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Life Writing is incredibly popular these days, and it came as no surprise to me to learn from This Very Short Introduction to Autobiography that Michel Foucault thinks that we have become ‘confessing animals’. The plethora of memoirs, autobiographies and ‘true confessions’ today seems to be evidence of a compulsion to record the complexities of human life, experience and memory, though it has to be said that some life writing seems of more lasting value than others.  Autobiography, a Very Short Introduction by Laura Marcus, a Professor at Oxford, is a fascinating exploration of this kind of writing, starting with the Confessions of St Augustine in the 4th century, through to its modern manifestations in multimedia, autobiographical novels and autofiction.

After the Introduction, there are eight chapters in this VSI (as well as the usual references, suggestions for further reading, and an index).

1. Confession, conversion, testimony
2. The journeying self
3. Autobiographical consciousness
4. Autobiography and psychoanalysis
5. Family histories and the autobiography of childhood
6. Public selves
7. Self-portraiture, photography, and performance
8. Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions.

Beginning in chapter one, Marcus discusses the important question of what motivates the writer of autobiography:

Numerous writers of autobiography, from across the centuries, have offered their own understandings of the motives for autobiography, its possible forms, and its intended readerships. Prefaces, or opening statements, frequently anticipate the charges of vanity, egotism, self-distortion (or self-promotion), and narcissism that might be levelled against the author who talks about him or herself, answering them in advance by suggesting more edifying or altruistic autobiographical motives.  Some writers of autobiography will suggest that they are on a quest for self-understanding, while others will stress their wish to communicate their experiences to others.  (p.5)

From a reader’s point-of-view, (or posterity’s) the value of a life-story depends on its representative or exemplary status.  Some writers (such as Harriet Martineau) feel a duty to tell the story of an unusual life, while others such as John Stuart Mill felt compelled to write about his life in an age of transition.   Gandhi apparently didn’t intend to write a real autobiography, but rather to redefine it by telling the story of [his] experiments with truth… and that, of course, brings up the whole question of veracity:

… any narrative of the self and its life-story will entail a reconstruction, subject to the vagaries of memory, which renders the division between autobiography and fiction far from absolute. (p.4)

Marcus suggests that the rise of memoir

…could in part be understood as a response to the problems of representing a whole life. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the distinction (at least in English-language contexts) was often drawn, or implied, between autobiography as a sustained and serious self-examination and memoir as a more outward-facing record of experiences and events.  (p,6)

This distinction, she says, has largely been lost in our own time, and the ‘celebrity autobiography’ is more often written when a career (or notoriety) is flourishing, rather than towards the end of a life.  And the religious confessions such as those of St Augustine (4th century); St Teresa of Avila (1555) or John Bunyan (1678) which record the spiritual conversion have been replaced by secular and emotional confessions about the creation of the self, as in Rousseau’s Confessions (1782).  What’s different in our time is that these ‘confessions’ are no longer originally a private or intimate act, and the idea of presenting a ‘model’ life or a good example to others was tested by Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis in which he accused Lord Alfred Douglas of ruining his life.  Closer to our own time, J.M. Coetzee’s trilogy of memoirs, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime distance his past selves through the 3rd person narration, and while Youth, Marcus says, has its own intense and ironic relationship to confession, shame and desire,

Summertime breaks with the narrative of the growing self: the (auto)biographical subject is a dead man.  A young English writer is writing a biography of the recently deceased John Coetzee and gathers materials from those, in particular his women lovers, who ‘knew’ him life; failures in intimacy and of knowing mark their recollections. (p.23)

A novel way to get round the problem that no autobiographer can write the whole life because it isn’t over yet!

In the same chapter, the question of testimony and trauma arises.  Discussing Frederick Douglass’s Twelve Years a Slave (see my review, in which, BTW, I classified it as a memoir), Marcus says that a number of former African-American slaves felt an obligation to write (or dictate) their testimonies because ‘testimony’ was legally denied to slaves and ‘coloured people’; they could not, in law, bring a while man to account for his actions nor testify against his word. Autobiography, in this context, is an assertion of identity and personhood.  Many war testimonies, such as Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man were written to bear witness too. For Levi, who survived the Holocaust…

‘the need to tell our story to ‘”the rest”, to make the “rest” participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse.’  The lesson he early learned from a fellow camp-inmate was that ‘even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness.’ (p.27)

Crucially, in Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death a Holocaust memoir by the historian Otto Dov Kulka, while drawings, maps and photographs are included, there are gaps in what is recalled.  In the present age, we recognise these gaps as authentic manifestations of trauma, and the ‘truth’ of the witnessing is not undermined but strengthened by the partial, fragmentary and times dream-like nature of its telling. 

Chapter 2 offers Thoreau’s Walden (1854) as the first of all those memoirs and nature and travel writings, while Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself’ in Leaves of Grass (1855) is an unashamed expression of delight in his own human form and energies and in those of others. These romantics are contrasted in Chapter 3 with the autobiographies of philosophers for whom (as R.G. Collingwood apparently said in 1939, ‘the autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought.’ This chapter is fascinating, focussing on the representations of memory, the self in and through time, concepts of subjectivity, identity, and consciousness, and self-formation or ‘becoming’ in the autobiographies of Descartes, Montaigne, Hume, Nietzsche, and the existentialists Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and (someone new to me) André Gorz.  Of these I’ve only read (some of) Simone de Beauvoir, but I have read Bertrand Russell’s three-volume autobiography and didn’t find it particularly illuminating so I noted with some satisfaction that Marcus says that he didn’t address the question of the self and *chuckle* his occasional mentions of it are distinctly cerebral. This chapter also raises the contested issue about whether or not lives should be conceived of as a narrative. 

[Do we think of our lives like that? I think of my life as more like a piece of crazy-paving… If I were to write an autobiography (and fear not, I have no intention of it), I would do what Roland Barthes and Michel Leiris apparently did (see Chapter 4, about psychoanalysis), and organise my life around themes.  Mine would be different to theirs (images, dreams and fantasies) but perhaps Mistakes, Wasted Opportunities and Failed Attempts at Elegance. And like Katherine Mansfield in her journal, I would struggle with the impossibility of observing the prescription ‘To thine own self be true’: True to oneself? which self?’  Remember the many selves of Lee Lin Chin and David Stratton?]

The chapter about family histories put me in my mind of a recent review at Whispering Gums, of Nadia Wheatley’s Her Mother’s Daughter. Sue called it a hybrid: where the biography is of the subject (mothers, in these cases) and the memoir is of the writer (the daughters.)  Giving as an example Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) Marcus calls this genre both and neither an autobiography of the son and a biography of the father, and she discusses how these works become part of the world of feeling and imagination which has been suppressed or denied.  And she cautions that:

It is, however, the world of imagination which may touch dangerously on the duplicitous story-making and self-mythologising that can destroy the self’s grounding in reality. (p.72)

[Yes, and there are ethical questions about those Hollywood tell-all hybrids when the parents are dead and gone and not there to defend themselves.]

Marcus also cautions against the ‘misery memoir’.  There’s a more elegant name for these: pathography, and she notes the role of the commercial structures of publishing which have promoted the literature of ‘the imperfect childhood’ as well as accurately describing my response to them: a certain contempt for, and perhaps exhaustion with, such writing. She names those high-profile exemplars A Child called ‘It’ and Angela’s Ashes and Jean Winterson.

The chapter about ‘public selves’ offered the most interesting examples of autobiography, ranging from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father to Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom.  I like this type of autobiography because it links to contemporary politics, activism and exemplary lives. But I skipped over most of the bit about ghost-writing and celebrity autobiographies…of people who are famous for being famous. 

The chapter exploring photography and the last one about modern manifestations of autobiography that blur fact and fiction are fascinating too, but I’d better stop here because this review is already too long.  Buy the book!

PS I should admit here that my record of reading at Goodreads shows that over a lifetime, I’ve only read 38 autobiographies, and, well, I haven’t rated many of them highly.  But I still have a few on my TBR and having read this excellent VSI, I shall approach the next one in a more informed way.

Author: Laura Marcus
Title: Autobiography, a Very Short Introduction
Series: Very Short Introductions (Oxford University Press)
Publisher: Oxford University Press,2016
ISBN: 9780199689255
Review copy courtesy of OUP.

Available from Fishpond: Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)