Max Saunders' "Life-Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies" (Summary)

 

The term "life-writing" includes a broad spectrum of texts and forms, leading to its contentious nature. It often includes various modes of telling life stories such as memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, diaries, letters, and autobiographical fiction. This breadth of coverage can create confusion, especially when discussing different ways of narrating a life story collectively. Additionally, the term is used to blur the distinction between biography and autobiography deliberately. Critics sometimes use "auto/biography" to denote this fusion or to discuss autobiography and biography together. The concept of autobiography emerged during the Romantic period, coinciding with the idea that all writing possesses an autobiographical dimension. This viewpoint, which gained traction throughout the nineteenth century and even in Postmodernism, suggests that the boundary between autobiography and other forms like biography or fiction is inherently blurred.

 

In his influential essay "Autobiography as De-Facement," Paul de Man proposed that autobiography is not a distinct genre but rather a mode of reading. This perspective allows readers to interpret sentences in biographies as autobiographical reflections of the author rather than purely factual descriptions of the subject. Life-writing, inherently intertextual, often draws from various sources such as letters, diaries, speeches, and other biographies. Even autobiographers incorporate external texts like documents, biographies, journals, or novels into their narratives. This intertextuality complicates the distinction between different genres and blurs the lines between factual and fictional elements.

 

The theoretical implications of life-writing, particularly for cultural memory studies, are significant. Scholars, influenced by Philippe Lejeune's concept of an autobiographical contract, often focus on ensuring the correspondence between the author named on the title page and the subject of the book. However, the existence of non-contractual autobiographies, including third-person narratives or pseudonymous publications, challenges this model. The destabilization of genres complicates attempts to view life-writing as directly connected to subjective experience and individual memory. Nonetheless, this problematization offers opportunities for understanding memory cultures through diverse literary forms such as novels, poems, travel writings, or historiography.

 

Approaching life-writing as a source for cultural memory necessitates a literary-critical perspective. Instead of treating these texts as historical documents, scholars analyze them as modes of writing that construct and circulate memory. While this approach may seem limiting, it highlights the textual nature of memory and the ways in which it is mediated and represented. Ultimately, studying literary life-writing texts enriches our understanding of cultural memory by revealing how memories are produced, constructed, and narrativized within specific cultural contexts.

 

Engaging with biography and autobiography from the perspective of cultural memory can enhance our skills as literary critics by encouraging us to read against the grain. These genres typically focus on individual lives, claiming to provide unparalleled access to the thoughts, experiences, and memories of their subjects. While this aspect attracts historians and cultural scholars, analyzing such texts through the lens of cultural memory offers a different perspective. For instance, William Wordsworth's "The Prelude," while offering a record of a unique childhood experience, also provides insights into the broader cultural context of late-eighteenth-century childhood and its evolving representation throughout the nineteenth century. Viewing "The Prelude" as a historical document allows us to understand how childhood was remembered and constructed within the culture of the time.

 

Notably, autobiographies and biographies by canonical figures often receive theoretical attention due to their emphasis on self-expression and uniqueness. However, other forms of life-writing, such as letters, diaries, and travel narratives, have also played significant roles in cultural memory production. Biography, in particular, has served various functions, including ancestor worship, moral exemplification, and societal definition. As Western societies secularized, biography evolved, with one strand focusing on the celebration of exceptional individuals and their impact on history, while another emphasized the representation of ordinary individuals as representative of broader social trends.

The tension between celebrating exceptional individuals and highlighting representative experiences reflects broader cultural anxieties and intellectual shifts. While some writers, like Carlyle, emphasized the significance of great men in shaping history, others, like John Stuart Mill or H.G. Wells, sought to downplay their exceptionalism in favor of highlighting the role of training and circumstance. These strategies reflect concerns about the increasing privatization of selfhood in the nineteenth century and the rise of psychological narratives. Emerson's idea that history is essentially biography resonates with the contemporary emphasis on subjective experience and personal narratives. However, the concept of cultural memory seeks to preserve a sense of universalized individualism, reflecting an idealistic notion of collective memory and identity.

Understanding the trajectory of life-writing involves grappling with a series of theoretical challenges posed by Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Feminism, (Post) Structuralism, and Postcolonialism, each of which has influenced the interpretation and production of biography and autobiography.

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Psychoanalysis, for instance, transformed the nature of interpreting individual lives by introducing the notion of a fragmented self and the unconscious. Autobiographers and biographers alike now face the challenge of navigating unconscious distortions in recounting life stories. The emergence of the "New Biography" in the 1920s, exemplified by Lytton Strachey's work, ushered in a new era of psychoanalytically-informed life-writing, expanding the boundaries of what could be discussed, including explicit explorations of sexuality.

 

Eliot's "impersonal theory" and the rise of American New Criticism challenged the authority of life-writing by emphasizing the separation between the artist's personal experiences and the work they produce. Marxist critiques questioned the conservative nature of autobiography, viewing it as a product of bourgeois ideology. Feminist scholars turned to life-writing to recover and amplify the voices of women whose contributions to history had been overlooked, addressing themes such as female desire and power.

 

Life-writing has also played a crucial role in documenting historical traumas, such as the Holocaust, with autobiographical accounts often becoming canonical texts. Anne Frank's diary, for example, serves as a poignant testament to individual suffering within a larger collective tragedy.

 

(Post) Structuralist challenges, represented by Barthes's "The Death of the Author," questioned the authority of authorial intention in interpreting texts, advocating for a plurality of meanings liberated from authorial control. Foucault's exploration of authorship as a discursive construct further complicated traditional notions of authorial authority.

 

 

In response to poststructuralist challenges, life-writing has taken on a postmodern flavor, becoming more self-aware of its own narrative construction, fictionality, and inherent impossibility. This shift coincided with the rise of auto/biographical elements in twentieth-century fiction, resulting in a blending of biography and fiction known as "faction" or non-fiction novels. Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" and Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song" are notable examples of this genre, narrating real-life events in novelistic styles. Similarly, the term "autofiction," coined by Edmund White, suggests that selfhood is inherently fictionalized.

 

Postmodern biographies have also blurred the lines between fact and fiction, incorporating invented characters and fictionalized scenarios. Peter Ackroyd's "Dickens" and Edmund Morris's "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" are examples where historical figures interact with fictional elements, challenging traditional notions of biographical accuracy.

 

Despite initial skepticism about the ability of texts to represent selves, there has been a renaissance in the study of life-writing, especially as biographers have become more critical and theoretical about the form. This resurgence, known as the "New Biotheory," has produced works that explore the theoretical dimensions of life-writing, focusing on autobiography and its intersections with biography and fiction.