Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 1
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Unorthodox Autobiographies / Matthew Ryan Smith
<1> Roughly two years before the completion of this special issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture on "Unorthodox Autobiographies" I had just finished writing a short novel that attempted to synthesize events and experiences of my life with that of a fictional protagonist-something that helped me make sense of myself by making myself other. The result was a one-hundred and six page work of literary non-fiction that I soon shopped around to agents and agencies. Although one reviewer described it as "lush and transporting," my text was nevertheless a "tough sell," and although I failed to garner a venue for publication, I had produced something, however small, about the storied conditions of my personal history.
<2> Out of the failure to publish my novella, combined with a pointed fascination with autobiographical discourse in literature and visual art, I decided to propose this special issue. My concern with "Unorthodox Autobiographies" was to provide authors with the opportunity to publish research that did not-and still may not-fit comfortably within traditional academic platforms; for example, papers that drove a particular argument through the rhetoric of personal experience, failed to reconcile subjectivity with objectivity, employ atypical language organization, and unusual interdisciplinary exchanges. In effect, the texts presented here radically engage with the subject of autobiography by remaining ontologically autobiographical or by investigating the autobiographies of others through unorthodox means. Gritty, peculiar, and neoteric, these are texts that deserve the opportunity to contribute to scholarship in a meaningful and productive way.
<3> The word autobiography is an amalgam taken from the Greek auto meaning self, bio meaning life, and graph meaning to write. Since the 1960s, research on literary autobiography exploded and scholars still argue over the categorical definitions of autobiographical discourse. However, one of the most cited theorizations of autobiography was proposed by French literary theorist Philippe Lejeune, who wrote in his essay "The Autobiographical Pact," "What defines autobiography for the one who is reading is above all a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name. And this is also true for the one who is writing the text" (19-20). Essentially Lejeune conceptualizes how readers interpret and respond to self-life-writing modes (and codes) of communication.[1] If Lejeune's metaphorical "contract" between the writer and the reader is broken, then the autobiographical shifts to the category of literary fiction, which fundamentally changes the way the book is read and received. Ask James Frey, the author of A Little Million Pieces, who was compelled to apologize to Oprah Winfrey (and her viewers) after it was discovered that he fabricated portions of his "memoir."
<4> One of the axiomatic, if not hermeneutical, obstacles associated with literary autobiography is its reliance on memory-the problem being that true or accurate or precise literary autobiography is always a fiction because autobiography is memory work, and, as we know, memory is something that is in flux, changing with the ebb and flow of history itself. This is not in defence of Frey or others, but in defence of the gaps in forgetting. To this end, James Wren approaches the language of memory as a privileged and precarious instrument of representation in his contribution, ""Not Much Power in a Dead Man's Voice": Perfected Memory, Configured Ideology, and the Representation of Self in Kawabata Yasunari's Jyurokusai No Nikki," in order to rationalize the ways in which Yasunari's early diary renders intelligibility and the configuration of meaning to approach a perfected sense of self-knowledge. Ricky Varghese's essay, "Living in the Future Anterior: Biography and Trauma in the Work of Vincent Chevalier and Francisco-Fernando Granados," also tackles the memory-operations of autobiography to examine what he calls "scopic fidelity," and how it is connected to the ways that individuals choose to remember, forget, and live with the past in the present. For his case studies, Varghese adopts the work of two artists-Vincent Chevalier and Francisco-Fernando Granados-whose work explores what it might mean to live in a future that has already come to pass, that is "always already" transposed in the past.
<5> Yet autobiography in visual art is epistemologically different than that of autobiography in literature. Autobiographical art, as I understand it, is this mode of representation whereby an artwork's subject matter is sourced from the artist's vernacular life. [2] In other words, autobiographical art is the representation of the artist's life represented by that artist. Here, the artist translates (or captures) fragments from the ephemera, happenings, and storied conditions in the course of their vernacular life into the stuff of aesthetics, the stuff of images and objects. I believe that this is an important distinction to make: that these are, in some way, lives on display rather than autonomous art objects displayed "for art's sake." To this end, we should not forget that the artists themselves utilize the modalities of autobiography to aid them in making sense of themselves, their life, their place in the world, and their relationships with others. As Paul John Eakin reminds us that the autobiographer does not contain an autonomous subject position because the individual is always a sum of their relationships (43), which directly supports the idea that autobiography can never be a truly singular experience.
<6> Ellyn Walker's paper "Representing the Self through Ancestry: Meryl McMaster's Ancestral Portraits," supports this premise of relationality by using the work of Ottawa-based artist Meryl McMaster, and her recent series Ancestral (2008-10), to demonstrate how Indigenous peoples record acts of resistance through ethnographic portraiture, thereby drawing attention the histories of Indigenous representation. In Ancestral, McMaster "challenge[s] colonial perspectives of ethnography by illuminating the significance of Indigenous presence and survivance, as well as opening up the possibility of Indigenous sovereignty within the archive." South African visual artist Sharlene Khan's contribution, "I Make Art - Voicing Voice, Speaking Self and Doing Criticality," is a performative artist project that restages a series of video artworks that engage the theory of "postcolonial masquerading," where the donning of
costumes and props is employed to interrogate Post-Apartheid South African memory, identity and states of 'Otherness.' Here the autobiographical creates vernacular "bio-myths" that interrogate social, institutional, racial, sexual, and religious hegemonies.
Of course, an issue like this should include papers that push the categorical boundaries of critical autobiographical discourse. For example, Brendan Sullivan's fascinating autobiographical rumination, "Dress You Up in My Angst: Living with the Past in Français 2646," describes a powerful encounter with a fifteenth century manuscript. For Sullivan, the manuscript creates a kind of temporal tension due to its "fifteenth-century-ness," which, in turn, becomes an alternative way into thinking about the historical meaning of the object itself. In this narrative tension between autobiography and academic rigor, Sullivan proposes how the manuscript manifests the desires and anxieties of its patron in tandem with the anxiety and frustrations that emerge as he attempts to understand the past. To round up the issue, I have included a conversation between myself and Rev. Michael Prieur, Professor of Moral and Sacramental Theology at St. Peter's Seminary in London, ON "The Art of the Confessor: A Conversation with Rev. Michael Prieur." In our discussion, Rev. Prieur and I discuss the social and personal consequences of the sacrament of reconciliation-otherwise known as "confession." This conversation also serves to locate a concrete definition for the "confessional art" of Nan Goldin or Tracey Emin. Finally, Sandra Lim provides an excellent review of the catalogue Auto/pathographies, edited by art historian and curator Tamar Tembeck, for her curated exhibition of the same name.
<7> These essays collected for "Unorthodox Autobiographies" are intended to challenge conventional discourses of autobiographical studies by rupturing their narrow definitions, thus opening them up to new states of inquiry and divergent lines of flight..
Notes
[1] For more on the communicative relationships between writers and their readers in literary and visual autobiographical discourse, see (Forthcoming) Matthew Ryan Smith, "Relational Maneouvres in Contemporary Autobiographical Video Art," Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (projected publication: 2015).
[2] See (Forthcoming) Matthew Ryan Smith, "Notes on Curating Autobiographical Art," ESSE arts + opinions (Spring, 2015).
Works Cited
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell U P., 1999.
Lejeune, Philip. "The Autobiographical Pact." On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Print.
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