saragoza in the last newsletter.) Byron amplifies his quasi-fictional story with extended footnotes recalling his travels and airing his views on the state of Napoleonic Europe.
In today’s terms does that make the poem autofiction? The term was coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 as being:
Fiction of strictly real events or facts; the autofiction, if you like, of having entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language, outside the wisdom of the novel, be it traditional or new.
He invented the term by hazard when asked by his publishers to write the blurb for his novel Fils (thread; son) an interior monologue covering one day in the life of ‘SD’, including his studies of Racine and a psychoanalysis session. In an interview for Le Monde in 2013 he confessed to being surprised at how the word had caught on. We must have been waiting for a term to fit the fictional procedure behind autobiography.
Don’t we all invent ourselves just a little? Think of how we work up a story (or a ‘funny incident’ to quote from an old kid’s programme on RTE) for our friends, and how we tailor it to our audience. To write about ourselves is also a process of selection and presentation. Traditionally, autobiography was the realm of the great and the good, and we read their accounts of themselves to learn what made them so. Afterwards, the researchers and others fill in the gaps, or correct the record.
Autofiction offers a way for the writer to be both, to tell her or his story and comment on it at the same time. This morning I read an interview with Vanessa Springora about her latest book, Patronyme, in which she seeks the origin of her unique surname. This leads her to her father’s and grandfather’s secrets. Asked about publishing this work, she says that she only discovers her true identity as she writes. (Her previous book, Consent, 2020, told of her abusive relationship with writer Gabriel Matzneff, he 49, she 14, at the time it began.) Of the fictional elements in Patronyme she says: ‘I’ve also read a lot of the autofiction of the 1990s, the works of Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, Hervé Guibert. That combination of sociology, anthropology or archaeology of the self is familiar to me.’[1] She flags the fictional passages emphasising that they are rooted in fact.
Her account of the form shows how it reconciles the ‘two [opposing] cultures’ of the 1950s. That ‘battle’ may have grown out of the fictional experiments of the 1920s, in the work of Joyce, Woolf and Proust, who, broadly, made expressing consciousness the centre of their work. Springora refers to Woolf’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ in which Woolf explains that life is not a simple linear progression from A to B and neither should fiction be.
Thus, the omniscient narrator is replaced by the mind of the protagonist. Language is foregrounded, leading to the new criticism I mentioned last time where the work was dissected in a vacuum, a false attempt to bring art into the scientist’s laboratory. The works of these experimental writers, particularly of Joyce and Proust, have autobiographical origins, Stephen Dedalus and Marcel bearing more than a passing resemblance to their authors.
From new criticism it’s only a short step to ‘deconstruction’, the pampered child of 1960s academic theory. Two years after Doubrovsky’s chance coinage of autofiction, Paul de Man, a deconstructionist, wrote ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’. De Man, whose own biography is an egregious catalogue of anti-semitism, lies and embezzlement, writes that autobiography cannot exist as a form in itself because it borrows from so many other forms.
Drawing on Wordsworth’s ‘Essays on Epitaphs’, the first of which was a footnote to a passage in Book VII of his narrative poem ‘The Excursion’. The passage describes a ‘gentle Dalesman’ who, being deaf from infancy, saw nature as a picture and found solace in books. De Man concludes that ‘Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause.’ In other words, to write one’s own life is to conceal it behind words, which are a representation, not the thing itself.
This interpretation may well also be a defacement of Wordsworth. The Dalesman’s books are a substitute for the human company he cannot enjoy, being unable to hear or speak. The fortuitously named poet had many a word to offer in communicating his intimate spiritual apprehensions.
Autobiography then, can take, and partake of, many forms, its truth residing in the interplay between the factual detail and the manner of its telling. Wordsworth’s revisions to The Prelude, Byron’s footnotes to Childe Harold, Springora’s inventions are means by which these writers relate to, and comment on, themselves as subjects of their works. As subjects they are already displaced into the realm of fiction. Who of us can say they do not sometimes act a role in ordinary life, be the person other people expect us to be, writing ourselves into our own lives?
[1] Interview with Vanessa Springora by Alexis Brocas, Lire, Fevrier 2025. (My translation.)
To write a memoir or not? How do you feel about writing about yourself?
Thanks Joan. Good question - does too much honesty make us less not more interesting. There's certainly a degree of egoism in the trend for soul-baring memoir. And yes, I think it springs from the use of 'journalling' in therapy, and the therapeutic conversation.
Of course the more such memoirs are written, the more people will realise that their problems are not unique. Some intimate memoirs have had an effect on society - Springora's book Consent drew attention to deficiencies in French law around that issue, and to the protection of child abusers among the 'intelligentsia'.
In some ways what we are seeing, I think, is a reaction to the veil of secrecy, silence, and shame, that hung over certain areas of human experience and health. Inevitably, some accounts will be well written, some less so. The digital dissemination of information has increased this 'openness' but the backlash to that is beginning. We may eventually retreat to a greater appreciation of privacy, which is different from secrecy.
There is also the question of popularity and publishers pandering to a demand, without always being discriminating about the quality. Conversely, do the readers of these memoirs look for good writing or for a shared experience? Perhaps too it replaces the popularity of published diaries and personal correspondence. There is an abiding interest in detailed accounts of people's intimate lives.
The 'confessional' writers of the 60s and 70s, including Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, were writers first who chose to express their particular suffering in poetry and fiction.
My hunch is that the best, and truest, of this writing will persist. If it brings about positive changes in society that is a good thing.
Thank you for your generous comment! Yes false memory is definitely an issue to consider in the writing and reading of a biography. A tricky thing to nail down unless there are enough witnesses around to correct the record. I like the title of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography: Speak, Memory which kind of sums up the problem. He has a lot to say about Freud too describing him as an old quack!
Do read The Prelude preferably the 1805 version - the middle one - as the last one is a bit more pietistic and therefore less energetic. Let me know how you get on with it!