ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book represents the final version of a work mainly based on my doctoral thesis, which I discussed at the University of Salerno, Italy. I would like to thank Maria Teresa Chialant, a real guide throughout my studies and my life. I am grateful to the Department of English Literature at Reading and the Department of Italian Literature at Warwick, which gave me an opportunity to spend long periods of time there as a visiting researcher, and provided support in different ways.
Introduction
The tendency to narrate oneself, the incidents and the particular events that have influenced one’s life is common to all individuals. Some people do not develop this tendency, perhaps, because they are convinced that they cannot do so. Others, starting their story with a peculiar initial mood towards both themselves and the outside world, begin to produce an autobiographical text.
“Why do some people feel called upon to write the story of their lives?” Burton Pike asks himself in the essay Time in Autobiography, proceeding with the following statement: It is easy to account for the case of the politician who wants to show how virtuous one can be in political life, or even the saint who wants his confessions to God to be read by us sinners. But beyond this kind of relatively direct impulse the motivation for this form of self-expression becomes obscure.
Gordon Allport offers a series of reasons from which he defines the gross anatomy of motives, highlighting the autobiographical impulse. This sample case includes: “Special pleading, exhibitionism, relief from tension, monetary gain, scientific interest, redemption and social reincorporation, and wish of immortality”. From a historical point of view, as shall be seen later, the definition of autobiography has often raised conflicting opinions, particularly for different roles, sometimes of unity, other times of multiplicity, that were, from time to time, assigned by critics. Therefore there has been a clash from which a kind of contentious debate concerning the matter of autobiographical writing started. It is clear that, in addition to the autobiography itself, we could add epistolary and diary writings to the same field. These other autobiographical forms, while diversifying themselves in various ways from the autobiography tout court, nevertheless have the following in common with it: the sincerity with oneself and putting the author at the centre of the narrative core.
Candace Lang extends the definition of autobiography even further, affirming that: “Autobiography is indeed everywhere one cares to find it”. The author adds that autobiography introduces a great problem for anyone studying the topic.
According to Lang, if the writer is always, in the broadest sense, involved in the work, any writing can be judged as autobiographical based upon how it is read. As Linda Anderson exposes, autobiography has also been recognized since the late eighteenth century as an important testing ground for critical disputes: However, Autobiography has also been recognized since the late eighteenth century as a distinct literary genre and, as such, an important testing ground for critical controversies about a range of ideas including authorship, selfhood, representation and the division between fact and fiction. The very pervasiveness and slipperiness of autobiography has made the need to contain and control it within disciplinary boundaries all the more urgent, and many literary critics have turned to definitions as a way of stamping their academic authority on an unruly and even slightly disreputable field.
In the reference text (in some aspects outdated, but still representing an initial focal point necessary to understand the autobiographical genre and its developments), The Autobiographical Pact (1975), Philippe Lejeune defined autobiography as a narration, made by an individual, about one’s own personal happenings9. It is interesting to make the reader ask themselves what the spark is that triggers the autobiographical fire, the drop that brings the person who narrates themselves to overcome hesitations and pass from the theoretical idea of writing about himself to concrete action. Let’s imagine for a moment that the spark that lights the autobiographical fire is to see oneself in the mirror, a sort of decisive meeting/clash that the individual has towards their unified image, where one’s own copy becomes unrecognizable to one’s own eyes: in the mirror I am not there anymore, but there is another.
Therefore, lost in that new image, perceiving oneself in two different ways: I am like this, here and now, a body that lives in this moment and within this form. But also: I am, here and now, a mind and body conceived as the result of years passed by; physical and mental elements that hold the signs, the wounds of time, sum of endless moments passed, and therefore infinite different “Is” from what I am now, that made me as I am now, here, in this mirror, discovering myself.
This is perhaps the key moment of autobiographical writing: the self is now conceived as the sum of the many different “Is”, and they create a frighteningly unknown “not I”. Here, at precisely the same time, memory
comes to the rescue of the individual, who, when writing about themselves, tries to find and rebuild themselves in a way that releases memories held in the depths of their mind, fixing them forever on paper through writing in a narrative structure that becomes a starting point for the search of the “I” and self-analysis just like in the novels of Proust and Svevo.
Writing then begins its journey from what was the first significant event to the last event considered noteworthy. So, image after image, many innumerable “Is”, all different from each other, are reconstructed.
All of them, at the time of their concrete existence, thinking and acting in a peculiar way. Many innumerable “Is”, both loved and hated. “Is” not understood, or indifferent to themselves. Many different “Is”, which, at the moment of writing, do not want to be forgotten: once I was like this… This concept of the “I” found critical support in the twentieth century, when literature tended to deal with psychoanalysis. Until then, and particularly
in England in the Victorian Period, the autobiographical text was conceived as a mere statement of facts concerning the public life of the author, giving little space to interiority and feelings, and especially to the
complexity of them. In fact, only in the twentieth century there was the realization of the impossibility of describing, and understanding, the truth related to interiority. Obviously, the phrase once I was like this… changes
according to the role that is given to the memory.
As Ugo Bonante explains in Rendiconti vittoriani “while the Victorian authors saw the events as if the memory was an instrument of pure recording of the past, for authors of the twentieth century, such as Yeats, memory is instead fundamentally linked to the present and so it brings the past back to light only in the form imposed by the present”. In this way, as Roy Pascal states, the first practical problems are reached: how to narrate oneself? Which events should be privileged enough to be remembered in the story of one’s own life? Which should be omitted? Which are to be disguised or – not following the essential canon Lejeune gives to distinguish autobiographical texts – even invented? The conflict with ourselves, with the text and with the truth, which is often fatal to the text itself, is thus triggered. Modernist and modern author Virginia Woolf has shown on several occasions to feel uncomfortable managing the autobiographical problem, partly demonstrated by never writing a real autobiography.
Regarding the problem of the selection that has to be done before the writing, when she thinks about the possibility of narrating her life, the writer asserts: There are several difficulties. In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember; in the second, the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written.
As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways. But if I begin to go through them and to analyse them and their merits and faults, the mornings – I cannot take more than two or three at most – will be gone. So without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself – or if not it will not matter – I begin: the first memory.
The “excuses” Woolf puts forward seem to sink quickly. The “lack of time” to which Woolf refers seems to be hiding the refusal to control and reorder one’s own experience. Not only did the author continuously postpone the writing of her autobiography, but she actually failed to begin. The author’s basic belief is that one cannot grasp any truth; therefore there is a substantial lack of authenticity in any autobiography. What a difference this is looking back to the ideas expressed a few years before, when she considered that blunt autobiography was the only “true” form of literature, because, to paraphrase the author, unlike the novel, it can provide some truth about the person.
As you know, of all literature […] I love autobiography most. In fact I ometimes think only autobiography is literature – novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you or me. And I think this
little book – why so small? – peels off all the things I do not like in fiction and leaves the thing I do like – you.
In any case, the landing place of Virginia Woolf’s ideas, which support the impossibility of the rebuilding of the self, act as forerunners to all of the deconstructionist and poststructuralist theories which actually go on to
corroborate the same principles that do not believe much in the reliability of the autobiographical text. The deconstructionists put into serious question the seemingly stable points established by Philippe Lejeune in support of the illusory referentiality (referentiality around which the thesis of the French philosopher is developed) of autobiographical writing. In the essay Autobiography as De-facement – in which the author questions the genre itself – Paul de Man explains how, in his opinion, it is not possible to reveal the thin line that exists between facts and fiction in the autobiographical narration, proclaiming, as Jonathan Gil Harris explains:
“The impossibility of autobiography, or at least the impossibility of separating it from other genres of fiction on the grounds that it has a ‘real’ referent”.
Hence the comparison with the rotary movement of the revolving door symbolizing the sense of loss which grips the autobiographer when he is preparing to narrate the facts of his existence: The distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but it is undecidable. But is it possible to remain, as Genette would have it, within an undecidable situation? As anyone who has ever been caught in a revolving door or on a revolving wheel can testify, it is certainly most uncomfortable, and all the more so in this case since this whirligig is capable of infinite acceleration and is, in fact, not successive but simultaneous. A system of differentiation based on two elements, which, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “[are] neither, and [are] both at once” is not likely to be sound.
On the one hand, the speech of Paul de Man has the merit of contributing heavily to exposing the deceptions which can hide behind the autobiographical writing. On the other hand, it appears to present the limit of non-acceptance of the necessary “compromise”. Literature, as well as language, is always based on a series of compromises which allow readers to cross the unbridgeable distance that exists between meanings which are
stated, the words, and those which are suggested, the feelings. The compromise (which is part of the “flexibility”) for genres and literary texts is a necessary element.
Unsurprisingly, Levi-Strauss had little luck in praising the rigidity of artwork. In fact, as Giovanni Bottiroli says: “The flexibility of artwork is, in Straus, not only ignored, but refused”.
