In the following essay, Frédéric Regard discusses the autobiography as a spatial practice -– a process of generating meaningful spaces for oneself to inhabit. With great insight, Regard points to the historical and thematic relationships between the geography and autobiography, and forces us to reconsider the meaning what it means to tell a story about oneself.

Autobiography and Geography: A Self-Arranging Question [printable version]

Frédéric Regard

<1> The border between fiction and truth in autobiography has been the subject of numerous investigations, yet the question of what we might call the "assignations to residence" of the author remains largely ignored. Critics have written abundantly about autobiography in its relation to the origin of the author as living personality with his own story, but never truly treated the idea of the spatial modalities, the layout, of the author's writing self. In his relatively unknown 1967 article "On Other Places," Michel Foucault, then on assignment in Tunis, saw in this thematic situation the stage of a major affront: "One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating polemics today uncoil between the pious descendents of time and the insistent residents of space" (752). If we acknowledge with Foucault that space itself has a history (753-754), must we not also deduce that the history of the "functions" of the autobiographical author, logically called upon to situate him- or herself in pragmatic fashion -- not just as a body interacting with other bodies, but also simply in the act of pronouncing "I" when faced with a "you" -- is manifested as multiple effects of these geographical schemas? My purpose in this paper is to explore such arrangements of the self, to examine how topological devices may have helped the self gain "access to the place of speech" (Ghitti 17), to define how, over the course of centuries of autobiography, writing has given place to subjects, how authors themselves have given themselves "place." My approach, to state it clearly from the outset, found itself knocked about by pragmatism, at least as represented by Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1999), and I have borrowed many terms from his theory; but, briefly, our approaches differ on two fundamental points: 1) where Lecercle sees, in the "placement" that produces a "subject," the effect of a purely linguistic interrogation (34), I refuse to exclude from my reflections a kind of placement inscribed in geographical reality; and 2), where Lecercle, a disciple of Althusser, sees no other issue than the linguistic game of point/counter-point (232), hence the inevitable triumph of ideology, I would lay bets on the effect of a delinquency in the autobiographical story, which inscribes the "I" inside a game challenging the structures of ideological placement, in a sort of poetic transaction of the self.

<2> Let me state once and for all that the question brings to bear on a discursive reality, that "the world," for example, is not an automatic given, but a changing organism that speaks differently and reinvents itself according to different times and cultures: now as arena, now as living corpus, as system, as milieu, etc. (see Buttimer passim). The discourse thus spatializes the subject in a much more decisive fashion than does "natural" geography. Moreover, one author-function always reflects back another, which precedes and announces it and sketches out its horizon of expectancy: for instance, the construction of an autobiographical author seems less determined by mentalities -- a mountain-dweller's or mariner's spirit; a country soul; an English, German, Italian, or French mentality -- than by "chronotopes," or spatio-temporal articulations (Holquist 109 ff.) passed down from archetypal narratives: the journey story, the story of the chosen people, the conversion story, the Bildungsroman, etc. The history of ideas teaches us as well that certain hermeneutic patterns elicit a variety of conceptions of space (a couple of quick examples: the capitalist ethic, the allegorization of nature, the eucharistic mystery, etc.). These "discourses" can include a palpable dimension that conditions just as strongly the positioning of the self: how many autobiographical authors have established themselves based on their roots in a certain defined place, linked to the architecture of prisons, private residences, public and political forums; we can equally invoke the human geography of castes or sexes, the "denatured" geography of war or large urban evolution; finally, we cannot forget certain technological data (means of transport or communication, optical instruments), nor, why not, medical or surgical techniques, since these latter furnish our perception of the body. One primary, unarguable conclusion must be drawn: seen through the lens of geography, "speech" fundamentally prohibits the "subject" from acceeding to his own "self-ness," from coinciding immediately with himself, including his own body.

<3> We can push the conclusion further still: does the act of writing oneself place the self-writing author at the heart of his works, as the passive product of these devices, or does it rather cause him to conceive of himself as a "heterotopia" (Foucault 755-756), i.e. an agency constructing rival spaces in breaking with the dominant geographical order? The geographies of the self are evidently determined by means of objective conditions, but cannot the "geographic" construction of the self, the speech effect of the author, implicate a geographical "ruse": that is, does autobiography reproduce an absolute space, in which each individual is meant to occupy one place, or can it rather produce other spaces in which to create new relationships with the self and the world, new social relations? Would this possibility not then bring into being something like a utopic delinquency of the autobiographical narrative, which would discursively effect a social operation by means of which the author can redefine himself (Marin 24)? Also, could not this delinquency be the mark of an English singularity -- a discursive singularity, not a national or insular "mentality"? For if we admit, as Foucault reiterates in a 1982 interview with Paul Rabinow, that the English, by virtue of their parliamentary tradition, their respect for local authority and their religious options, were able to escape the wide-scale, detection-based rationality of the 18th century, does it not follow that every narrative of English life entails an observance of liberty, an opening of space, an operation of discrepancy or "dis-placement" regarding authority? Far from being a writing tradition folded in on the interior self, can we not now consider autobiography as a "journey" the author makes, in other words: an experience of relativity and fluidity, of rupture with the laws of fixity? We would thus understand the reasons for which the question of autobiography seems inevitably to summon that of "écriture féminine": if it is true, as Fox Keller explains, that official Western knowledge, such as it exists in the 17th century, implies a polarization of sexual difference, then does not feminine autobiography constitute a privileged strategy of geographical delinquency? Doesn't the untimely inscription of the feminine in a spatial, social, and epistemological sphere theoretically reserved for men -- the literary circle -- bring into play the absolute geography of social relations? Fundamentally, does there not exist, consubstantially with the work of autobiography, a resistance to forceful alotment, doubled with the opening of unexplored paths?

<4> These questions posed, a second task awaits me. Am I the first, am I the only one, to raise them? If my reflection, initially purely intuitive, is to be pertinent, I must take the time to look a bit around me, to assure myself that the methodological tools already exist that will permit me to articulate my reasoning with rigor. One first observation: the classic French perception of the autobiographical event is not predisposed to admit this geographical reading of selfhood. Which will lead me to a second, more reassuring, observation. In 1974, the famous Autobiographical Pact by Philippe Lejeune set forth and insisted on an essentially historical element of the self. Autobiography is conceived as a "retrospective prose narrative that a real person creates about his own existence when he emphasizes individual life, particularly the history of his personality" (14). What is important, obviously, is what Lejeune calls the "autobiographical pact," or the formal obligation to remain in one's place in the narrative capture of what is unique to the author's self. The inherent difficulty in this famous theory lies in its basic premise: what is particular to the autobiographical subject implies an infallible identification of the author with the narrator and the character in the narrative, an inter-identification covered and guaranteed by the proper name on the book jacket. Lejeune considers this proper name as an honored signature. The narrative signs a referential pact, and it relies on at least two presuppositions: 1) the permanence of an origin, of the truth of a name, and 2) the belief in a history of the signatory's formation, defined as ipseity, the identification of the self with the self, all the more affirmed because it is repeated, uncovered, and recovered through a series of events. Autobiography is seen evidently as the narrative of a historical truth of the author. Certainly, Lejeune -- attacked on this point by those whom today he refers to as "the rusish deconstructionists who charge forward, heads lowered, like well-trained bulls, as soon as someone waves the red flag of sincerity" (For Autobiography 235) -- is careful everafter to speak in pragmatic terms. Today he speaks of the "pact" as nothing more than a "promise of sincerity": "An autobiographer is not someone who speaks the truth about himself, but someone who says that he speaks it" (Rough Drafts of the Self 125). This detail seems to me of crucial importance: first of all, because it raises the question of a certain rhetoric of the self, but also because of the effects of such a promise on the reader, a notion that suddenly allows us to think of the "pact" as, in fact, a double positioning: the writing self, on one side, and the "life-reader" on the other. In other words, Lejeune himself cannot avoid asserting that an author's story is conjugated within a geography of social relationships. That which he calls henceforth the author's "fragile reality" threatens the first certainty of a closure around the "uniqueness" of an "individual life," and hurls the self back into a world constituted by the discourse of others, in which the subject henceforth plays a rôle.

<5> Can I be satisfied by this latter-day turnabout and draw from it some advantage for my own examination? No. For I have no choice but to assert that Lejeune remains attached to a single and unchanging paradigm, that of an individual subject cut off from the world. The author is privileged as historical subject, to the disadvantage of the geographical subject. Each time, the possibility of arrangements, laying out spaces and positioning subjects, sketches itself out, but is just as soon erased before the primacy of the "individual proper." Lejeune admits that the subject occupies a position, that he is situated in the very enunciation of the autobiographical discourse, but the geographical question is always subordinate to a single horizon, that of the historical truth of the autobiographer. This point leads me to rifle through more nuances of my library, to dig out the object of my second, and reassuring, statement: there exists in the French tradition of the Foucault years, of which material directions remain slim in spite of everything, an effort to construe the subject in terms that allow for the articulation of a veritable geography of the author-function. I now turn to this text, which has no apparent rapport with the question of the author-function and of its history -- unless the happily random relation be that The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre was published the same year as The Autobiographical Pact, in 1974. Lefebvre, of course, does not speak of autobiography, much less of the author-function. He writes about geography. His book is first and foremost dedicated to analyzing the concept of "hegemony." This remarkable study brings him to see in space not a geometric reality, but an encoding of the social relationships of production and reproduction. What interests me the most for is that, after having established a complex dialectic "triplicity," linking "perceived" space, "conceived" space, and "experienced" space (42-43), Lefebvre denounces what he refers to as "mental binarism," by which he means everything that ordinarily sets up an opposition between subject and object, self and other, the res cogitans and the res extensa, between author and space. Because, precisely, Lefebvre affirms that these intellectual dichotomies evacuate from life "all that makes living activity" (49), the living being cannot think himself outside of a dialectic, this dialectic of the perceived, the conceived, and the experienced. Space, for Lefebvre, is "a product" (35), or, again in his words, a "resistant objectality," whose principal function is to condition the competence and the performance of each actor, each individual and collective subject (69-70). Granted, again, he does not say "author," but here again I find it à propos to add the word. Let us concentrate on the essential of this demonstration: for Lefebvre, a message is thus not reduced to a textual message; every discourse speaks space, that is, every discourse is in space and about space (155). Furthermore, he adds, in a manner capital for my research, the characteristic of modernity is to have instituted, by the means of rationalized production, a social space of which the form is, he says, "encounter, gathering, simultaneity" (121). In this context, he continues, the notion of a self-enclosed foyer, giving the impression of a privileged space, "consecrated, almost religious, approaching the absolute," invested with ontological dignity, is nothing but a fantasm of the past: "the Home," he writes "is nothing more than a historico-poetical reality" (143).

<6> I wish to transpose such concepts as Lefebvre's into autobiographical studies. No longer could we see in autobiography a kind of Home for the author's self, an absolute space in which writing functions like the ontological site of a "revelation," an uprising of Uniqueness, a Monument of self-presence. The process would consist of lining up the modalities of an "author-function" with the pulse of spatial practice (the "perceived"), the representations of space (the "conceived"), and the spaces of representation (the "experienced," conditioned by images and symbols). Autobiographies would be approached like the fruit of a detailed society, characterized by determined spatial practices, through which subjects would be positioned, by dissociation or by homogeneity. The being would be defined in regards to a primordial contextualization of topological order: there would be none but geographical ontology. In the Anglo-Saxon domain some recent writings, of another geographer, Edward Soja, work this same furrow whose richness Foucault and Lefebvre barely began to harvest. In Postmodern Geographies (1989), Soja, who also uses the concept of hegemonism as his point of departure, brilliantly shows how the historicism of the 19th century is combined with capitalism and a politics of expansion that had every interest in eclipsing a real problematics of space. Soja's ambition is not to replace one priority with another, but to rearticulate history and geography, with, as the operative idea, a social production of space. Moreover, on this exact subject, Soja does not hesitate to suggest incursions into the realm of writings about life, or what he calls "life stories." He notes that these latter are always defined by geography: "Life stories have a geography, too..." (14). Soja's purpose is certainly not to contest the notion of history: for him, it is more a question of re-situating the story, of re-placing it in the geographical theatre underlying it, a theatre that the agents of history either suffer or play with. Inspired by the concept of "heterotopia," Soja thence comes to trace the sweeping outlines of what closely resembles a thesis: the utopia of an ultimate, autonomic individuality, guardian of meaning, must be "reterritorialized" into a group of "heterotopiae," or heterogeneous relational spaces, which produce the self inasmuch as the self experiences them (23).

<7> This quick overview of the available theoretical tools allows me to express more firmly the hypothesis that it remains the task of autobiographical studies to explore the possibility of a conjunction between the problematic of the author-function and the development of the geographical question. The question is not so much "who am I?" as "where am I ?." Let us take a few puzzling examples. The near-simultaneity of the Rome-London divorce, the Puritan injunction to introspection, and the first university course in geography (in 1574 at Oxford, by Richard Hakluyt, cantor of the English colonialist epic) -- is this near-simultaneity really a thing of coincidence? Three centuries later, is it surprising to see autobiographical narratives multiplied, at the very moment when geographical instruction is generalized, when the Royal Geographical Society is founded in London in 1830, when Darwin introduces the idea of environment in 1859, when the first professorship in geography is finally established for John Mackinder at Oxford in 1887? In both cases, indeed, the question of the English subject's space arises as if the history of self-conceptions, and therefore of the autobiographical author, was always dependant in some way on geographical knowledge. We can trace out numerous other topics of interest in the same manner: can the author really exist in the same way according to whether he is alive before or after the first big topographical statement of the kingdom, the famous Domesday Book (1086)? Who is the author, before he is capable of being "a point" whose longitude and latitude can be calculated with precision? Is he the same before and after the 1884 international agreement that draws an imaginary line from pole to pole and passing through Greenwich? And what can we say about what he could be, this author, given the shrinking of the planet and the disappearance of the last remaining wild places -- that is, given the fact that space has finally become an "abstract" system, disconnected from the time once necessary to travel it (Giddens 17-18)? My neighborhoods, my borders, my territories, my trespasses -- will they all be similar on a map in which I am inevitably obliged to include myself according to the symbolic space allotted to me by a social, cultural, sexual, political, geopolitical environment? Like fiction and philosophy, will autobiography produce authors functioning along the lines of what Gilles Deleuze calls "conceptual characters": the Nomad, the Native, the Wanderer, the Foreigner, etc. (What is Philosophy? [1991])?

<8> Deleuze, à propos, has a bizarre view of the English, which interests me naturally to the greatest degree, and which will make up the third and last stage of my examination. For him, in What is Philosophy?, the English are always nomads who treat their field of experience as a moving, moveable ground on which they are content to stake their tents (101). The French build, the Germans dig, but the English are happy simply to, as Deleuze says, "inhabit." He associates this particular arrangement with a tradition of pragmatic thought traceable back to the philosopher David Hume. This latter, in effect, defines the "I" as nothing more than habit. Thus for Deleuze the English "I" has always issued forth, not from a heart of hearts, but from an "environment," "in terms of the immanence of a radical experience" (101). Geography is not here merely variable matter and places; it is a mental landscape, a becoming rather than a history (91-92). If we subscribe to Deleuze's way of thinking, indeed, never more than in England has the story of self-formation been so associated with a "milieu." Put in other words, never more than in England has becoming been conceived of as geography. "Becomings," Deleuze specifies in his Dialogues (1996) with Claire Parnet, "are geography; are orientations, directions, entrances and exits" (8). The French spend their time taking stock, while the English, he says, always "deterritorialize themselves" (47-48). Hume and the English, Deleuze affirms, "liberate conjunctions," because they conceive of being-in-the-world as "a geography of relationships" (70). A proper name, in this philosophy of becoming rather than of the historical, is not what makes the measure of the self: it is a heterogeneous arrangement, a "co-functioning" (84), a multiplicity of liaisons and relationships, through different ages, different reigns, even different sexes.

<9> The Deleuzian theory has the immense merit, as we can see, of allowing us to bury away the author's pure self preserved in the autobiographical tomb, to foreground its schemas -- its wanderings, intersections, gaps, tunnels, forks in the road, connections, combinations. We can imagine pinpointing in this way the particular combinations of autobiographical narratives, the singular arrangements of the author-function. But here again another aspect of Deleuze's work shows through, never clearly unveiled, sketched out by means of terms like "conjunctions." The term is crucial: in this perspective, geography is affirmed as the business of "signifiers," and Deleuze's predilection for series of metaphors is symptomatic of this essential aspect. At present, and to my knowledge, no study of stature has broached the profound linguistic dimension of Deleuzian philosophy. I therefore suggest that, in order to reach such a goal, the work of Michel de Certeau takes on today a considerable importance. Certeau explains how every narrative -- and autobiography is first and foremost a narrative -- implies what he calls a "passage to the other." Certeau thus targets the inevitable path that leads outside of what he calls a "place" (un lieu), characterized by its deathlike stability, toward what he calls a "space" (un espace), characterized by its openness and by the freedom deployed there (163-164). The idea is bountiful: from the moment when autobiography narrativizes the author's life, it can do nothing other than put into practice the originary "being-there" and open up the operational space in which the subject is produced. In other words, life-narratives can also be conceived as what Certeau calls "space fabrications" (180), by necessity organizing a disobedience to the laws of "place." And, Certeau goes further still when he opposes "topic" and "topology," preservation of places and opening of spaces, and most of all when he implies that space necessarily demands an effort of abstraction : "Where the map subdivides, the narrative traverses....The operational space it walks is made of movements: it is topological, relative to the deformation of shapes, and not schematic, defining places" (189).

<10> My final point draws near with this idea. Autobiography is therefore the production, even perhaps the invention of a language, whose tropes supply us with models and hypotheses. Indeed, we cannot forget that the reciprocal position of subjects and objects in space is obligatorily defined by the intermediary of the "signifier." The subject's inscription in a spatio-temporal combination requires shapes: every topology necessarily implies a tropology (cf. Barnes and Duncan). We know that the theoreticians of the "cognitive metaphor" illustrate the fact that there is no imaginable "reality" that is not the effect of a metaphor. Likewise, that which we call "life," according to these theoreticians, can be imagined only given the metaphor of the journey (cf. Lakoff and Turner). These linguists nonetheless do not exclude the possibility that it is the essence of the avant-garde to propose new metaphors that then confer a different "reality" on the world, and thereby a different function on the author. We can see the second dawning of the question of "écriture féminine": if we can imagine a certain essentialism of sexual difference giving way in reality to metonymic geography (the road and public space for men; the domestic sphere and the boudoir for women), we can then also imagine that another writing system presents other geographies of the author, disturbs the system of "assignations to residence" (cf. Gillian Rose) and redistributes each one's positions, the creation of new spatial metaphors producing different postures, different "author-functions." Such will be the core of my demonstration: tropes spatialize the inscription of one's presence in the world.

<11> A passage from Gerard Genette contains loose threads of implications that could prove considerable. In "Metonymy in Proust," he notes that in A la recherche du temps perdu, an eminently autobiographical work, every reminiscence is translated by the use of a metaphor, functioning according to a common rule: analogy entails proximity (55). The taste of a madeleine dipped in tea causes sensations experienced at great distance from one in time and space to coincide. Genette refines his analysis and shows that the Proustian metaphor functions not only by analogy but also by contiguity, following a metonymic trajectory (from teacup to bedroom, bedroom to house, house to village, village to "county"). This "enlargement by contiguity," Genette adds, constitutes the miracle of Proustian writing (57): "the vertical axis of the metaphoric relationship," he explains, is deepened by a "horizontal axis established by the metonymic trajectory" (60). The graphing of these two networks, in Genette's view, provides the coherence of the Proustian "Text" (60-61). In my view, it effects the spatialization of the "author-function." Genette's work lets us understand to what degree two shapes inter-inscribe each other, in a spatialized model we cannot take apart too arbitrarily: metonymy initiates a passage toward the whole, metaphor substitutes one space for another, but it is the permanent articulation of one shape onto another that produces the geographical inscription of the autobiographical author.

<12> By way of conclusion, I shall put into practice the principles acquired on this brief theoretical detour, in a large-scale and necessarily allusive reading of Cardinal Newman's autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). The narrative is presented as the quest for a proper place for the Church of England, that is as the quest for a metaphor, in the classic sense of a "borrowed residence," for the Holy Scripture. For the author, autobiographical writing has one single function: to found this site, to organize this return to the origin, to give form to the Word, to produce an order and to write it on the geography of an England adrift. In short, to found a place where the author Newman finds both his origin and his legitimacy. The autobiographical narrative, however, is also presented as the opening of a space, as a space beyond the religious schema. Newman's "I" is displaced, not only by shifting centers as far as the official Church and the geography of Oxford are concerned, but also in "spacing" itself, producing itself in a curious and fastidious network of historico-theological differenciations, like what Lecercle might call an "im-posture" (149 ff.), an imposture that places it above all as a part among other parts -- in short, as a metonymy. We can thus see profiled a geographical tension that constitutes many contradictions of the author-function: this is the tension that pits the architect against the nomadic prophet, the fortress of the Revelation against the multiplication of bridges, the cloister against rapport with others, the monad against the rhizomatic connection, the subject against the conjunction (Certeau 186-187). The autobiographical narrative can only be accomplished at the completion of this confrontation, when Newman effectively becomes "Newman" -- that is, once the author coincides once and for all with his vocation, converts to Catholicism, retires to Littlemore, builds his own church, celebrates his first mass, etc. In other words, the schematic instant signifies the death of the narrative, which is the generator of a deforming topology of consecrated shapes, notably that of the House of God. All the fascinating beauty of Newman's text comes not from his death after this return to the origin; but rather, from the fact that the text, meant to produce the author, procedes to a boundary marker animated by a dynamic contradiction between fixity and mobility, monologism and dialogism. The Newmanian "I," its authority, which makes of him the "Newman" we admire today as a great author of English prose, is only situated on the English religious map at the cost of such a division, between "place" and "space," metaphor and metonymy, and, most essentially, between prayer and narrative.

Works Cited

(The French references are given under their original titles. All translations mine.)

Barnes, T.J. and J.S. Duncan, eds. "Writing Worlds." Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Buttimer, Anne. Geography and the Human Spirit. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Certeau, Michel de. L'Invention du quotidien, Tome 1: Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

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Deleuze, Gilles, et Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1996.

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Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.

Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Keller, Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

Lakoff, G. and M. Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago and London: U of Chicago Press, 1989.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Interpretation as Pragmatics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.

Lefebvre, Henri. Produire l'espace. Paris: Anthropos, 1974.

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---. Les Brouillons de soi. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
---. Pour l'autobiographie. Paris: Seuil, 1998.

Marin, Louis. Utopiques: jeux d'espace. Paris: Minuit, 1973.

Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso, 1989.